How to Scale Greater Than 2x/Yr ARR With Low Budgets and Lean Ops with Gorgias, Vercel, Hypergrowth

Sam.

As a courtesy to our speakers and fellow attendees, we ask that you please silence your cell phones. Please welcome to the stage Excel Heems, Senior Director of Growth Operations at Gorgias, Morgan Palomaris, VP of marketing at Vercel, Martin Gontadnikas, co founder and GP at Hypergrowth Partners, and Guillaume Cabane, co founder and GP at HyperGrowth Partners.

Hello. Hello everyone. Thanks for coming today. Thank you folks for coming. The intro on this week was maybe a bit short, so I'd like the panelists today to present themselves. We can maybe start with you Excel, if you can tell us, you know, what's your role in company.

Yeah. Hello everyone, my name's Excel and I am a senior director of growth operations at Gorgias. Which means that basically my team handles all of the data collection, processing, process automation for all of the GTM teams. So that's going to be marketing partnerships, sales success, et cetera.

Okay, awesome. Thank you, Morgan.

Hi everyone.

Morgan here.

I'm the VP of marketing at Vercel. We are a front end development cloud platform. In terms of what I do all day is just make sure that everybody knows about us and our brand and help the company generate both self serve and sales serve revenue.

Okay, Gonto.

I'm Martin Gontonicas but everybody calls me Gonto, so call me Gonto. Um, I'm his co founder on Hypertos Partners. We help companies with marketing, growth and products. We do a deep advisory and try to help them grow with low CAC growth strategies. Before that I was the SVP of marketing and growth at oddsido, which was a off startup.

Okay. And I'm Guillaume Kevan, already calls me G. So we are the E2G's and I used to run growth at a couple of companies including Segment Drift, Gorgeous, where I worked with Excel and recently I'm an advisor at Ramp and obviously I co run Hypergrowth Partners and I'm your host today. And so today's topic is going to be on scalable low CAC growth strategies. And that's a topic that you know, Gonto and I, we advise what north of 20 companies concurrently fairly late stage companies. And obviously you've been aware that this is a clear shift in what the boards and founders are asking us. And it's no longer like cac, sorry, growth at all cost. It's low CAC at all cost, for better or worse. And then we've got to come up with creative solutions. And so we want to share today some examples and pulling from Vercel and Gorgias Some great examples if you're kind enough to share. So, you know, a couple logos here. Obviously, you know, they're all companies that we have worked with and say in common. The reason why we have Morgan and Excel here in common. Those companies have one thing that's fairly unique and I wanted to pull from this deck here, from the KeyBank capital deck before we kickstart this panel. And this is from like last year's survey, but the best companies, so the top companies have a significantly lower CAC than the rest. Now that might sound obvious, but when you look at the data here at the bottom of this slide, you're seeing it is like $1.05 versus $1.80 and that is like probably one of the most profound differences of the 120 slides. This is the one where you can see the biggest difference. And so it's obviously like how do you achieve that? Okay, so let's dive into some couple examples. We do have some slides which are weird for a panel. We will try to make this as conversational as possible. We love questions. Also this is like a full Latin panel so it might get intense. So be ready for that. And we can start I think with one example which is automated outbound. We have two interesting situations. We have one with Accel here, you're running at Gorgias with a team that has fairly good experience on outbound Outbound.

For a couple of years.

And Morgan, I think you have appetite to do that, a strong appetite. So maybe let's start there. Maybe Excel you can tell us a bit about how it's running and like some of the performance there and what we can learn and copy.

Yeah, for sure. So I mean as G said, we've been doing automated outbound at Gorgias for a while now and I'm going to try and give a quick overview of everything that's involved and it's a lot. So you know, keep it together. So in Outbound we are going to consider three channels. There is the email actually Dmengine, you're going to have email outbound, you're going to have ads and then you're going to have also customer referral. And what we do at Gorgias is our DemandGen engine is fully automated and it is a multi channel approach to all the contacts that are in the companies of our tam. So the first thing that we do is obviously we use quite a bit of data vendors to first have a clear overview of what is our entire tam. And then from there that's when the Strategy comes in. So we're going to be doing a lot of predictive analysis to categorize our tam. Right. And prioritize where we spend our resources. Because as we were saying before, making sure that you're making the most out of your resources, especially when those are quite tight, is paramount. So you want to make sure that you're using high quality data, that you audit it quite regularly and that from there you're making the best decisions possible. So what we do with that, and that's something that we actually started with G when you were working with us at Gorgias, that was in 2019.

