The Transformational Power of Brand

Think if you have a strong brand, you can actually convince people to buy in and really think about how your product’s gonna fit in a whole ecosystem. So we’re really trying to do two things, build a strong brand to make sure that we can overcome indifference, and with that, have a increasingly stronger value proposition. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Sixense investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Saima, question for you. Can there be demand without brand, or could there be brand without demand? And what came first, the chicken or the egg? I’m sure there’s edge cases where, yes, there can be something out of nothing. But let’s be honest, you need a holistic brand to demand strategy to succeed and do it well. So who we have today on the show? We have Ben O’Dell, who’s director of Demand Gen at Exclaimer. They are a email signature solution, which they’ve done some pretty innovative things the last couple years. When he joined the company, him and the CMO joined around the same time. The company was sort of in a very basic, no brand, spent a lot of money on search, and that was about it. And they were trying to do a lot of different things from a growth perspective and really take things to the next level. So we talked to him about that transformation. We talked about EVM. We talked about AI. Talked a lot about everything and really a transformation that they pulled off. Yeah. And what I love about this conversation when we look at our podcast ads and content that resonates, a lot of folks are interested in that. How do you start to dip your toes into ABM? How do you move from a inbound strategy, very reliant on MQLs to doing more proactive outbound? And he goes into specifics about how they did that, how they rolled it out globally, how they adopted a one to few vertical strategy. So really, really nice to just get some of the tangible and specifics on how a company like Exclaimer made it work. And there’s some pretty great statistics coming out of it too. Absolutely. And we talked about, a lot of the spreadsheets in budget planning season. So Your eyes lit up. I was just so excited. I don’t know if I need a life. Anyway, let’s jump in. Let’s do it. Alright, Ben. Thanks so much for joining us. We talked a little bit before on the prep, and there was a, and we’ll probably give it the title for this episode as well as no demand without brand, which I just love because it’s sort of straight to the point. But just diving right in, could you talk a little bit about when you joined Exclaimer? Because it was definitely a, improvement project that you probably had on your hands. What did it look like? I’d say from a brand perspective, but I guess across the board. So Explainer was a legacy technology company. Some of you may not know, but it was email signature management, and it still is. So it’s everything that comes after kind regards or best regards to the boss from email. How can we turn that into a bit of a marketing platform or a way to really show off your brand? And historically, IT people had been buying it with great utility. And I don’t know if you can believe this, but around fifty thousand customers around the world at this time, that legacy company about ten, twenty years, The brand just so hard to go to market with. Insight partners who got involved about three years ago. So that was one year before this time, new C suites, Carol at the time as our CMO, had just hired me to run demand gen, and it will partner up to come in and basically look at the teams and then try and work out what to do with it. Honestly, the landscape is crazy. We only had a really, really large PPC spend, a website with just capital letters everywhere, insane branding. And from what I understood, they just rebranded with something that looked like MS DOS. It was a very straight, strange time with that partnership. We’d gone around and we restructured the teams, basically started building out the departments, product marketing, demand gen, having that regional, hopes as well, branding content, everything. And we invested in a in a rebrand. And now we have the the charming color palette we have today, but we still want an evolution to really go to market, but we stood up about seven to twelve different channels since then. So it’s been a huge transformation project, just constantly convincing people to evolve and change. So, Ben, everyone listening to what you just said is gonna ask, how did you secure spend an investment for a rebrand immediately after a rebrand? But did that happened before you came in. Yeah. I would love to claim credit for that, but that was all Carol. So she, secured that ahead of time before joining the role. And, genuinely, the impact of that, I don’t think any of us would have joined. So when I was doing the the hiring for the rest of the roles, I joined three weeks, four weeks after Carol. When I was doing the hiring for the rest of the roles, I’m having to convince people with the brand in the state it’s in, hey, come and join us. Look at the numbers. Look at all this promise. We will update the brand. And I think that we’ve got some absolutely great people that have been here, but our average tenure in the marketing team tends to be around a year to a year and a half, which is super low, and it’s about thirty of us now. So fortunately, she’d got that exact buy in and the buy in from the the investors as well. And I think it would have been super, super hard for us to really achieve much if we hadn’t managed to secure that. So, yeah, big thanks to her. Big thanks to the the business for allowing it because, yeah, hiring would have been actually impossible