Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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.
Jeremiah Rizzo (00:02.024)
Okay, we've got people, it already says four, so people are jumping in. Hi, welcome everyone. If you, we're not kicking off just yet, we're let a few more people trickle in live. We had a number of registrants for this live interview with Sam, but I'm gonna give everyone time to trickle in. I left a note in the chat, whether you're watching from LinkedIn, YouTube, or the Riverside platform, drop your questions for Sam at any time during the interview. Sam and I will aim to talk for.
No more than 30 minutes, we're gonna be disciplined. It'll be like 20 to 30 on this topic, so it's gonna be fast and furious in order to leave time at the end for Q and A and to get Sam out on time. because, I don't know, you guys run a podcast, I've found like more and more, I get people coming to me that are like, thank you for keeping the episodes under 30 minutes. Like we just don't have the bandwidth for these long ones anymore.
Sam Kuehnle (00:50.459)
Ours are hit or miss. I let the conversation go where it goes. There's some where it's like people are just short, snappy to it. It's like, Hey, no fluff episode. That's fine with me. That's let's crank through it. And then you have marketers like us who love to talk, believe it or not. those ones go a little bit longer, but Hey, I say like, if the value is there, if it's good conversation, let it ride, but don't force it just to hit, like, we have to have a 50 minute podcast for whatever purpose.
Jeremiah Rizzo (00:57.268)
Yeah.
Jeremiah Rizzo (01:02.228)
Yeah.
Jeremiah Rizzo (01:11.798)
Yeah, 100%. The live thing keeps us on our toes a little bit more, so we're still kind of like testing everything. All right, cool. Let's do this thing. So let's kick it off now. And then obviously as people trickle in, they can drop questions in the chat. So if you're new, just turning in, I you've probably seen this, if you registered for the event, but we're gonna be, the interview today, Sam's talking about how to craft a marketing plan to hit your company goals.
Sam Kuehnle (01:19.193)
Yeah.
Jeremiah Rizzo (01:38.174)
Sam's been on the show before I asked him specifically to come back and cover this topic because if you want, you can go back and listen. can like search metrics and chill in Spotify or Apple or whatever and go find Sam's name there. And he had a really, really good episode talking very practically on how to like hit significantly increased goals on less of a budget. But as part of that interview, he went through this like robust planning process. He goes through and I was like, you know what? Planning is something that like everyone has headaches with.
Would you come back on and talk about it? And he was gracious enough to accept. So thanks for coming back on.
Sam Kuehnle (02:10.213)
Hey, way to let me channel my inner geek with this. It's win -win.
Jeremiah Rizzo (02:13.15)
I love it. love it. Yeah. If you'd not already follow Sam on LinkedIn, he's always posting like screenshots and stuff of like his spreadsheets and whatever. You're like one of the more practical people that you can follow and learn a lot from. So I love it. All right. Let's jump right in so we can be quick with it. I know you have a hard out at two. So let's start here. Why, fundamentally, why is aligning your marketing plan with company goals important?
what goes wrong when that doesn't happen.
Sam Kuehnle (02:45.445)
Tell a story. I've been in rooms before, one of my first companies I was at, and no fault of anyone in this, this was just the nature of goals and the story I'm gonna get into. I've been in rooms before where it's like, it's a quarterly business readout, the annual business readout, and I remember sitting in this room and...
It was the quarterly business readout. had marketing in the room, sales in the room, CS in the room, leadership in the room. Everyone was all there with their couple slides to go through everything. Well, we marketing, we were really proud cause we had a killer quarter. So we get up, we show our slides 120 % to goal crushed our MQL count, everything else. Like everyone's happy cheering, not really cheering, but in that like business to business kind of way where it's appropriate. And I mean, you can feel the good energy and then sales goes next. And they announced they missed revenue targets, pipeline targets by 15%. I'm like, huh.
There's a disconnect there. How is that possible? And kind of like lagging sales cycle, why I say like pipeline even things just weren't converting, but that goes to prove the point of things start in a good way and that company has a goal. Hey, we have a revenue target that we want to hit this year. And then it gets passed down to each department to try to figure out, Hey, how do you pick up your piece of the pie with this? But what happens is the goals get so diluted and broken down. try to make goals within goals of sub goals of all of that, where that's MQL goals become a thing. And it loses sight of what's the overarching.
aim that we're trying to go for. It's driving revenue. It's driving pipeline for the company. And that's, know, how do you define an MQL? How do you define certain things? Things break down because all of a it's like, well, we have to hit a thousand leads this quarter. So let's just push that ebook. Let's count this webinar signups as MQLs. And there's different ways of saying like we hit our goal, but if you're not all aligned on like, what is our North star goal? Revenue, pipeline, whatever that is.
that's where things start to fall amiss and why it's so, so, so important for every team to always remember in the back of their mind, like, Hey, you can hit our internal goals, which I wouldn't even say our goals are like indicators. They're metrics to kind of just say, are we on or off course? But at the end of the day, if we're not helping the company meet this North star goal, we're not doing our job.
Jeremiah Rizzo (04:39.818)
Yeah, yeah. And so to set this stage for everyone listening, like the goal of this interview is that you walk away with two things. Number one, how to address the first problem Sam covered, which is how do you craft a marketing goal that the C -suite or the overall, like matches the overall company goals and they're gonna say, yes, you're contributing, you're playing a part in the overarching company goals and we can get behind it. And then secondly, like how do you craft one you can actually hit? Because like,
It's one thing to be like, okay, Mark is going to contribute to revenue, right? But like, no matter how you measure that, like, how do you actually craft one that's fairly accurate that you're not so high that like, you're, you know, you're missing targets left and right. You're updating quarter of a quarter. Everyone just kind of feels like demoralized and defeated and month over month crap. and then like, you're not setting one that's so low that you're not really like stretching yourself or, or aware of these things. So that's, that's what we're going to get into.
Sam Kuehnle (05:23.673)
Mm -hmm.
Jeremiah Rizzo (05:33.782)
So I have a sample scenario. I know you've read through these notes, so I'm I'm not blind signing you. thought this might be a fun and practical way to approach it. So we've got this fictitious company called Sassley. It's a product, it's a B2B product. And it sets a company goal of going from, these are really even numbers to keep it simple. They're going from two to 3 million in ARR in 2025. So next year they want to add a million in one year. So at the highest level, let's start here.
