He Was the Only Marketer at a Startup Fighting Service Titan - Here's What Won

Speaker A: If I got into DeLorean and could make a difference five or 10 years ago, I'd hire a videographer as my first hire and, like, never look back. And it's just. It's cool to see you've done that.

Speaker B: Welcome, everyone, real quick to our B2B roundtable. Uh, I have Ben Reed, um, Refine Labs alum Ben Reed, I want to note also, but head of marketing, uh, uh, at then Field Pulse, and now Resio. And Ben, I want to give you,

Speaker C: uh, just a, you know, a few.

Speaker B: A few seconds to just introduce yourself real quick. And then I want to get into specifically your time at fieldpulse, because when we were talking about doing this event, I really wanted to cover that, given the success you had there, um, and then kind of dive into that experience

Speaker C: and then what you're currently doing at Resio.

Speaker B: So go ahead and introduce yourself.

Speaker C: And I want to dive into it, man. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, Matt. Well, first off, wanted to say it's a pleasure to be here. Uh, super excited to be back with the Refine, uh, labs crew. Uh, always a big fan. Um, but, yeah, I was at, ah, Refine for a little less than a year back in 2022. I was at Field Pulse a little less than four years. Um, you know, we'll get into all of this and, and more, but kind, um, of joined out of series A, left recently, um, at a late stage series C kind of a place. Um, and now I'm at a new series A Resio, and been in the construction and kind of trades field service industry now for about four years and loving, uh, it. Nice.

Speaker B: Awesome. All right, so, uh, look, we're going to talk a lot about FieldPulse in this, uh, in this roundtable because of what you were able to accomplish there, but I definitely. You're two months into a new role here at Resio, and, uh, I know you were at fieldpulse for four years, I believe, or three and a half, thereabouts.

Speaker C: Yep, yep. Yeah.

Speaker B: And so I definitely want to go over just from what you were started at fieldpulse to where you ended, and now you're starting at a new role and all those lessons you learned from Field Pulse and how you're applying them at Resio, I definitely don't want to dismiss that, uh, and want to cover that overall, but I want to start back your first day at fieldpulse. And so, you know, if you can put yourself back in time and in that seat, man, um, you were the only marketer at that company, I believe it was you and a bunch of sales reps. It was a product that was it pre seed or seed or Series A. You can, you can explain that. But what, when you walked in, what were you walking into at the time?

Speaker C: Yeah, it was exactly that. I mean it was Series A. It might have been six months to a year after Series A. They kind of had a couple false starts with marketing. You know, they had a few VPs that didn't work out, a couple smaller teams that um, weren't producing or successful previously. And uh, yeah, it was me. Um, I think I had an intern like for the rest of that like semester when I joined, but they didn't continue. So, um, getting a team off the ground was definitely priority one. Um, and then the product. Yeah, I mean the product was good, but I wouldn't say like they had a huge focus on product and positioning or anything like that. There was no like super strong go to market motion. You know, that's kind of what I helped, um, you know, build out along with the sales, uh, leader and others. And then I would say too, like a lot of it was sales and marketing led, you know, early on. Like there was no like core product driving a lot of the success, um, at that time. And, and then kind of how we were positioned with competitors, we were really just like another alternative. We were cheaper, um, a little bit easier to use and we kind of had like a good spot in the market. But there wasn't a lot of like meat on the bone there yet, um, when I first arrived. So it was a lot to do.

Speaker B: Yeah, let's go through a little bit of that kind of market. Cause I think it's important to understand where fieldpulse was. Cause it's not like it's some market without like super mature competition. Right. You guys are competing with Jobber and Serpent. Service Titan and House Call Pro I guess is kind of a, uh, maybe a secondary competitor there. So how were you guys selling and marketing or, or when you got there, like what was the perception of Field Pulse against that competitor set where like you have a company like Service Titan and Jobber. These people are spending massive amounts of money on paid and content and events to like m be well known and acquire customers. There also were much more well funded than you at the time. So you walk in and you're thinking like, well, how am I going to compete on this? Give me a sense of like how you, how you looked at the landscape at the time.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean there was, there was. You nailed it, those three were the big giants at the time. You know, there was a few other like smaller kind of failing giants. You had like Field Edge, which was kind of, you know, kind of slopping around a little bit and um, maybe had like a buyout recently by Explore or something. You had Service Fusion which kind of stopped creating their product altogether and was losing a bunch of customers. So there was kind of like a hole in the market. When I arrived in like the middle section, you had service tie in which was crushing it on the top end. Um, and they were actually going even further up market. And so when I got there, I think our ACV was around a thousand bucks, two thousand bucks, um, very cheap. Um, and we were going after like one to two users. And so that was kind of like the first big change in maybe the first 12 months was we really started to realize, hey, these one man shops are not really the best strategy here. And we kind of were going up market a little bit to uh, 3, 4, 5, 10 man shops, you know, going to ACV of 5 to 10K. And that was kind of the sweet spot we, we uncovered in the market because Service Titan at the time was kind of leaving those sizes behind and Jobber, Housecall Pro were going all in on the smaller guys. And so there was this kind of hole in the market that we were able to, to capture and that's where a lot of the success came from. I mean, I think like as we go through this, obviously a lot of grain of salt, um, to be had here, but the market timing was just ripe for somebody coming in, in the middle. You know, we weren't like competing with Service Titan or Jobber at first. There was just this hole that we were able to kind of capitalize on and it worked really well.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think you, you said it though. I think. And we were seeing this a lot play out in a bunch of categories right now where like, you know, there's this, this the, the drive for these AI AI native products. So much is it. So much of it's the timing of the market and luck and being there. You know, there's, there's like some giants out there that are really capitalizing on that. Um, so let's, let's get a little bit into the nuts and bolts of it here for you because I think also it was really smart for you guys. Um, and um, fortuitous that you guys kind of found that middle niche Service Titan left it, but you still had to go execute. You know, it's not like you exist there and people just come to us. You know, like you said before, the product wasn't really there when you guys started. So you had to not just find that market, but you also had to compel action, right? You had to sell into it, you had to market into it. So let's talk a little bit about that because this is a unique icp, right? This is blue collar. These are people who are tradespeople. These are not people who are impressed by fancy workflows and things like that. These people want it, want the thing to come to them and they want it to be pretty easy because what they really want to do is be managing their job sites and be managing their employees. More than anything. They care much more about the people relationship because a lot of these people, a lot of these companies are local, right? They have, huh. They have local roots, local reputations. So tell me a little bit about what were some of the things that your gut told you when they looked at the market and how they reacted to marketing. Like, you had not worked ah, in this industry before, had you?

