How to Build your Marketing Stack with Gorgias and OpenClassrooms | SaaStr Software Community

And so today we're going to talk about how to build your marketing stack. And so I invited both Alice and Pauline because they represent different stages of startup life with different types of mark tech stack progress. But first I want to give you a quick outlook on what I'm seeing. And so I've worked at Multiple high growth SaaS businesses as a growth leader. And the data we're seeing right now, this is from Tomas tunguns, is that CAC is increasing both in B2B and B2C. And you're going to see how that relates. Right. And it's increasing every year. Right. And it's increasing significantly, which means that our ability to react is going down. Wait, there you go. Our ability to react is going down because our channels are becoming saturated. What this means is that channels are saturated and we are starting to compete with money, which is not good. Right. We're just spending more money on each channel. The way that CMOs are reacting, this is 2018 Gartner data, is that the budgets of CMOS is they are shifting from every category towards martech. We're talking of human labor, paid agents, everything is shifting to MarTech. Right. That is how CMOs in the US and the number here, N is pretty big. N is like 600 companies. Right. The way they're reacting to stay competitive is to spend more on tech. Right. On martech. And that's very interesting. And if you wonder where are they spending money, they're spending mostly on data gathering. So data analytics, marketing, customer analytics and technology and acquisition. The second category is very interesting because you can translate that as the paid spend of Facebook and whatnot moving towards martech acquisition tools. Okay, now that we have the Martech outlook and the marketing shift, a couple of things I want to invite you all to go on slido. Yes. Last slide for this. So if we can pop up the Slido slide. And I want to invite you all to take your phone and go on slido.com for this session so that you can start asking the panel questions. I will start the session with a couple of questions of my own and we'll get started that way. Okay. So first, welcome, Pauline. Welcome, Alice. Can you please quickly present yourselves and your company and what you do at the company?

Yes. I work at Open Classrooms, which is a European leader in online education. So we basically train individuals, people from all over the world for high demand job. And my role at the company is to handle from the moment a person shows an interest in open classrooms to make sure they get the best experience until they become a customer and a student, until they eventually graduate from our school. Open Classrooms is We're now around 200 employees and we have offices in Paris, HQ, London and New York.

Hi. So I'm Alice. I'm the co founder and CEO of Double, which is a productivity tool that makes delegation more accessible and easier. We are starting by building tools and workflows for executives and their assistants to work better together. We're still super early. Early stage. We launched a year ago and we're based in New York and the team is seven people today.

Okay, keep the mic. So you're the as the founder and CEO of a very early stage, like almost pre product market fit startup.

Definitely pre product market fit.

Yeah. Let's give it some hope. What kind of market stack do you have right now at your stage?

So we've kept things simple today in marketing there's only me doing it and then I have someone in customer success who's helping me. And so we're mostly using Intercom for one on one interaction with our users. We're in private beta, so we have a smaller set of users. And then Zapier and then a CRM that we are hacked with Trello basically. And we're currently looking to move to an actual CRM in the next month or so.

Cool. Okay, Puddle, same question. So open classroom, 200 people now. What kind of stack do you have now?

Sure.

For marketing we have to deal with a high volume of users, so we have different tools. We use HubSpot, Salesforce, Blue Shift for email marketing. We have Zapier also Amplitude Tableau for data analysis. So quite a number of tools to be able to now scale the company.

Cool. Okay. And so I think there's an interesting thing here where we are seeing. So I've worked at like companies the size above or after Open Classroom and it's interesting for you all to understand like the shift in Martech stack by company size. But also, and I think that's the next question that I have for Elise is the decisions that you're taking now as CEO and founder of the company, some of them will be hard to reverse. If you choose a CRM now, it's going to be really hard to go back on that later on the cost of migration. And so what I want to know is what kind of vision do you have for your Martech stack? How are you making that decision right now? More Martech stack, less Martech stack. We saw what CMOs are doing. Yeah.

