Micheline Nijmeh shares her insights into why organic marketing pulls in better quality leads, the importance of educating your customer, and why your website is the face of your company.
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[MUSIC]
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Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
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I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Cast Me In Studios.
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And today I am joined by a very special guest,
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Michleen, how are you?
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Doing amazing.
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Thank you for having me.
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Yeah, excited to have you on the show.
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We've been working on this for a while.
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I'm thrilled to have you on today.
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You come from the Markatras group,
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which we kind of always end up talking about on this show
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in some form or fashion.
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Obviously Craig is the CEO, qualified,
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who puts the bill for this podcast, who we love dearly.
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And you worked for one point.
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So fun from that perspective and just fun to have you on the show.
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Thank you.
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Yeah, amazing team and looking forward to our conversation today.
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Yeah, so let's get into it.
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What was your first job in Demand Gen?
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My first Demand Gen rule was at Sun Microsystems,
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back in the day where I was part of the software DG team.
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Actually, my career started off in sales.
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And during my tenure at Sun, I was
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asked to join the software DG team.
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And I remember thinking, oh, no, I have--
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I'm back to holding a code again.
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And I was dreading it, to be honest.
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And it was the best thing I could have asked for.
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I wouldn't be a CMO today if I actually
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didn't have this path and this background around Demand Gen.
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So flash forward to today.
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Tell us about your role at JFrog.
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Yeah, so as I said, I'm the CMO JFrog.
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And like many marketing leaders, I
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wear different hats as the responsibility is so diverse
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or from day to day.
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But actually, at the end of the day,
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my job is to really provide a unified approach
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across our company in terms of who we're trying to reach,
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explain simply what we do and what makes us different.
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And how do we build these emotional experiences
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using modern marketing methods?
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That's how I kind of simplify it in three terms.
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Let's get to our first segment, The Trust Tree.
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This is where we go and feel honest and trusted.
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And you can share those deepest, darkest Demand Gen secrets.
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What does JFrog do and who are your customers?
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Yeah, JFrog is a DevOps platform that
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enables enterprise developers to automate the seamless and secure
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delivery of software updates to their end users.
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And actually, all the way to the devices.
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And when you think about what we do today,
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everything we use is managed by software-- cars, medical devices,
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airplanes, everything.
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Software touches everything.
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And for companies these days, for them to remain competitive,
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and for them to service their needs for their customers,
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they need to deliver fast and secure software releases
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faster than ever before, more secure than ever before.
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And you hear this like it's called digital transformation.
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And that's what we do.
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We provide this automated, seamless delivery of software
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updates all the way to the developers,
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to the end user as well as to the devices.
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And so who is the buying committee for your product?
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Yeah, when you think about who we go after,
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it's really a partnership.
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We build this relationship with our developers and DevOps
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engineers.
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We started off as a bottoms up approach.
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And we wanted to make sure that the developers and DevOps
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engineers had this amazing experience.
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So our priority is to win the hearts and minds
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of the developers because they influence the sale.
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They are the ones who try the product,
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and they're the ones who are going to tell their managers.
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They actually buy in some cases,
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but also tell their managers the value that we provide
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when they're playing with it in their sandbox.
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And what does that buying process look like?
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How do you structure your organization
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to mirror that buying process?
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Yeah, JFrog was really built out of a bottoms up approach.
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They engage with, as I said, developers and DevOps engineers.
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And when we give them this experience,
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this kind of product-led approach,
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we have a dedicated team to engage with this community.
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We listen to their needs.
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We meet with them.
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We bring them back to our product and R&D team
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to learn from them.
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So we're giving them that best experience, as I mentioned.
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And so we've grown the company really
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from the start from a bottoms up approach.
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And in the last year and a half, really, when I joined,
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we started to introduce a traditional enterprise top down
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motion to complement the bottoms up.
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Because we've added a strategic accounts team.
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We've added a field marketing team.
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We've added an outbound BDR team to complement
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the bottoms up approach, but also have a top down approach
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where we're going after the technical leaders
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and decision makers, such as the sea level VP of engineers.
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Tell me about your marketing organization.
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Where does demand sit?
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What does the rest of the org look like?
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I have a global team that crosses all geographies.
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We have about 10 offices around the world
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with remote employees as well.
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And my team specifically, I have a product marketing team
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in comms.
