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Franco Caporale:
Hello and welcome to new episode of the Demand Generation Club podcast. I'm your host, Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Tom Flierl, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Amla Commerce. Amla Commerce is a global software company that has grown out of the belief that eCommerce software should enable sustainable growth. The company offers its eCommerce customers insights into what works and what doesn't through a suite of innovative products.
In his role, Tom leads cross-functional marketing, sales and account management teams. He directs brand development, product positioning and go to market strategy. He also manages Amla Commerce technology partnerships, analyst and channel relationships. Armed with a deep and sales and marketing experience and a history of performance in business development, Tom offers leading teams and organizational leadership expertise across both B2B and B2C companies, including professional services, technology, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, financial services and consumer package goods. So I'm really happy to welcome today Tom Flierl, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Amla Commerce.
Tom, it's great to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Tom Flierl:
Well, thank you. It's great to be here. I appreciate your time.
Franco Caporale:
Great. So let's start right away with my usual first question, which is tell us a little bit about your background, your current role at Amla and what was your career trajectory?
Tom Flierl:
Yeah, sounds good. I'll try and keep this brief. I started out in media and as I was working in media for the first seven years of my career, I quickly realized the importance of digital media and where the world was going with the internet. From there, I actually got into software development working for a company that did custom software development. Quickly grasped and learned technology right out of the gates and it was a great experience. I was at that company for about three years, led sales and actually brought marketing in as a practice because coming out of media, I realized how important marketing was. And basically from there I got into the digital agency space. I worked in an agency that was light on digital, but this was before the concept of CMSs had really come into play where most CMSs were being custom built. And then pretty soon Drupal and some of the open source CMSs became part of our tech stack.
And then from there I went to a digital agency that had an e-commerce practice, was really working with enterprise platforms in the CMS and the e-commerce space. Led sales marketing business strategy for that agency for about five years. And then my current job, Alma Commerce, through a really long story that could be a whole separate podcast, I met the CEO and he recruited me to head up sales, marketing and account management, basically anything having to do with revenue at Alma Commerce. So a mashup of media and agency work and heavy technology, particularly in the eCommerce space work.
Franco Caporale:
And so today you are the VP of marketing and business development at Amla Commerce. Tell us first what Amla Commerce does, what's the solution? And tell us a little more about your role there.
Tom Flierl:
Yeah, sounds good. Well, so Amla Commerce is really our parent brand and we have a suite of products. Currently, we have two different products. One of the products is called Znode. It's a B2B enterprise e-commerce platform. To sum it up in real quickly, what it's well known for is easily being able to manage multiple web stores in one platform. It's an API first architecture, so it's very contemporary compared to some of the other platforms that have been in the market for a long time that are more monolithic. And then it has lots of B2B functionality from an e-commerce perspective. And anyone who's listening that understands e-commerce knows that B2C is much, much easier than B2B just because the account based nature of pricing catalog, et cetera.
And then we have another platform called Artifi Labs. And what Artifi does is it allows for, it's an e-commerce product customization tool. So it allows shoppers to upload a logo and place a logo on a product. And that product is actually being housed in Artifi, which is connected agnostically into a third party e-commerce platform.
So a great application is the uniform industry or the promotional products industry. For example, your sweatshirt that you're wearing right now, the SaaSMQL sweatshirt, that logo could have been uploaded and applied on that sweatshirt and you get real time visualization of what the product will look like with the logo. There's a lot of other features that are in the product like configuration of products, real time embroidery rendering, et cetera. However, it's pretty unique because it can take the sales time in the uniform or promotional products category from five days down to like five minutes. So it's a pretty cool product. Both products are really cool actually.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah, that's very cool. And so in terms of your team there, since you're managing both marketing and business developments slash sales, how is your team, how are you managing both at the same time? And that's something we're going to talk obviously more in depth later in the episode.
Tom Flierl:
Yeah, so I mean having grown up in both the marketing side, growing up in the media and the agency space and having a strong marketing background, but also always leading sales for the majority of my career being in sales, I've really brought both teams together.
