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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 3,500+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
In a world where there is so much competition, you need those advantages. And if you think that someone is going to lay up the feature checklist and compare 50 features and, okay, well, they do this one thing. No, I believe in taking those things out of buyers hands. I want to win with our story, with our brand, and I want to show you that we can do all the things that you want. And so I'm 100% on board with this idea that design and brand can be a competitive differentiator. All right, Eli's here. We connected last year or so, and I have a bunch of questions right out the gate. So you're the CEO of a design agency.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:49]:
A design company. But then if I go into your background, you've been advising a marketing advisor to a bunch of really interesting SaaS companies over the years. So what is your background, man?
Eli Rubel [00:01:03]:
Glad to be here. Yeah, I've got a weird background. Honestly, it's very atypical. I actually went to art school, dropped out of art school, thought I wanted to be an artist for a while, and then realized, like, oh, shit, I need to make some money in my life and do something that happened to everybody.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:22]:
None of us are here. Most of us on this podcast did not wake up, and we're not born to be here. Right?
Eli Rubel [00:01:32]:
Right. Yeah. So, yeah, I call that my quarter life crisis. And I decided that I would move into my mom's basement, and I wasn't allowed to leave until I started a software company. And so I was, like, 21, maybe 22 at the time, and did exactly that. I moved into my mom's unfinished basement. It was in Portland, Oregon. It would flood in the winter with water, and I'd have to mop up the water as I'm down there lamenting my decision to set this challenge of not being able to leave until I'd started a software company.
Eli Rubel [00:02:05]:
But long story short, ended up starting a software company. We raised VC from firms in Silicon Valley, like True Ventures and a bunch of others, and that business ended up getting acquired in 2014. So, yeah, that was my first foray into tech was as the CEO of a software company. And then from there, I bought an ecommerce company.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:33]:
Was there a team? Were there people? What was the.
Eli Rubel [00:02:39]:
Kind of. My thesis was, like, I don't have any business being in business. Like, I didn't go to business school. I don't have any background. I don't really have any knowledge. So the way I want to compete is picking a really boring, uninteresting sector that I'm not competing with. A bunch of Stanford grads and so landed on contract lifecycle management, which today comparables would be like. Yeah, right.
Eli Rubel [00:03:03]:
Comparables would be like Panda doc essentially today, something like that. But this is back in the day of docusign when they still just did signatures. There was no approval flows or any kind of workflow based logic. So tackled that, yeah, that was our focus, built a team.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:20]:
And how big was the company?
Eli Rubel [00:03:22]:
We were super small when we acquired. So there were like us, something like that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:27]:
Cool. Yeah. So you've been in a marketing advisor to c level execs at Dropbox loom product board. How did you get in there? Who are you to do that? Right? I don't even mean that in a condescending way. I'm just like, wait, this guy's a CEO of a small startup. They get acquired. Now he's a marketing advisor at all these relatively well known SaaS companies. Where did that come from?
Eli Rubel [00:03:59]:
Yeah, so after the acquisition, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next and basically went to our investors and was like, hey, what should I do with my time? And they're like, why don't you pop around our portfolio and start helping advise some of these early stage companies with how to think about growth and stuff like that. I had done that early stage growth sprint prior to the acquisition, and so that's really where it started. I just started advising early stage companies and then an advisor of mine joined Dropbox and wanted a fresh perspective on what was going on there and ended up going all the way up to the c suite and an advisory role there. So it just kind of like one popcorns to the neck, next, popcorns to the next. And I think you start to, I'm sure you see this too. Like, you see enough patterns, enough times that you can essentially drop into most of these businesses once you're familiar with that sales motion and have some thoughts.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:02]:
And do you have a general kind of thesis, like a view of the world of what usually works or doesn't work across these companies, especially in the early stages?
Eli Rubel [00:05:13]:
Yeah, I mean, my general thesis in the early stages is that most people fail at velocity. They try to get too clever. They're looking for new and novel, and at the end of the day, they're missing the fundamentals and they're not shipping fast enough. Probably same could be said for product, but in this case, I'm talking about marketing and go to market motion.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:40]:
Let's go riff on that a little bit because I'm a believer in that too. And that speed is the most important thing, especially in the early stages. But there's often a lot of pushback on that because people don't want to change the website so quickly, they don't want to go after a new market. But as we're starting to build exit five as a business, even we're making changes every week and we're trying to come up with new stuff that we're doing every week. And I saw this at drift when I was there as an example of momentum. It's contagious, right. The more stuff that you're creating, the quicker. Especially today when you have social media, you have email, you have an audience that you can reach directly, right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:20]:
Or even early customers, right? You can get feedback, you need to ship something. So you can get feedback on the messaging, on the product, and you need to keep iterating on that. But what should marketing be shipping, right? People know that product is going to move fast and ship stuff. But when you talk about marketing shipping and marketing velocity, what do you mean?
