From Series A to B: How Dreamdata Scaled Predictable Growth and Raised $55M

In this episode of Predictable B2B Growth, Javier sits down with Nick Turner, CEO of Dreamdata, to break down what it really takes to build predictable growth in today’s B2B landscape.

Nick shares lessons from leading Dreamdata through a $55M Series B raise, including why focus—not expansion—is the key to scaling, and the metrics that actually matter to investors: growth rate, gross retention, and burn efficiency.

They also dive into the reality behind AI hype, why most companies misunderstand its role in go-to-market, and how businesses should think about delivering real customer value instead of chasing buzzwords.

The conversation explores the growing importance of brand, the long B2B buying cycle, and why over-reliance on short-term demand generation can quietly kill pipeline. Nick also challenges how sales and marketing teams use automation, emphasizing that while marketers can scale communication, sales still depends on genuine human interaction.

At its core, this episode is about cutting through noise—focusing on the right customers, solving real problems, and building a growth engine that’s actually sustainable.

Key Topics and Takeaways

• Fundraising strategies for Series B
• The role of AI in SaaS growth
• Importance of customer feedback and focus
• Predictability in growth metrics is crucial for Series B success.
• AI is a tool to deliver value, not a buzzword to chase.
• Focus on a specific market segment to dominate before expanding.
• Listening to customers is the most reliable way to build products.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Nick Turner and Dream Data
01:51 Fundraising Journey and Predictability Metrics
04:47 The Role of AI in Business
07:55 Listening to Customers and Market Feedback
11:20 Navigating Investor Conversations
13:11 Defining Predictable Growth
16:27 Focus and Market Positioning
20:37 Metrics for Success and Burn Multiple
22:44 The 30-Day Blackout Challenge
23:45 The Sales Cycle and Brand Awareness
26:34 Marketing and Sales Alignment
29:43 The Evolving Role of Sales
32:43 AI in Marketing vs. Sales
39:23 Customer-Centric Growth Strategies

Resources & Links

• Dream Data - https://dreamdata.io
• Nick Turner LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/nickturner
• Chet Holmes - The Ultimate Sales Machine - https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Sales-Machine-Target-Profits/dp/1591842158

Thanks for listening to Predictable B2B Growth.

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Transcript

Javier Lozano, Jr. (00:01.529)
Hey Nick, I just wanna say thank you again for taking the time to join me on this podcast. I've really been following what you've been doing on LinkedIn for quite some time and just really love the content that you're posting. so before we kind of start diving into a lot of these questions that I have to ask you, just tell us a little bit more about your background and just so we can learn a little bit more about what you're doing right now as CEO at Dream Data and just kind of how you got here.

NIck Turner (00:28.714)
Yeah, of course. So like you said, my name is Nick Turner. I'm the CEO here at Dream Data. I originally joined as CRO two years ago and took over the CEO role actually a year ago almost today. So it wasn't an April Fool's joke, it actually happened. So I am here in seat now. Prior to that, I had...

20 years of experience leading go-to-market teams, in particular in the B2B SaaS space, and I would say in a very specific segment of that, which was both in Martech as well as in the C to Series B, Series C space. And that's where we are. We're a Series B company. But yeah, that's my background. Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (01:18.691)
That's awesome. And so, you know, you know, when we were talking before we jumped into the podcast, you kind of was, we're talking about the, fundraising. And this is kind of where I want to, I really want to kind of start diving into one of my first questions here. because you are, you get, know, dream data is now a series B company. so you raised a $55 million raised last November. Is that correct?

NIck Turner (01:41.282)
Yeah, we close October 7th. Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (01:42.863)
Okay, October 7th. And so, you spoke with 74 investors to close the $55 million raise. And the market's obsessed with this whole AI native startup and Dream Beta has been around since 2018, is that correct? And so, when you finally got to that term sheet, what was some of the specific predictability metrics, if you will, that they fell in love with?

NIck Turner (02:01.026)
That's right. Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (02:12.711)
and was it the AI roadmap or was it the boring, beautiful, like go-to-market math? Like what was it?

NIck Turner (02:20.812)
Yeah, I think there's two components here, especially when it comes to raising a Series B, predictability becomes a big part of that. But also, last summer when we went out and were fundraising, and even still now, obviously AI is the hot topic.

I think it's, you we couldn't pretend that we were AI native. We were, you know, created in 2018 prior to, and when everyone says AI, what they really mean is, you know, there's lots of types of AI, but you know, what they mean is the LLM style AI, the generative AI. And so, you know, the thing that I like to say is that, look, you're not, just because you're not AI native doesn't mean you can't learn to speak AI. You know, I...

