Mandy Hornaday: If you've ever felt like your marketing channels are noisy, your brand work isn't getting prioritized, and yet you're still on the hook to deliver pipeline, you're not alone. Hey everyone, welcome back to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Hornaday. And today we're kicking off with something brand new, our first ever live coaching series, where I sit down with real marketing leaders for an unscripted, coaching-style conversation. Our guest today is Bryna Dilman, a seasoned growth and demand gen leader who came ready with four big questions that so many marketing leaders are thinking about right now. How are roles evolving, and are generalists making a comeback, or is specialization still king in the AI era? Where digital marketing fits in a noisy world, and how to build trust and connection. Why brand work so often gets deprioritized, and how to make the case for brand and demand as a multiplier effect. And the go-to-market essentials, the foundational pieces every marketing team needs in place to grow with clarity. This episode is part coaching, part coffee talk, and it's packed with insights you can take straight back to your team. Let's get into it.
Mandy Hornaday: Hey, Bryna, welcome to Growth Activated. I'm so excited to have you here today.
Bryna Dilman: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to this incredible conversation with you.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, me too. First sort of coaching and coffee chat. I'm really excited about this one. And so before we dive in, I'd love for you to tell our audience a little bit about your background, some of your career story, and where you're at today.
Bryna Dilman: So I actually started in the nonprofit sector for many years working with large organizations, health charities, which I absolutely loved and really used a lot of the data to help me put together our marketing plans and programs and ended up getting recruited into one of the softwares that the nonprofit used because I am always constantly looking at research and where is the industry going and where are other industries going to ensure that we're never going to be left behind. We understand what should we be capitalizing on, etc. This tech software company thought that I would be a really great person for their product department, their product marketing, because I knew the customer so well. I worked in that for a little while, but ended up giving so much time and advice to the marketing side of the business, because that was my background and ended up getting moved into the marketing side of the tech software. And then from there, I actually was recruited a bunch of times to additional software organizations, worked for a bunch of VC backed small tech startups in the B2B SaaS space, and really have learned so much from working with really, really small, tiny teams to then moving to enterprise large organizations where not only is the team large, but also the customer and the customer journey for those sales are very different. So I've had a very interesting kind of introduction to the tech space, but I love it.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, wildly different, right?
Bryna Dilman: Yes, very different.
Mandy Hornaday: I did the opposite. I left a large, well, I should say I started at probably a small company of 50 million and then we grew to 750 million, which for me at the time felt very large. And then I went to like a 1 million in ARR startup and wildly different, wildly different. So it sounds like you almost did the opposite of that.
Bryna Dilman: Yeah, the learnings, right? Both ways, I'm sure is almost, yeah, shocking in some ways, but unbelievable for really understanding marketing for various sides of the business, which again, you can bring to any part of any business. And I think, yeah, it's nice to have those different types of experiences.
Mandy Hornaday: I'm so curious, what to you, what was the biggest difference between those two experiences that you've learned?
Bryna Dilman: The biggest difference is silos. So the bigger the organization, not only is the silos between marketing teams, but within other parts of the organization. And what was so incredible about being in the small startups is that you're so much closer to the product, the product roadmap and what's happening, which for marketing is essential to really understand the product, to be able to sell it. And when you're in such a large organization with product marketing, under marketing, and then product, and then product management, and then it just creates so many layers that just getting almost an understanding of the product was so much more difficult. And then working together as a marketing team to making sure that you're on the same page, driving the same bus to ensure that what marketing activities the company is doing reflects what you're actually trying to achieve as a business. And that, for me, was so different. What about you? Was it similar or different?
Mandy Hornaday: Totally. Yeah, I'm trying to think. I mean, I am a scaler. I love to scale and grow. So building was, I think I realized for me, building from scratch was not my favorite thing to do. I'm glad I was put to the test to do that and prove to myself that, after managing a large team that was actually doing everything, I still have it in me to do the work itself, which was good. But at the same time it was hard. It made me realize I'm an operator at heart, versus I guess a builder in a way, but I completely agree with you. The company I went to, both of the co-founders were previous mentors and colleagues of mine and the head of product was like one of my best friends. So we were really tight and then the CTO and co-founder brought in the CFO who he had worked with many times. So we were a really tight team. And I will say to your point, I was more integrated into the business than I had ever been at the large company. Just even understanding the health of the business, the business metrics, I learned so much about capacity planning and how a CFO is building like a tops down plan and how to pair that with the marketing plan. And there are amazing learnings for me that I've been able to take back to larger companies and insert myself to make sure that marketing is really a business leader at the end of the day, but wildly different for sure.
