How does ActiveCampaign get customers?
They come to them.
Ok, it’s not that simple.
But, Shay Howe, Chief Marketing Officer at ActiveCampaign, is well aware that a large part of their business is self-serve.
Which means he has to think about marketing a little differently.
We discussed the collaborative and transparent approach across the entire business, eNPS scores, hiring an ActiveCampaign customer to run social, and why signal-to-noise matters.
What you’ll read here are words. Some Shay’s. Some mine.
— Brendan
PS – No bullshit, this is the tenth of these that I’ve done and if you’re a CMO of a large marketing team (30+), you’re about to get answers to ALL of your current frustrations.
Below, we’ll explore:
- ActiveCampaign’s top performing marketing channels
- Taking a top-down versus a bottom-up approach
- Why it’s worth making sure marketing is NOT a service org
- Why Shay moved sales enablement, design and product marketing out of the marketing org
- The mistake most CMOs make when hiring
- The importance of employee health
- CMOs being blind to the idea that a lot of their business is through self-service
1. How far out do you plan your marketing in detail, and how has that evolved over the years?
Hoo *coyly smiles at the thought* ideally, it’s a 12-month vision, but realistically, you have a clearer understanding of what you’re doing in the next quarter or two, right?
That’s true for the entire business.
At the very top, we’re trying to define what the next year or two will look like. We’ll put the tent poles in place on the executive side, then take them down and figure out the next layer of structure we need at the team level.
The teams can throw some ideas around, but it needs to be a combination of both top-down and bottom-up approaches.
The entire plan has to cascade so every team is focused on the same goals and objectives.
We’ll set this plan a year out, and operate in a quarterly cycle.
2. Who does marketing ultimately report to, and has this changed over the years?
The executive team consists of the CEO, who obviously oversees everything. Then we have Product and Engineering, which we separated, and we have executive leaders for Marketing, Sales, Finance, the People team, Customer Experience, and Operations.
I don’t know if nine people are too little or too many, but I’m not sure it matters that much, either.
If it gets too much, there will probably be diminishing returns, but if that team has the right relationships, harmony, and enough trust to kindly keep the pressure on each other, then it will work.
The biggest mistake you can make is if you take the top goal and cascade it down to every team but then don’t talk about what we need from each other, uncover the overlap, and build the buy-in.
That’s where it breaks.
And Marketing is the easiest org to turn into a service org, where I turn to the team with, “Hey, we gotta go do these things..” and they’re like, “We know, but we’re also working on these four other things for other departments.”
Someone always wants an email sent.
Someone always wants a blog post on a certain topic.
Someone needs some design work here and enablement training there…
Preventing becoming a service department is about building that alignment across teams.
“Marketing is not a service org. No doubt there are certain times when we will help you with things, but our core responsibility is growing the business. It is why we exist, and we have to have the space and bandwidth to do that. And we also need your buy-in and support to do it.”
Marketing can’t do it alone, either. We all have to be looking at the overarching goals and find harmony in helping each other achieve them.
3. Do you use OKRs (e.g. objectives, key results, 70% goals, etc.) in some form?
In our history, we’ve tried probably every format under the sun (haven’t we all 😂).
We’ve done V2MOM and different sets of KPIs, but I think the thing that has stuck the most is OKRs.
For every quarter, we have OKRs.
In that, we have a mix of leading and lagging indicators. So say we want to achieve X metric, the leading indicator is how we get there.
We also put health or quality metrics behind the objective.
The book Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina R. Wodtke discusses OKRs in a simple but really effective way.
Say for instance, we’re trying to improve trials, so we set a key result around trial volume.
We want to double trial volume in the next 12 months, and we could definitely do that. We could surpass that goal and celebrate, but if we did that in absence of conversion rate then we’d be missing our overall revenue goal.
OR
We hit the trial volume goal, but only because we overworked our team, and they all end up quitting.
Either way, it’s a bad outcome.
So we set a health metric where we double the trial volume goal BUT do that while maintaining a consistent conversion rate of trails.
Do that while also maintaining a positive employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS).
“be careful of how you go and do it. And don’t do it with a blind eye to other things that matter.”
To keep track of our goals and our employees’ health, we moved our marketing team meeting to bi-monthly. The other two weeks are dedicated to open office hours where team members can ask questions anonymously or just jump in. These are the meetings where we’ll also review eNPS scores (submitted monthly), any themes among the feedback, and the action we can take off those.
