Metrics & Chill - Predictable Growth for B2B (Databox)

April Dunford joins the podcast to discuss her surprise (at least to her) hit book, Obviously Awesome. On this episode, we dig into some of the core product positioning lessons that April discusses in the book and coaches clients on, including: - How to tell if you have weak positioning - Where positioning should fall on a marketer's/executive's priority list - How the approach to positioning changes depending on the stage of your company - The 10-step process for defining your positioning, and... - The most important positioning lessons that April has learned throughout her career Enjoy.

On this episode of Ground Up, Shane Murphy joins John to discuss consistency in messaging, moving upmarket, and how to differentiate in a crowded market.

Transistor cofounder Justin Jackson shares why he and his co-founder Jon started a "boring" podcast hosting company, how they netted their first 100+ customers, and how they modeled their growth in order to grow without outside investment.

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Driving Demand for Clients

Jonathan and the team at Omni Lab are focused on using paid channels to generate demand that drives pipeline for clients.

The primary, lagging indicators they track are:

• Demos for sales led or Trials for PLG
• Pipeline
• Lead to Opp
• Opp to Rev
• CAC Payback
• Revenue

Along with a host of other leading metrics, to know how the ads are performing. By focusing on Lead to Opportunity, they’re able to gauge how effectively they’re targeting the right audience, with the right messaging, who eventually reach out to book a call with sales and become opportunities.

How They Improved It

1. They helped refine targeting by analyzing where the Client had been successful in the past.

They looked at case studies, social proof, quotes, and best-performing deals in the CRM.

One insight this revealed was that most of the “best customers” came from employee sizes of 10-50. But the client had been targeting companies much bigger than that.

This process essentially allowed them to reverse engineer who the best clients were (who gave testimonials, case studies, etc) and refine the targeting to reach more of the same.

A huge benefit of starting with a niche audience in paid, is that they were able to focus their budget in one place, vs just spreading it across a wide swathe of geo, industry, company size, etc.

It also allowed them to add better personalization, which drove higher conversion.

For example, they could make the creative more specific: logos of companies that look like them, or case studies of peers they’d know.

2. They improved the booking flow.

They’ve tested every possible booking flow with clients, but have found the most success starting with a form, then going to a booking tool like Calendly or Chili Piper.

When choosing a time, prospects have to go off-site to open their calendar & see what times work for them. That means there’s always a % that don’t come back. By using a simple form as a first step, you can send the booking form and remind them, to try and get them back.

3. They improved messaging by studying what worked best in the past.

Like many early-stage companies, this client didn’t have a dedicated product marketing team. So they got an overview of the ICP’s articulated pains, values they wanted, and overall buyer journey.

How?

• Reviewing early outbound emails
• Talking with the founder
• Listening to sales calls
• Talking to sales reps

This allowed them to create messaging that had the best chance of resonating, without the benefit of in-depth research. Jonathan believes that if you’re really early, this messaging may just be coming from the Founder’s brain. The key is: don’t wait for it to be perfect. Get it good enough, based on some positive input, and start testing.

4. They performed “micro-tests” on that messaging.

Before putting thousands of dollars of spend behind it, they did small tests with the new target audience to see how the messaging resonated well. Jonathan also said that this is where most people go wrong when testing messaging or creative: they test too many things.

They change creative and visuals, messaging, and CTA, so it’s impossible to identify what change made the biggest impact or how each piece is performing.

5. They optimized for the audience consuming the messaging in-channel.

Rather than try and optimize for immediate conversions or website clicks, they focused on getting more consumption of the message on-platform.

6. They resolved any uncertainty buyers felt in the retargeting layer.

They used retargeting ads to answer common objections and questions prospects had, and to provide social proof so they felt more comfortable with the client.

This meant that by the time the retargeted prospects did become leads, they converted at a much higher rate because they were already more familiar with the company and had many of fears/uncertainties answered.

Results

These steps led to a 49% increase in the Client’s Lead to Opportunity Conversion Rate (from 25% to 74%).

Thanks for a great 2022! A few updates from the Databox team, as we wrap up this year.

JD Sherman, HubSpot's COO for the past 8 years, joined the podcast a few weeks ahead of his announcement that he will be leaving HubSpot in July of '21. Here, he talks about his working relationship with CEO Brian Halligan, how HubSpot's leadership team approaches strategy and planning, and how that translates to various teams and departments, HubSpot's decision to go wide as a platform rather than deep and upmarket as an automation tool, and much more.

Kieran Flanagan, HubSpot's VP of Marketing, talks about the early days of freemium at HubSpot, instilling a growth discipline that expanded well beyond the marketing team, managing cross-functional teams, and more.

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Many B2B companies could leverage data-driven insights from their customer lifecycle journey to hone their marketing strategy, improve retention, and increase revenue. The key is to think like a Rev Ops professional, even if you don’t have one on your team. Sam Bowley, an experienced Rev Ops executive, shares how B2B leaders can do this.

Learn how Camille Trent used LinkedIn to double email subscribers from 6k to 12k in just 1 month.

On this episode, Casted CEO and cofounder Lindsay Tjepkema joins the show to talk about its recent public launch and round of funding, how the company is growing and what's been working so far, and why genuine and helpful conversations are the next big thing for B2B brands to leverage as a driver for growth.

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Sean Burke shares 7 areas where companies experience revenue leaks, and how to monitor and address them.

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Our benchmark data shows that for B2B companies, the median cost per click (CPC) is $1.52, while the median cost per conversion is $65.16. At face value, most B2B companies who want to capture existing demand among high-intent prospects could see a great ROI on search ads. So I sat down with Google Ads expert Silvio Perez to ask: who are the best for? How can you know if you'll get a good ROI? And what are the factors that make them successful or unsuccessful?

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In this episode, Casey Hill shares a 6-step framework to help you use email to improve activations during the onboarding phase.

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Jonathan Stanis, Director of User Experience, and Frank Isca, a strategist at Weidert Group, joined John Bonini on an episode of the Metrics and Chill podcast to discuss how they improved one key metric for their client: Goal conversion rate.

Learn how Nick Bennett drove 83 G2 reviews in 1 quarter, in order to drive signups, improve retention, build social proof and tons more.

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Adam Lewis offers insights into his 25-person team's strategies in system design and re-engineering work and the importance of proper training for sales teams. You'll learn:

• How Adam's agency employs benchmarks to measure their performance against other leading HubSpot partners
• His agency's marketing and sales tactics
• Managing different team member personalities in the workplace
• Optimization of the sales process, client services, and the pivotal role of feedback and reviews

... And a ton more!

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Fill out the form here to let us know how we can make the podcast more valuable for you!

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Prashant Kaw shares three principles your company should embrace, in order to make the most of your demand gen efforts.

Learn how Ryan O'Hara uses data to validate product ideas, and double down on the marketing channels there are already working.

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Why Free-to-Paid Conversion?

