Understanding Intent Data with Alex Blakeway, Sales Director at The Access Group

We recently sat down with Alex Blakeway, Sales Director at The Access Group, to discuss the importance of first-party intent data.

Most B2B marketers we have spoken to consider first-party intent data to be critical to directing sales activity. They offer valuable insights into customer behaviour, interests, and preferences.

According to Alex, ""customers are looking for solutions to their problems. By understanding their needs and providing them with useful content, you can build trust, and attract new customers"". He recommends the book They Ask, You Answer (Sheridan, 2017), as a guide for good quality content. He added, "In the digital world, there are no b2b and b2c; we all do the research if we're buying a software platform, a car or a dishwasher”.

Listen to this podcast to discover the challenges of understanding intent data. Thanks, Alex, for your collaboration."

Guests

Alex Blakeway, Sales Director at The Access Group

Alex Blakeway 0:30

problems never go away. They just bigger and more complex. We thought, you know, we seem to be able to find a way still very much into sales tech trying to one of the things that we've embraced over the last four or five months, Mark Sheridan's TED talk and they aren't so all around looking at where and again we were pretty guilty. Lots of the content was probably what we wanted people to know rather than what they ask and Mark Sheridan is really good speech of his wrote a book about how his cool business and the looks, you know, with the small business, he had a cool business he us all business and it was going it was the 2000 And was it 2009 Or one of the recessions in the US going really really bad. He realised that how could he effectively market his business and he realised all the content that they were putting out was completely separate to what people were asking, and where there's efforts and going through, like the most important things that people were asking was, I want to build a pool, how much does it cost? And every pool business in the UK, US was all worried about talking around what does it cost because it scared people off? And he's got these five or six different ways where he then relates that to digital marketing, and to how especially how software businesses it's really it's worth a good look. School Mark Sheridan is called to talk and you are sir. And it's around the top things that people tend to look when they're doing asking on Google are how much is something? What is a what's a comparison what's you know, so if I want to buy a BMW, what would be the next other things I should look at? Yeah. What are the negatives of buying this solution are all the things that we've found again, in software, we haven't been listening to what people have been putting in the search engines we've been pushing out content on what we think they would like to know. So we've tried in the last five six months to swap that round so that if you now put on a buy a booking system in hospitality, how much does it cost? Our article will come up. If somebody puts in can you recommend the booking system? It'd be our ask and we won't mention that we do one but we'll go here for other good great ones in the market and this the pros and cons of all all and hoping that someone connects the dots and goes well, they're a nice bunch of people

Tom Gatten 3:10

think I just have this memory from years and years ago about some story about a guy who was selling pools and he started like mentioning his competitors on the website. And it was crazy

Alex Blakeway 3:23

1017 It's literally taken this long, but and even back then he's on his bio he's got you know, Forbes best green 2070 Everyone just kind of ignored it. But why is come so relevant? I think

Tom Gatten 3:37

what those guys like people like NVF global do really, you know, they make a lot of money. And they because they're because they're independent.

Alex Blakeway 3:48

They're trying to put themselves there. And I think what was been because we know now and you know beyond doubt that in the world in the digital world, there's no b2b and b2c, we're all kind of using the same b2c way of of working. We all do the research. If we're buying a software platform, the same as if we bind the car or dishwasher. And we use Google we use the same tools for doing that we do or times the day or night, and we engage the salespeople or the company later in the process than we ever used to do. So there's all that you know the buyer Now does this research so why he's why his story I think, has taken so many years to now resonate with people is everyone's caught onto this up buying journey starts over here. They don't come to us we now get involved so much later in that process

Tom Gatten 4:39

to be a consultant as in someone that doesn't tell you information because the information is already out there. If you're doing it well. And if the information is not out there, I guess your point is that won't come to you anyway. No. So come to the person that does it for them.

Alex Blakeway 4:55

We're trying these things to try and say we're not getting sales people we're having we what we want to do is coach you as a buyer. We're buying coaches that will help you through that buying process,

Tom Gatten 5:07

or a consultant or a coach or someone that's helping you understand how it's relevant to you specifically, which is what a consultant does rather than just tell you information, which is what the old salespeople used to do. Oh now now I have you on the phone now I can tell you how much it costs.

Alex Blakeway 5:22

But you told me that I didn't know. So this now is why it's so relevant or intent data because you kind of go still the same intense always been an engagement. It's always been important but because of this shift of the buyer journeying starting so early, what is your correlation between if you find some intent, making sure you're feeding that right set of content, which isn't about your products and how great your company is? It's about that consultative partner going look, you'll be buying one of these these are the four things always go wrong in every implementation. You probably should know about it, and then correct

Tom Gatten 6:09

it or indeed anything like as long as it's related. I think you can have a conversation about literally anything as long as it's not your product. Like if you come and say to people you know how great my product is then switch off but you can actually speak to people about about anything the point is you are having the point is you know who your ultimate buyers are going to be and if you're really confident about that, if you're having a conversation with them it doesn't matter what it's about the fact is you're having a conversation with you're breaking down barriers

