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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:15)
Okay, hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm your host, Tom Rudnay, same as every other week. I don't know why I still feel the need to say my name. I'm gonna get straight into it this week and introduce my guest, which is one that I've been really looking forward to actually. And I've realized I didn't check how to pronounce your name, so I'm gonna give it my best shot. But I'm joined by Natalie Marcatullo from Novatic. How did I do first?
Natalie Marcotullio (00:42)
Perfect. It's funny, everyone is always so intimidated by Marco Tulio, which I get it. It's a lot of vowels. It's long, comes at you. But it's actually not too bad. It's like Marco Polo sometimes you say, like Marco Tulio. But then Nevada often trips people up a lot. So you were 10 out of 10 couple of right.
Tom Rudnai (00:58)
It's a lot of syllables and I'm quite a simple person syllables and general word lengths it does intimidate me but you're talking to a ruddy here I've had everything in my time from my old school teacher used to call me Tom Red Eye and then my personal favourite was Tom Rudini so I feel your pain
Before we, well, let's get into it anyway, enough about my surname. Do wanna give us a quick intro, Natalie, maybe into your background? And I guess what I'm always really interested to learn about up top is if there's like a particular point in your journey to this point where it really feels like everything clicked for you or like what was the most formative step along that journey?
Natalie Marcotullio (01:40)
Yeah, I'll start high level that can go into most formative. High level, been a startup marketer for about 10 years now. So I have been at two different early stage B2B SaaS companies where I was the first marketer and really helped like build and develop the marketing program. So very familiar with kind of growing from the ground up, limited resources. And but part of that as well is just trying a bunch of different things. I think the fun part of working at a startup, so early stages, you do get to wear a lot of different hats. It's not like you're just growth or just product marketing or just content.
Tom Rudnai (01:59)
you
Natalie Marcotullio (02:10)
You kind of just cherry pick depending on what the company needs. And when I was thinking about like, what was one of the most formative moments, it actually was when I wasn't a marketer. I was a chief of staff a little bit at my first startup. Um, it was more just out of need. Like we needed some help across the different departments. I'd become a little more operationally minded and focused. And I feel like that was when the first time I really just got to see how the whole orgs work together. Like what were the different priorities for different departments? What were we thinking about from a high level business perspective? I kind of got to see the behind the scenes operating models and that, that moment just really
like, this is how a startup works.
Tom Rudnai (02:43)
Yeah, I think it's more of a kind of American role, the Chief of Staff, than UK. Is it kind of like the equivalent of what we would call like Chief Operating Officer? Or what does a Chief of Staff do?
Natalie Marcotullio (02:55)
It's kind of similar to an operating officer. It really does depend. There are some companies where it might be a little more used to think about it like an executive assistant or maybe more of like a people ops or just like a behind the scene office manager. But then there are some roles where the person's probably not experienced enough to be like a...
COO or anything high up in operations like for example for me It was definitely when I did not have that experience under my belt But it was a way that I could get more involved and I don't must be like a stepping stone if I did ever want to be a CEO so kind of like that but think about it like a few levels down and usually you are really working very closely with a member of the C-suite or with a founder and or the CEO and like you're kind of like the right-hand person like doing all the things that No one else wants to do or maybe no one else knows how like has time or knows how to do it sort of just like
you're the, I don't know, the very flexible person who can do a bunch of things.
Tom Rudnai (03:47)
Nice, I think that's a really good like training ground for marketing in today's world. Like it gives you this really good kind of broad exposure to other disciplines beyond marketing, but also like a general skill set of like just get stuck in and get shit done. Is that something you found is that particularly as the world evolved over the last 10 years or so that skill set has put you in a pretty good place.
Natalie Marcotullio (04:10)
100%. I mean, I just think in general working startups, like you just learn how to learn things. Like I always joke like.
Tom Rudnai (04:15)
Yes.
Natalie Marcotullio (04:16)
My first startup, just kind of weren't, it's not that you weren't allowed to say no, but it was just no one else would do it and no one knew how to do it. So I just got really good at someone would be like, okay, we need this and figuring out a way to do it. And on the flip side, I think what's also been really helpful for marketing is it made me realize what's important to every other department. So now I'm a lot better at like communicating with sales and, you know, giving them updates in ways that they care about or CS, understanding what their day to day is like versus before that I was very siloed in my own marketing role and didn't really understand how that played with all the different departments.
Tom Rudnai (04:46)
How do you think about it? I'm already going off-piste here, but what you said there I think was quite interesting, which was you're not allowed to say no, which I think some people kind of think of it as like their job to know what to say no to and things like that. How do you balance that, like getting stuck in and helping out broadly with knowing when to say, actually that's not, that doesn't like fit with my priorities. And how has that changed as Novatic has matured as well?
Natalie Marcotullio (05:12)
Yeah, it's funny because as you say that, like now saying no is such a huge part of my job. I think more like early days when you're at a startup, when it's, you know, you're the first marketer, your first person doing something more. It's not because you can't say no for priority. I'm a big believer of saying no for priority, but more like it's not, can be like, no, I don't know how to do that. Cause the reality is a startup, no one really knows how to do that. Even if there's a specific function or there's a channel that someone has done before, they've never done it for your specific company. So more like I learned early on that.
Tom Rudnai (05:16)
Yeah.
Natalie Marcotullio (05:41)
You could just tackle things even if you've never done it before. Now, I have a lot of systems in place because yes, I know we could go off and do any single channel or again, go off and do any single priority, but it's like, how do we make sure that we are staying focused with what's most important to the business? Which I think it's a lot harder as you're growing. Early days, it's kind of like, okay, let me just figure out the low hanging fruit. Let me just do some things, some things in a wall and that would be better than the ground zero that we're at.
