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DA: 02:14
Hey Dan, thanks so much for joining me. I'm super excited to have you here today. How are you doing?

DM: 02:19
I'm doing good. Thanks for having me.

DA: 02:21
Yeah, I'm really, really excited about today. I've been waiting for this interview for quite a while. Drift for us is an amazing brand, amazing company, someone that we look at daily as inspiration for us. So we're huge fans, but for those people listening today that may not know the Drift's journey, maybe you can explain a little bit about the company, what you guys are doing uniquely in the marketplace and maybe why Drift has become so successful.

DM: 02:50
Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for that very flattering, those flattering remarks. Yeah. So Drift is the, what we call the new way businesses buy from businesses. We're focused on conversational marketing, which is a new age of marketing is done through conversations. I think a lot of B2B professionals out there will realize that, the way, the old way of forms and email nurture campaigns and emails that come from [email protected], these kinds of corporate presences are no longer working. And so we're really trying to help revolutionize that process for businesses around the world. And, and there are about 100,000 of them out there that are using Drift now to have conversations on their website through email, and connecting back to real time messaging. And, and it's been, it's been a pretty crazy journey last couple of years. I've been here for about 10 months, but the last I've been following very closely actually, from, from a couple of years ago and it's been a very interesting journey to watch from an external standpoint and then of course joining and being part of it. But it's been a rocketship. It's in a very fast growing company and so pretty eyeopening, pretty, pretty fun to be a part of this, this, this part of the stage of the company.

DA: 04:04
Totally. And you said you joined recently, when did you actually join and what was maybe the team size?

DM: 04:08
Sure. So I joined in September of 2017, so not quite a year, a little bit under a year still almost, but, but the, the employees I think I was employee number, like 30 to 40, somewhere in that range and we're now about 150, 160 employees. So in many ways, yeah, I'm sort of like a, a veteran in some level even being here less than a year. It's just been explosive growth. I mean, I think we just kinda hit traction particularly last summer and then it was like, okay, we got ramp up, we got ramped up, we gotta grow, we gotta build the sales team, gotta to build the marketing team and it's been an incredible, incredible 10 months. Very intense. A lot of stuff going on.

DA: 04:47
Yeah. It sounds like in that 10 months, what, are there any cultural things internally that you felt had been just like wowing for you joining the company and just seeing this rocketship over the past year?

DM: 04:56
Oh totally. I mean, I think it was an adjustment when I first got here because I feel I like to use this analogy of, before I got here, my last startup, we were kind of slowing down a little bit, not growing as fast and so I was kind of looking for my next thing and it's kind of like when you stop going to the gym for like a couple of weeks or you can take two weeks off and then you go back and you get in the bench press and you try to, you know, bench to 35 or whatever and you're like, oh no, what happened? My muscles are completely gone. I felt that way from a marketing perspective joining the team here at Drift because it was like, oh man, I gotta I gotta set, you know, NFL combine records here at this company and make sure I got my muscles built up and I'm ready to go again. So it's just a, it's an intense fast paced environment because we're trying to do something that's, you know, we're trying to disrupt a market, and we're having some luck doing it but, but it takes a lot of work and we're still a relatively small team. We are about, I think we're about 10 to 15 marketers right now. We're growing. We have a couple of people joining the team, but it's been like there's so many different areas you get involved across stage SaaS companies. It's just so, it's so much fun. I love it. I go crazy, you know, sort of just like doing all these different things. It certainly matches my personality, but it's also just like it's been, it's been an incredibly eyeopening to see the company go from 30 employees to 160 employees in less than a year. It's been, it's pretty awesome.

DA: 06:19
It is pretty incredible. And you got in like right at the right time, right before growth exploded. So you do have a lot of that, a veteran presence there. So it's going to be critical to see what happens over the next couple of years. So we'd love to have you guys back on this show in the future to hear how things grow and stuff like that. But I'm just going back to when you first joined, was there a specific role you're coming into fill coming into what was going on in the company where you guys ready to scale?

