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This podcast will help you grow your B2B company quarter after quarter—with confidence, clarity, and data-backed decisions.
In each episode, you’ll learn proven strategies, practical frameworks, and first-hand insights from GTM leaders, RevOps pros, and seasoned B2B executives. They’ll walk you through how they use data to set smart targets, forecast accurately, overcome growth plateaus, and build high-performing sales and marketing engines.
You’ll hear stories of real challenges, real results, and the data-driven moves that made all the difference.
The best B2B companies don’t just look at metrics—they use them to take action. Move The Needle will help you do the same.
Brendan Hufford (00:04.184)
My camera thinks that when I have my glasses on, I'm not a real person. It's so annoying. It's like a really nice camera, but as soon as you put the glasses on, it's like, you're not, you're just a thing now.
Ali (00:08.131)
you
Ali (00:13.742)
Weird, yeah, I have the issues with the ring light too. All the problems that the people with glasses have. All right, did it clear out for you? Okay, perfect. All right, I'll jump in.
Brendan Hufford (00:21.431)
Yeah, I'm good.
Ali (00:25.292)
All right, welcome to Move the Needle. I'm super excited today to sit down with Brendan Hufford, the founder of Growth Sprints. He helps take SaaS companies from 10 million to 100 million in ARR. He's the creator of his own SaaS Growth Sprint framework, formerly worked at a number of well-known organizations like Active Campaign. Brendan, welcome to the show. Of course.
Brendan Hufford (00:44.088)
Thanks for having me, Ally. This'll be fun.
Ali (00:46.05)
Super excited. I've been a follower for a while, so it's great to have you on. You know, recently I reached out because I saw your comment on a post and you were talking about like measuring what matters, some discussion around vanity metrics and how you have been able to correlate some of those so-called vanity metrics to revenue, which is like the holy grail. And I definitely wanted to dive in on that topic specifically with you today.
Brendan Hufford (01:07.82)
Yeah, yeah, this will be cool. This is something that lives very close to my heart. Roughly eight months ago, I decided to run a couple of experiments and really start diving into things. Coming up in the SEO world, there was always a big frustration of mine that people really lived and died by what I would consider vanity metrics, like rankings and stuff like that. So it's cool to see on all of these platforms, whether it's my newsletter, LinkedIn, Search.
website, like all of the different metrics that I could possibly look at, like what actually is vanity, what isn't.
Ali (01:42.284)
Right? And it's changing all the time. So I would love to know, maybe we start there, how have you identified the, I'm gonna use vanity metrics in air quotes for a little bit, how have you identified the vanity metrics that actually do matter for your business and for your clients?
Brendan Hufford (01:57.742)
So I think there's maybe two sets of metrics, right? Like there's business metrics and then there's maybe marketing metrics. And I think understanding the difference is really important. I think a lot of marketers maybe don't get the seat at the table that they deserve because they're so worried about marketing metrics and they're not thinking about business metrics. And over time, marketers can go one of two ways. You can either go really deep into the marketing metrics or you can go really deep into the business metrics. I've like leaned more towards business.
Ali (02:21.091)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (02:25.294)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (02:25.65)
especially now running my own for a couple of years, but, that delineation really, really matters. And I'm not telling marketers that they all have to think like a CEO or sales or whatever, but like going in that direction matters a ton. what I'm trying to pair is a marketing metric with a business metric. That's super, super important. That's a really good way to look at like how vanity is this now. I do have nothing but empathy for marketers at big companies where it's like,
We have an 18 month sales cycle, the marketing cycle, which is something I'm super passionate about that almost nobody talks about. Like we all know our sales cycle generally, almost nobody knows their marketing cycle. They know their sales cycle is 18 months, but for some reason they want marketing to perform in quarter. I don't know what makes you think that it takes 18 months to close the deal, but I can get them to hop on a call with you in less than 90 days. That's insane. The marketing cycle is almost always longer.
Ali (03:11.053)
Hmm.
Ali (03:18.67)
Yeah.
