Mastering SaaS Marketing - Shane Murphy-Reuter @Webflow

Speaker A: In today's episode, I speak with Shane Murphy Reuter, uh, the CMO of webflow, the visual web development platform that empowers users to design, build and launch responsive websites without code. We cover a wide range of topics, including the first 90 days as a CMO. And Shane's biggest lessons. The importance of positioning in SaaS marketing, the key pillars of SaaS marketing strategy, the challenges of measuring and scaling demand generation and getting CFO approval. How Shane doubled webflow's paid media ROI through media media mix optimization and CRO. And last but not least, how to work smarter, not harder generally. This was one of my favorite episodes of masters of SaaS. Shane. Massively delivered. So go grab a coffee, get your notebook and yeah, let's do it. Shane, hello. Welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thank you. Great to be here.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, the pleasure is generally all mine. Well, maybe you can start with a quick intro. You're obviously the CMO at webflow. Uh, but who is Shane?

Speaker B: Yeah. Whoa, that's a very uh, that's a big question. Um, yeah, so currently CMO at Webflow, you know, I spent the last 15 years or so in marketing. I actually started in London for about six to seven years working in telecoms and really first half of my career was in B2C actually in telecoms industry and then moved to Adroll, which was my first B2B role, and did a year in Dublin which then brought me out to the US and so really since then I've been working in marketing leadership roles at uh, kind of hyper growth, um, SaaS companies. My kind of sweet spot has been that uh, like hitting around 100 million ARR. And then kind of trying to um, uh, keep the company accelerating through that point. The zoom info which is my last job was probably the largest scale and we were, we crossed a billion near while I was there. So that was kind of maybe the outlier. But then webflow is much more back into that kind of like sweet spot for me. Um, ah, so yeah, just really love marketing, you know, love doing things like this. Getting to chat about marketing is uh, is always fun and yeah, got two kids, got a dog, a wife, live in the Boston area.

Speaker A: That's it. Busy life. Good stuff. Thanks for the intro. Well, um, listen, you have tons of experience, um, as a marketer myself, I'm really interested to pick your brains on some really complex marketing topics. So the role of a CMO and some other strategic, uh, areas as well. Maybe you can just explain for. I think most people know what webflow is. Uh, uh, but Maybe you can explain what is webflow? It's a super important company in this kind of no code, uh, movement. And sorry to kind of go off on a tangent here, I don't know if this is true but um, I remember listening to a podcast, it was a Tim Ferriss podcast. And I Forget the, the WordPress. The guy found his name. I think the company's automatic. And I remember him saying something like, I remember him saying something like some huge crazy number the proportion of websites that are run by WordPress. I don't want to say it was like 50 or some crazy number. What is Webflow? And it's about 65. Yeah. What is like what is Webflow? And kind of. Yeah. Maybe you can explain a bit more about the market you guys are operating in.

Speaker B: Yeah. So if you think about like you go you know, further back if you think about the WordPress market, if you're a person or a designer trying to design and build a website and launch it, you effectively need three things. You need a um, design, right? So you actually go into a Figma or something and make this is what it looks like. You need a CMS which is WordPress and then which is really difficult to actually bring it to life. You need a developer to go and code those designs to be the front end that sits on top of the CMS being WordPress. Um, and that's very complicated. Right. A designer doesn't know how to code, they don't know how to stitch that all together. And so the first innovation in the market were the likes of Squarespace and wix, um, launched as these very simple template based um, uh, website builders. The problem with those is they swing almost too far the other direction. If you're a designer you're really pinned into these templates. You can't actually design whatever you want. You lose all of the power of that code because you're so penned in. So webflow, um, launched to solve that problem. Like we're a, call ourselves a visual development platform. You are actually coding. So it's creating um, clean code in the background. You've all of the power of HTML, CSS, JavaScript all at your fingertips. But rather than manually coding, you're manipulating that code through a visual interface. So as a designer I now can actually build websites in an interface that is very typical that I'd be in like much more like a Figma style experience. So what that means is as a designer, if I'm an agency or an in house designer at a company, I can now design what I Want the website to look like and launch it with a click of a button without the need for using developers uh, which are very expensive. It can also be um, you know, challenging in the handoff. And so yeah we're really trying to find that sweet spot between manual coding and the more template based website, uh builders like Squarespace or wixing. So far it's obviously been um, that sort of value uh proposition has um, really exploded and you know we're still growing at a rapid, rapid rate and um, while we're not yet over 50% of the uh, websites and Internet aren't quite built on webflow yet. Like we're, we're definitely catching up.

Speaker A: Yeah, good stuff. Maybe you can give some uh, context into the um. I think the last numbers uh I saw the company was valued in the billions. Is it 4 billion? I think 100 million ARR. And maybe you can put. Is that those numbers still accurate?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So our last valuation was just over 4 billion which is I think April of uh, last year. Right. Just before the, the crash. So yep, theoretically we're still valued at that. Obviously there's been market changes in a private company so it's difficult to know exactly. But the good news is that our, our um, metrics have really continued to go from strength to strength. Like you know the 100 million. We're well past that now. I'm um, actually not sure if we've shared but like we're well past 100 now and you know much like most of the companies we've been really focused on getting to um, cash flow positivity which you know we're on track to achieve that pret pretty soon. And actually maybe it's a topic we could talk about later around how we've on the marketing side, we've doubled the ROI of our marketing spend while still growing new customer volumes. So like a big, big part of our job is to help with that efficiency. So yeah, still efficiently valued at just over 4,4 billion. Well past 100 million now. And getting to the point where we're um, going to be cash flow positive so that we're in charge of our own destiny. Which is great.

Speaker A: Yeah. Exciting times. Um, one of the things I was, I was doing some research for this podcast and I found something you wrote on Twitter and you put when choosing your next gig and you put in in brackets as a CMO on your way to being one, be really careful to choose one that suits your skills and one that you're culturally thriving. So why did you. I think you've been in uh, Webflow for around a year. Why did you choose webflow and why did Webflower choose you? Why was it a good fit?

