#212: Marketing Leadership | Lessons for First-Time Marketing Leaders with Michael Cole, SVP of Everflow

In this episode, Dave sits down with Michael Cole, SVP of Marketing at Everflow, a partner marketing platform that helps companies manage referral and affiliate programs. Michael discusses his journey from being Everflow’s first marketing hire to leading a marketing team of 16, and shares strategies for building a marketing function from the ground up.

Dave and Michael cover:

• How Everflow turns happy customers into referral partners
• What it’s like to be a first-time marketing leader
• Building a marketing function from scratch

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Introduction to Michael
  
• (06:28) - - Michael’s journey to marketing leadership
  
• (11:15) - - Understanding company growth before developing your strategy
  
• (14:19) - - Turning happy customers into referrals
  
• (18:24) - - Scaling a successful team
  
• (25:35) - - Referrals vs. paid ads
  
• (29:52) - - Organic vs. paid strategies
  
• (32:19) - - Growing organically and spreading through word-of-mouth
  
• (34:05) - - Finding complementary business partnerships
  
• (40:18) - - Enhancing content creation
  
• (43:18) - - Delegation and accountability in a strong team
  
• (44:17) - - Strategizing for growth
  
• (47:27) - - Closing remarks

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:

You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:17]:

Hey. My guest on this episode of B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt, is Michael Cole. He's SVP of Marketing at Everflow. Everflow is a partner marketing platform that helps companies manage their referral and affiliate programs. They've done 23 million in revenue, completely bootstrapped. They have 1100 customers. Michael was their first marketing hire six years ago when the company was just 15 people. Today now, his marketing team alone is bigger than that. Sixteen people.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:44]:

We talk about what it's really like being a first time marketing leader, building a marketing function from scratch, and how Everflow grew primarily through turning happy customers into referral partners. Here's my conversation about Startup Marketing and B2B with Michael Cole. People call you Michael? Are you Michael Cole?

Michael Cole [00:01:01]:

Oh, whichever. I've always been whatever people call me. So Mike or Michael. Whoever. Sounds good.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:08]:

Mike. Mike Cole. Michael Cole, Jermaine Cole, whatever we want to call it. All right. Michael Cole, good to see you. Thank you for coming on this podcast. So Are you an Exit Five member?

Michael Cole [00:01:20]:

I am not. I joined during the Facebook.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:22]:

I gotta go. We gotta hang out.

Michael Cole [00:01:23]:

Sorry. Very.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:24]:

Thank you for listening to this episode.

Michael Cole [00:01:25]:

Thanks, everyone.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:26]:

Yeah. All right, well, maybe, maybe we'll be. You should join our CMO club. That would be a good fit for you. So anyway, we have a community of 5,000 members. B2B marketing pros. We also do this podcast and this podcast is like the tip of the spear for us. And you sent me an interesting note.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:44]:

You've been at this company, Everflow for six years. Joined the company. The team was 15 people when you joined. You were the first full time marketing person Today. Company's grown to 20 plus million. ARR. You're a real big boy marketer now. You got it, you know, you got a team.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:02]:

I've been through this. Yeah, you got a team of marketers that's bigger than the company was when you joined. And so I thought it'd be fun. I said, yeah, let's have this podcast. I thought it'd be fun to dive into. Like, what's happening over the last six years. What is that evolution Like? And let's do that. So maybe let's start and rewind by talking about first, let's set the context.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:20]:

Like, what does Everflow do? What does your company do?

Michael Cole [00:02:22]:

Yeah. So Everflow is a partner marketing platform and we allow you to have tracking attribution for all your partnerships. That's the general tagline, especially the B2B tagline. Right now we really just focus on serving the affiliate marketing segment because it's a really old, proven segment. There's a lot of money there and there's a lot of very old companies where we can be taking market share from.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:44]:

Okay. And I think I mentioned 20 plus million ARR. But how many people are at the company today? Roughly what stage? Like, where are things at today?

Michael Cole [00:02:52]:

Yeah, so we are a completely bootstrapped company. So it's been a really exciting run. We don't have investors. The founders had sold their last company. They threw some money at the beginning and we've been profitable ever since. When they started this company, one of their first clients was closing their former bosses at the old company, which brought in the subscription revenue to allow them to grow from there. Which is the ultimate hack is close where you just worked from. So.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:17]:

Oh, because they got a. Did they get a bunch of affiliates from that company or are you saying like that was the first company that became like the first flagship customer?

Michael Cole [00:03:26]:

Yeah, so it was the first flagship customer. And we go back. So basically they started Moolah Media, which was a mobile ad network, and in the very early days of mobile, and then they built that up. It got acquired by Opera, slash Ad Colony. And then the technology that they built at that company was being used internally, but it was starting to get really creaky and fall apart. So when they started Everflow, they built a new platform for all the tracking. They learned a lot of lessons along the way that they built it better the second time. And then their first, like, big flagship customer was closing Ad Colony and that brought in a lot of early clients.

Michael Cole [00:04:05]:

It meant that they immediately got profitable. And so we've been able to like organically grow from there. So that's sort of the background. And then right now we're at 98 people, 24 million in revenue. We have no investors. So I can be completely transparent about all our numbers, which is really fun.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:23]:

Yeah, that is fun. And 24 million hundred people, that's a good business.

Michael Cole [00:04:29]:

It is, yeah. It's a nice high margin business.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:32]:

And to bootstrap a company to get to $24 million, that'd be fun.

