Scaling Success: Breaking Down Organizational Silos
Andy Nester, CMO at Firstup, breaks down organizational silos and how that helps scale success for businesses.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faizan, CEO of Cast Mein Studios.
And today I'm joined by a special guest and an old pal, Andy, how are you?
>> I'm doing great.
How are you?
>> This has been truly years in the making.
I can't believe we haven't done this sooner, but finally, finally, finally,
we have the great Andy Nester on the podcast.
So excited to chat with you about marketing, about demand, about all the cool
stuff the L are doing at first up.
But first, today's show is always brought to you by our friends at Qualified.
Qualified is the number one conversational sales and marketing platform for
companies, revenue teams that use Salesforce.
Head over to Qualified.com to learn how you can start having a smarter,
faster conversation with your buyers right there on your website.
Check out the pipeline cloud, Qualified.com.
Andy, what was your first job marketing?
>> It was a product marketing role.
I'm dating myself now, but probably, it's almost 20 years ago,
I was working at a risk management software that was a,
like Citrix based, if you're familiar from that way back in the day.
Implementation of software, we were just transforming it into a SaaS based
solution.
It wasn't even called SaaS at that point, but it was just kind of a cloud based
offering of our platform that I kind of moved into that role that was,
how do you package, position, and price this thing, which was product marketing
And I kind of kicked off my journey into doing that for a couple of years there
Going back to grad school to get deeper into it and then kind of launching
after that.
>> And now you're the CMO first up, an awesome company, obviously,
we know each other first up is we help you all make an amazing
podcast together.
>> Yeah.
>> But for those folks that don't know about first up,
a super cool company in the HR space talking about employee communications.
Honestly, one of the most important things as someone who's been a former life
in HR,
how you communicate with your employees is like so important.
What does it mean to be CMO of first up?
>> It's a really cool experience for me because you always have to be connected
to a mission of a company.
And for me, I really connect with ours and it is, it's, it may sound lofty,
but it's core to how we think about everything that we do.
Our mission is to make work better for every worker.
And we do that on the basis of communication.
So we make an intelligent communication platform that's used to connect with
an entire workforce, help leaders design and deliver really personalized
communications.
And then our biggest kind of claim to fame is then the insights we can generate
coming off of those communications and then engaging it happens between
the company and their workforce through those communications and
be able to see that throughout the entire employee journey.
>> And we're going to get deep into the marketing strategy here of how you
acquire those customers, including 40% of the Fortune 100.
Annie, let's get to our first segment, the trust tree where you go and
feel honest and trusted and you share those deepest, darkest, pipeline secrets.
What does first up do and who are your customers?
>> Well, I mean, essentially, we are a communication platform.
We are the best in the market at being able to deliver information at the right
time in the right place to each individual worker in an entire workforce
than anything else in the market.
And we talk about every worker, we meet every worker.
Most companies when they think about communicating to the workforce,
it's a lot of knowledge workers, desk workers, people who sit behind a laptop,
like this.
But in reality, 70% of the world's workforce doesn't have an email address.
They don't sit behind a desk.
So being able to communicate with them and understand how those
employees are either engaged or disengaged is really, really difficult.
If you don't have a platform that can automate this type of communication at
scale and in a personalized way to capture all those insights that can exist,
when you keep that connection with the workforce and use those insights to
really identify where there is potential challenges with retention,
where there are productivity issues, where there are opportunities for
advancement for people where you should deliver more LND, for example.
There's lots and lots of great things that come out of really understanding
the workforce down to an individual level.
And so our job is really to help organizations use that data most effectively
and ensure that they are getting their workforce what they need.
>> Yeah, it's so funny when we first met and you were telling me about sort of
like the size of this, the problem that y'all are solving.
I was just blown away at that staff, the 70% of workers don't have an email
address.
Because so in B2B marketing, we're selling everyone has an email address, right
Like every single person that you communicate with, but in so many of those
companies, companies with 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 employees where
the majority of them don't, it is a totally different ball game,
a rare fight error, as one would say.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Yeah, so tell us more about these customers and
what that buying committee look like and what those personas look like.
