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Brian Graf:
Hi there, and welcome to episode 70 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks.
I'm Brian Graf, I'm the CEO of Kalungi, and I'm here again with Kalungi's co-founder, Stijn Hendrikse, who's a serial SaaS marketing executive and ex Microsoft product marketing leader. For today's episode, Stijn and I have a guest. We sit down with Silvia Parra, one of Kalungi's fractional CMOs to break down demand creation versus demand capture and understand both sides of the demand generation coin.
This is a critical concept for modern day marketers because as the buying process gets more complex, it's increasingly difficult to just show an ad and have someone convert and talk to sales. More often than not in B2B SaaS, you need to meet prospects early in the buying process and guide them to a sale, which is nuanced, complex.
Let's get into it.
Thank you everyone for coming back and listening and thank you to Silvia, the first guest that we've had on this podcast in a long, long time. So thank you so much for coming. We have a good topic today and it's one that a lot of you can call them marketing influencers or marketing thought leaders have talked about.
Even our own Mike Northfield has talked about and that is basically: What is the difference between demand capture and demand creation? That's there's two very different sides of the demand generation coin.
And I would argue, and I think that Silvia agrees, that the best marketing efforts, you do both really well. And the ones that maybe struggle a little bit more usually are missing one side of the coin. But Silvia is more experienced than I am in this. So I wanted to bring her on. Why don't Silvia, you just give yourself a little bit of an intro and give the audience just a little bit of your background and we can go from there.
Awesome. Thank you for having me guys. So I'm Silvia. I'm one of Kalungi's production CMOs. I've been working at Kalungi for almost four years now. With more than 12 B2B SaaS companies in different maturity stages. And before that I used to lead a marketing agency and I was in charge of the inbound strategy.
So that's a little bit about my background and this is a topic that I'm passionate about. So thank you for having me and for just inviting me to talk about this. I have many questions to ask you, but actually it'd be useful whenever I listen to interviews about CMOs, I always like to know their specialty, if you will, or where their, where their strengths are, or where their sweet spot is for marketing.
So what would you say yours is? Well, in terms of SaaS companies, I would say my expertise lies in marketing and sales led go to market strategies. So we're talking about ACVs, from like 30 to a hundred thousand dollars. So from an ARR standpoint, it would be that. And in terms of maturity stage, I would definitely say companies that have hit PMF and are between the ranges between two to six, seven million in ARR.
In terms of maturity and in terms of marketing expertise, I would say I'm really strong on the brand and creative side of things and just tying all of those initiatives to numbers and attribution and reporting and data. So I think that balance is where I'm pretty good at. I've always been impressed about that in terms of your abilities.
I think your eye for design and for creating a brand is so much better than mine, but also the hybrid of that along with a data backed demand generation approach, I think is super unique. So anyway, talk to us about demand capture versus demand creation. Would you mind, maybe we can just start with what they are right?
And why are they different and important? Let's start with the basics. So demand capture refers to the marketing initiatives that aim to capture people who are ready to purchase. So that part of the market that is actively searching for a solution, they're problem aware, they're solution aware, they're product aware, and they're ready to hit on that schedule demo or book a call, call to action.
Whereas demand creation refers first to the marketing initiatives related to educating and introducing in some cases, the pain points on the solution to an audience that are potential clients, but are not ready to buy at this moment. And this is related to a concept in B2B marketing called the 95 rule that says that only 5 percent of your total addressable market is actively searching for a solution at any given time.
And the other 95 percent are either unaware of the problem, not ready to solve it, or don't yet see a need for a solution. I can give you an example, but let me know if that was clear enough. Okay. An example would be when you get, for instance, an MQL, a demo or a demo request attributed in your CRM to let's say Google ads, the normal attribution model will attribute that new business if it ends up closing.
To Google ads, but in reality, that's where you captured that demand, but it was probably generated somewhere else. Maybe it was a friend or a colleague or a podcast or a LinkedIn post. So being able to have that attribution system in place to have this extra data point can be eye-opening.
