Streamline your it customer lifecycle funnel with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

[Music] cool okay then it's 11 40 now we're gonna start now so um welcome with me luanna human from striker who's the head of demand uh and she's gonna talk about a very fancy topic actually i really like the title so right at the end of the funnel why it all starts with the full customer's life cycle in mind um and yeah so uh your aluana will take over and uh one question here please write your questions in the chat we're gonna answer them at the end of the session and then we can go through that okay over to you thank you thuy so hi from me as well um [Music] so yeah as we mentioned um today is about uh why there's always light at the end of the funnel and why it all starts with the whole customer life cycle in mind and just to kick off and there's going to be a little survey during my talk so feel free um to say um about your experience of the customer life cycle and i'd be keen to discuss that later as well all right um so sorry am i yeah all right so i'm luanna and i've been in marketing for 11 years so working in the startup world and working for corporates and have been yeah seeing a lot of different marketing actions evolve so as you can imagine 11 years ago that was very different to what it is today and have been at spiker for about three years so i'm kind of a striker veteran by now i guess and also seen that evolve a lot which was super exciting and there's still a lot of exciting things happening as you will see now and at striker i built up content marketing and now since recently we also have defined the area demand generation there so what is this talk going to be about um first of all i want to tell you a little bit about approach that we had before 2020 um kind of a thought leadership approach and then i want to talk a little bit about the relevance of the funnel from our point of view and what new formants perform new formats perform best and then um why it's been working out for us so well so before 2020 we focused on a thought leadership approach meaning that we wanted to be like an influencer so you have domain expertise and people come to you because they want to find out all about e-commerce all about you know the innovative topics that are on the market so we would write about car commerce we would write about smart home and this was super cool um so many of you might also know alex graf and who is exactly that like he's an incoming e-commerce influencer and he's also our ceo so we kind of worked as a synergy there as well so it worked super well on the awareness level and so we got a lot of contacts into our database through this approach but then where were the tons of deals and why were things taking so long so for example our sales process i'm also it's deals took 12 to 18 months to close which is um okay for many b2b businesses but we thought there has to be a faster way so we're like wait there's something missing we didn't look at the whole funnel we basically produced a lot of content to create awareness but that was not necessarily close to the actual product or to the software need so what we then did is look at the whole funnel including lead gen nurturing sales outreach and defined you know what are these channels what can we use and also what is the right content at what stage to drive this forward and of course by whole customer life cycle it's that stage from you know when you first become aware of striker as a brand to becoming a lead to being nurtured etc and then once you become a customer to also repeat that process because of course also for customers it's all about you know maintaining awareness of what value they're getting through our product so this continues even after customers or deals get closed but i'm gonna focus more on the sales part of the funnel today so awareness channels so these are the channels that we are using um of course paid and owned i guess is a common term for you so here um yeah just all the paid media that you guys probably all know about as well and in the owned media what is a bit more special i guess is that we have our own podcast um which we have found on the one hand to drive awareness but we're also sneakily using it as a sales tool so meaning that if you have a lead we may also send it to the podcast guest list um just to kind of keep them warm or to get foot in the door and then shared media so this is kind of a middle ground between owned and earned meaning that we have more access to these resources so that kind of shared and um for this we use our huge partner network of many fantastic uh solution partners technology partners and also carson sona the blog of our ceo alex graf and that's been working really really well for us as well and yeah of course external events influences and one good thing that came out of this year is that we saw it doesn't have to be a physical external event to drive awareness so we teamed up with for example internet world or with the k5 and we basically drove the event format in a webinar shape so that worked really really well for us a lot of brand awareness on through these channels and that's also something that i would recommend to you um yeah and then on the urn side i guess um what's special to us in the b2b space and as a software brand is that we work very closely with analyst firms so we work with gartner forester idc and also um started recently looking at review platforms so g2 dress radios gartner peer review so these are also quite useful channels to keep in mind if you're in a similar space and then for lead gen um kind of similar channels but of course also our website and um we saw a very interesting correlation which is that the more investment we put on paid media the higher the traffic on our website so it's not only the direct um leads that you can convert through paid ads but there's also an indirect effect that pushes brand traffic which is really cool so website is a very important channel for that and also because it's one of the better performing um channels then nurturing um so we have again media that you can leverage for example through retargeting and our own media also pretty classic i would say like of course on the website you can continue nurturing we have our automated email journey and then also webinars are a good way to do that right and then once um you define your channels so in our case that's quite a lot already i would say um you have to come make them come to life and for us what we did a little bit different this year is that we focused on core themes that we pursued the whole year so kind of the topics that represent spiker that are winning strategies to businesses because also this year and then especially with corona like these also match what companies needed as a winning strategy this helped us to have that consistent message to the outside so it was all about acting fast going direct so reducing independencies owning your growth and then preparing for a post corona world and so now i want to share an example for each of the channels um with the example of the d2c push that we did and so just telling you a little bit about how we did it and here you see the channels we use so we did a mix of organic and paid social media for awareness and um on linkedin we did a little bit of an interactive post game so you had to click through to see what d2c type you are so that performed really well we had um over 15 engagement on that one which was definitely above average and we produce video formats and then of course very important i mean you've all seen it also for the