Tom Rudnai (06:06)
Yeah, well, think because I mean, we're obviously at the Mongeuse, we're in a much, earlier stage than the Novadek. We're still in that kind of small team. And to an extent, I say this quite unashamedly, you throw shit at the wall and you kind of try and see what sticks, right, which I think is famously considered a bad approach. But I'm trying to get a little bit more ruthless now with how we prioritise, because we have done that for long enough that we are starting to get a sense of what works, what we need to be doing. So I'm already seeing that that journey evolve a little bit, which I think
as a, it sounds like you're a bit like me, as a kind of person who is drawn to a startup environment, try things, move quickly, like that ruthless prioritization doesn't come naturally to me. Is it something that you had to learn and how did you do that?
Natalie Marcotullio (06:54)
100 % something I had to learn. think it really came after my first startup just coming from a place of being really burnt out and seeing that when I was doing so many different things, the quality of each thing went down. even I know it can be so much more efficient than ever with all the AI and automation in place, but I still feel like humans could only do so many tasks in a day and the context switching and just when you're putting out so much stuff inevitably you're probably not gonna put it out as high quality. So really just like learn that lesson from seeing the quality of our work go down. I felt like I was doing all this stuff like doing a bunch of input
but the outputs weren't there. As far as like how did I solve that a few different ways, I think the biggest thing is one thing I did at Novadek
And I don't remember the exact day that this framework came to be, but I just remember early on, I really wanted to make sure that we weren't just falling into the trap of doing a bunch of marketing for the sake of marketing. So we developed a framework here that we call unique and valuable, which is essentially the concept of every single piece of marketing we put out has to be both unique, not crazy. doesn't like have to be, you know, I think when we think of unique and marketing, we think of crazy guerrilla marketing tactics where you show up to a conference in a bunny suit, like.
Not that, just we're not blatantly copying what others are doing for the sake of copying. How can we add our own original data or our own original perspective to it? And then valuable, we're not just putting out things for the sake of.
promoting ourselves or like streaming about how great we are, but things that actually help our audience. And just creating some sort of framework or guide rails like that really honestly help with prioritization and making sure we are keeping our marketing to a high bar and we're not just like, again, doing a million things for the sake of it. We also use OKRs and prioritization systems, but if I had to think of one thing that helped me stay focused, it is that framework.
Tom Rudnai (08:34)
I think that's a really great, it makes me think in our world, there's this concept of information gain, which is one of the things we're learning is super, super, super, super influential when it comes to being seen by AI.
Basically, I think what a lot of content marketing has always done is kind of synthesize and summarize information in a way that's useful for people and matches a keyword intent. But now everyone has the synthesizer and the summarizer personally for them. And that's what the AI does a fantastic job. So it changes the job of content marketing a lot. So if you can produce things that are adding to the collective knowledge, then you're adding something that the AI can then draw on in its summaries. And that seems to be one of the most influential things that you can do. But it's quite cool that that's
that you'd that you'd really honed in on long before that? Did you find that it gave you, I assume you kind of track AEO performance and stuff like that, did you find that you were doing very well, even accidentally for that?
Natalie Marcotullio (09:33)
Yeah, I was gonna say it's funny. I have noticed for content, like I actually have a background in SEO. My first job was a growth hacker. So back in the day, I was very familiar with like, okay, how do we make sure we hack the algorithm, pump out a certain number of blog posts, keyword stuffing, all that fun stuff. And...
Time and time again, it was like two articles that would rank really well and it was articles that we put the most effort into. Yes, they tended to be more bottom of funnel and like really focused to our main audience, but we put out all this like garbage top of funnel content and almost none of it ranked or produced any leads, but it was like five really well written content that always actually ranked. And so I brought that to me at Novatic and from the very beginning, like wanted to make sure we're producing really high quality pieces of content. were, this is like the equivalent to just using AI to write all your content now, but when I first
we're using this system where like you'd put in a blog post outline in a random writer somewhere who had no idea what your business did would take out and produce a little piece of content and then you could edit it. It's not a great system, brought an in-house writer and really just made sure all of our pieces follow that of like there has to be some sort of unique angle.
Maybe we're doing interviews or original data that no one else has access to. And again, like ultimately this is just helping our audience versus a bunch of topic funnel keyword fluff. And I, yes, I think about SEO, but I don't obsess over it. And for the most part, that ended up ranking really well. Again, the articles we put a lot of time and effort into are the ones that ranked the best. And when I saw flip over to GEO side,
I saw the same thing. It was the same articles that ranked really well for SEO that we put a lot of time into that had original thoughts that were clearly like had a unique point of view or perspective to them. So I think it's funny. Like, yes, I try to optimize it for the algorithm and all that stuff. But then today, like if you just generally write good content, I've seen it rank both AEO and SEO-wise.
Tom Rudnai (11:20)
Well, the algorithms have got a lot smarter, right? So I think the opportunity to hack your way through them. it's also like, if your focus is on looking at everyone always wants a growth hack. It's always like, it makes for great, great reels on LinkedIn or on YouTube, doesn't it? Because it's like a magic bullet. Everyone wants that because it seems easier than just producing good content. But you end up in this position where you're kind of playing whack-a-mole because you're only going to get so much mileage out of a growth hack. And then you need to constantly find more. It's a mindset that I think is very
Natalie Marcotullio (11:23)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Rudnai (11:50)
unhelpful when it comes to organic at the moment.
I guess one thing that's interesting is you've developed this kind of approach or this framework of unique and valuable, but you say you come from a background which is growth hacking, which I guess to me they are contradictory mindsets. me, growth hacking is looking for something that we can do that isn't unique and valuable that will drive performance. Is that an evolution in your thinking? Is it different approaches for different roles? How have you navigated from one to the other?
Natalie Marcotullio (12:22)
Yeah, it's so funny because you know, when I started marketing, first of all, didn't, I don't think I had like the taste of it yet, if that makes sense. Like I had, you know, didn't fully, I also didn't really know what B2B was. I was just like, okay, yeah, I can, I can figure out these puzzles and get us to rank higher. Like it's almost in a way, if you're not familiar as much with the subject matter expertise or the audience and not, and growth hacking is incredibly hard and a lot of thinking. So I'm not trying to say it's not in that way, but it's almost like the easiest first thing you can attach to. And the way my brain saw it is, a lot of problem solving, a lot of context matching, a lot
puzzles and I really liked that. And I wasn't really thinking as much about like, does it matter if this article is relevant to our audience? it's ranking, that's incredible. Or is this keyword actually bringing good quality leads? I didn't think about that. I was just like the keyword is producing leads and that's what I want. As I got more senior...
