Under Pressure: How To Win as a B2B Marketing Leader in 2022 with Mutiny Founder Jaleh Rezaei
7 Jun 2022 · 63 min
Jaleh Rezaei, founder of Mutiny, discusses how B2B marketers can drive revenue in 2022. She explains Mutiny's no-code personalization platform and shares lessons from her time at Gusto about aligning marketing with company goals and converting more customers.
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Exit Exit.
My guest is Jaleh Rezai. She is the founder and CEO of Mutiny.
Thank you for being here. Can you give a quick just intro to who you are and what you do and then I'll so everybody can get to know you and then I'll take us from there.
Yeah. So I'm the co founder and CEO of Mutiny. We are a no code platform for marketers to help convert their top of funnel spend into actual revenue by creating personalized experiences for their various visitors and customer segments on their website.
Okay, if you're in chat right now, do me a favor. Put the comment yes in the chat if you are struggling or if you could be doing better from a revenue generating could marketing be doing a better job generating revenue in your opinion? Put yes but yes or no in the chat.
Amazing ever.
And then it's like yeah, especially everybody here is mostly B2B marketing. Kaylee says yes. Stuart says yeah.
Okay, there's one though. It looks like Christopher Fox is all set.
Christopher Fox. Yeah, we'll bring that. We'll tell your, we'll tell your, we'll tell your CEO, we'll tell your CFO about that. Okay, so there's a lot of things that we're going to cover. We have a bunch of interview stuff that I want to do, but we're also going to take questions and I'll give preference to people who want to ask questions live. It's much better to see your face and so you can do that via Goldcast in here somewhere. But here's my question for you. This Is what? I didn't say tell you. I was going to ask. Ryan told me that you all have done this crazy fundraising blitz. Next week, you're taking the team and you're doing an off site. Can you just talk about that? Like, what do you want to. Why are you doing that? What do you want to get out of an off site? What do you think will make an effective off site?
Well, you know, one of the biggest learnings for me that came out of the pandemic is that turns out we don't need to have the entire company in one office, you know, huddled around to be able to build a really effective culture. And so that's been a big learning for us. Obviously not by choice, but in doing it, we realized that we can work really effectively without being in the same location. And that's allowed us to. Now, 70% of our team is completely remote. And so for us, the linchpin of how we come together and build culture are these off sites. We do four of them every year, and they're about five to six days long. So people come in on Sunday, we fly everybody in. We always get a house because I think that energy and vibe of not having this stuffy corporate environment is really important for everyone to feel comfortable. And so everybody flies in. We usually have. We used to all be able to fit in one house, and now we have to get multiple houses and then we have hotel overflow for everybody else. And so people come in on Sunday and we wrap up on Friday and everybody flies back. And the goal for the off sites, it's been the same, you know, since the beginning. We essentially, number one, we bring everybody up to speed on the business. So we do a full recap of what happened last quarter. What are our priorities, you know, based on what we're seeing in the market and what do we want to focus on this quarter. And then we spend a lot of time bonding and connecting as a team. So there's all sorts of activities like vulnerability exercises and laser tag and, you know, that kind of stuff. And then the third piece, which is what we exit the off site with, is our okrs for the quarter. So I love off sites, but one of the things I was really sensitive to is in previous companies, we would do a bunch of prep and then go to the off site, and then we would leave the off site and then come back and do another off site, you know, on site to finalize all of the goals. And it was just this excruciating two month long process to get the goals.
And so what you just described, and I could say this because I love them, this was every off site I ever went to at Drift. It was like we spent all the time at the off site and then at the end we're like, oh no, we need a framework.
Yeah, yeah, totally. So we try to do a couple of weeks of prep in advance. We go into the off site with these are the top four priorities. And then the rest of the off site is all focused on what are the projects we're going to work on. And then we put a pin in it on the last day and then everyone flies back out.
So if you're listening to this live right now, a couple hundred people here live, or if you listen to this later, it's going to be on the Exit 5 podcast later. The reason I asked you lay this is because so many of the questions that I see about marketing, the answer is actually not a creative marketing problem. It's about some internal bullshit, some internal misalignment. And I don't know much about your company, but I bet you that a company that has quarterly off sites led by the CEO and all the other functional heads with the goal of creating goals okrs each quarter, I bet you that this team is aligned and on the same page. And Jalen, I just would love to hear your perspective on like, I'm sure you see it too, but so much is about this internal bullshit. If you're going to be a marketing leader here and you want to drive revenue from a business perspective, you have to be a part of this and get everybody aligned at this level.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I think a big part of it does rest with the CEO. Right. I think that as a company, if you don't have top down direction, it's really hard for everybody else to try to align. I have operated in environments where we didn't have really good top down direction. And so what we would do in that case is at least bring the executive team together and try to decide, okay, what are the biggest goals? And try to take more of a leadership stance on that. But at least at Mutiny, we try to come up with top down direction for the entire company and then I communicate those out and then everybody starts building their plan to those priorities.
