In this episode I speak with Joe Chernov from Insight Squared. We discuss how Insight Squared create content to support their customer journey. They use data and detailed mapping to understand how people move through their lifecycle before during and after using the product. It’s interesting that Joe says the word “Lead” is a curse in their office!! Instead they are looking to create content to support people with their questions and pain points at each stage of their journey. They then create flags or alerts to help them understand who is ready for a sales conversation. This is an insightful conversation and one you won’t want to miss.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Ignore the experts. It really, it truly is. Like, if you listen to everything that the experts say and implement it as they say, there’s better chance than not that it is imperfect for your company. It’s not necessarily ignore the experts, but take the spirit of what the “expert” is saying and have the self-assurance you need to modify it when you apply it to your business.
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
Engagio
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
I thought that Influitive, under Jim Williams, their VP of marketing, I thought what they did a couple of years ago at Dreamforce was brilliant. They had a wanted poster in their booth, and the wanted poster was like, American western style. Wanted dead or alive. And it had it all of their top, the CMO had all of the top accounts that they wanted to meet with at the show. And so if you walked by and saw somebody you knew on the wanted poster and you brought them to the booth, you each got a bounty. I thought it was clever. I thought it was fresh thinking. I thought it was really fun and beautifully executed. I thought it was a killer campaign.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
N/A
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today, my guest is Joe Chernov from Insight Squared. Joe currently leads the marketing team at Insight Squared. Before that, he ran HubSpot’s content team, which included one of the most popular blogs in all of tech, a top five business podcast and long form content that generated 80% of the company’s marketing source leads.
Joe also has served as VP of marketing for Kinsey and Eloqua. So, to say Joe knows a thing or two about marketing is an understatement. In addition to this, Joe advises many tech startups, writes for popular marketing blogs and speaks at industry events.
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast today, Joe. How are you doing today?
Joe Chernov:
I’m well, thank you for having me, Matt.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, you’re welcome. It’s really, really great to have you on the call. Please, tell the listeners a bit more about Insight Squared. What is it you do?
Joe Chernov:
I lead the marketing team at Insight Squared and we sell sales analytics software to sales operations professionals and sales leaders, and the simplest way and frankly the most accurate way to think about Insight Squared’s project is to imagine all of the reports that at one time or another, you have wished you could get out of your CRM, that you’ve wished that you could get out of Salesforce specifically, but for whatever reason, were incapable of doing that. We provide those reports, many of them pre-built out of the box for you.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, it’s a fantastic tool. We’re actually, one of the reasons I’ve managed to get onto this podcast today is that we’ve been using Insight Squared for around two years and it’s literally one of our couldn’t live without tools for our business.
Salesforce is fantastic for us, but Insight Squared is really what gives us the power of visualizing all the data, like you said, at the click of a button, reports that we just would have to set up manually and with Insight Squared, they’re there, and powerful and filterable so that we can really nail down into our reports and really find out what’s changing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis for us. It really helps us review and act on our data quickly. We love Insight Squared as a tool and I’m really happy to have you on here talking about it today.
Joe Chernov:
You’re going to put me out of a job with that testimonial!
Matt Byrom:
Well, that’s true, you know. We went through a fantastic introduction process with you guys, we learned about the product and the set-up was great, and you have some fabulous people over there. It really is one of these tools that we couldn’t live without as a business. It really helps us really quickly see our data.
Salesforce, for us, has got a ton of information. We put lots of information in it, probably less than most people, actually, but we still put a ton of information into it. And it’s actually the visualization of that information is where the power is for us. We’re not really mega-analytical as a business, so for us to be able to see the reports clear as day with all the data, very easy to see, it’s super interesting and useful for us.
Joe Chernov:
And Matt, could you make a point to go back to the onboarding comment you made, at some point during our discussion about marketing’s role in an organization, because as it turns out, you’ve just touched on something that is a very acute need for marketers to consider and I think it would be in service of the audience if we circled back to that a little later.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, let’s talk about that now, if that works for you. Tell me about Insight Squared’s onboarding process, I can obviously give a bit of testimony from my own example, but I’d love to hear from your point of view how the onboarding process works and what you’re doing to actually improve that along the way.
Joe Chernov:
You’re one of the lucky ones, if I’m being really honest. A couple of years ago, that was a, I wouldn’t say a broken part of our system, but certainly an imperfect part of our customer experience, and what we found is that if you treat onboarding as a discrete event that is owned by a discrete team, what you get is an inconsistent experience, from customer to customer.
It is highly contingent upon the person who implemented the onboarding, the sales rep hand off to that person, but what we’ve tried to do now, and let me say this: and it ultimately shows in renewal rate, if you are failing too many customers during the onboarding process, you pay the price 365 days later.
