Hey, Harmony. Thanks so much for joining me today on the SaaS breakthrough podcast, really excited to have you and Outreach here today. How you doing?
HA [02:58]:
Great. Thank you for having me. I'm excited too to be on your podcast.
DA [03:02]:
Yeah. It's a real pleasure. We have a lot of cool stuff to go through specifically ABM and lots of cool stuff that you guys are doing but before we jump into that marketing conversation, why don't you give us a brief background explain more about Outreach, when it was founded, who your customer base is and what you're doing uniquely in the marketplace.
HA [03:21]:
Yeah. Great question. So, it was founded in 2014. We're a pretty young company given how fast we've been growing. We are sales engagement platform that allows customer facing team sales marketing support functions primarily to personalize and streamline every interaction with prospects and customers. So, that can be via email, voice, social essentially any channel in which you would engage with a prospect or customer.
The biggest value prop with Outreach is that it gives sales leaders and marketing leaders visibility into rep performance and activity. And so, it just makes management seamless, it makes the process between meet capture and then follow up from sales reps incredibly seamless so between the sales and marketing functions and it allows us to streamline programs and messaging and testing and so all of that combined, helps sales organizations and marketing organizations increase efficiency.
So, we're growing really fast, we're a headquartered in Seattle. I'm based out of San Francisco but I've got a lot of funding, 3 to 4 million of funding. I guess we're considered a unicorn now which we should be very proud about.
DA [04:37]:
Congratulations. That’s awesome.
HA [04:39]:
Something that on everyone's desks, we have like little like unicorns, they sit on everyone's desk. So, we're very proud of that. But yeah, it's a great company and I'm excited to be here.
DA [04:51]:
That is incredible growth like you said from 2014 to be a unicorn already. So, congratulations to you and the entire team, that's fantastic. Just a quick question that came to mind while you were going through the bio there. Do you guys typically come in with the marketing team or the sales team like who's kind of the person that finds you guys that they're trying to solve the problem that they have?
HA [05:10]:
Yeah. That's a great question. So, primarily it's within the sales function. Our core economic buyer is a sales leader so someone who manages an STR team or an AD team. Our strategy from a marketing perspective has been to create content that is relevant to the user. So, how you should write emails that land in your customers’ inboxes and things like that.
We kind of start with like the pain point of the user so STR is made ease and then, we will go upwards within the company so then we'll be like “Okay. Let's start talking to the director” and we'll have multiple people kind of telling our story for us.
DA [05:56]:
Got it. Makes sense. When did you actually join the team?
HA [05:59]:
So, I started almost a year ago now and it feels like it's been three in a good way but so I'm about a year in and it's been a heck of a year. A lot of projects, a lot of things that have changed just in a year.
DA [06:17]:
I'm sure with that fast growth, I'm sure lots of things change. What are you typically coming in and doing in a fast-moving growth startup like that about three years into the process?
HA [06:27]:
Yeah. So, the demand gen function primarily was started about two years ago here in Outreach so it's pretty young function. The former director of demand gen, who's a good friend of mine actually, moved within the company but he started out doing just building the foundation so all of the general software integrations like any marketing automation set up and running like starting to run some lead gen programs and that was working for a while, right.
It was like any lead that came through the door that even just visited our website, he jokes about this where the STR team was like “If they even see a logo somewhere, we want to talk to them”. And so, any lead that came in, we just like ship them all over to sales. When I started, by the time I started we were getting tens of thousands of lead in the door and honestly our sales organization just didn't have enough time to process them well and do high quality engagement with them.
And so one of my biggest initiatives was just making sure that we were able to scale efficiently, right. So, setting up the lead scoring and nurturing and stages and tracking and reporting and then, starting to expand the breadth of our program. So, lots of testing, lots of just analyzing like what's working and what's not, and just making sure that we were scaling efficiently and not just dumping leads over sales.
DA [07:56]:
Did that mean a lot of work in product market fit making sure that you knew the right avatars to bring over or were you still really looking to kind of have that wide funnel of like really any sales enablement or any sales person in the team should be a lead that we talked to or was it kind of fine-tuning that a little bit more to the right decision makers?