Speaker C: No, I hadn't. Um, you know, I was kind of poking around with some clients like in a similar industry. So like, I think I knew a little bit, but no, I didn't really fully understand what I was walking into. It became super clear like early on exactly what you said. They're super marketing adverse. And they're also like, I think that we marketers get the wrong impression sometimes of this audience and we kind of like think they're not beneath us. That's like the wrong, that's the wrong word to use here. But like, we kind of have to like stoop to their level of technology savviness and understanding and marketing. And I think that's kind of the wrong approach. And what we realized, or uh, what I bet on was like instead of stooping down to their level, kind of bringing them up to our level a little bit on the technology side of things, but also making it super direct and clear and not filling it with like marketing or sales jargon. I think that's what they hate. And so I think more than anything it's like, offer value and don't waste their time and just be super direct. Like if you're going after an H VAC industry for 5 to 10 size companies or whatever it is, just be very clear in that messaging, like target them directly, call it out directly, and build content that you think they would actually find valuable. But like the second you're running lead magnets and like these typical B2B playbooks and webinars that are all fluff with terrible partners. Like they see through that and that's not going to drive pipeline. So I think that was kind of like the big shift was just that narrative of like let's just be very simple, direct and add the value where we think we can add value. And then the other kind of flip I think early on was we were still, when I arrived we were still kind of like marketing to the one man shops. You know, we had a few programs still live that were building content that were like really only applicable to 1, 2, 3 user companies. And we were trying to go up market to a 5 to 10 man company. And so I think when I realized that it was like hey, let's stop marketing to what's working now, but let's shift a little bit and market to where we want to be next year. And I think my, my thought process is, you know, it might not be the most applicable to our exact audience right this second, but I think they can come up a bit and kind of like reach that next tier that we want to go towards and then we're also going to be reaching and moving towards that upper market. You know, um, I think, you know, not every company wants to move up market. Might be going down market, I don't know. But I think you can't do both. Like I don't think you can market to where you are currently and up. I think you got to decide and make the bet and make the decision and go all in.

Speaker B: I couldn't agree with that more. Uh, the number of companies that come and say we want to move up market before they're ready, before their product's ready, before their go to market motion is even ready. It takes so much energy and expense to go up market, um, and to fall flat on it is a pretty humbling experience that cost you a lot of progress and there's so much to be had in that middle market market. And how you guys define that mid market versus other companies can, can differ for sure but it's almost, it feels like a death sentence before the, the, the product is ready for it to go up market. And you guys clearly even knew that going in just given where you, you believed the product was at the time where you couldn't compete with a service titan. You, you had to find like what, what going up market meant for you and then playing in that space really well. So let me, let's get into some, I uh, want to get into some of the tactical stuff. That kind of going into that A, you were the one marketer with the intern, right. You had the sales team probably cold calling and stuff like that. So priorities, what do they look like first for you? You're looking at this and you're like, man, how the heck am I going to go get customers for this company and drive inbound pipeline? So what's the first thing that you're looking at and leaning in on? I think this speaks a lot to some of the strengths that you brought into the company. Right. You're like you, you have a background in paid and you were probably thinking, well that's the first thing I'm going to do because I simply just know how to do that and I also know that my customer is there if I can just get the message and the creative. Right. So give me a sense of how your priorities started allocation and then how that started to shift over time for yourself.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean I think you definitely nailed it. Like my background before this was 100% paid media. So um, the last several years, so you've got paid, social, paid search, you know, all that kind of stuff that was kind of like where I was focused early on. And obviously when you come into a new role, as most of us know and should know, you want to bank on some of those quick wins. You definitely want to set up some stuff that um, obviously is looking towards the future but you've got to make progress quick. You know, I think if you're working in a startup and especially a smaller startup and you're the head of, and you don't have a team, you, you have to find ways to build it yourself and build it fast and, and get those quick wins. So for me that was definitely demand gen paid media, all that kind of stuff. Um, at the time I think they had you know, a pretty decent like percentage of inbound, um, already coming in. Like it was very small but um, it was still 80 something percent inbound versus outbound. Um, you know, they didn't really get outbound sales to start working until a couple of years later and now it's really doing well. But um, a lot of word of mouth and partner referrals and that kind of stuff. And so it was clearly working. And so it wasn't like let's fix a broken inbound engine or let's fix like the website or any of that. It was just like, hey, how do we amplify, how do we get this message out there? What is the message? That, that's a big one. Um, we didn't really have a message. And so I think that's maybe one of my regrets is like, you know we focused on pretty decently unpaid, we were getting new leads, we were building pipeline pretty quickly, um, taking a modest paid monthly budget, not um, performing and getting an roi. Right. That's definitely a win. But I think on the regrets and pieces I missed, I think not focusing more on the product marketing stuff and the positioning and messaging and where we actually fit and resonate most in the market. And we were going after like all kinds of industries we shouldn't have. We were going after you know, the small guys still too, too large of companies that didn't make any sense and wasted sales time for months and all that kind of stuff. So I think that's one thing we should have done better. But things that worked were definitely paid. You know we, we quickly stood up. Paid search, paid social. Um, I learned very quickly that LinkedIn was not the play for this smaller construction audience. Um, they're just not there. Like I think when I really sit down and think about it, I think

Speaker B: they were there when you started where you did you start thinking well I'll try LinkedIn just because the targeting is just so seemingly deterministic there was it, were you thinking it could have worked for you at first?

