How to Effectively Build Your Lead List

So PubNub, it powers real-time infrastructure as a service. What is real-time infrastructure as a service? You might think of back, you know, five, ten years ago, your applications, you might have had to ping a server and get data every 15 minutes. In the days of Uber and Fitbit, where you need always-on data, that's what PubNub really powers. And some of the applications it supports, application areas, include chat, if your developers want to develop in-app chat, IoT, and real-time updates. So if your developers are looking to do any of that, talk to some of the PubNub people. You have Laura back there. All right. So with that, I'd like to introduce our esteemed moderator, Sonia Jacobs. I've got this one, this beautiful mic right here. Hello, everyone. Hello. Welcome to you all. Yeah, so without further ado, I thought we would go ahead and introduce ourselves, these esteemed marketers, one at a time. If you just tell us. Tell the audience a little bit about what drives you. Got you. I'm Kevin Liu. I'm the Director of Marketing Operations at MongoDB. What drives me is data, obviously. Hi, I'm Ryan. Ryan Goldman, VP of Sentry. It's a developer tool focused on error tracking. So probably no one in this room has ever used it or ever will. Sorry. It's great. What drives me? I'm really interested in how multiple functions within a single application, whether it's a server or a server, can in marketing integrate to kind of drive better outcomes for both the user and the company, which is data. But like, what's the backbone of the data? It's outcomes. And I'm Dan Frohnen, VP of Marketing for Schedulo. And we're basically a CRM for your field or mobile employees. What drives me is revenue. So whatever I can do in marketing to bring home the bacon is what I'm all about. Awesome. Awesome, awesome. So we're just going to go ahead and jump right in. Since we want to provide a lot of tactical, practical advice tonight, I want to know what you guys do if you're a smaller company and you don't know what to do to get Demand Gen off the ground. What's the very first step that you take? I can go first. So first thing is real simple stuff, I guess. It's social, blog. Having a blog is really important. On your website, just always have a place for someone to put up their email address, like, hey, I'm interested in your newsletter. Like, really simple stuff to at least get your lead list started. Also, like, if you're a brand new company, like, no one knows about you, like, your initial blog posts, they really need to be more on thought leadership, right? You're not going to be like, oh, this company is using us because we're better than this company, right? So you need to have a lot of thought leadership. For MongoDB, it's like, what is microservices? What is NoSQL? What is this stuff? And that's just a really good starting point just to, so people can come to your blog, people can come to your website and be like, hey, these guys know what they're talking about on, like, NoSQL and stuff like that. So true. From a mechanism perspective, so my background in addition to Demand Generation comes from product marketing and I've found that it actually starts with this idea of having a solution that complements other things that are already in the market. So most products that are entering today are premium or at least cheap stats. So being able to figure out a way to position your products such that it's not only complementary to the tools that are currently entrenched, but that they're adopted and embraced by those partners is a tremendous way to drive demand. So being able to get in front of people who have something at stake, which is getting more value out of the product they're already using, and then backing that up with, like, the mechanism, so the fields, the chat, the blog, being able to kind of, like, catch the exhaust of value. And I'd actually take it one step kind of before that, and I think that that's knowing who your buyer is, not only from what kind of account fit, whether it's enterprise, mid-market, SMB, but actually the persona of that buyer, so that you can actually, you know, get that out there. So that you can actually, when you're doing your blog, know what you're writing about in the first place. And then when you're going out and messaging your product and finding that it might fit in a certain ecosystem, how you're going to resonate that message to actually get things going in the first place. Makes total sense. And I think it's actually a good segue because this is a contentious topic. Buying lists to access those individuals that you want to talk to, how do we feel about that? I'll take that. So just to set the record straight, like, I hated, like, the concept of Lisp. Like, it was just the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. But ever since I came to MongoDB and learned about MongoDB's strategy for Lisp, it's actually our third highest influencer in revenue. The reason is because we are essentially, it's harder to market to people that don't know about you in certain ways than people that already know about you. So you have to develop a completely different strategy for Lisp buys. And the strategy we developed for Lisp buys is really like, it's not about MongoDB. The initial email, the initial touch that we have for the Lisp buy is not anything about MongoDB. It's about services, like, what is microservices? What is NoSQL? What are these things that everyone's talking about? What are these buzzwords? So we want to get the prospect to understand what everything is. We establish ourselves as a thought leader. Then we bring in, like, hey, how is essentially this company, how is United doing this? How are these companies doing this? They're actually using MongoDB, right? So we're gradually bringing ourselves into