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Interviews with top marketers sharing tactical tips, strategies, and lessons learned to help you grow your business. Hosted by Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five, former CMO, and author of Founder Brand. Learn more at exitfive.com
E5_Consensus webinar - June 2026 - Anti social buyer Demand Gen Plays - Audio Episode (1)
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[00:00:00] You're listening to The Dave Gerard Show.
[00:00:17] The modern B2B buyer has gone antisocial. I like that. I can be antisocial. No form fills, no demo requests, no hand raises. They're asking AI about your product, forming opinions before they talk to sales, and by the time they do, they're already halfway to a decision. We did an Exit Five live session recently and got into exactly what demand gen looks like when the funnel starts without you in control, and the room was fired up because this is where B2B buying is going.
[00:00:42] The whole way we use the internet is changing, and it's changing what it means for sales and marketing. Judy Kimball from ConsenSys made the case for ungating content and running LinkedIn influencer programs to reach buyers before they raise their hand. Hunter from TechMetrix showed how to build for AI visibility so LLMs cite you [00:01:00] accurately and why a share of voice in AI answers matters more than last touch attribution.
[00:01:05] And Mason Crosby from Scrappy ABM broke down why he measures content in hours watched, which I loved. He said they want seven hours of content watched. That's what matters to them, not leads generated. Here's a live session we did on how to win with today's antisocial buyer. This was one of the highest-rated sessions we've done, I think ever.
[00:01:23] Dan said four point eight out of five, so check it out if you need to know more about, uh, modern marketing and why the funnel is a whole mess. You're gonna really enjoy this episode AI is awesome, but you can only talk to Claude and get answers about marketing so much. I think we get a lot of value in talking to our peers, and that's what we wanna do with these Exit Five live sessions.
[00:01:42] We bring in members, people from in and around our community who are doing something right now as it relates to your job in B2B marketing. Today, the topic is all about the new way of buying. Like, what does a marketing funnel look like in a world where AI is answering all my questions? And we have Judy, Hunter, Mason, and [00:02:00] myself.
[00:02:00] I'll host. And I just was saying it's a really exciting day, buzzy day here in Vermont because it's the last day of school, and all of us were kinda backstage saying, like, we have fun, like, outdoor, outside plans after this. So we'll have a good little session, and then hopefully everybody can have a nice, uh, start to the weekend.
[00:02:14] But before we get in, can you just let me know that this is working? So put in, in the chat right now. I'd love to have, like, your name, where you're writing in from, and then also just, like, why did you join? Why did you take an hour out of your day to be on this? You certainly could just, like, get the recording later.
[00:02:27] Why are you here now? What are you hoping to learn out of this session? Drop that into the, the chat, and I, uh, I'd love to, I'd love to get some feedback 'cause I don't, I don't have any comments right now. Marissa's here. There we go. All right. Great. Nicholas is in Phoenix, curious with the playbook. Looks like, uh, Rhea from Toronto.
[00:02:43] "I work in B2B, and I'm here to understand our customer's proxies better." Okay, understood. Lisa's from Milwaukee. Calvin's out there in Utah. Okay. Kansas City. "Leads have been low in twenty twenty-six, so we need something awesome." We got people from, from all over. So, uh, we're gonna get into today's session in, in just a minute.
[00:02:58] And, uh, today's-- [00:03:00] we call this the antisocial buyer. I love this. The antisocial buyer, demand gen plays for twenty twenty-six. What does this look like in a world where AI is doing so much of the, the research? But before we get into today's session, I just wanna give a quick shout-out to our sponsor, ConsenSys.
[00:03:14] They are an interactive product experience platform. They help B2B buyers move from first click to final decision two times faster. Most of your buyers have already decided whether they like you before your sales team ever gets on a call with them. True. Absolutely. I'm having Claude do all my research.
[00:03:28] Why would I talk to your sales team? They've asked AI to get reviews about their product, hear what people are saying about it, and by the time they request a demo, they often already have a decision in mind, and now they have to wait Three to five more days to talk to sales. Right, I don't wanna wait l- to have this call.
[00:03:42] Let's talk now. That's why ConsenSys recently brought together ConsenSys, Peel and Seliio into a single platform built for how modern buyers actually buy. When a buyer shows up wanting to explore on their own terms, you give them interactive product experiences to discover your solution, AI-powered conversations to answer their questions, and personalized live demos to [00:04:00] validate the fit.
[00:04:00] Along the way, you see who's engaging, what they care about, and who else is influencing the decision. Stop being a bystander while the LLM sell or unsell your product. That's a crazy thing to think about, actually. Category leaders like Atlassian and Autodesk use ConsenSys to turn invisible researchers into high-intent leads.
[00:04:16] Check 'em out, go ConsenSys.com/exitfive. Shout-out to the team at ConsenSys for sponsoring this session, and I'm, I'm really excited to get into it today with Judy, Hunter, and Mason, who all have a different approach to how they're tackling this problem of the antisocial buyer. One thing, uh, Mercer, you wanna flip to that, that next slide that we have here just to set context for this?
[00:04:33] So this is kind of like Hunter sh- gave this to us and, and, and we'll touch on this in a little bit, but I wanted to just touch on this to set the stage here. Like, the new funnel now is s- and let me know if you relate to this in the chat, but the new funnel is looking something like, which is the opposite of B2B, how it used to be.
[00:04:48] It used to be, if you wanna learn about a product in B2B, you have to go to the website, contact the sales team, then they'll tell you about it. Now we've flipped this whole thing on its head to be like all the research happens o- online, self-research through Google, [00:05:00] Reddit, your website. Then I'm gonna ask AI like, "Hey, I'm considering this, this, this, or this for my CRM.
