Why Working Cross-Functionally is Crucial in 'Squeeze Times'

Collaborate Closely with CFOs

Amber highlighted the critical importance of establishing a strong partnership with the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of your organization.

During times of budget constraints, marketers need to prove their value and demonstrate the impact of their initiatives.

By working closely with CFOs, marketers gain valuable insights into financial priorities and align their strategies accordingly.

This collaboration enables a deeper understanding of the business's financial landscape, leading to more effective decision-making and resource allocation.

Embrace Data-Driven Marketing

Amber emphasizes the significance of analytics and data-driven decision-making in modern marketing.

As the backbone of an organization, operations play a crucial role in providing insights to answer data-driven questions.

However, it is equally vital to strike a balance between leveraging data and allowing room for creative thinking.

By asking the right questions and constantly evaluating actions, marketers can maximize the value of analytics while fostering innovation and flexibility within their teams.

Focus on Continuous Evaluation and Adaptation

Amidst periods of growth and limited resources, it is easy to overlook the importance of evaluation.

Amber stresses that consistent evaluation of actions and decisions is vital to ensure ongoing success.

Even during times of growth, it is essential to critically assess strategies, measure outcomes, and learn from both successes and failures.

By fostering a culture of continuous evaluation and adaptation, marketers can fine-tune their approaches, optimize performance, and remain agile in a rapidly changing market.

Wrap up

Amber Bogie's insights offer valuable lessons for B2B marketers facing budget and resource constraints.

By forging close collaborations with CFOs, embracing data-driven marketing while balancing creativity, and prioritizing continuous evaluation, marketers can navigate challenges effectively and drive meaningful results.

Embracing these lessons positions marketers to excel in their roles, prove their value to the business, and contribute to long-term success in an ever-evolving marketing landscape.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Tara Robertson: Welcome back to Demand Gen Chat. I'm your host, Tara Robertson, head of Demand Gen at Chili Piper. In this episode, I'm joined by Amber Bogie, director of Global Demand Generation at Reachdesk. Amber and I spoke about how a lot of us B2B marketers have a lot of experience in times of growth, but not so much what she's calling these new squeeze times and how we can work cross-functionally to make the most out of these times when budgets and head count.

[00:00:23] Tara Robertson: Or probably less than we would like. We also get into the direct mail trends that she's seeing at Reach desk and the outbound play that gets her sales team. 50% conversions to opportunity. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Amber. Amber, welcome to Demand and Chat. I'm so excited to have you on today.

[00:00:40] Amber Bogie: Hi. I'm very excited to be here.

[00:00:42] Tara Robertson: Yeah, super exciting to have someone from Reach desk. We've been working closely with your team on a couple different things, but I'd love to start with just something. Find and out there. What's your marketing hot take to share with our audience?

[00:00:54] Amber Bogie: Hi, Laura. Okay. Well, this one I feel like, I guess my hot take right now is that I'd love to look for silver linings in difficult situations, and I think all of us are feeling a little bit of struggle and pressure and everything going on with our circumstances.

[00:01:13] Amber Bogie: I'd have to say that like my hot take is that. This experience is making us really, really better at our jobs. It, it's making us better marketers. And I'm seeing that in the sense that, you know, we're all talking a lot about alignment with the exact team and conversations with C F O and investing in that relationship.

[00:01:35] Amber Bogie: And what I'm feeling is we're doing a better job because we have to, but we should always be doing this job. Hmm.

[00:01:45] Tara Robertson: So not just when times are tough, but we should be working with our CFOs all the time. We should, yeah. And, and

[00:01:50] Amber Bogie: aligned with the entire exec team. Um, you know, so I saw a post the other day on LinkedIn about, um, growth times versus like times like this, which I'm calling Squeeze Growth or Squeeze, and it's kind of, it was kind of around, um, how, you know, during periods of growth for, for a long startup especially, it's kind of like, all right, we have more funding, like run with IT, marketing, go play.

[00:02:13] Amber Bogie: And, you know, I can't speak to everyone, every company, but a lot of these times there's a lot less questions being asked, a lot less scrutiny and evaluation. And I think that we, it's easy to take advantage of that, but in reality, like during this squeeze time, like we're having really tough conversations with the finance team, with, you know, our co-founders with, you know, um, you know, various parts of the organization and.

[00:02:42] Amber Bogie: Sometimes we don't have those answers cuz we weren't asked to produce that before. Mm-hmm. And I'm really enjoying that kind of like, becoming a status quo for what it feels like me. And for me, I'm like, I'm a big like component of like analytics and always keeping an eye on, you know, on the pulse of things.

[00:03:04] Amber Bogie: Um, and I feel like it's, you know, because of this scrutiny, it's forcing us to have to do that, but I'm like, this is how it should always be. That's just my happy. Yeah. I

[00:03:15] Tara Robertson: think a lot of demand gen marketers listening would be nodding along with that. I think what I'm curious about is when you're leading a team that isn't all demand gen marketers, how do you work with people on the team who are from maybe different backgrounds and trying to.

[00:03:30] Tara Robertson: Maybe that analytics piece doesn't come as naturally to some people on the team. Have you run into

[00:03:34] Amber Bogie: that at all? I mean, I guess I'd say yes. It's not necessarily a natural thing for different areas of the organization. Like, you know, I have worked with some content teams that aren't really doing any sort of digging into like, the impacts of their, of their work.

[00:03:51] Amber Bogie: I think that's, you know, potentially, you know, an area, um, you know, product, uh, product marketing content, that kind of thing. All we need to really do is, is shift the conversation A and ask the questions. And ultimately we need operations. I mean, operations is the backbone of every organization. Like the emergence of marketing, operations, operations, revenue, operations within an organization has grown substantially.

