GUEST Webinar Success Secrets and REAL Lead Generation! w/CMO FloQast! [Industry Giant Accounting Platform] Ben Schechter!! 📈 Stop Counting Leads, Start Printing Pipeline | Ep. 430

Jay Schwedelson: Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for do this, not that podcast. And we got an important dude here who's here.

Jay Schwedelson: We got Ben Schechter. Now Ben is the chief marketing Officer at Flow Cast, but this guy has been one of the biggest CMOs in the world of SaaS for a long time. And Flow cast is an incredible company, okay? They are considered the number one. Closed management software company. What does that even mean? Okay.

Jay Schwedelson: Finance teams, accounting teams, at the end of every quarter, they're scrambling to organize, to track, to do all this stuff. That's why no one answers your emails, unlike the end of the month, because everyone's losing their mind flow. Cast fixes all that. They're a beast. They're crushing it. Really big organization.

Jay Schwedelson: And Ben is leading all of the go to market, demand, gen, everything. And we're gonna dig into what is actually working in B2B marketing right now. So we got the right guy. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Schechter: Thank you for having me. That was a great intro. I should, uh, try to hire you on our product marketing team for talking about like, that

Jay Schwedelson: I'm like the Michael Buffer of, uh, accounting software.

Jay Schwedelson: Um, so listen, before we get into what's actually working in B2B, which I'm very excited to talk about, how did, how did Ben become Ben?

Ben Schechter: Yeah, so I actually started my career in B2C, uh, way back in the day, which I learned a ton, uh, most notably. Really, how do you get people to sign up for something, uh, pay money for something, things like that, and conversion and e-commerce.

Ben Schechter: Um, and that was great. I really enjoyed that. I went back to school, uh, to transition more into product marketing. And then after school is when I really started going more into the B2B world. And I remember when I first started B2B, everything felt, uh, like I was in a totally new world. It felt completely foreign to me.

Ben Schechter: Um, but what, what I realized is. A lot of the skills that I learned in B2C were very applicable to B2B, and I think that has, as I've gone along in my career, has helped differentiate me because I can really understand things about, uh, digital marketing and driving conversion and everything from self-serve all the way through kind as I learned more and more driving that more sales led process.

Ben Schechter: And so I've worked at companies, uh, box, Adobe RingCentral, and then as you said, I'm now here at Flow Cast.

Jay Schwedelson: I think that's really cool because I think, uh, certainly in the last few years, uh, maybe it's 'cause of ai, maybe it's 'cause of, I don't know, pandemic, I don't know what it is, but it feels like business to business marketing has become more of this consumer flavor where we're marketing to humans and not just people that happen to be at businesses.

Jay Schwedelson: Has there been an even bigger. Kind of shift where B2B has gotten a little bit more consumery in the last few years as even compared to when you first got into B2B?

Ben Schechter: Definitely. Um, and I think it may be 'cause of the pandemic, uh, people stopped and I think there's, there's been some where people are now going back, but virtual virtual events are now more popular than obviously in-person events.

Ben Schechter: And, um, meeting people over Zoom or whatever are now is more common than necessarily going and meeting them in the office. So I think that's part of it. Uh, I also think people are inundated all day long in whether it's their personal life and or business life. And so they may not wanna talk to someone and they don't have time to take that meeting.

Ben Schechter: They don't have time to go out to that dinner. Um, and so they wanna do it on their own. And so they want to go to the website, they wanna consume the information. They may wanna even talk to, uh, a chat bot to learn more and direct 'em in the right place. And potentially, depending on the type of business that or, or software that you're selling, they might wanna just sign up and, and try it for themselves before they even talk to anyone.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, I, I, I completely can see that and I see the shift that happened after the pandemic. So before we get to kinda like AI trends and all the stuff everybody loves to talk about, I want to go into the nitty gritty on like the w word webinars. Are webinars still something that for business to business marketing is a viable, uh, content play to drive pipeline interest, whatever, or are webinars just garbage and just now wallpaper?

Ben Schechter: Yeah, so webinars are absolute gold. Um, and we've, I've seen that, uh, this is the fourth straight company. I have seen that. Um, and I'm actually not gonna sit here and tell you I know why, um, because it is a time consuming, um, medium to say, I'm gonna join this webinar, whether it's live or on demand. Uh, but what we see, um, and I'll just talk specifically to flow cast, is we get thousands of people who sign up.

