GTM Live

What is the most overlooked part of demand generation? Think about all the metrics you're measuring. All the channels you're covering. All the ad budget you're spending. Think about the number of leads you're collecting.   Now ask yourself this: Do you check to see if anyone is actually consuming your message? If your answer is "No", then how do you know if you're effectively communicating with your buyers?   That my friends is the most overlooked thing in demand gen programs. In today's episode, we're diving into how to start making this a key part of your demand gen process.  As always, we're taking live questions from the audience. You can join us weekly, every Tuesday night @ 7:30 PM EST on Demand Gen Live to ask your questions: https://bit.ly/2ZahXUE.

Dark Social is the difficult to measure areas where companies are creating demand for their category, brand, and product every single day. Brands that everyone knows and loves are built here, not through MQL generation. And let there be no confusion—the highest performing marketing teams in 2021 and beyond are winning by crushing their Dark Social strategy. Once you change how you measure marketing, what you optimize for, and how you think about attribution it opens up an incredible amount of opportunities for what B2B companies can do, that nobody is doing right now. When you stop trying to optimize to generate MQLs at the cheapest possible price, your mindset will change to educating the industry on how you do things and how it impacts them. When your prospects get continuous value out of your content, without an SDR beating down their door, they will continue to come back time after time—And eventually, when they're ready to buy, you'll win that opportunity.

In this episode, Chris dives in on how to change your mindset on LinkedIn ads to get better returns. If you want to be successful with LinkedIn ads you need to shift your mindset. It’s time to leave 2011 marketing tactics behind and stop optimizing your paid LinkedIn ad spend for MQLs. Instead, optimize your ads to increase the reach of your organic content. Use ads to help build your organic machine so you can reach a massive audience and be top of mind when they are ready to buy, instead of when you want them to buy. We also dive into how to optimize your pipeline for high intent lead handoffs to sales and answer questions from the best B2B marketers in the game.

“Capturing intent data is the only way to get intent.” - Marketing teams everywhere^ It’s not true and it’s time to accept it. Chris sat down with Jake Dunlap to discuss how the industry relies on intent data that is flawed, solely for the purpose of creating a metric—even if it's sabotaging their success. In this episode, you'll learn about the three levels of intent and how to optimize your marketing to create real intent, rather than capturing assumed intent. 

Marketing teams that start planning for 2022 now are the ones that are going to win in Q1. Teams that wait until December, or even early January, are the ones that are going to be scrambling and end Q1 in the hole. In this expert series of State of Demand Gen, Chris welcomes Dave Gerhardt to discuss their top three tips for developing a Q1 2022 marketing plan now. They dive into seasonality, marketing agility, testing new ideas and channels, and the necessities for a successful Q1.

Chris Walker and Megan Bowen brought the Demand Gen Live community back last night to discuss a couple agenda items in addition to a live Q&A. On the agenda:    - How product-led growth companies should be thinking about enterprise demand  - The Blended Funnel: why it’s hard to see it’s time to change your strategy. Chris answered follow-up questions in regards to the agenda items in addition to questions about how to tell when a channel is not working vs. the person managing the channel is not managing it well, and how to manage the over-reliance on attribution data. Don't miss our event with Dave Gerhardt, Chief Brand Officer at Drift, tomorrow October 7th at 12pm EDT. We'll be covering our top 3 recommendations for your 2022 strategy. Register here to attend live. 

This episode consists of a recording from Chris’s speaking slot at the Clozd Win Loss Week event. He shares how to build a marketing strategy, covering everything from win/loss analysis, customer research, and marketing fundamentals.

Chris Walker and Megan Bowen brought the Demand Gen Live community together again last night for an hour-long episode. They covered the history of lead gen & ABM and the leading metric every marketing team should be measuring. They also hosted a live Q&A and answered questions about event strategy, direct mail, marketing without technology, and marketing career paths.Register here for next week's Demand Gen Expert Session with Dave Gerhardt, Chief Brand Officer at Drift. 

Chris joined The Marketing Starter podcast as a guest to talk about the dynamic between marketing sales, the making of a B2B brand, paid social and ABM. He got into a ton of marketing fundamentals and broke down what "just checking the box" looks like. Chris shared what happens when marketing takes on sales behaviors and calls them marketing.

This episode consists of a recording from Chris Walker's speaking engagement at the Full-Funnel Summit 2021. The theme for his talk was Measurement & Reporting.