Adam Johnson | ActiveCampaign
How can marketing and sales leaders work together to get world class revenue results?
During his time with the company, ActiveCampaign SVP of Sales and Customer Success Adam Johnson has helped scale revenue from $20M ARR to $160M. One key to his success has been building a positive working relationship with marketing.
In this episode, he shares lessons learned and insights on what it takes for marketing and sales to get aligned, from establishing a common language and understanding of the customer lifecycle, to getting on the same page about which channels to focus on, what really constitutes a good conversion rate, and how all of that is going to translate into revenue.
Check out the full episode to hear what Adam had to say.
Resources from this episode:
Connect with Adam on LinkedIn
Visit the ActiveCampaign website
Email Adam at ajohnson[@]activecampaign.com
Adam and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:00):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Adam Johnson, who is the senior vice president of sales and customer success at ActiveCampaign. Welcome to the podcast, Adam.
Adam (00:26):
Thank you so much, Kathleen. I'm really excited to be here. Appreciate you having me on.
Kathleen (00:29):
I am excited to have you here as well, and we're gonna touch on a topic that is, I think, close to every marketer's heart, which is about how you work with sales on different things. I feel like we can never talk enough about that. There's never going to be a perfect solution to it, so perpetual work in progress. But before we do that, if I would love it if you could talk a little bit about your story your background and what ActiveCampaign is.
Adam (00:54):
Yeah, yeah. Appreciate that. So as you mentioned, I am the sales leader at ActiveCampaign. I've been with the company since the middle of 2017 and have had the opportunity be a, you know, part of this amazing growth journey that the company has been on. And you know, really excited to have the opportunity to work with businesses, to help them operate their teams more efficiently interact with their customers in more efficient ways, which is really what our software platform is all about is helping to drive automation throughout the entirety of the customer cycle to improve the way that brands are interacting with their customers. I've been in B2B SaaS for, you know, well, over a decade at this point before joining ActiveCampaign, I was a, a VP for the small business group at Salesforce. And so I have been working with sales and marketing leaders to help them implement technology, to make their process is more efficient for quite a while now. And something I'm really enthusiastic about really passionate about. And, and it's a big part of the reason that I wanted to join the team at ActiveCampaign and, and, and kind of continue in that way and and help customers leverage this amazing platform that that has been built over time.
Kathleen (02:01):
Yeah. I love that you kind of framed it as, as having supporting touchpoints with the customer throughout their entire journey, because I do think that, you know, this, we call this the inbound success podcast. And back when I started it, it was very like much about the orthodox inbound marketing, but I feel like the definition of that has really changed and evolved and with it, so has have the conversations we have here. And for me, it's just all about whatever naturally attracts the best customer to you and, and retains them and keeps them for their full lifetime. And I think a lot of marketers, at least what I've observed when they, when they first think about marketing or when I ask them about what they're doing with marketing, the answers almost always tend to be focused around demand generation understandably so because that, you know, it all starts there.
Kathleen (02:46):
You, you don't have a customer until you generate that demand and, and you work it. But I feel like very often the conversation happens at the expense of a focus on full lifecycle marketing and particularly in SaaS, you know, post purchase that experience, that journey is so crucial for, for deriving the appropriate lifetime value from that customer and, and really paying back what you spent to acquire them in the first place. So I'm kind of excited that we're gonna talk about it from a full life cycle through a full life cycle lens. What I would love to do is because this is a big topic and we can't cover it all is I would love to start out by thinking about this and maybe talking about planning because we are still pretty much at the beginning of the year. And granted most people's plans are probably already in place, but I I'd love to hear how you think through working marketing leaders, cuz most of the audience for this is marketing leaders. And so like your advice to marketing leaders, what have you seen work well in terms of how marketing and sales leaders can collaborate together to put together a plan for the year so that they're gonna be able to work productively together.
Adam (03:55):
Yeah. And, and I mean, I think you're right. It is a, you mentioned at the outset, it's a perpetual work in progress. I think that's a great way to put it. The I think there, you know, it all starts with, I think the good foundation and like really having an understanding of the fundamentals. So one of the things that like, as we were going through the planning process for this year, especially we spent a lot of time just going through definitions, you know, like how are we defining the different stages of the funnel, the different steps in the process, are we all sort of aligned on the language that we're using to describe the journey that the customer is taking? And I think that has a lot to do with like being able to put together a cohesive, you know, financial model or projection of like what's gonna happen, how's it gonna go?
