POPULARITY
3 episodes with mark organ
2 episodes with mark organ
2 episodes with mark organ
2 episodes with mark organ
2 episodes with mark organ
2 episodes with mark organ
2 episodes with mark organ
2 episodes with mark organ
2 episodes with mark organ
In this episode, we talk with Mark Organ, who created not one, but two software categories: marketing automation at Eloqua and advocate marketing at Influitive. These days, he coaches founders through the highs and lows of category creation at Categorynauts — and he specializes in deeply insightful and contrarian takes. Mark explores the evolving landscape of AI and its potential impact on business and technology. Organ projects how AI will further transform software development, scientific research, and industry strategies. He offers a nuanced perspective on technological innovation, highlighting the importance of human insight alongside machine capabilities. With a focus on practical applications and future trends, Organ provides listeners with a strategic view of how AI could reshape product development, market creation, and professional skills. His key quote, "I'm excited about the next wave of software that really could not exist without AI," encapsulates the episode's forward-looking approach to technological innovation.About Mark Mark OrganCEO Coach at Categorynauts, Founding CEO of Influitive and Eloqua. Author of WSJ and Amazon best-seller The Messenger is the Message, and Co-Host of The Best Half Showhttps://www.categorynauts.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/markorgan
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 35. Habakkuk 1-2: Trusting in the Lord Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 7/25/2021 Bible: Habakkuk 1-2 Length: 36 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 35. Habakkuk 1-2: Trusting in the Lord Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 7/25/2021 Bible: Habakkuk 1-2 Length: 36 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 30. Amos 7-9: Judgement and Restoration Through Christ Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 6/27/2021 Bible: Amos 7-9 Length: 48 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 26. Ezekiel 34: Jesus is the Good Shepherd Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/23/2021 Bible: Ezekiel 34 Length: 43 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 26. Ezekiel 34: Jesus is the Good Shepherd Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/23/2021 Bible: Ezekiel 34 Length: 43 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 07. Judges 3: Needed Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 7/17/2022 Bible: Judges 3 Length: 46 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 07. Judges 3: Needed Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 7/17/2022 Bible: Judges 3 Length: 46 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 07. Judges 3: Needed Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 7/17/2022 Bible: Judges 3 Length: 46 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 65. Jude 21-25: Keep Yourselves In the Love of God Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 6/2/2024 Bible: Jude 21-25 Length: 48 min.
Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Could customer marketing be the secret weapon your B2B SaaS company needs to thrive in today's noisy marketplace? Join us for a compelling conversation with Mark Organ, the CEO of Categorynauts and the brilliant mind behind Influitive and Eloqua, as we uncover the pivotal role of customer marketing. Mark reveals why marketing to existing customers for upsell, cross-sell, and retention, as well as leveraging their advocacy to attract new prospects, is becoming increasingly crucial. Despite its importance, many organizations still favor new logo acquisition. We tackle the organizational challenges that hinder customer marketing efforts, including the lack of alignment between customer success, sales, marketing, and product teams.We dive deep into how marketing operations can amplify customer advocacy through effective collaboration. Discover the strategies that marketing and customer success teams can use to identify and empower potential customer advocates, even those who may not be entirely satisfied with the product. Mark shares insights into utilizing data from various platforms and communities to enhance advocacy efforts. We explore the potential of centralizing operations under a revenue operations (RevOps) function to harmonize goals across marketing, sales, and customer success teams, thereby boosting overall company performance.Cross-departmental collaboration is key to success, especially in coordinating design efforts across product and marketing teams. We introduce practical tools like the broken importance matrix for prioritizing process improvements and highlight the critical role of the kickoff process for new accounts in reducing churn and fostering growth. Mark offers valuable advice for marketing ops professionals aiming to elevate their careers, emphasizing the importance of empathy, collaboration, and understanding the language of sales and engineering. As we wrap up, we express our appreciation for marketing ops professionals and invite our audience to share their ideas, feedback, and guest suggestions, ensuring our content remains relevant and engaging.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals We've been HACKED! (just kidding)If you love our show, you gotta be sure to tune into Justin Norris' show: RevOps FMSupport the Show.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 48. Galatians 3:1-14 Law or Faith: Believing God, Receiving Righteousness Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/26/2024 Bible: Galatians 3:1-14 Length: 40 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 48. Galatians 3:1-14 Law or Faith: Believing God, Receiving Righteousness Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/26/2024 Bible: Galatians 3:1-14 Length: 40 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 47. 2nd Corinthians 1:1-11 A Message of Comfort Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/12/2024 Bible: 2 Corinthians 1:1-11 Length: 48 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 47. 2nd Corinthians 1:1-11 A Message of Comfort Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/12/2024 Bible: 2 Corinthians 1:1-11 Length: 48 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 51. Philippians 4: When My Anxious Thoughts Multiply Within Me Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/19/2024 Bible: Philippians 4:4-9 Length: 45 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 45. Traveling Along The Romans Road Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/24/2024 Length: 32 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 45. Traveling Along The Romans Road Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/24/2024 Length: 32 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 45. Traveling Along The Romans Road Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/24/2024 Length: 32 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 45. Traveling Along The Romans Road Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/24/2024 Length: 32 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 42. Luke 19:28-48 Palm Sunday Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 3/24/2024 Bible: Luke 19:28-48 Length: 47 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 46. 1st Corinthians 1:10 The Unity of the Body of Christ Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/11/2024 Bible: 1 Corinthians 1:10 Length: 41 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 46. 1st Corinthians 1:10 The Unity of the Body of Christ Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/11/2024 Bible: 1 Corinthians 1:10 Length: 41 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 46. 1st Corinthians 1:10 The Unity of the Body of Christ Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/11/2024 Bible: 1 Corinthians 1:10 Length: 41 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 46. 1st Corinthians 13: Got Agape Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/18/2024 Bible: 1 Corinthians 13 Length: 43 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 59. James 5:12 First Things First Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/25/2024 Bible: James 5:12 Length: 37 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 46. 1st Corinthians 13: Got Agape Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/18/2024 Bible: 1 Corinthians 13 Length: 43 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 59. James 5:12 First Things First Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/25/2024 Bible: James 5:12 Length: 37 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 46. 1st Corinthians 13: Got Agape Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/18/2024 Bible: 1 Corinthians 13 Length: 43 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 46. 1st Corinthians 13: Got Agape Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/18/2024 Bible: 1 Corinthians 13 Length: 43 min.
Many entrepreneurs dream of creating categories. But few have actually done it - much less built a category worth billions of dollars. Mark Organ is one of those rare few. As founding CEO of Eloqua, he pioneered marketing automation in the early 2000s, paving the way for other players and selling to Oracle for nearly $900 million. Mark and I chat through how he co-founded Eloqua, the pivots and experiments needed to achieve product-market fit, and how category creators may be wired a bit differently. Thanks to Our SponsorMany thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak. If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform. You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that's slick, modern and beautiful. When they're done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button. What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it's got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners. Try Knak About Today's Guest Mark Organ is the founding CEO of Eloqua (the first successful marketing automation platform) and Influitive. His greatest professional passions include creating new billion-dollar categories in technology and developing new leaders. Today he helps CEOs achieve their full potential in their businesses and their lives as the CEO of Categorynauts.https://www.linkedin.com/in/markorgan/Key Topics[00:00] - Introduction[01:05] - Founding Eloqua and marketing automation[07:47] - Origin of the lead generation playbook[10:39] - Getting to product-market fit[16:03] - Genesis of lead scoring[19:08] - Toolkit software vs. opinionated software[24:25] - Pivots and brushes with death are the norm[27:09] - When is it right to build a category?[30:14] - Building a category around an under-served hero[33:51] - Creating a category for the second time[36:42] - Challenges with churn at Influitive[41:05] - Alternatives to VC funding in SaaSResource LinksCategorynauts - Categorynauts is the leading global community of category creating leaders, helping CEOs looking to discover, develop and dominate their category. Learn MoreVisit the RevOps FM Substack for our weekly newsletter: Newsletter
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 26. Ezekiel 18: Accountability, Insufficiency and Assurance Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 11/5/2023 Bible: Ezekiel 18 Length: 44 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 26. Ezekiel 18: Accountability, Insufficiency and Assurance Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 11/5/2023 Bible: Ezekiel 18 Length: 44 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 26. Ezekiel 18: Accountability, Insufficiency and Assurance Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 11/5/2023 Bible: Ezekiel 18 Length: 44 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 38. Zechariah 3: Cleansed Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 12/23/2023 Bible: Zechariah 3 Length: 45 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 43. John 6: O Come! Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 12/17/2023 Bible: John 6 Length: 17 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 37. Haggai 1: Seek First Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 12/10/2023 Bible: Haggai 1 Length: 40 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 29. Joel 2: Call on Yahweh Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/14/2023 Bible: Joel 2:25-32 Length: 46 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 18. Job 32: Elihu - Speaking the Truth in Love Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 3/5/2023 Bible: Job 32 Length: 46 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 14. 2nd Chronicles 20: The Battle is Not Yours Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 10/9/2022 Bible: 2 Chronicles 20 Length: 49 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 08. Ruth 1-2: What is Biblical Womanhood? Pt I Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 7/31/2022 Bible: Ruth 1-2 Length: 36 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 08. Ruth 1-2: What is Biblical Womanhood? Pt I Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 7/31/2022 Bible: Ruth 1-2 Length: 36 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 40. Matthew 21: Behold Your King is Coming! Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 4/10/2022 Bible: Matthew 21 Length: 38 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 09. 1st Samuel 1: What is Biblical Womanhood? Pt II Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 8/7/2022 Bible: 1 Samuel 1 Length: 35 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 03. Leviticus 20: Yahweh is the God Who Sanctifies Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/22/2022 Bible: Leviticus 20 Length: 52 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 04. Numbers 16: Rebellion and Remembrance Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 6/5/2022 Bible: Numbers 16 Length: 52 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 04. Numbers 16: Rebellion and Remembrance Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 6/5/2022 Bible: Numbers 16 Length: 52 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 04. Numbers 16: Rebellion and Remembrance Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 6/5/2022 Bible: Numbers 16 Length: 52 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 03. Leviticus 20: Yahweh is the God Who Sanctifies Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/22/2022 Bible: Leviticus 20 Length: 52 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 04. Numbers 11: Complaining Contains the Seeds of Rebellion Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/29/2022 Length: 42 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 02. Exodus 12: The Passover is for Yahweh Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 4/3/2022 Bible: Exodus 12 Length: 37 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 01. Genesis 3: The Word of God Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/6/2022 Bible: Genesis 3 Length: 40 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Untitled Sermon Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 10/11/2022 Bible: Genesis 2 Length: 31 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Untitled Sermon Subtitle: The Bible in 2022-2024 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 10/11/2022 Bible: Genesis 2 Length: 31 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Joshua 5: Jesus as Savior and Judge Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/21/2021 Bible: Joshua 5-7 Length: 45 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Deuteronomy 18: Jesus, the Revelation of God Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/7/2021 Bible: Deuteronomy 18 Length: 35 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Joshua 5: Jesus as Savior and Judge Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/21/2021 Bible: Joshua 5-7 Length: 45 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Joshua 5: Jesus as Savior and Judge Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/21/2021 Bible: Joshua 5-7 Length: 45 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Joshua 5: Jesus as Savior and Judge Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 2/21/2021 Bible: Joshua 5-7 Length: 45 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Exodus 12: Jesus Our Passover Lamb Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 1/17/2021 Bible: Exodus 12 Length: 36 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Leviticus 16: Jesus Our Holy Atonement Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 1/24/2021 Bible: Leviticus 16 Length: 40 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Exodus 12: Jesus Our Passover Lamb Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 1/17/2021 Bible: Exodus 12 Length: 36 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Numbers 20-21: Keeping Our Eyes on Christ Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 1/31/2021 Bible: Numbers 20-21 Length: 34 min.
A new MP3 sermon from Nehalem Valley Bible Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Genesis: Behold the Lamb of God Subtitle: The Bible in 2021 Speaker: Mark Organ Broadcaster: Nehalem Valley Bible Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 1/10/2021 Bible: Genesis 3-22 Length: 33 min.
You may or may not be someone who understands all the specific intricacies of marketing automation, but, no matter who you are, you're surely someone who's impacted by it. As the Internet has grown into the foundation of modern society, the marketing automation industry has become one of the biggest and most successful beneficiaries. And one of the companies leading the marketing automation revolution was Eloqua.Eloqua, along with its founder, Mark Organ, helped usher in the age of SaaS business models while supercharging the marketing processes for thousands of companies around the world. It was so successful, in fact, that Oracle acquired it for more than $800 million, and it's now the backbone of their marketing platform.But Eloqua's success wasn't quick or easy. Mark shares the unique story in this episode of Web Masters.For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.
