Key Highlights:
Tune in for a deep dive into the future of marketing with Amber's visionary perspectives and actionable strategies.
Amber Bogie on LinkedIn
Summary:
In this episode, Amber Bogie, Senior Director of Global Demand Generation at ReachDesk, shares her insights on the significance of gifting and direct mail in marketing. She discusses how these strategies enhance engagement and support sales efforts, emphasizing the importance of data-driven decisions in demand generation. Amber also highlights successful campaigns that leverage personalized gifts, showcasing their effectiveness in creating meaningful connections with potential clients.
[Read the full transcript]
pharosIQ: Good afternoon. pharosIQ here with another episode of pharosIQ’s podcast, the podcast for B2B demand generation and marketing professionals that is anything but boring. This week, really special guest joining us. We have Amber Bogie. Amber is an award winning global demand gen and ABX leader with a laundry list of successful strategy implementations under her belt.
She's a thought leader in the marketing space, sits on various leadership committees in addition to being. a board member of the Peak community. She's passionate about data driven decisions, tech trends, and is an advocate for three guiding principles that she attributes to her success. She's currently the Senior Director of Global Demand Generation at ReachDesk.
Welcome, Amber. How are you?
Amber Bogie: I'm doing great. How are you?
pharosIQ: I am all right. I am all right. We were just discussing daylight savings time and being consistently tired.
Amber Bogie: Yes. Yes. So we're in the middle of planning right now. So I've got adrenaline running through my blood.
pharosIQ: We're on a little off fiscal year.
So my planning, my, my new fiscal year doesn't start till March. So everyone around me is Oh my God, it's crazy. We're planning. And I'm like I'm not planning right now. But in two months, I'm going to be in the thick of it and everybody else is going to be like relaxed and executing.
Interesting vibe being on a different fiscal year, but I like it. It gives me an opportunity to kind of see, see what everybody does. I can be like the 2nd mover which has always been an interesting play for me, but it is different to be like, have it be like November and December and not be constantly stressed.
Amber Bogie: Oh, that sounds like a nice thing.
pharosIQ: So ReachDesk, given that, ReachDesk is a gifting platform. What I'd love to talk about, given your expertise in the space as we're through is a little bit about gifting and direct mail in general. We have a direct mail product here at MRP and it seems to be resonating really well with customers right now and engagement rates are up and we're seeing a lot of solid performance, right?
Are you seeing similar trends with ReachDesk across your customers or just in general?
Amber Bogie: Yeah, definitely without question and, just to say we wouldn't be here if it wasn't something that was resonating with people. It's our business model to provide software that allows people to do gifting at scale, to bring in their marketing campaign to score their event swag.
And then I think personally, the biggest kind of impact is being able to have your sales team leverage it. And we, at Reach Desk it's a part of everything that we do. Gifting is, it's just such a significant part of, our marketing and sales experience. And in fact, I was talking to the BDR team recently.
We do a day in the life with BDRs just to learn a little bit about their role, a little bit about the things that they have. Struggles with objections, all of that. And then of course, what do you feel works, the best? And. Getting an understanding of what marketing could do to better support their sales outreach.
And 2 of the BDRs that I spoke to on separate occasions, they both came back with the thing that helped them the most this quarter in getting their opportunities in, and it was using a direct mail campaign. It was a seasonal campaign that we did. It's pretty significant that the sales team, the single thing that they're saying is the highest impacting to their opportunity creation.
And that, that really just supports, that supports what the product is and what the product does. And in terms of customers, got a lot of happy customers, a lot of customers that integrate the campaigns into the product. Those that sends into their marketing campaigns integrate into their events.
And, what we understand about its effectiveness is really going back to when I was interviewing at reach desk always love to listen to a podcast when I'm interviewing for a job, listen to co founders who's, a future boss. And it still resonates with me very much.
A podcast I listened to their co founder, Alex Ali, who happens to be a boss. He said, what reach desk is and what, if you're doing gifting, it's about altruistic giving. So that's what the goal is to bring in this kind of genuine human touch and human connection to a not so human kind of system at times.