Speaker B: Yeah, you know I think um, I think there were, there are two parts to that as I mentioned. There's the cultural part which I'll talk about in a second but there's also the um, matching your skills. So different companies have different go to market strategies and I'll use Zoom Info as an example. Zoom Info's go to market strategy is fully sales led. They are, you get a lead in, hand it to a salesperson, they sell the deal and they close it and manage it. Most of my career up until that point had been at the likes of Adroll, Intercom and actually prior to that B2C where your job as a marketer is um, number one a lot about building the brand given that you're a much more scaled company ah going after like small business all the way up and then a lot of your job is to be a very commercial leader. You typically run the self serve business. So like at webflow I have the I own the self serve revenue ah number which is about 85% of our revenue because you're not just handing to a salesperson to own revenue. And so the role of a CMO in a company that I'm more used to which is a combination of product led growth like a self serve business plus the sales led to like expanded up is very, very different than um, if you go into like an enterprise driven sales led ah company. So you just need to be really really careful that like um, your experience and the things that you enjoy doing and are good at are matching with the company's strategy. Um and look, you know I would say this publicly that I'd zoom in for. I don't think there was quite that like I was only there just over a year and there wasn't quite that, that, that alignment. You know I think that for them go off and find somebody's much more focus on that like kind of lead generation of sales driven motion. Um so there's, there's, there's that so I think that's really critically important. And then you on the cultural side, you know cultures thought a lot about this. Cultures come in all different shapes and sizes and there isn't one that's necessarily good or bad. You just need to make sure that it, it fits who you are. Uh, I'll give, I'll actually give a sporting example which sometimes isn't great but like thought a lot about Like Chelsea Football Club under Jose Mourinho. Right. And Barcelona under Pep Guardiola. Both extremely successful. Could not have been culturally or strategically more different. If you were a player on Barcelona, you try to go play for Chelsea under Jose Mourinho, you would have been extremely unsuccessful and vice versa. Because Jose Mourinho strategy was want to have the strongest fittest people want to play direct football. We are going to like bash our way through and it was extremely successful. Guardiola's is much more like we are going to strategically think about this. Tap it, tap it, tap it until we, we pass the ball into the goal. Um, both really successful. You just want to make sure that you're not a Chelsea style footballer trying to play for Barcelona or Barcelona style footballer trying to play for Chelsea. And so, you know, digging in um, on what the type of culture you might be joining by either talking directly to the people, but actually more importantly probably back channeling. You can uh, do a lot of work where you probably know people who work there and reaching out to those people to understand that fit I think is really, really important. And so would, yeah, encourage anybody taking a job at any level really to figure out they, they fit into it.

Speaker A: So webflow more of the. The Barcelona or the Chelsea.

Speaker B: Well, interesting. You know, this is like I would say I think we're still trying to find our feet there. Like the football analogy, like uh, is kind of combination of culture and, and also strategy. Right. And more like go to market motion. Right. I think web flow. We had been so successful um, for many, many years, ah, in large part due to having extremely high product market fit in a certain market segment that it just like exploded. And I think that um, now as we think about going on the next curves, uh, of growth, we actually do have to like think about um, making sure that our culture matures with us and making sure that like so we actually did do internally a bit of a reset on our like core behaviors, um, and making sure that they were, we were ensuring that we were like holding a high bar around like delivery, making sure that we had the ability to move at pace, whereas I think in the past we had been maybe a bit more. Maybe Barcelona is an unfair example but like extremely thoughtful about everything. Like everything took like, everything's very strategic. Took a long time to like get to an answer. Everybody had an opinion which is good for like certain really kind of sticky, hairy problems. That's great. But I, you know, I thought a lot about meeting companies, didn't have two gears in particular Marketing departments for some things. That's great. Um, sometimes though you've got to kick it into the other gear which is like okay, we gotta move and not overthink this. An example would be like AI is here, right? Um, we were at risk at webflow of really overthinking the AI. Uh, our AI strategy and not getting into market was perfect and it was a really good I think moment for us to show our new sort of uh, focus on being able to move fast in certain instances. And we, we all got in a room, spent two days together figuring it out and then just got into market and said here it is. So we kind of were able to kick into that second uh, gear Anyway, sorry, so I didn't directly answer your question but like I think one of the things we might talk about later is like how companies can and marketing teams can shift as you grow. And I do think that like being able to figure out how to um, shift that culture appropriately to mature. But as an organization as you get bigger is important and the main thing that I've seen from certainly more San Francisco based tech companies is ah, a lot of focus on um, like um, thinking deeply, very strategically, maybe moving slowly, maybe not being as your kind of top stand directive when it you need to be and as a result can ah, not keep that growth going because aren't moving fast enough to, to crack into new markets and opportunities. And so we've done a lot of thinking about how we can kind of rebalance that.

Speaker A: Yeah, understood. Maybe just to kind of set the stage in the context. I can imagine going into a company like webflow. I'm not sure the definition of hyper growth but it's certainly a fast growing company with a huge uh, potential, lots of new hires, investment pressure. I can only imagine going in as a new CMO in that first, you know, whatever, 60, 90 days, that must be really, really important time. How do you think about that? Like what have you learned going in as CMO in that kind of first 90 days? What uh, are some of the lessons you've had from that?

