How the Hell Do You Get More Leads These Days? With Meagen Eisenberg, TripActions

I would be doing more of the intimate roundtables, going to events to try and meet the right people once they open up, and then making sure you're negotiating in your contracts the ability to use their logo and a case study even after you have to give it away to free to the first few. Those key customer logos and ability to reference them are going to help accelerate the next set of customers.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

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I am super excited. I've known Megan for a long time. She was an advisor in my previous company. She's been a repeat Traction speaker since the first year we've done the conference Megan CMO at Trip Action and she Trip Actions and she's one of the most sought after marketing leaders, won a number of awards. Most Influential Marketing Tech Leader Top 25 B2B Marketing Influencers Tripp Actions Megan, if I'm saying it correctly, is like a travel agency on steroids. Pretty much. How would you say that?

Yes, we are a booking tool and a travel agency and a payments platform. Expense management.

Awesome. And yeah, so once you have growing towards 100 people and more, you should use Trip Actions for all your travel needs Megan spent more than 20 years growing and scaling tech companies. Number of acquisitions. She's been a part of some IPOs like MongoDB, DocuSign. She's been a traction comp favorite since 2015. So welcome back to Traction. I'm bummed I can't welcome you in person, but hopefully next year. We've missed you. How have you been?

I'm doing all right. I'm sitting in our Palo Alto office and I think the future is looking good.

Before we dive into marketing and how to get more leads, give us your backstory because from what I understand you were a developer or technologist. How did you get into marketing?

Yeah, it's a good question. Undergrad, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. I graduated with MIS Computer science and went to Cisco Systems as an IT engineer developing on for master schedulers in manufacturing. IT decided I wanted to go back to school and get my mba. About three and a half years into that journey I noticed most of the leaders had NBAs and to the east coast, went to Yale School of Management and realized in that time that I really wanted to pivot and I had taken a lot of course work there around marketing and I thought I could come out and market tech just with my background and understanding of technology. And decided when I graduated that I did an internship at IBM and joined their marketing leadership development program. And then they acquired a small company called trigo, Byron Dieter Co. And I ended up joining that company right when it had been acquired by IBM, as in product marketing. So my first marketing job was product marketing and as things go in the valley, got pulled into several startups after that and always Byron's always been a mentor to me and helping me think through things and so that's what brought.

Me into marketing and Byron's I would say the godfather of SaaS in a way. Right. Like yes, yeah, is a great person to work alongside. There's this decade old startup marketing playbook of like founder led, tech led. What is wrong with that? What has changed over the last few years?

I definitely think a lot of things have changed. Certainly there's a ton more technology out there. If I think about marketing, we might have had one or two pieces of tech 10, 15 years ago. Now I've got over 40 pieces of technology just in the marketing stack alone. I also think that as new tech and new channels to communicate pop up, those that jump on them right away get the first mover advantage. Like I remember when Twitter you could first do promotions, nobody was doing them. We generated a ton of Leads at Docusign just by promoting over Twitter to audiences that resembled people with sales ops, folks we'd want to reach out to. But over time, those channels get crowded and people start to master them. Right. Right now, I think if you're smart, you're jumping on Clubhouse. We serendipitously started an event and we had 3,000 people join. No advertising, no just jumped on. My CEO goes on now Fridays. Elad Gill has an awesome Clubhouse event Fridays at 5. Who wants to go on and do a webinar on a Friday at 5 o'? Clock? But thousands of people are jumping on and having a discussion, talking about the future of travel, talking about future of tech. And so I think over the last decade, what's changing is the technology. We have access to the channels. Do they get saturated or not? How do marketers jump on those and how are they creative with them? Because at the end of the day, there's Personas we're trying to reach and there's a thousand companies trying to reach them. You've got to be the best at getting through the noise. And so I think if you learn what's out there and where that Persona is going for information, whether it's podcasts, webinars, events, and then be the one that's the most creative to get their attention.

Definitely. And Clubhouse is a good example. I thought of piping this one to Clubhouse because effectively you could switch off your audio here, like your mic on the laptop, and pipe it to your phone. I've done that with Founder Institute. I'll probably do that in the next couple of weeks to expand the reach. Because now traction, I think when you started, we barely had any subscribers in one conference. Probably a thousand subscribers. Today we're at like 95,000 subscribers. So I think we could get a good audience going and something organic. So that's good advice. Actually, I'm going to look into it, or rather have somebody look into it.

Yeah, Shaka on our team. He heads up Dei. He has over 4 million followers already on Clubhouse. There's an audience there and it's global, it's all over the world, so it's great.

But he's a mini celebrity, right? He's a celebrity.

Effective, but still, you join a new channel, it's impressive.

Definitely. Do you think Clubhouse is going to be like the future of radio? Because back in the day there was Meerkat and everyone had all this buzz on meerkat and meerkat shut down. Is Clubhouse going to be the new meerkat, or is Clubhouse Going to replace radio. What do you think?

