Vikash Koushik:

Oh, okay. That's, that's a hot take. That's hot take. Yeah.

Okay. That's interesting. But, but why though? Like like at least the, the theory is that like, because we acquired this company and they have this like massive newsletter, we have this owned media, which is now the popular terminology that everyone's talking about.

So if I, if I own my audience, I can keep talking to them…

Kamil Rextin:

Customers are not the same thing. I might be tangentially interested in, like, I'll give an example. Stripe has Stripe press. They publish amazing books. I've read a lot of books from Stripe press. Will I ever be a Stripe customer myself? Probably not.

You know, so like I'm part of their audience. I admire their brand. I admire their public, like the books they write, the books they publish. But there's a, there's a very low on the Venn diagram. I think the intersection is really low of people who are your audience and people who are, you actually could be your customers.

And I think audiences a term we throw around. Nobody actually knows what it means. We'll just say audience, audience, audience, but. I, we wrote an essay on 42 slash like two years ago or something, which is like, the audience are not your customers. Like, essentially the argument is that anybody could be your audience.

My mom could be an audience of this podcast that we're recording because she's interested in listening to what I say. My mom doesn't speak English. That's a separate topic, but you know, she's the audience, but would she buy everybody RevenueHero? Well, hell no. She's like, you know, like, she's not, no. So I think it's one of those.

Things where the intersection is really low. And I think there was this, money was free, audience was a big thing. Companies bought these communities and these publications and newsletters. I think they'll struggle to monetize them and they think they'll struggle to justify that investment. And over time they'll understand that the people who were the 10,000 newsletter subscribers, they're not our customers.

We ran into that with 42 slash Part of that, why we shutting it down is because we built this audience. But that wasn't translating into customers for the agency business. Yes, I wanted to monetize it in a separate way. I wanted to build a separate business around it. But like that's, that's just my heart, like super hot, spicy take.

Vikash Koushik:

Got it. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's definitely a hot take. We’ll know in a couple of years then.

Cool. Yeah. So, and with 42 agency, I'm, I'm assuming a lot of your clients are B2B SaaS companies that you work with. And from what I know, you do performance marketing, you do RevOps and a whole bunch of things, right? So I'm. Pretty sure like your, your customers and your clients are also asking you like, okay asking you questions about attribution.

How do we think about it? I know you talked a little bit about first touch and last touch being enough for most folks. Talk us through that a little bit. Like what do you generally tell your new customers when it comes to attribution.

Kamil Rextin:

This was when Bizible first came on the scene and this was like when I first started my career in marketing, I used to be on sales calls and I'd be like, Hey, how did you, how did you find us?

Because I have no idea. And they're like, Oh yeah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, Oh, that's pretty cool. And then Bizible came and we're like, Oh my God, Bizzable can give us all this multi touch blah, blah, blah. And then I went in, went to another job, another job, and I think I implemented Bisible like three, four times in my career.

And nobody ever looked at the dashboards. It was just like, oh yeah, U shaped attribution tells us this, but what does it mean? What are we going to do different given this information? Nobody, we didn't have a single clue what to do with that information. So I think like it's it's. It's not, it's easy to get, like, it's not easy to get the data, but like, once you have the data, it's about how you act in the data and for a lot of times, there's no, a lot of people don't know how to action the data.

Like, okay, I have a W shaped model that tells me. 25 percent of credit goes to organic social. So what do I do with that? Like, do I spend more time on it? I don't know. Like, how do I turn that into actionable insight? I don't know. The other thing is, I think as we go towards this world where privacy, cookies, first party, third party, blah, blah, blah.

I think what, what Eric Suh heard from Mobile Dev Memo calls deterministic modeling, like you kind of know what happened. Well, high degree of certainty that's going to go away and we're going to go into more probabilistic modeling. That's more marketing, mixed modeling, geotest, lift test, like turn off the channel for a couple of, for like three weeks.

What's the Delta, like you kind of measure what impact it has. So like we did this with a couple of customers where we turn off all ads for three weeks and like, okay, let's just see what happens. And we saw a significant dip, not just on paid, but like direct organic, like everything kind of took a nose.