Bryna Dilman: So and it's so funny because the scaling, sometimes I like to do it from scratch. So I've worked with organizations where they had no website, they had no pipeline, they had no CRM. And starting it from scratch is humbling and there's definitely capacity issues and challenges, but it's also maybe for me and my personality, it's like, I can still do this and I can support team members because when they don't know what to do or they get stuck, I know how to do it because I've done it or I've just done it or I'm still supporting them because it's so small. So it almost makes me feel like, okay, I can still do this right now. So I like the challenge of both, but it's, yes, so interesting, so different.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think it actually transitions really nicely into probably your first question. So I'll let you ask that and then we can keep going on this.
Bryna Dilman: Yes. So again, I really want to talk to you about how marketing roles have evolved. You know, 10 years ago, many marketers, I'd say, were generalists. One person was running email, events, content, ads. But today, teams are split into specialized functions. We have performance, paid media, demand generation, which is the leads and pipeline, marketing operations, content, brand, product marketing, analytics, et cetera. What do you see good, bad, whatever for this differentiation again from what it used to be years ago?
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and even now I feel like there's so many people questioning whether generalists will make a comeback now that we have AI, right? And generalists are being even more powerful. And I think to me, there's a time and a place for generalists and specialists, and both are incredibly important. It actually ties in nicely to what we were just talking about. I think generalists work really well for smaller companies. And as you grow and as you mature and as the functions need to mature and expand, it's time to bring in specialists. One of the things I've noticed, I should say, in terms of positioning ourselves. So rather than positioning ourselves as a specialist or a generalist, I think what works really well is when we position ourselves as who we help and what we help them with. And so not necessarily the how. I think the how is what's always changing about marketing. Is it PR that matters today? Is it events that matters tomorrow? Is it social that matters? But I think just even as a hiring leader myself, right? When I'm building out a team, I want to know that someone matches the organization, like where we're at at that point. So it sounds like you're really specialized in B2B SaaS startups, right? And you're probably specialized in taking a SaaS startup from a certain amount of revenue to another amount of revenue. And that's your sweet spot. And then if you take it even a little bit farther, I sort of look at umbrella categories. Like to me, there's four major umbrella categories within marketing, right or wrong, but I group them as growth and demand, brand and communications, product marketing, and ops. And there's so much opportunity within that. But to me, it's more important to say I help this type of organization grow from this stage to this stage within one of those four categories. And then the how can be flexed, but I think it's more about being a strategic partner right now than about being a generalist or a specialist. Does that resonate with you?
