Isaac Ware - Usergems

Isaac Ware, the director of demand generation at UserGems, discusses his background in B2B marketing and his role at UserGems. He explains his preference for B2B marketing over B2C due to the frustration with smaller ticket items in e-commerce. Ware also discusses his responsibilities at UserGems, including paid media, ABM, deal acceleration, and SEO. He emphasizes the importance of targeting the buying committee of specific accounts as part of their ABM strategy and explains how they use UserGems to identify and target the buying committee. Ware also discusses their use of LinkedIn and Facebook/Instagram ads, as well as their focus on retention and decreasing churn. He shares his plans for optimizing their ABM program and offers advice for early-career B2B marketers, including the importance of choosing the right company to work for and gaining diverse experience.

Transcript

INTRO:
The Demand Generation Club Podcast is back, and we're turning up the heat with season three. Get ready for insightful conversation with experts from Splash, TrustCloud, WorkRamp, UserGems and more, as we dive deep into B2B marketing approaches that are making an impact in 2024.

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Franco Caporale:

So I'm here with Isaac Ware, who is the director of demand generation at UserGems. Hi Isaac and welcome.

Isaac Ware:

Hey Franco, thank you for having me on.

Franco Caporale:

Fantastic. So I want to start right away and I want to ask you a little bit more about your background. How did you become the director of demand generation UserGems, and what's your story in the B2B marketing arena?

Isaac Ware:

Definitely. So I guess started out all the way back in college, started up a long board brand where I was manufacturing them, marketing them, building websites, everything like that. I discovered the piece that I loved most about it was the marketing side of things, but it was more on the e-comm and the creative and everything like that.

So I did that all through college and eventually when I graduated, got picked up by a marketing agency, and it was just me and a couple other people, and the owners grew that to around 30 people. It was an amazing experience being able to start small, grow with it. But then the interesting part about the agency too is we never niched. So we had e-comm, we had B2C, we had direct to consumer, we had B2B, SaaS, the whole spread.

It was actually a really good experience, because you were able to overlap a lot of what you were learning on the e-comm side with the B2B SaaS side and the B2C side. So, everything meshed together and you were able to view marketing more holistically and less siloed, which was really good experience. Especially early on when you're forming your ideas about what paid media should look like and what marketing strategy should look like, everything like that. So starting with that really good mix was really, really helpful.

After the agency got to around 30 people, left, went over to UserGems. Trinity, our VP of marketing, messaged me, opted in, went through that process, and I've been here for about two years now. So relatively short career, but jammed packed, especially when you start on the agency side, it's amazing, amazing how much happens on the agency side before you go in-house. So, I ended up here.

Franco Caporale:

That's interesting, and I would like to understand, since your agency was doing both B2B and B2C, all these different things, what intrigued you about B2B more than going the B2C route?

Isaac Ware:

I think one of the main things, just to be brutally honest, was the frustration with e-comm and smaller ticket items. I've told this story to a lot of people, where I think it was within the span of a few months, I had one client with over a 10x on ad spend directly attributable to their campaigns who churned because it wasn't enough. Then right after that, I had somebody with a 13 times return on investment and they just said they couldn't make it work with their margins.

So I was like, this might not be the space for me if I could pull a 13 times ROI directly attributable and it still not be enough. So it was one of those final straw moments where I was like I need larger tickets, and somebody that appreciates longer sales cycles and sometimes things take a little bit longer.

Franco Caporale:

That's a dream ROI for B2B, by the way, if you can generate that at 13x, everyone is going to be happy. So what are your responsibilities today at UserGems?

Isaac Ware:

Definitely. So, I came in pretty paid media heavy, obviously with agency background. Luckily I came into UserGems and they had amazing content director, Dosier, amazing organic social with Amber. Trinity, my VP, was just heading everything up. So really small team, but kind of a dream come true for a paid marketer to come into something like that, where they had demo requests coming in off of all these organic activities. So, I was able to come in and kind bolster that with the paid media piece.

So again, paid media is really heavy right now. Our ABM program, again runs through paid media, but has a really good ADR aspect as well. So the relationship there, especially the ADR sitting under marketing. Then there's always stuff with deal acceleration. A little bit of SEO, Dosier heads that up now, then always get involved with events and whatever else is going on. It's one those things where when you have a small team, you have your main responsibilities, but you're involved in a lot of other stuff though.

