Jim Williams, VP of Marketing at Influitive - The B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast

The B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast

Jim Williams is the VP of Marketing at Influitive

Jim is a strategic executive, growth hacker and advocate marketing thought leader. He’s had a successful track record of leading and growing, early stage technology companies. At Influitive, he oversees marketing automation, including lead nurturing, scoring, website personalization, sales enablement. advocacy, social and everything marketing. His most important work at Influitive is in mobilizing hundreds of fans, influencers and customers to refer leads, build brand affinity and accelerate the sales pipeline. Jim Williams is considered a thought leader in strategies to acquire engaged advocates (customers, partners, fans and evangelists) that support the growth of referral leads, dozens of product reviews and thousands of content and social shares. Prior to his work at Influitive, Jim was a marketing leader at Eloqua and worked alongside Triblio’s CEO, Andre Yee.

Press play and hear advocate marketing expert, Jim Williams, share his valuable B2B marketing insights.
The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/Influitive

Beginning of Transcript

Jeff Zelaya: Welcome to B2B Content Marketing Leaders. I’m here with Jim Williams, a VP of Marketing at Influitive. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Williams: Hi. Thanks a lot, Jeff. I appreciate the opportunity.

Jeff Zelaya: So Jim, I know a lot of people that are listening already know you. They know Influitive, but for those that this is a new name to them, start off by giving us just a bit of background on who you are and your role at Influitive.

Jim Williams, VP of Marketing at Influitive

Jim Williams: Thanks, Jeff. Yes, so Jim Williams. I’m the vice president of marketing at Influitive. I have been in B2B marketing for my entire career, and usually, at either startup or growth-oriented, growth-stage companies. So prior to Influitive, I spent 7 years at Eloqua where I worked with Triblo’s co-founder to help build that company and bring it eventually to IPO when I left, and prior to that, there was a number of different startups, some successful, some not successful, but you know, that’s how I kind of cut my deal with marketing.

Jeff Zelaya: Influitive is on the right track. I mean I hear tons of buzz about the company, and one recent marketing strategy tactic that you guys used was the BAM!TV, and wow, I was amazed. If you guys haven’t watched it yet, make sure you check it out, BAM!TV. It was a talk show, late-night talk show style video interviewing B2B marketers and sharing insight about Influitive, and really focused on the B2B marketer. And I want to just ask you like where did that come from because that was so outside of the box, so new, so refreshing. How did that start and how’s that been working out for you guys?

Jim Williams: Sure. I’ll definitely address that. Before I do, let me just give you a quick introduction to Influitive because I think that helps set some of the contacts. We’re an advocate marketing company, consider ourselves the advocate marketing experts, and advocate marketing is essentially using your fans, supporters, evangelists, promoters, the people that had a non-financial investment in your company, using them to help generate their low brand recognition and affinity, more leads, and using them to help accelerate revenue in pipeline. That’s what our platform does. While people in B2B world are generally familiar with terms like, you know, referral marketing and references and word-of-mouth marketing, there really isn’t… there has not been today a scalable way to actually execute on those various programs. There’s been no way to systematically manufacture buzz, right, and I think that’s what a lot of companies want to do. They want to manufacture buzz because, you know, like it or not, we’re in a socially-connected world where it’s what people are saying about you that defines your brand and ultimately your success as a company. So that’s what we help people do.

So BAM!TV. It’s really kind of an interesting story. We had a major product launch in the fall of 2014, and last summer, we started to think about OK, what are we going to do. We have some new product coming out. For us, it’s introducing a whole new product module which is a new thing for us for, you know, 3-year-old startup, and today, we’ve been kind of a single product company. We want to introduce a new product and also kind of announce our entry into an adjacent space. I’ve been in product marketing a long time, and unfortunately, most product launch campaigns are kind of whole home affairs, right? Number one, they’re very myopic. They’re very inward-focused. There’s a lot of communications around your products and features and functions, etcetera, which is kind of the exact opposite of what a broader marketplace is looking for which is education that’s best practices, etcetera, right? So they’re not really interest in products or interest in learning how to solve problems.

And secondly, the tactics involved in product launches, they’re usually the same thing, right? You issue a press release. You train your sales people and you provide them tools to help sell the product. You update your website. You create a product demo. And boom, your product is launched. It’s not the most exciting package of materials to put together for a pretty big event in our company’s history, so instead, we decided to step back and say, “Well, what if we did something different? What if we instead try to deliver our product message but through a more value added and very different medium,” and for us, that medium is something that I think we can all relate to which is kind of the format of a late-night TV talk show.

