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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 (00:22)
Right, hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I couldn't tell you what episode this is now, but we're in the teens, so I think no one really cares at this point. I'll let you know when it's 50. I've got with me today Paula Molinar, so I'll let Paula introduce herself.
Paula Molianr (00:38)
Hi everyone, I'm Paula. I am the head of the men's generation at Pado. And yeah, I guess that's me.
Tom Rudnai (00:45)
Awesome, so Paola, that might be the most, quintessentially British attempt to pronounce your name ever, right?
Paula Molianr (00:52)
It's fine.
I've been here for over 10 years, so I accept that my name has two ways of being pronounced, so it's all good. Don't worry.
Tom Rudnai (00:59)
Okay, good, that's the nice thing about Tom, no one ever gets it wrong. Three letters, one syllable.
But anyway, good to have you with us. So I guess initially maybe, do wanna just give us a bit of a long introduction to your background? What got you to this point today?
Paula Molianr (01:12)
Yeah, so I don't know if anyone picked it up, but I have an accent. I'm originally from Brazil and I've been in this country, as I said, just over 10 years. I started funny enough as a fashion designer in my career many years ago before I moved here. And it's a really tough industry as much as I love the creative side of it. It's just hard. And I saw quite a lot of attention on the marketing department of those fashion brands in the past.
So that's how I kind of moved towards that instead. Worked a fair number of years in this industry until I moved to this country and kind of met TAC for the first time. Met my partner as well in a TAC company. So it kind of all aligned, but it was just amazing in terms of the culture changes and differences from going from a retailer and a little bit of an old fashioned way of working to something completely new.
like startup, techie, everyone's friendly, everyone is, everyone thinks about flexible work but also is very driven by like what they can get from the company. So that really was interesting to me and yeah I just kind of sticked around in this industry. I've in B2B for just over 10 years as well but had this B2C background as well.
Tom Rudnai (02:26)
Okay, super interesting. I started in, like my very first professional job was in the insurance industry. So I kind of feel you on that very outdated, very kind of plodding. And then you arrive in tech, my first company was a company called Amecha here in London, a SaaS company. And it's like just the difference in how excited people are to come to work is just such a world apart.
Paula Molianr (02:32)
All right.
Exactly. think it's just because you are, you really are part of the business instead of these other companies where you're just like a pawn in it. ⁓ So yeah, the feeling is completely different. Like, I mean, I've been a paddle for six years. It just turned six years.
Tom Rudnai (02:53)
Yeah.
Paula Molianr (02:59)
and the people and the culture is definitely one of the reasons I want to stay and it happens in other companies but Pada we were pretty good at growing and still keeping that. So yeah, it's definitely a great industry to work at.
Tom Rudnai (03:14)
Yeah,
well that was one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, so maybe we'll go straight there. I kind of view Paddle as one of the big success stories of the London start-up scene over the last, what, five, 10 years, however long it's been, right? Pretty insane rate of growth and a very ambitious goal, like in FinTech, super cutthroat, taking on Stripe. Bold ambition, right? So you joined, I think, just after their series B, right? And then, was it 2019, is that correct?
Paula Molianr (03:39)
That's it, well done. I wouldn't be able to remember that, but that was it.
Don't know if you know the story of our founders but it's incredibly interesting. When I was, 13 years old, I had no idea where my future was going to be but our founders were actually thinking about this company already which is insane. So Christian Owens is the founder of the company, he's such an amazing person, extremely clever, nice but also managed to see the future into something that was needed in the market.
We are a marginal record so we're different to the likes of Stripe but yes we are competing against Stripe at the same time we Stripe as well so it's a weird relationship that we have with them. Definitely looked up to them because they have built something incredible but we are different so there is a different market for us out there. A marginal record, want to go too much into this but the reason we're different is because we take on a lot of responsibility, not responsibility but we take
on a lot of the work that SaaS businesses have to go through to be able to sell globally. With the likes of Stripe, you have a payment processor and that's it, but everything else that comes before and after a payment is done is up to the company to actually deal with. So that would be customer support, payment support, dining, cancellation flows, chargebacks, tax across the world. Like all of that is quite consuming
I so. I don't want to spread fake news. Maybe it was 17 but it was something ridiculous. Honestly, I was probably playing with dolls at that time and he was already building something. I know, I know. I feel like...
Tom Rudnai (05:07)
saw that at 13.
don't know if it's impressive or sad to be honest.
Paula Molianr (05:26)
Where have I, like, what have I done with my life? Like, he has done so much. But it is incredible. And they're just like nice people as well. think that's why when I moved to Pado and I met them, it was just all very...
Tom Rudnai (05:30)
Yeah.
Paula Molianr (05:39)
It's just so interesting and so different from working in a big fashion brand where you don't really know anyone. So yeah, it was really cool. it's been a roller coaster, a paddle, huge amount of growth. We acquired a company, a big business from the US. So we went from just marketing one product to marketing several products to then consolidating a lot of them as well. So it's been a huge learning curve, I think, for
that has been in the marketing team and the sales team because we had to kind of adapt and learn a lot. We had to go into different markets like the US as well, which wasn't something that we were strong. It was the main thing as soon as I joined.
