Inbound Success Podcast

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Mindtickle VP of Marketing, Brand and Demand Lisa Sharapata explains how she built an account-based marketing campaign that resulted in her winning the B2B Innovator Award and the B2B Vanguard Award at the 2021 B2B SMX conference.

Lisa’s approach relies on intent data to identify in-market accounts. She went all in on this after discovering intent data and joined 6Sense to learn more about it. Now, at Mindtickle, she’s a 6Sense customer and is using predictive modeling to identify the best fit, high intent prospects and market to them at scale.

The result? Conversion rates increased from 9 to 40%.

Want to know how she did it? Check out the full episode to hear Lisa’s story.

Resources from this episode:

• Connect with Lisa on LinkedIn

• Check out the Mindtickle website

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Draft founder Nick Disabato breaks down the advanced conversion rate optimization strategies he uses with his ecommerce clients.

Nick’s results are impressive. He beats the ecommerce industry average CRO results by 4X, typically increases conversion rates by 40%, and average order value by 15%.

In this episode, he breaks down exactly how he does it, with specific examples of CRO tests you can conduct on your own website (ecommerce or not—these strategies work just as well in B2B), and shares information on his favorite tools that make up his CRO tech stack.

Check out the full episode to hear Nick’s insights.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Draft website

• Subscribe to Nick’s newsletter

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Umault Founder Guy Bauer shares his approach to creating business videos that people actually love to watch, and that also get results.

Guy is the author of the book “Death to the Corporate Video”, and the host of a podcast by the same name, and has made it his mission to put an end to boring corporate videos. In this week’s episode, he shares what he calls “the mullet strategy” for making great videos, and breaks down specific do’s and don’ts.

If you’re thinking of using video as part of your business marketing strategy, or already have videos that aren’t performing well, this episode is for you.

Check out the full episode to hear Guy’s insights.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Umault website

• Connect with Guy on LinkedIn

• Read Death to the Corporate Video

• Check out the Death to the Corporate Video podcast

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Ethercycle founder Kurt Elster talks about building communities, growing a podcast, and why authenticity is the key to successful marketing.

Kurt is the host of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, widely considered to be “the” podcast for anyone using Shopify as their ecommerce platform. He is also the creator of the Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders Facebook group, which is now more than 4,000 members strong, and the founder of well known ecommerce agency Ethercycle.

Within the ecommerce world, Kurt has a massive, highly loyal following that relies on him for honest advice about growing an ecommerce business. How did he accomplish that? By fiercely guarding the integrity of his community and preventing spam, and staying true to himself throughout his podcast and marketing.

Check out the full episode to hear Kurt’s insights.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Ethercycle website

• Check out the Unofficial Shopify Podcast

• Apply to join the Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders Facebook Group

Sometimes the best way to market a product to people is not to market the product at all.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Linux Foundation SVP and Chief Marketing Officer Derek Weeks talks about why marketer's should embrace the notion that "helpful is the new viral."

As the new head of marketing at The Linux Foundation, Derek is doing just that by focusing on building a marketing strategy designed to help the organization's audience accomplish its goals. And in doing so, he's creating a future-proof approach to driving top of funnel demand.

Check out the full episode to hear Derek's thinking and learn how he's implementing it at The Linux Foundation.

How does the marketing team at Bigtincan use intent data to influence and close deals?

This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Bigtincan CMO Rusty Bishop breaks down the mechanics behind the company's account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, including the tech stack they're using, and the nitty gritty details behind their intent data.

Rusty says most companies look to intent platforms to solve their ABM challenges, but wind up spending a lot of money for poor results. In this episode, he gets into detail on the advanced keyword strategies Bigtincan is using to build an intent data set that they can then use to target in-market buyers.

The results have been impressive. For every dollar Rusty's team spends on display, they influence more than $107,000 in pipeline, and more than $27,000 in closed won deals.

Check out the full episode to learn how they do it. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Bigtincan website
• Connect with Rusty on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:02): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And today my guest is Rusty Bishop, who is the CMO of Bigtincan. Welcome to the podcast, Rusty. I am dying to know the story behind the company name. So let's start with having you make a quick introduction of yourself because I also, I'm going to scoop you a little bit and just say for my guests who are listening, this is going to be fascinating because Rusty has the software company, but he has been a biochemist. He's a guitar player. He's got a fascinating background. So stay tuned to hear about it. Rusty, tell us more about yourself and then also what Bigtincan is and how it got that name.

Rusty (01:01): You got it. So my background, so yeah, after undergrad, I did get a PhD in biochemistry and molecular genetics studying infectious disease research for a big part of my research came out here to Southern California, to the university of California, San Diego, to do post-doctoral research and ended up being on the faculty and staff here in San Diego for about 12 years. So I did about 15 years of biomedical research in my past life. I am no longer consider myself a scientist, although I think it does probably color everything I do for certain. After that I did, I started a company with a guy named Mark Walker, who is the head of sales at a company called Invitrogen which went on to become Thermo Fisher, one of the largest life sciences companies in the world. And then we started a company based on the idea that when, when I was in the lab, when I was a researcher salespeople would come into our lab.

Rusty (01:55): And that was back in the days where you could actually walk in the labs. You can't do that in more, they're all locked down, but they could literally just walk in and they'd be like, Hey, I'm from this company and I want to sell you some stuff. And they would literally break out a paper catalog and try to sell us stuff. And I, you know, at that point iPad was coming out, iPhone was coming out and we just thought, there's gotta be a better way. Mark and I created a company called FatStax which was geared and focused towards sellers, mostly in the life sciences space, those people who were coming to me and as a scientist and trying to sell me things that, that went very well. We had a great exit to Bigtincan in 2018, and I've been there ever since. And I became the CMO less than a week and a half ago.

Rusty (02:41): I worked under our previous CMO who is still here as the president of the company and kind of fought my way up to being the CMO. So marketing is relatively new for me. All of that, totally new. I've been doing it for years as a founder. And of course, you know, here at Bigtincan running marketing for about two years.

Kathleen (02:58): Love it.

Rusty (02:59): Yeah. Lots of weird science stuff in my background. And as you did note, I was a professional musician for about two years before all of that. So it's been a wild ride I'm multitalented guy. I like that. I like to do lots of things.

Kathleen (03:14): So tell me how the company got its name.

Rusty (05:24): Great question. Everyone asks that. So it reminds me that that's actually a pretty memorable name. So the company was found in Australia. And the original concept behind the company was, was when iPad applications were something that people actually wanted. So that the idea was that I'd take all of your content and put it into an iPad application and the original founders, David King, who's our current CEO always talked about how people have this thing where they're communicate through string cans and how that you lose the communication. So they had the idea that if you put everything into the big team can, then you could communicate effectively across your company. So that was the original origin story. Now, of course, that was in Australia with two guys standing and above a coffee shop in Sydney. So what the real name is, I really don't know. So we'll, we'll leave it at that for now. That's how I got his name. And it's been his name for ever since then, publicly traded on the Australian stock exchange. If you want to go learn more about us as a company, there's everything you could ever want to know is right there. I love

Kathleen (06:21): That story. And I definitely, when I was little, definitely connected to tin cans with a string and tried to talk through it, it was a terrible communication method. I will say it doesn't work. It's sort of like a myth, right? Like whoever did that successfully, I don't know. Right. So switching, switching gears, you you've, you know, I love that you bring this sort of brain of a scientist to the way you're doing marketing and you and I talked a little bit before we did the interview about some of the things you're working on. And I was really fascinated hearing you talk about what you guys are doing with intent data and how you're taking this very scientific approach to figuring out, you know, what, what you're going to search for within your intent data platforms to turn up results that are actually going to be meaningful. So let's back up and start with tell me what you're using intent data for in the first place.

Rusty (07:18): Okay. Yeah. Good question. So I'll start with one thing which I want to clarify. I'm sure that everyone that listens to your podcast knows this already, but intent software is not ABM. Everyone seems to get that a little backwards here, especially in our company. They're like, yeah, we're just doing ABM and no, you're not. You're using an ad platform to detect intent out there in the world. So, so what do we, what do we use it for? So we are attempting to detect in market accounts at various stages, we have three different product lines that we can either sell together here on Bigtincan, or we can sell them separately. We also go to market in various verticals and the reason we needed an intent tool was because the amount of keywords that someone could enter into Google to find what we do or to solve their problems more accurately was astronomical. So the chances of us, you know, properly making our website SEO for all those keywords was approaching zero. And so in order to detect all those accounts out there in market, we we do 6Sense and we chose 6Sense. I don't know if that matters, not to the users. I think they all do very similar things. So our methodology from day one was can we detect virtually every account in market using this type of software and is in combination with other things like G2 and other intent data.

Kathleen (08:45): So just out of curiosity, you mentioned you chose 6Sense. Why that platform over any other ones?

Rusty (08:53): You know, it's funny, I had a feeling you were going to ask me that and I tried to go back and look, and that's a year and remember why we chose 6Sense. I think at the end of the day, it was the combination of ease of use for us as well as the second part of 6Sense, which is the ability to do predictive. And that is, you know, once we know and we detected these accounts are in market and they're searching for certain things, and they're also making certain choices with you guys, Bigtincan, there might be opening emails or 15 people that account are doing certain actions. We can now begin to predict how well those accounts are going to move through the funnel and if they are going to close and should we be working them or not?

Rusty (09:32): We're about a year into building our predictive model. I will not say it's a quick process, but it's something I really wanted to get to core science brain. You know, how can we build something that would predict whether we should work these accounts or not, and you know, where we should put more activities from a marketing side. And so that was the ultimate reason we chose 6 cents. You know, in hindsight, I don't know if there's any real reason to choose one over the other, they all except for go and listen to, and really think about what it is that your company needs to achieve with these platforms. That's the key. All the sales people are really good by the way. Oh my gosh. Like, and that space, it must be really intense because the salespeople are all excellent and they will show you stuff that will blow your mind. And you'll absolutely think that this is the greatest thing ever. And you're going to look like a rockstar when you get demo these platforms. And to me, that's sort of like, it triggers one of my middle models, which when I start thinking software is going to make me look like a rockstar, I should probably stop and back up and realize it's not true.

Kathleen (10:32): Yeah. The tool is almost never the solution. Exactly. Yeah. So, so you're, you're using a platform to collect intent data, to look for in market accounts. And then before we dive into exactly how you're setting your platform up, I just want to talk through, like, once you get that data back and it flags these accounts, how are you, how are you adding that into your marketing workflow?

Speaker 3 (10:57): The

Rusty (10:57): Variety of different weights. It depends on where we detect them in the, in the funnel. You know, if we detect them high in the funnel, like they're just coming into awareness that they have a problem. We're mostly just doing marketing. We're mostly doing, you know, ads, LinkedIn ads and those types of things. If we're detecting them far down the funnel based on our predictive model and what they're searching for, I mean, we're going to be doing seriously active outreach. We might have salespeople going after them. We'll be using things like Alice to send them gifts, to make, have them have a conversation with us. We're reaching out to our partners. We partnered with apple, which is a great go to market model for us and seeing if they're working with them. So it really just depends on where they are in the funnel when we, you know, realize that, you know, sometimes they come into funnel really fast. You'll just see a flurry of activity. And so we can, you know, we have a person, I have a person on that team, Tyler who full time monitors, what's going on in six sense. And then, you know, we do a lot of things automated, but some of it's still manual like, oh my gosh, these guys are hot, get, get, break the process and let's go. Right. So it really just depends on where we detect them.

Kathleen (12:00): Nice. All right. So, so let's dig into it. So you've got, you make the decision to get one, get an intent platform and, and you're right. I do think there is a tendency for marketers to look at these platforms and think that they're going to be some sort of a magic bullet. Like I'm going to put it in, I'm going to login my account and the leads are gonna rain down on me. Right. so from, based on my conversations with you, I understand that that is not the case. So walk me through the process that you use to figure out how to get the right data out. Yeah,

Rusty (12:34): No problem. So the first thing I'll point out is that, so when you demo these platforms, the most of the time, they're going to ask you for a keyword list so that they can show you what your data looks like in their platform. And this it's really powerful, actually the way that I would demo it the same way now. So there's a mistake there that it will, I will caution all, anybody who's listening on, which is this, your keywords from your website is probably what you're going to give them. Right? You have all of us have like a data dump of SEO keywords we're going after. You're already ranking for a lot of those terms. You already detecting a lot of people that are searching for those terms. So you're not going to find people far off in the market or far down in market.

Rusty (13:10): You're not going to be able to segment a buyer, a group of buyers with your SEO keyless. But that is when you typically turn these things on, it's already in there for you. And so you think right out of the gate, wow, we're already doing great. We're detecting all of these companies all these types of things. So, you know, for us, it took us maybe like two or three months before we realized this is not showing us in mark. It's showing us some in-market accounts, but it was nowhere near the universe. So my first recommendation is figure out a way to get a baseline. So, you know, but coming from my science background, you always need something that is, you know, zero, you need something that, am I going to get an improvement, or am I going to get a negative out of this?

Rusty (13:49): Right. And that's the way that baseline is. I don't know what baseline might be for your listeners scaffolding. Right? So for us, we get something like G2 where you say, okay, G2, tell us how many people you think are in market. Right? And we might go to Forrester or to another analyst and say, how many, what is the total Tam of, for our market? And then we kind of do some back of the hand envelope kind of math and say, well, we think this many companies should be in market today. Now, if you're a giant company that could be, you know, a hundred of thousands of buyers, if you're very focused company, that might be only 150, 200 people. So knowing a baseline to me is critical because the is going to spit out numbers a hundred percent a good rule of thumb. I like to think about this. If your Tam is a billion dollars over the next five years, right. I seriously doubt $200 million worth as in market. Yeah. Unless

Kathleen (14:40): There's a ton of churn for every solution out there.

Rusty (14:42): Yeah. This is like massive. Like there's always outliers, but like, so just, you know, do some, some real back of the envelope, like, you know, smell, test kind of thing, where you say is this, like, could this many people possibly be out there trying to buy what we sell? So that helps first. And then the next phase, I would say segmentation. So for us, we took the very simple segmentation, which was, you know, on the top level, the buying stages for us that's awareness, which we defined as aware they have a problem. Okay. The second one is consideration, which means they're figuring out they have a problem. And the thinking that what we sell might be one of the things they could solve it with. The next one is decision pretty obvious, right? They've already decided this thing can solve my problem. You know, now I'm looking at the various offerings that are out there and of course the last one is purchased.

Rusty (15:28): So for each one of those what we did is we built a spreadsheet and that's when she had a list of modifiers and then a list of keywords. So let me unpack that for you first, give me some examples and understand what you mean. Here's an example. So I I don't give anything away. I love Peloton. I'm all about it. I ride every day. I could be their marketer tomorrow, if you're hiring, let me know. But so let's just use like a Peloton as an example. Right. So if I'm coming into awareness, okay. I might be searching for things like exercise programs. I might be searching for gyms near me. I might be searching for home gyms. Right. So I might not be actually searching for Peloton. Right. And so the things that I would add as modifiers there, especially for companies that generally sell things that people were trying to solve a problem, or have a pain they'll be searching for modifiers, like solve, troubleshoot, decrease, increase you know, and you build a full list of those modifiers. Okay. So with them, you're going to have all of your, you know, your actual terms that someone could be solving the pain for. So let's say the pain is right. Like I'm, I need to exercise more. Right. So like increase my exercise. You could, and now you just cross reference those two lists into your total list for your world of awareness.

Kathleen (16:45): Yeah. That's interesting. So it sounds like if I understand you correctly, it sounds like when you first start out, you're probably going to want to upload all of what I would term your highest intent keywords. And those are the ones that are going to create the greatest amount of overlap with the prospects you already have in your database.

Speaker 3 (17:09): Okay. Good. Accurate. Okay. So then

Kathleen (17:13): It's the modifiers or another words like making the search strings a little bit more long tail that produce the best results. Do you do any research behind like search volume or anything like that when you do that? Or is it really just intuitive?

Rusty (17:28): So we took a different tack. So we, we tried to do some search volume research long tail, just doesn't it just doesn't register enough in SCM rush or a Google analytics or any other things that are out there. So we were trying to, as I told you, our goal was to detect as many in-market accounts as possible. It was not to detect the companies that are hottest today. Right. So, you know, therefore what we decided to do, which could be completely different for you or for anyone else who's doing. This is effectively, you know, we want to increase the world so that we cash long tail, right. In LA by long tail. We mean that one person out there who's searching for that one thing, which we solve for. But when you have lots of different offerings, like Bigtincan has, there's a lot of things that we solve for, right.

Rusty (18:11): So there's probably a hundred different pain points that we can go in and work with on a customer. So the modifiers give you, if you could imagine, you have to put yourself in your buyer's shoes, I'm sitting down at my computer, I'm going to put something in the magic, Google search bar. I have no idea what I'm looking for, but I know that I want to get more exercise. Right. And somehow I've got to get from getting more exercise to Peloton Peloton marketer. Right. So then in each, so that's that's where the modifier thing, this gives you the world of possible, right? Cause you're going to be running this platform me around just because someone's not searching for it today. Doesn't mean they won't search for it tomorrow or the next day or the next day. So

Kathleen (18:49): You put, so you put your keywords in then with the modifiers and then what it comes

Rusty (18:56): A segment. Right. So we might have an awareness segment. Okay. Let's just take that one, for example. And then, which has a giant list of keywords and their modifiers. So we're trying to find people that are searched. So when someone let's say they're searching for, you know, increase daily exercise, I'll go back to the Peloton example. Immediately we know if we get information from them down the line, they come to our website, et cetera, they were searching for that originally. So their original pain was that. So that gives us the basis for all of that. But then that becomes a segment, right? So then the next step is the further, make it take your segments out. So you might have verticals, you might have geographies, you might have. Well, however it is that you go to market. So now I might have a segment that say, you know, people in, you know, California that are looking to increase their daily exercise. So you just keep taking your segments out further and further until your segments make sense for the way that your team goes to market.

Speaker 3 (19:54): Interesting. Yeah. And,

Kathleen (19:56): And how did that manifest in terms of the flow of leads coming into your go to market strategy? How long did it take also? Oh, that's a great question. That's, that's a very deep, that's a multi-part question, tackle it in whatever order makes sense. How about that?

Rusty (20:14): How long did it take? So you will literally begin to detect things almost instantaneously. Right. But especially if you have a broad enough net, okay. Now what will scare you, right. Is when one of the, some of the things that happened immediately, once we did this, right, was we had salespeople having the mind blown moment, which is like, oh my God, my biggest account is about to buy our competitor. You know, if we went in, because we of course put all those types of terms in there. Right. So our biggest competitor plus pricing. And so that is instant. Like you can, you will literally get instant data, right. So if people are searching for it and how do you, that's,

Kathleen (20:51): That's super interesting. So how do you tackle that?

