 to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jamie Spado-Cotaia and I'm the half of my family here at JSA. Welcome and thank you for tuning in to our JSA virtual roundtable entitled Marketing Strategies Post-Pandemic. Top trends and tools for the network infrastructure industry. All right guys, a couple of housekeeping notes just before we kick it off. Our first 100 registrants for today's roundtable should by now have received lunch delivered to your door or a gift card. So go ahead and please enjoy. We have well over 200 registrations for today's roundtable. So if you weren't one of our first 100, hopefully next time, make sure you register early for our monthly roundtables at jsa.net. And we'll have to say that. All right. Also, this is all about being interactive and giving you a chance to be heard and to hear from some great executives here. So we wanna make sure that this experience we've had as helpful to you as possible. So go ahead and ask any questions that you may have in the chat or request the mic to go ahead and come on camera and ask a question to our panelists. Also stick around our roundtable. Once it's finished today, we can join those virtual networking tables immediately following for a very unique opportunity to talk face to face with our event attendees and speakers. Simply just join the table in the lounge area and let the networking begin. So stick around. All right, let's get started. Our topic today is marketing strategies post pandemic top trends and tools for the network infrastructure industry. And it is a very timely, timely chat. We are in full fall mode. I can't believe already middle of September. It's funny I was writing a letter today this morning to my clients and couldn't help to compare this time of the year to watching my 15 month old who just learned how to walk. And so she's running, falling, running, falling. And I kind of feel like, yeah, that's this time of year. We are racing forward, wanting fast wins before end of year while also trying to look forward, case ourselves, plan out 2022. And there's still so many uncertainties, so many question marks from live event attendance to ever increasing privacy policies. And eventually the death of third party cookies by Google and that's 2023, but we need 2022 to truly move away from third party contacts to owning our audience more. And still there's this need for brands, particularly in our industry, to foster this trust, to personalize our messaging, to be viewed as thought leaders rising above the internet's white noise, to be heard, to connect, to make a difference to our community, to our clients, our prospects, our employees, everyone basically remote that beautiful face-to-face trust-building time. So it's very unique time, not an easy feat for us as marketing planners. So to break this all down, please welcome our round table of experts to help us. Today, we are joined by John Falker, the marketing director of Prime Data Centers. Joanna Sussi, Vice President of Brand Strategy over at Aligned. Corey Cohen, Vice President of Partner Experience. Oh, actually, just three days on the job over at Intermedia, I always said TBI, just a big change there for Corey. Kerry Cunningham, Senior Principal of Product Marketing at Sixth Sense, and Eric Bell, Founder of Backstale. So let's go ahead, go around the horn, set the stage a bit. Please go ahead and introduce yourself and your company, let's start with John. Hi, everyone, thanks, Jamie. John Falker, I lead marketing at Prime Data Centers. We are a wholesale data center developer and operator. Prior to Prime, I was doing a lot of software startups. I think five is my current total at the moment. That's where I came from, happy to be here. We love that startup perspective for sure and very critical considering our industry always growing, changing M&A's. Joanna. Thanks, Jamie. Joanna Sussi, I'm the SVP of Brand Strategy over at Aligned Data Centers. We also are a data center operator, builder, serving the hyperscale and enterprise markets. Prior to Aligned, I was on the agency side, worked for Imler Public Relations and thanks for having me on. Whoops, a pleasure, Joanna. And Corey. Turning myself off mute. Hi, guys, thanks for having me. I'm Corey Cohen. I'm currently a senior director of Global Channel Marketing and Intermedia, which is a global cloud communications and collaboration company. But I was previously, because I am four days on the job at Intermedia, I was previously vice president of marketing and partner experience at the Master Agent TBI. So I'm very excited to talk about this topic today. I'm excited to have you. Love the channel perspective as well. Carrie. Thanks, great to be here. I am with a company called Sixth Sense, we're a B2B marketing and account engagement platform, but I'm on my sixth week. So a little longer in my job than Corey is in hers. I spent the last seven and a half years at Serious Decisions and then at Forrester, once Forrester acquired Serious Decisions as vice president and principal analyst in marketing operations and demand strategies. So I'm really glad to be here today. I love your perspective as an analyst. We're dealing with a lot of data these days as marketers, so glad to have you. Thank you. And Eric. Hi, my name is Eric Bell. I'm with Backstel. I've spent 20 years in the network in data center space with