The main thing that was happening in the business was that we were looking into the SaaS market and we were looking into the US. So we kind of had to learn a lot of that in the past six years. We have a great team in the US right now. We learned loads. We are closing amazing businesses there. And yeah, it's just been, it's been insane to the amount that has changed. But I think if I needed to summarize, it's probably we have much more budgets to spend, which is great. More money.
Processes has been, I think, one of the things that we have changed the most. I think it's such, it's, it's boring. Like no one wants to hear about operations and processes, but it's so foundational and important, and, and underrated, improving that really makes any companies being able to scale. And really refining our messaging and positioning, I think as well has completely changed from when I joined and kind of knew what we wanted to say to people, but we were getting better and better on this.
I'm not saying that we got there and I don't think anyone actually gets there and thinks this is done. But yes, we have an incredible team now that really thinks about this every day of their days, every hour of their days, and yet we're in such a better position right now than we were before.
Tom Rudnai (07:26)
Yeah, and that positioning point I think is really interesting because when you're growing as quickly as Paddle has, that must be a big challenge, I guess there's two things. One, yes, you're constantly refining and learning more about your positioning, but then presumably, all the goalposts are shifting, right? You're constantly having to try and find new time, kind of expand your ICP. And so you must almost be like starting from zero again. It must feel like every 12, 18 months.
Paula Molianr (07:49)
Yeah.
It is. And it's not just that your addressable market. think it's also
Everything's changed. Your addressable market, the way they think about things and what they need is also changes. You to also change your product and change your value prop, kind of, or adapt over time. So yes, it is something that's consistently changing. And anyone who's listening to this and think that they got it nailed, it's probably not nailed. Like it is, it's always going to change. And I think that's why it's so important to have a product marketing team. At least at Pado, the product marketing team is the one that is thinking about this every day.
It's so important to have someone in the business that is thinking about this, is listening to sales all the way to customer success and the product side as well and merging all of this into what is important to our customer and how we should communicate this out there.
Tom Rudnai (08:39)
Yeah,
well, and then I'm interested to understand how it affects you from a demand gen perspective, but then maybe a better place to start maybe is like, what does demand gen mean at
Paula Molianr (08:49)
I like marketing people just like to invent words and invent a meaning. Exactly. Yes. I mean, we can start a whole conversation on what is campaigns, but yes, I won't get there. On demand generation, I always tell anyone that I'm interviewing or joining my team. I see it as a little bit too...
Tom Rudnai (08:51)
And we use the same word for a thousand different things.
Paula Molianr (09:07)
kind of analogies. One is it is the glue of the creative side of marketing and to the revenue seeking of the business. So we take on all of the creative stuff that the brand team and the PMM team, content team is creating and we put this out there towards our audience in a way that they're always going to see it and understand that and process. So when is the right time they are going to look for paddle. So we have to be very revenue focused while certain people in the marketing team don't have
to be thinking about revenue all the time. So that's one of the ways I think of it is it's the kind of the glue between the creative side of marketing and revenue. So the sales side. And I think that the only way that's not so nice to say is I always think that the PMM, the content team, the brand team is like the creative brain of the marketing team and DG are like the arms and the legs. So we're putting all of this in the market. And as I said, trying to make sure that our audiences
seeing all of this via our campaigns and all of the channels that we leverage. So these are kind of the two ways that I like to think about the Man Generation app panel. I hope that makes sense because it makes sense in my head, but who knows?
Tom Rudnai (10:14)
Yeah, no, I think
that's one of the clearest articulations that I've heard, actually, and it's a really cool role. How do you look at the way that you have to work then? I guess I'm particularly, because of what we do is always more around the content side, and it resonates a lot with them on Genius. Our whole thing is connecting content to revenue, so how do we do a better job of understanding and maximising the impact that content is having on the bottom line and on metrics that the people upstairs really care about?
So how does it manifest itself day in day out in terms of your working relationship with those creative teams?
Paula Molianr (10:48)
So inside, in my team, we have a growth team and we have a campaign team. The campaign team is very closely aligned with the content team. So they're constantly thinking about what are the campaigns that they need to put out there, but they're also very closely aligned with sales and they're listening to what sales is hearing out there. Like they are the people in the front line. They actually know what people want or need. So I think that alignment is extremely important, but data is also something that has been a struggle at Pado for
probably the first three or four years I've been here. But we recently acquired a tooling and we actually hired someone in my team to just focus on metrics and just enable the rest of the marketing team on metrics, which I think is so key to make sure that everyone is aligned and looking at the same things and spending time on the right things that is actually driving the needle for the business and our growth. So I think that having that feedback loop of information and quality
information from people in the frontline to say to marketing is extremely important but also having access to data and understanding how to leverage that is also very important and it's hard for smaller teams because you usually don't have
you don't have one person that you're just looking into data. So we're pretty lucky that we have someone that's excellent as well, that can enable the entire team on like what they need to know what has been successful and what hasn't. And also understand that there are so many different ways where you can look into data. There are things that you're building content that are going to be way top of the funnel. You can assume that it's not successful if you look at a window of 30 or 60, 90 days or something like that.
might take much longer. That's how we think about webinars here as well. Webinars do take time to influence people to actually convert, but they're extremely important. We see people converting that have joined five, six webinars within like six months, which is huge. They have been engaged with the brand the whole time. It was never really the right time to engage with us in sales, but it did get there eventually. So I think it's important to look at the data, but also you need to know how to look into the data as well.