HA [08:16]:
Absolutely. There was some market fit there where we try not to send over STRs and kind of like entry level sales reps to our sales team anymore, right. Like those conversations, they take a lot of time and they don't turn it into anything. Like we need to be talking to that buyer and so that's part of kind of our lead scoring.
We use demographic scoring and Filmographic scoring, we look at all the engagement obviously we want it sent over just to leave that they downloaded a single asset, you would want them to obviously raise a hand for a demo or something. So, we take into consideration all of those things and depending on the level too in the account so if it's a micro account versus an enterprise, we obviously would send through different people to different reps on our team. So, a lot of just mapping of what that looked like in the beginning.
DA [09:10]:
If you didn't come in with so much data like backlogged already in all of those leads, how would you recommend people kind of get through that process? Is that more just kind of interviews with those trials before you send them over to a sales team? Is that just kind of sitting with the sales team weekly and seeing like what leads are good which ones weren't so you can start aggregating that data better?
HA [09:32]:
Yeah. I mean we could not have done this well without the sales organization and the revenue ops organization. And we were consistently every day talking to them about our model like asking them questions like what's working what's not working. One thing that helped a lot too is we break out our SDRs and MDRs submarket development reps. Where the MDRs are the first like line of defense or offense, I guess you could say, for marketing source anything.
So, MDRs leads contacts campaigns and we meet with them almost twice a week like consistently all the time to ask some questions about what conversation are they having, is it working, are these people actually qualified, are they not? In addition to also talking to the ADs consistently. So, I would say my biggest advice for someone starting out on this is you don't always have to have mass quantities or data because it's even more difficult sometimes to sort through that especially if you have a small team.
So, start from the basics like have these conversations and start small. I mean like I mentioned, when we started, we didn't have scoring prioritization any of that setup because we didn't need it in the beginning. You don't always need to develop these incredibly robust operational systems. You can just start from scratch have the conversations and some needs over as you go but definitely make sure you are constantly communicating your sales.
DA [11:01]:
That's it. That's the key. The communication there. And you mentioned kind of operational efficiency and I know you guys as being so quick to grow so fast moving, you've really had to kind of dial in some of those internal focuses on operational efficiency which i think is kind of just where you're at and growth when you're a bootstrapped and just starting or if you're just a small growth company, you may not be investing as much into that. But you guys are on board and quickly you're bringing people into these different teams.
I know you guys have been just incredible through that. How have you set up that process to make sure that new team members coming in are able to get up and running and get results so fast?
HA [11:39]:
Yeah. I mean that's a good question. We're still a small startup so I would say we don't do really great job of it yet. But we have a small team so it goes back to just training and we also rely a lot on the IT to help us with a lot of like the actual operational updates of bringing on a new team member both from a customer with an Outreach and then also just internal within marketing.
But it's basic training and we try to hire people that have experience in some of these things, writing some the software's technologies and being able to execute these programs with us. But it's definitely something that we don't do perfectly. A lot of people think that average strength so fast, I've got from the people, they're just like a rocket ship and their brain is amazing like everything must be perfect and that's something that's not always accurate but something that we're certainly working on improving.
DA [12:40]:
Well, I think that's well said but that's most people and most companies, there's the obviously the outside perspective but in the inside a lot of times you're just trying to put things together with duct tape but you guys are doing a good job so that's fantastic and you'll keep learning and keep growing. But let's move over to marketing initiatives. Things that have been kind of working for you guys. Obviously, we have to start with outbound as Outreach.
That's what you guys do, it's what you talk about with your customers you talk about the content already so what does your process look like? I know you have both the marketing side and the sales side. How do you kind of combine those to create a super-efficient well thought through outbound campaign?
HA [13:22]:
Yeah. So, that's a great question. I mean I know we were probably trying to slid over one of the big initiatives we have is ABM and that's streamlining and integrating all campaigns. Every single touch on a customer prospect like has to be consistent within sales and marketing and so we do a lot of different things.