Yeah, we've we've seen some of the most effective ad campaigns be like for AXA, for example they're running or last year with us. They ran ad campaigns that were highly lead gen focused, but then they also ran awareness campaigns that perform way better in terms of lead gen. And the best performing one was

basically how to relate exercises you can do to relieve back pain when you're working from home in an unsuitable chair. Because something like 85% of the country has back pain. And you know, that was just a physiotherapist talking about these five exercises that you can do. And they had a link to their website and they got more quotes through that and a lower cost per quote, than any other lead gen focus and they did so the point is you're engaging people in a conversation, they suddenly go oh, now I slightly more respect these guys. And they were also able to call up businesses and say 50 People from the organised because you can see that on LinkedIn, you know how many clicks you've got from a certain organisation? Say 50 of your staff have come to us for advice about how to relieve back pain. And we've given them that advice, but would you like to, you know, can we help your staff in a different way? So you're having a conversation about something totally tangential, but breaking down

Alex Blakeway 8:04

trust. Anyway, it works. So I think that's the change for us where we try and do everything we do ask SAS which is huge volume play, we do the mid market, and we've got some of our products and teams selling in the enterprise. So our challenges are Yeah, how do you do that? Especially it's easier in the enterprise side where you kind of know the names and the frame and you work on account plans and strategies to get all that mass market. If you have the account list is huge. And of course capsule was important to us. And what's one of the highest scores are people even though we're really good at training, bringing through the organisation, the career development, so in some, some organisations we've got a lower base cost because we can kind of accelerate younger people through is still our most expensive cost. So they're putting those only so many hours in the day. So this comes back to if you're doing it are you talking to the right people, and a lot of salespeople still would go and it's up to us to give them tools and strategies to help start at A and then always work through to Zeze and so much of their time time is so, so important. So this is where they meet the intent side and looking at is engaging with you so so important to try and get that right we use in everything from a number of different vendors. And still, if I could say Have we found something that works it's really successful, probably not not yet. Just because it's so complex, so difficult to prove. And how do you measure it with complete accuracy? Or sometimes accuracy relies on salespeople, and salespeople accuracy sometimes don't stay in the same bucket. And is that a bit from marketing?

Tom Gatten 10:02

It's generally easier to tell the salespeople who's engaging with the marketing. Yeah, it is for the marketers to get a good idea of who's engaging with the salespeople for obvious reasons, unless unless you use things like you know there's all these like cool analytics tools these days.

You can try and get a sense of you know, the sentiment of a call in it's like it's like anything in CRM, it just takes so much to set up. But most people never ever actually set it up.

Alex Blakeway 10:33

No

barriers to getting it going. I think they probably didn't do a good sales pitch. But it's you don't need that you're doing the job properly. Working with engaged customers with great content, a good product sales people that have been well trained on how to sell and promote themselves present give really good reasons why spike is one of our other challenges is mostly the reason for not moving ahead is just staying with what they're doing today. So we haven't been able to convince them of the reason or the value of changing says indecision tends to stick around.

Tom Gatten 11:15

I can't I just saw Dan tried to join and he seemed to kind of drop off again. It might I think and Katherine and Katherine and Dan are both from Darktrace Alex. So it looks like Dan is trying to join but I definitely think we should just we should just crack on with the conversation and see

Alex Blakeway 11:32

Yeah. Happy to have we want to call back in another day but but ya know, far away with anything.

Tom Gatten 11:41

Yeah, they might be dealing with some some issues from from this morning. Yeah, they're part of that they were really associated with them. Autonomy Darktrace

they've had basically a short seller, called quintessential research hedge fund based in New York has written this report about how dark traces accounts are Miss accounted or something. So she may be trying to deal with the fallout from

Yeah, so what sort of how does you must have had exposure to as you say, literally every intent products under the sun and given that every company requires probably tried five or six different techniques.

Alex Blakeway 12:26

Yeah, I think they're all got their merits or the you know, the feedback I have is our people use it to when I ask, but how you implemented how you measuring it. It's probably the same as a lot of our access software. It kind of works okay, like a lot of companies works. Okay, well, what makes them brilliant, and where the divisions and areas where we excel is where we go for software's pretty good. It's got loads of bands and features, our expertise that how to use it, and we will make sure it's configured and optimised for you and we'll check in with you. We'll make sure your usage adoptions because we understand what the end user wants from it. And we'll work with you over a period of time to make sure was really going to be brilliant. And then of course that works. People are sticky. So So I think again, a lot of companies out there that are doing it is quite a light touch of oh, it's easy to use or he set it up don't go and run with it. And then they haven't got the wraparound support or the checking back in to make sure it's optimised for you to end up off.

Tom Gatten 13:33

Yeah, but what I mean, intent these days people usually think of third party intent. But, you know, a really big part of what the third party content providers people that sixth sense demand base terminus, like

other ones, do is actually leverage your first party intent, which is something that marketing automation platforms. LEAD SCORING basically has always promised to do and I think it's related to what we're discussing earlier. The problem is not that multi automation platforms aren't sophisticated enough. The problem is that people generally don't set up the triggers in the CRM on their website effectively enough to do to do good lead scoring, all the salespeople misunderstand it or something. So I mean, maybe if we just started from marketing automation platforms, lead scoring keep it basic and how people engaging with your first party content.