English is my original language. I spent time learning Spanish, and so no, I wasn't a native speaking Spanish, but I learned to speak it. I think that's the same thing that you can apply to moving from SaaS to AI. I do think that if you look at maybe the three major ways to deliver value in software over the last 20 to 30 years, even before that, you have on-prem, you have SaaS, and now you have AI. All of those are just different methods of delivering value through software, in my view.

It doesn't mean that people that are SaaS can't continue to deliver value, but I think it's clear that utilizing AI in your platform is going to deliver a lot of value to your customers. We're still working out, I say we, think both internally at Dream Data and collectively as a market, I think we're still working out what does that look like, how do you deliver value utilizing AI to your customers. But that's what I would have to say about that. I'm not a fan of buzzwords. I much more like to think about

Javier Lozano, Jr. (03:57.102)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (04:04.176)
Is this a good way to deliver value to customers? And if it is, then we should certainly be looking at how we do that.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (04:14.543)
I wanna double click in that a little bit too because I feel as though, and AI has been around a lot longer than we're giving it credit, but it's really taken off these last two, maybe three years. It's just exploded. It's like the joke in the marketing world where a company wants to hire a marketing unicorn that is basically four years removed from college.

and then has 20 years of you know, SaaS experience. like, what? That doesn't really exist. And so like, you're kind of basically saying that in a different way in the business world. and so I'm glad that you're bringing light to this because all these companies and all these people that are wanting this whole like, need AI native, guys, like this is literally being built as we are speaking, you know? And so, you know, what do you think about that?

NIck Turner (05:07.96)
Well, I think in the initial years of something new coming to light, especially in the enterprise side of things, a lot of that money comes from innovation budgets. And innovation budgets, this is exploratory. And everybody opened up the floodgate to innovation budgets for AI, of course. Everybody wanted to find out, hey, can this deliver value? And this kind of relates to hype cycles and where you're at in a hype cycle for new innovations.

I don't know where we're at. I don't know. I am not smart enough. I'm smart enough not to say anything about it, and I'm smart enough to know that I don't know enough about it to speak. But I do think that part of the cycle is you're at the peak of the hype, and then you have a trough of disillusionment. And then you glide into something that's somewhere between the total hype and the disillusionment, where you're still getting more value from it. And I just don't know where we are in that phase. I will say that there's definitely some disillusionment happening.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (05:38.071)
Hahahaha

Javier Lozano, Jr. (05:45.774)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (06:06.576)
from what I can see where people are adopting it, they're not seeing the results that they got from the hype, that they expected from the hype. I'm going to say very clearly that I am not opposed to AI, I really love it. We have it utilized in our product and we're going to keep using more of it as we understand how customers want to use it. I think that's the key thing. You cannot build a product and search for a solution. You need to find a problem and build a solution to that and if it happens that you're

Javier Lozano, Jr. (06:12.739)
Yep. Yeah.

NIck Turner (06:36.496)
and how to do that, then that's a very good thing. As long as you're delivering more value through all the work that you did, the R &D that you did on that innovation, that actually justifies what you've done.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (06:48.463)
I love what you're saying about that is building what customers want because I feel as though founders and CEOs get married to these ideas of like, no, this is what the market needs. And they start putting stuff out in the marketplace and like the marketplace is clearly saying, no, not interested. And you're looking at it from the other lens of it's not just delivering value, but making sure we're putting the market and getting that feedback loop from our customer base.

so that we're not wasting dollars in time and resources to developing something that no one cares about.

NIck Turner (07:22.614)
Yeah, I don't have a reality distortion field that I can rely on as a person. That's not who I am. The only thing that I can rely on is listening to customers and try to figure out what are their problems and how do we fix it. By the way, our product team does most of that also. I listen and I give feedback to our product team, but largely I trust our product team to go out there, do the interviews, figure out what's working and what's not, look at our usage data, see what people love to use in our product, and then proceed accordingly.

The idea that founders, and to be clear, I'm not the founder of Dream Data, but I think those are really one of the million shots where somebody says, hey, I have this idea, and it turns out everyone loves it. That's not a high probability shot, and I'm not the kind of person that takes those shots. I talked about the stage that I tend to play in.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (07:58.766)
Yeah, yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (08:13.412)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (08:19.702)
I'm not a zero to one type person. I'm much more of an operator and I can help to scale companies. And if there are problems and go to market, then I feel I really excel on that. I'm good, I'm better on that side of things than anywhere else in the company. So anyway, think listening to customers, it's funny that you have to say it, but that's something that you should do.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (08:34.607)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (08:43.503)
It's it's I've had conversations with with founders and CEOs sometimes and and it's it it's tough because it's like You don't want to you don't want to come in rude and saying like I don't think you're right and I'm not the expert in all the interest I'm not implying that but what I'm getting to is that like if people aren't buying this it's it's not because like it it's not because the the customer is wrong or whatever it's like it

probably doesn't really solve the problem that you think it's solving. And so it's almost as though you got to do a little bit more investigating. You got to do a little bit more digging. Are people trying to like hodgepodge these like, know, duct taping all these things to create a solution to make something happen, you know? And so that's something that, I mean, clearly is, it's a big conversation that I'm sure that you were probably having conversations in boardrooms whenever you were going fundraising, you know, where are these,

Are there problems here that you're trying to solve? And I'm sure those are the conversations like investors are asking, am I right?

