Reduce Revenue Leak with Purpose-Driven Marketing
Kyle Coleman, CMO at Clari, and Devin Reed, Head of Content at Clari share how to reduce revenue leak with purposeful marketing strategies.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
- Thanks for having us.
- So excited to have you both here today.
We are live at Dreamforce.
We're live at the Pipeline Summit
here with beautiful qualified surrounding us.
And I gotta say first off,
I'm the biggest fan of what y'all are doing.
Biggest fan of Clary and the marketing,
what you're doing.
It's so great.
And I think you're clearly one of the darlings
of B2B marketing right now.
- I do Kyle's a darlings on LinkedIn.
I don't know, we were darlings in the marketing.
And I'll take it though.
I'll take it.
- Oh no, seriously,
I talked to a lot of B2B marketers obviously.
And people are always,
like, oh, what Clary's doing is great.
So clearly it's working.
It's at least reaching the other marketers, right?
- That's like least phase one,
it's like other marketers notice.
And then hopefully one day your target audience notices.
But we'll get that.
- Yeah, indeed.
And so we'll get into obviously your marketing strategy
and all that.
But first, tell us what the past,
a couple of months have been like
with a lot of really great announcements,
seems like a lot of excitement around Clary.
Obviously you've been in the news a little bit.
So what's that, what's that been like Kyle?
- It's been incredible.
So we are, you know, for the last year, 18 months or so,
the market demand has been,
we want to consolidate our tech stack.
And a lot of the driving force of course is saving cost.
But that's not exactly all there is to it.
What we found is that the experience
that so many sales reps have is so bad.
You know, for all the right reasons
and with the best intentions,
their teams brought on a dozen, two dozen.
I heard from a CRO is 39 different revenue technology tools.
And what that means from a rep experiences,
they're constantly swiveling between different apps.
They spend, I think I saw a stat that was like 11 or 15%
of reps time is spent switching between applications.
Like, are you kidding me?
And so we saw this market demand for consolidation.
We saw this rep demand for simplification.
And then we also see this AI trend,
which is really a data trend that says
you need unified data that's going to inform
the revenue process.
And so that's been in the back of our minds
for from a company strategy standpoint
for the last year or so, maybe more.
And we've had a couple of different opportunities
over the last few years to try and add,
to accelerate the way that we're adding to our capabilities.
So in June of last year, we acquired Wingman.
It's our conversation intelligence product.
It's now known as Clary Co-pilot.
And the huge, the market adoption has been incredible.
And now, what you're alluding to is we acquired Groove,
a leader in sales engagement and prospecting.
And so now we have all things RevOps,
all things CI, all things engagement,
and much more on a single platform,
unifying all that data,
powering all the machine learning and AI workflows
and giving every revenue critical employee
from the individual rep,
all the way up to the CEO and the board,
everything they need to run the revenue process.
And that's the mission that we're on,
starting to streamline all of that.
And that's the wave that we're writing.
- Yeah, and I'll share some stats here.
30% increase in pipeline created,
10% decrease in slip deals,
and 24% increase in win rates for Clary,
the uniform platform to create converting clothes.
It's pretty incredible what you've been able to do
also from a marketing perspective,
getting out into market.
I talked to a Devon about this
that I saw those run revenue ads on LinkedIn.
And like instantly, I just love the campaign.
I love the targeting.
I always love an ad campaign that's both a call to action
and like an aspiration to be great, right?
It's like run revenue.
Yeah, I do do that.
And I need to be doing more of that.
And it just opened up that loop for me.
It's like, what is this company?
What are they doing?
And so tell me what that process has been like,
running marketing and seeing the growth so far on your end.
- So for us, when we are out talking to analysts,
we talk to customers, talk to prospects,
we keep hearing the same thing over and over again
from sea level execs.
And what they're saying to us is,
we can't answer the most important question
for our business, which is,
are we gonna meet, beat or miss on revenue?
And we're like, wait, you have a hard time answer.
Well, of course you do.
You're trying to kind of create this process
out of spreadsheets and BI tools and CRM.
And those systems weren't necessarily purpose built
to execute all the workflows that you need
to run revenue.
And so we started hearing this from our customers
and they were telling us that revenue is not just an event,
it's not just an outcome that happens
at the end of the quarter.
It really is a business process.
And importantly, it's the business process
that matters the most.
The CRO wants to keep her job.
If a CEO wants to keep her job, gotta hit the number.
You gotta guide toward the right number.
And so that's what is informing a lot of the way
that we think about things.
And they've been telling us that we need
to run revenue better.
And so we took the word straight from our customers' mouths
and turned it in to a marketing campaign
that this beautiful man has brought to life.
- Do you agree that you're beautiful?
- That is a lose-lose question.
- You're a darling.
- I agree that Kyle thinks it.
I'll agree with that.
But no, I was on you as well as like, it was a year ago.
It was the run revenue campaign,
specifically the acquisition and the launch
of the Rev.C.G. category or revenue collaboration
of governance.
I'm hard to impress.
Like I don't know if I'm like mean or something.
Like it takes a lot to impress me.
And I was happy at my last job running the content marketing
team and same thing I'm on LinkedIn.
And I saw Kyle posting their narrative
talking about launching this category,
talking about a lot of the reframes
that Kyle just shared as the point of view.
And I did two things.
The first was I slacked my team.
My entire marketing team and I was like,
this is really good.
We need to be taking notice of this.
And I was like, wow.
The nice thing to do is probably text my friend Kyle
and tell him that this is really good.
And he kind of kicked my ass this week a little bit.
So I texted him.
I said, man, really good stuff.
Send him the link.
