Building Marketing Technology Solutions with Jon @ Engagio.com - Escape Velocity Show #17
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Summary
John Miller is the CEO and Founder of Engageo, a SaaS marketing software company that makes it easy for marketers to get in touch with their customers. In this episode, John talks about how he built Marketo from the ground up, how he got into the marketing space, and why he thinks ABM is the next big thing in marketing technology.
Transcript
00:00:00.240
Marketers will all glom on to any tactic that works in volumes that will eventually ruin it.
00:00:07.280
Yeah. You know, and so, you know, great. Maybe, like right now, direct mail is working pretty well.
00:00:14.400
You know, everybody else is going to start doing direct mail.
00:00:17.120
And the next thing we know, we're going to be like overwhelmed and we're going to have to find something else.
00:00:21.120
So that's why I ultimately come back to the most important thing is that getting that sales and marketing team dynamic working, you know, so that way you can actually reach out to people with a human touch, maybe say something personalized and relevant, you know, and, you know, you'll figure out the channel to do that.
00:00:56.860
John Miller, thanks for being on the show, man.
00:01:00.180
So CEO, founder of Engageo, previously founder of Marketo.
00:01:05.640
You've been doing this now, I mean, SAS, what, 2005-ish?
00:01:11.760
talking about it late 05 and then really started things up
00:01:16.040
That was coming off of seven years of Epiphany,
00:01:19.500
which was a non-SaaS company, but was still in the MarTech
00:01:26.900
Was it called SaaS, like subscription as a service,
00:01:36.420
we were this on-premise vendor who had ASP partners for people
00:01:40.620
who wanted to use the software in a host environment.
00:01:44.120
Yeah, but by the time Marketo came up and running,
00:01:47.140
we actually didn't make a big deal about the fact
00:01:52.140
It was sort of almost common enough that, no, of course,
00:02:04.460
And then obviously, as you parlay into the ABM space
00:02:07.080
with Engageo, how do you see these opportunities
00:02:12.900
Like, starting with Marketo and getting Engageo.
00:02:15.960
Well, I mean, the broader arc is my whole career
00:02:19.540
So Epiphany, even before Epiphany, before business
00:02:23.080
school, I was associated with a company called Exchange,
00:02:30.640
It was the first campaign management tool, really.
00:02:39.340
was because they were going to enter in the market
00:02:44.320
You know, it's like, oh, hey, you know something about this.
00:02:48.880
is really been pursuing this vision of truly one
00:02:54.280
How can we use all this data and analytics that
00:02:56.340
are available to just make marketing better, right?
00:03:04.460
So that's sort of what I've been inspiring to all along.
00:03:15.960
And that's when Phil Fernandez and I started talking.
00:03:22.940
we both believed this vision of like this sort of future,
00:03:26.980
But we'd also seen the challenges that Epiphany
00:03:31.260
which is enterprise software, $250,000 price points and up.
00:03:51.480
was let's build enterprise, powerful marketing software
00:03:56.620
that we can deliver through software as a service that
00:04:00.060
would let us basically make the software as easy
00:04:05.760
to buy for the marketer as buying Google AdWords was.
00:04:24.180
and sort of bid optimization tied into the landing pages.
00:04:28.540
And the goal was when we wanted it to be really easy to buy.
00:04:31.300
So you could buy this thing self-service on a credit card
00:04:36.160
and then get up and basically we were just taking 5%
00:04:42.120
We had customers who we were earning like $0.21 from.
00:04:47.200
Yeah, and so we got up and running with that product.
00:04:50.920
And frankly, it wasn't particularly successful.
00:04:58.120
But through that time, we then built the product
00:05:01.340
that eventually became our marketing automation product
00:05:13.460
And what was the product hook for Marketo in the early days?
