Speaker 1: 0:00Hey guys, this is Kevin Kerner and I'm the host of Tech Marketing Rewired. In this episode, I sat down with Omar Akhtar, the founder of Benchmarker and one of the sharpest minds in B2B research that I've met. We dug into his latest research on how SaaS companies are really spending their marketing budgets, and the patterns he uncovered actually might surprise you. We talked about the hidden cost of brand, the myth of perfect attribution and what truly separates high growth companies from the rest. I promise his latest research on how 250 SaaS companies are investing their marketing dollars right now is going to change your mind about a lot of things, regardless of the industry that you're in. So I'm really excited about it. Let's get to it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. All right, Omar, welcome to the show. Great to have you, Thank you.Speaker 2: 0:47

Brad.

Speaker 1: 0:48

I am super excited to talk to you today. As you know, I have been following your research a bunch and we've had several conversations back and forth about the brand-to-demand thing here, so I'm very glad you joined us.

Speaker 2: 1:01

I really appreciate it, Kevin. I'm excited to get into the conversation today.

Speaker 1: 1:04

Yeah, awesome. I thought we'd start. Not many people maybe some people don't know you I thought you'd start with a little bit of your background and then a bit about Benchmarker and the type of work that you do.

Speaker 2: 1:13

Yeah, absolutely so. I'm the founder and principal analyst of Benchmarker, which is a research service that provides marketing spending and performance benchmarks to B2B SaaS companies. So I try to get as specific as possible, and my background is as a journalist and a tech writer. And then I was an analyst of the head of research at Altimeter Group, which is kind of like this mini Forrester out here in the Bay Area, for almost a decade. And then I was an associate partner at Profit, where I was helping consult companies on marketing excellence and content marketing, and really this business just came out of fulfilling my own need. Every time I'd go in and evaluate a company, they'd all ask me the same thing, which is just give us the numbers, what does a good conversion rate look like for a company of our size and our industry? How many emails would I be sending every month? And that number changed depending on the kind of company you were. So I decided to go out, foolishly or wisely, and decided to solve the problem on my own.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Yeah, that's great creds for what we're going to talk about today and, as you know, I'm kind of jazzed about the whole brand to demand thing. So I really want to dig into some of that research you've done recently. I know that your latest research really really talks about, I guess, how companies are investing in both brand and demand and, as we know, in the tech space where I play, demand generation seems to get all the dollars. But you're finding research that really nuances that out a bit more. So I wonder if you could talk about that research. Just give us an intro to that research, what you're finding, and then we'll dig into it some.

Speaker 2: 2:35

Yeah, absolutely so. What I do with my research is I survey about 250 plus B2B SaaS companies on a number of different topics and I tend to do six surveys in the year. The first and most really the biggest one is the one on budgets and spending, and then I sort of asked them questions on following up on performance, marketing and events and all that stuff. But budgets and spending is the big one, and what I found was when I asked companies to, when I asked marketing leaders to tell me how they allocated their budgets across kind of really the funnel, if you look at it. So, brand awareness, performance marketing, demand generation, sales enablement, post-purchase marketing and even sort of account-based marketing and customer success One clear pattern emerged and I kind of did this last year, I did this again this year and the results were strikingly consistent which was that the companies that were performing better than everybody else, that were exceeding their revenue and their growth targets, were investing almost equal amounts of their marketing budget in brand as they were in demand.

Speaker 2: 3:28

It was about 48% to 52% in favor of demand, so fairly close, which was different from what I found overall when I surveyed BBSS companies. Overall I found that they were investing 60% in demand and 40% brand. But here's the kicker the low performing companies were over-indexing on demand by a pretty decent amount. Now they're getting into the range of 65% demand and maybe 35, 30% in brand.

Speaker 2: 3:56

And that was really eye-opening to me, which was, you know, a lot of people talk about like, how do you measure brand and how do you see the effects of brand? And there's a lot of ways you can do it, but the big stark difference was look at what happens when you cut brand. That was sort of the biggest thing is like, you know, it might be difficult for you to measure what it's doing when it's there, but look at what happens when it's not there. And really what it said to me was that brand is the foundation upon which demand generation succeeds, and that's the way to think about it. And you can take it away and you might survive for a couple of months, but in the long term you take away that brand spending. It has a very outsized impact on your conversion rates, on your awareness rates and your growth, and so that was really eye-opening to me and I was happy to put that research out there.

