Scaling B2B Startups: ABM, First-Party Data, and Lessons from Canberk

Ivor: [00:00:00] So hello everyone and welcome to GTM tales. This is the podcast where I sit down with go to market leaders in B2B to hear and exchange stories that have unlocked growth and following on from the episode with Thomas from Trustpilot. This is our seventh episode and today I'm really excited to have a fellow Londoner on the show, Jan Burke, who, funnily enough, shares the same office space as Omnifia.

That's we work, not in Waterloo anymore, but in Hoban now. Welcome mate, how are you doing?

Canberk: so much for having me.

Ivor: So do you want to kick off by introducing yourself, give the listeners perhaps a feel of [00:01:00] your background and also like a brief, yeah, update on what you're up to today as well. Hehe.

Canberk: I'm John Berg and I was a corporate lawyer, uh, in the previous life. And after that I was like, okay, this is not the cup of tea that I would like to be drinking for the rest of my life. And I found myself working in a startup called Clinsley. And it was a B2C startup. And my title was grow ticker that I had no idea what it was.

Uh, and, uh, it felt like, okay, I was doing something nice that I was enjoying and I realized that, okay, I really like growth, but I hate working at a B2C company. Uh, then, uh, I actually ended up working, co founding a B2B SaaS company and ended up learning some, uh, Java and everything. So it was a mobile commerce platform, uh, connecting with your e commerce and enabling you to create a mobile app without any coding.

And by the time we launched MVP, COVID happened, the best thing. [00:02:00] And, uh, we scaled so fast, uh, because with the COVID, uh, the demand for e commerce skyrocketed. Therefore, the demand for mobile commerce skyrocketed. So in a year, we were at one mil and then, uh, we got acquired. After that, uh, I joined DeepCrawl as their demand jump person and became head of growth there after a couple of months.

Uh, after DeepCrawl, I joined Cognizant as their head of page, Group global head of pay this idea was so long that I really didn't really bother to memorize it And after cognizant, I joined hockey stick as their head of growth and after hockey stick I said, okay, you know what? Uh, it is time to go back and it's time to be a founder again And now i'm here with roasted and building my own company.

Uh once again

Ivor: Cool. Yeah, thanks for the introduction. It's interesting that you've come from a lawyer background and you went into to BTC. So what was I think one of the first questions I had actually as you're talking that through Around [00:03:00] why you didn't like B2C, and why did B2B appeal to you more?

Canberk: I think it was mostly because of the company and the product I was selling. So it was a cleaning service. So it was like Uber, but for cleaning, uh, diverse service provided one side customers, other side. And what I realized was that normally what we did, uh, cleaning was such a, Subjective thing and nobody was actually happy.

Everyone had a different idea about cleaning. And even when I think of Uber, actually, uh, you can't really have lots of ideas. Like, uh, if the journey takes 20 minutes. You'll be there in 20 minutes. And if it takes 30 minutes, then you could be like, okay, they were so slow. Or like, if it took 10 minutes, you would be like, okay, they were so fast.

So they would, uh, there would be some data, but with cleaning, uh, they would say, okay, I don't like the cleaning, but how, why, what, like, uh, It was such a subjective and we were also offering a hundred percent [00:04:00] satisfaction guarantee. So like, if someone doesn't like the cleaning, you have to give them a new cleaning.

Therefore it is actually not a profitable business. And like, I was actually working with an amazing boss. Uh, he was an ex Bain person. So he was a management consultant previously. think me, he did teach me how to think and how to build. So like, uh, it was a really good learning curve, but then also I realized that no matter what I was building, no matter how perfect the, uh, background systems were, there were always some problems, uh, with the service.

So I said, okay, I don't want to deal with people. I want to deal with companies.

Ivor: Mm. Okay, yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. And actually, maybe digging into that B2B experience. A little bit more. I'd like to understand you, you know, you talked about being at a couple of different startups and quite the, the early stage, so what are some like key channels and key [00:05:00] strategies you use to go from like maybe zero to 10 or maybe 10 to a hundred customers?

That'd be keen to, to learn about that. What's, what's been good in your background? Of

Canberk: had never been someone saying, okay, there's one strategy and it will work for every company. But to every company I've worked with, uh, we create a different strategy. For example, uh, with movie call. Uh, like we were able to provide the e commerce, uh, service for any e commerce provider.

So like it could have been Shopify, it could have been custom, it could have been Magento, but we realized that actually Shopify was the low hanging fruit. So actually, even though the technical capabilities were allowing us to service to any e commerce platform, uh, we prioritized Shopify and we were like, okay, how we can make, uh, Best out of Shopify.

So what we did was to, uh, find the most rated apps on Shopify app [00:06:00] store. And I would just reach out to their head of marketing and I'd be like, can we have a webinar, can we have a podcast? And I would just bring them to the podcast. Then, uh, we would basically make them share this on their email marketing channels on their LinkedIn, uh, because we knew that.

