#190: Strategy | Doing Marketing in a Sales-Led Organization with Taylor Udell, Head of Growth at Champify

In this episode, Dave is joined by Taylor Udell, Head of Growth at Champify, a sales intelligence platform that helps B2B sales teams identify key contacts for more effective outreach. With experience at companies like Twilio and Heap, Taylor shares the marketing strategies she’s used to drive growth in sales-led organizations.

Dave and Taylor cover:

• How Champify drives awareness through events, LinkedIn organic, and thought leader ads
• Why they stopped doing direct response ads and are seeing better results with high-value content assets
• Why cold calling is an effective channel in Champify's sales-led approach
• Why they chose to stop hiring freelancers and agencies and instead opted to build expertise in-house

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro to Taylor
• (03:20) - - How to Build Product Awareness
• (07:54) - - Why Thought Leader Posts Are a Better Approach Than B2B Ads
• (10:12) - - How To Measure LinkedIn Effectiveness
• (14:11) - - Areas Where Taylor Hopes to Drive Revenue Growth at Champify
• (19:07) - - Why Cold Calling Works at Champify
• (20:50) - - Measuring Success Between Sales and Marketing
• (22:51) - - Why Champify Stopped Using Direct Response Ads and Is Seeing Better Results with High-Value Content Assets
• (26:36) - - Driving Higher Intent with Content Assets
• (28:57) - - Why Champify Stopped Outsourcing Until They Had a Definition of “Good”
• (31:45) - - Measuring Success Without Gating Content or Generating MQLs
• (34:37) - - Advice for New Marketing Leaders
• (38:10) - - Closing Remarks

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https://open.spotify.com/episode/72pSHfNeZWj20hfJrWtVTf?si=Wbl46aC6Qk6fBcgLmEHfTQ

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:

All right, so you, you're head of growth at Champify. You spent some time at Twilio, at Heap we're going to dig into. So you've been, you've become one of the people that I enjoy following on LinkedIn. Maybe we'll get you six new followers from this episode if we do it right. But let's start with this briefly. Introduce yourself who are you? And talk about what is Champify? And then we're going to get into what you do there.

Taylor Udell [00:00:39]:

Okay. Awesome. I'm Taylor. I lead growth, which is what I chose to call marketing at Champify. So technically I actually run marketing. Before this, I did a stint at Twilio, both in product marketing and on the strategy team there. I originally found my footing in tech at a company called Heap, which is an analytics company. And I started out actually in like customer success and sales engineering.

Taylor Udell [00:01:05]:

So I have a bit of a story to background. But Champify is a sales intelligence platform that helps sales teams find key contacts at target accounts, whether that's former customers who have changed jobs or if it's new executives. But it's really looking for those people who indicate that a, either, you know, a company is ready to make a change in strategy so, you know, the timing is better, or they're actively exploring open initiatives or somebody who has a history with your company and they use that experience to become a even more avid champion.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:37]:

Okay, and tell me about the funnel a little bit at Champify, just to help folks kind of understand the business model a little bit before we get into the marketing tactics.

Taylor Udell [00:01:46]:

Yeah. So Champify is a sales led company. The basic funnel or like, if you think about like the process, I like to think of it starting at awareness. I think at a startup that's like a lot of our challenges is how do we even get on somebody's radar? Are they even educated in our problem space? So kind of like starting out there, but essentially once we have people's attention, whether that's through marketing or we actually have a really strong outbound motion at Jamify, they come in, get a demo, we do it, build an ROI case, and then it goes really into the sales world of negotiation, pricing and whatnot. But we don't have a PLG motion. We don't have a freemium product. It's like a very traditional B2B sales led SaaS company.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:33]:

Cool. Okay, this is great. We've talked a lot lately about companies more in the, you know, product led freemium world. I want to talk about how you drive growth in a sales led motion. You talked about awareness for a minute. It's interesting to hear you say that because a lot of times we get so caught up in the acronyms and jargon and nonsense of the funnel, and it's kind of like, well, the number one job is to get your ideal customer to know that you exist. And so first, do they know that we exist? And then I think if we have the right product and the right story, we can find a way to talk to them. What plays are in that awareness bucket? It's a very big word.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:13]:

It can mean lots of different things. Do you have like, a target account list that you're trying to specifically measure? Hey, we want these 200 accounts to know we exist. How do you actually go and execute on the, like, we need to get people to know who we are? Play?