Ali (03:23.62)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (03:23.746)
than the sales cycle. So even when we're capturing those in quarter, in month, in week metrics, that's somebody who's already at the end of their journey, right? You're just high-fiving them as they cross the finish line, basically. So in my business, I was looking at things that would be important business metrics for me. This includes leads. I'm not super high volume, so I think leads still matter for me. If you're getting 10,000 leads a month, maybe leads matter less. I'm looking at things like pipeline. I'm looking at closed one revenue.
Ali (03:31.48)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (03:52.322)
Those are my biggest business metrics in my business. And I think that that supplies to most other companies, including the B2B software companies that I work with. And then I'm also, I'm trying to correlate that. I'm not looking for causation. Causation, in my opinion, in marketing is dumb, especially if you're doing a ton of stuff. Like if you're only doing one thing, if all I did for my business was post on LinkedIn, I don't need causation because that would be the only way you would really find me, right? Now, when I'm doing 10 things, when I do,
Ali (04:13.892)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (04:22.03)
webinars and podcast conversations like this. And I have 50 different things that I fill in when I put people put on my form. You know, I asked who do you, how did you hear about me? They put something in, which is just, again, rot with the, it's just as bad as a software based attribution, right? It's not just because they wrote something in. It doesn't mean that people put in like, I've been following you for years. And I'm like, what does that mean? Like, what am I, that doesn't, or like referral. And I'm like, God. So anyways, it's just as much, but again, I'm just looking for signal.
amongst the noise. So I'm trying to pair those business metrics with everything else with impressions, engagements, things like that on LinkedIn, I'm trying to look at website traffic, I'm looking at new email subscribers, or just total subscribers, things like that, I'm just trying to find some sort of signal of, if I lean in more here, this metric more strongly correlates again, doesn't cause but it correlates more directly with
Ali (05:15.78)
now.
Brendan Hufford (05:20.352)
leads pipeline and revenue. And I think the more you can see, and it's not an overly complicated process to do this. Most marketers could do this in an afternoon or honestly, if they trust Claude or chat GPT or whatever, they analyze the data like you could do it in 10 minutes.
Ali (05:22.02)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (05:36.524)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So let's talk about your playbook for how you did that. Like you said, there's a ton of different activities going on. They're all signals. There is no perfect. I like that you delineated there between what you can see exactly one-to-one versus where you have to infer some correlation. You did feel confident that you've seen a correlation between directly LinkedIn impressions and revenue. So what tools are you using? What have you looked at that helped you come to that conclusion?
Brendan Hufford (06:04.184)
So I'll just plot out like monthly. So it's two different things. There's collected revenue and closed revenue in my business. Cause I'll close a deal for 32K, but that's over the, I get paid out over the course of four months, right? In the different growth sprints that I do. So that's really different. The actual revenue I'm bringing in versus the deals I'm closing can change those graphs radically.
The money I'm bringing in is a lot more consistent. The deals I close are very lumpy. I might close three deals one month, no deals the next month, five deals one month, none for the next two months. That'll drive you crazy as a marketer. You're like, my God, everything's failing, nothing works anymore, and I might as well just give up and go open up a flower shop or something that also sells coffee and books. That's my dream. Yours, maybe? I don't know. I feel like it's all of our dream to have this lovely little plant slash book slash coffee shop.
Ali (06:34.116)
There we go.
Yeah.
Ali (06:44.022)
Yeah. That sounds good. Yeah, that sounds good. I'll go in on that with you, for sure.
Brendan Hufford (06:54.862)
You know, but you feel like you want to quit and then you have to like rein yourself back in. So as I'm looking at these things, I'm really just making columns of all the different business metrics. Like I said, lead pipeline, revenue, collected revenue, et cetera. And then I'm mapping out all these other metrics and other columns. I'm trying to see does traffic correlate to it? Does, you know, I'm looking at using things like I'll use shield analytics sometimes for LinkedIn. I'll look at native LinkedIn. You can do exports and get some idea of total impressions, engagements, et cetera in there.
Ali (06:58.295)
No.
Ali (07:12.526)
Thank you.
Ali (07:17.956)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (07:24.586)
maybe I want to filter out for the, you know, outliers of like, I made a post and it was, had nothing. It was a father's day post and it got 700,000 impressions. It's like, well, let's prune that out. Like that's not, maybe that does do something for the business. Maybe I should leave in it. You know, like all of sudden you start looking, you're like, well, when I, when I anchor on these holidays or, know, you know, very ephemeral events, but something we're all experiencing communally, maybe that does have a huge impact.
