DA (02:49):
Hi Marcy. Thanks so much for joining me today on the SaaS breakthrough podcast. How are you doing today?

MD (02:53):
I'm great. Thank you for having me.

DA (02:56):
Yeah, I'm really excited to have you and Vidyard, an amazing company in the SaaS space would love to learn about some of the things that you guys are doing in the company. Some experiments, initiatives, lots to go through there. Before we do that, why don't we take a moment to talk a little bit about what Vidyard is, when it was founded, who your customers are and what you're doing uniquely in the marketplace?

MD (03:18):
So Vidyard was founded in 2010, really to help businesses and the professionals within those businesses connect with their audiences in whole new ways, through creating, engaging, and measurable video experiences. The video platform is really changing the way that businesses communicate by making it super easy, to add video content into emails, into sales outreach, onto your website, really anywhere that you need your video to be. Our customers are sales and marketing professionals that really value the personal touch that that video brings to their communications and outreach strategies. And in terms of what makes it unique is, you know, this has been such an interesting year. I think that where we all really know that video is the next best thing to being there in person, we know how video builds rapport, it adds a face to a name and it makes everything more personal.

MD (04:13):
But I think we're also aware just how important live video calls have been for us in our day to day over the last year. And how they can, if we're being honest, really be a lot, right? Like zoom fatigue can be real. So this is where prerecorded or asynchronous video really shines. It provides all the benefits of video, but it's better designed to handle today's real world needs, both by providing the best by your experience, as well as the tools for marketing and salespeople to be the most successful in their jobs. For sales and marketing people, it gives them the tools to use videos in one to many distribution. So think like more produced, higher quality, but maybe a little bit more generic brand type videos or even one-to-one videos that are highly personalized and targeted. So here think, you know, selfie videos or screen captures, or even a hybrid of both where there's both, you're screen recording as well as yourself on the video, and then make those videos easily shareable via all of those communication methods that we just talked about. And finally having all of those interactions and engagement with your video content, be trackable and integrated into your sales and marketing tech stack is super powerful in today's remote world.

DA (05:25):
It's a really great concept. I was introduced to your founding team or your CEO at a SaaS event a few years ago, and really got to know the video product. It's really funny. I was like my introduction into SaaS and marketing was in a company about 10 years ago and they were doing what Vidyard does, but in the very early stages, like before people were doing video. Most were using like flip cameras and like cell phones even, didn't have good video yet. It just wasn't ready for the market. People weren't ready for video. It was a hard thing to sell. It was tough to get into email. The results were great because no one was using it yet, but really we had a hard time kind of breaking into the market. And it's funny because now it's such a great method. It's so accepted now. It's a great way to use it for your sales team, your sales enablement team, all that kind of great stuff. So I would love to know quickly from your, from your perspective, like what would be an example of a powerful campaign that you could run with Vidyard?

MD (06:23):
Yeah. Oh boy. There's so many. I mean, as I just mentioned there, you know, you could be looking at this from a sales outreach perspective. So we see a lot of take-up in the one-to-one video that I was talking about with SDRs or BDRs or even account executives who are working one-to-one selfie recorded videos into their outbound cadence. And that's just, that's just sort of an evergreen, highly scalable method that you can do for maybe the ones that you don't need to have the individualized contact with or touches with. And then in your shortlist from a sales perspective, if you're, you know, you say your top 50 accounts, you have an opportunity to create one-to-one videos, really, really personalized, targeted interactions with them where maybe you do a bit of research and find out via LinkedIn or through other, you know through their own social platforms, what they're interested in. Maybe they love sporting teams. Maybe they've got their pet, you know, in all their Instagram posts and reach out to them with one of those targeted videos to really get their attention and make that personal connection.

DA (07:29):
Yeah, such a good idea. I was going to ask you for any tips on that research, and I think you kind of went through a lot of that stuff. And two episodes ago, I mentioned a guy like an outbound email that I thought was really well done by an SDR who saw that I liked wine. And literally the email was just asking about opinions of wine and then followed it up with some, some great like outreach. I thought it was a really good segue. So you can do very similar stuff with the research that you're doing with that video, but just more of a personalized approach to it with that video aproach.

