B2B Podcasting brings you a fantastic episode with Chris Roche, CEO of Catalyst Consulting, who shares with us the true essence of demand gen and how your company can apply it today. 
Understand the true essence of demand generation Perfect your sales pipeline by revolutionizing your marketing with demand gen Learn to create content that will educate your buyer on your product or service Create content at scale with a B2B podcast and other amazing content resources
00:00-09:42 | What is the real definition of demand generation? 09:42-16:13 | How to get C-suite execs involved with content creation 16:13-22:48 | Understand your sales pipeline timeline to implement demand gen 22:48-42:54 | Learn to look at demand generation as a sales strategy for your business
“Demand generation is creating content and educating your potential buyer no matter where they’re at in the sales process.” - Chris Roche, CEO at Catalyst Consulting “You have to have the attrition, invest the time and view content creation through a long-term lens to be successful.” - Chris Roche, CEO at Catalyst Consulting “The key to creating a strong personal brand is by leveraging organic to understand the content matrix which will enable you to fire on all cylinders and produce content at scale.” - Chris Roche, CEO at Catalyst Consulting “If you are going to invest in organic content and its distribution then you as the leader need to be involved with its production because you understand the organization better than anyone.” - Chris Roche, CEO at Catalyst Consulting
Full Transcription:
Kap Chatfield 00:20
Hey gang, welcome back to B2B Podcasting. The official show for B2B CEOs, brand leaders, sales leaders and marketing leaders to help them skip ads and be the show. On the show, we always talk about how you as a brand can start marketing your message, your unique vision in a way that doesn't just fill up the pipeline, with MQLs with opportunities that are actually never going to sell, but how to actually drive demand for your business and we like to do that through video podcasting. But today, we're gonna specifically be talking with a guest, he's a very special guest, his name is Chris Roche. He is the CEO of Catalyst Consulting. And one thing that I've noticed about you, Chris is you're you're a content creation machine, I see you showing up on LinkedIn all the time, amazing videos, and you're ramping up your video quality with the animation too, I've been seeing that. And one thing I've been really admiring from your content is your perspective on demand generation. So we'll be sure to get into that today, we'll be talking about how you measure the value of content. We'll be talking about your philosophy on paid media versus organic content and hopefully, we'll just see where it goes. We'll have an organic conversation. But, Chris, I'm just super grateful to have you on the show today. Thanks for joining us.
Chris Roche 01:34
Yeah, no, thank you for having me. Very much looking forward to geeking out over demand generation. And yeah, dive into everything.
Kap Chatfield 01:40
Well, let's go right into it. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Catalyst Consulting? There's a lot of marketing consultancies out there. What's like, what would you say is your niche? What's your main focus for your agency?
Chris Roche 01:50
Yeah, it's funny, actually, I was listening to some advice, probably about a year ago, and it said that one business, you shouldn't start is a marketing agency, because everybody and their mother has a marketing agency. So when I was starting Catalyst, I was thinking, "right, I have to do something that's going to be a little bit unique". I can't just go and you know, work for the local chiropractor and dentist and run Google ads for them in a specific location. It's just not what I was passionate about. So I really focused on combining my sales and marketing expertise, and creating a revenue and pipeline growth focused marketing agency where my goal with any of my clients and I specialize really in B2B SaaS companies that are just starting to go from either the seed fund to Series A, and assisting them at leveraging paid social and demand generation to ultimately figure out how to scale at the rate where they need to to either get to their next round of funding, to become profitable, whatever that next goal step is for them.
Kap Chatfield 02:43
What's the main problem that you see SAS companies that are going from seed funding to Series A, what's the typical marketing problem they'll run into?
Chris Roche 02:50
A lot of companies just simply haven't figured out the sales pipeline and the marketing process to go and acquire customers profitably. So they don't know the customer acquisition costs, really, they don't know the metrics. And that's one of the biggest issues is when you come into this, a lot of a lot of B2B SaaS companies, when they're first starting out, a lot of their clients have come from either introductions from VCs, from personal connections of the CEO or founder, from just simple, you know, hard sales outbound, and just constantly, you know, picking up the phones and having that more of an outbound effort. So they've never had the capital to be able to invest into really going out and acquiring customers and doing this at a scalable rate. So to suddenly have and you go and raise, you know, $1,000,000, $2 million dollars that you want to put into marketing, they don't know the numbers to be able to actually leverage that effectively. So a lot of my clients when I start working with them, it's about figuring out a lot of those metrics initially and then scaling from there.
Kap Chatfield 03:41
Got it. You do a lot of education, as I mentioned before, on demand generation. I feel like it's kind of like a buzzword these days. I wonder how many people who are using that word are actually using it correctly? From what I've seen from you, you are using it correctly, by the way. I would just, I'm curious for just you can share with the audience. What what is demand generation? Or how would you explain that to your customers?
