059. Special Guest: Britany Carter, KOPIS

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Hello, everyone. This is Emilio Garcia from the Man Gen Studio. Welcome to another episode. With me, as always, is Miranda Jenkins. And today we have the privilege of having as well, Brittany Carter from copus. And we will have a very interesting conversation. Brittany, welcome. How are you?

Oh, I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Yes, fantastic, Fantastic. So we don't do guest segments as often as we would like and you know, I've been talking about this with Brittany for a long time and we finally put some, you know, time to get started. So I'm really, really excited because as you know, the main goal of this podcast of these live series events is to share and help with other B2B marketers, especially in technology companies, some of the insights, the struggles, the things that are happening in the industry. And so as much as I will, you know, like to continue to share what happens at boundify, I think it's super helpful if we can hear some, some other people as well. So, really excited to have the opportunity to talk about that conversation and, and to get started. Brittany, I would love to hear a little bit about yourself, about what you do. How do you got into marketing? There's always very interesting stories about that. I, I'm, as I have seen and yeah, some of the, of the things that you are doing on COPUS that you can share.

Yes. So, yeah, so I right now am the director of marketing at copus. COPUS is a strategic technology partner for growing organizations. So what that means is oftentimes when a business or organization grows the technologies and processes that they used when they started, and as they continue to grow, there's a gap that happens because their technology isn't scaling in the right way with them. So COPUS can come in and sort of bridge that gap with either building out new custom software, implementing cloud service solutions, or sort of developing new digital products. So we sort of help across the board and it's been a really great opportunity. I've been at COPUS almost four years now, and I really love it. So it's been a great spot to be. But yeah, how did I get into marketing? It's kind of a funny story. Way back when I was, you know, fresh out of high school, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I wasn't really sure and I actually ended up at coronary school for a while, but I spent all of my time with my English teacher and like writing in the park. And I was like, okay, going to school is not ready to be. But I had to think through. You know, I have a. I have a love and a passion for creative writing, but I didn't know how to translate that into like an actual career outside of like writing novels, which, you know, isn't always a steady stream of income. So that's sort of where I started to explore marketing. And really copywriting is what I wanted to do. And I started thought I would be a copywriter forever because I love writing so much. And so that's sort of how I got my first in at the first agency I worked for was copywriting website copy, which I had a blast with. But I surprised myself and how much I loved learning about digital marketing and campaign orchestration and the metrics behind it all, which I never thought I would be saying. But yeah, so kind of a twisty road, but here I am.

Nice. You have a reverse path to mine, which I usually share. I'm an engineer by trade, so what got me into marketing was the numbers, the analytics, the ability to measure. However, over the years I have found a big appreciation for copyright. Actually, I will argue that at the end of the day, if you've sum it up, everything that you're doing in marketing comes down to copyright. Even if you're going to create video, even if you're going to create images, if you don't have a great copy that supports that, it's very hard to do a very good job. And so, yeah, I have no idea about the craft of copywriting when I got started and I've learned painfully about it, how important it is.

Yeah, it's when one of the first books that I read when I got started at the agency was building a story brand, which just clicked in my head so much and really helped me kind of establish the philosophy on how I wanted to do copywriting. And I mean, to this day, I still like to follow it. But yeah, that was. That was a big one for me.

Oh, okay. So I think we need to start building up some notes for the episode. What is the name of the book, do you say?

It's called Building a story Brand by Donald Miller. It takes the seven principles of good narrative story writing, like the hero's journey. Think Star wars or Harry Potter and you have a character who comes across a problem and they get sent on a mission and blah, blah, and it translates that into how to do that for marketing and how to position your company as the guide or customer as they are up the journey and as they go on this journey to like overcome the problem that they're facing at their Business, you help them along the way and all that stuff. So it's kind of a fun way to think about copywriting.

Yeah. No, I have heard a lot of anecdotes about the book. Right. But I never pinpoint actually the source. But yeah, clearly that hero journey and you being the mentor. Right. The. The helper to the hero. Yeah, I agree. Stories. Is this the way to go? That's fantastic. So how long have you been, you know, working at Copace? And do you mind sharing some, again, some interesting things that you have done or with big wins that you have had with the company related to your profession?

