Molly Bruckman, Head of Growth Marketing at Mutiny, a website personalisation platform, shares some top tips on how marketers can effectively leverage personalisation to enhance engagement and drive results. She also explains the potential pitfalls of over-personalisation and how it can negatively impact marketing efforts.

About Mutiny

Most Marketing teams can’t play a meaningful role in breaking through to target accounts because the 1:1 marketing strategies that work don’t scale, and what scales doesn’t work. Mutiny helps B2B companies generate pipeline and revenue from their target accounts through AI-powered personalised experiences, 1:1 microsites, and account intelligence. Backed by Sequoia Capital, YCombinator, and CMOs from leading tech companies, Mutiny is rewriting the Go-To-Market playbook.

About Molly

Molly Bruckman is a customer-obsessed marketing and CX leader. With 10+ years of experience building personalization, CRO and ABM teams and programs, Molly thrives on developing creative solutions that propel marketers to new heights. Her journey spans diverse landscapes, from nimble B2B startups to dynamic B2C enterprises, orchestrating growth programs across various channels such as web, email, community and events – always with an eye for innovative strategies.

Time Stamps

[00:44.9] – Molly discusses her career journey from mathematician to marketer

[05:44.4] – Molly explains what Mutiny does.

[06:32.0] – Molly discusses the best data points to base personalisation on.

[12:03.5] – Molly explains how over-personalising can impact marketing efforts.

[17:41.0] – Who can benefit from Mutiny?

[18:55.1] – How does Mutiny effectively promote itself?

[29:19.1] – Molly shares the advice she would give to someone starting their career.

[27:41.7] – Molly’s contact details

Quotes

“Marketing strategies that work don’t scale and the tactics that scale don’t work.” Molly Bruckman, Head of Growth Marketing at Mutiny.

Follow Molly:

Molly Bruckman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mollybruckman/

Mutiny website: https://www.mutinyhq.com/

Mutiny on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mutinyhq/

Follow Mike:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547

Transcript: Interview with Molly Bruckman – Mutiny

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Molly Bruckman

Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.

Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from my Napier. Today, I’m joined by Molly Bruckman. Molly is the Head of Growth Marketing at Mutiny. Welcome to the podcast. Molly.

Molly: Thank you so much for having me my.

Mike: Well, it’s great to have you on. And you know what we’d like to do first of all, is get a bit of background about people and understand how you got into Mutiny. Well, so can you use give a bit of a description about what you’ve done in your career and how you’ve ended up at Mutiny.

Molly: Yeah, absolutely. So actually, I found my way to marketing through math, which is a little unconventional, but always kind of had a love for math growing up, like the numbers, the quantitative, like how all systems work together. And then I also like, have this creative side, I’ve always had a creative side. So I was in the drama club growing up, I was a figure skater. And I’ve like, always sort of just liked to create. And so I after, like, graduating with a math degree, I joined a experimentation company where I was an analyst. So I was like, learning how to test and create new experiences and analyse the results and look at web data. And so it sort of like blended those two worlds for me. And fast forward a little bit, ended up at Mutiny, because basically have the same skill set. So I was the first second hire at Mutiny. And basically, our vos Ally was looking for somebody who had both sides, like the left brain, the right brain, somebody who could do the quantitative side, but who also had customer experience. And I’d been working as a consultant. So I had the customer experience in the programme building aspects. And then also new web, and conversion rate optimization personalization, really, really well. And so yeah, I decided to take a really big leap, join, fly across the country, I was in DC at the time, I moved to San Francisco, and and join a startup as basically like the second employee of the company, to build out our CX team, but actually like how we engage with our customers, how we help them. And back in the early days, we didn’t have product yet. So it was a lot of sort of r&d and figuring out what our customers need. And then working with our product team to build that. They grew up our CX team. And then I moved into our marketing org to actually like, do even more creative work. So start to build some education and content and activation programmes with customer base. And now I’m sort of blending the two together at leading our customer experience team and continuing that kind of education advocacy evangelism path that I was building in the marketing. org.

