Episode 14

Franco Caporale:

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of the DemandGen Club Podcast. I'm your host Franco Caporale. Our guest today is Sesame Mish, Head of Growth Marketing and Intellimize. Intellimize is the intelligent website optimization that uses machine learning to help marketers accelerate website testing and personalization at scale. On average, Intellimize customers have achieved a 46% lifting web conversion at 25 times the speed of A/B testing. Intellimize is trusted by brands like Drift, Snowflake, SomaLogic, Tableau, Dermalogica, Looker, and many more.

Sesame, has been leading demand generation Intellimize for the past two years. She works very closely with the sales team to have them engage with target accounts, run ABM programs and drive qualified leads and [inaudible 00:01:28]. Before Intellimize, Sesame worked in other famous SaaS companies such as Kahuna, Greenhouse Software, and Marketo where she focused on demand generation, digital marketing, marketing operation, and content marketing. So I'm really excited to welcome today, Sesame Mish, Head of Growth Marketing, and Intellimize.

Sesame, I'm very excited to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Sesame Mish:

Yeah, it's so great to be here and speak with you Franco.

Franco Caporale:

And obviously we have been knowing each other now for a couple of years that we've been partnering together. So I was really happy when you accepted to join us and share some of your knowledge with us. So thanks again.

Sesame Mish:

Absolutely. I'm excited to share what I know with your audience.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. So I want to start right away with some information about your background, particularly, how did you get started in the field of demand generation? Tell us a little more about your story and how you got where you are today.

Sesame Mish:

Sure. So my first venture into Saas actually was at Marketo. I did content marketing there and literally day in and day out just cranking out content. Over time, I started to get eager to understand how my content was being used and how it was impacting demand generation. And so I started to follow that and start measuring how is content playing into demand gen? How is it moving sales deals forward? And when I started figuring these things out, that's where I got really, really excited. And I knew then that my future, my future career was going to be more on the demand gen side of things. And so when I went to other companies after Marketo namely Greenhouse and Kahuna, I started to take on more demand gen responsibilities and my skillset grew from there.

Franco Caporale:

That's awesome. So your path was basically from content marketing into more demand generation and more campaigns level as you move from one company to the other.

Sesame Mish:

Yes.

Franco Caporale:

Awesome. So you've been at Intellimize now for a couple of years. Can you tell us more on what's your role there? What are your responsibilities? What do you focus on?

Sesame Mish:

Yeah, so I've been at Intellimize, like you said, just under two years now. And my title is growth marketing director. So basically I am overseeing our demand gen and both marketing efforts. And at the end of the day, I am measured on the number of marketing qualified leads and the number of sales accepted leads that we get into the funnel. And so I really care about programs and campaigns that are not only going to drive a quantity of MQL for me, but that are also going to be very high quality to ensure that they do turn into an SAL and than beyond that they do keep going further down the sales process. So I'm running several different programs and campaigns at any given time, everything from doing paid ads to nurture campaigns, to doing ABM and direct mail, to also doing virtual events and webinars.

Franco Caporale:

Perfect. And you guys were all over the press last week or a couple of weeks ago because you raised another round of funding. Can you tell us more about Intellimize for those people that don't know what Intellimize does?

Sesame Mish:

Yeah, absolutely. So Intellimize is a software. We offer intelligent website optimization and basically we're using machine learning to automate website testing and website personalization in tandem. And from that work celebrating the number of web conversions and revenue that's coming through websites and we sell to both B2B companies and B2C companies. So we optimize both types of websites

Franco Caporale:

And you guys work with some pretty famous brands. Is there any that you can mention-

Sesame Mish:

Absolutely.

Franco Caporale:

... That are your customers today?

Sesame Mish:

So we work with a Snowflake and Sumologic and on the e-commerce side, we work with the Unilever Prestige Brands and Dermalogica.

Franco Caporale:

That's fantastic. I think everyone knows those logos. Those are awesome accounts to have as a customer.

Sesame Mish:

Absolutely.