Bryna Dilman: No, I really, I like that. And I like having marketing fall under those buckets. Because again, depending on the size of the team, you could have one person or you could have multiple people or you could have multiple teams. I think the interesting part is again, when you're growing up in marketing and you're doing marketing, in the past, you're mostly a generalist. I love the opportunity for leaders to take courses and to learn more about the specifics of each role. But what I see or what I worry about sometimes for organizations is they're going so specific and the leader really has to be that generalist, almost like a T-shape to know like, yes, the leader might be specific in demand or whatever, but as long as they have that breadth of knowledge for product, for demand, for content, for even the customer journey, then you really have somebody that can make sure that you're all integrating, you're talking, you're working together. Because the challenge I found sometimes is when you have one particular role, brand's just writing content for content. Well, the demand team needs to understand how is that content being used for campaigns, for life cycle marketing campaigns? How are we using that in events? And when you have a team that's kind of so specialized, they don't necessarily understand the functions of the other team and therefore what they're doing doesn't integrate and therefore you have completely separate marketing companies almost working as one team.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, totally. And something you said made me think, so I certainly have my areas of specialization as a CMO that I lean into and those are my superpowers and my strengths. But one of the things I agree with you that you've got to be T-shaped enough to know enough about the overarching function. But for me, it's with the end goal of surrounding myself with experts. So I need to know enough about the function to know that the person I have in place is a trusted expert and that we're aligned. From there, they can do their thing and we can all make each other look great. But I'm a big believer that I'd rather have smarter people around me to make those decisions. But I need to know enough to know that they are the right person in that seat. The other thing that you were sharing, I think for me, what I would say we should all be over indexing on in terms of skill sets right now is of course AI and automation, right? Whether you're a generalist and you use that as a weapon to be a more dangerous and powerful generalist or whether you're a specialist and you are really able to use it to go 10 times deeper, right? We all need to be using it. I think that's a given. But the other thing I think in terms of how do we stay relevant and valuable in the new era of AI and automation within those areas, I think it comes back to, you're right, like the human side of the leadership, the collaboration and the partnership. How are we as leaders bringing inter-departments together and then also cross collaborating with other departments? Because AI can't do that. AI can't see the bigger picture and understand the problems the way that we do. And it's funny, I see this. One of the things that I do often for clients is this 360 degree marketing assessment. And I interview C-level execs within the organization. And I'll probably do anywhere from 10 to 15, sometimes 20 interviews. And if I dump those interviews into ChatGPT and say, tell me what the key findings are, tell me the key problem statements, my perspective is so different. It's like they will pull it out, but it'll be basic problem statements. It'll be the obvious stuff. It's not the critical business problems that need to be solved. And then that other stuff will kind of follow. And so, yeah, I mean, that's such a, one, it's like job security for all of us. But two, it just forces us to up level in terms of how are we viewing the business strategy? How are we viewing and collaborating with our partners and like the human side of marketing. But the skill sets themselves, I think those will continue to ebb and flow.
Bryna Dilman: Yeah. And again, it's making sure also as that T-shaped leader, those that are so focused on performance or brand or content, how do you ensure that they learn the other parts of the business? Because if they want to be that leader one day, you want to make sure that that leader has that breadth of knowledge and be able to understand how can they actually learn everything again? They don't need to be the specialist in every single industry, but be able to understand how to even push them to that next level. It's just so interesting because it's very different than what it used to be years ago. I mean, B2B SaaS wasn't really as big then. And yeah, using AI for all of this is so needed. And there's so many conversations now about AI taking over marketing. And it's so interesting because it's who's gonna put it into the chat, who's gonna, like there has to be the human side of it. Just even think about logistics. So it's a really interesting conversation. But I love putting things into ChatGPT, especially websites. What does this company do? Just tell me as if I'm a fifth grader. I think there's like a TV show, talk to me like a fifth grader. And then you're like, okay, why aren't we saying that, right?
Mandy Hornaday: Totally. Yeah, it does a really great job telling you what you're like. Yeah, exactly. Showing you the perception. And then you're like, that is not what we want to be. That's not who we want to be. And one of the things you were sharing earlier about how do we elevate the team, you know, sometimes I often feel like I'm a broken record about this and it's the most obvious thing, but you would be so surprised how many marketing organizations I walk into and the people who are executing don't know what the business goals are. And they actually don't have unified marketing goals. And they don't understand how their role specifically maps up to that goal. I mean, in a lot of instances, people don't even know the marketing budget that they have at their disposal. And I'm such a fan of transparency and over communication because if I can get the team to your point, like it's not about, to me it's not about telling SEO what their SEO budget is. I'll tell them that, but I'll also create transparency around what our entire budget is and what we're focused on and how that maps to goals because you wouldn't believe sometimes team members, one, they have empathy for it. Then they realize, I'm a part of the greater team. And sometimes people even say, well, so-and-so may actually be able to use my budget better than I can, we've got some overage, if that's gonna help us achieve our goals, let's move it there. And if they don't have that understanding or visibility, they can't be a part of the bigger picture. They can't be a part of the bigger team. And so for me, like that's the easiest thing we should all be doing as leaders is just open up, be more transparent and connect the dots for people on how they're a part of the bigger vision.
