Priyank Savla

Franco Caporale:

Welcome to new episode of the DemandGen Club Podcast. I'm your host, Franco Caporale. Our guest on the show today is Priyank Savla, Senior Director of Global Demand Generation at NetBrain. NetBrain is the leader in transforming network operations through automation. Today, more than 2,300 of the world's largest enterprises and manage service providers use NetBrain to automate network documentation, accelerate troubleshooting, and strengthen network security. During his seven plus years in NetBrain, Priyank was able to grow site traffic by 30x, built a community of over 100,000 engineers, and contributed to a 7.5x revenue growth for the company. So with that I'm very excited to welcome Priyank Savla, Senior Director of Global Demand Generation at NetBrain.

Priyank, it's absolutely fantastic to have you on the show today. Thanks so much for joining us.

Priyank Savla:

Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

Franco Caporale:

So I would love to begin with a little bit about your background and how did you end up being the Senior Director of Global Demand Generation at NetBrain?

Priyank Savla:

Yeah, so NetBrain was my second role out of grad school. I went to WPI for my MBA in Technology Marketing. And I was working as an e-commerce manager back in the day for a manufacturing company, where we sold a lot of their products online and on amazon.com. So I was mostly in a role where I had no sales. It's basically you have content, you run your campaigns and you see dollars, easy life. And I met with the CEO of NetBrain, Lingping Gao, which was a really inspiring person. And I could see he had a brilliant product and a huge enough market to cover. And I thought that would be a great opportunity for the next challenge.

Priyank Savla:

So I started working at NetBrain, I was probably the second real marketing hire. We had no budget, nothing. Basically started off with a semi-content creator, semi-web developer and semi-BDR. So started doing a lot of grassroots marketing for NetBrain and seven years later find myself running a decent size demand [inaudible 00:02:55] with a seven figure budget.

Franco Caporale:

That's pretty awesome. So how is the company today?

Priyank Savla:

We are to about 300, 350 employees and we raised venture capital in 2014. And since then the company has been doing really well. We are fortunate to not have to go through lots of rounds of capital.

Franco Caporale:

And so what's your team like today? You started with just you basically, you were the first marketing hire, and how many people are in your team today and what kind of roles?

Priyank Savla:

Yeah, I have nine people reporting on my team today. We have three people in EMEA for field marketing. We have a senior content marketing manager, senior web marketing manager. I have my designer who also doubles as my paid social manager, because paid social is so visual. So I have my designer who helps out with that. And then I have our data scientist who basically handles our tech stack attribution and that kind of stuff. And we have couple of these people who have direct reports who are interns, video producers, web developers, et cetera, more production roles.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. So tell me a little bit about your tech stack. This is something I always ask to every guest. I like to know what software are you guys using and how are they set up?

Priyank Savla:

Yeah, so our tech stack is pretty standard. We have Salesforce, Marketo as our core sales and marketing platforms. We use Bizible for our marketing attribution, Drift Customers as everyone is today. Besides that we've tried bunch of different ABM solutions. Started with Demandbase, hopped to Triblio. Recently introduced Influitive too, and that has been really nice. Other tools for just data like ZoomInfo and tools in those categories.

Franco Caporale:

Does your sales team use anything for sales automation, like Outreach or PersistIQ?

Priyank Savla:

Not at this time. Actually, the reason why we don't have any of that is we don't really have BDR teams. So it's marketing and we have our enterprise sales reps. And there have been periods when marketing had couple of BDRs reporting into them and we were very close to buying Outreach, but then there were some changes. And we decided to go against that approach, and we are trying to automate as much as possible with stuff like Drift and Conversica and those kind of solutions.

Franco Caporale:

So is your main strategy for demand generation focus on inbound and content and then qualifying them and passing to sales or are you more in account-based marketing focused company?

Priyank Savla:

I think we are inbound moving towards account-based.

Franco Caporale:

And so tell me a little more from this transition you're trying to make for account-based marketing. What kind of initiative have you implemented so far?

