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What else can I be doing to drive revenue? How do I optimize our go-to-market strategies to ensure effectiveness and ROI? If questions like these keep you up at night and occupy your thoughts by day, have we got a podcast for you.
Welcome to Market Mastery presented by The Bridge Group, the podcast where sales professionals learn to advance their careers. Join host and revenue expert Kyle Smith as he talks to elite B2B sales and revenue experts about the strategies they're using to win in the market.
From cultivating a killer company culture to navigating compensation questions, we'll provide you with the insights, education, and strategies you need to thrive.
For more from The Bridge Group, visit www.bridgegroupinc.com.
Evan Huck [00:00:00]:
And I think we're starting to basically apply a little bit more statistically scientific rigor that we would normally do when anything is important in society. Now to B2B purchasing, because it is starting to get more important. If you make the wrong purchase, you know, it can mess up the company, it can cost you your job. And so I think people are searching for a little bit more rigor and substantive scientific method when they go to make purchases.
Kyle Smith [00:00:23]:
Welcome to Market Mastery, the podcast dedicated to uncovering revenue driving strategies for sales leaders in B2B tech. On today's episode, I had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with Evan Huck, CEO of UserEvidence, and we talked through what his organization is doing for content marketers, customer marketers and sales teams providing ROI content for both top and middle of funnel management of the sales process, how reps are using it, and we even shifted gears and talked about how he's constructing his team, what they've learned so far as a series A where they're trying to go in the future. So good. Listen, hope you enjoy. So I appreciate you jumping on and taking the time to talk with me today, but for those who don't know you or haven't heard of your company, could you give us a quick overview of what is UserEvidence?
Evan Huck [00:01:15]:
Yeah, that's probably the vast majority of the world, actually, but yeah, so my name is Evan Huck. I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of UserEvidence based out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. UserEvidence is a relatively early stage. We have like 32 employees. Series A, stage B2B SaaS startup that sells to big enterprise technology companies. Basically marketing software that helps them capture the voice of their happy customers and turn it into content and evidence and proof points like testimonials and case studies.
Kyle Smith [00:01:43]:
Is marketing your primary buyer?
Evan Huck [00:01:45]:
Yeah, typically product marketing more specifically, customer marketing more specifically. And then there's a broader set of influencers in the deal. Sales and go-to-market team sales enablement, demand gen, marcomm. But yeah, primarily product marketing and customer marketing.
Kyle Smith [00:01:59]:
Yeah. In preparation for this conversation, I've been consuming more of your content and thinking about how to leverage ROI from my perspective in the sales process. And so when you think about leveraging assets like what you create or the value that you provide to your clients, how do you think about utilization beyond just like website or public for public consumption content and how a rep could actually leverage it as part of sales process execution?
Evan Huck [00:02:25]:
Yeah, that's part of where this idea came from. My background, like, I started my career as an SDR, so just ripping dials and selling right up, we mentioned, became an AE and then led sales teams. And part of the problem, I felt was we always had these squishy software solutions that provided squishy value. That was probably good, but you'd always get the question, like, you have two questions. One, can you talk to, or can you show me evidence or examples or stories from someone that looks like me, right? Like my industry, my use case, my size, my region, whatever. And then the second thing was like, hey, I need to, like, tee up a business case to my boss that proves that this thing is going to deliver ROI. And I always had a handful of, like, really pretty, like, beautiful case studies, but, like, it would be from, like, our top customers. Like, here's the MBA and here's Wells Fargo, and I'd be talking to, like, some, like, random mid market healthcare company.
Evan Huck [00:03:13]:
Like, well, this doesn't look like us. It's impressive, but, yeah, it doesn't tell us how we're actually gonna use this tool. And then the ROI part was tough too. So we had a bunch of, we love the product. Like, it's great, the sport experience is awesome, but, like, getting quantifiable evidence around value and impact and time savings and cost savings is always really tough for customers. So, yeah, so that, that was a problem that I felt personally. And something that we're thinking a lot is, you know, how can we put hyper specific religion targeted content and then believable metrics around ROI into the hands of the reps so they can help their buyers build a more compelling case for their solution?