Ben Schechter: The attendance is far above industry standard, and they're engaging, they're asking questions and what happens? Well, when they ask a question, they're pretty interested in your product. And so then when we have sales follow up, they are, they are fantastic leads. And the conversion rate that we see of these leads turning to opportunities and ultimately into, uh, closed one deals is significantly higher than other channels.

Ben Schechter: Um, and so we see that with, uh, various types of topics with our webinars. Obviously you have to be mindful of not, uh, overdoing it and, and, and constantly bombarding your, your prospects and customers with webinars. So you have to be mindful of the topics. You have to be mindful of who's speaking. Uh, but to give you an example, we have our, our user conference coming up.

Ben Schechter: It is virtual and we have, um, just an incredible amount of thousands of people who are registered, um, for what is a two, essentially a, you know, it's a virtual event, but you could think of it as a two day webinar and people will join and, and spend. The majority of those two days will be, will stay with us.

Jay Schwedelson: Okay, so for everybody out there that's listening, like, oh, I don't get thousands, I get hundreds. But even in my hundreds, you know, let's say I got a hundred people that register for the webinar and I got 30 people that show up, and I'm just curious for your own pipeline in terms of the funnel, are the people that.

Jay Schwedelson: Show up, uh, way further down in the funnel. Uh, your BDR is like, I'm calling those people versus the people that don't, uh, are the people that just register and don't show up? Are they borderline useless or you still see them kind of converting in some capacity?

Ben Schechter: Yeah, it's a great question. And to, to go back to what you said about the numbers.

Ben Schechter: Uh, we have other regions of the world. We are a global company that get more of those hundreds. It's not always thousands of course. So we, we, we see that as well. Um, but specific to your, to answer your question directly, uh, the way I think about it is you have registered, attended and engaged. So if you register for webinar and you don't show up, um, you know, we, this is tactical, obviously we talk about lead scoring.

Ben Schechter: There, there you're going to have some type of quote score associated with that where you're, you're interested, but hey, you didn't show up. You might not be ready to talk to sales. So you might be further up the funnel or the way we would think about it. Um, you would need to do other activities before we feel like, Hey, you should, this is a good use of your time sales.

Ben Schechter: You should talk to them if you attend a webinar especially, and, and stay for a specific amount of time. Just whatever, make up a number, say more than 50%. You're pretty engaged. That's a good person to talk to. Yeah. Um, and then if you are engaging in the webinar asking questions, you are the most highly, uh, engaged.

Ben Schechter: And so, although we, to give you an example, if you attend a webinar, we're gonna send you to sales. If you attend a webinar and ask questions or engage, we prioritize those. We're gonna send those to sales as well. But we're gonna prioritize those higher, where they should be calling them within honestly, hours, because that is a very, very engaged, uh, prospect or, or customer.

Jay Schwedelson: Well, first of all, congrats to you because I think that you all are super smart for what you're doing. If no one else takes anything outta this, that tactic of not just taking people that you know that showed up and treat 'em all the same, but that they engage, that they ask questions, that they stayed for more than 50% of the time, that is a massive, uh, uh, signal that you need to be reacting to in your organization.

Jay Schwedelson: So I, I love that you're doing that. So let's talk about other content plays, though I hate in the world of B2B marketing. People call, we got this many leads. And the lead could be someone that downloaded a guide, someone that downloaded a case study, which is much further down the funnel, someone that did something else.

Jay Schwedelson: That's ridiculous. How, how at flow cast you look at leads are, are leads? Just anybody that consumes any kind of resource.

Ben Schechter: So first, I'll tell you a story that always makes me laugh is I was at a company previously where they wanted to measure our performance actually on leads, on number of leads. And I said.

Ben Schechter: Well, I will be the worst CMO in the world if I don't crush that number, because I control the lead scoring algorithm, which determines if it is a lead so I can just dial it up and send a ton of leads. They may not be good, but I will crush your number. So to your question, leads to me is a, um, predictor of future performance if done well.

Ben Schechter: But by no means do I ever look at that as a, that's never a metric actually I ever really talk about with sales. Or at the executive level because to me it's just, uh, an indicator like, are we doing the right things? Um, but ultimately we're looking more at true dollars, true pipeline, true close one. So that's, that's the first thing.

