Brand or Pipeline? What Really Drives B2B Growth

It’s not about choosing brand or pipeline, it’s about understanding how they work together.

From social listening and executive influence to ABM, buying groups, and revenue waterfalls, the debate between demand creation and demand capture is forcing B2B leaders to rethink how growth actually happens.

In this episode of B2B Marketing Futures, senior demand and digital leaders explore where they focus today, how the balance shifts across regions and maturity levels, and how long-term brand initiatives ultimately connect to pipeline and revenue.

Guests

Kristina Thomas, Head of Social Media at S&P Global

Stacey Jaeger, Senior Demand Generation Manager at Protolabs

Jochen Karmazin, Senior Campaign Planner, Demand Generation at Siemens

Transcript

speaker-3 (00:00)

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Futures Today we are diving into one of the most disputed topics in modern marketing Demand creation versus demand capture Should we be investing more in building long-term brand awareness or focusing on capturing intent and driving pipeline today? If only one or five percent of the market is actively searching for solutions Why do you focus so much

on the 95 % who are unaware of your brand in this episode we'll explore how leading marketing teams balance these two forces how that balance shifts across segments and maturity levels and how brand ultimately connects to revenue but before we jump in I'd love for our guests to introduce themselves and share a bit about their role and their current focus so Cristina, would you like to start?

speaker-2 (00:57)

Sure. My name is Christina Thomas and I am the head of social media for S &P Global. My scope is a bit broader than that. Think of us more as digital communications, crisis and social listening, things like that. But I'm excited to talk about how our role has shifted as really the world has shifted in the last couple of years.

speaker-3 (01:15)

Thank you so much. Johan, welcome.

speaker-0 (01:18)

Hey, my name is Jochen Karmerzin. I'm a senior planner demand generation and Christina Satchesila started in social media like 15 years ago. And as you said, the road has shifted a lot. currently I'm heading a project called Demand Center at Siemens Smart Infrastructure. And the primary task is to build up a team there to, I would say, professionalize our demand chat efforts across the company and make it, I would say, more impactful for nearly 5,000 communicators.

speaker-3 (01:44)

awesome thank you so much and stay see you welcome

speaker-1 (01:47)

Hi, thanks for having me. I'm Stacey Jagger, Senior Demand Gen Manager at Proto Labs and headquartered in Maple Plain, Minnesota. I'm overseeing a lot of that cross functional relationship between marketing, sales, operations, working really closely with Rev Ops as well. So looking forward to the discussion today.

speaker-3 (02:09)

That's awesome and welcome.

So let's start with a quick pulse check. Okay. Where do you focus your marketing efforts today? Creating demand or capturing it?

Are you closer to 50-50, 60-40 or do you reject the split altogether?

speaker-2 (02:27)

I'll jump in. I feel like with my role and function, I'm gonna say that we almost reject the split altogether because it's hard to put a formula to success when it comes to social media. So what I mean by that is prior to let's say 2023, you could market without paying attention to what's being said in the ether because

A lot of times people thought like, that's just social media chatter. That's no big deal. That's not real. And now we are realizing that threads or conversations that start on social media are increasingly becoming real time issues. And if a company is just posting content without paying attention to the sentiment across social media specifically, but also other forums, and I'm talking social media platforms globally across all different languages,

Do you understand what does a specific region think about a certain tool? For example, the conversation around AI. Some places are adopting it and that's a great area to promote your AI tools, but other places are a bit fearful of it. so, staying away from that fear-mongering language that they are identifying in the social listening is really important. And then also we noticed that because SMP Global is an enterprise and we span multiple industries,

There are times when you can post something, you you schedule a post a week out and by the time it publishes, it's a bit tone deaf. So really paying attention to what is going out in real time to make sure that you are complimenting the conversation, not disrupting it, which is likely going to not get you any impressions or any engagement or not perpetuating false information that is being spoken about in the online.

speaker-3 (04:12)

Really interesting and you mentioned 2023. Something happened that year that I'm not aware of or is like a new technology coming in or.

speaker-2 (04:20)

Um, honestly, I don't know if y'all feel me on this, but since 2020, it's just all one year. I don't know. So I say 2023, but it was probably 2024. Um, to me, the catalyst for change was one, pandemic people became a lot more vocal on social media, a lot more opinionated and a lot more active on social media. But then fast forward to the shooting of the United healthcare CEO, that conversation started online and then.

turned into a real world problem. And I think that that was the time when corporations were like, ⁓ snap, we should be paying attention to what's happening online. We shouldn't just take this as trolls, trolling the internet. And not only do we take it from that safety perspective of just ensuring that we are creating guidelines and regulations across the company for safety purposes, specifically, we don't post about our executives in real time, things like that, but also in the way that we push out content.

