The Power of Segmentation and Experimentation in Saturated Markets
Martha Aviles shares how Talroo leverages dynamic market segmentation to meet customers precisely where they are in their buying journey.
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Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Caspian Studios.
Today's show is brought to you by our friends at Qualified.
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Today I'm joined by a very special guest, Martha.
How are you?
>> Hi, Ian. Good to be here with you.
So today we're going to be talking about marketing at Tauru and
of course, getting into your background a little bit.
So first off, what was your first job in dementia?
>> First job in dementia.
I would say it was probably an embarrassed.
It was an oil and gas,
a SAS platform that helped you uncover
the hydrocarbons in the subsurface of the earth.
It sounds very complicated,
but basically it helped you drill wells.
>> Crazy.
And fly forward to today.
Tell us a little bit about Tauru.
>> Yes, Tauru, we help mid-market and enterprise companies,
hire essential workers,
think warehouse workers, call center workers,
FedEx, Home Depot, Amazon,
nurses, home healthcare.
It's broad. That's why we say essential workers.
We help wear a talent acquisition platform.
>> Let's get into our first segment,
the trust tree where you go and feel honest and trusted and you can
share those deepest, darkest marketing secrets.
So within those types of companies,
who are you selling to?
What is that buyer persona?
>> Sure. I mean, depends on the size of the company,
but typically it's some sort of a talent acquisition leader,
could be a CHRO,
but it's usually a director or VP of talent acquisition.
>> And that buying committee,
it seems like everyone sort of in the talent side
are the people who are buying it, the end users as well.
Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not,
they may have a recruiting team,
they may have an operations team, an HR operations team,
it depends, right?
Or think about franchises even.
Sometimes the buyer isn't necessarily the user.
>> And how do you structure your marketing organization
to go to market?
>> We have a growth team.
Our growth team is everything around paid media,
SEM, the website, digital marketing, paid social,
that sort of thing.
They're helping drive ultimately growth for the business,
but pipeline is super important.
And we've got a product marketing team.
Obviously they partner with the product and sales teams
for sales enablement product, which is what have you.
We've got a brand and a VEP team,
and then kind of corporate marketing and PR as well.
>> What does demand fit within your marketing strategy?
How do you think about it?
>> Yeah, I mean, I think demand is a huge part
of every marketing strategy.
It helps you get a seat at the table
if you're able to prove that growing demand
for the business is a positive ROI
for marketing investment, right?
I think about it across all of the departments.
The growth team primarily owns it,
but without the content or the brand initiatives
or public relations or podcasts like these,
we don't get our name out.
So I believe that everyone shares it,
but the growth team on the main KPIs around demand.
>> I love that you call it growth team.
I think it's like one of our pals,
the family Kramer at MKT1 calls it growth and I love it.
>> Thank you.
>> Any other thoughts on sort of overall marketing strategy
or how you think about going to market?
>> Yeah, a couple of things.
I mean, I think in general,
it's about meeting your customers where they are, right?
And if you're in a market like talent acquisition,
the market can be very segmented and saturated.
So from a segmentation perspective,
there are talent acquisition leaders
that are not necessarily tech savvy.
So they don't want to know the speeds and speeds
or how our AI matching works within the talent platform.
They're an emotional buyer.
They want to understand how do you help your customers?
Can I read your case studies, that sort of thing?
But what I've been seeing lately, actually,
as I talk to customers and listen to gong calls,
is that customers sometimes are getting much more sophisticated
and thinking about their HR tech stack.
And so they want to know the differentiators
about your platform, how is it better?
How are you matching me with better candidates?
How are you filling my pipeline?
And why I'm explaining that is I think it's important
to understand where your buyers are, right?
How do they want to be communicated to?
And so just make sure to think about that
as you think about your demand generation strategies.
And then to your comment on the growth team,
part of the reason why I call them the growth team
is because it's really about experimenting.
Like you have to make sure you can test new channels,
test different methods.
People want to be communicated differently.
And so let's figure out what works for this market specifically
and for our buyers.
