Generating Pipeline Through Authentic Partner Relationships
Christopher Willis of Acrolinx believes that authentic partner relationships are the key to generating pipeline and he’s got the data to prove it.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Casimir Studios.
Today's show is brought to you by our friends at Qualified,
the number one sales, the number one conversational sales and
marketing platform for companies revenue teams that use Salesforce.
And I am joined by a special guest, Chris.
How are you?
>> I'm good.
Thank you, Ann.
I'm excited to be here.
>> Yeah, excited to chat about marketing, pipeline.
You're one of the first, very first people that I have heard,
or heard, refer to themselves as the chief marketing officer and
chief pipeline officer, so that's pretty, pretty, pretty excited.
We'll get into that and much more.
What was your first job marketing?
>> So we started a company back in the late 90s,
specific to services and financial services companies.
And in 2021, the world changed.
We were working primarily in Boston and New York.
And the economic downturn that happened after 9/11
drove most small consulting businesses out of their large enterprise customers.
And so we could either close or reinvent.
And as it turned out, we reinvented one of the things that we had been doing.
One of our partners had been working on a CRM conversion project for
what seemed like a decade.
We probably spent three years moving them from Janet to something else.
Mars was the system he was moving to.
And these mean nothing to people today, but they were early CRM.
And while doing that, he thought, it'd be really interesting if we could see
this data tied to sales data warehouse data, fulfillment data,
different analytic systems inside, specifically a mutual fund business,
on a small screen.
This is prior to Blackberry or iPhone or anything.
And we created the first packaged mobile application.
We didn't really know we were doing it, but it wasn't just taking a big screen
system and driving it down into a small hand-spring or palm pilot.
It really was a composite application.
And so there was four of us, the core for leaders in the company and
the room spun and we all ended up in a corner and my corner was marketing.
And at the time that the room was spinning, I was actually running sales for
the business and when it finished spinning, I was running marketing.
And my first marketing campaign was trying to gain traction around a thing
that nobody ever heard of before.
I'm going to help you do your job, but I'm going to take you off your computer
and
do it for you on your palm pilot wherever you go.
And so I had just finished reading a book by John Spolstra,
who was a marketer and sports team owner.
And his bet was everybody likes a FedEx box.
And he had struggling, I think it was the Portland Trail Blazers with a team
that he was marketing for at the time.
They were losing season ticket holders.
And so he took a rubber chicken and shoved it in a triangular long triangular
FedEx box with a jersey on it and a little note tied to its ankle and
sent it out to people in long story short, huge conversion rate and drove up
the purchasing of season tickets.
So Operation Rubber Chicken was born at Pixis.
I had custom made boxes built with little pillows with stars and moons on them.
I spent $1,000 buying the cheapest hand spring device.
That's the crappy generic palm pilot of the day.
And loaded it with what looked like a demo, but it was slides.
It was complete slide where on this device.
So you turn the device on, it's all you can have access to and hand delivered
it
to 10 heads of sales at mutual fund companies.
Not IT, this wasn't a software sale.
This was a lifestyle sale to a person that makes millions of dollars a year.
And that $1,000 investment won us $4.3 million in lifetime value at Putnam,
Pioneer and American Express funds and drove us towards being the de facto
leader
in the space.
We kept competition out of that space for a decade because of the work that we
did
in the early days, building ourselves into a vertical, becoming the solution
and
then expanding peripherally to different use cases inside that business.
I didn't know what I was doing.
But as it turned out, I learned as I went.
I still don't know what I'm doing.
Well, it's my story today and tell me about your current role.
So yeah, you identified an interesting thing in nature.
There isn't a chief pipeline title.
When--
Yet.
Well, yeah, it's interesting.
And it takes a very special company to make this role work.
You have to have a line that between sales and marketing.
Let's say that the chief pipeline officer is the marketing leader.
I think in most cases, that makes the most sense.
And we can talk about that.
But you have to get along with your CRO.