So again, a lot of times our editorial teams, they're creating content based on past things that have happened in the world. And by the time it's time for it to publish, it might not be the best thing to put at that moment. And so really trying to be more proactive and getting involved in conversations as they are happening and not piggybacking on the backend.

speaker-3 (05:36)

Yeah, well, such an interesting angle to see demand creation and demand capture from a social listening perspective. What about you, Johan and Stacey? How do you balance demand creation and demand capture? Or do you also reject the split altogether?

speaker-0 (05:54)

I'd say it's a very difficult question to answer. I Siemens is a huge corporation and actually in the metrics organization. So then we have countries communicating, we have business lines communicating, we have the Siemens brand communicating. But if I had to guess, I would say we are moving more towards a 50-50 split, but we are coming from an area like, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago where we rarely invested in demand capturing at all.

I guess a lot of other companies have done the same because by that time, I mean, you couldn't measure it like that. And I'm coming from an e-commerce perspective and obviously everything you did in e-commerce background, you usually try to capture demand and you didn't build brands so much. I have the feeling that in B2B environments, like 10, 15 years ago, it was all about demand creation, not so much about demand capturing and now...

⁓ We have a few initiatives that we actually try to shift it in the other way. Obviously, we need to justify our investments more. We need to prove more. What is the dollar value of everything we do? I hope that it's not totally reversing because I see a lot of value in a strong brand. I see how much a strong brand helps us in any direction. So we're moving towards a 50-50 split, but hopefully we stop there.

speaker-1 (07:14)

Yeah, I'd have to agree. It's a hard question, right? And I think it, like anything, it depends on where you are, what kind of business you are, what you're trying to achieve for the year, both strategically, department level wise, as a business in total. I can't say that we have a good idea on if we have a solid split number, at least at ProtoLabs. I think what

makes it challenging too is, know, ProtoLabs is a growth company. We're highly innovative. So while we're incredibly mindful about being, being ⁓

I guess, you know, in it for the long term with the brand and we have brand initiatives going on. We also understand that in order to keep up with the market, whether it be competitively or with emerging markets, any opportunity there, we need to be able to pivot and act quickly. where I see us going and the evolution we're trying to make, at least at ProtoLabs and with my team ⁓ and the departments that I work with closely is

You know, how can we continue to focus on the long term and creating that demand through maybe different tactics? Like you think about account based marketing, where you, it's a different brand play, but it is a long term initiative that is, is very much geared towards creating demand over time, as opposed to perhaps a little bit more reactionary or things that, you need to, to generate demand and capture it fast because

Guess what? Revenues down, orders are down. Tough month, we still have to hit our quarter budget and things like that. So I think you have to be flexible and nimble throughout that in order to be able to move quickly within the market or be able to set yourself up for long-term success. So personally, I'd reject this split to some degree, whether or not we do

formalize it or not at ProtoLabs is hard to say, but personally, in my experience, I don't think you can truly identify. You have to be ready for all of it and plan for all of it in a sense.

speaker-2 (09:15)

Well, it's not the easiest thing to do, especially with a company like S &P Global, because a lot of people still think that we're either McGraw Hill and we make textbooks, or they think that we are standard and poor, which we are standard and poor. But the name S &P Global hasn't really become a household name as much, know, the S &P 500 has. anyway, so with that, we identified that, hmm, well, one, there's an education issue, and two, there might be a bit of a trust issue.

So where do we go with that? Employee advocacy. People trust humans more than they trust companies. And we use employee advocacy, which is, we will identify within each of our divisions, thought leaders, people who have a bit of a following, are highly engaged on social media, and work with them to promote messaging, to reinforce our brand over and over again through their channels as well as the corporate channels.