Bryna Dilman: Yeah, I've heard you speak about that before and it's amazing because that is where, I love that, it breaks down silos right away when you can share this isn't my budget. This is the budget for marketing. And again, together looking at where you are in terms of your metrics and great, we're already above or we're on par with this particular goal, but this is a little lower. Hey, we've got some budget over here. Can we move it? Usually that's the leader that does that. But I love how you talk about the whole team really seeing that transparently and having those discussions together. And that's where I think a marketing team, big, small, whatever, can work together to achieving those metrics if they're all understanding of one budget, one goal. It's so helpful.
Mandy Hornaday: Good. All right, what else do you got for me?
Bryna Dilman: Okay, so again, there is so much noise everywhere. The role of digital marketing in a crowded space, audiences are skipping ads. Again, this is an opinion, LinkedIn feels oversaturated. I've read studies from P&G, Chase, Uber, eBay showing cutting digital ad spend didn't hurt their outcomes. So love your take. Where do you see digital fitting best now? What's your take?
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I feel all of those things too, just anecdotally. And even as I'm building Growth Activated from scratch, it feels noisier than ever. And I have these conversations with myself all the time, but to me, in the face of all the noise and saturation, to me there's two major priorities. And one is how do we build trust and credibility in this noisy market? I think that's more important now than ever. Everyone can use AI to drive content, but like how are you and your brand really building trust and credibility? And I'll talk about a few things within that, but the second one is connection. The human connection is gonna be even more and more important. Whether we're leveraging digital channels for connection or not, I think the way in which we use digital marketing has to evolve and it has to evolve with two of those purposes front and center. And so if I go back to building trust and credibility, you've probably heard or seen these stats, but people are trusting the LLMs to make recommendations more than they are their friends and their family right now. I just saw Accenture released a report where 72% of consumers are leveraging AI and 30% trust AI over their friends or over their colleagues to make decisions. So certainly, LLM optimization is high on the list in terms of how we can be building trust and credibility in the marketplace. But even below that, one of the things that was super interesting to me, I saw the CMO of, I think it's Kandji. I may not be pronouncing that correctly. They're a software development company. And the CMO was talking about how in order to build trust and credibility for their brand, they launched a completely different content platform off of their brand. So they didn't want it to feel like a company blog. But they have this original, it's on its own domain, own name, own brand. And that's where they're publishing a ton of content for their IT and development community. And the LLMs, the craziest thing that's happening, one, the content engine, it sounds like it's performing really well for their audience. But two, the LLMs are now referring to it as a source of truth and as a publication that is really trusted. And then that's offering a lot of brand value back to Kandji, because obviously Kandji is talked about and is a topic of conversation in this content engine. So that's just one example. It's wild. I think the things that we could be doing, so to me it's again, digital's not dead. We just have to evolve. How can we focus on more things like digital PR and content and social that is really putting forward trust and credibility into the marketplace in these unique ways. Who knows whether the LLMs will figure that out. It reminds me of SEO when you always figure out an SEO hack and then the algorithm is changed to eliminate that hack. But we should be trying. We should be creative. And I think the second thing, again, the connection, the human connection, maybe it's not digital, maybe it is, but even just the idea of creating community and events are going to be really powerful, whether they're virtual or whether they're in person. But how can we bring people together and have conversations to break through the noise? And how can a digital director encourage and support that to be done? So I don't know if that helps. I think it's just how the old tactics, you're right, are not working or breaking through the noise, but how can we pivot what we're doing to meet our buyers where they're at.
