The Transaction

Has anybody ever, for your icebreaker, asked you if you couldn't be doing what you're doing today, right?

You can't be a CMR, you can't even work in tech, unless you do something completely different.

What would you be?

It hasn't been for a while, but I have a standard answer.

What is it?

I'd be a barista in a coffee shop.

See, I love that about you.

God damn it, that is perfect.

What about you, Matt?

Mine's reasonably similar.

I would work at Barnes & Noble.

Oh, okay, man.

Really?

There's coffee there, too.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

It's quiet, there's coffee.

It doesn't really seem like those guys are working all that hard.

Apologies to any Barnes & Noble employees that may be listening, but it's such a chill environment.

And nobody goes to the library anymore.

They go to Barnes & Noble, but they're not around as much.

On the barista side, I used to say if I could just own a local bar, not because I just want to be around drinking or anything like that, but because I just want to be around the people.

Yeah.

You just realize, if you had a job that created that vehicle where people could at least just come and talk for 30, 45 minutes, I think that's amazing.

It's probably a really hard business to manage.

But like, if you just took this idea that you could communicate, you could like every night, you'd meet either meet someone new or catch up with someone old.

Like, I think that's great.

So.

Oh, was that the official opener?

Are we are we starting from ABM to PLG, from Meddic to Meddpicc?

The world of business is constantly evolving.

We'll cover the who, what, where, when, why, and most importantly, how you get the transaction.

I'm Matt Amundson and he's Craig Rosenberg.

Let's get started.

You know, in my old days at Topo, I worked with a lot of folks, including Matt.

And I just remember Sydney had gone to SalesLoft and I saw, like, just this incredible business person.

Still, I still have our text where I just like I did this workshop with, oh no, she just did this launch.

I'm like, you're one of the best CMOs I know.

And I know a lot of them.

It was like, I just would so I've been, it's like, you know, a lot of times we look from afar, but actually I was in there and I just saw not just a marketer, but like a business officer that like came in and, and brought that business to the next level.

And I got to see it live and I've always been impressed.

And as a result, we worked together in your in between before you became the CMO of Drata.

And it's like, I just, it's like awesome to have you on the show.

We wanted to wait a little bit so it wasn't obvious that we're only bringing our friends and favorites.

So we did a couple shows and now we have you.

Today's guest everyone is Sydney Sloan.

One of the best CMOs we know and one of the best business people we know.

Everyone, applause.

Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.

All right, Matt used to have a clapper.

I used to have a clapper at Baroque.

Yeah.

Yeah, I've always admired Sydney.

All the way back to our days at Alfresco, where I first became aware of you just because, you know, you were just such a powerhouse there.

And then, you know, I loved the team at Sales Off and was a long time Sales Off power user.

So you joined there and did such incredible work.

I sort of admired your career from afar for a long time.

And then we had this awesome opportunity to work together with Craig at Scale, which is literally the highlight of my career.

I felt like I was, like, existing on an all-star team because you never get to work with other CMOs hand in hand on a day-to-day basis.

And I just learned so much from the time that we spent working together.

Just I have such an admiration for you as a professional and as a person.

And now Craig and I will break you down and find out what you're really made of.

People can only know how much fun we had together at the beginning.

And I'd love to say we were, you know, we were the OD, the inaugural crew, and 100% back at both of you.

Like, inspired by, learned from.

I swear there was a topo slide in every single one of my slide decks that had a Craig Rosenberg quote on it.

And, you know, just same, just same back at you.

Love you both.

Should we end the show?

Because this was really great.

I think that's a wrap.

I think that's a wrap.

We've done it.

So here's the question we started the show with, which is, what's something that the market thinks they're doing right today?

Methodology, best practice way, approach that they're actually wrong and they, they should take a different approach.

And what should that be?

So it's actually your fault, Craig.

I know.

I'm going to say this.

So here's what I think has changed.

And then if people are still doing an account based approach, I think they're doing it wrong.

Radical and right in my face guy.

I have been an advocate for a very, very long time.

And here's where I think it has changed.

So I don't think it's about accounts anymore.

I think it's about segments.

Oh, that's great.

I love that.

So I think people are getting much better at identifying like ICPs and then segments within those.