And I was like, must be that new SVP guy they got.
She said, you just moved into marketing.
He says, hey man, how you been?
It's been a while.
Why don't we catch up?
And so we talk about dogs and kids for a few minutes.
He goes, hey, yeah, by the way,
I've got this head of content roll open.
I don't know if you'd be interested.
And so I was interested.
It worked really well.
And then I've been happily on the team for last year,
bringing that to life.
- I took the same screenshots of the Run Revenue Ads
and sent it to my team.
I'll literally show you my Slack later on.
That sounds weird.
But I did the same thing.
Because, and part of my thing,
this is the nerdy side of this.
But part of the thing with your ads and the Run Revenue
is that LinkedIn, which is extremely expensive
to run ads on, gives you this massive ad unit.
And if you put, we have similar ads
that are black background, white text.
But if you put black background, white text,
it really pops on the platform
and it fills your whole screen on mobile.
And so I'm like, you can tell a perfect story
in like a second with this ad unit.
And I literally screenshot of those ads
and I sent this to my team, like we gotta do ads like this.
And we ended up running ads
and they perform super well.
But I wanna give Devin the mic here
because running the campaign is important
and evangelizing the problem is important.
Bringing it to life,
and this is what's been so impressive to me about Devin
is it continue to call him beautiful and stroke.
- It's a good take it.
- It's the way that it's come to life.
Not just as in the refind labs, Chris Walker terms,
not just demand capture.
But further up funnel, how do we create demand?
How do we take this point of view?
How do we take this narrative?
And how do we evangelize this problem
of what we call revenue leak,
which is all the different areas across your revenue process
that revenue is falling out of the bucket?
This is the biggest problem that's hiding in plain sight
for every revenue team under the sun.
And so how do we create more demand for this problem?
And therefore for the solution.
And that's what I've been so impressed
and I'll let Devin talk about how it's actually done that.
- Yeah.
Well, the first time, like when I show up and I'm like,
we have this great POV.
We've got this enemy of revenue leak.
We have this revenue precision, which is the opposite.
And so Kyle's kind of like, all right, what do we do now?
And my thought is like the first thing is
you need people to feel it.
You need people to become familiar
and feel the pain of revenue leak.
So part of that is defining it.
So like the worst thing that can happen is in six months,
another company is known for revenue leak
because we didn't own it.
We created this, you know, all this great POV
and all this stuff, but we didn't do a good enough job
evangelizing it.
And so a lot of that is one, increasing the volume
of how much are you talking about it.
And that is familiarity.
Like when you see revenue leak, well, first of all,
I'll say is when you hear it, like you see the words,
I need clarity to be the next,
like has to be in that same sentence.
The other part was people go revenue leak,
it's a breakdown in the revenue process.
Makes complete sense.
But we hadn't defined it at the like when I'm at work,
when I'm running revenue, where that's not just a slip deal,
that's revenue leak, right?
That's on a break off in your AESD or hand off,
that's revenue leak.
And so the next part is getting them to see it,
like literally see it and then feel the pain of revenue leaks.
Hey, this isn't just the way it is.
This isn't just status quo.
This is revenue leak.
Here's the impact.
And of course, because we're talking about the problem
of evangelizing it, we have the solution,
both from a strategic lens, which is like our IP,
we have this revenue cadence playbook
and you can follow that, even if you don't use Clary.
But of course, it's much easier if you just also buy Clary
and that's the solution for it as well.
- It's funny, I smiled when you said revenue leak
'cause I forgot until you said that out,
oh yeah, that's right, I've seen that a million times
in the ads.
And I love what you said there about how you wanna put that
in their mind and then have your brand immediately
associated with it.
And I feel that way about run revenue
and I feel that way about revenue leak.
Zooming out here for a second,
tell us a little bit about your persona,
who you're selling to and the types of customers.
- So we have a few personas,
so we call them revenue pros.
And as Kyle says, like reps to execs.
And so the challenge is that's a lot of different people
from different industries.
But really the type three folks were going for,
CROs, RevOps, and what we call the practitioners
or frontline managers/individual contributors.
Because the product and the products we've acquired
kinda speak to those different personas at different times.
- And so how complex is it crafting
the individualized persona, those content and marketing
for those people that care about a lot of different stuff?
- Should we tell them about the marketing leadership
when I was a pain and I kept making it?
So we had a marketing leadership.
I'm like, am I safe to talk about this?
Marketing leadership, offsite, what,
four months ago, five months ago.
We're on day two and we're like,
we're gonna plan Q3.
Give me honesty, I've been known to embellish
a story or two.
And it's like, all right, we're gonna break down to groups
and we're gonna figure out what we're gonna do in Q3.
And like raise my hand, I'm like,
hey, like what quickly, who exactly is like, all right?
So who are the personas we're going for?
And like Kyle, like, it's this and this
and someone over here is like,
well, what about this persona?
Over here, what about this persona?
What about this?
And then 20 minutes later, everyone's talking.
I think this is it.
Raise my hand again.
I'm like, no, that's not really like specific enough.
I think it was like a two and a half hour conversation
with probably 15 marketing leaders.
And it was like a little painful,
but it was really helpful because one,
the team has, the way we've scaled was like acquisitions
and just like, you know, kind of like, you know,
teams joining other teams.
And so it was interesting to hear like,
our whole marketing team has different perspectives
of who it is we sell through.
And so this kind of like, I hate you don't want to love
the phrase coming to Jesus moment was like,
hey, we all kind of put our cars and table,
healthily debated and then said, all right,
these are the three personas.
This is what we're doing.
And then the last part was when you have multiple personas,
you have to allocate a percentage of time and budget
that we're going to put to them to which at first,
so I think it was 33, 33, 33, 33.
