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Why Traditional Sales Tactics Are Dead (And What Social Selling Does Better) with DreamData’s Laura Erdem

• Stun and Awe • Episode 43

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Laura Erdem is a Sales Manager - Americas at DreamData and a social selling powerhouse who’s helping redefine how B2B companies connect with their audience. In this episode, Laura shares her journey from traditional outbound sales to building a multi-million-dollar pipeline through LinkedIn and social selling strategies.

We dove into how Laura uses LinkedIn to create meaningful connections with buyers, track measurable revenue impact, and build trust through authentic, human-centric content. Laura also discussed the balance between structured and flexible approaches to social selling, offering practical advice for sales teams and leaders alike.

Laura highlighted how DreamData aligns sales and marketing efforts to drive results, with shared reporting and insights that ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction. She also gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how DreamData is expanding into the U.S. market and adapting its sales processes to meet the demands of a fast-moving, transactional environment.

We covered:

  • Social Selling 101: How Laura’s approach to LinkedIn has generated over $2 million in measurable revenue for DreamData.
  • Metrics that Matter: Beyond likes and comments—tracking engagement, clicks, and conversions that drive real business results.
  • Cold Outreach vs. Warm Outreach: Why traditional outbound sales is struggling and how social selling creates higher-quality leads.
  • Scaling Social Selling: Practical tips for sales teams to personalize and implement social strategies at scale.
  • Aligning Sales and Marketing: How DreamData creates shared goals and accountability between teams to drive growth.
  • Market Expansion: Lessons from DreamData’s move into the U.S. market, including the importance of hiring local expertise.
  • The Future of Social Selling: How AI is enhancing social strategies while keeping human connection at the center of sales.

Whether you’re a B2B sales pro, marketer, or founder looking to build stronger relationships with your customers and scale your pipeline, this episode is packed with actionable tips and insights to help you take your sales game to the next level.


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POD043 - Laura Erdem

Hi, everyone. 

Introducing Laura Erdem

[00:00:14] Michel: Today, I'm excited to welcome Laura Erdem sales manager for the Americas at Dream Data. Laura is a dynamic sales leader with a blend of sales expertise and a passion for marketing, which makes her stand out in the B2B SaaS space at DreamData. Laura has spearheaded the company sales effort in the U S building sales processes, coaching the team and driving key strategies for growth. Laura serves as an advisor to companies like ValueOrbit and ComSor, helping shape their growth strategies through marketing, sales, and thought leadership.

Known for generating all her leads inbound through LinkedIn, She's a true advocate for social selling and has doubled her linkedin followers year over year by consistently putting out impactful content. She's also released a full course on social selling to share her approach and help others replicate her success.

When she's not helping businesses scale, Laura is involved in diversity and inclusion initiatives and was recognized as an upcoming talent in Denmark under the Fun fact, Laura used to be a weekend radio DJ in her teens, which explains her natural ability to connect with audiences.


[00:01:26] Michel: Welcome to the show, Laura. happy to have you. How are you?

[00:01:29] Laura Erdem: Michel, thank you so much for having me. What an introduction is like. There's not so much more to cover really, but thank you so much. I'm great.

[00:01:39] Michel: It's too bad people cannot see, the background there's an orchestra, welcoming you as well. But no, super excited. 

Laura's Journey at Dream Data

[00:01:46] Michel: One of the things I'd like to do, with all my guests is, before we dive into actionable insights, I'd like for you to, give us, a quick rundown of who you are, but also, what you do and what is dream data.

[00:01:58] Laura Erdem: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I'm Laura. sales manager at Dream Data. I've been at Dream Data for more than four years now. So it has been a ride. I joined as employee number nine. At that time, like anything works, just let's bring any revenue we can to try to figure out how to sell to clients. And at the very beginning of that journey, most of those clients that we brought in actually churned because there was a either not ICPs, not the right fit and so on. And during the further time, then we figured out who are we actually selling to, which are the best clients from dream data, and also What are the best users to sell to and how are they actually buying?

And that's where that social selling part also came in because we sell to marketers and marketing operations. And a lot of those people are on LinkedIn as well. So we can cover all of those ways. How did we find that this is a channel? How do we work this out? So this is a big passion of mine because it actually was born when I joined Dream Data.

