Influ2 CEO Dmitri Lisitski

(phone ringing) - Wow, are you? - Hi mom, this is the time we set, right? - Absolutely, so you wanna get started. - Yeah, so what stood out to you in this one as something you think people might find interesting? - Well, first of all, I have a take on what they name is Influe 2, I-N-F-L-U-T, the number two. So I was thinking it could be Influe 2-U. - Why the extra U? - Because they make it possible to target ads to individuals as opposed to marketing that's more general. - So the U is like, it expresses the reaching an individual? - U, I thought that was obvious. To U, U, Influe 2, to whom? To whom, is it who or whom? - I think it would be whom by the book. - Okay, Influe 2-U, yes. I think that improves upon it. - Uh-huh. - It makes the list. - All right, well, I'll tell them about it. - Okay, let me know if anything comes of it. I dabbing a changer or their stuff that they send out with a stationary or everything. The people use stationary anymore. - Yeah, probably some people have cards or stuff. - Special letters, legal letters, and stuff like that. - Yeah. (upbeat music) - This is the bigger narrative, I'm Andy Raskin. I'm honored to have as my guest for this episode Demetri Lissitsky, CEO of Influe 2. Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook make it possible to advertise to named individuals. So, instead of just trying to reach, say, Joan Smith by targeting people who match Joan's demographics, people who might click on similar things, you can literally show and add to Joan Smith by name. Influe 2 makes it easy and not only to serve ads this way across a lot of platforms, but also to figure out who specifically clicked. The applications for B2B marketers are interesting. And when targeting say Google, instead of spamming departments and titles, you could zero in on a few critical decision makers. B2B marketers could advertise to people after those people are already in the sales pipeline. Say to like a CFO on whose desk a deal is waiting to be signed. The hard part to meet you told me is explaining how Influe 2 fits in the universe of marketing and sales tools. The last straw he said was during this final round interview with a really promising marketing candidate. He asked this woman to sum up Influe 2. She was kind of close, but still very vague about it. The reason why I was so frustrated is because you know the person who gets prepared for this interview and they went through like three, four interviews before at least. So they really spend time thinking about it. And even if at that moment, it's very hard for them to tell like what do we do. Like this is a very alarming signal. What do you expect customers for like five seconds looking at your buyer? And I think another aspect to this was we spent so much time looking for product market fit. If you sell to a customer in one year after the tell they were, okay, they like it, they want to buy more. This way you get expansion in every year. Expression in every means we understand what it is. It makes sense. The last year was we get to this point like where we have a majority of customers they really want to expand like what we're doing. It was a very important milestone here to the moment that gave it works, right? But still we can't explain what it is, right? And they don't explain. Actually, if you ask our customers even now, I think many of them will be very different in the explanations. I mean, we did talk to a lot of customers. But before we get to that, how are you talking about the company when you were talking to people before what was the pitch? So we called it, we said like we do person-based advertising. Person-based advertising. And what was the problem with that? The challenge was person-based could mean very different things. Some people assumed it's persona-based, which is a very different idea. So persona-based is like, hey, want to target finance? Or I want to target HR, right? So they're like, buy a persona that you want to target. It's not a specific contact. And then some people assume personalized, which was horrible idea because like this is that we don't want them to do it. Hey, I can put some people to their name on their brand. So if we want to advertise to Mary, we can say, hey, Mary, in the ad, and that's not what you wanted to do. For email, it works well because you expect emails to be personalized, right? While advertising is like the opposite, you expect a redizing to be not personalized, suddenly because personalized, which is very creepy because people follow you in or for that. It's creepy, yeah. I remember also you were talking a lot about ABM, account-based marketing, as a kind of framing concept for Influ2. Could you talk about that a little bit? So if you want to support your sales process, you probably want to try it, accounts you want to sell to, it makes sense, right? Like no, I can argue again, but accounts are just too big, right? It's still a volume game. It's just too many people working for Enka. If someone is still the Microsoft, and I target as the people who work at Microsoft, that's a lot of people. Exactly. The way I explain it is like if you buy a billboard in San Jose, right? Like it's the same size as Microsoft as a company. So it's still a good idea of who he seems as billboard. So I think the concept of account-based marketing is right, but you want to do it in the personal level because you want to go to individuals. But then I think the trap that we initially said, "Hey, ABM sucks. Let's switch to personal-based marketing." And that was very bad idea because that was the moment when the ABM became a thing for the market. So most customers said, "Hey, we just bought a new tool in the ABM space, and suddenly there's a new vendor that tells us that that was a bad idea." And this guy is a small, like, who they are to tell us what to do. And then again, like it's very hard to argue because the whole idea of account-based marketing was right. And then we tried to say, "Okay, we are kind of kind of solution ABM." - I