Then suddenly, you know, it was getting that feedback from sales and being like, these leads suck. yes, we're bidding a bunch on this, but they bring in low quality leads or hearing, getting to hear what is the strategic vision of the company and being like, wait a second, I'm spending all this time optimizing this page because I think it's going to rank well, but we're not going after that audience at all. Like it just doesn't became more familiar with.
Really, honestly, it's almost like comes down to efficiency. Like what are the most important points of the business and how to be strategic that I realized there's a time and place for growth hacking. Because let's be honest, if you write a great piece of content, but you have no ability to figure out the algorithm or you don't think about distribution at all, it's not going to go anywhere. So you do have to think a little bit from the growth side. But I try to really start now with is this
again, is this aligning to our main goals and is this going to help our audience versus in the past when I first started, it was like, how is this going to get me the most amount of leads or distribution?
Tom Rudnai (14:03)
Yeah, well, it's focusing in on I guess, as you go up the chain, focusing in on the right things and your your remit becomes broader and you see the context around, okay, 20 leads that are bad isn't as good as 10 leads that are good. I guess so with that slightly broader remit and context, where where is it in your marketing team that you would try and encourage a growth hacking mentality?
Natalie Marcotullio (14:30)
Try less growth hacking, but more, I think I like to think of it now more like optimizing. Like rather than trying to think about it as how can we hack this system, it's, know, if we're running a campaign, for example, even as something as simple as like events, we're doing a lot of events this year, which I don't think most people would think of from like a growth hacking perspective. But the first few ones, we just tried to throw it, we invited some customers, it was a lot of like manual outreach.
And we needed to do that manually first because we needed to get the data. To your point of throwing things on a wall, you sort of need to because you don't know what's going to perform yet. Yes, you can benchmark against others and read best practices, but then the day it's a different audience, a different company. Now we did six events last year and we have pretty good data about like, okay, what, what.
qualities of different cities mean that more people are gonna show up. Like one thing we found is no duh, if we have a lot of customers that have offices near that city, they're more likely to attend because they might bring a few team members as well. It's like close and easy for them. We also figured out like what was the best cadence to reach out to them. Where should we be reaching out? Like is it LinkedIn? Is it email? it?
directly from CSM. And so it's more how do we take that very manual throwing things on a wall and then optimizing each of those little channels and creating a system and process. And that's now sort of more how I think about like growth or growth hacking. It's less, again, it's less like how can I figure out this little trick that's gonna trick my audience into seeing our content? And it's more how can I take systems and processes? I know that worked because it was very manually and just make it more efficient.
Tom Rudnai (15:56)
Yeah, well, and I guess that's where like the...
my perspective, I feel it feels like the growth hacky or that skill set has kind of morphed into the AI experimentation world of it's yeah, it's more, I think what people are trying to do is scale something that is organic and authentic in a way that tries to retain some of that core, right? And I feel like that's where a lot of that kind of slightly more engineering type energy is going now.
Would you agree with that or am I thinking out loud here?
Natalie Marcotullio (16:32)
A hundred percent, but I think we're, seeing a lot of companies is the problem is that they skip that first step. Like I think the growth hacking mindset and honestly, I've, sometimes I think I've now almost stayed a little too much to that growth first step. Like I really liked just building something from the ground up and trying it. But I see too many marketers who are the opposite, who was like, well we can create thousands of LinkedIn ads now at scale. But we skipped the step of figuring out like, okay, but what, what LinkedIn ads resonate with our audience? Do, ours, our audience on LinkedIn? If they are on LinkedIn, what, what's going to get them to stop the scroll?
and this is something that we've been guilty of as well. It's so easy to do things at scale now that suddenly we're just like, okay, well, because I can create 2,000 personalized LinkedIn ads, I'm gonna do that versus thinking like, what would make this interesting to my audience? And again, that second part is so helpful once you have figured out that first part. And ideally, you have someone who can do a little bit of both.
Tom Rudnai (17:24)
think it's difficult because there's so much pressure to scale and a lot of that gets handed down from above. Marketers are, we're kind of operating in this world where you go on LinkedIn which I think I should try not to do that if you want to be sane.
You go on and in and you see these gaudy numbers of lovable and replic got to X revenue in 12 days or whatever it was and it puts a lot of pressure on you. I feel I feel this for myself sometimes you kind of want to force that level of growth but it stops you from actually doing the right things. You have to remind yourself that that is a consequence of doing the right things not a goal in itself. I think that's quite a hard thing to balance.
Natalie Marcotullio (18:08)
One thing that helps me though, when I think about that, because trust me, I go on LinkedIn all the time and I'm like, I'm doing my job entirely wrong and I'm bad at all of it because I don't have 10 AI automations running my day to day. But when you think about tools like Loveable and Replit, yes, there's so many growth hacks and things they did, but then the day, I would argue the thing that got them to where they are is word of mouth. I did not use Loveable because of an ad I've seen or anything like that. I used Loveable because 10 people told me to try it and I saw examples of it. So.
Tom Rudnai (18:17)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Natalie Marcotullio (18:36)
Like yes, there are other things they did to accelerate that word of mouth, but I think we often forget that the core thing you need of any of the products that went super viral, I think about like Figma or Slack or Clay, any of those, it's a really good product that people want to talk about and a loyal fan base that you are.
