The Future of Adtech | B2B Rocks

welcome everybody August 29th hey Demitri welcome nice too great to have everybody here on August 29th weather's cooled down somewhat in Europe that that's that's always nice uh tell us a little bit about your yourself how you came to start your company well um this is not the first company for me uh so my previous company was called Global logic and it was was uh you know pretty successful iar firm it was acquired by Hitachi like two years ago for 9 billion so it's pretty pretty sizable business uh at the moment when you know it was acquired um and um yeah the the reason I kind of created inut was that um I was you know thinking how can you know Global logic was more successful in jobs of know marketing and you know like specifically B2B marketing is

to me is not very efficient I started my career in tiing in consumer marketing and you know I work with companies like caola McDonald's the known you know this kind of uh like large consumer consumer goods companies and when when we started Global logic um my my idea was that probably we should use kind of similar ideas that work for consumer marketing for B2B but it didn't so honestly know we buil quite quite big company but not thanks to the marketing effort it's more you know to thanks to you know sales and you know other things that we did but marketing was not very efficient uh Frankly Speaking uh so and that kept me thinking what what else could we do how could we change what we're doing to to make marketing trly work for B2B to make it really Drive sales to make it have tangible impact in revenue and that's basically how how I came up is uh is is a cons of

INF okay so you you start inflow 2 um six years ago now right y did you start off well capitalized then I guess we using part of your your treasure chest from selling Global logic to start the company yes yes um well obviously you know like if you start a new business it's always have to have some you know like nothing goes pretty as predicted so you want to have some you know savings and you know to be sure that you know when things go hard you still have some you know backup plan good that way you can make sure you get a nice nice night sleep um so you started six years ago and the idea was to use advertising more effectively for B2B companies yeah exactly yeah yeah so so actually uh I wasn't the only founder uh

my co-founder Vladimir uh be kind of brainstormed about like I I told him you know like you know advertising doesn't work for B2B and it's kind of very disappointing because I love advertising as you know as as as a discipline but also I think advertising itself is pretty you know fascinating I would say media and fascinating piece of art as well sometimes so you know adzing can really go to the level that you know it can be Masterpiece just like Cinema or books or you know um you know like I really love advertising and honestly again like it didn't work for us um back in globic times and I sh this Serv with my co-founder and he said but it's he said me it's is possible to solve and I didn't believe him honestly so he had really interesting technical ideas how can we potentially solve this problem uh and the main problem was that you you basically you don't advertise to the people you want to advertise to right so you advertise to wrong people

wrong audiences and this is the main reason why people hate advertising like some people really hate advertising I think the main reason for this is because they just see wrong advertising right so if advertising is not targeted towards you it doesn't speak to your needs um it doesn't resonate with you that what makes you you know hated right um and he basically his idea was hey but we can you know we can Target specific individuals you can actually deliver ad to specific people just like you send emails or call people and to me it sounded impossible so we we had some ideas how can we potentially build this and we spent like six months trying to build this technology and it turned to be working uh and that's how you do emerged okay so I mean often I when I think of advertising I think of that really on the the early side of the sales cycle but it sounds like with influ from what what I looked at at your website it it's really integrated into the the whole sales and marketing process that right or yeah yeah exactly

exactly so we really think that you know I think again like there are really different situations and consumer ads your like life like your sales cycle is short right you don't even talk about Sal cycle sales Cycles in consumer marketing or e-commerce because you really sell your product within like minutes or hours while in case of you know B2B you can really spend six eight months 12 months selling your service or product and then in this case you know like the fact that marketing people only care about generating leads is insane to me because you know lead generation is tiny piece of of the whole effort and you can just you know you know stand back and and you know hand it off to sales people and and stop worrying about building this relationship as soon as as there is some initial interest in the form of has been generated right so I mean like the fact you have a lead is a starting point and it's a long journey and you want to

support your sales process throughout the journey and help sales people win the deals not just you know generate lead and yeah that's and by the way this is not something we thought about initially when we built INF to like the technology was just about how can we target specific individuals but as we you know offer this to our clients and looked at how they use our technology and we try to use our own technology ourself we realize that definitely marketing can drive sales not just you know generate leads but also drive you know sales Pipeline and and help to win deals by just continuing this um influence throughout the sales Journey yeah so I took some time and read some of your your content and your success stories I think as a former salesperson what really interested me was they were talking about complicated sales Cycles where you have multiple buyers and so you could map out the buyers and begin influencing the