Their customer base also were using Shopify therefore them Uh sending those emails would enable us to reach the customer base without doing any marketing and with um Mobico, we actually got the first four customers just like that like even Uh, the product was not ready back then, uh, we got like four customers and we're like, okay, how are we going to make the product ready?

And it was such a huge thing. Like we actually signed the deals even without the product. And, uh, we hit the delay. Like, we're like, okay, now we are onboarding new customers and we want to make sure that we are going to give you the most Uh, most amazing onboarding, uh, experience. Therefore, we are going to make you wait for a week.

Uh, like it was horrible. But, uh, we sort of did that. Like we sort of [00:07:00] did that. Uh, so that's what worked with MoCo with Deep Crawl. Uh, when I joined, uh, they were at Series B, so they, they just actually closed series B, so that was. customer based, but obviously, you know, like when there's an investment, especially it is in B or C, uh, the expectation from investors are always like, okay, you need to go enterprise.

Uh, and DeepCrawl was the PLG product. Like people were using DeepCrawl for like 20, 25. And the expectation was to increase the package from 20 to 40, 000. Uh, so we're like, okay, how you can make a basically free product to enterprise product. And if you actually back then Google The term Deepcrawl, Deepcrawl for 20.

Like, uh, even Google's results were showing that it is 20. Uh, so for that, the approach had to be much more different and we had to test ABM, uh, but even before ABM, we had to [00:08:00] update the website. We had to update everything we say on the website. Uh, but yeah, like to go enterprise, uh, with Deepcrawl. The ABM approach was the most, uh, solid approach that we taught.

And it was low hanging fruit to be fair, because if you just pinpoint 10 companies that you hundred percent are sure that they don't know about you, then you can pull that thing. Like you can be like, Oh, you know what? We have always been a 40 K product. Uh, but if you go wild and say everyone that now we are 40 K, there's a huge chance that you might be getting backlashing from.

The community, because it was also the technical SEO community that we were, uh, serving and technical SEO people knew about DeepGrowth. They were already using DeepGrowth for 20. So if we went to the wild eye audience and said, okay, it is now 40K, that was going to be a huge backlash. Uh, and with Cognizant, when I joined, uh, they were at Series C.

So it was [00:09:00] actually a bigger thing. Uh, and they just launched the Series C. Uh, but for them, the problem was the U. S. market. So how we can expect the U. S. market and similar, the new round and the investor expectation is that, okay, you know what, you need to expect the U. S. and you need to take over the U. S.

and there's unrealistic VC expectation. Uh, but with Cognizant. What we built was, okay, we can spend so much money to create that brand, uh, in the U. S. And then we can assume that, hypothesize that, uh, that brand events will convert into traffic. And then we are going to capture the traffic through Google Ads.

But then I was, okay, what if we just take a step back and see if there's an existing traffic that we can hijack? And it was zoom info. Zoom info had already Hit the brand awareness. They were already getting amazing search terms So what if we created an entire google ads strategy based on zoom info? Uh, we end up spending more money [00:10:00] for zoom for campaign than in every campaign We had like most of the google budget was going to zoom info We created specific landing pages for zoom info and I was a zoom info user before so like I knew about the product all of the search, uh elsewhere like Zoom info, meh, you can do better.

Zoom info pricing, no, you don't have to pay 30k. Uh, and it had ended up, uh, being the backbone of our growth in the US. Like, uh, I don't remember the exact figure, but most of the US revenue actually ended up coming from just one Zoom info campaign, uh, that had been downloaded. And with HockeyStick, It was the first party data, like when I joined TokiStack, what I was thinking that what makes us unique, uh, and we TokiStack, I was using product for the last three years, so like I was already the product user, I was already my own ICP, uh, so I said, okay, what do we have, we have so many customer data, uh, and how we can use this data, we can actually, [00:11:00] we can just anonymize this data.

And we can create reports based on this data and those reports will just answer the questions that I wonder as the head of growth. So like, actually, I was just writing the reports, uh, for myself, uh, with the data that no other company had. And that had been the, uh, growth channel that had been the ultimate growth channel that actually helped us to grow three eggs in the first six months.

Uh, and it was mostly because we were talking about the data that nobody had, and we were just talking about it in a really, Transparently, like it wasn't about the promotion of HockeyStick. It wasn't about promotion of anything. It was literally me being curious about the data and speaking with myself about that data.

Ivor: Okay. That is a lot to unpack. So I'm going to, I'm going to go through from, from the start actually. So you talked about kind of almost an integration strategy. So, um, looking [00:12:00] at Shopify and then seeing what the, the top rated, um, players on Shopify and kind of doing marketing collaborations with those guys.

That's a really good tactic. And I think I might steal that for Omnivia actually. Um, And then you talked about this kind of, um, faking it to make it a little bit, maybe signing deals before you actually have the product ready, which I think is quite normal in the startup world. That's far better to do it that way than to say, develop a product and then realize that when you try and sell it, that no one wants it.

