SaaS Breakthrough Featuring Bridget Poetker

AL (02:07):

I recently had a conversation about attribution with my team, where I was like, listen, just don't forget that by definition, attribution is measurable. And so if you are so focused on attribution, then you've already cut out a number of channels from your strategy. And it's really pigeonholing marketers I think.

BP (02:31):

I think that it's good in a lot of ways, right? We need marketing attribution. It's the birth of it was those questions, you know, how did you hear about us at the end? I actually went through a retail like cart yesterday and I was laughing because the only attribution that they probably, there was nothing in the UTM codes. Like it was an Instagram ad, right? Click it, nothing in the UT like no attribution on the front end of it, nothing. And then I get to the end of the cart and the, I like checked out and cuz Instagram ads will get me every time and it did, it popped up with, how did you hear about us? And I'm like, why don't we do that in B2B instead, because it was easy for me to just click and they put Instagram on the top because that's probably their top lead source.

BP (03:12):

And so like they ordered it and I'm like, it's not that hard. Just like pick one. There's no right or wrong way to do it. But I think two, you have to have a balance of both. You have to have the marketers that are focused on attribution and then you have to have the like, you know, I think people say fluffy stuff in like a negative derogatory way, but I'm like the fluffy stuff makes my brain work. And like that's what I'm excited to see that brand side and that creativity and things like that, that like, that's the like joy that sparked. It's not the attribution side that like it's, but some marketers that gets their brain working. So I think you have to have both. I think it's, we're just, I think as an industry, obviously, so metrics driven, but I think you have to have both and like the making space for both is really important.

AL (04:03):

I wonder if like, as marketers got closer and closer to revenue and started to really be responsible for pipeline. I wonder if that was for a lot of us, like the death of our non attribution marketing strategies, because suddenly we really did have to be accountable to everything that we did and it didn't allow for a lot of the other stuff.

BP (04:27):

Yeah. And it's hard to explain, so everybody just decides not to do it. Right. And it's hard to tie back and it's hard to do this, but it's, it's hard for a reason because it's, I think like a more of a right way to do it, more of a long term strategy that SaaS is so short term. And now, because things are short term, everybody's running the same tactics, everybody's doing the same things. The channels get flooded. And then we wonder we gotta go find something else. So that's why everything is so cyclical too. Like things come and go, but they'll always come back. And so trying to find a way to like focus less on what everybody else is doing and just like focus on what you think your customers need or like what your team's strengths are, or like find a couple channels that your competitors don't do very well in.

BP (05:15):

Or like you have really strong people on your team to do X, Y, and Z. Like just focus there, just focus on a few, doing a few channels right. But I think that unmeasurable creativity piece, you, it is the X factor. That's the magic that like a team, your competitors can't replicate cuz and like they can have their own version of creativity, but that's like a brand awareness and like brand feeling attribute and like that's a feeling. That's what brand marketing is, is creating a feeling for somebody. And you can't do that through just having the tactics. You have to have the creative on your LinkedIn ads. You have to have the creative spin in like the brand part to your, like any sponsored part of a newsletter. Even if it's not your news. Like any traditional demand gen piece that is mostly attribution, there's still a way to do creative marketing in there.

AL (06:09):

Yeah, I think you're right. I also, I agree with you about the emotion piece. I think we started so in our CRM, we've started tagging emotions on people. Like, like it's like an emotional buyer's journey. We've started like to move them through an emotional buyer's journey because one, I think it helps us get out of like the traditional awareness consideration decision funnel, which is not at all about buyers and exclusively about us so that we can track them in our pipeline.

BP (06:41):

So true. I never thought of that.

AL (06:42):

And it also really helps us with messaging and creating content. Because if we're, if we're focused on a particular feeling that we're trying to move them to, that they wanna get to ultimately, then we're creating content in a way that speaks more to the emotion of what they need and where they are just by default. Cuz we're just in that mindset all the time.

