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In this episode of Confessions Of A B2B Marketer, I'm joined by Global Head of Demand Generation Liam Bartholomew of Cognism.
We get Liam to explain how Cognism pivoted from lead to demand gen through ungating everything, running paid social and how/why they have doubled down on content distribution.
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but you can't just sit there. Set and forget some ads. Keep doing the same content over and over again, and expect there to be any results that you have to constantly be thinking about creative and what you're putting out.
Liam, how are you doing? Yes, good, Thank you. How are you, Tom? Very good, very good. Very happy with how Cnim rebrand went. Yeah, it went really well. Actually. I was glad when it was over, to be honest, but was it like a long process? Cause it, it looks beautiful. Anybody listening? Is it cosm.com? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Go and check out the rebrand.
Oh my God. Yeah. It was a very long process and then there's just a lot of stuff along the way that I just Yeah. That you realize you have to do that I don't really think I thought about in my. Idea of the scope of it. , that always happens. We pulled it off. It all went well, so I'm really pleased of it.
Yeah, we used a pentagram as the design agency and they've just done a really good job. Nice. And so that's actually like largely what I want to discuss today is how you guys. Like smashing it at the moment. Well, that's what it seems like from the outside . And I wanna go into this in a, in various different ways.
I wanna talk about how you guys are using paid social. I wanna talk about how you guys have transitioned from lead gen to demand gen, how not all MQL are created equal. And also about how there's no magic bullying, B to B. So if that sounds good, we'll jump straight in. Yeah, sounds perfect. So for, it's probably better to talk more about this transition from LeadGen to Jamal Gen.
Like when did that happen? Who's driving that in the organization? Why did it happen? Yeah, so started to happen. It's important like to, I suppose, in a phased way. So it wasn't like a sudden switch. It kind of started back in April. Last year when we just realized that under the current model that we are running with like lead gen, we are creating really cheap leads, tons of leads, and we used to have sort of what we call MDs, follow up on all of the content leads.
And to take it further, we would've had to hire another mdr. Now, fortunately for us, we were always target. On revenue. So when you, So the actual number of leads and stuff wasn't really an issue for us. So when you obviously split out your funnel to look at how to generate revenue, we could see that those leads from the lead gen were closing from leads to close one.
At North 0.2% bound is closing at 4% and 20%. Square to closed one. So that's significantly more. And then we're starting to think if we add an MTR in, we included that in our C, that their, their salary and stuff. So then if we're adding that to marketing C and they're not, it's not actually leading to any closed revenue, then look what we're doing here.
So, We had to, So Alice, uh, CMO sort of went on the mission to guess some test budget that we could be like, Well, we're gonna run the lead gen. Don't worry, we're not gonna switch that off. Keep the organization happy, but we're gonna get this test budget to run symptom agent. Can I jump in there? Could, before we get to what you do, the test budget, there's a couple of really interesting things you said.
The first thing that kind of hit me. Think about what the MDR is doing. He's trying to call these people and then educate them on how, on the problem you solve, right? Mm-hmm. , and what you've done is you've taken that budget from that person, and then instead of putting that into a person to call these people that don't really care about you, you are pushing that further up, right?
And you are creating the content and pushing that out. Would you say that's accurate? Yeah. That I suppose, Yeah. If you, if you think about That's exactly what's, that's kind of happened. Yeah. Yeah. So cuz the MDR is doing, I suppose it's, it's this outbound, right? When you're doing lead gen, really, you're just pulling people up and trying to get them into the sales funnel early and, and maybe do some of that education piece on the phone, doing it in your marketing efforts.
So, yeah. Cool. So that's the first interesting thing. The second one was about how you saying you guys have always been tasked, or your performance have been driven by, And I don't think that's the case. What? We'll mark this, right? So it's almost like we need to thank whoever made that decision. Maybe, I don't know.
Cro ceo. Yeah. Yeah. That was our first cro, so we were always just measured on revenue in the same, So yeah, that was always like our North Star and yeah. And you're like, you're right. Most marketing teams. Will be measured on MQL or something. And then it's really hard to break that model, right? Because if my target was 2000 MQs, there's no way in how I'm changing to my GEM model cause I'm just not gonna hit it.