April Dunford has advised countless companies, from startups to scale ups, on positioning their products and she details all of it in her book Obviously Awesome. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, positioning expert April Dunford breaks down the process she's used to develop positioning that helps her clients stand out and win customers. April has a long history as a startup marketer, having worked as VP of Marketing for a number of technology startups. It was that experience that taught her the importance of getting positioning right before investing heavily in the development of a lead gen engine. Today, she works exclusively as a positioning expert and has documented her approach in the book Obviously Awesome. Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to learn exactly how April approaches the development of positioning for the companies she advises. Resources from this episode: Visit Aprildunford.com Follow April on Twitter at @Aprildunford Buy your copy of Obviously Awesome Transcript Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is April Dunford who is the author of Obviously Awesome. Welcome to the podcast April. April (00:57): Oh, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Kathleen (00:59): I am so excited to have you here. True confession, I have been a fan girl for a long time. I saw you speak at HubSpot's Inbound conference a really long time ago. It was a really long time ago. And at the time I owned a marketing agency and you talked about positioning and I sat through your session and like the light bulbs were going off in my head and I was like, somehow or another she just made a very complicated topic, incredibly straightforward. And now I'm going to use this approach with all of the positioning exercises I do. So if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then, then I've flattered you tremendously for a very long time now. April (01:44): Well, that's cool because, you know, back then I was in the early days of working through how to teach this stuff. So you would've gotten the money first version of this on like, you know, unlike the version I'm doing now, which has a lot more polish on it than it did back then. But yeah, that's, that's neat to hear that. Kathleen (02:03): And, and, you know, it's funny because the reason I started this podcast was that I used to go to a ton of marketing conferences and, and I would go to these sessions by the so-called experts and you know, all excited to learn stuff. And I would feel when I left the session, like they had done a good job of getting me charged up about why I should care about their topic, but not really leave me with enough to go and do anything about it. And so I was like, I'm going to interview people and actually leave listeners with enough information to go do something. And that's what I felt you did in your session, which is why I think I liked it so much. So I will stop now fawning all over you. And what I would just ask is maybe you could talk a little bit about who you are and what you do. So for anyone who isn't as familiar with your work as I am and explain maybe a little bit about Obviously awesome. April (02:56): So this has been kind a long road for me. I spent the first 25 years of my career being a repeat vice president of marketing at a series of startups. I think I did seven of them. Six of those startups got acquired. About four or five years ago I decided to switch gears and move to being a consultant now. And that's what I do now. I only do positioning work. I don't do messaging. I don't do lead generation campaigns. I know there's, there's a laundry list of things that I don't do. And the only thing on the list of the things that I do do is positioning. I work mainly with tech companies, mainly with kind of growth stage startups and and yeah, positioning is my bag. The book is, is kind of my attempt to take my framework and methodology for positioning and write it down so that anybody can use it. Kathleen (03:53): Yeah. And it's a great book. I got my copy as soon as it came out and because I do love what you do so much. And I think the reason that I, that I appreciate your work so much is that I'm sort of like who you were before you went out on your own. I am a serial startup VP of marketing. And so every place I go very often I'm the first like true marketing leader they've brought on. And so there's always this exercise of molding the raw clay and trying to help them figure out how to present themselves to the market. So it is a really helpful framework. I want to just start out by actually talking just for a minute about why positioning is so important, because I do think that there are a lot of marketers who come in and they focus so much on demand gen and they, they think of demand gen a little bit too narrowly as lead generation, but there's so much more to it. So what's, what is your take on that? April (04:44): Yeah. You would know this because what you're doing now is very similar to what I used to do, but like you, you come in as the new VP marketing and, and here's the thing, what everyone wants is demand gen, right? So they're like, get me the lead, fill the pipeline leads, build the pipeline, get going. And what you learn from doing that job a bunch is that you're like, okay, I'm happy to go and build you lead generation campaigns, but there are a set of questions you're going to have to answer for me first. So question number one, who do we compete with? Even that question? Yeah, that question. A lot of the companies I worked for there, you know, they'd say, Oh, well, we compete with this, this, this, and then you go fast. The head of sales, head of sales says something different. April (05:31): Had a product, says something different. Founder says something different, somebody over in customer success, something different. And you're like, Oh, so we don't really know. And then it was like, well, who do we compete with? How are we different? What's the differentiated value that we can deliver for customers? Oh, by the way, who are these customers? Like? What is the profile of the ideal customer we're trying to go after? What is the market we intend to win? If we cannot answer these questions and clearly I can't build you good lead generation. These are the fundamental inputs. And so, you know, if I don't solve that first, then what I've got is, you know, mushy garbage coming in, mushy garbage is all you're going to get coming out. So if we really want to do lead generation, well, we needed to be focused and targeted around. April (06:24): You know, we need to focus it on the folks that we're trying to get to. We need the messaging and everything that we're doing inside of those lead gen programs really resonate for those folks, which means we need to understand how we're differentiated, how we're better than the actual alternatives. And so if you don't have that, then you know, all the great marketing, tactical execution is going to save you, right. You can be doing perfect tactical execution, but if you're a little mushy on who you're going after and a little mushy on what you're going to say, once you get them kind of, doesn't matter if you keep foundation Kathleen (06:59): Yourself effectively, and if you're not differentiated in the minds of your prospective customers, then the only thing you have left to compete on is price, right. You know, become commoditized, which is a terrible position to be in. April (07:16): And prices, you know, people don't realize it's hard to even compete on price, right? Like everybody can drop the price, right. Well-funded startup up the street, they don't care if they make any money on, on customer acquisition. They've got VCs with deep pockets that are going to pay them for that. Let's drop the price to zero. Well that sometimes you've got big companies you're competing with and they can just include everything in the thing. Because they're going to get the money out of you later with something else so they can drop it to nothing. Like even competing on prices is not easy. Kathleen (07:47): Yeah. That's so true. And it's just a race to the bottom anyway. So race to the bottom. So positioning, it's a big topic. I think it feels intimidating for a lot of marketers because it feels like, you know, it seems like these days in marketing, there's the science side of marketing like the performance marketing and then there's the quote unquote dark arts, right? Like, do you have to be, you know do you have to be like a creative genius to come up with great positioning, great branding whether that be visual or otherwise, but you, what I liked about your approaches that you took, what some people consider to be a dark art and you made it more like scientific, which is so great. April (08:33): And you know, I have an engineering background and so, you know, when I approached positioning, I was a bit like this can't we can't just be making this stuff up. Right. It's gotta come from somewhere. And, and that was kind of my driving thing at the beginning, when I was trying to figure out how to do positioning, I was like, it's funny. We have this concept positioning everybody in marketing and about, it seems like it's super foundational, but when I ask people, how do we actually do it? I get a lot of this like art department stuff. Kathleen (09:07): Don Draper came in and invented a creative position April (09:12): And that just didn't sit with me and my little engineering brain. I was like, that can't be how we do it. That can't be how we do it. And so I got really obsessed with the idea that, you know, we, we should be able to have a methodology with this with steps, right? Here are the steps we're going to go through. And so, you know, my way of thinking about it at the beginning was, you know, if we look at positioning, can we break it apart into pieces and then solve for the component pieces and then put it back together. And then we get the positioning. And it seemed to me that we could, because, you know, if you read all the stuff on positioning, we didn't argue too much about what the components were. And so the components of positioning, you know, even, even when I started out and all I knew was a positioning statement as a way to get positioning done. April (10:01): The blanks on the positioning statement are essentially what we, what we agree are the components of positioning. And so there's five things. There's, who's your competition or competitive alternatives. There's differentiated features. What do you got the competitors don't have, there's differentiated values of, so what for customers, why do they care about those features? And then there's customer segments. Like what customers are we talking about? And then the last one is market category, which is, this is the market we intend to win. And so the way I looked at it was all right, we've got five components. We should be able to figure out what the best answer is for each of these components, smash it together. And that's how we're going to get good positioning. And when you Kathleen (10:40): Talk about the five components, you're referring to what I like to call. I think the marketing Madlibs, that famous kind of like positioning statement with the, with the fill in the blanks that you see everywhere, April (10:52): The dumbest thing ever. Yeah, yeah. Like that, like that thing just drove me crazy. Like, you know, and again, maybe it's just my engineering mindset. Like people are like, okay, we need to do positioning. And I'm like, all right, how are we going to do it? And they say, well, we've got this thing. And it's like, fill in this thing. And I'm like, what? Wait, like, you know, the first company I ever worked at, we had this product that it was originally positioned as desktop productivity software is going to be like compete with Excel and Microsoft access. And it was a loser. Like we couldn't sell any of it. The thing was a dog. We almost pulled the plug on it, but before we did, we did this experimental repositioning, and we repositioned it as an embeddable database for mobile devices, pretty different market category. April (11:39): So we repositioned as this thing. And the thing took off and we sold tons of it and it was super successful. We ended up getting acquired. The thing got bigger and bigger and bigger. It was hundreds of millions of revenue at its peak. Anyway, this taught me that, you know, I've got a product that positioned in this market looks pretty bad, but you take the same product position in this market looks pretty good. But the other thing it drove home was, okay if I'm supposed to do positioning by filling in the blanks of a positioning statement well, one of those blanks says market category. So how do I know that my thing is better in this category versus this category? Because as far as I can tell most of the things I worked on and they can be positioned in multiple different categories. So just writing it down, doesn't tell me which one is the best. So how do we get to that? Kathleen (12:31): I always also hated that. And it's funny because a lot of the analyst firms are big proponents of that fill in the blank framework. If you use that, your positioning statement is going to sound like everybody else's right? April (12:48): That's what I think is so dangerous about it, right? It's not even just a useless exercise. And in my opinion, it's pretty useless exercise, but it's also kind of dangerous because it tricks you into thinking, well, if this is the way we do it, and all I have to do is write down the market category. Well, the most obvious one or the first one that pops into my mind must be the best one. And in my experience in quite often, that is not true. So quite often the root of your positioning problem is because you're falling into some kind of default positioning. And that default positioning is actually weak and therefore everything else is everything else is hurting as a result. And so that positioning statement exercise has really, really bugged me. You know, first came across that I was like, like this, not only does this not work, I think this will actually mess you up if you do it. Kathleen (13:45): Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. And it's really interesting to have this conversation at a time when so many marketers are also out there trumpeting this notion of category creation, because like, if you want it to be, and I have mixed feelings about that, I'll just copy cat it. But if you want it to be a category creator and you went to try and fill out that positioning statement, like, again, by definition, you're putting yourself in somebody else's category. So it's cool. April (14:10): Let's say you're a category creator, and you've just decided, okay, my category I create is floop flummer. And I just write that down in the, in the blank, that's it? We're done. Kathleen (14:20): Yeah. That makes sense. Right? April (14:24): What I hate about it is it's not a methodology. It's a, it's a, it's a, at best, a way to write down positioning and not even very good way to capture it. Really. If you wanted to capture it in a way to share it with the team, you wouldn't be putting it into this gobbledygook Frankenstein statement of pseudo English. You would actually want to write it down in a document or something that captured some of the nuance of how did you actually get to where you got to on this. But yeah, no positioning statement, not a fan. Kathleen (14:54): We could hate on that all day and probably do an entire podcast on it because I feel the same way, but that would not leave our listeners with anything practical. So, so I love that you approach this with an engineering mindset. It, now that you've said that it totally explains the whole thing and like, why, why I'm so drawn to it. So you've in your book, you break the process down into 10 steps. Maybe you could like walk me through how this works because it's very, April (15:23): So I, I can give you, I could give you the abridged version of it. Kathleen (15:27): Because there is an entire book on this. April (15:29): Right. So the, so if you think about it this way, like, so my starting point was, okay, I know that positioning statement is not going to work. Right. And I, I know from trying it, it doesn't work. So again, could we take positioning, break it into component pieces and then figure out how to solve for the component pieces. That was my first idea. So I was like, okay, do I know what the pieces are? Well, kind of, yeah, there, the blanks and the positioning statement. Now, if you go studying positioning statements, there's lots of different versions. And so I, you know, I did the tour through all the different versions, but we kind of circle around these five components, right? So competitors differentiated features, differentiated value, customer segments and market category. Those are the five things. So then I said, okay, all I've got to do is solve for each of those things. April (16:18): So when it's the best answer for each of those things and put it together, but when you start thinking about it, that way, the first thing you realize is that all of the components have a relationship to the others. So if I pull something out, like let's say value, the unique value add your product can deliver to costumers is completely dependent on your differentiated features, right? You can't, I can't separate those two, one flows from the other, but then I, if I think about it, my differentiated features are only differentiated when I compare them to my competition. So those things are related. And then if I think about it, my best fit customers, these are the people that care the most about the value that I deliver. So I, you know, I can't pick one without the other. And then the last bit is market category, which is a little bit more esoteric. April (17:09): But if you think about it, the best market category for a given product, this is the category that we position our product in, that makes this value kind of obvious to these people we're trying to target. So I can't really figure out my best market category until I understand differentiated value in the market segment I'm going