The Marketing Playbook for Multi Billion Dollar IPOs with Vidya Peters, Marqeta

Then in Path Factory, I can give you your own track of the top six pieces of content that I think are right for you to read. And the most beautiful part is you can just flip between different content. You can read it. It's almost like binge reading, so it encourages you to consume. It removes that whole onerous experience of going back and reading through hundreds.

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

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction Podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more, this episode is brought to you by Boast AI. Each year the US And Canadian governments give out billions of dollars in R and D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses like yours. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to frustrating audits, and receiving the money can take up to 16 months. Boast AI gets you access to research and development, tax credits and innovation funding opportunities without the headache and red tape. Join thousands of North American companies leveraging Boast AI software to maximize cashback. Check out B oast AI. This episode is also brought to you by Launch Academy, an international tech hub that provides mentorship, resources, network and the environment for entrepreneurs to launch, fund and grow their startups. Since 2012, Launch Academy has incubated over 6,000 entrepreneurs, of which 300 have grown their startups past Seed and Series A and have collectively raised over $1.2 billion in funding. To learn more about Launch Academy's programs, check out LaunchAcademy CA.

Without further ado, Vidya. Excited to have you here. It's a fantastic topic. The Marketing Playbook for multi million dollar IPOs. My kids are screaming. I don't know if you heard that, but you know you've done a fantastic job helping Marketa through the ipo. Prior to that you were at Mulesoft and It was a $6.5 billion acquisition in 2018 to Salesforce. You've been named top 25 women in fintech. Welcome to Traction. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you Lloyd. It's great to be here with you.

Before we jump into the marketing playbook for multi billion dollar IPOs, would love to get your backstory. How did you go from engineering to tech and startup marketing? Because you're an engineer by Education, right?

That's correct. I studied industrial engineering in undergrad. And I wish I could tell you that it was the path that I always dreamt of, that I always thought I would go lead marketing, but it simply wasn't. I made each choice based on the experience that I had in that situation. And then I made another choice. To use an analogy that the CE Mulesoft once used Greg shot. He described building your career like skiing down the moguls. Like you don't really know how you're going to go all the way down, but you take it one step at a time. And that's how I ended up in tech. I chose engineering because I always loved math and science. And so it felt like a very natural fit. I came from a very strong liberal arts high school where we read a ton, a book a week. And while I love reading, I really learned that I love the math and science. And so I leaned in there early. Coming out of undergrad, I joined Bain & Co. Because I wasn't sure what I want to do. And like a lot of people who weren't sure what they wanted to do for a living, for a career, you put off the decision. And that's what strategy consulting helps you do, which is you work in a variety of different industries and you taste different functional areas and you get a sense of maybe where you want to be. And what I realized is that I wanted to own outcomes coming out of that experience. So I realized that strategy was great, but it was not enough. And I wanted to own outcomes and results and impact. And back then it was pretty hard to make that switch directly from strategy consulting into an operating role. And Intuit was just a wonderful company giving consultants the opportunity to do that. So they hired ex consultants and then they put you into a P and l owning role 6 to 12 months after you joined them. And I thought that's a great opportunity to actually get some operating shops under my belt. And my first role was in product management in Intuit. And I failed miserably. And I realized that wasn't for me. I think it required a deep love for detail, for product features and functionality, for working around the clock with engineers in different time zones. And I just realized that I was out of my depth. And so then I tried on marketing. It was almost like trying on a different hat. And I loved the combination of the art and science that marketing brought. And so then I went from Intuit to a higher growth company where I felt like my pace of learning would be much faster. I joined Mulesoft and so it was very much step by step through some failings, some missteps, and then finding my groove in marketing. And that's how I ended up in technology.

Awesome. And that was a massive rush. And folks, as you're joining in, feel free to introduce yourself where you're tuning in from, what you're looking to get out of this session. But that was probably a massive rush, going from a larger company to Mulesoft. How early were you at Mulesoft?

When I joined MuleSoft had about $100 million in revenue and had completed a round of funding, I believe, in the E round. And so it was very much in the scale up stage. And I absolutely loved it because the pace of change was so fast. You could go from idea to implementation in hours, whereas in a larger company you definitely have a lot of hoops to jump through before you can make something. And when you can move quickly, you can learn and fail quickly, which is when the biggest growth happens. And that was just a wonderful opportunity. It also meant that you had to have an enormous appetite for multitasking, for moving really quickly, for being able to make rapid decisions with limited data, for still bringing people along with you in that decision making process. People still have to be a part of that, but to do that at a much faster pace than you would have the luxury of time for. And so it almost felt like an accelerated program. And so I love that because I learned the fundamentals of marketing at Intuit and then I got to implement at a much faster pace and environment at Mulesoft.

Definitely. And then what was the change from Mulesoft to then Marketa? One would argue actually that you guys did a fantastic job at Mulesoft. When you say you can go from idea to implementation in hours, there are many series, D series, etc. Companies that operate like dinosaurs. Right? Like it takes a long time, lots of bureaucracy. But what was it like when you joined Marketa?

I loved the switch to Marketa because it was almost like starting with a clean slate. It was incredible for the growth and stage that Marketa had been at. We had just closed a funding round that valued us at $1.7 billion and we were roughly just under 100 million in revenue. But the marketing team was about five people, which just blew my mind. And so there was no product marketing function and demand gen was entirely outsourced to an agency there. The PR was similarly outsourced. And so I just loved the idea of starting greenfield and putting all the fundamental building blocks of marketing in place and Watching that beautiful picture come together and the industries have been very different that I've worked in. Intuit was small business software that was mostly transacted e commerce style online. Various very small businesses transacting like consumers. Mulesoft was in the integration, is in the integration space, primarily serving CIOs and directors of it. And now Marketa is in the fintech space and card issuing and processing, modernizing that whole fintech domain. And so for me what has been most interesting is how technology is solving these age old problems in a new way. And the fundamentals of marketing don't change.