And this goes back to a concept that a lot of marketers throw around like this dark social idea of having these channels in play that you actually can't attribute as much as B2B SaaS marketing would love to be as attribution heavy as possible. There's actually a school of thought, which I would agree with, that says that it actually shouldn't always be attributable.
The ones that aren't attributable are often the most effective. They just don't get the credit. A hundred percent. I used to work with a company that when you saw the new business pipeline by source, it was attributing most of the deals to direct and organic. And in parallel, the marketing team was doing a lot of on LinkedIn promotion and just promoting thought leadership ads and snippets of use cases of the product.
And the CTA of all of these campaigns were “learn more” and they were redirecting to a use case website page on the site. And with that attribution model, you could not see or attribute any demand to LinkedIn. So after we implemented the self attribution model we were able to keep side by side both reports and actually see how it was around between 20 to 30 percent of the pipeline attributed to organic was actually in fact from Linkedin so it was really nice to be able to to see that and not necessarily rewrite or change the attribution model, but just have that extra data point.
It gives you a little bit more ammunition, right, to go back to your leadership and say look, this is actually, right, it's, you don't just have to go off of pure faith alone, right, this is, you can see the numbers here. If you wouldn't mind, maybe we can talk through what you see when you've worked with a lot of companies, B2B SaaS companies, you've worked with a lot of our clients, especially in Kalungi.
There's a, there's always a reason that we're brought in. And so marketing is usually not in incredible shape or can be improved when we come in. But what do you usually see in clients in regards to this? You know, how, how are their systems set up? How do they usually balance the two, if at all?
What do things look like there? So the attribution model, it's rarely set up to have both attribution models. The two models I'm referring to are the regular last touch attribution model that would basically capture or just reports on where you're capturing, capturing that demand. So they rarely have.
So one of the main things that we do is to include a “how did you hear about us” open field to the forms, especially the ones that are bottom of the funnel forms. And then we create a workflow to map those answers. Two buckets of sources and create side by side reports to see the difference in terms of attribution, and sources and where that demand is coming from. So from a process endpoint and like the martech infrastructure, it's rarely set up for this. So that's something I'd like to prioritize to have a better understanding of what's working and what's not. And as you mentioned, it is very important to show ROI of all of our initiatives.
And the leadership team usually wants to see a return on those ad dollars spent on LinkedIn and other like more long term channels. So this type of initiative really helps to tell that story and build that patience when it comes to waiting for the management to really kick in. What about the expectation or the culture around demand generation at the clients that you come into? Is demand creation usually a priority for these companies? And so it's smooth sailing as you set it up, or is it something that you have to work your way into politically? That's a great question.
Definitely demand generation is, I would say, the biggest area of focus our clients have when they, when they look for. For implementing marketing and investing in marketing. So definitely growth and they, they, they have this mindset of, I want MQLs and I want MQLs to feed into the sales team.
So that's very, very common. And it's always, the priority is always to balance the short term, the quick wins and the long term ones. So as you probably know, that different go to market initiatives, depending on the channels, they will. You'll result in the short term, some will take longer, like organic, for instance, and paid search being one of the ones where you can expect some like immediate conversion.
So something we like to do at the beginning of our engagements is really map the maturity of the market of the companies that we're working with, because definitely if you are in an immature market and you are a market maker, your expectations should be very different. If you compare it to being in a market that is way more saturated and you need to carve out a niche.
So we do that exercise of mapping where we are, where the product fits in the category. And based on that, we create a go to market motion that combines those short term wins and long term wins. And we give visibility and educate the leadership team. So they understand exactly what to expect and the growth targets are.
Basically build around this as well. Do you ever get any pushback from those leadership teams in that like those types of those clients that they want the leads now. Like, especially with smaller companies, I can absolutely see the urgency. And I talked to many founders that are like that as well.
But do you ever get pushback from the leadership teams when you're pitching initiatives like this? Like, Hey, I can't do this. I can't see the ROI of this. How are you going to prove to me that this works? You know, we need leads now, not in six months. You know, how do you handle those things if that occurs?
Yeah, that occurs. We've gotten better at this, but I think we are getting better at setting the expectation in terms of timeline. You're going to maybe need to wait between three to six months to actually start to see some ROI. So they tend to be patient within that timeline.