It's so much easier having been like the person on the other side of that. It's so much easier when you're getting the directive from the CEO.
Yeah.
Here are the goals we want to achieve. How does marketing contribute that? I think a lot of companies that I see, they Start they're like, the marketing team is also trying to come up with the company goals. It's like way easier when you're handed this, hey, here's going to be the pipeline target that we need.
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think in general in marketing there's a lot of complexity, right? It's one of the most complex teams within any company. You have sub functions within marketing. There's this mix of art and science and analytics and creative that's very challenging to manage. And so the biggest thing for me that I learned when I was leading marketing is simplifying. I tend to be a big simplifier, but marketing really put that to the test for me. The one thing that I would change if I went back and was leading marketing is I would just say no to more things. And even if I didn't have that top down direction from the CEO, I would still decide on one or two things that our team was going to do holistically and just focus on those things.
Oh my God, I wish I could pop through the screen and give you a hug because it's so true. It's like doing one or two things very well is what's going to be the difference, the difference maker. And so often marketing just becomes this team that just like say yes to everything. A year down the road, you're missing your pipeline goals, but you got events, a blog, a podcast, a community email, but you're not actually doing what the number one priority is, which is to build pipeline.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, at the end of the day, like, I understand what the source of the distraction is, right? Because you talk to anybody out there, they have a program or a channel or something that's working for them. And so you look at that portfolio and you're like, okay, I also need this big portfolio and I need to go build all of these things. You know, I approached it the same way when I started leading marketing. I was like, wow, like all of these things exist. We need to be able to get revenue through all of these pieces. But where what I think is really important is to approach marketing and program building in the same way that we approach product development, which is how do we create something that's truly valuable and differentiate it? And the reality is growth is really competitive, right? If you want to do content marketing, well, guess what, there are a hundred other companies trying to do content marketing and reach your exact same audience. And so you kind of have to take a step back and say, well, how is my content going to be really different? How is this going to break through the noise? How are we going to build a true flywheel that powers this? And I found that it takes one to two years to build something truly valuable and differentiated that breaks through the noise and is actually successful. And so when you think about it in that way, if you've got 10 of these things going on at the same time, you have literally zero chance of making any of them successful. And so I wish, yeah, when I was a younger cmo, I wish I could go back and tell myself, you know, feel comfortable saying no to more things. Just do one thing at a time.
All right, so you talk a lot about how, like, the world of marketing has changed. I would love to hear your perspective on that and what's changed over the last decade. And a lot of doers in this room right now, the marketers at B2B, SaaS, companies and others kind of doing, doing the day to day. So what, what are the implications? So let's talk about what's changed. Marketing.
Yeah. So, I mean, I think that we are at a major inflection point right now, which means a lot of things are going to change going forward, but it also means a lot of excitement and a lot of opportunity. So if we were to go back and look at the broader history of marketing, marketing was really created in, you know, the 60s, right? Post World War II economic boom. Now we have a bunch of different brands and they need to compete with one another. And so we need stories around these. And that's what created the Mad Men era, which was all about, okay with tv. Now we can start advertising, we can start telling these stories. And then about like 20 ish or so years later, right. As we started with the Internet, we moved into kind of this phase two, which where a lot of that spend moved to online platforms like Google and Facebook. And that's what I think a lot of marketing teams have been perfecting over the past decade, right? Getting really good at, you know, how do we do advertising, how do we do content marketing, how do we do SEO? And if you look at LinkedIn, you see a ton of people with these words in their titles, right? Like there's hundreds of thousands of people that are now experts at this that didn't exist before. But there's still a ton of waste in that process. If you look at the conversion rates in those funnels, at least 19 out of 20 every $20 that's spent is still wasted today. And so now with the availability of data and AI, we're really moving into what I think is going to be the third phase of marketing. And the focus is in this phase is all about not just how do we generate top of funnel and activity, but how do we convert all of that into actual revenue for the company. And that's the piece that I think takes a lot of engineering. Today, there isn't a really good technology that helps marketers do that. And this is why you see that some of the best marketers, their number one complaint is lack of engineering resources. But we're certainly as an industry are going to build technology around this and solve this problem. But really the next decade is all about now that tofu is table stakes. The folks that figure out conversion and are able to deliver revenue are the ones that are going to grow fastest relative to their peers.
Yeah, that's great. I was going to mention that, but you said it. Which is like the top of the funnel content has become table stakes. And I think we see that across the board. So you talked about figuring out conversion. Can we dive into that? Like what. When you look at the typical B2B marketing team today, like, how do you crack that conversion thing? Because I think there's a lot of different topics here. It's like, well, it's conversion. You're doing content, you're driving traffic to the site and that's not converting. Because I see a lot of companies that are doing a good job with content, but at the end of the day are struggling with pipeline. And then when you say, okay, you need to do more pipeline generating activities, they just instantly go to like, oh, that's so that's just cold outbound email to target accounts. Like, what's the mix? How do you go and work on this?