If there is any ego or aggression between those two, this will not work because
I talk
to salespeople.
I'm responsible for creation progression and Q plus one Q plus two.
So the health of the future business.
I think in terms of for new logos, I'm living in a rolling four quarters
forward model for
expansion.
I'm living in a rolling two quarters model.
Everything that we're doing right now is having an impact on the future.
Shane, our CRO, really gets to focus on current quarter business.
He gets to deal with his team and make sure that we're doing the things
necessary to get
deals progressed and closed.
But I'm back here pulling the levers on how are we feeding the engine?
How are opportunities entering the engine?
And then once they're in, what's the future look like?
So what's our weighted or our unweighted pipeline?
And then what's the weighted pipeline that shows me essentially how we've
progressed the
things that we've built.
And so I'm surrounding the traditional sales model.
But like I said, it makes sense because I have a lot of those levers.
I think in terms of sales velocity is the thing that I'm trying to impact the
most.
And the way that I look at sales velocity is it's a math equation of the number
of opportunities
in a rolling four quarters model times the conversion rate times the average
sales cost
over divided by the sales cycle, number of days in the sales cycle.
And that comes out with a number, a dollar amount per day for us to Euro, we're
based
in Germany.
And it's not terrifically relevant to me what that number is.
It's the trajectory, the direction of that number.
I need that number to be going up.
So back to why I am positioned to do this, I have those levers.
So numbers of opportunities entering the pipeline.
I can impact that starting backwards by quality.
So if I'm giving the right things to the salespeople, they're going to convert
them into dollars.
And I own the BDR organization and all of the demand organizations.
So moving backwards, do I have an effective BDR team that can convert leads
into meetings
into early stage opportunities?
Do I have a demand team that's generating the MQLs that are going to be able to
be converted
by the BDR team?
From a conversion rate standpoint is my product marketing team providing the
tools, the information
and the enablement to be able to drive deals forward for the sellers.
If a deal isn't progressing, it could be the seller's fault.
But it could be Chris Carroll's fault.
He's our head of product marketing.
And so he's on the hook and is tied to those numbers of specifically our
weighted pipeline.
Are we progressing?
If we aren't, he feels it and he provides tools and guidance and office hours
to help
sellers to move deals forward.
From an average deal size standpoint, how are we packaging?
What are we selling?
Is it attractive?
Is it competitive?
I reach all the way into product in helping to set product strategy and define
the direction
that we're going in to be an attractive product, to put candy out in front of
an enterprise
solution so that we're generating the leads and interest that will help to
increase the
average sales price.
From a sales cycle standpoint, all of those rules.
Is it the right lead?
Are we progressing it correctly?
Can we sell it for the amount that we're asking for?
So all of those things play into how I measure the different departments of my
team to be
able to impact the sales organization and get deals closed.
This was a thing that when our new CEO joined the company in 2020, he looked
around the
room and said, "One of us is going to be the head of pipeline.
Who do you want it to be?"
And I said, "I don't know what you're talking about, but I know that it's me.
I know that I want it to be me because I definitely don't want it to be you.
I don't think I want it to be that guy.
So me."
And we've done a lot of learning together, the three of us, our CEO, CRO, and
me.
And it's developed a really great system for a continually growing pipeline
over time.
I love it.
That's so cool.
It's such a cool way of framing it.
I love this sort of the modern take on the CMO being this pipeline owner plus
market owner.
I love the idea of the chief market officer that you understand how the market
is behaving
and you understand how you're serving that market and getting people into the
pipeline
holistically from everything from affinity through down getting it over to
sales.
So I completely agree that CRO should be focused on closing this quarter.
Just what is closing this quarter constantly 24/7, getting those reps to figure
it out.
And every other part of the pipeline should be the CMO.
And provide all the support to allow him to do the thing that he needs to do
the most.
Because I get paid on his results.
Let's all just understand that if we don't close deals this quarter, I am going
to suffer.
We are not an organization that says, "Great job on getting leads.
Here's your bonus."