You get this company goal. This is the company goal that marketing shares along with sales and other teams, right? How might this goal be divided or shared by sales and marketing respectively? Let's start there. like marketing obviously doesn't own all of it and sales doesn't own all of it. So where do we start with the breakdown?
Sam Kuehnle (06:13.978)
Mm
Sam Kuehnle (06:18.381)
Yeah. And we're not going to go down the attribution rabbit hole on this conversation because that's another conversation in and of itself. But I just go straight to historicals and I look at, usually you should be tracking whether it's lead source revenue channel. You're going to name it something within your HubSpot Salesforce, whatever CRM that you're using. And granted it's based on some type of attribution, but again, we're trying to carry apples to apples over year over year. And you can see, okay, what were those that are AE sales sourced? What are those that are BDR sourced? are those that are marketing sourced? What are those that are partner sourced? Any channels.
that you have at that level. I'll just go and look at the historical. So, you know, if we've been producing last year, we were at 2 million in an ARR. Where did all of that come from in the years past? You might have something like, you know, 40 % was marketing sourced, 30 % was BDR sourced, 20 % was AE sourced, 10 % was partner sourced. So I would then take those numbers and say that's kind of like.
baseline, so to speak. So if we wanted to add another 1 million and net new ARR this year, what do those numbers translate to in terms of that additional 1 million? So 400 ,000, 300 ,000, 200 ,000 and working down in that way. And so that is one of the lenses that I look at just to set the stage, to get some ballpark numbers. And then I start to get into the reality based questions.
Are these numbers realistic based on the resources that we have? you know, is there anything that we can do to optimize, get more efficient or are some of these like, we just need more resources, whether that's individuals, whether that's spend, whether that's time, something else. But I usually just go straight to the historicals in the beginning, just to see like, Hey, if everyone's continues to take the same piece of pie, this is what we do. If we didn't fund marketing at all, and now we want to grow another 1 million and we already have two, like there's always going to, and we didn't do any spend or something before that's probably going to require some.
type of kickstart, so to speak, to do that. So you can't just expect organic to continue to pick up at a rate that it's never done before. So that's where you have to also understand like incremental and what is the reality of like what we'll keep doing. Where do we need to push harder? So that's why I say just, I like to go back to the historicals just to get our lay of the land first.
Jeremiah Rizzo (08:19.19)
Okay, great. we are gonna for listeners, we are gonna get there, we're gonna talk about testing different channels that you might have like how you might get there. And it's not quite as simple as this, right? So but for for this starting point, I love this. So we have a million gap, historically, the first 2 million game, like let's say relieving numbers like you gave 40 % for marketing. So a number we could talk about starting is 400 ,000, then of the 1 million would be responsible. That's if marketing was able to keep going with 40 % for this extra million.
Sam Kuehnle (08:48.123)
Hmm.
Jeremiah Rizzo (08:49.014)
Something I'm curious about is like, is who are in these conversations and is there any advice you have for facilitating them? Like before we move, like I want to move past this and get to all like the letters we can pull and stuff and how to accurately forecast what you think you can do to hit that 400 ,000. That's where we're going to spend the remainder of the episode. But I think we need to just like touch on this because I can imagine a lot of people listening are like, okay, is this a conversation I have with the CEO?
Do I have this with the VP of sales? I'm gonna pull these numbers, but is everyone gonna agree with them? Does sales feel like they can't maintain their percentage and they're gonna expect marketing to pick up from it? You've been in the trenches, how do you actually come to agreement on the percentages? Have you found everyone's kind of willing to like, yep, let's just generally say that these hold true for the next million? Or do you find that like, yeah, it's a bit of a negotiation process?
Sam Kuehnle (09:43.739)
Yeah, it's gonna be more of the latter as much as we all wish like, yep, everything's perfectly linear. You signed on for your another 40 % cause that's what did in the past. Doesn't quite work that way. So what you want to do is you either want to get whoever's just like the best at pulling data from your CRM. And this is the matter of just speed resourcing. You're talking about different company leadership here. You just want to get these numbers quickly. It's not a matter of like how in depth and everything else. So whoever can pull these numbers and then you get everyone in the room together and say, here's what I found.
Does anything jump out to you all immediately? That just seems like, Hey, something's wonky in the data. This doesn't seem right. Or, you know, after everyone agrees like, yep, filters are correct. Everything was good enough in the CRM to pull. Then you start to say, here's the different options that we could go. We can continue to run at our current run rates. And then you might have the sales rep say, actually I just lost two BDR. So the BDR team can't continue to push that rate unless we backfill. And that's where you start to add in the context of everything else. Just with, say like, even if you were to consider.
current state, nothing's ever current state. There's always some type of variable, something changing going on. So understanding, okay, if we were just continue from here on today, what do we need to know? What do we need to keep in mind? And then you start to get into the future state, the Delta of it and say, okay, like if we were to grow now sales, like if you need to pick up an extra 30%, can you do it? Do the AEs have capacity? Do the BDRs have capacity? Marketing.
Is this going to continue with like with our current spends? Are we going to continue stay as efficient as we are? Do we have the channels to support it? Do we have the people that execute it? And that's where you just start to get into some of those questions to see, you know, does anything jump out that you need to address before you can start to commit to these numbers? And that's where you'll probably play with the numbers a little bit too. And it doesn't even have to be a peanut butter spread over the course of the year where marketing covers 40 % Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. could be like, you know, marketing is going to ramp up over time or BDRs.
Sales is gonna cover them for a little bit longer while the BDRs get ramped or vice versa with the AEs. You can play with all of that. And that's the beauty of it. You're not locking yourself into this like 12 month over and over and over, same exact thing. That's where if you have a true aligned, good GTM team where y 'all trust each other, you can cover for one another, which is what you want in a perfect GTM ecosystem.
Jeremiah Rizzo (11:47.926)
Okay, awesome. As a quick follow up, are we looking at one year of historical data, two years of historical data, as much as we have? What do you recommend? how, you can get so far back that it's kind of like irrelevant because things were very different back then, but how far back are we looking to get these percentages as a starting point for the conversation?
Sam Kuehnle (11:58.543)
Yeah.