Kyle Smith [00:03:50]:
Yeah, the case study, I don't know, or the press release, rather, that at least I saw today. I don't know. When you actually published it had a really important point to it that you just hit on, which was believable. And so the thing that I struggle with both as a consumer and working with sales teams is the seemingly ridiculous ROI numbers. Customers who engage with us see a 1600 percent increase in revenue creation. And it's one of those things that, where even if you can't see them, you could feel a prospect giving you an eye roll. Okay.
Evan Huck [00:04:21]:
Yeah, especially, I think, when it's so high level, it's like we increased revenue. But like, what the fuck does that mean? Like, what part did you play?
Kyle Smith [00:04:27]:
What did you do?
Evan Huck [00:04:28]:
Yeah, it's so abstract that. Yeah, it just sounds like marketing nonsense that I think we're all starting to like. As weve been around review sites enough and stuff like that, were starting to develop that antenna where we can sniff that out especially in todays market, which is what I would characterize as a fairly conservative buying market right now, where budgets are tight and buying reach a little bit larger and everyones just a little bit hesitant. There has to be a lot more confidence in the ROI narrative. Those two problems put next to each other. This skepticism and this inherent distrust of marketing claims because it's just so noisy out there. Plus this very conservative environment where there is a higher far rigor around creating a compelling business case is making it a top selling environment.
Kyle Smith [00:05:14]:
Yeah, and I don't want to steal your thunder or paraphrase the press release, so how do you do that? So when you think about the ridiculousness of certain ROI metrics that doesn't actually have the intended impact, what's your approach to it? To actually make it something that advances or reduces a buyer's skepticism and can advance the sales process?
Evan Huck [00:05:33]:
Yeah, I think there's a few different elements to it. One is like specificity and relevance. Back to our Walmart example. Even if Walmart saved 20% on cost using Salesforce, that doesn't tell me as a series a startup like what I'm going to do with it. So I think being able to show very relevant examples from a similar customer or a set of similar customers in the same segment and demographic and firmographic criteria I think helps you as a buyer just not have to discount these stories as much. So if the customer story is exactly the same parameters as me, there's a lot more likelihood that I might experience the same result versus trying to just put myself in the shoes of someone that's a totally different company. So one of the things that we do, our customers are like for example, like Gong and Salesforce, Pendo people that have oftentimes thousands of users. And the kind of old approach is to cherry pick a couple users and create a handful of case studies.
Evan Huck [00:06:28]:
Our approach is more, how can we get more representative, diverse sampling across hundreds of customers. So instead of just saying, hey, one customer saved 8 hours a week, Gong might say, hey. We used UserEvidence to conduct a study of 147 customers that are in the eleven to 50 employee segment. And on average they found that they saved seven and a half hours a week. If we were doing a healthcare study, you wouldn't just do a test on one person and then the FDA approves the drug. Oh, it seemed to kind of work. It's like, no, they do a substantive study of like a thousand people, right? Because they want to know. And I think we're starting to basically apply a little bit more statistically scientific rigor that we would normally do when anything is important in society.
Evan Huck [00:07:09]:
Now to B2B purchasing, because it is starting to get more important. If you make the wrong purchase, it can mess up the company, it can cost you your job. And so I think people are searching for a little bit more rigor and substantive scientific method when they go to make purchases.
Kyle Smith [00:07:23]:
Yeah, I mean, I think what you mentioned earlier in this conversation where there's more people involved in the decision making process, sales cycles got longer, budgets are tighter. It's been true since basically the beginning of 2023. And I think what you're doing is just reducing fear. And so you're not having that person feel like they're out on a limb to make this decision, and there's this massive risk associated with that purchase decision. And if it goes bad, it's like, oh, no, this is going to be my job. And in this environment, you say, this is going to cost me my job, and I don't know if I can go get another one, which means we're just not going to buy anything.
Evan Huck [00:08:00]:
Yep. Yeah. You're a little bit more risk averse in the survivor, for sure.
Kyle Smith [00:08:04]:
Exactly. So by understanding that this is a well worn path, 140 other companies have averaged seven and a half hours of time saving per month or per week or whatever it is. Okay, well, even if I'm on the lower end of that range, this still works for us like that. That math still works even if we're at four. I still like this purchase at that number. So you just change the way that they could evaluate the purchase, which is super interesting to try to forget it.