Right now, we're looking at a deterministic model where we're basing on our UTMs and blah, blah, blah. It would be like, Oh yeah, these people are coming from direct. So in theory, it shouldn't have an impact on that. But it did, because there's a lot of other stuff that happens behind the scenes. Somebody might see your ad, they might not know what on thead, but they might come back three months later.

We all know that. So I think we're going to go towards more of those kinds of things where it's more like, uh, like we, we did a couple of exercises with some of our customers where we break out statistical models for them based on LinkedIn campaign types, based on channels, based on like, what is that, and we.

And it's not like 100 percent certainty that we can say certain things, but like to a high degree of probability, we can say that this drives or does not drive opportunities. And it was not as much of channel, what channel it was just overall in terms of the marketing mix, where do we allocate our spend?

Okay, when the probability that this channel is outperforming everything else. So I think we'll go towards more of that, like 80 percent probability that LinkedIn is driving. Opportunities. We can't tell that directly, but based on this data model that we have, that's what we have. Let's go validate it.

Let's put 80 percent more budget into LinkedIn. Run this more than six months later, see what the results say and see if that compares to what the hypothesis we have. So that's sort of, I think the world would, that's what we move towards. That's my, that's where I'm placing my bet, but I might be completely wrong.

And I'm wearing a dream data hoodie right now. So they might be yelling at me for saying this.

Vikash Koushik:

Interesting. You talked a little bit about multi touch, sorry marketing mix. I definitely want to touch a little bit on that a little bit later. Because of all the different data points and you shared all the different models that's there.

That's one side of the spectrum, right? On the other side of the spectrum, now everybody is talking about self reported attribution like that's the holy grail and all the stuff. What's your take on that? I, I remember, I think you posted recently on LinkedIn, something around that.

Kamil Rextin:

Yeah, so I think I don't, my whole thing is there's a recency bias.

You remember the thing that you remember, you don't actually remember what happened, right? You don't even, I don't even remember what I had for lunch yesterday. So, like, how am I going to tell you how about I heard this company went for 3 month long journey to like, you know, I might have heard about you from a friend and then I might have Googled you and then I might have seen your ad.

I'll probably remember the thing that was most recent in my memory. I won't remember all those other things that might have happened and I think. But. I mean, one, I think uh, asking anybody who fills out your form how they heard about you is kind of like too much. What I used to do and what I still think people should do, and what we do as well is like ask people on a call like, Hey, how did you come across?

Like, you get them on a call, on a discovery call or a like, you know, understand their customer journey. Yes. But I don't think we should narrow it down to a single field on a form that is like the holy grail. Now we're gonna base on this like we ran a analysis and if anybody listening to us wants to volunteer their data, we'll happily to run this analysis for you too..

But we ran this analysis for one of the companies we work with. And we compare it on like 700, 500 records. So it's not a big data set, but a lot of the times what people said they heard about you was like, 70 percent was like search. And that's what HubSpot 70 percent of people are coming from search.

Now the, there's the difference in like paid search versus organic search. HubSpot could tell us that split on how many people came from organic search. But like when I, when we asked people, they're like, we probably need to move it. That doesn't help me at all, like, or like, there's also this it happens a lot is like people will just pick the first thing on the form.

So, like, you're not running billboards, but you have the first thing on your form is billboards and they'll pick the billboard. So, I think it's like, relying on human memory is always fallible. Like, you don't want to ask, you're trying to, I think what that does is, like, it tries to compress this. We talk, on one hand, we talk about how complex the B2B buying cycle is.

On the other hand, we're saying just ask people how they heard about you and that's your answer right there. And I'm like, I'm not going to, I'm going to fix it. Yeah, contradicts itself.

Vikash Koushik:

So, yeah, interesting. Okay. Yeah. I think we, we, we also do I think we have a similar take over here at RevenueHero.

Yeah, we look at HubSpot's original source, the latest source and all that stuff, right? But along with that I keep asking our sales folks, like, please ask them on the call where they heard about it. Like, it doesn't have to be very direct either, like, but it can be casual. Like, if it's part of the conversation, like definitely bring it up.

Right. And probably the biggest pain for me is like going through the calls and just noting them down every single day. That's probably the biggest pain. And I guess that's also what led everybody into this journey of like, okay, hey, this is like really painful to monitor and all this stuff. Let's go.