It’s extremely important to talk about those NPS scores. Otherwise, if you keep having people fill out the survey and never directly address any of their feedback, they’ll just stop, or your employee health data will be heavily skewed toward newer employees with more positive feedback.
Our goal is to have our response rate well above 50%. My theory is if we get the majority of people to submit an eNPS, it’s a better mix of the team.
4. For marketing strategy, who comes to these meetings, who runs the meeting, and how often do you meet?
This might be a bad answer, but it really depends.
If it’s a specific project, it’s who’s on that project team. If it’s a bigger initiative, it may have a cross-functional team.
Sometimes it’s just those standard meetings, where every other week we’ll have meetings across product marketing, product, and the marketing leaders.
Every other week we’ll also have a meeting that’s more campaign-oriented, which includes another variation of a team.
We try to do everything async as much as possible. We’ll have reviews or discussions inside documents, and then we’ll have meetings to debate, close gaps, make decisions, and align.
A while back, we had product leadership, product marketing, and marketing together for a meeting, and it always ended up being product walking through their backlog.
“I’m like, this all is in Airtable. We can read this. I appreciate the context, but let’s do this: Let us read it, propose how we want to market it, get that plan into Airtable in advance, and then use this meeting to make sure we have the right alignment, if we have any blockers, define what’s outstanding, etc.”
5. How many marketers do you have?
We have nearly 50 marketers, which breaks down like this:
- 4 in demand (A mix of performance marketing and growth)
- 10 in content (includes internationalization and multi-language support)
- 5 in corporate (PR, social, events)
- 8 in lifecycle/ops
- 5 on website
- 7 on platform strategy (partnerships and affiliate)
- Plus others
6. Do you structure your team around channels, products, user types, user journey, outcomes, or something in between? Has this changed over the years?
Design has bounced between marketing and product. It was product but it’s really gone back-and-forth and is back in marketing now.
We also moved product marketing into product. We felt like there was a gap between the two so we put product marketing into product, but we still debate this.
Teams can ebb and flow, and it’s a little less important where they report to and more important that there are systems to create connection and collaboration.
We moved enablement into sales. Before, we were doing a lot, but it wasn’t getting used or shared. For sales, you really have to have their buy-in to use something. They have to be a part of it’s creation.
Same thing goes for outbound. They aren’t going to start cold-calling lists unless they understand the targets, the messaging, etc.
We’ve also played around with outsourcing paid marketing and content marketing.
Our product is deep. There’s a lot to learn about it, which makes product education something people both want and need. You can’t really outsource that well, so we built out the content marketing team.
On the performance marketing side, we have a hybrid situation of part in-house and part agency. I kind of like that. Agencies bring a wealth of knowledge from just working with other businesses, and the one we’re working with is specifically B2B SaaS.
We also have an education team that has moved from marketing over to the customer org.
Funny story, we used to have like 15 people doing enablement across multiple teams (product enablement, sales, customer success, education). They were all essentially doing the same thing but none of them were working together. The overlap nearly broke my brain.
Since then, we’ve gotten enablement down to two teams: product and sales.
This is essentially a symptom of the hyper-growth side of the company. We’re moving quickly and we just need to get things done, let’s hire someone.
But then there’s this moment of pause, where it’s like, “Wait a second, there’s probably some waste here.”
One of the kickers for me was, at one point, we were doing around 150 webinars a quarter, and 75% of them were live. We were able to narrow down the themes of these webinars to around 10 topics, but we’re still producing at that high of a rate. We clearly weren’t doing it right.
The quality lessened because we were just doing too much, and so did the attendance. Signal-to-noise matters.
7. What is the difference between average marketing leaders and those who are able to attract, hire and retain top talent?
Good question. I put more stock into how we find the right people and ensure the highest success rate in our hiring.
This is where not being a marketer helps (Shay’s background is in product, design and platform strategy).
Good marketers know how to market themselves, which makes them a difficult interview.
It may be a blessing and a curse. I can get very granular with interviews, diving into what is your craft? What have you learned? How have you failed?
There was a time when we were in the market for a new social media manager. They (hiring team) were like, we need someone with social media experience, preferably from a B2B company, community management, and maybe some copywriting.