Not even when I joined, it was around a year after I joined, because before that I was at Gardner, I was at other big enterprises like Red Hat as well. And it's not where you really focus on social selling and sales. You sell big ticket deals. You think most of your clients are not on LinkedIn anyway. And then you share that magic quadrant of Gardner, your colleagues like it. And That's it. So, so we can cover some pieces of that. I'm currently located in Copenhagen, but from January, moving to New York to further broaden our office in the U S

[00:03:41] Michel: how many employees do you have 

[00:03:43] Laura Erdem: we're a bit over 60.

[00:03:44] Michel: Nice. Nice. L

Defining Social Selling

[00:03:45] Michel: et's talk about social selling. And that's one of the things that you and I, talked about just before, getting started. There's a lot of, big buzzwords in our industry and social selling, is.

One of them, before we talk about how you do it, well, let's define a little bit, the concept or the term. So what does social selling mean to you and how do you approach it?

[00:04:06] Laura Erdem: It can mean different things for different companies. And often depending on what type of company I'm speaking with, it might mean a marketing initiative, asking sales to just reshare the content. Or in some other cases, it's even more extreme. One thing your employees to have personal brands on LinkedIn and sometimes speak about your product for dream data to start with social selling was just a cheap mean to get the word out about what we're building. Cause our product. Is built for marketers is built for operations, people who are on LinkedIn. And when you're a startup, you don't have that much money to pay for ads, go to events, have booths and so on. And when your audience is on LinkedIn, we had to figure out. What type of content do they like to engage with so they can start seeing our content and seeing what we do and how we do it. And during that time we had to figure out how do we speak about this so it doesn't sound salesy, so it sounds engaging, so we get a point of view, a voice, it's fun. So it doesn't feel like somebody's selling to you. So when you're saying social selling. Well, I would put social as a first part, because it is a social platform and the buyers are not there to buy even where we call it social selling. Nobody is doing social buying. They're just enjoying their time on the platform, learning some things. Most of the times just scrolling past by stuff and waiting for somebody to engage with their content. This is how it works. But then the magic happens when you start creating the content, understanding what works, and then moving some of those conversations to private medias as well, direct messages, emails, and so on. Sometimes you wouldn't even move them to direct messages on LinkedIn, but they will start responding and telling you, Oh yeah, I've seen your content. I want to book a demo. And they just book it directly on your website. That's how you start to see that it's working. And we do measure it. Very closely as well to see what's working. And, and how do we see if it's actually bringing in revenue instead of just bringing in noise and people just liking your stuff, which actually without the actual revenue is totally worthless.

Tracking Social Selling Success

[00:06:29] Michel: Let's talk about how you're tracking things. So, what are the, you know, beyond let's say revenue, what are the type of leading indicators that you look at to see if what you're doing on LinkedIn is actually, producing any results.

[00:06:42] Laura Erdem: Yeah. Well, even though people would say, Oh, this is vanity metrics to look at likes and comments and views. It's not. It is a number of people who have seen what you're speaking about. And it depends what you're speaking about, because if you're speaking about your product or the problems that your buyers care solving. Then you're attracting the audience to see your content and you can start counting that so far. It's still vanity metrics because you don't know if it actually goes into the revenue part, but it's some good indicators. Then we check, are we hitting the right personas? Because you can do that on LinkedIn.

Are we hitting the right? Markets. Are we getting somebody from Europe, from the U S depending on where you're selling and what sizes of companies are engaging as soon as we've got those numbers we don't put them into spreadsheets or analyze them in big ways, but you had a big engagement on your post.

Have a look, what type of people engaged and are they a good fit to be your buyers? First good indicator. The next part is that we do measure our LinkedIn organic engagement. And all of the clicks that land from LinkedIn into dream data. This is the first part where you actually start to measure. Are they coming to our website? Dream data as a tool itself. Well, that helps a lot is able to measure LinkedIn organic engagement and paid engagement before they even land on your website. So we do look at those metrics too. But if you don't have that, you will be able to measure. Who and how many people land from LinkedIn. So they saw my post, they landed on Dream Data's LinkedIn page and clicked visit the website. If they're going there through LinkedIn, it's a very high indicator that something is

working of what we're doing on LinkedIn. The next part, most of the people will be going direct. So they won't be going all that way. It's like, Oh, there's their page. Oh, let me click and so on. No, they will either go Google organic or direct or Sponsored branded words like dream data and you have to start to measure those as well because after higher Engagement on LinkedIn you will start to see trends as well So we got some good posts or we did a campaign on Can we see the results on the website?