The other area where it's kind of a benefit if you think about it is in 2024, we announced a new executive leadership team, including a new CEO and building their brands while also building the S &P Global brand has been really helpful because if someone doesn't follow our brand pages, they are more likely to follow one of our executives.

our executives are more likely to get their content featured in LinkedIn news, things like that. So we've noticed that by focusing as much time in our employee social media and our executive social media, it helps build that brand trust that we feel like we were missing a bit since announcing the new brand in 2016.

speaker-0 (10:53)

Oh, let me jump. Sorry, let me jump on that because that's the perfect segue to what we are actually doing. I just came back from our family event yesterday with LinkedIn and they actually told us that at Siemens, it's exactly what we're doing. We're positioning our executives to create that brand. And they told us that we are one of the best companies to actually do this, which I'm super happy to hear that. I mean, there are a lot of other areas which you mentioned. I think we still have to catch up, especially using

employees more, we have lot of amazing engineers with a lot of knowledge and we're not positioning them well enough. But especially when it comes to exec communications, know Roland Bush was on stage of the CES. So a lot of things, a lot of passes created there. And it's actually for us, it's the same. It's if you have executives positioned well, it's strengthening the brand better than everything you can do while the brand.

speaker-1 (11:40)

I'll echo. think it's a huge opportunity that perhaps a lot of companies don't necessarily take as much advantage of, especially in the social space, because at the end of the day, that social space has that human first element, right? They are individual profiles. And with that, we are also capitalizing, especially this year, with just having incredible executives at ProtoLabs that have amazing stories. And they can tell stories

very relatable for individuals at all levels, at all levels within their career, as well as our target audiences. It's pivotal for us too, as a way to create demand, to really tell our story in a different way, coming from a different, we'll even call it channel in a way, right? A different channel or a different catalyst than we have in the past.

That is also impactful with your strategic partnerships then too. How can you leverage then that voice coming from executives and featuring them in your strategic partnerships that you might be exploring with customers, with organizations, groups, and so forth?

speaker-3 (12:49)

executives. Prior to that, you mentioned ABM, Stacey. And I would love to connect that,

but then you take that and you narrow down to more focused strategies

speaker-1 (13:00)

sphere. And I was explained account based marketing in its simplest form. You are marketing to the lens of an account rather than maybe an individual or a contact, right? It's truly looking at an account, what might move the needle there. When you think about the executive play within an account level,

If your account-based marketing strategy is, hey, I want to move the needle towards this area of their business, and I want to make sure that they are well aware of our capabilities,

How can that executive make a difference there, right? journey.

right? That's one in so many ways that you can leverage that executive relationship. Because at the end of the day, our executives care just as much as anyone along the hierarchy within ProtoLabs about

about So however you can leverage what they do, what they can do, what they can speak about and how they can show up from a marketing perspective as it relates to that account.

Why not give it a try? Ask those questions.

speaker-2 (14:03)

I have a piggyback to that, that you just made me light bulb. But ⁓ we are doing something similar, but we decided to try a different tactic with a vendor that helps create audiences around, it could be your ABM accounts, it could be politicians, public affairs, whatever. But instead of building it like, okay, right now if you were to build a,

paid campaign on LinkedIn, you're gonna say, I want this job function in this region and blah, What this tool does is it will identify an entire universe around a single person. So for example, say it's me, say that we're building a universe around me, because I'm so special. Not only would it be my coworkers, they would look at who is engaging with my social media accounts the most, who am I tagging the most, who's in my pictures. They would probably pull in my army of siblings. They would probably pull in my

you know, even like my third grade teacher, who knows, whoever I'm interacting with a lot, because the purpose of it is to push the same message in front of a person's entire ecosystem with the hopes that, you know, you're having a more casual breakfast or something and it comes up and you've both seen the same piece of content and you can have a discussion around that piece of content, which would then lead you to have a conversation about SMP Global, hopefully.

So I find that to be another interesting way. I think that marketing is becoming more personal, which I think is pretty cool, especially in the time of AI. And we've been saying, you know, our content is AI supported, but human led. And I think that that's really important.

speaker-1 (15:31)

Do you find it so interesting how authenticity sells today? If you think about mass production in the past and making things so perfect, so clear, so colorful, I think about, you know, imagery, infographics, video, apologize if I'm going tangential here, but it's so interesting how authenticity is making a difference in marketing today.

speaker-2 (15:58)

everything. And I feel like a lot of, know, we have some execs who are incredible speakers. And we're like, Hey, we want to do a video with you. And they're meeting like, you know what, I don't know if I want to do that. And it's like, no, it doesn't have to be in a full studio setup. Actually, some of the best videos ever are you in front of a white wall with your phone, just telling us how you feel about something. I think that I actually love that that's where social media is going, because it feels like I'm, you know, whether it be a false

feeling or not, but it feels like you're getting to know people a bit more. I think that that's why influencers has taken off as much as it has because people are aligning with these influencers and whatever they're pitching or focusing on, they find comfort in watching those people. And if you can find that same, I guess, balance with your executives, I think that that's really the secret sauce.

