Podcasts about insightsquared

Mike Droesch and Joe Lynch discuss the supply chain road map. Mike is a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that backs promising startups in technology, supply chain, healthcare, and consumer markets. Mike's focus is on logistics and supply chain. Click the link to see Mike review BVP's Supply Chain Roadmap.  Summary: The Supply Chain Road Map In this podcast, Mike Droesch from Bessemer Venture Partners shares insights on the importance of a supply chain roadmap and how technology is transforming the logistics industry. He discusses their firm's focus on investing in early-stage companies that bring innovation to the sector, and highlights key areas such as workflow optimization, digital connectivity, and automated financial workflows. Mike also emphasizes the significance of having a founding team with industry expertise and a deep understanding of pain points, and how venture capital funding enables the development of cutting-edge solutions in a competitive market. #SupplyChainRoadmap #LogisticsTech #VentureCapitalInsights About Mike Droesch Mike Droesch is a Partner in the Cambridge office primarily focusing on AI applications, cybersecurity, supply chain software, and B2B marketplaces. He currently serves on the board of directors for Tackle, Curri, Raft, Cypress, Netography, Optimal Dynamics, and VendorPM. Previously, Mike worked with a few venture-backed startups in Boston, including two Bessemer portfolio companies, Fuze and InsightSquared, where he supported sales operations and analytics efforts. He started his career as a systems engineer and then spent nearly three years in management consulting at Navigant, where he helped companies build new businesses around emerging energy and infrastructure technologies in the U.S. and Middle East. He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Master's Degree in naval architecture and engineering from the University of Michigan, and a degree in mechanical engineering from Tufts University. About Bessemer Venture Partners Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 145 IPOs and 300 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer's global portfolio has included Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr, and Toast and has more than $18 billion of assets under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong, Boston, and Bangalore. Born from innovations in steel more than a century ago, Bessemer's storied history has afforded its partners the opportunity to celebrate and scrutinize its best investment decisions (see Memos) and also learn from its mistakes (see Anti-Portfolio). Key Takeaways: The Supply Chain Road Map The importance of having a supply chain roadmap aligned with company goals and objectives. Bessemer Venture Partners' focus on investing in early-stage technology companies. The impact of COVID on the supply chain logistics technology industry and market volatility. Venture capital's preference for software businesses over hardware due to scalability and capital requirements. Mike Droesch's journey from mechanical engineering to venture capital at Bessemer Venture Partners. The supply chain roadmap: identifying opportunities for technology to impact the supply chain and logistics industry. Workflow optimization software helping trucking companies improve efficiency and profitability through data-driven decisions. Timestamps (00:00:00) The Supply Chain Roadmap (00:00:19) The History of Bessemer Venture Partners (00:02:00) Venture Capital in Supply Chain Logistics (00:06:31) Venture Capital's Focus on Software Startups (00:08:57) Discovering Venture Capital and BVP (00:12:13) Exploring the Supply Chain Technology Landscape (00:18:21) Optimizing Trucking with Workflow Optimization Software (00:24:35) Unlocking Supply Chain Efficiency with Digital Connectivity (00:29:02) Logistics Visibility: Bridging Silos and Automation (00:35:16) AI Readiness: Cleaning Data for Future Decisions (00:36:44) Automating Financial Workflows with AI (00:38:08) Improving Invoicing and Payment with AI (00:42:11) VC Funding Drives Logistics Industry Innovation (00:42:48) Streamlining Supply Chains for Competitive Advantage (00:44:14) Investing in Early-Stage Supply Chain Tech (00:46:56) Industry Expertise Trumps Finance in Supply Chain Startups (00:48:49) Investing in Supply Chain Startups Learn More About The Supply Chain Road Map Mike Droesch | Linkedin Bessemer Venture Partners | Linkedin Bessemer Venture Partners The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that helps product & growth teams build product-led experiences, experiment, and validate results, fast. And my guest is Jonathan Anderson, Co-founder and CEO of Candu. Jonathan Anderson is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He loves tech but can't write a line of code. He's passionate about product-led selling and has launched services, strategy, operations, and analytics teams at venture-backed SaaS startups, including InsightSquared and LaunchDarkly.  Prior to startups, Jonathan worked at Bain & Company and he has a B.S. and M.S.Eng from Stanford University.  In September 2018, he co-founded Candu - a no-code tool that allows teams to collaboratively build the UI components needed to encourage the adoption of features, onboard users, and announce product news on a day-to-day basis. It's not just for the pure-play product-led companies, like Atlassian, Notion, and Loom — it's for the 'strivers' who are trying to figure out how to adjust their go-to-market motion for this new world order.  And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jonathan to my podcast. We explore what's holding a lot of software vendors back from shipping products to market and achieving high adoption rates. Jonathan shares his vision of how he aims to change that for good. He elaborates on the challenges he had to overcome to build traction and what that took from a product investment perspective in terms of first principles, focus, and grid. Lastly, he shares a do and a don't for B2B SaaS CEOs based on his most powerful own learnings. Here's one of his quotes We're changing the way that a business thinks about building its product. A single person, a single growth PM, can actually define an experiment in their head, grab a template, customize it, inject it into an application, preview it, and QA it themselves. So it really collapses what is basically a growth team into a single person. That makes it radically less expensive and also much, much, much faster. During this interview, you will learn four things: His approach to convincing a user/ buyer Candu is exactly what they need  How to approach getting users to start using your product and become addicted Their approach to turn their user base into their best sales force What Candu did differently by giving their ideal customers a 'name' that makes them instantly recognize if it's for them or not  For more information about the guest from this week: Jonathan Anderson Website Candu Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it's actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It's short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rember when you needed a full tech team to launch a simple brochureware website? Now you can just jump on Wix or Squarespace and spin up a well designed, responsive website in seconds. The rise of the no-code movement has helped increase the pace and usefulness of technology and it has transcended into lots of other applications and use cases. It's a win - win, as business users can create applications or make changes on the fly, while the engineering team gets to spend their time working on more complex and sophisticated problems. Candu is right in the strikezone of this no-code movement, as the company is building a better way to activate users and release new features. The simple, drag-and-drop UI Editor empowers product and customer teams to create UI themselves, saving developer time and trimming technical debt. Candu is venture backed by Two Sigma, CRV, Angular Ventures, and Haystack. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Advice for improving the activation rate for SaaS products and whether or not those post activation email campaigns are effective. * Jonathan's background story and how his career accelerated while at InsightSquared, plus the details on wayOUT, a non-profit he co-founded. * How Candu came to fruition and the evolution of the platform to its current state including sample use cases for product growth teams and its value. * The vibe around raising venture capital in the current market and how entrepreneurs need to think about today's market reality. * Advice on how to have a successful launch on Product Hunt. * Business ideas from spending one year writing down a new startup idea every day. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

Evan Powell had a career mostly in sales, which started in college within his acapella group. His group recorded tracks for the well known show Glee, and Evan had to manage and negotiate contracts with Fox. Outside of professional ventures, he still continues his singing and plays Dungeons and Dragons with his friends.Sam Clemens came up on the opposite side of the house, on the build side. He was a product manager at Hubspot and Upwork, and co-founder at InsightSquared. He also teaches at business school, and gets his hands dirty on the weekends, helping his wife with her commercial farm by driving the tractor and wielding a chainsaw.Evan, Sam, and their other co-founder, experienced a recurring problem with sales demos at their prior companies - with sales reps deleting material from production environments, or internal teams spending lots of time maintaining separate demo environments. They thought there had to be a better way.This is the creation story of Reprise.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://www.reprise.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanwapowell/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sclemens/ Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Kipp Bodnar is the Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot, where he sets HubSpot's global inbound marketing strategy. Prior to his role as CMO, Kipp served as VP of Marketing at HubSpot, overseeing all demand generation activity worldwide and building out the EMEA and APAC marketing teams. Kipp serves as a marketing advisor for SimplyMeasured, InsightSquared and Guidebook. Kipp is the co-author of “The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More.” In Today's Episode with Kipp Bodnar We Discuss: 1.) The Journey to CMO @ Hubspot: How Kipp made his way into the world of marketing and came to be CMO @ Hubspot? What does Kipp know now that he wishes all CMOs knew when they started? 2.) Choosing The Channel: How does Kipp advise founders on which channel they should focus on? What is the framework which will tell them which channel is right for them? How many different channels should they try? How focussed should they be? Should they have independent teams for each channel? How do the best founders allocate resources to new channels? How do you know when one is not working and you need to stop? When do you just need to keep going and persisting? What have been some of Kipp's biggest mistakes when entering new channels? 3.) Product Marketing, Brand Marketing and Founders Marketing: How does Kipp advise founders who say that, "social and personal brand is just not for them"? In what two ways does Kipp believe that all businesses are constrained? Does Kipp agree that the state of product marketing has never been worse? What is truly great product marketing to Kipp? How does Kipp distinguish between good and great brand marketing? How has what it takes to be great at brand marketing changed over time? 4.) The Best Marketing People: What are signs of clear 10x performers in marketing? What advice would Kipp give to someone aspiring to be a CMO? What mistakes do 95% make that they should change? How do the best CMOs manage up and manage their team? Why does Kipp compare the role of the CMO to the general manager in NFL teams? Why does Kipp believe the role of the CMO is a lonely one? What are the hardest elements? What framework for learning does Kipp use to learn all new topics? What works? What does not?

Howdy, Ags! Today, we have the managing partner of Ring Ventures, Larry Warnock! In this episode, he discusses how venture capital actually looks at businesses. It is with great pleasure that we have him on the show!   Who Wants To Invest In Jurassic Park with Larry Warnock  Venture capital is never considered a debt. The beauty of it lies in the risk-taking capacity of a firm or investor because there is a potentially high return for it. Venture capital is equity to build a business with the hopes of an exit, being an IPO, or getting acquired. To be an accredited investor, one must meet the criteria the SEC set. By definition, someone making $200,000, or $300,000 with a partner, or has a million-dollar liquidity net means one can get accredited. A venture capital pitch takes six weeks on average, as investors would want to go into the details. A pitch usually takes 30 to 45 minutes, where investors check on the idea, the total addressable market, due diligence on income statements and balance sheets, and other similar things. After the presentation, that is the time investors bid against each other on who gets to buy a percentage of a company with a long-term opportunity to return high gains.    About Larry Warnock: Larry Warnock is a seasoned venture-backed tech executive with multiple exits via acquisition or IPO. He was most recently the president and CEO of Olono, an AI platform for sales effectiveness (acquired by InsightSquared). Previously he was the CEO of Gazzang, a provider of big data security software (acquired by Cloudera), and Phurnace, a provider of DevOps software (acquired by BMC Software). After moving to Austin from Silicon Valley, Larry was a venture partner at AVLabs, the incubator fund of Austin Ventures. His career has allowed him to work with numerous VCs and companies across California, Colorado, and Texas. Austin is now his home with his wife of 35 years. He started his software career in sales and marketing and has been a VP executive at several successful high-growth companies, including Documentum, OnLink, Siebel, and Vignette. Larry is an advisor to InsightSquared of Boston, MA, and several early-stage companies here in Texas. He is also a Venture Partner with ATXVenture Partners, a seed and Series A stage investor in the Southwest. Larry graduated from Texas A&M and is a frequent speaker at Texas A&M's Mays School of Business.   Outline of the Episode: [00:00] Intro [04:05] About Ring Ventures [09:38] Shark Tank Pitch [15:02] Follow the Trend [17:01] Pitch [28:27] Criteria for Evaluation [34:28] Dynamic Ad [36:45] Venture Capital-Private Equity Intersection [38:03] Lightning Round [45:57] Contact / Outro   Resources: Website: https://www.av.vc/funds/ring   Connect with Greg and Chris! Apple: http://bit.ly/AGH-Apple Spotify: http://bit.ly/AggieGH Stitcher: http://bit.ly/AGH-Stitch Podbean: http://bit.ly/AGH-PB YouTube: https://bit.ly/AGH-YouTube