>> Yeah, so I think you mentioned that we have over 40% of the Fortune 100
customers, I think that's kind of a telling stat in a way that the problem
that exists being able to reach and engage in entire workforce just gets so
magnified when you're over 1,000 employees, particularly if you're 10,000 plus
employees.
So that's where companies like Amazon and Tesco and Ford and BBC and
Helton, they use first up every day to connect with their employees.
And so we really do focus on those larger organizations that have a real
challenge with, you can think about diversity, diversity of the workforce,
because they have people in multiple countries with multiple languages and
multiple roles.
It's just at a scale that you can't manage that manually.
If you want to create a personalized experience for all of those workers,
you have to use automation, you have to use AI, you have to use a platform
that can enable leaders and communicators and
HR professionals to be able to get to each one of those employees in a way
that you can activate them toward the initiative that mattered to you.
>> That's what that buying committee looks really varied as well,
because I think when you're implementing a solution that touches every employee
in the enterprise, a lot of people pay attention to what you're doing at that
point, right?
So it's not just HR, IT, or operations, the CEO is usually involved,
because they're very bought into the idea of, if I'm going to do something
that's engaging every employee, I want to make sure that we're doing the right
thing by that.
And that we're not creating more noise for our employees,
we're actually putting more signal through that noise and be able to engage
them in ways that are much more effective than what they're doing today.
>> Yeah, when we were sitting down all those years ago now at this point,
and you're sort of talking about how HR is this massive stakeholder,
communications is this massive stakeholder, but just internal comms,
which is different than external comms, how those things play together,
who is responsible for speaking to the employees in the company,
that every single company is different.
And then you layer on how does technology play into this?
Is there someone at the company that's responsible for HR tech and those things
It's a pretty complicated sale, and to your point, it's like,
if this is something that is so important as talking to your employees,
the CEO is often extremely involved in that, because they want to make sure
that they're communicating effectively, and they have things to say.
So it's really a fascinating problem.
>> Yeah, and there's rarely one true owner of the platform,
even within our customers today.
I think there's a lot within HR that is,
I think emerging today is around this operational mindset that kind of sits
across all the silos of HR, because HR and large organizations,
there are 20, 30, 50, hundreds of people that are in that department that all
have very specific roles.
They're not thinking about this holistically most often, so
they're starting to become a role that's more operational focus that is looking
across how to tie all these pieces together, and then using communications
at vehicle to be able to deliver, I think, a lot of what the outcomes
that these individual groups within HR are trying to do.
So we are seeing some advancements there as far as that role becoming more
clear, but still most often today, it's a role that exists, but not in name.
It's just done by a role pool people in one time.
Which is the quite the sweet spot when you're when you're creating a technology
Anytime that someone will have a role who's who's overseeing the problem
that you're solving years from now is where you want to be.
What's your marketing strategy?
So for us, I think we're still in a we sticking a step back.
We lead the category that we essentially created five, six years ago,
our workforce communications.
So our job is to continue to push the bounds of what that category means
and to educate the market, particularly our buyers on what they should expect
from these solutions and how they should be thinking kind of two, three years
out in their minds of the evolution of where this is going to go and not be
anchored on where things are just today.
Because most of most of these organizations are they're buying into a
multi-year vision and they're buying a solution that they're going to have for
three, four, five, six plus years.
You know, they want to be confident that we're going to take them somewhere
that isn't even kind of visible today.
And so our marketing is really built around kind of setting that vision out
there and then really showing them the pathway that we're going to get there
and why that matters to them.
So very, very still very content heavy, very reliant on the voice of our
customers.
We have amazing customer roster.
So a lot of our marketing is based on telling the stories of those customers
that's built around ROI.
It's built around the problems that they have and how they're solving those
problems in ways that are very relatable to, you know, like for like
industries or roles that exist within our customers.
And then a pillar of that still comes down to how we build community out of
that.
Right.
So we have all these great customers.
We have these great customer stories.
They want to share with each other.
They want to learn from each other.
We have an opportunity to be the facilitator of how they get together
and learn from each other and really kind of grow
the function overall and the impact it can have on these organizations.
Because we've come from a place where communicators were the primary audience
of how our platform is used.