Mike: That’s awesome. And I love people who find their way into marketing from more technical disciplines. I mean, I used to be an engineer when I started my career, so, uh, I totally get the attraction of marketing.

Molly: Yeah. I think the blend of like, just understanding how different pieces work, but then having expression over how you communicate, that just really brings a lot to the table. And just depending on what you’re marketing, sometimes the technical side really, really helps you. I’m marketing to marketers, so I don’t need to be that technical anymore.

Mike: I love it. And also, you’re actually not based in San Francisco anymore, you’re based in Germany. So tell me a little bit about your trip to Europe and, um, you know, how you find working in Germany.

Molly: Yeah, I didn’t spend enough time to come up with a creative backstory there. So I guess I’ll tell you the truth. Actually, I can tell it dramatically, there was this wild global pandemic event. It was insane. You’ve never seen anything like it. But yeah, we were at the time, we were eight people at Mutiny working out of basically an apartment in the mission. And we were growing really, really quickly, we were going to outgrow that space, nobody could go into the office anymore. And so we all you know, went to a work from home model. And San Francisco, sorry If anyone loves San Francisco, but it just deteriorated as I was there. And so I was happy to get out. I was happy that we were like moving to a remote model. We started hiring people anywhere in the world. And my husband got an opportunity in Europe, he chose to come to Munich, which is why we’re here today. But he’s he travels all over Europe and we both actually travel a lot. So really take advantage of the like, work from anywhere kind of mentality.

Mike: Amazing. We’ve kind of hinted at what Mutiny might do. But could you just briefly give an explanation of what Mutiny does and how it helps marketers.

Molly: Yeah, absolutely. So I think where we’re at today in kind of the marketing world is that marketers can’t really play a meaningful role in breaking into target accounts because the one on one marketing strategies that work don’t scale and the strategies that scale don’t work, where they’re sort of left in a world where they can choose 10 accounts that get this one to one really special, bespoke treatment. And then everyone else sort of has to just like, maybe get some scale treatment. And so Mutiny actually helps B2B companies generate pipeline and revenue from their target accounts with AI powered personalised experiences, one to one microsites and account intelligence. So really, really helping our customers actually scale that one to one activity to many, many, many more target accounts.

Mike: So what you’re doing is you’re taking some existing content, maybe enhancing that with some data from perhaps the most relational CRM system, and then producing something that’s purely customised to that visitor on the website. Is that Is that a good summary?

Molly: Exactly, yeah. So we, we integrate with first and third party data sources like your CRM, like you mentioned, marketing automation, on the third party side platforms like sixth sense, clear bed that can tell you who anonymous visitors on your website are and help you customise those experiences. And then I don’t know if I don’t know what category this is in, but like, many owned data sources, as well for like, which sets up pages people are looking at and starting to build an intelligence layer on what interests people have on the site.

Mike: That’s great. There’s a lot of integrations there. , what do you find are the most valuable attributes to personalize on then? What, what’s the data that people pull in and it really makes a big difference to their results?

Molly: Yeah, it depends on the business, I think, you know, where I’d start, if I were advising a new customer or somebody to build a programme is start with how your sales team is segmented. So probably they’re segmented by region, maybe they’re segmented by vertical or industry. Usually, that’s for a specific reason, right? That’s to keep the account intelligence and learnings that you’re getting across the industry consistent and make sure that those reps get better and better and better at selling into that market. And so if you can map your ABM strategy or your personalization strategy in a similar way, where you can kind of apply marketing tactics to those same segments, tends to be really effective. As more of a broad like generic rule, I would say industry personalization always performs really well. And again, depends on your business. If you have, you know, a lot of reference customers already in a certain industry or not, you’re gonna do better. But industry personalization does really well, company size, personalization. Also, you know, the way you speak to a startup versus the way you speak to a large enterprise is completely different. You’re going to talk about different sets of use cases, you’re going to use different language, you’re going to talk about different value prop so so that one definitely matters a lot too. And then buying stage, I would say is another like critical way to be personalising. So when somebody needs to sort of be solution informed, like you need to teach them about the problem you solve. And as they move through the funnel, you need to start changing your messaging to how you solve the problem, and why you and not your competitor. So you can get really custom based on, you know, how far somebody is in their buying journey with you.