otherwise. So sixth sense, we had our, Inspire conference in London in was it June? It was June. June. It was June. It was my birthday. I’m just saying. Yes. Right. It was Simon’s birthday. You presented at our conference and talked about, this transformation. And one of the things that I was particularly interested in and really thought was a good part of it was, you know, brand is your secret weapon for scaling demand gen EBM. So could you talk a little bit about again, like, you were coming in and sort of, like, you know, you’re putting down the bricks again, but could you talk a little bit about that as a foundation for some of the things that you did? I think one of the things we realized about our business and the fact that the company had just had a huge PPC spend was there were actually people searching for email signature management. And I’m not saying it was a a crazy mature category, but there was a category. It might have been less known to us in marketing, but there was something there. And I think all of us have probably encountered this where budgets go up and down and left to right. Now unless you’re doing something to actually go and generate, attention and generate demand in the market, you you can only capture what’s available and become really efficient at that. So we just knew you could have just add more money to PPC. If anything, I was looking to cut and just make it increasingly more efficient. So just as example, two years later, I know I’m going to go into FY twenty five and cut it another twenty five percent because we’ve got some good people in play, and we can actually make that efficiency. But the big thing was no one really knew who or what Exclaimer was, and I think many people still don’t. And even if you have heard of Exclaimer now, the way people work and the way they buy, no one’s gonna wake up in the morning, oh, Exclaimer. Most of them won’t even wake up and think of email signature management, but some of them might think of email signature generator or something like that. So there’s almost three stages of intent on the terms in terms of knowing us, which pretty much match the funnel. But unless we’re doing something to give people a reason to care about the product or care about engaging with us, they’re never going to be interested. Our product’s really simple and it could be regardless a little bit of a utility more than anything else is. And I’m not just trying to blow sunshine in your direction, but sixth sense is a more complex product. But actually what you can do and you can talk about the outcomes way, way more than we can. So we did have to start to build a really strong brand. That was the first thing we had to do. And what does that mean for us? That means, forming a bit of an identity. What are we about and who can we help and how can we help them? So we expanded into the marketing persona, and we started to move in the direction of being a market player and something that can help with growth. It is still early days, but the way we did this was by really putting ambassadors out there. So just like you said, going and speaking at conferences, going and partnering with other brands, quite known in the SaaS ecosystem now. They’re always doing little side events with people and then sponsoring a lot of communities as well and not trying to take from them straight away, but just really just engage with people, let them get to know us. You know, it’s like if you meet someone for the first time in the street, they’re not gonna buy us from you. But if you have built that relationship, we know that’s what we needed to do. Just let people get to know us first. And that gave us time to also build the product features and improve the experience as well. That’s a great way to reset expectations and almost move into your ABM approach, it seems. Right? As I understand it from that presentation, your ABM approach at Exclaimer really involves account level targeting and then orchestrating a full funnel journey. Again, brand all the way through to demand. How has that impacted internally? I mean, I think we speak a lot about, of course, you know, what ABM means for the broader market. But as you were embarking on that journey, how did that change how sales and marketing interacted with each other and all those, you know, sticky conversations that tend to happen? Just so you can understand the context, we were mainly selling to SMB and commercial sized companies. And I know how much the leads cost and I know what the conversion rate is. It’s just not efficient. We we had to get upmarket. Specifically mid market, we had to get upmarket. And because there wasn’t a super strong alignment between sales and marketing, really, we thought, can we jump ahead and build an ABM motion? And we thought, also, what can we do where there’s already best practice and a bit of rigor built in? I’m not saying buying a product is gonna solve everything and solve GTM alignment, but actually having something there as a crossover and having success there, that really helped out. So I don’t wanna say we made a bet with the organization and a bet with the investors, but that was pretty much the conversation. Hey. We think we can go upmarket, and we think we have to do this, this, and this, and auction ABM program. One of the things we started with was, yes, getting all that brand creative on the front end and then preparing the different stages in the funnel so we can really bring people along on a journey. We we used to try and rush and almost ask people to give us something straight away. In the end, we really slowed it down, and we realized in that first wave, if we just use success display ads, it would take two months