Using Growth Marketing & GenAI to Generate 10K+ Leads a Month! | Marketing Nation Podcast E4

Speaker A: So let me ask a controversial question there. Uh, if you give 100 MQLs, how

Speaker B: much will be unqualified percent which is of them is gone out of the bucket.

Speaker A: I have a guest who is not just a guest, is a very close friend. He was with freshworks before and previously used to be with Google. You are also a co founder of high performer AI and the investor said,

Speaker B: what if I gave you 100k more per month? How much more revenue can you bring in?

Speaker A: I can already guess who they are.

Speaker B: If you have to sell something to someone, who do you reach out to? That's primary. If I start spending money on the top of them to start educating, then I'm probably losing dollars. When the TAM is already there, you start right in the middle funnel, the lower funnel. Uh, take videos for example, right where Sora AI is the uh, text to video. Play around with it, see what works.

Speaker A: Then if everybody is going to write similar content, similar, that's a very good

Speaker B: point that you're bringing. It's not similar content. The end of the day it's about engineering that prompt, the right prompt, what belongs to you. I think from a content perspective you have to embrace the gen AI on what it does.

Speaker A: Hey Ramesh, I have a question.

Speaker B: Yeah, shoot.

Speaker A: So are you using chatgpt like every day now?

Speaker B: Of course.

Speaker A: Uh, what's your take on ChatGPT?

Speaker B: I think it's here to live. Uh, ChatGPT is uh, there to make every person's life much more easier and uh, it plays a part in every bit of work that any person is doing. Uh, it enables you to write content, it enables you to write an email, it enables you to write, uh, if you want to put a good post. Uh, I think ChatGPT is here to stay. And with what GPT OpenAI is actually doing is fantastic. You're able to create bots. And I think ChatGPT is here to stay. Uh, if we do not uh, embrace it, then we'll uh, probably fall out. But you don't think so, Arun, why do you ask that question?

Speaker A: No, a lot of people are saying that ChatGPT will replace uh, content marketers. A lot of people are saying it's going to take away a lot of folks job. But my opinion is it will not take away anybody's job. It will only make people smarter, uh, or do work efficiently. Uh, it's like saying we uh, don't need a content writer anymore. That's like saying we don't need an SEO expert anymore.

Speaker B: So listen uh, to this right so when ChatGPT came in, everyone said, the jobs are gone. You know when everyone said AI, with the advent of AI, all of life, uh, is gone and you don't need. And everyone started fearing ChatGPT. Here's a big monster that's coming your way and it's going to eat you up. Then we realized that humans are getting better control of this monster because the monster starts hallucinating after some time, uh, so it's giving out wrong things and whatever. Then you realize that you have control on it only when the prompt is right. So the control is still with you. When OpenAI launched the text to video, everyone is, everyone is like, what a place to live. What a time to live in this earth when you are able to convert text to video. So ChatGPT is here to stay. It's upon humans to, uh, make use of it. It's about humans to say how you control this monster based on what you like. Uh, and it used in SEO, of course. SEO. SEO is a big portion of why everyone had tools to say, is this charge GB written content or is it genuine content now? Uh, who cares as long as Google kind of understands, right?

Speaker A: ChatGPT is not going to replace an SEO Expert, so is ChatGPT is not going to replace a content marketer. This is what you're going to hear in this podcast today. Welcome to Marketing Nation, Saasbumi's podcast. And I have a guest who is not just a guest, is a very close friend. I've had the opportunity to work with him very closely in my career and we've been in the other side of the coin. Like he handled growth marketing and I was handling the product and cop marketing. So, uh, I'm really, really, uh, at pleasure to welcome Ramesh Ravishankar. Quickly to introduce Ramesh. He was with freshworks before and previously he used to be with Google and had an opportunity to work with him. Hi Ramesh. Welcome to SaaS Boom.

Speaker B: Hey, Arvind. Wow, that is quite an introduction.

Speaker A: Uh, indeed.

Speaker B: Uh, thank you for having me. Uh, obviously, you know, uh, this is a great place and it's really fantastic that we also get on a podcast together to do this.

Speaker A: So firstly, I want to also congratulate you for uh, starting up and joining the other side of the, uh, force. Uh, you are also the co founder of High Performer at AI. So how is the journey? Uh, let me just start with how does it feel to start up?