a spoke focus on interconnection and currently run Backstel. It's a data center information platform or a neutral third party that provides wealth of information and tools for those who are looking for data centers. And we have over 23,000 active users a month. Love it. Thank you, Eric, for joining us and a big shout out to Backstel. Your resource website is really a wonderful addition for our data center industry. So thank you. And leading up to today's chat, we went ahead and pulled our LinkedIn community asking which marketing tactic has been most important to your company in 2021 thus far. And the results are in. This morning, our final tally, 39% say virtual events, 14% digital marketing and 23% on email and LinkedIn networking. And then there was a 25% that said combination of all of the above. All right, so let's kick it off with Corian. Change it around here. Does this, do these metrics sound true to you? Is that what you've been seeing in house both at TBI now and through media? So I mean, it's an interesting answer for sure where most people rated virtual events as top priority, I think. I don't know how that was worded. We certainly did a lot of virtual events this past year. And I would say that we were leaders in doing so experimentation and a lot of fighting for attention. The problem is though, is that we're in like such an interesting dynamic, right? I'm working from home. I have a three and a four year old. I'm like taking them to doctor's appointments, running around for the first time ever. I'm like leaving my desk. I've never really done that before. Like I've just always been at the office. And so how do you buy for people's attention when everyone's so kind of burned out but also just like doing life? So I would say for us, and now joining Intermedia, the biggest focus I would definitely say is digital marketing in all forms. A lot of search engine marketing, but also social media as well. And I know that some of my other speakers are gonna talk about that too. Yeah, for sure. And actually, let's kick it over to Eric at Backstale. You're seeing social? Yeah, so we've historically really focused on SEO. And in the past, we've kind of not done as much social. And this year we've upped our social game and provide a lot more emphasis on social. Yeah, absolutely. A critical piece of that digital assets that us marketers are managing these days. Joanna? Yeah, I think I echo everyone's sentiment. I think we've done three or four virtual events. I think, I don't know, Jamie, I think before this you called it the Zoomies. Is that what you said before? It's a little bit of webinar Zoom exhaustion that everyone's getting. So I think for us, and which will be a continuing factor in 22 is just finding out how to creatively bridge the gap between needing that relationship building and that human interaction and not being able to, probably in the future, being able to meet with our customers and prospects face to face. It's certainly not what we're used to at all. Travel restrictions, still maybe local, but not international like we used to. There's a lot of question marks for sure. Carrie, what are you feeling? Yeah, I was a little surprised to see that the top most important one was the virtual events. I think the answer probably has something to do with the fact that we had to get good at them really fast and weren't necessarily before. So it was probably the most important thing to master that you hadn't mastered before as an organization. I think still that all around digital marketing is for sure the most important thing that people can be doing well and that virtual events are really now part of that. And I think are going to remain part of that, giving people a way to connect is super important. I think that's one of the things that those events do. Yeah, I think you're praising it. Wow, it's digital marketing as this massive bucket, virtual events, social, email campaigns, much more actually falling under there. John, do you have anything to add especially from the prime side? I mean, we took an experimental approach to virtual events. We certainly participated as guests like I'm doing in this one right now. We didn't host any major virtual events on our own. We didn't sponsor any major virtual events on our own unless that sponsorship came as part of a larger sponsorship package. We wanted to take a wait and see approach. I think that moving forward, as Carrie pointed out, we've been working out the entire brand world has been working out the kinks on virtual events. And now that we're starting to iron it out, I think that we will take a much more serious look at deeper engagement in virtual events next year. Yeah, I think you're right there. There's definitely a hesitation particularly in our marketplace. People were wondering, well, even if we sponsor or register for this virtual event, what's the attendance really going to look like? Carrie said it best, just getting people's attention, very difficult. So how do people actually dedicate their time to showing up at a virtual event? And does that warrant our sponsorship dollars? It was definitely a check this out and wait and see type of feeling in 2020 and 2021. But are we in it for the long haul a little bit? Is it going to change in 2022? People feel more comfortable or put more emphasis on it because we just don't know when the