We take anything that is digitally measurable and map that – Talk Marketing 076 – Steffen Hedebrandt

Martin Henley: [00:00:16] Hello there. My name is Martin Henley. This is the Effective Marketing content extravaganza. And if you spent a second here, you will know that I am on a mission to give you everything you need to be successful in your business or be successful in your marketing career. So I am here giving you everything I know about sales and marketing. I’m pulling in anyone I can find with experience that is relevant to the success of your career or your business. To extract what they know about sales and marketing, I am reviewing the very best and the very worst of marketing content on the Internet and every couple of weeks we bring you the marketing news. But today is Talk Marketing and so we have a guest. So today’s guest is an economics and Business Administration graduate with a master’s in strategy, organization and leadership. He started work as a student teacher in 2006. Since then, he has been an innovation project manager at the Copenhagen Business School. Lectured about Excel. That’s Microsoft. Excel has been country manager for the Nordic region, both Elance and Upwork. He has held three CMO and one head of marketing position. He is currently co-founder and CMO of Dream Data, which offers go to market efficiency and presents transparent, actionable analysis of what drives business to business revenue. So we’re talking today about B2B attribution. What in your market, what in your marketing is actually delivering success for you? Today’s guest is Stephan, head of Brands. And I was going to Stephan check how we pronounce your surname because I don’t think he pronounced it like an English person in Denmark. [00:01:59][103.3]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:02:01] You did? You did. Well, it’s not safe for me to be definitive. [00:02:05][3.6]

Martin Henley: [00:02:07] Okay? I would, because I lived in South Africa for a little bit. Would that be a it’s not like a head is a head and brands. [00:02:13][6.5]

Speaker 3: [00:02:14] No, no. It’s more like like a. [00:02:15][1.7]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:02:16] And you don’t push hard. So it’s a Danish agency. He went he started running. [00:02:23][7.1]

Martin Henley: [00:02:24] Okay. Well, I knew there was something going on there in the way of pronunciation. Yeah, there was something going on that I wasn’t getting. And how are you doing, man? It’s good to be talking to you. You are in Denmark, are you? [00:02:35][10.8]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:02:36] I am in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. [00:02:40][3.6]

Martin Henley: [00:02:40] Excellent. And how is the mood in Denmark? You’re coming into winter. It’s going to get cold. [00:02:45][4.3]

Speaker 3: [00:02:47] Yeah, I’m. [00:02:47][0.4]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:02:47] Thinking somebody just blew up some gas pipes just outside of the Danish territory last night. So the politicians are a little bit cautious right now. [00:03:01][13.9]

Martin Henley: [00:03:02] Oh, my God. I didn’t I didn’t know that someone had blown off the gas prices. [00:03:05][3.4]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:03:06] No, there’s no they say they have no proof, but they do have sentiment to use gas in winter in doing your job. That’s the story. [00:03:16][10.2]

Martin Henley: [00:03:17] Yeah. The thing is, you need all the gas you’re going to get really this winter. I think so. That is. Yeah, I’m sorry to hear that one. Okay. On a brighter note, Copenhagen was voted the happiest capital city in the world, wasn’t it, for a number of years? [00:03:30][13.0]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:03:31] Yeah. Yes. It’s a very nice place to live. Very happy here, year. [00:03:36][5.1]

Martin Henley: [00:03:37] Excellent. Okay, cool. That’s good. I’ve never been. I’d like to come to visit Copenhagen. [00:03:41][3.5]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:03:42] I’m sure it’s the summer time in coming months and months. [00:03:44][2.0]

Martin Henley: [00:03:45] I think you don’t recommend the winter. [00:03:47][1.5]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:03:48] No, definitely not. Okay, so if. [00:03:50][2.1]

Martin Henley: [00:03:50] I go, I will come in the summer and I will track you down and you can buy me a beer. That’s the way we will be. [00:03:55][4.9]

Speaker 3: [00:03:56] Okay. [00:03:56][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:03:57] All right. Super cool. But we’re not here to talk about Copenhagen. Copenhagen or Denmark or gas pipes. We’re here to talk about what I think is a really interesting subject. Like you’re in the data business and I teach digital marketing. We do digital marketing for the data. [00:04:15][18.7]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:04:17] Hmm. [00:04:17][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:04:18] But the frustration, I think, very often is how much data is actually available to us. I mean, I’m in a privileged position because I don’t actually have to. I don’t do it very much anymore. And I teach so I can paint like the ideal picture for the students and get really excited. But I know when they go out in the world, it’s not going to be quite as rosy as the picture that I’ve painted. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from with it. I’m really fascinated, interested, you know, we do. I tell people what I teach in digital marketing. It should be like driving a car and the data should be like the instrumentation that you have on on the dashboard of your car. But in reality, I don’t feel like it’s exactly like that, but I don’t have to imagine what it’s like. We’ve got you and you can tell us exactly what it’s like. So actually, no, there’s only five questions. The first question is, how are you qualified to talk to us about business? The business attribution. You might need to define attribution for our audience as well, so we’ll start there. The second question is who do you work with? How do you add value to their lives? The third question is What is your recommendation for people who want to get better at B2B attribution? The fourth question really easy and what should people read? And the fifth question, who can you throw under the bus? Who might endure or maybe even enjoy to have a conversation like this with me? So question number one, Stefan, how are you qualified? [00:05:46][88.3]