Episode #39: What is 'low-code, no-code, and how can it open up pathways for creative problem-solving? In today's episode, I will discuss low-code, no-code creativity in technology tools with Jonathan Anderson, Co-founder and CEO of Candu. FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE About Jonathan: He loves tech but can't write a line of code. He has a dog named Ronnie, a cat named Winslow, and a husband named Luke. Jonathan is passionate about product-led selling. He has launched services, strategy, operations, and analytics teams at venture-backed SaaS startups, including InsightSquared and LaunchDarkly. Before startups, Jonathan worked at Bain & Company. He has a B.S. and M.S.Eng from Stanford University. Jonathan's Twitter: @jonaappleseed (Twitter) and Linkedin About Candu Candu is a product-led experience builder that empowers any team to improve their existing SaaS product without code. Anyone can strategically embed UI components to create personalized, in-product content experiences that engage users throughout the customer lifecycle. Candu has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Two Sigma Ventures with participation from CRV alongside existing investors like Angular Ventures, Haystack, and Entrepreneur First. Candu was founded in 2018 by Jonathan Anderson and Michele Riccardo Esposito, who saw the need to empower creative development in SaaS products for all teams. Jonathan wore every hat in SaaS besides "coder" but felt creatively stifled and professionally stuck—working outside the product in emails, decks, and pop-ups. As a product engineer, Michele could see engineering being torn between priorities for the product roadmap and supporting Customer Success teams who had a direct line to their customers' needs. They teamed up to give that feeling and meaning to those of us who can't code. Refining in-product user experiences is a slow process that involves cyclical collaboration with Engineering and Product teams. Within that time, prospective users may move on to a competitor before customer-side teams can facilitate application changes. Candu allows teams to collaboratively build in-product content experiences that encourage the adoption of features, onboard new users, and announce updates daily. Teams can build and publish experiences by combining no-code UI components and embedding them directly in the core application. Through a wide selection of customizable templates and a drag-and-drop editor, Candu enables its users to build, embed, and iterate rapidly. Candu integrates with leading product engagement platforms, including Segment, Intercom, Pendo, Wistia, YouTube, and Vimeo, and has been adopted by companies such as Adobe, Thought Industries, and Gorgias. Want to support this podcast? Subscribe, leave a review/rating, share with a friend & consider becoming a monthly supporter of Coffey & Code. Thanks for listening! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/coffeyandcode/support

Seth is a self-proclaimed “unredeemable CS Geek,” passionate about creating human first connections. He brings over fifteen years of experience in various analyst and customer success roles and leadership positions. Before his current role at Gainsight, Seth was the Director of Customer Success Operations at InsightSquared, where he managed various swaths of their CS. He saw the organization grow from fewer than ten employees to the largest company he had ever worked for. Today, Seth shares how CS Operations can become a strategic leader and partner to the CCO, what the maturity evolution of this role and the team looks like and what capabilities and skills are required to become a high-performing CS Ops team.

As the Founder + CEO of Skaled Consulting, Jake Dunlap helps executives around the world accelerate business growth with data-backed sales solutions. Before building Skaled, he held the roles of VP of Sales at Nowait (acquired by Yelp), Head of Sales + Customer Success at Chartbeat, and VP of Sales at Glassdoor (acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion dollars in 2018).Follow Jake on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap/Follow and connect with the host, Connor Dube on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/socialsellingexpert/Instagram: connor_dubeIf you're already thinking you need to find a more efficient way to conquer your monthly B2B content like blogs, newsletters, and social media – we'd like to show you how we can improve the quality, save you tons of time, and achieve better results! To learn more visit www.activeblogs.comKey Takeaways:Today's customer has done their research. They can be 80% of the way through the sales process before you have contact with them. You need a strong understanding of the sales process — which is almost universal — and a clear picture of where your customer is in that process when they make contact.With sales technology, to get your full ROI, make a solid plan for deployment, systems integration, and continuous optimization. Identify the bottlenecks you have, and choose/use technology to address existing problems.Jake's Top Sales Tech Stack Recommendations:For customizing and tracking steps in your sales process, Outreach.For a strong, clean data collection tool, LinkedIn Sales Navigator.For analytics to gauge the impact of your content, InsightSquared and Vidyard.For following up with personalized gifts, Sendoso.Hope you enjoyed this episode of B2B Mentors! Make sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Leave us a 5-star review, so your friends and colleagues can find us too. B2B Mentors is brought to you by activeblogs.com. Head over to our Content Trifecta page to schedule a chat with Connor about custom marketing content solutions for your company and the Content Trifecta effect!

How effective is current forecasting and how can it be improved with data, insights and intelligence to drive more efficiency, accuracy and predictable revenue outcomes? In this interview we discuss these issues and revenue intelligence solutions with Todd Abbott, the Chief Executive Officer for InsightSquared, and a seasoned executive sales and marketing leader for the likes of Mitel, Spireon, Avaya, Seagate, Symbol, Cisco and IBM. Listen in to learn what data is important to consider, how to measure sales and buyer flow, and why this is an essential tool to implement in 2022 for Chief Revenue Offices (CROs), sales execs, marketing leaders and revenue operation pros. https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-abbott-659b891/ #revenueintelligence #revenueenablement #revenueoperations #salesenablement

Joe Chernov is the Chief Marketing Officer at Pendo. He has been at the forefront of B2B marketing, creating impactful campaigns and strategies for various companies over his 20-plus-year career. Before Pendo, he was the CMO of two Boston startups, Robin and InsightSquared, which was named the most awarded sales intelligence company in tech. He takes huge risks and reaps huge rewards. What are his keys to marketing success? Listen to this week's episode to find out more. Key Takeaways: [1:35] Joe shares his journey from his double major to becoming a marketing executive. [3:50] He almost joined Eloqua but he was ghosted and they hired someone else. So when they called him back a year later, what did he do? [5:35] What is the key to building a peer community in tech that evolves so quickly? [8:20] Joe shares Pendo's struggle in seeing brands as a demand generator and how they shifted that into brand surveys. [10:30] It takes practice to input data into your planning and decision-making. The lines aren't always clear. [13:15] Churn is death. Joe shares a story of how he and his team turn a churn into a million dollars. [15:55] A good customer marketing program gets closer to a customer at the right time, not when they are about to go to a competitor. [17:30] Choosing a cause that is meaningful to that organization is becoming an expectation in today's working generation. [19:35] Joe explains his analogies, The Dragon Slayer and the Patron Saint, two ways on how to build a brand. Which one is better? [28:40] Technical marketing vs. content marketing. Joe shares what got him into writing and how it is important to marketing. [34:10] Joe talks about his live event, Pendomonium 2021, and how important that was to create his community at Pendo. [37:35] Joe also answers “This or That” questions. [41:30] To close, Joe shares his thoughts on the biggest growth areas in marketing for the next five years.   Mentioned in This Episode: Pendo.io Joe in LinkedIn  

Vishal Sunak is the CEO of LinkSquares. He is responsible for developing strategies to assist both corporate legal and finance teams with reviewing their contracts. He works to prevent his customers from having to read each contract one by one. He founded LinkSquares to build great products to improve how businesses operate. Before founding LinkSquares, he held positions in operations and product management at Backupify and InsightSquared. In 2020, Vishal was named an Ernest and Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in recognition of his dedication to innovation and growth. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here: ◘ https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishalsunak/ Learn more about his business here: ◘ https://linksquares.com/ Links that the guest wants to share: ◘ https://bit.ly/3mh6OuO

We've learned a lot in the first 25 episodes of this show. This synopsis episode will help you skip straight to the episodes which will help you and your team: Align Develop your partner culture Develop the right incentives Co-market effectively Create an implementation partner program Remove barriers to partnering ‍ Resources and episodes we reference: Creating reciprocity - Clearco's Data-Driven Referral Partner Program w/ top partner EmberTribe Culture - Jog > Crawl > Sprint Partnerships Strategy w/ Cory and Ross from Maropost Implementation Partnerships - Building Successful Implementation Partnerships w/ InsightSquared and Aptitude 8 Co-Marketing - The Co-Marketing Flip: Get Strategic With Your Partner Marketing Six Months Into the Partnership Contracts - A Deep-Dive into the Digital Agency-Partner Persona, w/ Greg Portnoy and John Florey Part 2 of SalesLoft + JB Sales: How Morgan Ingram and Chris Merrill from JB Sales run Partnerships Tech partnerships community / training center - https://collective.partnerprograms.io/ ‍ Our sponsors: Sendoso - The leading sending platform. Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts. Reveal - A free account mapping solution. ‍ ‍ ‍

This is the episode to listen to if you are either a robust tech product interested in building an implementation partner program, or an agency interested in becoming a trusted implementation partner of a top technology company. With us is Ben Turner who runs partnerships for InsightSquared and Connor Jeffers, CEO of Aptitude 8, one of his top Implementation Partners. What it is an “implementation partner”? Qualifying your product to support ‘implementation' partners? What the agency partner needs to have / be to be a successful implementation partner? What's needed to ensure success in this unique partnership? What both sides should know about when things break? Operations: Communication… Alignment… contracts... Enablement: documentation, assets, case studies, co-marketing around those ideal case studies… This is the episode to listen to when you want to get a better implementation or expert partner program setup. Suggested partnerships tech: Sendoso - The leading sending platform. Partnerstack - Partner tracking and payouts. Reveal - A free account mapping solution.

It's rare that a guest prompts us to completely rethink how we approach the work we do and our roles in our companies.That's exactly what happened, though, with this week's guest, Todd Abbott. Todd is the CEO of InsightSquared, the forecasting and analytics platform.Todd has dramatically changed the way he thinks about sales, sales funnels, and what he calls the "science of sales". And on this episode, he shares that evolution with all of us.In our conversation, Todd and I talk about what made him change his views, the power of system-captured engagement, and his mission to get reps out of the data entry business.Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts

What kinds of conversions are you seeing from your content syndication programs? Listen In. Will shares his success story working with a demand generation channel that is sometimes hard for B2B marketers to have success with: content syndication - and shared a valuable recommended resource

Everybody is looking at data. Whether from a privacy standpoint, or a productivity standpoint, data is king. But how do you harness that data to inform good decision making? In this episode, we interview Todd Abbott, CEO at InsightSquared, about utilizing data & technology to create scalable sales processes. We talked about the key elements to consider when trying to build a scalable sales process, what data points you need to collect, and the biggest mistakes companies make when trying to scale their sales processes. To hear this interview and many more like it, subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website. Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for B2B Revenue Acceleration in your favorite podcast player.

If you work in sales for an enterprise company, you probably have an expert revenue ops team providing you with engaging visual insights into how you succeed, why you fail, and in what areas you should be focusing your attention. And if you don't work for an enterprise company… you might find yourself gazing blankly at Excel spreadsheets, wondering what all these numbers mean. This was the experience of Todd Abbott. After working for a large company with excellent resources and support, he found himself in an entirely new situation. “I went to a startup that didn't have that, and I was lost. And so that's when I got exposed to InsightSquared many years ago, simply searching the web, like we all do, looking for a solution to a problem I had.” He couldn't have predicted that he would go from customer to CEO. On this edition of UpTech Report, Todd tells the story of how he joined the company, and explains how InsightSquared auto-generates revenue intelligence with interactive reports, forecasting, and even coaching through the use of a virtual assistant.