[00:04:17] Amber Bogie: And you know, the last decade. Um, and so we're now being asked to answer a lot of, a lot of kind of data driven questions, but some of that is still just not totally doable. So it's kind of like mm-hmm. You know that that meme with Charlie, Charlie from Always Sunny and he's like on the whiteboard, you know, like just

[00:04:40] Tara Robertson: with wild

[00:04:41] Amber Bogie: numbers of Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:04:42] Amber Bogie: It's like sometimes you, the. Like, sometimes there's just not an answer. Sometimes you kind of just kinda like let go and, and you know, not have to have like a data driven like metric to something. I think that there's a middle ground, like if something's not working, you can look for the data, you can look for the answers, but I don't know that there's always going to be an answer.

[00:05:06] Amber Bogie: So it's kind of like finding that happy medium. We've gone from like being a, you know, marketers being non analytic. You know, a as a whole, I don't know about anyone, but a lot of people studied, um, studied marketing communications cuz, you know, they were like, bad at math or at least I did. Uh, you know, so that's, there was some truth to that is that, you know, there weren't a lot of, you know, for, for some years it just wasn't like an obsession.

[00:05:33] Amber Bogie: Um, and now we are like, oh, look at us. We can prove ourselves, we can do this. And, and I love it. It's amazing. Um, but at the same time, We, we don't wanna get too lost in it and forget, you know, and lose sight of like what the, what value we're trying to bring to the business by way of mm-hmm. Yeah. Branding and community and certain things that are harder to measure.

[00:05:56] Tara Robertson: No, I think that makes a lot of sense to me. And you mentioned Ops as kind of the backbone of tracking some of these things and setting up analytics. Can you tell us a little bit about how DemandGen works with Ops at reaches? Is it. Does Marketing ops report into you or is it a

[00:06:11] Amber Bogie: separate team? Actually, we have, so we do have marketing ops, um, and we have our operations function reporting into the, the finance department because we have a rev ops function.

[00:06:24] Amber Bogie: Um, and I always think that having a rev ops organization is, is very telling of. Where you are in the maturity of a business and how you, how you value, um, how you, how you value operations and data and the technology. That's, of course, you know, the various arms of the business. So yes, we do have, um, operations, uh, reporting into the finest department, and I work very, very, very closely with our operations counterparts.

[00:06:55] Amber Bogie: They are my besties. I think that

[00:06:57] Tara Robertson: I, that ties back to your first answer, obviously, of working really close cross-functionally with executive teams and obviously operations as the backbone of your analytics.

[00:07:06] Amber Bogie: Yeah, absolutely. And kind of just like tying into that cross-functional alignment, collaboration and, you know, the, the partnership with marketing ops and how do they support us?

[00:07:16] Amber Bogie: Like, uh, we have a weekly, we have a weekly pipeline meeting, uh, where we have the, you know, we have our. C r we have our C F O, we have our heads of sales, and we have, you know, the marketing, you know, head of business development. We have the marketing function. And every week we're, you know, we're talking about like where each of our divisions are pacing between, uh, you know, between each of their tiers, how we're all, how we're all moving and we're, we're.

[00:07:47] Amber Bogie: Problem solving together, we're looking at a shared goal together, and if it's a sales ops or if it's a marketing ops thing, like we're having these conversations in one room, so everyone's aware of if we're struggling here and we don't know the answer, we're looking to figure out like why we're looking into doing that together, and then we have a solution.

[00:08:11] Amber Bogie: So it's, it's, it's like. Absolutely. For me, it's been night and day in ways that I have worked previously in previous organizations and feeling like the information just kinda thrown off the wall or like, oh, I, here, we're behind on our numbers for this porter, but like having no context into it. Mm-hmm.

[00:08:28] Amber Bogie: And there's, there's information sharing that's happening and there's goal sharing that's happening, accountability, sharing, um, all of it. So, I mean, that's. Kind of goes back to even just like my hot take. I feel like that's very much that I'm very on theme on brand right now with just like alignment of executives why it's so important to be ha be in the room no matter your level of seniority, having, you know, a seat at the table so that you can drive, drive more impact to the business.

[00:09:00] Amber Bogie: And you mentioned

[00:09:00] Tara Robertson: pipeline, so obviously you're tracking that closely. That's your impact on the business, but what other metrics does your demand gem team. Focus on, or do you report

[00:09:08] Amber Bogie: on every week For the demand John function itself, we are reporting on a weekly basis how many meetings are coming in, how many opportunities we are creating, and the pipeline associated with that.

[00:09:22] Amber Bogie: And we're looking, um, you know, of course at like what is our line of site for the meetings to be converted to opportunities based on our flip rates, focusing on our flip plates. We're looking at all of this across the different tiers, so, We are not measuring leads. Um, we are not, we're not like an M Q L like lead gen focus.

[00:09:46] Amber Bogie: Mm-hmm. Like all of that stuff is happening, but that's not our driver. Our driver is realistically how many meetings and opportunities that we're getting and what is the, like, what is the conversion rate and what is our inbound to close rate. I have grown up in a b m and come into a role that I have my arms around demand generation and I'm building ABM out and so it's been a really, it's been a really.

[00:10:14] Amber Bogie: Cool experience. Probably go backwards from where most marketers are. Most marketers grew up in DG and they, they learned about ABM and they took over abm. I'm done the complete opposite, but I think there's a lot of value in coming through that direction because I have not been conditioned to be lead focused.

[00:10:33] Amber Bogie: I have not been conditioned to be like form bills, warrant bills, like contacts, contacts, contacts. It's always been about for me, The end result and going backwards from revenue generation, like, how do we get there? How do we get there? Um, and yeah, I mean, I, I have seen significant, you know, increases in, in our impacts, you know, in paying attention to these things and asking questions around them.

