A New Way of Attracting the Right Customers with Sarah Scudder, Chief Marketing Officer, SourceDay

What if all this time, we marketing people have been doing it the wrong way? 

Listen to our latest podcast with Sarah Scudder, Chief Marketing Officer at SourceDay and get insights on demand generation using LinkedIn. Learn what makes it an effective approach in getting quality customers.

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Transcript

Introduction: 0:04
From Revenue Rhino, I'm Brad Hammond, and this is The Lifelong Customer Podcast. We're interviewing successful sales and marketing leaders in discussing ways in which they're building lifelong relationships with their customer.

Brad Hammond: 0:20
Welcome to the Lifelong Customer podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hammond. And our next guest is a self-proclaimed supply chain nerd. She hosts several shows on the subject. She is a regular when it comes to marketing and supply chain content. I'd like to welcome Sarah Scudder, Chief Marketing Officer at SourceDay, on our show today. Sarah, it's really nice to have me on.

Sarah Scudder: 0:41
Howdy from Austin. We've got some sunshine today. I was mentioning to you before the show that I actually have survived my first tornado, which is quite an experience, but all is well.

Brad Hammond: 0:55
Amazing, yeah. Let's start today by talking a little bit about SourceDay. What do you guys do? What problems are you solving? What does your space look like? And what does your role and day to day look like as Chief Marketing Officer?

Sarah Scudder: 1:07
SourceDay is a supply chain technology company that automates purchase order changes. So what that means is organizations have an ERP system that they use to cut their purchase orders from any time they need to buy something from a supplier. Our research has found that 52% of the time, there is a change that happens to your purchase order after it's been issued. Now if this happens once in a while, no big deal. I quickly go in. I communicate with my supplier. I go back into my ERP and make an update. But if you work in manufacturing or distribution and you're cutting hundreds or thousands of purchase orders every single month with hundreds of line items, managing all of the back-and-forth changes with your supplier via email is not manageable and can be a huge time suck for the buyer and open a lot of opportunity for risk. So we come in and provide a solution to automate those changes, so a buyer isn't manually spending hours and hours a day emailing suppliers back and forth. 

My role at SourceDay, I run marketing. I have been at the company about 4.5 months. I come from supply chain, so I have a supply chain background. But I was actually in the indirect side of the business, so indirect is where you're procuring things that don't go into the end product that your company sells. Since my pivot to SourceDay, I'm now on the direct side, which means working with companies that are buying parts and materials that directly go into the end products that they set.

Brad Hammond: 3:04
Very cool. So just for the audience's context and maybe you could reiterate this a little bit, who's your target persona, your ICP, all that stuff?

Sarah Scudder: 3:14
Yes. So we target companies in the U.S. and Canada that have between $50 million and $3 billion in revenue that are in 1 of 4 verticals: manufacturing, distribution, CPG and retail. We integrate with any ERP, but we definitely have a core group of ERPs that we work closely with because we have a direct integration and, in some cases, a partnership. For example, NetSuite is an ERP platform. We're actually a partner with NetSuite. We're part of their partner program, and we work very closely with the NetSuite team and companies on NetSuite. 

Brad Hammond: 4:00
Nice. So I learned something really interesting about you and that’s that you started in sales before you moved into marketing. And I'm sure that really gives you a unique perspective on marketing. Can you tell me a bit about that and what that journey looked like and how it's helped you as a marketer?

Sarah Scudder: 4:18
I think it's really shaped who I am as a marketer and shaped my strategy and my kind of unique perspective in how I go to market because I have a sales background. So I started in supply chain technology sales right after I graduated from college. And the company that I was at sold marketing procurement software, so kind of an interesting niche that is a hybrid between selling into marketing and selling into procurement. And so that is called, as I mentioned earlier, indirect where we're selling a software solution to people that are sourcing and procuring all the things that marketing leaders need. 