Speaker 1: 4:38

Yeah, that's why I was so excited about it, because you can kind of feel that you know, just as a consumer, a business consumer, if someone's not on the day one list you're probably not going to look at, they're not even going to enter in your mind, and if they show up in search or you know, you may try to find someone, a brand name, and if another other brand names that show up that you don't know, you're not even going to look at them. So it's really incredible that you put into research what I think everyone feels but most marketers don't necessarily really want to wrestle with, because the term brand comes up, which can be really tricky. Did you do when you did the research? Did you do any? Did you define what you said was brand and what was demand marketing?

Speaker 2: 5:16

Yeah, absolutely no. That's a great question. It comes up all the time. The simplest way that I could get people to categorize their activities in brand versus demand was to say that brand is marketing activities that are raising awareness about what the company and what the company does, and not asking for any follow-up action afterwards. So no clicks, no shares, no conversions, it's purely really just eyeballs. And so all digital activities that they would blanket under that would be considered brand. And then demand would be activities that increase awareness but consideration but follow up with a direct action. So whether that's attending event or converting, opening something, doing something, that's kind of a measurable activity, and so that's the only kind of to make it sort of easy for people to bucket those things, because there's a lot of debates about what's brand versus demand. That was the way I ran the survey.

Speaker 1: 6:03

Yeah, I find the terms are. The term brand is kind of a loaded loaded term because people think billboards and you know, tv ads and those types of things. But it can be, um, you know, it's any sort of branded media. It's this type of stuff we're doing here for brand. You know, it's video, um, it's those types of things. Did you find that there was any? I would guess. Let me just take a guess. I don't know if this would show in the research. I would guess that bigger companies are better at investing in brand marketing than smaller companies. Is that true?

Speaker 2: 6:30

Absolutely, absolutely, and there's a couple of things that are in play over there is the bigger the company, the more likely that people already know about them, so their effort is less about those quick capture conversions and they're also not as focused on high growth anymore. Once companies get above the 250 million ARR mark, their growth rates are pretty conservative, and so I would say anything between like 11 to 20% is on the low end, but that's decent for a company of that size. But when you're high growth, the problem that I think a lot of B2B SaaS founders and CMOs don't realize is that if you are chasing growth, if that's the biggest metric that you're looking after, you have to spend on brand, because that is what feeds growth. You can't grow by kind of capturing the people that are just in market. That's a tiny percentage.

Speaker 1: 7:20

Yeah, like 5%. I think the research says like 5% of people are marketer at any one time.

Speaker 2: 7:25

Absolutely, and so that's kind of the big fallacy. There is that when people think of brand, they think of stuff that's nice to have but doesn other way. In focusing on stuff that gets measured and measured sort of in this very conservative manner, that's kind of bean counting rather than actually seeing a holistic effect.

Speaker 1: 7:53

Yeah. Do you capture any or do you have an opinion on any qualitative data as to why the smaller brands, let's say mid-sized to smaller brands, aren't invest in brand? Is it just a misunderstood term around brand? Is it pressure from sales? Is it the experience of marketing leadership? What is it?

Speaker 2: 8:13

Two things I think that we saw it play over here. One, when we see there's a big influence in private equity investment which is different from VC investment. So that's where we see a big difference, right? So if you have VC money, you're told to grow and grow fast, and when you have VC money, you can spend on stuff that isn't you know. It's not that you're not going to get questioned on it, but it's more understood that you can spend on stuff like a billboard or spend on stuff like ads that just kind of show your logo and your name and what you do. And you got to spend a lot, you got to get awareness, you got to capture the market's attention.

