From Content to Clients: B2B Demand Generation on LinkedIn with George Coudounaris

FULLY EDITED TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Michelle J Raymond: Welcome everybody to the LinkedIn for B2B growth show. I'm your host Michelle J Raymond, and I am joined by a local this time. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:08] George Coudounaris: Thank you so much, Michelle. Awesome to be here. I don't speak to enough Aussies and that's when you and I spoke for the first time a couple of months ago. I think we were penciled in for 15 minutes and we nearly went for an hour.

[00:00:20] Michelle J Raymond: I seem to have a recurring theme around that. I met you first of all through your Company Page, which is called the B2B Playbook, and you also have a podcast of the same name, which I've been on record. It is the only podcast that I actually listen to.

Now I hate podcasts. Yes, I'm the host of a couple of them. Yes, I love appearing on them, but I hate listening, but yours is Different, and I find it really valuable, and we're gonna go into this about why I think it's great.

But George, how did you get started on LinkedIn? How long ago? Where did it all begin?

[00:00:52] George Coudounaris: First of all, that's very, very kind of you. Thank you so much and it's wonderful to have you listening. And to anyone out there who gives us even just one episode, I can't thank you enough.

Michelle, my LinkedIn journey started really probably January, last year is when I started to take it very seriously. And the reason that I really got into it was because quite frankly, that's where my dream customers were gonna be hanging out. That's where my dream listeners were gonna be. So the B2B Playbook is all about teaching B2B marketers how to grow sustainably online.

So we're teaching them Demand Generation. And Michelle, as you'd know with the podcast, once you have the podcast, you gotta find somewhere to get that in front of your dream audience. And for us, B2B marketers, a lot of them hang out on LinkedIn and that's where we went.

[00:01:40] Michelle J Raymond: It is the cool place to be. I'm so glad that you landed there so that our paths would cross.

I always think it's funny that LinkedIn is the place that brings us together when I think literally we probably live 10 minutes away from each other. So, I think it's hilarious, but we're gonna go over a couple of questions, which I've got here because you fall under probably a traditional B2B marketer.

I fall under more a traditional B2B sales history. And so I've got some questions that I wanna ask just to get some clarification around when we're gonna build a demand engine, what does it look like? But before we even jump into that, what is demand generation, George? Like, how would you explain it?

[00:02:19] George Coudounaris: That is such a good question. And I see people always trying to define it and redefine it. People say that it's content marketing. I personally think that it's, you know, sustainable, good, B2B marketing strategy. But I think to define it, to me, it's a go to market strategy that ultimately Michelle builds an intense desire in your dream customers to purchase from you.

And the way I see it, it's actually comprised of two parts. The first is demand creation, and the second is demand capture. I'm actually gonna start with the second and then move to the first. So demand capture that focuses on those who are ready to buy from you right now. So if you think of the total market of people who could buy from you, so the hundred percent of market who could be your customer, there's typically only 3% in buy mode.

And I'm sure that on the sales side you have seen that. When it comes to demand capture, it's really trying to capture that existing demand as efficiently as possible. But when that's all we focus on, we run into a problem. Focusing on that 3% alone, I'm sure you felt it, it can be like jumping into a swimming pool full of sharks.

It's full of competitors, chomping at the bit for the same small slice of the market. It can be really expensive to compete in there, and it's really difficult to scale in there. And ultimately, you're competing in a group of people who are ready to buy right now, but it becomes a price and feature war and a race to the bottom, because they don't truly understand why you are the best fit for them before they're looking to buy.

Demand creation looks at the other 97% of the market. They're not necessarily in buy mode right now. They're people who are problem aware or even unaware, meaning that they might not even be aware of the solution to the problem that they have.

So your job, with demand creation is to really build a relationship with them and win their trust, and you wanna make them prioritise that problem and lead them to the logical conclusion that you are the best product or service available for fixing it. So when they're ready to buy, they don't go to your competitor, they come straight to you.

[00:04:37] Michelle J Raymond: And that's what we want. We don't wanna lose them. George, I was actually talking to Ty Heath, who is one of the B2B institute that LinkedIn runs the other day. I was talking to her, they've done some research that says in a year where we're financially unstable, there's a bit of doom and gloom financially. Those numbers around that 3% actually drop down to probably 1%, which is a year like we've got today. So everything that you've mentioned there, it's even more critical that we get this sorted.

