The Playbook To Skyrocket Referrals & Turn Customers Into Spokespeople with Andres Botero, BlackLine

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Metric Just measure how many accounts are referenceable today and how many do you want at the end of the year? Like number of accounts that you can call on to be references. Measure how many publicly available reusable assets you have at the beginning of the period and how many you should have at the end of the period and push yourself to accomplish those goals. If you're growing rapidly, it means that you want reference might be used once, twice, three times, five times. You will exhaust that reference at some point. That will be a hindrance to your growth.

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More than 75% of B2B buyers consult three or more sources before they make a purchase decision, and businesses experience more than 70% higher conversion rate when they have advocacy programs in place. Couldn't find a better speaker on the topic. CMO at Blackline 4/7 billion market cap he's going to share the playbook for building a successful customer advocacy program so you can turn your customers into spokespeople for your brand. And Andres has been around the block with the CMO title at Callidus Cloud and a number of other great companies. And he started his career in engineering. What's really interesting is over the last several months I've interviewed a number of great CMOs Marketa, which IPO'd at 30 plus billion market cap. Their CMO Chander CMO of Coupa, which is almost 10 billion market cap former CMO at MongoDB and now Andres here. And the one thing is common, you guys are all engineers. There's this theme, engineers turning into marketers. You had a super impressive career in marketing. Give us your backstory. How did an engineer become one of the top marketers?

It's interesting. Yeah, I'm a marketeer by accident, let's put it that way. I'm an industrial engineer. I went to school to learn how to manage processes and tweak input, labor process machines to produce an outcome. So that really renders very well for marketing. My signature is everything I do in marketing. Pr, branding, pricing, advocacy, client marketing, analyst relations. Everything really works to produce an outcome, which is bookings and, and revenue. As an engineer, it helps the job is all data driven. These days, marketing, you gotta be creative, you gotta be have an angle for aesthetics, position in messaging. But also you gotta be super data driven. How to stretch the dollars to get the most benefit. And you gotta be technologically oriented. It's all about marketing. Technology and how integrated produces an outcome for you. So it's a little bit of everything. And engineering helps at least solves half of the equation.

And a lot of what you've learned is process improvements. Right? And marketing effectively generating leads, building brand is also a process.

Everything is a process. What you do at the top of the funnel to capture eyeballs, get your brand out there. But then in my case, you're getting a lot of interest. At some point that interest goes to a BDR in my team. So what is the right time? What is good interest? Good enough interest to pass it to a BDR. We don't want to waste their time at the BDR's time. And then what happens with the BDR? You produce something and then you pass it to sales. Is it good? Good enough. Too early. You got to continuously monitor what's going on. And then the final outcome was this lead. Good for sales. Did anything happen? How can marketing help throughout the process to close that deal faster?

Now, en route to becoming a marketing leader, from an engineer, what are some skills that were fundamental to your development as a marketing leader?

Oh man. In my experience, I'm super grateful. My first job out of business school was sales operations. I went into Civil Systems, a great software company, the creator of the CRM category. And I was in sales operations. So essentially watching how the sales leaders ran the organization and helping them run the organization. And that helped me immensely because I think as a salesperson I can understand how a sales leader thinks. What she wants, what she needs, what's Useful and what's not. And it's helped me because in what I do in B2B marketing, I've seen many sales leaders that are fighting with marketing constantly and it's never happened to me. I've always had great relationship with my sales peers because that experience helped me understand what's important to them and therefore try to align marketing to be useful to sales rather than adversarial.

Now you joined Blackline, you had a great career. Introduced to blackline, introduce us to Blackline. What made you join the company?

Oh, Blackline, we're the leaders, creators of a category with financial close management and later it become financial automations. We automate, we do pretty much everything that accountants need to do in Excel to close the books, to reconcile the accounts, make sure the numbers tie. We automate a lot of those things and we really free accountants time to focus on the actual analysis of what's going on in the business, provide value rather than just crunching the numbers. We crunch the numbers for them, let's put it that way. And our customers are companies Maybe in the $50 million in revenue and above all the way to like the biggest multinationals. We have some customers that are 140 billion in sales a year. So it's interesting, we cover mid market all the way to like the biggest of the biggest. And the company is software as a service. So we are all about getting customers to adopt, be happy with what they have and continue renewing. And it's like we have a final exam. Every time renewal comes, companies need to sign again. And that's the beauty of the software as a service model. You really are incentivized to make sure our customers are happy and continue using and adopting and learning what they can do with us.