speaker-3 (16:45)

Yeah, and it's all about the content, right? everyone is following the TikTok algorithm today because everyone can get viral if the content is good. It doesn't matter if you have one follower or one million followers is the content the ones that determines that if you will get impressions or not. And Johan, I think you have a...

an interesting view on the previous discussion because you moved from lead qualification to buying group qualification and all that social selling I think it's really important when you are targeting a group of people with the same main message but maybe with narrowed messages as well tell us a little bit about that experience and how you use that to create demand

speaker-0 (17:36)

I there are a lot of already generated lot of ideas out of your discussions. That's amazing. And actually it's what we've what we figured out. mean, obviously for years and years, leads were the most important thing for sales. ⁓ But obviously, as you said, usually a decision, especially in the B2B context, is never done from a single person, but usually a large group of people. And I think Forrester says average is eight to 11 people buying through. We figured out it might be a lot more.

And we know that sometimes in very little cases you have that CEO handshake and then the deal is done and everyone, so you cannot influence that anymore. In a lot of other cases, and I've been in that situation over and over again, you have a person that is not a senior leader that recommends something that is leading approach and has a lot of influence on that. He's not the person that's holding the final budget, but usually if your boss trusts you, then you're going to sign it. Yeah.

So we figured out that it's so much more important to actually influence a lot of people in the buying group than only the decision maker. And this is a change we've gone through, I would say, especially in the last three, four years, moving away from single leads to qualifying buying groups around topics. And what you just said, Christina, is amazing because it goes a little bit in that direction that you not only influence one person, but the people around it.

And I mean, in a B2B presence, it's obviously the buying group in many cases are the people around it, but you can go even further. mean, talking about influencers and buying groups, what are influencers and buying groups? It could be anything or nothing. Could be any third person outside of the company. could be a coworker who's in a very different topic. It could be your husband. It could be whoever. Yeah. So, and I think that's the biggest leverage we actually have is thinking about

more who are the influences in the buying group. It's easy to identify the decision makers. It's easy to identify maybe the users later on, but actually identifying the influences. I would say that's the tricky part and then generating content, particularly for them at exactly the stage where they are in the buying journey.

speaker-2 (19:39)

May I ask question that might put us on a tangent, it's an interesting one. Is that okay?

speaker-0 (19:45)

Yeah, I go.

speaker-3 (19:46)

Please, of course.

speaker-2 (19:47)

So like I said before, we're S &P Global. We have the S &P 500. Everyone knows that Pam Bondi said, know, the Dell's at 50,000. And so my point with this is what do you do when you have an influencer who is actually an influencer who is affecting your business reputation company in a negative way? And it's not someone that has a direct relation with the company, but it's someone whose content continues to perpetuate misinformation, but not

in a way that you can act on it from a legal stance because it's technically not illegal what they're doing, but they have influence and so it makes our jobs harder.

speaker-0 (20:24)

We actually were exactly that situation when I joined Siemens six years ago. know if you've ever heard about this Adani crisis at Siemens. there Siemens by the time we did a lot around the topic of sustainability like every company did. mean Siemens actually has a footprint there. And at this time it wasn't the media that Siemens sold stuff to the Adani coal mine in Australia. And then we had a person called Greta Thunberg in Germany who is

most likely known in the whole of Europe for everything around sustainability. Obviously, this was one of these influencers that was not happy with what we have done. And it's not easy to win those people. I obviously, I think what helps is actually give them what you just said. We talked a lot about authenticity is give them, invite them to the company, show them the processes. Actually have a, and you usually have.

a lot of views around the topic. You have one angle that the media is usually discussing a lot about, but you have a lot of other angles you can show the person. Obviously, you cannot if someone has a strong opinion, you cannot change the opinion easily, and you should never attack the opinion. But what helped us is really give the person a lot of other angles around the topic of sustainability and what Siemens actually achieved in this area. And you cannot win everything and you can't do everything perfect, but I think it's...

The first thing is really invite this person to an open conversation, show them the facts with a bit of risk that it could get worse. In our case, it worked out at least to some extent. Obviously, I mean, we had good arguments around it, but it's just like, don't fight that publicly. This is what we've learned.

speaker-2 (21:57)

That's a good point. think that we've always been nervous about reaching out personally, but I like that idea because at the end of the day, I feel like when someone is being really active and vocal on social media, it is to get attention of some sort. And if that attention is from us to say like, well, no, this is the methodology behind X, Y, and Z or whatever, if that could help, I do think the risk is worth it. So that's interesting. What we've done is just to promote content that educates from a basic level.