But if for whatever reason, that doesn't happen, then they start getting impatient. So it is our job to find ways to mitigate that by focusing on other areas to try to bring in some new business. Or either new revenue, whether that is from new business or expansion or helping with churn or renewals and like supporting those other areas of the business to try to get some give you enough time to develop those inbound motions and demand motions that might take longer.
Yeah. To your point. The demand creation muscle is definitely a long term one and it's not just a switch that you can flip on. So you absolutely have to balance the two. It's common to see founders and CEOs, and it's completely normal. I completely understand the reason behind it, but it's very common to see them being very impatient and just wanting us to focus on channels that we're going to capture that demand.
But when you really work on finding a good balance, it helps you nurture a healthy pipeline for both immediate conversions and then future growth. Otherwise, you're going to end up in a point where maybe your paid channels are performing very well, but you're spending a lot on ads and you haven't built that terrain through inorganic with SEO and other channels and with that in a healthy mix to really expand inbound growth in the mid and long term. So you need to be strategically patient with that healthy mix of channels. You also just are less diversified. From a demand generation perspective, you'll be more subject to seasonality. And if Google changes their algorithm or something like that, you'll be at their mercy.
Stijn, do you have any questions for Silvia? Thank you Silvia for your thoughtful ideas around this. It's always tricky when you're comparing marketing for a SaaS business to comparing marketing for a company that can benefit from what maybe is easiest described as one time demand gen: where you basically just try to sell someone something.
Very different from when you're trying to get customers to pay you again and again and again. We're in a SaaS business, customer retention and revenue expansions are a much bigger part of long term success than just the initial sale. So for that demand generation and demand capture also have a little bit of a different meaning.
The demand capture has to be capturing customers who then will stay. And who will ideally grow over time. Those sometimes are more expensive to get, so the customer acquisition cost is higher. Because you have to be far more targeted than what's really the ideal customer profile who's not going to be too costly for us to service.
In addition to customer acquisition costs, you have to worry about cost to service in a SaaS business. So, I'm super interested in when you think about the unit economics of what you can spend on a new customer and demand generation versus spending on capturing the people who are in the market, so to speak.
Which, of course, is a smaller part of the market, but of course, those are much cheaper to catch. Sort of, how do you, how do you think about that compared to maybe lifetime value and things like that? Any, any thoughts on that? Well, in terms of economics, I would say that for the priorities of the marketing team, I tend to, depending as well on the maturity of the category and the market, but I try to divide my focus like 60, 40, like 60 percent on demand creation, 40 percent on demand capture.
And we always try to have a healthy ratio. So definitely something that we need to keep an eye on. And if it's a very saturated market, very competitive, where your clicks are super expensive and really capturing that demand is going to be, it's going to cost you a lot of money.
That's when we come back and say we might need to be strategic and spend more time and be a bit more patient and spend more time on creating that demand. So from an inbound perspective and an organic perspective and other channels, they can come to us rather than us trying to battle and, and, and fight for that first position in a very saturated and competitive and inexpensive paid channel.
Where you're usually competing with other SaaS businesses to capture that demand. So that's something that we need to keep an eye on when making the decision on how to split our focus and our efforts and our budget to be successful. Otherwise, you're going to spend too much on acquiring that customer.
And you're just going to be thinking on the short term, like the immediate conversions and not really building that flywheel and inbound motion that is going to end up and ultimately drive growth. Do you have some thoughts, Silvia, on what is that relative cost to maybe lifetime value?
Do you have any rules of thumb for CAC and things like that? Or how long will it take you to recover the cost of acquisition? Yeah. So it's usually the LTV and CAC ratio that we usually recommend and try to, to, to measure our efforts against. So that's usually the ratio that we use.
That's also interesting if you think about the cost breakdown between demand capture and demand generation. I would love you guys’ thoughts on this, but I feel like on the demand capture side, you want to work within an ICP, right, but also you need to put yourself out into the places where people are looking.
And so you almost show yourself a little bit more broadly than you would maybe with a demand creation strategy. Demand creation will be more expensive to put in place. And of course. There's, I think the average, there's usually like an average of eight touches before a close.