DM: 06:45
Yeah. So I'll tell you the story. The behind the scenes story of my, of me joining Drift. I was actually a customer beforehand. I started using the product, like just saw the value I think in the first month at my last company we turn Drift on, which was really turning on messaging on our website and giving our sales team a direct line to the people on the website that were looking at a pricing page and using our product and evaluating it. It impacted like 10 percent of our overall business in the first month, which is like, Whoa, what, why? Like that's pretty intense to just turn on a channel and just like literally see that kind of impact. And so we kept using it and kept trying new things, building chatbots, trying getting our sales team ramped up on it and it's just like, okay, this works, this is the new way that, you know, where B2B is going, you know, and I was a big admirer of Dave Gerhardt, what he had done with the marketing team already here with the brand he was building. And so what happened was my old boss was joining Drift, as the VP marketing at the time, he's no longer with the company, but he was joining and I, before he joined, I point out to him, I was like, this company Drift, like it's like they're doing great. I think you should go look at it because he was looking for his next marketing leadership role. And I emailed him and I literally said, Hey, if you join that company, I'll quit my job tomorrow and I will come with you and I will work in that company. And he emailed me two months later and said, hey, I joined that company. You got to join now. So I, that's, that's literally he held me to it and I was, I was certainly when I had the opportunity to come here and join and actually be part of it, I was, I was all about it.

DM: 08:15
So I actually joined to start doing product marketing. And so my big focus for the first six months, six plus months here was product launches, rebuilding our website, adding a lot more product content to the website. And then I, I've since shift gears over to demand generation because really like all of our product launches, we do one every single month which is unique in itself. And that's why it was a big part of, of my focus. But you know, it really was that product launches, were impacting demand generation. And so we really needed someone to kind of just focus on demand generation. So about two months ago I kind of switched gears and have since just focus on demand gen.

DA: 08:54
So I want to walk through the process of those product launches. I think that is so interesting and important for your guys' growth, especially the demand generation side. But where did that actually come from? Like, who, who decided, hey, we're going to go so fast we're going for a new product launch monthly versus when we get releases done. Who added that actual restrictive kind of time frame there?

DM: 09:15
Yeah. So that, that was a, a decision by our founders, Elias and David, and they, you know, they have a track record of building customer centric companies and I would say extremely customer centric companies. And we knew that one of the things we wanted to do, and I say we, really they knew and then the rest of us like understood the vision and rally behind it and execute on it. But they knew they wanted to put in place a process where every single month we were delivering a new product, something extremely valuable hopefully to our customers based on their feedback, based on what they need, based on what is going to help them create better buying experiences for their customers. And so, you know, we've done one every single month. We just launched, for instance, this month Drift signatures. And everything we're doing is based around what the customer is asking for. And so it just, I think having one every month is really just a way of making sure that while there's a million different things going on a growth company like this, hiring sales, you know, product enhancements, you know, fixing performance issues in the product, that every single month we're delivering something tangible and valuable to our customers. So that's really where it came from.

DA: 10:24
That's incredible. And you can just feel the customer centric culture that has been ingrained in Drift. Just listening to you talk about it. I love it. So I want to talk about that, that process of the product launch because you know, you kind of mentioned briefly a couple of things which is getting user feedback, prioritizing user feedback. How do you prioritize those items over performance issues or bugs and then, you know, when do you start the marketing process for that? What is that kind of process look like? I would love to kind of follow your guys's roadmap of what's working right now.

DM: 10:56
Sure. So, we don't have like a one year, six months or even one month, well I guess we have one month kind of product roadmap. I mean we have a lot of, we're very, our product manager spends a lot of time on the phone with customers. Our entire engineering team in fact spends a lot of time on the phone with customers. You might find that surprising, but it's true. We, our customers success teams aren't the only ones really talking to the customers. And so when we see and we surface, hey, there's a, there's a pattern here of like it'd be really great if we could focus on helping customers use messaging with email or hey sales email is a really important piece of the buying process for our customers, so how, how can we sort of doubled down on that? So it really comes from a place of communicating with customers and, and we've done things like in January, we had, we had planned a launch for the following month for February and we had this offsite as a company and we actually brought in about 12 customers and we had a panel and we interview them as a company.