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I have a growth marketing team where the demand gen team sits
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there.
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It also includes BDRs, SDRs.
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It includes field marketing.
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We have country managers in different regions,
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like China, Japan, India.
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We have a digital marketing team and a website team.
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And that all falls under the growth marketing structure.
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In addition, we have the marketing ops team,
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the brand marketing team.
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And rare for many companies, we don't usually see this,
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is a community happiness team.
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So we want to make sure that, again, we
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have developer advocates thinking about the community.
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And also in there, we also have an events team.
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So all of that is under the community team.
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So they're thinking and prioritizing our audience's happiness
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and best experience.
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We can give them.
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Yeah, I love that.
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I'm so curious where this head of community
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or this function of community lives.
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And on our last episode, we were talking to someone
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about this idea of, does community live within brand?
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Is brand and community one in the same?
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If customer experience is the new brand,
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and for B2B, a lot of the times community
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is very indicative of how you're treated by the company,
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is that a brand play?
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I'm curious where you stand on that.
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Yeah, the way we built it here at JFOG,
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is actually, I have to say, is a smart way.
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We brought in the best developer community expert
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in the industry.
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And he has a very technical experience
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and understanding of the community.
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He runs, actually, I have also a partner engineering team
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on my team.
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So he runs that.
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And so he understands the persona inside and out.
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But he also owns and has that kind of business mindset.
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So he understands the need for marketing.
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So that balance is so critical.
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And we wanted it in marketing because we
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wanted to make sure marketing wasn't creating fluff.
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I call it marketing fluff.
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But that our messages resonated with this audience,
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our experience, the engagement, was relevant to this audience.
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Otherwise, if we separated the two,
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we'd have them maybe in product versus marketing.
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And so I thought it was very important to--
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and it started this before I joined.
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I have to give them credit.
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And to bring this team inside marketing,
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and they report directly to me.
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So we can stay close to building the message, the story,
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making sure they're aligned with the product marketing team,
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making sure they're aligned with the demand-gen team.
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They may not hold a number, but they
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hold a KPI that is very aligned with the demand-gen team
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that supports our efforts.
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So I'm a big believer having them in marketing.
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Yeah, and so how do you think about demand
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as part of your marketing strategy?
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For me, obviously, it's a big priority, right?
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We have pipeline as our number one.
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And I'm on the hook for it as the CMO.
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That's my top priorities to generate demand and create
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pipeline.
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And we built a two-prong approach, as I mentioned.
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So we have a core growth strategy that has gotten us
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the success so far, which is a product-led approach.
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It's a bottoms-up approach, reaching out to developers
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and DevOps teams.
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And then we've also built that top down.
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So for me, demand-gen encompasses everything that we do.
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So even when we build brand programs,
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it's to support our demand-gen strategy.
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Our developer advocates think about how do we generate demand
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by building those relationships?
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So every single part of my organization
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plays a big role in driving that demand-gen strategy.
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So it starts there first, and then everyone plays a role
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and has KPIs to support that plan.
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Let's get to our next segment, the playbook.
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So are you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics
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that help you win.
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You play to win the game.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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Hello.
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You play to win the game.
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You don't play, it's just play it.
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What are your three channels or tactics
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that are your uncuttable budget items?
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The three categories I would bucket into
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is paid media and organic search.
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Those are critical to me.
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And balancing organic overpaid is something
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that we strive for all the time.
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We're not there yet.
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My freemium and free trial offering that we have,
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we do offer a SAS offering as well as self-hosted offering.
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So giving that developer that experience.
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And then in-person events and online events like webcasts,
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podcasts, things like that, those are the three kind
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of big channels I would never cut.
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I love it.
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Let's dive into those a little bit more.
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Jumping into the final piece first, in-person events,
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online events, is that community stuff?
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Is it product driven?
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Is it bit of both?
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How do you think about events?
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Yeah, it's both, right?
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So there's product led webinars or events.
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But there are also community events
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that it's not pipeline generation.
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It's really educational.
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It's meant to get them again using our product
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because we have that bottoms up product led approach.
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And then there's ones that we want to drive demand
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and thought leadership at a high level.
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So we bucket them by persona.
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So our plan is to build them by persona,
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build them by the nurture, the content journey
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that we're building.