And in my journey as a salesperson, one of the things I realized was how backwards our process was at our company. We were spending all this money on cold outreach and cold outbound and 0 money producing valuable, useful content and getting it in front of where our buyers go to hang out and get information. And I said this just seems crazy to me that we are approaching people in a way that they don't like and appreciate instead of giving them data and information so they can learn about our company and reach out to us when they're ready. So that's when I discovered LinkedIn. This was, gosh, 4 or 5 years ago. And I thought, you know what, I need to do some research and figure out where our buyers are going to get their information. 

So I first started asking as many people that would talk to me, what social platform they were using the most to get their business information. And the more and more buyers or prospects or customers that I talk to, the more I realize that our buyers were all on LinkedIn, more than any other social platform. And so I said, I want to become a master and an expert at LinkedIn and leverage LinkedIn to change my whole go-to-market strategy. And so I started studying LinkedIn, looking at what other people were doing, figuring out things that I liked, that I didn't like, trial and erring. 

And then what I started doing is I blocked out time every single day in my calendar to write and do a post on LinkedIn. When I say every day, I mean 7 days a week, because as I came to learn, Saturdays and Sundays are actually my best days to post on LinkedIn. I get more engagement and more eyeballs on the weekends versus any other day. So I started spending a lot more time producing useful content for the buyers that we were going after. 

And over time, I started having tremendous results. And by that, I mean, I started having people reaching out to me saying, hey, you know what, we need a software solution for procuring packaging or we need a software solution for procuring print. Can you chat? Can I have more information? I'd like to see a demo. And never before in my career that I actually had inbounds and people reaching out to me. And I said, you know what, I'm really, really on to something. So I really, really started to hone in and adapt and really leverage as many resources I could to start spending more time on LinkedIn. 

And once I did that, I said, I am a marketer at heart. I love marketing. And I think marketing has an incredible opportunity to become a demand generation department at a company and educate the market at scale. So when someone is ready to buy, they think of your company. And that's exactly what I did. I became obsessed with demand generation, with dark social. And so I pivoted a lot of my approach and strategy really into marketing but through a different lens.

Brad Hammond: 8:46
I love that. I think I read a statistic once that in a typical market, at most, 5% of that market is going to be looking for a solution at any given time. And we see so many companies go out and hit people up via email and say, hey, here's our solution. Here's all the features you want to buy. And I think it's such a missed opportunity for companies to say, hey, that's great. We can capture the demand, capture that 5%. But let's like create valuable content for the 95%, so we can capture them early in that buying journey. I love that. I think so many companies have this opportunity. It's really cool to see you do that successfully.

Sarah Scudder: 9:29
And I think I'll add on to that, that it's really important to figure out where your buyers are before you do anything. So for me, it was LinkedIn. That's where our buyers were going to get information and to hang out. But if I were in a B2C company, I may not even be on LinkedIn. I may be on TikTok. I may be on Insta. So it's really, really important to spend the time to do the customer and market research and really understand where your buyers are before you pick which platform you're really going to dedicate your time and resources to.

Brad Hammond: 10:07
Totally. I love that. And I think a lot of marketers out there are probably in the situation of being really early in this journey. And you've now gotten to a place where your wires are there. It's just the momentum that you've built. But what did that early journey look like? How did you discover that LinkedIn was the spot? It's worth the time and the resources. And I imagine the first post wasn't like a viral hit. It probably took some time. Walk us through what that looked like.

Sarah Scudder: 10:35
Yes. So step one is going out and doing the research, talk to customers, talk to prospects, talk to industry leaders, get on the phone, interview them, meet them in person, ask them really good questions, do a lot of listening and incorporate it in your interviews. Really, really honing in on what are their trusted go-to places for information? Where are they going to make buying decisions? What social platform are they using most over anything else to do this research? So an absolutely critical step. If you don't do this, you could be investing significant time and resources on a platform where your buyers aren’t on. And then you're just wasting your time. 

Second step is then really learning how to use the platform. Nowadays, it's so much easier. You can go on YouTube. You can Google. You can find a lot of tools. But when I started, that stuff wasn't as readily available. So I really just took it upon myself to go on LinkedIn and look at lots of posts and how people were leveraging the platform and take my learnings and apply what I thought was applicable and relevant to me. And then you got to practice. You have to actually make the video, make the carousel, write the poll, write the post and actually pull the trigger and do it. And as you mentioned, when you start out, I mean, you're not going to probably have a lot of traffic and a lot of visibility. But the key is consistency and posting really useful information. 