the conversation, but it's not essentially the opening topic. And we're not like, hey, we bought this list. Let's send it to sales for them to follow up with. That's just not going to work. Absolutely. It's a little bit like, a little bit of storage. It's a little bit of storytelling, but then also weaving yourself into a broader narrative at the same time. What about your experiences, Brian, with buying Lisp? Is this something that you have much experience with? I have no experience with it. And you asked me that because you know I have no experience with it. Should you be focusing more on the problem? I mean, there's probably a couple different schools of thought with regard to how to intermediate, you said. Yeah, I mean, so the problem is a big part of it, but it's not the only thing. I think the broader context and a place and time tend to be pretty important. You kind of want to scare people a little bit, whether they know it or not. You want to put things in the context of there's a shift happening, and the shift affects all of us, regardless of your existing or past toolset. And then the problem kind of originates not only from the thing that you need to do well, but the thing that you've adopted historically to do that well, but it's actually working way poorly than you ever imagined. You know, this is working. This is where demand generation and product and product marketing come together because you kind of have an opportunity, kind of have an obligation to start pitching category and differentiation by not talking about your product as poorly in the lifecycle of your user as possible. And the more you can talk about context and kind of a differentiated pain point, the better you can kind of create a category. because it also blocks out your downstream competition. Right. Makes sense. Dan, what about you? In terms of buying lists, what's been your experience? Yeah, I mean, I think list buying has a negative connotation, and it goes back to when our phones used to ring when people would just acquire a list and call you all night long. I agree with both these guys. Obviously, earned is king or queen, but there are accelerants to becoming worthy of talking to someone, and we actually rolled out a few new things at Schedula with the help of actually one of our vendors that's here, ZenIQ, and that's identifying companies that are on our website that are anonymous, so they help us figure that out. Then we build out that data. We start talking to them because we know that they're already looking at us, so it's not as if we're just coming out of nowhere. Same with target accounts that are sitting in our system, so if we start to cookie them on the website and then we see that they're actually hitting us we go out to the right personas that we think are going to be looking at us or having that conversation and use that as a starting point. Do you consider those folks that you're identifying from anonymous to de-anonymous as purchased or acquired? Purchased, absolutely. Then what we'll do is actually put it through an in-house nurture, so I'm not going to just kick it right over to a BDR or an SDR unless they're prospecting our own database. Makes sense. So you guys have all sort of touched on, on content. There's obviously a burgeoning movement right now to free the content, to ungate the content. And I think there's a lot of people just echoing that sentiment, but what's the feasibility of that? Can you really make anything from that if all of your content is ungated and liberated? I always laugh at this argument because all of our content technically is ungated if you were to search in a certain way through or go to YouTube. I hate ungated content just because I want, I see super quality leads coming in that are raising their hand and giving me buying signals. But at the same time, if I wasn't in charge of marketing and I didn't own a pipeline or a revenue number, I'd be all about ungated. Yeah, I'm sort of with you. So I hate ungated content because you should charge a fee if it's really good. I mean, you want to start that relationship early. I mean, you have to believe that the content that you're going to use, the content that you're going to offer them downstream is going to be as high quality or more high quality. You don't get to give it to them. They don't get to benefit if you don't have their contact information. That said, I tend to market to developers. So, I mean, you don't get to gate anything. They never take the bait. Never? Never. Anything, anything at all that has worked? I mean, you have to be in a very specific, so my history is I was at a company called Cloudera and that was, a specific type of developer for a specific type of outcome that was like, we were able to micro-segment within that larger audience. And so we were able to gate a lot of stuff and it worked pretty well, especially because, and this has worked like gangbusters for MongoDB, offering a lot of education content and gating the heck out of that. And so it had very little to do with product or thought leadership. It was really like, this is an open source product. How do you actually use it in the first place? So that can really, really work. Yeah, that's interesting. I was curious your take on sort of like the educational, how do you prioritize what you educate people on? I mean, it depends. So like with something like Cloudera or MongoDB where a lot of the money comes from support, there has to be this understanding that there are people to use it in the first place. So you're able to kind of charge that fee up front with a lot more of the current freemium SaaS open source products like Sentry. Yeah. So it's not an option. The cost of adoption is so low to begin with and the product is meant to be easy as pie. Like you can just like use it within 30 seconds. So there is no option