resolution ABM. - So like, yeah, we're gonna help you do it more in a more targeted way. - Yeah, but no one understood what it is, right? So it's like it's very nice, creative way to stop the bosses, but it's very hard to understand what exactly. - I remember when I started looking through your collateral at the beginning, in some places, it would say, "We are not an ABM tool." And then in other places, it would say, "We are an ABM tool." - I think it was really circles for us. - So eventually we decided, "Let's get away from ABM as a positioning thing." Maybe it's not the best place to start. Let's talk about where you got to. Could you give a sense of what are the pieces of the narrative now? How do you talk about it now? - Most people assume ads are just like, to generate leads. And they say, like, it's new kind of advertising that does not generate leads, but actually helps you to drive sales. So like, from the production, to sell, to upsell. - I thought this was a huge thing when you guys got to this because it's not positioning against ABM. It's positioning against other kinds of advertising. And what we're saying is, traditional advertising is essentially a top of the funnel tool. What you're offering where you can advertise to named buyers is, "Hey, that could be useful as someone goes through the sales pipeline because salesperson is targeting them for a conversation or even when the deal is waiting to be signed." And we wanna reach a couple of key people. That was really interesting to me. - Yeah, I think we choose our own enemy. Our enemy initially was ABM. It was completely our own enemy because we fit very well in the ABM space and we have strategy. But the real enemy was like, the idea is that you use ads to generate leads. - Yeah. One of the key slides your team built was showing through the whole sales pipeline, how these ads could be used as a high precision tool for influencing the people who are really key in a decision as the deal goes along because it's just so clear there about how it's different from traditional advertising. - Yeah, so basically we talk about the new kind of advertising. We call it contact level advertising, which was a very interesting challenge for us to define the category. - I feel like there's no three word thing that's going to be the magic bullet by itself. But when you hit on that story of what we mean by this contact, I feel like that's where it started to really get some juice. - Yeah, I think once we nailed it, it went surprisingly easy because for most people, it's just so easy now as we move to a new area, it's such an obvious thing. It feels like it was over there. I think it created a lot of confidence in my team to just go ahead and use it. There was no internal friction about like, is it good enough or should it be better? Or I think the biggest challenge I have right now is because I was using the all talk track for such a long time. So I need to reload and require my brain to use it. But yeah, once I use it, I feel very confident. And how are you seeing buyers react to it? - I think it's just, do they understand the faster and easier? I think that's kind of an outcome. It's just get it easier. It's all the, we don't have problems playing out probably if we have 30 minutes. The question of like, how do we do it in two minutes, right? So that's where, that's how it was different between like, wood narrative and bad narrative. Because the program are defeated there, right? So it's challenging how to make it easy to grasp. - What would you say was difficult about getting to this narrative in terms of the process? Was there anything challenging about getting people to buy in and what happened here? I'm curious about that. - Well, overall, it wasn't that hard. So honestly, I think the process went very smoothly. I think we spend a lot of time, we build a lot of awareness about, hey, this is not the right story. - You mean like within the company you had talked a lot about, hey, we seem to have a problem here on how we talk about ourselves. - Yeah, exactly. The awareness was very like 100%. We all knew that we need to find a new story. And then this kind of stuff in a very strange, interesting problem that actually we managed to solve when we talked about this as a team with you was that our cerebral jaw was pushing the idea that we should not be that tactical, Like see you all as don't care about. like how do they ask? They care about revenue. But for me, for marketing team, if you talk about revenue, everyone else is talking about revenue too, right? So it's like every single GTM marketing or sales tech website, it looks the same. It's not about AI and revenue, right? So it's very hard to differentiate in this bloodbath of like AI revenue tools, right? Right. So your CR road wanted to talk about revenue as the kind of opening silo in the story. It was more about like value focused approach, which I think in the national's right idea, like you want to talk about revenue create a sort of value. But then if you only talk about value create, there are so many other tools that create the same value. It's like going to create health should to drive revenue and sales force helps with dry running and helps with the health. So how do we differentiate in this world, right? One way I talk about this trade off is I have this gender neutral version of Cinderella, where let's say we're the company that makes technology to turn the pumpkin into the chariot and get the person to the ball. We want to make our website. What's the first thing we want to talk about? Do we want to say, attend the ball as our like top high level message? Or do you want to say live happily ever after? I always ask people when I do talks and stuff, you know, which would you choose? And there's really not a right answer because you know, live happily ever after great. It's a very high level kind of you said, like the results oriented thing, the aspirational thing I want, the disadvantage of live happily ever after is that it's very vague. We come to