(537) ABM and AI for Outbound with Trinity Nguyen, CMO at UserGems - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb4ss7FQ0hk

Transcript: (00:00) if you're already in business that means you do have some product Market fit that means those buyers see something in you as differentiators my guest on this episode is Trinity nwin she is the CMO at user gems she joined the company five years ago as the first business hire and now she's CMO after joining as head of marketing 5 years ago she came up through product marketing that was her background that's her area of expertise I really like the Strategic aspect of it shaping the product Direction shaping the narrative competitive intelligence (00:31) all that stuff today she runs a marketing team of 11 at user gems and her company helps demand gen teams and sales leaders boost Revenue by providing signals to intelligently engage with the buyers that are most likely to convert we talk about her background in product marketing the role of product marketing in a startup running an ABM Playbook at user gems they target 500 accounts per quarter we talk about what that actually looks like and how they execute on it and we talk about why she's completely changed her mind on the power of AI for (00:59) outbound here's my conversation with Trinity 1 2 3 4 You know it's funny you were talking about Vermont uh one of our one of the exit 5 members this guy Dimitri and he said when he was uh he posted a picture from the airport flying from Chicago and he said I'm heading to the B2B marketing Mecca of of the United States is Burlington Vermont so um tell me about tell me about us user gem so you here CMO at user gems what is user gems are we software for sales and marketers basically we capture buying signals to help you prioritize who to Target when (01:40) and why and then help you execute it too and give me a like um people like to get a overview so they can kind of see this in their mind but like the how many how many employees roughly what stage is the company if you can share any type of like company Milestones that's helpful because we're we're going to get into talking about like the marketing team your views on marketing how you do things but if we can kind of set the stage for the the company it's helpful yeah we definitely um start up um so we're at around 60 employees um 100% (02:10) remote spread out between Europe and us um the stage of a company so we're past like we're around I'm trying to think like what I could so basically we're in the teens in terms of Revenue um still growing and and uh yeah $15 right yeah $15 yes yeah no that's good that's helpful 60 60 people teens you know that's good okay okay and you uh and how many people are in the marketing team um so marketing we have both the SDR team we call adrs and the marketing marketing so in total we have around I say like 11 nice okay that's (02:56) marketing owns the sdrs I just had Chris Walker on my podcast last week and he's all his whole world viiew is like a marketing should own sdrs 100,000% yes Chris keep repeating it well let's jump into let's jump off of the deep end now and uh okay so you got 11 folks on the marketing team State what was the state of the company when you when you joined five years ago oh um I was the first business hire so there were two co-founders and two Engineers so I was number five so I pre raise um did they raise money no it was (03:32) 100% food strap wow and did they pay you in money did they P did you get paid I did get paid um okay limited uh definitely definitely like it was fun time it's definitely like Pirates and Romantics kind of thing right well where where were you where were you at like stage of your career to to do that to to decide to go and do that yeah this one it's interesting experience um so I was I was a principal product marketing at a series b/c startup before so I would say like not early career a little bit in um and then I decided to do a like a a (04:13) break like a like sabatical because I want to take a break kind I reevaluate things and the thing is that after you're kind of like traveling around the world and your brain kind of rewired and rebalanced somehow it enabled you to take a lot more risk than you normally would because there was no way the Trinity of 2014 would have said that she would join that early of a company why and that's how it started and why why why not I think well I think a little bit of the situation so I was on Visa so first generation immigration uh (04:48) immigrant here just got my citizenship a couple years ago so that put a lot of natural restrictions there and then also it kind of inhibits you from taking a lot of risk because like you don't have the natural family safety nets in the US yeah yeah wait for forgive my uh ignorance um but what what what type of restriction does that does that put on your ability to like join or not join a a company yeah in order to um so you go to school and then you have some kind of like Visa that can let you work for like (05:19) an internship for a little bit but actually to work as an employees the company has to sponsor you and to sponsor you do a lot of paperwork you have to hire law lawyers do like do the whole like red tape situation I got it got it and hopefully you will get the job so a lot of companies don't want to sponsor International students because of that so that's just kind of like put a lot of restriction like who you where you can apply for a job and then who you can hire so okay and so did that did that impact your decision to CH to (05:51) choose a company and and you got your you you also got your MBA right yeah I did my MBA in Kell Northwestern yeah um it definitely does so that's why you don't see a lot of international students start a startup or join a very early St startup you always need to be sponsored by a company yeah when I join I already got my permanent residence so that's why I could do it okay the bootstrap startup did not sponsor me I was gonna say yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of legal and overhead as someone who is uh building a company for (06:26) the first time we have six we have six employees and even just work having one person who's in Canada like all the nuances that I didn't think of like oh you know I'll talk to my accountant or my you know Finance person I'm like hey we got this guy and can nope can't do this nope can't do