And that would only extend with a demand creation strategy, but the beauty of the demand creation strategy is once you set it up the right way, you are hyper targeted on your ICP. Especially with that motion, you're only targeting the people that you think would be best suited for your product.
And so your lifetime value should theoretically extend and you should be able to justify spending more on them. And still get a much higher payout. I don't know if you guys think that's true, but that is how I tend to think about it. Yeah, and also what I've seen is when you only focus on capturing the demand, the active market that is in search for a resolution and are just bidding for those high intent keywords, sometimes you see the clicks.
But you don't see the conversions because they either have no idea who you are or you haven't touched that company or that prospect multiple times through other channels. So that person is just not ready to convert. So really focusing on the bottom of the funnel call to actions and bottom of the funnel initiatives alone.
I don't think that that's actually going to work. I guess it depends as well on the ACV, but ultimately the success will come from a combined strategy. The other thing is the reality is that since the fifties, forties, fifties, sixties, depends a little bit what type, what you call marketing and demand generation, but.
There's been a continuous move from mass marketing to more precise right all the way to the ideal being a one on one match right or targeting if you will and we're getting very close to a lot of people not consuming any demand gen anymore. They basically just choose what they opt into.
And some of those platforms don't allow advertising. There are people who have closed down all the channels on their phone and they don't watch TV shows. So you're not really able to send any advertising to them. So it's all about whatever content they decide to consume. And how you fit your messages into that.
How do you think about the wideness of your aperture Silvia, and how many potential prospects you can reach versus the likelihood of them converting quickly and being relatively a good fit. How do you scale in today's relatively precise marketing?
Reality going broad versus going deep. Gosh, that's a great question. And I would say one of the biggest challenges that we have when doing demand gen nowadays. And lately I've been working with vertical SaaS companies. Companies that develop products for a specific industry with very specific features and very specific use cases.
And just doing inbound without thinking about associations, publications, events is something that we haven't been very successful with. We need to pair the regular inbound channels with regular Google ads, LinkedIn ads, organic, even account based marketing.
We need to pair it with thought leadership content on very specific topics, like niche industry or industry publications or associations or events. So that, and then of course, optimizing. Content for AI like AI is playing a big role in terms of how people look and consume content so making sure your site and your blogs are optimized.
So these AI engines grab that content in the form of answers is something that we're getting better at and definitely something we were focusing on as we prioritize those channels to really capture and create the demand. Just moving into very focused publications or just spaces where your target audience tends to consume content and then AI as well have been new channels that in the past we did not give that much attention.
One other thought that I always wonder, if we're talking mostly about B2B, how you have people who spend someone else's money or spend the money of the organization they work for, that you're not necessarily generating demand from the organization, you're generating interest by an individual. And that's where we have this whole P1, P2, P3 concept where you're not done when you have one person basically saying, Hey, we have this problem.
We need to do something about it. There's a couple of more steps. How do you think about using the main generation tactics, Silvia, across the funnel with maybe even some of those multiple people having to be persuaded. What we, what we've been doing lately, and this is something that is very clear with account based marketing is usually we used to just do this building for that P3, so that executive, or even the P2. The person interested in buying the solution for the user and then the executive level persona.
But now we're also doing list building in some cases for people that we know play a role in the decision making process. And sometimes tends to be a bit of a, either a blocker or just, we know plays a role in the journey. And then we create sequences. We make sure that the center of the campaign matches the job title of the recipient.
So if we're going to be talking to an operations persona, then we make sure that the center has an operation job title. So you can be very personalized. Messaging and content specific to the different person as a clear role that are not necessarily clearly not just one or two, but actually more right.
And definitely creating content to address their specific concerns or obstacles that can be presented in that journey. So that's something that we've done that has played really well and has to do with the personalization. You were referring to and the need for that, and then also using those lists in order to retarget with unpaid platforms.
So when we think about the cross channel, the multi channel like approach, definitely leveraging those lists to have targeted messaging as well and other platforms to touch that person more than once through an account based marketing type of campaign. I think too, with actually bringing this back to Mike Northfield, Mike, we're ready for your sponsorship whenever you whenever you get a second.
