1812 – B2B Marketing with Influ2’s Dmitri Lisitski

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2:08With us right now, it is Dmitry Lysyski. Dmitry, you are the CEO and co-founder of Influe2. That's I-N-F-L-U, the number two, dot com. Dmitry, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Well, so Influe2 looks like it is a B2B advertising platform, service? Can you maybe give us an overview? Yeah. Influ2 is a B2B advertising platform built specifically for enterprise sales. So I think B2B overall, it's like two different worlds of volume and velocity, small transactions, and selling to large enterprise. So we're helping with that more. And yeah, our job is to show ads to specific individuals, decision makers, and large organizations helping to sell into these organizations through the longer sales cycles.

3:03So that's basically our job to engage these people across Facebook, Google, LinkedIn ads, and then tell our customers who is engaging, like which decision makers are interested in the ads, and then help salespeople sell more ultimately. What is it that's unique about advertising when it comes to B2B as opposed to someone that's just selling a consumer product? Well, I guess the biggest difference comes from the fact that your sales cycle is very long. The number of people is more than one. They're typically buying groups who make decisions. And with that motion, you really need to care about...

3:45You can really invest a lot into the potential transaction, right? So in consumer, typically the size of transaction is very tiny compared, and then you need to run a lot of ads and the span is very short. In B2B, you can really invest in this relationship, right? And while you invest in this relationship, it's very important to communicate with your sales team to align marketing effort with sales effort so that salespeople know what marketing people are doing and vice versa. And also, the reason why we came up with Info2 was it's not just trying to connect those activities together, but also making sure you talk to the same people, exactly the same individuals.

4:29Because salespeople, as you know, they always talk to, they know exactly what they're talking to, right? So they're talking to specific individuals, specific decision makers. And our idea was, hey, marketing should do the same, right? Marketing should engage same individuals as salespeople talking to and help them sell them to these individuals, right? So that's what makes B2B very different to what consumer marketing is. And so what is it that's unique about Influe 2? Yeah, that's exactly the ability to target individuals, target specific decision makers by name and know exactly who is engaging with your ads by name as well.

5:08So what you can do with Info2 is you can sit together with your sales team and figure out, okay, here's 10 people inside, say, Microsoft, who they're trying to sell right now. And you can show ads to exactly the same people. And then if, say, John Smith from Microsoft clicks on your ads, your sales team will know about this tomorrow. And they can call this guy and say, hey, let's chat. Let's have a conversation. and this is kind of a simple explanation but when you do that scale you see very tangible improvement in conversion rates of sales process right so there's no direct conversion from from marketing because like if you sell large enterprise deals it's impossible to expect that you know like someone will sign up for your product and you know put their credit card on file and then you know purchase a product for seven digits like figure right so there's still salespeople involved, but you really can see a lot of improvement in conversion rates and better sales pipeline, but more deals won thanks to the fact that marketing are targeting the same people and helping salespeople close more deals.

6:16Why is it that other advertising platforms might struggle with individual? Again, what we're talking about with Influte2 is a very targeted, this is a very specific person and we want to follow this person everywhere online and advertise to them nonstop, right? Is it that other advertising platforms just don't have the technical ability to do that? Yeah, exactly. So we don't have our own banner network or anything like this. We serve ads across non-display networks and social networks like Google Display Network, Facebook, LinkedIn, all existing advertising platforms that you know. What you lack if you try to engage with this platform directly or through other platforms is that typically they're designed for consumer, right?

7:07So I think we see a lot of success of direct-to-consumers, e-commerce products, but it's pretty limited when it comes to B2B applications. So what we are doing is making traditional advertising platforms work well for B2B use case, right? Because B2B have very different needs to direct to consumer or e-commerce or media or any other consumer-focused variables. At what stage does it make sense for a company to investigate a solution like Influte 2? So I guess what I'm asking is, let's say it's a smaller agency and at any given time, they've got maybe 20 people in their sales pipeline, right? It's just a much smaller volume.

7:54Your application would be better suited for companies that are doing a little bit more volume than that. Is that correct? I think the real criteria is just repeatable sales process. Because once you have sales people on the ground doing their hard work, trying to close those deals and actually closing the deals, this is a moment when Info2 becomes useful. Obviously, the bigger the scale is, the more value you will see. But I think when we say no, and actually sometimes we say no to put you know mature companies if they don't have a sales process that is repeatable then you know it's pretty hard to tell how marketing can help right so you you first need to make sure that your sales people know what they're doing right and then once sales process works well and it's predictable and there are some predictable metrics that are typical for sales process then marketing can really help and accelerate this process and and have a tangible measurable impact on what salespeople are doing.

9:00Right? So like, and this is our job actually to measure how much marketing helps salespeople to achieve this results. But if salespeople are not selling, then marketing is pretty in a hopeless situation and they can barely help. Yeah. So as I understand it, so is Influe 2 for folks that have already kind of expressed interest, they're already like a known individual? Or can you use this as well for kind of very specific micro targeting? So a lot of kind of the way I'm hearing this sounds like it's kind of like, you know, you're not casting nets to catch a bunch of minnows. You got a harpoon gun and you're going after the Moby Dick's out there.

9:47So I guess getting back to the first part of the question I started asking is, can you do this to generate awareness or is it more appropriate to use Influte2 for people that are already in the consideration stage? Well, the best use case, obviously, and the easiest one is start from Influte2 before the first sales outreach happens. And this especially works well for prospecting. So if there's a group of sales development or salespeople who are doing prospecting every day, there could be huge help from the marketing team to build some initial awareness before the first email has been sent or before the first call is made.