Franco Caporale:

So obviously I have many questions about your current role since you've been there for a couple of years, so you've seen them growing from a smaller startup to now having raised more and more funding and closing larger accounts. So tell us a little bit how you're organized there. What's your tech stack today? What are some of the technologies and platforms that you use for your role?

Sesame Mish:

Sure. So we use Salesforce and Marketo. We also use Mixmax and Mixmax is a... For those who don't know is an email sending platform and-

Franco Caporale:

Is it Marketo... Sorry, is the Marketo influenced by your past in Marketo or is that...?

Sesame Mish:

I think a lot... Every company I've been at since Marketo has used Marketo just by coincidence. So I think it's was more just a coincidence.

Franco Caporale:

Okay.

Sesame Mish:

Yeah.

Franco Caporale:

Awesome. So you use Mixmax for a sales automation?

Sesame Mish:

We use Mixmax...

Franco Caporale:

Cool.

Sesame Mish:

Yes, exactly, to send sales and SDR emails. And then for our webinars and virtual events, we use Livestorm. It's a newer platform that we've tried and we've continued to use it because it's worked well for us. We love it because it facilitates audience engagement better than previous platforms we've used. So it doesn't really have a typical Q and A module that keeps things really separate from the audience. Instead, it has a live chat stream. So all the questions and comments from both panelists and the audience are all in one place and everyone can see them and react to them at once. And so we really liked that format for creating more engagement in our webinars and we've seen that be a lot more effective for making people stay on the webinar longer, which I know is a common problem we're all trying to solve.

Sesame Mish:

And then beyond live storm, we also use G2. We leverage the buyer intent data to help strengthen our demand gen and our sales outreach. And then I'll also mention that we use Clearbit. We use two different aspects of Clearbit. One is that we use Clearbit Reveal. We've used that for a long time on our website, and it's actually integrated with our own product Intellimize, which we obviously use on our website as well. And from Clearbit Reveal were able to tailor website experiences to different visitors based on the industry they're in or the company size they're in and things like that. So we found that's very effective as an integration with Intellimize.

Sesame Mish:

And then on the other side of things with Clearbit, we just most recently started using the Clearbit Enrich function, which will enrich our database both on the Marketo and Salesforce side. And then finally, I think the last two I will mentioned is that we have loved and found many uses for is Zapier. It's connected to some of our systems and it helps us sync tools such as our G2, buyer intent notifications are now coming through our Slack instance. And also when we do webinars, we connect our Livestorm to Marketo through Zapier so that we can have the registrations automatically come through a list on Marketo, which is very helpful.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, I see that Zapier becoming more and more popular with all of this system sparse around, and you need something to connect and integrate all of these different platforms. So that's a... I think becoming very, very frequent to see Zapier.

Sesame Mish:

Yes.

Franco Caporale:

And then we'll talk about you too in a second. I want to ask you all of this platform, what is your favorite tool or something that you wouldn't want to give up?

Sesame Mish:

Yeah, that's a hard question to ask what's my favorite tool because I couldn't really live without any of these, but I will mention a feature of one the tools that's really stands out and that really helps me day in and day out. And that's with Mixmax they have a feature where Mixmax actually integrates with my Gmail and has a side panel where in real time it's showing me who's opening my emails, right when it happens, who's clicking on a link in an email right when it happens. And also if I have sent meeting invites out, have they been accepted? And so it's telling me all of this like a live dashboard right inside my Gmail. So super easy to access and to have that visibility is invaluable.

Franco Caporale:

That's fantastic. Yeah, I used Mixmax before this. I found it very, very useful and moving away a little bit from the platform, I want to know some information about your campaigns and lead sources because you are targeting very large brands, right, so I would like to know more about where are these leads coming from? Where are your opportunities coming from primarily today and what are you investing marketing budget?

Sesame Mish:

Yeah. So as far as our main lead sources, our main... Pretty much our main MQL sources because as I mentioned, that's really what's top of mind for me and what's driving all the programs I'm running, we've engaged in doing some virtual events sponsorships and that has... I'd say it's historically not always been the biggest source of MQL. I think what I'll say here is that you can't just do the sponsorship and automatically you will see those MQL is rolling through the door in an immediate sense.

