Skip:
Hi and welcome to our podcast. I’m Skip Fidura. We have an exciting thing to share. We are launching the fifth generation of our product Lead Scale Engine. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be walking you through the what, the why, the how, all the reasons that we are here, all the reasons that we’ve gone down this road. Today is our first session. With me is Francis. Hi and welcome to our podcast. I’m Skip Fidura. We have an exciting thing to share. We are launching the fifth generation of our product Lead Scale Engine. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be walking you through the what, the why, the how, all the reasons that we are here, all the reasons that we’ve gone down this road. Today is our first session. With me is Francis.
Frankie:
Hello
Skip:
or Frankie? He doesn’t care what you call him. We learned that earlier. And Robin. Hi, Robin.
Robin:
I do care what people call me.
Skip:
Yes, you do. Could you give us more than just a hi.
Robin:
Hi. I’m Robin. Nice to be here
Skip:
Thanks. As I said, over the next, I think it’s ten weeks, 15 weeks, we’re going to be talking you through the fifth generation of our product Lead Scale Engine. Today we are talking about why. Why did we decide to build it and why did we decide to build it now? So, Frankie, to kick us off. Why Gen Five?
Frankie:
So to get into the journey of Gen Five, I think we first need to almost go over my own journey in the business, and I think where that starts with is I’ve been formally working in product for the business for the past couple of years, but I’ve been working in product by stealth for almost the entirety of the 14 years that I’ve been here. But when Robin and I decided to more formalize this product role and bringing me in as this director of product, I would say the chief objective of that was Robin going, we want to have a self-service version of, as it was then Lola Grove, a self-service version of Lead Scale Engine. We’ve been dancing around it. We’ve released components of it that have been self-service. We had this North Star, which we’ve stuck by ever since, which was North Star is fully self-service version of what we do. So as part of us planning out the strategy to get there, we had to lay out what that roadmap looked like. It’s quite a big journey to transform from a fully managed piece of software to a fully self-service service version of that. I think where that fits into the wider strategy in the final piece is that simultaneously the industry is almost going through a similar transformation. There are noises coming out around the idea that lead generation, the space software primarily operates in, that lead generation is ready for programmatic. That is going to be the next big thing in our space, will be the transformation of lead generation from how it’s currently run to it being programmatically run in a similar way to the evolution that display went through. And I think those two streams of us moving from managed service to self-service and the industry moving from however it operates now to this programmatic iteration of the industry really, I think, helped crystallize the idea that our approach fitted in with where the industry was going. Now the ‘Why Now’ piece is that we believe that our journey, the journey from managed to self-service, is going to be a necessary pathfinder for the industry going on that slightly larger journey. So, I do not believe that it is going to be possible for the industry to go on that larger journey towards programmatic without there being a business in a software like ours that can deliver a properly joined up self-service software solution. So that is very much the ‘why are we doing this now?’ Why are we deciding to move ahead with this solution now? That is the strategic thinking behind ‘Let’s do this now’.
Skip:
I like that word Pathfinder. I think it’s a great word for where we’re getting to in the industry and you touched on a couple of points and we’ll get to these in later episodes, I’m sure, but there’s one the technology Pathfinder, which is you can’t go from where we are to where we all think the industry is going to get to in one big leap, from a technology standpoint that just won’t work, but also from a human standpoint. We’ve got to take marketers on this journey with us because if we don’t, they will. It’s probably too harsh to say people’s heads will explode. But, you know, it’s a mind-blowing shift that we’re about to see. And if we don’t take people on this journey with us and we just went from where we are to the future, which is full programmatic lead generation, people’s heads would kind of explode. I mean, they wouldn’t be able to handle that quantum shift, you know, in a short amount of time.