Speaker B: I would say it's actually a good example of those two gears as well. I would say that you need to simultaneously figure out the strategic part um, as well as okay, how can I add value quickly and kind of prove yourself and so on. The more strategic part really it's about understanding. You got to understand like the company strategy, you got to understand the team, you got to understand how it's set up. You have to understand your goals. So basically how currently are you all set up in order to like over the next two, three years. And so it's a lot of like um, just chatting to the team, reading all of the strategic documents, picking out what a reading means, making sure that like you have a full understanding of the context that you're about to ah, execute within. Because if you're slightly misaligned in understanding of the strategy and you start then sprinting to deliver, you could really end up then like a completely wrong path and that you need to pull yourself back from. So I think the first part is like really understanding the strategy, the company, the team, um, so that you can therefore set the marketing strategy uh, near the end of your 90 days. That said uh, I think to be successful particularly in marketing, trying to figure out what are some low hanging fruit that are like obviously you can just go grab hold of it, not overthink it and actually just deliver value or like really important. So an example for me at webflow was when I joined we were in the middle of doing a lot of um, pricing, packaging changes and the project was kind of swirling a little bit with a lack of like kind of leadership, ownership and uh, focus as a project. And I was like great. That one like done this multiple times before. It's relatively well defined. It just needs a leader to like grab it and get it, get it delivered. And so that was a good example of like a relatively low hanging fruit that was like pretty reasonably large impact that I was able to like grab hold of to kind of prove it. So I think you're you know, as a, as a CMO and uh, generally as somebody in your job I would always encourage you to like really think about like am I, am I spending like the balance of my time at the right level of uh, like strategic thinking as well as like execution or just like short term delivery value. And so for in the first 90 days. And that's critical too.

Speaker A: Yeah, just um, in my own experience and obviously we're an agency with um, more than 50 SaaS companies, albeit these are going to be smaller companies than a webflow. Um, one of the things that the stumbling blocks I've often found in marketing is when we go to work with a SaaS company and they just have really poorly defined positioning. I guess positioning is very much part of that strategic piece uh you spoke about and I often find that's a huge blocker, right? Like who is the customer, what value? Just kind of like Positioning Marketing 101. How important is it to, and kind of how fundamental is that? And the Kind of the strategy piece to have really well defined positioning.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's crucial. Like if you think about marketing, um, relatively straightforward, your job is to like craft a story that is compelling and then communicate it in the market such that people like hear it at the right time. My face pretty like at a highest level, pretty straightforward. Um, I do feel like these days companies have overcorrected to the performance side of marketing a little bit and are much more just about like, let's just get a message out in front of um, uh, our target market. And as a result they end up having really terrible like LTV to cac because you know, people aren't engaging with their ads or you know, they're generally, they're not getting a lot of like organic growth because their messages in resonating markets, people aren't like coming in searching for them. And so the thing that uh, I've always tried to do in my early days in any company is look at do they have a clear messaging apps, um, and if not then working on it. And we've actually done a ton of work of trying to figure out my view of what uh, that messaging house should look like for like a B2B SAS company. There's a lot of them out there for like B2C which aren't fit for purpose for um, B2B because they're too light on the, on the actual solution and product side. And then there's some on the B2B side which I think are two actually product and solution oriented and missing the brand story. And so not to get way too deep on it. But like for me, um, basically the, the pyramid is at the top. You've got your, your purpose or your mission. Right? So for webflow that is to give everyone developer superpowers. We want to make sure that anyone can build for the web. Because building for the web is like writing was, you know, hundreds of years ago. It's like a skill that people should have. Underneath that then is your aspirational customer. What is the what who is the customer and what are the things that make them kind of motivated both emotionally and functionally. Then under that there's the old world, new world stories. So like I actually gave you some of it started this for webflow is like what's the old way? The old way is like handwriting code or terrible template builders. It's the new way. Well, the new way is like a visual development platform where you can manipulate code in anything or you need to have that story down. And so you got to get that new world, know what that's like in your solution level? This is the problem that we're trying to solve for people. And then under that then you start getting into more of your product messaging. Uh, here's an. As a result, this is what we've built. Here's how it works, here's the value, here's the proof. And then to your point, around like target segments, usually multiple companies have like multiple segments that they're going after. We go after agencies on one end and the side we go after what we call like in house design teams like within a company. At some point, that pyramid, ah, you want to go left and right and create like a parallel one for your different uh, audiences that is like relatively aligned but that gives space for each audience to breathe. Um, and so it's critically important to like have that all the way down because if those things aren't connected, you should be able to say, hey, our mission is this. As a result, this is what we built all the way down such that it's connected. And so yeah, I think it's critical that as CMO or in a marketing team, if you don't have that nailed, um, it's a really big problem and we're literally working on this. I'm going to be working on this today with my team actually at webflow. We put something light in place when I got here, but um, we're reimagining it uh, right now. So if you don't have that ah, part you want to get that locked in.

Speaker A: Interesting. So how do you tackle that problem then? I mean I'm not sure what you can share here, but how many people are involved in this? Is it a workshop? Is it? How do you approach solving that problem at webflow?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it kind of depends on the degree to which the story is known internally, just not really written down and codified. So webflow, I actually think the story is pretty well known. Uh, we just didn't have a common way of describing it. So for example visual development platform, other people would say we're a uh, website, uh, builder or we're a whatever, like even just like codifying some of the language to be used. So in a situation like webflow where actually the story is pretty well known, it just needs to be codified. That can be a smaller group. Right now my head of PMM and ah, one of his kind of uh, ah, strategic threat reports working on it directly with me and then we're obviously sharing it with a number of stakeholders like our CEO and And those sort of folks make sure that it's like what we're delivering is bringing its property to life. If however you're in a situation where like maybe when I was at Intercom Intercom, the story was really confusing. It was like are we a ah, live chat thing? Are we like a customer engagement platform? Are we a support tool? Like conversational marketing was becoming a bit of like a category. Do we want to latch onto that or is it too narrow? That was like a much more um, in those situations forming a uh, broader team of some of the key folk in the business, like your head of product, your head of product marketing, your CEO to work on it together I think is a broader group is really important. If it's really hairy sometimes getting in an agency to help is critical as well. So that you don't um, navel gaze. It's a big risk that you kind of navel gaze and say yeah this, people love this. It makes total sense. Yeah. Like the value is really clear and somebody who's like not internal or like what are you talking about? You know. So agencies can also help uh, um, if you don't have the internal sort of uh, support.