website and see live happily ever after. No idea what they do. And I think that's similar to, hey, we help you boost revenue. It's not very clear. Attend the ball is much more concrete. Okay, I really have an understanding what this company does. It's not as aspirational. And I think one thing that your team did was really move in the attend the ball direction, at least for the first high level message. Of course, we're going to tie that to revenue impact and all the rest, but it comes later. Yeah, I think ultimately it's kind of impossible to tell the story in one shot. And I think like speaking about like what was going to happen next, the biggest challenge is like, how do you communicate this? You need now to break the story down like in small pieces and digestable pieces. But in the nutshell, I think this story of funk is and then get into the ball and happy after it's all kind of waiting compressively, like easily digestible story that now we can smash it to break it down into Martin messages. One of the terms we were thinking about, I remember was named the buyer ads. And some of the people on the team didn't like that one. And then you decided to do a survey. Tell me about that and how that helped to move forward. I think the challenge for any communication is that you assume when we say something that people understand that exactly is the way we think about it. Like if you talk to your coach like in the GM, right? And you kind of you'll be right. You're trying to learn a new thing for the coach is very obvious thing what you need to do, right? But then if you try to follow because you don't have experience with the worst he is saying you just do it wrong. It's not because we're stupid. We just never experienced our body never did it before. So I think it's pretty much the same story. It's like the framework is there, but what are the words that will make people move in the right direction? Sometimes it's very hard to find. And honestly, I started my career in market research. So I know there's a lot of problems with market research and I will not trust it otherwise. And the finest part of this was like we were testing against person-based ads and and name pirates. While the third option was like just to make sure we have some really bad options like the conveyor like we just came out like randomly out of my mind. I think Joe was talking about the contact level ads. Just to know for listeners, Joe is in flew to CRO Joe McNeil. And I was like yeah let's just put it in like just to compare and suddenly this option was very clearly. And now in retrospect I understand why it one is because that wasn't the most intuitive thing in Joe's mind. Yeah. And while everything else we created really thinking about it. So I think the most intuitive thing turned to be easier to understand things. So you went with that one, the contact level at advertising which you didn't think was going to be taken seriously but actually. Yeah, I think and by the way, I think for each option people ultimately have to still be talking about it. Well, there was some confusion about person-based ads about it. For name pirates, there was no confusion. Maybe looking back at it. Not all the people we want to advertise to we think of as buyers initially but contacts people are talking about contacts and sales force or whatever. He just commonly used term for targets. In better way, actually we also used work targets which like some lipid synthesis maybe that would win. Any advice you'd give to other CEOs who are in a similar position looking to hone the narrative like this? Well, I think you don't want to think about narrative too much before you figure out your product market fit. So I think we would not be successful in doing this like five years ago. You need to first figure out what you do, right? And then what's the best way to explain what you do, right? There are a lot of great products especially I think consumers that basically develop narrative together with the product definition. In B2B you can still second your story and then build something meaningful simply because you have time to explain it's all about human interaction. And then on the opposite side I think obviously it's more for category definition race and obviously like if you have unique core ambition you want to build a new category and then that's where you need to have a strong narrative. If you have a good battle card probably you don't need this because there's no story behind it. What was this thing about if you have a really strong battle card you don't need this. What's that? Like we don't have battle cards. It's possible to build because there's no features that we are different on. We are different than in what we're doing in the essence, right? Like many of new people that came in our company said like hey do you have battle cards? Like our battle card is just we do the contact level everyone has those that are under-testing level. You're essentially saying we don't have competitors which I know you don't think that in the high level but in terms of a category of a bunch of players that buyers would think they all do the same thing. There's not that grip. Yeah well I can easily imagine the product that has battle cards that compete in this small or in the tight industry but they want to break out into new category and build something completely different like bigger category. The bigger vision behind what they're doing. So I think that definitely they need a narrative for this and I assume like any VC back company if they don't need the narrative probably the one we successful as a venture investment, right? Because like it's impossible to build billion-dollar-class value products without a narrative behind this clear vision, right? And that's what venture capital I think investors expect from you is like when they talk about market potential like adjustable market. I think whenever people throw a his this ten trillion dollar industry we'll take one percent of that. This where most investors stop talking right?