BC Startup Sales Podcast – Creating a Customer Landscape with Dave Govan (Dynamic Yield)
0 0 11
Dave has a stellar background as a long time CRO in the SaaS and marketing technology spaces. Over the last decade or so, Dave has served as an SVP leading North American Enterprise sales at VeriSign, and as an EVP at Sailthru, where he led global sales and oversaw a period of rapid expansion into the company’s growth phase. Currently, Dave is the CRO of DynamicYield, a fast-growing provider of SaaS website revenue yield optimization solutions. Finally, Dave is a prolific speaker on sales best practices in marketing SaaS and has authored a book on the topic called Crisis In The Enterprise.
Creating a Total Universe Of Accounts seems—on first glance—like a relatively straightforward exercise. But there are clear pitfalls and common mistakes that can lead to a confused and unfocused sales team early on in the life of a startup. As the CRO of DynamicYield, and a longtime SaaS, head of sales, Dave draws out a number of points that we hope you can use as a guide to improve your sales org. While no Total Universe Of Accounts is—or can be determined—the same, we lay out a clear process to built a focused, data-driven strategy that can help ensure that your early-stage sales team hits the ground running.
Give the podcast a listen here:
You can check out the transcript here:
NP: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast. Today, we have with us Dave Govan who is the Chief Revenue Officer of Dynamic Yield. How’s it going today, Dave?
DG: It’s going great, NP. Thanks for having me.
NP: Yeah. Thanks for joining us. So, I think to kick off, it would be great if you could just give us a little background on your role Dynamic Yield, what you guys do and then maybe a little bit on roles before that.
DG: Sure. At Dynamic Yield, I am global CRO. So, I work out at the world headquarters here in New York and we have an amazing marketing application where we’re helping media companies and e-commerce companies create more personalized and more engaging optimized experiences without the need for IT, without the need to integrate into content management systems, without the need to have development done because we provide a middle layer on the client side that drives everything. So, we are finding that major brands like The New York Times and Kenneth Cole etc. are really excited in getting some really tremendous results out of what we are doing.
NP: That’s awesome. And, maybe also just for account of the edification of our listeners here today, if maybe just give, you know, quick few points on kind of previous roles you’ve been in this kind of Head of Sales role of, you know, a number of companies.
DG: Sure. Yeah, sure.
NP: Yeah.
DG: I had the great pleasure to be Chief Revenue Officer at Sailthru and prior to that, I had my own consulting business. I actually advised CEOs in tech on optimizing go-to-market strategies and execution. That was called G2 Strategic Advisory Services. I authored a book on improving tech sales. It’s called “Crisis and the Enterprise” that’s available on Amazon. I’ve written a blog for a number of years and I formerly ran North America for Verisign and I worked at Oracle and a couple of startups in between. I started in Personalization back in the late 90’s when it was really early stage and I’ve had a couple of opportunities to work in that space. So, I’ve been very fortunate.
NP: So, we have a lot to learn from Dave here today, but what we will focus in on and what we’re going to dive into is creating a total universe of customers. And so, I will let Dave dive into to that concept, but I think it’s a lesson and a number of anecdotes here that should be extremely useful to both heads of sales and early startup CEOs as they think about building their sales organization and how to attack the right customers at the right time.
DG: Thanks NP. I’m very passionate about these topics. So, I’m excited to speak with you about it. So, after you create a business plan, you start operating, you have your go-to-market strategy in place and hopefully, you’ve put together a market map that really clearly identifies the voice of the customer that you are following, particularly from a persona standpoint and this will resonate with a lot of folks who work in this space. And so, you know the titles of people that you’re interested in marketing and selling to, you know what they care about and you have that down and then as you develop your solution, you lay out your solution strategy. Obviously, it addresses the needs of those people and what they’re interested in. And so, it flows very well how you’re exploring competitive vulnerabilities etc. and then it comes down to the actual execution of marketing and sales and that’s where creating a total universe of accounts comes into play. And so, what we’re looking for there really is it’s… while it may seem cool to try to sell your product to everyone and every type of company, it actually doesn’t work in B2B and that’s really the area that I’ve focused in throughout my career. What’s really more important is to identify those verticals, those two or three core verticals, to quote Geoffrey Moore’s work in ‘Crossing the Chasm’, which is a classic at this point, he really nailed it with his technology adoption curve where he laid out the, the earliest adopters, innovators and then you have early adopters, you have mainstream, late adopters, and laggards. So, in our case we are looking for people who are innovators and early adopters or if they are in a mainstream company, they are an innovator within their company and that’s the case with many new technology companies. It’s very important to find change agents and people who are looking to make a difference. So, that concept of people also applies to companies. There are companies that have a reputation for being more innovative in the, you know, in their markets than others and so that factors into filtering from a total universe of account’s perspective. But essentially, in a nutshell, it’s filtering out by SIC code, you know, vertical, sub-vertical, where you’re really going to add the most value, where your solution’s going to add the most value.