after. So all of these things are going to relate to each other. So you're like, well, this is a bit of a pickle. Kathleen (17:36): It's very chicken and eggy. April (17:37): Right? Like where do I start? And so for a long time, I thought that the way you did it was you, you picked the starting point and differentiated features is usually good one. And you work your way around the circle and you'd get candidate positioning, and then you would go out and test it the market and see if it worked. April (17:57): And if it did, great, you just ran with it. If it didn't, then you throw it out and you'd develop another candidate positioning. And so for a few years, like literally two, three years, that's what I did was I worked my way around. We can take our best guess at it. And then we would try that problem though, is, you know, I'm working at startups, so we don't have all day to test this stuff out. And if you're doing B2B startups, like sometimes it would take you a while to do a task because your sales cycles are long. And yeah. And so people were getting impatient with me. And so I was like, man, we gotta, there's gotta be a better way to do this faster. And what happened was I actually went way down the rappel reading Clayton Christensen's stuff, and I got really into kind of jobs to be done. April (18:43): And anyways, and after reading all that stuff, I had a bit of an epiphany where I realized you had to start with competitive alternatives. If I started anywhere else on the circle, I would end up with positioning. That potentially sounded really good in the office, but doesn't actually win out in the market because it's not differentiated. And so you had to start there. So so then I decided the way the process would work, as you would say, okay, I've got something it's out in market already. People are buying it. If my stuff didn't exist, what would the customer do? And that's kind of my competitive alternatives. So that, that sort of includes status quo. You know, like maybe they use a spreadsheet, maybe they hire an intern, but it also includes anybody that the customer might put on a short list when they go looking for solutions. April (19:35): So that's the first one, the competitive alternatives you'd start there. Well, once I had that, then I had sort of a stake in the ground and I can say, okay, well, here's what we've got to beat. And if I know I got a beat, then I can say, okay, theoretically, let's look at my product. What's my product got that they don't have feature function wise. Right. And I can write those down and there might be thousands of things, but I can write it all down and fill up a whiteboard with that. That gets me to differentiated features. Once I have differentiated features that I can say, well, how do those features map to value? And so for each of those features, I just go down the list and say, so what, so what for customers, we can do this. And then what you're trying to get to is a set of value themes, like two or three value themes. April (20:21): This is a bottoms up way of doing of developing value propositions. But what it gets you to is differentiated value because you started with, here's what I've got to beat. Here's how I'm different. This is the value for customers in that differentiated stuff I can do. Now, once I got that, now I got value. Then I can say, well, what are the characteristics of a target account that make them really care a lot about that value? And that's literally my definition of a best fit customer. Yeah. That makes sense. So those are kind of a bottoms up way of doing segmentation. Once I get segmentation, then I can say, you know, at that point I can lean back and say, all right, so I need to position this product in some kind of market context that makes this value obvious to these folks. So is it better if I position this as email or chat, is it a database or a business intelligence system? Like, and that's how I do it. So in the methodology, I've got, you go step by step by step through those things. But you start with this idea of competitive alternatives as a stake in the ground, and then you flow through the rest of it. That's how it works. Kathleen (21:28): You know, you mentioned at the end, they're positioning something in context. And that's the part that I think is so interesting. I feel like that's the part that I really enjoy listening to you talk about at Inbound because you had this like really fascinating way of breaking down the, I think it was, if I remember correctly at the time, at least I know it's evolved since then, but you had like four different approaches to putting your positioning in context, within a broader market. And, and I seem to remember some of the examples you gave were like, you know, you could, you could try to take on Coke with a competing product, or you could be the Coke for dogs. Kathleen (22:08): Another one was like, you used the example of Tesla with electric cars and just changing the changing the game I think was right. Put it, you know, changing the conversation and changing the focus from like battery life to sexy design and speed for fun. And there were all these different frameworks and I just, I loved, I loved having those mental models to use and understanding the different ways that you could contextually place your own offering within the broader market. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how your thinking on that has evolved. Do you still use those same frameworks? April (22:43): Yeah, I do. And you know, and there's a section in the book that talks about that. And, and the way I thought about it was I'd always get this question, like, how is it different if I'm positioning in an existing market category versus making up your own new market category? And so the way I looked at it is there's kind of, I used to talk about four, but I've kind of narrowed it down to three now. Like, so basically you either the market category exists or you're going to have to go make it. If the market category exists, you've got two choices. You either position your stuff in such a way that you're going to position in the existing market category. And your intent is to take on the whole thing. Did I call this the head-to-head? So that's like saying, you know, I'm email, that's it I'm email, no qualification on that and not email for a particular sub market or anything. April (23:33): What I have here is the world's greatest email as basically like announcing your intention to take on Gmail and outlook, you know, the email. So, you know, an example I'm used to that and talk with Coke, like, like I'm Cola and that's it, no qualifier. I'm just the world's greatest Cola. Well, that's like, basically say an ID, declare war on Coke. I'm going to go get those guys. And that sounds stupid, right? Like, like, are you actually going to be Coke from nothing? Like if you're a startup and you're just starting out. Kathleen (24:04): Although it's funny. You used the example of email and immediately in my head, I thought, well, this is like Basecamp with Hey or Superhuman. Like there still are people trying to take on the Coke of the email world. April (24:15): They are, they are, but Superhuman's a great example. Yeah. If you look at Superhuman and particularly the early days of when they were like, you applied to get Superhuman and you didn't get it, if you didn't meet their criteria, like they were not trying to be emailed for everybody. They were trying to be email for people that thought email was too slow. There was this component of speed. And if you didn't answer the questions, right, you didn't get home, they didn't get it. So they were very specific about that. They were like, we're not email for everybody. We're email for people that think they wish they could do their email faster. Because that's the only problem we solve because there's all a bunch of stuff that Superhuman doesn't solve. Now, if you look at Hey, Hey's a great example too, right? The Hey folks have come out and said, we're the email for people that actually care about, about privacy and control over who hits your inbox and who doesn't. April (25:14): And, and even more specific when the thing first came out, they, they couldn't even do business email. It was personal email only because you couldn't do your own domain and all the rest of it. That actually drove me nuts. Cause I didn't, you know, they weren't explicit about that. And so I signed up and paid it and everything else. And then I was like, Oh, I can't use this. It's not for businesses. They shouldn't have told me. Now I think they got a business version, but it doesn't have calendaring and a bunch of other stuff. So it's the, you know, it's not forever. Kathleen (25:42): That's a tough, that's a tough market to crack with how kind of insidious email is in our daily lives. April (25:48): I think they're trying to be everything. I think they're more this style too. So the style to it. So head to head is like I'm coming in and I'm going to take on the leader from nothing. And that literally never works. Right? What works better is to say, I'm going to go in and I'm going to shave off a part of the market that is underserved and I'm going to serve those people. And I'm going to eat the email for X right. Email for people that want speed email for people that care about privacy now, because you know, because the other guys like Gmail, isn't going to do that ever. This is so, you know, it, my alternative is Gmail. I got them beat. They can't match my feature. And I'm going to dominate in this sub segment of the market that really cares about that. April (26:34): And so the vast majority of companies that we know and love today started out serving a sub of an existing category. Like Salesforce was CRM for SMBs, SMBs that didn't have an IT department. And you don't worry, you don't need an IT department cause this one's no software, man. It's a, you can just have it run and you don't have to worry about it. I keep looking after it. So I mean there's so there's loads and loads of examples, almost every startup that later becomes successful, starts out being in a niche in an existing category. In fact, I did a little spelunking around because you know, category creation is hot right now. So everybody likes to think about style three, which is I'm going to create a new category. And then somehow I'm going to dominate that. But if you go back and look at tech IPO's of the past five years, so this is IPO. April (27:28): So if a company gets big enough that they, you know, they're more than a hundred million revenue, they're going to go public. If you go through that list of tech companies that are YPO in the last five years, over 90% of them at the time of IPO are a niche play in an existing market. Kathleen (27:49): That makes sense. April (27:49): Over 90%, which surprises most people because there's this idea that, you know, you can't get big unless you create a category and then position yourself within that category. And it's not to say that doesn't work. That does work in very limited cases, right. That you actually carve out a new key. You say my thing is so new, so different. So I don't know. And none of the existing categories really work for it. So I'm gonna make up a new category and then position it in there. Kathleen (28:19): Yeah. There's I think there's a lot of BS around category creation. Like everybody says, they're doing it and there can't possibly be that many categories. It's just invented word, word art. April (28:32): Yeah. And some of them are saying they're category creation when that's not even what they're doing. Right. Like I like, so I had some guys call me the other day and they said, we're a social media man. We're creating a category. And I said, Oh yeah, what's the category. And they said, we're social media management for agencies. Okay. One category, social media management for agencies. That's a niche play. And they're like, yeah, but nobody else does it. So we're creating it. I'm like, yeah. Okay. So first of all, you're not creating a category. You're basically leveraging what we already know about social media management and say we're social media management, but for agencies, that's why it works so well is I don't have to teach you what social media management is. I just have to teach you why agencies need a different kind of social media management. Then the category leader can give you. And then I just dominate my little bit. That's it? Kathleen (29:26): Your first approach is the head-to-head. April (29:30): The only time it works is if the, is if you know, if the market is created in the minds of customers, but there is no established leader. So an example of that might be smart glasses, right? Like, you know what smart glasses are, we all, you know, we don't remember Google glass had that thing. They did a great job establishing that category and then they just kind of exited it. So now if you wanted to buy smart glasses, who would you buy them from? No idea. No idea. So that's an example of, we kind of know what smart glasses are, but it's a dog fight out there right now. There's a thousand companies trying to do it. And eventually someone will emerge as the clear category leader there, but it hasn't happened yet. Yeah. So that's kind of wide open market. And if you had a, you know, there was a company here in Canada that raised a pile of money and took a good run at being the dominant player in the smart glasses market. April (30:22): It didn't quite work out and they got acquired by Google. But if you were to raise a bunch of money and take a big run at it, you might actually emerge as the leader in that space. So we know what it is. And we can say smart glasses and everybody gets it. But we don't know who the leader is. So that's an example where you might do, you'd say like when my guys were trying to do it, my Canadian guys were trying to do it. They weren't saying we're the fashionable smart glasses or we're the smart glasses for manufacturing or the smart glasses for anything else you might want to use them for. They were just like, no, we're smart glasses. Whereas our glasses where everything. So that's, that's head to head Denise plays where you say, no, you know, instead of saying I'm Coke, you know, like, you're, you know, I'm going to say I'm Coke for dogs, right? So you're like, okay, I know what Coke is. So I got a mental image of that, but it's for this chunk of the market that Coke's never going to dominate in and you're going to, you know, your intention is to go dominate there. And the last one is you create your own category, where you stay, you know what? I'm not smart glasses, I'm not Coke. I'm a flu flummer. April (31:29): And you say what the heck is a flu flummer? And I say, I'm glad you asked. Let me tell you, look, we got email and we got this and we got this. And then there's this space in the middle. And we call this the flu flummer. And that's what we are. And let me tell you why you need a flu flummer. And the hard part about category creation is you essentially fall into this thing where you've got to evangelize the problem. Because if people knew they had a problem, there would be solutions to solve that problem already. And so first you got to sell the problem. Then you got to sell people on the idea that you're the best solution to that problem. The real risk in category creation is that the history of Silicon Valley teaches us that the most likely outcome is you pour all your time, energy, effort, money into creating the category. April (32:26): And the moment the category starts to emerge, you kind of end up in that style one, don't ya? And then it's a dog fight. There's a thousand other companies show up and they come in and steal the category from you after you've already created. That's why we don't use ask Jeeves. We use Google. That's why we don't use my space. We use Facebook. Like there's a thousand examples. All the companies, you know, in love, they didn't create the categories they're in. They get whipping in at the last minute after the hard work of category creation was already done. So I don't know why everybody's so keen on category creation. It's literally the hardest one to do. But you know, but there are examples of folks successfully doing it. Like in my book, there's an interview in there with Mark Organ, who was the original founder of Eloqua, you know, who did create the category marketing automation. And so he talks about how he did that. So it does work sometimes. It's just, it's rare. And it's fraught with peril. Kathleen (33:23): And it's funny, cause there's a lot of debate in the marketing world over what really is category creation. Like, because there's, and I was on a conversation. April (33:32): So a lot of people come to me and they say, they're doing a gray area. And I know you're not. Yeah. I just read this book about category creation and everybody was telling me, Oh, I read this book April. You know, it's going to tell you how to create categories and I'm reading it. And I'm like, tell me kind of a compelling case know, but the first example they give is Salesforce. And I'm like, what are we just going to ignore? What happened for the first 200 million revenue? We're just gonna ignore that part. Like they didn't become a category creator until they were massive company. They were a niche play in the CRM market. There was a 2 billion revenue company publicly traded in CRM when they started create CRM. Are you kidding me? And then yeah, you can argue about, they're creating a category now of like, you know, platform as a service, whatever, but that's different. Kathleen (34:23): That's like hindsight is 2020, right. April (34:26): They were a group and company by the time they did that. So most of the examples that people give me, I'm kinda like, well, yeah, like once for the absolute dominant player in your market, then you get the luxury of moving the goalposts and defining what exactly the market is. And that's different. But if you're a little startup and you're just starting out, you don't, you don't get to do that. Yeah. Kathleen (34:47): Well, one of the things that you talk about in the book is forming a positioning