Katya Allison (00:02):

Welcome to the GRIN Gets Real podcast, a show for marketers by marketers, to shock shop and share insights of the ever-changing landscape of the digital world. My name is Katya, and I am your host on this exciting journey as we talk to our experts who join us. GRIN is the number one creator management platform designed for the next generation of brands who recognize that in the creator economy, authenticity is everything. Now, to get insight on how GRIN can help you manage your creator strategy, visit grin.co. That’s grin.co.

(00:37):

My guest today is Steffen Hedebrandt. He is the CMO at Dreamdata, a revenue attribution platform that collects, joins, and cleans all the data to give an insightful value to your business. He’s a subject matter expert in connecting marketing activities with revenue and is a notorious growth hacker with a very successful track record of scaling businesses and building teams at Upwork and Airtame. Steffen knows the pain points of rapidly scaling marketing and growth firsthand. So put your air pods in, turn up that volume and get ready for my guest today, Steffen. Steffen, welcome to the GRIN Gets Real podcast. I’m really excited to be chatting with you today and really starting to dive into a little bit of the customer journey mapping, especially from sales to marketing.

Steffen Hedebrandt (01:32):

Thank you for the invite, Katya. And I’m super happy to be here.

Katya Allison (01:35):

Absolutely. All right. Well, let’s start with you, just sharing a little bit about just your experience with connecting marketing and sales departments together, like your experience with the customer journey. Tell me a little bit about you. You don’t have to start with kindergarten, just catch me up to now.

Steffen Hedebrandt (01:58):

Yeah. So from my professional career, ever since I finished university, I’ve always been working in B2B companies. And predominantly, B2B companies where the internet or digital played a large part of the go to market. So everything I’m saying here, I’m biased by that background. Then you can say, my interest in marketing and revenue being joined comes from pain, failures and then seeing what happens when you’re actually able to do that as well.

(02:30):

My first job out of university, I was part of a vintage music instrument platform, where local vendors could put up their music instruments. And then, it was super important that our guitarist and drums, et cetera, came first on Google when people are searching for these things. And we actually managed to do that exceptionally well and we grew the traffic super much. But what we didn’t manage to solve was actually to translate this increase in traffic. We have the six-digit traffic numbers organically from Google every month. But we didn’t manage to find a valuable enough proposition to the customers, which would be these local guitar shops and drum shops, et cetera. So we didn’t actually create enough revenue and essentially that business went out of business at some point. That really opened my eyes for you can be successful with different parts of the business, but if you don’t see that dollar from your work, then at some point you’re going to be in trouble.

Katya Allison (03:33):

Absolutely.

Steffen Hedebrandt (03:34):

But yeah, I’ve also seen the good parts when you’re actually able to find a connection between your marketing activities or at least a very closely related functionality between when you do stuff and then revenue comes out of it. Then you can make, essentially, you can make a whole company prosper because when you spend money in marketing, you can clearly see that more money comes in from it. And then they become almost like an investment where you just continuously want to put more money and you can just see the stock going up.

(04:03):

So it’s just been my experience that whenever it’s possible to show a quite clear impact on your company’s revenue, then you’re most likely a successful marketer. And also, speaking in these times where there’s a little bit more economic turmoil, maybe marketing isn’t going to get shut down as fast, or people are not losing their jobs as fast because it’s clear to see for the organization. Then when catcher Stephen does ABC, then they produce a revenue out of those activities. So that’s why I always… I’m a big speaker for trying to do as much as you can for finding that connection between your activities and producing the pipeline and revenue.

Katya Allison (04:46):

So I, as a marketer, love what you’re saying. I think ideally, it’s a language that all marketers know and understand this attribution trying to make those connections that you’re talking about, because it’s true. I wish that I could say, this is a really bad example, but this TV ad produced this dollar amount for my revenue, right?

Steffen Hedebrandt (05:10):

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Katya Allison (05:10):

This was the return on investment, but the truth is that that doesn’t always happen. We’re not always able to connect that one to one. If it was that easy. If it was that easy. We don’t have bigger marketing departments. So what do you say in the event of a marketer coming up to you and basically asking you, “Well, how do I chase down attribution for all of my marketing efforts to show that we should double down and invest in X, Y, Z?” Influencer marketing is a really great example of that. There’s always this chasing the dollar trying to figure out this return on investment on an influencer post. And while there are links and codes that are… that one to one connection, how do you measure that?