We all like to watch Conan and all the variety shows, Tonight Show. We like to watch those there. They’re very entertaining. They’re fast-phased. It’s usually comprised of a number of very short clips. We learn something. You know, you get some insights. There’s usually some humor, and then you’re on to the next topic, and it just kind of flows along. Put our heads together and said, “Well, is there a way we could kind of package up a product launch and stick it into that format to make it a bit more entertaining and get broader reach, and that’s where we came up with this idea of BAM!TV, the first ever B2B late-night talk show.

Jeff Zelaya: The humor of it was just very in-your-face type of tone.

Jim Williams: Yeah. That was the idea, right? Like if we went out there and started talking about product, everybody would kind of tune out really quickly, so we said, “Alright, we got to make it entertaining. We got to get our message across, and you know, what are the things that a late-night format can offer us that we can work with?” So there were a couple things involved. Number one, we need to have a number of very brief segments that are related to the same theme, but kind of delivered in very different ways, right? So we need to have guests, right, and the guest knew to be somewhat entertaining, and interviews with the guests was not just professional but also personal in a way. You wanted the personality of the guest to come out, so we always set about finding a bunch of customers that we thought would fit the bill would be good in that format. We wanted an expert, you know, kind of the idea of oh, we got a man out in the field, and this next segment is an interview with an expert, you know, not in the studio but out of the studio. So we look for an analyst that could participate. We also did a way to kind of show out the personality of the company as a live interview with someone back at headquarters at Influitive talking a little bit about some product stuff but in a very light way.

We decided to do this kind of fun play on… If we’re going to talk about our product, we might as well, you know, make it creative, so we did the whole idea of kind of a lead piece of footage that the host of the TV show, you know, discovered some new product that wasn’t supposed to be released to the public, and so he’s going to kind of surprise us by showing that and we kind of react to that as a way to introduce the product itself, right. So we did all those things, but the hardest thing of all, Jeff, was look, you know, I’m a B2B marketer, and we got a CEO as in customers and an analyst. None of those people are late-night talk show hosts and late-night talk show hosts there are the anchor point for any successful broadcast, right? They had to be fast on their feet. They got to be witty. They’ve got to be able to change direction really quickly. They have to have the mannerisms. They have to, you know, be great speakers. They got to look at the camera. So you know, we kind of racked our brains thinking about who could do that role and we ended up saying this is an area that’s right for unctuous. Let’s go get a professional actor and have that person be the talk show host. That’s where we came up with Tony Ray who’s the, you know, the host of BAM!TV.

Jeff Zelaya: It came together so nicely, and if you guys haven’t watched that, go check it out. I think you guys have it on your website so I’m going to make sure I’ll include the link so you could go directly to that episode and take a look at it. And you guys, you know, as a company, had been using content in creative ways. I mean that’s an example of BAM!TV. I subscribe to the Influitive campaigns. I get your playbooks and webinars that you guys are putting together. So a lot of great content are coming out of your team. How does content intertwine with advocate marketing? How is Influitive using, combining those two? How are your clients combining those two?

Jim Williams: That’s really a great question. I think all B2B marketing and marketing in general has undergone this content fever over the last 5 years, right? Content marketing has become end all be all. We all want to become publishers as a way to increase our reach in generating trends and entertainment and form, and eventually, get to the metrics that matter which I know is a question you asked. All of this is great, and it’s fun, and you can build a great brand experience, but you know, pipeline saves lives. You know, like I always… I think this way like, and I talk to my team. My marketing team is at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is draw us a company by delivering real value to our customers, and we can do all the greatest stuff in the world but it’s got to eventually translate into pipeline.

So how do we use advocacy and content together? Well, one of the challenges, I think, that a lot of marketers are faced with content is they begun to spend a lot of money creating content, but they have a fairly narrow pipeline to push that content up in the marketplace. And so what they end up doing is just like we did with the email marketing, you know, generation before content came along as we go and look for other lists, we go on, and we do paid media to try and reach broader audience. We do earn media clearly through our social media channels, social communities, etcetera, but still having a hard time getting our content in front of the audience, and I think advocates are enormously helpful in this regard. Your advocates again are your customer’s partners, sometimes developers if that’s the kind of organization you’re in. There are people that are associated to your brand they have a stake in the success of your company. They believe in your products. In some cases, they built their careers around those products and they are and always on network for you to distribute a content through. They don’t just re-tweet your content. They do it and add comments. They do it with gusto. They do it with fervor. They’re passionate about your ideas that are in the content. And so, they’ll really help you reach a much, much broader audience if you can, you know, develop a program and mobilize them at the time that you’re releasing some important contents. So we do that.

And then the other side of it is you can hire all the writers in the world, but sometimes, the content that’s most meaningful that has the deepest impact on your prospect, a market you’re trying to sell to is content that comes directly from the miles of your customers, right? Sometimes, the most refreshing, you know, contact you read about your ideas and your products and the ones that are written by your customers and people that have bought your products to solve real problems. And so, we use that same network of advocates to source a lot of the content. Almost 40 percent of our blog content comes directly from contributions from our customers and from our fans, and that why. It’s a really big source of content, and inevitably, the ideas we get from our customers about the type of content they want to see, the type of campaigns and programs. Those suggestions tend to be our most successful campaigns.