[00:11:04] Amber Bogie: So it's like conversion in the foot rate and it's, you know, actually digging into why aren't we converting here? And how can we, how can we help that? Yeah. It's interesting

[00:11:16] Tara Robertson: you said that reversal because I'm definitely one of those people who's from the more traditional demand gen. We need a thousand leads this month to hit our quota.

[00:11:24] Tara Robertson: And I've just, in conversations I've had recently, a lot of marketers are turning back to that model because their work is being scrutinized so much and they don't know what else to do to show

[00:11:33] Amber Bogie: value. And honestly, like I, I don't blame them. I have felt that pressure too. And it is an uncomfortable place.

[00:11:41] Amber Bogie: I think that what I call it is, and I'm not saying that this is wrong or bad, but I'm calling it like reactive. It's reactive behavior versus, you know, proactive. And so we're thinking about, and I don't like demand gen versus, I don't think that those things are pitted against each other. I think they work together.

[00:12:01] Amber Bogie: I think that they need to be partners. Um, I think that there's benefits to both strategies and that they exist. The world is a better place when they exist together. Um, but kind of, you know, the whole, if you call it the ABM, is more around the investment, like the investment strategy. Long term results are yielded.

[00:12:22] Amber Bogie: Me and Jen is very quick, quick, quick. Um, and so I'm not surprised that people are feeling the, are kind of shifting back to that lead model at all because there's pressure from the executives, how do we make impact tomorrow? Mm-hmm. And they have those same questions. You know, when we are slowing down or we're not hitting in a certain area, it's what can we do, what can we do, what can we do?

[00:12:47] Amber Bogie: And honestly, you know, we can make changes to bring in like quick results, but I would ask those people to, you know, to look at if you are ringing a thousand leads next month because the pressure and, and, and you feel it, what are those leads converting to, like at the, at the end of the road? What's their conversion?

[00:13:10] Amber Bogie: Um, because right now art inbound to close rate, Has shot up like 20% over like the last two quarters, and I don't think that it's a coincidence. Hmm.

[00:13:23] Tara Robertson: That's a huge, I, I mean a lot of people are seeing the opposite right now, so I'd love to dig into why you think that is, that, that 20%,

[00:13:30] Amber Bogie: I think a huge, there's a, there's a few different things to it, and.

[00:13:35] Amber Bogie: I, I don't know that there's like a, uh, copy and paste answer here, but Yeah, everybody wants a silver bullet. But I mean, there is, there is one element that I think that, and I'm not being paid to say that, but there is one element that I do think has had a great impact. I'll get that towards the end. But first things first is, uh, during like the first initial like.

[00:13:57] Amber Bogie: Panic moment of what's going on. Let's just say the scrutiny, the evaluation, me and my team, we evaluated all channels, all paid channels, all spends, all impacts, looked at everything. Sorry, just

[00:14:10] Tara Robertson: for context, this would be probably like Q3 last year, midway

[00:14:15] Amber Bogie: through the, yep. Yeah, we looked back six months, but did, did start, this was in Q3 of last year.

[00:14:20] Amber Bogie: We looked back for like the last six months. It was like, What has literally every channel done and like since the beginning of the year and how, you know, how are we spending, what's it cost per opportunity, all of that. And, you know, surprise, surprise, who was asking was the c f Um, wonder why I feel so strongly about this relationship is, you know, seeing massive impacts because somebody asked me to do something, my work got better because we did, we did evaluate it, we spent the time to think about it.

[00:14:50] Amber Bogie: But so I would say it was a. Review of where our money was going, where it was, what it was yielding, what was our cost per opportunity, just looking at all of that and optimizing the channels that were working. Um, I mean that sounds pretty basic, right? But like, is everybody actually doing that? That's a question.

[00:15:10] Amber Bogie: Is everybody actually optimizing their spend and. Maybe, you know, setting a little every quarter to reduce the cost per opportunity to like 10%. You know, like, what, what are these micro goals that you can achieve? We ended up really, really improving our, our impacts. N C A became like our number one channel, organic social, which wasn't really a strategy internally until, um, someone on my team took it over, became the number two.

[00:15:42] Amber Bogie: The number two, bring in opportunities, so like those two channels. And then, um, I will say that Chili Piper, we brought in Chili Piper and we started using concierge in q4. And I, I truly believe that the, the utilization of the concierge has helped our quality significantly. We haven't necessarily increased the volume across our tiers.

[00:16:09] Amber Bogie: We haven't necessarily increased our demo, like requests coming inbound, but our, our conversion, like from inbound to close has shot up like 20% in, you know, a quarter and a half. And so I'm like, There's a lot of different things that came, you know, that are, are certainly factors. Um, but I do think, yeah, I do think Chili, Chili paper concierge, the tool that, you know, we, we brought, we brought in has been impactful.

[00:16:42] Amber Bogie: Um, so mm-hmm. That was the thing that I said I wasn't getting paid for. That's the true belief. Thanks for reiterating.

[00:16:48] Tara Robertson: Um, and when you say that 20% improvement, was there a certain part of the funnel that you were trying to fix or solve for, or was it just close rates in general? You knew they could be better?

[00:16:59] Tara Robertson: I'd say

[00:16:59] Amber Bogie: as a, as an organization, yes. We have, you know, been focused on, um, on, in increasing the opportunity to close, right? As, as a whole. Um, and I, we weren't being scrutinized for our, uh, inbound to close rate. So it wasn't something that we were, you know, of course we were, we were trying to make it better, but it wasn't something that we were obsessively looking.