Sam Kuehnle (12:04.571)
Yeah, it's going to depend on your company, to be honest. Like how long have you all been around? We're talking about going from two to three million in revenue. So this is a small company. It hasn't been growing a long time. You'd probably want to look at more recent trends. If you're a publicly traded company, if you're in a hundred millions, 50 millions, can probably, I would look back at a couple of years because things will be, you've got process in place. You've got operations in place. So those are the things I would keep in mind, but short side, absolutely a year. But like from, for my example, I'm looking at two years. we're a company, we're privately held. can't.
Disclosed numbers, we got 75 employees. So I can give you a sense of where we're about at, but I look at about two years worth of data because that's when I've been here for that long. I know processes, I know what's been in place so I can be able to put my asterisk next to anything that seems a little bit different and be able to run from there.
Jeremiah Rizzo (12:48.886)
Awesome, love it. I got a comment from a listener and I see this cool little show on stream button so I'm gonna test it out now. Nathaniel says, could Sam speak just a bit closer to the mic? Your sound's a bit low. I'm hearing you great but in order to honor, thank you for pointing that out Nathaniel. yeah, you do sound clearer now. Thank you for pointing that out, perfect. And I got to test out this cool feature which I wanted, this will be great for the Q &A at the end. All right, awesome. So the first step is look at the historic data.
Sam Kuehnle (13:04.706)
Yeah.
There we go.
Jeremiah Rizzo (13:18.358)
how many years back is gonna depend on your situation. You're gonna look at what the standard percentages have been, and then you're gonna come to an agreement, have a conversation with the team, come to an agreement of what percentage the breakdown, you wanna divide the gap of what you're trying to grow that year. Now, at a high level, so let's keep the even number we've had. You wanna grow a million and the 40 % is what everyone shakes and agrees on. So marketing's in this case is responsible for 400 ,000.
What are the high level steps you would take to begin planning that down? So now you've got to get this 400 ,000, which is more than, you know, that much more than you got last time. Do you take a top down approach? Do you take a bottoms up approach? Do you do both? How do you think about that?
Sam Kuehnle (14:01.445)
Yeah, definitely take both. So, and let's define real quick, like bottoms up top down. What the heck do these mean? Cause I even had to refresh myself as like, I know these, but I can't define them right now. So for anyone, this thing. Yeah. So bottoms up is basically like, what did we do this year and with what resources? So that's spend that's people that's time, anything else. And then top down is what's the target next year and what do we need to supply in order to achieve that? And then you want to find the Delta is going to be somewhere sitting in between those. So.
Jeremiah Rizzo (14:09.673)
I was gonna ask you to do that, so I'm glad you said it.
Sam Kuehnle (14:29.977)
What I like to start with is the bottoms up and that's where I'll drill into the marketing specific side. And I've actually got a model that I can show, you know, I love my, my data charts. So yes, you knew it. I couldn't resist. can't help myself. So this is an example of one again, round numbers for purposes, but I keep, call it a simple funnel, so to speak. So how much are you spending in variable marketing? hand raiser, high intent. whether that's like demo requests, your, if you're a PLG signups, things like that.
Jeremiah Rizzo (14:39.231)
This is why I had you on. I knew you were gonna share a spreadsheet at some point or something.
Sam Kuehnle (14:59.087)
What are the costs per demos? What's your conversion rate to qualified opportunity? Count of those costs per rescue. win rate one deals ACV. And that gets you to how much are you producing? What might your target be and what are your different spend and CACs? So, that's what I have in here. And then just, I like to always keep myself honest a little bit, just like, are really rough industry benchmarks? Sometimes you'll get this question from leadership. What should we be aiming for? And that's always a good question. I don't know. And that's where you can use historicals, but then you can also use like, what are.
Organizations that have optimized this well, what are they seeing? What is potential? Cause this is where it's also going to help us stay grounded in reality. So in the example here, we'll say, you know, we used to spend $50 ,000 per month. Here's how many demos we got opportunities, one deals, so on and so forth. you can see 25 months CAC payback period. That's not great. That means it's, it's over two years before you recoup your money. Hopefully you're selling through your contracts to be revenue positive. But if you're selling one year deals, have fun with that. this is common and B2B SaaS, unfortunately.
So moving from this, this is where we have a couple of different levers that we can play with. And what I like to do with leadership, especially is walk them through each one separately. So they understand just how big of a push would be needed for marketing in each one of these spots before we aggregate it altogether and show like, this is all really realistic. We can actually do this. But the first one you're always going to get is spend. let's say, okay, your AR targad.
Let's say marketing had to cover like the 1 million gap. You can play with numbers to understand, you know, we used to spend 600 ,000. We're gonna have to spend over 2 million to cover that. But, you know, let's say if we wanted to get back to the, oops, me put that into million. What happens if we need to cover 400 ,000? You could say, okay, like we're getting close. We're getting closer. So 800, you're probably gonna have to be about 825. You're gonna have to 50, 33, 50 % your budget. And again,
If you're a smaller startup where you're only bringing in 2 million in ARR, like this is a hefty chunk of change. You're probably not going to get a CFO to fully say like, yeah, let's do it. Let's, let's give you this more budget. So I would say, cool. Okay. Let's talk about some of our next levers. And this is cost per demo. And so what this is going to be a function of, and what I like to talk about down here, we'll share this afterwards so everyone can have access to it. But this is usually a function of your targeting.
Sam Kuehnle (17:16.796)
So with your ads, with your messaging, who you have following your podcast, your LinkedIn people, you can curate your feeds very much. This is to show, okay, if we wanted to hit to the 400 ,000, so let's bring this back up. You know, we're probably gonna have to bring this down somewhere in the $700 range from a thousand dollars. That's still a pretty steep jump. mean, even what I look at in my day, we'll fluctuate $25 per quarter, $50 per quarter. It's not, it's not anything heavy. So this is gonna.
have to be some big changes that you would have to play here. So again, that's a function of targeting and channel optimization. So it could be, I like to pick on Google cause it's easy. It's last touch. There's keywords out there that a hundred dollars per click. If you find that, you know, you have, you're getting a cost per conversion of $1 for a keyword, $2 ,000 for a keyword, but it's not turning into qualified opportunities or one deals. You can pull that and put it into other channels that are.