No, I, obviously I don't know. What I can tell you is my friend's kids are on it. There's 15 year olds, 18 year olds, 20 year olds, 30 year olds. My dad joined it, he's 75, so it definitely spans generations. I think it's easy to access there. There was a paper that went out yesterday on it showing the, the clip at which they're gaining people joining. I don't know, it could be we're all stuck at home and we're bored so we're jumping on it and that may go away when we get back out in the world, I don't know. But I think marketers are starting to get on there and figure it out and people who are wanting to get content out there and connecting. So let's see.

Yeah, what I like about them is specifically their onboarding as a self serve product. I didn't want to join for months and then I finally somebody invited me to give a talk that was piped to clubhouse and I joined. And as soon as I joined, without even thinking, I was put in this room with a few friends who don't even know each other. One person's in like Saudi Arabia and one person is in like San Mateo and they're like saying, hey Lloyd, you just got released from the hospital, hope you're doing well. All this stuff right. And it was amazing. I was shocked. And then quickly it turned into a conversation and that's like a perfect example of onboarding. Get users to an aha moment and it really had me hooked. So. So I'm with you. I think it's gonna, I feel it's gonna replace radio. Let's see where, let's see where it goes. But let's get started here. You're a new startup founder. You advise a lot of young founders as well as established companies. Where do you start? What should your marketing mix look like? How do you set up the right way?

Yeah, so there's a balance. A lot of times when I first meet with founders, I try to figure out what their largest challenge is. Is it awareness? They're just so early. Is it customer proof points? They're early customers. Are they willing to be a social case study on their website? Is it leads for sales? There's several things you go through when you're thinking about what they need to address. I would say the earlier you are. A lot of it is product marketing. It's understanding the buyer, why they buy your messaging, how you fit in the industry. What are your competitive differentiators? Getting yourself to product market fit, making sure you have a website that resonates and you have the right material for your early sales team and partnering with whoever, closing those first 10, 20, 100 deals. So I tend to think you need to hire someone in product marketing first. But then as you get product market fit and you start to scale, you're starting to bring in someone more on the demand gen side. And throughout this period, you're building your brand out and you're, you're evolving and there's a lot of importance that needs to be focused on your website because that's how people are going to find out about you, interact with you, get social proof, do you look credible, large enough for them to give you their business. To all of that, what does your.

Marketing mix look like in 2021? So you, how early were you at trip actions, for example, at what point did you join? How was, what did the marketing team look like there?

Yeah, I joined in early February 2019 and there were 10 people on the marketing team. When I look back then, we were very heavy, I think consumer marketers. We didn't really have a B2B product marketer on the team. We had a comms person, we had events and field marketers and a couple operations marketing ops people. I think when you're looking at it, you want to balance building awareness so your wide net, make sure people find out about you and there's a bunch of things in that mix. And then you want to capture as they come to you, how do you capture them and generate the right pipeline for sales? And I always think about a funnel. At the beginning of the funnel, what are you doing to get the awareness? What are you doing with the media? Certainly if you're fundraising or if you have interesting data or early customers that are willing to talk about what problem they're solving with you, have you tapped into the influencers, analysts, relations, who has access to people you want to buy and are you educating them about your product? So you start to become part of the awareness and your website's a big deal. As you get people flowing into your website, you're starting to think about, okay, I've got a few people, I've captured them, they've signed up for a demo, they're coming to a webinar, what do I do to get them through? And so there is a mix of things like webinars, maybe direct mails, content. You get to be very content heavy to answer their questions. And then as they become customers, you need to turn them and amplify their story, whether it's case studies, videos, their logo on your website and then it's certainly taking care of your customers. I think coming as we all know, things changed as we pre Covid. When I think about brand awareness, pipeline acceleration, events, dinners, trade shows, that was 40% of a lot of marketers budget that just went away because it wasn't possible. That had to be shifted to drive more awareness. And so we shifted online. We did a lot of video and ads. We went heavy with terminus more account based marketing, making our customers heroes. We did some brand work, we built a lot of content out. We wanted to become a trusted resource. So people were searching for information about COVID about travel, about restrictions, requirements, what did the world look like, how are we setting up our offices? What do I do with all these unused tickets? So we were creating the information content, people were searching for our buyers to help solve those problems. We built out a community so people could come and ask those questions. And if you're thinking about marketing, what am I doing around brand awareness content draw them in. We call it a digital watering hole. If you create the right content, people come to your watering hole to drink. And then you got to balance that with a targeted ABM approach. So if you can't do leadership roundtables and direct mails to offices, how do you evolve that? You do webinars, you do office hours on webinars. We went really heavy on CFO office hours and that took off for us. All about answering questions with their peers, less about us, just we were creating the environment and we worked with companies like Sendoso to shift direct mail. It was more of an opt in so we could do surprise and delight and send it to people keeping their information private through the system but getting them the information they needed. We did more personalized ads and Persona messaging. So I think moving forward there's you're still going to have you want to become a trusted resource. So podcasts, workshops, resource centers. We also launched an Academy. We did two courses starting in April. We created two courses a week. We have 25 courses, over 15,000 attendees in our academy. That was big. And it wasn't just customers we started. We have 4,000 customers but we started to see prospects coming in, people wanting to get better at their role as a travel manager, learning best practices, policy, management, post Covid world. How do you kick off travel? Those sort of things all come into the mix as you look at next year.