00:05:15.880
Was it understanding the journey of the potential buyer
00:05:19.880
Because I feel like that was a really innovative understanding
00:05:23.240
if they showed up on the website and what activities they did
00:05:27.460
that early days yeah that was yeah i mean definitely part of it was kind of tying the
00:05:30.740
the digital behaviors to the ability to kind of you know take action um the the real core problem
00:05:36.660
was you know gosh 2005 2006 remember google adwords was only about three years old yeah so
00:05:43.540
what was happening at the time was marketers were really for the first time generating
00:05:48.100
online leads that scale and and what they really needed was a place to capture those leads
00:05:53.540
you know and they needed a place to do something with them like store them somewhere
00:05:57.300
And then what do they do with the ones that aren't ready for sales?
00:06:00.080
In this case, they had to nurture them and develop them and score them so they could know when to pass the sales.
00:06:05.240
So that was the business problem that we were solving with that early Marketo solution.
00:06:10.880
As I said, we sort of dropped the self-service.
00:06:13.200
We actually raised the price point and actually made it a lot more successful because it was stickier.
00:06:20.560
People had to be a little bit more committed to it to kind of be successful.
00:06:24.760
And then Marketo, frankly, took off from there.
00:06:27.040
I mean, it was just got the right business model with a good product that worked in a good category that was growing.
00:06:34.000
And then I think we executed the market and sales pretty well.
00:06:36.640
Did you have a hard time picking the right customer segment, kind of the ideal customer profile in the early days?
00:06:45.340
In the early days of Marketo, it was relatively straightforward because we had an advantage at the time.
00:06:50.620
There was this company Eloqua, and Eloqua was probably the leading marketing automation platform.
00:07:03.680
Elqua is definitely a bigger company than Marketo.
00:07:05.680
And they had done a pretty good job, especially in sort of Sand Hill Road and the Silicon Valley community, kind of convincing people that you need something like this.
00:07:14.680
And the problem with Elqua was that it was pretty complicated, pretty expensive.
00:07:18.680
It was SaaS, but it was relatively long implementations.
00:07:28.900
And even though we sort of took away the self-serve,
00:07:35.780
Compare that to then Alcoa, which is people-
1.00
00:07:41.600
or almost as powerful, but it's a lot easier to use
00:07:46.640
And so we were able to just really go in and sell to,
00:07:49.160
frankly, the category they had helped to create.
00:07:52.540
And then once we got some scale, now that we're kind of
00:07:57.900
got out of just venture-backed tech and started to grow.
00:08:04.000
I feel like every SaaS company owes Salesforce,
00:08:06.880
because they kind of set the whole even concept of like,
00:08:11.340
Their marketing dollar enabled us to be able to build
00:08:15.640
We didn't even have to claim that SaaS is a great benefit,
00:08:21.840
And then what did you learn growing that company
00:08:29.380
in that journey about yourself or some of the skill sets
00:08:35.320
Well, one, I think Marketo was successful despite its culture
00:08:41.920
Phil and I didn't even spend one minute talking about values
00:08:54.780
And as a result, we ended up with a sort of fragmented culture.
00:08:57.420
It wasn't, I don't think everybody would say like,
00:08:59.260
oh my god, Marketo was such an awesome place to work.
00:09:02.540
Was the product market fit that enabled the growth?
00:09:04.660
We were winning because of a great product market fit,
00:09:13.280
So people were generally happy because winning feels good.
00:09:18.940
So that's one thing I wanted to bring to engage you,
00:09:21.400
a much more intentional thought about building culture.
00:09:29.420
sometimes actually putting some friction into the process
00:09:36.040
Because the real problem with marketing technology
00:09:37.780
is there's so many options out there for the marketer.
00:09:46.820
I've got the solution to help you solve your problems.
00:09:49.820
And if it's really easy to buy, people are like, sure, I'll try it.
00:10:00.500
You actually have to commit to wanting this thing.
00:10:04.260
And then they put the energy in to really be successful.
00:10:09.380
I think the third lesson is probably a pretty good segue
00:10:13.200
Because they didn't have, did you guys call customer success
00:10:30.360
We had like $40 million in revenue or something.
00:10:32.580
You know, like to help with the enterprise guys.
00:10:43.400
because it started with this whole vision of generate a lead, nurture it till it's ready,
00:10:50.040
pass it to sales. And it works really well, especially kind of at the lower ACVs.
00:10:57.240
And then as Marketo got bigger, that engine sort of only took us so far effectively.
