Optimizing ROI with the Right Marketing Mix
Grant Johnson shares insights on prioritizing ROI and tailoring your marketing mix, as well as the value of exploring new tools and strategies for your marketing approach.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Cast Mein Studios.
We are brought to you by our friends at Qualified.
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platform for your company's revenue teams that use Salesforce.
Head over to Qualified.com to learn more.
And today, we're joined by a very special guest, Grant.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Nice to talk with you, Ian.
Yeah, great to be talking again.
Really excited to hear about your new role, new company, and all of that.
Can you tell us a little bit about this new company that you, I guess not just,
but relatively recently, just started at Build Trust.
I am a relative newbie.
I went to join the first of this year, so about three months.
And I was fortunate to join the Sales Achievement Club and
meet a lot of the high performing sales folks.
And Build Trust is a B2B accounts receivable or otherwise,
you know, it's AR automation and digital payments market leader.
And in layman's terms, basically what we do is we help businesses get paid
faster, improve their cash flow and reduce cost.
All good things in this economy, I think.
There's nothing that I loathe more than working on AR.
It's perhaps one of my least favorite things on this planet.
Yeah, and a lot of people, I think, feel the same way.
And if we can make that job less frustrating and
free up some time to do more exciting things, then we're happy and
hopefully our customers are happier.
Grant, gosh, you came on DGV episode 28.
And now we are 100 episodes later having you back.
So it's excited to chat about this new chapter here at Build Trust.
Let's get into our first segment, The Trust Tree.
Where we go and feel honest and trusted.
You can share those deepest, darkest demand gen in marketing secrets.
Who does Build Trust serve?
What is the persona that you're selling into in the companies?
>> Yeah, it's really the office of the CFO.
And they come by a lot of titles.
We have like many companies, various personas.
So certainly the CFO in some companies, it could be the controller,
the VP of finance, it might be the AR manager, maybe even the treasurer.
As well as some more specific functions like credit director or
collections manager.
Since we're helping companies get paid, there's different titles associated
with
making sure that customers are paid in a timely fashion.
And we help with that entire process.
>> And so digging into those types of companies and
size of companies, how do you think about segmenting that market?
>> Yeah, that's a really timely question because we are going through what we
call
a TAM, total available market and ICP, ideal customer profile, refinement.
Build Trust went from private to public that an IPO a few years ago was taken
private again by EQT based in Europe.
Near $100 billion in assets, really successful company.
And as they close that transaction in the last year, I joined the first of this
year.
We have historical success in both mid-market and enterprise.
And in particular, I'll just share a few of the segments that we have a lot of
customers and heavy machinery, for example, manufacturing, medical equipment,
business services, technology, transportation.
If you think about it at a high level, if you're a business that has a lot of
customers and you want to make sure that your customers not only pay you in
timely fashion, but they're happy with the way you invoice them.
Having visibility into what's, did you deliver the good or the service or both?
Build Trust helps make that happen.
And we work for companies, I'll just use some alliteration like examples of
some
of these Chiquita brands, Caterpillar, St. Schobain and CDW.
Some of these companies are pretty large, but we also help smaller companies
across mid-market up through a large enterprise.
>> And how do you organize your team to go after those accounts?
>> We have segment based teams.
So we have teams focused on segments such as mid-market.
We have segments the larger enterprise.
We have vertical teams I mentioned.
We have specific verticals, sales folks that have industry knowledge,
what I would call domain expertise.
They speak the language.
They know the drivers, the important hot topics for those industries.
And so from a marketing perspective, I have dedicated folks that support both
the verticals as well as the product offerings by segment.
And we work hand in hand.
I believe go to market as a connected motion when it works well.
So that the BDRs, we call them ADRs, but you've heard ADR, STR, BDR.
That the development reps, if you will.
Together with marketing sales, we lock arms and decide on one of the best
tactics,
the programs and the feedback loops so we can optimize our opportunity
and gain new customers and grow existing ones.
Any differences or changes or unique stuff with sort of the you're go to market
and how you think about it at Biltrust.