And let's say you're a startup and you need to focus and you only have $10,000. Where do you start?

You know, I think that one, you're, you become content heavy. So you're writing content that's relevant. You're figuring out who the influencers are and what do you have that's interesting to media? I would be. It doesn't cost money to get a story in the media. You don't pay them to do that. But you have to have something interesting to say. So what have you uncovered in your data? What are, what problem are you solving? What do the writers care about? And can you get in front of the right writers and leaders to get the story out there? Or is there an expert in sales ops that you show them the product and they're willing to do a webinar with you and then you talk through the webinar and that bring, they influence the, their, the target audience because people go and watch their influencers or you get, they tweet something out or you're, you can brief analysts. Gartner, Forrester, G2, all of those don't cost money to have your content put out there. They want to learn about the technology and what you're doing. Take the time to brief them. So if someone comes to them with a problem that you solve, now you're top of mind, maybe even advertise. Maybe you should be doing nurture programs to analysts and account based marketing to analysts so they start to see your product everywhere.

Definitely. For those who don't know about account based marketing, can you give us an overview of how you use account based marketing and what are some of the things you do?

Yeah, we align with sales. Our sales team has their top 100 accounts. What are those accounts? And then we work with one. You're understanding the landscape. Everyone you're trying to target, you're doing nurture programs to those accounts. But we, with Terminus, we'll run ads specific. So if we're targeting bank of America, we have very specific ads to that audience. And where bank of America finance folks are going to look, those ads will run on those content networks and display those ads and people will start to become aware of us. They'll click on the ad and wherever you're directing it, whether it's a demo or a webinar or whatever you're promoting. And so the idea being don't just spend a bunch of money on paid search and ads anywhere. You only want to put it in front of the domains and the companies that you're trying to sell to and that your sales team's focused on. So it's a very, it's a great way to be efficient with your budget and very targeted. And it only works if you align marketing and sales. You wouldn't want to go spend all that money and then sales isn't following up on the target. And you can do that with direct mail as well where you're. You're sending a direct mail to those accounts, you're curating landing pages for them and specific content to that account.

Do you also use it for sending email? Because like typically salespeople will send emails, make calls. Is it like all encompassing or where does it stop? And your outreach IO?

I think it's definitely expanding. They integrate into Salesforce, they have chat. So we're going to start using them for chat because you have a sense of who's there, who's in market and setting up the chats. With Terminus, from a email standpoint, we've been working with outreach to send out messages for our SDRs and sales reps. So we have outreach going on and then we really understand the conversations better with Chorus AI. And so those are the type of products we're integrating with from that's on the sales side. From a marketing standpoint, we've got Marketo where we've set up nurture programs for the different Personas and then for our travelers, we separate our customers and travelers and we use Eloqua for personalized messaging because we also have personal travel. Anyone who's a customer with their business of trip actions can their employees can use it for personal travel and it's free and they get access to all the content as well as our travel agents for free. So on the road they have support, anything that they need.

And then why did you pick Marketo over a sea of other tools that you could use? Because the marketing automation space is getting heating up with HubSpot as a big giant there too. Right?

Yeah. I've always been a fan of Eloqua, but when I joined Trip Actions, we were on Marketo and the team. I felt like it was scaling with us. It hit the needs that we wanted when we decided to create a database and communications for our travelers. I didn't want it to be the same that that would sink into Salesforce because you don't want your sales team calling on your travelers. They should be talking to the buyer, which is finance, procurement and a travel manager. So I separated those databases out to make sure communications didn't sink on either direction. And I had someone very comfortable with Eloqua is Very flexible. And we also have the volume of our travelers is so much higher than an individual company. If you imagine we have 4,000 companies, we have millions of travelers.

What's the earliest you've advised a startup?

Two people is the smallest size I've done. I actually for me I think it's better if they have someone that's owning marketing because you can come up with a lot of ideas but someone in the company needs to go execute it. So it doesn't make a lot of sense unless the founder wants to do all those things, which some do. But I think it's better to have someone who I can help, I can talk through the right ideal profile to hire and stuff. But ultimately you need someone that owns it. There's just a ton of things that have to happen in marketing all the time. It can't be a part time job of a founder.

Definitely, definitely. I think we stretched it too far at post, but definitely makes sense. And then we talked about a little bit about field marketing because pre Covid everyone was all up in field marketing. You're going to every conference, you're going to every event. I think I heard some of this in the beginning, like it shifted. You're doing more webinars, you're doing more clubhouses. But what should marketers do? Where are you seeing the most success? What are some innovative things companies are doing in field marketing? Like trip actions?