And that kind of test and learn mentality is really important.
- In this new world, marketing 4.0 or web 3.0 or whatever,
I want to say, they're listening on so many different places.
And in so many different formats,
like we at Caspian call it multi-channel, multi-format,
where it's like they might listen to audio content
in three different types of places.
They might watch video content in four different,
five different, 10 different types of places.
They subscribe to apps.
They read stuff by searching for it.
They scroll around on social media
and getting the right format in the right place
is so hard to do, but it's so necessary.
- Absolutely.
I always talk about it being a whole marketing ecosystem
because it's not that black and white, like switch of webinars.
Those are the things that convert, right?
You've got to think about their whole journey,
where all the places they're researching.
And sometimes they're seeking out information
and sometimes you're presenting them information,
if that makes sense.
- Yeah, any other pieces on strategy that you think are relevant?
- I think don't forget that your customers,
your customers can be your biggest advocate.
That word of mouth marketing,
I think we all know that it's money, right?
We're like, yeah, but how do you do it?
You keep engaging with them.
And I think sometimes if you focus on growth,
that's just new customer acquisition all the time,
you're gonna forget that you've got people on the ground
that can be your best marketers.
So for Telru, for example, we've got Bizable.
It's a great tool.
I'm not sponsored by Bizable, maybe I should be.
But it's a great tool to talk about like
the multi-touch journey.
But through Bizable, what I've learned, for example,
is that sometimes in our webinars,
let's say we've got 1,000 attendees,
30% might be customers, which is crazy to me.
That's crazy high.
You've already bought the product,
but they come back for that thought leadership and learning,
and then they recommend others.
And so don't forget about that kind of,
I'm gonna call it the hidden network,
which is all these talent acquisition teams
that talk to each other across companies.
- It's kind of like inbound versus outbound, right?
Where you're like, you can create great advocates for you
that will receive inbound information
and speak on your behalf all day, every day, right?
If they get asked, you know,
what company should I use, they're gonna say Telru, right?
Like all day, every day, they're like, no questions.
But getting them to do anything externally,
to do an outbound motion to be like,
could you reach out to three friends?
They're like, well, I don't know which friends,
and I don't know if they're in the market,
and I don't really wanna be presumptuous.
Like there's so many different barriers there.
I don't know if you've had any experience
sort of dealing with that.
- I'm not saying it's a silver bullet,
but it's worked a couple times
where you have a referral program.
So if they do happen to recommend someone,
they get some sort of credit with us.
It's a hiring credit.
- Cool.
- Is the other customer converts,
and that seems to help that it's a mix bag.
Sometimes people still aren't willing to do it.
They might feel uncomfortable, for sure.
- Do you dedicate marketing resources to it?
Like how do you run that program?
- Yeah, we have a referral program.
So we reach out to, after you've been with Telru for 90 days,
if you were a happy customer, high NPS score, all that,
we actually have an automated cadence of emails
that goes out to you and says,
hey, we have this referral program.
It's cutely called Telru Tag.
Thank you very much.
I had tagged someone else that you know.
We've gotten a poll landing page in a campaign
and it's tracked all of us in the Salesforce.
Does it work?
Sometimes.
And I will say that the people that are the refers
continue to do it, right?
They want to continue to referring you
and then sometimes it doesn't work at all.
But I think it's good to have
because you can't forget about that word of mouth marketing.
Especially when you're thinking in the talent acquisition
space, like I mentioned earlier,
we've got so many franchises.
Let's say you're a franchise owner that's got 10 stores
and you know someone else that's got 20 stores.
I want you to connect me to that person.
One other thing that you had mentioned earlier
is that I think in terms of this sort of people
who are looking to improve their tech stack
and the talent acquisition and then other people
who are more of emotional buyers,
do you sort of like segment them differently
based off of that?
Like, you know, the segment within your persona
or something like that because it seems like,
you know, whether it's on the customer life cycle
or a maturity curve or the sort of like early adopters
in the middle, like it just seems like
a lot of people have that thing where they have like,
this is how it is for emotional buyers
and this is how it is for the more analytical buyers
but how do you get them to choose the right path
of where they want to go?