The fact that we are segmented, if I reflect on my career, this is my fifth
tour of duty.
Fifth stop is a tour as a CMO.
Each company, you sort of learn a little bit.
Certainly that's always been my goal is to find out, learn some new things.
And the segmentation is really, I think, key.
It's not that anyone today with all the digital tools and chat GPT
and analytics and machine learning and all the things we have at our disposal
is just going to do spray and pray or random acts of marketing.
On the other hand, the fact that we know who our customers are,
we know what the problems they have, we know who the persona's decision makers
are.
It makes us much more intentional in our activities,
whether it's a marketing activity, sales activity, communications activity.
So we tend to land better than if we just let's see who responds.
And so I found that, because in past companies, if you just have a general
business approach,
you're going to get some percentage of response.
Our response rates, while I can't disclose them,
they are a bit higher than industry averages.
It's such a good point about having this cornucopia of tools
that allow us to do way more spray and pray marketing than we possibly could
ever imagine.
I talked to one of the great recurring guests of this show,
Chandar always talks about you get to run three plays and that's it.
And that's all you can focus on and that's all you're allowed to do.
That's how much you can do well.
And I think about that every day.
Every single day when I look at our Q1 marketing goals
and our Q2 marketing goals and all that stuff.
And I think about that every day and I'm like,
are we doing too many plays?
Like, are we doing too many things?
Are we boiling the ocean?
Which does that fit into here?
And it's like, gosh, I'm like, yeah, the CHED GPT thing or whatever it is,
like there's no silver bullet.
It's another tool in the toolkit that we can use.
That's an really interesting point.
I think Chandar was one of my CMO peer groups, great guy.
And the more prescriptive we can be,
hopefully the more predictable we can become.
And so I did a blog on the 2020 through the year,
predictable market.
That's part of my vision of where we can get to is we just leverage the tools.
We have the right discipline and focus and execution.
We can say, look, if we have another million dollars of
pipeline marketing investment, we'll produce 10 million in revenue.
And the board and my CEO says, we'll do that all day long.
So that's what we're aiming for versus like,
let's just try a bunch of different things and keep changing what we're doing.
That's not a really good prescription for predictability.
I like the idea.
We have more than three sales plays, but it's not unlimited.
It's very focused by segment,
by informed by what's working and what's working best.
Yeah, and we're going to get into those plays here in a second.
And I do want to shout out that your blog, CMOmentor.com is great.
And everybody should check it out.
We'll link it up in the show notes.
And that's some really great, really, really fun stuff on there,
including the posts that you mentioned about predictable marketing.
But yeah, I think that that's the goal right is,
it seems like as you become more tenured in these,
in the as the fifth time around the sun,
you know, if you're CMO, CMO-dom,
figuring out how to be predictable is far more interesting than
like hitting the home run that you don't know
how it came from, where it came from, or why it came from.
And obviously we always want to have the own run too.
But it's interesting that predictable is your goal.
Yeah, I was fascinated a long time ago with a digital marketing.
I remember I had a pretty big PPC budget,
and it was great to see that.
But I'll tell you, the most success I had,
actually, I've been on the agency side of one point in my career,
where I ran Dell's direct advertising for North America.
And it's a little different than SAS FinTech business that I'm in.
We could provide Dell as their age with 99% certainty
on how much we get return on a dollar invested.
I've always been fascinated by, can I replicate that in the more complex
sat-sageable world?
And for those who were born after the computer era blossom,
Dell, one of the leading direct marketers of all time,
that they would sell millions and millions of computers
through direct to consumer, whether digital or TV or whatever they do it.
But they didn't invest those dollars without knowing what the return is.
And so that's sort of why that's the vision here.
There's not an appeal to the bright, shiny object.
There's really appeal to the better way of doing things.
There's always lots of tools, but if it's going to have a better return
and a better outcome, that's where I want to invest the incremental marketing
dollar.
And that was a good segue to get into those bets.
But I will just add there that I think that so much of making bets,
we see this all the time with the series that we create,
where people so often want to say, let's just test.