next time we really have this meaningful live of international events. It's an interesting question. John, we'll stay with you there. Do you think that in 2022 we'll be investing, especially since it's tentative with 2021 for events, virtual events, do you see yourself really investing dollars to sponsoring a virtual event in 2022? We could, it's certainly on the table. We're entering a pretty aggressive growth phase as a company and a brand. And so generally speaking, the marketing strategy is to start to build awareness start to engage on a deeper level with our accounts, our most important accounts. We do take largely an account-based marketing approach, AVM approach and virtual events and in-person events will both have a large role to play in that strategy. And I would also note that we are, most of our business is US dominated at the moment, but we are looking next year to really move outside of the United States for the first time in a meaningful way. And events both virtual and in-person will play a role in that globalization of our brand as well. That's really, it's really interesting. As your strategy gets international and the limits with travel and waters have become true borders now with the crackdown to Canada and the US, it's unprecedented as the word is overused there. But Joanne, I'm curious over and aligned, are you guys thinking 2022 to actually sponsor virtual events? I think we'll continue sponsoring meaningful virtual events that we feel would have a big impact. I think we've also, and I know we've all experienced this, we have kind of two strategies and maybe a mix thereof where we have a strategy that makes it really easy to pivot. And while we're all crossing our fingers and hoping that we can see each other in-person and have a budget set for in-person events, I think they will definitely have a seat at the table still going into 2022. Yeah, well said, well said. And Corey, I don't know about you, but I feel like the channel industry, they are always up for a good in-person event. Like I don't know to channel partners not even take a break throughout this pandemic. Yeah, we love our events. Navigating this, I definitely see us investing in smaller and hybrid events. I know that that's the buzzword right now, hybrid. How do you make that? How do you do like viewing parties and how do you make certain things interesting? How do you still get ROI from some of these, from some of these investments in virtual? And frankly, it's hard. I mean, like I said, everyone's in the same boat. So we're all trying to figure it out. And there's no magic button, I think, at this point that we can push, though I wish there were. I think for us, like I said, smaller, more intimate events are still gonna happen in person. And I think John maybe said it best with like the ABM approach. I think that COVID has really forced the ABM approach in an interesting way where we're just like, really targeting those partners and those customers that we really need to stay in front of. And I think that's what we're gonna look to invest in and get creative on for this year. Yeah, and I know, Eric, you were thinking of attending some live events from 2022. Is that still on the books? Yeah, I mean, we're vaccinated and I know there's still issues with that, but we'll be attending some events, maybe smaller events. But I think also, we started working with JSA this year and as such, we did some press releases and I think we'll do some more next year. And then as a, I'm also looking at what our unique capabilities are as an organization and one of them is data. And so we'll utilize our database to come out with rankings and some other ways to track and measure the data center industry that might produce simple publicity and attract users. Yeah, brilliant, brilliant. And actually that leads nicely over to Kerry. Data tracking is critical. From just to conclude the virtual events, are we spending money, are we going to actual 2022 just to wrap the events on bill up here. Kerry, what are you seeing from Sixth Sense perspective? Yeah, both from Sixth Sense and Forrester, they're going to be hybrid events, as Corey mentioned. And I think that's probably a really good model going forward. You can get a lot more people connected if you allow some of them to view and participate remotely. A lot of people are still gonna want to travel and go get together. I know that the Forrester Slash Series Decision Summit is something, it's a cultural event for V2B marketing and sales folks. It's not just a trade show, right? It's where the community gathers once a year and I think people miss that. When people still can't do it though, now they'll be able to do that remotely. We're gonna do the same thing with our customer conference at Sixth Sense in a couple of months. We'll have a live in-person gathering and for the folks that are not able to travel or able to attend for one reason or another, they'll be these virtual events. Now that's another thing to figure out, right? So we figured out how to do a digital event, a virtual event. Now you're gonna have to figure out how to do this hybrid thing. But I think that's gonna pay off. I think that is the hybrid thing is gonna be a thing that's gonna stick. I doubt there'll be all that many purely virtual big events going forward, but certainly a lot of the hybrid events. Sorry, I can't