Franco Caporale:

One thing that I always like to ask is what are your KPIs? Because sometimes director demand, VP demand, we're measured on revenue, on pipeline, on leads, on MQL, SQL. What are you guys tracking on your end?

Isaac Ware:

Definitely, so Pipeline.

Franco Caporale:

Pipeline.

Isaac Ware:

Pipeline is our main, so between Sarah, our ADR leader and me, we're responsible for stage zero and that stage one pipeline. So, everything has to direct towards that. But at the same time too, while that's the main KPI I'm held to, we still do a lot with deal acceleration. So, I think we'll talk about that later in the call, but even after the demo requests, we're still involved in accelerating in the deals, even if it's not one of my direct KPIs.

Franco Caporale:

So you are full cycle responsible to drive the engagement, and quickly, what is your favorite tech stack? What is something that you cannot work without?

Isaac Ware:

It's so corny and not a promotion thing at all for me, but it's UserGems for us. My main software that I'm using all the time is UserGems. So, I don't have a 6sense or Demandbase, or any other ABM tools or anything like that.

We're using UserGems to surface all the buying committee that I'm using for my targeting, and I'm using it to find all those job changes so we can target them as well. So it's a key piece of my paid media and what I'm using every single day. And then again, always the classic like HubSpot, Salesforce, but besides that, that's about it.

Franco Caporale:

That's awesome. And we're definitely going to touch on that right now because I was very intrigued about your process and how you are targeting the top accounts. So I want to dig into that and is the main focus of the episode is how do you target the buying committee of specific accounts as part of your ABM strategy? And so how do you start with that process? Is something really, really critical for every company?

Isaac Ware:

Definitely. So again, we're using UserGems on that side of things, but I think the key is to work really closely with your sales team to define exactly who that buying committee is, because over time too it might shift who has the most influence. So for us, sales, marketing, operations have always been our key three buying committee.

But then too, as market gets more difficult, CFOs become involved and you want to social proof around CFOs and then churn is really important right now, so CSMs have a massive use case for our product. So always stay in close contact with the sales team and define exactly who that is.

I think the second piece too is also test against that. So whoever's involved in the sales process might also not be who's able to initiate through paid media. So for us right now, paid media really heavily on VP of marketing. As soon as you get into VP of sales on the paid media side of things, our KPIs drop off significantly.

So for us, VP of marketing, biz dev leaders are key and then sales come second, but then once you get into the actual sales process, VP of sales is much more important than it was early stage with paid media. So keeping an eye on that is always important for us.

Franco Caporale:

Is there any role that is maybe less obvious that you have uncovered as part of the buying committee that actually has more influence there people will think?

Isaac Ware:

Yeah, I think one of the interesting ones where they aren't always the ones initiating but really important to keep serving ads to them is operations for us. So rev ops always has the say in bandwidth or if they can implement it or if it works with their tech stack or anything on that side of things.

So making sure that rev ops is fully bought in is super, super important for us, because they can be the ones that actually kill an entire deal no matter how excited everybody else is about it.

Franco Caporale:

And based on that, do you target them at the beginning as a top of the final engagement or once there is an opportunity started?

Isaac Ware:

So, we actually do both. We still have campaigns top of funnel that are targeting ops, but it's still more education around the problem, how we help solve that problem, things like that. But then I'll jump in a little bit to once there's a demo request, we're doing on the paid media side of things. So we're actually running a lot of multi-threading through paid media.

So whenever I say this to marketers, a lot of the time marketers don't know what that means. Sales has been doing it forever, and all multi-threading is pulling in those other personas within your buying committee into the deal. So sales is always doing this, reaching out, trying to pull as many people in as they can. We see way higher close rates when all three of our personas are involved in those deals. So we want to be doing that.

So we took that a step further and started doing it on the marketing side. So UserGems is taking all of our target accounts, surfacing the buying committee right into our Salesforce instance. I'm able to build out reports that say if there's an open opportunity and there's sales and marketing and rev ops and three separate audiences, start serving ads to them.

What that looks like on the paid media side is we have ads that call out their persona or their role. So we'll say, "Hey, marketing, did you know your team is talking with UserGems about X? Do you want to join the conversation?" This was an interesting one because early on it wasn't driving a ton of demo requests or anything like that, but what it was doing is we started hearing about it on sales calls, and we started seeing people screenshoting the ads and sending them in their Slack channels and things like that.