NIck Turner (09:48.063)
It depends, mean, in a Series B conversation, it's a little bit different. think if you are a pre-seed or a seed investor, that is absolutely the conversation that you're having. They want to know, okay, what's the new thing or what's the new, thing, if you've read that. What are you building that's going to solve problems 10 or 20 years from now, as opposed to what's happening today? And so they're looking at someone that can, they can say, look, I know this is a problem now and it's gonna be an even bigger problem in 20 years.

And the market size right now might be small, but it's going to balloon in size. AI is a great example of that. Having guardrails for AI is, I think, a good example of what everyone's... There was a story that came out from Amazon recently where they felt they didn't have guardrails in place specifically. And that's a huge problem. You saw how much money that they lost in just a three to four hour window because they didn't have guardrails and how they're utilizing AI within their engineering team.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (10:45.817)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (10:47.766)
somebody I'm sure saw that and said, I'm going to build a solution to that because I know that Amazon's not the only one experienced that problem.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (10:54.115)
Yeah, that's huge too. mean, like, and I know it's silly to cut, you know, to talk about building guardrails, but it's so true though. I mean, whenever I work with clients on a fractional side, you know, I'm building guardrails as far as like, Hey, this is our goal. We know this is what we're trying to achieve and this is our strategy and these are our tactics, but these are the guardrails. This is what we're gonna be playing in and anything outside of these guardrails, we don't, we don't look into those things. And so it's really important to know that you got to lay those foundations correctly. So love that.

NIck Turner (11:09.934)
Right.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (11:24.419)
You know, you've had several conversations when it came to fundraising. And so I'm pretty sure by meeting 50, you were telling investors that you weren't really, what you weren't really telling them is it probably a different meeting from like meeting one. Like, so the story kind of changed a little bit, not, you know, bad, but you're probably getting feedback is probably what I'm assuming. And so how did your definition of predictable growth evolve during that summer, during that timeframe?

NIck Turner (11:51.213)
Yeah, I think that the metrics, like once you get to series B, the metrics are the metrics. Like you're either showing good growth and good retention or you're not. And I think what you're looking for is predictability there. You're not going out and saying...

I think we can achieve product market fit by X date. What you're really saying is like, we have really strong traction and product market fit. And here's the, here are the results of that. This is our, these are our growth numbers. These are retention numbers. And then this is the opportunity for the rest of the market. And we're looking for growth capital or something like that. You know, I think that's the, that's the conversation that you're having versus saying, you know, we're to build this new, now this new, thing. Excuse me. The other thing I'll say is that.

It was interesting last summer because of course, AI, like I just said before, big, big, big topic, and everyone wants to know, how are you becoming AI native, which again is not a thing that you can do. You can't become AI native. You can put AI into your product, of course, and utilize it to deliver value for your customers. And so anyway, I think that was certainly part of the conversation. So the things that changed weren't necessarily, I would say they weren't major.

because at that point in time, metrics are the metrics and that's what people care about the most. But they did want to know what is your AI story? And so we think a lot about in Go-to-Market, because that's what we do. We're in B2B specifically and we're marketing attribution. We build for marketers. That's what we've always done. That's what we always will do. are...

fully focused on that user persona. know, ICP might change from like an account or company profile, but it's always going to be BD marketers for us. And so there wasn't a whole lot that we could change. What we could do is say, look, this is where we're strong. You know, we're excellent on the data side and we're building agents that can layer over top of that. And that is, think, if I get into kind of SaaS versus AI, which I kind of hate to do again,

NIck Turner (14:00.513)
I don't like the buzzword side of this. really think about what's the value from both of them. But if you want to get into that discussion, it comes down to...

Javier Lozano, Jr. (14:04.643)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (14:10.862)
What are your strengths as a SaaS company versus what are the strengths of a company that's starting fresh right now? Fresh, a blank canvas can be pretty exciting, but you also don't have a lot of the infrastructure in place when you're doing that. It's actually pretty straightforward to build an agent now. Building now is pretty easy. That's why I stress the idea of focus on an ICP or user persona because it gets so easy to build.

think, I'll build for these five user personas, and that's just not going to work when it comes to positioning and branding and messaging. How are you going to make sure that your positioning and branding and messaging speaks to this one person?