That's not a really often seen as a strategic role within these large
organizations. A lot of times they get pushed off to the corner.
They don't get a lot of budget.
They don't get a lot of attention, even though they sit on this gold mine
data, essentially, because they're the ones overseeing the communication
to the entire workforce.
That's where we're seeing that evolve now into a broader center stakeholders
that are really interested in what this is because they're seeing what they can
gather it as it pertains to the problems they're trying to solve within their
departments.
How do you structure your marketing team?
I like to think that it's somewhat, I guess, traditional for a SaaS company,
but maybe not.
I think that it's an ever-changing thing.
The two primary pillars of our team are
kind of the brain around product, solution, competitive intelligence, content
strategy. That all kind of sits within one group that we have,
because that really is taking in market feedback.
It is understanding what our customers are struggling with,
where the opportunities are there, and be able to take that and then feed into
what we do on demand and how we build our campaigns and how we go to market
there, both from looking at what we do from an inbound perspective,
but also what we do on creating demand in an outbound perspective.
So very much an account-based strategy with our sales team,
but that inbound outbound balance is really important for us.
In the middle, we kind of have this view around
essentially services.
So brand and creative services that do web development, graphic design,
video production, content writing.
That's all kind of serving the rest of the team
and how things get done.
And then there's a community pillar that's in there as well.
It's kind of the fourth R of it is around community.
That's a relatively new area for us that we created about a year and a half ago
to really set a clear kind of objective that we want to have
the most influential and vibrant community in the market for our category.
And to do that, we need to dedicate resources to that.
Not just dollars, but people in mind share there.
And so that's been a really exciting area for us that we're
continuing to grow.
And we're always seeing the huge dividends from that.
I'm curious when you're thinking about community
and you have a sort of a couple of different personas,
how do you think about building a community?
Because it's like, you know, if you if you're selling developers
and you build a developer community, like DevRel is like very calm, right?
But if you're selling to three different personas that all have these
inner inner locking rings, it can be more difficult.
We are dealing with that exact same problem, right?
Because we we had originally built a community that was for communicators.
But now as we see that we want to attract, engage
within the HR department, within even with an IT, there is a
an inherent conflict there, ultimately, because that the
the strength of the community really is how focused is it and how
how personalizes that community away for the people that are in it.
So the more you water it down with multiple roles and multiple functions,
it starts to lose some of its value.
And so for us, we've thought really hard about how do we connect those
pieces together under a kind of a common thread of where there's a
shared purpose between those different types of roles.
And so we're taking some first steps this year around being able to
get our friends in the communication world to bring in their HR partners
with them, to bring in their IT partners with them when they when they
engage digitally and when they come to our in-person events,
because they are they do have a share of purpose.
They're trying to improve the employee experience of their workforce.
In each other's other departments play a huge role in doing that.
And so we're not making this just about the problems of the communicator,
but just raising it up one more level to where there is a shared
purpose around how they are collectively kind of marching toward the same
objective.
That's seeming that seeming to work.
We'll find out as we kind of continue here and where we need to kind of branch
off and have more specific things for more specific roles.
But so far, we're able to keep this somewhat as a kind of a big tent.
I love that.
That's so cool.
And I love the idea of bringing.
Yeah, taking your your sort of like your your core group of of comms,
folks and having them bring their partners along.
It's a big ask, but it's a super important one.
And like you said, they're more than just sort of like stakeholders, right?
It's like it's someone who is has a real impetus to sort of like row together.
If they want to get anything done, they have to work together across that kind
of triad anyways.
And so this is a natural outcome of that.
So we're not forcing anything there really.
I think the biggest air we find is that a lot of times we are initiating
relationships that maybe don't exist very well within some of these
organizations that need to exist.
If they're going to be successful on this kind of larger objective.
So I think that part we're pretty excited to see when those come to play.
And then we see just how how the eyes light up of an IT professional, HR
professional,
when they kind of come to understand just just what they how they could use
this type of solution
and how impactful it is to their own KPIs that they're focused on.
Any other thoughts on sort of marketing strategy or how demand fits into that
or
infrastructure, anything else there?