And definitely a big task. And Blackline has become the preferred brand there in the mid market going to enterprise. There's other players in the space and you guys are clearly winning. So let's go into advocacy. Right? The topic of today, you can't win without happy customers. But what is customer advocacy? What is advocacy marketing? How is it different than referral marketing?

So referral marketing is when you try to get your customers to just introduce you to someone else. Hey, send an email to your best friends, to your peers, introduce me. What I'm trying to do here is bigger than that. Of course I want customers to introduce me to their peers. But what I want is to tell them the wonderful experience they've had with me with my software. And I want them to do it voluntarily. I don't want to be pushing them to do it. I want them to do this willingly. And so I want to lay down the foundation so anyone that is super happy and feels proud of what they're doing with us can do it. So I want customers to tell the world in a customer success story, in a video, in a webinar like this, ideally in a reusable asset, something that will allow others to see the same content over and over. So I give preference to reusable assets. And I, my, my job is to identify the people that are super happy, that have something to say, that are willing to say it, or the ones that are doing something remarkable that is really worth telling the world, identifying and encouraging them. And in this process, you have some people that are very risk averse, like they don't want to talk about it. I'm doing wonderful things, I don't want to talk about it. I'm shy. I don't know if my boss will be okay with that or. There are some people in the other extreme, there are people that are super willing to share and they are ready to do anything that you propose. So our job is to have an avenue, a channel for people in all these kind of, in the widespread of willingness to talk. So we have all kinds of programs for them. I can tell you more depending on the interest.

So let's dive in to the ingredients of a winning advocacy program. You talked, you conveyed the message here that referrals are a piece of the bigger picture. But how do you build this advocacy program that incorporates content, happy customers, referrals and turn it into a flywheel. What are the key ingredients?

There are multiple ingredients. The first ingredient, you need a good product that has happy customers. Without happy customers, you cannot do this, assuming you have them. Then I or my team, we manage our public reference database strategically. So we look at what we're doing, what we have, who we're selling to, what industries, what countries, what geographies, what size of companies, and we look at all the publicly available reference assets. We have videos, customer success stories, data sheets, webinars, and we look what is missing. And on one side you understand what you really need. On the other side, we work with our customer success managers, our salespeople, to identify happy customers that are willing to talk about what they're doing or that are hitting a milestone in their deployment that makes them ready to talk about something substantial. And then we target those people. We ask them, we invite them. Some of them will be very willing, some of them actually will be super enthusiastic to Participate for those we have a platform that has all kinds of incentives and there are small incentives to actually participate. There are many accountants that love Blackline and they want to talk about Blackline. Some of them, I say, hey, if you participate in this webinar, happy to give you a few points and you can redeem those points towards Blackline branded items. A coffee mug, a T shirt, small things like that. That process creates advocates for the company. They want to do it, they actually like the rewards. Small rewards is not. They're not doing it because of the rewards but they love the branded items because they love the software. So we have program on that side to cultivate advocates and let them show or display the love for the brand. Other people, they want to do one off. They need all kinds of approvals for the company. We support them in that process. What are you comfortable doing? What do you need from us? How much level of detail can you go in? And we will tailor the venue to whatever they can do with us.

Now you're getting these advocates who are users of the product, not just the purchasers. Correct? Not just the people who made the.

I'm interested in the user admin that manages the deployment. I'm interested in the accountant that uses the software in the daily operations and I'm interested in the CFO that wants to talk about the ROI they got with us. They require different channels like the. The a CFO will require someone like me at my level or the VP of sales in charge of the account to for a very special favor. And let's talk about what you're doing. And it's an executive approach. The user might go for the rewards platform and be super happy like sharing. Maybe a public review site like TrustRadius they might share what they're doing with us just because they love it. So for them we have a program to let them know how they can display their satisfaction, how they can talk about it and we might send them a link on how to do it. And it's more like a mass program versus executives. That is a one off motion, very targeted and you're making a special request.

You got thousands upon thousands of users and customers, right? How do you identify the targeting? Like how do you identify when to reach out, when to make the ask? Is that an automated process? Is that technology that does it? Because effectively, the way I think about it or what I'm taking away from your feedback is when a user experiences a happy moment or a moment of wow or you've saved them time, money, made their life Better, that's the time to reach out to them. So how do you determine when to reach out and then do that at scale?