Jeremiah Rizzo (18:07.957)
you
Sam Kuehnle (18:08.857)
seeing that lower amount. So that's where can reallocate those existing funds. And that's where you might see some of these decreases if you were to make those types of changes.
Next level I like to get into is the demo to qualified opportunity conversion rate. And honestly, this is my favorite one. This is the easiest one. I think this is one that so many marketers and organizations leave on the table. And what this is looking at is your current state. You know, someone raises their hand. They want to talk to sales, get them on the discovery call, give them the demo. They're qualified. And okay. So we're getting us to 400 ,000. Let's jump this to it's called that one 32%. Not even that 25%. I mean,
This is actually, and you can see how realistic this is. This is a matter of taking your very top of funnel and the closer you are to the higher number, the more this is going to impact the bottom of the funnel, which is why I love this one. It's so underused and utter under, leveraged. So we'll call it 22%. It's only 6 % uptick and that's still well below industry benchmark. So this is very realistic. And so to put this in perspective, I put down here, this is like, how do you let your prospects self -serve schedule? Cause this is where the biggest handoff fallout occurs.
Jeremiah Rizzo (19:04.511)
Hmm.
Sam Kuehnle (19:15.962)
You're playing chase with the different demos, prospects of people who are trying to sign up or anything else. then you have BDRs chasing them, sales, chasing them. It might take a week before you get in touch. You line on something. It's just, it's not a good process. It's not helpful for the prospect. So this is why I love tools like chili Piper. I'm not a partner, not affiliated, but pop that on your website and it lets them choose the date, the time that they will have that. And then we'll also route them to the person. can create routing rules, which I'll get into in another minute with that. But this honestly is.
the most inefficient place for most funnels that when you fix this, you barely have to touch anything else and you can substantially increase the results that you're going after.
Jeremiah Rizzo (19:52.287)
Hmm.
Why do you think it is, it's so funny, we had Adam Goyette on the last live episode and he touched on this, this exact area he honed in on and said this was one of his favorites. Why do you think it is that experienced marketing leaders are like, this is the first place they go, you like, I've heard a couple of you now say like, this is so many people miss it. Why is that? Is that because like our minds just go to like, we have to bring in more, like more inbound, more leads, more like whatever, more attention and.
Sam Kuehnle (20:00.965)
Mm
Jeremiah Rizzo (20:22.592)
This just isn't something that we think about or is it assumed like, sales will take care of that or like, why do you think this gets missed so much?
Sam Kuehnle (20:29.4)
Mm -hmm. think a couple different things. One is this kind of sits in no man's land. Who's responsible for that handoff? Is it marketing? Is it sales? Is it operations? Well, if you have an operations team, maybe. The other half is just The predictable revenue model is so rooted in a lot of leadership's head where they're not always thinking about this. It's just it is more it's how do we spend more? How do we do more? How do we get more? And that's just the default. And why I like to say look at your funnel, not just as
"What do we have to fill up more with?" Like instead of having it be so narrow, what can we do to just fatten it out a little bit? What can we do to improve that side of it? And especially now in today's day and age where it's like monopoly money is gone. Interest rates are not letting people invest the money that they want into their companies. How do you make the most with what you have? Cause it's really wild when you can see how leaky buckets are. And that was
one of my favorite opportunities at Refined Labs was working with so many different startups and being able to help them with this and saying like, you don't have to spend a bunch more. Like honestly, we can really clean up and improve your pipelines by just making this one small tweak. So very easy, low lift. The only thing is it's not sexy at the end of the day it's not something you take to the board and be like, look what this new marketing leader did in their first 30 days. It's like, it's it's a small piece of tech. It's not shiny. It's not pretty, but it gets, it gets the job done.
Jeremiah Rizzo (21:36.233)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jeremiah Rizzo (21:45.235)
Yeah, I love it. And for anyone who missed it, can you just reinforce before we move on past this, the difference between top down and bottoms up planning? Because I love the way that you distinguish these two.
Sam Kuehnle (21:57.456)
Yeah. So bottoms up is like, what did we do this year and with what resources? So just what's our historical run, right? What did marketing produce? What did sales produce top down is what is the new target that we're being given and what do we need to do in order to achieve that? So right now, like what we're looking at here is really the top downside of saying, okay, here was our run weight.
Top down is now saying, okay, here's our new target, which would be the 400 ,000. And then understanding what are the different levers that we can play with in order to cover that gap. And so like here, this is the gap, so to speak, with one variable that we'd be looking at.
Jeremiah Rizzo (22:28.373)
Right, okay. Awesome, I love it. All right, now, when we do look, so let's get to the stage now where at this point we've identified how we've historically performed. We've agreed with leadership on a percentage that marketing is gonna source of this new $1 million revenue goal. We've done the top down and bottoms up.
to determine what we would need to hit. Now, I wanna talk about some of the, selecting some of these levers. I know that we talked about, you're a big fan of some of these more down funnel unsexy things, but I'm curious for your take on, I wanna cover two areas we haven't yet, which is one is existing channels that have some historic performance. So maybe you've been running SEO for a while and it's driving some amount of results, or you have been running Google Ads, whatever. So existing marketing,
Sam Kuehnle (23:13.902)
Mm
Jeremiah Rizzo (23:23.304)
specific channels. And then I want to talk about new channels that you like think it's like, where do you even start with estimating the impact that they could have on this plan? So I guess first let's do existing. Most people listening probably have one or two channels that are currently working, right? It might be just the founder posting on LinkedIn. It might be YouTube. It might be SEO. It might be Google ads or Facebook ads. you and I have talked in the past, like there's a law of diminishing returns here. And I think that's important for listeners to know. So when you're saying,
Sam Kuehnle (23:29.766)
Mm -hmm.
Jeremiah Rizzo (23:53.493)
You know, we've got to increase this much more. What can we look to, what can we expect to get out of our existing channels? How do you think about how much you can ask out of your existing channels before like these diminishing returns start to come into effect?
Sam Kuehnle (24:06.396)
Yeah, that's a good question. So we'll look at this through two different angles. One is if we're going from two to 3 million, you probably don't have a big marketing budget. You need to be very careful not to pick too many channels because you will peanut butter yourself too thin and you will be putting pennies toward platforms that, you know, it might sound like a lot, $25 ,000 towards one platform, but $30 ,000 towards a platform. When you break that down, that's 3000 a day. So you target three different regions. That's 1000 a day. Like it spends very fast.