But like that you are amplifying that you are giving a lot of attention to and so people again skip that first step of let's create a great product that we know our users love let's make it super simple and create maybe like viral loops within the product first and let's really support and appreciate our customers. Let's make sure that they are getting a 10 out of 10 experience Then all the growth hacks and loops on top of that work because you already have people are gonna hype you up But if you don't have that first step that like all those other things aren't gonna really work so I just think about it like
Remember that it was really the word of mouth that was probably doing a lot of that growth, no matter what channel or distribution they tell you. And that's the first step you have to nail.
Tom Rudnai (19:34)
Yeah, think it kind of makes me think of like, the word it makes me think of is discipline. Don't go chasing the aggressive scale things and trying to follow playbooks that work for other people. You need to have the discipline to focus on fundamentals, which is kind of show.
value that's so amazing that people go out and talk about it. If you can do that and do that in a small scale, then we now know that anything that works, can generally scale up and you don't have too bad diminishing returns isn't something you're going to see for quite a while, thanks to AI. it makes me think that you kind of need to the way that we construct our teams almost needs to change a little bit because you kind of need people with both mindsets, people with that I'm going to scale it mindset and people with that kind of conduct more
traditional tests and think less about scale. Have you, as the world has kind of flipped on its head over the last 36 months, have you changed the way that you think about hiring and constructing your team and the way that you target people at all?
Natalie Marcotullio (20:36)
Honestly, I haven't thought that much differently about hiring. I think I've just really tried to phrase it from every stage of our growth. What do we need versus getting very distracted by like, I now need a go-to-market engineer or something. And trust me, we've been tempted, but I try to do really think about it.
two different things. Like one, what is the business need right now that is being ignored because we don't have someone full-time specialized on it? Or two, what is an area that's like taking up a lot of my time that I'm not uniquely positioned or have to do? I think as a solo marketer, you just get used to doing everything. And you come to a point where you do have to start being very like, honestly kind of ruthless with your time and your priorities. And you have to think, what am I best at? And what am I most uniquely positioned for? And what maybe is it that...
Maybe I could do well, but someone else could do a lot better. For example, like we brought in someone full time for growth this year, cause I was straddling both growth and product marketing. And I was really trying to focus on product marketing, which I think was very important because it was the first time I'd really led it. For us, product marketing was very important because we've got the stage where like differentiation and product education and upsell is much more important than the early stages of just like, Hey, we need to get our name out there. But all the growth stuff really took a backseat and I did have to kind of.
just admit to myself, like I am letting this fall. Yes, my background might be growth hacking. Yes, I do love the growth side, but I am because I don't have the full bandwidth to do this. And I've been focusing on product marketing. It is going to be somewhat better if someone else does it. And I can a hundred percent say the person we brought in Jay has 10,000 % to been doing better at me. He is all the scale AI side, which is incredible. He is so good at taking an idea, still thinking about again, the strategy and the reason behind it, but then how do we make it a lot more efficient or scale it up?
Tom Rudnai (22:19)
Yeah, it's interesting. And it was one thing that stood out to me when I looked at your job roles being product marketing and growth together, which isn't they're not two roles that I often see brought under one roof, so to speak. What was the and it sounds that you've kind of, well, they still sit under you, is that right? But you just now have Jay who leads the growth side of things on a day to day basis. What was the thinking and kind of merging those two functions? Was there a reason why those two you felt sat really well together?
Natalie Marcotullio (22:46)
Yeah, it was a little more honestly like just what I need to prioritize and focus on. Like I think of your title as really where do you want to be spending your time? And I was always the head of market or head of growth and marketing at Novatic basically. I mean, it was classic, like, you know, startup, your title is a little wishy washy, but I always, really wanted to choose growth because I do want to be involved more than just, as I mentioned, marketing with my chief of staff background. I got very close to sales and CS and I feel like growth naturally lends itself to some more of those initiatives.
But there was a period of time where we realized, because I was again spending so much time more on the growth side or traditional marketing, we were really letting product marketing slip. And we wanted that to be a product focus area for me. And so we realized, OK, the way to really get me to focus on it is I'd be officially in charge of it. Right now, the product marketing team is just me. But eventually, scale out the team. That would be something that 100 % is under me as well, so I can make sure that's a focus area.
Tom Rudnai (23:41)
Yeah, that makes sense. And I know one other thing that came out of our, the kind of prep conversation that we had a couple of weeks ago for this. You said that customer marketing is something that has been a big, big priority for you guys.
last year and this year. Interesting to understand that, because it's always one of my soap boxes that I get up on is that, what is often called like the right side of the bow tie post acquisition is something that is often overlooked and is a big opportunity for marketers. What's led you to kind of go down that route and yeah, is there particular data that made you realize there was a huge opportunity there?
Natalie Marcotullio (24:16)
Yeah, I think it was looking at the business and just looking at like, where do we want to grow and focus over the next few years, months? And again, really realizing like we've, we've kind of, we still have work to do, but we've really done the first part of, I'd say a startup marketing, which is like, you need to get the name out there or first you need to educate the market and what your product does. you could argue that's category creation or just being known in the category. Then you need to get brand awareness to make sure people know that you are in that category and that put out thought leadership pieces and good content to know like, okay,
This is our opinion and thoughts about this category and we still have work to do there.
But now it was a lot more when we're thinking about like where were we struggling as a business? It was customers not knowing, hey, I don't know about new feature launches or product releases. I think part of this was also spurred by how much faster we're putting out features because of all the AI innovation or just like we have a larger team now, we can develop a lot faster. It was also realizing like we have this great customer base, but how can we make sure they're happy? And then how can we make sure they're buying more? And when we look at our growth levers, there's probably more opportunity there than just continuing to focus on that new.
On top of all that, just thinking about that word mouth flywheel I was mentioning earlier, like also realizing that we've tapped a lot of these channels, which are great. And really the way that we keep this going is to make sure that we still have happy customers singing our praises because we can only scale so much, like our customers are honestly kind of like the ultimate channel for us if we can make them work. And I think that's the way a lot of people buy these days. As I mentioned with Loveable, like I didn't try it because I got an ad, it's because 10 people mentioned it to me. So it was a mix of like business
needs, okay we want to focus on customer health and then upsell. It was a mix of kind of market pressure or a market awareness of this is the way people are buying and then also just thinking about you know what's the next frontier that we haven't tapped or unlocked yet like where's the biggest growth opportunity.