Adam (04:37):
Right. And you know, I think it's important to be able to, to predict a little bit of, you know, how things are gonna go, what is the demand we're expecting? How do we expect that stuff to convert through the different gates of the process and making sure that both sides are kind of on the same page with language is tremendously important. So it sounds like a very fundamental thing, but I think I, you know, having spent a lot of time working with marketing and sales leaders, it's really easy to get, you know, not on the same page in respect to some of those things. And I think that can create tension and uncertainty, if something doesn't go to plan well, what is the, what is the problem, right? And if you don't have that common language and that common understanding, it's really difficult to pinpoint where you have an issue or we may, something may not be going exactly to the way that you had thought it might. And so that I think that foundational item of just, you know, get on the same page, have the same language and build the plan together from there, I think is really important.
Kathleen (05:39):
So, so let's build on that and get on the same page, have the same language. Does it break that down for me a little bit more? Is that starting with like working together to define the ICP? Like what does that look like?
Adam (05:52):
Yeah. I think having a common understanding of that, but especially in the, so a common understanding of who your customers are and all that stuff, I think totally important. And you know, what are the problems you're solving you know, at a, at a much higher level, you know, that stuff is really important. You know, I, I tend to think about you know, planning little bit more in like a financial kind of like operational standpoint. So what I was kind of alluding to there is like, you know, if you think about the, the context of inbound, right? You're, you're saying like, Hey, we want to drive traffic to the website. We want to convert that traffic into, you know, whatever language you use. If that's, you know, those are leads or, you know, whatever as say, like sales, you know, sales, qualified, sales, accepted, whatever version of that language you're using within your, you know, you wanna make sure that those things that everybody's on the same page, what is the, you know, the definitions, how do we expect those things to convert?
Adam (06:46):
And those primary conversion points, cuz that's really what you wanna optimize, right. If you're thinking like, Hey, we want to turn traffic into leads. You know, how are you optimizing that portion of your process and is everybody on the same page in terms of like what the goal should be for that? And what good. What does good look like for your business in respect to those primary conversion points? That's the stuff I think is, is really important cuz ultimately everybody, if you're doing the planning process, well, everybody is sort of driving towards what is ultimate success and that ultimate success, you know, tends to be for sales and marketing leaders driving towards a, a sort of a shared revenue target. So, and that's why the conversion points are so important.
Kathleen (07:28):
Selfishly, I have a question about this, cuz this is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about lately and I wanna get your take on it. A lot of my listeners are B2B and, and I in the B2B SaaS world and, and it's always, I I'm just fascinated that it feels like, and you came from Salesforce. So this you're gonna have an interesting opinion on this. It feels like we have this disconnect in how we track customers from, from first touchpoint through the entire lead funnel, if, if you will, the classic funnel and there's a lot of arguments to be made about whether we should even still be using funnels or flywheel, but we'll save that for later in the conversation. But like I look at a tool like Salesforce and, and I guess the thing that's always confounded me at least with B2B is it feels like it was built around people because it's generally starts with the lead object.
Kathleen (08:23):
And yet in B2B we sell to companies and, and therefore our funnels have been constructed where they start with people like we're looking at a person's visit to the website and then the person becoming a lead and then the person becoming an MQL or an SQL to an SAl. And then all of a sudden the lens changes. And it's like, now we're talking about companies being in opportunities. And it's always been fascinating to me, like how, when I hear marketers report, they're like, oh, these are our conversion rates from stage to stage, but I'm like, wait, your conversion rate here was for people and here it's for companies. So are we talking about apples to oranges? Like I would love to just hear about how you think about that and from a sales lens, like, do you, how do you go from tracking people to tracking companies, to tracking opportunities?
Adam (09:05):
Yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a, that's a great question. And I think there's, there's a lot of-
Kathleen (09:09):
By the way, I sorry to interrupt, but I blame it all on the fact that Salesforce has a lead object for screwing this entire thing up.