So you need to be careful with, with that, but yeah, the law of diminishing returns and what we look at. So marketers, sales reps, recruiters, they love LinkedIn. It's a great spice to spend time. So that's for many. it's a primary channel. Others use Facebook, others use Reddit, others use Twitter, YouTube. Like you said, on a lot of them, what I like about the ad platform is the data that it gives you. Even if you don't spend, can
Setup campaign, so to speak, to get some rough numbers and estimates when you add in your targeting criteria to understand how many people are even on this platform that would, that we would want to get in touch with. So in my example, we go after recruiters. So using round numbers that say that it shows, I want to go after these titles within the recruiting and staffing industry. There's a hundred thousand people I could go after.
We know on LinkedIn and most social media platforms, it's only about like 40 % of users will be regular losers. So that one says, okay, you'll be able to probably reach if you fully funded it, 40 ,000 of those individuals. And then what you can do is you can go in and understand with your spend and that shows CPM CPCs. You can understand, okay, if we have a thousand dollars per day at $40 a day, I'm not good at mental math. can't run this number off the top of my head, but based on that, how many people could we reach out of those a hundred thousand and let's say it's 6 ,000. Okay. So you have a gap there. You could reach.
34 ,000 more people potentially if you put more money into it and then it's not going to be a linear like keep those same cost per click, cost per conversion. You're going to start to plateau at some point, but you could easily ramp that I'd say up to like 25%. And you should continue on that linear path and then it will start to level out a little bit more. So those are the ones where I say like, find your best performing channels and get to that point where you do encroach on the point of diminishing returns with not quite hitting them. That's when I would usually start to explore going in other places or investing heavily in other places.
Sam Kuehnle (26:18.388)
so that's from the paid side though. Pick a couple of platforms on the organic side. That's different. You could, you can be everywhere because it's only costing you resource time had count those, those items. So, if SEO is strong for you, and this is an example I just learned, had, had to relearn for myself the other day. It's always like, SEO is going, I guess it's as important, blah, blah, blah. You have to remember if you're listening here, you're probably an innovator or an early adopter in most things. You're always looking for what's new, what's different. You have a growth mindset.
But the reality is there is the early majority and the late majority who are still doing a lot of things how it's always been done. They don't like change. They like just going to Google to get their answers and that's completely fine. So you want to make sure that you're continuing to show up for those people and in the ways that they like to search that they like to research and everything else. So SEO is one where I'd say like that's, that's a timeless one. If you're doing it correctly, you know, it doesn't have to be a huge volume play updating existing articles that have done well, linking to previous ones, building off of them, sharing them, but,
That can be a light one. Organic - find the place where your your audience is spending their time at the end of the day. So we like to talk about LinkedIn, but we're again, marketers, recruiters, sales reps. That's where our audience spends their time. So, understand where your audience is. I used to work with a number of organizations who were recruiting, like they're not recruiting selling to web developers and they pushed LinkedIn and then find nothing happens. It's like, well, they don't spend their time there. You need to go understand where they're at. It's Reddit, it's Quora, it's, you know, all those other places. So,
Jeremiah Rizzo (27:41.354)
Right.
Sam Kuehnle (27:45.337)
you can get very active in those channels and join conversation, everything else, and do it in a way that's helpful though. You're not pitching your product, not talking about like, look at how great Loxo is, look at how great Databox is, but just genuinely help and people will start to understand based on the conversations that you're joining in, what you're doing, that's going to build trust. That's going to build credibility that will lead to the brand awareness for you. So when time comes, they'll speak positively about you, which is what you want at the end of the day. So, organic, you can do.
in any any other number of ways. I guess I want to stop for a second. I'm rambling here for a minute. It's not a short time.
Jeremiah Rizzo (28:19.466)
No, it's good. It's all good. I do want to ask when it comes to, so whether it's paid or organic, you've got these existing ones and assuming you've got enough historical data to sort of forecast what you think, what role they can play in filling the gap that you've got now, what is your take on two things? One, when do you think like should people not...
try a diversity of channels until they find that one that you mentioned that's like really predictable, really, like, do you focus on, I know like Chris at Refined Labs where you used to work, right, is a big believer in this like idea of, I forget if you call it like something stacking, like channel stacking or something, but I think it's this idea of like, you wait until you find like the one or two channels that are like generating proven revenue and that you can really start to scale before you sort of.
start experimenting with the next one or the next one. Are you a fan of that or are you a fan of like at different stages of companies maybe trying three at once or whatever?
Sam Kuehnle (29:16.133)
Mm -hmm.
Sam Kuehnle (29:24.976)
I lean more towards his direction, not fully in that camp, but I definitely don't go towards like try three different ones at once because of what we know about dark social and other things. You're rarely going to get the attribution to understand what variables are working. Cause when you just take a step back and get to the statistical lens of this, a lot of these are going to be coming through direct organic. they're going to just follow up with that BDR who'd sent them an email while ago, pick up the phone randomly at the right time. And if you've got too many new things coming in and you just see an influx in organic direct you.
everyone listening to this has probably got the question like, it's invest more in SEO organics working. It's like, well, we didn't actually launch any new blog posts. We didn't see any rises in our organic ranking position, but it's been a result of people are now more familiar with your brand because of these things, but you're not sure where it came from, especially if you're not using like a self -reported attribution or uncovering that in the sales discovery call to ask them just like spend five minutes. Hey, where'd you come across us? What were you researching? What'd you hear? You know, and, and understanding all of that. So
That's why from a data standpoint, I'm usually in the camp of don't add too many variables at once because you're not going to know what is and isn't effective or you'll misattribute something to being more or less effective than it may have been.
Jeremiah Rizzo (30:36.008)
Awesome, okay. I know we are like at time for the Q and A. I've got some burning questions, so this is what we're gonna do. I wanna ask you some burning, but we're gonna turn them into lightning round questions. these can be like your fast simple responses and then I'll go back and pick at them if we run out of listener questions. All right, so the one that's been on my mind this whole time, how do you, how do you,
Sam Kuehnle (30:47.268)
Okay.
