The Building Blocks of the Modern Data Platform
Micha Hershman shares his insights into the building blocks of the modern data platform, why your website is the single most important conversion tool that B2B organizations have, and why the bottom line of marketing is about customer experience.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome to "Dumanja and Visionaries."
I'm Ian FaZe on CEO of Caspian Studios.
And today, we are joined by a special guest, Mike, how are you?
I'm great.
Thanks, Harry, for today.
Doing well.
Excited to have you on the show.
Excited to chat about Envoy, which
is a definite fan favorite of mine,
as I've been in just about every office building
in the Greater Bay Area.
And I've had many an Envoy experience.
So excited to chat all about that stuff in your background.
What was your first job in "Dumanja?"
My first two jobs were actually in the publishing space.
I worked for a company called Borders Group, who
ran Borders Books and Music, and Walden Books, thousands
of stores, and then shortly after I
worked at a company called Dark Horse Comics.
So publishing content, they were both consumer facing
businesses, super low margin, scraping
to make a profit of those kinds of companies.
They had hundreds of thousands of SKUs.
I'm like, Envoy, where we have one SKU, five SKUs.
And they had real problems with differentiation.
There were tons of competitors on the comic space.
It was DC and Marvel Comics who were exploding.
And the Borders Space, it was Barnes & Noble or Amazon,
who was disintermediating everybody else in the space
and crushing us.
So I came into "Dumanja" from a very different point of view,
not SaaS, not B2B, but from a consumer side.
And I think about "Dumanja" and a little bit differently
as a result.
And so "Flash Forward" to today, tell us a little bit
about your role at Envoy.
Yes, I've been at Envoy for almost three years,
next month, I think.
I run the marketing and brand design teams here at Envoy.
And I'm currently leading the BDR and SDR functions.
And I'd love to talk more about how critical
that interface between demand-gen and BDRs are.
Later as we chat.
OK, let's get to our first segment, "The Trust Tree."
This is where we can go and feel honest and trusted.
And you can share those deepest, darkest,
demand-gen secrets.
So what does Envoy do?
It's a good question.
Thank you for asking.
As you might expect, Cin, the workplace
has changed a ton over the last several years.
Coming into the pandemic, the workplace
is very different than the workplace
you see coming out of the pandemic.
And Envoy builds products that really
are intended to help solve that complexity problem.
How do we transform the office and turn it into a place
that people really want to be?
We focus on a couple of things.
But first and foremost is making workplaces
that people love and really work well.
Our goal is to make reopening safe and super easy.
And we've got a number of products
that make up our platform and our suite that
keeps visitors, that welcome visitors, that keep everybody
safe, that help employees book space like a desk
or a conference room, sync their schedules
as a big part of what we do right now.
So that everybody can come into the office together
and get creative.
That includes things like building access, security,
and more.
For us, the bottom line is about experience
and customer experience.
Envoy today is in over 16,000 locations
in more than 100 countries, excuse me.
150,000 people a day are using our products
in a hybrid environment.
And we're still growing.
So we've recently gone through our series,
CFUNG-raising $111 million in an evaluation
of 1.4 billion.
It's a crazy time for Envoy.
I tend to tell folks that there's no business that's
more relevant than Envoy right now.
You know, Micah, I tend to agree.
I think Envoy really is just about as important
as any company right now.
And I think because the world kind of shifted so much
and how this like, you know, flexible workspace
and how that stuff all looks and feels
and how it connects from digital to physical
and having visitors and figuring out what
tests use and hybrid work and all of that,
it's at the top of all of our minds.
Yeah, the complexity I think is multiplied.
Health and safety is a multiplier.
Things that used to be so conspicuous
and normal in Silicon Valley life, free lunch,
and how you serve food has become more complicated.
And how you sanitize spaces and how you utilize your space
effectively has become more complicated.
And really importantly for us, how you set your hybrid
schedule, how you find a desk, but you don't want to come
into the office and have no one on your team there.
It's a disappointment.
And that is exactly the sentiment we're trying to really fight
against.
We want when people to come in to have an awesome experience
to drive collaboration and productivity way up
and have people say, that was cool.
I want to come back into the office again later in the week.
And so how do you--
like what are the types of customers that you all have
and how do you target them?
It's a great question.
We talk a lot about our customers.
And we spend a lot of time getting clear on that
and communicating it to our organization.
We have-- effectively, we have four personas
in our organization.
And they start with the technology director.
So you can imagine a mid-market or enterprise company
that folks responsible for technology in the organization
are an all-based customer.
Second on our list are security leaders,
especially when you think about the enterprise space.
And you think about access to your building
and how people come and go from that space.
Security is really important, especially
if you have serious hardware or intellectual property
to protect.