Speaker C: Of course, I mean like you know, no B2B marketer is going to come in and not try LinkedIn like that doesn't exist. But um, um, you know I, I, I think it can work still and I think with the right, with the right positioning and maybe like some better strategy around it and, and longer testing cycles, I think it could work. Um, um we, you know I just didn't have the time or resources to, to, to do that right. Like you gotta, you gotta prioritize and, and make the bets that you think are gonna pay off the most. So for me that was, that was paid social or, or you know, Meta and that was a kind of a brand new thing for fieldpulse. They hadn't done anything on Meta before and running that and building that motion, um, became very successful over the next year or two. And then beyond that growing the team, um, I think I hired one demand gen manager ah in the first year. Then I started building out a creative engine. I hired a videographer. That was ah, an interesting move that most people wouldn't make um, as their second hire. And then like content and other things started building as well over time. But yeah, I mean that for that first 90 days is quick wins and then you start Thinking about, you know, how are you going to build the long term success? Because hitting this year's growth targets, you know, is one thing, but setting yourself up for success when it doubles again next year, that's something else entirely.

Speaker B: Yeah, walk me through a little bit of that on, um, the choice of obviously you want to hire the demands and manager. You came in, you knew you could run the page yourself, but you got to grow out of that. As the head of marketing, it's like I need eventually someone to take care of that for me so I can look with a wider aperture at our goals, um, and my job and how I can drive growth. The choice to hire a videographer as a second hire is quite a gamble and quite a move. But I think it was prescient, right, because mind you, this was three and a half years ago thereabouts. And this is really before video started to uh, I think explode on LinkedIn in particular. But just generally like almost everyone is doing ads at a really high level right now or is doing it with video or micro animations at the moment. So like, tell me a little bit about the calculus that went in for you to hire a videographer, how you sold that hire, by the way, to leadership. Because they're probably like, I don't know, do you want to do something, hire a field events manager first or something like that. Like, how's the videographer gonna, gonna help us? So tell me a little bit of how you sold that higher end. And then you know, also like how you, how you identified the right person based on what you were learning about the business and the market at the time.

Speaker C: You know, I don't think I ever fully sold it at the top, top. You know, I think even like years later, you know, we had two videographers and I think that would still be a question in the board meetings. Like, wait, you have two full time videographers? That's crazy. Um, but no, at the time, I mean, I think the market was so interesting and like, why I was like very excited to join the company at the time was it's a huge market, there are massive competitors, Servicedien, Housecall Pro, etc. And when I really looked at what they were doing, and this is purely my opinion, I wasn't that impressed. And I didn't think it was like incredible marketing strategy and interesting ideas and interesting content. It was just, they had big teams, big budgets, they were kind of the first to market. They kind of owned and built this category and yeah, they were pumping out a ton and it Was pretty good from a typical B2B wins. But it was very standard, it was very safe. There was nothing like too interesting going on or um, they weren't making bets at all. And so for me, video was one of those areas where I saw what they were doing and it wasn't much video. It was, it was very like. I mean back then podcasts were all the rage, you know, um, and so they were doing the typical podcast stuff and very templative and you know, five minute clips on YouTube, all that kind of stuff. And so my first kind of big bet around that was what if we actually tried to create interesting content for our end user and with our end user. And so the videographer's goal, or my goal with it was let's create real content with our audience. Like go see customers, go out on site, film with them and also make it like a higher quality. Don't look like a series they start up but look like that larger series D or whatever. And yeah, we're not going to pump out as much, but the quality was actually higher than a lot of the stuff our competitors were doing. We were punching above our weight as far as video quality goes. And you know, I think as a brand perspective, yeah, if you analyze us versus them, it doesn't look as amazing and there's clearly a difference. But when you're um, a random H vac shop or you're a random person that sees three things on field poles, they're not going to like evaluate every nook and cranny of the companies. And so if one of those three things they view can look super polished and super high quality and very relevant to them, I think that gives you an edge. And as a startup, uh, you have to find those edges.

Speaker B: Yeah, I also think uh, super smart for you to go to your customer like going back to. These people don't really like this. ICP more than any hates fluffy marketing. And they really, really like to see and hear their peers, uh, use the product, talk about the product, talk about the job. It's a, it's a bit of a fraternity at the end of the day. Uh, a lot of that people know other people. They, they, they kind of move in the same circles. I've done a lot of work in welding. It's very similar, uh, where these, all these guys know each other, all uh, these welding companies, these influencers that they work with and they really value that authenticity. So you know, getting out there, you know, the filming doesn't have to be perfect. Right. But the editing has Got to kind of, you know, elevate, elevate that raw footage and then, you know, showing those stories and then getting in p. Pushing it out there instead of what you said, like, because when podcasts were all the rage, what was a lot of. What were a lot of people doing with those things? They were clipping 90 seconds out of a podcast with the subject matter expert and then pushing that out as an ad instead. You guys were doing a little bit more of uh, an avant garde kind of like meet the customer where they're at play. And that clearly resonated for you guys overall as you started to push more of that out and people started to notice the quality. Guessing that would be fair to say.

