Digital marketing plays a critical role in each one of these challenges, but the one that comes up again and again is the long sales cycle that comes standard in the B2B SaaS world.

“Because you’re spending money up front, the long sales cycle is where things get tricky,” Bartek says. That is, there’s a lot of lag time between the first click and the final sale. In extreme cases, that lag time can last as long as a year. Because of this, it’s hard to answer this fundamental question: “Where do we spend our money to get the best results?”

One of the first steps S&P takes with a new client is to “set up infrastructure in order to trace where traffic is coming from and where it’s converting from,” Benji says. “Without that, you’re effectively doing billboard or traditional advertising.” To put it bluntly, a company without this critical component is spending its digital marketing budget blindly.

This infrastructure allows S&P and their clients to track sales all the way back to the original ad click from the specific keyword that generated the impression (aka ad view). From here, S&P can begin to establish concrete ROI and ROAS benchmarks for their clients.

This is one of the central features that makes digital marketing so powerful. But it’s worth noting that all digital marketers are not alike. In fact, this raises a critical distinction between SEO agencies and PPC agencies like S&P.

While SEO focuses on generating “organic” search engine traffic for keywords that are important to a particular business, PPC focuses on determining the actual value of said keywords from an ROI perspective, using a platform like Google Ads. The big difference is that Google, probably as part of its business model, “shares a lot more data from paid traffic than from organic traffic. For organic traffic, Google often doesn’t show you the actual keywords that sent traffic to your website. And without these data,” Benji says, “tracking a conversion back to an organic visitor’s keyword can be very difficult, if not impossible.”

Evolving KPIs

These days however, not all leads are treated as equal. As such, S&P has worked with Skedulo to map out its entire digital marketing funnel, ensuring that the leads with the highest probability of turning into actual business are the ones that S&P has focused on measuring and optimizing for.

To put it simply, as KPIs evolve (e.g. leads for larger deal sizes are prioritized), the definition of “the right traffic” evolves too. This means that S&P has to identify the campaigns, keywords, and ads that produce the leads that satisfy these ever-evolving KPIs. It’s not easy, but for businesses with long sales cycles like Skedulo, it pays off.

Bartek looked at his notes. “This is wild” he says. “Check this out.” Since the start of their
working relationship with S&P, Skedulo has:

Benji is modest: “All this comes from the maturity of the working relationship we have. One of the key messages on our website says: ‘We get you the results you care about, not what we tell you to care about.’ And my relationship with Skedulo bears that out.”

Indeed, uncommon results come from uncommon relationships. “He’s a pillar of the organization,” Bartek says. “He might as well be a full-time employee.”

“But on second thought,” Bartek added. “I think it’s better to have an agency. You’ve got top expertise and know you won’t lose the continuity. Especially in the PPC world, I think it’s uncommon for a full-time employee to stay on as long as Benji has.”

There are a lot of reasons Benji has stuck around. But one is that over this long relationship he’s figured out that his expertise fits perfectly with Skedulo’s business model: “B2B, software, long sales cycles, focused on lead generation,” Benji says. “That’s definitely our wheelhouse.”

Toward the end of our conversation Bartek looked worried. “The problem is, there’s only one Benji. And after all my great quotes get printed, he’s going to start bringing us competing offers. So, this nice case study,” he paused. “Don’t make it too good, okay?”

Sorry Bartek.

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