Stories Strategies, & Smarter Marketing with Delilah Adrian
Summary: B2B Marketing Dialogue: Stories, Strategies, & Smarter Marketing with Delilah Adrian
In this engaging episode of the Clarity Digital Podcast, host Al Sefati converses with Delilah Adrian, an enterprise growth consultant at One Nine Five, a demand generation agency under the Agent3 Group. The discussion dives deep into the nuances of B2B marketing, touching on demand generation, sales and marketing alignment, and strategies for driving business growth.
Introduction
Delilah shares her background, explaining her transition from mental health services to marketing, where her skills in psychology and relationship-building significantly contribute to her work. At One Nine Five, she focuses on helping mid-market and enterprise-level companies grow through demand generation and account-based marketing (ABM) strategies.
Demand Generation vs. Lead Generation
Delilah defines demand generation as the process of creating awareness and interest for a company’s products or services. Unlike lead generation, which focuses on collecting contact details, demand generation involves educating potential customers and building trust. This multifaceted approach includes personalized messaging, storytelling, and content marketing to guide customers through the sales funnel.
Challenges in B2B Marketing
The discussion highlights the complexity of B2B marketing compared to B2C. In B2B, marketers often target specific accounts and personas, such as decision-makers and influencers within a buying group. Delilah emphasizes the importance of identifying and engaging with an ideal customer profile (ICP) to streamline marketing efforts and improve ROI. She also introduces the concept of the “dark funnel,” where marketing activities occur outside of traditional tracking methods, such as word-of-mouth referrals and untracked sharing of content.
The Role of Intent Data
Delilah explains how intent data plays a critical role in B2B marketing. Tools like Apollo.io, ZoomInfo, and 6sense help identify signals that indicate a prospect’s likelihood to purchase. By triangulating and verifying data from multiple sources, marketers can prioritize high-quality leads and reduce wasted effort on low-potential prospects. She underscores the importance of refining data quality and implementing processes to ensure campaigns are more targeted and efficient.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
A recurring theme in the conversation is the need for better collaboration between sales and marketing teams. Delilah notes that both teams share a common goal of driving revenue but often work in silos. She suggests that regular communication, shared tools (like a unified CRM), and clear definitions of lead stages can bridge this gap. Aligning these teams ensures a smoother handoff of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) to sales-qualified leads (SQLs), ultimately improving conversion rates.
The Evolving Marketing Funnel
The podcast explores the evolution of the B2B marketing funnel, moving away from a linear model to a more dynamic approach. Delilah emphasizes the importance of nurturing leads through tailored strategies, understanding customer intent, and creating meaningful touchpoints. She highlights how modern marketing ops and sales ops teams can play a pivotal role in managing this complexity, ensuring leads are appropriately nurtured and converted.
Personal and Professional Insights
Delilah shares her aspirations for 2025, focusing on continuous learning, professional growth, and personal priorities like family and travel. She also discusses the global reach and customer-centric approach of One Nine Five, emphasizing their commitment to delivering high-value work and maintaining strong client relationships.
Closing Thoughts
This episode offers a wealth of insights for B2B marketers, from the importance of intent data and demand generation to strategies for improving sales and marketing collaboration. Delilah’s expertise and passion for marketing shine through, making this a must-listen for professionals looking to refine their B2B strategies.
Listeners can connect with Delilah on LinkedIn or visit www.oneninefive.com to learn more about her work.
Transcription
I’m excited to host Delilah Adrian, an enterprise growth consultant at One Nine Five, part of the Agent3 Group. We explore the world of B2B marketing, diving into demand generation the importance of aligning sales and marketing . Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting out, this episode is filled with valuable insights and strategies. Let’s dive in.
Welcome, Delilah . Oh, thank you for having me. Of course. Thank you for coming to our podcast if you don’t mind introducing yourself and where you work sure. My name is Delilah Adrian. I’m based in Florida and I work with one nine five.
I am an enterprise growth consultant. So we are a demand gen. marketing agency under agent three group. And so what we do is we work with companies mid market Mainly enterprise that are trying to grow focusing on abmx Scale programs or need to utilize demand gen to help increase awareness and of course, drive revenue and drive new opportunities.