team. And I just wanted to take a minute and talk about that because again, I'm always all about making sure there are some really like practical, actionable takeaways. So beyond the framework that you discussed, like organizationally, what is the best way to kind of get the team organized in order to move forward on an exercise like this? April (35:10): Yeah, so, so I included a bunch on this in the book for a reason. And it's because I think a lot of positioning efforts fail because the, the marketing team or the product team decides they're going to fix positioning and they're going to do it in their department without involving anybody else, which I think is crazy. So, you know, if you think about it, like, I'll give you an example. Like the one I mentioned earlier, the first I worked at and we repositioned it, like we thought it was basically desktop productivity, sell it for a hundred bucks compete with Excel and Microsoft access. We ended up repositioning this as an embeddable database for mobile devices, which we would sell to, you know, at a much higher level in the organization. We would sell a hundred copies at a pop because you'd be arming your entire sales team with this thing. Or you put it in every device that you had completely different, go to market, completely different pricing, completely different sales model, everything different. Could I make that decision myself as the person running marketing? No, I think the CEO would want to talk about Kathleen (36:24): Well and the sales team. I mean, it's the same thing. Like with, I just went through a pricing exercise in my company. Like you, there's all these things you can do in a silo, but unless you're you get the buy-in of your sales team to go out and like evangelize it in their conversations with prospects, it's not going to do you any good. April (36:40): This is it. So a lot of these things end up like a shift in positioning often ends up feeling like a shift in the whole company strategy. And so if you're going to do this properly, I think marketing is in good position to lead a positioning effort, but they're not going to be able to do it themselves. And so what I recommend is you get the heads of the teams together. So you need sales, you need product, you need customer success, you need the CEO, the founders and anybody else who's important in your company and you need to get everybody together. So that's the first thing. So I need to establish a team. And then once I've got that team, there's a few things need to happen. One. I need to convince the team to at least look at it so that the team has to kind of let go of their positioning baggage and say, you know what? April (37:33): Like I know we've always said, we're a database, but for this exercise, open your mind to the idea that, you know, we could be something else. Maybe we're a data warehouse. Maybe we're a business intelligence tool, maybe we're something else. And so that's, so we'll get to get the team together. I got to get the team to kind of put their positioning baggage aside. And, and then the last thing I gotta do is if we're going to do it, and we're all going to get together, we need to follow a process. We can't just get together in a room and say, okay, so what's our market category. Like that's just going to become a war of opinion. And if it's a war of opinions, let me tell you marketing never wins that war. Kathleen (38:14): Right. Opinions and some very long meetings that have no end in sight. April (38:19): Right? So what we need to do is follow a positioning process that for as much as we can takes the opinions out of it. So that's what my process attempts to do. Like you know, we could get together in a room and we can agree on what's the status quo in all the accounts. Who else are we competing with when we are in a competitive deal? So that establishes who our competitive alternatives are, that we're going to work through the rest of it without kind of asking for your opinion. It just sort of is what it is. Yeah. So, so those are the things I think you need to have in order to have success. You know, I need to, I need to get the gang together. I need to get everybody to kind of leave aside their positioning baggage. And then if we're going to do it, an exercise, there needs to be a structure and a methodology to that exercise that kind of takes the opinions out of it. Otherwise, we're just going to get, well, I think it's this one off. I think it's this. Well, if we all have an opinion, I like mine the best. Kathleen (39:17): How long do you generally, like when you're setting expectations with your clients, how long do you generally tell them that this process takes April (39:24): Well in the work that I do? Like? So if, if the company comes and hires me, I act as the facilitator for this exercise. So there's a bit of prep that happens ahead of time. Like sometimes we'll pull some data depending on what the company's like. Most of the prep is literally for me to get up to speed enough on the market and the product and the landscape so that I'm not so that I'm able to facilitate the exercise without slowing everybody down. And then we used to do this as the, as a two day thing. I used to fly to you. We'd all lock ourselves in the boardroom and we just bang it out in two days. Now since, since, since COVID hit, I've gone to doing these things virtually. And one of the great things about that is we can take a bit more time about it because I'm not flying in. And so what we do now is we spread it out over a series of sessions across a week, but we get it done in a week. Kathleen (40:18): That's great. April (40:23): Efficient, right? Like doing it yourselves, the companies can, you know, again, get into big arguments and fresh around on that stuff for months. And when I was internally at companies, it was not unusual for us to thrash around in it and his mom for months. I think, you know, one having a methodology and process to having an outside facilitator that can walk you through it and help you through it. You know, again, not everybody qualifies to work with me. Like some people come in, I don't think they're ready to do it, or I don't think positioning's even their problem. But if you do have a positioning problem and you look like somebody I'd work with that, we get it on the counter. And yeah, we, we bang it out in a week. And then what do you do? Kathleen (41:02): To tell your clients about like, they spend that week, they come up with their positioning? What then, because I would venture to guess, I mean, you already talked about Salesforce and how they started out being kind of niche, and then they moved to category creation, quote unquote you know, do you have like defined points where the group gets back together and evaluates and checks in and the process evolves? April (41:27): Yeah. So, so here's, here's how, how I instruct everybody, like, you know, what should happen? We're done. So we get the position and we do two things in these workshops to actually, so we do the positioning and then we do an exercise where we take the positioning and when we translate it into a sales narrative. So how do I actually tell the story of this product? If I'm sitting across from a prospect that doesn't know too much about it yet. So, you know, this is how we tell the story, and then that's what we do in the workshops. So we got positioning, we got the sales narrative. Then I leave now what other people do when I'm gone is they take that sales narrative, they turn it into a sales pitch. So it's usually slides and a demo or some kind of a script. So they worked that into a sales pitch and then they go test it with some prospects. April (42:16): So that's the first thing I recommend. I'm going to take it out and test it. Usually it works. I got the smartest people in the company sitting in the room. We don't usually get it wrong, but it often needs a bit of tuning because customers are weird. So, you know, so we tune it up and then once we've got a tune, then the positioning plus that sales narrative together goes over to marketing and then marketing can work on messaging. And so I recommend you build a, make a messaging document, but most folks will do that, or they'll work on the messaging for the homepage and off they go. Now let's think about positioning is we don't get to just set it and forget it because you know, everything's changing. So our product is changing as we put new features into the product and new things happen. April (42:57): Sometimes we make an acquisition. So our stuff is changing at the same time, the market's changing. So we got competitors coming in and out of the market. We've got you know, the landscape itself has changing. Like COVID is a great example where all of a sudden your buyer's priorities might have really, really shifted and positioning that didn't work pre COVID maybe does now or vice versa. So so because everything's changing, you need to check in on the positioning. You can't just set it and say, well, that's it. You know, we're done positioning. Don't have to think about that anymore. So my recommendation is about every six months. So when I was a VP marketing, we would do the workshop. We go through the process of testing it, get the messaging sorted out and everything else. And I wouldn't have a standing meeting with the same group of people every six months. April (43:46): And so we'd all get together every six months and we get together in the room and say, okay, has anything changed? So if we think about competitive alternatives, do we have different competitors? Are we seeing different things in sales accounts? Is the status quo the same as it always was. What's changed there. And we've got new stuff in our product. Has that changed our differentiated features at all? And if so, you know, does it change it enough that we actually going to have to update what we're talking about in terms of value? And if it's really updated, does that change our target customers that we're going to go after? If so, it may even change our market category. So we've got to check in on that regularly every six months, sometimes we all just get together and we're like, Nope, Nope, Nope. Everything's the same. Okay, good. And then, you know, it's a short meeting. Yeah. Sometimes you get it together and you're like, Ooh, actually stuff is changing. If we have the standing meeting, then we'll catch it early and we won't be caught flat food and trying to react to something that is actually causing us pain revenue wise. We'll get to it earlier. Cause we, you know, we had the standing meeting over six months to go in and review it. Kathleen (44:52): That makes sense. I like having that kind of cadence already. Pre-Planned. Well I could talk to you about this forever, but we're going to run out of time. So I'm going to shift gears and ask you the two questions I ask all of my guests the first and they're softballs. The first one is, you know, the podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound marketing these days? April (45:18): Well, you know, the one that comes to mind when you say that and you know, and, and I think they're just killing it in marketing in general is I sit on the board of a company in there called Samplr and I've been super impressed watching the way that this company has reacted to the change in the market that had happened because of COVID and how they've managed to shift that and turn it into this massive opportunity for them. So what sampler does is they they do digital product sampling. So if you think about, if you ever remember when we used to go to the grocery store. People would hand out samples at the grocery store or they would have, you know, people on the street corner giving you samples of granola bars or snacks or something. Consumer packaged goods brands spend billions a year on product sampling campaigns. April (46:11): What Samplr does is it is a digital way of doing that. So they match people with samples and then the samples come in the mail and they can actually, you know, survey the people afterwards and find out did you like to sample, did you buy this stuff later? And so it's just a way smarter, digital way to do it anyway. So that's what they've been doing for years COVID hits. And what happened in COVID was the big CPG brands were just like, we can't sample anymore because all the things are thing. And so we're just not doing sampling at all. We're done. Kathleen (46:48): I would think they're tailor made for this. April (46:51): You can imagine they had all this stuff in the pipeline, all this stuff, and all their customers were just like, yeah, no. April (47:02): What Samplr did was, you know, they are clearly the solution to product sampling if we can't do it in the store. Right. So, but you know, but at the beginning, the customer companies just didn't want to hear it. And so what they did, they did a very good job of crafting a message around contactless product sampling and the future of product sampling. And what would it, what was it what's product sampling gonna look like if we truly digitize it and do it in a way that doesn't involve direct face-to-face human contact and they dominated the story around this for months where you, you know, when every reporter in the land was looking for a, what's going to change because of COVID story. And there was Samplr saying, well, let me tell you about this thing. We're never testing the lipstick tester at the Sephora ever again. Oh Kathleen (47:56): Yeah. That's so true. I can't even. April (47:58): Let me give you a different way. We could sample lipstick, right. We could send you a sample in the mail and here's how it would work. So they do this really good job of being everywhere. And then within two months, their business was absolutely taking off and they raised around and financing and, you know, in the early days of COVID, which was, you know, again, pretty fantastic. And if you look at what they've done is just amazing. And so I think they've done an amazing job. Kathleen (48:24): Ooh, I'm excited to go check them out. That's my favorite part. One of my favorite parts of these conversations is learning about new examples like this. My other question that I always ask guests is that marketers commonly cite one of their biggest pain points. As you know, the landscape of digital marketing is changing so quickly. It's really hard to keep up with it and stay on top of everything. How do you personally kind of stay educated and keep yourself on the cutting edge? April (48:48): Yeah. You know, so I, so I read a lot of books. I'm, I'm big on books and, and so I'm reading a lot of books. I'm also kind of, you know, one of the things that I think is really interesting about COVID is there's been sort of this emergence of these kind of neat online communities. I feel like that's really accelerated. And so in particular I'm kind of on the product marketing side of things like positioning a sort of product marketing thing. And so one of the communities I'm kinda active in is the there's these folks called the product marketing Alliance. Kathleen (49:21): I'm in that group. Yes. It's great. April (49:23): It's cool. Right. And that thing came out of nowhere. Like that was like, that was like not a thing. And then all of a sudden they had 12,000 people in a Slack, in a Slack community and I'm like, well, how the heck? And so I've been really enjoying the stuff going on in that community. The other one that I, that I've, you know, more recently been engaged with is and I was engaged because they reached out to me and asked me to write a thing for them, which I did. And then I was like, Holy cow, look at this thing. Which is more on the product management, but again, product marketers side is there's this guy does a newsletter called Lenny's list. And so I, he reached out to me last year and said, Hey, do you want to write an article for my newsletter? April (50:04): And I was like, Oh man, I'm really busy. And he kind of pestered me and I said, well, you know, I got Christmas break coming up. And so maybe I'll write something when I'm on the break. So I wrote this thing and then it turns out he has this massive community. These is huge subscriber lists. He started a Slack community. And so that's been neat me and just sort of crack into these communities where smart people are hanging out and doing things. And there's a lot of neat ones popping up now. Yeah. I couldn't agree more to a lot of paid newsletters now just because I think they're cool. And there's a lot of qualities. Kathleen (50:41): Yeah. There's a lot of great innovation on the product side. I'm going to have to check them out too. I have so many good new ones now. Well, all right. Before we wrap, if somebody wants to learn more about you and what you do, or if they want to buy the book what's the best way for them to do that. Yeah. April (50:57): The book's available wherever you buy books, like there's a, there's a paperback book or an ebook or an audio book, if you want to, Oh, you can listen to three and a half hours of my Canadian accent. So yeah, most people just buy it off Amazon, but if you've got a local book seller, usually they've got copies too. So I'm in distribution all over the place where you buy it online. My website is Aprildunford.com and if you're interested in, you know, if you think you need a consultant or something, you can find me there and then I'm not too active on social media except Twitter. So I'm @Aprildunford on Twitter. So if you want listen to me, I don't know, listen to me talk to them about cat jokes or whatever you can follow me on Twitter. Kathleen (51:46): Great. Well, the book is Obviously Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me April Dunford. This was fun. April (51:51): I'm glad. Thanks so much for having me. Kathleen (51:54): Yeah. And if you're listening and you liked what you heard, or you learned something new, you could head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a review. And of course, if you know someone else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, and I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thanks April. April (52:10): Thank you.