Speaker B: I mean there's inspiration all across right across the road next to my residence. So there can't be a better place, better time than say okay let's do it. So it's been six months since we've started High Performer AI and uh we are helping companies build their social profile, social presence. Uh uh that's what we're doing. Eventually we will be a uh social CRM. While that keep that apart. I think life is great. So here we are. I uh mean I'm a first time founder, I'm a first time entrepreneur and it's really fulfilling because you are doing something that you really believe in and which is going to make a change in others lives. Uh and what a cause. There can't be a better time for me to do this and I'm thankful to all teams around me so the feeling is great right?

Speaker A: Good luck with your journey. Uh but I have a question which basically uh, I want to ask you this like every time we start a uh company like when I started Zargate and then Superops or when we launch a product in FreshBooks or Zoho, we always start with okay will this fit in our GTM engine? Like will this product or should we create a new GTM engine for it? Is it going to be inbound, is it going to be outbound, is it going to be SMB mid market? There are so many questions right? So the question is two folds. One is hey did you do this research for high performer AI and what kind of marketing engine or GTM engine you think will be suitable for high uh performer and what do you recommend for companies startups out there on how they should research uh before starting up on what GTM engine will fit their product?

Speaker B: Well great question Arvind. So high performer AI was born in July of 2023. Uh it started with some initial research and as any entrepreneur uh you start a certain way, you figure out more, you talk to more people, you refine your thoughts and then you decide on the part that you want to take. I'm sure that's the same case for everyone that we did. Um so I don't know because we just kickstarting our gtm we got to see what works and what not works to be very honest. But as far as our research goes uh Arvind what we did is hey how big is the tap right? That's the basic uh how big is the tap? How much are we going to look at it now when we think, when we do the research on figuring out is social presence. Now why did we embark on this? The reason is Gen Z is uh probably taking over Gen Z'S uh, are probably going to be the next level, you know, next wave of marketers. Gen Z is going to be the next uh, set of salespeople. And uh, they hang out more on social media than in the real world. Right. That's just going by the highest level of uh, research. Uh, what then happens is we realized that everyone needs a good bio. So what we did is we launched uh, Bio Generator as a free tool. It just blew out of like beyond what we thought. It just blew out of proportion and everyone started using it. And then while we were doing this research we realized that here is the time for us uh, to build something on social. And that's why we've embarked on this journey of building uh, AI social CRM. So we are going to embark on a PLG kind of selling which is very, very B2C. It's going to spread its wings uh, across multiple distribution channels. Uh, we will throw uh, our web is going to be our storefront. We uh, want to get everyone into the web. How we do it is something that we can talk about. I've done this earlier. Uh, so that's going to be the way. The factor that it also involves is how much is the customer going to pay for a product if it's at a higher rate, you know, let's say it costs about $10,000 a month, then you're not, you cannot sell it the B2C way.

Speaker A: I need to break it down for that Ramesh. I need to break it down for the audience here.

Speaker B: Uh, awesome. Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker A: Right. So you basically spoke about the ICP first about what kind of people might use, uh, and then you spoke about the tap, basically what is the addressable market. And then you spoke about hey, how can I efficiently generate and reach out to them. And you spoke about a free tool. Okay. The free tool is what is going to help you with product LED growth. So that's what you are basically breaking it down. And this audience, like you basically went after a market where your investment is building the product and the product is going to give you the leads. Like for me just to compare the similar kind of Sonus. Yeah, I did my research of my minus a niche market. Uh, it's been there for a very long time. It's a 30 year old market. The same. I did the ICT analysis and then I figured out that there is a lot of search volume and basically chose AdWords and Organic Legend. So that's a paid channel. What you basically did is so for the audience here is ICP TAM analysis, what kind of GTM motion, Whether it's inbound, outbound. So in this case for Amesh it was product led growth. Previously when probably we were in freshworks, it would have been a different channel altogether to start. Correct. So I think that exercise is very, very important to understand uh, uh, before creating a GTA motion as the first step is icp. So that I think uh, I want to double click on that. So like how do you recommend people to start with your ICP analysis?

Speaker B: First of all I want to give you the brownie points on summarizing the points.

Speaker A: Very well.