Whereas because my target was revenue, I needed to find any way to hit that revenue number. That with our growth plans was just getting bigger and bigger. And then lead gen just wasn't kind of mustard for it, for sure. So we got the tough budget. Mm-hmm. , what did you do first? Yeah. We took that test budget and we just told said that we're gonna, What we wanted to demonstrate that was cuz it's too hard to show it in hype and revenue.
So we wanted to show that we could show a marked uptick in inbounds over three to six months. And then if we could do that, then we could start to transition away from B Gen entirely. So that's, we did actually manage to achieve that. The first things that we did was we decided off really basic, and we just literally ungated everything on our website.
We're still running some lead gen ads out on LinkedIn and doing other lead gen activities, but if you came to our website, everything was out gate. And then we had this, with this like meeting, a big meeting there when we started to think about what other content we needed to create to really give a decent ungated experience and run demand gym.
So we all set bound being following refine apps. I think we called it Project Chris Walker . And we just started to like, and it just meant that we realized that you can't. Run the same sort of activity you had before, but un Gate, It's not that just creating tons of e-books. We needed to diversify into like video.
We needed to think about how we, what different ad creators we use. Moving, we like creating carousels and things like that and, and how we provide some of that value upfront and the ads that we run. On LinkedIn and Facebook, even if it's just like a static image ad and things like that. And that makes you go back to the basis of why you do anything.
So like webinars and stuff. The new purpose came, uh, for a webinar was not about getting people in to follow up the leads. It was about getting content that we could then use to promote elsewhere and getting all that video content to create snippets. We used to create a podcast. There's now something like a podcast was worth our time.
Whereas before, under like a lead gen. How to get leads. So we started, we just had to rethink all the content from scratch and then start to create these campaigns where we're motting, everything ungated and providing some of that value up front. We also had to do load of work on products related content and ads because we just hadn't focused on that enough.
We just focused on, I suppose, content that would, people would be willing to download and give their contact information forward, which is never, This is how the product works. But when you're running UN gate, That's of interest to people, but you've gotta find better ways of doing it than just like a one page or a product sheet.
You can have product tours, like explainer videos, stuff like that. So we had to really start from scratch on the bottom of funnel content as well. Main thing was like a big content rethink, and then how we would then structure. And the rest was like testing cuz how to do this. Everyone was so used to running their campaigns, like paid social and stuff with the objective of just getting cheap cost for leads.
But as soon as you start getting rid of the lead, it's like a minefield about what campaign objectives you use, what the, and then that was just like a whole load of testing and tracking all the metrics. To see what we were really looking for, how people engage with the content and the number of people watching it or coming through to the website and things like that.
So that just took a lot, a lot of testing, but whilst monitoring those top line funnel metrics of how many inbounds are we creating, how many are moving into pipe, and stuff like that. And that work is still going on now and it will be never ending. Really Cool. I just wanna dig into like how you knew it was working.
So when you say inbound, were these inbound demo requests on the website, right? Correct. Yeah. Mm. Cool. And you were just measuring the total amount and you were trying to see after the three sig months of demand gen, you got more of these, correct? Yeah, really basic at that. Ah, very basic. Yeah. Just let's see if we can see an uptake going out, like a significant uptake.
And then we're just tracking it month on month. Got it. And we saw X percent more inbound. And so you, the theory was that these activities we've done EG and gating everything, creating more valuable content that isn't gated, and let's just focus on helping this. Would mean more people would come inbound to learn about our thing.
And you guys are confident that that was the case. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And you proved that to the ceo? Yeah. Yeah. So then we showed them their figures. So for example, a really good way of doing that to the C for the CEO is you break, you split out your funnel between. Paid, which is like your Google like capture demand, and then direct inbound, and then your lookalike on your month, you'll probably have 80.
I'd say for us it was about 70% from a direct inbounds were source revenue. Then another two from the capture demand side, and then it might be one from LeadGen if that, sometimes not at all. So we just have to say we only need to make up one deal. From to at least be on par of where we're at. But because we know that inbounds close at a much higher rate and that already producing the majority of our revenue, we know that if we create a marked uptick on that, then we're actually gonna benefit revenue and pipeline overall.
