Profitwell Case Study

all right you you folks are the demand gen power brokers the true folks hanging around to the end we have secret prize we're going to find for you guys all right so we're in the home stretch here our last session of the day and it's a good one so as you hung around you're going to be thankful you did um so we talk a lot about um abm we talk a lot about precision-based marketing one of the promises of all of these trends and directional things is that marketing is going to get more customized more one-to-one but marketing automation platforms have kind of struggled to deliver on that people have struggled to execute on it so one of the trends we're hearing a lot more people talk about now is you know person-based marketing human-based marketing and it's in that second session we've got uh two great speakers that are gonna help us walk through some insights and examples on that so um i actually know um narosha methananda now for a bit she was actually vp of marketing with bombora and she is now with influent 2 which is a cool company actually one of our

sponsors here if you haven't met them check them out but narosha and steven know one of their clients who's actually going to come up and talk to us about some of the ways that they're actually applying this and changing the game a bit so bro stephen come on [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi everyone thank you for sticking around we know it's like uh three end of the session on a three-day conference so i appreciate the support um i'm naruto methananda as xander introduced i'm the vp of marketing at influe2 and um i'd like to welcome uh stephen know who is the head of growth at profitwell who is our um one of one of influential's uh customers uh sorry yeah influenced customers excuse me um so just a little bit about it in flute this isn't a sales pitch but just so you know what we do um implue 2 is essentially a person-based marketing platform and so what does that

mean advertising is generally a black box but what influential does is uh allow you to come out of that black box with your ad with your display advertising in your social media advertising and really target target the people that you want to target and give you back granular insights around who you are targeting so it takes your advertising out of a black box um stephen would you like to introduce yourself sure i'm stephen i'm head of graphite profitwell um a little bit about profit well we essentially produce a solve a bunch of problems for subscription-based companies so this would include you know b2b sas and subscription um you know we've recently started working a lot with subscription and commerce brands like your um example subscription congress might be your dollar shave club or a blue apron for example as well as you know um media newspaper brands like the athletic um and so you know we are essentially solving a bunch of problems they're focusing on a lot of problems that are a little bit kind of esoteric and abstract and kind of a long

time we're facing essentially the problem of both explaining what it is we do what problems we're solving and at the same time you know breaking those markets and trying to build those human connections cool thank you so stephen when we were we were talking about what you do at profit well i really uh you know i was i was amazed by what by the content and the heart of the content content is something that's i think at the heart of um of marketing certainly and just human interaction so and one of the things that i was really impressed about was the level of innovation and customization around it so can you talk us through that a bit about how you're you're humanizing your abm with your content right so you know obviously you know content marketing has been around for a very long time it's pretty saturated at this point uh but one thing we've done in addition to kind of your boilerplate you know blog posts um ebooks is we've invested a ton in having um high production value shows as well as podcasts um you know so two of our biggest shows for example are boxed out as well as one called pricing page teardown if you know what says

price intelligently that is our that is our show as well um and what we're essentially doing in these shows is we are literally kind of looking at a set of target accounts where breaking down you know opportunities and the strengths of their existing practical monetization strategy over retention strategy literally providing a you know a framework as well as a step by step here's how you would improve your retention strategy um and you know one thing this really helps us out with is number one it gives it you know allows us to actually show here's our methodology here over problems we're solving uh you know we're willing to give away this information for free because we're really about providing that value to photography customer and at the same time it really shows that you know we're not just you know a logo we're our human team we have human faces and um helps us to start building that human connection even if it's just through content um and you know of course you know we invested a ton in those shops on a podcast at the same time you know we've done a lot of work to uh take that underlying research and then present it

in other modes as well so you know we've got streaming videos we've got we published this on blog posts and we even published this in you know downloadable case studies and one pagers essentially trying to you know take that um kind of meat of the content and then get into the prospects hands in as many ways as possible um and you know one thing i want to reiterate here is that you know it is about providing that direct actionable value to the end customer and for us you know qualitatively the way that we measure success is is this does this show us what we do and does the prospect feel like they're getting um actual value out of it uh the best thing we usually hear is when someone says you know this stuff is fantastic i would be willing to pay for this and so if this is the stuff i'm getting for free then imagine what value you could be getting if we were to work with a profitable team as a customer yeah yeah and i think that's um super important because you know there's a lot of content that is out there at the moment you don't know where to where to sort of start how how do you work on differentiating that content for