And I went, no, if they're all the same,
then you know, there's just no leader.
So we ended up kind of going about it that way.
I love that you had that, the debate,
which I think we've all had about the personas.
And if you haven't, you probably need to go have
that conversation right now.
It's like Einstein said that if you have an hour to solve
a problem, you need to spend first 58 minutes
diagramming it, then two minutes solving it.
But I think that that is a common problem.
Like when we sit down with our customers,
of which like the vast majority are big B2B companies
and you have that same exercise like,
hey, we're going to create a video podcast series for y'all
and who should we make this for?
And you have a bunch of different answers.
You're like, yeah, well, what accounts are the biggest,
what accounts do you need the most acceleration on
or whatever?
And you sit down and have that exercise.
And a lot of times it's a lot of different answers.
And you say, okay, well, if we did do this persona,
how does attribution work for that persona versus that one?
It's like, oh, we have an attribution strategy
that does XYZ.
It's like, that doesn't really make sense.
If the attribute for your end user is the same
for a C-suite executive, it doesn't make any sense at all.
And so like you get into the devil in the details
and then they're like, what's the pipeline stage for this?
And they're like, I think we might have to go back to like,
you know, our RevOps team and talk about pipeline stages
because that brought up like, oh,
how do we engage like recycle accounts with like a podcast?
It's like a play that we run.
Oh, how do we look at recycle accounts?
And so like it adds all these additional questions
when you try to figure out personas.
And it's kind of like the core of what marketing is,
is like figure out who you're talking to before you talk to them.
- Yeah.
And the usefulness here is not just to create
that new opportunities to create new pipeline.
Mapping all of this out and understanding
who your personas are across the entire buying group,
it has to be done so that marketers can have more of a seat
at the table for deal acceleration on or so.
And that playbook is non-existent at most companies.
And most marketing teams are strictly focused on topofunnel,
more often than not, they're focused on MQLs.
Yep, they're not really considering
how the buyer journey has changed over the last few years.
And so doing this mapping exercise that we had
about who are our personas,
what channels can we engage them in,
what kind of messaging is appropriate for them?
It's not just so that we can run beautiful ads
that you see on LinkedIn.
It's also so that when we have that first meeting
and it becomes qualified,
we have the playbook now to go and engage the entire buying group
and take pressure off the rep.
So we can't put it all on the rep to educate,
to evangelize, to do everything they need to do
across the 10, 15, 20, 50 different people
that are involved in a buying decision.
We as the marketing team need to hold ourselves accountable
to that and if we do that,
we're gonna increase conversion rates,
we're gonna increase win rates
and we're gonna take pressure up what we need to do
at the tip top of the funnel.
And that's the perspective that I think a lot
of marketing teams don't have, that you need to have.
It's not just about creating pipelines,
it's not creating revenue.
And you're a critical part of the revenue process
and you need to be fully engaged with your sales team
and be working hand in hand to make that happen.
- Yeah, I mean, I think the notion of this like,
well, we're driving top of funnel awareness
and this not or whatever.
And like what that actually means is that,
eh, I've seen your stuff everywhere
and like, I've got to the tipping point
that 13 impressions or whatever it is
and like, I gotta figure out what the heck these people do.
Right?
And then you go to the website and then qualified meetings
pops up and then you can book a qualified
or a rep with your qualified person right there.
- Shout out to qualified for presenting this entire event.
But like that is the crux of it, right?
It's like, hey, Ian had seen run revenue,
however many times that I've been certain those apps
as I had seen revenue leak, I identified like,
hey, is cast been leaving revenue?
I took a screenshot of it and it's a,
our dimension person, hey, this is pretty cool.
And then I decide, oh, I should just go like,
see what's up with this company.
And then I go to the website.
And I think that for a lot of people,
you're right for marketing, we just focus on that part of it.
But then once they get to that stage,
we need to accelerate it from there.
And again, like that's where there's a lot of revenue leak.
- Yeah.
And a lot of what Devin has done is a lot
in the thought leadership realm.
In areas that are really hard to track
from a literal attribution standpoint.
So the way that we show up on LinkedIn as a company,
as individuals, as executives, all that thing is,
all that strategy is largely Devin and Nahal
is in the crowd here.
But also creating a new thought leadership website
called run revenue.pro, which has nothing to do with Clary
and entirely do with best practices on how to run
the revenue process.
But in tandem with that, we launched a new podcast called
Run Revenue.
- Oh, I know.
- And so we have all these things and now it's hard
to shine a light on the dark funnel
to know what kind of impact these things are making
from an awareness standpoint.
What's gonna make Ian finally raise his hand
and come to us, wait, it's hard.
But what we do know is that when a rep is engaged
with an account, they're using those podcast episodes.
They're using that thought leadership content.
They're sending those things proactively
to engage the account in tandem with the place
that the deal acceleration plays
that we're running from a marketing standpoint.
So all of this content and the way that we think
about thought leadership is it's different, I think,
and more operationalized than many other companies do.
And the impact is incredible.
We see it.
When more buyers, when we have more engaged buyers
at accounts, when rates skyrocket, like they triple,
when you have 10 people engaged instead of five.
And we have all of this data around it.
Now we have all these strategies and playbooks
to go and run the marketing place we need to run,
equip the field with the right thing to do
and say after each meeting and run an effective,
standardized, governed process
that adds a lot more predictability.
- Yeah, with our podcast, we, in terms of direct attribution,
21% of the people that come on our shows close.
And that's just like direct.
That's not like all the inventory.
- You've been warned.
- No kidding, Jesus.
- Yeah, no.