[00:17:25] Amber Bogie: At daily to see like, where are we, where are we? Um, the, these tweaks, you know, these tweaks here, here and there have just made a significant impact. And I think goes back to the whole, like did me and Jen feeling the pressure back to leads. It's yielding significant growth and we're, we're seeing some of the stuff that we're doing into the, and Jen, you know, one quarter ahead is, is impacting us a quarter later.

[00:17:50] Amber Bogie: So it's, it's not an overnight thing unless you're just wanting context and. Dumping them into the system, which is not my jam. Yeah. I think especially coming

[00:18:01] Tara Robertson: from an ab m background, that doesn't surprise me that that's not your thing. Um, I'd love to learn a little bit about, I know you've touched on ABM and demand Gen working together.

[00:18:10] Tara Robertson: How does ABM fit into your team structure? Do you have someone owning. ABM and kind of the enterprise or account strategy there.

[00:18:17] Amber Bogie: I was hired to build out an ab bs strategy for reaches. Uh, it as part of my, you know, core of my role as I came on, I'd been, here's almost a year now, and it was, you know, ownership of demand.

[00:18:30] Amber Bogie: You know, that's inclusive of demand, John and abm. Um, long story short is I'd spent most of my time here optimizing the band demand gen engine and building the foundation of a b m. So in terms of like ownership, it's, it's underneath me. Um, and at, uh, we are looking to grow that function here coming soon.

[00:18:53] Amber Bogie: We are just days away from watching success, um, the predictive model to our sales org and, um, I'm extremely excited about that. So, When it comes to, um, kinda like the ABM model, I, I mentioned like demand gen and ABM need to live together. I believe that like one person should own the demand gen strategy and one person should own the ABM strategy, but next to each other I have been that a B M person and I have been like a hundred yards away from the demand gen person and I don't want that.

[00:19:28] Amber Bogie: So I think it's been nice that we haven't had a dedicated AVM person to date. You know, we will. But, um, our owner of, you know, our day-to-day demand gen activities, she has been supporting, um, you know, kind of the foundational build on all of this. So there is such an element of partnership that will be kind of brought in once we do have a dedicated person.

[00:19:49] Amber Bogie: And I talk a lot about enablement and I talk a lot about foundation and I talk a lot about operations when it comes to abm. Like those things are key, critical, do or die. Um, ABM campaigns like we're marketers. We know how to do campaigns. We don't need to really lose sleep over that. We are creative, like we'll get it done.

[00:20:12] Amber Bogie: It's the foundational work that takes so much time. It's the operational stuff that. You know, you sell a strategy into an organization and you haven't thought through like, how do I operationalize this? Like, a lot of that stuff has been, been worked on, um, for the last, you know, so many months. So we're about to kind of kick off the operational, um, operational stuff with obviously six Sense, as I mentioned.

[00:20:37] Amber Bogie: Mm-hmm. Um, the campaign side of things. I call it ABM Light, you know, and that's, uh, Here's our capacity right now. You know, like that's what we've been doing. So really it's just been segmented campaigns, um, segmented campaigns, and those are, you know, simple. It's just really utilizing all the different tactics, um, and channels and having a streamlined message.

[00:21:04] Amber Bogie: Um, and you know, so you've got a webinar, you've got an event, you've got, you know, corporate. Um, you've got like a gifting uh, strategy. You've got, you know, the outreach, you've got kind of all of those different pieces to a set list of accounts. So that's sort of the E B M light. And um, yes, we are going to be growing that strategy very, very soon and I'm very, very excited about it.

[00:21:31] Amber Bogie: That's

[00:21:31] Tara Robertson: exciting. And obviously, I mean, to me, in my mind, the most important part of ABM is the accounts. And who are you reaching out to? How do you work with your sales team or who owns creating those target account lists today? And obviously that'll change when you bring in this ABM role, I'm assuming, but how does that happen today?

[00:21:50] Amber Bogie: Yeah. Um, I mean, so how it happens today, is it, it does, it does, you know, their target accounts live within, um, I'd say more or less the, the revenue operations function. Um, and it is a. It's very much in support of my, my own method, which is it's a two-step process. It's dataverse and then sales by second.

[00:22:16] Amber Bogie: So what are the accounts that fit within our ICP that are supported by all of these different data points? What does that audience look like? All right, of this like list of like 500 accounts, let's say. All right, salesperson, in this territory, which of these accounts do you feel best about? Because you have, you know, information about them that isn't necessarily found in a software system, that you've got previous relationships, you've got contacts, you've got kind of that, um, that non-technical, uh, information at hand.

[00:22:50] Amber Bogie: So that is kind of the, that's the strategy that I, I am. I prefer, and fortunately it's, you know, what we're doing here. Um, and then, you know, similarly, it's like, all right, you're sales targets and then your marketing targets. Like, are they different because they shouldn't be? Right. So it's, uh, we're, you know, we have our audience, you know, on the demand gen side, which is obviously a lot bigger than the target list side.

[00:23:18] Amber Bogie: And then, you know of that we select the. You know, we work with the sales team to utilize their select of accounts to prioritize.

[00:23:28] Tara Robertson: Yeah, that makes sense. So data driven, but you're using that anecdotal feedback from sales to prioritize and

[00:23:34] Amber Bogie: Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, you know, it's a winning strategy.

[00:23:39] Tara Robertson: Yeah. And then sales is happy cuz they get their say, but they're, they're not doing the whole, all the work of pulling list and the, yeah. So far

[00:23:47] Amber Bogie: operational side. If sales, if it was up to them, it would all be like Google and you know, Amazon, like if it's completely just sales selected, it's always like the biggest account that is the hardest to win the whales, the, you know, as if like, you know, we're gonna win them in a week, you know, kind of thing.

