1532 – The Length of The B2B Sales Cycle with Dream Data’s Lars Grønnegaard

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0:58with us right now, Lars Gronegaard. Lars, you are the co-founder and CEO of Dream Data. You're found on the web at dreamdata.io. Lars, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, thanks, Josh, for having me. It's awesome to be on the show. Yes. All right. Yeah. Tell us about how Dream Data works. On your website, I have pulled up right now, B2B revenue attribution. This is important to know. Yeah. I think like as all founders, when you work on something, of course, it's because you think it's important. So basically, we try to help companies, B2B SaaS companies primarily, but B2B companies of any type, we help them figure out what works, what doesn't work in their go-to-market.

1:43That's the fundamental thing. Yeah. Yeah. You work, you know, and you work with a lot of, well, I would say SM, it looks like a lot of SMBs. Yeah. And boy, I'm just so eager to get your perspective because obviously in your position, you likely see you probably now, because of just who you get to work with, you probably get some pretty meaningful data around trends around B2B marketing. I am the student. You're the master. Please school me on what is working right now in B2B client acquisition. I think one of the things we see across a lot of customers, which a lot of people are not aware of, is everybody understands that the length of the B2B sales cycle is quite long, but very few people know how long it actually is because we look at the entire sales cycle from the first time you ever see someone.

2:44And across our customers, it's almost close to a year, which is even when people are citing long journeys, that's actually a bit longer than what they're citing. So that's a big one. Another thing, we are very heavily in the B2B SaaS space, we have a lot of people who are very active on LinkedIn. So we're seeing LinkedIn as a very attractive acquisition channel, especially if your audience is living there. So we're seeing that a lot. What types of activity on LinkedIn? I think you can see there are like, of course, there's paid acquisition by LinkedIn. So that works. And then I think the big sort of the dark side of not in a negative way, but the part of LinkedIn that you can't see anywhere.

3:30I think the way we see that is you see it through indications of the data, but of course, like any kind of organic engagement. So engaging with people on LinkedIn, I think it's going to be super interesting to see what happens now in the in this sort of. Because we've been looking at this for years and we love LinkedIn ourselves for our own go to market. But I have a feeling that everything that's happening around ChatGPT and sort of the access to like really, really rapid content production via AI is going to make some, I don't know what the change will be, but I think there'll be changes. When we're talking about a sales cycle that may extend to a year, well, first, before I ask you about what I really want to ask you about, that one year thing is that, let's say, for example, there's like a marketing agency or creative agency or maybe a leadership consultant.

4:30And engagement is maybe$20 ,000,$30 ,000. Are we still talking about sales cycles that extend that long? Totally. Oh, my gosh. Wow. What's happening is that it'd be to be very often people like your product, but it's not the right time. I think it's like it's sales 101 that you need timing to be correct. And when you're hitting people with demand gen motions, you will hit them out of their sales, like that buying cycle. So that means that let's say somebody wants to buy my software, maybe it's not a good time for them now. Maybe the person who is going to run it is not in the business, or maybe there's no budget, or maybe we have other priorities at the moment.

5:16there's still someone out there who wants my product. But what happens is they will be looking for the right time to buy the product. That's what generates these like super long, say, demand to sale cycle. The actual buying cycle where you're actively engaging about the sale, that's maybe for our products down to 30 to 60 days. But the total length of the journey is often like years. makes it super hard if you're doing the mansion to know if your investment is paying off, right? Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about LinkedIn. And I like how you just talked about engagement. There are different ways, obviously, that you can engage.

5:59Some, I have a bias. I think does not work really well, but I don't know. And I would say the stuff that I think that I'm a little skeptical of would be kind of this traditional sliding into DMS and just, you don't know me. I don't know you. Hey, why don't we have a discovery call about how I can make you a lot of money or something like those sorts of scripts. I just think are just, it's so annoying. I talked to so many people that just don't like that. And then I've also interviewed lead gen companies who insist. They insist. The numbers work. It doesn't matter if you bother a lot of people.

6:38The numbers work. So obviously, they have a bias to keep people doing that. But I trust your answer here. I think, unfortunately, my answer is going to be a little bit the same as yours. I think we see ourselves as things that are working, which is not what you describe. I think what's working is more in the line of you build an audience. So you build an audience around, basically, you're talking to someone, typically the people you're selling to, you have a shared interest. So you're building an audience around what they care about. So you don't have to be talking about exactly what you're selling, but you're talking about the subject that they care about, the subjects they care about, and that builds an audience.

7:27And that means that you build sort of trust with these people. And at the point when you then sometimes you talk about your product, that audience will listen to you. So that's how I see LinkedIn working mostly. We don't have good measurement of that sort of like hitting people up in the DMs motion. I don't like it. I don't react positively to it. but some of the - Especially I'd say if we're talking about, you know, it depends on who the audience is. I think maybe you might be able to get away with it if your audience, you're selling a thousand dollar thing or something like that, maybe, you know, cause it's just much lower risk.

8:12Whereas I see, and here's kind of the thesis that I'm curious about, you know, about the value of relationship and the value of trust that is a requirement today you know, just even beyond the logical left brain numbers, you know, is the how important is it for us as service providers to kind of lean into the relationship together? Because we know, listen, if this is going to take a year anyway, we may as well just, you know, suspend this idea of, you know, I'm going to have a one call close here. And instead, you know, this is the beginning of a great friendship and I'm excited to see where it goes.