If you're a true listener of this podcast you have probably heard Mark Organ's voice before. Here we discuss why you should think big when crafting your category vision in startups/scaleups. Mark gives many valuable tips on how you should think, act and dominate within your category. Lastly, he shares interesting thoughts about the portfolio mindset, dealing with horizons and future investments. Mark Organ is the CEO of the global community of category creating leaders - Categorynauts. He also coaches other CEOs on how to develop and dominate their categories.
Subscribe | Transcript | Comment The Episode in 60 Seconds What does working with CEOs have in common with driving category creation? You must have a compelling vision. Mark Organ, the creator of Eloqua and other companies, joins John Farkas for a discussion about: The challenges of founding companies Why some leaders don't want to define a category The most important factor in marketing: your customer telling others And more Our Guest Mark Organ is the CEO of Categorynauts. He helps companies create and dominate new categories. He also coaches CEOs to achieve their goals in business and life. He founded Influitive and is the author of the book, The Messenger is the Message: How to Mobilize Customers and Unleash the Power of Advocate Marketing. Leaders throughout North America and Asia know Mark as a go-to-market consultant for SaaS companies who, most famously, founded and led Eloqua, the undisputed leading Enterprise marketing automation and CRM powerhouse now operated by Oracle. Show Notes You can reach Mark Organ at his LinkedIn profile or by emailing him directly. When you have the opportunity to lead the conversation, then you have the opportunity to lead the conversation. That demonstrates you have the competence, command and courage to lead. — John Farkas Mark Organ believes that leaders who can create categories aspire: To be a great leaders To build an amazing new markets To build incredible wealth for other people They are much more excited about their category vision than they are about amassing personal wealth. The most powerful component of category creation is the underserved hero. The underserved hero is a customer who plays an important role. That role will be different for each category, but don't miss identifying your underserved heroes and rewarding them. Golden Spiral has a number of free resources about differentiation and category design: The Real Market Value of the Soul of Your B2B Brand Positioning Worksheet 4 Important Steps to Crafting a Powerful B2B Point of View Seven Steps to Create a Strategic B2B Competitive Analysis Free Download from Anthony Kennada
Hear why Mark prefers creating new playgrounds to building better mousetraps and learn about the three steps of successful category creation: discover, develop, and dominate.
In this first episode, Gil has an intimate discussion with three successful CEOs who each were instrumental in creating massive software categories: Marketing Automation, CPQ / Cash-to-Quote, and Sales Engagement!You'll walk away from this episode...
#005: Mark Organ, founder & CEO of category-creating companies Eloqua & Influitive as well as a CEO coach, shares invaluable insights from steering his marketing technology companies through the last two great recessions. We learned a ridiculous amount in a short discussion.Some highlights:· Removing risk is one of the highest value messages to clients that most marketers miss· The more of the CEO's job you can take on, the more budget will open up· Content marketing is like an annuity that keeps paying off, and he increased his spend in the Great Recessionhttps://www.verblio.com/The Verblio Show is your weekly cocktail of content marketing fun and fruitful conversation. Hear Verblio's CEO Steve Pockross talk with marketers, digital agencies, and an assortment of thought leaders.
Every now and then someone comes along and creates their own category or segment. That's exactly what our podcast guest has done twice. He created sales and marketing automation in B2B with Eloqua which he sold to Oracle for $800 M. He then created a whole new category again with his company Influitive around advocacy marketing, to infuse more trust, at scale, into the buying process. He is a huge profile within Martech and proven successful over and over in building highly successful scale-ups. We are delighted to have Mark Organ join our podcast episode and share highly inspiring insights around Megadeals, messaging, building successful scale-ups, leadership, how to create new industry categories, the importance of “A” players and strategy. Drawing insightful learnings from his incredible success as an entrepreneur.
This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the way we can mobilize and leverage the power of advocates, and my guest is Mark Organ, Founder and Executive Chairman at Influitive.Mark is an entrepreneurial go-to-market specialist; a CEO with a focus on sales, marketing and business development. His greatest professional passions include creating new billion-dollar categories in technology and developing new leaders. Today he’s helping CEOs achieve their full potential in their businesses and their lives.Mark founded 6 companies, amongst which Eloqua (acquired by Oracle), raised more than 15 rounds of financing, helped a lot of people realize their dreams, and got specialized in creating cultures that are a competitive advantage. He’s also the author of the book “The Messenger is the Message.”In September 2010 he founded Influitive based on the idea that the most successful sales and marketing comes from advocates. That inspired me, and hence I invited Mark to my podcast. We explore the challenge many software businesses have in getting customers to reference them, how that’s driving everyone crazy, and what needs to change approach-wise, to solve that. We also dig deep into Mark’s experience in creating new categories that deliver remarkable impact.Here are some of his quotes:“What I realized, working at Eloqua, was how important it was to have your customers doing more of the work for you, more of the sales and marketing work especially.When you have multiple referrals and references and case studies and all these things, the sales cycle would go down by like +90%. We'd have these deals closing in four days, instead of the usual four months, because there's a ton of advocacy over it.Sales cycle is critical. Where most of the cash flow is tied up in a software company is in ‘people who are not able to make a decision.’ And the best way to get people to make a decision is to surround them with great relevant people who are all saying how great a company is, how great the product is, and how great the people are.”During this interview, you will learn three things:How the best innovation is created if you embrace curiosity and dare to bring in ideas and people from totally different domainsWhy you should fall in love with your target market, instead of your product, in order to create an impact that turns customers into advocates. That focusing your time on turning your advocates into superheroes is the secret that will ultimately turn you into a superhero. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life
Mark Organ is a serial creator of multi billion dollar software categories and companies. He coaches CEOs on how to discover, develop and dominate their categories. He is also creating the largest global community of category creating leaders, the Categorynauts. Mark is currently the Chairman and was previously founder and CEO of Influitive, the creator of the the advocate marketing and community category. Influitive creates communities of customer advocates, mobilizing advocates to produce massive increases in referral leads, reference calls, social media participation and more. Mark first revolutionized B2B marketing as the founding CEO of Eloqua (ELOQ), the world leader in marketing automation software, which was recently acquired for $871M. In between, he was a go-to-market consultant for SaaS companies in North America and Asia. Mark has also helped over a dozen software companies successfully go to market in asymmetrical or disruptive ways as a consultant and entrepreneur. With an M.S. in Neuroscience from Northwestern University and a passion for understanding human psychology, Mark is a dynamic speaker with a unique vision centered not only in business success and technological innovation, but also how and why people think, act and interact the way they do. Mark enjoys sharing his observations, regularly writing and speaking on entrepreneurship, marketing and advocacy. He has energized professional audiences at a number of recent events, including DemandCon, Influence HR Summit, The Globe and Mail Small Business Summit, InsideSales Virtual Summit and many more. Please see testimonials and video samples here: http://influitive.com/founder-and-ceo
On this episode we dive into our top 5 episode that we've ever done with leaders in the Canadian startup ecosystems. Featured guests include Mark Organ, Mark Maclean, Charles Boulanger, Rivers Corbett, and Marie Chevrier.
Your peers often influence your purchasing decisions. When they like something, you're more inclined to buy it. When they don't, you're less likely to do so. And those who are the most vocal supporters tend to have the most influence. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Mark Organ, the Founder and CEO of Influitive, a software company that specializes in advocate marketing. They get into the important role that messaging apps will have in shaping the future of marketing. You'll hear about: -How sales have changed from high touch to low touch (1:28) -How marketing is changing by mobilizing customers (2:34) -What CEOs should be thinking about when it comes to marketing (5:22) -The importance of advocate marketing (7:19) -The role of messaging in advocacy (9:44) -The importance of push and pull in messaging (13:24) -The best messaging platforms for building advocacy (17:30) -How CEOs can stay on top of technology trends for their business (19:25) -Achieving work-life balance(23:04)
Transparency and Transformation with OKRs w/ Mark Organ Mark Organ is a visionary who founded both Eloqua and Influitive and is the author of the best-selling book The Messenger is the Message. In this episode, Mark talks very candidly about the challenges Influitive faced in 2017 that led him to adopt OKRs and the WorkBoard platform – they'd hit a growth wall and the great people in the org didn't have great clarity on how best to contribute. Their OKR program was transformational within its first quarter. Mark gives us a candid view on what that's meant to the company, culture and to him personally.
14 Minutes of SaaS - founder stories on business, tech and life
Final episode of this 3 part mini-series with Mark Organ, Exec Chairman & Founder of Influitive (and original founder and former CEO of Eloqua). He tells Stephen Cummins that 'Best Place to Work' awards are a sham. He talks about Marshall McLuhan's famous quote ‘The medium is the message.' Today he feels the messenger is the message. Mark reflects on how Lego is the King of advocate marketing and is a prime example of how B2C is always years ahead of B2B
14 Minutes of SaaS - founder stories on business, tech and life
Influitive and Eloqua founder Mark Organ confesses to Stephen Cummins that he has an obsession with cashflow in the early stages of his startups – and explains why this obsession led to the founding of Influitive. We'll also find out how many months it took him to learn to speak and understand Mandarin. And what app he used to help make that happen.
14 Minutes of SaaS - founder stories on business, tech and life
Final episode of this 3 part mini-series with Mark Organ, Exec Chairman & Founder of Influitive (and original founder and former CEO of Eloqua). He tells Stephen Cummins that 'Best Place to Work' awards are a sham. He talks about Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote ‘The medium is the message.’ Today he feels the messenger is the message. Mark reflects on how Lego is the King of advocate marketing and is a prime example of how B2C is always years ahead of B2B
14 Minutes of SaaS - founder stories on business, tech and life
Influitive and Eloqua founder Mark Organ confesses to Stephen Cummins that he has an obsession with cashflow in the early stages of his startups – and explains why this obsession led to the founding of Influitive. We’ll also find out how many months it took him to learn to speak and understand Mandarin. And what app he used to help make that happen.
The world is changing. We all know this. Think about it: What do we do before we try a product or a service? We go and find reviews and information from others who have had experiences with those apps, companies, or restaurants. I recently interviewed Mark Organ, co-founder and CEO of Influitive. A serial category creator, he knows that advocate marketing is one powerful tool that, if used correctly, can explode a company's growth.
One of the last sessions at SaaStock18 was a bonus chat that brought a double dose of Canadian accents - April Dunford, the world's foremost expert on positioning sat for a conversation with Mark Organ, CEO and founder of Influitive. Even though they spoke at 4;20 on the day weed was legalised in Toronto, the topic they covered on the day was slightly different - category creation. On this week's episode we are bringing you their entire chat. Category creation had been coming up again and again during the two days of the conference. It's something that Mark, who has started 7 companies in his career, two of which category creators, is all too familiar with. His first one was Eloqua, which he founded 20 years ago and the second is his current company, Influitive, which he started 8 years ago. In their conversation, April and Mark talk about the origin story of each, to what extend Mark realized he was creating categories at the time, how he sold the idea to funders and customers, and many other. Both agree just how difficult category creation is and why you need to be built for the ordeal it would take. Mark and April also touch on the subject of the future of marketing and where the industry as a whole is going. Both Mark and April will be returning to Dublin, for SaaStock19. There, they will be joined by SaaS thought leaders such as Claire Hughes Johnson, COO, Stripe, Leela Srinivasan, CMO, Survey Monkey, Kathryn Petralia, COO, Kabbage, and Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshworks. Grab a ticket now at the best possible price.