talk too much more. I think hybrid is here to stay. Just even taking a temperature check internally here at JSA as a business owner. I'm being led by my employees' comfort levels. Half of us are ready to run out there and start shaking some hands and seeing our old friends and the other half, like myself, we have little ones at home and who can't be vaccinated yet. So traveling is, you know, questionable, particularly to bring you home. You know, how am I going to stay away from my little one for two weeks? Or quarantining, like it's just tough. So yeah, hybrid is here to stay. So guys, in the past year and a half, you know, so much has changed. How has your role changed? What are your most successful go-to-market strategies to date in this post-pandemic reality? Corey? I knew you were going to throw this one to me first. So, you know, it's funny. I always joke that my role is like therapist, mom, boss, and like in that order with my people, like with my team. And I would say that's even more so the case in the pandemic. You know, you said it best, Jamie, where you are led by the comfortability of your people. I too have done the same thing this past year, which is like temperature check. Like how are you feeling? Like let's take a step back and not forget about the fact that like work is not everything, you know? Your mental state of mind, your mental health is the most important. If you're feeling good and if you are good, then you'll do good work. So for me, my role truly changed in that sense, right, where I was like even more ingrained, I think in my team's life, just because I was feeling not so good, especially in Chicago, where the weather sucks during the winter, I was like, oh, this is just becoming too overwhelming and producing content on remote work and how to enable remote work and UCAS and CCAS and pumping this stuff out at an enormous rate. I mean, we were going like 18 hours a day, it was crazy. I was like, this isn't okay and it's okay to not be okay. So we had to take a step back and I think assess personal life before work life. I'm so glad you brought this up. I think as marketers, yes, of course, marketing departments have to be in line with sales and in line with overall business objectives, but we also have to be in line with HR in a way. Like we are often tasked with how is everyone feeling and getting a sense of employee communications. Do you see that Joanna? Was that part of some of your goal changing in the past year and a half? Absolutely, and Corey, I hear you on Chicago being an interesting place in the winter time. I am myself and based in Chicago, but yes, in addition to figuring out external marketing, we've had to do a lot of internal marketing, helping out HR, working alongside the team to communicate what we were doing from a safety, from a health perspective. We are, much as John said, on a growth path at this point, we're building a lot. We have a thousand people on site on average daily. How are we protecting those people day to day? So all of that was a factor that was a new factor to us, I would say, this past year and a half. Absolutely, absolutely. And John, how about you? How are you feeling, Robert Prime? How has your role changed? Well, I would say the role really hasn't changed. Corey was exactly right that marketers are used to change. It's the only constant. So the role is or should be built to adapt day to day. The go-to-market strategies, yeah, they've changed for all the reasons that everyone else has pointed out. We're trying to meet people where they are and we're trying to be empathetic because everyone is dealing with all kinds of stuff, whether you are being a parent of a little one at home, I have a five-year-old who just started kindergarten or whether you are trying to manage personal issues, like trying to get out to see family members on the other side of the country, the other side of the world who you haven't been able to see in a long time. People are just juggling a lot more and trying to be empathetic as a brand, as a company, as a marketer, I think is more important than ever. Yeah, I hear you. I have a pandemic baby that half of my family hasn't even seen yet, which is craziness. And Eric, as a fellow founder, obviously your employee health check-ins are paramount as well. Yeah, and the way back still does, we have a lot of contract folks that we work with. And so it's not direct employees, but still checking in on them is important. I know from a personal perspective, we were lucky enough to have an au pair here at school, here, and so she really helped out a lot at home with the schoolwork. It's allowed me to focus on work here. Yeah, that's so critical too. How are you building even your own personal network of support so you can have work time that doesn't lead into personal responsibilities, family responsibilities? Talking about, it takes a village. It still does, if not more so, in the new digital reality. Hey, Carrie, what are you seeing? Yeah, so from my perspective, it's a little bit different because I'm actually more focused on, or have been over the last eight years, more focused on other people's operations than the one I was part of. And so seeing what a lot of other folks were doing. One of the things that I think has worked really well. So if you think about what a marketing organization is trying to do, one of