Vishal Sunak is the founder & CEO LinkSquares, the first AI-powered end-to-end contract lifecycle management platform. Vishal is responsible for developing strategies aimed at assisting both corporate legal and finance teams with the review of their contracts and works to prevent his customers from having to read each contract one by one.  Vishal founded LinkSquares with the goal of building great products to improve how businesses operate. Prior to founding LinkSquares, he held positions in operations and product management at Backupify and InsightSquared. During this interview we cover: 00:00 Contentfy, Your On-Demand Content Team (Sponsor) 01:02 - Intro  02:11 - Vishal's Background & Past Positions 04:09 -  Building, Launching & Growing Linksquares 13:18 - Total Insights into Global SaaS Commitments Meaning 15:07 - Improvements when Leveraging Vishal's CLM 17:53 - Specific Challenges/Risks of Building & Running a Legal Tech Business 16:38 -  AI as the Differentiating Factor in Organizational Success 26:43 -  SaaS is Solving a Problem that the Industry Created 27:42 - Advice Vishal Would Tell his 25 Year old Self 30:19 - Biggest Challenges  Vishal's Facing Right Now 31:38 - Vishal's  Top Resources Instrumental to His Success  34:16 - What does Success mean To Vishal Right Now 35:47 - The Future for Ackroo & Get in Touch with Vishal Mentions: https://linksquares.com/ (Linksquares) https://www.insightsquared.com/ (Insightsquared) https://www.backupify.com/ (Backupify) https://www.saastr.com/ (SaaStr) Books: People: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmlemkin/ (Jason Lemkin) https://www.linkedin.com/in/robmay/ (Rob May) Get In Touch With Vishal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishalsunak/ (Vishal's Linkedin) vishal@linksquares.com Tag us & follow: https://www.facebook.com/HorizenCapitalOfficial/ (Facebook)  https://www.linkedin.com/company/horizen-capital (LinkedIn)  https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/ (Instagram)  More about Akeel: https://twitter.com/AkeelJabber (Twitter) https://linkedin.com/in/akeel-jabbar (LinkedIn) https://horizencapital.com/saas-podcast (More Podcast Sessions )

In this episode, we discuss the revolutionary concepts of Revenue Intelligence and Advanced Sales Math with Todd Abbott, CEO at InsightSquared.Revenue Intelligence and Advanced Sales Math are critical competencies to successfully maneuver in todays B2B SaaS reality of compressed sales cycle and the changing customer buying journey.The good news - traditional metrics including lead conversion rates, close rates, pipeline coverage ratio, and sales rep productivity still are helpful to calculate basic sales math. Basic sales math is essentially what level of “X” inputs are required to achieve “Y” outcomes. X being primarily marketing + sales investments and Y being new revenue.Advanced Sales Math takes this concept to another level, and will dramatically increase the performance of the #1 reason why B2B SaaS CRO’s and VP Sales lifespan is less than 18 months. The #1 reason the average CRO / VP Sales tenure is so short - the inherent challenges and low performance of FORECASTING!Research highlights that only 54% of opportunities forecasted to close actually close in the original “closing” accounting period. The average number of times an opportunity “pushes” or changes forecasted close data is 3+ time.A key, new variable in advanced sales math is the ability to factor in buyer engagement metrics, across each step of the buying process across every resource at both the buyer and the seller. The challenge of traditional “event” based sales processes and forecasting were dependent upon the accuracy and timeliness of data in CRM systemsThe proliferation of point solution in martech and salestech has led to even more complexity of filtering through the noise to find the right signals to increase forecast accuracy. Having integrated Go-To-Market teams coupled with an integrated and unified GTM data source is mandatory to enhance revenue intelligence leading to improved forecast performanceThe concepts covered in this episode of Metrics that Measure Up are thought provoking, and even possibly career preserving for any CEO, CFO and CRO in todays B2B SaaS ecosystem.

Amy Noack is the Field and Customer Enablement Director at InsightSquared. In this conversation with The Collaborator, she shared her experiences as a team of one Revenue Enablement practitioner, including insights on:1️⃣ The common approaches she is using for sales and customer success teams.2️⃣ How she is leveraging conversation intelligence to provide examples for all teams to learn from. A key point here to consider is that conversation intelligence is becoming table stakes for enablement teams. If you are not. yet using it, add it to your 2021 tech list.3️⃣ A reminder for enablement teams to align with all stakeholders on what enablement is, what it supports, and to build your charter to codify this.Give a listen.-The Collaborator

Today on the show, we've got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. With LinkSquares, you know what terms you've signed and what agreements your company has made. They sell that product to general councils, operations teams, and deal desks. Vishal and I talk about what it's like to start a company from nothing and how his experience at Backupify and InsightSquared helped inform the process.

Today on the show, we've got Vishal Sunak, CEO and co-founder of LinkSquares, a company that applies AI to your contract. With LinkSquares, you know what terms you've signed and what agreements your company has made. They sell that product to general councils, operations teams, and deal desks. Vishal and I talk about what it's like to start a company from nothing and how his experience at Backupify and InsightSquared helped inform the process.

A self-proclaimed math geek, Zorian answers the pivotal question, is sales an art or a science. And he discusses the following sales topics too: How to quantify an effective phone call Is sales a science or an art What to do your first 90 days as a new VP of Sales How can CEOs have a better relationship with heads of sales, CROs, etc. The reason for a chief revenue officer role

I always think the best ideas for a business are from entrepreneurs who are tackling the problems they have faced in the real world. As you'll hear from this episode, NeighborSchools is a perfect example. Finding quality and affordable child care is a tricky thing and when you factor in the COVID-19 world we are living in, the stakes are even higher. It was this challenge that Bridget was facing as a new working mom. Brian, Bridget and their third co-founder, Cedric McDougal, all met while working together at InsightSquared and once they started to poke around the industry, they noticed some critical issues that were ripe for disruption through technology. Thus, NeighborSchools was born. The venture backed company provides a platform to help parents find trusted child care, while enabling child care providers with all the tools they need to successfully run their own home daycare. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Starting a podcast and the details behind their own podcast series called Work Like a Mother. * Their background stories leading up to working together at InsightSquared. * All of the details on NeighborSchools and how they are revolutionizing the child care industry through home daycare. * How they navigated the business through the pandemic. * Raising a $3.5M seed round led by Accomplice. * Challenges founders face when starting a company. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

Sam is an investor and entrepreneur, who is one of the top product leaders in the tech scene. After leading product at BzzAgent and HubSpot, he went on to be a co-founder at InsightSquared, the leading provider of revenue intelligence solutions. At Accomplice, he is focused on making investments in B2B software and marketplace companies. He's also part of the faculty at Harvard Business School where he teaches the early-stage startup course called Launching Tech Ventures. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * How Sam's experience as a product leader and operator has helped influence his role as a Venture Capitalist. * His background story and how he ended up leading product teams. * The founding story of InsightSquared and how they built product market fit. * What led him down the path of becoming a VC again. * Lots of great tips for hiring product managers, including a useful secret on where to find them. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Todd Abbott, the President and COO of InsightSquared. Todd and I discuss the reasons that we're all running our forecasting and pipeline and funnel reviews in the wrong way because we're reliant on reps inputting manual data. What we really need to do is find systems that automate the input of data so that we can spend our time coaching reps and really guiding them to better performance. InsightSquared sells a solution that does that.

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Todd Abbott, the President and COO of InsightSquared. Todd and I discuss the reasons that we're all running our forecasting and pipeline and funnel reviews in the wrong way because we're reliant on reps inputting manual data. What we really need to do is find systems that automate the input of data so that we can spend our time coaching reps and really guiding them to better performance. InsightSquared sells a solution that does that.

Episode Summary: In this episode, Rob and Matt sit down with Vishal Sunak, one of Rob's earliest employees at Backupify, to learn more about LinkSquares. Started by Vishal and his co-founder in 2015, LinkSquares was created in response to a pain point that Vishal experienced first-hand at Backupify: the messiness of contract management. Tune in to learn more about why Vishal has loved his new roles as startup founder and CEO and to hear his tips on hiring and navigating the world of fundraising. Uncovered in this episode:Vishal's unique journey into entrepreneurship -- and the mentors he met along the wayHow to be undeniable: The power in letting your numbers speak for themselves when it comes to fundraisingHow LinkSquares builds team culture and customer centricity through weekly “Customer Stories” All HandsWhy getting it right is not as important as recognizing when you've got it wrongList of resources mentioned in episode and suggested reading: Website: https://linksquares.com/About LinkSquares: At LinkSquares, we think your internal legal and finance teams have better things to do than spending thousands of hours a year reviewing contracts one by one. So we built software that automatically reads and retrieves key data from your entire library of agreements, making review and diligence projects lightning fast and super simple. You'll be up and running on our AI-powered Contract Analytics cloud in a snap too - our white-glove onboarding will have you launched, trained, and fully integrated into your workflows in 30 days.  So go focus on raising money, getting acquired, or just plain growing as fast as you can. With LinkSquares, your contracts will become a source of knowledge the entire company can depend on.  About Vishal: Vishal Sunak is the CEO and Co-Founder of LinkSquares, an AI-powered contract management and analytics company. LinkSquares gives legal teams the ability to accurately understand what's in their contracts without having to do time-consuming and costly manual contract review. In his role, Vishal drives overall business strategy and vision for the company. Prior to founding LinkSquares, he ran operations and product management teams at high-growth SaaS companies including Backupify (acquired by Datto) and InsightSquared. Vishal has a BS in Engineering from Northeastern University and an MS from WPI.

In this episode, I speak with Amber Fallon who is a Senior Sales Engineer with InsightSquared.  If you're a sales rep who is seeking real words of wisdom on how to best work with your SE and deliver an amazing experience to your customers and prospects, then this is one episode worth tuning in for.  Be sure to follow our new podcast company page on LinkedIn! - Click Here  

Customer success needs to be the responsibility of the entire organisation - Interview with Fred Shilmover, the CEO and co-founder of InsightSquared, a provider of sales intelligence solutions for high-growth technology companies. Fred joins me today to talk about InsightSquared and their journey with implementing a customer success programme and how and why they changed it.

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Ryan Lallier, Director of Inside Sales at InsightSquared.  Ryan has a diverse background in Sales, with positions ranging from individual contributor to head of sales roles at companies like Dataminr, Gartner, and YayPay. Ryan is also a member of the Revenue Collective, and founder of SalesGevity, and advisory and consultancy for start-ups.

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we speak with Ryan Lallier, Director of Inside Sales at InsightSquared.  Ryan has a diverse background in Sales, with positions ranging from individual contributor to head of sales roles at companies like Dataminr, Gartner, and YayPay. Ryan is also a member of the Revenue Collective, and founder of SalesGevity, and advisory and consultancy for start-ups.

David Skok is a serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners. He founded four companies: Skok Systems, Corporate Software Europe, Watermark Software, and SilverStream Software and did one turnaround with Xionics. Three of the companies he founded went public and one was acquired. Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr, the world’s largest SaaS community and leading early-stage SaaS fund with investments in Automile, TalkDesk, Algolia and more. Jason Vandeboom is the Founder of ActiveCampaign, a sales and marketing automation platform that enables small businesses around the world to meaningfully connect and engage with their customers. Since 2013 with their transition to SaaS have grown to more than $50 million in ARR in less than five years, while maintaining profitability. Dave Kellogg is a leading technology executive, independent board member, advisor and angel investor. In his most recent role, Dave was the CEO @ Host Analytics where he quintupled ARR, halved customer acquisition costs and increased net retention rates before selling the company to a private equity sponsor. Fred Shilmover is the CEO and co-founder of InsightSquared, one of Boston’s premiere tech startups paving the way in the sales intelligence space. Throughout the InsightSquared journey, Fred has raised over $25m in VC funding from the likes of DFJ, Bessemer, Salesforce and Atlas Venture. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: Does David Skok believe that ACV should sit at the top of the metrics stack? What are the 4 metrics that fundamentally matter in your business? What can founders do to their pricing model to extract as much value from each customer? How do the very best businesses structure their pricing for value extraction? If ACV increase is a core focus for our startup, should we hire a sales rep solely selling to enterprise? What are the biggest mistakes founders make in this scenario? What can founders do to optimise revenue per lead? How does on need o approach lead targeting according to the individual skills of their reps? Is it best to start at enterprise and work down to SMB or does SMB and work up to enterprise work best? How does the product have to change with the scaling to enterprise? How does the messaging need to change with the scaling to enterprise? How do you need this change to be reflected in your pricing?     What does it truly mean to be an ARR first company? What is the right way for founders to calculate their differing ACVs? What is the right way to present that when pitching VCs? Where do many founders go wrong in how they present and discuss ACVs with investors? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Harry Stebbings Jason Lemkin SaaStr David Skok Jason Vandeboom Dave Kellogg Fred Shilmover

Scaling your sales team isn’t just about adding more reps. Rather, it’s about being a proactive operations leader and implementing an approach that equips your sales team with streamlined workflows and increased productivity to drive revenue efficiency -- then scale your headcount. Listen to Fuze and InsightSquared as they share the fundamental initiatives that organizations need to think about when scaling and automating their sales function. Panelists will cover: - How to build a data strategy for continuous ICP identification - How to architect your CRM for account-based sales and marketing alignment - How to measure success and iterate on feedback

Joe Chernov is CMO at Robin, and before that served in the same role at InsightSquared, and was VP of Content at HubSpot and Eloqua. He's often referred to as one of the most influential content marketers in B2B, and on this episode of the Swipe File, DG and Joe talk about micromanaging versus empowerment, why interviewing is an overlooked skill (for marketing), why having no metric is better than having the wrong one, career transitions to serve the business, and why hiring is the only thing that matters.