Chris Roche 04:05
Yeah, so the way that and you're right, it is a buzzword. A lot of companies, you know, say they're a demand generation agency and then they go and run lead generation campaigns and you download a white paper, it goes into HubSpot. And as you know, the sales teams comes in, you know? Every, I think every company right now probably has that issue of they're not really educating themselves on what demand generation is. The way that I view any demand campaign is really split into two separate facets. So you have the demand capture, and primarily, you know, I'm looking at channels like Google ads for this where we're capturing demand of people that are solution aware, but just simply not brand aware. So they don't know the company, but they know they have a problem. They're going after, they're trying to find they're using very high intent keywords. The issue with this is that you're only ever going to have a very small percent of your market who's ever actually in that buying mode, and therefore the other 98% of your ICP simply isn't ready to purchase and if you try and push things down their throat or you try and outbound sales them, you know, at this particular time, they're just not ready to purchase and you're going to, you know, ultimately have a negative effect because of that. And that's really where we rely on demand generation, which is creating content and educating your potential buyer, no matter where they're at in the sales process, about your company, about the solution that you offer, the benefits of it, being able to share a lot of educational content over a period of 3, 6, 9 months across your entire market so that once they enter that buying mode, they're simply ready to be able to reach out and they're able to contact you and somebody from your team, and they're already 70% of the way through the sales pipeline. And that's where, again, you're creating that demand for your product or service, not simply trying to get into this MQL hamster wheel.
Kap Chatfield 05:44
You're doing this for yourself. I mean, we talk about this all the time, content is like it's almost like a sales rep that works for you in your sleep. Because you're you put it out there, you're educating the market. And you're you're clearly invested in this, like I said, you guys are doing a tremendous job at creating. They look like they would be more formatted for like tick tock, maybe that's what you're doing. You're doing tick tock videos and putting them out on LinkedIn. It looks great. They're super short, to the point, very dynamic, very educational. So how much would you say your your team, your own team, is leveraging a content strategy to create demand for your own consultancy? Are you seeing that connected results for your company?
Chris Roche 06:23
Oh, 100%. We're, I mean, we're all in with, you know, producing content around, you know, the services that Catalyst can offer. And that's when I first started Catalyst Consulting, that was my goal. I didn't want to reach out and try and get into cold prospecting. I wanted to produce content around the way that I believe in marketing and the way that I will ultimately work with clients and see who that attracts. What I found, and you're right, a lot of the content that I'm producing is more formatted for Tik Tok, and are posted on Tik Tok. And I'm really starting to build up a small audience on tick tock, we've had a couple of leads come through there, I've only been experimenting with it for roughly about 60 days. So we're really just starting off with that channel. But when you take that tick tock content, and you repurpose that to LinkedIn, the engagement goes through the roof. And that's been the interesting thing that I found is that tick tock content on LinkedIn is so rare right now, these meme style kind of podcast interviews, it is becoming more common with that. And if you can take that and have a little bit of a unique twist with it, you stand out. And that again, just helps with your content consumption. And that's why I've really been doubling down on the tick tock style subtitles, animations, you know, face popping all over the screen, it's just more engaging, and it stands out on a LinkedIn newsfeed.
Kap Chatfield 07:30
And you're repurposing, like you're using this content and you're not just, I think a lot of people rightfully so can say, you know, tick tock feels like a very wild west right now. LinkedIn is the place where if you're doing B2B, if you're, if your brand is a B2B brand, LinkedIn is the place to be. But what you're doing is you're being very resourceful. And you're looking at, okay, how do we take this content and deploy it on a platform that we're trying to better understand, aka, tick tock, and then also really use it where we know we're gonna get the most bang for our buck right now, which is LinkedIn. It sounds like you guys are seeing, you're seeing some signals of results on tick tock, but you're actually also seeing a ton of results on LinkedIn as well. Is this something that you're doing for your clients, too? Or are you just doing it for yourself?
Chris Roche 08:15
Yeah, we do work with some of our clients in education really around creating that personal brown brand, specifically for the CEO of the company. It's something where, again, a lot of these companies, they're just, they're starting off with it. And because of the fact that I mean, we can run paid ads, or we can create the demand generation campaigns, that all works very, very effectively. But when these clients have found me because of my personal brand, and they're seeing the content that I'm putting out there, and they're seeing other similar sized companies interacting with my content, they're looking at that and seeing how Catalyst is growing. It's almost a, the the path has already been laid for them to be able to say, actually, this is working, we can see this is working. Can you now teach me how to do this as well? And when you talk about repurposing, I mean, even just coming on a podcast like this, like this is a great example, in my opinion of the best way to repurpose. You come on these on these podcasts, we have these really great in depth discussions over the course of 30, 40 minutes, whatever the time period of, we can chop that up, we repurpose that into meme style, Tik Tok style, you know, 60 second clips, three minute clips, 10 minute clips, and you can start to really bring that out. And then if you want to even go further and produce it into blog content, you know, Instagram posts, you know, you can really go as far as you want with that repurposing. What I found is by having that content Matrix very, very well defined, it allows me to produce content at a frequency which far surpasses company's 10x my size right now who just haven't figured out how to do it effectively. And that's where, you know, my my goal with Catalyst right off the bat was to do this.
