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A Napier Podcast: Interview with Sam Ovett - Mobile Pocket Office

In our latest episode on Napier’s Marketing B2B Technology Podcast, we interview Sam Ovett, co-founder of Mobile Pocket Office, which is leading the way in helping new and established businesses augment their human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity.

Find out more about Mobile Pocket Office, and Sams journey from a whitewater kayaker and guide to becoming a complete automation nerd, by listening to the episode here. 

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Transcript: Interview with Sam Ovett - Mobile Pocket Office

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sam Ovett

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 the latest episode of marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm talking to Sam over who is the co founder of mobile pocket office. Hi, Sam. Welcome to the podcast.

Sam: Hi, Mike. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Mike: Great. So I'm, I'm really interested to know, can you just tell us a little bit about your your background and how you've got to founding mobile pocket office?

Sam: Yeah, certainly. So you know, funnily enough, it's it's pretty non traditional. But my background is, after after getting a degree in college I did. I was a professional whitewater kayaker and guide. So I spent a lot of times in the outdoors taking a lot of risk and guiding people through that experience. And then, around a certain point, I decided that I wanted to be on the digital side of things, I didn't want to use my, my body to make my money. And I was really clear that automation was taken over the world, as we all feel and wanted to be on the right side of automation. And there's a bit of backstory there around co founding this with my dad, who had a lot of history in business analytics and process. And so we decided that we'd join forces do something together, I'd become really involved in the marketing side from the outdoor sports perspective. And I made a shift, just kind of a deadpan shift, I said, I want to do this, and I made the made the shift, and we launched mo pocket office and I can, there's the whole story of how we actually, you know, kick that business off and everything like that. But the bottom line is I went from being a professional whitewater guiding kayaker to, you know, a complete automation nerd.

Mike: Wow. So, I mean, there's so much in that I'm intrigued to know, for a start, you know, which was more stressful, you know, being a guide for people in whitewater kayaking or launching a new business?

Sam: You know, that's a good question. I was asked it quite that way. You know, what I always say is, you know, there's a lot of stress when you work with someone's business, and, and it's their livelihood, and other people's livelihoods, their their employees, but at the end of the day, nobody's gonna die immediately. That day, the risk of dying, that day is very low, whereas in the other, the risk is there and real. And you can drown, you know, as the primary thing and seeing that happen. And so, I would say that it's less stressful in that acute way. But I think on a daily basis, you know, when you get off the river, it's all good joy. And when you're improving somebody's business, there's a lot more stress, and I have a lot of real, you know, I get really involved with these projects. So I think the stress is a little higher here. But that's okay.

Mike: I mean, that's an interesting comparison, nobody's gonna die today is, I guess, a mystic view. But yeah, and you also start a business with your dad.

Sam: So that's a whole story on its own, but I think it's, you know, I was looking to make a shift. And he had, he had long worked on the business analytic side of, of business process with enterprise clients. And he was ready to make a shift and wanted to have a little more fun in the process side and focus more on the sales and marketing process, because it was always something that he enjoyed doing. But a lot of his work was in the analytics side.

And so, I had been really involved in marketing automation, when as an athlete, because I was automating some of my social media stuff and things like that. And I wanted to make a shift. And so we decided to kick this thing off together as partners, and you know, it's challenging working, or it can be, it can be challenging working with a, a parent, in my case, you know, the dynamic is one that we had to figure out what are the core things I'll share this because I think it's interesting is we had to figure out how to how to effectively debate an idea down to a better version of it. And it's easy in the relationship for as a father, right for him to say, you know, Sam, that's not a good idea. We're not gonna do it. But the reverse is more challenging for me to tell my father, hey, hey, Josh, this is bad idea, you know, and here's why. Right? It can become a very personal attack like feeling that way. So one of the one of the things that we worked out, as we did this outside of just the, I guess, also the kind of quote unquote, standard things that go along with growing a business is how to communicate about ideas and problems and solutions. So that we weren't at the end of day was we left to go, and hey, I love you, you know, you're my dad. And then for him, you know, you're my son. And that was always more important. And so at first, there was a lot of friction that was generated and, and, you know, we get a bit upset each other. And then we learned to say, Hey, you know what, it's not personal, we're going to do what we call catalyst session, we're going to catalyse this idea down to a better version of the idea. And it's not personal, but it's all just about getting ideas better. And the way that has improved our business, and also our relationship has been pretty cool. And I think something that has come out of this outside of just the business aspect of it, you know, the relationship side of it.

Mike: That's, that's really cool. And really good to hear. I mean, this approach, this capitalist session, is that then something you're able to use with your clients as well.

Sam: It really is. And it's one of those things where it's like, okay, let's take an idea. And you can, you can ask questions around this, however, is interesting, let's take an idea. And let's try and distil it down to the better version of the idea. And let's cut through the crap, right. And let's, let's try and throw out the bad stuff and keep the good stuff and iterate this too, it's a better version. And that can be really, you know, we you have an idea that your baby, or it's something that you came up with, personally to be attacked, on the principles of the idea can be can be, feel really personal, unless it's stated upfront, hey, this is a session to bring an idea to a more distilled better, workable, more simple, but more effective, you know, state that we can then execute on. And so doing that, and I think anybody can use this process with any any relationships they have, whether their personal relationships or business relationships. And for us, this has been just a, I mean, really a game changing way to communicate, to get to a better idea, because that's the hardest thing is, you know, you offend people, they get upset that timeline, slow down, blah, blah, blah, like, that's, you can't run a business like that, you know, it's too slow. It's not gonna work. So if you can have a method, say, hey, let's do a catalyst session and get this idea down, then everybody walks away and goes, Yeah, you know, you're not attacking me personally. We're just trying to distil an idea.

Mike: So awesome. So, I mean, let's take a step back first, just think about, you know, the business mobile pocket office? Absolutely. I mean, when you started it, what did you think it was gonna be? What did you really want to achieve?

Sam: So the thing that we want to achieve with it, and here's, basically, we saw a gap a hole, you know, Josh was working for years with these enterprise clients. And the gap that was always really visible. And I saw it in the outdoor industry that I was in heavily at the time, that was my, you know, kind of my realm that I was involved with, was this idea that like, in enterprise, and in most businesses, what we see is people are really good at their fulfilment, they spend a lot of time looking at the fulfilment process, right? Because if you can't fulfil whatever you promised, the people are buying, that's the fastest way to take an existing business, right? Not necessarily the fastest way to grow it. But the fast way to take an existing business, you don't deliver on whatever your promises, that that's not good. So people focus on that where the opportunities are missed, is in the sales area where you have a lead that's come in, right, you figured out how to generate interest. And then the process from lead to converting to a sale, that's the biggest opportunity that is just usually just completely wasted. It has a lot of human effort involved. And what most the majority do, that we've seen, with until they're introduced to this idea that, hey, you can add automation and process to this is they focus on, you know, who's the hottest lead now, right? What's the best account what's the best deal, and that's the focus, and everybody else who could potentially be a really good customer is forgotten about until that person eventually maybe comes back and says, Hey, I want to do you know, I need a big order, right? Because that's your focus. That's how you that's how you make your Commission's and that's how you survive. And so we see the just complete lack of focus on nurturing people and following up with people, especially at the enterprise level, because you're after the big deal, whereas you could be nurturing, you know, maybe 100, little deals, that could become bigger deals over time, with automation, and some process in place. And we see that that whole was just it's glaring. You look around and and it's tough to navigate politically to an enterprise, because you're you're trying to implement technology with automation. And that's always a challenge to get everybody on board when there's a lot of human sales people involved.

Mike: Interesting. I mean, the thing that fascinates me as you sit, you said it was about automation and processes. I mean, most of the enterprises that we see have, you know, more automation packages then then they could possibly use to help automate marketing and sales. So, so is it about the process? Or is it about, you know, getting the right automation package?

Sam: So, it really is about the process, because when what what do you mean, when you say automation package? Let's open that up for a second.