Bryna Dilman: Yeah. We live in a digital world. People work from home, we read digital newspapers, we research online. So I don't think digital is dead, but it's such an interesting conversation to fully understand how do you break through that noise? And more isn't necessarily better. It's quality, it's really making sure you're communicating in the right way. And yeah, just your take, I think makes so much sense and it's prioritizing what makes sense for your business, but it's also figuring out not that spray and pray. And what's so interesting is when you're just pushing tons and tons of content and ads out there in this huge space and you're hoping that they know you, your ROI is going to be way less than if they do know you. Again, how do you spend money on brand without that ROI direct connection is interesting. But yeah, again, when you see these large companies cutting budgets, it's not necessarily cutting digital out. I think one of the organizations found that they were posting on a ton of websites that just had no connection to their brand. So they reduced the amount of websites that they were on, but were much more targeted. Again, other organizations, I think it was one of the apps, were on a whole bunch of fake apps. So once they cut that out, again, it was more calculated of who they're communicating to. And then again, making sure that your content makes sense and making sure it resonates and that it is solving a pain, but again, not just pushing it all out there so that it just gets ignored. It's just a very interesting conversation today in this very busy marketplace where B2B SaaS businesses are popping up everywhere almost, you know, daily a new business, a new company, a new series A, B, C. And especially with AI, I feel like it's very similar the terminology, an AI based enablement X or it's dynamic organization, similar lingo. So figuring out the right language to the right company with the right target in the right spaces doesn't mean digital is gone. It means being more calculated. But yeah, that's my two cents.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. And brand, absolutely. And I think it's a great point that brand is more important than ever. You used to be able to get performance and be able to run lead generation ads and it worked and you didn't have to have any brand ads running. And now, that is not the case. We have to be more focused and differentiated than ever before, for sure.
Bryna Dilman: And that was almost my next question, you know, like brand awareness versus demand gen. You know, we know strong brand awareness drives sales, yet many companies focus only on those leads. So yeah, I'd love to dig into your take on why brand building seems deprioritized.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah. I mean, certainly there's the obvious answer. I think that it's hard to track and measure. It's almost like we've over-corrected. We went from, you know, early marketing days where nothing was trackable. We were just doing a bunch of activities. No one really knew the outcomes of marketing. And then we kind of swung the other direction where it was like, we figured out how to track a lot. So everything must be trackable and everything must prove ROI. And if it doesn't, you know, it's not worth doing. And I really feel like we're kind of course correcting right now. I see a lot of brands course correcting and realizing brand is still very important, by not doing brand we've actually probably hurt ourselves. We may not be able to quantify how much we've hurt ourselves, but we anecdotally know that we've hurt ourselves. So it's interesting. I'm happy to see the pendulum seems to be settling back in the middle of it. One of the things, there's this really great report, I'll have to send it to you and I'll link to it in the show notes. But it talks about this brand times demand is actually a multiplier effect. It's not an addition. And the report shows there's a 90% increase in your performance marketing and your demand marketing when you also have brand advertising running. And when you don't, in some instances, it can actually decrease your performance by like 45%. So the swing of impact is really wide. And that is something I've actually used to talk to CFOs about and actually say, hey, I'll use incrementality as a way to measure brand, right? The unfortunate thing about brand is you have to have it running for long enough to actually see, you know, you can't just turn it on for a month and then see those types of results. It's probably more of like a six month thing minimally. But a lot of times, I mean, CFOs are data-driven people. They understand industry stats and benchmarks and I have not encountered a CFO that will disregard industry data. I think just leaning on, in terms of investing in it, knowing we know that we need to, but I've seen success in terms of communicating the output with leveraging industry benchmarks. How have you seen success with running stats?
Bryna Dilman: I love what you said. It's being able to communicate to the right person who owns that budget, again, having that relationship with that leadership and making sure you're able to communicate clearly. I think recently there was a benchmark that came out with reports. They interviewed a bunch of B2B SaaS marketing organizations. And they talked about, I think companies that didn't hit their growth and revenue goals last year spent about 31% of their budget on demand gen and 25% on brand awareness. But in contrast, companies that exceeded their goals and had it the other way around spent 29% on brand and 23% on demand. So again, recognizing this is a small group of people that they interviewed in the B2B SaaS marketing space, but recognizing when you spend more money on the brand, you actually see longer term revenue goals being hit with demand. And yes, also, I think there's a ton of stats that say long term your actual conversion rates decrease because you're investing in brand. So you're spending less to convert those companies and those businesses because they know you, you don't have to explain it. And that takes a longer time, especially depending on the enterprise business that you're selling to. Even small and medium now really want to make sure that you're reputable, that you are going to be here, right? I'm going to invest in you, I'm going to spend money. Is this business going to be here in six months and two years? Right? So there has to be that investment in both and showcasing the data to the right leader. I love what you said is the best possible case. It depends on the type of business. Again, in those really small startups, if their goal is to exit, IPO, to sell, to be acquired, they don't necessarily have that runway to invest in brand. And I think that's the challenge that has to be communicated. It's like, it will happen, you know, but give us the opportunity to showcase how it can be better for long term for us to sell at a higher rate, all of these things, right? But yeah, it's an interesting conversation.