So all of us, my demand team, the product marketing team, all tied to this
current quarter's results.
But we know how to get there in any given quarter.
And we've got to do the things that help him and his team to be successful.
And that's, I mean, the thing that I've brought in the most recently is the
relationship that
I have with product management and with our strategy leader and the R&D
organization.
And it comes from that market view that we have in the front office.
And I'll combine our CRO and I in this.
We see what's happening in the outside and can think about what's necessary to
be competitive
and drive that back into the product organization.
And I spent several weeks last quarter over in Berlin with the back office team
helping
to identify how we can best work with them.
So what do they need to see from the front office in terms of feature requests,
enhancements
to the product?
How do they need to see those and how they're going to work into the process?
Then what do we need to be competitive right now?
And we have a very strong strategy leader in addition to the folks in product
management
and R&D that have been here for a long time and really understand the product
to be able
to turn on a dime and add new features that to me represent, like I said
earlier, the
candy that draws people in.
We're an enterprise content governance solution.
So it feels kind of like medicine.
Like, I need to tell you that you're sick and show you and make you believe me.
And then I need to introduce a medicine that you've never heard of as the thing
that's
going to make you feel better versus something like Grammarly, where it's just
a big bowl
of candy and it doesn't actually do a lot and it's not really great for you,
but everybody
knows that it's candy and they're all coming to take it.
And how do we, as an enterprise SaaS business, incorporate some of that candy
into our offering?
And that's something that, you know, I don't think traditionally the back
office thinks
about.
They think about the functionality and the features that are going to drive the
platform
forward.
And they think in terms of like multiple years of view, they have a long term
view on the
success of the product.
I have a view of today.
Like I know what I need to see in the product right now to be successful and
how we compete
in the world that's changing around us.
Being able to bring that into it is just another view of this whole thing.
All I'm trying to do is generate pipeline.
It all comes back to that wherever I'm touching.
And it's a really interesting place to play.
Let's get to our first segment.
The Trust Tree, this is where we go and feel all that's interested.
You can share those deepest, darkest marketing and pipeline secrets.
Let's dig into the customers.
What types of customers do you serve and what types of companies?
So we sell to the top 2000 companies in the world, specifically in technology,
pharmaceuticals,
financial services and manufacturing.
And what does that buying committee look like?
It's different in every group.
So the use cases inside those businesses fall into technical documentation and
product manuals
into marketing and then into service and support.
So it's different in each one of those.
Marketing is obvious because it's going to be somebody in digital marketing
primarily
that understands the problems that they're having, developing content to fuel
their demand
engine.
They're driving towards conversion as their goal.
So if conversion isn't happening, then I need new content.
I need a new campaign and I need different conversion.
So when we get in front of those folks, we can talk to them about how it's not
new,
it's optimization.
We can help them identify their best content, create more content that looks
like that, optimize
everything that they do and convert.
So that person's going to take us up ladder to their VP level.
We are unlikely in a marketing organization to have a conversation with a CMO
because
this falls somewhat below what at least I would be looking at.
But that VP of demand organization down into digital leadership directors and
such are
the ones that are coming together to make that early decision and then bringing
in IT
and InfoSec because we are touching critical private data to drive through to
the purchase
of the product.
On the tech doc side, it's different because we're likely to run into somebody
that does
this for a living, somebody that's an editor in the technical documentation
space that
lives in a world of editorial process.
And that person doesn't have access to the business buyer necessarily.
Business buyer in this case would be somebody that owns product development.
No, three levels down is a product documentation person.
So that runway is a little bit longer because we have to help enable that
person to buy
software.
They're not traditional software buyers, but they see the value of what we do.
And interestingly, I would say 60% of our opportunities fall in that area.
So that's the legacy of our business.
And we still continue to see new business in that area.
It just takes a smidgen longer than when we can build a firm committee in the
marketing
organization.
And what would an example of something like that be?
Is that someone like a Michelin or somebody that is going to need to do tons of
content
for their products that are getting out there in the world?