Yeah, so I've been at copious thinking at least four years in August, so it feels it's been short, but like, doesn't quite feel that way because I've just. It's been a blast. But Qobus is turning 25 this year, so we've been around as a company for a long time, but their marketing department is six years old. Their marketing is very new. So before I started, they had hired someone for marketing and she was there about two years before she transitioned into a totally different field. Well, so for me, the marketing person did a lot of PR and sort of establishing locally networking events and kind of that element, but not so much on the digital marketing side. So I was able to come in at a really unique time for the company where they knew and understood that marketing was important, but didn't have any sort of idea on how it should look or function. So I was in a really, I feel like privileged position to be able to come in and, and establish that and figure out here's, here's kind of how I think it should be run. And the challenge was there was no baseline, there was no metric. Like they couldn't, there was no where do we get our customers? Who are our best customers? What industries do we like to work with? How many leads are net universe existing? Like, none of those things existed. So my entire first year was just establishing baseline and like making sure our messaging was cohesive and making website changes. Like so much of that, which is a lot of hard work and there's not a ton to show for it at the end because it's not like you can say, hey, all of this generated X number of customers because you're just, you're establishing the basics, but without it you can't be, you can't run anything because you won't have a good, a good guidance for that. So it was kind of a, a really unique challenge and one I was really excited to take on. But over like the last three years, I mean the fact that I can share numbers with you I think is a huge win. Our metrics and tracking are working, but yeah, so maybe some of the kind of three big things. One is it's kind of fun to take a step back after, you know, you're in it dayto day and just helds down in the weeds. So like looking back, over the last three years, marketing generated leads have increased 92% which I feel like was really exciting to, to kind of think back and see. And then last year was a huge growth year for Compass. We grew 64% with closed, closed revenue. So it's been, we've had a lot of growing pains, but they're all good growing pains. And then I think my personal win has been in the last six, six months I've been able to add two people onto my marketing team. So before that it was just me. So being able to expand the team has been fantastic.

I think that's a great story and you know, something that probably a lot of our listeners will be identifying with. I believe if you have a recommendation there because you, you were in this position that I think a lot of our listeners will find themselves which is the company, correct me if I'm wrong, has been doing sales for a long time, typically through the founders and eventually they hire professionals, professional business development people. But marketing is always done haphazardly, right. There's no one there. But when that person gets in, you don't start with a, you know, five people team. Right? You start with one person. And I think that if you really want to make that team a three, five team person, you have to prove, as you said, that marketing is contributing somehow to multiply the effort that sales is already putting into the company through, through the, through the business development effort. So there's a path for that because if you don't do it, then you never get to grow the team and it's kind of like a bad cycle. And I think you are in the, in a virtuous one. Do you have any recommendations? I hear, as you said, establishing the baseline, that's, that's a good one. Knowing who are you marketing to so you can narrow down your message, you can narrow down your channels and your efforts. Any other recommendation on how do you work out your activities to, to show management that marketing was contributing to revenue and therefore justifying maybe bringing in more people or testing new ideas?

Yeah, that's a great question and it can be a tricky one. But Ultimately being able to show some sort of metrics moving in the right direction because for a while at the beginning, I was not able to say marketing brought in X number of clients. Like, we just didn't have all of the things in place to be able to do that. But I was able to show an increase in website traffic or an increase in, you know, conversions on the website or being able to just track how many leads we got that weren't from existing clients, you know, through partners and just showing, like, even though we didn't close windows and some of those, you know, we had to disqualify and all that. But like, that there's movement there and then, you know, you can, being able to show that then you can get more budget to run bigger campaigns. And then honestly, it kind of got to the point for me of like, you know, we did a campaign back in 2022, 2023, and we saw a lot of early results, we saw a lot of really great engagement, but I was at the limit. And we were like, I was getting directives from the executive team of like, we need to be doing, we need to focus on this area and this solution. And like, I was getting a lot of pressure to build more campaigns. And you know, I don't like to say no and I just try to figure out a way to, like, muscle through it and do it. But I realized I had to start kind of saying no or to say yes if, like, yes, I can do this. If we, if we put a pause on these other things or if we react, readjust priorities. And I think that helped them see of, like, in order to do more, Brittany's at capacity, like, we need more help and being able to talk about being a single point of failure. Like, you know, I, I was out on my honeymoon for, for two weeks in the middle of like, trying to launch a campaign. And I was like, I can only do what I can to set myself up for success on this.

