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Franco Caporale:
Welcome to new episodes of the DemandGen Club podcast. I'm your host Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Chad Egelhoff, Director of Demand Generation at OneNeck IT Solutions. OneNeck is an expert provider of hybrid IT solutions tailored for the market and enterprise companies. Chad is responsible for the demand generation activities of the company while also leading the transition from traditionally centric marketing to an account-based approach. He's an accomplished B2B revenue growth expert husband, new father, and also creator of epic playlist before OneNeck. Chad was senior demand generation manager at CenturyLink. So with that, I'm really happy to welcome today Chad Egelhoff, Director of Demand Generation at OneNeck.
Franco Caporale:
Chad it is absolutely fantastic to have you on the DemandGen Club podcast today, thanks for joining us.
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah, happy to be here.
Franco Caporale:
So I would love to begin with a little bit about your background, how you got started with B2B demand generation to then end up in your current role at OneNeck.
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah so I first started doing marketing right out of college at a B2C education management firm. As I grew in that role, I ended up running the, I was the sole marketer at a company of about 500 or so people. And was in again, the education industry and just really, didn't feel like a fit for me at that time. And I jumped to working in B2B. My first experience working in B2B was that company called Level 3 Communications headquartered out here in Broomfield, Colorado. That was in 2013. They have since been acquired by CenturyLink, but I went from this jack of all trades doing marketing in a B2C organization to all of a sudden, sudden being a small cog in a really big wheel at an enterprise technology company.
Chad Egelhoff:
And so really big transition, but it really, that was the the jumpstart to where I am now. My role kind of evolved there while I was at Level 3. We got acquired by CenturyLink. My last kind of role there was doing verticalized, mostly focused on the healthcare vertical demand generation.
Chad Egelhoff:
And when I got the opportunity to join one of my former bosses and mentors from Level 3 at OneNeck, which is where I'm at right now, I jumped at the opportunity, really liked the role. And that's where I'm at today as the director of demand generation at OneNeck.
Franco Caporale:
And so as the director of demand generation there, what are your current responsibilities? What is your team like? Tell us a little more.
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah, so obviously, demand generation, right, is the big one. But my role and my team, we're in charge of everything from field marketing and up to our digital strategy and our website, a little bit of a sliver of sales enablement as well.
Franco Caporale:
And who's in your team today in terms of the roles.
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah. So it's relatively small. I'll start with just our marketing team in general. I have a peer that does our marketing operations director of marketing operations. We have a director of product marketing and partner marketing and then myself, and then on my team, I have someone who is a corporate marketing manager and deals mostly with, again, our website and our digital, and then a field marketing manager who deals again, mostly with any kind of sales activation or events and any kind of sales enablement type of activity as well.
Franco Caporale:
Awesome. And so if you tell us, obviously you're responsibilities, I assume, are related to generating pipeline opportunities for the sales team. What kind of tech stack do you have? What do you use in terms of software for marketing automation, CRM and all of that?
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah. I feel like this is a long list, right? Because when I think about the tech stack, it's big. And I think this can be a good thing and a challenging thing, but I'll jump right into it. Right?
Chad Egelhoff:
So our CRM is Microsoft Dynamics, some challenges there just because of the... that's not the first platform that every other marketing tool integrates with, right? You think of Salesforce first there, so. But it's something that we inherited and we're trying to make the best out of.
Chad Egelhoff:
HubSpot's our MAT and our CMS. So it runs our website and all of our marketing automation.
Chad Egelhoff:
Terminus is our ABM platform that really does targeted display and we use it also for a website de-anonymization.
Chad Egelhoff:
Uberflip for content engagements on the website and through our paid strategies as well.
Chad Egelhoff:
We use Outreach for as a sales engagement platform, really like Outreach. Talk about that a little more, probably later.
Chad Egelhoff:
Lattice is our predictive analytics.
Chad Egelhoff:
We use Alyce for personalized gifting and, and opening doors.
Chad Egelhoff:
Drift is our chat clients.
Chad Egelhoff:
We also use TechTarget Priority Engine for lead gen and account prioritization.
Chad Egelhoff:
And then for contacts discovery, we use Discoverorg/ ZoomInfo.
Chad Egelhoff:
And then BrightEdge for SEO. So I think I nailed all of them there, but I it's very possible that I forgot one. And if one of my partners hears this and feels left out, I apologize.
Franco Caporale:
This is awesome because there is so much for me to unpack here. I definitely, besides the standard CRM and HubSpot, I want to ask you a couple of the tools that you mentioned. And also because of the fact they use dynamics, how the integration works. So when you mention Terminus. You know Terminus integrates really well with Salesforce. How is your with dynamics and how do you make all this system work together? Because some of them that you mentioned already ABM focused. So I assume they need, everything needs to flow in a very streamlined way, also back to sales.