Taylor Udell [00:03:26]:

Yeah, I think my superpower is actually saying no, which meant when I first started at Champify, saying no to just like, General, we're going to go after anybody. In SaaS, the first thing that we did was conducted a bunch of experience to really narrow down on our ICP outside of just, okay, it's a SaaS company with more than like, 100 employees. Right. We wanted to figure out what actually clicked with our story. Which types of companies were experiencing pain we could solve. So we do have a target account list, and it's a very tight target account list. It's like 200 accounts. So I guess, like, play one was figuring out, like, who should even be on those accounts.

Taylor Udell [00:04:06]:

And we can dig into that if you want, but that's a whole process that's really close partnership with the founders and also with the sales team. You have to have 100% buy in if you only have 200 accounts. And then what our awareness playbook really looked like is we know which accounts we're going after. We need to figure out who in those accounts we're going after. Like, there was some time where, like, are we selling to sellers? Are we selling in marketing? Are we selling to rev ops? That kind of a mix, kind of figuring out the profiles. And then it was figuring out how to actually get on their radar. And when you think about it, there's a million and a half things you could do. So we really wanted to figure out where we had a unique opportunity and we really had something to say that was opinionated and different and had credibility.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:54]:

All right, Taylor and I are recording, and we're just having one of those days. And I don't even. It's just pissing me off because I really am looking forward to talking to Taylor. I'm taking a bunch of notes, I'm learning something and then this damn product. I'm going to call them out. Zencastr, you got to step up. Today's not the day for this. Don't make me go to Riverside.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:13]:

It's a threat. I'll go to Google Meet. We'll do this whole thing for free. All right, so I got the gist of it. You told me there's two and a half awareness plays. You told me one of them. What are the other one and a halfs?

Taylor Udell [00:05:24]:

So the other one is just delivering high value content once again about how people do their jobs on LinkedIn. And that has been both in like our content strategy, just how we create it, but also what our founder Todd is posting, what I'm posting. We have One of our SDRs, Will, he's posting. And it's really just how am I doing my job? What are lessons I'm learning from other people who I'm talking to? Since all of us spend all day talking to GTM execs, a really impressive company is we get a lot of learnings. And how can I combine this into resources that are ranging from super relevant to adjacent? How do I do my job? Questions and we have been building our followings, especially our founder. He's the most relevant. He was a previous VP of sales. Right now he's building a platform for salespeople.

Taylor Udell [00:06:20]:

We take those posts that are really organic leave viral and we put thought leadership ads behind them to just our specific target accounts and the relevant Personas at those accounts. And I think of that much more as like a nurture touch than like a direct response type of ad.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:39]:

Isn't that like the most. That's like the most important ad unit that's come out in the last however many years, right in B2B.

Taylor Udell [00:06:45]:

It's amazing. So you know, like I said, we have our small target account list and 51% of those people have engaged with our ads prior to becoming an OP. Or 51% of our open ops have like previous engagement on those thought leadership ads. And I know they're those ads because that's pretty much the only ad playbook I'm currently running.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:07]:

Wow, that's sweet. So this is the. I love the thought leader ads because I hate a lot of B2B creative. I think when we think of advertising on LinkedIn we use like very branded like Champify ads. Like imagine basically taking your I'm looking at Todd's LinkedIn page right now, but it's like if you took his profile banner that says your best leads already know you with the Champify logo and then some social proof. It's like that's what everyone does for ads. And that looks like an ad to me. But if I'm scrolling through the feed and I see a post from Todd or a post from you and it's just text and it's like something educational or informational, like, that's going to work so much better.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:41]:

Your approach to organic content. I want to talk about, like the thought leader ads, maybe in a second, but do you have a strategy for this LinkedIn organic or just like, you kind of know what to write? Todd kind of knows what to write. This SDR writes. Do you all talk about it? How do you execute it inside of the company?

Taylor Udell [00:07:57]:

So I think that there's. There's a lot of experimentation that goes on sdr. We give him free range. He is speaking to the buyer of his experiences. He has a lot of, like, he's a lot funnier than I am, so his personality really shines through. Every now and then I'll be like, hey, can you, like, make sure that you talked about, you know, a play we're running internally or you know, how you use in dog food, our own product.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:22]:

Wait, what's his. What's his name? What's his name?