Rusty (20:54): It's by priority, right? So if, I think, I think we all know if someone is already in purchase phase, you're probably not going to knock them off your competitor. Right. if someone is, you know, up and maybe just coming into decision, or they're just into consideration phase, then it's, you know, you, you prioritize those over the other ones for outreach, everything else you tackle with marketing, with ads or emails and those types of things. So as,

Kathleen (21:18): As the head of marketing, when you have these different leads and some of them are very top of the funnel, as you pointed out their awareness stage, some are more middle and bottom of the funnel, how you parse it, like, are you parsing them all to your sales team? Or are you putting some of them into marketing nurturing? Like, how are you tackling that? Okay. So

Rusty (21:38): Two things here. So w you do not, you do not detect leads, you detect accounts really important. I thought, I thought this too. I thought I was going to get a ton of leads. You do get a ton of leads, but you got to know how to go look for them, right. So you gotta build a step. And we actually built this up. So when when account reaches a certain threshold for us, you know, on our predictability scale they immediately go out to a third party that we've hired. That's, LeadGenius probably shouldn't give that away, but whatever. And then they go and pull the names of the leads based on criteria that we give them an advance that comes back into Salesforce, and then we start our outreach. So that's the way we get an actual lead from it. And back up there, I forgot the first part of your question. I apologize,

Kathleen (22:23): Really a long, how are you parsing it out to your sales team or are you putting them into marketing, nurturing flows? Exactly. So

Rusty (22:30): Parsing out to the sales team is when they come down into the later phases, like bottom, bottom end of our predicting their consideration or decision phase, those would actually so we actually took 6 cents to the next level and bought the piece that goes into Salesforce so that our sellers have access at the account level and they have a 6Sense dashboard so that they can choose accounts to go after and we actually encourage them to do so. Our SDRs also have been trained on how to, you know, when they run out of inbound, which is very rare, but when they run up inbound to go and look for, you know, in market accounts to go out and do outcome for so very everything at the top end, we're using display ads through 6Sense or through other platforms to, again, try to, to move them down. The funnel is a way that I would look at it, right. So how do we engage these people that we've detected, who've hit the awareness phase and give them things that they might be interested in so that they come down into consideration and begin to see Bigtincan as a, as a viable solution for their problems.

Kathleen (23:35): And what specifically needs to happen for somebody to cross the line from, or somebody, some company to cross the line from an account that is in your ad, nurturing to an account that you think is really ready for sales outreach. Like what indicators are you looking at?

Rusty (23:52): I'm looking for multiple people, which you can detect in these platforms by IP address across the organization, searching for the right types of terms. That could be into very, you know, let's say there's multiple in consideration, there's several in decision. You know, that are hitting our search terms that we've specified you know, visiting our website is using indicator that they have at least figured out that we have something that could solve their problem. So the trigger generally, it, it I'm being vague because it's all set in our predictive model and it immediately notifies us when someone has tripped a certain number of the triggers that we've given it to say, all right, you know, there's X number of people at this company doing this there, you know, three people have come to the website, they've gone past the homepage. You know, one of them hit the pricing page at that point. You know, if someone hasn't reached out, I'm probably getting upset. Yeah.

Kathleen (24:44): So tell me about results. Like, we talked a little bit about how this isn't a really super fast thing to get stood up. You've been, and you've been setting this up for how long and, and using it for how long?

Rusty (24:56): It's a great question. So I'd say we did not use it properly for about a year, which is why, hopefully this is helpful to people so that getting this right out of the gate could save you a lot of time. But once I, once I feel like we had a good up and running, we probably had a completely running inside of Salesforce, entire system. Like we want it since January. Okay. Let's call it eight months, seven, eight months at this point right now as, as a simple measure, right? So for the first time ever, we're, we've detected more in market accounts, then G2 tells us are in account in market. So that was, that was a signal that I wanted to get to. So I wanted to say, all right, if people are going to G2 and things like that, right. I realize that you have marketers may not use YouTube.

Rusty (25:44): It's the review side for software, if you don't. So the people that go there are looking for specific things, right? I realized that once we went over that, that we hit a threshold of in-market, that was, was bigger than what we could get from other sources. So then we look at like results. So right now for about every dollar that we spend on display we're influencing $107,000 of pipeline. Wow. In our upper part. And for every dollar we display, we're closing one about 27,000. Wait, say that last part again, we're closing one close won. For every dollar we spend on display 27,000. 27,000 influenced by our platform.

Kathleen (26:34): For every dollar you spend on display, you are-

Rusty (26:39): Influencing a $107,000 of pipeline, and we're influencing $27,000 closed won over the last six months, per month.

Kathleen (26:49): Got it. Got it. Sorry. It took a minute there. Wow. That's great. That's great.

Rusty (26:55): Those are, you know, that's our average right now. So for me, I, I gotta be really happy with that.

Kathleen (27:02): Has it reduced the amount of outbound prospecting that you needed to do?

Rusty (27:09): Not at all. In fact it increases your outbound.

Kathleen (27:13): Just because you have a larger kind of target list to work?

Rusty (27:17): Yeah. You have a larger target list. The level of complexity that adds is you also have to train your outreach teams where their SDRs are salespeople to how to do outreach by looking at what people are searching for. So it, it does add a level of complexity, but what I like about it is one of the things that truly hate is when people try to personalize things for me and they just go out and say like, Hey man, you play guitar. That's cool. Like you want to buy our stuff? And that's not cool.

Rusty (27:48): That's not good outreach. Right. What good outreach is, you know, I've noticed that people at your company are searching for these types of things. These types of problems generally indicate this, you know, would you be interested in talking about a possible solution? That's good outreach, right? So training your teams, how to do good outreach is harder. But so does it, you asked me, did it decrease the amount of outbound, the answers? No. it, it effectively increases it. Right? Cause you're detecting more accounts than market.

Kathleen (28:16): What impact did it have on inbound pipeline?

Rusty (28:19): That's a good, I don't know. I don't know the answer.

Kathleen (28:22): I mean, I would think it would increase it because if you're targeting ads at those people and at least presumably it would, it would result in more inbounds.

Rusty (28:30): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have that. I don't have that on my dashboard. I'm looking at currently, but I will definitely go look at it. Cause it does make sense that logically if, you know, you were, they were getting, becoming engaged with your brand, that they would eventually comment and be an inbound in some way. Yeah.

Kathleen (28:46): So if somebody is starting down this path now, like let's say they purchase an intent platform, kind of like you did. What would be your top three pieces of advice for somebody who's starting today?

Rusty (29:01): Top three. Wow. That's a good question. I love it. I think the first one is make sure that your customer facing teams know what to do with the intent data. And that means you, you probably actually need to go and build actual messaging for them.

Rusty (29:25): Because they it's, we as marketers know, I think we sort of, if you're running a campaign or you're doing detection and you're developing these keywords lists, you kind of intuitively know what, how people should be out doing outreach, but your customer facing teams don't so that's, that was a big one, right? Because they'll go, yeah, they're in market and they'll just reach out with, Hey, do you want to buy herself? You've ruined your chance. Right. You blew it. So I think that's probably number one. Number two is what we talked about with the whole segmentation stuff is don't failing to take into account the long tail is probably one of the bigger mistakes that I think that you could make. Now, look, if you're one of these companies or just as magic product product that you can sell it, you can go to tech then 10 and go to town.

Rusty (30:09): Right. But if you're not, if you're a person out there working for a company that solves problems for people that they don't necessarily know that your solution can solve it, then that long tail is really going to help you. Yeah. Final piece, not refining regularly. I mean, you have to constantly refine. I'll give you an example of that. So when we first turned it on our platform on pre COVID one of our SEO terms was remote learning. So as you can imagine, that's sitting there in our 6sense platform, right. So what happened with COVID? Do you know how many people search for remote learning and how can we distinguish that from someone who was looking for learning software, right. A much better modifier you know, sales, learning software, and even much better modifier. Right. Then everyone who was sitting there trying to figure it out at work, how I'm going to train the kids, get them in school. Right. So you'll, you'll get these without we're finding constantly you, you run to a ton of false positives and the false positives are really bad. Right? Cause they'll make you reach out to people who are in market. And you know, I don't, I don't see any reason to blind, like email people. It's not something I do or we do. I guess it works for some people, but it doesn't work for me.

Kathleen (31:22): So how often are you refining? Oh, we never stop. We take a look at it weekly, monthly.

Rusty (31:29): I mean, we have a person who's about half of his job is to run that platform and to do account based marketing on top of it. Right. Not just run the platform, but so the reason I say that is we go to market vertically and the words that various verticals use to describe things are dramatically different. And our sales people will hear those words right. On a demo or on a sales call. And they might come back and say, Hey, you know, so-and-so was talking about this thing called e-detailing. And I'm like, I don't even know what that is. Well, it's the same thing as what we're doing right now, except for it's what happens when a salesperson talks to a doctor. Right. But then there might be another 50 terms that are associated with e-detailing, for example, that you also need to add that, or you're going to hear about and you know, analysts are changing the way they talk about things all the time, easy solution right there. The way that your competitors, right? What are they writing in their books? What are they saying? All of a sudden they change their messaging. I mean, you gotta be constantly refining it. I mean, I'd love to say we have a process where every week we're refining.

Rusty (32:33): One of our mantras around here is if you see something, say something and people are very good about it because we're all remote, like everybody else. And just, yeah. And you got to yeah, basically. Yeah. These days yeah, yeah. Bigtincan's all over the world and everyone's mostly remote. So slack is a great tool and training your people, right? If you see something, say something and that refines your keyword list and these tools. So you said for three, you know.

Kathleen (33:03): You got me three, I love it. And I put you on the spot with that one.

Rusty (33:07): One more, which I'll go for it. The fourth one which is don't just blindly measure intent around your competitors. You will get really freaked out, like really fast. What do you mean by that? So let's say you just, you just entered a competitor's name as one of your search terms, which you're going to do. Like, I promise you if you installed DemandBase or 6Sense, that's the first thing you would put in there, like how many people are searching for my competitor. But you have to realize that when people enter your competitor's name in the search bar, like 80% of those are their users are there. People who've already bought their stuff. So you got to get just blindly getting freaked out about competitors. Names and intent is, is not good business practice. But once you use your modifiers, now you can start to get, now you start breaking those competitors down. Right. And figuring out what people are actually doing. Right?

Kathleen (33:54): Yeah. I could definitely see where people would start to get spun up by that.

Rusty (33:57): Or for the fourth one. But that one actually, that's a good one.

Kathleen (34:03): All right. So we're going to switch gears and there's two questions. I always ask my guests. So I'd love to hear your answers. The first being, of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or an individual that you think is really studying the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days?

Rusty (34:19): Wow. You know, I knew you were going to ask me this question and I went and listened to some of your podcasts and I thought about it. So I want to give you somebody that's unusual that you might not have gotten. So one of my favorite people in the world is Tim Ferris, Tim gets so many inbound requests that he has an automatic responder that denies them all okay. On everything he publishes. He says, don't contact me because I won't contact you back. So if you had to set a gold standard for inbound, I think that's probably it, you know? So what does that let's unpack that, right. So what I'm not saying is you got to be famous to be a great inbound marketer. What I'm saying is you've got to create something that's so valuable that you had so much inbound that you're fighting it away. I think that's that to me is kind of an interesting bar to set. Now, the other side of that bar is like, that's

Kathleen (35:11): Such a, it's a very high bar to hit though.

Rusty (35:15): It is. But I think that we all get caught up into, I need to create this stuff so that people will click on it and download it. And it's not valuable. At Bigtincan we talk about valuable buying experiences every day? It's one of our reasons to be it's written on everything we do. We tell everyone about it. And I don't think it's very viable to send, you know, email. One, have you heard of this email. Two didn't you respond email. Three let's break up. You know, so I set the standard up there. Like we should be creating content that's so valuable that people are breaking down the door to get it now, are we doing it yet? No, but we're sure going to track. So that comes example, that example I've been studying a lot lately is Qualtrics. And the reason I've been studying them is I think that their Play Bigger move. I'll put that in air quotes to move from surveys to XM as a category is fascinating. And the way that they became a category and did inbound around that, it was just amazing. If you ever get a chance to read their 10K that they put out when they went public, it's just absolute messaging clinic. It really is there anything to read their 10K, but it is a message clinic. I mean, it's just awesome.

Kathleen (36:24): Now I'm super curious. I got to go hunt that down.

Rusty (36:26): Yeah. So a couple of unusual things. There's so many people doing great inbound. I mean, you interview them every day. So I think those are two unusual ones.

Kathleen (36:39): Yeah. Those are some good ones. And I'm dying now to read the Qualtrics 10K. You've piqued my interest with that one.

Rusty (36:45): Well, when you make a decision to be a category, you gotta, man, you gotta do it.

Kathleen (36:52): A lot of people give big lip service to it and very few are able to really make it happen. So those are always interesting case studies to look at. Second question is, you know, marketers tend to tell me that their biggest challenge is just staying on top of everything. That's changing all the time in the world of marketing, particularly with digital. So are there particular sources that you rely on to keep yourself educated on the cutting edge, et cetera?

Rusty (37:18): Yeah. I am not a cutting edge guy. I don't know about that. Just in time person, which means, you know and I don't mean that in a way to like give you a flippant answer, but like, you know, if we need to figure out why our segments aren't working in 6Sense, right. I'll go and search like crazy and find the blog on their website, which talks about that as opposed to staying on top of the most modern stuff. I mean that being that, so my mental mode is more to read books. And I read absolutely voraciously, take notes. My, I tell my wife all the time, if I died, just sell the Evernote, it's going to be, it's worth more than we are. But so, but there's like a couple of things that constantly refer back to so one, four hour workweek by Tim Ferriss.

Rusty (38:04): I'll just say it again. I love him to death. I think it's the way it should work. I love Designing Brand Identity by Lena Wheeler. I go back to it. I feel like every day when we're doing brand here at Bigtincan. Monetizing Innovation. I get asked about pricing all the time and segmentation of products. That book is the Bible. I probably have, I feel like a broken my Kindle reader, trying to go back and forth to it back in time. And the last one is On Writing Well by William Zinter. Probably my most favorite book on how to write. My team all the time, writing things and creating content. And they're always saying, how do I get better? And I say, this is the Bible effectively. So those four books I realized that's not how to stay on top of modern marketing.

Kathleen (38:44): No, that's a great answer. And I love, yeah, I love there were some books in there I've never heard of. And I too, I'm a big book reader, as you can see, I'm sure if you're listening, you can't see this, but I, I always, in my interviews, I'm always sitting in front of my bookshelf that has all the books that I love in it. And they're actually stacked two deep in the shelves that have books. Cause I don't have room for them all. So yeah, no, I love books. And thank you for being specific and mentioning titles and authors. That's great. Yeah. All right. Well, if somebody is listening and they want to reach out and ask you a question or learn more about what you talked about, what is the best way for them to connect with you online?

Rusty (39:22): The best way is through Linkedin. It's, it's Rusty Bishop, I'm on LinkedIn. It's pretty obvious who I am. I do react to LinkedIn probably better than anything else. That like most CMOs, I probably get a thousand emails a day. I, I may or may not respond, but yeah, LinkedIn is great. That's the best way.

Kathleen (39:39): Fantastic. And if you're listening and you liked this episode, I would love it. If you would head to apple podcasts and leave the podcast a review, and if you know somebody else, who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I'd love to make them my next guest. Thank you so much for joining me Rusty.

Rusty (39:56): Thank you. I enjoyed it. I did too. Thanks.

How do top e-commerce companies leverage customer referrals to increase sales by 20% or more?

This week on the Inbound Success podcast, ReferralCandy Chief Advocate Raul Galera breaks down the best practices behind top performing customer referral programs.

From when to launch a program, to how to ask for referrals, and how to reward customers who make them, Raul gets into the details that you'll need to design, build, launch and execute your own successful referral program. And he includes specific examples of companies that are doing it right now.

Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the ReferralCandy website
• Email Raul at [email protected] 

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Raul Galera who is the chief advocate for ReferralCandy. Welcome to the podcast Raul.

Raul (00:27): Thanks for having me.

Kathleen (00:28): Yeah, this is a great topic. Selfishly, I'm working on developing a customer referral program right now for my business. And so I am excited to pick your brain and I'm sure there are others listening as well, who want to learn about this before we dig into it. Can you talk a little bit about yourself and your story and how you came to be doing what you're doing now with ReferralCandy and then also what ReferralCandy is?

Raul (00:51): Yeah, absolutely. So actually the reason why I found ReferallCandy, it's kind of related to, to remote work which is a pretty kind of hot topic these days. So just to give you like the short version. So after I finished college, I started working remotely for a consulting firm from Spain, that consulting firm was based in, in Poland, which is where I had studied abroad a few years before that. And after working remotely for a few years, I wanted to work from an office and I also wanted to, to move abroad. So I moved from Spain to Chile and I worked for a startup company in, in San Diego for a couple of years. And then after that, I, I made a couple of decisions. The first one was that I wanted to work for a software company.

Raul (01:37): I wanted to sell software. It was something I wanted to learn about. And I also wanted to work remotely again. So after my, my office experience, I had decided that yeah, remote work was a better, better fit for me. And it's like I was looking for a remote sales jobs and, and I, I came across ReferralCandy on Angel List. I think it was they had a kind of like a remote friendly sales position. And so instead of applying directly through Angel List, I decided to email the CEO directly and tell him why I thought it was a, I was a good fit for, for the company. And he replied to the email, we had a couple of interviews and I guess the rest is history.

Kathleen (02:18): I love that story. I love that you reached out directly to him. I just think so few people do that. Everybody is kind of used to like hitting the submit button on LinkedIn or whatever. And it definitely makes a difference too, to go that extra mile. And I feel like the rest of the world is now starting to catch up with you with these remote positions. I, I also have worked remotely for some time and love it. But that's been interesting to me to see what COVID has done in terms of the perceptions of workplaces and, and, and people who run companies and, and their appetite for allowing remote work. It seems like it's really grown, which is I think a very good thing.

Raul (02:54): Yeah. I mean, I remember a few years ago I had to I mean, I've felt kind of weird explaining that I was working from my living room or my home office instead of from an office. And I would always get these like, weird looks about it, but where, where were you based? And where's the company based and, you know, like you're working from an office, you know, that's yeah, I'm kind of happy that that's how it could have more natural these days and worlds.

Kathleen (03:16): Yeah. There was a time when you had to hide the fact that you were at home and I would be really embarrassed if my dogs barked, which you might hear my dogs bark in this interview because I am still at home and I have two dogs and they bark, but no, it is, it is a good thing for all of us. So, so talk a little bit about ReferralCandy. What is, what, what is that?

Raul (03:35): ReferralCandy is an app that allows e-commerce brands to set up and run customer referral programs. So we, as a company we started working in, in 2010. I joined the company in 2016 and from, from day one with I mean, we've, we've pretty much grown alongside the e-commerce world. We were one of the first referral marketing partners for, for Shopify. And so we kind of like experienced growth as a company alongside all these like big, you know e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Big Commerce, WooCommerce, Magento, et cetera. And so basically what we do is that we allow brands to run these referral programs on autopilot in the way that we do this is by inviting customers to automatically join the, the referral program, the referral program, by giving them a unique referral link.

