The Insider's Guide to Getting More Leads - This Quarter with Twilio
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Join Tricia Miller, Sr. Director of EMEA Marketing at Twilio, and peek into an insider's guide to getting more leads. During her tenure in marketing, she has worked with a wide range of companies from early-stage startups to multi-billion dollar corporations. In this session she will discuss how to create highly targeted marketing programs reaching senior decision makers within the tech industry, to create and execute integrated demand creation strategies - to maximize your leads.
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The Insider's Guide to Getting More Leads - This Quarter with Twilio
- 1. The Insider’s Guide to Getting More Leads… This Quarter. Tricia Miller EMEA Marketing, Twilio
- 2. Why me? Tricia Miller EMEA Marketing @bluebird_mktg
- 3. A quick word about Twilio
- 4. ‘I need more leads’ Start-up Founder
- 5. Your to-do list for the Quarter TUNE THE ENGINE (AKA THE FUNNEL) THEN ADD THE RIGHT FUEL AND PLAN THE ONWARD JOURNEY
- 6. Fix the engine before you add more fuel
- 7. Be careful what you optimise for AWARENESS EVALUATION SUBSCRIPTION
- 8. What do paying customers look like? PAYING CUSTOMERS
- 9. What do AHA! Moments look like? • API Calls • Uploaded marketing contacts • API Calls • $5 spent
- 10. In SaaS, the product is the funnel • Where are you losing people in the process? • What is customer success or onboarding team telling you? • What changes could you make to the UX? AWARENESS EVALUATION SUBSCRIPTION ?
- 11. Adding the fuel
- 12. Website visitors AWARENESS PAID CHEAP/FREE PR/Announcements Employee Advocacy • Product launches • Partnerships • Customer stories • Thought Leadership Content
- 13. Tuning and fueling – our story 2017: • Flat organic growth YoY • Hiring 100 reps • No incremental marketing staff or 83% WEB TRAFFIC in Q3 ‘18
- 14. The optimisation doesn’t end here • Programmatically “farm” the user base • Email customers or alert sales reps when we notice successful triggers • Build a hypothesis, test, refine • Automate OPTIMISATION PROJECT FARMVILLE • Performance of page • Form / captcha • User feedback • Onboarding benchmarks • Tracking developer sentiment / NPS
- 15. Don’t assume interest means revenue • Nurtures • Content and messaging • But we don’t have any content… AWARENESS EVALUATION CONVERSION
- 16. Line up your conversion content
- 17. Case study: Pantheon • Repurpose case studies into a best practices guide • 8 Amazing Drupal Launches eBook
- 18. Case study: Linkedin • Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to Generating Leads on Linkedin • Launched in Jan 2014 – first edition had an ROI of over 18k%! • To date, over 1Million downloads!
- 19. Case study: Five9 • Create a short survey • Send to your opt-in DB • Analyse the data • Write and design a report • Promote it on the blog, via webinar, email marketing, online ads, etc.
- 20. Hire a qualified driver
- 21. Hiring your first Marketer • SKILLS • Marketing Strategy • Demand Generation • Marketing Operations • Growth Marketing • Search Engine Optimisation • Search Engine Marketing • Digital Advertising • Content Marketing • Acquisition Marketing • Website Analytics • Business Intelligence • IDEALLY PAIRED WITH • A Product Manager • Developer
- 23. The Martech Stack ATTRACT ENGAGE OPTIMISE ANALYSE
- 24. 5 Myths about SaaS marketing • All we need is more leads. • An innovative product will sell itself. • We have no content to promote. • I don’t need to pay to promote our content. • We don’t need a marketer - we have engineers who can do it.