of gating education. So in that case, we turned to AI. So it's a kind of interesting use case because we make everything available. You know, we've experimented with gating things and we kind of have it as like, in the background if you want it. But we tend to find that people are going to sign up for the product first thing no matter what kind of great content we have. And so like in the interest of intermediating that and trying to figure out how to encourage hand raising, we started using things like Drift. If you're not familiar with Drift, it's similar to Intercom but for sales and marketing as opposed to for support, which developers don't understand. But we're trying to make them understand it. It requires a lot of... kind of journey creation upfront such that you're able to disqualify people really, really fast if they just want technical support. Which is a hard thing to do when people have been trained by Intercom over a really long time to always look to the chat box for support. And so we're using it in another way. We're asking good questions. We're kind of like pushing the topic of raising your hand for a sales conversation. And if you buy into that, then, we have it in pretty good shape to offer a meeting or a live person. And like on the spectrum of, you know, here is the hand raiser who wants a sales conversation. Here is the person who just wants support. Somewhere in between is the person who actually wants content, which is my favorite. And then we actually figure out a way to capture information and nurture you because in order to deliver you any content, we have to ask you for your email. And it happens by a robot. You know, it's a cool robot. It's a trustworthy robot, but it's a robot nonetheless. Yeah, it's true. And people want to know if it's a robot. Kevin, what do you? Yeah, so I agree, completely agree. The developers, yes, they'll never give us information, stuff like that. We've actually started doing some, I'm going to put my operations hat on just to talk about like kind of the stuff we're actually doing. For us, we do like a lot of progressive profiling. They fill out the form once. They'll never have to fill it out again So you serve up the asset and then you have like a pop-up window where they can fill out your information or hit next. So we just started that experiment. Do you offer incentive? No. Word. Yeah, it works. We just started the experiment, so I can't tell you the results now. We don't know how it's going to happen, but yeah, I've seen a bunch of people start to do like optional gated content, stuff like that. We're also planning like some stuff where, So we have a SaaS product called Atlas where people can log in. So essentially we can log essentially like, hey, this person's logged in, they're visiting these contents. So they're essentially like a known visitor. So if they're logged into Atlas, they can access some of our content and we know who they are. So we can un-gate some assets like that. So those are some of the projects we have or experiments that we're doing. How do you decide which content Everything that was originally gated is still gated. What we're actually starting to gate is more like documentation. Like are they interested in learning this aspect of the product? Stuff like that. And then we can send them more targeted type messaging on like hey, use cases and stuff like that. If they're looking at documentation that essentially that's not their primary use case. Makes sense. Do you have anything to add, Dan? No, just that I've learned something Value one. So I think we've talked a lot about the forms of demand gen that seem to be easier to scale. But there's definitely interest in events. Do you guys use that as part of your strategy for demand gen? And if you do, how is that working for you? I could take the first stab at this. I don't trust like event leads just because swag is everywhere. Everyone wants swag. Like let me scan, let me use swag. Well, like unrelated will give you like their information just for swag. So what we've been doing is really just telling people like way up front like hey, we're going to be attending this event. Let us know if you want to set up a meeting. Or like post event or like we want sales to essentially tag people that are really interested. Not just there for the swag. So a strategy that we've been doing that's been working is just really like we're going to be attending like AWS New York or something like that. Let us know if you want to set up a meeting. And those are probably like the more important ones. Then I would say like just your lead list that you get from events. We really don't trust them as much. Yeah, so I actually have a conundrum around events. So before I started, my company was growing really fast without any marketing except for events. They, you know, 100% of the entire budget went towards events. And they were doing a lot of them, like several a month. Very few of the AWS or Raleigh types of events more language specific communities so like not meetups but like RubyConf. So there was some cost associated with it both in terms of sponsorship as well as like taking engineers offline and sending them to this thing to Manabooth. And like it did not take much analysis to figure out that those leads were generating zero pipeline. They just weren't. And I actually interviewed against this as I was coming in to run marketing at this organization. That events are important. They are terrible at generating new leads. Especially in a developer tool environment. They're nurture. Everyone who's selling to a developer should remember yes, you scan someone's badge and you should. It's not like ungated content. It's gated content. You have to scan people's badges. But it's nurture. And so no matter how many events you do you should pick like one or two a quarter