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, I don't think we did it well enough. You know, looking back, obviously I would, I would change some things, but I think overall, like, yeah, our YouTube channel quickly became like our bottom of funnel kind of proof points. And like if a customer was, was really not over the edge yet, that would push them over the edge a lot of the time. And exactly what you're saying, like the, the fraternity, like very close knit customer communities. Um, I mean, yeah, a lot of our growth also slowly became word of mouth and in these Facebook groups and in these, you know, trades forums and all this stuff, um, that we can't get into ourselves. But if we can like crack a few good customers and get their buy in, uh, it starts to really like, um, multiply. Yeah.

Speaker B: And pay definitely becomes that flywheel. Right. Like there's a couple of clients I've worked with in the blue collar space and these Facebook community groups are real things in this space. Like these, these guys have them, they're robust, they're active. Their customers like their buyers are there, their customers are there also. So they also want to be there. And then if you do paid well enough, you'll just see that group grow time, uh, over time and then you'll see your name mentioned more and more. So like, obviously you're working to do the direct response component on Facebook, but there's that flywheel word of mouth approach that you're also trying to create where you're seeing yourself mentioned more, it's getting mentioned, you're seeing more word of mouth on the. How did you hear about us? A lot of the things that we've espoused for, uh, a lot of things we've espoused for many years at Refine Labs. And like in an industry like that, it, it really works well when you execute, uh, At a, at a high level, I want to transition to the channel choices that you made. Because one thing I, when I was looking up at your, looking your company up is you guys are in a lot of channels, like Organically, you're on YouTube, you're on Meta, obviously Instagram, for the most part a little bit on Meta, uh, TikTok as well. Talk to me a little bit about. Cause we were in the pre, we were in the pre show and you were telling me that you had four full time creatives at your company when, by the, by the time you left field pulse and this is, uh, you had a team of 12. So a third of your personnel were just creatives, that is. And you talked about how you first hired a videographer, which I assume was also a part of that team. But that's, that's a huge amount to invest in creative. And we're seeing a move back from a lot for a lot of companies and like thinking hard about how they show up creatively, uh, on social mostly because you know, and you're very much ahead of the curve on this but like of the proliferation of just AI generated content and like how that over time really cheapens your brand. Now that you were doing this before, that was even a uh, concern. But tell me about like how you showed up on these channels, uh, with the amount of creative people that you had. So uh, we can start with YouTube because you guys have a lot of good shorts, you guys have a lot of good organic content, several videos with several thousand views, like walk me a little bit through the organic um, content approach that you guys were doing, um, across these channels and some of the choices you were making for how you showed up in each of them.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean it changed over time. So you know, I think early on it, you know, creative was all about give, demand gen and this paid flywheel, good content to like keep using and repurposing. And then also it's our portfolio. You know, I think early on I looked at like Instagram, YouTube as kind of like the bottom of funnel portfolio for the brand and also for you know, sales, engagement and that kind of stuff. And so that's kind of where it started. I think over time, you know, I became a bigger believer in content, you know, for, for one. But also stuff like SEO got involved, AIO got involved and we just became a bigger believer in like a very wide reaching content strategy. I think for the most part the strategy is create content where your customer wants to consume it and wants to hang out. So like I Wouldn't say we wanted to go everywhere. Like we tried TikTok, it kind of flopped. We deprioritized. I think we probably could have made it work but didn't have the bandwidth, you know. Um, but then really like for content itself, like, uh, YouTube was a big one, our Facebook groups was a big one. You know, we, we launched two owned Facebook groups for our users and also like public facing, that was pretty big for us. Um, and then, yeah, I mean, uh, meta, you know, Instagram wasn't huge for content. Like we weren't driving a lot of new followers or a lot of engagement there that, that kind of remained more on the portfolio side of things, I would say. But yeah, as we scaled even YouTube over the last 12 months, like we launched a bunch of new series for our channel and then also like leaned more into AIO and SEO from an even YouTube perspective, um, which ended up working really well. Like if you're not creating YouTube content, I definitely think you should for one, for even SEO purposes. Um, but a lot of our videos were ranking like number one on Google. When you googled a specific term, uh, they'll show you like the top three, uh, YouTube clips for that search term, even above like the SERP results. So you know, we kind of just leaned in to a lot of different angles and you know, I think the main priority for me was like mass reach and um, like two birds with one stone. Like even with a bigger team, like you gotta make uh, your resources go far. And so if it could, if it could help bottomless bottom of funnel sales, if it can help SEO and if it can help like paid, you know, quality in production, then we were all about it. So it kind of had to tick all of those boxes for it to really make sense. But um, that was kind of the goal.

Speaker B: How many people did you have dedicated on the YouTube side? So I know you, we mentioned you had one person dedicated just to do your media ads and I want to want to ask you about that later, but what was the team like on YouTube? Do you have two people, like give me a sense of how you resource that for yourself.

Speaker C: Yeah, you know, I kind of put YouTube under the large content umbrella and so I had a senior content manager who was amazing and she kind of owned all of content. Um, and so YouTube was under that and so she was kind of the front runner there. And then as far as like support and getting stuff created, um, yeah, it became a bandwidth struggle. Even with two full time videographers and producers, it's still a Lot of work and effort to create really good content consistently. And so they're getting pulled between content, paid media, brand hr, partnerships, sales, everywhere. Right. And so content, you know, it did struggle like with getting enough love from those resources. But, um, yeah, I mean, she really did a great job and, uh, I think she owned that. And then as far as like resource allocation, like, that was definitely on me. And that was. It's a constant battle. Like, you, you've got to constantly go back and forth with how to prioritize and you know, you can't say no every single time to partnership requests and sales requests. You know, eventually you got to, you got to give a little bit to those channels as well. So, um, yeah, even with four creatives, we still struggled to like churn out as much as we actually wanted to. Interesting.