And to stop and have that moment of connection and let somebody feel recognized. It's pulling apart the business stuff of it. There's the human impact that is what really ultimately has the impact on the sales engine. And yeah, it's really just, it feels really nice.
pharosIQ: Campaigns that. Have a story to them from gifting versus just your standard. Here's a bottle of wine. Take a meeting. Yeah, you mentioned this is all in the, okay, I'm it's summer. I'm feeling it. Somebody sends me a little barbecue with some, maybe some seasonings and some sauces and some stuff.
I get that that's going to make me go okay, cool. I was probably looking at this person anyway. Let's take a meeting. So I think there's that fine line between. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gifting and borderline bribery. And I think some companies miss it.
Amber Bogie: 100 percent agree with you there and that's what I was drawn to specifically with reach desk was that their mission was altruism and gifting for the human connection.
And we at reach desk, we don't practice gifts for meetings. We don't encourage it. Customers do it. It's their prerogative, of course, but that's not the point of it. And yeah it's really to have that moment of one of our most successful campaigns that we do just regularly is our congratulations campaign.
There's a 50 percent opportunity creation with that campaign. Which was really high. I was even surprised at that number. And it supports things like people changing jobs, people getting promotions, people doing speaking, somebody, somebody sees, that I'm doing this podcast.
If they send me a gift and say, Hey, I really liked what you said about X, Y, Z, I'm gonna, I'm gonna notice, I'm gonna, I'm gonna feel. Appreciate I'm going to feel seen and I'm going to take the time, to, to read what they have to say. So whether it's like a brand new conversation, you've never spoken to them before, or it's further along the deal, it's just.
You can't take the human out of us as buyers, it's just, it's always there. And
pharosIQ: campaigns was always we, in fact, this is a couple jobs ago, but we had, it was just, thank you. Every time we had a new customer join and anytime we had a new customer come on, we hit them with like a custom roasted coffee and a couple of coffee mugs.
And we branded our own coffee flavor or something of that nature. Or through a local roaster and added a couple of coffee mugs, sent it over to box and just said, Hey, thanks for being a customer. And it was massively popular. Everybody was just like, wow, that's so interesting.
I signed a lot of contracts and I don't always get a lot of thank yous once we go through the process of doing that. So it's it's those, I think it's those simple touches that create long lasting, the long lasting touches. Yeah. Listening to your bio, right? You mentioned three guiding principles that you attribute to your success, right?
Can we get at least one of them, if not two or three, depending on time?
Amber Bogie: Yeah, absolutely. One of them is, data is king, follow it as a marketer. I feel like for those of us who've been marketing for, 10 years, because that's where I'm at. We've observed. A ship in a way that markers.
Are running marketing. There was a time that marketers were not super data driven that they were always just the ones in the corner spending the money doing who knows what, and just driving MQLs. Like it's, there's a reason there's the tension between marketing and sales for history. I moved into ABM fairly early on in my career.
And it's very, it's a very, at the time that I started doing it, it was not as popular. It was not as much of a trend. It was early. And so it was isolating in a lot of ways. You also had to justify its existence. You still do, but this was me how many years ago having to do this and I, I honestly was had to justify my existence.
Therefore had to go to data to do I think that it's been like, for me personally, an evolution of realizing like, why it's so important to leverage data. I could probably spend an entire hour just talking about this, but fast forward to how it supports me and my role now. This last year and a half, I think that's how long it's been that it's been a challenge in the market, in the economy.
Lots of tech companies have been feeling a lot of pain. I've referred to it as the squeeze period. And previous to that, I don't think marketers were as challenged by their companies, their leaders to define ROI on tools on campaigns on pretty much everything. Some may have been doing so, but it wasn't really mandated to the degree that it is today.
And. Having a good relationship with data in general, it made it for an easier transition into the squeeze period. Now there were certainly challenges along the way, but it's data is what gives us direction on how to be better marketers. It also makes us better partners within the business. To our finance department to our sales department on any given day, I can generally tell you what our conversion rates are, what our cost per opportunity is.