[00:05:04] What should I do?" And then, so I think this is interesting. Judy, do you wanna ... Let's bring up Judy, and we can kinda like segue into this, but I'm just curious in the chat real quick, are y'all thinking about the flip in this funnel inside of, of your company? Hi, Judy. Good to see you. Hi. Good to see ya. I mean, there's no way they're not all thinking about AI in their funnel.
[00:05:22] Yeah. I mean, just, it's eaten all of my search. Like, ev- I just was, you know, from things in my personal life, you know, my kid's got a bug bite, and it's, like, growing really big. Like, how do I challenge that to, like... I have so much knowledge of my business and the way that I'm working is different. So you've done a bunch of interesting things.
[00:05:38] I know you're gonna kick us off. So we have each, we have three people here. We got about five minutes each. We're gonna dive into a specific play, some things they're doing at their companies that match this approach, and then we're gonna take a, we have a bunch of discussion questions and, and, and Q&A. So Judy, you, you, you are to lead us off here.
[00:05:52] Awesome. Hello, everyone. I'm Judy Kimball. I lead demand generation at ConsenSys, and so [00:06:00] I'm responsible for trying to get our prospects to fall in love with our product before they ever talk to our sales team. And so today, I'm gonna talk about why brand is actually the new demand. And so when Dave was saying, like, AI's curating your shortlist, and so our old play of performance marketing, like manufacturing familiarity, just, like, doesn't work anymore And the buyers that are ending up on your site already have some sort of recognition of your brand or else they wouldn't be there, right?
[00:06:35] And so brand visibility and affinity is what is ultimately gonna drive demand now, and I have to caveat all of this with obviously there's a lot more to brand than just the visibility component that I'm gonna talk about. So all of this is predicated on the idea that you've put in the hard work on understanding your audience and creating messaging that resonates.
[00:06:59] Nice. By [00:07:00] the way, there's a lot of love in the chat for this whole sentiment about brand being the, the new- Oh, good. Good. Great. It's-- I said it's great to see a demand gen lead. This is where we're at, as the d- seeing a demand gen leader championing brand as the thing to generate demand is awesome, so. Oh, good.
[00:07:13] Good. I'm glad you're- We're rolling. Keep going ... feeling the same. Yeah, awesome. Okay, so I wanna take a step back in time to last year. We saw digital costs rising thirteen percent year over year, but we didn't have the conversions that would have made that okay, right? Like, to keep our cost per the same and everything.
[00:07:33] And so I really had to, like, reevaluate my plan, and I feel like this is common among B2B marketers, and so tell me if you agree or disagree here, but I had over-indexed my spend on what was-- had, like, measurable hard ROI, and that wasn't brand. And so I had this conversation with my CEO and CMO of, like, we need to change something.
[00:07:58] It's not-- The digital [00:08:00] playbook isn't working the way that it used to. And so we started talking about where we get our information, who we trust, and obviously, AI is one component of it, and there was a whole different strategy around that that I know Hunter will talk about, like, their strategy on. But we started thinking about people, and how do we get people to tell our brand story for us?
[00:08:23] And so we tapped influencers to help tell our story. So we started testing the influencer motion last year with just four influencers in the sales space 'cause we sell to pre-sales, sales, and marketing. And so with those influencers, I personally interviewed each of them. My brand and content person and I reviewed every post while trying to minimize the amount of edits so that it was still natural coming from them.
[00:08:50] And during that test, we had two influencers post on the same day, and we saw a doubling of site traffic that day. So you can see that spike on the top [00:09:00] chart there. And then we also saw a big spike in demo views and hand raisers, which are our most valuable leads. So we went big. We then had 12 influencers for a three-month period.
[00:09:14] Real quick, I'm just thinking of someone in the chat right now, like on the last slide, do you have any ballpark of what you spent that you'd be willing to share? Like, how did you work with these people? How did you decide what to pay them and what to post? I think the specifics of this are interesting.
[00:09:26] Yeah, totally. So it varied depending on the influencer. It was somewhere between 1,500 a post and up to like-- I feel like our most expensive is 5,000 a post, 6,000 maybe. Yep. And typically, what the engagement looked like was like at least th- a three-month minimum, 'cause one post, while you might see a spike from it, it's really more about some, like, longer term engagement.
[00:09:53] And so we'd do a three-month, and you get at least it would be like one LinkedIn post. In some [00:10:00] instances, there would also be a newsletter, and some we did, like, each quarter, there'd be an additional activation, right? Like, they'd speak on a webinar, or they'd speak at one of our in-person events, something like that.
[00:10:12] Okay, cool. Helpful. Keep going. Okay, so then we went big, and so we had 12 influencers running at a time, and we saw the immediate impact. Like, I don't know if you can see it on the chart, but like right in the middle where it says Colin post, this was like a crazy post that went viral. I hate that term, but on LinkedIn, I think it had like 1,500 reactions, and we saw this huge spike in demo views and hand raisers.
[00:10:36] Which really sort of helped us invest more and, like, continue to invest. But then we also saw sustained impact. Our branded search volume just, like, kept growing with all of these brand activations, and ultimately it was about a doubling year over year in that branded search volume. This is the money one, right?
[00:10:56] 'Cause it's like obviously when they post, you're gonna see a spike on that day, [00:11:00] but how do we make this a longer thing? And it's like the correlation between them talking about your brand more on LinkedIn means people are gonna go to other places and search more. And I, I like when we can break things down to, like, this is how people think and buy and operate online versus how do we measure those 1,500 reactions on Colin's post, right?
[00:11:19] Yeah, exactly. And, like, we do do some, like, mining of social media data as well, where we're using Clay to, like, pull those reactions and comments into HubSpot and then into Pocus. It's, like, this whole complicated piece. Oh, that's interesting. People are gonna wanna know about that later. Yeah. And so then it is...
[00:11:37] It's not like an MQL trigger or anything like that, but what it does is it informs the AI research that then the outbound SVR team is using. That's, like, one of the components, would be the if they've reacted or commented on LinkedIn posts where we've been mentioned. Cool. And so then the other component of it, that's influencer.
