The Naberhood by Brandon Naber

August 01, 2019 Nicolas Draca - Chief Marketing Officer @HackerRank (Formerly @Twilio, @LinkedIn) - The Science of Marketing Playbook (Talent, Insights, Operations, and Lifecycle), Manager & Stakeholder Alignment: What is your job?, The Hiring and Onboarding Process

Guest:

Nicolas Draca - Chief Marketing Officer @HackerRank

(Formerly @Twilio, @LinkedIn, @Infoblox)

Guest Background:

Nicolas Draca has over 20 years of experience in sales and marketing. He is currently the CMO at HackerRank.

Prior to HackerRank, he was the Vice President of Marketing at Twilio. Prior to Twilio, Nicolas spent five years at LinkedIn, holding the position of senior director, global marketing operations. Before LinkedIn, in 2004, he co-founded Ipanto and served the same company as the chief marketing officer. Ipanto was acquired by Infoblox in 2007, where he spent another 3 years as a Director, building their Demand Marketing function globally.

Nicolas holds a master’s degree from ICN Business School, France. He is also an advisor and early investor in several startups and incubators (like Y Combinator).

Guest Links:

Episode Summary:

In this episode, we cover:

- The Science of Marketing Playbook - 4 Pillars (Talent, Insights, Operations, and Lifecycle)

- The Formula for Hiring, Onboarding, and Developing Successful Marketing Teams

- Critical Alignment w/ Your Manager and Stakeholders: What is your job?

- Data and Measurement - Moving from Data to Intelligence

- The Account-Based Marketing Method

Full Interview Transcript:

Naber: Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest growing companies. Enjoy!

Naber: Hey everybody. Today we have Nicolas Draca on the show. Nicolas has over 20 years of experience in Sales and Marketing. He is currently the Chief Marketing Officer at HackerRank, who have raised $58 million in capital. Prior to HackerRank. He was the Vice President of Marketing at Twilio. Twilio IPO's back in 2016, and they currently have a $17 billion valuation. Prior to Twilio, Nicolas spent five years at LinkedIn holding the position of Senior Director of Global Marketing Operations. LinkedIn IPO'd back in 2011, and they were acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $27 billion. Before LinkedIn. In 2004, he co-founded Ipanto and served the same company as the Chief Marketing Officer. Ipanto was acquired eventually by Infoblox in 2007, where he spent another three years as a Director building their Demand Marketing function globally. Nicolas holds a Master's Degree from ICM Business School in France. He is also an advisor and early stage investor in several startups and incubators like Y Combinator. Here we go.

Naber: Nicolas, awesome to have you on the show. How are you?

Nicolas Draca: I'm doing fantastic. Thank you for having me.

Naber: Yes, I'm so glad to have you. Hearing your French accent makes me think about the French holiday I just had, the French holiday that you just had, in addition to being in Greece and having all the amazing food. I am so excited to have you on. I've learned a lot from you in a short space of time when we've worked together in the past. Gotten to know you a little bit personally. Many of the people I've worked with have gotten to know you personally and professionally, and there's just so many good things to say about you, as a person and as a professional operator. So I'm more than excited for the audience to hear what you have to say. So why don't we jump in? What I think we'll do is, we'll get into some of the professional jumps that you've had through your career, talk about your career, as well as a bunch of the frameworks, the mindset you have, some of the methods that you've gone through and used in your playbook, if you will. But first, I think it'd be helpful, if it's okay with you, is to start to get to know you a little bit personally so that they can build up the same fascination as I have with you as an individual, and maybe we'll start back in the day, if you will. Maybe, we'll start in your childhood. So why don't we start with...I mean, you grew up in France, you were based in Strasbourg, you were born in Strabourg and grew up there, you were based in Frankfurt, then Strasbourg again, San Francisco, you've got so many global experiences. What was it like as a kid growing up as Nicolas Draca? And what are some of the things you're interested in?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So I grew up in France, in Strasbourg - border with Germany - East. And what was it to be Nicolas Draca? Well, I would say not much, pretty shy kid. Just following my friends wherever they would go. I was not the leader, that's for sure. I was average in every single sport. I was okay with it, no ego there. It's just, like, anything I would play, I was just average. I think that summaries what it was when I was young. I think school, I was average. Sport, I was average. I think great friends. I lived in the countryside. So after school, I was more about going outside, playing in the forest, playing with my bike. And that was my life as a young kid.

Naber: Very cool. And what were some of your hobbies, your interests as you were growing up?

Nicolas Draca: It was being outside, and I think this is still the case today. We lived in a small village. There were like 200 people, in my class were nine, on my level. Being with friends, outside, playing whatever, playing soccer, running around, jumping on our bike, whatever you can imagine.

Naber: Very cool. Very cool. And as you're going through high school, were there certain subjects or anything you acceled at where you thought at a young age, you were pretty good at it naturally?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. I specialized pretty quickly in math and physics. I have boys. I was a boy. I was just going with the flow. I'm just no big plan, no ambition, no nothing. To be fair, ,when I talk to friends today, and they look like where I am today, they struggled to connect between what I was when I was young, and what I do today. Like, really? That's what you've done and that's who you are. So yeah, just I go back to that just an average kid.

Naber: It's funny, I'm laughing so much, and I have to hold it in because of the microphone, but I'm laughing. That's really interesting...What did your parents do for a living?

Nicolas Draca: My father was a Sales guy, and my mother was a teacher. And then my father moved from Sales in consulting to building his own company. Actually he created two companies, two startups.

Naber: Wow. So that was in your genesY

Nicolas Draca: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Part of the education was you started in a job early, starting when you're 16 - it's like, first job, same for my sister, I have one sister. And you're going to have to work. Yeah, that was in our genes, that's for sure.

Naber: Very interesting. And what was the first thing you did to make money?

Nicolas Draca: The first thing I did to make money was to work in a restaurant as a waiter. And then the second thing, I ended up driving ambulance.

Naber: Whoa.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. That was my summer job. So this was when I was 18, you'll can only drive in France when you're 18. That was something really unique, learned a ton from it, specifically on the people side. And I think if I didn't have started computer science at that time, maybe I would have moved into being a doctor or something in the medicine field.

Naber: Wow. What were some of the things that you learned? You're probably about to say that.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. Wow. So when you drive when you drive an ambulance, you drive people from home to the hospital, or you drive them back. So quite quickly you understand and you see where they live, and you see all type of people, all social aspects of it. And so that was one part of it, which when you're young, I was like 18, 19, that's just wow, it was pretty surprise, I'd say. The other thing is, we will also doing ER type of thing, I don't know how we say it in English, but like we would go...there are car accidents, and we would go there and pick up the people. And yeah, we did a couple of ones where...once we went for somebody who committed suicide to pick 'em up.

Naber: Wow.

Nicolas Draca: so it's a, I mean a, you guys can go a little bit on it to give you an idea, but the, you arrive there and the person tried to, cut is they yeah. And yeah, but, but survived it. And so it was really a weird kind of set up because you arrived, you don't know the person, so you're completely disconnected. whereas there's a lot of drama going on around the seminary. You come here and you just try to do your job and then you have those weird part of the story where actually, which we have to do is to chase a cat with trying to leak the blog. We're story, but we ended up running in the k frame to chase that cat was trying to lead all the blog. yeah. Yeah. It's just kind of weird setup slash weird experience and we had many of those, which I'm not sure I want to share.

Naber: Oh Wow. That's an amazing short story. You walked into a storm on a bottle and you have to write into the bottle every single time. Yeah. Yup, Yup, Yep, Yup, Yup. Wow. That is, that's probably the most interesting answer I've gotten to that question. That's a really good answer.

Nicolas Draca: It says a, it was a unique experience actually. I a I still remember that, that job and I think I got lucky to get that job for a couple of months, a few years. And yeah. Do you find a lot? I think where I am today.

Naber: Very cool. Wow. You always learned something really interesting about somebody. You have these types of conversations, so you're in Strasburg, driving ambulances, working at restaurants, being, being, being, being a average, probably not average. You're probably overselling the average part of it. But, so then you're making decisions about where you want to go to school for university. how, what's the decision you make at that point? And tell us, walk us through, your decision around school. After, after high school

Nicolas Draca: I started, I had the chance of a started coding when I was young, like 11 year old. I'm 46 today, so 11 mean like in 84. at that time, you do not have access to computer, but we were lucky that intermediate school, we had computer. I think there was somebody who was passionate about it, was able to get a couple of computer for us. And so I'd have passion for it. Then decided quickly to move into computer science. I'm a major, and then got my bachelor in computer science. And then, my idea was you're going to find this weird, I wanted to work in a golf. I played golf. I loved it. I taught my other job, my third job on the weekend. And super weird. So I interviewed for a golf school, to be in management. And at the same time I interview for interview for a business school, meaning to go through the process to be accepted and went for business school and went from my business school aftermy computer degree, the master in business and then, took my first job.

