Show Resources:

Here are the resources we covered in the episode:

• Here's the Startup Benchmarks Report from the episode, free
• Connect with Ruby on LinkedIn
• Slides that Ruby referenced
• Follow Kacie Jenkins on LinkedIn
• Follow Betty Mok on LinkedIn
• Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert
• Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, or corrections!
• Rate/Review: a great, no-cost way to support us

Summary: 

The Power of Benchmarks in LinkedIn Advertising & Sales

In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox welcomes Ruby James from LinkedIn to discuss one of the most valuable benchmark reports available for B2B startups—Growth Benchmarks for Scaling B2B Startups. Unlike traditional benchmarks that focus solely on marketing performance, this report integrates both marketing and sales metrics, offering a holistic view of what success looks like for startups.

Key Takeaways:

1. The Evolution of Measurement in B2B Marketing
   • The top-performing startups are measuring marketing success beyond lead generation, focusing on sales metrics like meetings booked, opportunities created, and revenue closed.
   • Sales and marketing are increasingly aligned, with some companies merging them into a single "Revenue Team" to eliminate attribution battles.
2. The Growing Impact of Executive Thought Leadership
   • Startups that integrate executive and industry thought leadership into their content strategy see higher engagement rates and stronger conversion rates through the funnel.
   • Data shows that retargeting audiences who saw thought leadership ads converted 45% more frequently than those who only saw traditional brand ads.
   • Low-lift, high-impact content (such as quick takes from executives) performs better than highly produced videos.
3. The Shift to an ABM (Account-Based Marketing) Strategy
   • Early-stage startups have increased ABM adoption by 30% in just two years.
   • More companies are leveraging LinkedIn’s ABM tools, dynamically integrating CRM data and intent signals from platforms like G2 to refine their targeting.
   • Successful startups focus on pipeline acceleration campaigns, ensuring they engage buying committees throughout the entire sales cycle.
4. Reimagining the B2B Funnel
   • The traditional marketing funnel is outdated, and leading companies are shifting to an “in-market vs. out-of-market” approach (based on LinkedIn’s 95-5 rule).
   • Companies that engage early in the buyer’s journey (before prospects enter the market) are more likely to be on their final shortlist when they’re ready to buy.
5. The "Measurement Gold Rush"
   • Startups are investing in advanced measurement solutions (e.g., HockeyStack, Factors AI, Dreamdata) to track multi-touch attribution and incrementality.
   • The mindset is shifting to accepting that not everything can be perfectly measured and prioritizing longer time horizons for campaign evaluation.

Final Thoughts & Call to Action

• The full benchmark report is available in the show notes, and listeners are encouraged to read along.
• Ruby invites listeners to connect with her on LinkedIn for more insights and upcoming research.
• AJ encourages LinkedIn Ads fanatics to check out the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for exclusive content, courses, and coaching.

This episode provides game-changing insights into LinkedIn advertising and B2B marketing strategy, especially for startups looking to scale efficiently while ensuring sales and marketing are aligned.

Want more insights? Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community at fanatics.b2linked.com. 

Show Transcript:

Benchmarks are crucial to your LinkedIn advertising, but you know what's even more crucial? Benchmarks that measure both the marketing and the sales. That's what we're talking on this week's episode of LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey, hey, hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. As he said, I'm AJ Wilcox. I'm the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn Ads Show. I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers in their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status. Today, we're reviewing one of the most useful benchmark reports I've ever come across. I know you're gonna love it. It not only takes into account the LinkedIn Ads performance, but also the arguably more important and more valuable sales performance. I haven't seen anything like it before. I'm excited to introduce you to a guest, a friend of mine now, Ruby James from LinkedIn. She and her team assembled this report. She'll be sharing some of her top takeaways from it. And of course, I want you to scroll to the bottom right now of the show notes, go and get access to the report so you can check it out and follow along. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by b2linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

That's right, B2linked is the ad agency of 100% dedicated to LinkedIn Ads. And we have been since 2014, you know, back before it was cool. We build a custom strategy for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me and my local team. You won't get any sort of cookie cutter approach or standard account templates from us, no siree. Plus with the strategies that we've developed and our mastery of the LinkedIn Ads platform, we always save our clients more than we charge. So it's kind of like getting the best in the biz for free. If you'd like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn Ads management, schedule your free discovery call with me today at b2linked.com slash discovery. All right, do you have a question, a review or feedback for the show? You can message me privately on LinkedIn. My DMs are free and they're open. Or you can also email us at podcast@b2linked.com. If you want to attach a link to a voice recording of you, I'd love to play you right here on the show. And of course I'm happy to keep you anonymous or shout you out. All right, without further ado, let's hop right into the interview with Ruby. Let's hit it.

AJ

Ruby, so excited to have you here on the podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Ruby

Thanks for having me, AJ. I'm thrilled to be here.

AJ

For those of you who have not heard of Ruby James, she leads the LinkedIn Marketing for Startups organization there within LinkedIn. Welcome, we're so excited to have you here. Tell us a little bit more about your background.