Priyank Savla:

Yeah, so so far I would say it really depends on sales find, right? That's at the center of it. And there are teams that are sales teams that are more progressive, who want to take that approach, and there are ones that are slightly more resistive and they like leads. So we are trying to cater to both of them and hoping to transition. So account-based marketing, the key struggle over there is to have a coordinated system, right? You can run ... Account-based marketing, when I speak with most people, it's really just a form of account-targeted advertising. At least that is how most people are using it. That's not really effective. You need much deeper programs. So what we've tried in past is marketing running targeted ads on certain accounts, and sales making outreach within those accounts at the same time.

Priyank Savla:

We receive moderate amount of success. I won't say the success we received in pipeline was dramatically higher than the inbound model, but recently we are seeing more promise with Influitive. Influitive is an account-based advertising platform. it's not exactly account-based, it's person-based, but they can help you advertise to specific people. And in Salesforce you can see specific dashboards around a certain individual. How many impressions have they had on the site? How many visits have they had on their site? And using that, if we are able to get our reps to reach out within, again, a nice targeted follow-up, marketing pretty much writes all their emails and everything for them. If we do that, we are seeing a decent enough meeting rate.

Priyank Savla:

And we are, again, very new to Influitive, so this is past two months, but we are seeing close to 3 to 4% of our traffic booking meetings with sales, if sales performs targeted outreach fairly quickly. So we are trying to grow our success over there. And at some point we might get to a point where we are able to make that switch. Another barrier besides sales culture, around what they are used to and them wanting leads is that account-based marketing doesn't have scale today. When I try to advertise using vendors like Demandbase Triblio, Influitive], I'm just not able to use the budget I allocate for ABM, just because they are still trying to figure out how to map their data efficiently in a way where they have enough advertising inventory. So I think that's another issue. I've seen other interesting concepts around direct mail. And there are a few other ideas that we want to explore, but this is pretty much what we've done so far.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, I had a similar experience with like Demandbase, Terminus especially, a couple of years ago when ... I don't know if now they built more data, but sometimes you weren't able to spend all the budget allocated just because there wasn't enough cookies matching the accounts that we selected.

Priyank Savla:

And it's probably getting worse during COVID, because I know Demandbase specifically relied heavily heavily on IP data and less on cookie data. So I think these guys still have a long road ahead, but I still think there are interesting applications for NetBrain, because a huge chunk of our revenue, majority of our revenue comes from the top 10 deals of the year. So because we play in an enterprise space we can still afford to not have that scale and persist without investments and effort.

Franco Caporale:

So what are your top lead sources today? Since account-based marketing, you're still experimenting. What do you rely on?

Priyank Savla:

I would say my top source will still be Google.

Franco Caporale:

So organic search?

Priyank Savla:

Organic and paid, both. If I had to talk about our top pipeline source and maybe not lead count source, dollar value, it has to be organic. And it's natural. I still think you have to take that with a grain of salt. Just because it's organic doesn't mean it's exactly organic, it just means that you don't know what were the previous touches that happened before, right? So that happens very often. I would say our second source would be paid search. Third would be paid social. Fourth, trade shows. So for new leads and pipeline, our current state is still heavily geared towards the traditional inbound type model.

Franco Caporale:

And so when you look at the attribution, because you mentioned now that you might have some challenges understanding if it's actually organic or it might come from different sources. You mentioned you used Bizible. How do you look at attribution today? Are you looking more at the first-touch, last-touch, multi-touch or different models?

Priyank Savla:

We are looking at the w-shape model.

Franco Caporale:

W-shape, okay. So you look at the first anonymous touch and then when it become a lead and then opportunity?

Priyank Savla:

Correct. So we do 30, 30, 30% attribution first-touch need creation and opportunity creation, and then split 10% across all other touches.

Franco Caporale:

So you are not interested, once a lead becomes an opportunity you, your job is done from a marketing perspective?

Priyank Savla:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for the most part. I think once it's an opportunity, our job is done. And again, this is just a model that helps us understand what messages and campaigns and channels are more persuasive at people starting to evaluate NetBrain. And we are a complex enterprise software, so a lot of different things can go south after that point. There might not be vendor compatibility and there might not be compatibility between what NetBrain does and customer wants. But that's not to say that what happened before didn't work, right? So I think that is our baseline. However, we usually take our attribution out of Bizible, put it on spreadsheets, and we review all the deals over $100,000 manually, and we readjust the attribution. And then that ROI analysis is what gets presented to board and CEO.