Jeff Zelaya: You know, I can imagine it’s just more credible. It has legs. It goes out further. So maybe this ties into my next question, but I read that inbound marketing has been fueling 70 to 80 percent of the revenue that’s propelling Influitive to 400 percent year over year growth. And I could imagine the advocacy is a huge part of that growth strategy, but what else are you doing in terms of strategy to scale and to continue this type of growth year after year?

Jim Williams: I think we’re not unlike other startup marketing teams. We use an array of tactics and campaign to fuel that growth. So yeah, content is a huge among it. We publish, I don’t know, between 12 and 15 eBooks over the last year and more than a dozen case studies. We published. We… I might have put up 150 blog posts last year. So yes, we produce a lot of content. We do it in a fairly regular basis and that draws people to our message. A lot of that content is very evangelistic, right? We’re trying to create not just a successful business but a category. And you know, 3, 4 years ago, there was no B2B marketers that had the word advocacy written up on their white board. They just didn’t think about that term, didn’t think about it’s a program that they needed to fund, and we’re trying to get that category up on the board, and so again, a lot of content is about spreading the idea of advocacy and the benefits they can offer your business. So we do all those kind of traditional things.

We also do events and webinars and email campaigns and product demos and everything, everything else that you would expect to be in the mix. We do, you know, social advertising and Google advertiser. We do all that stuff as well just like anyone else. But I think we have, which is a secret ingredient or a secret weapon for us is a referral engine that operates at peak performance, right? So advocacy can come in many forms. It can come in content shares. It can come in people contributing to blogs. It can come in reviews and places like AppExchange or [0:13:36] [Indiscernible] or you know, IT central station. They can come in the form of people participating in communities and talking about your ideas and your products. Those are all extremely helpful, but the one that goes directly to revenue in pipeline is referrals that are given to you by your happiest customers. You cannot get enough of these referrals and they are goped.

So for us, a top performing referral engine looks like this. Out of all the content we produced and all the leads or inquiries we produce, referrals make up less than 3% of the names that we get that come into our inbound into our engine, right? But if you look at the pipeline it produces, suddenly that jumps to 22 percent of all pipeline comes from referrals, right, and if you look at close deals, it’s even significantly higher percentage.

Something like 40 something percent of the closed business comes from a referral. If you are a high-tech company out there and you are looking to grow your business, and you do not have a referral engine that systematically cultivates new business from your existing customers, you’re missing a huge, huge opportunity. It won’t make up the highest percentage of leads, but you’ll quickly see that has a huge impact on the share of revenue at the other end of the pipeline.

Jeff Zelaya: Yup. Where it lacks in quantity, the quality will be there and the conversion rate is…

Jim Williams: Right.

Jeff Zelaya: …is a lot higher. And when, you know, I know you’ve talked, you mentioned how passionate you are about building the pipeline and living and dying by the pipeline, at your level of marketing, right, the executive VP level, CMO level, what are the metrics that you’re paying the most attention to as you’re growing your business out?

Jim Williams: I don’t think there’s anything new here like in terms of the metrics. It’s not like we came up with some secret formula. We do have a magic number at Influitive that we look at which is really it has to do with the success of our customers and the engagement of their advocates on the platform that we revived, but from a marketing perspective, you know, I tend to look at metrics around those five kind of key frameworks, right, volume of leads that are entering the funnel and make it each stage to conversion rate all those leads. As they move to the funnel, we have a very common five stage revenue engine that goes from inquiries and [0:16:08] [Indiscernible] to opportunities to qualify pipeline to close, right? So we’ve looked very closely at that.

We look at velocity and what we can do to actually accelerate revenue so our average sale cycle is something like 3 months, but when we can get advocates involved through references at the end of the sales cycle, referrals at the beginning or some other advocate influence in the middle, we can shave 25 to 30 percent of that time off of the average opportunity, right? So that’s why we’re really focused on advocacy. So we look at velocity and that’s important. And look at total dollars. At the end of the day, we have revenue objectives and it’s pretty easy Math to know that if we need to hit X million dollars in closed business, then we got to have 4 or 5 X that in qualified opportunities in the pipeline. And so I’m always looking at how much forward-looking pipeline have we created for the next quarter’s revenue objective, so I look at that value.