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And then we identify events to support those journeys,
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where we are.
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So we think about who we're going to reach
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and what we want to say and where should we find them.
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We're taking our message to them.
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I have to tell you, when during COVID time online events just
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was not the best experience to driving those conversations.
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And now we rotate so heavy on in person the last six months.
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It's been amazing.
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We just held our own user conference.
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And they're so excited to be together.
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It felt like a reunion.
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But it's feeling like that at every in person event.
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And those play such a big role for us
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and in a huge opportunity from a demand gen side.
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Such a good point.
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I think that there is so much fatigue around digital events.
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And there still is.
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I think people often misinterpreted
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why people would go to in person versus not.
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And what would hold their attention
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or why they would do certain things.
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And I think one of the things that we've seen pretty clearly
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is that if you're in a situation where you can't make an event,
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if you can't be there, if your team doesn't have budget,
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or if you live somewhere, it's great to have options
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for those type of people to engage.
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That historically we're being left out anyways.
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But for the in person stuff, like you said,
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there's a real appetite there.
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I mean, what types of things are the signals
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that you see from the appetite to get together?
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Is it just the feel in the room, the conversations?
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Is it surveys afterwards?
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How excited people are?
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Is it driving signups?
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Like, what were the reasons there?
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It's all of the above, really.
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And when we held our user conference,
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we heard from our customers that they didn't even
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have budget this year.
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When they planned last year for this year,
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they didn't know where we were with COVID,
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where we're going to be in the same situation,
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especially in November, December,
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with On the Crown coming back.
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They, I don't think they thought how big of an event
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budget that they would plan for.
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So many of our customers said,
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you know what, we'd love for you to come to us.
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So we actually held our user conference,
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and now we're holding city tours to go to them.
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And we actually didn't do an online version.
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We specifically said, you know what,
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we're going to come to you.
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We're going to build the best experience.
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And it's been such a huge response.
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Like, during the last week or two weeks ago,
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I really felt like we were at a reunion.
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I was watching, and people were hugging each other.
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And I mean, it was like a big party.
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I missed it, right, for sure.
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It wasn't my first event, but it was our first user conference.
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And it was really a response, right?
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They were telling us this, the surveys,
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everything that, you know, they're ready to come back.
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We always have to offer a hybrid, but you know what,
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we always offered hybrid when we wanted to.
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It's just now, I don't think we build the same experience.
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The hybrid has to be a dedicated strategy.
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Just, it can't be like, here, let's stream it,
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and you'll be fine.
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It's got to be a dedicated strategy like we did last year.
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We've learned from that, but now we've got to, you know,
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make it where it's digestible.
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It's not this long conference that we've had,
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where people started taking those in-person,
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make them the same virtual.
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We got to, you know, we're rethinking how we do those for sure.
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- I love it.
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And you noted, we were just so unintentional
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of how we thought about both those things, right?
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Like the whole idea of, hey, we go to a conference,
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we've talked about this one on the show,
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but like, you go to a conference,
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and then you just live stream all of the talking points.
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It's like, yeah, but I don't go to a conference
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to just listen to people talk.
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That's like the 20%, the 80%
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is the connections and the meeting people
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and the networking sessions or the workshops.
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Those are the things that drive a ton of value.
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And I think that that's like being intentional
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about what is for what and why people go to certain things.
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I think is super important for people to figure that out.
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Otherwise, if you kind of just sit on the fence,
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like it's just kind of like be a bad experience on both sides.
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- And let's be honest,
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of who sits through an entire virtual event.
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You pick and choose your sessions,
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and when you're home or you're in the office,
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you get distracted, you get, no one sits through them.
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So in reality, we may say we've acquired this many people
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to attend our conference, but are they really,
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like they're not really contained, like in person event.
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We have them locked in and they're, you know,
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they're there, they're having the conversations,
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we're having those meetings,
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and you don't get that from the virtual.
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So, you know, we're definitely rethinking how we do them.
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We're, you know, cutting them even further,
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not to say we didn't do that a couple of years ago,
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but now we're doing it again in terms of
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how do we partner with the in-person ones?
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- Well, I think that, you know, like the way
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that you'd create an in-person event is like very regimented
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at this point, like so many people have done it.
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We know how to do it, the speakers, the this, the like,
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breakout sessions, all that stuff, like we know how to do it.