00:11:07.160
And what breaks at that level? I mean, what did you guys see in regards to the lower ACVs,
00:11:12.360
interesting lead scoring etc kick it off but then you're saying at a mid-market or enterprise a
00:11:18.120
couple things you know one you reach the point where you know doubling the number of blog posts
00:11:23.240
you write yeah isn't going to double the amount of pipeline you create right and goals are high
00:11:28.040
like you know it's like okay i can't just keep doing more of the same thing yeah you know i need
00:11:32.360
a different engine the other one is you know i always use this fishing analogy you know you're
00:11:39.980
We put our stuff out there, and we didn't care who responded.
00:11:45.060
But the problem is you catch a lot of small guys with nets.
00:11:48.280
And the economics for going after bigger companies
00:11:54.280
You know, you can have three times the deal with only 30%
00:12:08.620
And so what started to happen was sort of a breakdown
00:12:11.300
of the kind of traditional marketing and sales model.
00:12:15.520
You know, like the baton, it wasn't a baton handoff anymore.
00:12:18.360
Like, no, we're going to pick these big accounts.
00:12:24.640
just by marketing doing the same stuff we've always been doing.
00:12:31.340
Better analogy was that it was kind of more like a soccer team.
00:12:39.220
But we had to work past the ball back and forth
00:12:49.660
the challenge of trying to do that kind of dynamic
00:12:58.940
So obviously, inbound, content marketing really took off.
00:13:02.760
Obviously, marketing, having a seat at the revenue table,
00:13:06.200
and that stuff is all fairly, even RevOps as a thing.
00:13:17.040
that either companies were buying that made you realize
00:13:31.140
Well, it's a little bit of some of what I just said.
00:13:34.980
People talk about content shock and peak content
00:13:39.480
and different phrases of just describing what I said.
00:13:59.900
were hitting and so you had some dynamic where it was harder for marketing to kind of just do this
00:14:05.900
let me just get a list of people and then i'll start emailing them you know that that kind of
00:14:11.020
went away for marketers but what happened was then you had tools like outreach and sales loft
00:14:17.660
come on the scene and also now marketers weren't the only people who had the ability to email
00:14:22.860
anymore sales people had their own ability to email and frankly they didn't want marketing
00:14:29.040
And so the role of marketing at the top of the funnel,
00:14:34.740
and the only people who could work at the top of the funnel
00:14:47.400
Yeah, they'd go out and try to get these whales
00:14:49.200
or big accounts, but they didn't have the tools to do this.
00:14:58.300
you know obviously buying committees are getting bigger everybody knows that yeah right the
00:15:02.300
implication of that though is that you know now if there's 16 people involved in a decision
00:15:07.740
wow what are the chances that any sales rep is really having one-to-one conversations with all
00:15:12.940
16 it's pretty low very low and so but marketing is the function that's pretty good at talking to
00:15:19.340
mass yeah you know and so the best marketers are starting to think about how all right i have less
00:15:24.620
of a role at the front of the funnel how can i actually play a bigger role later in the funnel
00:15:29.980
you know while sales is already engaged yeah you know by accelerating the deal and you know that
00:15:34.860
kind of thing which is just back to the soccer ball analogy like closer it's not a handoff anymore
00:15:39.340
it's you're working together and i think the third big change is um you know through sas and
00:15:46.860
everything we were talking about most companies make their revenue today off of recurring revenue
00:15:51.660
models you know and expansion has become more important than ever yeah as a result most companies
00:15:57.660
make most of their revenue after the initial sale yeah the whole marketo baton handoff regenerate a
00:16:04.860
lead model is totally focused on new business and unfortunately i think most marketing departments
00:16:11.820
they look at today are still overly focused on acquisition in their business but that's
00:16:16.620
not the reality of revenue rev the revenue is happening after the sale attention yeah
00:16:20.700
you know and and so those are just to sum it up you know you have marketing spending less time at
00:16:27.260
the front of the funnel sales spending more yeah marketing spending more time late in the sales
00:16:32.060
cycle yeah you know to help accelerate deals marketing should be spending more time post-sale
00:16:38.540
to both expand and retain accounts collectively those are the key forces that i think drove
00:16:44.620
of this new model for how sales and marketing teams
00:16:50.020
So when you start thinking of a platform for Engagio,
00:17:05.260
I want to build that platform for true one-to-one marketing
00:17:10.600
that makes every interaction more personalized.
