In this episode of the B2B Brand180 podcast, Linda Fanaras interviews Andrew Seidman, co-founder and COO of Digital Reach. Andrew shares insights from over a decade of experience in designing full-funnel go-to-market motions for enterprises and startups. They discuss the importance of implementing a cohesive, integrated B2B marketing strategy. Andrew emphasizes the value of account-based marketing (ABM) and shares successful campaign examples, particularly highlighting a successful case with VMware’s Tanzu business unit. The episode also covers how to align sales and marketing teams as the critical first step for any new engagement.
01:34 The Importance of Integrated Marketing Strategies
03:48 Effective Tactics for B2B Marketing
07:25 Understanding Sales Cycles and Buyer Groups
10:10 Aligning Sales and Marketing Teams
13:42 Case Study: Successful Campaign with VMware
15:55 Rapid Fire Questions with Andrew Seidman
More information about Andrew:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-seidman/
https://digitalreachagency.com/
Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/
Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/
Linda’s Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/
Linda Fanaras:
Welcome to the B2B Brand180 podcast, a place where we focus on transformative strategies and innovative approaches in B2B branding and marketing. You’ll learn today how to make a 180 degree shift in your marketing efforts or actually complete reversals and brand strategies. So start now by making some pivotal shifts and groundbreaking moves that redefine how you position yourself in the market. My name is Linda Fanaras and I’m the host of today’s B2B Brand180 podcast. And I’m super excited to bring in Andrew Seidman. He is co-founder and COO of Digital Reach. And he has spent 10 years designing full funnel go to market motions for enterprises and startups. So, hi Andrew. I’d love for you to take a moment and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you.
Andrew Seidman:
Hey Linda, thanks so much for having me. I’m one of the co founders at Digital Reach. For now, 12 years, almost, we have been helping B2B companies create full funnel, go to market motions with ABM focus, but also demand generation, even PLG motions as well. I’m based out of Brooklyn, New York. I followed my fiance now fiance here a few years ago from the Bay Area where I lived and worked for almost nine years. Yeah, I’m super excited to be here and talk with you, Linda.
Linda Fanaras:
And I understand you’re a former high stakes professional poker player, which I thought was a great little tidbit about you that I did not know about. So
Andrew Seidman:
yeah, it is a unique, a unique piece of my background for sure. Did it through college and for a number of years out after college before I found my way here.
Linda Fanaras:
Awesome. All right. So today, what I really want to talk about is really building out and, and talking about integrated marketing strategies, how we really best tie together good websites, content CRM and a strategy that actually works. Something that’s. fully functional, this greased wheel thought process, this real integrated digital model. So I would love for you to start out by talking about what you think the value of having a strategy like this would be for a marketer or business owner.
Andrew Seidman:
Yeah, I mean, I would say, we came across this the hard way I wish we would have learned it more easily or, or sooner, but the the more common scenario that we would have is someone would come up to us and ask us to run their paid ads. we started originally as a paid media company and, there’s a bunch of questions we didn’t know to ask at that time. Like, how are you going to report on this? do you have the data to support proving whether or not this is actually going to work? do you have a creative organization or creative access that will provide really good ads or content that will be meaningful or useful for someone to drive towards, or even like at the top, do you have a brand that sits atop product market fit or that is competitive with other brands in your area? And so I think a common mistake that folks fall into is they really look for like a collection of these point solutions and
Linda Fanaras:
I
Andrew Seidman:
want the best paid social agency and I want to find the best branding agency and I want to find these different things without having a cohesive or central philosophy and how to do the whole approach. And so for us, we view that you, it’s just as important to ensure that your brand is going to hit the target or that you have good content to start new relationships in the upper funnel as it is to spend a bunch of money on paid search ads and do that really well and capture a bunch of high intense searches at the bottom of the funnel. Like you do need to do both to be successful in the longterm. And so I think that’s kind of just become my philosophy and our philosophy at digital reach.
Linda Fanaras:
So I don’t think you know, when our, when we talk about this integrated approach, I’m always thinking about all of the, I look at it like a hub and spoke model, Andrew. So we’re really driving traffic somewhere to the website. Maybe we’re using content, we’re using social media, we’re using a super strong digital marketing strategy. Can you talk a little bit about some of the tactics that you may have recommended to B2B firms that have worked really well and what that might look like?
