Transcript
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Welcome back to be tob growth.
I'm Logan lyles with sweet fish media.
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I'm joined today by Jim Rudden.
He's executive vice president and CMO over at
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upland software. Jim, how's it
going today, sir? It's going great,
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Logan. Thanks for having me.
Absolutely Jim. We're going to be
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talking about managing the entire customer life
cycle, really marketings impact in the entire
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revenue team's impact on that and how
we can better aligned between CS, sales,
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marketing, all of that. For
a little bit of context and why
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you're the guy talking about this today, Jim, give us a little bit
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of your background and what you in
the upland team or up to these days.
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Yeah, look, and so I've
been really my whole career, almost
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thirty years, in enterprise software.
I started on building and installing software,
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then moved over in the selling and
then for the last little over a decade
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been on the marketing side. Today
I'm with a company called Upland software,
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and upland has really four different areas
that we sell software into. The first
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that we're going to talk a lot
about today is enterprise sales and marketing cloud
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and that's really focused on companies that
have more complex sales cycles can a bigger
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ticket items where you really need to
synchronize and organize actions across kind of the
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whole revenue team. Second area for
us is what we call the customer experience
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management, which, of course in
itself is very broad. Our particular area
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of focuses around business consumer companies and
within that mobile such an important the mobile
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platform such an important way of interacting
with today's consumers, and so we have
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lots of technologies around kind of the
mobile customer experience management. Then we go
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to the back office and we go
to project and I management teams who are
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coordinating expense and projects for Really Complex
digital transformations. And then finally we have
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a group called our document workflow cloud, and you know, it's fascinating over
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there. It's been a three decade
journey of going from paper to the cloud
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and we have some really great technologies
to do that. So it's pretty broad
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span in our portfolio. Obviously,
today's conversation was zeroing in on what we
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for short, call the the EESNCLOUD
enter price, sales and marketing, and
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that's where you'll find products like post. I know you've had them on previously.
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You know, altifies another company that
we acquired last year that does a
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lot is kind of at the center
of our thesis in this in this market
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around coordinating activity because across revenue teams
and so that's kind of the overall you
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know, opens a public company coming
up on three hundred million dollars at nine
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hundred plus employees around the world.
That's the background. Absolutely. So let's
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talk about some of the the key
areas that you guys are focusing on in
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the sales and marketing space, from
marketing automation, customer advocacy, customer revenue
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optimization. You know, we're used
to, you know, the new Crro
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of chief revenue officer or but customer
revenue optimization is not something that gets talked
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about a ton. Can you kind
of unpack that term as you guys see
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it and share with us a little
bit about where your customers are improving the
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customer life cycle specifically in this area? Yeah, I think a couple thoughts
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on that, you know. The
first is, you know, all of
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us in the considered purchase space arena
are trying to move from the transactional to
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the relational. We're trying to have
that long term relationship with the customer,
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and so that's that's kind of one
of the imperatives. And when you start
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to say that, then you start
to think about the fact that they're going
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to be multiple functions that are taking
the lead in any given moment when we're
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interacting with the customer or different members
of that customer team. And so really
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what we're focused on is is how
how can we synchronize our teams so that
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they're they're taking the lead at the
right time and bringing their their expertise and
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what they have to share for that
customer at the right time, you know,
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and these these relational sales, many
touch points, many different team members
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involved, many different levels of depth
of the conversation, and so synchronizing that
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it's more than just you know,
it's not a relay race, right,
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it's kind of a it's more I
mean this is it's not really rugby's not
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the right necessarily metaphor as well,
but but the idea is much more of
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a team mindset where the right folks
are stepping for the right time. Yeah,
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absolutely, Lay speaking of a team
mindset. I like that analogy of
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it's not a relay race, it's
not like you know you have marketing here
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and then the handoff to sales and
then you know they work that deal because
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in enterprise sales or even just mid
market be to be, it's becoming more
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complex, with not only more digital
touch points but more team members on your
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side who are impacting the customer experience. What are some of the things that
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you guys are seeing amidst your customers
gym in how they're getting those teams aligned
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from marketing to sales to customer success? Some some organizations now have a dedicated
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customer experience that kind of overlays customer
success, because I think a lot of
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people, you know, interchange those
terms, but to me they're a little
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bit different, right. Yeah,
I think so. I guess the way
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I would in the way we tend
to come at that Logan is is a
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little bit less from the kind of
functional siload handoff perspective and a little bit
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more from from the point of view
what is the core competence? What's the
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reason for this area to be or
this function to be involved in the concern
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the customer life cycle. One of
the greatest I got to work with a
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really fantastic worldwide consumer brand, one
of their mantras for every segment that they
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delivered products into was no me to
serve me. And internally they would always
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push each other to say do we
know this customer? And then, and
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then what is unique about us in
terms of how we're going to serve that
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customer? And so, you know, when I think about the synchronization of
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different teams, my point of view
is marketings role here is to bring forward
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or to unearth the expertise that it
sits in our business, and that expertise
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might be with our product experts,
that expertise might be with the people who
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are actually going to install the solution
or have installed the solution. It might
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be with sales teams who have seen
these scenarias before. Marketings job is really
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to unearth those stories and then package
that that together, and so that's that's
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kind of one element of it.