So for me, I always wondered, I never knew the difference between what looked like content marketing to me and demand gen. I was like, aren't they the same thing? So I really appreciate you like bringing that together because sometimes there's so many acronyms, there's so much jargon out there in marketing land that sometimes I'm scratching my head just going, what the hell is all of this stuff.

But when we're talking about demand gen, what are the benefits? Like why should B2B marketers that are listening in today, why should they care about it?

[00:05:38] George Coudounaris: Yeah. Plain and simple, I think that the real downstream effects of demand gen, are you get better inbound leads. The marketing that you're doing has a more positive, real impact on the business. You see that through faster sales cycles and you're driving more word of mouth.

So you end up getting better inbound leads, Michelle, because you're building relationships with those dream customers and you're educating them before they're actually ready to buy. And when they're finally ready to buy, they come to you and they should be clear already on the unique value that you can offer them compared to your competitors.

So, there's more of a focus on the quality of the leads rather than the quantity, and what that ends up doing is it makes your sales funnel much more efficient because sales don't have to waste so much time servicing a bunch of leads that don't want to talk to them.

On the faster sales cycle side, that can appear to become faster because at the point at which someone becomes a lead for your business, they appear in your CRM, they're on your radar. They're much more educated now on the product and your solution. So there's less work for sales to do. So that's why we can take that average sales cycle's length from say, 90 days, down to 80, 70, whatever it might be, because they're so much more educated.

And then finally, demand generation that's really well executed. It drives word of mouth in places that marketers can't traditionally track, but buyers hang out in all the time, like forums, chat groups, communities that kind of thing.

[00:07:07] Michelle J Raymond: Is the cool word for that. Is that dark social, is that what you're alluding to on that one?

[00:07:12] George Coudounaris: It is. It is. It is dark social and I see so many people talk about dark social and it is kind of a cool word.

I guess maybe I should use it more, but I just like to think of it as in places that, you know what, as marketers, it's hard for us to track.

[00:07:26] Michelle J Raymond: you said some things just before that my sales ears pricked up. It's like you're getting those sales quicker, you've got better quality leads, which for me means, like you said, not wasting time.

And for me, I find even in my own business now, what happens is by the time I'm on a call with somebody, It's pretty much a no-brainer. As long as they've got enough money in the bank, they'll work with me because they've already seen what I'm capable of. They see the results. They know whether they like me, they trust me, all of those kind of things that we set out to do.

So when we actually get on that call, it almost becomes just about logistics. And I've gotta say, this is why I fell in love with social selling on LinkedIn, nearly eight years ago now as a salesperson in B2B sales because all of a sudden it became so easy and it was happening literally while I was asleep.

I didn't have to be face to face with people all the time. So it just became far more efficient to reach one to many. And then the conversions, look, that's why I'm here. And I think it also helps getting higher prices and shortening those cycles, as you said there.

But George when it comes to demand gen marketing, is it a short or a long term play?

[00:08:36] George Coudounaris: Yeah, Michelle, I think it's a longer term play. Because to drive demand, there's a whole process, right? And I think we'll probably get into that later in this show, but you've gotta really deeply understand your customers. Then you've gotta create genuinely helpful content programs that are different to what your competitors are doing and then you've gotta distribute that content in places that your dream customers are hanging out and educating them on your product and what it does and all that stuff really takes time.

You can accelerate that process, if you have some paid media and you've got a team of people to help you as well, but when you're a lonely in-house marketer, all of this stuff takes time. And that's why I totally acknowledge that so many in-house marketers, in small teams, they have so much to do already.

That's why I say try and set 20% of your time and budget aside for this demand creation exercise because one day, the demand that you're capturing at the moment is going to slow. You are going to run out and you are gonna wish that you created demand a long time before you have.

So make sure you get started there.

The other side to demand generation is the demand capture side, and that can be a bit of a shorter term play because that's really all about optimising how we're capturing that existing demand right now, and how can we do it more efficiently? So that's an ongoing process.

And I suppose an example for capturing, uh, existing demand would be, Google Ads, right? When people have a problem and they're looking for a solution, they Google it. That's why a lot of companies start there first.

