Episode Description

On today's episode of The Revenue Stream, I had the opportunity to chat with Andrew Allsop, Senior Demand Gen Manager at BRYTER.Andrew comes with several years of experience running his own agency (Wonderkind), selling it to Powered by Search, and running Demand Gen that drives pipeline and closes into revenue for several B2B companies.

We talk about the importance of understanding the impact of channel metrics on your bottomline metrics, what it takes to convert an MQL to Opportunity efficiently, why and how you should segment your campaign efforts, forecasting and planning your campaigns for it, and the importance of scrutinizing your data.

I had loads of fun chatting with Andrew in this episode and I hope you enjoy the show too. See ya on the other side. 👋

Show Notes

Follow Andrew Allsop: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewallsop/

‍Learn more about BRYTER: https://bryter.com

‍Article on forecasting by Andrew Allsop: https://www.poweredbysearch.com/blog/b2b-saas-marketing-funnel-forecasting/

‍Follow Vikash: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikashkoushik/

‍Learn more about RevenueHero: https://www.revenuehero.io/
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Episode Transcription

Vikash: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of Revenue Stream. I'm your host Vikash Koushik. Today I'm super pumped to have Andrew Allsop, senior demand gen manager at BRYTER. Like most tech marketers I met Andrew, I think on Twitter, it was about some, some conversation about. And geeking about it. That's how I met him.

Uh, and I think he was running Wunderkind agency back then. And since then, he, I think he, he sold that agency to Powered by Search. Which is again, an incredible agency. Uh, anybody, uh, I think most people in SaaS knows about Powered by Agency, Powered by Search Agency. I'm super pumped to have Andrew Allsop.

Personally, I think he's one of the, one of those rare marketers who, who isn't just talking about. CTRs, uh, CPLs, uh, just, just those metrics alone is one of those rare marketers that I [00:01:00] think is able to also combine them see how each of those metrics impact the, the business overall.

How, how does that translate to pipeline? How does each of these conversion metrics translate to pipeline and finally, revenue? Uh, right. So, which is why I've, I've, I've been following him for a while now. So excited to have Andrew today. Andrew, welcome to the show. 

Andrew Allsop: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. And it's, um, such a pleasure to finally be able to have this conversation with you.

I feel like every time. You know, there's people that you engage with a lot online and every time you have a conversation, I feel like it went on for way too long without having this face to face, but yeah, it's also great to hear you articulate what you take from the things that I post. Um, so, you know, with Twitter and LinkedIn and that kind of thing, like you go in and out of being actively trying to post more and then just, you know, sometimes you just post what comes to mind and that kind of thing.

But I think throughout my entire career, I've always had the same [00:02:00] philosophy and approach on things. And that's obviously developed as a, as I've progressed, but. I'm just glad that you take that message away. So it's great to, um, it's great to have got that feedback. 

Vikash: Let me know if you have any tips, um, sometime in the future, because I've been trying to, you know, Be a little bit more consistent as well in my posting if you look at my twitter feed at least recently Um, it's just been me reposting a bunch of stuff. Uh, I think i've become more active on linkedin I don't know what the product managers at linkedin are doing but there's something there that's that has made me a little bit more active still not as active, uh as I would have loved to. 

Andrew Allsop: Yeah, yeah, I think LinkedIn certainly made a lot of good moves recently to like invigorate the community over there.

There's certainly so much more valuable conversation goes on there and you know with LinkedIn there's also a lot of Cringy conversation that goes on there and, you know, maybe it's, maybe it's the fear of falling into that, um, into that realm of being cringy, which I [00:03:00] certainly have the potential to do.

Um, but yeah, Twitter, Twitter's, it's different now. I, I feel like I spend a lot more time on Twitter, Twitter, but I'm a lot more Less active on Twitter in terms of like posting and, you know, proactively building the community and that sort of thing. So, but yeah, it definitely feels that LinkedIn is a place to be at the moment.

I feel like there's also a lot of private communities that are, um, that are great for this sort of work focus conversation as well. So. I'd say, yeah, LinkedIn, but also do, do you have a lot of things like, uh, you know, demand collective pavilion, that kind of thing as well. I feel like that's where I get a lot of my value from at the moment.