Speaker A: Yeah, got it. Thank you. I think we've kind of already. My next question is kind of around strategy and uh, I'm not expecting you to tell us what, you know, uh, an effective B2B SaaS marketing strategy because obviously there's tons of content context and variation. But maybe if we speak about you know, web Pro, product led, predominantly 85. I think you said product led and then there's some sales support in there as well. We, you obviously understand workflow deeply. What are the kind of the pillars of the, of a uh, marketing strategy? We've spoken about positioning, we've spoken about messaging house, uh, what are the, what are those big pillars of the make up the strategy for you?

Speaker B: Yeah, like I think about uh, marketing in three broad pillars and there's the product marketing. So it's all of your positioning. How do you uh, tell uh, your story and then how do you take a lot of new products and stuff to market? Um, there's that brand marketing is the second one. The product marketing team will give the story to the brand marketing team and the brand marketing team's job is to turn it into, to marketing campaigns and assets that will engage somebody. So like um, using Intercom as an example. Yeah we might decide that we're like a live chat tour but like how do you take that to market and like a clever brand team might Say we should run a campaign called in your corner, where, you know, intercom's always in your corner there to help. It's like this emotional thing. You come up with the campaign, you can guess all that. Um, and then the third pillar of it is your growth, uh, and demand gen team who typically own the channels of execution of those uh, campaigns. And those are very technical, analytical folk who are going to make sure that those campaigns are put into market in the channels that are most likely to engage the appropriate target market. And so if you think about those three pillars, then, um, that's kind of like your, how you make the sausage, right? It's like get your position right, work with the brand marketing team to turn that into like campaigns and the growth and DG team to put it in market. Then the. So now you're set up sort of like with the right uh, machine marketing strategies, then need to operate at uh, different levels. And the three broad different altitudes are brand, solution and product. At the brand level, what you're trying to do is go out to the world and build your brand and have them like understand and resonate what you are and who you are and why you should care. Um, and so typically those campaigns are a bit more emotional and the media that you're using is typically to go after like a new audience. So like micro billboards, mass media, do super bowl ad, whatever you might want to do. Um, because what you're trying to do is I just engage people in understanding who you are. And as you move down those altitudes from brand to solution to product, you're more likely talking to either your existing market or your existing customers. Like at a product level you're talking to your existing customers, you already get the value, you already care about webflow. You just need to know that we've just launched this new product that you can like buy or will change the way that you work and therefore the way that you position, um, a product kind of to like a brand team. I'm going to do a big emotional, creative thing for a product launch. And the channels of communication will be much more like your email market in your in app messaging. And so I think about like our marketing strategy from that kind of like it's almost like that matrix of like are we set up to have solid positioning, a great brand team, you can bring it together in a great channel strategy to make sure that that conveyor belt, that uh, kind of sausage making is really, really thoughtful. And then am I thinking about it at uh, the multiple altitudes and my general, uh, having now worked for sort of four hypergrowth tech companies. My big lesson is that typically speaking in the early days, the founders and everything done a really good job of like building the brand. They just do it naturally and then over time, for whatever reason, all of the marketing activity ends up like flowing down to the product level. They are doing a great job of communicating the new products that they built to their existing customers. And they've totally forgotten about going and building the brand because we've got a great brand. It's like, yeah, uh, no you don't. You've got a great brand within your echo chamber, but beyond which you sit in the middle of, but nobody else knows about you. And so, um, and obviously these tech companies are pretty product driven, right? Like that's their technical, they're tech. And so always the gravitational pull is down internally down to the product. We're launching this product. We worked so hard to build it. Marketing, you got to support, you got to support it. And I'm like, no one cares. The existing customers care. But that's not the market opportunity. Only, you know, less than 1% of the websites in the world are built on Webflow. 65% are built on WordPress. Our solution is way better than WordPress, like, uh, way objectively. And I love WordPress. Like, uh. And so it's not a knock on them, but I genuinely believe Webflow is 10 times better. It's like a combustion engine car versus an electric car. Why are we spending all of our time trying to convince existing Tesla users that now you can like do this thing on the sat nav thing, like a new little product thing. We're only going out to the world and convincing them that electric cars are, are the future. And so anyway, something I'm pretty passionate about as you can see. Um, and so I think like as marketers, one of our key jobs internally is to like make sure that. And bring this back to your original question from a strategy point of view that the um, CEO and the whole company understand this messaging house and the importance to have marketing supporting the high level brand, the solution level and the product level. And one of the things I often do is show when I joined last six months, here's all the stuff we've done here at the product level. Here's what we've done at the solution level. We've done nothing at the brand. And you think that we're going to go and have rapid growth for the next, you know, five years, it's just not going to happen. And so anyway, um, that I think is like critical in making sure that your strategy is balanced across those, those different altitudes and that you're not getting sucked down into the product, uh, too much.

Speaker A: Just, just thinking here, uh, one of my follow up questions was going to be what is the um, hardest part of all of that? And I feel like maybe it's more on the getting everyone up to the, to the brand side. Do you feel like it's also, maybe this is more of a marketing issue. But do you think because also the, by the way, um, I also call brand like demand generation as well, that'd be another way that you would call, you know, brand demand generation. Do you think that it's also because it's harder to measure. Everybody just wants to say we spent X, we got Y, here's the outcome. Do you think that's also a barrier to why people want to invest less in that, in that brand?

