00:00 Hey guys, welcome back to another B2B Rebellion. Really happy to have with me today Carla Rivershaw from Turkle. Carla, I've been taking a look at your profile. You've got a good extensive experience. I've been going back a little bit in time as well and seeing some of the stuff that you've been doing early on in your career. You also did a bit of work in Ireland as well, which is interesting to see. So close to my heart, let's say.

00:29 but extensive marketing experience all the way from Thomson Reuters up to now where you're head of marketing in Turtle. So tell us a little bit about what you guys at Turtle do and give us a little bit of an introduction on yourself as well. Sure. So I'm going to start with myself. So, yeah, I thank you for the introduction. I guess I've been working marketing for just over 10 years now. And to your point, yes, I did have, I think, my

00:59 My first internship was in a law firm in Ireland. It's actually, I grew up in Ireland. I might not be able to tell that from my accent, but I did. And so I was doing a law degree. And so I managed to get a law placement at this firm. But very quickly on in my degree, realized that law wasn't really a career that I wanted to take. So since then, I've been going into marketing and absolutely love it. You know, it's really, it's just a fast paced,

01:28 career to have taken on. There's just always something new to sink your teeth into. And it certainly helps that I'm working for a company like Turtle where I'm extremely passionate about the product that we sell. And so Turtle, just to give you a quick intro to that, we're a content automation tool. And basically what that means is we are able to create really amazing interactive personalized content.

01:58 in a very scalable way. So basically anybody in a business, you don't even need to be a marketer, can produce this really, just really impressive looking content without having to have coding skills, design skills, and you're able to measure exactly how people are engaging with that content right the way through to specifically what sections of the content people are reading. So it helps you to basically just put better content out there.

02:27 So just on turtle, I've been doing a little bit of a dig into it. It's definitely something that I'm going to be taking a look at, by the way, after this. So maybe we'll have a chat off the record afterwards. But it's definitely something interesting that you guys have seen. I really enjoy your marketing as well, you know, about saying, I killed the PDF, you know, forget about the PDF. That's the past, you know, we're the future. Like it's really, I appreciate the type of marketing that you guys do because it's very much in your face.

02:56 no bullshit, you know, like, and making a claim, like you guys are really making a claim around around that PDF piece. How did you guys come to that? And did it wasn't it a tough decision to start really pushing that hard? I don't think it was too tough a decision, to be honest. I mean, I think that we all knew that the PDF was an easy target for us, because ultimately, the PDF was invented in 1993.

03:23 And it's incredible to me that marketeers still use that as their go-to way of publishing reports, white papers, you name it online, when there's absolutely no way to measure how people have engaged with that content. You can't actually see if people have actually read it at all. You can tell if someone downloaded it, but that's as far as it goes. And I don't really know how, as a marketeer, you can use that to tell whether or not a piece of content is successful, how you can improve on that content.

03:52 for instance. So I think we've had so many people come to us over the years, we've been in business just saying, like, you know, kill the PDF, you know, it says it's so outdated, our content looks so much better in Turtle and we know whether or not it's performing. And it was just a very natural transition for us then to take a bolder approach and just make a statement like that. Super interesting because like, you come across marketers that don't,

04:20 even care if the content has been interacted with. It's like, because I know people and I've been, so my background is in lead generation, right? And I could be accused of being that marketer in the past. Now I'm a more well-rounded marketer in a CMO position and also I've been leading marketing teams and looking at it from every different angle. But when I was corely focused on lead generation, like, I don't know, almost 10 years ago, I'd be like, let's just make sure that they get the thing into the inbox and I don't care if they read it or not.

04:48 Give it to the sales team, the sales team follow up with it. Now, it's obviously changed in that respect, but tell us a little bit about the metrics that you can see from within Turtle and the content that people have in there. Yeah, so I mean, I definitely can empathize with what you're saying in terms of where your head was at 10 years ago, and to be honest, so was mine. You know, I mean, I think...

05:12 six, seven years ago, it was totally the norm to just gate every single piece of content you had. And then as soon as you had a download, you pass that lead on to sales. But that just doesn't really work these days. And the reason it doesn't work is because one, people are a lot more sensitive these days regarding data. They don't necessarily wanna give you their data immediately. You kind of have to work for it. And also like the younger the generations, there was really interesting study done by, I think it was like Tim.

05:41 recently where they looked at the different generations and how they actually respond to gated content. And it turns out that younger generations are far more likely to just give phony information if they wanna access a piece of content. So actually those downloads are really not that valuable if people are just putting in these fake email addresses and stuff. So in terms of the stuff that you can actually track in Turtle, which just gives you so much better insight into the people who are reading it, is one just very basic.