I don't just do that monthly. That's something that I'm tracking regularly and the shift in the spend, be it ABM focus or your demand gen focus is going to give you direction on how you might need to shift your strategy, shift your focus, optimize. It's all in the data. That is huge in itself.
pharosIQ: Yeah. The squeeze is it's the funny thing is I've had, there's a lot of folks saying Oh, like, when is it going to get back to what it was? And I'm like I don't think it is probably 2018 to 2022 was a, an interesting time where interest rates were so low that money was free and investors were investing it.
And again, like you mentioned, there wasn't a ton of scrutiny. There was some right. But boards were like, oh, yeah, you guys are growing. Keep doing what you're doing, right? CEOs and CFOs are like, okay, great. Like 40%, 50 percent growth rate. Keep churning. And now that what I call this is I don't call this to squeeze.
I call this like reality because this is what it felt like in 2009 11 and 12 post, which is just normal, right? So that there's a lot of. There's a lot of revenue teams, marketing, sales, et cetera, who are just blindsided by the fact that, wow, this is really hard. This is not easy to do.
And that's why building high growth companies, that's why at one point they were called unicorns because. Unicorns aren't are so difficult to find that they're one in a one in a bajillion. So when we all of a sudden started having 700
Amber Bogie: unicorns. Yeah.
pharosIQ: I don't know if something might be off, but so you mentioned special.
A lot of marketers I talked to have, can have difficulty tracking that data, right? Those metrics that you were talking about, conversion, do you have a specific tool that you use in your tech stack, a combination of tools in your stack that help you there? Or what can you
Amber Bogie: help? Yeah, it's definitely a combination.
And. It's for the data, yeah, you have to grab data from all over the place. I'd say primarily our data, lives in Salesforce. That's, where we use that as a single source of truth. That's where we drive everything to. There are, certain things that I'm leveraging for certain aspects, be it demo requests.
And Google analytics, of course. So there's some other pieces, but we ultimately use Salesforce and we do have a looker dashboard that is really nice to use that kind of just pulls in data from a lot of different various sources using that via super metrics, and it is just a nice A nice snapshot of, I'm able to see on a weekly basis, the Mondays of my reporting days, I spend most of the day doing reporting and I made a handful of different dashboards.
But the dashboards I'm seeing, I'm looking at how many requests we've had in that week. What is the conversion on page for those demo requests? We use Chili Piper, a meeting booker tool. So how many of those that are going through demo requests are actually booking a meeting via the tool. How many of those are converting to meetings and opportunities.
So I'm looking from demo to opportunity creation. Then, of course, looking through the ABM metrics, which is a whole different subset of data. I'm looking at QAs created, The flip rate from meeting to opportunity for our QAs, opportunity creation. I'm spending a lot of time looking over all of these things so that, if there is a shift in one of them, we know, and we know how to move in the right direction.
pharosIQ: You mentioned a couple of tools there, Looker, Salesforce, Silly Piper, et cetera. Obviously, Pretty common talking point these days in revenue and marketing teams is the tech stack, right? Do you think, do you personally think the tech stack has gotten a bit out of control, right? Where there's too many tools or do we have the Goldilocks where we have just enough tools right now?
What do you think?
Amber Bogie: I think that in the space, there are too many tools. I think every marketer probably is overwhelmed every time there's like a new one, it's there are hundreds, if not thousands of tools. And Companies are trying to grow their businesses, so they're expanding what they're offering.
They're acquiring and or they're building and so it can be very challenging when you need this 1 tool and then it competes with 2 of your other tools. And then so that's consolidation. It's okay, that's cool from a spend, but how. I don't know how strong are you and these other components of the tool.
So you have to really scrutinize what the offering is. I do think that kind of talking about the period in which there were a lot of unicorns and it was just cash was easy. That's when I think a lot of companies became tech loaded. I do think that there can be too many tools in the toolbox. There are plenty of companies that don't have enough.
