The Revenue Formula

What does a SaaS company, an airline and an oatmilk company have in common? They're challenger brands. And it can be a pretty powerful strategy you can take as a brand.

We run through real examples and much more

  • (00:00) - Introduction
  • (02:10) - Challenger Brands... what is it?
  • (03:50) - Salesforce vs. Siebel: The Ultimate Challenger Brand
  • (09:55) - Salesforce's Guerrilla Marketing Tactics
  • (13:22) - Reflecting on Bold Marketing Ideas
  • (15:12) - The Power of Brand Exposure
  • (15:39) - Richard Branson's Guerrilla Advertising
  • (17:28) - Virgin's Creative Marketing Tactics
  • (19:00) - The Impact of Controversial Marketing
  • (23:35) - Oatly's Environmental Challenge
  • (26:54) - Drift's No Forms Movement

Sources

*** 
This episode is brought to you by Growblocks. Finding and fixing problems in your GTM shouldn't take weeks. It should happen instantly.

That's why Growblocks built the first RevOps platform that shows you your entire funnel, split by motions, segments and more - so you can find problems, the root-cause and identify solutions fast, all in the same platform.

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Creators & Guests

Host
Mikkel Plaehn
Head of Demand at Growblocks
Host
Toni Hohlbein
CEO & Co-founder at Growblocks

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone. This is Toni Hohlbein. You are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni. In today's episode, we get into what is CRM, an airline, and an oatmilk company have in common. Enjoy.
[00:00:16] Mikkel: So, you know, Tour de France. Everyone knows Tour de
[00:00:21] Toni: now we are
[00:00:22] Mikkel: we're talking. Yeah, I don't know how, I don't know where, if there's anything fun in this story or what the segue is, but I'm just kind of
[00:00:29] Toni: for everyone who actually only watches Tour de France on Netflix, You're going to spoil something now, right?
[00:00:35] Mikkel: Because I'm going to talk about the Danish
[00:00:38] Toni: equivalent Because Tata won, right? Not the other guy.
[00:00:40] Mikkel: No, I'm going to talk about the Danish equivalent. It's just to set the frame. Bicycling
[00:00:43] Toni: mean, you mean commuting to work?
[00:00:46] Mikkel: pretty
[00:00:46] Toni: pretty much, yeah.
[00:00:47] Mikkel: but it's so it's, it's five stages
[00:00:50] Toni: I'm, I'm doing the to to office every, every morning. Yeah.
[00:00:53] Mikkel: But it's five stages in Denmark because there's no mountains and it's a small country, it's a small country and we
[00:00:59] Toni: the walls out five days.
[00:01:00] Mikkel: We're joking. Well, we have a lot of islands. We're doing it on an island and it's like yeah But they have to drive around it 50 times it that's just stupid So but they had the final literally I want to say 50 meter from our house, which was kind of yeah Which was kind of cool. So we
[00:01:15] Toni: basically stopping at their main sponsor, Novo Nordisk.
[00:01:19] Mikkel: church actually, but yeah Novo was everywhere but yes, and so, you know that small town just lives up Awesome weather out there with the kids.
[00:01:28] So that I ended up, my youngest daughter was like, started pulling me by the hand. She's one, right. And wanted to go elsewhere. We ended up right by the finish line. Yeah.
[00:01:37] Toni: boring. Yeah,
[00:01:38] Mikkel: We ended right by the finish line. Right. And then you could hear the final stage.
[00:01:43] They draw five laps around and they're sprinting towards the goal. And everyone is like clapping and rah. And she gets really fucking scared. So I think the the, it was really close. They needed to take a goal shot. Who came first? I'm pretty sure you're going to see me with a terrified one year old, like clinging on me everywhere.
[00:02:03] And that's what everyone would notice. I haven't checked myself yet, but I will. So why am I mentioning a bicycle race? Why?
