Marketing Tactics To Drive Business Growth with Yaniv Masjedi

All right guys, so Yaniv, why don't we kick it off talking— we've talked about how we met initially, but why don't you start off by telling us kind of who you are and what you do? Okay.

Yeah, cool. So first, also the point of this session, which I was telling Eric, is we want to share as much information as we possibly can to help you with kind of growth tactics that you can kind of use today, go into your business after this conference and grow. So hold us to it. We're gonna try to share as much great knowledge as we possibly can. My name is Yaniv. I'm with a company called Nextiva. Our core product is business phone service. We started the company a little over 10 years ago, actually 11 years ago. We're based in Phoenix, Arizona, and started really small. The company started in Literally with just an idea and a tiny Regus office with a few guys. And today we have a team of over 1,000 people. And we literally compete with some of the biggest companies in the world. And it's a lot of fun because we've done it with no outside funding, no investors. And the business has grown to well over $170 million in revenue. And There's a lot of kind of marketing tactics and things that I think we've done that have really helped us get to where we are.

Cool. And where were you before Nextiva? Because you've had some businesses that were kind of a nuisance. Can you talk about that one? How much revenue that one was driving that was a nuisance?

A nuisance?

Yeah.

The nightclub?

Oh, the nightclub. Oh, that's right. You used to own a nightclub too.

Yeah, I owned a nightclub for a while. But when I actually started my career as a sales consultant, a sales rep. I was 16, 17 years old in Santa Monica. Just needed a job. I was really fortunate to meet a guy named Thomas, Thomas Gorney. Was doing the 6 AM to 2:30 PM shift selling web hosting. After that, I went to SMC. Did night classes at Santa Monica College. And then transferred to UCLA. Didn't really go to class. Just focused on work. And in the web hosting business, I, after a few months, I did really well as a sales rep, but then I saw an opportunity to really help the business grow in marketing. I'd never done online marketing before. I was really young. They took a chance and I really just focused on really doing more than anyone else has ever done in marketing for that company. And we really grew that business really fast to to hundreds of thousands of customers, ended up merging with a number of competitors, and the business sold for over $1 billion. And ended up after that, Thomas had an idea for a website security company back when people weren't thinking about website security. Like in 2006, 2007, everyone was obsessed with computer security, not website security. So, Started a company called SiteLock. And that company grew to a great size and sold last year. How much revenue was it doing per year? For SiteLock?

Yeah.

Over $60 million. Yeah.

So this was the nuisance.

Yeah. Not as much as Nextiva. And Nextiva is a tremendous opportunity. But a lot of great stories along the way.

Cool. And so one trend I see, like, looking even at SiteLock or even being in web hosting at Nextiva, you've worked a lot with channel partners, affiliates, whatever you want to call them. So can you talk about what you've done and how big of an impact they've been?

Yeah. Affiliates are a big part of our business. I've always been a fan of affiliate marketing. Let me just go into one idea. I'm gonna borrow an idea I got from Syed back there that's pretty game-changing from an affiliate marketing perspective. Let's say you have a product launch. Hopefully you have an affiliate program. When you have a product and you want to get it out there, obviously affiliates, they'll pay you or you'll pay them based on performance. They bring traffic, you sell the product, you pay them. But one thing that Syed came up with, which I think is brilliant, is paying affiliates not only for sales or leads, But paying them for content. If you're launching a product, pay them $20 an article, 500 words. Get the word out. Have them publish content on your behalf. Whether it's Commission Junction, Impact Radius, ShareASale, you can really push a ton of content around your product that's very favorable and positive by simply just paying affiliates. And so if you have an affiliate program, I think that's an unknown or unleveraged— no one's doing this. And it's a great way to just get a ton of content out there on usually high domain authority sites.

Wow. When did you guys talk about this? I wonder if I missed this.

Anyway, so— It was a month— you were there. Was I?

Yeah, you were. I must have been daydreaming or something.