DM: 11:49
There's, there's these 12 customers that sat on this panel on stage in front of us and we all have microphones and we asked them questions and we grilled them on some level. Right? Like, Hey, like what are you, where do you see value, where you're not seeing value, where having issues, what are you having trouble learning about the product and so on. And we saw like this commonality of they're, they're trying to figure out, well, we feel like Drift is helping impact the company. Like we feel like it's helping impact our bottom line, but we're having a little bit of trouble like seeing that, measuring it. It just, it's taking some time to figure that out. And so literally we said, okay, the thing we were going to launch in February, forget that, let's push it off. They want to see ROI. So let's figure out how we do this.

DM: 12:26
And so the following month we launched revenue reporting in Drift, which was connecting your Salesforce account into Drift and actually seeing how many of your close one opportunities, had conversations in Drift, how many were actually influenced by Drift. And now you know, our customers have that. So like that, that's the kind of sort of roadmap of, okay, customers say it, we see it, we can feel it, it's tangible. So we'll go and do it. In terms of the marketing, we usually get involved with the, we're doing one every month, so what happens is typically we will launch something and then the next day we'll sit down with the product team and say, okay, what's next? Right? And go through with them what, what is the next months? We usually know a couple months out what they're going to launch, but okay, what is coming out? Can you demo it for me? Can I ask you questions? It's been useful in from my perspective of sense a lot of these tools are being built for a persona like mine, right? Demand generation person. Even product marketing and marketing persona in general, so I can kind of grill and understand, okay, here's the value, here's the story. And then we'll usually will go through this month long process of organizing, okay, here's all the things we want to do for the launch. Here's all the typical things we have our sort of, you know, our hit list of maybe a dozen plus things were going to launch on product hunt. We're going to build a landing page. We're gonna write a blog post, you know, the, the, the more typical things that an organization will do in preparation for product, a product launch. But then we also try to do that, what's our new thing? Like what's our one thing we're going to do that we haven't done before? Back in March of this year, we did a Linkedin takeover where we went out there and we had all of our employees shoot their own videos, post them on Linkedin video, and talk about this new product launch and we had this huge, you know, huge effect and we had hundreds of thousands of views of those videos in the matter of 24 hours, and it was a huge impact on website traffic and lead generation, or we'll do something else where we get our partners involved or our customers involved. We'll try something new almost in every product launch to try to get people involved in it. And I think we've, we've developed a very, we've developed a playbook and we built our marketing team so that they know a marketing moment is coming a month out. They know what they're responsible for. We're gotten, we've gotten to the point where it's pretty self sufficient, you know, I don't need to be sitting there talking to every single team member belt. You need to do this and that. It's like they know exactly what's coming. They know what their role is going to be in, they bring something to the table, something creative to try to launch and it's just a matter of, you know, what can we do and how can we make a big impact? How can we sort of always beat the previous product launch and hit traffic records.

DA: 14:55
That's absolutely incredible. I love this feeling of growth internally there, which is how can we break into something new and innovative that Linkedin idea, is incredible. That was, oh man, it's such a good idea, but ways to just kind of outdo the previous one. Do you have benchmarks that you're going for? Are the benchmarks that you bring in? Are they sales benchmarks? Are they customer activation benchmarks at? What are the things that you're trying to beat and when you first started these, I guess maybe it was even before your time, was there like an actual base. I'm just thinking for people that are looking to do, if they wanted to bring in and started doing product launching in their business, what would their baselines be coming in and kind of how to, how to think about that.

DM: 15:37
Yeah, that's obviously going to depend based on the business and what's most important to them. For us, I mean like one of the most basic is website traffic. Another is you know, we have a freemium product and a lot of our launches are based around some freemium component to a launch, so we can see signups, new signups, we can see product usage, we can see how many logins we had for that day. We can see, but we can see a bunch of different these data points. One thing that I think we're doing well as a business that I think other businesses are not doing as well is just looking for the qualitative feedback, right? Like what are customers saying in replies to the emails we send, what are they saying on Twitter? What's the reaction on Linkedin? What's the reaction in conversations on our website when they come on and customers give us feedback or whatever. And that's, to me like those, it's so much easier to see, like it's so much easier to, it's harder to measure and give a metric, but it's easier to like, feel and understand if a launch was successful by seeing the customer say, Oh my God, I was waiting for this and you finally, you finally did it. This is great. Or Oh, I don't really understand this. Like how do I get to this in the product? Like we, we can see those commonalities. And, and I think we're such good communicators internally here at Drift. We are heavy, heavy users of Slack. We're sharing screenshots, we're sharing feedback. Everybody's, you know, like the marketing team doesn't just look at the marketing channel. They're looking at the product channel and the feedback channel and triage and all these other places. And so I feel like one of the sort of big takeaways for our product launches is in terms of, you know, my suggestion for another company will be think about, you know, the feedback that, the words people say, the conversations you're having with your customers, with your prospects, with your leads. And see what they say because you can really get a good sense of what's going on in the market, but just looking and reading that stuff versus always looking at a metric. Of course you need those metrics to understand, okay, it was a big website traffic day, a big lead Gen day, you know, a big product usage day. But looking and understanding what are people actually saying that's going to help shape and help you understand if it's a win or a loss for, for a product launch.

