INBOUND 2016: Kyle Lacy "You Can't Growth Hack Your Way to Success"

Thank you. You guys hear me? How are we doing? Peppy? Feeling good. Awesome. I gotta say right off that I've kind of screwed up this presentation for you guys. And I'm sorry. Usually what I do to start off is that I have a SlideShare link where all of you can go download SlideShare presentation. Unfortunately, I do not have a URL for the slide deck. So what you need to do is that you need to tweet me. And this is not a ruse, this is not a growth hack to get you to actually follow me on Twitter. I need you to send me a tweet and I will send out the link to SlideShare. If you actually go to my Twitter account, I've already tweeted out the link. The reason why I do that is because I've got about 90 slides in here that we're gonna go through in about 30, 35 minutes. So this is meant to be downloaded, it's meant to be used. It's not necessarily meant to have five pages of notes for you guys to take. Okay, so a little bit about me real fast is that I work for a venture capital firm, and I've been at this venture capital firm called openview for two years. We invest in software companies. Software. So what we do is we look at thousands upon thousands of companies every year in different stages of growth, and we help our portfolio companies that we've invested in grow as well. And those Companies range from 1 million in revenue to over 100 million in revenue to some public companies. Before that, I spent three years at Exact Target, went through an ipo, went through the acquisition by Salesforce. I led content for Exact Target in six countries and did a lot of market research for Exact Target as Demand gen to use for Demand gen. So this presentation is based off of what I've learned over the past five years at Exact Target, doing Demand Gen, doing content marketing, but also everything we've learned the past two years of just doing due diligence on a bunch of companies, because it's amazing what you can learn when you look at the numbers and try to figure out how to grow companies. So a lot of times at Exact Target and Even now at OpenView, I think that it's important no matter what we do, and I do this a lot, is just to understand change. And I've used this video for years because I freaking love it. Who's heard of Louis ck? Ok, so I've got a short video. If you've seen it, you can laugh because it's awesome. That I want you guys to watch. And it's. It's just taken in because we really have to understand change in order to fully appreciate where we're going from a trends perspective as well as just growth hockey.

When I read things like the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like, maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. You think that would just bring us back to reality? Yeah, because everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy. Like, in my lifetime, the changes in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. We had a phone that you had to stand next to and you had to dial it.

Yes.

Do you realize how primitive you're making sparks in a phone? And you actually would hate people with zeros in their numbers because it was more, this guy's got two zeros. Screw that guy. Why do I want to. And then if they called and you weren't home, the phone would just ring, lonely by itself. And then if you wanted money, you had to go in the bank for when it was open for like three hours. You had to stand in line, write yourself a check like an idiot. And then when you ran out of money, you just go, well, I can't do any more things now. I can't do any more things.

That's it. Yeah.

That was it. And even if you had a credit card, the guy would go, ugh. And he'd bring out this whole shung shunk and he'd write credit. You don't have to call the president to see if you have any money. It's all true, kids. You had to call the president.

Yeah.

It was ridiculous.

Yes.

Do you feel that we now, in the 21st century, we take technology for granted? Well, yeah, because now we live in an amazing, amazing world. And it's wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don't care. Because this is what people are like now. They got their phone, they're like, ugh.

It won't give it a second.

It's going to space. Can you give it a second to get back from space?

Is the speed of light truth?

I was on. I was on an airplane and there was Internet, high speed Internet on the airplane. That's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop. You can go on the Internet.

And it's fast.

And I'm watching YouTube clips. It's amazing. I'm in an airplane. And then it breaks down and they apologize. The Internet's not working. The guy next to me goes, this is bull. Like how quick the world owes him something he Knew existed only 10 seconds ago.