- That's a great question.
We definitely have different buyer personas
like in our buyer deck and we do think about segmenting them
but where I use that data is to encourage
and we're creating content to understand
which are the personas that we're trying to create content for.
Whether they're scrollers or researchers to your point,
we wanna make sure that we've got both angles covered.
Does that make sense?
- I love it.
I just took a note.
Great lesson.
Any other pieces on strategy?
- No, I'll just leave you with that.
I like this saying, I say it to myself all the time.
Like, sometimes you win, sometimes you learn
so just keep testing, right?
'Cause every marketing different,
there's no playbook that you can,
oh, I ran this playbook at this company
and then it magically worked at the second company.
There's a lot you can learn but every market,
every time period is different.
I mean, I've been at Telroom now almost two years
when I first joined to where we are now.
It's different, right?
So it's not about having a rinse and repeat playbook.
- Well, isn't that the best segue
toward next segment, the playbook
where we open up the playbook
and talk about the tactics that help you win?
What are three channels or tactics
that are your uncuttable budget items?
- All right, one, I would say is email marketing.
For a talent acquisition, I've been pleasantly surprised
how much people wanna engage with us in email marketing.
I was honestly wrong when I first joined.
I was thinking that email marketing
wasn't really how people wanted to be marketed to,
but that's not the case in talent acquisition
or not what we've experienced, webinars.
So thought leadership, people wanna learn,
especially in the uncertainty of the market.
And what I mean by that is like,
are we in a recession?
Some people might say yes, some people might say no,
regardless, it's net new path
that a lot of people haven't been through before.
So having thought leadership content
that you promote through webinars has been really,
really important.
And then I would say doing things like this, actually.
So podcasts and things that get your name brand out,
it's all about customer mind share
and how do you continue getting the Telroom name out
or whichever company you work for?
So this would be my three things
that I wouldn't wanna compromise on.
- It's so interesting how content driven
and creative driven, all three of those things are.
Obviously there's all sorts of marketing tools
and tech stack behind the powers, all of that.
But what you're emailing people, how you're emailing them,
what you're putting out there for them to learn about
and how are you spreading the word?
You know, quite as elemental as it gets in marketing,
which is kind of funny.
- Truly, but sometimes they're called building blocks
for a reason, right?
So you just gotta keep at it.
- Email marketing is something that like you said,
a lot of people are sort of either don't think works as well
or whatever, I'm curious, like what are the ways
to do it right?
Are you doing a big email blast?
You're doing short emails?
Is it lots of information?
Is it highly segmented?
Yeah, how do you think about it?
- Yeah, I would say highly segmented is important, right?
You wanna make sure, we go back to my tenants here,
meeting people where they are.
So we have a highly segmented email database,
but we also test.
So some of the times, for example,
I'm gonna say I never thought this would work.
We have a newsletter that get the over 30% open rates
and people click on it.
People love the newsletter.
The newsletter has three articles.
We try to keep as much as we can above the fold
and have call to actions that aren't just like,
raise your hand to talk to a sales person, right?
They wanna be educating, wanna learn about something else,
build them a path, but the newsletter works.
I'm not gonna say that I would have,
I wasn't the idea person around that,
let's have a newsletter by the way, but it, right?
And then it's really segmented based on
which market you're in, right?
Are you in trucking?
Are you in home healthcare?
Are you in call centers?
And then it's content specific to that.
I mean, for a long time, people have always said content
is king and I don't think that has changed.
And so that's how we think about our email marketing.
And again, test and keep looking at like trends and reports
and how do we need to adjust this?
Do we need to make this shorter or longer?
Where are people engaging on the page?
That sort of thing.
- You mentioned sort of like putting a bunch of stuff
above the fold, are you sort of saying that
the lessons from the article are right there in their face
and they don't need to click out?
Is that kind of what you're saying?
- Correct. - Yep.
- Right.