Javier Lozano, Jr. (14:47.193)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (14:53.376)
And then you're off also trying to talk to sales leaders or even within the marketing department. You're diversifying. I don't think that's right either. Anyway, I'm getting away from kind of the question and the answer here, but I think that those things are super critical when you're thinking about how you're going to develop these products and get them to market.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (15:14.413)
No, I think that's great. so, you know, I know that, so what you're saying is as you went to the series B, you had things that are already working that you, and it was just a matter of like kind of shaping the narrative correctly. How do companies that are looking to go from, you know, precede the series A or series A to series B, how do they start creating a little bit more of that predictability to help them tell that story correctly, to help them position themselves to where

NIck Turner (15:21.454)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (15:43.971)
they can go to market and start, you know, trying to get some capital raising. Like what is it that, that dream data did that was kind of unique to kind of get you guys prepared to do that.

NIck Turner (15:54.733)
Series A to Series B was very much all about focus. I joined the company, like I said, in early 2024. And part of...

My reasoning was that, look, first off, I tried to build what Dream Data had built several times before internally and completely failed at it. And so seeing that they had built an amazing product really helped me and I could see the usage of the product. said, there's a huge opportunity here because I felt the pain of this problem and we want to solve it. But.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (16:13.185)
okay.

NIck Turner (16:27.34)
what we do could also be spread across many, user personas and it could span marketing and span into sales. And so we really locked in on focusing on just a couple of user personas and that helped us, think, both on the user persona side as well as ICP. So what type of account were we going after? And when we brought that focus, markets are always bigger than what you think they are. And so people are sometimes afraid in the early days to

Javier Lozano, Jr. (16:48.132)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (16:57.274)
to focus, but I think you should focus and focus on we're going to really become the go-to player within this segment of our market.

and we're gonna show that we can kind of dominate this market. And then once we do that, then you can decide, okay, should we expand our ICP? Are we happy with the growth we have? Do we see more growth in this ICP or should we expand it? So I think focus to me, I'll always stress that is super important. But if I look at like the three metrics that I cared a lot about.

It was a growth rate and investors care a lot about of course. It's growth rate, that's what investors for sure care about. I have a little disagreement with some investors around retention. So a lot of investors will focus on net revenue retention in the early days of a company. I think that's a huge mistake. I think it gives permission.

to companies to not focus. And what I mean is, net revenue retention is a composite metric. So if people aren't familiar with what that means, it is your base of revenue plus any sales that you make to that base of revenue. And so you can hide problems when you focus on that metric. it could, know, people will go to growth at all costs, which means that they'll sell to anybody. And if you're selling to anybody, then you're going to hurt your turn, I think. And so

Javier Lozano, Jr. (18:00.397)
Okay.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (18:16.815)
interesting.

NIck Turner (18:16.994)
But we kind of immediately switched from focusing on net revenue retention to focusing on gross dollar retention. It means that you have to have discipline on your sales team. It means that you have to focus on what you're trying to pursue. And I think that helps a lot with your retention if you go there. And then figure out, okay, what's my second product line that I can utilize to improve my net revenue retention and not just focus on retaining customers, but also growing the business within that customer. Does that make sense?

Javier Lozano, Jr. (18:39.289)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (18:44.757)
No, it 100 % does and I love that you're sharing that because that's something that I keep harping down with this as well too, as I work with, talk to different prospects and work with clients is that they talk about like, well, we wanna do this and we wanna do this and I'm like, guys, we need to find one wedge and we need to crush it. One thing that we can go in there, like your worst salesperson can close this all day long and hopefully you don't have that situation but my...

where I'm getting to is getting so good at having this one wedge, this one go to market that you are so confident in, and then you start putting more fuel to the fire in that. And it's kind of like what you're saying is that that's how you get to those. And then you start looking at metrics within that to start kind of determining like, are we ready to start adding another product line? Are we ready to start going after, going up market for this or maybe going down market for this?

It just depends on where you're at. It's kind of what you're trying to imply, is that right?

NIck Turner (19:44.419)
Yeah, and actually I will say this, even after the raise, quite literally, I'm sitting in this room, our lead investor from Peaks Man, Matt, was here, and we were talking about getting even more focused because of what we were seeing from one segment. And so even after raising that funding, I think, and you'll be surprised at how big of a segment it could be.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (20:00.729)
Yeah.

Yeah.

NIck Turner (20:03.822)
and trying to narrow the focus even more after that funding. I know that sounds kind of crazy to people, we had that conversation and we were talking about should we focus more to help improve the metric for the business. I missed one metric, and I'll just summarize for everyone if you need it. But I talked about growth rate, I talked about gross oil retention, and then the third one I didn't talk about was burn multiple and how much cash you're spending to actually add a dollar of revenue to your... So if you're spending...

Javier Lozano, Jr. (20:27.364)
Yes.