Vikash: Let's get into it. Right. Like I, I, there was this post that you posted, I think a month, month and a half back, uh, where you spoke about growing businesses efficiently month on month, quarter on quarter, and, and the graph is always trending up and to the right, right? So I'm just trying to understand, like, what are some of the [00:04:00] things that you've seen work really well, right?

Like, especially given that you've, you've spent a bunch of time, uh, you know, working at agencies, you've built your own agency. I'm sure like you've worked with tons of clients. So, like, what are some of the things that you've seen are like super common with, uh, companies that are able to, you know, uh, keep growing consistently .

Andrew Allsop: Yeah. So with that post, essentially there is a category of marketer that is focused on making gains in metrics that don't make a huge amount of impact in the overall sales and marketing funnel. So for example, Google ads, you know, Google ads gets a lot of, a lot of stick. It's a fantastic channel, but if you change the conversion rate of your Google ads from 2. 5 percent to 3%, the actual tangible impact that it makes on your business, on your business is, is, is very small to get that requires [00:05:00] a lot of investment. So whether you bring on. Whether that is, you know, your own investment in your own time to improve that, whether it's an investment in an agency to get results that a previous agency hasn't been able to do, you have to make a lot of investment to make an improvement that might seem large, but when you track down to like how much differences that may make in terms of MQL is how much difference does that make in terms of pipelines and all that kind of pipeline and all that kind of thing, it is insignificant.

So the scope of focus that I think that we need to have as marketers and how we judge and assess the impact of our marketing is more on like the sort of key points of leverage that you have throughout the sales and marketing funnel. So if I can, you've, you know, you've got maybe like five of these key points.

So you've got the amount of spend. You've got the amount of people that land on your website, the ones that convert to leads to MQLs to opportunities and then [00:06:00] opportunities to customers. And then your average customer lifetime value. So if they're not, if you're not making a tangible impact on one of these, you know, sort of like top line metrics, then, then the impact that you're making overall is relatively insignificant.

Compared to the amount of energy that you'd have to make that you have to put in to make that change, and it's maybe even easier to make a change on to make a 0. 5 percent improvement in your win rate is maybe easier than making a 0. 5 percent improvement on the conversion rate of a single channel. Um, because everyone has that, everyone is aware, you know, you run Google ads, you do single keyword ad groups.

Like you have like your competitors keywords, there's a playbooks for all these things. There's only so many improvements that you can make that when it comes to things like, you know, making a lead convert to an MQL better, maybe make an MQL converted to opportunity better. There's so much more potential that goes unexplored that has, um, a much greater The efficiency of your [00:07:00] sales and marketing funnel, the more efficient your funnel is, means that you acquire customers for less, which means you can invest more into your sales and marketing, which means you can outspend competitors, you know, when the market become a guerrilla in your market, that sort of thing.

So that's what that post was about. In terms of companies that I see doing things well, they are companies that understand that a lot of things that a marketer will intuitively focus on are trivial. So, I think it all comes down to from this is maybe a bias of mine because I've, you know, I focused on analytics a lot from my career and data and all that kind of stuff, which is why I feel sort of confident in the conclusion that I've got to on this, but it all boils down to how you report on and assess the impact of your marketing.

So if you, if you ask someone who creates a report and you're like, this is how many clicks, this, how many conversions I've got, you know, this is my, [00:08:00] Projected pipeline value, then your scope of influence is defined by how you're assessing and communicating the impact that you have in. If you're then a marketer who is able to understand the impact that you have on these top line metrics and how the dynamics work between, you know, your win rate, your conversion rates and your opportunity to lead to opportunity, that kind of thing. Then your scope of potential becomes much larger and your, the, your ability to communicate the impact that you make becomes much more tangible. Um, so I think it all comes down to how do you assess the impact that you're making as a marketer.

And how do you define the scope of the impact that you're able to make? Um, yeah. And a lot of that just comes down to reporting at the end of the day. Um, that is, you know, a report in [00:09:00] reporting the outputs that you've created. And, and, and just knowing, knowing, knowing the sorts of outputs that you're able to have an impact on.

Vikash: I have so many follow up questions to this. So one, I think you mentioned, uh, the, the impact of a channel further down in your pipeline, right? Like, uh, if you can increase the conversion rate, say for, for your MQL to opportunity that has more impact on the bottom line metrics for the business. Versus and probably is comparatively also a little bit easier, uh, versus trying to, you know, achieve the same half a percent or 1 percent increase on the channel itself, right?