That's right.

I think is we use a system of signals which are basically behavioral events that you can scrape the Internet for to understand what your TAM is doing. So a couple examples like let's say a company is so gorgeous. Sorry, circling back here, we're a help desk for E commerce stores. So our Persona are CX people. So imagine somebody in your TAM is hiring for a new CX lead. This is an event for us. Right. This is a signal that they need help to figure out their CX motion. So that's something for us that's interesting. If a company that TAM, say is starting to use another tool in the E comm SaaS world that is also a signal for us, whether that be a competitor, direct competitor Gorgias or just a highly compatible tool like klaviyo yapo, etc.

If I recall, I'm interrupting if I recall from the numbers from back then, when you outbound a prospect with an intent signal, one of those versus not the dollars per contact were three times to four times higher, right?

Something like that. Yeah.

I'm no longer there so I can share the numbers. So three to four times higher revenue per contact emailed when you have a predictive signal.

Yeah, and now we basically just do.

That's all you do?

Yeah, that's all we do now. And there's tons of signals out there. So you know, our entire again, the engine is fully geared around that and so it has a system of branches of depending on one, the high fit of the company, the awareness stage that it's at with all the different signals that we compute and aggregate from there they're going to fall into different branches of actions of. Okay, they're going to fall into first an email sequence and then at the third stage you're going to put in some ads in there and then ask for customer referral and try to have a network map of how you can associate prospects with your customer base or your partners. So kind of putting all of that together using a ton, ton, ton of data and processing, that's intense.

I like it. Actually, let me prompt that with like one slide and let's switch to Morgan, because Morgan, like you want to build that. Actually, I have some data for all of you which I pulled from ramp and so for obvious reasons, I had to obfuscate the actual numbers. But I did give you the lift here. What you have here is the difference between the average cost per contact email between the automated Outbound team and the SDR team. So you have like a, you know, a 2 and a 2.4x difference and then the marginal cost. That's very important because as Excel was pointing out, there's a lot of infrastructure, there's a lot of effort, there's humans, lots of technology, lots of data vendors that you're buying from. So there's a high upfront cost to get it running, but once it's running, the marginal cost to keep it running is extremely low. And so you can see here this 8x difference.

One thing to add is something that to me is interesting, is that to get it running, what you need is engineering in marketing, which is not something very common. But to build it, you need to hire one or two engineers that are working on this, because some of these integrations, some of the things you need to check, they need to be there. One example that I can give you that was pretty complex that we did with humanitek is they saw that companies were buying their product when they sell to engineers, and they saw when the engineers, for example, when the company was going through an upgrade of technology Stack, meaning changing programming language, that was a good time to contact. So we had to get an engineer to look into programming languages that developers were using in LinkedIn, look into programming languages that they were using in the hiring page, and check that every two days. If they were different, that meant that they were going through an apprehensive of the text because they were hiding for something different that wasn't there before. And then through that, using that information, then using an engineer to automate sending the emails and starting to build. All of that means that you're paying for an engineer, but you're starting to replace some of the SDRs that otherwise you're paying. So it's a bit of a switch of the cost as well, even though it increases in the beginning, but then it slows down.

And how many emails do you send a month through Automated Outbound? Thank you. How many Emails do you send a month through your automated outbound program?

Let me recall. So I think in the past quarter. Quarter we sent like about a million million emails.

Yeah.

And how big is your tam? Like a couple hundred thousand. Like core icp.

Couple hundred thousand.

So you're reaching out to every company in your TAM a couple times per quarter? More or less, yes.

Yes. But then again, through that, it's different people at different levels within those companies. And there's a whole strategy too of like who to contact and when. Because I think also our outbound strategy as a whole has evolved quite a bit even over the past couple of years because our position in the market just wasn't the same, obviously. So at first you kind of want to reach out to everyone, get your name out there, make sure that you're known. And then there's a shift that comes in where you have to make sure that you protect your brand reputation, even just for emailing capabilities.