We were just mentioning it earlier. I think the decision we have to make today is how tool heavy do we want to be or how much do we want to rely on just humans doing the marketing work? We're still at a stage where the product evolves a lot. We're not at product market fit. And so we're making decisions that are impacting the product. And so today we're thinking more about we have to rely on humans to be able to be flexible, to move super fast to experiments and later down the road be able to go towards tools when we have a better idea of what we want to do and how we want to optimize what works. So right now we're more human heavy, but we are making decisions of going to a CRM and being able to define the best ways to grow with that CRM today.

And Pauline, you were telling me earlier about the role of your team at the communicating. Tell us quickly the size of your team at Open Classroom, how it's grown recently and how you work with other teams like interoperability with engineers and with marketing.

Yeah, sure. So Open Classroom has been growing very fast over the past year. So when I joined, we were three people in the marketing team. We're now eight people. And we have more and more experts in their field to help us to go further in the different funnels that we have. We as the marketing team work a lot with of course the sales team, but also with the tech team. As of today, it's a bit complicated for the marketing to be completely autonomous while we. So we rely a lot on the tech team and we need to find a way to also as a marketing team to be more technical and to have more competencies in house, even though we are not real developers. But maybe this, this will come at some point. I think it would be useful for company, but we really had to. At the same time, we become more. We have more experts in the different fields to make sure so that ourselves as marketer, we are able to know a bit more of coding, to be able to connect our different tools with APIs or just to go faster and have more experiments, as Alice was saying.

Cool. And so what's the current scope of your team in terms of tools? What kind of channels do you cover? What kind of tools do you cover? Right now.

Our role is mainly to generate leads. That's the main role of the marketing team at Open Classrooms. So we have a team who is working on paid acquisition and another one on organic acquisition. And we work a lot with the sales teams who is dealing with a lot of leads. We have to make sure so that we are really able to track and measure all the investment that we are doing. Quite lengthy sales cycles and we need to really be able to always constantly measure everything that we are doing. But mainly it's towards lead generation as of today.

And so there's a lot of scope there. And you talked earlier about how it's becoming more and more technical. I want to know like, how do you decide what you do in your team and the ability of your team versus when do you call the technical, the engineering team in?

Sure. When it's only our team who is being exposed to what we're doing. I think we're doing as much as possible to do it ourselves again just to save time and to be able to experiment faster. As soon as what we are doing is going to impact other teams, it's going to also touch the product. This is where we go to the tech team. But we try as much as possible to generate data and to come to the different teams saying, hey, we've been doing this, we have some data that showed us that we maybe could go further and also help us to have the team following us on this. But we really try as much as possible to be independent. That's why we are trying to be more technical on our side. But when we get to touch other products or other teams, this is where we go to the other one.

Alice, when I met you a couple of years ago, you were one of the first marketing people at Front Front App and then you moved to product and marketing at Sunrise, which was acquired by Microsoft and now you're the founder of your company, which means you've got an interesting perspective of having a marketing background in successful startups and now being the decision maker and as a right now pre product market fit at a company. Right. And so my question is how do you leverage Martech or how do you or how are you trying to leverage Martech at your stage right now with the experience that you've had in those past successful companies, what would you do differently? What would you do the same?

It's interesting because the jobs I had in marketing before are so different than what's required for me today. At Sunrise, for example, we had 1 million monthly active users. So we were not about discovering who our customer was or how to speak to them. It was mostly just how to activate them, how to make them come back to the app. Today we're still doing a lot of customer developments, doing a lot of acquisition and so they're parts of marketing which are really different. I think what helps at my stage is still being able to know what's going to come ahead and getting ready for that. So even if we're not at product market fit and we're still figuring out the right product to build and who to sell it to, starting to think about brand, about how we want to sell the product later down the road, how we want to build communities, which we did at Sunrise and at Front before that. And keeping this in mind as we're building experiments, an example that I can give is right now we're really focused on building a community around what we're building. And so we have this entire concept of having a waiting list that people can sign up on on our website and then we send them emails to keep them updated about what we're doing. In a way, we used to do a lot of content at Sunrise and at Front before that. And so even though the goal is a bit different here, there's still things that stay the same between experiences.