Robin:
Skip, that’s a good point. I mean, there is an educational component to Gen Five. To Francis’s point, if we look back at the evolution of display, it didn’t evolve from the fragmented publisher representation independent selling model straight to programmatic. And I think where I leant some insight is having observed the progression or the evolution of display advertising online. So, it started with independent publishers selling ads. It morphed over time to networks. And those networks, if you like, brought together a standardization, the ability to buy across a plurality of domains and sources all in one purchase order. That was the precursor. Also, with DoubleClick sitting in the background, pulling the necessary components of a campaign onto a single platform. They were the pathfinders before. Programmatic was layered on top. And it’s similar in lead and demand generation. The buying now is buying by publishers. It’s siloed, it’s quite segmented. It’s still reps selling to manual buyers. And the next step there may be the networks. That challenge we’ve seen coming with blind blended brokers and the need to change from that behavior to a transparent network that allows the relevant regulatory controls. But after network where you can buy from a plurality on a single platform, the platforms themselves must interoperate before full programmatic appears. So that’s why we like this concept of a pathfinder. And going back to core principles at Lead Scale, we’ve always thought of ourselves as delivering thought leadership in the space. I think we must deliver thought leadership technologically as well as verbally or intellectually or commercially.
Skip:
Interesting. Robin. That’s an interesting point. Perhaps before we jump to ultimately where we’re going or even what we’re going to do now as a Pathfinder in this intermediate step with Gen five, Frankie, it might be worthwhile going into what does the existing infrastructure look like, and, you know, what’s our starting point?
Frankie:
So, I think the education piece that Robin touched on is something that we’re in, you can never say unique position, an uncommon position to be in as a managed service, in a space where a lot of the technology is self-service. Where that’s relevant to this question is that we have a lot of people in our technical services division now who are, in effect, responsible for the parts that are just a platform and interface, that would typically operate as. Reason why that’s important is that we’ve got a real opportunity to ask questions. When you enter a bunch of data into a system, even the most sophisticated systems aren’t programmed to be intelligent enough to come back with questions. You know, we can see the beginnings of that in A.I., obviously.
Skip:
Right.
Frankie:
But now, we get to ask a lot of questions. We get to ask the question about what system have you used to generate this lead specification? What system are you using to plan your budget on? What system are you using to book your sales orders? And all those questions really come down to the importance of this business flow in your existing infrastructure. Because what we see is we see things happen like a salesperson booking a campaign at the high level with a business. And when we understand and talk to some of our clients that that process will then be entirely disconnected from how it then gets handed over to our client operations team.
Skip:
Sure.
Frankie:
So, a salesperson will agree, ‘Hey, we’re going to run this campaign for you. We’re going to generate this many leads. Those leads are going to have these profiles. We’re working in these geos, with these tactics, with these strategies. And the salesperson will promise everything is like, you know…
Skip:
Go easy. We love salespeople. Salespeople are part of our ecosystem. It takes a village and they’re part of the village.
Frankie:
Exactly. But they will work to one whole set of parameters. And then typically what will happen is there will then be some kind of internal handover where they need to communicate everything that they’ve agreed from a sales perspective to an operations team who will then be the ones who are executing it. Now, the nature of the number of businesses in the supply chain for just even a simple Lead Generation campaign is that there’s that first translation, which is two degrees. There is a client communicating with a salesperson going, here’s what I want. There’s that salesperson understanding what they want and translating that into their own definition of going ‘I’ve understood it, it’s this and this is what I’m going to sell’. They then must translate that to their internal operations team. They then must translate it to another company’s operations team going ‘Hey, here’s how I’m going to set up on the supply side of the market, and here is what I am going to be delivering to you’. Now, if there is an intermediary like us involved, they are talking to us, and we are then going and talking to the end data owners’ operations team for us to translate to them what’s going on. So, you’ve got all these markers and all these moments just for running a campaign where you’ve got now very manual translation of what you are doing on a campaign. So, forgetting about exactly what the nature of that definition is, but you’ve just got almost that game of telephone going on. We all know from, you know, playing that game as a kid that what happens at one end can become something completely different on the other end. And the result of all of that is that often what the data owner, the end client, the end brand owner, the brand, whoever is consuming these leads or on the other end has not got what they thought they were asking for at the very beginning.