yourself right so i think one big problem that a lot of content out there um does is it very much censors the brand or the product right it's like oh look at our product or here's this cool thing we're doing uh but the reality is especially when you're you know buyer doesn't know much about you is that they're not necessarily interested in you they're interested in what is this problem like i can solve so the thing i always advise is center of a buyer center of a problem and in particular give them a specific solution that they can use um you know of course we use this in box data and pressing page showdown to specifically show how these particular companies could do that uh but that applies to across all of our other channels as well so for example uh this is a screenshot from one of our retention webinars about ceo patrick we will literally go through um the framework and the retention framework and the research we've done we'll talk about you know here are the eight to 11 ways that a customer might turn or cancel and here's the data on on you know these particular ones these

particular causes for your particular space of most impactful so you should focus here and you know of course this is kind of giving away our playbook you could kind of infer our product roadmap from it sometimes but it's still extremely helpful because number one it positions us as not someone who's trying to sell you something per se but someone is looking to solve a problem for you um of course it shows that we have domain expertise and know a lot about this particular subject matter and you know we can show that instead of just telling you that and lastly is you know it builds that trust and that human relationship so bad you'd be willing to say okay you're well you i can see the work that you've done i know how you're arriving at the answer so let's um help to solve the problem for my particular business cool yeah and i think you know that's something that's um building that trust and being able to have relevance is something that is is becoming increasingly important in getting that content cut through and i think you're going to talk to us a little bit about uh the personalization and the customization you're doing around your your ads right so you know

of course i've talked a lot about the content kind of the element of personalization that matters here i think we've tried to apply advice principles as much now advertising as well so you know of course i talked about a lot about retention marketing strategy um and kind of a product where kind of pushing there is profile retain which plugs into your billing system like your stripe your charging example for example also gets deployed on your website so that you can white label you know retention marketing messaging to your customers in your brand coloring and you know we've tried to basically show it personalization but at the same time communicate that about our product so for example these ads you know they communicate the main value prop for profit will retain we'll reduce your customers turn your subscription cancellations and at the same time we'll have essentially you know simplified illustrations of our product showing you know not only how we're achieving that but also here's what the customer the user experience looks like when we white label of your customer messaging and so you know you can see a lot of the elements here where we've run a one-to-one campaign um you know using

inflow to maybe using say linkedin for example in order to deliver those personalized ads um and you know as a result like trying to maximize the relevance of course it's very personalized but really showing hey this is solving a very specific problem for you and we're focusing on the problem not on personalization for personalization's sake right right and um when we were talking and going through this you i have a little bit of a bias and in terms of i think many many probably b2b marketers do and this next example is going to sort of myth bust that a little bit but around social media and being intrusive on social media and whether you can actually hit your key decision makers so i know you had this example can you talk us through this right so uh you know number one is you know hubble contacts is a customer but they weren't the particular team that was responding in this particular anecdote uh but we had one particular case where you know we were using influent ii to target some ads towards a particular buyer um and then when we sent him an email through outreach he you know responded to the email and said yes in fact you know i just saw your

personalized ad i'd love to see more about profile retain and they actually sent a screenshot of the ad um from influential on you know his iphone on instagram and you know what kind of what was really interesting here is he didn't actually click the ad but you know it made such a big impression that it made him very uh kind of it primed him to respond once we reach out to him directly and so kind of the whole the whole point here being that like we were able to reach him and you know kind of impress him with that form of personalization right and i guess it's that um one to one in terms of sales being able to do outreach and then being able to be supported through your through your ad campaigns um and often that sort of gets lost from a from an advertising perspective because you're blind and not knowing who necessarily you're targeting right and it's it's very clear i think in this case that like you know the whole point here was communicate to you know this particular buyer here's a problem with weird looking stuff for you and we're trying to speak directly to you as opposed to just you know um being very clearly like the target of a set of

filters on facebook for example right right cool and so you know a lot of this content you produce um is quite customized i'm sure it has uh it takes a lot of time and effort as content does can you talk us through that a little bit and what that process is like right of course so uh you know one thing i want to reiterate is you know the clip i showed have boxed out a little bit earlier you know a lot of animation really high production value we've been doing first for a few years so we've kind of invested a lot more in that as it's kind of worked for us but one thing i want to reiterate is the production value is not what is driving uh the value here you know so this is a screenshot from the first episode of pressing page chat around from several years ago it's literally just you know ceo patrick and head of sales peter sitting at you know sitting uh at in front of a monitor from the office we bought a bit of wood paneling from home depot but what was really providing the value here was the data analysis that they were walking through and the insights they drew from that so in this particular case we're talking about how uh for example the pricing um