Kap Chatfield 09:42
It's a there's a reason why, there's a reason why we call our show B2B Podcasting. We are a B2B video podcast agency, you probably have already kind of gathered that about us if we hadn't talked about it before. And that's but that is so important. For for being able to crank out content at scale. Having some sort of pillar content engine that can really fuel it all. Because what you're seeing too is from what I'm hearing from you is, you're not just like creating memes for the sake of creating memes. You're not just creating content day to day trying to survive. You're when you create a format, like that pillar that you're talking about the pillar episode, it allows you to go deep with an expertise that's actually valuable with your audience. And then you can repurpose that in ways that are also valuable. And like, you're just you're, you're extracting as much out of that as possible. I don't want to put words in your mouth. But that's, that's what it sounds like, you're
Chris Roche 10:34
Oh no, absolutely. And that's what it is, it's getting every drop of value out of any piece of content that you do. Because there are only so many hours in the day, there's only so many podcast episodes you can perform in a given week, or go on or produce yourself, you know, you have limitations on the number of pillar events, you can do. What there are no limitations on it's how you can repurpose that. And that's really the key, in my opinion to creating a strong personal brand, or B2B brand. Leveraging organic is a way to really understand that Content Matrix and have that as an automated, automated process where you are just firing on all cylinders, because then you can produce content at scale. And once you figure that out, really the sky's the limit with being able to produce that content.
Kap Chatfield 11:16
Yeah. One thing you said that I wasn't actually intending to ask you, but I want to kind of go down this rabbit trail with you, if I can fire from the hip a little bit. You made a comment about working with the CEO, to create content. I have a personal point of view that is kind of controversial. I've had some people push back on it, I'd love to hear your perspective. I really feel like the CEO, like really the vision keeper of the organization, they are they are on the hook for helping with the content creation of the marketing and the sales teams. And I'd love to hear your perspective on that. What do you feel about like the founder or the CEO, really that C suite level thought leader, not just outsourcing content creation down down the team or to an intern, but to really be involved in the thought leadership creation? What do you think about that?
Chris Roche 12:04
I think it comes down to the quality of the content you want to produce, ultimately, and I have a very strong opinion on this as well is that if you're the CEO, you don't have to produce content, you're not going to the business isn't going to die if you don't produce content. But if you are going to invest in organic content and invest in the distribution of that, you need to be the one that's involved in producing that content. Because you are the face of the brand, you are the person that understands the business far better than a marketing intern. And as a marketing agency, in a broad sense of what I do with Catalyst Consulting, I refuse to create content for my clients that's organic, because I'm not an industry expert in anything other than marketing and demand generation. And therefore, I produce my own content, which is why I the way that we do it, nobody else on my team is producing content at the scale that I can, because of the fact that I'm also the expert in my company, I'm the resident expert. And ultimately, when it comes to having that conversation with potential prospects, they want to talk to me about that. And then afterwards, we can then bring them on with other members of the team. But if you're going to invest into organic, either your CEO, C level executives, they have to be bought into creating that content. They don't have to be the ones that do the video editing, they don't have to be the ones that handle the repurposing of it. But that pillar content that we keep coming back to, that has to have them involved, because if you hire a marketing intern, you're gonna get marketing intern grade organic, and it's just not going to fit the bill.
Kap Chatfield 13:26
It's not gonna resonate with the audience either. The audience wants to know, they want it, they want deep expertise, right? And that's, if you're the one who's like founding the organization, and you're leading the organization, you're going to be the gatekeeper for that. So I love that perspective. Now, here's, here's something that I'd love for your, I'd love for you to speak into. Have you been in situations where a client was hiring you, they wanted to do business with you, and they they understood conceptually what you guys did, but they had some pushback. The CEO was like, you know, I don't know how involved I actually want to be in this content creation process. And maybe there was some insecurity that came in, maybe they were like, you know, what, I don't know if I'm going to be a good person on camera, or I don't know if I have what it takes. I don't know how I don't know if I have enough time in the day. I can just imagine a lot of people watching this show are maybe the CMOS or you know, VPs of sales or marketing. They're showing this content to the CEO and that's the first thing going through the CEOs mind. I'd love for you to speak into. Have you ever had that experience with that pushback? And if so, how would you help them reconcile with that?