Michael Cole [00:04:36]:

Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:37]:

All right, so what was the state of the company when you joined? Let's talk about, like being the first marketing hire. How did you get to this company? Did they hire you to run marketing? Were you more of like a junior ish marketing person? Like, for me, I often tell the story on this podcast about, like, I worked at this company, Drift, and I Became VP of Marketing. And I ran marketing over time, but they didn't hire me to run marketing. I was just a guy that they hired to, like, help do stuff and, you know, start getting some traffic and getting some leads and making things happen. And then four and a half years later, I became the VP of Marketing. What's your path been?

Michael Cole [00:05:10]:

Yeah. So prior to Everflow, I was at another mobile ad network company and the founders of Everflow came in. The product wasn't quite done yet. They had a whiteboard. They were drawing out the whiteboard about why Everflow would solve all of our problems at that company and I'd use the competitor products. So I was immediately a believer because the competitors were all pretty miserable to use back in the day. And so that was when I first met them. And then when that company was falling apart, as many startups do, I started consulting for a few different companies.

Michael Cole [00:05:44]:

And one of those companies, I was going to launch a new mobile ad network. And I started with using Everflow, which now had a full product. And so I was customer number 23 of Everflow. Got a sweetheart deal because they hadn't figured out their pricing model. So it was very low risk on all sides. And I managed to scale it up to about like 7 million in revenue from that mobile to ad network side. They were looking to make their first marketing hire. We were hanging out lots of different conferences.

Michael Cole [00:06:12]:

They floated the idea. And the problem with mobile ad networks is you make a lot of money in the good times when advertisers are spending a lot of money and then on the bad times, everything drops off. It's like a roller coaster. And I really wanted to get into SaaS, so I was excited to join Everflow. I gave the two month notice. I had a lot of tears because I actually like my team, but I really want to get this SaaS side. But when I joined Everflow, obviously, like I'd been a customer for two years, I knew the product inside and out. It was a really awesome situation to grow it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:43]:

I think that's an amazing little hack. There's a bunch of founders that listen to this podcast and if you can do it, I'll get messages from founders often. Hey, I'm looking for, you know, I want to hire the first DG or I want to hire the Michael Cole. My company you made me think of. There's an interesting playbook which is like, can you find a power user of your, you know, of your product? Right. And so for you to come in and you already, you were the Ideal customer, you know how to use the product. That is a tremendous advantage from a product marketing standpoint. Just can be weird, like stealing a customer, stealing the person from your customer.

Michael Cole [00:07:19]:

But it definitely has to be done carefully and make sure that everyone is understanding. And like we kept my former company as a client until they just closed off that division this month. So it lasted quite a long time.

Dave Gerhardt [00:07:32]:

All right, so when you joined, there's kind of not. There was no revenue, right? Not a lot of revenue, no.

Michael Cole [00:07:38]:

They were already at like 2 million. So that's. They went up really quickly because they basically closed the first flagship. All the other companies that were also again like it was a market where no one was really happy with the current solutions. So when they got that flagship, people started hearing about it, people started signing up. So it already achieved some pretty good revenue. It was like, I think like 1.5 million ARR at that point or something.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:00]:

Right. But it basically had it been entirely through like founder led sales at that point.

Michael Cole [00:08:05]:

They added their first salesperson like four months before I joined.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:09]:

Okay, so what did you do? There's a lot of people that are, you know, they want to leave their job and go get a new marketing job at a new startup or you know, first time head of marketing or joining a 10, 15 person startup. Startup. Like how do you figure out what to do? Take me into the. If you can rewind six years ago. Let's try to unpack some of the playbook here.

Michael Cole [00:08:29]:

Yeah, that's interesting. I think in the early days it's really just about like plugging all the holes that need fixing. So obviously the website needed fixing just because it was like a three page website. And so it needed a lot of writing and focus there. So a lot of that took time. The conferences, we need to actually have someone organizing our conferences. We started doing events with customers at those conferences like right away. And then I wrote a lot of help desk articles to just like fill in all of the basic details and make sure that it was a little bit more like user friendly.

Michael Cole [00:09:02]:

So the very beginning is just a rush of like where are all the burning fires? It just needs like an extra 25% attention to be good.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:11]:

What about setting goals though? Right. It's easy to just kind of come in and just like put out fires. But you need to develop a strategy. You need to develop some direction that you're going in. Did you. How did you start to develop the marketing strategy?

Michael Cole [00:09:24]:

Yeah, I would say that it was less about developing the marketing strategy more than just getting an understanding of, like, what was really happening to the whole company. So I remember going to, like, David Scotta. He has a blog that's really excellent called For Entrepreneurs, and he had just done a session about, like, what do you do in your first 90 days? So I was taking all of the, like, reporting and data and then putting it into a spreadsheet with the bookings of how many customers we're getting per month. And so even if we had no growth in marketing, I was the first one to actually show them the growth that was already there in a very clear way on a spreadsheet of, like, here's how we're going month by month, here's what's working. So I think that even before you actually do that, if the company has some product market fit, really just letting the CEO know how much is growing and like, what channels is growing actually goes pretty far before you even start choosing channels to grow. Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:17]:

So I mean, in this case, you're already at 2 million in revenue, but basically nobody's measuring or tracking everything. And so instead of just coming in and doing more, you were the first person to, like, clean up the house and organize the pantry a little bit.