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah. So that's a really good question because that's something that... We talk about challenges that we're facing, right? Is we built a lot of our technology stack right, piece by piece with the idea of we're finding something that we felt was really suited to solve a particular challenge, right?
Chad Egelhoff:
And so when you start to add tools together, right. You know, the long view is for them to all speak together. But when you get into it, right, it becomes a lot more difficult. So I'm lucky to have a peer of mine, our director of marketing operations, who is not just a marketer, but also in some ways a data scientist. And so he uses some programming skills to bring a lot of different data together.
Chad Egelhoff:
But while we do have integrations with a lot of our tools, our CRM has in many ways, because we're a subsidiary of a smaller company or it's a larger company called TDS Holdings. They manage in a lot of ways, the CRM. So our CRM ends up not being our hub, if you will. And so that's part of, one of the challenges that we're, I've been there at OneNeck now for two years. And so building this tech stack, right. It has been one of the things that we've been doing over the past two years.
Chad Egelhoff:
And now that we feel like we've got this great foundation. We're in, we're currently investigating, how do we bring all this data together? And we we've got the ability to do that. It's just a very manual process right now. So getting to one account of record or customer of record, right, is that's challenging because Terminus calls something one thing, our CRM calls something a different name, right.
Chad Egelhoff:
And all of these different tools you can identify based on an email address, right, as an example for contacts. But it accounts, you're probably keying off of the URL, right? It's just not available in any, in every case when you've got, say a salesperson uploading an account in Microsoft Dynamics, right, historically.
Chad Egelhoff:
Anyhow, it's a very tricky subject or topic to get into, but it's something that's been a huge challenge for us. And a lot of it has been elbow grease and some SQL programming on the backend. But we do have, we've gotten to a place where we can see what's happening at an account. Right now it's just trying to scale that and make it easier for us to see all that data without so much work.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah, some of the challenges I can envision right away with all this different platforms and data in different format. Is obviously number one, tracking attribution, which I'm going to ask you in a second, how you guys do that. But number two is also from a sales alignment perspective, how you guys make sure that you're not stepping on each other's toes? Or certain accounts are being contacted and multiple parties at the same time. Is there a process for that?
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah. So, we use CRM as our account master from that standpoint. But we do, Outreach is where we are doing a lot of our sales engagement. So any of our outbound sales activity, right, is happening through Outreach now. And so that we do have the ability to make sure that there's not any account conflict there. Because they have the ability, you basically have an owner, right?
Chad Egelhoff:
And so we're working right now again, because Outreach is still relatively new for us in the grand scheme of things. And so we're working to integrate that right now into CRM. But all those integrations, things that you would like to have and easily turn on, haven't been as available for us because of some of the challenges that we face with our corporate structure. But yeah, that is a, it's a challenge, right? And how do you get all that data back to the sales team, right? And so that's something that we're currently in the midst of still solving. We do it, but again, not really well at scale yet, but it's something we're working on.
Franco Caporale:
From your point of view, how do you... What kind of metrics do you monitor knowing all of these workflows that you have in place? And knowing they use dynamics as a central focus point of all the data. What are the metrics that you and your team monitor very closely?
Chad Egelhoff:
So there's obviously quite a few, right? To me, the end all be all, and the reason that I'm employed is opportunities and pipeline, right? So that's the thing that, there's a lot of different metrics for different channels, right? That we're monitoring. But the main one really is our pipeline and really our percentage of the pipeline. How many opportunities are we driving? How many new logos are we able to penetrate and get appointments for, for our sales team?
Franco Caporale:
A common not misconception, but a common issue is especially with enterprise demand generation and sales. You mentioned how many opportunities do we drive for the sales team. What is your definition of an opportunity that is quote unquote sourced by marketing or influenced by marketing? What are you guys tracking? Is one marketing touch enough to count that opportunities, or you need to have the last touch? How you guys identify that?
Chad Egelhoff:
Getting into... Yeah, attribution is another thing that's a tricky topic right now. We're doing mostly just last touch attribution. I'd say our attribution is relatively unsophisticated at the moment. But that said, we're looking at trying to find that we had that touch, that we are a pre opportunity there, right? For the most part, it happens through leads through our CRM system, right? A lead comes in, whether it's from an event or from direct mail or it's inbound off our website, right? All the different sources and channels that you have. And then we generally use that last touch, turn that into a lead in CRM. And that works as a pre opportunity for us. So when that lead is converted into an opportunity, we're then measuring attribution that way. Yeah, we'll also go in the backend and try and comb for things where we know that maybe that linkage didn't happen. And so it can get a little messy.