Alex Blakeway 14:31

Yeah, so where is interesting where there's more effort where we are more advanced is using Salesforce and using it on a customer success and product side, the telematics and the product, plus the engagement scores coming back from customer success. We now have an index for every customer showing what is the potential of churn and how happy are they? Yeah, so again, that took a good couple of years load of investment and half an effort. So kind of, it's probably easier because it's more of a condensed dataset where of course, you're using

Tom Gatten 15:08

your own data. Anytime you're using internal data so yeah, I tend to find the companies tend to do that quite well. I mean, for you, you have the enormous challenge of how do you try and make that interoperable across tech, which I can't even imagine how complicated that is. Yeah,

Alex Blakeway 15:26

so they do well, where we then struggle would be found the difference between so we have marketing generated leads, and we also have self Gen and depending on each division different teams is split, but as a general rule, as a sales organisation, we're after about a 5050 split. So he was a salesperson, we expect you to go and find find your own business. So again, we give them the tools so consensus is very good. We use for videos, the video district tracking, but of course how that's now finally or very soon going to be working with Salesforce to put that data in Salesforce. So that's one area that we started.

Tom Gatten 16:17

That's amazing, because if the salespeople are already using it, yeah. Which presumably they are. Yeah, I mean, that that would be great then because then I mean that is how they are. That's how they aren't getting a sense of how I can engage in an account is, so that's exactly what you want to sense, isn't it?

Alex Blakeway 16:32

Yeah, with some really good statistics coming out from that showing that there's a good if you look across the whole broad companies are taking a big, big sets of data. This typically around 30% of the users that end up signing for contracts aren't the ones on our CRM system that we don't we don't know them. So we start off sending these videos these videos then get passed on to new contacts and new contacts with consensus then tell us who they are. And then when we kind of look it all back so who's we think was going to sign and who actually signed? There's a big chunk of people so again, it highlights us salespeople sometimes can be bad. Understand,

Tom Gatten 17:19

it's very hard. I mean, yeah, is I'm often wrong about that. Because it's just you just basically I think you think the people are going to sign up the people that you like and that like a human thing to think

Alex Blakeway 17:34

is difficult and also the customers lie. They go Yeah. Mike, I'll sign off and then they don't because they've got two three people above to talk about. So our benefit is that we have this split between marketing leads and sales leads. However the negative is where that data can be very separate. So marketing golf and do their thing. Try and get some intent but doesn't really work. Well. The best thing that they go on, which is quite basic that seems to work is of course if somebody does a form download is still that real basic gated content. Oh, somebody's built this form and somebody filled

Tom Gatten 18:17

two forms in there. Yeah.

Alex Blakeway 18:21

Exactly. So so it's it that is it because if you like me when I come to a lot of gated things I've just done because I can't be bothered. Even though Google you press a button, you fill it all out.

Tom Gatten 18:35

Many, many people would say that was very old fashioned. Yes. There are better ways of doing it.

Alex Blakeway 18:40

Exactly. So so that's our negative. So that's how the sales so boxing is in that way then sales doing individually. They're the ones that using a variety of different tools. What we want to try and work out is what's standards and what should we adopt Sales Navigator

Tom Gatten 18:56

consensus. Yeah. And also just you know, just email and telephone calls and all the senses that salespeople get that are hard to, hard to detect, quantify,

Alex Blakeway 19:07

and that's where you got different pockets of people of knowing that if we're trying to train someone on what's the best intent software should use, what does good intent look like? We probably haven't got those that level of maturity skill or experience. I think where you couldn't go to Marketing to go wasn't best practice for some really good content and I can help you with that. Other people in our business, right? What's a sales cadence? Now go right to sell this product. You got to do three calls a demo and do this. If you then get down to the detail of how did you warm people up with this type of content. So talk about price, talking about comparisons and references and who's used and what can go wrong. That's difficult, but also what you heard ones that you warming up who you're tracking. We can't really do that in a structured or an easy way. What I will do, I will work on the ones who are phoned up and I'm in a conversation with so what I can find is those ones sometimes down in conversation with they're the ones that will be you know, half of them are gonna be when loss in two months time because they never showed any intent and are really interested. They're mildly curious because we find them up rather than then making their choice. So our challenge is how do we get away from us creating opportunity, which we must do through again, good content and shame as a better way of doing things but finds that we're doing it in a cohort of people that have a certain level of interest or a certain level of need when you're doing it at scale in the mid market. You've only got so much time there's more companies than you've got than you really need. So

Tom Gatten 21:02

that's how do you explain that to sales as well because it is so hard. You know, one of the problems that you have with any intent tool is that you go and show a sales team. You know, look here's all these companies that appear to be really heavily engaged with all our content. They're clicking on our ads, they've read all these articles, and their salespeople, so I've never heard of them. Yeah, so well. That's the point. Yeah, exactly the point.

