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Franco Caporale:
Welcome to a new the episode of the DemandGen Club Podcast. I'm your host, Franco Caporale.
Franco Caporale:
Our guest today is Eugene Nilus, Director of Demand Generation at Shippo. Shippo is the platform that brings eCommerce businesses closer to their customers by making shipping effortless. Eugene is responsible for all the marketing automation aspects and for launching and managing the programs that drive engagement and opportunities for Shippo.
Franco Caporale:
Eugene started his career in web development, then transitioned to demand generation, working with companies like SmugMug, Townsquared and Atlona. So, I'm thrilled to welcome today, Eugene Nilus, Director of Demand Generation at Shippo.
Franco Caporale:
Eugene, it's absolutely fantastic to have you on the show today. Thanks for joining us.
Eugene Nilus:
Thank you, Franco. It's great to be here.
Franco Caporale:
So, I would like to start just a little bit in more details about your background. Where did you work before and how did you end up becoming the director of demand generation at Shippo?
Eugene Nilus:
Yeah, that's a very interesting question. So, I am a director of demand generation at Shippo currently, and Shippo is a shipping sorter for eCommerce businesses. And what we do, we make it easier for eCommerce businesses to connect their online seller platforms to our software to automatically bring their online orders in. Also, automate order management flow with business rules, find the cheapest carrier rates, print shipping and return labels, as well as create great post-purchase experience, like sending tracking info to their customers, the people that work for them.
Eugene Nilus:
And before that, I was working for different B2B and B2C organizations doing demand generation, lead generation, email marketing, there's different various things. How I ended up at demand generation is a very interesting story. I used to be actually, believe it or not, I used to be a web developer in like 1999. In the year of 1999, I became a web developer and I used to work for a tech company for a few years until everything went down.
Eugene Nilus:
And when I lost my job, I went to sales and spend there for about three years. At that time, it was a swish moment for me. I realized that I kind of liked it. I liked the psychology aspect of the sales and I got a very curious about how and why human shared their decisions.
Eugene Nilus:
And after being in sales for three years, I decided to go back to marketing, to the corporate world and I found a position that allowed me to do marketing as well as development and then slowly, I transitioned to marketing. And since then, I was in marketing doing a lot more of the demand generation stuff.
Franco Caporale:
So that's a very interesting transition from web developer to sales, to demand generation. So how did you find that transition, particularly the last one from sales to demand generation since you got to experience both sides of the table?
Eugene Nilus:
Well, so I spent a few years working for one company doing web development and marketing at the same time. And then I spent a few years in another company doing more marketing and slowly graduated from little things that I did in different marketing departments to become a demand generation person. I think this is what attracts me the most is finding a way and approach to talk to people online and give them the solution that they require at that time, if it makes sense.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah and so today at Shippo, how does your team look like? How many people do you have on your team and what kind of roles do they cover?
Eugene Nilus:
Well, right now at Shippo, we have about 10 people on our marketing team. Demand generation is part of the marketing team and I work very closely with pretty much everyone on our marketing team. We have people who do content, we have people who do online events and social media. We have people who are responsible for generating content for demand generation team. So lots of different things are being done by different people. We are still scrappy and we still continue to be a startup and there's a lot more work that go beyond job responsibilities.
Franco Caporale:
Talk to us about your tech stack in marketing demand generation. What do you guys use for automation, CRM, sales automation, or for SEO? Can you tell us a little more about the systems?
Eugene Nilus:
Yeah, absolutely. So for example, for the marketing and sales side, we rely tools such as WordPress, OptinMonster that allows to do very different popups on our websites. Unbounce too where we build lead-in pages. Wistia where we host our videos. We use HubSpot for email marketing needs. We use Salesforce, we use Drift for the online shop. We use SalesLoft, we use Looker. In terms of communication tools, I would say we use the most Zoom and Slack, that's probably most of the companies right now.
Franco Caporale:
You mentioned Looker, is that to analyze data and to pull data from different sources?
Eugene Nilus:
Yeah, so we have Redshift data warehouse and we use Looker that sits on top of the data warehouse and pulls all the data from data warehouse and allow us to visually see that data so we can easily make the decisions.
Franco Caporale:
Interesting. So I'll go back to that because obviously we want to talk about metrics and data in a second. But first I would like to hear from you, a semi-large team that is already a company of 10 plus people and all of the systems, what is your main challenge today that you are working hard to try and solve if you have to mention one?
Eugene Nilus:
Yeah, of course. I think that's a very good question. Like from my standpoint, I mainly concentrate on a few things right now. It's going a little bit up the market. Right now, we mainly concentrate on SMBs but we do want to go a little bit up in the market but it requires to align product marketing and sales. We need to equip our product with the right features, we need to have the right tools, our sales team needs to have their information. So we need to align every team as well as we need to find the right accounts to go after.