So, I mean, typically, typically, you might see, you know, a large enterprise have, you know, Marketo connected to Salesforce, I mean, they're spending huge amounts of money on on the the systems to run both marketing and sales. That's right. And so and that's what we see, too, and it's absolutely the case, is what I tend to see is that, like, they they usually have the technology, right. And the technology is usually there for them. But it is not usually leveraged in a way to enhance process and make it easier to be kind of this bionic human salesperson that's supercharged with the ability to follow up. And in the enterprise world. I see they usually have, you know, they do a decent job getting their newsletter out right to the different segments of clients.

They're pretty good about that. And usually, they're using Marketo and Salesforce, you know, like you could with, you know, you could kind of do the same thing with MailChimp almost. And, and so they're just pretty underutilised. Usually they've spent a lot of time designing the visuals of the database, right? but not necessarily thinking about? How do we follow up with people at different stages of the sales cycle, when business needs to be repeated? A lot of it's just some kind of really basic trigger or list. And they're still building reports that aren't dynamic and have paying somebody to build those things to say, oh, Who should we follow up with, you know, Who should we whose time for the recurring are? Like, let's take a manufacturer, we have to recertify certify something, right? Oh, it's time to get this person recertified, okay, let's all send them personal emails. And then that gets tracked into the CRM system. So they, they use these modern tools. But largely, this isn't, of course, there's there's always outliers, but largely, they use them as like old school CRMs, just a place for the information, versus using it to really drive process and follow up. And that's the opportunity loss that we see the most. Whereas you've got these folks who are I call them like Hidden Hand combat salespeople, right?

They're going out to trade shows, they're doing all these things that are the, they're effective, but they're also kind of an old school way of, of selling. They go out, they get a stack of business cards, and then they follow up with the hot prospects. And all that information is in the CRM system. And then you know, the person's getting the newsletter, maybe if they've got them on the right list. But outside of that, they're not really following up with the different specific product lines and things that they could be interested in. And making sure they're introduced to other parts of the business that they that that prospect could then buy after they bought the first thing, and educating people because the old school role of salesperson was largely outside of closing you was to educate you on your options. We have the internet now we had technology that can help you do that. And that's the gap. That's the big gap that we've we've really worked to fill when when we're working with a company, and then the rest flows from there, right? You have process. That's all downstream of that initial stuff. But the if you can get your conversions up, then you're basically saying, Hey, we're doing this amount of work to go out and generate leads and interest in people being excited about our products. And you're getting more effectiveness, more efficiency out of that top of the funnel work that you're doing.

Mike: Interesting. I mean, the thing I wonder about is, you know that these sales people are marketers that a large enterprises, they're smart people, why are they not seeing the problem and addressing it?

So here's a here's what we see. Usually, the marketers in a company are excited about it. They want to do it, but they get pushback from the salespeople. Because salespeople naturally want to guard. They're, you know, they're hunters, they're going out there hunting is a good one, they naturally want to guard their deals. And they don't necessarily want to tell everybody how it's done. And that's okay, but if you can equip that salesperson, and make them a more bionic salesperson where they could be following up with hundreds of prospects at a time Time that are somewhat interested in, they're going to have the opportunity then to have more closing calls versus prospecting only calls. I kind of went around the question a little bit. But I think the big reason it's an issue is because the bigger the enterprises are, typically the slower they move, and there's more politics. And so yeah, if you're a medium sized business, you can make decisions and just put them in place pretty quickly. And your, your, your biggest challenge is bandwidth. But if you make the decision, there's not a lot of pushback, politically, within an organisation. So the bigger you are, the more pushback you are, you might, you know, we see people get, the more consensus, you need to change the way things are done. And I think that's why it moves largely slower. And that's also why you see some of these really small, digital oriented businesses just crush it, because they can make businesses decisions so fast and changes so fast, that they're really effective at that. But you know, they don't have the market presence that some of these enterprise companies have. And that's where enterprise companies really have a leg up. They've got branding, market presence, all of that. But most of their marketing is usually sort of PR oriented. Marketing versus automation oriented, marketing. And you can have both. So as that kind of answered the question, we can have

Mike: A great answer. I love the idea of that ratio between closing two prospecting calls.

Sam: I thought, yeah, yeah, like that's as a salesperson, what do you what do you want to be on, you know, if I can get to closing calls all day long, versus out hunting, like, if marketing does a good job, I've got leads, right. And after that, it's up to me, usually they get passed off, but they're not followed up with any salesperson, just by the nature of time being constrained, they're gonna go after the hottest prospects, biggest deals, that's going to be top of mind. And if you don't have any kind of automation to follow up with all those other semi interested prospects, that probably would buy something as long as you maintain, you know, Top of Mind presence with them, and educated them about how the product or service benefits them. The amount of sales you could close in closing calls you could be on. I mean, you can have your calendar booked out way more than you normally would.

Mike: That sounds great.

Sam: I mean, yeah, it does, doesn't it? It's just like, you know, I can imagine every salesperson listening, just going, Yeah, that's what I want. Yeah, that's what I want to do closing calls all day making my Commission's right, that's, that's the magic. And so if you can put that automation in place and buy into it and say, hey, I want to leverage these systems and not keep all the stuff in a little notebook to myself, and just put in the minimum that I'm asked for, you know, what good automation team, and it's usually driven, oftentimes driven out of the marketing side of things is going to do is, is they're going to help you close more deals. And so if you can feed that information back to them, well, they're gonna help you find better prospects, they're gonna help you create longer term follow up. And I think every, every salesperson has heard it, but like, the magic is in the follow up, right? It's not that you're closing a deal on the first call, that's like, you know, sure, that's lovely. But like, that doesn't happen. Most of the time. It's a it's a follow up game. And any good salesperson knows that right there real good. Follow up. Yeah. So take that idea. And take the busy work a follow up, which is manually sending that communication and getting it out at the right time. So that someone's actually got a customer journey and experience an automated, there's a lot of different ways to do that. A lot of ways to look at it. But the core idea is that if you can follow up better at that stage of interest to converting to sale over the course of at least an average sale cycle, make sure you maintain communication, you're going to generate more business, you're going to close more deals.

Mike: So I mean, we've had a bit of a puppet, some of the enterprise companies. Yeah. I mean, is this a an enterprise specific problem? Or are there similar problems with smaller and midsize companies?

Sam: Yeah, no, it's definitely not an enterprise specific problem. And in any way, it just happens to be pretty acute. And I think the call was called like the lead waste, right? Like the number of leads that come in, that are then just wasted in enterprise companies is more noticeable because they generally have more interest and inquiry. But it's the same with a small business and it's actually much more important in a small and medium sized business drawing. That's kind of a huge range, especially here in the US, you know, it's classified as a small business. But the bottom line is like, if you could follow up with me be one of the leads that come in. And you don't have to hire more people to make that part of your business scale. Then all the effort that you do for marketing and getting interest, which is probably the hardest thing anybody can do in business, right? It's like getting interest in their business, getting that awareness within your, you're going to increase the efficiency, or like the effectiveness, you know, the percentage rate of people who are going to become customers, by following up, I don't care what you do, it can be the most basic follow up, you can get very sophisticated, you can branch logic of if they do this, if they do that, but at the end of the day, if you follow up versus not for a longer period of time, and educate people and remind them that you're there, see, if they still have the problem that your product solves. You're going to win more business, no matter what kind of business you are. So it's not universal. It's an it's not specific to enterprise. It just happens to be enterprises. You know, it's a fun place this space to play in because they spend more money to solve the problem. But it's a it's not specific. It's actually I think, a lot of times easier to implement these solutions for a little bit smaller business, because there's less politics involved in a, they tend not to overcomplicate it, because they just want the result faster, because it's it's a little more pressing need.

Mike: Brilliant. I think this leads on to the next question is, if someone engages with mobile pocket office and starts talking to you about a solution, I mean, do you have a process? Do you have an approach? I mean, how do you go about fixing these issues?