different buyers um at the different stages they are at the journey and depending on what their interest was whether financial side or what have you and I think you know when you're in a in a really complex sales cycle that's one of the things is kind you want to be present in the account omnipresent ideally uh and it's hard to get FaceTime all those people so I I guess using the platform you're able to Target with with right content exactly and especially this is true when you think about the structure of your typical buying group uh so when you do account planning you you you think okay there's like here's a champion that will I know for example but also there are people in procurement there are you know people you know like senior decision makers who will be you know making decision to allocate budget uh lots of Gatekeepers throughout the process and you just you know like when when you do complex sales you think about all these people and you design your buying group it's virtually impossible to build relationship with this people outside of sales calls where

they invited to right and obviously you know like you you talk to a champion your Champion supports you you're lucky if you have you know two Champions but still you have Senior Team uh you have Finance you have procurement who who like you you there's no way you can connect to those people in in most most cases right and you know if if these people just read about your company um if this people you know read your I mean it could be just you know overall know thought leadership content you know read about how you think about the industry or successful case studies anything any relevant content that just build helps to build trust with these people is crucial because these people especially later in the sales process they can can become The Gatekeepers that will prevent you for from closing the deal and if by that moment they they know about your companies they trust your company it's a huge thing right it's very hard to measure this impact because

obviously um it's like but every exposure like this every every engagement with this you know later stage buying group members is crucial to to make the deal successful and by the way we we we also measure this as well now but we spend like six months sorry six years trying understand how can you even tackle this problem yeah I was actually talking with someone on your team and they were talking about that you guys are really data driven on the ROI side and and you're trying to show your customers or you're able to show your customers how they can benefit from using the situation what things are you tracking with as far as on the data side to show them well our initial idea was that we we just need to track the engagements and you know pass this information to our clients and they will be able to kind of make sense of what is happening so basically the initial you know offering was hey we we can Target the specific people your prospects that you have in your Salesforce or house Po and

and and and basically all the buying group members and if someone is clicking on your ads you will be able to tell who clicked on this ad if someone is engaging with your ad spend spending some significant time on the landing page stuff like this you will all have this information all this information your in your CRM right so this is kind of core data infrastructure we provide to make this decisions and to make this models but also on top of this we realize that many customers just don't have enough time or discipline or resources to make sense of this data so we they can of provide this kind of second layer okay if you don't have time for this fine here's how we think about your results in your buyer journey of your buyers and now we we ALS also provide what we call Revenue analysis where we just try to understand how this data connects to the revenue results and if if they manage to achieve some you know tangible impact on their sales pipeline or actually manage to win some additional deals we we just help

them to point you know just point fingers to hey this deals that you want like you we really influence this deals right and again like you can trace back to the specific you know engagement that we generated so it's it's not just you know us claiming some someone else you know like uh success but we can actually traes to specific engagement with specific people that we manage to influence and and that helped to ultimately lead to a situation when they want this Qui so how how how would I Target someone would I just like right click on their name in my CRM have them get targeted under my ads and I have their profile information and what have you um well so I think um we need to switch shoes little bit because normally uh it's done by marketing or Revenue operations steams so like as a salesperson like salesperson would probably want to have this kind of

interface but typically it is run by Mar or sales up teams and yeah from this standpoint they can you know they can basically create a list in sales force or they can actually pull the data from influ so they can actually say okay inside influ they can tell okay I I care about people who work for this industry or or in this geography or for this accounts based on Sal Force data or they can say okay I just want to Target everyone all prospects of this specific bdr or sales rep right so basically you know I want to help John Smith know to be more successful in his effort so in this case uh you know I just pull all the prospects that you know John is currently working on and I will Target ads to this people so for as a market from marketing person standpoint it's like the best thing you can do is just to help sales people you know work on their prospects either it's

you know pipeline generation like Business Development effort or try to close the deals that they already working on right now like in both cases you just want to Target all the prospects of specific bdr reps so yeah and in this case you just say Okay whoever you know John is working on I will just you know Target the same people okay interesting maybe Target Target the prospects for your most Su most successful salespeople too you really want to accelerate the revenue um the good sales people get the best leads where do you think this is going are you guys integrating AI at all into this well uh you know like it's um it's pretty hard question for me because well first AI emerged as as a term in marketing technology way before it became popular in other Industries and like I think it is it's I think it's a marketing term more than more than the

actual definition of of the technine technology fair enough Mar marktech you know was always bragging about using some AI like since I don't know since the Inception probably yeah and obviously all the recent development in deep neural networks did not add a lot because the guys already used this term before so speaking about us um we we also mentioned at the launch we use Ai and by by saying this we meant that we use uh some you know mathematical models that help us to to Target specific individuals and yes we have some proprietary technology ol that you can call AI in a way because it basically is built on the same technology stack and same ideas that you you basically use for uh for other types of AI products in broader terms yes and the use it since even before it became know popular and you everyone started talking about