And I’ve been in this, in the marketing space specifically lead gen for 11 years now. How do you like it. I love it. I really enjoy it. What is it that you like about marketing? What you do? Is that the people aspect of it, or is that it? Being able to help people or what is it?
It is about, it’s about the people obviously. My background prior to working in marketing and advertising was in mental health services. I did a lot of work, helping people but I’ve always been interested in advertising as well. When that became emotionally Draining,
I made a switch, and now I get to help people in a different way. I think it’s really cool to marry the psychology and the things . That I learned about building trust relationships and problem solving and putting all those skills together really help and I get to actually make an impact that’s, I think, more measurable.
So I do enjoy it. I got into marketing from computer science, I realized there’s a lot of psychology . Whatever experience you had at your past career, it’s helping you at marketing, right? Oh yeah, definitely. Even more so today with the personalization that we’re seeing people are wanting things to be a little bit more human centric these days.
So I lean on my past learnings and understandings of human psychology and sociology and how our brains work and understanding a little bit about decision making. Definitely comes in clutch for sure. That’s awesome. And you did mention demand generation or demand gen.
If you don’t mind for those of us that don’t know what that is or how different is from lead generation. If you don’t mind giving us an explanation of what it is, that would be wonderful. Yeah that’s a great question. I see it trending often demand gen has all these different definitions, right?
Overall, it’s about driving awareness and telling your story to people that might not know exactly who you are. All the different things help get people into the funnel from. Top level awareness to, sales ready. Driving demand is almost a science, but also with art as well with crafting messages.
So it can be a little complex. To define it, but yeah, absolutely. It’s really about brand, at the end of the day. I agree with you. It’s really hard to define every time I tried I didn’t do justice to it. Because I was missing something talking about demand generation to me, it sounds like this is mainly for B2B companies. Yeah, sure. Our main focus and demand gen when working with B2B companies is to help them combat, all the noise in the ecosystem.
Whether it’s a security company an it company or an HR company, there’s. Not just one of them out there. There’s a lot of big players. There’s a lot of, mid sized players and a lot of them do pretty much this, similar things, right? And so it’s about standing apart getting out there and educating Your ICP about are giving them education, giving them, case studies, giving them information that’s going to help them make their decision.
Sometimes people don’t know they have a problem. So that’s when you start at the awareness stage of the funnel with, some content. Then, you continue the process of educating them communicating with them and speaking with them about who you are, showing up in the right places at the right time with the right messages that’s, what people are trying to achieve in B2B.
You provided a lot of information that we need to talk about more, but let’s just talk about B2B marketing what it is, like, how is it same or different from other type of marketing, like B2C or DCC? What does it make B2B marketing unique and what is it not, what is it has in common with other type of marketing channels or disciplines, I should say.
I think one of the key differences between B2B and B2C is with B2B, you’re going to know who your customer is or who you want that customer to be whether it’s, a list of accounts that you want to go after or, similar lookalike accounts specific personas obviously, which type of roles within organizations they typically know who their customer is, but it’s just about, paving the way to get in front of them, stay top of mind, stay in front of them, guide them down To eventually, have your sales team close them and bring them in as a customer so I think that’s probably one of the big differences, it’s. definitely more broad with B2C, right? But with B2B, it can get a little bit more complicated for sure. Talking about strategies, you mentioned a buzzword there, ICP, if you don’t mind explaining what ICP is and where does it play in B2B marketing stages.
ICP is just, ideal customer profile. Every, marketing leader, they should know, obviously, what that is. And, it can be a list of people. It just depends on, your organization and, what product or services that you offer. For example, maybe maybe my ICP is going to be other marketing leaders.
It’s going to be demand gen directors. It’s going to be marketing managers. It’s going to be, but then also, I know we’re going to get to this eventually people in the buying group, which is like the main. Manager content managers, people that are in the ICP. Those are the people that you want to speak with.
Those are the people that are going to be the end users or decision makers relevant for the products and services you provide. And those are the people you want to have conversations with. Those are the people that truly matter at the end of the day when it comes to Providing the solution product or program you have available.