Sam: Yeah, and we do, we do have a process and approach because without it, you're kind of like willy nilly all over the place. And what we found, and what we've done, you know, is was adapting our processes as well. But let me give you kind of the framework of how we think about this with people because it's something that people can, can, you know, you technically don't need us to go use this framework, right? We help catalyse that process, we have experience across industries. So we pull that experience into the experience to, you know, cuz you don't know what you don't know, in terms of what's going on. But there what, which you can find out is, where do you have opportunities for automation, right, we talked about that specific conversion phase of sales, leads to sales, but I'm going to give you the full picture because it's what we do with people as we, we say, Okay, if you want to automate things, and you feel like you can benefit from that you've somehow gotten this idea, you know, you want to follow up more whatever it may be. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to look at your your business, right, okay, there's, there's five pillars, any business doesn't matter size industry scale, everybody's got them, some are done better, some are done worse. You got to attract new business, right? That's that marketing work of generating interest, you got to convert that interest. So that's the Convert states attract, convert into leads in sales. And then you've got to fulfil whatever you promised. Then the good businesses delight their customers by offering ways to use the product better, keeping up with it, giving them new opportunities to buy more from them that benefit what they've, you know, complement what they've already bought, and help them as a customer. And then we're referrals. So those are the five pillars attract, convert, fulfil delight, refer you with me.

Mike: That's that sounds great. It sounds I mean, somewhat reminiscent of the HubSpot model. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

Sam: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so you'll see it across a lot of these different tools, right? They talk about it in these kind of pillar ideas. It's like buckets. And it's a great way to think about it. And so we really, really, yeah, it's common to see it, and it's for a good reason. Because then in those buckets, you look at those and you go, what are my processes within these sections of the system of our business, right? What do we actually do within these? And that's where it starts to break down. People get that picture, they go, yeah, we know, we attract, convert, fulfil, maybe we delight, we get some referrals, or like, maybe we have a process for referrals, where we consistently ask systematically, but where people get stuck at that point is, where do they How do they find out what their processes are today? And how do they figure out of those processes, which should be automated. And let me lead you down that path. Because this is what we do with folks.

The first thing is, we funny thing is like we do this digital automation, and we implement it, but we take this very analogue approach. We have everybody print off a spreadsheet for three days worth of 15 minute intervals. And so just for three days, you give everybody on the team and you can do this in smaller chunks to like, if you're just working with the marketing and sales team, then you You know you're working with you're attracting convert, not your fulfilment as much. And so you give them this spreadsheet, you say, okay, whatever to do just fill out what do you do every, every 15 minutes, make a note of what you've done throughout the day for three days. And you have to position it that like, we're not going to use this to say you're not productive. It's just to understand what processes you do throughout the day, what constitutes the work of your business, right? what actually makes up your time, and now you have a pattern. And some people need to do it a little bit longer. Maybe you need to do four or five days or like you have cycles, you know, you came back from a trade show, what do you do after that type of deal with Coronavirus? Those are largely like not a thing as much, but you just look at what do you do. And now that you've documented that, and we call it a personal activity log pals sheet, just a name we've assigned to it. And now that you've documented that, now you understand your process within the system, right? And you may need to do that, like I said, in different phases of the business year, stuff like that. But you'll understand, okay, here's the busy work, like I'm moving this information from here to here, I'm sending an email to this interested prospect, blah, blah, blah. Now you have your process. And two things come out of that. One is of that what is effective today? what works, what gets you new business? Right? If we're looking at those top two stages, once you start to understand what works, those are things that you should start to look at and go, okay, that works. How much time does it take me? to do that? And of it, what can I automate. And then that's that. And only at that point is when we start looking at the technology tools involved to make the automation happen.

Right, we're trying to design the house first, so to speak, and then get the appropriate tools to build it versus finding tools and then building a house. So once you understand your process, now you know what you can automate. And then you also see, this is where it's hard to do, or it can be hard to do without someone else who's seen it across different industries is is where the gaps, holes and opportunities to improve the process make it more robust. You know, in this case, we talk a lot about the follow up longer make it branch so that the logic makes more sense for different customer segments and driving that using data. And also turning it off at the appropriate time so that people are getting communication when they shouldn't be. And then you can do that for each segments of your business. That attract, convert, fulfil, delight, and refer. And so if we start there, if we get that going, Well, we increase your conversions. Well, of course, then, you know, you've got a fulfilment issue that you have to deal with, because you've got increased fulfilment that you have to do. And then the light and refer those all kind of go together. But that is literally the step. So you look at that. And then we use a digital tool called diagrams, that net, I think, the name changed recently, I have to find it, but to actually map out what you do after you've documented that process, and that's actually like a call that we have. And now there's a really clear picture of what goes on to run the business. And at that point, also, you get this benefit, that it's easier to train somebody new, because you just documented how the business runs. And then you start to put numbers to the value of automation. There's two opportunities for automation.

One is, and they both help you scale, but one is one that saves money, right? Where are there holes in your process where you're leaking money, because you're, you're paying more people to move information around from one system to another, right? That's a leak, that's money you can save. So automation can save you money in that way. And allow you to scale and free up humans to do more creative work more interesting work. And you know, occasionally people lose a job. That's the unfortunate nature of it. But like most humans want to do interesting work. They don't want to do repetitive stuff. And so, given give somebody that opportunity, they're probably going to flourish, be more excited about their work all that. So that's just a side benefit. But the other is where can you make more money, right? How can you be more profitable, because you're not communicating, you're not capturing people's attention, and converting that to a sale. And so those are the two big things. So they all relate to scaling, but one is saving money. One is making more money. And then on the you can ask some questions after this, but like on the saving money side, that was pretty easy. You know, how much time are we spending doing this on a weekly or monthly basis? Whatever the timeline is that makes sense for the process. And, you know, what do we pay for for this to get done? What is the person who's doing this? What's their time? build that? What do we what do we pay them at and if we automate And we pay for it once with an automation tool to get it built out, or we built it out, you know, then you can do some basic math and understand the savings.

Mike: So it's interesting, you seem to be looking at it from both sides of that return on investment equation, you know, both reducing the amount of money you have to invest to implement a process, and also increasing the return by making it more efficient.

Sam: Yep, exactly. And so, you know, the basic idea we can think about this is like, on the saving money side, someone who's doing administrative tasks that are required to make a business run, if the majority of their tasks can be automated, and you pay them anywhere between, you know, let's say, $50,000, a year, or something like that, right. And all the health care that's involved in all that, and like, generally, that person is also doing other stuff. Most of the time, they don't just do rote admin work. In fact, the majority of the time, what we see is like, that person is overwhelmed with stuff to do. And so if you can free that up, then they're gonna be more focused on the more on the higher value items. But at the same time, you can think about it like, well, if we invested that same amount once to build out the automation that we don't have, and the automation never takes a holiday, and never gets sick, and all those things about automation that you know, where computers are different than humans, then you've invested at once versus having to hire maybe another person or that person to do those things year after year, inconsistently, most of the time.

Mike: So that's, that's fascinating. I mean, I guess one of the push backs, you hear against automation, is that it creates inflexibility, once you've coded that automation, you can't change the process. Is that something you hear from clients? And what's your response?

Sam: I'm glad you brought that up. Because I actually, we, you know, we don't hear that because we take people down a different path, but it is, it is a problem. And here's how you address it. And we live in a day and age where the tools are not what's so fat, fantastic, right? They are fantastic in what they do. But they it's it's the strategy around it, that's more important. So if ever we see somebody going down the path of trying to custom code, something where it's fairly inflexible, and it's not relatively easy to modify, we, we try and hit breaks, and stop them because we live in an age where the tools are so the interfaces are so easy, you know, we do some custom coding with folks. But largely, it's the strategy around automation, the value that it provides to the business, that's that's the real magic, and like, tweaking it till it's better and better. And I can talk a bit about that. But the main thing is that, you know, kind of like my, my public service announcement is don't code anything that you don't have to use drag and drop builders use these easy to use tools, they're out there, you know, when you have to code stuff you do, but the ecosystem of tools is so strong nowadays, that you should be able to use a tool that's with a few clicks, allows you to modify the process versus lines of code. And so the the end of the day, like done well, we turn the systems over to our clients, and give them methodologies to improve the systems so that they can track the effectiveness of it. And then what I love to see is like you have at least one or two smart people on the team who are smart in the realm of these tools. And they're going to they're going to be able to make those tweaks internally. And you know, typically what happens, we sometimes will do it for folks, but we just guide them on the strategy and help them make decisions. Once the big implementation has been put in place, the infrastructure is there.