[00:05:47] Well, firstly, what is business to business attribution? And then you can tell us how you’re qualified to talk to us about it. [00:05:55][8.2]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:05:57] Yeah. So B2B to describe the business businesses trade trade the business businesses opposite a set of business schools who could be selling running shoes or using some cell phones or computer monitors, commonly called easy. So meaning that when businesses trade for businesses serves as a clear signal to customers, whereas less likely to cease to be such as Google in place and in math and science in B2B. You know the journey to me six months long or 12 months long, it might might be two, three, four, five people. He like a buying community and there’s a million in your customers versus this and all those things makes it very hard for for people to understand that’s going on if you don’t have that very, very season to set it up for like controlling what you’re about about data you don’t care about. So, so and the word just means one one. Make sure you collect all the data, data from all the customers you need and then to understand which, which of systems or which which, which of those structures were important to us. So when we’re going to be marketing, it’s typically beginning early, early after journey because you’ve got to see to see tickets to strike site. So, so we want to understand which of your activities is consists of just the. Yeah you could say starting not just that incoming coming you’ll start to see the see itself so to whereas you could also during the month which we would never ever talk to the sales sales people apply online. This is one one and you want to get rid of resistance. You should start producing more money for your company. Okay. Yeah. And so my my background for this is that I’ve been in, in B2B marketing ever since I graduated university ten years ago. So. And, and before this company, I was part of this kind of classical growth to list. And it’s 130 years and ending 001 and then emitting around €100,000 a month at the end. And in the beginning, you had a good idea that you should put in some money. Like, this is how Associates reconvened. We did this and this happened on the other side. But the last €20,000 you put into a monthly budget, you don’t really have an idea about what becomes of this. And that is not a very responsible or a good way to be doing business. You should have a wide group of euro borrowers. I do with you in India and CC and this was a topic I was super interested in in my my last company. And at the end of my tenure there, I basically met two co-founders who had a very ugly prototype of this product. We sold today entry data, but I suddenly could see that I could start with the first time and see which of these ads that I six months later ends up becoming pipeline for the salespeople, or which of my content pieces are the ones that produces buyers and which of them is just producing people who look at the content. There’s all these very granular questions about my marketing activities. I started to be able to see there’s actually somebody here who can tell me what works and what doesn’t work. And yeah, that got me, you know, very convinced because I knew the pain firsthand that if you can build a product here, you can build a pretty good, pretty great business around it. [00:10:03][246.7]

Martin Henley: [00:10:06] Okay. Excellent. And I think that’s the crux of the issue, isn’t it? It’s it’s what works and what doesn’t. So it was John Wanamaker who said in the middle of the 19th century, I know that 50% of my advertising is effective. I don’t know which 50% and what I tell people on my courses is that if somebody you employ comes to you and says that in 2022, then you should take them out into the car park and dispense with them because that’s just not accessible, that’s just not acceptable, that’s not what we’re doing anymore. You know, we are data driven marketing teams. Apart from it’s not quite as simple as that. So that’s cool. [00:10:43][37.5]

[00:10:43] So tell us about for anyone who might not understand quite what a buyer journey is, what do you mean by buyer journey? [00:10:51][7.6]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:10:54] So if you picture a company buying a piece of software, then it’s we’re basically talking about any touch that led up to you signed a contract with a company. So that could be, if we describe it, that it could be somebody searching on Google for a specific term attribution. Then we would show you an ad and then you’d go to our website. Then as you browse our website, you might download our e-book, and that’s all you do for this, for this day. Then the next day we send you another email with a new blog post, because if you like that e-book, then you probably would like this blog post as well. And then you click this blog post from your phone and come back into our website and read this blog post. And then, you know, six months might go by. You’re exposed for some ads, and now your boss comes and tells you, Hey, we actually need a product that does ABC. And that was actually what this e-book was about back then. So it’s kind of trying to like know step by step, understand what makes those money end up in your bank account. And if, you know, if we can understand this journey of every, every new business we want, we’ve one, then hopefully we’ll be able to replicate some of the things that are consistently present in those bio duties. [00:12:20][86.1]

Martin Henley: [00:12:22] Yes, 100%. And this is what I say to the people I teach, given I don’t have to do it, is that the mission is kind of like you just go on this loop continuously and it is a journey. You’re taking people from a place where they don’t even know you exist to a place where they’re putting money in your bank account, you know? And there is a journey and like you say, there’s touch points on the way. So I don’t know. They might see a social post, they might walk past your exhibition stand, they might sit and watch a video. At some point they might Google you, you know. So there’s lots of different places. And the mission then is to know which of those marketing initiatives have been effective. So then you can redirect resource into the most effective marketing resources, and that will have the effect of actually increasing the efficiency of your marketing. So that’s the way I understand it. It’s complicated because how on earth do you know really? Like so the one that I’ve put in there is then walking past your exhibition stand now. [00:13:31][68.2]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:13:31] Yeah. [00:13:31][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:13:32] You know, how would you know if that’s happened? How would you know if they if they’ve watched your YouTube video on the subject, how would they know if they’ve been in the pub with a colleague telling them. [00:13:44][11.1]

Speaker 3: [00:13:44] You know. [00:13:44][0.2]