Um, and yeah, I kind of, you talked about the ABM side of things as well. And maybe it'd be good to. Expand on that a little bit, actually, because I think it's a strategy that we're seeing a lot of different companies leverage. So, um, could you, yeah, kind of unpack like how you kind of approached ABM a little bit more and, and give some more detail there.

[00:13:00] Silence.

Canberk: I join, every webinar I join, uh, the first thing I do when I join a company, It's a reverse engineered funnel to understand, okay, what are the best customers, but also what are the prospects that don't convert.

And with Deepcrawl, the idea was that, okay, if you want to go enterprise, we want to go companies, like it is 5, 000 employees. Uh, we want to go companies in these industries with this revenue, but no, that was something else. Uh, the enterprise actually was supposed to be company that have more than 1, 000, 000 website URLs, because if they had more URLs, they need the proper website crawler that would help them.

Uh, so it wasn't actually about how many employees they had, how many, how much revenue they made, but it was about how complicated their website was. So, Uh, that existed in our salesforce because uh, deep crow was [00:14:00] working on credit based model And yeah, what I found was that if a company like more than x amount of urls They were more like to pay 40k 50k.

So that was our answer. We need to find companies with at least 1 million urls Uh, then, uh, our CTO back then, uh, we had a CTO Ali, uh, he found a way to reverse engineer this on the website. So he built a plugin, uh, where we would just, uh, write the website URL, and it would give us the estimated website URLs that website had.

So what I did was to then go to ZoomInfo, Then export the list of companies like at this 500 employees, uh, within the US, uh, minimum revenue. Then I import that list to our URL crawler. And now we end up enriching that list, uh, with the number of URLs. And then we're like, okay, we have 25 companies, uh, with more than 5 million URLs.

Uh, we have like 50 companies with more than 1 million URLs. And. We said, okay, we can actually just pick and choose among [00:15:00] them. And we chose 10 because it was going to be easier if we just do 10. And then, uh, we chose 10 companies with like more than 1 million URLs. And then we built, uh, specific landing pages for this company.

That's specific as saying that, Hey, it's been five years. I can three years. I can talk about it. Love, uh, hi, Nike. We know that, uh, you have 1 million website URLs. We know that, uh, Your competitor Adidas is using a website crawler, and we know that, uh, you have an SEO team doing this manually, but it doesn't have to be that way.

And this is what we are going to be doing. Uh, and it did really work because we were targeting SEO people with the content that they would like. And the idea was to just, uh, getting book, uh, book meetings. And we were saying that, okay, we already analyzed our website. This is what you found out on your website.

And it's not going to be a sales pitch, but we are actually going to talk how we can help with your [00:16:00] website. So actually in the disco call, it wasn't even a disco call. We did not say disco call. Uh, in that call, there was no STS, but there were our professional services team and the professional services team were actually helping them in like the 20 minutes and 25 minutes and tell them, okay, what they can do.

And from the 10 companies, I think we call it two of them. Uh, but. When we think of the ACV, the two of them actually easily prove the positive return investment of our enterprise motion.

Ivor: Okay. Yeah, that's all super, super interesting, um, advice and tips down on ABM. And let's change gears a little bit. So we talked a lot about your past, Jan Bert, but what are you up to now? What are you focused on on these days? And can you kind of shed a bit of light into that?

Canberk: So again, I thought I was going to retire. I was like, okay, maybe I can just get a low key job in a university and be a teacher. Uh, I just thought that, uh, but apparently [00:17:00] if once you're in the system, that system doesn't let you go outside. Uh, and I end up building. I end up actually getting a couple of clients, uh, for their marketing stuff.

And I was like, okay, uh, like I do marketing. I can easily understand that. I can just help them easily. Uh, then I get more and more referrals and I realized, okay, now I have a fair amount of clients. And actually I can, I can do some help, but, uh, the problem is that help meant me hiring new people. Uh, and if I hired new people, then I would be an agency.

There's a fundamental problem with agencies that I hate. Uh, like no matter how good the agency owner is, if you hire more people, you end up creating playbooks and those people just follow those playbooks blindly. They put no strategy. They just follow what strategy they had been taught or like, uh, they don't really think [00:18:00] or craft, uh, specifically for companies.

And from what I have I told you by now you can understand that I really love building a specific strategy for each company. So, like, having an agency wasn't something for me. Then I was like, okay, what can I do to scale? I can't hire more people. What if I clone myself? What if I become my own API? And I actually tried that approach at Cognizant.

And I was basically, uh, preparing weekly reports about everything happening in every channel. And we were spending like one mil, 1. 5 mil, uh, monthly. So like we had a fair amount of campaigns and I had been analyzing everything. I had been writing everything. And since the beginning of my career, like I had, uh, been taking notes about everything I have seen, like every failure, every experiment, every outcome in the notebooks.