So you're talking about customer intimacy. How do you know when a customer is experiencing a good moment? In our case, I mean there are multiple angles. One is the customer usage and adoption. When they reach a certain level, they hit a new milestone in their deployment. That's for example at one time when their implementation and the customer team, the professional services team knows that we're done with the first phase, I go live. That's for example a happy moment. I blackline to many customers that are going live. We send them cupcakes with their logo and our with their logo, their logo. And it's one cake is your logo, another cupcake is my logo. And we send them to the team that just finished the implementation and sometimes they go into social media and they're very proud of what they just did. Hey, congratulations to company so and so who just went live. They are posting pictures of their go live with their cupcakes from blackline in social they are telling the world that they are happy customers that just adopted to detect those moments. You need close alignment with your customer success team, professional services that just implemented and with sales, your account manager, the person that manages that account. That relationship with customer sales and usage is what gives you the insight to know when to approach them.

So you're basically monitoring leading indicators of wow moments. And then when they happen, you reach out through a variety of different channels. Top down depending on the level or bottom up depending on the user. And then you have programs in place whether sending them gift items or sending them links to leave reviews. Do you host events as well to bring these people together, treat them to good food, drinks, parties. Where does events play into that mix?

Events. We host events all the way from five people in a bar. You know it's a meet up small event in the corner. It used to be lots of them live pre pandemic, few people in a bar all the way to our annual conferences. We have conferences in North America, in Asia, in Australia and in Europe. They used to be the largest would be like 2,000 people live in one place. And all these conferences were opportunities for peer to peer exchanges. People like to connect with their peers. The user admin of Company X would like to see user admins of other companies to share what they're doing and learn from each other. So in these events we will organize birds of a feather lunches or breakfast places to get together. We'll have content for people in the same industry or same segments, same size of company. And there were lots of social interaction possibilities. There were cocktails, happy hours where people would just connect. And with the pandemic we went virtual, trying to preserve those opportunities to connect. But by going virtual we went from 2,000 people, 2,500 people to 20,000 people. So much bigger scale. And therefore the opportunity to connect is now through breaking out in chat rooms or visiting a virtual room where you can chat with other people that are like minded or maybe you have challenges and questions and you want to hear from others. So that's one area. In all those events we use the opportunity, we put the opportunity in front of people for them to share what they thought of us. So we have always a live booth in the live event or a virtual booth in the virtual event. So people could go and say, hey, I want to share my review. I want to share what I think of Blackline with Trust Radius or Garner peer insight or G2. And that was a great opportunity for that advocacy to channel it out into the public. I think we harvested at least 500 reviews in the last event, something like that, like big numbers. And it is just an opportunity for people to share with no pressure from our side. And that's when good things happen. People are super happy that they're asked about their opinion and they're engaged by the vendor.

So the way you're describing it, and there are some very important lessons I'm taking away here. One, it's not a funnel, right? Like the typical sales marketing funnel. You high volume and then you ask some people and a few give you referrals or feedback. You have this flywheel of advocacy going on. You starts with the ideal customer and it looks like you've segmented very well who the users are and group them together and based on them, how you monitor the wow the experience. Then you serve them different types of, let's call it content between sending them gifts to hosting events. And it's forever going on this advocacy in a flywheel versus a funnel. And that leads to testimonials for you. Social media posts, reviews on G2 crowd or trust radius. This is very interesting. How do you though I want to double click on this. How do you incentivize people to participate? Because that is hard. You talked about it earlier. A lot of people are shy. Some people need approval from top down. How do you incentivize them in general?

The underlying incentive for them is human pride. You're proud of what you're doing. I'm going to give you a channel to tell the world about all the wonderful things you're doing. So the advocacy is never about me. The pitch is not, hey, let's. I'm not asking you to go talk about Black Line. I'm asking you to talk about what you're doing. And I'm Blackline, we're just vehicles for your greatness. It's not Black Line's greatness, it's your greatness. It's essentially allowing people to talk about what they're doing, what they're proud of, their accomplishments. And my objective is not to do it once and be done. I want you and I to, or you and my team to continue having that relationship for a long time. I would like you to talk about what you're doing today. But hey, you might be taking blackline into a new division, a new subsidiary. You might be getting a new, new functionality in the future. We want to continue doing this. I want also maybe your help. Other people in your industry, companies like yours, want to talk to you about what you're doing with blackline. So maybe you will help us. Taking one or two calls to tell them about your experience buying, implementing, using, deploying. So it's not a one touch and we're done. This is ideally a relationship that will continue through the years and that will have multiple touch points. If you love us, we have 320,000 users or something like that. If you love us like the vast majority do, you might appreciate little tokens, a water bottle with the Blackline logo. We talk about the cupcakes. Maybe you will be a Bluetooth speaker, a little speaker with a Black Line logo. People, especially accountants, our customers, they don't really have that many brands selling to them. And the few that they use, they love them.