Now how do you come up with what to say? Talk to as many industry experts and customers as possible and turn those into posts. So the dialogues that you have, the conversations, the stories, the takeaways. If you look at a lot of my posts on LinkedIn, you'll actually see I do a fair amount of text-only posts, and I actually do dialogue posts where I literally have me and then I have what I said, and then I'll say Brad and then I have what Brad said. So it's actually a real dialogue. So things like that, I feel like anybody can do. But it's really, really important to go out and be talking to people in your industry so you know what's useful and relevant to them and then make those into posts and use that as part of your content strategy. 

And there's lots of specific things that we won't get into today, but optimizing your profile, doing your hashtag research, creating a tag list, right? These are all things that are really important and that will help you optimize. But for getting started, it was to do a post every day, and be consistent. The other thing I'll say is just because somebody says something doesn't mean they actually know what they're talking about, and they don't actually know if it's going to work for you. And I'll give you an example. So I was talking to somebody who is really, really active on LinkedIn. They were giving me their advice, and they said, don't post on the weekends. Absolutely, only Monday through Friday. Well, I thought, you know what, I'm going to post on Saturday and Sunday. And when I started posting on the weekends, those were actually my best-performing posts. So you need to figure out what works for you. 

I've also been told you shouldn’t post more than once a day on LinkedIn or you shouldn't put outside links in the bodies of your posts. Well, I try it and do it myself and collect my own data instead of just having somebody else tell me what I should and shouldn't do. And that's really, really important. Test everything yourself. Don't just go along with what “another expert” is telling you.

Brad Hammond: 14:27
Totally. I think a lot of times when it comes to creating content, there's this desire to create something that converts or generates some kind of sale or something instantly and maybe less credit is put towards getting a piece of content in front of that person 10 times before they actually convert via some other channel. How do you go about measuring this? And if you get questions from your leadership team, hey, how are we tying this to the pipeline, all that stuff? How do you navigate through all that?

Sarah Scudder: 14:58
Yes. So I'll say the first thing is LinkedIn doesn't provide the best data and insights. Compared to other platforms, it is kind of limiting. But I can use my knowledge as a marketer and as a buyer and ask somebody who interacts with people to look at what people are writing in the comments. And I think that goes a long way. You can view the number of impressions of your posts. And on LinkedIn, it means somebody has looked at your posts for at least 3 seconds. I would rather have lower impressions but more comments and more engagement with my posts. 

So for instance, I love Bradley Cooper. So if I do a post about Bradley Cooper, it may go viral but that's not necessarily relevant to SourceDay and my business. And that's not necessarily going to help create demand and awareness. So I would rather post very specific content about PO change automation, about manufacturing, about direct spend, about first mile, and I maybe will only get 1,000 views or 15 or 20 comments. But to me, that's more valuable than my Bradley Cooper post getting 1 million views with all these people saying, oh, he's hotter. I want to marry him.

Brad Hammond: 16:20
Yes, totally. You want it to be the right people.

Sarah Scudder: 16:23
That's right. So you really want to look at the relevance. But for me, one of the most powerful things is looking at the comments. What are people saying? How many people are interacting and engaging with the comments on the post and engaging with the other comments on your post. 

The other thing is look at your DMs. Are people reaching out to you with questions? Are they accepting your connect requests? That's also a good sign of, hey, maybe my content really isn't doing that well if no one's reached out to me in 2 months or maybe you do a post and you don't get a ton of views, but 5 people DM-ed you, right? That's probably a good sign. 

And then one of my favorite marketers, who I'm not sure if you've had him on the show, Chris Walker, who's the host of the State of Demand Gen podcast. He recommends putting a How Did You Hear About Us field on your website, and we've done that. And so I'm tracking that data constantly and seeing how many people are actually mentioning LinkedIn when we're getting those inbound requests and that helps me get the data that I need to go to leadership and say, look, this is working. LinkedIn is valuable.

