B2B SaaS Marketing at Scale: Shane Murphy-Reuter (Webflow)

0:00
imagine your brand is a field right and loads of crops in it and demand gen is
0:06
coming in and just like cutting the crops right you've got great brand awareness and imagine it's going to come in and like
0:12
um Farm all that uh love and demand if you what will happen is if you're just
0:18
farming your your output in the you know in a year is going to be amazing it's like we
0:23
spend we've just spent all of our time cutting all of the the crops hero
0:30
and then the next year comes and it's like oh we didn't rotate the fields we didn't yeah we didn't uh we didn't
0:36
put down any fertilizer oh my God the crops aren't growing and so the ROI of the campaign starts to get even got
0:42
really really terrible because neither farmers are going in you got you know 100 Farm people trying to cook then
0:48
crops and there's nothing there because you haven't invested the brand [Music]
1:01
Shane hello welcome to the show thank you great to be here
1:06
yeah I know the pleasure is generally all mine well maybe you can start with a quick intro you're obviously the CMO at a webflow but who is Shane
Who is Shane Murphy?
1:13
yeah that's a very uh that's a big question um yeah so currently CMO uh webflow you
1:19
know I spent the last 15 years or so in marketing um I actually started in London for about six to seven years
1:26
working in telecoms and really first half of my career was in b2c actually in the telecoms industry and then moved to
1:34
adro which is my first B2B um uh row and did a year in Dublin which
1:39
then brought me out to the US and so really since then have been working in the marketing
1:45
leadership roles at kind of hyper growth um SAS companies and my kind of Sweet
1:53
Spot has been that like hitting around 100 million error and then kind of trying to um uh keep the company
2:01
accelerating through that point um the zoom info which is my last job was probably the largest scale that we
2:07
were we crossed a bit in there or while I was there so that was kind of maybe the outlier but then webflow is much
2:13
more back into that kind of like sweet spot for me um so yeah just in really love marketing
2:22
you know love doing things like this getting to chat about marketing is uh is always fun and um yeah I've got two kids
2:28
got a dog a wife live in the Boston area that's it busy life good stuff thanks
2:33
for the intro well um listen you have tons of experience um as a marketer myself I'm really interested to pick your brains on some
2:40
really complex uh marketing topics so the role of the CMO and some other strategic areas as well maybe you can
2:46
just explain for I think most people know what webflow is uh but maybe you could explain what is webflow it's a
2:52
super important company in this kind of no code movement and so it's kind of got off on a tangent here I know this is
2:57
true but I remember listening to a podcast Tim Ferriss podcast and I forget the the WordPress the guy found his name
3:04
I think the company is automatic I remember him saying something like I remember him saying something like some
3:09
huge crazy number the proportion of websites that are run by WordPress I don't want to say it was like 50 or some crazy number what is webflow and it's
3:16
about 65 yeah what is like what is webflow and kind of yeah maybe you can explain a bit more about the market you
3:21
guys are operating in yeah so if you think about like you go you know further back you think about the WordPress
What is Webflow?
3:27
Market if you're a person or a designer trying to design and build a website and launch it and you effectively need three
3:34
things you need a um design right so you actually go into a figma or something and make this is what it looks like you
3:40
use CMS which is WordPress and then which is really difficult to actually bring it to life you need a developer to
3:47
go and close those designs to be the front end that sits on top of the CMS beam WordPress
3:54
um and that's very complicated right the designer doesn't know how to code they don't know how to stitch all together
4:00
and so the first innovation in the market where the likes to Squarespace in Wix
4:06
um launched as these very simple template based um uh website Builders the problem with
4:12
those is they swing almost too far the other direction if you're a designer you're really penned into these templates you can't actually design
4:18
whatever you want so you lose all of the Power of that code and because you're so pinned in so webflow
4:25
um launched to solve that problem like we're a call us as a visual development platform you are actually coding so it's
4:33
creating um clean code in the background you have all the power of HML CSS JavaScript all at your fingertips but rather than
4:40
manual decoding you're manipulating that code through a visual interface so as a designer I now can actually build
4:47
websites in an interface that is very typical that I'd be in like much more like a figma style experience so what
4:54
that means is as a designer if I'm in the agency or an in-house designer at a company
4:59
I can now design what I want the website to look like and launch it with a click of a button and without the need for
5:06
using uh developers which are very expensive it can also be
5:11
um you know challenging in the handoff and so yeah we're really trying to find that sweet spot between manual coding
5:17
and um the more template based uh website Builders like a Squarespace or or a
5:23
website so far it's obviously been um that sort of value proposition has
5:30
um really exploded and you know we're still growing at a rapid rapid rate and
5:36
um while we're not yes uh over 50 of the websites on the internet aren't quite built on webflow yet like we're
5:42
definitely catching up yeah good stuff maybe you can give some uh context into the um I think the last
5:48
numbers I saw the company was valued in the billions was it four billion I think uh 100 million ARR and maybe you can put
5:54
is that those numbers still accurate or yeah yeah so our last valuation was just
6:00
over 4 billion which is I think April of last year right just before the year uh the crafts are yep we're still valued at
6:07
that and um obviously there's been Market changes in the private companies so it's difficult to know exactly but the good
6:13
news is that our our um metrics have really continued to go from strength to strength like you know
6:19
the 100 million were well past that now I'm actually not sure if we shared but like we're well past 100 now
6:26
um and you know much like most of the companies they're even really focused on getting to um cash flow positivity which
6:34
you know we're on track to achieve that pretty pretty soon and actually maybe it's the top that we can talk about later around how we've on the marketing
6:40
side and we've doubled the ROI of our marketing span we'll still growing new customer volumes so like a big big part
6:47
of our job is to help with that efficiency and so yeah still officially valued at just over four or four billion
6:53
well past 100 million now and and getting to the point where were going to
6:58
be uh cash flow positive so that we're in charge of our own destiny which is great
7:04
yeah exciting times um one of the things I was I was doing some research for this podcast and I
7:10
found something you wrote on Twitter and you put when choosing your next gig and you put in Brackets as a CMO or on your
7:16
way to being one be really careful to choose one that suits your skills and one that your culturally thriving so why
7:23
did you I think you've been a webflow for around a year why did you choose webflow and why did uh webflow Choose
7:29
You Why was it a good fit yeah you know I think um I think there are two parts
Why was Webflow a good fit for Shane?