So for example, if someone is questioning our methodology on a rating or something like that, then we will just put a post out that links to our ratings page on our methodology. But that doesn't always get in front of the influencer that you want to get it in front of. And I'm not going to go publicly comment that link on their post because that could look petty. But anyways, I like your perspective.

speaker-3 (22:42)

And Cristina, have you found a way of actually creating opportunities out of those crises or is just battling the crisis?

speaker-2 (22:52)

⁓ so not that this influencer really wasn't like, was not an issue. She wasn't putting out false information or anything like that, but she was someone who was taking our reports and, know, writing about them and her following took off. And I love her dearly because she came to us via our DMS and was like, Hey, can I just get like, can I talk to the authors on this report? And it was amazing. And it was that moment where I was like, wait a minute.

Okay, this is actually definitely, this is a tool at our disposal to, if she's now coming to us and asking for commentary on these reports that she's writing about, that gives us a little bit more skin in the game. can explain our rationale behind whatever report she wants to focus on. And that has been really helpful. And now every single month I get an email for the most recent report. I connect the person with the teams and it's,

it's been this more seamless flow. that was one where we didn't reach out directly to her, but she reached out to us. But I'm wondering if we were to reach out first to some of these people, just as Johan said, and then see what comes of that and see if we can start to play a part of it in the content that they're writing and the audience that they're building.

speaker-1 (24:01)

love that idea because echoing what's already been said here, I often find when folks are communicating in this example, probably in a negative way or a less positive way that is really, there's a reputation management issue going on essentially with the company or a brand reputation management issue going on. Sometimes it's because they're misinformed or uninformed.

Right? So when you can take initiative and be proactive to be like, let me inform you, or let's take that walk around the facility. Let's sit down and have this conversation. So to other points being made, we can't prevent them from going out and sharing their message, but we can definitely help inform what they're sharing, do our best at least, right? To try to circumvent what might be happening.

speaker-3 (24:50)

This conversation reminded me about an anecdote. I used to work for a large winery in Chile and we sponsored the Tour de France, with a brand called Bicicleta, which means bike in Spanish. And it was the first time that a wine brand was actually sponsoring the Tour de France, which is kind of weird because France is one of the largest wine producers. And something very organic happened and...

And it was that the farmers in France were protesting and almost blocking the Tour de France in all the cities because a Chilean brand was sponsoring the main sport event in France, which was super weird for them, And the thing was for the opportunity for our brand was enormous. We were in

all over the news and all over the world like the farmers in France protesting against our brand and of course we didn't want that we just wanted to be in the Tour de France but we took the opportunity of something that was negative as a huge brand awareness for the brand and and and it was yeah of course hard to manage and and there are some risks risks but yeah you can you can

make like positive things out of crises and yes just an anecdote yeah all right so let's let's move into demand capture okay so once the interest exists what are the most effective ways you convert that into into pipeline is it through paid search retargeting remarketing account-based marketing i don't know tell me

speaker-2 (26:16)

That's a good one.

speaker-3 (26:38)

What are your techniques capturing the demand?

speaker-0 (26:41)

I mean, let me jump in there. So I think because it's very closely connected with what we've discussed before is actually identifying signals on a buying group level rather than an individual. So what we are moving towards, and I mean, we are in that transition right now, is actually figure out, first of all, who a buying group is around a specific solution, a specific topic we're offering, and then try to measure all signals around that specific topic and account. So it could be

website visits, could be social media engagements, it could be downloads of something, it could be people visiting events, visiting fairs And what we're actually doing is try to consolidate all of these signals for a specific account. And at a certain level, when there are a lot of people having a certain, I would say amount of involvement of specific people, we need to identify contacts, obviously, if we don't have them already, then we're starting to reach out.

calling them and say, by the way, we're seeing that there's something going on around that topic in your company. Is it something we can consult? Is it something we can help you with at the moment? Obviously what helped us here is what we just said is usually customers only reach out when they're like 70 % through their customer journey, whatever this means. And what we try to figure out is actually come into that journey as early as possible. So trying to identify the first signals and seeing something is ramping up and then being present.

before they actually reach out to us. And there's not a specific one specific tactic that I would say works best, but it's really the sum of signals that helps us to identify it. Obviously there are a few very strong signals, especially if it's last touch attribution, people coming to a fair, coming to a went, having a sales talk there or having a one-on-one talk is usually a very strong signal, but there are a lot of other signals before that, that a lot of other companies are currently ignoring. And we started.