Chad Egelhoff:
But as far as an attribution model, right now we're just mostly focused on last touch. But it's really, when I think about attribution, it is important from a standpoint of trying to really figure out that ROI. And if I'm having a conversation with my CFO around the particular value of a specific platform or a specific channel, and really also trying to measure that. What's really driving our success? Attribution is important from that standpoint.
Chad Egelhoff:
But one of the things that we're really trying to build more into is an understanding of, we've got multiple channels going out to the same accounts. And there's going to be a lot of different touches. For us to be able to see that entire journey at the account level and be able to see all the different touches that hit that account and generated that lift for those accounts where we're focused versus where we're not. And to see those opportunities come into those accounts where we're focused. I am not so concerned as to which platform gets credit per se. I'm more want to build an engine that works overall, that's driving those opportunities and driving that pipeline by that omni-channel combined approach to the accounts that are good fits and that we really care about.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah. I think of an issue with this is a lot of time and I see it in a lot of companies. Having this marketing versus sales mentality of saying, is that credit to marketing or sales? And that doesn't work really well when you try to do ABM, right?
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah. I will say our alignment with the sales team has really grown. Through that alignment, I think we really have been able to build this kind of a relationship where there is not an either or, right? We don't ever look at marketing sourced opportunities as, we'll call them marketing sourced, right? That said, nobody gets through the door and becomes an opportunity without having some kind of a qualifying conversation with our sales team. And it doesn't make it to the next stage, right?
Chad Egelhoff:
It doesn't actually turn into any source of revenue, certainly without our sales team. And so we don't play really strict on the territory around what's sales sourced versus what's marketing sourced. It's more so we're aligned and we're swimming, or rowing the boat in the same direction, towards the same set of accounts.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah. That's extremely important in my view. That needs to be abandoned if you're trying to do ABM. It can work if you sell to small business, high velocity, one touch sale type of thing. But it definitely doesn't work on ABM.
Chad Egelhoff:
Agreed.
Franco Caporale:
So I want to also start talking about campaigns. Because you mentioned obviously all your ABM efforts, as well as you mentioned something about direct mail.
Franco Caporale:
So what type of campaigns that you guys run? What is your main lead source today? If you have to mention one. And what is one of the cool campaigns that you guys have been doing the last couple of years?
Chad Egelhoff:
I would say our, from a standpoint of, what's our most effective source. This one isn't really sexy, right? It's not really exciting. Inbound website leads, generally from organic search traffic, right? It continues to be our best performing source and lead to the most wins for us, right? And that's a big, I'm a big proponent of getting SEO, right? And really focusing on your website, I think it's really important.
Chad Egelhoff:
But outside of that we are doing a combination of targeted display and LinkedIn ads, right? With Terminus driving people to interact with content and Uberflip. And then using a combination of Outreach and Alyce.
Chad Egelhoff:
So we're able to do this all in the same flow at the same time, right? And our Outreach sequences are built with direct mail in mind. Having that again, that omni-channel, using really all the channels that we have available to us. And delivering a consistent message and then heavily building that alignment with the sales team.
Franco Caporale:
In terms of direct mail. As people know, I'm a big proponent of using direct mail for B2B. And I personally had ton of very good results. Tell us a little more about your experience and what you guys started doing and why can it really work in terms of generating engagement and opportunities.
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah, that's a really good question. It's one that, we've been using it now for, really since I started, they had some form of direct of what you might call dimensional mailers going on. Transitioned to more of a direct mail platform soon after I started. Email we know, it's a workhorse, right? It's super scalable, it's cheap, but it's saturated, right? Calling or warm calling or whatever it is, is also a great channel, right? But it's hard to get people on the phone, right? People don't really like to talk on the phone.
Chad Egelhoff:
So you look at what other channels do we have, right? And direct mail postcards, right? Mailers, right, they've been around forever and they're still really big in B2C. It seemed like, and it's started to make a resurgence in B2B. What I like is that it's able to, in some ways, cut through the clutter. If able to send something that feels really relevant to someone, that aligns with your brand. And that's what we're doing with our direct mail. You bring the online and the offline together, right? You marry those. And again, I just really feel like it gives you an opportunity to have an engagement that's different than what maybe some of your competitors are doing.
Franco Caporale:
Tell me, since you mentioned you have Uberflip, I also want to know a little bit more about that. How are you guys using it? And what kind of results are you having by implementing that technology?
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah so, Uberflip is something that we really look at as an extension of our website. Most of our paid campaigns, we're driving people to what we call content streams. Instead of in the past, it would be like, hey you download this white paper, right? Which got... White papers, is there, is there not a more boring thing in marketing than an eight page PDF white paper, right? But so the whole idea is to try and have content that's more engaging. It's a more engaging experience.