Skip:
Well, it’s interesting. What you just described; I’ve seen that path of communications. I speak to a salesperson, you know, we agree a deal. The salesperson then on-boards me with, and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t have to be Lead Gen, it could be any marketing platform. Right? The Salesperson then hands me off to the onboarding team, the onboarding team on-boards me. And then ultimately, I get into a customer success team. The thing that gets lost in that, as well, is I’ve explained my why, ‘Why am I doing this? Why do I want to do this?’, to the salesperson. That doesn’t get translated down the line. And then if I get asked two months later by the onboarding team, ‘why are we doing this?’ You know, as a client, as a customer, I’m sitting there going, ‘Well, I told you why, I had this conversation. You know, we workshopped this with the sales guy for 3 hours. How did you not know that information? And oh, you’ve been working for two months without knowing my why’. So, I mean, I think with your analogy of telephone, a lot of important client information doesn’t get conveyed. Because with each person, they internalize some information and don’t pass it on and all the way down the chain.
Frankie:
Yeah. And I think that the interesting thing is, is that typically the solution for these human led processes is, the solution is technology. The solution is buying in a system that will make it less reliant on humans. And I think that now the technology solutions in the industry are amplifying some of these problems because each of those individual parties has got their own system solution for this. And you end up with not just the communication being a problem, but you end up with square pegs in round holes. You get someone who, you know, must choose from a drop down. And that salesperson has sold something slightly outside of the dropdown and they are forced to select from a certain list of values, and they end up going, ‘okay, I’ll just select this’. And that means when you have these systems which are not innately connected, they are these distributed systems across that supply chain that the systems themselves, by being disconnected, end up making more problems. Now, solving and coming back to the initial kind of introductory point we talked about here, that is where now this idea of programmatic is so challenging because you’ve got the systems which must be connected to enable programmatic are just all not really playing nicely together now. And rather than just looking at the current infrastructure, that is also then our vision of the future infrastructure, is looking at going ‘right, can we provide a solution which is doing the job of all of these individual components in a single joined up way?’
Robin:
It’s a fair point. Going back to your earlier question, Skip, when you asked about identifying the existing technology in the sector. The existing technology in the sector includes Excel spreadsheets for the production or delivery of a customized filter for data, the production in Word perhaps, of a specification for what should or should not be traded as a record or as a piece of data. So, you’ve already got the two Microsoft tools there, then you’ve got email because those documents are emailed around, or Slack or WhatsApp, or another communication layer.
Skip:
So, then you have version control problems.
Robin:
And so, you have version control challenges, potentially problems. And to Francis’s point, humans having to interoperate with those different pieces of technology that’s before you implement a media planning solution, whether that is, again, spreadsheet driven or a piece of software, a media buying capability, which is often a purchase order or sales order technology that is separate again. And of course, you have CRM, and you have the automation or activation technologies like Cheetah Mail or sail through a SendGrid something for activating the data now of activation you’re already into complexity. We’ve talked about complexity in the past, that each moment of interface between technology there is a human doing, a transposition, translation, if you like, an extract and a transform and a load as if you were automating it. But it’s a human doing that. And when humans do things, they do accidentally make mistakes. So that answers the question, hopefully, of some of the pieces of technology in place and starts driving at the challenge that Francis is alluding to, which is the elimination of the human layer wherever possible, in the pursuit of automation; that automation seems like a necessary step stone, a necessary halfway house on the journey to programmatic. You can’t be programmatic without automation. So, what is it in the current state of the market that we can and should automate today to drive and deliver programmatic in the future?
Skip:
So. We talked earlier about this word Pathfinder, which, you know, I think is a cool word. One of the things that it evokes in my mind is, you know, a journey. We’re going from here to there. And we talked about we need to take marketers on this journey with us. So, we’re entering this phase of going from where we are now with lots of different technologies, little interoperability, lots of opportunity for human error, to a fully programmatic phase, which, you know, I’m a marketer, right? What I want is a button. Give me a button that says, you know, give me leads. Push the button and it says, ‘How many leads do you want?’ I want this many. Fine. And it already knows what my lead spec is going to be, and what suppliers I’m going to want to use, and what my channel mix is going to be, because I trained it to do all those things. That’s where we’re going. Potentially. So clearly, we’re entering this transition phase between where we are and where we want to get to. Talk me through that a little bit.
