Leveraging Behavioral Insights for Smarter B2B Campaigns

Expert Marketing Advisors: Hello! We’re just going to give a couple of seconds here for people joining us.

Expert Marketing Advisors: Alright. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Depending on where you’re joining us from.

Expert Marketing Advisors: Thank you for joining today’s webinar: Leveraging Behavioral Insights for Smarter B2B Campaigns. Today we have Courtney Kehl joining us from Expert Marketing Advisors to get us started. Courtney.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, thanks for that. Bre. We’re really excited for the topic: Leveraging Behavioral Insights. I come from Expert Marketing Advisors. We definitely are always looking for what’s working in marketing and how we can move the needle. And certainly, for the GoTo market for companies of all sizes.

Courtney Kehl: With that said, let me introduce our guest, really excited to have Tara Robinson with us from Chili Piper, and I’m sure my introduction won’t do justice, so I’m going to hand it over to you, Tara, and by all means take it away.

Tara Robertson: Great thanks. So much for having me, Courtney, really excited to do this with your team. So like Courtney said, I’m at a company called Chili Piper. If you’re not familiar, we help you book more meetings from your website, and we help you qualify route and schedule meetings from pretty much any inbound or outbound channel that you can think of. I’ve been at Chili Piper for about 3 and a half years now, so it’s flown by. It’s been a roller coaster, but I’m excited to share some of my learnings today with everyone.

Courtney Kehl: Love it. Yeah, and interactive, by all means. If you want to participate with any questions or comments, just throw them into the chat. Tell us where you’re joining us from. I’m in the Bay Area right now, but I also spend a majority of my time in Austin, Texas. But you know Silicon Valley really has their finger on the pulse of everything happening. So it’s nice to come back as well. Where are you joining us from Tara?

Tara Robertson: I’m in Toronto. But I also love Austin. I love heading there for events.

Courtney Kehl: Yes, got it. Love it all. Well, let’s dive in with that, bear with me. I’m going into slideshow mode. There we go.

Courtney Kehl: Like I said we got Tara from Chili Piper. She’s been there 3 and a half years, which is a lifetime in most tech companies. And I think you’re really quite the expert to talk to us about why behavioral insights matter. And this sort of the differences as we go through.

Tara Robertson: Great. Yeah. So I think a lot of B2B marketers that I speak to right now are really struggling with seeing the results that they were seeing in, say, 2021, maybe even 2022. A lot of us have really lofty targets, but often smaller teams, smaller budgets than we did back then. So we really have to make the most of every – call it an insight signal. We can get into that in a minute of what we want to call that. But we really have to make the most of everything that we have available to us as marketers.

Tara Robertson: So really, the solution is to use those behavioral insights to optimize as much as we can at every stage of the buyer journey. And I’ll talk a little bit about how we’re doing that on the outbound side as well. But for marketers we obviously have a ton of data at our fingertips. And it’s just figuring out what we can use and what we can personalize.

Tara Robertson: And obviously, the impact that we’re gonna see, there is higher conversion rates throughout that funnel.

Courtney Kehl: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you’re absolutely right. There is tons of data. And it’s a matter of pulling what data actually matters. And again, move that needle. So let’s dive into that. What, exactly? Let’s identify each of the triggers, or what are we actually looking for here? That will make a difference.

Tara Robertson: Sure. So I think the really common behavioral triggers that for myself and a lot of other marketers come to mind 1st are things like someone’s viewed a specific page. So maybe they viewed a new chat product. So maybe they viewed our chat page and we can assume that they’re interested in that chat product. Maybe they’re looking at your pricing page or clicking on your emails.

Tara Robertson: But there are a ton of other things that are happening on the account side of things that a lot of marketers don’t necessarily take into consideration that can also indicate either buying intent, or maybe they’re looking to make a purchase decision. So one thing that we’ve done at Chili Piper is really focused on not just those individual behaviors, but also the account level triggers. So things like what’s in their tech stack, are they adding new tools right now that maybe you integrate with? And you should take a look at that to make a purchase decision.

Tara Robertson: Another thing that we’ll get into in a little bit is we’ve been testing out a company called UserGems to do things like if they’re hiring, or if people are moving around from one organization to the other, how do you keep in touch with those campaigns? So lots of different triggers that you can take a look at. And I think one thing that we were talking about earlier when we were setting up this webinar, is that signals is a really hot topic right now. But in my mind, that’s really just kind of reframing this whole trigger intent. There’s so many different ways you can phrase it.

Courtney Kehl: Like back in the day, you know.

Tara Robertson: Exactly. Yeah. So don’t feel like if you’re seeing that word signals tossed around everywhere that you need to start from scratch and figure out what your strategy is. It’s really you probably have some of this already in your back pocket, just probably calling it something different internally.

Courtney Kehl: Semantics. Yeah, awesome.

