Driving Demand (Akseli Matila, B2B growth expert)

Sophie Hedestad is the Chief Marketing Officer at Netigate and host of #kommuniceraMera & Voice Of Success podcast.

On this episode we talk about:
- How to create that golden sales and marketing relationship
- Why is it important to have a highly engaged marketing team? And how to achieve it?
- How to build your marketing team from scratch and why a web developer should be one of your first hires?

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross & HockeyStack.

Chris Walker is (probably) the father of demand gen as we all know it today. He is also the CEO at Refine Labs and host of the State of Demand Gen podcast.  Chris and his team at Refine Labs is not only working with high-growth SaaS companies in the US but are also very present in the EMEA area giving them a unique perspective on both markets.

On this episode we talk about:

• Why many SaaS companies in Europe is falling behind and what modern marketers can do about it
• What would Chris do in his first 90 days as a demand marketer?
• How would he convince management that demand gen is working?
• How does a successful demand gen playbook look for 2022 and beyond?
• What distinguishes a really good demand marketer from an average one?

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross, HockeyStack & Riverside.fm.

Gwen Lafage is VP Brand & Content at Sinch and also the host of the Tech Marketing Podchat.

On this episode we talk about:

• What is the difference between brand and demand?
• What defines a really great brand?
• How can you measure brand against revenue growth?
• When should a company hire in-house marketers and when is an agency a good idea?

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross, HockeyStack & Riverside.fm.

Bill Macaitis is one of the most renown marketing leaders out there. He is the former CMO & SVP Marketing at Salesforce, Slack & Zendesk. Today he is a growth advisor and board member for a bunch of really cool SaaS companies in both EMEA & US.

On this episode we talk about:

• Why you should have a campaign team instead of demand team?
• What is product-led growth?
• How product-led growth and demand gen can work together?
• How Slack built their successful product-led growth model
• Tips for scaling marketing teams and continue to produce a great output and keep the culture intact

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross, HockeyStack & Riverside.fm.

Liam Bartholomew is the Global Head of Demand Gen at Cognism. During 2021 they made their big shift from traditional lead gen towards demand generation and in this episode he shares the secret recipe that made it so successful. Oh, and they just took in their Series C investment of $87,5M!

We also talked about:

• How the discussion around demand gen started internally
• How they scaled their marketing team to fit the newly adopted strategy
• The first 5 things they did to make this transition and how it resulted in a pipeline increase from $2M to $6M 
• The actual demand gen playbook that you can start using today!

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross, HockeyStack & Riverside.fm.

For the first time ever you will listen to your host share his perspective on Demand Generation and how to build a demand framework and playbook from scratch.

In this episode we touch upon:
- How to make the transition from Lead Gen to Demand Gen?
- What's the most important metrics to follow daily?
- How do you build up and develop a successful demand team?
- How do you create your own demand framework?
- What's most important when building out playbooks for paid search and paid social?

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross, HockeyStack & Riverside.fm.

For the first time ever i had two guests joining me, both working at Optimere - a Copenhagen based SaaS company. Jillian Als is the VP of Marketing and Jasmine de Guzman is the Manager, Revenue Marketing.

In this episode we talk about:

• What is Revenue Marketing at Optimere?
• Focusing on capturing vs creating demand when there already is a lot of existing demand?
• The danger of focusing too much on paid search.
• One of the hidden growth levers, working together for a really really long time (6+ years in their case).
• Marketing to marketers, one of the toughest audiences ever?

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross, HockeyStack & Riverside.fm.

Paula Molinar is the Senior Manager, Demand Generation at Paddle. Paula started at the company in 2019 when they where just 90 people. A few weeks ago they took in their series D investment of $200M and in this episode Paula share their biggest learnings and also marketing successes.

In this episode we talked about:

• Moving from capturing to creating demand
• Insights from having BDRs within the marketing team.
• Learnings from implementing a "how did you hear about us" form field.
• Why you should focus on Storytelling Ads that tell people everything they need to know already in the feed.

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in Europe share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross, HockeyStack & Riverside.fm.

Frida joined GetAccept in late 2019 when they had just closed on their Series A investment. At the time they where 3 marketers focusing mainly on organic/events. She was tasked with building a world class marketing team and to create an inbound machinery to rapidly scale GetAccept's growth. 

In this episode we talked about:

• Strategy to scale a marketing team from 3 to 27 people in 2,5 years
• The importance of sales/marketing alignment and getting exec buy-in
• Building a brand from scratch (it's not just a logo and a few colors..)
• What is pipeline creation anxiety? (Hint: it's what we all feel at the end of a quarter)

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in Europe share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross, HockeyStack & Riverside.fm.

The average tenure for a B2B SaaS CMO is below 2 years.  Johanna Fagerstedt has been the CMO at Quinyx for the last 9 years and in this episode she shares some of her biggest learnings.