Tom Rudnai (26:10)
Yeah, I like that way of framing it. You kind of got the three stages that you need to go through category creation, brand awareness, then what I kind of wrote down value realisation or value communication, which I think is a really nice framework of like the three core jobs to be done for a marketer. But I think it's that last one that is generally not seen as a marketing job, it's seen as a product job. But I think you make a very good point there.
We produce features so much quicker than we used to, but we don't communicate them probably at the same rate. How do you, I'm trying to think what the best next question is, because I've got loads swimming around my mind. How do you think about measuring the impact of what you're doing on the customer marketing side? What are the metrics, first of all, that you're looking at to tell you whether that's working or not?
Natalie Marcotullio (27:01)
So one thing we always measure is boredom athletes. I know I keep harping on this point, but I really think that that's one of the biggest things you can do to see obviously like the gas, there's health retention upsell. To be honest, like we haven't tied a marketing metric to that just yet. We do eventually want to introduce the concept of like an upsell pipeline for marketing. We've always just been responsible for net new pipeline, but we're still in the experimental mental phase. So we haven't put an exact pipeline to it yet. But for the past two years, really, when we think about our annual metrics, we have two main ones.
as a marketing org. We always have pipeline and then we have a word-of-mouth lead goal. And it's really calculating like, if we're anticipating we are putting X much more resourcing spend into custom marketing, that we will get Y much more out as far as again word-of-mouth. And we just use the how did you hear about us field and we categorize certain things like when people say, a colleague, a friend, literally a lot of people say word-of-mouth because we sell the marketers.
But we categorize that and we just measure how many leads are we getting. And part of the reason why we measure leads is we also know those are some of our highest converting leads that are most likely to end up as pipeline and close one if they came from a word or mouth source.
Tom Rudnai (28:10)
Yeah, that makes sense. And are there particular tactics or campaigns that you've run on the customer side that you've found have a particular, that you've been able to track back a clear impact to the amount of word of mouth that you're generating?
Natalie Marcotullio (28:24)
I think if there's anything, it's hard because a lot of times it's long term. And honestly, this is making me realize we should be having a better framework and system for measuring this on the growth side, but it's more.
More, think, an example is the people that we invite to events. So we did, again, as I mentioned, six customer events last year. And this is mostly qualitative. I don't have the quantitative numbers for this yet, but we'll see those people are one, much more likely to become champions internally. So try and be fighting for, we've seen multiple times with those, the customers that are more likely to upsell and give us introductions, all that. They are much more likely to be posting about us, sharing about us in different channels on LinkedIn, organically. They're much likely to be engaging with our content, responding. And if we ever have a
customer ask if it's time for that we need a taste study or testimonial, maybe we need reference, they're much more likely to engage. So I'm sure we can measure that all back with how much pipeline has been attributed to those individual people, but we can definitely tell just on a qualitative scale, those that we engage with in person are much more likely to become those champions that we can make asks to.
Tom Rudnai (29:28)
Yeah, well, and I'd imagine there's a huge, I think it's always gonna be hard to attribute, but a huge impact across things like retention metrics, NLR and stuff like that, right? If people are obviously that's where content like
We've always viewed it as a product job to get the product adopted or a customer success job to get the product adopted but there is so much marketing can do there to keep giving people reminders of the value that you can offer particularly as that value probably changes quicker than it used to as we release new features. So yeah I think that's a call.
cool direction. The other thing and I guess it links a little bit to some of this but that I really wanted to get into with you because one thing I go on to quite a lot of LinkedIn profiles and I see Nevada advisor or Nevada ambassador, I can't remember exactly what the term you use is but I you have your kind of advisory board and that links into what you do with influencers so I really want to get into that and kind of understand from you how you've made that work so well for you at least, unless it's just my algorithm that has surfaced all of these
people for me. I guess let's start with like give us a little bit of context on exactly what you've built there and what you think has made it work so well.
Natalie Marcotullio (30:41)
Yeah. So to your point, they are advisors. We call it kind of our advisor influencer program. But I think what works so well is the fact that they are a mix of both. So I think there's two models that I typically see when it comes to B2B advising influencing. There is the advisor, which is usually strictly like, hey, we have a marketing person who's a little junior. We would like them to get someone, bring someone in who is more senior. Maybe once a month they meet. Usually you pay them in a little bit of equity and they act as an advisor to either an individual contributor or like to the company as a whole.
Then on the flip side, I see the influencer model, is I'm going to pay you per post. I'm going to give you a series of topics to post about or just to promote us. It's usually a little more of just like plastering an ad, and maybe they'll go on a webinar or podcast, but very much more pay per play. And I think what I...
I've seen work really well with ours, it's somewhere in the middle. So they are actual advisors. I talk to them frequently about, I mean, again, this works well because I'm a marketer selling to marketers, but we're actually launching an advisor program for another persona. And it's still very helpful where we'll ask them feedback about like, hey, you're targeting ICP. What are you seeing at the market? What are you seeing work well?
You know, we will pitch them product and maybe strategic ideas and get their feedback. How often do you get, again, your exact ICP in a room who will be very honest with you what we're thinking. Or maybe we'll say like, we're going to go in this strategic direction or position this in this way. What do you think about that?
So they do actually advise the company, but on the flip side, they also help promote. They'll post about us on LinkedIn when we're doing big announcements. They will help mention us in communities or in events that they go to. And I think what really fuels all this is it's not like, again, either I think like, honestly, monetary does fuel lot of it. It's not that either you get some equity and then it's really easy to forget about this and then eventually you taper off, or it's pay per post, which feels very transactional. It's just a monthly payment the same way you think about paying like a freelancer.
every single month like they are on payroll they are getting something from Novatic but it's not it is not just for their face or their advertising it is also for their expertise and knowledge.
