The Secret to Scaling with Bill Macaitis
You’ve built your product and proven that there is a market for it. Your business is working on a small scale. How do you turn up the volume and drive real growth?
Bill Macaitis has as much or more experience and success at scaling B2B startups as anyone. As CRO of Slack, CMO of Zendesk, and Marketing SVP at Salesforce before that, Bill was instrumental in the growth three of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world.
In my interview with Bill for Beyond Product, he shared his key learnings and advice for B2B startups trying to scale:
The Role of Marketing
For Macaitis, marketing’s success starts with the definition: “A lot of people especially on the B2B side think marketing’s role is simply to get leads in the door and then just hand them off to sales. Marketing’s role is to shepherd the journey of a prospect through their entire buying experience and through their journey as a customer… The bar is to get people to recommend you not just to get people to buy you… All the fundamentals — your cash payback, your magic number, everything just works better when you’ve got a strong healthy growth rate that comes from organic word of mouth.”
The secret to scaling, according to Bill, “I’m a huge believer that the customer-centric path is the strongest way to achieve hyper growth and to achieve long term differentiation in the space.”
Customer Centricity
Everyone talks about customer centricity and they think they’re customer-focused. But what does it really mean and how do you operationalize it to make it actually impactful in a business? Bill shared how they approached it at Slack,“when I was a part of Slack, we intentionally organized the sales, marketing, success, and support teams together because those were all the primary customer-facing teams. Those teams had a lot of interactions with prospects and customers on a daily basis and we felt uniting them under one leader would allow us to look at that journey more holistically to provide a delightful experience.”
“One thing that really drives it, is the metrics you use. If you say you’re customer centric, well what metrics are you using to incentivize your teams… Marketing is many times judged solely based on leads. Leads can be slanted. You can find ways to get spikes and leads that are really bad experiences for the customer…and sales can tend to oversell, over promise, put customers on plans they don’t need or put more people on it to get the biggest deal as possible.”
Metrics to Measure
There is much disagreement about NPS, But, Bill is in the Pro NPS camp when it comes to metrics, “I’m a huge huge fan of Net Promoter Score. It’s a good CEO metric. If you truly believe that brand is the sum of all these little interactions that a prospect and customer have with your company then marketing, sales, support, legal, product, they’re all influencing that overall experience and that overall net promoter score. So I like that one as a guiding North Star.”
“When you start to break it down into individual teams, there’s there’s lots of ways to measure the experience…For instance, if you’re marketing and you charge the website, bounce rate, that’s not a bad experience metric. I like putting the thumbs up, thumbs down on pieces of content marketing. In sales, we would do a post purchase survey of the people that had bought from us and ask, “How responsive was Sally and how knowledgeable was she and how helpful was she?”… For all these teams there are ways to understand at a moment in time, what is the experience you’re giving, can you quantify it, and then can you align the compensation, the performance reviews around those more experienced-based metrics.”
Brand
“I’ve always believed in having a brand and having a personality. That is such an easy differentiator from your competition.”
Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce have all understood and invested in brand in a way that most B2B companies don’t — to their detriment. I was eager to get Bill’s take on brand for B2B companies. “There’s this prevailing view that if you’re in B2B you have to be serious and monotone and use acronyms and a white background or black text and cheesy stock photo shots of people sitting around a conference room. And I just think, that’s such an incredible opportunity to differentiate yourself…The color scheme, the visual identity, the editorial tone and voice is, is not something that you need to spend ten million dollars to do. Any company of any size can kind of go through that exercise and just talk about how you want to be unique, how you want to be different.”
“I love the brands that you have a relationship with, and you root for and you recommend. I think going through that process of saying how can we differentiate from a color scheme perspective (If you look at Slack, it could have been black and white, but it shows a very bold tartan plaid color scheme that’s very differentiated), the editorial tone and voice (when Slack loads it takes a little while to load on the desktop. It could have been a little hourglass but instead has a fun inspirational message of the day). The Slack TV and YouTube ads have a lot of personality to them and there’s a lot of emotion. And you laugh and you smile and it’s not a standard transactional, ‘sign up today, free trial 20 percent off.’ It’s about the emotion.”
“Brand is about the experience and you want people, when they think about your company, to have a good experience and to have a good emotion attached to it. Don’t be afraid to stand out.”
Listen to the full interview:
You can also find Bill on Twitter.
For more from Bill Macaitis and the other 50 startup leaders interviewed for Beyond Product, you can order your copy at Amazon.com or one of your other favorite retailers.