Evan Huck [00:08:29]:
But this still sticks out to me like some of the statistics classes I took in college. Right. Remember that concepts are like confidence intervals, right? The bigger is the sample size, the tighter or higher your confidence interval is going to be. And so you're essentially like, if you can get a bigger sample of results, that's going to just improve, reduce your risk by just giving you a tighter confidence interval on what the result might be.
Kyle Smith [00:08:49]:
So how do you actually collect the data? Do you have humans who go out and do customer interviews or what do you do for data collection?
Evan Huck [00:08:56]:
Yeah. So for our core platform, I think software nowadays, at least for a lot of companies, like oftentimes you have thousands of users. Right. And so, yeah, it's not just, say Gong is selling to state farmer assurance. It's not just like one person that's the buyer that you need to get the story from. It's a collection of hundreds of people across different departments and different functions and different levels, and how all of them kind of interface with Gong and experience success is an important part of building this kind of larger story around how this account experiences impact with Gong. So we found one way to collect feedback at scale, in a one to many way, is through surveys. So we might do, do a survey that asks questions like by how much have you been able to improve your win rate? Or how much more pipeline are you able to generate? Or how much faster are you able to close deals? And we could ask those questions to thousands of users very quickly.
Evan Huck [00:09:45]:
Right. And that survey could be delivered through email, it could be delivered in app as they're using a particular feature. It could be triggered from a CRM at a logical point in a customer journey, like post onboarding. So there's all these ways that we organically within the context or the lifecycle of the customer journey, just ask questions about the impact of Kong in this example. So from the survey, we might get 600 responses or something like that, which then becomes this awesome data set to then go create evidence and proof points. So let's say a salesperson or a demand gem marketer wants to create an asset that's specific to a new industry vertical they're going after, which is healthcare. They might filter the data set so that they create a stat that's 87% of healthcare customers reduce sales cycles by four weeks with Gong, according to research from independent third party UserEvidence. So part of this that's important too, is analogous to how Chevy would say, according to J.D. Power and Associates, we're the number one ranked in customer satisfaction.
Evan Huck [00:10:40]:
Gong can now say, hey, don't take our work for it. We didn't just make this crap up. This is independent third party research from UserEvidence. It was a study of 148 customers. So it adds credibility, which is, again, important in this kind of noisy environment where claims are just thrown out pretty wildly.
Kyle Smith [00:10:56]:
Do you struggle with like take rate? Basically, if you reach out to 1000 customers, how many do you actually get anything back from? And of what you get back, how much is actually included in the data set versus ridiculous and excluded?
Evan Huck [00:11:09]:
We do, we do a little bit. Particularly as, like in the past, email is a pretty primary channel for getting responses to these surveys. And as you know, salesperson email for anyone doesn't matter. If you're trying to schedule meeting with prospector, do what we're doing, which is get responses to a feedback survey is getting harder. And we've really tried to diversify our channel. That's why in app is a great one, like through Pendo or intercom community can be another good channel. So the project we're doing with Salesforce right now, obviously they have a huge community of trailblazers. They can just drop a link into that community and get more passive feedback that way.
Evan Huck [00:11:41]:
So the other thing we're trying to do is diversify or augment the channels through which we can collect data. So surveys is kind of our primary one, but there's also a bunch of other good existing sources already out there for customer feedback. So we have a new integration with G two, which automatically sucks down reviews from G2 into our platform so you can turn them into content. We also have a new Gong integration actually that comes through a transcript like this automatically and finds positive moments that you might want to turn into social proof content. So there's a lot of other sources too that we can start to bring together or synthesize so that we've maximize our data collection, which enables us then to just deliver a lot more robust library of social proof and content to the go to market team.
Kyle Smith [00:12:25]:
If a company has multiple products, how do you differentiate or do you even care the difference between one versus the other? Like if you're going to look at Gong, do you care about, they're going to be bad because I'll mess up the name, the sales engagement version, engage. How do you separate the impact of engage versus the impact of the traditional conversation intelligence solution?
Evan Huck [00:12:45]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of our customers, we work with some of the biggest software companies out there, like Broadcom, Salesforce, HP, enterprise, ADP, and they have dozens of offerings. They're going to typically do different surveys for different product offerings. Gong was actually a good example. They launched Engage. Product marketer worked with us and they wanted to get evidence around the impact of engage and they wanted to get competitive evidence, particularly around how it's better than outreach and HubSpot sequences and stuff like that. So they asked questions that kind of orient to the unique value propositions of that particular product and the unique differentiators. And then they obviously pointed the survey at users that were using that product.