BP (07:03):

What are the stages of that? Like what are the, what are a few different emotions that you tag people with?

AL (07:09):

So the first one is frustration. So like they come to us with a pain point or a problem. Right. And there's something that they're trying to solve for. And then they move into a feeling of optimism. Where they're not yet. Yeah. Yeah. They're not yet sold, but they are like willing to learn more and then they move into confidence where they're like, okay, good I'm in. And then after purchase, they move into a state of gratitude where they're like evangelists, but we continue to have like a solid relationship that they feel grateful to us for. So we've started to like tag some of our content with these gaps so that we say that like our content is specifically designed to move them from one emotional state to another.

BP (07:56):

Similar to how they would be like, this is a top of funnel piece. This is a bottom of funnel piece. I love that. I think it's, it makes way more sense to somebody's buying decisions than it does like top of funnel means nothing when you think about an actual prospect. It's like they could go from being there to being grateful in, you know, 30 minutes, like who knows how long that's gonna take. It's interesting.

AL (08:18):

And if you listen to them, they're giving you clues all the time about how they feel. Like they're chatting into support with problems they're having, if they're an existing customer or if they're a prospect and they have questions cause they can't find pricing on the website or like whatever it is, sales has tons of like close lost problems and they're talking to people all the time and, they all start with something like, you know, with marketers it's, it's not ever about like, I wanna find a gifting platform or I wanna find a webinar content platform or whatever. It's always about like, I'm not hitting my revenue number. I'm not hitting my lead number. I look like an idiot in front of my boss. Like focusing back on like that internal pain point, I think always serves us better.

BP (09:07):

Yeah. And I think that that's kind of where I'm going with Postal too, is more like less like, you know, I wanna show up in places from a content perspective for gifting platform, for people that are like in that bottom, like optimistic stage where they like, know what they're looking for. They know what would solve their problem. But obviously the bigger part of the funnel, if we're still calling it, that is that like top frustration piece speaking to pain points. And like the pain point for gifting is like, how do you create strong, like stronger relationships, more meaningful, long lasting impressions, things that like, feel like something. And again like that is so tied. Postal's mission is so tied closely to like the way that I think about business relationships and marketing in general that like when I was brought here, when I was like offered this job, I was like, I have like, yes, like this is because it makes, it makes sense to my brain.

BP (10:04):

But I think demand gen marketers can also get creative with how they're using the data that's in your CRM. Right. So if they're seeing in like that's their version of creativity is finding those like little nuggets that like, okay, we've had, you know, the last 20 people that came through this specific event from whatever have had this exact pain point. So like let's use that. Let's like build some content around that, but like that's their way of being creative. So I think we think of creativity and like brand marketing as like always the external things, but there's so much happening behind the scenes, but it's more of like a mentality than anything else. It's it really isn't, that's what makes it unmeasurable. That's what makes it unmeasurable and like not able to duplicate by other teams because we're using, and I think that goes back to us being a scrappy startup that is told that we're able to fail and try things.

BP (10:57):

And like we have to be scrappier than our competitors. We're smaller. So like how do we use what we currently have better? And like leverage the team that we have instead of saying, what are they doing? What's the industry saying, what's, you know, all of these companies that we like want to emulate eventually. But how do we work better with what we currently have? I think is another misstep that like a lot of companies don't go there. They don't think like we make all of this stuff up. We make the goals up, we make the marketing. Like we make all of our OKRs up. Like if we don't feel a project is worth our time, then like why do we have to keep doing it? We don't. Like, let's refocus on things that people want to work on. I think that's important too, is listening, not only to customers, but to your team and what your team thinks because they're closest to the ground in those specific areas. And when you're a small marketing team, like you have really specialized people probably that have like very specific skill sets and like giving them those wins is really important and like finding ways for us to win while also testing other things. I think that's like the secret kind of sauce to creativity.