First, that's great. I think that you know, I mean, like, you shouldn't be coding. Now. Anybody who's like who's writing code is like, you should be writing code. If you're building a new system for somebody that is like, then you're going to sell them a bunch of people. But if you're just using a system, trying to automate some things, unless you've got a super complex situation that just can't handle it. And maybe you need something custom, but the reality is like on the sales conversion side, you're probably not going to run into you're going to run into unique things and you might have to adapt a little bit but like, you should be able to adapt around and use the tools that exist today. fulfillments a different story. You know, fulfilment gets kind of a more custom experience a lot of the times but fulfilment stays less flu is less changing. You know, if you have a product or service you can usually you're you're pretty happy to invest in the fulfilment automation, because you know how that works is consistent, but what you want to tweak is you want to tweak that, that experience in the, in the, in the attract and convert stages for sure. So yeah, don't be coding, use your use use the, like, easy to use tools. And how you got to set up you got to think about how you set them up right there. That's the deal, right? Because like, you can buy a Salesforce, you can buy a marketer, you can buy an ontraport, you can buy whatever these tools are by HubSpot. But if you set it up, like pilot junk, you know, and don't utilise it, well, that's where you're going to go, Oh, this thing doesn't really do what it's promised. Right? It does do what it's promised. You just got to design it for your situation.

Mike: Absolutely makes sense. And I am interested, do you have some examples of you know, perhaps some customers you've helped and how you've helped them out? So you can perhaps explain a little bit as to what it feels like to work with you guys?

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the one of the customers are mentioned in the enterprise realm is gx Nippon. So they're your company people know. And they've got a bunch of different business lines. One of the one of their headquarter office here is in the, for one of their lines in the United States, in Georgia, actually. And they have a in this, we'll talk about one of the products, which is the people probably, do you guys know, Tyvek? Over there? Is that the siding of houses stuff? Like the waterproof membrane on the side of houses?

Mike: No, no, we don't.

Sam: But if you think about a building, right, you see a house being built, see that, like, when it goes up, there's like that plasticky looking stuff outside,

Mike: We'd call it a damp course over here in England, okay.

Sam: So you take that stuff, and that's one of the things they make, right, they make a version of that. You know, of course, they think it's superior and things like that. But that's besides the point. They have a team of salespeople that are going out to trade shows, they're reaching out to prospects, they're trying to find dealers, you know, we're working with larger accounts, and they had Sugar CRM, enterprise, people probably know that. So older CRM system, you know, pretty flexible, you can do what you want not not crazy, easy to use, like some of these newer ones, but it's a CRM system, right. And unfortunately, most of these tools just get used like CRM systems anyways, versus actual marketing automation and sales automation tools. But they would go out, they would meet people, this was in the time of trade shows, when we did this one, and the same can be said for anything virtual is just following up, they would go out, and they would get a list of prospects and people would become interested. And then they would only follow up with the hot prospects, and it was all scheduling via email, you know, very cumbersome, and they would take these business cards and import them in manually to some Excel spreadsheet, if they even did that. And then the rest of the business cards would live in a drawer on their desk when they got back from the event. So there's a lot of opportunity waste, right?

All these cards could be potential customers, but they're only following up with one or two hot prospects, because that was you know, how they meet your quota and help them reach their goals, and no automation around follow up. And so really basic, but but very effective example, in their case, was to start there at that aspect of it, which was understanding that helping them understand that they could, you know, automate pieces of that, where, hey, now you can just use your phone take picture of the business card, and this app, it pops it in to, you know, in their case, a tool like Sugar CRM. And that talked to another tool that could send some automated emails that could educate somebody with some videos and information on a, like 60 day sales cycle. So it span that whole gap of time with information about the product, right, so you never were forgetting about that person. And then each of the emails had an opportunity to schedule a call because they're still, you know, we didn't didn't take it to the extreme where they're buying online in their situation, they were still closing that deal and doing doing the custom deal on the phone.

But what they were doing is everything leading up to that closing call was able to be automated, where all the follow up was education based. It was bringing the customer into their world, and also the primary thing in their case, which is not forgetting about people, right. You met them at a trade show where he goes back and then a few days later everybody forgets about everybody they said their follow up with except for the you know, hot lead. And so now they had gone from one or two, you know, really interesting prospects per tradeshow. To following up with all the business cards, they got in They will increase the conversion ratio of people simply by maintaining in touch because that you know that their competitors were doing the same thing, trying to follow up a lot of cases manually. And then. So that's one step of the process and also took the burden we introduced calendar scheduling tool that allowed them to schedule those calls with people more effectively, more efficiently, less back and forth busy work of sales time. And so their effort could be focused on closing costs. The other side of that was understanding and their case, their relationship to customers and referrals, right? Where did referrals come from? How did they get referrals? When people refer them something? What What was the, what happened? Like, what was the process that was experienced? And based on that building process to remind them, when it was time to send an email, in their case, we kept it still kind of manual, about asking for a referral, right, which is at a certain stage in the journey. So you just delivered something the customer is happy, they've got what they want, you just find that that point where the biggest joy is in the customer's experience, right? Are they Something has just been fulfilled on a timeline.

That's when you need to ask for that referral. And so just by reminding and putting process in place to ask for referrals,they were able to increase their referrals quite a bit, because of process now being in place to remind them through some pieces of automation, hey, it's time to ask for a referral and bugging the salesperson to remind them, while they're in the middle of whatever hot lead, they're talking to, you know, closing deal making whatever that is at the enterprise level, which can, you know, it's it, that is something that can be part of the, you know, part of the process is making that deal and that can consume time. And so if we can automate everything else around that and remind the sales team, hey, you have an opportunity for a good referral, right? You've just, you've just, you're the fulfilment team has delivered the product, right, it arrived, everything's there happy, then now's the time to ask for that referral. And that's a natural way to increase business in an amazing way. And it's, you know, the marketing's effectively free for that next lead. So those are two examples out of that. Any, any questions that come out of that?

Mike: No, I mean, that's, that's absolutely fascinating. And I'm sure people listening would be, you know, really interested in talking to you and working out how it could be applied to their business. So I guess the question is, how would how would people get in contact with you if they'd like to follow up after listening genre podcast?

Sam: Yeah, well, that's the easiest way you go to mobile pocket office.com. And on the front page, we've got a big book now button, you can book a call. And that's a call with Josh, and myself. And then our team is, you know, we, we manage the implementations I, I primarily manage all the implementations once we've done the strategy work. And then we QA that, but we have a team that actually does the building of it. And so that way, we're freed up to do the things we like we talked about, which is to be on those on this calls, you know, prospecting and closing costs, to kind of eat our own dog food and that way. So it's real obvious on the site book. Now, you can book a call, it's got an automatic scheduler, and it books it all in our calendars, it puts it on your calendar. And it's it's really easy, you know, use automation to our benefit there.

Mike: So actually doing what you preach, which is great here. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Sam, it's been really interesting. It's certainly great to hear someone talk about how to use tools effectively, rather than just the features of tools. So I really appreciate your time on the, for the interview.

Sam: Thank you, I will leave people with one other thought just one thought and kind of wrap it up is don't try to make a lot of big changes all at once. It's hard, make a lot of small changes. And also that'll get especially in the enterprise world, that as people see those Quick Hits results. And it's easier, things are faster, they take less time. They're, they're more consistent. There'll be happier to do then the next thing and before you know it, you've covered a lot of ground.

Mike: Perfect. That's great advice. Thank you very much, Sam.

Sam: Thank you.

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 Napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Hannah Wehrly

A Napier Podcast: Interview with Steve Zakur - Solosegment

We are delighted to share the latest interview from Napier’s Marketing B2B Technology Podcast.

In our latest episode, we interview Steve Zakur, CEO & Co-Founder of Solosegment, which provides software that drives engagement and leads with anonymous data and AI.

Find out more about Solosegment and the meaning behind anonymous personalization, by listening to the episode here. 

To stay up to date when a new episode is live, click one of the below links to subscribe:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Steve Zakur - Solosegment

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Steve Zakur

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 the latest edition of marketing b2b technology from Napier. Today, I've got Steve zaika from solo segment. Welcome to the podcast, Steve.

Steve: Thanks very much, Mike.

Mike: Thanks, Steve. So, you co-founded Solosegment, can you tell me about your career journey? And how you got to the point where you decided to found the company?