Chris Roche 14:36
Oh, yeah, the the pushback is almost with every CEO you try and pitch it to because it's that it comes into that imposter syndrome of "well, is it really valuable what I'm going to be talking about?" And you know, first of all, yes, it is because like it or not, you are the expert with the company. And the same way that you want to be involved in closing the deals and being on all the meetings which a lot of CEOs, especially early stage companies want to be, you have to be the face of that brand as well. Now when it comes to the insecurity about being able to do it, I personally am kind of a fitness nut with it. So I relate a lot of things to going to the gym. First time you walk into the gym, you have no idea what you're doing. Everybody, you know, everybody thinks they do, but you have no idea what you're doing. So it's repetitions, that's how you get stronger. And it's no different when it comes to creating content. It's flexing that that creation muscle, and as you do it over and over again, similar to what you said earlier, you know, hey, I've seen the videos that I'm creating. And if you go back seven or eight months on the content that I'm producing, I'm embarrassed of it now. But now the content I have is, you know, knock it out of the park, because I've got seven or eight months of practicing over and over again, being on podcasts, being able to talk in front of cameras. And that, again, it gets you to a point where you can be confident with that. But ultimately, you have to have that attrition and invest the time and view it through a long term lens to be successful. Just like going to the gym, just like eating healthy, just like anything like that. It's an investment into yourself. And that's where the way that I'll pitch it to, you know, specifically with clients, but it helps for them, knowing that I've already been through that process, and they can see the progress as well. Because like I said earlier, it really just blazes that pathway forward for a lot of CEOs who may have those insecurities.
Kap Chatfield 16:13
That's great. So yeah, so we're not alone, we're experiencing kind of the same thing. And I feel like this is it, and I love the gym analogy, because you're right, it's not like you go to the gym one day, you have one great pump, and then you're set for life, right? It's like, yeah, you got to keep showing up. And it's the same with content creation. It's, it's an episodic journey. That's that's partly why we say Be The Show. Think of yourself as a show. And every episode, every week, you have an opportunity to continue to build rapport with your audience. What are some practical things that you do or say or ask that CEO in that content creation process? I'll just say this, like we, we kind of look at it as like mining, like, we're here to mine the gold out of the thought leader. We're not the thought leader for you, like you as the client, you that's your job. But we're here to help you out with that. What are some things that you do to really help them see the potential that's already in them, or to mine that expertise out of them?
Chris Roche 17:11
A lot of it is figuring out where they disagree with the industry, in my opinion, it's being contradictory. So for instance, with myself with a marketing agency, lead gen doesn't work effectively. And that's why I pitch demand den. It's going against the grain. So as a CEO, if you are a financial services company, what do you believe that's going against what's currently going on right now? A lot of entrepreneurs, they get into starting a business to disrupt, you know, I know, it's a buzzword, but like it or not, a lot of CEOs, when they especially software startups, they see an opportunity, they see a solution that they can create to solve that problem and then they go on it 100%. And going back to the roots of why did you do that? Tell your story along the way. And when you talk about earlier being, you know, being the star of the show, going back to you know, one of the ways that I work with CEOs is to be able to say, document the journey from starting off, from getting going, start to create the content. When you make your first sale, have a post about that, have a video about you driving home, you know, whatever it is. Start to create that content and a personal brand, because people get invested in you. And then it doesn't matter what you do next, whether you're gonna you know, scale the company, sell the company, whatever that is, you will always have people that believe in you. One of the ways that I have found and I was actually talking to another podcast two weeks ago about this, and it was something that I hadn't even thought about at the time. But I'm on my third company right now and I still have clients from my first company who I communicate with on a monthly basis, who refer potential clients to me, who liked my content, because they have invested in me as the entrepreneur, whether I was working with software development, owning my own SAS company, whether I'm now with Catalyst, you know, it's you get that buy in, and people want to see you do well. Most people want to see others do well, there's a very small percentage of people that don't, but you know, whatever, more power to them with that. It's, you know, when you're being able to go after it and be and have that content people really invest into you as an entrepreneur.
Kap Chatfield 19:04
That's wonderful. I want to pivot a little bit, I want to pull some content that you had posted recently, I thought you had some amazing hooks, some questions that you're asking very thought provoking pieces of content. And I want you to maybe we can expound on a couple of them real quick. One of yours that you posted recently, you I think you were talking to a prospect or a new client. And the question that came up was would you rather hire a salesperson or deploy, you had said a marketing campaign, I wrote down a demand generation campaign. Why don't you unpack that for us? And then let's let's talk about what you think is the right answer.