Tom Rudnai (12:31)
Mm.
Paula Molianr (12:56)
so you're not making the wrong assumptions.
Tom Rudnai (12:58)
Yeah, and that's where I see people honing on specific attribution models or something like that, and you end up with really bad decisions being made off the back of that. ⁓ Because you're not understanding, these things are lots of compounding touch points. mean, people are a lot more hesitant than they used to be to engage directly with sales, right? So just because you haven't closed a deal within a month of a webinar doesn't mean that it wasn't a super critical touch point to retain a relationship with the person who came to it.
Paula Molianr (13:05)
I love that. Awesome.
Exactly. there is as much as we like to, there is not such thing as a linear customer experience. It goes all over the place. What you have to ensure is that you are there at every point of that journey from them just not trying to learn more about the industry all the way to actually looking to solutions and compare the solutions. You just need to be there all the time and be perceived as a trustworthy company.
because eventually people will just go to the website and actually either self-serve or try to speak to sales. People are very self-educated to just go to the website and go to Google or AI and try to learn as much as possible by themselves. don't need people to be constantly speaking to them for them to learn.
Tom Rudnai (14:08)
Yeah, and that's kind of how I always think of DemandGen. If I try and define DemandGen, would be that like, you know, kind of 95, 95 % of people aren't in market. DemandGen to me is we're going to be present for everyone and try to add value to everyone and kind of allow them to raise their hands as and when they're in a buying process. But if we can be present and be a consistent part of their life, then we will be front of mind at the point at which we make sense.
Paula Molianr (14:31)
Yeah, 100%. Like that 5 % of people that are in market, if you did a good job when they were not in market, they are going to a website and they're going to convert and try to listen to you. If you've not done a good job before, they're never going to know about you. You won't be top of mind. They won't go to your website and just request to speak to someone. So you have to definitely focus on that part before actually being into market, the education, the nurturing, the building intent, all of that is very important.
Tom Rudnai (14:59)
Yeah, well, and one thing that interested me, so I was doing some stalking on LinkedIn before. I was doing some prep on LinkedIn before, that sounds much better. And one thing I noticed, you came from like a PPC, a much more like performance marketing background, which in my head is kind of the antithesis of DemandGen. Like, guess, first of all, would you agree with that? And second of all, like, yeah, if so, why the transition?
Paula Molianr (15:10)
Yeah.
I mean, it's a part of it. It's part of our scene to focus on it and it's probably one of the areas where we spend the largest amount of money. I think it's just a very useful channel to make sure that you're front-lined of the people that you care about with the content that you believe that they will be interested on. I think that...
where it goes from just paid to demand generations that you have to think, you can't just think about a channel. It's never going to work like this. As we just said, like it's, it's a compounding factor of several things that are happening within that individual that is going to make them change their mind or have the thoughts that they need a solution. so you have to think about how all of these channels are playing together. So every time we have planning sessions with my team, we're constantly not just thinking about the campaigns and the messaging, but also
How are all of our channels intersecting into this and helping each other and playing with each other? So yeah, for example, um
if we put a content out there or a webinar, for example, we do a lot of webinars. If we do a webinar and obviously we request it's a form, so people need to submit a form, we always have a strategy behind that form. So it's not just, it's a webinar, it's done and dusted. There will be more coming from this. So we want to make sure that they feel like there's so much value for just adding that information into a form. So they'll be nurtured. We'll be giving them extra content, more information.
more value ready throughout the next whatever number of days. So I think you can't just think about a specific channel. I don't think anyone can be successful just by just thinking about paid. You have to think about how it all plays together.
Tom Rudnai (16:57)
Well, and
it's different, one thing that struck, like I think that is different about content strategy than say, I don't know, about five, certainly 10 years ago is that so much more of it is in the distribution, right? So I think paid is one tool in your toolbox. And I think the benefit of raising a $200 million Series D is that paid becomes a much bigger tool that you can leverage,
Paula Molianr (17:16)
yeah, if you have, again, it goes back to the foundations, like on the ops and the processes, you have to have really good processes to be able to flow... How do I say this?
You have to have really good processes to make sure that all of your channels are playing well together. So it's not just distributing yet, but once someone engages with something, what else do you want them to do? So you need to think about that whole experience, not just, did they see that blog and that's it? Have they been impacted by that blog? No. Have they seen the blog and actually converted into something else on the webinar and then received an email and then going touched by a BDR and a BDR called them and they were really interested because they did this 15 things just before.
