Welcome to episode forty-one of the SaaS Backwards podcast, where we interview CEOs and CMOs of fast-growing SaaS firms to reveal what they are doing that's working, and lessons learned from things that didn't work as planned. 

You can listen to the full episode directly below via Spotify, or visit SaaS Backwards on Buzzsprout or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Lead generation isn’t going away, but it needs to evolve.

Cristina Daroca at Riverbed Technology talks about how they’re generating, measuring, and communicating demand generation for today’s customer.

Edited for clarity

Ken Lempit, Host:
Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CMOs and CEOs to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Cristina Daroca, who leads global demand and Americas marketing for Riverbed Technology, a SaaS that helps IT teams to deliver exceptional digital experiences for employees and customers. Cristina, before we dig in, could you just tell us a little bit more about yourself and the company?

Cristina Daroca:
Of course. I've been in SaaS companies doing some sort of demand generation or film marketing for the last 10 years. Now I'm with Riverbed and we help IT teams to help employees and customers with their digital experiences. If you think about when you go to work and your apps are crashing, your device is crashing, or the network is not working, all of those things, we help IT teams really help anticipate those problems and help your employees and customers really have a better experience there.

Ken Lempit:
There's measurement and reporting of the behavior of these applications, right?

Cristina Daroca:
Exactly. We're now playing in a new category, which is unified observability, which considers all the visibility, all the data, bringing data from a lot of different places and making sure that you understand what's happening. Up until now, all those things were separate. The network was one thing. The device is another thing. The apps are another thing. We actually pull data from all of those different places and help the IT folks really understand what's happening. Where is the problem? How can we solve it?

Ken Lempit:
It's interesting--this idea of a comprehensive view of things seems to be a trend, not just in this monitoring and health kind of space for the apps, but just generally. It seems like in such an interconnected world, being able to understand what's happening at a larger level is harder and yet more important.

Cristina Daroca:
Absolutely. If you think about it, our IT environments have gotten even more complicated in the last couple of years with folks working remotely or working from anywhere. If you think about the IT tickets that these guys are getting, it can escalate very quickly. Before when you were in the office, you would just bring your laptop to the IT person and they could help you right there. But now we're all at home or working from whatever. It gets a lot more complicated. 

Ken Lempit:
Let's dig in and talk more about demand generation, lead generation, the revenue side of your marketing, responsibility and experience. Why don't we get it right in with lead generation? It's sort of the redheaded stepchild, the orphan in modern marketing. But I'm not so sure it's going away too soon. What about you?

Cristina Daroca:
I don't think it's going away anytime soon. What I think needs to go away is how we treat leads. A lead comes in because they downloaded an asset, a white paper, or something. You don't want to jump on the phone and annoy that person. You really want to understand their journey and where they are before you actually call them or try to get in touch with them. I don't think the leads are the problem or the lead funnel is the problem. I think that is still there. We're all still doing Inbound-- leads are coming into our website. It's really about, how do we evolve that and how do we make sure that we're creating the demand so that the leads come in and are really the leads that we want to get in touch with?

Ken Lempit:
I think it was iinsidesales.com that did a whole bunch of research years ago on “speed to lead” – calling within five minutes of the form fill or they've forgotten who you are. Maybe we don't want to send our BDRs right on the phones.

Cristina Daroca:
Right. That's absolutely true for your high intent needs. If someone is saying, "I want to speak with sales. I want a demo," yes, absolutely get in front of them as quickly as you can. We all know that the first vendor to get in front of the customer is the one driving the narrative. They're the ones telling the story. You're probably going to be able to influence that deal a lot faster. But not all leads are created equal. Your asset downloads, your content indications, all of those programs, you shouldn't be calling all those leads in five minutes.

Ken Lempit:
But they're still important for driving opportunities. I guess it's in the nurture where these leads become something. Maybe those are the leads we nurture to some greater intent and engagement with us.

