Network Development Reps, Google Ads, and Demand Gen
We explore headliens from NDR reps to recent trends in Google Ads. And Justin Keller share his insights on building people-first demand generation strategies.
Break through the noise. Stop conforming to the rules of B2B.
The advertising through that, it's self-expression, like, he's a perfect
example.
Demand-gen marketers, you have to act like a brand marketer as well for this to
work.
Real talk backed up with real action.
This is GTM Newsdesk.
I'm Nick Bennett and I'm Mark Killins.
Let's see what's trending.
[Music]
Welcome to GTM Newsdesk.
My name is Mark Killins.
Let's dive into the lead story of today.
Google just recently announced a ton of information and published research on
ads.
What a surprise, Nick. Google loves ads.
That's how they make their trillions of dollars.
So when I saw this, I was a bit skeptical.
It's like, what are they going to say that's really that interesting?
Well, the link is in the show notes.
Go check it out.
We took away the top three things for you right now that you can pretty much do
today.
And the other thing is, as you listen to these, our special guest in the third
story of today
is going to go a bit deeper into what Google found.
So number one takeaway, Nick.
Today's advertising celebrates self-expression.
I've got to give a shout out to one of your friends, Tim Davidson.
There's others I linked in, but Tim Davidson for some reason comes up in my
feet a lot.
Thanks a lot, Tim.
And he's always expressing himself with fruit.
He's the fruit king.
He loves fruit.
And he ties that into everything he does.
Talk about self-expression, Nick.
It just makes me hungry thinking about it.
100%.
Well, I've actually hung out with Tim a decent amount.
And I mean, not only is he a great self-expression when it comes to fruit,
but he also does really great self-expression at conferences with a sign that
he can write,
holds up.
And his whole thing is, think about that.
Think about how many people leverage taking pictures of him, posting on social.
I mean, any big conference that's out there, all I do is I see this guy on my
feet.
It just scrolls through.
It's Tim cutting fruit.
It's Tim holding up a sign.
I mean, think about it.
He's now known as the fruit and sign guy, but it's something that has got him
lots of,
I think, good press in a certain degree.
He's gotten brand deals from it.
He's gotten lots of great opportunities.
He's doing his own thing.
So yeah, I mean, I think the advertising through that,
it's self-expression, like he's a perfect example.
I am seeing more people pop up that aren't cutting fruit, but they have a
unique angle.
And they're standing for something.
I think that's another thing.
When it's self-expression, you have to stand for something at the end of the
day.
Yeah, I stand for good ties.
So yes, ties is how I stand out.
Number two takeaway, brand stories increasingly depict community.
I love this one because it's about telling the story of the brand with other
people,
not at or for other people.
So as you think about your ads, you talked about a real person like Tim,
you got to get real people to be the story of your brand.
Forget the brand saying, hey, look how good I am.
No, that's terrible.
That is garbage these days.
So much of that shit is coming at us.
Now, have someone who genuinely loves the brand, loves the product,
is a part of the community and get them to activate your ad and activate the
audience engagement.
And you'll see such better responses and you'll see real people commenting and
liking that.
And you're going to see a lower cost of customer acquisition if you do
something like that versus
just your generic company first, blah, blah, add.
And then the third takeaway, successful ads, have a strong hook, which isn't
like that new.
We knew that they're now leaning into pop culture, references, trends, catchy
music.
I don't know any of that shit.
I don't even listen to music really.
That's a fact, probably should, but I don't.
And they use some humor.
So when you think about B2B ads, how many ads have those things outside of a
hook?
Very few.
So break through the noise, stop conforming to the rules of B2B.
Our guest talks more about this later in the episode today.
Do not conform, Nick.
Stand out, stand for something, have some goddamn fun.
I think it's why UGC, which is user-generated content for, you know, that's
starting to pop up.
And like, I think people are using UGC or brands are tapping into UGC creators
to leverage for ads.
I mean, I'm seeing it more and more, and I'm actually seeing it more and more
in the B2B side as well,
outside of LinkedIn, of course.
But I'm seeing it on Instagram, I'm seeing it on TikTok, seeing it a little bit
on YouTube.