NP: So, yeah. All this happened there for us actually, so… but, you know, we’re talking about creating this, you know, total universe of customers and there are a kind of number of axes or a number of, you know, number of qualifiers for each company we can consider. You know, we just talked about industry vertical or SIC code. You can also think about to what extent they are an effective adopter of technology, whether they are an early adopter, you know, they have good champions for working with tech vendors internally or whether they are laggard. That would be a kind of a second axis. There are also a number of others, so how big the company it is in terms of revenue or employees, potentially even geography depending on how you structure your sales team. So I guess considering these different factors, Dave, maybe we could just take it back, imagine, you know, you’re working with a CEO relatively early on in the life of a company.
DG: Yes.
NP: And, you’re having this conversation of, “Okay, we have a sense for who our ideal customers are, but we need to create this total universe of customers.” How, you know, you’re welcome to use the actual anecdotes or just talk about it generally about how you kind of think through each one of these axes and do you actually end up coming up with that physical list at the end of that, you know, consideration set?
DG: Yes. That’s a great question. Yeah, so again it goes back to the go-to-market strategy planning with the founder, with the CEO, and sitting down and looking at like – where do we do the most good? Where do we add the most value?
NP: Yeah.
DG: From-from his or her perspective and then understanding that and then discussing use cases like practical use cases because at the end of the day, customers don’t buy features. They buy… first of all, we sell ideas and then they buy use cases, so it’s very important to come up with those use cases so we think about those use cases and then which actual types of companies, which industries and types of companies could benefit from those use cases so we use that and it’s always… I’ve never had an issue anywhere of working with a CEO on this, so it just kind of flows very…
NP: Sure.
DG: … very organically.
NP: Sure. So, let’s think through, I guess, a couple of those axes that you might consider as you’re building the total universe of customers. So, we talked a little bit about, you know, industry vertical, so you know, if you’re relatively early on… obviously if you have a vertical solution, you know, like DealerTrack, you know, one company that we…
DG: Yes.
NP: … we talked about in our previous podcast, you know, that who you’re going after, but…
DG: Correct.
NP: You have a horizontal solution. How do you test ‘would this vertical be a good one?’
DG: Sure. Yeah. So, if it’s like super, super early, you would have engaged with one particular type of company and, you know, I think it’s a well known best practice that when you’re launching a company, you actually don’t want to do it in a vacuum. You want to have real world input into your product design and implementation, so you will have just by, you know, natural flow, you’re going to have experience working in a particular type of company or vertical. In some cases though experiment in multiple and then see which ones resonate more…
NP: Yeah.
DG: In some cases, it’s like you start somewhere, but then you realize actually the market is a little different than you thought. So, you know, you’re flexible and you respond to that additional knowledge and kind of just make an adjustment, but at some point fairly quickly you realize really where you’re adding the most value…
NP: Yeah.
DG: …with your, you know, with your IP and that’s when you decide to focus in how to focus…
NP: That makes sense. Now, do you in your experience… is that a conversation that happens between you as the CRO and the CEO and the CMO on an ongoing basis? Are you pulling those data points from SCR sales people? Are you doing outside market research? I guess, how do you… there’s a lot of data to be consolidated.
DG: No, it’s a great point. In practicality, in most cases, that’s already been discovered by the time I am hired.
NP: Sure.
DG: Because the founders, they start with a very tiny team of people and they figure that out ahead of time.
NP: Yeah.
DG: In some cases though, the CRO may co-found and then they are figuring it out together.
NP: Yeah.
DG: But, in many cases, it’s identified and so, I found in my particular case, I’ve played a role of what I’d call optimization in that where they have figured out some really great places to start, but all the pieces weren’t necessarily put together.
NP: Sure.