Ali (07:53.369)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (07:53.952)
on things. Maybe I should do more of that. Maybe I should quit talking about metrics and, you know, leads and stuff and just be more human. It's just I'm just looking for signals. So I'll use all these native tools. I'll use Search Console, Google Analytics. I use ConvertKit for my newsletter. So I'll pull stuff out of there. I use Nutshell for my CRM. Not because any of these platforms are the best. It's just what I've used and what I like. So things like that when I am digging in there.
Ali (08:01.676)
All
Ali (08:14.756)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (08:20.93)
and I pull those out, I'm just mapping different columns, and I'm just setting up a bunch of stuff, and I'm just looking for the waves to match up or to what was really cool with the impressions, and I think revenue was they were perfectly aligned, but just a little bit off. So the impressions came first, and the revenue came after, but they were, it was almost the, mean, obviously the, whatever it is, X, I'm just above my pay grade. The X is the same, but the Y is different.
Ali (08:35.076)
Mmm.
Brendan Hufford (08:48.16)
looking at that, but it still looked like you were like, my gosh, look, these do trend exactly together. Like maybe there's a strong correlation. So I started that gives me a chance to, this is really important. So if I can zoom back really quick, I want to give credit where it's due this running this experiment came from a talk at exit five drive last year. When I went Pranav from Paramark made just some casual comment of like, more people should be looking at correlation. It's really easy. And he explained in 10 seconds what it just took me two minutes to explain.
Ali (09:05.284)
Hmm.
Brendan Hufford (09:16.91)
So I did it and I found this and I was like, this is super interesting. This is super helpful. And I'm just going through and looking for that correlation. And then the other thing he mentioned was the difference between upside risk and downside risk. Once you establish that this is correlated, how do you know if it's really having any causation? Downside risk would mean being like, well, maybe I don't post on LinkedIn for a month and see what happens.
Ali (09:41.156)
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (09:42.018)
Well, if I'm correct and it is correlated and there is some causation there, all of a sudden my pipeline goes to zero. That's very risky. Upside risk is instead of going from one to zero, go from one to two, double it, double. And I'm not big on checkbox marketing. You shouldn't just like double the number of checkboxes that you're doing. But if you want to make more investment, what if I posted twice a day on LinkedIn? Does that matter? Does that give me more impressions? Maybe impressions won't go up.
Ali (09:47.342)
Right.
Ali (09:55.692)
Okay.
Ali (10:04.568)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (10:09.538)
Maybe LinkedIn will throttle that second post because the first post is doing good or kill the first post because I've posted again. Like that platform is really bizarre with how it handles stuff like that. So I don't know, but let's experiment. There's no real downside risk to posting twice a day other than it's hard. And you have to figure that out. So I started doing that and like the correlation continued and it was really cool. Like, so I just keep running those like upside risk.
Ali (10:13.262)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (10:17.444)
Yeah.
Ali (10:22.404)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (10:26.798)
Right.
Ali (10:33.24)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (10:36.93)
kind of comparisons and changes. You know, I wonder with my newsletter, if I sent out more newsletters, more emails, does that matter? I don't know, let's try it. I think people are afraid of like bugging their audience too much. And I think that that's more of a, you know what I mean? They'll be like, well, I don't want to post, I don't want to annoy people. I don't want to send out two emails a day or, you know, to post twice on LinkedIn every day. That's too much. It's kind of overwhelming. And it's like, yeah, no, I hear you. Cause like,
Ali (10:37.977)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (10:44.77)
Yeah, awesome.
Brendan Hufford (11:01.75)
I find Gary Vaynerchuk's content to be extremely overwhelming. puts out like, or Alex Hermosy, they put out like 58 pieces of content a day. Like, it's exhausting. I don't want to keep, I don't want to consume all of that. Who could? Right? So, but I think a lot of times we air, we swing the pendulum all the way the other way and we don't do it enough. We're emailing people once a month and we're like, well, we don't want to bother them. And it's like, it's a...
Ali (11:07.658)
Yeah.