Michael Cole [00:10:29]:

Yep. And then from doing that, like, the obvious thing pretty early on that we've always made, like, our core focus was referrals was the way that we grew the business and how could we empower more referrals? So then you get to the point of, like, there's two things. So one of them is just formally building a referral program for customers, being like, hey, you're a happy customer. You know why our product is better than the alternatives. Is there anyone else in the industry that you would recommend use Everflow? And that is an incredibly powerful engine of just getting happy customers to refer business. That was the biggest growth channel. And then it's doing events.

Dave Gerhardt [00:11:09]:

And was that, Was that just an email? Was it an email? Like, you just emailed every customer at a certain point that message?

Michael Cole [00:11:16]:

So one of the big advantages Everflow had from the beginning and has made my job really easy is that at the same time that I joined, we already had, I think, three or four customer success people that were all excellent, that were doing a lot of onboarding. And so much of the success of marketing and our growth has come from customer success, which is just we made more effort to make customers feel heard, to get their features into our feature request, like queue. And we did a lot of stuff to make them feel special on the customer success side. And that made the sort of evangelical Customer that wanted to refer more business. So at that point it was really like, okay, cs, who are your happy customers? Can you talk about the referral program? Here's all the information that they need. Is there anything we can do to sort of like support them? So it became.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:04]:

I love that it's so funny. We go into, we talk so much about like hacks and strategies and tools and this non. And it's like, wait a second, you found this pocket of things at your company. It's like, we have a really good product, customers like it. We have a customer success team that kicks ass. Let's ask them to get more referrals. You know, like, there's so much not. There's so much like we've over complicated marketing at so many levels.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:28]:

And it's like, you know, the restaurant down the street or the tire shop that put my snow tires on, like, the guy who runs that shop is like, hey, tell your friends if you need anything, you know, you need anybody, like, we'll put new tires on the car. And it's like, have you done that for your SaaS company? Like Simplify. Let's get in a room and let's make a list of like the simple ways we can grow. So. And that's also one that I feel like people are not likely to. We kind of have this false belief of like, well, I'm not, I don't refer anybody to anything. But I have found that marketing is one of those things where like, if you ask, if you ask, you just gotta ask for referrals. Like if you ask 10 people, even if you get two or three people that are willing to do it, that is free marketing.

Michael Cole [00:13:07]:

Yeah, it's insane. And when you get it running, it gets even more amazing because as the referral program scaled, it became the tool that the entire team started using. So now sales keeps relationships with like customers they close and then builds like rapport to get referrals out of that newly closed customer. And like the engine becomes really powerful. I mean, obviously like, it still requires like a product that has happy customers, but when you have that, like, it actually can be a tool of like half your team to sort of like build their own book of business on top in a very authentic way.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:40]:

Cool. Okay, so early tactic number one was you had a bunch of successful customers ask them to go and tell their friends about it.

Michael Cole [00:13:48]:

What else?

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:49]:

Or give me early tactic number two.

Michael Cole [00:13:51]:

Yeah. So very early on. So we have one big advantage, which is like in the affiliate marketing world, there's like a Couple major conferences. So it was really easy to know, like, what are the conferences that are our ideal ICP from day one. But we started doing happy hours there very early on. Have a customer split the cost with us. It was very affordable. We did small events at smaller venues to start.

Michael Cole [00:14:13]:

It was just that every time those conferences would come up, they would know there would be an Everflow party there. So it's sort of like they feel like a part of a special club too. Again, like, this is the sort of thing that makes people passionate enough to be like, actually, like, let me recommend my other like, buddy or the other person.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:30]:

Did you have a booth at these events or was it just your play was like, we're going to go to these events and Everflow is going to be known for hosting a great party.

Michael Cole [00:14:37]:

Yeah, we had a small booth. We always did the cheapest booth. And the nice thing about this is it had like a single day booth or then the three day booth. And even now, like, I still being three days at Expo hall is like, painful. So we try to like, minimize the booth pass one day.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:53]:

Okay, so tactic number two would be there's a bunch of. I'm just trying to replay this. Like, I like simplifying things. So find out where our customers are.

Michael Cole [00:15:04]:

Yep.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:04]:

In your world. Everybody in this affiliate world is going to these handful of events every year.

Michael Cole [00:15:09]:

And make them feel special.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:10]:

Let's go do something interesting there. Right? I like this because right away it's like, we did parties at events. We asked customers for referrals instead of like, yeah, we started a blog and we started a newsletter which is like, what everyone talks about and there says, slow, slow growth. What did you do at the party? Tell me about the play of the party. Like, you just host a party, buy everybody drinks, and that ends up people buying from Everflow. Or was there some type of activation?

Michael Cole [00:15:37]:

Nope, that was pretty much it. Like, it was really. I mean, it's like, don't overthink it. You just want to have a happy place where you invite your customers, you have some prospects invited. Everyone's just happy. You get this awesome word of mouth that starts going where people start talking about, like, oh, were you at the Everflow party yesterday? Oh, like. And as the years progress, at those conferences more and more, you would just hear people mentioning Everflow as they were walking around. Because our brand got better, we got more well known, and there was a lot of people that were like, oh, did you go to the Everflow party? So it created like a lot of word of Mouth.

Michael Cole [00:16:11]:

And this is like for reference, these conferences are like 6,000 people. So they're pretty large, but they're not like gigantic.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:18]:

Okay, what else?

