Super Funnels with DeepCrawl

[Music] Welcome to the new episode of "Growcast". I'm super excited to have my friend Alex Schaefer on this episode. Alex Schaefer is deep-crawls chief revenue officer. In this role, he leads the go-to-market team that span sales, customer success, professional services, operations and partnerships. Alex is a seasoned technology and startup executive with 15 years of experience in private equity and venture capital backed ventures. He has also spent two and a half years with the Peace Corps in Kenya and has a global MBA from NCAD. He represents deep-crawl, which is the world's number one technical SEO site monitoring platform that helps users detect opportunities for growth and protects against deploying revenue-sapping code. Deep-crawl technology is trusted by over 50% of the Fortune 500 and all six of the major global group advertising agencies. Alex is here with us to talk about the concept of super funnels. Welcome Alex. Thank you very much for having me. Absolutely. Alex, we're going to get right into it. Super funnels is a very, very cool concept that I learned from you two weeks ago. So what is a super funnel and where did the concept come from? Yeah, so a super funnel. It's the idea that given where we're at, given that there's such a prevalence of data, given that we have more sophisticated and just generally more technology than ever before, you're able to build this super funnel, which is a low-calc, high-throughput, high-life time value funnel. So relatively low cost to get stuff in the top, you get as much as possible down at the bottom, and then that stays with you as long as possible and generates more revenue. So it's a little bit of a, it's aspirational. Let me use that word. But there are more tools available to create the super funnel than ever before. Yeah, I think it's a problem statement that most organizations struggle with. And obviously when they try to create big demand generation goals, a lot of people fail with the operation operation operation operation operation operation operation operation of it. And so I would love to talk about how should marketers think about creating their own super funnel. Yeah, when you have a big concept, you need to break it down into a few component parts and start with the two parts of it. There's really, there's the funnel piece, which is the low customer acquisition cost, high-throughput, and then the high-life time value customer. So you start with breaking that out in the two different things because they are quite the impact each other, but they're quite separate. So you know, define what your high-life time value customers are, the perfect ideal customer profile. And then you have to think about how do you get them into into your funnel and through to the bottom as efficiently as possible. Break it into those two different pieces as a starting point. I think for the sake of this conversation, I'm going to focus and we're all say my expertise lies in the low-calc high-throughput funnel. So dig deeply into that today. And if there's some time, we'll talk a little bit about the process for going about defining your high LTV customers. Sounds good, Alex. I think that yeah, one of the optimal goals that we usually try to chase is this three-to-one or four-to-one LTV to CAC ratio and enterprise in enterprises. And then the aspirational goal is empowering B2B to B customers with a similar retention rate. For the purposes of this, as you pointed out, we're going to focus on customer acquisition. So net net when you think about super funnels and you think about your high-impact customers, what are the implications for your customer acquisition strategy as they start building out a super funnel? Yeah, first thing is no no no great revelation here. No greats unique insight. I'm going to share it's first we need to think in the context of this current environment, which is digital first a UK GM at Salesforce. He defined it as digital only depends on the industry and depends on the space you're in. But we are still in a world that is predominantly digital. The good thing is the way to build super funnels, the way that it's the digital channels are where there is now this kind of advancement in technology and obviously digital channels. That's where you've got the best chance to deploy kind of take insights from data and and have that shape strategy and get better output through from your funnels. So the first thing is it's kind of understanding how your customers are how what are they doing? How is their behavior? What is their buyer journey look like in this digital first world? And we're a year into the pandemic, but a lot of us it's the situation is evolving quickly every every market is is an every kind of customer segment whether you're selling to mothers or you're selling to CMOs of enterprises. Everyone's behaviors are changing quarter over quarter. So it's it you need to think about the strategies that you had pre pre COVID pre pandemic and think about the things that you did to shape behavior to shape the buying journey. How does the changes in the buying journey how the changes in behaviors as your market is going through the buyer journey. How can you now shape that what is that look like where are they doing the things that they did in the real world. What are they do how they ported that over to a more digital existence and how do you shape that. Yeah, I mean I usually like to think about like on each channel journeys as the when the way you're describing it right so. If you think about a mother and you describe like it could be anything from like an Amazon Prime to Walmart to honest company and what you could do some people are digitally native right depending on generation that you arrive from and you want to have a 24 to 48 hour delivery time in which case. You are focused on timing and convenience in other ways it could be somewhere further downstream where people like to actually purchase online but then obviously it could be a buy online pick up and store it could be buy online return and store it could be curbside pickup where you're actually joining it to let's say grocery delivery and you want to pick it up and but all these people because they want some semblance of the routine that they've adopted. During the pandemic or a simulation the routine that they had before which is via this curbside pickup as an example then you need to really map out each one of these customer journeys in a similar format to possibly a decision tree obviously understanding the triggers along the way this could start from the CR level this could start