So we wanted to test what the actual impact of that was because we knew more prospects meant better win rates, everything like that. We actually ran this as a split test against our entire CRM. Long story short, the split test showed 67% more prospects involved in the deals, 31% higher win rates, 25% bigger deal sizes and 17% shorter sales cycles. So across the board improved all of our KPIs around each deal.

So we keep that one rolling even though it's not pouring in demo requests. I think we get one every once in a while. I saw one this morning on the sales side, but not a consistent producer on the campaign level attribution, but really huge impact on the sales cycle.

Franco Caporale:

And are you tracking those metrics separately? Like you have obviously a number of new opportunities generated versus how much are you able to accelerate existing opportunities?

Isaac Ware:

That's one of the things too. I mean you could keep an eye on it ongoing or run it as a test every quarter or every half or something like that just to see what the impact is, if it's changing and how that changes over time. But even if you don't have UserGems, I think it's a really key campaign to actually run.

Even if you're running it to the entire account, I think it still has some value, definitely a little bit more waste. If you can get as granular as we're getting over here with the actual buying committee down to the exact same people the sales team is reaching out to, definitely more efficient, less waste, but a really important campaign either way.

Franco Caporale:

Tell me more about how you involve sales into this process, because obviously there is a lot of back and forth here from when you are able to generate the initial engagement to when you are looking to target other people that maybe sales is not able to evolve into the sales cycle.

Isaac Ware:

For the most part, it's on autopilot, which I think is one of the biggest things for small teams. So for me, because UserGems is pulling those buying committees in automatically, I know the exact same people that sales is working off of that I want to be working off of.

If you wanted to do this more of a manual method, what you could do is as sales is adding people into an opportunity, you could turn that into a report and pull those people into a campaign that way. That's a little less reach, probably a little bit smaller audience size, but again, really important to be working off the exact same people sales is working off of.

There's kind of that one plus one equals four. When you start running sales outreach and marketing and you're running your ABM to them and you're doing this, so a compounding effect. I would say that the more granular and matched you can get on both sides the better.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. And when you say paid media, you mentioned LinkedIn ads, is there other channels that you use as well or is mostly on LinkedIn?

Isaac Ware:

Mostly LinkedIn. So we'll occasionally run Facebook/Instagram ads, retargeting audiences or something like that, especially with social proof. So, we run a lot of customer story videos. Even on LinkedIn right now. I think my customer's story, short snippets of our customers talking about how it impacted them.

I think I'm running over 30 different videos in there currently, and I'll always keep those running. So really good to run on Facebook/Instagram, where you're not as concerned about the direct conversion there, but you want to stay in front of them, keep social proofing, show more stories that they could relate to, can be really important, but not currently running Facebook/Instagram as of a couple months ago.

Franco Caporale:

And are you also focused on, you mentioned earlier, retention and decreasing churn with these campaigns or mostly on the marketing and pre-sale side?

Isaac Ware:

There's a lot of the pre-sales. Occasionally, we run more expansion plays or things like that appear soon I'm going to be running more of a reactivation play. During when the market initially dipped, you have that little bit of churn. We're seeing a lot of people coming back, where they're like, "This is a channel we can't do without. We really need this back," and they're coming back on customers again.

So we're actually using some of that, either customer quotes or videos if we can get them from the people to actually address the issue upfront, target our churn customers and say, "This is why I left UserGems and this is why I'm back," just so we can relate to them a little bit better, call out the fact that they left right in the ad, confront them with that.

Franco Caporale:

That's very cool. I wanted to ask you, what are some of the initiative that you're going to focus for the upcoming months, the next three to six months?

Isaac Ware:

I think one of the main ones is optimizing ABM. So for us, we run ABM at a pretty massive scale, especially for not having an ABM tech stack. So we just use UserGems, and we're running 300 one-to-one campaigns every single month.

On one hand, this is awesome, about 15% of them turn into opportunities within 90 days. Really great on that side of things, we're calling out job changers of their customers, asking if they've reached out. So really highly customized, calling out their name in the ads, and then again pass it over to the ADR team for the outreach.

I think the tough part with a massive scale like this on ABM with a smaller team is sometimes the iterations are tough to do. So right now, we've launched a couple iterations of ABM. We're trying to get that conversion rate up even higher.

We know we can, but it's one of those things where it takes a lot of effort to actually look at the data, 300 accounts, try and narrow down what ads are working, which ones aren't, and also to figure out, I mean, some level of gut feeling of should we make a change that isn't even shown in this data? I think that's a big thing coming up for me is trying to get more out of our APM program, especially because one of our main drivers of pipeline.