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. So I've been kind of a technology person by trade for a long time, although I've never written a line of code. You know, I've often been that person who is at the interface of Business and Technology, whether it was back in the days when I worked in finance, I moved into operations. And then in the late 90s, kind of caught the startup bug, I really was excited about the opportunity, especially the way the internet right at that time, was really changing and transforming how business was done and worked for a startup for about two years. And like many startups, that went when essentially nowhere, but I had the good fortune of getting hired by IBM at that point, because this was now late 2000, early 2001. And they were, you know, hoovering up all of these, anybody who could spell.com they wanted to hire and so had the good fortune to get hired at IBM, and then spent 15 years there, in a variety of executive roles, primarily focused on what I like to refer to as fixing broken toys, a lot of work, you know, looking at products, projects, customer relationships that have kind of gone awry, and helping us to write those.

And last couple of years that I was with IBM, I was working in there, I was responsible for their sales and marketing technology. And it was a pretty hefty responsibility. And of course, being an executive, your job is to take the pain that other executives throw at you. So it really gave me a keen sense for, you know, what were the gaps and opportunities, especially with regards to marketing technology. And early in 2016, I was at our Astor Place location, and I was walking through the halls, and I ran into Mike Moran, and Mike, who was one of the cofounders solo segment. He was the guy who hired me went back in November of 2000. And into IBM, we had lost track for about 15 years. And, you know, literally, he was back doing some consulting, we had a chat by the elevator and said, let's have a beer because I've got this idea. And that idea was soul segment, you know, did he had just gotten started with some development of software that that helped improve website search. But it really was that was the starting point. And, you know, a lot of our early conversations before I joined him, were very much focused on this gap, right? This this where the, you know, marketing executives, you know, weren't getting often the value they could out of the existing technology, and how could we bridge that. And so, you know, my journey to solo segment now spending four years building solo segment and from, you know, I guess what you classically think of as a startup into an actual business that operates is, was really focusing on that those gaps that we saw. And honestly, you know, of course, like any good company listening to, you know, your customers and finding, you know, the nuances and the pain so that you can make sure you're addressing what's important to them.

Mike: Amazing. And is the founding team. Are they still with the company?

Steve: Yep, they sure are. Yeah, Tim Peters, the third member of the founding team, Tim is our marketing leader. He's, he's a marketing technology person, as well, has a lot of experience in financial services, hospitality and into the tech industry as well.

Mike: Wow. So you've got the classic sort of CO marketing and technical trio family company. That's cool.

Steve: Yeah, it was. And honestly, that's one of the things that drew me there. I mean, you know, I know that, you know, from my prior experience, you know, that early team is really important in not only the vision, but you know, it's very easy for individuals to make to go astray. But when you have a solid team that you really, that keeps you honest and keeps you focused on the customer value, it's very helpful, but more than anything, you know, we fill each other's blind spots, right. And that really was the benefit. The early benefit was, you know, we all had very unique but distinct points of view on the business opportunity.

Mike: Amazing. I think I've got a blind spot that I need filling so. So the segment describes itself as anonymous personalization. Can you can you just unpack that and explain what you mean by it?

Steve: Yeah, you bet. So I mean, traditional personalization. I mean, it's in the name, right. You know, it's all about understanding something about the person. And so when you look at how personalization technology emerged, and again, this rewinds all the way back to the late 90s. And especially when you think about what Amazon was doing early on, you know, really under Standing patterns and behaviour. And there were lots of other companies that did as well. But Amazon, of course, is an exemplar in many ways. In the consumer space. You know, a lot of effort was put into understanding data about the people. And as marketing technology and marketing processes, embraced digital, almost everything we do focused on the person, everything from how the technology identifies people to cookies related to computers, which are related to people, logins. Now that data gets that first party data get sold as third party data.

So basically, you can buy information about anybody on the planet, that that root of the personal data in personalization is deeply, deeply embedded in how we think about web engagement, right, it's knowing something about you. And then using that information, to help you engage with social conversations that might interest to you to help you find products that might be interesting to you. In the b2b space, it's a little bit different, the challenges were a little bit different. When you look at the profile of a visitor to a b2b website, a very small portion of them are actually identifiable three to 5%. So why is 90 95% of the traffic on identifiable for a variety of reasons. First, often what you're doing at work doesn't relate to what you do in your personal computer, although in COVID, land, right, you know, everything is the same. But but in kind of a traditional view of things, you know, what you're doing in your personal life, or what you're doing your business life are very distinct. So there's not that data trail, that kind of translates really well. So if I'm on Amazon in the morning, buying something, and then I go to work, and now I'm looking at, you know, software vendors website, there's not a lot of interesting data that translates to that. And that that's part of what the leads to that lack of interesting data that's available to b2b marketers. But the other thing, other reason that that that data is not often available is because of the incentives.

In my personal life and my consumer life, there are lots of incentives for me to share information. Part of it is that you know, some object appears on my doorstep when I order it. But the other incentives are, you know, this data is actually I mean, while there are bad actors and whatnot in the marketplace, it's largely being used for good, right, I'm finding the things I want, and being exposed to things that I didn't know I want, but actually suit me very, very well. Anybody who spent any time on YouTube, going down deep into holes on topics of interest knows this. But in the in the business world, the incentives are almost there, almost disincentives, quite frankly, to sharing your information. You're part of it is that, you know, if you do share your information to learn the process, you're going to get harassed by sales reps in an endless nurture campaign in your email inbox. But there's not a lot of trade for value, right? You know, getting a white paper, and then taking on the burden of these endless emails doesn't often seem like a fair trade for value. So prospects, visitors resist that. And that, really, at the core is the challenges. Why anonymous personalization because what anonymous personalization is all about is creating engaging moments without having to know oh, this is Mike. And he's been to this website five times in the past, and he's done these certain activities. It's really in the moment, can you create an engaging experience, based upon not specific data about the person, but general data about the behaviour. And that's what we like to think about as anonymous personalization, engaging experiences that don't require personal knowledge of the person, primarily, because in b2b, it's very hard to get that data. And so why struggle to try and get the data, why not just accept and embrace what you already have, which is nothing and use that anonymous data to create those engaging experiences.

Mike: Interesting. So I mean, just explained to me a little more about what that means. So you're looking at the behaviour, just on one website, and then personalising based on that. So how does it work?

Steve: Yeah, so we have technologies and some of its kind of traditional predictive analytics, there are some machine learning as well as some natural language processing components to it as well. And we're looking at primarily behavioural data. So the two places the behavioural data that we find most interesting are first intent data that you can get out of out of a website's search engine. So while not a lot of people search on b2b websites, those who do give you some interesting information about content and the relationship with content to intent, like what they're interested in, and why they're interested in it. And once you understand that, you can then almost reverse it, right? And so for any piece of content, you know, what its intent is. And so that's the first piece of data that we look at is intent data on the website so that we know when somebody is on a page, you know, we can make a prediction That's if that's the fancy word for in machine learning for a guess, you know, we can make a prediction about what the odds are that somebody has a certain intent for a certain piece of content. And as you might imagine, that, you know, varies by content from content to content. But the other behavioural data we look at is just all of the visitor journeys that have gone on on the website, right, people start in one place, they end in another. And what we're looking for, especially in the longer journeys, the 2345 page journeys, is we're looking for journeys that, you know, lead to some sort of goal achievement. And by understanding those patterns, we can begin to gather with that intent data to, to make some guesses about when you're on a page, what, why you might be there, and what piece of content you might want to see next, right based upon the pattern analysis that the machine is doing. And of course, every time you give the machine some information, the machine makes better predictions going forward. And there's a third piece of data, of course, which is the content itself, we have a natural language processing technology that looks at content, and tries to understand what it's about what his topic is, what industry it might be about, you can imagine a lot of other things that we can discern.

And so when somebody comes to a website, you know, we're immediately the models are immediately running, they're looking at what the person is looking at, looking at how they're looking at it, right, their scroll depth, how they're interacting with the page, but and they're making these predictions of two things, right, based upon the intent based upon the content based upon all the journeys that are similar to this one. What might you be trying to achieve? And what piece of content might you need to see next in order to progress towards that goal?

Mike: And that helps. So I mean, it sounds like there's lots of elements of it, if I look on your website, you've got, you know, effectively four key products identified, can you explain how they work together to produce a solution?