I think sales role is to participate that
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and help share what they've learned and
what they know about the marketplace so that
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again, marketing can package that.
And then the kind of the customer success.
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This I always tell marketers that this
is where you should spend almost the
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majority of your time is talking with
the teams that are actually helping the customers
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install the software. What were their
expectations? What are their challenges? What
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if they told their management teams they're
going to go achieve? That is fruitful
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information because it it brings forward and
it packages this expertise, which is,
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at the end of the day,
in a relational sale. The reason you
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ask for more interaction with the sales
team, the reason you ask for more
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interaction with a customer success team,
is they're going to make you smarter.
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You feel like reaching out to them
is going to give you better insight than
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you had just by googling things,
and so I think that's what we're trying
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to do with synchronizing revenue teams,
is making sure that we have the right
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expert with a point of view and
depth of experience for that customer at the
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right time. That's you have to
know that customer, you have to understand
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what the account relationships are. You
don't bring your deepest dive person to a
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meeting with the CMO, but similarly
you don't send a salesperson who has limited
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product knowledge to a group that wants
to talk about configuration. So that's the
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synchronization we talked about. That demands
account planning, it demands the right packaged
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content. You know, it demands
that you show up as an expert again
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and again. Yeah, absolutely.
It reiterates that Monterre you were talking about
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know me to serve me, which
kind of leads to if you know me
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in order to serve me, then
you know how to serve me. and
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You provided some really good examples there
of not sending the wrong team member into
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the wrong situation right where where they're
just going to come out of the Lions
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Ten, you know, Mard and
torn up and all those sorts of things.
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I love what you said there as
well. Moving from transactional to relational,
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and you mentioned a lot their jim
the relationship between the different departments marketing
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talking to the folks who are interacting
with the customers at different touch points.
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Can you dive a little bit more
deeply into that, either within your own
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team or some of your customers in
the way that they are getting marketing to
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more regularly have those fruitful conversations because, as you mentioned, that's kind of
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where those gold nuggets lie. It
might be product, it might be your
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implementation team, it might be your
customer success team in ways that they can
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kind of pull out some of that
knowledge and then use that to empower those
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teams more curious how you're seeing some
teams in more complex environments do that on
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a regular basis and just make that
part of their normal day to day.
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Well, I think they're established rhythms
and then there are rhythms that you need
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to create, and one of the
more established rhythms, certainly in the software
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arena, is that your product marketing
group is going to interact with the product
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management team and really understand, you
know, what's coming down the pike on
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the product. WHO's that relevant?
To wise that relevant? Who of our
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existing customers asked for that? How
is this going to benefit them? And
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that that is also, as all, really great insightful information that you could
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package and deliver back out to the
market. For customers like that, you
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know that is always going to be
a bit more aspirational. You know that
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here's what we hope and what we
believe the product is going to be.
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I think you have to create a
cycle, and this really for I think,
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be to be marketers, and particularly
and kind of software field that I'm
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deepest in, of sitting down with
your customer success teams on a regular cadence
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as they're deploying and saying what are
you hearing? What do? What do
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we think? was going to go
well? That didn't go well. What's
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been a surprise? That went well. You know, look, and we
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were we had a sales kickoff this
year actually in this that you some cloud
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group and one of the customers was
up on stage and the salesperson asked them,
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Hey, what's the best bit of
content I could send to you?
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You know you're a real expert in
sales enablement and you're a Multifi customer for
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a long time now. What's the
type of content that breaks through to you?