DG: And that’s where I came in and helped optimize it further, refining a vertical, for example, like if you can say it’s e-commerce online retail, like in our industry, for example, I figured out that there’s also a utility aspect of value, so in other words if you’re consuming lots of different media content or you have many different products to sell that are highly taste-preferential, then, you know, the value of proposition is going to be very high. If it’s a utility-oriented relationship with a consumer, meaning I only come to the site when I need X.
NP: Yeah.
DG: … and I am really only interested in X and you might be able to sell me across only Y, but it’s probably not going to happen that often, so if you think of like hardware, for example…
NP: Sure.
DG: … so, there’s always exceptions obviously and there’s lots of gray technologies being used by these more utilitarian companies.
NP: Yeah.
DG: But, in general, so, there is some like learned knowledge that folks like myself will apply as well as we’re looking at it. On the other hand, if you look like at fashion, for example, fashion is a wonderful vertical for what we do and companies like us because there is this high taste preference…
NP: Yeah.
DG: … which is very, very… there are actually a significant number of cohorts yet to be discovered and identified by our analytics which our automation could then work off of and help engage those individuals and the same thing on media as well, the same principle applies if there is a diversity of content and a healthy volume of content…
NP: Yeah.
DG: … the algorithms are going to do the work and really add a lot of value. If you’re a site where you’re really publishing like, you know, one story a day or two, like highly, highly specialized a couple of stories a day…
NP: Yeah.
DG: It’s… we could… So, our value is going to be less. So, as a CRO, we take that into account as we’re doing the… defining the universe in at a sub-vertical level. We’re looking at that as well.
NP: Got it. So, I guess, you know, just to recap like, you know, financial… something like financial services versus the fashion vertical…
DG: Right.
NP: In your case you looked at, you know, really what is the value, the main value proposition of our product and what does that… what metric or, you know, what features does that tie to? In this case, it’s, you know, how much content do you put out there?
DG: Yes.
NP: And, you know, and then you analyze industry verticals in that way and then…
DG: That’s right.
NP: …maybe you find a new one that say, “Hey! I had no idea that autos did so much content, but you have a good idea”.
DG: Correct. So, like a contrast would be in financial services and in insurance, if it’s say, a financial services company that has a lot of really great content like in americanbanker.com or, you know,
someone like that, then solutions like ours will add a lot of value, right?
NP: Yeah.
DG: But, if it’s an insurance company that, you know, how often does a consumer buy insurance? How many different types of insurance products are there? It’s pretty much set and done. Now, we could still optimize landing pages for that customer and add value in the, you know, there’s definitely an opportunity to do business there, but it’s not going to be, like when you’re trying to grow a business, if you’re trying to be… if you’re trying to go too broad, you’re going to have issues because you’re going to wind up chasing opportunities that are going to be lower in terms of volume and value.
NP: Right.
DG: And it’s not… you’re not going to get as high of an ROI, whereas if you figure this out and you concentrate on the sweet spots in the market…
NP: Yeah.
DG: … then you’re going to drag more on.
NP: That makes a lot of sense. I think also, I mean, a kind of a sub-point here is, I mean, if we are thinking about our total universe of customers in terms of industry verticals, well, you know, once you have a couple of great adopters within fashion, just to give an example, you probably have a really good idea of how they procure software, what their specific, industry-specific pain points are…
DG: Yes.
NP: … and you can expand within that vertical.
DG: Absolutely. And that comes back to use cases. That’s spot on, NP. So, we know from working with online fashion retailers and other types of retailers like that, we know what use cases we were providing and they were using that are driving in the highest value.
NP: Yeah.
DG: So, when we commuNPate across that vertical, we can just give simple examples of that and in many cases, it resonates and there’s always unique situations where we expand and innovate together.
NP: Yeah.
DG: But, in many cases, it resonates. So, that’s spot on. I wanted to mention one other aspect of segmentation that is actually a… somewhat tricky for if you are involved. Like I am in the marketing technology space, right?
NP: Yeah.
DG: And you see the LUMAscape and there’s like a thousand companies literally and the LUMAscape in various reports, right? So, the traditional methods that tech companies go through to segment actually really don’t apply much in our space. So, it’s important for sales leaders and for marketers and for founders and CEOs, it’s important for them to recognize this and segment accordingly. So, what I mean by that, well, a traditional tech company… I used to work at Oracle, for example, we would look at these number of employees that the customer has as total revenue, sometimes locations depending on what we are doing and in the age of Internet 2.0 or 3.0.