Ali (11:23.384)
Well, like you said too, the algorithm controls so much of that anyway. Somebody you could be seeing today, a post that somebody put out a week ago and LinkedIn just decided today that it's useful for you to see, right? And somebody could be posting five times a week and you never see any of them. So for five times a week.
Brendan Hufford (11:34.221)
Yes.
Brendan Hufford (11:38.294)
And that's super common lately people I'll be like, what is this post and you see at the top like the two W and you're like, this is from two weeks like LinkedIn is showing old stuff a bunch now. So and I think it's a quality debate, not a tactics debate. Like if it's good, like get rid of your imposter syndrome, like make it as good as you can. And like, let's ship it.
Ali (11:44.152)
Yeah.
It's so hard to.
Ali (11:56.77)
Yeah, love it. All right, that makes a ton of sense. So by looking at that, you saw there was a very strong correlation, and it held up even when you increased your frequency there between LinkedIn impressions and revenue. Did that surprise you at all? I'm kind of curious why you think such a strong correlation there.
Brendan Hufford (12:15.502)
I think that I, I mean, I think part of it is years and years of writing, right? Like I write to find out what I want to say, not, I don't write just what I want to say, if that makes sense. Like there's a discovery process in there. I like writing. I think you get a lot of my personality in that. I could probably do more video audio. think I index while there too, like this. But I wasn't surprised. I mean, I'm pretty agnostic on everything. just, I want to make cool shit with my friends and do stuff that
Ali (12:24.74)
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (12:45.44)
seems fun to me. Like I like this isn't somebody asked me the other day about advice for young marketers. And I was like, here's some ideas. But also know this comes from somebody who sees the world through marketing. Like, I like this stuff. I'm looking at every little thing, the design of this and how that is how they, know, my how my pastor explains something in church on Sunday. And I'm like, I don't agree with that. Because I don't like that you weren't as media literate as you should have been when you were citing a source from the news, like
Everything is through marketing and I'm like, see all, I just can't take those marketing glasses off, right? So I very much like see the world through it. I love it. It's a lot of fun. It's the books that I read. It's just what I enjoy. So it is one of those things where it's like, don't, I'm not really surprised by anything. I just want to try a lot of stuff and have some sort of idea. And the cool thing is like for me, at least this is not true for everybody, but for me,
Ali (13:37.826)
Yeah, that's awesome.
Brendan Hufford (13:44.492)
marketing to marketers, even if it did bad, that's still a thing for me to share that's helpful for other people. So there's really no downside for me doing tons and tons of experiments like this.
Ali (13:49.678)
For sure.
Ali (13:54.21)
What I hear a lot as you're talking about that is like a growth mindset too. And I think if I remember properly when I was talking to you on LinkedIn, you have an educator background, right?
Brendan Hufford (14:03.19)
I do. was a high school teacher and principal for like 10 years. I have my master's in educational leadership. I credit a lot of how I work now to teaching psychology and sociology for a very long time. taught AP government for a while too. And then, yeah, like you also, it's a growth mindset and it's also like having to be the show every day. Like these high schoolers would have absolutely eaten my lunch if I didn't show up on my, and it happened. Like that's how you learn. It's trial by fire, right?
Ali (14:16.43)
Peace.
Ali (14:28.962)
Yeah, yeah.
Brendan Hufford (14:32.514)
So a lot of my ability to do this right now comes from having to do this every 57 minutes with teenagers for 10 years.
Ali (14:39.236)
I love that. If you can perform for an audience of teenagers, you can perform for anybody.
Brendan Hufford (14:45.582)
Yep. Eight times a day or six or seven times a day every day, every weekday for a decade. All of a sudden you have your Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours real quick and you're probably fine.
Ali (14:56.036)
Yeah. Mad respect. But that's not for everybody.
That's awesome. All right. So we talked a lot about LinkedIn and what you learned looking at the correlations there. I know you also do a lot of work around content and SEO. And of course, there's, you know, a raging debate around is traffic just a vanity metric now? Should we even look at it? Does it equate to revenue? You've done some good posts on this. So I'd kind of love to hear your point of view on, on search traffic as a, as a metric to measure in 2025. Does it matter? Does it not?