Amanda had a gut sense that since “audience research” was still pretty early and search volume was relatively low, they needed to nail the onboarding experience when people did give them a try.

She started working with Forget The Funnel, who helped them identify 2 big opportunities:

1) Increase free-to-paid conversion.

2) Improve the onboarding experience.

So they focused on growing their free-to-paid conversion %, and got to work improving onboarding.

How They Improved It

Improving the onboarding flow.

At the time, SparkToro's onboarding flow had 15 (or so) steps and a 10% completion rate, which was above average. Despite that, they were still addressing churn and getting questions about the product, so Amanda knew there was room for improvement.

So she worked with Ramli John, who helped them improve the sequence. They did this by reducing it to 8 steps, and having Rand Fishkin (founder) trim his welcome video from 5 minutes to 2.

Next, they updated the onboarding messaging, making it more concise and using a more active voice.

Finally, they made sure every onboarding step mapped to 1 single feature. Previously, they had introduced new users to "list creation" and "outreach" in the same onboarding step. Amanda noticed that not as many people were creating lists, so they broke these into 2 steps.

These changes alone took their onboarding completion rate from 10% to 15%. And even though Amanda couldn't prove users were actually consuming the messaging more than before, she knew it was easier to understand, quicker to get through, and it drove users to complete 1 successful search so they could reach the “aha” moment faster.

Creating a behavior-based email sequence.

In the early days, Rand would send personalized welcome emails himself. Later, this became 1 email welcoming users to the product, with subsequent emails being sent to remind users of upcoming monthly charges.

Amanda knew there was lots of room for improvement here, but she faced one major challenge: SparkToro had a very wide use case.

It's used by a lot of different companies, for a lot of different things. This meant that doing "1 size fits all" onboarding emails wasn't going to cut it.

So she created a "behavior-based" email sequence, with 3 main goals:

1. Get people to "value realization" as quickly as possible

2. Help users get into the habit of using SparkToro more often

3. Get users to use more features, and realize it's power

She worked with Casey Henry, SparkToro's co-founder, to build out workflows that would group users into logic-based cohorts. Depending on the cohort/segment they were in, they'd experience a slightly different onboarding email sequence.

For example, the first action someone takes is signing up for a free account. Ideally, the 2nd action they’d take is running a search. So if someone performed a search, they'd get a welcome email that would suggest other searches they might try. But if they signed up and didn't make a search, they'd get an email suggesting first searches to try, that might be beneficial to them (based on inputs from the customer).

This allowed them to provide specific help, based on prospective customers' needs and use cases.

Launching "Office Hours"

Amanda started a series of live sessions where anyone could ask questions and get answers in real-time on a consistent day/time every week.

They'd promote this to new users in onboarding emails, but it was open to anyone. They regularly get 1,000 people watching, with as many as 1,300 on some sessions.

This provided a way for curious, would-be customers to learn more about the product in a no-pressure environment. And existing customers can get answers to specific questions they faced while trying to adopt the product for their own use.

Results

In 4-6 months, the team doubled their free-to-paid conversion, adding more revenue without any new inbound channels.

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In this episode, we'll discuss how to create a powerful social strategy that not only increases brand awareness but also drives tangible revenue for your business. Discover effective social strategies that directly impact your pipeline and proven techniques to identify the social content that truly resonates with your audience and leads to bottom-of-the-funnel results.

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In this episode of Metrics and Chill, John Bonini sat down with Gabe Marguglio, founder and CEO at Nextiny. Gabe and John talked about how the team at Nextiny has turned video marketing into a lead generation powerhouse.

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Why Qualified Pipeline via Inbound?

The whole team is focused on driving net new logo revenue. So Pete focuses his team on qualified pipeline to contribute to that goal, and be aligned with the rest of the team.

They define “pipeline” as “total booked revenue” (= when a scheduled demo meeting takes place). Since they aim for a win rate of ≥ 20%, this allows Pete to work backward from their revenue goals, and determine how much pipeline he needs to drive to help meet it.

How They Improved It:

They focused on understanding their audience better.

They get on sales and customer calls weekly. This gives them insights around pain points and needs prospective customers have.

These insights help them continually optimize their messaging, in order to be more helpful and relevant. It also helps them learn where their target customers spend time or pay attention.

This means that when they make big bets on channels to invest in, they aren’t guessing.

They invested heavily into refining their messaging & positioning.

In a world where features are easily copied, Pete invested in differentiating Alyce by crafting a unique point of view and go-to-market message. This positioning provides a source for the entire team to draw from when they need to craft messaging or marketing creative.

They brought in Dave Gerhardt, who helped them further refine how they thought about positioning and messaging for Alyce in a new and unique way.

And once they had some concepts, they tested the new messaging on their homepage using Wynter, in order to look for leading indicators that the messaging would be successful and land the right way.

They focused on harvesting more existing demand.

They leverage about 25% of their resources and team on capturing existing demand. This includes using intent data to trigger more targeted outreach, retargeting on social, and a mix of branded & non-branded PPC programs.

They focused on creating new demand.

The biggest bet they’ve made is finding ways to create new customers and generate demand. They’ve done that in 2 broad steps:

1. Create relevant and insightful content

2. Distribute that content everywhere their target audience is

They made big bets on:

1. Events (micro & virtual)
2. Social (paid & organic)
3. Co-marketing with other brands
4. Investing in evangelists who speak on podcasts
5. And communities

Because they’re tracking self-submitted, qualitative attribution, they’re able to see the efficacy of these channels and find the ones that are most effective.

So far, it’s paying dividends. Top attributed channels are LinkedIn, Google Search, and Communities/Events.

They approached communities with 2 main focuses:

1. Bring value & education (don’t just talk about Alyce)
2. Find ways to let members experience Alyce’s gifting

For example, members might be sent gifts upon joining or completing certain milestones. This allows these marketers (= the community members they’re reaching) to experience the value of Alyce in a more natural and generous way.

Results

Alyce had great momentum from past marketing leaders. With that as the foundation, this framework helped them increase the % of inbound qualified pipeline to 70%.

Full episode here.

As Head of Growth, Casey shared how Bonjoro approached one key metric in particular: trial conversions. A software app for sending personalized video emails to onboard new customers and clients, Bonjoro took a page out of their own playbook by using personalized onboarding videos to boost trial user engagement early on.

On this episode of Ground Up, Joe Martin shares: - CloudApp's journey to becoming a thought leader in customer experience, productivity, and collaboration. - How to get the marketing right for your freemium product (leveraging organic growth and referrals) - The role of historical data in building your marketing engine from scratch - And more!

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Going All-In on Organic

In the first year, Emilia was the only marketer at Userpilot.

They tested just about every channel to try and get early traction: paid, webinars, events… they tried everything. But she was spread thin, and attribution was hard with so many experiments. The company was growing, but she needed to focus.