So
yeah, think you need to always think about everything together. There's no one silver spoon to the band generation or pipeline creation. It's a mix of things and you kind of need to understand what is the subset of things that works really well together and try to scale that every time.
understand that people, our customers trust other people.
they trust people that have been through a similar situation or have advised a bunch of people in similar situations. So I think right now we're going through this process of working. And I'd say right now it's probably been two years now. But we've been working a lot with influencers and leveraging them as people trust them. people will always trust people more than trust brands. So...
You have to also play around this. I like the idea of having your own ecosystem and not be dependent on other people. I think you also need to be open and flexible towards trying to open up other areas by partnering with the right people where people trust. So I think that's another thing that has been very successful at Pado as well.
It's one of the ways that we have been able to build really great content is by partnering with these people that really know about their stuff. They're working with this every day. They're helping people, they're advisors and so on. So I think that's another lever that is super interesting for, and I don't think it's used enough out there. But yeah, it still needs to be genuine. You can't just pay for someone to talk about you. You have to have that relationship. So we do have strong relationships with every partner that we have.
our influences that we work together with.
Tom Rudnai (19:35)
I'm also the belief that influencers, it's a very untapped opportunity in B2B. But one thing I've found when I've started to look at it for demand genius, and I'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this that have the same problem, which I assume is case for Paddle as well, you're not a kind of freemium PLG tool that an influencer can go try out for a week on their own, clearly see value and then play that back to their customers.
it's harder for them to build up the genuine, like authentic belief in your product. Like how do you manage that?
Paula Molianr (20:10)
We actually, that works for us, the scenario you mentioned, because we have founders that use our platform to sell their own software and they had the experience of using Paddle and they have an audience because most of are building in public, for example. So there is one person specifically, his name is Arvid, he's fantastic. And he was the one that had such a great experience with Paddle that he came up to us and said, I'll be happy to talk about you guys because I actually do love your
Tom Rudnai (20:18)
Okay.
Paula Molianr (20:37)
product. So that's how you really get the right people is by the people that have actually used your product. I think the other category that we leverage is the advice advisors. So we work with a lot of app companies and there are a lot of agencies that have companies to grow and monetization and pricing strategy. All of that is very important to anyone really that's scaling any business. So they know about ways
in areas where you can optimize by localizing by offering external payouts, external payment methods and things like that. they saw the value of Pado by seeing better conversion rates and improvement in LTV, all of that stuff. it's easy for them to recommend Pado because they have seen that happening with clients. So that's kind of the two categories that we use.
Tom Rudnai (21:22)
I wanted to come back to something that you talked about a little bit ago briefly, which is kind of attribution and how you look at kind of payback periods and things like that. what are the KPIs that you guys work towards? Do you have like a north star and what is it?
Paula Molianr (21:37)
I think the entire team is looking at growth, business growth. So we have ambitious growth plans for the business. So we're constantly thinking about that number. We obviously, as a Digi team, we have pipeline goals. The entire marketing team really is kind of responsible for pipeline as well as sales. So which really helps us to align by just being having the same goals. So pipeline goals is definitely my main
KPI and our pipeline targets, I want to say. And that's it. Like we measure MQLs, we measure leads, all of that stuff, but that's secondary. What we really care about is revenue for the business.
Tom Rudnai (22:16)
No, so that's always my biggest belief. It's like that should be everyone that's North Star. That should be the only like, you always end up with a talk to businesses who they're in this crazy situation where they're missing their revenue target. Yeah, all the individual people underneath there hitting their KPIs. And it's like, how can that happen? ⁓
Paula Molianr (22:30)
Yeah. Yeah.
Our COO says that.
green lights and angry faces as he says like all of the KPIs are looking really good but we're not happy as a business so it's exactly that like you have it only should go back to that main thing which is go for the business otherwise we're not going to be aligned like you can measure things in so many different ways and going back to your question about attribution I think
As much as you want attribution to be like the thing that saves the marketing team and makes this marketing team be able to measure everything, it's never going to measure everything. But it does give you direction. And I think that's what's important. So when reporting back to stakeholders, I think I learned through time that it's way more important to go back with them with.
This is the overall story. If we do X, we get Y. And if we increase 50 % of our budget, we get this as well. That's what they want to hear. They want to hear how we grow, not what the CPL and CPC is for whatever it is that we're doing and how we improve or decrease CPL. So they want to hear how do you scale and is it good for the business to start with, are we doing well and how do we scale?
Tom Rudnai (23:40)
Yeah and what are the levers that we have that we can pull? Yeah no agreed and then in terms of content I think you've like you've answered this a little bit but like how do you evaluate then if whether a webinar is successful or whether a particular white paper that you produce is successful and on what time horizon would you look at that?
Paula Molianr (23:42)
Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys.
Yeah, I wish I had a very simple answer for this. don't. I feel like with webinars specifically, because we do them a lot, they became almost a content source for us. We do the webinar, we see how people engage. We create a lot of snippets, again, see how people engage, create videos from it, create blogs from it, create guides, create emails. So we create so much from One Piece that when we look at the...
impact of webinars is not just the webinar per se, it's so much more than that. So we try to condense all of that into a campaign to see what the results of that are. I always look into deals influenced for webinars specifically, it's definitely a longer period. So we like to look at around. We do look in quarter just to measure how we are because it depends on the webinar as well. There's certain webinars are a little bit more bottom of the funnel versus top of the funnel.
