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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:15]:
All right. Kevin White is here. Kevin is the head of marketing at Common Room. Kevin, good to see you.
Kevin White [00:00:21]:
Dave, good to see you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:23]:
First, let's just set some context here. We're going to talk a little bit about a recent company shift and creating a new category and coming in as head of marketing. But just to fill people in today, what does common room do? Rough, like company size, stage, just so people can get a frame for that in their head?
Kevin White [00:00:41]:
Yeah, absolutely. So common room, we call and we get into category creation a little bit, I'm sure, is customer intelligence platform. And you're like, okay, what the heck does that mean? So we really see ourselves as a way to help go to market teams work more effectively. How we do that is by capturing a bunch of buying signals from all different breadcrumbs across the Internet and then identifying the person and the account behind those signals and then allowing those go to market teams to take action in a prioritized, efficient way and then level setting. On the company size, we're about 50 people. The marketing team is small and scrappy. We have five people on the marketing team. And then also the SDR team reports to the marketing team, which is something I inherited, and I'm very happy I did.
Kevin White [00:01:22]:
So that may be something else we can get into. And hundreds of customers, lots of notable names like notion, Figma, Zapier. So, yeah, things are going well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:30]:
And just a brief history of your career, like the two minute version, what have you. What did you do before this?
Kevin White [00:01:35]:
Yeah, so I guess I've been in SaaS for a good amount of time. But the things I'm most notable for, if I'm notable for anything, is leading growth marketing segments. Dave and I both had a crossover with Guillaume, who worked there, and then Guillaume went to drift. And so I inherited a lot of the work that Guillaume did and set the framework for. And then I, after that time period, for three years, I moved on to lead marketing at retool for a few years and then now at common room. So that's the quick nutshell version of my career.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:03]:
Beautiful. All right, good context. We're in the mix now. Everybody's locked in. So, like, after leaving retool, you kind of did the marketing advisor thing for a little bit. And was common room one of the companies that you're advising?
Kevin White [00:02:16]:
Yeah, common room. Ashby, deep note. A few others or a company like.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:20]:
I want to talk about going from advisor kind of, because a lot of people that listen this have either done something similar or our audience is people like you and me. And so they may be doing that. And I always think it's interesting when I talk to someone who was doing the kind of mini consulting, like either a consulting business or advising a bunch of companies. And then oftentimes I see this pattern where you kind of find the best company in your portfolio almost, and it almost like, always turns into, if it's the right, that person becomes head of marketing. And it kind of seems like that's what happened with common room.
Kevin White [00:02:52]:
Yeah, nailed it. That is pretty much what happened. And that's kind of the approach I took where I was like, okay, I know I'm, like, not the best fit for retail right now and wanted to go try and find the right company to work for. And typically for an advisory type role, you join 20 hours or 40 hours a week at one company and then like an hour a week for a bunch of others. And I think common room was one of the latter there. But what I really saw about common room was just like, oh, what they're building is really cool. I can see myself as a subject matter expert, and I feel like that I have empathy for the actual audience there. And so that weighed heavily, heavily into my decision because I've been working at a lot of, like, developer, even segment is kind of like a developer centric company.
Kevin White [00:03:33]:
Like, we're selling to product managers and, like, data analytics people and then retools, like, all software engineers. And, like, I'm not the best subject matter expert in that I can do the right marketing things, but knowing your space and marketing and feeling confident about that and not having imposter syndrome, like, goes, like, such a long way. And that really weighed into my decision. Plus, I thought they were building a incredible product and clicked with the team. And, you know, that's why when I decided to make the leap and just join full time, I want to actually.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:59]:
Go back and talk about something you mentioned there. Cause it's something that comes up a lot. And so I agree with you that as a marketer, if you are interested in marketing and, you know, the Persona, and that's you, it's perfect fit to take a job in that space. But a lot of people give me a hard time for when they listen to this podcast. They're like, oh, you just interview marketers selling to marketing people. I'm like, well, that's kind of, this is a big market. That's where I come from. And I think that's obviously much easier.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:25]:
It doesn't make the job easier. But I mean, like, understanding the Persona. Let's just talk about for people in the other camp. So for you in past roles, when you're running marketing, or if you're in marketing and you are not your customer, have you taken to that in the past? Or like, what advice would you give to somebody? So say you said like, retool is selling to software developers, right?
Kevin White [00:04:46]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:46]:
How do you get into that world? Like, for me in marketing, it's like, oh, I'm listening to those podcasts. I'm reading that stuff. I know that. But when you're not in that world, what's a good playbook or advice for somebody? Hey, I'm not a cybersecurity person, but I'm taking a marketing job at a cybersecurity place. Like, how do I understand the customer? How do I understand what they're interested in, their likes, etcetera, how have you figured out in the past, what advice would you give to people?