that nope can't do that gotta pay him this way gotta do it this way it's it's it's crazy and it it makes you think about all of the from a company side to start a company how much all the things that you need to have in place if you truly want to build a a (06:55) global company you know you truly can't just hire somebody from anywhere and put them on payroll and that's it right yeah I learned that too through user gems initially it's like oh yeah we we have tools uh we have deals we have like this tool that tool we can hire anyone and then Finance like wait a minute you need to be legally compliant in all these countes all right so so you um you're a principal in product marketing product marketing is your thing while you're doing product marketing did you have a eye towards like I want to be head of (07:24) marketing I want to run marketing or did you join user gems with like a kind of product marketing l to help the company grow um the lad uh I knew that I wanted to run marketing team at some point but I didn't really spend that much time dwelling about it I really like product marketing I really like the Strategic aspect of it uh shaping the product Direction shaping The Narrative um competitive intelligence all that stuff I really like product marketing so I just thought that like well user Gams just started my previous company was one (07:53) of their first customer so I was familiar with the product and when I was like you know backpacking in Europe and got bought after 3 months of just looking at churches I went to the website and I'm like this website is horrendous there's no way you're going to be able to find any customer if your website stay this way so I was in Lisbon I'm like well let me you know rebuild your website for you as a side project because I was so bored wait wait wait so so they they hired you as a contractor to build a website I (08:22) volunteered I was that boor out of my mind I'm like let me just figure out webflow and rebuild a website for you okay but how did you pick this company how did you pick user gems well I know I know the company already um I knew back then the pro the company I was at was a customer of user gems so I I knew the team I knew the product I did not see the website until that summer got it but you had been using the product but they had no they had no business people they had no marketing they had no sales founder let sales so the CEO was the (08:54) seller that's crazy okay so you be I I hope I hope this uh in improve the the the number of shares you have when you built their website for free in the early days so you so you rebuild the we you rebuild the website on webflow do you have design skills how did you design it heck no I'm like the worst designer ever yeah but like I think that's the nice thing about when you take a break from your regular kind of like hop off the hamster wheel then you felt more you feel more free to try different things and like I (09:32) feel about AI right now like I I think because I'm not a a head of marketing I'm just entrepreneur like you know we got five six people on the team I have some freedom to do what I want like I find myself playing more again and building a landing page and trying to do this thing with the video and I'm having F like I think those things are so important I think you got to like you got to stay in the game that way and and like you know as you grow in your career as a marketing leader so of the job becomes like management of people and (10:02) not what brought you into the job at the first place which is like no I like telling the story I want to make something and so it's cool to hear you hear you say that I love that I'd love to see um what you like what you're doing with the website using AI in the video yeah it's just so hard to uh just so hard to keep up with all the changes and updates and Ai and it's too much it gives me anxiety uh like I I go to I follow this one person there's there's this one resource that I follow on um on LinkedIn and uh this person is amazing (10:32) at like sharing what's happening in AI but every freaking week man it's like boom Google Gemini release this new update and you need to study it now because it's gonna blow your mind I'm like okay all right and then I you know spend a whole day reading that and then like the next day it's like no no no Claude you need to use Claude And I'm like okay all right all right here and then it's like chat gbt 7. (10:54) 0 came out and have you and like ah it's insane it's so much I serly don't know how people keep up with it I don't know and then I'll and then I'll like and then I'll like be out on a walk or whatever and I'm like yeah screw all that just trust your gut like you you don't you know make a to-do list of like here's the 15 things like I need to build my AI Avatar I need to do all this stuff all right anyway so so we'll talk about we got a lot to talk about AR so you you build um you you turn so you rebuild the site they're like this site (11:25) is awesome oh my gosh we have better product marketing now do you want to come work here fulltime M that's kind of like what happened and I I said yes but there were some conditions uh in before I signed that offer letter the first one is that I want the SDR team to be under marketing the founder back then didn't know like all these complexity of a revenue alignment account based marketing he's probably like whatever sure more wa was there even a was there even a sales team at that point no so you're like when we have a sales (12:02) team I want them exctly I was the first SDR and the marketer but I I put that in the offer letter because just because we went through a bunch of like account base before how to align sales team and SDR and marketing it was it was a nightmare the team was great it's just really hard to align and I went through that process I'm like you know what this is not how I wanted to run the business so I put that in there and yeah that was easy because there was no okay and what was the so you you you know you you decideed to join the (12:34) company your head of marketing first business person at the company what what did you what do you do where do you where do you start what or what did you do at the time well I happened to my major so product marketing so trying to kind of figure out like the positioning and messaging winter didn't exist back in the day so I just kind of use