So I think in the rest of 2024 and into 2025, successful ads are going to
leverage UGC creators
who already have audiences in B2B to not only help their own self, but also get
amplification
through that creator.
Agreed.
All right, story number two.
What's the second one for today, Nick?
All right, so we're going to dive into the NDR playbook, which is from our good
friends over at
ComSore. Very interesting. And so, you know, there was definitely some pieces
within the playbook,
some good, you know, I wouldn't say some bad, but you know, some things that we
could definitely
talk about. And so I pulled out some kind of interesting quotes, but I think
the first thing
that I have that is interesting that I at least want to touch on is the
playbook talks about
focus on customer success. At least that was a takeaway from me.
So improving your net dollar retention, it starts with prioritizing customer
success,
ensuring customers achieve their goals with the product, which ultimately we
know drives,
renewals and upsells because in today's world, it's, I mean, I guess in any
world,
it's going to cost less to retain a customer than go out and acquire a new one.
So, yeah, I'm curious on your thoughts on now and Mark.
I mean, I agree. I mean, you want to, you want to start with the end in mind,
you know,
the NDR playbook, which stands for network development rep, a new term that Com
Sore has coined.
Do we really need a new term, ComSore? It's all right. We'll let you have a
pass,
but fine. NDR, we invented one-on-drift CDR. So fine, you know, and look, we're
invented people first GTM. So yes, throw it right back at us, ComSore. I dig
ress to your point,
Nick, customer success and customer value is what you want to deliver. Like if
you don't deliver
value to your customers, will you have a healthy business? Most likely not. Sh
its eventually
going to catch up with you. You're going to be in trouble because you got a
leaky bucket and
you're going to keep spending money on garbage going out. Right? So when you
think about how do you
create quality customers, customers that are the right fit, they're going to
find and feel and see
the value that you are promising going and finding those customers through
people, through networks.
Right? It's probably a good move versus trying to take more of a spray and pray
, even if it's
targeted outbound, spray and pray approach or letting inbound do its work,
which does work,
but it's not going to usually never be enough to help a company really, really
grow. If it was
to grow, pass a certain revenue threshold. You're going to need to use another
thing. And that
thing today is go to network and people, I should say, that are helping enable
go to network,
are these network development reps. So yeah, what else, what else did you find
in the study, Nick?
One of the things, you know, listen, I think the NDR role and mix, I understand
it. I think it's
innovative, it modernizes sales strategies, but transitioning, and this is kind
of my second
point put together, but there's implementation challenges. Transitioning to an
NDR model requires
significant changes, at least in my mind. And again, maybe this is because it's
so new, just like
back when ABM came out, it's like, think about the training, the enablement,
the company culture
around implementing something like this. It's tough because it straddles both
sales, marketing,
potentially leading to misalignment within the teams. It's like, you know,
where does this person,
like, how does this person work with everyone else? And if they're not
completely familiar with
that, that can be really hard. Well, I think to your point, with anything, you
're going to have
to enable and upskill and train your team, like no doubt. You know, 50% of the
teams,
you know, have the BDR, STR function on sales and the other 50% have an
American. So I don't fully
buy that take fully nuts. It's always kind of messy. The take, I think you said
around, how do you
actually make the change management happen is good. And that's why you should
read this guide.
If you read the NDR playbook and the guide that was put out, it walks you
through a lot of the
things you need to do. That being said, it's just a guide. It's not the
ultimate resource. It's,
there's a lot more to be figured out. But you got to take a crawl walk run
approach. My youngest
is not even crawling, right? So if you're not even trying the NDR thing today
or trying to activate
your networks of people, so the people inside your company, the network of your
customers,
the network of maybe your best fans, your partners, if you're not trying to use
people to find new
customers, just start there. Just start asking every deal that is either going
to close or get
closed, lost. Hey, so and so buyer. I'm just wondering, do you have anyone else
that might
be a good fit for what we've been discussing? Would you mind baking an intro?
The amount of
people that don't do that is obscene. Just start there, for example, right? So
I just definitely
to your point, Nick, a mind set shift. It's going to require education, enable
ment, skill sets.