Raul (04:25): They can share these referral links with their friends on social media, on texts or whatever it is. The friend clicks on the link. And then from that moment on whenever they finish the purchase we're able to track the whole referral process from the moment that they clicked on the link until they completed the purchase. And we send the rewards to the customer that made the recommendation in the first place. So it's all so automated whether it's a coupon payout or, or an actual cash payout, we automate the reward process on our end. So the merchants don't really have to worry about that.

Kathleen (04:58): So customer referral programs, let's talk about this because I do feel like, you know, you guys are doing it particularly for e-commerce, it sounds like, but I would imagine that there are certain fundamental elements of customer full programs that apply to all companies. And so I guess I feel like everybody out there knows that customer referrals are a great way to get new business. Right? You have your, your happiest customers kind of talking about you, almost selling, selling for you, but I think the stumbling block that everybody runs into is how to ask for the referral. And, and so maybe you could address that, like who to ask and how to ask and when to ask

Raul (05:41): Those are all really good questions. I would say so, and I honestly, I have different answers or like I have different sets of answers for each one of them based on what I've seen. I don't think there's like one particular like rule of thumb that works for all businesses. They're all pretty different and the way their customers interact with, with these brands kind like make those interactions a little bit different in terms of when to ask and how to ask the, the main thing that in terms of how to ask I would say that there's, there's two main strategies on this. One of them is to kind of put the emphasis on what you as a customer are are going to get for every friend that you, that you were first.

Raul (06:30): So kind of like putting the emphasis on, you know, refer a friend and you will get $10 in cash or refer a friend and you will get a $10 coupon on your next purchase. On the the other side, it's to put more emphasis on what you can give to your friends. So we've seen referral programs that have worked really well because they've been able to kind of tell customers, look, you're going to look really good in front of your friends, because they're going to be able to give them this really special coupon or this really special offer and both of them work. So it, I guess it really depends on, on maybe how word of mouth friendly your product is in the sense that if you're selling something, that's, that's going to spark a conversation. And you know, that your customers are naturally going to talk about your products, just, just because of the nature of it.

Raul (07:19): Then you can put more emphasis on the friend reward because you know, that your customers are just naturally going to recommend you to their friends and family. But again both of them, both of them work, and I've seen both of them work in, in, in, in in, in different companies, in different industries. Now in terms of when to ask there's two main theories here. So the, the, the two of them are either ask your customers once you have their attention. So that could be like right after a purchase. So, you know, while, while the purchase still fresh, and they're still thinking about your brand because they just bought something from you it's going feel natural to get an email from the brand asking you to join the referral program. Cause you just became, you just became a customer.

Raul (08:02): The other theory is to ask customers to join the referral program after they have received the product. So wait a few days, let him get your product and use it and then hit them with email that asks for a referral. Once again, both of them work, I've seen both of those strategies work, and I guess also depends on the nature of the, of the business. And then in terms of how to ask one particular, how, excuse me, one particular way of asking that I like it's one brands when brands are transparent in terms of why they're asking for a referral. There's one particular example that I, I always like to share. Whenever I get questions about how to ask for, for referrals since it's, it's a company that's called Baronfig and they actually, so they have a page on their website about the referral program.

Raul (08:58): And one of the things that they say in, in this, they have to have kind of like a note from the team explaining why they have a referral program. And the reason that they give is that they want to they're rather spend money on their customers that on Facebook advertising or online advertising, like, you know, we, we, we know you love our product so much that we would just rather give the money to you instead of giving it to all these big corporations. You don't have to follow that particular example. You don't have to you know, like you make it either or, but showing your customers that, the fact that they're going to go out and spread the word about your brand, it's actually going to matter to you and it's going to matter to your business. I think that's really smart. And if you, and again, if you're, if you have honest marketing and your customers know that, that you care about them and you care about the products you're developing that way of kind of asking for other, for the referrals, it's going to come out very naturally.

Kathleen (09:52): I love that example about the Facebook ads, because it's true. Like if you're spending a ton of money on Facebook ads, would you rather give the money to Facebook or would you rather give it to your customers? I know what my answer would be. What do you say to people who push back and say, well, we shouldn't have to pay our customers to refer us. I don't know. I've definitely heard people express opinions indicating that they feel like the transactional nature of that somehow cheapens the referral. Do you have any response to that?

Raul (10:24): Yeah, I mean, I can, I can totally see that. And, and it's all, it's not really about it doesn't have to be a monetary transaction. You can there's, I mean, you can get creative and, and offered things that are going to their customers. Aren't going to appreciate without again, I can see that offering a coupon or offering cash can, you know, raise some eyebrows for some brands and say, Hey, maybe this is going to, to affect the way that we're positioning our brand. We we've seen that with a more kind of like luxury items or brands are they're in that type of business that there sometimes are a little you know, they kind of question the whole, the whole thing, but the reality is that at the end of the day, their customers are going to refer their friends and family anyway.

Raul (11:08): And so, you know, why not, first of all tracking it. And then second, like if you can add something on top of that too, to do have them continue doing so then, you know, it's going to be a win-win for everybody. So, but again, it doesn't have to be doesn't have to be, I'm going to try to turn a section and you can offer a free product. You can offer some like free accessory or you can even like offer them a spot on a new release. If you're going to release a product in the next few months, and you want to have a closer to, to kind of like a VIP group, you can offer that instead. And again, also for, for the customer, if you don't want to offer a coupon, you can, you can offer an additional product or something that's not available.

Raul (11:50): To, to, like I said to, to most people, you can maybe some sort of like a hidden product that's added to your cart if you make a purchase referred by, by an existing customer. So it's all, it's all a matter of making it a little bit special. And also you know, if, if your, if your customers your customers are going to be happy that they're sharing something, that's going to be useful for their friends anyway, which is it's honestly, the bottom line of, of referral programs is that referral programs at the end of the day, what they do is that they incentivize something that's already happened or happening organically, which is word of mouth. So if you can incentivize that even more than your customers are going have be able to add that little pitch at the end, after they sh they shunned the product, and they explained their friends and family, why the product is so good, they're going to be like, and by the way, if you buy using this link that you get a little, a little something, or we both get a little something.

Raul (12:42): So,

Kathleen (12:43): So when it comes to offering a coupon or a gift card, or some sort of monetary compensation, do you have any data that, that would point to how much that should be? Because I feel like, I feel like there has to be a sweet spot, right? Like too low, and it's not going to motivate the desired behavior too high, and it's going to be very expensive. And I don't know B it might just seem egregious, but yeah. What, what's your take on that? I mean,

Raul (13:12): It really depends on the company and kind of like what they can offer just from looking at a, from a financial perspective, like, what are their margins and what are they able to offer? What I would do, what I would suggest is to make sure that it's kind of a unique offer. We have customers that are offering, let's say 10% to, to their, to their customers and their friends for every referral. But at the same time, that's what they're offering to anybody that signs up for the newsletter. So, you know what, when you, when you put it on the same level and you make it a referral, it takes a lot more effort than signing up for a newsletter. And so if you're given that incentive it might not seem too attractive to customers because they can get that discount.

Raul (13:53): And by, by doing something else, that's honestly a lot, a lot easier to do. So what I would do is it's to yeah, like offer something, offer something that you're not already offering hopefully something a lot higher, make sure that it's also not clashing with other type of promotions that you might have in we, we noticed we had a, a client that we would notice that every weekend, their referral sales would go, we'll go down. And we couldn't really figure it out. Why, because the rest of the week, Monday through Friday, you would see kind of like normal sales and then they will drop in during the weekend, which w which was the opposite of what their customers were doing. Their customers were buying more from them over that weekend. W what was happening is that every weekend they had kinda like a a store sale with the same discount had a referral program.

Raul (14:40): And so people were, were just rather use that coupon code and then offer them that using the one that they that we're getting from, from making referrals. So, you know, those little things, like, just making sure that you have kind of like a clear picture of what your, your coupon situation is, and then makes something a little bit more special at the end of the day, making a referral for the customer. It's not, it's not something that's going to happen automatically, just because they're sharing it on their social media, or just because they're sharing the referral link on a, on a, on a group chat doesn't mean that they're, their friends are going to make a purchase right away. So you need to reward them for that.

Kathleen (15:13): That makes sense. So make your referral discount higher than the other discounts you're advertising. Can you talk a little bit about tracking, because you've mentioned a few things that point to that, and I imagine that's key to all of this, because if you're gonna, if you're going to offer these rewards, you have to be able to track whether the action happened and attributed back to the right person and then distribute that reward. So how, how, what's the best practice for handling that? Well,

Raul (15:38): I mean, it's out of ReferralCandy. We do it automatically. So depending on the platform, we have several different ways that we can identify who was the friend and who made the referral. For some platforms we use coupon codes that are specific for, for advocates. And so if we see a transaction with a specific coupon code, we're able to say, okay, this was the advocate, and this is the person that needs to get rewarded for other platforms. We rely more on the referral link and, and kind of like, you know, kind of like the, the, the tracking after they click on it we're able to basically to cookie the friend and then see what's, you know, what's the referral looking like. But what, what I was mentioning earlier about being able to track referrals it's more about kind of like the, the, the, the moment in which brands tend to decide that they need a referral program.

Raul (16:27): They know that they start to getting these early signs that they're getting referrals either because you know, a customer, my, my, mention it to a customer support rep or, or, you know, you might like see referrals happening on social media, just from people that have bought the product, and they're just sharing it or somebody unboxing your product on YouTube. And then maybe people asking them what they can get it, all that kind of stuff. So, like, those aren't kinda like early signs, but unless you have a referral program software on your store it's pretty difficult to, to, to track who are the customers that are, that are coming to you from referrals versus any other channel, because those, all of those referrals are happening organically in a way. And it's, it's kind of more like a, just like a natural conversation so that they might hear from, again, from a friend or my, my look at a video on YouTube, and then just go to the website and make the purchase. And you'll never be able to attribute that purchase to kind of like a referral source. So yeah, so instead of ReferralCandy, we were able to track that with with the referral links and coupon codes. But, but yeah, I mean, th those are kind of like the early signs that brands typically look at in order to decide that, okay, it's time to have something formal in place so we can see where this is going.

Kathleen (17:44): So what are the top three mistakes that you see companies make with referral programs?

Raul (17:52): So I would say that the main mistakes are either going to early so referral programs I mean, it's, it's a, it's an easy way for brands to retain existing customers and acquire new ones. So it's basically, you're turning your customer base into, into your marketing team. But it's a numbers game. And the, the number of advocates that you're going to have in your referral program depends a lot on, on your total number of customers. So how many new orders are you having per day or per week or per month? And then those are, the customers are eventually going to get added to the program. They're going to get the referral link, and then they're going to go out and refer. So it's a, it's a numbers game, really. So you need to have a good number of customers in the referral program in order to be able to see results in the short term.

Raul (18:38): So whenever we have a brand joining joining ReferralCandy and launching a referral program if it's a brand that has, let's say like 10 or 20,000 orders per month, they take off immediately. Because they're, they're getting you know, almost thousands of orders every day. So those are thousands of customers that are being added to the referral program right away. Now, if you're a brand that it's, it's making, let's say a hundred, 200 orders per month, and it's going to take a lot longer. And so it's, it's not that it's a mistake joining the referral program, but what is the mistake in my opinion, is to expect results in, in the short term. And I'll be number one. Another mistake that I typically see is not, not promoting it enough. So like I said, you depend on your customers to perform an action.

Raul (19:23): So you need to remind people about the, the, the existing of the referral program, because there's a lot of things that are happening in our daily lives. And, and, and if we're a, if we're not, if brands are not staying top of mind, then it's difficult for customers to think about it and kinda like generate those referrals. So promotion is key. And then the third mistake, probably the most important one. This is an actual mistake, in my opinion it's not, not being ready or not having a company that's ready for our referral program in the sense that either your products it's not good enough yet, or your customers are not loving your product yet, or maybe your kind of like purchase process, it's, it's complicated and messy, and your customers are not kind of enjoying the whole process. And then or maybe you don't have a customer support team in place.

Raul (20:18): That's like, you know, practically solving problems and your customers are not, not happy overall. So if your customers are not happy and referral program is not gonna be able to solve that. And that's something that I actually see quite often but you know, it, it, at least it's it's kinda like a, it's a way of figuring out if there's something that's wrong with, with the company or with the product. And then, you know, you can think of the company and kind of focus on fixing that. And then I mean, if our referral program is not working, honestly, any other marketing action that you might develop, it's not going to work either if your product is not, it's not

Kathleen (20:53): There. Yeah. That's so true. There's no substitute for a poor product. And you can't market your way out of that either. Exactly. so I'd love for you to give some examples, because I feel like in principle, this sounds like a no brainer if you have a good product and if you're ready for it. So can you maybe talk about the impact that it can have on companies? Like, do you have any real-world examples of companies that implemented a referral program and what that did to the business?

Raul (21:24): Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I brought a few examples of companies in kind of different industries so we can, we can kind of go over it together, but I would say that that one thing that they all have in common is that they obviously have a great product, that their customers are, are loving. They, by the time they launch a referral program, they, they realized that they were already getting kind of organic referrals. And that's what it was just kind of implementing something on top of that, that it was going to be able to streamline the whole referral process. So one of my favorite examples it's a company called Branch Basics. They are based in the US and they are offering a subscription business for cleaning products, which, you know, it's not, you know, initially it's not like, you know, a very attractive product.

Raul (22:11): They're, they're in a very competitive industry. And so it's something that sometimes we just buy kind of automatically you put it on your shopping list and you go to the store and you get it. But that kind of like the twist they, they being able to add to the product that made it so attractive for customers is that they, they realize that most of the ingredients that you buy when you buy cleaning products are plastic and water, so you're, you're buying a container and then you buy a product that's mostly made of water. And so what they, what they've done is that they, they, when you, when you subscribed to brunch basics, they send you a box with different spray bottles and, and, and basically the containers for your cleaning supplies. And then they send you a subscription of different concentrates that you can use to, you know, buy to clean different parts of your house. And all you need to do is just put that the, the, those concentrates inside of the bottles and fill them with water and you're ready to go.

Kathleen (23:06): By the way, I agree. Totally genius. That makes all the sense in the world, especially in terms of lowering shipping costs.

Raul (23:13): Exactly. And, and it's and yeah, it's something that when you think about it, you're like, wait a minute, that's true. I'm just, I'm buying water and plastic.

Kathleen (23:20): Yeah. Yeah. And I'm paying to have it shipped to me. Exactly, exactly.

Raul (23:24): So they, they, they were able to add a twist to this, like, you know, highly traditional industry. But at the same time they had an issue at the beginning, which is how do we break through the noise? I mean, there's, there's like cleaning supply companies are so big and they, they, they take over pretty much any marketing channel available to us that we need to find something else. And so they they realized that their customers were their best advocates, because they were really excited about telling their friends and family about the, the, the, the cleaning products that we're buying. So just to kind of give you some numbers. So right now pretty much since they launched the referral program they saw an increase in by 10% in their, in their total sales and that 10% came from the referral program.

Raul (24:08): And, and ever since they've been able to get like one in every 10 purchases coming from the referral program, which if you, if you look at it from the financial perspective and how much it costs to acquire a customer through a referral compared to any other, you know acquisition method, like, you know, like Facebook ads or Google ads, it's a lot cheaper. And, and also customers aren't coming from a referral tend to stick around longer and spend more. So in the long run, it's, it's made a really big impact on the bottom line of their business, which is their, their revenue. Other examples that I particularly like because it's it's, it's brands that have being able to target a specific communities of customers. So there's, we have a couple of companies that are selling products for, for either babies or toddlers.

Raul (25:01): And obviously the customer here is not the baby and the toddler. It's mothers. And so they're being able to target communities of mothers that, that we're going to be able to buy the products. And then, then we're going to talk about it to, to all their moms. And so in particular we have two companies, one called Momomee and the other one called Riff Raff. And they, they, they pretty much being able to see the same type of results pretty much from the beginning, they were able to increase their sales by 20 and 24% using referral marketing, which is a lot, I mean, it's one of the highest referral rates that I've seen in, in among our customers. And there were, they were able to do so because they, they were targeting a highly engaged community of people that were constantly looking for the best products.

Raul (25:45): And so if you see if you're part of a, of a mother's community and you see a mom being super excited about it, but one particular product, it's very likely they're going to buy it, even if you don't personally know about that person. But, but just the fact that you're both in kinda like the same stage of, of life, it kinda like makes you agree. And, and those referrals typically happen very, very naturally. So those are two that particularly like, because of the, kind of like the, the, that the way that they being able to, to target these communities. And then I mean, and then I would say that those are kind of like the 20, 24% referral rates I mean, are achievable because we have several customers that are, that are being able to get those to get to those percentages.

Raul (26:32): But then, you know, you see customers having anywhere between five and 15% referral rates that are, you know, kind of all over the board in terms of companies that are they're operating in the, in the clothing or apparel industry companies are selling gadgets or, or sporting sporting goods. And they all have a kind of different ways that they've been able to target themselves sorry, market themselves to their customers and their referral programs. But I would say that products that are, are word of mouth friendly are those that are either truly revolutionary in the sense that it's nothing that you've seen before, or their products from a traditional industry with the twist, kind of like the example of Branch Basics. They, they, they're not in a very traditional industry, but they being able to add something that you know, all of a sudden it makes it look like a, like a no-brainer. But if we look at the, kind of like the traditional or the kinda like the most famous classic referral programs, Dropbox, Uber PayPal, those were truly new products. And so when you were talking to your friends and family about those products, you were, you were sharing something that was brand new, something that anybody had never heard of before. So that's, that's what makes, in my opinion company's word of mouth friendly when, when the person that's talking about your brands, truly excited about what, what they're about, what they're saying.

Kathleen (27:58): So that makes all the sense in the world. And, and I think that that also makes it easier to onboard people into the customer referral program if they're excited. But I guess the other thing that I wonder about is activation because like, with anything, it's one thing to get the person to join the program, and it's another to then get them actually spreading the word and doing it consistently. So do you have any best practices or examples you've seen of companies that have done a really good job with activation?

Raul (28:27): Yeah, so I would say that the most the most common examples of this are companies that are, that have a pretty consistent promotion schedule for the referral program. And so they are either reminding customers, let's say sending me an email every couple of weeks to their customers to remind them about the program, they're sharing it on social media or even like giving incentives that they get people excited about sharing. One particular example that I, that I really like talking about it's a company called Thread Beast and they are subscription box for just apparel basically. And so whenever you buy a box, you get maybe like a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and a hat and a belt, and maybe a pair of shoes as well. And the way that they've marketed the referral program is that instead of giving so it's, this it's a subscription, right?