Ruby

Yeah, so you already shared this, but I most recently lead our LinkedIn Marketing for Startups org. I've been part of our Startups org since its inception four years ago. I've actually been at LinkedIn almost for nine and a half years now, which is so wild to think about.
But a little bit about the LinkedIn Marketing for Startups team, which again has been the largest portion of my LinkedIn journey. This team was created really with the goal of helping startups speed time to ROI on LinkedIn. And that was really done through our team's specialized startup specific support. And what that includes is LinkedIn Marketing Strategy and Advisory on other important levers that we found drive strong results on LinkedIn, including Advisory on Sales and Marketing Alignment, Measurement, the latest Go to Market Insights, Board Ready Reporting, all the things that again, ensure that your paid marketing strategy is optimized and efficient and really yields the highest ROI possible. We also focus on partnering with VCs to ensure they're aware of all the best practices that enable startups in their portfolio to maximize the value they see on LinkedIn. And so that's really a little bit about our team, where I spend the majority of my time and I should say all of my time in the work side of me, a little bit about me personally. So outside of work, I'm based in San Francisco. I always joke I'm a third generation San Franciscan, so a unicorn in my own right. And I love hiking. I also like to surf. I'm an avid yogi and actually teach yoga on the side at my local studio, as well as volunteering at a few organizations that bring yoga to underserved communities. So spending a lot of time both inside and outside of work on things I'm very passionate about, including startups and yoga movement, nature being outside as much as I can.

AJ

That is so cool. It's great to get to know you better. I love so much that you have an entire organization within LinkedIn dedicated just to startups, because yes, startups, they require different attention. They need more help and they need different help for LinkedIn ads. So I'm so glad. It seems like a big hug from LinkedIn to startups that they gave you this team.

Ruby

I love the description you use, big hug.

Yes, there's definitely other verticals throughout LinkedIn marketing, but we're actually the only verticalized team within our larger where we sit new business org. So essentially we verticalized to support startups in their first typically one to two plus years when they're first building their foundations on LinkedIn. Because we know that startups have such unique needs, they have aggressive growth goals, they need to see ROI fast and accelerate the testing phase, especially when trying a new channel. And so we were able to really make the case to give specifically startups, again, in this stage that they're in when they're first trying and sampling LinkedIn, this big hug. So it's great.

AJ

Oh, totally. All right, so the reason why we brought you here on the show is because you and your team authored a new report that I think is incredible. It's called Growth Benchmarks for Scaling B2B Startups. Can you tell us about the inception of this report?

Ruby

Yes, so I'd love to share a little bit more about kind of the impetus of the report and how we got here. So yes, as you said, introducing the Growth Benchmarks for Scaling B2B Startups report. As I mentioned, my team supports thousands of startups and over the course of the last couple years, both gathering from direct conversations with marketing leaders and also just aggregating, surging topics and trends that we were hearing across our customer calls. What we found was really the biggest ask from our customers was to understand what good looks like in this new era of B2B. So we all know the B2B landscape has fundamentally changed over the last few years due to macro challenges. Everyone's talking about larger B2B buying committees, shifting B2B buyer priorities, increased competition. And really what we've heard, like the biggest ask was our startups wanting to know what to do or how to succeed in this new environment? And so I first started to look at like what already existed in the market today to solve this. And I observed that although there were a good amount of B2B Benchmark reports that already exist, whether it's from partners like Gartner or VC firms, what I was finding was that most of the, or I would say all of the pre-existing B2B Benchmark reports really only featured the medium and top quartile of growth benchmarks and nothing else.
And I found that it was super important to democratize these insights, but really go beyond just that and democratize the how. Like, okay, great, we now know what the top quartile is seeing from a growth rate perspective or funnel conversion rate perspective, but like how did they get there? And so understanding that there was a gap in being able to really share and highlight and democratize the how and the tactics, obviously on the LinkedIn side, we're sitting on some really rich B2B insights. We decided to pull in HubSpot for startups, given their strong reach in the startup community and their role as a CRM and being able to touch what happens beyond the lead through to closed one. So we brought HubSpot for startups in to really partner together and solve the question or answer the question, like what are the top performing startups doing? The ones with the highest year over year growth, the strongest funnel conversion rates, what are they doing strategy and tactic wise? And so together with HubSpot for startups, we surveyed 250 B2B startups and then also analyze top performing startups on LinkedIn with the strongest results and pulled through these insights to really bring together and bring to life this report that highlights the median top quartile metrics like other reports you'll see in the market, but also the how, like what startups are doing to actually get their strategy and tactic wise.

AJ

Oh, perfect. And first of all, everyone I talked to loves benchmark reports. It's super important that when we are doing something that we can tell like, yes, are we going way off into left field or are we doing a good job or are we even like killing it, slaying it, which you can find out, especially cause your report has both the median, which you can be like, okay, are we totally off base here? And you have the top quartile to be like, are we destroying? This is great.