Definitely. And when you were there, they went from like a funding round that was probably valued at 4 billion or so and then went public at 16 billion valuation. Right? One of the highest sort of in the fintech space.

I think that's correct. We broke many records with our valuation when we went public, which is just a wonderful testament to the problems that we are solving in card issuing and processing. There have been a dearth of new technology. If you think about the cards that you and I carry in our wallets, Lloyd, they do very basic things. They check your balance and how much credit you have left and they maybe check for a zip code. Now imagine a card that is completely personalized to who you are, whether it's how the transaction is processed or what rewards you get or where you can use the card or under what circumstances those cards are used. Those level of customization and variables that you're allowed to build with were never possible before on legacy technologies. And so I think the market understood that this is a $75 trillion market and opportunity ahead of us. And cards have not even started to change as yet. So the growth is still ahead.

Definitely. And I like how you said that you came to Marketa and although the company was near 100 million or so in revenue, you had a small 5% marketing team. So you had a greenfield opportunity. And I'd love to start there. Let's just dive in.

Right.

In most cases that is your new founder, you've raised small amounts of money. Like when I'm trying to think in what cases, us at Boast, we now have a five person team. We bootstrapped the company. But I wonder why they had five people. Was it very product led or was it sales led? What was the reason behind getting to 100 million with such a small team?

I think it's a testament to what incredible product market fit Marketa experienced that the company was able to grow despite having a very small marketing team. But I think endemically there is also a secondary reason which a lot of leaders may experience, which is they're not sure what to expect from marketing. They've heard that it's necessary, they've heard that it can make a difference, but they're not really sure what to look for when they're hiring a leader, or they're not really sure what a good marketing plan or strategy looks like. And so there was probably a lot of churn on the marketing team when I joined leaders who had come in or out or team members who had cycled in or out. And so there's a big portion of marketing which is setting the vision and strategy up front and ensuring you're being very clear with the rest of your executive team, with the CEO on what you're going to achieve and how you will achieve that in a measurable way and ensuring that there is alignment around that. Because unless you're clear about that, marketing can very often just be like an activity field. Oh, I did this campaign and I went to this event and I ran this activity with very little to show for it. And so it's so important to get that strategy very tightly tied to measurable metrics.

I'm an engineer myself and most engineer founders I talk to, they think, and this is a function of probably Slack and Dropbox and a lot of product led companies, like we'll just let product do the marketing and market itself and go viral. But the world doesn't work like that. And you're right, founders don't understand what marketing does specifically. Like if you're advising a founder or CEO that is not a marketer or doesn't have a marketing background, how do you advise them to think about it? Like I need to bring on a cmo, what should that role be? Maybe let's start there.

I think of marketing as the accelerant for what the company is doing and so it will never solve product market fit issues if there's no product market fit. The marketing may help in the short term, but it'll never help grow the company in a sustainable long term way. But if you do have product market fit, then marketing is an incredible accelerant highlighter to the company story and to the company's growth. My advice to founders who are looking to build out that marketing function would vary based on what the company is. Is it a consumer focused company? Is it a B2B company? Is it focused on developers? So there are many different areas that you can focus on. If you think about the foundational building blocks of A marketing program. You have everything from the top of the funnel, which is brand npr, messaging, category creation. There's the product marketing, which explains what problem you solve and how you solve it better than anyone else. With this, then you have demand generation, which is you use all of that to generate awareness and viable demand for the business. And then of course, there's the last but not least important part, which is how do you mature that pipeline, whether that's through field marketing events, whether that's through a great marketing technology stack, and how do you make all of that come together in a sustainable way? And my advice to founders would vary based on who they are, what stage of growth they are in. Because for some companies, the key area to focus on may be product marketing because they're a highly technical product focused on developers. For others, it may be demand gen because they already have hit product market fit and they're just looking to turn on the tap on getting more demand in there. But also, realistically, for a lot of companies, they don't even know what they need. So then I talk to them about building that entire foundation of marketing. It's like building a house. When you're building a house, you never decide do you want the windows first or do you want the door first? You need those foundational building blocks to come in together. The key choices you need to make based on the company is where do you really double down your resources on? Because investing equally in all four areas of marketing would be a mistake.

Definitely. And I think one of the key things you hit there, marketing doesn't cover up bad product, market fit or a bad product. Right. It's like throwing money in the fire. And I've seen that in previous companies that you get high, churn and then marketing, nobody can save you. You get happy customers or people think they're going to be happy and they come and they don't get value and they leave. So you're a founder. Let's assume you have product market fit. Where do you start? What should your marketing mix marketing strategy look like? How do you set up to drive more customer acquisition leads?

This is not a very popular answer. A lot of people want to start immediately with product marketing and that's important. But I think there are three key pillars I would ask a founder to start with if they're starting greenfield with marketing. One is pr. You don't have to make that PR hire, but go get yourself a good agency, someone who's going to advocate for you, someone who's going to put your name in the Market and ensure that someone knows your name and can drive relevant traffic to to your website. The second area I would invest in is a strong website. That's the face of your company. A lot of people cut corners on their website. I would say this is the area to invest in because you're going to get a minimum of hundreds, if not thousands of visitors every day. Is your site as modern and cutting edge as you believe your technology? Is it optimized for SEO and content? Do you have your lead forms and flow set up right? Just get your house in order. It's no point, you know, paying for any Google Ads or anything until your house is in order. The third area of investment I would say is SEM. And don't just put a bunch of money in it, but I call it protect your competitive moat. Ensure that you own your keywords for your company and the top dozen keywords that are key for your industry know what they are. So when people look for solutions in your product domain, what are the keywords that they're using? Look at Google Trends. That's a great way of identifying which keywords have a higher volume than others. And go own those before your competitors do. So those remind three invest in PR so people know who you are and can at least look for you. Get your house in order with an awesome website that is truly optimized for SEO and has all of its lead forms working and functioning, great messaging by your product and platform. And third, go build your competitive mode on SEM. Own your brand keywords, own the key core keywords for your category before your competitors do.