You weren't paying attention.

So, okay, I guess here's a question for you, Yaniv. What do you think is the most important thing to growing a company? If you had to pick one thing, what would it be? Like, we talk about marketing and all this stuff all the time. What is that one thing?

I think being relentless. At the end of the day, if you're really— I'll use the Nextiva example. So many times when we first started, people thought we were stupid to start a phone company. Like, why would you start a phone company? There's tons of phone companies out there. But we felt that there was a gap. And we didn't know anything about the world of business phone systems or phones. But we just knew that there was a huge market and no one was serving it the right way. And we just went after it.

Yeah.

So surrounding yourself, like Neil said, with great people, I think that also means the people that you work with, like your employees or your team members. Everywhere in life, you wanna be around people that make you better. And just if someone closes the door on you, go in through the window. Just don't give up.

I would say, I mean, you just hit the nail on the head. What I was thinking was people, right? And so the one thing you and I talk a lot about is people. It doesn't matter what marketing tactics we're using. The fact of the matter is the older we get, we can't be on top of everything, right? So I do want to talk about how I remember Guy Tano right there. The Miami Heat hat. He made a video on how Nextiva's creating the Golden State Warriors team. Maybe it should be the Toronto Raptors now, but a championship marketing team. So can you talk more about that?

Yeah, you know, I would say as a marketer, really early in my career, I was very much focused on just hiring anyone I possibly could. Like if a resume would come in, the person passed, I would say, okay, hire them. But kind of to Neil's point, which was like, don't bring dumb people home. Don't bring dumb people to work. Don't work with people that don't make you better. And I think there's 3 principles or 3 things that I look for when hiring. First is you want people that are great at what they do. Yeah, you'll find a jack-of-all-trades marketer, but if you're hiring for, let's say, I don't know, an SEO manager, you want someone that lives and breathes SEO.

Yeah.

Don't take a— I mean, you can take a risk on someone that's just trying SEO, but I'd much more lean towards people that live and breathe, know that they love SEO, and when they go to sleep at night, they're thinking about SEO. They're not thinking about some random other career. Second, you want to surround yourself with people that get things done. Doers. People that— especially in an office, you work with people that 4:50 on Thursday and they're thinking about happy hour at 5:00 PM. They're thinking about going home and just checking out and they'll come back the next day. Don't get me wrong. Work-life balance is important. But if you love what you do, you want people that just have that urge. Because nothing that anyone's done here in marketing or anything you've published is ever done. Like, it could always be better. You can always optimize. You can always do more. So with that kind of thought, it's— you want people that think that way. And third is you want no assholes. People that are good. You know, people that are happy. People that make you kind of— make you a good person or a better person. And, you know, just recently I interviewed someone that was phenomenal. Who was that? when you think about like the role, but one thing that we definitely saw was just like very negative, and you can get that in the interview. Just like came across negative, and we're just like, fuck it. Like as good as you are at that job, we don't need negativity.

Yeah, actually there's a couple of people I've interviewed in the past where everything was perfect, and I do this character test with them. God, this is going on YouTube, huh? Okay, whatever. So here, let's do this instead. Disney, what Disney used to do is, I don't know if this is true or not, but they would leave like, if you see Nave's waiting in the lobby, they would leave a piece of trash next to him and they'd see if he'd pick it up. If he does not pick it up, he basically doesn't move forward. So it's a character test. So we do something similar to that and it's like, man, everything's perfect, conversation's good, but man, when something like that happens, like the smallest things become the biggest things. So that's just a little tip. But I do want to ask you, how do you go about finding amazing marketers? Because that's the number one thing I get asked about.

For me, there's one good move that we started doing that I think everyone here can do, which is go on LinkedIn and just say, who's the best SEO person you know? If you're hiring for an SEO manager. Who's the best X? Whatever role you want to hire. You're going to be surprised. People are going to start tagging people. People are going to start mentioning all the people that are good, and then just reach out. If you have anything in common, just start a conversation. I'm a fan of relationships and really getting to know the people that I'm working with more so than job postings.