Alex Blakeway 21:26

I think this is then some of the basics of I think it will become a a new way of selling where some of the training needs to be what do you do if you're seeing what 10 What is the level needs to be and what is your next step and does that and I've seen it work both ways. One somebody thinks because I've showed some intent, fast forward them all the way to the end of the sales process, which is well here's here's a demo. Here's a price you kind of didn't do the proper finding out the needs and finding out what they were all you do it the other way around. And you go oh, okay, I'll work very sequentially. I've got bits of intent. I'm going to snap start you here at the beginning. Even though the customers telling you I'm already interested. I've researched all of this I want to do long, quick, quicker. So these are the best

Tom Gatten 22:20

and which of your products can use product lead selling, so people can sign up for demos on the website and start using it because then you can use the thing that you have which is the churn prediction thing. In

Alex Blakeway 22:33

that most so most of them you can ask for a demo online. The again where a giveaway, no different suits, many other organisations have words if you send all of those back typically goes all the marketing folks. So it's who from marketing astir then have another bid or load that into Salesforce or Tallis salesperson. It's sometimes seen as, oh, that's a marketing thing someone's interested in and they then do the funnelling, which again, is fine, but the more people you add to the process, the longer it can take. But also sometimes it doesn't get routed to the right person. So then you'd say the flip side could be with those individual sales people do their individual campaigns on their self Gen. If they're using effective technology, they know their action. If something comes in, they'll jump on it straight away because they're the salespeople. And there's also a psychological thing of people believing if a lead comes marketing is not as good as one they find themselves. At the moment we prove beyond that that actually is the case the the south Gen leads have a higher order value. They have a quicker cadence of turning into business, and the close rates are better as well. Because the sales curves close

Tom Gatten 24:00

rates are always going to be better because they don't record all the negative.

Alex Blakeway 24:05

Exactly because Yeah. And also, the South Gen ones could start six months ago, and they only surface up on Salesforce and they go copy your amazing you find someone within two weeks have done a demo and replace them.

Tom Gatten 24:20

I've always found it. I've never been I've always found it absolutely impossible to compare data driven. Basically the conversion of data data driven leads like marketing leads with self Jen. It's impossible. There's no There's no way to have a reasonable comparison.

Alex Blakeway 24:35

Yeah, and we're relying them on salespeople putting things you know, which kind of helps us because if we can see there's a big disparity we can go. Is that just the case that you put your opportunities on later and you're hiding them on some spreadsheets and my most stumbling catch people out but that is are in their minds. They know. Oh, it's it's something that's coming in to them from marketing. Am I going to have to do more work? That's always the part. So that's on us to try and go. Have you got the tools, the right content to move them along? And

Tom Gatten 25:15

do you try to try and get so I've also found it impossible generally, to get an inbound team team that's trained to do inbound conversions to do outbound or vice versa is okay. But yeah, that one in particular was found to be impossible. Yeah, just impossible. You can't if someone is used to getting inbound leads, you cannot get them to unless you like maybe, you know, obviously access group is big enough that you can distribute them amongst teams than it used to be, I suppose, retrain them.

Alex Blakeway 25:44

Well, we have an SDR function. So it's the ones with all the inbound should come in, when it's all filtered to the right and then they do pre qualification where in the olden days, it would be you'd have less of that and you need to pick the phone up. So when we get completely right when we then say things acquire something down here, you've got more hours in a day. Here's a set of numbers. We look at call rates. They don't want to pick the phone up. It's it's there's a different set. You're better off as you said, there's just say that that's too difficult. And we'll get people to different teams, they won't do that. They'll just pick the phone. I mean, all they do all day long is know that the only way to get a target is picking up a phone. However, you'd like to think we can be multidisciplinary and we can have many people doing things so it means that if you're quiet here, you've got something else to work on. But yeah, we're we are challenged with with that and the inbound one. People would of course rather work on those teams. Because the perception is of course it's really easy. You just pick the phone up or you take the emails coming in or the social media posts coming in. Then you triage themselves the right people when you get a ticket, a box that goes towards your SQS that you're meant to get the day but typically difficult very difficult.

Tom Gatten 27:07

Yeah, and what about what about third party intent? And one of the big problems I'd imagine for access group is that your problem isn't at the higher end, it sets the mid market all around and third party intent just is not suitable. It's not suited for that sort of work because a company needs to have a certain number of hundreds or 1000s of employees, reading things like Business Insider and whatever else. Before you can make any kind of meaningful discrimination between who's most interested in ERP software between this company in this company and for smaller companies that just never reached statistical significance

