SaaSMQL Case Study - IntSights (a Rapid7 Company)

Okay, so this is Franco. I'm the founder of SAS MQL. I'm here with Jonathan, Jonathan Beaton from Insight. And Insight is one of our top clients, and so I'm here with him today. Thanks for joining us, Jonathan.

Cool, thanks Franco.

So I wanted to ask you first if you can introduce yourself and what's your background and what's your role at Insights?

Sure, so, well, it's an interesting question right now, right? So my role at Insights, I led the marketing team, right? I was a VP of marketing and as of a couple weeks ago, I'm the senior director of marketing at Rapid7, right? So we've just been acquired That's awesome news.

In fact, it was all over, all over the press a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah, it was over the— all over the press at a few places a little before we wanted it to be all over the press. But, uh, yeah, it's been a pretty smooth transition so far.

Perfect. And, uh, can you tell us a little bit about Insights and what you guys do?

Yeah, so Insights is a cybersecurity company that you know, develops external threat intelligence software. You know, generally speaking, threat intelligence has been, you know, kind of a tool that's only been accessible to what we like to call the security 1%, right? So Insights has been on a mission since its founding to kind of democratize threat intelligence and and bring that to those folks outside of that security 1%.

That's perfect. And, you know, we've been working together now since late December last year, so about 8 months, about 8 months now. So my question for you is, when we started working together, like, what was the problem that you wanted to solve, or like, what was the opportunity that you were seeing that kind of pointed you to us?

Well, you know, I think, you know, in cyber, generally speaking, events are, you know, a core producer pipeline. And obviously, uh, as a VC-backed startup, uh, you know, marketing leader at a VC-backed startup, a lot of, uh, my job is based on generating pipeline for the sales team, right? And we have to 2x every year, so we were looking to expand our ABM motion. It was not as sophisticated as I probably would have liked to have seen it internally. There's not just targeting, but there's operational challenges when you implement ABM. And I needed a partner that not only kind of had the playbook, but kind of the operational chops and the ability to help us kind of implement it fast, right? Because we added some fairly aggressive 2021 numbers.

Perfect. And, uh, you know, we started from the beginning with this program coordinating direct mail and LinkedIn ads and email touches, and we saw fairly quickly some tractions there. Um, what we saw working really well was this particular direct mail offer Was it something you tried in the past of integrating offline channels into this more digital touches?

Yes, but we struggled to do it at scale, right? I think, you know, the concept of direct mail is fairly well known, but integrating direct mail, you know, to sales outreach LinkedIn and having the data kind of work cohesively behind the scenes, not just to, you know, to optimize for effectiveness, but also to avoid collisions, you know, etc., right? To be truly effective, like, it's a— it's definitely an operational challenge, and we hadn't solved that yet internally.

And I remember at the beginning we worked quite a bit on, on the list together You guys have a lot of data in terms of scoring accounts and accounts intent and looking at the data sources to make sense of what accounts we should target first and where was the biggest opportunity. And we saw success within like a couple of months. Can you tell us a little bit about the results that you have seen so far in the last, you know, 5, 6 months?

Sure. So You know, we were at a position in our business where we truly understood who we were targeting and why we were targeting them, which I think, you know, is a fundamental, you know, aspect of, you know, creating a successful ABM motion. So it wasn't, you know, surprising to me necessarily that once we put the pieces together, we had success, right? So You know, you and I were looking at data prior, prior to our discussion here, right? And it's, it's pretty obvious the impact, right? So, you know, as a business that's having to 2x quarter over quarter, right? Q2, 24% of our pipeline marketing-driven was from our ABM program. And then, you know, even bigger jump in Q2 where we're seeing upwards of 40% of our pipeline being driven by this program. So You know, if you think about it, you know, we'll probably generate as much pipeline in Q3 of this year from our ABM program as we generated in all of Q3 last year, total marketing program pipeline.

And this is something we can see from, from my team as well, because we have a, you know, we have a notification every time there is a positive engagement from a target account. And your notification keeps ringing, like, constantly.