And so I look at anything that has to do with revenue operations as my accountability to the company. And so well, everybody has their own unique KPIs. We do actually have a playbook that we all work from so everybody's working from the same playbook. And we also have dashboards or everybody sharing their KPIs and showing where we're at and behind all of that I guess is there's a philosophy around what I believe a good leader should be, which I analogize to a basketball coach, a college basketball coach, which we can probably get into a little bit more. And then I have spent a lot of time in the EOS or the entrepreneurial operating system and there's a book called Traction which basically gives the foundation for that system. I don't use that completely literally the way the book prescribes, but I do use a lot of foundational elements from the EOS in managing the team, particularly around how to hold a team meeting, how to have agendas, how to share KPIs, et cetera.
Franco Caporale:
So let's talk a little more about this. So you talk about different type of leaderships. What is in your mind the right leadership, especially for a technology company when you're leading marketing or sales? What kind of leadership is the most effective in your view? And can you tell us more about it?
Tom Flierl:
Yeah, from my perspective, and again this is my philosophy, is I believe that coaching is the right type of leadership. I don't believe people today want to be micromanaged. I do believe that the digital landscape is changing rapidly. And so if you hire good people who are very curious, you can learn from your people, great ideas come from everywhere. And a good leader is really about coaching people, making sure that they're all playing from the same playbook and have the same understanding of vision where we're going, communicating execution and then having clear accountabilities. And that philosophy is based out of, I guess a little bit of my background. I went to college at a basketball school and I actually worked in the athletic department. I went to Marquette University, which is part of the Big East. And I've always thought that college basketball coaches and heads of sales and marketing have a lot in common.
What makes a great basketball program is first of all great recruiting. You rarely see a top 20 team that doesn't have a top 20 recruiting class, right? Every once in a while somebody sneaks into the Final Four, maybe they just go on a run at the end of the year. But for the most part, talent drives basketball. And the second thing that drives good basketball beyond great recruiting is also having a clear philosophy on how to play the game and a playbook that everybody's playing from. And then the third thing is every position has their own unique KPIs, right? I mean when you think about it, a point guard brings the ball up court and their job is really to pass and create assists, whereas a center, their job is to rebound. It's you take that whole philosophy and you go, okay, how do you run a sales and marketing department?
Well one, as a leader, my number one job is always be recruiting. People are going to come and go, hopefully they don't. Hopefully, they like our culture and they're happy and they're engaged. But if they do, you always want to have A players ready to go or you have to have some strategy for recruiting A players because A players are what are going to make you be successful. Two, having a common playbook. And this means anybody who's working on anything right now, whether it be an outbound campaign, whether it be an inbound campaign, SEO sales strategy, there's a common play playbook that we all have documented and are working from and we're training each other on it. So if there is turnover, everybody understands where we're at. But more importantly, so that you're connecting sales and marketing and the offline and the online and the conversations that are being had in a sales meeting, go back to the product management team. To me it's all about integrating and creating a true team environment where people are playing off of each other, learning from each other and sharing and they have a team environment culturally.
And then the third piece is that KPIs is, marketing is supposed to bring in the leads, sales is supposed to close them. Well, they should be talking to each other to know are the leads qualified? What does a good lead look like? How do we move upstream in our market, things of that nature. None of that happens in silos, right? No different than on a basketball court. If you start five centers and they have a set of KPIs and they don't have a point guard, it's not going to work.
Franco Caporale:
And so this common playbook, I'm interested because first of all, how do you standardize all of this different function into one? Like you said it's online, there's offline, there's sales, there's post sales. What helps you do that? And also how many times do you keep that update because things change, right?
Tom Flierl:
Yeah, that's a great question. Well, it's not easy one. I guess we have three different tools that we use. I don't know if you'd call them our tech stack because we have many tools in our tech stack. But we do have a playbook that is basically in Google, in Google Docs, that's in Google presentations. And we literally document all of our processes. We also use it for onboarding, everything from the company history to brand standards to how we do our writing, writing standards, which is a subset of brand standards to the different campaigns we run, et cetera. And not everything can fit in there. So we can also then link to Google Docs if we're doing keyword research for our SEO, et cetera. So that'd be one.
