How I Work with Josh Becerra

Troy Thibodeau / Competing Against Large Competitors, Webinar Strategy, Ensuring Alignment Between Sales & Marketing

January 24, 2022 Troy Thibodeau Season 1 Episode 14
How I Work with Josh Becerra
Troy Thibodeau / Competing Against Large Competitors, Webinar Strategy, Ensuring Alignment Between Sales & Marketing
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode of 'How I Work', Josh talks SaaS marketing with Troy Thibodeau, CMO of Ascentis - a provider of Human Resources Software Solutions. You'll learn Troy's approach to competing against VERY large competitors in the HR Software sector, the power of Ascentis's webinar strategy, how they pivoted during COVID and how they're ensuring alignment between sales & marketing.

Explore more content from leaders in the marketing community on our podcast. Or visit our blog to find more digital marketing tips and ideas.

Want to learn more about Augurian? Reach out to speak with an Augur today about your marketing strategy and digital advertising performance.

Hi everybody, this is Josh Becerra from  Augurian, and this is episode 14 of How I Work. I'm here with Troy Thibodeau, CMO at Ascentis, a provider of human resources, software solutions. Thanks for being here, Troy. Thanks Josh, for having me. I'm excited to talk with you. Yeah, it'll be fun. So you've been working for software companies and sales and marketing roles since the late nineties, before SaaS was even a thing.

So tell us a little bit about those early experiences and then how you ended up at Ascentis. Yeah. First of all, I do have to say that I started in the software world when SaaS was just starting to be a thing. And actually I was not at all. I didn't have any of the past experiences of working in what was legacy software.

So I know nothing but SaaS for the last 20 years. And it's been really interesting to be in a category where it went from being very nascent to now it's actually the mainstream and it's really the only way people are doing software these days. And it's been very helpful to see how by your community changes its preferences or changes what's considered acceptable over time.

Sure. Tell us a little bit about like where you were before Ascentis and then how you got there. Yeah. So in that time that I mentioned that I've been doing SaaS. I think Ascentis is now company four or five that I'd been with. The first company I was with we changed our names a number of times as we were trying to figure out our business model, but ultimately we were known as Wizmo and we delivered desktops to small businesses.

And this was again in the super early days of SaaS. And unfortunately, This was early two thousands. And between the what do you call it? The Y2K and everybody having spent on that and 911 and everybody kind of pulling back on spending money. People slowed down their tech spending and they were really nervous about this idea of putting stuff up into the cloud.

So Wizmo, I left Wizmo. And I went to Honeywell and Honeywell was actually trying to become more of a SaaS or software business. It traditionally has been a very hardware driven business. And so they brought me in and they brought a few other folks who had software experience. And we were going to try to bring new software offerings to the market on behalf of Honeywell and had some success doing that.

But I also learned while I was at Honeywell that really big companies just don't operate at the pace that gets my juices flowing. So I left Honeywell and I went to go work for my next SaaS business, a company called Joko. We do, we did a corporate travel and expense software, and we, when I joined, we were small and, but we were growing really fast.

We sold to fortune 500 global 2000 companies. And we grew really fast over the next three, four years. So. That our largest competitor, a company called concur, which is now the 800 pound gorilla in corporate travel and expense software. They took notice, they ended up acquiring us. We were very similar in size.

And I went on to work for Concur for another year, plus again, great experience because the business, while I was there was growing at 40 plus percent a year and had operations internationally. And then ultimately, I left concur. It was doing great, but I was on the road way too much of the time.

And I had three very little kids. So I decided to find something that would maybe keep me back in Minnesota, at least a little bit more than on the road all the time. And I joined a company called Convey and we were a founder owned, led business that had been around for 15, 20 years offering tax reporting software.

Couldn't be a more sexy category if you think about it. However, I have found even with corporate travel and expense tax reporting, that those industries or those markets where not a lot of people think it's very sexy. Ended up being great industries because it is really easy for you to then create a really great story.

Cause not a lot of people want to be in those industries. Yeah. So convey ended up, we had another great success story when I got there employee number 35 and over the course of the next eight years, We grew to just shy of a thousand people before I left continued to grow the portfolio of tax and governance products, software products we were offering to the marketplace.

And that's what led me to a scientist. We had gotten to a place that company was again, continuing to grow, but I've learned when companies get into thousands of employees. They move at a different pace. And again, my juices don't get quite as excited. So I came and found Ascentis. I had worked with the CEO who had just come on board at Ascentis before.