She joined our very own John Bonini’s content marketing community, where she got advice to just focus on what she knew was working. And what was working, was organic traffic. It drove 70% of signups at the time. So in 2021, they went all-in on organic content.

How They Improved It

She set a goal of 10x’ing article output: from publishing 4 articles per month to 40. After setting the goal, it was time to define topics and the scope of the content. By this time, they had 2 years’ worth of content, so she began to identify what was working, and what wasn’t.

She divided their blog topics into content clusters, and then assigned those clusters as “bottom of funnel” (BOFU), “middle of funnel” (MOFU), or “top of funnel” (TOFU) content. She also focused on what Grow And Convert calls “Pain Point SEO”: focusing their content around the pains their customers felt, and the solutions the product provided.

To help identify topics, they interviewed customers, found derivative keywords, performed a content gap analysis, and identified topics that relevant Slack groups were talking about.

Then came the hard part: finding writers. They initially tried to use freelancers to handle research, writing, and a tie-in to the product. But they found it incredibly difficult since the product was fairly sophisticated.

So Emilia started looking for unicorn content writers: People who wanted to work in-house, were familiar with the industry, had experience working with product teams, and were amazing writers. She eventually found them and built a small team.

But after a number of months, just about all of them had left, because they wanted to grow beyond the role. They were talented, smart, and ambitious, and over time – they became burned out with only writing SEO-focused articles. Emilia concluded she needed to build a better system rather than relying on better people. This meant going back to freelancers, but this time with a new system.

She built a small internal team of content editors. These in-house pros would create detailed briefs, which included the outline (links, headings, subheadings, images) and talking points (what to say, in what order, goes in each paragraph), along with additional resources. This way, freelance writers could just focus on writing, and the in-house pros could focus more on high-level strategy, and lean into their product expertise. This system allowed them to increase output to 50 high-quality articles per month.

Each main topic would become a “milestone” in Asana, and each blog post would become a task. When each contributor was finished with their stage of work, they’d pass each piece of content “down” to the next stakeholder, using a kanban board. She also focused on building the most high-quality links she could, until they reached a domain authority (DA) of 70.

At that point, they performed tests and found that after 15~ links to any single piece of content, there were no significant increases in search engine rankings. So rather than spend more time and money on link building to the highest domain authority sites they could find, they focused more on links from domain-relevant sites. She also started measuring which keywords were driving the most conversions.

She created a few dashboards. One listed all articles and was sorted by the highest conversion rate. Another showed each article and the top keywords that the article was ranking for. And another which consolidated data of “top converting keywords”. These visuals also gave them a better of why signups might be spiking or dipping any given month.

Finally, she compared how BOFU content compared to TOFU content when it came to driving conversions and found something interesting. She found if a user consumed one BOFU article and converted, they didn’t retain as well as the ones who would start at TOFU content and consume multiple pieces of content. Visitors who started on 1 piece of BOFU content typically only had 1 use case or pain they wanted to solve. This meant it was harder for them to see why they should pay a premium to buy into a platform that offers a myriad of tools to solve a myriad of problems.

On the flip side, if a visitor consumed multiple pieces of MOFU or TOFU content, and converted later, they had a higher retention rate. This indicated they were likely looking to solve many problems and could make full use of the entire product.

Results

About 18 months after making the commitment to go all-in on high-quality, organic content, they saw exponential growth. Organic visitors grew by 299%, and conversions from organic search went up by 59%.

Andy Cook, cofounder and CEO at Tettra––a company wiki and internal knowledge base software––shares the company's journey from "Ramen profitability" to actual profitability over the course of several years. On this episode, he shares details around: - how he and his cofounder cut expenses to avoid going out of business - how a failed round of funding made profitability a necessity - how launching a freemium plan helped Tettra increase acquisition and adoption - how the team sets, prioritizes, and aligns around goals in order to stay on track

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Do you have trouble setting goals at your company? Or that you don't have any real control over hitting them? Learn how Brandon Powell (CEO of HatchWorks) implemented a new goal-setting process to lead his team to their best quarter ever.

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Why a Virtual Event?

The event is called IG Summit. The website is beautiful (it actually won some awards) – https://igsummit.com/. But what made Anna believe this was a bet worth making? Or put differently, how could you know if a play like this would work for you?

It started by analyzing their Net Revenue Retention (NRR). They found that users who signs up via educational channels or who were looking to solve problems related to Facebook or Instagram retained at a higher rate.

They also stood to get the most value out of the product. So when they set a goal to drive new signups and paid accounts, they knew that using educational content around Facebook or Instagram would be successful.

Besides that, they had experience with doing events in the past, though nothing to the size they were about to aim for. May 2021 they launched Instagram Automation, and were working on a go-to-market strategy to promote it. The plan was to use paid ads. But for reasons outside their control, they didn’t perform well (like the rollout for Facebook Automation had), so they needed a new plan.

So Anna and the team made a quick pivot, and a big bet. The goal was to put on the biggest virtual IG summit in the world, securing 25k registrants, and 1k new paid accounts. In the end, they ended up surpassing these goals.

How They Improved It

1. They figured out what content resonated with their ideal customer persona (ICP) and tried to create the best content possible for that audience.

They surveyed their Facebook community of existing customers, to learn what content would be the most valuable. Then they performed research to know what topics were trending, what the market was interested in learning, and what existing content was already out there.

From there, they defined 3 “levels” of content the summit would include:

• High-level: over-arching business lessons
• Mid-level: more practical application
• Bottom level: ManyChat experts showing how to grow business with ManyChat tools

Finally, they set the niche categories they thought would resonate best, and then found speakers who could best speak to those topics. Each speaker had the freedom to formulate their talk however they wanted but was asked to stay within the topic range they had been given.

2. They asked all the speakers promote the event.

They encouraged all the speakers to promote the event (though not all did), and every time a speaker joined they made a series of content they’d promote across various channels.

3. They used existing, and new influencers to help promote.

They had some influencers they worked with before the summit, who they partnered with to promote the product. But they also brought in new ones who they hired to specifically promote the event. Generally, they found that the existing influencers (who had already promoted the product to their audience) performed better. They also found that all the influencers got better engagement by promoting the educational event, over the product directly.

4. They ran paid ads, and honed in one which drove $3 registrants 🤯

Initially, they ran ads on Facebook, Instagram, and paid search. They quickly found FB ads that used the native lead form vastly outperformed the others.

How well? $3 for every registrant.

The results were so good, Anna had the team check for errors – thinking they might be spam emails. But after analyzing the emails against signups from other channels, along with the summit email open and readthrough rates, they found the results were truly that good. But these results didn’t come easily. They involved lots of great design and creative, and lots of tests.

They also continually changed up the ads with new content every time they landed a new speaker.

5. They heavily nurtured the list of registrants.

They maintained constant communication with registrants the entire time leading up to the event. If they didn’t, Anna doesn’t think they would’ve seen the same results. Each registrant was sent a series of emails leading up to summit.