Yeah. So we've certainly done some zoom activities, Charcuterie boards, Hamilton Singers, made it very fun and creative. But I think we're going to burn out on it. It's not a long term strategy. I think it's what we have to do right now. I fully believe by summer we're back in intimate settings. Field marketing will move back out there. And I already see it. We've got our conference. GBTA is a big conference for us is at the end of July in Orlando. We're going. We have our user conference for Trip actions at the end of September at the palace of Fine Arts. We're there. Web Summit Lisbon just reached out. They're doing it in the first week of November. We will be in Lisbon at Web Summit. So all these marketers that had venues and deposits that are being held up were all pushed out to this year. You're going to see a bunch of those unleash summer, fall. I bet fall is going to be so busy and the appetite is going to be high because if you want a vaccine, you're going to have had one. You're going to be ready to get out of here. I have three kids. Our kids are going to be back in school and we're going to. I have no doubt we're back on the road. So I have actually allocated and saved 40% of my budget for summer and beyond to focus on events. And I'm starting to ramp up my field marketing team. So any good field marketers out there, send me a note. We're ramping up, definitely.

And that's very interesting because a lot of folks are just saying, let's wait and watch, let's wait and watch. And I think the way to get ahead of the tide is to just spot the trend and just prepare for it to advantage.

I'm fine, actually. I'd prefer others to not do their event because then I'll get more of the people that come to mind. So if you overlap my Personas, sit on the sideline and watch, I'm okay with that.

That's amazing. That's awesome. So from a PR perspective, you talked a little about brand building, pr, that sort of thing. Let's double click on that. When is the best time for a startup to get press? And like, how do you build relationships with journalists? I guess tips for staying in the new cycle.

Yes. Yeah. So I mean, fundraising certainly is when people will get press and that I find is more for hiring. It validates the company. It's a good excitement and you should do. There's not many reasons you should do press, but fundraising and big hires I think actually help you for more hiring and validation with the company. So if you hire a CMO or CFO or whatever, as you get bigger, you're bringing in C level execs or someone in the industry. You would want to put that out there. I think if you land an amazing customer, you should you and they're willing to tell a story to a journalist. You should give an exclusive to a journalist. What I've been really impressed with recently with our company is we brought an expert in on PR and she's really good on the data and she's been diving in, working with the data team. She's spotted all these trends and recovery. She's been, she's on with Cheddar, she's on with Reuters, Wall Street Journal. They all want to know that we have something that people are curious about. The economy, ties to travel. We have a ton of travel data. We're seeing great momentum there. We can see regional data, we can see hotels have gone up, flights came down. Now flights are starting to go up because people are flying Certain countries are opening up. We see busy Asia, we see domestic. It's just really amazing the amount of data and I have to believe almost every startup has some type of data. If you're in tech that can you. Are you looking at that to tell a story that someone cares about and people love stats data. Otherwise go get the data, do a survey, work with survey monkey, go ask the questions. That will be interesting. Pull the insights from. Oh shoot, I'm blanking on. Anyway, Nicola Draca did this for one of. He was at a developer company. A hack. Yeah, tech developer company for hiring and he ran a really big survey to their base and got back all this fresh data and then started to publish the snippets, started to get pressed to pick up on it. Very small company. He had two people in marketing. It wasn't large at the time, but he was smart. He's listen, I've got access to developers that are on here for free that I can tap into and ask them questions and then look at the interesting information that's in there and get it, get it out there, talk with analysts on it. So figure out what that is that you have that you could go pull or can you partner with someone in the industry. Maybe you're the smaller logo and you associate to a larger brand logo but you run the survey and you're willing to do the legwork if they're willing to put their brand on it, whatever that is to get enough people to respond to get some interesting insights.

Brand rub always works and keep leveling that up. A few questions here on splitting your budget in the post Covid world. Like how would you split your budget if you're early on? Let's say you're a seed company, you're like on the cusp of product market fit or you have it. Where do you see B2B companies splitting budget?

I mean honestly, it's hard to give a blanket answer on it. I think it depends on what your challenge is. If nobody's heard about you, you got to figure out how to get out there. And I would put my budget towards people out there or very focused on my sales team. What do they need to get those first 10 accounts and just work with them to get in front of network in warm introductions. That's where I wouldn't even spend money. It was like how do I get, how do I work with my board and my investors to introduce us to target companies, to have conversations. So it's in the beginning you wouldn't do mass paid search or anything. Like that you would focus on those relationship sales and hire the people that can get that. Once you get 100 customers then maybe you transition over to more mass scale programs. But I would be doing more of the intimate roundtables, going to events to try and meet the right people once they open up and just getting those customers and then making sure you're negotiating in your contracts the ability to use their logo and a case study even after you have to give it away to free to the first few. Those key customer logos and ability to reference them are going to help accelerate the next set of customers.

Definitely. Oftentimes when tech founders are at the helm here, they don't understand the convolute everything I'm included in here as an engineer turned founder. How do you balance this sort of brand, perform brand and then performance investments? When it's like really hard to measure the ROI of brand immediately, I think.