Evan Huck [00:13:22]:
Then the cool thing is like if you look at Gong's overall library, which might have 4000 assets in it, they can create what we call collections of content or folders, essentially. That's, here's a bunch of content around engage. Here's a bunch of content around why users switch from course, here's a bunch of content around how we deliver success in the healthcare. So you have all these buckets of content so that when a prospect asks, hey, why should I choose you guys versus Chorus? Then they just send a link to this collection of 47 people saying, hey, we switched from Chorus to Gong. Way better. And that's a pretty relevant, substantive set of people that have made that decision to lead.
Kyle Smith [00:13:57]:
Do you do anything on the enablement front or is it you hand to enablement meaning like tell your customer what to do with it?
Evan Huck [00:14:06]:
Yeah, absolutely. We've had you because even if we create a bunch of content, if it just sits there in a library and doesn't get out in front of prospect eyeballs, it doesn't.
Kyle Smith [00:14:13]:
Your ROI takes a hit.
Evan Huck [00:14:15]:
Yeah, exactly right. So that was a big problem for us for a while that we always think about is like, all right, we created all this cool concept, but how do we get people to use it? People being like the functions that would actually take it and put it out in front of prospects eyeballs, which is SDRs and AE's demand gen, people taking a cool stat or testimonial, putting it in an ad. So yeah, we had to think about distribution quite a lot. For example, on the sales side, we have a new feature that's pretty sweet, that's like basically AI concierge bot that just serves up content. So a rep from Gong would either in slack or in our own app. They can just ask a natural language like, hey, do we have any examples where we beat Chorus in healthcare? And it'll just be like, yes, here's like seven examples that fit that description. Or what are the top three features of engage I should highlight for someone that's using Salesforce? So that sort of just in time distribution of the right content asset at the right point in the sales cycle is something that we're definitely thinking a lot about. We also built out integrations with sales content asset management tools like hi spot and seismic to encourage consumption of the content wherever the salesperson is supposed to go to define contacts.
Kyle Smith [00:15:24]:
That's awesome. Shifting for what you do for the clients and to you and UserEvidence. So did you found the company assuming that you were going to go the traditional vc scale route or what was your vision when you founded the company?
Evan Huck [00:15:41]:
Not necessarily. So my, the last company I wasn't part of. So I graduated from Stanford in 2010 and should have got like a CS degree, but I did not. And finance and consulting was starting to become a little bit less cool at the time, but startups were cool. Anyway, I found this random company called Techvality. I was the first salesperson there and it was a self funded company, and I ended up leading sales there to about 13 million in ARR. And then it was acquired by SurveyMonkey, which was awesome. So that was the initial.
Evan Huck [00:16:09]:
We thought we might do something similar. We didn't have any money. We didn't make that much money from that acquisition, so I couldn't totally self fund it. We had to get a little bit of outside funding. It was actually kind of funny. So we set our initial valuation at $5 million pre money, which is, in retrospect, pretty low. But we're like, whatever. I was like, two dudes that had no money.
Evan Huck [00:16:27]:
We just made up this concept, and to describe a $5 million value to it seemed pretty cool. Anyway, as salespeople, my co founder is also a salesperson. We kept pitching investors and they really liked it. And so we just kept collecting checks and we just kept raising more money. We ended up raising 1.7 against this five, which was, in retrospect, way too much dilution, but whatever. Anyway, these are all first world problems. The context there is like, originally we thought it would be lightly funded, but then what happened is, having been in a self funded company for five years until the acquisition, and seven or eight total, there was a lot of things that we wanted to do that we couldn't do because we had to be judicious with capital. Right.
Evan Huck [00:17:08]:
It's like watching a big long movie in slow motion again, like, it's too slow. And so this time we just wanted to do a little different. I think we saw some big opportunities in tangent markets and just to keep us intellectually interested in it. Yeah, we wanted more to bring in more capital just to take a bigger swing and go faster and go bigger and be able to hire executives that we could work with. Smart people. So, yeah, we raised 14 million now today, including a $9 million series a about 15 months ago. But we'll see where it goes from there.
Kyle Smith [00:17:36]:
From a sales perspective, where did you know? Based off of your previous experience and knowing, like, you wanted more velocity, was there any role in particular you felt you were too late to add the previous company that you brought on significantly sooner for UserEvidence or any major changes in terms of the pacing or the order of your hires?