Steffen Hedebrandt (05:57):

That’s super hard. And there is definitely stuff where the direct link is close to impossible to do. Or at least you need to add a bit of guessing. And I think, the example that you give with influencers posting stuff on Instagram, as you say, some might click the link, but others would just hit, go directly to the Google and then type in whatever brand name that they just saw. And there it gets a little bit more unclear about what’s going on. But at least maybe you can try to be aware about what are at least the input sources you can say, or the activities that you carry out.

(06:33):

So keep an overview of, let’s say you’re running 10 influencers, making sure that you know at which time do these influencers actually do posts? So if stuff happens immediately after that, then you can at least say that there’s a clear correlation between when somebody posted and what happened afterwards. But it depends a lot on the different disciplines. If it’s in this world, where I come from, and most of our customers are, they are B2B companies and they have a large digital ad spend. And it’s easier when you have clicks pickup, then you can say, this click came to the website, they downloaded an ebook, and then two weeks later that company ended up buying or something like that.

(07:22):

And then there’s other activities like, you’re influencer marketing for example, where you also might want to be trying to record qualitative stuff. Where more mentions, like this person mentioned me, and then you as a marketer in your company, you should make sure to take that screenshot. So you have that screenshot, so you can tell your company that you have a narrative about this person with this audience posted this thing where they directly mentioned us. That’s a valuable piece for us.

Katya Allison (07:54):

Now, I absolutely agree. Now, before we dig into that, because I don’t want to get down that rabbit hole too far because I will go down there, because I have to follow questions to that. I do want to just go back to just the attribution of it all. There are a variety of attribution models. Which one do you think is ideal for a marketer? Or is it a combination or maybe there’s a time to use last click and there’s a time to use first click. But tell me about the attribution model.

Steffen Hedebrandt (08:27):

Before you apply any model, you want to make sure that you have as much data about the journey collected as possible. So any model you would apply to only, let’s say 5% of the journey is going to probably say something wrong. So if you only have very limited information about what journey is this person or this company actually taking, then whatever attribute model you select is most likely going to tell you something that is not true. But let’s say, in this state where you actually know a 100% of all the touches that took place, then you can talk about which attributes models to use.

(09:07):

I think if you have long journeys, so think complex products, typical B2B sales, then I would be very interested in these attribute models that look to describe some of the first touches, at least as a marketer. Because I want to understand what can I do more of that gets more of these customer journeys started. But if you have very, very short journeys for some B2C products, then it’s like less clicks might be just fine because it’s something you can make a decision upon within one click. In a very B2C world, if that’s my product, then I would be okay, just using a less click model for a lot of cases.

Katya Allison (09:49):

You bring up such a really good point. I know that this… when you say it now, it’s so obvious. If you do have a longer journey, which I think at least a majority of the brands that I’m talking to we’re not, we don’t ever have these attribution conversations, but I do think it’s really important to your point. To take a look at, what is it that you’re evaluating that are bringing people to, basically, to your front door, right?

Steffen Hedebrandt (10:16):

Yeah.

Katya Allison (10:16):

And then how you’re nurturing them along, just the customer journey. With brands that you work with, do you find yourself having to educate people on just attribution in order to have that next level discussion of like, “All right, now these are the qualitative and these are the quantitative metrics that we’re going to take a look at so that we can really prove. Or at least identify where we’re getting the most revenue.”

Steffen Hedebrandt (10:43):

Yes. It is definitely a topic where you need to train the organization and you need to go from thinking single touch to multi-touch. And what that means is that most customer journeys have a lot of touches involved. Even though your data is saying he clicked here and then they bought, they might have been exposed to five influencers before they clicked the ad, or they might have read the newspaper or watching YouTube or stuff like that. A lot of things lead up to that decision, for some products that are super complex. And then there is the $50 sandal, that an influencer posts about, this is something that you can make a decision upon on the spot and buy it. Here, I can fairly expect that the journey’s going to be very short, so I want to see an effect of that click immediately.