Mike: That’s great. I mean, there’s a lot of things you can do there. So maybe you could dig just a little bit deeper and explain, you know, how people might achieve that personalisation, what they might change on the website, or what, you know, kind of experience a visitor might get that makes it feel like the website is really personalised for them.

Molly: Yeah, definitely. And this, this depends on the channel of distribution. So somebody comes into your website, let’s say clear bed or six cents matches their IP address to accompany and then you know, which company they’re coming from. If you change your headline to, Hey, meet me good to see you’re there. Like that is way too much for like somebody who just came to your website on the first time they’re on your website, they’re gonna be like, very creeped out and confused and concerned. So don’t do that. There’s definitely like a right and a wrong there. But where you find the sweet spot is basically using all of the data you have as intent signals to help you adjust the message to get closer to what they might be looking for, though, maybe you look at Mutiny, and you say, Okay, this is a smaller tech company in the mahr tech space, they are probably working on scaling right now. So we want to give them a message about how we can help them grow faster. And then we see a headline that says, grow faster with blah, blah, blah solution, whatever it is, versus like a large enterprise comes and maybe you’re trying to replace another solution, or maybe you are, you know, you need bigger access controls for large teams like you can change that message and those value props depending on who’s there without being over the top. So I think like headline messages like text on a site, especially obviously content above the fold, like that’s always going to be what matters the most. And then CTA is so CTA is that match should kind of buying stage stage of funnel you know, don’t ask somebody to take a demo when they don’t know who you are yet, tell them learn more and like Teach, you know, send them to a video where they can learn more. So you can kind of map your CTA your asks per your, your visitors based on where they are in your binary funnel. And then social proof, I think is the other really big thing. So mapping your social proof to companies that are similar to the company that’s visiting your site, whether that is by industry or by company size, showing the right set of logos in your logo bar showing the right case studies showing the right like competitor takeouts and things like that can really, really help that whole experience just jive with the person that’s looking at it versus be like over the top built for you. Now, if you’re talking about microsites, that’s a different story, because that is built for you. And so that’s where you get to be over the top. These are kind of one to one pages, usually used in ABM programmes that you send or your your BDR SDR team sends out in email sequences, and they’re saying, Hey, I built this overview for you. And so at this point, now you have all the freedom in the world to like, use their name, use their title, go way over the top with personalization to say like, Hey, Mike, I built this page for you. Here’s three things I think you’re struggling with, here’s how we help. Here’s some case studies and playbooks they picked out for you, and a link to like book a meeting with me my Calendly link is at the bottom if you want to chat. So these ones you can get really, really personal. But it depends on how you’re distributing that page and how people are getting to the page if it’s organic, or if you’re kind of bringing them in.

Mike: So that’s fascinating. You said something there that I think maybe a lot of people don’t think about.  The level of personalization depends upon the context. So what someone’s expecting, if they just come organically to the website, then over personalizing can actually be a bad thing. You know, is that something you actually see reducing performance, where people over personalize and it feels, as you say, a bit creepy?

Molly: I mean, it depends on your industry. So if you are like selling to engineers, and security people and type people, you can’t do that, right, they’re gonna be really creeped out. They’re gonna be very concerned, they’re gonna be you know, they care a lot about privacy. So you have to think about who you’re marketing to. Now I’m, I work at Mutiny, I sell a personalization software, I can call you by name, because I’m selling the product that shows you that I can do it. So it’s like a little, you know, it all depends on the context at the end of the day. So I think in general, like different industries value different things. And actually, I’ve even seen a security customer of ours tried personalising using the company name on the inbound experience, and it didn’t perform well. And they changed the audience to only tech companies. And then it performed really well. So I think also, like tech companies tend to kind of value the more creative, personalised experiences and things like that versus like, education, health care, they don’t want to see their information on the page.