Right.

You get deliverability. Oh, for sure. So you need to work on that. And then it's about really mastering that balance between quantum quantity and quality and then really working into the creative aspect to it. So there's big, again, engineering upfront work. And I would say for us, I mean, we weren't even really engineering, so just kind of learned on the job how to do some of that engineering like work. Today though, I feel like there are a lot of tools out there that can get you to that level of sophistication without being a proper engineer. Engineer. There is a lot of no code or low code tools that can help you do that.

And Morgan, we talked earlier just before this, that you had the yearning, the appetite to do this because right now you're fairly SDR heavy. Where are you on this journey and why this appetite?

Yeah, so Vercel is still a relatively young company and when I joined about two years ago, every single salesperson was hitting their number or exceeding their target solely off of inbound. And when I joined, I was like, wow, I would have loved to actually be a salesperson here instead of on marketing because you guys are all fat and happy. But obviously, as we started to continue to grow and our targets remained highly aggressive, we needed to think about other ways we were going to hit our revenue targets without just relying on inbound. What we did at first is build a product advocates team instead of a traditional inbound SDR team. And so these were. Vercel is a developer company selling to developers. So what we did is we hired people just out of boot camps that may have not gotten a job as an engineer at a company to take on this inbound SDR role. And we did that for like two years. And it worked out quite well for us because they could actually answer the questions that came in through inbound. But as we started to move up market, we needed to move away from just capturing demand from mid market and actually really start bringing demand to us from the enterprise and strategic segment. So we quickly hired 15 outbound SDRs in a period of six months. What we've noticed now is that we have a very heavy or very large SDR team that may not know actually how to go outbound to the developer audience. And so we're asking ourselves, would it be more effective if we actually pivoted to an outbound, an automated outbound model so that we could be sending, you know, tens of thousands of emails a week and then passing anyone that's responding to those emails over to the SDR team and then, you know, are able to shrink the size of the team to be more effective and lower our acquisition costs.

Yeah, I think actually like I have, yeah, I have just here actually the payback period for multiple of my clients, which I obviously normalized here. And this is like looking backwards and starting to shift. But there's something we talked about which is, which is happening, which is the outbound channel both for email and calls were on a, I'd say downwards performance trend over the past 10 years. Mostly because everyone was being like, it was being commoditized, everyone was being like desensitized to getting like personalized emails and calls. And with the arrival of like AI and LLMs, the quality of the content is so much better that there is for now a return of like this renewed performance. Actually like there's this tweet which I found fairly recently, a couple weeks ago of somebody saying that the outbound they're getting from Reamp is the best emails ever. And those are automated, right? Fully automated. There's no human involved in sending this. No human was harmed, at least on our side.

Best crafted spam effective.

But I have a point there which is like generally I'm a happy camper if I provide value in the email. So here's the question I have which is like, if you provide true value, if your email is truly helpful, does it matter if it was written by a human or not?

For the audience that I market to, it doesn't matter. And in fact sometimes if you let them know that it was generated through AI, it has higher click through rates. But that Isn't the same for everybody. Not Everybody's Slanging Developer SaaS software, but.

There'S an honesty aspect to it for sure that people can relate to.

Yes. So I think there is a shift in quality, there's a shift in expectations. I don't think it's going to last. I think there's going to be a return to median in a couple of quarters as people get desensitized again. But for now there's new tools, both on the cold calling as well as on the email side and content creation side that you should go get those conversion rates and those low cacs. And if you're not, I think you're being left behind. You're absolutely getting left behind.

And I think what's key now for all of that is understanding what are the right data vendors to use and if they're not right ones for you is what can you scrap, what can you get out of it? Like you were talking about using tools. But I'm a big believer that if you're using the same tools that all of the rest are using, it doesn't work because it's the same. You have to be unique. I'm a big believer that it's better to be different than better. So if that's the case, it's how can I be more unique? How can I search something different? The rest is not searching. How can I in the email send you something that nobody expects? One example that you had that was pretty good was for example, sending GIFs. You create GIFs with injecting things based on how something would look like or you do a deep fake with something that is more custom now. And I think trying to be a bit more creative on some of those things and trying to actually use the engineers for build, that will make a difference. When you're trying to build these low CAC automated outbound strategies.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, we're good on outbound. You want to shift to another low cac. Okay, so other low CAC far off and gone to here a product led sales.