my own gut feeling being one of their customers and talk to other customers so that's one thing and then the next thing was trying inbound a little bit and I'm I'm going to be 100% um honest I think I told Mark (13:08) Hubert too inbound is not my strength at all I'm like an outbound marketer I don't know what that means but that's that's kind of like how I was so we tried to build inbound trying to replicate HubSpot Playbook um didn't seem to work or at least didn't work as quickly as I wanted to and I didn't have patience and then when you say replicate the HubSpot I'm assuming you mean like creating a Blog creating content SEO yeah yeah interesting okay hold on we got to unpack some of this stuff so I think what um your skill set is like that this (13:38) is the first you know people I get messages from Founders or whatever and they're like you know who should my first marketing hire be I almost always feel like and and look this is marketing advice right there's so much Nuance it's tough to say right however for most companies product marketing is kind of where you got to start right because the the and like the more that my career is going on 15 years and doing B2B marketing right I'm like oh it kind of all the features the tactics the AI this comes and goes the core fundamental (14:09) skills the way to like you know the thing that every company is always going to need is strong point of view positioning messaging product marketing right yeah and it's always one of the last marketing roles that get hired in most startups because it's not measurable it's not like a pipeline it's not like would rate instantly it's very fundamental and people are just impatient so well the so it I think it is it is it is measurable and you know that obviously but it's it's not measurable initially but I do think that it just (14:40) depends on your it depends on your relationship with the founder the CEO whoever because if like the first measure of it is going to be like oh we had no story before we have a story now I feel good about our story I feel good about our deck I feel good about our website okay we're starting to like attract more customers we're starting to convert more people like people don't like it because it's not some you know it's not we spent $10,000 on AdWords and we got this number back but like I do think it's like you move into this house (15:09) and it's very messy and everything is everywhere and like oh you have this amazing interior designer come in and like everything is set up it's like oh we can live here now okay this is we we can work with this on the product marketing side do you have um do you have a school of thought that you like do you have a positioning framework you like like what what was the the process you you went through to kind of like Wrangle product marketing for user gems I think back then it was really straightforward because the product was (15:34) pretty simple um but essentially like who like who who it is for and why they trying to buy your products I think that one is usually pretty easy for most startup because they usually build a product for a specific Persona I think the hard part is especially now in this age is like where do you play and why it's going to be you who win I think that's the part that's really hard to get the right and objective answer because internally everyone think that we're the greatest of course but how do you make sure that what you communicate (16:09) resonates with people who don't know about you yeah I want to read you this question because I got I got this question the other day from um I did a Q&A with a marketing team and they asked me this question and I want to hear your answer to it um how do you best differentiate positioning and messaging in a crowded and competitive market especially with a lot of similar feature offerings so I would say like positioning for me is just simply like who are you for and what do you do so kind of like your frame of reference you (16:34) are asked for I think the messaging is like why someone should care and typically people usually talk about messaging like the benefits benefit one two three I'm thinking of my Google sheet that's a template we use but in this day and especially with AI can replicate almost every tool differentiators are a lot more important so how do you marry your differentiators in a way that people care because everyone like every product will have a tons of different differentiators right but not all of them matter so how do you pick the one (17:07) that matter and that becomes your messaging yeah I feel like I've been in discussions with a product team or sales team and they're like here the seven ways we're different than this other company and it's like yeah but that doesn't stick with somebody it needs to be like one clear thing and then also as a marketer I feel like you don't necessarily own that completely doesn't it have to be a product like isn't it like in the DNA of the company like at a strategy level yeah it's a leadership level it's a leadership level thing (17:35) right so how do you how do how do you come up with that oh my gosh um every marketers like pmm would tell you like this is the hardest thing because not even before you even get to the messaging piece the first one is like who do we sell to like who is our core Persona and almost every company I've been at it's always a debate sometimes it's like a top 10 Persona I'm like oh my God if you sell to all 10 like who do you sell to yeah and it gets it gets worse as the company Grows Right you serve exactly yeah different product lines (18:05) right so you got to Wrangle that first before you get to the messaging so data helps but yeah the reality is a lot of time you just hope that the leadership believes in the data more so than the gut feel or aspirations and do you feel like the like leadership team is like collab like this is a collaborative thing or is like the founder lead this the head of product because it's you think about the the inputs into creating a differentiator it's like who do we sell to what are our what are our competitors doing what are (18:34) the featur you know what features do they have what opportunity like it takes it takes Vision you know it's not like uh you just put it in chat gbt and ask what the differentiator is and get it it takes like it takes vision and belief like hey this is where we're going this