Kevin White [00:05:09]:
Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. I mean, I don't think I'm ever going to jump in, especially if you're working at a security company or a developer first company. I don't think I'm ever going to like jump in and actually like learn how to code, get up to speed super fast, and like actually be a subject matter expert. So like, what's the alternative that you can do to get up to speed? And I think the ultimate thing for me, and just for lots of trial and error, is using customers as a cheat code. And so if I were a marketer and being placed into one of these situations, I would like, ask qualifying questions when you're being interviewed, like, can I get access to customers? What's the culture here of talking with customers, surveying customers? Because if you don't have that on the marketing side of things, you're just flying blind and guessing and just doing tactics versus actually knowing the underlying things and foundations for positioning and messaging. So if you're not a subject matter expert, I would say just rely on your customers. Your customers are cheat code.
Kevin White [00:06:02]:
Talk with them, ask them product, market fit questions like what was happening in your world before using this product? What did it unlock? What concerns did you have those types of conversations, qualitatively, just give you so much information that you can use and just copy and paste in your headlines, in your positioning and your messaging on your website. So I found that being customer centric is the workaround to if you're not a subject matter expert yourself, I'll also add onto that too, that it is pretty critical to hire subject matter experts, if you can. And there are those types of developers who are evangelists or I security people who are even evangelists. And if you can find those people, maybe you don't hire them full time. But if you can find them, that's a really great strategy to fill in the blanks of where you're weak, to find people who are out there and have them, like, represent your brand and your voice as a strategy or tactic or whatever you want to call it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:50]:
Yeah, that's a good point. So the first one is just like, that advice would be timeless, whether you know the market or not. Stay close to your customer. But it's almost like it changes the role in your mind. It's like, okay, I need to be a bit more of a curator and a researcher instead of, if you're in marketing, you know that deeply, maybe you're the subject matter expert. You kind of have your takes and perspectives where you're kind of putting on more of like your research hat. And then you mentioned customers. But I'd also say there's also probably people inside of the company too, right? Like that person, you know, those people exist inside of your company, either in that job function.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:24]:
And so you sell to HR, you're not an HR expert, but like, can you make your HR team amuse for your content? I think that can be a really good strategy.
Kevin White [00:07:34]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:34]:
And then oftentimes just the product team is maybe more technical. They're going to have to have a different level of knowledge. And so, like, having real relationships with the product managers and the engineers can also be another thing to add to your toolkit. Right?
Kevin White [00:07:47]:
Yeah, you bring up a really good point there that I definitely didn't touch on. But essentially, when you're joining these types of companies or any company, really just go on a listening tour. But a short listening tour, like the CEO is not going to accept that you're going to do a listening tour for the first 60 days, but quickly get up to speed as much as possible, like internally and with customers. I also think it goes both ways, where there's always someone who you're selling to or typically someone who you're selling to who plays that role inside your company. And so if you can make that person the subject matter expert and up level them and highlight them in a way that's like a, you know, advocate awareness type of role, like, that's also another really great route versus trying to hire someone externally or use a contractor or influencer or creator, whatever we want to call those people.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:28]:
I like that. You mentioned Guillaume. You know, his partner at Hyper growth Canto.
Kevin White [00:08:32]:
Yes. I'm actually part of the hyper growth, of course. Group. Yes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:35]:
The hyper growth mafia.
Kevin White [00:08:36]:
Yes, yes, yes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:37]:
So they sold to developers, Osiro, and they. He hired a content team. His content team was former software developers. And he was like, hey, I can pay a, like, if you're interested in writing, I can kind of match your, you know, pay your same salary. You can make good money and, like, write about your craft. And I love that. I think that is what it takes. It's very hard to appeal to an industry if you're not the subject matter expert.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:00]:
So if you hire a bunch of interns or let chat GBT, write your content, and you're selling to an advanced audience like developers, it's going to be pretty hard to fake that. And so that's an expense. Okay. That's a creative use of the marketing budget, right? Maybe you don't have to go and hire eight people like he did, but could you hire one? Make them an evangelist, make them a subject matter expertise. As the head of marketing, your job is to use the budget. Like, your budget is your tool, right? And you don't have to be an expert on all that content, but you're like, hmm, I got a million dollar marketing budget. Whatever. Just making up a number.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:32]:
Is it worth it to pay someone 250 grand or 200 grand or whatever the number might be to have them, like, be evangelists and host a podcast? Like, my friend Tom Wentworth, who's a CMO at recorded future, has done this, where they hired, like, a former NPR cybersecurity journalist to host their podcast. And that's been a great place. I love hearing stories like that because I think it just pushes you to think outside the box a little bit. And especially if you're at, like, a venture backed company like this, you're going to have a budget and you can use it wisely as opposed to, like, writing kind of shitty chat GPT content and wondering why your audience of developers is not engaging with that content.
Kevin White [00:10:07]:
Yeah, we did that at this other company that I was advising called Deep Note. Actually, it was a data science notebook company and went outside to different regions, India and Indonesia. We found what we did was find writers who were like, oh, we really like that content. And they're doing stuff with the products or similar products that really have, like, a strong connection to what we're doing and what we want to put out there. And then super simple, just grassroots, like, reach out to them, hey, I'll give you $50 for a post, or I'll give you $100 for a post. Can we see if this works out? The thing I would also add to that is that if you're not an expert, you don't have the editorial oversight or the editorial view. And so you actually do need someone who has that kind of lens of like, okay, we're not going to let this content render just run wild in the ask for a big, for creating content. We actually need them to go through some sort of editorial process.