It'S hard to create brand in the beginning. I think your brand is you, your company and your customers and how you what your values are as a customer. Are you folk, are you focused on the user and the experience are what is it that you are putting out there as a company becomes your brand as customers? Come on once you are larger trip actions. When I joined just shy of 400, we could run something on Sprinklr or Talk Walker and figure out our share of voice against our competitors and understand where we're at on that. But I would focus on those first few customers and they're getting them out there and you start to establish your brand as you build customers. Your website has a lot to do with it. Sure, you could work with the agency. You need your website to look professional because companies come there and want to know do I trust this company with my information and are they going to be around in a year, are they secure all those things? Your website has to be professional. So I do think it's a worthwhile investment to make sure you've developed or you're working with an agency, a functioning website that has the normal best practices going on in the beginning. People forget to put contact us on there. I'm always surprised. That's the one thing. If company wants to buy you or work with you, they need to be able to get ahold of you. So making sure you have a contact us on there, making sure you have a form they can fill out or a phone number chat, I think is a big deal. If they're on your website and they're curious, answer the questions, then why pay all this Money to get to capture the information and not chat with them. And then now you've got to spend a few days trying to call them up or email them to get them to respond again when you could have just been talking with them while they were on your site. And tools like Chili Piper. Brilliant. I'm on your site, I want a demo, and it hooks into your calendar, and it automatically puts the demo on the calendar that the person has time for. Once again, why waste time trying to get them back on the phone to take a demo with you? There's technologies that will do that in the moment when the person is interested.

Definitely. I think that's a brilliant one. Get people interested in the moment in your chatbot or on your website, on the page that they're there. Something. But you mentioned a lot of tools here. Right? How do you. You guys have the superpower here, like funding, resources and whatnot. But how do you stitch all this together? Because data silos is a real thing. I'm suffering through it right now, and I'm saying, like, okay, let's just migrate everything to HubSpot, and then we'll hire a marketing leader and they'll deal with it.

Yeah. You know, every time I've joined a company, one of the things I've done is understand the tech landscape, where the data is and how leads flow to sales. And that uncovers a lot of things. Web to lead, does it go into marketo to Salesforce? What happens? What are the rules of engagement? Does it go to an sdr? Is it a shark tank? Is it a handoff? How do you measure conversion rates? How do the leads that you put in actually come out? You'll find all these broken processes in between. And so I find it very important to map out the technology, the lead flow. And if you don't have any of that, then to put the technology in when you're ready for it, and then understand the handoff from marketing to sales, because that's where a lot of your upsides at. And if you don't have that going the right way, you're just wasting money because leads are coming in and not getting to the right folks or not followed up in time. And we know the thing that kills a lead faster than anything is time. You follow up in five minutes, your conversion rates are 20, 30%. And then after that, every 15 minutes, it drops significantly. And so speed to respond matters a ton. So how's the flow to someone responding right away, whether it's chat or booking a meeting with you right away? All of those things matter. And then if I can't get the data then I know I need the tools to get the data. So I couldn't figure out what are conversion rates, what the handoff was, what is attribution, what if my spend is working or not. I had to set up the campaigns module, then I had to decide the types of campaigns, what was first touch, what was influence. We put in technology like full circle CRM and we lean data cleaning up your data. You got to put the tools in that you can actually see the data to make better decisions. And I was getting systems in place. We were also rebuilding the website and we did a whole new look and feel of the website in about five weeks. We did new ia, we recoded it all, new lines of code. I hired a web developer, front end, back end, full stack ux because we knew that website mattered a ton for our lead flow for sales. But you can't do that the first week. Like you have to map out what are all my pains. I got a thousand fires everywhere, what's the highest priority? And then kick off the long term projects while working on the short term and then hiring the team. I hired about 20 people in six weeks. So I had 24 open headcount when I started, but only a team of 10. And so I was hiring leaders and people on their team at the same time because we were just so far behind. We had grown that year prior, 700%. At the end of this year we grew 500%. Now at the end of this we still grew, but only 75%. So through Covid we added 700 customers, but we were adding thousands of customers pre Covid. So you have to think about, we were scaling very fast. Now we're starting to come back out of this Covid and bookings starting to come up. People are actually searching for business travel again. I just went through nine, ten months where nobody was. My inbound just went away. Nobody was looking for a travel solution because people weren't traveling. Now as we see the vaccine rolling out, all these people are inbound, my demos are up, engagements up, my site is taking off. But because it wasn't this last year, I had to do a lot more fishing, I had to go find people, I had to do more selling motion where I went out and did account based marketing and did office hours and hand curated zoom events and I had to create a bunch of content. And so it was very much a different marketing motion this past year because it was tough. People weren't, I had to create a sense of urgency. Why do you want to do business travel now? Nobody's traveling. It's the best time to re platform. Why wait until travel takes off? You're going to have new policy, new duty of care, security needs. Like now's the time to get that in place. So as you start to ramp up, you've got the best technology. But we had to go through that change and do it very quickly or die. And the team, I'm very impressed by the team, how hard they worked this past year to learn that and get through it. Now we're great at all the stuff. When you don't have inbound now think about when we marry an inbound. We're much better at the outbound stuff like all coming together. I think it will be a good year.