Welcome to Episode 72 of The VentureFizz Podcast, the flagship podcast from the leading authority for jobs & careers in the tech industry. For this episode of our podcast, I interviewed Tom Eisenmann, Professor at Harvard Business School. What do the companies Rent the Runway, Birchbox, ThredUp, Cloudflare, Evertrue, and InsightSquared all have in common? Well, they are all companies that you may have heard of… but did you know that they all participated in Harvard Business School's New Venture Competition? It's true and this is a small sampling of the amazing companies from this competition. Sure, careers in management consulting and investment banking are still commonly considered by b-school grads, but its the path of entrepreneurship that has been one of the fastest growing areas of interest for students. Thus, I was excited to interview Tom and get an inside look at entrepreneurship at HBS. Tom has over 20 years of experience as a faculty member and he is also the faculty Co-Chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, which supports these students who are looking to transform their ideas into successful startups and even perhaps… change the world. In this episode of our podcast, we also cover lots of great topics like: -ABC's Shark Tank and how so many HBS affiliated companies have appeared on the show. -Tom's background and what led him down the path of academia. -How HBS has evolved over time as it relates to entrepreneurship and its curriculum, including their case method approach. -The common mistakes where entrepreneurs get tripped up. -Tom's thoughts on whether or not entrepreneurship is a trait someone is born with or is it something that can be taught. -Advice on how to get into Harvard Business School. -Plus, a lot more. Lastly, if you like the show, please remember to subscribe to and review us on iTunes, or your podcast player of choice!

This week on AMPUP Your Digital Marketing we highlight an episode from the AMPUP archives where host Glenn Gaudet interviews Gareth Goh. At the time of the interview Gareth was the Content Marketing Manager at InsightSquared. He now works with DataRobot as Customer Marketing Manager. Gareth hails from Boston University with a degree in Journalism, but as he saw the evolution towards content emphasis, his employment started focusing on content marketing. With a varied background in both journalism and content marketing, he is an experienced veteran of inbound marketing, SEO, and business intelligence. In this interview Glenn and Gareth discuss tips for effective content marketing in social media. What You’ll Learn About: · Why you need to invest in marketing · How to disseminate complicated topics · Why you should utilize C-level business partners · How to use GaggleAMP to extend your reach · How to know when to grow your team Connect with Gareth on LinkedIn.

Click and Listen to Joe  Our guest is Joe Chernov. He's the Chief Marketing Officer at @InsightSquared. He also lends a hand to startups and wildlife causes when he can. Diving right in, he says, "It's unbelievable what you can get done if you don't care if you get fired!" Talking about his experience at Eloqua, "If we were to publish something that is valuable, we could edge our way into deeper coverage by the media."  Scorecard - even though we're not supposed to keep score:  16 articles after spending 2 years developing a product and writing up the release. An infographic got 800 articles. Very eye-opening.   Why it Matters   Joe says, "Content marketing is what happens when a marketing department shifts its thinking from knowing that the company that signs their paychecks needs to shift to the customer signs the paycheck."   That shift in mindset turned collateral into an ebook, a self-serving whitepaper into a more valuable, lengthy piece of content.    Point: The opportunity to leverage the correct content through the active sales process:   Best content ideas come from your sales people. Conversations with sales will be the source of the best ideas.   Example: They publish a issue of their "blog" once a month that includes a recap of 4-5 articles on similar content. Each month has a new theme which helps to focus the articles on that topic.    He's talking about a sales team creating an editorial calendar. You heard Matt right.   Point: Personas as a driving force for effective content.   Personas help reduce the size of your universe so that as a writer or content creator, your writing universe is smaller which helps guide the writing and allow it to be less daunting.  But, he cautions against being way too specific with a persona. "Susie Seller" is just a role in an organization. We don't need to know which college she attended or coffee brand she prefers, unless you are selling coffee.   People have a hard time comparing their content metrics to their business metrics.   The very best way to shine a light on the value of your content is to look at lead quality. Your lead or transactional content success could be measured by downloads, subscribers. These are higher value than typical leads.   You want to know did they close? Did they move deeper into the funnel than other sources? Lead Quality tops the list for this comparison and measurment.   Favorite KISS song and why: Deuce. Gene Simmons wrote it on a bus. It's about absolutely nothing. 