Evan Huck [00:17:55]:
Definitely. So my old company, TechValidate, which is actually in a similar space. It's a decent analog. We got to 13 million a year and 60, 70 people with no marketing team at all.
Kyle Smith [00:18:05]:
Got it. Okay.
Evan Huck [00:18:05]:
Like, we had 27 SDRs at one time and like, 18 interns from Cal Berkeley, like, sourcing contacts on LinkedIn all day. So it's just a pure outbound machine which kind of worked ten years ago. Cause like you could rip a thousand emails and like schedule four or five meetings and now it's just so much freaking harder. We had to invest in marketing a lot earlier this time just because outbound was not as effective as it was eight to ten years ago. And so, yeah, we got a great vp of marketing, Mark, and now we have a person who runs product marketing and we're about to hire someone who runs content. We're trying to build more brand, particularly our new offering more. So like it needs a brand investment because part of the value of it, the new offering is basically a competitor to a forester total economic impact report, if you're familiar with that. So there's these analyst firms, Gartner and Forester.
Evan Huck [00:18:52]:
You can pay them a bunch of money and they'll like, interview some customers of yours and then give you a report around ROI for $150,000. But part of the reason they can charge that is because everyone knows who Gartner and Forrester is. And so they have this, again, in the consumer world that the J.D. Power style, like, trusted third party element to it. And so we think that we need to invest to kind of build up our brand on that front. Like, we have a bunch of differentiators that make it a cooler offering. But if we can catch up on the brand front on this almost modern day analyst positioning, we think that could be a pretty big tailwind for the company.
Kyle Smith [00:19:25]:
That's awesome. So knowing that previously you were in SDR, you had this massive SDR team, grew through a lot of brute force. And I say that as a positive. I work with a massive amount of SDRs. I love SDRs. But how do you think about ratios now for your business?
Evan Huck [00:19:40]:
When we started, like, it was like. Cause we're not in a defined category. It's not call intelligence or call recording. It's. I wouldn't know what you call it. Right. Like, our Persona, that our main Persona is like customer marketing. And there's starting to be more customer marketing tools now, and some of them are even getting funding, which is cool.
Evan Huck [00:19:56]:
But generally it's been like a kind of smallish Persona to sell to. So we started still heavy outbound. Like, we had 15 employees one time and ten of them were sdrs. But the other reason we, because, like, you know, we're not getting a ton of inbound and we weren't doing a ton of marketing. And so that was all we could do to generate business. The other thing I knew that would happen was like, yeah, I've always loved to promote internally. And so if we started with ten sdrs and knew that a good chunk of them would eventually become AE's and managers and stuff like that. So I intentionally built a big bench first, and now it's become more balanced.
Evan Huck [00:20:25]:
So at one point, we had eleven sdrs and two ae's, which was fun for those AE's because they were getting fed five to one. That didn't last. But, yeah, now it's more balanced. It's like five sdrs, seven ae's, and a good marketing engine behind it.
Kyle Smith [00:20:42]:
Does all your marketing flow through sales development, or does anything leapfrog sales development go direct to AE?
Evan Huck [00:20:47]:
So if someone comes into the website and requests to book a demo, if an AE owns it, it'll go directly on the AE's calendar. There's enough ways for us to qualify an account based on demographic and firmographic criteria. There's no point in doing, like, a qual call from a BDR, an SDR, just cause it's gonna be a bad prospect experience. So, yeah, if it is owned by an AE, it goes directly to an AE. And so, yeah, there is direct paths to that. But SDRs are still responsible. They probably generate, like, 50% of the pipeline. Is SDRs a 25% AES and 25% inbound or something like that? The channel that is, like, working a little bit.
Evan Huck [00:21:23]:
I even hesitate to say it because I don't want other people to jump on it too much, but is like, cold calls ironically. So we use an auto dialer called nuCs, which is pretty sweet. That just allows you to just rip 1300 calls in a week and have, like, 24 conversations. And so that's been actually the biggest source of SDR driven pipeline. So what?
Kyle Smith [00:21:40]:
Scarily, I'm not surprised at all. It's the least surprising thing. Any of our clients who still prioritize phone calls have the most success.