Stress is the precondition for growth when you get to figure out how to do more with less and squeeze more from the lemon as much as possible. There's a couple of questions here. When you're earlier, probably like seed series A or just starting out with marketing, what is the most important piece of software for marketing to have?

Probably Salesforce, but I know that's a sales software. I would, you know, I would say your website. Whatever it takes to modernize your website and make sure it's linking to sales. And then the next one I would say would be a Marketo or a HubSpot. You need a database, you need an email, you need to be able to email people, you need to be able to communicate. So I think you're getting a. Once you have a website that's capturing people now how do you interact with them? I would say probably email is your next space.

Definitely. I think email is still the biggest convert converter to sales.

I believe it. When people say it's dead, I'm like, no, I still have to read my email every day. And that's how I figure stuff out. So I don't think it's dead.

Email has been dying for 10 years. But I'll tell you one little not so secret secret is we do two webinars a week. We're jammed our lineup from last April. So what happened was we were also helping out on Saster and Jason Lemkin told me last February that Saster is not happening. We're taking everything online, big virtual summits and I'm like, I don't have the wherewithal to do like a 40,000 person online summit. So let's reach out to all the speakers and they say if they'll do like webinars and we've been doing two webinars a week. And when you do two webinars a week, you have no chance of promoting it. Right. Like you have one promo.

Yeah, you're right. Because otherwise you're just annoying emailing people.

Yeah. So we do one, we do a promo two days before the webinar and we still get 500 people register and 30% or so show up. And that's been phenomenal. It also keeps the audience engaged. So you're like basically conveying new things in email. And it's almost like when you send a dedicated email, more people show up versus like an email newsletter because the things post, the second scroll, people don't click. And all these other channels like Twitter, meetup.com, all these other channels, they don't really. It's like very incremental little. Right. Generation. So email has been dying for the last 10 years. I don't see it dying. Let's talk a little bit about Demand gen at your DocuSign and MongoDB days. How early were you at both of those companies?

So at DocuSign about 150 people. When I joined as a VP of Demand gen and I had one person reporting to me and then there was maybe seven other people, six other people on marketing and then Mongo it was 390 some people sub 400 but I had 24 people in marketing. So pretty sizable marketing organization. When I joined MongoDB compared to trip actions where we were 10 at the same size.

Interesting. So I want to dive into DocuSign because that's most interesting. You went in as the first demand gen leader and then you had one person. What did the first 180 days look like when you took over demand?

Yeah, very similar to what I talked about in a lot of just interviewing and assessing. So one assessing the systems. What data could I access? What was working? Interviewing all the sales leaders and the sales reps. What are you getting? What's not working? Talking with marketing, really evaluating our website. What were the things we could do to improve there and then prioritizing what we're going to go tackle and hiring. I feel like when you come in, you've got to go figure out your problems, figure out your systems and process and then hire and then you've got to deliver results right away to get credibility. So you got to have some short wins along with the long wins to show results and then you'll get more money and you'll get more headcount when you show results and you're partnering well with everyone. So the 180 days was assessing, learning, prioritizing and then fixing the issues.

Definitely. And how did that evolve over time? Once you're past that stage, then was it just scaling? You had something that was working. What was the one or two demand gen channels that you figured out after 8, 180 days, web was huge.

We did a lot of partnership stuff with Salesforce, became a good partner to drive leads and their marketplace. So a lot of different marketplaces that we are Microsoft box throughout all the different marketplaces. We did a lot of paid search, a lot of promotions. We had a SMB commercial mid market team. Then we brought in enterprise. So we started to go up market and a lot more of the account based marketing started to happen on the enterprise side. But I felt we had a ton of traffic and we had a lot of freemium users, people who had signed something. So trying to figure out how do you, okay, you use this for personal, how do we show you the relevancy on your business life? The other thing is everyone could use Docusign that was 18 and older and had access to digital or online. So we started out heavy in sales ops and sales contracts. But procurement did a lot of contracting. Marketers did events and contracting. HR did onboarding and NDAs and offer letters. Finance had contracts. Like every division, every company, every person has contracts. So in marketing, we created a lot of personalized content for those Personas and we started to create nurture programs and we started to curate content for those Personas but we couldn't do them all at once. So first quarter might have been sales ops and we continued that second quarter we focused on, you know, procurement. Then we did hr. Then we started to go into industries. So we had a lot of credit unions that were working with us, real estate. All of a sudden we had a focus of tech. So accumulate a bunch of deals, get momentum, do a press release around momentum in tech, do a case study with the tech company, create a nurture program for anyone that comes in with tech. And now do that for retail the next quarter, do that for government. Now personalize your website when you know they're from a certain domain of a certain industry. Now your website, your email program, your customer, case studies are all aligned around it. You become very targeted to who that person is. And if you enter a company or if you get an email and it's to me, a CMO in tech, I'm going to probably read it versus if you send me something about retail, that should go to finance. Like I'm not interested, I'm just going to delete or mark you as spam. So we got very good at targeting the audience with the right offer examples.

Of short term wins. You were able to demonstrate when you're.