It's always fun to talk to marketers. I'm going to turn this volume down again because being one, I know that it is constantly an issue that we're always trying to figure out what is changing. And so I believe that trying to figure out how to growth, hack your way, success and testing and all these things that people do now are important. But I think that what I've learned by looking at a lot of companies who have been extremely successful, as well as some that have failed or a lot that have failed, is that that is just one portion of it. And not actually understanding what's happening in the world for the most part, as well as not. Building a true foundation is important to understand because it's important as a marketer that we transition and we transition our businesses to actually understand what is happening in the world and why it's happening. So. So I'm going to go through two disruptions real fast. We already know this. The current future disruption is mobility. We know that mobile changed the world. Who uses their cell phone is their alarm clock. Cell phone. Cell phone. Who uses their cell phone as their alarm clock. Who gets pissed off when somebody's ringtone is your alarm tone? Seriously, raise your hand. Because that is the example pretty much that I give in general on why mobile is important from a trends perspective. We use it all the time. We know that everything in the world has to be mobile. I think I bring this up because a lot of times I am actually going to somebody's website and their phone number's on their website. And what's the issue with the phone number? You can't click the damn phone number. It's simple. You want a growth hack. Make your phone number clickable on your website. I don't even care if it's not even mobile enabled, just make it clickable. Right? So when we're talking about the development of mobile, it's extremely important that mobile is changing. And because of that, it's also important to understand that every customer is a consumer first. I've talked about this for a long time, but I don't care if you're in B2C or B2B, small business or enterprise. Every customer that you have is a consumer first. And the best way to show that is just mobile apps and the seamless nature of mobile apps in general. The customer experience, the consumer experience needs to be seamless no matter what you're selling. The example that I give is a cute example, and I'm kind of biased. This is my son who uses Amazon's mobile app. Okay, So I can walk with my son. He's not walking yet, but pushing my son. And I can use one hand and order formula within five seconds. That's then delivered to my door within 24 hours, hopefully within five, because we're going to figure out this drone thing and it's going to be delivered to my door. And what I don't understand a lot of times when I'm talking to product developers or CEOs or people who start businesses is that they don't take into account that my ability to click and buy something in five seconds and it be delivered to my door, it affects the way I buy everything. Whether that's software or it's an accounting firm for taxes, it affects everything that I do. And it's just that consumer brands are kind of leading that charge when it comes to trends, when it comes to being a marketer and surviving in the future, it's time to understand that. So because of mobility, I really think that a lot of the investment now is AI and smart machines. I don't think it's to the point where Terminator is going to come back and kill us all. I'm pretty sure that it might get there. And I'm not talking about Microsoft screw up with Tata AI, which I could probably spend 60 minutes talking about, but I'm talking about AlphaGo from Google. I'm talking about Betterment. Does anybody use Betterment in here? Every single one of you should write it down. You go through six screens on Betterment, and I get more financial benefit from Betterment than I did for two years with a financial advisor because it's automatically delivering things to me, delivering value to me in a short amount of time. Betterment's a great example of that. And then one of my favorite examples, now who's using X AI? Okay, if you want a growth hack, here's your growth hack. X A. There's only two things you should remember from this presentation. Louis CK's funny and X AI. Okay, X AI is actually a artificial intelligence bot. It's a bot that will schedule your meetings for you. That's what it does. So you go to X AI. I think they just released a monthly fee, like 39 bucks a month, I think is what it is. Now you go sign up. If somebody emails you and says, hey, Kyle, I want to have a meeting. I reply all and I put Amyx AI. Amy, could you please schedule a meeting? Amy does it to the point where it's on my calendar. And every single time somebody asks if I want to schedule a meeting or they want to schedule a meeting with me, I just copy Amy and Amy does it. And it's almost. I haven't had any issues with it. There are some times where it gets mixed up, but Xsetai is based in New York. They've had flowers delivered to the office for Amy. Amy's been asked out on dates via email. And Amy's not a real person. Amy's a robot, right? This is just the beginning of this stuff. And sometimes Amy breaks, sometimes Amy puts a meeting at 12am on a Sunday. Sometimes Amy screws up. But what the value of AI is that it's learning constantly. And then my favorite one, which I've talked about for a long time, is narrative science. Basically, what narrative science does is it takes a bunch of numbers and it turns it into content. So what narrative science did with Forbes is that they actually took a bunch of share numbers or earnings numbers and wrote Forbes columns on earnings reports from companies without human authoring or editing. This isn't meant to say that the world's gonna be destroyed and we're not gonna have jobs because robots are gonna take over. But it is meant to say that you can use some of these things to benefit