Still vanity because we still don't know if it's going into revenue. But then as soon as we have those clicks later on, you follow the customer journey and try to see, are they converting to marketing qualified leads? Are they converting to sales qualified leads? Are we creating revenue out of this? In Dream Data, yearly, we create over 2 million impressions in revenue. Measured according to new business. So out of all of those touches that they had LinkedIn impressions, they landed on our website. If we split them out into the whole customer journey throughout the year of all of our clients, this is how much revenue we're able to attribute to only to LinkedIn. It's insane.

Cold Outreach vs. Warm Outreach

[00:09:55] Michel: one of the things I'm curious about is, if you look at traditional, and I think that's something you've also mentioned in a previous interview, I think you said it, you know, traditional outbound sales does not work anymore. And this is where, social selling comes into play.

When you look at a traditional outbound approach, where people say, it's a numbers game, you just reach as many people as possible, and then, you start booking demos when, you switched, I guess, from this approach to social selling it's a very different lifestyle a very different daily routine.

How did you. make the jump or what will you recommend to people raised in the, cold outreach type of, school of thoughts and that they need, or they would like to explore social selling.

[00:10:43] Laura Erdem: Yeah, for sure. So I will divide. Cold outreach and warm outreach into those two buckets. Cause for me, cold outreach is when you're thinking of, I want to sell to Microsoft and Oracle because they're a good fit and I will do cold outreach. They don't know about me. I will just write a lot of messages, try to call those people, try to get them into the meetings. This is called, some people are great at it because they do it at massive scale, but it works less and less because of AI, automations, and all that stuff that are coming in. People are not able to trust this anymore. I'm not even sure if they're seeing your emails anymore, but the other bucket of warm outreach is when they're slightly aware about you. So this is what we do at Dream Data. So to start with, we just try to do whatever works. Like, so let's figure out what works. Cold outreach did not work. We didn't do a huge test of it. We're a startup. We had two people to do it, but, but later we figured out, okay, we're quite good at marketing. A lot of sources and channels are working and so on, but then we saw LinkedIn is working as well because people started to see our content. And people start to show intent, intent as of they're seeing our LinkedIn ads and our LinkedIn organic posts, they are going into G2 comparing us. They're on our website. We see that through a reverse IP lookup that this specific company. Let's take Microsoft again. Well, maybe too big of an example, but we can take a smaller one.

Let's say, a Carta is on our website looking around. Then we have to figure out who are our ICPs to start that outbound because they're slightly aware of us. They're on our website. We don't know who that is, but then we will do assumptions that these usually are the people that are our buyers, because if it's somebody else, we actually don't care because it would never buy, then you can start doing outbound, either try to reach them through your network.

This is something I really, really trust and believe in going through the people who would know them. Or if you don't have any, then start to build very targeted outbound sequences to those types of people, because you know, CARTA, what kind of problems they might be having, how would you be solving them and start the engagement with that piece, going after it, touch them on LinkedIn, visit their profile, try to connect with them. Not from the first time, but then also helped out with additional emails. Try to call them. And when you tie that into that very, very tight outbound routine, It definitely works because they're aware they're the right buyers for your product. They are aware of the problems that you are trying, that you are solving. And if you hit them with the right message and they're aware of your brand, this works like magic.

Effective Social Selling Strategies

[00:13:54] Michel G: And if we look at what you do specifically on LinkedIn, because, there are a lot of people will use those platforms just as a way to broadcast stuff. they use this organic social like paid ads I think we've all made that mistakes, myself included.

how do you structure a little bit, your social selling system or routine? Like some people say, Oh, you know, you need to comment, you need to repost, like what's your, did you have, let's say a structured approach or go with the flow?

[00:14:26] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: I'll walk you through my process of how I do this, but I have to leave you with one learning of the whole podcast. And if you think every time you post and create your own system with that one learning, it'll work for you every time. So that is, remember. On LinkedIn, nobody cares about two things, you and your company. Nobody cares about you and your company. When you have that in mind, start thinking about what do they actually care about? They probably care about you as a person's like, Oh, are you okay? Oh, there's a hurricane and stuff, whatever. But. They don't care about you. I did this. I achieved that. Or my company sells this. My company does that. They don't care. They care about their day to day problems, their day to day lives, and what is it that they're trying to solve and achieve at their work. And this is the system I work off every single day. So when I post on LinkedIn, I think about what kind of problems are my buyers trying to solve. And I sell an attribution platform. It's probably very often that they don't think about attribution, not even 5 percent of their time at work, but they think about a lot of other things. Are my ads performing? How do I create a social selling program at my company? How do I collaborate with sales? I'm a marketer. How do I collaborate with sales? Because they are just money suckers and only are going after commissions. How do I get that to work? These are the things they care about much more than they care about attribution. And when I put that into the system, what do my buyers care about? It is so much easier to start creating content that is Attracting their eye. They will always figure out what you sell because there will be times when you will loop in your product into this as well. So I talk a little bit, a lot about the problems that they care about. 