Cristina Daroca:
Absolutely. I think especially for SaaS companies and B2B companies in general, we need to look at it from an account perspective. We're selling accounts. The decisions are going to be made in a committee and with a buying center. The one lead downloading one piece of content might not be that significant. But if you then go, look at the account, and see a lot of different leads that are downloading the same type of content, the same type of product content, or something like that, then like you're saying, let's nurture that relationship. Let's make sure that... Maybe we don't hit the phones and start calling them, but we can put more content in front of them. We can make sure that we're tracking what they're doing to the point where they do hit the point where they want to speak with sales.

Ken Lempit:
Here's a really good point. This might be the instigation of ABM on an account. If they're not known to you in an ABM space, you might say, "X, Y, Z is starting to touch our content. Let's build out that account map and start putting them in an ABM motion if we've got that available to us."

Cristina Daroca:
Yeah. I always talk about ABM working with demand generation very closely. To me, they go hand in hand. They're not two different functions or two different teams in the company. They have to work together because the demand team is really generating the demand, starting that relationship, starting to put that content out there. Then by the time you actually get that account engaged and you see, like I was saying, more people engaging with your content, then that's where your ABM motion can start. You can start to do more research on them and start to move them into either an ABM program or a little bit more of an ABM motion. Absolutely, they go hand in hand. It's a little bit of how the journey goes for your buyers.

Ken Lempit:
Makes a lot of sense. The thing we discussed in our preparation was the difference between demand generation and lead generation. I always love to ask people how they view the divide there. I'd love for you to share with our listeners your take on the difference and the handoff between.

Cristina Daroca:
I think lead generation is the old way of doing marketing. 10, 15 years ago, we all bought into the inbound methodology, which was great at the time. We started to have more automation, more technology, and we could actually see who was coming to our website. We could capture some of those leads or some of those names. 

But now marketing has evolved. We all see that, like we were saying, hitting the phones for a person who just downloaded a piece of content might not be the best use of our time. That's where demand generation comes in. I think lead generation is more the capture piece. We are capturing the leads, but you need to do demand generation first, meaning you need to really understand your buyers. You need to understand your market. You need to also understand what's happening in the world right now.

It looks like we might be going into a recession. That's going to impact how your buyers buy. Put all of those things together in your content, on your website, and really educate your market. 

Demand Gen leaders talk a lot about having a point of view--what is the point of view of your company? How do you differentiate? All of that is the demand generation. You're doing all of that to create that demand and have a place in the market. Then by the time the folks are starting to hit your website, are starting to really understand how you could help them, and they end up asking for a demo or trying to speak with sales. Then that's your lead generation and how you're capturing the demand. Again, I don't think lead generation is evil. It is a part of demand generation. We need to be paying attention to both.

Ken Lempit:
Everybody seems to have a little different take on it. To me, the lead gen is finding people who are there now, ready to get into the sales process. However you get them, they become a lead. I'm almost indifferent how we identify them and engage with them as long as we capture that opportunity that's in the market. 

Then our demand gen is this stuff that we're doing to be ready, like being ready for when you're ready as a client to consider a solution. Whether we have to educate you about the problem, educate you about the solution, in your case, you want to create a category, this idea of this much larger view of what's transpiring across your environment. 

That's a problem awareness kind of demand gen--make people aware that all these things are happening that might be outside their current screen. Yet, now there's a solution, so problem, that awareness, problem and solution awareness.

You had mentioned to me that you've had some issues with your sales, CRM, marketing, and friction that's created by the integration there. Can you kind of dig in a little bit for us? I think marketing and sales automation is something we all have to live with. We all have different flavors. It might be interesting to hear about your experience and what you're doing there because I thought that was a nice deep dive.

Cristina Daroca:
Absolutely. This goes back to trying to sell to accounts and seeing the account as your market. Unfortunately, Salesforce wasn't built for account based marketing. It was built 20 to 25 years ago when it was all about the leads coming in. Within Salesforce itself, it's hard because you have the leads, which are not matched to an account. You have contacts who are people that are matched to an account. 

Ken Lempit:
You're not a person until you're associated with a company and an opportunity, right?

Cristina Daroca:
Exactly. I've seen a lot of companies have trouble with this. Your leads end up just floating in your system, but they're not really attached to anything. It's hard to identify them. Unless you have a very strict process where everything just gets matched and gets added to an opportunity or something like that, you end up with a bunch of leads and you're like, "What do I do with these?” 

