GUEST Webinar Success Secrets and REAL Lead Generation! w/CMO FloQast! [Industry Giant Accounting Platform] Ben Schechter!! 📈 Stop Counting Leads, Start Printing Pipeline | Ep. 430

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast, and we got an important dude here. Who's here? We got Ben Schechter. Now, Ben is the chief marketing officer at Flowcast, but this guy has been one of the biggest CMOs in the world of SaaS for a long time, and Flowcast is an incredible company. They are considered the number one closed management software company. What does that even mean?

0:39Okay, finance teams, accounting teams, at the end of every quarter, they're scrambling to organize, to track, to do all this stuff. That's why no one answers your emails on like the end of the month because everyone's losing their mind. Flowcast fixes all that. They're a beast. They're crushing it. Really big organization. And Ben is leading all of the go-to-market, demand gen, everything. And we're going to dig into what is actually working in B2B marketing right now. So we got the right guy. Ben, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. That was a great intro. We should try to hire you on our product marketing team.

1:10I'm like the Michael Buffer of accounting software. So listen, before we get into what's actually working in B2B, which I'm very excited to talk about, how did Ben become Ben? Yeah, so I actually started my career in B2C way back in the day, which I learned a ton, most notably, really, how do you get people to sign up for something, pay money for something, things like that, and conversion and e-commerce. And that was great. I really enjoyed that. I went back to school to transition more into product marketing. And then after school is when I really started going more into the B2B world. And I remember when I first started B2B, everything felt like I was in a totally new world.

1:55It felt completely foreign to me. But what I realized is a lot of the skills I learned in B2C were very applicable to B2B. And I think that as I've gone along, my career has helped differentiate me because I can really understand things about digital marketing and driving conversion and everything from self-serve all the way through, kind of as I learned more and more driving that more sales led process. And so I've worked at companies, Box, Adobe, RingCentral. And then as you said, I'm now here at Flowcast. I think that's really cool because I think certainly in the last few years, maybe it's because of AI, maybe it's because of, I don't know, pandemic, I don't know what it is.

2:34But it feels like business to business marketing has become more of this consumer flavor where we're marketing to humans and not just people that happen to be at businesses. Has there been an even bigger kind of shift where b2b has gotten a little bit more consumer in the last few years as even compared to when you first got into b2b definitely um i think it may be because of the pandemic uh people stopped i think there's there's been some where people are now going back but virtually virtual events are now more popular than obviously in-person events and meeting people over zoom or whatever now is more common than necessarily going and meeting them in the office So I think that's part of it.

3:13I also think people are inundated all day long, whether it's their personal life and or business life. And so they may not want to talk to someone and they don't have time to take that meeting. They don't have time to go out to that dinner. And so they want to do it on their own. And so they want to go to the website. They want to consume the information. They may want to even talk to a chat bot to learn more and direct them in the right place. And potentially, depending on the type of business or software that you're selling, they might want to just sign up and try it for themselves before they even talk to anyone.

3:42Yeah, I completely can see that. And I see the shift that happened after the pandemic. So before we get to kind of like AI trends and all the stuff everybody loves to talk about, I want to go into the nitty gritty on like the W word, webinars. Are webinars still something that for business to business marketing is a viable content play to drive pipeline, interest, whatever, or are webinars just garbage and just now wallpaper? Yeah. So webinars are absolute gold. And I've seen that. This is the fourth straight company I have seen that. And I'm actually not going to sit here and tell you I know why.

4:23Because it is a time consuming medium to say I'm going to join this webinar, whether it's live or on demand. But what we see, and I'll just talk specifically to Flowcast, is we get thousands of people who sign up and the attendance is far above industry standard and they're engaging. They're asking questions. And what happens? Well, when they ask a question, they're pretty interested in your product. And so then when we have sales follow up, they are fantastic leads and the conversion rate that we see of these leads turning to opportunities and ultimately into closed one deals is significantly higher than other channels.

5:03And so we see that with various types of topics with our webinars. obviously you have to be mindful of not overdoing it and constantly bombarding your prospects and customers with webinars. So you have to be mindful of the topics and you have to be mindful of who's speaking. But to give you an example, we have our user conference coming up. It is virtual and we have just an incredible amount of thousands of people who are registered for what is a two, essentially, you know, it's a virtual event, but you could think of it as a two-day webinar and people will join and spend the majority of those two days will be, will stay with us.

5:41Okay. So for everybody out there is listening like, Oh, I don't get thousands. I get hundreds, but even in my hundreds, you know, let's say I got a hundred people registered for the webinar and I got 30 people that show up. And I'm just curious for your own pipeline in terms of the funnel, are the people that show up way further down in the funnel, your BDR is like, I'm calling those people versus the people that don't uh are the people that just register and don't show up are they borderline useless or you still see them kind of converting in some capacity yeah it's a great question and to go back to what you said about the numbers uh we have other regions of the world we are a global company that get more of those hundreds it's not always thousands of course so we we see that as well um but specific to your answer your question directly uh the way I think about it is you have registered, attended, and engaged.

