B2B Marketing Playbooks, Trashing Lead Gen, and Cracking The Code | Edward Ford @ Supermetrics

Episode Description

On today's episode I got to join Edward Ford on The Growth Hub Podcast. This episode is lifting the lid on where the marketing playbook is going. I share my thoughts on how B2B SaaS companies should be gearing up for the future, we talk about the old playbook, the dark funnel, getting buy in, and measuring success. Dive in! I'll see ya on the other side. ✌️

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Show Notes

Obviously Awesome by April Dunford: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45166937-obviously-awesome

Advance B2B: https://www.advanceb2b.com

Follow The Growth Hub on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/SaaSGrowthHub

Follow Edward on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/NordicEdward

Follow Edward on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fordedward/

Follow Kaylee: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaylee-edmondson/

Learn more about Chili Piper: https://www.chilipiper.com/

About Demand Gen Chat

Demand Gen Chat is a Chili Piper podcast hosted by Kaylee Edmondson. Join us as we sit down with leaders in marketing to discover the key to driving B2B revenue. If you want benchmarks or insights on trends in the market, this podcast is for you!

Episode Transcript

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Demand Gen Chat. I'm your host, Kaylee Edmondson. And on today's episode, we are actually sharing with you guys an interview that I had the opportunity to have with Edward Ford, um, on his podcast, The Growth Hub Podcast.

So it is a podcast by a growth marketing agency called Advance B2B. We get into a little bit of everything demand gen. Um, it's super interesting conversation. Edward himself is a demand gen marketer as well, so we have a healthy back and forth debate on a couple of hot topics that are trending in the space right now and just really get into the weeds on what I foresee the future of demand gen looking like.

So go ahead, hop in, join us. Um, also feel free to go and follow Edward on LinkedIn. He is always serving us really relevant hot takes, um, great polls, good discussion all the way around. And then of course, um, Advance B2B hosts the Growth Hub Podcast, so go and find them on LinkedIn as well.

Edward, thank you so much for interviewing me and allowing me to come on the show. Hope you guys enjoy it. I'll see you on the other side.

We're really excited to have you on the show. It's going to be a great episode, as we're discussing the future of demand gen and essentially where the B2B SaaS marketing playbook is going.

But I think before we get into that, the term demand gen itself can be a little confusing, since-

[laughs]

... I guess the point of all marketing is to generate demand at the end of the day.

[laughs]

So to kick things off, what is demand gen, in your opinion, and where does it sit in the marketing funnel?

Yeah. No. I think you have a great point. Um, I, too, I feel like I always ask other demand gen marketers, like, "What exactly does your day to day look like?" Because it's kind of different depending on the size of the company or their, like, personal background or skillset, et cetera, because as you said, yes, like, technically, all marketers should be driving demand. Um, and I think honestly, that's going to become more common in the future, is that demand gen is synonymous with marketing.

Um, but as to, like, where it sits in the funnel, honestly, yes, like, it should be your entire funnel. Um, the evolution of demand gen to me is quite interesting, because really, it's derived from a digital marketing title.

So you know, five, seven, 10 years ago even, digital marketing titles were starting to really evolve. And then performance titles kind of started to come after that. And now, it's this era of, like, growth/demand gen.

And so I think that's why demand gen is almost always equivalent or perceived as paid marketing. But really, it shouldn't just encompass paid. It should be everything that your business is doing to leverage demand, whether it's creating, converting, capturing, any of the things in between.

And so for those reasons, like, where I see demand gen fitting in a marketing funnel is really quite holistic. So top of funnel activities, middle of funnel activities where you're actually, like, getting to know people one-on-one. You've captured who they are. They're in your CRM or your marketing automation platform, et cetera. But also even on the other side of the funnel when it gets to customer marketing and retention and engagement campaigns. Like, demand gen should own all of those technically, like, acquisition activities.

Yeah. That's great. And I think the discipline of demand gen is, it's more established in the United States, especially compared to Europe, where it's a relatively new term, and people don't hear it perhaps as much as they would in the States. So I think it's great to hear that.