Steve: The are independent, or they can be used independently, they all share a common platform. You know, we're, we sell two products, search box and guide box, they're kind of our two primary products, mostly, because that's how our customers think about web interaction, it's kind of interesting, you know, we we separate searching and behaviour from navigating behaviour. And there's even variations of navigating behaviour, right, we have navigation behaviour, where people are responding to, to campaigns versus navigation behaviour, maybe they're coming in through organic search, or they're just typing a URL coming direct. So there's lots of different types of behaviours. But when you think about how our customers think about the world, often they think about the website in those two areas, right? We have searchers, and we have navigators. And so that's why search box and guide box were delivered, but they all share this common platform. And that is, you know, looking at the behaviours of people on the website, and using data to automatically drive improvement. So let's talk for a moment about searching behaviour. In searching behaviour, you know, one of the key challenges is a and you would think one of the key inputs in the search engines, even though it's not, would be, hey, when somebody has a successful behaviour on a search, we should, you know, take that data and do something with it. And that doesn't often happen, right? A lot of how search engines work are based upon how good the content is. But it very rarely looks at the behaviours after the content. So that's what's unique about search box. And honestly, that's where a lot of our intent data comes from, is we're looking deeply at not only what did somebody search for, and what did somebody click on, but we're looking at the behaviours after the click to really discern, was this a successful interaction or an unsuccessful interaction? And that not only gives us data about searcher success, which you can then feed back to the search engine to give it some, you know, information about which links are the better answers versus which links are the worst answers. But more importantly, that then becomes a data set, were we really understand on a specific company's website? You know, how good is search? And, and are those searchers based upon again, coming back to intent what they intended to achieve achieving that thing?

Mike: Interesting. So you're, you're looking at what people search for, and then you're trying to use that to almost assess the value of different content in different situations? Is that how it's working?

Steve: Yeah, I mean, that's a good way of thinking about it. You know, the search engines are always trying to programmatically evaluate content and discern, you know, what it's about. And that, of course, once this once the search engine knows what it's about, you know, through a variety of techniques that are, you know, very mathematically driven, so I won't go into them too much. But most search engines work that right, right? They look at content, that's called indexing, right? They gather all the content, and then they evaluate that content to try to figure out what it's about. And we take that whole thing the next step further, which is to say, Okay, great, the search engines done that evaluation. It's figured out what this content is about. But now let's add the user feedback into it. Right, let's add customer experience back into it. And it's not just the customer experience while they're on the search engine results page, but it's really the experience after they leave the search engine results page after they make that click and start their journey. You know, was that journey actually successful or not?

Mike: Interesting. And in terms of working this out? I mean, I think you said the AI guesses. I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than that. I mean, can you explain what AI gives you that you couldn't get from something that's more of a programmatic formula type approach?

Steve: Yeah. So, you know, thinking about AI, is one of the ways I like to think about it. And I think it helps marketers think about it is kind of the traditional ways of doing, as you said, programmatic sort of solutions to this problem is very similar to a b testing, right? So you come up with an A and a B ad, and you run them and you see which one performs better. And then you start, you know, the machine would automatically say, you know, what B's doing a lot better, let's promote B. And so that's kind of a traditional way of thinking about those, you have you posit two hypotheses, and you test them, what machine learning allows you to do is to not have to come up with the hypothesis, right? You don't have to come up with the A and the B, you actually come up with a goal, right? So you define, I want more leads. And what the machine is going to do is it's going to come up with the A and the B and the C and the D. And it's just going to constantly try to optimise on that goal versus optimising the two choices you have given it. And so it the same way, when you think about all this journey analytics that goes on, we're compiling all of this information about people and their interactions with a website on a continuous basis.

Now, some of those interactions are very small, right, somebody responds to a campaign and leaves the site a one page visit a bounce. Sometimes they're very short, you know, you look at a lot of these companies. And they are their goal is to get two pages per visit on average, right? So they're very short interactions. But when you can look at the longer interactions, you just have so many of them, that it's hard to, for a human to kind of discern the pattern and choose, you know, which of these two, two pathways are better, right, and the human defines the pathways. So instead, we just tell the machine, you know, we want more downloads, we want more contact forms, we want more whatever. And now the machine knows that those sorts of events are the goals. And it's going to look for the patterns that that lead to the goals. And over time, as somebody comes to the website, it will recognise when somebody is on one of those patterns. And it could be as simple as G everybody who starts on this page, who happens to land on this page has an 80% likelihood that they're going that they're shooting for the contact form, let me nudge this person forward, to try to get him to the contact form, right. So it's that's the kind of predictions that the machines working on. But the the real difference between programmatic ways and machine learning ways is in machine learning, you define the goal. And once you've defined the goal, the machine can figure out the optimal ways towards achieving the goal versus having to draw, you know, for a human to actually have to figure out, well, here's the five ways to the goal, we're going to test let's just figure out which of my five ideas is best.

Mike: Interesting. So, I mean, how does a user use seller segment? It sounds like, you know, there might be this incredibly complicated set up before suddenly the magic happens it? Is it tough, or is it straightforward?

Steve: It's relatively straightforward. I'll say that. And, you know, we're working every day to kind of make it more straightforward. You know, certainly, when, when I was in my role at IBM, you know, one of the deep pain points that we had was time to value. You know, we were a large enterprise, when we bought large enterprise software was often complex to implement. It was often and part of that was by design, by the way, right? Because it's, it's far easier to retain a software, you know, retain an account if you're a software vendor, if it's hard to unplug you. So I think some of that complexity was by design, but but you know, required integrations with systems that, you know, we had, whether it was integrating to the CRM system or fulfilment systems. And so is the time to value was was, you know, one of the biggest struggles that you'd be a year into a contract and you're just getting the most basic function sort of deployed.

And I think that's where, you know, where I started in my role there, you know, getting involved in a lot of what I would refer to as best in class vendors, right, these smaller vendors who were far more agile, their price points were a lot more appealing. Yeah. And, you know, often they didn't require the complexity that that these larger kind of more traditional vendors required. And so that was really our goal, when we were thinking about what type of company do we want to be, you know, we started off with this idea that we don't want to be a company that makes it really hard to manage the data. And that was part of our, you know, focus on anonymous data versus personal data. But the other thing was, you know, we want to make it easy to get started. And so I mean, search box is the easiest product to get started with, because, you know, it gathers all the data via JavaScript, you put a couple of lines of code on the page. And it just begins to, to gather data about what's going on in search and what's going on after search. And that was our first product, by the way. And so that design decision where we said, we're not going to integrate with the technology that our customer uses, whether it's their web analytics, or their search engine, we're going to use JavaScript to capture the data ourselves, that now kind of pervades everything we do, right? What can we do with the JavaScript to make it easier for our customers to adopt, and honestly make it easier for us to get them to value, right that you know, to speed the time to value. So JavaScript is a way that we gather a lot of data, much like any analytics programme does. And we also the second way we gather data is we searched the website like a search engine would so we can index all the content and apply our NLP against those indexes that we created all the content, but we try to make it as easy as possible. And again, having been in large enterprise marketing tech, I get the pain point and the time to value problem. And so that's part of our goal.

Mike: But it sounds like you can load that JavaScript things start happening immediately. And then you obviously need to presumably give some idea of what a conversion is, whether it's a form fill or something, is it is that right?

Steve: Yes and no. So the general processes that JavaScript gets installed, and for some companies, and by the way, some people think when I give these examples, oh, he's talking about the small company had an easy time and a big company had a hard time, it actually doesn't matter on company size, it's often just, you know, the where the Paranoid dial is set out, some some companies said at 11, break it and some companies set it up for but you know, getting that JavaScript deployed, you know, is usually a couple of weeks just because these large companies have processes that they want to go through to, you know, test them and put it on board. And then we usually need some baseline set of data to get both search box and guide box to work. Because all of these learning technologies, you know, just they work they need to learn, right, they need some data set to learn. And while the holy grail is some general model that will work across all businesses in all industries, the reality is it has to learn on the behaviours of each of our clients. So that usually takes about 30 days. And again, it depends on the size of the client and the volume of data. But most of our, our clients are dealing with 10s of 1000s of pages of content and hundreds of 1000s of visits a month. And so we pretty pretty quickly gather enough data, enough head of steam, if you will, enough learning that the models are working within 30 days or so and and that's when the comp plan can begin to really get value from them. Where where the client has some work to do, of course, is getting through all of their processes to deploy, deploy the code, and that they have to make some choices, some of our technology appears on the glass, right that we deliver some sort of user experience. And so they have to decide, you know, share with us their design, standards and whatnot. So we make sure that it looks like something that comes from that company. But you know, again, our goal is always to kind of lower the barrier to getting started, lower the barriers, time to value.