I think that there is a right amount, but it is very challenging to determine, what that right amount is. So it takes. Takes alignment within your GTM team and, an invested RevOps team to, to support in that. I know that, my must have tools are, and there's a lot of tools that support beyond my team, but they support the sales team and then me indirectly.
So there's a lot of, there's a lot to consider.
pharosIQ: You mentioned consolidation too, right? I think there's a race to be that RevOps platform, right? Zoom, info, Clary, Gong, right? Outreach everybody's pushing to be the singular, unified platform, but it's just so hard to go to one platform for, because really what you have is, these singular platforms are becoming jacks of all trades and masters of not right.
Personally, I like the menster, right? I want again, I like gone when it was just a recording platform when that's all they focused on. Because it was, they were bringing amazing things to the table. I liked outreach when it was just a sales acceleration platform because the innovation was just in that segment.
And now. When you're trying to innovate across so many different facets of a unified platform, you just end up with a fairly average, everything I'm a, I'm anti consolidation personally, but.
Amber Bogie: I would tend to agree and it's an interesting thing to feel as a buyer and then also a marketer of a software, right?
Because you understand from a business standpoint, why that growth is there to grow the business, right? Obviously you want to go after your market and you want to. Penetrate and, take over that market as much as you can. You want to grow your customer base and then you want to expand, with those other elements and other arms.
But as a buyer I'm very wary. And I refer to it as I go to the tool that like for what their bread and butter is. So where did they like, what did they start out building? Where did they get their success? And that's generally, a handful of the tools that I've worked in over the years.
And I've seen them grow and I've seen them add on things. And I am a little bit apprehensive at times. These tools are not, they're not inexpensive and there's no question that you can drive value from them, but you have to be well implemented. You need to have the strategy put in place. So it's really important to have a good partnership and customer success support so that you can Leverage the tool to its capabilities because all of these tools have a significant value to your pipeline.
It's just a matter of, are you and your team leveraging the tool to its best capability? And is it built into your strategy? Is it being utilized by your team? You have to use a tool to make that ROI happen. And so I think that It's really, it's on the businesses to ensure that they're supporting that and delivering.
Otherwise. They're landing and turning and they're just leaky buckets.
pharosIQ: On a fun, on a more fun note I'm, I was perusing your LinkedIn comments post and you talk about memes a lot, right? You seem to be a fan of memes and funny, like I'm a huge fan. Like I've been, in fact, I've had arguments with my marketing leaders in the past because I love memes so much that I want to use them all the time.
And I'm told like, that's the thing. So where do you think humor falls at B2B memes, things like, that's type of stuff.
Amber Bogie: I think that it is, it captures our personalities very well. I think that in the SAS space. Marketing and sales specifically, I can speak very confidently about, we love a meme.
Like our jobs are hard and it makes our job more fun to laugh at the things that we do. And to laugh at the challenges, to make fun of it. Because the reality is it's hard. It's challenging. It's frustrating. There's the, I'm fine with background on fire, there's, like I saw on the other day that was from the sister from Arthur, the show, the cartoon show, she felt like the black eyes underneath.
And it was like, being asked to put in a deck with 24 hours, just something like last minute and I was just like, okay, I think it's part of. Part of our personalities when it comes to the fact that we're a generation of users of social media, we've grown up on the internet. I think that it fits with us.
I think that it resonates with us. And It makes brands very memorable, those that are using memes, like I can list a few that like I, I know actively use them and they, I'm much more aware of what's going on with their business and their brand because they're leveraging them. I'm proud to say that we are meme users.
Outreach to us and it's not an easy. It's not an easy thing to do. We know.
pharosIQ: Just like you have to, oh, is it the wrong one? You're like, there's so many variables to it. Where you have to like I've, Point around with it on my personal account, right? My, my favorite one is the spider man.
That's like pointing at five spider mans. My, my attempt was the spider man saying you have intent data. You have intent data. We all have intent data. That was my, my, my gander into the mean world, but I'm, I've been contemplating like a meme of the week. Just, saying, challenging myself to come up with something that's funny.