Fantastic. And sometimes diving into the SEM when you're early enough, sometimes it becomes a worry because it gets harder and harder to squeeze the same ROI out of SEM. How do you think about that? Does it worry you or others you worked with that is it wrong to build our whole demand gen or a lot of our demand gen strategy on paid advertising for example?

It is and it's only getting more expensive. Lloyd. It's such a monopoly with Google AdWords. Whether we like it or not, 90% of our digital ad spend is going there. Bing is barely any portion of the traffic. So it's a monopoly, which means that you are subjected to price increases and the constant gamification that you have to do with there. You have to focus on earned and organic search to ensure you optimize for that. So make sure that you have outstanding content. Make sure that you have a great marketing technology stack that is making the most of the traffic that's coming to your site, ensure that you're using abm. A lot of people are fishing in the ocean by just spraying and praying with money on Google Adwords. Let's ensure that you are top of mind for those target accounts that are right for your business. And so that means having a great go to market strategy in partnership with your revenue team, with your sales team and ensuring that you have great ABM technology, that you are front and foremost for the accounts that you care about the most.

Definitely. And I think this is a good lesson here. Leverage prior to and have a good website. So it converts and SEM sort of to get the initial going. But but then content and organic is the way and your brand is the way to win long term. Tamara asked you would you always go for PR no matter the company size? And Antonio asked, what's abm? Account based marketing? We'll dive into that a little later. Account based marketing. But at what point does PR make sense? Sometimes you just may not have stories to tell. Or maybe there's a strategy on how to craft stories here.

Lloyd, the key point here is product market fit. If you have product market fit, if your product is in GA and you are having a wholesale go to market motion, it's time to invest in pr. Don't do it. If your product is still in beta, you're still sussing out who you're going after or what the product is. It's a little bit like throwing some oil on the fire. You only throw it when you got the fire started and so only you can determine when that right fire size has started for you as a company. But that's when I would go with pr. And the reason is think about the first thing that people do when they hear about your company. They search for you online. What are the key things that come up? Your website and PR search results. Those are the things that come up. So you have to own those and make sure they are completely in your favor. Nothing is more disappointing than searching for a company and seeing nothing out there in the public domain. It doesn't build trust about who you are and your track record.

Definitely, definitely. And I think building trust is a huge part of this. Right. This is some great advice here. How has your marketing strategy then at Marketa changed during the pandemic? It seems like everything was online. You already had a great brand and you elevated it. What are some of the things you did to elevate that? But moreover, did anything change during the pandemic?

So much changed. And there are three primary ways in which we changed our marketing strategy. One is be relevant. I can't even underscore this more. We always try to be relevant as marketers, but when you are in the middle of a pandemic, nobody cares about how great you are or how innovative you are. There are just other issues on top of people's minds. So don't be tone deaf, be relevant. Nobody does this better than Marc Benioff at Salesforce. He is the guru of being relevant. So the question you should ask yourself is, what does the world care about now? And how can I add value to the questions that are top of mind for them? So the way we handle that, Marketa, we said we're in the middle of a pandemic. What can we tell people about the safety of digital payments and how it helps them make digital payments more safely in physical locations? The second thing is we showed data and trends that we're seeing across the country where consumption patterns were changing. That on demand delivery, for example, was surging even in the most remote parts of the country. This is relevant in a pandemic as people are curious about the role of money and how they can stay safe. The second change we did was be digital. Obviously all events were off the table. So what are you going to do with your marketing dollars? Are you going to put them in ad spend? Are you going to focus on online events? Our biggest learning here in events is that everything that mattered in physical events did not matter in the digital events. We almost reversed the playbook. When you talk about which physical events you want to be at, you talk about the largest numbers, you talk about the biggest brand, where you can go network and have meeting spaces and engage face to face with people. The playbook was completely reversed in the pandemic. We focused on digital events that were small, that were curated, where you could actually have face to face interaction. When we went to larger events, we were lost in the noise. Networking was an oxymoron in the digital setting. And so we focused on highly exclusive C level events that helped increase conversation and engagement. The third thing that we invested in is we took those dollars that we'd otherwise spend at large events and sponsorships and invested them in our technology stack. Let's be very smart about the use of marketing technology when we are completely digital. And so we double down on the quality of the tech we invested in here at Marketa.

Definitely. And what does your tech stack looks like for marketing or I guess depends at a series A versus B C company. Like how do you advise? Because you advise a Lot of companies too.

It varies a lot by stage. I'll share with you where we are at Marketa and then I'll share a point of view on how you should think about it based on your stage. So it all starts with the foundation. Our foundation. Foundation elements are Salesforce and HubSpot that work very closely together.

And Marketa is Salesforce and HubSpot right now.

Yes.

Okay. Makes me, it makes me feel good because everyone was saying, go with Marketo and we were a series A company which up until April I was manually forwarding leads and we've been growing like 300% year over year. And we got HubSpot and I was getting FOMO. So this is good.

Don't manually forward leads. I'm so glad you invest in a technology. I used Marketo at Mulesoft And I use HubSpot here at Marketa. And I couldn't be a bigger fan of HubSpot. This is a company that's truly customer centric, that lives its values and, and I frankly love what they've built and I'm a very loyal customer, so I couldn't recommend them more.

You know, I had Dharmesh Shah join our webinar, but as a guest, he randomly joined a webinar.