00:17:13.060
intelligent now i'm going to focus that on b2b but yeah but that's sort of the north star yeah
00:17:18.260
uh and i just want to engage you to be you know frankly the next generation of that kind of same
00:17:24.420
sequence yeah you know in order to do that the the most fundamental thing you need you know is
00:17:31.940
the proverbial single view of the customer yeah 360 view you gotta you know and and and the abm
00:17:37.860
the challenge was especially in this b2b account-based world you have you had a a complete
00:17:43.940
view of the lead sitting in marketo but nothing about the account you had data about the account
00:17:50.340
sitting in salesforce right but because the scoop away salesforce works the leads didn't tie to the
00:17:55.060
accounts no so you had a disconnect there you had you know what your website and tools like lead
00:18:01.620
lander that could tell you through reverse ip lookup which companies were visiting the website
00:18:06.660
but that didn't tie to anything else and then you have you know your email and your calendar
00:18:12.020
right and reps are emailing people and communicating setting up settings up meetings
00:18:17.220
and as you just said they never log their stuff nothing you know and nobody's ever succeeded in
00:18:22.260
figuring out how to make them do it so that's its own kind of silo so the first you know engage you
00:18:27.220
mvp on this journey towards building this like next-gen platform yeah is let's just solve that
00:18:32.260
problem let's let's take all the data from these disparate sources um match it to the right account
00:18:39.380
yeah normalize it um so you can make sense of it and we did that using the concept of time
00:18:46.580
um what we realized is you know like a webinar attendee that's 30 minutes yeah somebody who
00:18:53.140
downloads or visits your website that's just maybe one minute yeah somebody who comes to a
00:18:57.380
dinner that's two hours quantify engagement yeah you know so we use sort of use time as a proxy so
00:19:01.940
Single view of the account, normalize it through time,
00:19:05.360
and then we basically made the insights that generated
00:19:10.520
insights that we would then make available to marketing
00:19:13.760
The marketers could really start to understand things like,
00:19:18.500
do I create more engagement with the people that matter?
00:19:25.160
For the accounts I care about, what's happening?
00:19:27.080
Yeah, what messages are they pushing in these accounts?
00:19:32.440
What do they consume so that when I get on this next call?
00:19:35.020
And again, it's this weird, goofy Salesforce problem.
00:19:39.620
All the marketing activity is tied to the leads.
00:19:44.380
see what marketing was happening at the accounts
00:19:50.320
And hit product market fit on that pretty fast.
00:20:06.100
And we had our first paying customer in November.
00:20:14.740
into Engajo this time, making that more thoughtful up front.
00:20:20.180
From an innovation point of view, how do you guys,
00:20:24.940
because a lot of the content you guys write about some
00:20:27.780
What are some of the things that you've done with your product
00:20:33.400
Like, I'm assuming you guys were using your own product
00:20:35.880
right from the beginning to get these accounts.
00:20:41.580
I'll talk a little bit about how we kind of measured everything.
00:20:44.540
Because you've got to know what's working in order
00:20:49.320
So one of the things we've done is we've defined an account
00:20:53.460
So classically, salespeople have sales funnels.
0.99
00:21:04.200
And here's the things I need to do to move it forward.
00:21:08.820
We just extended it all the way back to the very top.
00:21:27.320
accounts that have at least one engaged target with us.
00:21:34.320
And then, actually, an interesting stage after that
00:21:42.420
playing off the classic thing that a lot of marketers
00:21:44.720
have been doing, which are MQLs, or marketing qualified leads.
00:21:48.340
So we sort of, no, no, no, it's not about the MQLs.