And if they ended up registering with the product right away (as a result of seeing the marketing or ads), they were sent various In-app messages about the summit. And throughout the summit, they sent a regular volume of relevant messages to the attendees. This included messaging which emphasized, “here’s the content you’re about to consume, if you sign up for the product, you’ll be able to better take action on what you learn.”

6. They tracked registrations all the way through to product signups.

They had tracking in place (which users could opt out of) If that was the case, they had the registration email they could match to an account in signup. Influencers had their own campaign funnel, so they could track those referrals separately. They used an attribution model where they attributed 40% to the first touch, 40% to the last touch, and 20% to the channel they interacted with in between

Results

26k registrants and 3,500 actually paying accounts (not free trials) – 91% of whom were new to ManyChat.

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Pete Caputa and Yoram Wijngaarde share lessons they learned, building companies from $1 to $10 million in ARR.

In this episode of Metrics & Chill, KlientBoost’s founder, Jonathan Dane joins the show to talk about how identifying and improving one metric helped boost customer engagement, customer retention, productivity, employee happiness, and so much more.

In this episode of Metrics & Chill, Tommy Walker, founder of WalkerBots Content Studios, talked about how they approach one often overlooked metric they believe is crucial for content marketing success: Return visitors.

In this episode of the Metrics & Chill podcast, John Bonini caught up with Jasz Joseph, founder and Digital Marketing Strategist at Jasz Rae Digital. Jasz and John talked about how Jasz’s agency has brought the inbound methodology to clients that sell big enterprise deals.

Learn how Casey Hill, Head of Growth at Bonjorno, used personalized video to 2x trial conversion signup.

Learn how Brendan Hufford (founder of Growth Sprints) grew ActiveCampaign’s traffic by 20% (in just 30 days).

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In this episode of "Metrics & Chill," Pete Caputa, CEO of Databox, chats with Jamar Diggs, a YouTube consultant, and Germeen Guillaume, an expert in nonprofit accounting. They explore how Germeen’s focused content strategy on YouTube helps her connect with smaller nonprofits, driving business growth and outperforming industry benchmarks. Tune in to discover how data-driven insights and value-driven content can elevate your YouTube game!

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Ellie Mirman, CMO at Crayon, shares details on the early days of building the inbound marketing playbook at HubSpot, how the channels and mediums have changed, and how she’s successfully employed that inbound playbook at 2 other early-stage SaaS companies.

In this episode of Metrics & Chill, Ramli John, Manager Director at ProductLed, talked about how the company took advantage of one often overlooked metric to increase MRR for clients - activation.

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Learn how to craft a marketing plan that aligns with your company’s revenue goal, and helps ensure you hit your marketing targets. We’ll cover everything from working with sales and other teams to identifying the “levers” you need to pull to have the best chance of hitting your target.

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Reaching New Prospective Customers

Since most of WorkRamp’s ideal customers might not be ready to make a purchase decision, or even know much about the category, they set out to bring in more new potential customers to the blog. The goal was simple: deliver helpful content visitors would bookmark, share, and come back to, in order to build brand awareness and trust with WorkRamp.

WorkRamp can educate these prospective customers on immediate questions or needs they have, and build familiarity with their brand and what they do. And eventually, when they’re ready, they’ll come back to signup or purchase.

How They Improved It

1. She focused on top-of-funnel content to reach a wider base of new prospective customers.

WorkRamp wanted to bring in more *new* people to the website, and introduce them to the brand.

Since most visitors wouldn’t be ready to make a purchase decision, she decided to focus heavily on top-of-funnel content to build trust & familiarity with Workramp so visitors would be more likely to come back and try the product when they’re ready.

2. They performed an audit to see what topics were playing, and which weren’t.

When Fara got started, there wasn’t a lot of content strategy in place. The team evaluated current performance to know what was working & what wasn’t.

If an existing topic was resonating and gaining traffic, they set out to repurpose or elaborate on it. If a topic wasn’t getting much attention, they’d stop allocating resources to it. This helped them know where to invest their time and budget in the early days.

3. She listened to sales calls every week, to learn what topics customers would be interested in.

Fara built a habit of listening to customer calls every week to learn common customer questions. She’d create content based on these common questions, problems, or educational needs customers had. She’d pair this research with KW research, and create content that had significant search volume – and mostly importantly – resonated with their target customer.

4. She set a practical “quality rule” for each piece of content.

Fara wanted to create content that readers would bookmark, share, and revisit. To do that, she created a simple rule. Every piece of content needed 1 valuable thing readers could leave with.

In other words, she tried to ensure that every piece of content had really valuable insight readers could leave with and put into practice. Even if they outlined “5 ways to ______”, she’d focus on the 1 thing readers could leave with – if they took nothing else away.

5. She analyzed what competitors were doing, to find how they could take a different angle on their content.

Even though competitors would cover the same topics, Fara wanted to make sure WorkRamp had a unique angle or take on saying the same things, to stand out from the crowd.

6. They tracked the impact of their content further down the funnel.

Besides organic traffic, Fara’s team keeps a close eye on contacts created via LI (from the brand account), social media engagement & traffic to the site, and ultimately, demo requests & MQL attributions.

Results

As a result of all this, Fara and her team were able to increase Organic Traffic to the Blog from < 20% to 77% Quarter Over Quarter (and they’re still growing).

An old friend Patrick Shea joins the pod to discuss the early days of HubSpot's partner program, how they went about building a powerful and thriving partner community, his transition to enterprise and what SMB marketers can learn from the enterprise playbook (and vice versa) and much more.

Daniel Waas spent 10 years managing and working on the same product––GoToWebinar. First with Citrix and later, after an acquisition, with LogMeIn, Waas's strength was perfecting and marketing a product that he himself knew better than anyone after hosting more than 500 webinars over the last 10 years. Here, Waas shares lessons learned after spending more than 10 years growing with the same company.

Learn how Peyton Walbeck increased Nectar's landing page conversion by 55% in 30 days.

In this episode of Metrics & Chill, learn how Patrick Campbell, Founder & CEO of ProfitWell grows one metric that’s crucial for both them and their customers: revenue per customer.

David Rostan, former VP of Sales & Marketing at Calendly, joins the pod to talk about how freemium helped shape Calendly's go-to-market approach and how growing market competition in the effort to own your calendar only sharpened Calendly's positioning.

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Why HIRO Pipeline?

Refine Labs helps drive demand and pipeline revenue for SaaS companies from Series A through D. When they hit 30~ Clients, the team went to measure how many pipeline dollars those clients would get for every $1 they spent in ads. Chris wanted to be able to show what the growth of their pipeline was (across all clients) from the time they started working with his team, to then.

But he had a problem. He realized that out of all their clients, none defined pipeline the same. Every single one had different definitions. For exome companies, “pipeline” meant that the lead booked a meeting with an SDR, and was in a stage where the deals convert at < 10%. Others defined pipeline as a deal in a stage that converted at higher than 50%.