We do direct mail programs where we have both a discretionary budget that marketing owns where we send out not master, like a couple hundred people so not like large quantities but we'll send direct mail to some of our top target prospects in conjunction with the SDRs and the ADs also having their own budget that they send direct mail from and that has been incredibly successful for us.
DA [14:10]:
A quick question right there.
HA [14:11]:
Yeah.
DA [14:12]:
With that direct mail, how are you guys getting the mail list? Is that going out to them and ask them for their mailing address? Are you doing like searches for list information? How do you find the right people to mail with that trick?
HA [14:24]:
No, that's a good question. So, that's one thing that we work really closely with sales on. What we typically do is we will pull a list from Salesforce, the core buyers within the top target account and then we have a VA team - a Virtual Assistant team actually in the Philippines so we've been working with our VP Max Altschuler for years and years now. They'll do a spot check of that so they'll look at the mailing addresses in the data and then we send that as a third spot check to the ADs and SDR team.
Now, I am on another demand under a table and this question actually came up recently and was like data like “How do you action if a list is right? Is there an easy way to do it? What's the secret sauce?” There is no secret sauce with this like data is always a challenge in every single company you're going to go to and when it comes to direct mail, the most important part of that is making sure that you have the right person and the right mailing address for that contact in particular.
There's a lot of people especially in the sales org, they are remote, right. They don't always sit at HQ and so we have this like kind of three step process for making sure that all the data is correct but it's not easy and we don't always get it right to be frank but just making sure we have all the processes, incredibly important.
DA [15:42]:
Yeah. I only ask because we do kind of some email outreach, I find it so hard just to find the right buyer information even for emails. Yeah I can see that being very difficult for direct mail but didn't mean to cut you off continue you were talking about just your direct mail campaigns being really good wins for the ABM process.
HA [15:56]:
Yeah and one of the things too that we do that kind of, we have a lot of options for direct mails. We use Cinder as our partner here, we stock our store with a lot of different options for sales so we want to give them the liberty to send what they think is going to be best for that contact, right. They know them better than we do and so we have things like cupcakes, Georgetown cupcakes. Which like honestly people love, the number of meetings we've gotten from sending people Georgetown cupcakes is kind of insane.
DA [16:23]:
That's awesome.
HA [16:24]:
But then we also have, like we wrote a book on sales engagement which is obviously very branded and that's something too that we send to kind more like the higher level executive leadership teams of like “Here's our book”. It's just a general what is sales engagement and we'll also send out with handwritten notes. So, those are a couple of the things that have performed really well for us in the past we're continuing to expand on future.
DA [16:48]:
That's fantastic. Because you guys with Outreach have email and SMS and all these things included inside the system, do you guys use that as part of an outbound campaign as well?
HA [16:58]:
Yes. 100%. Email is a huge part of it. So, for every single campaign we do, we have sequences set up with Outreach so pre campaign sequences, during the campaign we have sequences and tasks and touch points and then post campaign follow-up. So, obviously since Outreach is our product, we've operationalize almost everything we do between sales and marketing and we have an integration to use with a lot of different kind of direct mail companies.
But for instance, when a direct mail is sent and received, there's an auto like task set up in Outreach to have an [17:38 Inaudible] so it’s all combined. So, it's all kind of just integrated with every single program that we’re running. So, not just direct email but everything we're doing or all the sequencing we're sequencing, if sales is doing it we're doing and it's this whole process.
DA [17:56]:
How are you guys reviewing those metrics and when you went into this, what was kind of a hypothesis or the baseline of numbers that you wanted to go against? Your KPIs, are they built on something else that you've had like some benchmark or are you guys looking at them weekly and trying to optimize that campaign from there?
HA [18:16]:
So, that's a great question. So, we hold ourselves accountable for opportunity creation and pipeline which is a little I think is shifting a lot more demand into marketing teams are doing that, going from just lead creation regardless of like how high quality they are to actual pipeline and so every week for every single campaign, we're looking at pipeline creation and what's happening.