Weekly. Just so it's an interesting vibe, but I will most certainly tell my marketing team that Amber's a fan and that we should be doing more memes, if not memes all the time. Awesome. So let's talk campaigns. You talked about a couple earlier, right? You gave us a couple of nuggets, some creative things that you've done, creative things you've seen.
So You know, the meat and potatoes of today is let's talk about a non boring campaign that you've seen six that you've put out there. Did it work? Did it not? Why'd you love it? Let's inspire the guest.
Amber Bogie: Yeah. I always have a couple of favorites that I love to go back to. And I recently did I recently did like a LinkedIn kind of form fill or someone asked an ABM or named Tanya, she had asked what was your most creative one to one campaign.
So I filled out and, it was a kind of like a screen share of all these different ideas that people have done to give creativity to others. I always tend to go back to, I'd say there's two from my past that I really do love storytelling on. One of them was. And they're all mostly one to ones.
One of them was going after a. Was a C level at a bank, global, a global bank, and long story short, was in a bobblehead of himself, but it was beyond just a bobblehead. He happened to be a marathon runner, and the salesperson had found a photo of him. That he posted running a marathon. So I took that exact photo and I had it replicated with the bid that he was wearing the bid number, even down to these are small, but I zoomed in and got like the blurry images and I was able to match the logos to the companies that sponsor and I like found the race, got the logo sponsors and like everything down to, the shirt he was wearing, it was all just done.
So it was. That was a really fun, fun one, because this was a pretty massive organization and that son got, A response to got a meeting with that C level, simply because it was something that was memorable for him. It was meaningful for him. China goes back to the, the reason to gift right is to do it with intent another campaign.
That I did was for a large, a very large organization that does well, Home Depot, they like, how do I describe this? I'm not going to, I don't really do house projects. So that company, we took, because a lot of these companies are public, you can read their time, pay reports. You can listen to their annual annual calls.
So we worked really diligently on identifying what their goals were for the next four years. The product we're selling was, around planning and software. And we were able to align goals across every single C suite department and then align our products as sub which product would fit in with which group.
And then what specific kind of KPIs they had set for each of those departments. And then take our customer wins and say, we can decrease your downstream production time by this amount. We can improve your. Shipping time by this and this, all of the impacts we do and then to make it extra marketing.
We, of course, did really we used the image that they had this on and it was inspired, in the design and it was a very impactful campaign. We got meetings with four out of five C suites. We generated 800k in pipeline on that one campaign. The ROI was pretty insane considering it's one campaign, not so many.
Super significant spend. And yeah, that was a huge, that was a huge win on that one. Yeah.
pharosIQ: What I love about them is that the one to one nature of the, of ABM as you're speaking to it, I think we've lost a bit of it, cause this is what happened. This is my take, you do a campaign like that, those two campaigns that are truly one to one right.
And then they work. The UK pipeline goes up, the deals close, all of that. And then the executives come in and they go okay, cool. Scale that but you can't. Like you can't like the whole purpose of it is that you can't, right? You can't like you can scale it to 20, not 22, 000.
And that's where there's that divide between, like the old Google executive can you 10 X that right? No, actually I can't 10 exit. I can maybe 1. 7 exit but 10 X is just not going to happen.
Amber Bogie: I felt really strongly about this for a long time, and because of the different types of AVM I've put into play, I don't think I created this, but in my mind, it came to this conclusion.
Many other people are doing this at this point, but I built out my campaign structures. Based on the funnel and I basically was like, this is how we scale because to that exact point, everybody wants to scale and they want to scale one to ones and it's very challenging. I've done just one to one ABM.
I've done just one to few ABM. I've done kind of the mix until I got to a point where I was able to build out the full funnel of it. With the one to many, one to few, one to one, like generally we start from the top and move down because of the lift in the one to ones. So that was just another second company that I'm doing this full fun on.