So I want two perspectives of like culturally. Right. Elise is based in New York, I'm based in sf. And Pauline, you're based in Paris. Right. And so I want to understand first maybe by asking Pauline, like, what do you think your focus is on product versus marketing for your company? If you're more marketing focused or product focused and what are the consequences of those choices for you and your company?

Sure. Well, Open Classrooms is definitely focused on product right now and this is how the company has been able to grow. Also, things are also changing now that we are scaling and willing to really develop the company. But as a marketing team, we are trying as much as possible also to yes, more and more with the product team, with the tech team and to show them also that marketing is really here to help the company grow. And it's not just message or trying to do the things on our own. It's also really part of the product itself. If you don't have the right message or if you don't reach the people that could benefit from the product is going to be difficult to also expand the company. But what we've seen also recently is that we are more and more so working with other companies to also help us build our marketing. We recently signed a partnership with Salesforce and Microsoft who are co developing training path, tailored training path with us. So you also help us to really get the brand and the marketing emphasized to reassure people that we are serious and that we are really committed not only in the product but also showing who we are.

Cool. I have one last question. For both of you. And then we'll take the slido questions and I encourage the audience to go on slido. I really want this to be as interactive as possible. So my last two kind of questions is I want to understand your policy around build versus buy and then I want to know how do you make your marketing competitive? How do you build a moat for your company if you're taking, let's say, generic tools the same as your competitors? You want to start, Paulina?

Yeah, sure. As I said, the company is growing a lot now and so we have to take into consideration that the teams are also very working a lot with each other. So every time now that we are actually choosing a tool, we are trying to make sure that it's going to serve the teams and that the investment that we are doing is going to have the right roi. We had tons of tools being used by all the teams within the company. And as of today, we are more and more looking at tools which can give us the right, right data. So we need tools which are going to be able to communicate between themselves so we are able to track our performance, but also to offer a great user experience, but also make sure that a tool that is being used at marketing, for instance, is going to be able to be connected to Salesforce because this is the tool that the sales team is going to use to handle all the leads that we are doing.

On our side. The resources are super limited. As I said, there's only seven of us in the team and so we're all the build resources that we have go to the product. They don't go to marketing yet. So we are mostly buying everything that we're doing right now. But I'd love to know if you think we're making a mistake and if we should like change course.

I have a different opinion and my opinion is the teams I have built are really engineering focused and I buy a lot, but I customize a lot and I build a lot because I believe that's my competitive moat. I believe that if I use the same tools as my competitors in the same way, how am I going to win? If I can only win by spending more dollars on the same channel, that's a way to lose. And so I don't always build everything but my. For example, if I look at my past two companies at Drift and at Segment, I was the only marketer and the rest of my team was engineers. And so we were building custom solutions, often on top of off the shelf stuff, but we're building custom on top of it so that we can have a competitive moat that we would create. So that is my approach, which is like very engineering heavy and it has worked. And so let's take the first question here from Angie from SmartBnB. What's the essential marketing stack every SaaS should have, regardless of size? So I'll take the first dab at it. I've built that three times at a small company mentioned and then segment and then drift. And for me it really starts by having some kind of data collection, being able to understand who's on your website, who's on your app, what are they doing? The first thing is I need to collect and to understand. And so I spent, for example, I mentioned I spent the first two months building a really deep tracking plan to understand everything they were doing. Right. But there was enough volume which is like Alice can give us a different perspective at low volume things. Right. And then I need to be able to like do some bi. Some analysis. So I plug in some amplitude and if you're a small company, it's basically free, right. So some segments, some amplitude and then I need to reach out to those people based on the analysis. What I do is I break down my audience in different buckets based on their behaviors, based on the demographics, and then I try to customize their experience. How do I customize that? Emails in app messaging, onboarding. So it could be some app queues, it can be some drift, it can be some customer IO so I can touch the multiple channels. But that's basically my stack, right? It's data collection, data analysis and data action is how I break it down. And I want to anticipate another question, which is how much do I pay for that? Because I left both companies, I can actually talk about it. So at my past role, I spend about $300,000 in MarTech stack per year at a discount of about 60%. Right. So the, the list price for those products is about 700K. And then I was leveraging three engineers, so the budget for the team was about a million and that team would bring in about 5 million in revenue. Right. So 300k of martech, 700k worth of people and about 5x return on investment. That's more or less my economics. Pauline, you have a perspective maybe on, on this question?