We're asking them on the call directly. Why not just ask them on the form? That's my theory. But so anyway, the, the way we sort of try to think about it is like, sure there's the HubSpot but whatever, our prospects or customers are saying on the call is sort of if they say, say, for example, LinkedIn ad, right and if it doesn't match with what HubSpot is saying, the theory that we are taking is, okay, whatever they saw on LinkedIn probably had the most impact on them.

That's what they can remember. It had significant impact on them to make them remember about us for how many ever days or how many ever hours before the call. Right?

Kamil Rextin:

Yeah. I think I like, I also think when you ask people, you get more rich information. Like you ask them in a conversation and they're like, oh yeah, I was talking to a friend.

Better. Use that call to discover what was their jobs to be done. What was their trigger to buy, like, get much more rich information rather than, Hey, how did you hear about us? Okay. That's my version of truth. And I'm going to spend a hundred percent of my budget there. And I think the, I liked the framing of like LinkedIn had the most impact because like, that's what they remember.

I love that. But like, that also doesn't mean if they didn't say LinkedIn, it doesn't mean you're going to stop running. Because intuitively, you know, LinkedIn has worked for you. So like there's that, you know, like if out of 10 calls, six people don't mention LinkedIn, would you stop running LinkedIn ads? I don't think so because they kind of know LinkedIn ads work to a certain degree.

So like, there's also that. Yeah. What do you do with that information kind of a thing? And I think it goes back to attribution is viewed as I'm a marketer. I need to justify my existence in the company, not as. I'm a marketer. I need to understand how this customer came across, came to this decision to come talk to us.

Vikash Koushik:

Hmm. Makes sense. Yeah. And, and I think probably that also comes from the world view of like, Hey, Marketing is probably the most it's probably the, the, the team in the entire org that probably spends the most money, right? So if, especially if the leadership team is viewing marketing as a cost center, that's probably where a lot of the problems start from, right?

Kamil Rextin:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But also marketing is creating future customers. That's what I tell our customers, that's what I tell everybody, like if you stop spending on marketing today, you're not going to have a pipeline in six months.

Vikash Koushik:

There was the other thing that I remember, I think you posted this about a year ago probably a year ago.

About how you're using databox to do reporting. Like, how do you tie uh, the, the qualitative data probably sales folks asking questions on calls and things like that, along with the numbers?

Kamil Rextin:

That's a good question. We're not doing that right now, but that's why we hired Becky. Becky is on our team. She's comes from a customer research design background and she's bringing that more of a qualitative side to the equation because traditionally we've been very like, what's a number? What's a number?

What's a number? But we haven't dug into the story behind the numbers, like, who are these people, why are they buying? Where are they coming from? What's going on in their lives? Like, we haven't looked into that. We haven't done a lot of qualitative stuff and that's the direction we're going in right now, where we're doing more competitive research, we're doing customer research, we're doingmarket research, we're doing customer calls, like, we're going in that direction slowly, because I think that's an important part of the equation that we're sorely missing in the world.

Because performance is not just about raw numbers, it's also about What drives people to these decisions and all that stuff and understanding the larger context behind that.

Vikash Koushik:

With the customers that you work with today do they sort of like bring that perspective with them?

Kamil Rextin:

Some do some don't.

So, depending on the maturity of the organization, some people have a really strong product marketing function that brings that insights. Some people don't, and then we try to fill that gap for them. So we'll be like, Oh, we need to understand the market landscape. You guys don't have the bandwidth, give us some context, give us some customers you can talk to, and we'll do some desk research, first party research, and put together like a market landscape document that also informs our paid media, SEO, whatever, creative strategy.

So like, for example, the work that Alexandra, the creative team does, look at competitor ads and like what the industry is, industry as a whole, what are their creative concepts like, what are specific competitors running, so we do some of that research before we start designing ads. Or landing pages or other creatives, because you can't just create them in a vacuum, like you need to know what other people are doing around you.

So one, you can stand out, two, you can understand what the industry is like.

Vikash Koushik:

Can you talk a little bit around, like you mentioned you talk to potential customers and then sort of like figure out, okay, where to, where to put in money. Like, do we spend more on certain channels? Probably content or SEO or whatever channel, right?