So I break up the funnel in four sections. So section one is what we call top of funnel. So that's a lot of driving awareness. Getting your ad in front of somebody, getting your blog post in front of the right buyer. And I don't want to minimize that step. It is really hard and it requires a lot of infrastructure to be able to identify your ICP and successfully intercept them somewhere on the Internet and get your message or something in front of them.
That's where it starts. Right?
Exactly.
At the most basic level.
Yeah.
For everybody listening, what you're trying to do is to. I like how you put that. You're trying to intercept your ICP and get in front of them with your message. And then from there you can determine what are all the ways that could play out.
Right, that's right. And so after that Point, a lot of marketing teams, I would say, honestly, 99.9% of marketing teams that I interact with, all of their effort is spent on that piece. Right. But it's the follow on journey that I think is now going to become increasingly important. And so that journey has sort of three really big major steps in it. So the first step is converting that into a lead, and that tends to be on the website or, you know, with somebody over email, turning that into an actual conversation with sales, or if you have a PLG funnel into a product trial. The next step after that is converting them into a customer. And the step after that is converting them into upsell and referrals. And I'm happy to talk a little bit about kind of how we did this at Gusto, but those are essentially the big chunks.
Yeah, I would love you to go into that. And I just think it's so important the way you have it laid out. It's like, I think a lot of companies struggle to even give it a framework to operate in. And so it's like, well, what are we trying to get people to do? But so were you very explicit about those three steps? You're like, hey, here is the funnel at Gusto, where we want people to do this thing and then this thing and then this thing, and then here are all the programs that go in there. Let's go into that.
Yeah, absolutely. So it's acquisition, activation, expansion. Right. And so at Gusto, you know, when I first took over the marketing team, we had this challenge where we were spending a lot of money on various channels, whether it was content or advertising, and we were driving a ton of traffic, but our revenue wasn't scaling at that same rate. So we had a really high burn. But we weren't seeing all of that translate into revenue. And so when we started really double clicking into this, looking at the data campaign by campaign, Right. And talking to customers, what became really clear was that we were giving all of these folks the same exact treatment. And as a result, people weren't really converting into a customer. So a restaurant wanted something very different than a startup founder. Right. But we were giving everyone the startup founder experience because that was the Persona that we started with. You know, the call to action for a restaurant, you know, they're more old school. They wanted to talk to somebody, they didn't want to go through a self service signup that was kind of scary to them. They didn't want to look at pictures of people in offices, they wanted to see other people in restaurants. They wanted to talk about features that was more relevant to them. Right. And so as we started to do our diligence, we realized that the reason all of this spend, even though we were putting the right message in front of the right people in the form of our ads and content, they were still not converting, is that the rest of the conversion journey and like we talked about, wasn't really aligned. So we would just lose people by the barrel as they would go through this experience. So the way that we addressed this was we built out an engineering team and we started customizing our various stages of the funnel. So at that really first level, adjusting the website to the particular audience that we were getting in front of. If they were, for example, coming from a particular incubator, we would show them. These are the companies in your incubator that are using Gusto today. We would show them a custom discount code for that incubator to our signup form and onboarding flow. Lots of optimizations within that to all the way down to referrals and upsell. Right? So when somebody would buy payroll from.
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Out, automatically score and ping them. When it was time to do upsell, we created personalized referral modals in order to get them to refer more people. And so that allowed us to essentially both increase our acb, but also drive conversion in that funnel, which ultimately allowed us to grow incredibly quickly. During the four years that I was.
There, I hope people at home are like nodding along like me, because this is the stuff that people show up for. This is, I love hearing about this, mistakes that I've made with that is, I think it's so. And I see other companies do this. It's so easy to like, I get what you're saying, totally get it. But don't you think it's easy to just like, you jump into the tactics and, and that's not where you win. I think you win at like, hey, you and me are colleagues in marketing. Let's go sit down. Let's map this out. There's going to be funnels and flows that we say no to, but here are the paths. Because it's like you almost have this endless funnel. It's like you can tell that you've done the upper front homework to like map out the lanes that you want people to take and then you go and fill those lanes with the right content. Whereas a lot of companies, I think, just go into the tactic first and it's like, no, this is the blueprint. We're gonna, we're Gonna build this funnel, we're gonna map this out, we're gonna map the steps of the customer journey that we want people to take. And here's always the next step. Was that an important part of, like, making this work?
Yeah, absolutely. I think starting by understanding what is the canvas of influence, right? Like, if we want to drive revenue, what are all of the levers that we have within that? And then what we did was kind of similar to what a lot of growth teams do, is we built out a system for prioritizing ideas within that. So everyone understood, like, this is the customer journey, these are the different levers, but then you could ideate within that. And so for us, it started with, okay, let's come up with what we want to do differently. What stage of the funnel is it? What audience segment is it for? What's the idea? Like, how do we want to change the experience? And then we had a framework that essentially quantified the impact of that change. And, you know, it was a lot of guesstimating, a lot of talking to other companies, but essentially we were trying to get to like, what's the revenue number that we can put around this thing? And then we would fight tooth to nail for which ones we could. We would prioritize and that we had conviction in, and then we would go and build it, and then we would measure that. And those were kind of like the core pieces of the system that we built on top to help us like prioritize all the tactics.