Alex Blakeway 27:43

is and this is where we find is it's hard I think with the larger ones or where if one of these were interested is also saying what's happening in a market segment, what's the sentiment within that area of that geographic space as well? Because if we know through the sentiment engagement, that HR platforms are a big thing, we're seeing that at all levels. That then gives us hope to some of the technology and some of those things should trickle down to to a mid market. The same as the other way round. If the mid market seems to be booming in one area, you kind of think that the larger organisations will do the same. So the some of the things we're after is, is can we have a tool when we look at saying one of our divisions that does works in this specific market? How is that intent different it was six months ago it was three board or 10 years ago? Because that gives us something if you've got your target addressable market, what is the motivation for change or churn or innovation and if we could put some really,

Tom Gatten 28:55

I've never thought about intent at the kind of segment level and on the kind of six monthly kind of annual basis but that makes a lot of sense. I mean, as you know, we build fit a eyes that say someone is fundamentally a good fit, or not based on all these characteristics. But and then for each individual account, we say how engaged they are with your ads on your website. But if you could roll it up and say, this characteristic of a company, let's say companies in very expensive office space or companies that are you know, based in the south of England or better example, you know, companies with a lot of foreign staff. That's the signal up near to be really really heavily engaged with HR or ERP, or kind of payroll software over the last six months that's increasing. That's especially useful to you because you can actually change messaging offerings, pricing products packaging,

Alex Blakeway 29:50

shows you where it's go. So some of our issues this is a nice problem to have. You always different divisions and then you've got subsets within divisions, either salaries, different geographies, or starting to different size of market. And of course, we then want to get as well as our growth coming through acquisitions. We also do double digit organic growth month in quarter in year but when we have a pot of money and so right, we're gonna throw investment where should it go? You know, sometimes you get a bunch of sales directors all enthusiasts

Tom Gatten 30:22

have their own opinion.

Alex Blakeway 30:25

We'd love another 10 people, but could we have is there a dataset or something that goes that part of the market is hotter at the moment? If we've got another hot you know, of 100 heads, we're going to add in the next six months or next quarter? We got budget for 100 200 new people, where should they go? And one will be some obvious spots where we can see through word of mouth and common sense but a lot of it is going to be about placing bets somewhere. So there is a summon intent segment that you could look to roll is out the show. And especially if you can track that over time, you could start to see which ones are peaking and which ones are maybe slowing down a bit because it'd be natural cycles that they go through as well. So, so that's, that's the hard bit we've got some data we're trying to look at.

Tom Gatten 31:17

Because that's I mean, that's the end of the day. That's what that's all marketers to. Yeah, all that all that lives. Like, oh, look, this campaign. This particular segment reacted really well to this messaging with this particular image. Let's do more of that. We're getting a really high click through rate for that. Let's do more of that. So here's basically what we're all striving to do all the time. So yeah, that's a really interesting idea.

Alex Blakeway 31:41

Because when you have 100 New salespeople, and where do you put them? Everyone either go on I don't many more salespeople because I mean, I have to take our quota. Or it means everyone goes, Oh, yeah, of course I need more

Tom Gatten 31:53

sales. And of course, getting it wrong could be horrendously horrendously costly and terrible. It's been six six people, six executives that for whatever reason, are have great conviction about the segment. And they're wrong. And the data actually would have shown the wrong direction, then yeah, you've lost you know, 60 million pounds

Alex Blakeway 32:15

is a lot of effort where we see the you know, the opportunity cost of then having to pivot and then start the team in the in the right place. Is that difficult question, how long do you let it burn for but to kind of cut your all together? Let's move on. Where we have done quite well aware needs to be some more work is around our propensity modelling. We've got our own in house data science team, they're trying to look at new things, but they're working on lots of projects. We did some work with HG going back a couple of years but our luxury of how we run the business is we don't need to sign a net new logo to hit the company's targets within the next, you know, two, three years. We've got ourselves, it's all it's crossed out but forever. But could we can we crack using data what is some propensity modelling to go? They bear over here enabled one of those and then bought another one or these ones? That wasn't luck? Or, you know, good judgement. It was just because there was some process or some common sense between how they did it. And the way that that company is set up. It's no different to hundreds 1000s of other companies so but what were their characteristics of shape and size and build that made them make that decision? So can we then find the best product next best one, and that's it was wrestling with it. There again, it gets slowed down because, again, you know, data, scientists love to try and think about it build their own model, but if there's a tool that can help you, we can hook you up. We've now got somebody that literally owns data for the business. That was one of our big hires. We did going back probably six months ago. And we've got a whole team now structure and then they transport together all our data lakes, and of course, every function across the whole of access has got a data request. Can I do this? Can I do that with it? But that's that would if we would crack that propensity modelling. For us that would be that's one of our our challenges. Typically, as you said, this common sense. We can make our money by cross selling. But how do we know when was it 60,000 customers we go to build what products?