And I think the other thing you mentioned, that people can think about performance marketing and paid marketing when they hear the term demand gen, but people might also think about lead gen or things like gated eBooks or drip campaigns. So kind of looking backwards, what are some of the issues with the old demand gen playbook?

Yeah. Right? I think it's like the natural progression of evolution. And, you know, we marketers tend to overdo things. So, you know, when the ability to gate content and capture leads as a means of essentially capturing intent and better personalizing nurtures up front sounds like a great process. Right? It seems like, oh, okay, let me, let me capture who you are and what you're interested in so that I'm not spamming you with all of these emails about random things you don't care about.

However, push comes to shove, marketers just in general, myself probably included years ago, have overused that ability and just still blasted people with kind of irrelevant emails based on any type of intent data or personal information we could capture for them. And so, yeah, digital marketing was very much, like, immediately classified as, like, a lead gen activity.

Um, and then we, like, shot ourselves in the foot. And now, here we are, like, needing very badly to innovate and move forward and stand out amongst this crowd of people who are, you know, um, bait and switching you to get your personal information. While now, we're in a world where if somebody really wants to find your email, they can. Like, it's out there. Um, it's not hard to, like, identify people on a personal level.

But what's more impactful is now moving away from this very traditional lead gen model into a model where you're operating in a dark funnel. We can, like, get to that, too. But you're operating in a dark funnel, and ultimately, people enter a known part of your funnel when they've self identified, preferably raising their hand to request a demo.

Um, and that's going to be, like, if you look at conversion metrics for people that are converting to close one pipeline or close one revenue, through downloading a gated ebook or attending, or not even attending half the time, like, registering for a webinar, those conversion rates, like, if you're seeing anything above 5% for that, like, wow. You're probably, like, really killing the game in terms of averages.

Whereas if you do focus on doing good marketing, stop gating everything that you've got, give your content away for free, and really educate the market on who you are, what makes your company different from all of your competitors, because obviously, in the game of tech, it's all about feature wars.

So whatever feature you've got, so does your neighbor. So why should people care about your brand? You should spend that effort educating them, and then they will come to you and raise their hand. Conversion rates will be substantially higher for the same amount of work, just delivered in a much more efficient way.

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think going from here, let's then talk about the future of demand gen, where we go. And you said the future of demand gen is dark, more specifically, the dark funnel, as you just said there in your previous answer. So let's dig into this. What is the dark funnel?

Yeah. So I think, too, like, in, in, just in terms of mar tech, right, obviously tons of mar tech vendors have come out with attribution, for whatever it's worth. And everybody, like, loves to talk about the soap box of attribution, because I feel like, um, it's a code that no one can quite crack perfectly. And I think that's just it. Right?

Like, no matter what your attribution tech stack looks like, it's always going to be, like, triangulated data. Right? You need to look at the data in multiple ways to tell where people are really engaging with you, how they're learning about your brand, et cetera.

And I think moving into this notion of dark funnel is really going to... I think we're moving this way for several reasons. Right? So, um, in the last year and a half where people have had to live their lives differently, they've been forced to be at home. Communities online are becoming a huge place where people are going and learning and operating and educating each other.

Um, it's a, it's a dark, right, it's a dark place. Like, people aren't going to b- if somebody comes to your website from a Slack community, you will never know. Right? You're not going to know that's where they came from.

But when you hear about impactful stories, like, it's almost always word of mouth. People are willing and able to buy products based on whatever their friend texted them, recommended to them, Slacked them, LinkedIn DMed them, whatever. Those are all areas of dark funnel, um, where people are actively engaging, communicating, having conversations, learning about new products.

And you as the marketer, uh, or the business person, the salesperson on the other end, will never know that that's where it came from, unless I guess you're just, like, a company that's sharing blogs or something with a million UTM parameters on the back, in every Slack community that's out there. Man, but even still [laughs] that can get pretty dicey, and I don't know if people will continue to engage with that. Right?