the customer's willingness to pay for netflix goes up the bigger their family is which makes perfect sense but kind of the whole point was you look at the insight you can see the methodology on a pricing audit and how this might improve the profitability of your brand and so as as a result you know it's not the production value that's driving the value here it's you know that specificity and really providing the value and you know one thing that also really helped here is you know again um sales peter is literally in the episode and so a lot of the time he might be the one that might pop up on your demo or your pricing audit if you were to begin the conversation with us which means we've already started building that report uh you know with the buyer and between sales um and of course it really helped us to kind of um build some alignment with sales since you know we're literally going after accounts that um they want to kind of close right right and that that brings up an important point because you know i think that's been a big theme for a number of years around collaboration and that's that was one of the themes for this session as well because you know it's all well and good producing all this content um and then being able to

orchestrate it through your marketing channels but really if sales isn't on board um nothing happens with it right so it'd be good to talk through i guess how how you've been able to do that um and and how you've been able to orchestrate the content through your abm program more broadly sure um so let me talk about kind of two elements here number one is um getting the human buy-in team buy-in as well as the actual you know execution of a tech stack so first thing is you know our workflow is you know we of course have um you know kind of start to build out a team to specifically focus on the production of the content itself but when we're picking up you know which episodes to focus on which uh you know brands did research we would literally you know sit down with our sales team and figure out okay what are some key strategic accounts that you would love to break into what are new verticals or new spaces that we don't have a ton of brand recognition in where we haven't kind of proven that we can provide value and so we can really dig into those and then produce that content to really break into those

so you know already we're getting sales this buy-in there because we're very much leading with um you know what it's going to generate pipeline and revenue for the sales team um and as far as the tech stack goes um so this is a relatively simple tech stack so you know we're using zoom info to uh you know on the outbound side with a little bit of clear bit data on the inbound side to kind of filter through things um all of this is going into our crms which is salesforce and then kind of that gets funneled to a bunch of other platforms for um kind of distribution so you know for building awareness we're using terminus in flow 2 linkedin for you know those personalized ads as well as you know kind of to promote the content itself a little bit for hosting content itself you know which is more middle of funnel we're distributing this through you know email through videos and even through podcasts and so that's why we're using you know hubspot wistia and transistor for each of those channels uh respectively and you know the last piece being you know of course reaching out directly to some of these people in order to you know

push that a little bit more um you know directly into their hands as well as of course to try to pivot this into a sales conversation and so you know we're primarily using outreach and drift for that cool yeah and kind of uh one thing i want to reiterate here is you know this is a relatively simple tech stack admittedly there are the systems we're using but it's but those other systems aren't part of the minimal viable tech stack that you need in order to deliver a lot of this uh i personally think that you know if you're really censoring you know your your buyer's problems at the heart of it if that uh contest is really providing a lot of value then you don't need a you know a super um you know uh sophisticated or over complicated tech stack in order to deliver that and if anything you know um once you kind of get that basic engine in there then a lot of the optimizations become more tactical and you can still rely ultimately on that foundation of providing real actionable value right right and this is something that we talked about in terms of there's so many different systems out there but being able you know it's at the end of the day it's a human

that makes those choices around whether you orchestra you know when you automate something or whatever it is so it's really about being relevant and i guess i'm going to throw you a little wild card you know in terms of considering new channels or new new technologies how do you sort of assess that in terms of in terms of the holistic program and assessing new systems or technologies yeah uh so i think um you know it is it is both a quantitative and a qualitative qualitative aspect right um of course you can always you know look at like click rates or a number of impressions you're getting uh i i personally am thinking you know people you already need so many touch points to go on with a particular account um but a lot of time you know as kind of running of a growth team uh there's kind of a trade-off between you know what touch points you're choosing to spend all your time focusing on right and so kind of my uh my kind of forcing function is what are the touch points that are have vital highest leverage that cause your customer to organically

