Happy Customers Lead to More Customers with Kathleen Booth of Pavilion

In a network driven business, in a business that is leveraging community led growth, what you start to learn is that happy customers lead to more happy customers.

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Hello everyone and once again, welcome to Revenue Insights. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Kathleen Booth. Kathleen and I have known each other for a couple of years and I'm delighted that she's joining us today. Kathleen, perhaps you could start by introducing yourself.

Thanks guy. I'm very honored to have been asked to come on. Hi everybody, I'm Kathleen Booth, SVP of Marketing and growth at Pavilion. For those who are not familiar with Pavilion, we are the world's largest private community of go to market executives and we exist to help them achieve their full potential and find success in their careers. Yeah, I come to Pavilion. I was originally a member for three years. My background is I was an agency owner for about a decade and then sold that company and have been working in house generally as an early stage head of marketing. I think as a former entrepreneur, it's been hard for me to extricate myself from the startup life. I love that early stage. For better or for worse. That's what led me to Pavilion. I joined and I was a member for several years and loved it. And so when the opportunity arose for me to become a part of the company, I jumped at it because it's so rare in this day and age that as a marketer you get to do marketing for companies that have products that you've deeply experienced for yourself and that have made such an impact on your life. So it's been a really great opportunity.

Well, I've had the opportunity to watch your growth within the Pavilion community. I know I've seen you on stage now on a number of occasions and it's amazing to see how the community is growing so fast. I'm also happen to be a Pavilion member and a big fan of the community and the work that Pavilion is doing is just fantastic. It's just a real amazing opportunity to meet your peers that sometimes you don't necessarily get that kind of opportunity to have that close bond with. And what's incredible is some of the conversations you end up having over the dinners and at the networking events with people that perhaps you wouldn't necessarily think you'd have that engagement with. And I think every event I've gone to, I've come away with notebooks full of insights. So, big thank you for what you've achieved with the community. It's certainly a huge part of our lives and I know tens of thousands of people have been affected positively by what Pavilion has achieved. So a very exciting place to work, I'm sure.

Definitely. And thanks for saying that, because I will say what brought me to Pavilion and what keeps me there is knowing that we're having that impact on people. Because I know firsthand how stressful it can be to be a go to market executive and like to know that we're able to help people advance in their careers. To that we're there for them when they lose their job or when they need help. Like that is very personally meaningful. So it's always nice to hear that people have had good experiences within the community.

Well, as a founder and CEO, I spend a lot of time on the road and I've been to Pavilion events, whether it's in Barcelona, in Boston, in New York, in San Francisco. So wherever you go, there's always a lovely feeling of a community waiting for you when you get there. So I really get a lot of value from it from that perspective as well. But before we jump into the work you're doing at Pavilion, perhaps you can kind of give us a bit of an insight as to kind of how you got there and the work that you were doing before you started with Pavilion.