The third persona is workplace managers.
This is our bread and butter in the mid-market technology
space, the person who's responsible for the daily operations
of the activity who manages the lobby in the mail room.
And it turns on modern on both things.
We spend a ton of time focusing on them.
And then finally, an emerging persona for us
is the HR leader.
And I think this is, as you and I discussed,
tied to the rise of the hybrid workplace
and the complexity that's part of that.
So now, HR has to be involved because they're
health and safety concerns.
OK, so digging in a little bit to those four personas,
obviously those four are very different.
They seek different end goals for them,
for how they impact the organization, all that stuff,
and makes a little bit of a complex buying committee there
as they have different pieces there.
I'm curious, how do you look at that as a buying committee?
How do you create marketing for four distinct personas?
It's a super tough challenge.
And it's one that tons of folks in the startup space
experience.
It's part of the definition of being a startup
that you're trying to figure out here.
Your customers are what is your product?
What's your product market fit?
How do you go to market?
So this question comes up all the time.
The answer for Envoy is relatively straightforward.
First, we think about our businesses,
a horizontal platform.
You can use Envoy if you're a dentist's office,
you're a podcast host, or a highly in demand podcast producer.
It doesn't matter to us.
And so we have some messages that are really universal,
and we make sure that those persist across all of our messaging.
For example, ease of use, beautiful design.
Those are kinds of things that we market to everyone horizontally.
Then of course, we have verticalized messaging,
and we're getting deeper and deeper into verticalization
at the GTM level, excuse me.
And then finally, we have the enterprise component,
which as you referenced in is the committee.
So in the enterprise component, you've heard this a million times.
I'm sure on your show, you start to think about account-based marketing.
We've got programs that actually target what we refer to as below-the-line
buyers,
people like the workplace manager.
We provide them with hands-on content,
how to do a thing, how to solve a problem, inspiration.
We also provide them with content to sell upwards in their organization.
How do you pitch your VP of HR or VP of security on Envoy?
And then we market very differently to those C-level suites,
created dinners, the kinds of high-level content, direct mail,
and advertising that you'd expect to a senior leader who might be focused more,
less on experience and more on cost or return or security or compliance.
Yeah, and talk to me a little bit more about your team and how you kind of
structure your go-to market.
Happy to.
Go-to-market at Envoy is relatively straightforward.
You know, we're a 350 person, largely B2B organization.
Most of our revenue comes from the sales side.
We do have a kind of a product-led self-serve motion.
But we look like you'd expect.
We have a marketing team that's broken down into demand gen,
which is our largest function by design, product marketing,
comms, and visual design.
And there are sub-teams within all of that.
And the demand gen function, of course, is primarily supporting the sales work.
On that side, then we have the EDRs who are largely inbound and focus on SMB
business,
high conversion, short sales cycles, lower ATS or average transaction size.
And then we've got the SDRs who are what we call a hybrid.
They take some inbound, but they also are tasked with the outbound sales motion
really prospecting into either high value or strategic accounts.
We've got the sales organization that you'd expect is tiered by SMB,
mid-market enterprise with a team in the UK.
We've got a customer success function.
And then we've got an emerging growth function that's really led by our product
team with cross-functional partnership from other parts of the organization,
including demand gen product marketing, et cetera.
Can you mention that having some of those kind of traditional sales teams,
you know, under marketing is kind of an interesting thing?
Obviously, we deal with some folks who do, some folks who don't,
but what's your piece with this?
I am passionate about the BDR conversation.
I believe that this is a true statement.
The single highest point of leverage in your sales and marketing funnel
is the handoff between demand generation and BDRs.
You put a ton of money, millions of dollars in the top of your funnel in direct
response
or awareness advertising and content development in events,
generating leads, you're nurturing them, qualifying them,
scoring them and handing them off to the BDRs.
And those conversion rates, when you look at the benchmarks, are not great.
You know, conversion rate from an MQL or marketing qualified lead
to a sales qualified lead can be 60 to 90%.
So you're losing 30% of your investment right there.
And it gets worse, the handoff from a BDR who accepts a lead to set a meeting
is much, much lower, and that handoff to opportunity create is horrifying.
The amount of money that's pouring out of your funnel, you know, it's wild.
So focusing on that BDR organization is something we do and we spend a ton of
time on. And there's a couple of things that are magical about how we operate, I think,
and that make a difference.
The first is the most important meeting of the week,
which is the demand generation BDR handoff.
It takes place on Tuesdays, first thing in the morning.
It's co-led by our demand generation, our BDR leaders by segment.
So we have an SMB mid-market meeting and an enterprise meeting.
And those folks come in and we grind through the numbers every week.