Personalizing Social Selling

[00:16:37] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: I show my face a lot because people buy from people and I do a lot of video because if you have seen me talking, if you have heard me talking, the next time I reach out to you, and especially if it's on video, you will definitely respond because, Oh, so now you did this video for me. It becomes personal. So now that person cares about themselves, I did this for you, which means that I care about your problems and I'm going an extra mile to do a video for you, trying to reach you as a person, not as a mass email, trying to hit that 3 percent who's in the market. And then the biggest thing that actually works is product marketing on LinkedIn. But only if you did the first two steps I just mentioned. Product marketing on LinkedIn through video, walking through your platform and showing screenshots of your product with the buyer in mind. They don't care about your product. They care about the problem they want to solve. Okay, I don't know if my LinkedIn ads are driving sales qualified leads. This is a problem, but it's not something that I would say, Oh, attribution does this and that. And here you go, how you solve it. No, no, no, no, no. You as a marketer, you don't know if your LinkedIn ads are performing. So this is how you can do this. This is how you can figure this out. And then you walk through your product. Then they will look here. These types of posts get very little attention. And that's what bugs a lot of people as well. It's like, Oh, whenever I speak about my product, nobody cares. And the, nobody wants to. Like engage and listen. Yeah, because you're speaking about the product and if they liked and commented it, you would reach out to them directly and try to sell to them.

That's why they don't do it. But when you do that type of a loop, caring about them, showing your own personality, and then talking about the product, that loop will close with whenever you reach out as a salesperson to the companies that are your target audience, it's very likely they have seen your product. Posts they have seen you liking and commenting on their posts because you care about them as a person as well And finally, you will close the loop by getting a conversation to start with. Don't go off to the meeting from the first bat, go after the conversation. And when the buyer is ready, or when you spoke enough, you could always focus, like go straight.

Yeah, that's fine. Now we had a conversation. Are you at all interested into attributions? Like, not really. So fine. Or maybe in like half a year, cause we have a renewal. Fine too. So this is kind of the thought process that I go through. Every time when I post on LinkedIn.

[00:19:24] Michel G: Amazing. So really looking at educating around the problem, and how it can be solved and then your product becomes, a means to an end, as opposed to, the main thing you're pushing. super interesting. 

Institutionalizing Social Selling

[00:19:37] Michel G: I'm also curious to know if, uh, social, your social selling strategy is something that you've, you institutionalized, let's say a dream data or it's more of a personal thing do you have a social selling calendar and roles or, it's more fluid than that.

[00:19:52] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: we don't have a calendar and we don't have a precise structure, how we do things, we have best practices and the best practices for social selling. If you're not into this, Oh, I'm going to show my personality. I'm going to show my, myself on video are following our product marketing calendar. So what product is releasing. And we're talking on LinkedIn. Well, that's expected that salespeople would be sharing and we'd be talking about this, but in addition to that, all of that type of a loop, talking about the problems that your marketers care about and showing your personality. It depends on the person. So when we're taking a sales team, that's the thing that is very difficult to navigate.

if you ask your sales team to do social selling. This is amazing. Everybody has to do this and this is the cookbook. This is how you do it. More than half of your sales team will not be energized to do this. And it's okay because if they are better at crafting that perfect email or hitting 50 cold calls, Well, let's do that because you're good at it. I'm so bad at cold calling. But I'm better at social selling. So let's be put people there where they're best at. So it doesn't drain their energy either because it gives me energy, but my colleague gets totally drained that, Oh, I didn't post for a week. I have to do a post. No, let's make it easy. So if we follow our product marketing calendar. 

Leveraging Product Marketing

[00:21:31] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: Very easy for everybody to either reshare or add their thoughts to it, or just create a post from this same topic. Well, we've got ChatGPT right now, all of us. So just recreate the message, add a little bit of your own voice and share it as yours. It's very easy because now we've got a topic. Another thing that we do, we have a social selling Slack channel.

Whenever somebody posts internally, we post our post over there. A couple of things happens there. So people can see that we are active on LinkedIn and it is kind of a directory of historical posts. If you are really willing to do a post today, but you have zero ideas and maybe only three minutes of your time, you just go and copy your colleagues post. You go copy it, you go paste it, maybe adjust it a little bit, post it as yours. Nobody will notice if you really want to do this. So make it easy for your people to follow this. 