pycon i'm just tagging tagging big brands dragging collaboration partners so that always adds that extra bit of reach for you i'm collecting leads so here's a really really cool i can only recommend you um so conversation ads on linkedin are for us a great league converter so the way it happens is like you send a sponsored email to people and it's basically a chatbot reaching out but we wrapped it as such a clear message as well so the user knows okay it's a chatbot talking to me and then at first you get different options you can just click and download so we either convert them through that or if somebody is really interested and they would respond and then they will also get a prompter for personal meeting invite and that has been working so so well for us so we had ctrs of over 40 on our different campaigns and with not bad pricing so i think like this is something that if you haven't tried it yet like i would absolutely recommend that to you and moving on on the nurturing space so of course you can send automated emails one thing that has been working really well for the d2c thing here is to think okay people had exposure to certain aspects of d2c and now bringing it together in a webinar with hands-on tips and you could also invite more people etc that also help spreading it right but just to nurture people with an additional topic recommendation can help you a lot and then last but not least um once our contacts are on the stage where we hand them over to sales and also to provide them with talking points and assets that they can send um we have some materials that again match the d2c topic so yeah then you are at the stage where hopefully you close the deal but of course it's all a roller coaster um so the deal cycle itself will have probably been like that and then as i mentioned once you close the deal it all starts again so it's not stopping here but it's a journey that always continues so what did we learn today um basically following this strong funnel overview and having this fixed themes and we definitely have a better overview of what is working in the funnel and what needs to be optimized um we basically hit a record new arr which was also of course a nice side aspect and we decreased our sales funnel down to 6 to 12 months which again from 18 months is also quite a good achievement so yeah that was basically it in a nutshell from my side um super curious to hear what you thought um how things are going on your end and then to discuss more and also do reach out to me on linkedin um send me an email if you like i'm very happy to hear from you thank you luana um so guys uh feel free to to ask your questions or you can also uh grab the mic otherwise i'm just going to read out the questions that i bring in the chat so louis valley was asking how do you track through the whole funnel in different channels any good tips um so basically uh we use different tools um we have a hubspot um on the side where as a marketing automation tool where we collect um the contacts and nurture them to mqls and then once the sales process starts it gets handed over to salesforce so basically and then for um the interpretation to feed everything together we also use tableau so this gives us very nice charts of you know whatever you want to know like if it's the pipeline value if it's you know what is the best performing source uh what is the best performing asset so i would recommend you definitely in hubspot you can do a lot um but a tool like probably salesforce is even a bit better or tableau would definitely help you with that okay cool thank you then the next question is from felix at what point do you decide to call potential leads provided you have a phone number sorry the question was at one point yeah exactly at what point do you decide to call potential needs provided well like given that you or assuming that you would have a phone number yes yeah so that's a good point um because also at the point uh when it was about deciding what forms go on our lead form we said it has to be a phone number um because it just takes that threshold of getting that phone number right and for us the stage comes when um we've scored them to an mql status so for example downloading content that's very close to the product very close to the software need if they requested a meeting and that sort of thing like gets you higher scores and then once you hit mql stage the league gets handed over um to our bdr team then they would actually reach out and call or call leads just to also qualify them so that's the easiest okay cool thank you the next question is from gonzalo uh he's saying amazing presentation first we are now also advertising to entire companies in the late stages of our pipeline to drive awareness in the company and external conversion rates so a little bit going into the direction of abm have you tried doing this to deals in your pipeline and have you seen it having any effect um yeah very good question and i think abm is definitely a very hot topic and however it is nothing for quick wins so um selecting a few companies that you think you know they they would qualify for you they are in need of your product and identifying the right stakeholders etc and then starting to have personalized um tailored content for them that's something we haven't started in that much detail and we have done avm in a kind of smaller scale so focusing on certain company groups and certain verticals and then reaching out to them um and i think if you wanted to go with a very personalized approach and just from what what the stories are whatever is like i would definitely recommend you to also then get a tool that can help you on the stakeholder stage you know how are they engaging what stage are they at what's the status of you know the account executive and that um contact or lead at that stage i'm communicating if however you wanted to do it in a bigger way and just have like top um accounts in a certain vertical that's relevant then probably you can also do that in and have spot in salesforce okay well the next question is uh from uh jan and then we have to move to wonder uh did you follow a multi-channel approach or was this project predominantly based on linkedin um so the question was if we're following a multi-channel approach following linkedin mostly uh yeah because i think well actually uh yeah exactly yeah okay yeah so for us linkedin definitely makes the most sense so we do use for example instagram a lot for branding and even hr purposes but linkedin for us makes the most sense i guess it depends um where your target audience is if it's more live stuff it's more b2b for b2b i guess linkedin does work the best and also better i think sync for us even though we have a lot of um german customer base at this point um but yeah i think it makes sense to focus and for us linkedin is quite crucial yeah okay cool so the time is up we only have one minute left um i ask everyone to please join us and wonder if you feel that your questions haven't been answered yet which is actually quite a lot um and yeah and then we can meet them cool um anything on the survey or yeah sorry the results from the story unfortunately disappeared but uh like so basically the first answer uh we have to get on top of that it did have by far the highest rate and then the second and only a few actually tipped for the last one all right cool yeah so i thank you very much then very happy to do that okay cool then um cool then let's move everyone to uh wonder and uh in case that luana or i um need a little bit more time please be patient okay see you then [Music] so [Music] you