Two, we do have this traction slash EOS spreadsheet that we use when we have our common team meetings every week where we have a consistent agenda that we follow. Everybody has their own KPIs that they report on. They talk about if things aren't working well, we call that an issue and we address it as a team and solve it together, which again creates more communication.
And then three, we do have a completely different tech stack on top of that, such as HubSpot, et cetera. But also everybody aligning around HubSpot as our marketing automation platform and our CRM and having a common view of the customer and even having meetings where marketing and sales get together and talk because as you know, attribution is getting harder to actually tackle, especially a GDPR or people not accepting cookies. So how did we get somebody in a campaign to come to a long tail URL and eventually click a demo?
Sometimes sales and marketing need to sit down together and go through HubSpot and go through Google Analytics and do a little investigative work together. But the more they do that, the more they talk about, wow, this is working. This isn't. What if we did this? And suddenly creative creativity is kind of bubbling up everywhere in the company trying to solve problems and understand where we're at collectively.
Franco Caporale:
And so going back a little bit on your recruiting A players, because what you just mentioned obviously require people that are on the right role and they are kind of brilliant in what they do. And how do you recruit A players? And particularly how do you avoid recruiting people that needs to be micromanaged?
Tom Flierl:
Well, another great question and it's always, it's a gray area because nobody wants to be micromanaged. And so I guess it gets back to a philosophy of a little bit of understanding who your players are. Some people do want lots of help and usually they self-organize around help. So they'll say, "Hey, can I get a one on one with you on a weekly basis and a 30 minute standup? Can you coach me through this?" That's a great player, right? That's the point guard who runs over to the bench and says, "Hey coach, what do you think I should do next?" They're typically younger in their career, that might be the freshman point guard, but it's great that they're willing to accept coaching and that they're asking for coaching.
And then when you get somebody who's more senior, you have to give them more room to run. Maybe they've been in a similar role for 10 years and in that case, you still have to offer coaching and you have to have a one-on-one with them, but maybe they only need it every two weeks. And then using other tools like the DiSC assessment to know how people want to be managed and read those DiSC assessments and actually check in and use that as a tool to better manage people are some different ways to tackle it. But it's really understanding who's on your team and what their needs are and where they're at in their career.
Franco Caporale:
And in terms of promoting that, because when someone comes junior obviously that is going to learn, that is going to be coached and then at what point do you move them up on the ranking?
Tom Flierl:
Right. Well I think it's important to have very pragmatic conversations about where people want to go in their career and what it's going to take to get there. And I have noticed a lot of people do want to be promoted within one year or two years and I completely respect that. But then you have to be really clear, in order to become a manager or a director, here are the things that you have to do and be very clear with them. And until you can achieve those things, improve yourself, you can't be promoted. So I'm not responsible for your career, you're responsible for your career, but we have a general agreement on what it takes to get there in your career. The more you invest in that, the more likely you are to get promoted. I'm here to coach you and help you along the way 100%. We don't want turnover, we want you here, but you're ultimately responsible for your career, not me is the way that I see it.
And I think the other thing is too is realizing that people do leave jobs today. Some people get into a software company like ours and they want to get two or three years experience and they want to move across the country and leverage that to get into a bigger software company or whatever the case is. Or they want to leave and go to a digital agency because they might get a broader set of experience across many clients. There's all kinds of reasons why people move, maybe they get married and move. But to also have an honest conversation with them about not only are you responsible for your career and I'm going to be your coach and work with you, but if you ever feel like we're not hitting it for you and we're not able to get you where you want to go, let's have an honest conversation.
One of the best experiences I had in my career in my previous job was I had somebody who started out as an intern and worked their way up to a director level pretty quickly. It was a young person, very, very accountable, very smart, very committed. And we got to a point where we said, look, at some point you're going to have to graduate and go to the NBA. If I go back to my basketball analogy. So happened this person also played basketball. Let me know when you're ready. You're going to get stuck at some point because we may not be able to get you to where you finally want to be in your career.