What does that look like?
What types of companies would that be?
It could be any of your big semiconductor companies, any of your big internet
social media companies,
the biggest software companies in the world who have millions and millions and
millions
of pages of documentation.
And what our product does is from a live author guidance standpoint helps
individuals write
like the business.
So clarity consistency character.
It's going to be terminology, style guidelines, tone of voice, inclusive
language, emotion,
all the things that make their content theirs.
For the organization, the broader governance model, we automate.
So think TSA checkpoint.
We're the TSA checkpoint of content inside a big business.
So all content goes through.
Some of it has already been checked either in our product or some other product
and meets
the guidelines of the business.
And it's going to go right through.
Some content is going to have a water bottle in its bag and it's going to get
pulled and
it's going to be flagged and it's going to be corrected.
So there are multiple ways to correct from an automation standpoint.
You can automate with generative AI now.
That's one of the things that our product does.
But in the case of most of our customers, because these are the biggest
companies in
the world who care about the words that they say, they want to take that back
to the original
writer, give that guideline, that call that guidance to that original writer
and let them
make that change.
From there, I'm able to then see how my documentation is performing.
So is it useful to the audience?
Is it clear?
Is it solving problems?
That's where we start to see a shift from end results in product documentation
to end
results in product support.
So we jump all the way to the end of the process from the beginning, creating
and documenting
to the end, service and support.
How are my docs working?
Is it solving problems before people call in?
Because if it is, I'm saving a lot of money on phone calls and I can take all
my phone
desk and turn them into content creators and solve more problems through
content.
If it's not, I'm paying a lot of money for my phone desk.
So all of that ties together to the overall ROI of what we're selling.
What is your marketing strategy?
How does your pipeline strategy fit into that?
Sure.
So we still think, I mean, I look back pre-pandemic and our best results, we're
getting very
hyper personalized.
We know who we want to sell to.
So if we're going after, I don't know, I'll pick somebody that's not a customer
If we're going after Ford, I can figure out down to the name who I want to talk
to it
for based on who we've sold to at other major car manufacturers.
And because I'm not shotgun blasting this organization, I can get very targeted
and understand
the people more than just the persona.
Like I get what you do, but I also want to know you.
And a very generic version of this is I would know where you went to school and
I could talk
to you about your college experience.
For me, when I do prospecting, because I do, because I like it, I'm in a
community.
Some people call it a cult.
You could judge, but I'm a crossfit athlete.
I'm a crossfit coach.
And so if you have CrossFit in your link--
Definitely a cult.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
But if you have CrossFit in your LinkedIn profile, again, definitely a cult,
you and
I are probably friendly.
So if I can find that, if I can use LinkedIn Navigator and identify people that
I'm looking
to talk to that have that in their profile, then the email is simple because
CrossFit.com
has your games account.
If you've ever done the open, you're in there and you have a number and all
your scores.
So I'm going to pull yours.
I'm going to put mine.
My email is simple.
If this is you, good news, this is me.
And if that's us, we're friends.
You know this.
So as friends, I'd like to tell you what I do for a living.
And that gets 75% conversion rate.
So it's hard.
Not everybody has the benefit of being in a very easily identifiable cult.
But find that.
And that's what we've pushed into our BDR organization.
That's what we've pushed into our demand creation process so that we can enable
the
team to do that kind of research, have that kind of connection, put something
on the
desk of that person.
It's much harder now because people don't go to work.
So when I knew you were going to come to an office every day, I knew how to get
you.
When I have to ask you now, I want to send you a package key.
Let me have your home address.
I don't, A, it gives a person the opportunity to say, oh, I'm being sold to.
No, I'm good.
I don't need your thing.
But also, no, you can't have my home address.
That's weird.
And so the process has gotten harder, but we continue to think around the
process of how
do we continue to be that targeted to show people that we know who they are and
get that
initial conversation?
Because I know that if I can get that initial conversation, this is going to,
at a very
high rate of conversion, become a deal.