[00:02:10] Because we're going to talk a little bit about something called a challenger brand today, a challenge of brand today. I think one of the things we've at least noted is this tactic has appeared a little bit every now and then some vendors play this game of challenging another vendor either head on or challenging the status quo.
[00:02:29] And I think that's what we're going to talk about today because it's not just always about building more features.
[00:02:35] Toni: No, and I think it's the, the reason why people are obviously kind of thinking about this is like, it's a creative, cheap marketing stunt, actually. And I feel. Very few Europeans think about it because
[00:02:48] Mikkel: Oh, we're
[00:02:49] Toni: be, you need to be proper.
[00:02:51] And that's not okay. If you like talk badly about someone else and, Oh my gosh, doing it online, you know, that, that couldn't happen. So that's why we wanted to shed a light kind of, first of all, you know, if you're thinking about, you know, first of all, what is a challenger brand kind of, what is that, but also if you're thinking about maybe executing something like that.
[00:03:11] Don't be, don't be so fucking shy. We're going to, we're going to show you a couple of examples of other folks having executed this extremely well. And, and you probably will know every single one of those brands.
[00:03:21] Mikkel: Yeah. Maybe one you won't, but let's see.
[00:03:25] Toni: because
[00:03:27] Mikkel: it's not sass. Well, spoiler.
[00:03:30] Toni: SAS. Come on, spoiler!
[00:03:35] I let's, I think maybe the best way to describe what it is.
[00:03:41] Mikkel: Can we just take the. Greatest example of all time in SaaS of what we've seen. I have at least seen, and I love the story.
[00:03:50] We can tell a little bit about it, but it's Salesforce. It is Salesforce. So back when they started they had a competitor called Siebel. They did on prem software, which, you know, so this is CRM, Customer Relationship Management, on prem, meaning they had to show up and install it physically,
[00:04:07] Toni: Like everything that happened back
[00:04:09] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah,
[00:04:09] Toni: Like this was, this was the, this was the normal thing. There was a whole software category built around stuff where you needed to go to the customer, put in a server, install something on the server, and that's it.
[00:04:23] Mikkel: Exactly, so this was super common, but the problem at least Salesforce saw was, you know super expensive, extremely long time to value It was not a great setup. So they were kind of the, one of the early movers on what we know today as SaaS, really and did this thing with you know, the no software kind of campaign, but what they did very intentionally was to attack SEPO, which was the incumbent, the established market leader, right?
[00:04:51] And I think if you go back and read behind the cloud, you should definitely check it out. He's like, you always engage the market leader. That's how you become a challenger brand. Effectively is by challenging someone. Now, if you don't have someone to challenge, there is also another thing you can do, which is challenge the status quo.
[00:05:07] Again, you're a challenger brand. And I think today you'll see it a lot in what kind of values you carry. And if something happens politically someplace, you as a company can take a stand against that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:05:19] Toni: I mean, it's always great to have
[00:05:22] an opponent,
[00:05:23] right? Because especially if it's the market leader, a lot of people have already thoughts and feelings and values and an understanding associated with that term, with that not person, but with that company, with that product, whatever it is.
[00:05:37] And basically when you then, you know, try and challenge that in very few words, you can tap into a lot of knowledge and then take and twist it just a little bit. And I think that's what makes this challenger brand so successful. And obviously you should go for the biggest kahuna that is, because chances are most people already know about that brand, know what it stands for, know what it does.
[00:06:04] So really your message is appropriately delivered. If, if the Salesforce guys would have picked, I don't know, some unknown
[00:06:12] Mikkel: 10 on the list.
[00:06:13] Toni: Like, people would be like, Oh, okay, you're challenging that one, but I don't know that company to begin with, right? Kind of, that's, that's kind of the, the idea. That's where you kind of go for the big kahuna.
[00:06:23] Mikkel: company But I think it's also it gives people something to root for at the end of the day, right? So we were watching avatar the other day me my wife and my oldest son just trying to imagine that story number one, imagine that story, you know, that military dude, he's not there.
