pharosIQ: Welcome, welcome to this week's episode of pharosIQ’s podcast, the podcast for B2B marketers that is hopefully anything but boring.
We have a really exciting week this week where we're going away from the campaign and we're talking to, the operation side of demand generation, which I'm really pumped about. So today we have Emma Bowkett who's the CEO of Converter. Converter is the lead management operating system for the B2B marketing space.
So welcome, Emma. Good to have you.
Emma B: pharosIQ. Good to be here.
pharosIQ: Awesome. So first and foremost, while we're diving in, what is a lead management operating system for those of us who may not know?
Emma B: Yes. Great question. A lead management operating system here at Converter means to is a technology that allows you to ingest all of your leads, no matter where they're captured.
So multiple channels that could be events, content, syndication, social, and your ability to digest those leads, validate, verify, enrich those leads within our rules engine and automatically pass those. To the best converting team, whether that's your sales team for nurturing. And then obviously what we also do is track the lead to sales conversion, which let's face it, pharosIQ is the golden goose.
We're able to track from ingestion of leads all the way through to ROI through the CRM.
pharosIQ: The elimination of Excel spreadsheets at its finest. It sounds
Emma B: people often ask me, who's your biggest competitor still today? Excel spreadsheets, manual processes. There are so many large tech brands still eyeballing data, still verifying leads.
Slowing down the speed of lead flow, which is sellers. We want to get those leads as quickly as we can. Awesome
pharosIQ: So you guys are relatively new in what is a like really quickly growing march heck landscape, right? So tell us how that landscape's looking right now. It's very different than it was just a few years ago What do you see?
Emma B: Yeah it is very different, obviously, with a number of vendors on there, but where we see ourselves sitting is almost at the epicenter of that marketing landscape. So we don't just work with the brands and people creating, the need for the demand, but we're also working with people like yourselves who generate the demand and the tech partners.
So having that position at the epicenter of the landscape, what we're seeing is a lot of consolidation. Things like intent data. No longer are people looking at single sources, we need to see an aggregated view across those intent plays where technology can really come in and enhance that process.
A lot of the vendors working together sharing data to make that process better for the brands. It's really interesting to see how people are actually coming together more transparently sharing data for, for the industry to see a better result, I would say.
pharosIQ: Awesome answer. It's really, it's growing really quickly and fast.
So speaking of fast you're, you've quickly risen to the ranks of CEO there at Converter. So tell us a little bit about that journey. How did, how does one end up as CEO of Converter?
Emma B: Yeah if you ask my family, they said I'll be, CEO back when I was five years old.
My nickname was Bossy Boots Bucket. So there you go. This is not my first rodeo as a founder. So I was the founder of Converter previously from the age of 19, now 41. This is my fourth company. So I guess I've always been an entrepreneur, product ideas, commercial set. Not really an academic CEO in terms of journey so far, more so from an entrepreneurial perspective.
pharosIQ: But most founders, to be candid, don't make great CEOs. And it seems and and I think you're doing a hell of a job. How do you think, what do you think? And that's a good leading question, but how do you think being a CEO is different than a founder in some cases? And why do most founders not, why are they not able to make that jump?
Emma B: You know what? I think there's one quality that you need to have as a CEO, particularly in this day and age, which is emotional intelligence, right? And in order to have the emotional intelligence piece to be a great leader, where there's a challenge with some founders and, my opinion. Is separating your emotions from the business.
And that can be a big challenge for founders because, cut their veins and the business is in their blood, right? So it's hard to differentiate between the two. So I think, if you take your role seriously as a CEO and almost be like, I'm paid to be the CEO of this company. This is my job and remove the emotions from it.
It becomes a lot easier. Yeah,
pharosIQ: It's, and it's a really great point, like when it's your vision. Oh baby, yeah. Yeah, when it's your vision and you have this, it started here, right? And then every, I think every company reaches a phase where either the vision needs to change a bit, right? The world changes and you have to it's so hard for founders to pivot just because they had that vision.
Emma B: And with that, as the world changes, the business changes. You have to change your team. You have to scale up. And for some founders that can be incredibly difficult. People who've been on that journey with you from the beginning. And then you're saying, actually, we've outgrown these people.
We need to change. There's some really hard journeys as a founding, CEO would.
pharosIQ: So given the nature of your business, you have a ton of customers, you see a lot of leads come through your system, right? So what trends are you seeing on the lead front, right? What are customers having success with?
What types of content might be resonating the best? What's converting the best, help some of our listeners understand that because you see a huge bulk of data come through.
Emma B: Yeah. So to set the scene and give the context. We average anywhere between 40 and 50 million leads a year through Converter's platform.
They originate either from the campaign that the brand's delivering or the demand gen side as well, because we both work on both sides. But I would say that the biggest shift is actually in the process of generating leads. And, things like automation, you mentioned spreadsheets earlier, No longer particularly in this market can people afford to have so much human capital on the validation of leads and the process of leads and reduce the speed to market of those leads.
So huge amount of automation shifts as well, but with the automation brings information in real time. So wind back three years ago, Having conversations with some of the big, biggest tech enterprise companies in the world, they didn't know where the leads were being generated. There was no transparency to source.