6:31So if you register for webinar and you don't show up, you know, this is tactical. Obviously, we talk about lead scoring. You're going to have some type of quote score associated with that where you're interested, but hey, you didn't show up. You might not be ready to talk to sales. So you might be further up the funnel or the way we would think about it. You would need to do other activities before we feel like, hey, this is a good use of your time sale. You should talk to them. If you attend a webinar especially and stay for a specific amount of time, just make up a number, say more than 50%, you're pretty engaged.

7:05That's a good person to talk to. And then if you are engaging in the webinar, asking questions, you are the most highly engaged. And so although we, to give you an example, if you attend a webinar, we're going to send you to sales. If you attend a webinar and ask questions or engage, we prioritize, we're going to send those to sales as well, but we're going to prioritize those higher where they should be calling them within honestly hours because that is a very, very engaged prospect or customer. Well, first of all, congrats to you because I think that you all are super smart for what you're doing.

7:38If no one else takes anything out of this, that tactic of not just taking people that showed up and treat them all the same, but that they engage, that they ask questions, that they stayed for more than 50 % of the time, that is a massive signal that you need to be reacting to in your organization. So I love that you're doing that. So let's talk about other content plays, though. I hate in the world of B2B marketing where people call it, we got this many leads. And the lead could be someone that downloaded a guide, someone that downloaded a case study, which is much further down the funnel, someone that did something else that's ridiculous.

8:09How at Flowcast do you look at leads? Are leads just anybody that consumes any kind of resource? So first I'll tell you a story that always makes me laugh is I was at a company previously where they wanted to measure our performance actually on leads. on number of leads. And I said, well, I will be the worst CMO in the world if I don't crush that number because I control the lead scoring algorithm, which determines if it is a lead. So I can just dial it up and send a ton of leads. They may not be good, but I will crush your number. So to your question, leads to me is a predictor of future performance if done well.

8:51But by no means do I ever look at that as a... That's never a metric actually I ever really talk about with sales or at the executive level. Because to me, it's just an indicator like, are we doing the right things? But ultimately, we're looking more at true dollars, true pipeline, true close one. So that's the first thing. And then to your other point, this is where you learn when it comes to... And this is why I'm a huge believer in multi-touch attribution, because we know the average prospect or customer, they're doing 12 to 15 different types of activities oftentimes before they're touching or want to talk to a salesperson.

9:30So if you're looking at just leads and you're saying, hey, they download a white paper, boom, send them to sales. If they're not ready for sales, two things happen. One, the prospect gets annoyed. Like, why are you calling me already? Two, the salesperson gets annoyed. and they say, why are you sending me all these bad leads? And then what's a byproduct of that is they stop calling your quote leads. And so now all of a sudden you go, why are you calling my leads? And you get into this bad flywheel approach of a mistrust. So I try to stay away from the kind of the leads conversation and really focus more on the pipeline.

10:08Yeah, I'm so down with that. And you bring up a great point, how the BDR is going to get turned off with your SDRs, your salespeople, whatever, that they're like, oh, these are garbage. And anytime they see something coming in from that source, like garbage and they don't touch them and whatever and that's where the relationship falls apart people make memes about sales and marketing not getting along and it's the end of the universe uh you know i always joke around the dirtiest word in a bdr's language is content syndication because this is super top of funnel and that world has changed and maybe it's not as successful as it used to be but i've had a lot of success with that channel but they are never ready to talk to sales and they usually don't even know who you are from a company perspective.

10:48And so when you send those leads over, they stop calling them. And then when you actually do get a lead that's further down the funnel and maybe they started at content syndication, but they actually attended a webinar, that BDR looks at that lead and says, even though they didn't come directly from content syndication, they think they did just by looking at it and they don't call them anymore. And again, it creates a bad, kind of just a bad relationship across sales and marketing. yeah so i love your perspective on leads in general so let's pivot for a second so now people aren't going to google anymore they're not going to google say hey i need closed management software they're now going to chat gpt and they're going to claw and all these different places and now we have to not worry about seo search engine marketing now we have to worry about aeo are you aggressively working on trying to make sure that you all are showing up uh on chat gpt and all this stuff do Do you have like an AEO plan or is that something that's a 2026 whiteboard thing?

11:43I would say we're in the middle. I would say anyone who comes here and says, oh, we have this fantastic AEO plan that we know is going to crush it is either lying or very much misled because the reality is it's very new. Everyone knows where this is headed. Everyone's trying to figure it out. We are obviously trying to figure it out. But if I told you that we had a plan that I know is absolutely going to crush it, I would be lying. So yes, we are actively working on it. We are trying out new things. But we still see a lot of traffic through your typical call SEO and page search channels. So by no means are we turning off that switch.