Kevin White [00:10:55]:
So that's the one thing where it's like you have quality control internally, but externally that's like a really good route.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:59]:
So anyway, I wanted to circle back on that topic, how to be good at marketing when you're not a subject matter expert. Let's talk about common rooms. So what was the state of the company, just like, how many employees, rough stage wise, when you came in as head of marketing, and how many people were on the marketing team, if there was one, when you joined?
Kevin White [00:11:17]:
Yeah, yeah. So we did have a marketing team and also the stage that we were at. So the company was founded, I think, in 2020, I should know this, 2020 or 2021. And then it was during that crazy hype cycle where you got a lot of funding for not much product and not much actual revenue or customers. And so we actually haven't raised funding in quite a while. And so what we were essentially doing is just trying to grow into that valuation. Yeah. When I joined, there was a marketing team and I had to come in and make some changes, make some hires, fire some agencies, things like that.
Kevin White [00:11:50]:
The team grew from the size of 30 or 40 to now 50, but were still in this really scrappy stage where we need to grow into our valuation and just accelerate and execute to catch up on the revenue side of things, to make sure that those numbers square out and were well on our way to doing that. But the markets flipped really quickly in that time period. Yeah, it's been a challenge, but it's also, like really healthy, I think, for us to think that way. And it's not this growth at all cost phase. And so we really look at marketing from a lens of like, how can we have the most impact for the least amount of dollars or the least amount of effort and then do a lot of effort to make a huge amount of impact. So, yeah, hopefully that makes sense. But, yeah, it's been kind of a weird thing to navigate with the market the way it is.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:30]:
What types of agencies did you fire?
Kevin White [00:12:33]:
Yeah, without naming names, you don't have.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:36]:
To name names, but I want to know, like, what some of the fat that you came in and trimmed. And the reason why I'm asking is because it's going to be relatable for a lot of people. It's not going to be like, oh, interesting. I've never had to do that.
Kevin White [00:12:46]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I definitely didn't just come in and be like, we're going to do a clean sweep here and start from ground zero. I wanted to come in and, like, at least assess where things are. I don't want to completely damage my relationship with the team or anything like that, but the main thing we cut is our content agency. And it wasn't that they weren't producing anything or that they weren't producing anything that wasn't, like, acceptable. It was more just like this agency isn't embedded in the company and they don't have the same perspective that we have as a brand. And so they're creating SEO content that is. I mean, I hate to say it, but I think chat GPT could also just do that now at scale.
Kevin White [00:13:23]:
And so there used to be a time when creating that content would work, I think, but I really am allergic to that. Not having a point of view, not putting a flag in the sand and not having a perspective. I think you can still write SEO based content while having a perspective. And so I just, there was no way that we were going to bridge that gap by hiring externally. And I had a really strong point of view on what our positioning and messaging and outwardly content should be. So that's why we ended up making that decision.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:52]:
How many people were on the team?
Kevin White [00:13:53]:
Yeah, the team was like three people when I joined and now we have five. So it's a pretty small team.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:58]:
And did everybody stay when you joined?
Kevin White [00:14:00]:
No, not everyone stayed. We had to make some decisions that were not easy, but also in the long run, I feel like the people who, you know, we decided to let go, like, turned out better for them in the long run because, you know, we hired someone who was not the right person on the boat for the time and needed to make sure we're all, like, aligned and moving the right direction. And so that is one hard thing that we had to do.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:26]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's hard, but it's the reality of doing business. And I feel like if you have that opportunity as a marketing leader and you're coming in, I usually would prefer to have a fresh start.
Kevin White [00:14:36]:
Yeah. One other thing I'll say there is that. It's not that the person was doing a bad job, in fact, they were doing like a really good job. It was just like, this function is not what we need at this time. And so that made it even harder because they were working their ass off and actually shipping and delivering things. And it's like, I could use you in two years when our company gets to a maturity level where we need this function of pr and analysts and all that kind of stuff. So it's just sometimes the people are at a company at the wrong stage and time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:06]:
Yeah, I mean, I've done that and I've joined a company where it's like I'm just making up an example. But you join a company and you have a limited budget, you can only have a team of like three or four people, and that money and Budget is tied up today. And two of those people are fantastic people, good at what they do, but what their specialty is is wrong for that stage. And so you have a in house video producer making 150 grand and you don't need videos at that level, but you need that 150 grand back because your pipeline number needs to grow and you'd be better off hiring a demand gen manager. These are the decisions that you have to make. And I wanted to call this out in the podcast because we do have a lot of people who listen to this that are first time marketing leaders or want to be a future marketing leader. And I the thing that I didnt realize until later on is like this is actually the job to be ahead of marketing. This is the job.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:57]:
Its not. Were going to talk about the fun stuff like creating a category and doing the marketing, but its so much of the team budget planning, people management, like understanding whos on the roster. Its a big part of it is being the GM of a sports team or something where its like, hey you got dollar 100, you cant spend it all on one person or you could that you wouldnt have enough resources. You got to figure out like who can you actually get, who's available, what's the right fit and those things. That is so much of the job that I didn't learn until making mistake after mistake after mistake. And I think if you don't know that, you need to start to understand that if you want to be an effective marketing leader.