I'm like, dharmesh is great. He's always listening, he's always learning and he's super humble. And I love that when founders and leaders have that learning mindset, they're always going to invest it back in the tech. So I love what HubSpot is doing. And you have to remember that HubSpot has been the original guru of content marketing. I've learned so much about content marketing from HubSpot and so they've led the way in so many different ways. So big endorsement to them. The other marketing technologies that we have leaned on all the way from top of the funnel. We use Trend Kite to measure the effectiveness of our PR and brand. We use Terminus for account based marketing, what we call abm. We use an agency called Ability that's been a wonderful partner on SEM. O B I L I T Y. They're a wonderful agency, great partners of us and allow you to do more with less. They've been great advisors on SEO and SEM. We use Path Factory for content personalization which really allows your visitors to content binge. And we use Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics for web tools and analytics. We use Lean Data for attribution. We use Engagio for Intend data because it's integrated with Bombora, which We love we use Sendoso for direct mail. We use Yesware, Leadinq and Calendly for sales tools. We use Clearbit for data integrity, we use Wrike for project management. We use GoToWebinar for webinar platforms. We use Brand Folder for our Digital Assets Manager which allows the entire company to self serve on marketing assets so you really don't have to deal with the manual sending of emails or things being lost in Slack. And we use Splash for event marketing. So I'll take a deep breath there and we're not done. We continue to build on our tech stack. I'm a huge fan of investing in tech. There are so many great technologies. Every day I get at least 20 emails from different vendors telling me about a new part of the experience that they have helped improve. And it's great to see all these tools that are available for marketers now. Marketing is just as much about the use of technology to get more efficient and clever than it is about messaging. Just about messaging anymore.

Awesome. I'm going to read off the list because I know everyone is going to get FOMO here. So you got Salesforce and HubSpot, which is the baseline. Salesforce gives you a database. HubSpot is the baseline marketing automation. You said you have Trend Kite for trend analysis and it's for pr.

Yeah, Great tool. I use it at Mulesoft, I use it here at Marketa. Couldn't recommend it more. It gives you great data and analytics on an area that is very hard to measure. People go OPR is so fluffy. Trend Kite will give you the right analytics to justify the PR that you're doing. Measurement of share voice, measurement of sentiment, measure measurement dimensions on T or A and types of publications. Love the tool.

Awesome. So you got Trend Kite for pr, you got Terminus for abm. You said Obliti Obi, L I T Y, which is an SEM agency. Then you said pathfactory for content personalization. Meaning if I'm logging into your website from the US vs Canada, it would serve relevant content accordingly.

No, it's actually a little bit different. It's to say if you were searching for, let me say, virtual cards maybe is the keyword, then in Path Factory I can give you your own track of the top six pieces of content that I think are right for you to read. And the most beautiful part is you can just flip between different content. You can read it. It's almost like binge reading. So it encourages you to consume. It removes that whole onerous experience of going back and reading through hundreds and I'm recommending the content that's right for you based on your interest on your website. On my website.

Awesome. And then you said you use Engage you when you have Terminus as an ABM tool.

Why using different roles? So Engage you actually helps you track the engagement of accounts and it's a shared view between the sales team and the marketing team. So say bank of America is a target account. You can go and look at Engageo and see that the SDO reached out to them. Then they opened up this email. Then they binge read all of this content from Path factory. They spent 80 minutes with you. You get all of that beautiful engagement data. It's also integrated with Bombora. Bombora is a beautiful tool. I always say that intent is the new lead, which is don't wait for them to come on your website and tell you they're interested in your product. Bombora tells you when they're searching for keywords in your industry. Bombora is a free tool up to a certain number of words. So go out there, sign up up and see who's searching for the cards. Sorry for the terms in your category. So for me a lot of those are card related terms and so I know of companies that are searching for products in my space even before they come to my website. So then I can do an outreach to them and say, hey, it seems like you're looking for something here. Can I help? So that's also integrated into Engage U Terminus actually helps me deploy the ads to target accounts to ensure that they are aware of who we are.

Awesome. And then you said Sendoso. We use something called Swag up but Sendoso is similar where you send gifts to people, especially large prospects and whatnot. And then you said yesware, which is email automation on a personal level. Is that what you use it for?

Yes, correct.

And then Wrike for project management and you gotomeeting for webinars is that Instead.

Of Zoom GoToWebinar for webinar platform. So when we're hosting webinars, it's a great tool that we use that gives us really good analytics on who's joining, how long they engaged and it just helps us handle that whole experience very smoothly.

Awesome. Yeah. And we use Zoom for that purpose. And then you said brand folder to keep all your assets in one place. And then you use Splash for event marketing. This is just awesome. Just this is gold. I love because not many people talk about their tool stack and this is really phenomenal. I took notes, I am going to write it in a summary and share it out here. Awesome. Let's get on with the rest of the questions. This is very exciting and what you said is correct. A lot of marketing today is what you can do do with technology. A huge part of that. Coming back to your IPO roadmap, what does that look like? You had a very successful ipo. You broke many records. Walk us through the roadmap to get a company ready for an ipo.

Lloyd, There's a short, medium long here. So let me start with the stuff that you have to do if you're even envisioning an IPO in a one to two year timeframe, which is what the case was when I joined Marketa, I knew that could be on the horizon somewhere. And there are three foundational building blocks that you have to do if you think the IPO is on the horizon. First is you need to get the word out about who you are. And that means investing in pr, investing in your brand messaging, your category messaging. That's just table stakes. You have to invest in the what you do and in the what you do. There are three key pillars there. One is customer stories. Super powerful. They take a long time to build. And if you're ever thinking on ipo, you have to develop your sets of customer stories. They have to be dozens of case studies, videos, people and customers that are going to speak on your behalf because nothing is more powerful than that. The second pillar in what you do is platform and product messaging. So all of your web content, your white papers, everything that describes the technology has to be in top shape because once they know who you are, they're going to want to know what the technology is does. The third pillar of that is product demos. So now they know customers use it, they've read your website and your white papers. They know a little bit more about your platform. They have to see how it works. So start investing in the videos that describe how you address common use cases. And the reason I put these in the long bucket is all of this takes a long time to do. And so if you ever think you're going to IPO in the next two to three years, start building these now. Because it will take a while, but it's going to be necessary for your public, for your ipo. The third foundational pillar. And then I will come back exactly to your question. The third foundational pillar of this is the why. This is the most important because now you've told them who you are, what you do, but you're faceless and you're emotionless and you're meaningless without the why, which is what's your vision? What's your mission as a company? What are your values as a company? What's your culture as a company? Why should people bet on you, do business with you, partner with you, work for you more than other companies in your space?