In this episode we talked about:

• Making the transition from a Lead Machine to a Revenue Team.
• How do you successfully sell to the enterprise segment?
• What is most important when you evaluate new markets and how do you efficiently build go-to-market motions?

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in Europe share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross & HockeyStack.

Sam Dunning is the Sales Director and Co-Owner at Web Choice and also host of the Business Growth Show.  Sam is currently all over the LinkedIn feed talking about how to build out your SEO efforts and how it fits with your overall demand generation strategy.

In this episode we talked about:

• What is the difference between on- and off-page SEO?
• How to niche down your keywords to dominate rankings
• Strategy to build backlinks (yes, they are still very important!)
• How can SEO fit into your overall revenue marketing strategy?

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in Europe share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack & GetAccept.

Myles Madden is the Sr. Demand Generation Manager at Observe.AI and previously Performance Marketing Manager at Refine Labs. 

In this episode we focus on everything you need to know to become successful with paid social and paid search in a demand generation environment. The B2B buyer journey is changing and performance marketing need to change with it.

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in Europe share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack & GetAccept.

Nick Bennet is the Director of Evangelism & Customer Marketing at Alyce and also the host of the Rep Your Brand podcast. If you don't know Nick, you probably haven't been on LinkedIn for a long time. He is a superstar when it comes to Social Content,  Dark Social, Field Marketing, Customer Marketing and all those goodies. 

In this episode we talked about:

• How Nick is on track to create $1 Million in Pipeline for Alyce through Social Content
• Why it's a good thing to have your employees active on LinkedIn
• What it takes to get revenue results from Field Marketing

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in Europe share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack & GetAccept.

Ognjen Bošković is the Growth Lead at CXL. He is super passionate about Growth Marketing, Growth Loops, Product-Led Growth and everything else related to how your product/service can grow with the help of your customers.

In this episode we talked about:

• What is the difference between Demand Generation and Growth Marketing?
• Can all SaaS companies work with Product-Led Growth and how do you make it work?
• How do you create a solid Growth Loop and what are some examples from CXL?
• What is the best way to drive more business from word-of-mouth?

Are you ready to learn more? Join our Slack community where some of the best B2B marketers in Europe share knowledge on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack & GetAccept.

LinkedIn Ads is one of the most important channels within a demand generation strategy. It’s the place where we can almost guarantee that our ICP are present, no matter who we are targeting in B2B.

In this episode we cover everything you’ll need to get success in your paid LinkedIn efforts:

• How to think about cold/retargeting layers
• How to nail your ICP targeting
• How to use average frequency for retargeting success
• How to measure LinkedIn success (hint, it’s not direct conversions)

Are you ready to learn more? Join our Slack community where some of the best B2B marketers in Europe share knowledge on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack & GetAccept.

Jonna Ekman is the Marketing Director at Storykit. Not only has she been a big Demand Gen fan for many years but with a background as a journalist she is deeply passionate about telling great stories. And stories is the backbone of any successful marketing program.

In this episode we talked about:

• Storytelling? What is is and how to nail it?
• What kind of videos win on social?
• Facebook vs Slack when you're building a community?
• And many other things...

Are you ready to learn more? Join our Slack community where some of the best B2B marketers in Europe share knowledge on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack & GetAccept.

The SaaS Nordic Community is a really beautiful story. Starting with getting to know each other at a previous workplace, creating a joint podcast, developing it into a community from scratch and finally quitting their day jobs to monetize it all.

In this episode we talked about:

• Learnings from 50 podcast interviews with SaaS leaders
• Creating a community and finding revenue streams
• How to be successful in event creation?

Are you ready to learn more? Join our Slack community where some of the best B2B marketers in Europe share knowledge on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack & GetAccept.

Many companies are experiencing uncertain times, especially in B2B. The marketing department is usually one of the first to get hit in some way.

BUT, there are ways you can actually use uncertain times to come out even stronger.

In this episode of we cover everything you need to think about in your marketing work to come out on top:

👉 Why you need to focus on creating demand and not shift your entire budget to things you can attribute.

👉 How this could be the perfect time to perfect your baseline; ICP, messaging, website journey, customer research.

👉 Utilize retargeting efficiently to improve performance from all channels.

Are you ready to learn more? Join our Slack community where some of the best B2B marketers in Europe share knowledge on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack & GetAccept.

Gabriel Ehrlich is the CEO at Remotion, a LinkedIn Ads agency for B2B. They have helped some really cool companies scale their LinkedIn efforts... Does Gong and Monday.com ring any bells? 