It's going to require a belief though at the same time. But that's with
anything, right? Like
if you think about go to market these days, go to market is not a one team
sport. It's a multi-team
sport, right? You know, you could say American football might be the best
analogy of this because
you have three teams, but there's more than that even in a business, right?
There's four or five
teams. So I like the idea of NDRs a lot. I think it comes down to
implementation and rubber meets
the road when that happens and commissors going to continue to have to educate
and teach and show
examples of how NDRs are actually behaving and executing and acting in the wild
. Yeah, 100%.
Well, and I mean, you kind of touched on my last piece, but I feel like it's
interesting.
I feel like it's a mix of social selling plus evangelism plus creator to a
certain degree.
Yo, at least in the playbook, it says there's really two goals. You have a
meetings goal,
obviously, which we know with SDRs. That's what they're basically comped on.
But then there's also
Network Growth, which is where I think the like creator aspect comes in. And I
could see creators
being a really good fit for this. I think they would do really well because it
's like you're
engaging where your prospects spend time. So it will link to events. If you're
someone with an
extra personality going out there and just having those conversations and
building your own network,
which we know will only benefit you in the long run, I'm excited for it. I
think, like you said,
I think there's going to be a lot of education that needs to be done, but I
want to see where
they continue to build this. I want to see more companies start to adopt this
because I'm 100%
on board with this role and kind of like the mindset shift of it. I just want
to see how it is
from an execution standpoint. Let's get to the third big, big story of the day
right now.
All right, everyone. It's time for the third story of the day. The special
guest. We got a
great one today, folks. Mr. Justin Keller. What is going on, Justin?
What's up, guys? I'm thrilled to be here. As soon as you text me, Mark, I was
like,
I'm not even going to read this. The answer is yes. So I'm honored to be part
of this.
Brave man, Nick, right? Brave man. Very, very brave. But I mean, I love the, I
love the, like,
you know, the honesty is, I mean, you know, who knows what you could even be in
for because
Mark has been getting pretty spicy on these. So yeah, another my listener did
the preview and
like, you know, taking the bullshit out of marketing. I'm like, yeah, that's,
that's my language.
Like that's all I want to do. So I'm here for it. Justin, you've been doing
demand,
Jen, for a long time. Still a very young man. You look like that a day over 30,
Justin,
but you've been doing it for two decades. We got some pointed questions to ask
you today because,
look, you, Nick and I have all contributed to maybe a crisis is overblown, but
there's been some,
as a recent couple of years now, at least some pretty crappy tactics and things
happening to
get a buyer's attention. So the conversation we want to have with you today,
Justin, is around
this idea of how to create and build the demand, Jen strategy. I'm not a
program, but a whole
strategy that matches to how people actually buy things today because your VP
of marketing,
you've been a marketing leader for a long time, you get a ton of solicitation,
and a lot of that solicitation flat out is shitty and sucks. It is absolutely.
It is just what a
bad rap we're getting to. Like, I get it when people are like, oh, marketers,
like, no, I empathize
with that statement. Totally get it. Like, and it's, we've gotten maligned
because there is so much
downward pressure on the marketers. Like one good thing about marketers, I will
say a good
and bad thing, right? I think this, I think these two things to be true here.
We've gotten closer and
closer to the revenue number, right? Like as marketers have been able to get
measured, we're
more and more responsible for actual revenue. That's a good thing, in my
opinion, right?
And as a result though, that downward pressure has caused so many toxic
behaviors, right?
A kind of people are looking for like the quick wins, like, you know, what's
the signy bullshit?
I don't care what it is as long as it helps me hit my number. And I think it's
forced marketers to
play short game on short game on short game rather than building out a longer
term demand-gen program,
which I will say out loud if you have the privilege of, you know, building out
a long term demand-gen
program. Bless you, because that is not an opportunity afforded to most of us,
right? It's,
it's kind of like it's a double-edged sword, right? Like it's good if you can
play the long
game. So few of us get to play the long game. It's a good tip for people
looking for a job,
you know, kind of dig into that as it relates to how you interview that company
. But let's go to
the first question. So simply put, Justin, how do you make demand-gen programs
not suck?