7:34
to that as I mentioned is the cultural part which I'll talk right in a second but there's also the um matching your
7:40
skills so different companies have different go to market strategies and
7:46
and I'll use them info as an example Zoom info is go to market strategy is fully sales net
7:52
they are you get a lead in kind of two sales person they sell the deal and they close it and manage it
7:58
most of my career if it's that point and had been at the likes of Avro intercom
8:04
and actually prior to that b2c where your job as a marketer is
8:09
um number one a lot about building the brand given that you're much more scaled um uh company going after like a small
8:17
business all the way up and then a lot of your job is to be a very commercial leader you typically run the self-serve
8:23
business so like a webflow I have the I own the self-serve uh Revenue number
8:28
which is about 85 of our Revenue um because you're not just handing to a sales person to earn revenue and so the
8:35
role of a CMO in a company that is I'm more used to which is a combination of
8:41
product growth like a self-serve business plus the sales led to like expanded up and is very very different
8:48
than um if you go into like an Enterprise driven sales LED company
8:54
so you just need to be really really careful that like um your experience and the things that
9:00
you enjoy doing and are good at are matching with the company's strategy um and so you know I I I would say this
9:06
publicly that I zoom in for it I don't think there is quite that like I was only there just over a year and there
9:12
wasn't quite that that alignment you know I think that for them go off and find somebody who's much more focused on
9:17
that like kind of lead generation the sales driven motion um and so there is there's there's that
9:24
um so I think that's really pretty important and then you know the cultural side you know culture is it's wrote a lot about this um
9:31
cultures come in all different shapes and sizes and there isn't one that's necessarily
9:37
good or bad and you just need to make sure that it it fits who you are I I'll
9:42
give it I actually give a sporting example which sometimes isn't great but like I thought a lot about like Chelsea
9:49
Football Club under Jose Mourinho right and Barcelona under Pep Guardiola
9:54
both extremely successful could not have been culturally or strategically more different
10:01
if you were a player on Barcelona you try to go play for Chelsea under Jose
10:06
Mourinho you would have been extremely unsuccessful and vice versa because Jose
10:11
Reno's strategy was I want to have the strongest fittest people want to play direct football we are going to like
10:18
bash our way through and it was extremely successful Pro cardiolas is much more like we are
10:24
going to strategically think about this until we pass the ball into the bowl
10:30
um both really successful you just want to make sure that you're not a Chelsea football style footballer trying to play for Barcelona or Barcelona star football
10:37
bowler trying to play for Chelsea and so you know digging in on what the type of
10:45
culture you might be joining um by either talking directly to the people but actually more importantly
10:50
probably back channeling you can do a lot of work where you probably know people who work there and reaching out
10:56
to those people um to understand that fit I think is really really important and so I would
11:01
yeah encourage anybody taking a job at any level really to figure out um and they they sit into it
11:09
so a webflow more of the the Barcelona or the Chelsea well interesting you know this is like I
11:16
would say I think we're still trying to find our feet there like the football analogy
11:23
like is kind of combination of culture and also strategy right and more like go
11:28
to market motion right um I think webflow we had been so
11:33
successful um for many many years in large part due to
11:40
having extremely high product Market fit in a certain Market segment that it just like exploded
11:46
and I think that um now as we think about going on the next curves of growth we actually do
11:53
have to like think about um making sure that our culture matures with us and making sure that like so we
12:00
actually did do internally a bit of a reset on our like core behaviors
12:05
and making sure that they were we were assuring that we were like holding a high bar around like delivery making
12:12
sure that we have the ability to move at PACE and whereas I think in the past we
12:17
had been maybe a bit more maybe Barcelona's in unfair example but like extremely thoughtful about everything
12:23
like everything we talk like everything is very strategic took a long time to like get to An Answer everybody had an
12:30
opinion which is good for like certain really kind of sticky hairy problems
12:36
that's great but I you know um I thought a lot about meeting companies didn't have two gears in particularly
12:42
marketing departments for some things that's great um sometimes that you've got to kick it
12:47
into the other gear which is like okay we gotta move and not overthink this an
12:52
example would be like AI is here right um we were at risk at webflow of
12:59
really overthinking the AI uh our AI strategy and not getting into Market
13:04
into was perfect and um it was a really good I think moment for us to show our new sort of uh focus
13:12
on be able to move fast in certain instances and we we 've all got in a room spent two days
13:19
together figuring it out and then just got into market and said here it is so we kind of were able to kick into that
13:25
that second gear anyway sorry so I didn't directly answer your question but like I think one of the things we might talk about later is like how companies
13:31
can and marketing teams can can shift as you as you grow and I do think that like being able to figure out how to um shift
13:39
that culture appropriately to mature but as an organization as you as you get bigger is important and the main thing
13:45
that I've seen from certainly more San Francisco based tech companies is uh a
13:50
lot of focus on like um tanking deeply very strategically
13:56
maybe moving slowly maybe not being as their kind of top stand directive when it you need to be and as a result can uh
14:05
not keep that growth going because aren't moving fast enough to to crack
14:10
into new markets and opportunities and so we do a lot of thinking about how we can kind of rebalance that
14:16
yeah understood maybe just to kind of set the stage in the context I can
14:22
imagine going into a company like web I'm not sure I'm not sure the definition of hyper growth but it's certainly a fast growing company with a huge uh
14:28
potential lots of new hires investment pressure yeah I can only imagine going
14:35
in as a new CMO in that first you know whatever 16 90 days that must be a really really important time how do you
14:42
think about that like what have you learned going into CMO in that kind of first 90 days uh what are some of the
The first 90 days as a CMO - biggest lessons
14:48
lessons you've had from them I would say well it's actually a good example of those two gears as well I
14:54
would say that you need to simultaneously figure out the like strategic part
15:01
um as well as okay how can I add value quickly and kind of prove yourself and
15:08
so on the more strategic part really it's about understanding you've got to understand like the company's strategy you've got to understand the team you've
15:15
got to understand how it's set up you have to understand your goals so basically how is currently are you all
15:20
set up in order to like over the next two three years and so it's a lot of
15:25
like um just chatting to the team reading all of the Strategic documents picking out
15:31
what it really means making sure that like you have a full understanding of the context that you're about to uh uh
15:38
execute within because if you're slightly misaligned in the understanding of the strategy and you start then
15:44
sprinting to deliver you could really end up doing like a completely wrong path and that you need to pull yourself
15:50
back from so I think the first part is like really understanding the strategy
15:55
the company the team um so that you can therefore set the marketing strategy uh near the end of
16:02
your 90 days and that said uh I think to be successful particularly
16:10
in marketing trying to figure out what are some low hanging fruit that are like obviously you can just go grab all of it
16:17
not overthink it and actually just deliver value or like really important so an example for me a webflow was and