Uh, and at colonialism, I tried to build an AI. It didn't work because back then the, uh, language models were not really advanced. And after I had some clients, I was like, okay, can I do it now? So I had been, [00:19:00] uh, feeding my own bot, uh, with all of the experiment data that I had, all of the data I had been seeing.

And it seems to be working. So now I'm actually launching it. I shouldn't even be talking about this, but probably by the time you launch this podcast, it will be live. Hopefully, uh, that the software site will be launching in a couple of weeks and I'm not going to sell the product, but I'm going to use the product for myself to get more clients.

And the product itself, basically, I put the component in it. I export the, uh, file from the Internet from Google is I imported data and it basically analyze the data just like me and tell me what to do. And the good thing about it is that as I get more clients, I'll be feeding the AI model more. So actually the AI model is getting more and more advanced with every client that I put in it.

Uh, and so far it's working. Pretty well, like, uh, obviously it is not perfect, but since it is me, I can understand what I'm doing wrong or like, if I'm saying something wrong. Uh, and I suppose [00:20:00] now it makes me a founder.

Ivor: Yeah. Yeah, no, it sounds really, really cool. I'd love to try it. So yeah, feel free to send that across to me once it's ready to go live. Um, yeah, it sounds really, really interesting. Something, um, That'd be good also to understand your perspective on before I get the um, book recommendation is what are the key trends that you're seeing in go to market now for B2B?

Canberk: I think everyone is trying to be an influence on LinkedIn. Okay. Social Selling can work in this for sure. And LinkedIn, uh, integral strategy of this social selling. Uh, but yeah, I feel like everyone's trying to create the same sort of post on LinkedIn, like the same type. Uh, like I had spoken with a CMO of a five billion company last month.

Here's what I learned. Background tick, tick, tick. Like, uh,

Ivor: I had a baby last month. Here's what it taught me about [00:21:00] B2B sales.

Canberk: exactly. Or like, I, I got hit by a car. Here's what I learned. Uh, like, uh, unfortunately, this is the GTM trend and I don't know, people are just doing it, but I would Yeah, uh, uh, it is a trend that I don't, I don't really like the other trend I'm seeing is actually, uh, using companies using their own first party data like HockeySec did that, uh, by learning from Gonk.

GonkLabs was the first thing we tried to copy. GonkLabs, but I now I'm seeing more and more companies are doing that. And I think it's an amazing strategy for GTM. Because any company can replicate your strategy, any company can replicate what you have, but one thing they cannot replicate is your data. So if you have the data, and if you can actually comment on the data, that is the main proposition.

And actually, even Sixth Sense, they launched an amazing report a couple of weeks ago about the buyer journey. Uh, and I think this is the trend [00:22:00] and I think this is a really good trend in order to put companies into a top leader position. So like it is not a kitsch or generic content. It is not for lead magnet or anything like that, but it is a genuine content that helps their audience.

And I think this is going to be the main unlock for growth, uh, moving forward. What should be the main unlock for growth?

Ivor: Yeah, completely agrees, completely your, it's totally your proprietary information. No one else can replicate it, so it becomes a competitive advantage. So what we do at the end of each podcast is we get each guest to recommend a book for the next guest with a short reason why. So our last guest was Thomas, who was one of the first hires.

Trustpilot. And he's now started his own startup as well. And he recommended a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by [00:23:00] Daniel Kahneman.

Canberk: Exactly.

Ivor: essentially this like prevents you from jumping to conclusions too quickly and really helps you stay on track. Solve each day to day situations and problems. Well, and I think that is pretty relevant as like a, a founder.

It's very easy to kind of be rushed into the next thing. Um, so yeah, what's yours, Jamba.

Canberk: I think it's my all time favorite book recommendation, and this has been the book that I recommend everyone I hired, I worked with, uh, and anyone who wants to be in a startup environment. It is Blitzkrieg Link by Reed Hoffman. Uh, he is the actual founder of LinkedIn, and Blitzkrieg Link is about how, so, How to move fence and break things.

And like, uh, it is basically about how Facebook smashed it, how any startup can do that and [00:24:00] how you can prioritize because you know, it, I know with any founder knows it when there's a fire, that fire doesn't only happen in one place, there are multiple fires. So it is actually about how you prioritize the fire.

Like if there's a fire in your living room or in your kitchen, how do you prioritize that fire? Because you cannot. Put down, put off every fire. So that book is actually really helping you out how to protect, uh, fires and how to move fast and break things and why it is okay to do so.

Ivor: to definitely check that one out. I haven't read

Canberk: Can't recommend enough. Like it's my all time favorite book about starters.

Ivor: Okay. Awesome. Great guys. Thanks for tuning in and thank you for coming on to this. This really, really awesome episode. If you're interested in the topics or want to be a guest in one of the next episodes, then please reach out to us. Speak next time. Cheers. 