is where we see the market and those are the types of Founders that you want to work with as a marketer right yeah it definitely has to come from the founders or at least get the strong support and buy in from the founders and then that everything will Cascade down every now (19:00) and then you'll see that there's a strong head of products that is very Visionary but the founder needs to believe in that as well otherwise it's just it's gonna go everywhere how do marketers how do you push on that uh this comes up a lot in our community it's like yeah we don't have a strong differentiator I I can come up with all the angles in the world but it needs to be a leadership thing how would you like manage up and push the leadership team on like hey you all we don't have a different we don't have a clear (19:28) differentiator how do how do we solve that problem I think the first thing I would ask is if you're already in business assuming with a certain size of Revenue that means you do have some product Market fit that means those buyers see something in you as differentiators so I would truly try to talk to people to really peel the onion to see what are the differentiators that made those buyers picked you over someone else could be price could be anything um it might not be the same list that the internal folks want to (20:02) believe but I think that's the first part and then after that trying to validate it with other prospects close loss close ones that kind of feedback and then bring that data and insight to the leadership because if you start from internally there are a lot of hopes and dreams internally especially in startups so and also we also internally we're the most cynical one we're like yeah we're the same it's just same same but unless you just tinkering like you know at the very very early stage of business if someone's paying for you you (20:35) have something to offer you need to find out what it is yeah so that could even be like you have whether you have five customers or 500 there's got to be some pocket of like who is this for I remember when I was at drift we changed our ICP like you know four or five times in the first year or two because it keeps building on each other it's like oh we have a hypothesis of we think we're going to be for this person oh what interesting like actually we can be for this person maybe not four or five times probably two two or three times (21:03) but you can keep building and making this more repeatable and I think you you eventually learn oh actually we're we started out selling to product marketers but we are really for demand gen teams actually know it's a layer deeper than that it's not demand gen teams it's inside sales teams and the marketer buys it to support the inside sales team so the ICP is inside sales okay and then everyone gets rallied around that right that's so cool I didn't know the how the sausage was made and drift I was we were customers (21:32) um I went to one of the hyper growth conferences and now which one did you go oh man they W in 2019 in San Francisco and I was I was blown away of how laser focused in terms of the product messaging everything that drift was is it's very clear to me as a marketer that this product was built for me in my inside which is not the case with a lot of jackbots back in the day no well that was I mean that was a key part of the differentiation which was like okay look everybody chat existed everybody knew knew that chat existed and so we (22:05) couldn't come out and say like no no no we're we're a different type of chat we're better chat it was like No And the opportunity that they found in the market was like yes everybody's used chat we basically it's a cool exercise in positioning because I think one of the strongest things you can do as a marketer is it's not it's not necessarily about how you position your company but what we did is we repositioned the competition in the minds of the people we were selling to it's like oh intercom oh yeah there (22:30) because every's like how are you different than intercom we're like intercom intercom is great that product is great but it's great if you're using inapp messaging and and and like all their content was for like product managers and about growth and so we like we exploited that by being like Oh you know they're really building for product managers and so it's great for inapp messaging and surveys what we're doing is built for you like the demand gen marketer who has the pipeline number on their back and they're like you know (22:54) people need a story people want a story and so when you can say I'm building this specifically for you that's you get a couple hundred people at a hypergrowth and saying like oh yeah cool I mean it's What attracted me to HubSpot as a 25-year-old marketing manager who had to build a marketing plan for the first time and I'm like you know addicted to all of their content to help me do my job it's the same thing and so I think that was one of the things that we we leaned into and on the positioning side of things the positioning at the company (23:19) that it was so easy because we had this vision of conversational marketing basically everything in the product road map like fit perfectly under that umbrella and so first it was chat and then we acquired this email company and it was like at most other companies you'd be like how are we going to position this email company it was like we knew how we're going to position the email company because David and Alias the founders like were expanding the vision of conversational marketing and so we're saying like email should be a (23:45) two-way channel to communicate so it's conversational email oh that's genius and then it was like we acquired this like video tool okay it's conversational video and so I think it just speaks it goes back to the the reason it the the positioning works so well is because at the road map and strategy level like I knew as a marketer it was super fun because maybe that product didn't exist yet the road map didn't exist yet but if you ask me hey where do you think your product is going in two to three years I could I could tell you that vision and I (24:11) think the marketer the marketing teams who struggle with positioning and I've I've consulted with some of them I've worked with some of them one-on-one it's like when there is no vision it's very hard to to do good positioning