Naber: Wow. Not In the Gulf company.

Nicolas Draca: no, not a in a golf company. I still, I don't play actually anymore. but at that age, I don't know. And my parents were highly supportive. They're hey, you want to go? Even though you graduated for computer science, who went to be in the gold business? Go for it. so I had the oldest support up to me to make some decision, super happy about what happened.

Naber: Nice. Cool. I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to compete with you on the links. I'm sure that you're much better than you're saying you right now. So let that, does that get us to GE Capital? Is that the first role out of school?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. Out of school. My first job was, a Sales guy at GE Capital. And here I was selling infrastructure, so laptop, desktop servers, printers applications, for a large company in the east of France. So that's what my first job and that's where I met. I started the same day somebody called a Duchenne. Why cool. Founded a pencil, later on with

Naber: very cool. And so you were up, that's really interesting story. I'm sure we'll get to that in a second also. And you were obviously quite technical walking into that role. Was that really helpful walking in as with the quite technical mind to get into an account management slash Sales role at GE Capital and for it solutions?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah, it was, it was a, it wasn't nice to have actually two is not that complex. A, it was a new laptop computer, right? Yeah. To have a passion for it. So I had a passion for it, but not treating immediate at that stage. like here was really hardcore Sales. It was my first job, in back in the day you would start, there was no internet then I'm going to speak like an old guy. So actually you had the yellow pages. That's what I remember. And I was pretty shy. Like you have to remember that the, why am I in trail? Good question. and on a on day one, I get the yellow pages, which is not the best way to onboard somebody and say, hey, good luck and go and try to sell. And I had the number of to deliver on.

Nicolas Draca: the story is as well as the on friends factors actually what is happening in inferences. Sometimes they do a writing test where they analyze how you write. I think it tell them that country, I'm not sure. Yeah. Long Story Short, I started day one and then my boss come to see me and saying, hey, they just finished on an icing your the way you're right and we cannot keep you because more or less a summary, you get a report, three pages on the report. and the reports say you're a loser and you will never be able to handle pressure, and grow in your career. So are, you're going to have to leave tonight, and you can not stay. And I'm what? So it came back pretty upset to meet with the VP of Sales of GE.

Nicolas Draca: Excellent. its in Paris and then hey, that, that's not how it's gonna play out. Right. You were first from a legal standpoint, you're not allowed to do that. Number two, it's highly, disrespectful to onboard needs to get started to two and then decide after day one based on how I write. I agree with that. My writing is terrible, but then decide who I am as a person. so I kept that, I kept the report, and I showed it to my kids later. I'm yes, that's what your dad was. That's where happened. So that was my first job, actually. They one I came back home.

Naber: Well

Nicolas Draca: I'm I'm I was already withmy wife.

Naber: Yeah. Oh my gosh. so in a marathon you're not supposed to pre sprint from the start, but we are sprinting with good stories so far. This is hilarious and great. It's just excellent. So, what is the, what's the biggest thing you learned at GE Capital? And then we'll talk about your jump to CSC.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So a g tactical here was, so, I learned what it cost to be on the first real job and being a Sales person, what it took and how to be a, leave you smart. And what I mean by that is how can you make your quota the fastest way possible. and here we add professional services on one end, which was like 30% margin. We had a infrastructure which was 5% margin. And of course my quota was based on a much more genuine would bring to the table and decided where as we were in a selling hardware emotion in the company, decided to do all of my business in services, and professional services, sorry. This is my learning is what is the fastestto achieving, to beating quota was the learning of spending a couple of years at GE.

Naber: Yeah. Nice. That's great. Yeah. You've quoted a couple of times. whatever you're doing, somebody else's probably done it better than you. Don't reinvent the wheel, learn from others and be lazy, smarter. Yeah. I really liked that quote. And it's obviously something you can learn really early in your career. okay. Yeah,

Nicolas Draca: I actually have the, it's a, it's a big, big one is a, it's trying to look and does, this is what I did unconsciously though looking around me and there was one Sales rep who was highly successful and one was working really hard but not like I was working like 14 hours a day, but not being as successful. So I loved that the successful one. And I tried to understand the dynamic of the deals then and learn from it, then cloned it.

Naber: Nice. Excellent. Okay. So you're at GE Capital, you're learning a lot about what it's like to carry a bag, be a Sales person for the first time, you're making a jump to CSC. What did you make the jump to CSC, and what were you doing at that job?

Nicolas Draca: Yes, so CSC, one of my friends was leading one of the team at CSC, Computer Science Corporation, it was in the outsourcing business and it was focusing on transformation. And transformation at CSC will assign hundred of millions of dollars of deals where they will start outsourcing both infrastructure and people, and moving them into CSC. And our friend was putting a team together to help him through this transformation phase. And so you will work on an account for like 6 to 12 months max. And your job would be as fast as possible to be able either from an infrastructure standpoint, from a people standpoint, from a process standpoint, to migrate to CSC. So here it opened up to all of Europe because all of those contracts where across Europe or across the world and more of an international angle to what I was doing before.

Naber: Very good. Okay. And so you made that jump, and Program Manager. So day to day, what are you doing?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah, day-to-day the way it would work is we would be in charge of projects, all of those transformation projects. And depending on the project we had lined up, or our goal would be to work with a set of people...I had a couple of project manager working for me, you will have infrastructure people, you will have architects, you will have procurement, and so on. And just being able to orchestrate and to coordinate all of it to deliver on time. So the way it would work is as part of the process before starting on anything, you would send a quote to your customers saying this is a how many hours I'm going to spend, and this is how much it's going to cost. So you just ship within the hours you're committed to.

Naber: Are you creating that estimate or is someone else creating it and you're delivering on it?

Nicolas Draca: No, I have to create that estimate. And it was like massive, like millions of dollars every time. So, it was the first time I worked on really, really large contracts, so pretty exciting.

Naber: Yeah. Excellent. Okay. So you're at CSC, this is what you're doing day to day, and you are six and a half, seven years into your career at this point, your belt to make your first major entrepreneurial jump for Ipanto. Tell us about why you decided to start Ipanto, and the story for how it started, as well how you're ultimately acquired by Infoblox, which sounds like a great story.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So what happened is...one of the projects we were managing - so I was still working with my friend Eric from GE, we went together to CSC - and one of the projects we were working on is IP address management. So what was happening is people were trying to find a way to manage their IP addresses on their network. And they were using spreadsheets, which seems surprising, but that was more or less the go-to. And if you think about it like every single device, like your laptop here, your printer, whatever, has an IP address. And as you can imagine pretty quickly, you can not keep up. If you have 5,000 employee, and I don't know 3-4 IP addresses per employee, you cannot manage IP addresses in a spreadsheet. Then we looked at it for a customer and realized, that there was only one company that was doing that as a software, and they were charging per active IP per year, and it was $1.50. And with the explosion of IP addresses, we looked at it and were like, oh man, we have to create a company. So we started looking what other competitors were doing on the side, and at some point decided to create our own company...We had hired...So what we're doing is more or less, we stayed at CSC as consultants. So we work for them. So our daytime job was CSC. Our nighttime job was building our company, which many people do. So it was all bootstrapped and it took us like a couple of years to get an MVP and we started closing customers. And we did a decent job I think on the Marketing side, we did a decent job on our footprint where people believed we were a large company. With Skype you could open...we had, not fake, but we had numbers in Australia - a phone number in Australia, we have numbers in the US - phone numbers. So, as we had global reach, we will send quote like across the globe, and we would time our email to look like we were in the region. We also created a set of names, so I had multiple names. I was Shawn, the product manager. I was Nicolas, the CMO. I was also John, from support. And so emails we're going out, and we automated all of it, to make you believe that we were a large organization, but to ensure that people could engage with us through support, which we call customer success today. Or through the product team, saying hey, what do you think about the solution? And so on and so on. So, yeah, that's what we did.

Naber: So you're effectively like the equivalent of a chatbot with all of your names, and you are your own follow the sun model, as in like you did everything probably 24 hours during the day. How many people did you eventually have a on the team?