Yeah. To talk a little bit about this is I think the example that Morgan shared before is fantastic. Most companies become product led growth because they think it's going to be cheap and they think it's going to be just self service. But the reality is that most companies that do productless growth are not self service because in the end they need to get to enterprise because that's where the real money is. But if you only do enterprise and you forget about your user from the PLG perspective, then you're also fucked and it stops working. So to me, thinking about what's a good experience on product LED sales is what makes a difference. And I'll give you an example again, selling to developers. One thing, for example, that we're doing is we copied from Morgan the idea of using these product advocates, which are basically these junior, very, very junior developers that will act as SDRs. But one thing that we're doing, for example, is trying to understand if somebody got stuck trying to implement their product, how do we do that? We started with they click on one place in a dashboard, they click on another and then they come back. If they come back and they don't do anything, something weird is going on. If they click on a section and they stay there for 20, 30 seconds, maybe they are lost. But one thing we're trying to use now is AI to figure out if they are stuck. And then if they are stuck, the question is we want to contact them because we want to be useful, unstuck them and then sell them. But the other question is how creepy can we be? Can we tell them like, hey, you're stuck, we're going to help you, or they don't like it. So I'm a big believer in testing your creepiness level on how creepy you can be with your audience. What's interesting is that with developers, they love us to be creepy because they are like, oh, this is very cool. They did engineering work to be creepy. I love it. So it worked. But when you work with other audiences, maybe it doesn't. But I think starting to think about how to build your product LED sales, maybe starting to use more AI, starting to automating and testing your creepiness level is a good way to think about PLs to create these enterprise level deals from a product growth perspective.

And if we take a step back, I think we've had this debate a couple times where we're getting asked from founders on the advisory front all the time to help them build product LED growth all the freaking time. And we ask why do they want to do PLG when they don't have a PLG product? And the truth is, if you actually deconstruct the why, it's because they want low cac and they just mentally built the bridge that product LED growth means free signups, free signup is low cac.

That, that sounds great.

So let's just do this PLG thing. But they don't have the product that goes with it. There's no virality, there's almost sometimes no way for the user to get to success on their own. And so there's no way to build plg. And so there's actually a better way of building product led sign up motions with separate products to get people engaged and then push that into a sales motion. And that is a much easier transition than shifting your entire product from an enterprise product down to a self serve PLG product, which no one really pulls off. But Morgan, you have a true PLG product, don't you?

Yeah, we have both a freemium plan and we have a free trial model. Our freemium plan is bringing in 100,000 signups a month, which is a lot of people to be communicating with. And I always tell my team that imagine filling a football stadium and then trying to figure out of all the people in the football stadium who needs to talk to the sales team, which is quite hard. So I think if you're just starting off this model that we're talking about, about product advocates is a really interesting one because it's. It actually shifts the mindset of being proactive customer support. And if you're doing things in the best interest of your customers to make sure that they fully understand how to use the product, whether in a creepy way or an uncreepy way, you get really good outcomes and you let people start to self identify that they have the intent that they actually are maybe in the wrong place. And they do want to be speaking to a salesperson because they know for sure they're going to get a discount or they're looking for certain security compliance features that are not available in the free plan. And then if you maybe don't have a real PLG business model, I do think thinking about free trials in terms of intent is another interesting way. One thing that we did at Vercel is we realized, listen, some people, they don't even want to go try the free plan and they don't even want to take the effort to start a free trial. And so maybe they're not also ready to talk to a salesperson for an interactive demo. And so we built our own just like self serve demo that allows someone to, you know, look around in the product and see what it would look like with everything enabled. They don't have to do any implementation themselves.

You build it yourself in house, no nevatic walnuts involved.

Yes.

Interesting.

Why?

Just because those are the people that have the lowest intent but still have intent and we're not asking them to do anything. I think PLG is great, but the user is still on the hook to do something and they might not have the time of the day or it just might not be the right moment.