But also, like, it seems like you had a foundation that marketing doesn't just own demand gen. There are multiple ways to, to hit the revenue number. And it could be from new acquisition, it could be from expansion, and we're going to focus on getting to our goals. It might be either of these levers. It's not just all net new. Net new. Net new, net new.
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think that's a really important point because I feel like a lot of marketing and I talk to a lot of CMOs, right? And the thing that they bring up is, you know, I want a seat at the table. And how does marketing get that seat at the table? Like, the answer to it is really simple. Marketing gets a seat at the table when it's impacting something that the board and the CEO cares about, and that is revenue. And so if we're doing top of funnel and all of our metrics, everything that we talk about is around that piece. Well, we're spending a lot of money. And it seems important because it's a lot of activity and there's a lot of people doing things, but it's still kind of cute, you know, like. But when you move into, okay, here's how we're impacting revenue, like, that's when marketing actually becomes strategic and the nature of the conversations change internally as well. Right. So if the marketing team is impacting revenue alongside that conversion journey that we talked about, that means that you are in the room when you're figuring out, okay, what channels do we go after? You're also talking to sales about how you help them increase conversion for their deals and how to increase acv. It means you're talking to customer success and product about how you're driving more referrals and how you're driving more upsell. And so you just naturally get a seat at the table and you become everyone's most indispensable partner because you're actually affecting change along this entire go to market journey that was historically isolated teams playing relay and kind of doing their own thing in that segment.
Yeah, I mean, you laid out perfectly where it's like, when you have a seat at the table, you'll be focused on revue. So you just made me think of for me, early days of drift, when I think we were really humming was. I was running marketing and was really close with the head of product, the head of sales, the head of customer success, the CTO and the CEO and the head of ops. We all met all the time and we worked on those things together. The job was still hard, but I think as far as like we made revenue a company problem. And so it wasn't just, hey, marketing, go get more revenue. Hey, sales. It was like, oh, hold on, maybe there's a product issue here. A lot of people aren't buying right now. Low intent or not a lot of urgency. That's not just a marketing thing. So we're in that meeting and the VP of product. Product is like, well, what do you mean? I thought people are interested. So now the whole, the whole management team is collaborating on these things and from there you take that out to the company and then you go and execute on it.
I love that. And I think like revenue, to your point, gives you the opportunity to diagnose the problems holistically. Right. Like, right.
And the problem is not just. The problem is not just always net new. We just get in this trap of thinking that market. It's like, think across the whole whole company. Your job is to increase revenue. What are all the ways you can do that?
Yeah, totally. So like an example along those lines. One of the biggest go to market challenges that we had at Gusto initially was that our ACV, our average deal size was $450 when I started at the company. So B2C economics. But you have small businesses that expect a B2B sales treatment. Right. And that was really, really hard. And so, yes, if, you know, we were on our own and we were just thinking about top of funnel, we could drive growth to some extent. Right. But the reality is if we could get that ACV to move up to $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, all of these would open big new doors for us to drive a lot more revenue. And that was not something that marketing can do alone. And when we are all looking and thinking about revenue, we can have these more strategic conversations. Right? And I think that helped the marketing team have a lot of influence at Gusto in a way that, you know, a lot of marketing teams are struggling to gain.
What was that second and last line that you just said? I wanted to write that in the chat. Like, the more revenue, the more you think about revenue as a marketing team?
I think the more you think about revenue, like, the more you get to be part of these really strategic conversations, right? Yeah. And the thing is, like, the product team is thinking about how do we build a really great product. Right. They're not thinking about the mechanics of a customer acquisition engine and how critical the ACV lever is. Right. But when you break that down for them and say, hey, here we are in an online ad auction and we are bidding X dollars on particular keywords. And, and let me show you how, you know, based on our conversion rates, we cap out at this amount because we can only spend $450 on a particular customer. If that customer was worth $3,000, we would be able to expand and get this much more growth in this particular auction. Right. And so when they understand that, all of a sudden they're like, oh, wow, ACV is critical for our growth.
Yeah, you beat yourself up so much trying to drive more volume in the top. When you're like, actually, no, how do we just get them to spend a little bit more?
Yeah, exactly.
The. Oh, the other thing I was going to say to you is also when you hit re, when you focus on revenue first, you can. You almost gives you a free pass to go and do that super creative, random, wild thing that you want to do. Like, gives you a little bit of a longer leash. It's like, yeah, you can go do that.