MD (07:58):
Yeah, absolutely. And the real, the real beauty behind these is like you said, the freedom, right? You can, you can go as personal from what you can find, or you can go as generic as, as what works for you and the need to record something super highly produced or perfect, isn't really there, right? Cause the authenticity comes through in the recording of you and yourself and what you're doing to make yourself more familiar and personal, which is just another benefit of that video connection.

DA (08:30):
What I'm hearing more and more is it's better to have kind of that rought style because then it feels personal where it's like, if it's really professionally done, you can tell like, Hey, they took a lot of time to do, this is a marketing video versus like, Hey, this is someone that shot, you know, a private video for you on their phone, or just took a minute to say hello to me or something like that. So, so that's fantastic. And when did you actually join the team there at Vidyard?

MD (08:51):
Yeah, I joined, I had to actually look that up because I was, I was just speaking to somebody last week about this exact same thing. And I couldn't remember, it feels like a year, but actually it's been close to four years.

DA (09:02):
Wow. Wow. Well, four years in a SaaS is like

MD (09:07):
A year, right. That's why it feels like a year.

DA (09:10):
A thousand years or one year. You don't really know. It's like time, time loses shape there. So you've been there for a while now four years. Were you part of the process to find product market fit? Has it evolved over time? You're talking about a solution that fits every business or any business that has outreach of sales and a lot of other varieties of reasons for outreach video, but how do you, how do you market this? How have you guys really figured out the languaging, the angles? Who are you going after?

MD (09:39):
Yeah, that's been a really interesting evolution. When I started, we were predominantly marketing at that time, still to marketing professionals who were looking to host video content on their website and, you know, started use it as evergreen lead generation content, which Vidyard of course has a great job in doing. But while I think it was right around when I started actually, launched the screen recording component to this, to the platform and since then the product market fit has just, it's just taken off because now suddenly, like you said, there is the ability to not only incorporate the highly produced videos, like the marketing videos you're talking about into all your communication strategies, but now you can also create your own and anybody can do this, right? So it's no longer just marketing folks or people in the content team. It's the SDRs and the VDRs.

MD (10:29):
And we're actually seeing a huge uptake also just around internal communications. So especially in this remote world where we are trying to avoid getting on as many zoom meetings as we can. We've started flipping a lot of meetings by recording internal communication style videos and sort of getting ahead of the meeting content, distributing that in advance and using the live time for more one-to-one conversation or resolution of what we need to work through. And you can really see how with the worldwide pandemic and the complete move to remote work, how the need for that personal communication, especially for sales folks has really escalated. So now everyone is literally grounded and looking for ways to stay in touch with our customers and our prospects. And also not only to make those initial connections. Cause I think we've been talking a lot about using video sort of more in prospecting and outbound, but it's also an excellent tool for maintaining connections and for moving deal cycles forward in a way that you don't have to rely on establishing meeting times that work for everyone. Especially as you get into larger stakeholder committee type sales, where there's multiple people at the table and multiple people who need to receive information, like it's pretty hard to coordinate meeting times in a remote world. Where now you can, as an account executive, you can record a video go over maybe an update or do a proposal overview and have that same video content be distributed amongst the wider stakeholder community without ever having to secure a time or, you know, get on an airplane.

DA (12:05):
Yeah, that's a great point. You know, having all of those multiple touch points in a sale, it can be so hard to get wrangle everyone together on those different time zones in the remote work environment, answer all those questions, make sure you have all the right people. So I could really see how asynchronous video and asynchronous is a word you used earlier, I think is really going to be like the core part of the whole world's movement into remote work. And I've been a big believer in remote work for a long time, but I think, you know, we're still in a lot of ways stuck in synchronous communication. And there's reason for that. There's still reason internally to have those things externally to have those things. But asynchronous communication really being kind of the future. And the other thing that you mentioned is, is video is really a relationship builder. That is at its core what it's, what it is about, like building relationships. We do that with webinars. You guys use that with (inaudible) videos. But I think now more than ever, especially in a busier B2B environment and you know, people needing relationships more than ever, it's a great medium to use. So let's actually flip over to some initiatives experiments that you guys are doing to get figured out in this crazy time right now. I know virtual events have been a big part of 2020 to 2021. You know, it was really happening because of the pandemic in 2020. Right. A lot of offline events got canceled, got pushed to virtual events. How have you all adapted your approach to events and how have you seen, you know, some strategies that have started to work really well for you?