Nicolas Draca: So we went up to 10 employees, mostly engineers. So we build a small engineering team in Strasbourg. And then we had that rule, as a Sales leader you would appreciate it, and this was coming from my father. So my father, had a rule for a Sales rep that if you go to Paris at that time, you need to have three meetings a day. If you travel three meetings a day. We applied the same rule at the European level. So if we had people pinging us from any country, and we were able to secure a free meetings a day, we'll go and we'll take a flight. So we went to Dubai multiple times. We went to Saudi Arabia. We went to Turkey. Meaning that's where inbound was coming from. Was it rational in terms of like weighted pipeline and how much money we would make, it was not, we did not have that experience. What is it efficient in term of meetings? Yes, it was. And then we were having long meetings and we built partnerships across most of the Europe, which was pretty cool at that time, and got us to meet some great prospects. And then at some point, we decided...two things happened. I'm going to get you to Infoblox. One is...I don't know for what reason actually, I can not recall...we decided to raise funding. And the plan was, with my associate, he said, hey, you know what, you're going to go to the valley, and you're going to meet with VC. And I never met with VC before, nor have I ever put a business plan together the way a VC in the valley would expect it. So, one of the leaders in the space, Infoblox, just raised 20 million at that point. We send an email through some connection, and we end up with like 20 meetings in one week. I'm like, rule of 3, works. Jump on a plane. And I went there alone, when I think about it, it's pretty, I don't know if it was stupid, but it was interesting. Went there alone with my deck, seven slides. And my first meeting, I think it was Accel, I end up with like five people in the room, like partners. Tell me about your company and so on. I go through the meeting, I explained what I could explain. Was pretty weak on the finance side of the deck, which was the last part of the deck, focusing more on the customers we had, and the dynamic of the business, and the size of the market. But more or less, I did one meeting after the other like this. We didn't raise any funding, to be clear. Somebody told us unless I can call you at 11 first to have lunch together, we're not gonna work together...But we learn a ton through the process. We started discovering how people think here. How do they see the world? How do they manage their businesses? And actually, on the last two or three meetings, people just starting giving us advice, which I highly respect the US for...anybody, like trying to grow a company or be an entrepreneur in general. And people are really nice and friendly to give us advice about what we should do next, and how we should think about our business...And in parallel what we did is we ended up working on a deal with a company called PG&E. So coming from France, I have no bloody clue who PG&E was. It's not that I haven't done my homework, but we had all that inbound and we were just...And so we ended up in final on PG&E against a company called Infoblox. And we didn't win, whereas we had the support from the engineering team. And then Infoblox reach out to us getting really upset just starting to see us in deals, incuding that large PG&E deal. And the BD person, as well as the GM for Europe, Karl, ping'd us and said, I need to meet you. I need to spend time with you. I need to understand who you are. And this is where the initial discussion started.

Naber: Wow. Really interesting. Someone to reach out to directly from Infoblox and said, we need to meet you. Were you pretty guarded with those conversations? Did you feel like it was a com-partnership, or did you feel like it was more like them kind of feeling you out as competition?

Nicolas Draca: Yes. So we already had another competitor in the space who approached us, and our first feedback was we're not going to talk to. Like, we don't want to talk to you. And Karl, Karl changed our life somehow. We saw him at a show, and he's like, I want to see your product, like, show me, show me, show me. And we're nah, dude, we don't want to, we already had this. It happened two weeks ago. We were again pretty young, and we're like, no way, we're not showing you your product. That's not going to happen. Screw that. And then he pushed again and got the VP of Marketing and the VP of Sales to ping us and they say, hey, you know what we're going to do? Actually we're going to fly to Santa Clara. And you're going to come and present, and we're going to sign an NDA, pay for your travel, and everything. And at that point we're like, okay, again the rule of a couple of meetings, let's go to the valley. And then based on our learnings, meeting with all the VC in the valley, we were really set up for success in the meeting we would have there - understanding how they think, understanding how they approach things, and being able to engage in the right way through all the meetings. So it ended up being a successful week. There was really a good fit between their team and our team. They really love our technology and loved the way we were working. And then we quickly within a few months closed the deal, sold the company, and moved everybody in California, the engineers, and so on.

Naber: Wow. That's great. You've been a part of...you were required Infoblox at Ipanto, you had Talentoday that you're an investor in who was acquired by Medix in 2018, you've been a part of multiple IPO businesses. Do you have any advice for people going through that acquisition process, especially as a founder, especially as a Senior leader on the exec team?

Nicolas Draca: I think when when you go for that process you need to be...so a couple of things. One, we were pretty clear that based on our skillset, and based on our capacity to raise funding, we could not grow the company more. Okay. It didn't end up being a large company, it was a small startup, but we were aware and self aware that hey, we reached our limit. And so we decided to go on the path to...It's not like a week before Infoblox ping'd us we were like, we're going to sell. Like I think we built and designed the company for six months with a path to sell the company. So that was one. There was no ego involved on this one - that was the second one. And number three goes back to what you want to do as part of that opportunity. Right? You as a leader, do you want to be part of the adventure still? Or, I'm going to sell and stay six months and go. For us, again, we were clear we wanted to sell. We still believe in our product, and we wanted to push it and get that product / solution successful and growing, becoming the leader on IP address management. That's what our dream. And we executed on it. The last piece is of course, culture fit, or the fit with the team that are going to acquire you. Pretty often what you see, you get acquired and then everybody disappears, right? And you're not even sure your product is gonna survive that acquisition. And here for us it was really, really important that, we would get on well with the people that are acquiring us, that we were clear that we would be part of the adventure moving forward, and we could still execute on our vision to lead or yeah, to own IP address management, which was what we were doing. And this is what we did.

Naber: Nice. Excellent. It's a really good segue into Infoblox and you building the Demand Marketing function there. So as someone that went through an acquisition, you're founder or co-founder of the company going into that new company, tell us about what you were doing at Infoblox. And can you give it to us from the perspective of someone who just got acquired? Because someone that is thinking of their business with an exit strategy, it might be good for them to also hear it from a lens of, we were acquired and this was what it was like in the aftermath or the afterlife in the new company.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So first we were acquired. It took us some time to understand that...it was by a smart team. We did not realize - we just moved to the Bay, we had no sense of the dynamic here. It took me like a couple of years actually. I understood they were smart, but those people, it was their 4th IPO. They we're trying to go to their next IPO, they've done three of them. I was like, cool, what is an IPO? Congratulations. But the quality of talent that they assemble and the success they had in the past, I think just facilitated the vision of how we would work together. But again, this we didn't know about, right. I learned it later. But quickly, we agreed...We had a bonus structure based on revenue of our company, revenue of our product, sorry. And what happened, and I think you're going to love that one. So, Ipanto the IP address management product, was a highly successful lead gen product. Why? Because replace your spreadsheet to manage IP addresses was something everybody would understand and would get excited about, versus the other products that Infoblox that had at the end of the day are not that sexy, and actually you're competing with free. So it was kind of a Trojan horse. And the Sales strategy, which I didn't know, was to use our product to enter into accounts, to start a discussion. But the goal is to sell the other products.

Naber: You're the land.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah, I'm the land play, but on the discussion, not even selling it. And I got pretty quickly upset about it because again, we had with my buddy a vision that we wanted to lead IP address management, and they were using our leads just to do that, which is to land a discussion. And the piece you're gonna like is what I'm going to tell you now, is at some point this was also channel business. Okay. And they were not managing all the leads. And I found a channel partner to take over all the leads. So I went to see the Head of Sales, and I'm like, Hey, your team doesn't seem that excited. I have a bonus tied to it. And we went to execute on the vision, it's all good - and I was like, Director in that company, Director of Demand Gen, I was a nobody - and I'm like, I'm going to move over all the leads to that channel partner, and actually I'm going to Seattle to train them next week. Okay. And at that point, my boss, the VP, Marketing came andsaid hey, we are we going to have a timeout - like, you have to stop. And I'm like, why?...We understand you have a bonus tied to everything. We're going to pay your bonuses, we're good. And we are going to stick back to our strategy. But I think they did appreciate the commitment and the passion around that, saying, hey that's cool. Now can you do what you do to the rest of the business, and not focus only on your world?

Naber: Wow, really interesting. I mean you brought an entrepreneurial, founder mindset and you went in hot with an executive that's the Head of Sales. And that is not an easy thing to unlearn that mindset once you're running a startup, once you're a founder of a business, that is not an easy thing to unlearn when you go into a larger environments. I'm sure they really appreciated both the structure and method of the problem solving, as well like you said, the dedication to solving the problem, which is great.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. And it's not being a jerk as part of the process. What I say sometimes to my team...we were at some point, agreeing in our disagreement on the vision, and it's about having a discussion saying, Hey, this is the issue, the way I'm going to solve is okay, I'm gonna move on. And I think being able to have that level of discussion in a constructive way, and agreeing in your disagreement, is always a good thing to decide what to do next.