What we’ve tried to do now is think of the onboarding experience as effectively beginning the first time somebody comes to our website or the first time somebody hears about us through word of mouth, that is to make sure that the message that is conveyed when you land on our homepage to the message that’s conveyed when you have your first sales discovery call, to the message that’s conveyed throughout the sales process, to the messages that are conveyed during the onboarding, that there is some continuity there, and so what we’ve done is we have identified that our most successful customers use us for one of four reasons.
And now, all of our marketing messages, all of our sales messages and our onboarding process is all pinned to whichever of those four use cases, if you will, are most relevant to that customer. And that customer does not move on to Use Case Number Two until they have proven they’ve mastered Use Case Number One. And what we’re seeing is a much more satisfied universe of customers as a result of that.
Matt Byrom:
And for people that are trying to get a takeaway from this, how did you get to those four use cases? How did you find out that they were the use cases that were the most interesting and important to your user base?
Joe Chernov:
It’s a blend of anecdote and data. And in this case, it’s actually more on the data side. We see which reports our users load most often. And so, we know what our most popular reports are. Those reports are bucketed according to different themes on our end.
And so, what we know is that customers who renew, so we look at the cohort of customers who renew and the cohort of customers who churn and we see that those who renew, tend to load reports very often that meet one of these four criteria. And so now we know, just through behaviors what our happiest and most successful customers tend to do, tend to use our product for, and so we have built now, our messaging and our sales process and our onboarding process around those four use cases.
And then there are customer interviews and net promoter score data and simply conversations with users who have stayed with us, conversations with customers who have moved on from us, and ultimately, it’s rolled up to these four.
Matt Byrom:
And that’s really interesting that you actually, a very, very simple tactic of actually just bucketing customers or segmenting customers who renew and have had success with your product and analyzing the difference between those people and the people that don’t renew. That’s straightforward and it makes total sense, but I can see the power in that.
Joe Chernov:
Matt, we know … I know on day 30 if you are going to renew or churn on day 365.
Matt Byrom:
Wow.
Joe Chernov:
And so my job in marketing right now is to not only think about new leads, not only think about brand, not only think about funnel optimization, but also think about how I can identify those churn risks on day 30 and run programs that increase the likelihood that they sort of jump cohort and go from the in danger line into the likely to renew line.
And so my job has just been expanded dramatically from, as I said, brand/lead generation, funnel optimization, all the way through to the post-sale process.
Matt Byrom:
And will it be marketing that actually identify that and then perhaps gets sales or support involved to bring that customer into the successful cohort?
Joe Chernov:
It’s the other way around. We have a really strong customer success team, and they are incredibly dedicated to our customers. And they are 100% passionate about this initiative, and then I have a customer marketer on my team, who is their partner in this process.
We’re not the keeper of the dashboard that shows who’s at risk and who isn’t, they are, but then we partner with them to come up with strategies to get them more deeply engaged in the product and hopefully turn around, reverse that pattern.
Ultimately, it’s the product, stupid. Ultimately, it comes down to are customers using the product in the way that successful customers are using the product? And that means they use it regularly, that means that there is a power user on their end, a champion, that means that it is the usage ties to a specific role, that’s something that might be interesting for your audience to hear about, how we figured out that conventional wisdom was entirely wrong at Insight Squared, and we were trying to sell to absolutely the wrong person for quite some time.
And so, we look at that composite and then, marketing partners with the customer success team to come up with a play to re-engage decaying customers.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. And if you were to look at onboarding as a whole, it’s clearly very important to you as a business. Do you have effectively, each stage of a customer’s journey mapped out, and if so, what the metrics of success that you were to track at each stage?
Joe Chernov:
We have the customer journey mapped out and within and I think that there are five or six stages, and it is … the funny thing is, a lot of companies will map out a customer journey. But what they tend to do, there’s a natural sort of gravitational pull to map out the customer journey according to how you would like the customers to behave, that is, from your perspective.
We have worked really hard to map out the customer journey from the point of view of the customer. And it sounds obvious and it sounds easy, but it’s much easier said than done, like we will be in meetings and somebody, invariably, will start to argue a point from the perspective of the organization and we have to police one another to make sure that we are viewing this process through the lens of the customer.
The customer success team does have various stages within the onboarding segment of the customer journey, but the stages are not like, able to log in on own. Able to create report or modify report by self. They’re the individual has confidence to show this report to his or her superior. The individual understands the logic behind this particular report.
In other words, it’s really about the person’s comfort in using the product, and their willingness to sign their name to the product. And that’s what we’re really aspiring for in the onboarding process. Not they know which button to click.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. And we actually did something very similar in our business, just … well, it’s actually one of our early 2018 goals. We mapped out our whole customer journey and we’re quite process-driven, as a business, as well, and we wanted to just look at every section of our business, every customer touchpoint and really understand how can we make each touchpoint with the customer more successful, or how can we make it smoother, more seamless for them? How can we make sure that they’re getting success and our advice at every stage, really?
I think it’s so important.
Joe Chernov:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s well thought.