What does it take for a company like HubSpot to double its website conversions and inbound call volume, increase demo requests by 35%, and increase product sign ups by 27% This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, conversion copywriting expert Joel Klettke shares the process he used, along with a team from HubSpot, to achieve such remarkable results. Known as "the guy who 2x'd HubSpot's conversions," Joel is a world renowned conversion copywriting expert and the founder of Case Study Buddy. Listen to the podcast to learn exactly what Joel and the team from HubSpot did and get specific takeaways you can use to improve the copy on your site and increase conversions. Transcript Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. This week, my guest is Joel Klettke. Joel came to the podcast via a casual mention at first by Ian Cleary who was on a few episodes ago. And Ian, for those of you who don't know, is the founder of RazorSocial and OutreachPlus, and a well known marketer and keynote speaker. He happened to mention the great work that Joel did at HubSpot and then lo and behold, Andy Crestodina, one of our past guests as well, commented, "Joel, you should come on the podcast." I love when this happens! So Joel, I'm so excited to have you on and I love that you came via Andy and Ian. Welcome to the podcast. Joel Klettke (guest): Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm really pumped to get a chance to chat with you. Kathleen: For my listeners, Joel is a conversion copywriter who has worked with some incredible brands and gotten really great results. I already mentioned that he did some work for HubSpot. He's also worked for WP Engine, which is a platform that we love here at IMPACT, InsightSquared and others. He is also the founder of Case Study Buddy. So Joel, I could probably talk a lot about you - you've got a long and interesting resume - but I'm going to ask you to tell the audience a little bit about yourself. Joel: Yeah. I mean, the quick and interesting, hopefully interesting version, is that I got my start kind of fresh out of business school. I knew more about the type of place I wanted to be than what I wanted to do. I sort of randomly found my way working agency side doing search engine optimization (SEO) and that was my whole world for about five years. I really enjoyed the analytical side of it, but always had this sort of passion for writing. I just never thought there was a job in it for me. I didn't want to be an author and that whole world of kind of writing websites and landing pages wasn't on my radar until I started working on them for SEO and went, "You know what? Someone's got to write these. And it's not enough that they get found, they probably have to convert people." And so little by little, over time, I got to pick up more of those types of projects. And in 2013 I went out on my own focusing mostly on the content pieces at that point - so blogs and E-books - and then kept getting deeper into this conversion stuff and it finally became my whole focus by 2015. So I've been doing it since then working with a lot of cool companies like you mentioned - HubSpot and WP Engine and InsightSquared - to get more customers to convert. And then about two years ago, I saw an opportunity to build a business product. I was kind of working on making case studies available to these awesome agencies and software companies. This was an area I saw them really struggling in, struggling to capture these stories, share them, how do you use them. And so I saw an opportunity and created Case Study Buddy. I've got a team and we've been kind of stealthily moving along and this year it's becoming increasingly part of my focus. Kathleen: I think it's really interesting what you're doing with Case Study Buddy, because having been in this business for a long time and owned an agency and worked with just a ton of different companies, case studies seem to be one of those areas where we as marketers really phone it in. Like, there's this formula like "This was the challenge. This was the solution. They came to us, and here's what we did, and here's the results." It's that three part formula and I think we feel like as long as we're following the formula we can say, "Check! I did a case study." I have to believe tremendous opportunity to innovate in that area because we know from experience that case studies are of huge interest to different audiences. Everybody wants to see examples of your experience. They want to see the proof that you know what you're talking about. But for something that that is so valued by the consuming audience, it's amazing how little effort we put into them. Joel: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's funny too, because it is formulated. People always say "Well how hard can it really be?" and they go off and they slap these things together, but they don't realize that there's so much to capturing a story worth telling. And then telling it in a way that's worth reading. Even though the "problem - solution - results," yes, that's always going to be the heart and soul of it. But what's different, what's interesting, is how you tell that story and how you bring in the customer and how you weave it all together. And then increasingly too, how you use it. Where and how you wield that proof to make it useful. So a lot of companies, the big problem, once they have a case study is it gets relegated to a little resources section. And maybe sales pulls it out once in a while, but they don't have a plan for it. Both in the creation side of things it kind of gets overlooked or neglected or slapdash, and then in the actual using it, we're kind of like, "Well, okay. We'll email it out." Then we're yelling, "We have it and resources section, good work for us." And that makes me sad, because case studies are the one content asset that can play across the entire funnel. From acquisition, to nurturing, to upsells, to retention -- you can use them everywhere, but we don't. And so that's why I'm so excited about that space. Kathleen: Oh, I love it. Well before we dive too deeply into case studies, I really want to talk about the work that you did with HubSpot. Because as I mentioned, this came up when I had Ian Cleary on as a guest and I don't remember the context of exactly what we were talking about, but he was like ... he didn't even mention your name. He said, "There's this guy who was at HubSpot and he 2X'd their conversions." And it was so funny because HubSpot is a company that is known for being good at maximizing conversions. Like that's what they're all about is lead generation. And so, to know that there was an outside expert who came in and helped HubSpot take it to the next level - that immediately caught my attention and I was like, "Ooh, who is this guy?" And that was when I think it was Andy who chimed in and said, "That guy happens to be Joel." So, I would love to hear this story of what you did at HubSpot. We could start with what was it? Problem-solution-results or you tell a story that makes it interesting. Joel: Yeah. Well, before I dive into that piece, I want to make one thing really clear, because I love the fact that people are talking about it. This was such a rare opportunity to come into a situation and work with a company who is known for their lead gen. I want to make sure people understand that this is not something that I did alone. There's a great team there. People like Pam Vaughan were really instrumental. Austin Knight who was doing their design at the time was so instrumental. So this was definitely a team effort and I couldn't have done it alone. And it was a fantastic kind of case study, I guess, as we'll dive into here, in what can happen when you've got a whole team of people committed to doing this and committing to getting it right. So with that as the backstory, I want to kind of lead up into how this happened. So I had known Matt Barby for some time outside of that context before he was even at HubSpot. And so Matt and I had kind of chatted on Twitter during my agency days and we just continued to have a casual friend relationship. When Matt went into HubSpot, something he identified really quickly was despite the fact that yes, they are known for lead acquisition and they're quite good at this whole inbound mentality, he saw opportunity for them to grow. Opportunity for someone else to come in and objectively look at what they were doing and make some recommendations. And so because he'd followed me along, he knew where I was at in my career, which was I was working with one or more software companies on this type of thing. And so we decided, "Okay, well, we don't have buy in for the full project from the outset." You can imagine that for a company like HubSpot, they've got this brilliant team and there's a lot of moving pieces. So we thought, let's just focus on doing one section at the beginning. So originally, I got to work with Matt on revamping the CRM page. So just that product. What I introduced there with Matt was a very customer driven approach to writing copy. Customer driven research. So we were doing things like running a customer survey. And we were looking at things like, when people talk about the CRM out in the wild, what are they saying? What benefits are they mentioning? What pain points are they saying that it solved? And how does that stack up against how the company itself is talking about things on this CRM page? And so as we dug into this customer research, and as we pulled in the data from these surveys, we learned a lot of things. We learned, for example, that there was some language customers were using about the outcomes they achieved that we could pull in and we could put into the headlines. We learned that the things that the company thought was really important as far as features to be emphasizing, didn't necessarily align with what customers thought was important and the features they wanted emphasized. So, we revamped that landing page, saw positive uptake and that was the buy in that Matt needed. So, from there, I got a chance to be brought in for the whole big website project, which as you can imagine was a big endeavor with a short timeline. HubSpot wanted to have a brand new site ready for their INBOUND Conference. So our timeline was about 2.5 to three months to do the whole thing. Kathleen: What? Joel: Yeah. Kathleen: Oh, my God. Joel: Yeah. And that's why I say, you can imagine it took a village. I cannot pretend like I just was the hero riding in on the white horse. It took everybody being committed, and Kieran Flannigan and all those guys were there and present and so instrumental. I want to break down the process we used a little bit more to get the result that we got and how we did this on a scale. We took what we did with the CRM page, but we took it some steps further. So what we want to do when we're working on conversion copy, you can only sell to a customer you really understand. Everyone talks about understanding your customer but hardly any companies actually put the rubber to the road and do what it takes to do that. So again, we had a tight timeline, but thankfully HubSpot has got a huge customer base. So we ran some surveys to learn about how people were using it, whether or not they understood what the products could do for them and what the role of each was. HubSpot had recently split into these three products and the historical perception was that it was one thing. It was just HubSpot Marketing, but now they had HubSpot Sales and HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot CRM. And these are just different products. So we looked at customer surveys, and we asked questions like "What was going on in your life that led you to look for this solution?" And then we asked "How do you use this solution day to day?" to get them talking about the problems they solve with it. And then we got them to force rank the different features of the products they used by what was most important to them, again giving us a hierarchy for how we organize the page so people see that. The second kind of interesting thing we did that I always, whenever I give a talk on this, I always recommend companies do because it's so easy and it can be free, is we made sure that we went and looked at their chat logs. You can launch chat on your site tomorrow. It's dead simple. A lot of people are hesitant, because they're like, "Well, I can't monitor it 24 hours." You don't have to. Just make yourself commit to making yourself or your team available to do chat for a two week period and I promise you're going to be tempted to continue. After that point, you're going to want to make it a priority. But we looked at their chat logs, and we were looking for questions that came up again and again. Because those questions would be the things that the copy of their website wasn't doing a great job of answering. So if people are constantly asking questions like, "Which of the three products do I need to accomplish X?" Kathleen: Yeah. Joel: We found out really quickly that there was some confusion in the market about which product was right for each and how they interplayed and that sort of thing. So we started getting some insight into where people are at, what awareness level they're at, and what they're struggling with. We took all that information, combined it with the survey data and then worked closely with the internal HubSpot team and Austin -- as I mentioned, just probably the best UX designer I've ever had the privilege to work with -- and we started revamping the pages around addressing customer questions, around addressing features and benefits in a hierarchical way that met what the customer wanted to see and needed to see first. And then probably the most impactful thing we did, and I think it's still live on the site to this day (as you can imagine HubSpot's continually evolving) was we found some great language for talking about the way that their new tool suite worked. And so that's where the lines like "HubSpot tools are powerful on their own and even better together" come from. And we started being able to break down what each one was for and the benefits of each and then once you combine them, how they work well together. So clarity just went up and up and up. People started to finally get the picture of what HubSpot is today. Kathleen: That's really interesting. Let's go back to how you gather data because what I find interesting is you had a 2.5 to three month time frame for this massive website redesign. And having been through enough of these projects, I mean, I know that lots of people would hear that and it would feel like their hair was on fire and they just had to start writing and building pages from the day that the project began. But you guys stopped and slowed yourself down and did some homework. What I think is really interesting is not only did you do the surveys, which I feel like there's definitely people out there who do that, but I love the notion that your data already exists and you can find it by looking at the chat logs and looking specifically at the questions. Were there other existing sources of data that you drew upon? Joel: Yeah. Kathleen: And how long did this research process take? Because I can imagine you were under pressure to get it done pretty quickly. Joel: Yeah, really, really great question. I talked about surveys already and when you've got the customer base of a HubSpot, you can do that really quickly. But I should mention, you don't need 2,000 responses. Our threshold online is if we can get 1,000 or sorry, 100 really good responses. After that, you start seeing kind of diminishing returns. Chat logs were available to us, but other places that more companies who aren't at HubSpot's level can go are things like your testimonials, your reviews, and your case studies. We talked to sales. We interviewed their internal team. We asked sales and support, like, "What questions do you get all the time? What do you find yourself constantly having to explain that you wish you didn't have to constantly explain? So, myself and Josh Garofalo -- who I brought into the project to help me kind of cover the huge scope of it, because I couldn't possibly write all the pages alone -- interviewed that internal team. Often what our role becomes or what my role becomes in projects like this, is I'm unifying departments. Because they're all great at their own thing, and they all understand their own area, but sales might not have talked to customer support in a while. And marketing might not have talked to sales in a while. We can pull all these perspectives together, and then present to them and say, "Here's where you guys are actually at and where you're creating problems for the other side or where they're having an opportunity that you're not capitalizing on." So talking to your sales team, looking at existing reviews and testimonials to see what are these people already talking about, how are they talking about it -- those are existing data sources that are already there. One thing I want to drop as well. If you don't have a lot of these, go look at your competitors. And positive reviews are one thing for them, but go look at their negative reviews. Because those are things that you can exploit and position yourself against. So if, for example, people are saying, "Well, this solution is really slow and clunky." You can emphasize that you're agile and fast and easy to use. So by getting kind of a landscape of what your competitors struggle with, it also helps you understand how you can position yourself against them. Kathleen: That is a great idea. It's interesting because I feel like a lot of companies do the opposite, which is they look at the competitors but they look at the competitor websites. And they look at what the competitors are saying they do, as opposed to looking at what the customers feel that they don't do well. The result, when you look at your competitors and try to emulate them, is everybody starts to sound the same. Joel: Totally. Kathleen: And that actually suppresses conversions instead of improving them. Joel: There's this crazy fallacy that companies have that somehow their competitor knows what they're doing. They don't. I've written for the competitors. I've come into situations where I have written for both sides, the people being evaluated and the people being ... Often they're starting from the same point. Every company is just trying to figure it out. Just because someone launches a timer on their homepage, they didn't necessarily do that because it works. They're just trying stuff to see what works. Kathleen: They're throwing a bunch of darts at the wall to see what sticks. Joel: Completely. I would say more companies don't know what they're doing than really do, because why I'm so excited about conversion optimization and conversion copywriting as a whole, is I very much see what I'm doing now as in the same vain as where SEO was eight to ten years ago or inbound marketing was five to eight years ago or whatever it might be. It's still so young and so much opportunity and companies are waking up to the value of this. The tools are getting cheaper, the methodology is getting very defined. It's a fantastic time for companies to start thinking about this and to be moving ahead because we're getting to the point where if you're not, your competitor is. But there's still so much time to move and be the first to really measure and test and do this well. Kathleen: Oh, I couldn't agree more. CRO, conversion rate optimization, there's so much buzz and interest around it but there are so few people who really can claim to be experts in it, with true experience. One thing I want to talk about... so we start with all the homework you need to do before you can even sit down and put pen to paper or virtual pen to paper, however you decide to do it. Then there's really understanding the audience. There's the insights that come out of that. Obviously what you've talked about is to truly write for the audience but are there also certain universal truths or rules in terms of either how you structure copy on a page? I'm thinking of Joanna Wiebe who has her "problem-agitation-solution" formula or certain words that you should or should not use. Are there those universal truths out there that we should know about? Joel: Yeah. You know, everybody wants there to be this formula or this code. Plug in X, get out Y, but I think even Joanna would tell you the PAS, the problem agitation solution, that's a fantastic framework that can do brilliantly in some contexts and miserably in others. Joanna uses it all the time for emails and email series and that kind of thing. It works great. Let's put it in this context. There's different stages of awareness. So, if your customer already knows your brand and they already know they're sold on you, then a problem-agitation-solution format is just wasting their time because all they want to know is the deal. So, they just want to see okay, $50 off, boom. I know the deal. I know the value. I'm there. So, for that audience, a different formula entirely works. Whereas if someone is completely ... You know, they don't understand their pain even yet, they're still coming into the point where they realize that they've got a problem, then that pain can be addressed better. But there isn't just this sort of absolute truth. I think there's guidelines, there's best practices. For example, on language, there's some misconceptions. You can go read a bunch of blog posts that say never use jargon or never use a cliché or never use an acronym. Well, even in my work for InsightSquared, their audience uses and loves and understands acronyms. If we don't use acronyms, we're the weirdo. We're the ones who don't look like we understand the niche. If there is an absolute truth that I've found, if there are things that I can say every time, 100% of the time go and do this, it's you cannot be in the business of conversion without being in the business of talking to customers and having structured, documented conversations with them. You can't do it. You can guess, you can pull levers on a wall, you can change button color aimlessly, but you can't be in the business of writing conversion copy or optimizing your copy if you're trying to cut customers out of the equation and not spend time talking to them or researching them. It sounds so intuitive, but I guarantee there are companies listening to this where their methodology right now for how they come up with new copy is to huddle in a board room, copy up with a new tagline that they all feel is clever and represents management's vision, and never talk to a single customer until it launches. So, I wish I could tell you there are frameworks for these things, but there's best practices. It's more like a journey of well, if X, then Y. If you understand this piece then try this. But there's no one black and white this definitely works or this definitely doesn't work. Kathleen: So, when you develop that understanding of the customer, at some point you do have to sit down and write. The way you write and the volume of writing you do has to also be in alignment with the actual visual design of the page. Can you talk a little bit about how you think front end designers and content creators should work together on these projects? Which comes first? The chicken or the egg? Joel: Yeah. I'm so glad that you're asking about this because this honestly to me is what made the HubSpot project successful. When you've got a timeline like that, first, let's establish that if there is an absolute, its that copy should always lead design. You cannot just pop words into a pretty picture, otherwise you may be cramming a story into a frame it wasn't fit for. We knew that. We also knew we couldn't wait for copy to be done or design wouldn't have time to do it. So, the process that we used, and what made this successful, is that what you can do is you can iterate. So, when you understand the customer and when you've got a good understanding of "Okay, they're pain aware or solution aware or brand aware," then you know okay, you can define together with design. You can say, "We know these are the types of sections we're going to need to cover. We know this is the flow we're going to need to cover them in. We don't have specific copy yet but we know right now for example, we need a hero section. After that we need about a paragraph of narrative to agitate the pain. Then we're going to need this section on emphasizing particular features that solve that pain." So, when you've got an understanding of the customer you can sit down with design. What we did is we came up with a base framework, a base wire frame for the different types of pages on the site. In some cases you can template this a bit. So, one of the people that the project could never have been achieved without was Pamela Vaughan. Kathleen: I love her. Can I just say? I have to stop you for one second. I'm a huge fan girl of Pamela Vaughan's, because I've attended a number of her presentations and as a marketer, you can go to lots of conference presentations that are full of fluff and lots of "You should do this for this reason," but not a lot of "And here's how you actually do it." She gives the most detailed, useful, actionable information of ... Probably she's in the top three of anybody I've seen present. So, that's the end of my fan rant on Pam Vaughan. Joel: No, it's well earned. I mean, literally we could not have done it without her. She wrote a huge swath of the copy that ... You know, like the individual features pages. Those were Pam's. So, we worked together to define the template for common pages and then we were able to use that same template to kind of inform. So, we started with the base wire framed together with copy and design. Design was able to go away and mock something up while copy was working on our piece of the puzzle. Then we converged together, sent our wires to design and they would make our wire frames better and send it back. So, it was an iterative, collaborative process. That's the way it has to be. I love Unbounce and I love these companies that have these templated landing pages. They're great as a starting point, but if you're switching your brain off and not defining who the audience is or what they need to hear and just picking a template because "Oh I like the way that looks," you're missing the point. I think Unbounce does a good job of educating people there. Yeah, the design piece was a collaborative, iterative thing and for anyone listening who's thinking "I want to get into conversion copywriting" or "I want to hire a conversion copywriter," look for someone who's not just going to hand you a Word doc. Learn to wire frame. Josh and I both use Balsamiq. That was a common tool of communication so writing could be on the same page as design. It's a skill that I didn't anticipate ever having to learn as a writer, and it's one I'm loving exploring because the more I understand how the design interplays with the words that I write, the more effective I can be, and the more designers are going to like to work with me. So, the two are unbreakable, and actually Austin wrote a counter piece to my piece from design's perspective, so you can go read my piece on the HubSpot blog and you can read his. You can see where we both came from and how we made it work. Kathleen: That's great. I love that you mentioned Balsamiq because my next question was going to be are there certain tools that you find are really helpful through this process? It's funny, I'm not a designer either but I've had to create wire frames. There are many wire framing tools out there. We have one that our actual design team uses. I don't remember, I think it's called Moqups and it's super detailed. It's amazing, but it's too much for me. It would be like me going into InDesign and trying to create a webpage. I like Balsamiq because it's really streamlined and simple, and for a non-designer it's a great wire framing tool. Any other tools that you have used either in that project or in other projects that are really helpful for this kind of thing? Joel: Yeah. Basically, so for mock ups and wire frames Balsamiq has been the tool that I've found easiest to use, most versatile for me. I know the platform inside and out. I've also heard really good things about InFlow. So, inFlow is another one where you can experiment with that. I'm not an affiliate for any of the tools I'm about to mention, so none of this is a paid ad but I genuinely love them. Typeform is what we constantly use for surveys. Fantastic interface. Fantastic ability to use logic jumps to show different questions to different groups, which when you're segmenting information like we were was totally invaluable to be able to just naturally do that. So, Typeform is great. For chat, the one I always recommend to companies is Drift. Drift continues to innovate, continues to do really cool things and on their basic free plan you can get your feet wet, you can control manually the hours it's live and not live so you don't have to worry about being present at four in the morning. So, Typeform and Drift. Balsamiq is really helpful. These days I've been using Hotjar to look at both heat maps and recorded user sessions and I've been really pleased taht they just announced some innovations today where they can capture more in those recorded user sessions, so that's really exciting to me. We can get a deeper look at how people are actually interacting. So, those are kind of my old standbys. Then I'm increasingly looking at Google Analytics, which you know, it's kind of people are like ... It's been around forever but people still don't have a clue the fraction of the power you can get out of Analytics. One guy that I really admire in this space who is worth following and learning from is Michael Aagaard. He just knows the analytics piece really well. I think he would even tell you, he comes by it honestly, he's not necessarily like a numbers and analytics guy but he's found all these cool shortcuts and custom reports and ways to very quickly get at data that can highlight a problem so that you can respond quickly. So, that's kind of my stack. That's my toolkit. Occasionally you'll see things like FullStory or whatever, but I think that's one thing I want to communicate, is you don't need to have tens of thousands of dollars of budget to do this type of work. You just need to have the willingness to make the most of these free or basic plans for the period that you're using them. The barrier to entry to doing this stuff is only getting lower. The tools are only getting better. So, there's really no excuse for companies to just be turning a blind eye to this and saying well it's too complicated or too complex. No way. You can start doing this stuff tomorrow. Kathleen: Yeah, you could do it all probably in Google Docs too if you really had to. Joel: Totally. I used to wire frame in Word with like tables. I mean, it's not as pretty as Balsamiq. It's not as easy to communicate, but it gets the job done. If you're going to start there, start there. Just go with what you know and evolve, but just get started. Kathleen: Yeah. Absolutely. I love all the tools you mentioned. We use a lot of those. On my team we use Drift. We have Drift on our site, so I'm absolutely going to go back and look at the chat logs after we stop talking. You know, a number of those other tools ... One of the other ones that we're huge fans of, which if you haven't checked it out you might want to, is GatherContent. It's awesome. Our content manager has hacked it in a way that when we do website pages she's able to create blocks for the different content pieces that are needed and she can add in background on personas and guidance on how it should be written. It's really cool for content collaboration. Joel: Yeah. That actually ... Kathleen: That was my addition to the list. Joel: That reminds me, there's one more. It's funny I forgot. The tool that I'm really, really excited about I haven't had the chance to use it as much as I'd like but RightMessage. Brennan Dunn launched this tool. They continue to launch all these different sub tools, but RightMessage, if you believe in conversion optimization, if you believe that this is going to be important and integral for the future, RightMessage is what comes next. It's personalization. I have yet to see a tool working harder to make that easier, working harder to make it more intuitive, to make it more accessible. So, I'm really, really excited about what Brennan and his team are doing over there. I'm trying to bake it into my proposals more often because more people need to use this stuff. Kathleen: Oh, I'll definitely check that out. Now, circling back to the project at HubSpot. You somehow got this website rewritten, you and the other team of people in this two to three month time period. The new site launched. I've heard lots of different numbers thrown around about the results you guys got. Can you break it down for us? What was the change? Joel: Yeah. I'll pull those numbers up here, but the biggest change was we effectively doubled site wide conversions. So, on the biggest broadest level across all of their conversions, we saw a doubling there.  Then, to we break down some of the more specific conversions, HubSpot started seeing two times the inbound call volume. So, not just conversions on the site. Twice as many people phoning in. They saw a 35% increase in demo requests. They saw a 27% increase in product sign ups. For a company the size of HubSpot, with the traffic of HubSpot, those are some serious, serious numbers. So, the efficacy of having customer driven copy and really a design team who cares about conversion and about telling the story the right way, and then a support team and a sales team who are open about what's working for them and how to nail that down, it all comes together to create impacts like that. Kathleen: So, I have to ask. To what do you attribute that increase in inbound call volume? Because that's an interesting stat that I was not expecting you to mention. Joel: Yeah. That one was surprising to me too. You know, if you haven't ever had Matt Barby on the program, having him come in to talk about attribution and tracking and that sort of thing I think would be fascinating. Kathleen: Oh, I would love that. Matt, if you're listening, call me! Joel: Yeah. So, I mean, Matt. Matt would be the guy to really help pin that down. Not only did we change the site, and the copy, and the way we presented their products, during this time they also started playing around with kind of a freemium model and looking at some of these more freemium-type calls, so it's possible that maybe kind of having that angle correlated with more people being willing to check it out. I really do think, though, that it was the clarity, it was the ability for people to understand on their own very quickly how the different pieces of the tool connected to feel comfortable enough to make that call so they wouldn't feel like an idiot, or they wouldn't feel they'd have to spend all day trying to just sort up with sales, getting a sales pitch on everything, they could ask more direct questions about the things they actually needed. So, that's my hypothesis, that's what I would guess. But it would be fascinating for you to have somebody on the in-house side come in. And they continue to do some really cool and innovative things, and the site's changed and grown since then, so I'm sure they'll have even more stories. Kathleen: Yeah, there's so many very, very, very smart people on that team. Joel: Mm-hmm. Kathleen: I would take any one of them as a guest. So I assume that some of the lessons that came out of that particular project, or things you have applied in other places, fast forward to today and are there certain things that you're really excited about when it comes to conversion copyrighting, or conversion rate optimization? Joel: Yeah, two things in particular. So the first is that personalization piece. With RightMessage, like I mentioned, that's becoming more possible. What I'm really fascinated by is just before, if you wanted to have different conversations with individuals, it was clunky. You had to create a whole bunch of different stuff, just even pages upon pages, and you had to really do a ton of work to try to make it happen technically. So it wasn't always possible, and I love that the bar for that is coming down. I'm really having a fun time learning more and more about how to segment and identify the differences in user groups. So, that piece, I think, is so important. It is the future of this stuff, and I'm really excited about that. For me personally, where I'm seeing the most growth for myself, this year, interestingly, I've made more off of audits and reviews than any writing. So, I still continue to offer writing, but I'm doing more and more analysis and helping companies identify what's going wrong and how they can fix it with copywriting, and UX exchanges, and things like that. So for me, what I'm excited about and continue to grow in to, it's nothing sexy, but Google Analytics. Just unpacking the power available on Google Analytics, and how to deploy that properly, and the types of things you can learn. I want to share ... I'll make it quick, but I want to share a quick story, just kind of the stuff you can learn when you're paying attention. So, I was working with a client, and I was doing a review of their site. They offer divorce packages in the UK. One of those stats we found that was fascinating to us through Google Analytics that sent up a little red flag was men converted better than women, and we know that more women initiate divorce than men. So it was kind of like, that's an oddity. Something is amiss here. So, long story short, through Google Analytics, a combination of looking at Google Analytics, the times people were actually on the site, combined with chat logs to learn what challenges were unique to women, we were able to come up with a cool hypothesis that women are in more financially vulnerable situations, they're working multiple jobs, so they want to convert in later hours, but chat was off during those hours. Kathleen: Oh, interesting. Joel: So through that, we figured out well let's test extending chat hours and see what the impact is. So, stuff like that just gets me pumped up because it's ... The amount of stuff you can learn when you're paying attention is fascinating. Kathleen: Oh, I love it. I love ... I always say I'm a marketing nerd, and I feel a sense of kinship with you on this because when I discover the little nuggets like that, it does, it gets me super excited. And I'll admit, I definitely am not as much of an expert in Google Analytics as I would like to be. I feel like every time I start to get really proficient, it's like the grocery store when they reorganize it, and then you don't know where the milk is. Joel: Right. Kathleen: Google Analytics likes to do that to us sometimes, too, but it's like an ice berg, and we kind of see the tip, but there's so much there under the surface, so much power and so much data. But I think I agree, there is so much to be learned. Joel: Totally. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: So two questions that I ask all of my guests. I want to make sure I ask you before we wrap up today. One is, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Joel: The women are crushing it. All of the people that I- Kathleen: Yes. Joel: Most admire doing this right now are all women, and they're doing brilliant jobs in really different ways. So as an individual, someone who recently came on my radar and now I'm so excited to be able to collaborate with is a woman named Val Geisler. I'm not sure how you pronounce her last name. She does email onboarding series and optimizes those. What she's done, you know, she's a one woman shop, so she doesn't have the ability to publish thousands of things, but she does such targeted, relevant content. She does these really cool email tear downs of companies people know and respect. Her candor in those, you know, she's not rude or mean, but she's also very honest and very great at exposing it. "Here's what they're doing. Here's what they could do better." So Val is doing fantastic. Claire and Gia at Forget the Funnel, so they've launched this really ... Like, they are, to me, a lot of people ... we talk about blogs, we talk about e-books, but what we don't often talk about as much is building yourself a platform, giving people a reason to want to listen to you and come to you, and see you as an authority. That's what Claire and Gia have done. Two extremely bright, very talented women, who have launched this thing, and created this avenue to get exactly the right customers that they want to work with, exactly the right sets of people to listen to what they have to say. They do these great webinars, and they do these great interviews. So those would be two examples. Then one group of fellows, I think who is doing is good, is Grow and Convert, and they're putting out some really great case studies, and really great content, and really great pieces that are helping Mark [Rozano 00:38:06] and myself just stay relevant and level up what they're doing. Kathleen: Okay, what's really cool about what you just said is those are three groups of people, places, brands, etc. that are totally new to me. I love when I get answers like that, and I have new places to check out. I'm particular interested in these email onboarding series right now, because we're revamping ours, so I will definitely be checking that one out. Second question, and I'm going to narrow it down. I usually ask people, with digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date. But I want to get a little bit more specific than that with you, because I'm intrigued that you're focused on conversion rate optimization. I want to ask you how you stay educated for yourself, and build your skills in the field of conversion rate optimization? Joel: Yeah. So there's some really important sources that I consult and I look to, just to see what they're publishing. So, Joanna Wiebe, obviously. Anytime she's publishing a case study, or puts out a course, that's relevant to me. I'm almost always going to buy it. I'm really tuned in with her, and she's got tons of free content, but even if you can find her legacy content. It's just as relevant as it was then. Conversion XL continues to publish really valuable things. So, that's been really helpful. To me, in particular, and Michael Aagaard, like I said, he's done some recent webinars and that sort of thing. Expanding beyond that though, what's been really important for me in this field, and I think anyone coming in to should know, is that it is still young, and there is so much bad information out there where's it's like we change a button color and things would- Kathleen: Yeah. Joel: You can really educate yourself the wrong way, or you can educate yourself into a corner where you're like, "Well here are the rules. And here's what worked well in this situation," and you can treat it like gospel and try to apply it everywhere. So what's been really valuable to me is I've got Mastermind, just a little group of people in the same space, and we compare notes. We talk about what's going on with each other, and what they're learning, what they're coming across. In this industry, I think in all industries, it's valuable. But in this niche in particular, being tuned into what's going on with others, and what they're learning, and the context they learn it in is really important. Then the last one I'll mention is a site called GoodUI.com. He publishes a lot of, kind of tests and examples of stuff that people are trying out. Actually, one more that I really want to mention, and I'm excited to mention because it's not going to be on hardly anybody's radar, but I guarantee it's about to be on everybody's radar- Kathleen: Ooh. Joel: There's a company called User Insights. They have launched just the best tool for user testing that I have ever seen. Small batch user testing, very targeted, way cheaper than the competition, just as good, faster, but that service aside, that's really exciting. But they are doing some very interesting stuff. They haven't launched it all yet, but they're doing some very interesting stuff with case studies and actually testing in context a lot of different things that I know people are like, "Well should I have this? Or should I have that?" They're doing a lot of that practically now with ... across multiple sites, and verifiable outcomes. So they will be on people's radar because they're doing it at a scale I don't think anybody else is yet. So, I'm learning a bit from the people running that quietly in the background, and they're about to blow up. I'm sure of it. Kathleen: I can't wait to check all of this out. I feel like that's going to keep me busy for a while. That's great. I assume that everything you've learned through all of these projects, these engagements that you've done, you are bringing to bear with Case Study Buddy to help people improve their case studies. And you have a team there, right? Joel: Yeah, so Case Study Buddy is a different kind of a venture for me. Like I said, what excites me are these content assets that are easy to get wrong, super valuable when done well, companies struggle with the process, the strategy, the ownership of it. And so I've brought kind of all this stuff I'm doing in conversion. I'm trying to bring into the elements of how do we write something that appeals to multiple different scanners and readers and user groups, and how do we educate our clients on how to use these? For example, something I learned recently that I found fascinating is lots of companies are doing cold outreach. They're sending these cold emails. I can't remember the name of the company who did this study, but they tested out what is the impact of mentioning a famous "customer", so just a known customer in these cold outreach emails. And they've tripled the number of interested responses. Kathleen: Wow. Joel: So, the power is there, and if you can imagine attaching a case study, the impact that would have. Yeah, it's a different adventure. I've gotten to build a team and work outside of myself, and all the joys and pains that come with that. Yeah, it's been really fun, and that's going to be, like I mentioned, I'm still going to be doing this conversion work and that will be my bread and butter, especially on the back half of this year, growing Case Study Buddy, and getting it in front of more people and growing that initiative is high on my priority list. Kathleen: I can't wait to see where you take it. It sounds like you're on to something here. Joel: Thank you. Kathleen: Well, I know I've had a million questions throughout this, and I've had the opportunity to have you answer many of them, but if somebody's listening, and they wanted to reach out to you and ask a question, or get more information on something you've talked about today, what's the best way for them to find you online? Joel: Yeah, so I'm very active on Twitter. I do my best to respond to everything that comes in, whether it's a DM or a Tweet, or whatever. You can find me @JoelKlettke. That's one way to get at me fast. You can also email me. You can check out my ancient and desperately-in-need-of-being-updated site at BusinessCasualCopyrighting.com. Don't judge me. I built in 2013. It's due for an upgrade, but you can email me through there. I'm happy to field questions and if there's something you're struggling with. Then surprisingly, I always kind of shun the platform, but the past two months I've gotten a ton of value out of having conversations on LinkedIn. So, another space that you can see. I publish more there, actually, these days than my own blog. I do little snippets, and pushes, and tips and tricks there. I always try to make sure I'm responding to people who come through that channel, too. Kathleen: Yeah, LinkedIn- Joel: Those are kind of the three places. Kathleen: LinkedIn's making a comeback big time. Joel: Oh, huge. Kathleen: A lot of people are mentioning that on this podcast. Joel: They went from being the platform nobody wanted to talk about, to the platform everybody's publishing on. Kathleen: Yeah. Joel: It's remarkable. Even begrudgingly, there's still the joke about wanting to connect on LinkedIn, and after the apocalypse, only those emails remain. But joke all you want, they've become a serious contender. It's amazing that that team has done. Kathleen: Definitely. I agree. Well, thank you. This has been fascinating. I've learned so much. I have a feeling I'm going to learn a lot more when I go check out all those websites you mentioned. So I really appreciate you spending the time on the podcast. If you're listening and you liked what you heard, you learned something, I'm going to ask if you would please take a moment and go on iTunes, or Stitcher, or whatever platform you choose to listen to the podcast on, and leave a review. It would mean a lot. Finally, if you know someone doing kickass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, Joel. Joel: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.