So you don't actually have to do account specific.

You can get as good looking at segment based strategies.

And I think that you can build all your materials to a very finite segment.

That could be 100 accounts, 200 accounts, but it's the segment, not the account level strategy.

And then you teach your teams how to do, personalization and stuff like that.

But I don't think you need to do the one-to-one anymore.

I don't think you have to do like the, you know, top tier, custom landing pages, blah, blah, blah.

Like, I think segment is good enough.

Interesting, interesting.

How would you define a segment at this point?

Because I think a lot of people will look at the, will listen to what you said and say, verticalization.

Which is, yeah.

Which is, I don't know if you, I think Thomas Zung or Jason recently wrote, vertical SaaS has a higher return than non-vertical SaaS.

I read it in the last two weeks.

Yeah, vertical can absolutely be, but I would say a segment can be defined as, let's say the triangulation of three data points.

Though it could be industry, it could be buyer, and I think it should be pain point.

So you at least have something to align to.

It could be technology.

So like at Drata, we did an awesome deal with the team from KnowBefore, and now we're triangulating that with AWS.

We have KnowBefore plus AWS plus pain point, which is their end of life in that product.

So I have, you know, there's a thousand customers in that segment that I can run a program against, same pain point.

Your current product is end of life.

You know, the offer.

And then since we added AWS, there's a value add in the way that the deal can be done.

So here's why you would do it with us.

So that to me would be a segment.

Some people might call it a campaign, but I mean, still, it's not account based.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let me just say a couple of things though.

One is, we had Nicholas D.

Kaczewski on and he had this great headliner, which is segmentation is a lost art.

And that's essentially what you're saying, which is no, it's the most important thing you could do.

But I would still define that as account based.

Your ideal customer profile has been set against a certain segment of buyers.

Because of that, you deliver relevant content, messaging, even sales processes to that segment.

Sometimes you'll align resources against that segment.

That still fits into my definition.

So I actually know, but I do think it is important.

I do think the way you presented that is spot on.

That's the thing that's interesting.

Yeah, and maybe people will say, I need an account-based strategy.

What are our target 2000 accounts for our company?

I don't think that's it.

I think it's like, there's this segment, and there's this segment, and there's this segment, and they can be different.

They can be mixed with matches of each other.

I think if you use the tools correctly, then you're putting the total group of accounts in, and then you're working the ones that show intent versus tier 1, tier 2, tier 3.

That part to me doesn't feel like it.

I think it's evolved.

So I'd rather put the 500 accounts in the segment program, and just warm them up hard, and then build the middle, the final bottom, like how you actually engage with that account, or those accounts that are showing interest, versus the tiering of accounts.

So I'm just playing around with it, right?

Like I just think the approach that I learned, that I advocated for, for a very long time has evolved.

Now, let's keep going, because I actually, I think this is great.

For me, the most important thing is targeting and having the sort of life cycle of resources, content, message, campaigns lined up against a segment.

To me, by the way, it's, for some of the folks that I work with, it's not necessarily vertical, right?

I do think there is some, I like what you said, like Matt and I have been playing a lot with signal selling, and like there's these data points that if you can collect and segment against, can make a real difference in your success rate.

So I'm 100 percent in favor of it.

So like if you are going to sort of walk us through how people should think overall, not just about creating the segments, but then how do you roll against them?

How would you describe that?

So I think we talked about creating the segment, always power threes, at least three data points that you can put together that includes a pain point to an audience, so you can build the messaging around that.

Then I would, I think it's a little bit more just kind of continuous evolution.

So testing out the messages via outbound activities to refine it, and then building the messaging after that, which leads into your ad campaigns.

Yeah, I would try it, try it first, right?

Then put it into your ad campaigns, and do the warming up of the accounts in either platform you choose, demand-based or success.

And then just continue to refine.

I love the lookalike feature, so once you start to see accounts surging, like go back and then add more lookalike accounts in.

One of the other things that I hope people do that's not a misstep or missed art anymore is data cleansing.

Not just, take the time to take the accounts and actually clean them up, get the right contacts in if you have to use an external source or if you use your SDRs, Marketing Ops interns, one of my favorites.