Now, we also look at leading indicators and lacking indicators so I know if you've read like the four disciplines of execution but that's one thing that Outreach is an entire organization looks at so leading indicators were like leads, qualified leads meeting set which we're looking at almost on a daily basis from all of our programs and making optimizations from those numbers and then we're also in conjunction looking at lagging indicators which is like weekly, monthly, over time like 30 days out from a campaign succeeding is 90 days out.
What pipeline is it generating and we do it by channel, by partner, by campaign, by content asset, we're constantly looking at that in making optimizations and even cutting spend, cutting partners, cutting channels as we go if it's not performing well.
DA [19:32]:
So, I want to talk about how you actually do that with multi-channel attribution since you guys are doing so many different I guess traffic mechanisms and different campaigns and stuff like that. But do you ever get overwhelmed with all those numbers and how do you keep the KPI tracking to where you're seeing like you said the lagging and the performing indicator is the right way without getting overwhelmed with like too much data that makes you unable to create the correct decisions or new experiments when you test.
HA [20:02]:
Absolutely. I mean we definitely try to simplify it right because like I said there is so much of it and like we have a 100 Tableau dashboards, it's just all tell different things and so really so we use Bizible for our multi-channel attribution system and integration and it's completely ingrained in every single thing we do. So, we use Bizible touch points both online and offline sales and marketing to look at what is impacting the funnel.
So, we have a custom. We actually look at both with a w-shaped attribution model for a while. We actually just moved over to custom to make sure that field events were included in it. But we're looking at honestly on a weekly basis in our dimension meetings, we have our leading indicators so the simple just in sales and fuels, are they going against goal? Yes or no? And then, we have the simple lagging indicators that all pull invisible data.
So, we look at the number of meetings set and the impact that that's having on the pipeline and it's really difficult for people to grasp. I'm still even internally having like I'm educating kind of the greater business team and like executive team on why RY modeling is important. Because a lot of times I'll get pushback on well, what are we sourcing? And it's not binary, right. It's not sales or marketing anymore.
It's marketing and sales touch almost a hundred percent of every deal that comes in and so it's making sure you're looking at the impact that each channel has on that deal and it's difficult to do. By using Bizible, like it's a touch point reports actually quite simple. I have one dashboard that's like leaves MQLs, meeting set opportunities, qualified pipeline and close one by channel and if that's increasing, great. If it's decreasing, why? Then, we go into the rough rep activity, what's happening there?
Each territory, each market segment but just take it back to these KPIs. Like make sure you're defining what they are and that you're able to report on them.
DA [22:10]:
So, my follow-up question to that would be; how are you guys or how are you basically having the conversation and sharing the knowledge?
When you're looking at a lead that's coming through your pipeline and they're coming in through let's say a social paid ad but then they're coming to the website, they're getting a demo, then they're leaving, then they're getting retargeted back, then they're seeing a video, then they're downloading an e-book, then they're setting up another meeting and then three months later, they're buying. Like how do you then attribute it back to a channel? Is that like the first channel that they saw is like the ROI winner there?
Is it like there's just so many pieces that that lead is touching all along the way? Like how do you then attribute any direct attribution then for a sale?
HA [22:54]:
Great question. That is like we couldn't do that without Bizible. Like that's one of the technologies that I always knew I wanted at former companies but never had and then I got to Outreach and said “How did I live without this?”
Seriously, yeah there's a lot of other apps that do it so it's not just Bizible, we just happen to be partner with them but that's what having a model does in an automated kind of operationalize model like Bizible where after the deal closes, we go back and it does a percentage of that closed revenue on each touch point. So, like the first touch point might be 15%, all the creation might be 30%. So, what happened right before the office created? Did sales have a campaign? Did they attend a field event? What happened?
And then, within the opportunity process like each stage also has a percentage and it reads what campaign was happening right before that stage changed and it associates that value. So, it's percentage based. That's why it's confusing because you can see like let's say we closed a deal with Tableau for instance. If they, let's say that we sent them a direct mail and we attributed and it was right before the office created, that 30%, because that's the operation stage, of that air would go to direct mail.
And so you could have like .75 meetings from Direct Mail bits because it's a percentage base. So, we're getting into a lot of math here and we actually help on customer calls all the time to like walk them through what our beautiful lucid chart looks like, our operations in our model because it's hard for people to grasp but it's just associating a percentage to a touch point or to a campaign and then taking that percentage of total revenue one.