But a lot of, companies waste a lot of money on keywords on Google and searches for those that don't have a really high intent to convert with them.

And so demand capture as a shorter term play, would be going in there and trying to make that as efficient as possible, cutting out any wasted spend.

[00:10:26] Michelle J Raymond: I would imagine as a marketer in today's world, you are probably asked to do more and more with less and less time. Do you find with the marketers that go through your B2B incubator program, that they're trying to be everywhere, trying to do everything, and daily firefighting probably takes over rather than these long-term plays?

Is that some of the pain that these B2B marketers are facing on a daily basis?

[00:10:50] George Coudounaris: Yes, yes it is. It's a huge pain. And so much comes from the pressure from the executives above them, the sales to the side of them. And marketing for so long is just in service of both of these, particularly in smaller organisations, and they don't have the bandwidth to think about how this plays into a longer term strategy.

A longer term strategy requires engaging the stakeholders, the executives, the salespeople, sitting them all down and actually mapping out, who are our dream customers. I know you say that it's for this group and that group and this group, but we need to focus because we only have limited time and resources, and that's often a first step that is so difficult to do.

So when we come to them sometimes because the company has actually paid to invest in a program all of a sudden, they start getting heard. We tell them how to have these conversations with these people around them, and the business starts to get that focus. And when you get that focus, you start to get that time back.

[00:11:49] Michelle J Raymond: I can only imagine some of the people that are reaching out for your help that are doing their best, stretched to the max, trying to make a budget stretch even further that they may or may not even have. For me, just the marketers that I talk to, when you're managing multiple platforms, paid, organic, all these kind of different things, it's just theoretically, I don't even understand how you can logistically do it in any one day, week, month.

The firefighting that happens in everyone's jobs these days, I think just means, you have to maybe take that step back. How did you choose your dream customers for your business?

[00:12:27] George Coudounaris: Yeah, for us, it was really clear who we were serving because I guess we were in that situation ourselves.

So I was agency side, for some time, and I worked with B2C and B2B organisations and I very quickly realised that we weren't really able to have the impact agency side that we wanted to because to do things that you really need to do to create a great demand gen program, you can't do from an arm's length, as an agency.

You have to really be in that business to really deeply understand those customers, to create genuinely helpful educational content with subject matter experts.

 I should add, Kevin, also works in-house in a B2B organisation. So we are well attuned to the pain points, and we just saw that this group of people weren't being serviced properly.

Very often, an organisation would sign 'em with an agency they'd go after and try and get some of the lead gen. There wouldn't necessarily be great results from that. And the issue was, they weren't doing the work in-house first.

Agencies are great to scale something that's already working, but this work needs to be done in-house first. So we identified that problem. We saw that there was a real need for these marketers.

I suppose we validated that by creating the B2B Playbook podcast. And then we just got amazing feedback from all our listeners and the listeners who are reaching out to us were from small B2B organisations. And that's when we thought, you know what? We've gotta give people a way of actioning this in their business right now.

And that's why we came up with the B2B incubator.

[00:14:02] Michelle J Raymond: Which I love. And if anyone hasn't subscribed to your podcast, the B2B Playbook, I recommend that they do. If you go back and start at the beginning, you will get a masterclass in how to execute this as a B2B marketer, especially in an in-house team.

For me personally, you can listen to those episodes by themselves, or you can go back and listen to it. It's just brilliant the way that you've done it. And as I said, you're completely the opposite to me. I love the way that you guys have planned that out, it's just something that I'm always like, could I learn from you?

Uh, but The thing that you actually said there, which I have the same thing, so I have people reach out, even if it's for Company Page management, they reach out to me and they want more business.

Everybody wants to grow their business. That's the whole point of why I started this podcast. But when they come to me, George, and they can't even tell me who their dream clients are. I can't send a message to anyone on any level, be it through content or events or whatever we wanna set up. I can't do it if I don't know who I'm talking to.

Am I talking to the wall? Am I talking to nothing? Like where is it? And I get the flip side of that. I've been speaking to some people that are marketing managers that have zero ideas how to use LinkedIn that are paying agencies to do the work and trusting them to do the right work and they're getting no results.