Could you four episodes?
And I'm like, yeah, sure, you could do four episodes.
Would are some of your favorite podcasts or TV shows?
They're like, oh, this, this, and this, and I love the mineral ring or I love,
or whatever.
Like, do they have four episodes?
Like, no, like, yeah, because nobody makes things in groups for episodes.
You know, unless it's like British television,
you're making like hour and a half episodes or something like that.
And then they do multiple seasons.
I'm like, the point of, and I use the series stuff,
because I have these conversations every day,
but there's so much of this experimentation,
but without the backbone of committing to this is how this play works.
And I think that with all of this, like the rise of experimentation
that people lack the conviction to say,
this is something that I believe that the company needs for the long term,
and to look at those campaigns to say, what does this look like in three years?
Not that you need to run it for three years, but like, if I invest in this,
what is real success look like year after year,
and how do we build it to be consistent or repeatable?
And so often it's like the exact opposite.
It's just like, we tried this and that doesn't work.
Like, you hear people say, we tried video and it didn't work.
You're like, what does that even mean?
Like, there's a million things that video could mean.
How did you try it?
It seems like you have a lot of conviction for the way that you invest in
things.
Yeah, I do, and I do agree that you have to commit to something.
You can't declare it unsuccessful if you haven't given it a chance
and tried a few tweaks.
And after a certain period of time,
you don't hit your head against the wall.
You let it go, but you're right.
You've got to have the right,
lodged in tune and little view of what it takes for a campaign to take hold and
be successful.
Let's get to the playbook where you open up that famous five times CMO,
grant playbook and tell us the tactics that help you win.
You play to win the game.
Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play to just play.
What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items?
Yeah, I guess I'd have to go back to the first episode and congratulations,
by the way, Ian and team with well over 100.
That's you've got quite a series going.
And that was one of the early guests.
And this wasn't on my list before,
but I have to say it was like right before COVID, early days and all things
digital.
But in particular, I'm still even though I was early into it.
I'm still a PPC fan.
I just have to get really creative and have good tracking mechanisms.
But as long as you're getting acceptable rates and you have a diversified
campaign,
and often you have a partner helping you optimize your spend.
That's good.
It's funny.
My last company, it didn't have a lot of success for webinars.
I had it before.
We're having a lot of success for webinars.
And I think like a lot of things you've got to put the effort into it.
You've got to have production quality, compelling content, often guests,
authorities that in the industry that you're marketing in,
you have to do just like a physical thing, pre-marketing during the event,
have a good experience for the participants and post event follow up to high
source of leads
that flow through into opportunities and closed one business.
That's what I consider the true metric of successful market investment that
your salesperson closed in actual customer.
And the third, and maybe this is surprising, and I don't want to get 100 emails
about,
please come to this event.
But you know, events work pretty well for us.
And if you think about it, part of the reasons they do is that because we focus
on a lot of
verticals, they tend to have, you've heard of the term birds with feather flock
together,
they sort of industry, you've got to go to this industry event and you can go
to that event.
And if you plan it well and you have a reasonable cost per lead,
attendees are in the market, it can actually perform pretty well.
So well, we can't code every event and it's not even possible,
though there are certain events within certain segments that we find time and
time again,
produce really good return.
I love, I came with this phrase a long time ago called intercept marketing,
meaning you can also just have a really good booth presence and somebody doesn
't know that
bill trust is the best provider and they walk by and say, hey, that looks
interesting,
get paid faster.
That's one of our marketing themes.
How do I get paid faster?
My customers are kind of slow at paying.
How do I do that?
Well, actually, you can accept use credit card and we'll help with making sure
that's
easier for your customers to use.
It gives them some float time, get paid faster.
It's a win-win for you and your customers.
And therefore, not only are you getting your cash in the door faster,
they're happier doing business with you.
That's one of the reasons why that events is now bubbled up into the uncuttable
I can't say which one, but events in general.
It's funny to hear on the first time that you came on, talking about paid
search, paid social
and promotions on things like GTU and Capetera.