NP: Yeah.
DG: They really kind of go out the window.
NP: Right.
DG: Because what we’re really interested in is the size of the internet community.
NP: Yeah.
DG: That’s what really matters to us, so you can… I’ve had situations in the past where literally there’s a 70 person company that’s doing a high six figure transaction with my organization for that reason.
NP: Yeah.
DG: But, they have five million registered users…
NP: Right.
DG: … on the internet or they have, you know, they are contacting ten million people on a regular basis. If you look at Mashable, for example.
NP: Yeah.
DG: It’s a perfect example and Mashable has 150 employees or something like that, may be 100. … somewhere around there and they are a 5 star prospect for us.
NP: Right.
DG: Right? Whereas there could be a, you know, a pharmaceutical company like Pfizer which has, you know, an enormous amount of employees and for what we sell and what we do, they’re going to be actually a low… a lower end prospect for us.
NP: Sure. You know, it’s a really good point and I think, you know, it ties back into the… to the concept as well of value based selling…
DG: Yes.
NP: … and also pricing. You know, you could have a giant organization, you know, if you’re selling mobile analytics solutions, you could have a giant Fortune 500 company, you have, you know, John Deere or Caterpillar, may not be relevant whatsoever and, you know, a very small app publisher where it’s their entire business. So, that’s an over-simplified, but, you know, another…
DG: It’s right on though.
NP: Yeah.
DG: And the same thing applies, you know, if you’re selling a solution for big data development organizations, right?
NP: Right, yeah.
DG: I mean, , you don’t know how many developers or data scientists the company has just by looking at the center demographics. It actually got to simulate into the community and you have to come up with some intelligence that tells you that.
NP: Right.
DG: Right? And some of that’s done through old fashion, making calls and figuring that out and some of it’s done through research doing research reports and going to conferences, but whatever it is you’re selling and to whom, you have to align the segmentation to get to that total universe of accounts with that because if you’re working on other principles, you’re actually going to leave money on the table. You’re going to, you know, miss an opportunity.
NP: Yeah. So, in your guys’ case, I think that’s an interesting point that I am thinking about, you know, the relevant team and how big that team as kind of a proxy for how important is this value prop to them. So, in your guys’ case, did you ever look at, you know, like LinkedIn, something along those lines to say, “Hey, how big is their web content team?” or something along those lines?
DG: Absolutely. It’s a great question. There are a lot of ‘aha’s’ in the data. Actually, I had an opportunity to meet Bill Campbell back when I was at Verisign. He was an advisor and that’s his quote, so, I’ll credit the former CEO of Intuit with that.
NP: Yeah.
DG: Yeah. The ‘aha’s’ are in the data and so, a lot of these technologies and tools that we use, you can actually pick up some interesting data filters like, for example, Data.com which used to be Jigsaw, now is owned by Salesforce, I’ve identified it a kind of a cool unique identifier of criteria-wise, which is the number of contacts.
NP: Yeah.
DG: So, the number of contacts in Data.com for a particular company, I would actually like at a manual level in some cases, my organization would create this humongous spreadsheet of all, you know, Data.com entities in a vertical…
NP: Yeah.
DG: I would sort by the number of contacts in Data.com back then Jigsaw and scan that and then all the entities that had only like one or two contacts or a zero…
NP: Right.
DG: … just remove them right away. We would just like literally get rid of them. Why? Data.com’s space on user-generated content for people like, you know, selling and if there’s not enough people actually who care about selling to an entity because maybe they are too small yet, then why should we, you know, bother?
NP: Yeah, like a good leading indicator that they may not be an early adopter…
DG: Yeah.
NP: … or that tech friendly.
DG: Yeah. And I’ll share one other one with you too which I’ve discovered in our space and particularly in the online marketing tech space. So, there’s lots of different data… we’ve all been… data types we’ve been familiar with. There is compete.com, Alexa Rankings, Google PageRank, you know, all those data, right?
NP: Sure.
DG: But, it is arduous to look up all of these data points for my team, so I… I don’t know if it was just by luck or if through research, but I found this really cool site… hopefully after this they don’t shut down you know from volume, but it’s called freewebsitereport.org. And what’s cool about freewebsitereport.org is they actually take all those different matrix and they us… they have their own algorithms and they create their own score, so there is an FWR score that is based on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the highest and so you know like a Mashable would be like a 5.0 and a new… a very new brand that’s just getting started would be a 1 etc. So, I have discovered that this is actually free to use.