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We had no idea how to do virtual events, right?
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So it's like the idea that like, you know,
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you have someone talk for 45 minutes,
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and then you have like Q&A and then rap,
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it's like you don't need to do any of that anymore.
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You could have someone talk for 10 minutes,
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and then you can do all breakout rooms,
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or you can do like, there's so many different things
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that you can do, and I think that that's the sort of stuff
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where like again, in events, the reason why it's like,
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hey, Michelin and I both went to the, you know,
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how to, you know, upgrade your, you know,
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supercharge your SEO.
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Hey, I saw, were you in that thing?
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Yeah, you were like, I was pretty cool
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that they were talking about X-Y or Z,
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like it's still about like driving word of mouth,
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driving connections between people
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to talk about what they just learned.
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It's not just like, hey, I'm just gonna take notes on this
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and take it back to my team.
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In-person events are still about getting actual people together
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to talk about that stuff.
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It is, it is the psych conversations where you learn so much.
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So I completely agree.
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You mentioned organic.
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How do you think about organic as it relates to that
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versus paid versus, you know, both together
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and what's your strategy for building that?
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We have two very strong plans for organic
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and paid and obviously paid costs more than organic.
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So I always try to tell my team,
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you gotta, gotta change the balance.
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That's their objective and that's their KPI.
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Is how do you get to generate more demand
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and leads from organic versus paid?
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And organic is just better quality leads
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at the end of the day, right?
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They're searching for it.
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They're, we're driving them.
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They're seeing their right content
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and then they're taking action.
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So for me, they're top priority.
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But if I had it my way and I could fast forward everything,
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I would do more organic than paid for sure.
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- Do you think about like doing, you know,
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the definitive guide to XYZ,
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the kind of pillar content marketing strategy
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and driving everyone to one thing
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and having that sort of like anchor content
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or do you think about, you know,
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what type of stuff are you all kind of working on creating
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for that?
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- There's an old saying, right?
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The content is king and there's a reason for it, right?
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And organic search is all about content.
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Same with paid search, but organic much more so.
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And the nurture you're building
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to get them to engage with you.
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I used to do those, you know, my past career
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but with JFrog, it's all about technical content engagement,
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right? So it's not the fluff.
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They can see behind, they can see behind the fluff.
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So it's gotta be very educational, deep technical content
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with this audience, you really have to educate them.
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So it's taking them through a journey, right?
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So we think about the user experience,
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the moment they come to our website,
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what is it the first thing, you know, we wanna do,
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where did they come from and what's the next step
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they wanna take?
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And then we built workshops, again, to educate them.
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Very hands on, they're an hour and a half workshops
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so they can play with our product.
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And we bring them to try our product.
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We bring them to do these kind of demo days
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where, 'cause they don't wanna talk to us a sales rep.
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So right away.
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So how do we take them on this journey
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in a way that resonates with them?
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That doesn't feel like marketing fluff
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or that doesn't feel not authentic, right?
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It's gotta be authentic, it's gotta mean like,
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hey, we are trying to take you and educate you
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down this journey because we want you
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to have the best experience 'cause we believe
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that we're giving you the best product
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in the industry and we want you to try it.
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And once they try it, we know we've got them excited
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and energized about it, but it's just taking them
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down that journey.
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And organic search and content plays a huge part in that.
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- Yeah, it seems like, isn't that the hard part, right?
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It's like, if you're paying whatever, one to two dollars
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a word to get content created or whatever it is,
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or if you're creating a house, either way,
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like you have to find the really sharp technical writers
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or creators or people outside the organization,
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they're gonna be able to co-create that stuff
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because otherwise, like you said, if you're just trying
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to slap together a thousand words to throw it on the blog,
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we all know that's a losing strategy anyways,
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but how hard has that been for you all
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to find those technical creators?
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- Yeah, we've been lucky to be honest
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because we market to engineers and developers,
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we have a very large R&D organization,
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so we actually created a JFrog Gurus program,
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and the JFrog Gurus program are people
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all over the company who want to present,
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who want to go to events, who want to come on webinars,
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so they're actually like real life,
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the persona that we go after,
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they're presenting on our behalf and they're sharing,
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so we've been lucky to have that,
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we built our developer advocates team
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'cause that's 100% of their job,
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but we also leverage our R&D and our product team
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to build content, so on our side,
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we actually don't lack the content creation,
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for us it's like making sure that it resonates,
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that we're, it's focused, that we,
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there's a purpose to it, right?