and and to and to do good product marketing because I don't know what's I don't know what's going to happen Beyond like where the product is is today right but did did the Vision changed since you joined drift initially because you you said that the product changed in terms of persona right so the vision also changed (24:35) it's more like the company align on one Persona use case yeah but I joined like they were selling it but I joined very early I joined very early almost at like the stage when you join user user gems where it's like first marketing person they're selling it it's kind of it's not there yet and it was basically a year or two of like they were selling this chat product but we didn't call it conversational marketing yet you know it wasn't even until like maybe a couple million dollars in Revenue that it was like oh this is what it like this is the (25:04) repeatability thing and so I think there was a lot of flexibility like we knew it was going to be a messaging product in chat and probably in the sales and marketing space but it wasn't perfectly refined until a year you know a year or two even um if you look at if you go back and there was like a series B press release I know because I wrote it we called it conversation driven Marketing in that press release we didn't call it conversation conversational marketing it because we needed we were doing doing this for a year or two and then like one (25:31) time a customer in an email said to us like oh man this this conversational way of doing marketing has really Chang and we were like oh that's it and so there's this element of like the product marker in you wants it to be perfect and wants the position to be like nailed but there is some like you just kind of have to you can't obsess over the name so much you can't obsess over the the what you call it so much you you just need to keep going and collect more feedback you know I also joined the company early (25:55) when it was kind of basically still pre-product and so there was a lot of exploration and I think that's that's an important time to to gather all that learning in in the the phases of a startup you know yeah no I think drip is definitely one of the best examples when you have alignment in terms of vision Focus Persona how fast and how clear the messaging everything which just Cascades down the pipeline everything they also had uh the founders had Vision right like you know they could have told you like what what do (26:24) you think the product's going to be in 10 years from now they could have told you what they thought it was going to be and that's the fun thing that's fun from a marketing standpoint and I know there's going to be many people listening to this who are like working at a company where like the pro they can't even get the product the head of product to even tell them the road map like I saw a question in our in our we have this like CMO Community called CMO club and one of the the cosmos in there wrote like how do you get the product (26:48) team to share the road map and I was like I can't even I can't even relate to that because I've just worked at a company where like the head of product wanted me in those conversations he's like oh he would literally come to my desk be like dude we had this amazing meeting are you free right now and I'm like yeah he's come here come here come here we had this amazing level of like creativity and collaboration and he wanted to partner where there's other companies and they don't even like you know they share they don't share (27:10) anything with marketing they don't want to be involved in marketing and that was I don't think this is I wrote about this recently but like you know all the content on LinkedIn and stuff is about like sales and marketing alignment I don't think there's enough about sales and product alignment and how how how important that is to the success of of being a marketer yeah no absolutely I'm trying to like reflecting on our own Journey as well like I think like for us like we work really closely with the product team because we are their (27:38) biggest customers because we use our own product a lot I think the challenge with our team is that we move the product team moves really quickly so it's a good it's it's a great thing um but like for example you look at the product road map I want to put in the slide right I want to see like four quarters ahead they're like no no no things going to change really quickly I'm going to give you one quarter which I get it but I'm like dang it yeah yeah I got you I got you that that part is tough you're like trying to (28:05) plan this thing you're doing next year yeah yeah exactly all the Cadence for the launch how did we sing the two Team all that stuff but anyway what's the okay so you got 11 you're in the teens of millions you got uh 11 people on the marketing team you said you're not an inbound lady so outbound is your thing let's talk about the um what what is the mix like what is your 11 person marketing team like what is what is working for how does user gems do marketing that's my question yeah so um on the marketing side we have like you (28:36) know typical demand product um content social and um we have events we have a fral event person to help us with that um and then the rest is the ADR team so we have I think four ADR and one director roughly around that um so the way we do um we build program is this is really weird we like the opposite of almost every startup in terms of like how we build our pipeline so I guess from the budget I usually allocate between 80 to 90% on the pipeline activities of campaigns programs and then 10 to 20% on brand depending on the season and the (29:14) year what's going on and just to pause in that because it comes up a lot when when you say brand like what's in that bucket t-shirts did you say t-shirts I think it's just like different Investments on like the creative side uh things that we know we can't measure um yeah a lot of things that we don't really put like an Roi on top of it yeah that seems to be like a common Trend when I talk to CMOS it's it's a it's basically that 80 90% is the like true demand gen pipeline generating like we need to measure the dollars in (29:46) dollars out of this and then there's maybe 10 to 20% that is hey we want to start a podcast awesome I believe in that I don't think we should measure that as sales and so that's