Jeff Fagnan is Founding Partner @ Accomplice, one of the East Coast's leading early-stage funds with a portfolio including the likes of AngelList, PillPack (acq by Amazon), Freshbooks, Hopper, Secret Escapes and many more incredible companies. Accomplice is also unique as it is a platform builder creating incredible initiatives such as Spearhead, Maiden Lane and Boston Syndicates, really moving the needle in seeding local ecosystems. As for Jeff he is well known as a founding investor, working with most of his portfolio since inception, sometimes as a co-founder including Veracode (Sold to CA Technologies‍). Jeff also sits on the board of AngelList, PillPack, InsightSquared, Hopper, Freshbooks and more. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Jeff made his way into the world of VC from consulting over 18 years ago? How did his experience of the bubble influence Jeff's mindset and thinking? 2.) What did Jeff learn about building an optimal venture partnership with the transition from the 23 partner Atlas to the tight-knit Accomplice? Where does Jeff believe most venture partnerships go wrong today? What does Jeff believe is the right size partnership in venture? Why does Jeff believe that partners are there to save each other from themselves? 3.) How did Jeff's experience with Atlas effect his views on portfolio construction? Why does Jeff advocate for the model of raising $200m every 2.5 years for a pure seed strategy? How does Jeff think about building an effective reserve strategy? Why does Jeff not believe pro-rata should be guaranteed? Why does Jeff believe force ranking a portfolio is dangerous? 4.) Jeff believes the best VCs are able to manage 2 things, what are those 2 things? From his 18 years on boards, what does Jeff believe makes the truly special board member? Who is the best he has worked with and why? How does Jeff look to gain the balance of being both proactive to opportunities and reactive to inbound? 5.) Accomplice has recently made it's foray into the West Coast, what was the thinking behind that move? How does Accomplice think about establishing mindshare as a new entrant in a hotly contested environment? What does Jeff believe is the key to successful geographic expansion in venture? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Jeff’s Fave Book: Where The Wild Things Are  Jeff’s Most Recent Investment: Perch As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us. Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge.  Find out more on cultureamp.com.