Speaker B: So well done Aravind. Uh, on analyzing the icp. Right. Uh, I think we all go with the fact that if you have to sell something to someone, who do you reach out to? That's primary question. Hey, am I speaking to the right person? Uh, is there a fit? Uh, is the person the decision maker? We know all of this at the back of our heads when we start. You can't sell a uh, developer tool uh, to a marketing person. Even if the marketing has budget. Just because the marketing has budget, you can't go. That's basic 101. So in our case uh, as a high performer, who's going to buy this? It is the marketing person. Now is it a product that requires uh, CMOS authority level maybe for individuals and companies? It may not be for individuals who come in but as you go up market the budget kind of increases and you go ahead and spend that money. Similarly, let's take a step back at what I probably used to do at freshworks. At freshworks we were selling Help Desk software, right? We started selling IT Help Desk and then we started selling uh, sales. If you see it is very clear it's the IT buyer, right? Initially it could be the VP of IT or uh, you know, anyone who's uh, and even an influencer inside the IT team. It could be an IT admin who says my job gets easier if I'm able to raise uh, a ticket for something that's not working internally. But if you take help this software, the, the icp. I mean I'm breaking the ICP down to a designation level to kind of understand who do you go to. So you will go to a uh, VP of Customer Service or you will go to the, the influencer could be customer, uh, associate because you're helping them, you're helping them try the product and see does this product help me solve my problem? So you go after them. And this involves distribution strategies per se. How do you reach out to this person, influencer, uh, uh, to come and come to the website, sign up for the product. Then the influencer will probably go to the uh, VP or support or manager and say hey, hey. FreshTest is helps, just helps me because I'm able to get a ticket done and the customers can help. And it reaches me very easily in a very, very simple rudimentary problem that you're solving. It could be boring, but it's a rudimentary problem that you're solving.

Speaker A: For highperformer AI basically you decide that uh, IICP as marketers and uh, you know that uh, you don't want to spend on uh, revenue uh like dollars to acquire the customers. So you chose product LED code. So I want to listen more on that. Uh, so what does that free tool do? Like how did you decide to build that free tool and uh, what was the initial response and how did you launch that?

Speaker B: People were not comfortable writing their bio generally, right? Everyone looks at Elon Musk. But what is it that Elon Musk has? He has a bio that people want to associate themselves. So their problem was how do I put so much that I'm doing in such little space. Then we started breaking that down by people in the lower order as well. So sales guys, what's a good bio that people will come to my, to my profile and then click to click to High Performer or freshworks or Super Ops, whatever. Because at the end of the day the bio gives you the ability to have a link that people can go to your profile and that goes to your website. That was the analysis. We had a uh, tool, a very simple free tool to kind of give inputs which says developer. You could just say I'm a front end developer. I am a backend developer. See engineers are a breed in this. They were, they're not comfortable putting it out on what they want. So let's help them. We made it very example. We just said dump in keywords and we'll get you a bio. And that worked really well. That was literally worked like magic. It we put it on product hunt. We were the number one product of the day. Uh, so that's the. And then we decided to say okay now social is something that uh, people want to be on to make them get better. Their social presence should be much higher here. Uh, and that's it, that's personal to everyone and that's why we embarked on this uh, journey.

Speaker A: So um, let me uh, take you a little bit back to our journey of freshworks and we had this opportunity of uh, uh, joining and working in freshworks in different stages of the company. I think you joined little earlier. You have seen freshworks at the early stage where it was only uh inbound SMB, uh Motion was one in place. And then uh, we started mid uh market engine and then went into outbound. I just want to go through this journey when and how a company should look at Inbound motion versus Outbound motion or do both, uh, from your journey, seeing from early to uh scale.