[00:24:06] Amber Bogie: So it's like finding that happy medium. What. Data supports this being the target account that is most likely. Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, to be sold to, of course, utilizing a platform like six sensor demand base, you get further information about when is the right time to reach out to them. And then you've got the sales team who's like bought into this account because they've had a say.

[00:24:30] Tara Robertson: You mentioned direct mail earlier, and obviously I have to ask because you're outreached us, but I'd love to hear, first of all, how direct mail fits into your go-to-market on the marketing side, and then also how do you empower your outbound reps if you do, um, to use direct mail in their

[00:24:45] Amber Bogie: cadences? I mean, because of the products that we offer, it is fortunate that we drink our, we drink our own koolaid, like it is such a integral part of our business.

[00:24:57] Amber Bogie: Mm-hmm. We don't really have to try and force it in any capacity, I would say, you know, so like internal gifting, external gifting, like we're all about it. Um, and so, you know, it's not like it exists. It exists. So how do we utilize it? We've got marketing direct mail campaigns, and we've got se, you know, sales direct now.

[00:25:19] Amber Bogie: Um, campaign, the outbound team has a, you know, a list of of place that works really well. Um, for example, the, um, congratulations, like direct mail campaign. If somebody got a new job, has a baby, like basically won an award, like any sort of congratulatory gift is a 50% like conversion to an opportunity. So that one works really well.

[00:25:48] Amber Bogie: Um, they, there's also another one they call Amazon Rainmaker. That one has really good, um, results for them, but they have, we have, you know, basically think about like a template of outbound campaigns that they utilize. And these are, you know, these are BDRs, they're out in the trenches. You know, it's wonderful for us to be able to offer this to them because, you know, we're, the product itself is all about delivering moments of the matter.

[00:26:14] Amber Bogie: Points of connection, like human moments. So it's, it's great to have that as a resource. It is not aquid pro quo, it is not a gift for a meeting strategy. That is not what we are about. Um, and so, and you know, in terms of the marketing, like how do we, how do we lever that? It's, um, well similar to like when I mentioned segments, campaigns, like how can we make this more fun?

[00:26:38] Amber Bogie: Um, how can we bring in a gift, you know, that works well with this campaign. So example of that being as you know, we've got a A C F O calling, c f campaign we're doing this quarter. It's all about that relationship with, with the finance department and very much more of a thought leadership driven kind of campaign style.

[00:26:58] Amber Bogie: It's more about we're feeling pain, let's talk about it. How can we make this better? Um, our C F O actually, uh, we did a Christmas video around the holidays of like, what's your favorite gifts that you've ever given or, or received. And he said it was, um, a gift that was given, it was a Patagonia vest, um, to another cfo.

[00:27:19] Amber Bogie: And he is like, you know, cuz like CFOs and, you know, we are the best. So we actually, as a part of this C F O campaign, we're actually giving, um, vest like as a gift, um, for, you know, for the, the prospects they're going after. It's sort of like warm, warm up your relationship with your c f o with this, you know, we discuss kind of like a play on that.

[00:27:41] Amber Bogie: So, you know, that's just, that's just another example. Um, and then of course we are, you know, a very customer focused, customer driven organization. So how are we, you know, sending gifts to our customers and how are we actually supporting them with the utilization of gift sends? And so we also have, um, dedicated ABX managers on the customer side that help our customers actually.

[00:28:08] Amber Bogie: Leverage the product to the best of their ability to come up with campaign, um, campaign ideas, best practices, um, sort of like an internal kind of resource, if you will,

[00:28:19] Tara Robertson: that seems fun, brainstorming the different gifts you can send and the different occasions to send gifts. That's, that's the creative piece of marketing that a lot of us love.

[00:28:28] Tara Robertson: So that's cool to be able to do that for your customers

[00:28:30] Amber Bogie: every day. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think, um, some, you know, more organizations, MarTech organizations specifically are, are providing that resource to their, um, to their customers. You know, a dedicated resource, almost like an internal, you know, internal consultant internal, um, beyond a C S M role.

[00:28:53] Amber Bogie: Right? Like, I've noticed that, uh, I feel like a couple years ago, um, Terminus built out that in their organization, dedicated kind of a b m strategists and, you know, so, you know, we're doing something similar. We're really. ABM is hard. You don't, you don't always have the resources to do it. Internally, we're providing a product like, let us help.

[00:29:15] Tara Robertson: And are you able to leverage data from other customers to say, Hey, we know if you send this at this moment in the opportunity, this will help move things along, or is the product data a little bit of a black box

[00:29:26] Amber Bogie: today? Oh, no. We absolutely have the ability to look at that and see, you know, see, see different wins.

[00:29:34] Amber Bogie: Um, from, from customers. We even do a, um, a acute, like a quarterly gifting guide that we put out every quarter for, let's say it's like, you know, customer facing, but anyone who's. Really looking for ideas on gifting is, you know, basically is templates, plug and play. Like this works really well, this is what we've done before.

[00:29:53] Amber Bogie: So those are not just, you know, things that we've done, but of course things that customers have done as well. Um, and so yeah, definitely able to support that with data. That's,

[00:30:03] Tara Robertson: yeah, that's the most interesting piece to me, especially if I was in your shoes. I would love to get access to that data so you can say, well, we wanna be that use case, right?

[00:30:10] Tara Robertson: Like, we wanna figure out what the next. Big play is and try to experiment with that, so that's really cool. Yeah,

[00:30:16] Amber Bogie: I mean that's, that's exactly when I saw the, the data around the congratulations mm-hmm. Gift, I was like, oh, my, like 50%, 50%. That's huge. That's huge. Mm-hmm. That's amazing.