Sure, 100%. That's a really good point. I hear CMOs talk a lot about, you know, I don't feel like I have the freedom to go spend on things that are actually very difficult to measure. And like, I couldn't agree more with what you just said, which is if you have command and control over revenue and the CEO and other people at the company trust you to deliver revenue, you can then say, you know what, there's this new thing that we want to do called brand, and I can't tie every single thing around it to an exact, exact, you know, cost per lead type of thing. But here's our strategy and here's why we want to do it. And it's ultimately going to raise awareness, which is going to lower the cost of acquisition and, you know, all of that good stuff. Then you get to do that. And so, you know, I would say like in my, in my second, third, fourth year at Gusto, we were able to take a lot more bets on brand. But you know, we had to kind of pay our dues by first really wrapping our head around revenue.
And yes, for those at home, this. We, we made it 31 minutes. And someone asked if we will get the webinar recording. We almost made it the whole way. This is like the longest we've ever made it. Yes, we will send out the recording of this webinar. I promise you that. Okay, I want to talk about Mutiny and how Mutiny works and why you were crazy enough as a CMO to be so obsessed with a problem that you wanted to go start a company around it. And mutiny just raised 50 million last week. So. But, but before this, you're talking about personalizing like the customer journey and how, how that improves conversion. That makes sense in my head from a small business. High volume, you're driving a lot of traffic to the website. How does something like this work with those that sell more to more of an enterprise type sale out there.
So, you know, when we started Mutiny, we put up this question in our signup form, which was why are you trying to use Mutiny? And initially we thought it would be more of the PLG folks, right? They're trying to like the gustos of the world. They want to create segment based personalization. And 50% were always choosing ABM. We almost didn't even put that question in there. And so half of the people that were signing up, they wanted to create a personalized experiences for abm. And so it turns out that it honestly literally is 50 50. The PLG folks want personalization because they have high volume. And they want to create segment based higher conversion for the ABM folks. They have a small set of people in the universe that they can go after and they want to put the best possible one on one experience in front of those people so that they don't burn them and so that they convert. Also within ABM you usually are going after multiple stakeholders who care about very different things, even though they're all working at the same exact company. And so personalizing the message by Persona also becomes really important. And both of these ultimately use the same underlying technology from Mutiny for personalization and adapting and adjusting based on data. But one cares about it from a lot, a one on one standpoint and the other one cares about it from a segment based standpoint.
Super helpful.
Speaking of those two things, plg, abm, yada yada, how important is it for a marketing org today to be able to articulate, here's our go to market approach, like, do you have to be doing one of those things?
Yeah, absolutely. I think especially if you are early on, you should pick one. Doing both is so challenging. And so at, you know, at Mutiny we do abm, don't you find, like.
If you try to do both, because like I think you're right, like if you try to do both, you end up doing neither of them well. And it's like, well, how do we use this content thing but also use it for this thing where like so you at Mutiny, you've, you've just made the decision that you're just, you just do abm.
Yeah, exactly. So we're, we're focused on higher value customers and we have an inbound funnel. It's really important for us. But it is going through to that sales treatment. Right. Very different than the exact opposite of what we were doing at Gusto, which was our goal is not to talk to anybody and have them close on their own. Very low acv. I think what I see in our customers is that once you reach a certain size and maturity in marketing, you can then add the other side. So pretty much everyone that started with plg, once they get to, you know, a few hundred employees, say like 3, 400, 500, they are now starting to move up market and they have an enterprise motion that they also want to be able to meet. And a lot of the ABM folks, as they get really big, they start to look for new revenue opportunities and so they want to start adding in that self serve PLG motion. So. But when you're a smaller startup, I definitely recommend picking one or the other and actually separating the two funnels is a, is a big reason why people use Mutiny is to give those two separate experiences.
This is so good. Okay, listen me, if you're, if you're watching this, listening to it, whatever. If you, out of the many things that have already been discussed but like one action item is like, if you, if you don't have a point of view for your marketing, your company, your marketing team, if you don't have a point of view on your strategy, is it product LED growth? Is it freemium? Is it abm? You need to walk out of this after you listen this, you need to go find your boss, your founder, the CEO, whoever, and have this conversation and pick one. Somebody put it in chat. But it was perfectly said. Jake said this. The hunter that chases two rabbits, chases neither is so spot on. And I love the line that you said and it sounded so gangster the way you said it. You're just like, we're focused on high value customers, period. And so we're focused on high value customers. And so what that means is we know that they're not all going to come to us through content. That's not the way to do it. ABM doesn't just have to be for super enterprise. I think you probably have some SaaS, companies that aren't like Fortune 500 companies using you. It's not super enterprise, but it's a targeted approach that allows you to rally the whole company's marketing and sales and revenue generating efforts around. Around a strategy versus trying to take one and peanut butter across everything else.
Yeah, absolutely. Product too. I think they're a huge stakeholder and I'm one of those two go to market motions you can make work.