MD (13:30):
Yeah, for sure. So all I'm going to share with you a perspective on our own event, as well as our event strategy for paid or third-party sponsorship of events. The both have, as you would imagine, fundamentally changed over the last year. It's been a crazy crazy year for events strategies. The first part is around our own events. So we in the past ran our own events, which was called, is called Fast Forward. And we would run it once, maybe twice a year, depending on demand and what was going on with our customers and in the market. Fast Forward is really sort of a hands-on tips and tricks, best practices using video throughout sales and marketing and a little bit of thought leadership and aspirational content mixed in there as well. So like I said, we'd been running one, maybe two of these a year.

MD (14:23):
And with the move to online events, the demand for our very first scheduled Fast Forward was just through the roof. Something we'd never seen before. And so we made a decision to move to a quarterly cadence for Fast Forward. And, you know, honestly the volume is not slowing down. We've easily doubled regular quarterly registration over what our annual registration was. We're actually seeing a continued increase in the conversion rate from webinar registrants to attendees and we're hovering around 50% right now, which is pretty good. Given the, yeah, I mean, just given the volume increases on the one hand and then also the increase in conversion rate is, is remaining strong. So it's been a really great year for us from managing our own events. And one of the things that, Oh, somebody, the person who runs my demand gen team thought up one day was the simple addition of on the registration form for Fast Forward of adding a request a demo check box to that form.

MD (15:27):
And just through the simple act. So it's just an optional check box. You don't have to fill it out one way or another if you don't want to, but in order to register for the event, you obviously would see the option of requesting a demo. And through the simple addition of this little check box, we had 17% of all registrants on an ongoing basis choose to speak to a salesperson and receive a demo either in advance of the event or right after. Which as you can imagine has resulted in thousands of new demo requests, which as you know, are very, very high intent folks who are wanting to get a better understanding of the product. So something as simple as adding a checkbox to the registration form has just been a total game changer for us.

DA (16:08):
How did those demos do, did you find that they were as qualified as someone else that was on the website you know, actively searching for your product or actively doing investigations and looking at like, you know, the procurement process or were they kind of colder leads that were still going through and learning about your product?

MD (16:25):
Yeah, no, that's a great question. So they are not as high intent as somebody who would check a normal request to demo better placed CTA on the website, but they're still five, five times as regular or sorry, more likely to convert than just someone who attended the conference as a whole. So somewhere in between. Yeah.

DA (16:46):
That was a huge number. So huge numbers. Now you also mentioned, you know, incredible attendance rates, congratulations. You're seeing more and more webinars out there. So you're doing some amazing things to get people to show up. You're increasing your registration numbers. What are you doing to drive registrants to these events? It sounds like you're doing an amazing job of demand gen there.

MD (17:04):
Yeah. I mean, I would love to take all the credit for that. And, you know, we are doing some things, I think though that, like I'd said before, I think the focus on providing solutions to the sales audience in this time of remote work in and of itself is just a huge, you know, coming back to product market fit. I think that we have an actual tool that solves a problem that people are facing today and that just obviously cannot be beat. So I think a lot of really strong messaging around that, how we solve problems and how easy it is for those people to get up and running has been key. And I think just being more prevalent in those communities, also working very closely with a lot of thought leaders and sales trainers to make sure that people know that there is, there's a solution for the pain that they're feeling right now.

DA (17:55):
So very thought leadership oriented event. Content itself, are you focusing on case studies, new information coming out, new strategies? Are you just bringing on other thought leaders, like you said, other sales leaders and just talking about generic strategies, I'm just trying to get to the core of like what kind of content is working best right now.

MD (18:13):
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, if I'm being honest, it's a bit of a mix. I would say it actually leans more towards the practical. There's a lot of people who video in sales and marketing is still a new tool, and they're looking for easy ways to get started and understanding how to get started. So a lot of it is still very hands-on content, you know, from something as simple as getting comfortable on camera, right? How to look your best on camera right through to here are seven amazing email templates that you should be using to incorporate video into. Here are five video scripts, just the real nuts and bolts to show people how easy it is for them to get started and starting to make those personal connections.