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. Like the safe thing to do as a CMO is not to do what I, I just said. If you want to have a good reputation internally, typically speaking you do a great job of launching the new products and like your homepage is like, gets really into detail of how cool the project is. The CTO is going to love you, the CPO is going to love you, the CEO is likely a technical product person is going to love you. And what will happen is you will have short term impact, um, because you'll do a good job of like getting the existing customers maybe to spend more on those sort of things. But, and so you might have a solid couple of year run where um, everyone loves you. The problem is that the company itself will eat right and so because you fail to like go and match the market opportunity. And so yeah, and to answer your point directly, yes, it's just easier down there because it's like um, you can measure really directly certainly the impact that you're having on your existing customers with things like email marketing or in app messaging, all that. Uh, from a demand gen point of view it's very easy to measure more of your kind of like uh, lead generation campaigns and like sign up generation campaigns. Um, and therefore you can sign up for the cfo, uh, and he'll or she will love you as well, um, because you're showing the roi. And so yeah, I think you're right but you need like the one here. I'll just say, I'm sorry, I'm waffling a little bit now but what I've always said to my teams is like as a marketing team and this is most important for a cmo. You need to be the most financially literate person in the room so that ah, you earn the right that when you say we're going to go invest in the brand, the CFO turns around and she's like, yeah, I trust you. And so I've spent a lot of my career like anytime I heard anything in a uh, like board meeting, exact meaning like a term, I'm like, well I don't actually understand that term. Like mpv. How does that work? I'd go and I would learn it backwards. Spent a lot of my, my career figuring out how to like do detailed financial analysis. Um, and so that like now you know, our VP of Finance, Yvonne, he 100% trusts when I say we have to go invest in this brand, we're not going to be able to measure it, the direct stuff that we're doing, but we can measure the overall impact of the campaign. And he's, he's like, yeah, I get it. Like uh, and I understand the need for it and let's go for it. And so again, advice maybe for other marketers or more junior people coming up is like you need to be as uh, financially literate as um, this is a hard one, but it's possible is financially literate as the person strategic finance or FP&A, or whatever team it is that you're working directly with. Um, learn, uh, Excel. So do people use Excel anymore? Google Sheets? Um, because it'll stand to you, it'll stand to you through your career. Hey there. This is Alex CRO, lead at UproMedia and I'm here to tell you that if you want to get more conversions for your SaaS business, you need to prioritize conversion rate optimization at uh, Upromedia, CRO is our specialty and we can analyze your website, find areas of improvement and set up a tailored optimization program to get you more conversions. Visit us@appromedia.com CRO to learn more.

Speaker A: Yeah, how do you. So with all that in mind, how do you justify demand generation when it is difficult to measure? I think it's often it's difficult to justify a huge expenditure over a long period of time without that kind of feedback loop. You know, you need to kind of go all in like, okay, we're going to invest in brand. We're not going to see the impact of this for another 12 months to you know, whatever it is. I guess couple of questions like firstly, how do you, how do you approach that? So that's, that's a really big, I mean you've seen some of these big companies like I ClickUp Monday.com everywhere you go. It's full of like top of funnel brand. Actually not all top of funnel brand, but they, they have a lot of uh, output. How do you approach that problem and how do you scale that machine?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, honestly, I think most everything is measurable. It's the degree to which it's directly attributable and the degree to which it's a direct response, meaning you'll see it immediately. So let me explain. Um, a paid search ad. Somebody searches for web design software. Our, uh, ad comes up, they've got high intent, they click on it, they sign up. That was a direct response because it was immediate and it's directly attributable. We are directly able to say, go, click, uh, sign up. Good job. Paid search. That's, that's pretty easy. Now. Yeah, you can get into the whole conversation about attribution and you know, one touch attribution versus multi touch attribution. Honestly, in B2B, I've done this so many times that that argument is so overstated. Typically the number of touches in the patch conversion is pretty low and therefore single touches are fine. One level up would be, um, indirectly, not directly attributable, direct response. So that would be, um, let's say you've got a podcast ad, ah, running where it's got a very clear offer to sign up with some sort of like discount, whatever. You want somebody to take a direct response and it's not directly attributed because it's a podcast ad. You can't see the person click on it, those ones. It is absolutely possible to measure the overall impact of the campaign by doing like whole out, uh, groups. So what you can do is like say, um, let's do a big push in San Francisco. Let's see what happens with our branded search volume or traffic from San Francisco and have to see the overall upgrade that we're seeing from the campaign. And you should be able to see it, um, because it is more of a direct response even though it's not directly attributable to that specific like ad. And therefore the conversation with the CFO is like, hey, here's the overall impact of the campaign. Um, don't ask me which is specific ad, like really drove it. Um, and then the really hard ones are the uh, not directly attributable, not direct response. Right. Uh, so it's something like imagine like your investment in um, like comms. Let's say you have A five person PR team and they're helping get just like build your authority pre ipo, getting you coverage in various places. Like it's extremely long term, very difficult. So therefore it's not direct response, it's not directly attributable, you can't see what it's driving. Those are like the really hard ones and arguably like even TV and those sort of things if you're doing depending upon the message is like in that category as well.

Speaker A: Those are the ones we're here now as well. Shane, you're also on uh, this podcast right now. What's the ROI of this?

Speaker B: What are you doing here? Shane's thing on Oprah Media. But uh, those are the hardest. But like what you want to see there is that uh, over time that you can track things like your branded search traffic and the trend in it. And you do want to see that over time as you're investing those things that, that is starting to increase particularly in uh, yeah like maybe regions that you have a bigger focus in. So that's where really the, the head of uh, you know, finance and the company, you need to like just buy into it as a important part of the strategy and you use a certain amount of judgment in the short term but that is like the distance the hardest to measure. Yeah.

Speaker A: And I guess the second um, piece uh, of that question is with again all that in mind, how do you go to that? You've got the trust of the uh, CFO I think you said. Now how did you in those early days go and communicate that uh, and get buy in for those big budgets from the cfo?