And just make sure that the effort is worth the accounts, so you're not just wasting cycles or wasting salespeople's time.

And so just kind of rinse and repeat.

I don't think you have to get more complicated than that.

And once you start to see wherever your goal is, 20, 50 accounts, kind of start moving through the funnel, then you know you've got something and then I would triple down on it and build up more nurtures and refining the effort as you kind of blow through the list, the target account list.

For us in that example with Noble 4, I mean, there are 1,000 accounts that were using their product at the end of life, but they have 68,000 total customers.

So it's like, well, how do we take that segment, we'll learn about the 1,000 accounts that were using their product and now apply that to a larger segment of their customer base because now I have 400 customers that are using our product that are also Noble 4 customer.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah, when you think about creating a segment, what's the ideation around that?

Is it, hey, we just closed this big customer, or something came to us that we haven't seen before, or is it more there's pattern matching here and I think if we were able to be a little bit more specific to this subgroup of people, that's a segment.

I'd love to just hear how you and the team at Drata are thinking about creating new segments or refining existing segments.

My least favorite is we just did a big deal, let's make this a strategy.

That's my least favorite.

I'd say that's a data point of one and while interesting I can't draw a line through it.

I need three.

You need to see a pattern before you want to get marketing involved.

Great job sales, go find three more, and then we can talk about putting the marketing effort behind it.

That's generally what I'll say.

Craig, you and I did a scale event on this a while ago.

I do have a process that we do use.

It really is, I would say it's more of a SOM exercise where we're testing out different firmographic and technographic data and building account lists around that.

Then what I'll do is I'll build a three-year forecast for that account list.

You'll make assumptions on ASP.

You'll make assumptions on if it's an existing segment that I want to continue to grow into, those growth rates would be different than it's a brand new segment, which starts slow, but maybe grows faster.

Do that three-year projection of what you think the ARR, not the TAM, the ARR would be for that segment.

You could add in retention, growth, you can add it in all these different factors and weigh them against each other.

That's how I start.

That's how I started at Drata.

We had, I think we had 12 different segments that we looked at, and I added a step.

This is new from Drata times, which before we started, we did the analysis, the product marketing, revenue marketing, built the model.

Before I started the session with the executives, I gave everybody four virtual stickers to put on, like, where do you think we should make the investment?

Which is how we were doing it before, which is how a lot of companies do it.

Everybody put their stickers on for what they thought.

Enterprise had the most stickers.

Then it was a mix.

There were some verticals in there, geographic expansion, and then we went through the exercise, showed all the data.

So you have the financial data, but you also have things like go to market readiness.

Can our sales teams, existing sales teams, sell those?

If so, it's a high score.

If not, you have to hire new people, then it's the low score.

Product readiness, you know, do we have to make investments in product?

Can we create differentiation?

Competitive landscape.

Is this like a green field opportunity, or are we going to go head to head against our competitor?

We added partner as one of our metrics because we have a strong partner network.

Like, can our partners give us an advantage in this segment, like going into a net new region where we have a strong partner and that we want to lead with the partner.

So we used all those factors to then weight the options, debated it.

So each owner for the lines, the product leader got to be the ultimate decision maker for what values we put in each of the options.

And then you stack rank it and you look at it and you're like, wow, that's interesting.

So it's qualitative and quantitative feedback.

And then we start discussing.

And it doesn't have to be the top three, but you just have to pick the three or four.

Three just tends to always be where it ends up working.

And so when we took the final answer versus the original gut, the number one that was the gut was like number six.

The number one, which was actually a noble four, didn't even have a sticker on it.

So, and you know, they're like, whoa.

Where it just proves like, let's use data, let's have a discussion, let's align as a leadership team.

And I think the hardest thing is like, you know, you hire new people, they weren't in the room, they come in with their own point of view.

And so you have to, you know, I used to say you do it on an annual basis, I almost really have to do it on a every six month basis.

We used that same approach, by the way, for NRR.

So when we were building out our strategy for how do we retain and grow customers, we used the same model, awesome pricing person that did the work.

He actually looked at what was on cycle, off cycle expansion, how many accounts were up for renewal.

There were 12 options that they wanted us to do all at once.