- 25. 3 Takeaways TUNE THE ENGINE (AKA THE FUNNEL) THEN ADD THE RIGHT FUEL AND PLAN THE ONWARD JOURNEY
- 27. Thank You! Tricia Miller EMEA Marketing – Twilio
Editor's Notes
- Start-up businesses need growth And growth requires leads Which is where marketing comes in… and why so many of you are here, listening to a session from a marketer The simple need that you have is for more leads – and I will show you how to get those leads, and get them this Quarter. But I’m not just going to talk to you about increasing the flow of leads into your business. I’m also going to talk to you about how to ensure those leads deliver what your business really, ultimately needs. And that process starts before you invest in driving the leads themselves. That adds up to more to do this Quarter – but it will ensures that the leads you generate are actually delivering the value that you expect them to
- So why am I the person to help you get more leads? Well to put it simply, I’ve spent the last two decades thinking about how to generate the leads to drive hyper growth for SaaS businesses. 20 years ago almost to the day, I started a love affair with high growth tech companies. After stints at Sun and Oracle, I became the first marketer in Europe at Exodus Communications. It was 1999, the height of the dot com boom, and Exodus was the darling of the NASDAQ. I was responsible for driving the leads and pipeline to fuel growth. At 25, I was even relocated to Sydney to replicate the model we had built in Europe. But of course, the story isn’t that simple. For a start, there was a dotcom bust, then 9/11. I survived five rounds of layoffs by the time I finally left Exodus in November 2001 – and ever since, I’ve been earning the battle scars that only come from working for some of the fastest growing SaaS companies on the planet – the ones on this slide. As Loki said to Thanos at the start of Avengers Infinity War, I consider experience experience. In my case, living and breathing SaaS start-ups has made me an expert in demand generation, marketing operations and what eventually came to be known as Growth Marketing – and it’s helped me to form a clear idea of what these concepts actually mean for businesses like yours. How do I generate more leads this quarter? It’s a question that’s come up time and again during these two decades. Here’s how I answer it…
- Communications Platform as a Service Founded in 2008 We enable communications via voice, sms, video, chat and now email with the recent acquisition of SendGrid We have over 2M developers on our platform across the globe and will do close to $1B in revenue this year
- About 5 years ago, I got an email from a startup founder who I’d been referred to by a big Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm. He said, I need more leads, can you help? So I went to their office in downtown San Francisco to meet with the team and said, give me access. To Google Analytics, your marketing automation, salesforce, product data, all of it. As I pored over their reports and systems I was able to build a picture of the health of the business and what I learned was that he didn’t need more leads. What he needed was a far better system for capturing and converting the leads he was already driving. Website visitors weren’t converting because the call to action wasn’t clear and prominent Those who did sign-up weren’t converting to paid because their nurtures didn’t communicate the business value of the solution And finally, it was taking more than 48 hours for sales reps to follow up with those leads that did want to convert – which meant that the moment of opportunity often passed. He didn’t need more mice. He needed a better mouse trap.
- That start-up founder wasn’t alone. No business just wants more leads. What they need is more leads converting into paying customers and revenue – the more efficiently the better And so your to-do list for this quarter isn’t just: Get more leads It’s actually got three things on it: First, you need to check and TUNE the engine that takes leads and converts them into revenue (traditionally known as the funnel) Then you can add the fuel that fits that engine – the marketing activity that will get the right leads flowing faster But you also have to make sure this whole engine has somewhere to go. You need to line up your resources that will support the onward journey, and make sure that you get the end result you really need – paying customers The good news? The right approach to getting more leads this quarter will help you deliver all three of these things
- First things first: make sure your lead generation engine is working before you start fueling it
- People used to measure marketing on MQLs. So what did marketing do? Ran a bunch of webinars and went to big expensive trade shows because it was easy to generate a lot of MQLs…that didn’t always translate to pipeline or closed won deals So before you start spending money to fuel your growth engine, you have to make sure it’s optimized around the right type of leads – the type that will convert into revenue. Otherwise, you’ll run out of money and won’t be able to raise more
- More leads doesn’t necessarily mean more deals Effective lead generation means finding out what kind of leads are best for your business – then going out and finding them And you have plenty of information already available to help you do this. Do you have paid customers? What do they have in common? Which industries? What sized companies? Which people within those companies first made contact with you? What are the triggers for people to get in touch with you? Funding, New hires, eg. CFO Acquisition Regulations / Compliance issues
- But it’s not just the right type of leads that you want to optimise your lead generation engine around… it’s also the right type of experience for those leads. Look at who converts into paying customers – and satisfied customers. Then look for similar patterns in their onboarding and user experience SendGrid calls those Aha moments; we call that the Twilio magic. So for both Twilio SendGrid and Twilio we had identified patterns in our onboarding that dramatically increased the likelihood that someone would become a paying customer. For SendGrid it was based around the number of API calls, as well as the number of marketing contacts uploaded. So they optimized the onboarding process to reduce the friction and increase the likelihood of those milestones being reached. At Twilio, not surprisingly, we also have an API call metric, as well as a $5 spend threshold. Those 2 metrics together help to quantify the likelihood of an account becoming a paying customer. What are the aha moments in your business? Figure that out and optimize your whole onboarding process to make that as frictionless as possible. You want to facilitate people achieving those milestones rather than leaving it to chance.
- This matters because, for SaaS businesses, the lead generation and onboarding experience IS the product This isn’t like the old days, working at Oracle, when you signed up a lead at a trade show – and then months of contracts and implementation later, they finally got to experience your product Prospects are experiencing your product throughout the funnel – and therefore it’s important to understand where the leaks, disconnects and causes of friction in the process are. Where is the friction in your sign-up process? Can you remove fields from the form? Is the page loading fast enough? Is your messaging clear? Is the CTA clear?
- Once you’ve checked and optimized your engine, you can start adding the fuel – confident in the results you’re going to get at the end of it.