that are probably the most important. In terms of the number of people who will be there or how much money you're spending on the sponsorship but in terms of the fit and the likelihood for your downstream buyer or the influencer to your buyer to be there and look into your database and say can we figure out a way to get in front of these people three months early, four months early, six months early with content, with campaigns such that when you eventually get to the point where you're inviting them to come to your booth because you have a high belief that they have a propensity to pay attention you're pitching them something other than like oh we're going to be here so show up and get your t-shirt or cap or your socks if the case may be. It's more like we really want to talk to you and there's a likelihood that you've probably run into some questions over the course of these 15 emails that we've sent you over the past quarter or so. Let's have that conversation. Please come to our booth and we'll show you something. Offer them the value of expertise because if you position it that way what better way is there to qualify an opportunity than someone who followed up because you've already been emailing them and you invited them to come to have a conversation and look at a demo or ask some questions and then afterwards you can still hit them with the relatively generic campaign of thanks for coming to our booth. We were the ones with the purple socks or whatever. But chances are if they actually showed up and you were hoping they would show up or you were planning for them to show up that's a good buying signal. It's nurture. It's not demand generation. I think I agree with both these gentlemen. I think it's probably more in Kevin's camp in terms of trying to generate meetings pre-show making sure that it's the target account. I don't necessarily care if it's the same person as long as I got through to the account. We are small enough and startup-y enough to where I can dig into an opportunity and find some pretty major attribution to trade shows. So I actually look at it as brand plus demand. I'm out there. I'm getting my logo out there. I may have people coming in through my booth who may seem like they don't care about me at all. But they might go back to their office. They might get my emails over the course of the next six months and they might pass it on to the right person. And usually just by doing the pre-show marketing and then really hounding our sales team post-show we're able to show ROI and actually some pretty big deals at our shows. Do you mind if I ask a follow-up question? Yeah, absolutely. So given that and kind of going back to the previous question about buying lead lists. What are your thoughts on swapping leads from a show? We do it. Does it work? Depends on what you look at. So if I was to take a lead list and then be a sloppy marketer and say it was great to see you at Dreamforce when they never saw me then it's going to be bad news. But if I say, sorry we missed you at the show and then start to give them some relevant content and nurture them then I think there's value to it. Do you hit everyone that you acquired through those trades? Or do you segment based on best fit by title or company or something like that? I think it's usually, well for us and I think for most companies it's probably a very light nurture and if there's not any kind of hand raising then it's either going to a robot or kind of be clean in your database until something happens. The presence there is really about the brand and the leads are kind of like as many as you can get because you're good enough at marketing that you can kind of get them to convert. Yeah but at the same time not getting too stuck on the number of leads that you get at the event because I think to your earlier points like let's make sure that we're there for the right reasons, let's have the right meetings, let's meet the right companies. But at the same time if you're there you might as well build your database. So my next question just so you guys know is about telling us a secret to driving demand. But that's a pretty broad topic there so if you have a story about how you really did drive a huge compilation of leads I would love to hear that. I'm sure everyone wants to know where to actually get started and what some of your successes were. That's a tough one. I would say the surprise is I already went over it was list buys. For sure like we generate a bunch of leads from list buys. What about a common mistake people make? I think that's people are eager to get started and perhaps they bark up the wrong tree. Like how do you course correct after that? I think it's more for us like we have a SaaS product it's really anyone that signs up we should reach out to. I think that's a common mistake. Some people are just there to see what you have to offer. Even like people were in the news or something like that and people are like oh I'm going to check it out. They might not be a developer but they saw we have a free product. And it's really making sure you know what they're doing or if they're actually using the product instead of just signing up and reaching out for them. I think it's important to understand your customer there. So I can echo that. So my current company does a shit job and I'm partially responsible for that of nurturing signups. We have this perspective that because it's open source and because it's relatively feature obvious that we should use the product to do onboarding as opposed to using email to do onboarding. It's wrong. I'm trying to fight that battle but I'm with you. You have a responsibility to allow your audience to turn it off if they want to. Turn off the emails, unsubscribe, do whatever as opposed to just assuming that you know them better than you do. Which is, an email