Just starting out creating a nurture program, that first eight week long program where we took all our sales ops and dropped it in and started to communicate better when you filled out a form, hey, thanks for signing up for our demo. Here's a case study on how to use it. Hey, a question we often get. Is this legal? Here's the legalization of E Signature. Hey, is this secure? And so dripping them content to educate them along the journey. That was a first win. We rewrote the website that was a little bit longer but that was a six month win and came out with a whole new look and feel and just leads delivering leads that people want to talk to. Like seeing that month over month climb of quality leads while tightening the threshold being able to show them that yep, we're bringing people that want to buy E Signature solutions to you Definitely question.

Here on actually sometimes what you don't do is more important than what you do. Right? There's this question around what's the most common mistake you've seen startups make? And I want to take it back to the speakeasy days and dive into it. So you probably know he then Shah, right? He was an advisor as well and he came in and he said show me your marketing plan. And I showed him this marketing plan with everything and we didn't even have product market fit and I was doing product and marketing and sales and everything and he went like red in the face and he stopped, just burned down your slides. This is the marketing shit list. You have everything on the planet on this slide and you haven't hit focus. So what is the most common mistake you've seen marketers make?

I think it's more common that there's an unrealistic expectation on what one marketer can do in the beginning. And so I think it's important to focus on on are you creating content and enabling your sellers with that first deck, that pitch the competitive differentiation, how you go to market. Are they focused on making sure your website homepage captures the most people? Are they creating email communications like I would say help them if you're a founder, focus and don't expect that they're going to run social, run brand, do product marketing, get leads, write a deck, get you a media PR story. Like those are all different Skill sets too. Yeah, nobody has all those skill sets. It's very hard for me to take a communications PR person and make them a demand gen person or a product marketer and make them demand gen. They're so different. Or design like a designer. It's hard to be a designer, right? It's hard to be a web developer if you're an events person. Like and so marketing takes, I think one of the things people don't realize is as a head of marketing, you've got to bring all these different skill sets together to launch a product, to go to market and nothing goes out the door. If it doesn't look good, you need a designer, but if it doesn't sound good because your product marketing messaging is off, you need a product marketer, but if you put it on the wrong channel where nobody heard it or saw it, you needed the right demand gen person. And so I think the mistake is to think you're going to get all of that with one. So I would try to bring in a product marketer and a demand gen person second and use agencies to do your website, to do your design, maybe to do your channel, an agency to run your display ads, an agency to run social media even. There's even agencies that will help you write the emails and get the emails out there. Like you just have to. And you can use a PR person to help you an agency. So you may have to go heavy on agencies but don't expect the first marketer. And there's some really amazing first marketers out there, but it can be exhausting.

And this is the biggest problem I see actually founders make through like probably seed and even into series A is tech founders. They have a lopsided view of what marketing is and they expect them to do all these things. And it's almost like it's also, it spans across departments. Right. There's this whole notion of full stack developer. What that means is you do front end, you do back end. Yes, you do DevOps and they don't.

Android, iOS, all of that. Right. Mobile, nobody.

You can't be good at everything. And I think the most important thing founders should do is ask what is your superpower? And I like this concept of it's diving right into building your team. What are the key roles and skills you need when you're just starting out? Like how do you build a team? And you answered it perfectly in that get a product marketer. So essentially I hear messaging and crafting the message that's going out there and then get a demand Gen person, somebody who figures out the channel and marry them together. So somebody's producing all the content. Or rather I shouldn't say this but maybe polishing your turd, a very popular messaging expert talked about that is like, like marketing is polishing a turd. Good positioning is like turning that turd into a fertilizer.

I love it.

So yeah, so that's a good one. So you said hire a person on the product marketing side or like basically content messaging and product marketing could do mean a hundred things here but I want to dive into what exactly do you mean when you say like product marketing?

Yeah. So one, they're usually the leader on launching a product or feature and what does that mean? They are. What's the messaging, the positioning? How do you enable the sales team on it? Is there pricing involved? What's the competitive intelligence around it? All of that. So that's one portion of product marketing. They're also tied very closely to product and roadmap and seeing what's coming and what's that story you're going to tell. They also enable the marketing team, whether it's content for the website, for the email, they're creating the core content and then the rest of the marketing team will take that over the different channels and people don't realize all the different roles they're playing. If you have a CSM team as you get larger they're creating content for let's say you land with travel but you upsell expense management which is what we do. Well now you need to enable your account managers or your CSMs, your customer success managers to cross sell upsell into your customer base and there's a bunch of deck work and content that's needed for that and usually selling depending on the size of the deal, there's the first deck, then there's the second deck and then it's capturing the customer stories. So there's a ton of work for product marketing focuses on product, they focus on sales and they focus on marketing.

What is the skill sets and attributes that the VP marketing must have to be successful in a series B B2B SaaS startup. This is like a sort of very specific question but you've been there, right?

Yeah. Hiring, you're about to hire a ton of people. They need to have a network, they need to know how to hire, they need to know how to inspire, they need to know your story. Can they pitch your story? So I would, you know, they could either be demand gen or they could be product marketers, either one. But they need to be able to hire whatever they're not.