You brought up the concept of buying group. I just came back from a conference where they said buying committee, which I think I like buying groups more because committee means there’s a committee that’s meeting regularly and making decisions where group means, Hey, just it’s more informal
today, buying decisions are not, they’re not really made in the silo anymore. It’s not, the CRO is just going to hear about the product, understand the product, decide that they want the product and just sign the check and not really talk to anyone. It’s going to be almost like a community decision these days.
The number of people in buying groups is increasing. You can have 10 people in a buying group. You can have 19 people in a buying group. It depends on the size of the organization, but you can have, five to 19 people in a buying group that are going to be it. Different stages of the buying cycle.
So it’s just becoming so important in B2B to to target those in order to get faster wins and you’re going to need to get buy in from those people, obviously as well. That’s awesome. Let me ask you a question. I’m an agency owner and some of our clients were.
They want to buy certain tools for their marketing. Sometimes they ask have you worked with this tool? I recommend them. And sometimes I say, I don’t know. Sometimes I say, yes. Sometimes I say, no, they’re too expensive or doesn’t do what you want it to do. Am I part of that buying group?
Or am I just an influencer in that group? As an external vendor. Yeah, you’re becoming an influencer in that mind as well. So yeah, if you’re a trusted advisor, then I would say, yeah, definitely. And I think you mentioned something about account marketing, when a lot of account marketing strategies that happen, is it just going after certain individuals within that company, or is it worthwhile to also explore lookalike audiences?
In that case, I could be targeted by that advertising too, is that correct? Yeah, there are a couple of different things you can do. Like I said, it just depends on the organization. Let’s say you’re a big fintech company and you want to just work with the largest of the largest banks.
You might just look at accounts and lookalikes really won’t matter at that point because the size of the deal and the opportunities, so that might make more sense. But if you’re a software company and you’re trying to grow and scale the business, then yeah, sure.
Lookalikes might definitely come in handy if you’re trying to build out a target account list and looking at things that, Resemble what has been working for you in the past. Yeah, that’s great answer. You did just mention a term intent data. I think that’s really big in B2B marketing. It’s a little bit easier. With B2C e commerce, because the intent is basically people looking for your product, we work with B2B and B2C clients, and I think B2C, the intent data is you still have to do some work, but it’s figured out a little bit more, in B2B, there is understanding and segmenting intent data.
Data is very important. If you don’t mind elaborating on that a little bit and maybe how you go about it at your organization. I think, a lot of organizations their sales teams their SDRs, their BDRs, their marketing teams, they’re utilizing some form of intent data, whether it’s from, Apollo IO Xema Info Cognizant Sixth Sense or Demand Based.
There are a lot of tools out there. One thing that we do as an organization, because we do have an insight team to help our clients. more strategically target because it just makes so much more sense to target people that, are showing intent signals and demonstrating, through their behaviors and activities that they’re in market, having that information is helpful because you can drive down, waste of spend on people that are not so likely to convert, you want to target people that are more likely to convert. So it can be, a smarter investment, is there a perfect, remedy or secret sauce?
I think it all goes into, how Organizations are utilizing it and putting it into play. It’s quite fascinating because it goes back to that psychology, background and identifying, the trends and what’s going on.
What kind of piece of information would they need next to keep moving the ball down the field? For us, sometimes, just utilizing one source of information is fine. But we like to triangulate information and cross reference, and verify. Verification is very important because we want to make sure that you’re working with the best data.
If anything, just go into those campaigns with a lot more confidence that you’re going to get some really good things out of it. Some of the tools you mentioned while they do a good job and I want to give them credit for what they do, I it definitely needs further nurturing, I’ve noticed some of the contacts are outdated or the person is not working there anymore.
The email doesn’t work we’re going to spend time and resources reaching out to that person, either cold outreach or targeted advertising, but it doesn’t do us any good if that person isn’t there anymore.
So what are some of the steps you guys take at your organizations to make sure that intent data is refined more? Is it a more proprietary software you have, or is it a bunch of things you do? Yeah, I don’t necessarily work that deep in the house, but to my understanding what we do, like I said, is we’ll use multiple, quality sources.
When you can triangulate that information cross reference and check different sources from where that came from I think you’re increasing the quality of that information so much more.