16:24
when I joined we were in the middle of doing a lot of um pricing packaging changes and the
16:30
project was kind of swirling a little bit with a lack of a kind of leadership ownership and our focus is a project and I was like
16:37
great that one like done this multiple times before it's relatively well defined it just needs a leader to like
16:43
grab it and get it get it delivered and so that was a good example of like a relatively low hanging fruit that was
16:49
like pretty reasonably large impact that I was able to like grab her love um to kind of prove it so I think you're
16:56
you know as a as a CMO and generally is somebody in your job I would always
17:03
encourage you to like really think about like am I am I spending like the balance of my time at the right level of like
17:09
strategic thinking as well as like execution or just like short-term delivery value and so for in the first
17:15
90 days I think that's critical too yeah just um in my own experience and
17:21
obviously we're an agency we would work with um yeah more than 50 SAS companies albeit these are going to be smaller
17:27
companies than than a webflow one of the um one of the things that The Stumbling
17:32
box I've often found in marketing is when we go to work with the SAS company and they just have really poorly
17:37
defining positioning I guess positioning is very much part of that strategic piece uh you spoke about so and I often
17:44
find that's that's a that's a huge blocker right like who is the customer what value this kind of like positioning
17:49
marketing 101 how important is it to and kind of how fundamental is that in the
17:54
kind of the strategy piece to have really well-defined uh positioning yeah it's crucial like if you think
Why do so many SaaS companies have a poorly defined positioning?
18:01
about marketing um run too straightforward your job is to like craft a story that is compelling
18:07
and then communicate it in the market such that people like hear it at the
18:12
right time I place pretty like at the highest level pretty straightforward um I do feel like these days companies
18:20
have over corrected to the performance out of Marketing a little bit and are
18:26
much more just about like let's just get a message out in front of
18:31
um uh our target market and as a result they end up having really terrible like LTV to cack because
18:38
you know people are engaged with their ads or you know they're generally they're not getting a lot of like organic growth because their messages in
18:45
resonating and markets so people aren't like coming in searching for them um and so the thing that uh I've always tried to
18:53
do in my early days in any company is look at do they have a clear
18:59
um messaging house um and if not then working on it and we've actually done a ton of work of
19:05
trying to figure out my view of what that messaging house should look like for like a B2B SAS company there's a lot
19:13
of them out there for like b2c which aren't fit for purpose for uh pdb
19:18
because they're too light on the on the actual solution and product side and then there's some on the B2B side which
19:24
I think are two actually product and solution oriented in missing a brand story and so not to get way too deep on
19:32
it but like for me um basically the the pyramid is at the
19:37
top you've got your your purpose or your mission right so for webflow and that is
19:42
to give everyone developer superpowers we want to make sure that anyone can build for the web because building for
19:48
the web is like writing was you know hundreds of years ago it's like a skill that people should have
19:53
underneath that then is your aspirational customer what is the what who is the customer and what are the
19:59
things that make them kind of motivated both emotion the end and and
20:04
functionally then under that there's the all World New World story so like I actually gave
20:10
you some of it that started this for webflow is like what's the old way they always like handwriting code or terrible
20:15
template Builders this is the new way well the new way is like a visual development platform where you can
20:21
manipulate code in anything or you have that story time and so you got to get that and you will know what that's like
20:26
in your solution level these this is the problem that we're trying to solve for people and then under that then you
20:32
start getting into more of your product messaging uh here's and as a result this is what we've built here's how it works
20:38
here's the value here's the proof um and then to your point around like Target segments usually multiple
20:44
companies have like multiple segments that they're going after we go after agencies on one end and then the other side we go after we call like in-house
20:51
design teams like within a company at some point that that pyramid you want to go left and right and create like a
20:57
parallel one for your different uh audiences that is like relatively aligned but that gives space for each
21:04
audience to breathe um and so it's critically important and
21:09
to like have that all the way down because if those things aren't connected you should be able to say hey our
21:15
mission is this as a result this is what we built um all the way down and such that it's
21:20
connected and and so yeah I think it's critical that as a CMO or in a marketing team if
21:27
you don't have that nailed um it's a really big problem and we're literally working on this I'm going to
21:32
be working on this today with my team actually a web floor we we put something light in in place when I got here but um
21:39
we're we're reimagining it uh right now so if you don't have that priority you want to get that locked in
21:46
interesting so how do you tackle that problem then I mean I'm not sure what you can share here but how many people
21:51
are involved in this is it a workshop is it like how do you approach solving that problem at webflow yeah I think it kind
21:58
of depends on the degree to which the story is known internally just not really written down and codified
22:05
so a webflow I actually think the store is pretty well known and uh we just
22:12
didn't have a common way of describing it so for example visual development platform other people would say we're a
22:19
website builder or whatever like even just like codifying similar language be used so in a situation like webflow
22:27
where actually the story is pretty well known it just needs to be codified that can be a smaller group right now by head
22:33
of pmn and uh and one of his kind of uh strategic threat reports working on a
22:40
Friday with me and then we're obviously sharing it with the number of stakeholders like our CEO and and those
22:46
sort of folks make sure that it's like what we're delivering is bringing its property to life if however you're in a situation where
22:55
like maybe when I was at intercom intercom the story was really confusing it was
23:01
like are we a live chatting are we like a customer engaging platformer we support to like
23:07
conversational marketing was becoming a bit of like a category do we want to latch onto that or is it too narrow
23:13
that was like a much more um in those situations forming a uh
23:19
broader team of some of the key folk in the business like you had a product you had a product marketing your CEO and two
23:26
working it together I think is a broader group is really important if it's really hairy sometimes getting
23:33
in a an agency to help is critical as well so that you don't um enable Gates there's a big risk that
23:39
you kind of enable gays and say yeah this people love this it makes total sense yeah like the value is really
23:45
clear and somebody is like not internal or like what are you talking about yeah
23:50
so agencies can also help um if you don't have the internal sort of uh support
23:57
yeah got it thank you I think we've kind of already my next question is kind of around strategy and uh I'm not expecting
24:04
you to tell us what you know uh an effective B2B SAS marketing strategy because obviously there's tons of
24:09
context and variation but maybe if we speak about you know web Pro product LED
24:15
predominantly 85 I think you said product LED and then there's some sell support in there as well we you obviously understand workflow deeply
24:21
what are the kind of the pillars of the of a marketing strategy we've spoken
24:27
about positioning we've spoken about the messaging house uh what other what are those big pillars of that make up the
24:32
strategy for you yeah like I think about uh Marketing in
What are the key pillars of a marketing strategy?