Courtney Kehl: That’s great. So one thing to really point out is obviously, you know, as with B2B tech companies and B2B GoTo market. You really want to look at those business buyers, and they’re more likely to buy from a company that provides a personalized experience. So people really want to humanize. You know, AI is great. But you can tell when AI has been utilized as opposed to an actual human being.

Courtney Kehl: So, I think it kind of brings back that human touch. So as we’re talking about personalization, what exactly does that mean? It’s not just as simple as using somebody’s 1st name.

Tara Robertson: Yeah, exactly. I think in general, just the bar is super high. Now, when we say personalization, people have very high expectations. And to your point. It’s not just, hey 1st name saw you attended this webinar, but it’s also what have you done in the past with us? What context do I have about you? Maybe you were an open opportunity 6 months ago, and you closed because of pricing. And now is the right time for our sales team to reach out, because we have some kind of incentive that we should speak to you about. So it’s really looking at all the previous engagement that you have access to? Not just what data fields do I have about you on a personal level.

Courtney Kehl: Right, right? And I think a big part of it is also timing. You know, what is relevant for the individual at that moment in time? Make it about the actual buyer from the outside in yeah. Great.

Tara Robertson: Yeah, that timing piece is huge. I think one signal that really took off recently, or maybe not recently, maybe in the last year or so is that a lot of companies are now targeting when people get a round of funding. So it’s funny because we haven’t raised a round of funding in a few years now, and I still get emails. I got one yesterday. That was clearly AI, but it was someone saying, Hey, congrats on your funding. And it was the gist of the email was essentially like you have money. Now please talk to me and buy my product. And I think people see right through that type of personalization. So you really have to layer on multiple signals. It can’t be just one.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, absolutely. I call those folks sort of the ambulance chasers. However, you want to look at it. But yeah, they’re definitely not personalized or doesn’t feel really genuine. So I think that that part of being genuine and sincere makes a big difference. When we bring that all together. Obviously, sales and marketing. We really want to make sure they’re aligned. They’re on the same page. Sales knows what marketing is doing and marketing knows what sales needs.

Courtney Kehl: I always say that we all work for sales, but kind of talk a little bit about bringing that together, and how you see it working best.

Tara Robertson: Yeah, so one way and obviously every GTM Team is structured a little bit differently. But one way that we like to do alignment at Chili Piper is we have a pretty large team of outbound SDRs, and they’re actually much larger than our marketing motion or marketing team, so we often kind of use them to test out new signals or new plays which some people like to say outbound is free.

Tara Robertson: I don’t know if I agree with that necessarily. But it’s definitely more cost effective than launching new ads to an audience that we’re not sure about just yet. So one way that we build alignment with our SDR Team is we help them with new signals. We help them with new audiences and crafting those cadences, and once they’re seeing success they come back to us and say: Hey, this audience is really working, or this signal is really landing. And then we take that from the marketing side and figure out how we can amplify that.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah.

Tara Robertson: Aid, or maybe putting some content effort behind it.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, I do always recommend folks kind of start in the organic world to figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Courtney Kehl: But to your point. Organic doesn’t necessarily mean free. But once you do know where the successes are, then you can kind of double down with the paid and the digital ads and such. So yeah, definitely, that’s great. So syncing behavioral data and signals targeting and qualified accounts, it brings me to sort of that, of course, the account based marketing. And I, maybe I need a little more clarification as you’re targeting, not just people, but actual companies and accounts, correct?

Tara Robertson: Yes, exactly. So we build our account lists on the outbound side. We use a tool called Good Fit to build out what our high score is. We call them, High Score Accounts should be and that’s a mix of a ton of different signals that we’re looking at. But some of them are, we’re essentially saying, what is the propensity for this account to buy Chili Piper and then targeting that way versus just an outbound team kind of picking the flashiest logos that they think they want to land.

Courtney Kehl: Sure. Yeah, so is it kind of in comparison to like lead scoring. It would be account scoring.

Tara Robertson: That’s exactly it. Yeah. So we actually don’t focus on lead scoring necessarily. But we’re very focused on these are the high score accounts that we should be going after, both from sales and marketing. We’re focused on the same account list.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, I think it makes sense. I think we saw a pivot over the last 5 years where folks really started realizing, let’s make sure we’re going after the right account. You know that ICP makes a big difference as opposed to just people and contacts. Let’s bring it all together. So with all that, I mean. What? What are sort of the tangible takeaways, the actionable things that folks can do, as they’re listening and joining us here.