Ruby

Totally. Again, yeah, the top quartile and median benchmarks, both business metrics and sales and marketing metrics serve as a really nice gauge and pulse point to understand like how am I stacking up against my peers that share the same perhaps ARR bucket as me if we're looking at business metrics or like ASP if we're looking at sales and marketing metrics. And then yeah, taking it a step further, like really what I get most excited about with this report and some of the key takeaways we'll talk about today are again, what came out of us being able to cut the data and actually see what are the startups that have the highest year-over-year growth across all the ARR buckets, the strongest conversion rates through the funnel and cost per through the funnel across all the ASP buckets. What specifically is that cohort of top performing startups doing strategy wise? And even if you're exceeding the metrics that you're seeing from a benchmark standpoint, you can still then pull through these strategy insights to perhaps go far and beyond the benchmarks that you're seeing in the report as well. Or again, if you're not where you wanna be, these tactics are gonna help you get there because this is what the top performing startups are seeing work for them. So three kind of key takeaways that I'm excited to dig in more with you that came through our research. First is this fundamental shift in measurement that we're seeing, as I mentioned, everyone's talking about longer sales cycles, bigger buying committees, it takes more time and effort to win a deal. And really what came through in our research is that the top performing startups are measuring the impact of their marketing programs over a longer time horizon. And they know in order to understand the value of their efforts and really what's working best and driving the strongest ROI, they really need to extend the horizon in which they measure. That was one key insight that I'm really excited to dig more in with you on. And then the two others, number two, so what we'll see in the data, and I'm super also, I'm excited about all the insight that you can hear, but for number two, we can now finally point to the ROI of a strong executive engagement strategy. And I think historically what I've seen across our customers is that executive thought leadership has kind of been seen as this like vanity portion of their strategy. And we now actually have data to show that it's driving the strongest results through the lens of direct marketing source pipeline.

And with that, we now have again, like these ROI insights that reinforce it to be a core part of your marketing strategy. And there's now an opportunity cost to not incorporating your execs into your marketing strategy. And as a startup, you'll be doing yourself a disservice if you don't. So that's one big one I'm really excited to dig more in with you on. I know, you know, having followed you for a while, you have a perspective on that too.

Totally. And then the third insight or takeaway that I'm excited to dive a little bit more into today as well is how we're seeing these top performing startups reimagine their funnel. So what really came out of the research and further conversation with a lot of the thought leaders that we interviewed for this report is how we need to reimagine our funnel. I feel like we talk a lot about the funnel. The word funnel shows up all throughout this report. It's a really helpful mental model for marketers and leaders to think about, but we're all well aware that it doesn't actually work like that. And this report really started to make it clear that we need to reimagine how we talk about marketing through the stages of the B2B buyer's journey. And then, you know, beyond those three takeaways, I think this underlying buzz and theme is around, you know, tightening sales and marketing alignment, something we've been talking about for five plus, seven plus years. But we'll talk more about kind of how that pulls through and how that's an important piece to always be evaluating. But those were really the core takeaways that came out beyond, you know, why we did this. It became very clear that, again, beyond the actual metrics and benchmarks, there were some key insights that we know are gonna help startups be more successful as they go to market in this new B2B era.

AJ

Amazing. And just for all you fanatics who are listening, I'm sure you wanna check out the report. We put the link right down there in the show notes. So go open it up and read right alongside of us as we're talking about it. All right, so Ruby, obviously going through a report like this, there's going to be lots of information and maybe some outcomes where you go, yeah, duh. Like that just, it told us exactly what we already knew. Were there any of those kind of reaffirming beliefs or things that the data told you, like, yep, I already knew that and now I just know it a little bit stronger?

Ruby

Yeah, it's a great question. And for those of you that have opened up the report and are following along, in the very beginning of the report, you'll see some cuts of benchmark data. So both business metrics, again, cut by ARR bucket and then conversion rates for the funnel and lead volume and cost per so the funnel by ASP or average sales price. Again, when we pulled through this cohort of startups that had the strongest metrics, so we consider them like these top performers, we kind of found something, again, that we kind of were like, duh, like this is what we're hearing on calls, this is what we're seeing across the thousands of startups in general, but it was even more concentrated within this cohort of top performing startups, was really this shift in measuring success beyond the lead. So now about 75% or 3 fourths of the top performing startups that we surveyed shared that their North Star metric was now downstream KPIs, like sales meeting volume, opportunities, total pipeline, closed one revenue. I could even say three years ago, there were much more startups that were measuring success on lead volume and demo volume. Like, hey, we just need to bring as many demos as possible. And I think it's great that we're seeing this shift to measuring metrics that actually matter down to the bottom line and holding both marketing and sales accountable together to those higher ROI focus metrics and really taking ownership over the entire journey through to closed one. We interviewed Kacie Jenkins, who's the SVP of Sendoso, and she really validated how great this is and how she is bringing this shift within her startup, Sendoso as well. And she actually even referenced the CMO panel at Sester that recently happened a few months ago where it was a core topic where more and more marketing teams are taking ownership over the full pipeline number and they're taking it a step further by doing away with those sales versus marketing attribution battles. And I really loved how Kacie, her and I chatted after this report to again, get her perspective and any other insights we can glean. And she made the call out that she now refers to her sales team and marketing team at Sendoso as one team called the revenue team. Cool. She's completely shifted where it's less about who gets credit for what. And instead these teams are really up leveling their measurement sophistication. And again, up leveling or adjusting and enhancing the timeline and time horizons to measure what shared motions or tactics both teams are seeing the most success with, what's moving the needle, what's driving the strongest pipeline, conversions to the funnel and ROI. And so that's been like a key shift that we're seeing. And although it's like, duh, like if startups are now gonna be very ROI focused, like marketers should be measuring success beyond the lead. It was really helpful to see the data and seeing how it's now like very much table stakes. Majority of startups are reporting on this change within that top performing cohort. But I'm curious your perspective on this AJ, like I'm curious if you're seeing more marketing and sales sharing, same numbers, if there's any challenges that are coming up as a result to that. But again, I was very excited to see this validated.