(11:33):

Whereas for our average customers, the journey from first touch to when you buy something is six months or something like that. So when you come very late in that journey, it’s much more the work of a salesperson than it’s a click on a Facebook ad or a Google ad or a LinkedIn ad. And when the journeys are along, that’s when I think it’s super interesting to understand, are there any of the first touches that we can replicate, just get started, more customer journeys.

Katya Allison (12:02):

Yeah. Bringing more people at the top of the funnel, right?

Steffen Hedebrandt (12:06):

Yeah. And bring the right kind of people into the top of the funnel.

Katya Allison (12:09):

Very well. Exactly. And then it’s not just a numbers game, right? It’s really evaluating the quality of leads that you’re getting through the front door, the quality of the web traffic that you’re getting.

Steffen Hedebrandt (12:22):

Exactly.

Katya Allison (12:22):

Do you see, this is going to sound like a strange question, but do you see a trend of where certain brands stop to nurture the customer throughout the journey? If we’re looking at it in comparison to the marketing funnel, for instance, right? There’s a lot of top of funnel, which to me is the beginning of a customer journey, that middle of the funnel, which is the education piece, and then you actually make a sale. Do you see that there is a trend of where brands need the most help?

Steffen Hedebrandt (12:57):

I’ve given a little bit up on funnel thinking just because I-

Katya Allison (13:00):

Tell me, why? Why have you given up on funnel thinking?

Steffen Hedebrandt (13:05):

It’s very nice to think that there’s such a thing as a funnel where people do A, B, C, D, E, F, G. But I just think for a lot of cases, B2C as B2B, it’s not that rational or it takes longer time. So I think, my best advice is just to continuously post quality content in front of your target audiences, because at least when you talk about B2B then people are not necessarily in market right now. Typically, you say it’s only 1% to 3% of your total market that are out buying right now, if that’s true. Then you just want to continuously stay up top of mind with top quality content that inspires them, makes them smarter, or makes them laugh. So when they’re at that point of time where they’re looking to buy samples or an ice cream or a B2B software, then it’s your brand name that is on top there.

Katya Allison (14:01):

What you’re saying makes complete sense. I also love that you’re going away from funnel thinking. I probably will never go away from funnel thinking but I’m right there with you-

Steffen Hedebrandt (14:10):

That will be me there.

Katya Allison (14:12):

I know, you have to.

Steffen Hedebrandt (14:12):

Yeah.

Katya Allison (14:13):

But I’m right there with you too, to think that it’s as simple as going from the top to the bottom. I also think that there are a lot of just marketing initiatives that are very top of funnel with the expectation of bottom of funnel performance, right?

Steffen Hedebrandt (14:27):

Yeah.

Katya Allison (14:28):

I am going to show them this ad and they are going to want to purchase. And then we’re always forgetting this like, “Why would they purchase based on this?” Do you make purchases based on that? You don’t. You make purchases after seeing something so often. So now, my follow up question to that is, while in theory that makes sense, I think as a marketer we’re in a really tough position to say, “Hey, let’s spend more time on the quality content. Let’s spend more time on the brand awareness because it’s going to feed into the customer journey that’ll ultimately make the sale.” So how am I going to prove marketing works from a brand awareness perspective, if it’s not bringing in the revenue right away? Or is there something I should start tracking with brand awareness so that I can tie it back to that revenue dollar?

Steffen Hedebrandt (15:20):

Yeah. One of the advices that I keep repeating is if you’re in doubt whether something works, it probably doesn’t. If you don’t have the-

Katya Allison (15:31):

Oh, no.

Steffen Hedebrandt (15:34):

… feel that the light starts blinking or you see your workshop is telling you there’s more sales than usual in absence of these things, you need to start thinking critical about whether it’s a good idea you do this or not. But actually, then today, a technical answer to what you’re saying here is that there is actually starting to be a lot more technologies available that can help. I’m sure that at GRIN you do some of these things as well, but-

Katya Allison (16:03):

Yeah. Oh, for sure.