Actually I want to double click on that because I love that trail of thought there. Actually there's a connection between Outbound and PLG where they're both like very high scale, low conversion motions and if you just compare, let's say sales led businesses, there's like a complete opposition. In the sales led business the cost of doing the sales is fairly high. You have humans involved, you've got SDRs and AES and there's dropouts at every point. And if you're trying to be careful, thus like all the qualification tools, like the MAD Kudus and all of that, where you're trying to basically de risk and remove some of the costs that might come into your funnel. In PLG and Outbound, it's the opposite. There's no cost for you to get people on this self hosted demo, self serve demo, you're trying to push as many as possible and the people will self select. Oh, Vercel is the right tool for me. This is perfect. I'm the right user and those who get through are qualified.

Right.

And so you have qualification like scenarios. The question is like who's doing the qualification, who's bearing the cost? And then in the PLG outbound model, the user is bearing the cost.

Right.

And in the sales then model like you, the company is bearing the cost. Which is why we're all seeing this shift from the company to PLG and Outbound. Because yeah, we want to shift the cost to the users. That's what's going on.

Yeah, that interactive demo is completely ungated, so. So anyone can try it. We're not asking you for your email and then at the very end we just say, are you interested in chatting with someone from the sales team or are you interested in starting a trial? And we let them just choose on their own. It does reduce the amount of leads that we're generating, but we don't want a large SDR team so we found it to be more effective.

Can you give us some examples? I thought there was some cool examples of a community and prg.

Yeah, like the other thing that to me is interesting is like if you think about community, community is also one or few too many things where you want to blow up or become a thought leader or become known in a specific community so that then people start coming to you. One thing that we've done with one of our customers that I think is very interesting is when everybody thinks about community. They think that they have to create their own community. But I think in most cases that's not a good idea. I think it makes sense to create your own community when you have something that is free for everybody or it's a big portion that is free, or if it's open source, if it's a developer product, but if it's not that, then you have a closed product. People need to pay. They don't want to be part of your community. Why? So in those cases, to me it's more about how do I tap into existing communities. And existing communities are still relationship based. So one thing that we did, for example, was after interviewing a few of ICs from our target market, we figured out who were the 20 people on Twitter and YouTube that we wanted to talk about us. So what we did is without them knowing, we followed them around the world, we looked into what conferences they were speaking and we spoke into all of those conferences. The people who spoke at those conferences were just two, they flew around and the idea was we went to those conferences not because of.

You're following people around the world at conferences.

Yeah, creepiness.

Yeah, I was going to say like actors eking towards the edge here.

And in that case, instead of caring about the attendees like you, we care about the speakers because you have a speaker dinner, you go drinking with them, you build a relationship with them and then because of that they started to share our content. So then what's our distribution talent? It's not Google, it's actually the community who are the influencers in this community that we have a relationship with that show our content. And then people are like, wow, everybody's talking about this company, this must be great. But even though the product in this case is great, that might not be the case. And it's more a relationship driven thing that is making it happen.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

And for Vercel we had a different approach. We didn't necessarily tap into an existing community, although we are like a REACT based framework. And we did tap into that community, you could argue. But we ended up creating our own open source framework and essentially we're giving technology away for free and that's growing the community. That Next JS community is what actually fuels all of our growth. So if that number is going up and to the right of how many people are using Next js, we see the same correlation for how many people are actually signing up on our paid platform. And it was a very similar model from when I worked at GitHub.

What I love about that is that even though your product was not free or was not open source, you created something in parallel that is free and open source and people can use. And then once people are using it, you're like, oh, but they work so much better in my platform. Yeah. And I think that that's a fantastic way to build your own community with something that's.

I want to say it works that way but not the other way around because like when you have a successful business, then you open source part of it, but you already have the monetization framework that works great because then you're creating growth. Gaunter and I, we both have been involved in like open source businesses which tried to like monetize on top of like completely open source like community. And that's been like one hell of a struggle. Right. Because they have no monetization paths and people are like, hey, this free platform is open source platform is great, why should I pay? Right? And so the shift of the perceptions is not there. And that's been a real struggle. So I think like a couple of businesses like Vercel I was in segment is the same. Right. Monetization comes first, open source for acquisition comes second. Other way around is like super hard. My opinion.