DA: 17:44
Completely. Yeah. That's so good. Always getting that feedback from the customers, from the users themselves and I love that you talked about before you brought in the panel of actual customers to your retreat to learn from them directly. So that makes a ton of sense. And I guess looking over the past year while you've been there, what major lessons have you taken from these product launch efforts? Obviously you're doing some amazing stuff. It sounds like things are going well and growth is, is obviously huge. But what about specific lessons learned?

DM: 18:15
Specific lessons learned, I think one of the big takeaways that I've learned that I, I didn't quite fathom before getting here was that it's okay to focus on things that aren't scalable, right? It's okay to focus on the one to one conversations. It's okay to go on a Webinar and say, hey, you know, if you want to come to our conference, email me, here's my email address, I'll help you, I'll give you discounts. I'll give you tickets for free or I'll give you them at a discount. It's okay to, you know, launch a Twitter campaign that isn't necessarily, you have a direct correlation back to Linkedin if you're thinking about delivering value, if you're thinking about being, if you're being creative and you're delivering value and you're helping build an audience, you're winning. And I think we, so we just, we're, we're, this is my selfish plug for a book that we just wrote. We're writing a book. It's a free book. It's an actual physical book that we're going to mail out and we're in the process of printing them now. And it's called This Won't Scale and it's about, it's 40 playbooks from us about the things that we do that are not scalable practices from a marketing standpoint, but it's, you know, but the, but the end result is you're helping build an audience. You're helping deliver value and those things, if you, if you, if you're always focusing on the data points, you're going to suffer and you're, and you're not going to like listen to what I'm talking about. The product launch listened to the actual customer listening to the words they say the language they use. And so I think that's, that was one of the bigger things because I think in my past life as a B2B marketer, I've always thought about, okay, if I'm spending time doing this one thing, gen one lead, I immediately have to figure out how it's going to generate a thousand leads and how to scale it. And if that doesn't work then I got to give up on it, move on. And that's just not, I just in this day and age with B2B buying is with, with how B2B marketing works and the people that are winning and B2B marketing, you have to be authentic, you have to be real, you have to deliver value. The buyer has more power now than ever before. There's more information across the Internet than ever before to understand, you know, whether you should go with one product or another. So, I think delivering value and thinking about, hey, if, if I'm always focusing on scalable things and I might not be focusing on the right stuff and actually ultimately helping my company grow.

DA: 20:24
I think it's also, this is basically what I'm taking from what you're saying is humanizing the data, right? Like it's not just lead, they're actual people in the and the things they say are truly the reflection of what our product is trying to solve. So, yeah, that sounds awesome. And what about moments where you guys have done some experiments in the product launch that didn't go as you expected? Did you, have, you had any of those moments when you're like, oh shoot and then learn from them? So anything that you could take away from that?

