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Brian Koffler (D.I.G.S. Marketing) has a blunt take: paid ads don’t “fail” because of creative...they fail because leaders track the wrong scoreboard.
In this episode, we break down:
- Why ad teams and leadership talk past each other (and how to fix it)
- The first revenue connection every B2B team should build
- How to identify which campaigns actually create qualified pipeline (not just “conversions”)
- Why early-stage teams often execute better than bigger orgs drowning in silos
- A leadership reality check: if you can’t understand it, you can’t lead it
Connect with Brian:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briankoffler/
D.I.G.S. Marketing: https://www.digsmarketing.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briankoffler/
D.I.G.S. Marketing: https://www.digsmarketing.com/
—
If you’re building a reality-first growth engine and want to pressure-test what’s real in your system, grab a quick Foundation Call with me. No pitch, just clarity: https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/foundation-call-20min
Creators and Guests
What is Is Anything Real??
Is Anything Real? is the Reality-First Leadership podcast for builder-leaders who want outcomes, not optics. Each week, Adam W. Barney sits down with founders and operators to unpack positioning, marketing, community, energy management, and influence - plus the numbers behind what actually worked.
You’ll hear: a quick Reality Check, a practical Proof Stack (inputs → actions → outcomes), and one EnergyOS habit you can run this week. Specifics over slogans; humane systems over hustle cosplay.
New episodes every Wednesday at 12:00 PM ET.
👉 Book your 20-min Exploration Call: https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/explorationplugin-20min
[00:06.3]
Paid ads don't fail because of bad creative. They fail because they never made it to revenue. Today's guest has spent a decade fixing that disconnect. He's built demand engines that turn SaaS clicks into cash flow and breaks down silos between marketing and sales.
[00:23.1]
We're going beyond the dashboard metrics to talk about what's actually driving pipeline. This is Brian Koffler from D.I.G.S. Marketing. Welcome back to Is Anything Real? And The show where we cut through the noise, challenge the hype, and explore what truly drives growth.
[00:38.8]
I'm Adam W. Barney. Today's guest again is Brian Koffler, founder of D.I.G.S. Marketing and a longtime B2B SaaS growth leader. After 10 years running demand gen for in-house teams, Brian now helps Series A and B tech companies link ad performance directly to pipeline and revenue.
[00:57.8]
We're going to dive into why most ad programs still live in silos and how smart teams are finally connecting the dots between impressions, intent, and income. Brian, welcome. Thanks for having me, Adam. You got it. All right. Your hot take is that paid ads are often siloed and that's why they fail.
[01:17.2]
What does that look like inside the companies you work with? Great question. I could spend the whole time answering that question. I will try to be concise here, but in general I often see, paid ads, the metrics that are reported on paid ads are often not the metrics that leadership or revenue or the management team cares about in terms of revenue or qualified opportunities.
[01:47.2]
And so what ends up happening is the team that is running the paid ads is saying one thing and thinking things are going well or maybe not going well. And the rest of the leadership or marketing team is not on the same page. And I always describe it as like a silo or an island.
[02:03.7]
And I think breaking that down, dissolving that and getting everyone talking the same language is usually more important and impactful than, you know, actually, nitty gritty of the ads. Right, right. Why do you think that silo keeps happening, though, between marketing metrics and revenue?
[02:24.2]
That is a million-dollar question. I think that there is a few different scenarios why. One main reason is often the leadership team is not in the ad platforms and may or may not even have a great understanding of like how they actually work.
[02:39.6]
And the person in the ad platforms is usually like a very tactical, like this is what they do. So they talk just like different languages a lot. As simple as that sounds. So that's number one, and then number two is, especially at earlier-stage companies, often ad management is part of someone's job and so they're not fully 100% dedicated to paid ads.
[03:05.7]
Especially if you're like a growth marketing manager or demand gen manager. Right. You probably have six other things on your plate. And ads often get put on the back burner and sometimes that translates to communication issues around the ads just because it's not priority.
[03:23.7]
It's almost like a double, double set of blinders on from each ends of it. Right, so that's interesting. What do you think of that vein though? When you're linking ads to qualified pipeline and revenue and not just conversions, what's the first data connection every company should be making? Yeah, I think you just said it.
[03:40.7]
I mean with the platforms available today and the integrations available, it's not that difficult technically to link your ad platform to your CRM and see what's happening down funnel. And usually the eye opening moment is when you can show these campaigns are leading to these many qualified opportunities that are worth this dollars and leading to this closed revenue.