And he literally came into my office one day and he said, "I think I'm ready." And I said, "Great. Are you targeting any companies? What's your timeframe?" It allowed me to start recruiting to replace him. Luckily we had somebody underneath him who got promoted up to take his place and I actually reached out to my network and helped introduce him to three or four companies and actually helped him get out the door. And so it was a really nice way to, versus somebody interviewing behind our back or whatever the case is. It was a nice way to collaborate on helping them further in their career. So it was really about all of us collaborating for the greater good collectively rather than then the opposite, which happens in many companies nowadays.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah, that's really ideal as a scenario where there is that kind of partnership and you have enough time to recruit the substitute and this person feels like he's not being kept in the same role for a long time just because there's no opening even though that person will be ready. Great.
So the other thing that I'm really intrigued about is the fact that you are obviously leading sales and marketing together. So I'm trying to understand from you a little more of what it takes to align sales and marketing. What are things that prevent sales and marketing to be aligned in many companies that we all see and we probably experience? And what are some advice that you can share?
Tom Flierl:
Sure. This is a gray area too. There's no absolutes here. So I'm going to tackle this from my own experience and worldview and philosophy. But what I see a lot is like what's preventing sales and marketing from working together is just legacy silos. If you go back before the concept of inbound, say pre 2014, sales was largely an activity based role at companies, right? There were companies would hire BDRs and they'd hire lots of young people to do outbound calls and create leads, et cetera. And that's how sales leaders were comped. That's how sales leaders built plans was around building sales teams. And then you get to 2021 and 92% of all product searches start online or the path to purchase starts online. And so the whole world has changed. And for me, having evolved in my career through that whole process, going from, growing up in traditional sales to inbound, I think legacy silos are what create the problems.
Sales leaders still have this concept of we have to build big teams and they think that leads come from sales and marketing people nowadays are much more accountable to understanding that it's not just about creating brochures and being creative, it's about lead generation, right? So you have this great natural tension of everybody wants to generate leads, that's a great problem to have. But if you go back to the concept that the path to purchase starts online, you have to invest much more in marketing than you traditionally would and you probably don't need as many salespeople if you're handing off sales qualified leads to your salespeople and their job is to take that lead and nurture it and push it through the pipeline. How do you get that done? Again, I mean to me you have to change the way, balance your portfolio where you spend your money.
My first thing is, okay, I need to grow the marketing team to generate leads and then I'll grow the sales team based upon the volume of leads we get in versus I'm going to grow a sales team and hire a lot of people and what are they going to do if they're not generating leads, right? So it's kind of, I guess in my mind it's a reversal of where the world was at say even 10 years ago.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah, that's a common situation where the new company, especially startup, they hire seven, eight reps and they don't have enough leads. So they have to go and struggling to build pipeline, but they are spending almost zero in marketing. So that's why I like this approach that you have one budget and you are shifting it as you see fit. Whatever is the bottleneck, if the bottleneck is lead, you're putting more money in marketing and then you're hiring more sales people after. That's quite an ideal scenario as well.
Tom Flierl:
Well, And maybe part of the philosophy too is focusing on qualified leads is, you can also hire a marketer who's just generating lots and lots of unqualified leads and saying, look at me, look at all the production here. And it's like, well that's not solid production, right? It's also going to, you're going to have to hire more salespeople to filter through all the unqualified leads. So it really comes down to qualified leads, which again lead up to do you have a clear position in the market, a clear target audience, clear value proposition, which is all marketing work, right, that then leads to the digital strategy, that then leads to qualified leads, that then leads to, okay, how many salespeople do we need based upon how many qualified leads we get per month, per quarter, per year? What's the cost of qualified lead?
Franco Caporale:
What is a qualified lead for you? Are you looking at a person, it's basically a SAL or a meeting booked for your sales team from someone who is qualified to buy or are you looking also more top of the funnel leads?