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And this leader, who's leader for
sales enablement for thousands of sales reps,
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he said, you know, the
most the best thing you could send
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me is, how's my year going
to go if when I sign on the
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DDTTED line and I started sawing this
software and three months in I don't have
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the adoption I want? What do
I do then? And so that just
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encapsulated from me. The way you
win, the way you distinguish yourself with
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customers, the way you bring your
expertise forward is you you articulate for them
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it's not a perfect world and when
things go sideways, here's what that's going
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to look like and here's how you
have to respond. And the only repository
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of information for that in a company
are the people, the customer success teams,
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the consulting teams that are doing this
work. And so I think it's
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a cycle that I don't see exist
in a lot of companies. It is
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marketing going and looking not just for
the case study of we we got for
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x Roi on this software, but
actually asking the question where do things go
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wrong and what do you do when
things go wrong? Right and and all
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of us have the there's a quote
widely attributed. Everybody has a plan and
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until they get punched in the mouth. And I think that is the most
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powerful marketing, is the authentic marketing. are around things go wrong and here's
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what to do when things go wrong, and that's an area of fascination for
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me right now of how can you
bring that expertise, that reality forward and
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represent that. Yeah, I was
just going to say I heard, I've
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heard, you know, some people
talk about some examples of this. We
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did a podcast episode on, you
know, five areas where our service was
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really sucking and we put, you
know, five freasons our service sucks and
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how we're improving it in the headline
of that podcast episode. And the reason
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we do as kind of what you
alluded to. Their gym is, you
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know, everybody's doing the case studies
and and they're well polished and they're putting
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the numbers, you know, right
in front. But everybody expects to see
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that, right. And as I
was talking to todd caponey on the BB
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sales show about his experience diving into
the psychology of buying and when he was
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at power reviews, they they realize
that four point two, two, four
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point five star rated products, services
sell better than a five point Oh,
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because we know that five point Oh
isn't reality. And so then if we
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let ourselves have that expectation, we're
always disappointed, right, but we know,
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you know, it's just like on
Amazon, they don't. I don't
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even think they have a filter for
a five star rating and only it's four
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star and above, right, which
kind of lends itself there maybe some other
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good examples. I know we're kind
of getting on a tangent here on,
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you know, authentic marketing, but
I just love the thread here of leaning
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into those because I think it was
justin well show was reading a post he
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did on linked in about anytime your
team is trying to solve a problem,
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is facing a challenge, has a
customer issue, that's a content opportunity and
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I don't think a lot of marketing
teams have that mindset or are willing to
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share that. But that's what the
customers are looking for and I love that
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that quote from from your customer.
Your sales kickoff there. Yeah, so
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I think perhaps not a very specific
example Logan, but but a little bit
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more of a philosophy, I think
from a marketing perspective, where we are
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always feeling the tension of scale versus
personalization, is I should be developing something
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that we can put across all these
different channels and that will be my campaign
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and things like that, and that
necessarily comes at the expensive of specifics and,
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of course, personalization. You know, we love getting down in there,
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but then there's a little voice at
the back of our head that says,
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but this is really only relevant to
a small set of people. I
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feel like this, the past decade
was really all about breadth and you know,
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how can I just leverage digital technology
social at the end to get the
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story to them Max Possible scale,
and then we'll just sort out the leads
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as they come in. And I
think all the reason all of us are
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interested in account based marketing and account
based selling is because, intuitively, we
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feel like that's the right direction to
go in in terms of making customers more
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successful. And so I think we're
going to go through a phase here now.
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How do you scale up lots of
very specific customer journeys as opposed to
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trying to normalize everything down to the
same customer journey for everybody? And that's,
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you know, kind of coming back
to our thesis in this marketplace.
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That's that's why software package like all
tofy exists. It's why content operations,
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through composed exist. Say How can
we scale up lots of very specific customer
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journeys that we have the expertise to
get people through? And you know,
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in a self interested way, the
the deeper you are with your expertise,
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the higher success rate you're going to
have, the more your customers will pay
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you, the higher your renewal rates, all of the magic elements that go
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into a SASS business. High renewal
rates follow on sales. Things like that
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happen when you get you get specific
and they evaporate when you get generic.
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And so I think that that's that's
the but we have to scale. You
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know, tell any sales rep that
their territory is twenty accounts and they'll freak
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out right and and so so I
think that's I don't think there's an easy
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answer to it, but I think
as marketers in BETB scenario supporting sales teams,
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we should always be thinking about where
am I on the scale, from
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from kind of generic down into two
personalized and how can I push from the
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personalization that which goes back to the
what I was saying before. The way
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you get to personalize as going in, sitting with those customer success teams and
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understanding the individual stories and then say, okay, who can I apply this
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more broadly to? This is applied
to a hundred accounts as it supplied a
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thousand counts. You know, that
type of approach. Yeah, I like
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what you said. There are,
you know, finding those those common threads
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and then trying to scale multiple.
It's not swinging from, you know,
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no personalization to mass to personalizing on
every single individual level. But there's some
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there's some area in between, right
where we can leverage technology and we can
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leverage I like what you said,
what we feel intuitively that we need to
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lean back the other way. I'm
just I don't know, I'm just such
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a moderate in so many ways that
I think the truth is usually in the
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middle ground somewhere. So it kind
of on that note, Jim, as
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we kind of wind down today,
any other parting thoughts that you want to
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share with fellow marketers that are dealing
with some of these challenges of personalization and
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scale or aligning with customer success or
putting out managing their content operations and infusing
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that with those authentic stories? I
mean, we've touched on a number of
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great things today. If someone listening
to this was going to take one thing
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away from this conversation, what do
you think that would be? Today,
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I would simply say be clear with
yourself and your organization about what problem you're
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solving at the moment, and I've
given you a couple of frames for thinking
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about that. Am I am I
going for scale and I going for personalization?