Martin Henley: [00:13:45] You should check out these guys? So there is always in there some unknown. What’s interesting about what you’re saying is that you’re making decisions about which of these are important touches. Explain how how do you deal with that issue? You can never 100% figure exactly. [00:14:04][19.6]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:14:05] And we will never like to say to anybody, we’ll tell you 100% of what’s going on. So you’re completely right, Martin, that there’s there’s stuff that is measurable and then there’s stuff that is either hard to measure or impossible to measure. And here that’s where you kind of need your gut feeling and common sense and experience as well as a marketer. [00:14:26][20.7]

Martin Henley: [00:14:27] All right. Sorry. Can you hold that point that there’s someone in the street and the dogs barking at them? It’s not going to stop until we go. I’m going to be back in 90 seconds. Okay. Sorry. [00:14:34][7.8]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:14:35] Fine, fine, fine. [00:14:35][0.5]

Speaker 3: [00:14:41] Oh. [00:14:41][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:15:16] Sorry, man. I would put a little cut in there. Where are we? We are at one minute. Cuts. Okay, cool. So sorry. Do you know what you were saying? [00:15:26][9.9]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:15:27] Yes. So we were coming from you saying that, you know, meeting somebody out of pop or walking by an exhibition stand that’s hard to miss. And you’re completely right. So what what our two will is doing in a dream that as we’re taking anything that is digitally measurable and mapping that into a a customer journey. Didn’t are still things that takes place that is valuable but almost unmeasurable. You know people in that community on Facebook or slack writing to each other, recommending stuff, etc., and that’s just that’s just how the world is. So we all take any data that you sit upon and map into a customer journey, but then you will still also have to, you know, use common sense and your gut feeling and experience as a marketer to think about is this still a meaningful activity to do? Is it the right people that gets the right message? [00:16:28][60.5]

Martin Henley: [00:16:30] Yes. Okay. Because I have a what do I have? I think the world is starting to think a little bit differently about kind of digitalization. I think we’ve got to the point where a lot. What’s the word? A lot of respect was given to much respect was maybe given to digital and too much importance was given to digital. Now, we love digital as marketers because, you know, we can justify everything that we’re doing. But I’m thinking maybe it’s less of the picture than than we’ve been attributing to it, and it’s going to be less of the picture as we go forward. You know, I think people are behaving differently around digital now. What do you think. [00:17:19][49.3]

Speaker 3: [00:17:21] Is. [00:17:21][0.0]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:17:22] Kind of yes and no? I do think that there’s things that digital is consistently valuable, but then there’s also people who underestimate the power of actually having a beer with somebody at a conference. [00:17:37][14.6]

Speaker 3: [00:17:39] Or. [00:17:39][0.0]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:17:39] You know, seeing an ad on a billboard two times a day. He probably also leaves an impression of a brand, so and so forth. So but I think the most important thing is that you just, you know, for any marketing activity, you’re critical about, is it the right people? Who’s going to see my marketing is the proper messaging for the right person. And then what is the cost of this thing? And then sometimes you actually have strong, quantifiable numbers that this works. And other times you have to run a little bit undercut feeling as well. [00:18:16][36.4]

Martin Henley: [00:18:17] Yes. Because also it’s I mean, I really hope that we’re not going to get to the point where we stop having beers, conferences with people, you know, really know that that’s not going to end. So by the term attribution, we are attributing value essentially to the marketing initiatives. Like which marketing initiatives do we attribute with a contribution to making that lead or that sale? That that’s what we can do. So I suppose. [00:18:50][33.0]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:18:50] Exactly. [00:18:50][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:18:51] Because even if it’s digital, it’s complicated. So I don’t know the answer. But do we know when they’ve seen a display ad if they don’t click on it? Do we know when they’ve seen a pre-roll ad? Do we know? Because it’s not until they kind of identify themselves that we have any idea who they are. [00:19:18][27.1]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:19:19] Exactly. So you’re right. Those are good examples of stuff that where you don’t get access to know who’s watching what. So what you can do today is you can have a tracking script on your own website that monitors everything that interests your entity, but you cannot, you know, Google or LinkedIn, Facebook do not expose who view something that would be illegal for them. So you can only measure stuff that takes place on and on places you control. [00:19:56][36.3]

Martin Henley: [00:19:57] Okay. So you can when they come on to your website, you can you can see their IP address and you can put a cookie on there on them, on their machine, on their browser, whatever. And at that point, you start you can start to know where they are, where they’re turning up. [00:20:18][20.3]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:20:19] Yeah, exactly. So and initially they will be anonymous because, you know, when you first enter a website, you don’t know who they are. You might see which IP address they represent, but you don’t know who that person is. And so they might have three or four or five visits to your website while they’re anonymous. What our technology does is that we record and revisit. Where did they come from? What did they do on the website? But they will just keep writing to that anonymous log. And then once people submit a form on a website, this is where we get consent to look at what they did in their past sessions on the website. So now we know that Martin has been on our website five times, and he came from these sources and he looked at these pages, but not before he gifts his own consent for us to to to take the unidentified idea and connected with something that is actually Martin Henley. [00:21:21][61.4]

Martin Henley: [00:21:23] Okay. And can you do that retrospectively? So when they sign up, then you can say then you can attach them to that IP address, which is just showing up. Okay. Right. You see, what I’m feeling now is that you can only really I mean, so I’m seeing now that quite broadly you can say, okay, this piece of content consistently appears in the buyer’s journey. This piece of content consistently appears in the buyer’s journey, you know. So these are having positive effects in that people are showing up on our website and telling us who they are and giving us consent. [00:22:04][41.3]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:22:06] Is that the same with a particular ad you have running or a particular keyword or. Yes, you want to see those things that are consistently present when people buy your product and then you want to either do more of the same thing or do similar things to what seems to be working. [00:22:24][18.7]