[00:11:58] The other side of [00:12:00] activating people was really, like, telling the brand story through communities. So again, we pilot everything before we go big, so we started with 30 Minutes to President's Club as our first community, and we heard anecdotes from our sales team about people hearing about us on the podcast.
[00:12:16] I was actually even on a sales call with a CMO who said she had first learned about us from the 30 Minutes to President's Club podcast, and so, like, that felt pretty good. But I think the big learning that I took away from this is it's not just about the ad read. Like, great, Dave did the ad read about ConsenSys, but what really matters is getting your people involved.
[00:12:39] So for our sales communities, we offer up our CRO. He's super charismatic, as most CROs are, right, to speak on things, to be at events, to meet people. And then for our marketing communities, our CMO and I engage in the communities. Obviously, I'm here speaking on this, but, like, I go to the, all of the Exit Five [00:13:00] webinars and I'm in the chat.
[00:13:01] You know, it's that kind of stuff of making sure that you're really engaging to get the most out of the communities. But that brand recognition eventually is still gonna lead people to your website And so it's just not about, like, getting them to download gated content anymore, right? It's about starting a conversation with them.
[00:13:19] So we really focused in on how we could make it easy to self-educate and convert. And so we stopped gating top of funnel. We don't gate any of our content anymore. And we started adding context. So we, we obviously are a demo solution, and so we added video demos with a lot of, like, value prop messaging and context to them.
[00:13:43] And then we did click-through tours as well throughout the site And then we really leaned into conversational AI, and I'm happy to talk more about this if anyone's interested 'cause conversational AI is very new for us. But it's not just a chatbot. It's [00:14:00] this AI feature that you feed product context to and brand messaging to, and then people can just ask it questions.
[00:14:08] And so that's been a really interesting thing to see the engagement on our site. I think we went-- we've, like, two and a half times our time on page by adding that conversational AI to it. And so obviously we used consensus for all of this. And so for us, it had that double whammy effect of giving the context, but also showcasing how our product works as a marketing tool.
[00:14:32] But I will say we had to take a little bit of a leap of faith by ungating so much and just, like, trusting that people will like what they see and they'll hand raise. And so just one anecdote on that. We ran an AB test where we had gated content on our marketing persona page, a gated tour, and then we had an ungated tour.
[00:14:55] And on the ungated product tour, we doubled the number of [00:15:00] people that booked a meeting. And so it works to ungate even though- That's how it works. You just need, like, you need a win. You need to do it to prove it. Then you-- everyone's always obsessed with how are we gonna measure it, and, and you'll know.
[00:15:10] You'll know. You'll know when it works. Mm-hmm. Now, I will just say, like, last thing from me, you can't just, like, ungate with no plan. Like, it does take time and, like, testing in and that sort of thing. We're still in the walk phase. Like, I do have a gate on my homepage demo. I wanna remove it, and I will eventually remove it.
[00:15:29] We're just walking the line with, with sales until I get to completely ungate. So that's it. Thank you. Nice. Good job. Good start. Good start. Hot start. Good job. Producer Marissa backstage on a heater from the lake house. We're on a good start. Okay. Next up is Hunter. We got to know Hunter because Hunter's boss, Claire, is a member of our CMO council, and we're like, "We're looking for smart people to come on and talk about this, who's doing this at their company," and they're like, "You gotta have Hunter on.
[00:15:57] She runs demand gen at TechMetrix." [00:16:00] So good to have you on. Who are you? What do you do there, and what does your company do? Yes. Thanks for having me, Dave and Exit5 community, and shout out to Claire for the recommendation. My name is Hunter. I am the director of demand generation at TechMetrix. So TechMetrix is the all-in-one platform for independent auto repair.
[00:16:19] What that means is if you've ever taken your vehicle in to get serviced, maybe an oil change, new tires, a new starter, chances are you were interacting with a shop that might be powered by TechMetric. And we serve over 15,000 shops across North America, and we are building for the independent auto repair shop owner, and everything that we do is tied back to their success.
[00:16:42] Because when the shops win, we win. Uh, this is just for me, but clip this team. Let's clip this. "Oh, he only talks to people who sell to marketers." Clip this, okay? Clip this. Thank you. Next. I love it. Yeah, so today our pipeline, 66% of closed-won deals are driven from marketing [00:17:00] sources, which is super exciting being on the marketing side, right?
[00:17:03] Having that, that metric tied to us. And 70% of that new business comes from paid and organic channels. So what we're all here to talk about today is the antisocial buyer, right? And that buyer has done their research without you. But our job is not to interrupt that process, it's to be in it. So we're not trying to catch them after the fact, we're trying to shape what they find while they are forming their opinion, while they are doing their research.
[00:17:33] So I'm sure many of you have heard the same thing that we were hearing is, and what we're talking about today, the funnel has started without us, right? Buyers, if you think about yourself as a consumer, you're Googling stuff, right? You're listening to your friends and your peers about what they have to say about clothing choices, new vehicles to purchase, and the list goes on and on.
[00:17:53] You might be asking ChatGPT, you might be reading Reddit threads. And by the time that your prospect [00:18:00] books a demo with you They have already decided if you're worth talking to or not, right? And we stopped asking ourselves, "How are we getting more people to show up in the funnel?" And started asking ourselves, "What are they finding before they show up?"
[00:18:14] And that question is what led us to build our AEO and LLM strategy that I'm gonna give you a peek into today. So I'm gonna gatekeep a little bit on the metrics that we saw, 'cause I want you guys on the edge of your seat in the next couple of minutes while I'm chatting with you. Good. Well, we need a marketer.