Step it up, Kyle.
- Do I have to sign a contract?
- It does.
- He's gonna buy from you.
- Oh yeah, that's right.
- That's right.
- What do you take?
- The interview doesn't end 'til one of a size.
(laughing)
- Lots of doors.
- Oh, you didn't sign that.
- I didn't read the fine print on the contract yet.
- We take your fingerprints off the Aquafina model.
But I think that those sort of things,
the dark funnel looking at attribution,
looking at those creative things,
like that is where marketing is headed.
And it's also where marketing, where there is value, right?
It's like every single person can run paid ads
and you can run it better or you can run,
you know, Google ads better or you can run,
you know, LinkedIn's ads better,
where you can have like cooler creative and stuff like that.
But in all of those dark places
is where you can create extra value
that actually drives your business past your competitors.
And they don't necessarily know that you're doing it.
- Well, you're saying marketing's going there.
That's 'cause our consumption is already there.
That's actually how we hear about anything from software
to movies and everything between is conversations,
word of mouth, social media, organically.
I don't know the last time.
Like, I know we talked about the dark funnel
and depth in our paid ads yesterday a lot.
I don't know if you click ads
and like on LinkedIn to buy software.
- No, of course.
- I'm not saying they have no value,
but like a lot of times the things in marketing,
like unless it's clearly attributable,
like this click or this form fill,
like we're not gonna do the other stuff, right?
The dark funnel stuff that you can't attribute as well.
But the truth is I've always ran towards that direction.
I joke with Kyle, like I built my career
on leap of faith marketing.
- Yeah.
- Like I'm gonna show you brand growth and audience growth.
Then there's the damn dark funnel or whatever you call it.
And then at the end of the day,
it's like, how do I know I'm doing my job?
If inbound is going up and if direct web traffic is going up,
we must be doing something right,
even if you can't directly attribute it.
- Yeah, so what I think there and the tools,
I think are catching up to this a little bit.
And obviously tools like Clarion qualified
really help with this.
But I think what's happening is like so much of sort of
like that old style, like, well, I'm gonna go with my gut
and I'm gonna do what I think should happen.
And then it moved into data being very data driven.
And then now there's a little bit more towards like,
with the content specifically,
of like, I think that this needs to exist in the world.
And I feel conviction that if we serve our customers
and our prospects with things that they actually do want,
based off of information that we've pulled from them
by talking to them about what they actually want.
And then we go create that,
then we know we're in the right.
And I think that, so for us, what we do in terms of framework
for our customers is like, there's four ways that we do that.
There's like peer led content.
So it's like your peers, learning from your peers,
being persona driven, so like hyper focus on a persona.
I say serialized content is even in the world
to like being serialized.
So serialized content that people binge,
just like how everybody binge is stuff.
And then the fourth thing is multi-channel, multi-format.
Like you have to be in multiple channels,
you have to be multi-format.
And like, if you do those four things in your marketing,
not just in your content,
then like that is how people consume that stuff.
And I think that for so many people,
that is way more work because their team is not built
to do any of that stuff.
It's like, what's your peer driven co-creation content strategies?
Like, fine, does that even mean?
- Don't get any ideas, don't ask me that.
- But I think that that's really challenging
for the modern marketer to be like, wait,
but I don't have that.
I have a beta, it's team that I could put more money into it.
But that's what all your competitors also have.
- Right. - Yeah.
For your customers, what's the size and the scale customers
that you're targeting?
- We serve now that we have our conversation intelligence
product, now that we have our sales engagement product.
Of course, we have RevOps and forecasting.
We can sell anybody, any industry.
If you would have asked me this question 18 months ago,
I would have said, "Add, you know, tech companies,
"200 to 5,000 is kind of the sweet spot,
"but we have exceptions on both sides of that."
Now we have Fortune 50 companies,
we have five person SMB companies and everybody in between.
And are they all gonna be on the full Clary platform?
No, but there's a journey for them to get there
if and when we can help them operationalize their growth.
So, you know, we're selling, as Devin said,
to CROs, heads of RevOps and practitioners
at any company, any industry.
- It's really exciting, but also probably a way bigger
challenge from a strategy perspective.
How do you think about the marketing strategy
as it relates to now that anyone can be a customer?
- I mean, every time Kyle buys a company,
my job just gets harder.
So it's like, man, new personas, new to it.
I do like it though, because I think it's like,
it does give us more like place to play.
And by the mean is like, you know,
if thing of all the accounts, like, you know,
we're primarily SaaS, like you said,
it's like, you know, 12, 18 months ago,
there's one CRO at those companies
and there's one head of RevOps
and pending the size of that RevOps seems
a few kind of folks there.
And obviously there's influential people.
- Sure.
- And once you, you know, as we started kind of going
down the practitioner trail, it was like,
now there's more people that we can influence a deal.
So I'm not just worried about,
can I get the right ad in front of the decision maker
or the right event only in front of the decision maker?
But as we started to expand the product lines
and therefore the users, therefore the market audience,
it gives us a lot of people that we can influence.
And having been, I mean, you've been in it too,
but I've been a sales rep selling sales tech
to salespeople for a few years,
it's kind of inception.
I've been in those deals and in internal meetings
where, you know, Kyle, you know, the leader could come in
and say, hey, we're looking at, you know, this tech,
anybody like have you heard of anything?
I want people to say, yeah, we gotta check out Clary.
And those reps, as we all know, those salespeople are,
they're loud, they know what they want
and they're opinionated and they know what they don't want
and they're opinionated.