Frankie:
So, I think one of the easiest ways to boil this down is to just go simple in terms of this journey from the disconnected to the connected. And an example of that is that we’ll take three basic components of a lead generation campaign, you’re looking to execute way more than these three, but we’ll just start off with these three. You’ve got the assets which are going to be used for that campaign, and by those assets I mean, everything from the creative assets to what collateral you’re going to be using to promote this campaign to an audience. So, for a B2B campaign, it could be a white paper, it could be an infographic for a B to C campaign, it could be the email creative display banner. So, what are the creative elements you’re going to be using to promote this campaign? You’ve got a whole set of legal documents, so you’ve got the agreements about the code of conduct, you’ve got the trading rules. So, what strategies can you use? How frequently you’re going to be paid for this campaign, and you’ve got some data assets. So, is there a suppression list? Is there a target list? So, you’ve got all these assets to do with the campaign. You’ve then got the actual budget itself. So how much over how long and for what? And then you’ve got the actual configuration. So, is this campaign being delivered automatically into Marketo for it to enter a client nurture path? And how does the data end up with the client for the client to do what they want to do now? Now, it’s almost always going to be the case that those three elements are dealt with by three entirely different teams. And it’s often the case that none of those three teams quite realize that they are intertwined in terms of, you cannot really, as a publisher, provide your quote on how you’re going to deliver a budget without knowing what assets you can use.
Skip:
Right.
Frankie:
And equally that the way that you structure your budget can often be determined or have a knock-on effect on how the campaign gets configured and delivered. So, if you’re not splitting up your budget by geos, for example, but on the client side, they have their CRM separated by GEOS and they have requirements, going ‘my sales team cannot take in more than 50 leads a week in Germany’, unless you’ve got trading rules and the budget split where you’ve stipulated that for your Germany part of the budget. Different from the UK maybe saying, ‘oh, we can receive 100 records a week’, that unless you get the trading rules, and the budget signed and correct the configuration can’t hang off that. And then you can’t know the budget unless you know the asset. And equally, unless the client knows what assets you’re going to use, they don’t necessarily know ‘Okay. I need to make sure my sales team know that we have generated these records with these five assets’. Otherwise, my sales team has a conversation in a vacuum without referencing back to how a record was generated. So, you’ve got all these aspects where now are dealt with very independently.
Skip:
Sure.
Frankie:
What we’re saying we are looking to do is, we are looking to at least bring all those elements together in a single system. So within our system, the vision is to have a system where you are onboarding the assets into a system where you are then actually bringing together the budget elements and what assets are used for what budget elements, and having that system so it is primed, so you can turn all of that structure of how you plan a campaign into one which can easily be then transformed into how you will actually deliver and execute that campaign, in terms of how that budget is ultimately going to be delivered to the client from a configuration perspective. So, you don’t have all the breaks in these chains where you end up with only a thousand leads being delivered to a client for an asset that wasn’t supposed to be used for that.
Skip:
Right.
Frankie:
You’ve got an asset which is only supposed to be for HR Managers and then the client gets delivered 1000 leads where HR Managers are shown as having been given a sales asset and that client just goes, ‘I’m not going to pay for any of those’.
Skip:
Well, and as a client, as you walked through that, you know, anecdote, I was sitting there thinking, well, interestingly, what I have known to say. You know, I am the European marketing exec, the European marketing director, whatever my title is, would I have a thought to ask my sales team in Germany ‘How many leads can you handle in a week or a month’ or whatever? And then would it occur to me to say while I’m doing this pan-European buy, ‘oh, but by the way, I only want 50 leads a week for Germany, but I want 100 leads a week for the UK’. That might not have even crossed my mind.