Speaker 2: 8:52

But when you're PE funded, the emphasis is growth is there, but there's a big emphasis on efficiency. So if we were to go into PE companies, you'd see a lot of demands of saying that, yes, we understand you need to grow, but we need you to be profitable. What can you cut? And that's where the mistake that happens is that the brand stuff because people struggle with proving the impact of it is the first one that gets cut, rightly or wrongly. And so it's like, okay, we don't need to put out that many ads. Maybe we can make it up with email and content marketing, which is what a lot of companies do. We found that low growth companies were. If you look at how we segmented their budgets across channels. Low growth companies are spending more of their budgets on email and content marketing, so they're trying to make up for that with just organic.

Speaker 1: 9:35

Wow, that's crazy.

Speaker 2: 9:37

And the high growth are spending on paid search and paid social. No two ways about it. You got to pay to play. Events was an interesting one, though it's almost like when PE funded companies were the only cohort that didn't want to spend on events, so everybody else kind of spending a lot on events, but except for PE funded companies, and so it's one of those things where it's like, if you are not allowed to spend on advertising and kind of your traditional brand awareness activities, you try to make it up through content marketing, organic content. You try to make it up through just you know, events, showing up at events, doing what you can there. Or you try to make it up with email marketing, your newsletters and your drip campaigns, whatever it is, and that's really, really difficult.

Speaker 1: 10:17

Golly, that is so fascinating and counterintuitive to so many marketers that are thinking about content marketing and email and nurture and all these things. It just is crazy you should market this research to PE companies so you can help out all those smaller brands.

Speaker 2: 10:34

Absolutely. And again, you know, I think to an extent PE companies get demonized a lot in the marketing world and it's one of those things where, like you, have to understand their goals. Their goals are fundamentally different from venture capital goals. Their goals are to have profitable companies, companies that where they can easily say that, look, this is a money-making machine and we can resell it because we've, you know, put it into shape, and that can look kind of overly stifling for marketing. But I also think that you know the days of kind of free VC money is kind of ending as well, right, and so you're going. It's not that you're not going to be given money to grow, but you're going to have to be very convincing about how to do that.

Speaker 2: 11:15

And again, this is kind of a particular affliction of B2B SaaS marketing. If you talk to marketers that are on kind of everywhere else in the world and in the country, they intrinsically know brand awareness. It's the demand gen side that they struggle with. They don't know how to capture the demand with some of the digital ways they understand brand awareness really well. In B2B SaaS it's kind of the opposite, where they're very good at capturing in demand and they're very good at converting and having digital experiences and all that, all those tactics but building a brand and sustaining it is something that's kind of a fundamental science that they need to get behind.

Speaker 1: 11:45

Yeah, it's a kind of a speed to outcome play that you need to live within, and brand is not a speed, typically a speed play. It's more of a longer term play. Maybe it's getting shorter with some more authentic marketing, personality led marketing, but it still takes a lot longer to get to that outcome. So that means that some of these smaller well, let's say, mid-size SaaS companies to smaller SaaS companies they must have a catalyst, they must have a person internally that's helping, that has that sort of mindset. I wonder how they? Do you have any insight into how they're messaging this effort in their own companies to actually be successful, to get the, to be able to get the leeway to spend some money on brand?

Speaker 2: 12:27

Yeah, you know, and I feel for marketing leaders at those sizes of companies is typically they've been brought up in the world of demand gen, right Like that's where they come from. It's very rare that you see folks that have been on the agency side and have built brands and then they come into sort of like SaaS. The folks that are here are mostly coming up from the demand gen side of things, so they live quarter to quarter and that which has kind of been the SaaS way of doing things is like quarterly growth, quarterly numbers. When you live quarter to quarter it's really difficult to talk about brand because that doesn't happen.

Speaker 2: 12:55

The best thing I can do for marketers at that stage is kind of give them good analogies. Right, if you go to the gym and you work out, you know, yes, you can see maybe a little bit of a difference, but you're not going to lose weight overnight. You're not going to build muscles overnight. You're not going to see a big difference day to day. But once you see a difference, maybe six months a year from now, not only do you see a difference, but that difference, the benefits, compound continuously. So once you get fit, like you stay fit for a long time it has so many benefits that go on and that's.