What was our leads versus target?
What was the lead mix? What was our MQL versus target?
What was the MQL mix? Did something change?
Did more high value folks come in from one channel or another?
And we talk about the campaigns are shipping, educating those BDR managers.
Then the BDR managers are talking, and we're going down to the BDR level.
Did XBDR make their call volume targets this week?
What was our time to first touch by segment?
Our goal is under five minutes. Are we at that goal?
We are not, but every week we look at that number and we look at every single B
DR
and how fast they give back to leads.
So we're working weekly to optimize that handoff and make the most of it.
That's magic moment number one.
The second thing that's magical is an SLA.
And if you are out there and you're a marketing leader without an SLA
between your demand generation and BDR function, I would suggest you stop what
you're doing right now.
Go look up some examples of how to do this.
Reach out to me. I'm happy to share.
But the SLA is effectively a written document that we refresh every six months
that outlines
how marketing and, or how demand generation, excuse me, and BDRs will work
together.
It defines every stage of the funnel explicitly, how we measure it, what Sales
force report to use.
It talks about the responsibilities of marketing in terms of the goals and the
quality we will deliver
and the BDRs and the time to first touch and the number of touches per lead
that they will deliver.
And it is literally signed off on. We go through DocuSign internally.
Every six months to have every demand gen and BDR and Sales Leaders sign the
document. So we say, we have agreed this is how we're going to operate as one team.
And that makes the finger pointing go away.
That really accelerates the one team, one dream mentality.
And it keeps the churn and the spin from arguing about, well, is it this or is
it that?
It reduces it to almost nothing because it's all on paper and it's crystal
clear.
I love that. Yeah, I want to get my hands on that thing.
That sounds, that sounds odd.
And maybe you can just teach me, teach me your ways and I can create my own.
That's really fascinating. Why did you decide to make that?
Where did that come from?
Boy, seven years ago I was at Eventbrite.
And we were scaling up the demand generation machine there.
I came in at 300 individuals in the company at $100 million in revenue where
the self-serve of product-led growth is driving the business historically.
But we're trying to move out market into mid-market and enterprise.
We're trying to grow our transaction size.
So the organization brought me on to help lead that effort.
And it was very clear early on that we had BDRs or Nitoriously Jr. in their
career. No fault of their own, of course.
But it's often a first or second job.
Their managers are generally more junior in their careers.
And sales leadership, proper sales leadership in the A.E. world, are almost
always interested
keenly but a little removed from the operational details.
So it was an observation that myself and a couple of other my teammates made
that if we tighten up these communities,
it's almost always about communication, right?
In clarity. If we can tighten up the communication in clarity, if we can set
expectations,
well, this machine is just going to move faster.
I'm going to spend less time arguing about stuff.
And we turned it on and it worked incredibly well to help scale Eventbrite from
$100 million to $400 million to IPO,
which in turn opened the door to give me the opportunity to talk to Enflie.
But how much of that was at the expense of Brian Rothenberg?
Because I feel like he was just kind of sitting in the background.
Oh boy.
You know, drinking tea.
I love Brian.
Brian is one of my dear friends.
I have enormous respect for him.
He was running the self-serve engine.
He'd been kind of building growth at Eventbrite for a long time.
And so he and I worked intimately for a while.
Where peers for a while, here's my boss.
We worked intimately on how something really tricky works.
How does the self-service funnel?
Work with the sales funnel.
How do you maximize that relationship?
How do you take people coming in through a self-service motion, identify them
and say,
"Oh, these are high value customers.
Move them over to an AE to maximize revenue."
And how do you identify low value customers or customers who just don't want to
talk to a sales person, take them out of that funnel so we're not driving up our LTV CAC rates by
having them engage with the sales person.
So that flow between self-serve and sales was a huge part of what we did at
Eventbrite,
what we're doing at Envoy, and I credit Brian Rothenberg for really driving a
lot of the thinking around how to do that right.
Oh, geez, giving him credits too.
Shout-outs, Brian.
Nice guys.
Nice.
In a brilliant, brilliant marker.
Has he been on the show?
I'm going to bring him on the show.
One other thing that I wanted to ask you about, with this, and then we'll move
on.
I learned about Envoy by visiting all of these different company headquarters.
The thing with tech in general, and not just tech, but here in the Bay Area
specifically, and where there's a lot of tech,
when you are going to a lot of meetings, you're meeting your friends, you're
doing this sort of stuff,
everyone has pretty advanced office spaces with a very tech-enabled sort of
setup,
and Envoy started becoming very popular.
There was this kind of great moment where you'd get in, and it's always this
crazy kind of,
"Okay, what am I going to get when I go to this company's headquarters,
and there's going to be all this crazy stuff?"