Chris Roche 19:37
Yeah, I think the question was, if you had $100,000, which is better for the business? To hire a sales guy or to invest into demand generation. It's a question that I had our a conversation I had with a prospect. I've been prospecting and communicating. It's a personal relationship I've had for a long time. It's it's an older style company. So they're very much you know, outbound sales. We're gonna, you know, literally go and knock on doors to get business like, that's great, it's working for you, you're profitable, you're scaling, cool. However, what if we could do this at scale and the way that I positioned this to the CEO was, you know, with your salesperson, they can go and reach out and I've been in an outbound sales role, you can make 120 phone calls a day, if you're really effective with that. And that really relies on the fact that you're not going to communicate with everyone, it's just picking and smiling and dialing, really. So you have this ability to leave 120 voicemails a day, basically, across your network, and you're constantly going to, you know, really be taking shots, trying to capture somebody that is in the buying process. So you have the likelihood of getting somebody, first of all, you got to connect with the person, you got to get on the phone with them, you got to build a relationship with them. And then you need them to be in the buying process. And that's the work that one person can do. And they can do that all year all year round. And they might close two or three deals. My argument was by switching to a demand generation campaign, you can basically figure out who your ICP is, target those across different channels. And I was using LinkedIn for the example, which is something that again, with B2B can be very, very effective. And I recommend usually a combination between LinkedIn, Facebook and Google ads at the moment. And we are starting to experiment with tick tock because it is becoming something where B2B buyers are kind of hanging out, but don't really know what they're doing on there yet. So they're at least engaged. But if you take that, you can be able to produce content, at scale to the masses by constantly producing fresh content, putting it in front of your entire potential audience over the course of a 3, 6, 9, 12 month period, to the point where they know exactly who your brand is, they know exactly the solution that you offer. They know the pricing, they've already seen a live demo, because you don't gate it and you don't make them sign up with seven people to actually get on to the demo, you have all of this content that's available, so that when the person or the individual key decision makers within the company get to the point where they're evaluating what options are, they already know everything that your business offers, and it's very easy for them to say, Hey, I've already heard of this company, why don't we go and have a conversation with them, we can recommend this, let's reach out let's submit the contact form. And one of the big things that I talk about, you know, just on a kind of a tangent here with this contact forms is having that self reported attribution allows you to figure out which channels are working most effectively for you. Because when you do done demand generation, accurately and the right way to do it, you're not trying to actuate everything back to hey, this person watched this video, and that was the channel, or this person searched organically for the brand name and that was the channel that did it. It's being able to build up what actually influenced the person to be able to come into the pipeline. And then from there, can you accelerate that through a shorter sales cycle?
Kap Chatfield 22:48
I think that just leads perfectly into this next topic that I want for you to speak into one of the themes that we're really trying to cover, this season of B2B Podcasting is measuring the value of content. One thing that we've seen is, a lot of people get excited, business leaders in the C suite, particularly, they get excited about the idea of, we're gonna deploy a ton of content, we're gonna establish ourselves as the thought leaders, and then all of a sudden is you, you know, as you know, running your own business and having to navigate what's worth the investment, what's not, the emotion starts to wane. And now they have to rationalize the excitement that they had before. And they have to think they have to answer the question, what's going to be the ROI of us investing in this demand generation strategy? Because I'm sure, it's probably similar for you unless you figured out the secret that we haven't figured out. It's a it's a long game play, it's an investment, you're not just looking for short term results, you're trying to build a brand that compounds in value in return over time. So my question to you is, how do you help that person understand what it means to measure the value of content?
Chris Roche 23:53
It comes down to first of all, asking what the ROI of it is, if your CEO is asking that you're already fighting a losing battle, because it's very difficult in a short period to prove any ROI. The exponential growth and the exponential benefit that you get with this is in a 12, 18, 24 month period, it's not in a three month period. So the way that I communicate this to clients, when we're first starting off is, first of all, being very clear with what the expectations are, you may not have leads come in, in the first 14 days, you may not close a deal in the first 30 days. But your sales cycle has been 270 days over the last three years anyway, so don't worry about it. And that's where again, you have to look back at what those metrics are to be able to bring in the reasoning and the justification and saying, Hey, this is what's been happening previously, we're doing we're doing MQL. We're doing you know, straight lead generation right now, we have a nine month sales cycle, our ACV is X amount and it takes 74 sales reps to close a deal. This is not scalable right now and we're actually losing money on every deal. But that's not always necessarily the way that the CEO views this or the way that even it's been explained to them in the past. So when you break it down like that, it could be quite eye opening anyway. Then from there, then we look at implementing these campaigns, when it comes to creating content, creating a podcast, if you're a business who's looking at creating a podcast, you have to look at it as a way to create value over a long period of time. One of the, and I'll call this a secret benefit of creating a podcast, which I think is something we talked about actually, before this episode, but is an immediate way for you to perhaps justify this, if you're a CMO that wants to do this, and you are getting pushback from your CEO, go and find who your top 10 prospects are, or your top 10 companies and ask them or whoever the decision makers are in that company to come onto your podcast with no other agenda other than having a really insightful conversation. Because from there, you've just built a relationship with your top 10 prospects and you're probably on a first name basis. And you probably know the name of the kids at this point and all the other good benefits that come from having a relationship with somebody, your sales team is nowhere near they don't know anything about this prospect, they haven't even managed to get past the gatekeeper yet, after three months of cold calling. And you can really start to create those relationships. From there, that person knows who the brand is, they know who you are, and when they're ready to purchase. That, again, is when you can bring them into the fold. And it also shows all their competitors that they're talking to you when you start to distribute that content. And that's the sales side of podcasts that people just don't understand and don't really see the value in. And that's what I've done in previous companies. It's not something I do at the moment, because I don't have my own podcasts. It's just something that I personally right now, I'm not trying to scale aggressively enough where I want to invest in my own podcast, I like to come on other people's podcast to talk about this. For me, that's really the avenue that I'm going down. But for my clients, you bet we're going out and having conversations with their top prospects, and we're getting them onto their podcast. And we're getting into that kind of sales process. Because from there, they build the relationships, when they come in that sales cycle is less than 30 days. And it's a 90% reduction in that nine month that we're looking at.