And then we aligned on the top three and that's where we started.

Totally worse.

It's amazing.

I'll put it up on my LinkedIn.

I've been meaning to do it.

So I'll grab the, I'll find the scale session that we did, Craig, or the white paper that we wrote.

And I'll put it up on my LinkedIn though.

Yeah, that is such an, you know, I'm just wondering if...

I should write a book.

Yeah, because it's an exercise that can be applied to any business.

Yeah.

When you, and then just generally speaking, if you end up with a segment, so you're looking at ARR or NRR, as you're sort of, whether this segment's worth it.

But just generally speaking, because I know this is very tactical, people ask me this all the time, like how many accounts do you typically end up with in those segments?

I would say anywhere from, like in the thousand area, thousand, two thousand, like up in there, yeah.

And then on the sales side, so when we decide on this, it sounds like we understand the, well obviously you're going to roll out your marketing campaign, but does sales then build, not customized, but relevant materials for their sales process against that segment as one of the actions that you would do after that?

And what does that look like?

Ideally, there'd be a playbook.

Yes.

Ideally, there would be a playbook.

You know, we run pretty hard and fast.

So we haven't quite got to the playbook yet.

It's next quarter's project.

So, but yes, ideally, ideally when you're building a campaign structure, you would build a sales playbook that goes with it.

It may be as simple if you're like running fast and lean as the cadence.

It could be like, here's the cadence, train them on it, here's a couple of case studies, like you need to do a 20 minute kickoff session.

Like you could start there and then continue to, just continue to add to it and build a high spot page for it for sure.

Or seismic page, like so it has a home and you can continue to add things to it.

Okay.

So that, I mean, that's, that's reasonable.

And then track it and track it.

Yeah.

By the way, a key indicator is just, you know, your sales team is so hard charging that, you know, they're going to take it and run with it and we'll fix as we go.

Isn't it, you know, that, that is actually an important trait.

Like sometimes we want to slow them down, but we want the ones that are going fast and we figure it out as we go.

Not the ones who are like, well, you didn't give me this, so I can't go.

Yes.

Like we're even starting with like, here's a five-step case, you know, I know best practice is 15 and which should be this.

Just like, let's just start and learn and iterate, knowing we're going to get to that.

But that we call that Drata speed, like where Adobe was planned forever execute this much, like it's the opposite.

Yeah.

And so it's just, you know, let's just go with an S in it.

And, and so, you know, just it's a different, it's a different pace, which, you know, is an iterative pace, which is totally fine.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

And then you mentioned, and I'm sorry, Matt, I'm just very intrigued.

No, you're good.

You're good.

Go.

So I do think the, the iterative pace.

So you, you mentioned that, well, actually just go back through, like, what is it?

You're regularly meeting and looking at things, or is there milestones that you want to see and then sort of regroup and figure out?

So you said, look, we'll go, let's get going in there and we'll see if it actually works.

So that's one thing.

And then what is, so what, how do you define that?

And then generally speaking on the iteration, is that just all the different teams doing iteration as they go?

Or is there some kind of meeting structure, reporting structure, analytic structure?

What does that look like to figure that out?

I'll tell you what best practice is.

First is what we really do.

That's how we all work like that.

What do I recommend or what do we do?

So, what I would recommend, what I would recommend, yes, is that, and I've learned this from Lisa Horner at AppFolio.

I thought she had one of the best structures in this, and I've copied her playbook.

So, I think you want to have a regular check-in with a crew of people.

And I do believe in that, when I was at SalesOft, we would call them the Cadence Committee.

But it's a combination of the campaign manager, whoever in marketing is running the program, somebody from sales enablement, representation from the SDR team and the sales team, and you're checking in on the performance of the program.

That's ideal.

And so, you have goals, you have stats, you're checking in, you're reviewing, you're making updates, you're updating messaging.

I love when product marketing is also involved.

So, they're looking at the messaging, they're listening to GONG calls or refining the messaging and updating the playbook.

So, it's this, every month there's an update and it could be an updated asset, an updated learning.

And so, I would put it on a monthly structure where it requires enablement for the sales team.

It's not just a readout.

It's not just, hey, here's this campaign we're learning this week.