can't hurt. No matter who your audience is. Developers, HR people, call center people in another country. Everyone can benefit from an email or they'll just ignore them or turn them off. So I'm with you 100%. But your question about what has worked. My current company, again, we don't do it because we are not at the right stage to do it but integrating your SDRs into your process, thinking of them as marketing assets, whether they report into marketing or not, and figuring out how to crack the nut of getting them both focused and consultative is a huge win. I've seen it at a couple of the companies that I've worked at. Having them have a stake and be enthusiastic about the product and not just about their logo is a huge win. And it's a win for them as well. The best way to enable SDRs from my experience is being transparent about what happens in marketing. Not such that they're doing marketing but that they're a stakeholder. They understand how they're a beneficiary, how they can take advantage of things, how they can go to the well for content, go to the well for insight, understand personas. One of you guys talked about personas earlier. It's an easy thing for SDRs to forget, but it's important that they remember. And really, really trying to serve them, to enable them as much as possible. And then also making them more data-driven tends to work. So I have this analogy that I always use, and a lot of SDRs tend to be former athletes. It is what it is. That like, you talk about Steph Curry, Steph Curry is able to take as many shots as he does because he has high confidence that the ones he's taking are likely to go in. And it takes a long time to get there, but the cheat code is studying. Like, you take as many shots during practice as you need to, and you kind of tabulate what works and what doesn't so that when it comes to prime time, when it comes to production, you know which ones to take and which ones to avoid. And SDRs can work the same way. Keep track of everything you do. Break down your emails, break down your phone calls into bite-sized portions. Do repeats. Figure out what's working. Keep track of things. Every email has an anatomy. It's subject line. It's opening sentence. It's closing sentence. It's call to action. Mix them up until you figure out what's working and what's not. And you'll get better SDRs. And more importantly, you'll get more pipeline. You'll generate a lot more demand. And if your SDRs are working well, that should be your highest value leads. I mean, if they're not, then you're doing it wrong. Yeah, totally. I'm glad SDRs came up. I've been fortunate enough to manage the SDR team in my past two companies, and we actually definitely consider them to be a part of the marketing team and an extension of what we're doing. And when they're bought in on what the messaging is for personas, when they're bought in on the target account strategy, when they trust marketing enough to send out a message that actually has a little bit of a message from them in their signature, then you know you're on to something when they're willing to pick up the phone and then act as if they had actually sent it. So I definitely agree with you there. In terms of, you know, I think the original question was like, is there something easy you can do to start? Yeah, kickstart the process a bit. And I think the answer is there's no such thing as easy. I think the easiest thing that I've found is to actually stop everything, which is scary as hell, because I think people just want results. They'll throw spaghetti at the wall, whatever sticks, I'm going to do more of it. But I'm a pretty big firm believer that you can stop, you can figure out who you're trying to sell to, what the message is, what the best channels are, do some testing, and then start to whip the fast horse. And there's no other way. Yeah, that makes sense. And actually that's the perfect segue. So let's talk for a second about the marketing sales handoff. I'm curious to know sort of your best example of that kind of handoff, and then the worst one. I don't know who has the gnarliest tail, but Kevin, you look very serious right now. Maybe it's you. I could start. I've been really fortunate enough, for the past couple companies I've worked for, we've had a really great relationship with sales. It's just really getting down to understanding how sales are measured. Sales at the end of the day doesn't care about how many MQLs you generate. They don't care about how many MQLs are coming in. They don't care about that. It's really understanding how sales is being measured at the end of the day. What's their quota? How does it And really getting a deep understanding of it. So our approach is we have a weekly meeting with sales, with our LDRs, SDRs. They're under sales, they're not under marketing. Just to understand to get that qualitative feedback. And we also have quantitative feedback. We have an agreement. We understand what metrics, essentially, they're measured on. And then we're going to present them their metrics every week and say, this is how we're doing. And once they get that big picture, I think it really helps in the long run. If you follow up on X amount of leads, we convert at X percentage. They'll know. They essentially understand the big picture. And they're able to get it. I think where we've been really struggling on is just training new SDRs, new LDRs on everything that's going on. A lot of these people come in from different organizations, different processes, have their own way of doing things. And it's hard to essentially fit them into what we're doing. Because everyone wants to do things their own way. They think they'll sell the best doing it this way. Stuff like that. They go based off their own experiences. Stuff like that. Not the data that we're giving. I think it's just important to