Speaker B: It's a long story but I'll try and see how precisely I can uh, uh, kind of make this up. Right. So I think uh, Girish is just a visionary first uh, because he did. He had the products absolutely in line. Uh, where he clearly thought of the product which is, which has a large stamp in itself. A huge stamp. Just take Fresh Desk alone. In itself standing alone. It's a m. Customer support is critical to any business. Right? The only difference is if any business is successful they could be looking at Excel Sheet as their first line of. And then they move from Excel Sheet to a tool. What people wanted is a uh, Help Desk software. And Girish embarked on this and all is this, this is a brainchild, right? And he said uh, people are searching for it online, right? If you take Help Desk, Help Desk software and now think of kind of building uh keywords around it. Now there is just Help Desk which is the category and then there is a competition and then there is your brand. So brand like I'm just going to talk the AdWords way for a second for all of you to know. If I were to go, if I'm a startup and start spending money on my own brand, nothing is going to come out of it because no one is searching for your brand. So keep brand out of the way. What still has volume is the category as a keyword and the competition as a keyword which means Fresh test may not have an instant uh, volume of keywords that people are searching on. But helpless software will have, right? Support software will have customer support software are ah the keywords there. So this has huge volume. Think of it as a funnel, uh Arvind. So right at the top of the funnel people have no idea that such a software exists. You have a different strategy for that where you have to, it's more educational. Do you need a Help Desk software? And here is where I think uh, uh FreshTest played a fantastic role in building up that content repository which came on your um, website. So it was all about content marketing. Everything that went, you know What's a secret sauce, uh, for a good customer support, right? Those are the high top level, uh, content that we wrote out and you know, people came and read it and got to understand that, oh, if I need to do better customer support, I need a better customer support software. That's very educational in nature. Now people, the commercial intent to go and buy a software there is very, very minimal. But you're educating them. Next part, the mid part of the funnel is hey, I have a business, I'm growing, my business is growing, lot of customers are coming. Could be one case or, uh, I'm using an incumbent software and I am unhappy with it, which means I could have a commercial intent to switch, either switch or buy the software. I'm tempted, right? I'm leasing the threshold and my free tools are exhausting. I cannot do with them anymore or I'm unhappy with something else that's already going on. That's a separate. So you have to target them differently. The final I need to buy a software right now is the third bucket right at the bottom of the funnel. Um, people already know about what a hell best software is. They're already using one. I need to buy one right now. So FreshTest in its initial days was looking at the mid funnel and the lower funnel in terms of market targeting with some commercial intent. That's what we wanted. We wanted to build our revenues faster. Uh, and with people we went behind people with commercial intent not to educate anyone. Because the TAM is so big. If I start spending money on the top of them to start educating, then I'm probably losing dollars. When the TAM is already there, you start right in the mid funnel and the lower funnel. And that's how we started. Lucky was uh, fresh test. Lucky was girish to get funding really early on. He understood the game. There was a large market already, so AdWords worked like a charm. Um, it was rather cheaper as well. You know, 13 years back, uh, when he started CPCS, um, were much lesser than the competition. SaaS was new, so a lot of these played advantage to that kind of a marketing. And um, you know, we just blew

Speaker A: it out of the park. Literally.

Speaker B: Right? Every sales guy would get more than 600 leads in a month.

Speaker A: Unheard of.

Speaker B: Too much of a.

Speaker A: Those are the days like where AdWords was cheaper. Payback, uh, was much efficient. Uh, conversion rate was much easier. Like we don't have to do consultative selling for SMB. Low tech sales was much more uh, easier to close. But today, even for a uh, deal which is less than 5k CB VR. Forced to do little bit of consultative selling because that's how the, uh, market has evolved.

Speaker B: The choice as well. Arvind, there is choice in the market, right? You have to kind of edge yourself over the others. And I think Fresh Tours also did that. So their magic was customer support in itself. Like, uh, you know, the. So that also really helped, uh, early

Speaker A: days, AdWords was really, really efficient. Where we invest in, uh, uh, in AdWords, we get volume of leads and sales, thus low touch sales, and we will be able to close. I think it was less than like 20 days. Uh, life cycle.

Speaker B: Much lesser, much lesser.

Speaker A: Now, same product, right? Same fresh disk. We did outbound time taken to close a deal, uh, to conversion in, uh, mid market was much higher. We didn't invest in ad hords. Uh, Persona and target audience was much completely different. And it was a different beast altogether.

Speaker B: Yeah, the idea was probably sown in 201718 when we rebranded FreshTest to FreshWorks. Um, the whole idea of increasing our revenues stemmed from that. And then freshworks was then a double engine model. One of the first in the industry to have both an SMB engine. The whole idea of having an SMB engine and an enterprise mid M market, enterprise engine was temp. Then before we go to that, uh, I want to talk about an interesting, uh, thing, uh, event that happened. Right? So us, uh, was just killing it. Like the US Market, the teams were like, this is the inbound engine. Inbound. In the inbound engine, right? Revenues were like, really doing well. Uh, and then there is one of the investors came in. They called me directly, uh, and said, uh, Ramesh, we need to double down on us. What do we do? And like, there's already pressure. I mean, sales guys are already getting 600, maybe 500 leads by then. And how much more do you want? Because think of the demand and supply. There is such a big supply there. And, um, these, you know, there are only limited folks. We can't scale. And the investor said, what if I gave you 100k more per month just on us. How much more revenue can you bring in?

Speaker A: I can already guess who they.

Speaker B: Right, Okay.

Speaker A: I think we reduced the number of leads per AE from 500 to 155. Right?

Speaker B: 200 leads. Yeah.