And so a lot of to me, like for at least my lens is like,
how do I get as many people here
that are running that meeting
in that meeting or influencing a deal to say,
hey, I know like and trust Clary,
because those closed door rooms are how,
in my opinion, someone actually decides
to go ahead and request a demo.
It starts there first and I wanna be the first person
and hopefully the first company named
and hopefully the only one named.
But so all that's right, we're doing, you know,
it's time to start, you know, recording calls,
using CI, upgrading our sales engagement platform.
I want Clary to be in the same sentence.
And so long, long-winded answer is like,
I like it, it gives us more room to play.
I also think that marketing the term like actual engagement
in terms of like, hey, they engage with our content
or they engage with an ad or whatever is very fraught
with lots of noisy data there.
It's like, what is, do they listen to a 45 minute podcast?
Did they come to a live event?
Did they do this stuff?
So obviously that part being critical.
But then once you talk about the different personas
and then the different size organizations where it's like,
okay, the CMO of a 100% company.
And it's like, it gets extremely difficult.
How do you sort of deal with that complexity?
- The way that we're starting to figure this out
and we don't have a perfect answer yet.
- My answer is like, we don't have to figure that out.
- It's hard.
It really is hard that we, you kind of think about
the data table and the primary metric we care about
is the pipeline we create, the conversion rate
of that pipeline and not all pipeline is created equal.
So we're looking at pipeline by source.
How is it different if somebody comes to a live event
versus they click the request demo button?
How do those cohorts behave differently from there?
So that's one cut.
But maybe to answer your question more directly
about different industries and company sizes is the data
that table looks like you have company sizes as columns
and you can call it whatever you want,
SMB, mid-market enterprise, whatever.
And then the rows are number of engaged buyers.
And then each cell is what's the win rate
for each of those cohorts.
And then you can start to triangulate,
okay, at a thousand person company, mid-market company,
when there are five people engaged,
here's our win rate, when there are 15 people engaged,
here's our win rate.
And you can sort of have this little heat map that says,
we now have a best practice where we know roughly
the size of the buying group, we know how many people
we need to engage at those accounts.
And then we can drill into that data and say,
what are the personas?
And at what stage in the cycle do we need to engage them?
And you can start to create really sophisticated plays
that are marketing led, sales executed,
and try and optimize the entire process
and spend the right times on the right thing.
That's not just about creating 10x pipeline coverage.
That is not a sustainable way to run a business.
And so if you can be smarter about creating
high velocity pipeline, there's a real chance to close
via the sources that you know are creating
that meaningful pipeline.
And then you have the programs that accelerate it
and engage the right buyers at the right time,
that's the holy grail.
Way easier said than done, way easier.
And it's a journey for us.
Like we're not saying we're perfect by any means
in this regard, but we've created a lot
of the right infrastructure.
We've created a lot of the right content
thought leadership assets.
And now we therefore can go and operationalize the strategy.
- We always do uncuttable budget items.
What are your three uncuttable budget items, a query?
Oh, I'd cut the content to you.
(laughing)
- Dammit, it's been fun.
I was actually, I was doing my prep on my way here.
What, what, Nahal?
'Cause she's, I see my right hand here
and the number one thing that jumped out was social media.
I think it's, I was, because we were talking
and I'm like, it's probably shocking that
when I joined here and I got to hire somebody,
the most senior person I brought on runs our social media
strategy.
That is the number one thing.
And that's kind of weird to I think to a lot of people.
- We got some raised eyebrows from our CFO.
- Yeah, I had no facts.
- No, it's not Nahal, it's like, that's like,
I remember this, it was literally, Dev, I trust you.
It was this hand motion, like, look, I trust you,
help me explain to them why social media
is the number one thing.
And so I can go on a rant if you want on that,
but that's number one, uncuttable.
It's like the Crown Jewel right now,
I'd say what we're doing, it's working the best
and it's not just Clarice Channel,
it's our employee activation, it has our CEO's playbook.
I mean, Kyle's already a machine at it.
So like, it has so much more benefit
and reach than people are ready to admit,
I think for a long-standing point.
The other one I would say is like,
thought leadership or category content.
And that's where it kind of splices into like podcast,
articles and different things.
But for me, again, no shock,
director of content marketing and thought leadership,
social media and category content are,
gotta keep going.
- That's a margin to do.
- I totally agree, I totally agree.
I'll say one other thing, yeah.
- You still have a job, don't worry.
The thing that's uncuttable from my perspective,
in addition to what Devan said, is we sell the CROs.
There are number one person,
I know Devan listed the three,
but CROs are the main decision makers in many respects.
And so they're the ones that get the outsized amount
of our time, energy, attention, resources,
budget, the problem is that many CROs,
no offense to anybody in the crowd or anybody listening to this,
that they don't read a ton of stuff like a--
- Totally.
- They do not.
- White paper a CRO, rather,
it's hard to get them to come to a virtual event.
- They don't read marketing collateral.
That's something, they read other like industry stuff
and not marketing, but yeah, like B2B.
- But what they do, and I've had this conversation
with a handful of CROs, and I always ask them,
like when you need to answer a question, what do you do?
Zero of them say Google.
They all say, I pick up the phone,
and I call this person, this person, this person,
I just ask them, give them an answer that way.
And so the word of mouth and manufacturing that word of mouth
is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about.
So to answer your question finally, Ian,
is the uncuttable thing for me is in-person events.
In-person events.
And I'm not talking about, this is lovely to be here
at Dreamforce, and what are there 50,000 people here,
something like that, great.
I'm talking about the six-person dinner.
You know, you go to Denver, you go to Atlanta, Chicago,
whatever, just get six CROs talking to each other,
not about Clary, just about what's going on
and how they can help each other.