They.

So they really like these little gifts we send them. And it's not about the gift, but it's about the feeling connected to what they use every day. So we try to do it. It's never a big gift. It's always something small, a token of appreciation and hopefully we'll have some gratitude. You will take the call again next time when I need your help for the next reference. Call on the incentives. There's also a big incentive for people that are career oriented. Like sometimes talking about what they're doing with Blackline, I mean, enhances their internal career. When we present you as an example of best practices in accounting, hey, your boss might take notice. I have a great person in my team that is doing great things. Blackline, who has all these thousands of customers in accounting is telling me that my employee is wonderful and is a best practice. We've seen people's careers take off, so that's that. Some people take it from that angle. A vendor is telling internally they're giving me ammunition to actually expand my influence, take what I know into other areas of the company. So it's a partnership. It works from that point of view as well. Career advancement.

You got 320,000 users, so that's a community on its own. It's a massive community and everyone wants to feel loved and appreciated through acts of service and gifts and praise. And you're effectively making these professionals look like celebrities or thought leaders in front of their peers, which advances their career both internally and maybe externally. People, you're amplifying them. The good work they're doing that is brilliant. Now questions are on what are some tools of the trade? What are some tools to do this at scale? You're not jangling Excel spreadsheets and making phone calls to CS and sending emails to your sales team.

So many things we use our CRM system. There's a lot of data there we use for the incentives. We use the tool called Influitive. It manages the incentives. We had a number of direct mail vendors like Sendoso where you can send gifts, direct mail, send physical goods to people in your database. One click we connect the system that our customer success story. People use to see where a customer is in the life cycle, the deployment, and understand their mood, how happy they are at the time. So is all of this, plus we have. I have really great people in that advocacy team that have been with us for years and actually have formed direct connections with many customer executives. So as I said, it's not a one off. There are people that we've known for near five years and they've done many things for us and we've done many things for them. It's both ways. When they need something, they know they can come to marketing and we'll help them. Is not one way relationship, it's two way.

So some great processes here, starting with your segmentation of your customer base to monitoring them, using internal tools to see what are the leading indicators of happiness, and then leveraging tools like Influitive and sendoso and G2 and trust radius. Now, a lot of times it's very easy to prove the ROI of sales, right? You send a bunch of emails, you make a bunch of phone calls, you get people through a funnel and you close it. But advocacy, community, things like this It's a little harder to prove ROI because you're sending gifts, you're throwing events, there is people sending referrals your way or writing testimonials online. And everyone is in this instant gratification. Show me the roi. Three months in six months. And I know a lot of people here might be wrestling with that. How do you prove the ROI of this? Because this is not something that happens overnight, it takes months. Unlike you put an SDR team and they make cold calls and you get a bunch of leads. This takes a little bit of time, right?

Yeah, it takes a little time, a little bit of money, a little bit of effort. And I see there is this two angles. A portion of this I see as fixed costs is the cost of doing business. Like having a small team that helps or get references, sales references, we centralize all. When you want to sell, a request comes through the system and it goes to the team and they, we use our system to identify the accounts that would be well suit suited for that reference. That's the cost of doing business, cost of doing sales. You got to have it. Without that you're not going to have that sale. Then there are other incremental, let's say variable expenses, the incentives, the little gifts, I've grouped those as part of client marketing. The client marketing team has some goals for pipeline generation from within existing accounts. So we have what we call a sales and marketing contract with our sales counterparts and there's a number of deals, a number of dollars that will be generated through, in every quarter and then throughout the year. And so client marketing, the ROI is really that pipeline that we're generating and then bookings that come at the end. So we're constantly monitoring how much we're doing and how much is coming in. But in the client marketing side, it's a longer game. You're here for long term. And we have goals, we have pretty substantial goals when you think about it. I think the renewal rate is all we have like 97% or something like that logo renewal rate. And I think last year we had 100, 809% net dollar retention rate. So the all those great numbers come because sales is doing a great job, the product is really good. The customer team is doing a great job at getting their customers life and we're doing a good job at helping those customers feel connected to the brand, inquire, Buy More if they want tell their story. So the ROI is embedded in all of those metrics and ultimately success is success or failure belongs to sales, customer and marketing Integrated, not only marketing. So I never measured my ROI as like only marketing. It's I instead my success is pegged to all those things in company results.