Franco Caporale:

So you move the data into Excel spreadsheet to aggregate and match.

Priyank Savla:

Yeah, because even Bizible can't be accurate, right? The best way to do ROI analysis and attribution is to open that account and open that opportunity in Salesforce and just both go through timeline of events, right? Sometimes genuinely salespeople are already in contact with someone before they engage in marketing campaign. So it's unfair for marketing to get that credit. And there are times when it's very clear that our reps just downloaded that name from a database like ZoomInfo, and then they perform a marketing activity. And I think although it shows sales-generated lead, it's clearly marketing-generated because there was no communication happening from sales side. We believe it's worth the effort to do that for deal sizes that are six-figure and higher. It doesn't take that long. It just gives us a more real view into how we are doing.

Franco Caporale:

So what do you think are some of the biggest challenges today for a startup in particular to track this attribution and become better at performing this analysis? Especially for those that have medium long sale cycle?

Priyank Savla:

Yeah, I think the challenges for most companies would stay the same. People are using a lot of different devices. People are using a lot of different browsers. People are using incognito browsers. It's hard to be 100%, unless you are someone like Amazon, where people live in your app and pretty much all of their touchpoints can be measured. And I think measuring touchpoints is easy, but grouping them to an identity is not that easy. So that remains to be the biggest challenge. But I've had honest conversation with my CEO saying that there is no possible way to completely attribute marketing impact. So you need to put in some time and do manual review of the yields in Salesforce and talk to customers, actually ask them questions. Where did they hear about ... How did they find out about you? What motivated them to talking evaluation? And stuff like that, you learn from there. So I think it's a hybrid approach, do enough to get clarity, but don't go so crazy where it just becomes a full-time job.

Franco Caporale:

How much of this process depends on the sales team taking actions like, I don't know, tracking the contacts correctly in Salesforce or flagging them, adding campaigns, or doing any manual activity?

Priyank Savla:

I think that's important, right? So there are two schools of thoughts over here. Some companies don't try to divide attribution between marketing and sales. All pipeline is creating. You cannot operate under the assumption that all pipelining is created by both marketing and sales. In that model there isn't a whole lot of disagreement. Then you are just finding rich marketing campaigns, touches that created more pipeline relatively.

Priyank Savla:

And then there is a school of thought where how much pipeline did sales create versus marketing-created pipeline. And I think that is where it gets more complex. So if sales does not follow different data, hygiene rules in place, it might just get hard. If they don't put in their activity, they might not get enough attribution. They just download tons and tons of leads from contact databases in their Salesforce. It will be hard for marketing to generate any new lead, right? Because everyone exists in the database already. And so all the touchpoints that happen can only be opportunity creation touchpoints. So there are semantics and technical challenges and it's important. And I don't think we've really figured that out, because in the end we want sales to focus on selling. We try to remind them of what we expect them to do. And the more we remind them it gets better, but I don't think we are being very strict about it at NetBrain.

Franco Caporale:

And from your end, what are the metrics that you report to your CEO or to the executive team? And what are the methods that you measure and monitor on a weekly or monthly basis?

Priyank Savla:

Yeah, so we report on two core metrics every week, which would be for number of activities grouped by different types, like low-touch activity, something like a white paper download, like sales-ready activities, requesting a demo or a quote. So we show a table of all different types of activities performed and we show a pipeline created on any given week.

Franco Caporale:

Do you also track revenue or just the qualified pipeline?

Priyank Savla:

We do that once a quarter.

Franco Caporale:

Okay, once a quarter.

Priyank Savla:

Because we have manual review of $100,000+ deals, because that adjusts our visible generated attribution. So we make adjustments to that upon manual review of $100,000+ deals. So we can only do that once a quarter, so we do that quarterly.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. And so I want to shift here a little bit and start talking campaigns. So from the metrics to the campaigns. What is an example of a really successful campaign that you set up that worked really well? And also would like an example of a campaign that did not work well, an experiment or a test that you ran. And it can be in NetBrain or in a previous role as well.