24:38
three broad pillars and there's there's the product marketing so it's all of your positioning how do you uh uh tell
24:46
your story and then how do you take product new products and stuff to Market um there's then brand marketing is this
24:53
the second one the product marketing team will give the story to the broad marketing team and the brand marketing
24:58
team's job is to turn it into marketing campaigns and assets that will engage
25:06
somebody so like um using intercom as an example
25:11
um yeah we might decide that we're like a live chat to it we're like how do you take that to Market and like how clever
25:17
Brandy might say we're sure in a campaign called in your corner where you know intercom's always in your corner
25:22
there to help it's like this emotional thing you come with the campaigns all that um and then the third pillar of it is
25:29
your growth and demand gen team you typically own the channels of execution
25:34
of those campaigns and that those are very technical analytical folk who are
25:40
going to make sure that those campaigns are put into Market in the in the channels that are most likely to engage
25:47
and the appropriate target market and so if you think about those three
25:52
like pillars then and that's kind of like your how you make the the sausage right it's like
25:59
okay position right and work with the brand marketing team to turn that into like campaigns and the growth in DG team
26:06
to put it in Market um then the so now you're set up sort of
26:11
like with the right machine marketing strategies then need to operate at different levels and the
26:18
three broad different altitudes are brand solution and product
26:25
um at the Brand level what you're trying to do is go out to the world and build your brand and have them like understand
26:31
and resonate what you are and who you are and why you should care and so typically those campaigns are a bit more
26:39
emotional and the media that you're using is typically to go after like a new audience so like like Billboards
26:45
mass media do student all that whatever you might want to do and because what you're trying to do is I just engage
26:51
people in understanding who you are and as you move down those altitudes from Brand to solution to product you're more
26:58
likely um talking to either your existing Market or your existing customers like the product level you're talking to your
27:04
existing customers you already get the value you already care about webflow you just need to know that we've just
27:09
launched this new product that you can like buy or will change the way that you work and therefore the way that you
27:16
position a product hand it to like a brand Team market I do a big emotional creative thing for a product launch and
27:23
the channels of communication be much more like your email marketing and not messaging and and so I think about like
27:30
our marketing strategy from that kind of like it's almost like that Matrix of like are we set up to have solid
27:36
positioning a great brand Team we could bring it together in a great child strategy to
27:42
um and make sure that that can vary about that kind of sausage making is really really thoughtful and then am I
27:48
thinking about it if they're at the multiple altitudes and my general uh having now worked for a sort of four
27:55
hyper guards tech companies my big lesson is that typically speaking
28:01
in the early days the founders and everything have done a really good job of like building the brand they just do it naturally
28:07
and then over time for whatever reason all of the marketing activity ends up like flowing down to the product level
28:14
and they are doing a great job of communicating the new products that they built to their existing customers and
28:21
they've totally forgotten about going and building the brand because we've got a great brand it's like yeah I know you
28:27
know you've got a great brand within your Echo chamber but beyond which you sit in the middle of but nobody else
28:33
knows about you and so um and obviously these tech companies are pretty product driven right like
28:40
that's their technical their technique and so always the gravitational pull is
28:45
dying internally down to the product we're launching this product we worked so hard to build it marketing you got to support you got to support it and I'm
28:52
like no one cares but it's just a customer's care but that's not the market opportunity only you know less
28:59
than one percent of the websites in the world are built in webflow 65 are built on WordPress
29:05
our solution is way better than WordPress like wait objectively and I
29:10
love WordPress like and so it's not a knock on that but I genuinely believe with those 10 times better it's like a
29:16
combustion engine car versus an electric car why are we spending all of our time trying to convince existing Tesla users
29:24
that now you can like do this thing on the sat nav thing like a new little product thing we're only going out of
29:29
the world and convincing them that electric cars are are the future and so anyway it's something I'm pretty
29:34
passionate as you can see um and so I think like this Market is one of our key jobs internally is to
29:40
like make sure that and bring this back to your original question from a strategy point of view that the
29:47
um CEO and the whole company understands this messaging house and the importance
29:54
to have marketing supporting the high level brand the solution level and the
29:59
product level and one of the things I I I often do is show when I joined last
30:04
six months here's all the stuff we've done here at the product level here's what we've done at the solution level and we've done nothing at Brando
30:11
and you think that we're going to go and like have rapid growth for the next you know five years this is not going to
30:17
happen um and so anyway um that I think is like critical in
30:22
making sure that your strategy is balanced across those those different altitudes and that you're not getting sucked down into the product uh too much
30:31
just just thinking here you know one of my follow-up questions was going to be what is the
30:37
um hardest part of all of that and I feel like maybe it's more on the getting everyone up to the to the brand side do
30:43
you feel like it's also maybe this is more of a marketing issue but do you think because also the by the way um I
30:49
also call Brand like demand generation as well that'd be another way that you would call you know brand demand demand generation do you think that it's also
30:56
because it's harder to measure everybody just wants to say we spent X we got y here's the outcome do you think that's
31:03
also a barrier to why people want to invest Less in that in that brand yeah 100 like to say the safe thing to do as
Is demand generation harder to measure?