DM: 20:54
Yeah, I mean, I think we've had, you know, in some ways thousands of micro moments like that where we did something in and we, I think in the early days of the product launches, for instance, we sort of were organizing and communicating, but there was never like one set checklist to say, hey, these are the things we need to do. Right? These are the things, these are the check boxes we need to check off once we've, during the launch day or right before it's that we know we're ready to launch it and we know we're going to have a successful launch. I think that was one of them. And that's kind of a basic planning and organizing task. You know, we've tried things where, you know, we've gone on certain communities and spend a lot of time working on, you know, a product hunt for a certain launch and we realized, well, maybe the effort spent there could have been better spent figuring out how to roll this out for customers and make them successful because, well, that product hunt community, like yes, we know product hunt is a great place to go for us when we launch stuff and we still do that. But some of the stuff we're launching isn't really right for a product hunt community, right? Like that audience is not going to, unless they're, you know, a Drift customer, they're not going to get as much value from this launch. So I think thinking about the audience and the targeting, who we're communicating to is another one where if we had spent more time and thought through, I would love to. What I would love to have done something different with training customers and communicating the impact of a, of a specific launch to people. We're doing 12 launches a year. I mean it's, it's tough too because 12 like big launches a year, that means you're, there's so many different people impacted. People are at different stages. It's a growth company we've had, we've changed our pricing and plans so we don't, you know, it's not as clear cut as we know exactly what someone is using the product, how this is going to impact them, with, you know, the, all the customers we have now too, it's just, it takes a lot of, a lot of effort to make sure we're delivering value and we're delivering the right takeaways for every single product launch to the right person. But that's something we got to get better at. You know, we'll, we'll always, we'll always strive to be better at that I think.

DA: 22:50
Yeah, I can definitely see how that can be a little bit tricky as you grow so fast and you bring in so many users, there's so many different aspects and channels of messaging that you can use to articulate benefits and how it works for different segments. So I can see that as a challenge, but I know you guys will definitely solve that and figuring out probably in some next launches how you guys can do more, you know, specific messaging and segmentation for those people, which would be really exciting. Where do you see it, so you're doing 12 a year, but where do you see this growing and progressing? Are you guys going to hit a point of saturation from product launches and you're gonna have to switch things up? Or is it always just about how can we find that next cool innovative initiative to add to that product launch thing to just keep spring up conversations and excitement?

DM: 23:36
Yeah, I think. I think it's both. One is, you know, we have to be careful not to saturate the product launches. We haven't in the course of almost a year that I've been here about, I guess it's 10 product launches or so, we haven't seen saturation. We haven't seen product launches turn into something where it's like, oh no one cares anymore that was just a phase we went through. We keep breaking records, we keep hitting, you know, new record highs in the metrics we do track like website traffic and product signups and product usage. When we do launch something and we're still seeing that qualitative feedback of yes, this is great, or you know, hey, or, or whether it's a great feature and people are excited about it or it's, hey, I have some feedback, I don't think this was done well. We're still seeing a lot of response to our product launches. So I think maintaining that, but I think over time we will certainly change. I think we'll get more. I think we can get more targeted, like I mentioned before with some of our product launches. I think we can find new mediums, new ways, new channels to communicate product launches. I think that'll change over the course of the, I would imagine it's to change over the course of the next year as it has the past year.

DM: 24:38
And I think the other thing is like with initiatives, we're still, we're still coming up with new initiatives. I mean, we just wrote this book were like, Hey, let's write a book, the marketing team, let's write it and talk about these playbooks because people are asking about it. We hear a lot of feedback from customers like, Oh, I love what you guys are doing brand and your marketing team (inaudible) can you guys share like what you're doing? We're like, hey, let's just read a book and let's do it. So we're always thinking of those new initiatives. we're launching, you know, we just launched the conversational marketing university. We're about to launch the conversational marketing summit. You know, we're writing a book about another book about conversational marketing. Like it's just like these initiatives and I think that's a cultural thing too, like we're always doing these initiatives and coming up with new things and we have some pretty cool stuff I think coming in the next couple of months as well that we've thought of. And so we'll always do those new initiatives, but we're always going to still, you know, focus on these product launches and delivering value to the customer because we've literally written a blog post that says, hey, this is our market moment that definition of it, that's our launch every month, we call it a Marketable Moment. The definition of it is "delivering a new product to customers forever", right? So the plan isn't, we're going to taper down and we're going to stop doing it anytime soon. We're only going to hopefully get better at it and make it so that we're delivering value to the customers every single month.

DA: 25:49
Yeah, I love that. I can just hear it in your voice. That excitement that you guys have to push forward, you know, that innovation. I would love to get a copy of that book. I love what you guys are doing and love, love all the initiatives and what anything that you're most proud of over the past year that you've been involved?