Eugene Nilus:
So that's one and the second one comes from the first one, it's outbound sales. Basically, we're trying to figure out how to leverage the buyer intent signals right now and data that we get from various places to our advantage so we can close more deals and faster.
Franco Caporale:
Okay. So you're basically trying to transition more aggressively to an account based marketing, moving up market and so you want to leverage more of the intent signal from these large companies?
Eugene Nilus:
Yeah. So it's two sides. We still want to concentrate on SMBs, we still want to scale our channels where receive the good results coming which is also why we acquired SMBs. Plus we want to go up the market a little bit and we're using different softwares to find buyer intent data and signals that can tell us, "Oh, okay, so this account could be in market right now." So you want to go after that the account, we want to have our SDRs reaching out to that account and open up opportunities and close those opportunities.
Franco Caporale:
And in terms of your lead sources, and I know you probably have different segments on SMBs and mid-market and going up market to enterprise but if you have to look at your top lead sources today, what are they and where are your leads coming from?
Eugene Nilus:
A great question. So I would probably just name a few. The top two, I would say we have Adwords and organic]. We heavily invest in SEM and we heavily invest in our content.
Franco Caporale:
So I want to go back to the metrics part because it's something I'm always very interested in. So what kind of metrics are you tracking today regularly that you monitor daily or weekly? So what's on your dashboard and what do you report at the executive level?
Eugene Nilus:
So from a demand generation standpoint of point of view, I'd say we look at how much we spend in each channel and each campaign, the number of signups we are getting, what was the cost per signup? How many customers we are getting from the signups and what is the cost per customer? What is the activation rate and by activation rate I mean how many sign ups become customers? So we look at that rate. We look at your revenue, we look at pay back period, we look at customer lifetime value to customer acquisition costs rate. So there's many that we care about.
Eugene Nilus:
From a more of like an executive standpoint of view I would say on a quarterly basis, the metrics the most our executive team cares about is how many signups we get, how many customers we get, and what is the revenue.
Franco Caporale:
Your SMB customer that you said you track signups, are they self served in terms of business model, or they still have to go through your account executive or SDR in order to be converting to customers?
Eugene Nilus:
So we have a few different products. We have a Web App and we have API. API is more for larger customers because they already have their own infrastructure and it's easier for them to use our API to get the live carrier rates and buy shipping labels. Smaller segments or SMB segments, most of the people who use a Web App. A lot of them self served but we do help some people that get onboarded. We have a very good sales team and they help the people who need help to get onboarded.
Franco Caporale:
So when you look at attribution even for that segment, do you look more at the first touch campaign where the leads originated or what got them to convert as a signup or is it a combination of them and you look also a multi-touch level?
Eugene Nilus:
That's a very good question. Right now, we are looking at the first touch. A lot of people who we drive to our site, we cookied them and we look at the first touch. So basically if you come from our ads in Google and then you leave and come back, let's say from Facebook in 15 days, you still will be attributed to the ad that you clicked on inside of Google. So our model is pretty basic and simple at the moment.
Franco Caporale:
But is that because you're so focused on first touch because of your fairly short sales cycle so you think it still carries the value from the first touch?
Eugene Nilus:
Yes.
Franco Caporale:
If your sales cycle was longer, would you maybe distribute it more towards the last campaign or what's your thoughts?
Eugene Nilus:
I would say if our products, so let's say starting from a product side, our product is not a very priced product. Right now, people don't pay for our software, they use it for free. We don't have a product that costs a lot so it's easy to get started. You can sign up and start right away. For this matter exactly, we don't need a very complex solution, but if I were a sales company and our product costed thousands of dollars, the sales cycle will take it a lot longer and I would probably bring some other tools that could help us figure out what were the actual touches, the multi-touches that brought a specific account to a close.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah because I see quite a few companies that, for example, have a six to nine month sales cycle and if there is a lead that comes from LinkedIn six months ago and now converts on webinars for example, they tend to put more value on the webinar because it's what triggered that opportunity. But leads can be originated like even a year or two before. So yeah, I think the value in that case shifts to the last touch.
Franco Caporale:
In terms of a single campaign, if you have to look a single initiative that you ran, what was something that worked out really well for you in terms of a campaign and one that maybe didn't work out as well? Maybe it was a test that wasn't as successful.
Eugene Nilus:
Yeah, great questions. I wouldn't discriminate in regards to like the most successful or successful. So I'll just probably given an example of just successful campaign, if it's okay?
Franco Caporale:
Yeah, that's great.
Eugene Nilus:
What's working for us really well right now is a pre-targeting ads that we are pushing to people who visit our website sign up. So we have hippo logo. So our company is called Shippo, but it's based on hippo, right? So we have a hippo logo and we have a very like quirky image. The hippo is seated inside the car and the message says, "Hey, take Shippo for a test drive." And that converts, I would say, fairly well. The activation rate that we see from these type of ads are greater than the actual activation rate that we currently see from all the channels by, I would say, 50% or so.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah. I can see that working with the hippo in the car. And so tell us now what's one example of a campaign that didn't work as well. Maybe a test that you tried and you don't want to try again.