And then this time around that layering in webinars and events, which are two
of the
more old school demand gen tactics, quote, unquote old school tactics.
But I think that what you're talking about is something that I've seen a lot of
, which is
people have worked back into their preferred way of learning.
And there's a few think of it as like people either, this is not really true,
but there's
people who brush their teeth every day and like to learn every day or there's
people who
like to go to the dentist and get their teeth cleaned twice a year.
And I think that you see a certain subset of the population really loves those
in-person
experiences.
Certain set of the population loves those digital first video first experiences
in a
webinar format where they kind of have to be there on at time and they can ask
questions.
People obviously like things like podcast and video series or it's on demand.
And I think that it's the blend of those different things of giving people
options.
That's what we're starting to see is that people are defaulting into those
those ways.
They've always been that way, but there's now a proliferation of digital tools
and smaller events
and micro events and digital events.
And now the in-person stuff stands out even more because it actually is
something where you can
grab a beer and catch up with long time friend.
Yeah, it's the right, as you say, constructing the right marketing mix and
multi-channels that
optimize your opportunity to engage with prospects and customers.
And yeah, you don't over invest in one, but I think you're right now.
Some of these other or traditional means that they found their way back into
the mix.
I think that the reason why they found their way back into the mix is because
that's what
people voted on. They wanted that stuff. They prefer it and that's why it works
And you got to be listening to how your customer engages.
I put a poll out the other day about webinars and I was like, the one last
thing we went to a webinar.
And there was a section of, because one of my employees was like, "I've never
been to a webinar,"
there's a section of a demographic of people that are of a certain age that's
straight up,
"Don't go to webinars." They've never been to webinars. It's never been part of
their life.
So if you're selling to that group and you roll out a solely webinar driven
strategy,
like you're going to be in tough shape and there's other groups that do, and it
could be industry,
it could be whatever. So any of it fascinating. What about your most cuttable
things or some
stuff that maybe you're not investing in? A litmus test. I don't know if I
tactic is just using
the example. I said, "Hey, can we spend 10,000 on this?" It does seem like a
lot of money.
It got budget in the millions and we're a good-sized company. It probably
reported before it went private.
So I can't report that, but Bill Truss was probably about 165 million.
It's before it went private. Approached a couple hundred million good-sized
company.
So 5,000 or 10,000, that's a crazy amount. But I asked anyone who wants to
invest the dollar is,
you need to model it out. What's the audience? What's the demographic? What
personas you're reaching,
whatever methodology used, the budget authority need, a timetable or somewhere
packed. It doesn't
really matter, mythology. You model out and I've had some of these folks come
back and said,
"I don't know." I said, "Well, then discussion's over." It may not achieve that
, but there's not an
ROI. It's got to be at least three to one ideally. You'd be 10 to one ROI, but
at least has to be
three to one ROI. That's really the key thing. If it's not, we doesn't even get
off the ground.
And if we start looking at things, I always like within the year, there's a
good practice of looking
at your marketing tech stack and your tools as well as your programs. There's
no entitlements.
It's like, "What's going to work in 2023?" I totally agree. If you had been
that way,
obviously, with everything with COVID and then this and then tech apocalypse
and this and that,
and then they say everything that's been going on, it's like, "Goodness
gracious,
if you rolled out the same playbook and didn't adapt, it'd be tough." How do
you view your website?
I think it's essential. They were talking about some generations. They don't go
to webinars and
my kids. They don't open email, but I can text them or catch them on social
media.
There's a lot of talk with ABM tools about the dark funnel and the website is
your electronic
presence. It has to do a lot of things. When I joined here, the individual who
directs our web
and digital had a 65-page document, we're re-platforming and relaunching. We
have both a new platform
that we're going to host on. We have a whole new information architecture. You
can now
navigate not just by product. You can navigate by your title. You can navigate
by your industry.
We're trying to make it easier. I've always felt from the early days of the web
to the current
digital experience or platforms that, "Yeah, you got a lot of metric. You want
to lower your bounce
rate and time on side and all your conversions." But in general, just like any
other brand
impression, you want people to say, "Hey, I want to come back to that place."