That's a great way to think about it, right? The customer's journey doesn't end when sales has closed the deal. It just starts with your company. And through customer success and client marketing, you are continuing to build that relationship beyond your product or service. And I often say this, that if you fall in love with your customer and make them successful beyond your product or service service you'll be indispensable to them. There's a question here around gifting and for gifting whole teams after go live, do you only send gifts to the team leaders who are your main point of contact during implementation, or do you send it to the individuals involved? It's a little complicated. Or it can be complicated with remote.

It all depends. But in general, the ideally I mentioned the cupcakes. Ideally is a box of 20 cupcakes for the whole team. And it doesn't have to be too expensive or too complex. It is. The thought that matters is that you're thinking of them. You're celebrating their success. For a leader, the gift might be a T shirt, something small or something small for their desk. But it all depends on our relationship. What's appropriate for that account and what it would take. Some companies have a no nothing policy, no gifting whatsoever. And we've seen those. But in general, I've tried to make the gifts small enough that they are just a token of appreciation. It's never anything too big that would make some people uncomfortable or think twice about getting it.

What are the key metrics to stay on top of? Like for a smaller company?

Effectively, for me, my most important metric is measure how many accounts are referenceable today and how many do you want at the end of the year. Like number of accounts that you can call on to be references. Measure how many publicly available reusable assets you have at the beginning of the period and how many you should have at the end of the period and push yourself to accomplish those goals. If you're growing rapidly, it means that your one reference might be used once, twice, three times, five times. You will exhaust that reference at some point. That will be a hindrance to your growth. You gotta manage how you use your references very carefully. Otherwise growth is not possible. So bias towards reusable assets. You hear this from many companies. I want three references. Let's say I want. I want to talk to three companies. It might be that you're Going to be able to talk to maybe one company and I'll give you two other recorded assets. Because at the rate I'm growing mathematically, there's no way to give everybody three live references. When you're a small startup growing 100% a year, it just won't happen. The numbers don't add up. So managing strategically, your references, live conversations versus reusable assets and positioning those accordingly. With your it's okay to tell your prospects, hey, I'm growing 100% a year. I have only 10 live customers. When you're a very small startup, you will talk to one of them, but I cannot put three or four because they need to talk to other people. I'm growing too fast. It's okay.

I'm going to draw a parallel to other channels for growth. Right? Like sales development. When you're in the B2B space, you're cold calling, you're cold emailing, or product led growth, for example, you're leveraging your product. And so when you're looking at sales or Sales Development SDRs, leads are just the lagging indicator, right. There's so much of it goes into the messaging, the activity type and the number of touch points. Those are the leading indicators. Right. And even with product led growth, the leading indicator of people referring you to or becoming your advocates and or creating leads for you is them having wow moments through the product and then you touch them. And so the parallel here is number of referenceable clients and number of referenceable assets is a leading indicator of closed deals and leads to follow. And if that number goes up, then your number of leads through referrals and close deals via influence will also go up.

Exactly. I think when you think about how strategically or not how strategically you're managing the pool of references and referenceable assets is an indicator of how sophisticated you are as a marketeer and as a company. So you're thinking about it for the first time. You're very early stage. The sophisticated companies will know exactly what the white space hey, I'm lacking assets in this industry, this size of company and this country and I'm going to go strategically, source those references and those assets. That's where you should go over time, where you are in the continuous. Are you just thinking about it or are you already managing it as gold? I always said references are gold. Like referenceable accounts, public reference assets, they are gold. You got to dig for gold and manage it strategically.

And the other thing is, there is no silver bullet or growth hack here. You got to follow the process Start by segmenting your audience, making sure you're capturing the leading indicators of wow moments, looking for them, then reaching out at scale, making sure they're in a CRM, they're captured. You're using a tool like Influence and Sendoso and then following that whole pattern. Leads just don't come. They are a result of a bunch of activities. And this is a fantastic channel here. Now, when is the right time to start this? When you're a startup, right, You're a new startup founder. How do you know when is the right time?