Speaker B: Well the reality is we're on a journey. So companies like webflow invest relatively little in that like top, top bucket today. Webflow, the vast majority that we're investing is in the directly attributed direct response.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker B: Yeah, actually, well because we just have a lot of like brand awareness anyway and there's certain things that we invest like in our community team and those sort of things that are just known as like good investments that are helping to like build a band. But most of our, in fact almost all of our media spend right now is in um, directly triple direct response. Um, and we have spent in the last year I was like job one is to make sure that that spend is extremely great roi. And so we've got to the point where um, we've have the cac. We now at a point where we are at like an eight month payback. So extremely like that's really Strong for a B2B company. And literally, I think it was last week, obviously the CFO and the CEO were going, this is amazing. Is this sustainable? Like what a great job. And I said it's absolutely not sustainable. Um, but they now they trust me, right? I'm like, hey gang, look what we did. Here's how we did. You know, they're like, we trust, right? So the conversation I had was like, this is what we've done. What we've been doing is our brand is like, imagine your brand is a field, right? We've got loads of crops in it. Um, and demand gen is coming in and just like cutting the crops, right? You've got great brand awareness. Demand gen is going to come in and like, um, farm all that love. Uh, and demand. If you, what will happen is if you're just farming your, your, your output in the, you know, in a year is going to be amazing. It's like we spent, we've just spent all of our time cutting all of the, the crops. Hero. And then the next year comes and it's like, oh, we didn't rotate the field. We didn't, yeah, we didn't uh, we didn't put down any fertilizer. Oh my God, the crops aren't growing. And so you, the ROI of your campaign starts to get even, got really, really terrible because now the farmers are going in, you got, you know, 100 farm people trying to cut down crops and there's nothing there because you haven't invested in the brand. So this story that I had, I literally used that analogy with them. I was like, what we're now going to do is we're going to have today the way we measure our CAC as we break it out into what was spent on media and what was spent on the team and I, we are going to have two more categories. The we're going to have our evergreen campaigns, which we have right now. They're high performing, high ROI campaigns that we will continue at like an eight month payback. We're going to agree how much are we willing, ah, to invest in test campaigns where we're okay that they have low ROI for a certain number of months while we test them out to see if we can turn them into evergreen. And the ones that don't, you cancel them. So that'll be part of our CAC or that part of our cac. We're okay it has a bad roi. Um, because the idea is that you're trying to like figure out what ones would work and then the next part of our cap will be Our investment of brand, that's our crop rotation and that set that part of our cac. Again I'm not going to be reporting back on the um LGB to CAC ROI of that spend because it's so hard to measure. But what I will ensure is that our mix of our investment between those different categories ensures that overall we're still in a decent place from an ROI to, from an ROI perspective and that uh, we are able to at least like at the different campaign level, like at a brand level have a conversation about is it driving an uplift. So anyway it's a journey that I've gone on. So like what I would say this is by like early earning your earning the trust. I think had I come in day one and been like hey we gotta start investing in the brand, whatever and they're like looking at the cat going your CAC is up at like 16 months. So and now you want to like just spend you know, millions on this thing that you're telling is not going to be measurable, like go away. So no, what you do is you earn that trust, show that you know what you're doing and then you come and say this is what we're going to do next and that's where we are as a company me right now. And um, so anyway I think the, the macro sort of message um, and lesson is you need to earn the trust of the head of finance and whoever else um, like kind of is in financial decisions at your company so that you have the um, the ability to invest in things that are not as measurable.

Speaker A: I have so many potential follow up questions but I can only, with a limited time, I can only choose, choose uh, one. So I'd be crazy if I didn't ask you how you managed to improve so you doubled the ROI of the campaigns. Uh, how did you do that?

Speaker B: Yeah, it was relatively honestly it was not like rocket science. It was mostly medium mix optimization. Well combination medium mix optimization, conversion rate optimization. So we, I'll talk about conversion rate stuff first because maybe easier. And we reoriented our web team to be much more focused on partnering with the growth team on um, driving results. So like when I joined I think in the first six months or so I don't even know if we did one conversion rate experiment. Now we have so many queued up that we actually we couldn't do any more because we just don't have enough traffic to like get to uh, statsig and so they're just backed up and we're about to launch a massive homepage experiment. We're always do pricing page experiments. It's like landing page experiments. And so our conversion rate has, has, has improved quite significantly. And then on the media side, the first thing was just going like, what is our media mix? And what do we think is driving. We were investing a lot in Facebook, a lot in YouTube and at the time the team were like, oh yeah, it's driving conversions if you look in Facebook or you look in YouTube. But they're of course like, of course, yeah, let's see what happens. Uh, we actually ended up, yeah, basically, you know, which is kind of wild. We went from a place where I think our paid search was about 30 of our investment. Paid surge is now like 95 of our investment.

Speaker A: It's the highest intent channel. Right?

Speaker B: Highest intent, but also the most measurable. And as a result you're able to optimize. If you can't really measure the thing, you can't optimize. It's a bit of a. Let's hope. And then within the paid search that got us kind of half the way there just by like channel mix and then within, then paid search we implemented a, um, uh, so a lot of like heads of the kind of growth or media whatever companies would say, oh, it's a portfolio. So as a result, don't double click and look down at the ROI at the campaign level.

Speaker A: Um, kind of like it's a magic formula where it all fits together.