Martin Henley: [00:22:26] Okay. And I suppose then there are levels to this are the because if they’re clicking on an ad, then you have a greater amount of control, you know exactly where you’re sending them. So that is a much more controlled visitor than somebody who turns up in your home page and and just Wombles about through looking at various pages. [00:22:51][25.5]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:22:53] Yeah. [00:22:53][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:22:54] So does it make sense then. I’m, I’m only thinking out loud about this for the first time. Maybe, but does it make sense that you say okay, we are interested to attribute because there are different stages like so when we talk formally about buyers journey, there needs to. [00:23:11][16.8]

Speaker 3: [00:23:11] Be. [00:23:11][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:23:12] Awareness. There needs to be. I’m struggling now cause I wasn’t expecting it. So what is the day they need to be? What do they call it? Consideration. There needs to be. There’s like five or six, isn’t there? The last one is. [00:23:26][13.7]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:23:28] Maybe something more like, yeah, there’s attention, interest, desire action is one model. Yes, indeed. In B2B, you typically name it something like maybe a lead and then a marketing qualified lead. Yes, sales qualified lead. And then the deal that you win. So you call it cold, the different stages, different things according to how the account progresses through your system. [00:23:53][25.0]

Martin Henley: [00:23:54] Yes. I mean, I’m tempted to look it up now, but it’s something about like attention, interest, desire action is kind of the lead generation part, isn’t it? But there is an established it’s attention, consideration, purchase. I think there’s something between consideration and purchase or consideration in purchase and next to each other, something between awareness and consideration. And then it’s advocacy is kind of the final one and like maintaining the customer is in there as well. And so and so I’m thinking if you were to break this down and you say, okay, you have to go through those five steps, you know, because people need to be aware of what you do. There needs to be some depth to that. They need to be aware that you exist. Then there needs to be some depth to their awareness of what you actually do and what it costs and how you deliver it and all those things. And then they will consider it and then they will go through to purchase. So I’m imagining now that there will be some a value, some value in doing the attribution, maybe at two or three stages. So you can do, okay, this is what the this is what we attribute our website traffic generation to and this is what we attribute leads to and this is what we attribute our sales to. So does that make is that kind of how you work? I don’t know. We haven’t. [00:25:14][79.5]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:25:14] And so the trick is actually to look at who do you actually end up selling to. [00:25:19][5.1]

Martin Henley: [00:25:21] And then working it backwards. [00:25:22][0.8]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:25:23] To reach is the sales pipeline. Yeah, exactly. And then you do more of those activities that make them trickle all the way down to becoming customers. So we don’t want to optimize towards, you know, getting more people to visit the website per say that, you know, given that it doesn’t help us pay any salary, we want to do more of those activities where we actually sell to the customer or at least they go very far in the journey. So we want to have special attention to these activities and try to amplify those. And those activities only pushes people to the website but never becomes buyers. We don’t necessarily want to sustain those. [00:26:02][39.2]

Martin Henley: [00:26:04] Brilliant, perfect, because who cares if they don’t end up supplying? Who cares? I mean, if anything, the danger is that you end up attracting more people who don’t buy and that ends up taking more resource salespeople talking to people who’ve got no intention of buying. Brilliant. Yeah. [00:26:20][16.0]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:26:20] So a bit a career advice for any market is to get as close, to be able to prove that you are producing money for your activities as you can. Then the CFO, the sales manager. CEOs are always going to like your work, whereas if you’re showing up with I guess we’re doing these things because I think and you have if you have no proof that you’re producing money, then that’s when you risk getting fired when there’s an economic downturn. [00:26:52][31.3]

Martin Henley: [00:26:54] 100%, and this is exactly what I tell my groups, is that the marketing were always the victim. Because, you know, when the when the boss is in a bad mood, they’ll come pick on us because we just spend money. And historically, we’ve got no idea what value it is that we’re deriving. Do you know? I mean, it’s like you spent £10,000. What did the £10,000 go? It went on the billboard. Good. What happened after that? People drove past, you know, it’s no story. Whereas now, with the amount of data that’s available, then we can tell the whole story. You know, we did this. This was the outcome. This is what we’ve learned. This is what we’re going to do going forward. You say, I like to talk to people about if I’m pitching marketing, which I don’t have to do anymore. I like to talk to them about cost of customer acquisition and lifetime customer values, because these are the metrics that demonstrate that you are not only generating money but actually adding value to the bottom line. You are increasing the profitability of the business. If, as they say, if it’s true that 30% of turnover is typically the cost of customer acquisition and you can drive that down and you can drive the lifetime customer value up, then you are impacting the profitability. So we’re together on that page. There is an issue here, isn’t there, Stephan? There’s a couple of issues here. One is about the kind of the nature of data and the way people feel about data and the availability of data. And I think the best example is what’s going on between Apple and Facebook, where Apple have essentially diverted the stream away from Facebook and decided, you know, if their customers get if they get their customers, that if Facebook get their customers data, that’s probably the easiest way I could have said that. So there is an evolving attitude to data and it is becoming increasingly regulated and increasingly more difficult to come by. What do you think about that? [00:29:02][128.8]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:29:05] So I think there’s probably always going to be an internal E to internal cat and mouse chase between those who tried to protect privacy and then those who want to exploit cookies and tracking and all the things you can do with these things. But it’s so it’s kind of it’s just part of the game that, you know, you you do what you can within the law at any given time. And then you try to make the most of that, the data that you you have available. What Apple has been particularly hitting down on with something called intelligent tracking prevention is that they have started to delete cookies faster from app platforms. So they only allow a cookie to sit from a four from an ad platform. At least that’s what they say for around 24 hours. So this means that once they enter your website, you’ll only be able to advertise to them within 24 hours and then they will clean the cookie store. I can’t remember the technical term, but it means that it’s harder to connect that this device has actually been on our website before if the only tracking measure you have is the app platform. But there’s also been a rise of what you can call first party data and third party data collectors, which means things that we track all selfs and this is the bucket dream data falls within. So we are we are just tracking what takes place on your website, meaning that today you came from Facebook. Let’s write that down. The next day you came from Google. We write that down. We’re not utilizing this to retargeted people and run ads towards them. We’re just helping the company keep an overview of what’s going on. And this type of cookies, which is set as a static statistical tracking cookie and not an advertising cookie, tends not to get deleted. I don’t know if that makes sense now. [00:31:22][137.4]

