How Banzai Gets Customers

Ashley Levesque has been on a wild ride.

She joined Demio as Director of Marketing in September, 2020.

Demio was acquired by Banzai 5 months later.

Soon after, Ashley became VP of Marketing at Banzai and has led the marketing function there for a combined 3.5 years.

If you’re a marketer who wants to go from individual contributor to VP/CMO OR are working in a company involved in M&A, you’ll want to read this.

I sat down with Ashley Levesque (VP of Marketing at Banzai) to get a behind-the-scenes look at how Banzai gets customers, plus how they went public and their marketing strategy going forward (which was a new one to me!).

I can’t wait for you to apply these insights to your own company.

What you’ll read here are words. Some Ashley’s. Some mine.

— Brendan

Below, we’ll explore:

Moving from a PLG motion to a hybrid motion (self-serve + sales-led)
What to do when OKRs don’t work for you (new framework)
Mergers, acquisition, and becoming a branded house versus a house of brands
The 6 data points that inform their business strategy and marketing philosophy
Banzai’s 2 best performing marketing channels

1. How far out do you plan your marketing in detail, and how has that evolved over the years?

2023 was planned with goal numbers for the year and every month had numbers attached.

Tactics were planned quarterly.

But then, the team gave feedback that planning should be tighter.

Execs were getting frustrated that there wasn’t enough flexibility to change in the quarter and results were taking longer than that.

New for us in 2024 is starting to think through how to create objectives and be flexible enough that we can change tactics in real time.

Some time after the Demio acquisition, it moved from an exclusively PLG motion to hybrid motion – now marketing is responsible for direct sales pipeline and PLG. .

We had to address that previously Demio was underpriced and was seen as low value.

Also, so many enterprise companies can’t hop in through PLG (even if they wanted to) → they need a contract.

So our marketing had to reflect that.

2. Do you use OKRs (e.g. objectives, key results, 70% goals, etc.) in some form?

We used to do OKRs exclusively but never did them well/right.

The methodology caused too much chaos and not enough clarity internally.

It led to a lot of execution without a lot of value.

Now we use OGSMT (similar to OKR but works way better for our business)

O – company objectives
Goals – measurements related to objectives
S – strategies, high level → execs stop here (ex: improve self-serve exp)
M – measurements → (ex: activation conversion rate, total new customers from trial)
T – Tactics (output activity)

This framework gives the leadership team more accountability and agility in strategies and measurements.

The top-down/bottom-up goal setting wasn’t working, so now the requirement is we have to do it cross-functionally.

Before, marketing had numbers that didn’t match product, or were too dependent on product, and they got thrown off.

Now, the rule is it’s not allowed to go on the board unless all of leadership agrees.

It reminds me of an alignment framework I’ve used successfully:

Problem
Solution
Implementation

Start with agreeing on the problem, and when we run into a roadblock, be able to zoom back out and make sure we agree.

Immediately leveled up leadership to be outcome-driven versus output.

3. Who does marketing ultimately report to, and has this changed over the years?

The Executive team includes:

VP of Marketing (Ashley)
VP Customer Exp
CTO
CEO
VP of finance

The director of demand gen and head of sales also report directly to the CEO. Customer marketing reports to VP of Customer Exp.

Products operate as their own business unit, with their own GTM team, and a General Manager who’s responsible for the performance of the entire business unit. Case in point, Demio’s Director of Demand Gen serves in Demio’s business unit and is only responsible for Demio revenue – not other products.

4. How many marketers do you have? How has that team changed over time?

3 total, including their customer marketing manager who reports to CX because she’s responsible for retention, cross sales, and renewal.

5. Do you structure your team around channels, products, user types, user journey, outcomes, or something in between? Has this changed over the years?

Banzai operates within a “holding company” level and “business unit” levels. I sit at the holding company level – leading corporate marketing, brand, investor relations, analyst relations, events, internal marketing, and content (for Banzai as a brand).