12:32I think it's more how do we balance and how do we know what the future is going to be. So let's make sure we get ahead of the game. Yeah, I'm with you. And I agree with you. I'm glad you called that out, that nobody really has it all together yet. But I do think that if it's not something that you're trying to figure out and you're not looking at the schema and listicles and everything that they're looking for, then that's actually kind of ridiculous. So what about other things that are emerging? So we're seeing a lot of B2B folks now looking at things like paid ads on Instagram that used to only be a consumer channel or Reddit now having some lead gen ads and things.

13:07that nature are you all going beyond just oh yeah we run on linkedin we run on google ads you know stuff like that are you looking at these other platforms absolutely um i think one of the reasons i love digital marketing and why i i gravitated earlier in my career um is because i love i love testing new things um and i love the quantitative feedback that you get from these tests uh versus as maybe other areas of marketing that are not quite as quantitative. So we try all these things. You mentioned Reddit, that's become more and more popular. You've mentioned, you know, we try them all. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't sometimes.

13:46And then oftentimes, it's a matter of which, you know, part of the funnel you're interested in. Certain things are gonna be more top of funnel versus middle or bottom. And so it's important to set up success metrics before you run the test and agree on what you're trying to accomplish. Because if you're running, call it a video pre-roll on YouTube, and you expect to get direct clicks from that, that convert into leads, you already know it's going to fail. So it's important to set up the success and align with whoever is going to be looking at it to measure what would be, what you expect to come from that channel.

14:24All right. So one more thing I'm curious about, because you happen to be, and don't take this the wrong way, you happen to be in not the most sexiest industry on the planet, okay? You're in the finance, accounting professional industry, and a lot of people out there are listening like, oh man, I need to listen to this because I'm in a regulated industry. I'm in a really an industry that everything is off brand. I'm not allowed to test this, test that. I have to follow my brand guidelines, and I truly don't know the answer to this. So I'm curious for you all, do you uh step out of just the kind of formulaic it's got to look this way or do you have lo-fi content that you put out there or you we're in the accounting world we can't go that route so i i love this question uh because i'm actually coming up on my one year anniversary at flowcast and one of the reasons why i i wanted to um to come here was because of that brand identity and the differentiation.

15:20So our founder, Mike Whitmire, he's a former accountant. And he is very big believer in like, hey, accountants are not boring. Like we are people, we consume information, we want to be different. And so sure, are we going to have like a crazy, whatever the right word I can't think of is like out of the box, like brand campaign that's way out there? No, that wouldn't fit. But we do have, if you look at us compared to our competitors, you will notice very distinct tone of voice and messaging. And we are constantly thinking about that when we develop content, because we want to stay true to that brand.

15:58And it's one of the things that we hear from customers they love us about is that, you know, we do speak their language, but a more call it, you know, conversational or pithy way that speaks to them. And in fact, we have something that's unusual, really, for I think most marketing departments of our size, especially in this industry is we have a studios team. That is, you know, we're based in LA, we're based in the Hollywood world. And we have a studios team that creates very engaging video content that we leverage. whether it's through different channels, through at our user conference, that is highly, highly consumed and people really enjoy.

16:43Dude, that's cool that you have a studio thing going on. I mean - Yeah, very cool. You know what? I think it's so important for people to hear, especially those people out there that think they're in a boring industry, think they can't do stuff. It breaks through when you act like a human. That's what we get out of this. Yeah, you know, one of the things that I loved when I met Mike was typically when you work with a founder, you're going to have to work really hard to educate them that like, hey, we have to be different. We have to sound different. We have to have our own distinct voice if we want to rise above the fold with our competitive landscape.

17:20He'd already done that. So to me, that was such a win to walk into that world. And now, of course, I feel the responsibility as our team does to continue that as we move forward. I think we've done a really good job with that. Yeah, well, the more I've gotten to know Flowcast, the more I feel that. So you're doing a great job. I'm not just saying that because I'm staring at you. And for everybody out there listening, listen, you could follow Ben on LinkedIn. It's Ben Schechter. Okay, Flowcast is F-L-O-Q-A-S-T. I strongly recommend checking them out. They're fantastic. Ben, what else did I forget?

17:55how else should people get involved in your world? No, I mean, I think you nailed it. Obviously, if you are in the accounting world, definitely check out Flowcast. And then in the marketing world, I think we had a great conversation and hopefully spurred some ideas for people listening. Awesome. I'll put it all in the show notes. Ben, thanks for being here, man. Thank you. You did it. You made it to the end. But wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast. And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five star review. Why not?

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