Steffen Hedebrandt (16:04):

… just this thing as, that’s called customer data platforms nowadays, that can continuously write down the behavior of what is catching you doing. So initially, you would just be somebody anonymous and then they’ll keep a lock of what are you doing while you are anonymous. And then at some point as you identify yourself, either when you complete a purchase order or download an ebook or whatever you do, then they get the identity of you that they can join together with what you did while you were anonymous, and even with your consent to do it. So you might have had 10 visits to that website before you bought anything, and they might actually have a logbook of those 10 visits.

(16:44):

There are technical stuff that makes it easier nowadays. But again, it depends very much on how your buyer journeys are. If I’m a Rolex or Mercedes or something like that, try sponsoring Wimbledon or a Formula One.

Katya Allison (17:01):

Exactly. Exactly. I guess that’s what I’m talking about. But you’re also talking about brands that have built up so much brand equity, that their name is just synonymous with something, right?

Steffen Hedebrandt (17:11):

Yeah.

Katya Allison (17:12):

Like Rolex, it’s synonymous with this class and all of that stuff. So I think, for myself, I’m always wondering, obviously, like you said, we all want the sales, but what you’re talking about that brand awareness and building brand equity. How do you prove out the value of this brand equity from a data standpoint? How do you prove that it’s helping the customer move?

Steffen Hedebrandt (17:35):

It needs to be like a game of ping-pong between what are the activities that you’re carrying out and what happens in the time after. And then you continuously as a team need to talk about, we did these things, we saw this effect, now we’re going back and trying some more of this thing. But I think it’s us as marketers, we really, really need to try to explain what’s going on because we are spending a lot of money on behalf of the company. So we should also really, really care about our activities, whether they’re worth it or not.

Katya Allison (18:09):

Yeah. I mean that definitely makes sense. In your experience then, we’ve been talking about the marketer’s flight on attribution, but how do the sales and the marketing team need to connect or synergize, that sounds so cheesy. But essentially, how do they need to connect so that they’re working together and not in silos?

Steffen Hedebrandt (18:32):

This is something we talk a lot about in our company and in B2B in general. Because in B2B, then marketing can only attract or create the demand. They still need the salespeople to talk to the customers and maybe go through months of negotiations and explaining before you sell anything. So if those two people are not speaking to each other, you quite often risk coming into a very bad place. We, typically, talk about the importance of sales marketing alignment, and what we basically mean by that is that we should actually, with our time and money, try to support each other.

(19:10):

So low practical examples can be the salesperson walking into the marketing room and telling the marketing people, look, the customer calls. The meetings I like the most are with companies that look like A, B, C, D. This size, it’s this role. They’re from California or they’re from New York, or stuff like that. So they very clearly describe, these are the people I like to talk with. And the marketers need to go out and base whatever activities they’re doing based on trying to attract this particular persona. Because of the opposite way, marketing can be attracting the perfect personas to sell to, but if the salespeople never actually pick up the phone or answer their emails that come in, then all the money you put into marketing is probably or likely wasted. It’s a responsibility on both sides to make sure that everybody’s trying to pull into the right… the same direction.

Katya Allison (20:13):

So I love that you’re saying that because well, I 100% believe that. I think it’s a team effort, and so often marketing’s left in this island of like, “Well, they’re doing a lot of stuff?” But how is that helping me as a salesperson? Especially in B, what’s the equivalent in B2C then? Is listening to your customer, is it understanding… or B2C and even D2C, right?

Steffen Hedebrandt (20:37):

Yeah.

Katya Allison (20:37):

What’s the equivalent of connecting with your sales department? Is it connecting with the exact level of… or the overall business strategy? What is that equivalent in B2C, D2C?

Steffen Hedebrandt (20:53):

Yeah. That’s a good question, Katya. And I think in the differences in B2C, we as individuals can make the buying decision quite fast. So the ads that we run, the posts we buy from influencers, they actually have an immediate effect. So there’s not always a salesperson involved in this. So the marketing activities should, hopefully, have an immediate effect on your revenue going up, people coming into the web shop and buying certain items after you run the ads.

Katya Allison (21:20):

Yeah. That makes sense. What kind of technology would I want to make sure that I have in place, to be able to map out my customer journey so that I can really create that customer journey map that leads me down to the island of revenue.

Steffen Hedebrandt (21:37):

To make me a runner.