And it's a really expensive lesson that I'm not sure everyone learns. I think it can be a costly mistake over a long period of time. Because if you don't understand how it works, how do you know that the right things are working? So I think there's a big dollar savings when you go back and do that work and actually narrow it down and have a plan in mind.

 My training just like yours probably starts with having a game plan. I redid my training over Christmas because I realised that what I was doing through my training is also saying to people, look, just jump in. Here's how you use LinkedIn, and I was almost encouraging them to dive in that deep end and start swimming with the sharks, as you said, without even knowing where they were headed to and it was a recipe for disaster.

So I've stepped back on that. Told people stop. Just like George says, stop. Don't just be busy for busy's sake. No one's got time for that.

 We're gonna talk about actually building a demand engine. Now, is that demand engine, is that a term that you guys coined? It's not one I've seen before. Is it yours?

[00:16:22] George Coudounaris: No. No, it's not ours. To be honest, Michelle, I don't think we've really coined anything other than our five B's framework. Our five B's framework is for executing and implementing a demand gen program.

But in terms of creating new terms for the category, we haven't gone into that.

[00:16:38] Michelle J Raymond: That's not my strength either. Before we jump in, can you tell people what your five Bs are, just so that they know how you guys work through things?

[00:16:47] George Coudounaris: Yeah, for sure. So our five B's framework is really our strategy for sustainable B2B marketing, or as others call demand generation.

Put really simply, the first B is what we call be ready, and that's about really deeply understanding your customers. The second B is what we call be helpful, and that's about learning to develop relationships through helpful and educational content. The third B, we call be seen that's about amplifying that helpful content and then narrowing your focus with account based marketing.

The fourth B is about optimising all that workflow that you've done in those first three fundamental stages. And then the fifth B is gonna be, and we haven't got to this in the podcast yet, Michelle, but it's all about how you can use some of the advanced tactics that are normally reserved for the big players with the big budget.

[00:17:36] Michelle J Raymond: That's awesome. So how does this play into creating the demand engine? Are they tied together? Let's talk us through this.

[00:17:43] George Coudounaris: Yeah. Yeah. So I think I've gotta take you through really those three fundamental B's in more detail and it should become more clear. So as I said, that first B, be Ready, that's about getting everything in order like we just spoke about.

And for us that's really deeply understanding your customers and we recommend starting with an 80 20 analysis that defines your best customers. So looking within your business and going, which are the ones that actually fit our business like a glove. Once we get there, we love to really deeply understand them, not just by looking in our Google Analytics dashboards or sending out surveys.

But actually running customer interviews to talk to them to identify how does your product help them get their jobs done better. What are the benefits of your product? What are their KPIs? What does their buying journey look like? What do they struggle with that you can help with? So these are really key to understanding very deeply what matters to these dream customers of yours.

From there, we really recommend that people document who the buying committee is and what that ideal customer profile looks like. So when you're selling into an organisation, there's normally a couple of different people that you've gotta get past, in order to win their business. That's what we call the buying committee. We really wanna understand them because at the end of the day, business is all about relationships and getting people to trust you.

So a key part is really identifying who they are and documenting what matters to them. Based on that, you've then got to start to look internally at your own business and go based on these new dream customers that we've identified and everything that they've told us, how can we position our company, our business, so it looks like the obvious perfect solution to them.

So we would then encourage businesses to look at their own positioning. Once you've done that, update all your messaging, so all your collateral, your LinkedIn profiles, your website. You've gotta make it really clear who it is that you're serving and what it is that you're giving them, and why it is that you're giving them that, and that's better than the competitors.

The final step of Be Ready is really mapping that buying journey and creating what we call the Dream 100. And the Dream 100 is making a list of the top places that your dream customers are already gathering online and offline too. So it's looking at what social communities are they hanging around, what YouTube channels are they subscribe to, what events are they going to?

And the idea is people are already gathering somewhere. We just need to know where that is, so then we can start to distribute our material in front of them and build those relationships. So that's be ready. That's the first stage. That was a super quick rundown. The second B is be helpful, and that's all about developing relationships with helpful and educational content.

So when we did that great research, all that customer interviews and be ready, we should have a really good idea as to how it is that our business can help our dream customers. Not just when using our product, but what it is that they're actually struggling with in their day-to-day jobs.