NIck Turner (20:32.918)
Obviously you're spending over a dollar to add a dollar, then you're burning cash. And if you're under, then hey, you're doing a, you're probably in a decent, a very good, very good spot. And so we, we lowered our burn multiple considerably. When I joined, we had 50 employees. We, we three X the size of the business from a revenue perspective, and we still had 50 employees. And so, and so I think, you know, if you in today's world.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (20:56.77)
That's awesome.

NIck Turner (21:02.574)
You know, I really kind of for 10 years, more than to 10 years, I lived in a world where money was almost free. Interest rates were nothing. I lived in world previous to that, but until 2022, 2021, money was just free and people paid a lot less attention to building like a profitable business. I've had bad experiences of not building a profitable business. And so I, you I learned my lesson. talked about like touching hot stoves the other day. Like I've touched a lot of the most.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (21:12.92)
You

Javier Lozano, Jr. (21:18.254)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (21:31.502)
Yeah, yeah.

NIck Turner (21:32.481)
And so I think, you make sure that we, you focus on that burn multiple as well. And I just want to be clear, like this advice is not for someone that's going from C to Series A, totally different conversation. You know, Series A to Series B or Series C, that is what I think you need to focus on is showing repeatability and that, hey, you know, if we added $50 million to our...

our banks, then we would be able to scale this business because the market's there, we know what to do, we just need to do more of it.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (22:05.795)
Yeah, I love it. Okay, this is great. I can talk about this all day long, but I'm gonna have to shift a little bit. Sorry about that. So you recently had a post about kind of like a 30 day blackout challenge, if you will, where you are challenging leaders to essentially turn off performance marketing for say 30 days. And if an AI driven growth engine does that and leaders or lead flow starts dropping to say zero, is the brand weak?

NIck Turner (22:11.726)
Yeah, yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (22:33.345)
or is the AI just capturing demand that would have been found somewhere else? Where's your head on that?

NIck Turner (22:37.72)
you ready.

Yeah, is like it is obviously I posted I posted for a reason because it's a hot topic like I think marketers are pulling their hair out because you know, companies live in quarter cycles. That's just how they do CFOs. By the way, I was a CRO. I had marketing report to me. I ruined it. And, I think that's important to call out. Yeah. Not that I didn't learn again, hot stove. learned my lesson, but I,

Javier Lozano, Jr. (22:45.751)
I know.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (22:54.649)
Yes.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (23:02.344)
really? Okay.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (23:08.951)
no, i understand, i don't wanna call you out by any means, but not very many people admit that

NIck Turner (23:12.098)
No.

Well, I think that as a sales leader, you either live on monthly or quarterly cycles. That's what you do. You have a target on your back. I understand that pain. And then if you end up with marketing under your belt, like, okay, well, where are the leads for this quarter? I said, well, it takes, we just published a LinkedIn benchmark report and it takes 272 days from that first touch point all the way to a closed one deal. That's on average. And so we're talking, I don't know, is that nine, 10 months?

Javier Lozano, Jr. (23:20.623)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (23:41.103)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (23:44.225)
months, something, yeah, maybe nine months, you know, let's call it 30, 30. So, so, so, so nine months. So think about that. Like if you tried to compress that down into like a 90 day cycle, all you're going to be doing is trying to capture existing people that are hunting right now and looking. Now that means that you have not built up any brand with that customer. And I can tell you like giving, I think of it as like air cover for SDRs or for AEs that are doing outreach, you you.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (23:46.179)
Yeah, yeah, roughly.

NIck Turner (24:14.19)
an SCR is much more likely to get a meeting if they know your brand, if the customer knows your brand, than if they don't. And so there's a hard press right now for marketers to remove their brand spend. And I think what that's going to do to companies, obviously I have lot of opinions about this, what that will do to companies in the long term is it's going to dry up your pipeline and it's going to ruin your conversion rate because you end up being...

Peter, our CFO, he affectionately refers to it as column fodder, which means that, column fodder, that means somebody already knows who they want to buy, then procurement says, I need a competing bid.

And so then the person goes out, gets a competing bid, and of course the person has decided they want to buy this other platform. And so they mold the RFP or whatever they're doing to help to please procurement to focus on this other person. So your sales team is going to spend so much time kind of trying to position themselves to win that deal when they don't even know they've already lost it.