So that's, like, the dark funnel, and that's where people are moving to operate. Um, the crowd of tech is massive and getting more massive every day. Right? There are, whatever, 10,000 just, like, mar tech vendors alone out there.

Um, and so in order to stand out above the crowd, it's like, like what I said in my other answer, too, is just prioritizing better marketing and educating the market. And you need to educate them where they are.

And unfortunately for, like, performance marketers who are very obsessed with attribution, um, they're in dark places, and you're just not going to be able to track it. But, like, that's where you're going to have to convince yourself to be, your team to be, your leadership to be, if you want to be a player, like, in today's market.

Yeah. I love it. So what does the dark funnel mean in terms of the demand gen playbook B2B SaaS marketing teams should be running?

Yeah. Just, like, maybe I could just talk a little bit about our own playbook and, like, kind of where we're running and seeing success. So, um, I guess it was, like, this time last year or maybe even a little bit earlier, um, we really saw this shift. Oh, excuse my dog in the background.

Um, we [laughs] really saw this shift moving towards, um, communities. And so we actually hired a dedicated in house person to help us be represented across communities, um, because we understand that that's where a huge percentage of our person is hanging out these days.

Um, there are hundreds of them out there, and so of course, dependent upon who you're marketing to and what your buyer is, um, I'm sure that's applicable for nearly everyone, that everybody is starting to have some kind of community, whether it's on Slack, LinkedIn, Facebook even.

Like, go and be involved like an active contributor, not just, like, you know, um, I'm not saying that you need to have a presence in terms of, like, a news ticker feed, like, every time you publish a blog just, like, share the link. Not that.

Um, like, go and be an active, like, member in your community. Provide feedback, learnings. Educate others, um, not only on, like, what you're doing that's working, but maybe some things that are not working. And just, like, humanize yourself, which will then in turn humanize your brand.

So we've been doing that for a little over a year now, and it's like, we've seen success, but again, we have no UTM parameters that say we've seen success. Um, what we actually do is once, um, a demo request becomes an opportunity, the first question that our sales team asks them is like, "How did you hear about us?" Like, literally going back to the basics, which I feel like is very common in B2C, um, even very common in D2C, but not very common in B2B for some reason.

So, um, I n- also know a lot of people are just bold enough to just put it right there on the form, open text field, "How did you hear about us?" Because a dropdown will bias, obviously, the answers. Um, but, yeah. Open text field, "How did you hear about us?"

And people will most often tell you the thing that's most impactful to them. Maybe it's not the first place they heard about you. Maybe it's not the last place, but it's the thing in their own discovery journey that stood out the most, which is, like, going back to this, what I said earlier about, like, triangulating the data.

It's like, okay, you've got some type of native attribution, whether you're using HubSpot or Visible or Looker or whatever it is you're using. That's probably, like, first touch, last touch attribution. Cool. That's helpful, kind of. Uh, but it's almost always going to say, like, direct organic, so maybe not super helpful.

Um, then you have these other touchpoints as well that are a little bit more qualitative, um, in terms of, like, hey, how did you hear about us? And they're like, "Oh, hey, we heard about you on the podcast." Cool. That'll never come up in HubSpot tracking. Right? But it tells us that we need to, like, continue to do more podcast episodes or better distribution of the podcast episodes, um, because that's a type of content that's resonating with people.

So, um, back to, like, activities that we're doing in our playbook, obviously we're huge on communities. Slack, Facebook communities, LinkedIn communities. Um, we've really prioritized organic LinkedIn. We found out that's where our people hang out, is on LinkedIn, um, so we've grown our follower base there a massive amount since I first started, just by prioritizing engaging with other people's content and providing valuable, um, like, valuable reactions to what they're saying and trends that we're seeing in market.

Um, obviously, we started a podcast this year. We started in April. Um, we've produced, I think, 12 episodes to date. Um, and our, you know, listener rate is growing r- substantially well. And honestly, we're not, we don't have any kind of tracking set up for that. Right?