Speaker 2: 13:25

Those are the kinds of stories that we have to kind of tell marketers and this is ironic coming from a data guy, it's like I can show you all the data you want, but I don't think marketers have good stories and good analogies to educate their investors, to educate their CEOs to say that, look, this is how marketing works. It's a long-term effect, this thing feeds into this thing. It's not two separate levers that we have to pull. One feeds into the other and if we take one out, then the other one won't work. Those kinds of analogies, I would imagine, do a much better job than any data that I can give you, but you should look into it.

Speaker 1: 13:59

Yeah, I had can give you, but you should look. Yeah, I had one um cmo that I was talking to you probably a month or two ago, who was who I was talking, having the same discussion with and, um, she was telling me that she really doesn't mention the term brand when she presents to the elt because she's just worried. So she'll do, she'll, um, she has brand tactics going on but she'll try to, um, basically like keep them under the covers and that's that's the one way that she could get it across. Yeah, but there must be um, someone asked you about measurement, because you can measure brand and you can measure demand. Those two things separately. Maybe a couple questions one, have you seen any successful efforts on measuring brand? That's not a bigger brand study, because there's a lot of pushback against doing those and they're typically long-term. And secondly, have you seen any success in measuring brands' effect on demand? So, what metrics would equal? Hey, we're doing this brand effort that's actually having a positive effect on the demand generation that we're running.

Speaker 2: 14:54

Yeah, I can give you kind of the small micro example of myself and then I give you the companies I speak to. The key word is incrementality. Are we doing? Are we getting? Are we you know and I hate to use sports analogies but are we just getting more chances at bat? If you start thinking about marketing as a numbers game and here's the funny part is like we understand that sales is a numbers game, right, say, everybody knows that, like look, you're gonna, and it's like baseball that you get like 30% of the time if you convert people you're a hall of famer and that's kind of sales. But we don't extend that same sort of mentality to marketing. Everybody expects marketing to be like that one viral moment or everybody the Steve Jobsian kind of way of getting things done. Where you're just this giant marketing machine. That's magical. Marketing is a numbers game. The more you do of every marketing activity, the more people that it touches, the more positive effects you're going to see. And I can kind of give you the idea that we were talking about.

Speaker 2: 15:49

Some of the stuff that I've done for my own business is when I write more blog posts, when I send more emails, when I just kind of show up more. Now I can't tell unless somebody specifically tells me, and I don't expect this to happen. Where someone says I read that LinkedIn post of yours, I am ready to buy that was awesome. It's never going to happen. But I do know that people that read my LinkedIn post six months ago they followed me on LinkedIn. They look at everything that I'm reading and then one day they're like you know what? I want to take a call with them and find out a bit more about this kind of stuff. Now again, the ROI on that is astronomical. It doesn't cost me a lot to put it out there, but I can't say that my LinkedIn converted this many people. All I can say is, when I put out more LinkedIn posts, when I do more of it, it reaches more people. And when I reach more people, more of them visit my website, more of them follow me, more of them respond to my emails.

Speaker 2: 16:42

Good things happen all around, and I went from this world of trying to figure out attribution models and checking out measurement software and today I really am kind of on the other side of it, which is to say that, look, it's kind of a fool's errand to focus so much on attribution. Are good things happening? Are more good things happening? Are you getting more chances at bat when you spend on brand? And if you are, then you're doing something right. And if you aren't, you know if all that's been on brand is having a minimal effect on at bat. That's when you know that the activity within that is not working. Your creative is not working. Your creative is not working. Your messaging is muddled, you're targeting the wrong audience. Those are the kinds of things you start to figure out.

Speaker 1: 17:20

But as a whole, if you do it right, it should work. Yeah, I totally agree. I think the LinkedIn analytics the LinkedIn measurement and analytics is actually underutilized from a brand perspective and maybe if there was more employee-led branding, so when an employee becomes the actual part of the brand and they get to speak and you could look at their analytics on, you know how they're, how many followers they have, how how many people are commenting on their posts, that is seems like one of the new marketing benchmarks that sometimes sometimes really getting to look at it because it's all. It's all about click to conversion. But there's a whole, there's a whole host of engagement that happens before that conversion. That's trackable on LinkedIn. You can see it on LinkedIn. You can see what's happening. It's just, and that converts back to the site and you can track it on your site.