They knew that 50 percent of the leads were potentially invalid, inactionable leads, were not going to generate the ROI they wanted. The challenge was they didn't know which 50%. Whereas now we're in a world of automation, they have that information at their fingertips. We have a business insights tool that gives you that in real time.
Whereas previously they were working until the quarter had ended, campaign had ended, and then they're assessing it, by which time the money's been spent, it's too late. The automation piece is key. Vendor management, huge shift in vendor management. So what we're seeing as a big trend is a lot of the large tech enterprise are moving away from agencies that have the relationships with vendors directly that in housing, content syndication, demand gen and, working with those vendors to generate the right content for the right audiences.
As you can imagine, the ROI is much better.
pharosIQ: Yeah, it's really, it's a unique space. It goes up and down. I think it's been almost 18 years for me. And what I'm seeing is a lot of the emergence of audiences again.
Emma B: I was just going to say that, pharosIQ. Yeah.
pharosIQ: There's this pivot from, like it was all about data for a while, we have 1.
7 trillion signals and 270 billion, like so much shit out there with these big numbers. But when I started, it was all about hey, we have this active audience, right? And I think that's where the market's coming back to, where, Demand buyers want that. Tell me about your unique audience, right?
Because to be candid, if I can find Joe IT manager X anywhere then coming to, Ferris IQ or anybody brings me no value, right? So that's, I think the vendors who are sticking out right now have an audience and have that proprietary signal data, the proprietary audience data that kind of separates them.
Emma B: I've been saying for a couple of years now, and I'm glad this is a shift that's happening in the market, which is. Buyers will go back to the traditional publishers. that own the audience, that have the data and the insights and can build the right content for the right audience. The challenge with that is, is the volume is far less than the demand.
There's a lot of things to think through in terms of how we solve that as an industry.
pharosIQ: You have to find the, there's a good mix, like legacy publishers struggle because they're so editorial driven,
Emma B: right.
pharosIQ: That, that and editorial costs money. And you can only put so much into it that it ends up being and it just ended up the cost to, to output ratio never reaches that, whereas, like where we've seen success at Pharaohs is leveraging publicly available content. Or even customer content, to build like basically unique audiences, even at the customer level. I could go to a. I could go to any brand in the space and take their content, give me two months, and I could build them a unique audience that's just engaged with theirs or their competitors content, right?
So I call it like the emergence of brand to demand, right? Absolutely.
Emma B: Less is more, right? So what we're seeing, and particularly from Converter's perspective, is our customers are pulling in their targeted account list and the campaigns are distributing those targeted account lists to the vendors.
The reality is, before that, there was just so much volume. Let's see what sticks. The leads were coming through. The challenge is not on the vendor side. The challenge is on the process thereafter. So how do I create these nurture programs? How do I get the right? So for the right audiences, whereas if we agree the audience, the ICP and the targeting up front, suddenly marketing has an easier job, which we can, move to that level of intent and return on investment far quicker.
pharosIQ: The industry as a whole, like that the strength of the post COVID rush, right?
Emma B: Yeah,
pharosIQ: I'll say, I believe he hit a lot of blemishes. There were a lot of blemishes in process from an execution standpoint, from both the sales and a marketing perspective. You
Emma B: can throw the compliance piece in there, right?
Yeah. And it's
pharosIQ: it, and now that when the market gets tougher, which it is, like execution matters so much more. And that's where a lot of marketers. I have conversations every day where they're just like, I don't know what to do right now. I have no idea what to do. It's so different. What do I do?
And it's really, it's an exciting time to be at the reamer. And it's again, not exciting to be old because I'm old, but I'm like, yeah, I, I can say, but at least I can say hey, I've seen this before. And here's the, and here's a battle plan to do it. And here's how you can execute and pivot away from the spray and pray, get as many leads as you can.
And hope for the, and hope for the best, to a little bit, again, volume is still important, but targeted volume. And I think that's really, we're in a kind of a unique, I'll call it Renaissance of the demand generation space.
Emma B: Yeah, and it's, how many conversations a week I hear my team having, I have myself the difference between demand gen and lead gen, right?
Let's just clarify that and compare apples for apples because you asked me about some of the shifts and last year there was a huge change to social lead gen. But all of a sudden people are realizing, no, actually that's creating demand. That's not creating leads. What are we trying to achieve here?
What's the KPI? Great social works for creating the demand, but it's not generating the qualified leads that we need. And actually, there's so much bad rep for content syndication out there. What we see out of those 40 some million records a year is that content syndication is The biggest return on investment.
pharosIQ: There it is. Boom. Dropping the hammer. Mike drop Emma.
Emma B: I'm done. Yeah. No, and we
pharosIQ: can end the podcast.
Emma B: Yeah. Yeah. We have the data, it generates the return, but it comes back to the process, right? You've got to be able to deliver the process beyond the contents indication late.
pharosIQ: The, and I've ran the math more times than you could ever imagine.