But by default, we always look at that 90 day window, but then look it back towards at least six months, not more than that, and see how that has impacted. And I think a white paper, a gated content would be in a similar way. The other thing that has been huge for Pado is case studies. So we're building a lot of voice of customer assets, and that can go from a traditional case study on the website to a video
to just quotes that we post on social, on paid social and things like that. So all of that, again, there's so many formats that you can share that same content. So we always need to look into the campaign itself. And I think that has been one of the biggest levers for us to really influence those. I mean, it's no secret. People want to see how successful the solution can be. So case studies is huge for us.
Tom Rudnai (25:42)
Yeah, it's cool to see the focus on that though, because I think so we had Lee Densma on the other week and she was talking about how the biggest mistake that most particularly early stage, but SaaS companies in general make is they over index on top of funnel content. Because I think broadly because it's easy, it's easier to produce it requires less kind of internal haranguing and less in depth thought. We've produced demand genius like an AI agent recently that
that automatically does content audits. And we've been using that to assess all of the content and like where it sits within the funnel top, middle, bottom. One of the really interesting thing that came out from that was actually that it completely disagrees. Now we're just looking at the content of the article. So not the keyword strategy or like basically not the intent, but the execution. And what it shows is that across SAS overwhelmingly only about 16 % of content is top of funnel.
overwhelmingly the rest is middle and bottom, which I think is super interesting because we've got a gap there, but it's speaks to the way that we're going about writing content, right, because we just can't resist dropping in a lot of information about ourselves. So there's a gap in terms of true compelling bottom of funnel content, but what you do have is a load of top of funnel content that actually is bottom of funnel, it's just bad.
Paula Molianr (26:40)
Right.
nice one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
can see that happening. That's really super interesting. I feel like we went through the same journey as well. We built a lot of top of the funnel content, probably was for usage. I built top of the funnel mixed with bottom of the funnel. How do we plug our own product there? Mostly for SEO, I think really trying to build that traffic.
I don't think we did historically a great job at like really building on the commercial intent instead. So that is something that we have been focused on in the past year or so. And we've seen huge improvements from that, but also.
I think it's much clearer in our heads right now when we want something solely educational to when we want something that is commercially driven. And I think, yeah, as you said, I think in the past we probably just built for the sake of building instead of actually thinking more about it, critically about it.
Tom Rudnai (27:47)
Hmm.
I think there's a rush. It's come up as a theme a lot. There's always a rush to just get going, get producing content and you think that you'll accelerate the benefits. Whereas if you actually take a step back and think about what we're trying to do here, what's our unique kind of content IP, it will pay off. But then I'm guilty of that myself. You raised a couple of interesting points there that I wanted to come back to as well. So one was around SEO. what have you guys seen over the last...
Paula Molianr (27:54)
⁓ yeah.
Exactly, exactly.
Tom Rudnai (28:12)
year or so, like have you seen the same impact as everyone else in terms of a decline and how's that filtered through into how you leverage it?
Paula Molianr (28:20)
Yeah, we did see a decline mostly on the top of the funnel stuff again, top of the funnel. So when we acquired this company in the US called Profit12, they had a lot of amazing top of the funnel, like real top of the funnel content that was huge, great asset for us.
And that has declined since it's been a bit of a roller coaster. But because at the same time, we're going through this process of building more commercial driven content, I think we saw less of a decline because we also saw the increase of this. So we kind of balanced out. We're trying now to continue to build on this because I think it is it's helping everything that we do that we're seeing on the end.
the AI side, LLMs. I think I was just having a look at data just before this call because I knew that this potentially was a topic. It looks like just from, I to say...
March to April, I think we've seen an increase of like 80 % in referrals coming from LLMs just because of our commercial driven keywords that we have been focusing on. So I think it's awesome. Like we already have all of the Stop the Funnel content. Obviously a lot of it is being referenced on the AI side, but it's good to also build up on the commercial prompts. In terms of what's coming next, we have actually an SEO person, so I cannot claim to do any of this.
She's fantastic. She's been on my team for a year now and she's spending a lot of time thinking about how do we bring the AI side into our strategy. And right now we're engaging more and more with our PR agency to build more content, press releases and PR in general, leveraging more the external websites to improve our positions across LLMs, which...
I feel like everyone, no one really knows how to do this pretty well. So you've got to keep trying. And it's all about really understanding your audience. And it goes back to a very foundational thing, which is understand your audience and what do they want. I think if you focus on that, instead of focusing on this growth hacks and things like that, you're going to get more long-term success than just focus on very tiny little things that you can do right now that might help your...
how many times you're appearing on a prompt, but it might not be the real strategy you should be focusing on.
