In this episode of the B2B Marketing Methods podcast, host Terri Hoffman, CEO of Marketing Refresh, interviews Fedor Simic, the partnership manager at Databox. They discuss the challenges and benefits of digital marketing, focusing on the importance of analyzing marketing metrics. Fedor explains Databox's innovative Benchmark Groups tool, which allows companies to compare their performance against industry benchmarks.

They also delve into Fedor's personal background, sharing his journey from working in customer support to becoming a partnership manager. The episode provides valuable insights into how businesses can leverage data to improve their marketing strategies and achieve better performance.

Topics Discussed:

• Who is Databox
• Using marketing metrics
• The value of analyzing your marketing program metrics
• What are Benchmark Groups

To learn more about Fedor, connect with him on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fedor-simic/  

To connect with Marketing Refresh, visit: MarketingRefresh.com

Unlocking B2B Marketing Insights with DataBox Benchmarks with Fedor Simic

Some of the points that we're going to be touching on is our marketing metrics, the value of analyzing your marketing program metrics-- they have a software package that lets you do that in a very easy way with like hundreds of connections that they have to different software packages. We're going to be talking about a new program that they created that is called their Benchmark Groups.

I'm going to have him unravel that. It's something I talk about on LinkedIn quite frequently. But I thought it would be great to have Fedor on as a guest so he can dig in a little bit deeper and help my listeners really learn more about the value of those Benchmark Groups. So, welcome Fedor. It's really great to have you on.

Thank you for taking the time to join me today.

Where do you work every day?

But the reason that I'm working from here is I try to separate work from home. I got bored of working every day from my apartment. So I decided like, Hey, it's time to either rent out an office or find somewhere else to work from just to like, have a relationship with work that i lacked. So grandma was really, uh, open and she let me move it and have my own room.

There used to be pictures of me when I was a kid in the background, but I changed them.

That is super generous of her. Do you get like grandma lunch included sometimes?

And then I started off in customer support and after two months I moved into customer onboarding. So that was like my first time talking with people on calls. And then I went into account management and then around a year, maybe a year and a half ago, I moved into a partnership manager and. That's where I am now.

I really like it. It's a lot of fun. It's super challenging and every day is different. Two things I really, really love, you know, because I, I don't like smooth sailing. It's boring. I just like being challenged, pushed and learning new things. And that's what I do every day. So super happy here.

So yeah, this is fun for me too, because I didn't really know much about your background prior to this role that you're in. How did you make the transition from a software engineering role to a company that primarily focuses on like marketing data and marketing metrics?

I believe it has to do with my computer skills. I would say, like, I was always on the computer. I was like a gamer when I was a kid. I grew up with video games. I was always spending time on the computer. And then like, That kind of connected with this. And I was learning marketing on my own. So I used to own a small e commerce store.

The drop of drop shipping a bit, it didn't really work out that great, but actually managed to sell my store for around $400, even though I haven't really invested a lot of money into it. I sold around a hundred products, which is really interesting. Without any marketing experience, like I didn't know to run ads.

I didn't know anything what I was doing, but I posted comments on YouTube and I got sales for that. I don't know how it worked, but yeah, that's kind of like my entry point to marketing. And then obviously like for working with Databox, I just learned this whole other part that I had no idea about, you know, before.

So I bet that gives you a great ability to relate to people when they're at the beginning of that learning process.

Like I started learning through the data about those platforms and then just connected it through there. So it was kind of like reverse engineering. In sort of a way.

So we have a 100+ integrations and we made it really, really easy to use that data and report on it, put it on dashboards, visualize it. And then all the other things come as extra, like forecasting, benchmarking, generative AI to summarize your data and dashboards.

So it is, there's a really small like entry point. You don't have to have a lot of knowledge on using the tool, but you can get really into it, like go into the details really fast. So like, it's, it's a really easy tool to learn, but it takes a bit of time to master it because you can go really deep into the data. And do so many other things.

Um, and I think if you have a marketing program without reporting in place, you know, you can't improve something that you're not measuring and tracking. And so the reporting is the key. It's the underlying fundamental that you have to have in place. Our agency has tried, um, different platforms and we actually just made the transition to Databox last year.

And it's, it's to me, head and shoulders above the rest that are out there on the market and we've tried a lot of them. So we're, we're happy. We, we found Databox. Like some of the things that you can connect into it, that, if you're in marketing, would be pretty obvious, but you know, you can track your website metrics, your social media metrics, you can even look at your CRM and connect HubSpot or Salesforce or other CRM tools into it, which I think is, is super helpful, but, the reason I wanted to have you on today is because I think one of the more advanced things you can do and the new program that you guys created is the benchmark groups.