06:11 is somebody reading it at all. Two, who is that person who's reading it? How long are they reading it for? Which bits are they reading? Which bits aren't they reading? At what point do they bounce off? Do they share the content with anybody else? Do they interact with anything within the content, like if it's a video, how long did they watch it for? If there's a poll, how did they respond to that poll? And suddenly, you have this really rich profile of information around that person to be able to.

06:38 And one, better tailor your messaging for that specific individual. But secondly, just to get a better sense of your audience overall and what topics are more interesting than others. So you can just optimize your content strategy. That's really, really interesting stuff. Okay, well look, let's get down to the bottom of things here. The reason why we're here today is because it's to give our audience some key actionable insights or takeaways that you can recommend as a marketer. Things that people can...

07:08 maybe go away and implement easily without having to put their hand too deep into their pocket or to have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to processes and whatnot. Do you have any tips for marketing and salespeople out there right now? Sure. I mean, I think probably the first one I'd like to go to, and it's actually the reason that Turtle was founded in the first place, is actually around the psychology of the human brain and how the human brain responds to visual stimulation.

07:38 And it was actually, there was our CEO, this was probably maybe six, seven years ago now. He was working as like a contractor and he was working on a project in Oxford University. And he happened to be in a room with some researchers there who were discussing this research that they've been reading about. And it was all about how the brain responds to visuals. And there was this really interesting study

08:07 where basically there was a kind of test group of people and they were asked to read a paragraph of text and they then went home, and I think three days later they came back in and they were asked to kind of recite what they could remember basically of that text. And I think that the results were something like 10% of the texts they were able to recall. So they ran a similar study and this time they offered people

08:35 piece of text with a contextual image alongside it. And people went home for three days. And when they came back, they were able to remember 65% of what they read. The only difference was there was an image. Otherwise it was the same text and they were able to remember it 6.5 times better. And this is like so interesting, I think as marketers, and this is what our CEO was thinking at the time, like, wow.

09:00 if you can just make small changes like that and people are able to remember your content better, this is gold dust for marketers. So he started to think like, how could I apply that and make it as easy as possible for marketers to produce content that speaks to the human brain? So I think thinking about the psychology behind how people consume information, how they retain information is really, really important. So like imagery is really, really key and making sure that you use

09:30 I mean, it has to make sense, the imagery, of course, but using imagery to really bring your content to life, this is super important. Another thing is around the layout of the content. So there's been a lot of research that's been done into how we like to, what the format needs to look like in terms of the content that we consume. So if you look at things like newspapers, for instance, the format of their content has basically been the same for the last 400 years. It hasn't changed at all.

10:00 And there is a reason for that. So, you know, when you open a newspaper, you'll have like big image at the top, you know, you have your headline and then you have the text below it. And generally what you'll find is like, when people are reading a newspaper or a magazine, you're not necessarily gonna read it from cover to cover. You're gonna flick through, you find like a heading that looks interesting with an appealing image and then you'll read that. And that's just generally how the human brain likes to consume information. And this is the problem with formats like PDF.

10:29 for instance, where it doesn't work like that. It's a very static document where you have to scroll down, scroll down, scroll down. And what happens, unfortunately, due to this layout is that your brain switches from being in an active state to a passive state, and your brain just switches off. And you cannot consume any more information. And there is an interesting reason for why that happens. And it's because we have, similar, I guess, to a computer with RAM. There's like a computer.

10:58 only so much memory that we have available at any one time. And so once that RAM in our brain fills up, working memory, your brain just stops. It cannot consume any more information. So actually the act of turning a page, whether it's reading a book, a newspaper, a magazine, it actually allows your working memory to partially reset so that you can then carry on reading. And that's why we're able to read novels and things like that, because turning that...

11:28 page just allows our brain to reset. So the reason I'm saying this is that there is so much that can be done when you're thinking about the content you're producing to make it far more engaging to that primitive brain, because I think we often, when we're producing content, we think about these things in a more logical way. Actually, we tend to be quite emotional creatures. And so when we're producing content, you need to be speaking to you.

11:58 that sort of more emotional part of the brain. And so keeping in mind some of these basic psychological principles when you're producing content is really, really important if you wanna maximize on how much people remember and generally how long people engage for. So that'll be my first tip. That's actually, that's really good advice. And I've never heard it explained that way and I've never taught about it that way. And it makes sense, you know.