Even with the systems that we have, they create friction. You have to overcome that and really understand, what are the other pieces that I need here to make this work for me? There's tools out there to match leads to accounts and do all of that automated in the process, in the background really. But the system itself is creating that friction sometimes.

Ken Lempit:
If the Salesforce.com product management people are listening, here's an opportunity. Create an ABM play within the salesforce.com object universe. I think that would be pretty smart.

Cristina Daroca:
Yes, Salesforce—please fix this. That's part of their business. They have created add-ons and other things that you can add to the platform to make it work for those situations, but if you just have Salesforce itself out of the box, it doesn't really include all of that.

Ken Lempit:
I think that the nature of the complex sale becoming more and more collaborative means that the account-based play, whether it's a sales play or a marketing motion, and really both should be walking hand in hand here, is more and more important. Unless you're selling a sub $50,000 a year solution, you're going to be in a collaborative decision environment. We need automation that's going to support that on sales and marketing.

Cristina Daroca:
Absolutely.

Ken Lempit:
Let's try and make this a little more human. I think that breezed past it there, that in the traditional Salesforce data model, you're not really a person until you're tied to an opportunity. But what are the ways in which we can humanize marketing? 

I do a fair amount of writing for clients and try to humanize these solutions. I'm writing things like, "Connecting blah, blah, blah to people." That's become my go to starting point in the creative process. But I think it's a longing for wanting to humanize marketing, humanize these companies. How are you approaching that aspect of the work?

Cristina Daroca:
That was made very apparent to us during the pandemic because our buyers are supporting their employees under customers, which for the better part of two years, couldn't go into the office. They couldn't get their problem solved. 

Our messaging really shifted to being more human, "Guys, we know you're getting all these tickets. We know your load is just off the charts. You can't really manage all of this." Honestly, all of us, when we get frustrated with IT, we yell at the IT person. It's not their fault that they can't manage everything. 

Absolutely, we're really trying to understand, "How can we help you on a human level? You want to be good at your job and you want to really excel. Right now you're in this situation where you can't excel because you just don't have the tools." 

Our messaging has shifted again now (whether there's a recession or not) as the economy's slowing down. We see a lot of changes in the world. We're also trying to bring that into our messaging and really make it feel like we're not just here to sell you stuff. We really want to help you because in the end, we all know people buy from people, and we need to connect with them on a human level.

Ken Lempit:
How are you gaining these insights into the problems of your customers and prospects?

Cristina Daroca:
We speak with them all the time. Obviously, we get a lot of feedback from our sales team and our customer success team. But even some of the marketing team, we try to speak with customers as much as we can. We have a customer advisory board with some of our top customers where we can get a lot of insights from them. We're now putting together a few in-person events in the Fall. We're going to have folks there talking to the customers. It’s as simple as that--not easy, but simple.

Ken Lempit:
I feel like that's the drum we, as marketers, need to keep banging on, that the customer insight is fundamental to the work we're all trying to accomplish. I don't know about for you, but for me it's a yellow, if not a red flag when leadership pushes us away from speaking to customers. I think that's really important. I just wanted to underline that. As well, we had another recent podcast episode where we talked about customer advisory boards as a great way to engage. Can you just dig in a little bit with us? Is it one customer advisory board you're running? Who's in it? What are your goals in running that CAB?

Cristina Daroca:
We are evolving our CAB because Riverbed went through a merger at the end of last year. We've had two companies come together, so we needed to evolve that and really build it again. But I'll tell you what we were doing before the merger when I was at my previous company. We had a customer advisory board of 15 people, 15 customers. They were some of our top customers, but not our happiest customers either. I think you need to have a balance there and really understand, "We can't just get all of our happy customers because then we don't get really the feedback that we need." 

What we did was we would meet quarterly. We would have our executives and one person from each of those customers get together. We would go through an entire day of sessions around our product, their feedback, what they thought, what they were using, the challenges they were having. Those sessions were just so amazing in terms of learning from our customers and really understanding their challenges. Usually, even your top customers are talking to your customer success team, they might be talking to your product team, but everybody else in the company's not really getting that exposure. 