this um and this is the reason why we don't say it anymore right because it's it's it's like you know like if you recall the ter the cloud you know like like years ago right so everyone was talking about Cloud until everyone started using cloud like you don't need to call it Cloud anymore because everyone isn't Cloud I think that's exactly in AI even even if you if you if you don't say AI or don't use AI explicitly you don't even know that your engineering team or your marketing team is already using this right so you don't there's no need to to do anything additionally and like know ultimately it will appear as a part of your solution infrastructure you know technology you know consciously or unconsciously because this this has become a standard infrastructure for for most companies yeah I guess it's kind of a rhetorical question on my part um everyone's always trying to build a smarter mouse trap um that makes sense I was just

thinking more on like the predictive side for perhaps for forecasting the possibility of closing sales and stuff like that it seemed like it could be really interesting looking at if if people within an organization are interacting at all and how that influen eventually sales but I'm sure you guys are already looking at that quite intently um yes yeah yeah yeah yeah I think like the the beauty of our situation is that we have a lot of data and this is kind of for for for for nerdy people this is kind of amazing thing to have and uh because we we managed to spend a lot of time and effort trying to to help our clients to understand know if the program was successful you know and what exactly helped them to close more deals and what was happening and you know like that's that's a lot right so like we need to to spend a lot of time helping our clients make sense of what is happening we we have a lot of you know I would say and again like currently we really have data for more than 100 clients and uh if we can look at

different Industries different scale of businesses different situations um and yeah we see some common patterns and I think in itself it's it's pretty interesting and we're planning to have a series of you know kind of pie where we just share common size that we see across different clients and yeah speaking about buying groups and how many people you need to engage and you know how many buying group members you want to Target that kind of things there are a lot of interesting you know data has been collected over this time and now now is a good time for us to to start sharing this not just using for for our know advice for our clients but also to share with a broader Market um yeah so yeah I think in the nutshell I think what Forester and Gartner talks about buying groups and and I think they talk about this more like how the client think about it so basically the way know the data that for example Forester you know basis their research on is basically they they ask

their clients what they think about it and they just provide some collective analysis of like what industry thinks about buying groups and how they want to tackle this right while we actually have the real dynamics of different buying groups across different clients and industries and that's kind of underlying data that our clients use and kind of we we actually see Behavior yeah exactly so like so it's not just opinions of marketing directors or sales leaders it's actual the and actual behavior of of their prospects uh and it it it does confirm what what the guys talk about so I think the guys were kind of very smart and know I think they kind of predicted uh what what we see in our data that you know like buying groups work people talk to each other and we we again like we have data that proves that you know buying groups is not just like an abstract idea you know buying group members really talk to each other and you know and you can easily see it

by by fact that you know you can engage one buying group member and suddenly another buying group member becomes a champion of of in this deal and they clearly talk to each other that's how this deal emerged typically you talk about like a Target senior person and then you see you get you know a junior manager that come to talk to you and have this you know initial conversation um and again like it's not just us but we see across different clients how that works and or or if you influence multiple B group members the conversion rate drives goes up and you can actually see some improvement in conversion rates Target try to make your your conversation multi-threaded try to talk to multiple bank group members so yeah it's like everything that was like kind of you know currently it exists as a concept as an idea we we have data that Pro that actually something is happening and works it's funny because I remember when I was learning about sales they would

talk about you know to build arguments based on the different profiles you would be meeting with in a sales meeting but at that point when you're in the sales meetings most of the decisions have already been taken so you guys are doing a lot of influencing on the front end before they've actually and and and speeding along the decision so it seems to be to be a good place to invest is there a certain Niche a certain type of client that that best benefits from what you guys do I mean do they need to have like a certain total lifetime um customer value um uh complicated sales Cycles who best benefits from you guys you have a profile what's your ideal customer profile yeah the harder the self process is the more sophisticated the more complex the longer it is and the better it is defined I think uh you know part of this is like if if or in organization they have sophisticated self process but it's just because you know their their process is not defined well or not structured well

probably different reason for this yeah probably in this case we like it's kind of premature to use any additional you know technology they need to fix this kind of core basic s process first but yes the more sophisticated situation is the harder it is to sell and the better the process defined the better the more effort they put in they will see more benefits by using our technology to just to to boost it like very simp simple observations like our job is to boost sales pipeline or boost sales results but you need to have some sales pipeline some sales results to boost right so if you start from zero probably it's too early to use any additional technology you need to start selling my my math isn't too good but if you do 2x0 I think it's still zero yeah exactly exactly so okay good we're we're on board there um what was I going to ask is that my question what about I mean can people use this out of the box or is this something that they should plan on time