Tom Rudnai (32:48)
Yeah, well, because that's that was what I was thinking was when you were saying some in the middle, that's great. But then how do you kind of compensate people for that? Because I always have that thing. Equity feels great the moment you get it. But a year later, you've kind of forgotten that you have it. You don't you feel like you've already earned it. Even though it's festering, it's not quite like seeing cash come into your bank every month. So it's like, how do you avoid it being transactional, but create the
feeling of proximity to the business, but that and that's what you've landed on as has worked really well. I guess what what have you found other like features of the advisors that you collectively get the most out of right in terms of how you approach the relationship and maybe like the profile of the person.
Natalie Marcotullio (33:37)
Yeah, I'll actually start with the profile of the person because that's the most tactical. I think when we first started this program, we fell into the trap that a lot of people probably are. We need to get the person with the most follower counts on LinkedIn, right? Like we just need to get people who have a hundred thousand followers and it'll be great. And what we found oftentimes was that actually wasn't a great fit. There are some people who have great follower counts. That's awesome. But the more followers you have, the more you're diluting your message because you're appealing to a lot of different people. You're probably talking about pretty high level concepts versus what we found worked really well as people who had very niche
Tom Rudnai (33:47)
Yeah.
Natalie Marcotullio (34:07)
topics or industries that really spoke to our audience. For example, like we, lot of product marketers use Novatic. We found some people who maybe had like 10, 20,000 followers, but they really went deep into product marketing and they understood immediately because their audience is product marketers, why something like an interactive demo would be valuable to them. We didn't have to sort of explain it. Like it, really clicked. And we were also looking for people who they didn't have to be talking about interactive demos, but we're already sort of talking about the narrative that we were trying to push. And so our narrative is about creating a better
buying experience, right? We all know buying software is painful. I won't go into the whole thing, but kind of our concept is like we make buying easier because you get to see the product more upfront. So we were looking for people who were talking about concept of like B2B buying, why it's painful, how they want to try to make it better, things they've done. So even if they are not talking about interactive demos one-to-one, we know that their audience aligns with the message that we're trying to push. any questions on the profile side before I go to like the tactical of how we interact with them?
Tom Rudnai (34:59)
Really.
No, I think, well, I guess one, which is at what stage did you start this? And do you think there is a right stage to start this? And the reason this is a very self-indulgent segment of this podcast, because I'm building something not dissimilar at this point. yeah, that's why I'm wondering.
Natalie Marcotullio (35:17)
you
I started this about, I think a year and a half into Novatic. I'd say what's important is you do know who your ICP is. Like if you're trying to figure out product, fit, and you don't know exactly who is your best persona yet, I mean, you could use it as a way to try to validate, right? If you talk to three different people who represent three different personas, maybe you could test that out and see like which one does bring in the best leads. But I think it will probably work best if you have a clear idea of who is your audience. What is, again, what is your narrative or message that you were trying to push out?
And then I would start small. tell everyone, we started with like one or two people. I would usually say pilot it with like three and do a three month test. Like start with a three month contract, which usually people understand it's like, Hey, we're testing this on both sides. It can get really overwhelming when you try to start with 50, which I see plenty of programs also do their life. We're to do influencers. So we're to start with a community of 50.
and really just work closely with those three. Like we have adapted our program based off of what our advisors has given us feedback on or based on their specific skill sets. Like originally we thought this was just gonna be LinkedIn posting and then some of them started podcasts and they're like, hey, you wanna also sponsor my podcast or we're starting a YouTube channel. Can I mention Nevada in that or a newsletter? And these were things we never would have thought of if we didn't just get really close to the advisors and work with them one-to-one.
Tom Rudnai (36:36)
Yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense. then Toby had profile and then there was another question I asked which I've since forgotten but I'm hoping that you remember.
Natalie Marcotullio (36:43)
think it's about what is the makeup of the actual program or how we interact with them. Is that it? Cool.
Tom Rudnai (36:48)
Yes, yeah, yeah, and how you how
you keep the relationship going in a way that produces the best outcomes. Thank you.
Natalie Marcotullio (36:56)
Yes, exactly. So again, first of all, I'd recommend testing three months. Don't do like a one month post test because also the LinkedIn algorithm sucks now. Sometimes things just flop. I would really see three months. And again, like, is it resonating with your audience? You might not see immediate ROI, but if you're seeing, like go into the profiles of the people who interact with their posts. And if you're seeing like, hey, this person is like...
Target great fit account and they just like this post and commented on it. Probably a good a pretty good signal So once you've gotten past that point what we do is we do a monthly update with our advisors We do this in an email and a slack channel. So once a month, I will send an email update I will give updates on here's what's happening from a marketing department. Here's maybe what I want some feedback on For example, let's say we're launching a new ABM strategy Maybe I want some feedback of like hey, is anyone done ABM topics? I have a question about this thing and then I might have a few asks as far as like
We are launching this new product or feature. Can I get your thoughts on it? Or we just launched a big report, maybe some asks for reviewing it and then helping promote it. And then once a quarter, we also do a quarterly advisor brainstorm, which is where we get together. I usually give a little bit of an update on the beginning again, depending on what is the strategic focus of that quarter. For this quarter, we just did it, I think two weeks ago.
The strategic focus was all about the report we're coming out. So we talked about what are the big themes this year. We talked about promotion timelines. And then we did a big brainstorm about, know, how can we, what are some themes and topics that we want to pull? What are ways that we can make this promotion stand out or do it a little differently? What are you all seeing that you really like? Like when someone promotes something. And that cadence of the monthly update and the quarterly brainstorm, I find works really well. Early days, you might even want to do like a one-to-one meeting with all the advisors.
But at this point we have like 15 and I think that group setting for however can come works well.
Tom Rudnai (38:44)
Nice, think that everyone's looking for a way to cut through the noise in a super noisy environment where getting good content in front of the right people is very difficult. I think it's a really nice organic, it's obviously paid, but it feels more organic. I go onto LinkedIn all the time and I see posts that you can just see, it's so clearly sponsored and it really turns me off and it stops me.