[00:18:31] She's a proper marketer. I appreciate that. I'm trying my best. So what we did is we built a dedicated LLM visibility page. We have AEO content spritz in place. We've done some technical schema markup, the SEO technical elements that everyone's familiar with. We implemented tracking, and shout out to Judy, I was clapping backstage.
[00:18:53] I have similar thoughts on the ungating strategy, and we have applied that as TechMetric as [00:19:00] well. So you might be asking, "What the heck is this LLM visibility page, Hunter?" Well, it is a page that's structured specifically to be cited by AI models. Plain language answering the exact questions that your buyers are asking AI, and it's organized the way that models will parse through and quote the content.
[00:19:19] So here's the quick hit of things that I talked through as far as what we've built. This slide will show up at the end again with the metrics. Here is the LLM visibility page. So URL top left, what the page looks like in its full length on the right, and then a close-up where you can see we've removed all of the flashy headers, images, things like that, so that we are talking to the AI bot that we want looking at this page and not a consumer.
[00:19:49] So that is a dedicated LLM page, and this morning I went into ChatGPT, and I asked what the best auto repair platform was, and you can see that [00:20:00] TechMetric shows up first. Sure, this might be due to what I've been asking and researching within my own instance, but just wanted to give that visibility as to, to what's happening there So next up, when I've talked about our AEO content sprint, the challenge isn't creating AEO content, right?
[00:20:18] It's that the model might cite the content, and the buyer might never visit your site. So how are you converting a buyer who's leveraging AI, and they're never coming to your site, never raising their hand? This is where we've built out comparison data, FAQ questions, and we're actually powering some of this by G2.
[00:20:38] So we're using the actual words of the community to build out these comparison charts on our website, and it's structured as TechMetric versus our competitors to give models a clean, quotable answer when somebody is asking this question directly within AI. And we wanna make sure that we are, you know, the answer [00:21:00] before somebody raises their hand.
[00:21:02] And through that is kind of where I'll go into my, uh, soapbox moment about the ungating strategy. I, prior to working in marketing, worked as a retail operations manager, and one of the biggest things that we had told all of our team is you can't sell something with-- when it's in the stockroom, right? If your buyer isn't able to see it on the floor, how are they going to know it's available for them to purchase?
[00:21:25] I have that same mentality when I think about gating and ungating content throughout the website. If you believe in your organization and the product and the content that you're creating, why are you hiding it? Why are you creating barriers to entry to allow your audience to consume that information, right?
[00:21:48] Create that journey where they're able to consume and better understand what you offer and the value that you provide to them while they're in their discovery of kind of their customer [00:22:00] journey. So I'm a huge fan of ungating, and I know that this creates a whole nother door of questions, right? How do I get stakeholder buy-in?
[00:22:09] How do I prove that it's working? So open to questions when that moment comes, but that is definitely the approach that I take as well. So, as I mentioned, holding out on some metrics with everybody. At the bottom, you'll see a screenshot here. This is how we've been tracking our AI and LLM visibility to understand if what we're doing is actually working, and the numbers I have listed on the right-hand side are from twenty twenty-five to twenty twenty-six.
[00:22:37] So you can see that some of our numbers have decreased, but what this is telling me is our channel mix is actually diversifying. We've introduced web chat, and that's emerging as a meaningful contributor to our strategy, and our conversion is strong. Organic holds roughly the same percentage from SQL all the way to close one, so our lead quality is stable, and [00:23:00] there's not a significant drop through the funnel, and it still remains the number one channel by volume at every stage from twenty twenty-five and twenty twenty-six.
[00:23:09] You're a celebrity in the chat right now. Sorry. Perfect. I can't see it right now in my screen. Yeah, I know. I, I, I'm telling you this because I know what the feeling is like. You know when you're, like, presenting it at all hands, and you're, like, just on your slides, and you don't know if everyone's like, "Boo!"
[00:23:22] Like, no, it's really good. I love it. I love it. Well, yeah, big fan of AEO over here, as well as ungating, so, uh, would love to continue the conversation once we get back to the Q&A section of this. By the way, so our goal for Drive this year is to do more real hands-on, tactical specific content like this because this is why the chat's blowing up.
[00:23:42] This is what people want, and this is the whole pitch of, like, our stuff at Exit Five. Not to make it about us for a second, but I will 'cause I'm a marketer. These are the things that you can't just go into Claude and ask Claude about this. You need to hear from someone who's actually doing the job, like you, and that's what we're basing all of our-- That's what we're pushing to make all of our content like, and then in particular, Drive is gonna [00:24:00] be this in person, and Hunter is speaking in there.
[00:24:02] I know Dan just dropped a, dropped a link for Drive tickets, but this is what we want Drive to be like. And I think now more than ever, there's just-- you don't know who to trust. You don't know what to believe, so the best way is to see other marketers, like, who've done something like you, being like, "Oh, like, you learned something from Judy.
[00:24:16] Judy just learned something from you." Like, that's the whole game, so this is awesome. Good job. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, and learn from one another's mistakes, right? Not everything's gonna work within every industry and at every organization, but what nuggets can you take from all of us to build a strategy that works best for you and your audience?
[00:24:33] Amen, sister. Well said. All right. Great job. Hunter's gonna pop in the chat right now and, uh, take all your questions, and then we got one more, fellow by the name of Mason. Mason's thing is, uh, ABM, and he's got some cool stuff that they're doing here. He's gonna talk about this. Mason, you got the mic, sir.
[00:24:48] Awesome. Dave, thanks for having me. Hi, I'm Mason Cosby, founder and CEO of Scrappy ABM. We build account-based marketing programs for primarily mid-market SaaS companies. We've built about a hundred programs in the past three-ish years and have sourced about [00:25:00] a hundred and thirty million in revenue. So- It's good What I'm gonna walk through You're good.