- Well, people don't have a lot of time
and so make it easy for them.
- I feel the same way.
You know, we do a bunch of newsletters
for our different podcasts and I've always felt that
like I don't even care if you listen or if you read
or if you just read the show notes
or if you just see it on LinkedIn.
Like it doesn't matter to me.
It just, if you, if we're helpful and you get the information
and you like it, then that's great.
I think so many people are just so obsessed
with getting them off the device and back to their site
instead of making the thing readable and accessible
in the site.
And I just like, yeah,
drives me absolutely crazy all the time.
- I wholeheartedly agree or sometimes I think marketers
want to overcomplicate it to like,
well, what's the journey from the newsletter to the this
to the that like, how about give them the meat?
You know, like where's the beef?
That's what people want.
And then they'll remember like,
hey, the Taluru email or the Taluru newsletter,
it helps me every single time.
And I just have to look at that, you know?
- The second piece, anything that you're doing specifically
for webinars or is it sort of a similar thing
just, you know, hyper personalized and sort of niche down
with really relevant stuff?
- Actually, I have to really commend my team for this.
They test webinar titles on landing pages.
So we'll drive traffic to a landing page
and understand which titles work better.
And that's how we come up with our webinar titles.
So things like think like a marketer and talent acquisition
or recruiting is like sales.
Those are like one of our top two performing webinars.
That's how we came up with those titles
and it risks like people respond to that
versus putting Taluru in the title or I mean,
sometimes we've got partner webinars
and we've got big logos.
We don't put that in the title.
So all of the messaging is tested first.
And then those are like our top two performing webinars.
- I love it. - Pretty impressive.
- Yeah, so cool.
Yeah, any other, any other things like,
how do you measure success of webinars?
Is it, are you saying, is it strictly pipeline
out of these things?
Is it just people attending a lot?
- I would say that ultimately,
it's how much pipeline and revenue they drove.
But we also just look at like open rates, attendance rates.
Sometimes we get north of 50% attendance rates
over people that RSVP'd, which I think is really good.
- That's amazing.
- And then when we started looking at the visible data,
we have a lot of customers that attend
and then we started reaching out to them.
We do surveys as well on the backend.
What was helpful to you?
Why do you attend?
If you're a customer, why did you attend?
And you get a lot of insight that way.
- Yeah, what types of stuff do people say?
I'm curious.
- A lot of times they're like,
well, I'm here to learn or,
or you guys are always giving us tips and tricks
of how to do our job better.
So our CEO has been in the space for over 20 years.
And he is the one that hosted both of those.
So recruiting is like sales.
A lot of times they're frustrated
and they're like, yes, I get told no.
- A lot.
- I have, you know, I've got a ton of churn.
How do I think about retention?
And for example, one of the messages that we had is,
you know, forget about retention.
You're not gonna be able to control that.
Let's make sure you have enough candidates
in your pipeline and at the top of the funnel.
And people responded to that.
So those surveys on the backend of the webinar
also help us develop the next webinar.
'Cause we understand what kind of content
they're looking for.
Of course.
So it's been really helpful.
- The final thing is sort of, you know,
they're getting your name out there,
going on podcast and that sort of thing.
Yeah, how do you think about that as a program?
How do you manage it?
- Yeah, the way I think about that is so brand measuring
is hard, right?
And like everyone has an opinion.
How do you measure it?
And I'm not gonna go into that.
But ultimately I wanna drive eyeballs to the Teluru brand,
right?
Whether that's through the website,
through other branding initiatives, what have you.
We also do media interviews, that sort of thing.
Because I just think it's important to get our brand name out.
Maybe that person isn't our perfect buyer.
But when you're a company of our size
and you're trying to build a brand,
it's really important to have those eyeballs.
And so honestly, the way I report on brand
is a quarter over quarter,
unique visits to the website.
Inbound, right?
If we don't know that they came
from a different landing page and then landed there,
how did they get there?
They probably heard of us either on a podcast of yours
or on a website somewhere else,
or maybe we've got a sponsorship with Austin FC.