[00:30:30] Tara Robertson: Yeah, and

[00:30:31] Amber Bogie: I think that's, if you really think about it, like giving someone a gift is not creating an opportunity.

[00:30:38] Amber Bogie: Right. It's, it's. The purpose of that gift is to congratulate somebody on something meaningful that happened in their lives. So really what they're doing is they're connecting. Mm-hmm. And having a, a meaningful moment. It's not like the gift itself is creating opportunity. So, you know, it's establishing that relationship and that connection between, you know, these two people.

[00:31:05] Amber Bogie: That it's obviously yielding significant results. And so that just kind of goes back to and support, it supports the, you know, why you should have a direct mail strategy without question. It supports why you should have an APM strategy. Like it's all about that level of humanization personalization, person to person.

[00:31:22] Amber Bogie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And

[00:31:24] Tara Robertson: that's what makes it memorable at the end of the day. I mean, getting something like a real tangible gift is pretty rare these days, so makes it memorable for sure. Are there any kind of new or up and coming gift ideas that you've seen customers use that you were like, oh, I really wanna try that for ourselves?

[00:31:41] Tara Robertson: I love the best example that's so on brand for CFOs in finance, but anything else that comes to mind?

[00:31:48] Amber Bogie: I mean, we have so many different gifting options. Mm-hmm. I think that it, you know, it just comes down to being creative. Right. Um, yeah, you don't

[00:32:02] Tara Robertson: wanna send what everybody else is,

[00:32:04] Amber Bogie: especially in your kitchen and not just Yeah.

[00:32:06] Amber Bogie: And not just sending a gift to send a gift. You know, like, really nobody needs another water bottle for the rest of their lives. I know you at Chili Pepper, you guys have hot sauce and like that is, that's something that's like, if it ain't broke, don't. You know, don't fix it. Like yeah. We keep thinking, we've

[00:32:25] Tara Robertson: overdone it, but we still find new people that haven't got one yet, still want them.

[00:32:29] Amber Bogie: Yeah. And it's such a, it's so synonymous with your brand, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, so I think it's just kind of like finding that, that. You know, those things that work for your organization and not everybody's gonna be able to be a Chili, Piper hot sauce. Like, I don't know, you know, we send cupcakes and that's definitely, definitely been like a reached us thing.

[00:32:50] Amber Bogie: But not everybody has to have like this like, you know, token gift that their, their organizations are known for it. It's also like, What is a really meaningful thing that you can send to somebody? Mm-hmm.

[00:33:03] Tara Robertson: Yeah, so sometimes personalized is definitely better than

[00:33:06] Amber Bogie: being like on brand

[00:33:07] Tara Robertson: necessarily for you. I think one trend that I'm happy to see kind of out the wayside is just putting your logo everywhere on everything and sending that to me, that's not really the gift.

[00:33:17] Tara Robertson: It's just a branded thing.

[00:33:19] Amber Bogie: Yeah. Because it's not about us. At the end of the day, like we want, we want people to remember our names. We need that recognition, we need that brand recognition. Um, but they're, we need to be subtle. We need to be marketers. Um, you know, there's, the moment you create an emotion with somebody, they're gonna hold onto that.

[00:33:46] Amber Bogie: But if it's a negative motion, they're gonna hold onto that. So your first kind of emotional connection with a brand, be it positive or negative, it sticks with them. Mm-hmm. Like, that's our responsibility to think about, you know, like that's why I, I very much become a brand ambassador for companies whose brands I'm a fan of and I respect cuz I've had this positive.

[00:34:14] Amber Bogie: Moments, positive connections. Mm-hmm. And then I speak about them and I share positive things about them. I'm promoting them. Nobody's asking me to do that. If this opposite happens and something comes up about that company, then I'm also talking about like, oh, this thing happened to me. You know? So it's like we need to think about that.

[00:34:33] Amber Bogie: You mentioned

[00:34:35] Tara Robertson: earlier that you did kind of a full deep dive on different channels and different programs that were or weren't working a couple of quarters ago. Were there any tough cuts that you did have to pause or maybe even just decide we're, we're not doing this anymore. It's not giving us good roi?

[00:34:52] Amber Bogie: Uh, I would have to say like many, we have really scaled back our event. And, and is that sponsoring trade shows

[00:35:01] Tara Robertson: or what type of events have you seen? Uh,

[00:35:04] Amber Bogie: yeah, I'd say sponsor. Like showing on, it's like, yeah, it's expensive. It is expensive, and. You know, for the most part events they returned your investment with, you know, a handful of opportunities, but are, you know, they have to close to close so you mm-hmm.

[00:35:23] Amber Bogie: You really need that to happen. It's, yes, we were seeing roi. Were we seeing as impactful ROI on events as we were other channels? No. We didn't have a dedicated events person anymore, and so it just seemed like the easiest one to make the decision on events are exhausting and anyone who invents it for a job like I am, like, you know, applaud you about, about you.

[00:35:54] Amber Bogie: It is a, it is a, it's a very, very hard, hard job to do. Speaking to us specifically. We're still a young company and you know, our event strategy was on the, you know, earlier side of maturity and we were figuring it out and it made the most sense for us to just focus on, on sponsorships with people like Chili, Piper and, uh, various other vendors that we've moved down Indiana sponsorships with, um, where it's a little bit lighter of a lift for us.

[00:36:26] Amber Bogie: We're getting that brand exposure. Um, and that has been beneficial to us. It's, you know, we've been fortunate to be, um, I like to say it's like the Cool Kids Club. Uh, we've been fortunate to have a lot of cool companies ask us to partner with them on various things. Um, and so, you know, we've, we've really kind of leaned into that.