And over time, right? Even at your lowest conversion rates at the guaranteed cost per acquisition, right? That syndication sits at right. Any software company with an average ACV of over 25 K, it is almost mathematically impossible to not get five to seven X return on investment. Oh, there's almost mathematically impossible not to even at we're talking, 1 percent conversion rates.
You're still 5 to 10 X. Where I'm seeing a big shift now is that basically executives are getting impatient, right? And syndication because of the nurture process can take a little time. It takes a little time to go from lead to hand raiser, right? So we're seeing a little bit of a push in the market to be like, Hey, who can accelerate some of these leads?
What tactics do we have to make hand raisers pop up a little bit faster? And I think that's where a lot of the innovation in our space will be happening shortly with that type of stuff.
Emma B: Look, one of the challenges with that, and you've seen this time and time again, like I have, the large enterprise brands would would buy and target let's throw more money this quarter at content syndication, but that's not going to hit the numbers for another 12 months.
So it's about the insights being at the forefront, tracking the ROI, tracking the conversion, tracking the attribution piece. That's key. And with those things now available, they can make the decisions earlier.
pharosIQ: Yeah, it's, and it's fascinating. It's great to see the data and it, it's something that, again, I, people ask me this all the time.
I sold my first lead in 2006, I think.
Emma B: Literally
pharosIQ: 2006. And I have customers who bought from me then who still buy the same product solution. And they're like, how is that? How is this product sustained? So this tactics extends so many years, right? And it's because, and I say this all the time, if you go to your CEO with this 12.
Page attribution story on how you did this and you're attributing 1 percent of revenue to second click or last click or this, or, all of, and again, you can sell it, but it's just so confusing. But if you go to your CEO with a Hey, we bought 1000 leads for 35 a lead and we spent 35 K.
Those people turn into this much pipeline and then that much pipeline turned into this much revenue. It's just easy. And there's not a CEO in the world who would say, okay, wait, so you gave me, I gave you 35k and 12 months later you gave me 250k.
Emma B: Yeah. The biggest advocates for our platform, CFO and CEO, they love the visibility, spending 10 million a year on leads.
What's the return on investment? We can see it in black and white. That's the dream.
pharosIQ: Sweet. All right, the B2B boring question, the B2 boring question, if you will, right? You've been around a lot of campaigns. You've been a lot of buyers. You've been a lot of companies. You've done a lot of stuff, right?
Tell us about your campaign or program or unboring initiative and what made it stand out.
Emma B: Oh, that's a good one. You know what? I'm going to use one back from my B2C days in Legion. And it was when Netflix was launching in Europe, and I won the budget, I won the campaign it's quite a boring one, to be fair, but the lessons learned.
When they launched, they didn't have much content. And I remember saying to them up front, look, we can launch this campaign, but, I'm not sure of the ROI, because there's not much content here. So what they decided to do, you'll be familiar with Marks and Spencers, right? So You know, Marks and Spencers, the high retail shop.
I'm trying to think in the U S maybe like Walmart, let's compare it to Walmart for a second.
pharosIQ: I don't like Walmart. Is it a high end? Like fancy?
Emma B: It's like food and clothing. It's yes.
pharosIQ: Let's call it target. There we go. Oh, okay, target,
Emma B: right, netflix said let's just give people vouchers to sign up for a 30 day free trial.
I'm like, okay, how much? Let's call it 15 at the time. Sign up for a 30 day free trial for Netflix, you get a 15 voucher to go and spend at Marks and Spencers. So of course the campaign went absolutely crazy because everyone just wanted a 15 voucher for M& S. At the end of the 30 days, as predicted no one was paying for the fees for Netflix because they'd gone through all the content in 30 days, there was nothing else to watch.
So I was right in the first instance, they then decided six months later to pull out of Europe, gone, generate a load more content and come back when they'd fixed the problem. But, that was crazy time. The amount of money that was spent on that campaign, just from the vouchers alone, But the ROI, when you're just like as a marketer back then, I was like, this is not going to work, but okay, you still want to do it.
pharosIQ: And it always comes back to somebody on an Excel spreadsheet did a something that said it was a something and that. And you went and it got happened, and sometimes
Emma B: Spencer's yeah, he comes back to the brand demand versus lead and conversion conversation, it's the same thing. Yeah.
pharosIQ: Thanks so much for joining us. It's been really fun. I think we should totally do this again. It's really great talking to different types of industry experts across that and hearing different perspectives. Where can any of the audience find. Converter or find you, should they be interested in being, partnering with the lead management platform?
Emma B: Yeah, absolutely. Converter. io or come and join me on LinkedIn.
pharosIQ: Got it. And that's C O N V R T R, correct?
Emma B: That's correct. Yes.
pharosIQ: Yeah. Okay. Awesome. So convrtr.io is where you can read that or obviously you can connect with Emma on LinkedIn as well. So for me, I'm pharosIQ. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find pharosIQ on LinkedIn.
If you're listening to this podcast on Apple music or Spotify or wherever you're listening, give us this. Give us a subscription. Come back and listen to us every week. Give us a five star rating. So other B2B marketers can find us when they search B2B marketing and, try to spread the word.
So until next week, Emma again, thank you so much for joining. It's been awesome and we'll connect soon. Have a good one.