We are starting a new series of video/audio episodes called “Coffee With a CMO.” The idea is to have a relaxed conversation with a CMO and let the conversation take us to the real heart of things. First up is Joe Chernov, Chief Marketing Officer at InsightSquared. In this one, Joe covers a range of topics including why being a good interviewer is becoming such an important skill, the problem with common marketing metrics, and his journey from being known for his content to being known for his work with ABM. Use the promo code SEEKINGWISDOM when you get your tickets to HYPERGROWTH 2018 and save $500 today (just $199 for your ticket). Visit https://hypergrowth.drift.com/ to get your tickets today and come see speakers like Jocko Willink, Molly Graham, Chaka Pilgrim, Amelia Boone, Grant Cardone, and more in September. PS. The Seeking Wisdom Official Facebook Group is live! One place, finally, for all of us to hang out, get updates on the podcast, and share what we’re learning (plus some exclusives). Just search for the Seeking Wisdom Official group on Facebook.

Our guest this week is Fred Shilmover, Founder & CEO of InsightSquared As the CEO of InsightSquared, Fred's goal is to simplify sales analytics to help business leaders make better decisions with their data. Fred sits down with Jeffrey and Jennifer to debunk sales myths and tweak common sales approaches that may be holding you back.  If you're interested in learning more about what Fred and InsightSquared does, click here. This episode is brought to you by, Deathwish Coffee, the world's strongest coffee and the only brew we drink when we do the show. It's the only choice for the true Sell or Diehard! On today's show... 3:30 - The kind of discipline it takes to run a marathon and how it translates to business 5:29 - The idea behind InsideSquared: So easy even a CEO can use it 8:03 - The details behind "legacy sales" 11:56 - Will robots replace salespeople?? 14:51 - What are some of the major trends happening in the sales industry?   Are YOU a Sell-or-Die-Hard?

Jeff Fagnan is a founder of Accomplice and more recently Spearhead, in partnership with AngelList. Jeff is well known as a founding investor, working with most of his portfolio since inception, sometimes as a co-founder including Veracode (Sold to CA Technologies for $614M in 2017). Jeff sits on the board of many scaling startup‍‍‍s including AngelList, Carbon Black, InsightSquared, PillPack, and others. He's also the founder of Spearhead, a program that provides funding and mentorship for new angel investors; Maiden Lane, the first investment vehicle built on top of AngelList; Boston Syndicates (BOSS),a federated movement to create stronger angel substrate in New England; and TUGG (Technology Underwriting Greater Good), a nonprofit foundation harnessing the power of the tech ecosystem to catalyze social innovation in New England. In this episode, we discuss Jeff's fourteen years as a partner at Atlas Ventures in Boston, the spinout and transition to Accomplice, and the many experiments with the venture model that's run with Maiden Lane, Angellist, and now Spearhead.

Fred Shilmover, Founder and CEO at InsightSquared, joins me on this episode.

Fred Shilmover is the CEO and co-founder of InsightSquared. He has helped grow the sales intelligence company from a single spreadsheet into one of Boston's premiere tech startups. Prior to founding InsightSquared, Fred was a corporate development associate with Salesforce Ventures and before that he held several key roles at Bessemer Venture Partners including associate and Director of IT. He is a board member of TUGG, an organization that brings together tech entrepreneurs with social enterprises that support at-risk youth. Fred received his B.A. from Tufts and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is an mediocre triathlete and runner, but he tries hard. In fact, he managed to complete the last three Boston Marathons. He enjoys turning large pieces of wood into small ones. Fred is also an avid wakeboarder.

Fred Shilmover is the CEO and co-founder of InsightSquared, one of Boston’s premiere tech startups paving the way in the sales intelligence space. Throughout the InsightSquared journey, Fred has raised over $25m in VC funding from the likes of DFJ, Bessemer, Salesforce and Atlas Venture. Prior to founding InsightSquared, Fred was a corporate development associate with Salesforce Ventures and before that he held several key roles at Bessemer Venture Partners including associate and Director of IT. He is also a board member of TUGG, an organization that brings together tech entrepreneurs with social enterprises that support at-risk youth.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Fred made his way into the world of SaaS, hustled his way to being a VC with Bessemer and then came to found InsightSquared from Boston? Why does Fred strongly argue that it is easier to start with SMB and move to enterprise than enterprise down? What are both the technical and personnel considerations of the decision? Why is it the product manager’s job to lose complexity as slowly as possible? Why does Fred disagree and state that CAC/LTV is not the guiding metric for SaaS startups? What are the core problems of CAC/LTV? What alternatives should founders consider as their guiding metrics? Where does Fred believe most founders go wrong when assessing their metrics? What metric keeps Fred up at night? What does Fred believe are the fundamentals to successfully building an inside sales team from scratch? What is the lowest ACV that an inside sales team can justify? How does Fred look to create a culture of accountability and responsibility without the element of fear of not hitting quota? Why does Fred go against conventional wisdom and suggest that customer success is the responsibility of the entire organisation? Why is this advantageous compared to a dedicated CS team? How does this mean both time and teams are allocated towards customer success? 60 Second SaaStr What does Fred know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? What is the least discussed but most worthy topic in SaaS? What would Fred’s biggest advice to emerging SaaS founders be? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Fred Shilmover    

Fred Shilmover, CEO of InsightSquared, shares how he has grown the company the past 7 years by staying laser-focused and not expanding globally. It has been there since day -1, back when Fred applied for an MBA to figure out what SaaS company he wanted to create. Fred did a proper research what would be of most value to people. Eventually, he figured that to deliver the best value to customers and not have a bloated product, the focus should be only on revenue. A lucky early sale to a cohort of similar companies showed a pattern that what they were onto made sense. Fred created a prototype putting together loads of spreadsheets and gave that to his co-founders to build a product. In the first year, he made all the sales. Somewhere there Fred made the decision that sales efforts would be focused solely on The North American market. With that geographical focus, InsightSquared now has close to 1000 customers, has banked $27 million in funding and employs 130 people. In that, he is a prime example that to grow, SaaS founders have to do less. Listen to learn how he has kept his focus on: Why a CEO should do a tour of duty for all main functions How to avoid building the wrong product at the start What is the cost of defocusing How to manage your appetite when you are hungry for many things How the strategy of a company should change through its different stages If you like the episode, please leave us a review.