Speaker B: So you guys, we talked about content and we talked about paid. There was that other stool kind of of that three legs, and that was your guys, Events Motion. And um, I know when we were talking about this, like when you, when you initially started, you were going, getting like something like 10 book meetings. A show is a pretty low number, right. And you, and you like exponentially scaled that. And you had not done events before, really, as a head of marketing.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: This was like a brand new thing for you. And you were probably a little bit like, oh, well, it'll just show up. We'll scan a bunch of badges and this will work just fine. Tell me a little bit about, um, how you learned to run field events starting at this company. Because it was, uh, it was a bit of a baptism by fire for you.

Speaker C: It sounded like, is that, um, fair to say? A hundred percent. I mean, like, outside of paid, all of this stuff was, was relatively new to me. So, um, the Events Motion was like one of the last ones I even stood up. I mean, we didn't really get it firing in all cylinders until last year, really.

Speaker B: Were you guys doing it before? Like, uh, were you kind of dabbling in it or was it just like, we're not ready for it, I can't even support it?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's kind of just deprioritized. Like the first, the first two years, I would say we did one to two events a year. There'd be like a partnership event we'd have to support and maybe we would do one sales focused event. Um, but yeah, you know, we just didn't have the resources and I didn't have the expertise to feel confident you know, allocating budget to that. And so it didn't happen. Until, you know, we signed a really big client, um, our biggest ever 20, um, 24. And they were in the glass industry. And they were like, hey, we have this really big glass show coming up in a few months. I was like, great, we'll be there. I had no idea, like, how much work that would be. And two months before a show is a terrible time to sign up to a show, to sign up for a show. And so we were like scrambling to get our booth set up and all this, like, it was, it was kind of a nightmare. Um, I attend. It was one of. I've been to a few trade shows with Philippus at this point, but this was a big one. This was like the biggest glass show in the world. Um, you know, 10,000 attendees. It was massive. And so there I really saw like an opportunity of like, hey, there's actually people here that one want to interact in person. They're kind of like, you know, it's, it's two years or three years after Covid, but like, people are still kind of in that post Covid era of like, I want to get back to in person connections. And they're really open to evaluating new stuff. Like, you know, a lot of them are going to booth to booth, and they're just drinking and having a good time, and they're not. But a good chunk of them are like, they're open to a conversation. And so if you can just pull them in, have a 5 minute chat on their current processes, what's working, what's not. Hey, can I show you a quick thing? And then let's book a meeting. Like, I really saw that opportunity. We did really bad at that show. And so it was more of like, hey, I saw what this could become, but it still flopped that first go around. But from that, that's where I kind of built the strategy of, hey, let's actually try events. Let's pick some really smart ones, some of our best industries, small ones, big ones, et cetera, um, and really go all in on booking actual meetings. And so the first handful of events might have flopped, but as we grew the motion, we really got our stride down. And huge credit to our sales team. And the head of sales at the time, um, did an amazing job with me building this strategy where it was all about booking meetings and those quick conversations. And we were aggressive. It was not your typical B2B event trade show booth motion. We were very aggressive, pulling people in, having a good time, being lively and, and energetic. Um, and none of our competitors were doing that. We would Go to the service titan booth and they're like on chairs, on their phones, barely engaging. And we ran circles around them. Um, and it was really all credit to sales. And so, yeah, I mean, towards the end our bigger shows, we were booking 100 plus meetings. Um, and these were like legit meetings. And I think around 75% would show up, um, you know, the following week, which is like a fantastic number for qualified, uh, opportunities.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And like, it sounds like you guys were. When you did the first show, there wasn't much of a plan kind of going in. It was when you guys doing the badge scanning. And then as you went over time, it's like, no, we're opening the calendar app and we're actually going to book this call and put it on, put it on your calendar. And then to your point about being energetic. So much of these events and just these in person is just how you show up, right? And like, just having that energy and that's like everything in marketing at the end of the day is how you show up, how you show up with your creative, how you show up with your content, how you show up at events, um, is what makes people remember you. You know, it's not just, you know, if I just exist there, I'm going to get noticed. Especially again, going back to what fieldpulse was at the time when you walked in, it was not server side and it was not jobber. You know, people were not just going to look at that logo and go, okay, I've seen them people, I've seen those people before. And maybe at the time when you guys started doing shows, you'd been running paid so much, maybe you had a little bit more recognition when you were at these places. But so much of it comes down to how you show up and the energy that you bring to these sorts

Speaker C: of, uh, sorts of, uh, motions. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I would say too, like another little tidbit on events, like, don't, don't copy and paste it from what's working in other channels. Like, it's a completely different motion. Treat it with the respect it deserves and like, go and build a custom event strategy. You know, like, what works for you in a different channel may not work. And you can probably find a better way to engage and, you know, have fun with it too. Like, I think in person stuff, like there's a more or there's kind of like the only room really in marketing to like, have some fun. Like you can get these people to laugh and smile and enjoy the interaction more so than any other channel. And so I think that's what I would say is like, just give it the thought and care it deserves. And then I don't know if you want to go deeper on events, but.