Encouraging Team Participation

[00:22:32] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: It can never be a rule you have to do this. Another really important part is your founders or your top level management has to be on the platform as well, because if you're trying to enforce it internally and you're somewhere in marketing and think it's a very good idea. If they see your founders or C level doing this, it will be shown and seen as a golden example that, okay, this is something we want to do and this is encouraged as well. So this is not social media time that I'm doing on my work time.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

[00:23:05] Michel G: Another thing you've talked about is the alignment between the marketing and sales team. I'm a big fan of this. I've been, CEO of a tech company and I've seen this, tension, right?

The same way you'll have tension between the P and E team and commercial teams. And I kept, you know, repeating that, we were on the same team and, the enemy was actually the competition was out there, right? Not in the same room that, that we were in. what's your experience with that misalignment, and what solutions have you come up with to, bring everybody together.

[00:23:38] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: the closest and shortest way to alignment is common reporting. 

Aligning Sales and Marketing Teams

[00:23:43] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: So if we understand what type of leads are coming in. What is the number? How many of those are actually drilling down and going down to sales qualified new business? Then it creates natural alignment between the teams because sales knows what marketing is bringing in sales knows that marketing is bringing in leads that are actually converting to sales qualified, which means here you go.

The Importance of Sales Qualified Leads

[00:24:07] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: Sales. I brought in sales qualified leads. It's not just noise. It's not just email addresses of people who don't actually care of buying. It's very high quality. And then sales go in and closes the deals or loses them, which also creates the alignment the other way, because marketing cares that the leads we brought in are actually closing to new business. And if they're not closing to new business, what is happening? Is it something that marketing can do to support you? During that process, do you need some kind of documentation or do we need to do some better product marketing, something on the website, or is it just sales training or am I bringing in the leads that show interest? And never close. So then there are so many questions that we have in common to start looking at together. So our marketing is always present in sales weekly meetings. So they know what kind of leads they brought in. What are we closing? Which deals are closing? Why are they not closing? What are they talking about? So product marketing can also focus on. The missing pieces that might be on the website, on the product and so on and so forth. So that creates that type of alignment. 

Analyzing Marketing and Sales Reports

[00:25:21] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: Whenever we look at those reports and analyze them as well, a little closer, what is happening? 

The Value of Face-to-Face Events

[00:25:29] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: We, our CMO was very skeptical about face to face events for a very long time. He was like, no, it's expensive. No. And it requires a lot of time for us to do anything. It's like, okay, so Stefan, let's do this. Send me to an event and let's see how it works. It costs you a ticket, my flight ticket, my hotel, basically it. Send me, let's figure this out.First time I went to Zastro, we also co hosted an event, uh, for some after hour. It went insane. It costed us so little comparing to what the ads would cost. We gathered so many contacts and touched so many people. And later, a year later, we closed a couple of those deals. So what you're able to see as well is that how long time does it take for us to close the leads that are coming from Google, from LinkedIn, from events, from webinars. And that's where you start creating that alignment. What type of things should marketing be creating? So sales can close them faster or what type of long term initiatives do we have to do in order to get those long term clients? Some branding, there comes some stuff, soft stuff that you can met and cannot measure anymore. It's also important, but to start with, let's look at the most impactful stuff that moves the needle the fastest.


Choosing the Right Events for Lead Generation

[00:26:55] Michel G: let's talk a little bit about, um, the events that you just mentioned, because I was also skeptical and I think I'd like to learn more of a little bit about your experience because there's, um, quite a few. Assumptions. Let's say this, right? The first thing is that you go to the right event.

I've attended a lot of events where I was looking for clients, but actually everybody wanted to sell me something, right? So sometimes it's not the right crowd. also the expectations when you go to an event, you know, a lot of people would like to be able to closed deals, a week, a month after you just mentioned that, sometimes it takes a year.

can we dig? Deeper into this and understand how you pick your events. your goals as well, when you go and, what kind of expectations you have when you come in.