Taylor Udell [00:08:24]:

So people can look, it's Will Faulkenberg. Everybody who is heavy into cold college should follow him.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:30]:

Oh, I've seen this guy.

Taylor Udell [00:08:32]:

Yeah, he's a hot dog kid. So he is building his own brand and he gets.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:38]:

He works with you. Okay. I saw his. Him recording cold call videos. He's got like, a baby.

Taylor Udell [00:08:43]:

He's got two babies.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:44]:

Oh, my God.

Taylor Udell [00:08:45]:

He's super impressive. Honestly, like, top point one percent of cold callers, I think that exists. I'm constantly blown away by how effective he is, but. So he's part of.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:56]:

We're going to talk about cold calling, so let's put a pin in that. So he's writing. You don't have to be funny though. And I'm sharing this because, like, I think your content is damn good. And I think you know your lane. You lead with, like, information. You don't. You rarely write any fluff or anything.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:10]:

You write something, like, meaningful. Right? So you're doing a great job. You have the CEO and founder writing on LinkedIn. You got Taylor. You're in your lane. You're basically. I see your lane as like, Facts, you're talking about data, numbers. This is what we did.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:25]:

And then you got the kind of third amigo, which is, will your SDR like being a little bit more funny, bringing some personality into that outside of you, like running sponsored content for posts that, you know, work. How do you measure LinkedIn? How do you know that it's working for Champlify?

Taylor Udell [00:09:42]:

There's a ton of ways and I think so I will say this about marketing. The past decade has basically been a little bit of a fun game slash trap for marketing because first marketers could measure for the first time and then the smart people could gamify those measurements. And now we've kind of exploited every channel or surface or like measurement to death. And so we're kind of reverting back to this place where marketing is, unfortunately for those of us who are data driven, a little less quantitative. And you have to get a little bit more creative on how you actually think about measurement. But you also have to get more creative about just kind of living in the gray or like not being able to get an exact ROI of everything. And when it comes down to this, for all the leaders who are scared of this approach and always want to quantify, you know, marketing, like, I'm tied to company revenue. If, like we don't have revenue, then I am not doing my job.

Taylor Udell [00:10:45]:

And so kind of at the end of the day we're like looking at how much new revenue and what's our nmr and like, that's the metrics I'm really caring about and trying to build that kind of like long tail system to get there. So with that said, some of the measurements are a little bit fuzzy about how we think about measuring the success of LinkedIn. So one example is, you know, I'm looking at our open ops. How many of them were engaging with like those thought leadership ads? Obviously LinkedIn doesn't let you export organic engagement, which is a big lever for us. But I'm going to be looking at like, how did those deals move through the funnel comparatively? I did an analysis of like, you know, Todd's new founders. How many of them are senior titles in our ICP list to see. How do you do that?

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:32]:

How do you do that? School me on that. How do you measure, you know, you sold to this account, they didn't see the ad. How do you actually do that?

Taylor Udell [00:11:39]:

So I would love for someone to tell me a better way, but the way I'm doing it right now is exceptionally manual. I have uploaded my target account list in LinkedIn ads it has under the plan section. Kind of like the engagement. I download the engagement rates I in Google sheets, do a vlookup and see like how does that look and match to our target account list? What are the opportunities there? So basically Excel still runs the world despite all the software we've invented to ease the pain. Other things are like, I built a nice little Crawler, thank you ChatGPT to like look at all the followers who joined in a specific month or all of the organic engagement on a specific post. And then I enrich that and I will just like measure it against like, hey, are these people showing up at accounts that I actually care about just to like sanity check. Like I am hitting the right message with the right people. And so it doesn't give me a scale, but I'm getting enough sample points where I'm building confidence and an argument.

Taylor Udell [00:12:43]:

And then there's like the obvious ways where like 20% of our traffic is from organic LinkedIn and like that's great, that's easy.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:51]:

Or maybe, maybe your overall direct traffic in organic is growing since you all are doing more on LinkedIn.