Ben Schechter: And then to your, to your other point, um, you know, this is where you learn when it comes to, and this is why I'm a huge believer in, in multi-touch attribution. 'cause we know, um, the average prospect or customer. They're, they're, they're doing 12 to 15 different types of activities often before they're touching or wanna talk to a salesperson.

Ben Schechter: So if you are looking at just leads and you're saying, Hey, they, they download a, a white paper, boom, send 'em to sales. They're not ready for sales. Two things happen. One, they prop it, the prospect gets annoyed, like, why are you calling me already? Two, the salesperson gets annoyed and they say, why are you sending me all these bad leads?

Ben Schechter: And then what's a byproduct of that is they stop calling your quote leads, right? And so now all of a sudden you go, why aren't you calling my leads? And you get into this bad flywheel approach of a mistrust. So I try to stay away from the kind of the leads conversation and really focus more on the pipeline.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, I'm so down with that. And you know, you bring up a great point, how the BDRs gonna get turned off with your SDRs or salespeople, whatever, that they're like, oh, these are garbage. And anytime they see something coming in from that source, like garbage and they don't touch them and whatever, and that's where the relationship falls apart.

Jay Schwedelson: And people make memes about sales and marketing not getting along and, and it's the end of the universe.

Ben Schechter: It's, uh, you know, I always joke around the, the dirtiest word in a, in A BDR is language, is content syndication because it's super top of funnel. Yeah. And that world has changed and maybe it's not as, um, successful as it used to be, but I've had a lot of success with that channel.

Ben Schechter: But they are never ready to talk to sales. And they usually don't even know who you are from a company perspective. Yeah.

Jay Schwedelson: And

Ben Schechter: so when you send those leads over, they stop calling 'em. And then when you actually do get a lead that's further down the funnel, and maybe they start at content syndication, but they actually attended a webinar that BDR looks at that lead and says, oh, they.

Ben Schechter: Even though they didn't come directly from content syndication, they think they did just by looking at it and they don't call 'em anymore. And again, it creates a bad, um, kind of just a bad relationship across sales and marketing.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, so I, I love your perspective on leads in general. So let's pivot for a second.

Jay Schwedelson: So now people aren't going to Google anymore. They're not gonna Google and say, Hey, I need closed management software. They're now going to chat BT, and they're gonna claw and all these different places. And now we have to not worry about SEO search engine marketing. Now we have to worry about a EO. Are you aggressively working on trying to make sure that you all are showing up?

Ben Schechter: I would say we're in the middle. I would, I would say anyone who said comes here and says, oh, we have this fantastic a EO plan that we know is gonna crush it, um, is either lying or very much misled because the reality is it's very new.

Ben Schechter: So everyone knows where this is headed. Um, everyone's trying to figure it out. Uh, we are obviously trying to figure it out, but if I, if I told you that we had a plan that I know is absolutely gonna crush it, I would, I I would be, I would be lying. Um, so yes, we are actively working on it. We are trying out new things.

Ben Schechter: Um. But we still see a lot of traffic, you know, through your, your typical call it SEO and, and page search channel. So by no means are we turning off that switch. Um, I think it's more, you know, how do we balance and, and how do we, we know what the future's gonna be, so let's make sure we get ahead of the game.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah, I'm with you and I agree with you. I'm glad you called that out, that nobody really has it all together yet. But I do think that if it's not something that you're trying to figure out and you're not looking at the schema and listicles and everything that they're looking for, then you're, that's actually kind of, uh, ridiculous.

Jay Schwedelson: So what about other things that are emerging? So we're seeing a lot of B2B folks now looking at things like, you know, paid ads on Instagram that used to only be a consumer channel. Or Reddit now having some lead gen ads and things of that nature. Are you all going beyond just, oh yeah, we run on LinkedIn, we run on Google ads, you know, stuff like that.

Jay Schwedelson: Are you looking at these other platforms?

Ben Schechter: Absolutely. Um, I think one of the reasons I love digital marketing and why. I, I gravitated toward it earlier in my career, um, is because I love, I love testing new things. Um, and I love the quantitative feedback that you get from these tests, uh, versus maybe other areas of marketing that are not quite as quantitative.