Adam (09:17):
It's fair. I think it's fair. Like I you know, and you know, I think, you know, in a B2B context, ultimately it is the, it is the business that you're addressing. I mean, there are some examples where like there are tools that can kind of be both like I, you know but I think, you know you are ultimately trying to, to, if you're a B2B company, you're ultimately trying to get another business to use your product within their business. And so that business in a lot of cases made up in more than one person. And, and in many cases it's made up of multiple departments that have multiple stakeholders. I think this is something we think about a lot is just the idea that like the, a customer journey is not like just a linear process anymore, right? Like it's, it's messy, it's complicated.
Adam (10:04):
Each member of that business may have maybe at a different stage of their journey with you. And so it's important to understand sort of both angles, which is like, where are the different individuals and where are they within the process with you? And, and what does that mean for the context of your relationship with that business as a whole? And so I think especially as businesses get more complex you know, you have to be thinking of, if you're trying to sell them a complex solution, you have to be thinking about how are you advancing those individual relationships in pursuit of that broader business relationship. Hopefully that's not too like,
Kathleen (10:41):
No, it makes total sense. I'm curious though, as a sales leader, like you talked about getting on the same page with marketing, starting from like traffic to leads, like how much do you even care about that? Because I've talked to a lot of sales leaders who are like, don't even talk to me until they're in sales qualified. And by, by the way, we need to all agree on what sales qualified is. So I'm, I'm interested to know how involved you get in those more top of funnel stages.
Adam (11:05):
Well, it's, you know, that's, that is an important question. I think the and I, you know, I'm, I'm just, I'm curious. So I, I tend to care just because I sort of know how it all happens. Right. But I think the I think it's important to have sort of some of those like delineations where I've seen, you know what I don't want as a sales leader, what I don't want is my team worrying about that and like, you know, looking up and saying like, well, our issue is way up there. It's now we gotta, we gotta draw some lines here so that you can create the right sort of like accountability within the different groups, within a business to make sure that everybody's, you know, focused on the things that they can control. So I think it's a combination like you want to, you know, you want people to care, you want to understand how things happen and you want to be able to like put yourself in your business partners, shoes, right?
Adam (11:57):
Like if you know, if marketing's doing a great job driving traffic, like I want to be able to help them celebrate that. Like, you know, and, and, and that's a, that's important too. But I don't want it to create, you know a lack of focus or ownership of, you know, how are we turning that into pipeline? You know, how are we turning that into qualified pipeline or how well are we converting on it? So I think it's it's a tricky balance. And I think like that's something that also, you know, it's been an interesting, you know interesting journey for me at ActiveCampaign. I mean, we've gone from a hundred and I think 120 me five or so employees to over a thousand in the four and a half years that I've been here. And that changes too, right? Like the, the level of, you know, influence the level of, you know, understanding of all details of how things happen, changes as, as companies scale as well, which has been kind of an interesting dynamic also because it, you know, there, there are more compartments, more pieces to the puzzle and all that stuff. So it's been, it's been fun and exciting to see that change as the company has grown as well.
Kathleen (13:01):
So the other thing I'm super curious about is, is kind of, I guess it speaks to the root of where I feel like a lot of disconnects happen between sales and marketing teams, which is around credit. And I have seen super toxic environments in companies that track is this sales sourced, or is it marketing source? And it becomes a very like us versus them situation versus like tracking channel performance. And, and obviously, I mean, I'm a big believer as a marketing leader that I can't be successful without. So sales and hopefully sales feels the same way about marketing. And so like, you need to have that collaboration. And I'm curious, like you've worked across a couple of incredible organizations. What have you seen work really well from a structural standpoint in terms of like attribution and tracking work well to like foster that collaboration between marketing and sales?
Adam (13:56):
Well, I think let me, let me, I, I will talk about, let me talk about what I think maybe where I've seen some stuff go sideways, like I've I've had, like, I've had the the opportunity to work with lots of different businesses. I think like there's one that I won't name the business, but like there was a, it was actually a customer. And what was, what was happening there was like a ton of tension, like very not good relationship, you know, between these two orgs. And what was happening is like, you know, marketing gets credit, as you said for, you know, you get a deal to this stage of the pipeline. And sales obviously gets credit when that, you know, those deal, they were judged on revenue and, you know this, this certain stage of the pipeline was filling up just wonderfully.