[00:27:42] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: pick events where your buyers are at. Our buyers are marketing and operations. So let's pick events where marketing and operations are going and B2B SaaS for us. So it has to be a B2B SaaS event where marketing, and operations are present. So for us, it's usually HubSpot Inbound, SaaStrWoz, but like you have to map out where your buyers are going and then you have to figure out, do you want to be present there as of a booth or are you going there as our CRO calls it doing guerrilla sales where you're trying to get those meetings and try to book them and so on, which is much, much harder, but you don't have the budget at the very early stage.

if you have a booth, you're there for Lead Gen. everybody knows whenever they come to a booth, they know that your target is to book a meeting with them and create awareness for the product. So it's okay that they will be cold. Some of them will be coming over to you. There are tactics of what you should do in the booth and so on.

it's costly. It will cost you at least 50K to attend the bigger event. Plus you have to send people there. You have to have entertaining swag and do stuff and so on. Costly, time consuming. So you have to do that cost analysis. Are we going to do this?

And what are we expecting? How many leads do we want to gather for this to work? 

Strategies for Event Success

[00:29:07] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: The next part is the one that I have more expertise on because. We're still not doing booths and we probably will one day, but is going by yourself or a couple more people into an event and trying to start conversations and book those meetings. The best way to do it is to focus on either pipeline acceleration. So if there are your prospects there or your clients as well for renewals, you have to meet them a hundred percent at the events as well. And if you're focusing on the first part of this lead gen part, these are the things that you need to do to start with.

You have to analyze and figure out who's going. Very hard because you don't have any lists. You don't have a booth. You're not getting any lists. So look at the sponsors We're going who are your buyers? You'll have to reach out to hundreds of people online to figure out who's going from your company that you would like to meet Look at who the speakers are some of your buyers will be the speakers on Stages as well And, uh, they know that everybody's there to sell.

So you'll have to figure out how are you going to get the attention of the person who already knows that you're there to sell. So all of your work starts before the event, the event is just the finish line, like that last half a mile of your marathon, where you just trying to look happy and that the picture is going to capture you for that.

I finished the marathon and I'm not looking. Anyway, so all the work starts before figure out who the people are, try to reach them, try to figure out how you will start the conversations. And as soon as you've got that, try to book meetings very hard. Nobody wants to book meetings in advance before the event.

Nobody, unless they know you, that's where social selling comes in. Oh, I've seen you. You're going to be there. Me too. let's chat because probably I've seen that you're not just trying to push your product, but you're also talking about various marketing things. So let's do that. Arrange a side event.

Do a side event during the event. It has to be. Quite close to the event location and start inviting people who you think are going to the event. And when the event has come, well, you'll have to go around, meet the people that you know, that are there.

Try to hunt them down. For me, the easiest way to do it. You've got a list, you've got a list of all the companies that are there. You've got target people that probably are there as well. If you haven't confirmed it, and then you go after them, try to meet them in their booth with curiosity, which means you go to their booth, talk to their salespeople, understand what they're doing. Maybe even book a meeting with them because it's an interesting product. You might want to see as well. Then they'll ask, what you do? Then it's your time to shine, but it takes so long time and you cannot do shortcuts. If you try to do shortcuts, no way you're not going to get through. So this is the way that we work with it. And it's hard. It's hard to prove that working when you know how much work Is behind it and some of it is less structured work than it would be doing outbound or Starting to do social selling and so on.


[00:32:28] Michel G: I think it's great to meet people in person. sometimes it's your first touch point and then you follow up later they see you on LinkedIn and you have That connection in the real world, which I think we lost a little bit with the pandemic because I've seen a lot.

I mean, everybody was doing events, pre pandemic. it was just too much, And then afterwards there was, People who started reconsidering, do we actually need this to, to actually want to go there? but now I think we've seen a, you know, things coming back up in terms of, uh, of events because it's fun.

I agree. 

Entering the US Market

[00:33:03] Michel G: One thing i'd like to discuss before. You go is, the U S So you've been involved in launching, the market. Can you tell us a bit, what was your role? I know you're moving there, but I'm interested in understanding a bit more how you and, you know, as a company approach that market entry, this is something I've done quite a bit in the past myself.

this is something that's pretty easy to screw up, you know, as a startup or as a scale up. So tell me a bit about your story.

Challenges of International Market Entry

[00:33:35] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: It's tough to kick off and I see companies have European companies having troubles getting into the American market as well, because the sales are different and the buyers are a bit different and so on. And, oh, we failed a lot, but I think the right thing that things that dream data did from the very, very beginning, even before I at all touched any of this was they have never localized where they're selling, meaning It never created just a sales motion for Europe or like Germany, France, and so on. It has always been in English. It has always been defined. What is our target market? And that included the U S Europe and a little bit of Australia, but most of that was Europe and the U S which also meant that when we finally got to some of the American clients, It's always much easier to start splitting them out.