the most important things it's trying to do is establish the connection between your brand, your organization and the market in which you operate. And what is that connection going to be? How vibrant is that connection going to be? What's the flavor? What's the color of that connection? And that all becomes much more challenging if you can't be out and around, folks. So a lot of organizations, I think, have done a really good job of being more authentic and more present even digitally and virtually. I think because we're seeing everybody else at home now and we hear the dogs and we hear the kids and all of that, the walls come down a little bit between fellow employees and between employees and customers or prospects. We kind of know each other a little bit better in some ways than we did before. We're not meeting in an office somewhere. Instead, I hear your parrot in the background. So now I know you have one and it talks and it says things that actually happen on the call, right? So I think that part's been really good and the folks that have been best able to adapt to that and just say, you know what? We wanna be connected, we wanna feel connected and I'm just gonna drop some of the pretense that we had before and actually connect with you as a prospect or customer as a human being. I think that's worked really well. And I hope we'll continue that. Yeah, I feel like our profiles are probably a lot more colorful now when we're typing into our content management system. Joe has a parrot. When somebody comes blasting through your virtual background and to whisper over your shoulder that they need something, you know, those kinds of things. Exactly. Well, I wanna stick with you on for my next question because I think it's a great transition. What do you see as the greatest marketing and or business challenges now that we're in this new reality? Well, I think, you know, the biggest challenge is the biggest opportunity. It's nice when those two things align. But one of the things that organizations have realized over the last year started to do a lot better job of is to make use of the investment that you've already made in marketing. So I would say and did say for a lot for seven or so years at Forrester that most organizations make a very poor use of the investment that they make in bringing people to their website getting them to fill out forms or getting them to their events. The vast majority of web traffic is anonymous and nobody knows who's there. If you're most B2B brands, most of the brands in this space, no disrespect to you but there's nobody coming to your website by accident, right? They're there on purpose. Now that doesn't mean they're all potential customers but you should not ignore and you cannot ignore that. You need to know where that traffic's coming from and the privacy laws don't interfere with you being able to understand what companies they're coming from. So that's been important. We've seen a lot of organizations, I think the leading organizations who've gotten through this period well start to really focus on that. Like you've already spent the money to get these people to your website, understand where they're coming from. Second thing is if you've got 1,000 people who filled out a form, probably only a hundred of those or something like that became your MQLs and got sent over to sales or something. Those other 900 filled out forms and they're probably not junk and they're probably also related to the hundred who did the QLs. You have to know if you're a marketer and you don't know the answer to the question, how many of my leads came as groups or teams, then you're missing a big part of the picture. So we've seen a lot of organizations get much better at that but the awareness of that and the ability to go solve for that is I think the thing that's going to get us to the next level of performance. It's not just like a small incremental change. It's like you have paid for a lot of eyeballs and a lot of traffic and you're not doing anything with it, right? So fix that and you'll be better off going forward. Data tracking makes me want to bring an error break. Here I am and me and myself. So we don't have a direct sales team. Instead we've built a lot of tools to be self-service and it's not surprised that, you know, build it and they will come, it hasn't produced the highest results. And we've started working with JSA to help, you know, promotion and that sort of thing. But, you know, from that perspective, JSA has really encouraged us and I'm a data guy and we have a lot of data but in terms of visitors to our website, what Carrie was talking about, you know, we are, we're starting to collect that information and we're looking at ways to enhance it and really provide a lot of, you know, build an analytics platform beyond just the standard analytics forms to really understand that traffic. Yeah, I think it's critical. Are, you know, how are our contacts finding us? What do they want from us? Are we being responsive? John, how are you guys doing at Prime? Well, I think just being smart, I agree with Eric definitely that a lot of, a lot of this is just being more committed to what you know works and what you've known for years that you need to be doing well and the correct priorities and order of operations in marketing. I try to always adhere to the marketing order of operations