And if we can build those communities,
build that network and earn their trust,
they're gonna be much more likely to ultimately come back
to us to try and solve other problems.
So it's not super expensive.
Like it costs way more to serve a billion paid ads
than to run four different in-person dinners every month.
- Totally.
- And so that's an investment that I think
we need to continue to make.
And I think this is a real appetite for just humans
in general to have more face-to-face contact,
but certainly CROs because that's who they trust
is each other.
- Yeah, one of the things with in-person events,
and the reason why I totally agree, by the way,
at the small batch events, like,
it's a very common uncuttable budget item,
and it's something that I think came out of dealing
with COVID, like how do we do stuff,
and how do we figure this out?
And people are like, oh, it turns out these small batch events
are way better, they outperform.
And so what I think is really interesting
is you have the content size,
so like, value leadership content from your team,
like push content, then you have like,
so I think of content in community as like a push and pull.
So content pushes into your community,
but it also you pull out of your community,
other ideas that they wanna hear and stuff like that.
So it's those two things work in parallel.
And your community includes doing events,
and it's not necessarily like,
demand is running an event per se,
although that's fine too.
What community is running event,
where it's like, with no salespeople in the room,
with no like, even sales agenda at all,
we were just talking with Karen Flores from Okta about this,
of just like getting people together,
and like, let them talk about
whatever they wanna talk about is fine.
And like, back in the day,
this was like people, you know,
going to golf courses, doing stuff like that, right?
We don't have time for that anymore.
But I think it's really fascinating to pair together,
you know, this peer driven content of like,
getting your executives with your customers and prospects
in public, sharing that as like, on the main content,
and then partnering that with,
it by the way, with a small in person six,
you know, six person events, private event,
like just for you, if you're interested.
And it scratches the itch of the executive
who doesn't really wanna read stuff,
but they want to participate in stuff.
They want to have a voice and zero is like to talk.
And so it gives them a place to talk,
but to network with their peers,
or to share their thoughts publicly with the world.
And that's like what they're doing.
- And importantly, those small format events,
they can't be like a time share meeting,
where you lock people in a room for three hours,
you're just pitching them this beautiful space,
you have in Hawaii, like, don't turn it into a sales pitch.
People were shocked, we just did a recent dinner in Chicago,
and we had the unbelievable sales leaders there.
And at the end of a three hour dinner,
where we were just shooting a breeze,
talking about family and the Taylor Swift tour,
and like whatever.
At the end, they were like, where's the sales pitch?
It's like, I'm not gonna pitch you.
If you wanna learn more about Clary, go to the website.
Like we're here to talk to each other.
- You just spend an hour with us.
I don't care about that.
That was one of the things, shout out to Nate Skinner,
former salesperson, CM OVON, Fido.
Where when I did a podcast with him back in the day,
he was like, I do not care if people talk about
our product at all.
In fact, you can like competitors on,
you can let anyone, it's like, it's our platform.
They're coming to us.
We're getting all these like engagements here.
It's like, it doesn't matter.
It's like, if you create the space
and let them do what they want there,
it turns out like you'll get a lot better results.
- Yeah.
- What else is your, or actually not what else?
What about your most guttable budget item?
What's something that you didn't wanna spend money on
this year or next year?
- All my budget items have been approved.
Which one did you not want to approve?
- No, if you gotta approve, it's not, it's not cutable.
- Cutable.
I mean, I run an extremely lean team, like in tech stuff.
Like I was just weird, like we were talking earlier,
but like how much tech, it was funny,
but in sales, one rev-ops leader told me,
he's like, Deb, this looks good.
Like how much, how much things my tech stack
am I supposed to have?
And that was resonating with me.
And so like when I'm interviewing folks or talking,
I think it's like weird, like asking what like a marketers
tech stack is, 'cause it's like Google Docs.
Like we can get a lot done with Google Docs.
Like I don't need a lot of like technology.
So I run a pretty lean team in business.
So like I honestly like can't say that I come,
like I don't ask for money that I don't absolutely need.
And I'm not just saying that 'cause he says yes.
So I don't have anything that I could cut.
- What about something you're not investing in this year?
- Well, I'll answer the first question first.
And then we can talk about that in a second,
which is I have increasing skepticism of paid ads
as a means for demand capture.
- 100%.
- For demand capture.
So there's demand creation, awareness is kind of a more
common term for it.
And there's demand capture.
Like how getting people actually convert, raise their hand
and say tell me more.
That's just not the way that buyers buy.
There's, buyers want to do more research.
They want to become more educated.
And so I think there's a time and a place for paid ads
to create awareness, tell the category story,
show up on LinkedIn.
So we're getting those impressions.
So it's like a billboard.
It's like a billboard.
I think treating paid ads like a billboard is way smarter
than trying to lean on them as demand capture mechanisms
because then you end up playing this impossible game
of skyrocketing CPLs, terrible conversion rates,
terrible win rates, and your finance team is like,
what the hell are you guys doing?
And so I think we got to find a better balance
and rethink a lot of the ways that kind of the traditional
playbook of running paid ads so that people see an ad,
click an ad buy a thing.
It's just not the way it works in B2B anymore.
- I totally agree.
We have an ad that we've been running for like the past year.
And our A/B test was like, do we go with just like pure value,
like value proposition?
And then others was like, let's just be funny.
And the one that's funny, way outperformed.
So we did an ad with someone like who looks like he's
on a deathbed with a bunch of doctors around and said,
I almost died making our company podcast
but then I found Caspian.
And like we get all sorts of comments on it
and people like tagging their friends and stuff like that.
And again, like I don't care if anyone ever clicks
on the ad but it's like, and we usually,
we use it a lot for retargeting as well.