- When it comes to driving qualified traffic to your site, AdWords is still the fastest way to get results. Not only are you targeting people who show a specific interest in what you’re selling, AdWords acts as a first point of contact for lead nurturing tactics like remarketing, email marketing and conversion optimization. Want to target a specific title/skillset? Linkedin might be your platform – lots of products there like sponsored content, display ads, inmail, etc. Don’t forget about other paid social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Twilio has been surprised at how efficient facebook has been for driving sign-ups. On the free/cheap side… Do you have a few new features you can group together into a new ‘product’? Example: Zuora’s Z-Commerce for Media (August 2009) at DEMO A high profile customer who will do a win release? A partnership with another vendor? Finally, a piece or research, a commissioned analyst report, contributed article Wrap a whole launch program around it Press release with customer reference Webinar Email blast to your base Event Example - Zuora for Media FINALLY, don’t forget employee advocacy. Research shows that your employees’ combined reach on Linkedin is at least 10x that of your company page. So make sure your employees are sharing your content. There are a lot of tools out there like GaggleAmp or VoiceStorm which can enable you to automate the process.
- Here’s what happened when we optimized our engine – and then fueled it In January of 2017 George Hu joined Twilio as COO. After 8 years of growth with a self-serve developer focused go to market strategy, here comes George from Salesforce where he spent 13 years. Let me tell you, no one knows more about building sucssessful SaaS businesses than that go, ok maybe Jason Lemkin. ;-) And the first thing he says is – there is an amazing market opportunity in front of us. We need to hire 100 sales reps this year. Oh and we’re not increasing marketing headcount and you’re not really getting more budget. Now in the meantime, organic website traffic had been flat year over year. So our CMO Sara Varni joined in January 2018. Also from salesforce. So we form this growth marketing team. Marketers, Engineers, Business Intelligence folks, and we’re going to solve this problem and grow the signups. So what the team achieved in 2018 was amazing. OK so by Q3 website traffic was up a massive 83% year of year Organic traffic was up 36% thanks to a massive investment in SEO. Ok that won’t help you this quarter but you should be doing this. Q3 momentum is stemming mostly from Whatsapp (Product Announcement), UX improvements, and paid ads: - 1,700 signups were attributable to interest in Whatsapp landing pages - 1,800 signups came from a faster signup service. By moving PHP code to Scala, we slashed response times from 6.3 to 1.5 seconds. - 8,143 signups came from pay-per-click sources (mostly Google SEM) - 6,907 signups came from our increasing use of paid social, mostly Facebook. State of the User Report Combing through thousands of responses from new signups, a member of the growth marketing team released our first State of the User report. It shows us where to add "cowbell" first. While we are alarmed that this group show NPS of 14, we know which segments are frustrated and why. If we tackle the top 2 problems in the report, we should be able to double signup NPS this year. Crushing Captcha For years, users have been frustrated with Twilio's use of Google recaptcha. Starting in March, we began testing a lightweight alternative from Arkose Labs. Implemented by Shanan, Lupita and Nick Funnell, the new version is easier on humans and tough on bots. And unlike Google's version, this one works in China. We're testing it on the signup page; if the experiment goes well, we'll hand it to Identity for use at login. New Lifecycle Model We took some time in Q3 to define a simple model of the developer's journey. We now use these 4 stages to track the velocity of each cohort: You can see how developers are progressing through this in Priya's weekly lifecycle metrics. Onboarding Benchmarked at 12.7% For now, we're using PA10 as our proxy for successful onboarding. 12.7% of Q3's cohorts reached this milestone. This is our biggest area for improvement, as we want success for all signups who are developers. This quarter, Ari, Nick V, Nick F, and Lupita are building a wizard that asks each user about their objectives and how they want to build. It then guides each user to the best resources for getting started (e.g. an SMS Quickstart in Python). Developer Sentiment up 3% Signup CSAT increased for developers over Q2, from 7.0 to 7.2. For non-developers, we still get terrible scores. We will use our wizard to steer these folks to help. We're adding a widget in console for ongoing product feedback. Should be live this week. We're sending emails now for our semi-annual NPS survey. Results expected in December. Traffic up 83% Q3 web traffic grew 83% YoY, driven by unprecedented investment in digital ads and out-of-home billboards in 6 cities. (Thanks Sean, In-Young, the whole brand team, and Troy.) The brightest star has been organic traffic, where SEO investment continues to pay off. Q3 organic traffic was up 36%---remember when it was flat last year? Troy, Pranav, Ari, and Paul Kamp have boosted Google rank on 8 of 11 target keywords, and we now rank #1 for "Voice API". We also achieved page 1 rank for 3 new keywords: cloud call center, cloud contact center, and whatsapp api. The latter brought us 550 extra signups last month alone. Q3 momentum is stemming mostly from Whatsapp (Product Announcement), UX improvements, and paid ads: - 1,700 signups were attributable to interest in Whatsapp landing pages - 1,800 signups came from a faster signup service. By moving PHP code to Scala, we slashed response times from 6.3 to 1.5 seconds. Amazing result from Nick F, Lupita, and Roger. - 8,143 signups came from pay-per-click sources (mostly Google SEM) - 6,907 signups came from our increasing use of paid social, mostly Facebook. Great collaboration here between Troy and DevNet, especially Brent. 