Yeah, I think that we've gone through a bit of transition over the last
six plus months where we used to have a very we've always had a very strong
content strategy.
But I think that we were focused really heavily on
maybe the wrong things when it came to creating content,
kind of a bigger, bigger funnel volume over over quality and kind of lost the
thread on,
you know, are we creating? Are we actually creating demand?
Not. Are we drumming up interest for something that is maybe adjacent to what
we do,
but looks good for SEO and looks good for the looks good for MQLs,
but not really translate into things that where people want to talk to
ourselves, folks.
Like we were generating almost almost by accident,
creating a longer sales cycle for our company because we were pulling people
into into a funnel
that really shouldn't have been in the funnel yet.
And then our sales team goes to talk to those people.
They're so far out of a buying cycle and then they waste their time trying to
pull them into an
opportunity when they should be focused on people who haven't checked,
people who have raised their hands.
They say, I'm ready to go now because they've already done the work ahead of
time,
either through engaging our content, engaging with our community or other
places too.
And so I think we lost the kind of the thread when it came to kind of splitting
that funnel in a way that
we got the people who were ready to be engaged to put them in the hands of
sales and the rest of
the people kind of get them out of the way, disqualify better and move them out
of the way in that direction.
So for us, that looks like things like, you know, for content syndication, for
example,
like things like that that generate a lot of volume of leads, but don't really
signify intent.
We've backed away from a lot of those things like that and we've moved more
toward
you're really doing activities that we know will be proxies for intent or we're
doing things that
maybe before we couldn't measure as cleanly. So that's podcast is a great
example where it's
very difficult to measure the impact of a podcast unless you do things like
self-reporting attribution
or things of that nature where you can start to measure those things in more
clear ways.
Those are all very logical to think about. We just, we weren't doing those
things.
And I think that was a fundamental shift for us to think about how we invest
our dollars
and our time much more toward reaching our prospects in the flow of how they
consume information
like natively, you know, in LinkedIn, in Facebook, in places that are, are
there more like to engage
to learn about stuff rather than trying to pull them into our world before they
're ready ultimately.
I love that. And that's, that's the space where a community can build that
anyways, right?
If they know who you are and when they're ready to engage or they're seeing
sort of the,
the demand creating activities that you're talking about, then when they're
ready to,
to raise their hand and say, Hey, I'm actually ready to buy, then you get way
more value out of that.
That's like the point of community, right? Is in the, and the point of some of
that type of content
rather than like you said, trying to just like jam, you know, MQL's into the
system that people who
were like, not, not really there and not the right persona or whatever.
It also changes the role like downstream of the SDRs, you know, BDRs, SDRs,
whatever people call them, you know, instead of them trying to convert someone
into a meeting,
they're focused more on discovery because they know there's intent there. They
know the meeting's
going to come and now it's more about, all right, well, what can I find out
about the pain point
this person has and what's specific to their company that may be different than
what we typically
think about so that when we do have that meeting for the first time, it's super
tailored and it's
very much on point to solving the problem that customer or that prospect has
rather than trying
to just kind of bulldoze them with our talk track and hit them with a first
call deck type of thing
that just, you know, just speeds through to get through it and then we don't
end up with like a
proper conversation. That's such a great point. I'm glad that you brought this
up. This is,
this is a really important point of it's like, hey, you look at the data and
you're like,
we're pitching a bunch of people on, on, on our stuff. They're getting through
the slides,
they're doing that and we just don't see any follow up there. I wonder why that
is. And you're
totally right. It's like, if those initial calls are listening rather than
talking and you find
out all this information, then you find out, oh, a bunch of people that weren't
ready to buy,
who weren't ready to see the side deck yet, were getting the side decks then
like,
how much time are we wasting doing that? That's super, super fascinating. Yeah.
We used to have a model that was heavily reliant on, on outbound SDR demand
creation. And that just
by and large creates a lot of activity and it's from the measurement
perspective,
kind of looks good on paper once again. But we look at what drops down into new
business,
such a large drop off, such a low percentage gets down into late stage pipeline
or even closed.
Just doesn't work in the way that I think the way that stays buyers buy.