AL (12:08):

You've got a really cool, you've got a couple really cool examples of creativity, but walk me through, I was really struck by this one about aloe plants because I'm like such a plant mom. So will you walk me through this? I wanna know, like, let's start at the beginning because you were just mentioning goals and OKRs, which I think is a really important place to start when you're talking about campaigns. So like what was the goal? What was the intent of this campaign?

BP (12:35):

Yeah. Well, backing up a little bit more. I think just explaining Postal in general is we connect like B2B businesses with, through a marketplace to like small and local businesses, right? So we're helping B2B businesses build stronger relationships through experiences, through gifting, virtual events, things that like are offline experiences, but we're also lifting up local and small businesses in order to do that. So I think that that context is really helpful. So what our team does is we go and we, you know, go through our certified vendor list and we pick the best experiences that we know a customer is gonna have a good experience with that. So that campaign was just us trying to do a direct mailer. We have decided that like, we have to learn how to use the product the best and show like that's the best way we're gonna educate the market is if we we're using the product.

BP (13:31):

So that was just a traditional, like direct mailed man gen play that aloe plant campaign. And that actually started as a champagne campaign. We were calling it. It was right around new year's and then of course there was a champagne shortage who knew. We literally had like the landing page, the direct like everything was done, like so beautiful. So themed out, it was great. The theme was like last year's toast. Like it was so great. And then we went to go get the, and it was like all 40 champagne suppliers on. They were like, you can only order 10 of these. And we were like, okay. Like, and we looked it up, we Googled it and they said that there was a champagne shortage. So, so we had to, we had to pivot, but so then we went to aloe plants for spring.

BP (14:18):

And the message was just like, you know, grow your ABM program with us. Grow, like, grow with us. So that's where the plant came in. We love puns at Postal. But yeah, so same thing. We did the direct mailer with the QR code scan the QR code. It takes you to a themed landing page. You fill out the form, entered into a HubSpot web or workflow. I almost said Web flow because that's like my old brain right now. HubSpot workflow. And then it triggers through the Postal like integration to just send them a plant for registering for a free trial. It's just like, it's fun. It obviously like people are more encouraged to do things when they're incentivized to do things. So like we try to push like, yeah, we're giving you something, but we're also getting something back.

BP (15:08):

Like we wanna make sure we give you something for your time. But I think too, traditionally direct mail has been complicated, but also expensive. We spent, I think, $1,500 on that and we got 20 plus free trials. So like that's a $75 CPL, like that's super cheap. And you're only paying for what product you've used. So like we're, you're not paying for gifts that like, you know, you've allocated to the program and if they aren't redeemed, you don't pay for it. So that was a really good way for us to like reach some target accounts that we were having trouble breaking through digitally. And so like obviously you have to have the online digital part to have the offline because like they enter their own addresses. You need to go to the landing page, but like it's a more omnichannel approach and it's more like, well put together because it's like, it feels substantial. It feels like a full campaign, right?

AL (16:04):

Yeah. Yeah. How are you doing direct mail in a like remote landscape? Like where, like, are you sending to people's homes now? Is that, is that what we're doing for direct mailing?

BP (16:17):

Yeah. And I think the power of, you know, the beauty of something like Postal is I don't have to have your address for that. For the original, for a direct mailer, we do. And we have lists that have addresses that we've collected over time, whether it was through Postal or through something else, like an event list or something like that. But with traditional gifting still, you would also need, you know, package the things up, send it to their house. Do I send it to the office? Like all the stuff. Like this way, you can send a link. Here's the thing you put in your own address. I never see that. I never have to worry about where I'm sending it to. I don't have to pack it up. I don't have to do any of that. All I have to do is send you a link and it's done.

BP (16:58):

And the touch points, I think to the amount, like if you're sending an outreach email, you know, you're only hitting that prospect one time. If you are sending them a gift, your first gift email, then the like here's the whole gift screen and the gift email. And then when they get the gift and then when they keep the wine on their bar, like physical things have such a way of like bringing emotions out of us that we are trying to tap into and trying to, again, that's a longevity play. It's more of like a long lasting relationship building than anything transactional. Like everything gifting. I think, since it's been introduced into SaaS, it's been very transactional. The typical use case that you see is like, give a gift card for a meeting. You know what I mean? Or like the G2, like will give you a $30 gift card for your review.