Speaker A: 200 leads. Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. That changed a lot. Much needed, much needed. Efficiency was much better. Uh, just to put in when I say into perspective for the inbound engine, uh, they were already closing at a fantastic rate. And then you start when your company is growing, right? You're starting to look, uh, between the cracks, what's falling in between, what's closing automatically, what's a self closure, what's a sales disclosure, all of those, uh, we had a fantastic closure rate of 10% from raw lead itself. So think these are all magical things that are happening. 10% closure rate. So 100 leads, 10 customers are there for you, uh, paying so ready to swipe their cards based on that.

Speaker A: We are in the IT world Ramesh. We have better conversion rates than customer support. Uh, I'll add up one more question to this. I'm sure there are some meetings which I have been uh, part of where uh, sales and uh, growth team, uh, on the quality of leads. I want you to little bit explain how you defined an SQL, how you defined an mql. And also there was a lot of uh, discussion uh, about how sales and qualified lead and there was a lot of discussion if we remember, I think for the audience here, I think we need to take like that on how we actually decided that back in the day.

Speaker B: Okay Lord, uh, if you're going to bring all those meetings into the next two minute conversation, it's going to be tough. But let me try. So first of all understand that uh, every sales guys need leads and it's the job of the marketing to support that, right? If the sales guys comes back and says uh, I'm very happy with the leads, thank you very much, I don't need any more leads. Which means the marketing guy does not have a job. It's as simple as that. Let's just be very straight. So it's a good thing uh, for all of you who think that sales guys are bugging me with leads, the quality of the leads, those are very, very good pointers. It's, it means that they are hungry to close more sales because what you are doing is actually working. Now having said that, it came with a lot of challenges. The moment you are getting 300 leads, right? It's the responsibility of the salesperson also to go and close that many accounts, right? So uh, you would hear back from them saying hey, the quality was not great. I couldn't close this month because you gave me crappy leads. It's all part of, because when you are going at that breakneck speed, you are bound to slip up in terms of the quality of lead. You know, you know we would have put it on the Google display network. A student would have gotten. And these are live examples, right? A student signs up, uh, doesn't know what's happening. Sometimes you put it, your, your ad shows up on A movie ticketing site. Because ticketing, movie ticketing, you know, that kind of happened. And then they come up and sign up thinking that you'll get a free movie ticket because it says three months free. All of this happened. Right? Um, so how do you control it? One control is on the marketing side of things. When you are, when you, as a leader, you have to say, yes, quality is an issue. We can't let money, uh, bleed, so let's target them better. And of course there are many optimization techniques that every marketer will know. On the sales side of things, um, we had to put in a lot of these checks and balances to qualify define the quality of a lead. Because you had the version, you had the luxury of getting 300 leads, uh, per sales rep. Um, you had to kind of think about in saying, hey, what's, is it a duplicate lead, which means a lead that is already in the CRM, or is it a fresh lead, uh, you spoke about, hey, is it uh, uh, arvindickymouse.com or is it arvinuperops.com right now with the company name means it's a valid email. Um, if you sign in. Our own CRM had this nice, uh, feature where it connected and you could see the LinkedIn profile, even if it's a Gmail. Now is the person a valid person? We had to put these checks and balances in place. What we also did is because you can't do it for, uh, whatever x 10,000, 20,000 leads that are coming in a month, you have to invest in a, uh, lead scoring model. Now the problem with the lead scoring model is it's built outside of your system.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: That's a generic model. It cannot be customized to, so we can only take one part of it which is fit. You cannot take the intent part in a lead scoring model. A lead scoring model will not tell you if Arvind is ready to buy, uh, software right now, but it will tell you if Arvind is an original actual person. If Arvind exists, that's all it can say. Um, and it and every lead scoring model came up with their own, you, uh, know 200 parameters that I'm putting into it. It's a machine learning, um, it's AI driven and all of that. It also depends on what stage you are to go and get this done. We had, uh, infer, which was integrating with Salesforce. Then we had Matchpudu. Uh, and then there's a lot of things, a lot of these people came online.

Speaker A: So let me ask a Controversial question there. Like uh, if uh, you give hundred MQLs, how much will become an SQL out of 100 leads, how much will be unqualified?

Speaker B: Yeah, first if you say raw to MQL, you are anyway losing out about.

Speaker A: So RAW is uh, your Gmail leads also can be considered as raw, is

Speaker B: it not considered whatever the rules of engagement that says between your marketing and sales team. Let's assume you get 100 leads, uh 60% which is 60 of them is gone out of the bucket because it doesn't qualify.

Speaker A: So when you're saying SQL it's a deal.