You go and I'd see the little Envoy, and he'd ask, "Okay, this is going to be
easy."
I'm just curious, did you all ever take a look at just what this is?
What that type of marketing had?
Because if you're talking about just putting that little kiosk that makes
everything so much easier,
obviously that's part of your product, but it's also brilliant marketing to be
sitting there in everybody's headquarters
when all the visitors and all the candidates and all these people come in and
have a great, seamless experience
as a visitor, then they go, "Hey, maybe at some point when I'm in that role,
I'm going to beat on facilities door and say, "Hey, we should do this," or HR
or whoever.
Yeah, we did.
Most of that work was right before my time, and as I got here,
but there are hundreds of stories around the organization of CEO of X Company,
goes visit CEO of Y Company and has that amazing experience,
and gets on Slack or sends an email and says, "Hey, I want this, and I want
this one. I'm back in Germany."
We go and install Envoy, and we can see those connections happen.
We spent a lot of time figuring out how to optimize and maximize that
connection, so that's number one.
The other really interesting one is the more of the non-CEO employee experience
One of our features is called Passport, which is a sleeper amazing feature that
kind of shows you
and your application on your phone, shows you every company you've been to,
and it makes it super easy to check in.
It's not just a passport much like clear at the airport, ahead of time,
it'll automatically fill all that in when you arrive at that company,
and people will stand in line and just watch people pass them.
They're like, "How did you just do that magical thing and go on by Passport?"
That's been another really great viral motion.
It's kind of employee driven to showcase the magic of the product right in the
front of the building.
Yeah, if only we all had a magical experience in our market.
I'd like to start that to live in other...
You know what's funny? I actually thought about this back in the day.
Every time I'd see, I'd use Envoy.
I was like, "Somebody should just create a product like this just as part of
their marketing
and just give it out for free."
That piece of just that one part of it to have that experience
because you get to be in every single headquarter of every company.
That's great, right.
Obviously, you all have an extremely layered solution with all sorts of
different products,
but it was something that always struck me that if nothing else,
if you all were losing money from the very beginning on Visitor Check-in,
it was probably worth it to build the brand.
It's really interesting you say that because what I think about is,
folks know about Envoy from our Visitor Solution,
and that's where primary revenue stream is.
However, we have diversified the suite of products,
kind of culminating in what we call our workplace platform.
We went from single product, worked our positioning and messaging,
pivoted to become a workplace platform,
but that's actually a middle step for us.
Our vision of being a platform is much more truly platform oriented.
How do we rely less on any given product to drive revenue
and move to become that hub that's in the center of the workplace,
where every other company who's building workplace products
is building it on our platform, our data, our mobile application,
and we can start to monetize the future of those interactions
and rely less on Visitor so it becomes as kind of you suggest
an easy entry point to the platform.
Yeah, always so nice when you have some consumer-type feel to your product
that's so effortless.
I mean, we see a lot of this with the 40 plus podcast that we do,
so the guest experience on any of our shows was like,
"Oh, I don't know who is doing this.
Now we do it a lot of times on behalf of our customers,
which is great for them because it's the same sort of thing,
but that key, that one-to-one experience that is so memorable
and remarkable is always great."
Okay, switching gears.
Let's get to the playbook, is where you open up the playbook
and talk about the tactics that help you win.
You play to win the game.
Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play to just play it.
What are your three uncuttable budget items?
Yeah, it's pretty straightforward for me when we think about the funnel
and I'll be the first to admit, I think about a traditional funnel.
I know there are helix 8s and cycles and circles,
but for me, top to bottom of the funnel, it's paid.
How are we driving exposure to either direct response,
people starting a free trial, or exposure to our content,
maybe in the enterprise world?
The next one is SEO and content.
SEO and content for us has a radically lower payback period
in terms of weeks, whereas a paid program can be in terms of years.
And SEO content has a much higher customer account.
Almost two X are paid programs.
Fraction of the cost, double the volume of customers.
So those two are at the top of the funnel and they do a number of things.
They serve multiple purposes.
They build your brand.
They drive direct response or free trials, kind of building your database.
They capture net new leads, so again, we can put in our database
and market to these folks.
They help crowd out competition.
They help keep you top of mind when you're a lower price product.
We don't, Envoy doesn't cost, you know, Marketo or Salesforce kind of numbers.
So you want to be top of mind when somebody's considering a product like Envoy,
you want to be top of mind.
So paid and SEO are, are key.
And then the last piece is light people.
So you've got these people in your free trial program or in your Marketo
database.
How do you engage them?
How do you nurture them?
How do you expose them to your content?
How do you build confidence in your products in your thought leadership across
the market?
And then how do you score them and deliver them to your BDR team?