Jeremiah Rizzo (31:02.741)
accurately forecast when you've got this in our example, $400,000 we have to cover in 2025. We know what our historicals we think we can get them to do and now we've got to fill the gap. Let's say we went down and we did some of the further down funnel stuff, like getting people to show up on sales calls and everything you covered. But now part of our plan is we bet that this one or two new channels, so we're going to get into YouTube this year or we're going to start doing LinkedIn impression based ads.
without having tried it yet, how can we get an accurate sense? Or how do you think about that? what putting down on paper what you should expect out of that? Or would you not even put a number till you like could know but how do you think about that when it comes to putting new levers that you're trying to pull for next year's plan?
Sam Kuehnle (31:48.953)
Yeah, that's a good one. I usually, won't commit to a number or if I do, it's very, very, very, very, very, very, very conservative. like I'll estimate one, maybe two deals, something else from it, very low volume until it's, it's proven out. Cause that's a hard part, especially when you get down to, as we said, like channel attribution. Was it really that channel? Was it something else? It's hard to know, but, I would be conservative for the
First quarter and I would also have very strict stop, start, continue criteria with us to validate along the way. Cause this is the one thing that we marketers like we love to be right. We love to take big swings and be proven that we're right and we'll stick to things longer than we usually should to try to prove that we're right. so having specific criteria for yourself or say like this needs to happen one quarter, two quarters from now. If we're not seeing this, we need to evaluate, is it the channel itself? Is it the playbook that we're using within the channel? It's the issue.
Jeremiah Rizzo (32:41.109)
Hmm.
Sam Kuehnle (32:41.879)
And then reevaluate, like, we continue this? Do we stop and go back to a channel that we know has worked well that we aren't at the point of diminishing returns at or something else? But, yeah, that's a, that's a hard one. And I'd usually tee that up with the, with the leadership as like, that's an experiment. I would keep it on the side of the funnel. Like what's the worst case scenario, what's the best case scenario, but we have to hit this goal regardless. So I, I don't want to include this in the funnel unless we have incremental spend, incremental resources to apply towards this.
Jeremiah Rizzo (33:08.149)
Hmm, okay, so this is a good point. So then when we look at our plan, we're mostly leveraging like everything that's either improvements to the existing like down funnel, like you're saying like, like the number of people who raise their hands, the number of people who show up on a call or something like that, or we're looking at leveraging as well as leveraging the channels that we have historic data for and these things which are more experiments. So like for me, if you know, if I propose YouTube for 2025,
It might be something like a leading indicator in Q1, something like we're going to aim to get 500 new subscribers or, you know, a thousand new subscribers and 20 ,000 impressions. And then by Q2, we want to start to see on self -reported attribution. Like we want to see five to 10 people coming in saying that they saw us on YouTube. If by the end of Q2, we don't see this to your point, it's either do we suck at YouTube? it like our playbook? Cause I know, like you said, people are quick to write off a channel is not as like this doesn't work, but
actually their execution sucks. Or if we think we're doing it all right, is it like, okay, this maybe is going to take longer than we think, and we don't have the patience for it right now. Or this is just not the right channel for us. You know, you gave an example of our audience is blank, and they're really not on LinkedIn that much. Maybe it is time to experiment in the in the latter two quarters with this private forum that they all hang out on or whatever it may be.
Sam Kuehnle (34:26.756)
Mm -hmm, exactly. And unless you have a fully optimized funnel, your demo to ask your rates killer, your win rates killer, like all you can literally do is add more. Then I would say, yeah, start forecasting like what adding new channels. Cause that's it. Are you only lever left? Like you can't raise ACVs crazy amounts. can't increase your win rates any further. I mean, maybe it's a smidge, but when that becomes your next truly big lever, then you can start to do that. But that's you to say like, Hey, these are hypotheses, best case, worst case.
Jeremiah Rizzo (34:52.989)
Okay, awesome. All right, another lightning round question. How do you adjust strategy if you're off course? So you're in Q2 and you're like, crap, we are not on track for this goal that we projected.
Sam Kuehnle (35:03.164)
Yeah, I think it really does. It goes back to just like, is it a channel problem? Is it an execution problem? And take the time to really evaluate it and look at it also like take off your marketer hat for a quick second and say like, would I engage with this? How does this come across? and I would do some customer research, prospect research, call 20 of them and understand like, are you spending time on this channel? Yes. No. Like, have you seen this? Yes. No. Like just start to understand some different things there and gather that information for you. But,
That's a, that's a tough one where, especially if you're on a short timeline, it's having the exit criteria for yourself of when you need to opt out and get back into something. That's where I would have a plan B kind of set up for the team. Hey, this does not work. We need to pivot quick. We know it'll at least like work. have opportunity to just put some money into this channel. So things don't fall apart. Like what is that channel? Is that your LinkedIn? Is that your Facebook? Is that your Google ads? Understand what that is. Like, no, it's not like
the absolute best way to spend your money, but it still does drive results. It's not going to be completely killer for you at the end of the day.
Jeremiah Rizzo (36:06.163)
Awesome. Okay, I'm gonna jump in to listener questions. I'll save my last two lightning round in case there's no questions at the end. So I've got those teed up. If you are listening, I think even if you're on YouTube or LinkedIn, you can still type in the chat to the stream and we'll see your message. So if you're on LinkedIn or YouTube, type in and I'll see your message. All right, Nathaniel asks, show on stream.
My question for the Q &A, are there any resources strategies specific to companies who generate revenue from public bids and tenders where subjectivity and brand loyalty is less relevant because contracts are often attributed to the lowest bidder and the access to decision makers is very limited?
Sam Kuehnle (36:49.211)
Let me read this one a second.
Jeremiah Rizzo (36:50.579)
Yeah, no problem. And Nathaniel, feel free to like in the chat, like elaborate or if you have like specific things that you're looking to cover.
Sam Kuehnle (37:01.552)
Yeah. These ones are always fun to say the least. You can, you absolutely can still influence them through, this is more like a brand awareness way, but they have their structure. They have the process that you need to follow. So there's a couple of things you can do. One is like, these are the big enterprises. You just need to get ahead of them long, long, long in advance. And the other side is development of relationships.