Michael Cole [00:16:19]:

Let's see. In the early days, hmm, it's so hard to remember half these things. I think it was just the.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:26]:

Hey, do I have to wake you up? You pitch me. You said, let me come on your podcast. You gotta do more than this, brother. Come on.

Michael Cole [00:16:33]:

I'm trying to think about the early days. I will say that as we started to scale, like one of the things that I really appreciate from especially your podcast, back in the day, in the privy days, just how much you talked about team structure. I think that this was one of the things that as we scaled it was so helpful to know, like, oh, no one should ever have more than five direct reports. And you keep building your team. And a CMO is someone who manages people that manage people that helped me so much. And it's one of the most important lessons is like, as you start to see success, you want to figure out what are the different levers of scaling that make that work. And now with like our CS team, they're like, how do you know how to build a team so well? And it's cause like I have to give it like all credit to your podcast. That was the first place where I really understood like, what is the proper structure of marketing team.

Michael Cole [00:17:26]:

So in even the early days, it was always like the thought of like, how do I add people and make sure that I'm not overextending myself.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:34]:

Well, thank you for that. I think that I'm not even great at it. I just think that I work for this guy at Drift called David Cancel. He's the CEO and he was just like, it was very liberating because he was like, he said, make it up, nephew. Make it up everybody. I think people get too tied, that people get too caught up on like, okay, the marketing team structure. Now I go, I'm Michael Cole, I'm a one man show. And now we got three people and I gotta over architect the team.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:01]:

Like in the early days, you don't, like, you don't need too much structure is bad. But eventually as you grow, instead of thinking about necessarily the perfect roles, you need to think about like, what are the I like the jobs to be done framework for your marketing team? Like, what are the things we need to do? And so like at Drift it was like, oh, we have a really. Our content is really good and content is a big driver for us. Okay, so we need content Yep, that's one team. Social media is like a big part of that. Okay, well, content and social make sense together. And then we got product marketing over here and then we got this other team we're going to call, you know, like customer growth or something. And I just did a podcast with this guy last week called Gurdeep Dhillon.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:38]:

He's the CMO at Content Stack. And he just was telling me about how he's like, at every company he's been at, you just make up the pods, like, stop obsessing over, like product marketing, demand gen digital marketing, like, who's on your team? What are you trying to accomplish? Put people into pods. And when I was at Drift, the founders, David and Elias, they came from HubSpot and they had this kind of like revolutionary way of setting up a product and engineering team where they'd have like three engineers, a product manager and a designer. And that was like a pod of five people that was working on solving some challenge. And I love that as a framework for marketing because in marketing there's so many times that like, it's very hard to just put someone in a perfect box and you need to share resources and like, there's a lot of overlap. And so I think you just need to. This is part of the creative job of running a marketing team is like, let's sit down, let's map out all the things we're trying to do as a company. Let's map out the people we have, who do we need, and let's try to bucket them all together.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:34]:

And then each team needs a team leader. That doesn't necessarily mean that that person's a VP or director or even ahead of it could be a manager, it can be an intern, but someone has to be like the one. I wish there was a softer analogy for this, but like, do you need like the one throat to choke for each. I'm sorry for that analogy, but for each piece of it, because you need to figure out like, who's going to share updates on this, how are we tracking towards our goals on this? And so I think that's stuff that I think earlier in my career when I was on the other side of management, I used to roll my eyes at, but I've now learned that like, man, that is a huge part of the job is organizing the team in the right way is no different than a sports team where like a key role inside of the organization is a general manager and figuring out like, who's on the roster and who's going to do What?

Michael Cole [00:20:16]:

Yeah. And ownership and accountability are everything.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:19]:

Yeah. How do you have the team structured now? So you got 15 people on the team. Maybe let's dive into the team structure today and that'll give us some more to riff on.

Michael Cole [00:20:27]:

Yeah, And I also can talk about, like, the early days with, like, paid ads if you want to cover that too. Cause I think it's pretty.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:33]:

Yeah, let's talk about that first. Then let's talk about more tactics that, like, you know, got you from 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 to 6, you know, what tactics worked, and then we can get into the team today.

Michael Cole [00:20:41]:

So.

Dave Gerhardt [00:20:41]:

Yeah, so paid was a big channel.

Michael Cole [00:20:43]:

Yeah. So in the early days of the company, I think we were getting maybe a hundred leads per month. So pretty good even in the early days. But one of the things that was challenging was I had very few levers to actually scale up leads. Like, we were getting leads and we were closing a lot of customers from them because it was a lot of referral. There was a lot of word of mouth. It was very strong for that. A lot of, like, organic is really just, like, brand and word of mouth, from what I've seen.

Michael Cole [00:21:08]:

Whereas, like, it looks like it's all content organic, but really the people that are coming in that are actually requesting the demos tend to have, like, heard about you from someone else. So I thought that's pretty interesting. But as, like, the marketing leader, like, you need leads to go up to hit your goals and to look effective. And so it took a while before I could actually get approved a paid ad budget. And then, of course, like, once we turn on paid ads, like, Suddenly we have 200 leads more a month. So really easy to hit all your lead curves. But I think maybe that first year of running leads or something, you had something like 1200 leads. And of that we generated 15 customers total or something, which paid for itself in the long term.