Speaker B: No, I do. I actually, I do want to go deeper on events and I want to talk a little bit about like some of the specific things you did to show up differently.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would just say like, um, don't, don't give up if an event flops, you know, is where I was going to go. Like we had Maybe we did 20 events last year, 25, something like that. Like half might have flopped, you know, and, and we're really just testing here. Like there's so many events in our space, so it might not be applicable to, to everybody here. But, um, you know, if I had given up after like three or four failed shows, we never would have had the bigger successes that came later on. And I think like showing up, you know, 10 by 10 5k, spin like a very small budget, uh, show and get 10 qualified meetings. Like, that's, that's pretty great. Um, and so if you can do that, like I'd say do as many as you can. And then for the, for the bigger shows, that's where you got to like really like take a bet. Um, and it gets a little scarier because you're spending way more money on those big shows. Um, and you need to get 50 plus booked meetings, right? And you need some like, significant closed deals from that. Um, so, you know, I think like, ways we showed up differently, like, I don't think we didn't do anything too crazy on, um, like booth interactions or engagement. Um, you know, we tried like the spinning wheels, we tried giveaways, we tried all this kind of stuff and it was more noise than anything. Um, like again, like, the people that are going to come to your booth because you have a spinning wheel aren't the people that are going to really show up to the book meeting. And so we were really like, okay, let's ditch a lot of this like fluff and kind of noise and let's only focus on the people that actually are interested in the conversation. And so that kind of was the game changer for us. Um, you know, we showed up differently with like, really thoughtful swag and like, you know, a really small thing. But like, our, again, our creative team was amazing. We had custom creative for every single show and location. And so like, if you're in Florida, make it a Florida theme kind of like branded swag and uniforms and you know, just look interesting and different. I think that that's a really small thing, but stuff like that when you're smaller, it helps you stand out against like a service titan where they're just very straight and buttoned up and, and kind of boring. You know, like, it lets you be interesting and different.

Speaker B: Yeah. And like, again, you want to, want to stand out and not be super like cookie cutter about it. Right. You have bigger people going through the motions. They're doing more events, so they just simply need that to kind of keep that scale. 25 for you sounds like a good number. You guys were able and again, also resourcing. Right. You know, you had enough creative manpower to kind of put that kind of thought into each of those events because you could split the, split the labor there a little bit. Another advantage of investing in creative is like, we get a chance to be very bespoke for everywhere we show up because we have the capacity to do that. And I have the people that can actually help support that A little bit. Um, I wanted to ask a little bit about, um, uh, I want to go back to paid a little bit here. Um, because you, um, you guys, you guys invested a lot in paid. Paid was a huge channel, has been a huge channel for you. Um, and we got a little bit into like just choosing channels and things like that. I want to get a little bit into like, what worked for you from like content types and formats and hooks. You talked earlier about, not you talked a little about, like the one thing you regretted when you first started, uh, doing paid was not identifying the messages. The message that you were going to say to the audience at the time, what messages were you kind of like going with? And then as you learned and iterated through that, where did you end up figuring out this is what works, These formats, um, this message type, these, these kinds of stories and then doubling down on those things.

Speaker C: Yeah, great question. I think early on it was we were throwing spaghetti at the wall and uh, I think like, that's, that's pretty typical and I think that's okay too. Like, I think testing really fast and really wide is actually okay. You have to like, I think if you're going to make a bet and you're going to have this testing period, I think what you have to do is clearly identify like the benchmarks and time period that you're going to do this and get that buy in before you start. So like, don't just say, hey, we're testing a bunch of stuff. And it seemingly may never end. Like you should have. Like, hey, we're going to test this quarter. These are the very specific things we're going to test. This is the results we're hoping for. And let's reevaluate and adjust after, um, we didn't do it like that, buttoned up. You know, I think early on that would have been better. But um, yeah, we were testing every kind of content type, like, um, you know, product specific ads, um, you know, podcast ads, content ads, all that kind of stuff. Different types of, um, call to actions, whether it's book a demo or you know, I think we had free trials at the time. Um, download this piece of content, all that kind of stuff. What really started working for us was again, kind of goes back to like our specific audience and being direct and very simple and value focused with them was like very to the point and specific product industry ads, which is kind of how I would call it. But like, if I'm going after H vac, plumbing, electrical, these different industries, I'm creating ads specifically for each vertical and then also like variations specific to specific pain points, product and features we have and like value props they're hoping to get. And so that was really our bread and butter. Like we had maybe five to six industries going at once that were like really hitting and working really well under each of those. Like this is tactical, but we had multiple ad sets and audiences and in each ad set it was like 10 to 20 different AD variants of product focused, industry focused, pain point focused, et cetera. Um, and you know, at the highest point, when we had a bigger team, you know, we're testing 10, 20 ads a week, which is a lot. Um, but when you're spending, when you're spending a lot of money on it, um, and with Meta specifically, ah, you need the ad creative. Like you can't, you can't just run the same stuff over and over. Like you need a lot of output. Um, and you know, when Andromeda came out, if people know what that is, Meta's new algorithm, it uh, definitely like changed things. And I, uh, have a lot of thoughts on that, but maybe that's better for a different conversation.

Speaker B: No, I actually like to bring that up because I mean, I think, I think Meta Ads is almost having a moment in B2B uh, right now because I think Andromeda has opened that up more as a channel. Meta's cost efficiency is just there all the time to be had. And the Andromeda algorithm does demand a lot more creative. You're able to go super wide. Basically people are putting you into cluster, uh, based on how people engage. You're getting into these little clusters of psychographics and things like that. And then you keep kind of delivering on sounds like you had, you had five different verticals running at a time. And I guess the ad sets were different variants of the audience that you were running. Whether you were going wider or smaller or look alikes or anything of that nature. Is that first they give me a sense of how you had the ads, the media set up a little bit. I do want to get a little bit into the tactics of that, uh, for as much as you're willing to share.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I mean it was a lot of testing. Like we never stopped testing. Like I think when you're, when you're scaling that big, um, and that fast, you just, you can't stop testing. So that, that's, I guess a little asterisk there. But um, you know, our top performing one was always Broad. And so like, you know, when I, I think using broad audiences and meta for B2B four years ago, for a lot of you, it's a little bit taboo, right? Like people weren't doing that. Um, I actually kind of proved it out with some, um, lead form stuff I was doing at the time where I would kind of run to broad audiences. And I learned like, hey, these, these specific H vac ads are only bringing in H vac leads, whereas the electrical stuff is only bringing on electrical companies. But it's the same exact broad audience together. And so I was like, oh, the algorithm is good enough. It can use your creative, it can really find that audience for you. And so that was kind of the stepping stone to legitimate demo focused ads and pipeline building ads, um, that we're still leveraging the broad audience over time. We built lead lists that were kind of encouraging it and suggesting it and stuff like that. But Broad was always our best performer and scaled really well. Um, and then we had lead lists as well in there. Some retargeting stuff too. Um, but I'd say broad, as scary as this sounds, was probably 70, 75% of our budget. Um, and it was a lot of spend.