Speaker 1: 18:03

I was telling you before we got started about our YouTube journey and we really didn't do much on YouTube till the podcast started and the last few months here and I got a third of all of the traffic we've ever had and we didn't have much traffic. We got a third of our traffic in the first month of launching the YouTube channel. So it's just and what's incredible is the shorts. It's primarily the shorts that work and it's the weirdest topics on the shorts, like I did, one topic on a white paper, why white papers may not be the best piece of content to put out in those days. Then that got more than you know, talking to Scott Brinker or someone on that one week. It was just so. There are new marketing metrics that you can go after that maybe aren't as wonky as some of the demand gen metrics that you would have normally put out there, but they're. They may be more valuable in today's economy.

Speaker 2: 18:56

Yeah, absolutely, and that's great to hear. By the way, like I think you know the fact that you're because it's hard work right Putting yourself out there, but you put it out there I think it's fantastic that you're getting great results and sort of immediate impact. That's got to be really validating.

Speaker 1: 19:08

Yeah, it hasn't converted Like it's not converting to, it's converting to traffic on the site, I believe and this is something Jacob Banks said in the last podcast. But you got to as an entrepreneur, you can even as a business owner or marketing person. You got to. You got to go for the channels that you believe in and you just take some bets and it just seems so logical these days that you would have more people ignoring emails and ignoring ads and going more towards influencer led, slash, person, authentic voices in the space, and so that's what we're trying. It seems to be working. Were there any other surprising elements of the research that you found that we haven't talked about?

Speaker 2: 19:46

One thing that I thought was particularly interesting and I wasn't trying to find this out, but the difference between well, two things I'll tell you. But there's a big difference in companies that are selling to the enterprise versus companies that are not Selling to the enterprise is its own beast and everybody is trying to do it. Everybody's trying to move up market. But you can't sell to the enterprise with the setup of someone that's selling to SMBs or mid-market. Everything in my research show that companies that are selling to the enterprise, they spend more on sales versus marketing. They have more of a headcount. More of their marketing budget is invested in people rather than tools or programs. So it's very much kind of this fairly complex selling motion that takes a long time, it's not very rewarding and the benchmarks are completely out of whack for someone to sell into the enterprise. So if you're going to do the enterprise, be prepared for a whole new level of pain and complication. So that's one thing that was interesting to me. The second one how much?

Speaker 1: 20:45

before you get into the second one, how much more do they spend on sales? The sales organization versus marketing in selling to the enterprise Makes sense to me.

Speaker 2: 20:54

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 20:54

That they would.

Speaker 2: 20:55

Typically, if we see kind of a typical split it's about in a smaller company, it's about 60-40 in favor of sales. When you get to sort of mid companies like 50 to 100, it's about 35% marketing and 65. But if you're selling to the enterprise, the low end of that is 25% marketing and everything else sales. Enterprise, it goes all the way. The low end of that is 25% marketing and everything else sales. That's something that you kind of see is like a couple of things are probably happening at play there, which is that those companies are bigger and so they're going after bigger targets and when you're bigger you just spend more on sales. That's kind of the way it is. Because you're marketing, you know law of diminishing returns and all that doesn't mean that your budgets are smaller, it just means that you know sales is just yeah, and it's solution selling and you have account teams and all the larger sales organizations.

Speaker 1: 21:44

That makes sense. I'm sorry I interrupted you for the second. What was the second one?

Speaker 2: 22:03

more on their website. Those are all things that we can expect to see, but their growth rates are much more volatile than if you're sales-led growth, which is another way of saying that product-led growth is exciting but it's risky. Sales-led growth is boring, but it's a bit more dependable and so you can control the outcomes a little bit better. With sales-led growth it's like if you've got enough of a decent sales team, you can predict your growth by the kind of activities that you're doing. Product-led growth depends a lot on just kind of immediate product market fit, virality, word of mouth, having you know, unlocking that perfect feature on your website that causes people to convert and buy immediately. There's a lot more tinkering to do with product-led growth, so they have their floor of growth rates. There's a lot lower, but their high of growth rates is a lot higher, so there's a very big dynamic range in product-led growth companies.