00:21:51.600
We have that stage, and we have the meeting stage,
00:21:53.360
and then the early stage opportunity, late stage
00:21:58.500
And then for each territory, we know where all the accounts
00:22:03.860
For our target accounts, our tier one, our tier two,
00:22:05.820
our tier three, we know where all those accounts are
00:22:13.900
I mean, the third party stuff you talked about, like, you know,
0.94
00:22:17.980
yeah, just I've been told you can, like, you know,
00:22:19.700
essentially monitor search terms within an organization.
00:22:23.700
I mean, the way it mostly works is with the intent is,
00:22:31.000
well, so very, one way is like if you, let's say,
00:22:37.780
They know who is reviewing your category, right?
00:22:44.080
Or registered user, or who's looking at your competitors.
00:22:47.500
So that's a very explicit way of figuring out intent,
00:22:55.680
and you have access to all these content sites,
00:23:01.240
Hey, somebody from HP is on a page with this article.
00:23:09.100
Like, oh, hey, people from HP are looking at security software.
00:23:14.440
you can kind of sell that as kind of an intent search.
00:23:18.000
And that gets, in your model that you mapped out,
00:23:27.800
Now, it's not somebody who's engaging with us necessarily
00:23:45.580
So if an account goes to that intent stage for us,
00:23:58.680
Could be a sequence of steps that you feel like,
00:24:09.820
combining marketing and human touches from sales.
00:24:15.080
So if something gets a little bit further along,
00:24:17.260
we might send a package to the CMO, personalize it,
00:24:36.940
I mean, this is really cool because you can create these
00:24:38.700
like really elaborate experiences for the account.
00:24:48.400
Now, the magic, actually, is slowing things down.
00:24:56.580
And you could send the same package to 500 accounts
00:25:08.120
Customize each package based on a little bit of research.
00:25:10.380
I saw the bobblehead stuff you guys talked about.
00:25:16.400
When we do a fully customized, totally bespoke.
00:25:19.360
What's the craziest package drop, mail drop you guys have done?
00:25:36.820
But we were getting good engagement from mid-level people.
00:25:41.440
But we weren't able to get anything from the CMO.
00:25:47.120
Her profile on Twitter said that she liked Catterberry
00:25:55.060
had wine, Catterberry chocolate, a copy of my book.
00:26:00.220
And basically it was, I think, Catterberry and wine
00:26:19.280
So he had her write and customize a song for this prospect.
00:27:03.780
And so, I'm sure you've seen the challenger sale.
00:27:09.000
They teach their prospects something in a way that's
00:27:13.300
tailored to their specific business and industry.
00:27:17.940
We need to try to do the same thing in our marketing
00:27:23.060
How do we actually, as part of our prospecting this account?
00:27:28.360
We educate them in a way that gets them wanting to know.
00:27:34.520
would respond to an unsolicited marketing outreach
00:27:37.360
if it contained ideas that are relevant to their business.
00:27:45.080
We're in Gageo, and I have to keep pushing my team.
00:27:56.260
and group them together that say, these are probably
00:27:59.460
So let's do a custom piece of content, personalize it,
00:28:04.240
but we know it's going to land because they all see that.
00:28:18.100
Research the hell out of that account, and create
00:28:24.260
If you're doing six-figure deals, 250 or whatever,
00:28:34.380
create something that's really commercially insightful and then lightly customize it yeah
00:28:39.340
you know for each one you're doing high five figure deals um so 70 000 60 000 or whatever
00:28:47.740
that's where you know you just you can't do that quite that same level of of customization um at
00:28:53.500
least try to go to the persona level yeah and and still personalize you know dear frank cadbury and
00:29:06.120
to go much deeper than that at that price point.
00:29:08.580
And when you guys do ROI calculations for your customers,
00:29:16.020
and how much they should spend in that activity?
00:29:24.080
try to not have people think of account-based marketing
00:29:29.220
Account-based marketing is a way of running your sales and marketing engine, right?
00:29:39.200
You know, what we try to work with our customers on is at the end of the day, you do have a constrained marketing budget.
00:29:47.880
You have to decide where you're spending those dollars or investing those dollars.
00:29:53.880
So very often people will do some kind of multi-touch attribution.