- Oh cool. - They've had a great season.
And we've got a QR code in the stadium
that's been scanned several times.
But we just assume like, is it a Saturday?
Or did a bunch of people go to the website
and look at Teluru.com?
Oh, well maybe they were at a soccer game in Austin.
- That's super cool.
And they just got those brand new Yeti kits,
which are freaking sweet looking.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And expensive.
- Were any of their thoughts on Incurables?
- I just wanna say this for all marketers
'cause I still have to do this all the time.
A lot of our, if you're a marketing leader,
your job is education and you have to bring people along.
So make sure you stay consistent with,
okay, these are the things we're measuring.
Here's why, these are why they're Incurables,
especially in a market like we're in now,
where maybe people are having to justify
what it is that they're doing
and why are they spending on this
and why is this kind of a very secret activity?
Explain all those things.
Have transparency around the metrics,
but just continue beating that drum
even on days when you're tired
and it can be difficult.
- Side note, for anyone listening,
go check out towelroot.com
and go click around and go tell your talent people
if you're at a big company
that has a lot of essential workers.
What is one brand
or marketing channel or tactic
that maybe you think is something
you're not gonna be investing in?
- It's a great question.
We haven't had a lot of success with Instagram, for example,
and I have a lot of people ask me about TikTok.
And I keep saying, if you can show me that our buyers are there,
I can invest in that.
Everyone always wants to bring up
the hottest latest social media platform or Instagram.
To me so far what I've noticed
is that Instagram is definitely,
it's a brand channel,
but it's more employee engagement.
We're recruiting for ourselves versus for our customers.
I haven't really seen a lot of talent acquisition buyers
on Instagram, but I get asked that a lot
and currently we're not investing in Instagram for TikTok.
- Any campaigns that you've done in the past
of a favorite campaign or anything like that?
- I would say we've had some really good success
with account-based marketing.
So I am spoiled at Tellroom.
We've got quite a great marketing tech stock.
We used success to do some account-based marketing
around the different segments that we support.
So I'll start with trucking again, warehouse logistics.
We did a big Q4 push, obviously,
because of all of the holidays that happened in Q4
and people are buying things.
And so we were able to reach a lot of our
dental customers think of Amazon,
FliteX, UPS, those people of the world
with our Q4 account-based marketing campaign.
We invested quite a bit, and if you look at
the number of impressions, it's astonishing
like how many impressions we had,
but it also is super interesting to see how many people
from the buying committee would go to tellroot.com.
Sometimes we got accounts that would have
like 30 different people that were involved at some level,
whether they saw an impression or engage with us.
And so that was just really interesting.
And it's a good way to show ROI.
- How do you view your website?
- I think the website is basically
our digital storefront, right?
I want it to be a destination,
whether you found us through paid media or scrolling
or you were listening to a podcast.
I want it to be a destination.
I want it to be easy to navigate.
Ultimately, of course, I wanna drive conversions,
but to me, it's where people go and understand your brand voice
and what you stand for.
So with Telru, we really want people to understand what we do.
We help you hire essential workers,
but then we want you to learn from us.
That's been a big strategy that has helped us tremendously.
So if you go and you look at our website,
it's mostly about content that is helpful for our buyers.
- Okay, let's get into our next segment, The Dust Up.
Or where we talk about healthy tension of events
with your board, your sales teams, your competitor.
Or you're two year old in the background about to take an app.
Can you tell us,
have you had a memorable dust up near career Martha?
- A memorable dust, yes.
Yes, of course a metamememorable dust up.
So I would say that my last one was really about
our customer acquisition model.
I think it's important for marketing leaders
to make sure that they're on the same page with their CFO
of how is the customer acquisition model built
and that you're generating ROI for the company, right?
There's always gonna be healthy tension
with your finance department probably
because there's spending a lot of money on marketing.
But I think about it as an investment and not budget.
So one thing, as I always say,
our marketing investment,
like what is our marketing investment for the year
versus our marketing budget?