31:10
a CMO is not to do what I just said if you want to have a good reputation
31:15
internally typically speaking if you do a great job of launching the new
31:20
products and like your home pages that gets really into detail of how cool the project is
31:26
the CTO is going to love you the CPO is going to love you the CEO is likely a
31:32
technical product person is going to love you and what will happen is you will have
31:37
short-term impact um because you'll do a good job of like getting the existing customers maybe to
31:43
spend more on those sort of things but and so you might have a solid couple
31:49
year run where everyone loves you the problem is that the company itself will
31:55
Peter out and so because you fail to like go and match the market opportunity
32:02
um and so yeah it and then to answer your point directly yes it's just easier
32:07
down there because it's like um you can measure really directly certainly the impact that you have on
32:13
the existing customers with things like email marketing or in-app messaging all that from a demand gen point of view it's
32:19
very easy to measure more of your kind of like uh lead generation campaigns and
32:24
like sign up generation campaigns um and therefore you can stand it from the CFO and he'll he or she will love
32:31
you as well um because you're showing the ROI and so yeah I think you're you're right
32:37
but you need like the one here I'll just say I'm sorry I'm walking a little bit now but what I've
32:42
always said to my teams is like as as a marketing team and this is most
32:48
important for a CMO you need to be the most financially illiterate person in the room
32:54
so that you earn the right that when you say we're going to go invest in the brand the CFO turns around
33:00
and she's like yeah I trust you and and so I've spent a lot of my career
33:09
um like any time I heard anything in a like boarding exact meaning like a term
33:14
that I'm like well I don't actually understand that term like MPV how does that work I'd go and I would learn it
33:20
backwards um spent a lot of my my career figuring out how to like do detailed financial
33:26
analysis um and so that like now you know our vpa
33:31
finance Yvonne he 100 trusts when I say we have to go and invest in this brand
33:36
we're not going to be able to measure it um the direct stuff that we're doing but we can measure the overall impact of the
33:43
the campaign and he's he's like yeah I get it like and I understand the need
33:49
for it and let's go for it and so again advice maybe for other marketers or more Junior people coming
33:56
up is like you you need to be as Financial literate as um this is a hard one but it's possible
34:02
is financially literate as the person in strategic Finance or FP a or whatever team it is that you're working directly
34:09
with um learn Excel so do people use Excel anymore sheets
34:16
um uh because it will it'll sound to you it'll stop you through your career yeah how do you so with all that in mind how
34:26
do you justify demand generation when it is difficult to measure I think it's often it's difficult to justify a huge
34:34
expenditure over a long period of time without that kind of feedback loop you know you need to kind of go all in like
34:40
okay we're going to invest in brand we're not going to see the impact of this for another 12 months to you know whatever it is
34:45
I guess a couple of questions like firstly how do you how do you approach that so that's that's a really big I
34:51
mean you've seen some of these big companies like either click up monday.com everywhere you go it's full of like the top of funnel actually not
34:58
all top of funnel brand but they have a lot of uh output how do you approach that problem and how do you scale that
How do you approach and scale demand generation?
35:04
machine yeah um honestly I think most
35:11
everything is measurable it's the degree to which it's directly attributable
35:17
and the degree to which it's a direct response meaning you'll see it immediately so let me explain
35:23
um a paid search ad somebody searches for Web Design Software our ad comes up they've got
35:29
high intent they click on they sign up that was a direct response which was immediate and it's directly attributable
35:36
we are directly able to say go click uh sign up good job paid search
35:42
that's that's pretty easy now yeah you can get into the whole conversation about attribution and you know one touch
35:48
attribution versus multi such attribution honestly in B2B I've done this so many times that that argument is
35:55
so over stated that typically the not the number of touches in the Practical version is pretty low and therefore the
36:02
single touches are fine one level up would be um
36:07
uh indirectly not directly attributable direct
36:12
response so that would be um let's say you've got a podcast ad
36:17
running where it's got a very clear offer to sign up with some sort of like discount whatever you want somebody to
36:23
take a direct response and it's not directly attributed because it's a podcast art you can't see the person click on it those ones it is absolutely
36:31
possible to measure the overall impact of the campaign by doing like whole like
36:37
uh group so what you can do is like say um let's do a big portion in San Francisco
36:43
and let's see what happens with our branded search volume or traffic from San Francisco and to see the overall
36:50
uplift that we're seeing from the campaign and you should be able to see it um because it is more of a direct
36:56
response even though it's not directly attributable to that specific like ad
37:01
um and therefore the conversation with the CFO is like hey use the overall impact of the campaign
37:08
um don't ask me which is specific I just like really drove it
37:13
um and then the really hard ones are the uh not directly attributable not direct
37:20
response right uh so it's something like imagine like your investment in
37:26
um like coms let's say you have a five person PR team and they're helping get
37:32
just like build your Authority pre-ipo again you coverage in various places like it's extremely long term very
37:40
difficult so therefore it's not direct response it's not directly attributable you can't see what it's driving those
37:46
are like the really hard ones and arguably like even TV and those sort of things if you're doing depending upon
37:52
the message is like in that category as well here now as well Shane you're also on
37:57
this podcast right now what's the ROI yeah what are you doing here
38:06
um but uh those are the hardest but like what you want to see there is that over
How do you get the CFO to approve big budgets?