Speaker B: Were you always going for the reach objective or were you looking at conversions as an objective? The uh, like in terms of like camp, let's get, let's get into the nitty gritty here. Uh, like campaign objective stuff and how you guys did that give, uh, me a sense of like, what, what were, what were for you smiling because you're like yes, this is like what I'm all about.

Speaker C: Absolutely. I mean I have a lot of strong opinions on this.

Speaker B: I think give me, give me some hot takes. Give me some hot takes on this.

Speaker C: Here's a hot take. I think you should only ever use two different campaign objectives. I think the rest of them are probably worthless. Maybe there's something to be said about video stuff. I don't know about video specifically as much but I think if you want an action it's got to be conversion based. Um, there's only one caveat to that and I would say is your audience size. So if you have an audience that's big enough that can really take the conversion based algorithm which I would say is like a few hundred thousand minimum to a million minimum in audience size. Run conversion. Like I don't care what your conversion is, I don't care what's a lead form, a demo form or content download. Like you gotta leverage the algorithm. M. I'm a big believer in that. And so yeah, our big spenders are raw demo campaigns like spending 5, 10k a day like stuff like that. That was all conversion based. Um, whether you were going to a

Speaker B: lead gen form or click to convert, it was just, it was all conversion based and just depended what the conversion action was in the custom events basically.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean most of our spend was focused um, on driving demos and so that was like straight to demo page, it was straight to homepage, a lot of different landing pages, testing like that. Um, but yeah, conversion based for sure. I mean if you're doing broad, you have to because otherwise it's not going to learn anything. It's not going to know what you

Speaker B: need to get the conversion data to train itself. And then ideally, you know, you tell it what's qualified and not through offline conversion tracking or something like that. I don't know if you guys were utilizing that or not. Um, and then it starts to learn uh, on itself and then were you finding like when you got, when ad sets got stale or campaigns got stale, it's just, well let's just hit the reset button on it. Let's just, let's just dupe it and then just run it net new and let, let the algorithm reset. Like how are you recycling and underperforming campaign? Uh, once it starts to get a little stale.

Speaker C: Yeah, good question. Uh, let me get there in a second. I want to go back to the only two objectives I would say you should use. So conversions for big enough audiences and conversion Points and then everything else, I would say run impressions. I think impressions is the cheapest and most affordable and you can really, you can do well toggling, like how much reach you want. You can cap impressions, you can cap reach, all that kind of stuff. So I think that's the best way to go. Um, so if you have a small audience, like sub 50,000 list kind of a thing, and you want conversions, I'd still just run impressions and just like just max out the frequency, you know, just um, saturate them. That's my, that's my two cents there. Um.

Speaker B: Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to. No, go on the creative. Are you like just calling out your ICP on it? Basically? Is it just like, hey, general contractors, H Vac, uh, H vac companies? Like you're like using the creative to almost call out a little bit. Uh, who you're trying to actually message to is that, that's, and that's, that's a big part of the Andromeda algorithm is just like, just let your creative do the work. By going to your point of what you talked about earlier, which is to the point, product industry has like being super pointed and not super fluffy a little bit with what you're saying.

Speaker C: Yeah, 100%. I mean our biggest spenders and um, revenue drivers was that broad industry plus feature call out. And so it was as specific as like, hey, small h vac owner doing 1 million a year. You need project management software. It was like we're hitting all those small details, um, and that's driving the algorithm for sure. Um, yeah. I mean, Andromeda, you know, threw a wrinkle in us a little bit. You know, I don't think we fully cracked it. I think the thing about Andromeda that I think people don't fully appreciate or realize is it's way smarter than I think we think, um, and way smarter than we probably want it to be. And so you can no longer do what we were doing, which was like copy and paste, you know, these templates and swap out headlines, swap out visuals. Like your ads need to be very different. Like the creative diversity is everything for Andromeda and they can see through your, like Canva templates and all these things. Like it will only let you spend one ad, basically. But if you want like true performance, you've. You've got to have really good diversity there, um, which is really hard. Like that's not easy to do. You need like very good content, different types of content and they offer different types of value. You know, um, and that's. And that's tough.

Speaker B: All right, that was a great stretch on meta ads, and I wanted to geek out with you on that because I know you have an extensive.

Speaker C: Always.

Speaker B: I was really glad to get into that. Um, all right, we have about eight minutes left, and I'm hoping there's a couple questions. Stephanie, you can let me know they're not. But I want to ask one question to you real quick before we get into that. Potentially. You just started at Resio.

Speaker A: You're.

Speaker B: You're now new head of marketing at Resio after being at fieldpulse for three and a half years. Um, tell me what you're doing differently at Resio. You're 60 days into this role that you did not do it feel or that you learned from FieldPulse, let's say more accurately, like, what are your first 60 days looking like now based on what you learned then?