Kevin White [00:16:35]:
Yeah, yeah, I feel like now is the time where you really had to come in and inspect that too. Or you know, when I was at segment of retail, I didn't have to do those things because, you know, we're just growing and spending money like crazy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:45]:
So much spend, for sure.
Kevin White [00:16:47]:
Yeah, yeah. So I think it's a good forcing function. And now I'm like, okay, if I ever, even if times are good again, I can reflect back and be like, this is what a highly efficient operating team looks like. This is my standard going forward. None of this growth at all costs. We're just going to hire everyone and have feel good type of marketing team. That's not where I would make my marketing decisions anymore.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:08]:
All right, so how did you evaluate what types of roles you needed on the team and what type of go to market strategy you were going to deploy? And with that, actually, if you could tell us what that strategy is like, hey, our goals were this, and we wanted to do marketing this way, and so we built the team around this model.
Kevin White [00:17:25]:
Yeah, yeah. I think what was happening before is just kind of marketing going through the motions without having a leader in place. And so it was like, oh, we're going to do webinars, we're going to do campaigns, we're going to do content, and like, these are all things that are pillars and functions of marketing, but not exactly in a cohesive, like, strategic way of doing those things. So, like, there's results and there are things happening, but it was just kind of like marketing by way of shipping things or like feel good things that aren't actually making impact. So the first thing I wanted to look at is just like, okay, what are the things that we're doing that are driving actual results? And not just results like mqls or top of funnel, like, what is happening further down the funnel that we're doing right now that we want to keep investing in? Or what are the inklings of, like, this is going to end up working well. And so if you look at it through that lens, it's pretty easy to cut all the stuff that's not working, like events like this content that's getting zero engagements. And so the first thing I did was just kind of like, come in and assess and like, clean house of the things that weren't working. And that really helps with cutting budget.
Kevin White [00:18:27]:
I mean, I think the first three months that I joined, we cut our budget in half, but then increased pipeline by like 30 or 50% the next quarter. And so if you can come in and like, just get rid of the things that are taking up resources and time and that unblocks a lot of other things that makes the rest of the productivity go up. So that was like the first order. And when I looked in and inspected, like, what is working. I did see that working with our community and the people who are advocates for us and our customers, like those things tended to perform pretty well. And so we invested in a creator program as a hypothesis to find more people who like our customers, who could advocate for us, but maybe have a bigger distribution. So that was one program that we invested in that worked out well. And then on the content side of things, I had a hunch that were selling to marketers and were selling to go to market sales reps.
Kevin White [00:19:15]:
And those people consume content. They consume video content, they consume content on LinkedIn quite a lot. And so one of the first things I did was get rid of that agency and then hire someone who I trusted and knew the space really well. And the hypothesis there was like, this content person would help us have a point of view and also help us get awareness and distribution in the right ways. And so that investment is something that we made. And that channel is not just like blog posts, it's really just like the whole mix of content and how you represent yourself in the channels where your audience is hanging out. And that just tends to be LinkedIn. LinkedIn and Slack channels for us is where our audience is hanging out.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:51]:
I'm trying to look it up right now, but what's like the go to market motion for the business? Yeah. Book a demo and start for free. But are you selling like, to the low end, to the high end, to both?
Kevin White [00:20:01]:
Yeah, I would say it's like fast growing SaaS companies with a hundred plus more team and then a go to market team. That tends to the ratio there, if you have a hundred people, 100 employees, tends to be like at least ten or 20 on the go to market side. And so those are the companies that get value from common room. The motion there is, yes. A sign up and connect some signals and start to pull in data so that that good market team can start to act on it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:25]:
So you're trying to drive everybody to do that. Is it more of like a drive them to the website, get them to sign up for free? That's how you're measuring success from a funnel standpoint. Are you trying to drive, I see good fit people to book a demo with sales?
Kevin White [00:20:39]:
Yeah, it's more like. So one of the other things that I changed when joining is instead of having MQL as a metric, moving our metric, marketing metric to pipeline. And so because of that, there are certain things that we would looked at that are driving pipeline. It's people who are handraisers and then the right kinds of accounts that are signing up for a self serve version. And oftentimes, actually a lot of people mix this up, is that the handraisers, the demo requesters, aren't always just coming to your site and hitting request a demo. They're signing up, they're doing some things, they're maybe getting stuck and then raising their hand. So we would see that retool. Actually, we saw this.
Kevin White [00:21:13]:
50% of people who would go through that self serve motion would actually, in short order in an hour or sometimes in a week, would raise their hand and request a demo. PLG or self serve acquisition approach actually helps to create more handraisers and demo requesters. So those two things are the main entry points. Someone signing up for the product who's a good fit, we can offer them a self serve onboarding concierge that helps with getting a call with them. It's like, hey, if you have this 15 minutes, call with us, we're going to help you onboard and like, get value to this quickly. That's a good offer. That's not just like, hey, we're going to sell you our product. And then also the people who just come in, they're like, okay, I get this.
Kevin White [00:21:48]:
I'm not going to set it up all myself. I'm just going to raise my hand and ask for some help. So I think it goes kind of both ways in terms of that mix. But those are the two main channels that we're getting pipeline from.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:58]:
How does marketing drive pipeline from those two channels?