Oh, I think when you. I've been in that situation where you're in a startup, you're early stage, you have a few customers, the sooner the better the sooner because at that point you want to partner with your customers. You want your customers to understand that you're a startup, you are smaller company and you are on their side. You want them to be successful as a customer, but they probably want you to be successful as a vendor. No one wants to buy from a company that won't be around. And so I've been in the receiving end where a small startup has reached out and say, hey, we want to be better vendors to you. Tell us what else you need, what features maybe belong to the advisory board and more importantly, help us tell our story. And they recruit me, recruit the customer early in the process and they make it a partnership. And they don't expect you to sing praises and say nothing critical. They expect you to be authentic. And when you're a startup, you understand that not everything is perfect and it will never be. And it's okay. Your references will be able to talk about what you do well and what you don't do well. Yet hopefully they will express that confidence that you're going to overcome obstacles and be better over time. And authenticity in the from the references is a key ingredient on making those references useful in the sales process. So it's okay the earlier you can go and have that frank conversation with a customer, hey, you want us to be better vendors, help us. And I've been very receptive to that.

We started the community attraction, community advocacy pretty much when we had happy customers who were staying with us and high retention. So sign a product market fit and effectively. We started hosting events from then, right? And then some of these things we haven't implemented. But this is a great masterclass for me as well. It's in terms of the blocks I need to pick now. Tell us about modern B2B marketing. We talked a lot about advocacy marketing. What is modern B2B marketing if you don't have the mechanics or the budget, you're too early as a startup founder. What are some things you can do in modern B2B marketing?

Modern B2B marketing I think it's interesting, it has a lot of angles here. One depending on the is really understanding your objective, the company type of company that you're trying to reach. So if you're selling to very big accounts, it's very different than if you're selling to in volume to smaller accounts. If you're selling to large accounts, maybe understanding that is a long game that is going to take a long time to long sales cycles. Many B2B marketeers ignore that attribution. It's a very tricky game. Everybody's what's your attribution model? What is your one channel? There's no one channel. You got to have all channels because all channels collectively are the ones that are converting your big customers, big prospects into customers. So it's not a one channel game, is multiple channels and all of them have a role. You got to understand the role of the channels and not castigate one channel, assuming that it's not converting and then kill it. I've seen many marketeers do that. Oh no, I'm going to kill this channel. Kill this channel. I'm going to only do this. You need all channels and is the mix that you need to alter to get to an outcome. And in B2B long sales cycles there is as much art as science. The understanding that, that the mix matters and playing with it, that's one lately the intent world there are vendors out there that have intent data. If you can invest in a tool that really helps you identify when people are in market looking for a solution like yours, I've seen that produce good results, really good results. Managing your marketing budget for digital advertising is very important. Before the pandemic, prices were relatively cheap. With the pandemic, all of a sudden the entire world decided that digital is the place to be. There is no other place to put your money. The prices go through the roof. You can spend a gazillion dollars without knowing because everybody's bidding the same keyword. So really at some point being strategic on how much money you're going to put in that channel versus other channels. There might be other channels that perform better in the pandemic than just digital ads with Google. So it's being very strategic and understanding the context like what's going on right now, what is everybody else doing and what should I be doing? That or maybe alter.

Where does Martech play into this? There's so many tools, tons. And the Martech landscape is just blowing up. I get three dozen calls a day, somebody trying to sell me some tool or the other. Is there a minimum viable Martech solution for a smaller company that you would recommend so you're not jangling Excel spreadsheets and whatnot? Right. Because usually when you're an early founder, you're focused on one channel and then you're at product market fit and then you start testing a number of other things. What is your preferred Martech stack? You'd say.

In general, in the topic of Martech, you need your CRM. Whatever you're using for CRM, you need your CRM, you need your marketing automation then solution and if you can afford it. I've used some of these VM intent tools to know who to target and when to target them, identify accounts that are in market or doing research. It's been good for the size of company that I've been with in the last years. Beyond that, there are a lot of point solutions and you could go crazy trying one new thing every day. In general, what I would say is, or at least what works for me. Once a year I go to a couple of events, marketing events, and I spend the time actually the day in looking at technology, getting demos, understanding and once and understanding the landscape. And once we have something, once we've decided to bring something to the company, we married for a while. I push my team. We're going to whatever we have, we're going to make it successful, we're going to use it to the best and we're going to give it a few years to mature, do well. And I don't want my team to be constantly thinking on new things to replace what we just bought. That's a trap I've seen in many companies our size bigger, where people are constantly lured by something newer that's slightly better. But it's a lot of effort to turn off what you have and buy something else, deploy it. You're in this perpetual cycle of installing something new, learning something new and not letting it mature. So I would say resist the urge to try a gazillion of new things every year. And when you buy something, commit to it, let's say give it two or three years at a minimum and commit to it, even if in two years it's not the best tool out there. Hey, there's value on using what you have, on improving your usage, deploying it versus just replacing it. With something that will take six months to get deployed again.