[00:36:50] Amber Bogie: As a way of showing up to events, but in a different, in a different capacity. Yeah.

I

[00:36:55] Tara Robertson: think a lot of B2B marketers still think of events as, you have to get the booth. It's a non-negotiable. You have to drop 50 K on the booth and travel, but there's so many other ways to be there and have a presence. So there's a thing

[00:37:08] Amber Bogie: called, I don't know if I've just, uh, aged out of this, but, uh, there's this thing called sharking events.

[00:37:16] Amber Bogie: And then our b d r team does it. Um, you know, it's basically rating events, you know? Mm-hmm. Making sure their sales presence there and having a plan of action. Like this is who, where, when, why, and this is what I expect to come home with. And that's a, you know, that's a very low, low cost, um, investment. And I don't know, as a marketer, I think about why I go to conferences.

[00:37:37] Amber Bogie: I might be an anomaly, but I'm not really spending a lot of time with, I'm. I'm going to the sessions I'm interacting.

[00:37:44] Tara Robertson: I don't think that's unusual. I think a lot of us that used to sponsor trade shows would kind of tell ourselves that people wanted to talk

[00:37:51] Amber Bogie: to us at a booth, but there's like a handful of people that do that, and I think they're keeping this alive.

[00:37:58] Amber Bogie: They're keeping it off. I think

[00:38:00] Tara Robertson: there's, there's that flip side too of if, especially in MarTech, it's such a small community that often we're there to pitch other booths. So that's kind of an unusual. Yeah. Thing that a lot of companies, it doesn't apply to them, but if it applies to you, then getting booth could be

[00:38:14] Amber Bogie: worth your while.

[00:38:15] Amber Bogie: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, there's, there's value to it. No question. Our sales team is, they prefer that we do sponsor, they do feel that there is more impact to them. Hmm. Um, but as marketers, like, not, it's not, yes, we want meetings, opportunities, so what I'm gonna say, you know, but it's not always about that.

[00:38:34] Amber Bogie: It's also about what is it doing for your brand? And mm-hmm. You know, focus on what you can measure, but at the same time, do not, do not obsess on it so much that you're losing sleep because what's the whole number doing? Mm-hmm. What's the whole number doing? Be similar to abm. Uh, you know, measurement becomes a little bit harder because you're utilizing all these different channels at the same time and you're looking at accounts.

[00:39:06] Amber Bogie: You know, as a whole, you're not necessarily tying things the same way you were before. I mean, I don't know anyone's being mad for saying this, but I'm like, if the number's going up, I don't care if, you know, it's like, let's just increase the, let's increase the impact. Mm-hmm. It's good to have answers.

[00:39:28] Amber Bogie: It's good to have analysis. Don't, not get me wrong, I'm obsessed with it, but if you're winning, like. Focus on that.

[00:39:36] Tara Robertson: You're doing something right. Yeah. So maybe don't question things too much if you're too much, if you're hitting target on, on the flip side, you mentioned losing sleep over things. Um, but what is something that's getting you really excited right now or something that you're looking forward to

[00:39:51] Amber Bogie: for the rest of the year?

[00:39:52] Amber Bogie: I'm so looking forward to growing, um, to growing the team with the ABM strategy and mm-hmm to, you know, growing, allowing my team to grow in their careers. Um, I have found a lot of joy in being a leader and kind of not repeating the mistakes of, as, you know, previous bosses that I've had is just kind of like what I say.

[00:40:18] Amber Bogie: It's like not doing the things that made me miserable and not, you know, creating this horribly painful path to kind of climbing the ladder. Um, I've, I've taken. A lot of joy in providing mentorship and you know, Co working in a collaborative, you know, collaborative team. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to the impacts of the business with the strategy that we're, you know, we're growing our account based strategy and we're doing it together with demand generation, and I'm really looking forward to, you know, bringing somebody else on the team to help support that.

[00:40:56] Amber Bogie: I'm really looking forward to the existing team, being able to, to, you know, level up and, um, you know, challenge themselves in new ways. And I'm looking forward to continuing to be challenged, um, in working with, you know, the C-suite and having that seat at the

[00:41:13] Tara Robertson: table. Yeah, that's an exciting thing to look forward to growing your team.

[00:41:16] Tara Robertson: And obviously with your background in abm, I'm sure that's super exciting to hire someone and take that piece off of your plate so you can really focus on strategy. Yeah. I'm

[00:41:25] Amber Bogie: so excited about that. I know it sounds here, but I'm like, I'm just excited to be like a, a supporter, you know, it's like, Mm-hmm.

[00:41:32] Amber Bogie: I've done the executing for a long time and I love the strategy side of things, and you can still be, you know, executing on ABM and the strategic driver of it, but I've gone up one level and I am so excited and I, I'm enjoying it so much. Well,

[00:41:50] Tara Robertson: that's exciting to hear that desk is growing. I know, like you were saying, times are tough right now, but some teams are still growing, some marketing teams are still hiring, so that's really.

[00:41:59] Tara Robertson: Giving a nice silver lining for everyone and we'll keep an eye on breaches as you guys grow. So move on to our quickfire round. Um, first of all, is there another marketer you follow that our listeners should go check out? Um, yes.

[00:42:12] Amber Bogie: So I'm like, I have a few on this. Oh, great. On this one. Well, well, I didn't mention by name, but like the whole time I was talking about like our strategy and our team and things that we were doing, we were optimizing.

[00:42:25] Amber Bogie: Um, somebody unlike Sophia Silva, she's on my team. She's a unicorn now, you know her. Um, she's a marketer on the rise and it is such a pleasure to obviously be able to work with her directly. Um, I think she's an influencer on the rise. I had a boss years and years ago, referred to somebody on her team as, um, like, oh, she's gonna be my boss one day.