before someone would magically pop up an inbound over here. Whereas if we started to layer up the approach or involve sales more, that time would come down. So it was a bit of a battle, and I did make a few big mistakes. One of the big mistakes was I tried to roll out everywhere with all the sales teams, all the different regional managers. You gotta create FOMO. That’s what I like to say. You gotta create the FOMO, makes a couple of pockets really successful, and then if you build it, they’ll come. Yeah. So we rolled it back close to the US and just had a couple of managers, and then we really started to get there. There was a lot in there about personalization, and we just recently had an episode specific to personalization. But you had some really, I think, very specific, like, one to one, one to few, one to many, which again, like, as you were getting into this, could you talk a little bit about that? Because I think so many orgs try to do personalization and mixed results or go too big or too broad, but it seemed you really broke it down in such a way that seemed like, a, was just clear what you were trying to do, and b, pretty successful. So we’d love to hear a little bit about that as part of the strategy. The thing we got right in the strategy was we realized once a few was the way to go. But in our heads in the marketing team, we’re like, yeah. Want a few means this. It means this size company. It means this kind of size list, and this is all targeting. Had we gone around the whole organization and checked that everyone else had the same idea about what ABM means or want a few? Actually, no. We we didn’t. So if I could go back in time, that’s one thing I would have checked you with people and done. But we realized because we were learning about our ICP, it was safest to start with one of you and start moving, in a direction. So just take an example. We’ve got a great ABM guy on our team in the US, Brock. So he started off in one of the segments with US health care. So we’ve started with US health care, one to few. The audience is actually about hundred accounts or so, and we’re whittling it down. And what we didn’t understand is that there are so many different segments and subsegments within health care and which ones can we actually provide a message to. It took us about six to nine months to realize actually it’s mainly hospitals within health care, that we should really focus on. Only then could we move to doing one to one for the top ten there and then start experimenting with that. But it took us a while to graduate to that. And then even now, we’re still putting in more rigor to that, and we’re going through the same process with our ABM for legal campaign, which was two weeks ago. Actually, it’s funny. I was in the offices, I think, Wednesday or something, having a meeting in there with the UK team. And they showed us some playback from one of the campaigns. So we’ve moved forty percent of the accounts to decision stage in about two weeks, which for us is absolutely unheard of. We will get to one to one in the other verticals. We’re trying to get there. But it’s so smart again to apply, especially when you’re making a shift from a traditional marketing approach to ABM to just test, iterate, see what works, and then build on it, and so a geo based vertical approach, one to two is a great place for anyone to start, so I’m glad it’s yielding results. Ben, can we talk about AI? You mentioned obviously that GenAI has transformed your brand strategy, and I’d love to hear more about how at Exclaimer you are using AI to just differentiate yourself in such a crowded b to b space? I’ll be the first person to admit we don’t have in our product, like, some super duper, like, AI thing that’s happening in the product. We have all of that kind of stuff in development. But in terms of how we use it in house, we thought we were in a great place and we were like, oh, yeah. You know, we’re making our content with AI. We’re doing this. We’re doing that. We’re starting to think about how we can do some design there as well. And we can automate some of our spreadsheets and things like that. We do really well in marketing team for AI. And then I know you’re also an Insight Partners portfolio company as well. We had Jared from the Center of Excellence come and do a talk with us. And I remember it was a three hour session. And for the first fifteen minutes, I was thinking, oh, I don’t know if it’s gonna be really high level and not super engaging. Then all of a sudden he started going through all these different Google sheets from sheet to sheet would model out the different workflow steps for building basically a whole marketing plan from ICP definition, from audience, and then interrogating yourself, doing customer research. Absolutely phenomenal. And to be completely honest, by the end of that, I was completely blown away, and I felt like an absolute clown thinking that we were doing well just because we were doing content in II. So we started off with things like Jasper. It was going well. We had tone of voice built in. We even had tone of voice built in, which was some of our figureheads and ambassadors within the company. But seeing what we could do with workflow from Jared’s session, absolutely amazing. So it’s funny because a couple of months ago, we had kickoff and we actually asked Jared to come over, and then do that session in person for the whole marketing team. So I was gonna say that if if anyone hasn’t looked at Workflows II, yeah, you’ve got to do it. And then we’ve got everyone chat GPT licenses. And we do a lot of interrogation of the the numbers and also of the plans with that as well now. But there’s still a long way to go. There’s