These types of accounts, I would consider these like your strategic accounts. If you're a larger organization, you should have strategic account executives where they get paid a lot of money to close one deal a year. And that's done for a specific reason, because these deals are for these types of organizations where they're probably locking in three, five, 10 year contracts, million plus dollar deals and everything else. So.
Yeah, I know it's not a great answer for it. don't deal too much in this space, so I'm probably not the best person to answer it either, but just based on my experience, what I've seen before, that would probably be the route that I would go is like have marketing do that cloud or the air coverage, make sure that you're aware within them, but continuing to drive those relationships on site visits, calling, emailing with that, that person who owns that relationship regularly, just to be consultative though, not like, you ready to buy yet? Are you ready to buy yet? When's that process starting up? But like just helping their business in general.
That's what's going to help you float to that top of the wrist and they'll push you more when they do have to, you know, have 10 people on their list, but they'll be, they'll be making sure that you're the top of the list every time with them when they have those.
Jeremiah Rizzo (38:32.361)
And that's like, that's something I was gonna add or thought about. It's like not a space I played or have like any experience in, but one of my questions would be like, does it always come, like if it always, always comes down to price, you know, maybe there's not like a lot that can be done, but if there's always a shortlist gathering process, I feel like you could impact the, like usually that level of Pearson is gonna spec out who they want on the shortlist. Like make sure you reach out to so and so or include them in the bid or whatever. And if it doesn't,
always come down, then are there other things of like quality, consistency, like is there something that you do that stands out that other companies don't and you can highlight that in your messaging or lead forward with that. So I wish we could be more helpful, Nathaniel. If you have anything else we can be helpful with, please follow up with another question here. I'll take Robbie and then I had a question come in from LinkedIn too. So Robbie wrote in from YouTube, sweet. He runs our YouTube. What's your biggest lesson learned in 2024?
Sam Kuehnle (39:12.134)
Mm
Sam Kuehnle (39:19.687)
You
Sam Kuehnle (39:32.136)
biggest lesson learned. I'll take two, I'll take a general one and I'll take a specific one to myself. General, macroeconomic conditions are a thing. No CFO likes to hear this, no exec likes to hear this, no sales leader, marketer, anyone likes to hear this, but it is a thing and I'm not saying that you should place blame on that by any means, but you need to make sure that you can be flexible with that to understand, okay, like we haven't changed anything with who we're targeting, with our offers, but we're seeing less buyers come in. We're seeing price sensitivity become more of a thing.
You need to be willing to meet the market where they're at and not just say, we've always sold this rate. It'll come back. Like if you want to stay in the game with the market and continue to grow, you have to be flexible with that. So, that's a general one I'd say on the personal side. So our organization were very much like we're creating a new category. It's, it's different a lot word. Different from what our incumbents do in the sense that many of them are just like traditional applicant tracking system. do everything a recruiter could possibly need in one spot. They're used to 10 plus different tools.
We're one. So why do you care? Why should anyone listening to this, anyone that's in a similar position? And this is just about like going to market in general, especially when we were talking about like that two to $3 million AR example here, you're going to win early on with the innovators with the early adopters. They love change. They want to see what's new, what's sexy, what's out there. And if they can't quite figure it out, they'll be quick to just chat into your CS team to go to YouTube, to go to Google, to figure it out.
Well, we're starting to get to the crossing the chasm point and we're seeing a lot of the early majority start to come in where they, kind of see it, but they're just like, that's too hard to figure out. Or our team won't adopt this. We're scared of change. We don't like change. What we have now is good enough. And so big lesson there is you do have to, as your product matures, as your market matures, your marketing, your sales, your internal.
enablement teams, your CS teams, they need to mature with that because we used to be able to take more hands -off approach with our, our customers. Like they'd figured out, we could help them quick answer. Like they're going to go and get on with their day. But with the early majority of the late majority, if you aren't able to help them on the spot, not only are they not going to go figure it out on their own, like the other group would, but they're going to stop using the product and they're probably going to churn after a certain amount of time as you have these larger organizations are just like, we have 40 users.
Sam Kuehnle (41:52.19)
37 of them aren't using the product and we're spending however much money, that's what is going to start that. And then you'll see the fallout as a result of that. So that's one where I'd say like being aware of where your product sits within the overall customer life cycle is something that I've been getting into deeply this year.
Jeremiah Rizzo (42:12.213)
That's awesome. We are exploring a lot of those same things at DataBox. So it's cool to hear the way that you're thinking about those. We had a question, I hope I don't put your name, if I do, I'm sorry, from LinkedIn. Aurelian asks, how can we measure the effectiveness of our alignment efforts post implementation?
Sam Kuehnle (42:34.526)
effectiveness of alignment efforts post implementation.
Jeremiah Rizzo (42:37.385)
I think they're talking about specifically sales and marketing alignment post implementing the plan.
Sam Kuehnle (42:40.946)
Yeah. Okay. So a couple of different ways. Do your sales marketing BDR leaders get along when you put the three of them in a room together? Are they all working towards the same goal? Are they able to have good conversations, not pointing fingers at like, you're not pulling your way or why didn't this AE pick this up? So that's one's very qualitative so to speak, but the other will be in those conversion rates that we were talking about that marketing or sales handoff, the win rates. another example, one of my favorites is with like BDRs and marketing.
I started my career as a BDR. So this one always hit home for me in the sense that I remember calling prospects and there were two very different ways that they would answer the phone. I'd say like, Hey, it's Sam calling from Loxo. How's it going? Sam from what? What do you do? I've never heard of that. Like, I don't have the time for this click. Right. And they just hang up. And then you have the, Sam from Loxo. Yeah. I see Matt stuff all over on the internet all the time. Like perfect timing. just saw listen to your podcast, saw a video, something else like I'm not available right now, but call me back in 30 minutes. I'm jumping into a meeting and then let's talk.
And that right there is a function of when you have teams working well together in the sense like marketing isn't forcing that person to fill out a lead, like whether it's your form to join a webinar or whatever, they're planting the seeds of what is it that Loxo does? How do we help solve the problems that they have? But talking about the problem itself, not like why you should use Loxo, why Loxo is the best, the ROI you'll get from us, but just helping them and speaking to all that in our marketing. that way, when the BDR does call.