So you've put together a whole certification program around that, but, you know, maybe you could just start by explaining why you created the benchmark groups and what the value of those, those groups is.

We had with Databox, you could do historical benchmarking, so you can compare your current results to your past results. That's one form of benchmarking. But then. We didn't want to stop there.

We wanted to kind of expand, not into like competitor benchmarking, because that you can only benchmark certain things that are publicly visible and to get into competitive analysis, but we wanted to expand into industry benchmarking, kind of offer more insights for companies so they could use our benchmarking tool, which is free that we build on top of our other tool. And our, the accounts are shared across the data points are shared across. So. We built that other tool so companies can have one place where they can get insights into how they should perform. Basically to be able to tell like, Hey, this is me and this is me versus companies similar to me.

So we're building this massive data set where companies will be able to come and find where they stand, what's going good, get ideas, what can be improved, what can be doubled down upon and just see how they're comparing to a company similar to theirs, and then work on improving those metrics with Databox.

This is just looking at a high level and, but it sets you off in a direction, right? And then you would want to investigate deeper into the data and try to improve certain parts of each metric to get that ultimate boost in performance that you're seeking.

So if we show them, Hey, here's how your Google ads are performing. And we tell them, Oh, there's a, you know, 3 percent conversion rate. Their reaction is, so is that good or bad? What does that mean? Give me context. Right. And that's what I love about the benchmarking product is that it immediately provides them, as the client, with context, but it helps us guide the conversation and then make better decisions because we can see does this need to be improved? Does this need to be scrapped? Does it need to be built upon because it's going so well? Like, have we stumbled upon a real gem here?

So the, the benchmarks I think are awesome because it gives you that context and it helps you see where you fit in in the industry. Like, are we doing okay? That industry differentiation is just so hard as marketers for us to find. We all Google search for it every single day. And I'm sure you guys see that, you know, how often people are searching for it. Yeah. Yeah. So how many, Oh, go ahead

So, yeah, it helps you a lot. Yeah.

If I were in a business role and wasn't working through an agency or was working through an agency and I was just kind of trying to ideate, I feel like that section on your website just has tons of pieces of gold in it. Can you talk about that?

And it's doing the same for the other members that are in the group. So when you find a group, the best matches your space. So you can filter by industry, by business type, by company size, by revenue range, and you can find the group the best matches your business. And you can find integrations like data points that you want to benchmark for.

And then you can find a group, join it, and they will instantly. Tell you like, Hey, this is going on good that you're maybe like in the middle, or maybe this is going bad, like, and then you just know what matters to you, which metrics matter to you, and then you can improve those metrics and get that ultimate boost in performance.

We also have benchmarks explorer, which is different to groups because there you can just pick metrics that you want, and then filter them and find, What metrics you want to see, compare against, and you can build your own report, but it won't show you where you stand within those metrics. That's the difference between the, the Explorer and the groups, but explorer, you can use without even signing up for an account. So like you can use it just off the bat. We have a, around 10 searches, I think. And then you can find what you want to look into, get insights and compare with your data on your own. So that's an easy way to use, uh, the Explorer functionality.

So it's just every additional company that joins adds value to everyone else. That's how it works.

Like, how do you guys go about getting more companies connected so that the value of that benchmark data continues to build?

We don't have access to each industry. Like we don't know people from each industry. And then we figured like, Hey, we could partner with agencies that are specialized in these industries, and they can bring this data set in, which will add value to everyone else. It will just enrich the data, make it more valuable for everyone.

So that's when we decided to allow other agencies to kind of like build their own groups. We would call those group private groups because they, they kind of have the keys to the group. They can control who gets added to the group. Typically they would invite first their clients. And then if they would want to open it up to more people, then they would share a link so other people can join. They also control the members. So like they can add members, remove members, but if they don't have access to the data, like the data source, they won't see anyone else's data, right? Even as the owner of the group, If someone joins through you inviting them, you don't see their data. You just see them as a member of the group and vice versa. Someone else joining the group doesn't see anyone else's name who's in the group. They just see, Hey, this is me against the group. And this is where I stand and that's it. And how many companies are in the group?

So it's completely anonymous. There's no like infringement of the data. There's no leaking of the data. It's completely secure and it's going to be accurate unless you have poor data management in your integration, which is not, not as often of a case, you know, it's probably like one in a, or two in a hundred.

What do you hear about that?

Like, as I said, even if they do join the group, you can only get value out of it, right? So like, if you join a group of an agency and you compare against their clients and you're doing good, like that's, that's wind in your back, you know, you're doing good. You're working on your own and you're achieving these amazing results.

Meanwhile, if you're not doing that great, like maybe it will point you in a direction of what things you can improve to achieve better performance, or it can tell like, Hey, maybe I should work with someone to help me with achieve this better performance. Right? So I think there's really no downside to it because you'll just get answers, right?