from the CDP this could start from even a data management platform starting from a local like audience to hyper personalized one to one. Decisioning system but you really to your point have to get into the weeds of precision marketing and I think that will allow people to start developing a more robust customer acquisition strategy where it's not generic where people feel like not only is the communication personalized but every little aspect. The micro journey within the customer journey is tailored towards said customer right absolutely absolutely and you said you said a few things that feed into this this idea of super funnels and in how to build them in this in the April 2021 April first April fools day of you as we're transitioning from the pandemic world slowly moving into a post pandemic world but we're out of the world. This pandemic world but we're obviously still a long way ways there's the the frameworks are going to be the same but the way they might be applied and the way they might be executed on are going to be different from a legacy brick and brick and mortar retail type of business to a digital first business and also there going to be executed on differently if your primary customer if you're if your ICP is is is. A digital native or if they are someone who is you know if they're of the an older generation if they're a boomer who've just been you know ripped into this world yankton to this world to become much more digital so how you think about executing on the building a super funnel it's going to be different in context context but I do believe the the framework applies it's going to be the same. framework. You also talked about something that is becoming more and more possible is the ability to leverage physical assets. So really what important as we move to a post-pandemic world, gradually to responsibly leverage physical assets, everyone is craving normalcy. People are looking to get back to a world that is not so constrained. And physical assets, you mentioned a few things that were very innovative six, nine months ago, curbside pickup, buy online pickup in store. But these are the little things that the little tactics that make a difference between winning in this digital first world and just completely falling behind. Yeah, yeah, I mean like, when I drop on like three examples, there's like Williams to know them that gets 70% of its sales VE commerce. You have people in the historical context would think about a furniture store, Williams to know my own properties like pottery barn, etc. And they would think like how would that even fathom that they're not going into a flagship store, sitting, feeling, etc. But there is an element of like, you know, 360 views, potential AR integrations too that is taking over that is that people are now embracing as a new normal from an e-commerce standpoint. There's Nike, which is like also giving you the ability like Zappos to, you know, we'll ship it to you, but you can return it. There are other industries that are now against to it like capsule, for example, the desk 24 hour to 48 hour capsule delivery, like pills, right? Like pill pack. And you normally would go into CVS and Walgreens to actually pick up your prescriptions, but now you don't have to do that. And that is analogous to like, all right, I understand my customer. I understand what's important to them. I need to give them generic prices versus like proper prices like branded prices, but then also sending it directly to them, right? Yeah, yeah. And I think there's one of the big points, the one of the big things that, yeah, we're in the technology world and the thing that we are seeing the best performing CMOs, the best performing marketing organizations, one of the key things, it's simply having the modern tech stack of this is this is one of the the core pillars to to the super funnel concept. It's understanding what the current technologies that that are out there that help you deliver outside's return and getting them within your tech stack. Second, getting the talent that understands this new digital first world understands technology is very, very quantitative, even in roles that maybe were more creative previously. There's just so much data in the smarter that a marketing organization can be the more that they have that quantitative analytical skill set in every single function within the marketing organization, the more effective they're they're going to be. And then kind of these then go a final piece that goes hand in hand, it's simply you got to be really disciplined and really sophisticated about measuring ROI and and being ruthless and understanding what's working what's not working as certain spends I have diminishing ROI redirect that to other places where you're seeing that there is much greater potential. Yes, the flexible budgeting for ROI is a very, very important one. I think that during the pandemic a lot of organizations had to move month to month versus quarterly to because every organization was struggling about like what's going to be the next month strategy let alone the next right is the world falling off the rails completely or is it only you know for going off course for a little bit is and you have to have dynamic budgeting and dynamic ROI, which is something that people are coveting right now and you alluded to three important things that I want the listeners to take away from what you just mentioned, which was the more tech stack the resources that go with it and this idea of dynamic budgeting slash dynamic ROI. With related to more tech stack because a lot of let's say people that are want to prepare themselves and their organizations for this digitally native some of it being permanent some of it being in a hybrid model are there things around like tools around social media, paid search, website analytics or marketing automation that you'd recommend that are very useful that they should consider. Yeah, yeah and that's absolutely so connecting it to what we were talking about a little bit earlier of understanding where people are going, understanding where people are spending more time online now, understanding where your customers in particular how they're going about the buying process and everything that feeds that leads up to the buying process. So you need to know which channels have the greatest amount of activity that are the sort of inflection points of your customers buying process, but from there that should feed into what to invest in in terms of tech stack because there is a limit you can't get the most modern the best the highest grade everything, but social