38:12
time that you can track things like your branded search traffic and the trend in it and you do want to see that over time
38:18
as you're invest in those things that that is starting to uh increase particularly in uh yeah like maybe the
38:25
regions that you have a bigger focus in so that's where really the the head of uh your financing the
38:32
company you need to like just buy into it as a important part of the strategy and you use a certain amount of judgment
38:39
um in the short term but that is quite a distance the hardest to to measure yeah
38:45
and I guess the second um uh piece of that question is with again all that in mind how do you go to
38:52
that you've got the trust of the CFO I think you said now how did you in those early days go and communicate that and
39:00
get buy-in for those big budgets from the CFO well the reality is we're on a journey so
39:05
companies like webflow invest relatively little in that like top top bucket today
39:11
webflow the vast majority that we're investing is in the directly attributed direct response no interesting yeah
39:18
actually well because we just have a lot of like brand awareness anyway and there's certain things that we invest
39:24
like in our community team and those sort of things that are just known as a good Investments that are helping like
39:30
build a brand but most of our in fact almost all of our media spend right now is in direct distributed direct response
39:38
um and we have spent in the last year I was like job one is to make sure that
39:44
that spend is extremely great Roi and so we've got to the point where
39:52
um we've have the CAC and we're now at a point where we're at like an eight-month payback and so extremely like that's
40:00
really strong for a B2B company I mean literally I think it was last week obviously the CFO and the CEO were
40:08
going this is amazing is this sustainable like what a great job and I said it's absolutely not sustainable
40:14
um but they now they trust me right I'm like hey gang look what we did here's how did you know they're like we trust
40:20
right so the conversation I had was like this is what we've done what we've been doing is our brand is like
40:28
imagine your brand is a field right and loads of crops in it and demand gen is
40:34
coming in and just like cutting the crops right you've got great brand awareness to imagine it's going to come in in like
40:39
um Farm all that uh love and demand if you what will happen is if you're just
40:46
farming your your output in the you know in a year is going to be amazing it's like it
40:51
was fun we've just spent all of our time cutting all of the the crops hero
40:58
and then the next year comes and it's like oh we didn't rotate the fields we didn't yeah we didn't uh we didn't
41:04
put down any fertilizer oh my God the crops aren't growing and so the ROI of the campaign starts to get even got
41:10
really really terrible because now the farmers are going in you got you know 100 Farm people trying to cut their
41:16
crops and there's nothing there because you haven't invested in the branch so the story that I have literally used
41:22
that analogy with and I was like what we're now going to do is we're going to have today the way we
41:27
measure our car because we break it out into what we spent on media what was spent on the team um
41:32
all right we are going to have two more categories we're going to have our Evergreen
41:39
campaigns which we have right now they're high performing High Roi campaigns that we will continue at like
41:45
an eight-month Payback we're going to agree how much are we willing to invest in test campaigns
41:52
where we're okay that they have low Roi and for a certain number of months while we test them out to see if we can turn
41:58
them into Evergreen and the ones that don't you cancel them so that'll be part of our calculator that part of our CAC
42:04
we're okay as a bad Roi and because the idea is that you're trying to like figure out what ones would work and then
42:11
the next part of our cap will be our investment of brand that's our crop rotation and that uh SEC
42:18
that part of our CAC again I'm not going to be reporting back on the
42:25
um those of you to CAC Roi that spend because it's just so hard to measure but
42:31
what I will ensure is that our mix of our investment between those different categories and ensures that overall
42:38
we're still in a decent place from an Roi to from an Roi perspective and and
42:45
that uh that we are able to release like at the different campaign lab like at
42:50
the Brand level have a conversation about is it driving an uplift so anyway it's a journey that I've gone
42:55
on so I'm like what I would say this is by like earning you're earning the trust I think had I come in day one and then
43:02
like hey we got to start investing in the brand whatever they're like looking at the cat going your is up at like
43:08
16 months so and now you want to like to spend you know Millions on this thing that you're
43:13
telling is not going to be measurable like go away so now what you do is you earn that trust show that you know what
43:19
you're doing and then you come um and say this is what we're going to do next and that's where we are as a company right now and
43:25
um so anyway I think the the macro sort of um message and lesson is
43:32
you need to earn the trust of the head of finance
43:37
and whoever else um like kind of is in financial decisions at your company so that you
43:43
have the um uh the ability universities that are not as measurable
43:48
I have so many potential follow-up questions about canoni with a limited time I can only choose uh choose one so I'd be crazy if I didn't ask you how you
43:55
managed to improve I think you say you doubled the ROI of of the campaigns uh how do you do that
How Shane doubled the campaigns ROI
44:02
yeah it was relatively honestly it was not like rocket science it was mostly
44:07
media mix optimization well a combination medium mix optimization conversion rate
44:12
optimization so we I'll talk about the conversion rate still first is maybe easier
44:18
um we reoriented our web team to be much more focused on partnering with the grow team on uh driving results so like when
44:26
I joined I think in the first six months or so I don't even know if we did one conversion right experiment now we have
44:33
so many queued up that we actually we couldn't do any more because we just don't have enough traffic to like get to
44:40
statsig and so they're just backed up and we're about to launch a massive home page experiment we're always doing price
44:46
and Page experiments it's like 90 page experiments so our conversion rate has has improved quite significantly and
44:53
then on the media side the first thing was just going like what is our media mix and what do we think
44:59
it's driving we're investing a lot in Facebook a lot in YouTube and at the time the team were like oh yeah it's
45:05
driving conversions if you look in Facebook or you look in YouTube there yeah of course like of course yeah
45:11
that's yeah let's see what happens uh reaction yeah basically you know which
45:17
is kind of wild we went from a place where I think our paid search was about 30 of our investment paid searches now
45:25
like 95 of our investment and it's the highest intent channel
45:30
right but also the most measurable and as a result
45:35
you're able to optimize if you can't really imagine the thing you can't optimize them let's hope
45:43
um and then within the Page search that card is kind of half the way there just by like Channel mix and then within that
45:50
paid search we implemented a um uh so a lot of like heads of of the kind
45:57
of growth or Media or whatever companies would say oh it's a portfolio so as a result don't double click and
46:02
look down at the ROI at the campaign level um kind of like it's a magic formula
46:08
right or offense together like yeah wait a second if I've got a
46:14
portfolio if my investment manager says we've got a portfolio of Investments we're making here I'm not okay that like
46:20
half of them are terrible return and half of good return and when I stopped doing the terrible return ones
46:26
like um and so what I'd encourage any head of marketing
46:32
to do is like uh basically like decile your campaigns into one of the top top
46:38
10 20 all the way down in buckets of Roi and and then have a chat with the team
46:43
like how much how many of our campaigns are like in the like above one Roi or
46:49
let's say how many are two if that's the goal 2x LGBT great Evergreen keep those gone how many are above one okay well we
46:56
need to optimize those at least they're not burning how many are below one and how many are like below like 0.5
47:04
and then you need to make sure that the ones that are below one not like they're they have to be tests
47:11