Tom Rudnai (30:44)
Yeah, I mean, Google released some guidance last week on how to get into the AI overviews, which I started reading thinking this is kind of fun. They've told everyone how to do it. But I mean, it was still pretty bland. They've not exactly opened the black box. think the key things out of it were first of all, like, yeah, write good content that answers users' questions, which I think explains why you're seeing a lot from that, because it sounds like that's just a shift that you've made anyway. I mean, that's nothing new. That was a change
a long while ago, that you don't just cram stuff full of keywords as a route to the top of the rankings. The other thing that I found really interesting, because it's something we've been saying for quite a while, is like, they're trying to really make the case that, okay, you're gonna get less traffic from us, but there is a higher engagement and click-through rate on the traffic that you do get, which makes sense, right?
Paula Molianr (31:15)
Exactly.
Tom Rudnai (31:28)
So I think it just changes, it changes A, what keywords you're trying to capture and how you approach the strategic side, but then also where the website sits within your funnel. It just is a mechanism that exists further down the funnel and that puts focus on a whole lot of other things. ⁓
Paula Molianr (31:45)
Yeah, totally
right. That's why I always go back into the user experience instead of just thinking how you get them to the website, you need to think about how are they landing to their website and what can you do to keep them there. So as you said, it's not, you shouldn't be always...
Well, we should never really just be tracking how many clicks you're getting from organic. You should be thinking about how they're actually performing across the website after that. And it's the same thing with LLMs, isn't it? Like they're reading before they're getting to the website. Great. They have been curious enough to actually go to your page now. Like what do you do after that too? So you have to, you have to think about what's next for them.
Tom Rudnai (32:24)
Yeah, well, that was the other question that I wanted to come back to, which is about content gating. Like one thing for me is this puts a whole lot more focus, if you're getting less people, be a lot more discerning with the experience that you give them, whether you're going to turn away, like what the value exchange should be on the traffic that you do get. Like how do you guys think about content gating at Paddle?
Paula Molianr (32:44)
So we do it, we're not one of these companies, I just say, we're never gonna do this again. But we do it with intent behind it, as I told you, like we look into how we play with other channels. So if we are using a form, there is something after this for the customer. It's not just we want your details and we're gonna spam you with emails. We don't really wanna think like that. We want you to think about how do we nurture them after that for very specific content.
And typically we don't see unsubscribes or things like that because we're actually giving them value. Obviously we're thinking about like timing as well. We don't want to things too often. We want to make sure that it is personalized. So I think all of that is very important. With that being said, we don't do forums that much. It's, it's, I think right now actually we don't use it at all. The only place we use forums is for webinars. We kind of need that for the tooling.
But that's it. I'm not, I hate being like 100 % against something. So I'm not against forms, but I think you need to think about the experience. Are you going to provide them value or are you just doing this so you have more leads and you tell your boss that you got 100 % for leads, whatever it is. That doesn't mean anything to anyone. So yeah, you need to think about why you're doing this, how you're providing value and...
Is he going to help your go at the end of the day?
Tom Rudnai (34:08)
Well, the phrase you used that I really liked was we do it with intent, which is always my argument on that. There are points in the buyer journey where a content gate is the right thing to do, right? Because in order to help someone solve a problem or answer a question, we need to change the nature of the relationship, right? It's not a question that we can answer through content. We need context, need kind of, some kind of interaction, or we need to capture some data that allows us to tailor the content and then solve your problem. So if you think of your goal as helping people.
through that journey, it has a role for a good deal of companies, but it's doing it with intent and deliberately. It's funny, my background, well it's probably not that funny, but it's very interesting. My background is in B2C payrolls. me and my co-founder spent like five years helping BBC, Financial Times, Economist with their payroll strategy. And the level of sophistication is crazy, right? You and me will go onto the Economist or Financial Times and based on first-party data that they hold, propensity models.
Paula Molianr (34:39)
Exactly. Yeah.
Yep.
Tom Rudnai (35:03)
we're gonna get cut off at a completely different point. And it's taken them like 20 years since their industry digitized to get to that point where they're that good at driving outcomes from digital content. In B2B, we've been kind of going through the same process 20 years behind in terms of our industry digitizing. And we kind of, think it's the next journey that we need to go on. And particularly as we're getting a much, we're not casting such a wide net, it's a smaller net of high value people. Just be.
Paula Molianr (35:20)
Yes.
Tom Rudnai (35:30)
Treat them well. ⁓
Paula Molianr (35:31)
Yeah,
I think we're going through discussions with the company right now on how do we... because the website is our product and we need to think about it that way and how do we evolve it over time. Like all of these things, people have changed the way they look for products, the way that they educate themselves, all of that. I don't think... Sorry, my dog. I'm sorry. What was I saying? Yeah, I think it's just that we...
Tom Rudnai (35:40)
Mm.
Get the hell out of me.
Yeah.
Paula Molianr (35:59)
I think in SaaS in general, we haven't adapted to the way that our websites are built for the customer and the way that they actually aren't trying to consume information and make decisions. I think there's a huge gap right now in the business.