There's nothing that says they listened to an episode and requested a demo. Um, but there are people that self report that they heard about us through the podcast, so that's great, and that's how we figure out, you know, like, qualitative data.

DMs. Honestly, I get a ton of LinkedIn DMs about the episodes or content that we're covering, questions they want to know more about. So that's great.

Um, and then events. But when I say events, I don't mean, like, hey, let's go spend six figures on a 10 by 10 booth. Um, I mean, hey, let's host a dinner in cities where we know that we have existing customers but also, um, great prospects that we'd love to sit down with, like, on a micro scale and have a meaningful, like, round table conversation with, um, in multiple cities. Like, we started with the US, but soon we'll expand to EMEA cities as well.

I think those are, like, three to four main activities. Of course, we're doing other things, too, but, um, those are primarily our dark funnel activities that seem to really be moving the needle for us.

Yeah. That's awesome to hear. And I'd love to know, how do those answers that people leave on their demo request forms match up and compare to your attribution data?

They don't.

[laughs]

They don't at all. Right? So we're not brave enough to put it on the form quite yet, because I just really want to test things before we roll it out. Um, obviously, we are a company that's really centered around optimizing conversions, so who would I be if I just added extra forms and didn't test it? So, or extra fields and didn't test it.

So, um, that part of it's still in testing. We want to move it to, like, a little bit earlier in the funnel so that we can take more work off of our account executives, just so they can, like, hop into their job and not be doing, like, our homework for us. But for now, it's at least asked when the opportunity is created, when the AE gets on that demo.

So, um, no. It doesn't match up at all. Like, 60%-ish, on average, of our data is sourced either direct or organic. But w- [laughs] when an account executive gets on and asks, like, "Hey, how did you hear about us?" Obviously, they never report, "Oh, I just did a random Google search and found you guys." Never. Like, that's not the thing.

Um, so, yeah. They, like, "Oh, we heard about you on this specific community," which is obviously super helpful for us to know exactly where it came from. Others aren't as direct, like, "Oh, we heard about you through an event." And it's like, "Oh, which event?" Ah, I'm not really sure, but it was definitely an event. Right?

So, but at least you get, like, a general sense of, like, where people are hearing about us or what marketing activity was super impactful for them. And that's just what's top of mind. But it's never direct or organic, and that's basically all HubSpot tells us. [laughs]

Yeah. Absolutely. I think a lot of people could relate to that. So you're actively taking part in communities, educating people in places that are hard to measure, launching a podcast, and a lot of other things, as you just said, organizing dinners in different cities.

But getting approval for this approach may be difficult, especially if you have a, a CEO who, quote, "Doesn't get marketing." So how can you, as a marketing team and as a marketer, get buy in for this playbook from senior leadership in your company?

Sure. So I think we're unique in a few ways. One, this didn't exactly apply to us, because thankfully, our CEO got it. Um, we've not, I mean, not that we went to him. I would love to say we were forward thinking enough to have gone to him last January and been like, "Dark funnel. Here it is."

But in reality, no. We've been, like, picking up pieces as we go along, um, and just learning, right, learning as we go. We're also a fairly young, um, marketing team here to Chili Piper. So, like, we're just figuring it out as we go.

So it's not like we went to him with one thorough plan and we're just like, "This is it." Um, but along the way, as we pitched him new ideas that have now become our plan, he's been great the whole way, which is cool. Um, so we didn't quite have this issue.

However, I do understand that this is probably quite terrifying, not only for CEOs, but also specifically for CFOs who really want that, like, direct ROI. So when they're going in and building your growth model for the year, um, or your business plan or whatever you call it, that they can say, "Oh, okay. We're going to give marketing $2 million, and they're going to give us back six." Or whatever your ratio is. Right?

Um, so it's going to be probably even harder for a CFO if they aren't, like, completely on board. Thankfully, our CEO was completely on board. So honestly for us, I think it's all in the, it's in the data, though. Right?