Eugene Nilus:
Yeah, totally. So recently we did try podcasts and we sponsored different podcasts and we hired a company, we did lots of different podcasts. What We anticipated is probably a little bit bigger volume of signups and a little bit bigger volume conversions and customers than we actually got. So we were a little bit disappointed, but we also thought that podcasting is more like a brand awareness play rather than just direct response play. Even though some companies are very successful in direct response ads running on different podcasts, but we came to the conclusion that is not the case for us.
Franco Caporale:
That's very interesting to know because I see quite a few podcasts publications that they charge 10k, 15k per month to sponsor, even 20k. Obviously, they have a very, very big audience so I'm always curious to know like companies that are using those podcasts, do they get the results that they wanted or that they expected and how is their experience? Were you using specific call to action or did you have a specific offer during those promotion or it was just mostly visit our site?
Eugene Nilus:
No, we had a special promotion running on those podcasts that's I can't remember what it was but it was, I would say, it was very compelling.
Franco Caporale:
So I want to close this talking about your relationship with the sales team and what alignment there should be. The first question I want to ask you is do you think in general, not just at Shippo but in general, SDR should report into demand generation and marketing or they should report to the VP of sales and why?
Eugene Nilus:
That's a very interesting philosophical question.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah.
Eugene Nilus:
I think it depends on the company, how the company is structured. Like for example, we have SDR people in our company and they are on a demand generation side right now. So one of the advantages I see having them on the demand generation side is we are more aligned in regards to how we want to position our messaging that we are sending out versus basically our people being on a sales team and reporting to a different person. So there are a lot of companies that are set up that way, there's nothing wrong with it. It's just probably have one extra step where we need to go through a SDR manager and get his approval before we do anything else.
Franco Caporale:
Yeah, absolutely. This is pretty common I see across the board, especially at companies at this stage. But in terms of processes with sales having, the SDR under sales and their marketing, what's a good cadence in order to meet with them or exchange ideas or keeping everyone on track with their SLAs or their action items when you guys generate leads or having feedback from sales? Do you guys have a process? Do you guys have meetings? What do you guys do in order to align marketing and sales?
Eugene Nilus:
Totally, we meet actually a lot nowadays. The new norm right now brought a new perspective of how people communicate. So we communicate a lot more than we used to when we were in the office. We meet right now at least two times a week, sometimes three. We discuss the plans, the initiatives, the messaging, the positioning, et cetera.
Franco Caporale:
Do you also participate to forecast calls, quarter QBR or sales kickoff and all of that? Who from the marketing team usually attends those meetings?
Eugene Nilus:
From a high level perspective if we used to meet with an executive team, we have a VP of marketing. If we need to create forecast plans, what we'll do next quarter or this quarter, or how the next year will look like, the channels that I'm responsible for, I'm the one who's driving that initiative.
Franco Caporale:
Got it, perfect. And so I want to close with one question that I usually like to close every episode is can you share with us one hack or one trick or maybe something that is quick to implement that we can try that can be very profitable or has worked really well for you?
Eugene Nilus:
Sure. So I used to work for a start up, it was a startup similar to Quora company. We had like Q&A marketplace. On one of the sides of the spectrum, we had the people who had questions and on another side, experts who would answer those questions. So whenever people posted a question, it went to marketplace and an expert would answer a question, but we wanted to monetize that process. So we were charging money, I believe $5 or $10 per a question that people want us to get an answer to and then we were paying experts a percentage of that money.
Eugene Nilus:
A lot of people fell from the funnel. They posted the question, we asked for their email address and then on the next page, we asked for money. And obviously, 95% of people didn't want to pay. So what I did, because we collected questions and email addresses, we created the followup email to people who wanted to post a question, but didn't because they didn't pay. So our goal is to collect money and what I did, I personalized that email.
Eugene Nilus:
I believe I did different tests during a two month period. What I did, every time I tested something, like I only tested one thing. At the end I had a very personalized subject line that included a question that people ask. Inside the body of the email, I would the picture of the expert who could actually answer that question and I also put a small animated gif saying, "Hey, this expert is online, so he's available to answer your question right now."
Eugene Nilus:
So small things like this, like personalization, out of the box idea of like hey, let's put the face inside that email so people know who's going to be answering their question. And with all these changes, the email contributed to 25% of the whole revenue that the company was making.
Franco Caporale:
That's awesome. Yeah. That's kind of what you have to do when you don't have the huge budget or when you raise a ton of money that you can throw money on LinkedIn or AdWords.
Eugene Nilus:
For sure.
Franco Caporale:
So Eugene, it's been such a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you again for spending time with us and joining us today during this episode.
Eugene Nilus:
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.