Speaker B: Raleigh to MQL from MQL to SQL. From that remaining 40 you get 20. From that you will get uh about uh 30% of it would have a conversation. The moment you have a conversation its value that has been created as deal

Speaker A: and then it consoles. So you're saying when you said 10% conversion rate is it from SQL or MQL?

Speaker B: Oh, from the RAW lead actually.

Speaker A: RAW lead. That's uh, brilliant. Yeah, yeah, awesome.

Speaker B: So that's why, I mean that's what I said right? Like we had the end. You know you should uh, all kudos to also the product because the product was built in a way where you came in free. You try and this is again one uh, very new in India at least like a company from India could afford to do this. Uh, you could uh, have a product, give them a trial for 21 days. You get them hooked on if they really want to buy. You have a salesperson talking to them and say help them uh, onboard the software and your sale is done. You don't even have to explain what it does. That's the beauty of this entire inbound system. As easy as it sounds, Arvind, there are a lot of moving parts. I can just spend about a minute or two on this to say what the moving parts are. First from a marketing standpoint, do you have your distribution channels in place? Do you have a website that actually talks about it? Do you have the mechanism to get the traffic into the website? All of them should be legitimate uh, sources. Right. You just can't go anywhere and say I'm fresh desk or I'm super, ah, obstacular. That's point number one. The second point to get that in place is the product. Does the product allow you easy entry into it that you sign up and you should enter?

Speaker A: That's a genius.

Speaker B: Again genius move where you do not ask too many questions. Where do you belong? What do you do? Are you icp? Which geography you should be able to decipher all that, uh, with a third party kind of uh, plugged into uh, the system. After that. Are they using the product? The product usage is very important. Do you nudge them? Which means you have to send emails. Email marketing plays a major role at various points. You send an email marketing day one, day zero, day one, day three, day eight, day 10, day 15.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And that is preparing. That's another important piece. You'll nudge them to use the product when you see that the product is being used, that the sales guy have enough ammunition to get that intelligence from a CRM to call them or reach out to them. Hey, I'm um, so and so I've been seeing that you're using, I've seen, been seeing it's on and off. Can I help you in any ways? Sales assist, again, it's not a hard sell because they already know what the product is. Yes, I'm doing something. Then pre sales probably comes into place and say hey, can I integrate with my existing software? This is what I'm doing. Or migration for that matter plays an important role. And finally even the billing and support make such an important difference because they're able to swipe a card. You better ensure that the card is swiped and the money comes. If that's not happening, that could even be break it. So if you see this whole assembly line, it needs to be in a place for you to actually be successful in sales. And that's the beauty of this entire inbound engine. And imagine doing that at scale for greater than 50,000, 70,000 leads.

Speaker A: And uh, you also were, if I remember right, organic, uh, lead gen was one of the biggest pillars for freshworld. Uh especially the quality of leads and the conversion rate were also better for uh, organic than paid. I just want to talk uh, to you a little bit more about uh, how at the scale, like we are talking about the scale, a company which is right now at 500 million, like when we were uh, handling it was at a 200 to 300 million uh, journey. Like it would be good to talk about uh, Organic Legion little bit at the scale and things which you can share to the audience like, which helped uh, the growth of uh, freshworks at the time.

Speaker B: Organic Legion right now is more important than paid at this juncture for every company because not all companies get as lucky as fresh. Test point 1. Not all companies have uh, the uh, you know, the money power to go and go and spend an experiment. Right. So things are, times have changed. Uh, so my advice to every Company, every founder is please do focus on Organic Legion. It may not yield results instantly, it will take time, but it's always beneficial. Having said that, I want to go back and revisit the point that I spoke about. Right. Initially when you start you starting in when I say organic, uh, when Arvind says organic and paid all he means search. In particular when people are searching for the category, it's very easy. When people are searching for a brand, they clearly know what they want. Right? Fresh test, super apps, high performer, they know the brand. You have to ensure that your brand, the cost of acquiring a lead with your brand kind of keyword is the lowest.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Brand. Why is it so why is brand such a beautiful thing? It converts at 30% Raleigh. It costs 1 tenth of your uh, uh, you know, non brand lead. So the question is why can't everyone just invest and spend on their brand? It's not as easy because no one knows your brand. So when you to your point ar when the company is about 200 million or 300 even 100 million for the matter, it knows everyone, it means that your brand is well known, reasonably right. There is no end to it. Other brand metrics we talk about, that's the time when brand takes over. That's point one. Uh and then the website should just talk that language brand and everything to the other point Organic search just converts very well. It converts at probably uh, 20% if not 30%. Because when people are reading you have articles. Now again I'm going to put this through the funnel of organic content that is very educational in nature which means you don't expect them to read. But at some point in time when you are reading articles, when you are putting it out, it's at the back of your head. So sometimes you know, okay, let me see. It's now Organic Legion doesn't mean you just keep talking helpless precious. Helpless precious. You're talking about Girish. You're talking about you know how uh, this person is helping the SaaS in India. You're talking about uh, the product marketing. What does the product do? You're talking about interesting updates. You're talking about webinar that you've been doing. All of that content goes into now you can't pay money then promote this as much because it's not going to give you yield. Uh so you make it rank and that's a long haul process. It's a six month journey to uh, say what kind of content and how will it rank? And that's a separate team in itself. Which talks about volume of leads versus difficulty of leads. Right. Help desk as a keyword will have huge volume, high difficulty. So it's impossible literally for any newcomer to say, I want to rank it in the top three. There's no way you can do it. It has to wait. You have to wait it out. But you need to keep refreshing. You have to write about all the keywords that's on the even the periphery of a help desk that you may have to look. When we started with the inbound lead, gen paid was at a good 70, 80% and non paid was just contributing 20 over a period of time. At this point of the last that I know I was at Freshwerk, uh, non paid has overtaken paid, uh, signups, which means that it's a power.