Chad Egelhoff:
I think we as marketers have a lot to... B2B marketers, I should say, have a lot to from, excuse me, B2C marketers in this customer experiences, user experience, right? When someone's coming to engage with content on my website, I've gotten their attention via an ad or through an email, right? I want to make sure when they go there, it's an experience that's enjoyable. So now not only are they consuming really good high quality content, that's relative to their objectives they're trying to solve as a business professional. But also it's a good experience.
Chad Egelhoff:
So with Uberflip, right, you have the ability to binge on content, if you will, right? You can go from this ebook to this webinar, to this checklist, this infographic all in one, what we call a content stream, right? So you can walk someone right down the journey, down the buyer's journey around a specific solution or a specific challenge that they're trying to solve for instance. So what we've seen is higher time on site, more, just more content viewed per visit. Our pieces of content that people are consuming per unique website, visitor tripled when we started using Uberflip for those contacts that were actually driving to our content streams.
Chad Egelhoff:
My philosophy is that if we can do a really good job of creating really solid content, again, that speaks to the objectives and get it in front of the right people, establish that credibility and that authority that way. And it's a good experience working with us, that eventually when one of those other tactics, again, whether it's direct mail, whether it's email from one of our salespeople, whether we see them in an event, they're going to have a opinion that OneNeck is somebody who knows what they're talking about and might be able to help them solve this particular problem that they're trying to solve.
Franco Caporale:
That's awesome. So you mentioned a few channels here, direct mail, organic is your top one, LinkedIn ads, display ads. Is there a channel that you tried, maybe in your current role, or even in the past, and it didn't work well for B2B demand generation didn't generate the leads that you expected and you shut it down?
Chad Egelhoff:
It's interesting, I don't know if I found a particular channel that I say doesn't work. We go back and forth with actually with you, it's really relevant right now, right? With events. Actually events are huge in B2B, but we've seen an instance where we had to really kind of dial back our event budget. Because we were spending a whole lot of money and a whole lot of effort at these events. And we just weren't seeing results from them, right? And we, and hard to figure out, right? Is it just an inability to measure it properly to do attribution. But we had to really dial back our events budget, because we were just not seeing success there. And it's interesting, right? Our current environment where we have a pandemic and all events have been shut down.
Chad Egelhoff:
You look, and you say, how much is this affecting our overall pipeline? Is it affecting it as much, right? Do you see that... The lift, the rising tide that you would expect drop, right? Now that we're not doing events. And it's really hard because, because there's so much change that's going on right now. It's hard to know what exactly is driving it, but we haven't seen this huge drop off in opportunities and revenue with the drop from events as a source, completely taken that channel out.
Chad Egelhoff:
So I don't know if I completely answered your question there. But events has been one of the things that I'm recently considering. Not that we wouldn't do them because our sales team likes them. But again, evaluating how big of a piece of our budget is that, right? Versus maybe some of the things that we're doing right now, right. With webinars, virtual events, podcasts, like you're setting up here.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah. That's the interesting, because maybe... Obviously you don't know if that's going to be a repercussion in the long term.
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah, absolutely.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah that's going to be interesting to see down the road. I have a couple of more question about the sales alignment in particular. So first the question I like to ask to every guest is, from your perspective, do you think the SDR team should report to sales, to marketing or some sort of hybrid structure?
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah, that's a good one. So we right now only have one SDR. And then we also have an outsourced version and they are all reporting to the marketing team.
Franco Caporale:
And my last question in 60 seconds, is there any hack or trick that you want to share with us that really worked for you that we could try this week and potentially get some good results?
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah, the only thing that I can think of and I would assume that a lot of other people are doing this. But one thing that I started, that we started doing is just using our de-anonymized website engagements to identify those accounts that are spiking in engagement. And go directly out with that direct mail piece to them.
Chad Egelhoff:
So we'll try and take the demand unit of the buying unit at that account, source their contact information. And when we start to see a little bit of peaking engagement on the website, we go, right? We go directly outbound to them right away to try and start that appointment and that conversation.
Chad Egelhoff:
That's my one thing I think that'll probably actually hinge a little bit when we... Trying to get more of the conversational marketing thing going and really incorporating chat more and being more proactive with those website engagers. So maybe it's, again, in six months, it's not something that I'm relying on as much. But it has been, it's been a nice tactic for us that's been relatively easy to put into place and been quite successful.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah, I love this. This suggestion is something that has worked out really well for us as well. You can imagine someone who comes to the website or someone from their team comes to the website and within a few days they receive a box. There is nothing more powerful than that.
Chad Egelhoff:
Yeah, I really think it makes a lot of sense, right? And so, it does take a little bit... It takes a little bit of tech to be able to do that, but I think it's a good little play that a lot of companies can run.
Franco Caporale:
Chad. It was absolutely great. Having you as a guest on the episode today, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks again for joining us.
Chad Egelhoff:
Thank you, Franco.