NP: What does that score speak to?
DG: It’s… so… it’s… it’s a propriety score they have created that combines Google PageRank, the number of back links, the… Alexa Ranking, you know, a number of different matrix. They don’t expose the actual formula because I was curious about that. So I tested it myself and kind of like just did a sample audit and I checked it out and I would say for my segmentation purposes it is about 85-90 percent accurate in terms of the score on freewebsitereport.org correlating to the size of the opportunity for a company like ours in a marketing text based. As a result we have basically been using it’s… and they call it the FWR score, we have been using FWR scores and adding that in our CRM system which is salesforce.com and I have used that to segment between my mid market team, enterprise team. When we get a lead that comes in, we look up the FWR score and we determine that will tell us like how important… so, a quick example we are doing some really effective marketing retargeting now, and we just… two days we had a large Polish media site come in, in Polish, but you know we weren’t familiar with it because we don’t live in Poland, no offense to anyone who does and… but, we quickly went to freewebsitereport.org, looked it up and it is a 5 star property based on what they are doing. There are a lot of Polish speaking people who read that and… and it is a great… it looks like a great site and a great brand. So, as a result we knew not to like blow this off and just… but to pursue it heavily and that’s what we are doing. So, the point to these two anecdotal stories is there are depending on your industry, there are other data sources today and I am sure there is more added next month that you can find and use to help create this total universe of accounts that you want to focus on.
NP: Great! So, lets talk for a second about, you know, we have this total universe of accounts, you know we chatted a little bit earlier about the concept that if you wanted to blow this list out to you know enormous proportions, right? There is an ideal size you know and that probably ties to the size of your org, how many sales people you have. How do you think about what the ideal size is?
DG: Sure. So, I would answer that in… in the following way; it depends on where you are at in your journey, how mature of a company or how many sales resources you have, how horizontal versus vertical your solution is. So, for example, if I was like Zendesk back in the day which has a horizontal tool that can be sold many different places for customer support, right, lower ticket item, it would… my total universe of accounts would probably be fairly large. If you are a… marketing app… SaaS marketing application like ours, I actually don’t want a total universe of accounts of 200,000, that’s not going to… I know from experience that’s not going to actually serve me well. I want a narrower list, I want something like 8,000-10,000 accounts in the total universe of accounts because I know based on filtering for in our case for ecommerce and media, I know that that quantity is probably going to give me most of mid markets and enterprise accounts I am interested in at this point in time. Now, there are always exceptions, just because we define it, it doesn’t mean we turn away someone that comes in, like the Polish news site or community site example, we don’t turn away someone just because they are not on our predefined list. But this definitely helps us focus more and then over time I would see our total universe of accounts expanding by something like, you know 5x and 10x as we enter additional verticals with additional use cases, then we will add financial services and consumer package goods, you know other industries that… as we grow. So, it is really I think… it’s a… it’s a matter of where you are at in your journey and you know what your resources are and what you are trying to accomplish.
NP: So, to… to help, you know listeners kind of place themselves along this you know… I guess they are where they are in their journey and how they should think about the size of their list, could you give us a sense of… if you were targeting 8 or 10,000 on your total universe of accounts of your customers how many… how many people did you have on your sales team then, just approximately?
DG: Yeah. So, right now, we are building out our sales organization and right now we have about a dozen people and we are growing very quickly, we are hiring if anyone is interested, please approach me. But, so we have a combination of market developers and of enterprise sales reps and pre sales people that are focused on…on this and we are partnering with marketing in terms of the total universe of accounts so… but, leveraging some really great technologies that allow us to automate, outreach and have analytics. We are able to actually get a lot more done than you would think this size of team could get done, like literally one of my SDRs I think this person had 3,000 touches so far this month and is generating some really excellent meetings again because we are focused. The main benefit of having a narrower total universe of accounts is you have already pre qualified that a) the comp… the verticals are fit, b) the company is a fit, c) the titles are fit, so when she goes through her… you know her list and she is looking at titles she has already got it pre defined before she even begins outreach. they are all pre qualified for general suspect fit, right. And then it is a question of timing, appetite, you know budget, all of that but at least we know as I was mentioning to you before we know which hills we want to climb and so at least we know like where we are going, right versus if you are… if you are more or like kind of stuck in that vast green field, you are always going to be reacting because any opportunity that happens to be brought in by marketing you are going to react to, you are going to spend sales resources on and there is an opportunity … cost associated with that. So, we really look to… to minimize opportunity cost and maximize engagement in areas where we know it can lead to pipe line contribution.