8:59Yeah. I think there's a huge risk, especially if you have poor control over your data. If you are, I think we all experienced some companies that are continuously sort of hitting you with different BDRs on LinkedIn. There's definitely a risk that you're creating. If you have that type of motion, there's a risk that you're creating sort of negative sentiment at the market and something that might negatively impact your performance. I think the big thing is that the volume might, if you do it in a good way, the fact that you're doing things in volume might work for some. I think it depends on the audience.

9:42We're selling a lot to marketers and go-to-market professionals of various kinds and they are in general being approached so much on email, LinkedIn, and phone that outbound is a tough, tough motion towards them. We are 100 % inbound in our motion, the way we work. I think it's always risky. I don't think that that is the recommendation for everybody to be that because different audiences, different motions will work, right? Yeah. Let's talk about dream data. How does it work and where does it fit in? So we're a data platform product. So we sit, you can say, underneath all the other tools in your go-to-market tech stack.

10:32So your CRM, your marketing automation, your tracking, or your ad buying. So we aggregate data from all of that. And we use that to then provide you with analytics so that you can figure out what works, what doesn't, you can optimize based on that. But you can also do automations on top of it. So sometimes if you want to email a bunch of people, the data that's in your CRM is not enough, or the data that's in your tracking is not enough. You want, say, for instance, I want everybody that was on my website last week, but I don't want to email all the people who are my customers. That data set requires merging of data.

11:06So we fix that for people. Makes it super easy. So it enables, because I think of B2B go-to-market as something that is iterating towards more and more automation. And our goal is to be sort of the data foundation for that automation.

11:26And let's say you have someone who's nervous that it's going to integrate well with their tech stack, or it's going to be very, very disruptive to add this into their workflow. Can you kind of talk about how implementation works? implementation is not complicated if you are on a standard tech stack. So we work really well with Salesforce. We work really well with Marketo. We work well with HubSpot. We work well with Microsoft Dynamics. So a bunch of the sort of standard business systems and go to market. I think those are the hard systems to integrate with. Then there's the ad platforms. That's less complicated.

12:07And there's a tracking component, which I think most companies that would be interested in a product like ours, they know how to implement tracking on a website. So I don't think it's a very complex setup. I think what can be disruptive is using data. And sometimes you might discover things that are, that things are not the way you thought they were. You have, we all do things because we think they work really well. But on the other hand, And I think we also all know that sometimes we have bad ideas and not everything works really well. And when you get something that actually measures it against performance, sometimes you discover things that you thought were really good that are actually not that great.

12:48Yeah. And so I'm curious, who is Dream Data and how did this all come about? So we got, like most startups, we got started by facing the problems ourselves. uh so uh it's like a growth stage now ipo company out of copenhagen we're a sass company and we wanted to figure out at a very actually that was at a quite high level we wanted to figure out the sort of proportions of our sales motion our marketing motion and our product motion how was that driving revenue and we had tons of data but the answers that we're looking for required so much work. We did the work inside of that company, but at the same time figured out that this was a product problem.

13:34We thought it was a standard setup we had at that company, but we still had to do a lot of custom work ourselves. So we thought, okay, here's a space for a product. And that was the theory or the thesis of founding the company. And who is DreamData today? who we are as a company? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who's on the team and what does it take to run a company like this? So we're a 35-people company now. So we got started a couple of years ago. So we're growing quite well.

14:10We're selling mostly in the US, even though we are a Danish company. So our biggest market is the US. US is a very marketing-oriented market, which means that the US... But I think it's interesting that the US in general is more advanced on the approach to sort of automated go-to-market, which means that we have customers in the US. There are just more people in the US or companies in the US requiring a product like ours. Yeah. Yeah. And when somebody, let's say that somebody is listening to our podcast and they're like, okay, this sounds really interesting. Maybe they're doing their due diligence and part of their due diligence is listening to our conversation right now.

14:56And they're ready to take it for a spin. What's the next step? Yeah, I think that was for us a fundamental thing that we believe very strongly that you should be able to try a product before you buy it, especially a complicated product that is, it could be hard to trust. So we have had, again, like as a founding thesis that we wanted a way of setting up a trial for people so that they could test the product. We also have a free product that people can use in a fairly automated approach. So if anybody out there wants to try the product, I think the easiest thing is to go to the website, as you mentioned, dreamdata.io or dreamdata.com, and you can sign up for the free product or for a free trial.

15:40That's the easiest approach. Yeah. Again, website is dreamdata.io. And you also have a, didn't I see a book somewhere? Yeah, connecting the dots. What's that? So that is like our sort of collecting all the content that we have around attribution and revenue automation. So it's basically giving the foundation of like, why do you do attribution? How do you do attribution? it also covers things like, what if I don't want to buy your product? What if I want to build it myself? How do I do that? What are the big sort of pitfalls and things like that? Excellent. All right. The website is dreamdata.io.

16:25The book you'll find where it looks like, well, it looks like you just send the book, right? Like anyone can download it. It's a download. That's great. It's a download. Yeah. A guide to B2B growth and attribution for the technical marketer. So if that's you, go grab that. Lars, it's been great. Congratulations again for five years, the growth that you've experienced and the good work that you're doing in the marketplace. Thank you for this conversation too. Thank you, Josh. It's been a pleasure. Thanks.

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