Tom Gatten 34:44

Yeah, this is a really different it's a really different. It's a much more trivial thing. But in going back to the idea of identifying trends within your client base about companies that are going to be particularly interested in a particular scheme way of selling and last week, we had a guy on from signing media whose clients are people like Netflix and Amazon Prime and you know, they're busy security company to prevent prior to bad content piracy. And one of his tips, which I thought was really interesting was that he has some sort of

system whereby he's able to track what images what themes in images appear to be getting a lot of traction in popular culture. And then he runs ads about that. So for example, when in last September, in a very popular very successful campaign with a really high click through rate that had pictures of people with swords and bows and arrows. So this is a b2b security product, but it's not it's not consumer product. But he said because it was around the launch of

Lord of the Rings and The Game of Thrones prequels, and therefore everyone was just interested in bows and arrows and so but you know, packaging up this kind of rather boring in a b2b style ad in this kind of got lots of click throughs although he then also did say didn't get very many form fills, which I guess is not hugely surprising. If they may have been the wrong audience. Anyway, but I thought it was quite nice. I did kind of a site Geist tracker. I mean, it's a it's a more trivial example. And you were talking about, you know, tracking kind of trends in need or economic and macroeconomic changes.

Alex Blakeway 36:40

And I think that's the, if somebody sees a problem, they can be unique in that because that's where they are, but a lot of the time, it just makes sense. They're seeing same somebody else down the road is seeing if you can be ahead of that. We were lucky we purchased a great acquisition called min soft which is all around within your warehouse tracking for all your products that came right just before COVID Hit were of course, warehouses or were sitting at home shopping. If you could have done something to fix that. You could then it's where could you help and focus your sales team again, where could you help focus the marketing team on content? And just

Tom Gatten 37:31

at the very least, you know, to begin to predict something at least you should be able to measure it, you know, if we were able to look at you know, what is it because we you know the businesses that have filled in forms over the last x many years we could work out what they had in common and how that changed over time. You know for this particular product that's warehousing product, it started out being shops, and then it was specialist ecommerce companies and then it was companies had investment in Shopify or something. Yeah, software and then you could try and look at these little lines and then say, Okay, now what can we can we look at this chart and make a human prediction based on that. And then can we make a piece of software to try and do automatically

Alex Blakeway 38:11

and anything like that? I think everyone staffs the you know, the the edge of say, in a good company with a good name. There's lots of potential out there, but how do we be laser focused on trying to get it?

Tom Gatten 38:27

I mean, there aren't companies you can spend a lot of money on to help you do this. Like for example, mandore and Fitch part of WPP you know, that's they're turning over 300 million pounds something and they do total rebrands for companies like they rebranded BP as beyond petroleum, and created the brand for Saudi Arabia's neon you know, that linear city

and they will come in and say, well, your market your customers are divided into five different segments, and over the next 10 years, this is how their segment will develop and grow or decline. And these different segments have innovated, they are attracted by different angles on your messaging. And so therefore, to capitalise on that, you should kind of change your brand to be like this, and therefore you're going to make this amount of money. But yeah, obviously that costs like many, many millions of pounds,

Alex Blakeway 39:24

and that's what's up and he's probably been very, fairly poor. You know, ourselves. We're always, you know, good secret because we were rubbish at promoting us sounds the same way as Cisco No, and you get our work for Cisco 173 When they had a, a kind of moment, which was like we let everybody knew who we were and then also purchase WebEx. Why don't we have a go as you started to kind of be at the tune all of a sudden you'll see a big picture with Cisco on advertising and everyone was like, Okay, I know the brands now. And they actually did prove that when you have decision makers and you go and talk to them, they just feel more comfortable because they already know the brand. Rather than going oh, yeah, but we are the leader of routing and communications. It's

Tom Gatten 40:13

how do you think that's going to change? We were having a conversation recently working in AI about digital ad spend b2b digital ad spend. It's increasing hugely since 6 billion in the US in 2019 to 14 billion last year 2022. So that's a huge, an enormous acceleration. And it's paralleled the growth in b2c digital ad spend in the late 2000s, early 2000 and 10s. And at that same time, there was a huge explosion in jobs in consumer digital consumer marketing. So, you know, everyone and their dog got into being an expert in Facebook ads, you know, for consumer, for every business under the sun suddenly needed to display advertising on Facebook because Google has a limit on but because that's why everyone wants doing Google keywords because it's easy, and I think in broadly and b2b, every honest doing Google because it's easy, you know, search, search terms, and whatever. But display is harder because you have to understand your market. But clearly if the growth continues to be like that, then in another

like 10 years, their spend on b2c digital advertising in the US will be b2b digital advertising the US rather will be like 40 billion and the spend globally will be more like 150 billion.

But it might not be but but at the same time, that may be an artefact of the pandemic. Yes. So it could be that actually that is a just a coincidence. And that actually it's about to kind of go back to tradeshows and salespeople knocking on doors.

Alex Blakeway 41:55

I think it will change I think one of them I worked with a company a few years ago they did the the experts that you've put a doozy camera and I would see where your eye went on the screen. And they'd also proved that over a period of time you start to go blind to these adverts and you actually just because it's not interesting anymore and your brains worked out. Why should I look over here? I don't need one of those or it's not interesting to me. And the thing with digital advertising, I think we're moving over more to like on TV where you have we're more of an on demand where we don't want to watch and wait for things. I think we're going to move to a more of an individual one making the conscious choice to go and find things rather than it being served. That's us. Because you're right, everyone else has come to the conclusion. Now this is an easy way of getting business. What we'll do is we'll just pay the money for Greg digital. I think what will happen is that will slow down or the effectiveness of it will slow down and it will then become Oh again, it's good for a brand recognition. But it's hard to link it's hard facts of increasing my sales because when they then track and look at individuals and they look at what that individual is doing. They want to self serve their own content or their time of choosing not having it forced on them. Is a hard is a is a hard one.