spending time with the customer success manager or someone who's on your customer Su well um it really it really depends on you know on their kind of if they have an idea in terms of how they want to leverage technology uh I think you know obviously you know like our customer success people canot tell them what is the best for them to do they can they can share the experience of other clients and that's kind of critical so I think if you don't want to guess in terms of you know how to build your program the best way or experiment yourself you can you can just ask our csms okay what did work for your clients before and they they will you know gladly share what worked and what didn't work because we've seen a lot of cases when it didn't work right and why we can now we understand why it didn't work obviously you know our job is to deliver us to specific people and track what happened but you know like then the

question is like how do you leverage this type of technology and what what is the best use of it right and they have a lot of best practices across like our client some of our clients are actually six years with us so they they try different things and they know what works so like why not you know asking our csms and and they will GL to share what what worked for the customers and what made them successful interesting so you guys are six years in how has your company grown you started out two co-founders and how many people are you today it's more than 100 people right now wow okay great and and are you still private or what are the next steps for your yeah so yeah we I think we we we still kind of um um like it's a long way for us to grow I mean the market itself is is pretty large and uh you know like we see kind of long-term future for us to you know to

to to continue growing within this market and also we we believe there are so currently we mostly focus on you know high-tech companies simply because they're faster to adap adopt new new technologies and they're more they're smarter in terms of sales process while if you talk to kind of traditional Industries like manufacturing or financial Services these guys are just much slower in terms of and you know we we we had some cases it's not the it's like there was some UK client with like huge insurance company they still think if they need to adopt CRM system for them so obviously you know these kind of companies uh they kind of slower more traditional but still it's potentially huge market and it's like it tells us it's kind of I think we will we will stay private and we'll continue to grow uh together with with the market and and you know help you know like you know like starting from high companies but also we

we will help you know more traditional companies to adopt our technology fure as well so it's a long long long journey for us well it you know right now in the SAS industry of course we're all aware there's quite a bit of turbulence and people are really looking on return on Capital it's like whatever we're going to invest in this is going to generate real returns and the focus on Revenue reducing customer acquisition costs uh uh sales cycle time all these things they're just so hugely critical so I'm sure um people um be reaching out to you speak with you do you um are you going to be going to B2B rocks on September 19th um yeah my team will be there unfortunately I won't be able to to make this but yeah actually think have a couple of team members the the joining B rocks great great well listen thank you so much for your time we just have uh two more questions we'd like to ask our

guests uh which is one do you have a funny story maybe something about starting your your second company something that surprised you um well yeah I think I think the the the the funny you know thing that we talk about uh it's like we we really like the main struggle of our clients and obviously ly like that something I learned from like from early early times in my you know first job in reising was that you know if you want to be successful you know account manager ining agency you you want to make your client help your client to make their career so if you if you help your marketing manager who you work with to to make their Career Success make them successful in their career that's how you become a good account manager for the for your client right so this we I still have this mindset so we we help our clients to be successful in their jobs and acheve doesn't prove that the job was successful uh and I think the biggest

challenge for them is just their cooperation with sales sales sales organization because you know like these are in B2B you know sales the most most of the companies are sales-driven organizations and marketing teams need to prove the their you know presence their need uh and and and to prove prove their they're useful and prove the impact on revenue and they they constantly struggling to prove um and a ton of pressure yeah a lot of pressure especially these days and um we have a joke about this actually that you know like whenever sales like whenever there's a good you know successful you know uh close one you know deal then it's because sales people you know work hard if it's lost deal then it's because marketing people didn't help yeah so yeah until until I move to

marketing absolutely yeah yeah that's that's really funny thank you okay last last question for today what do you have a favorite rock song right now because we're B well um yes of course well actually I I play hard rock I play Bas and that's right yeah so and my favorite favorite song is Metallica For Whom the Bel draws this is the first one I I I learned with my son actually play together and this is the first song we played together on stage so it's still my favorite song That's great so just let me tell the audience really quickly so they have I think a band inhouse at their company so they play music and I think when you guys have get togethers for all your employees I think you get to play some songs and um that's great listen thank thank you so much for your time Demitri thank you and look forward to seeing your team at at btb rocks on on September 19th yeah looking forward to it too thanks

byebye uh really interesting guy by second company looks like they're going to be successful as well so kudos to him um we don't have anything planned for next week uh for the moment we'll see if we can get a guest lined up but for the moment nothing and um in any case if we don't see you that's fine and if we do that would be even better have a great day