Walk us through the short, maybe in a little more detail in the medium and the long. And that would be super valuable.

Absolutely. So this is the long, right. So these three pillars are what you would do on the long term basis. These all have a two to three year timeframe. Nothing here is easy, nothing here is quickly done overnight. So invest in these foundational of who you are, what you do and why you do it. Then I would start to think about, as you're getting closer to the ipo, how do you get your narrative to be absolutely tight? The marketing team is going to play a key role in the writing of the S1, especially the product platform sections, the sections about the narrative, the overview. You're going to play a key role in all of the materials that come together. The investor roadshow is a huge marketing lift where in a period of 15 to 20 minutes, you have to tell the whole company story and bring it together in a compelling way for your investors. You have to get your website ready. Your website has to be modern, cutting edge, really representative of your brand. You have to bring a lot of your customer stories together for the ipo. Not to mention you need an outstanding PR plan. So the IPO ends up being the single biggest brand event you'll have as a company. And so it's your role as a marketer to make the most of that. You have to get the media interviews lined up for your key executive speakers. You have to get broadcast interviews lined up. You have to have that messaging really tight. You have to do media training and you want to ensure that on the day of, you're owning everything from social to customer communications to employee communications, to ensure that all of it's coming together in a cohesive way. So that's a little bit about the short and the long of work. It's a long road. There are a lot of moving pieces to it, but when done, it can be a huge multiplier for the company's ip.

You talked a lot about pr and I fundamentally believe in pr because we announced our Series A and everyone from fox Business to TechCrunch to VentureBeat, everyone covered us twice. And we saw that big shift in the first quarter of January of this year. It literally drove a lot of leads but then it's like, how do you stay deliberate with pr? Yeah, you have product, market fit. Everyone sees PR as fluff. My co founder is also an engineer. Everyone, everyone sees it as like, how does this tie? And especially if you have a sales leader or leaders, they're like, how does these events, the community, the pr, how does this directly correlate to sales? Everyone's trying to look at that one to one connection. And a lot of PR and community and events is driving brand. And this anonymous attendee asked here, brand versus performance marketing, how do you measure this roi? And you talked about Trend Kite, but perhaps walk us through in detail, like how do you actually show the roi?

Yeah, let's start with ROI and then we'll talk about the effectiveness to pr. So for roi, I have, I strongly believe in metrics and having metrics across the funnel. Metrics at the highest part of the funnel tend to be the most challenging. The highest, it's a little bit of an art and science. As you get further down the funnel, it becomes very accurate, right. I can tell you with great certainty how many leads I generated, how many of them convert to SQLs, how many of them converted to closed opportunities or expanded opportunities. That is not the issue. At the highest top of the funnel. It's a little bit of an art. And that's why I use three to four metrics to triangulate on it. The number one metric that you can use is the traffic that comes to your website from direct channels, right? As someone that actually types in your company name in the search bar, that is a direct correlation to brand. Now there are other sources of traffic, such as paid traffic or organic traffic. Those measure different things. They measure the efficacy of how SEO optimized your website is. They measure the efficacy of, of your paid search and your investments there. So we put those aside. We measure direct traffic as one of the metrics for brand. Another one that we measure is share of voice through trend kite. So we say that of all of the competitors in my space, how much of the market conversation and the voice did our company have as a percentage? Is that growing or is it declining over time? Is it a positive sentiment or is it a neutral to negative sentiment? So really focusing on, on the market conversation, voice and direct traffic tend to be a good indicator of brand value and strength. Now one of the goals, I always say, is for a high growth company, your direct traffic better be doubling year on year, otherwise you're not doing something right. And it's a high bar. And my team immediately freaked out when I told them that when I joined this team because we were nowhere near that. But that's the bar you have to set. It should be minimum doubling for a high growth company at a higher rate than your revenue. And the reason is that's a leading indicator of your business and so you always want to be at the tip of the sphere in the growth on that. But I will say some of the larger companies at Intuit we did brand survey where we measured the awareness of your brand. Now that makes a lot of sense when you're a consumer brand. It makes less sense when you're a very targeted enterprise software brand. I also haven't had the budget to do frankly these very expensive brand surveys. But if you have the budget and you're focused on consumers then that's another great way way to measure the efficacy and the growth of your brand awareness.

On your I think your Scision was acquired by Intrado someone says but Scission is some of these PR platforms are just mired with like bad user experience and it's a pain. Right? What is, how do you manage PR internally? So you talked about Trend Kite but then you might have an agency or maybe a person or people like how do you manage PR to stay deliberate in the press over and over again. Maybe some concrete examples.

So first I'll tell you about our agency which we love. So I'll put out two endorsements. One is when we were earlier stage we used Bospar. We love them. They really helped us get to where we are in the.

How do you spell it?