BP (17:50):

We're trying to say like, still go toward think personal, meaningful. There's so much information. Even like surface level on LinkedIn that you can go find from somebody. And they're like, what kind of pages do they follow? Oh, this like, she has a family, he has a family. She likes golf. Like those kinds of things that I think it's a little bit more substantial in a way that, like, I actually did my research when I was looking and it's not just for BDRs or anything. Like, it's like, if I'm looking for a new partnership, like I wanna make sure that that person feels like I am listening to them, I'm paying attention. So creating those stronger relationships through things like that I think is, is really impactful in a way to kind of set your business relationship with them apart from other business relationships,

AL (18:41):

How can marketers and SDRs or BDRs or sales work together in sort of a long term play, right? As they move through the buyer's journey using gifting, like as part of this, like multi-touch multi-department experience. Like what have you seen there that is really cool from a creative standpoint?

BP (19:04):

I think there's so many different ways. And usually it's, you know, there's a company starts with one gifting use case. It's either like, okay, we're using this in our field marketing, you know, we want this for events and to manage our swag and we don't have to have inventory and how we can do that through a platform. So we see a lot of like customer success and like client gifting of like, thank you gifts. Or like your client just had a baby, we're gonna send you something for that. Like yeah. A milestone gift. And then, yeah, there's , you know, book more meetings with Postal. So it's, it's working through the buyer's journey, but also like thinking about when exactly, and I think that's the part that we're trying to hit the most is like, nobody knows when nobody knows how to do direct mail, right. Because we were all taught. Okay in you're sequencing, you call them, then you email them, then you hit them up on LinkedIn. Then you do this. And it's like, when do you slot in gifting? And it just fits in the same way that those other tactics do, you know, if somebody doesn't accept a gift, you you're not paying for that. So like, then, you know, you go back to your regular sequence and then you say, but gift emails have like a 90% open rate. Like people redeem.

AL (20:24):

Yeah why wouldn't you want a gift.

BP (20:25):

Exactly. And so like if your goal, it really depends on what your goal is. Right. And so the gift and the incentive or the virtual event really has to be, that's where it has to start. It can't start with like, well, we're just gonna send fruit to all of these people or like fruit baskets or like, things like that. But steak dinners have always existed for ABM and those kinds of things. Right? So like, it's a way to do that in a remote world that still feels substantial.

AL (20:55):

I have been gifted many things, and I will say that I am, I always accept the gift and I always turn down the meeting, but because I'm not

BP (21:07):

I love that for you.

AL (21:08):

I know me too. But I know exactly who they are, you know what I mean? Like I drank the wine, I have the chocolate, like I have the things or whatever. And even though it wasn't the right time for me, like the brand association that I've now made is strong that when it's time I'm gonna come back. And that's just much more effective than an email, right. It just is. Which is the same strategy that we try to use with inbound, which is like, when they're ready, they'll come back to us. But the incentive isn't strong enough anymore. I think as we get noisier and noisier in the market.

BP (21:42):

Right. So then we start to think of, you know, it's not just gifting, it's experiences, it's offline experiences. Like how do you create those for brand like further up the funnel so that we're thinking about, you know, okay, come to our virtual event and we have this kit and we're doing wine tasting. And you know, we're talking about our new feature, but like the majority of it is just an activity for other marketers to get together and just like enjoy each other's like company. And that again is like more of a brand play. But I think you said it correctly in that, like, it is about being in the right time at the right place. But sales has always been that way. The quickest deals are always when you find them, when they're the most frustrated and not in that optimistic phase yet.