[00:25:04] It's okay. I, I, you know, 150 sounds better, but 130 is pretty good. I, you know, the 130 is real. Uh Yeah, fair. Fair. So, you know, some people are claiming revenue numbers, and it's like, that's unverifiable. So what I wanna walk through is two different angles. So angle one, we're a bootstrap business that has actually done about 5.2 million in sales in three years with myself, one sales guy, and one marketer.
[00:25:29] So walking through exactly how we've done that, while also then sharing some of the tips and tricks that we are giving all of our clients. Hopefully, that sounds helpful for everybody. I'm a big fan of verifiable metrics, so this is our actual Hubspot dashboard of revenue closed in the past 12 months. So you can see 2.5, average deal age of 58.5 days, and again, overall revenue at about 5.2.
[00:25:52] So I promise what I'm gonna walk through Israel and works. So basic premise is we lean super, super, [00:26:00] super heavily into async video. There's a lot of stuff here that I'll walk through, but at the highest level, we are a business that thrives on showcasing actual expertise and s- actually being a subject matter expert.
[00:26:12] So we just give all of our information away to the best of our ability. We have done that primarily through a podcast. We've done that now through social, and I'll talk through how we're doubling down on some things. The basic premise I'd also give everybody as you're thinking through, like, "Okay, what are the lessons that I can apply for my own marketing program?"
[00:26:26] I'm stealing this framework, but it's more, better, new. So if something's already working, just do more of that. If you started to cap out when you do more, do it better. And the last thing you do is new, because new is the worst bet, because you have no historical data on anything new. So for us, we have largely scaled our audience through social and attending events.
[00:26:45] So for example, we did two events last year. This year we're doing 13, and we're just going and hanging out. And then every event we've done so far, we've walked out with on average eight opportunities by simply being present and being there in the moment where [00:27:00] people are talking about the things that we can help with.
[00:27:02] So that's the first thing. The second thing, and we actually just hired a dedicated social media marketer. We happen to have about three hundred hours of content for the past three years, and he is going through and finding all of the best clips, and his job is to actually start posting across YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta, Instagram, TikTok, X, between twenty and thirty times a day.
[00:27:23] Just side questions 'cause I'm the host, I get to ask sometimes questions that are interesting to me. Yeah. Where do you start on a project like that? Is there a tool that can help identify like, "Okay, I got three hundred hours of this content." How do you find out where to start clipping? Yeah, what a great question.
[00:27:36] So one of the things- How are you, how are you approaching it now? Yeah. So we're fortunate that we've already got all the transcripts, and all those transcripts are organized. So one of the things that we're doing is our team has consistently used Claude or ChatGPT to feed in all of our content, and we've got very well-documented brand points of view and specifically outlined what we view are somewhat differentiated perspectives from the market.
[00:27:58] We've already documented- So [00:28:00] it's like going through the transcripts? Yeah. So we're uploading every transcript. Finding those places. Yeah. Yeah. We upload every transcript and then have a rating system of tier one, which is like this was succinct and short and to the point And then we go and manually validate anything that's in a tier one or a tier two, and then tier three, we just actually, like, push off to the side.
[00:28:22] Tier three is like-- It was a long ramble that wasn't super easy to clip, so if it's a concept that's, like, three minutes or greater, we're actually putting that in, like, a tier two or a tier three. And then tier four, which is just there's lots of filler content that happens to exist when you have three hundred hours, we don't even clip any of that.
[00:28:39] So our main goal, though, first is essentially get out in the next four months up to twenty to thirty posts between six social channels, see what works, and then just consistently repurpose those content clips to get better hooks so that we can actually increase overall visibility. So it's a process, but I'm fortunate that we've been able to hire a [00:29:00] person who's...
[00:29:00] that's their whole job. And again, we did that- No, perfect. That was the exact answer I'm hoping for. Like, I like to hear- Cool ... when someone has just a philosophy like, you know, we're gonna tier it out. That was really useful. Thanks. Cool. So all of those clips, though, are actually going to drive towards specifically our newsletter.
[00:29:14] Our newsletter is going to start releasing playbooks every single week. So after one hundred ABM programs, we've summarized it down to about forty-five core playbooks that exist. There are obviously nuances, but there's about forty-five. So we're going to actually create open, ungated playbooks anyone can access with videos that go along with those so we can educate people at scale.
[00:29:37] The whole goal of all of our async video is, again, get people to trust us. I know that there's this concept around the number of touch points More recent data that I've leaned more heavily into is it takes someone on average seven hours of engagement with your brand to actually trust you. So I'm le- looking less at how do I get the 28 touch points and more to how do [00:30:00] I get the seven hours?
[00:30:01] So again, if I can do that through async video, that's both short form and long form, that is going to actually expedite their trust in our brand. Also, they buy into a person that they know actually has done the work versus, again, AI. So we're-- everyone else is talking about like their AEO strategy. I'm actually just leaning really heavy into in person and like video.
[00:30:21] Yeah. That's cool to hear you talk through that because I think that gives a metric. I think a lot of times when we marketers, we need to justify something like this, we often don't have a metric. Like it's hard to be like, well, the metric is not like direct sales because you're not just gonna buy our thing because you saw a clip.
[00:30:35] It's just not how B2B works. Yeah. But it's cool to hear you kind of like-- And there was a question earlier, we'll get to this with the panel, but it's almost like a lot of what this job is sometimes is like you kind of have to make up a metric to show why you're doing it, and it's like you have this made up...
[00:30:47] And not made up in a silly way, but you're like- Yeah ... I think that we have this point of view that if people spend more time with us, they're more likely to buy, therefore, we're gonna optimize for time spent with us. We're gonna do that through videos online, and we think the magic [00:31:00] number is like if we can get someone to roughly watch seven hours worth of video, then that's who we des- determine engage.