Andrew Seidman:
Yeah. I mean, I think in terms of capturing or generating demand as a starting place, one of the most important tools that we have is something that we call internally, at least sequential retargeting, basically bucketing your audience. If you imagine like you have an audience, You’re starting with, let’s say that, you know, you have a certain product that’s going towards, I don’t know, like we’re just working with our organization right now that’s selling to marketers. So, you know, you’re going to work, this is marketing focused campaign. It’s the line of business that you’re going for, but then inside of that bucket, you have people at varying stages of awareness of their own problem and awareness of your brand. And so, LinkedIn is one of the most effective and best for doing this because it gives you both incredible targeting, like it’s the only. Since like self reported database, literally someone tells you, I am the head of marketing at XYZ company. Right. Like your next best option is like a, like a demand base or a six cents where they’re trying to like reverse IP lookup and like all this
Linda Fanaras:
stuff,
Andrew Seidman:
LinkedIn’s got this huge advantage and they’ve got a lot of pretty, they’re pretty mature ad. Platform. So what you might do is tactically setting up, like we usually use three buckets, an aware and aware and an engaged bucket. And then this is the sort of the really critical linchpin of it. We then match the content that we’re serving to where people are at in the process. And those buckets can have super clear definitions like. The top one has never engaged with anything. And the next one is like, okay, has been to our website. Maybe he has engaged in watch the video that we did. Maybe they’re on a list of people that we know have met at a conference or something. I don’t know. And then the bottom group is these people have filled out forms. They have talked to our sales team. Like they’ve done some things that are like really high in time, but then we can really align, okay. The top of the funnel, you guys are going to watch our video. We have a hype video. We have some like informational videos, like that kind of stuff. Middle of the funnel. Okay. We have some guides. We have some things you can download and digest some more deep and then are like webinars is a common one we might throw there. And then the bottom of the funnel is a real offer, a roadmap that is a money back guaranteed go to market plan. And we would never show that to someone who doesn’t know who we are.
Linda Fanaras:
True.
Andrew Seidman:
They’re never going to buy that. It’s going to be a waste of money. But tactically we kind of have split it up in this way that is really trying to speak to where someone’s at in the funnel.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah, that makes sense. Because if you look at it, if you break those three buckets down, you’re looking at number one, you’re engaging them in one way or the other. You’re either showing them a video, something that really piques their interest. It could be a multitude of different things, something that really attracts their attention. Number two, it sounds like you’re really focused in on educating them, you know, getting them to really understand whatever topic they’re after, providing the resources, the materials that help Build that knowledge and also build that connection. And then number three, that’s when you kind of go in for the offer to your point, where at this point in time, you’ve gotten their attention, you’ve educated them. Now you want to move them through that funnel and get them to that. That close cycle. So that makes complete sense. And I think that’s a great strategy. And that, you know, and, and how long do you think something like that takes if you were to try to move somebody through a B2B funnel? Is it, is it sector dependent? Is it is consumer versus business owner type? have you seen different sort of timeframes based on who they are, what markets they’re in? Can you speak a little about that?
Andrew Seidman:
Yeah. I think the sales cycles really vary a variety of different reasons, but one of them might be the target audience you’re trying to sell to. Like, if you’re trying to sell to a small business, for example, you’re very likely to engage the decision maker directly. Are the same person who’s doing the research on figuring out what tool they want to use to solve their problem. If you’re, so in that sense, your sales cycle can literally be sometimes like a day, like somebody sees your ad, they click on your thing, they go to your site, they buy your product, or they contact someone to buy the product, right? The and, and forward, it’s worth, there’s almost always some low hanging fruit that you might be able to capture, let’s just say like on Google search is a good example of this. Okay. Some keywords that are somebody typing in, I want to buy X where X is you can basically always have a profitable paid search program. If you only go after those types of probably not a ton of volume for those types of words, so you’re not going to spend that much money, but the I think the more common thing that we see with a lot of our companies, especially ABM clients are that they’re actually trying to engage like a buyer group of a large number of people who are trying to solve a very high value and very complicated problem. And so in that sense, the education is not just you and a decision maker. It’s actually you and maybe a variety of influencers. It is speaking to a collection of different pains, like. Maybe on a executive level, that pain is I’m missing my revenue targets, but maybe on a practitioner level, the pain is I can’t get the damn website to do the thing that it’s supposed to do. And so the being able to speak to both of those contingencies I think nurtures their, their relationship until you have a buying committee with enough momentum that you end up in like an enterprise sale. So. If that’s a multimillion dollar deal, which for a number of our clients that would like what the kind of things that they sell, those things might take several years to from initial first engagement all the way through to a 20 person buying committee. That’s going to then approve some 10 million purchase.
Linda Fanaras:
Right?
Andrew Seidman:
So there’s a pretty wide range, I think. And most organizations tend to know, we usually start off with a benchmark. So how long it takes. And then we’re, our mission is then to accelerate that. Like, how do we, how do we make this happen? More inexpensively.