Mike: And it sounds like you're also giving a little bit of consultancy in terms of helping the customer is that right? I mean, it sounds like you're not a classic SAS vendor that you sign up online, and you're on your own.

Steve: Yeah, I mean, you know, we had intended to be that SAS vendor, you know, that was already dead. And by the way, experiences, again, in my career, you know, these large enterprises, they are, they can be high touch. So, you know, they, you know, when I think about all of our client relationships, you know, I know most of my clients, but, you know, we're, you know, I try to make sure that I'm speaking to them fairly frequently. But they're, I mean, the nature of their businesses is they're large and complex. And so, because we have a point of view on, on not only our area of expertise, which is in digital engagement, personalization, sort of technologies, but on how those technologies integrate with the entire marketing processes, you know, you bet our customer success, people definitely, you know, chat with our clients about broader issues. And in some cases, we do some consulting, where they ask us to go deeper than honestly a software vendor might normally but where we have some expertise, we definitely do that.

I mean, I never want to turn away a client who, who we can help extract value, but our core really is, you know, how do we make help the software drive value? Because at the end of the day, you know, my frustration, as an executive was always that, you know, I'd get the PowerPoint and you know, it'd be 102 pages of insight. But how do I then execute that? Right? It's really hard to do so. And what we're we want to focus on is how do we use data to automatically drive improvement, whether that's data that's automatically improving the search experience, or whether it's data automatically helping navigators. But there is far too much content, there are far too many visitors. And there's far too few resources, whether it's money, or people within these origin enterprises to do anything manually. And so, you know, it's funny, we have a dashboard for all our products that shows the value, etc, etc. And our clients rarely use them. And so we knew that like, that was an early feedback point. You know, we knew that sharing data was not the most important thing, right? using that data, in a way to automatically make things better, was a lot better than sharing a dashboard, which gives some overworked marketer more work to do.

Mike: I mean, trade, I mean, obviously, as a company, you're really focused on value. And I guess one of the ways of measuring value is, is in terms of number of leads and cost per lead? Is that the primary way people measure or are there other ways that people look at value from the product?

Steve: Yeah, I think that the folks that, you know, that's those are certainly Top of Mind measures for all of our clients, you know, they are under pressure to deliver mq ELLs, right. That is the that is the ultimate the ultimate point of the exercise. You know, of course, when we're one piece of an integrated stack, in a very complex business, it's hard to do attribution, right, that is the Achilles heel of everything that marketers do, and quite frankly, the marketing technology companies do. So, you know, what we're looking at is well, what are the metrics that lead up to an M qL, that we can contribute to in some meaningful way and measure from an attribution perspective very specifically? So certainly, we're looking at, you know, a lot of those leading metrics, right. So are we getting more engagement and engagement is a fairly complex algorithm, but it basically means are more people staying on the site? are they seeing more content? Are they progressing more towards their goals? Right, so those are, that's our viewpoint is we want to increase the level of engagement with content on the website, where we can measure those goals. And we tend to refer to them as events because I think goal has a very specific meaning, right? A goal is something that a marketer has defined as the point of a campaign, say, or product manager is defined as the on this page, when somebody gets to it, they're going to take this specific action.

One of the things we do when we evaluate the content automatically on our website, is we look for places where people can do stuff, right. So it could be if you had, say, a commerce element, two of our clients have a relatively small portion of commerce on their website, but they have carts and they have checkouts and those sorts of things. So we look for those sorts of events. But the other things that are more common are events, like, you know, download the white paper, or fill out the contact form, or those sorts of things. And so what we're looking for is signals that indicate that one of those events have taken place. And that of course, you know, once we see a signal that an event has taken place, we're then going to try to drive more people who fit that pattern towards that event. But that's really our goal. So as opposed to leads, I think the most thing you the thing you could most likely attribute our technology towards driving is probably contacts, right that people are actually taking some of those events or and sharing their information. So that now there, they can fall into quite frankly, a personalised experience. Right. So now they can fall into a technology which will nurture them with an email campaign or will, you know, prompt a sales rep to make a call?

Mike: Brilliant, nice. That's really clear. And you said earlier, you're talking about, you know, typically having hundreds of 1000s of visits for a typical customer? I mean, can you talk to me about you know, who benefits the most from using solely segment?

Steve: Yeah, so these are generally companies that are kind of later to the digital game, I think that there are a fair amount of companies very mature companies digitally mature, by the way, you know, it's funny how interesting, you know, a company size almost is not a predictor of digital maturity. But it's somewhat related, but not highly related. But, you know, we're talking to a lot of companies who are a little bit later to the digital game, right, that they're, they, you know, didn't get involved early, but they're looking to advance quickly. And, you know, I think one of the frustrations that these companies often face is that you know, they go to some of these law Large integrated vendors. And, you know, they're faced with, you know, six figure seven figure licence fees. And, you know, equally six, figure seven figure integration, installation fees. And of course, you know, months and months to value. And so, so these so these companies that are coming a little bit later to the game, they see that they're a little intimidated, and now they want to think, well, how can I get started without having to take that huge bite.

So those are companies that are very good for us as well, we deal with some large manufacturing companies, some large chemical companies, medical device manufacturers have been very popular now in COVID. But as these companies who are a little bit late to the game and want to accelerate are very good. And generally, the folks we're talking to are, you know, the people who are really at the, at the tip of the spear, you know, all CEOs with their, you know, favourite, you know, people like be right, I want to go talk to the CMO and I want to have a great relationship. But, you know, at the end of the day, the CMOS don't feel the pain as acutely as, say, a senior manager or director of marketing, right, they are, they live where the pain is. And so, you know, we have a lot of conversations with those folks who are wrestling with, you know, yield on their marketing campaigns with, with, you know, just, you know, engagement on the website, you know, they've got a 80% bounce rate, and, you know, every page has a 90% exit rate, you know, so they're, they're really dealing with, you know, trying to create engagement connection with their clients. But we're fairly industry agnostic, but it's really, you know, helping to talk to the folks who really, you know, are at the tip of the spear with regards to the pain and the challenges that the business is facing.

Mike: That's interesting. So you're almost coming into people who are, you know, lagging behind and give them giving them a bit of a speed boost to catch up?

Steve: Yes.

Mike: And I'm interested in you talked about bounce rate, you know, people having 80% bounce rate, which I know, in on some sites is the case. So say the segment can really make a difference on that first page in terms of serving the right content, can it?

Steve: Yeah, you bet. You know, I think, and I don't think marketers Think about it this, but certainly lay people think about it like this, or people maybe who aren't marketers, but you know, fans, folks, and all those other people who exist in a corporation, you know, they always think about, somebody comes to our website, and they're coming to the homepage, and they're navigating around. And that's not the way it works at all right? A very small portion, everybody, most people come in sideways, what I like to think of is sideways, or they come in the back door, they come in the side door through the garage, because they're most often, you know, go into Google and doing a search. And, you know, they're landing on some random page on the website. And, you know, for a marketer, you know, we spend a lot of our time and attention on the high value stuff, right. So we spend a lot of time on campaigns, and campaign landing experiences, and, you know, increasing yields there, we spend a lot of time on our top products, we spend a lot of time on this homepage, because the CEO thinks it's important. And so we spend a lot of time on those experiences. And they account for a very, very small fraction of the total visits to the website.