So I knew he and I shared similar beliefs in how you create a great company and culture. And I've been here four years and we offer, like you said, At the beginning of the episode, we offer HR software from recruiting all the way to retirement for organizations all over the U.S we are predominantly North American focused.

And so far, the four years I've been here, we've more than doubled in size and it's been really fun. Wow. What a cool story. You've been in some really interesting sectors. I really like how you're paying much attention to what you enjoy most and like those juices, like you said, like that's, what's driving some of the decisions that you're making in your career.

That's very cool. So the HR software solutions sector, that's pretty competitive and much like the travel that you were mentioning before. I'm sure there's those 800 pound gorillas that you've got to deal with, but Ascentis seems like you got a huge growth, then the ceiling is a long way away. So what do you attribute to the growth?

For starters, let me start by saying that when you're in a company, so we are a little less than 400 employees. And when I got here, we were. Around 200 ish folks. And one of the things that I and our CEO had learned through past experiences, if you want to create a growth business, it starts with creating the right culture.

And by creating a great culture, it's a culture that is incredibly collaborative, but also in incredibly driven and incredibly ambitious and what it wants to achieve has big goals. And so we worked a lot when I first got here four years ago. And how do we create the right culture? How do we get the right people into the organization that are going to be driven, ambitious, want to take the, this company, which had been around actually for two, three decades before I and the CEO had gotten here and they had achieved some level of growth, but it was more like single digit growth each year.

And we said, we want to turn this into a much faster growth than. Business and to do that, we had to start with culture and people. But once we did that, a lot of what we've been doing as a business is we've said, this is an incredibly competitive category. Actually the most competitive category I've ever been in hundreds and hundreds of companies sell different aspects of HR software.

So we had to figure. First we have a full portfolio of products which means, do we put a little bit against everything or do we actually figure out where within that product suite, can we have the greatest success? And we did identify where we could have the greatest success and it really has catapulted the business to have a much more focused approach to go to.

So the point where even in the last year we continued to evolve our brand and our go to market strategy. We are much more focused now than when I got here on what we call workforce driven organizations, which is organizations where the people that fill those organizations, get the work done on their feet and with their hands it's we do not do as well.

And our solutions are not designed for organizations where everybody's sitting in front of a computer all day long, getting their work done. And that has helped our business a lot because in a super competitive space, getting a lot more focused at where we want to be at the 800 pound gorilla has helped us kind of catapult our own success.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's really smart, start with the people your internal team, get the right people in the right seats and then really gain that focus. That's really cool. One thing that we talked about is that Ascentis has a robust webinar strategy. When we're preparing for the conversation, you said you saw a dip in your webinar participation during COVID.

So first, can you just talk about that webinars strategy then what you attributed the dip to and then how you responded to the dip and COVID in general. Yeah. So if you'll bear with me just a second, I want to go back here for a second. I know that content is a very Vogue thing these days, like having strong content strategy, but I believed as a marketer, that content is a key to success for many years.

And so for all the companies I've been with, I believed that providing good content and a lot of times that's virtual content via webinars is a really strong way to build brand awareness and get some brand equity. Yeah. When I came to Ascentis, I thought I had understood how to use webinars or how to get good value out of webinars, but I've been really schooled here at Ascentis on this because we have webinar programming that over the last few years, we get over 50,000 folks attending our webinars.

Our average webinar attendance is somewhere between 800 and a thousand attendees. And a lot of it has to do with, we get really good content. We use some of our own speakers from internally, but we also partner with a lot of external thought leaders. And and so we've just really built a strong brand.

In fact, I think if you go out to Google and type in free HR free HR webinars, we're like one of the top one or two organic results. What I can tell you is as a business, we've leaned heavy on this webinar strategy. And when the pandemic hit, we actually felt like we were better positioned than anybody because here we are as a business, a lot of our brand creationists through digital, which doesn't, lot less in-person event type of stuff, but that the last year has been very educational for us because everybody else figured out that they could no longer lean on events or in-person stuff.

And so I think everybody else started putting a lot more energy into weapons. And consequently, we did see a drop-off in our attendance to the different events that we were putting on. We were still getting hundreds of folks showing up, but we really do track like what's our average attendance on a regular basis.

And we saw that dip, especially. Back half of 2020. Now fortunately we kept on tweaking. Like how can we look at our content? How can we look at engaging people in the events in stronger and better ways? And we have seen a rebound here in 21 with our with our webinars. In fact, we just had one. Two weeks ago where we had 13, 1400 folks on the webinar.