you. I know HubSpot has an AI platform now. You have a ton of chatbots, whether you have Drift or Intercom, in order to sell a product on your website without a human being there, product or service. A lot of this stuff is extremely important. And a lot of the success of business has to do with our ability to understand this type of stuff. And that's why it's changing marketing. And that's why we have to understand the true fundamentals, because all these things are changing. I think a lot of times you look at things like X AI and freak out because we feel like our job is going to be misplaced or replaced. But the truth is that we don't necessarily have to survive as much as evolve. We have to evolve as professionals. We have to evolve as marketers, business owners, people who sell product and services, because that's the future. And in order to do that, I have four P's, of course, learning from the college that I barely graduated from, four P's to building sustainable growth. These are based off of a lot of conversations that we have with CEOs, with CMOs of high growth companies as well as public companies. And it's kind of melded into these four Ps in general. Four Ps are People, Persona, programs and performance. Our people. Is that do you have the right people? And I think it's easy to say, but it's really hard to do. You hire for aptitude, attitude and agility. And I don't think we spend enough time or energy a lot of times on the most valuable resource of the company. It's your people and it's your people believing in the culture of your company. I know we have a couple people from exact Target days actually in this room right now. And I would say the same thing for HubSpot. The culture of HubSpot, the culture of what we had at Exact Target even I would say Salesforce is a bigger example, sold a lot of that product because people loved their jobs. I don't think we put enough emphasis on people, people loving their jobs. A great example of that is Shopify is a great company, has a great culture and people just love selling the brand. Shopify Track Maven's another one in Washington D.C. they have great culture. I think it's important that we invest time and energy. No matter what size you are, no matter what industry you're in, in people giving a shit, because it does matter. And I think that team organizations in general from a marketing perspective has to change in order to survive. In general, I think that the way that we design marketing teams now is a little broken. And this is not what I think it should be. From a setup standpoint, every company is different, Every company's size is different. If I had a perfect world, this is what my marketing team would look like if I ran a software company. You have three sides of it. You have acquisition, conversion and brand. Acquisition is everything. Acquisition, I don't really have to explain that. Right. We want to acquire people so they buy. Conversion is product, sales, enablement, training, onboarding, converting those people that we acquired. I think a lot of times we spend time and energy thinking about acquisition and we don't think about actually selling it. And we're going to talk about this a little bit later, but if you drive a bunch of leads to the sales team or to your business and in six months half of those customers are gone. Whose fault is that? Everyone's right. Most of the time we blame it on sales, but it's maybe because the leads weren't right and the Personas were wrong. But it's important that everybody works together. I think this is the best way to do that. And then of course you have brand, which is important. Internal brand enablement, corporate comms, creative events, content. One of the most important things that we did at openview from a brand perspective, if I show you the internal workings of a VC firm is basically that everybody was saying different things, whether that was how much money we invest or what type of products we sold. Like everything was different. Everybody was saying different things. And we spent a lot of time and energy in brand enablement so that everybody was saying the same thing, right? You want marketing to kind of be an echo chamber, honestly. You want people to say the same thing constantly because then it sells the story, it sells the message. You don't have to figure out how to hack your goals every quarter because the brand is enabling that. That doesn't mean you have to try to figure out how to get more. But it's important to understand that the enablement of things internally is important. When I was at exact target, we were driving tens of thousands of leads to the sales team. It was going somewhere, right? It was just being flown off into the darkness. We couldn't figure out why it was converting at so low of a percentage. Really low. And what we found was that the sales team didn't actually understand what was in the content that was driving the leads. So we were getting all these leads from all the thought leadership, which I'll talk about later, and they were selling the products without ever talking about what the content was that the people downloaded, whether that was a state of search report or state of marketing report or a state of social report. And we did internal brand training conversion rate went up because they sold what people downloaded. But you can't expect people to read an 80 page report. They're not going to read it, right? They're not going to read your content. The sales team, I'll just say it one more time, the sales team is not going to read your content as much as we love it, right? So internal brand training was extremely important. So I think people, the way we set up our teams are important and will shape the future. The marketing team of the future, I believe, controls every aspect of the customer and prospect experience every single point. I would argue, and a lot of people will throw stuff at me that the onboarding of customers, the support of customers, should