Very proud to say that, we've gotten to the one to one phase. We're about to launch our second iteration. We're doing four a quarter. That's. That's a pretty decent amount for one person. I have a small team, but it's truly personalized. We have a campaign form that we have the sales AEs fill out a level of information that gives us enough detail about the account.
Then we have bi weekly one to one meetings with these reps. Pre campaign and obviously during the campaign and each of them has a custom landing page. And it's it's such a cool experience. It's really hard to do this, but you have to be realistic about what's scalable and you have to align it to what works for your business.
And yeah, we're doing that exact thing. I just got a message from my my manager this morning. Sophia Silva, who's amazing and also a LinkedIn influencer. She Sophia she was messaging me about an idea for a one to one gift in conjunction with this campaign. And it's absolutely genius. We haven't done it yet, so I won't share it on the podcast, but it's really nice to get back to that.
The fun part of FABM and one to ones, it's not all fun and games. It's very challenging. You have to be very patient in scaling the programs, but I do completely agree with you. You can't scale one to one, otherwise you lose the touch points, then make it impactful.
pharosIQ: Yeah, and it's really, those are really cool ideas.
And just the concept of one to one, like chatting on it here. It's the first time we've chatted on the podcast, right? Cause again, it's, there's this, so there's so much of this push to scale. And the reality is that in the squeeze, as you put it earlier, right? Yeah. You can't play through the whole tab. You just can't do everything, so you have to really laser focus on those opportunities that have the highest propensity to turn into money in the short term, because and you have a small team, your resources are smaller, your dollars are smaller, your tools are smaller, all of that.
And one to one plays really well in that squeeze time. Because you're like, okay, here's, I've even talked to my team about the con I don't know, can set the concept, I call it like, let's do contact based marketing, right? Forget about our top 100 accounts. Who are our top 100 contacts who are our top 100 humans that we know by what we sell at scale and or that right?
And then how can we, it sounds crazy, but attack them, right? But how can we approach them directly with the goal of because we know that they're going to have the highest impact on that. So it's really fascinating. Awesome. Thanks for the time. It's been really sweet kind of hanging out and talking all things ranging from ABM to tools to memes, which is pretty varied.
So leave us with something as we approach 2023, 2024 planning from a seasoned demand gen pro.
Amber Bogie: In terms of planning,
pharosIQ: leave us with anything, inspiration. My, I just had my daughter on the podcast, so I just, yeah.
Amber Bogie: My inspiration is for those of the for the whole marketing space that's been, it's been a rough two years almost is to keep pushing, is to keep focusing on the data, to keep finding areas that you can tweak.
To improve because the way that it's been so beneficial and I just I had this Intuition early on, like this is going to really suck, but we're going to be so much better marketers at the end of the day. And I have this conversation with my leader and my boss we're pushing through this challenging time.
And we are such a better business because of it. Our processes have improved. Our numbers have improved. Everything has gotten better because we keep pushing. So I say that with mindfulness of, take care of your wellness and your mental health and everything, but to persevere, just keep marketing.
And then, in terms of 2024, I'll just say I am in advance because man, it is nice when you are a few months out from your fiscal year and you have your plans prepped, ready to go.
pharosIQ: And that's, that's hugely immense advice. I remember the COVID year. And it whoa, and then it was like, okay let's look back and are we ready?
And then like the work that we did at the time in my I was in my selling organization from a process standpoint, from a structure standpoint from a plant, like the work we did set us up for 1 of the biggest 20, 20 ones that I've been part of. And we would never have had the 2021 without the 2020 paint.
So I think. to your 2024, five, six, the. The teams coming out of this and the companies coming out of the squeeze here are going to be the ones that are the next rising stars, not only in the industry, but in the field. So with that, thank you again so much for joining. For those of you listening, you can find us again, like us.
Follow us, give us some five star ratings on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast, share us on LinkedIn. You can find me at LinkedIn. It's pretty simple. You can find us on an MRP on both LinkedIn, Instagram, all the usual social channels as well, where we usually share the podcast.
So thank you everybody for joining. Thank you, Amber, for your time. It's been awesome. And till next time.