Taylor Udell [00:12:56]:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We can see spikes on our traffic the days we have viral posts. Like that's direct correlation. And then we also look sometimes at like the self source, like which I think. Or the self reported attribution which is basically like what is the most salient data point in somebody's evaluation history is basically all that you're asking in that question. And a lot of people, like, we saw an uptick on LinkedIn when we started posting on LinkedIn. People will say it, right?

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:24]:

Cool to hear you talk about it this way because ultimately like the goal is measurement is not going to give you this perfect output of like, all right, here, go execute this play next. And this play next. It's like your job. You're measured on company revenue each quarter, each year. You're trying to grow that number. You're trying to make bets on. Where are you going to place bets to like hopefully grow revenue more?

Taylor Udell [00:13:44]:

Yeah. And the easiest way to place bets at this stage is like I'm only going to do specific things, like one thing at various points in the funnel. So like if I want to run an experiment on awareness and I see all my awareness metrics grow, I'm only doing one thing. So it has to be that thing that's working and like that's how I think about a lot of things. Like how do I test if it's working or not? What happens if I turn it on or what happens if I turn it off to like these other metrics to test kind of that causation or correlational relationship since I can't get that exact measurement.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:20]:

Yeah, that's great. Now this is going to be super useful and relevant to a lot of people. How important is it for Unity gold on company revenue versus marketing specific metrics?

Taylor Udell [00:14:31]:

I will say I think it depends on the stage of the company. I would say that both at very small and at very large companies, executives should be measured on revenue in general. Just because it's kind of like the lifeblood. If you're not doing it like at a startup, if you're not hitting those revenue targets, you're just not going to have a company. So it is kind of the thing that matters. And then I think if you are at a very large public company, if you're like not hitting your revenue and growth targets, then like you're devaluing your shares.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:06]:

And so I get what you're saying. It is hard. There is a middle ground where it's hard because like marketing might still be doing good things, but there might be reasons outside of marketing control why revenue is not growing.

Taylor Udell [00:15:16]:

Right, right. I think there's some of that and then there's also some of that. Like in the beginning like a ton of what I'm doing is like not scale. Right. Like, and it shouldn't be scaled because like it's testing and I want to get out the quick dirty data so that I can understand where I should be putting the effort to actually build something scaled. Now it's not like total duct tape, but I think that there's like a big middle ground when you're like building for scale where like if you only incentivize marketing on revenue, then you are disincentivized from thinking about laying long term foundations. And this is true even at a startup at Champify size. Like where I thought a lot about like, yeah, how do I want to be compensated? But I do think having the revenue kicker in there is important for marketing regardless of whether you're gold on total pipeline.

Taylor Udell [00:16:03]:

I never think it should just be marketing because then you get into fights.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:08]:

But I think about something like you said, like you do a lot of outbound in your company. You all are very effective at that or the hot dog man is doing cold calling. Right?

Taylor Udell [00:16:19]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:20]:

In a world where you are only incentivized and I've been at a company where this is the case when the world where you are only incentivized for marketing Sourced revenue, then you're fundamentally not aligned to help will be effective at cold calling. Because you're like, well, if he cold calls, that's going to be sales generated. I'm not going to.

Taylor Udell [00:16:39]:

Right, exactly.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:40]:

I got other stuff to do.

Taylor Udell [00:16:41]:

I think attribution is the evil of all progress. And I have.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:48]:

Yeah, this is where you came up. You came up in that world you were working at. I came up that stuff?

Taylor Udell [00:16:53]:

Yeah, I came up in that world. I came up being responsible for the reporting and having to like, mediate fights where like, you know, the BDR is like, no, but I was outbounding and that's why they came in and then they signed up. That's the exact same person. I called five times and I'm like, okay, but like, what if they saw an ad? Like, realistically, the way I think about marketing, especially in a sales LED company, which is going to be more outbound heavy in general. Like, it's the way you buy. There's no, like, teaser. You don't have all these other levers to pull. You can do like, kind of kooky campaigns to get emails, but at the same time, if you're doing something super kooky, the intense there is probably the same amount of intent as an outbound call.

Taylor Udell [00:17:37]:

Right. So the way I think about it is like, how can I make it more efficient? How can I make it so that when Will calls, they're like, oh, Champify, I heard of you, or I saw your content. Or like, you don't have to do that weird, awkward intro with what company again.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:50]:

Right.