Eli Rubel [00:06:43]:
Yeah, so we have this whole thesis that we created around demand efficiency. So zooming out for 1 second, I have two agencies that I run mattermade, which is like demand efficiency performance marketing, and then the design agency, no, boring design. So mattermade. After four years of doing these engagements with super high growth startups, we basically had this pattern where we would go in, we would spend two to four weeks doing really deep dive discovery to find out exactly a gap analysis. Like where are all of the areas that they were lacking and what we found this ties back to that people tend to focus on the big sexy things, like the obvious levers, you hear the talking heads on podcasts, where a lot of them are talking about demand capture and demand creation. And just like the big things that are fun for execs to get into a room and talk about budget and blah, blah, blah blah. But in doing so, they neglect what we call them, micro surfaces. Like all of these small places throughout a buyer journey where you could meaningfully drive conversion, like ultimate conversion.
Eli Rubel [00:08:01]:
If there are 50 or 100 microservices across revenue orchestration, tofu, mofu, bofu, ways that you can experiment, messaging, alignment, brand retention, expansion. Like if each one of those buckets has some number of these microservices that you could tweak and drive, conversion improvement mean you could cut your cost to acquire in half or double your pipeline with the same budget. But people don't prioritize those small spaces, those micro surfaces, because when you look at them individually, they seem like a nice to have they seem like it's kind of like a three week project and really what we should be focusing on right now is insert more interesting sexy thing. But the aggregate of combining these smaller microservice projects and shipping them on a regular basis back to your original kind of point is where I think the most meat is on the bone at the end of the day.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:57]:
Is that what you do with mattermade from what does a typical engagement look like?
Eli Rubel [00:09:05]:
Yeah. So Mattermaid's changed a lot over the years. We used to do full spectrum demand gen and now we just focus on paid media. So performance in. We're pretty well known at this point for coming in, reducing a company's paid spend while keeping their pipeline the same. And then once we've found the efficiencies through a bunch of the stuff that I just mentioned and everybody's happy with the unit economics, then we can pump up spend together with the team. But yeah, we frequently come in and cut spend by 30% through all of these efficiencies while maintaining the same pipeline.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:42]:
What are the typical channels in the paid bucket that you're focusing on?
Eli Rubel [00:09:46]:
Search social indie channels, depending on the industry that they're in.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:52]:
What's an indie channel like a niche community like exit five for b two b marketing as example.
Eli Rubel [00:09:56]:
Exactly. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:57]:
Cool. And then what goes into that? What are the big general themes that you see over and over like you come in and you reduce, spend. Where is money? You reduce spend while keeping pipeline the same? I'm sure it's the 80 20 that you see across these companies. What is it so often that you can cut that doesn't impact pipeline?
Eli Rubel [00:10:21]:
Yeah. The first thing that sounds so dumb and ridiculous to say, but it's so true, is most of them just don't even have the measurement in place to know what's working and why. And so the very first step is getting them to a place where they have clean data so we can actually make real decisions, not gut based decisions.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:42]:
And are you working with specific, it seems like the companies that you've worked with, like just the ones that you reference, right. Like Dropbox, hop in g two loom product board. Those are all like self serve sign up type of companies. I don't know what you'd call them. Maybe product led growth.
Eli Rubel [00:11:00]:
Yeah, it's pretty evenly mixed between PlG focus, pure old school sales led and then some folks have like hybrid PlG into a sales assist.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:12]:
Got it. I was just going to ask because the measurement at least this has been my experience and I'm not very good in this area, but the measurement is easier in the high volume product led companies. My experience has been that it's much harder to figure out what you should be doing with paid in the sales led motion. But I'm not sure if I'm right about that. I'm curious to hear your take.