Mike: that’s fascinating. I think it’s an extra layer that maybe people don’t think about when it comes to personalizing content. So great advice, Molly.  Um, just moving on, you know, in terms of how Mutiny works, understand it. I mean, you as a marketer really have to select what gets personalized. So you might say, well, this is the headline that’s going to change.Is that how it works? And in that case,  Does it take a significant amount of time to actually get up to speed and work out how to use Mutiny and what to choose to personalize?

Molly: Yeah, that is, for the most part, how it works today, although AI, obviously, is an area that we along with everyone else is investing quite heavily in and continuing to build in. And so one thing that is like very clear to us, and our strategy is, we need to allow marketers to be in the driving seat here. So we’re not going to be like a black box platform where you just say like, click headline change, and AI does all the work and it changes all of these things, and you have no control over the message or what actually goes out there. So we’re always going to leave the end decision up to the marketer where the marketer can, you know, AI can maybe suggest a lot of things and you can approve and say yes and no to certain things. But it should be your copilot and your helper and not just like, oh, cross my fingers and hope they do on brand or don’t tell a lie about our product features or anything like that. So yeah, I think like technology will continue to is best there for new customers that to your question on like, does it take a lot of time to learn these things? We actually pair all of our customers with a Mutiny in house growth strategist. And that is a team that I grew and I built and I felt very, very passionately about but I have not hired CSMs I have hired marketers, and so everybody is here to actually be an extension of our customer team and make sure that they are implemented. think best practices and steer them away from, you know, using the company name on the in the headline like we wouldn’t recommend and you know the sort of some of these best practices that we’ve seen, our team is here to help guide and give ideas and share best practices and things like that. And as we continue to grow and develop more and more of that gets absorbed into the product experience as well.

Mike: That’s great. And the other thing I really liked about Mutiny when I looked at it was, it’s not driven from a marketer’s opinion. It’s very much driven from data. So I’ve got to ask, you know, How often do optimizations work and how often do the marketers have to go back to the drawing board and, you know, maybe tweak what they’re optimizing to get best performance?

Molly: Yeah. And I told you, I have a conversion rate optimization background. So I was running. Before I joined Mutiny, I was running experimentation programmes and a B tests for large large enterprises, like a gap and Oppenheimer funds and big big brands. And they’d be pretty happy with a 1%, lift, 3% lift like pretty Thrall lifts. And in general, I’d say like one in four, or one in five tests would win. So you have like a 25% ish when, right? The cool thing about personalization, so on the CRM side, it is very life. What if we change the headline to this, what if we change the button to get started, it’s sort of like random ideas that you are trying to find a better solution for the average person, but the average person doesn’t exist, right? Like, there is somebody who is like 10 feet tall, and somebody who’s two feet tall, and to say that your average person is four feet tall, which you know, the math doesn’t work out there. But you get what I’m saying. Like, you can just take the average of any given person, it’s really about how different segments are behaving. And so the difference with personalization is, you’re actually segmenting your audience, you have a specific person that you’re building for not an average person, and you know a lot more about them, or you can do more research about them. And so you’re actually crafting an experience for a specific person rather than some broad idea of the average visitor on your site. And so they actually win more like three and four times. And the lifts are more like 30% to 50%, even like 100% Plus left, so you’re much, much bigger gains. And you’re winning a lot more often.

Mike: With all this testing and with the ability to, to really scale up the personalization, I mean, does this mean Mutiny is really an enterprise product? You need a decent amount of web traffic to really benefit from it.

Molly: So I think this again, comes down to how you’re going to use the product. So if you want to identify who’s coming into your website, segment those audiences and then deliver personalization. Yeah, the trade off there is yes, while you win more often, you get big lifts, you get big lifts for smaller segments. So although those smaller segments are your ICP, so it’s a good trade off. At the end of the day, you are cutting down your audience size. And so for inbound website, personalization, you should have I would say like 10,000 monthly visitors, at least on your site in order for those segments actually be meaningful volume for you. But for outbound personalization, like these microsites I was talking about that’s only constrained on how many emails your team can send, right, like your BDR team, your SDR team can send and so there’s no kind of traffic requirement for that use case. You just have to have a muscle around outbound email.