Taylor Udell [00:17:50]:

Like, I'm thinking about that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:51]:

This is so underrated. And I think this is why, like, the best thing that an outbound sales team could have is a strong brand. Right. Like, more people know who you are. That's going to make it easier to go knock on doors and like, is it hard for stripe or Zoom to go, like, do outbound? No, everybody knows that those companies exist. Right. But also there's a whole element. This is why kind of how I asked about the measurement thing is because if you're incentivized on revenue, then you as the marketer, you're going to figure out, well, like, how can we help Will? This guy's really good at cold calling.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:23]:

This is working. But he's got to spend six hours digging for phone numbers or he doesn't have good lists. Like, this becomes then something that you and your team should go work on and you don't have to worry about, like, who gets credit or, like, how do we budget for this because it's going to drive pipeline? I think it's just really important from an alignment standpoint. Maybe. I just, I was burned once by it and so I love like harping on it with people. But I think when you realize that the company cares about revenue and then like you have sales and marketing or kind of two inputs to get to that number, it just does make things a lot easier.

Taylor Udell [00:18:52]:

I think so. And I think, I mean we've all been in those conversations where marketing is blowing the MQL is out of the water and then sales isn't hitting their revenue number and then like what is the point at that point, right? Like it doesn't fundamentally matter how many MQLs you have if you aren't getting revenue. Like, sure, maybe it's nice to find levers in the funnel where you can optimize, but it's not like, hey, you did your job and your job was done perfectly right. And I think it's more about, I mean at the end of the day you're a business and so you have to be tied to things that actually move the needle in the business and then you get to poke out of the box or you get more collaboration. And sure, you can measure tactics for attribution like is this working? Is this not working? But you stop having those conversations where like, oh, marketing has the gap or SDRs have the gap and you can start moving the conversations to what can we do to actually close the gap? Because essentially most people kind of have a gap at, you know, this part. In the SaaS era, you wrote in.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:52]:

July you finished one year at Champlify and you have 5x the quarterly pipeline generation. I'm going to read you the three big marketing initiatives that you wrote about that you killed and I want you to just do a quick commentary on each of them. So things that you killed were number one, direct response ads, number two, selling to just anyone in SaaS. Number three, stopped outsourcing until we had a definition of good. So let's talk about number one quickly. First you killed direct response ads. What does that mean?

Taylor Udell [00:20:19]:

So all the ads that are like sign up, get a demo, download X, we just, we got rid of them. They are expensive. I'm a pretty big fan of some of the refine labs like analysis that they've done for intent.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:34]:

But like, so where do you drive people instead? I understand and I have some follow ups. So where do you drive people instead? Just nowhere. Just only do thought leadership ads.

Taylor Udell [00:20:42]:

It's like 90% thought leadership ads maybe a little bit lower than 90%. We drive people to. If it's like top of funnel ad like the first time they've seen us, we will drive people to Playbooks. So we just released a big playbook about building outbound culture at companies. It is Champify adjacent. Like it works better if you have an outbound culture. But it's really, really great advice from people like Justin Geller at Gong or Doug May at Harness. It's like very tactical how to do your job.

Taylor Udell [00:21:14]:

So we'll drive people to assets like that that'll help them regardless of whether they're using Champlify or not.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:19]:

Is there, is there some type of lead capture something on that or you just engagement on the back end?

Taylor Udell [00:21:25]:

It's a little bit of both. We need to get better. And this is like the first thing we really tried to do in the first part of the year was like, how do we just even get people to know about us? Now I'm thinking about like, how do I move people from being like, oh yeah, they're helping me with their job with my content. Like, let's shift down to like the product. But we have on the page just a way to subscribe for more of this, like leadership newsletters for sales leaders. And we'll put like webinars on the page too so that they can subscribe to webinars and then we get their email. But basically the premise is deliver value and then earn the right to.