AJ

Yeah, totally we've seen the same thing. Over the last 10 years of us being an agency in business dealing almost exclusively with B2B, we definitely have seen like probably the first seven years of our inception, the majority of clients were very much lead focused. Like get us conversions, get us leads. We're gonna throw them over the wall to sales and then get mad at them when they're not working the deals hard enough. Over the last three years, I've definitely seen a movement. And if I had to guess why, I think there's probably two factors. The first is that we have better technologies at our fingertips to allow us this kind of tracking. If you didn't have even your CRM tracking what your LinkedIn ads performance or any ads performance was doing, you really stuck. Like, yeah, you could go and marry those things up manually, but that takes a lot of time and effort and you may not be able to do it super often. Whereas now all of these tools, I mean, we've got factors, dream data, I can go on and on. So many of these attribution platforms that do have direct integrations right into LinkedIn's ecosystem and they also plug into other ecosystems allowing us to kind of see everything in one picture. So that's kind of like number one, we have tools. And then second of all, I think marketers we're getting better. We're getting better at using those tools and understanding. And I think B2B marketers, like we're finally stepping into this role of like, we have to be smarter and we have to be more capable and better with data than B2C marketers are in a lot of cases because we're dealing with longer sales cycles, more of an incomplete picture, larger deals, all of these things just scream to me like you need to get better at data.

Ruby

Totally, this wasn't included in depth in the report, but coming again, as I've had more conversations about the data, about these insights and what we're learning from the research we did, I did a quick look, we use Gong and I was able to see the increase in mentions of these like third party sophisticated measurement solutions. As you mentioned, like factors, AI, hockey stack, RevShur dream data. And we've seen about 300% increase in mentions, just showing exactly what you said, where we're just seeing this shift towards bringing on these more sophisticated measurement solutions to be able to really track and understand what's moving the needle as you work, more closely with sales or align the same goals as sales. And then the other piece that just more anecdotally that I've been seeing, again, sitting on all the data that we have on the B2B side at LinkedIn is we are noticing more and more startups recently hiring for like a head of measurement or head of analytics. Oftentimes that role might sit with someone that also just owns demand gen or again, it's not bucketed as its own specific scope, but I'm seeing that it is now becoming more and more common to prioritize bringing that on sooner.

AJ

Oh, I totally believe that. Yeah, the sooner we can get those insights and anyone out there, if you're considering a job or a role switch, look into data science and your brain being plugged into marketing's data and sales data could do some incredible things. I think there's gonna be a role open, at least one in every large company.

Ruby

The other really interesting reaffirming insight we saw, and this is kind of a nice segue into the first part around just, again, sales and marketing, sharing more of those downstream metrics and marketing taking more ownership over the full pipeline number versus just looking at lead volume is what we're seeing startups do with ABM. And what we found that super interesting is the top performing startups have really doubled down on aligning their targeting with sales, which again, if we're gonna share a total pipeline number, like it makes sense that we'll then optimize or think about our targeting more strategically with them as well. We all know ABM is table stakes. So like this again was another like, okay, this is what we're seeing. This just like validates what we all already know. But what I thought was like, you know, more interesting or like a step further in what we already know was that we actually looked at on the LinkedIn platform percentage of startups by stage that are leveraging an ABM list. And the most interesting data point that we saw was we looked at this in 2022, and then we looked at it again this year in 2024. And we saw that early stage startups use of ABM actually grew by 30%.

So even though we all know ABM is, you know, what you should have this as a portion of your strategy, we all know, you know, it's super important to align with sales and target their, the accounts that they're prioritizing. We saw that actual shift in behavior where more and more startups earlier on are actually bringing it into their strategy. And there's a few different ways that we kind of saw that come to life. I wanna quote, there's this amazing marketing leader, her name's Betty Mok. She used to lead marketing at LinkedIn and then she moved on to Pendo I.O. and now is at Consensus. And she, when her and I were chatting through this report, she talked about this trend of like marketing deepening their focus on what she calls riding shotgun with sales. And so, you know, she described that as more and more, again, of these top performing startups are targeting all of their decision makers. They're not just targeting the, you know, job titles that might be requesting the demo or, you know, just the C-suite. If they think that that's gonna be their needle mover or influencer, they're targeting decision makers, influencers, even hidden buyers across their target accounts. And they're doing one to many, one to few, one to one, ABM tactics. And then one of the newer things we're seeing is the addition of pipeline acceleration campaigns. So more and more marketing teams are targeting open pipelines to nurture these buying committees from initial conversion all the way to closed one. And we're seeing different tactics to do so, whether that's, you know, highly targeted nurturer streams, addressing persona specific challenges or addressing, you know, an industry or segment challenge. We really now have the data from this report. And again, from like a lot of the conversations that we had with these thought leaders that buy, as Betty says, like riding shotgun with sales from, you know, initial engagement with your brand all the way to close one. Those startups are seeing shorter sales cycles and higher win rates. So again, there's this opportunity cost in this new era of B2B go to market that again, if we're not staying present throughout the entire journey and marketing kind of helping sales do so and creating that halo effect, you know, you're not gonna see as strong of funnel conversion rates and close one conversion rates. And they're not gonna, your deals aren't gonna close as quickly. But, you know, again, you've been doing this for forever. I think you can agree that ABM has been a conversation for, you know, I want to say hundreds of years.

AJ

Yeah.

Ruby

But we'd love to hear your take on this. And again, like how you've seen ABM evolve most recently.

AJ

Well, it's so interesting because with LinkedIn ads, we've been able to do all of these things. I think it was like 2017.