Yeah. You remind me of those memes, right, of marketers being on the beach with the computer.

Yeah, yeah.

And say, I don't want to. Yeah. So I, I agree. Right. How do you, how do you balance, you know, all the, I think it's the, your, your nos make your yes more powerful. Right. The, the things that you say yes, do more powerful. And you have to pick your battles for sure. I, I, that is, it remind me of asking you something I, we constantly discuss in these episodes a balance between what we call demand capture and demand creation, or, you know, popularly known as how much do you dedicate to performance marketing versus doing branding? You were mentioned about that PR company that the company was working at at the beginning, which is also for me a journey of learning. I, I focus or we focus on Boundify at the beginning a ton on performance marketing, mostly pay search. And we've been learning little by little the importance of dedicating some resources to brand awareness or demand creation through social media channels. But I wonder for you, what have been your learning curve? Do you have a recommendation, a mix between the two efforts and how management and the executive team perceives both investments or both types of investments?

Yeah, that's. Yeah, it's a really interesting kind of dynamic to try to juggle, especially because so many executive teams just want to see results. But there are some efforts that aren't going to really produce results, like PR and brand awareness. Those aren't meant to generate results. So it's been a lot, at least for me, of like really educating the executive team and the sales team around how those efforts work and so trying to put it in ways that they understand it. So, you know, our CEO has this flywheel for our company and like, how all the departments work together and like all this stuff. So like I took his flywheel and converted it to marketing to show like, okay, PR brand awareness is like entry into the funnel and then from there is where our campaigns come in and like trying to tie it together so he can see brand awareness. And PR is still helpful in its own right because we need to get people aware of who we are and what we do so that when they see our campaigns they can negate. Like they're used to seeing us. And so, you know, kind of those air cover campaigns are helpful, but it's, it's hard to show the full, you know, result of that. But we've just tried to been, we've been building that into our campaign. So like, and that's sort of where I think the idea around ABM comes in, because it's this full orchestration. So all of our campaigns start with brand awareness and we run that for a couple of months and it's just all about impressions. And we're not even asking on our brand awareness ads to get clicks. Like, if we do, that's great, but it's just how many impressions can we get with our target market and then from there, you know, moving them down to the funnel when they've seen enough and by that time we see higher engagement. So like being able. And this might sound counterintuitive, but to help Prove your case. Run a campaign where you're just trying to do, where you're, where you don't do the brand awareness and you're just asking them to engage with you. And you're not going to see a ton of engagement because they don't know who you are. They don't have any of that built. And then run the campaign where you add that piece in. And I think you're going to see your results which should hopefully help tell that story.

Yes, it's a multiplier. That's what it does, right. It amplifies what you already done, what you're doing. On the performance side again, another big, big breakout for me has been the importance of psychology in general in everything that we do. I've been reading very recently, I don't know if you're familiar with. He's not as popular, but the partner to Berkshire Hathaway founder or owner Charlie Munger. He, he was this guy, he died recently and he, he published a book called the Poor Poor Charlie Almanac. And he dedicate a big chunk of his book, which is about investing, to psychology. And he mentions a ton of biases that we, we carry with us. He mentioned some that are very popular in marketing, like anchor bias, right? That when you see pricing and you, you anchor a price, the one of about association, right? If you see a recognizable person using some products or services you associate with them or their uses, use cases, you also want to use it. And those works are their experiments approved them and all that. And I think one is super, super relevant to us all marketers for the brand awareness part is the thing is called availability bias, which is you tend to select things that you are closer to your mind, right? Closer to what have happened to you recently. And that's the trick that if, if you, if, if you are a brand that happens to be seen very recently, you will be on that set and it's very hard to prove. But as you are saying, if you run a performance campaign with or without that branding support, then you are influencing that availability bias, right? I've seen you before very recently. It comes to your mind quickly and is, is imperceptive. And he makes the point that is, you want to know all those biases, not to use them in a manipulative way, right? It's not to manipulate people, but rather to inform your actions. Because this is, has, has nothing to do with, you know, numbers is all, it has all to do with humans. And so I, I completely agree with you. Do you have. So clearly you, you Talked about educating the, the executive team about this and which I love. I think you have to start there. Do you have some, you know, metrics that you prefer for your brand awareness or demand creation efforts versus the performance ones and based on that, do you have tested what is the good, a good ratio between the two at least the one that works for you guys?