This week on the If You Market podcast we talk to Mark Organ about Customer Powered Companies and how to be one. Mark encourages everyone to take customers to dinner, create a space for customers to be part of your company and more. Mark is an entrepreneurial go-to-market specialist; a CEO with a focus on sales, marketing and business development and loves creating new billion dollar categories in technology and developing new leaders. He’s founded 6 companies and raised more than 15 rounds of financing. He’s also the author of a new book “The Messenger is the Message”
As the General Manager of the Service Hub at HubSpot, Michael Redbord helps helps scale the support and success teams of many businesses ranging from startups to a publicly traded SaaS juggernaut. He turned HubSpot’s customer support team from a cost center to a profit center and one of HubSpot’s greatest engines of growth. He is a noted writer, speaker, and leader who is joins us today to help us re-envision what success looks like for your business. Quotes To Remember: “If you don’t make your customers successful, you are not able to create repeat customers.” “The hard truth about marketing is that nothing you create is as powerful as what your customer says.” “Make sure that there is an obvious way for your customers to create repeat cycle.” “The customer can be the best marketer.” What You’ll Learn: How to Create a Customer Centric Strategy For Your Business Balancing Sales and Marketing The Power of Repeatable Business Getting Our Customers to Voice Out Their Thoughts Key Links From The Show: HubSpot What's The Difference Between Customer Satisfaction And Customer Loyalty? Recommended Books: Content Marketing Secrets by Marc Guberti Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh The Messenger is The Message by Mark Organ
After he left Eloqua and before starting Influitive, Mark Organ tried really hard not to go back to SaaS. The experience of seeing Eloqua, the company he had built with his two hands, go public without him as the CEO had been too painful. He didn't want to inflict that sort of pain on himself once again. No matter what he tried, it never really brought him contentment. So he decided to do it once again. But do it right. The start of Influitive was slow as they were introducing a completely new category but once it took off it really took off. For awhile Influitive was one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world. There was a time their LTV to CAC ratio was 6 to 1. Everything was going stellar until it stopped. Just like that. Influitive hit a ceiling, which as it turns out is a common occurrence for many other MarTech SaaS companies. It was time for some major changes. Employees had to be let go, perks had to be stripped down, costs reduced severely. But to truly survive and prevail, Mark had to implement fundamental strategic and operational changes, affecting customer base and the product. In this truly honest conversation, Mark talks about all that, offering numbers and emotion and not sugar coating anything. He has been very successful in what he has achieved so far, cutting churn rathe and burn by 70%. And he has managed to keep the promise he made to himslef when he started Influitive - none of this at the expense of company culture and morale. On the contrary. As Mark says during the interview, SaaStock is one of his favourite conferences to attend because instead of chest bumps it brings honesty and intimate conversations between founders. A lot of the changes he implemented came as a result of conversations he had had at SaaStock 17. Also some international clients he has recently closed. To see him speak, have similar valuable conversations in a friendly and fun environment and meet new potential customers join us in Dublin, 15th to the 17th of October https://www.saastock.com And if you are a startup, we have just launched the application for our Global pitch competition so head over to https://www.saastock.com/global-pitch/ and apply before September 16th.
Featuring special guest Mark Organ, co-founder and CEO of Influitive (and co-founder of Eloqua before that). We talk about the roots of customer advocacy, the future of the Influitive advocacy platform, and why Mark Organ thinks the next generation of CMOs will come from customer advocacy.
In this episode we talk to Mark Organ, CEO at Influitive. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markorgan/
The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life
Mark Organ. He’s the founder and CEO of Influitive, helping companies mobilize their advocates to produce massive increases in referral leads, reference calls, social media participation and more. He revolutionized B2B marketing and the founding CEO of Eloqua, the world leader in marketing automation software, which was acquired by Oracle for $871M. In between, he was the go-to marketing consultant for SaaS companies in North America and Asia. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Getting to Yes What CEO do you follow? – Dara Khosrowshahi Favorite online tool? — LinkedIn How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “How important it was to build new relationships with people” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:40 – Nathan introduces Mark to the show 02:17 – Mark left Eloqua even before the acquisition 03:25 – It was the VCs that pushed Mark to leave 03:54 – Mark still had a great exit from the company 04:10 – Influitive helps companies grow by getting more value out of their happy customers 04:46 – Mark saw the importance of mobilized customers when he was still in Eloqua 05:13 – Influitive created communities where companies invite their customer advocates 05:51 – ACV is $50K annually 06:10 – Influitive currently has 270 customers 06:33 – ARR is close to $10M 06:51 – it would take 4-5 years for Influitive to reach their $100M ARR mark 07:02 – Influitive was founded in 2010 07:21 – Influitive has raised $50M 08:09 – Mark shares why he had to raise 09:13 – Influitive’s growth is faster than Eloqua’s 09:40 – 2016 revenue 10:05 – Influitive is averaging more than 50%, year-over-year growth 10:50 – Influitive is cash flow positive on some months 11:08 – Team size is 125 with 8 people in sales 11:22 – “I want all the sales guys to make money” 12:03 – Increased quotas make it impossible for salespeople to hit their numbers 12:55 – CAC is around $40K 14:10 – Payback period is a year to 15 months 17:01 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: VCs are there for a reason, trust them. Reaching one’s quotas takes a much longer time than it did a decade ago. Networking and relationships are crucial to your personal and business life. Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
Are you connecting with and empowering your customer advocates? If not, you should. Here’s why. Customer advocacy marketing programs help you increase revenue by improving customer acquisition and retention (and they’re also your best source of leads). How? Because you’re helping to motivate happy customers to speak about you positively to others. And delighted customers […] The post Why Customer Advocacy Should Be at The Heart of Your Marketing appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
Mark Organ, Founder & CEO at Influitive. Influitive helps B2B companies mobilize their army of advocates for more rapid and profitable revenue growth. They have raised close to $50m in VC funding from some of the best in the business including the likes of Lightspeed, First Round Capital, prior guest Cindy Padnos @ Illuminate and Nick Mehta @ Gainsight, just to name a few. Prior to Influitive, Mark was the founding CEO of Eloqua, growing the business to over 150 people, hundreds of clients and a major presence around the world in 7 years. Eloqua was eventually bought by Oracle in 2012 for a reported $810m. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Mark made his way into the world of SaaS, came to found Eloqua and then what the catalyst was for the founding of Influitive? How did Mark make the decision to make profitability a goal? How did Mark communicate his desire to focus on profitability and unit economics over aggressive growth to his investors? What type of SaaS startups should consider this route more? To what extent is “landing whales” crucial to getting to cash flow positive? What are some of Mark’s big learnings in how to attain those “whales”, having done it so successfully before with Eloqua? Where do most founders go wrong and how should they approach pricing whales? Why does Mark believe paying sales reps on signing misaligns incentives? Why does he believe it is optimal to pay half on signing and half on cash being received? How do you communicate that to your sales team? To what extent should SaaS startups consider debt financing as a respectable and appropriate form of company financing? What type and stage of SaaS company does debt make perfect sense for? When is it wrong in the lifecycle to take debt? 60 Second SaaStr What hire does Mark wish he had made earlier? What does Mark know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? Pros and cons of running a SaaS startup not in Silicon Valley? 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 Mark Organ
Welcome to Episode 43 of the No Quit Living Podcast. NQL is a personal development podcast designed to help listeners achieve their goals and desires. Through hearing the inspiring stories and tips from the greats, we will all find it easier to stay motivated and never quit. Mark Organ's "no quit" story starts back when he was a teenager. He worked for a house painting company doing door to door sales, and soon after started his own business doing the same thing. Organ learned that knocking on doors in the rain provided better results, although it wasn't comfortable, prospective clients would be more likely to let him into their house and listen to his pitch. This is a perfect embodiment of something we talk about at NQL often, which is the importance of living out of your comfort zone. In total, Organ almost had to file for bankruptcy four different times in his career. Instead of throwing in the towel, he persevered and put his people skills to the test and ultimately was able to turn his situation around and sold his company to Oracle for one billion dollars. Organ's main project right now is called Influitive, which is a company that creates marketing campaigns using a business's pre existing customers as marketers. He's an incredible innovator and is changing the way businesses market their products for the better. Website: https://influitive.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/markorgan?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/markorgan
Have you ever been close to filing bankruptcy? My guest today almost filed 4 times and then grew his company which sold to Oracle for a whopping 871 Million Dollars! Mark Organ is today the founder and CEO of Influitive, a powerful platform that could help you gain massive increases in referrals, create better communication with your clients, have immediate access to references, get your content on steroids and much more! Mark first revolutionized B2B marketing as the founding CEO of Eloqua , the world leader in marketing automation software, which was later acquired by Oracle Now, all this success would get to most people’s head but beyond this wildly successful businessman is a charming, curious, humble, authentic, passionate and genuinely caring human being. I’m truly honored to introduce to you this quietly unassuming leader … Mark Organ What you will learn: How to get more referrals How to gamify your business How to create a sense of urgency The power of focusing on one thing The future of growing your business How to motivate people to promote your brand How Mark went from bankruptcy to building a billion dollar company … and MUCH MORE Interesting highlights: Mark was a week away from filing bankruptcy Mark sold his company for close to a billion dollars! Mark poached clients from his biggest competitor Mark’s #1 practical advice: Advocates are the future of your businessTweet This Wanna pick Mark’s brain? Join my exclusive FB group now (https://www.facebook.com/groups/canipickyourbrain) ! Resources & Links: Upshot (https://upshotstories.com/) Influitive (https://influitive.com/) Get Featured (http://www.GetFeatured.com) (Sponsor) Thank You for Listening! I would like to personally thank you for listening to my podcast. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with others. Just click on the social buttons below. Also, if you podcast on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/can-i-pick-your-brain/id1076916148?mt=2) , you would be joining me on my mission to help as many people as I can become really successful. And finally if you haven’t already subscribed podcast on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/can-i-pick-your-brain/id1076916148?mt=2) , so you can get automatic updates whenever another episode goes live!