Yeah, I would have said data for me is essential. If you are not able to know who is coming to your website or what's working, what's not working and what's going on on your product, it's going to be very Difficult even to make choices with marketing. But yes, probably just maybe also where Alice is. But being able to track and then be able to talk with your customers when you're doing whatever you are in whatever stage you are, I think it's really essential that you are always able to get feedback from your customers and also to engage with them with the right message at the right time.

Alice, I think you have an interesting perspective on that one because you're at the very early stage and basically you need to engage for sure you're doing one to one marketing. Do you also need. Do you collect data? Do you do any analysis at your stage?

Yes, we do. We have data everywhere. So we have Tableau. We use mode, which is kind of like amplitude.

Do you have Tableau in the pre product market Fit company?

Yes.

Okay, I'm just checking. Okay.

Our ops director who's in charge of data loves tableau and so he set it up, but we use mode in a smaller size.

So just to understand because you don't have many users or customers. So what do you analyze in tableau? Is it like your own data or is it like market data?

It's our own data. So we have it connected to our products. We have apps that we're in private beta, but we have people using our apps. Right now we're mostly just tracking feature usage and which features are used in the app. Which one should we push for? Which one should we kill? We're killing 50% of the app this week as an example because we realized that it wasn't necessary. So we use it just to help the product. Mostly then mode is more trends. How do people use specific features? Do they come back to it has retention, things like that.

Okay, cool. Let's go to the second question. How to measure marketing activities in B2B sales? Enterprise sales with long sales processes, 9 months plus. Any attribution tips when marketing to enterprise? Yeah, segment sales cycle on the enterprise side is long, maybe not nine months, but some deals are past nine months for sure. And basically my take on it at my stage was to be able to understand the number of interactions with the account. We're talking enterprise. Yeah, with the account over time. So how many times did we touch the account over a period of time? And we do regressions to understand how touches impact our conversion rates. Right. And what we saw, which is fairly obvious, is that the more touch points interactions we have, the higher the likelihood to close. These days there's a word for that, it's called conversational marketing. Right. When I talk about A touch, it's not sending an email because that has zero value. Did the end user receive value from my touch? Which means basically, did they respond to my email, did they call us or were we able to talk to them? Did they came to a booth at an event or did we have a chat with them? So do we have a conversation? What is the length of the conversation and how frequent is that conversation? The name of the model is rfm. It's a recency and frequency model. So how recent is the last conversation and how frequent is a conversation? So if we have five conversations in the past 30 days, that's good, right? It's really good. And so that's how we were measuring marketing effectiveness, the ability to generate conversations responses. So that's what I have. Alice, I think you have some experience in that from your days at sunrise in front of. Not so much a bit now.

So Sunways was B2C, but front was B2B sales. But we had really. Well, really? No, but we had shorter cycles. I wouldn't say that they would take nine months. We did a lot of, on our side, we did a lot of content and a lot of like newsletters. And what you were saying about making sure that you, you stay very present with your lead until they make the final decision. So contacting them on a frequent basis, going back to them, sharing new updates, new features.