That's basically saying the buyer spent 70 percent of their purchasing process, conducting independent research and like what you're talking about, Silvia, especially with account based marketing and outbound. How can we reach up as far as possible into that independent research and start the process of interacting with them as fast as possible.
It also just reestablishes the importance of this domain creation side of things. Where you just need to be able to show up in that independent research process. You need to be in the sources. That these people are looking at and becoming the authority that educates them on how to make the decision, how the product or what the problem is, how to solve it, what the best way, what the best solutions are, et cetera.
And all of that will come basically in a stage where you can't really attribute it. It's broad, but the way that you really need to build it to be successful, especially in the ACVs that you've been playing in, Silvia, has to be hyper focused on the personas that you're targeting.
Talk me through, basically, if you were to, let's flip the script. You've been talking from the perspective of a marketing leader for this, this entire conversation. But a lot of the listeners that we have are from our founders and executives and I can hear them already saying: this is great guys.
In theory obviously we would have infinite budget and infinite time to be able to build all this out and to you know go up the funnel and get all these people. But we don't. We live in a real world that has constrained resources and I don't have enough budget or time to be able to do this. So what would you say if you were the leader of a company and a marketer came to you and pitched this strategy. A, you'd need to put a little bit of trust in them and give them the leash that they need to be successful. B how would you, as the leader, hold them accountable to make sure that they're moving things in the right direction.
They're moving the ball and they're not just wasting six months of your time. Running an ineffective strategy. Great question. I would say that trust definitely is important when you hire that person. So aligning with that person on the strategy in terms of your positioning, your ICP, your personas, and from a foundational standpoint on the same page, first of all, I would make sure that happens.
And then I would align on what leading indicators we're going to be tracking in terms of each of the demand gen channels, so making sure that the person has the marketing team has the reporting infrastructure. So we can if we're not seeing immediate, like new business generation from most of, from some of the channels that we can at least align on what leading on what leading indicator and what success looks like on the, on the early stages of those initiatives.
So I think that will be important to define what success looks like, because I would say most of the Frustrations come from not being aligned on what success looks like. And not being aligned on the expectations. So I would push for that and I would recommend relying a lot on data. So being a very data driven organization and ensuring that you have the system in place to, to track and, and have visibility into those leading indicators.
And I would push on it. I would encourage them to have a self attribution model. So they can shed the light on those other initiatives that are influencing the buying criteria and the buying decision, but might, but might be different, difficult to just to attribute it directly to, to the conversion of the new business generation.
So I would like to see that as well. So I can put things in perspective and in context. What would some of the KPIs be that you would use? I mean, you can pick whatever channel you want, but the leading indicators that would show you that things are on the right track. Even if you're not seeing revenue come in the door right away.
I like to see, for instance, the type of keywords that are clicking that are driving clicks to the site. If most of the sessions that the site is getting are coming from irrelevant search terms, or very top of the funnel, or they're just not the right mix. Then I would be concerned about being patient and expecting that traffic to convert eventually, because people that are getting to this are not even the right ones.
So I would really focus on the quality of the content and the quality of the traffic that is getting to the site. So keywords and clicks to the site. I thought those would be two metrics that I would keep an eye on. If you do have thought leadership content and downloadable content, and you have initiatives in order to generate top and middle of the funnel contacts, I would also like to see an increase in those, in the generation of those contacts.
Maybe they're not MQLs, maybe they're not necessarily new business, but new deals, but I'm seeing new leads coming in. And if you do have the infrastructure to, to nurture those leads, whether that is through an SDR motion or nurture sequences or whatever it is, I would like to see. See that conversion rate also going up.
I would also, and a good indicator also is even if it's not volume of like more MQLs and in an increase in the conversion rate from MQL to up, that's a great indicator. Indicator that the quality of the demand that you're generating is actually. Good quality. They feed the ICP, they have the right intent.
So that conversion rate is very telling in my opinion. So we've talked about these two kinds of theories for this podcast. Would you mind giving me, it could be a hypothetical or it could be an example of like how you've actually built this out in terms of like what channels you've used and what campaign types you've used? Because you usually have to mix a bit of demand capture with demand creation to create like the true funnel.