Tom Gatten 43:22

But it's not gonna You're right. It's not going to repeat the 2010 because I think you know the public attitudes very firmly switched away from social media based advertising because basically that boom in b2c was purely was that was social media, you know as Facebook, Twitter Tiktok you know, I think public attitudes have changed very firmly away from stolen PII style marketing. Yeah.

Alex Blakeway 43:49

But there'd be I think there's a place for it. I think. If you can do that, it's always way and you did a two things you can spot some intent. And you know, if you serve something up, there's relevant, there's a good chance somebody's going to click on it. If that bit of content looks engaging, or it looks to answer my problem or solve my problem that I have that

Tom Gatten 44:15

I tell you, I think that publishers are gonna have way more power. I think their data is far more powerful than they realise. People like the Financial Times, for example, have a subscriber base where they know every article that everyone is reading and where their eyes go and where they work. But they don't sell that information. I mean, they do in sense that they sell ads, and of course, ads can be contextual, and they can do clever stuff there but but you know, wouldn't it be amazing if, with the removal of third party cookies and the removal of this stolen PII thing, we moved towards, actually publishers have suddenly having you know, they've been denigrated for the last 20 years, and, you know, pushed out of everything. But if publishers actually suddenly realise that their first party data about who they're in b2b publications, you generally know someone's email

address. Yeah, yeah. No reading. You know, construction news. UK, you need to be logged in. So it's free, but the Financial Times it's, it's expensive, but that level of intent information is so much more valuable than the kind of third party intent that's aggregated across however they do it.

The kind of you know, they have to buy in data from third parties. I think that's going to become much, much harder with removal of third party cookies, and just the changes in attitudes, but a publisher like the Financial Times, getting going to you and saying, you know, we can tell you these trends about which accounts appear to be interested in which things how this is changing over time. Yeah, that would be

Alex Blakeway 45:53

I think it's a sensible lens, because there's a sense, right, where, where you're investing your time and efforts, there's got to be some value by being able to look at that. And again, go right well, you're investing that time effort doing something you must be able to a problem or a personal interest, or something that you've been tasked to go and research or its problem. If you can then make sure that you know who those that group people are, you can service them and probably find that you're close rates and hit rates and be able to get through to people he's getting that's the other problem says we're just getting through to people is a lot harder. So much noise, where it used to be Oh, yeah, LinkedIn is the golden way you connect and do this so that so many people on LinkedIn, so many emails, so many calls are actually not many calls because people are all on mobiles, and they don't know what the numbers are. So that's the difficulty is just connecting, because they'll type you're blocking them because they know who they are trying to connect to them. So you kind of know, you're going to connect but to an audience that have an interest. Again, I just think that that would go a long way to helping.

Tom Gatten 47:02

Alright, look, I think we should. This has been a really interesting chat. And I'm so sorry, we didn't have the Darktrace guys on. I do kind of understand. I think they must have

Alex Blakeway 47:15

let me what I'll do. I'll do an email introduction to our guide. It's head of data. Just have a chat to him about that. You are looking for a team and we've tried to get again in hospitality with

Tom Gatten 47:30

Ashley Alex. These days I would. It's probably better if I was able to speak with someone who runs your advertising. Because we have no right like we used to think of ourselves as a data provider or someone. But these days we just think of ourselves as a competitor to LinkedIn campaign manager. So people upload content, they you know, identify and target audience using growth, intelligence and we can then advertise across a range of publications and get it much much higher.

Much lower cost per cost per lead.

Alex Blakeway 48:02

And that is very we've grown out we've got a lot more people in it. We've seen that again, as he said, you know, digital first that's we've typically stopped a lot the trade shows, which I think in some ways is good because we have people we're not getting anything back from it. We're still at the ones that we need to be but we've stopped that and we've put more spend on digital let me put an invite I'll introduce you to Lucy Lucy Ledbetter, who is our head of digital awesome. Burke has been here for a couple of years. Just have a chat with explain. I'll say you know worked with you for a bit which is just worth hearing what you can do.

Tom Gatten 48:42

I'd love to get have you on our platform.