you have like you have to have a theory of how you're going to optimize them to be positive and if you can't over a
47:18
certain time period turn it off and then you have to agree what you're willing to put into those lower Roi ones
47:24
and so by doing that we basically able to um uh pretty dramatically improve our
47:29
Roi while also um uh turning our
47:35
the new customer growth around so when I when I joined March of the year I joined
47:40
our new customer value grew four percent year over year and this March I grew 34
47:45
year over year with a half the cack um and so but that's wild like I do
47:52
think that last year's comp was uh was on top of the pandemic pop in March before so it was a heart comp so it's a
47:59
little bit like kind of choosing your stock to make you look good but um we are in marketing so
48:07
um uh but yeah so I think um combination of media mix optimization
48:12
and then uh conversion rate optimization the one area that we've not done a good job on yet which is the next one to pick
48:19
out is um you know when I was at Paddy Power it talks about the three C's of marketing
48:24
there's coverage meaning like your media mix where are you getting coverage how are you optimizing that
48:29
um uh there's clicks how are you improving the way that people interact with your
48:34
ads and these conversions so they're using a good job on the coverage side like medium mix optimization and conversions and landing page conversion
48:41
whatever the clicks part we've not done a great job of like making sure that our
48:46
creative and ads are really well written or designed incredibly well and those
48:51
sort of things such that we improved the number of people that actually engage with the ads land on the the landing
48:58
page and so that's the next sort of big opportunity area for us super insightful um one of the one of
49:05
the things to kind of build on this one of the challenges or one of the mistakes I often see a lot
49:10
of people make particularly in paid search giving yours is 95 of um of the budget is that they try and
49:17
seed the ceiling of what search can deliver there's obviously a finite amount of harvestable demand and surgery
49:22
volume per month so they reach that whatever you know 85 90 whatever the magic number is search impression share
49:28
and they try to go beyond it and then you exponentially increase uh your CPA
49:33
so I guess the challenges yeah Common Sense Media mix let's just try and spend the most money into our top Roi
49:39
campaigns and then kind of cascade down um I don't know if you've seen that in your own uh career people trying to push
49:44
beyond that that ceiling yeah well I think that that's here as you go the longer tail keywords and everything
49:50
intent drops right like of course you're going to be on Web Design Software but you do a drop in Tang as you do a longer
49:56
tail I think um we've been fortunate enough that we were pretty solid demand
50:02
outside the US as well and so it's a big opportunity for us to start investing in
50:08
those other countries which meant that there was a lot more sort of uh crap to sew I suppose
50:13
um and but it's it's true to say this is why I had a conversation with the head of uh our head of Finance in a CEO which
50:20
is like yes this Roi is sustainable but we're not going to keep growing out
50:27
of both 50 year over year as a company um if we're just focused on maintaining
50:33
an eight months uh payback period and so that's where the like investing
50:40
in these like test campaigns but also the brand is critically important like you gotta you you also really do need to
50:46
invest in a brand so that you kind of um get in front of a broader audience and you aren't just harvesting existing
50:51
intent you're creating intent um so that's yeah that's what we need to do next
50:58
one of the things I'm super interested in a follow-up question maybe it's a selfish question because obviously we're run paid media campaigns but I'm really
51:04
interested into um I always say one of the highest leverage things you can do is obviously with Google ads is to lean into the
51:09
automation right you want to feed the algorithms with the best quality signal you can so obviously in your case you
51:15
have a lot of volume which is great because we don't just want to optimize towards someone you know entering in for a free trial to give your email they're
51:21
in we want to go deep into the customer Journey as we can that's an indication of quality right and obviously you guys
51:27
um I did the onboarding yesterday for uh for webflow you have quite a uh an in-depth onboarding right it's a
51:32
complicated product we're talking about building you know websites here so how do you balance that kind of well
51:38
basically what signal do you use in Google ads uh that has the highest quality but also has the right volume
What signal in Google ads has the highest quality and the right volume?
51:43
yeah that's actually been a journey and when I started we were using
51:49
um a sign up and feeding that into into the algorithm
51:55
um yeah and that was a mistake um because to your point there's too
52:01
many people that might be looking just for like a website and that will click and sign up to
52:07
webflow going oh I can build a website in webflow and go look at it and assume there were Squarespace and they drop in
52:12
it's like whoa this is a development platform this is like for professional workflows and I brought our sweetheart
52:18
um so now we are trying to like figure out a way to create an environment for them that is like more easy to
52:23
understand but like it's not a core market so we started we we shifted it to first-time subscriber meaning activated
52:30
customers somebody's actually swiped a credit card and it's paying and we are fortunate that we have enough volume
52:36
um to uh feed that in uh and uh that actually approved the campaign
52:42
performance quite quite a lot and so yeah we're now we're now in that the one that we're now trying is like I've been
52:49
in our more major markets we'll be able to do because we have more volumes we broadly speaking have three types of
52:56
customer segments we've got in-house teams who are like designers and heads of design at a company like webflow
53:02
right big opportunity and agencies big opportunity they're a good channel for
53:07
us and then what we call like our DIY customers what if people want a personal site me who I just want like Shane
53:13
mri.com just like as a resume site the DIY customers just aren't really a
53:20
fit for us like relatively poor retention so even if they come in they
53:25
kind of turn off and let's go now what we're trying to do and like today we're feeding first time
53:31
subscriber data back for all those three so you could have a campaign that's giving a lot of DIY they will still get
53:36
like Google like oh we're doing a great job um because you have to self-select that on the onboarding process right so you
53:42
know that because someone comes in and you ask them got it and then you bucket those off got it exactly yeah um and so we're looking at
53:49
doing what are two things either just feeding the in-house team and agency data back to Google or applying a LTV
53:57
waiting to the different first-time Subs so hey Google you get 100 credit for a
54:02
nice team 75 credit for uh agency and like a 10 credit for a DIY because the
54:07
ltp is like a tenth of the nhg one um so we're we're kind of like playing
54:12
with that right now we're not feeding the back we're manually looking at the split of those for our bigger campaigns
54:18
and then kind of putting our finger on the on the scale um yeah Google is definitely pushing on
54:25
the um Target CPA was the um the best bidding strategy sometime and they've
54:30
really started pushing on this target roast in fact she's somebody internally on slack yesterday shared I think Google you've got to take what Google's numbers
54:36
with a pinch of salt but they said on average we see a 16 better Roi with
54:41
campaigns at run Target rower so yeah I although I'm not necessarily sure I'm buying into the 16 I do think there's a
54:47
movement towards so this more precise so yeah that makes a lot of sense um a couple of questions because we're
54:53
almost at the end of our time together um just on the you said something before you said I'm interested to understand
54:58
how um who's the in kind of a charge of who's kind of the voice of customer
55:03
internally who does most of the customer research because you said I think you said something like the product team passes that information over to the
55:10
brand Team and then they have to go and make a campaign who's in charge of like customer research and how is that fed into marketing yeah so when I started my
Who is the voice of the customer internally? Who does the research?