BP (22:27):

So like, you never really know, you know, a gift is not like the magic thing. That's gonna make them take the meeting this time. But the work that you put into the like prospecting piece of it, maybe is, and like really starting to understand their problems and like, yeah, maybe you can't find something about them on LinkedIn, you get them on the first meeting, they say something about having a kid. Right. And then your follow up gift for that is thank you so much for taking this meeting. Here's a book that I read with my daughter and I loved it. I would love to send this to you. And so there's so many, it's all about how you are using it, which is every tool in marketing. It's not just the silver bullet to, to fix all of my problems. It's still right place, right time, which is hard. But again, that goes back to our earlier conversation of like, just focus on yourself and what your customers need instead of trying to find these like quick tactics that just work. Cuz eventually it doesn't work like that.

AL (23:29):

It's exhausting.

BP (23:31):

It's like a hamster wheel, right.

AL (23:33):

It totally is. Yeah. And you're just side by side with other hamsters, all running.

BP (23:38):

Nowhere you're

AL (23:39):

Yeah. Just looking at each other, thinking you're out pacing and you're not, you're literally doing the exact same thing. Okay. So throw out, I love your aloe plant example, throw out like two other really awesome ways that as marketers, you think we could be using gifting and then let's kick it over to like sales and then let's do like customer success.

BP (24:01):

My goodness. Put me on the spot here. Okay. My favorite one that we've done recently for marketing and I mentioned it a little bit, was anything with like of an in person event, like a field event. We instead of like schlepping all that stuff to the conference and then having people carry it all around the whole thing. And like, do you have to have room in your suitcase to bring this thing home? Like all of that stuff. We created these cards and we made it shaped like a t-shirt because that's what we were giving away. And they had QR, QR codes are back. Okay. If there's one thing, the pandemic did was bring codes back. Scan a QR code, it takes you to a collection. There's a shirt, a tote bag or donates charity. But like, instead of you, it literally said on the card, this is your conference swag.

BP (24:54):

And we made it shaped differently because we wanted to stand out from other things that they'd be picking up from the conference. But again, like nobody's carrying a t-shirt around the whole conference the whole time you have this little card and it also doubles as like lead gen, like scanning and stuff like that, because those events will give you lead lists, but maybe two weeks after the event has happened. And you know, you've talked to all these people and like two weeks is a lifetime for a marketer to follow up with you. Like I'm not gonna remember that. No. So beating, I think other vendors to attendees is important too. So by having some kind of like scanning thing that you're able to kind of have those at least like the really high value contacts that you made sure like I will follow up with you, you do quickly and our SDRs are seeing some really good success from follow ups from events, from in-person events, from that specific program.

AL (25:49):

Yeah. That's awesome. Okay. Next one.

BP (25:53):

Sales

AL (25:55):

Sales.

BP (25:55):

Yeah. Our BDRs are technically on the marketing team and I think majority of them now probably are, right. It's more of an outbound kind of just like, so I'm gonna count them in marketing, but yeah, but for AEs, it is that it is that you know, after you get the first meeting or listening to them speak, or here's a book that I think would really speak to what you were talking about or you know, you're a whiskey girl or you like go like whatever it is. I think it's more about like building that relationship and really listening to them during the call and then sending them a meaningful gift after that. I think we see a lot of like sales velocity because of that, of like the touchpoints are more meaningful. It's not just, Hey, I'm following up on our call. Hey, did you talk to this so, and so person yet, Hey, did you do this? It's like, again, those like multiple touch points, it's the email. And then when they actually get it, they're thinking of you again. And they're like, oh yeah, I have to get back on the phone with them. Or I have to go sell that up. Or I have to, you know, it's like the more touch points you can get from one single interaction, the better. And I think offline is a way to get multiple out of one.

AL (27:06):

Yeah. What about customer success?