Yeah. And when you shift that content towards
the demand creation type thing, then, and not so much as sort of like,
buy now, buy right this second. It's probably a much, much different
conversation for sales.
Okay, let's get to our next segment, the playbook where you open up that
playbook and talk about
the tactics that help you win. What are your three channels or tactics that are
your uncuttable
budget items? Oh, I like that question. I don't think anything's uncuttable.
Ultimately,
it all depends on what's working and not working. But I think right now, our
most important tactics
are either channels, if you will. Ungated video content that can be consumed,
like I said,
natively by our kind of ICP. That part there is, we're seeing traction of that.
We're very
convinced that's the pathway forward. And I think we'll keep investing there
even over other things
because we see that that's getting to our audience in a way that we haven't
traditionally gotten to
them. The second thing there, it kind of feeds into that as far as further
upstream is capturing
and producing and distributing our customer stories. We've done a good job of
creating customer stories
historically. We've gotten much better in the last year about refining how
those stories were told,
where there's a clear before and after. There's a clear ROI that we're artic
ulating. We're helping
our customers articulate a story that is more powerful and less nice to have. I
think that
part for us and those get chopped up and put into video content that gets put
out into the market
on channels that we don't know. The third thing there is podcast. For us, I
think that is a great
way for us to be a little more genuine in the way we tell our story and a
little less structured in
how it happens. And also do it in a way that's more consumable for people to
listen to or watch
when they're able to. I think that versus reading a blog or a white paper or
some of their long-form
content and ebook and things like that, it just seems like if we put all of our
focus in those areas
as far as video content that's ungated, things like the podcast, customer
stories,
we can really, really build a good, not only awareness of who we are and what
we do in the market,
but we can really set the stage for people to find their way to us and raise
their hand that they
want to understand what we do. Dude, if I showed you the three things that are
on,
we had a marketing meeting yesterday, those are literally the three things that
are on our list.
It's like video podcasts, ungated video content, and customer stories. And it's
like,
it's so true because I think that for so long, we thought of customer
storytelling
and customer stories in like one way. And I think what this new way allows you
to do is you can be
really tailored to the before and after ROI type story and have those in a
place on your website
that the person they want to see these, they're going to see these, they want
to watch the one
that's exactly like them, and they want to see before after the very crisp,
very tailored,
very produced, you know, give me exactly what I need to know ROI type
conversation so that I can
go to my boss and go look at XYZ Corp because they got ROI from this and we
will too, right?
You need to have those, but you also need to have customer stories in the other
ways,
which is like where you talk about, you know, podcast, video podcast, things on
social,
your customer is talking about you in a way that's unfiltered and convers
ational and personalized
and less produced. And like those two things work in harmony crazy well. And
like that is totally,
it's the same way that I think about that stuff. That's great. I love it. What
is one thing that
you think is like maybe not working or fading away? So we touch us a little bit
around,
you know, things like content syndication, you know, just producing to feed
Google,
which is we're not in the game of that anymore and we're not going to play that
kind of be in that
that hamster wheel. By the other thing we're playing around with a lot now is
like the,
you know, the concept of events in trade shows, you know, for a little while
there,
they just disappeared. And so we don't have to think about them anymore. And
now as of the last
year, they're back. And I think that it's really interesting for us how we
decide where we should
be and where we shouldn't be. And then ultimately how to measure what is good
and not good from
these types of events. They certainly haven't gotten less expensive in the last
year. They've gotten
way more expensive. There's a, there's an odd vibe a lot of them now because
people aren't used to
being at them. So they're at them for the first time in many years. Even, even
internally, like
our people are, you know, our marketing team or salespeople, et cetera, at the
event. So just kind
of out of practice too, for what to do with these events. And so it all around
just feel kind of
lethargic and not done very well. But that's where I think for us, we're moving
away from things
where we kind of pay to be somewhere. And we'll focus in this year, back half
of this year and
into next year, focus much more on the events that we, that we produce and we
put on that are
more regional. They're smaller. Yes, they involve partners and customers as far
as storytelling. But
they're more kind of workshop based and done it away to create more engagement
and less about,
you know, a booth and less about kind of going through the motions that way. We
'll still be
certain places we have to be just based on kind of category leadership
perspective. But
you know, the days of us going back to having 70 events or 100 events in the
year, just those
are all for us. And do you think it just spread the team too thin plus the teen
y plus all that
stuff? Because that was part of the thing for me is like, it's the you lose the
travel days,
you lose the day while you're there, the teeny stuff is crazy. I don't know if
it's like
inflation or what like I'm not a economist. But I'm like, it seems like
everything is so expensive.