DA [24:52]:
Got it. That's super valuable. I think it'd be near impossible to try to figure that out without that and I think so many companies are struggling with that so it's a really great tool. Any tips or lessons learned while you kind of built that multi-channel attribution process out?
HA [25:06]:
Yeah. I mean it all kind of goes back to starting small, right. Like don't try to pull the cart before the horse and make sure you have a champion internally, you have someone that really understands the technology and like how to implement and what you're like life cycle and sale cycle looks like. You know like what's running, what's not running. We started with the simple like out of the box model right.
We said Bizible or whoever your partner is like what are you seeing that other your customers are using that has been the most reliable and effective way to track marketing and sales touch points and usually there's some out-of-the-box systems to do it. Implement which honestly as long as you have all your pixels set up and everything's correct on the back end, it's relatively easy to do.
You can just like turn it on and like let it run for a little bit and then like odd it, go back through, make sure like pull the reports and see like “Okay, what is this ROI model showing us today? Does that seem right, like gut check? Like it doesn't even have to make a lot of sense in the beginning, like does this kind of make sense? Like do we actually think we done drove 80 percent of all LR, yes or no? If it's no, then like revisit the model. And I would just start that way and just make sure that you are committed to it because it does take a lot of set it up and make sure you have a champion internally to do it for you or help you do it.
DA [26:34]:
I love that. Yeah. I know it sounds like, it is definitely a big process but it sounds like something that once you have set up, you can't live without. What about any recommendations or advice for people doing ABM or wanting to do something with direct mail and ABM, something that I'm really interested in as well? Are there lessons that you've learned from that campaign?
HA [26:42]:
Yes. So many lessons. I love ABM, I just think we've all been doing it for a little while. Like ABS, all the company saying is how you sell normally, right. These days, ABM is like it scares people a little bit because it's a big broad program and no one quite knows what it means. Everyone does a little bit differently and there's no like perfect way to do it but once you get it down, it can make a massive difference in your pipeline.
And by the way, I've started ABM at two other companies in addition to Outreach and I failed a couple times doing it and learned a lot from it and failure points happen, you don't have full buy-in from the entire organization, all of the revenue facing team. So, Sales Ops are robots in marketing and then executive leadership number one is that alignment.
So, I always tell people the first thing you need to do if you want to start an ABM program, sit-down with sales, have your kickoff meeting, define what ABM is to your organization, what it means, what success could look like and just make sure you're aligned. And then, the second most important part of it is your accounts, right? Like what accounts do you have? What's your ICP, why? And once you determine your account list then you can really start running programs and testing programs.
But don't try to run programs against a list or just like in Salesforce because we all know it's hard to like keep a target account list updated, prioritizing accounts, there's so many operations on the backend, like make sure you have that list and start again. Start small, right? Start with a hundred accounts. Don't just try to go up to a thousand quickly. Start with one hundred, run some programs, see what happens, make sure they're integrated with sales, baseline some data and then expand as you go.
DA [28:47]:
I love it. I love the advice of starting small. That’s something that I often recommend to people too because there's just so many complicated pieces in a marketing campaign. You did mention something that was really interesting talking about buying and I like this topic because I think as a marketer and any part of a company, any size of a company, so much of your job is communication. Being able to communicate ideas, initiative experiments, things that you want to see.
So you talk about sitting down with the sales team obviously that's where you want to start with, how do you then approach the other parts of the team to keep them excited or to have that buy-in like you said so that you can go full force into that experiment?
HA [29:26]:
Yeah. I mean getting sales buy-in is so valuable and we all know like what motivates a sales team. It's like money and going to president's club making sure that they're like top of the ranks for like revenue generated and having an ABM strategy honestly, helps accelerate that, right. Instead of it taking six months for you to plus enterprise deal, we're hoping it's not going to take like four or three or whatever your baselines are. And so making sure that like you kind of speak their language, right.