BP (27:09):

That's back to that milestones that we were talking about. I think we see a lot of like congrats on your engagement, congrats on having a baby, congrats on your new home, congrats on all these things. I think that that's really powerful. And we see that a lot too in like employee gifting too. So like every birthday somebody had, like, I had a birthday in April and Postal sent me wonder text. So like I got something from the marketplace and I was like, this is so nice. Like, that's awesome. I mean, it's not just like company swag that comes through, which we'll do that too. But it's more like, Hey, you had a birthday, like here are some delicious birthday cookies that like, we're thinking of you and all those things. But that happens too in success. And I think ahead of renewals, that's the timing aspect of that is like three months ahead of when your renewal is due.

BP (27:58):

It's like, Hey, we're thinking of you. Or, you know, we wanna make sure that, you know, we're in good standing and like, how can we get on the phone with you? Like, you know, do we send you a gift card for lunch that we can all have a conversation together? Or did you know, is there a milestone that we could tie a communication? I think that the most effective communication is when you can tie it back to something that's happening. Right. It's not just out of the blue. It's more like those milestones and like, yeah, you can make stuff up. And I think the beauty of that is there's always something happening in marketing, but also like with holidays and stuff like that, like you can raise out your holidays too and just have something themed. And that goes back to the creativity piece of like, how do you build campaigns that feel like a brand play and feel more like traditional advertising campaigns and for us like, and I think for the majority of, everybody has been so online and so digital that we've completely forgotten about like how to have a fun time, like outside of that. And how to tie in things that like bring us joy outside of work.

BP (29:02):

You know what I really love? Tequila. If anybody sends me Tequila, I'm probably taking that meeting.

AL (29:07):

Yeah, for sure. For sure. I talk about this all the time where I think, because marketers learned how to market behind the keyboard, like most marketers learned how to market via looking at Google Analytics or like writing blog posts or something that so many of them. And I'm finding this a lot, when we look at webinars, they don't know how to be in front of people. They don't know how to network. They don't know how to do public speaking. They don't know how to communicate effectively because they're not used to actually engaging with humans. They're used to sitting behind HubSpot or whatever. What I love about the experiences, whether they're virtual or not, is it just requires more personalization.

BP (29:51):

And presence, right. It requires you to be there and to be active and to be listening. And I think we've seen so much passive marketing where it's like, we just have to keep doing this. We just have to keep doing this because we've gotten the numbers and there's, again, there's so much pulling from other areas for inspiration instead of just, I think we've lost a lot of the, like ideation in marketing and like actually thinking for ourselves about what a good like advertising concept is. Like, I'm very lucky that my background is in ad agencies. So like, I will always be a brainstormer. That's just the way that my brain works. And like, that's how I prefer to collaborate with people is to hear everybody's ideas, to bring those into the fold and to like build campaigns that way around the same value props. I think too, the other thing is in marketing, we are consistently changing the value props because we think like value props are changing for customers. And I'm like, no, they're really not though. The customers' problems will always be the same, like things that you have. So I think that goes back to really understanding your customers and like your job is to serve them. It's not to like have the most leads come from LinkedIn. Your job is to make sure that you're serving the customers and the prospects with a product that they actually need.

AL (31:10):

That feels like such a great, like closing segment. So, but before we wrap up, give us a quick, like, where can we find you? Where can we find Postal? Like, where should we, where should we stalk you at?

BP (31:24):

Yeah. postal.io is the web address. We're also on LinkedIn and Twitter. I am also on LinkedIn and Twitter. Oh, Postal's also on TikTok. I'm on TikTok, but all I do is like, but Postal's on TikTok and they do pretty good. We do pretty good on TikTok. So that's interesting. I love that B2B companies are starting to kind of pull that, pull that into the strategy.

AL (31:50):

Yeah. I'm nervous about TikTok. I get it though. I get it.

BP (31:54):

Yeah. I think it's different for us. We have like the vendors to feature too. So it's like their stories and our internal team more than like, this is what the product does, but it's a little bit of behind the scenes, which I really like.

AL (32:04):

That's cute. Thank you for being here. It was awesome to talk to you as always, really appreciate your insights.

BP (32:11):

Always. Thank you for having me.