 We love to then encourage businesses to create helpful content with genuine subject matter experts. So don't outsource your content to a freelancer. Get a real subject matter expert, whether in the business or external to create content that educates and also Michelle entertains because people are starting to catch on to the fact that they need to do content finally. And the way to get that extra cut through is to make it entertaining as well.

For us, we love to have a piece of pillar content. I know you do this with your show too. For us, it's our podcast. So our podcast is our pillar piece of content that we do every week. Then what we can do is we can then chop it up, repurpose, and distribute it to where it is our dream customers are hanging out, and for us, that's YouTube, LinkedIn.

They're the two main channels that we focused on. We can't do anymore at this stage, Michelle, we've got limited resources, limited time.

[00:21:41] Michelle J Raymond: I feel your pain my friend. In a perfect world, we'd have all these resources and be able to do it, and I think it's a really important point that you can only do what you can do and when people start to spread themselves too thin, and I've been guilty of this.

I tried to be on Twitter, Instagram, this, that, the other couple of podcasts, couple of newsletters, YouTube, you name it. Plus my content that I do on my personal page, my Company Page, plus my client's stuff. Like I was going crazy and I didn't even enjoy all of those other platforms.

And I was really lucky, I had a friend of mine, Tuomo, who came on my podcast about, I don't know, 12, 18 months ago. He's a performance coach that has nothing to do with LinkedIn as such, but he said these words, simplification leads to mastery and that has stuck with me.

So off went Twitter, killed that account. Instagram, I play with it occasionally if I feel like it. It's not something that I do cause I realised it was all reflecting poorly on me by trying to be everywhere and everything to everyone. And I think everything that we do on LinkedIn, as you said, the more that we know our dream customers, where they hang out, we can be targeted and that is way more efficient then spray and pray, which is completely the opposite.

So yeah. I love that you raised that. I'm with you. I can't do all of the things in my mind that I would love to do for my business, but there's a plan that I will get there at some stage. But yeah, I think patience is a virtue when it comes to marketing, right?

[00:23:11] George Coudounaris: Yeah. I think the temptation is to look at big organisations and go, they're servicing all these different markets. They're in all these different channels, you know, they're big, they that must work. But the reality is all of them would've started by defining a niche that is an inch wide, and they would've gone a mile deep in it.

Because you've gotta dedicate the limited time, resources, and budget you have to winning over a particular segment of the market. And then that's gonna give you the money to then reinvest and to scale into other programs, other segments, other markets.

Back to the second B Michelle, so I mean, this is related to that, right? Is we're repurposing and we're distributing our content where our dream customers are hanging out. The question is how do you scale that content? And you can do it internally by getting people within the business to help you create more content. So some of that could be trying to get some of the employees engaged in this, in engaging, in creating content. And I know Michelle, that's something that you probably have a lot to say about as well.

And the other part is perhaps at this point you can start to use agencies to scale the distribution of your content, not the creation of it, but helping you push it further using paid media. The last step in Be Helpful is about improving that content with qualitative and quantitative data.

So it's not just looking again at Google Analytics going, which of our articles got the most amount of free time? Which of our podcast got the most listens? It's not really about that because that only tells you what happened. It doesn't really tell you the why and the impact. So the qualitative stuff, and this is why I love distributing all this content on social, is the DMs that people send you on LinkedIn when they say, Hey, that piece of content was great, or, I really enjoyed your podcast.

It's the comments that people leave you on social. It's the emails that people send you to give you feedback on particular pieces that you've done. I think that the business that has the tightest feedback loop with the customer is the one that's really gonna win. So that's why that's really crucial.

[00:25:23] Michelle J Raymond: I love that idea. I find often with podcasting, especially that it's one of those things you don't often hear back from people. So if you're listening to this or any other podcast, please leave ratings. Please reach out to the people that are putting those podcasts out because if you enjoy it, let people know so that they can make sure that that content you enjoy.

We can give you more or less if you don't enjoy it. Both ways are helpful. But for me, I've always found, because there's no likes, there's no comments, no dopamine hits in podcasting land, but I know so many people get value because I do see that more and more.

For me, where I came unstuck when I first started, my podcast name wasn't clear, just something so small. But by changing the name to what it is now, I've had people reach out and go, I'm so glad you did that. It makes more sense. It's aligned with who you are. It gives me that guidance that I'm on the right track.