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I'm not a believer of, I call it,
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don't create content that sits on the shelf, right?
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Have a purpose of how you want to use it,
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how is it going to, you know, going out to market,
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how are we going to engage with the audience
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more than once, right?
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Creating one piece of content, letting it sit,
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it's not worthwhile, so that's the hardest part
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because there's so much content
22:22
and we deliver a platform that has multiple products,
22:25
so it's not just one story all the time,
22:28
we, you know, we want to showcase a certain product
22:30
of our another, and so therefore,
22:32
that's probably the hardest, it's the storytelling,
22:35
not the technical content that we deliver,
22:37
I mean, don't get me wrong, it's hard work,
22:39
but we have so many experts in the company
22:42
that that's less of a concern for me.
22:44
- What about your most cuttable budget item
22:49
or something that you might not be investing in, you know,
22:52
in the coming years?
22:53
- Yeah, I tend to find, you know,
22:57
content syndication, not, you know,
22:59
it's not like it's cuttable, I would cut it,
23:02
it's just the least amount,
23:04
and the reason why we would continue doing that
23:05
is it's very top of the funnel,
23:08
so if we're, if you're starting out,
23:11
like when I first joined,
23:12
we wanted to make sure we had enough names
23:14
and our database, so that was a tactic we used
23:19
for a very long-term evolution of good quality leads,
23:24
so we would bring them in, we would nurture them,
23:26
we would build that engagement with them,
23:29
and then we start, you know, thinking of them as leads, right?
23:33
So I find that probably the least that I would cut the most,
23:37
if I had to choose, this is what I would pick,
23:41
but that's the most I see in terms of, you know,
23:46
channels that are not doing as well as I'd like to see,
23:51
'cause every company that I've seen at,
23:54
when we try it, it's not that great for me,
23:57
from a lead perspective,
23:59
and then again, virtual events,
24:01
making sure that the ones we do do are meaningful,
24:05
they have, that we build meaningful conversations
24:08
around these virtual events,
24:10
because we are getting that fatigue as we discussed.
24:13
- Okay, do you have a favorite campaign?
24:16
- There's several, but probably the one worth mentioning
24:19
is our recent security campaign that we ran,
24:22
JFrog has a security solution called JFrog X-Ray,
24:25
and it enables customers to kind of deliver software
24:28
securely, right, faster, and with the recent,
24:31
I don't know if everyone's aware of this,
24:32
but with the recent software pandemic
24:34
that we had with Log4J,
24:36
you know, it was a very horrifying experience
24:40
to so many enterprise companies,
24:42
like they were panicking across the industry.
24:45
Luckily, our customers were safe,
24:48
but it was kind of a marketer's dream in a way,
24:50
because we like quickly launched this campaign,
24:53
showcasing the value of X-Ray,
24:56
our JFrog X-Ray solution,
24:59
how we're strengthening their supply chain,
25:01
how we brought customers forward,
25:03
how we showcased them,
25:04
and it was beautiful,
25:07
it beautifully executed.
25:09
We launched a myriad of content,
25:13
blogs, social, customer stories,
25:17
and the result was amazing.
25:19
You know, we saw huge spikes in our website, traffic,
25:22
journalists that have not written about us before
25:25
started writing about us, putting us in their headlines.
25:28
So for me, that was a beautiful, very relevant,
25:32
recent one that we use now,
25:34
and we're figuring out how do we do this,
25:36
replicate this for any campaign
25:39
to drive that kind of air-covering
25:40
such a short period of time, it was amazing.
25:43
It also validated the need for the teams to be aligned, right?
25:48
When you have this passion and this focus
25:52
across the entire marketing organization,
25:55
like magic happens,
25:56
and it just shows that as leaders,
25:59
if you focus them on so many different things,
26:02
you don't get that type of return,
26:03
and that's the difference that we learned from it,
26:06
is that we're always doing
26:07
so many different things all the time,
26:09
and to have that type of focus was just amazing.
26:14
- Yeah, I always reference Chandar,
26:17
'cause he's one of my all-time face,
26:19
but he said on the podcast,
26:22
is like you can do three things,
26:24
like you can have basically three elements of focus
26:28
at any given time for your marketing team, and that's it.