Remember the days
when they were black websites and all kinds of crazy stuff. I think it's just
an important part
of your company. It has to serve all these stakeholders. Then the day, you want
us to drive
demand and build brand. It also has to be a pleasant experience. I think I've
always been very involved
in web. In fact, when I find some extra time this week, I've joined about 23
other testers
before we go live with the new site. Sometime early April, there'll be a new
experience for a
build trust. I'm going to go click on every link myself because I just think it
's that important.
I love it. Couldn't agree more. I do the same thing. One of the great lessons
of my life of my
business life was that you got to look through the lens because I did a video
shoot and there was
a mic in the shot. The whole video shoot, I let the director do it and I didn't
look in the lens.
Literally a full day's worth of shoot. I was like, "Oh, my gosh. Don't repeat
that one, huh?"
Yeah, I saved up for you. Any other things that you find especially interesting
are things that
you won't invest in, things that you're excited to try out, things that have
blown your mind recently
as a CMO. Again, a fresh look at a new company. Yeah. I think now everybody's
doing it, but I
remember before it was on national TV. Thank you for mentioning CMO Mentor. I
do mentor other
CMOs and write the blog. I was like, "What's this chat GPT thing?" This is last
year. I tried it
out. I asked it, "What are the seven most important things that determine
success in a CMO?"
"What are the seven essential things for a good digital campaign?" And since it
synthesizes what's
available out there, it actually came up with what was pretty good. I'm not
afraid of it. I think
some folks are afraid of chat and bots and generative AI and all this stuff. It
doesn't have the human
element, obviously, and it doesn't have the creative element. And that's if it
can take the place of
monotonous manual repetitive tasks, then I think it's great. I will tell you,
we're using it. There's
a number of companies I know are making announcements, some of whom we adopted
their technology. We
might adopt their technology. And I think that's pretty exciting because if we
can free up time to
do more creative, impactful endeavors in our lives and in our work, then I
think that's great. So
that's why I say, and I mean it, that I think it's the best time ever to be in
marketing. I don't,
there was a bad time, but there's a lot more at your disposal if you know how
to leverage the tools
to your advantage. Yeah, I'm not scared of it at all. We've actually been using
AI copywriting for a
while. Pretty much since I started the company, why wouldn't you? And it's
funny, we have conversations
all the time. It's like, if that's happening, then couldn't that all just be
replaced or this
replaced or whatever? And I'm like, sure, could be, but someone's got to put
the inputs in, someone's
got to figure out what to put there, someone's got to come up with new ideas
and new creative things.
They have to get that stuff in market. It's not doing everything for you. If
you're a copywriter,
and that's all you do, that might be a little challenging, but for the vast
majority marketers
are pretty safe. Yeah, I think that you've mentioned the big idea is still
going to come from people,
right? The repetitive monotonous things that the first drafts and all the rest
of that machine
learning can produce. Why not? More time for big ideas. Yeah, and if you can go
back and spit a
bunch of stuff that you've said into a thing, then they can write a book for
you in 10 minutes.
That's pretty damn cool. If it's your own thoughts and ideas that it's regurg
itating back into you,
that's a lot better than going to a book publisher and having them help you,
that's for sure.
In terms of disruptive innovation, Clayton Christensen said it's exponentially
better than
nothing. I think Chet GPT fits the bill for that. All AI fits the bill for that
. It's exponentially
better than not having anything. So I just think it's an exciting time too. Are
any other thoughts
there or any other thoughts that you wanted to touch on? No, I think you really
hit on what I
think is going to help us move more towards predictable marketing when you can
get
bots and tools that help with the workload. And then you can free up some time
for these
impactful ideas. Early in my career, I inherited a team that was real proud of
all the leads they
created and they were sort of activity focused. And I always had been more
outcome focused. I
said, well, how much has been accepted by sales? What's converted and what's
closed? And that's
the ultimate success of a market organization. The company makes their number.
If we could have all
these vanity metrics and the company succeeded, it's not a lot to celebrate. So
that's the other
thing that this helps us align with sales and together achieve our shared goals
all the better.