media, the it is getting the ROI of most social media ad spends it is eroding. There's interesting numbers from segment to segment, but we're seeing that you know it's anywhere from it's cost is anywhere 30 to 50% higher to get the same type of type of output for certain categories that's still fine, but certain categories that start to get to the beyond the point of where ROI makes sense. There's technologies out there like there's much more sophisticated social media monitoring and social media analytics, Sprout social is a good sort of mid market, not hugely expensive technology sprinklers a little bit more on the enterprise size Falcon IO that's another one that's we're not not advocating for any specific technology, but these are the types of technologies that you should be looking into and trying to understand if if social media is a big channel for you, then take a look at these technologies. There's a whole slew of pretty pretty really basic but incredibly useful tools that Google pays that Google provides that helps you understand basically how to spend more money through them. So they're going to they're going to equip you with that the the area where where deep crawl is the where we operate in and where we see some really insane growth over the last year in particular, but it is in the organic the SEO space. So there's a whole set of technologies that are out there now that can help you make the absolute most out of what is actually the largest channel of traffic online. So it's 50% of 51% of all traffic to an end website other than Google starts from Google starts from a Google search and purchasing related traffic it's anywhere from 40% to 60% within different segments. So there is a big right opportunity to to mind that huge huge huge pool of traffic, but you need to use the right technology and analytics to understand kind of what your current performance is and really optimizing the site for both the user experience and so that it ranks as high as possible within in Google. These are the things that can be a make a really really big difference to two examples really quickly. One is simply building off of the one of Nike their digital sales grew 75% in in 2020. They do really sophisticated stuff with their user experience. All types of really cool design capabilities on the site if you can even if you're not a shoe head you can easily spend a half hour hour on their website just playing around with the different technologies they have because it's really cool. But they also invest heavily in in SEO. They are they have a big team they invest in the technology infrastructure. They think about their their website experience not just from the user but also from from the search engines perspective and they kill it in organic and that's helped feed that 75% growth in in 2020 in in their digital sales. And the different in the financial services there's another Motley pool. They are also a digital first business but they've absolutely killed it. They had 300% growth in organic traffic and revenue associated from the organic channel. And they have they had a pretty old clunky website and they've just invested in better user experience. They've invested in the site monitoring. They've invested in all the little things all the the sort of strong nuts and bolts strong foundation of technical health that then enable good user experiences fast seamless user journeys within the website and also that tend to rank really high within Google. Yeah there's a lot to unpack there so there's a few things that I want to call out. One is that organizations have become very dynamic with like taking on the tech second house and they've created these things. called Centers of Excellence where they are obviously what you alluded before with the flexible budgeting resources and more tech stack. They use all that to create solutions in-house and then of course, deploy it from a Skunk Works project into a real-world implementation, but it definitely starts with the POC phase. Now, organizations that I think you alluded to Nike, so Nike has something called Ballant Labs. Ballant Labs actually does have a lot of its new technology that they prototype and then they deploy over different platforms, right? Maybe mobile, social, or even their web platform. And it gives people an insight into how to try some of these new shoes, or it gives them a feeling of some replacement to the store or an augmentation to the store. The second piece of that was, I think about as BCG Digital Ventures, right? So BCG Digital Ventures has a very interesting innovation engine, which is how can you build Skunk Works projects that are, let's say I will build a brand new company that is fun out that will eventually move into as a portcode portfolio company, a subsidiary into a customer's overall thing. And BCG Digital Ventures will have part equity along with, let's say, Nike, Williamson, Oma, etc. But BCG Digital Ventures will be responsible for the problem and the product market fit and then hand it off to a large organization. And that model also employs a certain amount of growth via tools like the ones that you mentioned, the other ones are marketing automation like HubSpot, MoorKeto. You also use tools like similar web, similar Russian RFs, which could be interesting, but they definitely take it to a growth level that companies can then be like, all right, we're ready for it to be run within in-house. Yeah, and there's two, the one category of technology, two specific technologies that I highly recommend that maybe aren't completely mainstream at this point is the similar web in Samarosh. If you are sitting in a position where you don't fully understand what you're, you don't feel like you have good insights into the way that your customers online behavior has changed. Similar web and Samarosh in particular, each refs, they also provide similar data, but it's tons and tons of useful insight around what people are doing across every single digital channel. It's almost overwhelming how much they have, but there's a ton you can learn. It's great for targeting new potential, potential to market segments that identify trends to capitalize on. So tons of online search, behavioral, transactional trends that can be really, really useful for forming a strategy and then helping you decide how much resources to deploy on different opportunities. Yeah, Samarosh recently IPO'd. Yeah, I think they're going to do really, really well. They have built a unique mode. And I think sprouts social and one of the other more tech players that I want to call it was Sharp Spring. They're doing