So Chris created a new pipeline revenue metric that could be easily adapted by all clients (and non-clients who wanted to), and would allow them to benchmark their performance against others.

They define HIRO Pipeline as leads that come in through a high intent source (book a call, schedule a demo, etc) with win rates greater than 3% from lead-to-win, and reach a deal stage in your pipeline that converts at a 25% rate for that cohort of opportunities.

These two qualifiers mean that if the deal stage starts to close below 25%, marketing needs to change the stage that HIRO is defined by (to a 25% or higher one) so they’re always aligned to sales performance.

It also helps align marketing to revenue, without having to wait for the lagging metric of actual revenue to come in – because it’s based on a secure win rate.

How They Improved It

Using qualitative attribution

First, Chris believes it’s important to understand that HIRO Pipeline’s efficacy isn’t going to be clearly shown by traditional attribution software. It requires a blend of qualitative and quantitative attribution. For most, this can be done by adding a simple open text field in the onboarding process, asking prospective clients how they heard about you.

Balancing focus and budget between creating demand, and capturing demand

Chris believes the main key to driving HIRO Pipeline is striking the right balance between creating demand and capturing demand.

Capturing demand is waiting in channels where people have demonstrated intent, are “solution-aware”, and are actively looking to buy something. For example, Google Ads or product review sites like G2.

Creating demand is spending time reinforcing your messaging in channels where people are not in the market for your product or service. They may not be “solution-aware”, and don’t have intent to buy what you’re selling.

Chris believes the key is to have two different strategies to reach each of those audiences.

Chris believes that because companies rely so heavily on attribution software, they’re only focused on the “channels that work”, which are all demand-capturing channels.

This means there are only so many buyers these companies can reach, and worse still, they have no control over how that demand was generated. 

Instead, companies must focus more on creating demand (vs capturing it), so they have control of the flow of new buyers entering the market.

This means most companies must change the way they think about and approach demand generation. For example, if you don’t draw a distinction between “demand capture” and “demand gen” channels, you’ll end up treating the audience in each of those buckets the same. Where in reality, one audience is ready to buy and wants to consume one type of content, while the audience in the other is not going to buy and is interested in an entirely different set of content.

For Refine Labs, this means using “demand gen” channels to help clients amplify messaging that educates clients about:

• the category
• the business problems that the Client solves
• How that Client has driven success for other customers
• Differentiating features the Client has, that competitors don’t
• etc.

Chris believes marketing teams need to take those elements, say them in compelling ways, and serve that messaging up natively in demand-gen channels that prospective buyers are already in. The goal is not to convert the prospective customer in that moment, but rather to educate them and keep your company top of mind.

This means that instead of driving a person on LinkedIn to download an e-book, you might run an impression-based video ad that showcases the growth you drove for a client, or a written post breaking down what people should know about the category you’re in.

The idea is that you plant the seed in this person (who has consumed this messaging) in the belief that they will end up sharing your company in a Slack channel, with peers at an event, or through a LinkedIn DM. And then someone from their network or company will come directly to your site when they’re ready to buy.

Results

Refine Labs has been applying that framework for customers since Day 1.

They researched a cohort of 20 customers from B2B SaaS companies that had clean, historical data for 6+ months before starting to work with them. 

They then compared the 6 months prior to working with Refine Labs to the 6 months after working with Refine Labs, specifically drilling down to the HIRO metric.

Across those 20 clients, the median increase in pipeline was an impressive 76%. This means a series C or D company doing $2m in pipeline before Refine Labs was doing $3.5m~ after working with Chris’s team.

View the full episode here.

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In this episode, we'll look into the "Revenue Architecture" framework, a proven method to transform your business into a revenue-generating machine. Learn how to optimize your sales process, set clear targets, and increase your bottom line with expert insights from Roee Hartuv, a Revenue Architect at Winning By Design.

• Follow Roee
• Visit Winning by Design

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Learn how Amrita Mathur (VP Marketing) has helped Superside grow to $45m in 4 years, using a combination of short and long-term planning.

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Learn how Frank Rocchio implemented a new framework to help the team at Lone Fir Creative better understand how to troubleshoot and hit their growth goals.

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Andres Glusman (CEO, DoWhatWorks) shares a simple framework to help you run more successful growth experiments, and save time and money.

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Learn how Rachel Whitehead (VP Marketing, ChartMogul) and her team leveraged internal data to create valuable content that drove brand awareness, traffic, and signups.

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Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP of Marketing at HubSpot, joins the pod to provide what is essentially an oral history of marketing at HubSpot. Anderson has been with HubSpot for 9 years, and in her words, it's like being with 3 different companies during that span due to all the different phases of growth. In this episode, Meghan provides all the details behind what makes HubSpot's marketing engine move, including: - how the team is structured - how their planning process works - how they set goals and cascade them down to the individual contributor - how they stay flexible to make adjustments, improve efficiencies, etc. - the channels they're investing more in, the ones that have evolved, etc. Enjoy!

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Learn steps you can take to increase revenue and grow more efficiently. 

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Gaetano DiNardi shares what many companies get wrong when they analyze website performance and traffic, and steps you can take to better know and serve your visitors.

Gaetano is a growth advisor to top B2B companies like Gong, Cognism, Workvivo, Aura, Pipedrive, Nextiva. He has 8+ years of demand gen leadership for high-growth SaaS companies, with expertise in optimizing websites and scaling organic growth machines. He's also a musician, writer, and entrepreneur and has been published on HBR, Fast Company, NASDAQ, HubSpot, and more.

Learn the framework Kristina Simonson is using to structure the marketing functions, mission statements, and KPIs at Privy.

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In this episode John Bonini chats with Adam Goyette, VP of Marketing at Help Scout, to learn how they grew their website conversion rate, and why that metric became a priority for the team.

You’ll learn…

• How the Help Scout executive team sets annual goals
• How the marketing team identifies where to invest their time and money
• How improving the website conversion rate became a priority

Why Website Conversion Rate?

Each year, the Help Scout executive team works together to identify what their annual revenue goal is, and what growth % they’re aiming to hit in the upcoming year.

Once they have this number and growth %, they work backward to find how many signups and new customers they’ll need in order to hit that goal. 

Although the revenue goal is set annually, they’ll adjust the forecast of what they’re expecting quarter by quarter. This allows them to make smaller adjustments in real-time, as they see how things are trending.

Transparently sharing their performance

Every day, an email is delivered to the team, showing them how they’re progressing towards that month’s goal. It includes a breakdown of trials, sales opportunities, and projected MRR. 

On top of that, individual teams meet weekly to review their own numbers. And executive teams meet once a month, reviewing what happened in the last month and where they’re going next month. 

They feel that having the numbers transparently in front of the entire team, encourages everyone to be creative and offer up solutions to help improve that number. 