Tara Robertson: Yeah. One thing I know, we just touched on lead scoring. But I would caution that if you don’t get a ton of inbound lead volume. It’s probably not the best use of your GTM’s Team’s time to do a very complicated lead scoring process. You’re probably better off focusing on scoring those accounts first. And that’s where you can do things like, okay, here’s our account list. Once someone from that account engages with us. Then we should track those behavioral triggers, but not necessarily building out account scores lead scoring for every single person that visits your website, regardless of if they’re in your ICP or not.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, I mean, that makes sense, too, because folks like you said they sometimes want to track. If your decision Maker has left that company and gone to another. You’re selling to companies, even though individual people are the ones that are truly the decision makers. And if people, if there’s rotation or change in the company, you’ll still be targeting that company with the right focus. That makes sense.

Courtney Kehl: Okay. So we’ve got to identify. Make those hand raisers out there, give them some weight. Utilize those triggers. Role in the personalization piece and then, of course, aligning with marketing or in sales.

Tara Robertson: Okay.

Courtney Kehl: We all work for sales. So figure out what’s and what’s not, and then double down, of course. So do you have an example? I’ve got a case study here.Walk us through something that you’ve done here.

Tara Robertson: Yeah, I would just say, going back to your previous slide, I know we have a line with sales as the last bullet point. But in my mind it’s also first, it’s kind of a circle. So it’s really when we’re identifying and tracking those key triggers. Ideally it should never be just marketing, sitting in a room doing that you should be involving your sales team in that step as well, and that kind of ties into the Case Study that we’ll get into. But I just wanted to point that out.

Courtney Kehl: No, absolutely. Yeah, no, you’re 100. Yeah, we don’t want to be over here doing one thing while sales is doing another that makes a big difference.

Tara Robertson: Exactly. Yeah. So one way that this was actually a project led by our outbound SDR Managers. So we brought on a tool called UserGems to track job changes, because I’m sure a lot of people on this call are familiar. But in the market space and in B2B in general, people job hop quite a bit. So Courtney mentioned when she introduced me. But 3 years at one company is quite a while for a marketing leader, and we tend to sell to people in marketing and sales leadership roles. The turnover is very high in those types of environments. So tracking job changes of our campaign. We knew that it was something that we had to do and was kind of one of those things that we kept putting off, and our SDR Managers picked that up as a project. So we used UserGems to automate a little bit of that.

Tara Robertson: What we were able to do was automate the process of assigning those new companies that our campaigns had moved on to right to an SDR. Right away so that they’re not, they’re not sitting around getting outreach from either our competitors or other tools in the space. But we’re really getting there 1st and making sure that that person knows like, hey, we can still support your needs at this new organization. Let us help you in your new role.

Courtney Kehl: And then it starts building. That accounts for the new place that your Decision Maker went. So yeah, no, that’s great that we’re your campaign, so to speak.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, that’s that’s actually, I mean, I would love to see that in action for several of the companies that we work with. I think that’d be really valuable.

Courtney Kehl: Right?

Tara Robertson: And you see all the time that champions will come and advocate for your tool at a new place. But it’s just not always their number one priority. So it helps to have that push from sales to remind them.

Courtney Kehl: Right awesome. So just to be specific, you’ve opened 19 opportunities equal to 300K. That was right out of the gate, so that we, utilizing the UserGams or talk me through.

Tara Robertson: Yeah, we definitely need to update these numbers here. But this was within the 1st quarter that we implemented. So now we have a couple more months of data that we can update that with. But we essentially saw that the tool was ROI positive within, I believe the first 3 months.

Courtney Kehl: Wow, okay, that’s great. Yeah. I mean, we always look at like 6 to 9 months out. You know that sort of the pipeline and the lead life cycle.

Courtney Kehl: Okay. So I think that kind of takes us over to any questions and happy to, you know, open it up to the folks that are joining us here. Thanks again for joining us and the topic. Oh, there we go! Thanks for joining, and by all means connect with us on Linkedin. Follow us on Linkedin, or reach out as well. If you have any questions. There’s our inbox there, and we’ll be sure to have the right person get back to you, and we’ll make sure that this recording is available for you as well.

Courtney Kehl: So going into questions, I do see a couple of them here. Bear with me. One is around OPS. What tools can we use to track actual behavioral triggers? What are the specifics?

Tara Robertson: Yeah. So for the individual level behaviors. We at Chili Pepper, we just use Hubspot for that. There’s some fancier tools you can look into, but depending on the level of granularity. Whatever you’re using for your marketing automation can probably get you 90% of the way there.

Courtney Kehl: Sure. So it’s just a matter of building it out, whether it’s HubSpot or Marketo, or whatever it might be.

Tara Robertson: Exactly. Yeah, whatever your current automation is, I would start there and see if you have any gaps before you go buying new tools all over the place.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, it is what I was just saying the other day, it’s almost like a Disneyland of tools. And it and it’s a little bit of an overload, because you want to make sure the tools that you haven’t, and already, under your umbrella are being utilized to the fullest extent. There’s a lot of overlap. Yeah, it makes sense.