Brendan Hufford (15:28.436)
I think a lot of marketers are getting this wrong. And that's simply because they've been pressured for so long to focus on traffic as a main metric because they weren't given visibility into what happens after traffic. When people start trials, what happens after the trial? Marketing doesn't know. When somebody books a demo, like,
They don't marketing doesn't know what happens after that. They don't know that sales isn't calling 60 % of the leads back. Like they don't, you know, all these things they don't, I was like one of the first people I think to start telling marketers about SLAs. They're like a service level agreement. What's that? I'm like, yeah, it's the one where you don't get yelled at for not providing enough leads if they're not going to call them like that sort of thing. Um, so I think like the, I'm trying to figure out the
Ali (15:55.032)
Yeah.
Ali (15:59.523)
Mmm.
Ali (16:07.574)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (16:15.392)
Website traffic thing is something that is very easy to see. And this is something I learned from Rand Fishkin, where it's a difference between how easy it is to measure versus how easy it is to attribute. These are two things that will really screw up your relationship with other executives and with your leadership team if you're focused on a lot of things that are very easy to measure and really hard to attribute. With that said, I think...
It's not I wouldn't say it's a vanity metric across the board. That's where we get into really dangerous territory. We're saying that's what know, SEO is dead. LinkedIn is dead. Facebook ads are dead. What any tactic saying it's dead? Cool, like it might not be working for you right now. Got it. But I can give you six companies that are crushing it with this right now because of their market maturity, their product differentiation, all of these other things. You know, it's like, this like, you know, solar panel installation.
Ali (16:51.3)
Everything's good.
Mm-hmm.
Ali (16:59.0)
more.
Ali (17:03.652)
Okay.
Brendan Hufford (17:08.526)
software, sales software is absolutely crushing. And you're like, Oh, I just was basing mine off of like, MarTech, you know, like you have to like think there's all of these niche, there's software supply chain, software, like that is a real thing. All of this other stuff. And what I'm finding is, in some businesses, it is a vanity metric. When I was in house at ActiveCampaign, we had like, I call it the great traffic panic of 2021, where all of our top pages by traffic,
Ali (17:20.676)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (17:37.196)
which were how to become a life coach, what is an SDR, company slogans, a list of like 30 famous company slogans, and something else, like the, I don't know, like the characteristics of highly successful people. None of those helped sell email marketing and marketing automation software, none. And traffic was going down and the word from on high was get it back. Okay.
Ali (17:39.587)
Hmm.
Ali (17:51.618)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (17:56.226)
Yeah.
Ali (18:03.331)
Hmm.
Brendan Hufford (18:04.056)
We still rank number one for company slogans. What do want me to get back? And I had to like pull up a Google Trends report and show that every year it's less and less and less people are Googling company slogans. We can't get it back, nor should we. Who cares? Like less people are, it's just a fading topic in the ethos of marketing and business and culture. Nobody cares about this anymore. That's okay, right?
Ali (18:20.408)
Right. Right.
Ali (18:27.192)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (18:30.764)
So it's one of those types of things where it's like in their case is traffic a vanity metric? Absolutely. Absolutely. Especially legacy traffic. They did it made a lot of brand plays early on. They wanted to get known and get seen by life coaches and big brands and stuff like that. And they did. And that made it might've worked as a brand awareness play. Got it. Cool. The what is an SDR was simply an article written by somebody on the marketing team who used to be an SDR and wanted to write it. My buddy Ernie, and he is great.
Ali (18:32.078)
We're here.
Ali (18:54.818)
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (18:57.534)
And he wrote that and it just happened to do well over time because it was a, I almost said Ernest, which is also his name, but it wasn't Ernest like a story of like how he became an SCR and what he learned and what was hard. it's like a good read. I say all that to say, and in some businesses, traffic is vanity. In others, it's not. You just have to figure out what it is for you. All of these things, anything can be a vanity metric if it's not correlating to revenue or some other brand growth.