DA (18:55):
That's a really good answer. That's very helpful. And what about engagement? How are you keeping people engaged to this virtual event? Are you guys doing anything fun throughout the event or during the sessions?

MD (19:07):
I think, I mean, we're really focused on making sure and this would, this actually comes into the second part of what I want to talk about in terms of our own event strategy for paid events is we're, we're really focused on making sure that there are people available to have the right conversations in all the communication channels that are open to us throughout these virtual events, because that's all we have now, right. And we're all, we're all humans. We all want to interact and network. So really making sure that the people who we have engaging in our own events, through the chats and through the third party events are focused on just that being there, being present, being part of the sessions, you know, being problem solvers, and trying to help people resolve what, what problems or questions that they have in the moment.

DA (20:00):
When you're game planning internally, are you sitting down with your team and you're just designating who needs to go to each session? Are you pre-writing questions that they should be talking about or like, how do you get your team actually prepped for that to make sure that they're fully there and present?

MD (20:13):
Yes to both, honestly we don't end up having to use a lot of our pre-written content in general, the topics are pretty engaging both in terms of the ones that we're, that we're owning and the ones that were participating in externally. But yes, we definitely sit down. For third-party events, we don't put emphasis on making sure that someone's in the booth. Again, we make sure that we have people out in the sessions, engaging with the content being part of the conversation. Because that is that's, what's really missing today I think from the in-person events, that's what people are missing, are those, those opportunities to connect and have conversations. And so we're trying to replicate that as much as possible in a virtual world. Yeah. The other, the other thing that we're doing and again, it sounds super simple, but for these third party events, most of them have an opportunity to record in your bio information about who you are. And we've been using a lot of video there again, because again, people want to make those connections. They want to see feel like they know somebody or they've met somebody after a show is over. And so just by the simple act of, rather than just putting a text update in your bio to record a little video, you have an opportunity to go in a little bit more detail and show a little bit more personality about who you are and what you are and what you're hoping to get out of the event.

DA (21:32):
Love that. Yeah, that's a good one. And I'm just, as you're saying that I'm kind of thinking in my head, like for the internal ones that you're running the ones for yourself, you know, breakout rooms or follow-up events for those people that have questions, or you want to continue a conversation, you could really run another small kind of session with someone on your team to continue those conversations outside of it. But it's all, again, relationship building, thought leadership, I love it. And it's very similar to our next topic. Kind of moving into content marketing. It's something that we talk on this show about a ton. It's just such an important part of the B2B SaaS marketers toolkit. But I would love to hear what you guys are doing with content marketing. Everybody's doing it in their own unique way. They're really leveraging different channels. And I know you're doing some unique stuff with your website and your knowledge base. Talk to me about that.

MD (22:23):
Yeah, absolutely. So honestly I feel like I could talk your ear off for the next three hours and all the experimentation that we've had with content over the last year. Something near and dear, but this one this example that I will give you is I hope super actionable and maybe something that not everyone has thought of. Is super easy to do and definitely worth considering. We had realized that our knowledge base. So, you know, our support site, basically where we put all the information on how-to's for our product was capturing a lot of long tail keywords things like how do I switch the front facing camera on my Microsoft surface tablet? So very long tail. And we also knew that the majority of the traffic coming into the knowledge base was coming from organic search. So through some data comparisons between that and our active user counts, it became clear that a good portion of that search traffic was not actually coming from our current Vidyard users.

MD (23:25):
These were, these were prospects who were just searching for random things like how to switch to their front facing camera on their tablet. So we decided to run a test and add a signup for Vidyard free call to action on the bottom of every knowledge base article. So super simple. And this resulted in a 24% increase in signups coming from the knowledge base. Now there isn't a landslide of traffic being referred from the knowledge base to our website on any given day. So the impact to the signups themselves was not massive, but given that, you know, honestly there was less than an hour's worth of work to make this change. It's just another really great evergreen channel of sign-ups for us and an opportunity for people who are searching for things on the internet to have maybe a problem of theirs solved by signing up for our free Vidyard account and being able to start their own recordings and sharing of videos right away.