Mandy Hornaday: Totally. I also think we sort of do ourselves a disservice in a way by splitting out brand campaigns versus demand campaigns. To me, it's one campaign. If we've got a segment that we're really trying to break into or expand within, like run a full funnel campaign. And so it's almost built-in brand awareness and equity at the top. And you almost don't even need to break it out in a way, in terms of reporting back to execs and this idea of storytelling and how can we get the story to resonate, I always report on what's the overarching segment we're trying to break into and what kind of movement did we make? So whether 500 of our target accounts saw our ads, sure, that's brand, but it's a part of us breaking into this segment, which is the business goal. A business usually wants to sell a new product or break into a new geographic market or whatever it may be. And so let's just combine them. Why do we have to separate it out when we report back to the business? That's one thing. And then the second thing is certainly it goes back to the business goals of what does the CEO really care about? What does the C-suite really care about? And often rather than us packaging something up as a brand campaign, a lot of times they might care to be a market leader. How can we reframe the language that we're using that really hits home with them? And then make it a market leadership campaign. They just need to know what the end game is and how we're progressing towards that end game. So some of it is, I feel like how we package up and talk about what we're doing to the executives too.
Bryna Dilman: And as marketers, we should know how to do that.
Mandy Hornaday: We would, we should, but we often don't think about the internal people as personas that we need to learn about. Every leader in function is their own persona. They care about their own things. They have their own way of working and showing up and idiosyncrasies. And we should be taking the time to learn our internal personas as much as we do our external personas.
Bryna Dilman: I agree. Great advice.
Mandy Hornaday: This has been so fun. Do you have anything else for me? What's top of mind for you right now?
Bryna Dilman: So I think even just everything we've discussed goes back to one of the first things that I have been thinking about a lot lately is back to basics. Like what are the essentials almost every team should have in place knowing every organization is different, whether you're B2B, B2C, what do you need to have in place? And I'm not talking people, I'm not talking roles or teams, but kind of the basics of marketing 101 should be in place for a lot of these organizations, just for everyone. This is not, I love talking about the basics, because once that's in and in place, you can play around with really cool campaigns. You can look at what budget you have to see where you want to test markets, channels, et cetera. But yeah, love your thoughts on what are those essentials every team should have.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm totally happy to share and honestly, you probably have more experiences with this than I do because of small startups and going in and building. But what I will say is I've walked in and have assessed a ton of organizations, mostly a hundred million or higher. And so even what I'm going to say right now still sometimes blows my mind that I walk in and they don't have these foundations in place. But to me, I call it the go-to-market essentials. I've actually packaged this and I tell organizations, you do not pass go until you have these few things. And they're really obvious things, but I'm happy to run through them. And then I'd love to hear your perspective on what I'm missing. For me, I think first and foremost is your target list, your target list that's actually based on your ICP and personas. But so often sales might have their lists and sometimes it's a bottoms up approach where they've built their own and it's not actually based on an ICP or target personas. And then marketing is broadly targeting ICP stuff. And to me, I'm like, no, no, let's get on the same page. What are the 500 accounts, the thousand accounts, the 10,000 accounts, whatever it is that makes the most sense for how transactional your business is or what your average deal size is? So to me, I want the target list, number one. Number two is messaging. The amount of people who don't have some sense of messaging, and I think about it in sort of two, there's some critical brand messaging and then there's the solution messaging. In my world, I call it solution messaging because I'm on the services organizations side, but obviously in the tech world, product marketing messaging. But the amount of people who are trying to run campaigns without having some level of basic messaging of what we're trying to put out into the marketplace and what is sales saying, what are we saying, how do those stories come together? Are we telling the same story? What is customer success saying? So it doesn't have to be fancy or formal, but what are those basic points that we want to get out into the marketplace that we're all aligned on? So that's number two. Stop me if these are like way too obvious here.