Evan Huck [00:21:48]:
Yeah, but they've gotten so good at it now. Like, imagine you had, like, they get so many reps where it's like they're freaking really dexterous. Like, you know, fencing. It's like they're so fast.
Kyle Smith [00:21:57]:
Have you done it?
Evan Huck [00:21:58]:
Oh, yeah. I still love it. I jump into nooks and riff calls. I had a day last week where I was on there for 45 minutes and scheduled two meetings, so I still got it.
Kyle Smith [00:22:06]:
My first time ever using anything like that. At the time, it was connect and sell.
Evan Huck [00:22:10]:
Yeah, exactly. Totally. Same idea. I used to do that. That was hilarious. Cause, like, you would have, like, a person overseas that was like, connecting you. You'd have this lag and you'd be like, oh, crap, sorry. Like, how do you unmute there? Yeah, the technology has come a long way, so.
Evan Huck [00:22:22]:
But same concept for sure.
Kyle Smith [00:22:23]:
It was so stressful. I just remember sitting there and I was like, I've made like a thousand calls ever in my career. And you're just sitting there, you're watching, like, different people light up and you're just waiting for the beep and your hands are sweating. But once you get the hang of it, it's incredible.
Evan Huck [00:22:37]:
Yeah, it's intense. I've gotten to the point where I can, like, now sometimes I'll just throw it on while I, like, do my emails and multitask. And then you share. Ding. You're like, hey, it's Evan. What's up? Don't suppose that name sounds familiar. Sounds like I caught you at a bad time.
Kyle Smith [00:22:50]:
I love it. That's great. And so what about CSNs?
Evan Huck [00:22:54]:
Yeah, we overinvested there early too because we intentionally. Our ICP is generally anyone with over like 200 employees and we do like mid market to large enterprise. And so we intentionally wanted in. Our ACV is reasonably high too. Like at the smaller end, it's 25 to 40k. Some of our bigger deals are 150 to 200,000. And so we intentionally wanted to just deliver a fantastic customer experience and have csms have a pretty small amount of accounts. And that investment paid off this year.
Evan Huck [00:23:22]:
We're over 120% now. Retention. There's a lot of land that expand and upsell and cross sell both within bigger accounts, like a broadcommerce Salesforce, but also just selling new product offerings that we have to the same people. That functions very highly functioning, very sophisticated, very enterprise y. I'm glad we've kind of over invested in the customer experience there.
Kyle Smith [00:23:42]:
So on the does the CSM own the cross sell, not upsell or renewal? Do they own the cross sell or does the AE reengage?
Evan Huck [00:23:50]:
So far at least? Eventually you might have to decouple it, but I've just paid them both. So we're just double paying on cross sell and upsell revenue just so that incentives are aligned. There's plenty of upsell and cross sell where the reps not involved and obviously we're not paying them on that if they weren't in the picture at all. But yeah, we're starting to include sales in it more particularly on cross sell. But yeah, generally I just try to err on the side of paying out more people. So that from the customer's perspective, there's not this weird, like, no, like, talk to me type of thing.
Kyle Smith [00:24:19]:
Yeah, that makes sense. You said ACV. So are the all or the majority of your contracts actual annual recurring contracts?
Evan Huck [00:24:28]:
Yeah, and we try to do a decent amount of two year deals. And, you know, one trick I've learned as a founder that's been pretty helpful is like, yeah, especially as you're trying to raise money, is NRR is going to be important. One way to get great nr is just build it into the contract. Right. So the two year step up deal going from 40 to 60k. Like boom. Yeah, there's your 120% NRR right there. So, yeah, all of them are annual contracts and there's a decent amount of two year deals as well.
Kyle Smith [00:24:53]:
Okay, awesome. What's like top of mind that you can share publicly for 2025? Like, what do you want to do, especially from a sales perspective, where do you think the next growth opportunity is?
Evan Huck [00:25:04]:
Yeah, we're really eager to invest in our more in our research content offering and these ROI studies and just do more around really disrupting the analyst business. You know, Gartner and Forrester still make a freaking ton of money. I think what we're starting to realize is that, like, their content's really good, but you don't need to pay like seven x just to have the brand on it. Like, a lot of times, like in an ROI study, for example, what people are really interested in is what their peers are doing. Right. What's the actual data from customers? Like? It helps to have a third party brand on it. But anyway, that's a space that just seems like there's. It's ready for a lot of disruption.