Kap Chatfield 27:00
I man, I think what you hit was so important about looking at this as a sales strategy, because I think so many marketers are already fighting the uphill battle trying to keep their jobs because they're like, how do I prove the value of what we do? You're a content creator, I'm a content creator. We know intuitively, it's not even just intuitively, we just know based off of the connection that we have with our audience that what we're doing is working and it's leading somewhere. But when you're you know, when you're trying to fight for your job like that, it's it's super challenging, but when you position it as a sales strategy, and you're thinking like, hey, what's the value of beginning a relationship with your top target accounts, and knowing them on a first name basis? Like you had said. One of the things that you said that I thought was super helpful, I want people to take this down, if you're writing notes, is if someone presses back on that if you're if you're in that position in your organization, you're like, man, I want to I want to deploy demand generation strategy. I can't I can't get past no with my oversight, asking them what is our time to close average time to close anyway? If it's 270 days, I mean, holy moly, like we wouldn't, we don't have much to lose.
Chris Roche 28:10
I wouldn't even ask I would go and figure it out. You could do this very simply. And if you have any CRM, you have HubSpot setup, go and look at the data, the leads are coming in, the percentage of those that come in as a marketing qualified or lead generation. So when it comes in at lead gen, look at the day they come in, then look at the conversion from that lead to even scheduling a demo, having any kind of clicking the sales rep or even getting contact with them. When they have the conversation, then look at that conversion to are these sales qualified? Then from there look at a closed one, most likely that conversion is gonna be less than 1% anyway. So you have to times whatever that customer acquisition cost is by 100. Just to get any kind of realistic number which most people don't do, let alone the fact that that sales process is going to be 3x, what the CEO thinks it is because they're going to count it from when that sales rep has a good conversation, which could be six months after they submitted the contact information anyway, go and figure that out. And that's why when you present that information to a CEO, that's when you can start to really leverage demand generation. And if I'm a marketer, I'm a CEO, CMO at a company like this, I'm asking for commission if I want to start a podcast. Put me on commission like the sales teams and see how it compares. And then tell me it's not more valuable in 12 months time, because when you start to see that from the seat when the CEO standpoint, when he sees he's paying you more commission that his top sales rep, that's when things start to get interesting. And that's where again, it's a real differentiating factor and it shows more confidence that you have this ability which everybody who is a legitimate marketer right now understands that demand generation is the next step. And it's the way that companies need to evolve if they want to keep up and it's unfortunately, you know, not every company is going to do it. And that's fine, you know, focus on those that are.
Kap Chatfield 29:47
Golly, Chris, you're preaching bro. Let's let's go. Let's keep going. I want to ask you a follow up question. I want to ask your perspective on paid versus organic content. I think some people are kind of, they're a little bit too dogmatic one way or the other, I personally think that that you can have a good blend. What's what's your what's your take on that? How do you how do you consult your clients through how they should look at paid versus organic?
Chris Roche 30:11
So I have a very unique opinion on paid versus social, in my opinion anyway. And that's the look at paid as a way to guarantee the delivery of your top performing organic content. So when you're producing video content like this, and you have this really compelling message that's going to resonate with your ICP and your target audience. By producing on LinkedIn and sharing it organically is fine. And sharing it with your Instagram with your 74 followers is fine, because people that are watching it, obviously know the brand, but 99% of the market may not know who you are, especially if you're just starting off with demand generation campaigns or for my clients, if you're, you know, a B2B SaaS company that's just raised capital, most clients and their potential clients and their target audience, they don't know who they are yet. And therefore, it's about being able to guarantee the delivery of that content and optimize that content for consumption within the feed. Don't optimize for landing page views, don't optimize for cost per lead, for downloading a PDF, an ebook or webinar, whatever that is, optimize for consumption, and start to create content at scale that you can then be sharing. And then as your audience starts to engage more and more with your content that you're sharing, they may move from a paid category to an organic category in terms of the way that you can reach them, because of the fact that they interact with you. They connect with your CEO, you can start to move people over. And that's been a really interesting way that I've worked with clients to be very, very effective from leveraging paid and social at demand generation campaigns.