[00:06:38] They're not going to kill all the Na'vi. They're just going to, you know, Oh, you don't want anything from us? We'll just live in harmony. Great. No one would care about that story all of a sudden. There has to be kind of antagonist and a protagonist and all that stuff, right? And that, yeah, that's what you're creating.
[00:06:51] You're creating a story. And sometimes the beautiful thing is, if you start attacking the market leader, if they engage, you know, They kind of acknowledge you as competition and if they do nothing they kind of look a little bit weak if you're being honest as well. So you're kind of forcing them to potentially do something and we're going to get into some of the stories.
[00:07:12] I think there's another question which is when do you run this playbook even?
[00:07:16] Toni: So I don't know about this, but I just want to kind of one more time state kind of the, the definition that we're kind of coming up with here of a challenger brand really is something where you as a vendor, as a brand, as a maybe new or smaller player, you specifically singling out the leader in your category or an adjacent category, or if you think you're like a snowflake and you're a new category, you can also kind of say like, well, you know, It's the closest one we have, basically, right?
[00:07:46] Call it out and declare it the enemy, show something very clear that is broken about this enemy, that people immediately can understand, which then translates into, Ah, okay, you're basically this category with a twist. Right, kind of, that's actually what you're executing here, but you're doing it in an extremely engaging way.
[00:08:05] You're doing it in a way where people are like, Oh, let me, Oh, let me read. This sounds interesting. Yeah. Someone is getting into a fight. Let me, let me stop you on the street and kind of look, look at that for a little bit. Right. And that's basically kind of, this is this instinct that's being kind of, tapped into with every, you know, with the audience.
[00:08:21] And, and that's, what's, that's, that's, what's, you know, behind this challenger brand. Right. So that I just wanted to make it clear. This is what this is about. We have a couple of examples. I think we're going to talk a little bit about the magic that kind of happens also when you do this. But basically kind of just wanted to make sure that the definition is somewhat
[00:08:36] Mikkel: clear.
[00:08:36] And just to give a, like an example of two simple ads that Salesforce did. They had a kid. And then a, what's it called, a chalkboard and he was writing, you know, if you've seen the Simpsons, you've seen Bart write, you know, the over 50 times again, the kid was writing, I will not give my lunch money to Siebel.
[00:08:54] And in another one, they did a line that went, I will not spend my summer implementing Siebel. And, you know, stuff like that, where they just even called them out in the ad. Right. I think in terms of when is it time, that's really hard to say. To be honest I think it's more a matter of, is the company ready to take that kind of stance?
[00:09:12] Are they ready to have some of those tough conversations? There might be some challenges out there, like prepare to potentially be sued, prepare to be called up by a reporter asking you about something you did and you better have, you know, a solid answer as to why ready. So I think it, it requires, maybe it's not the timing, it's more the who, like, who do you have on the team who can carry this?
[00:09:34] Because I do believe it's, You need to be potentially a special breed of professionals, right? When you look at Salesforce, Marc Benioff Virgin Atlantic which we're going to get into, right? There are some cases where those founders, they are kind of very different persona, right? So, I think we've talked a bit about what it is, what you challenge.
[00:09:53] Should we just get into some examples here?
[00:09:55] I think the first one, and we already talked about Salesforce a bit, but there are two classic examples of what they did to really kind of, attack Siebel and generate a lot of noise for their company as well. They basically said, whatever Siebel does, we will see it as an opportunity to attack whatever they do.
[00:10:15] And they had their annual user conference in San Francisco. So what did they do? They hired a bunch of actors to show up as protesters wearing uh, you know, wearing uh, with sign uh, signs in front of the convention that went like no software basically. Right. And uh, that's like one step, but they also decided to hire actors who were reporters.
[00:10:41] to kind of show up because there was this demonstration happening. And Marc Benioff, you know, at least in the book said he was very seriously considering renting a tank and showing up himself because now the army has to set in to clear, clear it out. Right. And the beautiful thing that happened was they were handing out them flyers to every single person.