And so I think that that to me gets to the heart of the problem with this 95-5 debate and CFOs and CROs and CEOs trying to tell marketers, hey, where are the leads today? I said, well, you should have asked me nine months ago.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (25:15.023)
interesting.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (25:32.163)
Yeah, no, and I'm glad you're shedding light there because I feel as though, I mean, this is a conversation I had a lot with our VPA revenue. And it's a lot of education. It's a lot of, but you have to have that from a marketing leadership standpoint to a revenue leadership standpoint. Like you have to have that like tied to the hip and you have to see each other eye to eye. Like you may not agree with everything. And really I look at it as like offense and defense. Like, know, let's say that sales is offense and

you know, marketing is defense. And where I'm getting to is like, you have to win together as a team. And so there is a strategy and how brand is worked and measured. can't use those same metrics as you would use demand and Legion and, and, and, and, or, know, or capture and how you're working those same, you know, those same kind of like strategies. And so you've got to use those accordingly and you have to pull certain levers at different moments and times.

knowing that one is gonna be a feature investment like an investment to the S &P 500 if you will, while another one is gonna be like crypto investment if you will. Not saying go invest in crypto, I'm not saying it's bad, but it's like you can get immediate returns like literally tomorrow if you wanted to. Like it could be crazy and you could lose everything tomorrow as well too. they work almost hand in hand I feel like. Is that kind of what you're saying too?

NIck Turner (26:28.504)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (26:47.598)
Exactly.

NIck Turner (26:53.006)
100 % yes, like I think that it just won't show up as soon as you want, like you're going to decrease your investment in brand and then you're going to feel the pain nine months later.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (27:06.212)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (27:09.826)
You know, like people have too short of a time horizon in their minds right now when they're trying to say, let's decrease on the brand side and let's focus on demand. And you can overspend on demand for people that were already in market anyway that might be looking at you.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (27:21.764)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (27:29.358)
Anyway, I think that's the problem that I have with it. Obviously, there's marketers struggle constantly with how do you prove this. I run an attribution platform, so I'm going to say this. You can't prove everything that works. You can see a ton of what's working. You can see a ton of the data, and we're getting better and better. Right now, what we see is 81 % of the buyer journey.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (27:52.067)
Yeah. Yeah.

NIck Turner (27:58.575)
It's all marketing before sales even gets involved, 81%. And so again, this is in the benchmark report we just did. Last year we saw it was 70-30. And I've been asking myself this question. I'm wondering, well, wait, are buyers just spending less time in market or has it always been this way and we just couldn't measure it yet? 20 years ago,

Javier Lozano, Jr. (28:02.957)
Really?

Javier Lozano, Jr. (28:20.621)
Huh, you know, no, go ahead. Sorry, sorry, keep going.

NIck Turner (28:26.956)
I was an account executive and I could quite easily, I knew.

a lot more about them. There was information asymmetry, right? And that has gotten to be less and less. And the role of a salesperson has changed a lot. Where they're coming in near the very end, they're an important part of this, don't get me wrong. But they're kind of the anchorman in this relay race. And their job is to talk more about how do I purchase as opposed to what should I purchase.

and why should I purchase it? There's so much information out there now for buyers that the salesperson no longer has that information under lock and key. It's all available for people to see. And with AI, that's only going to...

accelerate this process of I think of sellers again play a super important role. don't want salespeople to hate me but because I grew up in sales but it is you know the role is changing a lot in terms of what they what they do in market.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (29:27.535)
I like where you're coming with this. Are you familiar with Chet Holmes? He's an author. He wrote a book called The Ultimate Sales Machine. I was gonna say like, as a CRO, you probably read or know of that book.

NIck Turner (29:34.382)
So yeah, I definitely know of.

NIck Turner (29:42.242)
I've at least read the click notes.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (29:43.823)
Okay, anyways, I've read the book. I love it. He has a whole bunch of different kind of cool strategies in there that are I think they're timeless or evergreen. And one of the things he's talking about is his breakdown is like 3 % is in market. And then like, I think I want to say like 6 % or 7 % are like, like aware that they need a solution, but they're not really quite shopping. It goes along with what you're talking about. Like, you mean the 3 % is let's just call it 5%, whatever.

NIck Turner (29:53.016)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (30:13.423)
And then the other 95 % is like everything else. And you can kind of chop those up a little bit based off of like where buyers are. But where I'm getting, know, where you're saying is, that there is those people that are in the bottom. You've got to get them solution aware of like, this is going to be something that's going be hitting you soon. Like I think one of the examples he uses tires, like no one right now is in the market to buy tires except for 3%. And then, you know, when your tires start kind of going bald almost like, maybe I should start looking at tires. And then, so you start working your way up.

towards being that 3 % in market, you know? So that's kind of what you're sharing as well too, right?

NIck Turner (30:49.218)
That's it. Yeah. mean, I mean, everybody needs tires. Like I got a haircut this weekend. Everybody, most everybody is going to cut their hair, you know, and that's a, you know, that's one of those things where you're not necessarily going, I don't think you're going to create demand for a haircut, right? Like people just, they're going to get a haircut when they need one. And when they need one, then you need to be there. And if you were previously, then, you know, not a good spot.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (30:56.591)
Exactly.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (31:09.368)
Exactly.