Ben Schechter: So we try all these things. Um, you mentioned Reddit, that's become more and more popular. Um, you've mentioned, you know, we, we try 'em all. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't sometimes, and then oftentimes. It's a matter of which, you know, part of the funnel you're interested in, uh, certain things are gonna be more top of funnel versus middle or bottom.

Ben Schechter: Um, and so it's important to set up, uh, success metrics before you run the test and agree on what you're trying to accomplish. Because if you're running. Call it a video pre-roll on YouTube, and you expect to get direct clicks from that, that convert into leads. You, you already know it's gonna fail. So it's important to set up the success and align with whoever is gonna be looking at it, um, to, to measure what would be, what you expect to come from that channel.

Jay Schwedelson: Alright, so one more thing I'm curious about, because you happen to be, and don't take this the wrong way. You happen to be in not the most, uh, sexiest industry on the planet. Okay? You're in the finance, uh, accounting professional industry and a lot of people out there listening like, oh man, I need to listen to this 'cause I'm in, I'm in a regulated industry.

Jay Schwedelson: I'm in a really, an industry that everything is off brand. I'm not allowed to test this test that I have to file my brand guidelines, and I truly don't know the answer to this, so I'm curious. For you all, do you, uh, step out of just the kind of formulaic it's gotta look this way? Uh, or do you have lo-fi content that you put out there?

Jay Schwedelson: Or are you, we're in the accounting world, we can't go that route.

Ben Schechter: So I, I love this question, uh, because I'm, I'm actually coming up on my one year anniversary at Flow Cast and one of the reasons why I, I wanted to, um, to come here was because of that brand identity and the differentiation. So, uh, our, our founder, Mike Whitmeyer, he's a former accountant, um, and he is very big believer in like, Hey, accountants are not boring.

Ben Schechter: Like, we are people, we consume information, we wanna be different. And so Sure. Are we going to have like a crazy, uh, whatever the right word I can't think of, is like out of the box, like brand campaign that's way out there. No, no. That wouldn't fit. We do have, if you look at us compared to our competitors, you will, you will notice very distinct tone of voice and messaging.

Ben Schechter: And we are constantly thinking about that when we develop content because we wanna stay true to that brand. And it's one of the things that we hear from customers they love us about is that, you know, we, we do speak their language, but a more call it, um, you know, conversational or, um. Pithy way, uh, that speaks to them.

Ben Schechter: And, and in fact, we, we have, um, something that's unusual. Really for, I think most marketing departments of, of our size, uh, especially in this industry, is we have a studios team that is, you know, we're based in la, we're based in the Hollywood world, and we have a studios team that creates very engaging video content that we leverage, whether it's, uh, through different channels through at our user conference.

Ben Schechter: Um, that is highly, highly consumed and, and people really enjoy.

Jay Schwedelson: Dude, that's cool that you have a studio thing going on. I mean, yeah. Very cool. You know what, I think it's so important for people to hear, especially those people out there that think they're in a boring industry, think they can't do stuff.

Jay Schwedelson: It, it breaks through when you act like a human. That's what we get out of this. Yeah.

Ben Schechter: I, you know, one of the things that I love when I met Mike was, um, typically when you work with a founder, you're gonna have to have to work really hard to. Educate them that like, Hey, we have to be different. We have to sound different.

Ben Schechter: We have to have our own distinct voice. If we wanna rise above the fold with our competitive landscape, he'd already done that. So to me, that was such a win to, to walk into that world. Um, and now of course, I, I feel the, uh, the responsibility as our team does to continue that as we move forward. I think we've done a really good job with that.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. Well the more I've gotten to know Flo cast, the more I feel that. So you're doing a great job. I'm not just saying that 'cause I'm staring at you and you know, for everybody out there listening, uh, listen, you could follow Ben on LinkedIn. It's Ben Schechter. Okay. Flo Cast is F-L-O-Q-A-S-T. I strongly recommend checking them out.

Jay Schwedelson: They're fantastic. Ben, what else did I forget? How else should people get involved in your world?

Ben Schechter: No, I mean, I think you, you nailed it. Um, obviously if you are in the accounting world, definitely check out flow cast. Um, and then in the marketing world, uh, I think we had a great conversation and, and hopefully, um, spurt some ideas for people listening.

Jay Schwedelson: Awesome. LL put all in the show notes. Ben, thanks for being here, man.

Ben Schechter: Thank you.

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