Like we're helping you, like help us make it easier for you to close this deal which is one of the kind of tactics being used at Outreach like this is for you, let us help you. And so I would say like that's one of the big things and then consistency on making sure always checking in on what's happening within the accounts that you're running programs against.
So, we actually have a really lovely ABM dashboard that our BI team built for us but we have our target account list and the dashboard shows new marketing capture leads that come in each week on that list. MQL is created or converted within that list, ops and then pipeline in closed one every single week. So, the activity we see when an account is disqualified while we're constantly trying to improve the account list that process and those programs based on some of the leading and lacking measures that we talked about earlier in this episode.
But just consistency, that communication and you can't just kind of line started and let it go, right. You have to constantly be working at it.
DA [31:04]:
I love that. Great answer. So, kind of looking at the final quarter here in 2019, are you excited about any new challenges or opportunities that are opening up and maybe the industry as a whole kind of the sales enablement, sales follow-up?
HA [31:20]:
Yeah. I mean there's so many exciting things like I think sales obviously is a big industry. There are thousands of companies selling into sales functions and so that is certainly always going to be a challenge of how do you set yourself apart from all of the other companies or how do you partner with some of these companies that don't do exactly what you do but sell it to the same personas.
So, that's one thing that's kind of exciting for us we're trying to build out that partner database of that partner model and with integrations. And then making sure we're just developing relationships within the industry but from just an Outreach and a marketing standpoint, I mean we're growing so fast, holding ton of events, we're trying to make sure we're setting ourselves apart from our direct competitors with our positioning content is exciting right now.
Again, it's a big market. It's a little saturated, it's like what is it that you're developing that's going to actually help you with the needle but the big thing is just staying on top of what's happening from the marketing within tech in general and it's always tough to do that especially with how fast every team is moving and sometimes, I feel like we're operating in a vacuum in a good way, right. We're going so fast, we have to like get stuff done but stopping and kind of taking a look at the landscape is just generally exciting for us right now.
DA [32:39]:
That's a good point. I was even going to ask, is there ever like a little lingering fear of maybe like scaling too fast or a growth that's too fast that doesn't allow you to actually like execute the right way on the back end?
HA [32:57]:
Absolutely. I mean even when it comes to product like that's one thing that we're investing so much and now in anticipation of our growth is like possibility, right. Like that's something that you can't deep prioritize and so it's not something that we're thinking about all the time. It's like okay we want to get to these new markets like I'm middle of next year and then this is what we have to invest now from a marketing perspective like to clients.
Like one of the biggest things that keep me up at night right now is just making sure our compliance is operationalized, that we are compliant with CCPA, right. It's going live in January in California, GDPR, things like that is just things like that that happens when you keep scaling and making sure that you kind of have that vision right one, two year and three year out, you can plan for it now and it's always scary but it's good problem to have for sure.
DA [33:58]:
It's definitely good problem to have. Do you think it also forces you to prioritize time and effort to the right places or is it more about we need to make more operational efficiency higher, faster but with better ability to scale those roles up?
HA [34:13]:
Yeah. I mean I think it's both of that. We have very clear priorities for the team and when I first started, it was just we have so much doing we just got to do it like just all these tasks, with shiny object syndrome really bad and we've started taking an approach that's - okay, this corner what do we have to get done in order to scale or in order to do this program next quarter or develop and create more pipeline?
And if things come in the door right that we think is important but it's not actually aligned to what those priorities are, we just say “No”. We're getting to the point where we're saying “No” to things a lot. We're saying “No” to things that might move the needles like one tiny piece of our market or not for the greater one and you just have to maintain focus and our teams are relatively small and that's difficult to do because we all just feel like we don't have a family to get anything done.
But that helps keeping those priorities very clear within the entire organization that was in marketing with just within sales helps maintain that focus.
DA [35:30]:
Totally and you have to remember that sometimes 20% of your effort gives 80% of the results and it's about finding those priorities and I know that feeling of being like overwhelmed and constantly behind, you don't have enough time to get it all done but you guys are doing a great job so you should feel pretty proud. But what I want to do is I want to switch over to our lightning around question. Five quick questions you can answer with the first best thought that comes to mind. You want to get started?