It's like, you know, grab a couple of gong calls and share that like, this is what great looks like.

This is how to have a first call.

This is how to have a second call.

You know, here's a customer testimonial.

Like, again, it could even be a gong snippet of, or a sales law snippet of, you know, the customer on the win call.

You know, like, keep feeding it back.

Put those clips in, in the sales channel on Slack.

Like, and that campaign owner or the product marketing owner for that program and is the one that does that.

Now, I'm a little bit all about simplicity.

So, we're only running two campaigns, truly two campaigns.

So, we have Startup and Scale Up.

Now, Scale Up has four versions of it, because in our maturity model, you could be at four stages of Scale Up.

But that, that is one segment.

And again, we're building it.

There's lots more to do.

But I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible, because that's all we need.

We actually don't need to be more complicated than that.

And even the Know Before example fits in the Scale campaign, because those customers are in that segment.

And so it's like, oh, if you get a Know Before, then this is the conversation.

These are the customers that we've already moved over.

This is their success story.

This is how we do it.

And so it's within that.

It's a program within the bigger campaign.

The Transaction is presented by Ringmaster, the go-to branded podcast team.

You know, when Craig and I were thinking of starting this podcast, we had all the ideas in the world.

But you know, all the ideas in the world won't get you a great podcast.

That's where Ringmaster comes in.

They hand out the creative, book guests, and do all the production for the podcast, so we can focus on what we do best.

Talk to one another and our amazing guests.

To discover how your company can leverage B2B podcasts to deliver outsized ROI, visit ringmaster.com today.

By the way, I should have Horner do just a piece on their, the way they, like their meeting structure is organizational design.

It's like, totally that she had that one slide.

I have it.

I could probably pull it up now.

It's on my desktop.

Like it's so good.

Because it's the rhythm, right?

There's one as an operational check-in and then the other is like a tactical.

And so they balanced those two.

It was awesome.

It was one of the best presentations I've seen a long time.

Yeah, for sure.

Without a doubt.

Is there anything around channels that you've seen work less well or more well, whether it's in the segment strategy or not?

That's one thing Matt and I have been sort of grappling with is hearing from some folks that some of the channels that they'd used before are broken and now they've made adjustments.

Like, for example, I still quote the Megan Eisenberg last year at the event.

She's like, what's working well?

Events.

What's not working well?

My old school webinars and content syndication and those things.

What would you say to that and whether it's related to segment strategy or not?

Um, I mean, so I'll say we start with, you know, I've been at Drata for a year.

We're only three years old.

We have a lot, a lot to build.

We relied heavily on digital and paid.

And what was surprising to me was that our CTA for top of the funnel paid was demo and it was working.

We didn't actually have middle of the funnel or bottom of the funnel.

And it just like everything.

I do believe in pushing everything to hand raisers.

Um, and just weeding out all the rest.

And because the demand was so high and the product market fit was so good, that's what we needed to do.

Now, of course you need to invest in brand to bring that cost down.

Um, I was just at Google yesterday.

Nice, cool.

Hello, Google badge.

Um, learning about some of the things that they're doing.

And what I learned from them yesterday is, you know, making sure that you have your, um, your Salesforce data connected to the Google Ad Marketplace.

And, and they, they said, um, those that have clean data that is helping the Google algorithm train itself better have like a 4x performance than those that don't.

Wow.

And when you're relying so heavily on paid, like you have to.

And also when I came in, we were, we were paid, we were across all the channels.

We were on Instagram and Facebook, and then I go to our Instagram page and I'm like, Oh no.

You know, it was just, we were just spreading money everywhere.

So again, in the world of explicit, I went, what are top free channels?

She done everything else out.

Let's just focus on those and get those working well.

So we're Google LinkedIn primarily and sounding.

And we're just, we are doing our best to like refine those, get better and better at it.

You know, look at all the performance along that.

And then I'm doing out of home.

The other thing that I've kind of learned in going into cybersecurity, I went and interviewed a couple of like sneak CMO, Octa's previous CMO.

So, you know, don't be afraid to call on your friends and learn and ask coming into a new market.

And both of their strategies were go bigger than you are.

Show up bigger than you are at these events, which is really hard because there's a lot of companies in the cybersecurity space that have a lot of money.