Whereas, during these events myself, for example, our CMO, some of the marketing folks, we were able to attend and facilitate those sessions. That is a really great way to get in front of your customers and really learn from either your biggest customers or some of your best customers.

Then the other piece at Riverbed, they used to have more of a technical advisory group. It was more like the practitioners, so not the executive level, but the practitioners. That's also a really great way to understand your customers because those are the folks using the product. They're in it day in and day out. They really understand. They are the ones having the challenges that you're trying to solve. Again, getting them together, listening into the conversations between them, not just you talking to them or them talking to you. It's really about them networking. You can learn so much from them just speaking to each other.

Ken Lempit:
It's pretty clear you got product and company feedback and use case information. Did you also get any personal insights into the pressures of these executives?

Cristina Daroca:
Yeah. That's the great thing about having a small group--people get vulnerable and share stories. "This happened the other day. How have you guys fixed this?" Or, "Can someone help me with this other thing?" You really get to know the people, like you were saying, and you can start to humanize that a lot better. We did get a lot of really great insight and personal stories from those.

Ken Lempit:
What's your perspective on the risk of putting customers in the room, especially if you're opening it up to people that aren't 100% happy? How do you view that risk?

Cristina Daroca:
That was something we thought through very carefully because you're right, someone could come in and disrupt the session because they're unhappy or they don't agree with what you're doing or how you're doing it. But we thought it was important for us to hear those comments also and just understand if that was one unique customer who didn't agree with something or wasn't happy about something, or if it was across the board. 

I'm not talking about a customer who's unhappy because someone didn't get back to them or something like that. It was really about, "This company has been asking for this feature or this type of thing." It's just not on our roadmap for whatever reason.

It's really good to have those customers come. You can actually expand on that and explain, "We hear you. We know what you're saying. We understand your challenge. Here's how we are addressing it," or, "Here's other things that we're doing to also address that challenge." You have to be very careful. You obviously don't want to bring people who are unhappy and are going to be ranting throughout the session. But I think it's important to really hear the feedback from everyone.

Ken Lempit:
I think there's a couple of things I wanted to touch on here. One is the way you handle that customer in front of the other customers. It demonstrates your commitment and ethics as a business, how you're going to run the business. 

Cristina Daroca:
Exactly.

Ken Lempit:
I think that's really important in terms of bringing people to a vision that you are customer driven. But also, I think for C-suite leaders who are reticent to put their customers in a room for fear of that interaction, I think we have to make sure they all know these folks are sharing their opinions anyway. 

Cristina Daroca:
Exactly.

Ken Lempit:
They're on G2, they're in their Slack groups or Facebook groups talking about your solution and their problems anyway, especially if you've got a lot of problems. I think we need to, as marketers, help our leadership to have courage that a CAB could be a great way to either accelerate all the things that are good or really hear what's not as good and get a handle on it. The risks are very low, I think, especially if you're thoughtful in how you put those groups together.

Cristina Daroca:
I absolutely agree. You have to trust that your customers are a professionals too, so they're not going to come in and rip you apart, hopefully. It's really what you're saying, they're going to be talking about you anyway, outside of your CAB. You might as well have it in-house.

Ken Lempit:
I think the idea that they don't have a way to find out or share their opinions, that's very 20 years ago. 

Cristina Daroca:
Absolutely. 

Ken Lempit:
There's plenty of opportunity to find out about you as a vendor. Let's talk a little bit about how you measure success and how you want your business to measure success. Any recommendations you have about changing what the C-suite is measuring? I can't tell you how many times we get into the situation where we have the demand generation mind meld. Then the next thing I hear is, "How many MQLs are we going to get next month?" How do you manage that process of the rethink of the KPIs?

Cristina Daroca:
This goes back to what we were saying about lead gen versus demand gen. For those of us who have been doing lead gen for a long time and your executives are used to that, the board is used to that, the sales team is used to that, you can't just turn it off one day and hope that things are going to be fine the next day. 