Adam (14:45):
And everybody was like celebrating marketing and like, you know, they were like crushing it in terms of their goal, right. But sales was not crushing it in this situation. And I think that's, you know, that's a situation where it's like, Hey, you know, celebrating this performance while the rest of the process isn't working the way that you want it to, and you're not, you're not winning as a business. And is, is it, you know, is it entirely this group's fault or is, or is that goal system wrong is the way that you're measuring success for another group. Wrong happens in the other way too. Right? Like, but I think where sometimes like marketing, you know, won't get as much credit as they deserve for the influence that they have on generating pipelines. So it like that can happen in both directions. And I think that's where like, things can get like, you know, unkind between sales and marketing is when, you know, you're focused on individual or departmental success versus overall success for the business.
Adam (15:46):
And I think that's where, you know, are you all working together towards the same end or are you working towards like success for your group? And, and that's where I think, like, you know you know, I mean, we're all on the same team, right? Like if you're working for the same company, you ought be on the same side of the table, working together to, to figure it out and focusing mostly on how do you create success for your customers? How do you success for, for the stakeholders of the business? And if you do those things then individual or departmental success typically follow pretty fast, right. Like that. So I think it's all about the order in which you're trying to solve the problems.
Kathleen (16:26):
Yeah. Interesting. As an aside I literally, before I came on this interview, I was in a slack group that I'm a member of. And there was a discussion slash debate happening around whether marketing should ever be invited to go to president's club. And like, it just, it's just so funny having this conversation right after that, because the discussion that I saw was along the lines of, well, my AEs think it's ridiculous that marketing should ever be invited and like, but the CS team should, but ops shouldn't and it's like, oh my God.
Adam (16:57):
Well, so we have we, interestingly like we I would say like Active, not a secret, like ActiveCampaigns historically been, you know, more of like a product led company. And so when we made the decision to, to introduce like a, like an incentive trip or like, you know, club, we made the choice of business to make it available for everybody. So it's actually a percentage of everybody at the company. It's not just sales or marketing or CS. You know, every time that we've had, you know, a, a, like an announcement of, of our club, it's called ACE club, by the way, it's really, really cool. And it's, I think very unique and special in many ways, not the least of which is the fact that like we've had members of our office management team, you know, be a part of that, our recruiting team, our, you know, our people team, you know, like everybody has been represented. And we try to make it about, you know, the contribution, cuz it's not even, it's, you know, the go to market's important. Like, but we gotta have product to sell.
Kathleen (17:59):
Right. Especially if you're doing PLG. Yeah.
Adam (18:02):
And, and so I think like that's been really important too, is like, you know, not to use those moments to like elevate one group of over another, but more to like recognize the fact that like, it, it takes everybody. Like we all, you know, we all have to contribute to have sustained success.
Kathleen (18:18):
I love that I will definitely drop ActiveCampaigns name and that Slack thread and say, everybody go look at them. They figured out how to do it. Cuz it's just, it was like such a, it was such a almost toxic conversation around like the dynamics. And, and I just reading it, I felt like this is set up for failure from the beginning, because if, if you're worried about making your AEs mad, if marketing comes, you got deeper problems than who should go to president's club. So yeah, that's an aside.
Adam (18:47):
It's the, I mean, it's you know, one of the things that, I mean, one of our like company values that I think is, you know, is is important as this idea of growth with gratitude and many of our many of our leaders and it's, it's been cool to see like the, this sort of catch on. We'll start meetings with like, Hey, just say, thank you, like share some gratitude, like who helped you? Like, and, and I think like it's been, it's been cool to see cuz I think especially in growth environments, like it's easy to there was a, a guy used to work for, he, he referred to it as getting picky of like, you know, thinking about like, you know, how do you get your sort of unfair share during these moments of growth and, and things like that. And that's the not, that's not great, right? Like, you know, if you take the ego out of it, just focus on, you know, being a good part of the team, contributing, you know, doing your part and helping generate again success for your customer success for the company. And and things will usually go well.
Kathleen (19:48):
I love that. All right. Let's and shift gears and talk about customer lifecycle sales and marketing. So we talked earlier about how their marketers can sometimes tend to maybe over overemphasize demand gen at the expense of full lifecycle marketing. And, and so I'd love to just hear from your perspective, how maybe at ActiveCampaign, your sales and marketing teams are working together and what that motion looks like throughout the full customer journey.