So it's like people have already engaged with us.
But it's like that sort of thing like follow them
around the internet and make them laugh.
Like that's all you need from that stuff.
It's just like a positive brand sentiment.
And it's like, that's it.
But they're not, I don't need to measure
the conversion space, that stuff.
We have their email.
I could just send them an email.
- And that's a perfect segue into what are we trying
to invest in more.
And broad strokes, what we're, we,
Clary are trying to invest in is running our marketing
organization with more of a B2C kind of vibe.
We want the customer to be the hero.
We want them to be, to be the ones taking center stage.
The old B2B playbook of selling technology.
As it sounds obvious that like, of course,
we should be marketing and selling our technology.
Well, not really.
You need to be selling and evangelizing the problem
that you solve and you need to be putting the hero cape
on the buyer so that they feel empowered to go solve
that problem leveraging your technology.
And that's the move that we're trying to make.
So a lot of what we do in the run revenue campaign
and the way that we're showing up.
And certainly hopefully the vibe that you get
when you engage with any Clary properties,
whether that's runrevenue.pro or clary.com or us on social,
hopefully you get more of a B2C feel from us.
We want you leaving any Clary experience and feeling like,
that was, that felt like Nike.
I felt like Apple, not, that felt like IBM.
Like that's not the way we want to go.
So that's what we're trying to invest more in.
I don't exactly know what it means,
but it's something of a directional,
a North star and ideal state that we're trying to get to.
- I mean, I feel like that, you know,
starts with content in personal experiences.
You know, the buyer experience, how all that stuff feels.
Are we going to be the people who send 5,000 outbound emails
to the same exact person?
I just said this on another podcast,
where we did a test of, we took 250 people,
we sent them, you know, like an email like,
"Hey, buy Caspian."
And then we did the second thing
when we invited them on our podcast,
1% rate versus 25.
- Yeah. - Wow.
- Yeah.
- The offer is completely different.
And one makes you feel special and cool.
And the other one's like,
"Dima doesn't, everyone's trying to get you to buy something."
It's funny at, not Kyle, previous marketing land,
I've had that like, "Hey, we're behind on pipeline."
What do you say we just like send an email
to our database asking for demos?
- Yes, let's send more.
- And I was like, "Man, if that was a good idea,
"more people would be doing it."
And it would be working.
And so guess what, I got forced into doing it.
Wrote the best copy I could,
not one demo, 75,000 people on list, not one demo.
And I was like, "Can we just like hang this up now?"
Like, this is not how the world works.
- But Devin it costs zero dollars to send those emails
and you got-- - My time is not worth.
- 0.23, yeah. - 0.23 deals
that close because of that.
But that's the same argument.
You're like, but the other side of that is,
it's super annoying to be on the other end of that.
And have you ever thought of that?
- It is.
- And my thought was trust immediately.
- The unsubrate was what I showed.
Which was like three times higher than when we were saying,
you know, we were saying,
you know, like content, a lot of like just offers, right?
Free stuff.
And I'm like, now there's, I don't know,
thousand people, I have to go regain their email
and regain their trust because we decided
to take a shortcut that didn't work.
- And that's not gonna happen.
If somebody unsubscribes from your email,
like, why would they ever resubscribe it?
- Unless you've shown them that you're gonna treat them
like a lead in your database.
And not like a human that who has problems you understand
and can help solve.
Why would they ever come back to you?
- Ironically, we had to do it again twice.
Could you believe that twice?
We had to like prove,
I know six months ago, the world's changed.
I was like, okay.
- I was talking to someone who,
who due to pressure from the royal investors
in the sky that they fired a content marketing person
and hired two more outbound reps.
And I was like, you're already sending these people emails.
You wanna just send more?
Like, what are we talking about here?
Plus, outbound's a marketing function anyways.
So like, why do you even need those two people
to send those emails?
But you're like, that's like a back where you've already
lost, right?
And I think the other piece that we've talked about a lot
is like the 95% of people who are not buying,
that is when you need to get in front of them.
- Yes.
Well, that's why I liked your ad, sorry,
I didn't catch up.
Your ad that you said about the casket.
- It's like you're not converting them,
but you're winning mind share.
- Yeah.
- And you need to win mind share
before you can win market share.
So all that like people like,
all it's brand content, like that's not converting.
It's like, but most people aren't buying anyway.
So you need to start to get them to know, like,
and trust you, like you're doing with your ad.
And then later, when the meeting comes up
that I need your services, you'll be the first one.
And then you'll get more inbound.
Or when the SDR does do the outreach,
it's like, oh yeah, I've known you.
I've seen this stuff.
I'm more likely to take a meeting.
- Glad pass.
One of the things, I love that you were saying about
trying to feel more like that B2C experience.
And I think that I would add to that,
that just like having more personality,
and then having your sales process match your marketing
is something that that is like so hard to do.
If you can do it right.
It's like, if you're the company who has like all this
very cool, very like, hey, buy from us,
if you want to get better, but if not, like no worries.
And then your salesperson bangs down their door
5,000 times.
We had someone on the podcast who said something
that was brilliant, which was like,
we will not like pester anyone ever
unless they follow the lead form.
And then it's like, we will email them 100 times
because they told us that they wanted to do business with us.
So like, until they say, no, actually that was my bad.
I just did that when I was in the middle of the night
and I was in a weak place.
- You get like, don't opt out of that.
And I thought that was like a refreshing way
of thinking about it.
It's like, hey, I'm not gonna,
you interrupted me to say I want your,
you know, I might want to do business with you.
But at least that has like a strategy behind it,
rather than just like annoy the living heck out of people.