And then the last, and I say it’s the last because it is important but for a startup, it’s not the most important is return. Right? So if I’m spending a dollar on this particular type of campaign what type of return am I expecting to get? Again, it’s an interesting metric. It is not the most important metric, you know. If I need to generate 50 opportunities, I’m not going to be… You know, if it takes me like I got to spend twice the amount that I thought to generate those opportunities at the revenue objective, then I’m going to do that despite the lower return, and the reason I’m going to do that is because again, for better or for worse, the market out there, the public market, the investor market, the DC market values growth above all other metrics when they look at your business. It’s all I’m really here to feel growth.

Jeff Zelaya: Growth is king, at least…

Jim Williams: Yes.

Jeff Zelaya: …in the business side. And you obviously at Influitive has done an excellent job of being an innovator with B2B marketing. Are there other brands that come to mind that you look at as inspiration or as in the same category as Influitive when it comes to fresh ideas with the B2B marketing space?

Jim Williams: It’s funny. They’re few and far between, right? It’s not like I’m, you know, every day I’m blown away by the campaigns and content being created elsewhere, but someone’s a definitely standout to me. I got to give a hand to Vidyard. I think their content… Of course, they’re a video company so a lot of the content is delivered by video, but the way that they deliver their content, the personality they put behind their content, I think it’s incredible. They did do a really, really good job. I think Lattice Engines does an unbelievable job. I think they’re really clever. Their marketing nerd campaign was very popular last year, and it spoke to a lot of people in the business they’re trying to sell to, right, like people that are really into demand gen, in particular into the area of lead scoring. Those people are nerds, you know, whether they know how to write code or not, they’re marketing there. They did an unbelievable campaign that really kind of resonated with their audience. I thought that was really clever.

Of course, there’s the stalwarts in our space. You know, HubSpot always producing interesting stuff. Marcheta always producing, you know, their definitive guides. I think they’re great. Those are companies that I look to as well for interesting ideas. And you know, the list kind of goes on and on. My CEO’s position on marketing is, I think, dead on. Yes, pipeline saves lives and you know, you live or die by pipeline as a B2B marketer, but you know, after that, his kind of statement to me was like, “Your job, your number one job as a marketer is to stand out, is to stand out, is to get noticed.” And so, I kind of used that lens a lot when we’re thinking about campaigns. OK, we have this message we want to get across. We have these objectives. How can we do it in a way that makes us stand out, that’s a little bit different? So BAM!TV, you know, very different type of format. There’s not a lot of people that are producing like, you know, these late-night video, late-night talk show kind of format to introduce a product, right? So that’s different.

We have a conference coming up at the end of March. This is our first conference around the idea of advocacy. It is not a customer conference from Influitive. It’s really about the idea of advocacy, and so, rather than just doing, you know, the advocate marketing summit, we’re doing something called Advocate, and it literally is all themed around going to summer camp and being in certain, you know, certain cabins and earning certain badges and unbelievable networking, and rapid fire presentations and a whole bunch of things that make it kind of a different feel than the usual business conference, right? So just be different. Stand out to them.

And even like our own case study, right? We need to find out to the marketplace how we use our own software, and I would say this is a tact that I pulled right from our kettle. They are unbelievable very early on. I competed against them at Eloqua. They did an unbelievable job of showing the marketplace how they use their own product to fuel their growth and it worked really well. So like take that page from our kettle and we did our own case study on how we use Advocacy, but it sounded just calling it the Influitive Case Study, we called it Influitive

Exposed and we use some rather provocative barrels, someone nude images throughout the case study to convey this idea that, you know, we’re really opening up to common era and we’re giving you a look at the good and the not so good of how we run our business on Advocacy, right? It’s just a little bit of a different theme just to stand apart.

Jeff Zelaya: Yes, you really stood out in that case. I enjoy that ad campaign. And my last question to you Jim is what do you see on the horizon for 2015? I know we’re just getting started with the year, but is there any predications that you have for how marketing might change or will it stay the same? You know, what’s your take?

Jim Williams: I don’t think it’s going to stay the same. That’s for sure. I mean when has that ever stayed the same?

Jeff Zelaya: Right.

Jim Williams: I think the couple of things will probably happen over the course of this year. Again, this is so much self opinion, but it’s backed by a lot of evidence and a lot of talk. I do believe that 2015 is going to be the year of customer experience. I think that the first generation of cloud-based companies and SaaS companies focus much of their attention in marketing on how to create predictable revenue, and you know, that fills the growth of marketing automation. A whole bunch of other players, they’ll figure out how to acquire new customers, and now I think the challenge for a lot of cloud companies today, the second generation is how to keep those customers, how to keep them happy, how to keep them satisfied, how to grow those accounts because, you know, the reality is that most cloud companies don’t make a lot of money on the initial order. They got to make it on secondary orders and upsales and the like. And so I really think that this will be the year of customer experience in getting to the heart of what defines an unbelievable customer experience, how to keep your customers engaged throughout the entire life cycle. I think that that will be a big trend this year.

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