12:24 It's certainly taken away myself and provided this over to our content team here at Leadfeeder as well. It's super interesting. And even I was thinking there when you were saying that, like, where can I find examples of that? I've actually, and this isn't mean to be a plug for Turtle, but like I've looked at your homepage, I've looked at the examples that you have with the different companies you work with. And they all follow those sort of design principles that you just mentioned there, around the folding of the page or turning the page and different bits. And actually,

12:53 when I was looking at it just prior to this call, I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. I, I, I wasn't, the thing was I wasn't used to seeing a page turn that way. Or when browsing online to go to, to, to click to the right rather than scroll down, I was actually trying to scroll down because my brain is like, okay, I can use scroll downs. This is obviously like a PDF. So PDF was like almost tried to rewire our brains, but in the, it, it was a nicer experience for me.

13:22 to be able to see that page turn like that. And I just connected the dots now that you said. Yeah. Super creepy. Good, good. It doesn't make perfect sense. So that's interesting, super interesting. OK. OK, so let's get to your second point. Yeah, so second point then I think is just really, as a marketer, I think working really closely. This is obvious, right? Working really closely with your sales team. But I think.

13:51 particularly when it comes to lead management. And I know that this is like a really big struggle for most marketers out there. Are my leads actually being followed up? And one of the experiments that we've been running at Turtle this year, it's been a bit of a pet project for me, which is why I'm mentioning it today, is making sure that your marketing leads get as much attention as outbound leads, because it was a realization, I think, maybe halfway.

14:21 but sooner than that. At some point during the year, I just realized, oh my god, you know, our SDR team are focusing pretty much all of their time on outbound and my marketing leads are just sitting there in a queue and nothing is happening. And so I have put in a process now where, first of all, there's a lot more visibility around marketing leads so I could see exactly which ones are, you know, just haven't been touched.

14:49 which ones are so-called being qualified, but actually are they being qualified? What's the kind of level of qualification that's going on? And then just sort of seeing what the conversions look like. And so I know you were kind of looking for like quick and easy tips. I'm not sure that this is a quick one, but it is something which I think is absolutely vital to every marketer to make sure they nail this down. So basically the process I've put in place is I've got this dashboard.

15:17 I meet with our head of the SDR team normally once a day, sometimes every other day, just to very quickly review the dashboard. We have a quick look to see how many new leads are sitting with this team. Does anyone need to be like chased to make sure they follow up on them? We have a look at any of the leads that are being qualified out. Are they being qualified out correctly? We'll have a quick look to see the ones that are being qualified, what kind of messaging is going out.

15:46 And generally on a weekly basis, I will just listen into any phone calls that are being made. So we record all the calls that are being done just to make sure that, you know, for meetings that are booked at least, I'm sort of listening to just make sure that, you know, the right messaging is being used, you know, offer advice to the SDR team, just to say, I'd suggest that you maybe sort of say something about this, you know, if I think it's appropriate. And more recently, one of the things that we've done, which we're still in the process of,

16:15 is actually having somebody dedicated to follow up on marketing leads and working with them really closely to just make sure they have like the right emails going out, the right pieces of content and that they really, really understand the different marketing activities that we're doing and how to follow up correctly. Because one of the things I realized is that we do so much activity at Turtle and it is really, really.

16:40 tricky, I think, for SDRs to just stay on top of all of that and to know, you know, this lead is actually from this webinar where we spoke about these things. And so actually just breaking that down for them and making it really, really easy for them to know what's the right thing to say. And so having this dedicated person really, really helps because they don't have the outbound stuff to distract them and then they can focus a lot more closely on specifically what we're doing in marketing and where these leads came from. So that would be, yeah, my next tip.

17:09 I couldn't agree with you more, by the way, and this is something that I specialize in. This is like, so I come from an SDR background. I was an SDR and then I was an, I was an AE and then, then I went back into, I studied marketing that went into marketing. And that's a long time ago now since I was an SDR, but like it's, it's a tricky thing. Right. I remember when I first came to lead generation, I was, I got really pissed off because I was like, I'm doing all this work, but the sales team are just ignoring what I'm giving.

17:39 Right. Which is, you know, I think a lot of marketers have that feeling. Right. Or if they don't have that feeling, it's because they don't care what's happening after they hand over because it's happening. Every single every single organization has like drop out in the funnel, like or a leaky funnel there between sales and marketing. Right. And it's it's a tough thing to try to do. But you're like.

18:03 Meeting with the SDR leadership once a day is amazing. That's the best thing you can be doing. One of the things I'd ask marketers typically would be like, how often are you speaking with your sales guys and girls or ladies, whatever? How often are you speaking with the guys there? They would say, well, every now and then, so I'll define what every now and then is. Well, we met each other at the last company summit or whatever it was when we had a meeting. That was like six months ago. So everybody's working in their own.