Dave Gerhardt [00:21:59]:

Yeah, well, it's interesting because like, even if you're selling to bigger companies and you can make the case that like, well, everybody's contact info is available in zoom info. And so I don't need or wherever Apollo, whatever. And I don't need to like get their information in my database. But it's like a signal. Right. And so I know there's a whole movement of like not doing any, like don't do lead capture or whatever. But there's some level of signal of like if you showed someone ad it took them to this like playbooks about, you know, how to run an outbound sales Org. And then someone then like joins your newsletter list or something to get more of that content.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:30]:

Then you can match that up with like, oh, a target account of ours is now interested in our content that then changes the conversation that sales can have with them.

Taylor Udell [00:22:38]:

Yeah. So basically what we do when we like launch content is basically every month. You know, we all have the intent what websites or what companies are looking at your website. We'll pull the List of companies who are, like, looking at it and use it for a nurture campaign. That's like, I saw you were, you know, your team is checking out X, here's X, Y, and Z based off of it. So we'll rejigger that as, like, use it as a marketing moment or an activation play, for sure.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:04]:

I like the idea of killing direct response ads only because one thing I've always struggled with in B2B is like, unless you have a PLG or freemium motion, it's like, know who we are and then get a demo. And that's just like such a big gap in between. Like, I don't want a demo yet. And I know that if I get a demo, it means sales is going to contact me. And you're probably like, me, Taylor. The only time I reach out to get a demo is if I'm like, pretty damn close to probably going to end up buying.

Taylor Udell [00:23:29]:

I'm like, I've already talked to people on who are logos on your website. By the time I reach out to you, I know you're down to two. Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:37]:

I know that not all demos convert, obviously, 30, 40% or something. It would be fantastic. But I'm not taking a demo unless I'm already at the finish line of this process and now I have to see it because you're making me see it. And I've always thought, okay, how do you drive higher intent? But they're not ready to get a demo yet. And I like the idea. My friend John Short, who runs compound growth marketing, he's a big fan of, like, building middle of the funnel tools, like free tools and resources, like a grader of some kind sometime. And you're doing this now with content and reports. I think that there's just so much of marketing that needs to be done there.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:13]:

You can't just have, like, get a demo and then like, the head of sales is all over you because demos are down. Well, we can't just run ads that say, get a demo. We can't just email our list and say, get a demo. We got to build different on ramps. And I see you kind of nodding along. It seems like you've thought about this.

Taylor Udell [00:24:28]:

Yeah, definitely. I think I was just gonna say, like. So our first one is, like, pretty generic. Like, here's what the new, you know, spam, Google things means for you and how you should change your targeting. Here's what, how you think about measurement, whatever. It's very top of the funnel. There's ads that's involved a lot of the time that are just like interactive or like, here, I need an account planning template. Like, sure, we'll give that to you.

Taylor Udell [00:24:49]:

And then like once people have visited our site or like really interacted with our content or our ads, then it starts to be like, here's how I do my job from a customer and the role Champify plays in it. So we try and do case studies that are the generic case studies are great in that, okay, somebody's willing to go on record that they use you. But the actual content of the case studies are generally pretty weak. Like it's not super tactical or like helpful. You're just like, great. They're trusted brands. So we've been trying to rejigger how we do case studies to be much more aligned with like, hey, I run this team. Here are the four plays I'm doing.

Taylor Udell [00:25:25]:

Yes, Champlify is a part of it, but it's like not the whole thing. So then that's what people who are interacting are just kind of getting slowly pushed down to, like consideration of like, oh, I have that problem too. I will consider Champify. And that's kind of how we think about the goal.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:38]:

Our number two was selling to just anyone in SaaS. I'm going to assume the answer to this one. You started a year ago. My guess is before you started they just, it's an early stage startup just kind of selling, not a clearly defined icp. You did. That makes a ton of sense. Number three, this is a really good one. We stopped outsourcing until we had a definition of good.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:57]:

What does that mean?