00:30:15.240
That's a simple form of multi-touch attribution.
00:30:42.100
That's where those minutes I talked about earlier
00:30:48.740
how much credit are you going to give to each thing.
00:30:50.940
So sure, they attended the webinar, 30 minutes.
00:30:56.340
When you're allocating the deal, maybe you should give twice as much to the hour sales meeting than to the 30-minute webinar.
00:31:04.540
And what that lets our clients do is it lets them really look at not just the impact of the marketing, but the relative impact of marketing and sales.
00:31:11.620
Start to think about, hmm, maybe I should not do that trade show.
00:31:19.740
But it's important to kind of look at the marketing and sales touches together.
00:31:23.040
And then what's your, do you guys support the bow tie approach to kind of like, you know, selling past the sale of engaging these accounts to expand?
00:31:32.660
And I said that's sort of a key part of the trends here.
00:31:36.860
You know, so in our own, for example, custom funnel, after customer, we have expansion target, expansion opportunity, expansion one, and then kind of go back around.
00:31:48.820
The trick that where most companies find this challenging is to start to think about it, not just at the account level, but at the buying center level and really understand the opportunities around different kinds of product categories.
00:32:07.720
Because usually expansion is you're selling with one of two modes.
00:32:11.860
So after the sale, you're usually either selling an additional product to the same people
00:32:19.300
or perhaps the same product or a different product to different people.
00:32:26.480
And so you need to look at the account in a little bit more subtle level.
00:32:30.500
You can't just say, you know, this account is an expansion target.
00:32:35.560
You have to say, huh, this group of people are engaging with campaigns or content about this product.
00:32:45.660
And so that's an expansion opportunity into that particular demand unit.
00:32:51.720
And then you might have a totally different buying center that's at a different stage of their journey for a different product.
00:32:58.680
So you have to almost double click down one level to understand kind of those different dynamics after the sale.
00:33:07.180
You know, we, we, our customers can look at, you know, heat maps of the account by persona
00:33:11.320
and by product and see kind of where they need to kind of be connecting.
00:33:15.860
Um, the honest truth is that's pretty cutting edge.
00:33:18.600
Most, most clients haven't gotten the operational sophistication yet to be really good at managing
00:33:29.140
I mean, as SAS matures, that's really where, as you mentioned earlier, the, uh, the opportunity
00:33:33.680
is going to be in the revenue retention and expansion.
00:33:50.400
as the owner of the top end of the revenue engine, which is cool.
00:33:55.640
CMOs had a lot more credibility in the boardroom.
00:34:05.040
But marketing really has the kind of almost orchestrated
00:34:17.400
They're essentially bringing awareness to the product.
00:34:27.120
about introducing that to your existing customers,
00:34:32.240
But Evan, that's like having your salespeople do all their own, you know, everything by themselves.
00:34:36.260
I mean, market marketing should play a role there.
00:34:37.880
And like you're in it, so, you know, you think it's normal.
00:34:41.960
But like, what are some of the cutting edge, you know, pixelation, remarketing?
00:34:50.120
Like what are people doing from an experience point of view that's really borderline not creepy, but you know what I mean?
00:34:57.340
Because, I mean, if I search on a site and then all of a sudden you know that there's intent, all of a sudden I'm seeing ads on LinkedIn, is there other stuff that people are doing that is in that in regards to try to bring awareness to a product?
00:35:15.340
like i mean i guess a couple things you know first of all say i'll say there's no there's no
00:35:20.780
single magic bullet um second some good line i don't have exactly right like marketers will
00:35:28.700
all glom on to any tactic that works in volumes that will eventually ruin it yeah we re-ruin
00:35:33.980
everything yeah you know and so you know great maybe maybe like right now direct mail is working
00:35:40.460
pretty well yeah you know um everybody else is going to start doing direct mail and next thing
00:35:44.700
we know we're going to be more overwhelmed and we're going to have to find something else
00:35:48.380
yeah um i so that's why i ultimately come back to the most important thing is that getting that
00:35:55.340
sales and marketing team dynamic working you know so that way you can actually reach out to people
00:36:00.700
with a human touch maybe say something personalized and relevant you know and you know you'll figure
00:36:08.140
out the channel to do that if you get the underlying team dynamic working what about
00:36:15.520
are having when they show up even in the sales pipeline?