Mike: Interesting, so lots of flexibility. But it’s been great talking about Mutiny Molly. I’m also interested  in how you promote the product yourself. I mean, you’re responsible for growing the business to a large extent. So one of the most effective tactics you find to get marketers engaged and interested in Mutiny.

Molly: Yeah, so this is the fun part about marketing to marketers where, you know, you get to use your own product, talk about your own product, to sell your own product. And so I think I have something cheeky on my LinkedIn, like, I use Mutiny on Mutiny to grow Mutiny, or I’m a marketer, selling the market, just selling a marketing technology to marketers and talking about marketing or, you know, something that is just very confusing. But I think, yeah, we get that benefit of using our own product in a lot of our programmes. And so we really think about how do we bring more people to our website so that we can tailor that experience and show them the product in action when they come to our website. And then we have a really, really big microsite strategy. And actually, our microsite product was built out of our own early days when we didn’t have website traffic we had, I think, like 2000 people coming to our website every month. And so we needed a way to talk about ourselves to market ourselves. So we built our own microsite product in order to help us get in front of the right people because we’re targeting B2B marketers and CMOS You know, marketing leaders like we have a very defined ICP and audience, if we can build a page that demonstrates the product to them and show them, we’re always going to do really, really well. So our own ABM programme brings in 60% of our pipeline and Mutiny. So it’s really, really effective for us even to this day. Now we’ve grown our website traffic quite a bit too. So we can use both use cases and Mutiny. But in the early days, it was really on the microsite side, outside of using a Mutiny, like customer stories. And creative campaigns, I think are two really important levers for us. So putting the customer at the centre of everything we’re talking about, making them the heroes showing, you know, marketers always want to learn from marketers. So making our customers look like heroes telling their stories, getting those out there, it helps our customers continue to activate and it helps our customers like brand build and further their personal careers. And then it also helps the market and everyone on our team kind of grow from there too. So actually did launched an ABM MBA programme, which is a fun play on words, but it features some of our customers that features non customers too. So just ABM errs, who are doing really, really good work and dives into the programmes that they’re building and developing. So that one’s really fun. And then creative campaigns. This is like a passion child. For me I love like big creative campaigns. In the fall, we ran a survivor programme was was spelled with AI in the middle sister of AI vert. And it was all about kind of educating around AI teaching workers how to use AI in their workflows. And it was gamified. So there was a big game platform, there was a $10,000 prize at the end, we had a lot of partners involved. So really, really just fun creative through like running games and different types of activation than just like a boring webinar programme.

Mike: I love that. I love that you’re, you’re so obviously having fun with some of your campaigns as well. That’s brilliant.

Molly: I think that’s the one thing like anyone looks at mutinies brand. They’re like those guys have a lot of fun over there, huh?

Mike: It’s awesome. I mean, you did mention the survivor, the AI campaign. Um, I, I’m interested, you know, how do you personally use AI in your marketing or do you use AI in your marketing?

Molly: Oh, yeah. I mean, I always have at least one probably many chat up T tabs open for real things and for fun things. And for life things like sometimes I’ll just be like, Hey, here’s the ingredients I have in my fridge and in my cupboard what can I make? I was thinking of soup is there what if I added ginger to it? Is that good or bad? It’ll like make me recipe do I have Mutiny are like logo and mascot is a raccoon. And on social media, we have you know, with mid journey and things that have popped up, we’ve got like an AI version of the raccoon that’s looks a little different than our logo, but he’s pretty consistent. And whatever setting we need to put him in, his name’s at chew. And I made an issue custom GPT builder so I trained it on all of our like brand approved to choose so that I can just say like, like we launched a Mean Girls campaign to go back to having fun with marketing. We, we didn’t Mean Girls theme campaign, and I made all of these versions of it chew in like the classic mean girls to us, like, you know, at the cafeteria and things like that. So that one’s super fun. And then for work, like with a BM MBA programme, for example, my process for getting to very high quality episodes is I do a prep session with the speaker. And we sort of like pre plan, what our agenda is going to look like and shape the story together because I don’t want to just come in and like ask the same leaders all of the questions, same questions, I want to kind of dig in and tell a unique story with everyone. So we find that angle. And then I have a chat GBT process where I basically like turn that into the agenda for how we’re going to speak together. I turned that into the copy that I need for the landing page. I turn that into the speaker notes and everything I’m going to need at the end of the day, so I have all of that processing kind of work through a workflow there. And outside of chat, GBT, our team also uses copy AI, which after the ABM MBA episode is recorded and published, we will put that through a copy AI workflow to come up with several different blog posts, newsletter posts, social posts, where we can like chop that up. And then on top of that, it’s all of the AI that’s just built into the tools that we’re already using like Riverside and you know, production tools and things like that.