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Ivor: [00:00:00] So hello everyone and welcome to GTM tales. This is the podcast where I sit down with go to market leaders in B2B to hear and exchange stories that have unlocked growth and following on from the episode with Thomas from Trustpilot. This is our seventh episode and today I'm really excited to have a fellow Londoner on the show, Jan Burke, who, funnily enough, shares the same office space as Omnifia.

That's we work, not in Waterloo anymore, but in Hoban now. Welcome mate, how are you doing?

Canberk: so much for having me.

Ivor: So do you want to kick off by introducing yourself, give the listeners perhaps a feel of [00:01:00] your background and also like a brief, yeah, update on what you're up to today as well. Hehe.

Canberk: I'm John Berg and I was a corporate lawyer, uh, in the previous life. And after that I was like, okay, this is not the cup of tea that I would like to be drinking for the rest of my life. And I found myself working in a startup called Clinsley. And it was a B2C startup. And my title was grow ticker that I had no idea what it was.

Uh, and, uh, it felt like, okay, I was doing something nice that I was enjoying and I realized that, okay, I really like growth, but I hate working at a B2C company. Uh, then, uh, I actually ended up working, co founding a B2B SaaS company and ended up learning some, uh, Java and everything. So it was a mobile commerce platform, uh, connecting with your e commerce and enabling you to create a mobile app without any coding.

And by the time we launched MVP, COVID happened, the best thing. [00:02:00] And, uh, we scaled so fast, uh, because with the COVID, uh, the demand for e commerce skyrocketed. Therefore, the demand for mobile commerce skyrocketed. So in a year, we were at one mil and then, uh, we got acquired. After that, uh, I joined DeepCrawl as their demand jump person and became head of growth there after a couple of months.

Uh, after DeepCrawl, I joined Cognizant as their head of page, Group global head of pay this idea was so long that I really didn't really bother to memorize it And after cognizant, I joined hockey stick as their head of growth and after hockey stick I said, okay, you know what? Uh, it is time to go back and it's time to be a founder again And now i'm here with roasted and building my own company.

Uh once again

Ivor: Cool. Yeah, thanks for the introduction. It's interesting that you've come from a lawyer background and you went into to BTC. So what was I think one of the first questions I had actually as you're talking that through Around [00:03:00] why you didn't like B2C, and why did B2B appeal to you more?

Canberk: I think it was mostly because of the company and the product I was selling. So it was a cleaning service. So it was like Uber, but for cleaning, uh, diverse service provided one side customers, other side. And what I realized was that normally what we did, uh, cleaning was such a, Subjective thing and nobody was actually happy.

Everyone had a different idea about cleaning. And even when I think of Uber, actually, uh, you can't really have lots of ideas. Like, uh, if the journey takes 20 minutes. You'll be there in 20 minutes. And if it takes 30 minutes, then you could be like, okay, they were so slow. Or like, if it took 10 minutes, you would be like, okay, they were so fast.

So they would, uh, there would be some data, but with cleaning, uh, they would say, okay, I don't like the cleaning, but how, why, what, like, uh, It was such a subjective and we were also offering a hundred percent [00:04:00] satisfaction guarantee. So like, if someone doesn't like the cleaning, you have to give them a new cleaning.

Therefore it is actually not a profitable business. And like, I was actually working with an amazing boss. Uh, he was an ex Bain person. So he was a management consultant previously. think me, he did teach me how to think and how to build. So like, uh, it was a really good learning curve, but then also I realized that no matter what I was building, no matter how perfect the, uh, background systems were, there were always some problems, uh, with the service.

So I said, okay, I don't want to deal with people. I want to deal with companies.

Ivor: Mm. Okay, yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. And actually, maybe digging into that B2B experience. A little bit more. I'd like to understand you, you know, you talked about being at a couple of different startups and quite the, the early stage, so what are some like key channels and key [00:05:00] strategies you use to go from like maybe zero to 10 or maybe 10 to a hundred customers?

That'd be keen to, to learn about that. What's, what's been good in your background? Of

Canberk: had never been someone saying, okay, there's one strategy and it will work for every company. But to every company I've worked with, uh, we create a different strategy. For example, uh, with movie call. Uh, like we were able to provide the e commerce, uh, service for any e commerce provider.

So like it could have been Shopify, it could have been custom, it could have been Magento, but we realized that actually Shopify was the low hanging fruit. So actually, even though the technical capabilities were allowing us to service to any e commerce platform, uh, we prioritized Shopify and we were like, okay, how we can make, uh, Best out of Shopify.

So what we did was to, uh, find the most rated apps on Shopify app [00:06:00] store. And I would just reach out to their head of marketing and I'd be like, can we have a webinar, can we have a podcast? And I would just bring them to the podcast. Then, uh, we would basically make them share this on their email marketing channels on their LinkedIn, uh, because we knew that.