Brad Hammond: 17:34
I love that. Yes, Chris is a great guy. We're currently editing his episode.

Sarah Scudder: 17:38
Oh, awesome.

Brad Hammond: 17:40
Yes, yes. So let's talk about real quick, I want to rewind a little bit, you mentioned research. I think that's very maybe not thought about. Most people will jump to like let's start creating some content and get it out there. But how much time do you spend on research versus actually creating the content and then promoting it?

Sarah Scudder: 18:01
Yes. So in a perfect world, I would be speaking to a customer or a buyer in my industry every single day. I am obsessed with talking to as many people as I can in our industry because I want to know the industry as well as or better than them. What software trends are happening? What shifts are happening in the market? What's happening in the manufacturing space? What are the big direct spend challenges? That's so, so important and is the driver of all of the content that I create. It is shocking to me when I talk to fellow marketers and they have never spoken to a customer or they speak to a customer once a year at a conference. 

You should have a customer insights program. Before you do anything else, you should be putting a program in place to interview and spend time with customers. If you're a small start-up, which is where I've been most of my career, very tiny supply chain tech companies where we don't have a lot of customers, start reaching out to people on LinkedIn. Meet your ICP that is potentially an ideal buyer, ask for 15 or 20 or 30 minutes, say you'd like to interview them, pick their brain, you're doing market intel. I've had a few people reach out to me and say, we're doing market intel or research. Would you be willing? And assuming I have the time, I absolutely will say yes. And I'm happy to provide my expertise and perspective. So launch that program. 

We just hired our very first product marketer in January, which is super exciting. And Kelly is now owning our customer insights program. When I joined the SourceDay team, it’s something I launched and was owning and managing. She's now managing that program, but I'm in on every interview. I want to be there. I want to be part of the conversation. We record all of our interviews, and we share them internally. So we're getting useful information. But the most important thing you can do for content is know your market, know your industry, know your buyer and produce things that they care about and want to read about.

Brad Hammond: 20:16
I love that. And I just want to clarify, by speaking to the customer, you actually have been speaking to the customer, not listening to Gong calls or something like that. 

Sarah Scudder: 20:25
No. I mean you're actually scheduling as if, well, if you could do it in person, always do it in person, especially if it's out there. Like for us in manufacturing, being able to go in and be on the manufacturing floor and really spend time there is great. But I know COVID has complicated doing things in person. So what I mean is schedule a Zoom for 30 or 45 minutes. You're actually face to face asking them questions.

Brad Hammond: 20:53
I love that. As we're wrapping up here, dark social. I think this term is becoming more and more used in marketing but isn't maybe fully understood yet. What is it? How is it relevant to this conversation? Walk us through it a little bit.

Sarah Scudder: 21:08
Yes. And Chris Walker, who I mentioned earlier, talks a lot about dark social as well, and I have a very similar viewpoint to him. So to me, dark social is things that attribution software doesn't track. LinkedIn is a great example. I would consider most activities on LinkedIn dark social because I'm not going to be able to log into my Salesforce and see how impactful all those comments and all that engagement was from my post yesterday. But 3 of those people may go to our website in 2 weeks, fill out a demo request form and one may become a customer. So to me, that's what I mean by dark social. It's really hard to track and measure the ROI. But you know it's working. You know it's having an impact. 

And I think for dark social, the most important thing you can do is pick one channel and master it. I can't tell you how many friends I have in marketing who are doing 10 different social media platforms. They're on Twitter. They're on LinkedIn. They're on YouTube. They're on Facebook. And when I spend time with them, they don't really seem to know a lot about any of the platforms. They're just producing content, kind of the spray and pray method, and posting it. What I think is more impactful is pick your one platform, go on there for a year and absolutely crush it, become an expert, know it inside and out, build a big following. Once you've mastered a channel, then add a second, then add a third. But don't do it all at once. 