Robin:
That’s right. It’s interesting listening to that. Those ideas from an objective perspective. Again, if you zoom out and you look at the display advertising world, there are fewer moving parts in display advertising than there are in data trading. In display advertising, you have clicks, you have impressions, you have ad units, you have your targeting, etc. But you don’t then have anything other after that than that click. Okay, so it’s a click led business with lead and demand generation. You do have this much more complex, fluid, agile asset called a person, okay? And they themselves bring a level of complexity to the process. So, taking that in mind as a thought. Looking at the bid and offer mechanism that you need for a programmatic landscape in display advertising, the ad unit itself is always available. It’s uploaded into the delivery platform, into the trading platform. The volume is clear, and the targeting is clear, to your point, Skip, that there are choice architectures that have evolved and there are industry standards that have evolved. So, you, as the European marketing director, you do know your targeting criteria, your ad unit sizes. They’ve been worked on heavily by the industry and the IAB has standards for an awful lot of the variables in lead and demand generation. The industry has not necessarily established those standards yet, so that brings the challenge you’ve alluded to. On the other hand, I remember a seminal conversation with a seller from one of the large, large, traditional publishing shops. And she said in one call, you know, ‘I think we do quite a good job of offering, if you like, of responding to RFP blind’, and the word she used was ‘blind’. And she’s saying, ‘I don’t even know what the client wants, what I’m supposed to provide the preliminary quote back, which is volume, price and time frame’.
Skip:
Right.
Robin:
That I can’t even get to giving you an offer because you have not given me all the necessary components, I need to give you an offer. So that’s where Francis’ points about bringing all the necessary components to a head, to a single place where the bid can be led by an executive who knows what the parameters are, within which the industry can and will operate, and all of the necessary factors, assets, specifications around that bidder all present at the same moment so that the lady in question isn’t blind anymore and she can offer the right volume, price and time frame based on all of the necessary prerequisites. That’s what we’re seeing today, and what we’re seeing away today is the friction that is caused by any omission, any error, any lack of clarity. It just leads to some friction. And to Francis’ point, somewhere along the line, somebody doesn’t get paid. What happens today is any error in the marketplace, any gaps between the bid and the offer, and the communication breaking down, and the suppliers not paid. And the biggest instance that I’ve heard of recently, there is a $2 million dispute and, leaving aside the money, we could look at the discussion and go, ‘that’s a specification error’, and the specification error is one of omission. It’s not that somebody said, ‘I want red’ and got blue. They didn’t say whether they wanted red or blue or black or gold, and they got green. And then they went, ‘Well, I never asked for green’, and they say, ‘Well, you didn’t not ask for green’.
Skip:
Right.
Robin:
Right, and that’s where the industry is at today. So, to your point and to Francis’ point about dropdown menus and yours about being informed about your choice architecture, they’re all the challenges that lie ahead of programmatic, and it’s why we don’t believe that Lead Scale Programmatic can be delivered in the next iteration of end-to-end demand generation. There must be a step stone. We’re calling it a Pathfinder, and commercially we’re calling it Lead Scale Engine generation five.
Skip:
Frankie?