these little, like, snippets inside your presentation that really struck me. Another one was the concept that you talked about of buyer indifference, right? And like there’s privacy and again, obviously you’re you’re marketing in the US but I’m sure you’re marketing regionally as well. And certainly the the European landscape for privacy is trickier. How have you been navigating that to try to get through the indifference part more than anything else? Indifference is a challenge for us. I think for us, it’s a lot of the time it’s not us versus a competitor. It’s us versus not buying products or doing nothing. And that is a big challenge. And I think at the top of the call, we started talking about why did we want to invest so heavily in brand if we wanna drive demand. I’m not gonna call out other SaaS products, but I think if you have a strong brand, you can actually convince people to buy in and really think about how your product’s gonna fit in a whole ecosystem. There’s so much indifference in the market right now. The you’ve all seen that chart with the marketing landscape. There’s, like, thousands and thousands of logos now. It’s impossible. So we’re really trying to do two things, build a strong brand to make sure that we can overcome indifference, And with that, have an increasingly stronger value proposition. So now the product team works hard to make sure we’ve got success metrics in there, things like that. But then the other thing is we started to do more ecosystem led growth with partners as well I really start to tell that better together story with other firms about how you can get the most out of the product. And the nice thing about that is we’ve got loads of really strong partners who are happy to tell that story, and it just makes it so much easier in the mind of the buyer because I already have that trust, and now that trust is implied with the other products, but I can also see what the outcome will be. And I think and to your point, there is so much indifference that you need to paint a clearer picture of the outcome. The rest is too hard because you’re just overwhelmed with choice. I actually eat it every day as well when people bring me different products. It’s not easy. Ben, we have a question that we ask every single guest on the podcast. What is the most ridiculous thing you’ve been asked to do in your career? I had a CEO who made a vodka brand, and I might have been asked to bring that to an event in a different country in a few suitcases, obviously, stamped in another country. I wouldn’t say the quantity or the amount, but it was for a marketing event, just to be clear. So it is still marketing related. That was making me sweat a little bit at the airport of the country I I was going through at the time, which I won’t mention. We’ve done a couple of, like, over the great smuggling. Yeah. Flag across borders stories. You didn’t have to say, Adam. But, yes, the feds are not no. There’s no Yeah. Law enforcement, I don’t think, that listens to podcasts. We’re not big in that ICP. Actually, before we go, I just wanna ask you one more thing too. What’s next? So, like, you’ve gotten sort of done a significant uplift, rebuild, you’re doing. What’s the next pillar for you? What’s the next thing that you’re kinda alright. We’re gonna go there now. Yeah. Absolutely. So how do I not give a boring ask? Because I spent all morning doing budgeting and go to market initiatives for next year. Question. Hold on. Hold on. I love a good budget spreadsheet. I I do. I find it oddly soothing. Even when they’re like, take it out, take it out, take it out. It’s still very soothing. So it’s not so boring. Okay. I’ll I’ll do my best. Really, it’s accelerating our growth rate. Like, we’re on for between twenty five and thirty percent. But next year, we have to do thirty five percent, and we can get there. And I think one of the big things for explainer, if we’re talking internally, is where I’ve explained that position in terms of what maturity marketing was at. Imagine that across the whole business in terms of we’re starting from a little bit further back. And at sometimes when you get to a base level on something, you don’t celebrate that win because you’re looking around at your peers thinking, oh, we’re still behind everyone else in terms of sophistication. But, really, it’s just getting better go to market alignment and then having a solid plan together. And when I was looking at the numbers earlier, all we’ve gotta do is move like, if I get twenty percent more leads in the the mid market area, which isn’t actually loads. So, I mean, there’s a couple of hundred across a year is not actually loads and just affect that conversion rate from seven percent to around nine percent. All of a sudden, we’re almost adding fifty percent to the ARR, like, without ADB really dramatically changing. I know that sounds wacky to talk about, and it’s just because we’re not selling enough of that deal size. And that’s to do with alignment and just the way we process things and the way we treat the funnel. Obviously, I missed out some of the metrics along that journey and this conversation, but it’s within reach. It’s not that far away. So it’s just really solid fundamentals, keep a reach on the converge remotes, and then we’ve got some very exciting product development coming as well. Alright. Well, this is great. Appreciate you jumping on. Thanks for the conversation. Thanks for for coming out to the conference back in June, which I seem to still have problems with the calendar. Thank you. Yeah. Of course. Thanks so much, guys. Really appreciate it. And, yeah, big fan of success. So anytime. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.