So is there anything else that you would add into this section?

[00:26:18] George Coudounaris: No, I think that that's really it for the second section. Again, providing people that opportunity to give you that feedback is crucial. So as you said, like when people are listening to podcasts, they're often multitasking, so it's very difficult to get them to take action in that moment.

So then repurposing it, putting highlights from the show on LinkedIn that provides an opportunity for those people to consume it again and to reach new audiences.

And it actually has a space for them to like it, to comment, to give you that feedback. So make sure you're providing ample opportunities for your dream customers to give you that feedback.

[00:26:53] Michelle J Raymond: And realistically, you're putting this much effort into creating them, putting all of this content together. If you've got your subject matter experts involved, it takes time, it takes resources.

You want to stretch it as far as possible. And for me, that's why I love this kind of pillar content that you say. So that's creating a long form piece and bringing it down into much smaller chunk sizes. That's definitely a part of my strategy that allows me to create more with less. You know, back to our point, I don't have a team of 30 people that I can just farm out everything to. It's basically myself and my small team that are doing that.

So from that perspective, that's all really cool. So within that, we've built our demand engine, George, and you've given us such great structured, steps to do that. But how do you actually go about choosing the best format type and the platform that you go to. Now I picture you and Kevin, your business partner as data nerds that are screaming through lots of data.

Is that what happens? Or how do you do your research?

[00:27:56] George Coudounaris: We used to be like that. We used to be really quantitatively driven, meaning, hard numbers, looking in analytics platforms, slicing and dicing it up and then we realized that we were just guessing, like we were just guessing so much. We were inferring things that might not have been true.

So we really rely on just directly speaking to our dream customers. I try and have at least a few conversations a week, every week with our dream customers to find out, where is it that you guys are hanging out? Where is it that you like to learn?

So when it comes to choosing a platform, don't guess, just ask them. And you don't have to ask a hundred people. Just define those very best customers of yours. Interview five of them, just five is probably fine, and they're probably gonna give you the same answer.

And at the point that you start getting the same answer, Hey, you know what? I hang out on LinkedIn two, three times a week. Other than that, I like to learn on YouTube. Great. We've got the answer. Go deep into that. You don't need to do anything further.

[00:28:58] Michelle J Raymond: Takes the guesswork out of it and you're gonna deliver what they want, where they want it, in a format that they want, which, you know, may sound simple, but I'm with you too many people.

Again, if you don't ask the questions upfront, you're gonna learn by trial and error over time, which is costly, is going to drag out those life cycles and sales cycles. It's just gonna be crazy.

George, like you have given us so much, but I'm gonna ask you for one more thing today, every show I like to wrap up with an actionable tip that you can give people that wanna grow their businesses.

What is one tip that you think that when it comes to demand gen, that they can go away and implement today that will help their business grow?

[00:29:39] George Coudounaris: I'm gonna repeat myself, Michelle, but it's, go out there and speak to those dream customers. Go there with the plan of what you're gonna ask them, find out what key benefits they're getting, find out what their KPIs are, and really start to distill exactly how you can help. When you have relationships with people, that's where real business gets done.

[00:29:57] Michelle J Raymond: Look, that is a perfect way to sum up our conversation today, and again, it has been so great to have you here. I feel like I'm listening to your podcast, but even better, I've got you on mine. So I appreciate that you took the time today to come and share your knowledge with the audience.

I'll be sure to make sure that there's lots of ways to contact you, and as always, I encourage people. I'll give you George's LinkedIn profile and the Company Page as well. Go and follow them. Ring the bell on both so that you can stay up to date with all of the great content that him and Kevin are putting out.

So George, I appreciate you and I look forward to doing more with you in the future.

[00:30:36] George Coudounaris: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Michelle. And thank you all that you do too. I get so much value out of what you do every day. And it's really wonderful to have an expert like you. I know, as you said, probably just down the road, but it's great to see another Ozzie out there doing awesome things. So thank you so much for having me on.

[00:30:54] Michelle J Raymond: It's my pleasure.

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, we're outta here.

Cheers. . .

[00:30:58] George Coudounaris: Thanks, Michelle.

[00:30:59] Michelle J Raymond: Cheers.