Okay, so Patrick's in here and he said he has a new job this week and the first demo that he took was, was Mutiny. So this is a good transition. Let's talk a little bit more about. There is a lot of practitioners here and people that like to poke around and check out new products and stuff. And so let's talk about Mutiny. What does it do? How does it work? And why are. Why were you crazy enough to leave your CMO job and go start a company around this?
Yeah. So I mean, the bigger vision around Mutiny is essentially automating away what today takes a lot of growth engineers or cobbling together a bunch of disparate tools. Right. What I saw at gusto was that this type of customization and conversion that we were driving was incredibly valuable. But it really pissed me off that I needed so Many engineers and data scientists to be able to do that, right? Trading, marketing, headcount to get engineers. I had all this money that I could spend on technology, but I couldn't do it. I needed another department to be able to do my job and deliver revenue. So emotionally that always really pissed me off in marketing and I wanted a solution around that. And so. So I think ultimately what made me my co founder was also from Gusto. What got us really excited was that we felt like we could build a no code product that everybody could use to do what historically required growth engineers to do. And so the way that Mutiny works is we integrate with a bunch of different data sources. So whether that's the advertising data, the CRM data, Marketo Salesforce we integrate with IP data. So clear a bit six sense things that help identify the company, their industry. We have our own behavioral data that identifies what the user might be interested in based on what pages they're looking at. And we use NLP to essentially tag them into Personas or different use cases. And so the foundation is a bunch of data that for us on average identifies about 73% of the website visitors. And then what people are able to do is then using our no code workflow is create different experiences for these different segments. So you can say enterprise customers versus self serve customers. I want them to see very different call to action. I want the enterprise folks to see big enterprise logos. I want to put, you know, the main CTA be talking to sales or maybe offer even some much more expensive call to action like a strategy workshop or something that doesn't make sense on the, on the self serve side. And then, you know, streamline it and push everybody into an inbound flow on the self serve. So you can actually create that separation and change your website for those groups using the visual tool that's in Mutiny. And then we measure the results and so everything that you launch, we keep half of the group in holdout so you can see what was, you know, I just created this awesome experience for enterprises or for healthcare companies or whatnot. What was the lift in conversion that I actually received? What was the revenue impact from this? So we will, we will report out the analytics around that.
It's amazing actually that wasn't a big part of what I focused on but, but it used to be like create 50, okay, we're going to create 50 different landing pages or we got this use case just from a website personalization standpoint. So for those that are maybe a little bit more, I guess enterprise or ABM focused in their marketing efforts. What are some of the better strategies from a call to action standpoint? Because you're not just driving traffic to a landing page and booking a demo when you're selling to the enterprise. So can you give some guidance there?
Yeah, absolutely. So we have a lot of like a lot of big companies too that use Mutiny on the ABM side. So Snowflake, Qualtrics, they're a segment, they're big ABM users with Mutiny. And essentially what they do is they use Mutiny for both inbound and outbound. So when they're big ABM segments, you know, those customers come in, they can personalize the page, even one on one for them. So they can change the logo to be the company's logo. They can change the message. Certainly I would say personalizing the logos to the industry and the size of that company is going to be really important for inbound. But then on the outbound side, what they can do is Mutiny plugs into Salesforce and you can grab all of your target accounts from Salesforce and create one on one personalized pages for them, either at the company level or at the Persona level. And so we have customers that literally create over 100,000 pages, all done automatically through a couple of campaigns inside of Mutiny. So once you set up the campaign, you can just keep adding accounts and Mutiny will just create the one on one pages for you and even link them back to Outreach or Salesforce so that your SDRs can also grab those one on one pages that are all pointing to the same underlying base page. So you're not actually creating every single one of these, but we are personalizing it. And then they can go ahead and reach out to their target accounts with those pages. And We've seen a 3x increase in conversions and demos booked when either the marketing team or the STR team is using these one on one pages.
Got it. Because you're. Cause like I'm reaching out to you to try to show you or tell you about some, some pain or problem or challenge or frustration. What's. What's typically been like the best content in that, in that outreach that, that works other than like, hey, I saw you're the CEO at Company X. Here's my personal page. Like what's the. Yeah, what's been the best content?
So the things that work really well on these one on one pages is usually I recommend having like one vector for personalization. So oftentimes that's either the use case or the industry or the Persona. And you don't Need a ton. Like you can go crazy and personalize every single thing. And sometimes I think people assume that that's what they need to do, but actually just personalizing it to. You can even ask your sales team like hey, when you are talking to your target accounts, what's the most important thing to personalize to? And typically that's either industry or Persona. An industry maps really closely to use case. So typically those two things and then what Mutiny will do is we will interpolate and personalize one on one everything else. So you can personalize the image or the logo or the company name you can stick in. The CTA does not have to go to a round robin. It can be the calendly of the rep that actually owns that account. All of that can be interpolated by Mutiny to make the page fully one on one. But to create those thousands of pages, the only thing that the ABM person did was actually come up with like maybe three cuts for industry personalization and then everything else is done automatically by Mutiny.