Yeah, I've had somewhat non traditional career trajectory in that I actually started my career working in international development consulting. I did two graduate degrees because I couldn't make up my mind, I guess. I did a Master's in international politics and I did an MBA in marketing. And so for the first decade or so of my career, I was really working on the international politics side. I was doing consulting work for the World bank, the Asian development bank, the U.S. agency for International Development. And I specialized in public private partnerships for water in the developing world and loved that career. I was in my 20s, I was single. It brought me to 54 different countries around the world and I got to see amazing things. But it was also very frustrating and disheartening because what would happen is we were doing this work to try to solve and deliver water to people that didn't have good, reliable clean water services, which was very meaningful. And yet the projects kept Getting derailed. And I identified this was probably midway through my career, that it was because of a lack of consensus building and strategic communications. And I thought, well, gosh, I did this MBA in marketing, maybe this is something that I could help. And so I spent the latter part of my career there, kind of almost transitioning back into marketing and working with a lot of these governments and multilateral development banks on how do you do work earlier in the lifecycle of these projects to build consensus, to educate people on what's coming. It's effectively a form of marketing. And so what happened was about 10 years into that career, I got married and decided I wanted to have children. And flying all over the world, particularly to the developing world alone for weeks and sometimes months at a time, was not conducive to having a growing family. And so I had a little bit of a midlife career crisis and had to reinvent myself. And I was fortunate that my husband had been doing some work in marketing related field and was like, hey, what do you think about starting an agency? Which is one of the things I feel like I've always connected with you about because you have a spouse who is a business partner. So we did that. We started a marketing agency. We had that business for 11 years. We were really early HubSpot Partners. And it was digital marketing and demand generation back then. Very content led, I would say, and it was great. I think our affiliation with HubSpot gave us very much of like a national brand. And so we worked with companies all over the country and I loved it for a long time. But agency life is very difficult. It's hard to scale. The margins are really thin. And so I started when my kids got old enough where they were heading off to college, I started looking at what was next. And we had worked with a lot of B2B technology companies and I realized I wanted to get out of the agency world. So we did sell our company to a friendly competitor. And I spent some time transitioning the business over. And it was interesting because it was in that time when I was transitioning that I had my first community experience. Because the company that I joined wanted to build a community and they actually wanted to build a media company around their agency. And so I spearheaded that effort. We built a 5,000 person marketing community. We built really a media engine. And after about two years of doing that, I left to finally go in House into B2B tech companies as head of marketing, which is what I really wanted all along. And my timing was terrible because that was right around when Covid started. So I have done that a few times. I've worked in cybersecurity, In e commerce, SaaS, in ad tech, all in these very early stage roles where many times companies were still trying to find product market fit. They needed to build teams. They needed someone to come in and impose discipline and strategy behind their marketing, in some ways educate them about what good marketing was. And I loved that work. And that's what led me to Pavilion because it was when I was leaving that initial role where we sold the company and I was working at that company that acquired us and going into B2B tech, I had shared my resume with somebody who sent it out through what was then Revenue Collective, Pavilion's precursor. And I started getting these amazing interviews with incredible companies from all over and when I would ask them how they heard about me, they kept saying Revenue Collective. So I joined and it's been great. It has followed me through my career from finding jobs to helping me be better at jobs to building a network. And a few years back in fall of 2022, when I had the opportunity to join Pavilion full time, I jumped at it because it felt like the natural next step. Not only because of what I said earlier about really deeply believing in the product, but also because having had that experience of building a community back in 2017-2019, I left that experience feeling like this is the future of how marketing is going to be done and I want to go someplace where I'll have an experience that allows me to be at the forefront of it. And so those are some of the reasons why I joined Pavilion. And it's been fun being here and really like immersing myself in what it means to build a community led marketing engine.

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Yeah, you're now not just influencing a single business, but hundreds of businesses that are kind of all influenced by the community. And the learning that goes on is fascinating to see. So what are you Seeing that's changed kind of. You talked about Korean post Covid there. So what are you seeing? The things that were happening in marketing and go to market maybe in 2019, 2020 versus now. Can you see a big shift?

100%. So before COVID that was back when I owned my agency and when I worked for the other agency. And so I was in a sales role a lot of the time. I mean especially when I was CEO. You're like chief marketer and chief seller and chief, as they say, cook and bottle washer. And so whenever I would pitch people, I would always say, hey, think about how people buy. When they realize they have a problem, what do they do? They go to Google and they try to find a solution. And so back then it was you've got to be found in Google. And this is why we were very like digital and content led. And I believed strongly in what HubSpot evangelized back then, the inbound marketing approach, the content led approach, the educate, don't sell approach. That has changed. And what happened was during COVID there's always been communities, but Covid served as like an accelerant. And for that two year period when we couldn't see other people in person, I think a lot of us flocked to communities to substitute for what we had gotten previously in other ways. And so we went to communities to establish connection and build relationships. We went there to try to drum up business, to learn. There were no conferences happening in person. And I think the whole virtual conferencing was not very successful from what I recall. You know, so communities became this mecca and pavilion, you see it in Pavilion because we grew dramatically during that time because we solved this need for people. And as a result of that, what has happened and we now have some research to back it up. Actually we did some research with TrustRadius recently that underscores this. Buying behavior underwent a sea change in that time period and even since has continued to evolve. And what we see today is if I rewind that same conversation I would have had as an agency owner of like think about how people buy, I would never answer that question today and say the first thing they do is they go to Google. Because what I see day in and day out in the virtual halls of Pavilion's Slack community is that people, when they have a need, go to their community. And people define community differently. For some people it's Pavilion. For Some it's their LinkedIn network. It's wherever you find your people and your peer set. But if somebody's Buying, for example, intent software. These days, they're not generally going to Google and saying, what's the best intent software? Because, let's be honest, Google's going to give you a fast answer. But can you really trust it? Is it just the company that paid the most to appear on the top of the search results, or is it really the best company? Whereas if you go into a community and like, I'm in Pavilion's CMO subchannel and I say to the other CMOs, what's the best provider of intent software? I'm going to get a lot of really honest, unvarnished opinions really quickly. And so I always like to say that community has become this cheat code. I have a teenager who plays a lot of video games and cheat codes are a thing. And so community is a cheat code for B2B. Go to market leaders, because we can go in and get that same speed of response. But the key difference is that we trust the information so much more because we know who it's coming from and it's people who've been there, they've done that, they've used the thing, and they can tell us in an honest way what the benefits or the pros and the cons are. And then what we do is we develop our shortlist from who we've heard about in our community or on LinkedIn or what have you, and then we go to Google, finally. But instead of typing in what's the best intent software, I'm typing in the names of the three companies on the shortlist I developed from the conversation I had within these walled gardens. So I think the big takeaway here, the big lesson in terms of how buying has changed, is that if your brand is not a part of the conversation happening within those walled gardens, you are probably not even getting the at bat that you might have otherwise gotten.