- Sure.
- Right.
- Anywho.
- Yeah.
- Last thing here, just talking about RevOps really quick.
Obviously we've been doing this show Rise of RevOps
with Qualified and I have been stunned
at how different RevOps teams are,
where it sits in the organization.
Does it roll up to CFO?
Does it roll up to CRO?
What type of person?
What is their background in it?
RevOps seems like it is this like uncharted territory
that like we're sort of figuring out on the fly.
Obviously you work with tons of RevOps people.
So I'm just curious like about this,
this sort of like nascent field
that is now the zipper between sales marketing
and customer success, which is all really new.
Like what is sort of the next phase for RevOps?
- So RevOps is, I'm glad you did a really good frame up
because a lot of people think of RevOps simply as
a coming together of sales ops, marketing ops, CS ops,
just jam them together.
Put them on the same team, put a leader and we have RevOps.
And that's not it, it's not it.
What RevOps is, is it's a function that facilitates
the operational strategy of running revenue.
And so I don't like the function,
we get so wrapped around the axle about the function
and where it reports and all those things like,
well, what are we actually trying to do here?
We're trying to create a revenue strategy,
operationalize that strategy and drive predictable growth.
That's what RevOps is.
And so I think it makes sense for some works
for that to roll into finance.
I think it makes sense in other works
for that to roll into the CRM.
A lot of it is situational, a lot of it depends.
And so like the answer to any good question
is always nuance.
And I think the answer to this one is nuance
and it depends on the needs of the business.
But that North Star is really important.
You as a RevOps person or team,
you are the facilitators of the revenue process.
You're the ones who make it come to life.
You're the ones making sure all your revenue critical
employees have the means to collaborate.
You're making sure that all the processes
that you're running are standardized, governed and can scale.
And if that's the service you're providing to the company,
you are irreplaceable because you're driving
the most important business process, which is revenue.
- Another thing that I think you can add onto that
is that there's certain folks, RevOps folks,
that are strategic and then some that are operational
and then the unicorn that is both.
- Yeah, and that yeah, exactly.
And so when you talk to the people
who are the strategic level thinker,
you have this like, you talk to them,
you're like, oh, you're thinking about the business
for years from now, you're thinking about
like all of these super strategic levers,
thinking about, you know, all of these different parts
of the business and how one thing impacts another.
Like if you move this, if you change a stage here,
if you do this, and like those types
of strategic conversations are not things
that historically have been in RevOps.
And it's really fascinating.
Like how do we help build the RevOps community
to develop the strategic muscle if you don't have it, right?
If you have just been like, if you started your career
as a Salesforce admin and you moved from there into like
your career path now to, oh, I have to go learn strategy.
Like that's a very different skill set.
So I think that part of it is fascinating.
And I know that y'all are gonna be at the cutting edge
of pushing that stuff forward.
- Well, we agreed, we agreed, Blue.
We had a session yesterday.
I think it was a Neil from Asana, the head of RevOps,
who was like the whole point of his like going from like owner
of the tech stack and the dashboard, you know,
the person who goes gets the dashboard
to that strategic function in that leader.
And that's what a Neil was doing a great job saying.
One was like, you absolutely have to be looking
a year or two years ahead.
But please don't get a twist.
Like you are always in the operational mode.
There's always too much work to be done.
And you just need to accept that as you go into the role.
- Yeah.
- But it's kind of like interesting
because I kind of appreciate that.
Like it is what it is, at least for now.
And you still need to find a way to be more strategic
to elevate the function from like what we call it.
Like the person who goes and gets the question
or go gets answers, the person asking the right questions.
- Yeah, we heard a CRO who talks about
how they just bifurcated their team.
They like, they have like their little, their strat,
they have a little strat team that just like never
has to get operational.
And then the rest of the RevOps,
we just purely operational.
- And they're constantly, their strat team is like,
they are thinking six months plus out all the time.
- That is, it's super fast.
- I'll find the episode now.
We'll link it up in the show notes as they say.
But that stuff is like, man, this is a brand new field.
Like it really is a brand new field
with the way that it is changing and you know,
it's super energetic.
- It's like sales enablement eight, 10 years ago.
You ask like 10 different companies,
what sales enable them to do and look like at your company
and you get 10 different answers.
So RevOps is growing and it's starting to mature.
So you're still kind of get that.
- Not only is it growing, RevOps is the number one
fastest growing job in the US.
- According to CNBC, like this is not clary propaganda.
This is real.
Number one, fastest growing job.
Faster than frontline medical workers,
faster than truck drivers,
faster than every other job in the US, which is wild.
And it's because they are the facilitators
of the revenue process.
And to do the job well,
you earn the right to think long term by executing short term.
You earn that right, you earn the seat of the table
by doing the hard stuff, running toward the fire,
figuring out how to make the rest of the team successful.
- And it's interesting to hear that teams have bifurcated.
I wanna help.
- I heard that.
- Yeah, I wanna follow up with that person
like six months from now, like did it work or today?
- Yeah, no kidding.
- Case study.
- Gentlemen, it's been wonderful having you on the show,
having you at the event.
For listeners, you can go to clary and check it out.
A lot of great, check out the Run Revenue podcast
and any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- You just plugged the main two CTAs that I love to plug.
So yeah, go run revenue with clary.
- Yeah, totally agree.
The most, the highest leverage thing you can do
as an operator, as any revenue critical employee
is root out and stop revenue leak.
If you do that, you're irreplaceable.
You're never gonna get riffed.
It's gonna be lovely.
So that's the focus for everybody that we work on.
- Awesome, thanks so much.
Take care. - Yeah, thanks.
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