Kevin White [00:22:02]:
Can you be a little bit more specific with that question? I mean, there's like awareness, distribution types of things that we're doing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:09]:
But I want to know the plays that you're running. I want to know how you're actually doing that. It's like, hey, we got two funnels. We just existed. We talk to our customers, we got subject matter experts, and we just magically get pipeline. I want to know the tactics, some of the plays you're actually running.
Kevin White [00:22:23]:
Let me just hit on the tactics that are working well for us right now. And a bunch of this did take some trial and error. So one of the core programs that's working really well to driving top of funnel, both signups and demo requests is our LinkedIn creator program. What we did there to make that work is find people who are talking about signals. They're talking about go to market consolidation. They're talking about the things that our product can help out with. They typically have a good amount of distribution, and we just tapped into them and said, hey, can we sponsor you, partner with you to write about how what you're saying, like, common room can actually help out with and mention common room and like, drive people to check us out. And so that is something that is really hard to attribute.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:07]:
How did you find those people? How did you find them?
Kevin White [00:23:09]:
You just have to be immersed in the channels where your audience is. Like, we know those people on LinkedIn. There's not like some magic platform for finding creators and influencers. I think on the B two C side maybe there is, but on the b, two B side, it's just being immersed in the channels where your audience is at is where to find the people who you can, like, start to work with, because they show up and you just know from being in there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:27]:
So is that mainly LinkedIn for you guys?
Kevin White [00:23:29]:
Mainly LinkedIn, main LinkedIn, some TikTok and some like, newsletters, some substack newsletters. And some people have like the full stack where it's like, I have a sub stack and I also have a strong LinkedIn presence and I also have a podcast. And then they package it up like that too, so you can hit people on all fronts. And then one thing I wanted to get to, it's kind of an important point, I think, is that if you look at that from a pure, like, roi linear lens, it's really hard to attribute because no one reads this post on LinkedIn or reads this newsletter and clicks the link with UTM and then signs up for your product. And so you can have this perfect attribution to this person. So essentially, we just had to look at the mix of we're investing in this. We're seeing a lot of impressions and a lot of reactions here. How is that correlated with what we're seeing in terms of top of funnel? And we did implement a self reported attribution on our site.
Kevin White [00:24:17]:
And it's crazy how much self reported attribution. People say LinkedIn, they say the influencer name, they say these things that are like, okay, we know this came from this program, but it looks like direct traffic, organic traffic. It is absolutely not the same as what people infer that they're being influenced by.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:33]:
I could talk about this for hours.
Kevin White [00:24:35]:
I know I opened up a new can of worms.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:38]:
No, this is amazing. And people that are listening to this, you should go and listen to rand Fishkin on marketing against the grain with Kip and Kieran. He talked about basically just how marketing gets done today and how initially all these social media platforms would drive this beautifully trackable referral traffic back to you. But now either that stuff gets all stripped out or they don't. If you've ever actually clicked on a link, on a LinkedIn post, do you know what it says? It says, are you sure you want to leave this site? And then you have to click again. So that adds friction on top of that post with a link. I forget there is a stat on this. It's like five to six times less reach when a post has a link in it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:19]:
And so if you're going to do something with an influencer or sponsor, and your whole measure for success is how many people signed up through this, I give Kevin. I identify Kevin as an influencer. I want to do a campaign with him. I give him this UTM link, I want him to post the link. And then I go and I see that there's been zero signups through that UTM link. Like, of course you're not going to be successful with that. But anyway, in this podcast, Rand talks about how we've gotten so used to measuring everything, marketers are going to actually have to go back to doing more what you did, which is like, time series based measurement. I forget what he called it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:52]:
But, like, hey, we ran these campaigns with these influencers over this time, over these 30 days. Did we see a spike in signups compared to this other time? And then also what you mentioned doing, which is adding the self reported attribution. And some people don't like that because it's not perfect data, but you're really just trying to lick your finger, check which direction the wind is going, and saying, is this working? Should we do more of this?
Kevin White [00:26:15]:
Yeah, I love that time series attribution. That's a good coin buzzword there. Also another spark tour person shout out to Sparktoro. I guess Amanda had this post on zero click content, which is kind of what you're talking about, is, like, if you click LinkedIn, doesn't reward that. And so if you write content that is just giving everything away on a LinkedIn post versus trying to get someone to click and, like, go to your site and track them, that content tends to perform a lot better. You just have to be okay and accept that. Like, you're not gonna be able to attribute that to anything.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:45]:
Yeah, I like that. And I also like what you said about finding influencers, which is like, knowing what's going on in your industry. Okay, so that's been one play. You've identified a bunch of influencers, you make a list of them, and you just reach out. And how do you figure out what they should write about? Is it like around a product launch is just some kind of like general thing about common room? What's the offer? Because I feel like that also matters a lot, too. Is a relevant offer to get these people to promote.