And so the choice that I made coming in was we're not going to go to every show, but the shows we do go to, we're going to go big.

So we just went to RSA.

We had a big booth next year.

We're going to have two big booths.

I bought all of the kiosks within like a mile of Moscone.

So everything, every kiosk you walk by had our ads on them, not the digital display.

I got the old school ones.

You're not sharing with other people just on the digital display network.

We had roaming cars and all the extra things, and just tried to own the space.

And we're just talking about reinvent and looking at airport at, like just looking at it all and just trying to show up bigger than we are, like be big on brand.

And that's how you'll get noticed in these crowded spaces.

So that's working.

Yeah, my office not far from Moscone, and it was raining Drata that week.

And I was like, I was like, hell yes, Sydney.

Like, to your point, every place where there was freestanding advertising space was Drata.

These cars were going by Drata.

Like going into Moscone, Drata.

She just, oh man, it was spectacular.

And the messaging was so crystal clear.

And I thought the branding was so beautiful.

So great job.

That's Shadow Tur in-house.

So we did that all in-house.

That's incredible.

That's amazing.

You know, I love the go bigger than you are.

Yeah.

So, you know, Maria Purgolino is working with us now and she's got this thing, which is like, at a conference, they will leave remembering one to two things.

Your job is to be one of those two things.

And that's what you're, you know, you're, you're, you're coming in hot.

I love that.

So like when, so next year you'll go even, you'll go even bigger.

This is, yeah, it's a better quote than go bigger, go home, go bigger than you are.

Or, so I'll, and I'll give a shout out to events and a little self promotion.

So we have Drataverse coming on June 12th.

We're doing it in Pure 27.

You're very familiar with that, Craig.

Sorry you couldn't make the walkthrough, but you know, it's a big venue.

It's a big venue.

And so we have to fill it.

And we are going to brand the shit out of it.

And then we bought like, we already had that network in and then we bought everything around.

And my goal is just like, I can't wait to see that room full of people, all those pictures, all over, you know, digital and social and just, you know, filling it.

Like last year we had our first event and it was about 300 people.

This year we'll have 600.

I want it to look like a thousand, you know, but, but you know, that's great for a second year.

And, and so just keep trying to push for big.

Awesome.

That's awesome.

I just, I mean, that, that segment on our show that had segments in it was one of my favorites.

That was so, so good.

By the way, fun fact on the, you know, the Topo summits.

So like none of the generic sentence worked.

So we hired this kid, Mark Booze.

He's like an SC now.

He's done great.

And he was Craig's AI.

We've downloaded every contact that I have.

And he got my email address and personally reached out to, we literally filled.

So the, I think second year we had like 800.

That was literally, and that was this kid just going through.

And we were taking a wrenches over the phone.

We were like, you don't need a wrenches, you know, I'll get on, we'll do a credit card.

He was, it was like a salesperson.

And then the next year before, you know, we, we did, I think 12, 14, same.

I mean, this, it was, we had a different intern and he did the same thing.

He was crazy, man.

He was like, I heard him on there.

You know, I was getting emails from people because they were coming back to me where he was just like, how about you buy five to cat?

Like he was like, literally being an inside, nobody knows, you know, it's so funny.

I remember, you know, that was one of my first jobs, by the way.

So I was a telemarketer for best special event.

And when I was a senior in college, it was when they had the old phones and it had the armrest thingy on it.

And I had green and white line paper.

And so I called all the subscribers of special event magazine to invite them to the special event.

And that's, yeah, dialed for dollars.

Yeah.

Look at you now.

Now look at you.

I started.

Yeah, no, I love it.

So on the just going back on the digital, so you narrow it down.

Um, so Google, LinkedIn, something you had indicators that those were working better than others.

And then, um, and so that's a, that's actually a really good recommendation because even some of the young companies are going to spread, then you want to figure out once again, simplicity.

So now you're, you're, you did, you had indicators that they were good and now you're continually optimizing those very specific channels is the way you want to look at it.

That is correct.

Yeah.

We were only doing top of the funnels.

Now we're doing middle funnel, bottom of the funnel content.

So like phase one was like, get the campaign out there, get started, top of funnel, go.