Would you be open to sharing what CRM and marketing automation you guys use? You did mention influentive for advocacy and Sendosa, but would you be open to sharing what tools you use?

Yeah, for CRM we have Salesforce and Marketing Automation. I think we use Adobe Marketo but those are pretty standard tools of companies.

Our size and on the earlier stage, HubSpot's a pretty good tool because it's got the CRM and marketing automation things. A lot of it is just how can you curate content and communicate with your customers at the right time and even with us when we do this webinars, we do two webinars a week and we promote it via email. And the biggest driver for conversion is email. We'll send an email and we'll get four or five hundred people registered. Now I want to dive into teams. So much of what you do in marketing is powered by people, right? When is the right time for a company to bring on a CMO and also CMO versus VP marketing. What's the difference?

Interesting. So let's start with the difference Marketing. The VP of marketing is usually someone that is more in the tactics, in the working in the campaigns, the number crunching, working with sales. The CMO does all that. But owns usually the position and messaging for the whole company has a very big input into the strategy of the company. It's a peer to the head of sales. So it's not subservient to sales, but it's more like a peer to sales. It has something to say definitely on the strategic roadmap for the company partnerships. A lot to say on the strategy from the product side, what are the adjacent areas that companies want to colonize? Keeps an eye or maybe manage. In my case I manage a competitive intelligence. Really understands what's going on with their competitors and the market and how it is changing. Is talking to analysts and observers of the industry to understand what they see but also influence them. So the owns or a big portion of a big chunk of customer satisfaction and the customer experience. So the role is bigger, has more. The CMO has a larger scope interactions with all the peers in the C suite and I would say the expectations are a little bit higher. When you're the VP of marketing, the CEO and the C level people tell you what the strategy is. When you're the CMO they might ask you what is input into the strategy and where we should do.

Now that's good advice here because a lot of people may Jump to hire a CMO sooner than they think they need. But like you're an early startup at a seed stage or series A stage, and you just need leads. And to generate that, maybe you need a VP of marketing who can just dive into the tactics and then you get to a point where you're maybe 5, 10 million in revenue or your Series B+ company. And now you need that customer advocacy and you need strategic input, analyst relations. And then you bring a CMO at that time. Is that the right way to think about it?

You'd say, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Some companies are public and like also the branding and what you say about the company reflects also on the stock. There's an investor's communication angle that is managed by the CFO for sure. But marketing and investor relations should work together. So it's just maybe the place to start really is with VP of marketing, the cmo. I see it more like larger companies when you're already in the hundreds, if not thousands of people.

Because sometimes what happens is we up level the title and we bring somebody and then we get upset when the skill set is not aligned. Like you bring on a CMO and they want to do these things that are like brand marketing, analyst relations, all these things. But I'm like, I just need some leads tomorrow. So you know, but they're not in the weeds in the tactics. Now let's say you hire this VP of marketing, Andres. What do you expect from them in your first few months? Maybe first 30, 60, 90 days. What does success look like when you've hired a VP of marketing?

I think for, for the first 30 days, this person is learning, observing, getting the team, establishing himself or herself, the peers, really understanding the product or the solutions you're selling. I expect, at least on my end, when I was starting my in my roles earlier, I've always started with like understanding the solution. You cannot market. You don't understand. You need to be close to the solution. The technology, what is it for? How is it valuable? Who cares about this? What's the experience? So investing. The more time you can invest with the solutions early on, the better because that will inform your programs, communications, your campaigns in the future. So for the first 30 days is all immersion. I'll say the first 90 days is immersion plus forming an opinion and a plan. And month two and three is already starting to execute in that plan. And you adjust. But having an opinion and having an idea where you're going, what you're trying to do, problem you're trying to solve, and how you're going to do it and starting execution is key. I'm a fan of iteration. It will never be perfect. Your plan will never be perfect. But you need to know what you're trying to do and adjust as you go. And having a shorter time frame to adjust is better. I usually don't wait on three months and see how we went as we go. Adjust as we go. And as new information emerges, new plans emerge, new people, new suggestions, change the plan.