And I hear that more and more from leaders. Like building a company is not about hiring. It's not about doing the nitty gritty and delivering, but it's like building and motivating a team to deliver. And that is the key thing. The building and motivating is a sort of leading indicator here how much of what you do is. You would say that like leadership and project management versus like the nitty gritty.

I feel like you're always hiring. No matter what you're hiring, you're building, you've hit a new stage. You need to bring in someone who's ready to take. That brings in fresh ideas and energy. And so I think hiring, you're always doing. I think player coach matters a ton. Part of being a great leader is understanding the role of the people you're leading. And so if you've done it or you're there with them, the other thing is it's not always going to be perfect. Sometimes I need to deep dive into events or sometimes I need to deep dive into product marketing. So depending on if I'm not, I don't see success in that area, I need to start doing it myself. If I'm not getting the results I want, I'm going to go do it and get in there and micromanage and figure it out. And then once we figured it out, I'm going to, okay, you're good now you're empowered. Run. I'm going to go focus on this problem. It's like a CEO, they dive into the problem areas. Is it sales, is it product, is it engineering, is it marketing? They're going to deep dive where they're not seeing the results. Figure it out. Hire someone to replace or bring in someone new or whatever. Once that area is going, they move on to the next problem. And marketing, because you have all these different functions, you're always going to have different problems. You're also living and breathing with your sales organization. So if your sales organization has a weakness, whether it's in a SDR or a certain function, marketing is going to try and shore that up. We got to deliver more in this area. We've got to create more content for enterprise or more content for the SDR team or we've got to. There's this problem happening on rules of engagement. You're going to dive in and out where those problems are. Because every when you have people, organizations, as you bring in new people, they bring in new problems. And so you're just, I Think a leader is moving around, finding the problems as fast as they can and fixing them. And you're either doing it yourself, hiring someone to do it, or you're teaching the team to do it.

You talked about all these things as you scale, right? You start with one, you do the most important thing and then you add all these people and now it's like massive teams here. You as a leader now at a company that's pre IPO here, how do you coordinate all those marketing teams and units efficiently?

Yeah, just like a company that has your. You need company goals. What's the company focused on? What's the strategy? What are the top three to five things? How does marketing align to those goals? Then we've got our own set of goals to deliver on the company goals. And then each of my leads has their own objectives on what they need to do in their role to hit those objectives. And I think being aligned on what our goals are and what we're focused on, what our priorities are. And constant communication. And we have a weekly marketing all hands and I have a weekly marketing leadership meeting and then I have one on ones with my leaders where we're prioritizing and focusing on what we need to do and we're all going to make better decisions if we have all the same information. Decisions become logical when often when people disagree, it's because they have different data, different background, different decisions so things that they've experienced. So when you're trying to make a decision, making sure everyone has the same information, you'll tend to get to the right a closer idea with that. So making sure everyone has context on why we made a change or why we're focused on what we're focused on.

As you look back on your career and everything you've done, what do you did, what do you wish you did more of and what do you wish you did less of?

I'm always trying to learn, so sometimes I feel like I could read more, I could learn more, network more. Right now I feel like I'm still sucking at networking. I used to go to lunch with people, I used to go to dinners, I'd see people at events. I was learning. What are you doing in your business? I still do some of it. It's on zoom, it's on the call. But I miss networking because that's where a lot of ideas come from. That's where you go, oh, wow, they're doing that over. I just talked to the CMO and this is what they're doing and we should try that. Those ideas are gold. They help me, they keep me fresh. As far as less of less zoom. I do not want to do zoom anymore. I'm like, I'm on these all day long. I want to meet people in person. I'm ready to get back to that. I can't wait for six months from now when that's possible.

And recommended reading. There's a lot of books, there's a lot of things, but you're at the top of the game. What do you recommend people read?

Yeah. So we as a leadership team read no rules. It's the Netflix one on culture. I think that was very thought provoking and really one thing I got out of that was just really interesting around feedback. And we all know the importance of feedback to getting better. But sometimes it can feel difficult to give tough feedback. But I loved how they related it to a sports team and that when I played soccer, I don't know, 18, 19 years, you always want to get better at your position. And the only way you can get better is if you practice, you have coaching and you are learning. Right. And so that's the same with your team. You need to coach them, give them feedback and they're learning so they could be the best at their position. And I just felt that was a really interesting way to position feedback and to be able to take feedback better. And then of course, when I first started here, I read the hard thing about hard things. Ben Horowitz is on our board. Just a really great book about grit that I think prepared me to go into Covid like a wartime when you're in business travel. So I think that was a great one. I've been reading 48 laws of power. That's a crazy book. Fun, historical. The ways human beings think about power. And then I've been reading travel books because I am going to go to Italy in August and I'm planning to.

Spend August in Portugal. I love Portugal. Awesome. This has been a great pleasure, Megan. I always learned something from you every time we chat. Thanks everyone for joining us. I need some traction.

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