Matt Byrom:
So bringing this back to Insight Squared as a business, and yourself actually, you’ve worked for companies like Eloqua and HubSpot, arguably at the cutting edge of content marketing. What was it that brought you to Insight Squared?
Joe Chernov:
The CEO. I think very highly of the CEO and there is a … when you are a, let me put it this way: a founder/CEO of a venture-backed casts a long shadow. The organization spends a lot of time trying to solve for what they anticipate the CEO wants. And so, what you get is a culture that is heavily defined by the personality and the positive attributes and the negative attributes of the founder/CEO.
For me, it was really important to go somewhere where I had a high degree of comfort with the founder, because whether he wanted to or not, he casts a long shadow and he influences the culture. He and I connected really well. We’re very different, but we’re complementary. And so that was one.
The other is I had probably the most success in my career marketing to marketers, but I didn’t want to market to marketers again, at least for a period of time. But I didn’t want to stray too far from that persona, because I trust my instincts. When in doubt, I trust myself when it comes to that persona. I marketed to developers for a while. When in doubt, I had no idea who to turn to because I just didn’t grok that personality, the personality of our buyer.
And so, Insight Squared was close enough to marketing to marketers, that is marketing to sales and sales operations that I felt like I had a reliable dataset of one but it was different enough that it would cause me to exercise some new muscles and I liked that combination, and the third is, it’s a product I’d use. I like the product.
If I weren’t here tomorrow, I’d be an Insight Squared prospect. I believe in the product, and that helps.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Absolutely, I agree. If you can believe in the product, then you can sell it, you can market it and you’re fully behind it. What position was Insight Squared in when you joined and what opportunities … well this is a three-part question.
What position was Insight Squared in when you joined, what opportunities did you see, for you to influence the business and what have you actually implemented since you have joined?
Joe Chernov:
That’s a full podcast question! The company was doing well when I joined, it wasn’t like I joined a company that was skidding across, skipping like a rock across the water’s surface. It was a growing company and it continues to be a growing company.
This was by no means a turnaround project. But frankly, it wasn’t a company that was compounding, year over year, what do they call it? The triple triple double double growth. It was a good, strong, healthy company then and it’s a good, strong, healthy, efficient company now. And that’s the fundamental difference, I think. If I’ve contributed anything, it’s to continue our growth trajectory with lower dollar investment and lower headcount investment.
When I joined the marketing team was at its peak, after I was here for a couple months, we’re at maybe 18 people, and we are delivering more value, quantifiable value to the organization now with six people. We had a lot of bloat in marketing, and so we’re running a similar program in terms of impact, but with a third of the resources. That’s partly attributable to a very, very different marketing strategy today than when I joined.
Matt Byrom:
Is that something that you’ve actually implemented since you’ve been there, cut the bloat and increased the success of the team?
Joe Chernov:
Yeah, and I feel like I sound insensitive when I say bloat, because we’re talking about human beings, and so it was a very good team and the people who made up the 12 people are great and they’ve all gone on to be in compelling roles and very successful. This was a talented group.
There was just too many. We didn’t need … we had the same size marketing department here as we did at Eloqua when we IPO’d. And we’re at very different stages. And when I say bloat, I don’t mean it dismissively. It was just not right-sized for the stage of company.
But what we did purposefully is we shifted from a marketing model that was very much like HubSpot’s: it was content driven, it was content that was designed to get high traffic, it was content that was designed to be shared and social and the expectation was, somebody would fill out a form, and the minute they fill out a form, we shove them over to the sales team, and the sales team tries to close them.
If you’re HubSpot, that model makes a lot of sense, right? Because HubSpot sells to the proverbial base of the pyramid. They have an enormous addressable market in terms of the types of companies they can sell to. They can sell, from a small cluster of hair salons all the way up to a division of Fortune 500 company, and everything in between. It’s a great business. This isn’t a knock on a HubSpot.
But the model is flawed if you have more constraints on your addressable market. And I think, and I’ll talk about that momentarily, but I think that the HubSpot and to a lesser extent, but along the same spectrum, Eloqua and Marketo, the bully pulpit that these companies have enjoyed and the influence that they have had over marketing practices has done a disservice to many companies that have constraints on their addressable market and yet believe that content-only or inbound-only model is the new de facto way to run a marketing program.
It’s not. If you’re selling to a very finite audience, an inbound model is gonna be grossly inefficient. My father-in-law sells software to nuclear power plants. If he started a blog and he was writing about general energy issues, most of the people who come there can’t be customers. They’re not nuclear.
And so, you see instantly with that example how inefficient that model can be if you’re at the top of the pyramid. What we’ve tried to do, since we’re somewhere in the middle of the pyramid, we have a large addressable market, but there are some constraints. You have to run Salesforce, you have to an inside sales team, there are some reasons why we can or can’t move forward. There are some sort of binary decisions we have to make when we’re talking to a customer. We have to have a hybrid of some inbound-y stuff, but calibrated differently than the way HubSpot does it.