Bospar B O S P A R. And the agency we use now, which we absolutely love and have been a huge portion of our success as we've gone public and beyond is icr. They're based in New York. Just a tremendous team and they've gone above and beyond for us in so many ways. So I would wholeheartedly recommend these agencies. What I also want to say is the agency is not the answer. The PR strategy is just as important. So the PR strategy says what is the map the agency can help you execute. But without the map and the strategy you'll be under serving what you're looking to do with the agency. And one of the mistakes that people make when they're thinking about PR strategy is is they start with saying how can I tell people about me? And you forget nobody cares about you. Really. There's nothing more boring than some self gloating article or some PR announcement about how awesome you are. 80% of your PR should be focused on adding value to your reader. What is an original piece of research that you have that shows data or highlights trends that you think would be interesting to your audience? How are you solving new problems or use cases so that people get a sense of, Ah, that's an interesting problem. I'm actually grappling with that. Let's see how they did it for ABC so that maybe that will inspire an answer for me. The third one is thought leadership. What are you seeing in the industry that you cannot read from a book or a canned news article? What value can you add to the conversation that no one else can? Those should be the three fundamentals of your PR, and that should be 80% of your PR. If you do that well, then you earn the right to do the remaining 20% of the PR, which is talk about your product announcement, talk about your revenue, your momentum, your executive hires. But please don't get the mix flipped. If you get the mix flipped, your PR will never take off. Nobody wants to use you as just a megaphone for yourself.

Definitely. And does your PR firm, like, boast far bos par? I'm going to share all the tools, by the way. It's fantastic. And all the resources. And I might ask you for contacts later for myself personally, at least on the PR side. But did they help you with strategy? Or how much of the strategy was the PR firm helping you? What do you get with pr? Because oftentimes as founders working with pr, it's. They just email reporters and maybe stuff happens. And I feel like I've traditionally felt that if I just email the reporters directly, I've gotten a better chance of success. So, like, how do you hold your PR firm to task to make sure they're like, what is the deliverable with pr? And maybe not at that ICR level, but at the. When you're smaller and using a company like Bospor and you have limited budget, how do you. What is their deliverable?

Yeah, you know, a lot of people make this mistake, which is they don't fully understand pr, and they go to the agency and say, hey, make me known, make me awesome. And the truth is, that is not a strategy. That is an outcome. The strategy must come from you. The question is, what is the right strategy for your company? And I always like to start with the end. If we were to do a great job with PR for the next two years, what would you want the market to see about you? Not just, oh, your company's awesome, your company's growing, but really get to the specifics for Example, I want Marketa to be a thought leader in the card issuing and processing space. I want to be seen as the single most important source of data and trends in our space. I want to be seen as the thought leader that is adding value in fintech and payments at large. With those three goals, then I we actually here Interleave Market has set the strategy. The agency is a great thought partner to say, you know what, that's actually not strong enough or that's not going to fly. Have you thought about this angle? But you have to do 90% of the lift. PR can never be outsourced. And this is an important distinction. You can have an agency, but PR can never be outsourced. The strategy has to be yours. The content and thinking has to be yours. The speakers have to be yours. The agency is a great partner to help you bring it to life, to make it happen. And so then what you can hold the agency accountable for is the execution of the plan that you set out. So when we set our strategy for the year, we say this is what we want to do by quarter. This is what we want that narrative arc to look like over the course of the year. Year. This is what the quantifiable metrics that I want to see have happen. So let me give you an example for the ipo. The media landscape is changing so quickly. I said, let me look at the most successful IPOs of the past 12 months in the enterprise B2B software space. What sort of media coverage has the most successful IPOs seen? And I'll make up this number. But we said, you know what, the most successful ones have seen about 12 unique output. Lets cover the IPO. And we said, you know what, we want to double that, we want to see 24. And then we said, you know what, let's partner with our agency to say how we can meet that goal. We say, who are all the atlas that we want to work with? What sort of key content or messages can we give them that will help make this a worthy standalone story? And then you partner with your agency to make that happen. So start with the strategy, have quantifiable metrics and partner with your agency to make that happen. Never outsource it because otherwise it's dead in the water to begin.

Definitely. No, you said it right. And then if you had to prioritize that, what is the top two value pieces you got in terms of your PR firm? Was it the outreach and the connections they had or was it something else? Like how would you prioritize that?

Value the most important value that an agency can give you that you can do in yourself. And I've had PR completely insulated, sourced within the company and now I do a hybrid model. The number one value that a great agency can do is newsjacking. They have visibility to all sorts of activity in the press and media space that you may not. They may be pitching an agency on a different company and then you hear that the report is actually doing the story that's actually relevant to your space. So they become your ears, they are able to see the traffic of the conversation and find out the right intersection point for you that an insourced that an in house team would have a much harder time doing just because they don't have the visibility to all of those conversations and traffic. So that's the number one value add. But by the way you can only newsjack and newsjacking is a term by the way. For example, if fraud hacks is a current theme in the news media and they're looking for an expert to weigh in, that's called newsjacking. And they'll say who's the thought leader in the industry who can help us understand electronic fraud or card fraud that we should call to ask for a comment on this story because we're seeing this to really grow or trend right now in the news place. Newsjacking is a great way to be able to join conversations where they're happening. But you can only do that Lloyd is if you've done the first three things well, which is shown thought leadership, shown trends, data, been useful, been able to actually be helpful to the read on the market. So only if you have those foundational pieces will someone then call you to weigh in on a topic as an expert.

This is fantastic advice. I'm taking notes here but like news jack, stacking is the number one thing. You've shared a lot of tools here. You've given us your whole stack and I think this, you'll say it again and again. This is probably the most valuable piece of information I've ever got across speaking with many marketers because people don't share how it all ties together. And this is super, super valuable. Give us your best practice for building like strategic marketing plans. Like how do you tie it all together? Brand PR events, product demand gen. Like how do you like when you think, when you come into a new company, let's say how do you prioritize and stack it all?