like we can spend five grand a month on that and that's going to be in this brand bucket yeah I wonder if that changes if you talk to CMOS in like 100 plus million they are because I I hear that at that range a lot of their focus is on Brands and Communications and PR right it must you ever get off the airplane in Miami and the whole airport is like Cisco (30:17) Billboards and none of them even have like the website URL on it you know how do you measure that I don't know this is why I'm like a media I've run a podcast for a living I'm not like a you know enterpr CMO but how do you even know how to spend that like I don't know so yeah I don't know brand sentiment survey somehow um somehow do a survey that's right yeah but on the pipeline on the pipeline side so we built it um basically the the main program for us is account base which is crazy because most people kind of like different right like (30:48) paid acquisition we actually start out with account base is the core outbound so we pick accounts that we know or think would be good fits to go after them okay so your marketing Mo motion is driven off of accounts accounts yeah yeah and how many how many how many are there what's the universe of accounts the universe with for ICP is probably around 15,000 yeah um and yeah and then we just kind of like Pick 5 600 per quarter to go after using all kinds of signals to Bubble them up U reaching out so that's kind of like demand and adrs (31:22) work together and then on top of that those are different programs like close loss nurtures etc etc I believe all the brand stuff and inbound stuff but I do think I I think there's a lot of one Challen I I I just I think this is such a it's not it's not for everybody and what what's like the ASP of user gems like what is a customer roughly around like high 20 30 30 you're not selling like you know a $29 a month like no subscription right so it's so it's different I think that world is more high volume inbound right but in this (31:54) world like I do think a lot of the the the kind of BS and the non sense that we fight with sales and sales and marketing alignment and and how do you measure marketing like it's usually not an issue at companies that are account-based and driven by accounts because alignment you know you're you're hey these are the 500 accounts we're trying to sell to this quarter let's we're going to measure our success by like penetration among those accounts yes right we're not like oh we wrote this blog post and you know 15 (32:19) people put their emails in on it it's measuring it's it's a much more tangible way to measure like the alignment of sales and marketing we're working together to get into these accounts no one's arguing over credit did marketing do this or not it's like oh did did we get a meeting at one of those accounts then like everyone high fives right yeah 100% I don't know why well I can I don't know why not as many companies just adopt this when I understand that there's Legacy systems incentives that kind of structure no way that didn't (32:46) encourage this but it's a company buying the product it's the company's name on a docu sign why are you fighting just we fight because of internal metrics it's like I don't get I don't get my performance bonus if you know 6,000 people didn't read our blog or something like that exactly yeah okay so you got 15 thou you know you got however 15,000 accounts you focus on 500 to 600 of them a quarter what are the tactics of like actually going out and and executing that you know there is Acme Corp and they are on your account list everyone's (33:16) always like so what what you know what do you do do you just start calling them you start emailing them like how do you how do you do that I I want to maybe maybe we can just use like a madeup account as an example but take us into like what how do you do that yeah so so so kind of like the whole work stream right the first step is like how do we pick which accounts will go after when so we use all kinds of signals to Bubble Up like do they have any like past champions just join any new hires are they fun just raise funding are they (33:41) hiring da D basically all of that right we give those scores so in the Salesforce report we rank all ICP accounts based on the total scores the fits and the signals and then we just the ABM team would just grab the first 500 every quarter and then they would start focusing on the creative so we do one to one abms a lot so like all these accounts will have their own set of campaigns that they going to be served when when you is the creative like you think of a a hook that would apply to everyone like what's the campaign we're (34:12) running for user gems this quarter is it like account specific um it's account specific oh it's a mix so each campaign we have multiple creatives right so we have like some mix of like highly personalized to that account and some is kind of like one too many messaging but with their logo for example so that's on the the marketing side and then while the marketing team's creating all those creatives the ADR St preparing for the Outreach so in the past um like every Friday the ADR teams will have like a prospecting hours that they would kind (34:44) of go down their list of accounts and then select prospects and because they know how the marketing team picks these accounts based on signals they look for those signals in Salesforce basically grab all the people the most likely to buy da da da da and them into Outreach so since September last year we use our own AI to automatically grab all these people put them into sequences and write emails for the Reps as well and that's it that's it that's it and then we start tracking every quarter do they convert do they not what's going on how the span (35:15) going and are there sorry and what are the what are the channels like so so so email so you're sending outbound email email calls LinkedIn um digital um it's all one it's all one to one so like I'm at you know if exit 5 was on your target list of accounts I'm going to go to LinkedIn and I'm going to see a ad creative for my company yeah it was say like hey exit 5 yeah what what tool are you using for that creative H Blood Sweat and Tears just canva and campaign making 500 versions of that creative oh yeah with humans humans are (35:50) great yeah no we we've run this for almost six years um ABM was the first program