And some account-based marketing, but at a higher volume than you would typically see with an all-in on ABM strategy. Those tend to be companies that sell to the government or Fortune 100 customers.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. I mean, you’ve given me lots of insights there and to little snippets of insight into the marketing strategy at Insight Squared. Can you tell me more about the marketing strategy and what your core areas of focus is as a team?
Joe Chernov:
Yes, absolutely. So the marketing strategy, let’s sort of … I don’t know if trifurcate is a word, but let’s break it into three parts. There is a Patron Saint part. I believe that there are two viable strategies for building a B2B brand. This is just my personal opinion, this is not … if you go to UCLA Anderson School, they’re not going to teach you this. I may be wrong on it, but it’s the way I see it, and so it’s the way my team implements it.
I think there are two strategies.
Matt Byrom:
That’s what we’re here for. The School of Good Joe Chernov today.
Joe Chernov:
Alright. And maybe someday they’ll teach it at Anderson. Alright. On one hand, you can be a dragon slayer. Think of HubSpot. They are the perfect example of dragon slayer. They stand in stark opposition to an older and an unpopular way of doing something, but the incumbent is big, gnarly and nasty. And that is interruption marketing. They stand in stark opposition to intrusive ads and spam emails, all the things that people don’t want, and they … and their product and their methodology and their ethos all exists to slay that dragon. That’s strategy one, implemented beautifully HubSpot.
Strategy two is Patron Saint. And that is you pick a role or a persona and you stand as the champion of that function. So, a great example here is Gainsight. Gainsight is the leader in customer success software. Before Gainsight came around, there were customer success people in an organization, for sure, but that would likely roll up under a different function. Thanks to Gainsight and their patron saint strategy, they have been able to successfully elevate the customer success role to an executive level seat. That’s been incredible. And so those folks have a debt of gratitude, in a way, to “pay to Gainsight.”
So what we’ve tried to do is become the patron saint of sales operations, and I could talk to you a bit about how we’re doing that.
The second piece is to run an inbound process but resist the temptation to pursue virality. When I joined, we were writing blog posts like Why Selling is like the Game of Thrones. And yeah, that’s good for cheap day one traffic, but it’s not a serious post. It’s not a sober post. It’s not something that speaks to a sales ops person who’s struggling to be taken more seriously in the organization. They don’t want to be relegated to a behind the scenes persona.
And so, our content now is much more about helping a sales operations professional be perceived to be more strategic in the organization. It’s never gonna go viral. It’s never gonna have the social shares like our posts in the past. But you know what? We have 47% more traffic to our blog since shifting to this strategy, than when we were pursuing that HubSpot-like lightweight, high waste post, and we’re not doing that anymore. And our traffic is up nearly 50% since.
The third piece is air cover for the sales team. We do have an ABM account-based marketing component to our strategy, and that is partnering with the sales team, identifying the opportunities that we really want to close, that we think have a strong likelihood to close and helping accelerate those deals and increase the deal size for those accounts.
It’s really a three-pronged approach.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. Really appreciate that. I love the School of Joe Chernov. I’m learning, I’m taking notes as we speak. So, you’d really class yourselves, I guess, as the persona of the helping the sales ops professional rather than actually speaking on a light touch, you’re trying to create deep content to really help those people.
Joe Chernov:
And there’s another twist to it that I’m particularly excited about. With six people on the marketing team now, we don’t have the horsepower. We don’t have the human power to generate the amount of content we need, so we have to work with some third parties.
And what we had historically been working with are writers. Writers that you know, were tech-savvy. But as it turned out, they just … they couldn’t fake it well enough, when writing to the sales ops persona. It was obvious to a true sales op pro that this was good writing, flawed analysis. What we’ve done now is we’ve shifted, where practitioners write for our blog. We don’t hire professional writers to write for the blog; we hire sales operations practitioners and then all we’re responsible for is selecting topics, topics that align to one of the four use cases that I mentioned earlier.
As I said earlier, the idea is that the onboarding process begins when somebody lands on our website, so our content is aligned to those use cases. We pick the topics, we put them out for bid from our panel of practitioners, and then we’re just in the editing business.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, and I think it’s a typical issue, really, across people that want to create content for their business. The person who has all the expertise in a small business, for example, person who has all the expertise doesn’t have the time to write. Or even in a big business, I’d guess.
You’re actually torn, really, between creating perhaps lower quality content or lighter touch or less insightful content, or taking the time of the person or the people who really do have that expertise, but perhaps don’t have the writing skills. It’s interesting to hear how you actually go about that. How do you tackle the issue about the people with the expertise not having perhaps writing skills? Do you marry them up with an editor, like you say?