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And in a transactional situation or my
in a relational situation, am I
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facilitating discovery or do I need to
be discis facilitating kind of depth and differentiation,
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and so I think you have to
clearly articulate those because when you when
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you have a sense of each of
those, that gives you a real great
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compass on. Okay, this is
a level of depth I should be going
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to, this is who I should
be talking to on the team, and
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then this connects all the way back
to what we talked about with the customer
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life cycle and and revenue teams across
the board. What conversation you're trying to
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have and then how do we bring
the expertise forward, you know, to
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have the appropriate level of that conversation
and just the reality, which is great
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news for us. There's a lot
of work to be done here, because
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you have to be able to go
at all of these altitudes, and I
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always think of looking at my kind
of content map around. Do I have
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my different altitudes covered and can I
go to depth in the key areas,
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key markets, you know, for
me, and then can my colleagues do
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that as well, which we could
talk a whole other aspect on how you
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enable sales teams and customer success teams
to make sure that they're speaking with with
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one voice Yep, absolutely. So
on that note, we're talking a lot
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about one voice back in episode twelve, how to manage content operations chaos with
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toby murdock and so it ran off
on the compost team. So will link
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to that in the show notes.
So we'll leave that conversation for now.
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But there's another one right there if
you're interested here and figuring out how to
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make this work very tactically. Jim, I like those three questions that you
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posed or you are encouraging marketers out
there to ask themselves for how they're going
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to impact the customer life cycle.
Jim, this has been a great conversation.
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I think we could. We could
go on about football, marketing,
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revenue teams in general, great content
all day long. You and I become
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fast friends. If anybody listening to
this is also become a fast fan of
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yours and wants to stay connected,
what's the best way for them to reach
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out to you or stay connected with
the upland all tify and and the rest
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of the team's over at upland.
Well. So, for for myself,
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you know, just Jim Rutten at
Linkedin is the best path for there.
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I think linkedin has become such a
powerful content marketing platform as well. I'm
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at I'm a periodic twitter user at
Jim Rudden on twitter, so you can
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certainly reach me there. You know, upland softwarecom is where we are.
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You know, if you are in
it going to be to be company and
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you you have complex sales and marketing
needs. I hope you'll give our our
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enterprise sales and marketing tool set a
look. You'll know it is all to
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five post and we also do proposal
management things like that. So I think
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it'll hope to check that out.
In the last plug, I'd say,
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is across our company right now we're
running what we're calling our connected through change
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campaign, which is really focused on, you know, through this Cup covid
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nineteen crisis and pandemic, how can
we keep people connected, you know,
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to the jobs, to their colleagues
and things like that. So if you
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look for those hashtags or, you
know, come check us out on upland
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softwarecom you'll hear more about that.
I love it. I love both the
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the heart and the execution behind that
campaign. So definitely encourage people to check
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that out. I appreciate the share
their Jim. As I mentioned, episode
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twelve on managing content operations chaos,
probably one that you'll like if you enjoyed
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this. That to your last point. Their gym about enabling the rest of
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your team to kind of speak the
same language. Back on episode thirty seven,
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we had UMRITA Gurney on from crowd
riff talking about how marketing lives in
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other departments and what to do about
it. So to other episodes you might
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want to check out if you enjoyed
this conversation with Jim. As always,
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folks, thank you so much for
listening. Jim. This has been a
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fantastic conversation. Really appreciate you joining
us on the show to thank you for
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having me. There's a lot of
fun. I hate it when podcasts incessantly
301
00:21:29.819 --> 00:21:33.130
ask their listeners for reviews, but
I get why they do it, because
302
00:21:33.170 --> 00:21:37.410
reviews are enormously helpful when you're trying
to grow a podcast audience. So here's
303
00:21:37.410 --> 00:21:40.049
what we decided to do. If
you leave a review for me to be
304
00:21:40.130 --> 00:21:44.529
growth and apple podcasts and email me
a screenshot of the review to James at
305
00:21:44.569 --> 00:21:48.200
Sweet Fish Mediacom, I'll send you
a signed copy of my new book,
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00:21:48.240 --> 00:21:51.880
content based networking. How to instantly
connect with anyone you want to know.
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00:21:52.359 --> 00:21:55.240
We get a review, you get
a free book. We both win