DA (24:25):
Yeah, that's amazing. And I think you're, you're kind of talking about a couple of things, which is like finding, finding low hanging fruit within your marketing process that you can utilize to drive more traffic and obviously to serve the customer base better and to serve your audience better by getting them through to a, you know, a product that solves their problem. But you're also talking about finding those low hanging fruit. Like what caused you to even look at the analytics and your knowledge base? How often are you auditing these different pieces to figure out where to even experiment, because there's so many places that you can do that. And there's so many actions that you can do in marketing. You know, my question, which would be from my team is like, when do we do an experiment like this? When are we finding, or how do we find those types of low-hanging fruit items?

MD (25:14):
Yeah. I mean, I think it's a great question because it's definitely a trade off between focusing on, you know, the business of every day, right. And, freeing up the time and the mindset to find opportunities that are not part of the everyday. So I don't, you know, I don't have a 20% of your time should be spent on this kind of answer. I think this, this comes from, this one in particular comes from a fairly regular analysis on what keywords we're seeing, performing well, including the outliers, and then sort of doing some work backs from there.

DA (25:51):
Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. That's a great idea. Do you guys do that audit like on a monthly candence?

MD (25:57):
I would like to say yes, but honestly I'm not sure that, like I said, it's, it's a mindset shift to be able to focus on the, what ifs versus the known ones that, you know, you need to do in order to hit the targets. Right? These are, these are the hacks that provide the unknown growth opportunities. So I don't have a exact number in mind, but I do recommend for sure, making sure that someone on your team has an interest in this type of thing and is making sure they allocate some of their time to some more free thinking.

DA (26:34):
Yeah. I'm asking all these tough questions because we're in the process of possibly thinking about a demand gen manager or content manager, and I'm just selfishly asking these questions, you know, I want to make sure we bake it into our processes, but I think the mindset thing is the key kind of answer there, which is, we just got to have the mindset of when we do do the evaluations to also, you know, be open to those more experimental options or more creativity and not just the day-to-day run the same thing every day. And we're just like looking at one set number kind of thing.

MD (27:05):
Yeah, for sure. And I think there's also, I mean, there's all sorts of frameworks that can be applied, but I think one of the keys to this particular experiment was the knowledge of, we could make the change with very little work. Right. And if the impact was not huge, that's okay. Because very little work was lost for it. And if the impact was beneficial, then that's great.

DA (27:26):
Do you have a framework that you're using to kind of judge the different experiments? Is it like the ice score?

MD (27:33):
Yeah. Yeah. The ice score. Yeah. Perfect.

DA (27:35):
That's what we're using as well. And it's obviously a tough one. Sometimes you're also making a gamble on someone that had or something that has possibly a higher impact you know, lower effort you know, less, you know, there's not much cost in it, but you know, a lot of it, like you said, is mindset, just having the ability to say, okay, this one may not work, but you know, it's low effort and we'll try something different and then you're just learning from it. But that's fantastic. Now I want to switch back to actual video content. Something that we started the conversation with, and I know, you know, most of our audience here probably understands the power of video and how explosive it is to build those relationships, to reach your prospects and do all that great stuff in marketing and sales. I know you've had a great case study actually with your product in SalesLoft one of your customers and it involved an SDR as part of their outreach process, what were they actively using to get such great results?

MD (28:27):
Yeah, for sure. So this is a fun story because the star or the story's name is Ellie Twigger and Ellie is an SDR, as you mentioned at SalesLoft and Ellie has tons of personality and great insights. So she is an SDRR. So her job, as you know, is to go out prospect and start conversations and introduce SalesLoft to prospects. And once an account has been qualified, she passes it off to an IE. So Ellie has developed what she calls Ellie's hexagon theory, and sales methodology in which she believes that to be successful as an SDR, you need to connect with your prospects in six different ways. And for her, this means using every tool in her sales arsenal, from email to phone calls, to LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera, with each of these connections with each of these outreaches, Ellie also makes a point of introducing herself and our company and the value that SalesLoft, her company can bring to the customer just to ensure that she's got a real consistency of message.