Naber: Nice. Excellent. And I'm sure that'll play a little part of talking about some different pieces of your playbook a little bit here. So we're gonna jump from Infoblox into LinkedIn, Twilio, and HackerRank. Heavy hitting, awesome, really interesting hyper-growth organizations that you've joined at very different stages, and endured for very different stages. And you've just done such amazing things at these businesses. So why don't you talk about the jump into Linked, what you were doing at LinkedIn, maybe for a couple minutes. And then I'll pull up, I want to talk about a couple of what I know are your superpowers, as you're going through both that role...and you can jump into examples before you get to Twilio, before you get to HackerRank. But just jump into how you joined LinkedIn and what you did there.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So when I joined LinkedIn, I focused initially on the Talent Solution business. It was before the IPO, again, I know you're pretty familiar with that business. And here if the goal was to build a Demand Gen engine to support that Talent Solution business. And if I recall it correctly, I'm not 100% sure about the number, I think our prior year the revenue was like 80 million. And I come, I think their Marketing team was like 30 people all together, reporting into Nick, and my team was like two people. And I look after two weeks, and I put a plan together, super proud of how fast I did my plan. You'll see what happened next. I go and meet with the CMO of LinkedIn, and I'm like, Hey, here it is. Here is my vision, this is how we are going to grow from...I'm going to build an organization to support $500M, from $80M. And he looks at me, and he's like, I like your plan. It's a good plan. It's not ambitious enough. And I say, what? I'm like, 80 to 500. He's like, yeah 10x. Like the rule at LinkedIn was like 10x always. And I'm like, what about 10x? He's like, year, you need to build a plan for to support a $billion because Talent Solutions is going to be our first billion dollar business. And I'm like, you're joking, right? He's like, no, no, I'm not. Can you please come back next week with an update on your plan? And I'm like, of course. So I go back to my cubicle work on my plan. Then he pings me, Hey, can you come to see me in my office the day after. I come to see him the day after in his office, he's like, Hey, I really liked your plan. This was Talent Solutions. It's like I just hired a lead on the Marketing side for Marketing Solutions, and I love for you to help her to build a Demand Gen engine again. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Yesterday you told me to go from 80 to a $billion, now you asked me to to focus on this. I'm like, I cannot do that, I have two people. He's like, nah, figure it out. And this is how is has been since day one. And this is where you learn the scaling muscle, hyper-growth muscle. More or less, I mean you've been through that journey, being on a high speed train and building the tracks at the same time, at scale.

Naber: Yeah. Speed. The ultimate function of speed.

Nicolas Draca: Speed. I think it's the ultimate function of, okay, speed and demanding excellence, which is a core value. Because whatever you're going to do as an experiment, if it's works, you're going to have to 10x that experiment. And 10x can mean the same thing you build in the US is going to have to work in Europe, in Australia, in Brazil, or it's going to have to scale across the organization, across all business lines. And when you are initially...I remember the first couple of months being exhausted. But not exhausted because I was working, I wasn't working 16 hours a day, not in like number of hours. It's the intensity of the meeting. Like in half an hour, and again you've been through that, you'll have a meeting in half an hour, and you come with a V1 of something, after half an hour you would be at V5. And if if you had to check your phone for two minutes during the meeting, you would be lost. Like if you did not follow the discussion, you're like what are you talking about? That's level to speed, yeah, you went back to it. Speed, demanding excellence, and all the core values of the company. Yeah, it was incredible.

Naber: Amazing. Okay. So you're at LinkedIn and you're undoubtedly iterating on and building new pieces of your playbook. One of the things that you've talked about in a few different forums, you've been interviewed on this, you've been on stage talking about this, is your Four pillars of the Science of Marketing - Talent, Insights, Operations, and Lifecycle. What I'd love to do is start picking apart each one of those, because we're at LinkedIn now and I know you've developed quite a bit of muscle fiber putting together a lot of the playbook there, and then ultimately exercising it more and more, and iterating more and more at Twilio and HackerRank. Can you go through, the basics of those four pillars, and give us a little bit of sense for how your frameworks work within each of them. So maybe we can start with talent, and then move from there. Is that okay?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah, of course. So talent is about, I mean it's number one. And it doesn't come from me, it comes from LinkedIn as the driving force for success. And it's something I learned at LinkedIn. I appreciated at Twilio, and I appreciate it even more at HackerRank. It's about how you're going to build your team, who you're going to hire, and how are they going to be able to scale, right? Not having any compromise on who you're going to hire. And the process we had, and I think it was across the company, but you can tell me, was when you hire somebody...So first we want to somebody for their current job or their job description, but we're hiring somebody for their capacity to grow, and scale, and be in a job two years from now... But when you are in a high growing startup, you never hire people for what they're going to do the next six months. That's not gonna work. And the number one thing is, people who will go through the interview process will decide who will test on what, but at the end of the day when we will regroup after talking to a candidate, 100% have to be a yes. I know it was the same on your end, I think. 100% have to be yes. Otherwise, we'll pass on the candidate. It doesn't mean the candidate was a bad candidate. The guy could be like super smart, super...it's just, it did not work. But two things that are really important. Number one is people knew that if the said no, there will be consequences, right? Meaning that person would not get hired, right? So you have to work with people who understand that. Number two is if somebody said no, you can go back, if you have one out of seven people saying no, you had the opportunity to get back to that person and say, Hey, you are the only no, just doing one last check that you are 100% no, because we're going to pass on this candidate. And the person has to be, I'm going to say smart to even maybe come back and say, hey actually let me re check my notes. Let me check that, and maybe I was wrong, which not many people are able to say. Or I was right, and I picked my my view...And I was wrong, I'm actually a yes, and let's move forward. So first is no compromise on hiring talent and spend the time between needed to find the right person. The other one is hiring is a full time job. And initially when you build a team, it's not the thing you're going to do at seven at night. You just want to block your calendar to just have that muscle, and spend the time partnering with your recruiter, looking yourself in your network, and so on. But it's a full time job. And then when you've done all that job of hiring, next step is onboarding and after it's nurturing, right? It's how you going to help people understand who they are as a professional, and what are they good at, what are they less good at, and it starts there. And what is the path for them to grow? It can be a year plan, a 2 year plan. Whatever it takes to ensure that you assembled the best team possible, a team that is going to collaborate. I think collaboration is at the heart of it. I think specifically in Marketing, I'm not going to talk about other organizations, but in Marketing you are the center of so many things that if you don't have like collaboration / communication skills, it's going to be a little bit hard to succeed. So that's one. The second one for me is demanding excellence. Demanding excellence across anything you do. And the third one is passion. Passion for your job. I can talk more about it, but I think when people ask me what do you look for in a candidate? I'm like, okay, you look for the skills and so on. I'm going to look for culture fit and passion. And both are going to be equally important.

Naber: Yeah. Excellent. When you were going through these interviews...ABP always be pipelining, like you said, just building that muscle all the time. You're the CEO of the hiring process, you own the hiring process. As you're going through, and you're going through the interviews, what was the calibration exercise like after that? What were the nuts and bolts of that method you use to calibrate with the rest of the team after you were done with the interviews?

Nicolas Draca: Yes. So they way it was working is, we do this today at HackerRank, we have something called job guidelines. When we agree what are the skill set that are needed for the job. And we defined the skillset and what we expect from them. And the same way I love to had passion for the company, passion for the job, which I have two different, which are different. And then I had culture, values as part of the scorecard. Okay. What we do is everybody has to...so there no like, oh yeah, I didn't have time to update, and I'm just sending you an email and this thing is going to be okay. No, everybody has to [complete] the scorecard. It is super important. At HackerRank, and depending upon your entry level, if it goes Director and above, actually the entire package goes to our CEO, he wants to review it. And it's really, really... Like if you don't have the package ready, he's not going to approve it. Like he's not even going to interview with the person. And if he's not part of the interview process, he's not gonna approve the package. That person would never get an offer and a reference. So it's pretty core. So we have alignment and discussion, a pre-interview process. Not for every interview, but when start a job search. And then what we do, which takes time, but it's worth it, when you interview a couple of candidates is that meeting debriefing session. I do believe that often the first two or three candidates you're going to bring on sight could be for calibration, calibrating the team. What is happening when you are going that path is you have many new hires, and you're going to have to understand their interview style, and what they value, and what they don't don't value. And I think those post interview meetings, meeting with the team of interviewers and just agreeing and - saying, hey, I he was strong of that, and somebody else saying, no, he was like super weak, and ensuring that everybody's on the same page on what we expect, and how we value those skills, is really, really important. So calibration on a couple of first candidates is my take. When you have a more junior team or a new team within the organization.