Ruby

Yeah.

AJ

When we got the ability to upload lists. Like we've been able to do all of this stuff. But if you had to think about every time you have access to a new audience, let me download it to a CSV. Let me go upload it to LinkedIn. Let me go create a campaign targeting this list. Like, let's be honest, we as marketers were busy and we're not always thinking about doing that. But this is a technology nod, I think. Like now because we have CRMs that are directly integrated into LinkedIn, we have products like Zapier who can create a dynamic list and keep it updated for us, push it right into LinkedIn. It takes out all of those middle steps and now marketers are actually using it because surprise, surprise, if we have to do it manually, it's probably gonna drop.

Ruby

You're totally right. It's through the test of time, we've been able to upload accounts within LinkedIn. And that's really what differentiates us as our first party data and our ability to really accurately target, obviously the right professionals at the right specific companies that you want to engage and get in front of. I think to your point, what's been so great over the last couple of years is how we've evolved in our ability to leverage, obviously like a Zapier or even like our intent partners like G2 to kind of combine your data with intent data to get even more specific around, okay, like if I have X amount of dollars, I should be allocating that to the portion of my target account list. If I can't reach 100% of it, who's most likely to convert or most likely to talk to sales or ready to talk to sales? LinkedIn on our side, we've also developed a new tab where you can actually see it's referred to as like the company's engagement report, the new like ABM companies hub where you can actually see companies with the strongest engagement with your brand to help you think about slicing and dicing your list in different ways. Maybe you want to create target account list with the sales as target accounts that have shown low engagement with your brand and you want to serve them a different message than the accounts that have already gone to your website or have engaged with you organically. So what's cool is that again, to your point, AJ, we're evolving more and more how we can get even smarter with ABM, both with LinkedIn's data and then the data of our partners, which is pretty awesome.

AJ

Oh, I'm a huge fan. Thank you.

Ruby

Well, collective thank you to LinkedIn product if they're listening. They've been very avid too and like listening to Gong calls and understanding what more we can be doing to up level what it is we bring to our startups and the broader market, which is awesome.

AJ

Oh yeah.

Ruby

There's one other piece I think of this that might be worth sharing in like the what was reaffirming to you. And I know I mentioned it as a takeaway, like kind of like a always on hum in the beginning, but I think something else that needs to be mentioned is just like what sales and marketing alignment means today. I think what's interesting is, since the inception of our startups team, four to five years ago, we've been talking about sales and marketing alignment and what we found in our research that again, just validated what we already knew, but it's still important to say because it's so important is the startups with the highest year over year growth, the strongest funnel conversion rates and strongest efficiencies like cost per so the funnel, they actually cited not just strong sales and marketing alignment, but actually the behavior of continuing to find new ways to improve sales and marketing alignment as one of their most effective go to market strategy enhancements that helped improve their funnel conversion rates. So I bring that up because obviously aligning your targeting with sales, thinking about sharing, how you're gonna reassess your North Star metrics with sales and measure that, but also more generally, like how can you as a startup keep up leveling your sales and marketing alignment is just so, so, so important. And I think that kind of relates to everything we just talked about and kind of where, you know, what else we'll probably talk about, but I guess the reason I bring it up is because even if you think you have amazing sales and marketing alignment, there is still always something more you can be doing. And as you learn more about, you know, what's happening with the deals in your pipeline, you know, what you're seeing work, what you're seeing, you know, you need to optimize or maybe learnings, like those are kind of the data points that you can use to improve how you align with your sales team and consistently look into that on whether it's a monthly or quarterly basis, like reassessing how you can be more effective with sales.

AJ

Yeah, I've always said no amount of speaking with, developing a relationship with your sales counterparts is wasted. It's kind of this analogy of sharpening the saw. So if you're trying to cut down a tree, you could take your saw out there and, you know, have hard labor, you know, crank on that tree for two hours, or you could spend 10 minutes at the beginning to sharpen your saw and then only spend 20 minutes. You've taken time away from doing what you were expecting to do to spend a little bit of time to sharpen a saw. It feels like you're going out of your way. It feels like you're wasting time, but then overall, like you've actually ended up saving over an hour. That's kind of what I think about that sales and marketing alignment conversation.

Ruby

I love that, yes. And I think you're, that's actually one of my favorite quotes. I think it's an Abraham Lincoln quote. As you were talking, I looked it up. It's Abraham Lincoln was often quoted, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." No, it's exactly so spot on where it's like every month as a sales and marketing org, as a revenue team, you should be carving out time to sharpen your axe. And even like last week, a VC partner reached out to me and asked for the latest insights on speed to lead, because even though, you know, one of their portcoes has a speed to lead process and SLA, they wanted to identify if there's been new data to support something different, or like they looked at their top converting deals and when the reps reached out to those marketing source leads and they were able to then further optimize that. So love that metaphor or quote of sharpening the sales ax, the sales and marketing ax on a regular basis.

AJ

Totally, I need to actually attribute it to Abraham Lincoln rather than.

Ruby

No, it's your quote now, it's fine.

AJ

All right, so those were all really good to be like, okay, this is reaffirming what we already knew, but maybe were there any insights that you got out of this research and report where you were like, whoa, I wasn't expecting that at all.