Franco Caporale:

And how would you be able to scale that if tomorrow they say, "We need to target 600 accounts," since you're running one-to-one campaigns?

Isaac Ware:

I'm gone. If they say 600, I'm gone. Actually, we might actually move the opposite direction. So there's something to at 300, I think a lot of things fall through cracks of are we targeting right accounts? Could there be better accounts to target? So I think even scaling back up a little bit, even to 200 or 250.

It gives that little extra room to actually really examine who you're targeting, target what's going on with the messaging, could we do a little bit better with the ads? Maybe it takes a little bit more time, but if less accounts, they'll convert higher. I would say 600. We get to the point where we need a significantly bigger team because 300 alone, I mean all 300 of those accounts have four ads running to them.

So we have to make 1200 ads basically running to those accounts. We have the outreach side with the ADRs. I mean, I think we're almost at peak scale for our current team size. I think the biggest challenge though is moving from that when you first started an ABM program is starting from that 20 accounts up to that 300, because that relationship with the ADR team is one of the toughest things.

Luckily, we have that figured out on our side with, if I couldn't just hand the buying committee over to the ADRs, I wouldn't run a program like this. So being able to do that with our own tool makes it immensely more efficient.

Franco Caporale:

That's fantastic. I have two more questions for you, Isaac. The first one is, what is one thing that you wish you knew at the beginning of your career in marketing and B2B marketing as well?

Isaac Ware:

I think one of the biggest things is no one really has everything figured out to a T. I think it's really easy for us, especially as marketers to get in that mindset because all the biggest public figures, if you want to call them that in marketing are super loud, super opinionated, state everything is fact on LinkedIn, all over YouTube, everything like that. So it's these gurus make you feel like certain people have everything figured out, when in reality nobody really does.

I think out of all of the demand gens that I've talked to, no matter how big or how prestigious their marketing departments are or anything like that, you get into conversation with them, and they're still trying to figure out all the things you're trying to figure out. So even though I'm early-ish in my career, I've met people with 20 years of experience that still are working through the exact same things that I'm trying to work through.

So I think iterating, testing as much as you can, and also just sometimes going with your gut on things, even though other people aren't talking about doing it. I think it's one of the biggest things because it'll help you stand out and also you might figure something out before everybody else does, which is really, really beneficial.

Franco Caporale:

I agree a 100% on this, and so I have one more question for you. And for the people that are earlier in their career, what is the common mistake that B2B marketers should avoid, in your opinion, that is maybe very, very frequent?

Isaac Ware:

I actually might take this a different direction than I think I usually would go in, and I think picking where you're working is one of the most important things early in your career. I would really, really avoid large marketing organizations. I would say if you can go trial by fire, be one of the first marketing people at a company early in your career is fantastic, because you're going to make a ton of mistakes, but also you have a lot more freedom. You won't have as much oversight. You can just try things.

You also don't have that outside influence. You join a marketing org where somebody has 30 years of experience. Those 30 years of experience has shaped that person into the person they are, and it could be great, but also you don't want to be impacted fully by that and shape your ideas of marketing around that person's ideas. You want to form a lot of those for yourself early on. You want to test, you want to be involved in a lot of different industries.

You want to see a lot of things earlier in your career, and then as you move forward, decide what you want to focus on and go that direction. But also don't forget all the stuff that you learned about, like I said earlier, e-comm, B2C, things like that. Take that what you learned from the other industries, apply it to what you're currently doing.

Franco Caporale:

I absolutely agree. I see many times young people joining large companies where they learn to do one thing very well, which is great, but they don't know even if there are other things that they like more and they don't have visibility into it.

Isaac Ware:

Exactly. It gives you a roadblock where you don't necessarily know where you want to go next, and it's hard for you to see yourself in another role if you've never done it. So, as much as you can early on.

Franco Caporale:

Awesome. Fantastic. I think we're out of time, but I want to thank you very much, Isaac, for joining us today at Demand Generation Club Podcast, and I really, really enjoy talking to you.

Isaac Ware:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Franco.

CLOSING:
That's a wrap for today's episode of the Demand Generation Club Podcast. If you're curious about how we're landing enterprise deals and unlocking millions in recurring revenue using account-based marketing and integrated direct mail campaigns, check out our website SaaSMql.com. That's S-A-A-S-M-Q-L dot com. We share tons of content every week on tried and true strategic ABM initiatives that actually generate pipeline from enterprise accounts. Thanks for tuning in.