Zaius, a marketing cloud for B2C marketers, faced initial challenges in achieving scalable growth until CEO Mark Gally implemented a strategic approach focused on customer feedback and market fit. The company transitioned from an enterprise offering to a freemium model, targeting mid-market customers while addressing onboarding issues and enhancing product capabilities. As a result, Zaius experienced significant growth, increasing quarterly bookings by 3.2x year over year and developing a new automated marketing solution.

1. [ ]ZAIUS EXPERIENCES
PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE

2. Mark Gally
• CEO, Zaius
• Zaius – Matrix Portfolio company
executing this playbook
• 20 years experience leading sales,
marketing, service at exponential
growth companies

3. ZAIUS’S JOURNEY
Getting to Repeatable, Scalable, and Profitable growth

4. Zaius
Quarterly
Bookings

5. What is Zaius
• Marketing Cloud for B2C Marketers
• Somewhat like HubSpot, Marketo, etc. but for B2C marketers
• Market served by ExactTarget, Responsys, Adobe, Silverpop
• Out of date technologies, not keeping pace with the market
• Email and web centric
• Not omni-channel
• Inadequate data for customer understanding, insight and great personalization

6. Owned by MarketingOwned by IT
The Pain
CDP
Customer
Data
Platform
Email-centric
Marketing
Automation
e.g. Segment
Marketing: no access to
data for insights
High Friction between
Marketing and IT

7. The Pain
CDP
Customer
Data
Platform
Email-centric
Marketing
Automation
Mobile Push Editor
Browser Push Editor
Web page
Personalization Editor
Facebook Ad composer
Google Ad composer
SMS composer
Facebook Messages
composer
Etc.
e.g. Segment

8. The Pain
CDP
Customer
Data
Platform
Mobile Push Editor
Browser Push Editor
Web page
Personalization Editor
Facebook Ad composer
Google Ad composer
SMS composer
Facebook Messages
composer
Etc.
e.g. Segment
Manual Exports
No access to data for
personalization in the
editors

9. Tightly integrated, Owned by Marketing
Zaius’s key differentiators
CDP
Customer
Data
Platform
Multi-Channel
Marketing
Automation
Single Editor
Automatic Channel
Selection
Direct Access to Data for Personalization
Marketing is
empowered

11. Brief History
• Company founded by two technical founders
• One of whom took the role of CEO
• Mark hired to lead sales and marketing
• Initial go-to-market efforts fail
• Company has burned through most of its cash
• Mark takes over as CEO
• Mark has very little cash left to figure something out

12. The Search for Product/Market Fit

13. Key Learnings from the time before you take over as CEO?
• Too few Design Partners
• Not in a consistent segment with a single use case
• Closing early customers
• Used friends and family to close some early enterprise accounts (some nice logos!)
• Again - not in a consistent segment with the same use case
• Problems closing customers that weren’t warm introductions
• Customers said they wanted Zaius
• But - unable to get through an enterprise sales cycle
NOTHING WAS REPEATABLE

14. So what do you do when you take over as CEO?
• Cash is low
• Scale back to buy the company more time
• Re-think the market to addressing
• Opened up the funnel to customers of all sizes

15. Finding a Repeatable Sales
Process

16. Finding Repeatable Sales Process
Mark’s Method
• Turn on a flow of leads
• Find a great Search Engine Marketer
• Take 2 months and work every lead trying to get a phone call
• Drive for 15 to 20 conversations per week with real prospects in the raw
• All sizes of customers, large and small
• This is the only way to start recognizing patterns
• Need to get money from strangers not warm leads
• Warm leads will tell you what you want to hear
• This process tests every hypothesis and either validates or proves you
wrong

17. What do you aim to learn?
• What customers need and whether your product meets those needs
• Where your product needs to be changed
• Hone in on:
• Who will pay? - (market segmentation)
• For what? - (product development)
• How much? - (pricing and go to market model)
• Determine the characteristics of the market and the right go-to-market
strategy
• Go-to-market strategy/model determines how to scale the business
• (Mark has worked in Enterprise, Channel and High Velocity transactional sales models)

18. How did you apply to Zaius?
• Took an enterprise product and launched a Freemium offering
• Added in aggressive search marketing
• Intentionally spoke to all customer levels
• Drove leads and tried to close deals to get a read on the market
• Find out how the product matched up with the needs of the market
• Had used the same strategy at TribeHR and others
• Got a lead source working (took a few months)

19. What did you discover?
• Learned that Freemium wasn’t going to work
• But found that there was an Email Service Provider refresh cycle going on
• ExactTarget, Responsys, SilverPop, etc.
• Got the messaging right:
• Data is the key to marketers success
• Email service providers don’t have the data to answer the question “What’s next?”
• “What’s the next campaign I should be running that will increase revenue?”
• Found which segment to target:
• NOT enterprises
• Focus on mid-market
• Discovered that it was very important to use a non-disruptive entry point
• Too much at risk if they turn off current ESP, and this fails
• Solution: Work with existing email service provider until Zaius proves value and reliability

20. What did you learn as you tried to make it repeatable?
• 30 day sales cycle emerged
• BUT – the product wasn’t ready
• Couldn’t deploy rapidly to meet this high velocity mid-market
• Moved engineering into Customer Success – because we had to
• But turned out to be one of the best moves as they saw first hand what had to be done to
the product to fix the onboarding issues
• More out of the box integrations
• Simpler UI for three key functions (designer/editor, analytics, segmentation)
• Seeing this first hand created far greater urgency in engineering
• After several months we could deploy in a reasonable time

21. Prove non-founders can sell

22. Founder led selling first
• Mark spent the first quarter as the only sales person
• Didn’t mention who he was, or his title
• In the past has gone undercover using a fake name and email address
• See Mark’s article: Undercover Boss
• Sees this as a valuable management tool

23. First two Sales People
• Hired one Trailblazer and one more typical sales rep who was a proven
grinder
• Delighted to see how fast they were able to get up to speed
• 30 day sales cycle -> can tell in first 2 months if they will be successful

24. Finding the Wow! moment
• Need to tap into the emotional fears of the buyer
• In our case: fear that they can’t answer the question: “What’s next?”
• That is what they are tasked with
• Seeing the data that gives them the comfort that they can answer it
• Today the fact they need to go to IT or to Data Analysts is clear admission that they don’t
know ”What’s next?”
• As soon as they see the customer profile, they realize that the system is going to provide the
answers

28. Making it Scalable

29. Started hiring 2 sales people every quarter
• Pretty consistent success
• First order comes in their first
quarter due to 30 day sales cycle
• Quarterly Bookings have grown
by 3.2x year over year

30. Making it Profitable

31. Making it Profitable
• High cost customer success in the early days led to low margins
• Segment analysis – select the most profitable segments
• Simplifying the product
• Fixing onboarding
• Simpler, more automated process
Fixes

32. Key learnings and advice

33. Find a Budget where you can win
• Find a budget that you can win on
• VideoIQ:
• Theft and vandalism – not just a use case, but a use case with a budget attached to it
• TribeHR
• Found they could tap into budget on HRIS and on Performance Reviews
• But couldn’t go after Application Tracking, as there was already an incumbent there
• Zaius
• Email Service Provider – customer has a budget for this and is already spending here
• That is when you can scale
• You have to have a budget, otherwise you can’t scale rapidly

34. What comes next for Zaius?
• ZAM – Zaius Automated Marketing
• Tells the customer exactly what campaign to run next
• Gets the individual email tone and content right based on the data
• What is most likely to get a specific individual to convert