Katya Allison (21:38):

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Steffen Hedebrandt (21:41):

Actually, if you think about a customer journey from before anybody has heard about you until they’ve bought your product. What are all the places that your brand are touching these, your customer? And if it doesn’t leave a digital trace, the touches that you have with your customers, then it’s very hard for you to map what’s actually going on. So we can take some practical call examples. Let’s say you have a phone number on your website and this phone number just goes into your own mobile phone, which doesn’t leave any trace that you talked with Steffen on this date or anything like that. Then that touch, you can’t really map it anywhere because it’s not recorded. It could be that you just send emails from your personal Gmail account, not using a marketing automation tool. Then you can’t see which emails did you send to this customer, did they click it, et cetera.

(22:37):

The same with, I’m sure with GRIN as well, that you get a good list of which influences posted which piece of content for you. And if you actually don’t have that trace that some of these things took place, then you can’t go back and try to put all these pieces into the journey. And then what we do with our technology, but what people can do themself as well is that we pull all of this data into one data warehouse, into one big bucket, and then we try to sketch out a timeline of this took place in this date, and then the next day we saw them was this date. So you can try to pull out the data out of all the silos and map into one timeline.

Katya Allison (23:17):

Well, and as a marketer, I think I just love data warehouses because I’m pulling… Well, because I’m pulling from 12 different places, right?

Steffen Hedebrandt (23:26):

Yeah.

Katya Allison (23:26):

Because me, I think of it from a distribution channel standpoint. If I’ve got my influencers in one, I also have my email strategy, I have my website strategy. I have my experiential strategy with events and whatnot. And then I’ve got my entire paid advertising. And maybe on top of that there’s CRL, and on top of that there are other initiatives, right?

Steffen Hedebrandt (23:47):

Yeah.

Katya Allison (23:48):

So it sounds like the best solution is to pull all of that information. If not, it sounds like you would be living in a ginormous spreadsheet of I’ve pulled it from here, I’ve pulled it from there. Yeah.

Steffen Hedebrandt (24:02):

Yeah. Basically, any interaction you have with the customers, try to make it, have a digital reflection. And once you have that in place, get it all into one place and start cleaning it up and organizing it so you can see what’s actually going on.

Katya Allison (24:15):

How do you feel about the iOS update and marketers living up that cookie list life? Because you’re talking about having that digital footprint, and then there’s this real worry, especially, from something that has worked before in the past, all of these paid social and these programmatic things. So what do you say to that?

Steffen Hedebrandt (24:34):

I remember the good old days where you can retarget on Facebook for 180 days. It was hot not to make marketing work for a short period because you can just put traffic on your website and then retarget for 180 days on Facebook. So I miss these days. I think that forever it’s going to be a little bit of a cat and mouse game of different things, stop working on other things-

Katya Allison (24:57):

Amazing, right?

Steffen Hedebrandt (25:00):

… starts working. I think those who are most in trouble are actually the ad platforms because ad platforms per se, sit on the outside, trying to understand what takes place on the website and what revenue comes out of it. And that’s what I’m saying… like with these customer data platforms, they sit in the middle and then they can look at the click came from Facebook and then they went on to buy inside the Shopify e-commerce system. Whereas Facebook is on the outside, they might have a pixel on their website, but that gets deleted super-fast. So there is, I think, I’m seeing more and more solutions to this pain, but not for the ad platforms. I follow different kinds of podcasts as well to try to get smarter on it all the time.

Katya Allison (25:44):

Well, I think it’s tough, for me, I’m always going to push more influencer marketing because that’s evergreen. It doesn’t have to have a cookie. People are watching people.

Steffen Hedebrandt (25:54):

Yeah. I was just about to say, if you just make sure that the audience is the right audience for your company, then you don’t have to one-to-one measure everything. As long as it’s the right people who continuously get the right message, then you’re bound to see it working at some point.

Katya Allison (26:15):

That’s true. That’s very true.

Steffen Hedebrandt (26:17):

Or you have a bad product or stuff like that.

Katya Allison (26:20):

Well, then there’s a whole other list of things that you needed to go through. It’s not always marketing, it is the product, it’s the company’s values, the whole nine yards.