Kevin White [00:27:09]:
Yeah, this is a really key point, actually, in that we've had learned through trial and error is that everyone has their own. I'm sure you, Dave, have your own. Like, these are the topics I talk about. Here's like, my angle on things. Here's what I feel comfortable with. And so I feel like I don't know how many people actually get hung up by this, where they're like, I must force my brand message in this boilerplate into this influencer's feed. But we certainly, like, didn't take that approach. It's more like, okay, this influencer is talking about a lot of the things that we're super aligned with and it's also opinionated.
Kevin White [00:27:39]:
And so let's work with them to come up with, like, show them our product, show them what we do, and then have them, you know, workshop an angle for it. And if it's not going to be authentic, if the post is not going to be authentic to the person who's posting it, then it's not going to get the distribution that you're looking for and people are going to see right through it. Not that we're trying to like, you know, do a bait and switch on people. Like, we're very upfront and open when there's a post that's mentioning us. But, you know, the content still has to be valuable and still has to cause people to either. I like to think about it in two ways. It causes people to think and be like, oh, I didn't think about those things that way. And maybe my world or my paradigm has shifted a little bit now, or it's super helpful and super useful for me to take this and take action on it, tend to create content around those two different types of buckets.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:21]:
So it's interesting. So I did a, before really going and building Exit Five, I did two years on my own as a solopreneur and was doing marketing advising. And then I had this paid community that has now become Exit Five. And brands started to reach out to me because I have a big following on LinkedIn and a voice there. They sort of reach out to me to do stuff like this. Like, I would be on that list for an influencer campaign, for example. And I would do, you know, one off posts or whatever. But now that I'm building Exit Five, we bundle them all into other sponsorships.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:49]:
And so I don't just do like a one off post. It's got to be like common room becomes an Exit Five sponsor, which you should, by the way. Common room becomes an Exit Five sponsor. With that, it's like, oh, they get three months of podcast advertising, we do a webinar together, and then I might do a promoted post on LinkedIn. But now what's cool is we have a team of five people, and what we're doing is when you do that with us, each one of the people on our team is posting. And so we're doing this kind of micro influencer campaign, which is like, you're going to get not just me, but five people. And then I have found exactly what you mentioned, that the best performing stuff is when it's really related to our course. Surprise, right? But when it's really related to our core audience.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:29]:
And so, like this one company, Goldcast, is a sponsor right now, and we use their product for our webinars. And when I do an ad for them, it's an actual clip from the webinar, me talking about how we use the webinar product. It's a clip that was used with their AI content lab. And then if I just post that, it's not going to work. But if I write something about, like, here's why I think most webinars stink, and here's what you can do about it and talk about a bigger trend, and then do good writing to actually connect the dots and then talk about the product, that's when that stuff works really well. But I've even found working with some early sponsors, and I'm mentioning this cause I know a lot of people out here are doing influencer campaigns in B2B like you're talking about, I think you really have to work with them to create the right copy. I think if you just send to somebody like, here's the copy for common room, we want you to post on LinkedIn on July 7. It's not gonna work.
Kevin White [00:30:19]:
Totally.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:20]:
If you really treat it like a piece of creative and sweat the copy and write a good hook, have a good offer, then it's going to work. It's just like anything else in marketing, right?
Kevin White [00:30:28]:
Yeah, like anything. It's the effort that you put into. I have actually another fun anecdote for a creator program, which I didn't even realize until I. You just brought it up in my, reminded me of is that one of the creators that we worked with. His name's Florin. He saw the product and was like, I really want to be a creator. He actually came to us and raised his hand. And then by onboarding him onto our product and also having him post about it, he was getting enough traction and saw enough value there that when we had a role open, he's a SDR leader and an influencer in that space.
Kevin White [00:30:57]:
And so when we had a role open, we actually hired him to lead our SDR team. And so now he's come in and is, well, we don't have to pay him anymore for posting on our behalf, which is kind of nice. But then also he's using our product and then evangelizing what our product can do and how it's helping his team and how that team is dog fooding the products, like, get the right kind of results. So, yeah, maybe not the best, like, hiring tactic, but that does happen sometimes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:20]:
What else is in your revenue generating bucket? What are you trying to do to drive pipeline in the short term, other than the influencer stuff, I would say.
Kevin White [00:31:28]:
The other thing is what I just talked about is dogfooding our own products. And so, not to pitch common room.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:33]:
Too much, but no, you can, because actually, I do want to talk about this signal based approach to marketing. So maybe let's segue.
Kevin White [00:31:40]:
Yeah, yeah, happy to segue in that, too. So, yeah, what our SDR team is doing is actually using our products. And so what they're doing is like, there's lots of signals happening all over the place, buying signals that could be acted on. And so those are things like website visits. Those are things like people posting, like our creators posting on LinkedIn, and people reacting to those posts and commenting on those posts. There's things like our PLG motion, like people signing up for a product, connecting integrations. And so what we've done is aggregate all of those signals into our platform common room. And then the other thing that they're doing, our SDR team is doing is prioritizing based on our ICP.