[00:11:02] They hope we're hosting a. Party that night that, you know, close by and handing out flyers, inviting all those users over to their party. And obviously, Seibel executives find out and they run out to the street and go, like, what the hell is happening here? And they call the police. The police show up, but they had a permit to do it, so they couldn't do anything.
[00:11:22] And the culmination of this whole story was, obviously, lots of people went to the Salesforce party. And in the years to come, Lots of them actually became customers as well, which is the point. Right. They were able to
[00:11:34] Toni: and I think because the police showed up, because kind of all the commotion. And because there was already a reporter present, actual reporters
[00:11:42] Mikkel: probably
[00:11:42] Toni: actually showed up and kind of then, you know, covered this story from like, we just come, all of this stuff is completely made up, but it kind of worked.
[00:11:50] Right. And, and obviously with their, with their core audience, folks that are customers of Siebel, they had a great, great interaction
[00:11:58] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the, so the funny thing is, and I didn't remember this story until recently.
[00:12:03] They pursued to do almost the same thing again, only in Europe, in their annual European user meetup, which was in Cannes, in France, I think I told you this last week. Everyone will go to the same airport. There's only one. You go to that airport and then what are you gonna do to get to the venue?
[00:12:20] Well, you go by cab. That's, that's what you're gonna do. So apparently Salesforce made a deal with the cab company and rented every single cab from the airport to the venue, branded it, put flyers in. So when the Siebel team kind of arrived there, they had the choice to walk. Or take a salesforce cab. Like how crazy is that?
[00:12:44] That's just to, again, there was not a opportunity to attack and they did the same thing, like obviously really challenging them. And uh, eventually what happened in this battle was Siebel did kind of engage a little bit, but it was from the perspective of being interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and saying, yeah, I don't know why anyone would take that company serious.
[00:13:03] I don't think they're going to be here for too long.
[00:13:07] And the kind of the opposite, I guess,
[00:13:08] Toni: yeah, sure. But the, I think the I mean, that's a typical answer from from the leader, basically because that's what they clearly have in their corner. Right. I, I actually want to kind of in the, in the lead up to those two things.
[00:13:22] You know, after the fact, oh, high five, awesome, that was so cool, who had that idea? But also, you know, if, if, if you don't know how the story ends, I wonder how many folks actually have the balls to, to go ahead with this crazy execution story like this, right? So especially the Cannes thing, which I think is it's, it's a little bit newer to me.
[00:13:42] You know, let us, you know, hiring actors in San Francisco. That's also fucking crazy, but the Cannes thing. So I must imagine it probably wasn't even all that expensive.
[00:13:53] You know, it probably wasn't that expensive because the it's not like they paid the cab fare, you know, the, the guests still had to pay the cab fare.
[00:14:01] So they're really just kind of renting all the cabs for the advertisement space for what, like two, three days. We're not talking much here actually. Right. So probably this, and this was in, you know, France, not that fucking expensive. So I think at the end of the day, it probably was like, what, 20, 30, 000 or something to kind of pull the whole thing off.
[00:14:20] And. And I wonder,
[00:14:23] I
[00:14:23] wonder how many people, even if you had that idea, would go ahead and, yes, let's, let's go do that.
[00:14:30] Mikkel: so I was gonna say, it made me reflect over two things back to what we said. You need to be kind of a rare breed to say, you know what, that sounds like a great idea. Maybe the tank is a little bit too much, but all the other stuff, let's, let's go, right?
[00:14:42] You have to be a special breed. I can imagine someone, if there's a marketing person out there listening now thinking, should I go talk with our CEO? about hiring actors or renting out all the cabs, how's that gonna go, right? I think a lot of folks are gonna be like, ah, it, it sounds fun, but I'm just worried of all the downside
[00:15:01] Toni: but also how are we going to tag those opportunities? Like what, what are we, what are we going to put in the CRM? I mean, how, how do we know that this was CAC, CAC
[00:15:11] Mikkel: And you know what?