Sesame Mish:

And I think a lot of people get turned off by that and we'll just stop doing those sponsorships. But what you do get right away is brand awareness and if you do enough of them, that will help over time. But as far as the immediacy factor, what I have seen drive MQL much quicker and get higher ROI out of these sponsorships, which is why I do like to continue doing them is the fact that I have found that if you are very strategic afterwards, after the event about doing very specific followup, meaning very specific...

Sesame Mish:

The copy that you're using, the email is very specific to the event. You're doing one idea per email making it very focused. I think that is what is helping us drive more immediate MQL from these sponsorships. And at the same time, we're getting that brand awareness that I just mentioned. So it's killing two birds with one stone, and that's why I'm seeing a lot more ROI from these sponsorships now.

Franco Caporale:

And I know Intellimize you guys are very ABM focused and we'll talk in a few minutes about that as well. So I would like to also understand how do you generate leads with limited budget today? Like any other startup when you don't have millions of dollars to invest.

Sesame Mish:

Yeah, great question. And I think it's also a very timely question because as you know this year things have been crazy and we've all had to deal with restricted budgets in 2020 and the uncertainties around COVID. And we're in that same boat we've had to deal with this too. And so prior to COVID, my biggest MQL generator was something that costs money and it was doing these in-person executive round table events, but once COVID hit, that was automatically cut. And I was like, "Oh, no, what am I going to do?" My biggest MQL generator has just completely gone away and now I also have a more limited budget like, "What am I going to do?" So I needed to find some no cost ways to bring MQLs in immediately. And so I ended up finding two paths to do so and both of them have actually come down to leveraging email in a much more strategic way than I ever had before.

Sesame Mish:

So one of them is that I completely revamped our email nurture. All of our channels... First off, all of our channels, ultimately point to nurture. And I think it's similar in other companies as well. So this was a very key area for us to improve upon, and if I could improve upon it correctly and do a good job, I knew it can make a big impact for us and do it for $0 essentially. So our nurture had not been optimized or revisited in a long time. And when I had first designed the last instance of it, I was eager just to push our content out and basically design each email around a different blog posts that we have, and just keep pushing this content out that was already on our website. But as time went on, yes, people consumed it in the beginning, but as time went on I noticed the nurture became stale and our metrics were dwindling over time and I was like, you know what? This content is already on our website. It's not valuable. It's not standing out or unique in any way versus other vendors and their nurtures.

Sesame Mish:

And that's really what it comes down to is, we needed to stand out in the inbox and revamp our nurture so that it would make people excited to get that email in their inbox and we would become more recognizable that way and would get that open. And so what I did was we completely changed our nurture approach from a typical content or blog focused, nurture to a nurture that was going to share ideas, share examples, and really get our prospects and the people receiving these emails excited not only about the email they were looking at now, but also get excited for the next one. And so a common question that we're always getting because we do website testing, we do website personalization and marketers are always dealing with what ideas should I be testing on my website to drive conversions?

Sesame Mish:

Like which ideas out there are working? And we're always hearing these questions. And so we're like, "What if we built a nurture around sharing these types of examples with everybody that everyone's always asking for, it seemed like a no brainer." And so that's what we did. And so each nurture email, we present one website optimization idea really to just inspire our audience and make it very actionable that they can see this idea. We can show, "Hey, this idea worked for one of our customers. Here's the increase in number of conversions that they saw on their site." Here are the actual before and after visuals to make the email even more interesting. And now whoever's reading that email could be like, "Oh cool. I can go apply this in my organization tomorrow, and I can also go share this with my team and get them excited about it." And so we have found this approach to our nurture where we're sharing one very visual example per email to be so much more effective than just pushing out blog posts and eBooks and our email. And so we've actually...

Franco Caporale:

That sounds like a ton of work, Sesame. So I'm very curious to know what results you're having from there.