Kevin White [00:32:18]:
So they're saying, like, okay, the signal of a product signup is great, but then we also need a layer on is this an economic buyer? Is this person a sales leader? Do they fit the criteria? That would be someone who could get a lot of value from our product. And then once they have those two things, then they have the context of, like, what actions happened in the past, the motives or the assumptions of, like, what this person or this account is looking for. And then they can run their own SDR plays outbound plays accordingly. And so when you combine those things, you get a ton more better results in terms of both velocity and conversion to pipeline than you would with just pure cold outbound, like finding an ICP, finding an ABM account, and just trying to get into one of those accounts. So that approach for us is working really well. And one of the goals that we had when hiring Florin is can we get our entire team just using signals? Only if it works, of course. Not going to do something that doesn't actually generate pipeline, but we found that there's enough signals here and enough scale here that that team can purely just be doing the signals based approach to generating pipeline.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:20]:
What role does signal based marketing play in the world today? It's a different era that we're coming into from a marketing standpoint where there's a lot more tools, there's a lot more competition, there's a lot of people that have come on here. Some people love intent data, some people don't. They say some of it is outdated, like Dave happened to read some article and that counts as intent. We're all trying to circle around intent signals. What is it? How do you do it? Especially in a world where like, privacy is becoming more of a thing. Cookies are going away for a lot of people. Can you talk? Just some of, like, the, just the overall trend of why this is important, why now?
Kevin White [00:33:59]:
Yeah, yeah. So just like many things in marketing, like ABM for example, like signal based marketing or signal based anything has been around forever. Like ten years ago, it used to be more in control of it on the marketing side, where it's like, okay, we know who's hitting our website, we know who's filling out our form, we know who's downloading and consuming content, who's opening emails, who's raising their hand for a demo press, who's doing a chat via drift. Right? So these are all signals, but they were just all signals that were only trackable by a marketing automation platform, essentially. And so with the buyer journey changing, product led growth. People self serving into a product, tapping into different places like LinkedIn, like slack communities, like open source. There's just so much surface area now where these buying signals, and I like to call them like digital breadcrumbs, where people are like leaving traces of, like, there's a potential signal here that's putting me in market or making me have interest in like this category. And so I think the signals haven't changed in terms of, like, we're going to take action on something that a user did or a person did.
Kevin White [00:35:01]:
It's just the surface area has kind of exploded to all these areas. And so that's why I think this, like, term of like, signal based go to market is catching on, is it's just like, it's not the traditional marketing funnel, it's, the funnel is now expanded to 70%, to 100% of it is happening outside of your own purview. But you can see it, you're just blind to it. So now it's just like, can we pull in all those signals and can we score them or can we pass them over to our sales team so that they can take action on them? And it maybe doesn't mean that the person is raising their hand or opting in. So there is a privacy concern there kind of, or I would say definitely. And so it's just kind of working with. Some companies have higher appetite for doing colder signal based outbound than others. And so, yeah, I think the main thing is just the buyer journey has changed.
Kevin White [00:35:45]:
And now the way to take action efficiently to like, drive pipeline and drive revenue takes a different approach and maybe a different tech stack to be able to like, have a good idea of where all those things are happening.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:56]:
So is your vision that like, let's, if you're a marketing leader, you see a world where like, you want somebody to get, okay, you're going to do marketing. You would want to get a tool like common room to like, put that in your funnel, and then you're going to run your marketing plays around these signals that you're getting.
Kevin White [00:36:12]:
Yeah, yes. But people always ask, like, how do I get started? And I'm, you know, I am biased, but, like, you don't need technology, you don't need a software to do all this stuff. The approach or the thing I mentioned of the play that's working well for our team is look at these different creator posts, look at our own internal posts, look at posts from our competitors on LinkedIn, the people who comment and react to those. If we run a play against that, and that play gets about 120% higher conversion than just our normal ABM type approach, you can do all that stuff on LinkedIn or on whatever channel yourself. It's all Google search away, it's all publicly available. You can scour the different people who are reacting to those things on LinkedIn. And yes, tools can help you aggregate and take action on it in a much easier fashion. But I like to have people start up.
Kevin White [00:36:57]:
You can do this all with just an Internet connection and a spreadsheet and so I would say like, you don't need to start with a platform, just like go out there, have a hypothesis, try something that, and when it starts working, then start to add on the technology and the scale side of things.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:10]:
What would be a hypothesis? Like what signals would somebody be looking for and what's even possible to get?
Kevin White [00:37:15]:
Yeah, so this is also like the number one question or one of the number one questions I get and I have a terrible answer for it, which is it depends. So it depends on a lot of different things, like whats your go to market motion? Are you product led? Are you open source? Are there people visiting your website? Do you have a lot of brand awareness? And so theres probably thousands of signals out there that you could potentially use and take action on. And so I like to try and lay out, group them together. I actually have a spreadsheet which maybe we can share in the show notes. Thats like here's 100 signals and here's how they're categorized. And from there you can sort of like filter and figure out like, okay, these are applicable to me or these are not. So if you're not open source, you can weed those out. If you're not PlG, you can weed those out.