Raul (29:18): So instead of giving a coupon code on your future subscription or in your feature invoice what you get is every time you refer a friend, you get an additional box. So if you refer three friends, you're going to get your box plus three other boxes, full of clothes. And then your friend, the friends, I think they get like, like like 50% off or something like that. So it's pretty easy for the friends to to get started as well. And so when you are basically not capping the type of the, the, the type of rewards that they can earn it gets people really excited about sharing the referral link. So and actually, if you go on YouTube and you search for Thread Beasts, you're going to see tons of videos, a lot of them from, for the past few days, because people just keep renewing their videos unboxing, what they got from, from Thread Beast then.

Raul (30:07): So they, they do like a, maybe 10 minute video explaining all the different products they've, they've gone. And then they also shared the referral link and to tell people how to get started on Thread Beast as well. So those type of rewards in which you're not necessarily capping it that works really well. Also companies that offer cash instead of coupon codes. So if you're, if you're selling a product that, you know, your customers are not going to buy from you anytime soon, and I always give the same example mattresses.

Kathleen (30:34): Oh yeah. That's so true.

Raul (30:36): If you're selling mattresses. I mean, that, that's kinda like the iconic example of a product that you're not going to buy a, you buy once, and then you're not going to buy it anytime soon. So if you're, if you run a referral program, and you're a mattress company, you can either maybe offer up, offer free product, which might be some sort of accessory that you can use under your bed.

Kathleen (30:54): Or something. Yeah, exactly.

Raul (30:55): Or you can offer cash and people are going to be happy to share and get cash because, you know, nobody's going to say no to that. So again, promotion and then being a little creative with the rewards typically helps with activation. And then something that we've also seen with with customers is that they they they're being able to add a little bit of a gamification to the process. So Riff Raff, the example that I was mentioning before they, they offer, they have like, kinda like a limited set of products. I think they only have like five or six items that they sell, but you can collect them in a way. And so instead of giving cash or giving a coupon to their customers, to give them a free product, every time they refer, I think it's five friends. And so if you end up referring, you know, 15, 20, 25 friends, you might end up getting all the different items of the collection. So you can, you can kind of collect all these, all these different products. So yeah, it's like I said, I mean, they're all I can't really give like one particular you know strategy that would work for all businesses, but it's all about getting a little bit creative and also knowing what truly get your customers excited.

Kathleen (32:05): Yeah. And I think hearing some of those examples is helpful, cause it's just stipulates that the ideation, all right, we're going to switch gears because we're coming towards the end of our time. And I want to make sure I have time to ask the two questions that I always ask. First one being you know, the, the world of inbound marketing and digital in particular is changing really, really quickly. Some of it fueled by technology, some fuel by regulatory things around privacy. You know, there's just so much platform changes. There's so much happening. How do you personally stay educated and on top of all that, are there certain sources of information that you really rely on?

Raul (32:44): Yeah, so I so I don't have like one particular news outlet that I follow for, you know, for anything related to marketing or e-commerce but instead I rely on community. So I'm part of several Slack communities. And from, you know, people that have worked in, in either in, in, in direct to consumer or people that work in, in e-commerce technology. And they, I tend to rely on those communities to get information that's going to be relevant. I think that when not necessarily a cause I used to be really active on Twitter. And I used to get a lot of my news from Twitter, but, you know, Twitter is just a little bit out of hand. I mean, I got out of hand in, in my opinion. And so I decided to kinda focus on kind of like smaller communities, more niche communities, and, and that, I think the quality you might not get as many articles to check every day, but the quality in my opinion has improved a lot. And there is. And then there's also an interesting conversation whenever somebody shares something, if it's, if it's truly interesting, there's going to be people that are going to like, you know, go back and forth about it. And that's also, my opinion is super valuable because allows me to learn from people that I've, you know, they're like, that are really way smarter than me. And and that that's always good.

Kathleen (34:00): Any particular Slack communities that you really love?

Raul (34:02): Yeah. So I'm my favorite one it's called Partner League. And it's a community for Shopify partners. It's, it's not run by Shopify it's, it's kind of like a, it was organized by by several Shopify partners. It's, it's a little bit independent and I think that's what makes it interesting, in my opinion, there's like really, really interesting conversations that happened there. And then also whenever somebody shares anything, anything that affects the industry, there are some really interesting conversations about this. So, so yeah, Partner League, if you're in Shopify I totally recommend

Kathleen (34:33): It. I am in that one as well, and I think it's good. So now we know we can Slack each other. Great. And then the second question is, of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Are there particular companies or individuals that you think are really setting a great standard for what it means to be a really good inbound marketer these days?

Raul (34:57): Yeah. So whenever I look for, for example, so people, companies doing good marketing, I like to look at my inbox. I, I unsubscribe whenever I make a purchase, I end up subscribing from like, I don't know, 75, 80% of the brands that I, that I buy from. Cause I, you know, I ended up just not enjoying the content they send me, but those that remain in my inbox type. Those are the ones that I particularly like, and there's one company that's called Back Market. They sell a refurbished products so, you know refurbish technology. So, you know, iPhones, some computers you know, whatever, actually my, my last two iPhones are from, from them. So I a I'm a really good really with customer of them, but I like the way to do marketing because, well, first of all, they've been able to educate people on you know, kinda like all the electronic waste that we're producing.

Raul (35:49): And that they've been able to kind of like remove the, the, the stigma that most, a lot of people had on, on buying refurbished products for products that are not brand new. And so I think they've done a really good job educating what refurbish means and what's the impact that you can make for, for the environment. And then also I like the tone. So they I mean, I get, so I'm based in Spain, so I get their content from their Spanish site, but I don't know if the US site will be a little bit different, but they're pretty funny. They use humor a lot in the way that they that they interact with with customers. And I think that's key to be honest, like whenever, whenever I see their emails, even if I'm clearly not going to buy another iPhone in the next year or two, but I still look at their emails and I read every single one of them, because I think they're really smart. And that any time that I don't have a referral program, by the way. So from here, if anybody from Back Market is listening to me, we should, we should talk. But anytime that I hear somebody that wants to buy some sort of electronic site typically think of them because of how exposed I am.

Kathleen (36:50): Well now I definitely want to go and subscribe to their emails because I love collecting just emails that are, that are well-written. And I love email, and I love corporate marketing. That's done with humor. So a hard thing to pull off and to do it like to hit the right tone. And then right note, like it can go wrong pretty easily, but for the companies that pull it off, it's incredibly powerful.

Raul (37:12): One thing that they do that I think helps a lot, and that's something that pretty much every single brand can, can copy is that they these emails are not sent from black market. It's sent from somebody inside of Back Market. So you get it, you get a first name and in the email. So you can always kind of like, think about who's the person that's writing, the, the email that you're reading. And so it feels a lot more personal rather than getting an email from kind of like a faceless corporation. And so, and that's actually something I copied myself. So I have a newsletter for, for my agency partners had ReferralCandy that I write myself, but I also make sure that it's not sent from ReferralCandy's sending from, from my name. I think it, I think it helps to, to get your message across and, and we tend to put a voice on what we're reading. So if I can get people to read it with my voice, that's even better.

Kathleen (38:03): Totally agree. And I do the same thing, my newsletters and all my emails, excuse me, come from people who nobody forms a, an emotional relationship with contact at or info at. It just doesn't happen. So I totally agree. All right. Well, we have reached the top of our time. So if somebody is interested in learning more about ReferralCandy, or just wants to connect with you and has a question what's the best way for them to to connect with you online?

Raul (38:32): So ReferralCandy.com for anything related to ReferralCandy, and then they can just email me directly. So my email is [email protected]. So [email protected] and I'm always happy to continue the conversation there.

Kathleen (38:48): Great. And I'll put that link in the show notes. So head there, if you want to get in touch with Raul and if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, consider heading to apple podcasts and leaving the podcast a review. That's how other people find us. And we would very much appreciate it. And in the meantime, if you know another marketer who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me Raul.

Raul (39:18): Thank you so much.

What's the quickest way to build and execute a content strategy that will deliver big inbound lead gen results in a short amount of time?

This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Trimble Director of Demand Generation Lindsay Kelley breaks down how she and her team grew inbound deals from 22% to 66% of the company's pipeline in just six months with a content-driven strategy.

As Lindsay says, the company's website was "skinny" when it came to content. Upon joining, she immediately set about creating "cornerstone" content and then repurposing that into other assets. Her name for it is the "Thanksgiving Turkey" approach - meaning you break up big content pieces and make lots of other things out of them, just like you do with a Thanksgiving turkey after the big day. 

She also explains how she worked with her internal team to encourage cross-departmental collaboration on content and other marketing efforts.

Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Trimble website
• Connect with Lindsay on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:03): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is my good friend, Lindsay Kelley, who is the director of demand generation at Trimble. Welcome to the podcast, Lindsay.

Lindsay (00:45): Hi, Kathleen. So excited to see you so excited to be here. And I love your podcast so much. And it's like a dream pinching myself to be on the podcast.

Kathleen (00:56): Okay. True story. I was thinking about who should be my next guest and I was thinking about people. I know. And I thought of you because I've known you for a really long time, and I'll say in a minute how we know each other. And honestly, when I first thought of this, I was like, oh, I already interviewed her. And this has happened to me a couple of times recently where I'm like, oh, I already interviewed that person. But then when I looked, I was like, wait, no, I haven't. So this has been a long time in coming. I met Lindsay. I don't even remember what year it was. It was at HubSpot's inbound conference.

Lindsay (01:29): 2013.

Kathleen (01:31): Holy cow. We just happened to sit next to each other, like during a big keynote. And the rest is history. We became fast friends, even though we were at competing agencies, but we never, I don't think ever thought of each other as competitors. And it's just been a wonderful professional relationship and personal friendship over the years. And man, I will, I I'll stop going on and on about it, but it's, I'm just so happy we finally did this.

Lindsay (01:55): I know me too. And you did ask me six months ago and I said, give me six more months because as I was new, newer to my role and I was still in building phase, I may say I don't have anything great to share yet. So you came to me at the perfect time six months later, almost exactly.

Kathleen (02:13): Yeah, I know coincidentally. Right. and now you do have some great stuff to share and, and it's no surprise to me because just for those listening, like Lindsay is she, is she used to be from the agency world, like I did, and now she's, in-house like I am. And I just have, I have a lot of respect for you as a marketer and how you think about marketing and your execution and everything. And so let's start by having you just tell folks who are listening a little bit about yourself, your background and where you are now and what Trimble is.

Lindsay (02:42): Absolutely. So I started my career in Baltimore in the late nineties. And I started an ad agency, which was a really great experience learned a lot. I was on the B2B side and so that kind of set the stage for my career. I spent my entire career in the B2B of the house. But fast forward a couple of years after some in-house, you know, marketing coordinator marketing specialist working your way up. I finally landed at a place in Baltimore where I met John Shea, who, you know, and John Shea and I went out and started our own agency and it was a sales and marketing alignment agency, and really learned a lot. There, had a great time wanted to grow a little more of the marketing side. So ended up he went sales side.

Lindsay (03:29): I went marketing agency side, joined up with another dear friend Darrell Amy. And I think you've had Darrell on the podcast too. And so Darrell and I were partners for about three years and we built an agency that was focused on the copier industry. So we would go in, we would help them build websites. We put the inbound methodology in place and, you know, we were HubSpot gold partners. So we were a little smaller. But it was a really, really great time. And you just learned so much when you start your own agency.

Kathleen (04:02): Oh my gosh. Yes.

Lindsay (04:06): I think one of my favorite stories was calling a friend one day and it was a Thursday and I said, it just hit me that I haven't showered since Monday. And if you're doing nothing but working and I'm like, and I can't remember the last time I had lunch, you know, it's ruling, but yeah, it really does teach you a lot. So when I when I eventually decided to go back into the corporate world, it was because my daughter was really having a hard time with me traveling. I traveled so much giving the inbound marketing workshops, traveling to clients since she was eight. So I said, I'm going to go agencies. I'm going to go out of the agency world and into corporate America, joined up with an organization called Telit. Had a great time there for about three years.

Lindsay (04:48): And then I was actually recruited away in the middle of COVID. So what an experience to interview and and go through that process during COVID, it was a very unique experience. And so the, the companies was originally called e-Builder. It still is e-Builder. It's a product. And so we have a SaaS tool that's designed specifically for construction owners. So we really kind of sit in the, in the arena of the guys that sit in the office and go, okay, I need to build 10 hospitals this year. I need a, a tool to manage that. So, so that's really the software that, that I focus on today and that's part of Trimble. And, you know, Trimble's made a lot of acquisitions over the years to really be able to build this connected construction strategy. And so we're kind of in the middle of it now, and we're, we're working on the connected scale.

Lindsay (05:40): So by 20, 25, we'll all be together. But I will say, like, I have had such a ball meeting all of these amazing marketing folks across the different sectors. So I feel really lucky that I found this and you know, my my team is I absolutely adore working with them every day. And so we've done some really fun stuff and they've all said, wow, this is, this is different than what we've done in the past and we're enjoying it and it's fun. So I think for them, it was a little bit of a new adventure. And they're, they're enjoying it. It's, you know, there's always going to be a little rough road, but we we're just, we're loving it and we're killing it.

Kathleen (06:20): That's great. I love that story. And I mean, your background is so similar to mine in that sense. Like I owned an agency for 11 years and then my kids reached a certain age where I was like, I need to be more present for them and left and went in-house. And so we've had really oddly parallel career journeys. Although I would say I've been at smaller companies, more series a startups, and you've been at some slightly larger companies. And so it's kind of cool to be able to trade those experiences. You know, you came into tremble and this is an established company. So this, like, I tend to come in and there isn't marketing. And so I build it out and I get to like do it out of whole cloth, right? I'm like, not, I'm not undoing anyone else's stuff or changing anything.

Kathleen (07:01): You have a different situation. You came in to a plane that was already flying. And so you have to like, you know, there's, there's always challenges you have where you maybe want to do some things a different way, or you need to tweak things, but you need to do it so that it doesn't take the plane down. Right. Like you've got the plane in the air, how do we keep it in the air, but maybe make it perform better. And so talk a little bit about like, when you first joined the company, how was it doing its marketing and what did it go to market strategy look like?

Lindsay (07:29): Yeah. And, you know, for, for a long time, e-Builder has been such a well-respected and known brand amongst all the owners that we serve. So really for a long time, it was just, you know, name recognition and, you know, people could pick up the phone and have a conversation. Oh, we build there. Okay. No, I've heard of you guys. This is great. And you know, how it goes said, competition comes into the marketplace and becomes a little more challenging. And the ways that you did it before, aren't quite as successful. Not that they're not still successful in a way, but they're not as successful as, as they could be in this new environment. And so, you know, with buyers changing the way that their buying habits are doing a lot more research learning online it was something that when I first came in, they were doing a lot of email marketing.

Lindsay (08:18): It was to an existing database. So they had, you know, a really solid, good, a number of contexts that they were able to reach out to that they had built up over the years. And, and so, you know, we had, you know, the customer marketing department, we had the demand generation and we had inbound and they all kind of worked on their own. And, you know, they were great friends. They had a really good chemistry, but when it came to the, the business side of it, they were pretty siloed. And so we spent a lot of time breaking through that to figure out, you know, how we could take it from, you know, the, the top of the funnel all the way through to the customer customer marketing. So that's been a lot of fun. The, the team has really enjoyed getting to do more brainstorming together and understanding more about, you know, the power of strategizing together and, you know, people coming up with different ideas and pulling them together and saying, actually, you know, what if we did this this way?

Lindsay (09:14): So I think for them, it's been a lot of fun. But they, they really were very heavily relying on email marketing some paid sponsorships and events. The events person had just left right before COVID hit and they hadn't rehired the position. So we actually just recently rehired the position because we really, you know, we were trying to figure out what it was going to look like when there were no events. So so heavy, heavy reliance on email had a couple of pieces of content that were, that were very well put together. Product marketing was solely responsible for all of that. So when I came in, I said, well, what goodness? And like, be like product marketing has so much to do. They really you know, really should have some, some assistance for them. So what we did was we said, all right, sales, foot sales, friends, how do you sell what does it look like?

Lindsay (10:08): What does that journey look like for you guys from start to finish? And so, you know, a couple of the guys had some really nice well put together slides that really showed, you know, the, the biggest challenges that these guys were going through. And I'm realizing this really isn't represented on the website. The website was, was I call it skinny. It was skinny content. So it really didn't say enough about the benefits of, you know, bringing in a product like e-Builder, because they really hadn't had to in the past, everybody just kind of knew who they were. So, you know, we really kind of, for the first six months, it was just fast and furious let's build content. So we, we had started a blog. We were able to put at least one piece out a week, if not two, we had white papers that we produced.

Lindsay (10:57): And really the biggest reason that I did this dirty little secret is they hadn't spent the money in the first six, six months of the year. And it's one of those use it or lose it. So I'm like I got all this money, let's hurry up and get some, some really nice pieces of content put together. So we kind of changed the process of how content was created and started bringing in some expert writers. Some that I've used in the past others that, you know, they had used in the past as well. And so we have a nice little mini arsenal of freelancers. So all we do is we put these freelancers together with the product marketing team, because they're the ones with the message, the go-to-market strategy, but years and years of construction experience. And we were able to come up with some really nice pieces of content. And it was funny cause we did a very poor job for the first six months of really putting it out there in any real form or fashion that was valuable to anyone aside from just putting it on the blog. So we were in go, go, go mode. So we created as much as we could. And then at the end of Q4, we started saying, okay, what are we going to do with this stuff? Yeah. Okay.

Kathleen (12:01): Before you go down that path, hold on. I'm going to stop you. Cause I know you're getting to the good part. Okay. So, okay. So table setting, you came in, the website was skinny with content. You had this opportunity because of the budget to go out and all of this and quickly create more, which I love. And, and you, you sort of alluded to this, but this, this was a different way of marketing for your team. Like before you joined, there was a lot of email marketing, et cetera. There wasn't a lot of content creation and you, you are a part of a large enough team that, again, it's the flying, it's the, it's the flying building the plane while you're flying it. Right. So when you come into a company like this and you have product marketing, you have you know, events or you don't have events or, but you have all these different people on the team who are used to doing things a certain way. It can, I know from experience, it can be very disruptive and sometimes like you can really shoot yourself in the foot by trying to like change it too fast if you don't manage that process. Well, so can you just talk a little bit about how you manage that? Cause it sounds like it went really smoothly with your team and they were really happy with what you came up with, but I'm curious to know how you, how you ushered that change in.

Lindsay (13:17): So the team today looks a little different than it did when I first came in. So, you know, we, we did have a couple of folks leave. And we did, I had a great opportunity to bring my team together to interview for filling these roles because culture is such a big part of, you know, not only the e-Builder culture, but you know, the Trimble greater culture. They were very, very well aligned, which is why the owners were happy, you know, when, when the acquisition happened, cause it very similar cultural values. Part of what we had to do was really just start breaking down the why, so why are we going to do this? Okay. Because we've always done it this way is a very standard answer.