Michael Cole [00:21:53]:

But again, like, there's a thing is, like, referrals and word amounts are, like, so efficient, and paid ads are like the opposite. You get lots and lots of noise and leads, a lot of junk leads, et cetera, and then very few customers. And with the paid ad stuff, like, the whole strategy on that side is just making sure, like, how do I get rid of all the noise, how do I get rid of all the generic Gmails, the people in wrong countries, et cetera? Like, you have to just keep cutting, cutting, cutting all of the stuff that Google Ads wants to send you. Because we mostly did Google Ads, and it was just one of those things. Where it's like you're really just telling them, like, hey, this is a good lead versus a bad lead. And you're constantly cutting down all the bad lead sources and feeding into Google Ads like, this is what a proper lead looks like. Please stop sending me the rest.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:36]:

So was paid not a good channel? Is that what you're saying?

Michael Cole [00:22:39]:

No, I mean, it was ROI positive, but just barely. But it was one of those things where it's so much noise and. But from the marketing leader's perspective, all of a sudden I was hitting all my lead goals and the company was happy about it. But it was a long time to sort of like keep optimizing it, to not send junk, for it to actually be like a really good revenue channel, which took like two or three.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:04]:

But if you're hitting your lead goals but it's junk, how are you hitting your lead goals?

Michael Cole [00:23:09]:

Yeah, so it's just what I mean, it's the early days of companies where like those lead goals are still not fully understood.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:16]:

And so you don't have a clear. I've been there too. Like, you don't have a clear ICP yet. It's almost more of a volume game. And so you're just trying to like, sort through the shit, get a ton of volume in the doors sales. You kind of have three to five sales reps. They're just going to manually hunt through all the leads, make calls. You're in that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:23:34]:

I feel like that is still searching for product market fit phase. Even if you're at 2, 3, 4, 5 million in revenue, you just have inbound coming in, but it's not efficient yet. You're not necessarily like, you know, for every 100 leads that are going to come in, you got to kind of sort through them and maybe 25 or 30 of them are going to be high quality and those are the ones you're going to work.

Michael Cole [00:23:53]:

Yeah, and it's part of the nature, especially with Google Ads. I think even now we still get 300, 400 leads from Google Ads a month and it generates like five customers. And that it now is very profitable for us. Like, it's a very profitable channel. But you're always going to get so much noise from Google Ads because most people are not. They will request a demo before they have any buyer intent or they will think it's like, hey, I don't have to pay any money. Can I just get a free version of the platform? So you get a lot of noise. No matter what the Google Ads, it's just really Making sure that you are getting those opportunities and you're really optimizing towards.

Michael Cole [00:24:29]:

And you can do this as you get more sophisticated with the system is you can tell Google Ads like less generic leads, more MQLs, more SQLs and Google Ads will then actually start sending you more of those if you put a value on it. Like there's a lot of stuff you can do later on, but in the no matter what Google Ads, you're always going to get a lot of noise.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:49]:

Yeah, but you have to be willing. It sounds like a cheat code where you can say get me more of my good fit customers, but they all have a price. And so are you willing to spend 30 bucks a click on a high intent looking person that you might not know converts or not?

Michael Cole [00:25:06]:

Yep. But it's important for marketers to have those like big flashy things in the early days because as we transition it went from lead goals to revenue goals for me. And then it became much easier because I could focus on like the real channels that had revenue. But in the early days it's natural for a CEO to just sort of want like what levers are we using to grow faster? And we want to test those out and see how they work. And so leads make sense in the very early days.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:33]:

And what's your relationship with paid marketing now that the company has scale?

Michael Cole [00:25:38]:

I mean we still, we do Google Ads heavily. It's a very like ROI effective. We've never made any of the other channels work like Facebook and LinkedIn. We'll get lots of leads, but none of them end up becoming customers. And the way that I look at our dashboards, we use HubSpot in our own internal tools is like what drives customers. And if I'm not seeing any customers ever coming from like social or LinkedIn et cetera, eventually we just say like, let's just stop doing this. It doesn't matter how many prospects and opportunities. If none of those are becoming customers ever, it's not an effective channel for us.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:10]:

There's a whole pocket of. I guess I get it. I haven't been at a company that has had to spend a significant amount of our budget on paid because the two companies that I've been at from a marketing perspective, we had strong organic marketing. But then there's a bunch of people, I wonder if he. Listen, there's this guy that's in our Exit Five community and he's on LinkedIn called Evan Weber and he's a LinkedIn ads guy. And basically anytime I write about anything on organic he's like, yeah, but if you're doing organic plus paid, it would be one plus one equals three. And so there are definitely ways to amplify it. AdWords is one that hurts my brain a little bit to think about.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:45]:

There's been a bunch of debates recently I've seen about spending on your own branded terms. Like that one seems crazy for me. Like you spend on if somebody Googles Everflow or Exit Five, we rank number one for that term. But then also we're gonna spend money. So when someone searches for everflow, we're gonna show up first. But why that costs money that you're gonna get that click anyway. There's just like crazy things like that that I've never understood. And please don't come at me in the DMs after this because paid is not my thing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:14]:

I'm happy to hire someone who's great at paid to do that, but AdWords is just one. That man, I don't know even as a consumer, if I'm looking for a pair of shoes, I'm still not clicking on the sponsored link.