[00:31:06] Like that's an amazing answer- Mm-hmm ... to give to the CEO, the CFO, whoever. And I think a lot of times it's about they wanna feel like you have a point of view and you have- Yep ... a strategy that you can articulate versus like, "Yeah, I know, we're just gonna film a bunch of stuff and like, yeah, it's gonna grow our newsletter," you know?
[00:31:20] Yes. That exactly. The other thing that we've seen is when somebody starts to engage with us in async video, inevitably they have their own questions, so they actually wanna come and hang out live. So we are still leaning in pretty heavily to, like, webinars. So we host a monthly webinar that's on a, a deep dive on a topic, and then the goal actually of our webinar is to get people to a seven-hour workshop.
[00:31:40] So if you're like, "Mason, do you really believe that's seven hours?" We host a seven-hour workshop roughly every six weeks to help people build out their full ABM program. Now, the reason we do that is, we may talk about this later of, like, third-party intent data. I'm actually not a fan of third-party intent data.
[00:31:54] I'm a big fan of, like, first-party signals. So if somebody shows up for a seven-hour workshop, [00:32:00] the likelihood they have a pain is pretty high . So there's no real way around that. So our main goal is, again, optimize for async video so we can increase perceived expertise and trust to then get them into live engagement.
[00:32:14] But then the goal being once they've actually engaged with us live for an extended period of time, they will inevitably want to come and work with us. The other things that we do that I don't think a lot of people think about is if you go to our Services pages, we actually literally have videos that walk through exactly what we do for clients.
[00:32:31] So every single one of our pages on our website has a video that just says, "If you were to work with us, this is what we'd do for you." And we also are very transparent on pricing, so, like, no one has-- ever has to guess what our pricing is. So, like, it's just right here on the website. So we actually try to answer as many questions as humanly possible, and then make it also super easy for people to book.
[00:32:53] And if you just go to the Call page, I actually have a video here, it'll take a second to load, that tells [00:33:00] people who we're not a fit for. So the whole purpose of all of this is to make it so that people that don't wanna waste time on calls don't waste time on calls What that then does for us is our close rates are higher, our sales cycles are faster.
[00:33:15] So we move from that fifty-eight point five days, twenty-eight point five of those days on average are actually legal and contract review. We get to a proposal within four weeks and a, "We wanna work with you," because of how much we do on video and make life really easy for people. And side note, this is another one, we even record the pitch.
[00:33:33] So we haven't done a live pitch in two and a half years, and our buyers love it because they actually get the pitch in full that they can then just drop in Slack. And what we do after they watch the video is just a Q&A call where they can bring anybody that they want to then we'll just answer all their questions.
[00:33:48] So again, we are trying to make this as easy as humanly possible and lean as heavy into video as we can so that it just makes things easy for our buyers. So that's all that we are doing. [00:34:00] Now, you might think, 'cause this is what a lot of our clients have said- Oh, that's it. That's all we're doing. That's it.
[00:34:03] That's it. It's a good time. Most people watching- A lot of- ... are like, "I'd like to do one of those things well." Well, here's the one. Here's the one that I'd recommend you do. Dave, perfect for you up there. A lot of our clients say, "That sounds great for you, but we don't have a subject matter expert that wants to be on camera all the time."
[00:34:16] So one of the things that we recommend is most people have a very consultative call to in their sales process where they do a deep dive diagnostic to better understand all the problems that that customer is facing. If you take the call script from your call to and turn that into an audit diagnostic process that people can fill out, and then you deliver a result to them, and then you actually review the results in an async video with a subject matter expert, what you now get is unique information that you can use to follow up specifically with those accounts that is them literally telling you their problems.
[00:34:48] So you can't run that as an awareness play. But again, once you've already gotten people to your website, if you have an exit intent pop-up that's like, "See where you stack," and you actually tell people exactly what their problems are and [00:35:00] how they rank up against their other competitors It raises their awareness of the problem, and then they have to deal with it.
[00:35:07] Because if you're aware of how bad your pain is and you choose to ignore it, they were never gonna be a good buyer in the first place. But if you then raise awareness of their level of pain, you then also have the ammunition to follow up effectively and say, "Here's exactly what we would do with you if we were to have the opportunity to work together."
[00:35:23] So our whole goal is just, like, how do we get our target accounts or our best fit customers to tell us all their problems so that we can then walk them to a solution? Awesome. This is great 'cause, like, you're really specific and tactical, and so, like, I think there's people that are like, "Oh, well, yeah, I don't run an ABM agency, so of course you do it this way."
[00:35:40] But I'm actually taking the meta lesson out of this, which is it's more-- now more than ever, how much can you cut, cut, cut, refine, refine, refine, refine, refine? It's more important than ever to be specific to who do you provide the most value to, who's a really good fit for you, and then build your whole marketing funnel around how do we make it easy to get those people?
[00:35:57] We're not just talking to everyone. I think that's, that's my [00:36:00] kind of like macro lesson from that. Does that-- You get what I'm saying? For sure. We're actually about to release new messaging on our website that says, "Build your first successful ABM program," an agency specifically designed for twenty to two hundred and fifty million mid-market SaaS companies.
[00:36:12] Yeah. Like, getting as granular as possible. Okay. Hey, L- Marissa, let's bring everybody up here 'cause we have a bunch of questions. So that, that was great. So everybody's been in the chat, but we have some-- We have a bunch of questions that we have in our, in our doc based on some things people were asking about on, on the way in.
[00:36:26] But I wanted to bring you all up here and try to a- answer this question 'cause we got this question from Matt, which is the, the biggest reaction, and I think this is kind of the highest level strategy question we can help. Matt says, "Love all this, but our entire model is built on needing X leads and MQLs a month."
[00:36:42] Yep, still in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-six. "For ungating, how are you able to get leadership on board when they're so used to seeing lead and MQL numbers?" So I wanted to bring you all up and just have a discussion about, like, okay, so yep, totally, totally bought in. This is where marketing is going, but we're stuck to this old way.