Kevin White [00:37:57]:
And so essentially, when giving guidance on signal selection and executing on signals, it's really about trying to figure out a dozen or so that you can take action on or that you have a good hunch about. And then from there, there's like two other things that are part of the signal selection process. One is what volume do you see? Or what volume do you expect to see from these signals? An example of that would be like website visits. You have 30,000 website visits a month or 1000 to the pricing page or whatever. So you know the volume there. And then the other hypothesis, or the other factor into like signal selection is what is the conversion rate from like acting on that signal to the next stage in the funnel, which is typically like a demo call request, like your SDR or someone took action and started reaching out to this person who showed the signal. Did they take the next step to book a meeting or respond to an email or whatever? And so when you have those two different vectors, the volume and the conversion rate, then you can stack rank all those dozen or so signals that you're hypothesizing on and then start to do those things that don't scale and take kind of like a crawl, walk run approach to, okay, we're going to execute on this signal. We're going to see if it's moving to pipeline or converting to pipeline or whatever, the next step is in the way that we anticipated.
Kevin White [00:39:12]:
And if it's working, like, let's figure out how to scale that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:14]:
Like eating your own dog food, using your own product. What have been some of the best signals for your team internally?
Kevin White [00:39:19]:
Yeah, for my team. And I have another anecdote for something outside of my team that's kind of fun to share. But for my team, it's three different cohorts of signals. So the first one is that social engagement. We call it social engagement. It's essentially people who are. I've talked about this too much already. It's the people who are engaging on LinkedIn.
Kevin White [00:39:36]:
The second signal is PLG. So we have a self serve motion. There's people who are in our ICP who are signing up for our product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:43]:
Wait, wait, can we talk about LinkedIn? What signals are you measuring? Is it monitoring conversations on social? I'm interested in hearing about that.
Kevin White [00:39:51]:
Oh, yeah. Let's do it from your perspective, Dave. So Dave posts something on LinkedIn. Its relevant is maybe like the follow up to this podcast about signal based go to market.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:59]:
Okay.
Kevin White [00:40:00]:
A bunch of people comments on that. Like, I tried this, I didn't try this. What do you think about this vendor? What do you think about intent? What do you think about intent platforms? What do you think about website tracking platforms? Whatever people are engaging with that post. And so all those people who are actually interested in this topic are signaling, pun intended, that they might be in market for your product. So we'll ingest that. Well, you can do that manually by just combing through all the comments, but we'll ingest that post into common room, and then our SDR team will run plays that are saying, like referencing the post in dynamically in email, referencing quotes from other people who have commented things, and then following up with those people who are in our ICP to book the next step. So that play is working really well. And it could be an influencer post.
Kevin White [00:40:43]:
It could be one of our competitors posting something. It could be one of our internal team members posting something. And if it gets enough traction and distribution on LinkedIn, then that gives us enough signal to pull into common room.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:53]:
Can it identify, like any posts or is basically when you connect it to common room, you select accounts or something. So it knows.
Kevin White [00:41:00]:
Yeah, LinkedIn works in a couple of different ways, but you can connect to your company page and like pull in that via API. But the thing that's working really well is actually ingesting data from any post.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:10]:
Interesting. And so could you go into common room and search for terms and see what's coming up? It's like a social listening tool.
Kevin White [00:41:17]:
Yeah, it's kind of like social listening. It's a little different. Yeah. You can search for keywords, you can search for a number of reactions, comments, whatever proposed. Like, there's all sorts of ways to slice and dice it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:26]:
Have you played with Sparktoro at all?
Kevin White [00:41:28]:
I have. It's been a few years and I didn't, like, get it to a place where I could use it to identify the right kind of. I was using it for a Twitter use case and so I didn't, like, quite get there. But I recently listened to the Rand podcast and I don't know if it was from you or also from marketing Instagram. I consume a lot of marketing podcasts, but I was like, I should relook at this thing now because it seems like they probably made a lot of improvements.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:50]:
I wish there was just like a magic social listening tool. The problem is with each platform, you know, it's different APIs, different levels of access to data. But that would be the dream marketing tool is to be able to understand who's talking about what's topics across channels. I found, I've used Sparktoro and I think it's cool, but I found the results to be a little bit more generic than what I wanted. Like, if you search for B2B marketing, you're going to get like a bunch of kind of older podcasts that I don't think are that relevant. I'd love to be able to, like, say, who's talking about signal based marketing on LinkedIn and get that universe. That'd be amazing.
Kevin White [00:42:26]:
Yeah, LinkedIn search for it is really doesn't work super well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:29]:
So you just have to like, oh, it's brutal. Yeah, yeah.
Kevin White [00:42:31]:
Follow the right kind of people, I guess, and then, like, it comes in your algorithm. But I see stuff. I'm like, I wish this would have showed in my feed and why didn't it? It's like, these are all the things I care about. It's frustrating, for sure.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:40]:
All right, it was great. All right, go find Kevin. Kevin White, go to LinkedIn, check him out. Go check out common room if you're interested in. Sounds interesting. I think you're all at the intersection of, like, this kind of newer wave of tools for B2B marketers, where the old way of doing marketing and thinking about marketing is changing and even just how you're using influencers first just like. Yeah, we're writing a bunch of articles and trying to rank for keywords to drive demand for our product is interesting. So, Kevin, good to see you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:08]:
I'm going to be continuing to follow you all at common room, see what you're up to, and maybe we'll have you back on in the future.
Kevin White [00:43:13]:
All right, sounds good. Yeah. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:16]:
All right.