And now we're, we're working on middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel for one of the two campaigns.

Um, and, and, and say, and partner with, partner with your reps.

I went to the Google office, like, you know, I want a relationship.

I want that rep working for me and you know, best practices, like help us out.

And LinkedIn, my team at LinkedIn is Ressa, she's so good.

Like, we got, like, Nielsen studies from them.

They have best, they have experts that have taught our teams.

I kind of do, write good copy, like, say yes to everything.

How can you help me?

And if you're spending enough, it comes with.

If not, then, then get them to help you.

Like, so, if you're not getting the most out of the investments, these big investments that you're making in your ad platforms, if you're just relying on your agency, which you should do, but I'm like in these meetings.

I want to learn.

I want to ask.

You know, I want to understand.

Because it's constantly changing.

Like, the algorithm is constantly changing.

The offerings are constantly changing.

And so, I want to stay on top of it because that's my biggest channel right now.

And so, yeah.

When you think about Google versus LinkedIn, do you think about LinkedIn as more brand and awareness and bringing people in to the top of the funnel?

Or does it convert as well as Google?

Because I generally think of Google as like, hey, there's a sort of, there's an active market that I'm trying to capture.

And on LinkedIn, I'm trying to create a new, I'm trying to expand my market through awareness.

And if I can capture them, great.

It's like kind of like a secondary value.

How do you think about the two at this point?

Well, you're the master at it and I learned from you.

And we used to, I mean, we used to advise companies like, hey, just start in LinkedIn because at least, you know, your audience is there and it might be more expensive.

But you'll have a faster indication and return on that investment that you're making if you really know the companies you're going after and if you can prove they're on LinkedIn.

So I'm always a huge fan of LinkedIn.

And I think that they keep on putting new offers in place that like the document ads or carousels perform more.

But balance that with your organic LinkedIn strategy.

Yes.

If you're not doing both, you have to do both.

And so you have to have really good content, know who your influencers are.

We have four and be working those in tandem where they complement each other.

There's also a lot of good built, again, LinkedIn.

It shows me my competitor's ads, tells me what works, what doesn't, critiques our stuff.

It's great, like color structures.

I'd Mark Young come talk to our team, who I think does LinkedIn hacking the best.

And he talked about different strategies.

So it's like, just really educate your team on that.

Now, going back to, I'm constantly learning.

I used to think that Google was just, you can't control Google.

Anybody comes to Google and where you can be very controlled on LinkedIn, Google is kind of like, you can't be.

I'm not sure I agree with that now.

Like, based on what I learned, if you're connecting your systems to their network, they're trying to do the matching of your audience, and then you're tuning your bid strategy against that audience.

And we went back to like manual on that for a while.

And so, I think those things are important.

Here's the other piece to the equation, though, is, you know, really making sure, and this is an area that I'm really trying to work hard on, that you have to have your brand voice done.

You have, like, I worry about, you know, spending money on ads when I'm not like there with the brand.

And so, prioritizing the brand over the demand capture is hard when demand capture and marketing, you know, ads are feeding the sales teams.

Like, we're 45% of revenue right now.

And so, like, it's that constant, the constant battle.

And what I know to be true, but what, you know, is still like that balance of just driving the demand.

Yeah.

Well, you guys are in just such a hot market, and there's so many people who want what you're selling.

It's so hard to take your foot off the accelerator of what's driving the business, especially when it's there and it's happening right now.

But I think, like, examples of what you were doing at RSA and, gosh, what conference was that in Vegas where the-

Reinvite.

Oh, my gosh.

Like, I was so impressed by everything that you guys were doing there, too.

And just, like, the limo service thing was such a great idea.

What was the limo service?

I mean, you guys, you're inside baseballing me.

We wrapped escalades.

We went to a DMC that you can buy it on through the ad networks, too, but we went direct and did it on our own and cheaper.

But we got a bunch of escalade and wrapped them and gave free rides.

It was so sick.

They looked really cool.

I've seen other ones at different events and stuff.

But what I do know is that security people do not like you to wrap the Tesla trucks.

Some of me did that and I got the total naked.

I guess I was like, oh, okay, don't do that.

We'll stick with the escalades.