Tom Rudnai (36:13)
okay, look, super interesting conversation. I'm conscious of time, so we've got about five or 10 minutes left. So what I like to do at the end is always go to some quick fire questions, So first one is, what's the biggest change that you've noticed in B2B marketing since you started,
Paula Molianr (36:24)
I just feel like there's too much out there. LinkedIn is so, I don't want to swear, F busy. It's so funny. I think every company right now needs to find a way to stand out, but you need to stand out within three seconds. The tension span is gone. Everyone has two seconds to absorb something and you have to, that's why the messaging, positioning, all of that is so important.
Tom Rudnai (36:30)
You can swear. It's fucking noisy.
Paula Molianr (36:48)
You have to nail it and continue testing it. But standing out is so important. And I think at Pado, probably one of the best things we did in the past, I go on, knows when we actually did this, but the rebrand was huge for us because we actually had something known as a brand that is different from everything out there. And I think more businesses should think like this. My partner works in a tech company and...
They do not care about French as much and honestly they struggle. They struggle to stand out because no one will remember them. They're just so busy. You've got to find a way to stand out.
Tom Rudnai (37:24)
Yeah, it's the thing that I find the hardest about marketing, And I'm kind of in awe of really good marketers who are good at boiling down a message to like a really attention grabbing thing. it's tough as a founder as well because you want to tell people all the great stuff that you can do.
I think founders normally make pretty terrible marketers. They make very good sales people because they're taught with passion on all the stuff they do. They're really bad at boiling it down to the things the other person cares about.
Paula Molianr (37:50)
Exactly, It needs to be short and sweet. And it's so hard with B2B because your product is super complex. mean, there's 15 different things that you're solving. You have to find a way to. And that's why segmentation is also so important. So you're talking to the right people about the right things instead of just trying to be very generic all the time.
Tom Rudnai (37:58)
It's complicated.
do you think LinkedIn's had a net positive or net negative effect on like the B2B space? Because in a way it makes discovery so much easier, right? You have access to tools from all around the world, but there's just so much noise.
Paula Molianr (38:26)
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I have an opinion right now. I feel it has been amazing for the past god knows how many years. But right now it's just... I think they're putting some rules in place, which is great. it gives me a little bit more confidence in the tool that they will survive for a little bit longer. But I think that's why the communities are surging right now. Like we have so many communities where people just want to be...
close to other people that think I like them. And that's probably because LinkedIn is too busy. I don't know, I get hundreds of invitations a week and not because I'm cool, it's just because it's a bunch of salespeople trying to speak to me.
Tom Rudnai (39:07)
I think there is space for someone to come and challenge LinkedIn, right? Because it's, no one likes it, but everyone uses it because it's really the only game in town. Like a much more community focused tool. Yeah, I guess Slack are doing that a little bit, but.
Paula Molianr (39:18)
Yeah, yeah.
It's still not great. There is a community I follow or I'm part of. It's Exit 5. ⁓ I don't know what the name of the tool that I use, but it's pretty good because you choose where and who do you want to kind of talk to.
Tom Rudnai (39:28)
Yeah, I know that's a five, yeah.
Paula Molianr (39:38)
I think that's good because I know where I want to go and ask questions or where I want to go and reach what people are saying. Instead of LinkedIn where it's say say say one good post say say say say You know what mean? Or like very, I don't know, there's a lot of cringy content there too that I don't appreciate.
Tom Rudnai (39:50)
Yeah.
No, I'm with you there. And I think those like much more focused niche communities are doing really well. There's one we work with in the States for content marketers called SuperPath. They're fantastic. Like such a, not massive, but like a really engaged group of users. And it's a lot, it's like, it's a pleasure to be a part of it.
Paula Molianr (40:09)
Exactly.
Oh, 100
% if there's 100 people that are pretty cool, I'm happy. I don't need thousands.
Tom Rudnai (40:18)
Yeah, no, I'm with you. Anyway, one of my new resolutions for this podcast is when I say quickfire questions to actually do them quickfire. let's move on. An AI use case that you love or an AI tool that's kind of blown your way.
Paula Molianr (40:19)
Yeah, how do they?
Hmm. Do they have an AI? We just purchased Unify. I know if you know them, we struggle at Pado with qualification of leads because not everyone that wants to use Pado can use Pado. So qualification has always been a problem for us and we kind of build our own AI agents to go and check.
every company out there that comes to our website to see, they actually good for Pado? So we can do all the things that we know how to do, like leverage all of our channels and so on and messaging, crystallize the messaging. So Unify is allowing us to do that. So we created an AI agent that does all of the qualification process by looking at a website, looking at information of the company, looking at the ICPs, who is potentially on the website based on the country, IP, blah, blah, blah. So there's a lot of data there. And
Yeah, we're really leveraging this for the content as well and how do we speak to them. So that has been a great experiment with, I think we've been live just for a month. So I can't really tell anything, but it's looking pretty good so far.
Tom Rudnai (41:35)
Yeah, nice, I like the concept. And then, okay, if I was to go tomorrow and approve your like plan A budget request, and the way I think about it is like fund the project that no one would ever be stupid enough to actually give you budget for, what would you do with it?
