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Franco Caporale:
Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Demand Generation Club Podcast, I'm your host, Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Lorena Morales, VP of marketing at Go Nimbly. Go Nimbly is the company that help SaaS and other high growth businesses identify and close gaps in their customer experience using the revenue operation methodology. Go Nimbly has been a partner to companies like Zendesk, Coursera and PagerDuty. Lorena has a background in product and product design, she fell in love with marketing and became passionate about scaling fast growing tech companies. In her current position at Go Nimbly she started as a single marketer and built this brand and marketing engine from scratch. Before Go Nimbly she was marketing director at Fit3D and at the Center for Social Dynamics. So I'm really excited to welcome today Lorena Morales, VP of marketing at Go Nimbly. Lorena it is absolutely fantastic to have you on the episode today, thank you so much for joining us.
Lorena Morales:
Thank you Franco, it's such an honor on my side. Thank you for having me here.
Franco Caporale:
Perfect. So I would like to start right away to ask you about your background and how did you end up becoming the VP of marketing at Go Nimbly and how was your career trajectory?
Lorena Morales:
Right. I think more than a title, my story is especially interesting because of the industries that I have been working on. Not necessarily the title even though now in my career the title matches the responsibilities which, by the way, didn't happen through my entire career, especially not in Silicon Valley. Long story short, my background is in product, my bachelor's was in product design. I kept studying product in Latin America then I went back to Mexico and I started to work for NGOs, that was my true passion. I thought I was going to make it as someone that would change the world as every young person, I guess. And soon I realized that I had to pay my bills because I chose the most expensive city in the entire United States.
Lorena Morales:
And so sadly NGOs were not going to cut it so I decided to pursue formal education in marketing because I knew how to create products and services very well but I didn't know how to sell them necessarily. I never thought about marketing because I've been an introvert my entire life and so when I heard marketing the only thing that stuck to my mind was understanding the mind of someone. Not necessarily control it because I feel from the days that marketing was advertising, people had these misconception of, oh, marketing it's a bad thing and it's kind of a scarlet letter on, we're controlling people's minds and people's choices. That's not the case, I think the good marketers are the ones that are almost like psychologists where you really interact with the customer to a degree that it's so profound that you understand their pains of the day to day. So yes, my first master's was in international marketing and then I decided to go back to the highest level of design with my second masters which was strategic design management.
Lorena Morales:
That taught me how methodologies like design thinking and human centered design should be applied not only to products but also to how you grow teams, how you grow revenue. And soon I started to manage teams, so I've been managing teams for the past eight years. And as I was telling you Franco, the interesting thing about me is that I have always reported to a CEO, I thought that was normal, that was for a marketer, and today I understand that's not the case. But I have worked in every single industry that you can think of and I ended up in SaaS because my current position allowed me to choose an industry. Everyone that lives in Silicon Valley, they know someone in the tech space, they know someone in SaaS. And so when I heard about the companies that were changing the world literally, I said, this is a fantastic opportunity working for a consultancy, working simultaneously with these accounts is going to allow me to really understand the operations of all these companies and kind of the backend of all these companies, if that makes sense.
Franco Caporale:
This is such a fascinating background, definitely a very particular trajectory to SaaS. So you've been at Go Nimbly for about, what? Three years now, can you tell us more of what Go Nimbly does so we have a better idea.
Lorena Morales:
Sure thing. Yeah. It's been a little more than three years and what we do at the core of everything is we are a consultancy. We consult on revenue operations, which means how to, number one, invest better and smarter in operations, and secondly, how do you spot revenue leakages through the entire funnel in order to better serve your customers. So it's a very customer centric methodology same thing as other methodologies that we've been hearing for the past five, eight years like account based for example. Revenue operations is just a larger spectrum of that because it includes not only the GTM teams but also the operations teams. So it has to do a lot with alignment because to do a lot with, how do you make sure that you are more nimble, yeah of course, that's why we chose the name, right? How are you more nimble in these hyper growth companies and these hyper growth stages?
Franco Caporale:
And can you tell us a little bit about your team there? What kind of role you have and what help are you having internally?
Lorena Morales:
Yeah. I started as a single marketer which was very interesting because I went through this path of being the builder and then the maintainer many, many times in my career. But what was special about Go Nimbly was, revenue operations was not a thing in 2018 so people were confusing it with business operations, if anything, the other 50% of people didn't even hear about the word back then. And so my job started purely in branding to make sure that people knew that revenue operations was not a buzz word, it was not a trend, it was not something that you're just mentioning at dinner, it was something that could change the way we do business forever and that would disappear legacy operations. So that's where I started, soon I realized that the GTM strategy that we had mainly based on referrals was not sustainable in order to hit the ARR growth number that my CEO at that moment had for the marketing team.