Like, even still, if you go to your CEO and you've added a form that's like, "How did you hear about us?" We added a question on your field, um, "How did you hear about us?" And everybody is like, "Oh, we heard about you at an event, or we heard about you, um, you know, o- on a webinar," or whatever it is that you're already doing.

And none of your data in your HubSpot or Visible or whatever you're using for tracking is saying that. Oh, okay. Well, like, how can you kind of extrapolate some of those learnings to build a case?

Um, so something that's maybe unique to Chili Piper is that we, obviously we're fully remote and always have been. Um, we're in, I think, like, 29 countries or something now. So we're also across so many different time zones that when we need to make big decisions, we make them in what we call a decision memo, where you just, like, lay out the context. It's always data backed, so you have to have data. It's not an opinion or, like, a feelings game.

Um, and you just kind of set out the roadmap for, like, okay, here's the context for why I'm writing this. Here's a decision that we need to make collectively, right, because we don't make major decisions in a bubble, either. And just lay it out.

So, like, we've had several decision memos that we've written as a marketing team being presented to our senior leadership team about these changes that we want to make in our marketing mix, that have now accumulated to kind of where we're at now. Um, and obviously, for each piece, it's a little bit different.

So, like, when I went to, um, Nicolas, our CEO, for, hey, I really want to start a podcast, he was like, "Okay. Cool. Write a decision memo. Let me know how it goes." Um, and the decision memo was really just like, "Hey, look. We're obviously, like, demand gen is a huge, uh, buyer of our product. Like, what are we actually doing to give back to this community?" At the time, kind of nothing.

Um, obviously as a demand gen marketer, I'm, like, constantly seeking advice from others, feedback from others. I always want to know, like, what's your playbook look like? What's working? What's, like, totally failing?

Um, and that was the prem. Right? It was just like, "Hey, I want to start a podcast to talk to o-" Primarily me. I was the only demand gen marketer here at the time, in a bubble. I want to learn from others. I want the opportunity to talk to others, figure out what's working, figure out what's, like, an absolute flop, waste of time, don't do it, and why, because I think it's just fascinating to learn at scale. And then, well, duh. We should just record it and give it back to the community.

And so anyways, we circulated some data on how many people in the market could potentially listen to something like this, how demand gen marketers prefer to learn. We did a survey. Tons of them love podcasts. Okay. Cool. Let's start a podcast. Right?

So I think it's, like, situational, but, um, for us, decision memos really work well. So maybe that's something that others could take back as well, just to put it in written format and, um, basically put together a small pitch to leadership to try and convince them that, like, this is the future.

Yeah. I think that's really good advice, and I think the way you did it by doing one step at a time rather than just completely shifting and changing the entire marketing playbook at once, it, it's going to be much easier to-

Yeah.

... [crosstalk 00:20:10] that way.

Yeah. And I think, right, there's, like, definitely that saying of, like, ripping off the Band-Aid. But, like, ugh. Like, in this case, if you went to your CFO and you wanted to rip off the Band-Aid, yeah, that might not go over so well.

But if you almost, like, ease into it, like, keep your existing playbook. Right? If you're doing a full lead gen model, cool. Keep doing lead gen. Keep some things gated so that it doesn't just, like, completely shift overnight, because I will say that when you completely adopt this new way of marketing, like, yeah, naturally, like, your MQLs will go down.

But it doesn't really matter, because your MQLs are just, like, a falsely inflated metric anyways, um, because again, that conversion rate for people that are, like, downloading an ebook is probably less than 5%.

Yeah. Absolutely. And you spoke there about MQLs, and I know that has been a hot topic of debate within demand gen recently. So I'd love to know, what are you gold on? So essentially, what does success look like for Chili Piper's demand gen team?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, because we're a meetings company, I think we've made up this terminology ourselves. But, um, we [laughs] we call it QHMs, which stands for qualified held meeting. Anybody else in SaaS probably just considers it an SQO, a sales qualified op.