Speaker B: Like, yeah, wait a second. If I've got a portfolio, if my investment manager says we've got a portfolio of investments m. We're making here, I'm not okay that like half of them are terrible return and half a good return. I'm going to stop doing the terrible return ones. Like um. And so what I'd encourage any head of marketing to do is like, uh, basically like decile your campaigns into what are the top, uh, top 10, 20% all the way down in buckets of ROI. And. And then have a chat with the team, like how much. How many of our campaigns are like in the like above 1 ROI? Or let's say how many are two? That's the goal. 2 x LTB to cap. Right. Evergreen, keep those going. How many are above one? Okay, well we need to optimize those. At least they're not burning. How many are below one and how many are like below like 0.5. And then you need to make sure that the ones that are below one that uh, like they have to be tests you have like you have to have a theory of how you're going to optimize them to be positive. And if you can't over a certain time period, turn it off. And then you have to agree what you're willing to put into those lower ROI ones. And so by doing that we were basically able to um, uh, pretty dramatically improve our ROI while also turning our new customer growth around. So when I, when I joined March of the year I joined our new customer volume grew 4% year over year. This March it grew 34% year over year with a half the CAC. Um, and so that's wild. Like I do think the last year's comp was, was on top of the pandemic pop in March before. So it was a hard comp. So it's a little bit like kind of choosing your stat to make you look good. But we are in marketing, so, um. But yeah, so I think, um, combination of media mix optimization and then conversion rate optimization. The one area that we've not done a good job on yet, which is the next one pick at, is um. You know, when I was at Petty Power, I talked about the three Cs of marketing. There's coverage, meaning like your media mix. Where are you getting coverage? How are you optimizing that? Um, ah, there's clicks. How are you improving the way that people are interacting with your ads and conversions? So we've done a good job on the coverage side like media mix optimization and conversions and landing page conversion, whatever the clicks part, we've not done a great job of like making sure that our creative and ads are really well written or designed incredibly well and those sort of things, such that we improve the number of people that actually engage with the ad to land on the landing page. And so that's the next sort of big opportunity area for us.

Speaker A: Super insightful. One of the, Just to kind of build on this, one of the challenges, one of the mistakes I often see a lot of people make, particularly in paid search giving yours is 95% of um, of the budget, is that they try and exceed the ceiling of what search can deliver. There's obviously a finite amount of harvestable demand and search volume per month. So they reach that whatever, you know, 85, 90%, whatever the magic number is, search, impression, share, and they try to uh, go beyond it and then you exponentially increase uh, your cpa. So I guess the challenge is, yeah, common sense media mix. Let's just try and spend the most money into our top ROI campaigns and then kind of cascade down. Um, I don't know if you've seen that in your own career, uh, people trying to push beyond that, that uh, ceiling.

Speaker B: Yeah, well I think that that's, yeah, as you go the longer tail keywords and everything, intent drops. Right. Like of course you're going to be on web design software, but you do drop intent as you go. Longer tail. I think, um, we've been fortunate enough that we have a pretty solid demand outside the US as well. And so it was a big opportunity for us to start investing in those other countries which meant that there was a lot more sort of crap to sell I suppose. Um, and uh, but it's, it's true to say this is why I had the conversation with the head of our head of finance and SEO, which is like yes, this ROI is sustainable but we're not going to keep growing out above 50 year over year as a company, um, if we're just focused on maintaining an eight month uh, payback period. And so that's where the like investing in these like test campaigns but also the brand is critically important. Like you gotta, you ultimately do need to invest in the brand so that you kind of get in front of a broader audience and you aren't just harvesting existing intent, you're creating intent. So that's, yeah, that's what we need to do next.

Speaker A: One of the things I'm super interested in, a follow up question, maybe it's a selfish question because obviously we're run paid media campaigns but I'm really interested into, um, I always say one of the highest leverage things you can do is obviously with Google Ads is to lean into the automation.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You want to feed the algorithms with the best quality signal you can. So obviously in your case you have a lot of volume which is great because we don't just want to optimize towards someone, you know, entering in for a free trial. They give you email, they're in. We want to go as deep into the customer journey as we can. That's an indication of quality. Right. And obviously you guys, um, I did the onboarding yesterday for, for webflow. You have quite a, uh, an in depth onboarding. Right. It's a complicated product. Talking about building you know, websites here. So how do you balance that kind of basically what signal do you use in Google Ads, uh, that has the highest quality but also has the right volume?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's actually been a journey. And um, when I started we were using um, signup and feeding that into, into the algorithm. Um, yeah, and that was a mistake because to your point there's too many people that might be looking just for like a website and that will click and sign up to webflow going, oh, I can build a website in webflow and go look at it and assume they were a squarespace and they drop in. It's like, whoa, this is a development platform. This is like for professional. And I thought I'll screw that. Um, now we are trying to like figure out a way to create an environment for them that is like more easy to understand but like it's not a core market. So we started, we, we shifted it to first time subscriber meaning activated customer. Somebody's actually swiped credit card and it's pain. And we are fortunate that we have enough volume to feed that in and uh, that actually improves the campaign performance quite, quite a lot. So yeah, we're now, we're now on that. The one that we're now trying is like, I mean in our more major markets we'll be able to do because we have more volume is we broadly speaking have three types of customer segments. We've got in house teams who are like designers ahead of design at a company like webflow. Right. Big opportunity agencies, big opportunity that are a good channel for us. And then what we call like our DIY customers who are like people want a personal site. Me who I just want like shanemr.com just like as a resume site. The DIY customers just aren't really a fit for us. Like relatively poor retention. So even if they come in they kind of turn off. So now what we're trying to do and like today we're feeding first time subscriber data back for all those three so you could have a campaign that's doing a lot of diy. They will still get like Google like oh, we're doing a great job.

Speaker A: Um, because you, because you have to self select that in the onboarding process. Right. So you know that because someone comes in and you ask them. Got it. And then you bucket those off. Got it. That's super smart.

Speaker B: Exactly. Um, and so we're looking at doing one or two things either just feeding the in house team and agency data back to Google or applying a LTV weighting to the different first time subs. So hey Google, you get 100 credit for a Nest team, 75 credit for a agency and like a 10 credit for a DIY because the LTV is like a tenth of the in house team one. So we're, we're kind of like playing with that right now. We're not feeding it back we're manually looking at the split of those for our bigger campaigns and then kind of putting our finger on the, on the scale.