So it's fascinating, isn't it? It's amazing to see. And it's happened in such a short amount of time as well, this massive transition. So. And if you think about your whole revenue team, not just the marketing function, but the whole revenue team now at Pavilion, how has that structure changed? As you've seen that transition, have you. Is the team as big as it was, or is it bigger? Or have you got resources working in different ways or focused on different things?

Yeah, it's been fascinating, even in just the almost two years since I joined the company, how much this has changed. I think every. All of us have undergone changes, right, with the economy and the banking crisis, like, companies have contracted and expanded again and contracted. And we're certainly no different. And it's forced us, like many others, to really get lean and mean and focus our resources on what's working. And so for a good part of my first year at Pavilion, I actually ran marketing, sales and customer success, which wasn't what I initially came on for, but it, I had an opportunity during a time of change for us as a company to do that. And it was a great experience because we are a very network driven business. Word of mouth is huge for us. And I think the examples I gave of how people buy absolutely apply to how people buy Pavilion. And it tends to happen on LinkedIn. People will be on LinkedIn and mention they took one of our courses or that they joined and went to a chapter event. And all of a sudden we see this all the time. People say, oh, you're all over my feed. I keep hearing about you on LinkedIn. Right. And so in a network driven business, in a business that is leveraging community led growth, what you start to learn is that happy customers lead to more happy customers. Your customers are a big source of demand. And I think this can be true in any company and it probably should be true in most companies because it's the lowest way to acquire new customers is to leverage the happy ones you already have. And so being a head of marketing who was given the chance to run CS was really eye opening for me because it forced me to focus on how do we really look at word of mouth and start at the true beginning, which is how we're delivering service to our customers and how we're nurturing them along their journey so that when the time comes and somebody says, hey, what's this thing Pavilion I've heard about? The customer themselves is in the position to act as essentially our field sales rep. And so that was one of the big things that I think was really educational for me. And at the same time that that happened that I took on these teams, we dramatically downsized our sales team and we made a couple of really interesting bets. We had somebody who had been running our corporate social media when I first came on, who was amazing, amazing. But we made a bet that, hey, if we wanted to make this company really, really lean, because candidly, like pulling back the curtain, we had accepted venture capital and we were spending it like a lot of companies spent it at the time. But Sam, our founder, made the decision when the Silicon Valley bank crisis happened. He was like, we have to get serious and we can't rely on venture capital in the Future, we need to practice what he calls profitable efficient growth, or peg. And so the whole idea behind all these organizational changes was how do we lean down to the point where we're taking in more money than we're spending so that someday maybe we will decide to take more venture capital, but if we do it, it'll be because we really want to, not because we have to. And so we let the corporate person go on and placed a bet that we could drive as much, if not more, pipeline through individual people's social media, both our team as well as our customers. We dramatically downsized the sales team and also started looking at how can we leverage this social media engine, this word of mouth, to almost substitute for what the sales team had been doing. And so we implemented a lot of processes behind that. Happy to talk about more of them, but it was a pretty massive change in terms of the company size. And the good news is we're growing. We're growing at. I think there were months earlier this year where we were doing 100% year over year in time periods that were compared back to when we had that larger team. And so it's not to say that those people weren't good or weren't doing great work and weren't valuable. It's just that we totally changed our whole approach to how we were going to market and we found ways of doing more with less, which I generally hate that term because it tends to imply that we should just all, like, work longer, but it forced us to get smarter about how we went to market.