[00:36:57] It's h- really hard to change my org. [00:37:00] Where do you start? How do you help lead this change? And feel free to take the mic and whoever wants to run with that. I can hop in. I think testing. It's gonna be different for everyone based on the relationship you have with your stakeholders, right? But one of the things that I always try to do is ask for some runway.
[00:37:16] What's the risk of if we don't run this test? Or how can I get autonomy to make a decision, and give me X amount of time to show you this might work? And leading with that. Again, it might not answer everything, right? If you have business metrics that you're held accountable to, the conversation probably starts elsewhere, right?
[00:37:38] How do you get the insight into what's being created at that top level to know what you're contributing to? And I would just add to that, I do have some of the metrics that are driven off of the marketing source model and all of that, that I'm accountable for. And so we did small shutoffs of things, like [00:38:00] of paid content acquisition leads, and were able to show that it didn't impact down-funnel metrics when we shut off little bits here and there.
[00:38:09] And so then we were slowly able to turn off more and more because it wasn't actually impacting down funnel. They were honestly garbage leads that we shouldn't have been capturing to begin with. They were way too top of funnel to turn into anything anyhow. It's interesting. A lot of times this ends up being a reality check for like, you might not have had as many leads as you thought when you trim all that out.
[00:38:29] Mason, just-- you're in a different position, but y- I like the way that you think about marketing. How would you answer this question? If you're, you're in-house, you're a director of demand gen, and you're trying to make the case to the team and the company to, to take this approach, how do you sell it? Yeah, I mean, I'd actually throw out, I probably have this conversation every other week with a different organization.
[00:38:48] You're like the therapist on the sideline helping them. Yes. Yeah. We're for sure the marketing therapist. So if you actually look at what I recommend of the, the audit process, there is still a gate aspect. We're just [00:39:00] saying push the gate further down and make it something of actual value. There's a level at which I'm a fan of gating, but when it's unscalable.
[00:39:08] So if you're gonna gate, you should have a clear follow-up that's like a one-to-one or a one-to-few type approach. So that tends to enable people to feel a little more comfortable with it 'cause they still have their gate, but the volume does go down, and they're typically higher quality, and the conversion is more quick from gate to actual pipeline.
[00:39:25] And again, it's still, for lack of a word, for some people, does check that box. And Judy, you said it earlier, you can't just un-gate everything all at once, so this is a way to breadcrumb towards a more un-gated approach. And then the final thought that I always think through is just if you're going to un-gate, there needs to be a new metric that you can track.
[00:39:41] And for many people, they don't have the technology today to track the website engagement at a contact level that you would need. That's the root cause of the question, I think, which is-- or, or whatever, however you define it. It's like, it's not about gate or not, it's when you have something gated, it's very clear how to measure that.
[00:39:56] This number of people requested it, here's their contact [00:40:00] information. When I take that away, how am I gonna talk about measurement? And so do you all think like part of this also is being able to have this conversation with your leadership team about like, "Here's why we're making this change." Once you have this conversation with them, like think about how you all buy things.
[00:40:13] Why should we be so silly to think people don't buy our product this way? Therefore, we have to make this change. Here's how we're gonna do it. Here's how we're gonna roll it out. Here's how we're gonna measure it, is like you have to have that conversation first, and then you can go do this. My quick thought.
[00:40:26] Somebody made a comment about it and I appreciate the-- They were like, "The flow charts are so helpful." So I think so many people don't fully understand marketing, which is why we try to have visuals or like there's tons of tools out there like Mural or Lucidchart. They're very inexpensive. If you can create a visual so that people can understand the flow of what you're now recommending your buyers go through, it makes e- buy-in a lot easier, 'cause right now most people only hear the, "Well, we're gonna stop doing this," and they don't fully understand what it's being replaced with.
[00:40:52] And as a result, they just latch onto what they know. So again, I don't, I don't fault people for it. It's just like change is scary. So if you don't know what you're changing [00:41:00] towards and you can't get excited about what you're changing towards, then you're gonna continue to latch onto what you've always known.
[00:41:03] I will say we're not perfect right now. Like, our measurement is not perfect. What I do always lean back on is hand raisers, and when I see a spike in people that are saying they want to talk to sales, that's a good sign. The other thing is with our conversations, like, you know, that last touch attribution is so problematic and can make us under invest.
[00:41:29] I saw you put that in the chat, like makes-- under invest in channels that may be working just because they weren't the last thing that touched them. And so we've also start-- moved to our sales team is always asking, "How'd you hear about us?" Or, "What made you come ask to talk to us?" Or, "What made you take my call?"
[00:41:46] All that kind of stuff. And then we do-- we look in Gong and use trackers in Gong to see, uh, if people are saying any of our channels or any of our activations. One more piece on that metric thing. Is there some middle-ish funnel leading metric? Like [00:42:00] Mason, you mentioned something about engagement with content.
[00:42:03] Is there something that you would-- people would measure there? So measurement is dictated by where the buyer is in their journey. So when I look at like our account progression model here, there's a different measure of success by stage. If they're at the awareness stage, the whole goal is do they know we exist?
[00:42:18] Because fun fact, someone that knows you exist is exponentially more likely to buy from you than, uh, someone that doesn't. It's like that's just goal one. And then at the initial engagement stage, it's are they starting to engage in actual like problem-related content, meaningful engagement? Do you actually start to have multiple folks within the buying committee?
[00:42:32] There are eight core roles on the buying committee. So do you have multiple of those people actually engaged with your brand? Ideally, more towards like solution-oriented content at that MQA stage or the conversion stage. They're actually doing some form of a hand raise that might be coming to an event, that might be they actually fill out this audit process.