Evan Huck [00:25:39]:
So we're going to really lean in there. I think the sales motion might be a little bit different there than our core kind of SaaS offering. And so we're trying to think through how that looks in a little bit different way. Yeah, I think we're also trying to think about, like, how we reach larger enterprise buyers. You know, like, I think we do a good job on LinkedIn and our own echo chamber of getting to all the other small SaaS marketers, but all of our friends are well aware of us. But getting to the IBM's and the Dells and the Ciscos and things like that is really where the big deals are for us. And it's a slightly different motion in enterprise marketing. So we're trying to think through that.
Kyle Smith [00:26:15]:
What's the pushback is the resistance there. I'm just trying to think it out that they're doing this with humans.
Evan Huck [00:26:21]:
There's no resistance once we get them. If we get the right person from one of those accounts, our close rate's 75%. So it's just fricking getting in front of them. I don't really know where they hang out. They don't. Some of them do, obviously, but like they're a little bit less likely to hang out on social. Their email inboxes are harder to get into just cause they're barracuda and minecast firewalls are tuned to high hell. We've gotten that couple from going just events and trying to find these people.
Evan Huck [00:26:46]:
Even just going to their trade shifts and just walking around and walking up to marketers at their booth and saying, hey, what's up? That's been an effective channel to get some of the larger enterprise buyers, but we certainly haven't cracked the code on it. But if we do get in front of them, we're incredibly successful. It's just freaking hard to get in front of them.
Kyle Smith [00:27:01]:
Would you ever consider an indirect sales motion, like through partners?
Evan Huck [00:27:05]:
Yeah, so that is one of my more strategic initiatives this year is leaning into co selling partnerships. As an example. Like Seismic has very strong overlap in larger enterprise B2B tech. And we have a great integration that pushes UserEvidence content into seismic so reps can find it there. So yeah, we've been talking to them about co selling and co marketing to an extent even we have a good integration there and they have obviously have great overlap in our ICP. So yeah, more technology partnerships and a little bit of agencies like agencies was.
Kyle Smith [00:27:34]:
Where my head was going, but I'm not that familiar with that world.
Evan Huck [00:27:37]:
Yeah. So the PR agencies are actually a good source, especially for our newer offering. Like one of our new offerings is like thought leadership content, like market research. Like you've probably seen the 2024, you know, state of sales, whatever. It's like the B2B equivalent of a listicle. Right? It's like those things work so well, but just no brainers. But PR agencies love those because it's good fodder for press and earned media. And a lot of times PR agencies do content to like social media content, blog content, and having an original research report to deconstruct it into little did you know, stats is useful.
Evan Huck [00:28:07]:
And so yeah, PRNC has been actually a pretty good source of referrals for us and then yeah, a slack set of technology partners. But yeah, if you can't go cold through the front door, you got to find other routes. And so that's what we're thinking through.
Kyle Smith [00:28:19]:
Okay. How much do you do? So you mentioned events a little bit. So do you think events ever mattered? Let me ask that question first. Do you think in person events are valuable?
Evan Huck [00:28:28]:
I do, yeah. I mean, I think, like, when Covid came, that's what screwed up email.
Kyle Smith [00:28:31]:
Yeah.
Evan Huck [00:28:32]:
It's like all these older, like, bigger companies lost a huge chunk of their pipeline, which was field and events, and so they had to go to email.
Kyle Smith [00:28:39]:
I saw it in the HubSpot data. You saw Covid happened. Field marketing dies. Email volume of sense sent through HubSpot doubled directly up.
Evan Huck [00:28:47]:
And the inverse correlation of that. So, yeah, so events did work. I do think they still work. Like, for us, we put it in two buckets. There's events that we call, like, prospecting events, where we'll go to, like, AWS reinvent in Vegas, where, like, the people that are presenting there are all of our prospects, right? Like Dell and Splunk and stuff like that. And at their booth, there's always a marketer, right? The marketers run those things. And so you just go find the marketer and be like, hey, you know, do you have a hard time getting your big customers to go on the record and tell stores, I got that from cool. I want to talk next week.