You and I talked last time about this, the ROI of everything and something that
you focus on a ton.
Obviously, we're in this sort of do more with less phase in technology that a
lot of people
have been talking about. That's pretty terrible sort of phrase. To be honest,
last time you talked
about this idea of number of qualified leads, times opportunity conversion
percentage of
close rate, ACV divided by cost. It's pretty simple calculation, pretty
powerful calculation,
as many simple ones are it's something that we use at Caspian as we're
justifying ROI for
creating a video series or podcast series or something like that. Where does
time fit on that
equation? Yeah, I think time does. It takes too much time. You don't have time
to experiment
effectively. I don't know I put that into the math equation, but it's a really
good observation.
It's also related to the scale of the effort. It's a much larger multi-touch
program and you're
going to have to give it time to prove out and what can you learn each step
along the way. And
sometimes there's one and done programs which work well. Webinar is a great
example. And there's
other multi-touch different tactics that used. If you look at what's called the
buyer's journey,
we're doing some analytics there to see how many touches does it take? What
sort of content
they consume? We've got various tools for that. What was the real catalyst we
became in the final
three, shoot out, and then ultimately the vendor of choice and what got them
over to our camp.
And so again, the time is going to help you with that. And so I think that's a
really good element
to add to the equation. Yeah, I just to me it feels it's so challenging because
of seasonality
with so much especially, you know, budgets are cut now. Everybody's saying,
okay, Q3,
we're a second half of the year. Hopefully budgets heat up a little bit or, hey
, you know,
our buying. So you got to talk to me in October and then we can budget it and
get it going.
But we know as marketers that if I'm talking to someone, if I get a lead in
January and they're
not going to close till next January, that the flash to be on that is going to
be really,
it's going to be really long. We know that they're just no way they're going to
buy,
right? They do not have money. They can't find money from somewhere else. But
that lead is just
as powerful and it doesn't fit into the equation as something that, you know,
hey, if a campaign
drives you 100 leads and all of those or impacts 100 accounts and all those
accounts close a year
from now, you might not last that long as a CMO if those things don't start
converting.
It's how you navigate that. Any final thoughts your grant?
No, I think we've covered a wide range of interesting topics. You know, one of
the things you'd asked
before, I was thinking about it when I did the CMO mentors, I've mentored 12
individuals across
my career who become CMO. So I'm proud of that. And I, you know, I think the
first time you're a CMO,
I learned the hard way with mistakes I made and don't do it alone. Get a mentor
, join a peer group,
talk to your, your former boss or colleagues. It just runs some ideas by people
before you make
the mistake on your own. And I think that's probably the best advice I'd give
to a first time CMO.
That's awesome. Okay, quit some quick hits here. These are quick questions and
quick answers,
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Grant, are you ready?
Yes. What do you do for fun? If you could see the shelf behind me, I try to
collect tennis trophies.
I've got a term this weekend and I've been playing competitive tennis for a
while. And I just find
it's not only great exercise physically, it's mentally challenging. And it's
kind of fun when
you win. I've got another shot this weekend. If you could take any animal and
make it any size,
what animal would it be and what size would it be? I would just take a horse
and I would just keep
riding. Right. And maybe I'm somewhat influenced by as we were talking about
series binge watching
Yellowstone, the horse segments are so cool. I didn't grow up with a horse. I
did have summers
on ranches and learn to ride. But I think they're just the right size. If I
brought you back here
one year from now, what's one thing? We're the biggest thing that has changed
for marketing.
I think we're sweating less because we're doing more predictable marketing. I'm
always asked
by board members and CEOs, what's going to be the outcome? Are we going to make
the number?
And I think we'll have the data and more tools to be able to predict that with
a higher level of
certainty. I don't know if you ever get to 100%. Otherwise, I'd know the lot of
numbers to pick.
I think a year from now will be more predictable. Grant, I love it. Awesome
chatting with you as
always. Thanks again and take care. Hey, my pleasure. Thanks again. Bye now.
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