Looking for growth opportunities

Once they have their growth goals in place, it’s time to figure out how to achieve them. Their goal is to find the right set of “levers” to pull, in order to move the needle on traffic, free trials, demo requests, weighted pipeline, and more.

And there are dozens of levers they could pull. It’s probably the same challenge you face at your company. Do you try new channels, or grow existing ones? Do you send more traffic, or improve conversion with the traffic you have? 

To help narrow things down, they look how each stage of their funnel is performing, and how each channel is performing. Then they ask questions like, “what channels can we reasonably expect to grow?” and “what channels might be worth investing in?”

They also look for the easiest wins. For example, if paid channels are steeped in competition with deeper pockets, they’ll look for a channel where they can be more competitive. Or they might find they can get significant results just by doubling down on an existing channel.

Why they chose Website Conversion Rate

Adam and the team found that the free trial to paid conversion rate was 20%+, which was already high for the industry. But if they looked higher up in the funnel, they found they were getting 500,000 visitors every month. 

They decided it would be far easier and more impactful for them to increase the website’s conversion rate (driving more free trial signups), than it would to increase an already high “trial to conversion rate” of 20%.

So they set to work running experiments.

How They Improved It

They view their website content in 2 main buckets: “High-Intent Pages” and “Low-Intent Pages”.

High intent pages include the homepage or product pages, where people are visiting with the intent to explore and potentially sign up for the product. Here, the call to action is “sign up” or “start free trial”. 

Low intent pages include content like a blog or thought leadership content, so they make the call to action something like “join the newsletter”. This encourages visitors to stay in the Help Scout ecosystem, without forcing them to take an action they have no intention of taking. 

When setting out to measure and improve their website conversion rate, they only looked at conversion on the “high intent pages”. This helped them get a more accurate number of how they were performing on pages that had a set call to action of conversion.

Their current “website to free trial” conversion rate was 2% on those high intent pages, and their conversion rate from “free trial to active paying customer” was 20%. 

They assembled a “task force” of stakeholders

Website conversion is often “cross-functional”. In other words, it’s owned or used by multiple teams. 

Brand marketing might own the messaging. Product marketing might own the positioning. And growth marketing might own SEO or conversion rate.

So Adam and the team put together an “optimization squad”, comprised of all the stakeholders who needed to have input on the website. This ensured that every stakeholder had seat at the table, and could work together on improving conversion without stepping on each other’s toes.

They tested everything

They experimented with just about everything. But they saw the biggest results by adding personalization. Helpscout has a wide base of customers, so by understanding who their buyers are, they’re able to present more helpful messaging tailored to those personas.

For example, they found that smaller companies have to convert better by going through self-serve, while bigger companies almost always convert better when they speak with sales. 

The optimization squad would take an insight like this, and present a dynamic (changing) call to action, depending on the person viewing the site. Someone from a company with more than 500 employees might see “talk with sales” while someone from a small company sees “start free trial”. 

They’d also highlight different use cases of the product, and change the way they talked about Help Scout. For example, if a 500+ person organization read, “Help desk software for small business”, they might feel Help Scout wasn’t for them. 

By personalizing the team could show different customer logos (that looked like the visitor’s company), make the language more relevant, and be more helpful with use cases that visitor was interested in.

In total, personalization included dynamically presenting the call to action, headlines, length of free trial, use cases and social proof.

Results

In just 6 months, they saw a 56% increase in demo requests and a 6% increase in trials.

Check out the episode summary here.

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CallRail is an incredibly data-driven company.

They transparently share performance metrics across the entire team, to foster accountability and ownership. 

By looking at the metrics regularly, they’re never surprised to see a low or high number at the end of the month. And they work together to try and identify negative (or positive) trends when they see them happening in real-time.

In this episode, Jason Rozenblat (VP of Strategic Accounts) shares how CallRail grew Free Trial to Customer Conversion %: the percentage of total users who begin a free trial and end up becoming paid customers.

While they have other metrics they obsess over (namely MRR, ARR, and ARPU), Jason and his team are especially focused on “Free Trial to Customer Conversion %”  because it directly impacts deal size and close rate.

It’s also important, in that it’s a shared metric across the team. Jason works with the Demand Gen team to grow it, and it’s shared by any teams that touch the website because those teams also care about driving traffic and improving website conversion rate. The two go hand in hand.

This includes engineering, product marketing, and customer marketing. So they obsess over this metric as an entire organization.

How they grew it

Jason and his team found a number of things that have contributed to growing this metric.

Changing from monthly to weekly cohorts.

By measuring cohorts weekly rather than monthly, they were able to get much more granular and ask, “what happened this week, that was different than other weeks?”. This helped them spot causes of growth or decline in real-time, as opposed to waiting until the end of the month and looking at a post-mortem. 

They also started tracking cohorts in 5-week intervals (from 2-week intervals). 

Since they have a 2-week free trial, they used to analyze cohorts in 2-week intervals. But they started to realize that there was always a long tail of trials that would close way past the 2-week mark. 

Users would extend their free trials, or come back after a trial had expired in order to enter payment information. 

So by extending the sales cycle, and measuring cohorts in 5-week intervals, they got a clearer picture of what was going on and had better data to make decisions from.

They changed the way they handled lead assignments.

Before, if sales reps were going to be using PTO the following week, they’d be pulled out of rotation to ensure they weren’t assigned any new free trials to manage. But what they didn’t account for was all the free trials that were set to expire on while that rep would be out of office.

So they changed the way they handled lead assignments, to make sure that whenever a free trial expired, it was passed off to a rep who would be in office during that time. They also started to view expired trials as viable leads and focused more on converting them.

They focused on sales training and education.

On top of all of this, they continued training sales reps on how to better handle objects, close deals, etc.

Results

The results they saw were amazing. Some months, they increased their Free Trial to Customer Conversion rate as high as 10 points.

With the traffic and free trial volume, they had at the time, that change alone could add an additional 100-150 customers or $100k of ARR.

And in certain cohorts, they saw trial to conversion rates of 70-80%.

View the full episode here.

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Jen Spencer (CEO of SmartBug) shares how they've grown by serving the right clients, with the right services, managed by the right team. Learn how this segmentation has been a huge factor in their success, and get insights you can use at your company.

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In this episode of the Metrics & Chill podcast, Mike Donnelly, founder and CEO at Seventh Sense, talked about the right way to measure and improve one important email marketing metric: active audience with email.

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At the time, Gremlin had raised a great Series B and was growing significantly. They had product-market fit, and were looking to scale. Their goal was to make the sales and marketing funnel more efficient, so they decided to test an account-based (ABM) approach.

Where many companies go wrong here, is only focusing on target account engagement: blasting targeted accounts with ads, and seeing “impressions” going up. But Peter wanted a metric that would be a leading indicator that what they were doing would pay off. So he and the team designed an engagement score metric that combined quantity and quality.