[04:04.6]
And then you can get fancy and do it all the way down to like a keyword level or ad group level. But in even just like a campaign level, that makes management usually go, oh we should try to invest more in this, or oh, we should try to invest more in this campaign versus this campaign.
[04:20.7]
And that gives the person running the ads a lot of great direction and confidence that like things are working and management is speaking their language. Right. And you know, obviously when that happens, you think about measuring ads by what actually closes.
[04:37.4]
Right. And from your perspective, how does that change the way you allocate budget across platforms? Because there's a deep implication there, I think. Yeah, I think there's a two-step process there, especially in B2B SaaS companies or any tech company.
[04:52.5]
Usually it's larger deal sizes, and often it can take months for these deals to close if they're $20, $30, $40, $50,000 values. So I always like looking at qualified ops because that usually happens within the month of the conversion. So that's like the first leading indicator.
[05:08.8]
And then yeah, you look at the six month trail of like what is actually leading to one revenue. And the number one kind of decision that I see that wasn't happening before, once you show these metrics and you can say this campaign is leading to this manyops and this much won revenue over a six month cycle is that management then goes, okay, what if we gave you X budget?
[05:31.5]
Like what if we increased it? Can we project the same scale of new ops and won deals and it gives them confidence to at least try where if you're just reporting on conversions and clicks it's very hard to get buy in on investing more or trying a new campaign or whatever.
[05:52.7]
Like the thing that you were. The person running the ads wants to do. Right, Right. Right. And I mean it's, you know, it's all about tracking that real revenue potential. How, for instance, in that same sort of scenario if you flip the script a little bit, do you handle those internal conversations when say a CMO is still chasing what I would consider vanity metrics like MQLs, click through rates, or even our most basic thing called impressions.
[06:17.7]
Right. I think when you look at a short time frame, those things are not bad to look at. If you're looking at data, a week after you make a change in ad platform or even two weeks after you set up a new campaign, I actually don't think those data points are bad to look at because it will take longer to get opportunities and revenue.
[06:38.7]
Yep. I also, on the flip side, think if it has been a month, I usually use a month as like a good time frame, and you're still talking in those metrics instead of qualified opportunities or qualified conversions and closed won deals. There's no like how do you have confidence that this money is being spent to bring you more money in return?
[07:02.1]
Right. That's often how I frame it. To people who are still talking about vanity metrics, it's like maybe it's working, but can you confidently tell me that it's bringing more dollars in than you are spending, and when the answer is no, or we're not sure, it's like very hard then to be like, okay, we should spend more, or like this is a good channel.
[07:24.0]
So that's kind of how I like to frame it and sometimes I think it's just about explaining it very simply like that to a CMO. And I think that that that gets into, Brian, what you've talked about by saying that team structure has as much impact on performance as ad creative.
[07:42.7]
What do you view as the ideal setup for demand gen engine or a demand gen team that actually connects marketing and sales in real time? That's another great question. I actually think that this depends on the company size. So I think as you get, I usually use like, you know, if you get above $50 or $75 million in ARR, you usually, on the marketing side, have a full time headcount or team for each dedicated function.
[08:10.4]
So there's like an events team or person, there's like a paid ads team or person, there's a organic website. Right. And, and then those people in my opinion are responsible for the execution of those channels. But also the reporting and inter-channel and inter-department communication, I think.
[08:30.8]
So that's a little simpler when you're a bigger company that kind of has product market fit and is successful and all these things where there's like a full marketing team. Consider a full marketing team. I think in the earlier stage often like the companies I work with, there's two to five marketing people that are doing everything.
[08:49.7]
There's usually a marketing leader who is stretched extremely thin. And I think that in that scenario there is a very solid case to have your in-house people focused on the channels that either have had success or that they are experts at and then staffing with, you know, fractional agency part-time people, and building the department that way because they're realistically not going to have headcount for a 10-person marketing team, at that stage.
[09:20.1]
So I think yeah, like, that evolves as the company gets bigger. But initially I don't think you need a full time headcount for every single function but you do need specific full time headcounts for the functions that are working and/or you want to invest the most in.
[09:36.0]
Right. That's a really fascinating nuance, actually, right around the fact that smaller companies often can get these things right more naturally, you know, so there's something there that bigger, bigger organizations of course across the startups and enterprise giants you've worked with can learn from that being nimble a little bit or maybe being a level deeper into things than you think you need to be.