[00:15:12] That's where, right now, it's probably 20 years ago, they did this thing. We are talking about it right now. To our huge audience who's listening, exposing Salesforce
[00:15:24] Toni: all of them are currently like, ah, should we buy Siebel or should we buy So,
[00:15:29] Mikkel: Mark,
[00:15:29] we'll send you a check or you can just hop on the show.
[00:15:31] That's fine. We can, you know, barter or something here, but you know, that's the point. I think it's, it's very much a brand exposure thing you're getting. Right.
[00:15:39] So let's take a maybe a non SaaS example Richard Branson.
[00:15:45] Toni: Virgin Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Galactic, Virgin whatever, right?
[00:15:51] Mikkel: Whole Foods or something, I don't know.
[00:15:53] Yeah, he does everything. Everything. Maybe not food.
[00:15:58] Toni: I mean, no, I don't, I don't know. I only know those three actually. I think he had more stuff though. But he started out with at least what he became famous for was the record stores, right?
[00:16:09] Mikkel: yeah, exactly. But anyway, so the one I saw way back, I bought a book called Guerrilla Advertising, which had all these different ways of running ads.
[00:16:19] And one of them was set in London by Virgin Airlines. And in London you have, I think it's called the Eye of London. It's very silly, the big wheel.
[00:16:31] And it had to go through restoration or renovation or something. So they had to lay it down, fix it, and then get it back up again. And British Airways, of course, being, you know, a true British company were sponsoring this part of this renovation or were involved somehow in it.
[00:16:47] And what did Richard Branson do when the project ran into trouble and got delayed and delayed? He hired a blimp with the text on it.
[00:16:55] Toni: What is a blimp?
[00:16:56] Mikkel: a blimp, a zeppelina and basically had printed on it. British Airways can't get it up. Circling around that area in Virgin. I think it was either was in British Airways style on Virgin Airlines, probably Virgin because there were no logo on there, right?
[00:17:12] And it's just, I can see him getting a lot of press. Obviously it fit well into that. kind of brand because when you think about it Virgin Airlines probably tilted the lid more towards the younger demographic versus British Airways. So it's kind of a, a fun thing.
[00:17:28] And he's done so many other things. He did a I think I also told you this, a bet, I forget what the bet was about, but with a competing airline, the loser would basically had to, you know, become a stewardess for a day.
[00:17:41] Toni: Stewardess,
[00:17:41] Mikkel: a
[00:17:43] Toni: So it's two CEOs. It's, it's, it's a little bit of a different, you know, it didn't, didn't age well, that story. But, but still, that's, we just, we just accurately kind of reciting it all the time.
[00:17:52] Mikkel: well. But, but still, that's, we just, it's accuracy kind of deciding. A lot of
[00:18:04] Toni: He makes a massive
[00:18:05] Mikkel: made a lot of press on this
[00:18:08] Toni: this one. One of the stories also from Virgin I heard was they had like little pepper and salts like mills or, you know, something like that. Kind of when they serve folks and I think, you know, business class or first class.
[00:18:20] And they were like very specific, very specific, very cool.
[00:18:25] Oh, let me take this
[00:18:26] home a then. And they had, you know, they were like stealing then in the bottom, like, you know, in the bottom, if you flip it over, they had written on it, stolen from a virgin plane, you know.
[00:18:40] Mikkel: I love it. And by the way, so I think the point here is, you, if you wanna get press, If you want to get exposure like this, you need to give people something to talk about. There has to be a story. And you know, we've just done two examples now where there's at least a lot of stories being told over and over again, and you got to have some guts in order to do it.
[00:19:00] I think a recent example that you kind of spotted was RB2B.