They're familiar with the brand. They have a positive association with us because we're not acting like every other SaaS company that's trying to rip their wallet out from them, but like genuinely help them educate them and form them. And then the BDR again, they continue that consultative approach where it's not, are you ready to get on a call with our AE next? But it's just like, great. You know, it's like, what are you struggling with right now? What can I help? Like I talked to hundreds of recruiters like you every day. Like what can I share with you? Cause we recognize that
Jeremiah Rizzo (44:26.591)
Yeah.
Sam Kuehnle (44:28.254)
95 % of the market is not in the market. And it's not because they don't want to be, but they're an existing contracts. They're scared of change. They don't have the budget for it right now. So instead of trying to force them through prematurely, it's developed that relationship. So as soon as they are ready to buy, you're the first to come back to they, come back to that BDR, they come to the website, they fill out the form, whatever that is. But those are some of the different indicators that you can look at. And again, that one's a very like.
anecdotal qualitative, you'll have to talk to your BDRs to understand what's the general sentiment of the calls. But those are some of the different mix of, of metrics that I look at.
Jeremiah Rizzo (45:04.243)
Awesome. Sam here on Riverside asks, what are you currently, no, he already covered that one. No, no, no, he didn't. What are you currently most excited about learning more about as a marketing leader?
Sam Kuehnle (45:17.916)
currently most excited about learning more.
This one's kind of geeky trying to figure out what SEO and chat GPT like AI where that world intersects moving forward. Cause GPT doesn't source anything. If you ask it for a citation, it won't tell you. so I think it's, it's really interesting and confusing at the same time to figure it out. Okay. Like where is it? Cause if you go in and type in like, you know, what's the best ATS platform for recruiters?
If I type that into my instance of chat GPT, you type it into yours. Is it the same answer? Is it different based on the conversations that we've had with our AI, like based on what it knows about us? Cause it does save the conversation. So I think there's a lot to unpack there and figure out what does that all mean? How do we lean into it? And we ask, how'd you hear about us in our forms? Anytime I see that come through, I reach out to those people like, Hey, just out of curiosity, like what did you prompt?
Like what was the context that you were using that it said like, yeah, you should check out lock. I mean, it literally say that, but like it would list lock. So as, as one of the items that they should look into. So I think that's one, the time will tell how that goes, but I'm very curious about it.
Jeremiah Rizzo (46:27.893)
If you, Alex from our growth team has been like knee deep, I should say chest deep in this stuff. And like always, I'm like constantly getting updates from him. He's sharing with the team around like, you know, like LLMs are crawling, like the number, like mentions, and then like, you need to make sure that like the way your brand is talked about is consistent across, like he's got all these things he's pulling away, listening to what like leaders are saying at these conferences and stuff. if you ever want an intro to Alex, he would love to talk your ear off about this stuff.
Sam Kuehnle (46:56.83)
I think you need to have Alex on this podcast to talk about that.
Jeremiah Rizzo (46:58.661)
Yeah, yeah, yeah Okay, we've got I think we've got time for one more. know Sam has a heart out. We don't want to push them too close Allie asks or says a lot of this data is specific to b2b SAS any thoughts on budgeting and marketing planning for professional services So Allie if you have any follow -ups from what we say like if there's a specific one or two specific questions dump them in chat real quick and and we'll and we'll we'll get to them, but yeah I guess like to start this question off Sam. Do you think
the planning process you talked about, I would imagine it's still fairly similar in terms of like historically how much is marketing driven? What's the gap that the company's trying to fill and then like agreeing on the percentage that marketing set to drive. The overall strategy of saying like this is what historically has driven like all that would hold true, right? So the actual method of planning would probably be the same.
Sam Kuehnle (47:47.123)
Mm -hmm.
It's still similar. Yeah. And so this was like, you know, it refined labs. We were services company with who we market to recruiters, their services company. So yeah, the planning is similar where you'll see the biggest difference is you'll have your average ACV, like what are your services costs, but then your margins, that's going to be what the other thing is impacted. Software is very scalable, right? It really doesn't cost that much. Once you sell it to someone, it's the, it's the overall development in the beginning. But when your services, you have hours you need to provide and coming out, okay, how much did it cost to
acquire this company customer, and then how much does it cost for us to service them? Like how many hours are we putting towards that? That's real. You'll probably want to take that into account and kind of like chart. was sharing earlier and have a row that looks at just like your gross margins overall. And I can't think of the number off the top of my head right now with like, the numbers are very different for SAS and services. want to say like SAS good is like 70 % above services is like 40 % above something. And that don't quote me on that. Something I think I remember. I'm not, not sure, but
That would really be the main area that I would be looking at because when you are marketing your services, it's similar to marketing a SaaS. And honestly, to kind of go off on side tangent, I personally prefer to market services versus SaaS because you are the product at the end of the day. Like sharing your knowledge, sharing your expertise is showing people exactly what they're going to get when they use your organization, when they sign on with you with anything else. So like there's no better way to show your product, like organically, especially where it's, it's free to do it on LinkedIn, on Reddit, on Quora, wherever it is that your audience is spending time.
But that's one where, yeah, this, same process will hold true for you.
Jeremiah Rizzo (49:23.734)
Okay, awesome. Ali, if you are still here reviewing, you have like a follow up on that, feel free to drop that in. All right, Sam, thank you so much for coming on. I think we're gonna wrap here. We're gonna give you 10 minutes to get to your next call. I know you squeezed us in in the middle of the day. So thank you so much for coming on again. Everyone, I hope this was really helpful for you. We're gonna summarize Sam's playbook of how to set these accurate goals that align to company value in our newsletter. So you'll see that.
coming in your inbox. Sam, where can people follow along with you or learn more about Lockso?
Sam Kuehnle (49:58.034)
Yeah, so Lockso, our website, lockso .co, not .com. I'm on LinkedIn, our company's on LinkedIn. We're very active on LinkedIn. That's a great spot to learn about us. And then I've got a sub stack newsletter, little bit longer form stuff. Easy to find, just Google my name. It's spelled right here for you, even though it is a very tough name to spell, but yeah, easy to find me if you want to.
Jeremiah Rizzo (50:17.577)
Okay, awesome. Thank you again, Sam, for coming on. Really appreciate it.
Sam Kuehnle (50:20.818)
Yeah, thanks y 'all.