Like can you talk a little bit around that process that you typically use over there? Because I think... I think that that is sort of important today and I like, because it also ties back to the attribution thing because today from what I understand from what I'm seeing, right? So it's mostly like, okay, hey, our dashboard says they [00:22:00] got.

70 percent of our customers from Google ads. So 70 percent of the budget goes to Google ads, right? So it's sort of that very single dimensional approach that a lot of people have today. So trying to understand a little bit around like what your approach, what your thought processes around that.

Kamil Rextin:

So a couple of things that I think, yes, 70 percent of revenue is coming from Google ads, but other channels are probably influencing. A lot of that. So we try to dig into that. Second, we, when we do competitive or market research, we get a lot of insights on copy, creative keywords, campaign, what have you.

And then we operationally like use those insights to inform our performance marketing strategy. So we're not doing your positioning and your messaging, but we're using both research as a conduit into a better performance marketing strategy. So it might be like people are often, I don'tknow, people love this certain feature about this certain product.

Let's highlight that feature more because we haven't really like, we're talking about the product as a whole, but the market really like this, this specific thing it can do. Thank you. Let's go market that more because that's what people like, or they talk about this problem in a certain way, but we've been talking about it in a different way.

Let's talk, let's talk in the same language that they're talking about, or if you're doing competitive ads, you know, people hate this thing about this customer. Let's, you know, leverage that too. So we work with a HubSpot competitor and HubSpot is making changes to their partner programs. And like, we capitalized on that to run some ads saying, Hey, if you're a HubSpot agency partner and you're not happy with these, whatever changes are happening, come work with us.

We're more agency friendly, blah, blah, blah. But then you need to understand the broader market landscape and like what's [00:24:00] going on in the market to be more effective at your, whatever you call it. I think one of the things is also mostly around like, okay, Hey, we know certain things are working for us, right?

Certain campaigns are working for us. Let's try to in the name of trying to scale that it's mostly things like, okay. Okay. Let's see if we can find. More such keywords or more let's create more creatives and run it with different audiences. Maybe you'll start working with that audience and that sort of stuff, right?

So I think this is sort of a, a slightly better and a more Yeah. Yeah. More holistic. That's what we call it. So nobody likes that word internally. When I say holistic, everybody says we're not, you know, we don't. Holistic healers that use gems, whatever, but like going back to the fundamentals of like, who are we trying to reach?

Why they, what they buy, let's dig into that. So we can create more effective campaigns versus just, you [00:25:00] know, hammer nail analogy when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So like you're a hammer, you think search works and you don't want to keep hammering on the keywords, whereas it might be something else.

Vikash Koushik:

Yeah. I love that. I love that analogy. Nice.

Kamil Rextin:

Yeah, it's one of my, yeah, it's one of my favorites.

Vikash Koushik:

Cool. Moving forward thinking a little bit you know from a long term perspective, I think the browsers are now starting to strip away the click IDs and all this stuff, right? Like, Given all this and everything that we've talked about in terms of attribution and all that stuff, like what do you think is sort of like the future slash landscape going to look like for B2B marketing?

Kamil Rextin:

I think a few things. One is the ad platforms like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook make billions of dollars from ads. So they'll figure out to model this by machine learning or something like that. There's people much, much smarter than you and I [00:26:00] working on these problems. I think there's a joke in Silicon Valley that, and during a certain phase, all the smartest engineers went to work in ad tech because that was like the hot space.

So like, yes, there's a lot of fraud and blah, blah, blah. But I think like even with iOS 14 and Facebook, it's come back. Yeah. Like it's not as big of an issue as it was before. Like people are in panic, but Facebook figured out a way to do something. I think the other thing is that we'll start to move away from single channel.

This channel drove this to more holistic view. Again, I'm gonna go back to holistic, but like blended on a blended basis because we don't know if this person came from Google search or LinkedIn or something, but like, yeah, on a blended basis we put this much dollars in marketing. Here's a fixed cost. What do we get out?

Like I think we'll go to more of that kind of measurement because a lot of times. People might click on an ad, but then the shop is direct in the cookies or blog, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think, and then we'll move into more of the marketing mix experiments, turn off certain channels, see what the impact is.