Ruby

Yes, I'm so glad you asked. And, you know, I get excited about the things that were reaffirmed, but obviously I'm most excited about like what came out that was like shocking or new or, you know, at this moment of innovation where like we're all learning together how to be effective. The most shocking insight is related to executive thought leadership and how that really moves the needle at the top of the funnel or when you're creating demand within your ICP. I first though, wanna kind of take a step back and mention one reaffirming table stakes thing that is gonna build on, you know, that allows us to jump off onto the shocking insight. But what I wanna first start by saying is like, it has become table stakes. Like we know that every single top performing startup that we surveyed and we looked at their performance and their strategy, it is table stakes to deploy a full funnel strategy on LinkedIn or I shouldn't say on LinkedIn in general. And we know that full funnel strategy is really accelerate the buyer's journey. We now have data support that startups active with a full funnel strategy, see a 6X increase in conversion rates to the funnel. They actually see a 2X increase in needs or prospects readiness to talk to sales. So we did some analysis to like validate that again. There's much stronger ROI and full funnel. Even though I feel like everyone knows this and I'm curious your thoughts, AJ, on this. Like, you know, four years ago, if we had recommended, if my team had recommended to some, you know, most of our startup customers to run top of funnel, like many or ungate things, like they would have laughed in our faces. And like, you know, the portion of investment that went to bottom funnel, product focused messaging or request demo pricing, like all the things that are more demand capture, we're seeing there's like a really big shift and a shift more towards ungated up funnel kind of top of funnel content and messaging. And so we're seeing a lot of that in our marketing and strategies. And what we found in the data, and this is really the shocking kind of exciting, innovative insight is around executive thought leadership and the role that it plays in your demand creation efforts. And even in your demand capture efforts, like throughout, you know, the funnel and your entire marketing strategy and demand gen strategy. You know, again, looking at everyone's running full funnel,you know, you can say you're running full funnel, but you're mainly focused on your product or you're doing XYZ, which isn't fully full funnel. But I say that because like what matters is, you know, how can I cut through the noise and what's actually working? And what we found is that again, this cohort of startups, you know, these top performers with the strongest metrics, both business and marketing and sales metrics, they actually cited content featuring company execs or industry thought leaders and third party reports as the most impactful content type that actually moved their buyers through their journey faster. So actually accelerated them through to close on revenue. So we now have data to support that you are really doing your startup a disservice. You're missing out on revenue. If you are not putting your executives front and center in your marketing strategy and, you know, LinkedIn and what you'll see in the report, LinkedIn published research that shows now, you know, people trust people, people trust humans over brands. This came from some research we did in collaboration with Edelman. You know, it makes sense, you know, if you go back to first principles, like it just makes sense, like people trust people. And so it is now something that, you know, we as marketers, especially startups, when they're sitting on such gold, like they have a founder who obviously has a reason that they founded their startup. They have a unique perspective. They're innovating in a space that, you know, might be saturated with some of these incuments. And we need to think about how we can bring those perspectives to the forefront. And that's really what we're seeing move the needle and actually drive higher conversion rates through the funnel.

AJ

And I totally agree with that, especially the very first time I got to use a thought leader ad when they came out back in like 2023, I ran exactly the same message from the company page as from one of the executives in the company. And the difference was shocking. It was like half a percent engagement rate from the company, the exact same message from an individual. We have like a 11% engagement rate. And I immediately became a believer like, oh, same message, same audience, but they gravitate to people. If you have a face telling you something, you're gonna pay more attention than if it's a company, a brand you've never heard of before. So absolutely believer in this, especially after all of our testing we've done with thought leader ads, it's game changer.

Ruby

Totally. And just at the macro level bird's eye view across our thousands of startups, both anecdotally and we have now legitimate data now that we've had thought leadership ads available for about a year now, as you mentioned, like we're seeing growing adoption of that leadership ads, but then as you mentioned, it is so far outperforming all of our other traditional brand ad formats. We're seeing higher engagement. It's about like a 1.6 X increase on average compared to brand ads that don't come from an executive. So just as you mentioned, that's again, the average over a larger sample size. And then most importantly, on the impact on their bottom line, like we did an analysis. So we actually looked at a retargeting audience that was built surely off of thought leadership ads. So every single prospect in that retargeting audience saw thought leadership ads. And then we also had a retargeting audience that only saw other brand ads, not using thought leadership ads. So there was no executives included in any of their ads. And we saw a 45% lift in demo conversion rates from retargeting audiences that saw a thought leadership ad compared to the traditional brand ads that didn't feature execs. Wow. And we also have data that, again, many of our startup customers will ask for where they'll say, "Hey, can we see the incremental lift between thought leadership ads versus something else we're doing on the brand side so we can really prove to our executives that this is something they should be spending their time on and investing in?" And I think that leads me to, and I'm curious, AJ, what you've seen with your clients, but I would say the biggest challenge we see and hear across our startup customers is that it's really hard to get executive buy-in and get them to participate. And I think, number one, I wanna bust this big myth. It seems like one of the bigger kind of concerns is that so many execs incorrectly think that they need to commit to this robust, big, exec engagement thought leadership strategy that's gonna be this huge investment in time. And in reality, it should be very low friction. And there's so many low friction, high impact ways to meaningfully accelerate your startup's growth and funnel conversion rates by getting out there and being part of your marketing team's content strategy. Some of the things that we're seeing is the best thought leadership ads are unplanned, unmanicured, very authentic, and it's literally just an executive sharing a hot take or a perspective from maybe a customer advisory board that day, or maybe someone posted something about a challenge that their ICP is having, and they just took that and re-shared it with a couple sentences. So again, I really wanna bust this misperception that you need to have this really robust strategy. And in reality, if you can just produce one to two, again, low friction, low lift, high impact perspectives, it goes a really long way in driving results for your marketing team and helping bring in more close to end revenue.