have a direct influence of marketing as well. Because it is brand. That doesn't mean it needs to be managed by the CMO or vice president of marketing, but it needs to have a dotted line to the messaging of the product or service. Because a feedback loop is extremely important as well. When it comes to developing your services or product, your customers are your best salespeople, right? You could sell it all day long, but your customer's selling the product. I mean, that's why we're all here, right? I'm a HubSpot user. Why are we all here? It's because the customers are the best salespeople for the prospects of any company, right? So we're all hanging out. HubSpot is a great product for all of you thinking about buying it, you probably should actually do it now. You can email your sales rep, they'll love it. But customers are the best salespeople and I think marketing should control a lot of that. Personas I'm not gonna get into because if you read anything from HubSpot, pretty much always talk about Personas. But the reason why I touch on it is because not a lot of people do it. Even though there's tons of content out there about it. You have to understand who you sell. You have to. And if you don't, your content that you're producing, the search, the PPC that you're doing, anything that you're trying to do from a marketing perspective is going to fall flat. I'm not going to beat this into the ground. You guys understand this. But you also can't sit in a conference room and map out George, Bill and Linda and cut out weird people images and put them on the wall. You should do research and ask your customer, do win loss reviews. Why did you lose somebody? Why did you win somebody? And build Personas around that? And then of course, this is straight from HubSpot. Semi fictional representation. A semi fictional. Not a fictional. Semi fictional representation of your ideal customer based off of research. Okay, Third one is process. How does your team operate and optimize for product pricing, promotions and channels? So the first process tip is uxperience matters. I'm probably gonna change that because it doesn't make any sense. You get it right? Your user experience matters. And I talked about a little bit before in the mobility trend, the minute details of your experience matters to everyone. And I cannot emphasize this more, honestly. I think we spend a lot of times trying to figure out how to get in leads and not the overall experience of the journey. I don't care what size company you are, everybody is going through the journey. You have to understand the experience because it matters. Get the experience right and your product will sell yourself. We talked about that betterment. Talked about it before. One of the Better examples of this, a lot of people from a Software perspective. And HubSpot. Didn't HubSpot release a free version their marketing software? This is an example and that's another example. You create a product so great and offer it for free that people will use it and then you upsell them on certain signal points. Right. HubSpot did it amazingly with Website Grader. Who's used Website Grader from HubSpot, One of the most genius lead gen tools that I've ever seen in my life. It was free. And all of the information you're putting into Website Grader, what's happening with it, it's going straight to the sales team, right? Oh, you got a D on your website. Do I have a product for you. Right. To help you. It's great betterment. You put in all of your information, it spits back for free what you should do. And then it says, well, if you want to get more information to make more money with your financial situation, sign blah blah blah, sign up. The best lead gen possible is product usage. I don't care if you're an accounting firm, an agency, a software company, the usage of the product is your best marketing. If you can figure it out, HubSpot figured out with Website Grader, there's a ton of different versions of that. You know, we at OpenView, pricing is a big issue for our Persona. Our Persona is an early stage CEO that's gonna raise a Series B. Pricing is a huge issue for software companies. So we created a pricing calculator. You put in all of your information. It's a 15 question thing and it spits out what you should do with your pricing. So what do we use that for? We use it to try to find CEOs that we might not already know about because we want them to ask us for money and then we want to give them that money. Especially if they're good companies. Right? So it's important to know that the product sells itself. Your customers will sell it for you. X AI, which I talked about before is a great example of this. If you just search X AI, they have raving fans. But they couldn't create a crappy product and then try to get con people into tweeting about it or even sharing about it. They had to build the product first and make it great and then people shared it for them because it was so good, because it was functioning so well. Now there's always the bad side of it, but they spend a lot of time and energy in the product. 73% of companies consider user experience a top priority. I want you to guess how many actually do it. Well, just guess. Top priority. One per. That's 1%. I can't remember what it was. Yeah, it's 1%. 