[10:00.2]
Often the smaller companies, the higher level folks internally actually have a better understanding of what's working and what's not working than the bigger companies that I work with. I also think that it is more of that, as you work at a bigger company, more of your job isn't just doing the function, it's actually communicating internally of what is working, what's not working, and why.
[10:27.3]
And I see again I work usually with smaller-size companies who are pretty good at that because there's so much going on that they need to keep everyone informed. When you get to 150, 200, 500 employees and the marketing teams and the sales teams gets bigger, that's when it actually often breaks and it becomes extremely siloed.
[10:51.0]
So yeah, I've seen this myself in my corporate career in marketing. But also I've said it time and time again on this podcast. When teams stop fighting for credit and start fighting for revenue, everyone wins. Yeah, and I think that often happens as you get bigger, bigger company, company size and more mature again.
[11:14.4]
What I find this is why I enjoy working with, you know, earlier-stage series. A-series B-companies is because what I find there is like everyone just wants it to work and then investments are made based on what's working. No one is just doing things for credit.
[11:32.1]
And I've also worked in larger enterprise companies and it's definitely a different vibe and there's definitely a credit aspect regardless of like what is best for the business, which personally always bothered me, but I know that's just like comes with the territory of a larger company.
[11:47.1]
Yeah, yeah. Let's focus in on those series A and series B companies that you help with D.I.G.S. marketing. Do you have any campaign or client examples where connecting the dots between ads and revenue completely changed the outcome for the organization? Yeah, and I think it's more common than not where the dots were not connected.
[12:07.0]
So like a good example is I was working with a series A company. They were actually already spending on paid ads. They were spending like $30 or $40,000 on Google Ads a month, which is not insignificant for a smaller company. And it was actually somewhat working.
[12:23.0]
But again, when I first started talking to them, I asked the same question, which is like, can you tell me which campaigns or which keywords are actually leading to the opportunities? Or can you just tell me in. And of course they said we're not sure, like the data is not great. And we, you know, there's some foundational setup and how the systems are connected.
[12:42.7]
But basically once we did that, it was very obvious that like three of the eight campaigns were the ones that were bringing in the qualified conversions. Not just any conversion. And since then we have scaled. This was eight months ago and we have like tripled the ads budget.
[13:00.8]
They're spending hundreds of thousands a month. And the key is that the 80% of that spend is in the three campaigns that are leading to qualified ops and revenue. And now they're more willing to test, you know, like new campaigns because we know if it works we're going to have an understand, we're going to see that down funnel and actually have confidence in it.
[13:23.4]
Right. So yeah, like, that's a real example and it's pretty common, where things are actually working but they're not visible at the level they need to be down funnel to have confidence in investing more, until you're kind of connecting one revenue all the way back to the ad platform.
[13:41.2]
Right, right. And I have to say, I mean I've even seen recently where maybe we were not doing a good story. You know, we were seeing CPCs increase but our cost per acquisition was actually staying consistent. That's a more detailed story to tell there.
[13:58.4]
In that sort of vein though, you know, even in Series A, Series B companies, I know you've said that companies that have multiple products often have a struggle to stay aligned. How do you, how would you recommend they keep focus when there are so many different priorities competing for attention?
[14:14.7]
Yeah, I like to start when it's a more complicated product or multi product. I like to try to simplify it and say imagine that we only had one product. And I even do this with campaigns in Google Ads, like imagine we only had one, which is like the most aligned or the closest to revenue or the best one.
[14:33.7]
Sometimes I actually use that phrasing like hey, which one is the best of the products? If we get it, which one would you be happiest with? I start there and then I usually would try to like simplify that into a one campaign or maybe two campaigns, you know, depending on the platform and try to get some early momentum before getting into the multi-product or multi-campaign.
[14:59.1]
So I think in general I would rather have one campaign. This is one of these things I say like every day to my clients is I'd rather have one campaign that is working extremely well versus five that are all like, ehh. Start with the one, and then let's test number two, and then let's test number three.
[15:16.9]
A lot of people, agencies, internal, just try to overcomplicate it at the beginning. And I see accounts that are just trying to do too much before they have anything that's actually working. And I guess I'd love to take a lens sort of looking ahead here, say in the next three years, especially in the B2B SaaS world.
[15:37.0]
How do you see AI changing demand gen and measurement? Yeah, I think a few things. So one is, I think you will always need a human to do the thinking of like those questions that we just talked about.