Yeah, the best people obviously aren't going to be responding to a job post most of the time unless they're in transition. Here's a question I think most people like here. You're in a very competitive industry. You didn't raise any money. This is very hard. What kind of tactics did you use to grow without having to spend a ton of money?

Yeah. I was talking to you about this recently. This wasn't an old-school thing. This is actually something that we're doing now that I think is pretty crazy. By show of hands, how many people are familiar with Cameo, cameo.com?

That's a lot.

Yeah, like 20. Not as much. Well, cameo.com. It's a website where you can literally get personalized shout-out videos from celebrities, business figures, you name it. Snoop Dogg. Whoever you want. And it's pretty cheap. Like, some are $15. I think the most expensive goes up to $1,000, but Most people are in the sub-100 category. Send your leads, your prospects, if you have information on them, whether they're cold, warm, or they're an existing customer, send them a Cameo video. Get a celebrity to do a personalized shout-out. And we've seen that help convert. I mean, it's a one-to-one communication piece or touch and it's made a huge impact. I mean, I think you've done it with your employees, no?

I have. Yeah. We did one. We were launching our Big Hairy Audacious Goal. We had Kevin from The Office do a cameo. So that was cool. Syed actually did something too with Marcus Lemonis. Yeah. From The Profit. And that was really cool as well. How much did it cost you, Syed?

He would— yeah.

$500. Yeah.

Kevin was only $100. Yeah. I think Snoop Dogg does it for a couple hundred bucks and he'll smoke a blunt while he does the personalized video.

And you did that, right? You sent it to me.

Yeah, I've done a Snoop Dogg video.

And how about— how do you guys at Nextiva— because you guys are launching new products all the time— how do you guys approach product launches? Because I think it's confusing sometimes when you guys are known for— well, let's call it voice services or phone services. So how do you guys do it?

So we launch products a fair amount. One thing that no one's doing right now, in my opinion, no one's doing well, especially teams, are LinkedIn takeovers. You and your team, same day, the day the product launches, just get on LinkedIn, make a quick video talking about how pumped you are, or talk about the product. Don't make it obviously too awkward, but just a simple video where you're—

Excited.

Literally just talking and you all do that the same day. There's some momentum you'll create. Whether your team's just 2 people or 10, 20, whatever it is. LinkedIn takeovers, especially on video, same day. Try to push as much engagement or likes and shares in the first— what would you say, 30 minutes? Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not the LinkedIn expert. You guys are.

30 minutes. 30 minutes. And you'll see some good shit happen.

And so, okay, let me get this straight. So when you guys launch a new product launch, let's say you have 20 people on your marketing team, you guys are all doing that and you guys are all—

We're all making— each of us are making a video and then it just spreads. Like, all of our networks get it. It's great.

So how, like, let's— Gaetano does this really well. He'll do like a LinkedIn post talking about Nextiva maybe, and he'll get like 500 or 1,000 likes and a ton of views on it, right? So what are you guys doing there to make that happen?

Gaetano's a wizard. If you don't follow Gaetano Denardi on LinkedIn, I suggest you do that ASAP. He's that gentleman right there in the Miami Heat hat.

Wave to everyone. Wave to the people.

Just search Gaetano Dinardi.

Yeah.

G-A-E-T-A-N-O. Gaetano. G-A-E-T-A-N-O. Dinardi. D-I-N-A-R-D-I. This guy does a LinkedIn post, it just blows up. He's really mastered the art of whether it's a video or a text post just like right from the start. He gets you engaged, gets you in, and it just blows up.

Awesome. How much are you guys spending a month on ads right now? Roughly.

AdWords?

Yeah, AdWords, Facebook, combine everything.

AdWords, over half a million.

Okay. So half a million bucks you're spending. So $6 million a year.

Yeah. But we— and because the company is much larger. Like early days, there was no fucking budget.