Mike: That’s a lot of AI actually. That’s interesting to hear how proactively you’re using AI for everything from image generation through to written content and, and uh, podcasts. So, fascinating you’re so bought into it.

Molly: Yes. And, and actually, uh, Stu on my team, he’s our head of content. he sets a goal for himself to try a new AI tool every single week. So he’s always testing something new and, and actually like replacing workflows. Like he’s using copy AI now, but he was using something else previously. And just, you know, he won’t settle, he’ll keep going until he finds something that really, really works and has the right quality of output for us.

Mike: So that’s amazing. I mean, trying a new AI every week. That’s a real commitment to learning and testing new technology. this has been really interesting money. I’m sure I could talk for a lot longer, particularly about AI. But there’s a couple of standard questions we’d like everyone to answer just to see what people think. So the first thing I’d really like to know is, what’s the best bit of marketing advice you’ve ever been given?

Molly: I would say actually, not just marketing advice like generic advice, but simplify, very true for marketing too. But simplify, you get one ask you get one CTA, you have to prioritise what is that one is going to be. And if you get a good result, you can have another Ask you can have another CTA. And that’s true for marketing funnels, marketing, language and messaging. But also, when you’re working with customers, or communicating really with anyone, right is, you know, don’t give people a laundry list of asks and things you need from them, simplify it to that one thing, and you’re going to be much, much more likely to get a good result.

Mike: That’s, I mean, that’s great advice, I think, in a lot of areas. So I love that. We have another question we’d like to know is, what advice would you give, but particularly to one person who’s just embarking on a marketing career?

Molly: Yeah, I think from a student perspective, I don’t know if I would recommend like, go and get a degree in marketing, I think it is just the landscape is changing so rapidly that I don’t think that is necessarily like, how you can set yourself up to like, become an online marketer, like the textbook background isn’t necessarily going to help you as much as like, on the job experience. What I would say is probably really helpful is psychology or behavioural economics, or, you know, more kind of education time spent on how people think how people understand and process information, how they behave. And then you can learn the specifics of the marketing to whatever role industry tech stack, the company that you’re in, is using, but if you have the foundation of understanding how humans operate, and how humans think you will, you’ll be able to learn the tools and apply different strategies that are current. I mean, now it’s like every six months, were like so rapidly developing and changing that, that I think you just need to stay on top of the market.

Mike: that’s great advice, and I think it’s important to remember that, you know, even people who have done the degree,  their, uh, knowledge, their information very rapidly ages. I mean, I actually qualified as an engineer, and we had exactly the same problem all those years ago, that, you know, by the time you finish your degree, what you’d learnt, it was already becoming out of date.

Molly: And I think that, that’s absolutely the case in marketing.Yeah, for sure. And that’s kind of cool to see. Right. Like, think people know it in the tech field that like, C++ isn’t really the future anymore. But But yeah, I mean, marketing is moving really, really quickly to I’m sure all of business, every role kind of has that that vibe as well.

Mike: Absolutely. Molly, it’s been fascinating talking to you and thank you so much for all the insight you’ve given. I mean, if somebody wants to learn more about Mutiny or maybe even ask you some questions, what would be the best way to find out more and perhaps get in touch?

Molly: Yeah, LinkedIn, feel free to follow me connect message me. I’d love to meet you, people. Awesome.

Mike: Molly, thank you so much again for your time. I really appreciate it. Thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.

Molly: Thank you so much for having me.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

 

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