1% actually deliver an excellent experience. And a lot of times for a lot of big brands, it's because that all the channels, whether that's mobile or social, they all live in different realms of a business. In my opinion, if you have under 500 employees, you shouldn't have a problem with your customer experience. Even a thousand. You're not big enough to have that issue because you're all there, you're all talking about the customer experience. I think we just get so bogged down on lead gen trying to figure out how to drive revenue that we don't realize that we've already sold a lot of people that could give us more revenue. Right. So we have to deliver an excellent experience even after. User Testing is an awesome portfolio company of ours. If you have not looked at user testing, you should. They also have a great tool, kind of like website grader where you can go get a free analysis of your web. I think it's free. We have a user testing person here, don't we? Is it free? What's it called? Peak. What's the URL? Peak.usertesting.com so user testing basically has millions of panels of people and they will go use your app or website for free. Well, they pay them, but you pay User Testing to do it. They will use your app or website and they will give you feedback live. User Testing takes all that information and delivers it back to you. So you know that if a color button is wrong, you don't have to do testing. You just send it to User testing and they do it for you. User Testing has great content on the UX experience in general. Discovery, research, conversion and engagement. It's important to understand. It's important to map those customer journeys in general. Process tip number two, my favorite, it's not content marketing, it's thought leadership. I have a hard time thinking of content as solely lead gen. I think great content marketing is thought leadership. I think it's top of the funnel. I think you have to create content that drives people to buy and it's really depending on your business. But our best content is survey research based when it comes even to open view as well as when I was at Exact target. I'm giving you some examples of these thought leadership. You can see the theme here. We can create surveys all we want, but it really Starts and ends with your customers really trying to understand about the customer and the experience they want and why they want it and then producing content around that. So there's four types and my opinion of great content marketing, it can come in any form that you want it to. I don't really care. But this is all qualitative and quantitative. It's really depending on how you build it out. Experiential, consumer, peer and Benchmark. Four types. Experiential, consumer, Peer and Benchmark. I'm going to give you some examples from Exact Target and kind of pepper in stuff that we're doing at OpenView. At exact target, we we mainly wanted some of the top retailers in the world. I mean we sent a lot of transactional email. We were an email service provider. We were the largest one in the world. We sent billions and billions and billions of emails. You probably still receive them. But what we wanted to do was try to figure out how do we create content that actually gets in the door of the CMO so that when these salespeople are selling, you can call it abm. This was three years ago that we're hitting different points of a system so that there's influence on the CMO so they actually know what's happening. So what we did was we had two issues. One, we didn't have content that actually meant anything, so everybody hated it. And two, we didn't have salespeople that actually cared about the content that everybody hated. So we pulled the 100 fastest growing retailers list, I think from shop.org we gave the salespeople gift cards with a survey and they went and shopped and all of these stores and tracked basically like are they asking for email point of purchase, do they have a sign for their social, like all the different touch points that they might have a customer. We did that in two areas, two retail locations each. And then my team went on each of their websites and tracked and signed up for newsletters on their website. And we tracked the customer interaction over a 90 day period of time and basically graded all these customers or prospects, delivered tailored reports to the CMOs. And when the salespeople called those CMOs they would say, hey, did you get our report card that we sent you that was actually experiential that we went and shopped. We tried to understand what you're doing and by the way, do you also want to see how your top competitor graded as well? So we were actually able to get into the door of the CMO of these large retailers because we delivered a tailored report to them that nobody else was doing. What else did we do with the content? We published what the 100 fastest growing retailers were doing. 80% of our press mentions a quarter was from content. 80%. Journalists don't care about product launches. They don't care that you hired somebody. They don't care about product launches. They care about content that they can only get that nobody else has. We were a public company and 80% of our press mentions were coming from content because we were pitching it. Okay, so one's experiential thought leadership. Second is consumer thought leadership. This one's a little bit more expensive unless you do it a little bit cheaper with your own surveys. But basically consumer thought leadership is understanding the end user of the person you're trying to sell. So for us it was a lot of consumer brands. So we went into each of our geos and surveyed thousands of consumers about how they use email, social and mobile because those are the products we sold, packaged those up as reports and used them for demand gen as well as thought leadership. At conferences like Inbound, we had our own user conference called Connections. So we were actually using our own data as thought leaders instead of analysts like Gartner and Forrester. We still use those people, but we were producing our own thought leadership. We weren't just borrowing and we were doing thousands, but you could do 150 customers and trying to understand that in general. So the second one's consumer third one's peer thought leadership. Same thing. We just interviewed marketers. Sorry, this keeps jumping ahead. Everybody wants to know what everybody else is doing. A lot of people are doing this now. Interview the people you're trying to sell and then develop trends reports around what they're going to do for next year as an example. And then the last one's benchmark, we didn't do this very well. We were actually