Yeah. So ultimately like as far as like communicating some of these metrics and results at the end of the day sales and executive team, there are three big metrics that they really care about which is how many meetings did we get set for the sales team, how many net new leads did we generate and then closed 1 sales from net new leads. And so when it comes to, you know, boiling that down for the marketing team and what we look at kind of, as I mentioned before, we sort of integrate all of it into one sort of campaign. So like as far as like, you know, brand awareness and sort of building that, like that's all built into the campaigns that we're running. So we, we don't normally differentiate. This is just brand awareness. It's. We start with okay, we're so sort of. I'll kind of back back answer your question with a little bit of a story. So one of the big changes that we have made going into this year into our marketing is focusing on running campaigns based around pain points that we can solve for clients. So one of the biggest struggles that I see in B2B marketing is that so many people talk about B2B marketing when you're doing a product sale or a SaaS solution. But Copus sells services. I don't have just a product or just one particular thing to sell. So I have to sell qopis expertise as a whole. And so because of that our marketing looks a little bit different and our metrics I think are a little bit different. So we are selling, you know, there are across all of cobus capabilities, it kind of boils down to three or four main pain points. And so we use those to build our campaigns. And so we start by brand awareness and we just talk about like we just highlight one pain point. So like outdated and legacy systems, like that's a big pain point. So we talk about and use client language around that as like the brand awareness. And that sort of builds a little bit of trust and like empathy through just digital marketing that we otherwise wouldn't get until much later in the sales process. And so we start our brand awareness with just getting people to see we understand what they're struggling with. And then we have our campaigns built where after they see those ads, those will typically run for like a month or two. And then we transition those ads into high value pieces of content, whether that's, you know, webinar replays, white papers, like all that sort of thing. And then once they do, they see that enough, we use that to build a lead score. So then puts them in an email drip, they get ads around that and it's all around that pain point. And then if they don't engage with that pain point, we move them onto the second pain point. So we sort of allow them to choose their own journey. But as far as metrics go, our biggest thing that we look at is how can we get that lead score high, like through the entire campaign. It's all built around let's get that lead score high enough so we can send it over to the BDR for personalized follow up and get that appointment set. So our metrics are like a little bit different. So I don't know if that fully answers your question, but selling services I feel like has been a little bit of a mindset shift for me of like, how does it all work? Because it's not quite the same as selling one product.

No, I love it and it's quite novel. I, I haven't heard of it before. I agree with you on the part or it's not new to me. The fact that you want to lead with pain points. Right. It's the that jobs to be done. Right. Asking the example that I use all the time is about the person looking for a drill, right. Asking where do you need the drill for? Oh, well, I want to put a frame on the wall. Well, I have more things because that's truly the pain point. You want to be knowledgeable about that because if not you drive into the benefits of the product without understanding what is the problem that the person is really trying to solve. But making that kind of like campaign theme across the board, that's interesting. It is like instead of focusing on product lines, as you were saying, right. Focusing on pain point themes or topics and see if you can influence or nudge people across the funnel for that particular pain point and offering multiple ones. So that's very interesting. I have a couple of questions before letting you go, Brittany, and thank you for being so sharing all this with us. I know that we have talked about this before that you are, you have experience with abm, which is an interesting topic to me all the time because I think you really need to know as a company and a marketer when to use it, how to use it, what kind of accounts to include. It's a different play from more broader kind of inbound demand generation efforts in general. That's one question that I have for you. And the last one will be your take on, you know, good old sales and marketing alignment, which looks like you have already sort out, but I'm sure you have some issues or some challenges at the beginning, so those two are of interest.