Joe Chernov:
Exactly. We edit at our end. And they’re better writers than you’d think. Everybody that we work is an acceptable writer. They just need a little bit of help. But I think that the lighter weight type content can work in a dragon slayer model.
Like, HubSpot, because they tend to write more to a marketer taking their first job, they don’t have to have that type of deep expertise among their writers. They write, and especially early on, where they were in stark opposition to all that “bad” type of marketing, I’m using air quotes around bad, they didn’t need deep expertise. They could just shout from the rooftops. When you’re trying to be a patron saint, well, you know, golly, you gotta know every aspect of what that person is struggling with if you’re going to earn the credibility you need to be their champion.
And so depending on the sort of flavor, if you will, of your marketing and brand strategy, that will inform how deep your content needs to go.
Matt Byrom:
Do you have some guidelines in terms of the depth and quality length perhaps of the content pieces you guys create?
Joe Chernov:
I had some information on this at HubSpot; I don’t have … I haven’t analyzed it here. At HubSpot, it was essentially, let me think of how to label the axes. If the y-axis was word count and the x-axis was, let me think … x-axis is word count, y-axis is readership, it was a U-Shape.
What we found is short posts, that is less than 500 words, enjoyed a pretty good readership. Long posts, that is like a comprehensive post on a given subject, like sort of an un-gated ebook, think of an ebook as a blog post. 2,000 words. Those posts tended to enjoy high readership.
The 500 word blog posts were our lowest performers. And I think it makes sense, right? Like, a short post, somebody can see it’s a two-minute read. It takes a low commitment, sure they’ll sit there and read it. A long post where it ranks for lots of keywords, it gets more traffic over time, it has sort of a compounding readership, a different shape, of popularity? Those posts could do well because they create traffic.
But that 500, 600 word post where it takes somewhat of a time commitment but it doesn’t go deep enough on the given subject, that was death valley.
Matt Byrom:
And at Insight Squared, are you really focusing then on the longer pieces and just discarding, I guess, the shorter pieces or do you mix a few into your strategy?
Joe Chernov:
Given the resources I have … I had eight bloggers at HubSpot, let alone the entire marketing team. We had the luxury of being able to turn those knobs. Right now, I’m just looking for good content. If it takes 200 words, if it takes 2,000 words, I’m not precious about it, I just want good content that people find helpful.
And I aspire to someday to be able to say that this post is good, but outside of the sweet spot word count range. If I’m being really honest, I’m not there right now here.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Well, that makes sense. How do you actually decide on topics? You guys sitting down and planning topics in a quarter, in a longer-term strategy and then guiding the writers, or do the people with the expertise come to you and say, “This is a useful topic; let’s plan this in.”
Joe Chernov:
It’s a hodge-podge. It’s sort of … it takes a village. We have … our contributors are very enthusiastic to suggest topics that they’re passionate about. We generally accept those because we trust the practitioner.
There will be times that we are meeting with sales and we will ask the sales team about conversations they’re having, where they’re getting stuck in conversations, where they’re talking about a particular use case, let’s say one of the use cases is forecasting and they feel that they don’t have the right content to follow up with a prospect after having a good forecasting conversation. Maybe the conversation is who really owns the forecast? Sales leadership, sales ops, or the CEO? And they say, “Gosh, I wish I had something that gave a best practice for who should own forecasts.”
We’re in frequent sales meetings. If we’re in that sales meeting, we’ll say, “Okay, great. We will get you something to follow up with that person posthaste and we’ll put that post, that topic up for bid,” and then there is the … we run the team through Pivotal, project management software, my team has a Pivotal folder, if you will, labeled “Joe Requests,” and like, in my midnight hour, I’ll just have a fever dream and come up with like, five posts that I want to see, and I’ll just throw them out at the team, and they get to those when they get to those.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. I love that. And I took a look at your stats on Similar Web and it shows around 300,000 monthly visits, with over 50% of the traffic coming from search. Is that fairly accurate?
Joe Chernov:
That’s fairly accurate. The blog, as with most companies that run this type of strategy, the blog tends to be our center of gravity and what’s interesting is when it comes to the way we’ve implemented the blog and I talked a little bit about this earlier, we’re not using our blog in the way that a typical inbound strategy would use the blog, where we’re not really trying to use blog for lead gen, what I want it to do is be … I want it to show our thumbprint to sales operations folks and for them to sort of, to be a mirror to sales operations pros and for them to see their own reflection in it.
And that’s really the goal of the blog. We don’t measure the blog on absolute traffic. I mean, I want to see it going up, but I want to see is the right composition of audience. Like, if the traffic is flat but we’re getting geekier and geekier and geekier in the subject matter we write, and I mean geeky in all loving terms, I know we’re onto something and I don’t really need the data to prove it.
If I’m not writing cheap traffic posts, I’m writing posts that you’d have to be insane to not be sales ops and want to read it and the traffic is stable, then I know that the composition of my audience is improving. And now I don’t have to worry so much about that initial conversation. I don’t have to worry so much about traffic growth over time, because I know what I’m doing is showing sales ops people their own reflection in our content.