Adam (20:19):
Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's some really great examples of this. You know, so we, we have a lot of trial volume, so we, we bring a lot of people to the site. We have a 14 day free trial. Other people can sign up for to get a, to get a sense of the platform. And there's a, there's a combination of things that happen through, you know, a, a, a blend of automation, human touch during that process to try and drive towards conversion. So it's, you know, it's outreach from sales team potentially depending on how they're engaging, it's, you know, nurture sequences that are, that are being sent out you know, through automations and sort of a coordinated effort to try and get people the information they need to find value in the platform and get access to the resources that they need to be become successful in the use of it and hopefully become a, a paying customer. Right. and so those, those are those things are really important, but a great example of this is like our, our automation and I, I get a little like, you know, nerdy about this.
Kathleen (21:24):
I love getting nerdy on this podcast. So, so great. Fly your sales and marketing freak flag. I'm here for it.
Adam (21:31):
Cool. So it's a really simple it's, it's really a simple concept, but it's, it's, you know, obviously it's been tough for a lot of people to execute, but it's just nice idea of like, there are events that happen and those events can trigger different actions. So a great example is, you know, we have, you know, we have different events when people take certain actions, they, they do certain things in the platform. It can let us know, right. So we can then know, Hey, they took this action. What should we do now? Right. Like, should we send them a follow up on this topic or a different one, should we have somebody reach out and offer them assistance? You know, do we, do we change the way that they're moving through this experience with us based on what is actually happening with their engagement with our website or the product or our team. And that's true, you know, throughout the, the life cycle at, you know, at conversion, right? Like, are they, you know, they're now they're paying customer are they adopting the platform? Are they logging in, are they, are they doing the things that we know lead to success?
Kathleen (22:38):
So are you defining like a, a, a PQL in that sense or?
Adam (22:43):
Exactly. Exactly. Yep. So we, and we'll do that, like even for upsell opportunities. So once somebody has become a customer, we're looking at what are, what are signals that lead us to think that they may have room to expand the use of our platform, either through, you know, going wider or using more of the advanced features that we offer. So there, there are things like that where it's like an example that would be Hey, if you have a, a customer is using our landing page builder, they may be a great candidate for web personalization, which is, which is the, the option to, you know, personalize the actual experience on the website based on things that we know about them. So I think, you know so if we know you're from Chicago, right, like, you know, the, maybe the, maybe the, the image is a picture of millennium park or something versus, you know, some generic stock photo of random insert random city here. Right? So those things can make it feel more familiar based on the things that you know about that person. And there's so many ways to personalize the experience that someone's having, you know, through through the technology that's available. It's just incredible. And that's making it, you know, feel more, feel, make everybody feel like they're more at home as they're interacting with your content or with your site or whatever the case might be.
Kathleen (24:03):
So where do you draw the line? Because you, you oversee sales and customer success for ActiveCampaign. And, and like, I'm a marketing person and we have a product in my company for example, that we're gonna have a PLG motion for it. We also have an enterprise motion. And I think that the questionn always arises and we're a very early stage of like, once somebody becomes a customer from that point forward, what is the rule set around when should marketing contact them, versus when should customer success and sales contact them and how do we coordinate to make sure that it, for the customer, it doesn't feel like the left hand isn't talking to the right?
Adam (24:50):
Yeah. That's a, I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I think, you know the way that I would think about it, like just in sort of generic terms is like, Hey, you know, if you have a, if you have a paying customer, you wanna keep them up to speed with what's going on. You want them to know if they're relevant events or content information that you're putting out. And so, like, I would always be sort of like under the, the view that like marketing should be involved, right. You know, help to help to deliver that information, help to keep them engaged. One thing that we have we've implemented is like, for example, if if a if a sales rep is working an active expansion or upsell opportunity with a customer, we will, you know, we will sort of like suppress some of the, some of the marketing activity, just so that it's not, you know, feeling like it's bombarding or potentially like conflicting with something that, you know, that they've got going on. Yeah. But I think, you know, the business rules around, you know, customer success, engagement, sales engagement, a lot of that is very, very specific in terms of how you've got those roles designed and-
Kathleen (25:58):
Does customer success in your company hold any sort of a quota?