So Google Ads in this case, right? The question here is like, yes, different companies define MQLs and opportunities a little bit differently. Like, what are some really good levers that you can pull to, you know, increase that conversion rate for MQL to [00:10:00] opportunity, right?

Uh, because I'm sure like marketers who are probably listening to this podcast, right? Like they'd want to know that, especially after you share that with them. Like, what are some levels that you can pull for, say, uh, MQL to SQL or MQL to Opportunity? And of course, for Opportunity to Close One, I think there's a lot of influence on like, you know, what your sales process looks like, what is your average ACV like, what is your sales cycle like, all that stuff, right?

Andrew Allsop: Yeah, so from my perspective, if you want to make an impact on these kind of numbers, the easiest thing that you can do is to analyze Segment the people that go through your funnel, look for the segments that have a good conversion rate and look for the, look for the segments that have, you know, when I speak about conversion rates, I'm speaking of lead to MQL to opportunity to, to customer.

So you will see that there were big differences in the different kinds of segments. And we did this exercise with a company when I was at Powered by Search. Um, they. They didn't, they didn't [00:11:00] segment the marketing. The marketing was sort of intent driven. So, you know, people searching for keywords in that were relevant to their product, um, and they sort of had this broad market focus and, you know, they're doing well as an organization, but, um, yeah, then the question comes up is how do we then improve these conversion rates?

And we did some deep analysis and you know, I need to be careful not to give too much away or like, um, you know, there's private confidential information, that kind of thing. So I'll just try to speak about it from a broad perspective, but say they had two different segments and one of them was like financial services and the other one was insurance, the financial service, the leads that they're generating from financial services were far more likely, like significantly, like, you know, the conversion rates was in like the high twenties in financial services in terms of opportunities to close one customers.

In insurance, it was like, I think it was like 4 percent or something extremely low, just something that was like completely unworkable. But there was no, there was [00:12:00] no, there was nothing in the way that they approached marketing that acknowledged this difference. So if you're paying a hundred dollars to acquire a lead in insurance, and you're paying a hundred dollars to acquire a lead in financial services, but based on all the historical data and based on, you know, this comes down to their ability to.

Sell and serve customers and, you know, communicate how good they can do that to different sectors. They obviously didn't have that fit in insurance versus where they had it in financial services. Yet there was no prioritization of Aviva segment over the other. So. I feel like it's what a lot of people want to hear, you know, put in this start 10 step lead flow and use this kind of language and this kind of stuff.

But it comes back to a lot of like old school things, which is just basically segmentation and yeah, if I was going to say, do you need to do one thing to improve these numbers, it's segment that [00:13:00] funnel by different aspects of your market, whether that is. Demographics, firmographics, whether that is by channel, you are going to see that there are parts of that funnel that are bringing the average down.

You get rid of them, you put that investment back into the strong segments, you're going to see improvements. I reckon about 75 percent of people who do that exercise would, would, would get that kind of impact out of it. 

Vikash: Love it. Amazing. A quick follow up question here. Like, what are, what are some different segmentations that, you know, you can, you can do like your typical, uh, based on industry, uh, which channels are driving, you know, best conversion rates.

Another thing that I can think about is persona based. Like if you have, if you're going after multiple personas, like is there one specific persona that's like always converting the best for you? Anything else that comes to your mind? 

Andrew Allsop: Um, I mean, I would start off from the, from the [00:14:00] basic, uh, you know, I'd start off in terms of industry types, marketing channels, geographies, um, start from there and then dig in, um, there's, there's obviously a million ways, like, If you're using an enrichment service, you know, you have maybe 900 properties that you can use to segment your data by, um, if you are smart with your data collection and you know, you see the data that you're collecting on forms as part of your overall strategy, then, you know, then there's an infinite ways of which you could segment it, but I wouldn't, unless you're doing these kinds of basic segmentations and I wouldn't recommend going any deeper than that, essentially.

Figure it out first and then go deep, like the potential is, is, you know, is bottomless. But unless you are, unless you're able to put, you know, figure out what to do to perform this basic analysis, then going, going deeper doesn't really make sense at that point in time. So yeah, [00:15:00] start from the, start from the simple and get more complicated over time.