[00:42:50] Amber Bogie: And it was, I don't remember what that, you know, I don't remember thinking I knew what that meant at the time. And now I get it. I'm like, Ugh. We say Sophia from president, she's gonna be, well, she's gonna be our boss. It's a huge compliment. She's amazing. Um, so if you aren't following her, you should. She's, she's amazing.

[00:43:07] Amber Bogie: Um, I also, two others. Um, so Amber Rhodes, um, and. Because for her, she has a podcast to this specifically. I mean, I know most people probably know who she is, um, at User Gems and she's fairly active on, you know, the LinkedIn scene. But she has a podcast called Everything That's Coming Up Marketing. And that one I think is really important to flag because that podcast is about mental health.

[00:43:33] Amber Bogie: And I think that it's really, really important to talk about, um, ourselves outside of just data and numbers, like we're human beings. And I embody authen. Yeah. Authenticity. Yeah. I don't know. Let's, let's take a buzzword, but I embody just being yourself, being vulnerable, um, talking about real things. And so I love that there is somebody out there that is promoting this conversation.

[00:43:59] Amber Bogie: Great. Um, and then the third one, um, hoping that we have time for sharing all of these amazing humans mm-hmm. Is Justin Fordham. He's an ABM uh, leader out there and he also just started a podcast called the Robin Engine. It's on obviously revenue operations, but him specifically, I met him in the peak community and he is an ABM strategist that is just really, you know, really incredible.

[00:44:24] Amber Bogie: So, um, those are, those are my piece. Great. So I'll put

[00:44:28] Tara Robertson: links for all those three in the show notes if you're not familiar, so you can give them a follow. And Amber, what's an under the radar channel? Or it could be a tactic that your team is really loving

[00:44:37] Amber Bogie: right now. Oh gosh. I mean, I'm just call OG social, like organic social.

[00:44:42] Amber Bogie: That is, mm-hmm. I wouldn't call it under the radar. Some people utilize it, um, others don't. But we have seen tremendous, tremendous impacts from focusing. On this channel that is also inclusive of, you know, internal advocacy. So we're definitely have a lot of that kind of going on internally. Um, as I mentioned Sophia just a second ago, like she has taken on the organic social and you know, we're just paying attention to it for a couple months.

[00:45:12] Amber Bogie: Like we saw it yielding, very significant. I think, you know, I think it was $800,000 in pipeline, like in six months. Um, wow. Yeah. So you know that that one is 3 99 as they say. Um, and then the other one is actually creeping the community slot channels. Um, you know, some people randomly ask questions in those channels, and if you have somebody paying attention, like we've seen close one opportunities from that.

[00:45:39] Amber Bogie: And I wouldn't say that's like everybody do that because those channels are supposed to be a safe space, but,

[00:45:47] Tara Robertson: Don't go pitching right away, but if

[00:45:50] Amber Bogie: something, no, someone asks a question, we're just like, I'm just gonna leave this here. You know, if somebody wants to pick it up. Cool. Yeah, those are, those are channels.

[00:45:58] Amber Bogie: Like we're marketers. We're always like, if somebody asks us, we love to market, not just our own products, but somebody else's. If somebody asks me about a meeting tool, or I'm gonna say like concierge, like Chili pepper. If somebody asks me about, you know, like content experience, I'm gonna be like Uber flip.

[00:46:19] Amber Bogie: I'm obsessed, you know, like, This is just opening up a whole advocacy customer conversation on and on about, but basically yes, creeping the, the communities blocks. Um, respectfully.

[00:46:31] Tara Robertson: Respectfully, yeah. That's the key piece. Or you could, you could get in trouble or,

[00:46:34] Amber Bogie: yeah. It's not sales people doing this. This is actually just like marketers on the side like, oh, hey, I noticed you asked about this.

[00:46:40] Amber Bogie: Let me. Just suggest it.

[00:46:42] Tara Robertson: So yeah. Or even better if you can get your customers and your community doing that for you, which is a whole other can of worms, but it's, that is much better. That's right there. Great. And lastly, where can our audience go to find more, find out more about you or follow your content?

[00:46:57] Tara Robertson: Um, that would

[00:46:58] Amber Bogie: be the good old LinkedIn. That is the channel for me.

[00:47:01] Tara Robertson: Cool. So we'll put that link in the show notes as well so everyone can keep in touch with Amber and see how reach desk is growing. Thanks so much, Amber, for joining me.

[00:47:10] Amber Bogie: Thanks for having me. It was absolute pleasure.

[00:47:12] Tara Robertson: Great, and thanks everybody for listening.

[00:47:13] Tara Robertson: We'll be back in a couple weeks with a brand new episode.

[00:47:17] Amber Bogie: Thanks for listening to Demand Gen Chat. Demand Gen Chat is a Chili Piper podcast hosted by Tara Robertson and produced by me Nola McCoy. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a five star rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast.

[00:47:31] Amber Bogie: It only takes five seconds and helps other marketers like you discover demand gen chat. Also, if you'd like to have a question answered in a future episode, you can connect with Tara Robertson on LinkedIn, send her a DM with your question, and it could be answered on a future episode. Finally, if you've gotten this far and are wondering what Chili Piper even is, Chili Piper helps B2B marketers book more qualified meetings for their sales teams.

[00:47:55] Amber Bogie: You can't afford to leave opportunities on the table, so let your lead self-qualify and schedule a time with the right rep instantly, and that's just one of the many revenue impacting things that Chili Piper does. Visit Chili Piper dot com to learn more, and thanks again for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of Dimension Chat.

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