Naber: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Your teams at such hyper growth businesses, those teams are always new, always getting used to the process. Also a smaller business, obviously always getting used to the new process. So as you're bringing people on board and you're onboarding them, do you have any couple of tactics you use to make sure you bring them onboard and starting to onboard them most effectively?

Nicolas Draca: Yes. So actually took me time to find the right onboarding process. Of course you want to put that document together. That's what you then have to do. And I think that recently, I finally, found a good way to do it. And what is happening now is on my team when you start, you know on day one, it's already on your calendar actually when you start, there is day 30 - you have to present to the entire Marketing team.

Naber: Very, very cool.

Nicolas Draca: And what do you have to present? So we provide them a template. I'm a big template guy. And the template is... What is your job - you're familiar with that - in less than 15 words? What did you understand is your job? Less than 15 words. To execute your job, I have something called Relationship 15 - who are the 15 people for you to be successful? We can go deep on that. And list those people. You have five people which are for you to be successful, five for your team, and five for you to grow in your career. Then a stop, start, continue. And people are surprised by it. They're like, I just started. I'm like yeah, but I hired you based on your expertise. If you're super junior in your job, I'm sure you have a point of view on what we should Stop doing, Start doing, Continue doing.

Naber: And fresh eyes. Fresh eyes.

Nicolas Draca: Yes. And give your point of view. And it's just to empower people to say, tell me what you think. Like actually, I'd love to know what you think. And the last one is, what are you gonna achieve at the 60, and what do you plan to achieve at day 90? So this is a forcing function for many, many things to happen before the presentation. Because by doing that, by presenting this to the rest of the..So they presented the entire Marketing organization, to my entire team. And the goal is not like to boo them, and say this and that. That's no what it is about. It is about the person to be accountable for what they are going to do. Number two is to understand why they were hired for, and just set a high bar. Like not day one, but it's kind of like you're going to have to do that. And people realize that that presentation better be good. It just sets the bar for how they're going have to deliver and ship moving forward. And three is, for people in the team to understand who they are, and what they're going to do, what the new hire is going to do. So it solves a lot of things, and have those meetings & milestone day 30...Wherever I go next, I'll repeat that because I'm happy with it myself.

Naber: It's in the infamous Nicolas Draca playbook. So there's so much to pick apart there. Two things I want to you to expand on just a little bit. One is, you talk about, what is your job? I think it's from Fred Kaufman's Conscious Business - 15 words to define it...That you talk about, and when looking at some of your content you've referenced that in the past. You talk also about how that as an exercise can be a good calibration and way of helping manage up within your job? Can you explain that a little bit?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So what is happening, and it happened to me at the Twilio. I worked with somebody called Francois that I know really, really well. And it took us four months to be on the same page on what my job was. And you might find it silly, it's not silly. It's just that, you come as a new hire and you have a vision for what you want to do. And when it grows that fast, and it grows at that speed, you're going to have to be pretty, pretty clear about what you're going to do. And I think you have to be more clear about what you're not going to do. It's as important. And I think the key to it is being on the same page as your boss on what is your job? And we spend four months with Francois discussing it, where even on my one-on-one, I would bring it on a biweekly basis saying, hey, this is what I'm going to focus on. And I will get that feedback saying yes, but maybe. And I'm like, wow, we really have to get to the end of it. And the why of the discussion is pretty simple. One is, let's assume you do that. You decide by yourself and what your job is without agreement with your manager, meaning without sign-off and really being on the same page. After 12 months, you're going to do a 12 months review, and you're going to claim victory! You're going to think you're going to claim victory. You're gonna say, Hey, this is what I did. It is amazing. And the person is going to look at you and say, this is not what I expected from you. And you're like, what? I've been working my ass off building that team, shipping A, shipping B, shipping C, delivering here, moving that KPI. And if you replay it in your head, I'm sure it happens to many people in the past, where the person is looking at you saying, yeah, Nah, that's okay, congrats. And so you want to avoid that type of gap or misunderstanding on what you need to solve for. It's not only about your personal review, and progression in career, and everything, it's just about being sure that you tackle and address things that you were supposed to, in alignment with your boss. Because he or she may have other things to solve for, and they have a bigger vision, they have information you don't have, that needs to be to be solved when thinking about the overall strategy - which you could miss a piece. I had another boss at LinkedIn, it was the same like Nick, where I'm kind of intense, and I move fast, and I love to do things, an so on. And I close on the topic in a meeting, and two weeks later he would come back and say, what about that? And in my head I'm like, I don't understand. We already talked about that. I thought we we closed on it. And then you need to - listening is a big, big thing - pause, listen, and say, okay, it looks like I missed it. And the goal for you is not to push it and just repeat what you need two weeks ago, it's more to clarify and say, okay, what is the gap? What is the issue? And what do you expect from me? And you will see that, and I've seen it multiple times...Where people, and I do it the same with my team...If I have something bugging me, I'm like how can you solve that? And they're yeah, of course. And then they don't do it. And two weeks after I'm going to come back to it because I had it top of mind for me. I'm like, what is the progress on that? And they look at me like, what are you talking about? And so I think driving that alignment, managing up...It's more about aligning than managing-up I think, and setting up expectation, is key to success in a collaborative relationship.

Naber: Nice. Excellent. And one more quick side note on that. You had mentioned, so thinking about managing stakeholders, and we'll get to that in a second here. But managing close stakeholders in your close sphere - managing up, managing sideways, and managing down. You talk about this also it has an application to managing sideways and managing your stakeholders, correct? Can you explain that a little bit?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah, yeah. thanks for that, I forgot to mention it. Yeah, good catch. Yeah...So by being clear on what is your job... So first you're clear with yourself, which is a good starting point and this is where you want to start. You have managing up, and then again when you're in a company growing that fast, everybody has priorities, everybody has work to do. And you want, and I ask my teams do that when engaging on projects, when asking for bandwidth, and time from somebody else on your team or not on your team, you want to explain every time the why. Okay, you want to spend time and say, hey, actually I'd love for you to spend time with me, or allocate x hours of your time to my initiative. And let me explain the why and impact it's going to have. It's kind of a Sales pitch internal, it is a sales pitch. And to ensure that that person is going to focus more time with you that they would on another project. And I think explaining clearly the why, and what is your job is part of it, people will appreciate it. And if they disagree, or if they don't understand, just pause, put yourself in their shoes, try to understand what they have to solve for, what are the issues they have and why they're not getting it, and spend the right amount of time on that. When you build a a big Initiative, large initiative, you want to ensure that people are inspired by the project you're trying to lead and push. And I think this will help one, you get successful, two, people understand why they should spend time on it, and three, deliver and ship at scale.

Naber: Excellent. Thank you for that. Really good tips and insight. And then the last one I want to talk about within Second last thing I wanna talk about within talent. You mentioned the Relationship 15. Can you explain a little bit more about that? You kind of grazed over it, but I do think it's important. So the five, five, five, can you explain a little bit more about that?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So, what we do here is we try to get a sense and invite people, I invite people on my team or I do this across the company, also sometimes I did it here at HackerRank...Is can you please list...And I invite everybody to do that. It's always an interesting exercise...who are the five people for you to be successful personally, that work in our company. Then who are the five people for your team - and the team can be the team you belong to within Marketing... - to be successful? And who are the five people to help you grow in your career. Okay. And all of these people are mutually exclusive. So they are like 15 different people, right? And afterwards you do a 2x2, everybody loves a 2x2. One is connective tissue - low versus high. And the other one is core versus strategic. And you put the 15 names in that 2x2. It's up to you to decide on low versus high and connective tissue. Connective tissue doesn't mean that you need to talk to them on a daily basis. Okay, let me be clear. But it means that if you contact them, or you send them an email, they would reply to that email and make time available for you. So when you do that, people came to come to a realization most of the time that they have gaps. The first they are sometimes unclear about who should be those people. They realize that they have gaps. They realize that, hey, actually those 10 people within the company, they don't know what my job is, and these are the people you should interact with and explain because they are key to your success. They'd better know what you're solving for. And then as people put together a plan to say specifically, there is a gap on the not in your company for you to grow. And they put together a plan saying, Hey, I need to force myself to go to user groups, to conferences, and make friends, or get to start knowing people and learn from them to be able to grow. Again, it goes back from the assumption...Meaning in my day to day life, when when I work on a project, if it's a big initiative, one of the first thing I will do is I will ping between five and 10 of my friends saying, Hey, I'm thinking about that. That's how I would like to do it. What's your thought? What's your 2 cents? And I can tell you like within a day I get everybody's feedback. I listen to feedback. That's really important. That's another part is just not asking for feedback for the sake of it and process it, package it, and get your idea from V1 to V5 or V10, and learn from it.