which is when I think about the media universe, I do owned first, then earned second and paid last and I only do paid after I'm very comfortable with the status sophistication that my owned media and my earned media is in. So I think just coming back to those first principles is the healthiest marketing strategy and behavior. I couldn't agree more. And yet, you know, you're watching ad rates, digital ads, you know, are so expensive these days for the same keywords that, you know, five months ago, you know, we're talking pennies on the dollar. So Joanna, what are you seeing over at the lines? I think broadly as marketing professionals, I think we're always looking at creative ways to, you know, market to a specific audience or have a specific angle. I think especially within an industry like ours, it's still relatively small. It's, you know, there's a lot of noise and especially with something like COVID, I feel like everyone is talking about the same things, right? So I think, you know, for us, for me specifically, the challenge has always been, how do we cut through the noise? And it certainly helps when you have a team, you know, that's backing you up at a line that's kind of feeding you stories, great news. And you know, I'm certainly, that makes my job very easy. You know, but that's not always gonna be the case. I think one thing that, one challenge, more on the business side of things that I don't think you hear being talked about a lot on the marketing front is actually staffing. And I think, you know, we talk a lot about being an operational challenge, you know, having and finding a lot of technical staff right now is proving to be a challenge. I think as marketers that's ultimately going to hit us too, you know, our marketing, it has to be niche, right? Just like operations, maybe not as technical, but people still have to have, you know, a pretty, they have to be well-versed, I guess, in the industry, and have a certain level of technical acumen to do our job. So I think we definitely have to start looking at staffing for marketing in this industry as well. And you know, I think it's our responsibility as an industry, especially as communications professionals to, you know, start introducing the industry to new audiences. Could not agree more, not agree more, great point, Joanna. Corey, what are you saying over in the channel side of the house? Yeah, well, I mean, your original question was like some of our biggest challenges. And I do agree that with Joanna, to her previous point, not about staffing so much, I mean, yes, that's obviously something that we have to look into. But, you know, marketing jobs are like white hat right now. And there's an abundance, and everyone seems to be sort of jumping ship or changing at this point. I think fitting in to that new, those new lives that I was talking about, my new life, right? I'm not always at my desk and constantly getting up and leaving and coming back, struggling to find and cutting through that white noise that Joanna was talking about, like that's imperative and that's been the biggest challenge. How do you come out and touch on all of your goals? Not just ROI from a sales perspective, which of course is paramount, but from that thought leadership, from the brand awareness perspective, how am I getting my partners to think about right now intermedia and call upon us? I think how am I creating, not just content for content sake, but how am I creating assets that are actionable or engaging? At TBI, I was lucky to have a really great video department and an amazing production manager who would put together like awesome, even parody videos about like the struggles of working from home. And it got people thinking and then they wanted to call us. I think cutting through the noise right now is the biggest challenge. Yeah, yeah. And that's actually a great transition to my next question. How are we measuring brand building and prospect engagement in this crazy new world? Are there tools, technologies you mentioned, video? I'm such a big fan of video, obviously. So what's been helpful for you? How else stay with me here? Yeah. Well, in an age where you're able to track everything, you know, do so, but also, you know, it's okay to put the onus back on sales, right? I mean, that is why we have account executives. So everything is measured, videos, we look at Google Analytics, we have social listening tools, our PR firm does a great job at doing that. And then taking that data, absorbing it, and then passing those MQLs along to sales to convert. I mean, it sounds simple, but at the same time, we need to put the onus on sales to act on what marketing has worked so hard to produce and get people to engage with. And now we need to take it a step further. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And it feels like sales has been more and more on the shoulders of marketers. I don't know if it's my perspective dating me here, but I liked how you were like, yeah, put the onus back on the sales team. I think that's an interesting point. Glad you made it. Eric, over at Backstale, what do you see in tools, technologies, best practices you want to share? Well, I mean, we started using HubSpot, which has great analytics, particularly from, you know, email, you know, it integrates with CRM, and as well, you know, our website traffic, so we're able to do that. We're looking at integrating that with a broader analytics platform. So that's to be D, and we're investigating that now. You know, I think that, and maybe this brings up a broader question, but you know, it's very important to measure stuff, but also, you know, is some, you know, a portion of the marketing budget, should it be for brand, building brand awareness? You know, that might be harder to measure. Are there marketing efforts that might be harder to measure, but are just known to be, as long as you're pointing it in the right direction, it might still be very beneficial for building your brand. Love that. I'll have a side conversation with you about some of that point later, I think there's so many things out there. Kerry, what are you seeing over at 6th Sense? Yeah, so really related to what I talked about a minute ago, which is when you go, so first of all, I'd love to hear a couple of people talking about taking a more account-based approach, because the biggest disconnect between marketing and sales is when marketing goes to the travel of producing those great MQLs, but they're not in accounts that sales wants to sell to, or can sell to, right? So the first most important thing that we have to do is make sure that as much of the product that marketing produces and delivers to sales is inside a set of accounts that you've mutually agreed. It shouldn't be just sales. Marketing has a lot of the intelligence about really where you ought to be selling. So, but it's gotta be a mutual agreement, and that's really the principle of ABM. Second thing is, if you focus more of your marketing attention on a specific set of accounts, you have to ask and then answer, how am I going to notice if it's working, right? And the way that you're gonna notice if it's working is not by following one person who fills out a form through their life cycle. It's by noticing whether more than one person does, right? Your buyer in every case is not one person, but many people working together as a team. If that organization is gonna buy something from you, multiple people from that team are gonna end up on your website. Couple of them are gonna fill out forms, maybe more. Much of that is gonna end up as anonymous traffic. So what I was talking about a minute ago is bringing together those signals so that you can see, all right, is this one person who became an MQL? Are they acting by themselves or are they bringing friends? If they're by themselves, that company's not buying anything real soon, right? But if they've brought friends, that's something you absolutely have to pay attention to. And I guarantee you that's in your data today. It's already there, you've already paid for it. The thing now is to make as good a use of it as possible. By the way, that's also great for customer experience. Today, most BV organizations are kind of like that person who, if you can remember back when we went to shopping malls, the sales person who would stand in the doorway of the store that you wanted to go into and you're like, okay, I'm not going in there. Cause I don't want to have that person start harassing me the minute I walk into the door. So we are that person. We start nurturing and calling folks the minute they come to our website. So they don't wanna come to our website, right? Most of them are not in market right now. So if we can understand which ones are market and focus our attention on them, the rest of them will be over time, a little less concerned about coming to our website and filling out forms. It'll be more likely to understand that they'll be able to get the information they want when they need it. I love it. You're talking ABM plus intent data measurement. And it's funny, we've seen a mixed measurement now that everyone's working from home, those reverse IP address lookups, they're getting some of their signals a little fast. I feel like, you know, what company are they truly from? Let's kind of dig deeper there as they pulled out of form and told us. So is intent data, you have this conversation later, I guess, but is intent data working? So I'm gonna jump in, I'm not gonna pitch, but we do that really well. And there are ways to do that really well. It did, you know, so intent data did take a hit overall when people started working from home. There was a substantial recovery because, you know, substantial portion of people started working on VPNs. And then there were also sources of intent that really don't rely just on reverse IP. Yes, and I definitely think it's the future. It just took a couple of little back steps in the last couple of months. This one is gonna do so, right? John, what do you guys seem? Well, I definitely think that attribution and analytics is gonna be the largest challenge and the most interesting part of the marketing world to watch over the next couple of years. With the demise of the cookie and really no clear consensus on what comes next, it's gonna be, it's sort of anyone's game. And I think there will certainly be a greater emphasis on first party data. It will be really interesting to watch how some of the larger tech platforms like CDPs adapt to this. How do the lookers and the mixed panels and the companies like that adapt to this? I think it will be more art and more art than it has been. I think marketers did themselves a huge disservice over the past five, 10 years