Steffen Hedebrandt (26:28):

Yeah. It’s not overall fault, all of it.

Katya Allison (26:33):

It’s not a promise. Okay, so at this point, it’s prediction time. I’d love to hear what you see just changing for marketers in the next year, next year, next year or two. And what kind of changes do you see?

Steffen Hedebrandt (26:45):

It seems like that this economic turmoil, I don’t know how it is in your industry, but in our tech startup industry, there’s a lot of concerns about this economic turmoil coming up. And I think if there’s less budgets, less optimism, we are going to see a bigger and bigger push for stuff like attribution or more plainly explained, why are we spending money on these things? What are we getting out of spending money here? So a push for efficiency out of all activities that goes for sales, product and marketing. And I think as this episode comes out, I think if you’re not already starting about… thinking about how to prove the value of your work, you should definitely start. Because the worst situation is that you’re caught off guard and then the CFO comes and says, “Ah, I think we’re going to cut your budget with 50%.” And you’re like, “Okay.” So you need to assume that responsibility of explaining we’re doing these things and we are doing it because of this and this, and I think we see this kind of outcome of it. So be prepared for efficiency questions about everything you do.

Katya Allison (27:54):

I love that prediction because it is true. You have to not just prove that you are getting revenue, but there is a method to the madness. There’s a reason that you’re going down this path as a marketer. It could be brand awareness, it could be building brand equity. But you have to be able to… like to your point earlier on, as you said, have the qualitative with the quantitative as well too. And sometimes, it’s a little more balanced on the qualitative side, this is the… look at all of these places that we’re at this name recognition, this provides value, this is why we’re doing it.

Steffen Hedebrandt (28:32):

I could imagine, if you do it well with the right influences, then you start also seeing micro influencers coming inbound, asking for-

Katya Allison (28:40):

Absolutely true.

Steffen Hedebrandt (28:41):

… can I also like-

Katya Allison (28:43):

That’s a good point.

Steffen Hedebrandt (28:43):

… takes screenshots of those mails that come as qualitative proof that we’re definitely getting our product shown in front of the right or through the right people.

Katya Allison (28:54):

Oh, I love that. We’re getting more inbound. I do. I have a lot of love this early in the morning as we’re recording, but I mean-

Steffen Hedebrandt (29:02):

Coffee is working.

Katya Allison (29:03):

It is. It’s working. I had a little cough attack earlier, now I’m prepped. I got coffee in my system. But it is true, I think that that’s a very great qualitative way to show that what you’re doing from an awareness standpoint really does impact. I think from an influencer side, for sure like, “Hey, we’re getting more inbound requests to partner with us.” But I also think at a more macro level for any brand, it’s your direct traffic to your website, right?

Steffen Hedebrandt (29:35):

Yes.

Katya Allison (29:35):

You should see those numbers elevate, if you’re building up that brand equity and it’s taking a look at all of those channels as well too. Well, Steffen, this has been fantastic, enlightening. I appreciate you. I know we have moved this around a few times, so I really appreciate you taking the time just to come and talk to me about marketing and the customer thing.

Steffen Hedebrandt (29:58):

Yeah. Favorite topic.

Katya Allison (30:01):

Same.

Steffen Hedebrandt (30:02):

Yeah.

Katya Allison (30:02):

Well, thank you again so much.

Steffen Hedebrandt (30:04):

Thank you, Katya.

Katya Allison (30:08):

As a marketer, I am always interested in talking about attribution and chasing down the data to prove ROI in something. What really stood out for me in this particular podcast episode is how the customer journey informs that attribution model that as marketers we’re always talking about. But not only that, I also really like that he said, “Without knowing or really understanding the customer journey, whatever data that you’re looking at could possibly not be true.” It puts a ton of weight on that marketer to truly have their ducks in a row to get the revenue numbers they’re looking for with the strategies that they’re implementing.

(30:48):

Want to hear more? Be sure to subscribe to the GRIN Gets Real podcast, to get the latest episodes. Give us some stars, or better yet, share your favorite episode in a review. Connect with me on social, you can find me on LinkedIn, Katya Allison. And if you are interested in learning more about GRIN, visit our website @grin.co. That’s grin.co. Until next time. Keep grinning.