Well, well, if we get the answer, I mean, these so many different ways. My
opinion,
I'm just going to go back to what I was saying, like about playing the short
game. If you are
trying to do a cash grab, you're never really building momentum, right? You're,
you're, you're
just slowly picking away at something. And so being able to build a demand-gen
program that is more
around a movement and that creates community. And that has a spirit to it. And
I think that's like
the part, you know, if you can underline me on this, like that's the thing that
I think is missing
some from so many demand-gen marketers. I think this new generation, like I've
been marketing
for a long time, but not long enough where this was the story where marketers
were storytellers,
right? And it was just about really amazing ad copy. And you know, everyone was
reading
O will be and trying to be kind of like that madman marketer. I've been doing
it long enough
where I have seen the demand-gen marketer come of age and their job is
basically working in
spreadsheets and doing reports and trying to build audiences. And that's
awesome. It's important.
It's also like it somehow has become marketing. And I don't feel like those two
things are quite
the same. Like the craft and the act of marketing, I think are two different
things at this point
in time. And I think it's important for a marketer that really wants to make
demand-gen not suck to
remember that your job is bigger than spreadsheets and reporting on how that
campaign went and,
you know, trying to get alignment with your sales leaders, all things that are
critically
important. But you're missing like the last yard in kind of truly great
marketing, which is
figuring out how to tell a story. Great demand-gen programs and strategies put
people at the center
of those programs and strategies. The story, the lead story today, Justin, was
something from Google
and they looked at what makes great ads. You nailed it. They talked about
storytelling and people.
I think I'm not going to be able to find this. There was a meta or Facebook. I
don't know which
one at the time. Rare report across the billions of ads that they serve every
day. The biggest
determinant of what makes a high-performing ad is the creators. Not the
targeting. It's not the,
you know, what was the call to action button. It was like, what did this image
the story make me do?
What did it make me feel? And that's so important. Buyers don't buy with their
heads. Like, they
like to think they do, but it is an emotional action. True. True, true. Nick,
what's next on the
docket for Justin? Yeah. So this one, you know, I'm curious on your take on
this because I have some
maybe misconceptions in my mind, but what's the most egregious mistake made by
practitioners
of trying to create and capture demand today? Okay. I have it around long
enough to kind of
have seen this whole story play out, right? The back of the day, the manager
was like, you know,
your keyword strategy. Like, you know, where do we take their biting? What's
like, drop our lines
there, right? They started to get a little more targeted. And then at some
point it became AVM.
And it was like, okay, we can find all the different points on the map where
the fish are. Let's just
make sure we all need to drop our lines there. And that helps if some
efficiency is there.
But what I think is missing is, and let's go back to storytelling, it's like,
rather than trying to
find the fish, why don't you try and corral the fish into one place, right? And
I think that the
act of trying to just do a lot of either too broad, right, just kind of like,
you know, this one-size
fifth-law message or the opposite where it's like just too hyper focused on too
many little things,
depending on the size of the fish you're going after, is a bad thing. And I
think it's bad because
of how it shows up in the actual creatives, like how it actually shows up into
the world
is bad because if you're speaking to everyone, you're not speaking to anyone,
right? And if you're
talking too narrowly, you are kind of missing the ability to tell a good story.
And so I think it's
kind of finding that middle ground. And I think that gets exacerbated because
of what we're saying,
like a demand-gen marketer spends too much time in spreadsheet, not in the last
time, just kind of
look their heads down and being creatives. And that's an existential issue, I
think, for marketers.
Because what that happens is they get lazy, they take the product marketers
says, hey, these are
the cool things about our project, they're like, great, that's now my, that's
my ad. I'm just
spending all my time throwing that into ads and figuring out why the hell it's
not working,
rather than trying to actually take facts and turn them into something that's a
little more
aspirational, someone that's like, you know, I don't know exactly what this is,
you're never
going to get that done in a single ad. But like, I want to learn more, like, I
need to kind of like
understand what's happening here. And that's what the biggest, most egregious
thing is, is they're
not bringing these things to life and giving it a soul.