And then you just have to make sure
that you're on the same page of,
okay, this is how much it costs to acquire our customer.
This is how much revenue we ultimately have to drive
for this to be a cost-effective method
and go from there.
All right, let's get to our final segment of the day.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
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generate pipeline faster,
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to identify your most valuable visitors
and instantly, and I mean instantly,
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Qualified is quick and easy just like these questions.
Go to Qualified.com to learn more.
Martha, are you ready?
- I'm ready.
- Number one, do you have a hidden talent or skill
that's not on your resume?
- I can grow plants.
I have like 160 plants in my house.
Get me a cutting, I can grow it.
- Do you have a favorite book podcast or TV show
that you've been checking out the alike recently?
- Wow.
So I listened to way too many podcasts
probably to have a favorite there.
I would say my favorite book right now is Think Again.
You haven't checked it out.
It's been really reframing how I think things.
And that's not me trying to make a pun,
even though it ended up being that way.
It's just a really fascinating book and I just finished it.
I'm one of those people I listen to a lot of audio books
by like podcasts as well.
I'm probably gonna have to listen to it again.
- Think again, the power of knowing what you don't know
by Adam Grant.
Cool.
I'm checking out Adam Grant's great.
So that's fun.
Good recommendation.
Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby
that maybe indirectly makes you a better marketer?
- Maybe.
That's, maybe so.
So, aside from plants, I build on my car.
So I've got a forerunner and it's all tricked out,
has a snorkel and a lift and all these things, right?
But the reason I think it might meet a better marketer
is because when I'm out, like I went to Utah, for example,
and I went off-roading and you get to meet
a bunch of people that also do crazy things
to their forerunners and trucks and what have you.
But I have learned to talk to people about what they like
and uncover why they do the things they do.
And I think it's really helped me
from a marketing perspective,
because I think a lot of marketing is about human psychology
and understanding the tips and tricks
of how their brains work.
And I think that helps, actually.
- What is your best advice
for a first-time VPN marketing?
- Make sure that you have alignment
with the rest of the executive team
on what you're trying to measure
and how you're going to measure it.
I think we said this earlier,
but a lot of our jobs as marketing leaders
is to educate and maintain that alignment.
And so you have to bring people along,
you have to educate them,
be transparent about the metrics, there's no, in my mind,
there's no need to spend them if you will.
Just educating the why, understanding why you're measuring this,
understanding what it ultimately does for the business,
it's gonna help you in the long-term,
get advocates on the executive team
so that you can get more marketing investment.
- What is an MDR and how do you define that?
- Market development rep.
So I've got five MDRs on the team at Telruk.
They help us call on warm leads
that are not yet warm enough to be called
a marketing qualified lead or an MQL.
To go to the sales team, for example,
if you registered for a webinar, but didn't attend,
our MDRs are gonna call you.
They help these lovely human beings,
help us convert all of our leads
into discovery calls ultimately,
and feed the sales team as well.
- That's cool, and why that versus an SDR?
- To me, it's the differences between outbound and inbound.
I think of SDRs being outbound calls,
MDRs call inbound leads.
And I really like, I advocate for this as well.
I really like the closed feedback loop that we have,
because the team is within our department.
So we understand what content is working,
what content isn't, where are the downloads happening?
When the MDRs are on the phone with the prospect,
they ask, what did you look at, what did you value?
And they can tell us, hey, this report isn't working,
or this webinar is working,
or it's just a great level of intelligence.
And we listen, I have the whole team listen to
three to five gong calls a week.
Everybody's got a quota.
- Well, it's been wonderful having on the show.
Thanks so much for joining, for listeners,
you can go to teleru.com, we'll link it up in the show notes.
They have some cool stuff over there.
As I said, tell a friend.
And Martha, any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- No, just thank you for having me.
This was great.
I wanna tell you that the podcast has helped me
a lot of times I go and listen to it.
And like, it helps center me and I go back to the basics,
'cause sometimes that's what we all have to do.
- Well, that's fantastic.
I love to hear that, that's very, very awesome.
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