that we we started like generating pipeline way back when so we have a very well oiled machine it's just assembly line and then you templa tize it and then things just yeah is the company still a bootstrap did you ra they ra no we raised we did raise in 21 yeah yeah series a but it doesn't seem like there's crazy like uh crazy high Venture back go like it doesn't seem like you're on this you know you've been there for five for five years company's (36:25) growing nicely it doesn't seem like you have these crazy growth goals that make marketing like unattainable I think or maybe maybe you do says the person who's not CMO at the company I'm like oh look at all these like gray hair um no I think when the I think our leadership team in the board pretty reasonable when the market was unpredictable in the last couple of years but before that we were tracking along with with the the typical you know triple triple double double all that fun stuff but I think the team like (37:00) yeah the leadership team is pretty seasoned and you know and so so that so so the campaign you described to me is that the main is that like your main motion and then are you doing other stuff to that one is now just one of the many um it was the main motion for a long time and now we have like the usual like paid acquisition throughout the buyer Journey nurturing retargeting all that stuff we retarget people during sales process too so when they talk to AES we also like help the multi threaten other people and then we apply all of those (37:37) campaigns that we do on the pre-sales also to post sales what about as far as like showing um the the product experience right so you kind of the main the the main thing you're trying to drive people to is to request a demo or book a demo right that's majority of our ctas but I don't want to talk to sales I want to see I want to see the product I want to have a free trial yeah um the hard thing for us so like to see the product is something we're working on I think for so long um user gems product is kind of (38:08) like set it and forget it we wanted to make it so seamless so there wasn't much to show because it's just you know workflows data I think that that's already changed so we working on something that to show so people can kind of like experience it uh especially with the AI aspect but on the second part is like the free trial this one's a little bit tricky because we we did test with this over five years like when we give people trials it's a little bit hard because then your sales cycle becomes really long because people (38:37) waiting to see how they their own trial turned out in terms of Pipeline and we couldn't influence it and when it's free people actually don't pay attention to it as much and put as much resources because for user gems to work you need to connect to your CRM so it's like a jet fuel for your pipeline you need the data there's no way to like show that without yeah okay you wrote just before this you actually wrote we hit our Q4 targets my proud my proudest metric is this one pipeline grew 26% while our spend decreased 27% we effectively (39:09) doubled our outbound capacity this time last year I was one of the biggest naysayers when it came to AI for outbound doesn't seem like that's true anymore uh let's talk about AI let's talk about how you decrease the spend and let's just talk about where does AI fit in your you know toolbox as a marketer and how has it helped you specifically with outbound yeah this one's for outbound specifically um obviously the target always increase so like the pipeline growing that's given um the spend there are two aspect of the (39:39) spend one is the like the program spend and second one is just like the headcount capacities right the program spend one thing is because we want to make sure that the company can grow efficiently and have a healthy run Runway another thing is because I'm a crazy boss so our team is extremely strong in page too strong that like our ads are like really catchy people love it but we too good at it it's really hard to win the team off of it but I want the team to figure out other programs and channels so at one we're (40:14) trying to do that for a long time couldn't do it because it's it's so addictive to get the paid performance so one point I'm like okay we're going to cut this this is the max we're going to spend un paid figured out how to hit the number so that's that's part of it the second part is the constraints it's not you're laughing about it but like constraints and guardrails make a big difference right it was very stressful for all of us all of us but um but yeah I think you gota you gotta kind of like win yourself off of it um second piece (40:43) on the ADR capacity piece so we uh coincidentally half of or many of our adrs um happen to have babies during September October November so naturally the capacity was Slash in half um and then this was when we uh rolling out our own AI agent I I told the team I don't I don't want to Market something until I'm like convinced I need to see that it works for us so you can kind of like see all the stars align in hindsight so we Ed the AI to augment the capacity of ADR that we didn't have and everything just worked out as if we planed but it was (41:22) very no wracking to kind of like see would it get there so yeah so that's how we got to the the Q4 result okay so it's a little bit of a forcing function which is great I mean that that's how this stuff happens but it also is like a good lesson of like if you want to make a change in your team you had a natural one but sometimes can you just force you know hear the guardrails go go figure it out go make it happen and we uncover some like non-paid channels that it took me a very long time to look at you look (41:51) at you doing inbound stuff it's not just outbound right God so what are you excited about in in marketing right now for you know for the company for the team gosh um everyone's like of course you're going to say this is AI but now I'm a Believer because I'm like he it it does work like as long as you kind of like think about it through uh fundamentales and then set the guard rails and try to do it so I'm really really excited about this because I also we just did our planning for this year and then the pay team is like yay we hit (42:23) our goal here's a new goal like can we increase our spend I'm like how about now