I think that’s where a lot of people have problems, right? You grab a contact send an email and then they’re not there anymore. You check their LinkedIn and they’ve moved on to somewhere else. So you have the wrong business email.
There’s definitely problems with software and technology for sure. But it’s still a really valuable tool. If you have processes in place where you can use it more strategically and use the information in a smart way.
And double check, triple check, make sure that you’re working with the best content and the best information. Got it. We are actually debating right now, even for our own agency, if we should filter out free emails or not, the Gmails and personal emails.
A lot of professionals use a personal email to download, let’s say, ebooks and stuff like that. What is your opinion about that? Would you recommend filtering, out personal emails like Gmail or Yahoo from your database and just focus only on business emails? Or is it a, case by case basis?
I’m not sure about that part. I might download some things on my personal email. And, maybe as if things are going to progress to next levels, then so I say my initial feedback would be maybe not to completely do that.
Gmail is just so commonly used we have this thing on our phone that automatically fills in our email address.
So that could be part of it I think, with all of the autofill information. I don’t know that I’d discount it completely, but that is a good question you brought up really good points. In fact, my linkedin is not even connected.
To my work email because I don’t want to get spam everything’s gmail right now so that’s a good point maybe down the road, When it comes to nurturing, that could be something you could be looking into.
Talking about nurturing, it reminds me of the marketing funnel. It’s very complicated in B2B when we draw a funnel, it’s usually has this, It’s like linear waterfall, but it doesn’t quite work like that in B2B . And I think it was a folks at your company at the last event introduced a concept that had never heard dark funnel.
And I just wanted to talk about that a little bit. What is today’s B2B funnel like and what is a dark funnel? The dark funnel. Yeah. Notice that’s been coming up. It’s just where you’re not going to be able to necessarily track all of the behaviors and the sharing of, your white paper or a case study.
It’s just where things are happening. And it’s great because word of mouth is. Honestly the best referral ever so that’s happening, but it’s happening in an area where people aren’t going to be able to track that. It’s not, necessarily a trackable download or, click on the website.
There’s a lot of conversations that are happening that are not being tracked. Things are happening in there and decisions are being made and people are being influenced. I’m curious to hear your thoughts. I just came from a bunch of conferences and there was a lot of personal networking
there were some leads that came out of that and you could say that was part of a dark funnel, but you could also track to see what led up to that dark funnel, right? If I have custom data, if we know that I attended a conference because I had to go on their website and buy it, buy the ticket.
And then a year later. We had a client that actually happened to go to that conference and you can put two and two together and say, Hey, it’s a very high possibility that happened at the conference. So I think there is a manual analysis. And that you can attempt to analyze the dark funnel, but it’s not exact science, right?
There’s a lot of guessing and statistics and estimation. That’s just part of who we are as humans. We are not digital beings, right? So we are offline. We are, unless our phone is with us all the time is listening to us and spying on us.
There’s a lot of stuff happens. So connecting just using your logic to see, hey, did this happen, and then also understanding what portion of your leads are customers and coming from that way. So you can replicate what did I do? Like you can go about it.
Deductively Hey, we got this client. Where did it come from? Oh, this client XYZ I met at XYZ conference. Oh, okay. So conferencing works for us. So that’s an example of dark funnel. There was no UTM parameters. There was no clicks or impressions, but it was a very simple conversation.
And I think that is very important for B2B companies, in my opinion, to have that. ongoing conversation and data analysis. Now, having said that I run a smaller boutique agency. We do work with bigger clients, but we are smaller ourselves. So it was a lot easier for me to figure that out, but for larger companies, that part of the,
thing is that part of the activity is usually done by sales teams or biz dev teams and marketing team is doing something else. Something that I see a lot happening to B2B companies is that the marketing teams and sales teams aren’t very integrated. I wanted to see if you have any opinion about the whole marketing and sales collaboration and enablement.
Oh man. Yeah, that comes up. It seems like the sales and marketing relationship. At the end of the day, they’re all working towards the same goal, to drive revenue. They want to grow. They want to bring on new customers, new logos. And the marketing team their job is to create the demand, and then the sales team is to lock it in and bring in those new opportunities and close them. It does come up often. At the event we were at I was sitting at a table at lunch and just listening, and it definitely was something that came up quite a bit they want to solve that problem.