One of the ways that we’ve gotten off of this flywheel of write a post, try to get traffic, try to get them to convert on a form and then push them over to sales, is if somebody visit, I think it’s five blog posts in a week period of time, we give just as much weight to that action as if they filled out a form.
I don’t live and die by form fills. What I live and die by is am I getting the right people to engage with us in some fashion?
Matt Byrom:
And are you really looking at that as almost a support portal, or an education portal in that sense?
Joe Chernov:
There’s pressure on me right now to move it closer to a support portal, that is the customer success team, well-intentioned, they feel that we could help the onboarding process if we had blog posts that looked at some of the best practices in getting started with Insight Squared.
And so, what we’re doing is we’re horse-trading a bit, where maybe there is something that is like a … a deeper, more Insight Squared specific piece of content that the customer success team uses when onboarding, and meanwhile, there is a companion blog post that is a little less Insight Squared-centric that speaks thematically about the specifics that we would like somebody to do during the onboarding process.
What we basically have are two flavors of the same issue. There is the Insight Squared-specific flavor and that’s something that we would equip the customer team and then there is a generic-ized version that sort of winks at Insight Squared but is not an Insight Squared help doc, and that lives on the blog.
That’s where we’re netting out there.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. And do you not then see any correlation back to … if you’re saying people are using the blog more and more and more perhaps and that’s one of your metrics of success, do you not see that correlating back to more, an increase in leads, or are you finding that from customers or from people who may just need that supportive content that you’re creating but may not then use the product for example, sorry?
Joe Chernov:
No, I’m sorry to interrupt. We don’t have a concept of lead here. Lead is … we have sort of like a swear jar, curse jar, where if you use the word lead, you have to put a dollar in.
We have target accounts and my goal is to engage those target accounts. And so, we don’t have many net new leads that marketing’s job is to source them and to introduce them to the sales team. What we really try to do … we have them, but we get them by accident. What we really try to do is take the inventory of accounts that sales is going to pursue and find ways to engage, to warm those accounts up. And that’s why I say, whether it’s a form fill to download a piece of content, or they visit our pricing page, or they visit five blog posts in a week, those are all different flavors, different versions of what we call an alert.
And an alert is a marketing engagement that merits follow up from the sales team. And my job is to generate alerts. I know that some alerts are more valuable than others, and my team tries to generate more of the high-value alerts, but in general, one of my primary KPIs is, how many alerts am I generating and are those alerts converting to pipeline at the rate that we expect them to?
I don’t particularly care if it’s five blog posts or one pricing page or a trade show booth visit. My job is to gen up these alerts and give my sales team an excuse to contact that company.
Matt Byrom:
And what sort of actions are people taking to actually flag themselves up, to merit an alert?
Joe Chernov:
I listed a few. But I can go through it. There’s organic alerts, so an organic alert is website visits. Pricing page visits. Multiple blog post visits. There are trade show or conference alerts. There are email conversion alerts. There are paid conversion alerts. We offer middle funnel content on LinkedIn and a variety of social channels.
There are free trial alerts. We have a variety of free apps. Free app download is a type of alert. We have some interesting stuff where we partner with some data providers, like Data Fox. And what Data Fox does is they look for fundraising events and new sales executive hire events and they tell us, they pump that information into our CRM, and when that happens, a company raises money or a company hires a new sales leader, that also is a type of alert.
Those are a variety of flavors. We have more. We have G2 Crowd, they supply us with a type of alert.
Matt Byrom:
Okay.
Joe Chernov:
And my job is to get as many of these as possible and then to track the different type of alert cohorts, and see if they deserve to be an alert or not. If five blog post visits yields no opportunities, then we have to retire that type of alert.
Matt Byrom:
Interesting. And some of those alerts are actually anonymous. If they haven’t filled out a form or they haven’t visited or they haven’t engaged with you in any way, is there anything you’re doing to actually engage with those people proactively? Web personalization, or anything that you might do to those people to help them convert next time they come along?
Joe Chernov:
Yeah, in some ways, I’ve sort of purposefully overstated our icy relationship with lead generation. It’s still there; there’s still plenty of hooks in the water. There’s still plenty of opportunities to convert, because … for the very reason you expressed. If it’s anonymous and you’re on our blog and you’re on our pricing page, you know, if a tree falls in the forest, right?
We don’t overly rely on unorganic alerts. They’re about our second cohort of alerts. There are some limitations with this model, as you point out.
Matt Byrom:
Cool. We talked about content a lot, from the blog to all the other types of content you create. Are there other things that you do within Insight Squared as part of your marketing strategy that still come up in the further positions of marketing for you guys?
Joe Chernov:
Yeah, I actually omitted, accidentally, a piece of the answer to the previous question. We have used website personalization. We continue to use IP batching so that we do get a better idea of even anonymous traffic.