[00:19:04] RB2B,
[00:19:05] Toni: RB2B, Adam Robinson so you probably, you know, whoever found us and is listening to us, probably also present on LinkedIn and looking through LinkedIn here and there, it's the guy with a lot of hair. Thanks a lot. Yeah,
[00:19:21] Mikkel: Who does video.
[00:19:22] Toni: unmistakably not Mikkel and I.
[00:19:25] And he does video he writes a very long form text. And he basically decided with his RB2B product to kind of go after 6 Sense, which is the big kahuna in the space and so forth. I don't want to go into what each of these products do actually. But he went after them and lo and behold, 6 Sense send him a seasoned assist.
[00:19:49] Mikkel: Which is the worst move you can
[00:19:50] Toni: And, and the thing is, you know, from a, from a white shoe law firm. So this was serious. This cease and desist itself probably cost 6sense, I don't know,
[00:19:59] 50, fifty 000. Like, you know. Easy. And the thing is, what does that guy do? He posts on LinkedIn.
[00:20:05] Mikkel: LinkedIn.
[00:20:08] Toni: He posts on LinkedIn that 6 Sense is suing him and got massive exposure.
[00:20:14] Sixth Sense got completely slammed. It's this whole David Goliath thing, right? I mean, they couldn't have done it a worse job, honestly. Also kudos to Adam to have the cojones to kind of go for it and do it. I don't know if there's still legal action pending, if there's something happened that totally could have, by the way.
[00:20:32] But he, he used this to his advantage And then, so on, this is actually on a, on a different podcast. I was talking about the same thing. I was saying like, Hey, you know, this is actually not a bad idea to try and find some, you know, um, someone else and kind of start a fight. And I know Adam listened to that podcast.
[00:20:52] So what happened then since, well, he started a fight with Mark Kosoglow,
[00:20:58] Mikkel: Colo.
[00:20:58] Yeah.
[00:20:59] Toni: gone. And then, I don't know, a couple of other kind of places that are really known, maybe no, probably not sales off, but like, anyway, kind of Mark Kosoglow is a known guy. And then recently he, he started a, an online fight with someone that does some kind of security stuff because this is his software I be to is like GDPR issue to a degree.
[00:21:21] And kind of, he started a fight around this. And the thing is, I am 1000% convinced both of those subsequent fights, not the 6 sense one, but both of the subsequent fights were staged. Yeah. Completely staged. It's like he called, he calls up Mark's like, Hey Mark let's get into a fight.
[00:21:42] Mikkel: Cool, when?
[00:21:43] Toni: you think, you think my,
[00:21:45] Mikkel: Musk and Zuckerberg?
[00:21:46] Toni: yeah, exactly.
[00:21:47] Anytime, anywhere, you know? But Hey, you, you think this inbound let out bound is bullshit, which, you know, I think many people can. you know,
[00:21:57] can be, can be saying like, yeah, I can see that. And then, you know, I think Adam slammed Mark on like, Hey, you never build an actual business and you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
[00:22:07] And then, you know, something with the security guy. And obviously those were like a couple of posts going back and forth. With the security guy it started with a couple of posts that then became a a
[00:22:17] Mikkel: a
[00:22:18] Toni: had like a fight off webinar. And so forth. Right. And both of those things, it's basically, I mean, they're basically kind of used influencer marketing in this case, right.
[00:22:27] They're kind of tapped into kind of their audiences and kind of pull people in. And, and maybe I'm kind of going a little bit too far, but especially here in this SaaS situation, you know, what it does is it forces people to choose
[00:22:42] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:22:43] Toni: and, and that is so incredibly powerful. Because really what it does is let's just say I have a hundred people and you pitch a hundred people what you do and that you're great and so forth.
[00:22:54] Right. Out of those hundred people, maybe 10 will be, Oh, that's pretty interesting. That's kind of, let's kind of have a conversation. All the other 90 will be like, nah, sorry, I lost my attention. I'm already over there, but you know, I don't give a, I don't care. But if you do like a one side versus the other.