[00:42:49] But it's more than just like they were on the pricing page. I view pricing page as a thing that we follow up to then do one-to-one value-added content. At that point, you then book the meeting. [00:43:00] So it's not what do we measure, it's what do we measure at the stage based on where the buyer is in their journey.
[00:43:07] Because otherwise we're just gonna throw out on page engagement, and, like, maybe. But if they're n- don't know you exist and that's the core metric you're going for, that's really tough. So put measurement in context of the buyer's journey to then h- outline what you should be measuring on at that stage.
[00:43:22] All right, I'm off my soapbox. I think that was a good soapbox to stand on, and I, I wanted you to go first 'cause I feel like sometimes I- I was gonna say, if you're a loser, that's a good soapbox to stand on. Get off that soapbox. Hunters up. Well, we're all in marketing, right? Sometimes there's vanity metrics, and I've come from an agency background, and there's a lot that, right, wrong, or indifferent, you can make something look good no matter what the numbers are.
[00:43:50] You take the percentage instead of the actual, and you build context around the narrative that you're trying to paint. So when it comes to metrics, for me, I think, [00:44:00] Mason, to your point, it's like where are they in their journey and what are you actually trying to get them to do? What do you want them to achieve?
[00:44:06] From our perspective within our marketing department, we use OKRs, and it's tied into company OKRs, and it lets us know are we doing the right things at the right time, should we set something down, like, what are we all working towards? But I think there's a lot of fluffy metrics that exist even for demand gen, and sometimes they're helpful to be a leading indicator on what you're actually trying to track, and other times they're just noise.
[00:44:33] So I think, unfortunately, my answer to the question would be, at the end of the day, what are you trying to achieve, and what are the things that you need to track on almost, like, a benchmark or a timeline to help you achieve that thing? So I couldn't say, like, "Oh, you need to track MQLs. Oh, you need to track AI visibility."
[00:44:52] I think it's a combination, and everybody's story is a little bit different based on what your organization's goal is, and sometimes there's a lot of vanity behind those [00:45:00] metrics. Well said. I'm not letting any rebuttals come to that. I'm moving on to another, another question 'cause you each said that s- beautifully.
[00:45:07] One other thing we had in here that's really relevant today is can you walk us through one specific thing you've changed in your demand gen program over the last year because of how buyers are researching differently? What was the play? What drove the decision? What happened? Hunter, why don't you-- You have a good answer in our, in our little doc.
[00:45:24] Why don't you tell this story, please? Yes. So we adopted Qualified. Previously, we were using a different chat tool, and we weren't seeing much success. So we had adopted Qualified, and we went from seeing two percent of total SQLs to eleven percent. We launched last November, to give you a rough timeline there, and we have since seen a twelve-- excuse me, it's been a 9X, so we started at one percent of total closed one.
[00:45:56] It was essentially zero, and we've gone to just under thirteen [00:46:00] percent of closed one coming from web chat on our site. So it didn't just improve that as a channel. It, it created one, and we were able to get double-digit volume month over month, and now this is rivaling some of our paid channels as far as SQL contribution.
[00:46:16] So look at your chatbot tool. Do you have the latest and greatest, and is it keeping up with AI agents and how users are asking questions once they land on your website? Judy, you got anything? So I would say there's-- we made a big shift in our LinkedIn strategy. So we had been doing content leads out of LinkedIn.
[00:46:38] It was a holdover, and I wanted to get rid of it forever, but I didn't have a replacement. We figured out a replacement doing conversation ads in LinkedIn, so we run a lot of thought leader ads. Like when I was talking about the influencer stuff, we always, like, boost those as thought leader ads, as well as our internal folks and customers But then we also run conversation ads, booking a meeting.
[00:46:59] And [00:47:00] so that sort of replaced the volume that we were seeing from the LinkedIn, not on the MQL front, because who gives a shit about the content leads? They weren't going anywhere anyways. But on the meetings front, like they were actually turning into meetings and qualified opportunities now. And so by making that shift, we've like doubled our meeting set rate from the MQL stage, which we still call it MQL stage, even though it's mostly hand raisers and demo views.
[00:47:30] It's just easy shorthand. But that's been our, our big shift. Cool. I see some things in the chat. I think you answered this, but can Hunter explain a bit further about the AI info pages impact is on overall website traffic? Didn't you say you don't know the answer to that yet, maybe? I would say we're still in early phases here.
[00:47:47] We have seen an increase in traffic driven from AI and LLM sources, and it took about three months from when we first implemented the strategy to when we started to see those numbers climb. [00:48:00] So I would, I would say that's where the impact has seen the LLM AI traffic driven to our website. And as far as overall impact, it's still a very, very small percentage, but this is one element of the larger strategy for us to improve that visibility.
[00:48:17] Cool. Hey, real quick, we're gonna wrap this up in two seconds, but one thing that we do, just given that we're data-driven folks, uh, like all of you, but while things are hot, we wanna just get a quick poll in there because we, we measure all of these. We just wanna rate. Justin said, "Thank you for all this.
[00:48:30] I've got a full page of notes to take to our team. The, the chat was really useful. I don't wanna bias our votes, but this was a, a really awesome session, and our team has been in our little Slack thing the whole time. Like, it feels like there's something bigger, more here where like we should do an AMA of some kind."
[00:48:44] There's a lot of like, follow-ups that we can do, you know, to get a little bit more specific. So this is the bar. I'd love to have this every time, full pages of notes coming out of these things. Just real quick, thank you to Mason, uh, Judy, Hunter. Great job. Chat. Good job, chat. You did your [00:49:00] job today. Let's do more of this.
[00:49:01] This is a new bar for these live sessions that we're doing. We got notes. You all rocked it. Thank you for giving us an hour out of your day. It's school break around here, man. We're gonna go jump in the pool. We're gonna have a nice little afternoon, but now that we got our homework out of the way, we can go have fun.
[00:49:13] So see you all later. Okay? Great job. Thank you.
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