MD (29:29):
So as an SDR, Ellie owns 2000 accounts and she can't possibly personalize outreach to all 2000 of those. So as you would expect, she segmented them in tiers from one, two, three. For her tier ones, which she works daily. She uses, as we were mentioning before a hyper-personalized approach to her video. So she, she will do the research. She will find out if you like drinking wine, as you mentioned, or if you're a beer fan or whatever, whatever it is that it would make a personal connection with you and record these hyper-personalized videos and share them with her connections. Now for her tiers two to three, it's not feasible that she does this because there's thousands of them. So she has either her own created videos or marketing type videos that she uses that are a bit more generic, but still quite powerful and on message that she works into her cadence in order to work through the tiers two to threes.

MD (30:23):
So at the time of the last time that we interviewed Ellie, she was very successful. She was 120% over target, and she was one of SalesLoft's top performing SDRs. And, you know, we talked about this a fair bit already, I think, but the key to this is that this is totally attainable and doable for anyone who is listening to this podcast, that you can go get free screen recording tool, like Vidyard, and there are of course, others out there. And start this approach from personalized video recording for your prospects right now, today, just go create an intro video or incorporate some of the marketing videos that already exist into your outbound cadences.

DA (31:05):
That's amazing. That's a great story. And I know I'm sure at SalesLoft being a top SDR is very tough and it probably takes a lot of like looking around at what your colleagues are doing and trying to find what they're not doing and doing it better. You know, are you guys working a lot with your customers to try to find out who's doing what, do you utilize that customer generated content? Do you bring these people also onto your events?

MD (31:29):
Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think Ellie was definitely a part of our last Fast Forward. We worked very closely with our customers to highlight the content that they're already creating and how they're sharing it, getting right down to like, you know, in Ellie's case, I think she shared with us the actual cadence that she uses and what each step looks like. And then we can share that out with our, with our sales customers as well. So they don't have to start from scratch.

DA (31:55):
That's amazing. I think those types of personalized, like thought leadership stories are also so great for your events. Cause it it's similar to this podcast, right? It's like the tactical real world what's happening right now. How are you doing it and how is it working? And eventually everyone's going to copy her her system and she's going to have to tweak and change it, which is how innovation happens. So that's great. And then looking back over the past four years with Vidyard or one year, any hard lessons learned that didn't work out as expected, any opportunities you felt you were missed and you kind of look back on as a learning lesson?

MD (32:30):
I think probably keeping it in the last year. I mean, there's lots of lessons over the last four years, but I think the pace of change of what has happened through the pandemic. I wasn't expecting. And I think if I could do that one over, I think we lost a bit of time there as, as we were recalibrating what this meant and what it would mean to our customers and to the market. However, I'm pretty sure I'm probably not alone in that sentiment.

DA (33:01):
I don't think anyone knew what to do or what was going to be like. And you know, companies like us got a lot of tailwind and we didn't really know how to react. Is it gonna stay? Is it gonna roll back? That's what our biggest fear was, was everything was going to roll back. So it was hard to like really invest in that stuff kind of looking forwardnow, would you recommend for people or advise people to, you know, make quicker pivots or decisions in these big kind of macro moments?

MD (33:25):
Yeah. I mean, again, if I had the answer to that one wholly, but I think personally in what we're doing within my team is just expecting, really expecting the continued disruption and uncertainty and looking for the opportunities that that brings, because I just think we're still, we're still learning. Right. We still don't know what opportunities are going to come up for all of us in the world of B2B as a result of what's going on right now.

DA (33:51):
Yeah, absolutely. We just have to be flexible, adaptable, and ready for change. And I think that's actually a good lesson for everything in life. Right.

MD (33:59):
Totally.

DA (33:59):
But but fantastic. What I want to do now is I want to jump over to our lightning round questions. Five quick questions that you can answer with the first best thought that comes to mind. You ready to get started?

MD (34:10):
Let's go.

DA (34:11):
All right, you got this. What advice would you give for early stage SaaS companies starting marketing today?

MD (34:19):
Today's is a good one. So I think coming back to what we were just talking about, I think it's about change. I think that you have to approach change as an opportunity in that the next thing might be a lot better than what it is you're focused on today. And that that's just a great opportunity and you need to embrace it.

DA (34:37):
You've talked a lot about mindset today and I think that's, that's exactly what you're talking about there, just that mindset of being adaptable. So I love that. What skill do you think is vital for marketing teams to improve and build on today?