bring it up in a sales conversation um and if you can increase the number of those touch points and also increase you know the and also ensure that those touch ones are being had with the people who are specifically part of your buying committee as opposed to you know just part of a general kind of um companies that you're targeting then that's really what's gonna drive um an improvement in value from whatever baseline technology or tech stock you're using cool thank you and so i think what we're going to do is you're going to take us through a couple of the results that you've had from this this approach sure um so you know there's a bunch of ways to measure uh performance here one thing i want to reiterate is kind of you know again we started out working with a lot of b2b brands and then uh broke into the e-commerce space a bit more recently and so these all metrics around you know boxed out when we're using it to break into the e-commerce space which means that we were operating off of kind of a low baseline admittedly uh but you know we were seeing pretty um great uh traction across the board so first thing being you know of course if you measure

things on the inbound leads we looked at the number of uh inbound leads were coming in from retail brands or ecommerce brands based off of the company emails and we saw that you know after uh you know basically the monthly number of leads were generating from those uh increased by 70 after the show uh started running uh you know we found that um of all the of all the companies that whose brands we were analyzing um in in a given season of box that we were able to start holding um conversations or engaging with two-thirds of those um and of course you know some of those didn't engage necessarily but it actually started some really good conversations with the competitors as well like you know if you're talking about dollar shave clubs uh retention strategy you know maybe they might be interested but harry's race is going to be super interested in that in it as well uh you know when we're running with personalized ads you know we saw a 23 increase in click-through rates uh and when it came to the outreach we saw a 40 increase in response rates um reason for the banner click-through rates you know being the lift being a little bit lower i think is because um because we were

being so personalized the ad saturation and frequency here was a lot higher but we're still seeing that lift which was pretty great um and last thing being you know um of course this very personalized approach is great if you're trying to break into a new vertical into a new space it's also really great if you're trying to move up market which you know we've been doing the past two or three years as well and so as a result you know we do have a good foundation as far as customers in smb but we were essentially able to see you know a huge increase in the number of enterprise deals won um as you know these shows continue to roll out simple because we were shown that we could indeed work with these big brands these enterprise quote-unquote kinds of customers cool um so i think the final question for you is um what have you what have you learned through this process and what can you share and key takeaways for the audience right so you know um so you know i i came from a much more data background like i started out as a data analyst soviet so a lot of this stuff sounds right but it was actually very new to me is uh number one is you

know all of us uh centers upon engendering trust and what i mean by that is you know um first thing being you know i'm you know it sounds sometimes it sounds like a new concept but it's in reality it's always been true is you know audiences don't want to buy from brands i don't want to buy from a logo unless you know basically i just want to get the most proven thing as so especially if i'm an early adopter i don't want to buy from a logo i want to buy for my brand i want to buy from people um and as a result uh building a human relationship as a marker is gonna do a lot of work that um paves the way for my sales team um and that's especially true when you consider you know again that content i think there's more content out there now than then there is attention used to not be the case 10 years ago and so if so if you want to stand out you don't just need to you know optimize your seo but you also need to um have that connection there and have people coming back to your contents repeatedly um at the same time you know we talked a lot about automation and personalization

and i think a lot of it is you know obviously personalization and targeting has been in the news a lot lately uh when it comes to this i've spent a lot less time focusing on the tactics and technical stuff of you know um just hitting the right people of course that tech still exists out there but it focuses a lot more on um are we providing specific and actual value to this particular audience and ensuring that when this audience sees it they can see i can understand why this person is is uh you know what this person is targeting me with this and i am glad that they are because it means that i am getting that value um for the same reason that like for example on netflix um you know if if recommendations are good then you're glad that they're tailoring that a little bit more because it means that you can find the stuff you want um which you know gives a huge advantage over say like hbo max where i can't find any of the stuff i want necessarily um and the last piece being again again like once you engender um once you figure out how to enter the vet trust as a baseline then again as always it is a process of learning and testing

we're constantly um you know experimenting with like new forms of content new messaging new channels but ultimately we try and never distract from away from that main principle of engender trust by providing value right right and one of the things that i asked you before actually um you know what is it that something that that you would improve or you'd change or that you you know that that sort of didn't quite go right and um you know you if you figured it out through share something like that with us um so one thing that uh one improvement i would love to make for example is um you know so when we started out doing a lot of these case study formats especially on the bdb side you know b2b people tend to work a lot better with more abstract um you know data-driven concepts so price-to-page teardown we were looking at charts we were talking about like price sensitivity and you know all these all these things um and then when we went over to the e-commerce side you know we were taking a lot of that same