Speaker 1: 22:49

Wow, this is so valuable. I can't. I mean, I gotta imagine people will want this research because product-led growth gets such a big. You know it's getting a renaissance, let's say there's a lot of people interested in it. It's kind of attractive. But I wouldn't have known how to quantify sales impact like actual revenue impact. One versus the other. That's just fascinating to me and I wonder if it's the maturity of the sales models versus PLG models. But yeah, it's really. Do you have a take on why one would be better, why PLG would be riskier?

Speaker 2: 23:24

I think it's because the sales motion is kind of a tried and tested motion. Right, you make enough calls, a certain number of those people will return your calls or emails and a certain number of them will buy your product. Run through a demo. People are used to buying that way, people are used to selling that way. But in order for you to sell your product without a sales team like just hope that they'll find you it depends on them searching for the right keywords. It depends on them. It depends on you showcasing the product that's immediately attractive. There's so many different variables to get right. With product-led growth, so you get it right. There's high growth, but most companies take a lot of time to get it right, and so there's a lot more tinkering.

Speaker 1: 24:02

Yeah, a really, really good answer, and I wouldn't have thought of that. But you're exactly right. That's exactly the reason. Where does this go? Like, what are you going to do with the research now that you've done it a couple of times, right, and now you can see the trend Like what's the next step in this?

Speaker 2: 24:19

I know you'll keep think there's still in the next round that I do. The next survey that I'm going to do is more on like performance-based metrics. So this means like cost of customer acquisition, cost per leads on different channels, and so this is more around. I'll get better answers to say that if you are spending on brand, which channels are working for you? And if you're spending on brand, what is the benchmark for what good looks like Versus. If you're not spending on brand, what's the benchmark for what good looks like? Those are the kinds of things that this survey, which is purely about how companies spend, the next survey, will answer a bit more about how they perform when they spend in this pattern, and I think that's important because it shows that.

Speaker 2: 24:56

Look in B2B, saas even though it's all SaaS, your goals are different and the matrix of goals are very different. You can be a midsize company that's chasing high growth. You can be a large company that just wants to consolidate its market share and it's not looking for high growth. You can be an incumbent. That's like $10 million and you need to grow like a bajillion percent in the next two years, depending on what your goals are. How should you think about investing in your channels and what channels are working versus not, and I think you know us talking about video. That's going to be a big play where we start asking about, like, what tactics are working. So there's video that exists on its own. There's video that lives in social media. That's now. There's now video that is embedded in your email marketing. So how well is that performing compared to all the static emails that you sent before? That's going to be really eye-opening and I'm excited for that.

Speaker 1: 25:46

Oh, that's going to be so cool. I mean, that is the question, because, let's say, you could convince your leadership team that you need to spend more Like. Then it's like, what do you do? What's actually going to work, and by company size, and that cool. And when you put that together, it'd be really interesting to look at tactics, newer tactics, because video is a is kind of a format, but that's. You know, how are you using video? Is it podcast, is it shorts, is it? You know all these other things because, because within each one of those tactics there's approaches, let's say, for, um, marketing. I just think marketing is going to change pretty significantly in terms of what works for brand and, and you just wonder if brand media is going to work as a primary tactic. Maybe it's a secondary, overlay tactic versus other things like what we're doing here. That will be a super interesting study. When will that come out?

Speaker 2: 26:41

That's going to come out in June. So if you follow me, know and this is if you, if you follow me on LinkedIn, just this is the time to message me and say, hey, this is what I want to find out in my next survey that you do, because I'm just about ready to launch that survey. I've got kind of the basic questions ready, but you know, this is the time to ask me what you want to find out.

Speaker 1: 26:58

Oh, that's going to be. That will be very interesting. I should have you back on when we, when we talk to you. That that'd be super cool.

Speaker 2: 27:04

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 27:05

Okay, I wanted to do one thing with you before I let you go here. I do a thing I've been doing, this thing called AI roulette, where I load your profile into perplexity, I give it the information we're talking, we're talking about today, and then I basically ask it to tell, to ask me a question. That's, you know, provocative, slash, disrupting, and so let me let me push send here and see what it says here and hopefully it will come back without too much. Okay, this is good. Okay, based on all your data and experience researching sass brands, what's the one thing sass marketers consistently obsess over that your research suggests doesn't actually matter?