You know, it's general advice that I'd appreciate. You could probably apply to any question, to be honest. 

Vikash: Nice. Um, I think the other thing that was really interesting for me personally was being able to report on something and, uh, that's going to have a massive impact on like how you, how you look at things.

Right. So another thing that I feel like a lot of marketers, I think, especially marketing leaders probably benefit a lot is forecasting. Like, uh, I know, I think, I think you wrote. An article about, uh, forecasting as well in detail, that's like bread and butter for a lot of marketing leaders, senior marketers, right?

So can you talk a little bit around that, uh, as well? Because I think a lot of that is connected, right? Like, so if, especially if you want to, if you're, if you want to become a marketer who's, uh, reporting on these like, uh, metrics that impact your bottom line. Right? Being able to see if you're able to [00:16:00] hit your forecast, right?

And if that doesn't happen, what, uh, what is my plan A? What is my plan B? What is my plan C? Right? That's, that's typically how I, uh, think about it. Can you talk a little bit around, uh, forecasting and, uh, Absolutely. 

Andrew Allsop: So if I can, if you remember correctly, this is around a project that I did with an organization and we got the, I think it was like six months out.

And they are, our goal was like 0. 01 percent out of the forecasted range. And, uh, you know, the peaks and troughs had followed the forecaster, like almost perfectly. And I'm not going to lie. Like there's a, there's in any degree of forecasting, I'm, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a, um, I'm I'm not a quantity. I'm not like my marketing is purely back.

My background is purely marketing. So there's a lot of like, there's a lot of look that goes into that as well. But then, you know, the way that we did approach putting that forecast together was probably was a smart way to approach it. And, you know, did also have a really significant. Impact [00:17:00] in how accurate that forecast was.

So that came down to, um, just breaking down that sales and marketing funnel into so many different segments. And, and again, speaking about these different points of leverage that we have in, in, in marketing. So no looking at spend, looking at traffic, looking at leads, look at MQLs and how that differs by channel, how that differs by month and all that kind of stuff, and then.

Um, you know, building a, we built a model in Excel where we could make like, if we increase the budget by 0. 5 percent on this channel, that makes this impact in the amount of leads. But then maybe that means that. Um, you know, the law of diminishing returns, maybe that means that the lead to MQL rate will go down.

And it was just, it was just having this whole model mapped out with this ability to tweak all of the variables, but also looking at things in a really pragmatic way in terms of nothing ever scales, um, and [00:18:00] stays as efficient as when it's at lower ends of the scale. And that's the, that's the law of diminishing returns.

That's just one of the laws of the universe, but people very rarely model that sort of stuff in. Um, so yeah, I think the success of that came down to, you know, understanding SaaS business model as a whole, like, you know, if you don't understand payback, payback, Payback periods, if you don't understand, you know, some of the financial elements that, um, that, that impacts marketing from a SaaS point of view, then you're not going to be able to build a model like that.

So, I guess it's, yeah, understanding SaaS at a deep level, like going beyond just what happens in marketing and, and, and having this understanding of like what's happening in the sales and sort of financial aspects of the business. If you can understand those then the way that you approach it as a market is completely changes But yeah in terms of putting the forecast together You have to understand like the SaaS business model.

You have to [00:19:00] Build a model and you have to be um You have to be realistic in terms of the changes that you can make and the impacts that you can have um But I think there's actually if you go on the Powered by search blog, there's maybe a write down about how we put that forecast together with a downloadable template.

So poweredbysearch.com forward slash blog, look for the forecasting blog wrote by me, and you'll have a complete breakdown about how it did that. 

Vikash: I'll find the link and put it on show notes for sure. So one of the other questions that I had in my mind was. While you were speaking about this, the law of, uh, dimension returns, right?

Every channel has its maximum capacity, right? I think being able to figure that, Hey, we are almost, uh, hitting that peak. That's like super critical, right? Like, because now that it means that you have to, okay. If say, for example, Google ads is like one really good example, right? Like for [00:20:00] most companies, Google ads is usually the first channel that starts to plateau.

Typically, like what is the thought process that you, you, you have when it comes to trying to figure out like, Hey, is this channel, like, have we matched out on this channel or not? Right? Like, what is your typical thought process over there?
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