I love that personally. And I just kind of have a little bit of a follow-up
question there. But
do you think it's because, and especially in tech with, you know, we obviously
know how the economy
is going, do you think it's due to bandwidth? Or do you think it's due to laz
iness?
Yes, both. I think both are true. Yeah. And I think, and I think a third reason
too, is that
they've not been shown that, right? Like, I mean, I know very tenured demand-
gen people at this point
who have come and grown their career wildly successfully without taking a beat
and thinking
about the craft of marketing. It's almost an ignorance option too on there.
Yeah, five-minute apps. Nick loves using the five-minute apps routine. You can
't really do that,
though, with the man-gen, right? There's no five-minute apps for the man-gen. I
mean, come on.
You know, Nick, does the five-minute apps... LinkedIn would like you to believe
that, right? Like,
I mean, how many LinkedIn posts do we scroll by every day? We're trying to like
, you know,
"Why brick, why brick? This is your five-minute app. Here's how to max out your
first quarter sales."
That's exactly it. Fuck the five-minute apps. Five-minute demand-gen. That's
what that shit is.
What is the most common misconception from executives about demand-gen?
It's a good question. I do think that, I don't know, I don't want to speak on
behalf of all the
executives. Please do. No, no, no, please do. We represent every executive.
I think... We represent everyone, Justin.
Like I was trying to say, marketing is increasingly more and more responsible
for revenue.
And as a result, is less and less able to do truly brilliant things, right? I
have so many
most of them in the past. Executives are like, Justin, you know, like, take
some time, dream big,
do something big, and you do. And they're like, okay, now bring it back, bring
it back. Okay,
this is, you know, too much budget. That's gonna take too much time. This seems
a little like some...
This might piss off one or two, you know, people in our buying group. We need
to be able to please
everyone. And I think it's just, you know, executives speak both sides of their
mouth, right?
They want super fast results. They want results, period. But they also want
what we all dream of,
which is creating like a really magical marketing moment. And I think both
those things can exist
at the same time. Compromise. Compromise, Justin. I think it's compromised. And
I think it's like,
you know, get the marketing team a little break. Like the marketing. No market
er. I shouldn't say
no marketer. Most marketers want to do right by the business, right? They want
to see while
the successful things happen. And then we say, okay, great. Like, show me all
the numbers. Give me
the data, run the report. Tell me how that would have worked in Q2 two years
ago. And it's kind of
like, at some point, analysis paralysis prevents great marketing. I'll add to
this though. One of
the most common misconceptions I see is they think demand-gen can just do it on
their own. It's like,
all right, demand-gen, just figure it out. Like, no, no, no, no, like for it to
work, it has to be
integrated beyond marketing. So hey, CEO is listening 100%. Get your head out
of your ass
and understand that you need a complete, united go-to market between marketing,
sales, product,
finance is the checks and balances. Like, what the fuck? 100%. And you know how
hard it is even
for a CMO to be like, okay, here's what we're doing. CFO gets stoked. CEO, here
's what we're doing.
I need you to tell a whole company, getting that amount of buy-in at that level
is nearly
impossible. It has to come from the CEO. The CEO used to be one that's like,
yeah, we're doing this,
we're going big. Like, this is coming from me. Everyone's boss. That's how you
get that, that
moment and started breaking news. The CEO has an idea about marketing.
Well, and then on the flip side, I mean, I know there's lots of people out
there. If the CEO
doesn't get marketing, that's a huge red flag in its own. Red flag run.
You can be up and get out. It was just tough. And I've worked for many CEOs
that did not
understand marketing. And it was like, you know, I don't know, three or four
months on the job,
where you could just start to see the clock ticking down because it's just not
going to work.
100%. All right, let's dive into this last question of this first segment here.
So as you know,
you're a big believer of the people first. And so in your mind, what does a
people first version
of demand generation look like? So for me, marketers get put into very specific
roles.