Lorena Morales:
And so we started to create on top of the remoderation layer, we created an account-based program in order to kind of hit a bigger ARR number. And so I brought in-house design and content simply because I believe that it is true, content is king, engagement is queen and so every single company needs to focus on how you nurture not only your prospects but also your current customers with the right content at the right time. We live in the era of education of resources, every single person wants to know what are they buying into. And so if you provide that information and if you make sure that the 75% journey that it's supposed to be happening digitally before the customer touches sales, then you're already winning but a lot of companies don't know how to do that process.
Franco Caporale:
So you said you have the content person and design all in house, who is responsible for running those campaigns that you guys started running after you joined? Do you have a paid acquisition person or a marketing ops person?
Lorena Morales:
We do have a marketing person because that's not my strongest suit but our paid acquisition, field marketing, partnerships, customer marketing, that's pretty much me still. So I'm the person that holds the strategy first and foremost, but ultimately I am very comfortable kind of putting my sleeves on and getting my hands, well, I actually don't enjoy that term, getting your hands dirty, I don't know why people use it and I don't understand the term but, I mean, I understand it because I use it. But I don't like it because I don't think it's getting your hands dirty, I think it's playing with a cake, right? You're playing with the cookie batter because it's fun because going back to the things that made you, the marketer that you are today, for me it's a privilege and it's also a very humbling experience.
Lorena Morales:
For me I didn't touch for example, Google AdWords in, what? Six years almost, that's something that I did at the very beginning of my career and I wasn't even the best at it. And so when the pandemic hit at Go Nimbly I realized that most of our efforts needed to convert to digital and we needed to make sure that paid acquisition was not only targeted with tools for account base but it also needed to be bigger than that. So there I was going back to Google AdWords and kind of run paid acquisition by myself.
Franco Caporale:
And so you mentioned that events and field marketing was a big deal for you and Go Nimbly in general. How did you reallocate your budget and kind of shift your strategy once the pandemic hit?
Lorena Morales:
The budget I don't think that was a problem. I know a lot of marketers struggle with, how do I move the money? I don't think that's my case because I am really good at supporting gaps and I know where to put the money, I am very good with money. So for me it was, okay, we're not investing in field, let's put everything towards target advertising even more than what we were doing before. Between that and customer marketing I think those were the two biggest investments that we moved around. But the challenging part was, how do you make sure that you are still relevant while not seeing people in-person? Especially with the nature of a business that it's a consultancy, because people want to see you, people want to spend time with you, people want to have a drink with you, have dinner, have whatever it is.
Lorena Morales:
And so the challenge was not really how to move the money, it was how to move the attention and how to grab it and maintain that attention. So for us it was through our partners, we needed people that were doing special things same as us in this space so the offer was twice as interesting as if it was only Go Nimbly. So I think partnerships is one of those channels that proved a lot of people that there's something more than email marketing, let's say, that's kind of the worst channel for me because I'm just not that good friends with my email but yeah, that's how we pivot everything.
Franco Caporale:
Which leads me perfectly into my next question and it's something I was really interested when I was talking to you earlier is you had some very good opinion on how to better approach your prospect and customers from the very first interaction to all the way when they sign the contract, when they sign for renewal and in their entire customer journey, can you share some thoughts into that?
Lorena Morales:
Yeah. Franco, this is going to be a little kind of upsetting for a lot of people because, for example, getting the content, that is something that for me it was a no, it was an absolute no, we need to get rid of forms from the very beginning and when I started at Go Nimbly. Simply because for me having forms and getting content and those things, even though they allow you to be better at marketing attribution and lead scoring and these things, yes, you need to have that, but for me it was a decision between, do I want to be super analytical and have pinpointed every single interaction of the customers? Or do I really want to do an organization that is customer focused? Because in reality these exchange or this perception of exchanging something even before people have given you their emails people are like, no, why am I going to leak my knowledge if they haven't even rebuild themselves, I get it.
Lorena Morales:
But at the end I think customers are going to come to you when they are ready and if you don't provide the resources in order for that to happen you can't measure, yeah, if they were on your side but that doesn't mean that they are going to buy. Whereas if you track and if you remove the barriers of entry, they are going to come to you and you're going to know exactly who they are through, for example, conversational marketing, other tools that are way more sophisticated than a form. And so I believe that's the way you can provide value from the very early stages, pre opportunity, so I am talking about awareness acquisition and all the way to cross sell, upsell and renewals.