Cool.

Let's get into questions into a second here. Any other creative tactics you want to share? Gone to more creepiness ideas.

I have one more to share. I was sure, which is a creepy. I'll say. But one of the things that we did, for example with influencers as well is we wanted influencers. We wanted people to think more of our brand and know us more. So one thing that we did was we looked into the known influencers in the space again in this case, they were developers as well and they had some open source frameworks and they had their own landing pages. And what we did was two things. One is we started to go and offer them for free to redesign their websites. So open source framework and the influencer page, we did it for free. It's like, hey, we'll redesign it, we'll do everything of this for you. And of course they said yes, because it's free. But why did we do it? Because this is the creepy part.

The thing is, that was coming. I knew it.

Yeah, our redesign is exactly with the same branding, same color, same everything as the product brand. So now people don't see it. But when they go to every influencer page and to every framework page, they see the same type of logos, the same type of colors and they think it's related. Even Though it's not. So with that they feel a bit more related to this. And one last thing that we added on top of that is that we asked them that if in exchange of this free redesign, they could either retargeting Pixel on their website. So the idea of that is that now if anybody goes to any of these open source frameworks, we can target them with ads, even though we don't know who they are. But we know that if they're going to that page, it makes a lot of sense for us as a customer as well.

Basis of marketing, you're offering something of a perceived value which is much perceivedly higher but very low cost to you. And in exchange, you're getting something of very high value to you but very low cost to them. So it's a good trade.

Exactly.

Good trade. I like it. Okay, a couple of like takeaways from today and please prepare your questions because we're ready where they are ready. So what do we chat about? So like a strong shift towards like low cac. Like absolutely, like high volume low CAC in very different businesses. Like you look at Excel at Gorgias and Morgan at Vercel, we're talking of two different industries and motions, but the yearning is the same. Right. And what Gandra and I are seeing in our talks with founders is founders obviously want to have their cake and eat it. Sorry for the founders here. And so they want both. You both want the low CAC of the outbound and you want the PLG motion and you want it now. And so that's what's going on. Honestly, you should start somewhere. Not on both sides is my opinion. But yeah. And so PLG for sales led. PLG to sales LED is probably the new thing we're seeing right now. I think that's the major shift we're seeing right now with AI empowered outbound. Think of the two major shifts we're seeing.

I think it's that and also the combination of both of them together. Like you're doing PLG and you have ICs from something, individual contributors signing up. Then you automate maybe showing ads to their bosses. So because of availability bias, when they bring it up, they'll remember it. And then you send them emails that are automated based on information from what the developer is doing and what others are doing and using AI. So I think also the combination of these two strategies is where things start to get fun, creepy, I don't know, something.

Yeah, I think there's really, there's really a strong shift with the Tools we have like both like Excel talked of like the low code tools, but also like the AI tools like on the copywriting and automation part as well as on plg. Like if you're not using this, you're going to be left behind.

Right.

And I also don't think it's going to last super long. There's going to be a reversion to the mean in the next couple quarters as people become desensitized. And so like there is a time window to do this right now. Like there's a significant benefit if your competitors are not doing this to do it yourself. But in 3, 4/4 you'll have to do something else.

Cool.

You guys are ready for questions? Let's take it. We can share some more creepy examples in the outbound space or PRG space or we can have a lot of details from Excel and Morgan on ops and marketing. So thank you very much for this first part. And let's get, let's get the questions. You have mics here, here and here. Please use the mics, please.

The one who gets there first speaks first or work.

Thank you. Thank you for the great insights you shared. So I like to understand a bit more your perspective on content because that typically is the. For the things you must do well. Right? Especially when you market to developers. So why you think it's losing its effectiveness now?

Okay, when you say content, do you mean like content marketing, like blogs or something different?

Yeah, I'm referring to the first takeaway. This talk about content is no longer relevant.

Different opinions go ahead.