Speaker A: I think we were 50, 50, I think I remember, uh, we were talking about 50 paid. And that's a great number. We are not paid as, uh, absolutely right.

Speaker B: Because I mean the company has grown. It's a public company. It takes time. But we must remember it's taken 12 years for Freshworks to get there and it's just scratching the surface. Right. Think of companies like Google, Adobe Salesforce, their investment on speed is high, but their HubSpot, they're even higher.

Speaker A: So I have a tactical question. Um, so global brand, global organic is one thing or global search volume itself is one thing. Uh, like each territory will have a different kind of lead target. US might need 3000 leads, but for the team or Europe, uh, might need 2,000 and uh, Australia might need just thousand. Right. But the search volume would be lesser compared to us to Australia and everything. But you probably need to have different tactics, uh, to address each market. So is there any tips and tricks for the folks, uh, out here other than adverse, like what did you do to make sure that you get that kind of volume?

Speaker B: There are quite a few things that we need to understand the market now. Um, basically from a target setting perspective. You cannot have us, uh, target just because the geography is big and India target the same. You cannot have a Europe and Australia target as the same. That target setting is one piece of it. Now once assuming with common sense prevailing the size of the market, knowing you know the TAM in every place, you boil it down to the number that needs to be achieved at the end of every year. You break that down into leads back of the envelope or you have a systematic method of conversion rate. That's a calculation, ah, that goes, you come to X number of leads that is needed for X journey. This will significantly be Higher. Let's say the company is growing at 50% year over year. The number of leads that you need for every region will be 50% more. Let's just keep it at that from the previous year. Now how do you go about doing it? Um, like sales, you start narrowing down the targeting, right? If it is US first step in the first year, uh, uh, of operation, of breaking down, you break it down by US West, US east. There's because the marketers, you have to do that even for the marketers. Hey, you are in charge of generating leads for US West. You are in charge for generating leads for Mark. So you do not have the same person do it. Only then we will know in US west, beyond New York, hey, uh, beyond California, what else are the states, uh, that are generating leads. You have to get into the depth which city, which territory is where we're getting. This is easy for the US because it's only English. The problem goes multifold when you go to a region like Europe. When you go to Europe, uh, The language is 50, 50 English and non English. Some regions it's more skewed towards the local languages. You have to look at local language. You have to look at the city level. And that's how you drill down to every piece.

Speaker A: Personalization also has to be done for each uh, market and each. And that's a good point.

Speaker B: Yes. Uh, let me give you an example. Funny incident that happened was, I think it was Portuguese, uh, the website, the Spanish website which had Portuguese. Um, freshdisk had a line which says three agents free. Uh, we put that out, we put Google. You have to hustle in a startup, right? So you just use Google Translate, Translate it and then it goes live it. The copy read as in the local language in Portuguese. Three convicts were freed. When you say agent, it was when you use Google Translate. So what I'm trying to say is uh, these are rookie errors but in a hassle mode it's fine. But you have to use the right transliteration and it's just not about translation. So these are the challenges that again come that you have to be uh, very wary.