Yeah, it's like

Javier Lozano, Jr. (31:17.903)
Yeah, that makes sense. so like, you know, I feel as though AI is great at targeting that, that 5 % who are buying, you know, like helping us get there. And so how do you use AI to win the mental availability battle where the other 95 % without sounding like you're a robot. And so, you know, your stat with what you were saying that how 81 % of marketing influence, I mean, that's, that's pretty compelling, you know.

NIck Turner (31:45.987)
Yeah, I think when it comes to AI and go to market, there's one key thing that people should think about. Marketers have permission to automate communication. Salespeople do not. So marketers over the last 10 years, look at what's happened. Marketers...

Javier Lozano, Jr. (32:02.203)
Hmm. Yeah, I was like double kick into that.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (32:10.116)
Okay.

NIck Turner (32:11.308)
their conversion rates have improved as they've gotten better technology or better context, context is a popular word these days, gotten better context on how they speak to their buyers. Well, every buyer knows that marketers are not speaking to them one-on-one. Now, a salesperson ...

That is expected to be a personal conversation. You're expected to be on the phone with someone or in an email or on a video call or in a meeting or having dinner, whatever. Those are considered personal things that are happening. If you look at the last 10 years for sales teams, and don't get me wrong, these tools have their place. We use them. But if you look at...

I'm not going to name names. I'm trying not to name names. If you look at platforms that do automated sequencing, things like that, that, the conversion rate, because of those things, cold calling conversion rates have gone way, way down.

Email conversion rates have gone way, down because we're trying to automate something that buyers haven't given us permission to automate. And so they expect from a salesperson for this to be personal and that they're dealing with another human being. And so that's why I think in a world of AI, like in go-to-market marketers are far better prepared to utilize automation because they've had to in their day-to-day work for years and they have permission to

it, whereas sales teams do not have permission to use it. And so if sales teams try to automate communication with customers, they don't like it.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (33:45.997)
Yeah, you know, and I can see both sides of that. You know, at my last in-house role, we created a, I'll make this really quick, but we created basically, we're generating so many leads inbound and we had a very small team. And so we're like, how do you contact a thousand leads per AE, which is hard, almost impossible. And how do you do it by not sending out marketing emails because that's not gonna inbox correctly.

NIck Turner (34:07.138)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (34:13.269)
It's going to be flagged as promotion. And on top of that, the open rates are atrocious. And compared to what it could be from a sales-based email. So what we were doing is we were doing sales-based communication coming out of their Gmail account, as though they wrote an email to Tom. But we were doing it based off of where they were in the journey.

If you will so like if they dropped off at different stages we would have something that was kind of along the lines of of that communication and it would be automated and it would be also an automated text but it came out like as though like one of the eight ease literally wrote out an email to Tom and the open rates were like 40 to 50 percent the reply rates were through the roof on depending on where they were if they were like early stage or if they were like late stage.

NIck Turner (34:53.39)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (35:03.279)
So we did this and it was a way to create handraisers for our sales team so that they can have true conversations with them. And so like what we were thinking about was like, let's compress the sales cycle. Let's see if we can hammer them for like seven or eight days, get them on the phone. And then after that, and again, this was all automated so that the sales team didn't have to be like typing these things out. And then from there, what they would do is like, okay, nothing really work, let's do indoctrination. So it kind of like educate them a little bit.

NIck Turner (35:03.406)
You

NIck Turner (35:23.756)
Right.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (35:31.449)
but still coming from a sales perspective. And if nothing happened, then what we would do is then we would recycle that lead to another AE after 30 days, and it would just restart a new conversation and it would just kind of be, know, perpetually, it just kind of happened naturally. And so, you know, like it's, so we played with what you're talking about, but we were kind of like doing both sides of it in a sense, trying to create that personal conversation, like what we would normally send, but then also using automations as well too.

NIck Turner (35:31.822)
Yep.

NIck Turner (35:45.163)
Yeah,

NIck Turner (36:00.131)
Yeah, there's a gray area there that I think is really important. There's a very gray area where if you've got a hand raiser where someone is saying, I need this solution, right?

Javier Lozano, Jr. (36:02.615)
Yes, it is.

NIck Turner (36:11.086)
You look at the platforms that are kind of designed to handle that gray area where, okay, we're getting close to needing to have a real conversation with a real person. so to me, you did, this also congrats on all the leads, like that's awesome. But in having to automate it, like it's clear that there's a problem there to solve. But I think you want to get to a place where...

Javier Lozano, Jr. (36:19.886)
Yes.