Customer marketing also sits at the holding company level, operating inside the Customer Experience function, and held to goals around NRR such as cross sales, upsells, etc.

Then each business unit will have its own GTM team responsible for the revenue of that specific product.

6. What’s your primary tool for tracking tasks and campaigns? And for production?

We use Notion for a wiki and it contains all their “stuff.”

But, for Ashley and Banzai, it’s less about tracking tasks and more about keeping everybody aligned, especially as they acquire more products.

For them, it’s Vision → Mission → Positioning

You have to say this shit a LOT because it gives them guideposts on how to build within it.

Stay within the guideposts and you can’t fuck it up.

Once we learned that the company needed a clearer vision, the business strategy became a lot easier.

Ashley distinctly remembers being in a QBR meeting with the exec team and shared a data point that customers who looked at their Demio analytics page after a webinar were retained 4X longer.

We noticed data really mattered to their customers and considered repositioning to focus more on the data.

We had to decide: do we want to be a data company?

No, we want to be a marketing technology company whose tools have great data.

That distinction and staying aligned there is far more important to them than tracking tasks.

Ashley is also a Gartner client, and her AE has joked that she’s their best client because she’s “all the fuck over their research.”

As a small company that doesn’t have product marketers, she’s found an amazing resource with Gartner, including incredible data on how marketers spend money, economic downturn on budgets, etc.

When they paired that with Demio data, they were able to build a vision and business strategy that aligned:

Customer marketer pulling insights directly from customers
Public product board with weighted feature requests from customers
Gartner data
Sales data on what new customers value
Data on why CS is and isn’t getting renewals

Then, the above OGSMT framework makes sure this all gets shared cross-functionally

Output to outcomes happens when it’s clear their leadership has their ear to the ground and knows what the fuck is going on.

7. Is there something unique or philosophically core to how the marketing team and leaders think about acquiring customers?

Banzai has an interesting strategy around team structure in that we see ourselves as a holding company.

At Podia, their product strategy *is* their marketing strategy.

Similarly, Banzai’s M&A strategy *is* their marketing strategy.

It also informs how we structure their internal teams and why Ashley is on the deal team for M&A.

Banzai sees their path to growth through cross-selling products for the same customer.

It’s neither to become a “branded house” (Hubspot), nor a “house of brands” (P&G), but something in between.

Their vision is to buy or integrate every leading tool for marketing. This means 100+ tools that operate in ABM, events, content, distribution, advertising…

It’s honestly not too different from how Disney moves with the intention of having everything support each separate part.

One of Banzai’s core values is 10,000 years: strategies and tactics that serve the long-term legacy of the company.

This is in stark contrast to Klaviyo, another martech company that also just went public but raised $778M and still laid off ~15% of the company pre-IPO to appear “profitable.”

Long-term, values matter.

8. What were the best performing channels for you? Did that change over time?

For Demio, it’s absolutely their product.

But secondarily, it’s content (across all channels).

Specifically, data-driven content, like their annual benchmark report.

Instead of sessions that were run, they’re asking bigger questions like: “What types of events have the best focus rate for attendees?”

REALLY be a data center.

For content, organic is always the best performing.

80-90% of their search traffic is branded and everyone is buying now based on word-of-mouth and communities.

How to use this info:

1. Send a DM to your teammate: “Dave — OKRs seem to be causing more confusion than clarity for us and I read about how Banzai uses an OGMST framework instead. Check it out, might be worth bringing up to leadership?” Then send him this link.

2. Meeting with your boss: “I recently read about how Banzai sees themselves neither as a house of brands, nor a branded house. With our recent acquisition of [company/product], I picked up a few things that might help us. This might be worth bookmarking.

3. Linkedin Post: Here are the 6 data points that inform Banzai’s business strategy and marketing philosophy (make sure you connect with & tag Ashley!)

Thanks for reading!

This is the eighth of a long series.

If you have a tip or feedback, I’d love to hear it.