And so, you know, part of the reason that, you know, we focused on this anonymous idea was also because there's so much of the content that's anonymous. When you think about, again, somebody's coming to the website on any random page. And then you draw a histogram that says, you know, lists all the web pages and how many visits they got this month, you know, there are probably 150 pages that got 90% of the traffic. And then there are 15,000 pages, they got two or three visits each. But each one of those visits was important to the person who found it. Now granted, a lot of people get to places that Google sends them that aren't very valuable. But again, whoever came into that page, they only got one or two page views a month, they had a purpose. And of course, nobody creates a bespoke experience on a page that gets one or two page views a month. And so, you know, part of our thought was, if we can provide the ability to somehow figure out somebody's on a page, where can we send them next? That helps you avoid that bounce helps you if that's their second page, avoid the exit, it gets you that continued engagement, right, get to another swing at the plate to use a you know, American baseball term, right? Yeah. So, you know, your swings at the plate are the kind of the things that you want, right? You don't want to strike out, you don't want to get out, right, you want to, you know, have a lot of opportunities as a, as a baseball manager to, you know, get people on the field. And so in the same way, as a marketing manager, you want the opportunity to somehow connect with this person. And so if they're coming to the site, and they're, you know, 80% of them are, you know, bouncing out, then you know, anything you can do to reduce that rate is critical. We had one client, who we've done a couple cases studies on this and really study that deeply. And one client in their first six months of having guide box on the page, they reduced their bounce rate by 12 points. And so, you know, it was a pretty significant opportunity for them to turn those one page visits into at least two page visits. And, you know, again, you know, we're all those successful, absolutely not, but would you like to double your opportunity to engage with somebody? You know, absolutely. Everybody wants that every day?

Mike: Oh, that's an amazing stat. And I think, you know, it's interesting, it sounds like you're almost learning about the visitor from the page they land on, because you're effectively inferring how they got there in terms of search is that, crudely speaking, how the AI is doing it?

Steve: It is, but and it's also inferring, you know, why they're there. And again, it's, you know, we've never really studied to say, you know, how often Is it right? You know, we don't do surveys of people to see if we got in their minds. But you know, but you can look at the data, right? And if you're giving somebody a very smart recommendation about, Oh, you like this content, you know, maybe you'd like to see this next. And that's one of the models that we use is it's kind of it's a content recommendation sort of thing, much like say Amazon does product recommendation, what we're trying to do is offer people really smart alternatives. I mean, when you look at any, any large enterprise, and pretty much any company's website, it's organised, like their organisation chart is organised, not how their customers think about their problems. And so you know, not only do they have many ways off the page, one of our clients we counted, they have 70 ways off their pages, because they show this huge menu. And there's this, you know, right side navigation bar, and there's a left side navigation is hugely confusing user experience. And again, you wouldn't do that for your best products. But there's a lot of other things on your website that you just don't have the time and energy to invest in. And so, with guide box, saying, Here's three options to progress your journey some way, would you like to choose one of these three things that seems really smart? You know, it's a way of creating that engagement that, you know, allows somebody to not be honestly intimidated by all the choice that's before them, and much of that choice being irrelevant to them?

Mike: Well, so the scope, I mean, you know, effectively seller segments, sat there, it's it's customising 10s, of 1000s of pages for hundreds of 1000s of visitors, I've got to ask this question, because I'm sure people listening are wondering, it's terrifyingly expensive, right?

Steve: Actually, it's not if you that is, I mean, that's one of the things that while I'd like to choose to charge people a lot of money and make make a lot of money. You know, it's actually it's pretty modest with regards to marketing technology spend, you know, you're spending, you're not spending millions of dollars. And most folks aren't even spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars right there. You know, it's relatively modest, and it scales honestly, to the size of the enterprise. So, you know, we have companies, and as small as sounds weird, but as small as $300 million, so in revenue, so so we can make the solution scales in a way that makes sense for, you know, most of the large enterprise companies that we deal with, you know, the the thing that we're also working on is a way to scale this down, because the models are driven by data. And so, so you need a fair amount of data, but we're looking at is some alternative algorithms that try to do the same predictions that we do a large enterprise and smaller Sharpe enterprises, but in fact, we have a beta of it running on our website, and I don't know how many pages of content we have, but not not 10s of 1000s, that's for sure. And, and so we're looking at ways to scale this down in a way that still creates that meaningful engagement. Because, you know, at the end of the day, you know, the marketer wants you on the site, they want you progressing towards some goal, they want swings at the plate. And so if we can do that, for companies, the scale of john deere, while at the same time doing it for companies, the scale of solo segment, we think there's that's a tremendous opportunity, we're not quite ready for primetime on that scaled down model. Because there's still some things that we have to figure out how to scale on the back end, because as you would imagine, what we did on our website was a little bespoke, but, you know, we're definitely, we're definitely looking at those models. Because, you know, there we, you know, think there's a great economic opportunity for us, and there's no reason it's just the big guys should get all the value from a, you know, better engagement.

Mike: Well, definitely let us know when you've got a product because I'm sure we'd love to have it on our website as well. That'd be great.

Steve: Sounds good.

Mike: I mean, it does sound amazing, you know, for the cost of, you know, probably two or three really good marketers, you can get this huge amount of personalization, that just would be impractical. If you were trying to do it manually. I mean, you know, I can certainly see the potential in terms of return on investment there. That's great.

Steve: Yeah, you bet. I think that's a great way to think about it. I mean, how many people would Do you have to add to get, you know, engagement on the long tail of people who are coming to your website?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so you've given us a little hint about the future in terms of where you might go? Is there anything else that you feel we should cover? Any anything you'd like to talk about in terms of salary segments? Or something about the technology I've missed?

Steve: Yeah, no, I think I think part of it is, you know, one of the things I think we didn't talk about was a little bit more about, like, why is this the moment to be thinking about anonymous engagement. And, you know, anybody who's an advertising is now trying to figure out what to do now with the death of cookies is kind of the thing that's out there. But with the larger trend is is, you know, people are tired of their data getting stolen and misused. regulators have responded that, by that with GDPR, and the California acts and a lot of others that exist around the world. And, and now the software industry, most notably, the browser industry is acting to, you know, limit the amount of data that browsers will transmit to companies. And so this is, you know, most immediately, folks are freaked out, marketers are freaked out by the fact that ads, the ad business is going to change dramatically. You know, we all we heard Twitter and Facebook already talking about how their ad revenues are going to go down. Well, when ad revenues go down, that means advertisers have less opportunity to engage, right, because that's why they're going down. And so, you know, there are certainly some headwinds and significant headwinds, and I think they're only going to increase over the coming years, with how we're using personal information, and especially when you're a b2b marketer, you know, it's already harder to use personal information. And so, you know, to the extent that companies can they really should be starting to think about, you know, how do they create engaging visitor experiences using data other than personal data, because they're already starting at a deficit, right, they, you know, very small percentage of the visitors that come to these websites are engageable, that we can know something about them. And if it's only going to get more difficult, you know, kind of doubling down on a traditional personalization strategy just seems like folly, because, you know, the regulators aren't going to change the direction, Apple, Google and Firefox aren't going to change their direction. And so I think that the smart marketers are not only addressing kind of the current pain they're seeing, but they're actually starting to think more strategically about how are they going to operate effectively? How are they going to achieve their business objectives? deliver those mq ELLs deliver, you know, more contacts, in a world where personal information is going to be increasingly rare?

Mike: Wow, that's certainly a trend we're seeing. And I know, iOS, for example, a lot of people are freaking out over the privacy there. For for the advertising industry. So I think it's a great point. You know, it really is a time when people need to be thinking about what's next. And, and he gives this opportunity for really effective personalization. Without any kind of privacy issues. That's, that's cool.

Steve: Yeah, indeed.

Mike: So assuming we've got somebody listening who's you know, responsible for a website that's, you know, got several 100,000 visitors, or more a month? I mean, is there any way they can get in contact with you? You're the CEO of the company. I mean, yeah, I suppose there's a way they can get you.

Steve: Yeah, they could definitely get me and my emails probably on the website somewhere, but yeah, I mean, honestly, I could actually just email me directly, Steve@solosegment.com or they could go to the website solosegment.com. Hit me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'm available in all the normal ways. But yeah, I'd be happy to have conversations and, you know, direct them to the right people in our organisation who can be to the conversation.

Mike: Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast, Steve. Um, there's so much more, we could ask you and find out. All I ask is if you could come back when you do have a product that works with smaller websites, I'd love to talk to you again.

Steve: You bet, Mike. Thanks very much.

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.

by Hannah Wehrly