saying that, oh, no, no, no, it's all science now. There's no art, there's no spray and pray. I can tell you with 100% confidence where our leads are coming from and which ones are revenue attributable. It was never 100% science. We made progress in the cookie world, but it was always art and science. And I think over the next, certainly over the next 12 months, if not longer, the amount of art required is gonna really start to rebalance. And I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. It means that marketers, we bought ourselves another, at least another couple of years until we get replaced by AI. Scary. All right, Joe, I know I just wanna get you in on this conversation too. What are you seeing, tools, technologies, best practices that have been helpful? Yep, everything that everyone said couldn't agree more. You know, making sure that you have a target and you're aligned with the sales team on your target list is key. Keeping a close eye on analytics, social engagement, intent data is great. It's worked out really well for us. We do Zoom info, these tools like Zoom info for all that intent data. One thing that hasn't been mentioned that I think the pandemic has really afforded us, people aren't traveling as much. We're doing, going back to Zoom, we're doing Zoom happy hours a lot more. We're getting some of that interaction in different ways, which gives us a little bit more time. And as people have said before, allows us to build a little bit of a deeper relationship, whether it's parents flying at your screen or two year olds flying at your screen. But, you know, it gave us an opportunity to get direct feedback from prospects and customers, you know, partners, coworkers, even some competitors, which has been very interesting, just because people have a little bit more time and you're able to build those deeper relationships. I agree more, well said. Okay, one last question, and I know my team is probably like, what? But try to, so quick, quick, we'll just quickly go around the horn, but any final words of advice is we're planning for 2022. Anything creative that you guys might be thinking about? What do we do with 2022? Joanna, let me continue with you. Sure, let me get off mute here. I think this may seem counterintuitive, but, you know, get creative in going back to the basics. Right, think about the basic things that people are lacking right now during a pandemic, working from home, and fill that void for them creatively. All right, John, any final words of advice? Anything creative to add? Well, definitely a plus one to what Joanna just said, and then remember to have fun. You know, I think all of us have, generally our stress levels have risen, our uncertainty has risen, and therefore our fun has fallen. It is so crucial to keep some element of fun and humanity in it. Fair hair. All right. I would just echo building an analytics platform, and John's point previous about art versus science that often the pendulum swung so far in the science and measurability, but there is some art there. I love that. Carrie, final words of advice? Yeah, I think what Joanna said was really spot on. Everybody wants to have connection, and that's what's really been heard during that pandemic. And so if you, as an organization, can create that connection among your employees, among your customers, among your prospects even, and build that community, and help build that community, I think you go a long way. And Carrie, final words here? Very, very hard to go last. I mean, because I agree with everyone, the mixture of art and science, I believe the last couple of years has done us no favors by saying we're all scientists, right? I do believe that COVID kind of leveled the playing field. Sales was used to certain ways of selling and COVID kind of threw a wrench in that system. But marketers, we were used to that. We're used to things ever evolving and changing Google, changing algorithms every year as an example. So I agree with everyone that the connection, the human connection, being forced to pick up a phone instead of clagging someone's email box goes a long way. Yeah, it does, human connection. Well said, guys, thank you so much. Guys, thanks, our speakers, their insights on marketing strategies post pandemic, fabulous, fabulous work, John Falker, crime data centers, Joanna Susie aligned, Corey Cohen, Intermedia, Carrie Cunningham, Sixth Sense, Eric Bell, Pat Stell. Thank you guys so much. And hey, guys, just a quick reminder, our speakers are staying on for the remainder of this lunch hour. We've got 10 more minutes here. So go ahead and answer any more of your questions. Go ahead and meet them back in that networking lounge and table hop to talk to as many folks as you can. Also viewers, if you're one of our first 100 registrants, we hope you enjoyed your lunch today and make sure you visit us at jsa.net to register for more upcoming virtual roundtables. Our next one, Thursday, October 21st, 1 p.m. East Coast time, where our leaders are talking about transforming, connectivity, digital transformation, digital trends, just hinting at some of our conversation here. Without for the playback of today's roundtable, coming soon to JSA TV and JSA podcast on YouTube, iTunes, iHeart, Spotify, you name it. In the meantime, see you back in the networking lounge. As always, stay safe and happy networking.