Adam (26:03):
So that's, that has changed, you know, through different of periods of time. But really like customer success for like customer success for ActiveCampaign is around truly success and, and retention and support of the customer. And so they're, we are really trying to have those resources be in service of helping customers to find success. And so they will the way that we've got it structured today is that, you know, they will find, they will obviously be on the, on the lookout for like, Hey, this is a great customer. They've got, you know, room to expand their use of the tool. They'll identify that. As a, you know, almost as another version of like a, like a qualified lead that can can be worked by sales, but we're trying to keep that as, as focused on success and health and, and and adoption of the platform as we can.
Kathleen (26:55):
And, and when marketing post initial customer acquisition, are there any particular KPIs that you guys organizationally are tracking for marketing and how they're supporting the upsell cross sell motion?
Adam (27:09):
Yeah. yeah, marketing is a big part of that. Like the, the post-sale sort of engagement and, and they're looking for ways to help sort of generate some of those opportunities in more systematic ways, right. Versus like, you know, sales is thinking, Hey, I worked with this customer before now we release this new feature. I think they might be interested, right. Like marketing's trying to do all of that stuff in a more systematic way, which is really important for our business specifically because we've got over 150,000 customers. So it's, you know, it's, we're not gonna do that in a sort of hand picked fashion. You for the entirety of our customer base made even more complex by the fact that they're all around the world. Right. We've got all those customers are in 170 different countries. So we definitely need the tool to be working for us in a lot of ways to help surface and drive some of that opportunity to the team.
Kathleen (28:01):
And where do you see, like earlier, I loved that you kind of focused on, like, where do things break down, cuz I do think that's important to understand. So when you think about full life cycle marketing, where do you see the biggest breakdowns or disconnects occurring between marketing and sales?
Adam (28:18):
Yeah, I, I mean, I think it's you know, that's a good one. I don't, I think, think that the my, I mean, at least maybe for me in my experience, I would say that a lot of that a lot of that stuff tends to happen more on the front end. Like I think acquisition, at least in my experience tends to be where there's more tension. But you know, I would say it's the, it's probably in the it's probably in the overlap app where it's like, Hey, we're, you know, we're working on this deal and, you know, customers getting hammered with this messaging, that's like not relevant to like what we're trying to like talk about, like from a post-sale standpoint, that's probably it. I would also say it's just, there's a lot to it, right? Like you know, especially with some of these platforms that have a lot of new months, you know, driving people to the right content to adopt the right features to make them successful is it's, there's a lot there, you know, and it, and it takes a lot of really good plan.
Adam (29:18):
I mean, we've, we're, we're fortunate, we've got a, a, a really fantastic marketing team who's done a great job of putting a lot of that, you know, nurturing together both pre and post sale. But it's, it's, as you know, it's, it's not easy to do. And I think it's it can be messy if not managed well. Yeah. I think that, you know, one thing that's it makes me think of like one of like probably one of my fit and again, like not to, not to just like plug AC here, but like within the platform, like we also, we have this concept of goals that are in our automation and it's a, it's really important. And this is, I think an example where if the person has done the thing, leave them alone, right.
Kathleen (30:02):
Stop emailing them for the love of God.
Adam (30:06):
And I think like that's so important because it's like, Hey, did, did you accomplish the goal? Have you done the thing? If so, like move on to the next part of the journey or just, you know, give 'em a minute, you know? And I think, you know, that's something that is, is often overlooked, but it's really important part of it. I, I can't tell you how many times I've gotten, like, I mean, I, I get 20 messages a day from companies where it's like, I bought, I bought it like, yeah, you stop emailing me about it. Like I already own it. Like yeah. One.
Kathleen (30:35):
Yeah. Now do you have, I feel like underpinning, all of what you're talking about right now is like ops. And so within ActiveCampaign, do you guys have rev ops or do you have marketing ops and sales ops? What does that look like?
Adam (30:49):
Yeah, we have, we do have a, like we do have a rev ops team. I would say it, probably that team probably operates more like sales ops. We also have like some, some operations more like sales ops. They we also have some resources within marketing and CS and, and others what we've done to try and sort of like harmonize there is is created what, what we refer to as an ops council. So the, those different representatives meet routinely to, to make sure we're on the same page. All of those folks are sort of represented during the planning process as well, to make sure that everybody's got a really clear understanding of who's doing what, how do things fit together? We had the opportunity even just last week, we're going through, we're releasing some new functionality.