Courtney Kehl: So when, if you’re setting up these behavioral triggers and you know your marketing automation tool, your HubSpot or whatnot is there sort of a like a I don’t want to say like, is there a playbook? Is there like a sort of easy, quick, and quick and dirty way to kind of get it going. And then you kind of build from there. How would somebody?

Tara Robertson: It really depends on what your buying cycles look like. So for us, I know I spoke to our outbound motion, but on the inbound side. We typically don’t pass any leads over that are not part of our target account list unless they book a demo and raise their hand, and that for us is enough volume to hit our targets. But if you’re looking to hand over more leads to your sales team, you might need to expand that criteria and look at things like website engagement. How often accounts are coming to your site.

Courtney Kehl: Okay, yeah. So it’s just kind of where you want to make that pass or that handle.

Tara Robertson: Exactly. It’s figuring out what that handoff looks like for your GTM Org.

Courtney Kehl: Got it, got it. So we have another question here around tools for accounts. Based signals. Obviously, this leads into ABM strategy. Are there any specific tools that you’ve found successful for? The account based side of things.

Tara Robertson: Yes, I mentioned this briefly, but we use a tool called Good fit. And this project is, it’s one of those things that’s never done so. If you’ve ever done any kind of account, scoring or lead scoring, it’s always ongoing. But we have a blog post that I can share about how we used Good Fit to refine that process. And our SDR Manager is leading that process when he’s been working really closely with their team on essentially what they did is they took our existing customer base and did an analysis of what do they have in common? What are the overlaps and things like Market stack company size, sales team size and a bunch of other factors. And then they came back to us to inform us of that score. So it wasn’t just us sitting in a room saying, Hey, we’d love these ten logos. It was really, really backed by that data of our existing customers.

Courtney Kehl: That’s awesome. I’ve never heard of Good Fit, but I’ll definitely look into it. I mean it’s great when you’ve got those ones that really turn results out and validated, awesome. We’ve got another question here. Do you route each engagement behavioral insight to a campaign for ROI tracking? In short, how do you track the ROI of each medium?

Tara Robertson: Yeah, that’s a good question for us personally. We don’t track each engagement as a campaign, but certain touches, like, for example, we’re kind of wrapping up the event season now. So if we met someone at an event, if they came to a dinner, we would track that as a salesforce campaign definitely.

Tara Robertson: But I wouldn’t track necessarily someone who viewed a certain page or engaged with stuff on LinkedIn. Or, yeah, you can get very granular on that. If you want.

Courtney Kehl: Maybe if it’s one of those really.

Tara Robertson: Yeah, for any we do track, any form fill would definitely be in a campaign. But something simple, like a visit. We don’t get that granular. Personally, I know companies that do, but we don’t do that.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, yeah, we we’ve seen companies that, you know, go right into, like the social media, like the clicks and engagements there, which you know really the outermost part of the onion

Tara Robertson: Oh is it!

Courtney Kehl: So that there’s some interest. It’s just certainly not going to be that handoff moment. Yeah, got it.

Tara Robertson: Yeah, we are looking at. I don’t have access yet, but I’m excited to get access on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has this new, I can’t remember what they call it, but it’s like a data source called Company Tracking. And you can track different company engagement with not just paid, but also your organic activity on LinkedIn. It’s in Beta right now. So not everybody has access. But that’s something that we’re thinking about. Should we sync that to a campaign potentially, now that we have that data. But it would be company based, not individual.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, right? Which brings us back to the argument for ABM.

Courtney Kehl: Oh, that’s great, LinkedIn. I do find that LinkedIn, they’re always kind of change. There’s pivoting here and there. But I do that? That is actually a really great channel for finding your buyers and being a part of conversations and just being involved. Yeah.

Courtney Kehl: Great so I think that does it for questions. Again, I appreciate everybody joining us. We’ll be sure to get this out as a recording here shortly, and we’ll have it on our social pages as well. And then, of course, Tara, thank you so much for joining us. I love talking shop. So I mean, I can go on for days. And yeah, any anything, any last comments

Tara Robertson: Thank you again for having me. I love this short format. I think it’s great. You can just run through it. And I will share that account. Scoring blog post we wrote because I’ve had a lot of follow up questions on LinkedIn about that as well.

Courtney Kehl: Right? Yeah.

Tara Robertson: To dig into.

Courtney Kehl: Like lead scoring for us. We’ve got kind of a right out of the box like base.

Tara Robertson: Hmm.

Courtney Kehl: You know, score 5 for this, or and then what’s your actual threshold? And then the account side? We really would be great to have that piece as well to kind of bring it all together. So yeah.

Courtney Kehl: Great, all right. Well, thanks everyone again. And pleasure speaking with you, Tara. I’m looking forward to more conversations, and where it all goes.

Tara Robertson: Thanks so much.

Courtney Kehl: I think that wraps us up, all right. Thanks everyone.