Well, you know, I'll give a shout out to Troops a little bit here because I also get a Slack notification every time an opportunity is created from the program and also in the channel that you guys set up. So even when I'm on the golf course, I could still see that ops are coming through.

And I do have to shout out on your team because they've been fantastic at jumping are like very quickly. There's never been like a drop-off from handoff to opportunity, has always been very smooth. They are like working very, very efficiently and effectively. Yeah, I think that helps.

I think we have, you know, because obviously I was pretty heavily involved too where we kicked things off, um, you know, and Fortunately, I have a pretty solid team and you guys have obviously been a great partner as well. So I've been able to be a little hands-off here recently, but we have super tight marketing and SDR alignment, which, you know, I think, you know, if you were to ask me success, right, it's understanding, you know, who you're selling to, why you're selling to them. But then that alignment between marketing and SDRs super important to make this work.

Absolutely, and it helped that we were working on a weekly basis with someone from your marketing team as well as the art team, so everything is very 100% aligned. And we had fun experimenting with different direct mail offers, different type of giveaways and messaging, and that's where we drive a lot of this conversion because you guys are doing an awesome job also warming up these accounts in other, across other channels, including virtual events and webinar, email marketing. And then we are getting a ton of conversion once we integrate the direct mail touch. Can I ask you also what type of companies are you typically targeting that sees value in this solution that we're seeing in DBM program?

Yeah, I mean, our target accounts, and like I said, you know, democratizing threat intelligence, but you know, that includes a lot of Fortune 500 accounts Fortune 1000 accounts, you know, down to your, you know, let's call it 5,000 to 10,000 employee range accounts, but all businesses that, you know, the, you know, the CISO or your more senior cyber folks, you know, they're pretty busy, right? So you have to earn their attention and I think this program has done a great job doing that.

Yeah, and we saw that across every channel, even on the LinkedIn ads, we're getting very senior people from large enterprise downloading your content, which clearly resonates with them, and then we are able to retarget them with email and direct mail and getting that conversion.

Yeah, I would say, you know, even as short as 2, 3, 4 years ago, you know, the single touch to, you know, an SDR cadence worked, right? But, you know, everyone's getting funded right now. Right, there's no shortage of VC money floating around. You know, marketing is getting even more saturated. And I think the days, you know, obviously you hear a lot about brand being an important lever, but you know, the days of single-touch conversions are in the review, right? Like you are overspending on your marketing programs if you're single touch only and not putting them into a more intimate kind of ABM sequence. It's just the way things are now.

Yeah, that's what I also noticed. If we do just LinkedIn ads, it's gonna— your CAC will skyrocket and the conversion would be pretty small.

Yeah, 100%. Like, you know, even for virtual events now, and virtual events, and I'm sure every marketer can relate to this, right? Like the cost per op, the CAC, you know, is, is through the roof. But we have found vendors— I mean, you got to do something, right? Like, when events aren't there, you still have to find ways to generate pipeline. Like, this, this doesn't stop, obviously. Um, and we have found ways to work with, you know, really high-quality vendors and add on kind of that SAS MQL ABM program to get our CAC costs in in a range where, you know, our finance team doesn't scream at me too loud.

Exactly. And my last question for you is, so would you recommend other SaaS companies, would you recommend them to work with us? And if yes, why?

Yeah, so, you know, listen, one of the things, you know, I'm an old-school Marketo veteran like Franco here, you know, so we didn't know each other prior to this engagement. And I would presume we probably, you know, crossed paths at some early Marketo conferences back in the day. But it's kind of that breed of marketer that's been brought up doing this at every level and gets it. So a lot of my initial trust was obviously a new Franco. And then, you know, as I've worked with you, right, the results speak for themselves and the quality of the team that you've built, you know, has also been a huge advantage. So it's a no-brainer for me.

Awesome. Thank you, Jonathan. I really appreciate it. And thank you for all the good words and for taking part in this interview.

Cool, likewise, Franco.