DM: 26:09
Oh Man, that's, I think that's tough because I think there's a lot of different things that I'm proud of as a team that we've accomplished. I think the product launch is a great example of just, you know, we weren't, we didn't really have the playbook, we didn't have sort of a fully thought out mechanisms and we went out and we tested a bunch of things. We figured out what the playbook is. We built a team that I think is really great. In the course of time I've been here, we were four or five marketers really when, when I joined, and now we're, I think it's like 12 what we're at right now. And so it's not a huge growth in the marketing team, but I've been here and seen the team grow and help grow the team. And so I'm really proud of the team I have around me. I just feel like I'm constantly intimidated but also constantly impressed by the people around me, which is, which is a really great sign. I've, I've certainly felt that before other companies, but I feel it, you know, in a, in a much bigger way here. I just feel like we've, we've developed a great team, so that would be another area I'm really proud of and I just think the growth, I mean overall, we've, we've just had a really great positive reaction from the market to our product, you know, just, you know, people are excited, people are using it and people are buying, people are expanding their subscriptions of Drift because they want to use more of it. They're seeing the value. I'm really proud of the value people see and that fact that we've built a product that is helping customers, you know, sell to other businesses and helping them deliver value and create better experiences. We see it almost every single week. We have a metrics meeting every Monday and we share some feedback from customers, proof points, data points in just, you know, revenue influenced and qualitative feedback and how many meetings have booked for people and stuff like that. And every week it's almost like your eyes open a little bit like, wow, we're doing something that's really impacting this market and helping people do, you know, do their jobs more efficiently. So that's, that's a pretty cool thing.

DA: 27:53
It's definitely an incredible feeling to recognize the value that the product you're working for gifts to the world. It's always just such like inside of you it just feels so great. And then on the other side, it always just, it's got to be amazing to work with such a great team and just be proud of the work everyone is doing. So congratulations to you guys. Seriously like, just great work in the industry and we all love you so. Cool. Well, what I want to do is I want to transfer over into the lightning round questions, just five questions that we go through quickly. You can just answer what the first thought that comes to your mind. Best advice you can think of. Ready to get going?

DM: 28:26
Let's do it.

DA: 28:29
Let's do it. Alright. What advice do you have for early stage SaaS companies starting marketing today?

DM: 28:34
If you're starting marketing test often and test early, test a lot of different things, test email frequency tests, different webpages, test different messaging, try different channels, start doing webinars. You don't need to have a six month plan, a three month plan, even a one month plan, you know, figure out on smaller sprints how you're going to test stuff and you don't have to have a large audience to validate if, if you know, developing a Webinar program for your marketing team is worth it or building, you know, creating a podcast and brand through that. Start small, test, get some early data and then double down on what works and then don't ever stop testing and trying new things.

DA: 29:10
That is such a good answer. That should go in the book. What marketing skill do you think is vital for teams to improve and build on today?

DM: 29:18
Copywriting, writing skills in general and in marketing. I think this is, and I mean this is part of the book, but I think this is part of the mantra of what we're trying to write the book, which is like if we get so lost in the data and the dashboards and the TV screens with all these data points on them, then we're forgetting about some of the core skill sets of marketers, which is communication and writing is a big part of that. You know, go read, (inaudible) on advertising, go read the (inaudible) letters and there's so many different things we could. I mean, when I got here, I feel like I was given, like Dave has hammered on me to become a better writer. And I feel like I really have, just because he's been giving me so many resources, I did become a better writer. So I highly, highly, highly suggest for people out there marketing, even if you're a VP of marketing or whatever, go work on your copywriting. Go study great copywriting, go study great ads, and get better at writing.

DA: 30:07
Such a good answer. And you guys have created such an amazing voice and copywriting kind of persona that really is just such a powerful part of your brand. What about the best educational resource you'd recommend for marketing?