I love events. I think events are amazing. I think they're so awesome. But I
like just tend to
agree that it seems like people are just kind of picking and choosing a couple,
rather than just spreading their team. And then that teen, that's all they do,
right?
Is like all they're doing is on the road. And you're like, is this all actually
worth it?
Yeah, I think that's the time thing is so critical for me, I think, because
that's
because because we're all distributed now, everyone's coming from different
places.
And you get these kind of travel days on either side. It does become like the
opportunity cost of
that is we could have done X, Y, and Z instead of that. And when we have
reached more people,
would it been a better outcome? And I think that you can talk yourself into any
event. You can,
you can measure how you want to measure it. You can do it by, oh, we had this
many demo meetings
or this many discussions we had. But the data for us just shows that at least
from a sourcing
perspective, we're not sourcing business at events really. The data doesn't
prove that out.
Now, influence wise, maybe, but even that's pretty weak in the sense for, I
could argue that we could
influence those folks in far more efficient ways than maybe seeing them at an
event in person.
So I think that part for us is it's been hard to get our head around,
particularly if you're not
in the mode of just kind of acquiring leads. If that's not your goal anymore,
if your goal is to
acquire high intent kind of pipeline, well, trade shows become not a great way
to do that.
Yeah, they are truly a engaged to 95% that are not ready to buy.
Activities. And then the question is, well, is there a better way to engage
this 95% than by
chucking a bunch of people at this thing? And then with the big event
sponsorship, and you're like,
what are you getting for that? No, I mean, I think the smaller batch events
that you own and control
and can deepen relationships and then leveraging persona-driven content like
videos like you said
in customer stories and podcasts can sort of live for longer. And you can be
really tactical in the
way that you engage people there. I tend to feel the same way. But I think that
the people on the
road, the TNE that those costs are so high and the opportunity cost of using
the people that you
have to send there is so high that that's the thing that you're just like, I
mean, rather kind of just
have them sitting at home for eight hours and cranking away on the projects
that can have more value.
Yeah, totally.
And you know, it sounds sort of the small batch events and stuff that are any
best practices there.
Yeah, I think for us, we took a different approach this year and kudos to our
kind of community
layer, Chuck. We're going to do these kind of regional events different. We're
going to,
one, we're going to make them super specific. So we've done them by vertical.
So we've kind of
spotlights on certain verticals. We bring people in just around that particular
industry. That's
been very successful. And the second thing is doing things kind of non-digital,
like so no screens,
you know, the whole that whole kind of two, three, four hours, whatever it
might be depending on the
scenario. It is, you know, there's no PowerPoint, there's no laptops open,
stuff like that. It's
very hands-on, it's very conversational, and it's meant to get people kind of
outside of their typical
mindset because most of the people that we're talking to are working from home
or they're in an
office. So they're in front of their computer all day long for 12, 13, 14 hours
. So just breaking
out of that mindset and thinking differently has been super, super welcomed.
And so I think we'll
continue that process. It's just to do things differently than what they would
expect.
I love that. That is awesome. That's really, really cool. Do you do like some
snacks and drinks and
all that sort of stuff? Is it sort of how experiential is it? All the things
that are in play, as far as
giving people a comfortable experience. But more so, it's the, you know, have
topics that will create
maximum engagement and then get people up and moving, working in groups, you
know, whiteboarding
things, you know, walking through, you know, in an exercise that takes them
from, all right, I need
to build a best-in-class onboarding experience. How would we do that? Where did
we start? And
they walk through the steps of that and help people think through kind of
almost like a journey
mapping exercise of like, how am I going to do this very much the same way we
do with, you know,
mapping the customer experience type of thing. But they're trying to do it for
the employees.