So how have you done that in the past that has worked? That's a great question. So let's look at LinkedIn. So when I first start working with a company, usually they don't have warm audiences built in order for me to turn into MQLs, which let's just define an MQL as somebody ready to speak to sales, somebody ready to book a call, a demo.
So I like to create audiences on LinkedIn with top of the funnel, middle of the funnel depth of content. So basically addressing pain points, introducing some of the solutions and use cases of the product. And then what I like to do is I try to start creating and making sure these audiences hit the threshold in terms of size that I can then use to retarget with more bottom of the funnel call to actions and bottom of the funnel content.
So creating those audiences and these first campaigns that I run. I don't send them directly to a demo page. I send them to either a website page talking about a specific use case. Usually it's either a solution page or a use case type of page. So I like to create that layer on LinkedIn.
And in terms of formats for this, I like using single image ads and also short videos that show the page, product, or specific use case that I'm showing. So if I'm sending traffic to a use case specific page, I like having a short video that illustrates how you can actually accomplish or just talk about that job to be done within the platform and show the product.
So once I hit the threshold of audience in terms of size of audiences, I start creating variations of that audience. For instance, I have a lookalike audience, I have the retargeting audience, I have a native audience, and then that's when I start creating like another layer of campaigns that can include, still include single image ads and video ads, but I also like to include conversational ads.
So conversational ads to this warm audience that has been exposed to your face. First layer tends to work pretty well. And in some cases, when the person, when you're doing a conversational ad, you create like the conversation tree and you give the person different options, you're trying to push it to push them to book the demo.
But if they're not ready, sending them to a page where you can have an ungated or partial recording of the product usually helps a lot. So that's something I've tested and actually worked pretty well. So that's something that I recommend doing for that middle layer after you have a warmer audience.
So single image ads in terms of format, conversational ads, thought leadership ads, spotlight ads as well. When you are in that process of creating a warmer audience to then retarget. So they are cheaper as well. And it just gives you an extra impression and awareness touch point to, to the right audience.
So that's another one that we use in that middle layer before testing. The bottom of the funnel book a demo like add for that more bottom of the funnel campaign. We do like to test sending people sending traffic to the bottom of the funnel to get a demo page to schedule the demo directly on the site.
And we also AB tested with a lead gen form to see if by just having an option that has less friction, we can actually generate the conversion. In terms of ad formats what we've been testing lately on LinkedIn and it's depending on the audience product as well, of course, but that mix of layering the ads and layering the audiences and the formats played very well for us.
And then just to build off of that LinkedIn example. What do you think about the content side of things? Because content basically facilitates every other channel that you have. And one of the things that I have liked quite a bit about what you do is like organizing your content according to each persona and each funnel stage, basically.
But what do you think about the types of different content to go really high up in the funnel and generate awareness and go pull people out of stasis versus bringing them down the funnel into a conversion in a model like this. Once I have my funnel stages defined and mapped.
I try to break those stages. Let's just say we start with subscribers, then lead MQL, SQL opportunity and customer, I break that funnel into, or I map them to the awareness, consideration and decision stages. And I work with the team to like literally put ourselves in the shoes of and describe their mindset when they're in each of these buckets and stages.
So how are they thinking about their problem and the solution? And what are the questions they tend to ask themselves at each of these stages? So I literally write down questions. Of course, when I'm moving down the funnel, I need to talk with sales and I talk with CS to try to capture those questions that prospects and customers ask themselves in that journey. I capture those questions and then I brainstorm the content that will answer those questions and basically meet them where they are in their journey. So in terms of format, earlier in the funnel we look at blogs So and here's where you're really like building your authority around a specific topic for the right set of keywords.
So listicles just blogs in general, any league magnet that is very tactical in terms of practical like this is something they can use to succeed in their roles You're helping them be a hero of their journey to be a good whatever role they have You So you are not thinking about selling necessarily, you're, you're thinking about like adding value and that can be in different formats.