Adam (31:40):
And so we're gonna be deploying some new stuff that ActiveCampaigns rolling out for our internal teams. And, you know, we add members of our, of each of those teams together last week, going through like, okay, here we are, how are we gonna define this? What does it mean in this situation? How do we make sure that we have, you know, a shared understanding of how it's gonna work, but also how we measuring it, you know, in a common way so that we all understand how things are working. So that's been a really important part not creating like a centralized ops function, but making sure we have those folks, you know, in lockstep at all times,
Kathleen (32:18):
If there's a discrepancy, like in terms of how of data and how people are interpreting it, who, who ultimately is the arbiter of that?
Adam (32:28):
That's a great question. I mean, I think I, you know, we we have a, we have a business intelligence team who will, like, who helps with a lot of the like logic and the actual like structure of it. And so they will, they will help in a lot of cases with making sure that the, that the data is sound and that we're all looking at it, like in an appropriate way, you know, the interpretation of that then like becomes like a shared responsibility, like you, their ops or the leaders who are involved in those conversations. And I think that gives us a chance to sort of like, you know, wrestle over things a little bit and, you know, offer our own interpretations, which I think you know, is all like, there's always, you know, unfortunately, like there's always more than one way to look at a report, right.
Kathleen (33:16):
It helps to have a third party that's not in one of the two teams to be able to objectively look at it.
Adam (33:23):
Yeah. And I think, I think like finance for us has taken a, like, taken a bit of a leadership role there. And, and I think when, when when we can't get on the same page, I think we, we tend to lean on them cuz I think they, they look at it usually in a little bit more like binary way. And I think that that's been that's been a good relationship. The sort of triangulation between sales, marketing, customer and finance has been, you know, has been good and healthy and I think productive for us.
Kathleen (33:54):
Awesome. Well, so many good nuggets here. I love, I love all of the advice. It sounds like you guys have, have really figured out a lot of this stuff and, and have a good working relationship between sales and marketing, which is nice to hear.
Adam (34:08):
It can be done.
Kathleen (34:10):
Exactly. But it's like, I feel like it's like marriage, right? It's not like you figure it out and you're done. Like the next challenge is on the horizon. You just need to know how to communicate really well and work through your challenges and stay committed to figuring it out.
Adam (34:24):
Yeah, for sure. And as long as I think, you know, that just goes back to the beginning, as long as, as long as you have certainty that everybody's, you know, working towards the same goal you can get through just about anything like any of the little scuffles, no big deal. As long as you know, that you're on the same team and you're working for the same thing.
Kathleen (34:42):
Yeah, totally. All right. Let's shift gears cuz I always ask my guests two questions at the end and I wanna make sure I have time to get this in with you. The first is, you know, of course, as I said earlier that we, the podcast is the inbound success podcast. And so it's, we talk a lot about inbound marketing, which as I mentioned, I loosely defined as anything that naturally attracts the right customer to, you know, is there a particular company or individual that you think today knowing how marketing has evolved is really setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?
Adam (35:12):
Well, I, I don't, again, I don't want to just like plug us, but like I actually think like I actually think Active Campaign's doing a great job. Like we, you know, we've generated a lot of good track and momentum and, and I think a lot of good advocacy there, I will, I will tell you a like a, like a quick customer story, if you don't mind that.
Kathleen (35:32):
Go for it. I'd love to hear
Adam (35:33):
There's a, there's a company that we work with they're called Party Headphones. So they do like rentals for like the, the headsets for different like parties and events.
Kathleen (35:41):
Do they do like silent disco headsets?
Adam (35:43):
Yeah. If you wanted to do a silent disco call party headphones, for sure. They'll take great care of you. But they, so they're using an ActiveCampaign. They've used it to, to, you know, generate traffic and bring people in. And, you know, obviously from a marketing standpoint, but they've also used the automation capabilities to streamline their fulfillment process. And so they had this really complex, you know, I think it was like 12 or 15 touchpoint, you know, onboarding or fulfillment process that was taking them hours and hours. Every time they signed up a customer and they've been able, able to automate that entire process through the automation builder. So it's such a great example of what we call customer experience automation, sort of bringing that process from manual to totally automated, making their experience better for their customer, making their business way more efficient. And I just, I wanted to plug that story cuz I just of the, it, it's just such a good demonstration of, you know, better operation, better customer experience, which is, which is what we're trying to help people do.