Kap Chatfield 31:45
I, I personally agree a lot about using paid as like an amplification tool to just find the right audience, especially on LinkedIn. I mean, what's amazing about LinkedIn ads is that you can target the very demographic that you want to do business with, or you would want to see this content. If you're doing a show for CROs of SaaS companies, between this size and this size, and these parts of the world, you can pretty much guarantee that you'll get that content in front of them. However, I'd love to hear your perspective on this from an investment standpoint, because I can imagine people pushing back and saying, if we're going to invest in paid, then shouldn't we be focusing on filling the pipeline as quickly as possible? Or is it worth investing in paid with a long term mindset approach? Which maybe I'm not hearing you right, but I'd love for you to qualify that. If someone if you could imagine somebody asking that. And maybe you have heard people ask that yourself.
Chris Roche 32:43
Oh, it's the first question people ask when you want to switch from lead gen to demand gen, is if we're going to invest into this, why are we not going to get leads in after the first 14 days? And that's where again, that's the whole value of creating a demand generation campaign, you're not optimizing for leads, because we've already broken down that sales process. And we know that converting at less than 1%. And we know that it's taking seven, eight months to actually get a prospect to close from coming into that. So yes, we can invest into creating more leads, and we can keep the sales team busy. But my argument would be don't create a marketing strategy and a marketing campaign around what's going to allow your sales team to be busy, even though they're not being effective. Why not invest in a more effective campaign, create this more of a demand generation campaign and allow your sales team to prospect organically or even create their own personal brands, which is what we talked about earlier? Have your entire sales team creating podcasts, experimenting on tick tock, being able to find ways to differentiate themselves in the market as well. That's a better use of time then our sales rep does cold calling all day long.
Kap Chatfield 33:46
So good. What would you say, if you could you break it down? We're gonna come to the end of our episode shortly, we still have a little bit of time. But I'm thinking about practically for an organization that wants to kind of wrap their head around how does this actually work? How do we begin something like that? Do you have like a simple framework, like a few steps that an organization could be considering to begin creating a good demand gen strategy?
Chris Roche 34:13
Yeah, I think going cold turkey is unless you're the CEO that wants to switch from lead gen to demand gen, going cold turkey can sometimes be a little bit of a risk, because you've run into the issue of three months later, someone saying we don't have enough leads, the sales pipeline isn't full enough, we're gonna switch back. So you can start to take it in steps, and this is kind of a step by step process that I would take. First of all, when we're looking at demand capture, you want to invest in demand capture until the point where it's saturated. So leveraging Google ads, you want to split as much of your budget into capturing that demand of people who are solution aware but just simply are not brand aware who are actively going out and trying to find a solution. From there, you can fill the pipeline using those highly qualified high intent leads that are coming from that demand capture campaign when it gets into that demand generation, you most likely have a lot of the content already created. A lot of companies have these ebooks, these white papers, these webinars, whatever it is, instead of optimizing for somebody to simply submit their contact information, who we know is not going to close for nine months 1% of the time, focus on that consumption and monitor the consumption as the success. So if we create a podcast episode like this, and we take a snippet, and we run this across LinkedIn ads, look at the average percent of the video that's being viewed when you are doing it to a very targeted audience. From there, look at how you can compare that with different videos, create more content on a monthly basis and push out that content and start to see how the organic search of your brand is starting to increase. That's another leading indicator, if you're doing that demand generation very, very effectively, you're going to start to have more demand created for your brand. And your organic search should start to increase naturally over time, as more and more people are starting to realize that, hey, this is something that would fit my need. Let's look into it, I saw this video, I may not have clicked this LinkedIn video on my phone, but I'm on my computer, I'm going to search for it and start to learn more. So those are the first layers of metrics that you can take. But you still have that demand capture channel, which is creating opportunities. And then over time, as your schedule a demo request more information, whatever that contact form is, start to monitor what that how did you hear about us, free text entry is and start to see how more and more of those start to attribute to the channels where you're running the demand generation, and then from there, that's how you can justify it and start to manually attribute them. And people say I don't want to manually attribute to LinkedIn, it's not difficult to do if you're using any kind of CRM, just have it come in. I wouldn't have a drop down menu, I very much believe in self reported because people will say, Hey, I saw that podcast of you and Kap discussing things. I know that's most likely going to be LinkedIn rather than Tik Tok. But I want to have that insight as well. Because now I know that that particular topic that we talked about has resonated with the next five leads that come in through Kap's website. So now I may produce more content around this topic. So it allows you to make more informed decisions as you start to analyze the data over time.