Their customer base also were using Shopify therefore them Uh sending those emails would enable us to reach the customer base without doing any marketing and with um Mobico, we actually got the first four customers just like that like even Uh, the product was not ready back then, uh, we got like four customers and we're like, okay, how are we going to make the product ready?

And it was such a huge thing. Like we actually signed the deals even without the product. And, uh, we hit the delay. Like, we're like, okay, now we are onboarding new customers and we want to make sure that we are going to give you the most Uh, most amazing onboarding, uh, experience. Therefore, we are going to make you wait for a week.

Uh, like it was horrible. But, uh, we sort of did that. Like we sort of [00:07:00] did that. Uh, so that's what worked with MoCo with Deep Crawl. Uh, when I joined, uh, they were at Series B, so they, they just actually closed series B, so that was. customer based, but obviously, you know, like when there's an investment, especially it is in B or C, uh, the expectation from investors are always like, okay, you need to go enterprise.

Uh, and DeepCrawl was the PLG product. Like people were using DeepCrawl for like 20, 25. And the expectation was to increase the package from 20 to 40, 000. Uh, so we're like, okay, how you can make a basically free product to enterprise product. And if you actually back then Google The term Deepcrawl, Deepcrawl for 20.

Like, uh, even Google's results were showing that it is 20. Uh, so for that, the approach had to be much more different and we had to test ABM, uh, but even before ABM, we had to [00:08:00] update the website. We had to update everything we say on the website. Uh, but yeah, like to go enterprise, uh, with Deepcrawl. The ABM approach was the most, uh, solid approach that we taught.

And it was low hanging fruit to be fair, because if you just pinpoint 10 companies that you hundred percent are sure that they don't know about you, then you can pull that thing. Like you can be like, Oh, you know what? We have always been a 40 K product. Uh, but if you go wild and say everyone that now we are 40 K, there's a huge chance that you might be getting backlashing from.

The community, because it was also the technical SEO community that we were, uh, serving and technical SEO people knew about DeepGrowth. They were already using DeepGrowth for 20. So if we went to the wild eye audience and said, okay, it is now 40K, that was going to be a huge backlash. Uh, and with Cognizant, when I joined, uh, they were at Series C.

So it was [00:09:00] actually a bigger thing. Uh, and they just launched the Series C. Uh, but for them, the problem was the U. S. market. So how we can expect the U. S. market and similar, the new round and the investor expectation is that, okay, you know what, you need to expect the U. S. and you need to take over the U. S.

and there's unrealistic VC expectation. Uh, but with Cognizant. What we built was, okay, we can spend so much money to create that brand, uh, in the U. S. And then we can assume that, hypothesize that, uh, that brand events will convert into traffic. And then we are going to capture the traffic through Google Ads.

But then I was, okay, what if we just take a step back and see if there's an existing traffic that we can hijack? And it was zoom info. Zoom info had already Hit the brand awareness. They were already getting amazing search terms So what if we created an entire google ads strategy based on zoom info? Uh, we end up spending more money [00:10:00] for zoom for campaign than in every campaign We had like most of the google budget was going to zoom info We created specific landing pages for zoom info and I was a zoom info user before so like I knew about the product all of the search, uh elsewhere like Zoom info, meh, you can do better.

Zoom info pricing, no, you don't have to pay 30k. Uh, and it had ended up, uh, being the backbone of our growth in the US. Like, uh, I don't remember the exact figure, but most of the US revenue actually ended up coming from just one Zoom info campaign, uh, that had been downloaded. And with HockeyStick, It was the first party data, like when I joined TokiStack, what I was thinking that what makes us unique, uh, and we TokiStack, I was using product for the last three years, so like I was already the product user, I was already my own ICP, uh, so I said, okay, what do we have, we have so many customer data, uh, and how we can use this data, we can actually, [00:11:00] we can just anonymize this data.

And we can create reports based on this data and those reports will just answer the questions that I wonder as the head of growth. So like, actually, I was just writing the reports, uh, for myself, uh, with the data that no other company had. And that had been the, uh, growth channel that had been the ultimate growth channel that actually helped us to grow three eggs in the first six months.

Uh, and it was mostly because we were talking about the data that nobody had, and we were just talking about it in a really, Transparently, like it wasn't about the promotion of HockeyStick. It wasn't about promotion of anything. It was literally me being curious about the data and speaking with myself about that data.

Ivor: Okay. That is a lot to unpack. So I'm going to, I'm going to go through from, from the start actually. So you talked about kind of almost an integration strategy. So, um, looking [00:12:00] at Shopify and then seeing what the, the top rated, um, players on Shopify and kind of doing marketing collaborations with those guys.

That's a really good tactic. And I think I might steal that for Omnivia actually. Um, And then you talked about this kind of, um, faking it to make it a little bit, maybe signing deals before you actually have the product ready, which I think is quite normal in the startup world. That's far better to do it that way than to say, develop a product and then realize that when you try and sell it, that no one wants it.