Sesame Mish:

Yeah, and so I'm excited to tell you that it worked out. Was it going to be receptive? We didn't know. The short answer is yes, it worked out and we're seeing a... We've seen a 79% lift in the click-through rate on these emails. So we're seeing this as a signal that this content in particular is compelling enough for people to want to learn more about Intellimize and read more about us on our website. So they're clicking through on the email to do that. And at the end of the day, that's what it's all about is using these emails to compel... Whatever is in the email to compel people to want to learn more about our product. Separate from that click through rate, we're also seeing a 63% decrease in the number of unsubscribes on our nurture. I know that's another battle that a lot of marketers fight is not wanting those unsubscribes to come through on the nurture, and we've seen a 63% decrease in that. So we know we're onto something. We know people are looking forward to receiving that next email and really that's the goal at the end of the day.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, this really separates from a lot of companies that do the set and forget type of nurture, which is understandable, right? There are a lot of priorities, a lot of programs running at the same time, but when you do take the time to really personalize and add value from each email that you send, it makes a big difference.

Sesame Mish:

Absolutely. Couldn't have said it better myself, Franco.

Franco Caporale:

Awesome.

Sesame Mish:

And then I did have one other one to share with you. So the nurture was one way that we got a lot more strategic with email and found success with it. The other way is something I mentioned a little bit earlier, which was after virtual events, after webinars that we participate and speak on, in the past, I had been sending one follow-up email to the registrar and saying, "Thanks for attending, here's the recording, here are some bullet points on the main takeaways if you don't have a chance to read the recording or watch the recording." And that was it. That's all I did. And obviously from that one email, we were seeing very little conversion, very little hand-raisers. We've completely changed that approach at this point. What we're doing now is after the virtual event or webinar is over, we are sending the recording and we are saying, "Thank you for attending," and sending the main takeaways, but we're going beyond that.

Sesame Mish:

Now we're sending... Instead of one email, we're sending five or six email follow-up and each of those emails has one idea in it from the webinar and how that idea ties back to the Intellimize product to get people excited about asking for more information or learning more. And so we're finding a much better conversion rate on our webinars and virtual events because of this new process that we've implemented. And so actually at this point, it used to be 0% now it's 10% of our marketing attributed MQL are coming from webinars and virtual events, and I only see that number increasing over time.

Franco Caporale:

Do you see a difference between a webinars and virtual events? What's your opinion about these virtualy events that obviously this year became very popular everywhere. Would you compare it more to a webinar or more to a live conference? Do you get value from it?

Sesame Mish:

I think I touched on this a little bit earlier. With virtual events, it's that sponsorship, you're paying a lot of money for it. And I think, yes, you're getting the speaking slot. It's really what you do with it afterwards, that really matters. And that's where the strategic email comes into it. But there's also the other side where you're getting a lot more credibility because your brand and your logo is alongside these other great brands and logos on the landing page. And by association, you're getting this credibility, you're getting this awareness, you're getting more leads in your database and eyes on you than you would have by doing a webinar on your own. Right? And so I think there's definitely value in that, it's not necessarily measurable value or immediately measurable value, but I do think there's definitely something to say about participating in those sponsorships. That makes sense. And that is putting you aside other brands and in front of your ICP.

Franco Caporale:

Do you believe people that say the live events are dead forever, or do you think they're going to come back?

Sesame Mish:

I hope they come back because selfishly I love working in the booth and I love talking to customers and prospects alike. And so selfishly, I hope they come back for that reason. I think it's a great way to meet other people in the industry and get people excited. You can only go so far with the email back and forth with people.

Franco Caporale:

I agree. I honestly miss them a lot. Going to conferences and meeting people in person is... The live engagement is definitely another level in my opinion, compared to virtual events, but for the time being.

Sesame Mish:

Yeah.

Franco Caporale:

So I want to go back a little bit also talk about... You mentioned you G2 earlier, so I want to discuss a little bit about intern data. How are you guys leveraging G2? I'm curious, what is your process to really make this intent data actionable and get value from it?