And they never really have the time to sit and do that. And they can't do it
with their peers.
So having the opportunity to do that with their peers in a safe space and get
things that they
can just take in the turn and use directly back in their companies as soon as
they get back in
the organization, those have been super big draws for us.
Final thing on events that I wanted to mention, we've sort of heard rumblings
of
CMOs saying maybe they don't do their user conference and things like that.
Other people being on the total opposite of the spectrum, like never cut, no
way,
never. How do you think about your big user conference?
Yeah, I think on one hand, when those happen, they're matching, right?
Everything comes together,
it galvanizes the entire company. You get this huge momentum push that forces a
lot of things
to happen, right? You get that next level demo ready faster because you're just
going to be for
the big event. You get all your customers in one place. You get prospects to
engage with them in
a really crazy environment where they're just being fed all this awesome first
party information
around how awesome first up is. We love those things in that sense. On the flip
side,
there's a huge cost to that too. It takes almost the entire company in a lot of
ways to put on
that event. There's a lot of risk because we have to invest seven figures on an
event like that.
We don't charge people the true cost to that event because it feels unnatural
to charge
somewhat $3,000 to come to a two-day event in our space at least at this stage.
Maybe at some
point we'll get there. We're eating a lot of that cost. There is a positive ROI
there for sure,
but how much of an ROI? That's a good question. I think we're always looking at
is this the right way to do this? Do we instead of having one big bite at the
apple,
do we break this up into two or three one-day events? They're done in different
geos across the country and even across the world such that it's easier for
people to get to the
commitments lower on our customer and prospect side to make that commitment to
come and do
that sort of thing. We are looking at that in ways that allow us to create less
content there,
more with higher quality, and then repurpose it a couple of times over the
course of the year.
Rather than today, it is all leading up to one big explosion for this event
that it is a major,
major undertaking that taxes the whole company in a way to make it happen.
For listeners who don't know, firstup.io, an amazing website, I absolutely love
what you
all have done with it, didn't exist a couple years ago because you were a
merger of companies.
I kind of say it just looks amazing. The website is so awesome what you all
have done with it.
How do you view your website? Our website is kind of the front door to the
company.
I think about the website in particular as being, I've heard someone else say
this before,
that it's not my saying that I've stolen this in some sense. It's the second
most important
product of the company. For us, we have to be six, seven, eight months ahead of
where
our company is today with what we're reflecting on the site because, like I
said before,
our customers are betting on us for a long journey. We need to show them where
we're going
that we have a big vision and that we're mapping and tracking toward that
vision.
And there's logic of why we're going there. For the website, it's really key
for us to show
that vision out there. Also, for us, it is the primary way that we will capture
intent in the
market too. Our demo requests, our pricing requests, our contact us requests,
the people who come and
ask questions on Drift through the site. Those things become our primary
proxies for intent that we pass on the sales. So that has to be a really
efficient process.
It has to be optimized for the best experience possible for that prospect.
And at the same time, it's a great place to test. We have a long way to go to
be
good at this, but A/B testing on the site, looking at primary messages, not
just on the home page,
but in subsequent areas on the site where you get into solution-specific pages
or persona-specific
pages, really testing to see what's landing within the prospects. Because what
we would see
by doing testing in our platform with our customers could look different from
what we see from
prospects out there. As we're shifting how people think about the platform and
who the buyer is,
the economic buyer, is that starts to expand? We have to get smarter about how
people think about
how they talk about the problem that they're trying to solve and what will
resonate within the
most. And so that testing ground, it's the ultimate testing ground for us to
figure out
the best way to frame and position what we do and who we do it for.
Y'all did something really cool on the website if our list is if you go to
firstup.io.
So you have the first intelligent communication platform as the big H1, and
then right below the
fold, or just sneaking right above the fold, you have customer case studies and
you put on there,
watch video and the length of the video next to the logo. And I think that is
so clever. I've
never seen that. I think it's absolutely brilliant to just put it right there.
And so many people,
you put your customer logos there, but actually having the photo plus the logo
plus the big
lot save 10 million with just in time training, and then watch video with the
actual length is so
digestible. I love it. Yeah, yeah. Big shout out to our web team there and Ray.