Lindsay (14:01): And I'm like, well, let's challenge that. So little by little, over the weeks when we had our team meetings, you know, I would start a conversation with them whether they really knew what I was doing or not, I'm not sure I'm giving it all away now. Now they're all going to go back and listen to like, oh, that's how she did that. But just kind of saying, okay, so, so, you know, you have this project coming on. So what, you know, what's another way that we could do that. What's another way you could engage the audience or utilize some of these materials or be here in customer marketing, so you don't have to recreate the wheel. And so we started having brainstorming sessions and they would get really excited because they really hadn't done that before. And having that kind of collaboration, I think helped excite them.

Lindsay (14:45): And they started doing it on their own without me, which was really the goal. And so you know, the team as a whole really came together and I think some of the, some of the new folks we were able to bring in as well have really helped with that cohesiveness. A lot of times, you know, it's a lot of times it's finding the right people that fit with the team that really helped the team come together. And so I had you know, a critical hire that came in who's my, my graphics and web guy that I brought with me from my last, my last company. And it's just, he's one of those people that has like a collaboration, it's his middle name. He loves doing that kind of stuff. And so it was a really great person to bring in so easy to work with.

Lindsay (15:30): And I think that honestly was a very nice glue that wasn't just me sitting there saying, Hey guys, why don't we do this? Why don't we do that? So I think that was a big part of it. I also had, you know, two really strong senior managers on the demand gen side and on the customer marketing side and they just wanted to succeed. And they saw how much we were doing with content. And you know, it was, it was a little challenging cause it, it went from, you know, demand gen and email, email, email, and demand gen is getting all the leads too, but all the exciting stuff that's happening on the content side. Yes. But take that. And now what can you do with it on the email side, on the paid side, what can we do with it? Give me some ideas. So it was kind of helping them get there on their own. And to be honest, like they, they did this themselves, they just, they just needed a little, a little bit of guidance.

Kathleen (16:24): And the raw materials, the content, you know, you got it. Yeah. You've got to have that there to work with it. Otherwise you can't, you can't, you know, multiple if you don't have any clay.

Lindsay (16:33): Exactly, exactly. And I think part of the, the really, really instrumental piece of this for me was my, my VP of marketing is so supportive. I mean, he, he very admittedly he's like, you know, demand gen isn't my, isn't my strong suit. So I had his support every step, every turn. He's been an amazing mentor and he's just one of those guys that you love coming to work and working with. And the whole team loves him as well. But you know, this team had been really without a leader for a year. And my, my manager, my boss was, was doing his best to, to keep them all together and keep the wheels on the bus. And he did a great job of doing that, considering all of the other things that he's responsible for. So I was given a lot of flexibility and freedom to bring these new ideas to the table and he supported me. And that really makes all the difference. And the fact that the leadership team was willing to listen, let me present ideas, you know, show them things that have worked for me in the past. And then given me that opportunity. So that's why I always get that.

Kathleen (17:40): Yeah. It sounds like an amazing place to work which is, is so wonderful. And I think coming into an environment where you have the confidence of the people above you to your job, you know, to just do your job the way, you know, it needs to be done. That is huge. So we were about to get into the part of this conversation that I love. Cause I got a little preview before we started talking. So to recap, you came in, you started immediately creating a lot of content. But let me ask you one question about that. Did you have any kind of like particular strategy or framework behind that content? Like what is it that you were creating?

Lindsay (18:18): Absolutely. And you know, I come from a HubSpot background you know, partners, you are a HubSpot partner. I was a HubSpot partner, you know, and one thing they do really well is they help you build the foundation of inbound and they, they teach you that methodology. So I brought that methodology with me. Even though we're not on HubSpot now, so they have that pillar content strategy. So that's, we sat down with sales and said, Hey, this is what we're trying to create. You help us feel like in your journey that you take the prospects through, we now have to digitize that because COVID is here and you can't get on a commune anymore. So help me help you. And we had a really instrumental sales guy being Mike who had a great slide. And it was literally like, like plucked from the pages of inbound. And he's like, it's kind of like this. And I'm like, nah, that's what we need. So that was really the framework for building these, these pillar pages, we call them cornerstone pages internally. And so, you know, they really,

Kathleen (19:18): These are like exhaustive really in-depth guides on a particular topic. Right?

Lindsay (19:25): Exactly. They're like, call them meaty. They're the meaty ones, the skinny website that was there before coming from the vegetarian

Kathleen (19:35): Steak house now.

Lindsay (19:38): So so yeah, so that's really what we started from. And so the person who was in the role at the time, who since has gone on and I'm very happy for her, she got an amazing opportunity in a very similar startup world that you're in now constantly. But really, you know, she, she helped build the foundation of of this, this content strategy. And she went out and worked with all of our subject matter experts. She knew the, the framework and we, we worked very hard together on what that framework looked like and, you know, we were able to build and just build, build, build, build, build. So that's, that was really what we started with. And we got those on the website made sure that they were properly linked. We had an amazing SEO company called Amps Digital in Manhattan, and I've been working with them for years. And so they were instrumental in helping us from an SEO perspective make sure we are properly optimized going after the right terms and attracting the right type of the right type of folks to the website.

Kathleen (20:42): Got it. So you created some cornerstone content as you called it so that you would have some meaty pieces of content on the site. And then, and then what, so like you, you, you fattened up the website a little bit. What did you do from there?

Lindsay (20:57): Okay. So from there, we went into a strategy. I affectionately liked to call it Thanksgiving Turkey.

Kathleen (21:02): I'm seeing a theme emerging, by the way, were you hungry when you developed the strategy?

Lindsay (21:09): I'm a vegetarian, I don't even eat Turkey. But, but we call it Thanksgiving Turkey. And the premise behind it is after Thanksgiving, obviously how many different dishes can you make from this one Turkey with this massive amount of leftover meat that you have? So we take almost every piece of content and we chunk it into as many different pieces of content forms of content as we possibly can. So an example may be we'll have a webinar and it will be a 45 minute webinar in depth talking about, let's say document management and we'll, we'll have a client on and we'll have this, you know, amazing turnout of all these people coming well afterwards we'll take, and we'll transcribe that webinar. Then we bring in some freelancers, we bring those subject matter experts back and we say, okay what kind of a blog post can we get out of this one blog post two blog posts.

Lindsay (22:05): So we'll get two really great blog posts that fit. And then we'll publish those on the website. Then we'll go back and we'll say, okay, we have 45 minutes worth of footage here. So we'll Chuck it out into what we call snackables. And the snackables are really 90 seconds to two minute clips of a client answering a question. So it'll be a nice little video with the question that's been asked. So that's your thumbnail. And you put those on social media and it kind of attracts people in and then you can drive people to that webinar on demand. Then we'll, we'll also take these snackables, we'll create a web page, we'll put all the snackables on one webpage and each one has their little phone. Now the question and we put just a little bit of content on it, cause we don't want to compete with ourselves on the big meaty blog. So we'll take all of those pieces and put them on there really great asset for sales to have as well. So that sales is able to share that with their prospects and say, oh, well, here are some of the questions that you might, you know, might see in one of these webinars. And so they'll, they'll take and use that to hopefully they're using it a lot.

Lindsay (23:14): So little things like that, we'll, we'll do that all day long. We'll take the cornerstone pieces of content that we have and we'll we'll create web webinars from those. So we can either bring in a customer or we can have all of our internal experts and sit down and just talk about it, have another webinar there. We, we took one of our big long webinars and we chunked it into 15 minute, 15 minutes segments. And this was for our other product that's geared towards general contractors. We call it project site in a flash. Same thing, push it out on social. Did YouTube live every week? It's the same content, just repurposed in multiple different ways. And then one of the, one of the greatest things that we have so far, that's been a really nice lead generator for us is we took those six cornerstones and we created them as PDF white papers. So we repurposed them, laid them out sent them out individually, marketed them individually. Then we took them, we put them all on one page and call it the ultimate guide. And it's all six and you can download all six. And it's all in one page and it has a little tiny synopsis on each one. So we've Thanksgiving Turkey'd everything we possibly can.

Kathleen (24:32): So I'm just going to stop and say, I love the theme here from skinny website to meaty content, to Thanksgiving, Turkey to snackables. So I love the whole food theme. We, I think we need to come up with an overarching name for this, like the culinary approach to inbound marketing or no, I think it's great. I think it's great. And I love how much you repurpose your content because that's that whole theme of doing more with less is really important for marketers in general. So tell me a little bit more than about what this did for you because you came into, as I said, a plane that was flying and it was flying pretty well. Like this is a company that was successful and getting good leads and had a steady stream of business. So, so what, what impact did this have?

Lindsay (25:24): So, so what we did was in the very end of Q4 in 2020, we started strategizing all of this, this content and we started building it out and optimizing it, making sure it was in the right place. So from a lead generation perspective, when I'm looking at our opportunities the opportunity value in January of the website and the conversions from the website was 22.43%. And last month in July.

Kathleen (25:54): So inbound represented 22.43% of your overall lead volume?

Lindsay (25:57): Yes.

Kathleen (25:57): Pipeline

Lindsay (25:58): Yes. Of our pipeline. And then in July it accounted for 66.67%.

Kathleen (26:07): Hold on, pause.

Kathleen (26:08): Okay. If you're listening that's in six months, you tripled basically the, you tripled the percentage of inbound leads as a percentage of the total pipeline. Like that's massive. From 20 something to 60 something percent in six months.

Lindsay (26:31): Yes.

Kathleen (26:33): Wow.

Lindsay (26:34): Yes. And that, and that allows us to also try to make better decisions as to, you know, we want to be good stewards of the money. So, you know, we're, we're utilizing money to, to drive really high quality content and you know, taking from other areas, you know, like we were talking about before, there's no events anymore, so I could take that budget and move it. You know, we're, we're still spending on media brand is so important. You know, being out there in the marketplace is so important. But you know, at the end of the day, if I have a question or if one of our owners has a question, they're gonna ask the magical Google search bar and we want to make sure that we're there, that we're coming up both organically, you know, and in, in PPC.

Kathleen (27:17): You mentioned when we were talking earlier that when you first joined almost all of the inbound traffic to the website was coming through branded search, correct?

Lindsay (27:25): Yeah. 95% of our inbound, our, of our website traffic was branded search. So somebody's physically typing in the word e-Builder,

Kathleen (27:36): An incredible testament to the value of your brand.

Lindsay (27:41): When we look at our search appearances let's see, July is up 66%. Non-branded.

Kathleen (27:53): That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, kudos to you. My hat goes off to you.

Lindsay (27:59): It's not me. It's, it's such a huge team effort. And, you know, if we didn't have product marketing and the, the rock stars that we have on that team, helping us drive the message the right way you know, demand gen needs that we, you know, we're not the stewards of all of the information and knowledge like these guys are so good at helping us craft the right message, put the right thing out in market and just knowing what to do with it, watching the numbers and, you know, working from there.

Kathleen (28:26): So what do you think if you had to narrow it down to three or fewer key things that were the drivers of your success with, since you've joined the company, like in, in, in achieving what we just talked about, what do you think those three things would be?

Lindsay (28:41): Oh, well, the first, the very first thing is, I mean, it might be a standard answer a lot of people give, but it's, it's teamwork. You can't do this by yourself. You need all of these people to, to be bought into the process. So I would say that I would also say another key success metric is vulnerability. You know, you really have to be vulnerable with with some of the folks who you're, you're working with to help them understand, you know, this should work. I'm not going to promise you that it will. This has worked for us in, in different industries that we worked in. But I had to be really vulnerable with them to, to say this, this industry is new for me, that we could go in on this and it could flop. And they were like, okay, well, let's take the ride. So I think that was, was another, another big one. And I think trust, you know, I mean really like my manager, me and my team trusted me. And if they didn't, if they, if they weren't along for the ride, if they weren't bought in it, it would not have been so successful. You can't push a boulder up hill for that long.

Kathleen (29:54): The other thing I'd want to ask is you talked about collaboration and teamwork, and I feel like people use that word sometimes and everybody kind of tunes it out cause it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, teamwork. But I mean, I live this all the time, you know, we're, and we're not as big a company as you are, but having to collaborate between products and engineering and customer success and sales and marketing everybody, I think, does it differently, I'm curious, like how do you achieve that collaboration? And like, if you could be specific, like, is there a certain cadence of meetings or, you know, cause I think when it comes to teamwork and collaboration, it's very easy to err on the side of like death by meetings and talking too much and not getting stuff done. But then it's also easy to air on the other side of just like, screw it. I'm going to go do it all in my son, my own and I'm going to get it done, but then you're not, you know, you're not being collaborative. So what is your, how do you balance that?

Lindsay (30:48): That's a really great question, Kathleen. I have a cadence where I have a, a full hour team meeting every week and beginning of the week. I have one-on-ones religiously with every person every week for 30 minutes. And they, and I've encouraged some of my leaders to go out and I'm like, well, collaborate with so-and-so or collaborate here, see what you guys can figure out. Now they do it all the time. So I'm not in a million meetings anymore because they take it and they come back with a strategy. They work together. So that was a big part of it. I think the other really big part is just across all of Trimble. Different groups are starting to come together. We have like a little brain trust. That's all content people. We have a little brain trust. It's all demand gen people and we share and we share and we get ideas. And then my team gets excited because they learn something or they share something and there's so much positive feedback. So those are really big values. You know, for not only myself, but for the whole company is to foster that kind of collaboration as, as far and wide as we possibly can. And I love it. Oh my God. I love it.

Kathleen (32:02): Do you have any like set recurring meetings with other teams within the company? Like, do you have a meeting with your sales team or your customer success team or anything like that?

Lindsay (32:14): Right now I'm, I'm, we're working on getting better. Cause you know, as marketers, we, we do death by meeting. I'm getting better at meeting more with my BDRs meeting with the BDR leader. And so next quarter I've made a promise. I stayed there like they just promised two days ago. I said, next quarter, I'm going to make sure that every month both of our teams are sitting down and we're talking through this it's kind of like, you know, you're, I'm trying to chunk it out cause it doesn't get that.

Kathleen (32:41): I feel like I'm a professional meeting, goer. All I do is go to meetings.

Lindsay (32:45): It is, it's like, oh, it's back to back and back to back. And you know, and I often laugh because sometimes I have to take the laptop I'm in my shed, which is, you know, across the way from my house. And I see if had a bathroom in here, it'd be much more convenient. But you know, my husband will see me on the ring, the ring system, walking across the yard on a call with my laptop. Cause I just don't have time in between meetings. And I'm like, if this meeting's about to end then I'll have 30 seconds.

Kathleen (33:12): Yeah. It's, it's hard. It's hard. I mean, I love your story. I love that you have been able to affect the results you have in the amount of time you have that's so, so impressive, especially cause it's easy to do something like that. If you come in to a startup like I'm in, because you're nobody nobody's been doing marketing before, but it's, it's really especially impressive to come into a company like yours, where you have an existing marketing team and to achieve that level of results in a short amount of time. So again, kudos. All right. We're going to shift gears because otherwise we're going to run out of time and we could talk forever. I, I know we could. But I always ask my guests two questions and, and I want to make sure we squeezed them in here. The first being you know, the challenge I hear from most marketers is that it's what we've been talking about. Like doing, doing it all. How do you do it all? And one of the things that often falls by the wayside is like continuous education and staying on top of everything that's happening in the world of marketing. So I'm curious, how do you do that? How do you continue to educate yourself? And do you have certain sources of information that you rely on to keep yourself up?

Lindsay (34:18): Oh yeah. No, there's so many, first of all my team and I were about to do a, an exercise in values and one of my core values that I shared with them was education. We do a quick 10 minutes of what did you learn last week? Every single meeting. But I love digesting Chris Penn's Almost Timely News.

Kathleen (34:40): I love him.

Lindsay (34:42): Love him. And he's a, he's a Baltimore guys and Maryland guy like us. But I, his stuff is absolutely phenomenal. So I, I do a lot of that. And then I do a lot of books on tape, like just listening to things. I mean, in right now I'm trying to focus a lot on, you know, leadership qualities and capabilities. Cause I'm now leading leaders. So, you know, I'm trying to make them the best leaders that they can be. So I'm really digesting a lot of Brenee Brown right now. It's just, there's, there's so many different sources that, that I love. Chief MarTech. Scott, Brinker. Love his stuff. Keeping up with the technologies that are out there and the processes that you put in place for those. So those are some of my top ones right there.

Kathleen (35:28): Those are some good ones. And I love the Christopher Penn shout out. He was a guest at one point. He was my last interview of the year, I want to say two years ago. He closed out, maybe it was 2019. I'll have to look but great guy. Great guy and super smart. All right. Second question. Along these lines. Of course this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual right now that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to setting the bar for being a great inbound marketer?

Lindsay (35:59): Oh my gosh. I always go back to this and I can't help myself, but myself and my team, we just read and we just devour everything that HubSpot puts out. And you know, even though we don't use HubSpot internally, their methodology and you know, what they're doing is just spot on. But lately one that's been taking over HubSpot for me is Drift. Nick Sal has really done a lot for that company along the lines of education, certification teachings and trainings that he's putting into place there. And I'm loving them. I'm digesting them like candy. It's amazing.

Kathleen (36:40): Because people who are listening probably don't know, but Nick Sal is a former colleague of mine. We worked together for two years, one of my favorite human beings on the planet other than Lindsay Kelley. Of course. So now I'm gonna, I, it's funny, I don't know if I've interviewed Nick Sal, so maybe he's going to be my next guy, but you're right. He's amazing. He was in HubSpot for many years was like one of their leading HubSpot Academy professors, you know, and now he's back in, in a role that really allows him to show his incredible skills at Drift and another amazing Boston-based company. So love that name.

Lindsay (37:19): Yeah. Yeah. Really, really great stuff. I highly recommend checking it out. It's not just like conversational marketing sales. They have events certification for virtual events and it's, there's just so many nuggets of wisdom in their Insider's club. It's absolutely phenomenal and it's free to join the insiders club.

Kathleen (37:37): That's so great. Okay. I'm definitely gonna gonna go do that after this. Lindsay, if somebody wants to learn more about what you've talked about and connect with you online, or ask you a question, what is the best way for them to do that?

Lindsay (37:50): Definitely LinkedIn. And I am the super easy one, linkedin.com/Lindsay Kelley. So I'm there. I'm listed as a Trimble employee and I would love to love to connect.

Kathleen (38:06): Great. And I will put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So had there, if you want to connect with Lindsay and if you're listening to this episode and you liked it or you'll learn something new, which I hope you did, I certainly did. Please take a moment and go to apple podcasts and leave the podcast or review. That's how people find us. That's how we acquire new listeners. It would mean so much, especially if you're a loyal listener. Who's been listening to the podcast for a long time. So head there and leave a review. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork and I would love to have them be my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Lindsay.