Michael Cole [00:27:25]:

Yeah, but you're looking for those people that are like in that research mode where they're just like, I need what else is out there. And when they search for the generic terms, which is really like, that's part of Google Ads too, is like what has buyer intent. So for us it's like affiliate marketing software. It makes sense. That's the person looking for a solution that may not have heard of us. And so we actually see that when you run that stuff, you get a lot of extra organic traffic, you get a lot of other channels like ranking up. So there's definitely some lifting of all boats. But going back to the branded keywords, it seems ridiculous to me too because we're in a B2B space.

Michael Cole [00:27:58]:

There's only so many solutions out there and by the time you can look up our brand, you must know something about us. And if you're not going to give us a shot after that, you probably are going to be a bad customer. That's going to turn.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:08]:

Okay, so that was paid. Paid lessons. There's a lot of noise to separate through. That's the biggest takeaway. What about like building predictable and repeatable channels? I think for me as a first time head of marketing at a fast growing company was like the more noise we made, the more product launches that we did, the more, you know, we made our own momentum and that drove growth. But I was always kind of looking for more predictable, repeatable Growth levers. What's your experience been?

Michael Cole [00:28:37]:

I think that some of this stuff just sort of works out when you're sort of not doing the like the thing with campaigns is like those are great for like those little bursts and they excite people. Like those are effective. But at the end of the day you end up sort of with the things that are just naturally repeatable, which would be like, as your brand reputation gets bigger, as you get go to the same conferences and people start talking about you, the word of mouth is like extremely strong. That makes organic feel repeatable. Because we always have leads coming in every month because people are always discovering us for the first time. That's like the first phase. And to sort of go back to like what the marketing org is now is that like the marketing team on my side is actually relatively small, like six people. And then we have the full partnership team under it, which is all of our referral program, our agency program, all of that side.

Michael Cole [00:29:29]:

And that's as big a part of what is a repeatable growth, which is, as I was saying, before you turn your customers into referral partners, extremely effective. As we got more mature, we started providing compensation upfront, which is send us a qualified lead, we'll pay you 250 right away and then we'll pay you when they become a customer. So there's things you can do like that to sort of really accelerate the. With referrals, it's really about being inertia. So anything you can do to sort of get them to take that extra five minutes to recommend you super powerful and then you have all of the other sort of agency partners and stuff like that, that become that repeatable engine. So I like them all under marketing because all the partnership stuff, the best first win is going to be co marketing. So it's doing fireside chats, it's doing events together, et cetera. Because partnerships, you want to have that quick win too.

Michael Cole [00:30:18]:

So it makes sense for us that partnerships and marketing are like hand in hand.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:23]:

Yeah, I found that partnerships, like it's got to be the right fit. It's got to be like a complimentary offering. Because I think oftentimes partnerships and co marketing is like a code word for like can I spam your list of, you know, can I get your contact list after let's do a co webinar together and I'll get a thousand people that I can email and you'll get a thousand people as you can email. But like if you have a peanut butter and jelly combination, you know like, you're a website platform and you don't have an email product and you're going to partner up with an email product. So in the Everflow example, what were some of the, you know, you're an affiliate solution. What were some of the good fit partners? What did they do? How did they complement what you did?

Michael Cole [00:30:59]:

Yeah, our best ones are the ones that have the win win situation. So these are like agencies and publishers where they can both sell their own services to a potential client and say, like, to work with me, you need to use Everflow. So that's the easiest. Like, if you find those referral partners, it's awesome because they both make money directly from the client or whoever they're selling to, and they're referring business to you, so they're getting paid by you. So now it's twice as much money for them and they can do it day in, day out as like a focus. So that's the ideal referral partner. And then the second one is just any tech partnership where you are an essential solution to them or their vice versa. Which for us was like in the early days, payment solution.

Michael Cole [00:31:43]:

So you need to pay out your affiliates. We had integrated payment partners. We sent a ton of business to that payment solution, and in response, they sent a bunch of customers to us.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:54]:

All right, cool. What else, sir? What else should we talk about with this audience?

Michael Cole [00:31:58]:

Yeah, let's see.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:00]:

What do you do today? What's working today, 2024 into 2025? What's exciting to you? Where are you going to invest next year? What are you investing in now?

Michael Cole [00:32:09]:

Yeah, the thing that worked the best this year and puts us in a really good place is that once you hit a certain stage, the agency play becomes the most powerful player. Because I think it's Shopify has like 26,000 agencies sending like at least one customer per year or something. It's some insane number for Shopify. And basically, I mean, if you look at like, clay too, all the people posting on LinkedIn constantly about clay, like, those are all implementation agencies for clay. So I think that was the thing that worked the best this year was we started having dedicated agency resources. We have someone hopping on calls with all of them. They're constantly talking about our product to their potential clients. We're sending business to them.

Michael Cole [00:32:56]:

Like, the agency play is really like the strongest one. So I can go more into that or if you want me to go on a different tangent.

Dave Gerhardt [00:33:03]:

No, let's talk about that. Cool.

Michael Cole [00:33:05]:

Yeah. So, I mean, agency goes the same way as I was Saying with like referral partners, like agencies really can have a win win situation where you can give them some benefit for sending business to you. You can send them a lot of referrals, but also they are getting paid by the client when they close them. So you immediately have that win there. And the way you sort of like empower that is like a. It still goes to like where the watering holes are. So you want to go to the conferences. There's a lot of like events that only agencies go to.