Yeah. So right now, I'm assuming because you're spending so much money, obviously you're driving them to optimised landing pages, right? So what kind of copy are you finding or what kind of techniques are you finding converts well for you for that amount of spend?

I'm going to share some, then I want you to share some.

Okay.

All right. There's one. So first, does anyone not use exit intent technology? Are you not using exit intent popups?

So no exit popups.

Well, you should. You should start using it. Use OptinMonster. Syed, he's got a great company there. But one thing that Syed's kind of taught me is he has a ton of data and just information around the words that get people to convert. What are, especially exit intent language, that gets people to act. And very often when you have an exit intent pop-up and you just say, learn about SEO services the right way, or anything the right way, gets people to act or click. And it's natural, right? When you see something and it tells you to do it the right way, you obviously don't want to do it the wrong way. And I think the right way is is a big one. I'm also a fan of the laws. If you have a listicle article, the 40 laws of SEO or 40 laws, the laws of whatever. Because I think we're just trained. We want to obey laws. We don't want to break laws. You definitely want to learn about the laws. So laws of is definitely a big one. Turbo. Turbo is a good one too. Any service that you have, like if you have an agency, give them the turbo setup or anything that you offer, do the turbo. It simply works.

Yep.

It simply works.

I was just gonna say that one.

Yep. I like that one a lot too.

Cool. Actually—

How about you?

This other one we actually got from Gaitano. Gaitano's friend in Miami. His name is Tito and he runs a company that helps people with sales. So they do outbound sales, which just makes a lot more sense now. It's like when I reach out to you and I say, hey, Yaniv, do you want to do a demo?

No.

Who wants to do a fucking demo with you, dude?

No.

30 minutes. Can we just get on a call for 30 minutes? Nobody wants that either, right? But if you say, hey, I just did a personalized webinar That's completely different, right? And so we started changing that copy up with our— whether it's on landing pages or through email outreach, and the performance is significantly higher because we're doing a personalized webinar, which it is because 20 to 30% of it is personalized. The other 70% or so might be the quote-unquote demo, but the whole copy, right? It puts you in a completely different mindset.

Yeah. I mean, you definitely don't want to— everyone wants to feel special, right?

Is that what you guys are doing this too?

We just started.

Yeah. It makes so much sense.

Yeah. No more demos.

How about on the— this is not marketing related, but to me it kind of is because like people, like hiring great people, that to me is like, okay, if I learn how to hire someone, if I learn how to hire great people, I'm gonna build a great marketing team, right? Or just a great team in general. When I think about how do I also retain those people just like how I would with a product, That's really important to me as well. So this is always on my mind. Culture, culture, culture, right? How do you keep people engaged? How do you retain people? So I don't want this to be like an HR talk, but to me, it's like I like talking about the hacks or the strategies around retaining people because that's what's going to help your company grow. So what do you guys do around Nextiva right now with 1,000+ people?

The number one complaint every employee has in a company, maybe not number one, top 5, probably top 3, is communication. I don't care if it's like a 5-person company, 20, 100, 5,000. Employees complain about communication. We've heard this a ton, especially when we were smaller. Like, you're a communication company and your communication sucks. Like, employees just like complaining about our communication. So we're like, okay, let's do something about it. We started sending emails. No one reads the fucking emails. So then we're like, okay, let's leave papers on people's desks with announcements. No one reads it. And then we're like, okay, let's do bathroom signs, because we knew that when they're in the stall or the urinal, captive, they're not leaving. So we started to do bathroom signs, and literally we just got— I mean, any announcement that we had, anything we wanted people to do, We just— we got like full participation. And then we took it even further. We started doing— we realized that people hate emails, people hate reading, and, you know, we needed to connect another way. So we started doing a weekly TV show. And it does— I mean, it's not as big as it sounds. It's not a TV show. It literally started with like me in front of a MacBook Pro just— as monotone as I am, just sharing information about what's happening in the company. And every Friday, we would just publish a 2 to 3 minute video talking about what's happening. We call it Next TV, kind of a play on our name. And I mean, we're up to episode— we're over 300 episodes. And it's definitely evolved. But It's just a weekly TV show. Keeps everyone kind of on the same page. And no one really can say communication sucks anymore.