[00:23:09] What basically everyone is automatically doing is like, well, I'm on the Adam side. Well, I'm on the Mark side. And what happens is that suddenly out of those hundred people, you'll probably have 90 people that are committing to either side. You will only have 10 people that's like, I don't give a shit. 90 people will be like either leaning for this guy or for the other guy.
[00:23:30] So you have, by default, you increase the amount of people that are actually interested in what you're
[00:23:34] doing.
[00:23:35] Mikkel: So I think that's actually a perfect segue to the next example, because I was, I found myself, I think last week asking myself, should I start drinking oat milk?
[00:23:47] Because it's just way better for the environment. Right? I don't want to give up meat. There's just no way I can, you know, swap around fish
[00:23:54] Toni: everyone knows that milk is the big contributor to
[00:23:58] Mikkel: No, but it's the cows. Cows, it's not good for the environment, right? So I caught myself thinking about it and the whole reason actually was, I was researching this episode.
[00:24:07] A company called Oatly came up which does oat milk. And you know what they're doing? They're forcing people to kind of think, to, you know, make a decision. Not whether you should choose Oatly or not, actually, because they're attacking the status quo, which is just, well, we drink milk. It's like, well, should you drink milk?
[00:24:24] Because it's not great for the environment, right? So, they've done also a lot of crazy stuff. If you've seen their advertising, they're also in the States. They do some really crazy things, to be honest. But it started with them getting, again, a very rare breed of a CEO who was comfortable to be the character in the ad with a keyboard standing in a field singing, Oh, wow, no cow. Because they didn't need a cow to produce
[00:24:51] Toni: So where, where, where's the challenger
[00:24:53] Mikkel: So the challenger thing is they're challenging the status quo of drinking milk, right? Saying, well, actually they commissioned an entire study on how terrible it is for the environment versus if you used oat
[00:25:06] Toni: So, I'm not sure if it was them and this, you know, maybe we should prepare a little, a little bit better here, but I think because it's oat milk in some areas, in some countries, you're not allowed to call it milk because milk is protected to be from, you know,
[00:25:21] Mikkel: know,
[00:25:22] Toni: And then they basically kind of put on the label, not milk.
[00:25:29] Mikkel: you know,
[00:25:29] Toni: You know, to really, to kind of push it out and be like, Hey, you know what? This is, you know, we're, we're not milk, but that's the point, you know?
[00:25:36] Mikkel: but I think it's also that, so you have to realize as we talk through this, there's also a lot of tactical elements we've gone into. Right. And one of the things they also did I think pretty well was just on a tactical side, they were like, yeah, we're, We're not going to go to the grocery stores.
[00:25:51] That's not where we're going to start. They went in the States. They went through baristas, like high end barista shops who adopted it. And they could kind of go from there. They had established a foothold, right? So they, you know, they use a lot of tactics along with this. Let's say very different position.
[00:26:08] Even the packaging, when you look at Oatly versus regular milk, I will say, no matter the market, it's going to be very, very different how they approached it. Right. And then once you start looking and you should totally go check them out and look at kind of their, their values, it becomes so clear that it is very different from what a lot of the other companies are doing and how they're acting.
[00:26:27] Right. So whether you should drink oat milk or not, don't care. That's up to you.
[00:26:31] Toni: to you.
[00:26:31] I heard it actually tastes good. Yeah, that's my, that's my problem. Oat milk is like, it tastes kind of shitty, but I heard that these guys actually pulled it off and have a good product.
[00:26:41] Mikkel: product. Should we end on a SaaS?
[00:26:43] Toni: This episode is sponsored by
[00:26:45] Mikkel: Oatly. Oh wow, no cow. No, no, no. So let's end on a sass sample.
[00:26:53] SaaS example.
[00:26:54] Drift! Drift.
[00:26:55] Toni: Who
[00:26:55] still knows them? I don't know.