Bryna Dilman: No, I love it. No, and yeah, no, no, no. I mean, I'm sure somebody out there listening is like, I told you we needed to have this.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, I'll keep going. Number three for me is an offer. It could be a content offer. It could be a free trial. It could be anything. It could be a discount on your product, but what's the why now? What are we doing to get in front of buyers that's going to trigger them to do something, take action for us now? So a lot of people don't have that, and I don't care what the offer is, but like why should people engage with you? A lot of teams don't have that or can't answer that question. And we're just doing like this blanket broad outreach and then not seeing anything from it. And then I would say number four, and probably the last one on my go-to-market essentials list, is some type of clear journey. Do we know how we're going to get the person to the meeting or how we're going to get the person to the close deal? I'm not talking about automation. I'm not talking about having it be a fancy journey, but is there a clear step-by-step process that's actually going to get a new prospect in and get them what they need and close the deal? And again, a lot of people don't have that. So none of this stuff has to be fancy. The amount of times I walk in and we're spending a ton of money or we've launched all these demand gen campaigns and we can't answer these questions or sales is running and doing a ton of outbound and we don't have these basic fundamentals in place. I wonder why performance isn't there.
Bryna Dilman: No, I think you completely nailed it. Like to me, the opportunity is ensuring you have these really easy pieces in place. ICP is the biggest. I think going into a business or if you're in a business, especially for marketers, what are you selling? Really understand whether it's service, product, whatever it might be, you might find those nuggets that you don't even realize we're not talking about that actually makes so much sense to the business. So really understanding what is your ICP and make sure everybody is on the same page. And I think one of your discussions, you said something which was amazing is that talk to the sales team and put together, you know, what is an MQL? I know MQLs are not as valued as SQLs, but that's how you get people in the door. And before marketing decides on what that is, is this the right customer? Is this the right target audience industry? Is this the right size of business for attracting marketing? Yes, we're calling it a marketing qualified lead, but is this a qualified lead for the business? And are we all on the same page? So understanding at your business, making sure you're aligned with the teams who are selling it and really understand your customer pain points. So you're not just selling a product or service. What are you actually doing that's making a difference? Because everybody has a platform or a tool that solves this. And if you look at this market, they all sound similar. What do your customers say? So really going in and speaking to customers, understanding those nuances. And for a marketer, that's a dream to really be able to sell the pain you're solving. Again, product marketing, content, storytelling, brand, fits in, but the pain you're solving is what is your differentiator and how you do it is also right. Maybe you are the same as everybody else, but your differentiator is you're faster, you're quicker, 24/7 support and service. There is a differentiator, that is why your business has customers and figuring out what that is, is the basics for me, for the business, along with what you said.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And as you were talking, one of the cool things about my experience that I am so grateful for is when I went into the B2B SaaS startup, we were selling to CMOs. And so I was that persona and it really opened up, blew up. Before I was selling to CMOs, I was selling to CTOs. Like, I don't know who CTOs are. You know, I learned a lot about them, but I'm not that persona. And there was something so magical about doing marketing for myself that really encouraged me. It really blew open how I view marketing today because we should be learning all of that. Sometimes we may not have an interest in learning. I mean, I'll be the first to say I didn't have a huge interest in learning like a CISO versus a CIO versus a CTO and what they all care about and what they don't care about. And, you know, at some point you just kind of gloss over on it, or at least I did. But selling to CMOs was such a special experience for me because I became a product marketer, where I had never really been before, and I was able to be successful at it. And so anyways, that's neither here nor there, but what you're saying, I really resonate with because I hadn't taken the time to go that deep until I knew the persona we were selling to. And then it became natural and it was like, of course I should be learning these things and doing these things and helping.
Bryna Dilman: And you can find what really matters, right? And that is again, all the discussion that we've had, how you stand out, how do you break through the noise? How do you showcase your organization over the others? It's because you truly know that ICP.