Sesame Mish:

Yeah, absolutely. We have been purchasing the G2 intent data for a while. And in the beginning we weren't leveraging it to its full advantage. Originally, our intent signals came in and the ones that seemed more important than others were mentioned to our sales team and they incorporated that into their email kit, which was great, but there was really no set process or accountability or any measurement in place for these intent signals. And it just wasn't top of mind. And so absolutely. We had to do something about that. And so what we started to do was take a much more SDR approach. We started following up on these intense signals one by one first, making sure it was an ICP for us, but if it was we would follow up on it and we would send a very personalized email to a handful of contacts at each of these accounts that were coming through and showing these signals.

Sesame Mish:

And so we would send this one very personalized email. And so we're like, "This is going to be great. It's so personalized. How could they not respond?" Right. But what we found was because it was just one email that actually had worse impact than the fact that it was personalized. And so just sending the one email was not enough to get someone to reply back in a positive way to say, "Hey, I want a demo or to raise their hand." And so we really had barely any results to show from this effort, even though it sounded really good from the beginning. Now what we're doing instead is like, "Okay, we got to completely change what we're doing. We're still not getting anything out of this." What we're doing instead is we have started integrating the intent signals from G2 into a shared Slack channel.

Sesame Mish:

So I mentioned Zapier before and we use Zapier to do this and connect the two. And this way the intent signal is more visible to many different team members at once Instead of staying siloed in one person's inbox. So we put it more on a mass scale. So this way there's more accountability for following up and team members will also based on the account that they see and contacts that they personally know with that account, they'll jump into the Slack channel, and type in and say what they know about the account and basically give us more Intel related to that signal. And this Intel also helps in making the follow-ups more personalized. The other thing that we've done is we've moved away from that one email SDR follow-up that I mentioned. Now, instead, we are implementing a longer email cadence.

Sesame Mish:

So this is in line with that follow-up cadence I mentioned after the webinars and virtual events, that's been effective for us. We're doing the same thing for our G2 intent signals. So we're emailing the contacts of the account in a five email follow up cadence. And we're finding that because the cadence is longer, it's give me... It's keeps peppering in to the contact, over time, every few days it's peppering, another email, more information about Intellimize and getting them to that point where they actually reply and raise their hand and schedule a meeting with us.

Sesame Mish:

The other thing that we're doing is when we see an account and we know that an internal team member and Intellimize has a very relevant connection that we'd be interested in speaking with of that account, we have that team member reach out to that contact directly. And so we're finding what this two-pronged approach that we're getting so much more success around the G2 buyer intent data. And this is how we're taking action on it now and it's much more successful. We actually used to not... I don't think we had at one point any MQL coming from G2 intent data. Now 21% of our marketing attributed MQL are coming from this because of this two-prong approach that we've implemented.

Franco Caporale:

That's a fantastic take away. From G2 I think people are taking notes.

Sesame Mish:

Yeah.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, it shows that if you are able to make those intent data, intent signals actionable, you can really get a ton of value. It's just, that's the tricky part.

Sesame Mish:

Yes.

Franco Caporale:

So I know we're almost out of time, but I have two more questions for you and I want to make sure we cover that because I-

Sesame Mish:

Cool.

Franco Caporale:

... Want to understand how you work with your sales team. You guys are very ABM oriented and you have this very enterprise approach. So I'm very curious to know how you're working with a sales team. How is marketing collaborating together with sales to engage and convert these large enterprise accounts?

Sesame Mish:

Sure. And I know that a lot of organizations will Have the cliche that, "Oh, there's... We have sales marketing, alignment and everything is rainbows and sunshine. And I thought I had alignment at previous organizations I was in, but it really, really is different here at Intellimize. And we approach things differently to really create that alignment. So we don't just say it, but we were actually doing it and living that every day. And so at the beginning of each quarter, we meet with the sales team and we literally go line by line on the target account list and make sure we're aligned on every single account and why that account is on the target account list. So marketing and sales have the same target account list for ABM And we're both looking at that account list together on a regular basis and aligning around it as a whole at the beginning of each quarter.