Why wouldn't you like to get answers?

We offer it. And if they want to, they want to. And if that's not something they're prioritizing, like you said, at least they're getting the comparisons of the data for their own marketing team to see, Hey, is this working? Is it not working? What, what do we, where are opportunities to kind of expand from here?

Right. Yeah. I think there's nothing but positives to joining.

You can only get more value out of it. Even if you don't end up taking that agency as a partner that you want to want to help you with, you know? So I think there's like, Nothing but value can get out of it, you know?

Are there some that come to mind where you're like, Oh, this is a way it helped a brand by first joining one of our groups. What are some of those successes?

And they, they did some form of benchmarking before, but it was really, really manual. Like they were using a spreadsheet. You know how it is. It takes a lot of time. It's prone to errors because you rely on everything being really, really accurate and then with manual entry, there's always room for a mistake. Right?

So when they heard about benchmarks, they were really fascinated. So they build their own group and put. A hundred locations of that franchise and into the group. So they're really able to compare and see the average performance across all the locations. Right. So, uh, that's really an interesting case because that they had the same ad copy running for all the locations. Some were in cities, some were rural areas, but they, Everything had to be kind of like the same, tell the same story.

So their idea was to take a look at the bottom 20 performers in the group and see what's going on with them. Why are they performing bad and who are they, you know? So they did it and they discovered that. The worst performers are actually rural areas. So that information gave them the ability to then drill deeper into the data and figure out that it was the ad copy that was kind of like not connecting as well with the people that live in these areas as it was with people that live in cities.

So they were able to use this, uh, that information to present it to their client and become more of a strategic partner in, it gave them Something that's tangible. I would say, it's not really tangible because it's, it's still data, but it's something that doesn't lie. It's factual information.

They were able to present it to their client and get them to get them to buy into their idea of changing the copy. So they did and those locations got better performance, their CPC went down and them changing that and helping those 20 locations actually improved the performance of the whole group.

So now everyone, like the whole group's performance improved, not just only those locations. So like it, it was just beneficial to them, you know, and to the client, of course.

So that, that was really interesting. I was really, really, uh, excited when I heard that from the partner that they shared with that with us and how it helped them better help their client.

Let's shift gears and talk about the other component to the benchmark groups, which are the surveys. That to me has a whole different set of value, right? And so talk about that extension of your program that you guys created.

But then we figured we could connect it to the benchmarks because benchmarks leave one big question unsolved, right?

You look, get a glimpse into performance. You find out how, where you stand, what's good, what's bad, how you should be doing, but you don't know what you need to To do to achieve that type of performance, right? You don't have a benchmark for insights, for example. So that's when we figured we can connect surveys to benchmark groups.

So if a benchmark group is around digital marketing, we can connect the survey that talks about digital marketing, what people are doing for the digital marketing. So we can find out both. And with that kind of connection, we can find out this is what a typical company should perform like, and this is what they should be doing.

So we're trying to make the tool one huge data hub of not just performance data, but also insight data. So any company can come in, find out how should they be performing and what they should do in order to achieve that performance, so it's just giving more and more in value to everyone, basically.

And everyone that joins helps everyone else, right? So like every new addition is just like, we're not only helping ourselves, but everyone else is going to benefit from it, right? So that's, that's kind of like the whole goal that we have.

And why we decided to partner with agencies is because we're not experts in all these different industries, right? We don't have these connections. We have a list of people who subscribe to be, alerted of new surveys coming out, but that's kind of it, right? Like we typically have a lot of agencies answering our surveys, but we don't have insights into other industries, but our agency partners do, like they're experts in manufacturing, they're experts in healthcare, they're experts in all these various industries, and they have connections so they can help us enrich the data. help their clients better, find out new things about their, their audience, and their audience can benefit because they can learn new things about their industry that , they haven't had access to yet. And the best part is that this is always up to date. It's not a typical report that gets published once a year and it's outdated immediately, right?

This is continuing to be improved, to be, uh, enriched. So like every new person that joins, that takes one of the services, joins one of the groups is just helping more and more people, not the, not just themselves. And that's what I really love about it. It's just, it's just giving, giving like each person joining gives value to themselves, to others.. Just helping each other. That's kind of like our main goal. To just help each other. That's our main goal. …

Yeah. It's like teamwork.

Google changes their rules and their algorithms and each social platform does that, and if you're not keeping up with that monthly and quarterly and, um, having to wait until the end of the year, oh my goodness, it, it really does make a big difference for us when we're trying to manage strategies and budgets and programs, and that's not a knock on what these companies have been doing before.