It can be a quiz, it can be a calculator, it can be a template. Something that I like to do as well to generate demand is for instance, doing a webinar. and pair it with a template. So you're pushing a template, but then in the webinar, you're like explaining and teaching how to use it properly.
So that can actually add just a ton of value to your audience and then place yourself as a thought leader. And whenever they're ready to, to buy or to search for a solution, they will think of you. So in terms of formats, that's what I like to do or use or create. Create in the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel.
And then as I go down, these are more sales enablement assets in the form of PDFs or one pagers or two pagers or slides for a deck that the CS team is using, so that's how I approach creating content to meet them where they are in their journey. Well, because at the end of the day, content is a purpose and marketing's purpose is to answer as many questions. You know, as effectively as possible for the prospect in their buying journey. I like that approach a lot.
Fine. Any last questions from you before we wrap this up? The one thing that I always also want to bring into the mix when we talk about topics like this is the maturity of the market. There is, you talked a little bit about the cost of clicks and things like that, that have to do with saturation, right, of the market, which is.
sometimes a function of maturity. Usually the more mature the market, the more commoditized the solutions are. And the harder it becomes to buy people's attention, to stand out, et cetera. But talk to me a little bit more about the maturity of the market from you know, the customer maturity, how much education you have to do and how much your demand generation is really market education versus actual Demand generation.
Maybe your thoughts on that. I actually just had a client and they were a vertical SaaS company. And they are building a product very specific to an industry. And this industry is problem aware. They are still using Excel for this particular set of responsibilities, but they're not solution or product aware.
It's not a market that has been serviced before. So in terms of demand and retention, there's just no volume for high intent keywords or just people searching for a solution like this when they don't exist. But when the sales team has a high quality list of contacts and they call and they introduce a pain point, they 100 percent relate to the issue or to the problem and they are interested in the engagement. And when they see the product, they are amazed and they buy. So the challenge that we had was let's enable inbound and even motion and inbound channels. We specifically picked organic or SEO, LinkedIn ads, and Google ads.
And we had two months to actually, to show results, to see if we could start generating bottom of the funnel MQLs, basically MQL conversions. It did not go well. Let's just say that. We generated maybe two or three MQLs from those channels and we were starting to see clicks on our ads. We were starting to see the traffic increase. The leading indicators were there.
We were driving in the right direction. The right type of traffic to the site, but they were not converting. They had no idea who we were and they, they, there needed to be more education and we needed to be more patient before being ready to actually just capture the bottom of the funnel demand. So when you're in a market like this, when we're in this case, it's not saturated, you're, you're like creating this new category.
It's a market that is not solution aware. It's not product aware. It will take time to really to really capture that demand through inbound channels. So definitely like knowing that and and and creating a mix of outbound with inbound and retargeting and the industry publications and the and trying to to identify those watering holes where you're right where the right personas live and consume content and engage.
Is really what you need to to prioritize and focus in order to to see results So yeah a lot of education to your question is needed in some cases It's really almost with with a more mature market It's it's almost a much easier sell just because everyone knows what the table stakes are and so you can say, you know It's so much easier to differentiate when everyone is starting at an awareness level seven where they know what the category is.
They know the solution type and you just need to put a spin on it or focus it a little bit tighter on an ICP. Versus the category, people don't even know what to call it. So how are they supposed to find you? So it takes a lot more. I mean, we call it building a market for a reason.
It takes a lot of time. But if you do it well, right, then you are the first, you're the first mouse and you get the spoils, but it just takes a long time to do. It just takes time. And I do think it's important that you focus on, you focus your marketing and the content that you create on very specific use cases, like very specific combinations that have features and what you can do with them.
So you are not like a null in one or too generic, too broad type of software that gets confused with other bigger players. So definitely going specific and trying to stay away from generic positioning is very important as well. Okay. Thanks so much, Silvia, for your time.
I appreciate it. It was a great conversation. Thank you for having me. It was great. I'm looking forward to listening to the episode. Me too, it's gonna be great. Okay, let's wrap up.
Thank you to Adriano Valerio for producing this episode and the Kalungi team for helping us make this whole thing work. And of course, you for choosing to spend your time with us.
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Thanks again.