Kathleen (36:44):
Yeah. I love that. Cause I actually had this conversation with somebody earlier today about marketing automation and how I feel like I, you know, I used to own an agency for 11 years that, and we helped customers with marketing automation. And I feel like the there's two camps in the marketing world, there's the camp that uses those tools as the, you know, as they were intended to be used and sort of follows the playbooks. And then there's the camp that is more like the first principles thinkers and and they look at it and they just see that really it's just an automation tool. Yeah. And when you look at it that way, it opens up this whole universe of options for how you can use it. And I think I, I too have seen some very creative use cases. So it's nice to hear that story about party headphones. And I have been looking at silent disco for a potential trade show booth activation. So now I might know who to call.
Adam (37:34):
Yeah, great. I would, I would absolutely love it if you did. That'd be great.
Kathleen (37:36):
I will tell them that you sent me.
Adam (37:39):
They're great. They're a great great customer and in a really good business and, and I'm sure you'd be happy to work with them.
Kathleen (37:45):
Awesome. Alright. Second question. Most of the marketers, I talk to say that one of the biggest challenges is that just keeping up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing and sort of drinking from the information firehouse. So how do you personally stay up to date and current yourself for everything you need to know to do your job?
Adam (38:04):
Yeah. I mean, I, I well, first and foremost, I love talking to customers. Like I think that's that's a great way to do it cuz I think you know, there's no real better source of information than practitioners like people who are in the trenches every day, like trying to figure this stuff out. Like I think that's really important. I think I, I like, I think marketing profs is a great resource as well. So I, you know, I think you know really good stuff there. And I, you know, I try to read, you know, a, a a, just a smattering of different things too. I, you know, I I like reading about marketing and, and business in general, but you know, just try to try to take in as much as I can from different sources to, to broaden my perspective on, on life in general. And, and I find like even reading about like, it's kind of weird, but like even reading about like, I love reading about history and different, you know, different leaders I've read a lot of like biographies about like the presidents and, you know, read some science, publications and stuff. And it's funny how you can find, you know, parallels between those things and, and, you know, business, whether it's marketing or leadership or, or other things. So that's the way that I try and go about it.
Kathleen (39:12):
Okay. So then I have a tip for you and you're gonna think it's really weird, but you might thank me later. So if you, if you like biographies of people like of leaders and people who've accomplished amazing things, read the biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's actually the autobiography.
Adam (39:32):
When you read it, did you read it in his voice or did you read in your own sort of internal voice?
Kathleen (39:37):
I actually listened to the audio book in his voice.
Adam (39:40):
Oh really?
Kathleen (39:42):
Really. So I did it when I, funny enough, I used to listen to it when I was working out and lifting weights, but, but I was turned onto this book by David Cancel at Drift because on Seeking Wisdom, he talked about how much he loved it. And I was like, really what? Like, I gotta check this out and I started reading or listening to it. And it is, yes, he talks about weightlifting and stuff, but it's a fascinating autobiography about just like leadership and success. And how you think about business and communication. Like it's, it's a total sleeper hit. So if you read it, let me know what you, because I know it sounds like a weird recommendation, but I'd be curious to know your reaction.
Adam (40:21):
Yeah, no, that's great. I appreciate the recommendation. I'll check it out. Yeah.
Kathleen (40:24):
All right. Well, I, this has been a ton of fun. Thank you for joining me. If somebody wants to learn more about ActiveCampaign or has a question and wants to reach out and connect with you, what is the best way for them to do that?
Adam (40:35):
Yeah, you can you can find us at obviously our website ActiveCampaign.com. You can check us out on social, various social channels. Linkedin, you can reach out to me. I'm aJohnson@activecampaign.com. You can reach out to me directly. I'd love to hear from you.
Kathleen (40:51):
All right. Fantastic. And as always, I will put the links to all of those things in the show notes, which you can find at kathleenbooth.com. And if you know anybody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, my interesting Twitter handle, and I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me, Adam. This was a lot of fun.
Adam (41:13):
Yeah. Great. Great to be here. Thanks so much.