Don't start with marketing. That's my first, most important advice. Start with the company strategy what is the company looking to achieve over the next 12 months, over the next three years? Once you have a good sense of that, then move to a revenue strategy. And I really want to underline this because a lot of marketers make the mistake of saying, saying, let's do a marketing plan. And then they all get all the marketers in a room and they start writing. You've already missed the most important steps, which is you're not even in the right zip code. These are all tactical tools. The question is, what's the company looking to achieve? What is the right revenue strategy that is in partnership with sales and marketing that you together can partner on to achieve the company strategy? And then you get the marketers in the room to say, all right, in light of the company strategy and the revenue strategy, how can we use all of the tools in our arsenal to help make that successful?

You talked a lot about timing, right? A lot of marketing is if you don't have product market fit, don't do it. But then you said, like at the early stages, getting the word out, PR SEM while you build that content engine. Talk about events a little bit. I heard like you guys do a lot of events webinars. You talked about how you brought things digital and then doing virtual roundtables and whatnot. I fundamentally believe in events and community. We were able to bootstrap to 10 million in revenue just by hosting a lot events and building this traction community. Even our investors, everyone we met. And I feel like during COVID we probably did like over a hundred online webinars. But then there's no post event engagement and maybe that's okay, but it seems like a problem you guys have solved. When you talked about virtual roundtables and whatnot, walk us through that experience or how you've set it up.

We have not solved it, Lloyd. We bridged it. We survived the pandemic doing what we could in virtual.

You're being too humble like you are.

I believe physical events will be back stronger than ever. People are craving physical connection. When it's safe to be physically present again, events are going to come back in a big way. And events are extremely powerful. And it's also a forum where you can be scrappy. Now people may look at events and say, gosh, I look at the booth price, I look at the booth design price. It's incredibly expensive. My advice to you, if you don't have a lot of budgets to work with, is first identify the top three industry events where all of your prospective customers show up. Not where your competitors show up, where your prospective customers, who you want to target show up. Where's the conversation in your industry happening? First, identify those three events. Then I would start thinking about getting an earned speaking position on the main stage. Of those, forget about sponsorships, forget about sponsoring that expensive booth. If you don't have the budget, it don't worry about it. Earn speaking is still the most powerful way you can do it and it costs you nothing. But for that, you got to put your marketing chops to work. What's your original point of view? What is interesting to that audience? How do you get up on that stage? How do you put your CEO up there or your CTO or your CPO and ensure that they have the biggest audience listening to them? It's a lot more credible and respectful than a paid speaking spot. The third advice I would give is then bring original research to that. Bring a point of view that nobody else can provide but you. Because you are watching data on your platform, you're watching trends from your vantage point that you think is useful for that customer. And then watch the goodness happen. Because the media is usually at these biggest events. So it ends up being a great multiplier for your marketing because you got your C level executive on that stage. They're speaking about innovation. They may not even have mentioned your product, you may not even have had to do that. But because you are up there, people now know your company name and they will find your product through all of the media coverage, coverage, the social coverage of the attendees, the tweets that come out as a result of it. And then I would say take your scrappy 10,000, 20,000 and book meeting space somewhere around that conference and get all those prospective customers to meet with your AES, with your sales organization, with your executives, and make the most of your time there. So I would say events is coming back. You don't have to have deep pockets to have great impact at events. You can be creative, you can be scratched. I actually love working with small budgets because it forces the creativity. It forces you to do more with less. And it's amazing how far you can go with very few dollars if you're just thinking without constraint.

Definitely, and I think that's a fair point. I have this other belief that anytime you incorporate more than two senses, it ends up in a. You have an opportunity to build a strong relationship. So right now we're sights and sound, but if you incorporate taste, touch, smell, then you build like genuine bonds. So that's fantastic. Now I want to move into PR a little bit. Because I'm really.

You really.

I'm anchoring on PR because you talked about it and you started the conversation by saying this is going to be an unpopular comment. And that's why I'm clicking on it. What can founders do to build. Build strong connections with the press? How can founders show commitment? Because I know for sure on our team, not everyone, like my co founder, for example, doesn't like speaking with the press. I have to force him. He doesn't like doing speaking engagements. I'm very vocal. How do you advise founders to be more deliberate here?

Be helpful. It's not about you, it's about the audience. What can you do to help your prospective customers? What can you do to help the reader? How can you. You be more supportive, informative, educated? Out of all of the knowledge, resources, data that you have, when you do that, you will earn the trust and respect of the audience and you will earn the right to speak about your platform. Many people have it wrong. They want to come out the gate and talk about their entrepreneurial story or how amazing they are. It's not about how amazing you are. Tell them about your entrepreneurial story. Yes. But about all the failures you had, all the mistakes you made made and what you learn from it so that other people don't make the same ones. Don't tell them about how amazing your technology is. Tell them about what problems in the industry and what role technology can play in solving them in a better way. Maybe about bridging gaps, serving unaddressed customers, about serving the underserved. Have something that is actually helpful. Turn PR on its head. It's not about your platform. It's really about the awesome.

No, that's. That is fantastic. Now if you had to prioritize, let's talk about like demand gen now and going at Intuit, Mulesoft, Marketa, your early days, we talked about some of that, but we talked about a lot of channels, right? We talked about abm, we talked about SEM, we talk about pr. Has like PR been strategy number one or how did that. How did you prioritize at maybe Mulesoft, which might have been different than Marketa?

It depends on the maturity of the company and it depends on the weight that I always placed on one channel versus the other other. When we were earlier stage, I invested more in PR because I frankly, I needed the awareness. As I matured and awareness is pretty strong. Then I focused on how to make the most of the demand that was coming in. Then I focused on quality lead gen Optimization, ensuring that I was ab testing the heck out of all of my campaigns and ensuring that I was getting the highest quality leads to our sales organization. And that work never stops. It's about having your target account list. It's about ensuring that your job doesn't stop the moment the lead comes in. That you are partnering with the sales team to help that lead progress all the way to closing. But also then that you're playing a role in expanding those accounts and opportunities by being helpful to the customers and creating word of mouth so that they in turn can help bring other prospective companies into your funnel. And that's really marketing 2.0 now, which is we're not lead generating, we're revenue generators. And you need a mindset shift to do that, to ensure that your work never stops. Your work just continues alongside the sales organization through the entire lifecycle of the customer.