It turns me off to the brand that did it actually more than the person that posted it. I kind of like fair enough. You're trying to make a living. Um, so I think it's a, it's a very clever, clever way. Are there any benefits that you've seen from the program that maybe aren't what you expected at the start? Any unexpected benefits that you got?
Natalie Marcotullio (39:28)
I think really it is that access to your ICP. Like I think a great example is you're doing a website refresh and you know, you and your founder or your CEO are debating the headline of the H2 and which is very natural. I feel like I don't know a marketer who hasn't been in this position. Suddenly it's, you know, trying to get customer feedback. It's great, but sometimes you don't want to bother your customers getting prospect feedback and be even harder. This is your direct audience that you can then ask and say, Hey, what do you think? And suddenly it's not me. The marketer didn't like CEO's copy. It's these
expert advisors who we pay and are the best of the best, that's their feedback. And I think that's something that also helps really build the trust with the advisors. Again, it's not just I'm asking you to go post about us, but I really am valuing your input and you are helping shape this industry. So I think a lot of people make the pitch for it when they think about the influencing side, but having those advisors on tap that you can go to get feedback from and almost just like stress test as your ICP is probably even the more valuable part.
Tom Rudnai (40:27)
No, I can see that. mean, that's how I approach it for us and what we want to build here. We're in an incredibly competitive space in AEO, right? There's a lot of people trying to solve that problem at the moment. And we're also in a kind of engineering world at the moment where really more engineers doesn't necessarily help you build a project product. What does is faster reaction to what competitors are launching, what customers are finding issues that they're having. And in a fast moving space like ours, changes in the algorithm learning about how to
for AI search. So I kind of view having this kind of research or advisory board at the core of our business as something which doesn't just fuel our content and marketing, but actually gives us like a sustained product advantage. And I'm sure that's something that other people out there would find as well. Is there a way, guess, thinking of like, so a lot of people are probably listening to this thinking, well, okay, but I don't, know, it's, is there a way to...
Don't put yourself in the shoes of someone who maybe doesn't have carte blanche and doesn't have the keys to their whole marketing operation to kind of implement this and really integrate it into the business in the way that maybe you would want to or that you have. there ways that you think it could work really well that are starting a bit smaller and a bit more of an experiment initially?
Natalie Marcotullio (41:49)
Yeah, think first thing is like first just figure out who your audience follows like that I think a lot of people get that question is number one even before like how could I test this just like who should I reach out to who's an advisor so like just step number one is do a survey talk to some customers offer to buy them coffee and just ask them like who do you trust in the industry who do you go for your advice news podcasts all that they they're probably gonna name some people you're like well that is way outside of our range but they might have some more niche people as well and if nothing else you're gonna find some good nuggets in there so like that's that's probably a helpful exercise
to do anyways is just going out and asking your customers, anyone in your ICP, again, who do you follow, who do you listen to, where do you go to get your news, things like that.
Then just connect with these people, right? Like maybe, maybe if you're not ready to start an advisor program, a lot of our advisors, we initially did like a really low key interview series. they went nowhere. We posted them on YouTube. They, did a pretty bad job with them. This was before I knew how to really interview one, but we just invited them on. Just think of us something like that, whether it's a webinar, a podcast, a video clip, something where you can just pick their brain and get their expertise. And you might get a good idea in that moment of like, do we think this, the way this person thinks in line with the narrative that we're trying to push. And now you just.
developed a connection. So again, worst case scenario, you have a great piece of content, you can repurpose for blog posts, for LinkedIn clips, all this stuff. Or worst case scenario, but good content, best case scenario that starts a relationship. And then maybe you show that, again, you show that blog or that video to your CEO and you're like, look how knowledgeable they are. Wouldn't it be great if we had someone like this pushing about how great we are? And then I would really recommend if you're gonna pilot it, start a three month trial. Usually, I mean,
It won't be too expensive if it's just three months, start with just one or two people. And then if that goes well, you can always scale it up. But I would just start with like identifying the people, building the relationship with the people, maybe starting really small one or two people. And then that's when you can scale. But again, when I started, it was like three people. is nowhere near as organized or as large as it is now three years later.
Tom Rudnai (43:46)
Yeah, I always think like...
My best advice that I could give anyone, one of the best things I've done since starting Demand You Is to start in the podcast. it's not really like, it's not because it's got a massive audience or anything like that. there's, know, pipeline flooding in off the back of it, but it's a fantastic way to meet people. And it's a fantastic way to learn. You get to have deep conversations. I can ask, I can ask you questions on a podcast. And if I met you at an event, you'd be like, all right, relax. stop asking me about the contradiction between this and this. Right. So I get to understand how you think in such a deeper way.
I would if I just went to a networking event. It's a really good way to build relationships with people and actually to just challenge your thinking and learn in a much deeper way. You don't have to be the founder of the company or something like that to go and just do that.
Cool, well look, I'm conscious that we are starting to get towards the end of our time together. And so I'm gonna try and wrap up on time. I've got a few quick fires if you have some time to run through before we wrap up. So, okay, well, first one, and we haven't actually, probably for, this is the least I've talked about AI in a podcast in a little while, which I think is a fantastic thing. But we're gonna break that now. So what is an AI use case or a tool that you absolutely love?
Natalie Marcotullio (44:48)
Let's do it.
Yeah, I'm going to give one that's probably unexpected, but I was trying to think not just me, but the entire business. have a tool called Ask Solo where it's kind of like support, but it's all internal and it actually looks into our code base. So if you're like, Hey, does this integration do this thing? It's not just pulling from our docs, but actually pulling from the code. So, you know, if the docs aren't always a hundred percent up to date or if something's very nuanced, it will both flag the answer, but then say, here's the engineer person who is an expert in this. If you have a follow-up answer and then pull any relevant docs, if it has it. And we use this a lot.
a blog post too. Like a lot of times if we're writing about maybe like our writers writing about a new feature, she'll actually sometimes ask, ask it and ask like okay I need some more information about this feature or like understanding the more nuanced parts.