Frankie:
Yeah, I think I left a point hanging earlier when I talked about an uncommon position being this managed service, and I think that idea about not knowing what questions need to be asked, you know, it’s the Johari window framework, it’s this idea about having known knowns and known unknowns. So, I have things that, as a buyer, on the client side, I don’t even know. I don’t know, and a lot of those things are, you know, the important, pragmatic but very boring downstream things are around if I design the specification of what I want to buy, can that be delivered from a technical perspective. And that’s the bit where we’re in this kind of uncommon position, where now we’ve got people doing the translation. So we’ve got people where we get center specification, which has been written up in a word document or in a spreadsheet, and at the moment we are having to do that translation, we’re having to do this joined up piece of going, ‘let’s take a bunch of content from a Microsoft document, a Microsoft application produced piece of content, and turn that into something that can be processed and delivered into a very complicated piece of software called Salesforce or into Marketo’. And because we can ask these questions at the moment, we’re in this uncommon position around being able to design a piece of software, which we believe will be able to soften this journey, soften this education piece of a lot of people on one side of the market who are unfamiliar with having to go into a piece of software and choose a bunch of options in a piece of software, rather than just being able to type whatever they want in a Word document or type whatever they want in a couple of cells of Microsoft Excel. That this is very much the software journey that we think we are going on is that we’ve always talked as a business about setting industry standards, driving industry standards, and a lot of that has been more people led. It’s been about a people approach, about championing these standards, about saying why it is important to do things like data validation and verification is something we spent, you know, a decade and a half really championing those standards. And I think where we’re moving to now is the setting of these standards from a system perspective of, ‘okay, how can we go from this Wild West of everyone with their very kind of ephemeral ways of entering data?’ So, I write up my lead spec in a few paragraphs in a word document going, ‘Actually, if we’re looking to eventually arrive at programmatic, that’s just not a reality we can live with’. You have to have a greater degree of definition, and when we talk about the bionics of our software, it’s taking all of this knowledge and experience of the different ways that we think a specification and a campaign brief can arrive in a system, going ‘Can we design a system that is able to set the standards for how that needs to be codified into a system and do that in a friendly way?’ The client side of the market, who were used to doing it in spreadsheets, a friendly way that they can innovate in a system that is then naturally translatable into all the downstream aspects that it has a real knock-on effect on.
Robin:
Right, if you want to deliver automation, then you must deliver measurement where leads and data are concerned. You can’t have a lead specification that’s not to some degree measurable. If you can’t measure it, then you cannot settle it against the pre-agreed measurement and scoring matrix. I’m just thinking, at the moment, of clearinghouses for checks and if all the checks are blank, the clearinghouse is going to fail, or the checks will have to have an exact measurement and a number on it before the clearinghouse can settle all those transactions and present a ledger to each entity, each bank, about what amount of money they need to transfer, to whom, at the end of each settlement period to resolve and lay that trade closed, that block of trades or however they do it, to close that off. And so, yes, to your point, Francis, we must see the industry, and I think to yours as well Skip, move to a point where they’re clear about what can be achieved. And it’s not always going to be what the buyer wants because the seller may not be able to achieve what the buyer wants. And it’s not always going to be what the buyer and the seller agree if the machinery in the middle that can produce a programmatic or an automated settlement solution can’t check that what they’ve agreed has happened. If that check doesn’t come, then the settlement is moot, and the disputes and arguments and problems that we see today would persist. They don’t persist in display, to me and tell me I’m wrong, the remaining problem display faces is one of ad misplacement or fraud, if you like. But it’s not one of clarity between the buyer and the seller of what was intended in the trade and what machine will count and what the count will be and how the deal will be settled. So that’s again when we look at a North Star of where we’re heading, we’re learning from display. It’s been done before. We’re seeing the added complexities of people in data and the multiple technologies currently in play. We have a lot of work to do, but again, the summary is: I certainly don’t believe, and I hope nobody at Lead Scale disagrees with me, that I don’t believe that a piece of technology is going to come that’s going to leapfrog what the display industry went through, which was that platforms and networks, standardization, the precursors, the overlay of programmatic, and we don’t have that yet in lead and demand generation. We don’t have it in one territory, we don’t have it in the USA, we don’t have it in the UK, we don’t have it coming out of Singapore. There’s no one territory that we can look at and say, ‘Well, if we all copy that standard, we’ll be fine.’
Skip:
Right. So, I earlier alluded to the fact that I’m a marketer, and therefore I just want a button that solves all my problems. Which underplays what marketers really want and really do. And we’ve talked about a future of programmatic. What does that look like in concrete terms? What does that look like? As a marketer, I understand programmatic on the display side. But Robin, as you alluded to earlier, display is kind of only half the problem of Lead Gen because all you really need is that first interaction with the potential customer, with the prospect. And from a display standpoint, they’re done. Now it’s up to the marketer to carry that on. Lead Gen goes further so, tell me what the future looks like.