The metric produced a cumulative total “engagement score” based on all contacts’ lead score, impressions, and engagement. For example, they could have 1 contact at Nike who loved them (browsed the site, downloaded content, etc.) w/ a lead score of 100. So their avg. lead score per contact and total “engagement score” would be 100. But if they attracted 9 other contacts from Nike who didn’t engage with their content, and had a lower lead score, it would bring the overall engagement score down.

This provided a number of benefits. If they had content that played well among other highly engaged accounts, and it wasn’t playing well for a new target, they’d know that account might be less likely to close. Or if they found an account that had lower cumulative lead scores, they might pump the brakes and serve up more top-of-funnel content and slow down their approach.

And it didn’t merely serve as an early performance indicator. They could also use their cumulative engagement score to test different channels or content that might drive all target accounts higher across the board.

Results

By using a more holistic, custom metric to measure their ABM strategy, they saw a 50% increase in engagement among targeted accounts in just 1 quarter. They also added a few points to the marketing qualified lead (MQL) to qualified opportunity rate.

ThriveHive CMO Dan Slagen joins John to discuss: - the challenges of marketing to the SMB - how to develop a marketing strategy for a high-churn, high CAC audience - how to foster a better working relationship between marketing and sales, and - how channel/partner marketing has been the key to it all

Vimeo's VP of Marketing, Melissa Matlins, dives deep into Vimeo's journey to become a full-service video platform and how they're repositioning the brand to support that.

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How They Moved The Needle

1. They boosted retention by offering a discount for the next year, and the ability to pause (vs cancel) a plan.

When travel screeched to a halt and churn started to ramp up, the CEO and his team focused on retention. They prevented it in two ways:

If things were going OK for customers, they could upgrade for another year at a discount. If they weren’t, rather than canceling and losing data, they could simply pause their account.

This also showed customers that the company had there back, and would support them.

2. She updated messaging and value props the client led with, based on customer research.

The old messaging focused on value props around reliability and value. Asia did customer research to learn the “job” customers were hiring the product for, and what they valued most. In her research, she found that these value props didn’t resonate with customers like they did before.

The market had changed, and so did the needs and beliefs of the customers. She found customers still wanted reliability, but they really valued things like:

• Innovative features
• Things they hadn’t considered before
• Help tackling other problems their businesses faced

After she completed the customer research, Asia crafted new value props, centered around how the product would:

• Work with customers
• Help them grow
• Be in their corner your corner
• Release innovative features

3. She updated the Client’s Google ads campaigns to better reflect the new messaging and value props.

4. She completely redesigned the Client’s website.

In her research, she found customers weren’t choosing the Client because the “marketing wasn’t as pretty”. One respondent actually said, “you guys didn’t look as cool as the other options.” Other competitors looked newer, more professional looking, or more modern. It was also hard to tell the difference between the Client’s site with all the lookalike competitors, touting the same solution.

Through research, they found they were often the last product people tried. And because users would try 2 or 3 competitors first, they’d often end up signing up with them instead. Asia wanted them to stand out, resonate, and be the first product they tried.

So they overhauled the design, opting for a darker, bolder theme to stand out from the competition (who mostly did light, lookalike designs). This had a huge psychological effect on buyers. The Client stood out, and customers would remember the site and experience better.

4. They updated the website with new messaging that showcased the new value props they discovered.

The old messaging centered around being reliable, easy to use, and convenient to connect everything you needed. The new messaging centered around being a platform that would help you grow, innovate new features to solve ongoing problems, had flexible pricing, and would always be in your corner. This included updating the signup flow, pricing page, and messaging on the homepage.

5. They hired an SEO agency to build organic traffic.

Asia had helped build a foundation for content, so when the SEO agency came in, they started increasing 10% month over month.

6. They overhauled the onboarding emails.

They went through several versions of onboarding emails, with the goal of getting the customer to value realization as fast as possible.

7. They helped the Client improve the signup flow to reduce friction and get users to value realization faster.

Asia identified and changed steps in the signup process that were causing friction, and contributing to a lack of activation.

Results

They increased MRR by 10x in just 2 years, organic traffic by 10-30% month over month, and doubled website conversions (largely due to the overhaul in their design and messaging).

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James Robert Lay, founder and CEO of Digital Growth Institute, shares his journey of building a successful consulting practice focused on helping banks and credit unions improve their sales and marketing efforts.

Links:

• Follow James Robert Lay
• Visit Digital Growth Institute

In this episode of Metrics & Chill, John Bonini talked with Ben Sailer, Inbound Marketing Director at CoSchedule, about how the team at CoSchedule refocused their content strategy on driving trials and product signups, instead of just traffic.

On this episode, Kyle Lacy sits down with John Bonini to discuss brand-building, communicating your brand's vision, and battling imposter syndrome.

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How They Improved It

1. He hosts a weekly meeting with sales to review conversion and lead health.

AJ hosts a weekly meeting with sales to get continual feedback on lead quality, and to learn how many marketing-driven leads are either becoming opportunities or leading to pipeline revenue.

This helps him:

• make sure marketing and sales are rowing in the same direction
• refine their ICP over time
• understand which campaigns are most effective, in real time

For example:

Sales may share that prospective healthcare clients will be facing open enrollment in a few months, and need to scale their SDR team. So AJ might decide to run a special seasonal campaign to support sales efforts.

2. He made a big investment in building brand trust and awareness.

AJ’s goal is establishing demandDrive’s name in the outsourced sales space, growing awareness and trust through valuable content. This contributed to a 3x increase in overall inbound leads: people that have consumed their content, but haven’t said they’d like to learn more about the service/offering (yet). They’d learn about demandDrive, but weren’t ready to learn more.

3. Created a marketing automation system to nurture inbound leads, and help more of them convert to MQLs.

As inbound grew, AJ realized he had a big opportunity to keep these people engaged until they decided they wanted to learn more or might be a good fit for demandDrive. Since it was primarily valuable, organic content that grabbed the prospect’s attention in the first place, AJ served them up more of the same in the nurture phase.

This meant that most of the messaging they’d receive from demandDrive was just valuable content. If a prospect consumed a large amount of content (e.g. read blog posts dozens of times), or raised their hand and said they wanted to learn more, they’d be moved into the MQL stage.

4. He crafted more effective sales-driven emails by studying the most effective outbound messages.

Once in the “nurture” stage, prospects were mostly sent valuable content. But once in a while, they’d receive a more sales-oriented message. To make the sales-oriented messaging more impactful, AJ would find messaging that was resonating well in outbound campaigns, and adapt talking points to fit his needs in marketing.

5. He started manually evaluating lead quality, and handpicking the best leads to make sure they went to sales more quickly.

He’ll send those directly to sales because they look like companies that have had a lot of success with demandDrive in the past.

6. He started ungating most content.

AJ found that the gated content just didn’t perform better than any ungated content they’d release, so they’ve been moving to ungate just about everything. This likely contributed to the 3x increase in inbound leads they’ve seen.