Yeah, so like my journey into ABM has just been a giant learning and I feel like I'll never stop learning. Ultimately ABM can kind of be a lot of different things and it's hard when you're a small team with a small budget to feel like you're doing it well because oftentimes you hear about it needs to be super personalized. You'd have a really small set of accounts and all that stuff. So I've kind of had to like in my own head, like kind of get over that a little bit of like at a, at a high level. To me, account based marketing is taking a specific group of people that you've identified and figuring out how to give them a very relevant message at the time that it's going to be most relevant. And so anything you can do to take steps towards that I think is going to be a good way to get you closer to ABM and being realistic with your resources. So our first abm, if you will, campaign was just being able to take a target list of probably about a thousand accounts that we felt like were good fit and kind of just testing out like, okay, we think around this message and kind of using some of those different signals and stuff like that of like just trying to figure out how to make it work. But, but really anything that you can do to, to focus in on that messaging and making sure you're delivering it to the right people at the right time. I think those are all steps to getting a good ABM campaign and to try to figure it out for what that looks like for your company.

Good. I have a very particular question where you. And it's a great segue into marketing and sales alignment. That initial list, which is, you know, large of 1,000 accounts was broadly, broadly defined by some criteria based on industry and maybe some, you know, tax and web technologies and things like that. And vetted only by you or was vetted, you know, account by account by sales as well.

Yeah, so that was largely a marketing effort. We went, we worked with the sales team to sort of identify company parameters and sort of what we were looking for. So we worked with them on the front end, but we did not go line by line through account. We did at one point run a smaller campaign of like 100 companies. And that I did put more pressure and more ownership on the sales team that they had to contribute 50 per person to help build that campaign out or that list out, which gave them a little bit more ownership over it. Obviously the big list was just sort of our first. Let's kind of test some of this. But yeah, I think it's important. I always say sales is my biggest customer.

Yeah. But I love what you're saying because I kind of think the same way. Right. If as you get the list smaller and smaller, then the participation of sales should be larger and larger. Right. Not just on agreeing at the account level. Right. But even at the. As you said. Right. How you personalize that approach, not just from marketing, but from sales as well. Right. If you have a account list of hundred or less, definitely there's going to be someone from the sales side doing also some support on the outreach or at least making that suggestion for a thousand. Definitely. You're going to wait for. Going to be more like you were saying. Right. You're going to score, you're going to prioritize so you can give them a more manageable segment to work with. But love it. That's fantastic. And what about sales and marketing alignment? What have been your learnings there?

Yeah, it's been. It's been an interesting ride. I feel really lucky to be at Corpus and to have been able to come in and sort of establish what that looks like right off the bat because there wasn't really much of a marketing department before me. It was sales didn't really have a whole lot of expectation or like preconceived notions on how they work together. So I kind of came in and really just spent a lot of time talking with them, asking them, how can I make your job easier? Like, I'm here for. I'm here to. I'm here to help you hit your goals and like, really just try to be super humble about it and just keep reinforcing. Like, I'm here for you. So, like, anytime they raise their hand, I was like, yes, I'll help you. I try to jump on it as quickly as possible just to establish like that relationship and that trust of like, even if it's just you have a sales document, you need to reformat it to be branded. Like, yeah, I'll jump on that for you. Just so that they could really start to understand, like what I'm doing is to help you. And so I've been able to transition that now as we build campaigns, you know, whenever we have a campaign, I sort of set a meeting to like pitch them internally on what we're doing, how we're doing it, make sure we're giving them opportunity to give input and feedback some. Sometimes that doesn't always necessarily change what we're going to do, but at least opens up the conversation and makes them feel part of it because it's, it's difficult for marketing to realize its full efforts if sales is not on board.

Of course. I completely agree. Very well. Well, I think this has been a fantastic, fantastic conversation. I think our listeners will get a ton of insights from what you freely share here. Brittany. I appreciate that. I honestly have one question which I think is very relevant for anyone that is starting out. If there was any advice that you will give yourself to your younger self years ago, now that you have done all this, what would be be more.

Confident in yourself and don't be afraid to share your ideas.

Nice. Very good. Love it. Well, I think that for today we cover a ton of ground. I thank you again, Brittany. I hope that we can, you know, somehow do this again with other topics down the road. I appreciate it. And for all of you listening to this, if you want to reach out to Britney, I don't know, do you spend more time on what? LinkedIn, I guess.

Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me.

Awesome. And we will put on the notes some of the things that we cover and yeah, look forward to another episode. Thank you everyone. Have a great day. Bye Bye.