The challenge then is the IP match rates aren’t where everybody would like them to be and we only know if the account came to our blog or the account came to our pricing page and so, it’s operationally tricky to get that information imported into the contact record and create a task. There’s all these ops complications.
But we have used personalization and IP matching to get a bit of a better read on anonymous traffic. Okay. So, moving on to your question about what else besides content.
We do a lot of direct mail and we do a lot of dinners.
Matt Byrom:
Okay. That’s interesting.
Joe Chernov:
And direct mail is fun. Like, we don’t send out coffee mugs with our logo on it. I look at direct mail, here’s the other sort of, my own personal school of marketing, I look at direct mail as a Venn diagram. There are two circles: there are things people want and things people are unlikely to want to pay for themselves. If you get the intersection of those two, it makes for good direct mail.
So, people are unwilling to pay for a coffee mug with your logo on it, but that’s because they don’t want it, therefore, bad direct mail, right? We’re doing … this isn’t exactly direct mail, but we’re giving away a promotional item for meetings at SaaStr next week. SaaStr is a big, you know, software service conference, and we’re trying to get prospects over the hump to meet with us at the conference, and you know, this is no great brainstorm idea, we’re doing a drawing for a promotional item. Usually, companies do this for like an iPad. Something that people want, but are also willing to pay for, so they have it already.
Therefore to me, it doesn’t meet my standard for good promotional item or good direct mail. We’re giving away one of those Elon Musk flamethrowers.
Matt Byrom:
Wow, yeah. Heard about that.
Joe Chernov:
Everybody thinks they’re cool. Everybody would kind of like to have one. Not many people are gonna shell out $500 bucks for one.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Apparently, a lot of people have.
Joe Chernov:
Yeah, it’s true.
Matt Byrom:
But not everyone’s got one.
Joe Chernov:
So, we do that. And this is the stuff that’s fun. This is the stuff that gets my team leaning forward, like everybody on my team hated this idea, and I was like, “Guys, you just have to trust me on this one. People will like it. I’m telling you,” TBD if it works. We’re still trying to secure meetings, but it’s paid itself back.
We know the price we’re willing to pay for a meeting and this has beat that by three times, so I’m happy about that. And we still have a couple days to go.
And we do direct mail. But here’s the thing. We try to do direct mail in a way that has a surprise and delight quality to it. Let me give you an example. We kicked off, last year, with a campaign where we sent open ops in December, so it’s the end of the year or before. Open opportunities, we’re trying to get them to close by the end of the year, because a lot rides on December performance.
We sent … went to this kind of premium brand, I don’t know if you have it, Shinola, and they make really nice, like very, very high end leather goods and these very posh, like turntables and just very meticulous Yuppie accoutrements.
Matt Byrom:
Okay.
Joe Chernov:
And we had them make these beautiful luggage tags that had the initials of the recipient on them and we would send the luggage tag out with a note that said, you know, “Looking forward to,” something corny like, “flying high with you next year.”
One of my founders said, “Hey, where is the Insight Squared logo on this?” I said, “Oh, it’s not our logo. It’s the recipient’s ‘logo,'” that is to say, their initials. If you put our logo on it, the deal is square when they use it, right? They advertise for us and they don’t owe us anything in exchange. And ‘owe’ is an overstatement on purpose.
But if we put their logo on it, that is, we don’t put our double-stacked squares on it but we put JC on it, well, and then we call, there is sort of an element of guilt, if they don’t take the call.
Matt Byrom:
They feel like they owe you one.
Joe Chernov:
Yeah. I call it Jewish Mother Marketing. They kind of guilt them into it a little bit.
Matt Byrom:
Marketing by guilt. I like that. That’s cool, and these are some interesting strategies, so not only are you guys sitting creating interesting content trying to help your main persona but you’re actually thinking of out of the box strategies to PR and marketing wise to bring new business in, meetings and things to actually guilt people into doing business with you, which is all, at least speaking with you, it’s a door opener, isn’t it?
Joe Chernov:
It is. And that’s exactly right. One of our ethos here is, an agent’s job in Hollywood isn’t to get the actor the part. It’s to get the actor the audition. My job is to get sales the audition. Their job is to get the part.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. I love that. To bring us towards the end of the podcast, I’m interested to learn a bit more about what you’re planning to do in 2018. Do you have any specific campaigns or as a focus, what’s your renewed outlook for this year?
Joe Chernov:
We really have to figure out the customer marketing piece; that’s in flight right now. And I am very much focused on thinking about how we can take all the best things we’ve learned in terms of top of the funnel and funnel throughput and cherry-picking the pieces that make most sense, to increase the likelihood of renewal. That’s the challenge for us this year.
Matt Byrom:
And how to make your marketing and sales and support more personal to each customer, I guess.
Joe Chernov:
Exactly.