Run certain channels in a certain location and see what the impact is. Let's do some lift studies. Let's do some brand next studies. Let's do some talent lift studies. Let's create some like model, let's model out this data and see what we expect and if we do that action, does it actually go through or not?

I think we'll move into more of that.

Vikash Koushik:

Interesting. Yeah, I can already see a lot of people trying to spend more time in multiple channels. And I think, like you said, early on, right? Like It was predominantly just Google ads for a lot of the business. I think that's still, still true, right? But I am seeing more, a lot of my friends are now starting to seriously focus on other channels, right?

Kamil Rextin:

Like, and also. Events is now like definitely people are investing a lot of money there. Right. So in person events, all that stuff is now coming back. So that makes a lot of sense.

Vikash Koushik:

The marketing mix model. I'm glad you brought that up because I, I definitely want to talk a little bit about that.

Kamil Rextin:

So marketing mix modeling, I'm not a brand expert. Michael Kaminsky runs this company called V Cast, Michael Taylor. who runs max power Eric Super, who runs mobile dev memo. Like these guys talk about this a lot and they come from more like B2C gaming, mobile apps, that kind of stuff. And those are the big spenders, like compared to that, we'll be spending like 1 percent of money, but they like, I'm still learning this.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. I'm like we have an analyst who does the modeling for us. I don't do it myself. What was your learning in the experiment that you did we'll write it. We'll have to look out for the essay that's coming out soon.

Oh, okay. I'm not going to spoil it.

Vikash Koushik:

But, but I think in a way we when it comes to the right, like you, you definitely need a bunch of data, like a whole lot of data than most companies have today, right? And I don't think it's probably it, it isn't that straightforward for most companies.

Kamil Rextin:

Yeah. You need at least like six to 12 months of data because the more data you have, the more accurate the model is. Basically you're creating a model that explains the data. So you're, you're. You are putting in different variables and you're saying, if I do this and this and this, does that explain the data distribution?

So the more data points you have, the be like, the more points of the graph. the more easier it's to like draw a line to them. But I do think like even if you don't have so much data, you can still do some basic correlation analysis on, when I spend money on Google, does my organic traffic go up?

What's the, what's the correlation coefficient for that? Is it really high? That means yes, there's a high correlation between when Google ad spend goes up, direct goes up or whatever, or it's a low correlation, that means that there's no relationship. Again, that's not absolute deterministic, whatever, but it's just like you're just saying there's 80 percent chance that these two things are connected.

Vikash Koushik:

Yeah, makes sense. Got it. Cool. Anything else on just the topic of attribution? I feel like we covered it pretty extensively.

Kamil Rextin:

No, I think just like don't overcomplicate it. I think too many people overcomplicate it and they want to like twist themselves into a group to understand what was that thing that drove this person to purchase.

I mean, look, look at, look at averages and just make your decisions based on the best data you have. There's no perfect solution. You'll never know exactly what drove someone to purchase. We're all trying to like solve probabilities at this point.

Vikash Koushik:

Yeah, makes sense. Interesting. Awesome. Cool. Before I let you go I'd like to do a quick fire round.

So what's a tactic or a channel that you're seeing work really well, but a lot of people know don't know or use it well.

Kamil Rextin:

I think offline. Mm-Hmm. Like billboards events, like those underrated.

I think more people should use that because they can be incredibly effective.

Vikash Koushik:

Who are some of your favorite marketers that you think are listeners? Tara Robertson from Chili Piper.

Brian Balfour. There's too many . There's a bunch of smart people.

Vikash Koushik:

Awesome. Okay. Where can people find and connect with you?

Kamil Rextin:

Twitter, LinkedIn. And threads. I'm on threads too now, so you can find me on threads.

Vikash Koushik:

Are you active there? Like once a week. Okay. Twitter becomes too much of a weird place to be and then I go to threads.

Okay. Nice. I, I try to, I try to get into it, but I just, I don't know, I just didn't find anything interesting out there. So yeah.

Kamil Rextin:

It takes some time to build your follower graph and stuff. Feed the algorithm. Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of people on Twitter that stopped using Twitter and now they only use threads.

Oh, okay. So I, I'm there just so I can follow what they're saying. Oh, interesting.

Vikash Koushik:

Thanks. Thanks for hopping on the call, Kamil.

Kamil Rextin:

Yeah, my pleasure.