So I think, yeah, breaking it down like that was just really, really basic and simple for us. And then after that, well I'd say we don't really even look at the, we look at the direct inbound number. It's a good measure of where we're going, but we're probably shifted on now to be more focused on pipe.
Cause again, if as long as you're stuck on the lead level, you can, you end up optimizing for the wrong things and you have to move yourself to pipe entirely to be able to make sure you're doing, bringing in the right people. And this is all pipeline that's come, that comes inbound through the website is your kpi?
Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. It's very simple. Isn. So simple, but there's lots of things that become more simple because of it. We have over a hundred forms, I think that we've now got 10. You just don't, you don't need all that sort of everything. You simplify everything. It's just about. Yeah, the tough bit is really is thinking through your content strategy and yeah, knowing what I will drive those inbounds.
That's the hard bit, for sure. Cool. Okay, awesome. My next question is about all this inbound stuff. Mm-hmm. , I'm assuming I haven't checked, I should have checked this before I came on, but you have self-reported attribution on the demo form, is that right? We have self-reported attribution on our thank you page.
Actually, not on the demo form. Interesting. And so that's not mandatory. Right? So that only comes after what? Do you know what percentage, if you can share of people that submit that form, give you feedback on where they found you? Yeah, it's currently at 20%. Got it. Okay. So we get less. We probably get less.
But you're not putting any barrier before the demo. It's actually something that we're constantly in debate about, but we might test put it on the form at some point, but at the moment we're kind of getting the insights we need, I suppose, from the thank you page. Got it. And are you happy to share just something interesting you've learned from doing that?
Yeah, I think actually the main, the main thing that you find is just how much of it is generated by word of mouth and also how much is generated by doing stuff for your own personal brand. So we've got subject matter experts in sales that we work with on our, for our sales persona. And then we have a few of sales directors, like we've got them pushing out to.
Build out their personal brand. And we're obviously trying to do a lot of that in the marketing team as well. And the amount of people who say like, Oh, I saw a following us 10, or I followed Ryan, or something like that. You just wouldn't have, You wouldn't be able to see that in any other way, I think, than other than through that human attribution form.
Like people aren't clicking on their profiles and coming straight through to C say other attribution wouldn't pick it up at all. Yeah. And then word of mouth, I think that's just normally testament to all the other. Yeah. Activity we're doing is just building this, I suppose, a community of people that are, are talking about the brand.
Yeah, that makes total sense. I hope they put you guys on commission for this deals you're bringing in from your personal LinkedIn . That would be good. Yeah. I think when we look at it, like 40% of the people who competed it have come from some sort of word of mouth, which is crazy. Cool. Okay, so that test finished if you started in April, would've finished like around a year ago.
Right. And so then you got the green light from the ceo and since then you've just been going hard at it. Right? And you've forgot about all the lead gen forms, correct? Yeah. Yeah. So we, yeah, I think we went fully demand gen by October last year, so, and we just, yeah, digital the churn forms and just went full for this ungated sort of demand, churn approach.
Yeah. Awesome. Now one another aspect of this that I saw at LinkedIn both of you recently wrote was using paid social being a slightly different way. And so I'd love if you could dig into that a little bit. Yeah, so using sort of paid social, I think as a form of content distribution really. So I think when people think of paid social because of, we think about it from maybe a traditional sense, running it as the gen, We forget that you can actually.
Distribute content really effectively there. And it's a great way to reach your ICP and target them really precisely and hit them with the content like repeatedly as well, without having to build a big organic following. And that's something we've done just right from the, the A of doing this. So it's like taking all of your best content, putting it into a format that is consumable within the platform.
So whether that's like video or carousel ads, Image adds just with all of the information that you want to serve up from, I'm running that to your ICP and with the campaign goals of reach or like video views served, like of like maximum impressions. And then it's a great way of just distributing all that content that you've created directly into people's.
I think tins feeds, for example, a Facebook timelines for exactly what you want them to see and to the right people to read it. So yeah, it's for us, like as a content distribution tool, it's been great. Whilst we've been trying to build out organic followings and our own like company organic followings, you can do it really fast and quickly through that for paid social.