Anything that has been your most cuttable budget item or something that you're
like,
I don't know if we're going to invest in this in the future.
Yeah, you know, the thing that comes up in every company ever since I've
started really
as a working marketing professional is social media.
Social media on the B2B side explicitly is notoriously challenging.
And every CEO wants it, right?
They want an amazing Twitter feed.
It's built for that audience.
They want kind of a great enterprise LinkedIn feed.
You can hire people.
You can produce content.
You can sponsor or boost your posts.
And they are great at driving engagement and building brand.
But they're kind of terrible at generating net new leads that convert.
So I think social media is the place where we have to invest.
And we're always walking that fine line of how do we make sure that we're doing
this right
at a good level of quality with the right frequency, but not putting resources
in there
that we couldn't use more effectively to generate demand elsewhere.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I started casting and we didn't even -- we still didn't
even have
a Twitter handle just because you're like -- again, from a brand building
perspective,
of course, it's on the 2D list down the road, but it's like, to what end, right
It's like, that's the whole thing with all of social media is like, where do
you stop?
Like, where does the sprawl end?
Is it that you're going to put daily stuff on TikTok?
You know, it was -- oh, my God, I'm reading his name.
Anyways.
But yeah, I heard a while back.
You know, it's like the average post on Twitter gets less likes than the size
of the content
team that created it.
And then like, that's the truth, right?
So, like, why build a monument to failure?
And then I think the other thing that's so fascinating about things like that
is you all
speak to four different personas.
So in that end, who are you talking to at any given time?
Because if you're talking to all four of those with one trying to have one
cohesive stream
of information that's relevant, like, why would the HR manager care with the --
you know,
like, they have totally different jobs.
Yes, they intersect with the year product, but that's where they intersect.
They don't necessarily intersect in all these other ways.
And I think that that's what's so tough with social is you're building -- you
're trying to -- like, it's a stream of content that you're putting out in the world and
more importantly,
engaging with other people.
And I think that's the other thing where people get it wrong is you should just
-- your social
team should be 80/20 engaging with other people, not just posting.
Yeah, that's a great point.
I think -- and again, the magic here is what we're talking about is B2B.
B2C is a totally different animal.
You know, I build a big book differently.
For sure.
But on the B2B side, social has got value, but for us, it's more of a
distribution channel
to do a couple different things, right?
We take that same e-book that we produce for an enterprise customer that we put
in a paid program on LinkedIn and we use in our engagement programs.
Well, yeah, absolutely we can slice and dice that on use on social.
And we should and we do.
But, you know, we're not spending tens of thousands of dollars in hiring a ton
of people on social
to build social content for B2B.
That's not going to return.
Yeah, one of the things that we've seen with our shows across almost all of our
shows is
that creating video content for LinkedIn is vastly outperforming anything else.
Right.
And so if you're doing like clips of of of demand, you envisioners, for example
, on qualified
LinkedIn stream, those do fantastic when our guest posts them.
They do way more fantastic.
So if you what we see is that if you're creating content, video content for
LinkedIn and your
customers and prospects and people in your community are then sharing it.
No kidding, but that's where you see in a ton of value and a ton of brand halo
effect.
That's right.
Literally in our staff meeting an hour ago, I asked our content social person,
you know,
the videos that we're posting on LinkedIn are those organic are paid because
the volume
engagement was 2x what we typically see and she said they're fully organic.
Yeah, it's just that's what the algorithm.
That's what they want.
That's what LinkedIn wants.
It's what Microsoft has put a lot of effort into apparently and for that for
that channel.
And you got to you got to use it.
Do you have a favorite campaign that you run for envoy?
Oh, for envoy.
Can I answer more broadly?
Can I start with favorite campaign?
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Do you have a favorite campaign that you've done over the past handful years?
Yeah, I'll answer a I'll answer favorite campaign in brief and then we'll jump
back to the envoy
to mention piece.
My favorite campaign ever was B2C.
I got to work on Harry Potter seven with scholastic the producer custom content
We produced custom books that you could only get through us.
We worked on it was amazing to work with, you know, Harry Potter at the height
of Harry Potter,
like literally goosebumps.
That was the coolest person in the company.
It was crazy fun and we got to do wild and creative stuff and it was a massive
financial
success.
So that was my favorite ever.
Now, if you talk about favorite campaigns, it envoy or event bright, they
actually fall
into the same category in terms of what they were and what they yielded for the
business.
And it's not sexy or exciting at all.
It's no Harry Potter seven.
What it is is on demand demo.
So many companies, so many sales organizations do a live demo and there's a
value in that
and you should maximize that.
But supplementing your live demo or replacing it with an on demand video demo
is a game
changer.