18:32 silos and the sales team, regardless of how you want to feel about it from a marketer and some marketers get a little bit like actually are fragile around this specific piece but at the end of the day the sales team or the SCR team are your customer as a marketer like you should be delivering something to them which they can then turn into business then later on and if you're not caring about what your customer is doing or what your customer thinks or how your customer feels then you're doing something wrong and people

19:01 it's sometimes hard to swallow that pill because sales demand a lot and they're not always right when it comes to marketing and so on but you still need to get the information from them and try to action it somehow right. But that's super advice, it's really really good advice. Yeah I totally agree with what you said there and I think one of the challenges marketers face and maybe why they don't care so much about what happens to the leads after the...

19:30 you know, lob them over the fence, is that it's just the way that businesses are measuring marketing. So if you're being measured on the number of MQLs you generate, then why on earth would you care if those MQLs are quality or not? Like, whatever, just pass them over, you know, we've ticked that box. Whereas actually, if you're being measured on the conversion of those MQLs or contribution to pipeline, those kinds of things, that's when you start to really care about, you know, whether or not these leads are actually converting. So.

20:00 For sure, my target is revenue. So that's the target that I set for my team as well, revenue, and then they build out whatever KPI's we need to get to there. But bottom line, when I'm presenting to the board, it's like how much revenue is marketing delivering? Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so I think we have time for one more. Yeah, I have one tiny last one, but this is like my absolute favorite thing right now. And honestly, anybody I speak to,

20:30 here's me talk about this and maybe that somebody watches this and goes I'm sure I've heard her talk about this before because I just love it. So we have just invested in a tool called Onbora which for those who don't know is an intent data tool and the reason I'm so excited about this tool is that it basically allows us to be able to track which companies are currently researching topics that

20:57 aligned to our business and what we are able to offer them. So for instance, for us at Turtle, we might be interested in people who are currently researching content personalization or account-based marketing or sales enablement or anything like that. And we'll be able to get a list of all of the companies that fit our profile, so industry, size, all of those things, and see specifically which companies are actively researching at this very moment those topics.

21:26 The really nice thing about Bombora, yes, we've just purchased it, but you can actually sign up for free weekly alerts with them. So if you go to the website, you can sort of select your keywords, you can kind of define what your profile looks like. And then once a week, you'll get an email with I think it's like 10 companies that kind of fit that criteria that you've set up. And what I was doing as I was sort of building the case for whether or not to invest in Bombora,

21:52 was actually looking at this list and identifying maybe a few accounts on that list that I thought might be worth our whilst getting an SDR person to follow up with. And then I would share them with somebody on our SDR team. And we managed to book like quite a few meetings off the back of just this free data that we were getting from Bombora. And it's like absolutely fantastic. So it's really good if you don't have the budget but you wanna test it out, like try it, but it's also really good for helping you to build a case for implementing that.

22:22 And now that we actually have the tool in place, some of the really cool things we can do is, first of all, for our account-based marketing strategy, it's really good for understanding what are the things that these accounts we're focused on are actually actively researching so we can align our messaging to those interests. We can also select accounts using this data, so we'll know, okay, these ones are focused specifically on areas we're interested in, so these would be good key accounts to spend time and resource on.

22:50 But also there's this integration with LinkedIn. So for instance, I could set up a campaign in LinkedIn, I don't know, maybe for instance, pushing a guide that we've created on ABN. And we can just target that ad only at accounts that we know are actively researching ABN right now. And the really cool thing is that Bon Bura will just automatically send those accounts to LinkedIn. So it's like an always on campaign.

23:17 And we don't really need to do anything. Once we've set the campaign to go live, that's it. So yeah, I'm really excited about that. That's amazing. It's really good advice. Bombora is a great tool. I know Bombora. We actually have some customers of ours at Leadfeeder here that use a mix of Bombora for their third party intent and then Leadfeeder for their first party intent. So third party is what's happening outside your own four walls of your website. Exactly. And then first party is everything that's happening on your own site. So they use a mix of.

23:47 what you just mentioned there for their account-based marketing, like understanding what's happening on those accounts, what their search intent is, like what are they interested in, what are they looking at? And then also, if they end up on your site without converting, you're looking at all of the different information that they've looked at, what are the search terms that brought them there and everything, and you get that from Leadfeeder. So it's like the mix of both of those tools together provides some great insights. That's really good, really good advice. Nice. Very good. Perfect.

24:14 So Carla, just before we finish up, where can people find you and where can people find Turtle? So you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on there. So feel free to drop me a little connection invite and just let me know where you're from because I don't accept everybody because I'm always afraid that salespeople are just trying to sell to me. So please let me know why you want to connect. And Turtle, you can find us on turtl.co. Perfect.

24:44 Carla, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you. I wish you all the best for Q4. Hope you guys smash again like you did in Q3. And yeah, speak soon. Yeah. All right. Thanks, Andy.