This is awesome. Oh, I got one more question of my own and then we're going to go to the Q and A and there's a lot, some related. How do you think about measuring content? Like does Mutiny help measure the impact of content? Like not even in like a. More like ABM funnel. Like if we're, if we're blogging, we're creating content, am I able to see like what pages somebody with? Like how do you think about content and influence in a world where it's not like direct response to book a meeting, for example?
Yeah, absolutely. So you can essentially track any conversion event in Mutiny. So if it's important for you to download a piece of content that can be a conversion event that you track. And so what we see is for our plg, customers tend to track a lot more down funnel metrics. Some go as far as did they actually convert into a customer or something at a minimum free trial. Some of them go a little deeper. Like Brex tracks soft signups, which is essentially a qualified signup. We have customers like livestorm that like to go all the way to did they become a customer? On the ABM side, we see conversion events that are more top of funnel. So did they download this piece of content? Did they click into this particular area that we were interested in? You can essentially choose what conversion event you want and that just essentially maps to whatever your strategy is.
Okay, here's this first question is from Uma. Does Mutiny replace an ABM platform?
Yeah, really good question. So we do not replace ABM ads. So if you want to think about like the reference architecture, right, you would still buy an ABM platform like six Sense to run your ABM ads, right? Or clear that like to run your ABM ads. But what happens is, if that's all that you have is you're going to be spending all this money driving all of these people into your web pages, but then most of those people are going to get to that web page and they're going to not end up converting. So what Muni allows you to do is make that post click web experience, highly personalized, so that you actually get that customer to convert into at least a sales conversation or a piece of content download for you. And so we work really nicely. And in fact, the like six Sense and clearbid both also are in house users of Mutiny, so they use it in conjunction with their own product.
Good answer. This is my own answer. Completely separate. Have you watched We Crashed?
That's so funny that you asked that because I tried watching it last night and found another WeWork movie on Hulu and I was like, I don't think this is it. And then I realized the we crashes on Apple plus and I don't have that. So I ended up, I ended up reading instead.
Oh, okay. You gotta watch it. It's worth, it's worth getting Apple. It's worth getting it. I think you're gonna love it. Okay. Has nothing to do with this, but I figured you tried, you tried and failed, so.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, this is a great one. This is from Anna. The brand marketer in me needs to know the story behind the name Mutiny.
Yes, yes, absolutely. It really is. I mean, one, it's fun, right? B2B brands are kind of, they can be a little boring. Right. And so we wanted to come out with a bang and have a name that would evoke some emotion. Let you know that this is not going to be your typical B2B brand. But the reason it's Mutiny specifically is that like, it is a mutiny against the status quo. Right? Like, going back to the question that Dave was asking. As a marketing leader, I felt like I had all of these tools, I had all of this money, but at the end of the day, I needed engineers to be able to deliver revenue. And that's completely bullshit, right? Like you should not be in that situation. I think that's a shortcoming of the marketing technology. And we hope to change that and fix that for every marketer so that you can actually own revenue and show how you're delivering revenue.
It's memorable in the purple. That was intentional too.
Yeah. We were debating between purple and yellow. I don't know why. I love the color yellow. My co founder hated it and we both aligned and agreed on purple.
We disagreed and committed is how I read that.
We disagreed and then we decided to do what he wanted to do. Yeah.
What's your best actionable marketing tip for an early stage startup with small ad spend budget?
I would say pick one channel that you want to invest in. Just pick one strategy and focus your entire team on that strategy and don't add another one until that has reached steady state where you feel like you're now in optimization mode or like, or it doesn't work.
Or like you do that for two weeks and you got nothing. Then like, great, switch it up, go do something else else.
Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, I mean the whole, the question of how do you optimize within this. I did a first round article on like how to speed up the marketing team. For anyone that's interested in rapid experimentation in marketing, I recommend reading that. Yeah. So when I say like focus on it for six months, I don't mean go into a basement, build for six months and then come out and say, does anyone want it? You are prototyping your. You know, I would say one week to live MVP is sort of my time frame. Even if you're building the world's biggest, greatest program, you should be live within one week and then you iterate through that. So those six months are, you know, you're probably going through like almost 100 iterations of your program and that's how you get to something that's valuable. If in your early iterations you realize that this is not a good investment, then you abandon it and you pick something else for sure.
Okay, this one, this question just came in from Brendan. It's a good one related to Mutiny. I'll ask you. Brendan says, love what you, Ryan and the team have done with Playbooks. Can you talk more about Playbooks and how that helped build your community around your product? And would you recommend this thinking to other marketers?