If we tell you about our medicine, you'll realize that it solves your problem.
One is that you weren't looking for medicine.
So our organic lead flow is not where I'd like it to be.
That's the thing that we're working on now as much as possible.
As a smaller business, you know that people don't like to spend money on
awareness.
But that's a thing that we've turned on in the last year.
Even now, when everybody's budgets are super tight, I'm still paying for
awareness because
that's important to our growth.
Any other thoughts on marketing strategy before we go to the playbook?
ABM is new.
The Operation Rubber Chicken was essentially ABM, but we call it direct mail.
Yeah, I mean, it's crazy.
Obviously putting different parameters around these things and defining them
and what's old
is new again.
That sort of stuff always takes place.
It is the explosion of channels and places to find people and find information
and all
that sort of stuff is so much more complex than it was back then.
That your barrier to entry might be a little bit harder now, but like you said,
that personalization
or that human connection and authenticity is always going to win the day.
It does.
I think that there's so much that you can learn from the signals that you get
back from this
outreach and how do we use, if that's a simple view of what the signals are
that we can get
from the things that we do, how predictive could we get?
By sending out learning what content does what and what impact we expect it to
have
and what results we should be able to collect to be able to create a predictive
model of
what's happening and what's not happening.
Really.
With the increase in AI in the world right now, this starts to get easier and
it starts
to get more predictive so you know and can target where you should be spending
more of
your time based on those signals.
This can continue to get better as we go, but already where we are is just
helping us
to know where to spend time.
You think this is good?
The system thinks this is good?
It might be good.
You think it's good.
The system thinks it's junk.
You need to validate.
You need to show me why you think it's good because predictably it doesn't look
like it
is and then everything in the middle.
It just starts a new kind of conversation.
All right, let's get to our next thing with the playbook.
We talk about the tactics that help you win.
What are three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items?
Our partner channel right now.
So this is the thing that we've put investment in over the last couple of years
Prior to great team, put them in place and while it continues to grow, the
early results
for the spend are huge.
So continuing to invest in that area matters.
The leads that come in, the deal registrations that come in through our partner
's channel,
close faster and close easier.
Did you start with like one partner and get it really great?
Did you start with a one or two or did you start with a bunch and then how did
you go
about doing that?
Well, the business, I mean, so we've been around for quite some time and there
's been
a lot of companies that we've worked with and that have worked with us over the
many
years the business has been here.
But the difference between then and now is the focus on the one and one equals
three
relationship that we're having with the businesses that we work with.
Now, businesses like MHP, which is a services organization owned by Porsche or
Hitachi in
Japan or RWS where there's real value in the two companies working together
that goes
well beyond small technical and marketing relationships.
Like I love to put together, you know, quick marketing partner deals so that we
can go
out and co-market together.
But those are what they are, they're marketing and we're going to get some
leads out of it
maybe and they're going to get some leads out of it.
But we don't really work together.
Versus crafting a product and an offering and a point of view.
So we identify as a content impact platform and we meet MHP over in Germany.
Again services organization owned by Porsche and they have partnered with us on
the concept
of content impact and they've created a content impact program and analysis and
the ability
to go out and sell into that space on their own and then incorporate in our
product which
is a unique enabler to reach content impact.
That's what we're looking for.
Partners like Hitachi who are going to help take us to market in a much broader
way in
a region where we have some success but not all success, specifically in Asia
and targeting
Japan.
These are big exciting partnerships or sales force where we have a very
exclusive role as
the only product that does this kind of content governance inside sales force
knowledge within
the product.
So incorporated into that.
There's nobody else that does it.
So we're very differentiated in that space and sales force sellers get the
benefit of
getting paid on our deals.
And yeah, fantastic.
So these are the things that didn't exist two years ago that are now driving
measurable
pipeline and deals.
So continuing to drive into this channel as something that is in the DNA of our
business.