Yeah, I want to give a tip that I've used that is very easy is that I send very personal. I send automatically very personal emails that look like text. And there's no link, there's no cta, there's no button. The goal of the email at the enterprise level is to get a response. So the email comes from the sales leader, the sales rep, or the CEO, depending on your company size. The goal is to get a response. The responses are automatically analyzed by Monkey Learn, which is a AI tool. And so I can do some sentiment analysis. Is the response positive, negative or neutral? If it's positive, it goes back to the sales inbox. If it's neutral or negative, it goes to the trash. Right. And the goal of that is to understand are we creating a high volume of positive responses? Right. And that is super scalable. I scale that segment to thousands of emails per week. Let's take the next one. Do we have any golden rules for hiring something, someone versus buying a platform? Alice, I want to start with you because you asked me exactly that question like 20 minutes ago.

Yes. So I don't have the answer. But to rephrase, the question is we are so super small team. We're mostly focused on product right now. And probably the same is I know my next role has to be some sort of marketing role. We've hired on the product and engineering team a lot. And the question is, I don't know which role to hire for because we're still. I'm not sure which product I'm selling, I'm not sure who I'm selling it to. And we're mostly experimenting right now. We're doing events, we're doing a tiny bit of content, we're doing community building, partnerships. And I don't know if I should just give this to someone, to an agency. Should I hire someone internally? How do I make the decision? It's kind of. It goes with the same question.

My take on it is I never hire someone to rebuild a specific product that already exists. Right. I hire who are able to customize complex tools. HubSpot is a good example of that. Use Zapier. But competing, like having a human that competes with an entire company which is dedicated to building a product is a losing battle. There's no way I can hire someone to compete with like HubSpot doesn't make sense. Right. Or any tool to send emails. There's just no value there. Right. And so I try to hire people who can improve existing products further and build relationships with those tools. That's what. Pauline, your team has grown from like three to eight people in the past six months. So maybe you can tell us a bit about how they have specialized and how you decide around like the build versus buy.

Yeah, sure. And it's actually interesting because we are more and more doing things internally, but we are so more and more making sure that the marketing team is also being able again to make the connection sometimes with the different tools and teams. So for instance, in our case, I've been able to connect our CRM tool with the customer success team. So we're able to proactively contact, for instance, students if we need to. And also it's a matter of seeing that all the value that we have somewhere can be shared. And like having people with more and more competencies bits expert in a field, but also being able to have a step back and understand a bit how different tools work and how you can link them is very helpful rather than just being good at just one thing. Like how exactly? Like how do you go further and how do you create value with all the tools and data that you have?

Yeah. The next question is most companies don't invest in data infrastructure segment and such. In the beginning would you say it's the right. When do you say it's the right time to do so? At the beginning is the right time because it's not so much a tooling problem as it is a culture problem. It's always easy to hire a consultant and say we're going to do tracking, we're going to put tracking everywhere in the app. But you haven't really solved the problem, which is people don't know what the events, what the tracking naming is. They don't know how to preserve it. What's impressive, I see them being used from very early stage to segments still uses it, drift still uses it. It's fairly impressive. The downside of Zapier, which you might soon see, is that when you have 200 people building zaps, it's really hard to understand what the data flow is. What are some ways that marketing customer success can work together? Pulling. Take that one.

Sure. Well, in our case the first one was talking to each other. It might look a bit stupid, but at open custom we're always in a bit of a fight. For instance, every time we will launch email marketing campaign then the customer success will come and say hey, we are going to have tons of tickets behind. It's going to kill our KPI and stuff. But we've been able slowly to understand each other's needs and to find ways to reach each other's objective. In our case, when we're for instance we are launching new projects, we are always getting the student success team where they where we could have an impact on their work. So we make sure that we have thought in advance what we need and what we can improve. We are also serving some of their needs. So for instance, I was talking briefly but we have our demarketing team developed a system of alerts so that the customer success can proactively reach out to customers. And this was not possible without the help of the CRM. So just building the bridge and talking to each other for me is the key to success.

Okay, thanks. Someone's asking the question about the world of influencer marketing in the marketing mix and if we use any platform like Cold Square to automate it. I don't know about that platform and I haven't done myself influencer marketing. I've done community marketing and I've built referral platforms for sure influencers if it's in the scope of B2C. I know almost nothing about B2Cuz I do almost only B2B. Alice, do you have from Sunrise Days some stuff on right now to use influencers.