So for us, it means, uh, uh, obviously, we use our own product, um, naturally, to book meetings. So we skip, um, we auto qualify upon form submit and route directly to the respective account executive based on ownership cues, round robins, even distribution of weighting, vacation time, all that stuff. Right?

Um, but it automatically books the demo on the account executive's calendar, so we kind of skip that step of qualifying with an SDR. And that would traditionally be, I think, where most marketers stop is, like, cool. Meeting is set on AE's calendar. Like, check. We've done our job.

But for us, we actually want to take it one step further into the pipeline and just make sure that once that account executive gets on the call, conducts the demo, that there's no other, like, lingering random misqualifications that have happened to where it's like they don't have budget, they're not really in buying mode, um, it's going to be, like, a legal thing or a security thing, et cetera, et cetera. Right?

So, like, we want to make sure all those boxes are checked, too, and it's actually a viable buyer, and they are actively in buying mode. So for us, we call it a QHM. Pretty sure the rest of the industry is going to consider that an SQO, but that's what not only, um, demand gen but all of marketing at Chili Piper is, um, gold on.

Okay. That's good. That was going to be my next followup question, so good that you answered that already.

[laughs]

Um, and you spoke about your current playbook, what you're doing now, the things that are really working for you. But I'd love to hear, are there any other ideas that you're thinking about trying as part of your future plan, say, for next year?

Sure. Yeah. So, like, outside of that, obviously, still, we're doing, like, pretty heavy spending on Google ads. Right? I feel like at this point, that's, like, table stakes, but just to throw it out there in case anybody's not doing Google ads. You should.

Um, and when I say Google ads, I mean obviously, like, don't be bidding on words and linking to a gated ebook. Um, for us, it's really just, like, bottom of funnel buying intent words, so things around software tools, obviously anything that's, like, within our wheelhouse of what platform we consider ourselves. Um, those are the types of keywords that we're bidding on, and then branded terms too, which again, table stakes.

Um, social advertising is, uh, a decent percentage of our media budget, um, primarily on Facebook and LinkedIn. In the next year, especially, like, as we're starting to do Q1 planning for 2022, um, we've done a couple of pilot tests for, uh... Excuse me.

We've done a couple of pilot tests for, um, podcast advertising as well as newsletter advertising, so email newsletters, um, because again, it's a huge place where people hang out. So people are listening to podcasts, yes, but we don't want to bank on the fact that they're only listening to ours, because we know good and well they're listening to others as well.

So, um, yeah. Podcast advertising, I think, is going to be pretty big for us. We've done a few pilots and feel pretty good about it. Um, and then newsletter advertising as well. So there are tons of communities that not only take place on social, on Slack, but also in email form. So if our readers are there, then we need to be there, too.

Yeah. That's really good to hear, and also get an understanding of how the paid piece fits into the wider demand gen activities on, on the organic side. So great to hear. So think about all of this, everything we've discussed, dark funnel, the future, rethinking how we approach marketing. What skills, then, do you think demand gen marketers should be investing in so that they're ready to operate in a dark funnel world?

Oh. Okay. So core things that I think, like, I wish I would've known sooner. Um, product marketing, first and foremost. Um, I think this in, like, in my career in B2B tech, which I feel like somehow I fell into B2B tech, specifically in demand gen, pretty early on. I've never really had that much exposure to product marketing as much as I've had here. Critical.

So, like, if you can find a product marketing buddy, if you can work closer with your product marketer at the gig you're working at now, would highly recommend.

Um, understanding the market, understanding your persona better than anybody else. I feel like it's oddly common in B2B SaaS companies, at least I can speak for myself and the ones I've worked in, um, it's oddly common that the only person on your marketing team that's talking to your customers regularly is product marketing.

But, why? [laughs] Right? That seems a little bit odd and disconnected, so, um, yeah. Make friends with your product marketer. Like, you should understand product marketing just as well as they do, um, because they aren't in all of these platforms adjusting targeting and audience parameters like you are every day. So that would be critical for success, in my book.