Ali (19:04.77)
haha
Ali (19:10.372)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (19:18.318)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (19:24.42)
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (19:24.846)
And that's another thing too, like I think a lot of times we can get boxed in, this happens especially in SaaS where marketing gets boxed into being an ATM of like money in, money out and stuff like that, which I don't find to be true because we all know that brand is probably the most important thing when it comes to closing a deal, right? The company that they liked first is probably the one they'll end up going with no matter what the selection criteria and buyer committee says. So there are plays.
for that stuff, but you just have to figure out what it is for you and where and how you want to invest in it. And this changes in every single business. And that's why I think it's important to work with somebody like me or have a voice like me internally. That's like, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Everybody calm down. Everybody relax. What is this for us, though? How do we look at these numbers and decide this sort of thing? Because there's also a lot of other things. If I was in a big business, I don't need to look at stuff because I'm the one doing all the selling. I'm the one doing all the marketing in my business. But
Ali (19:57.23)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (20:06.968)
Yeah.
Ali (20:10.596)
Mm-hmm, I love that.
Ali (20:21.048)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (20:22.242)
What if all of a sudden I change how we think about marketing, we maybe make more brand investments and our sales cycle gets cut in half. It goes from 18 months to nine months. What does that mean for the business? Well, that just changed the whole business, right? This business is massively more profitable, more valuable. We should make different investments. that changes, well, that was a marketing play that reduced that sales cycle. That was a marketing play that made conversion from stage one ops to stage two ops double.
Maybe there's a lifecycle marketer like my friend Jacqueline who works at Copy.ai who can do things in lifecycle marketing that have huge profit potential and it's not just net new revenue. So there's all of these other, how much does our nurture emails or our lifecycle marketer, what is their impact? All of these things, just give me the two columns. Give me the like, or not even two columns, give me all those in between metrics too.
Ali (20:57.358)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (21:11.492)
You
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (21:15.886)
Right? Like what's our close rate? What's our close rate within SMBs, mid market enterprise? You can really get nerdy about this. You can tell I like it a lot. But you can get really nerdy about it. But look into all of these things. Hey, if I post twice as much on LinkedIn, does our sales cycle change? Does this, if our CEO posts twice as much on LinkedIn, if our CEO doubled her impressions, does our sales cycle change? Does our close one rate change? Maybe. Maybe they find out that like deals close 30 % more.
Ali (21:22.456)
You can.
Brendan Hufford (21:45.262)
when she posts more. That's interesting. Maybe there's a correlation there. Like all you find out all this cool stuff where you're like, oh, yeah, I could guess these might have been related, but I didn't have it. And then you show the graph with the same waves. And all of a sudden, everybody's like, oh, got it. All the executives got it. The boards got it. Your CFO is bought in, you know. So I think there's a lot of you know what I mean? Like all of sudden, it's like, oh, she she posts twice as much.
Ali (21:46.914)
Hmm.
No. Detective.
Ali (22:00.452)
Cool.
Ali (22:06.276)
school.
Brendan Hufford (22:11.372)
she doesn't really have the bandwidth with that, well, now we can invest in somebody like Devon Reed to help us with that, you know?
Ali (22:14.148)
sorry.
So I have to ask because
It all makes sense. I'm tracking with you and the benefit of having those aha moments when you see the correlations. And you mentioned attribution at one point. So, we've both gone through the evolution and marketing of attribution marketing and everything was causation, right? Now we've done it. We've cracked the secret code to be able to attribute every single activity and we'll know every email and every thing in the world that we're doing in marketing, how it perfectly lines up with revenue. And that was really fun for a short period of time.
while we all like deleted ourselves into thinking that we had that totally figured out. And now it's like big shift the other direction. And I'm curious, especially like as you're doing this for yourself, but you're also having a lot of conversations with SaaS companies that you work with.
Are people adopting and are they embracing a shift towards more of a correlation model understanding that we can't perfectly causation line up every single activity or are people still in that like more traditional attribution modeling everything has to have a nice neat linear path.
Brendan Hufford (23:26.616)
So I'm finding the smartest people who want to think about this the best way are looking at things like buyer journey and account journey. And they're using platforms like my friend Casey Jenkins from Sindo. So just did a really cool webinar on this the other day. And cause it's one of the only ways you find out the impact of things like gifting and direct mail, which is what they do. You need a platform to map those touch points along a long sales cycle or even a long
Ali (23:47.395)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (23:55.618)
whatever we want to call it, marketing cycle, right? So you can see, okay, cool, we had 26 organic social touch points. This account came to five webinars. They were influenced by these 73 ads. They came to two in-person events. We sent them five gifts, and we've had all of these calls. And within here, here's where they became a Stage 1 op. Here's where they're closed one. And you're just looking again for like, okay, cool, now that I have all of this data from all the touch points from...