Lindsay (38:49): This was a ton of fun. Thanks for having me.

Pricing a new product or service is one of the biggest challenges you may take on as a marketer. What do you need to know before embarking on a pricing exercise?

This week on the Inbound Success podcast, podcast host and clean.io CMO Kathleen Booth talks about pricing. From who should be involved in determining pricing, to what type of research you'll need to do, choosing a pricing survey methodology, and evaluating different pricing structures, she goes into detail on how to conduct a pricing exercise and what you should expect once you nail down initial pricing.

There's plenty of actionable advice included in this episode, but if you want access to Kathleen's full swipe file on pricing (including sample presentation decks for customer research calls), all you need to do is Tweet her or send a LinkedIn DM and she'll give you full access.

Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the clean.io website
• Connect with Kathleen on LinkedIn
• Follow Kathleen on Twitter

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, it's a little bit of a special episode because I don't have a guest. We are over 200 episodes into the podcast and I generally try to really shine the spotlight on other marketers who are doing, you know, outstanding marketing work and learn from them. I mean, I learned so much when I interview them and I figure if I'm learning then, so are you well, this week it occurred to me that there's something I've been working on, that when I set out to do it, I really didn't know anything about, and I didn't have any good resources that told me how to do it. And so I thought today I could be my own guest and share with you the experience I had specifically with pricing. So some of you may or may not have been responsible for pricing in your career.

Kathleen (01:08): It's one of those things as a marketer, that when you are given ownership of it, it can be very intimidating because pricing is something that goes out to the world. It has a direct and immediate impact on the attractiveness of the product, the likelihood of people to convert, how you're positioned competitively, as well as how much revenue you bring in. So knowing how to price is such a valuable tool to have in your marketing tool set. And yes, marketers are, you know, people who should have some responsibility for pricing. Very often though, I will start by saying that, you know, very often in companies pricing is a committee exercise. It's something that more than one person within the company does. And so I would suggest that whether you're given ownership for pricing or your company's talking about pricing, step number one is to form a pricing committee and who, who is on that will depend on how your company is structured.

Kathleen (02:07): But certainly if you have anyone that owns product marketing, they should definitely be involved if not be in the lead position, but you would want to have somebody from, you know, product slash engineering, somebody from sales, certainly. And you know, you can, you can add other people to that committee as need be perhaps customer success, if you have people in those roles. But the whole idea is to get cross-functional people on the committee so that you get all of the different perspectives on how pricing could impact not only customer acquisition, but retention and also the sales perspective as to how it affects your ability to position yourself competitively. So the first thing is to form a pricing committee. And once that committee is formed, really the next step in a pricing exercise is research. And that really starts with what I guess would call economic value analysis.

Kathleen (03:03): That's sort of a fancy term, but the bottom line is you want to study the economic impact that your product has on the customer. You know, are they saving money with it? Are they saving time? And does that translate into money? How does it affect their sales velocity, et cetera. Now, some products won't have a direct financial impact, but the whole idea of this exercise economic value analysis is to begin to quantify whether there's any sort of an economic impact that the product has on the end customer. And there are a variety of ways to do that. You know, if you do, in my case, I was pricing out a SaaS product that actually did have a direct economic impact. So it, it held the potential to save money by reducing the incidents of sales that were affected by discounts or promotions.

Kathleen (03:58): And so we had a variety of market research tools we use to figure out like, what percentage of sales would this affect, how large are those sales? If we're able to prevent promotions from being activated in this case at checkout, what, what size of promotion are we talking about? Like, is this a 5% off, a 10% off, et cetera. So these dynamics are going to be different for every company, but really understanding what that impact might be is, is crucial. And then looking at industry benchmarks for pricing. So in our, in my case, as I said, this was SaaS pricing. In some industries it's easier to find competitor pricing than others. You know, if I used to own a marketing agency and at that time, so many agencies were posting their pricing on their websites. So it was very easy to, to benchmark and to figure out like what the market was willing to tolerate for SaaS.

Kathleen (04:56): So I turned to open view partners and their mastering SaaS pricing research to understand industry benchmarks around average revenue per customer, by customer target segment. And that was really helpful for me, as I began to think about how I might segment our customers. And then, you know, I also looked at a competitive analysis. So what were other companies in our space charging? What, not just how much were they charging, but what was the structure of their actual pricing? So this is where you definitely need to, as a marketer have already done your research. And usually let's face it usually with pricing, you're talking about a new product. So at this point you have to have already done your research and really settled on who is the audience that we're targeting, who is the, and what other, in this case, software products are they buying?

Kathleen (05:51): So whether you have a direct competitor or not, you know, what are the other players in the space and are they structuring their pricing? So that would be what I would call a peer cohort, right? You identify your peer cohort of SaaS solutions and then figure out what they're charging. So in my case, I looked at a number of different companies that sell products that affect checkout for e-commerce stores, because that was what we were really selling into and looked at the structure of their pricing. So in some cases, these companies were charging a fixed monthly fee plus a variable fee. For example, it might be a percentage of the customer's revenue. So like if you are selling something into checkout, presumably your product affects e-commerce revenue. So the, a lot of these companies had a variable amount that would scale as customer revenue scaled.

Kathleen (06:46): In other cases, there was a fixed fee plus a fee that had to do with the number of orders processed. So there's a lot of different ways to do it. Some companies only charged a fixed fee, some only charged a variable fee, but the more I dug dug into it, the more you started to get a sense for the actual pricing structures that these companies were using, how they were developing different customer segments, how that pricing scaled whether it was annual or monthly, et cetera. So there's a lot in there that's really important to understand so that you can figure out, first of all, why is pricing structured that way? Is it because that's what, you know, the customer set is used to seeing is that what they're comfortable buying because if that's the case, then having a pricing structure that's dramatically different than what they're comfortable with is going to introduce friction in the process, which is not to say that you can't do it, but it's something that you need to factor in when you're thinking about your pricing structure.

Kathleen (07:45): The other thing you have to look at once you've done that competitive analysis is really how do we want to structure our pricing? And so there are a variety of common pricing structures, there's usage based pricing, which aligns really closely to the value that a customer receives from the product and enables you to fully monetize customers who use the product more. So, you know, there are, there are plenty of examples out there on usage based pricing you know, everything from I do rent the runway and the more I do a monthly subscription and the more items I want to include in my monthly shipments, the more I'm going to pay, right? That's an example of something that I guess you could call it SaaS, but it's really sort of a, more of a subscription model. Volume pricing is a little different that gives one defined price for all items purchased with the price per item, determined by the total quantity purchased, meaning put simply quantity discounts, volume discounts.

Kathleen (08:52): So the more you're getting the less you're paying very common when you're buying hard goods, especially if you're buying them wholesale. For example you see that in a lot of different in a lot of different industries, then there's tiered pricing, which allows companies to offer multiple packages with different combinations of featured features offered at different price points. That's really common in SaaS. We see that all the time, you know, there's your silver, your gold, or your platinum package, or, you know, it used to be a HubSpot partner and they had basic professional and enterprise and the feature sets differed pretty dramatically based on what was included. And then there is value based pricing, which uses the perceived value of the product as a benchmark for price setting. And based on the rule of thumb that I saw generally, you want the value that the product provides to be at least 10 X the price.

Kathleen (09:52): So, you know, and I mentioned, I had a marketing agency earlier. That's an industry where I think you do sometimes find value based pricing, for example when you hire agencies to do rebrands or big strategy projects those are not often like time and materials contracts. There's a perceived value for brand work for strategy work that is very high compared to more commodity type services. Like for example, Hey, we'll write your blog for you. There's usually a fixed price for that. And it is somewhat commoditized and, and therefore you can charge as high of a margin. So usage based pricing, volume pricing, tiered pricing, and value based pricing. You really need to start to narrow down from your research, what pricing structure you want to go with before you can get to the next stage in the pricing process. So everything I've described so far, just to recap, it's all background research, it's all information that's publicly available, whether that's what competitors are charging based on information from their websites, or whether that is research into, you know, what buyers can tolerate as far as pricing or whether that is you know, economic value analysis and what you think you'll be able to state as claims to your customer, that the product will have as an impact on their life.

Kathleen (11:18): All of this research goes into then helping you narrow down, what do I think my price structure should be? And what incentives or disincentives will that provide the customer once you get there, once you are at the point where, you know, what you think you want that structure to be? In my case, it was a fixed monthly fee plus a variable fee that was based on the number of orders, the customer processed every month, because we were present at checkout. And so we felt that that would enable our pricing to scale with the customer, larger customers that processed a high volume of orders could pay more than customers who processed a lower volume of orders, but it would also allow us to peg that fee in a way that as the pricing scaled, it would, can keep a degree of consistency in terms of how it affected their revenue and their margins.

Kathleen (12:14): So they could budget really easily for it. So that's what we settled on in my case, once you think you have your pricing structure and your pricing committee is all in agreement about this, because let's be honest, if you have a committee, that's really what it's about at this stage is consensus building. Then you want to enter into the next phase of market research, which is actually speaking to potential customers. And in our case, we decided to onboard free beta customers before we did our pricing research, so that we would have at least 10 to 15 users who were experiencing our product and could speak to the value it was delivering. And so we did our customer research with our beta users. I got an, they weren't paying anything prior to this and these customer research interviews, they take 30 minutes or less.

Kathleen (13:10): They're really pretty quick. And I had, I got some great feedback from other SaaS marketing leaders. I know who shared with me really fantastic examples of presentation decks to use for these calls. And if you're somebody out there who's going to be charged with doing pricing, and you want an example of a deck like this, tweet me at work, mommy work, and I can DM you and get you a link to a template for this. It saved me a ton of time. And let me just tell you, it worked incredibly well, but the basic structure that we used for these 30 minute customer conversations was the following. So I would let them know in advance that I was going to be asking them questions about the product and about pricing. And I made sure I had the right people on the phone. So people involved in, in making decisions about purchasing the product and about using the product.

Kathleen (14:03): And then I had my deck ready. And I started out with just a quick overview of the, kind of the rules of the conversation. So like, I really want your feedback. I need you to be honest, there are no wrong answers, et cetera. It's really important to do that table settings so that people aren't trying to be polite. If they have negative feedback, you need to really encourage them to be completely candid. Then I would go into a recap of what the product did. And I'm sorry, before that, then I would actually ask everybody on the phone, what their role was with the product. So are you involved in making purchasing decisions? Are you involved in using it? Who else that's not on this call is involved or would need to be consulted just so that I could get a sense of, you know, who the players were on their side and what that customer journey might be like leading to a purchase.

Kathleen (14:53): Then I went into background description on the, on the product, even though they're already using it, everybody uses it differently within a company. And so I wanted to level set and go in with a shared definition of what the product was just in terms of functionality. Then I made a list of, from all of the conversations I had had prior to this and all of my research, as well as all of my assumptions, I made a list of what I thought the pain points were that the customer might be experiencing, that our product could address. And in my case, I kind of was able to sum those up into six distinct pain points. And I, I framed those as first person statements. So an example would be I feel like I can't trust my attribution reporting for my affiliate marketing program. And I put those in quotes.

Kathleen (15:47): So it's like, it's like a statement coming out of a customer's mouth. I had six of them, each of those six hit on very different pain points. And then with the group on the phone, I had those pain points listed out in a table on a slide. So I had a slide deck that I took everybody through. And the first the first slide I showed them on the pain points, had the list of the pain points. And then it had a second column. And I asked everybody on the phone to force rank the pain points, one through five, one being the most painful five being the least and just put them in order. And they all had to agree. So they went through a conversation, they agreed, I made notes on the screen so they could see it as they were talking. And we came up with a rank choice, a list of pain points.

Kathleen (16:35): And in order from worst least, you know, at least effecting, okay, then this is where it got really interesting that tells you like, w you know, in what order do they prioritize the pain points, but it doesn't tell you like how much more painful is one of those things than the next. So the next slide was the exact same list of pain points. But this time, instead of saying rank them one through five, I said, okay, I'm going to give you a hundred dollars to spend to solve the pain. And I want you to tell me based on how painful each of these five things is, how would you allocate that $100 across these five pain points in order to solve them? And what was fascinating about that is in many cases, like the pain point that they had previously ranked number one, they would say, you know, we want to put $95 on that.

Kathleen (17:31): And then $1 on each of the other ones, like that's how much more painful it is. That's so, so, so telling in terms of, you know, giving you the information you'll need later to hit on in your marketing, but also to understanding that when you do your pricing, your pricing needs to speak to how, how the price correlates with the value the product will deliver and solving that pain that they're saying they really want to get rid of. And so, in my case, what I learned when I, when I summed up all of these kind of dollar based questions, like the, the more qualitative questions around pain, I learned that there were two themes that really emerged that our customers felt very keenly. The first is the need to take back control over something that they weren't able to control previously. And the second was to increase their profit margins.

Kathleen (18:28): And so immediately we knew those were the two themes we had to hit on in our pricing and in our marketing messaging then, so still on the same call, we did the exact same exercise, but we did it for product benefits. So it's kind of the other side of the same coin. Like I listed out the pain points. And then on the other, this new slide I listed out here are the benefits that I think our product will deliver. So examples of those were re retain more revenue from your sales, in other words, increase your profit margins. Now one was, get better insights into how customers are using your coupon codes. Another one was improve the accuracy of your attribution reporting. So there were five or six different benefits that we listed out. And I went through the same exercise. So the first slide where I asked them to rank to force rank one through five, the benefits, one being the one that was most important to them, five being the least, and then the same exercise where I asked them to put the dollars behind getting those benefits and the same thing, funny enough happened again, there was one benefit that like leaped out far and away above the others, and it had to do with revenue retention or incremental gains in profit margins.

Kathleen (19:39): So that was really interesting. And it was a really fun exercise to go through. The, what I would say is that at, at the after that, then in that conversation in those customer interviews, I went into, this is going to be a bunch of big words, a simulated van Westendorp price, sensitivity analysis. So I'm going to pause here and explain what I mean by that. There are a lot of, not a lot. There are a few various, very common well-known methodologies, very scientific methodologies that you can use to conduct a pricing survey. And at some point, if you're doing pricing, particularly if it's SaaS pricing, you're probably going to need to do a survey. And I knew that, that we were going to eventually get there. We happened to wind up using Qualtrics for this because they were able to supply us with a really good audience.

Kathleen (20:34): And after all the research I did, I settled on this methodology called van Westendorp. And I liked this methodology because it's really simple and straightforward and quick in the sense that it gives you a very clear picture of exactly what your price should be. So the reason for that, and the way van Westendorp works is this, it is really just four questions. The first question is at what price would you consider the product or service to be priced so low that you feel that the quality can't be very good. That's the question. Number one, and effectively that sets the absolute rock bottom floor for pricing question, number two is at what price would you consider the product or service to be a bargain, a great buy for the money. So still kind of honing in on the lower end of the pricing scale, but like in a way where it becomes very attractive and would incentivize someone to buy it because they're thinking I'm getting a deal question.

Kathleen (21:36): Number three is at what price would you say this product or service is starting to get expensive? It's not out of the question, but you'd have to give some thought to buying it. So this starts to get into the upper end of the pricing band, where if you do price something at this level, it, it would begin to introduce some friction. People might question whether something was worth it. Question number four, the last question is at what price would you consider the product or service to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it? So questions one and four are the absolute lowest and the absolute highest you could possibly ever charge and questions. Two and three are the ones that are meant to really hone in, in that middle area, which puts simply as like your pricing sweet spot. So I knew I was going to do this survey through Qualtrics.

Kathleen (22:29): But I decided to verbally ask these questions in my customer research interviews. And the reason is that when you do an actual survey, you need to have a sense for like, what scale are you giving, letting people answer on your, it's not an infinite scale. You're not saying like on a scale of zero to 3 trillion, right? Like you need to know we're talking about between a hundred and a thousand dollars a month, or, you know, 5,000 and $20,000 a month, whatever whatever's appropriate for you, but you need to know where to set the floor and the ceiling. And that's where I think questions, number one and four can really help. If you ask them verbally in customer interviews, they will help you understand where to set that scale so that when you develop your survey, whether you're using Qualtrics or some other product like survey monkey, you'll have a good starting point for that.

Kathleen (23:20): So I did ask those questions, got some really great answers. And I was able to kind of like put that together into an analysis in order to come up with like, Hey, we need to be within this range. We know that based on these conversations and the other great thing about the customer interviews is you can ask why. So I had some people say a certain, you know, upper limit for pricing. And then they explained like, Hey, the reason I said this upper limit is that that's similar to what we pay for this other tool. And every single person in our company uses this other tool, but with your tool, we think only one department would use it. And so paying more for a tool that only one department would use would be much harder, you know, in comparison. So that was just fascinating.

Kathleen (24:05): It was really interesting to understand the why behind some of the answers. And so if you do these customer research interviews and you get some of these pricing answers, I encourage you to dig in and ask why that's where the gold is. So then lastly, I also, in these interviews showed customers a loose product roadmap. I, I shared with them over the next nine months. You know, these are 10 to 12 features that we're thinking of introducing to the product. If you could choose only three of them as being most important to you, which three would you choose. And that was also a really interesting exercise. It helped me understand, like, you know, what really do customers want out of this product? Where do they want to see it go? And then even more importantly, I asked, what's not on here. That should be so interesting.

Kathleen (24:54): You know, not on here in terms of product features, product roadmap items. It was so interesting because almost everybody answered the same thing. Like we had missed. We had missed a thing that in hindsight seems so glaringly obvious, but we never would have caught it where it not for that question. And so that was incredibly valuable, even just on top of the pricing insight we got. So that really kind of sums up the pricing interviews with customers. I think the last thing you do in those meetings is you give them an open forum. Hey, any other feedback you have for me? Any questions you have, anything you think I should know, it's just a wonderful opportunity for some back and forth for you to understand, you know, what's happening with your customers, how they're experiencing your product, what their pain points are, what they love, what they hate, et cetera.

Kathleen (25:41): I did I think it was between five and 10 of those 30 minute interviews. And that gave me a really nice small data set, but a consistent data set. The feedback I got was consistent, which was really helpful going into structuring the actual van Westendorp survey. So in this case we settled on what was called a sort of a three part tariff, which is like a combination of a fixed fee plus a variable fee every month. But it also included a base amount of let's call it usage in the fixed fee. So if they exceeded that there might be an overage charge and there are a variety of reasons for that. Partly, you know, we felt that the fixed fee component should be value-based because we wanted it to convey the premium nature of our product. We wanted the variable fee to be based on a volume metric so that it would scale with customers and, and they would as though it was worth it to continue paying for the product as they grew.

Kathleen (26:49): And we wanted pricing to incorporate elements of a tiered approach by providing customers and higher price brackets with premium feature sets. So it could be more support or other value added features like enhanced reporting, things like that. That was, that was what we went in thinking three-part tariff. So then, then we needed to segment our customers. And you know, we, again, this is where your competitive research can really come in handy. But we, we decided to segment them based on order volume, you know, the number of orders they process every month, which was sort of a proxy for revenue, which is also kind of a proxy for, you know, stage of growth, if you will. And we, we did a lot of research using, you know, publicly available kind of database information on how many companies in our addressable market fell into each of those price buckets so that we could see like do these pricing segment sizes make sense.