I mean, partner marketing has always been part of marketing but those partner
relationships
are much more strategic and it's interesting to hear you talk about sort of
like the impact
of, you know, to pipeline obviously partner ecosystems driving tons and tons of
revenue.
I mean, I think sales forces ecosystem is for every dollar they make the
ecosystem makes
it like four or five.
It's crazy.
So clearly that stuff works.
It's interesting hearing you say it from a pipeline perspective as a CMO rather
than like
the CRO saying it or, you know, or like you said, those sort of one off more
partner marketing
type plays.
Ah, ah.
Strategy.
But therein is the thing.
I was saying it is the chief pipeline officer.
And to be fair, I mean, and I kid, but I don't because if I was just
responsible for marketing,
they're a competing channel.
So if all I cared about was my piece of the business and generating marketing
led leads,
that would be a challenge.
But we don't think that way.
And interestingly, we've gotten pressure to report on the question has always
been, well,
who's generating the leads?
And we honestly don't think that way or report that way.
There is no sales did this, marketing did this channel did this because we're
all doing
all of those things.
If sales generates a lead, they generated it with a most likely with a cadence
that was
built by somebody in marketing that's running in sales loft.
If we do an event with a partner through the partner channel, the partner
marketing people
have worked with our field marketing organization to build out that event and
make that event
successful.
Nobody's touching anything by themselves.
So unique in the point that I don't think in terms of division, when I got here
, it was
60 40 marketing generate 60% of pipeline sales creates the rest of it.
And that in my opinion is toxic because then you've got everybody competing to
try and
get that sellers are holding on to everything that they do because they need to
show their
value in the pipeline creation process.
We got one number.
I know what that number is.
And I sitting here as the pipeline person don't care where it comes from as
long as we
get there.
And now let's use all the tools that we have.
Okay, second uncuttable.
It's been recently my BDR organization.
And we've tried to.
Like I've looked at outsourcing.
I've looked at other ways to convert the interest in the leads that we create.
But our BDR organization has continually stayed good.
Now, I think one of the things that's interesting is that when I got here,
there were two BDRs
that were hired the same time that I was, I think we onboarded together.
And that was the whole BDR team.
They reported into sales and they were, sorry guys, wildly unsuccessful.
And I have a thesis on why.
And it's because if their job is to turn interest into meetings, they didn't
create
the interest and it's easy for them to push away from that, try to do their own
things,
not be accountable to the process.
When our CRO joined the company, one of the first things he said was, would you
prefer,
he needed to come in and grow a sales organization?
Would you prefer to have the BDRs?
Well, hey, if you wouldn't mind, see how cordial we are.
But yes, I'd be happy to take the BDR organization.
And we saw that team dramatically shift because marketing's using the BDRs as
the litmus test
for everything they do.
They're the filter through which I get my ROI.
If I don't own that function, if I don't make that function better, it's very
difficult
for me to prove success from an actual pipeline creation standpoint.
When we brought them in, we enabled them.
We built them all their content.
We helped them with all of their email cadences.
We provided them with all the direction on the way that they would run their
program,
spend their time, the touch model that they were going to work through,
everything they
needed to be successful, and then we supported them all the way through the
process.
And we went from 3% contribution to pipeline to 78% contribution to pipeline in
two quarters.
Wow.
Because we were creating, my marketing team is amazing.
So they're creating real interest in real leads.
But we had this little tiny function that lived inside sales that didn't care
about
that at all.
And so nothing was converting.
Nothing was moving through.
So I'm spending money over here to get no benefit over here.
If I own the middle, I can guarantee we're going to get through.
Now, and what you're going to say is, cool.
But then the sales organization, how do you handle that handoff?
We've pushed our compensation model for the BDRs and the whole demand team into
the discovery
stage, which we don't own.
The first thing everybody gets paid on is when something makes it to, I'll call
it an
SQL, we don't call it that.
Once something is sales qualified, folks get paid.
But they get their real money when it moves into discovery.
So it becomes a valued pipeline item.
We don't do either of those two things.
Sales does that.