Ali (23:57.102)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (24:24.27)
everybody in here, are they news like I can see my correlation between them becoming a newsletter subscriber and becoming a customer. Like I can see all that stuff. You know, you can use platforms like Sindosa uses dream data, I'm a huge fan of theirs. I've done a lot with them in the past. And even currently, I'm working with them on stuff. Dream Data and other platforms like it are really, really helpful for seeing this correlation in a one like a single god, I hate like single pane of glass.
Ali (24:35.598)
Mm.
Brendan Hufford (24:50.574)
It's kind of what it is, right? Like you can see it in one view of like, okay, cool. Here's all the touch points. And now we can start seeing the correlation. And there are marketers that are, you know, maybe, however they want to define themselves that are like, okay, cool. The average we noticed this bit, this blah, blah. So and the ads are closed one deals had more ads than the less ones. So now yeet more ads at them. And it's like, no, no, no, slow down. Like you're now slipping into this causation piece, right?
Ali (24:57.838)
Mm.
Brendan Hufford (25:17.824)
And but we can see that deals that got no gifts close at half the rate than deals that got gifts. Okay, cool. That gives us some idea of what we need to change or what we need to do better. So I think that the, don't look like I loved the old days when it, you you could look in Google analytics and see the entire journey of somebody of like, okay, cool. They click this ad, they came to the website direct. They came in on organic search. She had some idea of like,
Ali (25:24.056)
Yep.
Ali (25:28.866)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (25:44.738)
You also had some idea of how many touch points. When I would look at closed one deals and I'm like, my God, these closed one deals had like 73 touch points between Google Ads, organic search and direct website visits. We need to calm down on like, and it's just you're helping educate everybody else in the organization. Again, maybe it's just the teacher in me. But because we don't have that anymore in Google, we can use a platform like Dream Data to look at that modern kind of account journey, that very messy squiggly line that we always see.
Ali (25:51.139)
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (26:14.56)
as the buyer journey, but now we can see it mapped out and like, all right, as an account, here's the things and to what impact each of them had, maybe an ad mattered more than a gift, but maybe the organic social posts that they interacted with was a huge mover. I don't know. But we start to see like, okay, cool. Like over time, like I know there's another platform that I like a lot called Turtle to URTL that also like is trying to figure this type of stuff out. Like, and you you're just looking.
Ali (26:17.966)
Nice.
Ali (26:28.718)
Mm-hmm.
trends.
Brendan Hufford (26:44.066)
to see, and I believe this is in dream data, like you're just looking for some analysis of like, of all of everything that we're doing well, like all our close one deals, what do they have in common? What do they not have in common? What do we notice about like our outliers in terms of like, are these huge deals we closed? What happened with them? Stuff like that.
Ali (26:53.368)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ali (27:01.442)
That's fascinating. I to check that out. I've not heard of that tool. I have dream data. I'll look it up.
Brendan Hufford (27:05.846)
Yeah, they're incredible. Steph and their CMOs, super smart. I've been a fan of theirs for a very, very long time. They also have a free version that I have on my website. Like, I think everybody should have it. De-anonymizes website visitors and you start to able to see like that correlation between stuff of like, okay, cool. If I get them on my newsletter and they open six newsletters, they're four times more likely to become a customer. Okay, interesting. Now I could go metrics-based and like, just be like, just get four opens. Who cares? Like, that's not how that works though.
Ali (27:12.653)
Okay.
Ali (27:28.012)
Ooh, so, that's like old man, yeah.
Brendan Hufford (27:35.702)
Right? But now I know like, okay, cool. Well, if I send twice as many emails, could that get me four opens faster? Maybe? I don't know. My tank the whole thing might be will be like this guy sucks and these are annoying, you know.
Ali (27:42.254)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (27:47.236)
But it gives you some insights where to up risk, right? Where to put some and do some experimentation.