Mandy Hornaday: The other thing, just in terms of the basics, and you brought up MQLs, which it's like the necessary evil in some ways, but in terms of elevating ourselves as marketers, and maybe this is controversial, I don't know, but I always try and focus on the meeting as the main KPI. If I can't get people to a sales meeting, then something's wrong. Either they weren't totally qualified or sales didn't view them as qualified or whatever it may be. And frankly, of course we should be looking at things as closed won opportunities and revenue and stuff, but there's so much between a meeting to close that we don't have control over, and we can nurture and we can enable that to happen. I would just challenge people to think about how do we get people to the meeting. And whether or not you oversee the BDR function, they are an extension, they are the hybrid that brings us together. And so how can we make sure that we're driving in quality and really like a business metric that matters in my opinion?
Bryna Dilman: I love that. And it's interesting because I think sometimes that MQL incorporates the meeting and not the meeting, but you are right. Looking at the conversions, even from meetings to moving down the funnel to closed won is way higher than sometimes the MQL, but there's not necessarily always a definition in the general marketing metrics about the meeting held. I mean, I think we talk about it, especially in the BDR and the sales teams, but not necessarily the marketing. But I really love focusing on that because when you look at that conversion rate, it is usually, depending on the company that you're working with, way higher once you get that person on the phone and you can explain the value of the business. And usually that converts much higher. So figuring out, yeah, how do you calculate that meeting held as your standard, as like the first almost point of entry.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. I mean, I just was doing an assessment in an organization two weeks ago and I was talking to the director of demand gen and said, well, talk to me about the performance. What are we seeing? Talk to me about volume, talk to me about quality. And he said, well, 80% of our leads make it to an MQL, so we are crushing it. I was like, well, how many of those make it to a meeting? And he didn't know the answer. And that's alarming because when I talked to sales, they said, well, all the MQLs, first of all, we don't even know what an MQL is. So they didn't know, right? They weren't a part of the definition. But they said, second of all, it's from the daycare down the street. It's not from our target enterprise account. So, you know, again, there's this like natural, if we as marketers really challenged ourselves to figuring out how do we get people to the meeting, I think we would just be better marketers too.
Mandy Hornaday: And then the other thing I was just going to say is when we were talking about the ICP, sometimes agreed, it is like so critical and so many organizations don't have it. And what I have found in terms of helping the organization understand the importance is more so to talk about the outcome of an ICP. And what I mean by that is the target account list. The target account list is the outcome of an ICP. And most people understand the value of needing a really strong target account list, but they don't necessarily understand the value of seeing like this pretty PowerPoint that has images of people. So I always try and think about like, when we talk about buyer personas and we talk about ICP and messaging and all these things that sometimes live and die on PowerPoint decks, like really think about how is that information gonna get activated in a way that executives understand and buy into. So let's focus on the outcomes and the activation and then do the work that we know we need to do to get there. But the amount of people who tell me, we don't have time to focus on ICP or buyer personas, they're right in a sense in that the PowerPoints just live and die and they never get activated. So why would we spend the time to do it? Right?
Bryna Dilman: But yeah, no, it's the basic. And even if it's a list and not a pretty document, but an actual goal to understand these are the companies, these are the businesses, this is who we're going after. That to me means your sales team and your marketing team are working from the same page and that they're not interpreting things differently. And it doesn't have to be pretty, branded in a Google document. It just has to be, this is who we're trying to engage with for our business. And yeah, that's the basics. You have to have that to be able to actually grow your company.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for this conversation today. This was so much fun.
Bryna Dilman: Thank you. This is so much fun. These are things that I've been thinking about for so long and I'm so happy that you are able to talk through them with me. Your experience, I think, is just really, really helpful. And I think they're very on point with what's happening in the market today. So appreciate all your insights. Thank you.
Mandy Hornaday: Good, good, anytime, anytime. Well, if people wanna connect with you, have a mentorship, a peer-to-peer working session, whatever it may be, how can they? Obviously on LinkedIn, I imagine.
Bryna Dilman: Yes, connect with me on LinkedIn, Bryna Dilman. I would be more than happy to connect and chat, meet up and talk marketing all day long.
Mandy Hornaday: Amazing. All right. Well, I'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much.
Bryna Dilman: Thank you so much, Mandy.