I mean, she's gone
through a lot of thinking through the optimizations of how to get people to
actually watch those,
because it's so much the content that is still out there is it's chunky. It's
long. You want people
to be able to get in and get out fast and get the point across pretty easily.
So we do that on our
website instead of putting a demo, we put watch video case study. So there's
like a let's chat
button on cast me studios.com. And then there's a watch video case study. That
is the number one
thing clicked on our website is is that watch video case study. And it brings
you right to the
to a case study with one of our customers. We've tested other things there, but
like that works
absolutely the best. And it's so funny how we always push to like go demo first
demo first demo
first. And we have like a video, you know, neck, like on the main screen that
you can watch,
but people watch the customer case study more than they watch the demo video.
It's like,
that makes sense. This is marketing in 2023, right? Right. It's like actually
just show me it.
Show me who did it first. And then okay, and I'll go back and figure out what
the
thing even is. Isn't that funny? Right. That is. I mean, that's very, very g
ermane to like how we
how we do things to our consumer life as individuals now to like I think a lot
of ways. So
it's way too easy to learn about things without the company's involvement in
any way. That's
really why it's well, make it seem like that for them when they have to talk to
us.
Okay, let's get to the desktop. Are we talking about healthy tension?
Whether that's with your board or shell teams, your competitors or anyone else.
Have you had
a memorable desktop in your career, Andy? Many. I think there's there's healthy
conflict
within any startup, particularly when it comes to who you're going to target,
how you're going to
target. Are you convicted in what you have? Are you willing to change your
strategy or your tactic
because you're getting indicators of something else that happening there? So
yeah, many, many
conflicts across the way, but like I don't really engage in too many kind of
shouting matches
alter altercation type of stuff. So I sleep pretty calm and admittedly, I think
that often
rouse up the other party a bit by being that way. But my goal ultimately is to
understand
where the other person is coming from, what their motives are, and kind of work
from there.
And so I think that that's serving pretty well throughout the time.
Let's get to our final segment. Quick hits. These are quick questions and quick
answers,
just like how qualified.com helps companies generate pipeline quickly, tapping
your greatest
assay website to identify your most valuable visitors and instantly, and I mean
instantly,
start sales conversations right there on the website. Quick and easy, just like
these questions,
go to qualified.com to learn more. Andy, are you ready? I'm ready. Number one,
what's a hidden
talent or skill that's not on your resume? Oh, I think adaptability is really
key, especially
in the role of the CMO. The job is hard, market shifts fast, competitors pop up
over the place,
navigating that, getting them to thrive, getting the team to thrive in that
kind of environment
is a skill that you've got to be good at. And I think that's one of my
strengths, then
it's certainly also serving quite well over the years. Do you have a favorite
book podcast or TV
show that you'd recommend? All right. Not work related. I have to go with the
bear.
TV show, Hulu, check it out. 30 minute type of show series. It speaks to my
heart. I'm a
closet chef and watching that guy go through his journey is fantastic.
I love it. What's your best advice for a first time CMO trying to figure out
their
marketing strategy? I also didn't come up with this, but I have really held
this to be true.
I mean, your job is to, if you haven't created it, you have to own it, but you
have to really
own the story of the company. Get everybody else in the company behind that
story and be
comfortable telling that story. That's like the number one priority of it all.
Like,
yes, you need to imagine, yes, you need all these other things to work. You've
got to create
pipeline. You've got to create growth with the company. But if you don't own a
story that can
captivate an audience that can resonate with a buyer, a target audience in that
kind of way,
that everything else falls apart. You really have to be the embodiment of that
story and own that
in a way that nobody else does and be confident when that story is a change and
evolve over time.
You can't be stagnant. I think that's something that if you can't do that,
someone's going to do it for you and then you've lost control of the role.
I love it. Andy, it's been so awesome having you on the show. Again, it was a
long time coming.
For a listener, just go to firstup.io, go talk to your comms team, go talk to
your HR team,
your IT team. If you want to connect the employee experience ecosystem here,
you've got to go do it first up. Any final thoughts? Anything to plug?
No, I think that's great. Awesome. Thanks, Andy. Take care.
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