So wait, the stall thing.

Yeah.

So how did— go on. Like you said, 100% participation.

Yeah. We actually— it got so good, we started doing 2 updates a day. Like a beginning of the day update and then like midday update. Um, with just information.

Next, next Piva.

That's a good one. Next Piva.

I like that. Yeah, so here's the thing. I think, um, who, and who makes the TV show?

Uh, CEO? No, it's, uh, just in marketing. We have like some people. We get information from like every like department. By Wednesday, we want to get like the news or the announcements. And then we just kind of try to make fun and make sure it's a lighthearted video, but it's not fancy and everyone knows what's happening.

Cool. And then what's one creative thing you think you guys are doing right now in terms of customer acquisition?

Creative?

Yeah.

Damn. Give me a second. I'll think about it.

Okay. We can move on from that one. You think about that one.

I have some good ones.

Okay.

Oh, you know what's a good one?

What?

One thing we started doing recently is we incentivize our customer support reps to push our customers to drive reviews on websites that are important. You saw G2 Crowd. Obviously Ryan was saying the importance of peer insights or peer reviews are valued. Incentivize your employees to literally write Or push happy customers to write positive reviews. And, you know, they're— A, pay them for it because it's going to help your marketing a lot. Regardless of company size, you can probably do this. And then use that information and just create your own kind of— We literally have our best element on our landing pages are insanely long lists of us comparing Nextiva to its competitors on every review site. And it's— we started with like 2 sites, like G2 and whatever, BBB. And then we just expanded it to like 14. And it's just like rows and rows comparing us to competitors. And people want that information. And then you tap on— like you add on the idea that it simply works.

And How much do you incentivize your customer support reps?

$20.

$20 per review?

Yeah.

Got it. Okay. So that makes sense. And I asked this question earlier to Syed, and I kind of want to know from your side because you're always showing me new stuff. So what's new? What's one new tool you've added in the last year that's added a lot of value?

A tool?

Could be physical or could be an app.

Dude, Cameo.

Cameo.

Cameo. Like, use that. It's cheap. Whether it's to an employee, send it to your friends too.

Well, you gave that one already.

I know. I need to think of another one.

All right.

Give me a second. I'll come up with something.

Should we just stare at each other?

Yeah. What's one— you tell me a tool.

Wow. Yeah, I think you have to come back to me too. It's late.

Hold.io was good.

Oh yeah, Holdup? But I used that one already. You gotta give new shit.

Okay.

Yeah, we'll come back to it. So how about—

You know what's a good move?

What?

In terms of culture, I picked this up from David Hensel. He's part of a company that's called MaxCDN and now TaskDrive. Look, we all want— I think marketing has a big responsibility in most companies to not only be kind of like the voice outside for the brand, but also within the company. Regardless of size, marketing has a big responsibility to ensure everyone's on the same page. Culture is strong. Whether you're a 5-person company or 5,000. If your marketing team's like 2 people, you can immediately expand your marketing team by engaging everyone in the company. Create as many brand advocates as you can within the company. And just like literally like promote— make sure everyone's promoting the brand. But one thing David Henzel shared with me that I think was really valuable was this. When employees join his company, he has the vision, mission, and values of the company listed on like a sheet of paper on day 1 that they're required to read. And what he realized was no one was fucking reading it. Like they had the company values on this piece of paper. People would just like glance over it and move on to the next page. One thing he added was at each line he added an initial. Like initial your name with this value. Initial your name with this value. Initial your name and so on. And at the end, sign. And there was almost this like commitment for people to hold and like live the company values that was even greater. than in the past?