Martin Henley: [00:31:23] It makes 100% sense. So basically what you’re saying is like there is a war going on between Apple and Facebook, you guys aren’t involved because you’re only interested in who sends you and when or who sends them and when they send them. Please tell me. Yeah, you’ve actually got someone there sitting writing this down. I would love that. It would be really good for the employment statistics. [00:31:44][21.7]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:31:47] Yeah, now we don’t. But but maybe just to recap. What I mean is that at any given time, there’s going to be challenges. And your responsibility as a marketer is to come up with this equation of these are the activities we do, and then we produce money because then we can replicate this and scale it and put more money into it. I often think about it as, you know, when I was playing computer games, when I was a kid, there would always be like cheap coats you can find to the game and then the game would get significantly easier. And understanding the kind of customer journey that your customers take is, to me, the cheat codes to the game of marketing. Because if you understand which path they take, we can go out and do more of these things. [00:32:35][48.1]

Martin Henley: [00:32:37] Cool. Excellent. And the thing is here is, though, I think you’re not really cheating. You know, all you’re doing. [00:32:48][10.9]

Speaker 3: [00:32:50] Is. [00:32:50][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:32:53] All you’re doing really is the sensible thing, which is recording, you know, the effect of the marketing investments that you make. So I think that there are people who are this doesn’t seem to me I wouldn’t describe this as cheating, you know? No, no, no. I have a very definite idea of what the limits of. So, for example, Facebook recently were fined €400 million, I think, in Dublin for failing in Ireland, for failing to protect the contact details of children. Oh, that’s cheating. You know, I mean, that 100% is cheating. I think you tracking who comes to your website and where they’ve come from, not even who the IP address is. The visit your website. I don’t think there’s anything nefarious, underhand. It’s to me that just sounds eminently sensible because basically now you’re talking about ads. When I was busy with clients, we still got some benefit from the organic thing. You know, we could put a good piece of content out there and it would get some traction in the world. Well, we all know that doesn’t happen anymore. So now we are increasingly having to support that content with money to pay the platforms. So I think it’s only reasonable that we invest some time and energy in making sure that that we are getting as much value as we possibly can out of that, out of that investment, and more importantly, understanding what’s working so we can invest more in doing that then rather than what’s not working and invest less in doing that. But the platforms aren’t necessarily on our side as marketers, you know, they don’t want us doing the work. They just want us throwing money at everything. You’ve got me on to rant now, Stefan. I’m sorry. [00:34:41][108.3]

Speaker 3: [00:34:43] Bro. [00:34:43][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:34:44] But that’s kind of how this is evolving. You know, I was there when it all happened, and I think that would be my recommendation. A little bit like yours. Well, I say to people all the time is make hay while the sun shines, because none of these things are getting better. You know, now is the time to do this because it won’t be as good tomorrow and it won’t be as good next year and it won’t be anything like as good in five years time, you know. So the thing is, now I think that there is some urgency. People need to pick up this stuff and actually be doing it because and I’ve been saying this to people since like 2008. Like, none of these platforms are making it easier for us. You know, none of these platforms are interested in driving efficiency for us. They’re interested in driving profits for them. Okay, good. I’ll get off that rant. Okay. So, do you want the good news? [00:35:33][48.5]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:35:34] Yes. [00:35:34][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:35:35] It sounds to me like you are eminently qualified to talk to us about business to business attribution. How do you feel about that? [00:35:45][9.2]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:35:46] I think I am. [00:35:47][0.7]

Martin Henley: [00:35:49] Confident that you are already. Okay, good. It’s always a little bit sensitive when we get to that point because. Well, if I think you’re not, then then we’re going to have an interesting conversation from there. But I do. So that takes us then to question number two. [00:36:01][11.9]