26:30
And I break the rule all the time,
26:34
like I constantly break the rule,
26:36
but then you go back and you're like,
26:37
oh, it's way better to just do three things
26:40
right and thoroughly than try to just boil the ocean.
26:44
- Right, and as marketing leaders, it's hard, right?
26:46
'Cause you get asked for so many different things
26:48
from across the entire company
26:51
that we have to try and protect them,
26:52
but it is, I do the same thing.
26:54
I try to remember, but it's hard not to focus them
26:58
on more than three things. (laughs)
27:01
- How do you view your website?
27:03
- Gosh, our website is the face of the company, right?
27:08
It's something that people come to,
27:11
the first thing they come to when they're learning.
27:13
It's the, it plays many different roles.
27:17
It's the highest producing channel for us
27:20
for conversion rates.
27:21
It's the leading indicator of how well we're doing
27:24
from a brand awareness perspective.
27:26
Are we driving more traffic?
27:28
Are we driving more unique users to come?
27:30
Are they engaging?
27:31
So those are all leading indicators to me
27:33
to the health of the business.
27:35
And it's a place where we can tell our stories, right?
27:37
It's not just from a product perspective,
27:39
but they can come to our blogs where we can learn
27:42
and excuse me, teach them and showcase our existing customers
27:47
and inspire future customers.
27:49
So it's the number one property.
27:52
And I hired someone just dedicated to think about
27:55
the health of the website.
27:57
That is, I'm gonna give a whole team around it,
27:59
thinking about it, but one person is waking up
28:02
and sleeping, thinking is my website a success.
28:05
And that's number one for me.
28:07
- I love that.
28:09
I haven't heard it put quite that way.
28:13
I was just like single point of success.
28:17
Like, as we said in the area, pin the rows
28:21
on the one person who it's like,
28:24
you know, this is what you think about every single day.
28:26
And this is like the classic marketing thing.
28:28
If you don't resource it, it's never, you know,
28:31
and if you don't give an owner,
28:33
how can you expect it to be successful?
28:38
- Absolutely, that's exactly it.
28:40
If you don't have the focus,
28:41
you're not gonna get the results.
28:43
- Well, and to expand on that,
28:44
the website is such a complex thing.
28:46
Now, I mean, we talked about it every episode.
28:48
It's such a complex thing because you're selling
28:51
on the website, especially, you know, you all have PLG
28:53
and bottom up.
28:55
It's so complex now.
28:57
All your content is living there.
28:59
Like, there's just so many different things
29:00
that are going on.
29:01
It's like if you don't,
29:02
if you create, you know, the center of excellence model
29:04
and nobody's owning it, owning it, you know,
29:08
it's just not, it's just not gonna,
29:12
it's still just, you know,
29:14
too many cooks in the kitchen and not one person saying,
29:16
like, no, this is how it has to be
29:18
because we have these 55 other things
29:21
that are happening at any given time.
29:24
- Yeah, I mean, you know, one person is not enough
29:26
and we're just starting to grow that organization as well,
29:29
but it's, we need to have that focus.
29:32
And for this person, her job is to make sure
29:35
everything's optimized.
29:36
So we take our top generating content
29:39
and is it converting on our website?
29:41
Is it, are people coming?
29:42
She's not responsible for people to come,
29:44
but once they go on to the website,
29:47
her job is to ensure conversion and engagement.
29:51
So we take the top kind of performing, you know,
29:55
content pieces or web pages and make sure
29:58
that they're converting and optimizing at all time,
30:00
partners with the SEO team,
30:02
partners with the product marketing team.
30:04
So it's a tough job, it's never ending.
30:06
And we're just, you know, that was probably my second,
30:09
third hire when I joined the company.
30:12
And we just need to grow it.
30:13
It's just, you know, there was so much other things to do,
30:16
but it's definitely something that I can see
30:17
a whole team around focus on different aspects,
30:20
whether it's optimization on conversion,
30:23
optimization on, you know, like exit pages,
30:26
how are they moving from one page to another?
30:29
I can build a whole team around this in the future
30:32
and that's the plan.
30:34
- Let's get to the desktop when we talk about healthy tension,
30:37
whether that's with your board, your sales team,
30:39
your competitors or anyone else.