[00:26:57] Mikkel: just sales
[00:26:57] Toni: I know, but I mean, they're still around somewhat, right? So Drift they really, they started out as one of those website chat bubbles, right? Kind of, now you would kind of say it's an intercom. But back then, both of these companies were like super competitive, super early on.
[00:27:12] Intercom was more focused on the product side and customer service side. Drift was more focused on the sales and marketing side. So, what did Drift do as, as, you know, calling out the status quo and attacking something that's there that sucks? They decided to go after forms. Yeah. So what do we mean with forms?
[00:27:32] Well, the way HubSpot and Marketo and all of these other you know, Pardo and all of those other tools work is if you request a demo, you need to fill in a form, right? And then you hit enter and then you wait. Yeah. And then maybe someone calls you up. And basically Drift was saying, Hey, that workflow sucks.
[00:27:50] This is not a good workflow. If I want to buy something right now, I don't want to, you know, maybe wait a day or two before, before I can be before someone reaches out to me. Right. And, and that, by the way, makes sense both from a customer or prospect side, who wants to kind of get this done now, and from a company side to get those conversion rates up, because we all know.
[00:28:09] So, you know, speed to lead, increase your conversion rates. So what did them basically kind of put out is kind of, lots of messaging around around no forms, you know, death to forms, you shouldn't be having any forms and basically you should only be using the chat app, which, you know, was kind of a form as well in order to kind of get that workflow done and then route this internally and, and, you know, what have you, right.
[00:28:30] And there weren't even so far. They've, you know, rolled us back since, but they went so far to remove all the forms on their website as well. So when there was some kind of a request demo button, basically drift, drift, you know, popped up and ask you a couple of questions and then you were kind of routed along.
[00:28:46] Mikkel: And I think they, they basically obviously got heavily inspired by what Salesforce did when you look at their no forms, very similar to the no software.
[00:28:54] I'm pretty sure they also did the actor trick on HubSpot's inbound conference. So they did a couple of things. They also build up, you know, a founder brand, a couple of other pieces to actually tell that story. But what I would recommend is, If you have like 20 minutes right now, dear listener, go to YouTube, search for Dave Cancel Hypergrowth Keynote.
[00:29:12] Just watch that 20 minute presentation. We'll link it in the show notes. But you'll see also what a great job they did on outlining that story, where you just get hooked as a participant, as a listener. Because you agree, you agree. Yeah. These forms, they kind of suck. Yeah. I'm used to now texting and message and getting a reply.
[00:29:31] Like now I'm used to streaming on demand, all these changes. So why do we have this? That's actually a good, you know, so they did a really great job in that kind of storytelling, which I think. If you're a SaaS company, in a lot of cases, you will need to think about that story as well. What are you gonna, what are you gonna tell them?
[00:29:49] You're not just gonna hire a blimp, you know, and have some catchy messaging on there. There has to be a deeper meaning with it and some deeper values as well.
[00:29:57] Toni: That's it.
[00:29:58] Mikkel: So we talked a bit about taking a stand here and becoming a chat, or at least some cases of challenger brands, I would say.
[00:30:04] Toni: So we, we outlined a little bit, you know, what a challenger brand is, kind of what the upsides are, and then we went through a couple of recent and, you know, somewhat old examples of, that we found great in terms of that being executed extremely well. And we can, you know, to our American audience just sit down and think about it.
[00:30:22] Mikkel: And then do it. And then, you
[00:30:23] Toni: then, then do it for a European audience, grow, grow a pair, you know, and, and go, go execute afterwards,
[00:30:31] Mikkel: we could just go after the status quo. That's a bit more safe, maybe, than calling out someone else, but yes.
[00:30:35] Yes.
[00:30:36] Toni: So this is, this was wonderful. Thank you, Mikkel. It was a lot of fun. Hope everyone had fun listening as well.
[00:30:41] And like, subscribe,
[00:30:42] Mikkel: well.
[00:30:43] Toni: share review, whatever. And help us, help us on our mission here. Thanks a bunch. Bye bye, guys.