Eli Rubel [00:11:35]:
So your take is that it's much harder to measure in a sales led motion for paid.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:40]:
Just. Yeah, like that. Oh, someone converted on this, right? Like first, if you have loom and we're trying to drive people into the free version of the product, that's much easier. It's much more direct response, right?
Eli Rubel [00:11:52]:
Totally. Yeah, it's much more like b to c almost in nature, where you're able to very quickly. So these longer sales cycles, then you get into arguments around attribution and how are we actually modeling that piece of things, which is, at the end of the day, I think quite a bit of a distraction from just like, are we increasing revenue in the way that we want to at the price that we want to? But yeah, anytime the sales cycles get dragged out, it's going to increase complexity there on measurement.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:18]:
And do you have benchmarks around targets? You mentioned we want to keep things the cost that we want them. Do you have rough benchmarks for ratios that you like?
Eli Rubel [00:12:30]:
Yeah. So actually we published all of this on Mattermade Co. You can go and see the demand efficiency benchmark. And that's where companies, I mean, ranging from like box $0.06. Most of the fast growing or established tech companies at this point, their marketing leadership have gone in there and taken the demand efficiency evaluation. And then we allow folks to opt into benchmarking against each other so they can see like, oh, how am I doing? As compared to fill in the blank other company? And they can specifically see what micro surfaces exist. Where is the low hanging fruit? So originally that was kind of like our secret sauce. Then I realized when the market took a downturn, I was like, let's just open source this and let people self evaluate.
Eli Rubel [00:13:19]:
And some people are going to need help with it, and other people are going to just take the information and it'll be helpful to them. So yeah, we publish all.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:26]:
What are the most important benchmarks that somebody who wants to get better or start exploring or getting smart about paid should be focusing on?
Eli Rubel [00:13:38]:
So in this case, our benchmark, it's our own metric. So it's the demand efficiency score. So it's not like a subset of paid. It's really looking at their entire program across those categories that I mentioned earlier.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:54]:
Right. But is there something like CAC and payback period? Those have to be.
Eli Rubel [00:14:00]:
Yeah, it's all the usual suspects in SaaS metrics. And what those usual suspects are, are going to depend on their selling motion. Right. Like to your point, if they're sales assist or mostly PLG, it's going to look quite a bit different than sales led or more enterprise motion.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:21]:
What are the most common inefficiencies other than measurement?
Eli Rubel [00:14:27]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:28]:
Like let's get measurement. Right. Where do we see people typically wasting money?
Eli Rubel [00:14:33]:
Yeah, I mean, shit, we can just pull this up and look at some real company examples. If you're game for that, that'd be great. Let me move you over to the other monitor. So if we go to Mattermade Co. There's a demand efficiency drop down, go to the benchmark. And so we can see all the companies who have taken the evaluation and opted ins like Sendoso Zoom info $0.06 Grammarly and they're stack ranked by their sophistication around demand efficiency. So if we jumped in to answer your question, let's go to the, towards the bottom here we've got picnic health. So the three areas it says that they need to improve messaging, alignment, experimentation and customer focus.
Eli Rubel [00:15:17]:
And then within that it's saying, all right, they haven't implemented lead routing or automated lead booking or lead enrichment. They have an opportunity to launch experiments to determine channel viability across out of home podcast direct mail. They don't have MofU nurture sequences to support accelerating the middle funnel conversions, increasing free to paid conversions. They don't have use case and Persona specific sequences. What else? They don't have post close retention nurture sequences. So it's like death by 1000 paper cuts.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:54]:
Yeah, I get what you're saying now with these micro surface areas, it's like you're spending money, you have the creative, but there's so many things that get you. Like if you're trying to go from step a to step d, it's like, oh, well, what was the landing page there? Oh, there's no email or the email is not performing here. It's a bunch of leaky parts of the funnel. As opposed to like, we need to throw out this creative completely, come up with a new campaign. It's all the stuff in the middle.
Eli Rubel [00:16:22]:
Which totally adds up, right? Like if you compound some of that stuff together. I have an example here for you where, and this is actually what led me to starting the design agency. No boring design. So I had this client way back in the day, it was the first electric motorcycle company in Silicon Valley, Alta Motors. Great product, and they don't exist anymore. But I was helping them with some marketing stuff and their cost to drive the action they were trying to drive, which was to get people to sign up to go ride one of these bikes in person at an event. It was like $37 was kind of their baseline, and came in, looked at all the different elements of that campaign, and just focusing on one micro surface right now around design, we were able to tweak between design and copy. We were able to get that down to, like, I think, a dollar 30 at its lowest, and then it normalized around seven.
Eli Rubel [00:17:23]:
And that was through just simple experimentation with design. So, for example, I ride motorcycles, but I don't jump motorcycles. And so if I see an ad of a motorcycle jumping through the air, I don't identify with that. It doesn't get me going. But if I see a motorcycle, like, ripping through a forest, that's a different story. And so just, like, simple variations and playing with is something that's colorful going to grab more attention than maybe something black and white that's going to be more timeless and nostalgic? And the answer is, none of these are right or wrong. Most people just never take the time or have the rigor to actually test and learn. I think a lot of teams, and this is a pattern we see, a lot of teams, are, let's say, for example, average clients spending $100,000 a month on paid across a variety of channels.
Eli Rubel [00:18:16]:
Many of these clients, especially the earlier stage ones, call it like, pre series c and below, they're operating from brand guidelines that were maybe created by the founders in a room with a tiny budget way back in the day. And all of the decisions around ad creative are being hindered and restricted by those early brand guidelines, decisions that haven't been updated. And so you're talking about $100,000 a month that is potentially being massively handicapped because the marketer is afraid of getting fired because they don't want to step outside of brand guidelines to experiment.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:53]:
It's crazy. I mean, you just go to the LinkedIn feed, and if you see ads, I would say 90% of the ads look like ads.
Eli Rubel [00:19:00]:
Yes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:01]:
And I had a great relationship with a creative director at a past company, but we would always argue about the line between looks good and on brand versus. I wanted to just write a bunch of scribbles on a postit note and take a picture of it and use the picture from my iPhone as the ad. And he was like, we could never do that. That's not on brand. I'm like, but you have to play the game a little bit here, which is like, you have to stand out. You have to interrupt the pattern in some way. And I always felt weird about, like, why are we spending so much money on paid media when all this stuff just goes off in my brain as ads and everybody has this banner blindness and it just blends in too much. I don't understand that exactly.
Eli Rubel [00:19:45]:
When you're talking about a meaningful monthly budget, like $100,000 a month, for example, if you could write on your postit note and have it interrupt that feed and not just be another ad, and it stands out, and you got 50% lift because of it, who gives a fuck if it was on brand guidelines or not? Like, your CFO is going to love you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:05]:
So I want to get to the design piece, because I think it's interesting that you basically have a paid media company and then a design company, and we're kind of only talking about, I want to talk about the design piece in a little bit. But you're talking about this idea of all of these micro surfaces, right? I used to call it something different. I called it more like free money. It was free money or house money, which is basically like, we already have all this traffic here. They convert on this landing page, and then we send them this really shitty email that comes out after that, right? Versus the opportunity is like, well, everyone's already going to get this email anyway. I remember doing something for an event once where we were trying to drive tickets to an event, and the number one channel ended up being, after Eli buys a ticket to this event, we send you an email and we offer you a promo code to bring a friend or something. And just adding that little micro step in there became a channel to get hundreds of new ticket sales, as opposed to it is, to your point, it's so easy to be like, all right, what's the next big hit? And it's just exhausting when you have to come up with this next campaign. Next campaign.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:15]:
So I guess, how do you get coach people to focus on this? Is it like, let's get on the whiteboard and map out all of the touch points in this funnel, and let's really try to squeeze the juice out of each one of those channels first before we go take the next campaign. And I also have this other competing thing in my head as I'm saying this to you out loud, which is like, I also do see, though, I do see some people obsess over the nurture emails a little bit too much. And it's like there's also this balance of like, sending another nurture email is not why this campaign is not working.
Eli Rubel [00:21:50]:
Yeah, totally. So to the question on how do we do this with clients and just in advising and all that, I actually use the framework that is published on the site. So I have them take this evaluation, which gets me, I mean, this is basically like 80 20, right? It gets me, them and myself visibility into what are all the total possible things that they could be working on. And then we go through and say, okay, how many days of effort, how many team resources do we think each of these is going to take? Like small, medium, large. And then we stack rank them based on impact, like potential impact, and start clustering them together and then basically have the team commit to a cadence. It's just like anything else. It's like, hey, what would be a reasonable cadence based on your team size and capabilities right now? Is it knock one of these off, one large, one medium, one small per month per quarter, some teams are knocking three small off per week. It just really depends on the team layout.
Eli Rubel [00:22:56]:
But going back to that original point of velocity is finding a velocity around this particular discipline and then not overinvesting. Right to your point. Like it's 80 20. You don't want to polish 100%. You want to knock as many of these micro surfaces out to about 80% of. Done. Moving on to the next one.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:18]:
Speaking of nurturing, have you found any particular type of recipe or what works here? I do see this question come up in the exit five community a lot and somebody asked it for like an AMA that we're doing tomorrow and I figured I would ask it to you now, which is all right. We have great open rates on our nurture. This is from Pia. We have great open rates on our nurture cadences, but conversion is pretty much non existent. Have you seen a nurture play that directly converts, at least eventually? So this is actually perfect. Right in your alley of like, what should Pia go do here? We have great open rates on our nurture emails, but conversion is pretty much non existent. How would you go and tackle that?
Eli Rubel [00:23:57]:
Yeah, I mean, the first and obvious piece is like, if open rates are great but conversion is non existent, there's something in the headline that's really compelling that people are willing to spend some time on.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:08]:
Yeah. Get free pizza if you open this email.
Eli Rubel [00:24:10]:
Yeah, exactly like.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:11]:
But then the $1000 Amazon gift call, right?
Eli Rubel [00:24:16]:
Exactly. Yeah. And then it's like reverse engineering. Okay, where's the disconnect? A lot of the time companies will be nurturing, but they're nurturing this incredibly massive software purchasing moment. Right. And that moment, it might be that they're already bought in on the concept, but it's like they don't have a budget. There's nothing you can do about that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:42]:
That's been my take is like with working with companies with a bigger average contract value, it's like, is it that you could send three emails or 16? And the emails are not going to be the reason that they do or don't buy, right? They're not going to be like, oh, thank goodness you sent that 11th nurture email. And like, yes, I would like to take a call now.
Eli Rubel [00:25:02]:
Yeah. And I would think about it to that point. I would also think about it and challenge a little bit on nurture emails might not, depending on your sales motion, like if you're enterprise led, long sales cycles, nurture emails might not be the place where you're driving conversion. That shouldn't be the goal. You're building trust, you're building authority, you're staying top of mind. But it might not actually be that because again, it might be January, they might not be making this purchase until August. And again, nothing you can do about that except add value to this person's life and be a champion of their role as a company. Build brand value.
Eli Rubel [00:25:39]:
And then they just think of you first when August rolls around, if you're like a loom, for example, obviously it's very different. Then it's much more b to c. Like you're able to have a hook in the headline and expect that they click on the link. And if they don't, you've done something wrong as a marketer and you should be experimenting and tweaking with all of the little variables they're in.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:02]:
I like that. In that example from PiA, it's like, okay, you have this one data point that says people are opening it, so they're clearly getting it. They're clearly interested in opening it. Obviously to your point, the subject line does matter, but then the first step is like, well, how could we need to put a better message in here where it's like, it'd be a different issue if like, hey, we're sending all these email, these nurture emails out. Nobody's even opening them. Okay, then how do we get them to open them? I like this micro surface approach because you're just being a little bit more targeted with smaller stuff. And to your point, to make this change, it doesn't require like a three week design, sprint and approvals from everybody. It could just be like, yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:45]:
I'm going to go change that email right now and I'm not going to ask anybody to approve it. We're just going to go do it. And that's how you create this velocity of shipping. Small wins. Is that kind of what you're referencing in the beginning?
Eli Rubel [00:26:55]:
Completely, yeah, you nailed it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:58]:
Also on the nurturing thing, I think people get caught up in nurturing. Must mean like x number of emails where I see it all the nurturing can come in other forms too. I'll notice even in just like with my small business as an example, someone would be like, I just joined exit five. I've been listening to the podcast for six months and I finally saw a LinkedIn post and I joined. That to me is also nurturing. It's like you can be getting in front of your ideal customers in a bunch of different ways so that when they are ready, 95% of people are not going to be ready to buy right now. When they are ready, you're top of mind and they're going to come in and be interested. It's not going to be because they directly converted on some nurture email that you sent.
Eli Rubel [00:27:42]:
Yeah, completely.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:44]:
What else is interesting to you, sir?
Eli Rubel [00:27:47]:
Yeah, I mean, I've been nerding out pretty hard on the design side of things ever since spinning out no boring design. Our focus there has.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:56]:
What made you want to do that, by the way? Why did you go spin out a design company from a paid media company?
Eli Rubel [00:28:01]:
Yes. Design and creative had always been a huge part of our secret sauce at Mattermade on the paid side. And we had people coming to us saying, hey, the creative that you're pumping out or the website that you just released, whatever is really excellent, can we work with you? Just on the creative side? And I kept saying no. And then at some point small business, Eli's brain was like, hey, I should actually just say yes to this and spin it out and offer it. Because I see so many companies either failing to have an interesting and iconic, memorable brand and website, or the same statement, but for their marketing, creative and collateral and just anything visual. It blows my mind that tech is generally full of a bunch of well educated folks who are smart, and yet we fail to grasp in many cases, we're emotional beings when it comes to purchasing things and learning about things. We like things that are beautiful. We like things like Apple right.
Eli Rubel [00:29:06]:
And yet, when it comes to b two B, we're just like, no needs to be a corporate PowerPoint presentation look. And so I'm pretty passionate about making that part of the Internet a more beautiful place, a more aesthetic place. And I think the companies that are willing to take that risk and make that investment are rewarded in spades. I'd imagine as someone with a strong point of view on brand yourself in b two B, this is something that you probably feel strongly about.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:33]:
Yeah, I mean, I was trained to think this way by, when I was at drift, I worked for this guy, David Cancel, who was a CEO, and we had product differentiators that we were building. But his big hypothesis in the beginning was like, hey, in a sea of 10,000 sales and marketing tools, we're going to differentiate ourselves by brand. And that meant the look and feel of the company, our tone of voice, the way we did things. And he was obsessed with the types of hoodies that we sent to customers or the font on the website and us not looking like everybody else. And I see now how that was so, and I saw it then. I mean, that was so essential to like, yeah, I don't know yet how you're different than these four other companies, but I just think your stuff looks cool. So I'm ready to talk. And that gives you a huge opportunity.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:30]:
And I think in a world where there is so much competition, you need those advantages. And if you think that someone is going to lay up the feature checklist and compare 50 features and, okay, well, they do this one thing. No, I believe in taking those things out of buyers hands. I don't want you evaluating the features of our nearest competitor. I want to win with our story, with our brand, and I want us to show you that we can do all the things that you want. And so I'm 100% on board with this idea that design and brand can be a competitive differentiator. The hard part is it just constantly tries to break inside of the company. When you get into this, and I'm not calling out demand gen people, this is very important.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:17]:
But when you get to the sales and the revenue side of things, people just default to like, well, this is an ad to promote this thing, this ebook that we're doing. And once again it should just be a postit note. And we did some really awesome ads in the early days of drift and we had a lot of fun doing this where we would just take pictures with our, with, we would literally take a picture with my iPhone and that would be the creative for the paid that we were running. And we had Matt, who was like a product manager, and Jess, who was in marketing, and we had them stand with their arms crossed in the middle of the office and their backs to each other, and they both looked like real mean and mad, just silly. And we said, who will win the battle in sales versus marketing? And it just was completely made up. But that creative worked amazing. And it was a picture we took with our iPhone and it was like, oh, yeah, I believe things should look great and look professional. But in a world of marketing is a game of attention.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:17]:
You are trying to literally get people to pay attention to you. Why would you not try to stand out? And it doesn't have to be in a corny way. It doesn't have to be in a forced way. It doesn't have to be in a desperate way. But there's so many ways that you can use brand, create an advantage. And I've seen a bunch of your stuff. It looks awesome, and it doesn't look like the type of design that other people are doing. How do you pitch that to some, like, do people come in and they know that's the type of stuff you all put out and that's why they want to work with you? How do you help people get over that hurdle of like, hey, let's try to do something that doesn't look like what everybody else is doing in your space.
Eli Rubel [00:32:52]:
Totally. Yeah. I appreciate that. My approach has changed a lot over the years. I think part of it is just having been in industry long enough now where when people, and in a way, the design agency is like, it started as a passion project for me, so I'm much more comfortable being really blunt and just myself with people. And so you get these series a, series B, series C, founders coming in and kicking the tires, or their marketing leaders kicking the tires. And I'd basically just tell them the same story like, hey, how much are you spending right now on paid? Right. And if we could do something so silly as to mess with your design and increase conversions by 25%, would you care what it looked like? Would you be willing to take that leap with us and try? And the answer to that, once they see it as like a conversion lever, not just a, oh, I want to impress my buddies on LinkedIn by how cool my company looks lever, they're bought in and they're willing to take that leave.
Eli Rubel [00:33:55]:
And then, of course, once people get a taste for it, they're like, oh, this actually works. What we should be investing in, creative.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:04]:
And do you have a process? I know I've done a bunch of design exercises in the past and some people, they'll ask you a bunch of questions and which type of things do you want? And they have the twelve brand archetypes wheel. And do you have a process that you use for that? For developing a brand? No.
Eli Rubel [00:34:25]:
Oh, for developing a brand, yes. I thought you were talking about, our approach to creative is just to your point, like getting creative. We've got a bunch of senior creative minds in the room and I think to some extent, when you put structure and process around creativity, it can kind of squeeze the life out of it. So in many cases, no, in many cases we will just riff as a creative team with the creative directors, lock themselves in a room and come out with something really interesting and some options to try.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:56]:
And ultimately, in that scenario, you're doing something based off of their existing brand guidelines and you're just going to create a campaign, right?
Eli Rubel [00:35:05]:
Yeah, exactly. Or trying to kind of take what they have and bend it to the furthest extent that we can possibly bend it before someone slaps our wrist and says, okay, that's like not our company anymore.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:17]:
Yeah, sure. Which often works. And then do you do any creation stuff? Have you worked with somebody on developing a brand identity? Or are you more working with existing companies that have already defined those things and helping them execute?
Eli Rubel [00:35:30]:
It's 50 50. So we do, I'd say 50% of our engagements are, they already have brand guidelines locked in and they just need help on, like, we need to produce ads, we need to produce social graphics, we need to produce anything visual, landing pages, et cetera. And we just are on retainer each month cranking those out for them. The other half are, hey, either our brand guidelines are outdated and we know it and we want to refresh them and create something iconic, or we're a seed stage startup series a. We've never really gone through that in the first place. We picked some colors in a font to raise money, and now it's time to do something meaningful. And so, yeah, that's where we will run through a full process, create their brand, create their website, work with them on that full picture. We don't touch narrative around messaging, positioning, copywriting.
Eli Rubel [00:36:21]:
So they come to us with that point of view on the industry and where their place is in there. But then we work with them to make something truly iconic that stands out, which I think at the end of the day is much more durable than this is going to be a super hot take product because I think product. Like most of these founders, this is about as spicy as it gets from me. Most of these founders come in and they think they're going to change the world with their tech and it's not new and novel, but then if they're actually onto something, there's going to be five well backed competitors within the next three years and they're just going to be duking it out for feature parity. So it's like once you have a thing that's legit, it's almost game over on. Like your product is this unique unicorn of a differentiator and you need something durable, like brand, like your visual identity that keeps you top of mind and sticking out in the market.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:18]:
Do you ever work with teams where the in house creative team is a little upset that the head of marketing went to go work with you all directly as opposed to them?
Eli Rubel [00:37:29]:
Yes, we have a process for that, though. Our pitch there is like, hey, we sell it as like, there's so much tedious, like you as a design. Usually it's like the designer or creative director, like, hey, you hate doing ads, you hate doing ebook covers. This makes your soul as a designer die every time you get asked to do it. You want to do the interesting creative explorations, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so we sell them on the idea that we're going to take over the mundane part of their work. And then once we get in there and we earn their trust, we slowly start to have more of a point of view and an opinion and can really help be a partner in the room when it comes to driving creativity, not just like a commoditized resource.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:15]:
What do you think makes design and brand not boring?
Eli Rubel [00:38:25]:
Great question. I think it's about taking risks, taking risks in ways that other companies aren't or haven't. Taking risks in how far you take certain concepts, the details. I think it's probably the overlay of those two pieces to me is what, at least, especially in our industry, around creativity and where it can drive the most impact and how I think if you really knock it out of the park with those two layers, people will notice.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:11]:
What do you think about mascots?
Eli Rubel [00:39:17]:
Ah, the mascot.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:21]:
You know, let me give you context. There's no context. This is how I am. But there was a decade ago, people would just be like, best brand mailchimp, right? Everyone loved in a world of, they had just had the way like the monkey, the sweating monkey, pressing the email send. I was working at constant contact back in the day, which was like mailchimp before Mailchimp. And Mailchimp was eating constant contact's lunch because they had a free product and they had this cute and fun and weird and quirky brand, and the monkey was behind that. And there is just so much sameness in B two B SaaS that we see today. And it's like everyone's got the black and the white and the blue.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:05]:
There's something to be, to your point of just doing something, like taking risks. There's something to whether it's a mascot. I don't even know if it's a mascot, but there's just something to. Just doing something nobody else is doing that's going to get you attention. Yeah.
Eli Rubel [00:40:19]:
I mean, the great thing about mascots is, and you mentioned a piece of this, it gives you permission to get really creative in places that people aren't expecting creativity. Like the sweating monkey pushing the button. That could have just been a button or an arrow or whatever. And instead it was like this moment of joy that you gave someone randomly when they weren't expecting it. And having a mascot gives you that opportunity to involve them in all of these little micro surfaces, if you will. So, yeah, I don't know.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:53]:
I need an exit five mascot. Like a sign with legs and, like, hands or something.
Eli Rubel [00:40:58]:
I need the sandwich board.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:00]:
Sandwich board.
Eli Rubel [00:41:01]:
It should be the. I love the TikToks of the blow up outside of, like, a tire shop, you've got, like, the blow up thing and it's flapping in the wind and they set it to top beat or something like that. You should have, like, the blowing in the wind mascot.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:17]:
All right, I'm making a note. I'm making note. Dan, if you're listening, we need a mascot. We need a mascot. We need a mascot ASAP.
Eli Rubel [00:41:25]:
I'll have the team at no boring design throw together.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:29]:
Cook me up a mascot. I need something crazy. I want a viral. I just want a viral LinkedIn post that's really. I don't care if it works or not.
Eli Rubel [00:41:36]:
We'll do it. We'll do it. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:38]:
All right. Anything else before we should wrap? I think a couple of things I got from this conversation today was like, don't be afraid to take risks with design. And in fact, that's going to be the thing that helps you stand out. And you can actually drive pipeline by doing this in a world of sameness and lots of noise in the feed, how can you stand out? And brand can do that. Prioritize the small spaces. I made this note. You can make small wins, the big wins. By finding these micro surfaces and prioritizing these little things.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:12]:
And so maybe like a call to action for people is to go and reevaluate all the existing parts of your funnel today. This email could be better, right? This landing page could be better. This piece is missing here. Go and evaluate all those things. And I love that as advice, especially, you had sent us an initial note. But at a time where Cac matters more than ever, right, everybody's looking to get more efficient, to your point, going in there and finding things that you can either trim out or make more efficient by finding these micro surface areas. I love that we talked a little about nurturing, but maybe if you want to have a parting thought, we got a couple of minutes if you want to get something off your chest.
Eli Rubel [00:42:55]:
Yeah, I mean, I love this conversation. I think there's so much out there that is free that people can do with just a little bit of time and elbow grease to really meaningfully impact their year, like the outcomes of their efforts. And so, yeah, folks want to, we have that free evaluation, mattermade co. Demand efficiency benchmark. They can take it and it'll spit out all of those results. And if nothing else, it gives them like, fodder to sit down with their team and talk about and brainstorm and potentially get on their roadmap. And then likewise, if folks are curious about the impact that investing in design, investing in brand could bring, noboringdesign.com. And if you mentioned that you heard about us through this pod, we'll do a free design on it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:45]:
Oh, I love. Right. So, so go check out Eli. Go to Eli Rubel on LinkedIn. It's noboringdesign co.com. Noboringdesign.com. Yep. And mention that you heard about them from this podcast and get some free design action going on there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:06]:
And I really like the benchmarks you mentioned from Mattermade. What's the link to that resource?
Eli Rubel [00:44:12]:
If they go to Mattermade co up in the top nav, there's the demand efficiency benchmark and the demand efficiency evaluation.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:22]:
Perfect. I got that now. And we'll link to that. All right, Eli, great to have you on. Let's stay in touch. I'm going to send you a note. Let's help me come up with a mascot for exit five. This is a serious project now, dude.
Eli Rubel [00:44:34]:
I love it. Let's go.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:35]:
All right. Good to see you, man.
Eli Rubel [00:44:37]:
Likewise. It's.