Linda Fanaras:
So, when you’re dealing with sort of internal teams, it could be the marketing team or the sales teams. They’re often silos. So, and it’s always been a challenge, right? Trying to connect marketing and sales and then finance and how do those all two how do those, those two in particular work together? have you come across any. Tactics, any recommendations around connecting those systems to avoid those silos? Particularly in a go to market strategy.
Andrew Seidman:
Yeah. I will start off by saying that I think it almost always has to start at the top that the, some organizations foster a culture of collaboration and some foster a culture of competition. And I’m totally, totally sure which is better. In fact, organizations might, might be better or worse than the other. But I would say that the things that we see on a very high level. Are in alignment of sales and marketing goals where they’re on the same like competition over credit generally is is not super productive. I tend to find organizations are more successful when they have a shared revenue goal and often rolling up to a chief revenue officer, for example, as opposed to a babbling CMO versus a chief sales officer kind of thing. So that’s one, super high level takeaway. I think the, the other kind of maybe more tactical thing is there’s actually a bunch of space where there’s mutually beneficial conversation between marketing and sales teams that people sleep on. So I’ll give you like a really common example. We actually had this like example with a client where we had working with a marketing team and we, this was like last year, maybe, okay. And we’re getting nothing but good feedback from the marketing team. Like the MQL numbers are up, the traffic numbers are up. We think things are going great. We’re even, we’re like preparing to ask them for a case study on all the success we’re having. Out of the blue, the entire marketing team gets let go and sales gets moved over to be in charge of the relationship with us.
Linda Fanaras:
Oh, wow. Okay.
Andrew Seidman:
Wow. That’s interesting. Sales sits down and they say, you’ve never driven us one quality lead and we’re not paying for this. And the misalignment that was happening between the sales side of the table and the marketing side of the table was so dramatic and it could have been easily solved if we just like had a conversation, right? One of the things that we have introduced after that actually was just like a standing lead quality call. You spend 20 minutes with the marketing stakeholder and the sales stakeholder. And you just say do the leads look good? Are they coming through and they seem appropriate. And we could also do some education there. When people talk about lead quality, they often are talking about two different directions. One of them is, is this lead at the right type of company? And then the other one is, is this lead ready to buy? Right, right. So for example, Google driven leads, super ready to buy a lot. They’re going in there and they’re typing in, I want to buy product X, but they might be like the intern, or they might be like an SMB or they might be, you know, in the wrong geo or something like that. LinkedIn on the other hand, it’s like, Oh, this is the director of it at Fortune 500 company. That is a really qualified lead. And, but they’re also like, I am here to read a white paper, you know, they’re not anywhere near purchasing. And so finding that right equilibrium, we can help educate the sales team as to kind of where we are in the process and also get super valuable feedback from them, who they’re talking to, what’s effective, and also like messaging and talk tracks, like they offer the best messages. And if we can incorporate those into our ads, our emails, our organic meta information, like that kind of thing, it really helps, I think, you know, rising tide, float all boats kind of thing.
Linda Fanaras:
I’d love you to talk a little bit more about how you may have had put together a successful campaign. Maybe you could tell me what it was on and then the different tactics that you tied together to make that be a big success.
Andrew Seidman:
Yeah, I mean, I’m thinking about for and this is, there’s a case study for this on our website, but we did a lot of work with the very large corporation VMware and one of this, the case study is about one of their business units, a group called Tanzu and the we were, thankfully there’s an awesome company to be a partner with. So we were kind of brought in, in this integrated way where we were not just working on one side of the equation, but we were working on, the like we built landing pages for them. We built reporting for them. We built like we helped integrate their demand base for like an ADM movement. And then we also were running ads on, on a variety of platforms, basically all the paid social platforms and Google. The, the thing that made this really I think really successful was we had a super. Targeted audience, there was a very clear set of accounts and they were actually especially strict. They were like, if you’re not on this list, we don’t want to
Linda Fanaras:
talk to you.
Andrew Seidman:
This is even if you’re a lead coming in from a company that seems good, who wants to buy, like, doesn’t matter if you’re not on the list, we don’t talk to you. So we had this extremely narrow focus and we were able to come up with really, really crisp. Okay. Ours for the engagement. So we could say, we want this many matched leads as leads that have filled out a form from one of the master counts.
Linda Fanaras:
You could
Andrew Seidman:
say, we want this much account engagement. So we have demand based set up tracking on the account engagement. We know these, we know our account lists. We want to see these accounts increased by this much engagement. And we wanted to do this by offering this really personalized experience. So we would have like verticalized landing pages that were serving these really great experiences. And then we’d have like covering the zone with really valuable content. I would say this, this example is kind of like the, honestly, it’s like the model we use often for how to create a best practice campaign, which is that it was truly integrated. We had same goals for everyone. We had removed the silos from the equation. We had a sales liaison, we had all the things that we needed to be successful. And as a result, we drove a ton of mass leads. We drove a ton of pipeline revenue. And this was all in the run up to, ultimately VMware getting acquired and like the largest merger of all time. That’s awesome.