have that feedback loop. Makes sense. Brian, how do you manage that handoff? What does it look like for you? What experiences have you had? At my current company, we're not quite there yet. We're trying to figure it out. I don't have a lot to draw from. At some companies, it's been a situation where we have so many salespeople with such high quotas. And it really does feel like throwing spaghetti at the wall. MQL has become pretty important because you just need to goose the numbers. You just need to give them something to follow up on because we're hiring 50 salespeople a week or a month. It's just insane. It's not a good feeling. But you have to live with the balance of quantity matters because you have mouths to feed. And you have to trust the process that they're going to figure out how to do it themselves. And that you're training them well enough that your product marketing team knows what they're doing in terms of giving them the tools that they need and sales plays that are going to work. But then in the background, really thinking through it's temporary. Anything, like you said, you can stop whenever you want. So anything can be temporary. You just have to have another plan. So when I've been in that situation where I'm not happy with the way things are working and that can be religious too. I'm not going to pretend I don't have a marketer's perspective on things. Where even if it's working I don't sometimes think, this shouldn't be working. It's working, sure the data shows it's working but it shouldn't be working. It's all like spray and pray. And when you start to feel like that it's kind of your responsibility to come up with something different. And you can't really put the brakes on until you have that something different and skunk works the heck out of it and make sure that it works. And so that's why getting back to the original point having a good relationship with sales isn't because you can't set up the skunk works. You can't get buy-in into your experiment unless you have some people who trust you. Who have a willingness to understand your vision as a marketer. And that's when it gets really fun. At Cloudera when we were growing fast the most fun stuff was when sure, everything seemed to be chugging along. All the SDRs and AEs were hitting their quota. Everyone's happy. But you're not really comfortable with how it's working and you come up with a new way of doing things. And you kind of put it in place in a cold corner of the room with one or two people and see how it works. And then you kind of hammer at it, hammer at it, hammer at it until it works the way you want it to. And then you kind of just roll it out to everybody else. So if you have a big enough organization if you have enough resources make friends with a couple of people that you trust and kind of segment your sales organization. Don't just segment your markets. Segment the way your AEs and your SDRs go to market. Listen to what they're doing. That's the best thing you can do. Don't treat them like bean counters. Don't treat them like coin op. Figure out the people that you actually want to have a relationship with and serve them. I agree 100% with the servant mentality towards marketing leadership. I think the more that I can show the sales organization that I carry a bag as well that I own a pipeline number that I care about your pipeline when I see a person I will openly ask about a deal that's in play. I'll know a couple of the contacts on it and I'll ask real questions because I care. I want to brainstorm on it and I want to see how I can help. And I think that that goes a long way. In terms of just programmatic handoff I do think it's important just from sales methodology to make sure that you have your stages defined your sales methodology defined and then kind of a clear delineation between what the marketing handoff is to LDR, BDR, SDR, whatever you're going to call it to your AEs. And to make sure that everyone is extremely clear on that and that everyone understands what they're comped on. Because I think the second that someone realizes oh your quota was that I want to help you get to your quota. Oh your quota was that I want to help you get to your quota. And then ultimately revenue we want to hit that revenue number to help that AE get to their quota. Let's turn the dials that make everyone want to achieve it 100 plus percent. Makes sense. Do I have time for one more question? So a lot of people here they need to create high quality content and it has to be the gateway for getting to know about your product or your brand. So say you do a fantastic job at that right? And you've got amazing content and you've got 75,000 subscribers to your blog and this list is just sitting there. How do you turn them into paying customers from there? Are there any rules? Are there any taboo actions that you could take that are probably not a great idea? I think it just comes back to everything that we've talked about whether it's trade show leads or inbound versus list build. I think they signed up for a particular thing and you need to take them down a journey and try to get them to raise their hand and say that they want something else. And at the same time it doesn't hurt to pick up the phone from like a BDR or an AE and just have a quick conversation and prospect it and kind of be a little bit old school. Yeah. Maybe we take a bad approach at this but if they sign up for our blog they're going to get our emails. It's like a subscription center like if they want to opt out and stuff like that. I think maybe our approach is not the best but we give them options to opt out if they need to. So I'm going to not apply. We have a big percentage of our users in Europe. So GDPR is a regulation that we're kind of dealing with or getting ready to deal with. So we're kind of just backing off of