And it's a game changer for a whole bunch of reasons.
First is if you move to on demand, your customers can access it whenever they
want.
Secondly, what we saw it on boy, what I saw it, event bright was 22 minute long
demo videos
from a BDR who may or may not have been very polished, may or may not have been
outdated
within three months of producing it.
And suddenly, you know, 12 minutes into a 22 minute video, it's wrong.
So moving to modular video, let's talk about our various products in our suite
or let's
talk about solutions or use cases in one or two minute videos.
You get more viewability there.
You get more people watching through to the end.
So in terms of the consumer engagement, that's been massive.
Secondly, you can gate it.
If you're fan of gating, I am still a fan of gating.
There's upside into the real sure and scoring.
Absolutely.
It's when from our number seven campaign, both at Eventbrite and Envoy to our
number
one or two campaigns.
So MQL volume shoots up.
You've got people who are raising their hand and saying, hey, I'm interested
enough in
learning about your product that I'm going to give you all my information.
Great.
Not only is that a net new name to your database that you can nurture, but it's
a high intense
signal that says, oh, hey, BDR, go reach out to these people within five
minutes.
So hugely high intent.
And it doesn't take much to do.
You can work on making your on-demand demo easier to find.
Like we did at Envoy and Eventbrite, put it in your nav for our emails.
We put it as a footer link in all of our emails.
Check out the demo now.
And then you can spend some time as we did on BDR enablement.
Training them that this is a high priority campaign.
We break our campaigns for BDRs into three types, high, medium and low.
Hand-raisers with high intent, like the demo watch, go straight to high
priority.
So they work them right away.
They need to be educated on how they came in.
And then we work on the sequences with BDRs and outreach.
Okay.
Somebody comes in through the demo and they watch this video.
Here's the sequence.
Here's the talk track to really maximize the opportunity.
And it's had a transformative impact on top of funnel, top and mid funnel
growth at both
Eventbrite and Envoy.
I'm so interesting that you're pro-gating.
I'm pretty anti-gating at this point.
So I'm curious.
Why are you pro-gating?
It's a mix.
The right answer, in my opinion, the right answer is a mix.
So for example, it Envoy.
It eventbrite and now it Envoy.
Once you reach critical massive content creation, the 80/20 rule is in full
effect.
If it eventbrite, we had a thousand e-books.
You know, only a handful, right?
20% of them were yielding results.
So you keep the gates on those, take the gates off the other 80%.
And suddenly you get the Google SEO value from all of those super rich e-books
that no
one was filling out the form for anyway.
And you're still getting the high demand stuff that people are willing to give
you their
information as a signal that says, "Go talk to this person right now."
Great insight.
I love that.
I still think I would not gate, but...
It depends on what you have, right?
For example, our number one blog post is "What is hybrid work?"
And we don't want to gate that.
We want to educate the world on what hybrid work is.
But if you want the playbook on how to deploy hybrid work at your organization,
that is
20 pages long, fully custom illustrated, tons of insights from actual customers
What we find is people are willing to give up their contact information for
that still.
Do you have a worst campaign that you run?
Oh, I was afraid you're going to ask that question.
Yes.
We all do.
Mine was, fortunately, a decade ago, long enough that the pain of it is
starting to ease.
But in my role at Dark Horse, we were responsible for super fun and cool
marketing.
We work on comics with media partners like Star Wars and Halo, cool franchises
that like
every 25-year-old dude is like, "I would love to do that for your career."
And I was responsible for Comic-Con, our presence at Comic-Con.
A massive event.
And I was, of course, too cocky.
And I thought our old branding was dated.
And we weren't leveraging multimedia.
We had tons of Hollywood talent to come and sign.
We didn't have space for them.
We did retail, but it looked crappy.
So I worked with our head of design, and I worked with a third-party events
organization
to re-engineer this whole program.
Rebrand it, put in new hardware and infrastructure.
It's a $500,000 event.
Now, that's crazy compared to what most B&B events are.
We sent 60 people to that event for a week.
I mean, it was insanely inexpensive.
And I thought I was doing a great job of really rethinking the brand and making
it more cohesive
and pulling all the properties together and rethinking about color and appeal
and differentiation
versus the Marvels and DCs.
And I was so excited.
My team was so excited.
We deployed it and we got to Comic Con.
And our CEO got there a day or two later.
And he absolutely hated it.
He hated it top to bottom.
Hated the layout.
Hated the digital, hated the swag, hated the look and feel and the color.
And I was crushed, just destroyed.
Because I was proud.
First of all, because I was proud of it, I thought I was doing good work.
And secondly, it was a massive investment for the company, just like horrifying
ly bad use
of my time.