pretty bad at it. Benchmarking from a software perspective has a lot of issues, especially if you're not housing your data correctly. But any business can do this. You have a need that you solve that you solve for your Persona. There's a reason why people buy your service and there should be data points that you can pull to help create thought leadership around how you're helping your customer. For us it was like how many people open email at 8am? What's the best open rate for retail at 10pm on a Thursday? And we were sending billions of emails. So that's something we should have done. The one thing that we didn't do correctly was that in Our customer contracts, a lot of them said we could not use their data even if it was anonymized. So that screwed us. So if you're a software company, make sure that you do not have that written in your contract because you want to be able to use anonymized data to create content, because that sells your product and it also sells the reason why people would buy your product. So that's it from the content perspective. Performance. The last one. Do you have the system in place to track and evolve? I've used this quote forever. You guys know, were you in the main room with Ryan Bonici? I'm pretty sure he made you do like squats or something. I was with Ryan. This was like four years ago when we heard this quote in Australia. It's my favorite thing on the face of the planet. We must move from numbers keeping score to numbers that drive better actions. I think we spend way too much time trying to hit the numbers constantly and not trying to figure out how to forecast what's going to happen in the future and how we can change it. We're just trying to beat numbers and we're not actually trying to understand what's happening with them. So performance tip number one, Data is life. How does this picture make you feel? Who watches hoarders? Who doesn't watch hoarders? Guys, you're so misled. Just Google hoarders. Does this make you uncomfortable? I'm sorry if some of you live like this. Actually, I'm not sorry. You shouldn't. How does this make you feel? A little bit better, right? A little bit better than the ramen all over the counter. I think data cleansing importance is extremely important. I don't think we spend enough time looking at a database, de duping the database, doing data analysis and actually trying to append data to our customer information HubSpot. You guys have multiple different tools in order to do this? I don't think we spend enough time doing it. I think we try to figure out so many times how to get more people into it. And then further down the road we try to build on a different piece of software or integrate with something and it breaks because our data is crap and we didn't build a process to begin with or half of your people are on spreadsheets. That's my only tip. Get your people off of spreadsheets. It's really hard to manage and there's so many tools out there that allow you to do it effectively. So how do you effectively efficiently manage data? Data cleansing should be a Top priority. So an example of this is that we send to about 100,000 people a week an email newsletter. And we track. We have six different newsletters that we send and we track open rates for all those newsletters. One of them's a CEO newsletter. We hadn't cleansed our data in about two years. And what we found within the CEO database is that 30% of them were not CEOs. So the open rate that we've been tracking with HubSpot over the past year, is it actually valuable to that Persona? Like, am I actually making good decisions off of that open rate? No, because 30% of that database were not the people that were in that Persona. So we were making bad decisions off of engagement metrics because we didn't understand who was actually in the database. You should have somebody focus on data management. If it's not you, get your team off spreadsheets, get your team off spreadsheets. Get your team off spreadsheets. And one system of record for the entire company, depending on your size. Good luck. It's really hard to do. We're 40 people and we're still dealing with it. We're trying to build as best integration as we can between HubSpot and Salesforce. But if you have HubSpot and HubSpot CRM, HubSpot Marketing, HubSpot CRM is really easy, but make sure that you're trying to connect as much as possible and you have one database of record so you actually understand what's happening in that database. All right, last one. Better goal tracking leads to better results. I wanted to show you what my stack looks like, quote, unquote. This probably would be different if I were in a software company, honestly in some cases, but overall it's probably what I would use. We use BetterWorks for goal tracking, which I'm gonna get into. Who uses Trello? Brilliant tool. If you don't, please use it, or please at least go look at it. It's a great project management tool. We use Slack for internal communication. Salesforce is our CRM. And then data automation. We use Google Analytics and HubSpot. I'm going to talk about BetterWorks in Trello because it's completely changed the way our team works and I wish I would have had it before BetterWorks actually, which I'm going to show you is a waterfall system for goal setting. One thing that makes. I didn't want to mention them too much. One thing that makes Salesforce so successful internally is that they have waterfall mapping of goals all the way to Marc Benioff the CEO. So me as a director of content, I could map all of my goals all the way up to the CEO and how it aligned to his five initiatives or whatever. They built that internally. But BetterWorks is an example of a software you can get to do that. You can set your goals and then all of your team produces goals that rolls up to the top one. It's really effective when it comes to management of people and what they're doing on a daily basis. And it also they just built in employee review systems so you can actually do that