exceptionally well in this digital arena. In terms of advertising players, we've seen actually our ad tech coming back right now too. If you even look at the performance of them in the public equity market, everything from a pubmatic to an ac-QD ads to a magnite, there is a surge in a revival. And a lot of what I'm seeing now as an increasing trend is the blend between Martek and ad tech, which is how can you actually employ e-commerce advertising as a potential channel for that will start there, but then eventually will end at the site or both mobile or web of a brand, which is becoming increasingly popular, this concept of shoppable ads, right? So yeah. Yeah. And a final, somewhat connected to this. And this is a big area of focus of our art technology investment in our R&D is in is simply it's it's operationalizing marketing and marketing technology and internal connectivity between engineers and in different marketing teams, where there's the ability to execute on any given marketing strategy. It's more and more reliant on on the tech stack and the ability to customize, get efficiencies, use data in a smarter way, connect APIs, pull everything into data lakes. There's a ton that is that is relied on now from marketing teams, the reliance is in the with the engineering organization. So building great relationships with the engineering organization, investing in technology that that will automate and create efficiencies to help your engineers and help your CTO to more efficiently deliver on the tech stack and the marketing product roadmap that is needed to execute on strategy, the further you're going to go. And that's another most sophisticated organizations are seeing some of the most successful. That's the kind of stuff they're working on. And that's the kind of stuff that we see a ton of potential in in terms of unlocking value for businesses and for us in creating our technology platform. Alex, I'm glad you brought up that point because a lot of people think that the problem just lies with the advertising/marketing folks and you have to bring product and engineering into the journey. And I think that that is when you think about even building by some organizations think that they would like to buy stuff in house. But instead of like thinking about that the relationship with an ISV could also be a build. It's just that you're not building the entire stack. You're inviting them into part of the workflow is a necessary, let's call it conceptual change in the mind of product and engineering. And that communication has to be delivered from the marketing team and the ISV who would be working in concert with the digital marketing team. Yeah, absolutely. And there are more there are more and I would put deep crawl within this realm, but incredibly high quality pieces of technology that solve a pretty specific set of problems. And those technologies are there in the enterprise context they are going to be most powerful if they can connect to other technologies and to be part of a kind of bigger, broader technology platform and technology stack. But you know, it's it starts with having finding technologies that solve really define really cute problems. And then if you have all the development research in the world, share build, but more and more, it's like just bringing this this this a vertical piece of technology. And as long as that piece of technology has a great API, which naturally deep crawls does, then you can just connect it into whatever it needs to connect to build that automation build efficiency, have data flowing to whatever teams need data that's going to be generated from the piece of technology. Yeah, I mean, so I want to summarize this and Alex, thank you for joining this episode, but for everybody's broader super funnels, obviously, is the high cack high throughput, sorry, a low cack high throughput high high supply value concept. And a lot of it starts with where you are in your business, right? Do you drive like the larger portions of existing customers or new customers now if customer acquisition is a big part of the funnel, which in most cases it is, you have to start thinking about the three pillars that Alex laid out, which is your more tech stack, your resources, and your dynamic budget slash analytics, right? Or ROI in the more tech stack, there are different tools that can be at your disposal, which are marketing automation, SEO, SCM. And you have to really understand what is the marketing budget that you have and how many campaigns do you want to run, how many searches, how many customers are searching for you based on a comprehensive like equation, if you will, you would start layering in three, five vendors that will work with your engineering team to build out your full stack. With that, you have to have a complimentary resource team, which is demand just gen specialist, it could be SEO specialist, it could be a SCM specialist or it could be somebody who is a full stack market here. But somebody that understands all these different tools and is basically working towards optimizing obviously you don't want to employ too many customer acquisition strategies from the get go. So it is a iterative learning process. I'll highly recommend that you take one channel at a time. But it starts with the customer journey in terms of who the customer is, where do they lie, how much data do we have, can we hyper personalize it to get to that on your channel, holy grail. And then finally, when it comes to dynamic ROI or budgeting, is now that we know that like budgets may change. And customers may change and we're looking at a more precise category of customers. To facilitate this, let's call it higher row as, or return an ad spend, or an higher lower CPM, we are basically going to be, have to be more nimble and flexible. And so from the perspective of an ISV, if it means that you have to get into monthly and quarterly billing and invoicing to make the necessary adjustments would be huge and or coming up with a contract where the customer feels like it's flexible, so that they don't have large break clauses, could be somewhat useful so that they feel it's flexible, they're not tethered to it. And as you get out of the pandemic, you feel like the customer feels like this ISV was a big partner in participating in not only my time to strife, but my time to grow, then I will get that success. So with that, Alex, thank you so much for joining the podcast. We were super excited to have you to bring in this super fun concept. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you very much and great summary at the end there. [Music]