figure out how we can do it together with the increasing spend first and this is this whole thing breaks and then we put money in it so I'm really excited to try use AI to grow the team um capacity and then another thing is like how to bring AI into the workflows of the rest of the marketing team and the rest of the company not as in like we have an AI project but more like think about like the daily workflow how do we weave it in (42:51) naturally and I think the outbound side's getting there but the rest of the company is not quite yet it's still kind of like a ad hoc one off yeah I think there's a lot of there's going to be a lot of learning it's like um it's like being like I I keep going back to like it's like marketers discovering the internet we got to figure out how to use it and how to use it in the right way and how to use it in a way that like if everyone's doing it if everyone's doing the same thing well what's going to be the opportunity so if everyone's (43:16) blasting people with the same AI outbound messages then of course it's not going to work and so what is the opportunity to make it yours and that is like the creative exercise as a marketer exactly I feel like it's very easy for people to see kind of like one step ahead kind of like oh everyone's going to do the same thing but then how about we push oursel to think about like two three steps ahead of that like how that's always been true though like it's like everybody oh start a podcast everybody's got a podcast start an email (43:42) start doing an email everyone's doing email start going events everyone's doing events it's it's everyone's always going to copy what everybody else is already doing so it's like how do you innovate within that opportunity exactly um but yeah so I'm really excited about that um was funny you mentioned that same thing with webinars I'm trying to convince the teams are like webinars I know it's not sexy but it's just a medium they're like okay Boomer no no one buys anything from webinars or emails I'm like it just a we (44:13) only have limited channels to reach somebody okay I'll talk to them but give me I'm a I guess I'm a boomer too I'm 37 that would make me a boomer in this generation of how the people we work with but a webinar how is a webinar different than then you watch YouTube right you watch Tik Tok it's it's a information Source right and like you know you're selling a product right so so your user Gem's customers is like what's your who's your ideal customer demand gen yeah yeah uh demand gen sales leaders as well okay so so you're you're (44:45) Focus On Demand gen and sales leaders who want to grow Pipeline and increase sales inside their company the best opportunity for user gems is to be positioned as like an expert in helping you do that and we're going to do an hour session on helping you how to helping you do that and so maybe 100 people will show up live and that's great maybe 500 people will watch the replay and get it recorded later it's also like a trojan horse for creating content not you know not to help you pitch the webinar to your team but I (45:11) just I'm using this on this podcast as an example to just show like how it's all these tactics and techniques can be timeless when you zoom all the way out and think about well are we caught up on the term webinar are we thinking about what the delivery actually is right yeah exactly I should have talked to you like a year ago the team's now bought in because by chance I figured out how to call webinars called a show so like like an Isaac show an ABM Master Class show then like oh Show's cool it's still webinar it's still wear we call them we (45:41) do them we do them once a month for exit 5 and we just call them live sessions and and I make a joke and I'm like it's a webinar you can call it a webinar but they're but they're good also think there's huge value in doing these shows you know shows webinars live sessions beyond the direct sales Roi because even just like been taking notes this whole time in this podcast right anytime you do something like this it's like having a sales meeting it's like having a pitch right you're refining your story and so (46:06) like even if people don't buy user gems because of the webinar what if your pits just got like 10% better or like you found something that you said on this webinar that was like you know chat like lit up when you said that it's like oh that's a signal that we can use it's like a standup comedian like testing their material in a way and I think that's such a valuable piece of marketing I love that I'm going to use the analogy of stand of comedian I think that will land very well you got right I mean think about (46:34) like when you join user gems right you're the first person you're doing product marketing you're just testing the messaging right and so like you know right now you have this thing on your site outbound AI that converts without cringe on January 15th great maybe that helps you accelerate deals maybe that helps you you know bring in new people maybe you just learn that like this topic crushes it and now we have a whole new set of creative and stuff we can be doing around this like outbound that isn't cringe concept there's there's a (46:58) lot there anyway Trinity it was great to hang out with you um good to see you good to have you on the podcast I hope uh maybe we can get you to one of our events or I don't know we can if you know if you maybe we should we need we need a I know you're tired of Miami but we need a Miami event oh my gosh if you come to Miami that would be awesome let me know I'll help you Source locations you know Jane Sarah from dextra women uh no oh okay she's also here as well so we will help you put the an event together yeah this awesome group of Cosmos down (47:29) in Miami all right Trinity great to see you go check out user Dems go follow Trinity on uh LinkedIn that's my favorite is you know you've never been on the podcast before my favorite thing is like after we put your episode out and three weeks later you send me an email and you're like I didn't know you had so much reach I got 15 messages from people on LinkedIn so that's what I want maybe you go work with her maybe you could go buy user gems just hang out just that's the best type of feedback so go find Trinity on on LinkedIn and and (47:54) follow her okay all right see you later thanks so much day [Music]