NP: Yep, I think, you know, that’s a good plan. I mean, you kind of have that you know total universe of accounts or customers, that’s also kind of a resource that is… unifies the sales and marketing, right because you have this context for the marketing team for what is or what should be a marketing qualified leader at MQL such that MQLs… you know, such that marketers don’t have in their minds, oh this is MQL but then a sales person gets it, says well this is a crap lead.
DG: Yes, I am smiling very widely because that is a classic discussion that goes on and fortunately we… marketing and sales at Dynamic Yield are great partners and you know we are all working together and everyone is listening to each other. But that is a classic situation where there is literally like I am staffing now and I recently interviewed a candidate recently and I wont mention where from but the candidate literally said this person is responsible for customer acquisition that are you know their field reps would no longer accept any inbound leads from this company and its like wow! You know, that’s pretty bad. So, it can get to extreme places but we are avoiding that through collaboration, education, commuNPation, just making sure because scoring is very important. One thing I just wanted to weave in too, if you were like at a seed stage or even earlier you would even have a micro set of in terms of your total universe of accounts. I think that’s healthy and I think it is okay to say, you know what I am going to start with 500 accounts and we have designated… and they could be a mix of mid market and large and tiny depending what you do or they could be all of one size but like at that stage you are just trying to get any customers, so focus is really, really important and that’s okay, right. Then as you start to go to growth stage where we are then you want to have a tangible set that is still focused but at… from a macro perspective at something greater that you can mine. Don’t forget also that the… when it comes down to titles we don’t only pursue one person even when your focused on selling a marketing application there are 4 to 6 titles that we are pursuing in an enterprise account and probably 2 or 3 in a mid market account. So, when you do the numbers and say 10,000 accounts then multiply it by that number of people the suspect list gets fairly large quickly so it’s statistically speaking it’s a pretty good sample size to work off of to generate the type of results we are looking to do which is hyper growth.
NP: Yeah. Now say… I guess, just as a quick aside say you have 5 roles or 5 people that are in an organization that is you know a great… great fit in one of your top prospects in your total universe of accounts how do you go about pursuing that customer, you know in… in kind of a focused way? So did you actually have the same person touch all the 5 people of this organization or is it totally laissez faire?
DG: Yeah. So, they could hit really in two ways in terms of introducing Dynamic Yield, so we have a 7 touch process that we have laid out for outbound, which my organization is responsible for, which combines LinkedIn, email and phone and… and its quite effective, again because we have pre qualified the suspects and then marketing is actually running more like thought leadership, blogging, eBooks and… you know, from that angle so… and retargeting as I mentioned before, so they do cross over from time to time but we are very careful not to spam the… you know, the total universe of accounts and contacts in there, we are very careful about that and we are not… at the same moment in time we don’t have the separate organizations attacking the same target in terms of introducing the company. And then if we don’t have engagement after that… you know after that process we place it on nurture back to marketing and then marketing can… you know send our news letter to them if they wanted or they can opt out, it kind of flows like that.
NP: Got it. And finally, I think you know what? I… what I’d like to touch on is as you know a company grows, we were just discussing you know that the total universe of accounts or customers is going to grow not just in terms of… of volume of customers and also volume of touch points especially as you… kind of move up into the enterprise tier but also you know certain over time as you learn more about different customers, certain industry verticals. You may learn more about those customers and say, actually look fashion is much more compelling than we thought, these guys are great adaptors you know so what are… what are maybe some of the ways that you know you guys evolve the list over time so maybe expanding on a vertical based on you know the matrix you collect?
DG: Sure, absolutely. So, as the product portfolio roadmap continues to unfold we have a great development organization, they are coming up with new capabilities constantly, so we look at it from a go to market standpoint if our… you know for broadening, yeah. And we have product management so we look at that from that perspective and then it would expand then, if that answers your question. Sometimes we find we have an epiphany where someone got hold of our IP and our application and started using it in a certain way that we weren’t familiar with right and we then listened really well to them. We had like a division of a larger company we sold to and they actually figured out they could create more variations of landing pages faster with Dynamic Yield, so they just went on a tear and created like 70-80 variations for their business which is on the online gaming space and you know we hadn’t identified that use case, we knew that they could do it but we hadn’t identified that so as a result we listened to the customer, we actually tweaked a few things to help them and then we added a new feature to our capability which is landing page developer. And so, I think most companies are pretty good at this point at listening to the market and that is where we pride ourselves in doing that.