Um, and then marketing ops. Right? Underst- Like, if your job as a demand gen marketer is to create and capture all this demand, conversion is super important. Understanding that once you're getting these people to your website, obviously, CRO sometimes falls underneath demand gen anyways, but sometimes it doesn't.

So making sure that you're capturing and converting as many people as humanly possible, not only to get them into your marketing automation platform, but also getting them appropriately routed over to your sales team so that they can, like, continue that, um, customer journey, uh, in a pretty seamless scenario.

Um, so, yeah. Product marketing. Marketing ops. I think those are the two, like, core areas I would recommend, outside of the obvious, like digital marketing.

Super good. We could've probably spoken all day or all evening, as it is here in Finland, on this, but we could move onto our closing questions and our fast five challenge so-

[crosstalk 00:27:00].

... to wrap things up, I will ask five questions, and all you need to do is answer as quickly as possible. So Kaylee, are you ready?

Game on. Let's go. [laughs]

Let's do it. All right. First question. What is the one book you'd recommend others to read?

Oh. I read this book, and I feel like I probably read it three times. Um, Obviously Awesome. Uh, April Dunford is the author. Incredible book. And it also speaks to my last point about product marketing and its importance, so highly recommend.

Yes. Absolutely. Second question. SaaS you love and why.

Ah. Easy. Gong. It's got to be Gong. Right? Um, why? They're just killing the game. Right? Like, they were killing the game of organic LinkedIn, like, way before it was popular. Um, if you could go steal one page out of their playbook, go and follow them on LinkedIn. Um, their head of content is a guy named Devin Reed. Brilliant human.

Yeah. Plus one for Gong, and they just launched their own merch store as well. There's a lot of cool things happening there. So, yeah. There's a huge amount you can learn from Gong, so I'll second that.

Third question. Favorite place to learn about marketing online.

Oh, obviously, uh, DGMG is great. Right? So Dave Gerhardt started his own community. It's called DGMG. It's filled with really, really, really brilliant humans that you could stand to learn from.

Um, outside of that, I've had a lot of success and good learnings from this Slack community in the last two years. It's called Demand Curve. Um, they keep, like, rules and regulations pretty tight, so there's, like, no advertising, no business, no selling, um, just really learning good playbook info from other marketers who are, like, struggling with the same challenges that you are.

[inaudible 00:28:39] growth metric.

Uh, QHM's pipeline. Right? If you're generating a bunch of MQLs but it's not turning to pipe, you're wasting your time.

Yes. Awesome. And fifth and final question. Best piece of advice for fellow marketers.

Ah, I think it's getting in the weeds early. Right? So somehow, early in my career, I lucked up in this gig where I was, like, a glorified assistant but was a coordinator for a marketing team and could get my hands in a little bit of PR, a little bit of digital, a little bit of product marketing, like, a little bit of event marketing, and figure out, like, oh, okay, well, I'm terrible at these things. Like, cool. Didn't want to do that. I, like, don't have the skillset for this. Cool. Like, I can't be a creative director. Awesome. [laughs]

I narrowed my pool pretty quickly to, like, digital marketing or demand gen. Um, but I think, like, rolling up your sleeves and getting in early to every area of marketing is just, like, critical for understanding how things work and then how they need to work at scale.

Yeah. I think that's super good advice for all those early on in their career, to try out different areas, see what you like, see what you're good at, and take it from there.

So, awesome. Well, Kaylee, I have to say, this was a real pleasure, and thank you so much for coming on the Growth Hub Podcast.

All right, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for that episode. Again, if you don't already follow Edward on LinkedIn, please go do so. Brilliant content all the time. Um, he also just became a new dad, so maybe expect some content on that front as well. Um, but, yeah. Uh, Edward Ford, LinkedIn.

And then, uh, Advance B2B's Growth Hub Podcast as well has so many great episodes. Their end of the year lineup, I think, is, um, my episode, Chris Walker is joining, and a few other, uh, demand gen leaders as well, so spicy content yet to come. See you [inaudible 00:30:22]. Bye