Matt Byrom:
Very important. I love that. I’m going to bring this to our last five, if that’s okay with you. First off, what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Joe Chernov:
Oh. Ignore the experts. It really, it truly is. Like, if you listen to everything that the experts say and implement it as they say, there’s better chance than not that it is imperfect for your company. It’s not necessarily ignore the experts, but take the spirit of what the “expert” is saying and have the self-assurance you need to modify it when you apply it to your business.
If my father-in-law listened to everything that HubSpot said, he’d be running an energy blog when he can only sell to nuclear companies. That would be a mismatch. But he can take the spirit of what they say and apply it to his more precise cohort.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, and do it in your own way, I guess, with your own style and direction.
Joe Chernov:
Absolutely.
Matt Byrom:
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Joe Chernov:
Oh. I loved the Heath Brothers’ book on how to make change stick. They wrote two books, Made to Stick and a book on change. And their book on change was incredible because it points out the various ways that people try to force change, using only one dimension of what makes somebody embrace change. They only use logic and forget that there’s an emotional component to change, or they only appeal to somebody’s heartstrings, and forget that people also make mental calculation.
Or they give somebody a view on change that ties into logic, tugs at their heartstrings, but they don’t show them a path on how to get that change accomplished. The book is spectacular. It’s Chip and Dan Heath.
Matt Byrom:
Amazing. I’ll certainly check that out. I’ll also put a link to that in the show notes, so anybody listening can come grab a link and check that out as well. What software tool couldn’t you live without?
Joe Chernov:
Engagio.
Matt Byrom:
Engagio?
Joe Chernov:
Engagio. It’s John Miller from Marketo, it’s his new play, it’s an ABM software, but what Engagio does is it allows us to take all of the accounts that are assigned to sales and simply track how much we’ve been able to engage them.
Since I am sort of a … trying to hunt, if you will, in a closed pen, I need to know what is in that pen at all times. And Engagio allows us to do that. And the name of the Heath Brothers book is called Switch.
Matt Byrom:
Switch, great. That’s really interesting about Engagio as well. So, you would have like a list of target accounts and then input them into Engagio and that would give you some data and insight in terms of how far you’ve been able to engage with them as a business?
Joe Chernov:
As a whole and individually and each rep has a browser extension where if they get an alert on an account that they need to follow up, they can click on the Engagio browser extension and see the entire history of interaction that company has had with us, so when they place the call, they know exactly what to talk about. They know that they’ve been to the pricing page and downloaded these eBooks and used one of our free apps, and now they can have a much more sophisticated conversation that’s tailored to them.
Matt Byrom:
That’s great. I’ll certainly put a link to that in the show notes, as well. And what’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Joe Chernov:
I thought that Influitive, under Jim Williams, their VP of marketing, I thought what they did a couple of years ago at Dreamforce was brilliant. They had a wanted poster in their booth, and the wanted poster was like, American western style. Wanted dead or alive. And it had it all of their top, the CMO had all of the top accounts that they wanted to meet with at the show.
And so if you walked by and saw somebody you knew on the wanted poster and you brought them to the booth, you each got a bounty. I thought it was clever. I thought it was fresh thinking. I thought it was really fun and beautifully executed. I thought it was a killer campaign.
Matt Byrom:
That is a good campaign and you could see people probably actually running across the conference to find people they knew so that they could bring them to the stand. And you know, how else are you gonna do that?
Joe Chernov:
And it appeals to their ego and their wallet, you got $100 bucks for it. It was just neat. It was neat.
Matt Byrom:
That’s great. Okay, so last question is what other podcasts do you listen to?
Joe Chernov:
I don’t have a favorable answer here. At the end of the day, I am so tired of marketing that I listen to music or read the New York Times. And I really … I am not the best technical marketer. I don’t know the most about marketing software, funnel throughput. What I do that I think is my one advantage is I try to draw inspiration from areas outside of the typical marketing practices and so, that requires me to just … maybe this is an excuse here, but I try to tune out marketing, and I try to … I’ll read a boxing blog or I’ll read a skiing blog and I try to find ideas in funny places.
Matt Byrom:
I totally agree with you to be honest. I do like to listen to a lot of marketing and I read a lot about marketing, but sometimes switching off is just as good. It relaxes the brain and helps you focus when the chance comes along next time.
Joe Chernov:
I hope so. That’s what I tell myself and I think, because deep down, I know I should be studying more on my craft and I need an excuse to give myself permission to listen to Elvis Costello.
Matt Byrom:
Well, Joe. It’s been a pleasure speaking to you today. I’d encourage everybody who’s listening to go and check out Insight Squared, they have a fabulous tool. We love it here. My business [inaudible 00:58:27] and I’d really recommend everyone to check it out, especially if you use Salesforce. It’s just an absolute lifesaver.
Until next time, Joe, I appreciate your time. Thanks very much.
Joe Chernov:
Thank you, Matt.