as well. Within the BetterWorks platform. We use it. It's a great tool. Trello I'm obsessed with. We're a Scrum shop. Everybody that joins OpenView has to go through Scrum training with Jeff Sutherland. And so Trello kind of fits with us because this is more of an agile tool, but it's a great way and it's so easy to use. And if you want a great example of create a product so good that it sells itself, Trello's an example. I have my entire team on Trello. We don't pay for it, but what is Trello doing as we use it more often? Pinging us for upgrades. And we're down to the point where we're gonna upgrade because we Jello tool but it's a great way and it's so easy to use. And if you want a great example of create a product so good that it sells itself, Trello's an example. I have my entire team on Trello. We don't pay for it, but what is Trello doing as we use it more often? Pinging us for upgrades. And we're down to the point where we're gonna upgrade because we need to integrate with some things. But they created a great product, Trellis, a great project management tool and they build integration into BetterWorks which is important. Alright, last one promise is die. Engagement metrics. Long live Union Economics. I think E commerce companies are the best at metrics. Anybody that I've ever met that runs any type of marketing at an E commerce company is obsessed with metrics and is obsessed with understanding every single point of a journey of a customer because they have to. And I think that marketing in general should function like an E commerce company. I think engagement metrics are important, but honestly I think they're secondary to unit economics. And unit economics are important for a lot of reasons. But I don't think that anybody under the C suite actually or the, the leadership team actually, and even people on the Leadership team try to truly understand unit economics of a business. I didn't only until I got to a venture capital firm where that's really all we care about is unit economics. I think that they are the primary reason you should be driving a lot of what you do because they're important to understand in general unit economics at a very high level. Direct revenues and costs associated with a particular business model expressed on a per unit basis. The best thing you could possibly do is Google unit economics. That's what I did. This is what came up. There are a ton of articles underneath it that tell you a little bit more. Some of those Unit economics, customer acquisition costs, lcv, ltv, payback, period, customer retention. There's tons of them. I think any business should truly understand the unit economics of their business. Customer acquisition cost is important. How much did it cost for you to acquire a customer? And then how much did it cost for you to be paid back on that marketing investment? It's taking it one step further than just figuring out, oh great. I changed the subject line of an email and sent it again and I got a 30% open rate. Awesome. That's great. It is great. But it's taking it one step further and actually understanding out of those 30% who converted, why they converted and tracking their conversion to the point where they are upsold or resold on your service. Because when you are upsold or resold and the customer is paying you again, that's when I think marketing succeeded, frankly, because you built an experience and a journey for a customer and they stayed. Now that pertains more to a software company because we look at churn rate as a venture capital firm. If you have high churn like it's. Especially if you're a software company, it's very bad. Right? But it's important to understand as marketers lifetime value the amount of revenue a single user generated during the entire generation of their usage. And I really think you should try to. Good luck. Try to know your unit economics better than the CEO. You should be able to be in a board meeting or be in the hallway or be talking about it at a meeting and understand what your customer acquisition cost was last quarter. Because guess what? The CEO maybe might not even know. And they should. But you're going to be a genius if you know. And guess what, your marketing is going to be way better because you'd be making decisions based off of the health of the business, not just the health of the marketing team and the channel. All right, so to wrap up people Persona programs and performance are the four P's. You could throw a couple other P's in there. But a way to think about this is that we believe providing individuals with this service will result in this outcome. We will know this when we see the measurable result. I think that with all the tools that we have today, it's really hard not to measure everything, but it's also okay not to measure everything. If you guys are familiar with Wistia, I think they have a booth here, actually. Boston based company Chris Savage, their CEO, has a blog post out on his blog this week called you don't have to measure everything. And that's because sometimes great branding and great experiences don't need to be measured because they're going to drive value anyway. And creative people sometimes don't function very well in really measurable situations. But unit economics can help solve that. So the way that you plug this in is your people should develop and redevelop your Personas and processes to improve performance. Performance processes are important, performance is important. But all these things should work together. We must move from numbers keeping score to numbers that drive better actions forecasting everything that we need to do in order for the health of the business to survive. And then you have a blank slideshow link. So thank you guys, I appreciate it. Of course, send me a tweet if you want the deck. I will send it out as well. If you have any questions, I'll be down here, but I'm going to let everybody else go because it's time to eat. So thank you guys, I appreciate it.