Yeah, and there's no CTAs that'll capture the email address, right. You literally just want these people to consume the inform. Yeah, exactly. And then people say forever up like sales persona. We talk a lot about cold calling and you know, we have these different, we bucket these things as differently, but calling for us is a big one cause it has like a dotted dime back to the product.
We have loads of mobile numbers in the platform, phone verify them and stuff like that. So cold calling is a massive thing that we can help. So we just want, we serve this content with people, come it looking for help with their cold calling. Watch it, get that information. Next time they come to think about, uh, I've struggling for contact data.
I really need to reach out. Oh yeah. CM have taught me loads about cold calling. I know they are con, they need to be contact data fighter them by top of mind. And it's the first person, first company that they'll come through to. Right. And that's sort of the logic behind it. Exactly. It's like you're treating the buyer with more respect.
Right. You're not trying to trick them into getting some information and then you're gonna call them, You're like, Here, you have this, you're an intelligent person. This is gonna help you. And then when you need our thing you, it's quite easy for you to come and find us. Is that the. Yeah. Yeah. And then we're tough of mind.
So even with that, when I was talking about spitting out the funnel, you've got your difference between the capture demand and generate demand. And that if someone, Googles competitor of yours and then clicks on your competitor to add and fills out a down form, they just Google B2B data. And then they come through a Google ad or even seo, and they fill out the form.
They've likely filled out maybe three or four different forms for B2B data providers as their in buying mode. They're gonna be researching us all. But what we want to do with all of this other content distribution, paid social, all of the UN Gate ads is. Do it so that when they actually think about wanting to buy B2B data, they don't think of anyone else.
They just think of Cognizant and that's it. And then they just go fill out a form for us, and they don't actually even as a competitors. And that's kind of the mindset behind it. And then that's why you still see that those demo requests actually close at a much higher rate even than the captured demand ones.
You're like, we have less competition because people are, are coming to us because they want to come to us and we're off top of mind. Yeah, because you are, They're like, like, and they trust you. And if it's a person like you and the marketing team and these other people that you are making famous, they consider your content.
You have this, you're almost a tiny bit famous in their eyes. And so if they're like, I could go with this. No name provider that I dunno anyone from, or I could go with Liam. Who has taught me how to do cold calling, then you're totally right. They're just gonna come straight to you. And the win rates and that time, what?
What's it called? If velocity, right? The velocity of the deals should also be faster. That makes total sense, Liam, awesome. I think probably another LinkedIn post that I really enjoyed of yours. And the basic message, whether there isn't one thing that you're gonna do that's gonna blow up your pipeline for next quarter.
And it's actually a multitude of different things. And I'd love if you can like dig more into that and explain what you were meaning in that post. Yeah, so we, I think as Mark has, and I've definitely felt like this before, that it's like you're just, we're all looking for like that, that magic bullet that will.
I dunno, fix all of our problems and I'll, there'll be like one activity that I can run and then it will all be fine. But reality is of it that it's, it's always constant hard work and testing and you, and once you've found something that works, Looking for the next thing, otherwise we'll start to see a drop off again.
So I felt that's exactly, I suppose kind of how we've always operated it here and we've, we've really been trying to cycle in and out our campaigns now a bit more so it, refreshing creatives and things like that. And actually, so much so that we are now sort of structure ourselves and that we have these six week campaign.
Her persona while we focused on a particular theme and build out specific content for that. And then what we have over the top is what we would call our gut boys on content, where we talk about the core themes that we always want to talk about, that we know fit what cognitive is. Just educating on the product.
And running all of that regular content activity that I was talking about, like the regular webinars, podcasts, and stuff like that. And that bit is what we call, what we'd call the media machine, which is just purely acting like a media company, but actually those this, the combination of both, like that always on media machine and the spot campaigns that we run, which will then over time consistently contribute to your pipeline.
But you can't just sit. Set and forget some ads. Keep doing the same content over and over again and expect there to be any results that you have to constantly be thinking about creative and what you're putting out. They're always on content machine. Love that we've discussed the impact that this shifted demand gen is having on all the inbound pipeline.