Priyank Savla:

Yeah. So the most successful campaign that I've ever run was a campaign. It's a technical industry message around dynamic network mapping. So NetBrain has a product that's more innovative and more capable than our peers. And this was few years ago and we figured out the perfect way to describe it. And it was just a standard campaign. We ran Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and it had a beautiful landing page that exactly explained what dynamic mapping meant. And it really resonated, because we had excellent product market fit, the demand was strong and that was super successful. But it's not so much about any demand gen tactics, I think I would attribute success to message more than anything.

Franco Caporale:

And what was your success metrics there? Were you tracking number of meetings? Was it just awareness? What were you looking for?

Priyank Savla:

Back then meetings and pipeline.

Franco Caporale:

Meetings and pipeline. Cool. And so on the other end, what's the example of a task that you ran, it could be a new channel that you experimented with or something new that didn't work out, that you don't want to try again.

Priyank Savla:

Content syndication always fails. That has never succeeded. I just think there is ... I don't know. I don't know. Have you had issues with content syndication?

Franco Caporale:

I did with the generic ones, like those platforms that offer to syndicate your content across multiple channels and then send you a list of leads. Those ones I've always-

Priyank Savla:

In Excel spreadsheet.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, those ones I've always failed.

Priyank Savla:

I wonder if those people actually perform those activities or if it's just a scam of some sort. Because every time I get those, the only way it succeeds is sales does nothing with them. If they follow up at some point they will hear back from someone that they never downloaded that asset or anything. So I've got lot of those, even from reputed trade publications, to a degree that I'd just lost confidence in it. And luckily I didn't burn too much before I found out that contents syndication is just so hard to get any value out of.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, so I had a similar experience where I got all this list of leads and we follow up and they say, "No, I never downloaded any content or anything similar." And it's so common response that you start to believe that might be true. But on the other hand, I had some success with a specific publication when I was working within a niche, like in the hotel space or in the mobile space. Those were actually good, but because we were driving traffic to our landing page. So-

Priyank Savla:

That's the key, because now you have approved that that content was actually accepted or requested by whoever you were targeting. I think the spreadsheet ones, I recommend that we stay away from them.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, I tend to agree with you on that. And so Priyank, I have one last question before we close this. You mentioned at the beginning that you started your role at NetBrain with basically no budget, and now you have a seven figure budget. What can you share as a tip for us if a company doesn't have a lot of budget? How can we generate lead on a very, very tiny amount on a very small marketing budget?

Priyank Savla:

I think it's really not that hard if you immerse yourself in your community. You can just meet people and you can literally generate your own leads. I participated in a lot of LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups. Without any incentive I offered to co-admin lot of network engineering groups on LinkedIn and Facebook, help moderate that stuff on those groups. And again, I can't show that to my CEO and be like, "I accomplished this." Because I'm serving other people, but by doing that I build really strong relationships. And I just had people promoting me on NetBrain, my company, because I was helping them.

Priyank Savla:

I started working with our customers, I think building our referral marketing, again, super under-appreciated. I think that's important. It's almost criminal to spend a dollar of your budget until you maximize on these things. Until you maximize on forums ... I will notice all the time, marketers would say that they don't have budget, and if you look up their company, there are unanswered questions about their products and services on the internet. So I think you should almost make budget slightly less significant in your game plan overall and automatically you will just see that there are so many visible options.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, that's an awesome tip. I see a lot of those on Quora as well. People that ask question about a specific product and zero answers.

Priyank Savla:

Yeah. You have a lead sitting there, right? And there are no answers. And then that same company will be spending thousands and thousands of dollars on close to zero click-through rate advertising on the internet. So I think it's just easy workflows, people get very used to it. Same reason why people are spending so much on trade shows and list purchases and those things still exist, right? Trade shows I think serve a purpose, but list purchase and all of that, it still exists. There are still people buying leads on content syndication. So I think a lot of that is more habit-based, but if you're immersing yourself in your industry and you talk to people and you actually network and get to know them, I think you will just automatically see there are so many opportunities. SEO is huge again. But just saying, if you really try, I think there are so many options. I can't even go on listing all of them.

Franco Caporale:

Awesome. Priyank, it was really great having you as a guest on the episode today. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks again for joining us.

Priyank Savla:

Yeah, thank you so much. It was a pleasure being here.

‍