Kap Chatfield 37:11
I love that. I I've seen Chris Walker say something similar about the the manual input field versus the drop down. And we've experimented with that ourselves. And it's been really, it's been really amazing when you give someone the freedom to write down like some people write one word answers, but some people actually write down a pretty thoughtful response, like, Oh, my goodness, like, this is really insightful data. And then I would also add too, like, you get on the demo call with them, those that actually do end up showing up on the call. There's nothing wrong with asking them like, Hey, I saw that you saw the content or whatever. Tell me a little bit more about that. And then getting right then in there, oh, I heard I saw this episode. What do you like about it? Oh, I like this, this and this cool. You know, and not you don't have to belabor it. But it's getting that information directly from the source. It's, it's extremely valuable.
Chris Roche 37:59
No, absolutely.
Kap Chatfield 38:00
I want to, I want to hear what your thoughts are on video content, particularly. I think a lot of people are afraid of video, particularly maybe the CEOs of these organizations. They don't want to show up, you know, and look clunky or whatever. But you are you're really doubling down on video, you're taking it seriously for your own brand. Sounds like you're also taking it seriously for other brands that you're working with. I've heard a lot of people ask why can't I just do an audio podcast? Do I need to embrace video? I have my own thoughts on why people should invest in video content creation, I'd love to hear your perspective on why you guys are taking it so seriously.
Chris Roche 38:37
I think in terms of specifically for podcasting, when you talk about video versus just audio first it is more engaging. Those faces, people want to see faces, they want to be able to make eye contact with you, they can see it it's it's that stop the scroll factor when you create that video content. Now, when it comes to the delivery and the consumption of that content, videos are going to perform better on LinkedIn and Tik Tok just in general and instagram reels and the you know, these other distribution channels. But the way to be able to attract people to your podcast is not to have a podcast on Spotify, and then put in your bio on LinkedIn podcast host of you know, whatever podcast name, that's not going to bring people to your podcast when you show these snippets, and you show these teasers, and these bits of really, really valuable content in an engaging way. And video just is more engaging. People then want to learn more, and what you can do and something that I've seen a lot of people and I think you do as well, it's very effective is when you create this content in this, you know meme style or whatever the distribution format that you do for the video, put the full episode in the comments and then let people go on to that full episode. It's almost a trailer to the entire movie, basically with the podcast. And that's something that allows you to attract more people. For me personally, when I listen to an entire podcast, I do it when I'm driving, when I'm walking the dog, when I'm working out whatever that is. So I'm not watching full videos podcasts, I'm doing it all through audio. But if I'm going to consume it you know, 30 to three minute 30 seconds or three minute video that's all the way through the video format. And that's where I can see the snippets as a hey, this is an episode that I may want to learn more information about.
Kap Chatfield 40:09
So good. So good. Chris, we're coming to the end of our time here, you've provided so much information, I feel like, if you're not already thinking about it, I highly would consider, I would recommend you consider putting together maybe a course, on demand generation. You just you have a really clear framework for how you approach it, I could tell that you're convinced that it works. You're doing it for your own business, as we say, in our business, you're eating what you cook, you're cooking it up for your customers, and you're living by it yourself. Just to recap some of the cool things that we talked about today. One thing that you said that I thought was super valuable, measuring the value of content. You guys, you're on your team, you look at content consumption as a successful metric to be looking at. If people are consuming, if the right people I should say, are consuming the content that that communicates that you're reaching the right audience and over time, it's going to certainly it's going to generate demand for your business. I love that you're you're a big advocate for looking at this as a sales strategy, not just looking at this as a marketing strategy. And one of the things that stuck out to me as well was paid versus organic, looking at paid not just as a means to collect email addresses, but as a vehicle to drive amplification for your message and getting in front of the right audience. I love the the the cadence of taking a paid audience, hopefully seeing that convert into an organic audience. And then eventually seeing those convert into customers. Brilliant stuff. Chris, I want to make sure that people have an opportunity to follow you and check you out. Where's the best place for people to see some of the content you're putting out?
Chris Roche 41:41
Yeah, the best place is gonna be LinkedIn. I do it all through my personal brand. I don't do too much of it on the company page. Honestly, it just for me, I double down on personal branding, it just has a better reach. So connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on LinkedIn. I produce content, pretty much daily to be honest with you, you know, when I'm producing this video content, so would love to you know, have more people who are interested in this, you know, learn more about it. And if anybody ever has feedback on any of the content that I'm producing, you know, I welcome all feedback, positive or negative sometimes, you know, welcome all of that as well.
Kap Chatfield 42:10
Awesome. We'll definitely put a link for your LinkedIn profile in the show notes in description of this episode. We'll also put a link for Catalyst Consulting so that people can get right to work with you. I hope that there's some businesses that are in that place. Sounds like you could probably work with a handful of different companies. I love the focus though, SaaS companies that are going from seed funding to series A, sounds like you provide a lot of value for them. You've already done that for some of your other clients. So we'll put a link for your your consultancy there. Chris, thank you so much for joining us on B2B Podcasting today.
Chris Roche 42:39
Yeah, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