Robin:
It does go further, but I think it’s important to clarify it. For us the cut off would be the delivery of the record, if you like, and display the delivery of the click and then a programmatic vision of the future of lead and demand generation. The delivery of the record to the advertiser would seem to be the reasonable threshold for the marketplace to operate within. I hesitate to add an extra reach to that threshold, where the advertiser can reject a record other than immediately. If they can reject a record in several days’ time, for example, which they can do today, the level of complexity that will bring to a programmatic system, again, that’s quite exponential. So just important that we, I think, put some parameters or perimeter around-
Skip:
Sure.
Robin:
Around what we’re talking about. In plain English, it would be the end-to-end automation and execution of a trade between multiple buyers and multiple sellers on one or more systems and those systems are interoperating much higher. And again, in display, you see the supply side platforms that perhaps hold and host all the available inventory needs to interoperate with the buy side platforms that hold and host all the bids that are being generated by the advertising marketplace. Francis?
Frankie:
Yeah, I think the part which is the really important pivot point of all of this: when we talk about the need for industry standards that, I’ve never really thought about it until we were just having this discussion today, but at the moment, the current state of the lead generation industry and specifically, if we look at the B2B industry is, now everyone’s so comfortable and used to the IAB standard ad unit. We’ve got different, different pixel sizes of different banners, and you’ve got a fixed set of them. Now the analogy would be that currently, if B2B lead generation were operating like display, every single person could design their own banner of any dimensions they wanted. If they wanted to say, ‘I want one pixel by a thousand pixels’, ‘I want it 74 pixels by 281.’ It seems like it’s ridiculous, but that is the reality now. That we could sit down with all our suppliers and all our clients and just talk about: what do you consider an I.T. manager? Which is a real kind of stick in the ground of a very-. If someone asked us what a typical audience is that our clients are looking to reach, a lot of them would say I.T. decision makers.
Skip:
What does that mean?
Frankie:
Everyone has got this different definition of what they mean is an I.T. decision maker. So, this very basic first iteration of what programmatic could be, this idea about joining up buyers with sellers and joining up with the collection and delivery of the data that the sellers are looking to buy from the buyers. The buyers looking to, you know. That now even that just isn’t really feasible, because no one’s got consensus on what one side is selling is the same thing that the buyers are saying that they want to buy. That is very much the crux of this journey that we’re going on because the absolute key part of programmatic, this idea about having this automated trade happening in a system, is very much reliant on them talking about the same thing and being on the same page about what is being traded. And that is the journey that the market has to go on to get to that point about that ability for a buyer to go ‘I want to buy 100 I.T. decision makers’, and in this ideal programmatic world them hitting that magic button where they go buy 100 for the system, whatever it is, or the industry to be able to go out and go, ‘Okay, I’m going to link you up with these three partners. They’re going to deliver you those 100 I.T. decision makers, and they’re going to automatically arrive into your salesforce’, right. That is almost what the ideal of a programmatic buy would look like, and now it’s that key bit now about them agreeing that what, 100 pieces of data have been delivered. Are they the actual people that the buyer wanted to buy?
Skip:
So, I think if I was going to sum up our discussion so far, it would be that I don’t want to use the word problem, I’ll say the challenge in the B2B lead generation industry is the human component. The humans, because of the wide variety of tools they must use to do that, can introduce error into the process. And they introduce a lack of clarity, or to be more positive about it: right now, we need humans to tease out that clarity. So, when a lead spec comes over in a word document and it says ‘I want I.T. decision makers’, somebody currently on the Lead Scale services team would go back and say, ‘What do you mean by I.T. decision maker? Let’s clearly define what those job titles are going to be, to make sure that we get the right ones. We don’t get gold and green, when we wanted blue and red as Robin was saying. Francis, Robin, thank you very much. It’s been a fascinating conversation.
Robin:
Thank you for having me.
Frankie:
Thank you very much.
Skip:
Folks, join us next time we are going to start to get into the problems that Gen Five will be solving.