a lot of that stuff. We're kind of entering the market at a time when we never really ramped up that heavy on any of it. And we kind of have to stand back and just put some consideration into how do we market to people? How do we get their trust? How do we get them to opt in? Because it's not the way it was even like six months ago where we can even with great content serve people. We have to figure out a way to respect privacy and we're basically treating everyone as if they were based in the EU. Not my choice but something I'm going to live with because our leadership thinks it's the right way. Going back to list buys we only buy list buys in the United States. Do not buy list buys anywhere else. Like Canada, Europe. Do not. For EMEA get ready to start doing direct mail again. Awesome. Well I think we're right about a time where we maybe get some questions from the audience. If there's any... Yes. Hey there guys thanks and congrats on the MongoDB IPO. That was fantastic. I can't talk about it. Thank you though. It's a great milestone. That's all I can say. So I had two questions. One was for David, is that right? Yeah, David. And Ryan. You mentioned email content inside of their email signatures. Can you describe what kind of content you put in there or how you target it? And then the second question is for Ryan. You mentioned something about list swapping at conferences. We actually have a Dreamforce booth this year and I'm just wondering how do you ask to swap without looking too cheap? But it's fine I guess. Yeah so I mean we actually send emails on our BDR's behalf. So we'll actually take a marketing email make it look like it was a forward from that person with a hey blah blah blah I thought you might be interested in what's going on over here. Let's have a conversation. So that's what I was referring to there. So for list swapping, I've never taken part in it but it is a thing. It comes down to this and this is not just list swapping it's everything. Just think about opportunity cost. You don't get the option to do it unless you actually reach out and what's the worst that could happen? And I think everyone who approaches me at a conference and is like let's swap lists. But what's the worst that could have happened? I'm just going to not swap lists with them. I'm not going to judge them by it. I'm not going to stop being their friends. So be fearless. If you have colleagues or former colleagues who are running booths at Dreamforce don't be afraid to even mention it to them beforehand. Let's go at this. Let's really go in and get high ROI from this and plan to my leads are yours your leads are mine. And just wander around. Just strike a good conversation with another person who's running a booth. You might come off the wrong way but if you're a good dude or a good lady it's not going to make a big deal. People are going to either say yes or no and that's all it comes down to. So for the two of you that do have SDRs sorry Ryan at your company do you bifurcate them by inbound vs outbound or do they have responsibility for both? That's a great question. We have this concept of LDRs, SDRs I don't know what XDRs are. We have so many different versions of the DRs or something like that. One part is definitely outbound. We have this thing called PG lists pipeline generation where they'll go and source their list but we're making this shift to more completely inbound. Outbound prospecting will be much less next quarter than it is this quarter. So we're making a huge shift toward inbound. It's probably cyclical. It'll probably go back to outbound again but they do have PG lists essentially requirements or numbers they need to hit as of this quarter. Next quarter will be different. So it's probably like 80% next quarter will be 80% inbound and 20% outbound. I'm a pretty firm believer in SDRs actually handling inbound and outbound and there's some topo research that shows that's kind of a best practice at this point but from a career path standpoint if you are building a really big BDR organization it actually makes sense to start LDR because it's very entry level to kind of mid-range BDR and then up to more strategic outbound. I personally think that outbound prospecting is a career shift down versus inbound but that's me and that's why I don't actually pick up the phones but I personally believe in a mixed methodology. Quick question about lead nurturing for folks that opt in versus cold lists. I know that you don't buy lists but what would be say an appropriate cadence to that and how do you vary that up? In terms of what's In terms of the outbound so let's say you buy a list of a thousand or something people and they know nothing about you but based on their titles or their company they're probably within the target range. What does that, how aggressively do you go at it? Is it like once a month, once every couple of weeks? Or do you guys not do that at all? If we put someone into an in-house nurture they open up two emails and engage twice then we pick up the phone and call them and I think it really just depends on kind of like your internal experience and how you want to run your scoring but I would never buy a list and then just assume that everyone's an automatic MQL. They have to go through something that you deem worthy of them being able to have a conversation or them doing something that says I might know enough about you to have a conversation. In general like your systems will tell you if you're getting toxic. can't just go in assuming that if you email a bunch of people that it's automatic toxicity. If you have a good enough product, if you have a good enough content in those emails it takes a lot of touches to get people to engage. So if you're going to spend the money to get the leads and you're going to spend the time to build the nurtures use the nurtures