Evan Huck [00:29:17]:
So, yeah, those prospecting style events have been a really good source of pipeline for us. And I surprised you don't have to sponsor them or anything. You just get an expo pass and show up. It was a little bit easier when they were all in San Francisco. We all lived there. Now it's five people around the country, which is a little tougher, but whatever. And then we have a few that we sponsor that are more like customer marketing and product marketing focused, but there's just not that many of them, and it's not a huge audience either. So there's just, even if we wanted to spend more on events, like, there's not really.
Evan Huck [00:29:43]:
We couldn't. We're doing all the ones that make sense, and that's all there is to do. The one thing we haven't done, I guess, like, events wise, is, like, we haven't exhibited a dream forest or even, like, forest, or like, these more, like, less focused, generic, like, sales and marketing conferences. So that we haven't done yet. We'll have to try that next year. I mean, I've always had, like, you know, I'm skeptical if it'd be good for us or not, but we got to try it, I guess.
Kyle Smith [00:30:07]:
Yeah. Well, if you come to inbound, let me know.
Evan Huck [00:30:10]:
Yeah, inbound, be a good example. Who knows?
Kyle Smith [00:30:12]:
It's an in between. You know, it's not 1500 people. I think it's like 10,000 or 15,000, but it's not whatever Dreamforce says is 100,000 or whatever people rolling through there.
Evan Huck [00:30:22]:
Yeah, for sure.
Kyle Smith [00:30:24]:
Cool. So you started a podcast producing content for that. What made you want to do that?
Evan Huck [00:30:30]:
Yeah, generally we want to invest more in marketing and content, period, is a big pillar of that. And we believe that a podcast could be a really strong content pillar. Obviously, we're creating a ton of derivative content, snippets and whatever and blogs and whatnot from the podcast. It is just a pretty efficient way to create a lot of content also, just like the distribution, the people that you bring on obviously help with the distribution, which is important. The next stage of this is we want to use it also to support account based marketing and start to bring on some of our prospects that we can then set up a back channel for the rep and stuff like that. And just awareness, it's hard. It's not like you get podcast and you see 15 demo requests come in. But anecdotally, it does seem to help with brand awareness.
Evan Huck [00:31:14]:
We do a lot of sales calls where it's like, yeah, we see you guys everywhere. We love the podcast. So it was a big bet that Mark felt strongly about and don't trust Mark.
Kyle Smith [00:31:23]:
Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Personally, I've seen way more middle of funnel impact where it's like, I've already talked to somebody, let's say it's me personally, I've already talked to somebody. We connect on LinkedIn, then they see a couple clips of whatever the pod videos from the podcast, and then in the next conversation like, oh, yeah, I saw that clip. That was an interesting topic. I think that ties into what we're scoping with you guys. So it's like a nice little middle of funnel nurture. I have no idea if it ever will lead to top of funnel capture, but I don't.
Kyle Smith [00:31:52]:
I don't really care, to be honest.
Evan Huck [00:31:55]:
Yeah, you have some faith, right? There's, you're not agree able to quantify everything, right. You have to, like, use your intuition and kind of some of the more anecdotal feedback in your sense of how valuable it is to kind of ascribe value to some of these more amorphous brandy type things. But over time, I just think, I do think it compounds particularly, again, like in today's market, where I think there is a kind of a flight to safety for buyers. Right. There's so much competition wherever I. You're just going to go with brands that your short list is just going to be brands like, you know, and that you've heard of, just because it's easier mentally. And so I do think these brand building activities will really start to make a difference, particularly in the enterprise, to have that sort of awareness. Yeah, I think it's pretty critical.
Kyle Smith [00:32:34]:
Yeah. And then I'm fortunate enough to be in a position where I don't have any ROI metrics being put on me. It's like, I'll just do it because I think that this is the. I genuinely believe that this is a good thing for the business. This. And have conversations that I'm interested in having, and then we'll go from there. So. Great.
Kyle Smith [00:32:52]:
Well, I super appreciate you again spending the time coming on and hope that I can talk to you again in the future. Check in, see how things are progressing and whether or not any of the plans that you've laid out are coming to fruition or how they've modified in 2025.
Evan Huck [00:33:04]:
Yeah. Enjoy the conversation. It was fun. Appreciate it.
Kyle Smith [00:33:07]:
Good deal. Thanks for listening to this episode of Market Mastery brought to you by The Bridge Group. If you're a revenue leader in the B2B sales space or know someone who is, connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget to subscribe to stay updated on future episodes.