hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm your host Mike Parsons. I'm the CEO of quality QualityNet. And today we have arrived at the third. Of four parts in our zoom video case study. And in the last one, we learned all about people and culture and how they build teams in particular, apart from the culture of happiness, they have this huge North there's a vision.

If you will, a frictionless video and they just obsess about it. Sort of helps them make all their decisions. And today we're going to go back onto the outside of the County. We want to learn how they market their product and they do some very cool things. In fact, I would say they even do some contrarion things.

So there's some really good stuff to learn from zoom video. We're going to go to the third paid promotion. It's the third part of our case study. It's zoom. Let's go now. This is perhaps one of the most powerful things that I've discovered in studying zoom to kind of work out how they've, uh, worked in their category.

What's really interesting here is that they've slow at what I call full stack partnerships in the productivity suite. And this is a rather contrarian approach because generally what people tend to do in a market is everybody competes. Uh, for example, for the same search queries in Google, uh, or Facebook, uh, everyone is in like, They say we do this 10%.

Uh, the competition comes in and says we do it 11% and it's all very tactical, um, uh, really lowly differentiated. Well, I always call it hand to hand combat. What was really interesting is the following insight that actually zoom built their business in a slightly contrarian way in a, in a different way to the competitive set.

So what happens is if you look at the website of zoom and the website of WebEx, you notice that there's this really interesting difference in the most related websites. So when you look at all of the data, when a Google and other tools say what sites are related to zoom.us, the main website for zoom, you notice something very different.

Zoom has a pattern. Zoom is highly related to complimentary products, not to competitive products. So here's what I mean by that. The one website that is most related to zoom is actually Google calendar. The next one is a sauna and the next one is Calendly. What's the insight here? Well, these are all, um, complimentary tools that go with zoom together that help you get a job done.

Help you be productive, help you work from home when you take WebEx on the other hand. What's really striking is that actually the first website that is most related is actually a help website, but then it's other conferencing tools and there is one or two other tools like stack over file, I guess, and maybe Salesforce, but to a far lesser degree.

What is the point here? Zoom went out and made deep. Strong product level partnerships. So they are embedded in other people's products. So they are deeply related to the job to be done. Be productive, connect with others, do a deal, have a meeting, present, share collaborate, rather than that. Highly competitive world that they're super attached to the fight between them hanging out since guy who's the best, um, video conferencing tool.

This is really, really massive because by embedding their product and integrating their product through partnership, they have achieved huge growth. Even pre, uh, quarantine and pre work from home. So when we all had to work home, what you're going to see is their business took off because they're already embedded in the workflow of others rather than competing for search queries and search terms in Google.

Really powerful. Now here's the other crazy thing. I want you to remember, I'm going to talk about the second big insight. So first one is how did they grow? How did they tell their story? A through partnerships really embedding themselves in the productivity step. The second thing is they just bring people together and they have a signature event called zoom, zoom, Topia.

Now the crazy thing is here. I want you to remember this is a video conferencing tool. And if you take a look at zoom Topia, this is more like a Ted event or to me, like there's so many lasers and people getting pretty excited about what's going on. You'd think it's like a rave, but like the point here is that they can create so much excitement around their mission or their vision.

A frictionless video and bringing happiness to others. They can actually pull together a massive event with thousands of people that all come and get really pumped about zoom. Now, if you were to look at this and you said, Mike, while this looks like this looks good as an event, maybe it's as good as Salesforce and their Vinco Dreamforce, but here's the thing I dare you to imagine.

Do you think people would get excited like this for a Skype event? Or would anyone even turn up for a Google Hangouts event? I mean, here's my point to get this much excitement around a really utilitarian product. This is really exceptional. And it goes to speak to the stories that they tell and how much they resonate with their community.

Last one, we're going to kind of. You know, we are going to put down the glowsticks for a second. That's enough raving. We're going to go to the hard graft of sales of enterprise sales. And what I discovered is they have a very deep and rigorous way in which they train their sales team. And this is really powerful.

So check this out. So, what they do is when you join a zoom as a sales person, here's what they do. They actually get you to jump into their Academy, where they give you a general onboarding to this is how the company works. This is the way we think and so forth. And then they move you into bootcamp. And boot camp is very different.

It's not sort of a general onboarding. This is a very specific, specific job, specific role specific boot camp. Where they get very deep into in your job, you will need to learn how to do this. Here's how you do it. Now. What's really interesting about these two is that they are largely taught by existing execs and team members inside of the company who come to do the teaching.

So you're taught by your peers and your colleagues, which I think is very powerful. But they keep it going. So once you fully on board, and then they put you in their elevate program, this is all about your own personal growth and seeing to it that you grow, that you're challenged. If you're fulfilled and satisfy, this is pretty solid, pretty robust.

Now what's really killer though. What's the twist here is zooms is SAS company. Yet they have bought some of the best practices of enterprise sales. And you're going to see a bit later on that this really pays off for them, but this is the third thing that they do around people and culture. So let's do a quick recap.

They have, I'm sorry, this is not around people in coaching. It's about promotion. What am I saying? So what are the three things they do to tell their story? It is number one. Full-stack partnerships, number two. Zoom Topia. This is about bringing people together. And lastly, this is about customized sales showing really deep and really professional.

I think what really stood out to me here is that they had this contrarian approach to grow their business, tell their story by being embedded in other people's products, to be part of the larger productivity story. While a lot of their competition, we're all fighting for like the best rates. On the same keywords, they were doing something completely different.

So that's promotion. That's how zoom promotes, tells their story, grows their business. I can't wait to share with you the final pay of the zoom business, and that's going to be profit. So there you have it. That's a wrap for this episode of the bottom up skills podcast. I hope you've enjoyed it. And re...