[00:36:02] Question number two is, who do you work with and how are you adding value to their lives? So you’re telling us that there’s a tool here? Is there? There’s there’s a piece of software that does this work. What is that? Yes. How does it work? Who is it designed for? [00:36:17][15.3]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:36:18] Yeah. So that’s that’s I think I don’t know if you said it, but it’s called dream data, I hope. What we basically do is we set up a data warehouse for our customers. And inside of this data warehouse, which is a fine word for a bucket, we set up this bucket for our customers and then we extract data from all the tools that touches their customer journeys. And then we extract all of that data and loaded into the bucket. And then our algorithms start to clean up and sort this. Which leaves them at end with like a timeline of every touch that we know of from every account. And the systems that typically touch the customer journey can be like a CRM system, which is where to keep a log of communicating with the customers, which meetings that we have, who we call. It can be your email tools. So which tools are sending emails to the customer’s customer success tool and so forth? There’s many tools that touches the customers, and then we extract the data from all of the platforms, which adds, Are you running? What do they cost? And then we track the website in the middle. And this basically means that if there’s any digital touch to touch your customer journeys, we map that into a customer journey from our to our customers. And then you can ask who is ideal customers for a product like this? Because in some businesses, as you mentioned in the beginning, Martin, they are very heavily driven by conferences and events. But there’s other types of businesses who do the majority of their business online or digital, and we call them software as a service companies. So B-to-B SAS companies, and they’re kind of the way that they go to market is that they invest their money digitally in ads primarily. But then the salespeople sit remote, as we do today, and talk with the customers, and they also deliver their product online digitally, which means that you kind of have a closed loop of the whole customer journey from the very first touches to the sales part, to the product being delivered to the customers. And these are the people that we focus on, those who have a predominantly digital customer journey, because that leaves behind the most traces for us to map that into a customer journey. [00:38:49][150.1]

Martin Henley: [00:38:50] Okay, brilliant. And that is important because I don’t think people spend enough time considering keeping their customers longer or making sure that people are actually making use of the service or actually getting value from the service. And if you are working exclusively with service providers. [00:39:15][24.4]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:39:16] Like that, see that’s the one though. They are the ones that we chase. If you come in and it’s not in that bucket, we will still have a conversation. But the ones we chase are SAS companies. [00:39:27][10.5]

Martin Henley: [00:39:28] Okay. Because the beauty of that then is that you get transparency of the entire process. You know, it’s like you should see even beyond where they become a customer because there was a statistic, I don’t know if it’s still true, but there was a group of middle aged men working for the government in the beginning of the noughties did a study and they found that it was 17 times more expensive to find and win a new customer than it is to sell to a new an existing customer. So this thing about customer retention, I think is really important 100%. [00:40:02][34.1]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:40:03] And it is it hurts me so much the few times when the customers don’t want to renew their contracts with us. And it’s kind of I think that, you know, as a marketer, you should actually you should be thinking about who is most likely to renew their contract once you’ve sold to them. Those are the people you should try to generate demand from because then as you’ve acquired them, you’ll just keep making money. And then, you know, you know, in this also implies that you actually attract somebody who’s a good fit for your product and are likely to become happy customers as they will renew their contract. I don’t know how you see that, Martin. [00:40:44][41.4]

Martin Henley: [00:40:46] I see that I had a living example of this yesterday. Oh, I agree with you 100%. So people waste. Well, let’s start at the very beginning where marketers waste a lot of time and energy is counting the likes and comments on their social media. You know, you can’t buy anything with with a social media like, you know, so so that’s why they got it. And then you’re right, they start wasting money thinking about how many people have been on their website and they waste money on, you know, how many sales meetings they have necessarily. So they waste money on all of this stuff. The only thing that’s really important is what you’ve said already, which is who actually ends up buying. And the only thing that’s more important than that is who ends up actually taking the most value from what you’re offering and then who actually ends up being the longest serving customer in your business. So this is something that I’ve said to people forever, like, you should focus on your very best. Customers. This is beautiful because this comes around. Exactly. So if it is 17 times more expensive to find and win a new customer than it is to sell to an existing customer. If you’re going to invest 17 times as much resource and you want to make sure that that prospective customer is going to have a chance of being in your top three customers. You know, and certainly you don’t want anybody who’s outside of those parameters, who needs more customers, who needs more leads, who needs more likes on their posts. I mean, nobody needs that stuff. What you need are very good customers. And then what this comes to is the quality of your product and the value that your product develops. I was in Singapore yesterday, and when I’m in Singapore I like to go to the Maxwell Food Court and the Maxwell I don’t know if you’ve been to Singapore, but it’s just all these like kind of. [00:42:46][119.8]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:42:46] Pockets of some food courts in Singapore. [00:42:48][1.5]

Martin Henley: [00:42:49] Okay, so you’ve got the idea. Now, when I go, I don’t know what the name of this particular one is, but the food’s amazing and it’s in Chinese. That’s why I don’t know the name. I know where it is and I know which one it is because there’s a queue. So I stood in the queue for this place for 15 minutes yesterday and I’m looking at all of these other food providers and in the 15 minutes that I was in the queue, they didn’t serve anyone. So they’re basically standing there looking at the queue for this one place and it kind of goes against everything that we think about serving customers, which is they don’t want to pay the most, they don’t want to be inconvenienced. It’s all they don’t want, whatever. And I think what it comes down to is that customers want the best product. That’s what they want. And when I was pushed for time yesterday, I was happy to stand in this queue for 15 minutes because I knew that I was getting the best products. You know, there were others with longer queues, but I had experience of this one and you know, I’m happy to stand in the queue. So I think this is the beauty. I think of SAS is that you get this app, this transparency, you can see how your customers are engaging with the software and the value that they’re taking. And then because of that, that data is available. There’s no excuse not to continuously evolve that, to make it more and more and more and more valuable. Is there a question in this? There is a question in this, which is, you know, about retention. [00:44:17][88.5]