Yeah. Actually, okay, I got something now. He bought me time. And that was really good. We added that as well. But before the end of 2018, we added— so we had a guy from Scaling Up come in, a coach come in. And he brought up this concept of daily huddles. And I was like, dude, I come from startup culture. I know what a standup is. I don't want to fucking do standups. But he showed me a video. So the video is if you Google 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And you Google daily huddle, you're going to see 1-800-GOT-JUNK transform into— I think they do over $150 or $200 million a year now. It's because they do these daily huddles. You can see their setup. It's very fast. You're 5 to 10 minutes. Everyone's aligned. You talk about communication. I think for a smaller company like ours, it's like, okay, we're going through the numbers really quickly. We're talking about the— we're nominating people too. So it's like there's good feel-good stuff, right? You're nominating people for values at the end of each. There's like 3 nominations. And then we're talking about what's happening in the news, like who's working on something, like do we have a client coming in or whatever? And then victories too, right? So it's like all this feel-good stuff, but I think it's very important because we're all on the same page. So if you Google that or YouTube it, you'll be able to find— you'll see the small size they were at. And then even when they got huge and they had people in different offices, the people in different offices would be on a TV and they would still all kind of You know, there's one thing that you started using this year that's super valuable too, and that's iPad Pro.

That's game-changing. That device has literally changed the way I work.

We should talk about this. So the story behind this, right? And I actually made a YouTube video on this too, if any of you have seen the YouTube video. But what happened was we arrived in Mexico and then you were in the car and you bust out your iPad Pro and you're like, bro, you gotta get this, right? I'm like, this is This guy's stupid. I'm not even gonna listen to him. So like, we kept driving. I didn't think much of it. And then later you started talking about it more and more. And then—

And you saw me, like literally I do all of my work on that device. There's some people, like Neil made a good point, like some sites or Google Analytics isn't as effective or easy to use on an iPad Pro. But the majority of your tasks in a day can be achieved on that device. Except opening up zip files.

Yeah. So let me talk about the benefits. And no affiliate code here. So with the iPad Pro, one guy made a really good point. So when I bought it, I was a little like, man, I can't unzip CSV files. And then Yaniv was kind of making fun of me. He's like, what else do you need to unzip?

Like, who's unzipping files these days?

Yeah. So anyway, we had a mutual friend, Eric. He was like, dude, it's genius. Like, what Yaniv is doing is genius because the iPad actually prevents you from doing other stuff. 1,000 million tabs and open 4 separate screens. It forces you to focus and it forces you, if those of you that are executives or owners, it forces you to delegate. So that forcing function is really powerful. And now they have a new OS coming out too where it's going to be a lot more user-friendly. And when you land on a website, it's not going to be just a mobile version, but the battery life lasts forever. I flew to— it was a 5-hour flight. I only lost like 30%. Whereas on my Mac, I would be completely powered out. So I'm a huge proponent of it. And Neil and I were recording Marketing School episodes and I was just talking about it and then lo and behold, before we finished the episode, he already recorded one or bought one, had his assistant buy him one. And an hour after he got home, he sends me a picture of him working on it. So yeah, it's pretty powerful.

It's a great device.

Yeah. Whoa. iPad Pro, guys. Cool.

Yep. And buy Apple stock.

Cool. Well, Yaniv, I think we have time for one more question. Is there any— how do you get better at marketing yourself?

Me? Obviously you, Neil, being around you guys is immensely powerful. For me, I love LinkedIn. Really connect with great marketers on LinkedIn and just look at the content they're sharing. I mean, it's obviously very similar to Twitter, but I found LinkedIn to be like my source, my new source of great insights.

Mm-hmm.

Not really a fan of like articles or a lot of kind of like traditional like Entrepreneur or Forbes articles. Like anything that's getting posted on those sites is usually old because like the editorial process and just like the people posting there just like are a few steps behind. So I like to really like follow people that are like you and just see what you guys are talking about.

Why, thank you.