What if you could actually use the data your Sales Development team was producing to really improve team performance? Everyone talks about it, very few people can actually do it. Fred Shilmover has made it his mission to get the data out in the open and USABLE to you and your team. Join us as we dive into how he thought about this problem and specifically set about to solve it with his team at InsightSquared. Fred is an extremely intelligent guy so I’m hoping some of it rubbed of on me in the interview. :) #salesdevelopment #sdr Tenbound

  Our guest today is Joe Chernov. He's now the Chief Marketing Officer at @InsightSquared. He also lends a hand to startups and wildlife causes when he can. Diving right in, he says, "It's unbelievable what you can get done if you don't care if you get fired!" Talking about his experience at Eloqua, "If we were to publish something that is valuable, we could edge our way into deeper coverage by the media."  Scorecard - even though we're not supposed to keep score:  16 articles after spending 2 years developing a product and writing up the release. An infographic got 800 articles. Very eye-opening. Joe says, "Content marketing is what happens when a marketing department shifts its thinking from knowing that the company that signs their paychecks needs to shift to the customer signs the paycheck." That shift in mindset turned collateral into an ebook, a self-serving whitepaper into a more valuable, lengthy piece of content.     Point: The opportunity to leverage the correct content through the active sales process:   Best content ideas come from your sales people. Conversations with sales will be the source of the best ideas.  Example: They publish a issue of their "blog" once a month that includes a recap of 4-5 articles on similar content. Each month has a new theme which helps to focus the articles on that topic.    He's talking about a sales team creating an editorial calendar. You heard Matt right.   Point: Personas as a driving force for effective content.   Personas help reduce the size of your universe so that as a writer or content creator, your writing universe is smaller which helps guide the writing and allow it to be less daunting.  But, he cautions against being way too specific with a persona. "Susie Seller" is just a role in an organization. We don't need to know which college she attended or coffee brand she prefers, unless you are selling coffee.   People have a hard time comparing their content metrics to their business metrics.   The very best way to shine a light on the value of your content is to look at lead quality. Your lead or transactional content success could be measured by downloads, subscribers. These are higher value than typical leads.  You want to know did they close? Did they move deeper into the funnel than other sources? Lead Quality tops the list for this comparison and measurment.   Favorite KISS song and why: Deuce. Gene Simmons wrote it on a bus. It's about absolutely nothing.    -----------------------     Even though this is a replay, it's timely as it mentions the upcoming Dreamforce. Matt will be presenting 5 minute walk from Moscone. Take a break:     You Can't Buy a Beer With a Hashtag: How to Translate #ABM Into Execution, Pipeline & Closed Deals - Matt Heinz Champion your way through Dreamforce –visit the B2B Champions Club! Need to step away from all the noise at Dreamforce? Look no further. Come to the B2B Champions Club – just a 5 minute walk from Moscone Center. Hear industry leading speakers as well as relax, recharge and network. Sign up to reserve your spot! Stop by anytime throughout the week for: 20+ sessions by top B2B Sales and Marketing Leaders Networking alongside industry leading peers during breakfast, lunch, and happy hours Live streaming of Marc Benioff keynote Register for the #B2BChampionsClub today!

Rob Biederman’s co-founded Catalant (formerly HourlyNerd) while getting his MBA at HBS as a requirement to for his Field III Course. They started by going to small businesses surrounding the campus and asking what problems they were facing and how they could help. MBA students from surrounding schools would then carry out the work needed for the small businesses. Today, Catalant has over 28,000 experts on their platform and has completed projects for small companies and enterprises such as GE. Companies turn to Catalant when they have a project they need completed but don’t have experts in-house capable of completing the work. Catalant experts cost a fraction of hiring a top tier consulting firm because they remove resources who aren’t necessary in solving the problems the company is facing and only include resources that are necessary for your need.   In this episode, Rob talks about:   How freelancers on the platform are vetted   How freelancers on the platform can stand out   What drove the decision to rebrand from HourlyNerd to Catalant   The difficulties with building a two-sided marketplace   Why he decided to continue working on the company after graduating from HBS   How he sees the gig economy affecting the overall job marketplace in years to come   How they were able to get Mark Cuban as an investor   Links from today’s episode:   Bain   BCG   Behance   Uber   Lyft   Postmates   UpWork   GoDaddy   InsightSquared   Kuvee   Slack   Sonos   Zero to One   The Hard Thing About Hard Things   Sales Acceleration Formula   The Challenger Sale   If you liked this episode:   Follow the podcast on Twitter   Subscribe on iTunes or your podcast app and write a review   Get in touch with feedback, ideas, or to say hi: nic {AT} startupbostonpodcast [DOT] com   Music by: Broke For Free

In today’s episode, I interview Bettina Hein, founder & CEO of Pixability, a software platform that helps brands and their agencies place video advertising on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Bettina’s first company, SVOX, which worked on text to speech, was sold to Nuance and that technology can be found on mobile phones and cars today. Bettina was born in Berlin, attended college in Switzerland, and moved to Cambridge to become a Sloan Fellow at MIT. It was then that Bettina started Pixability at the Cambridge Innovation Center after identifying the major shift underway in the video industry.   In this episode, Bettina shares amongst other things:                 Pixability’s shift from a B2C company to B2B                 The sea change happening in the consumption of media                 Why online advertising is still undervalued                 The three big mistakes that most advertisers make                 How Bettina sees video advertising changing over the next five to ten years                 The three things you need to be a successful entrepreneur                 How she manages a company with multiple offices around the world Links from this episode:                 Clayton Christensen                 Vimeo                 metacafé                 Dailymotion                 Snapchat                 Amazon Instant Video                 SNOW                 WeChat                 Pinterest                 WhatsApp                 Tinder                 Twitch                 DataXu                 nToggle                 Adelphic                 nanigans                 Hulu                 Netflix                 Slack                 Google Hangouts                 Trattoria Il Panino                 Mama Maria                 InsightSquared                 Buildium                 Localytics                 Happie                 Thinking Fast and Slow                 The Power of Habit                 Crime and Punishment                 The Green Brothers                 Casey Neistat                 CaseyNeistat.video                 Kid President                 SoulPancake                 Pixability on Twitter                 Pixability on Facebook                 Pixability on Youtube                 She-E-Os   If you liked this episode: Follow the podcast on Twitter Subscribe on iTunes or your podcast app and write a review Get in touch with feedback, ideas, or to say hi: nic {AT} startupbostonpodcast [DOT] com

Our guest today is Joe Chernov. He's VP of Marketing @InsightSquared. He also lends a hand to startups and wildlife causes when he can. Diving right in, he says, "It's unbelievable what you can get done if you don't care if you get fired!" Talking about his experience at Eloqua, "If we were to publish something that is valuable, we could edge our way into deeper coverage by the media."  Scorecard - even though we're not supposed to keep score:  16 articles after spending 2 years developing a product and writing up the release. An infographic got 800 articles. Very eye-opening. Joe says, "Content marketing is what happens when a marketing department shifts its thinking from knowing that the company that signs their paychecks needs to shift to the customer signs the paycheck." That shift in mindset turned collateral into an ebook, a self-serving whitepaper into a more valuable, lengthy piece of content. Shifting strategies from serving the executive to serving the buyer changes everything. Q. Is there a concern we are flooding the world with content so much so that it will no longer work at some point? A. There is more content marketing happening which makes it more and more difficult for signals to be heard, but that's only the surface. 50% of a company's content never gets used. It puts more pressure on originality. We've rested on our laurels a bit.  Definitive guides, whitepapers - been done years ago by the industry leaders. Q. What are the ways you distinguishing your efforts at InsightSquared to stand out? A. Trying to apply some of the ethos that makes good content marketing - serving the BUYER. Applying it to direct mail. Rather than a coffee mug or t-shirt with logo on it. Something more original. If we close loosely - demo, in funnel - we try to accelerate them coming back. Postcard: Come Running Back - link on back to enter your shoe size. Gets them a pair of Nikes WITHOUT logo. The deal isn't done.  Think creatively. Be memorable. Keep the conversation, interest and value going. Hear more solutions, reveals and ideas in the full replay. Get to know our guest, Joe, a bit better. TWITTER | LINKEDIN

Adam von Reyn is the VP of Growth Marketing and Joe Chernov is the VP of Marketing at InsightSquared. In today's episode, we discuss how companies should allocate account-based vs. inbound marketing to their overall strategy, how content marketing for ABM has evolved, the FlipMyFunnel Festival, and more!

Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared, joins the podcast to discuss horizontal content integration, measuring the value of enablement content, and helping companies find their balance between pure inbound marketing and ABM.   Special thanks to our sponsors: InboundWriter Oracle Marketing Cloud Uberflip   In This Episode: How to flip content marketing from vertical function to horizontal function How to provide quality content for all stages of the funnel and convince your superiors to support it Working with sales reps for better use of enablement content Finding balance between pure ABM and pure inbound marketing for mid-sized companies Finding balance between quantity and quality in content marketing Redefining content success with the rise of the ABM model   Resources: Joe Chernov's Twitter InsightSquared Datafox Infer   Visit ContentProsPodcast.com for more insights from your favorite content marketers.  

Fred Shilmover, InsightSquared -- In Traction's first-ever episode, NextView's VP of platform Jay Acunzo briefly explains the concept behind the show - to share the stories of the creative, unusual, and brilliant ways entrepreneurs scrap their way to early results. Then, Jay and co-founding partner Rob Go hear the seed-stage story of InsightSquared, a successful SaaS startup that's exploded in Boston, all based on a smart-yet-sneaky tactic used by co-founder and CEO Fred Shilmover before he had any capital, co-founders, or even software. If you like the show and want more episodes and related content, subscribe at ViewFromSeed.com. You'll receive new episodes of Traction as soon as they're available, along with more stories, resources, and advice for seed-stage startups from entrepreneurs, VCs, and industry experts. Let me know what you think of the show -- tweet me (Jay Acunzo) @Jay_zo

Joe CaprioofInsightSquaredjoined us in the studio this week to record another episode of theBowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast: “Must-Have CRM Fields For Data-Driven Sales Teams.” There are certain data points every sales team knows to track from day one, whether you useSalesforce,Zoho,Sugar,Insightlyor even if youdon’t have a CRM yet: accounts, deal sizes, owner, etc. But there are a range of other less well-known data points that data-driven sales teams have found to be useful in optimizing their sales funnels. Whether your goal is measuring the quality of your leads on likelihood to convert, understanding what your ideal customer profile looks like, or streamlining your inside sales outreach process, it’s important to track the right data early on; you can’t fix something properly if you don’t know why it’s broken.In our podcast today, Joe walks us through the top 6 CRM fields that he feels have really allowed his org to streamline its sales funnel, highlighting a few that are less commonplace.

Joe CaprioofInsightSquaredjoined us in the studio this week to record another episode of theBowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast: “Must-Have CRM Fields For Data-Driven Sales Teams.” There are certain data points every sales team knows to track from day one, whether you useSalesforce,Zoho,Sugar,Insightlyor even if youdon’t have a CRM yet: accounts, deal sizes, owner, etc. But there are a range of other less well-known data points that data-driven sales teams have found to be useful in optimizing their sales funnels. Whether your goal is measuring the quality of your leads on likelihood to convert, understanding what your ideal customer profile looks like, or streamlining your inside sales outreach process, it’s important to track the right data early on; you can’t fix something properly if you don’t know why it’s broken.In our podcast today, Joe walks us through the top 6 CRM fields that he feels have really allowed his org to streamline its sales funnel, highlighting a few that are less commonplace.

Gareth Goh is the Content Marketing Manager at InsightSquared, an analytics generation company for growing businesses. Academically, he hails from Boston University with a degree in Journalism, but as he saw the evolution towards content emphasis, his employment started focusing on content marketing. With a varied background in both journalism and content marketing, he is an experienced veteran of inbound marketing, SEO, and business intelligence. Gareth recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss content marketing on social media. “There is a great deal of opportunity to be more effective, be more efficient, and be both!” Gareth discusses tips for effective content marketing in social media: Invest in marketing. Disseminate complicated topics. Utilize C-level business partners. Use GaggleAMP to extend your reach. Know when to grow your team.

Joe Chernov is CMO at Robin, and before that served in the same role at InsightSquared, and was VP of Content at HubSpot and Eloqua. He's often referred to as one of the most influential content marketers in B2B, and on this episode of the Swipe File, DG and Joe talk about micromanaging versus empowerment, why interviewing is an overlooked skill (for marketing), why having no metric is better than having the wrong one, career transitions to serve the business, and why hiring is the only thing that matters.