That's my belief and it's based on the fact that everybody is now doing content. So everybody's telling you, oh, you need to do content, you need to do SEO. And if you do the same as the rest, it's hard to position yourself on SEO, on doing blog and stuff like that. I'm a big believer in doing something that is slightly different. For example, I believe in something like content products. The idea to me of a content product is you're building a tool that is useful to your ICs but that they use every week or every day or something like that. Great example is optimizely. Build a tool that is an AB testing calculator on when you do an A B testing, how many people need to see it, how much time does it need to take? People go there weekly and it's some type of content, but it's more something that people can use more than anything else. And I think content works if you do it together with Some influencer strategy as we talked about or something like that. If you just build content to be positioned by Google, I think you have so many companies that will fight with you for that that it starts to become less effective because it's a framework that everybody uses.

Yeah, Morgan VP Marketing here. Real opinion.

I mean, I think content still has its place.

Of course.

What I usually tell my team is that we need to build, we need to invest in like certain pieces of content that are very specific to us that no one else could write and quite honestly, maybe AI couldn't even write. And those are the people pieces that we really invest in. And we even invest in the design and make sure it's very interactive. Otherwise it's a huge time suck that doesn't have a lot of quality. And for my audience, from a developer's perspective, they just really don't want to read it now. Docs and tutorials, interactive templates that are helping people get into the product itself, I still very much believe in. And I think you can pair the two together.

I think that's the key. It's interactivity. 100% agree on docs, but I think interactivity or making something more creative or different on top makes a difference.

I think I can fall on the sword on that one to wrap up, which is like, I think there's people like me, unfortunately who optimize for return on investments like roi. And so we saw the opportunity a couple years ago that content was converting well but had a high cost and so we optimized for lower cost. We produced shit content at scale, which worked for a couple years, right?

As HubSpot and.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And. And obviously eventually it didn't, but now that trend is in motion and so people are producing like a ton of content with AI, which is mostly like lame and terrible and conversions are going to continue to go down.

So.

So like reason why content is no longer top channel for us is because of that it's going to take a shift back to quality interactive content, unique content for the conversions to go back up. But right now I'm not seeing them be great.

Great session guys, as always.

Thank you.

Curious for maybe Ramp and Gorgias specifically. Curious to hear what the tech stack is. How much of it you're building in house versus stuff that you're buying out of the box and specifically how many domains are you using to send that kind of volume?

Specific questions. I like it. Excel.

How many domains?

Let's start with the tech stack. Let's start the easy question.

I'll start with what I know best, tech stack. So that also has evolved quite a bit. So just really quickly I guess when we started we had very low number of data vendors and our process was fully event based. So by event based I mean like signal based. There's a signal that we detect, we send something. Then we had a lot of data vendors for, you know, we were optimizing for coverage, still event based. And then at this point we're, I'd say like in the medium range, a variety of data vendors and we've switched from just event based to object based. And I'll explain that a little bit. But in terms of data vendors, what we use today, there's store leads which is really good for us for E commerce. So depending on what industry you're in, Store leads has been really good. You have coresignal Apollo we also use sometimes for the very high quality prospects, we will sometimes work with contractors to do some of the manual enrichment. Really for the highest, highest value.

For cost reasons. Sorry, for cost reasons?

Yes, exactly, for cost reasons. But for the vast majority these tools kind of get us to a good place.

Cool. What do you send? Emails?

Emails is Reply IO? Yeah, Reply IO. We tried outreach for a bit.

Stayed.

On reply for multiple reasons and just I guess for like the high volume, fully automated reply was better. Outreach is probably better for like bdrs and where there's a lot of personalization that comes.

Just to follow up on the second part of the question, the orchestration of all those tools is in house. And that's your team.

Yes, well, it's my team and actually demandgen owns a lot of that themselves. And what we've done is it's a little, it's a little strange because we've been always very centralized ops and then now that we have a solid infrastructure, we're trying to give a lot of ownership to the different teams so that they can really, you know, change things up whenever they want.

Right.

And we're not a bottleneck for them. So the only prerequisite is that you have a super, super solid infrastructure. You have standardization of guidelines, same tools across the different GTM teams. So for the orchestration, that is where some of the more engineering type work comes into play. We use dbt, we use high touch and for some of the signal data collection and processing, we're going to be using things like Airbyte as well as Google Cloud functions. So that's what requires a bit more of the coding piece. But other than that, I mean everybody at Gorsches does SQL. So if you know SQL, you can learn Jinja. DPT is there. DBT is a great tool. So that's really what we've been using. And so the different activation and intermediate models that we have through that where we can identify the different segments, signals, prioritization of signals, this is the basis of the entire orchestration there.