Franco Caporale:
And in particular, I like this part by the way of removing the form which is always controversial because yeah, you lose something and you get something, right? You lose some attribution but you offer much more value from day one without asking something in exchange. What is something that helps once a customer signs and he becomes a customer and now it's time, in SaaS in particular, to manage the relationship because the first year is usually not profitable so if a customer quits after a year it wasn't a great thing to begin with. So how do you make sure that that relationship becomes stronger every year?
Lorena Morales:
I think the days where customer support was responsible to make that relationship last, are gone, because number one, customer support now it's part of customer success, customer success was not even a department five years ago, six years ago, eight years ago. Today they have a place not only on the strategy for the GTM, at least if only we listen to them and we try for our clients to also listen to customer success or their account managers. But I think the responsibility is in them but the work is through the entire go-to market team.
Lorena Morales:
So if you bring customer success before close one opportunity, your chances of knowing that customer are higher, way higher. So the moment that they are going to renew everyone is already informed of how ready they are, if they are going to get stuck in paralegal, how much you can squeeze from a contract, if you can move to other territories or if you can move to other instances of the same business which for example happens with Go Nimbly a lot. We generally penetrate through one department and then we slowly but surely we impact other departments, so the way we can become their operations teams.
Franco Caporale:
Do you typically recommend for sales to manage their renewal or customer success? Should they bring someone from sales when it's time to negotiate and talk renewals or it's better to maintain the relationship at CS?
Lorena Morales:
That's also super, super controversial. My personal opinion, it should be sales with the help of CX because sales had that relationship from the very beginning. But to my point, if you bring customer success early on it's going to be a real team effort. But who is going to be the one that goes and makes the calls and makes sure that the thing is happening and that they close before the end of the quarter and those things, it's going to be sales. It has to be sales because they have the energy, they have the muscle, they have the thirst, they are hunters generally so they are going to make sure that you sign the damn thing. Whereas customer success is going to be more like, is implementation okay? Are you talking to the right people? Are we kind of offering you the same thing that we were offering you a year ago and more? So it's a yes and, so it is sales but I don't think it's a sales only activity.
Franco Caporale:
That's a very good point. Another question on this is you talked at the beginning Go Nimbly helps spotting gap into the funnel. So how can you spot gap after a customer has signed? What are some signals that will tell you for example, that they might not renew next year or there are some opportunities to upsell, is there any metrics or any signal that a company can look at to improve their customer success metric or their renewal metrics?
Lorena Morales:
Generally NPS of course are the ones that are going to take the temperature on those. However, for example, at Go Nimbly we don't have a formal NPS because we are small, well, we're very large for a consultancy but we're small for a SaaS company if you compare to a product company. So if you are kind of a small team, make sure that you talk to your account managers or in our case our project managers, because they are going to be the ones that know the red flags. And so if those go into the CRM, the entire organization is going to know when there's an account that it's at risk of churn and if it's not churn probably it's going to be a shrink, it's going to be shrinking.
Lorena Morales:
So those things are human interactions, you know when you are not delivering, they are going to tell you, your customers are going to tell you right in your face when they are not happy. The only trouble there is, how effective you are communicating those moments. The same thing as the interesting moments that Marketo has in their platform, there should be something, Marketo are you listening to me? This is an implementation. There should be the same thing for the scary moments. Instead of interesting moments, why we can't bring the scary moments where a customer is not attending meetings or our customer is getting late to meetings or, I don't know, testimonials. There's positive testimonials which is why companies like YouTube exist but also there's negative testimonials that you should be recording years for years because those are going to be informing you what to change so that's my point on that.
Franco Caporale:
I think marketing has been too much focused on the positive, the interesting moment, like you said, and there's no scary moments but it would be a really cool feature if they had in Marketo or HubSpot.
Lorena Morales:
Right? Yeah.
Franco Caporale:
There used to be something that tells you when you're not doing well so now it's kind of under a carpet like everything else. Awesome. So the other thing that I realized from our conversation and I want talk some more is about your marketing relationship with the sales team, also there you had some very interesting point. What do you think are the three challenges or three issues that may seriously affect or compromise marketing sales alignment?