approach about talking about like abstract strategy talking about data charts and stuff like that um but kind of as we've dove into the e-commerce space i've found that you know people on the e-commerce side tend to be a bit more tactile and like very much involved with the customer experience certainly like their activative is very is very visceral and and really great and they're very much into like you know like having those physical products and so if i you know one thing i've asked um or it's feedback i've given to our um to our production team is basically when you guys put up the next season of boxed out let's get a lot more hands-on so you know let's look at the website and then figure out like is the landing page optimized um let's look at for example let's like show a little bit about like the email type the email uh retention strategy and you know what if things that could be improving there and so as as a result not just talking about the data and talking about a high level but be as specific as you can and so um that's an example where um you know again we kind of um did what applied what had

worked for us previously as we went into a kind of a new buyer audience we've um we discovered that there are some things that we need to kind of optimize a little bit differently to make sense for that audience right um but again like ultimately listen listen to your customer and um a lot of those insights will come from there yeah yeah absolutely i think relevance is is key um cool well thank you steven for for joining us i appreciate it i know we've got a little bit of time left so if there are any questions um then happy to take them um otherwise that's it for us there any questions we need to do right now we're going to do it once event and then forget

um so the question is how to approach uh reasonability and showing value yeah so one thing we talk about a lot in sas is the kind of idea of a time to wow basically right which is um number one from a more rational perspective you know people you know is a theoretical idea of like providing value to someone but ultimately you need to provide value in those first i want to say two three months depending on your product exactly um because ultimately you know time to while actually kind of implies there's a very visceral reaction right like it's an emotional decision weirdly enough and so um what we kind of advise when it comes to that is number one um focus very much on showing value in the very beginning and building very rapport of course and at the same time you know kind of uh you know once you've established that baseline continue to show value to show value across across the board um you know kind of one thing we try to do individually in our products is like honestly it's like we focus a lot on measurable value is that like if you don't have to question the idea and you

in your brain that like something is providing you value then it's it's easy um and like and so as a result like yeah it's it's kind of thing where just like you know you can measure it with like uh you know how much the buyer is invested in it but you should also simply ask like you know the people who are using the product on the day-to-day if they were to get rid of it would they throw a fuss basically does that answer your question right and i will admit that a lot of our customers tend to be on the lower price point range even on the b2b side so it's not quite an apple samples comparison um and it is the kind of thing like you know we're definitely positioning around a lot like automation but if it's a again like you said 70 000 purchase

there has to be kind of a human element there and i think well i i think it's a little bit about i think content decay as well um and being able to i i can understand that i've had this experience of you reduce this amazing piece of content and then it has this shelf life and so i guess uh what i like to do is what i call content exploitation um where you take a piece of content and then you break it up into pieces and i you know and and roll it out in different formats which i think is something that you showed but i the other thing that you can do with that it's it's only gone to a particular audience so you know there's there's not only a like say for example at this conference there's only a few people from uh you know each company it's not it's not the whole uh buying committee if you like so being able to take that content and be able to reuse it across the buying group that might help through that through that long process hopefully that answers your question are there any other questions

andrew qualitatively or anecdotally as you have customized [Music] yeah we do in fact um you know we get uh people all the time who say you know oh hey i saw you know i saw you guys on this particular show or i saw this particular ad um i think kind of the thing i'm alluding to there is again when you're trying to censor the customer is um i find a lot easier to like think of it qualitatively because then you can really see that mine's eye so kind of use that to like kind of source like is this thing happening what about this this idea and then kind of the way i use a quantitative aspect is okay so you know we have this ideal hypothesis about what's happening now you know how can we measure that at scale or how do we kind of ensure that

this same experience is scaling across it once we start applying it across many prospects um so it is the kind of thing where yes we absolutely hear from our sales team we we source it you know anecdotes from our sales team it is by no means the only piece of feedback we use and i was going to say that with your you know you showed the tech stack and it's not necessarily just one way it recycles i'm sure it's right at points across that journey definitely correct cool cool thank you is there other any other questions all right well thank you so much stephen for for joining us i appreciate it and thank you everyone for sticking around thank you uh stephen and uh great session to end with i'm sorry there's a ton of people missing because this is good stuff um fortunately we videoed us we'll be able to share with anybody that missed it um definitely catch narosha and stephen you'll be in the back a little bit too if they have questions on the break they can grab you i would definitely try to pick pick their brain a little bit more uh we'll go to a break now so we can check

up with within flu 2 or any other sponsors that you missed one last chance uh our final session is actually going to be a digital video session uh john miller actually recorded that they weren't able to to travel um and then we're gonna have our awards at 5 30 so hopefully you folks can join us for that thanks again thanks thank you