[00:44:17] So how is data working to support businesses to increase the retention of their customers? [00:44:24][6.6]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:44:26] So like broadly speaking with data, then at least if you have a digital product, then you can see, you know, how often does this customer log in, how many users this of the, you know, of the product? Which part of the product do they use? So they’re essentially if it’s a digital product, which we we work with mainly there’s actually a lot of indications that they are happy users to then return every week to use the product or something like that. Yes. Like, you know, at the end of the day, it’s you know, it comes down to do they renew the contract or not? And then you want to you know, you’re basically you want to renew as sorry interview dosed who renew and you also want to interview those who do not renew. So you write down what were the reasons for you being happy or unhappy? And then you tell your product team, the customers are saying the unhappy customers are saying these things. The happy customers are saying these things. Again, can we try to do more of the good things and this less of the bad things? [00:45:27][61.7]

Martin Henley: [00:45:30] Yeah, 100%. Because also there should be like a virtuous cycle in businesses where marketing identify the market. They pull out the people who have the most interesting, that are most entrenched, most relevance sales, have conversations with those people. Then it goes into production, they produce the product, and then customer managers are speaking to those people. So it should be out of that that you evolve into an increasingly valuable product. But I don’t get the sense maybe that is happening in SAS, but I don’t get the sense that’s happening in most businesses. The way it seems to happen in most businesses is that it’s got a room full of boffins that never see the light of day, who conjure up like product, and then the sales and marketing people are kind of forced into going out to force that on the market. You know, that’s the way I see it. How is it in SAS? [00:46:24][54.5]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:46:28] I hope it’s more integrated, I think. The business visit to Dorset. Dorset Road is that they don’t think about the customer journey as one integrated stream. They think about it. Here’s my marketing silo. We just do our thing. Here’s our sales team. We just do our thing. Here’s the customer success team. We don’t speak to marketing, sales, and the over here is the product team and we don’t want to talk to any of those commercial guys. Yeah, that’s when I think you’re doing it wrong because you want to do things to most effectively and you want to spend your money the best way possible. And I think that’s when you get all the teams to pull in the same direction. Who’s ideal customer profile? How do we attract them? How do we make sure that the salespeople spend time on those? How do we make sure the product team builds the product for the ideal customer profile and so forth? So everybody’s kind of pulling the same way. [00:47:21][53.4]

Martin Henley: [00:47:22] Yes. And then there’s all this nonsense that people talk about, a marketing led business or a sales led business or a customer centric business. But I think that’s typically junk because typically businesses are led by the leaders of the business and they’re led by their egos, and they just want to do what they want to do. So it’s I’ve experienced it quite often where people aren’t interested in the data unless the data supports what they want to think. Does that make sense? You know, if the data is. [00:47:54][31.2]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:47:54] Nothing, if it’s not you or you’re wrong. [00:47:55][1.4]

Martin Henley: [00:47:56] Yes. Yes. [00:48:00][3.1]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:48:00] But I think there cannot be any ego in business. You need to be rational about what’s working and what’s not working. And, you know, fixing the stuff that is not working and investing more in the things that have a clear sign that it’s working. [00:48:15][14.2]

Martin Henley: [00:48:16] Yeah. I mean, I 100% agree with you, but I think 90% of businesses are ego driven. You know, it’s like it’s what the boss wants and the boss and the data. But a better confirmed that what the boss wants is right. You know, I mean, I think that goes on. But your 100% right is it should be just about removing all resistance, you know, whatever. Like let’s not make it difficult for the customer at all to buy. Let’s not make it difficult for them to learn about the product. Let’s not make it difficult for them to use the product, or it should be about removing resistance at every stage. But I think this issue of ego is prevails. You know, it’s what the bosses this is what happens too much of the time. And businesses that are data driven have to be more successful. You know, because you’re right at that point in time. Yes. Good. So give us a sense, then, of the kind of work that you’ve done with customers. You don’t have to name who they are. You don’t have to talk about anything strategic or secret. But give us a sense of what this could be achieving for a SAS company or some success that you’ve had with SAS companies. [00:49:28][72.0]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:49:29] Yeah, I’ll try to make it fast as we’re running out of time here, but no worries. So typically we see our customers, you know, lowering their customer acquisition costs with around 50% because they get a like a new transparency into what’s working and what’s not working today. They can shift the money that used to go down to training things that wasn’t working into things that is repeatedly present when they sell. So they become more effective with how they spend their money. And, you know, that goes for their ads, their content, even the status. People are less blind when they sit and do HTML calls with their customers. [00:50:14][45.0]

Martin Henley: [00:50:15] Yeah, and that doesn’t surprise me at all because my experience of like once you look at well, once you tell people what their cost of customer acquisition is and they pick themselves up off the floor and are able to have a conversation again, like there is so much waste in this that is really not difficult to to make things much more efficient. [00:50:32][17.1]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:50:33] It actually surprises it it surprises me how few businesses has actually thought about what they’re willing to pay for a new customer. [00:50:41][8.4]

Martin Henley: [00:50:42] Yes. [00:50:42][0.0]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:50:43] Like even the ones that comes to us have not thought this through. What is what is a positive result for us is that are spending €10,000 acquiring a new customer. Is it 5000? Is it 20,000? And if you’re not really consciously decided upon this, then you’re just operating randomly. [00:51:01][18.0]