And I really struggled as a marketer.
I'm sure so many folks listening to this have experienced this.
Some things are hard to get over and they change you.
If you've ever read Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, he articulates it, "
Well,
you don't learn unless you suffer."
And that was a moment of real pain and real suffering for me.
Where I learned as a marketer, you can't be cocky, think you know what you're
doing,
you can't ride that horse by yourself out in front of the army.
You have to bring the CEO in, you have to bring your head of sales in, you have
to be
circulating and socializing at key checkpoints all along the way.
Or you're going to set yourself up for a massive moment of pain at the end.
How do you view your website?
Website is the single most important conversion tool that any B2B organization
has.
That's my strong opinion.
I say that to everyone I know, every CEO who I talk to about leaning into
marketing, it's
the most important conversion tool you have.
Secondly, it's a critical brand and positioning tool.
And you should think about those two things together.
Brand and demand, they are not antagonists, they are not opposite.
They don't operate in parallel and separate channels, they work together.
So you need to think about your website as the priming example of that, first
and foremost.
At Envoy, we've got a manager who's responsible for the development and the
productivity of
our website.
And by that, I mean, is it generating traffic?
Does that traffic convert into a net new name?
Does that net new name convert into a qualified lead?
So we've got one person who's responsible for that.
And of course, they work in concert with the design team and with product
marketing and
the rest of the team.
Every year we invest in the website significantly, it's one of our primary
investments, top three.
We invest in testing and we use a lot of tooling and we play there.
Right now we're really focused on personalization.
We're using, we're really excited about Intellimize and Gagulif over there and
what they're building
is a really super cool tool for driving more conversions from traffic to lead.
That's our number one goal for that team.
How do we get more net new names into our database from our website using tool
ing?
And then we also break our site into two parts.
We have a commercial site and we have our content ecosystem.
And they are of course related and we work very hard to make sure the customer
experience
is seamless and the branding is seamless but they actually serve different
functions.
Our content site is more of a top of funnel, brand and engagement tool and we
build that
on WordPress.
And I'm a passionate advocate for WordPress.
Maybe it's a data technology but it's friendly to marketers and that is the
most important
thing because our commercial site is built on a fancy technology that I can't
even explain
to you.
You really need engineers to go there and mess with it.
And the number one learning on the website, if you're building a website, is
startup,
if you're thinking how do I do this, is use technology that your marketers can
get engaged
with.
It's a horrifying moment when you're like, oh I'm going to make this simple
change on
the website and you're like no, the engineer who does that is on vacation and
suddenly
you're just banging your head on the table.
So marketing friendly technologies for website development.
I have a final piece here on content.
I do want to shout out just some of the resources that you have, the workplace
trends report,
the return to workplace index and some of the other resources that you all have
that
I think are pretty cool.
But one of the things that I thought was so interesting in one of those reports
was that
foot traffic is the lowest on Friday by about half which obviously that makes
sense.
It's not only Tuesday and Wednesday are the two highest.
But I just love, I call it, you know, fight where you can win.
But I love it when marketing leverages stuff that you own that is your first
party information
that only you can put our reports on because you know and it just seems like
you do a lot
of stuff like that.
Man, here you say that gives me goosebumps.
I couldn't agree with you more.
I think platform data is something that everyone needs to leverage.
And if you're a marketer thinking like, "Hey, I'm going to go," I'm considering
joining
this new company.
The questions you need to ask yourself, there are lots of them, but include, do
they have
platform data that helps me tell a story and can I access it?
At Envoy we've got a ton of access and so we can tell these great stories.
At Eventbrite I had very limited access and it was gated by the comms team and
the legal
team, the product team.
So that made it really hard to tell that story.
But because this is really a demand-gen focus conversation, I want to lean into
why that's
a valuable to demand-gen marketers.
Because not only is it a brand builder, you can talk to your comms person and
pitch those
stories to the media and be successful and we've been incredibly successful
mostly because
of the moment in time and the hard work of our comms people.
But on the demand-gen side, this is valuable information.
We complement platform data with surveys every single quarter of our personas.
And we just published our first annual report, again, a gated long form asset,
custom illustration,
beautiful, fully unique, but it tells the state of the workplace from a
combination of platform
data and interview data and qualitative quotations from folks in the market.
And I think that stuff is such a powerful tool to generate demand, whether it's
interest
and traffic or whether it's actually a net new name or engagement, if they're
already in
your database, massively powerful tool.
I love it.
That is such a great insight.
Platform data plus surveys and combining those two things.
Gosh, I love that.
I want to do that for us.
Let's get to the desktop.
Where we talk about healthy tension, but that's with your board or competitor
or sport.
Anyone else, if you have a memorable desktop in your career?