If you are going to change your sales processes and so on as well, because you already have experience in that part. And that's where companies usually fail. They think, Oh, we've got three German mark, uh, three German clients. Let's try to go after the German clients and it's a good tactic to niche in and start to understand how they're buying. But you're only niching yourself in into that German buyer only. And the reason we were able to do America's as well was because we never niched down into specific one. And after I think maybe like a close three or four American clients, then we started to see that there is that type of dynamic and what type of people do one and the other market. Like to collaborate with, and what are the types of sales that they're looking into? So, and kind of, it comes up quite naturally, but, and also generalizing a lot. Europeans, they tend to like to soft, the soft sale and start to learn the product. Usually it takes a long time to buy. A lot of people have to be involved and like, there's a lot of dancing, but as soon as you get the European clients to buy your product, they're very loyal. Very loyal and stays so long time because they care about you. They bought you not just because of what the product does, but also how you are as a company Americans. It goes fast, like time incentives works like, Oh, like end of the quarter, we can pull up those deals and so on. We failed a lot at the beginning because we didn't know that this will actually work.

And we were afraid to touch those time based incentives, for example, because, Oh, you don't do this in Europe. It's like, what is this? This is fake. No, it's not. It works. And,

[00:36:36] Michel G: It's a lot more transactional, uh, in the 

[00:36:39] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: It is so much more transactional. It's like, they know what your product does before they come into the meeting. You have to show me the demo, talk with me about your pricing. And finally, then we'll figure out. When is it that it is fitting for me to buy never be afraid to talk about pricing, even on the first call start with values, of course, but, but they, it feels more that the buyer is so much more in control when you are in the U S so you have to control the process as well from your side.

So it becomes that type of a. European dance, but it is controlled where we both know where we're putting our feet. So it becomes a very well structured sales process.

[00:37:24] Michel G: I always tell, startups or scale ups, if you don't want to adapt to the local culture, stay home, especially in sales and marketing. stay true to yourself. I'm not saying to sell your soul, your soul to the devil, but there are things you have to adjust.

you've mentioned European companies having a hard time in the U S it's true the other way around. A lot of Americans, come with that, transactional approach in Europe, and that's, not always, pan out, so you're moving to the U S you set up an office there or you're hiring people, you've already hired people where are you at in that market entry phase?

Hiring Local Experts for Market Success

[00:37:58] Laura Erdem: the next step that DreamData did that was a huge successful step was hiring a local CRO. Our founders are very technical and we've got a CMO as well. So none of those like really know. How the sales process should work. And we did start it out, but they hired the best CRO on the market that you could find, who has tried to scale European companies to the U S with success. And that person is in New York. So Nick has started it off. And started hiring the right people to the commercial team. So it is a commercial team, both sales and customer success in the U S and, and that's where we're broadening up that office, but that step as well, I think. I don't have many examples, but I have a feeling that.

A lot of founders, European founders, when moving to the U S it's like, okay, we're going to move one of our founders, a couple of people from our office. I'm going to try to establish the presence from my limited experience. Hiring an American top leader was a huge positive step for Such a step up. Like we're learning every single hour from that person and from the way the team is functioning over there. So I'm going there not just to like move the company, but to learn, learn, learn how this market is doing the sales that we're not doing in Europe.

Adapting Sales Strategies for Different Markets

[00:39:36] Michel G: I think what you just said is super important is it's good to have somebody in the market who can translate back to HQ. But the other important element is you need the HQ to be open. And,that's seems to be the case for you and that openness to learn and, to really try to adapt and understand more that, international market 

I've had a lot of experience with China and a lot of the struggle really was for the headquarter to understand that, China is a different planet pretty much. And it's a very different culture, different ways of doing business.

[00:40:10] Laura Erdem: So, uh, yeah, I totally agree. Having somebody on the ground who's from there and, you know, having that counterpart of the HQ is open that's the secret formula, Definitely

[00:40:21] Michel G: Okay. I don't want to take too much of your time, Laura, but I'd like to ask you one last question and then, you know, have three followups.

Advice for B2B Marketers and Salespeople

[00:40:27] Michel G: So, but one of them is I'd like you to think about, you know, if you had to give a B2B marketers or B2B salesperson a piece of advice to drive more revenue and results, what would that be?