Kathleen (27:53): And a lot of that information you'll find whatever industry you're in. It's very publicly available with all of that. Then we went out and did the survey, and of course the survey was those four basic van Westendorp questions that I explained earlier, but then it also had other questions I threw in because I simply wanted to know the answers to them. So I wanted to be able to segment people's answers based on their company size and some other demographic criteria. So I asked them for how many orders they processed every month, that would give me a sense of which of our customer segments they would fall into. I asked what their job title was, what their job function was, or are they marketing? Are they finance? Are they sales, et cetera. And all of those questions super helpful. Then I asked them a few other questions that had to do with whether they were a good fit for our product, but in any case, we got the results back.

Kathleen (28:49): And I think we, I want to say it was, it was, you know, thousands of answers which was really helpful and we processed it and what's great is on the internet. There are actually Excel spreadsheet templates that you can download that do van Westendorp analysis for you, and they will show you where your pricing sweet spot is. So as a result of this, we literally knew exactly where we needed to land with pricing. And then it was just a matter of assigning that pricing based on customer tier and coming up with our feature sets for each customer tier so that they felt differentiated. Sort of the last question we had to answer was, should this be a monthly subscription or an annual one? And we started out with it as a monthly subscription, because that seemed to be what was most in our marketplace.

Kathleen (29:43): I'll get in a minute to why we've changed that in what we're playing with, but we felt like monthly would help to, you know, help us focus on new customer acquisition, which is what we were optimizing for at that moment. Versus, you know, later down the line, when maybe you're optimizing for reduced churn, when annual contracts can be really attractive. So there are a lot of different considerations there, but I think you need to look at what is your competitive set doing? What is the customer going to expect? And you know, honestly, like what can you get away with? Like, I know a lot of VCs like to see annual contracts because there's more revenue predictability. And especially if you're going out to raise another round of venture capital funding, that might be really important to your business. So sometimes it has nothing to do with the customer.

Kathleen (30:30): And it has a lot to do with like positioning yourself as an investment target. Now that has to be balanced with customer needs because you can't, you can't structure pricing fully in favor of investors in a way that would harm your ability to acquire customers, but they're, they're all things to consider. So we made that decision and then honestly, you know, when you, once you've kind of quote unquote, settled on pricing, the most important thing to understand is it's going to change, right? You will have gone through this massive exercise and feel like you've accomplished so much. And you know, you pat yourself on the back and you go to market with pricing, and then you're immediately going to start to get impact from the market, right? As soon as you start to try to sell, and you begin talking about pricing with people, they're either going to love it, or they're not.

Kathleen (31:15): In our case, we went, you know, we knew we were going to need to change it, but we wound up changing it much more quickly than we thought we started getting immediate feedback that people either didn't understand the pricing or it wasn't exactly what they would prefer. And so we did adjust not so much the amount of the pricing, but how we were determining our variable fee. I think it started out as a percentage of revenue, the customers revenue, and we switched it to being a percentage of their monthly orders or based on a percentage of their monthly orders. It just was a metric that they could wrap their head around more easily. So, you know, your feedback could be different. Somebody might say that's too expensive or that's, you know, that seems really cheap. Is it really worth it? Is it good?

Kathleen (31:56): Is it any good? You, that's why a pricing committee is so important and that's why it's so important to have multidisciplinary people on your pricing committee so that you start in the beginning, you meet once a week after you launch your pricing, you meet once a week and you get sales feedback immediately. What are you hearing in the market? What are people saying on your sales calls? And as soon as you start to see consistent patterns, a feedback, that's when you can test different variations to pricing. This was one reason we did not publish our pricing on our website in the very beginning, because we wanted to retain the ability to test different pricing models in our sales conversations. In general, I'm a huge fan of published pricing, but this is a great reason why in certain cases you might not want to do it.

Kathleen (32:43): So in the beginning, test those different pricing levels, structures, et cetera, get it to the point where you're really happy with it and you feel comfortable with it, and then you can always publish it and, and then you can still adjust it once it's published. It's still easy to do. It's just that you can do it much more quickly and nimbly in the beginning if it's not published. So that is a, a very quick overview of how I approached pricing. I have a huge swipe file on this, including, like I said, sample customer, interview decks and links to articles on van Westendorp, pricing methodologies. I'm happy to share all of it. You know, when I first started this podcast, it was all about helping people learn how to get better results from their marketing in a way that was really actionable. Nothing drove me nuts.

Kathleen (33:35): Drive drives me nuts more than going to a conference, sitting through a session that's supposed to be educational and coming out and feeling like somebody talked all about why to do something like in this case, it would have been like why to do pricing. Or why do you use the van Westendorp method and not how to do it? Like how is so important? We're all under tremendous time pressure. We all need to produce results. So we all need to know how to do things. So I hope that this was helpful to you. And if you do think that my swipe file could be valuable, like I said, tweet tweet me at work, mommy work. Or if you're not on Twitter, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. And I will share all of my resources with you. And hopefully then if, and or when you are made responsible for pricing, you'll have an easier time of it than I did when I first set out to learn how to do this.

Kathleen (34:26): But it was a great exercise to go through and, and I'm grateful I had the opportunity to do it, and it made me understand so much more about our customers than I otherwise would have those customer interviews were invaluable. So with that I will just segue and say that, you know, the podcast is slightly over 200 episodes. Now it's been going for four years, which I can hardly believe when I really think about it. And we're at the point where I need your feedback. I want to keep going. I learned so much from my guests, but I want to do it in a way that provides value to you. So whether you're a longtime listener or somebody listening for the first time, I would really be grateful if you would just take a moment. And again, either tweet me or DM me on LinkedIn or email me if you have my email address and do two things.

Kathleen (35:21): Number one, tell me what it is you love. And don't love about the podcast in its current format. And to send me the name of somebody you think would make a great gas too. I have not yet interviewed let's figure out who the next kind of chapter of great marketers are in the history of the inbound success podcast, and let's do it together. So with that, thank you so much for listening. I, you, the fact that you dedicate, you know, 30 to 60 minutes of your week listening to this podcast, it means so much to me and I truly hope I'm delivering value to you. Have a great week. Thanks for listening. Leave a review. If you haven't done so already and tweet me at work, mommy, work. If you know somebody else who's doing kick marketing, cause I would love to make them my next guest. Thanks for joining me.

What happens when you take on a new role as CMO and develop a new marketing strategy, only to have a pandemic hit just months later?

This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Planful CMO Rowan Tonkin talks about his experience since taking on the role of head of marketing at Planful. It all started with a complete rebrand (including a company name change) that was rolled out at a company meeting in January 2020, just prior to the onset of COVID.

Rowan explains how a focus on the customer, and their needs and pain points, helped his team determine how and when to shift their marketing strategy, and he talks about what it means to create a new category (including why it's so important that your competitors embrace it). 

Planful's ability to remain nimble and adapt to their customers' changing needs helped fuel significant increases in pipeline and revenue, much of which was driven by organic and branded search.

Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Planful website
• Connect with Rowan on LinkedIn
• Follow Rowan on Twitter

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Rowan Tonkin, who is the CMO or chief marketing officer at Planful. Welcome to the podcast, Rowan.

Rowan (00:27): Thanks Kathleen for having me. Really excited to be here. I've listened to lots of episodes of inbound, and I'm really glad that I can, I can actually be on the show.

Kathleen (00:35): I'm really excited to have you here. I think you have such an interesting story, especially in the last few years, and I can't wait to dig into it for listeners. Before we do that, maybe take a moment, introduce yourself, tell us who you are and your background, and also what Planful is.

Rowan (00:52): So firstly, you may notice from my accent, I'm not American. I grew up in Australia in a little place called Woolongong, which is about an hour south of Sydney. And I actually started my career in, in technology in Australia, working in customer support for a marketing company back then we would provide services to agencies and white goods and brown goods manufacturers to basically get the best images for, for, for catalogs, right, for, for the things that we all receive in our, in our letterbox. And and that turned into a MRM space where I worked in pre-sales. So for those that are familiar with MRM, it's kind of like the old Asana and Monday.com and helping marketers do all that project management, budget management, things like that. I moved to London for 10 years selling MRM software, working with lots of marketers over there.

Rowan (01:44): My role was increased sales and customer success and doing actually implementation work as well. And I managed to convince myself that product marketing was actually where I had most fun. So I joined product marketing and and have been in the marketing space ever since. I'm now at, at Planful. Planful is a financial planning and analysis platform for finance and accounting professionals. We basically help finance professionals basically become super agile in the way that they work by getting them out of spreadsheets and getting them into a connected and collaborative platform. And you know, my background in marketing planning, if you will, helping marketers manage their budgets has kind of translated into me telling the stories of, of those finance professionals and how they do their work for, for all of us. Right. If you think about the team of finance you know, there's the accounting team that are recording everything that happened and there's fantastic FP and A teams that are kind of helping us trying to figure out what will happen in future.

Kathleen (02:47): Yeah. And speaking of what has happened and what will happen, you joined the company, was it in 2019? Is that right?

Rowan (02:54): In September of 2019. Yeah.

Kathleen (02:56): Yeah. So, you know, at interesting time and I know that you came on board and there was a lot of change already happening in the company. And you proceeded to, to make some really significant changes on the marketing side, and this is all happening, like on the eve of COVID, it's crazy. I say 2019 and that feels like a really long time ago, but, but it really wasn't and a lot has happened since then. So let's actually rewind the clock and start when you came in and, and what was, what were you setting out to do and what was the scenario when you joined?

Rowan (03:31): Yeah, sure. So Planful had been actually called Host Analytics before that. And many of your listeners may know of Host Analytics. And we were acquired by a private equity firm in December of 2018 and they went on the search to to find a new CEO and they found someone that I'd worked with before. Grant Halloran. And Grant joined as CEO, I believe like 1st of July or something like that. And in 2019, 3 months later, he brings me in and had devised a lot of the strategy. And the strategy that we were going to to execute upon was to really focus on segments specific segments. So what we call the lower mid-market and the upper mid market and selectively play in the enterprise, right. And, and traditionally, you know, Host played across all of those segments. So we really wanted to focus.

Rowan (04:24): The second thing that we wanted to do was reposition the company. The world of FP and A, and the space that we play in has a category definition called enterprise performance management or, or corporate performance management. The funny thing is only analysts talk about that. Buyers don't call it. They call it FP and A software or planning, budgeting, and forecasting. They don't, they don't call it CPM or EPM. And so and then unfortunately for Host Analytics created by Jim Eblen back in 2001, the word Host and Analytics has changed a lot in that time. Right. And so really important to us that as we repositioned, we decided to change the company name. And when you think about doing that, that's a really intense exercise. So we decided to just put the guard rail of let's do it in 12 weeks.

Kathleen (05:17): Ripping the bandaid off.

Rowan (05:20): Correct. Yeah. And, and so actually we did that at our company kickoff. We everyone walked into the company kickoff in January at San Diego all of the swag. Yeah. And, and everything was branded Host Analytics. Everyone got their gifts as Host Analytics in the keynote, we dropped the big reveal, switched to Planful and all the signage and everything had been changed outside the room. And everyone had new swag bags and everything like that. And at the time we, we repositioned the company to, from, from enterprise performance management to what we continuous planning. And that's now the kind of category that we, we have tried to define if you will. Now as you do that, you want to create new campaigns and new things to go to market with. And we did a lot of that and continuous planning sounds great now, after everyone's been planning for the last 18 months, but back then it was a new concept.

Rowan (06:20): And we were trying to evangelize that concept and created lots of great top of funnel campaigns, ready to launch posts. That event had them live for six weeks and then the pandemic hits. And we're sitting there with this fantastic campaign that was beautiful for the moment. Beautiful for the time, very positive, very uplifting, very empowering for our audience. But as soon as the pandemic hit, that's not what they want to hear. Then like they're in, we call it the ambush they're in the ambush mode. If you think about what your finance team may have been doing in the middle of March, it was trying to figure out, are we going to thrive, survive cashflow.

Kathleen (07:03): It went from, I imagine, continuous planning to crisis planning.

Rowan (07:06): Effectively. Yeah. Cashflow forecasting became, you know, scenario planning. What if analysis became the, the top use cases, if you will, or the top things that finance professionals wanted to care about. Right. And capital management, liquidity, all of those things. And and so we're sitting there with this fantastic campaign that we've spent lots of money and worked with some amazing agencies on. And and the, the other thing is our audience. We're just in a bunker trying to figure out what's going on. They didn't want to talk to us. So we went very like many companies, we went very much into support mode, right? How can we help our audience through this? What can we do? And did a lot of those things, built communities, hold weekly meetings, you know, how can we support? You tried to educate them on, you know, different ways that they could use the platform.

Rowan (07:59): And and, and internally I, I, I converted my product marketing team to a research analyst firm, you know, who will survive, who will thrive and, and how can we go and target those people and educate them on what we do, but the message just wasn't right. You know, selling and telling the story about continuous planning in the middle of that environment, wasn't what people wanted to hear. And so we spent you know, we spent probably too long trying to continue to evangelize that, you know, the, the commitment and consistency of like, oh, we put this great thing together. Let's just keep doing our work.

Kathleen (08:39): Gosh darn it, we planted our flag in the sand.

Rowan (08:42): Exactly. And so you know, I had a conversation with Grant one day and I said, I just don't think like, this is the time to, or this is the place to be pushing this message. And and, and we thought back to kind of core marketing principles, and many of your audience will know about, you know, the five stages of awareness from, from sports. Right. And so we looked at that and we said, well, where is where is continuous planning fit here? Right. Well, it fits for the most aware people are customers or people that have bought this technology before, and they really understand it. So we can keep pushing it to that audience for the completely unaware per person. It makes, it actually makes sense as a thought leadership play as a play around storytelling and, and actually evangelizing that.

Rowan (09:30): But for the people in the middle, right, the people that we're actually trying to get to buy or get you know, get into our final or convince them to buy versus a competitor, it didn't work because they were trying to figure out, well, actually my pain point is not continuous planning. I kind of, you haven't really even explained what that means, what that is, how that works, you know, where am I on that journey? They want to know, how can I do scenario management? How can I do cashflow forecasting? Can I do direct method, cash flow, forecasting, or indirect method? Where are we with our, what if scenario analysis and, and those types of things. So what we did was we stepped right back and said, all right, let's create a use case strategy. Very tactical, very much at the pain point level of, of what our audience is going through.

Rowan (10:22): And so, you know, as, as all businesses where, you know, we're going through, what's going to happen for us. And, and actually coming out in the back of you know, that first initial ambush, we were hitting record pipeline numbers in kind of Q3, right? Amazingly everything was going well, we had this use case campaign. It was going well, what we did tactically for that campaign was create landing pages all around. Those specific use cases, I actually used the pandemic. One of my strategies as I was planning to come to, to plan for we we'd been very much a lead acquisition company. And I wanted to use the reposition and that mode to, to move the market into demand creation mode, as opposed to lead acquisition mode. Now it was kind of good because everyone was just so focused on, you know, how many opportunities are we getting every day into our, into our funnel.

Rowan (11:23): And so effectively, I was able to turn off every MQL report that we ever had which is great. And now no one really asks me about MQL. They're always asking me about, you know, opportunities. And so I was able to use that time to transition away from, you know, classic sales and marketing, talking about MQL calls. Well, now we're talking about pipeline creation and, and what we call, you know, stage one opportunities, S ones. And so during that period, I was also trying to shift our strategy away from very much, you know, purchase nurture leads, right? And, and then hopefully that they convert over time. I wanted us to move to a, build a brand, build awareness in the market and, and, you know, bring them to us. And and, and over that time, that sort of started to happen which was great.

Rowan (12:18): And, and we saw the results of that in Q3. And then as the second wave of the pandemic came again in Q4 and Q4, for those that don't know, every finance professional is about to enter their either favorite or their worst time of the year planning season. And so again, you know, these people had been planning for so long Q3 was pent up demand, and then Q4 became a really hard time for us as well, because, you know, you're starting to see people get back into their planning season. And and, and, and now we're back into that mode of just really accelerated growth. I mean, we've, we've hit all of the kind of records that we would want to be hitting as a software company this year, so far growing like crazy, which is, which is really fun. And a lot of that is off the back of the fact that we really just stepped back to basics and created these use case use case plays. And so, as I was saying before, it's a landing page. It's a, an ungated demo on that landing page. It's having case studies on each of those landing pages. It's, it's the social proof inside of that. It's telling a story about how you go from use case to use case and the value chain that is associated with that for someone when they buy a platform, right? Because like most technology, we're a platform. You can do lots of things with it.

Kathleen (13:40): So I have so many questions for you. Going back to the beginning, you talked about coming in and the company being founded in the early two thousands and being called Host Analytics. And what had changed in the time from when it was founded to when the PE firm bought the company. And it was funny, you, you said something along the lines of like the meaning of Host had changed. And the first thing that popped into my head was, was it that Airbnb happened and everybody thought, you know, is your company about analytics for like hosts who rent their houses out? Or like, what were you alluding to there?

Rowan (14:18): Yeah, actually we'll say, let, let me start. So Host Analytics and the name was, so Jim Eblen founded the company, created the name. Back then we were taking a box into someone's office and hosting their financial analytics for it. Right. So very literal and, and Host actually means army of angels. And so that was another reason for the name, you know, the army of angels are coming to help you with your finance department. Now, you know, fast forward to 20 where hosting is now all about service providers, right. Or in your, in your mind, Airbnb?

Kathleen (14:59): Well, certainly not on-prem software.

Rowan (15:01): Yeah. Yeah. Correct. And actually host was the first FP and A platform, EPM platform to move to the cloud. So I think we did that in, in 2011, 2012. And and then there was a race for, for cloud financial planning platforms you know, Anaplan and, and Adaptive Insights and some other other companies came along.

Rowan (15:25): And so there was this, you know, a big race for, for people to, to move to the cloud from the on-prem world. And and so Host was a big part of that, that, that race and that shift from on-prem to the cloud. And unfortunately though, like, you know, if you sit back in the middle of 2019, and you're calling someone in finance, and you say I'm from Host Analytics, the first thing that I think of is maybe Airbnb analytics, depending on their industry, or most of the time it was what you're going to analyze my cloud service usage or something like that. Like, they, they kind of be like, actually there was this cognitive dissonance that people would have, and ultimately they wanted us to like, they're like, oh, you should speak to it. This is, this is not for me, I'm in finance. Why, why are you trying to talk to me about hosting and analytics? Like so that was the major trigger there. In terms of what had changed is frankly, just cloud, on premise, all of that had changed and, and the term hosting had become synonymous with, with cloud cloud platforms, cloud software, cloud.