Linda Fanaras:
That’s phenomenal.
Andrew Seidman:
It was a a really big success.
Linda Fanaras:
Awesome. So I would love to I don’t know if you have anything else you want to share, but I’d love to ask you a couple of rapid, what I call rapid fire questions for our, I’m sure you’ve been doing this for 12 years, so I’m sure you have an answer. So if you could, you know, maybe your answers would be two to five sentences, right? Great to the point. That’d be awesome. All right, cool. So ready to get started.
Andrew Seidman:
Let’s do it.
Linda Fanaras:
All right. So what’s your biggest mistake in business? I
Andrew Seidman:
think we this is such a cliche, but we had a product a few years ago that we, Was super easy to sell and we thought that it would be super awesome for our clients. We, it was like a new version of how we were going to provide our services.
Linda Fanaras:
And,
Andrew Seidman:
We didn’t we weren’t proactive in the actual strategy or the service delivery in that product. Like it ended up being where like we kind of turned to the client and asked them, well, what do you want? To do instead of us saying, Hey, this is really the best way to go to market. Like we’re the ones who are the experts here.
Linda Fanaras:
Okay.
Andrew Seidman:
I think, I think the big mistake there was that we, we didn’t take a strategic leadership role in the engagement and we actually have a new product that is now designed to totally correct that issue. But I would say, yeah, like, You know, we do this a lot. We have experts, like we should take a role of leadership, I think.
Linda Fanaras:
Okay. So what do you tell your client that their first step should be if they engage with you?
Andrew Seidman:
We do the same first step for everyone. It is called a roadmap for us and it is a execution ready, go to market plan. And the reason we do it this way is because all the time folks will say, we want you to just go drive pipeline. Just go get this. Go get us opportunities and like we talked at the very beginning of this conversation, if you don’t have a way to report on stuff or you don’t have a content that will support it or a brand that’s off target or something like that, you can’t win. So starting from a really like crystal clear view of everything is really important because often like people think they want paid media, but they really want pipelines. Maybe it’s like the place to get pipeline is actually because you drop a hundred leads on the ground every month in your
Linda Fanaras:
CRM.
Andrew Seidman:
It’s like, if we fix that, that’ll be so much faster than if we spent a ton of money on ads.
Linda Fanaras:
Right.
Andrew Seidman:
And so, zooming out and remembering that, like, the answer is almost always just pipeline
Linda Fanaras:
and
Andrew Seidman:
trying to figure out the best, most strategic route to getting there. I think that’s a, that’s how we always start.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah. And what’s your top. Digital tip, would you say to a customer client
Andrew Seidman:
Google search is amazing at capturing buyers, but not a good tool for branding.
Linda Fanaras:
And my last question just for the our audiences. We talked about a B. M. A lot. Can you take a couple sentences and explain to them what is that and why is it important?
Andrew Seidman:
A B. M. Stands for account based marketing. And the really key difference between account based marketing and sort of traditional marketing or lead based marketing or demand generation marketing and so forth is the, that version applies to people or like focuses really on individual people, whereas account based marketing is focused on the account, the actual company, which in a B2B environment is, you know, who ultimately signs the check. Like it’s a company that’s paying the bill. And the, the kind of, I guess the important distinction here would be to You might get 20 leads. That all come through as like an MQL, but they’re all from kind of crummy companies and your sales team might spend all their time working on that. Whereas you might see 20 pre MQL people at a really good account all engaging and you might miss that if you’re not paying attention and instead you might want to go capture that giant account that has all those people engaging but if you’re not in an ABM mentality, you’ll miss it.
Linda Fanaras:
Well, thank you, Andrew. Thanks for coming on today. Really appreciate you. Joining in and sharing all your insights about digital and integrated marketing strategies. I would love for you to share how the audience can get in touch with you. So I’ll have you take it from here.
Andrew Seidman:
Thanks, Linda. It’s been a total pleasure to be here. Yeah, if you want to get in touch with me, feel free to shoot me a message on LinkedIn. Or of course, come visit our website at digitalreachagency. com. Happy to chat about anything and would love to explore our roadmap. If that’s something that sounded interesting to you.
Linda Fanaras:
That sounds fantastic. Well, thank you again. Thank you for listening into the B2B Brand 180 podcast. For more information, you can visit us at mill. agency or you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn as well and happy marketing. Thanks for joining us today.