00:36:24.940
we've researched, looked at the reviews, talked to people.
00:36:28.440
And we're kind of doing a demo as almost like a check and balance
00:36:31.740
to make sure it actually does what it says it does.
00:36:34.600
How has that impacted the sales process or opportunity sizing
00:36:48.300
to kind of do that self-service is a bit of an inhibitor
00:36:55.380
to talk to the salesperson until they have reached
00:36:59.640
a certain level of their buying process, right?
00:37:02.320
So the question is, is that just antithetical to everything
00:37:09.500
The difference, I think, has to do with the quality
00:37:11.500
the outreach, i.e., if as a salesperson, you're just like,
00:37:16.600
hi, I'm John from Engage.io, and we sell B2B marketing
00:37:25.480
If that's all you're doing, you're screwed.
0.97
00:37:29.680
But can you find a way to knock on people's doors
0.95
00:37:41.200
could actually help them, there's still room for that,
00:37:47.320
Now, it gets into complicated measurement things.
00:37:49.360
Maybe you do that, and maybe three weeks later,
00:37:53.300
shows up on your website and downloads some content.
00:38:01.160
So you've got to understand the dynamics of it.
00:38:05.300
But I still think there's a place for well thought
00:38:13.020
Around content, to help educate the customer more than just
00:38:21.020
And that seems to be hard for a lot of companies.
00:38:25.620
Well, it's interesting because just even the concept
00:38:27.700
of plays per stage, and I don't know for your customers,
00:38:32.060
but it sounds like there's a creative aspect that
00:38:37.180
You know, you got to help them understand how to think through each type of account.
00:38:41.980
I'm assuming, you know, SMB, mid-market enterprise probably have a specific play that is going to work better.
00:38:48.040
Each persona has different things that need to work, you know, work differently.
00:38:52.360
Is there any rules of thumb for a certain amount of engagement per stage or touch points?
00:39:01.120
I don't know if there's any one rule of thumb I would share.
00:39:03.600
I mean, I like the idea of seven figures, you know, you know.
00:39:06.720
yeah yeah yeah um you know we we see a couple hundred uh interactions you know with with deals
00:39:17.360
where you know i mean a web visit an email i mean yeah you and you add all that up it gets into the
00:39:22.800
hundreds wow um so i don't know if kind of you know and people are always looking for like what's
00:39:29.360
the magic thing if i do this and then this and then this i get the opportunity yeah it doesn't
00:39:38.120
I think you've raised $36 million so far in two rounds, A and B.
00:39:44.500
What's been the new learning around deploying capital
00:39:54.320
It was very easy to raise capital, which at the time
00:40:03.000
I think I made a classic mistake, to be honest,
00:40:04.800
that a lot of people make, which is really easy to raise capital.
00:40:09.240
And I raised into the peak of inflated expectations.
0.99
00:40:16.320
Even if you can raise at that premium valuation,
0.98
00:40:21.180
And I like to think I'm pretty damn good, but nobody's perfect.
00:40:26.280
And then as a founder, one question I like to ask as we wrap up
00:40:47.400
is to bring the inspiration and the positivity.
00:40:56.140
But I'm always focused on execution and climbing the hill
00:41:05.380
I'll find every typo, every flaw, every problem
00:41:09.460
in what we're doing, which is a good set of attributes.
00:41:14.140
I've had to learn to stop, thank the team for what's awesome,
00:41:19.020
recognize all the amazing things that are going on,
00:41:26.140
But acknowledge kind of the, find the good in what we have
00:41:34.240
It's something I've had to work on to be more deliberate about.
00:41:38.620
John, where do people find you and tell them about the book?
00:41:50.080
You can download my book all about account-based marketing.
00:42:00.780
John, I really appreciate you coming on the show.
00:42:03.960
Thanks for watching this episode of Escape Velocity.
00:42:07.080
Be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment
00:42:09.960
with your biggest insight from our conversation.