Speaker 2: 27:41

oh, that's a really good one. Gosh, gosh, they obsess over so much. But yeah, I would go back to attribution. I think it's just if you woke up tomorrow and you said, and you were given permission to say that we're not gonna do any attribution, I suspect that your marketing wouldn't.

Speaker 2: 27:57

The success of your marketing wouldn't change much at all, I would hypothesize very strongly that if you ripped out whatever attribution software, whatever attribution dashboard, whatever it is that you have in your company, you ripped it out, you wouldn't lose much, Because the truth is you're already spending on certain activities.

Speaker 2: 28:15

You should track how those activities are performing. So, for example and not to toot my own horn but if you're, if you're, if you're getting less visits to your website, then a company that's of the same size has been around as long as you, probably not doing as well as you should be. If you're spending way more on your LinkedIn to acquire a lead than another company is, you're probably not doing as well as you should be. But having said that, if you are trying to attribute your success to a single channel, multiple channels, trying to track the journey across all those different things, I would say that that's the ultimate goal of marketing, which is to make more people aware of who you are, what you do, and to get them to your own properties to take some sort of quantifiable action. You would still probably be just as good as that as you were with attribution software.

Speaker 1: 29:03

Wow, to the dismay of attribution software providers everywhere, I don't know about you.

Speaker 2: 29:09

Have you seen one that's really been like yep, I believe this one.

Speaker 1: 29:12

And you don't-, no, no, no, no, and they're usually Omar. They're usually a reaction to someone downstream, like sales, asking for or taking credit for a lead and needing to then work it back up. So if you take that equation out of the mix the defense of like not defense, but working with sales to try to tell, hey, we gave you this then really it's just. It's just, it could be. I totally agree. It could just be activity based. It could be more visits to your site, less spending on ads, more followers on social channels. It doesn't need to be some complex system going downstream, but there's always the. You know, I feel the pain of my friends that are CMOs needing to try to justify when sales says we don't get any leads for marketing. They have to somehow justify it. But that's a great answer.

Speaker 1: 29:58

I'm always amazed how so I've done this like four times and perplexity does much better questions than I do every single time. It is quite impressive and it's a fun. Eventually I'll just do the podcast by, just like you, and I'll just be answering questions on perplexity, ai questions. I am super happy to have had you here. The research is just. You know, I love geeking out over this particular topic and you've put a voice to, I think, something that is unknown. You've made known what has been unknown in the past, which is really cool, and I'm very excited to see the next round of this. I'm going to urge everyone to follow you on LinkedIn. Go to your site, but I wanted to give you a chance. Is there anything that you would want people to do after watching this? How do they stay in touch with you other than those things? What's the best way?

Speaker 2: 30:46

Yeah well, first of all, thank you so much for having me up here. I can talk about this stuff all day long and it's a wonderful conversation to have with you, so I was excited when you sent me over the topics. I'm like, oh, this is gonna be a good one. So I really appreciate it and I enjoyed my hour with you.

Speaker 2: 31:02

For realists, if you want to follow me on LinkedIn, that's probably the easiest way. You know I'm perpetually online, more than I should be, and you know if you want to check out the website benchmarkerdatacom, we do it on a subscription based model. So if you want to just sign up and get the data and you want to cut the data, anybody you want we have a database. You don't have to talk to me or anybody you want. You can just come to the website and do it. You know I'm trying product-led growth as well as sales-led growth. Let's see how that goes. My goal really is to be the CMO's best friend in the boardroom so that they don't make decisions in the dark, and if I can do that, then I'm pretty happy about it.

Speaker 1: 31:34

Yeah, I think it's great. Like for me, it's a great quarterly planning tool. Right, you're just kind of redoing the plan or you're you're making, giving evidence for the plan that you're in maybe tweaking some stuff based on the data, but it's really fantastic. Omar, that's been awesome. I'll include all the socials and everything in the description here, but thank you so much for joining me and we'll. I hope we talk again soon. I'm counting on it. Thank you, kevin. Take care, okay, man, I'll see you.

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