Um, and yeah, I kind of, you talked about the ABM side of things as well. And maybe it'd be good to. Expand on that a little bit, actually, because I think it's a strategy that we're seeing a lot of different companies leverage. So, um, could you, yeah, kind of unpack like how you kind of approached ABM a little bit more and, and give some more detail there.

[00:13:00] Silence.

Canberk: I join, every webinar I join, uh, the first thing I do when I join a company, It's a reverse engineered funnel to understand, okay, what are the best customers, but also what are the prospects that don't convert.

And with Deepcrawl, the idea was that, okay, if you want to go enterprise, we want to go companies, like it is 5, 000 employees. Uh, we want to go companies in these industries with this revenue, but no, that was something else. Uh, the enterprise actually was supposed to be company that have more than 1, 000, 000 website URLs, because if they had more URLs, they need the proper website crawler that would help them.

Uh, so it wasn't actually about how many employees they had, how many, how much revenue they made, but it was about how complicated their website was. So, Uh, that existed in our salesforce because uh, deep crow was [00:14:00] working on credit based model And yeah, what I found was that if a company like more than x amount of urls They were more like to pay 40k 50k.

So that was our answer. We need to find companies with at least 1 million urls Uh, then, uh, our CTO back then, uh, we had a CTO Ali, uh, he found a way to reverse engineer this on the website. So he built a plugin, uh, where we would just, uh, write the website URL, and it would give us the estimated website URLs that website had.

So what I did was to then go to ZoomInfo, Then export the list of companies like at this 500 employees, uh, within the US, uh, minimum revenue. Then I import that list to our URL crawler. And now we end up enriching that list, uh, with the number of URLs. And then we're like, okay, we have 25 companies, uh, with more than 5 million URLs.

Uh, we have like 50 companies with more than 1 million URLs. And. We said, okay, we can actually just pick and choose among [00:15:00] them. And we chose 10 because it was going to be easier if we just do 10. And then, uh, we chose 10 companies with like more than 1 million URLs. And then we built, uh, specific landing pages for this company.

That's specific as saying that, Hey, it's been five years. I can three years. I can talk about it. Love, uh, hi, Nike. We know that, uh, you have 1 million website URLs. We know that, uh, Your competitor Adidas is using a website crawler, and we know that, uh, you have an SEO team doing this manually, but it doesn't have to be that way.

And this is what we are going to be doing. Uh, and it did really work because we were targeting SEO people with the content that they would like. And the idea was to just, uh, getting book, uh, book meetings. And we were saying that, okay, we already analyzed our website. This is what you found out on your website.

And it's not going to be a sales pitch, but we are actually going to talk how we can help with your [00:16:00] website. So actually in the disco call, it wasn't even a disco call. We did not say disco call. Uh, in that call, there was no STS, but there were our professional services team and the professional services team were actually helping them in like the 20 minutes and 25 minutes and tell them, okay, what they can do.

And from the 10 companies, I think we call it two of them. Uh, but. When we think of the ACV, the two of them actually easily prove the positive return investment of our enterprise motion.

Ivor: Okay. Yeah, that's all super, super interesting, um, advice and tips down on ABM. And let's change gears a little bit. So we talked a lot about your past, Jan Bert, but what are you up to now? What are you focused on on these days? And can you kind of shed a bit of light into that?

Canberk: So again, I thought I was going to retire. I was like, okay, maybe I can just get a low key job in a university and be a teacher. Uh, I just thought that, uh, but apparently [00:17:00] if once you're in the system, that system doesn't let you go outside. Uh, and I end up building. I end up actually getting a couple of clients, uh, for their marketing stuff.

And I was like, okay, uh, like I do marketing. I can easily understand that. I can just help them easily. Uh, then I get more and more referrals and I realized, okay, now I have a fair amount of clients. And actually I can, I can do some help, but, uh, the problem is that help meant me hiring new people. Uh, and if I hired new people, then I would be an agency.

There's a fundamental problem with agencies that I hate. Uh, like no matter how good the agency owner is, if you hire more people, you end up creating playbooks and those people just follow those playbooks blindly. They put no strategy. They just follow what strategy they had been taught or like, uh, they don't really think [00:18:00] or craft, uh, specifically for companies.

And from what I have I told you by now you can understand that I really love building a specific strategy for each company. So, like, having an agency wasn't something for me. Then I was like, okay, what can I do to scale? I can't hire more people. What if I clone myself? What if I become my own API? And I actually tried that approach at Cognizant.

And I was basically, uh, preparing weekly reports about everything happening in every channel. And we were spending like one mil, 1. 5 mil, uh, monthly. So like we had a fair amount of campaigns and I had been analyzing everything. I had been writing everything. And since the beginning of my career, like I had, uh, been taking notes about everything I have seen, like every failure, every experiment, every outcome in the notebooks.