I've been reading a few posts on LinkedIn lately, people saying, "There's some predictability with your lead gen, so you at least have that." As you move on to demand gen, you have to walk that balance and be careful when you turn it off.” Then the next month, you're saying, you don't have MQLs. I definitely think we all need to take that journey and move towards more of a demand gen motion, but you can’t turn it off overnight.

For me, what we should be measuring is meetings, opportunities, pipeline, revenue. But your leads are still your leading indicator. If you see how many leads are coming to your website to ask for the demo to us, to ask to speak with sales, all of those high intent leads, those are still leading indicators for the rest of your business. I think you still need to track it—it’s debatable whether you should share those results with the board executives, etc. But again, if you've been sharing it like that for years and years, you also can't just stop sharing it because then the next question is, "What is this new report? I want to see how many leads we’re generating.” 

Ken Lempit:
"What happened to my leads?"

Cristina Daroca:
Right. It is a fine line. But I think we need to, like you're saying, educate the executives, the board, everyone across the business in terms of, "What are the real indicators that we need to be looking at?"

Ken Lempit:
This “real indicator” is a great path; meetings, opportunities, pipeline, and revenue. We have a new acronym, the MOPR. That'll be our KPI.

Cristina Daroca:
You made it up.

Ken Lempit:
That'll be our KPI set, the MOPR. But seriously, I think as an executive, a meeting sounds a lot more tangible to me than a marketing qualified lead. Somebody had a meeting that was of value, so we're reporting it. That meeting or series of meetings created some opportunity. We can start to put a number on it. Then it gets into our pipeline. Right now it's a qualified deal. These are far more intentional things to count, KPIs to measure, than the number of website visits, clicks, or downloads, which we have clients in that world. They're still in the world of website visits, clicks, downloads being measured. Is it possible to segment part of your business and say, "This is my vision. Folks that are addicted to the lead gen, I'd like to show you the difference." Is that one way to introduce it in a change management framework?

Cristina Daroca:
Yeah. The folks at Cognism have done a really great job of this. What they say is, "Start by separating your funnel." Not all leads are created equal, like we said, so separate the funnel between the high intent demos, speak with sales, etc. versus the rest of the leads that are just browsing, researching, downloading content, but not really high intent leads. Then if you separate those, you start to see your conversion rates are very different. That's when you can start to prove, "Hey, board, executives, this is the actual high intent people that are hitting the website. They're asking to speak with us versus the rest. Yes, they're still there. We can still track them, but they're not going to hit a meeting right away."

We're very lucky because we have the team of BDRs sit under marketing at Riverbed, which I really love because we work with them very closely. Our field marketers work with them very closely so they can all get together every week. They review, "What's happening?" Certain campaigns, certain events, all of that, they really track all of that very closely. 

But I think that's where it starts, separate your funnels, start to see the high intent versus the non-high intent leads. That is where you can start to build that business case and build that narrative to really move into more of a demand gen motion. But I think for awhile, if you are still stuck with lead gen, you're going to have to report both for awhile. Like we said, we can't just turn it off overnight.

Ken Lempit:
Sure. If you're the new marketing leader and on day 10, you say, "We're not going to report on leads anymore," you might not get to day 20, right?

Cristina Daroca:
Exactly.

Ken Lempit:
That might not be the way to manage that change of perspective.

Cristina Daroca:
Absolutely. 

Ken Lempit:
This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. I think we got some insights to share with our listeners. If people want to reach out to you directly to learn more about Riverbed or your perspective on demand generation, how can they get you?

Cristina Daroca:
I'm on LinkedIn, Cristina Daroca. You can find me there.

Ken Lempit:
Perfect. Likewise, I'm on LinkedIn. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please do so. We're available wherever podcasts are distributed. Cristina, thank you so much for making this a great episode. Look forward to speaking again soon.

Cristina Daroca:
Thank you so much, Ken.

Thanks for listening to the SaaS Backwards podcast brought to you by Austin Lawrence Group. We are a growth marketing agency that helps SaaS firms reduce churn, accelerate sales, and generate demand. Learn more about us at www.austinlawrence.com. You can email Ken Lempit at kl@austinlawrence.com about any SaaS marketing or customer retention subject. We hope you'll subscribe, and thanks again for listening.