Definitely. Awesome. This has been fantastic. We're almost at the top of the hour. We talked a lot about tools, stacks, metrics, all of that good stuff. I want to talk about the team, which we didn't touch on as much, but you started with a team of five. If you were to start with a team of, of zero, what are the key roles and skills you would bring on maybe to get from, I don't know, 10 million to 50 million? In what sequence?

I guess I think the first one I would hire is an excellent web marketer because the website is the face of the company. It is the one marketing asset that works the hardest for you, works around the clock. So I would hire a really strong web marketer that ensured that our website looks and performs. Awesome page load, mobile readiness, SEO optimized, great conversion funnel that we're ab testing all of our forums, ensuring it's in top shape, that we have great technologies interlinked with our website to enrich data to help lead form completion. That would be probably a very foundational aspect. And then I would start there because everything goes from there. If you don't have that, there's no point in investing in pr, right? You don't want to generate awareness when you come to a dead end experience. So that would be my first and key hire. When I'm looking to hire. This is also controversial, but I don't actually look for functional skills necessarily. What's most important for me is that the person is intellectually driven, which is they wake up every morning wanting to solve the problem better than anyone else. There is a motivation there. They are searching for answers, they are able to connect the dots because I feel that when someone is intellectually driven, then they want to keep making things better. They don't just bring an old playbook and they apply it. Because marketing is so quickly changing, technology, so quickly changing that what I've learned five years ago is already outdated. Lloyd, the lessons I'm sharing with you are hot off the press from the last 24 months. The playbook from Intuit doesn't even matter here anymore. And so I want someone who's intellectually curious and who's driven to find the right answer. Second, I look for people with grit because we all face problems every day. There is no perfect job. There is no perfect life. You got to be able to get up every day and work through problems and overcome them. And if you can do a lot with little resources, if you can do it even when people say no, if you can find workarounds, when you're turned down by this event or by that keynote or by that placement, but you can find a way, then that is an invaluable step. And last but not least, I really look for people that partner well with other people. If you want to go somewhere very quickly, you go alone. If you want to go somewhere far, you go with other people. And so I look for people who enjoy partnering and working in teams, because that's how you build the greatest marketing organizations.

Awesome. And again, I'm going to ask you the prioritization question here. You said webmark, and then you talked about grit and the soft skills. Were there any of sort, sort of other hard skills that you would prioritize?

There are people who have developed cutting edge SEO skills and SEM skills. Very valued today in the Valley. So hard to find, so important, so critical stake. So if there was a hard skill I would lean in on, it's someone who understands SEO and SEM.

Definitely. And you talked about the agency that you used previously. Right. Was that a way to augment?

It was a way to start. When you don't have the talent on your team, when you don't have the headcount, you can lean in on an agency that does this day in and day out, but nothing will come close to having someone on your team who is focused on your business, who understands your industry and is living and breathing your business 24, 7. So agencies are a great way to supplement in the short term, but I'm a huge advocate of bringing that in house. It's too critical of a function to be outsourced entirely.

Awesome. So like PR agency, SEM agency, you use that as a starting point to get off the ground while you build that skill set in house. This is an awesome comment, Alwyn says. I've been around a lot of CMOs and VPs of marketing. I have yet to meet a CMO that speaks about marketing and business like videos. So this is phenomenal. Like I am engaged and think about it, over the last couple years I've interviewed more than 300 people. This is absolutely fantastic. As you look back on your journey from this industrial engineer who just graduated to where you are today, running one of the most successful companies on the planet, what do you wish you did more of and what do you wish you did less of?

I wish I wasn't so afraid of failure. I should have taken bigger jumps, bigger chances and fallen flat on my face more because then I would have learned more. I think it's a human fear that we often have, which is just enough fear that I I feel I can get up and do it again. But sometimes you need to go flat out and I wish I'd taken more of those risks done campaigns that were absolutely awful because I would have learned something extraordinary rather than doing the middle of the road that sort of didn't go either way. So that would be my ask of all the marketers. Hey, it's better if you do something that's not great but at least you learn something from it. Somebody noticed it. The market is filled with middle of the road campaigns that nobody notices, nobody's of afraid, defended by and everyone gets on with their world. It's a challenge to you. It's also a challenge to me to continue to push myself and my team members to take Boulder moves.

Awesome. And are you active on social where can they find you?

You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. I'm the only Vidya Peters I believe.

On those social channels, idyapeters and any sort of resources for people to get up to speed outside of outside of everything you do, following you on Twitter and whatnot. What is your to get educated on marketing or growth?

There's no book that I would recommend because all these books get outdated because the technology is so quickly evolving. I would recommend a classic, the Psychology of Influencing in Marketing. It's a fabulous book. It's an oldie goldie and it's just got an update and I love it because it tells you about the fundamentals of human psychology and what it takes to influence and I think it's a must read for every marketer.

What was it again?

The psychology influence of persuasion.

Okay, is that Robert Cialdini yes, it is awesome. I tell everyone to read this Influence by Robert Cialdini and if you hate reading like me, I watch a lot of videos or I bring authors and interview them, but it's absolutely a fantastic book. And to go with that, how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which is very simple. Thank you so much, Vidya. Enjoy your time in the Bay Area. Have a great trip back to Amsterdam and love and peace. Thanks for joining us. I need some traction.

Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at Boast AI that's B o a s T AI blog.