on the leads that you bought. Don't be afraid to if people don't open them then they're disqualified. Just ignore them going forward. Or you wait until they come to your website inbound and then you got them. But if you don't email them often enough then you're never going to engage them. You're never going to qualify them. You're never going to score them. Hey guys. My name's Krista. I wanted to ask on the nurturing side of things when you talk about a fake forward from a BDR are you using Marketo or are you using Outreach and at what point do you decide that they're duplicative tools? That's a good question and I struggle with it constantly. I think if it's I always tell our BDRs that if I go in and see that you sent the same group of 50 people an email that I could have done on Marketo then I don't need to have a BDR in that chair. So I actually and that's just the God's honest truth I could hire a marketer. So to me they're very much measured on research of an account research of a contact and how relevant that conversation is or they need to kick it over to marketing so we can be programmatic about it. We've actually started using this tool called Convertible. Conversica Conversica if you don't know it's an automated sales outbound prospecting tool what it does is it handles I want to say the bitch work of the SCR so it's like hey are you interested stuff like that and then when it deems that it's ready it's an AI, when it deems that it's ready it'll actually hand it off to that SCR to have a real human conversation with it so it's like hey if you're interested in MongoDB any way you can help out and it'll actually have that conversation with them that's Conversica and that's via email it's really scary because how smart it is Two more questions So do you believe that marketing compensation should be tied to top of the funnel like lead goals or bottom of the funnel like pipeline metrics Alright so both and neither Marketing is a many splendored thing and has a lot of people inside of it Segment your people I think that in certain roles within marketing we don't tie it to metrics enough so I think that like evangelists and product marketers don't get tied to metrics nearly enough and for them it's not top of the funnel it's going to be pipeline generated and for demand gen and growth and things like that, SDRs it has to be have to have some top of the funnel in there that's probably the main thing and then qualification and pass through is probably pretty important as well You can't really expect demand generation to be responsible for pipeline personally Yeah I generally agree it just depends on how close the team is to pipeline I have one more question when it comes to when it comes to the list buys that you have on a regular basis and over time your database either gets bloated or it ebbs and flows what's your strategy on data hygiene? I can take we essentially we keep unsubscribes like always I feel like they can always come back and resubscribe stuff like that a lot of times we'll get bounce backs we'll delete them right away there's no need for them not really only for list buys, this is only for list buys we feel like but yeah it's just straight up deleting them no because we can't reach out to them anyway we can't like email a bounce back and stuff like that they actually hurt our metrics the initials then will be a lot of bounce backs stuff like that and then we just won't send to them Alright I have actually one final question this is kind of a question that we ask at a lot of our events it's a Peter Thiel question what's one thing that you believe about effectively building a lead list that most people would disagree with you on and that's a question for all four of you I'll just turn my sound on I'm in no way prepared I'll let the esteemed guests answer first so you're looking for one thing you believe a lead list that most people would disagree with you on whoever wants to tackle it first I think the scarlet letter of putting data in is not really a scarlet letter I think as long as you have a plan in place ahead of time you should go for it because if you're not going to do it and talk to companies first your competitors will so to me it's a jump start to your marketing and to your pipeline I haven't tested this super thoroughly but it's a belief I'm a religious guy so it's kind of become uncool to ask too many questions on signup you use your clearbit or some other thing and you kind of just enrich data in the background and you segment actively if you're trying to qualify and you know questions that are important to fit for downstream opportunity just ask them don't expect a system or AI or whatever to fill it in and even if it's right that's fine but if you can get people to answer the question you're more likely to sell to them in the future because it's a good way to signal intent so not too many questions but if you know there are certain things that are key to your conversion funnel just ask those questions especially if they're well crafted and developed in conjunction with all the information that they have available I think smart questions are probably better than none at all I agree I'm just trying to think of something I already talked about Lispy so I don't know if I have any IPOs to talk about There's an IPO I believe I'm really excited Mine is just I'm repeating myself it has to be the Lispy thing I love Lispy now it's my new favorite band Cool Well thank you guys If you want to give a round of applause I'll stand right next to them and give final announcements here We are here until 8 o'clock Again I want to thank PubNup for hosting us Feel free to connect There's alcohol There's drinks and there's food After this conversation The panel will be up here so if you have questions for them please feel free to come up and ask them questions