So for me, I was just at the Social Media Marketing World Conference last week in San Diego. And one of the reasons I attended was I feel like I have mastered LinkedIn. Now I'm never going to stop learning, but I think I know LinkedIn better than most people. I could teach people how to use it. I could run sessions. I spend a lot of time every day on LinkedIn. I am ready for my second platform. So now I'm just citing, do I want to really invest time and resources in YouTube? Or do I want to invest time and resources in TikTok? So I went to the conference to learn from experts in both fields to figure out what I think is going to be best for our company.

Brad Hammond: 23:36
Yes. I think that's such a great point to highlight because we see a lot of companies that will take even the same piece of content then throw it on all the different media channels. It's like you have to develop a different format even for whether it's on YouTube or TikTok or LinkedIn or whatever.

Sarah Scudder: 23:53
Yes. And I think there's a clear distinction. Repurposing content is awesome, but you can't use the exact same format on 10 platforms and expect it to be successful in all of them.

Brad Hammond: 24:06
Exactly. That’s a great point. 

Sarah Scudder: 24:08
But you can write, let's say, a long form post on LinkedIn and maybe some of that could be used on Twitter or some could be used on Facebook or maybe you make a long-form video and then you break it up into shorts. So again, reusing or repurposing, yes. But just cut-and-paste method, absolutely not.

Brad Hammond: 24:30
Totally. So as other marketers are out there listening to this and considering this strategy, what advice would you have for them? What pitfalls or land mines are there? Where have you maybe navigated around some challenges? And what advice would you have for them?

Sarah Scudder: 24:46
Yes. So I think a lot of companies, the leadership teams do not value marketing and they think it's just kind of an afterthought. And the time and resources invested in sales and the BDR team and marketing does not have the correct budget and attention. So it can be hard to go to your CEO and say, I want $1 million to invest in dark social or I want $100,000 to create a TikTok channel and start producing videos. So really, really try to test something out, get your data and get your metrics and everything in order before you start going out and trying to ask for budget and money. So it's really, really important. 

I would not go to my CEO and say, I want to hire a full-time LinkedIn person without any data or having experience or things to back it up. So I think that's really, really important. I also think it's important to have realistic expectations on how you're setting up your attribution structure and how you're tracking your data and metrics. A lot of companies, I think, have very antiquated ways of doing this. Your traditional MQLs and all the different processes, I think, really need to be looked at and assessed as you're developing this new dark social strategy.

Brad Hammond: 26:12
I love that. Yes, I think of it like a company creates a white paper, they put it up. They gate it. And any email that collects the sales immediately jumps on the phone and calls them and gets them to try to buy and all that.

Sarah Scudder: 26:27
Yes. And I think your point of the model is to create a white paper or your blog post, 5 Reasons Why To Do This. You really need to look at quality over quantity. So I could go and get you 2,000 email addresses this week. But are any of them relevant? Are any of them interested in buying? Do any of them fit our ideal customer profile? So you really, really want to look at going after and targeting the right people that are ready to buy versus just a mass collection of emails, which is what marketing used to be when we didn't have the Internet and we didn't have so many ways to message and communicate.

Brad Hammond: 27:11
Yes. And now we have like ZoomInfo where anyone can grab that list. I think you make a great point. It's not about the list. It's about the right people and developing and generating demand in that list.

Sarah Scudder: 27:24
Yeah, you're right. I mean I could go on right now when we hang up and use the platform and generate email addresses. So the days of marketing being an email collection department are gone.

Brad Hammond: 27:36
Totally. Well, hey, this has been great. I love this approach and the perspective that you bring to marketing and what teams out there should be doing. Any last words? Any plugs? How should people connect with you if they want to get in touch?

Sarah Scudder: 27:51
Yes. So absolutely. Find me on LinkedIn, Sarah Scudder - Manufacturing Maven is my name on LinkedIn. And I would say if you haven't started using LinkedIn Live, I would highly recommend testing it out. I host 3 monthly shows on LinkedIn, posted one a couple of hours ago. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for people to create demand and build brand awareness by using LinkedIn Live, if you haven't done so before.

Brad Hammond: 28:23
Love that. Thanks so much, Sarah. This has been a pleasure, and it's great to have you on.

Sarah Scudder: 28:28
Thanks for having me.