In this episode we talked about:

• The most common errors they encounter and how to fix them
• How to actually drive demo requests from LinkedIn Ads
• How to create a successful playbook for LinkedIn Ads in B2B SaaS

Are you ready to learn more? Join our Slack community where some of the best B2B marketers in Europe share knowledge on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack & GetAccept.

Emir Atlı is the Co-Founder and CRO at HockeyStack. He is also the podcast host of his own show "SaaS Marketing & Growth Chats" where he has interviewed some of the best marketing people in the business.

On this episode we talk about:
- Why attribution matters for marketers and how you can use it to win
- How HockeyStack position themselves in the competitive attribution category
- How they went from 0 to 1,5M impressions in only 6 months from SEO
- How they 5xd their pipeline from LinkedIn ads in only 4 months

If you want to get more in-depth information and get a step-by-step guide into their SEO playbook or LinkedIn Ads playbook - check out The Flow, their growth bible for SaaS marketers.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack & GetAccept.

Roman Krs is the performance marketer at Easygenerator. He is also a freelancer within the paid ads domain and focuses especially on Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads within B2B SaaS.

On this episode we talk about:
- How to set your Google Ads account up for success?
- How to find and decide what keywords to focus on?
- How to think around bidding?
- Does non-brand campaigns have an effect on brand?
- Most common errors Roman see companies make

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack, GetAccept & N.Rich.

Get your free ABM diagnostics from N.Rich - HERE

Viktor Carlsson is the co-founder at Albacross. During this episode he shares how they have grown Albacross during the last 8 years and why intent data is really what has set them up for success.

On this episode we talk about:
- What does cost-efficient growth mean for us as marketers?
- What is intent data?
- Is there different types of intent data that serve different purposes?
- How can a company utilize intent data to grow their revenue during this recession?

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack, GetAccept & N.Rich.

PS. Get your free ABM diagnostics from N.Rich - HERE

Laura Erdem is a Senior Account Executive at Dreamdata. During this episode she gives us an in-depth look into how Dreamdata (and herself) became extremely successful with Social Selling.

On this episode we talk about:
- Their playbook for social selling on LinkedIn
- Main success metrics?
- How to get everyone to buy into it?
- 3 most important things to become successful on LinkedIn?
- 3 most common errors in employee advocacy?

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack, GetAccept & N.Rich.

During the last few years Cognism have been a real success story in their shift from Lead Gen to Demand Gen. A little over 6 months ago, Canberk Beker joined the company as their Global Head of Paid Acquisition and managed to double the ROI from their paid pipeline during these months.

In this episode he shares how he did it:
- How they generated a huge pipeline from Competitor Ads on Google
- What does LinkedIn in-feed consumption really mean?
- Can you capture Conversions on Facebook and how do you do it?
- And much much more

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack, GetAccept & N.Rich.

We've never seen so much chatter about ABM as in the last few months. Marketing teams have been forced to niche down their marketing efforts and focus on high-value accounts.

But executing on ABM can mean so many things. In this episode we run through a pilot program anyone could start doing if you are looking to do more ABM.

On this episode we talk about:
- How do you decide on what accounts to include? How many they should be?
- What kind of tools do you need?
- What can a pilot playbook look like?
- How can ABM and Demand Generation work together?

This episode is brought to you by our great partners Albacross, HockeyStack, GetAccept & N.Rich.

Q1 is done and dusted: How did we achieve our highest paid pipeline ever?

Adam Holmgren (Global Demand Gen Leader at GetAccept) and Canberk Beker (Head of Paid Acq at Cognism) give you their secrets on how they crushed their paid pipeline during the first quarter of 2023.

Find out:

• How to succeed with LinkedIn Ads in a Demand Gen setting
• Why Lead Gen forms could be your next success
• How Facebook can drive direct pipeline with a conversion objective
• Experimenting with Youtube and Reddit could be your next move
  
  

🌍 Join our community of 600+ B2B Marketers on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners  HockeyStack, GetAccept & N.Rich.

Justin Rowe is one of the brightest stars when it comes to LinkedIn Ads for B2B. One thing that's so great about Justin is the fact that he openly shares the playbooks and frameworks he is running for his clients and in this episode he deep-dives into how you could use them for yourselves.

On this episode we talk about:
- Most common LinkedIn Ads mistakes in B2B (and how to fix them!)
- Justin's LinkedIn Ads B2B Playbook
- How do you measure success from LinkedIn Ads?

🌍 Join our community of 600+ European B2B Marketers on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners GetAccept, Sway & N.Rich.

Andrew Davies is the CMO at one of the coolest SaaS companies out there, Paddle. During 2022 they took in their Series D investment of $200m and are now over 300 employees.  In this episode, Andrew shares openly how they think about growing during a recession and why marketers should get back to the fundamentals.  