What are the key skill sets you'd look for in a VP of marketing and what are some leading indicators to ensure that they're successful?

Vpo, marketing, out running marketing and especially the imagination. I would say number one, I would look for affinity for sales. Really understanding how sales works, what sales idea. I like my profile. I like someone that has either carried a bag or work with sales and understands that because that will open up, open the communication and avoid frictions. That's one. Digital skills understanding definitely digital marketing. Different technologies. Having worked with tools like you mentioned, Marketo, Salesforce or other CRM. Understanding the integration, minimum integration necessary to produce campaigns at scale and be able to crunch the numbers and see what's going on. I would also look for can do attitude, shorter time frames. When someone tells you hey, I'm going to need three quarters to do that, I would say run anything. Measuring quarters for a startup, forget about it. You want someone that thinks maybe weeks and days and if they think quarters and years, there's a mismatch there. No startup has quarters. So that time synchronization of timing the way to think about time. And also it's harder to measure. But I will look for someone that is not perfect, understand that he or she is not perfect and is just wants to be better every day. Improve a little bit. If a candidate sounds like it's perfect, everything I do is perfect. Run away. There's no perfection in this business. Everything we know now in marketing, especially digital marketing, will be forgotten in a couple years. Like all half of the vendors in the might be gone consolidated in the marketing tech stack space. So you want someone that adjusts quickly learns and doesn't think that knows everything.

The only thing constant is change the rate of innovation. It brings new technology, new processes, new mechanisms. But the one thing I want to zoom in on for the people listening here, especially startup founders, is the importance of carrying a bag. A lot of the times I advise companies and they say we have this VP of marketing, they want to focus on a bunch of things and I asked them if your VP marketing has not carried a bag or understands the value of a bag, like how is it going to impact sales? And specifically have they carried a quota before? Chances are they don't understand the implications to sales as well as somebody who's carried a quota. And then you'll start getting a lot of fluff. Marketing versus how does this convert to a lead? Right, like your number one goal is sales. Sales goal is to close deals. Marketing's goal should be to generate leads. But have you carried a bag before? That is a very important learning for a lot of founders. Looking as you look back on your career, your illustrious career, what's one piece of unconventional marketing advice that people ignore but shouldn't?

Oh man. Unconventional marketing advice. I would say one of the things that people don't exploit the way they should is the value of happy customers in the sales process. Your super happy customer today might be moving from company A to company B. And when that happens, most organizations have different salespeople. One person covers company A, another person covers company B. So that relationship is lost because the happy customer move from, let's say, you to another salesperson. Good companies track that and make sure that we follow our happy customers and when they move to another company, that the new sales reps, they know about it and we approach them and we don't lose the relationship because it causes an arm and a leg to start from scratch. In this case, if you have someone that loves you, has used you before that company, chances are this person is going to be willing to take you into another place or open the door so you can sell in another place. Follow your happy customers as they move from company to company. Those are your easiest, fastest converting leads into deals.

As founders and early startup companies, we say okay, sales, closes deals or just win the deal and then they keep it separate. Right? Like sales, marketing and then customer success. And I think if you look at it as, it's not closed one, but you're really starting the relationship with the customer and how do you make them successful and then integrate them into your marketing? You will become successful as well. Any recommendations for books or things that you've read that's been very influential for you?

I don't read business books. I don't read business books or marketing books. I spend my time reading novels. But the best time, at least for me, is being as I described, one day or two days in an exhibit hall looking at all the marketing technology. Really immerse yourself there, look at the demos, ask all the questions, don't let yourself be sold. But you ask all the right questions. Every time I do that, I come out smarter and with more ideas because it's a collective market, the whole market making you smarter. So it's not about getting sold, but it's about understanding what's going on and how things are changing.

There's so much truth to that. I could never read, and I hate reading, by the way. And so my hack was starting traction. And every week for the last several years, I've interviewed two people, very smart people like yourself, and I asked them questions and I learned so much from that experience. And there's something to be said about novels when effectively by reading and learning, you're expanding your brains. And novel is a different kind of stimulus as well. Andres, thank you so much for joining us. Wishing you great success. Have a wonderful rest of the week.

Thank you so much and you too, and the whole audience. Good luck to all of you.

Love and peace.

Bye bye. Take care.

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