AJ

Totally. We've found some situations where a brand would share like a video that they paid 20 grand and they had a studio put all these complex animations together with. And we actually got better engagement, more conversions from a 30 second clip of an executive just talking right into their phone. And it was edited with an AI tool like Descript, that's 12 bucks a month. We got better engagement, better results from that. And what that taught me is like, people wanna hear from you and it doesn't need to be a huge ask or a huge lift from your executive team to just give you a quick snippet, a little bit of thought leadership.

Ruby

Totally. I love that. That's such a great kind of data point to again reinforce how low friction, low lift this is. Something that I know my team and I will be prioritizing heading into this new year. So early, you know, calendar year 2025 is more easy best practices and tips and tricks for executives and founders in the startup space to align and incorporate executive thought leadership into their startups marketing strategies because it has such a strong impact. And there's so many things you could be doing with again, very little time, very little resources. And there's no one more well positioned to be effective here than startups. Because again, they are kind of coming into this space as innovators, they're newer, they're always innovating. They have new perspectives that they should be sharing. So super excited to lean more into helping more and more startups adopt this portion of their strategy because we now have the data to support that it really does move the needle from an ROI standpoint.

AJ

Totally, love that. All right, going through the report, there's a lot of gold here. I specifically from the advertiser perspective, I saw a lot of suggestions that are going to help us with improving the overall performance of our ads, improving conversion rates, improving ROI. I'm curious, what sort of trends and new ways of thinking does the report give us that we as advertisers can go and implement?

Ruby

Yeah, love this question. And you warned me that you wanted to make sure this conversation went deeper than what we had in the report and above and beyond, a lot of the insights and obviously we have the data and then we have the insights and the takeaways we can pull through. And then we have the hot takes from a lot of the thought leaders that we brought in to give us their perspective and validate what we were seeing in our research. And something that came up a lot was again, this idea of re-imagining the funnel. We use the word marketing funnel throughout the report, both in how we share our benchmarks. It's a well-known framework and mental model for marketers. So I do feel a little bit silly saying this because again, the word funnel is all over this report. But I do think in reality,we know that that's not how B2B buyers buy. And LinkedIn, our B2B Institute introduced the 95 five rule years ago. And it's really become more apparent that the top startups are re-imagining the funnel and instead thinking about their prospects through the lens of in-market versus out-of-market. And so I think more and more, we'll see kind of the word funnel disappear. And that's something that really became clear in our research, but AJ, I've been following you for a while and I know you have some thoughts on this. So I'm curious your reaction.

AJ

Yeah, I've heard several advertisers come to me, I'm active in a Reddit community on LinkedIn ads and in our own private community. And I've had several people say, how do I go in and how do I reach that 5%? Cause they're the ones I wanna go and drive business from. And I just tell them like, forget it. Don't waste your money trying to hit the 5% because you're going to waste your money across the whole 95%. Think about your audience in terms of stages of interaction and getting to know you. And this really does feel a lot like the funnel, but we give them opportunities in stage one. This is what we would consider our initial touch with an audience. We have no idea at that point if they've ever heard of us before, have had any sort of interaction. And then we re-target those interactions at stage two where that's a little warmer. And then again, at a stage three. And what we find is even if you have the same calls to action all the way through all of those three stages, what you start to see is in stage three, conversion rates are five times higher than they are in stage two. And it teaches me that yes, there are 5% of your audience who are currently in market. Awesome. Do whatever you can to get in front of them for sure, but don't make your entire marketing program be about that. Instead, build an entire, I call it my lead generating machine. Build a whole ecosystem around your audience so that you can take those that are cold audiences and eventually warm them, educate them, nurture them until they are ready to respond at a high rate when you finally say, okay, you look ready, let's have you talk to sales.

Ruby

Totally. It's so spot on and super helpful to hear like specifically how you think about it. And like the real data points that validate that's the right approach and the way we should all be thinking about it. My brain goes to this, the Google Zero Moment of Truth study. And there's also a Forrester report that I recently read. So this is not, again, a groundbreaking stat, everyone knows it, but it's around like, I think three fourths of B2B buyers choose a vendor that's first to help them with useful content. So we know that it is so important to be there first, before your buyer is in market, because if you're not, again, if we know that 74% of these B2B buyers are actually selecting the vendor that is helping them in the beginning with before they're in market, before they're ready, helping them educate them on potentially a problem that they may not be aware of. And again, being present when it matters most, like what really matters, and Kacie from Sandoso said this too, like her focus is how they can get on as many of their prospects day one vendor list as possible. Because again, to your point, if you're also just gonna be focused on that 5% of buyers that are in market, they already have top of mind, likely who they wanna go with. And so you're already too late and you're reducing that 5% by 75%, because 75% of them already know based on who they engage with in the beginning.

AJ

Exactly.

Ruby

Yeah, love that, we saw it in the data, we saw it in our conversations with all the thought leaders and it's super helpful to hear how you advise your customers, because that's totally how we should, or clients, because that's really how we should be thinking about it.