Speaker A: I remember that campaign. So, uh, I have this one last question, but we just written little detail and I'm thinking every department uh, in the world is going through this transition. Especially we live in the Gen AI ChatGPT world. How do you think this marketing in SaaS industry gonna change with these new trends? Gen AI and ChatGPT and like what should they be looking out for? Where should they invest? How should we hire how should they adopt? Like it's a broad question but like from your uh, experience like what would you advise all the marketers out there?

Speaker B: I think um, that's a very nice coming back to where we started. Right. So um, few things over here chat GPT in this AI gen AI kind of era, I think it's all about speed. You can get a lot more done. It doesn't mean you get a lot more done with lot less people. That's not what I'm getting to.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: You can get a lot more done. How do we leverage this? Which means um, what you would take as a roadmap to write 10 articles, you should use the same number of people to write 30 or 50 articles. Right. That's for a content um. When you are a content marketer writing top of the funnel content, you can't be obsessed with language and say this is my style of writing. I write a very journalism kind of way. This is a copy. It's not needed because you have chat GPT. If something is not working you can just tell uh GPT that hey it's not working. Can you give me alternatives? You don't have to sit and brood your time on that saying uh, we have to get it better and I will take time. No. So content marketer it definitely helps in the era of it's predominantly content that it will help uh founders. Uh when you're looking for you know back in the day when you're putting out a website messaging these are. It has to be quick. You can't say you can't you. There's no need for research now to say this is what our customers want and let's try and work on this messaging. You can put it. If you're a sub million dollar company, uh, it's very fast. Just keep experimenting. You don't have to use your brains. There is a GPT you tell it even number of characters it it gives you. So that's uh another way to you can iterate much faster than you probably did earlier. That's again help in the content marketing system. In the ad world every, you know probably Google I've not gone into the system it will even start start suggesting you what ads to do. So don't break your head Dan on saying this is the right ad. Uh so a lot of times content is very subjective. What I like is what you may not like, what you may not like. But if there's performance let's go with it. Right. If there is, if there is a punctuation or if There is a preposition that is missing. Go ahead with it, don't worry about it. So I think from a content perspective you have to embrace uh the uh gen AI on what it does. Uh, take videos for example right where sonar AI is the uh text to video. Play around with it, see what works, write long form content uh using GPT. Go ahead, put it out. Let's see. Who are we to judge if the quality is uh, GPT focused And Google will decide that.

Speaker A: So the last controversial question to you, uh, because you mentioned Google, do you think Google Bot is going to penalize people using ChatGPT in future?

Speaker B: Uh, so far it hasn't.

Speaker A: Uh, because if everybody is going to write similar content, similar this one how will.

Speaker B: That's a good point. Okay, yeah that's a very good point that you're bringing. It's not similar content Arvind, right at the end of the day uh, it's about engineering the prompt, the right prompt, what belongs to you, you know your Persona the best. So the output, you still have control over the output. So the prompt engineering there is very very very very important. It's not going to be similar content at all. First of all second, even if uh, Google doesn't, like I said we are in this cusp in this time where there's a transition happening where Google is important but it's not the ultimate source anymore. There are social media networks that are really taking over. Like people are discussing active topics on Reddit, on Facebook. Uh so don't leave those channels out. Uh, so these are channels that are becoming Google. People are using more to find you know if you take the Gen Z, the restaurants nearby but the actual discussion deep dive topics are happening on LinkedIn. You put up a post, have your uh, say you will have people uh discussing that that's your own original content. Well right, you're not using ChatGPT to reply, you're using your own.

Speaker A: That's exactly what I would say. Like the content person, even if they're going to use ChatGPT or the Marketer who's going to do long form, short form, all these kind of content, uh, it's very important they go little deeper and research and write a prompt uh to write a Twitter. If you're going to do surface level content it's not going to be recognized and it'll be very very interesting how this rules of engagement is going to change once Google bottom uh are going to come up with uh, what works and what doesn't work. I think it's going to change the way we think about SEO, think about marketing, and completely on Organic Legend, and so on. Awesome. Ramesh, been a pleasure talking to you as always. And, uh, thank you for, uh, joining us in the Marketing Nation Sasbury podcast. And, uh, good luck with your new Journey High performer, AI and subscribers. Please hit like, share and subscribe to, uh, our, uh, podcast. And thank you once again.

Speaker B: Uh, don't forget to hit on the bell icon. You missed that. All right, great.

Speaker A: Fantastic speaking to you, Arvind.

Speaker B: As usual, you've been a pleasure, uh, talking to, and I hope it's really been useful for all marketers. And, uh, this has been fun.

Speaker A: Thank you.