Yeah, that's funny.

Hey, really quick.

For the sake of the, the organic LinkedIn strategy said you have to nail that.

What does that mean?

For the organic strategy is what you can control.

Your influencers, the influencers, if you're working with external influencers, though to me, that's the natural strategy of social.

So we use Frout Social, we set up a thought leadership.

We're working with our top five thought leaders and helping them set up their LinkedIn strategy.

They already have lots of followers.

That's what we picked it on.

But getting that, what does each thought leader want to talk about?

How do we match that with articles and content and get that regular rhythm going alongside?

So then, engaging our internal audience now to share their contents.

The content has to be there, then the employees on top of that, and then partnering that with really encouraging our customers.

So we have a couple of programs when they get their first stop too, or when they get to reward them for that when they put up their trust center.

So then there's a customer activation as well.

That's what I would call organic for LinkedIn.

It's like all the things that are not paid.

I love it.

That is amazing.

Yeah.

Reptiles, three years old, 67,000 followers.

Our goal is to get to 100,000 this year.

Not bad.

Not bad.

Good job, team.

Yeah.

It's wild because it feels like we all went gangbusters on social strategy in the early days of, frankly, social.

Then it kind of cooled a bit.

Now it's like LinkedIn is Uber critical to your strategy, both organic and paid.

I think that's real across the board.

Sydney, one of the things that we've been talking to early stage on is like, you got to win on LinkedIn.

For most of them, it's the founder.

When the founder can get on there, there's some really amazing evidence.

I talk about Albrow all the time.

He didn't even get the company off the ground, but if he had, he had built such a following by just dedicating.

Didn't he have AI?

He had AI like reading the X feed and then building content.

Didn't he have some hack there?

Well, I don't know about the app, but I do know this.

What his thing was, he believes in his studying that X is two to four days ahead of LinkedIn.

So that's why his articles were so topical, is he's following all these people on X and he's like, there was incredible, those long tweet streams, some of these folks, right?

He was taking from that and doing his research on X and he was able to stay one step ahead on LinkedIn from X.

So maybe, I don't know if it was an app, maybe you wouldn't know, actually sounds like I should dig in with him on that.

But yeah, it was.

100% agree on the founder thing.

It has to be natural to them.

I think Ryan Neu at Vendor has some awesome content if you're not following him.

He's just using his data in a really, really smart way.

So I think he's doing a really good job.

Yeah.

He is.

Yeah, that's a perfect example.

Now, he has the data advantage, but so what?

Like he's create your own data, create your own data.

Yeah.

His stuff is really unique.

And so when you see him at the feed, you're like, oh yeah, I definitely want to at least peak at what he's got going.

And where am I?

Where am I?

Hopefully I'm in there.

The Drata.

Yeah, of course you are.

By the way, G guys, as we close this out.

So I did this webinar in a, I don't know, I've told Matt about it.

So this someone who listened sent Sangram this just like brutal critique of the webinar.

And she, she, he or she said, like, he spent, they spent 15 minutes complimenting each other.

I hope that I didn't do that here.

Right.

But it was important that, you know, Matt and I have been really excited to have you on the show.

And like, you know, it, it's like the initial sort of admiration fest I think was really important for us here.

But that was like some of the most actionable content we could have got.

It's hard in podcasts.

And so like, but I left here today.

A, I love the segment strategy.

There's just a lot of scale there.

And like, it's just easier to create, to think about relevance on a thousand account level than it is on a one.

So I agree with you on that.

Thank you on the channel, the channel specificity, what you do at events, like all of these things were really specific and actionable.

And so that made the show awesome.

So I'm going to give this show an A plus.

Wow.

Oh, good.

But thank you so much.

Like this is what the transaction is all about.

And so this, this hit the mark.

I was stared to be on it.

You've had such great guests with such knowledge.

So like, I made sure I got a good night's sleep.

So I could hopefully help do my part.

I love that.

You crush it.

Sometimes I get worried that when our friends are on, we're just going to talk.

But this was so good.

Yeah, that was actionable as hell.

Yeah.

Love you guys.

All right.

Love you too.

All right, guys.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Transaction.

Craig and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end.

What are you actually doing here?

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