So we are seeing a rebound. I do think some of it is, as some of the other folks have stopped, maybe their pedal isn't or their foot isn't on the gas on webinars, as much as we've kept ours on that gas. But it's been a pretty interesting year to say the least. I remember also when we were prepping you mentioned like those boxes I see over your what's that yeah.

Now, yeah, those are something kind of new and novel that you've tried here recently. With COVID you want to tell the viewers a little bit about that, because I thought that was a really cool way you were doing that. Yeah. So call me old school, but I grew up my early formative years of Marketing.

Direct response and, direct mail was a pretty big thing, but obviously over the last number of years, direct mail, direct response has dipped incredibly as people do, email and virtual stuff. We said, you know what, let's flip this on its head, ecause everybody's moved to completely virtual.

And what we did is we started what we're calling. It is a rooted drop campaign. And what I mean by rooted is we operate really well in the Midwest and in the great lakes region. That's some of our strongest geographies. And we said, let's pick some of the biggest metros that we are successful in, and let's find a way to connect to them by understanding the roots of those communities.

And so we ended up creating, unique boxes for each of these communities. And have something from a client we have in the community, some other chotchkies, it's a high value box that is then sent to folks' homes because that's what we had to figure out how to do during this pandemic or this last year.

And the response has been fantastic. I think we've had 50, 60, 70% response rates depending on geography to those pieces resulting in conversations. And in many cases resulting in opportunities for the business. I just thought that was such a cool idea. I didn't want it to not get in here. And I love how it's so embedded in like the city or that geography.

So it'll really resonate with the person who's getting it at their home, which is just, it's amazing. Yeah. That's really cool. All I got to ask you, and you've mentioned two of these words already, right? You've mentioned focus and content. So on the whiteboard behind you, you have focus content, community momentum, and four quadrants.

So that like a framework or, tell us a little bit about why you have that on that whiteboard. Yeah. It's really for. Principles that I want our team to, our marketing team to use as lenses for everything we're doing. How do we make sure that we're creating focus in the in the different things in, we're an integrate.

We do all kinds of integrated marketing, but how do we make sure that it's as focused as possible? I already told you I'm a believer that actually the best marketing they think of themselves as almost like their. Movie producers or, book publishers, et cetera, content is the name of the game.

So I keep on saying, guys, what is our, what are we doing to create more and more compelling content every day? Yeah. Community is the lens of, are the best way for us to scale efficiently from a marketing perspective, is through word of mouth. And so what are we doing to create word of mouth with our client base, great word of mouth in the communities that we're in.

And, in today's day and age, a good example of this that didn't exist, a few years ago is there are all these review sites, technology review sites you can go out to, and they're filled with reviews of the different companies that buyers in the stages of their buy process go out and they go read all these different reviews.

It's like looking at Amazon reviews. We've had a very kind of assiduous strategy to figure out how to, how do we curate reviews? We, we do client pulse surveys on a regular basis to find out who loves us and who do we have to work harder to get to turn into loving us. And we take those folks who love us and we turn them into how do we make them into reviewers on those review sites?

So it's all about community. How do we create community and how do we really promote what we're getting from that community? And then the last thing is, I have a guy I can't take credit for this. I have a guy who I worked with here. And he always said win the day, win the week, win the month and when you have a winning.

System in place, it just empowers and it inspires and it gets people much more motivated to keep on pushing through and achieving greater things. And so for me, it's always like guys and especially with my leadership team. It's how are we helping the team appreciate tha we're getting momentum and we're making the flywheel turn faster and faster in terms of what we're trying to accomplish.

Yeah. That's very cool. I like that it's ever present as well on, on your whiteboard, behind you there. So let's shift gears and talk a little bit about MarTech. I always like to ask guests about MarTech. So can you tell us a little bit about your tech stack, or cool tools you think all marketers should have in their tool boxes, especially SaaS.

Yeah. So I'm going to talk about it as sales and MarTech because the teams I work with actually manage kind of both buckets of technology. So on the marketing side, obviously we use marketing automation. Our vendor today is HubSpot. We're a Salesforce shop and have been the whole time I've been here.

We use several data providers to get data on leads or to allow us to have context, et cetera, whether it's zoom info, discover.Org or DNB sales, LinkedIn navigator. We do have, drift on our websites. So we've got the chatbots like everybody else. And I, I don't know that I was very curious to see if we have success with a chat bot and every single month I'm seeing more and more conversations and more and more opportunities being curated through the chat bots on our website.