MD (34:49):
Yeah, well, you know, it's one of the things that I've been thinking a lot on and unfortunately I don't have a full answer yet, but I'm getting close I feel. Is that we're really in an interesting period for marketing right now. And it has to do with this merging of B2C tactics and B2B realities. So for me, what that means is there's a lot of, you know, we have a lot of, we have all the data, we have all the data of what's going on and I think we can, we can, over-rotate too much on the data and lose the personal touch of traditional marketing, where we spent a lot of time understanding the customer and the customer problems and who they were and what they ate for breakfast. And I think we're at a stage now where we need to, as marketers really balance those two approaches, the B2B and B2C, and those who out that balance are really going to be the winners.

DA (35:41):
Well, when you, when you get more on that answer and you figure it out further and further, you gotta let us know. I want to hear that. That sounds super interesting. And I agree with you completely. What about a best educational resource you'd recommend for learning about marketing or growth?

MD (35:54):
I think this depends a lot on your personality type and how you like to learn and who you like to learn from. So personally I, when I want to learn something new or understand a new area of the market, I'll spend a lot of time reaching out to my peers and asking them, finding people that they will recommend that I can talk to. Just as a starting point to sort of frame me diving deeper into the research from that, from that point. So I highly recommend starting with your peers, people you respect in the market. And from there, obviously moving on to the appropriate webinars or even Google. And then once you have a bit of a framework, because if you're starting off fresh, it can be pretty broad on any topic that you're wanting to look into. There's of course, you know, Moz, Reforge, HubSpot has tons of great, great content all the time. But I would definitely start with peers to at least get you pointed in the right direction.

DA (36:52):
Do you have any Slack groups or like private communities that you work within to have those conversations?

MD (36:57):
No. Mine tends to be more one to one.

DA (37:01):
Amazing. Yeah, I think that's such a good answer. What about a favorite tool you can't live without?

MD (37:06):
Well, I'm going to have to say Vidyard as a shameless plug. But honestly I use, I use video, you know, probably three times a day I'm recording videos for people or watching other people's videos. But other than Vidyard I would say the favorite tool is, especially in this remote work world is my Title. It's my music service that I listen to all day. That's what keeps me focused and motivated.

DA (37:33):
I've never heard that.

MD (37:34):
Yeah. I think it's just another Spotify. I didn't choose it. And if I'm being honest, it's my husband's. And I just remember, but you know, it does, it does the job.

DA (37:42):
No, I think it's very interesting how important music is in our lives. Especially like focus music when you're working, have that flow. I love it. That's actually a really good answer. What about a brand business or team that you admire today?

MD (37:59):
I have to say, and this might be a little bit both not surprising and maybe a little bit controversial is Slack. So as much as Slack is the bane of my personal existence in terms of all the communications that I'm part of all day, every day, I just can't imagine working without it anymore. And then when I look at what they've done from a product market fit and a marketing perspective, a go to market strategy is just amazing for what they've pulled off in a B2B space.

DA (38:31):
It's very true. I mean, I have such a love-hate relationship with Slack. Well, I think they've done an amazing job in B2B. Like you said, like just fantastic, incredible. But we also mentioned a ton about asynchronous communication today and they are the antithesis of that in a lot of ways. Right. They're kind of like forcing the synchronous communication and but like you said, it's so built in now. It's like, I can't imagine running our business without it.

MD (38:54):
Yeah. I think, I think it's an interesting, we moved to remote and we took all our tools and we just flip them to be remote tools. And I don't think that they were all necessarily intended for 24/7 communication. Right.

DA (39:11):
Yeah. And I think Basecamp is trying to be that new voice of like, Hey, if you're doing a remote company, you can do it this way with asynchronous communication. But when you build into Slack, like we have, you guys probably have, it's such a hard thing to move away from. So they probably have amazing retention there. You know, obviously their numbers show that, but Marcy, I just want to say thank you so much for jumping on with me today for coming on the show on the SaaS Breakthrough podcast, talking about Vidyard, sharing such great experiments, you know, I'm really wishing you guys all the best you're in a great position moving forward and have a wonderful 2021.

MD (39:43):
It was great to be here. Thank you for having me.

DA (39:45):
Yeah, it was my pleasure. Thank you again. And we'll talk to you soon. Have a great day.

MD (39:50):
Bye.
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