So we've built a level of trust between the BDR, the marketing organization and
the sales
team to say that we think we're giving you quality.
We're going to prove that we're giving you quality by putting our paychecks on
the line
with you.
And that's created a frictionless handoff process.
Yeah.
It's just way, way easier to track the actual results of the things that drive
value rather
than tracking the stuff that doesn't drive the value.
Absolutely.
I think you can probably look at it a little bit more data-driven as a CMO or
as a G5
pipeline officer than you could as a CRO perhaps.
I think that the right CRO would look at it the right way, but I have a number
that's
associated with them.
And if they're doing it, then we're cool.
And if they're not, we need to fix something.
But it all ties back to the amount of discretionary spend that I'm putting into
my marketing organization.
So whatever goes in the engine needs to come out.
And if it's not coming out, we have a problem that we can solve.
We're uniquely positioned to solve it.
If it lives anywhere else, they'll solve the problem some other way.
So if it's living in sales and nothing's coming through the BDRs, it's not
incumbent
upon the CRO to optimize the BDRs for the leads that are coming in.
They're going to find a different thing for them to do.
They're going to smile and dial and go play on LinkedIn.
And so then anything that I'm spending is just going into the garbage.
So eventually my budget's going to go away because I can't prove any value
because nothing's
coming through this channel.
I have to be able to optimize that.
Yeah, I call it finding Nemo marketing.
All drains lead to the ocean.
Right?
Every single drain's got to go to the AE because that is where the money is
made.
So it's like, if it's going anywhere else, what are we even doing?
Why are we even doing that?
All right, third uncutable budget item.
So I'm going to not say demand gen team because that's obvious.
But I think assuming they're there is the content process.
It's the content that we're creating to drive this whole engine.
And I'm not saying that because we are a content business, whether it's here or
in my
last several experiences, content has been the big differentiator.
So an example that I would give is at my last company, we were a mobile cloud
testing
business.
And I think big banks want to test on all the devices that are in market for
their consumers
on any given day.
We have a data center, a series of data centers all over the world filled with
actual physical
devices that they can test over the internet.
So they load their apps and they can build automation on top of those and run
them.
Content marketing helped change the average deal size of that business from
under 100,000
to a half million to 1.7 million.
And it was we developed a magazine, a quarterly magazine that became the
expected deliverable
quarterly by all of our customers and the market.
It's called factors.
And what factors did was lay out all the devices that exist right now that are
in use by region,
by industry and by consumer demographic.
And in the back of it, it would go on to show what percentages of testing
coverage represented
based on a number of devices.
So we could have a conversation and I can say, Ian, you are the head of mobile
application
development at Bank of America.
How many devices do you think you want to test on it?
And you would say, you know, I'm thinking we could probably do this on about 15
devices
right now.
It's based on a couple of Android's, a couple of iPhones.
And our sellers would pull this thing out, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip,
put it
in front of you and say, okay, so what you just said is you were a bank.
So we're in the bank system.
You said 10 to 15 devices.
Okay, that's 20% test coverage.
Are you a 20% test coverage business?
No, I said I was Bank of America.
Okay, well, where do you feel comfortable from a task coverage standpoint to
protect the
business's reputation?
80?
Okay, that's going to be 150 devices across these configurations in these
regions.
So we're going to need multiple data centers to be able to run this program so
that we're
making sure that we're hitting the right regions and the right devices in the
right places.
Does that sound more like the business you want to do?
And when you have that kind of conversation and when you're talking to the
right people
and showing them this right in front of them in a nice pretty published
magazine, it seems
very real to them.
So content marketing is huge.
If you can do it right, actionable content, here's so many issues.
Content means 50 things to 50 different people at this point.
And so it's a very difficult thing to look at, but content marketing, I think,
in B2B needs
a little bit of a refresh to understand how it drives strategic pipeline to the
business.
And it's cool to hear that type of story, which is so, so tactical.
How do you view your website through a browser?