7. He baked in more CTAs to talk to sales, or opt-in to the marketing automation system in content.

If a reader wanted to learn more, they could either opt in and join the nurture campaign (marketing automation), or get in touch directly with the sales team.

Results

As a result, they grew Inbound Lead to MQL conversion from 40% to 60%, and MQL to SAO conversion from 52% to 73%. And in May 2022, they did more business (total new logos & revenue) than all of 2020 combined.

Learn how Dee Acosta sourced 50% of all his deals via outbound, and his approach to differentiation, cold outreach, and more.

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Read the full report (here)

Pete's LinkedIn Posts

1. Most companies are still cutting and pasting into spreadsheets/slides
2. Picking metrics is hard. Few do it correctly.
3. Marketing is the most measured activity. Is that a good thing? 
4. Sharing company performance transparently is not the standard, but it probably should be.
5. Seven habits the highest performing companies implemented.

Recently, John Bonini connected with Amanda Natividad, Head of Marketing at Growth Machine, for an episode of our Metrics & Chill podcast. Amanda told John all about how they’ve turned a notoriously hard to attribute marketing channel into a conversion and sales engagement producing engine.

Benyamin Elias, VP of Marketing at Podia, shares how to have a well-informed marketing gut and how to use KPIs to inform the growth of your business.

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Learn a better way to do marketing and sales, by partnering with your target customers.

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• Create your own private benchmark group
• Read the "Collaborative Growth" article

Learn how Hillary Carpio (Sr. Dir. of ABM at Snowflake) uses “Process KPIs” to ensure her team can create sustainable, repeatable processes that help them hit their goals.

Get insights from Community-Led Founder Mike Rizzo, on how to start and grow a successful community that drives meaningful growth to your business.

In this episode on Metrics & Chill podcast, Chris Strom—founder and Principal at ClearPivot—sat down with John Bonini and walked him through how ClearPivot took a strategic approach to grow organic search traffic around a pretty competitive niche: SaaS marketing.

Elle Woulfe, a martech veteran with over 12 years working in SaaS for companies like Eloqua, Lattice Engines, and Path Factory shares her experiences in: - building a content marketing engine - hiring and structuring a marketing team - aligning your team around metrics/goals/plans - the most important skills a marketer needs in 2020 (and beyond) - and more...

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In this episode of "Metrics & Chill," Jennifer Christensen, founder partner at Beacon Media and Marketing, shares the agency's journey from a content and inbound marketing firm to a national leader in marketing for mental and behavioral health clinics. She discusses the use of tools like Databox for reporting, the transition to telehealth, the impact of AI on marketing, and the value of a collaborative industry approach in driving business growth and performance.

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• Follow Jennifer
• Explore Beacon Media + Marketing

In this episode, Wes Bush, author of Product-Led Growth, sits down with John to discuss all things PLG, including how it's different from marketing + sales-led organizations, the key levers for transitioning to product-led, how teams can get started, and much more.

In this episode of the Metrics & Chill podcast, Logan Lyles, VP of Customer Experience at Sweet Fish Media, talked about how they lowered revenue churn from 15% to 3% in 12 months despite the pandemic.

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In this episode, we go behind the benchmark data as Connor Jeffers shares insights on building a successful technical consulting firm. You'll learn about their approach to demonstrating expertise through workshops and research, leveraging webinars for content distribution, and the importance of customizing CRM systems for individual organizational needs.

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• Explore hapily

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Our benchmark data shows that it’s relatively inexpensive to run impression-focused ads on LinkedIn. We explore the topic, “should more companies try this? And can they run profitable ads for just $3k/mo?”

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• View the benchmark data
• Follow JD
• Hire Impactable

ActiveCampaign's CMO, Maria Pergolino, joins Ground Up to share: - how the company netted 80,000 customers by focusing more on product and less on marketing - why she's joined the company now and how marketing will continue to fuel growth, and - why they're leaning into brand and an already established community to grow

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In this episode, Guy Alvarez, founder of Good2bSocial, shares his journey from lawyer to marketing expert and dives into successful digital marketing strategies for law firms. You'll learn:

• How Guy built a thriving digital marketing agency specifically for the legal sector
• Content marketing strategies to improve client engagement and website traffic
• How to integrate and analyze marketing data for law firms using real-time analytics dashboards and tools like Databox

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In this episode of Metrics & Chill, Alli Blum talks about implementing an outcomes-led strategy to boost product growth and customer retention. You'll learn how to estimate project impact, align your team with clear goals, and make data-driven decisions. 

• Follow Alli
• Explore Hypothesis Department

Ryan Bonnici, CMO at G2, checks in after 2 years at the company to share: - how they grew the team from 5 to 80 people - how he structures the marketing team into 3 pillars - how the marketing team measures success - the strategies that helped them grow monthly sessions from 500,000 to 5 million - his aggressive approach to goal-setting and planning - and more...

Patrick Campbell sits down with John to share the peaks and valleys of bootstrapping ProfitWell over the last 7 years, including making $0 in year one, managing product/market fit, building a consulting model to help sell Price Intelligently, and going through 2 bouts with cancer.

In this episode of the Metrics & Chill podcast, John Bonini talked with Tyler Pigott of Lone Fir Creative, a digital and inbound marketing agency focused on driving conversions through copy. As founder, Tyler let John in on how the words-first agency turns brand messaging into higher conversions.

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We go behind the benchmarks to learn how Lauren Ryan, owner of Coastal Consulting, transitioned from managing a team to serving as a niche solo marketing consultant who booked more than $300k in revenue this year.

Links

• Follow Lauren on LinkedIn
• Visit Coastal Consulting

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Learn how Adam Robinson found product-market fit and bootstrapped Retention.com from $0 to $15m+ ARR.

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Prashant Kaw shares three principles your company should embrace, in order to make the most of your demand gen efforts.

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In this episode, we explore how a B2B company can grow its newsletter subscribers, and tackle issues like send frequency, list maintenance, what content you write about, and more.

Links

• Mailchimp Benchmark data
• The Sauce newsletter
• Follow Tara

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In this episode, Alina Vandenberghe (Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Chili Piper) shares how she drives predictable growth by using a framework she calls “predictable orchestration” - the idea that GTM is not 1 motion, from 1 team, on 1 stage of the funnel, but rather, orchestrating all motions (paid, outbound, field events, etc.) at all touchpoints, for all personas involved in the buying committee.  

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Learn how Bob Ruffalo was able to grow IMPACT, a coaching and training company that helps businesses improve their sales, marketing, communication, and leadership, into a $12m firm that's in the top 93rd-100th percentile of his agency peers.

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Learn how Nextiva's Mark Jung drives predictable growth by finding his brand's white space, building a media arm to communicate it, and being different - not better.

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In this episode of Metrics & Chill, Dougie Loan, CRO at SourceWhale, shares his simple, but powerful, formula for crafting an accurate sales plan to help you hit your annual revenue goal.

• Follow Dougie
• Explore SourceWhale