NP: Awesome.
DG: Yeah.
NP: So, you know, the final question on my end you know would just be as your… you have this at this point we have this you know successful total universe of customers and… various different verticals and business is growing, you know what is your internal process, I am just… get down to exactly how you guys review and audit the list over time as just opposed to letting kind of your lease list on sales force grow while you are in control.
DG: Sure, the way we work is I am empowered to lead a commercial efforts of the organization so… but I work very collaboratively with marketing and with my manager, the CEO, so I will observe something that is going on or someone will commuNPate something with me and then I’ll come up with a draft concept to expand, circulate it amongst the customer success team, a leader there, my colleagues, marketing, my manager and then we will just agree that this makes sense or doesn’t make sense. So, it’s… we are a nimble company where we are like really low on bureaucracy and politics fortunately so we get a lot done in a short period of time. And we think in more established companies that I have worked at in the past obviously it is a bigger ship and respectfully there is more consideration to be taken into account so in that case it is probably like a 6 months or 12 months project or something to do it. But I also if I have time to mention one more sort of you know idea I wanted to share…
NP: Sure.
DG: So, the other thing I would recommend your listeners keep their eyes open for our specific cohorts that they can identify through … selling and use of our or their technology and what I mean by that is so we… if not familiar with the term, its like a micro segment, multidimensional micro segment within the you know your segment itself. And so, coincidentally, our major value add for Dynamic Yield is we help large brands, small brands etc. identify cohorts they weren’t aware of and then in like seconds or minutes be able to create the cohort through our audience capability and then take action to personalize and engage that cohort whether it is video enthusiasts for media companies or just general ad users. For example, in one large brand we… we discovered that only 5 percent of users are consuming 50 percent of the ads and then another 20 percent are consuming or clicking on the balance of the 50 percent. So, basic you have 25 percent of users that are clicking on ads and 75 percent that are not, so for our customer we have automation that figures that out and moves them and engages them. But, the same principle applies for B2B tech vendors as well. So you know if we just really early on keep your eyes open and just watch what’s flowing and look for those cohorts I… again, going back to GeoffreyMoore I think one of the key filters for the cohort is those innovators.
NP: Yep.
DG: So, as you lead your market development teams, I coach my team to do a lot of online research when they you know use some of the technologies and tools that are out there to you know to get like Newsle, for example to get updates and when you see one of your prime suspects speaking at conferences on innovation, digital innovation add them to that. And there are other dimensions to the co…cohorts as well, for example Ghostery, a free Plugin for Chrome which will tell you what technologies are running on any site. So, we all have Ghostery running and as soon as we look up a prospect site we immediately look to see what they have running on their site, how much they have running on their site as well and that can help us, that adds another dimension to the cohort, like are they a heavy technology adopter, you can see that right away or is there like hardly anything on the site; it tells you a lot. So, whatever you are focusing on marketing or selling there are these other you know somewhat esoteric you know filters that you can add as you are doing your targeting so you have your total universe of account and you won’t be adding the cohorts there, you will have that… but as your then you are going through the programs and developing that there is another opportunity in addition to that to add… take cohort based thinking and apply it in market development and selling.
NP: Yep.
DG:Like, for one example, if we find that it’s like this one cohort that I have created that is just shows as a really, really right lucrative prospect, we may make a decision that the market development person is going to ask their enterprise sales director to actually pursue that suspect instead of the market development person.
NP: Sure.
DG: So, it is kind of having some flexibility around that.
NP: Yeah. So, as you are kind of able to collect more granular data about your customers, you tell on to them, use different tools to learn about, you know, their engagement and how innovative they are. You know, you can start to even add new kind of ways to segment customers on an even more granular basis than just industry size etc.
DG:Exactly, exactly.
NP: Cool. That makes sense. Well, Dave I think that’s about it for this broadcast, but I really just want to thank you for joining us today. Really appreciate you coming in.
DG: You are welcome, NP. It is great to speak with you and I was excited to be here.