Speaker A: Google is definitely pushing on the um, Target. CPA was the, the best bidding strategy for some time and they've really started pushing on this target uh, Roas. In fact somebody internally on Slack yesterday shared, I think Google, you got to take what Google's numbers with a pinch of salt. But they said uh, on average we see a 16 better ROI with campaigns that run Target Rower. So yeah, I, although I'm not, not necessarily sure I'm buying into the 16, I do think there's a movement towards that. It's more precise. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um, a couple of questions because we're almost at the end of uh, our time together. Um, just on the. You said something before you uh, I'm interested to understand how um, who's the, in kind of a charge of who's kind of the voice of customer internally who does most of the customer research? Because you said, I think you said something like the product team passes that information over to the brand team, then they have to go make a campaign. Who's in charge of like customer research and how is that fed into marketing?

Speaker B: Yeah, so when I started m, my career in consumer marketing was always responsible for the research. B2B. That's a lot of time. Certainly at our scale there isn't a team that is dedicated to like voice uh, of the customer or customer research. Certainly my last two companies, the only team that's uh, existed is the product research team whose job it is to like work directly with the product managers to give them customer insight in order to run their campaigns. And so they tend to, those teams start with a relatively narrow focus on what they're generating insights for. Um, and so in the last two places that we've taken those teams and kind of expanded their remit such that they are uh, responsible for the generation of broader customer insight that the whole company can use like marketing included. And so yeah, so right now like at webflow and this was the same at uh, Intercom, those uh, teams sat within the product or work. And that's not, I don't think you design it that way from scratch given that they're supposed to support broader customer insight and like you might put them in like a more central sort of biz ops team or something like that strategy team. But given um, most companies start the product team need that insight to develop their product. And so it starts in the product team and so Rather than trying to like rework the whole thing, let's just expand the remit. And the reporting lines don't matter that much. So yeah, it's typically the, the product research team that end up being responsible for it. And then, then the PMM team within marketing are supposed to work very, very closely with that to ensure that like PMM team are briefing that team on um, the types of insights that we need from a marketing perspective, which would be a little bit different from a product perspective. Like a lot of the time we need a lot more core motivational research and what's really, really like drives people both functionally and emotionally. So yeah, that's how it's worked. Last two companies have been out.

Speaker A: Thank you. Um, okay, last, last question. Um, recently, uh, kind of personally I've been um, obsessed. Obsessed is a strong word, but been very focused on how can I, uh, work smarter and not harder. So what are the highest leverage things that I can be doing? So beyond just, you know, making sure we're prioritizing the right stuff, we're working on the right thing. Because as a cmo, managing a huge team hyper growth company, like how do you think about that? How do you get the most leverage from your time?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's honestly, it's hard. Um, I think having really clear priorities is like really important and like that's obvious. But um, it's really only later in my career that I realized what that actually means. Now what I do when I plan with my team is everybody sets out their goals and then I choose what I believe are true needle mover projects, or before I call them movement projects. I'm like, these are the projects where I personally want to be involved for what it could be because I have a certain insight or whatever experience around it. And secondly, I think really move the needle for the business. Um, the other projects you all can run with, you don't need my approval. I might steer here, there reactively. But these five projects I want, they're my like personal needle moving projects. And so I think um, that driving for that priority is really, really important so that like both your team understand which projects they should bring you in and so it focuses your time as well. And what I've been doing which has been really effective is on um, those needle moving projects, every two weeks the team have to do a loom update for me and where they record a update, uh, going through what. And if, if it's like I feel like something fast enough or I'm like, oh, I'm you know, sure that we'll then call a meeting where we'll like sit down, live and get into it. So Loom has been an incredible way for me to uh, be more effective as a leader like without needing like standing meetings on every needle moving project like once a week. Um, and then I think the, I think we were talking about this just before we actually hit record. But creating space as a head of marketing for thinking time and writing time is really important. I, when I started my career as a head of marketing boat at AdWord and Intercom, I ended up just in meetings literally from the second I started the work until the end. And so what you end up, end up doing is your whole role ends up being reacting real time to information the people in your team are giving you. So you sit in the meeting, you go, hey, hey Shane, I've got a uh, proposal on pricing and packaging as a new product. Okay, here's it is what you think and you have five minutes to make a decision that's not going to be a quality decision. Your job is to improve the quality of your decisions. If you did that by 10% it's hugely beneficial. So one of the things that I've done to improve that is two things. One is pre read. So getting them to send me looms beforehand so that I can at least 24 hours before watch it for my thoughts. And then when we get in the meeting first we need a shorter meeting but I can be way more effective and then just generally making sure that I have time in the day for thinking. And luckily I'm on the east coast so I in my morning time is like pretty effective there so that I can write down my thoughts and send it back really thoughtfully. Um, and so yeah, I think that that's like the big thing is like really being prioritized, making sure that you're getting pre reads so that you can really soak it in and have like thoughtful response and then just thinking writing time, like critical.

Speaker A: Well incredible advice. You've also made me feel a little bit better because we also um, recently introduced um, loom videos. So for example our okrs, we uh, every two weeks we do a loom video just because it's so much easier to, because one it focuses the person to really think about what they're going to say and then they might start again and then they can chop it and they can edit it and then secondly you can watch it on your own time uh, which is hugely beneficial so you're not being reactive like you said and you can respond in your own time, you can do it in a much more thoughtful way. So I'm all game for anything that chops down meetings and being reactive. So, um, yeah, you made 2x.

Speaker B: 2x is the most important 2x.

Speaker A: So true. So true. Um, Shane, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate. This is. This has been awesome. Where can people find you if, uh, they so wish to.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm on Twitter. Shane Murphy is my handle with an F in the Murphy M U R F Y. It's a bit weird, but Murphy mistaken. Uh, so Twitter's probably best, you know.

Speaker A: Yeah. Good stuff. All right, Shane, thanks so much for your time and, uh, speak soon.

Speaker B: Cheers, Todd. Talk to you soon, mate.

Speaker A: Thank you, man. Thanks for tuning in, guys. I really hope you enjoyed today's episode. The links to any of the resources, or if you'd like to be a guest on the podcast, head over to uproarmedia.com.