I mean, that was, that was the way to do it. Right. But I think you guys have just helped to evolve that and bring it forward in a big way, which is super helpful and very appreciated by agencies and marketing departments. Yeah.

But with our surveys When you complete it, you get access to the preliminary data. So you can instantly see the data that's here already. And you can come back to that data next week in a month, in two months, or like in worst case scenario, when the report is out in like three months, but it doesn't stop there.

It's always going to live. It's always going to accumulate more and more responses and just enrich the data, you know? It's instantly accessible, which is a big difference, to the other types of reports out there.

On a more strategic marketing level it's a big stress point, you know, for our clients. They're not sure how to approach it. They're not sure how much, if there's like a rule of thumb, they should be following, but the number one thing that comes up in any conversation we have with a brand is how do I prove an ROI?

How can I take something to my board, or my investors, or to C level leadership, and show them. That we're getting a return on the money that we're spending on marketing. Like how, how does that get, get tracked and measured? And so I think even on a strategic budgeting level, there are ways and, pieces of data that you guys are helping to gather that as marketers, we can use that to put together an ROI and a business model that the leadership teams can use. To me, that is very, very valuable data because at the end of the day, if you're spending on money on marketing and you can't track what it's doing for you, why are you doing it? That's a fail. Why are you doing it? You can't improve something you're not measuring, , or tracking. Don't remember which wise person said that, but it wasn't me. I'm copying that from someone else, but it's, it's so important and it's so skipped. I mean, just basic things like going to a trade show, maybe you spend 50, or 60, or 75 thousand dollars on that and you don't even know what it did for you. Right. If you're not tracking that it's, it's just a big lost opportunity for companies.

Is there, is there anything that you want to make sure that we emphasize about the benchmark groups or surveys that we haven't covered already?

They do offer a certification for the benchmarking process, and he Fedor is one of the people who teaches the course. It's all all delivered online. It was really helpful for me and my team to go through that process.

And after that, you know, being locked up for three months, you want to go somewhere, but you can't visit other countries. So we actually went camping down South into our national park called Tara. And it's the first time I ever went camping and it was for a week long trip. So it was just so much fun and I fell in love with nature even more and camping even more. So I tend to at least go once a year for at least a couple of days. Just hang out by the fire, talk stories, cook food on the grill. So, uh, that's, that's probably one of the best trips I ever had. I'm going to travel more now, so I might have an update to this story in the future.

If there was a musical group or artist who you'd be able to see in concert, and this, this group or person can be dead or alive, this would be like your dream concert.

It was a singer from Kazakhstan. I think no one ever heard of him. His name is Dimash Kudaibergen. And he is just out of this world. He's probably the best singer on the planet and no one knows about him because he just doesn't sing popular music, but the way he sings, it's It's mind boggling. So if anyone is interested, go check him out.

I don't think anyone has heard something similar in their lives to this guy.

So it's really strange, you know, his concert is not that, fun, you don't go up and dance and stuff. But like, when you're you're just listening and not believing what you're hearing. That's how I would explain it.

I, the best one I've ever been to is we saw the U2 concert in the sphere in Las Vegas last October. And that was, that was amazing. It was so good. I love U2. They're my favorite band. Other than the Beatles.

I absolutely love them. I have you know about this scandal?

In terms of kind of like mindset and just growing as a person. I'm now reading ultimate power by Anthony Robbins. Actually my sales coach, Rick, he recommended that book to me. I was very skeptical. And, but as I read it, it's really awesome and I'm hooked on it. So I got to finish that one, but I really want to have myself in mental space where I can just like digest all the content, make notes.

That's how I read. So I don't read that often. I don't read every day because I just don't have the mental bandwidth for it. So I put aside time on the weekend to do it, but then I go for like 60 pages or something and just digest it properly.

And yeah, my favorite kind of like fantasy book is obviously Harry Potter. I read it three times when I was a kid, I was really hooked on that. I read. One whole book in a day. So I, when it came out, it was the order of the Phoenix. That one was really good.

It kind of like ticks all the boxes. I didn't even know that I had those boxes, but it Started taking them as I, as I started working here in this role, you know,

Like you said, that's, I love that. That's fun.

I also played tennis. I had a band when I was, I was a waiter at one point I worked in a casino store. So I tried like everything, literally, it's crazy.

The only person who didn't say that said being a dad is his favorite job. And so, you know, That one's, that one's kind of hard to combat. That was like a winning answer for sure.

Well, thank you so much for joining me today and kind of sharing what the, the program that you're managing is all about. If people want to get in touch with you directly and hear more, what is the best way to, for them to connect with you? We've got. You know, people who are in sales leadership roles listening, but we also have other marketers listening and so how could, how can people connect with you directly? What's the best way?

Thank you everybody for listening today. Thanks again for joining us and I really appreciate your time.