Naber: Nice. Excellent. That's great. Okay. let's stop into, so we talked about talent, talk about hiring, onboarding, talked a little bit about about developing a dart, developing that talent as well. Understanding them as people where they want to go. from a, from a development perspective, let's hop into insights. you've talked about, moving from data to intelligence and you also have talked about smart data versus, not just big data. Explain the insights pillar to your, of your science, of Marketing pillars.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So on the Marketing side today we are, we are lucky because we have more and more data. We have data for everything. There is no lag of a, of metrics. on, on one end we're lucky on the other end it's overwhelming. and why? Because there's too much data and now you can spend your days and just looking at spreadsheets to everybody and a, as far as they know, you don't need a business by just looking at spreadsheet. All right? 12 hours a day. So here are the eight year is first based on your priorities and everything. I come from the science of Marketing. it's to be able to, and dishpan how are you going to measure success early on? and maybe the first time you do it, you don't have the right number. But I invite everybody to try it.

Nicolas Draca: And they're, I'm pick a number. and maybe their first quarter is to test your capacity to deliver up to that number, but what you wanted a success as to being controlled and then descend the dynamic of how you're going to get there. And w w when you are able to do that, the first time, then you'd be able, you're going to be able to build on it and become, become better. But I believe for that, for whatever you do in general, there is a measure of success that you can apply. and you should apply that measure of success, learn from it. My framework all the time is I have a high KPI and then I have free metrics reporting that KPI. I know I'm saying conceptual than meaning is there so many, as I mentioned, you could apply and when you have these under control and when this is working and you are able to predict, okay. Plus minus 10% what you're doing, it's to move to the next level. And being able to leverage meaning machine learning, data science, depending on the, on the team you have, if you have good Ascentis working for you to be a model is a big drewhich is to predict capacity of people to buy or to predict something unless at the time predict capacity of a customer too to buy your product.

Naber: Yeah. Excellent. And when someone has very little data or limited data, what's the mindset that they should have as they're getting started doing that?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah, so I think they are. so I don't, so first most of the time of people I have the data,and why? Because you have historical data and so the feedback everybody's gonna share is oh yeah, but they stopped. I'm yeah, okay. But it's still really, that's it. And so every time I build something, I'm going to go like hardcore Demand gen here. You're okay, well many SQL Sales qualified qualifying today, deliver next quarter. And I invite people, I'm like back and they're it's sex. I'm yeah, I got that part. Look back, it doesn't matter. And try to make a guess about how many and then try to define a target for yourself and you show you the next quarter and how many you want to deliver and you will, you will learn. So that's one. because looking at historical data, you always add something to learn.

Nicolas Draca: There is no perfect data and nobody, no marketer will tell you like you have the best data in the world. So, you just have to put your ego aside and just process of past data to try to understand what's going on. Or you can look at benchmark. of course, they are, there is no lack of website with benchmark data. I think as a core, you should look at historical data. And my guiding principle here is you just want to become better quarter of a quarter, right? If your number was 50, the way you want it to become 60, like something higher and let's these 10%, that's how I look at it. And you need to take into consideration the cycle that it wouldn't take you like three to six months, which is okay to understand it and to be able to grow it. Success all the time is being in control. Agasomething I learned in many companies is you can miss something like the word assist mess and not being in control and not understanding the why. If you're in control, it's a great starting point for you to become better at what you do.

Naber: Nice. I love that. That's great quote. You can put that on a, put that on a license plate, put that on a, on a tattoo, something like that. So two more pieces I want to talk about with an insights. one is, I mean, I don't know if people know this about you. You have six U s patents. I mean that's, that's ridiculous. So one of those patents that comes from the use of data insights and moving back against an account based Marketing model, yeah, you've gone from a data to intelligence and applied that to how can I impact revenue as much as possible. Can you talk a little bit about, your account based Marketing thought process structure, the mindset? yeah, but let's start there.

Nicolas Draca: Yes. So on the ABM you want me to talk about the patents, like what we did, how did we get there? Okay. so what we do, I go back to the talent buckets that we ensure that we spend 20% of our time experimenting, always. and why is because we live in a world where things are changing fast. and whatever you did and whatever failed six months ago doesn't mean it's going to fail today. So we, we build a culture, all empowerment where you can succeed or fail. And actually if you fail, it's okay. As long as you know why? that's why we go back to, yeah. You need to know why you need to be in control. And so by doing that, there are some experiments that are going to fail and and died and some other that are going to be highly successful.

Nicolas Draca: And here we were working with a teon the Sales op side, data science side and business insights. Okay. We'd love to predict propensity of an account to buy. And what we did initially, we started on a a on a Friday putting on a whiteboard. Like how would we score an account? And and today everybody in Sales and Marketing you the framework, your called decision, a demon waterfall. And that demon wonderful framework as a little bit of an issue is there's not yet you move from it lead a contact I mentioned to an account I mentioned. So more or less he does not really connect because in a perfect 12 you want to do a funnel, which is a full account funnel from Marketing qualified accounts. That's where the new concept of the time up to your SQL and close one business. So looking at this, we're okay, we need to identify, defined something called working quantified accounts.

Nicolas Draca: I think we called it ais. I count into our score. Initially the idea was to say, okay, let's look at all the contacts associated to the account, their level of engagement, and do kind of a weighted nps average on how, the account score should be. I'm geeking out a little bit, but as you can see, it started more with a brainstorming with somebody on my team called fat and saying, Hey, how should we think about that? And then explaining the why as a vision, partnering with Sales operation, partnering with a data fence theme and some of the tewe assembled this team saying, okay, this looks pretty cool. let's put some science behind it. what we did is what started an experiment, ended up being a success because it was one of the dimensioned core to how we will plan into account or location or account follow up.

Nicolas Draca: moving forward, at LinkedIn and with all the support of the company. We went through the patent process and after I think, I'm sure, you also when on the product side, where people looked at it and maybe integrated it in their algorithm. I'm not sure about that. I don't know what they did with it, but, that it was a great story. There's a, an experiment on a Friday afternoon discussion culture of hey, let's push it to the next level, see if it works. Partnering with people who could operation and being able to put it together.

Naber: Yeah, the common, yeah, that's what I was thinking. The combination of collaboration, cross stakeholder management, cross stakeholder partnerships and projects that you had to work on in order to get that done. Plus it's the vision that you had in order to get that done. It was, it was really impressive. so, one more, one more thing I want to talk about around data. Let's pull it up a level and we're going to talk about stakeholder relationships for a minute. you talk about, measuring from a Marketing perspective and aligning with stakeholders within the business. most specifically you've talked about aligning with finance and aligning with Sales. Can you talk a little bit about the process you go through taking data, taking information, and at the same time going to align with the way that you believe and they believe Marketing should be measured within the company because it sounds like you've got, an excellent methodology that I believe a lot of people would really benefit from.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So I want him to another panel recently we talk about the same. So what's happening? What is, what is the, because there was an issue today, the issue today is sometime the issue is misalignment. Wow. Looks like simple issue, but it's a pretty complex one. and what is the issue in my point of view is Sales as a point of view on what an SQL, if you dig ESCO as a measure of success should be Marketing at the point of view and people don't align.okay. And so the way I've done it [inaudible] I come with a set of like two or three definitions. Okay. And I go and talk to finance to, to Sales. And I'm Hey, this is a freeways, we can do it a n. And really my positioning is pick one. I don't care. because the deficient or like it's more in the details.

Nicolas Draca: It's not really in the definition itself. It's like it's a detail. And I think an open discussion and explaining against the why saying, Hey, this is option a and this is what's going to happen. This is option B, this is option c, what do you feel good about? And often actually those discussion people are oh, thank I appreciate it first to have a discussion. I appreciate the explanation of all of it. And quite often actually people come back saying, okay, you pick, I agree with, I understand where you come from, I understand what you're trying to achieve. And let's agree on it. And and so quite quick, quite often actually people come back, say you pick, if they decide,I'm fine with it, but what are we going to do is, we'd gone and we're gonna spend the amount of time needed to get to that agreement.

Nicolas Draca: it's not the loosey Goosey suggest hey, we had a discussion. Oh, I'm running out, I need you to come to a call, a meeting. I'm yeah, we're going to meet after agalike just to be the, I want to hear you say it. I agree with and you're going to say the definition and then we'll be done. Right. and then really, and it's not that you're later. So we get to that and then what are we going to do? on top of it is I think as the, our Sales development, depending on representative team or BDR, depending on the teeverybody has different names, but you want to co own, and this is when I was doing a, I've LinkedIn is what I was doing a Trulia, here's what my team is doing. A HackerRank that number was, was that team and be golden.