Paula Molianr (41:50)
I think kind of a mix of that community concept. just love, think we teased that idea a few times, but it's just a bit ridiculous. I'd love to have like a ridiculous, some sort of like a retreat where all of our top accounts that we really want to win, Dream Logos would be invited, but also the Dream Influencers are the dream. People in that industry will also be there.
God knows, we might invite Obama there as well. Who knows? But yeah, something like crazy like that, it would be so cool to do once. But yeah, we need to pay a lot of budget for that and you'll probably take a year just to get a mature degree.
Tom Rudnai (42:29)
You've kind of taken that question down to just, want my dream dinner party. I want to meet cool people. And okay, for you personally, what skill or trait has most moved the needle for you in your career, would you say?
Paula Molianr (42:33)
Yes, that's it.
I don't know if I've claimed to be that, but I think everyone these days needs to be very savvy on tech and leverage the new stuff that's coming up. You should not be scared of using it. AI is an obvious example, but I tell my team all the time, come to me every day or every week with a new way to spend money. It can be tooling, can be new channels, anything like that. You have to be on it.
And I think a lot of it is by understanding how tooling can play with each other and how to leverage a lot of that too. So I think techies having us is huge. You have to be very quick to adapt to new things that are happening in the market.
Tom Rudnai (43:23)
Yeah, I completely agree. think marketing ops is one of most important functions in the marketing team.
Paula Molianr (43:28)
They do. Yeah. You have to think about data. Like how do you leverage data on your day to day?
Tom Rudnai (43:33)
Yeah, no, I'm with you. And then last one before I just kind of close out is the flip side for you. What's the biggest fuck up that you've ever made in your career? Everyone's gonna listen to this and think Paul is so smart and I want them to know that you're not always.
Paula Molianr (43:47)
I don't think I have any spicy stories to share, I'm sorry. I mean we've all done the forgot to put the first the name on the email and say hey first name or subject line a subject line all of that stuff. ⁓
Tom Rudnai (43:58)
Yeah.
Okay, so I've got a good question. So after you did that,
what did you do in response to it? Did you like, I've seen people send really funny emails off the back of that or?
Paula Molianr (44:12)
I think the first time I did it, just pretended that it didn't happen. ⁓ And I probably worked in a small company enough that no one noticed, but I was thinking that the world was going to end as you are, as a young marketer. But I think after that, I kind of embraced, I kind of embraced like, yeah, you should just embrace it and make fun of it. That's what I do with my...
Tom Rudnai (44:16)
Nice.
Paula Molianr (44:35)
The fact that I don't speak English as my first language and it is my second language, I think I used to be really hard on myself when I made mistakes and nowadays I just make fun of it if I do make mistakes. So I think that's the best way that you can embrace all of these things. No one's killing anyone in this business, so if we're making mistakes, our silly mistakes, just make fun of it.
Tom Rudnai (44:56)
I do, yeah, I come back to that. I always think, okay, we're gonna spin around on this massive rock in space for 80 years. At the end of the day, most of the things we do on it don't matter, so let's just kind of enjoy the ride as much as we can. Okay, cool, and then before I you go, one recommendation that you'd make for all of our listeners in terms of like a book, a podcast, or a thought leader that they should check out, something that you found helpful.
Paula Molianr (45:08)
Exactly, exactly that. Agreed.
I think that Exit 5 community is pretty cool. I think in general just try to find these smaller communities in your area. Exit 5 is pretty good for DJ. People in content sites probably, you just mentioned one. I think I did tell this to everyone in my team. keep telling them to invest in communities, don't invest in like...
courses as much because courses just get outdated in two seconds. You want to speak to people and build relationships. do that. And the XO5 has been really good, like podcasts in general are amazing. Yeah, all of that. Just try to keep as much in the game as possible.
Tom Rudnai (46:04)
Yeah, I like that. think it's like, kind of like find your tribe, but I think particularly as we're all more disconnected and remote, you have to go out of your way for that a little bit more than you're used to with just doing it with colleagues. And then truly last question, anything you'd like to plug, just give you a quick second if there's anything that you're doing at Paddle or yourself.
Paula Molianr (46:14)
your punch, yeah.
I'm not very good at marketing myself. No, I don't think I have anything to talk about, but if you are working in a SaaS company and you are thinking of how to grow globally, really, I'd suggest you to have a look at paddl.com. Also do have a look at paddl.com for the marketing stuff. We do really great stuff there. So I hope people can get a little bit inspired. It's not me, it's the entire team. But yeah, do check us out.
Tom Rudnai (46:46)
Awesome, and I'm sure I'll follow Paula and she will let you know them when she's hiring as well and you get to work in her team.
Paula Molianr (46:51)
Yes, we actually do. We are hiring. We are hiring for a paid media role. And soon to be open another role. So keep your eyes built.
Tom Rudnai (46:59)
There we go, watch this space. Well
look, Paul, thank you, it's been a pleasure. I really appreciate you coming on and yeah, to UNOP and all of the listeners, thank you very much.
Paula Molianr (47:08)
Thank you.