Brendan Hufford (27:52.428)
Yep. Yep. looks at I get those upside risk bets more quickly for sure.
Ali (27:57.87)
Cool. Awesome. Well, I want to be respectful of your time. Any final thoughts, rants, or advice you'd like to share?
Brendan Hufford (28:06.988)
Yeah, one thing I think about a lot is that, especially in my world of B2B software, people are very quick to think that like the way to get to all of this stuff, we're talking about attribution and correlation, all of these things, but we're not talking about the things that come before that. And we talked about organic clicks and social and gifting and all of these other things and platforms and how to measure it. But we kind of skipped the foundational piece, which is what I call content IP.
and that's naming the problems your customers have. This is a huge lever. Almost nobody is doing it because nobody's been trained to do it. We all got excited about category creation and stuff like that. And what we forget is all these category creators also named the problem that they solved. Companies were able to do that. I mentioned Sendoso. They are testing some stuff right now. And every time they mention their problem that they helped solve, their posts blow up on LinkedIn.
Ali (28:37.176)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (28:44.665)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (28:49.827)
Yeah.
Ali (29:01.965)
Hmm.
Brendan Hufford (29:02.222)
I made a post about it and it was probably one of my biggest posts I've had in last six months. And it's just meeting people, your customers where they're at, identifying with the frustration and being like, it's called this. And now just similar to if you remember experiencing the great resignation or quiet quitting, right? We all saw it happening. And then as soon as somebody said it, first of all, it's like A plus copywriting, right? That's really good wordsmithing.
Ali (29:12.035)
Hmm.
Ali (29:17.57)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ali (29:27.523)
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (29:27.544)
But you get that like I call it the snap in point where people are like, that's what that's called. And you're like, that's what that's called. And they're like, cool, I trust you to solve it more than anybody else now. Because you gave me words for something that was really frustrating me. That's something I think people skip. So I want people to like listen to this whole conversation, but I don't want them to go immediately into it with more generic checkbox marketing and thinking, okay, cool, if I can just find these correlations, I'll just check, check, check, check, check, check those things. And the correlation will continue and this will go up.
Ali (29:35.246)
Mm-hmm. I like that.
Ali (29:47.897)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford (29:56.204)
The companies that find this, the ability to do this sustainably and later, at scale, are the ones who have named the problem. And then everything comes out of that. The webinars, the social, the gifts, the emails, whatever.
Ali (30:01.476)
Mm-hmm.
Ali (30:09.708)
I'd love that. I love that. That's really timely for us. We're going through some positioning work internally right now, and we actually have named the solution, but we haven't named the problem. this is kind of, my wheels are spinning as you're talking about that. I'm thinking about it.
Brendan Hufford (30:23.894)
If you need help, I know a guy. We're not turning into a sales call, but I'm happy to help. This is something I'm very passionate about and love doing. So I'm sure you all do a great job though.
Ali (30:31.492)
That's really cool. Thank you. That's super actionable for me right away. Love it. All right, where can people find you? Where's the best place for them to reach out or follow you?
Brendan Hufford (30:40.93)
I'll pretend it's because I'm good at SEO. It's not. You can just Google my name. If you Google Brendan Hufford, you can misspell it as much as you want. But the place that I share everything as I'm learning it is on LinkedIn, literally sharing what I learned the week before, what results my clients are seeing. I made a post today about how one of my clients, because of that IP, had 10 demos booked off a webinar before the webinar was even done.
Right? Super high intent. Like that 10 doesn't sound like a lot, but I'm not talking about 10 book demos because we just yeeted the BDRs at them. Like on the call, people are like filling out the demo form. That's really cool. But I share stuff like that on LinkedIn every single week. What happened the week before? What are my clients seeing? Let's keep it real time. So that's the best place to follow me for sure is on LinkedIn.
Ali (31:26.148)
Perfect, that's where I found you. Alrighty. Well, it was a pleasure. Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (31:29.016)
Well, thank you, Allie. This has been wonderful. I appreciate it. I hope this is valuable for everybody.
Ali (31:32.664)
Same here, thanks so much for being on, appreciate it.
Brendan Hufford (31:34.798)
All right, thanks.