Tom Flierl:
Well, I mean from the way that I look at it now, and I would say this is constantly evolving because I think the digital landscape is constantly evolving and when you think about even the 2014 playbook of inbound, fewer and fewer people are filling out forms. PPC is getting more expensive or less effective. So there's all these different things that are moving around to get to how you get to qualified lead.
But if you really break it down, we look at a sales lead when somebody hits requested demo and that then becomes an inbound sales lead unless we're at a trade show or we're using some other tactic or if we're doing outbound campaigns. But one way or another, requesting a demo or getting to a demo is how you get to a sales lead. Before that, you can have a marketing qualified lead. And after that, once they say request a demo, however that occurs, then do you have time and budget? If you don't have a timeframe and you don't have budget, then you're really not a sales qualified lead yet.
Franco Caporale:
Is not an opportunity also?
Tom Flierl:
Right. And you can automate that process. That is where you need a salesperson on the phone, engaging the customer, talking with them, consulting with them, maybe trying to give them a timeframe, helping them form a budget if they don't have a budget and then you can work with them. Ideally though, a really good qualified lead says, "Yeah, we need something implemented within six months and we put aside X amount of dollars to implement and we really like what we saw on your website because I've been on 20 pages and I think it's the right solution." That's the perfect scenario. It doesn't always happen, but that's the perfect scenario.
Franco Caporale:
That's 80% of the job done already by marketing.
Tom Flierl:
Right, exactly.
Franco Caporale:
The sales person at that point just needs to send the proposal.
Tom Flierl:
Right.
Franco Caporale:
Perfect. So one last question I have for you on this is how do you divide your time between the sales and marketing team? Do you follow the same approach of the budget or how do you not get distracted when pulling in both direction?
Tom Flierl:
Yeah, I guess that's demand based, the supply side from my perspective. So a lot of it is what are the demands in a week, in a month? So for example, this particular last couple weeks, we've had lots of bottom of the funnel deals happening where, at my role now I do a lot of contract negotiations. So sales hands me contracts and says, "Can you help me get it to the finish line," and I'm on with procurement, et cetera. There are times when that's hot and heavy and that's what my job is, right, and how I balance my time.
And then I also set aside time for higher level strategy and thinking. But a lot of times it's who raises their hand and says, can I get help? And then you have to prioritize. Fortunately or unfortunately, revenue is always the top priority. So if we're in a week where there's lots of deals at the bottom of the funnel, that takes priority, but then I try and balance it out with getting back to KPIs. Are we getting the right number of inbound leads, going through the data with our head of marketing, who reports into me and then also who raises their hand. It's kind of like three things happening all at once.
Franco Caporale:
Makes sense. Perfect. I have one last question for you, Tom, which is something I always like to ask is, what is top of mind for you right now, and particularly for the next six months of 2021, what are you focusing on or a problem you're trying to solve that is keeping you up at night or some opportunities that you really want to tackle? What is...
Tom Flierl:
Yeah, I would say there's two things. One, getting back to the general philosophy around what does a great coach do? It's recruiting, right? So number one for me is just looking at, because we're growing pretty quickly and we have a number of open recs and we continue to talk about staffing and hiring more people. So what's our plan to recruit, what's my individual plan to get the right people on board? That always keeps me up at night.
And then number two is probably the changing digital landscape. The fact that what was working three years ago and four years ago may not be working as well. And I guess I spend a lot of time talking with our product marketing manager around investing more into online video, brand oriented communications versus only with less attribution but knowing that over the long haul you're going to get more inbound leads if you have a bigger, more dynamic ecosystem, including a lot of brand oriented content and easier to digest content.
Franco Caporale:
Makes sense. Perfect. Cool. I think we're out of time for today. Tom, this was really great. I truly enjoyed the conversation. So thanks again for joining the Demand Generation Club.
Tom Flierl:
Well, thank you. I appreciate your time and thanks for hosting me. Great to be with you today.