base, I would say start our demand nurturing route around all these signals and then reaching out in person.

speaker-3 (28:37)

And how do you move from lead qualification to buying group qualification in this context? Do you wait until the whole group has certain percentage of their bio journey or?

speaker-0 (28:51)

Yeah,

I mean, there's a scoring behind it. It's actually the whole group. So we say we want at least two contacts to engage. So we're starting to reach out if it's only one contact, we want at least two contacts to engage and we want a certain score of signals. So a certain amount of signals.

speaker-3 (29:05)

interesting what about you stacy how are you what are your techniques in capturing demand is it paid ab you mentioned abm earlier but i don't know you you tell me

speaker-1 (29:17)

Yeah, I mean, we have a couple things that are working really well for us ⁓ historically, know, paid just SEM in general. And what we've done there has been a huge success here at ProtoLabs. We're finding and of course SEM, you know, we're sitting in our PPC and our paid social ads and so forth. With that, you know, that's been a really great way to bring in new.

net new right into our funnel and get them going. I think where we have recently over the past six, eight months identified a huge missing opportunity as you know, as a growth company at ProtoLabs and bringing in net new constantly. We found that we were missing a little bit of that. Well, we've got this incredible database. What about that retargeting that re engagement? It's that you know, they they bought with us once or they looked at us once.

And then what happened after that, right? So we're really seeing an opportunity of just what's in our wallet already essentially and how do we grow share of wallet right now. It's not necessarily net new in the respect of a brand new customer, a brand new lead, a brand new account, right? It is, we've got a very rich database today. Some of them have been sitting dormant and it's just possibly because of volume, because of bandwidth, things like that.

How can we take advantage of nurturing or re-engagement campaigns using automation, using various channels so that using the data of where are they in the buying journey, how far did they get when they were here, however far back it was? So there's some segmentation of the data going on there as well. And truly re-engaging them, waking them up.

letting them know what is new, what's happened since you've been here. I I think that's a tactic that a lot of marketers can often miss is like, we're always focused on bringing in that new or driving brand awareness or driving that top of funnel. But it's like, once they're there, they're there, right? You're not starting from scratch. They're somewhat warm in a way, but they've been here, right? You've built some sort of value to get them to that point.

What are different tactics and different ways then that you can bring them back in right where they left off or bring them back in where it makes sense where they are today to keep that journey going or do the journey again. And that's where you get into that re-engagement, retainment, loyalty, retention area. So that's a big opportunity for us right now at ProtoLabs is focusing on where we've been and how do we continue to get that

to get those folks coming back in again and understanding the capabilities we're bringing in and the new things we have to offer while still bringing in that net new through PPC, Optimize SEM and things like that.

speaker-0 (32:05)

So this has changed a lot over the last years, but right now, campaign is really always on communication stream towards a certain industry. then, mean, we have some sub-segments in the industry, obviously, but this is our understanding of campaigns. A little bit like people do it in politics, right? You have it. In politics, it's usually once every four years, and we actually try to keep it on over and over.

speaker-2 (32:27)

I'm going to be very simple on mine. I like to think I'm a wing woman to our salespeople because I just, know, come to me, talk to them. what we do integrations, and that's the biggest thing is integration. So integrating our social media management system with our CRMs so that sales reps can go in and see what content is a contact engaging with. If someone is consistently only engaging with our, you know, commodities content.

then in the sales rep hasn't previously had a conversation about our commodities solutions, then that gives them kind of a conversation starter. So people aren't gonna accept a marriage proposal on social media typically. So we like to take the conversation off of online. Once we get people pretty far down the pipeline and we really want them to build that relationship with a sales rep or an account rep and.

us helping facilitate that conversation, I think is a big component of that.

speaker-0 (33:23)

Are you saying you're capturing social media engagements in your CRM?

speaker-2 (33:27)

Yeah, so it'll say like, you know, John Smith likes, you know, liked these posts in the last however long. So, you know, most reps are, I've never done sales because I don't think that that's where I would excel if I'm being honest, but you know, they have a cadence when they call back. And so if they can go back and say, okay, in the last 30 days, here's all the SMP content that this person engaged with. It also includes emails that they opened, emails that they were sent and didn't open.

things like that. it gives an insight into what this contact is engaging with across all marketing channels, which I think really helps to hone in on what they are most interested in.

speaker-3 (34:04)

thank you so much for this great conversation we covered a lot today from brand building, social listening to buying group qualification and revenue flywheels, things that we are discussing now so thank you so much and until next time thank you