Yeah. You know what's funny is that and going back to what Gaunto was saying, like tying back into the question, this is a marketing panel on a marketing channel. And like this is very technical. This is deeply technical. It's not just engineers. You have engineers, you have obviously copywriters, you have some mops in here doing some heavy orchestration to create a channel. And so if your CEO, if you're a marketer and your CEO is not giving you the resources to do that, don't embark on this journey. You're not going to be able to copy this. This is not possible.

Right.

Because there's also no off the shelf platform right now that you could use to do that. It doesn't exist yet.

Yeah. But you can build the basis of it. I think when we started all of this was maybe zapier bigquery and working off of that. So it was pretty and segment. But as we evolved and we tried hundreds of different signals and from there we prioritized, that's when it got a little more structured. Another good thing too is like you said, our CEO has always been very pro data automation. Really a big believer in that. So that's been super helpful. And like I said, we're sharing resources across the different teams. So now my team is really more in charge of the infrastructure and the maintenance and making sure that everything runs well and so that demand gen can really focus on the iterations and the experiments.

That's cool.

So as long as they follow the guidelines, they do whatever they want.

I want to take one last question. Kira.

Thanks everyone. This is a great session. I wanted to ask about the automated outbound, the reluctance from a team to go from like, does the SDR work it? Does the AE work it to like, hey, we want to improve our margins by having automation do it. How did you actually get alignment around which accounts could be touched by automation and avoid crossing wires between like human outreach and automated outreach.

Cool. Yeah.

I think for us it was slightly easier because we started from there. We, our AES don't do any outreach. Our sales team receives all of the leads, whether it's from partnerships or from marketing. So that's that in terms of SDRs our SDRs today are really in charge of maybe responding to the couple people who will actually respond to some of those automated outbound. A good majority of people will just click on the links like book a demo, start a trial, things like that. But when people actually respond and there's a protection handling that needs to happen, that's when we have some of that human touch.

So you started from there, but Wong. And you're the opposite side, huh?

Yeah. So basically my approach right now, and I'm in the thick of it, so I'm with you, I'm with you, is I went to all the sales leaders and I said, just give me the list of accounts that you are going after right now. And I said, how did you figure out these accounts? Do you have confidence in these accounts? And they were all pretty protective over them. And I said, okay, that's cute, you keep working on those. And then I went to go work with other vendors and looking at our own intent data sources too, to create our own list that we believed that had much higher intent. We looked at the overlap between marketing's list and the sales team's list and we removed any that was on the sales team's list so that we in a corner can go do this experiment or this pilot and depending on the results, we'll go back to the sales team and say, your approach, you like shopping at Target and so that's why you pick Target. Our approach is slightly different and maybe more effective. Let's see if this is going to be a better way for all of us.

We did a bit of that with ashp. We did exactly what you said. And then what we showed was the conversion rate was higher with automated outbound. And the other thing that we ended up doing is the really good SDRs promoted them to ace. The bad ones, we fired them. And the ones that were still kind of code were also there to reply, but the team ended up being a lot smaller than it used to be.

One thing I'll add real quick too is obviously we collect a lot of data. It's gorgeous and hopefully everybody does. But something that really helped as well is depending on the different tiers, you can also look at historical performance of the multi channel approach and see, all right, for like, is there a specific pattern that comes out of a timeline order of channels that reach out to which types of people within that company? Is it because of a certain industry? Is it because of other tools that they're using? Is it a type of campaigns? And from there try to get some of that analysis out to really identify the different patterns. Obviously, certain more high tier prospects are going to be a lot more sensitive to that human touch. And it's going to be different people, too. And it has to come from higher ups. Right. So that's what you're going to see as well. So just identifying that. And for us, it's really a multi touch approach that gives us that information.

Cool. Thank you. Thank you so much. We're out of time. Please go and meet our fantastic panelists just after this. Thank you so much for coming today. I hope we answered some questions for you and I hope you can go talk to your founders, your CEOs and do at least one of those two campaigns. Thank you, folks.