[00:40:40] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: More revenue, more results. I think. Depends on the stage of the company, really. So to begin with, at the beginning, when you're new and you're trying things out, be open to try a lot of things out and see what works. if you're in B2B, it takes some time to see the results, but you will start seeing the nuggets of what's actually seems to be working for you to either drop the stuff that is not, or just continue watching what the things that you have started, Have brought in, in the longer term.

it's very fluffy, but social selling, cold calling, events, whatever it is. Rank what you would like to try and try them out. Okay. And when you see that it's kind of working, go all in to start structuring it around it as well. So one thing that we failed at the beginning with dream data was outbound. So we tried it a bit. Ah, it doesn't seem to be working. Okay. Let's continue. We got a lot of inbound because marketing is great. Then we say, Oh, we still need some outbound. Um, okay, let's try. So you try, okay. I try. And then it's never really structured. Okay. Nobody really sat down and say, this is what I do.

I'm going to grind for three months and try to set a proper outbound that actually works, that includes social, that includes ads, that includes emailing calls and so on. So get that structure in now when we've got the structure, it just. works as a well functioning machine. But if you see something working, put it into structure and figure out what to focus on. So people who are working on it, they know the impact that is expected from them and how to do it. when you onboard new people, tell them. This is how we do this. And go do something similar or try to find your own way to adapt to this. That actually maybe works even better. So these two things are core to driving more revenue.

[00:42:42] Michel G: experiment with different customer acquisition channels, see what works. when you find something going in the right direction, structure it to scale. Great. 

The Future of Social Selling with AI

[00:42:51] Michel G: one last one, especially if we go back to social selling, there's, you've mentioned chat GPT.

You know, Jenny, I think I got this moment maybe a year and a half ago where I thought, Oh, my God, this is gonna change everything, This is so much bigger than the Internet. What's your take on generative AI and How you link this to let's say your social selling and how you potentially see this evolving or maybe how it's going to change a bit how you work and how you do social selling in the next couple of years.

[00:43:28] Laura Erdem: so I don't use chat GPT for social selling myself, unless I'm really stuck. Like, somebody said, Oh, help us on this campaign and their friends is okay. I'll support you. And I have no idea what to write. Then I will plot it into chat GPT and then rewrite it as I would do, but I usually don't. But if you're stuck it is a good way to kick off creativity. So that block that you're not able to start writing something, it's off. It helps you out to go faster and then you have to edit it because everybody can see that it's shit if you just post it as it is. The same goes for outbound for anything else. But where it's going, I think the good part of it is that human connection, And that type of a face you and I is going to be more and more important because people can see you, people can see your emotion. That's what people get attracted to. That's what people are also craving to see in all of the social media platforms.

They want those experiences. They want to understand how is this panning out for each person and company? How did you succeed? Or where did you fail? Where does it hurt? what did you learn? that personality and personal stuff is going to work forever, all the time people are like, we thought that social media is going to bring people together closer because we meet each other more.

I can have FaceTime with you even when you're not online, Michel. but it brought us further from each other. because we don't even talk anymore. And that's what where it's going to take us. One crazy thing that I saw recently is that even this conversation can be generated by AI. So there's a tool on the market that you would take Michel's interests, Laura's LinkedIn profile, and the content that she has done. And AI would create a podcast for you. Nuts insane. And two people talking about like no real people interacting at all. So even this is going to be disturbed. And how are we going to recreate this personal connection between Michel and Laura, what we're having right now? It's, um, it's tough. It's going to be difficult, but we'll have to have people to shine through this.

[00:45:53] Michel G: Yes we'll crave those social connections and face time, it's going to be a big change. You need to get ready. Laura, do you have any, uh, parting words for our audience before I let you go?

[00:46:03] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: just go and do this, go and try this out. The social selling thing, if you're thinking about doing it and if you have questions, feel free to reach out and ask, or just as just follow dream data and the dream data, people who are doing social selling. And, and see how, how this is working. And, and if you've got questions, where does it hurt?

And where are we lying? Because we're not lying on social, but we're adding a lot of stuff. So feel free to reach out.

[00:46:33] Michel G: Thank you. The best way for our audience to reach you is on LinkedIn,

[00:46:37] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: It is 

[00:46:37] Michel G: Thank you so much Laura for your time, for your insights. I wish you all the best with your move to the big Apple enjoy the ride and thanks again.

[00:46:45] laura-erdem_1_10-03-2024_114111: Thank you so much. Enjoy the conversation.

[00:46:47] Simon: Thanks again for listening, I hope you enjoyed the show. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. And as usual you can find the show notes at stunandawecom. 


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Michel Gagnon

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