On this episode we talk about:
- What does a recession mean for us as marketers?
- How can we work towards cost-efficient growth instead of growth at all costs?
- Why focusing on your existing customers might be your best bet

🌍 Join our community of 600+ European B2B Marketers on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners GetAccept, Sway & N.Rich.

What should you prioritize first when you get back after your vacation?

In this episode, we talk about how and why you should evaluate H1 in order to crush your marketing targets in H2.

🌍 Join our community of 600+ European B2B Marketers on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners GetAccept, Sway & N.Rich.

James Sutton has been working at two of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the UK for the last 4 years, Cognism & Jiminny. In this episode he shares openly why playbooks need to be different dependent on the company you work for and how to make it work regardless.

On this episode we talk about:
- How to grow revenue through subject matter experts (SMEs)
- How to build a paid ads playbook focusing on engagement
- Why shifting from lead gen to demand gen too fast might hurt you
- What's James biggest learnings from working at both Cognism & Jiminny?

🌍 Join our community of 600+ European B2B Marketers on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners GetAccept, Sway & N.Rich.

Pasha Irshad is one of these marketers on LinkedIn that have a really clear niche and expertise, HubSpot and how marketers can excel at using it. Around 1,5 years ago he decided to create a B2B agency with this unique perspective and have since experienced massive growth.

On this episode we talk about:
- Most common faults marketers do when using HubSpot?
- Most important reports to have built out?
- How to think about marketing attribution while using HubSpot?
- Setting expectations for success when shifting from lead gen to demand gen

🌍 Join our community of 650+ European B2B Marketers on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners GetAccept, Sway & N.Rich.

Tara Robertson is the Head of Demand Generation at Chili Piper, one of the most badass SaaS companies around. In this episode, she talks about how to use podcasts as your main content piece and how to tie it back to revenue.

On this episode we talk about:
- What to think about when creating your own podcast as a company
- How to tie your podcasting efforts back to revenue (hint: it’s possible)
- Why thought leadership ads might be the most interesting ads format yet
- Structure of the marketing team at Chili Piper and why it works so well

🌍 Join our community of 700+ European B2B Marketers on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners GetAccept, Sway & N.Rich.

 In this episode we give you a deep-dive on how to transition from Lead Generation to Demand Generation. I will give you the ins and outs on how we did this journey at GetAccept and the results we've seen from it.

You will learn about:

• Understand where your audience consume content
• Split your funnel into high-intent and low-intent
• Understand the dark funnel
• Create demand vs capture demand?
• Why should you care about building an owned audience?

🌍 Join our community of 700+ European B2B Marketers on drivingdemand.io.

This episode is brought to you by our great partners GetAccept, Sway & N.Rich.

Yulia Olennikova started out as the first marketing hire at N.Rich and before that she did 7 years at SEMrush. She's deeply passionate about ABM and is currently documenting their journey of building the go-to-market motion for an ABM platform.

On this episode we talk about:
- How do you start building out an ABM program?
- How do you define your ICP?
- How do you plan the actual campaigns?
- How do you measure success?

🌍 Join our community of 700+ European B2B Marketers on drivingdemand.carrd.co

Ling Koay started as the first marketer at Oneflow and has been with the company for 7 years, during which Oneflow went public while Ling built the marketing function. Ling has a strong passion for brand and that's what this episode is all about!

On this episode we talk about:
- When should B2B companies invest in brand?
- Is there a scenario where brand doesn't matter?
- What goes into a brand and how to get the founders onboard?
- How to approach a rebrand? How much time and budget should one allocate?
- How do you measure your brand?

🌍 Join our community of 700+ European B2B Marketers on drivingdemand.carrd.co

Hey and welcome to the Driving Demand podcast.

Fredrik Selander is the CMO at SuperOffice. Before that he was Director of Marketing Nordics & Global Partner Marketing  Director at Quinyx. 

On this episode we talk about:

• The challenges during your first 100 days as CMO
• How revenue-obsession is key for sales and marketing alignment
• Why SuperOffice are so successful at content marketing and SEO
• How to win against global competitors with a localized approach

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross & HockeyStack.

Edward Ford is the Demand Gen Director at Supermetrics and also creator of The Growth Hub Podcast with around 80 episodes under his belt.

On this episode we talk about:
- Building a demand gen team in a product-led environment
- Measuring and creating brand through data-driven experiments
- Differences between SaaS companies in the US vs EU?
- Do Performance Marketing need to sit in a Demand Gen function?

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross & HockeyStack.

Emelie Malmquist is the Head of Marketing at Adnami. Before that she was Demand Generation Manager at Vainu.

On this episode we talk about:
- Learnings in taking the route from sales into marketing
- The difference between doing marketing in a start-up vs scale-up environment
- How to piggyback on other companies with co-creation
- Should we use agencies or hire FTEs in-house?

Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.

This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross & HockeyStack.