10:30Because obviously, it's much easier to connect to a person when this person knows who you are, right? And by the way, this is the best, like when you think about creatives, you can just put the face of your salesperson on the banner and present them as an expert so that whenever the salesperson reach out to your prospect, then, oh, yeah, I know this guy. They have this feeling of, okay, they not just know your company, but also they know the person who is trying to reach out to them. And that really helps. And we see like very measurable improvement in sales development and prospecting conversion rates if you do this.

11:06But it's not limited to this use case. Obviously, throughout the sales cycle when you already have some sales opportunity and you're working to close this deal, obviously takes time to close a deal. And a lot of cases when your buyers just forget about you, right? They just meet with other stuff. So in this case, marketing can be really helpful to keep them aware and remind them and build additional credibility as well. So this is a perfect time to invest in building credibility and explaining why your product or your service is different and strong and reliable. So obviously, throughout the sales cycle, there's no moment when you don't want marketing to help sales, right?

11:53It's like until the deal is closed and actually beyond that, right? So like it's - Stay top of mind. Yeah. Yeah, particularly, you know, if you're dealing with a customer who's evaluating you versus three to five other solutions, you know, to keep staying top of mind there, keep showing up. What would you, the content of the ads, if you had someone that was already in your sales pipeline, what would you advertise to them? Well, typically, if it's called prospect, obviously, you either advertise a salesperson, an account executive, or you advertise the value. So you talk about very basic value.

12:31And then once you pass the stage, you already started the conversation. I think the biggest help that marketing can provide is to build credibility. I think this is the biggest thing that you need to work on throughout the sales cycle. So because when your buyer compares your company to other companies, your product to other products, they need to be sure that what they're trying to buy is the best option on the market. And that's where beyond sales pitches, beyond sales conversations, marketing can do a lot to drive this. But also, don't forget that it's never one person, especially the big companies, that typically all the decisions are made in buying groups and you know you can you can read garden and forrester talking about this a lot about like how this buying dynamics happens in larger companies and then from marketing standpoint what we can do is you can engage all your buyers not just the one that you're the champion that your sales people talking to but also other buying group members that are not visible from sales standpoint but we know they exist we know they participate in decision making.

13:41And that's what salespeople call multi-threading, right? So you want to multi-thread your conversation to engage other people. And this is a perfect job that can be done by a marketing team to engage other team members. Yeah. Tell me about the company itself. Tell me about Influe to yourself, like your company, who's part of it? Like, you know, when you're working with someone, when you're working with a client, like when they're working with you, What does that usually look like? Is it a bit of an agency-type relationship or consultancy-type relationship? Or is they just kind of investing in a platform and then they need to learn to use the platform?

14:20Yeah, well, our platform was designed to be self-serve, so you don't need to talk to us when you use the platform. So basically, the job of my customer success team is to ensure that customers understand and can leverage to the full potential. and also it's a lot of about like consultancy in terms of what are the best practices we see across different clients and then what's the best implementation and the best processes they can leverage to make you know their user per space advertising successful so yes it is more like a consultancy but obviously if there is need like technical help that is needed obviously we can be happy to provide this as well your website is influe the number two.com influe2.com someone who's maybe stumbled upon our podcast and maybe they're kind of investigating or researching in flu too, and they're in the consideration stage.

15:15And where would they go from here? What would they do? Well, I think the easiest thing, they can just, you know, like go, you know, hit sign up button and talk to our salespeople. And well, again, like our salespeople job is not Actually, it's interesting because unlike many other companies, our salespeople can tell you, hey, it's a little airy for you. And I encourage this. Really, we are a lot of involved in motivating our salespeople to make sure that the first sell is not the end of the story. We want to make sure that there's going to be a long-lasting relationship and successful relationship for our customers.

15:56So we want to make sure that the implementation goes smoothly and the use case will work with this specific customer. So like this thing to do is just talk to our account executives and they will help evaluate if Info2 is the right thing to do. Also we did recently, we launched a version two product and this version two was a big thing. It's kind of huge step forward compared to what we had like a year ago. So we did pretty big event and the recording is available. So I would recommend to watch it. It talks a lot about the value and what we have built, especially for those marketers who already tried other IBM platforms, tried to come with marketing.

16:36So I think it will resonate a lot in terms of what could be done with the new capabilities that we offer in version 2. Yeah. And what does a demo typically look like? well I think demo is not a good starting point because the product is pretty sophisticated and like before you run demo you you want to understand we our our account executive would like to understand what's your use case what problem we're trying to solve and we try to connect uh you know to and address the problem that our potential customer could need to solve yeah all right dimitri again your website is influe2.com for someone that's not quite ready for a demo and maybe they just want to kind of dig into some more resources it looks like you have quite a few resources on your website including some webinars podcasts or different reports anything stand out to you that you'd recommend yeah absolutely well i think our content is more about how do you apply, you know, person-based ads to different use cases and why you should care about person-based advertising as an element of your revenue marketing strategy or part of your ABM programs.

17:50So if, while throughout the evaluation, this is something you care about, I would highly recommend just to read our blog, read our LinkedIn. And again, like if someone is interested to see like more kind of, to learn more about the product and what it looks like right now and what problems it solves. We'll be happy to share the video of our version 2 launch. I think this is one that will answer many of the product-related questions as well. And again, our salespeople are friendly. They're not sales. They're consultants. I think people should not be shy to ask questions they care about. Happy to answer all the questions.

18:30Yeah. Dmitry Luzitzky, again, you're the CEO and co-founder of Influe2, your website, influ2.com. Dmitry, thank you so much for this conversation. Appreciate it. Thank you, Josh. Thank you so much.

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