So who do I not want to have listened to this answer?
Our website is largely informational right now.
It is far less of a conversion engine than I would like it to be.
I feel like I've said that enough internally that it's not news.
I mean, I think every single CMO on the planet feels that way about their
website.
It's always an evolving process.
I think we all know that.
Because we still need to explain what we do, we need that informational web
portal for people
to come and understand what we do.
Our primary call to action is let's talk about this.
Those are our best leads, but that's our only major call to action.
Until recently, we have a couple, I mean, we have lots of landing pages that
accompany
our campaigns, but I don't count those as the website.
They're transient and they're specific.
People that come to Acrolinks.com are hit with a lot of information, a lot of
actionable
content, videos, podcasts, webinars.
I'm going to boil it down to a single call to action, which is let's talk about
this.
If I had my way, I don't need it to have a button on every corner of every page
above
the fold everywhere, everywhere.
Touch, touch, click, click, click, click.
We do get a lot of traffic.
I would like to find ways to get more out of what we have today.
What about something that maybe is your most cuttable budget item or something
that's maybe
not working or fading away?
We're struggling with direct mail right now, which has been, like I said
earlier, very
successful for us, but it's getting harder to find people.
There are people within our teams that still use it and use it very
successfully.
It's still an interesting tactic, but it wouldn't kill me to cut it because
when you look across
the sales organization, we've given every seller a budget, individual budget,
within
we use postal, and they're not able to use it.
I'm not going to say they're not using it.
I think they would love to use it, but they're not able to use it.
It's a shame because before the pandemic, that was number one.
That would be the uncuttable thing is we need to put things on people's desks.
As a specific tactic, that's challenging.
That and events, it's so dynamic.
It's so fluid now with people being in their homes.
It's both terrifying and a very exciting time to be marketer.
It is.
Events is the number two thing on that list, by the way.
I know it's that everybody, it's things, their utility changes very
interestingly when
people are at their house and set up an office.
No kidding.
All right, let's go to our final segment of Quick Hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers just like how Qualify.com helps
companies generate
pipeline quickly to have your greatest asset, your website to identify your
most valuable
visitors and instantly and I mean instantly start sales conversations.
Quick and easy just like these questions go to Qualify.com to learn more.
Quick hits, Chris, are you ready?
I certainly think so.
Number one, what's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
I used to play guitar.
I'm a beekeeper.
Oh, beekeeper.
That's pretty good.
Do you have a favorite book, podcast or TV show that you'd recommend?
I'm a Harry Potter person.
Love it, me too.
Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby that might make you a better market
er?
Well, I mean we already talked about the CrossFit Coach thing but I think that
definitely helps.
If you weren't in marketing, what do you think you'd be doing?
If I could do it over again, I'd probably be in sales.
What advice would you give to a first time CMO?
Try to figure out their marketing strategy.
Start at the top, figure out what the top level strategy is and build down from
there.
Don't try and start at your tactics.
You are also a podcast host of a podcast called Word Birds.
Can you tell us?
What's the favorite episode that you've done?
This season, there's been some interesting ones.
I didn't know where they were going to go but my favorite episode this season
has been
with HP Enterprises because I was speaking with the person that does content
for their
customer experience center out in Austin, Texas.
They're sending people up to the International Space Station to film experient
ial video that
people are coming to Texas to view through VR goggles to get a feel of what it
looks
like to service HP equipment on the Space Shuttle.
Wow, that is some pretty cool content.
We'll have to link that one up in the show notes.
Chris, that's it.
That's all we got for today.
Absolutely awesome having you on the show.
For listeners, you can go to Acroblinks.com.
Check it out, especially if you're in marketing.
Definitely check it out, which I mean, that's a run of listens to the show.
You got a solution stab, just click on the one this is for marketing.
Chris, any final thoughts or anything to plug?
Nope, I think that's it.
Come to www.acroblinks.com.
Happy to talk to any of you.
Awesome.
Thanks so much.
Take care. [music]
(jazzy music)