Every quarter, half a year, you may have a brainstorm where everyone gets to
bring their
ideas to the table. Like, that's every marketer's favorite day. It's like, you
know, when you get
to sit down and try to be really creative and think outside the box. And 90% of
those ideas
just go into like a good ideas box and you swear to God, you're going to get to
those later.
I think empowering people to break out of that is what I think of like being
able to celebrate
and hear the ideas from all over the marketing team to take a bad idea,
especially to take a
bad idea and to turn into a good one is like one of my favorite things about
being a marketing
leader. Like, I can't think of I would go so far to say 75% like the most
successful things I did
started as a dumb idea that someone said kind of like as a half joke. And then
we're like, okay,
wait a minute, like it's kind of like one of those those clums when it's like
the record scratch.
It's like, okay, that is obviously stupid. But what is and you just start to
kind of like
polish it up, polish it up and then pretty soon you're like, okay, that's
actually kind of a brilliant
idea. Empowering the team to be able to contribute is really good. And then I
think being able to do
that in a way where it's not just absolutely him and you know, everyone all of
a sudden the
email marketer, you know, who's attending every crashing every meeting saying,
hey, this is what
I want to do is to give frameworks, right? And so I think there's a few ways I
've done this before
around like the concept of like brand archetypes and like, you know, personify
in your brand and
kind of like giving people guide posts so that they stay in their lane but are
also able to
contribute and work autonomously. I like that a lot. When I was when I was at
Alice, we did, um,
we did these things called inspo sessions and it was myself, MK it was a, you
know, Sarah Pion,
there was a lot of people that were there and so we would do a one hour meeting
and we, we, we really
wouldn't hit our stride until about 45 minutes in but we would basically just
everyone on the
marketing team would get together and whenever we had a big launch or something
like that, we would
basically throw some crazy ideas and a lot of them, like you said, they, you
know, they were like
wildly crazy or maybe dumb ideas that like once we like refined it together 45
minutes in,
um, we're like, oh wow, this is actually a really cool idea. We have everyone
responsible for their
own swim lane but we know how it all integrates together and now how we can go
to market and I
just thought it was so interesting. It was actually the, the first company that
I ever did anything
like that. Every launch that we had was absolutely fantastic, fascinating.
Everyone knew what they
do and everyone was growing the boat the same direction and I think that was a
huge piece of it
having those sessions and just kind of like having the frameworks and
understanding everyone plays
their own role in it but everyone brought really creative ideas to the table.
So 100% everyone's
getting credit for an amazing thing like they may not be responsible for the
sexiest part of it but
they had a hand in it, right? And all of a sudden like they get to add that to,
you know, let's
move better in their cap. I totally agree. That's something I'm doing with my
team next first one
is next week, 30 minute at the end of the day on Tuesday, we're just having a
30 minute creative
session where it's like we're going to talk about marketing in epidemic song
word at a,
thinking about marketing in like an abstracted sense like not what does this
campaign need to do
but as marketers, what are we trying to get done here? Like let's look at like,
let's look at B2C,
like let's figure out like what's what's when we're other people aren't let's
do things that are
decidedly different. What's absolutely not pay attention to what the guys on
LinkedIn are saying
and trying to get us to hype up and ultimately buy their products secret.
Before we get to your
exclusive frameworks that are for people checking this out on the TAC network,
I'm going to make one
point and answer this question as well. I believe it comes down to the culture
of the marketing team
and the culture of the company that is decided and evolved to both leadership
and the people
that are literally doing all the actual hard work because you know leaders like
Justin,
you really don't do anything. Don't lie. I was an executive with you at Drift
at HubSpot.
You know, doing thing. We just show up. You put some makeup on. We smile like a
makeup on for this
episode. You know, it's fine. So it's the culture that matters. It's the
culture. Justin, tremendous,
tremendous person, tremendous marketer, tremendous guest today. Thank you so
much for the time.
Thanks for joining us on this episode of GTM News Desk presented by the TAC
network.
To hear our full conversation with our guest today, head to the link in the
show notes to
subscribe to the TAC network. Until next time, I'm Mark Killins and I'm Nick
Bennett. Keep it
people-ferrous to everybody.