Sales Funnel Mastery: Business Growth | Conversions | Sales | Online Marketing
In this episode, we chat with Eric Siu about growth hacking!. Eric is a badass when it comes to growth hacking and how to implement little-known strategies and tactics into your business to spur new growth. We discuss everything from CRO, to ninja paid traffic secrets, and everything in between! Resources Mentioned conversionrateexpert conversionxl.com growtheverywhere.com growtheverywhere.com/marketingschool Transcript Jeremy Reeves: Hey what is going on guys. Jeremy Reeves here with another episode of The Sales Funnel Mastery. And today, we have on the line, Eric Siu. Eric is the CEO of digital marketing agency Single Grain which has worked for Fortune 500 companies. It is a pretty big one such as Sales Force, Yahoo, and Intuit. And what they do is they help to scale the revenues using a combination of SEO and advertising strategies which we are going to talk about that today. He also owns Growth Everywhere which is a marketing podcast where he dissects growth levers that help business to scale. He has had guest from -- on the podcast from Echo Sign founder, Jason Lemkin; Eloqua co-founder, Mark Organ, Andy Johns, (inaudible 1:01.4), Facebook, Quora, and Twitter and a whole bunch more. He also contributes to Entrepreneur Magazine, Business Insider, Forbes, Fast Company, Time Magazine, and more. By the way, if you guys are not listening, he also does a podcast with Neil Patel, it called Marketing School and I listen to it every morning. I also highly recommend that you guys listen to that as well. So Eric, how are you? Eric Siu: I am good man. Thanks for having me. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah. It was a pleasure getting you on here. I think we can have a pretty fun conversation. What we are going to talk about for everybody listening is basically what is working now because Eric is kind of like me you know, we do a lot of similar things and he is -- he is kind of dabbles in a lot of different areas, so he knows what is working in a lot of different industries and a lot of different parts of the sales funnel everywhere from getting the traffic to actually making the traffic convert to making -- helping people become repeat buyers and you know, and raving fans that kind of a thing. So we are going to kind of walk through that process, but before we do why don’t you dive a little bit more into your story and tell people a little bit more about you. Eric Siu: Yeah, absolutely. So like you mentioned you know, I have an agency called a Single Grain and yeah, I mean you know, we mostly help technology companies, a couple in Fortune 500 in there and yeah, you know, we talked about growth everywhere that is why we really interview a lot of different people. We just talk about marketing and you know, talk about business and personal growth stuff and then the new one you mentioned Marketing School, that is a daily marketing podcast where I just you know, Neil and myself nerding out on marketing every single day, but we do a lot of different things you know, in addition to helping clients grow. We have our own projects too, so we kind of live and breathe marketing you know. Our ultimate goal is to really just accelerate the great ideas in the world and we just have fun while we are doing it. Jeremy Reeves: That is awesome. Yeah, I like that quote, accelerate the great ideas in the world. That is awesome. I like that. Yeah, so you are actually you know, a lot of people kind of just you know, they read things and then kind of just repeat that to their audience -- but you are actually in the trenches doing it you know what I mean which is kind of cool. Unfortunately, a little bit unique -- you know, I wish it was not -- I wish that was not a unique thing, but it is you know. So before we get into the you know, the content of this, all the you know, what is working basically. I like to do a couple really quick questions just so everybody can kind of get to know you a little bit more as a person right and there are 4 questions and the first one is. What is the worst habit that you have ever had and how did you get rid of it? Eric Siu: Worst habit that I have ever had well, I think it was probably -- I think I was just being kind of get everything at once. I think that is something that (inaudible 3:50.0) sometimes it will pop up every now and then but you know, trying to do too many things and not being able to prioritize that is something that you know, easy people struggling with quite a bit because there are so many opportunities coming to you and you just do not know what to do with them. So that is what it is. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, you know what, I struggle with that myself sometimes. I definitely feel you there. Alright. Next one. If you could cross off one item on your bucket list like -- you probably have cross off a bunch of things. You probably have a whole bunch that you have not you know, done yet. If you could only cross off one more thing, what would -- which one would that be? Eric Siu: Yeah. I think it would be to the ultimate one, is to give away $60 million to the charity. Jeremy Reeves: Nice. I like that. And if you could change one thing about your life instantly, just you know, flick off the rest, what would it be? Eric Siu: You know what, I do not think I would change anything. I think you know, just you know a couple of years ago or a year or two ago, I started doing the 5-minute journal and that has really taught to be a lot more grateful (inaudible 4:44.8) as long as you are grateful, I think you just have to be happy with what you have, I think you are good to go. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah. You know what, I have recently started doing a similar thing myself. I write down every morning 3 things that I am grateful for and then -- I write it on a note card and then when I go up -- when my wife wakes up, I am up like quarter to 6 and she comes down around like 7, I do not know, 7:30 maybe. I do not know, something like that and when I go up for coffee I give it to her and she writes hers on the back you know and then -- the other night we actually asked both of our kids what their favorite part of the day was you know. Yeah. You know, and we are teaching -- they are only 3 and 5 and they are learning that skill already you know. It is so, so important. Eric Siu: It seems like really (inaudible 5:28.7) stuff like I used to be like you know, that stuff you know, I do not need that whatever, but it genuinely helps you know for the long term. Jeremy Reeves: Yep, yep, absolutely. And if you had to choose a spirit animal, what would it be? Eric Siu: Well, my spiritual animal -- Jeremy Reeves: Just the top of your head. Eric Siu: I think it would be the bull. Jeremy Reeves: Okay. Eric Siu: Because I used to like the Rock. I mean that brahma bull on his arm (inaudible 5:52.1) yeah it will be a bull. Jeremy Reeves: Nice. Yeah, the Rock is awesome. Nice. Okay. So with that said, now that we kind of get to know you a little bit better. Let us start with you know, getting people to the website you know, because there is kind of like -- if you really break it down, there are really only 2 pieces you know, there are getting people to the website and then actually converting those people. So I think we focus there you know, we can help a lot of people out. So you know, what are some of the things that you are finding that are working for the most amount of people in terms of getting people to the page whether that is -- and maybe you want to split it up (inaudible 6:27.6) like free stuff versus paid traffic. Eric Siu: Yeah. So I am going to keep it simple. I mean, you know what something that works well right now that not a lot of people are doing is Gmail Advertising. So that is literally you are advertising within a Gmail platform and you know, they are able to see an ad there and you click through it and (inaudible 6:46.8) to your website and the clicks are you know, really not that bad right now and the good thing about it is that you are able to target people that are opening emails. For example, if you are Coca-Cola you want to target people that are opening emails from Pepsi or you want to target people that are opening emails from Red Bull, right. And you are able to do that with a Gmail and bring them back and then drive a good you know, conversion rate and you know for 1 client that we had you know, they target cost per acquisition number was $150 that is for lead and we are getting that (inaudible 7:14.9) $7. So that is definitely worth trying. Jeremy Reeves: That is crazy -- I am actually -- I have heard about that, but I never actually done it. Is that through Adwords? Eric Siu: Yes. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah. Okay, I thought so. I am going to have look into that more. You got my curiosity peak on that one. And how about, anything with Facebook? Eric Siu: Yeah. I mean Facebook (inaudible 7:36.0) a lot of people pushing people to you know content or to webinar (inaudible 7:39.9) whatever it is. I think Facebook is you got to be doing Facebook nowadays. I mean, it is -- even it is retargeting people or getting people you know on your email list. That is kind of the bare minimum. So definitely, you know, target cold people to your content perhaps or you can warm traffic you know, these are people that know your brand. Target them to content and then you know, try to drive them down to funnel you know, even deeper. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah. You know what, you know, you are talking about content and there is kind of 2 schools of thought you know. One is hey, just you know, take it right from Facebook to your landing page whether it is a webinar or but you know, whatever it is, to your opt-in page and then the other one is you know, know (inaudible 8:15.9) content first, get super cheap clicks and then retarget them back to your opt-in pages. Is there any -- have you done any you know, because -- like a lot of people are doing really well, doing both of those, you know what I mean. Have you ever done any like straight test where you literally took the same audience, same offer, everything and tried both? Eric Siu: Yeah. I think we have and I think it really does -- (inaudible 8:39.1) it depends on the offer. It depends on what you were selling exactly. If it is something that is free you know, you might just (inaudible 8:43.8) directly to it or you know if it is a higher ticket like $1,000 or $2,000 course and they do not know who you are. You probably going to have to build that relationship and try to get into the webinar. So obviously, the less steps you have, the better because you know, my argument with (inaudible 8:57.1) what their content in the beginning was like, you know, why you want to add that step in the beginning but you know, it does in fact work because you are building a relationship you know, (inaudible 9:05.5) a piece of content and you are able to retarget that later. Really depends. You have to you know, work out the numbers on your end and then -- I think at the end of the day, if you were able to just make 1 tweak, sometimes all it takes is just 1 tweak for a campaign to sky rocket. So definitely test you know all the different ways, try to direct or (inaudible 9:23.1) piece of content and see how that does for you. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, definitely. And you know, when it comes to you know, when it comes to -- because a lot of people really they do not focus enough. And I am actually building -- I am in the middle of building a course on doing webinars and one of the things that I am talking about is pre-selling people, you know what I mean, because so many people it is like you are taking them from you know, wherever it is, Facebook or Adwords or whatever it is and they have never heard about you and it is just like plop you know, right into the ad and I have seen a lot of people try where the ad itself had. It was more of curiosity thing you know and then when they get to landing page, they have like -- there is no context. There is no pre-sell whatsoever and they are getting a lot of clicks, but they are not getting a lot of conversions and you know, kind of the theory behind that is because they are not pre-sold you know. What are your thoughts on pre-selling people like do you try to really -- well I guess without giving it away you know, when you are writing ads for let us just say Facebook just for example. Do you try to you know, do you try to write the ads in a way that it kind of you know, targets a specific audience or do you do it more you know, maybe you are having a success with doing it more curiosity based you know, what are your thoughts on the actual ad itself? Eric Siu: Yeah. So, when I target people I mean you know, obviously you wanted to go to the you know, the message to whoever your target instead of just writing a general one. I mean -- I think you know, in general, the logic is you know, obviously (inaudible 10:55.6) target, it is going to resonate, it is going to get better, click to rates, better engagement in overall it is just better you know, better (inaudible 11:01.2). So yeah, that is generally what we do on that front. Jeremy Reeves: Okay, sounds good. You know -- and actually you know, while I am here, have you found anything that is working best for different price points you know. You know usually I find it usually like higher price points are webinars, have you found anything else -- I guess more in getting people kind of into the you know, the lower end product like for example. I have a client right now and they are selling a product for $250 right. It is a physical product, it is this mask that you put on your face. It is for like, you go out in the sun and it rejuvenates your face that kind of thing, right. So it is a beauty product. So we are not really going to do a webinar on that, probably a video at some point, but you know, it does not really fit into like a webinar category, but it is also not a just like, hey you know, here is this thing go buy it type of deal. Now we are going to try Amazon ads, but you know, besides Amazon because there are already buyers so they buy a little easier. Have you found anything that works best for you know, something like that where they are not high enough to really get them on a webinar, but it is not really low enough or it is an impulse buy you know, have you found anything that works in that like kind of a middle range? Eric Siu: Oh yeah. I will give you a couple of examples here. These are little more low tier but you know -- I have a friend at (inaudible 12:24.8) E-commerce company and they sell leather cases right, mobile phone cases and you know, it is like you know, they were $7 to $15 product and they are literally just tried the Facebook traffic to the product page and it is actually working for them believe it or not. And so that works and then you know, also we have a client that -- they have, they sell these brushes, really nice brushes, it is a subscription service. I believe it is about $20 a month and literally yeah, Facebook traffic is going straight to the product page and that is working out. So yeah, you know, the easy stuff people say you cannot really use Facebook to drive people directly to a product page. It does in fact, work. Jeremy Reeves: Nice, okay. I am going to have to -- because I have some clients that have lower end stuff and you know, a lot of what they are doing is like -- I am one -- especially when people are first starting like I always try to you know get some wins first without going into paid traffic and then once the funnel is converting, then you pay traffic rather than kind of just jump to gone over right in just because I am little bit more risk-a verse that I think most people are. So I like to do things like you know, for example, that client that I was just talking about one of the things that we are going to do is reach out the bloggers, have them review it that kind of thing you know, do like paid sponsorship type of situations that kind of thing. Just to kind of like get some feedback first you know, because it is one of those products that we have to be kind of sensitive with the objections and the way that we handle certain things. It would kind of take too long to explain it, but -- You know, brings me kind of my next one is, what are some things that you know, so you said the Gmail advertising right. So I think everybody you know, most people listening to this, they know about the like the big things you know, Facebook and Adwords and SEO and that kind of thing. What are some -- do you have any other kind of unique traffic sources that most people are not doing that they typically it makes a little bit easier to make something work you know, it kind of like the Gmail Advertising? Eric Siu: Yeah. I mean, the Gmail Advertising has followed the (inaudible 14:26.6), but I think at Youtube you know, Youtube has been something that has been you know, it is the number 2 search engine in the world and still not a lot of people are giving it even though it has continued to get bigger and bigger. I mean you look at your Facebook you will see everything single day you are seeing more and more videos. Facebook video has done well, but you know, people continue to neglect the power of Youtube advertising, but you have to think you know, you are able to retarget people. You are able to you know, to retarget or target certain channels, target certain keywords it is pretty powerful, still do not neglect Youtube advertising. Jeremy Reeves: Okay, that is a good one. And are you doing -- that is one actually that I am going to be starting to do actually with this webinar course. That is one of the things I am going to test out and also for client that I am working with now. It is also -- we are kind of (inaudible 15:12.2) you know. When you are doing Youtube, is it -- I am trying to think of the way to say this. When they are looking at the ads, is it -- do they only pay for it if they actually watch the whole -- I think there is a certain amount, they have to watch a certain number of seconds or certain percentage of the video or something like this and how that it works? Eric Siu: Yes, so the way it works is if they click on the ad you get charge for it or it is either you have to watch 30 seconds or you finish the video, which you know, whichever one comes first. That is how it works. Jeremy Reeves: Okay, nice, okay. You know I guess kind of a similar question is. Are you sending people, is it like or I guess maybe kind of depends probably. Are you using that more like an opt-in kind of strategy or you are selling it right from the ad? Eric Siu: (inaudible 15:57.2) I mean some people do opt-ins and they are getting you know, CPAs for as low as $1 to $2 or you can drive them directly to a page to sign up so either way, you know you just test it up probably (inaudible 16:08.5) and make it work. Jeremy Reeves: Okay, yeah. I guess you know, the easy way to -- I am huge you know, kind of a just hey you know, test a couple of things and see which one you know works the best and then put all of your effort into that as well and it sounds like you are kind of the same way. You know, I think an easy way to kind of figure out where to start like what strategy to start with you know, in terms of like opt-in or just a straight sale. It is probably the price point mixed with the complexity you know like the market sophistication of whatever you are selling you know what I mean. Would you agree with that? Eric Siu: Totally agree. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, okay. I think that -- for anybody listening you know, if you want to try that out or even Gmail or whatever you know, I think it is like, if it is an easy buy you know, if it is just like hey, here is what it is, here is what it does, buy it now. Those typically tend to sell pretty well just straight from the ad versus like if you have to explain it. If the market does not really know what it is and you have to explain what it is or how it works that kind of thing, typically it is a little bit harder I think to you know, to make it work right off the bat, right. Okay, so that is -- I think that is, you know, pretty good amount of you know different traffic tips for people rather than the typical stuff do they hear or do Facebook advertising. That is like kind of it you know what I mean. I think 9 out of 10 times it is just oh do Facebook ads you know, but yeah, I mean there are a lot of other -- I am actually working with client right now who is doing a CPA offer you know, for a supplement you know, and it is like, a lot of people do not do that type of stuff you know what I mean. There are big opportunities because everybody is doing Facebook and everybody is doing Adwords so if you find things that people are not doing there is less demand there and the clicks are less and you know, and you get CPAs that are less which is you know, which is awesome. I think it is important to try some of this you know, some of these alternative strategies. So with that right, so we have the traffic now we covered that. How about some you know, conversion you know, once they -- so we are getting them to the page you know, how do we sell them once they are actually on the page you know, do you have any kind of you know, ninja tricks for you know, for doing that? Eric Siu: Yeah. I do not think there is really any ninja tricks nowadays when it comes to conversion. Nothing that comes into my -- I mean you can look at the digital marketer stuff, what they do when it comes to -- oh dragging people to a low dollar offer like a $7 offer and then doing some upsells right after you know, some one time offer you know, you up $7 and you upsell them to you know $200 product and you can upsell like another round. So you can use a tool (inaudible 18:48.4) to help you you know, set that whole thing up, but I mean in general, if we are going to talk about new conversion stuff that showing up. Generally, I just like to look at conversionxl.com or conversionrateexpert just to see what they are talking about, but I have not seen anything groundbreaking in the last couple of years. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, you know what, and honestly I think that is a good thing because I think that -- I used to be really, really heavy into the CRO world. I actually -- conversionrateexpert actually reached out. This was a couple of years ago and they wanted me to work for them, but I am just not really an employee kind of a guy, so I said no. I actually worked with Peep too from conversionxl.com. He is super, super smart dude. And you know, I think when I am talking about conversions with people, I think a lot of people miss the basics you know. They want to focus, it is like, oh, what button color is or what color background or you know, what about you know, flashing arrows and then they are focusing on that stuff, but they have not really nailed down the core message right. They have not nailed down the objections. They have not nailed down the emotions of the market’s feeling or why their product is unique and like all the big thing is really you know, drive like 99% of the conversion you know what I mean, is that something you found as well? Eric Siu: Yeah, I mean, you know, generally people will talk about the colors and things like that just because you know, they read an article but really it is about more than that. You have to look at the data. You have to survey the audience and you have to you know, come up with the hypothesis before you start doing all this run and test and I think you know, growth hackers they just launched a tool called Growth Hackers Projects where it allows you to organize all of your tests get everyone on the same page. I think that is a great tool for you know, team to start using. Jeremy Reeves: Nice, nice. I like that. I am going to have to look that up. Because we are doing a lot too and it is like -- it is sometimes it is hard to you know, organize various tests because you have a whole bunch of them going at the same time and you forget you know what is even happening with them. I am going to have to look into that. I am going to write that down. How about you know, have you ever tested things like you know price points. I know digital marketer, (inaudible 20:55.4). He did a thing a while ago about you know, about pricing you know and I have kind of seeing the same thing. I think there is a lot of price elasticity when it comes to you know, when it comes to selling things and I have actually had a lot of different cases where a client came to me and they were selling something for whatever just say, it is $47 and we rewrote the copy and increased the price and kept the exact same conversions, but the price was you know, 50% higher. And I think that comes down to just good copy you know what I mean. Just explain (inaudible 21:30.1) the value more you know, building up the value more and reducing the risk you know more. So I guess you know, have you ever tested any types of pricing strategies that you have worked like that, like you know, you had one thing like I know with Ryan is one of the big things. He did was -- he had a $97 and he did 2 payments in 97 and it was like the same conversions with double the price that kind of thing. Have you ever done any test with that or any like kind of cool pricing strategies that works? Eric Siu: Yeah. I mean most of the time, I think people are just you know, afraid to increase their price. I mean that is the easiest way to kind of just start to scale your business and I think you know, I have certainly you know, victim to that you know, still sometimes I will be as well, but just to give you an example you know, for some clients come to us for a marketing strategy you know, (inaudible 22:16.6) marketing strategy as you know, $1,500 offer well you know, recently we started increasing into $5,000 (inaudible 22:22.9) it is literally the same thing. We just increased the price. So I think it is a matter of just saying, okay, well you know, I am just going to increase it you know, screw it. I am going to see how it works out and you know, we never got any complaints. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah and you know what, how is your -- how was the quality of your client has been, since you did that? Eric Siu: You know, it is even better. I mean you know, when you increase your price, you get different types of -- you get different kinds of people you know, if they are willing to pay that price, great right and they are not complaining you know, it is a different type of client versus the ones that are trying to you know, trying to negotiate that price down to you know, a $1,000 to $500 or something like that you know, it sets a different type of expectation I think. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah you know, I was thinking the other day about like micro continuity sites where it is like $7 a month or $10 a month versus just you know, versus just like alright say you have you know, like which is easier if you had $10 a month and you have to get whatever a thousand people to make $10,000 a month or you can charge a $1,000 a month for some kind of like you know, lower end service and have 10 clients you know, which one is easier to service or you know, $10,000 a month and have 1 client you know what I mean. And I think that is something that a lot of people you know, a lot of people missed you know. When you work with people, do you look at things like that like if they have low end and you think the price can be higher or you know like when you are working with clients -- I guess the question is rather than just like do you look at it more holistically versus more transaction I guess you know, things like that you know, pricing and the strategy behind it, the positioning rather than just like okay, lets us you know, do this traffic source and do this copy or whatever. How do you work with clients when you are -- you know, when they come to you and they have a problem that you are trying to solve? Eric Siu: I mean we would not get feedback. I mean, we have you know -- 1 client they have a type of service that is based off on subscriptions and we came to them saying, hey, you know, maybe your (inaudible 24:27.0) is a little too high, maybe you wanted you know, figure out, maybe making it just like a set price instead and try testing that out. So the thing is you know, we will take a look and we will give our feedback (inaudible 24:36.9) price at first you know that is really reserved for you know, agencies out there like price intelligently that can really help nail things down and really have a more scientific process to it. Jeremy Reeves: Okay, got you, got you. And how about -- how does your testing process go? So like you know, once you actually -- because this is, I know from an experience you know, this is an area that a lot of people get hung up on is they will put together a funnel, right, and they are all excited and then they run traffic to it and either it totally bombs right, and it is just like does absolutely nothing or it does a little bit, but it is not quite ROI positive right and then you know, of course and that is one we will focus on and then of course the other one is they launched and it does really well and you know and that is fine (inaudible 25:18.3). What is your process for going and actually like you know, taking a funnel that is -- it is kind of showing some light you know, because some of them just do bad. The messaging is all off you know, it is just not a good product in the market but you know, I think most of them will show at least some legs you know what I mean. They show signs of life they just have to be optimized you know. What is your process for actually going and optimizing funnels once they are actually launched? Eric Siu: Yeah so for us I mean we do not specifically specialize in funnels, but (inaudible 25:51.5) mostly for our own stuff I mean, when it comes to testing especially with ads I mean usually what you see with people is that they will say, okay you know, we have this $5,000 budget you know, let us test like a $100 or $200 a day and let us spread it over you know a certain amount of time. Our thing is we rather just put all that money up front and then collect all the data as quickly as we can. Get that data and then you know, try to (inaudible 26:13.3) shall we continue on with this? Are we seeing traffic with it? If we are seeing traffic let us continue and move on. So we are looking for any signs of you know, growth and then you know that is how we kind of continue to innovate. Jeremy Reeves: Okay, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I am on the same way you know, I rather just get it all out there because why wait 2 months when you can just get it in a week you know, and then you could spend the next 7 weeks tweaking it you know what I mean and seeing you know, seeing what is wrong in that kind of thing. So when you are looking at results you know, are there any -- are there any certain KPIs that you, you know, that you typically look at -- For anybody who does not know the term, Key Performance Indicators. Any certain matrix that you look at as kind of like a benchmark? Eric Siu: Yeah. I mean there is a lot (inaudible 26:57.3) I am sure you do that too, (inaudible 27:00.4) we are looking at cost per acquisition you know, we are looking at -- or cost per acquisition, cost per lead whatever you want to call it and then we are looking if that numbers increase and decrease in overtime and then we also wanted to look at you know, also how much volume we are driving and you know, you can look at other matrix such as you know, click the rate as well, conversion rates too. Those are kind of the you know, the matrix that we look at and also cost per click too. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah and there is also going to be -- I think that is a good summary of like the you know, the basic one. Then there is -- you know, for different industries there will be a couple other like you know, specific-like industries, specific lines. Eric Siu: Yeah, the lifetime value things like that. It really depends and yeah. Jeremy Reeves: Okay, sounds good. Alright. Well, hey you know, I have a blast. I have learned a lot. I guess my last question is, is there any you know, is there a question that I have not asked or something that -- that you want the audience to know before you get off, that you would you know, you feel bad if you got off and they did not hear this one big tip. Eric Siu: No. I think that’s about it you know, if you are into marketing just listen to marketing school every single day. Give us feedback and give us topic ideas because we are always aching for more. Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, definitely. And before you hop off. Let everybody know where you know, where they can find you. Eric Siu: Yeah, absolutely. Just go to growtheverywhere.com and then you can find me on that podcast or you can go to growtheverywhere.com/marketingschool to listen to the podcast with myself and Neil. Jeremy Reeves: Sounds good. And for everyone listening, those will be in the show notes as usual and I also give my personal recommendation you know, for his podcast. They are topnotch you know, like I said, I listen to you know, to the one Neil Patel literally every morning which is cool while I am making my coffee and it is a good just kind of you know, quick insight you know, kind of just gives you new idea, nice little you know, spark I guess for the day and yeah, it is a good stuff. It was great having you on. Thanks for coming on. Eric Siu: Alright. Thanks for having me Jeremy. Jeremy Reeves: Sure.
VB Engage - Mobile, Marketing, & Technology Podcast from VentureBeat
This week, Stewart and Travis talk with Mark Organ about influencer marketing, employee advocacy, and how we can do more important things with our smartphones than play Angry Birds. We then reveal why the Kardashians are in trouble with the FTC, what Instagram are doing to make ads better for everyone, and how Facebook plans to power the new economy of chatbot payments.
Fred Stevens-Smith is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Rainforest QA, which if you listened to 20VC with Byron Deeter, you will remember he discussed them and their amazing trajectory. So for QA first, it is essentially QA as a service making it fast and easy to test your webapp in multiple browsers and they are backed by some of the best as we said there Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, our own Jason Lemkin, Y Combinator, previous guest Kris Duggan @ Betterworks and Marc Benioff just to name a few. As for Fred he is the man at the helm as Co-Founder & CEO and absolutely smashing it I might add. In the show Fred mentions his favourite reading material to be Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross’s new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue and if you have not read that, that is a must and can be found here! In Our Discussion with Fred You Will Learn: How did Fred come to found Rainforest QA? What was his origin story to YC? How did Fred look to establish the pricing model with Rainforest? Why does Fred believe most software companies undervalue their software? What are the challenges of going upstream? How does it affect product? Sales cycle? Does Fred agree with Mark Organ that in a new category, the company CEO must be the category CMO? How much of a role does content play in Rainforest QA’s education funnel for customers? Why does Fred believe you should spend the most time with your best people? Similarly, the least amount of time with your worst people? How has Fred gone about building out the sales team? What did Fred look for in sales reps and Heads of Sales? 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 Stevens-Smith
Super excited to welcome a heavy weight of the SaaS industry today as we have Mark Organ, Founder & CEO at Influitive. Influitive helps B2B companies mobilize their army of advocates for more rapid and profitable revenue growth. Prior to Influitive, Mark was the founding CEO of Eloqua, growing the business to over 150 people, hundreds of clients and a major presence around the world in 7 years. Eloqua was eventually bought by Oracle in 2012 for a reported $810m. In Today’s Episode with Mark We Discuss: The founding story behind Influitive? What was the a-ha moment behind the concept? What were Mark’s biggest takeaways from watching Eloqua scale into the global force that it became? Influitive are creating a category, so how is that for Mark? What are the inherent challenges? What are the commonalities of successful category creators? What is the difference between good and bad competition? Why does Mark try and encourage good competition? Why are brand advocates crucial to the success of a business? Is it a really scalable solution? How did you figure out the model for making customers successful? In a round we call the 60 Second Saastr, we also hear: Mark’s fave SaaS resource and reading material? Thought leadership: Fundamental or unnecessary? Target Markets; Go large or be specific and niche? 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 Mark Organ
IMA Leader Audio Podcast | Leadership, Marketing, Content Marketing, Big Data, Social Media, Email
As the founding CEO of Eloqua – which is now part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud – Mark Organ has been developing tools related to #modern #marketing for decades. Mark shares his experiences with Eloqua and his most recent company, Influitive. Mark’s opinions on the future of our industry can’t be missed.
To Mark, the term” category creation” is often mislabeled. He would rather refer to it as category discovery, in the same way that archaeologists discover ancient cities and relics, he and his team at Influitive discover categories and trends. Mark first finds a group of people that he thinks will become powerful and numerous because of important trends that are happening in technology and society.
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