I responded that we needed an ActiveCampaign customer. People don’t want a social feed full of awards and events; they care about the product, how to use it, and examples of others using it… We needed to hire an ActiveCampaign customer, and we did.
Good hiring takes time, and I think there are two ends to it. Sometimes, you acutely feel the pain and you know exactly what you need to fill, and others, you really have to sink into things like, what is our gap? Is there anyone on the current team that can tackle it? Is there a way to test it?
Go talk to the market too, and find out if there are better ways to do this. Maybe, let’s not go out and try and find someone who perfectly fits our need if there’s a way to evolve it.
When it comes to hiring, ABR: Always be recruiting.
You should always be talking to people and out in the market to understand the current landscape.
So many people are doing it backward, where they have a rec, go to the people team to post it on the website, and say, “Send me all the qualified applicants and I’ll go through them and choose.”
You’re the expert overseeing this. Get in the weeds and figure it out. Jump into your network and start asking for referrals, get on LinkedIn and source your own candidates. Pinpoint organizations you think are doing it well, find the person running it, and go recruit them.
Do your own sourcing because that is how you build the best quality team.
A-players want to work with A-players. Once you get a few in the boat others are naturally going to follow.
“We’ve really grown and built ActiveCampaign, not by following a playbook.”
We heard people say you’ve gotta do it a certain way and we look at it more like, let’s remove the guardrails in some respect. What would be ideal? And make that possible.
For example, we have 185,000 customers and every single one has free onboarding and migrations.
Everyone would tell you, “You have to gate that.” or “You’re not charging enough.”
But for us, it’s what’s the best possible experience?
Instead of treating something as profit or cost center, let’s find a way to build that into the ethos of the product.
8. What’s your primary tool for tracking tasks and campaigns? And for production?
- Marketing uses Asana
- Engineering uses Jira
- Product uses Airtable
- Lots of Google docs and Looker views to keep up visibility
9. Is there something unique or philosophically core to how the marketing team and leaders think about acquiring customers?
Something I’ve thought a lot about in recent months is how self-service our business is.
We will have thousands of people each month come to our website, create a trial, sign up, become a paying customer, and we will never talk to them.
We had SDRs calling nearly every trial in the past, and most folks didn’t want to talk. Most of the time, they’d just want the answer to a simple question.
So we created a team to use livechat, use the phone, whatever, but you’re not a revenue quota-carrying rep. Your job is to move them forward in the buying process. Help lead them to convert into a customer.
The conversation with customers went from asking their budget, timeline, and pushing demos to ‘How can I help you today? What problem are you trying to solve?’ and providing exactly what they ask for.
This new way of going about things led to building a customer activation team (40 globally – 6 languages) where we literally just walk people through the product quickly and send them on their way.
10. What were the best-performing channels for you? Did that change over time?
Organic (owned channels) is the absolute best channel for us. It is a blessing.
I could close my laptop, and next month, if no one does anything, we’ll still get tens of thousands of trials.
We’re obsessed with the idea of growing our organic channels. How do we gain more control of them so we can continue to see that number grow?
And also, where do we use paid, which is a challenging environment? Can we get harmony across those two channels?
11. What other questions do executives ask each other that often aren’t shared publicly?
If it’s a healthy team, I’ll point out the top talent of the team and how we can help them grow. Then I’ll ask other leaders to help them in their respective areas.
Succession planning is also a part of that. What would happen if this person left? Who could step in and fill the spot? What is the immediate need?
Also, metrics matter a ton in marketing, right? We’re constantly thinking about ROAS, the efficacy of our work, conversion rates…
How to use this info:
1. Send a DM to your teammate: “Lindsay — I read about how Shay from ActiveCampaign gets customers and how they’ve grown to $250M ARR. There’s 3 things in there that might really help our team. Mind if I send them over?”
Then send her this link.
2. Before your next 1-1 meeting with your CMO: “Read this recently about the mistake most CMOs make when hiring and the importance of employee health. Think there’s something we could apply? If so, this might be worth bookmarking.”
3. Write Linkedin Post: Every company should have a non-quota carrying team to move customers through the buying process. Here’s how ActiveCampaign’s CMO, Shay Howe, does it… (make sure you connect with & tag Shay!)
Thanks for reading!
This is the tenth part of a long series of CMO-level interviews about how the top SaaS companies *actually* get customers. (can’t believe we’re already at 10 of these!)
If you have a tip or feedback, I’d love to hear it.
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