No, we never did that. Nope, sorry.

Okay, well, sorry for that question. Let's move to the to Emil, who's asking a question about open classroom. How do you work with marketing, automation, etc. The second question from the top.

Yeah, well at the marketing if I understood where the question but inside of marketing team as I said, so we have different people working in their expert fields then maybe my job is more to again create a link. For instance, when we have new acquisition campaigns that are being launched, how do we make sure that the people have the right tracking received afterwards the right message that the sales team have the right information about the lead. So really the automation is also more about collecting and enriching the data so that we all have clear information about the leads and customers that we have. I don't know if it answers the question or not. I'm not sure if I understood well, but.

And then I think we'll take the two last questions from the top. So in an early stage startup with no current marketing hires, how would you advise the first dimension hire spend their first three months? Yeah, I've been there and you have been there too.

I'm wondering the same thing. So if you want to answer this one, go for it.

Yeah, for me if you're talking early stage like pre product market fits, the job of that marketing hire is to in finding the market fit. An example of that is that person should be able to build 20 unbounce pages, spend $2,000 on AdWords and Facebook Drive traffic to those pages which have different copies, different appeal to different audiences, different messages and understand the KPIs of what's the click through on my ad, what's the conversion rate on my form, on my unbounce or on my Typeform and who has actually converted. Understand the size of that audience and then give back to your CEO information on like this is the size of that audience Persona, this is how much it costs to reach each of them. This is the quality of that audience and here's the message that appeals best to them. Because building a product is one thing. But imagine Alice builds a product, then she wants to acquire those users. Isn't it better if she already knows exactly the metrics, the cost of acquisition and the conversion. One of the best strategies is often to build a fake payment page. If you have a product that requires payments and there's actually no payment happening, but build a fake payment page and see what is the on payment page conversion does your message and your Fake product resonate well enough that people are willing to pay for it. If the answer is yes, you have a product, just go and build it. If the answer is no, then you have a challenge and that reduces the cost of spending on products. Especially here in France. And I'm French, as you hear, French people tend to build way too much product before they go to markets. Way too much product. So build less product and go to markets sooner. And I'll take the last two questions. How did I take on Intercom at Drift? That's, I'd say fairly easy. So for those who don't know, Intercom is Drift's biggest competitor. And what I did was I created a competitive moat of marketing. What that means is I found channels and I found ways to reach the audience that my competitor was not using. So I could build acquisition at a fraction of the cost of my competitor. Right. And so basically to summarize, what we did is we built an advanced system to predict which companies were about to buy Intercom and we reached out before they would talk to Intercom with a cheaper price offer. So we ran prediction systems, say, hey, those people are going to buy some chats or they're in the market for chats. And we would reach out and it means we were undercutting Intercom on time and on price and we would also go after each of them renewals. So I'm really good at a market when there's a large incumbent, a leader, because I can go after all of their customers and steal their customers. So that is how I do it. And the CMO should be the first marketing team employee. We hire him at the later stage. It's very rare for a person to be able to be very hands on. Your first employee is very hands on and builds everything himself or herself. And then you want that person to also be a good team leader, a good manager and good at building forecasts and, and sitting for hours in executive meetings. That is a recipe for disaster. So for example, I know myself, I'm really good at SaaS, startups between 30 people and 200 people. That's why I left segment, that's why I left Drift, because at a certain stage I no longer do anything. I'm just sitting in exec meetings and looking at slides and that's not what I want. And I have a team of beyond 10 people. It means I'm not doing growth myself, I'm not doing marketing. So you might find those people. It is exceedingly rare because it means that someone who has succeeded at being a team lead, a fantastic leader, and is still very knowledgeable on hands on building marketing. So I would not recommend that at all. And I think we're right on time. 40 minutes. So thank you very much. Thank you, Pauline.

Thank you.

Thank you, Elise, for coming. Thank you all for coming.