HA [35:54]:
Yeah. Let’s do it.
DA [35:56]:
All right. You got this. All right. What advice would you give for early stage of SaaS companies starting marketing today?
HA [36:03]:
Start small. Don't try to do everything at one time, make sure you can track the effectiveness of your programs and the worst thing you can do is fill a leaky bucket. And to create demand at the top and not have anything anywhere for it to go at the bottom.
DA [36:24]:
I love it. That's a common thing that we talk about all day today. That kind of start simple, start small. I love that. What skill do you think is vital for marketing teams to improve and build on today?
HA [36:34]:
I'm a little bit biased to some advanced marketer but I truly believe that every single marketer on any team needs to understand data, really use data and be able to determine and find your findings from data. That I think we're shifting in that direction but we're not completely there yet. So, whether or not you are a copywriter or you're a brander or your demands on pause, I think everyone needs to have some data chops to be a great marketer.
DA [37:06]:
What is the best educational resource you'd recommend for learning about maybe metrics data marketing around that?
HA [37:16]:
Honestly, your industry peers. I have learned so much from being involved in to managing roundtables in networking with people that do the same thing I do but other companies. I have yet to find like a great book or like a great website or anything that like really can touch on what I'm trying to find so talk to the people in your industry like network and make friends.
DA [37:41]:
Outside of the San Francisco area for people across the United States of the world are there online meet ups or things that you utilize to create these networks or is it all kind of just in person and safer?
HA [37:53]:
Honestly, not a lot of them are in person [Inaudible] is virtual right now. I'm just used to that stuff and all over the place but connect on LinkedIn and a lot of cities do have meet ups for things and I do. I realize that it's a little bit more difficult if you're in a smaller city from the US or anywhere in the world but connect on LinkedIn because people like that. It's like I get requests every now and then it's like “Hey, I also do demand J and like in a smaller company. I would love to like get your feedback on some things”.
And that's honestly the best way to learn like don't worry about doing things face-to-face. If you can, great but just retiling yourself out there a little bit.
DA [38:33]:
Such a good advice. I love that. What about a favorite tool you can't live without?
HA [38:37]:
Oh Bizible. I know I've said it like 12 times so like that's one of the best but of course Outreach as a marketer and I'm not just trying to like plug my product for real but before I had it, I had no visibility to what Bizible is doing. Now, I do and like as a dimension marketer, we hold ourselves accountable for pipeline but marketers don't actually go in and create the pipeline, we have the calls to do it. So, you can get yourself a system where you have that visibility right into the entire funnel not just the marketing model.
DA [39:06]:
I love it and we'll have to get your referral link or Bizible so you can get all the Commissions from there.
HA [39:08]:
Right? I know.
DA [39:13]:
What about a brand business or a team that you admire today?
HA [39:18]:
Yeah. So, one of them that's popping out the [Inaudible] I'll shoot myself in the foot here but they came in top of my mind for some reason is Alice; the new Direct Mail company. They have from the best ABM programs because it gives Outreach recently. I have like people coming to me every day and how can you like to doubt it, Alice. You looked at them but they just got a good brand doing, they've got a good strategy I think and they're going to quite fast as well.
And then every time I think about like great brands and get excited about them, it always comes back to like travel. So, Southwest Airlines Alaska like big companies that have stayed true to themselves, stayed true to their brand and keep their customers just always blow me away. It's just easier said than done.
DA [40:07]:
Absolutely. That's such a huge piece of creating a great business, loyal fans and followers. That brand, that identity and the culture, that kind of keeps it all together but that's awesome. Harmony, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, this was fantastic. You're such a great guest and shared a ton of great knowledge. So, thank you so much.
HA [40:24]:
I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's been fun.
DA [40:28]:
It has and we'll talk to you soon and I appreciate it.
That was an awesome episode, right? Big shout out and a big thank you to Harmony and the entire Outreach team for allowing us to learn more about what is working over there at their unicorn company. What an exciting achievement to have they're growing so fast but do incredible stuff so definitely a company to check out, look at what they're doing and learn from this episode. (...)
About Harmony Anderson:
