Building Smarter Audiences with Cohort Designer | Sacha Gauthier from Paddle

Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining. We're super excited to kick off this webinar with us today. My name is Barbara. I lead up our customer marketing team here at Influ. I will also be joined by Tim who is on our product team and Sasha who is actually a client of Influ who's worked with us for about four years working with us at Paddle. So we are kicking off this is a brand new webinar series where it's called Influ in action. So, we've heard a lot of feedback from our customers that you guys want to see how are our customers using our favorite features within the platform and what are some challenges that they face? What are some tips and best practices for how you guys can better be enabled with these features? So, we're really excited. We've heard your voices and we're here to kind of answer those questions for you. So, today we're going to dive into cohort designer with paddle. So why are we doing this? Right? I think this is always the question we ask ourselves and as marketers it's so

essential as we are building out campaigns that we're making sure that we're hitting the right people at the right moment. So a recent Forester survey actually found that GTM teams waste up to 30% of their budget on misaligned outreach, which is what we really want to work with you guys on solving today. Are we ensuring that we're hitting the right people that sales is aligned with within our ICP? That we're making sure that our campaigns and ads are hitting them at the right moments when they're actually interested and showing signals. And then making sure that we're getting creative within cohort designer to build out those lists to ensure that it includes suppressions and making sure that we're hitting them whether they're in the pipeline build stage, pipeline acceleration stage. So, we're really excited to help you guys and really just provide some insight into how to make this a bit easier for you guys to build out really robust and concise lists directly within cohort designer. So, we want to kick off the webinar with just a quick little poll. So, for those

of you that aren't currently using cohort designer yet, what's currently holding you back? So, we'll give everyone about 30 seconds to kind of put in your insight, and this will just kind of help us guide our tips and tricks as we kind of navigate this webinar together. All right, we're seeing some answers coming through. Great. We'll give you guys a few more seconds, but it looks like this webinar is really timely. The majority of the audience is not sure how to get started. So hopefully this webinar will give you guys some insights into some best practices to help kind of alleviate that. Some of you guys are relying on Salesforce campaigns. Yep. Some are on marketing automation list as well. Messy data. We all align and relate to that. Okay. Perfect.

So, here are the results here. So, kind of as I mentioned, a lot of you guys are just looking to get started. So, hopefully today we can offer some tips and tricks with Sasha. Um, a lot of you guys are using a mixture. We also, we're not saying that you don't have to use Salesforce or your marketing automation platform. This is really just going to provide some insights into how you can actually use cohort designer as well. So, hopefully this will kind of give you some best practices of what's a better and easier journey for you. So with that, I'm actually going to pass it off. We're going to cover a few things today. So we'll go through what is cohort designer and how can it help you today. We'll do a live walk through with Sasha at paddle and then we'll do some getting started tips, just some best practices of how can you actually leave this webinar and get started today with building out your first audience in cohort designer. And then we'll open it up. We really want to make sure that this is collaborative and interactive. So if you guys have questions, we'll have Tim and Sasha staying on at the end to answer those for you. So with that, I'm going to pass it off to Tim, our

fearless product leader, to kind of just go through what is cohort designer. >> Uh, hi Barb. Thanks for introduction. Uh, hi guys. For those who I've never met before, my name is Tim. I'm primarily managing product development here at Inflow 2. Uh, I'm really happy to explain to you what this cohort designer is and why we've actually built it so far. So let's start with the very beginning uh what is actually cohort uh and why do we call them cohorts not audiences not lists not campaigns and so on. So uh with the evolvement of influ within a big certain period of time like five or six years we have understood that most of our customers and most of marketing that works with the buying group marketing or accountbased marketing still uh keep working with the same audience within dedicated like time frame. So they reuse the same audience criterias within a pro uh certain period of time. uh and what what the only thing that changes that the content they show

uh and that's why we've decided that we're going to start working with the cohorts. So, and we've like came up with the cohorts uh as a set of people that are grouped by specific criteria like account data like data, contact data like demographics data, titles and so on, deal data like where the company or people in your buy group stage uh and so on to ensure that you are capable timely uh timely deliver ads that you can keep your audience relevant and personalized at every stage of the bar journey. Uh can we move to the next slide? Yeah, thanks. So uh with all of this being said, it's really important to understand why cohorts actually matters and why our cohorts designer makes a lot of sense. So first of all, it covers the biggest pain point most of our customers had before is self-sufficiency. So I'm not quite sure about your processes but in big organizations most

of the marketing people highly reliant of the ops teams and in order to start working with a certain audience they have to create a ticket to pass all the requirements to the sales ops or marketing ops team to wait until the campaigns are created to wait until campaigns are passed to influ and only afterwards to launch ads. it doesn't make much sense especially in the fast-paced environment where we live right now uh where you need to be flexible and uh be ready to make changes quickly. So cohort designer helps you to be self-sufficient uh and grant you opportunity to rely on yourself and not to rely on your ops team in terms of audience management. The second thing we actually cover with cohort designer is precise targeting. So in a HubSpot or Salesforce or any other C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C the C theorem there are definitely some limitations on how you can build audiences in terms of filters in terms of objects and so on. So what we have

done so far, we have tried to get rid out of this limitations in our cohort designer. So you can build the most sophisticated piece of audience you want mixing account rules, contact rules, deal rules uh to make sure that only the people you want to go after are actually present in your campaigns. The third problem here is that it's really difficult to keep audience updated while you use legacy CRM like Salesforce in example right campaigns in the Salesforce mostly not dynamic and you need to keep them up to date manually on Salesforce side or to build workflows automations and so on. So to save your time and your ops time on doing this thing in a salesforce, we are making sure that all of your audiences are up to date and matches your criterias from the scratch without any additional improvements. And the last thing those this is actually a sales and marketing alignment. So even if you are

the best marketing person in the world, even if you can like call every person, tell about your product, unless you have a proper sales point, unless you have a proper salespeople that are actually selling your product, uh there is no way uh you can be actually successful with your marketing program. So sales alignment is important and our cohort designer actually helps you to build cohorts not only about specific criterias but around the sales people that works with your contacts. So you can tell like enterprise accounts that are being covered by Megan Holloway an example should be targeted in this cohort. Uh >> thanks Tim. >> So it yeah that's it. Yes. Thanks, Deb. Appreciate it. All right, we're going to do one more poll before we kick it off with Sasha in the live demo. So, we want to know what is your biggest challenge challenge with your audience targeting today? Whether that's with your

Salesforce campaigns, whether that's with your marketing automation tool. So, just let us know where you're really seeing some struggles when you're building out your audience. We'll give you guys just about 15 seconds to kind of complete this. outdated or static lists. Inability to layer intent signals is a big one right now. Yep. For third, it looks like the audience is saying slow handoffs or delays from the marketing ops team. Okay, perfect. So it looks like our not perfect, but it looks like our front runner is those outdated or static lists with our second being inability to layer in intent signals. So as I kind of pass it off to Sasha, we'll kind of go through how he is overcoming some of these current challenges and how they're building out their audiences directly in cohort designer. >> Awesome. Thank you. Uh let me share my

screen and we can dive straight in. Um, so, uh, yeah, it's interesting that people mention like outdated static list that that's kind of like perfect because that's something that cohort designer is going to do really really well, especially a lot of people using the um the campaign stuff in Salesforce and I can imagine the pains of having to like enroll and unenroll people to that in order for that to be up to date. So hopefully we can go through this and it can kind of show how simple it can be. Um so uh this here full transparency um uh I didn't want to actually show our current active campaigns. Um so the amazing team at Influ actually built out a kind of uh homunculous uh replication of what our uh system looks like. So you can even see our creative here and everything. Um just for demo purposes. Um but yeah like uh let's just dive straight in. Um first thing uh that we

at paddle uh consider before we build out the cohorts is what the goal of the uh campaign is. Um and this is really transparent actually which I quite like. You have to select the journey which is very much focused like it's very goal oriented very much connected to the rest of the campaign. Um and this is something that uh can't easily be changed. So it's really makes perfect sense for you to set this at the outset. um to find what that journey is, define what the goal is and how you plan on segmenting. And this will differ for different people, but for us, it's really important in our ABM motion to split based off um our two major um commercial geographic regions that we cover. Um and also we've got like a major split in the kind of two uh segments uh or two verticals like yeah two verticals that we support. Um for us that's like app uh accounts and software accounts. Um so it's really important and you can actually see this

represented here with like you know worldwide software and things like that. We similarly have like a US software etc. Getting those top level definitions is important. Um but obviously this is contactbased uh advertising. So the next level from that is making sure out of all of the contacts that we have tied to the accounts that we're targeting the right ones. And there's loads of ways to go about doing this. Um what we've uh settled on is we give a kind of like scoring or grading uh on our kind of buying groups. Um so this can uh it it really this is a little bit of an ops thing. Um where you need to have this sorted in the data that you have. Um hopefully it's not something manually done. Uh but if you know for example the job title and you can have some logic that categorizes them on a kind of like simple grade on how uh significant that persona is uh in the buying groups. That's a really great thing. Um you can get really sophisticated and instead of

just having these like more numerical uh level if you want uh to personalize the campaigns you could have this be a little bit more descriptive. So you might have like a finance persona or a technical persona etc. and have those clearly spelled out. Um, and this is quite important because we ran into this issue where some of our best target accounts had like 200 contacts in because it had been an account that we'd have been going after for 5 years. A lot of uh sales reps had gone after them um over time and maybe we' met them at an event and had interactions with a lot of people. So, making sure that those like out of those 200 we were targeting the 10 that we actually wanted to target. um was a big deal. Um and similarly uh you can have the opposite issue. You can actually have it where and I know Influ's helped us with this and uh but like you can have it where you have a great account but you've only got like one contact tied to it and this can kind of help you troubleshoot that and make

sure that you actually have those buying roles defined in the CRM so that when Influ rolls out the targeting it's there. Um but yeah, so I'd say that's like a really cool key thing to call out. Um a few uh a lot of this is pretty transparent but I'll just go through it. Um our targeting here we've got account priority levels uh which is defined by the team. Um typically accounts that we're going after this quarter or next quarter um as opposed to ones that are far more like long-term relationships. But there's definitely purpose for like you know long-term nurture campaigns or reactivating loss. Um uh again uh geos uh we've put some segmentation here because not uh influ isn't supporting our whole sales motion. There are some smaller accounts that we're not uh directly targeting with Influ. We use other channels to to promote to those um u mainly because there's like one or two people at those companies. So um putting a headcount limit is pretty important for us. Um, and then you can pull in

things like is there an active op or or you can use this as an exclusion and say there's no active op and so you want to push it etc. Um, and then growth track is kind of like painbased categorization uh which is manually selected by the team but um yeah this isn't necessarily something that we exclude based off of but it helps us uh do the personalization. Um and then this is uh quite a nice one that we've pulled in. is far more transparent on this. Uh uh I think we have another what is oh no it's best looked at here um is the last outreach date. So uh this really depends on your sales stack but we use uh gong engage but whether you're using outreach io or something similar if you're able to feed back when the last outreach was uh when the last email LinkedIn task uh phone call etc occurred with the account you can kind of add some prioritization and make sure that you're not targeting people who have been kind of like

disqualified or maybe unenrolled from a lot of comms and haven't been connected recently. So, we tend to pull those out as well. Um, this isn't a full replacement for some of the exclusions that I'll go into as well. Um, slightly wary of time, so I'm going to dive into exclusions. So, exclusions is um something that obviously super important. uh the way we set it up initially in influ2 we had to change uh because we were pulling our kind of internal CRM logic into influ as a platform and there's obviously limitations from kind of working in a third party platform that's kind of pulling from the CRM and that main limitation is you can set up these global exclusions uh and this works quite nicely you can go in here and you can essentially add cohorts as exclusion cohorts and you select that cohort um But the issue with that is you're going to be limited based off the um uh like the API calls. I think uh it's like 50,000 maybe actually 200,000 is like

really high. But if for example you're saying I want to exclude everything that's been previously disqualified and you've had your Salesforce instance for like a decade, there's going to be a lot of accounts and a lot of contacts that are going to be excluded. And that list is that cohort is not going to be full enough to actually be a reliable exclusion. So, anything like that where it's a uh exclusion that you pretty much always want to exclude and it's uh going to impact the majority of your CRM, definitely add them into here. Um that would be adding in the disqualification rules and things like that. Um the global exclusions, the reason we use this is we're able to pull in competitors uh and list out competitor domains and also do ad hoc exclusions. And this is where I know a lot of people highlighted like the hygiene issue uh with the ops team. If you've got duplicate accounts, things that are pulling in that you don't want to, you can just hop in here and just add those exclusions. So you can have that manual control that you probably do currently, but for the most part, you're actually

trusting that these are going to populate uh dynamically with the right accounts as they're added. And then and your exclusions will pull them out. Uh but then you can just manually go in on those odd occasions where you know there's a Slack thread because a dormant account is being targeted and it's just an ops issue that you can kind of smooth over. Um uh but yeah, so wanted to highlight that. I'm just trying to think um of other aspects. So yeah, I guess this is like nested exclusions and then like the global exclusions that you can set at the cohort level. Um and then yeah, what have we talked about? recent outreach. Um, oh, and another thing is making sure that these are like up to date. Uh, we review them every quarter. Um, basically after our, uh, sales have their kind of end of quarter or like start of new quarter. Um, QBR, we pull all the insights on how they want to segment their accounts and pull them in here.

Sometimes we get additional context which helps us kind of like layer and narrow down our focus on their best accounts. Um, and sometimes there are fields that they're starting to use that we're not even aware of because we're not involved in those conversations because marketing and sales are obviously not always on the same calls. Um, so it's really key that that we pull those in. Um, so that we really tightly align with them. Um, and then I think the rest of it really depends on your campaigns. We uh have started targeting like active opportunities to do some deal acceleration. Um there's loads of justification for like closed lost accounts. Uh similarly customers that have potential for kind of like uh renewal or upsell or anything like that. You can definitely build out those audiences and automate it. Um it just work requires like working not just with the sales team but with the success team there. Um but yeah uh definitely like a lot of controls uh available. >> Fantastic. Thanks Sasha.

>> All right. So getting started. How do we actually get started based on all of the fantastic details that Sasha just shared. Step one, start with a goal. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to re-engage dormant accounts? Are you trying to drive upsell? With knowing your goal, you're able to understand what your criteria needs to be. Step two, target your full buying groups. Right? To Sasha's point, making sure that you understand program role within if you're targeting an opportunity, who is the decision maker, who is the champion, and making sure that you're able to create cohorts that are actually specific to that buyer and their journey. So making sure you're not just targeting one person within the buying group, but including everyone segment beyond the basics. So paddle is really advanced and we love to see it, but outside of just what's their job title, right? Layering in where are they in the deal stage, when was the last sales outreach. So being able to

actually integrate all of your data into the system to really understand who is the buyer, where are they, and what are they interested in will help drive more impactful campaigns. And then of course to everyone's point, you know, and Tim mentioned this as well, Salesforce campaigns can become quickly outdated. So as you're thinking about this, if you're using Salesforce right now, potentially maybe just consider building out one cohort. Start small. You don't have to shift everything over, but play around and see how it works when you start building out within cohort designer for one specific campaign. And really just making sure that you're aligned with sales to ensure that your audiences are always up to date. there are certain criterias, you know, if they're no longer with the org or if they're shifting in your ICP, just making sure that you have that data cleanliness on the Salesforce side with your marketing ops team and your sales team to ensure clean, healthy data. So, with that though, I do want us to go into the Q&A section and really just hear, oh, actually one more poll. We want to know after this, what do you

guys need to be successful? So, we have shared a ton of great content today, but for all of you that are really interested in getting started, let us know what you need in order to kind of kick that off. So, we'll give you guys just a few seconds and then, you know, my team will take this data and making sure that we get you guys what you need after the webinar. So, is it going to be a step-by-step walkthrough with your CSM? Is it just more use cases from other customers like Sasha and how they're using it? We could do like a round table or something where we're all just sharing best practices. Is it more just knowledgebased articles and support on the written side or is it just deeper integrations with your CRM? So it looks like we've kind of got a mixture here. More knowledgebased articles and best practices, more use cases from customers. So maybe we can do a round table, but this is all fantastic. All right, so with that, we want to hear your questions. Right, we've covered a lot of content today, so we really want to open up the floor. What questions do

you guys have either for Sasha at Paddle or Tim from the product team? We'll let these come in. Here's one. Sasha, what criteria does Paddle find most valuable when you're building out your cohorts? >> Um, that's a tricky one. Um I think uh overall it's going to be like the contact based stuff. Um because like I think that's the real strength of influ targeting. Um so any intent signals that can be pulled through because if if you're feeding that back to that your CRM you can pull all of those through as well. Um but also uh any of the other stuff about like have they left the company? uh when was our last touch with them? Uh like have they engaged at with a certain campaign or a recent event? Uh

anything like that. Uh I think those really strengthen it because it allows us to personalize and also kind of prioritize uh where we're kind of already resonating with an individual. >> Fantastic. This one we have another one. Sasha or Tim can probably cover this. maybe different perspectives, but how do you just recommend a new user get started with cohort designer? We have a lot of people that aren't currently using it to date. What should they do to just kick off getting started? >> Um, I can share my thoughts on this. Uh, genuinely, if you're if you're comfortable building out filters, you can build a like in your CRM of choice. Uh, you can build out a cohort and you don't even need to connect it to a campaign yet. you can just build it out, see like how many uh contacts come in. Possibly even just build something in your CRM or take a report that you have in your CRM for kind of like targeting maybe something that is reviewed as like the touches on the latest contacts and

just work on replicating that. Um yeah, it's a I think it's a strange uh strange response, but it is just should just be as simple as like having a go and playing around. Um, I think the the Influ team have actually built a really accessible tool. So, >> this one's kind of similar but a little bit different. Why and when would I use cohort designer versus contact level advertising? I'm assuming they probably mean like over Salesforce or the marketing automation tools. Why like cohort designer verse other tools that they're already using? >> Yeah, I think I I can I can cover it. So uh primarily the case here is that cohort designer like you can have a different set of audiences uh like temporary one or long live audiences right so when you have a temporary audience in example event based audience or have this like I don't know holiday based audience for some holiday campaign or event campaign there is no need for

you to build or to use cohort designer because it's definitely going to be much easier for you for your sales ops for your even marketing team to build a campaign to pass it to influent to launch ads. Uh but if you have a piece of audience you go after on a long term right so in influ example we are going after like software companies and we're pretty sure that we're going to be going after software companies for a while not for a quarter for a year like for a long period of time. In this case, it's worth to utilize cohort designer because in this case, you're going to have much more control over the audience itself and the audience from the serum going to be sourced into cohort automatically. So the general problem of like campaigns management in terms of audience going to be solved by cohort designer. So hope it answers your question. >> Thanks Tim. All right, I think we've answered everyone's questions. We have one more

question. This was our first webinar to do Influ 2 in action and we really just want to know, did this hit the mark for you guys? Was this successful? Was this helpful? Um so just let us know what you think and you know we're going to continue to do more of these. You'll have our email. I'll send out um the recording and the slides tomorrow. And if you guys have suggestions on future topics, um, or if you want to actually present similar to Paddle and Sasha, like, please let us know. So, we're really excited to do more of these for you guys, but we appreciate you attending and we hope to see you at the next one.