Tom Rudnai (45:50)
that's awesome. it Ask Solo?
Natalie Marcotullio (45:53)
Yeah, just like the word ask and then solo, S-O-L-O.
Tom Rudnai (45:56)
Nice, I'm going to check that one out. That sounds really cool. Awesome, love that. And then I guess for you personally, is there like a skill or a trait that you have that you like you think has really moved the needle for you in your career?
Natalie Marcotullio (46:10)
I'm gonna go back to our earlier conversation and I talked about how I used to say yes to everything, but I actually think this skill was learning how to properly say no and prioritize. Especially now, there are so many things you could be doing. And again, I just don't think humans are supposed to do more than X number of tasks in a day. It also just makes the job a lot less enjoyable when you're constantly switching from one thing to the next versus doing deep work. Like I'm always my happiest when I'm actually able to do deep work.
Tom Rudnai (46:36)
Yeah, I agree. You forget how to otherwise, like it's nice to focus on something. Yeah. And what about the flip side? Is there a time in your life? I'm trying not to swear so much on this podcast. So what's the biggest screw up that you've made in your career? Like I always think of it as like the heart stopping moment.
Natalie Marcotullio (46:59)
I think this goes to such a good example as I talked about understanding other departments and what's important and what I didn't do. another not Nevada, but different startup, we had this really big feature launch, entirely changed the product, UI, all this stuff. And I didn't really understand how it would affect our customers as much. I knew I had to communicate messages to them, but I was so focused on the plan of, OK, tomorrow we email this cohort and we have this messaging. And the next day we email this cohort. I wasn't thinking about how would it actually impact our customers, especially because it was not
Tom Rudnai (47:27)
Yeah.
Natalie Marcotullio (47:29)
the most technical audience, so big changes like that really affected them. And even in my messaging, I wasn't leading it from an empathetic point of view. It was just like, oh, this is so exciting. Things are changing. And I remember someone messaged me on LinkedIn or messaged, I think the company page on LinkedIn, and was like, this is the worst product update I've ever seen. We're making fun of it right now. I was like, what?
clearly did not communicate properly. think there were some things internally I had to figure out, but it reminded me, it was such a good example of like we were all executing in our own little silos because we were so wanting to get this product launch done, but none of us like took a step back to be like, is this the right time? Is this the right messaging? Are we communicating this properly to customers? It's more about getting the thing done than actually helping our audience.
Tom Rudnai (48:12)
Yeah, well I think it's very easy.
tech companies are very specialized, right? was because we focus a lot on efficiency and tracking everything. And it's very easy in that to forget to kind of do the little things that you don't quite see the ROI on a spreadsheet from, but make quite a big difference to just the congruence of everything that you do with a company. So that's a good one. And then last one's a little bit more fun. If I was to give you carte blanche or if your CEO was to give you carte blanche to run any marketing campaign that you want and the way I always
think of it is like the campaign that they would never actually be stupid enough to sign off. What would you do?
Natalie Marcotullio (48:52)
This has nothing to do with actually good marketing. Totally selfish. I would sponsor an F1 car so I can go to a race and get to go in the paddock. That's nothing. I could even argue there are probably a lot of tech people who watch F1, but that I always joke like if Nevada makes it big, that's what we're going to do. We're going to spend all of our marketing budget on sponsoring my favorite team.
Tom Rudnai (48:59)
You
Nice, there's going to be an interactive demo of Novatic on the side of an F1 car one day, isn't there? And I'm going to know exactly who was behind it. Which team would you sponsor?
Natalie Marcotullio (49:20)
Exactly.
So you probably can guess by my last name, but I am unfortunately a Ferrari fan, which has been tough this season.
Tom Rudnai (49:32)
No, I think that's good choice. There's something like classical and cool about Ferrari. There's gravitas. I think it's good one to have Novatic associated with.
Natalie Marcotullio (49:44)
It's more just also being, again, Marco Tullio being Italian. It was no other option but to be a Ferrari fan.
Tom Rudnai (49:51)
Yeah, fair enough. That's the case often when in the UK when we decide which football team we support. It's like you like to think you have a choice, but really you're going to support whichever one your dad supported or they're to disown you, which is what happened with me. And now I'm stuck as a Southampton fan. I've loved this. always want to get, just before I let you go, one, I think it's nice to get one recommendation from you. So I don't know, is there like a podcast or a thought leader or a book that you've read recently that you've
rated and reckon people should check out.
Natalie Marcotullio (50:24)
So it's funny, I was trying to think of something recently, and I have a great of lot of people I follow in books I've read recently, but the thing I used to always say and still kind of come back to is I love the book Uncanny Valley. It's like 10 years old at this point. But I think as a lot of people are trying to figure out how they navigate in this world of AI and efficiency, it's not a book that's going to teach you marketing. It's about a New Yorker who comes from the publishing industry and got sucked into the Silicon Valley world in the 2010s. And it's just very funny, sometimes therapeutic, but it also does really make you think about the way.
startups operate. So if we're looking for a little break from all the optimization and tech bros, this can be a nice little reprieve.
Tom Rudnai (51:01)
Hey, we like the tech pros. But no, yeah, I will check that out. That's a new one actually that I've not heard before. So cool. Well, I've really enjoyed this. Hopefully you have as well. And hopefully if you're listening at home, then hopefully you've found this useful. Nally, is there anything, I guess, you want to plug that you're doing or that you're doing at Nevada quickly before I let everyone go?
Natalie Marcotullio (51:25)
No, just if there's anything you'd want to talk about our advisor program, our customer marketing, the way we approach marketing, anything like that, I'm more than happy to chat. I always joke about LinkedIn way too much, so feel free to reach out there.
Tom Rudnai (51:36)
I think we all are. Cool, I'm gonna let you and everyone else go. But thank you very much for joining. It's been lovely to chat to you and same to you at home.