No, I love that. And, you know, I made a number of notes off the back of your comments there. In particular, I really like this idea of happy customers leads to more customers. I think that's a great tagline. I'm going to be using that as in a company update next week. So, yeah, really like that stuff. So a couple of questions there. So you were running the idea of a single voice responsible for sales, marketing and success is. Makes a lot of sense, but are you now focusing exclusively on the marketing side and have you got others responsible for the other departments? And how do you get that dynamic continuing to work as one unit now that everyone is being run by different departments?

Yeah. So it was an interesting evolution. There was, like, I would say, my first year at Pavilion, it was a process of me absorbing all of those teams and running them and learning how they work. And then as we stabilized the company and reach that point of profitable, efficient growth, it became a year of almost evolving back and finding people to head Those business units. So the first thing we did was we brought in somebody to lead customer success, and we peeled that off from under me because it then had a leader. And then we peeled off corporate sales because we brought somebody else in to own that. I still have what I would call individual sales, so the enrollment team, because we're almost like product led in that regard. And so I think there's an argument to be made that should sit under marketing. But right now I have marketing and growth, which is that individual sales motion and corporate sales and CS are separate at this point.

Okay, makes a lot of sense. And does that mean you don't have any sort of outbound function at all? It's all inbound now? Or do you still have an outbound sales team as well?

So we are in the process, as we speak, of reintroducing outbound. Part of what we did when we contracted the size of the team is we really decided to focus on optimizing the inbound engine as much as we could. And like I said earlier, we've seen tremendous growth from that. And so I think we feel like we have that humming now, and that allows us then to start to shift our focus on a very strategic approach to outbound. And so we are in the middle of testing certain things around that we've been doing, for example, outbound to people who work in companies where there's already someone who's a Pavilion member. So, so like adjacencies, essentially, where we can say, hey, your coworker is a member. Maybe you should consider it too. And I would say those are like warmer audiences. Right. Because they probably have either heard of us or there's somebody they work alongside who they can go to for a reference. And then our next test is going to true cold audiences. And so we've begun to build lists of our ideal customer profile. And regardless of whether they know a member or work with a member, we're going to probably begin testing some cold outbound just to see what our conversion rates are like, because that'll help us calibrate how much we should spend on that channel.

Wow. Well, it sounds going to be an interesting year ahead and see what the outbound can achieve, but well done in stabilizing and growing it from the inbound perspective. And of course, civilians all over my feed as well. So that's. That's.

I love hearing that.

So as a marketing with a background in marketing, you're obviously quite data driven already. Now I'm a huge advocate of sales teams becoming a lot more data Driven. And we spent a lot of time talking about the delta between top performers and average performers within sales teams and how we can really use the data to understand what good looks like so that we can start bringing the B and C players along with us. But with someone with a marketing background that's so data driven anyway. Are you able to bring that data driven approach into the sales team?

Yeah. So as I mentioned, in my team we do have the enrollment team which is, and that sits under demand generation. But we have two sellers effectively who are working all of our inbound leads. And soon we're considering adding a third who will work the outbound and we with the inbound team. I'm fortunate that I have a great head of demand generation, Josh Carter, who is also very process oriented and very data driven. And so what's happened is we have a pretty tightly defined process for how we work those enrollment leads. And obviously, and I know I'm preaching to the choir, I think the baseline is like expecting the team to follow the process. Right. That's number one. And how you enforce that through the way that your CRM is set up and the way you stage gate things in your pipeline. But even with processes, I think there's aspects to them. Like there's smaller aspects to them that can easily fall through the cracks. And so some of the things we've observed, for example, are speed of email follow up is a huge factor for us because we have a very short sales cycle for our individual memberships. People come to the site, they fill out an application and they can if they want, self serve through that application and like put down a credit card and join. So there's almost an E commerce aspect to our business. But there's a lot of people that abandon CART to use an E commerce term, or they come in as leads through other channels like a DM on LinkedIn and they to one of our team members. And so there, that whole population of people that have expressed interest but not joined is where our enrollment team is focused. And that's where we see that the speed of follow up is so crucial and also like the personalization of follow up. And so we do have more than one seller on that team. And I think we've been able to see differences in outcomes based on like speed of follow up, degree of personalization, I think are like the two biggest things that we've noticed from a data driven standpoint really set the two sellers apart. And so how are we tackling that? I think there's obviously just, there's coaching. But then we're leaning heavily into AI at this point as well. So we have a tool called Fixer AI, which is an email inbox automation platform that's helping one of our sellers to speed up their follow up and improve their follow up. It actually helps with both speed and personalization because it drafts responses. But then we also have this incredible team we're working with Brian Sowards from Drive Pipeline and the team at Copy AI. We've built a number of automations that essentially de anonymize some of our website visitors and people who have made it through part of the application process, scrape their LinkedIn profiles and help draft outreach for our sales team so that they don't have to spend as much time getting to that baseline level of personalization. And what's cool is actually Josh, our head of Demand Gen, is doing a build in public and he's publishing on our LinkedIn channel these tutorial videos that show exactly how he's doing this. So if you're interested in learning more about what we're doing there, I would say head to our YouTube and check it out.