30:40
Have you had a memorable dust up in your career?
30:43
- I've had many.
30:47
Really, I've been lucky not to have anything
30:49
with the board.
30:50
I've been, you know, the board,
30:51
every single engagement I've had with the board,
30:53
they're really there to support and guide you.
30:55
So I can't say I've had, you know,
30:58
anything to say about that.
31:00
I've been lucky so far to have an amazing supportive board
31:03
in any company that I've worked at.
31:06
You know, usually the healthy tension is around sales.
31:09
You know, if you don't have that transparency
31:14
and open communication and if they don't know
31:17
what you're doing or they're not seeing the mistakes
31:20
that you make or the challenges that you have,
31:23
then they, you know, they assume certain things.
31:26
So having that kind of healthy tension is good.
31:29
I actually, I welcome it.
31:31
I want that amongst our team,
31:33
but it's gotta be healthy as the word that we need to focus on
31:38
to ensure that they're working together
31:41
and they're holding each other accountable,
31:43
but then they're meeting together as one, right?
31:46
I just, today I was meeting with a sales team,
31:49
we called it, you know, one mission, one team, one mission.
31:53
And it doesn't matter where the challenges are,
31:56
it's our challenges, the collective hour.
31:59
And luckily for JFrog, and I have,
32:01
I'm not saying that 'cause I happen to be at JFrog,
32:03
but I work with an amazing phenomenal CRO
32:07
who is really truly a partner.
32:09
But we have that healthy tension,
32:10
but really she's, for us, it's an open book.
32:14
So yes, in my past, I've had many,
32:17
especially early in my career,
32:19
where, you know, people assume certain things,
32:22
but as I've, you know, been at more experience nowadays,
32:26
I try to have less and less of that as an option.
32:30
All right, let's get to quick hits.
32:32
These are quick questions and quick answers.
32:34
Just like how quickly you can talk to somebody
32:37
on your website.
32:38
If you use Qualified, go to Qualified.com
32:41
to learn more qualified prospects
32:43
or on your website right now.
32:44
And you can talk to them quickly.
32:46
If you're using Qualified, quick and easy,
32:48
just like these questions, we love Qualified.
32:50
Go to Qualified.com to learn more.
32:52
Quick hits.
32:54
Misha-line, are you ready?
32:55
- I'm ready.
32:56
- Number one.
32:58
Do you have a hidden talent or skill
32:59
that's not on your resume?
33:01
- Mixed drinks.
33:02
I just started to learn how to make great mixed drinks.
33:06
So that's probably one that's on my, not on my resume.
33:11
Favorite drink?
33:12
- Gosh, Negroni.
33:14
I have many.
33:15
Wine's my go to, but Manhattan, I've started to like more.
33:19
- Do you have a favorite book, podcast, TV show
33:21
they've been checking out recently?
33:22
- I just started, opened this book recently.
33:24
It's by Simon Sinek, Infinite Game.
33:28
It's more of a, teaches leaders how to plan for the long term.
33:32
It's more around helping our organization plan better.
33:36
So that's just something I started
33:38
and I'm enjoying reading it so far.
33:40
It's a quick, easy read.
33:41
- What advice would you give to a first time CMO
33:46
who's trying to figure out their demand-gen strategy?
33:50
- Know your audience.
33:51
Know your audience and product first,
33:52
understand their pain.
33:54
See what makes them happy, see what challenges they have,
33:58
what excites them, inspires them to purchase,
34:01
to try your product.
34:02
Know your data, bring on a marketing ops leader first,
34:07
if you don't have one, if you don't have an amazing one.
34:09
- And probably my third, it's probably obvious,
34:12
but hire great people around you.
34:15
- Muchelene, it's been awesome having you on the show.
34:18
Thanks so much for joining.
34:19
For our listeners, you can check out jfrog.com.
34:23
Go give a nudge to your DevOps leaders
34:27
and say check it out if they're not.
34:29
The majority of the Fortune 100 is already a JFrog customer.
34:32
So, I mean, you gotta get on that.
34:35
Any final thoughts, anything to plug?
34:37
- This has been so much fun.
34:38
Thank you so much, it's great talking to you again again.
34:40
- Yeah, awesome having you in, take care.
34:43
- All right, thank you.
34:44
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