AJ

Oh yeah, if you just show up right there at that last stage, more than likely they're just gonna say, "Ah, we've already done our research, "we don't have room for one more applicant to consider," and they just blow right past you.

Ruby

Maybe they'll take the call with sales because they wanna make sure that they've done their due diligence across all the vendors, but you're still wasting, in a way, your sales team's time by not being present in the beginning, because again, they're less likely to go with you, and they likely also took that demo. Maybe there's something there in us doing some sort of calculation of lost time spent, or sales time spent on leads that didn't have that specific vendor on their consideration list, but they're still taking that call to check the box and make sure that they feel good about day one vendor they decide to go with.

AJ

That would be super cool research, I would love to see that.

Ruby

Okay, I would say there's one other innovative kind of trend or new way of thinking, and it kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation that you brought up just around measurement sophistication and where we're seeing our startups go. So I kind of noticed in what became really clear in our research, as well as the conversations we've had with the thought leaders that we featured in our research is really just around measurement. So both top performing startups mindset around measurement and then also how they're approaching measurement. So on the mindset piece, it became really clear from again, our research and our conversations that the top performing startups understand and get their executives and board on the same page that it's not possible to measure everything. And single touch attribution is completely misleading.

Although it's more comfortable to think that we can measure everything, I think getting to a place where everyone can agree that it's inherently impossible and it also just doesn't make sense based on the way B2B buyers buy and they're buying behavior. Even if you looked at like there's so many great insights that came out of hockey stack and factors AI come to mind specifically around someone that converts obviously maybe they're doing some research or maybe they're not doing research yet. They're obviously like scrolling LinkedIn, looking for information to make them more productive and successful. They might see some helpful pieces of content that gets them to a place where they're ready to actually do some research. Maybe they go to Google, search for different things. And then you ask them, they eventually convert on a form. You ask them, how did you hear about us? And your attribution tool is telling you they came from Google, but they're telling you that they heard about you from someone somewhere very different. Kacie, also I'm quoting her a lot because she's amazing. She should come onto this podcast as well. Yes.

She can be part two, but she talks about how she was able to get her leadership and boards buy in on like rethinking measurement as a whole. Because if you actually just looked at your top performing channel, it would be website traffic. And she's like, that tells me nothing.

And so again, it's step one in us all, or I should say like the top performing startups, just like rethinking and understanding and getting comfortable with the uncomfortable in adopting this mindset that it's not possible to measure everything. And we have to move away from just single touch attribution. And then that second piece is again, moving away from single touch attribution is like what I would call the umbrella of like approach. Okay, now that we know that the B2B buyer journey has gotten longer, it's more complex, we can't track everything. How can we at least up level the approach to measurement to at least feel really good about where we're seeing different tactics move the needle? Obviously, these different tactics work together. How can we understand incrementality? All the different pieces across multi-touch, across incrementality, across channel influence, measuring over longer time horizons, to at least get a sense of what's moving the needle and driving the strongest pipeline through the funnel and ultimately driving ROI. I was joking with somebody the other day, I know everyone's saying it's like the AI gold rush and I'm like, forget the AI gold rush, it is the measurement gold rush. And I feel like right now is this like key moment where we're watching startups, again, like up level and think through how they evolve their approach to measurement.

Curious what you're seeing here too. I know that was a lot. So curious what you're seeing here too and your familiarity with kind of these different changes in mindset and approach.

AJ

Yeah, I think five years ago, clients would come to us and they would go, LinkedIn is not profitable in and of itself. Let's say it's 80% profitable. And they'd say, let's go to a channel that is profitable. And now I look at it and go, wow, if any channel with direct attribution, if you can tell that you're within 20% and that might even be low, there are synergies with all your other channels that you can't measure, you won't know the impact until someone tells you down the road, like in the middle of closing a deal, someone goes, oh, by the way, I heard you on, I saw your ad on LinkedIn and you're like, oh, had no ID, you were sourced from LinkedIn. Your UTM showed us as you coming direct or from Google or something. So I love that. I think we need to realize that our measuring, our tracking, no matter how hard we try, it's always gonna be imperfect. And if it's, I always just assume it's probably 20% at least better than what it looks like.

Ruby

Totally.

AJ

Ruby, thank you so much for coming on and sharing the report with us. I hope everyone is opening it up right now and you're gonna go scour it. This is fantastic. First of all, I'll just ask you, I know as an employee of LinkedIn, you probably have to tell people like, come follow me, but what would you like us to do? How can we best help you and follow you and all that?

Ruby

Yes, well, even if I wasn't an employee of LinkedIn, I actually don't have any other social media. So I'm a big LinkedIn fan across the board, no matter what. It's just given me the most useful insights and information and allowed me to connect with a lot of our customers and the segment and community in general. So please follow me, connect with me on LinkedIn. We'll definitely be sharing more rich insights as we head into the new year in January, kind of continuing on from like some of these key takeaways that we saw to share even more best practices. And if you have any thoughts, perspectives, feedback, I would love to hear from you on the report, what we could help you continue to solve or answer. Please reach out to me on LinkedIn.

AJ

Perfect, thanks so much Ruby, we appreciate it. We'd love to have you back for round two on your next awesome report that you'll publish. Thanks again.

Ruby

Thank you so much for having me AJ. You have such great perspective and insights across all the clients you work with. So it was really valuable to hear your perspective as well on some of the data that we were able to bring to life through this report, so thank you.

AJ

Oh, you are most welcome.

Ruby

Bye.

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