Michael Cole [00:33:37]:

So getting there, booking a lot of meetings, doing a lot of conversations there, like that's extremely awesome. And then as you start to sign up agencies, as they start to have success submitting those to awards, that's like a very cool like co marketing trick. Is obviously case studies important. But the problem is like if you submit to like an industry award for a case study, no one cares. It's kind of like the G2 people with. I always think of like the meme of like the generals with all of the badges. I loved when some of the marketing people were sharing that of like everyone's celebrating their G2 wins. Like you winning your own award isn't that valuable.

Michael Cole [00:34:14]:

But if you're doing a joint submission with an agency for an award and you win and then that agency is sharing it with all their other clients, that's already a ton of opportunities to win more business if their client is sharing it with their industry peers. A ton of reach. So there's a lot of these things where it starts with partnerships, but really it's like the co marketing amplification is what reaches like whole ICP segments that are perfect for you in an authentic way which as we know with like the current world and AI and everything else, like you're trying to figure out like what is that authentic way that I can get in front of these people as much as possible and be.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:51]:

Top of mind you mentioned AI. What is your appetite for AI?

Michael Cole [00:34:56]:

I like AI as just a thing that makes processes that we don't want to do easy. So we do a lot of Fireside chats with partners and publishers and customers and as soon as we do that, it immediately becomes an AI transcript. That's a blog next to the Fireside Chat. Unique content takes way less time from like our content team. So I love that play. It's just like we always have a full piece of content and then obviously like the transcripts and product marketing research of Gong or Fathom to just find out every time a product's mentioned or a feature is Mentioned. That's awesome. For like, product launches.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:34]:

Oh, interesting. Tell me more about how you use that. You're looking for people that are mentioning things that they want or like to track a new thing, adoption of a new thing that you launched.

Michael Cole [00:35:43]:

Yeah, both. So we have a couple. Like, we're at the stage where we have to start releasing more products and that's been a transition this year to sort of like actually getting the product team towards like a single platform to a lot more upsells and modules. So our product marketing to really push these extra upsell modules is in the early days. But it's awesome. Then Fathom, like, we have a media buying package coming out. We can just see like, okay, what is every conversation customer success has where media buying comes up? What were they saying there? What was an exact quote? And now as we're doing these launches, we can basically ask for permission of like, that quote from a customer during their conversation and then use those quotes on our pitch. We have a, like, a full understanding of like, what people are actually asking for.

Michael Cole [00:36:27]:

It's like super easy hack and like, we're already using Fathom for everything anyway because it's just nice to have those, like, transcripts for sharing internally.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:36]:

Yeah, I think there's a huge play in the transcripts, like being able to take transcripts from. So here's an example. We do 50 to 60 episodes of this podcast every year, right. I can take all the transcripts from this podcast and get summaries, write newsletters, write articles. I think there's so much knowledge stored internally in a company, like having the transcripts from all of your internal meetings and be able to use AI to like, pull out themes and patterns. I mean, man, if I had some of this stuff years ago, like, hey, we're going to do a new product launch. And like, I just did an hour meeting with the VP of product and I'm like using like a voice recorder on my phone and trying to take notes versus if I could just shut up and just like, you know, track all that stuff. And then the tools that are available to like, product marketers to understand adoption of these things, like, product marketing has forever been kind of a mystery role where it's like, tough to measure the success of that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:29]:

But hey, if we did this, then we got all these customer calls and we can see how many people are actually talking about this feature. Super powerful.

Michael Cole [00:37:35]:

Yeah, we've been building a lot of battle cards with that too. It's just like, okay, look at every call that every salesperson's ever had on Gong for messing its competitor. What is everything that people liked about it? What is everyone people didn't like about it?

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:47]:

Oh, nice.

Michael Cole [00:37:48]:

Amazing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:49]:

For like, do you do that in Gong? Gong, Yeah. I mean, or you do that in you, like, export those transcripts and put them in another tool? Or is it all something you can do in Gong?

Michael Cole [00:37:58]:

The way we're doing a lot more simple, which is just like, you find it in the transcript, you grab that quote, you pop it into a spreadsheet where we have everything that people liked and disliked about it. And then our product marketers sort of broken those out into different segments of like, here's the details that people know about this competitor. Here's what people like about them, what they hate about them. Here's what G2 reviews say about them. It's a super helpful thing for the rest of the team to understand exactly, like, where we are versus the market.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:26]:

Do you report to the CEO, Founder? CEO?

Michael Cole [00:38:29]:

Yeah, I report to the CEO.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:30]:

Okay, let's talk about that relationship as we wrap up. What do they care about? What have you learned reporting to the CEO, especially as a company's growing fast? Just any overall lessons about, like, you know, your path to SVP of marketing, running marketing, managing up, what should the CEO know or not know, level of details to get involved with, like, what's your relationship as it relates to marketing with the CEO?

Michael Cole [00:38:53]:

Yeah, we're a very transparent company. So everyone on the entire company knows exact revenue, where we're at, how many customers we have. So we keep regular updates every quarter on that. And then we do leadership meetings every quarter where we go through every single topic over eight hours in a very, like, sometimes heated discussion about different things we need to resolve, et cetera. So we have a very healthy thing as a whole there already. But then, like, I'm in a nice situation, which is we were a remote company to start. Now we move toward that spoke hybrid model where we have a bunch of different hubs in different cities across, like, US and Europe and Canada. Wherever our customers are, we have sort of like hubs there.