Uh, and at colonialism, I tried to build an AI. It didn't work because back then the, uh, language models were not really advanced. And after I had some clients, I was like, okay, can I do it now? So I had been, [00:19:00] uh, feeding my own bot, uh, with all of the experiment data that I had, all of the data I had been seeing.

And it seems to be working. So now I'm actually launching it. I shouldn't even be talking about this, but probably by the time you launch this podcast, it will be live. Hopefully, uh, that the software site will be launching in a couple of weeks and I'm not going to sell the product, but I'm going to use the product for myself to get more clients.

And the product itself, basically, I put the component in it. I export the, uh, file from the Internet from Google is I imported data and it basically analyze the data just like me and tell me what to do. And the good thing about it is that as I get more clients, I'll be feeding the AI model more. So actually the AI model is getting more and more advanced with every client that I put in it.

Uh, and so far it's working. Pretty well, like, uh, obviously it is not perfect, but since it is me, I can understand what I'm doing wrong or like, if I'm saying something wrong. Uh, and I suppose [00:20:00] now it makes me a founder.

Ivor: Yeah. Yeah, no, it sounds really, really cool. I'd love to try it. So yeah, feel free to send that across to me once it's ready to go live. Um, yeah, it sounds really, really interesting. Something, um, That'd be good also to understand your perspective on before I get the um, book recommendation is what are the key trends that you're seeing in go to market now for B2B?

Canberk: I think everyone is trying to be an influence on LinkedIn. Okay. Social Selling can work in this for sure. And LinkedIn, uh, integral strategy of this social selling. Uh, but yeah, I feel like everyone's trying to create the same sort of post on LinkedIn, like the same type. Uh, like I had spoken with a CMO of a five billion company last month.

Here's what I learned. Background tick, tick, tick. Like, uh,

Ivor: I had a baby last month. Here's what it taught me about [00:21:00] B2B sales.

Canberk: exactly. Or like, I, I got hit by a car. Here's what I learned. Uh, like, uh, unfortunately, this is the GTM trend and I don't know, people are just doing it, but I would Yeah, uh, uh, it is a trend that I don't, I don't really like the other trend I'm seeing is actually, uh, using companies using their own first party data like HockeySec did that, uh, by learning from Gonk.

GonkLabs was the first thing we tried to copy. GonkLabs, but I now I'm seeing more and more companies are doing that. And I think it's an amazing strategy for GTM. Because any company can replicate your strategy, any company can replicate what you have, but one thing they cannot replicate is your data. So if you have the data, and if you can actually comment on the data, that is the main proposition.

And actually, even Sixth Sense, they launched an amazing report a couple of weeks ago about the buyer journey. Uh, and I think this is the trend [00:22:00] and I think this is a really good trend in order to put companies into a top leader position. So like it is not a kitsch or generic content. It is not for lead magnet or anything like that, but it is a genuine content that helps their audience.

And I think this is going to be the main unlock for growth, uh, moving forward. What should be the main unlock for growth?

Ivor: Yeah, completely agrees, completely your, it's totally your proprietary information. No one else can replicate it, so it becomes a competitive advantage. So what we do at the end of each podcast is we get each guest to recommend a book for the next guest with a short reason why. So our last guest was Thomas, who was one of the first hires.

Trustpilot. And he's now started his own startup as well. And he recommended a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by [00:23:00] Daniel Kahneman.

Canberk: Exactly.

Ivor: essentially this like prevents you from jumping to conclusions too quickly and really helps you stay on track. Solve each day to day situations and problems. Well, and I think that is pretty relevant as like a, a founder.

It's very easy to kind of be rushed into the next thing. Um, so yeah, what's yours, Jamba.

Canberk: I think it's my all time favorite book recommendation, and this has been the book that I recommend everyone I hired, I worked with, uh, and anyone who wants to be in a startup environment. It is Blitzkrieg Link by Reed Hoffman. Uh, he is the actual founder of LinkedIn, and Blitzkrieg Link is about how, so, How to move fence and break things.

And like, uh, it is basically about how Facebook smashed it, how any startup can do that and [00:24:00] how you can prioritize because you know, it, I know with any founder knows it when there's a fire, that fire doesn't only happen in one place, there are multiple fires. So it is actually about how you prioritize the fire.

Like if there's a fire in your living room or in your kitchen, how do you prioritize that fire? Because you cannot. Put down, put off every fire. So that book is actually really helping you out how to protect, uh, fires and how to move fast and break things and why it is okay to do so.

Ivor: to definitely check that one out. I haven't read

Canberk: Can't recommend enough. Like it's my all time favorite book about starters.

Ivor: Okay. Awesome. Great guys. Thanks for tuning in and thank you for coming on to this. This really, really awesome episode. If you're interested in the topics or want to be a guest in one of the next episodes, then please reach out to us. Speak next time. Cheers. 

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