Absolutely. They want more alignment between the teams. That way they can all, get to the finish line together and have more success. I think, communication is so important. For alignment and any relationship, right? Sure. Having good communication. I think that is really good that the sales team they’re working with people.
They’re having conversations with them every day and being able to give that feedback to marketing should be very helpful, right? Yeah. There’s a lot of things. That can definitely be done. To help that
repetitive problem in b2b because it has been something we’ve heard a lot this year People want to resolve that problem. Yeah, that’s going to become even more complicated as The company gets larger because the personal interaction may be nonexistent. Before launching my agency I used to work for a really large company.
I never saw the sales people and I was the in house one of the many marketing managers in house. We knew who they were, but we never talked to them. They were in a different building. They didn’t come to the office. This is pre COVID era. They were always on the road attending trade shows.
We had an idea. They’re attending this trade show, that trade show. We didn’t have a unified strategy on messaging and any of that. And I think a lot of that is, has to come with the higher ups, CMOs and CROs and that, that is a CRO is one of the new Nor C level titles.
I believe it stands for chief revenue officer, and that’s their job to connect sales and marketing together. And you can’t ask sales to do things that are not good at, marketing, cannot ask marketing to do sales work, but there is a, there’s a gap, and I think needs to be filled in one thing that I think was helpful.
At that organization, we used to have two or three different CRMs marketing had HubSpot, the sales team had Salesforce, and having a unified tool could Help a little bit. So we, yeah, even as much as we liked HubSpot, we ended up ditching it in favor of Salesforce.
And that helped a little bit. Seeing the data from leads and acquisition it was a good insight for us to see what’s working, what’s not working. But yeah, like you said, this is still it’s, and it’s different for every organization too,
there’s a lot of. moving elements in every company. So it’s something that B2B marketers have to continue You know, having to deal with
just create awareness. Hey, our sales team and marketing team are not integrated as much as they should be. What can we do to solve it? I think that’s the first step and then everything else will come after. For sure. I think, like I said, communication, if they’re able to have like regular meetings and talk about what is marketing, trying to accomplish right now.
What are some campaigns that they’re doing sometimes just having an understanding of, what’s going what’s the pulse what’s the messaging. And then also understanding what the sales team is dealing with I think that can help everyone be on the same page.
And like you said, working in two different CRM sounds a bit complicated if you have to track, the signals and, the journey it’s Like you’re speaking two different languages. So you can’t do that in marketing. We need to be on the same page. Communication is key, we marketing can’t hand over MQL, as it’s single or double touch and just say, go call them and go set up a demo now.
A lot of people I’ve heard, they’re upset that they’re not calling enough. And like I said, everyone’s going to have different types of problems, but just maybe having better definitions of, lead stages and what is the next step to take with that lead to continue to nurture them because you have to match energy.
You can’t jump, too hard on somebody, you’re going to scare them off. Think about how we act if we just go on a website and then sign up for something. And the next thing we know, our phone’s blowing up off the hook. And I have four missed calls and two text messages trying to set something up.
And I’m like, hold on. Like you’re coming on way too hard right now, like back off a little bit. It’s a dance. But I think matching energy is really important. So being on the same page is going to be key for that to happen. Yeah that’s really good point. Another that companies have for this, that they have marketing ops and sales ops, basically get the lead from marketing and then vet it out a little bit before they pass it to the other department.
And I think that could work for some organizations. It doesn’t work for every organization, depending on the size, The challenge I see is that marketing and sales have slightly different goals. Sales, obviously the ultimate goal is the same, help the company, but the immediate goal marketing wants to get more leads,
sales wants to close Leads so they can get the commission or their points or bonuses. Marketers tend to go after conversions and leads and contacts. They want to go after, commission and and that leaves a really huge, open space there. Like, how do we do, there’s a lot of good leads that may not necessarily be customers right now or next six months or a year from now, but they could eventually be, someone needs to own that, or we need to do something with it. That’s where lead nurturing is pretty important in my opinion, because.