Nicolas Draca: The same number. Okay. Yup. And and this is just going to move from definition to execution where, and being able to do it on the operational side. It is, there is no disconnect. People present together. They the same view on the number and phone and stuff. And you would see it goes back to that alignment, that alignment and collaboration again. I know like just the theme I and again agreeing in your disagreement nation on the same page, to be able to push it and to move forward. Like I don't think if you work in an organization I was sharing, it's where Sales and Marketing or are not like partnering together every single stage, not only at teaching level, you have the CMO and the cro like smiling and saying, of course we know each other up to the board level and down to the lower level in the organization.

Nicolas Draca: It needs to be across the board. It doesn't have to be a exact only because, because this, this is, this would not work. And I had something else I wanted to add and that's level. Yeah. Once I have, I have, I have a good anecdote. I have, somebody called Dan. one of the company I worked at, they told LinkedIn and once I was struggling withwell I would not align with my str clinical quintuple and he looked at me and I'm Hey, I'm struggling here. It wasn't a big deal. Right. But we were just we were doing planning for the year and we're just not moving forward in one sentence. The he fixed it is Hey N***a,

Naber: okay,

Nicolas Draca: if you guys are not able to align, [inaudible] means that we may have hired the wrong people.

Naber: Yeah.

Nicolas Draca: and in my head, I froze and I'm yeah, we, we, we, we, we, we'd be aligned by end of week.

Naber: It's going to be okay.

Nicolas Draca: Sandy twice. to be frank, it was me and Jeff

Naber: [inaudible]. Right, right.

Nicolas Draca: The last name I just get first name. But it was, and we were not struggling in our relationship. Like it wasn't like it wasn't a great relationship, but it was just as the detail of the planning. It's yeah, we do not hire the right people.

Naber: Yeah.

Nicolas Draca: In my mind, it was like 10 years ago, I think. And I'm yeah, got it.

Naber: Well those details matter and that Dan is a very smart Dan. so when we're taking a look at these different pillars, what I want to do is, let's jump into Twilio. You're jumped to Twilio. What's you're responsible for, at Twilio. You making that jump and then jump into HackerRank as well, and talk about how you jumped in and what you're doing right now. And then I've got one or two more topics and then we'll, and then we'll break. Yeah. So Twilio there was a little bit of, another muscle to build here. It was on the growth angle and a business to developer Marketing to developer. agagrateful product, great team internally, very pretty product.

Nicolas Draca: And here the play was to adapt. And the challenge I was excited about is to be able to learn how to market to a new persona, being developer, knowing that one, so you don't like a marketer and they don't like Salespeople. so it was, that's kind of a challenge when you start. and, and how to be successful at driving engagement and building trust, with that audience to grow the business.

Naber: Got It. what did you learn about going through that process when you were at Twilio and what were you guys particularly good at?

Nicolas Draca: So I first starting from the CEO, the relationship was a w meetings. The CEO was a developer first. cool type of c a product to but like hard core developer. And so, the first one was how to keep and maintain a developer law brand. You have to constantly, like in developer, well do you have developer love and developer? so being a developer love brit's all about trust, and, and great product of course, and documentation and psalm. But there is a muscle, tied to it. And the other one of the big learning is the concept of a listening. Meaningless. Listening is a, is a big, big thing. And listening and understanding how that persona, communicate and there is a lot of lessening because there is a lot of learning. so I graduated from computer science. I'm not going to claim to be a developer anymore, but understanding and little bits of persona. But here it was a lot of like nobody really had a playbook about how to like AWS add one. There was the only one but how to successfully build that motion and it was a ton of listening and learning and experiment actually listening learnings and experiment.

Naber: Oh very cool. road you must have gone on in order to get there. So from a, now the last, the next two pillars reason I want to jump into Twilio's cause operations in life cycle. I'm sure that you had to iterate on your playbook as you're thinking about the operations and life cycle, jumping into that development persona or developer persona and persona, you were, you were a Marketing too. Can you talk a little bit about operations in lifecycle pillar and also some of the best practices one should think about as they're going through executing those two things?

Nicolas Draca: Yes, of course. And you're going to see, my answer is going to be pretty fruit. Hopefully it will be on point. so as a core, Marketing is about orchestrating customer life cycle. Okay. What does this mean? It means that you need to be able to execute on the right persona, right time, right offer, right channel. It seems super simple actually. It's highly complex, right? And as part of that framework, and if your approach was that frame within that framework, you can not be wrong. And there are two things you want to do. One is customer centricity just puts a customer as a center of it and you want to be relevant. If you're not sure how that event in those four dimensions, you're just going to be unsuccessful. Sure. Okay. So when you think about operations and orchestration, lifecycle and so on, is when I playing that framework, if you put the customer at the center of it and you're relevant and you're able to understand right persona.

Nicolas Draca: So who's your buyer? So you have a set of persona and defining them and understanding what they care about. right. channel is what channel do they use? How do they engage with you? Right? Time as ours, they're a suspect, meaning they have no clue who you are. Prospects such as they have an idea, but what you offer our costumers, which hopefully they know they'd be more, right offer is what type of content they need or they care about. Right? Is it a customer story? Is it some data sheets of white papers, some demo, some video and so on and so on. So just spending's a time to operate within that framework, agaand putting the customer as a center of it is what's going to set you up for success.

Naber: Cool. And I know this is, that's a great answer and I love the framework. If I'm going from, I know it's going to depend on the place where I'm starting from, but if I'm going to move to the model you just talked about, around right content, right person, right time, right channel. If I'm gonna, if I'm going to go through and execute against that framework, how long should I expect it to take me as a market, new organization? as I go through an iterate on this, how long should I expect to take to me for me to get it right?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So I think as usual is because it is so complex, you just want to start, learn and become better, right? So I think the, the first step, for example, if you go step one is okay, I have three type of buyers, whether they are type A, B, and c, and it's trying to be able to bucket them in those and to tag them in your CRM saying, okay, so this is type A's, this is type bs, this is type two. It doesn't need more complexity than that. Right? and it started there. That's step one. And being able to, go in details and say our buyer persona framework available on the web as much as you want and start ensuring that the way you communicate to buyer a, B, or c a is different, in your wording and your messaging and what you deliver to them, right?

Nicolas Draca: For example, if you have a highly technical buyer, you going to be really careful and really thoughtful when, on your messaging and those type of profile. I appreciate more of a nonhuman type of interaction. Yeah. Okay. So only one to empower your Sales development team to go crazy and say good and last then because what's going to happen as in subscribes, whether it be for the roof and they just gonna hate your brright? And if, if, let's assume you find a way to engage with them, you want to ensure that the, the, the Sales team is highly technical or has been trained to have at least a first like five minutes of discussion is a buyers technical again to, to out that, that, that lingo and ends that engagement, right? Because the center approach is as just not gonna work. And I think it's the same applied to every single persona. So to summarize, I think success will come quickly for your messaging, looking at your engagement rate and if people engaging with if they're not engaging with it's just means you're doing it the wrong way. But keep it simple and start don't, don't wait. And don't overthink it. Focus on your persona and your messaging. And this will solve, I think for many, many things to get started and just improve it.

Naber: Okay, great. Thank you. Hey, one more topic I want to cover. So let's jump into HackerRank. You joining HackerRank, what you're doing, and then I've got one more topic and then we'll wrap. Okay.

Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So HackerRank so I joined two years ago, two over there to one, build a team again. startup was a series B. It was 120 on police when I started. So it's, to put a team together to execute on a, on a Marketing practice and then to focus really on meaning a couple of things. One, the brand and end the value prop. Also positioning messaging, was a big topic. enablement. we have Salespeople across the globe. was it be topic as well? thought leadership. of course, our current, today's a leader in skill assessment for developer and felt leadership. Like we, we believe we own the discussion, on that topic where as the expert and being sure that we can execute on thought leadership across multiple dimensions.

Naber: Yeah. Excellent. and thank you for a small overview of HackerRank as well. it's such a cool brand and excellent product. when last topic I want to talk about is, is that transition, into, let's call it an early stage or mid stage business at the COO level, how does your mind need to develop and how does your thought process need to develop as you're getting into that mid stage

Nicolas Draca: COO mindset, what should your mindset be as you're coming into the organization? What should your first few steps be and what sort of frameworks that you think to apply as you're, talking to other c levels and starting to execute with your team? Yeah, so the a, when you start, I think, all the ways is you don't know what you don't know. Another, a stupid statement, but it's, spending another half time. I think it's a step one. And I was discussing with friends, in the same jobs as do, as many customer meeting as you can, in there for 30 days. So whatever I talked about prior in the 30 days, I apply it to myself, as well. but, but it's it starts with hearing the voice of their customer and it's not to go on those customer meetings to please the Sales organizations saying, Hey, I'm on the Marketing side.