[15:52.0]
Meaning like which campaign is the best for the business? If it does well, what is our value prop? Like what do we want our brand to look and feel like that. I feel like there's always going to be someone or people that need to do that. I do think that I should be able to help making a lot of these like little tweaks within the campaigns that are still pretty manual.
[16:13.7]
That may mean like tweaking word in a Google Ad or an image in like a LinkedIn single image ad and then some of the like pacing and optimizations. There are already, there are already tools that help with this, but they are outside tools that you have to purchase on top of the ad platforms.
[16:32.4]
And I think that some of that will just get brought into the ad platforms. Things like, oh, you're underpacing by 50% of your budget, you should increase your budget. Right now you have to basically use other tools and pay for other software to do that. And I think in a few years a lot of that will be native in the actual ad platforms, whether through consolidation, mergers, acquisitions, or they just build it themselves and buy out the other companies.
[17:00.8]
There's so many companies that are doing similar functions that live on top of these ad platforms. It just feels like the Googles, the Metas, the Linkedins of the world will be able to just take the best ones and build it into their platform, their own flavor.
[17:20.0]
Let's say outside of that, you know, if you could wave, if you, Brian, could wave a magic wand and fix one thing in how core our companies structure their growth teams, what would it be? I think it's a good question. One pet peeve I have and maybe this is just because I come from this world and this is where I worked in house for most of my career as like an early stage of you know, number one or number two marketer on the team is I think if I could wave a magic wand I would, I would say that if you are a marketing team under you know, five or ten people, I truly believe that the leaders, VPs, even CMOs need to be able to understand and actually probably execute on the channels that they are overseeing.
[18:08.1]
Right. I think when you get to a bigger stage company that is not the case, and they can actually be quote unquote "management" and lead and not be in the weeds. Boggles my mind when I see VPs of marketing who have a team of two or three people who truly could not do the work themselves or even understand some of the channels.
[18:29.5]
And I feel like at that stage for you to be successful, yes you can hire people and you should delegate a lot, but fundamentally a leader at that stage still needs to know how to do all of the things and make decisions off of that when they should know how to do the things is something I've always argued for.
[18:47.5]
Right. If you don't know how to manage something, you don't know how to lead something. Right, I agree, I fundamentally agree, but I don't think that's always true in practice. But I mean the future then of growth belongs to the teams, I guess, who collapse those silos before they collapse the budget.
[19:07.0]
Right? Correct. And also I would say the teams that have leaders that not only understand how all of the channels tie together, but also can make intelligent decisions on where to place strategic bets based on that.
[19:23.5]
And what I see is when the leader isn't able to do the work themselves or able to understand all of the work themselves inherently, it's very hard for them to make successful bets and decisions at that early stage.
[19:39.0]
Yeah, that's great. That's perfect. Brian. This was awesome. Practical, sharp and real. Before we close, where can listeners find you, connect, and learn more about D.I.G.S. marketing? Cool. So yeah, I appreciate it Adam. I think pretty simply you can find me on LinkedIn.
[19:54.9]
I'm trying to be more active on LinkedIn. So it's just my name, Brian Koffler. And then I have a website, digsmarketing.com and like I said, I specialize in working with really seed Series A and Series B B2B tech companies who are looking to scale pipeline and don't have a team of 10 or 15 or 20 in-house marketers and need some additional firepower.
[20:19.6]
So I reach out to me on those channels and like I said, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn and trying to be even more active. So say hi. Awesome. And I mean what stuck with me here today, Brian, is really simple. Paid ads don't exist in isolation. They're part of the revenue engine, and you can't measure what's real if you're not looking at the full system.
[20:40.0]
You know, marketing might spark attention, but it's that alignment that creates the acceleration point. Right. And that's the difference between campaigns that fade and companies that scale. Yeah, I think that nails it. I think it's no, different than other marketing channels.
[20:56.8]
Like if you think of events or email marketing or anything. Right. Like they need to tie back to qualified opportunities and won deals or else they are not worth investing. Paid ad shouldn't be any different and shouldn't be nin a silo.
[21:13.7]
Right? Awesome. Well, thank you, Brian. And thanks for tuning into "Is Anything Real?" I'm Adam W. Barney. If this episode gave you something real to think about, share it, leave a review, and join us next time as we keep peeling back the layers on what's real in growth, leadership, and momentum.
[21:30.4]
Thank you, Brian. And until next time, plug in, power up, and keep finding what's real.