300 signups came from removing captcha from the signup form. As long as we don't see fake accounts creeping up, we'll keep this and expect 1,200 extra signups in Q4. State of the User Report Combing through thousands of responses from new signups, Priya released our first State of the User report. It shows us where to add "cowbell" first. While we are alarmed that this group show NPS of 14, we know which segments are frustrated and why. If we tackle the top 2 problems in the report, we should be able to double signup NPS this year. Crushing Captcha For years, users have been frustrated with Twilio's use of Google recaptcha. Starting in March, we began testing a lightweight alternative from Arkose Labs. Implemented by Shanan, Lupita and Nick Funnell, the new version is easier on humans and tough on bots. And unlike Google's version, this one works in China. We're testing it on the signup page; if the experiment goes well, we'll hand it to Identity for use at login. New Lifecycle Model We took some time in Q3 to define a simple model of the developer's journey. We now use these 4 stages to track the velocity of each cohort: You can see how developers are progressing through this in Priya's weekly lifecycle metrics. Onboarding Benchmarked at 12.7% For now, we're using PA10 as our proxy for successful onboarding. 12.7% of Q3's cohorts reached this milestone. This is our biggest area for improvement, as we want success for all signups who are developers. This quarter, Ari, Nick V, Nick F, and Lupita are building a wizard that asks each user about their objectives and how they want to build. It then guides each user to the best resources for getting started (e.g. an SMS Quickstart in Python). Developer Sentiment up 3% Signup CSAT increased for developers over Q2, from 7.0 to 7.2. For non-developers, we still get terrible scores. We will use our wizard to steer these folks to help. We're adding a widget in console for ongoing product feedback. Should be live this week. We're sending emails now for our semi-annual NPS survey. Results expected in December.
- Remember - we’re treating the funnel like a product And with a product, we don’t leave it alone once we’ve launched it. At Twilio this means we keep building and developing: State of the User report – in depth user feedback New lifecycle model
- So we’ve got our flow of leads working, we’ve optimized our approach to generate the right leads, and we’ve optimized our engine to make sure it’s delivering the right onboarding experience. So we’ve got more leads coming into the funnel and not dropping out of it. That’s great – but let’s just pause for a minute and consider what a lead represents for our business It represents interest, perhaps somebody signing up to a free trial or freemium service, perhaps a developer experimenting with our products with a credit card. The biggest mistake that a SaaS business can make is that this is the end of the journey. That from now on the sheer value of our innovation will sell itself. I’m here to tell you that innovation alone isn’t enough At this point, you need to SELL the business value of your product if you expect people to pay for it. You need to keep landing that value message How do you do that? Content.
- Content I hear you say? We don’t have any content. That’s where you’re wrong. Most SaaS businesses I know have resources that they can translate into content that demonstrates their offer’s value – they just aren’t using it. Here are some examples from my own experience:
- Took 8 existing case studies and turned them into a best practices eBook.
- Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide – they are on their 5th version Launched in Jan 2014 – first edition had an ROI of over 18k%! But they kept going! They’ve updated the guide 5 times They’ve added Crash Courses Podcast – interviewing influencers Took the podcast on the road – to Cannes Lions Translated into 7 languages 75k downloads on the podcast (and counting) They even created a quarterly magazine!
- As my husband Jason Miller, who is a content marketing expert would say, There are no new ideas. This is going so far back in my career that I don’t even have screenshots. But it’s still a great idea.
- Poll the audience Who has at least one marketer on staff? Who has at least a basic CRM / Marketing Automation in place? Well, you know what? This stuff is a whole lot easier when you have a trained professional working on it with you. You wouldn’t expect a marketer to engineer your software – it’s equally unrealistic to expect an engineer to handle your marketing
- Marketer on staff – ideally someone who can think strategically and execute tactically. Bonus if they have a growth or demand gen background. Chances are a brand/comms person will not have this skillset so think carefully about who you hire first and what you think is more important. Consider hiring an agency and/or consultants to get this going. This should probably be something that’s like the profile of who you need Marketer – Demand Gen or Growth Marketer, needs to be analytical AND creative, ideally a good writer too! Engineer/Product manager
- There’s a complicated marketing landscape out there
- Marketers know where to focus their efforts – with the right support, it’s a lot more manageable than it looks
- Don’t forget the 3 takeaways and now go do it!