Oh yeah. And another thing that I’ve noticed that we not the intent behind a marketing. Action is important. If you are having a two ebook, somebody downloaded the ebook about state of union, right? Of marketing. . Whereas someone downloaded the brochure. The intent of those two leads are a little bit different, right?
The person’s downloading the brochure’s actually seems. More interested in your products and services, whereas someone downloading a thought leadership ebook may just be interested in learning and may not be a customer. So when salespeople reach out to me, because I downloaded let’s say I running a marketing agency and took, digital marketing trends, 20, 25, and I download that.
And when someone reaches out to me, trying to sell that really annoys me because I just wanted to learn what the next trends are, but if I go to, a marketing platform and download their brochure or watch one of their demos. There is some intent behind me being the customer.
Marketers need to be able to distinguish the intent behind. The actions and that would drive better MQLs. MQLs are still just MQLs. They’re not opportunities. They’re not closed businesses. So there needs to be this nurturing happening that often it’s not done by marketing or sales people.
So there needs to be this new role, marketing ops, sales ops, whatever you want to call it. There needs to be those people that are just focused on that. And that’s another way organizations work and try to solve that. The world of marketing, especially B2B, evolves so quickly.
It’s important for, teams to focus on what they’re good at. They have to be good at that and then be good at it as it evolves and keep learning that. So when you have additional resources like, marketing ops or rev ops those people can come in and help with that portion of the business, then marketing can focus on generating the leads.
And then they can focus on, getting the nurture program set up because you have the MQLs and you don’t want to call them. And then you have the SQLs, you might call them and furthermore. But I think that those teams can be extremely, instrumental with setting up a system that’s going to work.
And you’d be surprised with how many orgs organization I speak to and they don’t have a nurture program. They might have a newsletter. That’s it. So they don’t really have a clear journey for where they can send people to continue the relationship building with that, with those prospects.
There are a lot of them that don’t have their nurture program set up, or they don’t have them set up correctly. They could use some improvements. So yeah, just a whole. List of ongoing struggles in our world, but things that I think people are really trying to improve so that 2025 can be a much better year.
Talking about 2025. What are your personal and professional goals for 2025? Professional I’m just always continuing to learn. It’s just so fast moving, so quickly evolving. Just continue to learn, listen to more podcasts read more attend more events, do more networking Even if there are, some certifications to get under my belt, I’m really driven this year to just take things up a notch and my career and just become just even better, obviously cause I like what I do.
So I enjoy it. I just want to be the best. And then personally travels always on my list. I love traveling more time with family. I have two boys, One’s about to be six, one’s twelve more family time, and just staying healthy and happy.
I just like to keep it simple. Simple is the best. So to make your boss happy, maybe you can talk about your company a little bit, the company you work for and what do you guys do and what type of solutions you provide? Yeah I work with 195 and we’re a demand gen agency.
We are headquartered in the UK, I work with a brilliant group of people, but we do have offices. All over the world, we have offices in San Francisco Seattle New York City Australia. I know I’m going to miss a couple. South Africa, Bulgaria London, Manchester I feel like I’m forgetting something, but we’re all over the world.
We are, part of agent three group, which is really cool because what we do is what agent three group does is that they’re just a true ABM agency and they are, like I said, just an incredible group of people. And sometimes we’ll work with them if we’re doing like some ABM at scale plays. Customer satisfaction is so important to us, we really believe in what we do. We really like, the relationships that we have with our clients, it’s so important. Like I said, customer centricity is so important. Doing high valuable work is something we stand on.
We’re an award winning agency and, I couldn’t Asked to be, anywhere else. I feel like I’m working with the best of the best. I know we are running out of time. One last question how do our viewers connect with you? Is LinkedIn the best place, or is there a website
or obviously we are going to post that on the description as well, but just for sake of our audience, if you don’t mind which one’s your preferred way? 195demand. com is the website and then just hit me up on LinkedIn. I am happy to make new friends and chat about marketing, talk about marketing.
I love it. And yeah, follow me. I’m here to support, my fellow marketers as well. I’m here to help them. Just by your attendance, you’re supporting us. I appreciate it. Thank you for making the time. This was an awesome episode and I look forward to having you again in near future.
Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. It was really fun. Thank you. Happy holidays. Talk to you later. You too. Bye.