Martin Henley: [00:51:02] Yes. You percent up. And the thing is, if you like if you it amazes me how many people haven’t actually factored this cost. They think that there is no cost to acquiring customers. So if their cost of customer acquisition is 30% and they’re selling on a 20% margin, they are losing 10% every time they find a customer. And this goes on in the world and is a lot of the reason why businesses fail. Okay, cool. How much time do we have left? [00:51:30][27.2]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:51:31] Not a lot. [00:51:31][0.4]

Martin Henley: [00:51:33] Okay. So we’ve got three questions remaining. Let’s run the super short because I want to put it on tick tock. So in less than a minute,. [00:51:39][6.4]

[00:51:41] What is your recommendation for people who want to get better at business? The business attribution. [00:51:45][4.9]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:51:48] My recommendation for this is really that people start recognizing that there is such a thing as an account based journey, meaning that we’re not in a B2C space. We are talking about plus six months by our journey, plus three people involved in the journey, a lot of touches. And that means that all the platforms that they use, their Google Analytics are not able to understand this complexity. So they’re bound to make long decisions if that’s the only thing that they have available. [00:52:17][28.7]

Martin Henley: [00:52:18] Okay. And what they should do is visit dream data. [00:52:21][3.1]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:52:22] I know that’s one approach, but I would say just recognize that in a B2B transaction, people are buying as a team and think about what does complexity mean for your activities. [00:52:31][9.6]

Martin Henley: [00:52:33] Yeah. And wake up to the fact it’s costing you actual money and time and energy to win customers and you can manage that to be more profitable. Drive a nicer car, have nicer holidays, live in a nicer house, have a nicer retirement. That’s what that’s my what, my happy life. Yeah. Okay. Question number four. [00:52:50][17.8]

[00:52:51] What should people read or what content should they be consuming? [00:52:54][3.0]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:52:57] I just want to like our our own block. Undreamed added that I, we, we put out you know, 1 to 2 pieces a week on this topic trying to make B2B go to market more efficient and trying to explain people how, how does this work and how to think about data so that that’s one I sell myself. I publish stuff on LinkedIn maybe four, four or five times a week about the same topic. So people are welcome to connect and ask any questions that they they might sit with. [00:53:28][31.8]

Martin Henley: [00:53:29] Okay, super cool. Is there a book that changed your life or your business life? [00:53:33][3.4]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:53:34] A book that changed my life. So I would say Trips by Seth Godin. [00:53:40][5.8]

Martin Henley: [00:53:41] Yeah. [00:53:41][0.0]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:53:42] I think that’s a brilliant book to think about in marketing because he basically describes the fact to think about if you think about a tribe as like, for example, surfers. That’s a very, very small community out of everybody in the whole world. So that means that there’s if you think about surfers as the tribe, that there’s surf spots. There’s surf magazines. There’s surfers who are influencers. Maybe a few competitions, a few magazines, etc.. So if you’re just present at those few places where the surface look, then you’re on a, you know, on a smaller budget and then a budget for the whole world. Then you can actually look very, very present in that small community. So Tribes is the name of the book by Seth Godin. [00:54:26][44.6]

Martin Henley: [00:54:28] Brilliant. Cool. Thank you very much. [00:54:30][1.9]

[00:54:30] Okay, question number five. You need to throw a couple of people under the bus. You need to introduce me to a couple of people who might be interested or at least endure to have a conversation like this with me. Who have you got in mind? [00:54:41][11.5]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:54:43] I would say my good friend Emilia Christensen, who is the CMO at Trip.com now? They just got out. He co-founded a company called Sleek Now that then got acquired by trip. And he’s, you know, one of the best CMO that I know of. So I think you will enjoy a good conversation with him. [00:55:01][18.0]

Martin Henley: [00:55:02] Fantastic. Is there somebody else? One more. [00:55:04][1.9]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:55:06] Oh. Who else? Um, no, I’ll just leave it at that. [00:55:10][4.3]

Martin Henley: [00:55:11] Okay. Supergirl, if you could put together, like, a link to an introduction, then I’ll pick up the. [00:55:15][4.5]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:55:15] Bible and. [00:55:16][0.4]

Martin Henley: [00:55:16] I will run from there. Okay, good. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, man. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. What we’ll do now is will say goodbye. And then for the purpose, for the benefit of anyone who’s still listening. Then I’ll press stop and then we’ll say goodbye like normal human beings. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I think this is probably the most important thing in marketing, is knowing how you’re spending your money and what value it’s actually delivering for you. And I think it goes contrary to I think what people don’t realize is we’re actually dancing with these huge monolithic platforms Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and they are expert at extracting money from our businesses. And if we don’t become expert at knowing that we’re getting value from that, then you can very easily go out of business. So I think this idea of attribution is probably if you’re going to do marketing, you have to do attribution because people will rob you of your resources entirely and leave you out of business and they won’t even care. And if you don’t care to do that, then maybe you deserve for that to happen. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and it’s been really cool. If you can introduce me to a male, that would be amazing. [00:56:33][76.4]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:56:34] I’ll do that for sure. [00:56:34][0.7]

Martin Henley: [00:56:35] I will let you run brokers. I’m sensing there’s something urgent that you need to do. [00:56:38][3.2]

Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:56:40] Is thank you so much for today. You might need to stay up while it uploads or anything like that. [00:56:45][4.6]

Martin Henley: [00:56:45] No. [00:56:45][0.0]

[3195.5]

WHAT DO YOU THINK?