Sesame Mish:

So that I would say was the most pivotal thing when we started doing that to form alignment. The other thing is how we look at MQLs. So it is called an MQL. It does have the word marketing in there, but an MQL we use across the board. So whether that MQL is driven by a marketing program, or it's driven by a sales outbound activity, or it's driven by something, outside of marketing or sales, maybe a referral from the outside, we still call it an MQL.

Sesame Mish:

And so it doesn't matter what source it's coming from. The important thing is that it's on our target account list that it's in our ICP, that they requested a demo that they've raised their hand, that they want to talk to us. And so we count that towards that MQL goal. And it's the same goal for both teams for the whole company. So this has really helped us have true collaboration that we're sharing these goals and that there's no fight between marketing and sales about one team trying to take credit. And there's no battle like that. We're all focused on that same list and that same number.

Franco Caporale:

That's fantastic. I saw that going wrong a lot of times where sales and marketing are arguing on who will take credit for a specific opportunity that usually never ends in a good way.

Sesame Mish:

No, and I'm so glad I don't have to live that.

Franco Caporale:

That's awesome. And then I want to know another thing from you before we close because you guys are doing a lot of work on ABM. So I would like to know what advice would you share today of something that has worked for you that could be implemented quickly and drive a lot of results?

Sesame Mish:

Great question. So I think what I can think of in the context of ABM is about the target accounts list itself and which accounts you're going after. I'd say a while ago, our target accounts list used to be a lot longer and almost untackable if that's a word, it was just so long. And it was all also almost very random. Every account on there wasn't our ICP, but it was almost just random like who is who's list of, of companies in our ICP without real purpose for being on this list. The ABM target account list today is much shorter and each account on that list is on there for a very specific reason. So they're all still in our ICP, but they're on there for a very specific reason. And that reason typically is that account is a friend like a vendor friend of another customer that we have.

Sesame Mish:

So what we do is we look at all of our best customer logos. We look at the strongest customer stats that we have and are free to share publicly with our audiences. And we say based on these stats, based on these logos, based on these case studies that we have to share and put in front of prospects, what are the friends of these customers? And we build our target accounts list around that, because those are the people when they see that a VPR marketing talking about Intellimize and finding success with Intellimize, they're going to say, "Hey, I want to do that too." And so we have found that that has become the most effective approach for us to draw people's interest. And so I'll give you an example. We have a very strong customer logo that's in the cosmetics industry, and we have a very...

Sesame Mish:

The CEO who's very well known in that industry. We have a quote from him and we also have a case study video from him. And prior to this, we have never really thought about specifically targeting the cosmetics industry. It didn't cross our mind. We thought more broadly about e-commerce in general, but not very specifically about cosmetics, but when we started looking at our customers and looking at what we had to work with as far as assets to put in front of prospects, going after cosmetics seemed to make so much sense. And so we started building a cosmetics focus, target accounts list, and now we are running based on this list direct mail at these people, were also running email campaigns as well as paid ads. And so we're finding that our results are just going through the roof with this approach much higher than our baseline average from before. And we're getting hand-raisers this way who were interested in speaking with us.

Franco Caporale:

So you basically recommend to shorten the list instead of expanding it. For the people listening you're recommending to remove some of the accounts in the list and try to concentrate more instead of adding more accounts-

Sesame Mish:

Right. It is not about the quantity

Franco Caporale:

... To get more results.

Sesame Mish:

Exactly. It's not about the quantity. It's about why is that account on the list? Do we have a customer logo or story that can support that account being on that list? Where if we marketed to that account, do we have a case study to put in front of them that would compel them and make them want to look at it and learn more about Intellimize.

Franco Caporale:

That's a great advice for everyone who is trying to implement some level of ABM strategy.

Sesame Mish:

Yes.

Franco Caporale:

So, Sesame, it has been a real pleasure speaking with you today. Thanks again for joining us.

Sesame Mish:

Absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity, Franco.

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