Alex Blakeway 48:43

I'd be meeting and then to get that and again, I think that's that's a good one because you know we've got you know pockets of people so loosely on the digital side. So that was taken out data engineers that kind of are trying to look for ways and strategies of having solutions that can go right I can suck up both now organise all our data that I can plug it into something. So yeah, let's start with doing so you haven't have a chat with her. And then yeah, let me know if I can help in any ways. I think it's the future is the 100% the right thing that you need to do. It's just hard to crack it to prove it. Well, I

Tom Gatten 49:24

think I've got a nice way. I think I've got a nice way to prove it. You see, so I'll see. I'll show her it will be called an audience audit. It analysed all the advertising you've done on LinkedIn, and then says here's all the impressions you've served against companies that we don't think are in your target audience and here are all the impressions you've served against those and this is the dramatically higher click through rate you've got from those that are within the audience has been so kind of automated very instant process these days. So Lucy

Alex Blakeway 49:53

Yes, super, super interesting, because that's where so much the spend is on those platforms. Yeah. Typical b2b b2b, we do you know, some of the more creative was more of the South Gen side to be honest, doing stuff on tick tock, we need to push. The marketing tends to be a bit more down with the different the newer ways of working because we do tend to stick to sometimes the traditional ways, but then I have a chat with Lucy. Anything else say that 100% Thanks, Alex. The right route,

Tom Gatten 50:25

we will write up this conversation into a little document and you and I will get a chance to just look it over make sure you're happy with everything. And then we'll also edit the podcast down as well over the next couple of weeks and we'll have a conversation about that as well. But Alex, thank you so much for your time. It's been great and great to see you again.

Alex Blakeway 50:42

Yeah, good signal. And I'll speak to you again.

Tom Gatten 50:45

Speak to you soon. Bye

Speaker 3 50:47

bye. All right. Ah I'm really sorry the other people didn't show up. Yeah, that's

Tom Gatten 51:00

a shame isn't it? That's the first time that's happened. So yeah, and they can the guy from checkatrade Farah star Yeah. I mean with with the top trace guys I do understand given the PR stuff down appeared to join and then leave again.

Speaker 3 51:17

Yeah, that was so weird. Yeah. But but he didn't answer me. Yeah,

Tom Gatten 51:22

you sent him an email saying I

Speaker 3 51:25

didn't answer and Catherine answered. And she told me did Tom receive my message this morning?

Tom Gatten 51:32

Oh, gosh. Okay, maybe there's sorry I missed it. But now I haven't got an email from I guess. Oh, yeah. I have actually. Apologies lateness of I won't be able to pretend later due to a meeting clash. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, she replied to the invite. And for some reason that wasn't labelled as important. So

Speaker 3 51:59

yeah, that's a shame but it was a great conversation and I think it's a great material and also a great content. Yeah,

Tom Gatten 52:08

well, we'll just move ahead as normal. But yeah, those guys through checkatrade and whatever.

I mean, definitely get in touch with them and say really, really sorry, weren't able to attend. You would have been lovely to have you. We had a good conversation. We've got an event on the x, where we're also going to be talking about intent. We'd really love to have you there.

Speaker 3 52:28

Yeah, sure. And the good news is a lot of people is clicking on the event for next week. Agency event, the agency event. Yeah, I will. I will. I will upload all the rest of the events a month ahead. As event as the events and also in our website, of course, I will put a bit of money in maybe in the gara lot, but I will put all the money in these events because it's proven to be working so brilliant. Sorry about the grammar issue this morning. Yeah, I mean, maybe we should revise it with someone else. Maybe Adrian?

Tom Gatten 53:13

Yeah. That's a good idea. I think maybe someone well, I mean, Adrian would be really good, but he is quite busy. So I'm thinking about it. I'm not sure we're gonna come up with an answer right away. I think I am definitely too busy. Yeah.

And the thing is, if we went out to someone, like, if we went out on just general, I mean, Sarah could definitely do it. I mean, she's probably too annoyed with us for not paying her bill. But someone like Sarah could do it as well, temporarily expensive now,

Speaker 3 53:46

but I think revising something is way cheaper than, than then than than write it. So. Yeah. But

Tom Gatten 53:56

I think it's, they have to have the context. Like they have to look at this. And just, and kind of, to make it simpler, which is what I'm talking about to make it clearer. So lots of the problems, were not necessarily grammar. I didn't, I was saying grammar, because it's a simple way of saying it, but

yeah, so it's like, yeah, complexity may not always focus on leveraging motion and being consumer audience first, you have to, to know what's wrong with that you need to be a marketer, because you need to realise, cuz it's being consumer first. Well, we're doing b2b. So we don't necessarily, we want to be human first, but not necessarily consumer is a bit confusing. And then this complexity may not always focus on that doesn't quite make sense. You kind of need to understand the context to be able to know why it's wrong.

Speaker 3 54:45

Maybe I'm taking too little being too

Tom Gatten 54:50

literal. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the problem is, we have this with network Sunday, you remember last last summer, where those writers were writing it down, pretty much add exactly what they said. And when it was presented back to them, they go, this doesn't make any sense. Because when you're saying it, everyone understands because it's in context, when it's written down. It doesn't make any sense. It needs to be simplified context needs to be added clarification needs to be added. So I think, you know, the, the AI things clearly working, as I said, it gets 99% of the way there. But I think you probably need to just go through once more and go, Do I understand this? Of course. And if not, and it's always it's always you don't need to be verbatim people forget what they said anyway. It's better to be simpler, clearer.