So those are the things that we do on, purely marketing side of things. We've got some other ancillary tools. But what we have to make sure we're doing is marrying those technology strategies with the tech strategies of the sales organization. So our sales teams we use outreach as a way to do one-to-one sequencing or nurturing with accounts.

And we have to be very thoughtful and conscious about what we're doing through HubSpot in a more broadcast big way and what we're doing through outreach one more one-to-one way. And the field is using that. We also use a technology called gong, which is really a what do you call it?

It's become the rave these days. It's a, it's an AI tool that you can use to record and then get insights on conversations. You're having with prospective buyers and clients and sales uses it to, for coaching and development of its folks because they listen to calls and they figure out marketing uses it to understand what are some of the keywords that are happening in these conversations that we need to weave into our content.

Because we know that's the language that the buyer's using. We know that those are things that are said a lot of times during conversations or end up triggering somebody moving to the next stage of the sales cycle. We're seeing as much value on the marketing side as sales is on the kind of development side with tools such as gone.

So does that give you a little bit of an impression? Gong, G O N G is that right? G O N G, yes. All right. Cool. This is not sponsored by them, but it's good to know that's available. I think that's pretty cool from a like align, aligning sales and marketing. That is probably like one of the biggest chores for a CMO is to work with your peer in sales and get that alignment.

So I know you guys do a great job. There, there any tips that you would want to give to other CMOs or other SaaS markers around this idea of a alignment between sales and. I don't know if I have any tips, cause I know there's a lot of smart marketing leaders out there, but I know that for me. So first of all I got my first cut my teeth in marketing at general mills and it was consumer and it was consumer marketing.

And I had a certain lens. I thought about marketing when I left mills, but since I left mills, I've done nothing but B2B marketing. And one of the things I've learned through that experience is that in B2B marketing, you're marketing as much internally to your sales team, who becomes your ambassadors for what you're trying to achieve as you do to the marketplace itself.

So there has to be a really strong collaboration and symbiosis between sales and marketing. So I know with my team, I'm constantly encouraging them. I want you out on sales calls. I want you to actually listen in on prospect calls or have relationships with clients. So we understand exactly.

What our field is seeing and can figure out how to arm and enable them as much as have the best stories for the market and for clients and prospects. I know that for me, I've now been or I've been a student of five or six different sales methodologies, and tried to understand those sales methodologies as well, or better than even.

So that marketing is very complimentary and additive to the selling process, through the right tools and messages and everything that take place based on those selling methodologies. So for me, it's I don't understand how you could operate without sales and marketing almost, one in the same.

And I'm fortunate. I've been lucky enough to work with a bunch of other sales leaders that share that same belief. Because I have gone into places and, this happened a bit when I was at Honeywell where sales and marketing, don't see eye to eye and it's very kind of oil and water.

And when that happens, you just can't achieve the same things as when sales and marketing are, doing everything hand in glove. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. My last how I work episode with Kara Kanis, she is like the, I can't remember. VP of demand gen I think is her title. And she's oversees all of sales and all of marketing.

So I, that alignment and connection is super important and that's probably, what's getting you the great results and the growth that you're seeing. Last question it sounded like you've seen a lot of different like sales playbooks, and you're pretty well read and paying attention to some of The newest stuff coming out.

So if you had to recommend a book or a podcast or a blogger or some media source that you believe SaaS marketers should consume, besides of course this, these videos what would that be? One of the ones, actually, there are probably a bunch, but let me just share one that I recently read in the last year.

And I just think it's so critical, especially in software as a service. And that is a book called customer success. It's authored by the CEO of Gainsight, which is a customer success tool, but it, but the book talks all about how do you How do you create success with your clients so that they want to buy more?

They want to recommend you more. They want to stay with you longer, et cetera. And it's got 10 principles in it that are really critical principles for understanding how to create great customer success. And it, it drives marketing strategy. It drives sales strategy. It actually drives whole organizational strategy.

But that's just been a fantastic book. Again, in a SaaS business, figure out how you keep the recurring revenue model producing at the rate as you want to. Outstanding. You obviously have it producing at the rate and growing in the ways that you want. And it's obvious by what you've shared today.

You really have that focus. So I appreciate your time. That's going to wrap it up for this episode of how I work. Thanks so much for your time Troy. Thanks Josh. I enjoyed the conversation.