Lorena Morales:
Oh my God, Franco, the amount of times that I have talked about this topic is impressive. And I always say it, it shouldn't be that hard people, yes, marketing and sales are misaligned, oh my God yes, yeah, it has been like that since day one. But if you ask the why, why it started, that's factor number one, the focus on lead generation for the sake of fixing volume. If we think about that and how it started, if we go back to 2004, 2007, even 2011, where we didn't have the technology available to enrich accounts, to enriched lists, and you had to do that pretty much manually or you could outsource someone in a foreign country overseas to kind of enrich that account list and hopefully that would pass your marketing automation system.
Lorena Morales:
Back then the job of marketing was okay, get the list, do the campaigns, and then pass it to sales, hopefully, and crossing the fingers that those accounts are going to convert. Okay, that's marketing, then sales. If we put ourselves in the sales shoes in those years, of course Franco, sales couldn't like to work with those accounts, couldn't like to go talk to a customer that was never even nurtured with any type of program, with any type of information, of course nobody wants to talk to those accounts because it's just annoying, they are not even going to pick up the phone so of course the misalignment started. Sales that's the moment when they start to say, you know what? These leads are trash, we don't want to work with them. And then marketing is like, but I did my job, they told me to bring a 100,000 leads, I delivered you 90,000, why are you not working them?
Lorena Morales:
It's not about working them because if you try to convince or force someone into seeing your product when you don't even understand the need, that's a problem. So again, factor number one, the focus on lead generation for the wrong reasons. I am not saying let's disapprove lead generation, I am saying, do it in the right combination in the right amount and with the right body proposition from the very beginning. The second one for me it would be, humanizing your systems. And what I mean by that is most likely your CRM is going to be dirty, very, very dirty, because it can be as good as you want but it can be also the worst thing that happen to you because at the end it depends on the human element.
Lorena Morales:
It's a person inputting the information, it's a person updating that information, it's a person administrating and making the entire architecture of your fields. So when you think about that you need to really make sure that you're enabling the people that are interacting with your CRM, most likely it's going to be sales. So if you don't focus, even if it's marketing doing the work or if it's sales or if it's customer success, it doesn't matter, but you need to have someone that makes sure that the sales team know exactly what are the processes to input the information so everyone has access to updated and clean data so you don't have to scrub it and kind of massage the data three years later when you're already in series B, so that's the second one. And the third one for me would be, why misalignment happens because you are not looking at the same thing.
Lorena Morales:
So if you have different intentions and different KPIs, of course you're not going to be in the same room, you're not going to be in the same channel because if sales is looking at revenue impact metrics such as pipeline creation or impact to revenue in cross sell and upsell and marketing is still focusing on how many impressions they had in the website, we have a problem, you can't communicate effectively. So what would be the solution for that? I think make your marketing team a revenue marketing team, keep the temperature, keep an eye on the vanity metrics. You need to know what content is being consumed, you need to know the engagement with your socials, yes, but it's only to a certain level and that's kind of an internal metric for us. You need to be in align with the entire revenue team, so your GTM teams, to kind of look at the same exact KPIs and hopefully those are tied to revenue.
Franco Caporale:
And have you ever had the problem of who is taking credit, quote unquote, for certain opportunities or pipeline generated? That's something that happened to me in the past, not frequently luckily but marketing and sales trying to fight for who will get credit for certain deals or opportunities.
Lorena Morales:
Yes. You would be surprised how often that happens. Because again, you want to prove value to your organization, there's a reason why they hired you. And especially in a remote world where you are not at the office showing that you did your 60 calls, of course you want the credit because you want to look good in front of the people that trusted you. But ultimately Franco, I don't think again, that's not very customer centric, if you're focusing on what is your personal input in the team, the possibilities that you're going to be thinking about your customer are very, very vague.
Lorena Morales:
And so my point there would be, if you start compensating the teams similarly, I'm not going to say equally because I don't think the work is equal, but if you find a sweet balance between how to compensate marketing and sales where both of the departments feel that it's a fair exchange, I think no one is going to be pointing fingers or no one is going to be looking for their own spotlight. That's what revenue operations is offering these days, an alignment that kind of looks at the customer first and then at the internal teams secondarily.
Franco Caporale:
That's awesome, that's a great point. I certainly have been struggling in the past and I think you're absolutely right, it all depends on how you compensate and how you divide certain role and merits as well because obviously everyone wants to take their own merit, that's awesome. So Lorena, this was absolutely a pleasure, thank you so much for joining us today and for talking to us.
Lorena Morales:
Of course, it's my pleasure. I love talking about these things because the more people understand revenue operations, trust me, it's going to be a better world not only for the SaaS industry but I feel like for every single business.
Franco Caporale:
Awesome. Thanks again Lorena.
Lorena Morales:
And thank you.