Yeah, of course.
Unfortunately, too many.
We're all just battle scars piled on top of battle scars.
We walk around limping until we're done being professional marketers because
they've accumulated
so much show.
Mine was probably five or six years ago.
I was the senior director of demand generation globally at Eventbrite at this
point.
I was relatively new to the team, to the organization.
We had some high power, high profile folks on the sales leadership team who I
was in a
meeting with along with several amount of reports.
At one point, one of these senior sales leaders started literally screaming at
my new employee.
I've been there three months screaming at her.
You can see she's quiet and stoic.
You could see the tears start to come down her face.
I just slide aside, superhero quiz.
I want to be Batman and the Hulk.
I just feel like I'm getting angrier by the second at this guy.
Angry and angry.
I maintain my cool.
I try to diffuse it, whatever.
The meeting breaks up.
I go.
I'm not going to talk to the employee.
I'm going to HR.
It's never going to happen again.
I went to my employee.
I said, "Not cool.
I am so sorry.
This should not happen to you."
Sales leaders, it's not okay to scream at marketing people.
Then I went to HR.
HR was like, "This is not cool.
We're going to launch an investigation."
They did.
I was super pleased.
I was like, "Okay.
I'm operating in the way I should.
I'm going to yell back at this guy.
I talk to people responsibly.
I close the loop with HR."
We'd go by.
HR pulled me back in and said, "We conclude our investigation and your employee
declined
to file a complaint."
She didn't want this guy addressed because he's an influential sales leader and
she's
a demand-gen person and fades.
Fades are tied.
I probably just fell out of my chair.
That's what a shocking thing to have happen.
The lesson for me was it was so hard to process.
You think you do everything right.
You think you take care of your team.
You think you stand up.
You think you're a good partner for SITs.
That really damaged my relationship with both of them.
I had a lack of trust in either of those parties because there's some weird
psychological dynamic
happening there.
I think my failure was, I should have stopped it earlier in the meeting.
The first time the voice was raised, I said, "We're not doing this.
Let's break up and come back one more calmer."
That was 100% on me.
I definitely still feel the scars of that one today.
Yeah, what a dust out.
That's a great insight though and definitely good advice to just step in right
there.
Right away.
As soon as you see something.
Let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
Questions and quick answers, just like conversational marking with qualified.
You can talk to your prospects quickly on your website right now with qualified
go to
qualified.com to learn more quick and easy just like these questions.
Micah, are you ready?
I am.
Number one, what hidden talent or skill is not on your resume?
Hidden talent or skill not on my resume.
I'm a nerdy science fiction first edition book collector.
I train in three martial arts and teach one of them.
Going on 50, I still get up and go skateboarding Saturdays and Sunday 6am in
the morning.
Nice.
Do you have a favorite book podcast or TV show you've been checking out
recently?
Watching the Last Kingdom on Netflix, which is pretty epic.
Really in love with that.
I highly recommend it.
Super complex drama.
Like I said, I'm a book collector and nerd.
I'm reading a book called Starfish, which is about an underwater colony on the
riffs where
they only send down people who have survived trauma and it's kind of like squid
games underwater,
which is super cool.
What piece of advice would you give a first time VP of marketing as they're
trying to
figure out their dimension strategy?
I've probably talked to 10 first time VP of marketing in the last six months
and I tell
them all the same thing.
Number one, get crystal clear on your goals with your CEO and your head of
sales, crystal,
crystal clear.
That includes forcing prioritization.
We all know that the answer is yes, both quality and quantity, but you've got
to pick one.
And as a first time VP of marketing with two or three staff and your startup,
you can't
do everything that your CEO and VP of sales wants.
You've got to get crystal clear on that priorities.
Then you have to allocate your resources and be crystal clear about that.
I got three people.
My number one priority is predictable pipeline for sales.
That means I'm not doing social media.
That means I'm not doing product marketing.
Can we all live with that?
And then the last piece is build a roadmap and say, look, I know you want all
this stuff.
I know these things are all coming in and I got a million requests.
So we, we at Envoy have a monthly roadmap meeting.
We put everything we can't do into a document and we put a date on it.
We say, yeah, we're going to come back to this when we have more time and
monthly, we
look at that and we groom and say, is it time?
Yep, let's do it.
If it's not time, push it out.
That way you capture the thought.
You don't lose it.
It's top of mind and you show your stakeholders that it's going to come.
Mike, it's been absolutely awesome having you on the show for listeners.
Go to omboy.com to check out all of their cool marketing.
Like I said, highly recommend some of their resources, which are pretty rad.
Any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
No, this is super cool.
I love talking shopping and thank you so much.
I really appreciate your time today.
Awesome.
Take care.
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