Kathleen (16:38): Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. When I hear you talk about this, you know, the CEO was new, you came in, you were new, the company had just been acquired. And the it's the first big meeting of everyone. And you introduce a new brand and you start, like I said, earlier, you rip the bandaid off. Right. I feel like that could go in two directions as, as somebody who's been a head of marketing has navigated rebrands being the new people. If you don't play it right. It can definitely, I think exacerbate like friction, fear frustration, et cetera, amongst people who've been around for awhile. If they think, oh, this new person's coming in and they're changing everything and they haven't taken the time to like really understand us and, you know, kind of build consensus, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Or it could, or if you navigate it correctly, it could really engender a lot of excitement and breathe new life and et cetera. So I'm curious, how did you navigate that in a way that it built excitement and trust and momentum and didn't cause friction?

Rowan (17:45): I don't think you can do a rebrand without causing friction. This is my second one that I've led. And you're going to have naysayers. I think, you know, for anyone listening, that's contemplating a rebrand. You're going to have those people that basically say, I don't like the new name. I don't like why you're changing it, what's wrong with the current name, you're going to get all of that. And, but most importantly, you've really got to focus on you know, what's the intention and why are we changing it? We weren't changing the name for, for our employees. We were changing it for our audience, for our customers. Like they, they deserve a name that is more befitting of, of what they actually do. And so for us, when I think a couple of things helped us.

Rowan (18:40): So firstly Grant and myself had come from this space before and we had created, Grant,was the CMO at one of our competitors and had created a category over there. And that company is doing very well and had gone public. And so there was a perception that, okay this new CEO is coming and he knows what he's doing. I'd also led rebrands before. So, you know, able to sit there and say, Hey, I, I also know what I'm doing as part of this process. So we were able to create some trust because it wasn't, you know, the first time it wasn't a first time category creating it. Wasn't the first time rebranding. Secondly we anchored the rebrand very intentionally on our customer. And at the same time we were going through things like a rebrand at a culture level, we had a new chief people officer and she's out building a new company values, right.

Rowan (19:40): For the new new company and our number one value is customers. So as you think about that, we're able to anchor on, okay, well, we now have our new values and isn't it befitting for our customers to have a name that recognizes them. And if we think about financial planning and analysis folks, they are Planful. It's a real word. It means to be rich and methodical and full of plans. And that's what our buyers and our audience and our customers are. They espouse that every day. So that was really the way that we tried to overcome a lot of that by, by making it or intentionally making it about other people, other than us, it wasn't us trying to rebrand the company. Cause we, we like rebranding companies. It's very expensive to do. It's very hard to do, and it creates lots of friction and you know, lots of people, you know, people believe and perceive that there's lots of brand equity as well.

Rowan (20:40): Right. And so lots of people had those questions. Well, what about, you know, we're an 18 year old company, what about all the brand equity that we've built up? And those types of questions are really important that you have answers, which is okay, that's, that is true. Yes. but actually psychologically people move on for a rebrand really quickly. They adapt we humans, we adapt really well to things and, and also we wanted to espouse the new vision for the company. Right. And, and having a name that fits that new vision was also really important.

Kathleen (21:15): Now you have mentioned a phrase a couple of times that I want to ask you about, because it's a phrase that gets thrown about a lot these days in the world of marketing and that is category creation. And I feel like it's, it's almost become this very generic term that people use for a lot of different things. So can you just explain a little bit about when you think about category creation, how do you think about it? Why did you think it made sense to do that? Because, I mean, it's something I've looked at, and I know it's, it's, it's quite an undertaking and you have to go in with your eyes open and be realistic about what you're going to be able to achieve. And then, can you just talk a little bit about your strategy for doing that in this case?

Rowan (21:59): Yeah, so, I mean, I may be quite simplistic in my view of category creation, but I think you need to just think of it from your audience's perspective, your audience needs to quickly recognize what do you do and where do you play in the ecosystem? And your definition of that category, if you will, whether that's creating a sub category, if you, if you've you know, read those books from the 22 immutable laws, right. If you can't create a category, create a sub category. The that's the simple way I look at it, right? And, and we had been playing in the enterprise performance management category, and when buyers are searching for for products, they're not looking for that they're looking for planning software. So the first thing that we wanted to do as we were going through this category creation and reposition, rebranding, the company, reinvigorating you know, changing the way that the company operated new segmentation, things like that, where it's to make sure that people could find us really easily.

Rowan (23:08): And so if you think about that, it's okay, well, what do you do? Well, we're in the planning space. And you know, we also have capabilities, you know, you know, in our platform for, for accountancies and things like that. But the majority of people are looking for a planning platform. So we wanted to create a category inside the planning space that play to our strengths. And so when you think about planning, what we have is some capability in our product that allows us to do that more frequently than other competitors. So that's continuous, right. And, and that had already been coined by other analysts. So we were able to basically co-opted from them and, and then use it as our position. And, and so when I think of category creation, I think we just simply think of it as, how do I want my buyer to perceive me, what ecosystem do they want to think about me in? And and then can they find our USP inside of my category description of that?

Kathleen (24:11): I like it. So it's funny that you, you, you phrased it that way, because one of my questions was going to be, when you set out to do this, were you hoping that, that, you know, analyst firms would build a quadrant around you, but I really didn't hear you say that. I mean, I heard you say analysts have used the term, but it sounds like success for you. Is, are customers using the term not so much is like Gartner using the term, is that accurate?

Rowan (24:34): Yeah, that's accurate. I mean Gartner have changed in our category, right. So they have gone from FP and A to what's called XP and A, and they're going to have now two quadrants for us. Other analyst firms call it the enterprise performance management category still. Now we want them to change away from that whole term because that's, that's pretty old. Now it's about 30 years old as a category. And our perception is buyers just don't use it. Consultants use it you know, us in the industry. We use it, that buyers don't use it. They don't know what it means. So we'd rather, they yes, we want them to change it, but I don't necessarily mind what they call it. And yes. Do we, do we care about being in those those quadrants, those waves, those, yes, absolutely.

Rowan (25:28): But it's not about naming, like trying to define the category for an analyst. I think the, you know, this is a it's a more mature market as well. So the analysts already have their perspectives of, of what's in the market. And so our positioning was, should never really have been about trying to do that for us, like at our stage, at our maturity of market. I think if, if I was at an early stage company where there was no quadrant, yeah. You'd absolutely be trying to get them to, to redefine or create a quadrant around you having been there before you, the other thing you have to do though, is you have to go and get your competition to also call it the same thing. So that becomes interesting.

Kathleen (26:13): There's no such thing as a category of one.

Rowan (26:16): Yeah, correct.

Kathleen (26:17): Yeah. So, so one of the other things I wanted to dig into you, you talked about you joined shortly before COVID hit, you did the rebrand, you had all these plans, then the pandemic hits and the customer's priorities started to change, and their immediate pain points started to change. Talk a little bit about how that changed, how you approached your strategy.

Rowan (26:43): So the first thing I think it's really important to recognize is prior to that, you know, customers had gone through their annual planning cycle, right. And they were in the midst of rolling out and trying to operationalize their 2020 plans, you know, finance teams or like, okay, well, we've just, you know, some of them hadn't even closed Q1 yet. And normally we all joke, you know, every, every annual plan is, is dead on arrival. Well, that is even more true of 2020. Everyone's plans had been thrown out the window for a finance team's perspective though. Their first thought was, how do we make it through like firstly, a lot of customers just delay payments, right? Cashflow becomes super important. So rather than have a net 15 on invoices, my new standard is net 60 net 90, and you're trying to hold all the cash inside of your business.

Rowan (27:45): Everyone's doing it to each other. And so, you know, cash becomes king. And so one of the use cases that we can operationalize with our customers is cashflow forecasting. So firstly, we wanted to make sure that customers of ours that had an implemented that use case realized that they could do that. And the other thing that became really important was speed became super important. You know customers and prospects, aren't going to want to go through a big finance transformation in the middle of a situation like that. They want things to happen fast. So we created a package of implementation services. We call Planful now, right. Get up and running in less than 30 days, make it make the, the folks that do want to buy or can buy, make them realize that it's not a, it's not a 12 month ERP implementation or CRM transformation or anything like that.

Rowan (28:43): So very much focused on, okay, what can we do for people? What can we do for them right now, if it's if it's an existing customer, how can we help them with, with those key priority use cases which were cashflow forecasting for them and scenario on what if analysis, you can imagine the, what if analysis that folks needed to do in in kind of March and April of last year, that's all many companies were doing was trying to figure out what if, what if, what if, and looking at it from all sorts of lenses.

Kathleen (29:14): Yeah. And then I also loved the thing that really stood out from what you said to me. Cause I really believe this so strongly is about really focusing on brand and knowing that if you, it, it, it is very much a kind of a longer play. But knowing that if you build a really strong brand, the demand is going to follow, right. People love working with brands that they love and it fo it, it functions like a magnet to pull in the right leads. A lot of times though, and I, and I've talked to other marketers, who've experienced this you can, as the head of marketing strongly believe in the power of brand but unless you work for a CEO and and you are a part of a leadership team that also believes in the power of brand, you can get a lot of pushback because it can be very tempting for those people to say, no, we just need, you know, keep the MQL flow going. And sometimes during that pivot, when you're like really shifting your focus, sometimes things can slow down as you do that, but you have to kind of like do it, knowing that you're slowing down to speed up if you will. So I'd love to hear just what your experience was with that.

Rowan (30:32): Yeah. So, so firstly, I think your key point there was having a CEO that understands the power of, of brand. And I'm thankful that Grant was a CMO that is a blessing and a curse for those that ever want to go work for a CEO who has been a CMO. They can get right into the weeds as well. And that can be, you know, not as enjoyable as you want it to be. But it does mean that they understand the power of the marketing machine and you know, Grant has very similar philosophies to me on, on that. Like he's done rebrands before. He's done brand refreshes. Really cares about the power of brand. And that's a lot of what we talk about. You know, position brand, narrative, things like that. We talk about that a lot.

Rowan (31:23): And so as I think about going through that exercise, it was much easier, right? I didn't have you know, it was part of why I came was I knew that we were going to get to build a brand and rebrand the company. So that was part of the excitement of joining the company was, oh, wow, we're going to do this. This is going to be fun. Now I wish, you know, I wish the timing had been different because as I said, we had a great campaign ready to go. It was really fun. And we had, you know, all this spend that we wanted to put behind it, well, in the middle of a pandemic, you know, you're not going to get the same return for that dollar. Right. As I said, our, our audience was ambushed. So we pared back a little bit responsible thing to do, make sure that we hit our growth goals in an economical way.

Rowan (32:14): The, I think the second part about brand that you mentioned is the leadership team actually also valuing that. And I think that's something that I was lucky to have. Here was people that understood that this is a transformation and to do the transformation we needed the power of a brand behind it, as well as the flexibility to to really go through that change. Now, the I guess the, the benefit of doing that through the middle of the year, like 2020 is, no one knows what the numbers would have been like before. Right. Like, you know, we talk about this a lot internally, like never compare to 2020 cause who knows what those numbers should have been or could have looked like. So we always do a lot of, you know, a year over year, but year over 2019 as well. Right.

Rowan (33:07): Because that was a more normalized year. Yeah. So I did get the, the lock or the the challenge of doing that through a pandemic. And that meant that no one knew what the numbers would have been anyway. So I was able to focus on what we wanted to do, right. The intentionality of, you know, the power of that brand. And so there was no, well, we're expecting this many MQL this week, this month, and you're not getting them because we weren't expecting a normal period at that time. So that was actually I won't say luxury.

Kathleen (33:44): It sounds like take advantage of those black Swan events when they happen.

Rowan (33:49): Take advantage of a crisis. And so frankly, that's what we were able to do. And actually, that's, that's also, when you think about how you want to build that brand, we want to do it in the most economical way possible, right? Like when I worked for a PE company, I don't just have billions and billions of dollars to spend on, on brand. So we're able to focus on the places where building a brand actually makes sense. So I have a podcast like you have a podcast, right? We very much focused on organic social and doing that in a way that is, is really powerful for us. We focused on being more creative than our competition. So as you look at our advertising, you look at our color scheme, it's very different to what's out there and that's all intentional to, to kind of be a pattern interrupt for our audience. And so those things allowed us to, I believe, build faster. You know, a lot of our competition do you use blue, right? What's a safe, trusted finance finance colors, right? Blue, everything's good, no red. We're able to use color and creativity in a way that our competitors aren't using. And so that's how we're trying to stand out to our audience.

Kathleen (35:03): I love all of that. I'm a huge fan of the pattern interrupt. And it's funny because I've always, I've always worked in B2B tech and my dream has been to work for a company where I can have the primary color and our brand be purple just because nobody ever picks it. And I'm like, the fact that no one picks it is why we need to do it. Like let's pick crazy colors and go with that. But I, you know, still working on that, the dream of purple someday.

Rowan (35:29): Well, I'm getting to live the dream of purple and for those that ever want to know why, why purple. Well purple actually has association with royalty, rich and richness, and wealth. So it's actually a great color for a finance company.

Kathleen (35:43): Yeah. And sometimes, honestly there doesn't need to be a reason, like just the fact that it's different is great reason. Right? well, we're coming close to the end of our time. And so I want to sort of wrap up this segment of the interview by just asking, can you, are there any like results that you can speak to? Like we talked about the journey coming in and changing things up and then having to grapple with the pandemic hitting and your customer's priorities suddenly shifting, like what's, what's been the outcome of all of this so far?

Rowan (36:18): Well, so I think in, in a couple of key things, so firstly right now in 2021, we our, our pipeline creation to one ratio has increased by 5%. And, and well, not by 5%, it's probably by like 150% or something silly like that, but it's a five percentage point increase if you, if you compare the two numbers. And so that means we're getting high intent buyers coming to us. And that means our deal velocity is much faster. So, so that cycle of what we're trying to create with a brand, people come to us, giving us that momentum has absolutely worked. Our website traffic is up you know and it was 180% year over year, and it's like 140% year over 2019. And, and that is all organic. So not the paid stuff, it's not paid, that's driving all the website visits.

Rowan (37:16): That's, that's organic traffic. Branded search terms are up, right. So people are looking for the words like continuous planning or Planful. And, and so that's really important to us. Ultimately for me, it's about it's about revenue and, and that's up, you know, we're we're about to have a press release soon. And, you know, our, our revenue numbers, sales, bookings numbers are drastically up like year over year, but also again, you're over 2019. And so that changes significantly that marketing shift, that, that fundamental shift is starting to have the realization now. And a funny blessing is that now also lots of other organizations are using continuous planning. And I, I suspect that's because everyone planned continuously last year. So we were lucky in the fact that we kind of coined it and owned it prior to everyone realizing that that's actually, it's the new, it's the new normal.

Rowan (38:19): So everyone is planning all the time and it's going to be an interesting for us planning season, because for those folks listening in marketing, go and give you a finance professional, a hug, please, because they have been going through a really, really tough time, consistently planning, planning, planning, re-planning. And now they're about to go into planning season again, which means sleepless nights for them. And we really want to make sure that we can alleviate that. And I think burnout and finance teams is something that's going to really appear soon. And we're hoping to alleviate that for, for organizations.

Kathleen (38:56): Amen to that, because I work with an amazing CFO, Josh Shenker at my company clean.io, and he has been continuously planning for, since I've met him and we are already in planning for next year. So everything you just said is absolutely spot on. So shout out to Josh. All right. Shifting gears. I have two questions that I always ask my guests at the end of every interview, and I'd love to hear your answers to them the first being I, you know, and you just really gave me the perfect segue, which is that things change so quickly in every industry, marketing certainly being one of them. You know, in marketing, we have the added elements of, you know platform changes, algorithm changes, regulatory changes, et cetera, all of which affect how we do our jobs. And I think most of the marketers I talk to say that staying on top of all that is one of their biggest challenges. And so I'm curious how you do that. How do you keep yourself educated and are there certain sources you turn to, to stay on the cutting edge?

Rowan (40:00): I would actually counter that and say, I, you know, you've heard me talk today. It's been a lot about brand. It's been a lot about fundamentals. And so you know, I started my career very much in the tech side, always being like, you know, very big fan of Scott Brinker's MarTech slide, and always priding myself on knowing who was what and who was who and how it was all going. And then I couldn't keep up. You know, I don't think even Scott could probably keep up. And so what I found myself gravitating back to is actually more of the fundamentals, more of the psychology, more of behavioral, you know, behavioral understanding of buyers, psychology of things like color and words, and, and coming back to basics of things like copywriting. Now I have a great team, thankfully that stay on top of all of the technology aspects, but I also see the trends going away from more relying on that technology now, you know, with all of the Apple's privacy changes and impending, Google, privacy changes and things like that. I actually think coming back to basics is, is what more of us should be doing. And so I've been doing a lot more of that, like rereading the classics and you know, going in you know, a lot of kind of persuasion and reading a lot of psychology books which has been interesting, but that's what I've been doing.

Kathleen (41:20): Well, I think that's, that's so smart and I agree with that. You know, if you solve for people, you will always win. If you try to solve for machines, the machines are trying to solve for people. So you'll just be one step behind the machines, right. So solve for the people. It works every time. Second question is the, in terms of this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular person or company that you think is really setting the bar for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days?

Rowan (41:56): So I work with Eddie Schreiner at Very Good Copy. And I think Eddie, like it, I look forward to Eddie's email every week, right. So if I think about inbound marketing, right? Yeah. That's outbound, but I'm excited to get his email all the time. And so, you know, I think someone like Eddie is out there creating demand for his services, but doing it in a way where he's consistently educating me and my team and I'm sure his audience the other folks that I really admire right now is the team at Metadata. Some of their advertising captures my attention. We talked about pattern disrupts, you know, they're doing things that other companies aren't doing. And, and even though it's, you know, it's, it's MarTech and it's one of the things that I'm not keeping up to date with. They're using more of the core principles to actually get my attention. And so I would say, you know, the, the folks there at Metadata are doing really good.

Kathleen (42:55): Awesome, well, we'll have to check those out. And I also love Very Good Copy. I get that newsletter and I'm a huge fan of it. So check that out if you haven't done that already. And if you are listening and you want to get in touch with Rowan, Rowan, what is the best way for somebody to do that? Where can they find you online?

Rowan (43:15): Yeah, so definitely my LinkedIn is the best for business chat. My, my Twitter, which is @RowanTonkin is mostly golf and rugby. So unless you're, unless you're in that golf, rugby and marketing cohort, I would go to my LinkedIn and simply just Rowan Tonkin. You'll, you'll find a picture of a man behind a purpose.

Kathleen (43:34): All right, fantastic. Well, I'll put those links in the show notes and if you are listening and you enjoyed this episode, please consider heading to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast a review. And if you know somebody else, who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love for them to be my next guest. That is it for this week. Thanks so much for joining me Rowan. This was a ton of fun.

Rowan (43:57): Well, my pleasure. Thanks so much, Kathleen.