Taylor Udell [00:25:58]:

So I don't have a demand gen background pretty much at all. And we first started outsourcing things like ads and it turns out when you outsourcing but you don't know how it should be done or you don't know what it looks like. It's not that they're necessarily doing like a bad job, but it's just like maybe not aligned with your company or you'll never learn. And so what we started doing and once again, I think outsourcing is like a weakness of mine that I'm trying to like build that muscle. I'm a little bit of a control freak and I like to have it all like understood what's working. But when we are deciding to outsource, we know exactly what we want, how we're going to measure what the goals are, how it fits into our overall strategy and like what the actual steps should look like. That way you know it's working or it's not. And there's no kind of like black box of, I don't know, discovery and throwing away money because you don't know how to do it or measure them.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:52]:

It's my number one as a former washed up VP of marketing and later cmo, I realized that basically any hiring mistake I made is when we. This is kind of a similar lesson. It's like any hiring mistake I made is when we didn't do the thing first and then outsource it. And so it's like, oh, we need to start running ads, let's go hiring demand gen agency or whatever. And I'm like, no, just something happens when you learn that first. Or I'll give you an example. Our first event when I worked at Drift, we were gonna just like fully outsource it. We did it all in house because we needed to feel it, we needed to know it, we needed to do.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:26]:

We're doing that with Exit 5 right now. We didn't hire an agency to help us do our first event. We did it. We have a ton of data now. Now if we go into next year, I can look at the budget and say like, should we spend 50 grand on an event marketing agency? Maybe we should. And now I feel like we know how to do it and this is where, you know, maybe I've made a lot of mistakes with agencies because we haven't come up with the best brief on the way in because we don't know what we want. And so I think if you can do it as 20% of your job or hey, you want to explore partner marketing, hey, can your product marketing manager do that in like 20% of her job for the next three months? And then let's figure out like if we should go higher full time. You got to test into these things.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:04]:

And it's hard because there's a solution for everything. There's an agency for everything. There's a freelancer for everything. Someone solved it. But there's just something about if you don't do it yourself in some small way first it's going to be hard for you to do it effectively as you scale.

Taylor Udell [00:28:17]:

Yeah. Then you learn lessons really hard in an expensive way. And then you also don't know what good should look like after the experience. So.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:25]:

Okay. And then instead you created a true brand strategy. I think we've kind of roughly talked about this, which is good messaging for the homepage and intro deck. Check out champlify.com messaging is very good. And then content audience fit. Okay, that was good. That you wrote that I wanted to go deeper in this. You did this big report and you are not gating it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:46]:

You want to sell to bigger companies. You're doing events, you're doing cold calling, but then you're doing free content. How on earth are you measuring the success of content if you're not gating it? And that means you're not getting any MQLs. What are you doing, you crazy lady?

Taylor Udell [00:29:02]:

So we're doing a lot. I think the first part was like, hey, are we getting awareness at the companies we care about? And that's super easy to measure because tools like Clearbit will reveal that for free. Or we use koala so we can see all of the companies who are viewing that content. Now I can see that company. Are they in my CRM? Do I have an active op? And in that case I can see, okay, if I have an active op, do those opportunities close faster? Do we navigate to power more quickly? Are we able to loop in VPs of sales, which is who this content, for example, is for? And I can, at the size, get a lot of anecdotal feedback from like our reps on how it helped them in the deal if they're net new. I'm counting that as like, hey, I got on this ICP accounts radar and so that's a really easy way to measure it. Can I open an opportunity now? We set up a nurture campaign for this one specifically, which was we did like a little teaser using our LinkedIn strategy, where we kind of shared a little bit of a report or a little bit of the findings and learnings and said, hey, DM me or comment on this post if you would like a copy of this. So now we have all these people who are kind of like opting in in advance.

Taylor Udell [00:30:21]:

It's not the exact same thing as an mql, but you can bet that I can enrich those people and do these really targeted outreach. And then it's also like personalized and it feels more conversational and it feels more relationship oriented. So now my founder and my sales team has all these threads with people who've like either opted in or liked that post or maybe their company was checking out the website and they can just start a casual conversation and be like, hey, like, saw your team was checking this out. Or hey, you look like you're building outbound strategies. What else is working for you right now? Or what types of initiatives are top of mind and you can come in with a more consultative angle. Then view my product, check out this demo And I think that starts to build trust and rapport. So we're also looking at like number of conversations started or number of ops reopened because of the content as well. So it's really like account visibility and conversations.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:12]:

Nice. I said champlify.com before it's champlify.io champify.io. You should go check it out. If you go to champlify.io, you can find this like how to build an outbound culture content piece. And I love this style of content because it's very clear you're not just like blogging for the sake of blogging. You're not just like creating, you know, five blog posts a week to try to rank for something. Like people Talk about like 10x content or you know, pillar content. If you go to this piece of content, it's.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:38]:

There's an overview video, right? There's a clear, like just the layout of the page is legit. This feels like a meaty, worthwhile piece of content. Not just like, hey, let's crank out content. I like this, like, let's do less content, but let's do it more in depth and better. I want to end on just talking about you taking this job as head of marketing, AKA head of growth, since you made up the title Advice for new marketing leaders out there. There's a lot of them that listen to this podcast, advice on joining a new company, what you should look to do in your first week, month, 90 days or whatever. And you know, looking back on your early success at Champify, just give me advice to, hey, I'm going to go start a new head of marketing job next month. What should I be thinking?

Taylor Udell [00:32:23]:

I think the first thing is one of the big reasons that I joined Champify is actually that I had worked with Todd in the past. We had a lot of rapport, which meant that I had already spent all that time building up goodwill and trust before even joining so that I knew I was going to be able to make decisions and kind of like draw hard lines in the sand from the get go. But I think knowing that whoever is running the company, knowing that they're gonna like trust you or like let you do things kind of out of the box or experiment with things that are like, not necessarily measurable is really important. The next thing I would say is.

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:00]:

How did you identify that by the way? That comes up a lot. How did you know that, that he.

Taylor Udell [00:33:04]:

Would trust me to like do whatever I wanted?

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:06]:

Yeah. Cause I think in a lot of companies it's the opposite.

Taylor Udell [00:33:09]:

It's.

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:10]:

I don't trust you until I trust you versus think good leaders will trust you out of the gate until you prove otherwise.

Taylor Udell [00:33:16]:

Yeah, well, like I've known Todd for a decade now, so that is an unfair advantage. I have had to earn credibility at a lot of places and like, usually what that looks like is just getting the quick wins on the books. I can guarantee you if you walk into a company, there's a couple of things that are fundamentals that are just not happening well. And instead of looking for something big and flashy, look for the low hanging fundamental fruit. And like, don't try and do it all. Just do one thing and do it well and do it quickly and maybe it is even a favor for somebody whose credibility you're trying to get or trust yourself.

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:59]:

Yeah. Favorite go a long way. Like a little quick help for the sales team. Like, hey, we haven't had this field in salesforce. Boom. Now you do some nonsense like that, right?

Taylor Udell [00:34:06]:

Like, like, oh, I needed countless. Oh, great. Here you go. Oh, like we've been wanting to be able to run like a really small event. I'm huge on the favor economy. I will go out of my way to kind of like get trust that way. Because you also learn a lot more. You say, okay, well we tried this thing you wanted.

Taylor Udell [00:34:25]:

It didn't really drive the results. Here's a couple of other ways I think we could hit those same pain points. But if you can take somebody, whatever they're asking for a favor and back it up to the business problem they're trying to solve, then you can come in with the next thing that you want to try really easily. And you have to be able to do that mapping from like, favor to actual problem. But I think about that a lot and I think that's the best way to start any new job.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:48]:

Love it. I love that. I think there's a lot of nonsense about getting in there and talking to customers and talking to people on the team and don't twist my words. I'm not saying those things are not important. They obviously are. But I think it can be a crutch for like the first 90 days. I'm going to talk to customers. No, like, you got hired because you're smart and you're good at marketing and if something's broken, go and fix it or make things better in your first week.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:11]:

You totally can do that. Taylor, thanks for hanging with me on the Exit Five podcast. Taylor and I, this is the third. We went through every recording platform to make this happen, but I got a bunch of great notes you're never going to know as a listener you're never going to know what we went through but go check out Champlify IO find Taylor we'll have her linked in the show notes go connect with her People ask me all the time who should I follow on LinkedIn who's someone that doesn't have a bazillion followers I don't want you that I should follow and learn from it's absolutely Taylor. I learned something from her approach like she posts every maybe once a week she posts I feel like but when she posts it's not like a it's not like me it's not some silly quote or a meme she's coming with the heat it's long form it's specific go and check her out Follow her Taylor I think I'll see you in Vermont in a couple weeks I think.

Taylor Udell [00:35:57]:

You in September yeah All right cool.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:59]:

Thanks for hanging with me I appreciate.

Taylor Udell [00:36:01]:

You thanks so much for having me all right.

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