Michael Cole [00:39:36]:

And the CEO and the CEO are both based here. And so they actually come to my coworking office on Tuesdays, which is makes it super easy to handle. And then in terms of relationships. So one thing I really admire about our CEO is like, he's very much like, if I'm dead tomorrow, like, this company should still run well. So he's very good at like, the delegation and just making sure that every person builds their own, like, Accountability and sets their own metrics and make sure they do it really well. And at the end of the day, like all the company cares about and the leadership is revenue and customers like leads. They're nice pipeline, it's nice. But at the end of the day, we're looking at what drove customers and working backwards.

Michael Cole [00:40:21]:

So it's like, okay, the customers we closed in November, what were the sources that drove them? What influenced them, what strategies are working? And that's how we do the planning. So it's very revenue focused.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:31]:

And how do you set goals for marketing for the company?

Michael Cole [00:40:35]:

Yeah, so I think with the way that I do, like, the strategy for that is just sort of like, what are the big picture things that we need to solve for and just like, what is sort of missing? Where do we see levers in this case, like I was mentioning, like, the agency side has really, like taken off. So we're really putting a lot of resources in that. We have a affiliate marketplace, so we have that team that we're putting a lot of resources into figuring out which both of those will drive a lot of referrals. So we also have to figure out, like, not only how do we grow agency and marketplace publishers, but also have the right sources to get referrals out of them in authentic way, which is like, hey, who can you send us? So, yeah, like, that's one piece, which is just sort of like, what's working for this year? What sort of resources do we have that we're not really like leveraging enough? So we have like a big, like certification process. How can we sort of use that to get the people that get certified into large brand companies so that we can start getting a toehold into winning those companies? So it's sort of like, what other resources do we have internally and just sort of like, what is working? Like, paid ads was working way better than I realized when we actually did the numbers. So how do we scale that up? So that's sort of like the big picture. And then at this point, I have all of the sort of team leads coming up with their strategies. And a lot of it is also just making sure that we are doing pattern matching.

Michael Cole [00:41:58]:

So, like, what is the skill set of the team? Let's have them focus on that. And how do we cut all the work that isn't a good fit for that? Like, a lot of this stuff is like telling the team to stop doing stuff because they'll take on too many things. And I say like, no, that doesn't matter, Please cut it out. So I think that's the other part is like breaking down the smaller team strategies to like what really matters and.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:19]:

What'S the makeup of the 15 that you have today? We had mentioned that earlier, but just curious to hear how you have the team structured today.

Michael Cole [00:42:26]:

Yeah, so right now we have like the product marketer, the demand gen person who does all our website building, which is awesome. We have three content people, we have our product marketer and that's one set. And then we have the partnership team which has two people handling just referrals. We have the lead for that, we have the agency team. And then this year we switched over the marketplace team to my side. So that's basically like being connected with affiliates that work on a performance basis. That's what the marketplace does. So that's a team of five and they're always doing recruitment of affiliates and then pattern matching to connect affiliates to new customers.

Michael Cole [00:43:05]:

Because with all SaaS companies like the biggest thing is fighting churn. So the faster we can get that first affiliate generating revenue with them, pretty much at that point we don't churn. So it's very important to sort of figure out how do we show value as quick as possible. And for us the nice thing is that can be actual revenue for the user of our platform.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:25]:

What's the biggest thing you've learned over the last six years? Going from first time marketing leader to SVP marketing team of 15 $24 million revenue company. Or maybe there's multiple things, but if you could talk to yourself now to back then, what would you want yourself to know or be aware of along the way?

Michael Cole [00:43:45]:

I feel like for talking to my past self, like you kind of just have to go through it and adapt to the data. But I will say that like I always think of like what are the silver bullets that I would take to any future company. And for me it's just the basic ones are like there better be a good product that people actually like and there better be customer success because that human touch is the easiest way to distinguish yourself against incumbents. Because any large company, the customer service experience is like the first thing to slide. So you can just, that's a place where you can just put more effort and stand out. So those are sort of the base of like a company that's a good fit. And then like I said, the referral program is something that I would implement at all future companies because as soon as you know there's happy customers and you can Even just check G2 Trustpilot, see what people have said about it. And then you should be reaching out to all those people, see if they'll refer other people to you, like asap, because it's just the easiest way to get that very high.

Michael Cole [00:44:45]:

It's. So with our referrals, it's something like 2.4 times higher conversion rate than any other channel we do. So if no one's taking ownership in your company, marketing should definitely own it. And it's an easy way to spike up your revenue.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:58]:

But the meta lesson is go through the journey, learn along the way, make mistakes, and then develop your point of view. Like you are who you are now because of what you've gone through over the last six years. Doing it. Doing it is the best way to learn. Right?

Michael Cole [00:45:13]:

For sure. And it's just you're always adapting to the state of the company at that time. Like, there's a lot of stuff we can do now that works because we have way more brand recognition, which would never have worked in the past. So it's just like you have to do everything at the right stage, too, and not forget that if you don't test it and customers aren't coming from it, it's probably not working.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:32]:

Cool. All right, Michael Cole, thank you for coming on my B2B marketing podcast. People can go find you on LinkedIn, you're posting there and send you a message and maybe somebody will tell you that they relate to your story, relate to your journey. Thanks for coming on, chopping it up, talking about building out the marketing function. Everflow below. And good to see you. I appreciate you coming on.

Michael Cole [00:45:53]:

Thanks so much. It was great to be here.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:59]:

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Dave Gerhardt [00:46:27]:

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