But I'd also love to get your thought on whether all this work you're. The even gen that is demand gen is helping your outbound team. Cause I think you guys have an outbound function as well, right? Yeah. But yeah, have a big outbound function. So yeah, they currently produce 40% of the revenue, actually.
Cool. And how would you, well, if at all, the work you've been doing in demand gen, how has that impacted the outbound function, if at all? Yeah, so I actually only have sort of probably some qualitative stats on. Or like feedback on this. I'm not sure if I've got any hard numbers I can give, but we regularly have it actually.
And I think this is, we always going with this idea of marketing's objective is to make sales easier. And I think that definitely plays into outbound as well. So a lot of times I have the outbound reps say that they, in they'll, first thing they'll say is it's the cognizant and people respond with, Oh yeah, I know.
Or just even people know any of the subject matter experts we put out on LinkedIn and they say that they follow us and stuff like that. We have, cuz our two personas right, are sales people and our marketers. So we get people come back and, you know, say that they really love Ryan, who's our subject matter expert on the sales side.
People really feedback positively about the marketing team. I know a lot of the reps have got through to marketers and people are like, Oh, I know your, I follow your Chief Marketing Officer. I really enjoy her content and stuff like that. So they're straight away with sort of giving the outbound reps like an in with a bit of conversation and positive brand perception as well.
Yeah, it's definitely qualitative, isn't it? I dunno. How would you be able to measure that qualitatively? I'm not sure. Yeah, no. Quantitatively we'd have to pull, like we could pull, I suppose, recordings like call the companies and try and throw out some way. But yeah, it would be. It's difficult to track Liam.
Do you think they have a better feeling for a marketer than having either an inbound sales person or an outbound sales person coming over at you in the office and being like, Oh my God, everybody loves us. Do you think there's a better feeling for a marketer ? No, there really isn't much. I've had a few of the AEs coming forward.
This. And particularly really, really pleased with inbounds we've been, uh, that have been coming to them. And it is such a good feeling cuz it's, we're all so used to, I think having the opposite where sales are just against it. what we're providing is rubbish. Yeah. That's awesome. So there's a concerted effort that you have been making blow up the personal profiles of, you mentioned Ryan in sales, and then a few people in the marketing team is there, like aside from trading awesome content for them to share on LinkedIn.
Is there anything else you're doing to help build the profiles? No, it's nearly, it's pretty much all content focused. So for example, we pair up Ryan with someone in the Demand Gen team and they work with him closely on creating content. He does a lot of it himself, but then he takes other insights and feedbacks and, and goes away.
And creates that content and then we put it together in almost like a structure for what he would share over the week. So it's kind of simple. You could, but we break it up. So it'll be a certain type video explainer on a Monday poll, on a Wednesday. Quite formulaic like that, but it's. Consistency. I think something that B2B can definitely learn from B2C is just consistency and volume, and then we just stick to it rigidly and just keep up the content and posting.
Listen back to feedback as well that we're getting in on LinkedIn. We have a commenting strategy as well, so it's to. Allocate time to go back and actually like, comment back to people who either comment on posts or about you elsewhere, which is obviously another, is a good way of sort of hacking that sort of LinkedIn algorithm.
Cause it, it loves you if you go around commenting and part of the discussion. So yeah, it's kind of just being Yeah, well organized with it for sure. Well, Liam at TA is great. To see a UK based startup slash scale up absolutely crushing it on the marketing side. And as I mentioned, the rebrand is sick. I think I follow all of your marketing team on LinkedIn, but now I'm gonna go and follow Ryan from sales.
So first, thank you for doing that and thank you to obviously to the marketing team. But then also thanks for coming on and sharing very transparently how you made that transition. It's really interesting. No problem is that, Yeah, really enjoyed it.
And thank you very much for checking out this episode of a Confessions of a B2B Mark, the podcast that was Liam from Cogni. And what a great story is great to see, specifically a UK start flash scaler, crushing it in. Of demand gen. Now, of course, if you have any feedback for the show, please head to Apple Podcasts and leave a rating and review.
Take a screenshot, send it to me on LinkedIn, or just tell me on LinkedIn that you've done it, and then I'll get you a shout out in the outro of a future episode. So again, thank you to Liam and thank you to you for listening.