Nicolas Draca: I did it. Check, let's move on. That's not what it is about is trying to get a sense of, how are you learn so much, right? What do customers care about? the lingo? Like what word do they use? What it is, their perception of our brand? What is the type of issue they're trying to solve? So use case and what does it mean on, on, on their end. so does this is one that I'd spend time with, different size, SMB and Marketing depending on your business, but try to tackle all the segments. Yup. And from a prospect standpoint and a customer stand point, because of course a discussion are going to be different, you're learning are going to be different. Number two is, I do deep dive was all the exact meaning my stakeholders saying, hey, we gonna meet a year from now.

Nicolas Draca: What is success like you're gonna tell me you gotta you good job because of work and what do you expect? And everybody has a different expectation. So you just want to go around and get a sense from everybody about what they expect. And then step three is just putting a plan together. I tend to define priorities pretty quickly saying, hey, so those are my priorities. This based on my playbook of course. But, and of course I'm at like six months or more, like two years, and get a team and makes the effort saying, okay, I'm going to take all of your teputs them together in a room for 45 minutes, send the preread and I'm going to explain to you what I think I should do and what I'm going to focus on. And so over communicating on that. Okay.

Nicolas Draca: and go there getting feedback and that just a pan. And what I will do, on my first one oh one wasmy boss in that case, a CEO, I'll use my priorities as a framework to lead for as an agenda for, for a, our one on no, and just builds that muscles things. This is what I'm focusing on this way and it's works meaning it, it's just because he's oh yeah, where are you doing on time? When are you doing on the life cycle? What are you doing in go to market? and it's just to connect the dots between is what he has in his head and what he's expecting from me.

Naber: Nice. That's great. that's actually a really good transition to my last question about it. how do you get people to, how do you get, other stakeholders, whether it's Sila, whether it's up, sideways, down, maybe even board level, et cetera. what's the exercise you go through, some of the tactics you use in order to get people on the same page about what Marketing is, what their job is and how you define it versus how they define it. What are those types of conversations? Are some tactics you use to get on the same page?

Nicolas Draca: Yeah, so we have, so we have like any other, a team like QBO, ours, so if you don't have QBR, so even if it's, yeah, so I was discussing recently was a smaller company actually not so small and they're oh, we don't have QBR yours. And I'm what? so, we, we have, so if you don't have cube, yours was your exec teput qprs together. and so this is, this is what I use. for those, for those who don't know, quarterly business reviews can explain a little bit, maybe 30 seconds, explain about the quarterly business reviews. So quarterly business reviews is as kind of a, one thing as you're going to look back. So you're hey, I had five priorities and this is how I deliver against my priority, and what my team has done and look forward saying, hey, is this is what I'm going to focus on on the next quarter?

Nicolas Draca: It was a session for the look back. He's more hey, this is what happened and the look forward is this is what I plan to do. Is it the line was what you guys spent? Yeah, I'm super religious about those. and what I mean by that is I'm not going to do zen at 7:00 AM for a meeting at 8:00 AM. I'm going to spend time with my team. I'm going to spend time with myself prepping for that and being, like demeaning acceptance of myself as aquatic Cimzia QBR because it ties back to the quality of the work, that, that we going to do. And I'm going to spend time if needed. And if there are some complex topic, I'm going to pre wire it was my stakeholders and if we have a team meeting, at the each end level, I would not be shy of doing even those half an hour meeting of Hey, is, this is what I'm thinking about? What do you think? I'm happy to do five, 10 of those meetings if needed, but I want to ensure that there was no gap. And if your communication, what I selfishly, work on and when agreed and when I get a little bit of feedback after moving to after it's okay, see you in three months, more or less and w moving fast. I think by, by working on, like if you don't know where you're going, you don't know where you're going.

Nicolas Draca: Agaanother stupid statement, but at for one. And so it means you don't have a pass do anything. and so we try to be pretty clear at all level in the Marketing organization about what is success three months from now and that's what we should for by doing zap. It helped us understand what we are not going to work on and number two is have an impact. And I think with time, if you have this type a little bit of a vision of what you want to do and issue, you know where you're going. except if you are wrong on your destination, that's a different story. But if you are right, you will drive impact, which would drive respect and trust, was in your organization.

Naber: Awesome. Okay. Excellent. You've been so great with your time. Amazing. Thank you so much. I've got two rapid fire questions. It won't take very long and we're gonna wrap. first one I asked to some people's birthdays. It's not your birthday. We said, well, if it is, there'll be really bad of me not to know that. But it's, I don't think it's your birthday. but I'm going to ask you anyways, I explained all this to my audience are sick of hearing me say that, but I really like to ask to some people's birthdays. what is the most important, learning or lesson you've acquired professionally in the last 12 months?

Nicolas Draca: What is and what have I learned? The, work, it's a, enjoy. I'm still, it's both a personal and professional is, enjoying the moment. I'm not there yet. and what, I mean, why, why you personally, it kind of makes sense. Why would it make sense? Professionally? It's because we keep running like crazy doing a loan and a lot of things. and we don't spend enough time appreciating either what we're doing or what we've done and I'm still learning process in mind for another 18 months. It will, it will take me another, I've set up a goal on it. I think it's will take more time to be at the level that I'd love to be. I'd love to understand.

Naber: Yeah, that's such a hard one. if you've got any tactics that you've found are very helpful share, but otherwise, the next 18 months, maybe we should revisit the session and we can talk only about that topic if there's a framework,

Nicolas Draca: having that peace of mind. I don't know. That's why I'm not there, but I'll find it.

Naber: Okay, fair enough. let's see. Last, last question is, when you're looking to hire, executives within a business, what are, what are a couple, like maybe your, maybe your, well, let me rephrase the question. Let's say you're at a smaller mid size business uh,

Nicolas Draca: you're hiring your first a couple of leadership hires. What are some things that your no, you need to hire for in those first couple of leadership hires in order to nail it? Yeah, I think the, so when you, you tend to learn, it's a great question. so I think you learn through the process when the person, I'm going to go, when the person started, like you're gonna learn often that if it is your first, executive team hire, you're going to learn a year later what you expected. and which is a little bit of an issue. So what you want to do is, I'm going to talk about the Marketing function, and I think apply to other function. I meet with a ton of CEO and they're I'm going to hire my first marking. how should I look? And I'm Hey, it's easy.

Nicolas Draca: what is I go back, what is success, a year or two years from now? Like you need to be really, really clear about what, what is success and not success, like super tactical success. Like what are the three things you want that person to solve? Because I think from that, it will drives a skillset to you. You need and you will have a better send and prioritizing, like [inaudible] kings zos. because what ended up happening sometimes is you're looking for a Unicorn and Unicorn don't exist as far as I know. and so being clear in your head about what you're looking for and stack ranking, who will help you define the skills, that you did and if that's just from the skills number two is a compromise. A culture. Like if you don't hire somebody, like if you have a doubt by the way on culture fit, just go no, like we used to do it anymore because you're next candidate.

Nicolas Draca: I know executive hires hard and takes time, but I've never seen somebody compromising on culture and hiring somebody and the thing to work it every time it's getting worse actually. because yeah, like you have the unconscious voice in your head and number free. That's I think something that people are shy about doing that. Ask people to present a plan. Even at executive level, Hey, guess what? Love loves the discussion. come and present a plan to the team. And sometimes I've seen it where people are shy about that. Butyou say executive, I'm no, screw that. Right. we want to understand how he thinks and I think this tells a lot, about how like their mindset or they think and how their, their view of it a business. nice. And how prescriptive are you with the plan that you asked them to present?

Nicolas Draca: You templated about it or did you just kind of let them run with whatever the plan is now it'sno template. There's like winning that level. The guy you should be able to articulate something you don't know like from the session. oh, people, lesson manage time. how does each thing, what do they value religious talk about theirselves do they would do like or if you have a plan, I'm going to go back to Thailand as a guy and they were talking about these telike what, what happened you miss that. Like I add a Sales plan. I've seen a Sales exec presenting and they never talk about the customer. And so every time I weighed like 40 minutes and I'mwhat about meeting was costumer? Oh yeah, yeah. That's why I'm dude, what are you talking about? so I think it's a, when it gets Heidi tactical, but I think it tells you if if you manage it the right way and you know you're because sometimes people have a tendency to say, I'm going to do email. It's hey, email. Decide. You just listen and use two hours to go really deep. you will understand that.

Naber: Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening. If you appreciated and enjoyed the episode, go ahead and make a comment on the post for the episode on LinkedIn. If you love The Naberhood Podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give us a five star review on iTunes. Until next time - go get it.

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