Yeah, absolutely. So the thing that I didn't mention about Mutiny and thank you for reminding me of this is what makes Mutiny. The no code piece is great. But what has made Mutiny really successful is the AI layer that looks at the performance of different experiences across different audience segments, across our entire user base, and extracts best practices and Playbooks out of that. Right. So we'll actually recommend what type of like, we'll write content for a particular segment, right? We can tell if we're running on. On your website. We can tell you, hey, the health care segment is underperforming on your. On your website based on the potential that we think it can have. And we can start writing content and rewriting essentially your existing website content for that segment. The Playbooks are essentially when people like, let's say Notion is using Mutiny, right? This is a real example. And what they did was they personalized their website to different search terms, right? So if someone you know before using Mutiny, no matter what you search for, whether it was wiki or project management software or docs, you would end up getting taken to the same Notion website. Now with Mutiny, they have set it up so that if you were looking for a wiki, you're going to get the Notion website that's going to talk to you about why Notion can be used for wikis. And all of these use cases essentially have their own personalized experience that Mutiny is helping them orchestrate and deliver. And they saw, in this case, like notion, saw a 60% increase in conversion rates for their paid channels because of this type of personalization. And so what we do is we have a flow inside of the app that essentially asks Notion, hey, congratulations on this win. Would you like to share this playbook? Like, we can actually, it doesn't just go into an AI algorithm. We can actually attribute this to you and share with everybody in the community exactly what you did. And if, you know, if they say yes, then that gets extracted automatically with a bunch of metadata by our platform and that becomes a playbook that we can then share with other marketers. And believe it or not, like, pretty much everybody says yes when they have the opportunity to, to become a playbook, because they're proud of the work that they've done, and it's a really great way for them to publicize and show their skills. And we now have created a whole content engine, or I would say, like, we're in the beginnings of really building that out, where we take the Playbooks from the product and we write content around that Playbook and then we distribute that content. And now we just launched M2, which is sort of the first final leg of that, which is the community piece. So everyone can now also be inside of this community via Slack, and share these Playbooks with each other, share these strategies with each other. So it's starting to become a real flywheel for us from product all the way to, you know, marketing and community that's amazing.
It's amazing content marketing because that's what people want. But it's like also, you check both boxes because it's also product marketing at this, at the same time. And you got the social stuff. That's really cool. I, I didn't know that. Okay, this was, this was amazing. I'm going to wrap up on this question, which I think you'll, you'll appreciate. Can you see this? Isn't this amazing?
Yeah, this is perfect. This is fantastic. You know what I'll say about this, Samantha, is that the biggest misconception people have about personalization is that they need a lot of people to do it well. And that is like, it couldn't be further from the truth. A lot of the most effective personalizations that you can do honestly take 10 to 15 minutes. Personalizing the CTA, personalizing the headline, personalizing the logos. Right. These are all really easy stuff to set up. If you think about personalization as a revenue program. Right. It helps you. No matter where your leads are coming from, this personalization is going to help you convert more of them into qualified leads and customers. And so from an ROI standpoint, it ends up contributing a lot more to your bottom line than almost any other top of funnel program by itself. A lot of our customers, they'll still have one person dedicated to mutiny and that person will spend 25 to 50% of their time on Mutiny and personalization. And they can get to like 20, 25, in some cases like 50, 60% more qualified leads from their website after like a 6 to 12 month investment. I do not know of any other top of funnel program that can generate that much more leads for a marketing team. I didn't have that when I was at Gusto and I'm not seeing that across any of our customers. And so from an invest, even though it's a new thing, you know, from an investment standpoint, it, it really makes a ton of sense, especially if your company has some big, big growth revenue targets this year. This can be a really easy add on that's going to help you get there a lot more quickly than just doing it the old way, which is you pour a bunch of money at the top and then, you know, hope for the best in terms of leads and customers. Yeah.
All right, this was, this was amazing. A lot of great chatter, a lot of great knowledge from you today, Jaley. I, maybe we'll do it again in the future. Real quick. If you want to wrap up and just, and just give me a plug and then and then I'll say goodbye and we'll get out of here.
Yeah, I would love to. I mean, if this seems like a. A good fit for you, I would love for you to check it out on the website. You can sign up for a strategy workshop where we can show you what are some of the fastest growing companies like Notion, Carta, Brax, Amplitude, Snowflake, you know, Qualtrics. These types of companies, how are they using Mutiny and what types of results they're seeing. We can also even give you a fully customized roi. So actually look at your website data, give you that x ray vision into all of the segments and share with you what do we think is the revenue impact that Muni can have on your website. So if you're intrigued by it, but you don't quite know how to think about the roi, we make that really easy. So you can go to our website and do that. And then finally we launched a community called M2. So you can also sign up for that on our website. If you, if you go to mutinyhq.com and click on the community tab, you can get on the waitlist for M2.
Awesome. All right, Jaley, everybody here, thank you so much. This was a really good one. Whether you're a couple hundred people watching this live or watching this video later in the Exit 5 community, or listening to it later through the Exit 5 podcast, thanks for being here. A good hour, investing in yourself to help grow your career. I think you made a bunch more fans today. So awesome job and great to connect with you and I'll see you around.
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. Dave.
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