DM: 30:20 ^
I can't recommend one source. I would say start reading again. Start listening to podcasts. Start getting, you know, like I, everybody has to commute. I was just talking to one of our sales, sales reps ears and he was saying I have a 30 minute commute and I've been reading books every single day and I, and that's part of our culture here, is we have a book club and you can rent a book anytime you want or we'll order for you and bring it to you. And so our (inaudible) Elias has been recommending books and we just had a company meeting yesterday and Elias was like, this is home depot book. He's reading excerpts from it and like giving us motivation (inaudible) And it's like people are just like, I think read as many books, listen to as many podcasts, listened to people, learn constantly. I didn't quite understand that I was always a doer. I would do this, I would do that. I would do this and I was kind of learning in the process of doing, but sitting back and learning from materials like podcasts, audio books and, and physical books, is very valuable. I think it's, I think it's underthought and I think it seems obvious to the outside world probably, but I think the marketing people forget, like go read and studied great, great, great marketers and take away from them and try stuff that they recommend.

DA: 31:21
It's the growth mindset. If having the mindset of saying I'm always going to try to learn more. It's a great mindset to have. And like you said, so many people are in that, like do mindset. You have to kind of shift out of that, but amazing advice. What about a favorite marketing tool that you can't live without?

DM: 31:36
I can't say Drift, right?

DA: 31:36
You can. Absolutely. Absolutely.

DM: 31:40
I would have said that if, if I were at my last company and I was still a customer, I was just like a wow moment. I was just really impressed with it. But I don't, I don't think I can get away with saying here. I think Drift is valuable, but I think honestly the favorite tool I can't live without is pretty basic Google sheets or even Excel, I just, I need like I need to conceptualize everything even, you know, I have all these reports in Salesforce, everything for demand Gen, but I rebuild them in spreadsheets because that's how I learn and I built and I can focus on it and I can think about, look at these microscopic like, you know, daily reports on certain channels. And I have my whole team right now inputting numbers into a spreadsheet that's already living in Salesforce so that they every single day looking at the numbers that they own and make sure for each channel manager there, you know, they understand on a daily basis how they're, their channel is performing and just because it's so easy in a growth company to get sidetracked with a million different things, it's not their fault, it's just another way of sort of focusing and having laser focus on what really matters. So Google sheets is, is definitely my favorite marketing tool outside of Drift of course.

DA: 32:40
Yeah. No, that's great. And they always say like writing down notes or copying over notes again, helps you learn faster and memorize those things. That's probably very helpful for your team to actually input that data because then they're seeing it again, they're typing in. It's probably digesting more in their minds, but yeah. That's awesome. What about a brand business or team that you admire? Obviously outside of Drift, which is one that we do.

DM: 33:04
I really liked the team over at InVision and the brand they're building InVision App. We have used the product as well. I think it's very valuable even for marketers, is a design tool, but for a marketer that's building websites and review websites is a very useful tool. And I just like the brand they're building, the content they're creating. I get their emails every day and it's really geared towards like UX and design, but I still love them. I just think they're, you know, I'm reading it often. Another team I'd recommend that I like is the Impact Team, the Hubspot agency based out of Connecticut. They are creating a lot of really great content marketing. I think they're doing content marketing at a pretty elite level, I think even better than some other companies that people would point to and say, you know, the past (inaudible) content marketing companies, I think the Impact team is doing really great content marketing. I still get their emails and I still read them often, if not daily, then weekly, the blog content they're writing. So I think they're doing an amazing job over there as well.

DA: 33:58
That's awesome. I will have to checkout Impact, but you're probably the fifth or sixth person to say InVision App on that question. So they really are doing an amazing job. So if you guys haven't looked at it yet, make sure you take a time sometime to checkout InVision. They're incredible.

DM: 34:09
They are.

DA: 34:12
Awesome. Well, Dan, that wraps up our time today. I just want to thank you so much. Seriously. It's been amazing to learn from you. Amazing to hear what's going on over there at Drift and you know, we wish you nothing but the best. Would love to have you back on later this year or even early next year to see how the rest of the year went with those product launches and we'll be following closely, but thanks again for your time man.

DM: 34:30
Thanks David. I really appreciate it.

DA: 34:31
What an incredible episode. I really cannot thank Dan and the Drift team enough for coming on and sharing such great information with us, sharing their playbook for those product launches. I'm really excited for some of the things that we already seen this year in marketing, sharing some more of the tips and tricks that are working so well in their marketing team and in their company. It's really breathtaking to watch from the outside. He shared a ton, so make sure you listen to this episode a couple of times. Take notes and implement some of these things. Product launches can be so, so valuable if you're creating a product centric and a customer centric company. (...)