NIck Turner (36:36.93)
You're preparing that to me, would say you're preparing a salesperson for a call. Maybe, you know, you're trying and you're, and you're maybe like, we, do a couple of things where we may send out a quick questionnaire before the call that's automated. so we can gather the, you know, the details so that we can have a good call. can give people what they want to see on that first call that we have with them, with a, with a customer or prospect or, and between them and the eight. So definitely a gray area there where, and I would also

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:03.661)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (37:06.864)
kind of argue that that is again kind of AI encroaching a little bit on what Zoom does. there are, you know, right now you could argue, well, there, you know, you could utilize an AI agent to close deals that are sub 10K or pick a cutoff. I'm not sure what it is. There are some like random stats around, I use an AI agent to close 110K deal. I saw that this morning somewhere on the podcast. And maybe that happens, but it's not standard, right? It's something that may happen out of the blue.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:11.887)
Correct.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:24.11)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:33.668)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (37:36.82)
But you're getting to a point where deals that are sub 10K, that also can be kind of PLG and you don't need a salesperson involved. But you can make it a better experience with an agent by making it bit more personalized with them.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:37.101)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:51.075)
Yeah, no, I think that makes complete sense. And you know, it was, you know, when we were running this strategy, was like, well, we're resource constraint. So we, you know, crack the code on how to get inbound. it's just like, how do we make our team not call every single one? And so how do we create prioritization for them? And then after they go through like the prioritizations and, you get the drill, then you go through the other ones. like, okay, well, maybe this one is like, they opened an email, they, they, whatever. And you just keep doing that. And,

But no, definitely get where you're coming from on that. That makes sense. Well, we're getting close to the end. And so what I'd love to do is just, if you can give us a little bit of insight, you're very few CEOs that take the time to talk to other people. And so you spend, I think, what, three hours a day talking one-on-one with marketers. And so, I think it's amazing. And you actually publicly,

Share that, am I correct?

NIck Turner (38:52.046)
Yeah, on my LinkedIn profile, I would say I set aside three hours. I don't always spend three hours. If people don't book it, then I don't use it, I've got that set aside in my calendar. If people book it, there's nothing more important right now. I was saying earlier that it's getting easier and easier to build, but it's building the right thing. And the only way you can build the right thing is if you're talking to your customers. And so that to me is just...

Javier Lozano, Jr. (38:58.593)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (39:11.971)
Mm-hmm.

NIck Turner (39:18.434)
really critical, so I made a commitment to do that. And also kind of as a setting a, maybe a standard for the team that hey, listening to customers is super important, we're not here without them, so let's make sure that we get their feedback.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (39:33.687)
I love that. And so where I want to kind of you know, ask this last piece is like, you know, after all the AI hype and the $55 million fundraise and what is the one human truth about B2B growth that hasn't changed since 2018? Since, you know, yes. What's the one human truth that, you know, about, yeah.

NIck Turner (39:48.687)
Sorry, what growth? B2B growth. What do you think has not changed? Oh man, that's a great question. Let me think about that a little bit. What hasn't changed since 2018? I would say it's the same thing that I said before is just that

Javier Lozano, Jr. (40:06.253)
And this is based from dream data, being around that long.

NIck Turner (40:13.134)
Yeah, we resisted for a long time, like putting AI driven attribution on the website because I hate buzzwords and I think what does that mean? know, like what value is that actually driving? You you can, you can call a product, whatever you want to call it. But what really, really comes down to at the end of the day is what value you're driving for customers. And so I do come back to it if it's very generic and simple is that, you know, if you're not giving any value to, to your customer, then you're not going to be

Javier Lozano, Jr. (40:20.206)
Yeah.

NIck Turner (40:43.118)
around for very long. And so the end goal of a company is not to build a company that can sell a deal for one year. The end goal is to be there for the long term and be a good partner. So I think for me it is getting away from the buzz and really focusing on what value am I actually, what problem am I solving for the customer? that will never change.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (40:44.387)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (40:56.793)
Awesome.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (41:05.476)
Yeah.

I love that. I I feel like we've come full circle with what we've just discussed. so Nick, I really appreciate you taking the time sitting down and kind of sharing a little bit more about just your experience, your thoughts about sales marketing, all of that. How can people find you? How can they connect with you? Where should we send them?

NIck Turner (41:27.95)
Yeah, always on LinkedIn, Nick Turner, CEO of Dream Data, that's think easy enough to find. And then if they want to chat, my calendar link is right there on LinkedIn for everyone to see if they want to book time with me. And there's always our website, dreamdata.io. But I would love to chat whether or not we're fit for you. I'd just love to hear feedback on the pains of being a B2B marketer today and if I can do anything to help.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (41:57.039)
Awesome. Well, Nick, this was great. This was awesome. I really appreciate it. think a lot of people are going to get a lot of great value out of this, especially for folks that are trying to create that predictable growth as they're going down and precede series A, B, C, et cetera, and just kind of learn a little bit more about your thoughts. So thanks again for your time and we'll talk to you soon.

NIck Turner (42:15.471)
Thanks, thanks a lot.