Just a quick reminder and then we will be right back to the show. At Revenue Insights, our goal is to share how top performing revenue leaders build predictable, efficient go to market teams. Every week we speak to the brightest minds and every quarter we release the latest findings from our analysis of billions of dollars in pipeline. If you don't want to miss out, sign up to our newsletter at ebster.com forward slash newsletter-signup that's ebster.com forward slash newsletter dash signup the link to make that a little bit easier for you will be in the show notes of this episode. Wherever you're listening. See you there.

Very good. I can't believe we made that whole 20 minutes without talking about AI. So we. I know you did well there, so no, Very good. I was going to ask you about that. And once customers are on board, communities in general are notoriously challenging to with around retention. So how are you dealing with those challenges and is there a data driven approach there?

There really is. And I have to give all credit to we have an amazing internal ops team and I feel so lucky because I've been in companies before where there isn't dedicated ops and the difference is night and day. So we have a man named Tom Andrews who leads our ops team and then Samantha and Rupa who work with him. And what Tom recently did has been, I think a real game changer for us, which is it's the second time he's done it. He took a pass at exporting all of our customer data and putting it into machine learning and large language models and basically developing cohort analyses that is able to be segmented along a number of different parameters. And so we just went through the most recent iteration of this and really uncovered some like goldmine of data around what drives a propensity to renew. And so we learned things, for example, like if you're a Pavilion member and you go to a salon dinner, you mentioned our dinners earlier, or you go to one of our summits, you are dramatically more likely to renew than the rest of the population of members. And so we have that data for all kinds of different variables. Things like how many courses have you enrolled in and attended and where you're located and whether you're in a chapter and whether you pay monthly or annually. And so this is where I think like you can have all the theories in the world on what's driving retention, but having that data makes it so black and white. And so what we're investing in right now is this exercise around building out what we think the ideal member journey should look like, which we call the good Path and shout out to a woman named Robbie Kelman Baxter, who came in and helped us with this. But the idea being that like, we know what drives retention. So let's make sure, like software does with aha moments, like let's make sure we drive members to experience, experience the things that increase the propensity for retention as early in their member journey as possible. Because usually people know if they're going to renew within their first month to two months based on that initial experience.

Yeah, again, taking a loss there. I love this idea of the Good Path. I think all of us should spend more time thinking about what is the good path for our customers, what's the perfect experience and what do we absolutely need to do to ensure that they're getting enough value for them to want to continue and renew and spend more money and become an advocate. Right. Because again, what we're hearing here is community led growth and ecosystem led growth is now so important to the way that we sell. And again, I'm going to come back to happy customers leading to more customers. So I love both of those. So listen, Kathleen, thank you so much for joining us today. Really enjoyed the session. If people want to find out more about Pavilion or in particular want to follow your content, I know you're very active on LinkedIn and I love your content. So tell us a bit more about how people can interact with you.

Yeah, definitely. Send me a LinkedIn connection request and mention that you heard about me on this podcast and I will for sure accept the request and happy to answer any questions in my DMs. And then if you want to learn more about Pavilion, just go to joinpavilion.com as I've already described. There's lots of information around our membership there and you can join right on the site or you can reach out to me and I'm happy to introduce you to a member of the team who can answer any questions.

Fantastic. Well, I know you're in the States at the moment, but you're on your way to London in a couple of weeks where the big GTM event is coming to London. So those that haven't already got their tickets should check out GTM Pavilions because it's going to be an amazing event. It's a two day summit here in London. Yeah. Looking forward to seeing you when you get here.

Yeah, July 10th and 11th and I'll see you there. You're going to be on stage.

Yeah, looking forward to it. So thank you again for joining us today. I really enjoyed the insights and I know our community will as well. So thanks again.

Thanks guy.

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