55:18
career in consumer marketing was always responsible for the research um in B2B that's a lot of times
55:24
certainly at our scale there isn't a team that is dedicated to
55:30
like uh voice of the customer or customer research Discerning my last
55:35
two companies the only team that's uh existed is the product uh research team
55:42
whose job it is to like work directly with the product managers to give them
55:47
customer Insight in order to run their campaigns and so they tend to those teams start with a relatively narrow
55:53
focus on what they're generating insights for um and so my last two places that we've
55:59
taken those teams have kind of expanded their remit such that they are responsible for the generation of
56:05
broader customer Insight that the whole company can use like marketing included and so yeah so right now like a
56:13
webflowing this was the same at intercom those teams sat within the product org
56:18
and and that's not I don't think you design it that way from scratch
56:24
and given that they're supposed to support broader customer insight and like you might put them in like a more
56:31
Central sort of Biz Ops Team or something like that strategy team but given
56:36
um most companies start a product team need that insight to develop their product so it starts in the product team
56:42
and so rather than trying to like reward the whole thing let's just expand the remit and the reporting lines don't
56:48
matter that much so yeah it's typically the the product research team that end up being responsible for it and then
56:53
then the pmn team was in marketing it's supposed to work very very closely with that to ensure that like the payment
56:58
team are briefing that team on the types of insights that we need from a marketing perspective and we should be a
57:04
little bit different from a product perspective like a lot of the time we need a lot more core motivational research and what's really really like
57:10
drives people both functionally and emotionally and so yeah that's how it's worked last two companies
57:18
thank you um okay last last question um recently uh kind of personally I've
57:24
been um obsessed as a strong word but been very focused on how can I work
57:30
smarter and not harder so what are the highest leverage things that I can be
57:35
doing so beyond just you know making sure we're prioritizing the right staff or working on the right thing because the CMO yeah you're managing a huge team
57:42
hyper Growth Company like how do you think about that how do you get the most leverage from your time
How to work smarter, not harder
57:50
yeah it's it's honestly it's hard um I think having really clear
57:56
priorities is like really important and like that's obvious but um
58:01
it's really only later in my career that I realized what that actually means
58:07
now what I do when I plan what my team is everybody sets out their goals and
58:14
then I choose what I believe are true needle mover projects or before I call
58:20
them move Mountain projects I'm like these are the projects where I personally want to be involved for
58:26
what it could be because I have a certain Insight or whatever experience around it and secondly I think really
58:31
move the needle for the business um the other projects you all can run with you don't need my approval I might
58:39
steer here and there reactively but these five projects
58:44
I want they're my like personal needle moving projects and so I think um that
58:50
driving for that priority is really really important so that like both your team understand which projects they
58:55
should bring you in and also it focuses your time as well and what I've been doing which has been really effective is
59:01
on those native moving projects every two weeks the team have to do a new update for me
59:06
and where they record a update going through what and if if it's like I feel
59:12
like something fast enough or I'm like oh I'm already you know during that we'll then call a meeting where we'll like sit down and live and get into it
59:19
so Loom has been an incredible way for me to uh be more effective as a leader
59:25
like without needing like standing meetings on every needle moving project like once a week
59:30
um and then I think the I think we were talking about this just before we actually hit record but
59:35
creating space is a head of marketing for thinking time and writing time is
59:41
like really important I when I started my careers ahead of marketing and
59:47
intercom I ended up just in meetings literally from the second I started to the work until
59:53
the end and so what you end up end up doing is your whole role ends up being reacting
1:00:00
real time to information the people in your team are giving you so you're sitting to me and you go hey hey Shane
1:00:06
I've got a uh proposal on pricing a package and it's a new product okay here's it is what you think and you
1:00:14
have five minutes to make a decision that's not gonna be a quality decision your job is to improve the quality of
1:00:21
your decisions if you did that by 10 it's hugely beneficial so one of the things that I've I I've done
1:00:28
um to improve that is two things one is pre-reads so getting them to send me looms beforehand so that I can at least
1:00:35
24 hours before watch it for my thoughts and then when we get in the meeting first we need a shorter meeting
1:00:41
um but I can be way more effective and then just generally making sure that I have time in the day for thinking and
1:00:47
luckily I'm on the East Coast so I in my morning time is like pretty effective there so that I can write down my
1:00:53
thoughts and send it back really thoughtfully um and so yeah I think that that's like the big thing is like really being
1:00:59
prioritized making sure that you're getting pre-reads so that you can read you soak it and and have a
1:01:06
thoughtful response and then just thinking right in time it's like critical well incredible advice you've also made
1:01:13
me feel a little bit better because we also um recently introduced um Loom videos so for example our okrs uh we
1:01:20
every two weeks we do a loom video just because it's so much easier to because when it focuses the person to really think about what they're going to say
1:01:26
and then they might start again and then they can chop it and they can edit it and then secondly you can watch it on your own time uh which is hugely
1:01:33
beneficial so you're not being reactive like you said and you can respond in your own time and you can do it in a much more thoughtful way so I'm all game
1:01:39
for anything that chops down meetings and being reactive so um yeah qax is the most important two extra
1:01:46
that's so true so true um Shane thank you so much for your time
1:01:51
I really appreciate this is this has been awesome where can people find you uh if they so wish to yeah I'm on Twitter uh Shane Murphy is
1:02:00
my handle with an F in the Murphy m-u-r-f-y it's a bit weird but Murphy was taken uh so Twitter is probably best
1:02:07
yeah yeah good stuff all right Shane thanks so much for your time and speak soon
1:02:12
mate thank you [Music]

‍