Speaker C: For sure. Uh, it's different. Like, very different. You know, I think the big, the really big bullet points here are prioritizing product marketing, prioritizing our messaging and positioning is almost everything. And then really focusing on content strategy. And so, you know, I'm hiring a role right now. Shameless Plug, if you know anybody, send them my way. But looking, um, for, you know, a great content strategist. But I really believe the foundations of that are going to help and set us up for everything else to come. And so that's everything right now. I think other two small pieces are like SEO. I wasn't an SEO guy and it was a little bit snake oily for me the first couple years. We finally cracked it, um, maybe early 2024, and we were doubling SEO stuff every year and getting a ton of revenue from it. So I'm going to bring that in early on now. I'm going to make the bet and invest in that, um, which I didn't before. And then the last bullet point there, I'd say is partners, influencers, and customer ambassadors. We're going really hard on that. We have very happy customers who love the product. And I think just getting more of that involved, whether it's revenue driving referral programs or just content creation and getting out in the market. Um, I think it's a big deal, especially when you're going up against, like, these big players who aren't really even doing that. You know, it's, it's, it's an edge.

Speaker B: Interesting. Uh, Ben, I wanted, uh, just to thank you so much for your time on this. I. Let's try to let's try to get Steph if there are questions. I know, Luke, you had some comments that I saw in there, and I do want to invite you on if you do have a question for Ben, because I know you a little bit on LinkedIn. I know you work in this space quite a bit. And so, uh, if you have a question for Mel's, just bring you live and just shoot it and what's up, Luke?

Speaker A: I need someone to define sexy for me first, because I. I'm everything.

Speaker B: This is an unsexy category.

Speaker A: I feel like sometimes I work in one of those too, so it's not fair. Um, no, I, uh, I sort of made the point. Props to you, Ben, because I. The other day I said if I got in a DeLorean and could make a difference five or ten years ago, I'd hire a videographer as my first hire. And, like, never look back. And it's just. It's cool to see you've done that. And I'm. I'm trying to do that. So my, My question to you is, I think you said you ended up with 12 people on your team. Um, I've been here for 12 years, and I'm still only one person. And, uh, I. To be fair, I outsource a lot of marketing and whatnot, so I do feel like I have a big team of people at companies like Matt's. So, um, what. I just kind of want to know what your team growth journey looked like. You. 3 years, 12 people. You hired that videographer first or second, I believe. And then another one. How did that. How did that team expand over those years? And what did the org chart kind of look like as you grew?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it comes down to your. Your company growth and, and your, Your company goals, too. You know, I definitely don't think it's apples. Apples, probably here. But, um, our targets were 100% year over year, and revenue and marketing was driving 80% of that. And so for me, it's like, hey, if I'm going to double or more than double every year, I need the resources and budget for that. And, yeah, I could have outsourced more. I could have put that into agencies. I didn't have almost any agencies. Um, but I just believe, like, the content and stuff we're putting out, you know, like, I guess marketing is like, really two things. It's like what you're putting out into the market, and then how are you getting it out there, you know, which is like the content and the, the ad Stuff or events or whatever. I, um, just believe like the content output is super important. Um, and so that. That was kind of like how I prioritized, I think what that looks like, you know, like on paper, it was kind of like every year I had a new goal that was about doubled. How am I going to hit that? And the answer is not just double my paid budget. Right. And so, like, a great example of this is like, you know, as you know, in our board meetings and stuff, we think about layer cakes and layering on these. These new channels to drive incremental revenue and stuff like that. You know, events was one of those. And so if I need another million dollars in ARR for events, I need an event head. You know, I'm not going to be able to go and launch that channel. Um, and I don't want to outsource it. So I think as we grew like that just kind of naturally progressed with our targets and goals. And um, yeah, I guess I just kind of leaned in house more than outsourcing.

Speaker A: And then it was your in house. Were most of your employees in person or virtual when you were at the previous company?

Speaker C: So, ah, yeah, we were fully in person in office in Dallas. And so that actually made. We didn't talk much about hiring here, but I mean, hiring really difficult. Um, yeah, super hard. And so like, yeah, I mean, it took me like six months to find my paid person who I really liked and you know, three to four months to find a good events person. So it's challenging. I think if you are remote, it makes it much easier. I guess on. On one side of it, there's definitely pros and cons. Um, but yeah, we're fully in house, in person.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: Yeah. All right, uh, let's wrap. We had a. Thanks so much, Luke, for that question. But, um, first off, I just want to just thank you so much for coming on the roundtable. Uh, I think your journey is. Is awesome. I also just love that you started out as a paid media person, got to go to head of marketing and grew into product, um, which is kind of the opposite of how this happens for a lot of heads of marketing. They usually have a product background and they either outsource demand or they grow into that themselves. Uh, I think it's amazing how you were able to, uh, how you're able to grow into that role. And look, man, 300% growth overall for FieldPulse in your time at 300 plus percent, uh, is. Is incredible with the amount that was inbound source like you Got nothing to. You got nothing to do but take a bow for your time there. No doubt that you'll continue to crush it at Resio and look forward to continuing to follow what you're doing. I think you. You bring, like, uh, this really calm, strategic sort of approach to the job with having, like, some deep tactical knowledge that you can really lean on to kind of put those quick points on the board while you stand other programs up. So just all credit to you as a.

Speaker C: As a refined alum.

Speaker B: We're super proud of you and just happy to see you out there crushing it and looking forward to see what you do at Resio.

Speaker C: It's been an awesome pleasure. Thank you, everybody, for joining and listening. Uh, Luke, appreciate your comments. Um, but, no, I mean, FieldPulse is success. You know, it was a amazing team, a great product, and great market timing. Like, that's not to be discounted there as well, but, um, thank you, Matt. This was. This was fun. Yeah.

Speaker B: Awesome. All right, thank you all so much. We'll see you at our next roundtable. Appreciate you guys so much. Have a great rest of your week and a great end of your summer as well. See y'. All.