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What’s the secret to selling
to mid-market businesses and why should you focus on this category?
Let’s talk about it in this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning into Closing time the show for Go to Market Leaders.
I’m Val Riley from the marketing team at Insightly CRM.
And today I’m joined by Steve Oriola,. CEO of Unbounce,
a landing page builder company that recently acquired Insightly CRM.
So, yes, Steve is my new boss.
Steve, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Well, let’s get you introduced to that closing time audience.
You’re the CEO over two brands in the MarTech space right now,
but that category isn’t new to you.
No, it’s not.
I’ve been in the MarTech category for SaaS for about 23 years.
So, yeah, a fair bit of time.
You know, it began with my joining. Constant Contact, you know, very early.
I think I was the 25th employee or something like that
and was there for ten years.
I’ve also been at Pipedrive, which a lot of folks may know.
So, yeah, I’ve got I’ve got a fair bit of experience and a pretty wide range.
So you’re familiar with the CRM space and how competitive it is.
Last count I saw, there are more than 1700. CRMs on the market.
So what was appealing about jumping back into that space, Steve?
Sure.
What was really appealing was
the combination of the two brands and the two platforms.
Less than excitement to jump into a very competitive space.
Insightly is a pretty comprehensive CRM,
and that was important to me as we,
me and our investors, made that decision
and Insightly
focuses on the sales use case from a go to market perspective.
The product they’ve built covers marketing and services
as well and Unbounce, we know the marketer, right?
That’s our buyer and we understand those use cases and we’ve built
a very, very robust landing page solution that includes
experimentation and optimization capabilities.
So it’s a pretty powerful tool.
And we also, under our tent have an attribution solution.
So we looked at the marketing automation platform
that Insightly has and we got very excited
and the industry certainly has moved to more comprehensive solutions in CRM,
some would call them all in one and as well,
I think everyone’s realizing that from a technology perspective
you can’t treat sales and marketing as silos
because, you know, healthy, modern companies
that are that are progressing are breaking down those silos
and we feel like we can help accelerate that and support that.
So that’s the strategic synergy
that jumped out at me several months ago when we started this journey.
And that’s what we’re excited about.
Yeah, let’s let’s dig a little deeper there because
I think there is significant overlap in just in the verticals,
in the mid-market focus, geographically.
How do you see those synergies becoming an advantage?
Sure.
Unbounce as well has been focused on the mid-market
as Insightly is, Unbounce
operates a bit more globally than Insightly, yet Insightly has prepared
to operate globally at the product level, probably more than Unbounce.
Brands are learning from each other in that regard.
We have an office in Europe.
We’re capable of going to market in Europe.
Insightly is a localized
solution for most of Europe,
so those overlaps, as we looked
more deeply, were pretty synergistic, to be honest.
We’re a global company now and we’re one company
and we have a global solution that we’re going to market with.
I think another interesting point,. Steve, is how both companies
really had an alignment on values out of the gate.
How do you see that as an advantage moving forward?
Yeah, the cultures felt
pretty similar and not identical.
You know, they never are.
But the the integration is is not that painful
because at the values level, which is really important.
That’s really sort of lubricated the the whole deal and the integration.
And, you know, we’re very focused on, on velocity of planning, decision
making and execution, and everyone’s aligning to that pretty easily.
I will say. I can validate that from the inside.
We are we are very focused on velocity.
So it’s an exciting time,. I think, to be at the company.
So both of these organizations were previously selling to the mid-market
and as a combined organization, we are the mid-market.
So let’s talk a little bit about that category
and what you feel maybe makes it a sweet spot.
The way I think about it is, you know,. I got a lot of experience
in mid-market and small business and some experience with Enterprise.
And for me, it’s it’s about the user and the buyer.
And, you know,
small business
go to market and cracking that knot is not easy.
The part that’s a little simpler is that the
the buyer and the user are almost always the same person.
And as you go up market, those, those tend to start to separate.
I would say they’ve probably start at the mid-market 50-100 people,
you know, the buying decision and the user
can be different.
You get to enterprise and they’re very different.
And and the, you know, the requirements for the purchase
don’t always accommodate the user.
And I’ve just found myself very uncomfortable at that level
where you’re selling to someone in the criteria to get the deal done
aren’t really the criteria to keep the user happy.
Now, that’s certainly changed over the last 10 to 15 years where,
and especially is new generations of workers come into,
you know, big corporate environments.
They just have certain expectations that IT kind of needs to meet.
But there’s still that separation.
And that’s the big difference for me is
it’s appealing to go to the mid-market
for a company like ours because,
you know, you end up in a situation where there’s more opportunity
to expand that account, there’s more things to sell to them
and they’re stickier.
They stay around longer, they’re more loyal.
You know, small businesses tend to be, you know,
a bit transient, you know, to put it mildly.
And and small businesses fail at
some rate.
I think the failure rate for small business in the U.S.
is somewhere around 2% a month.
So your churn rate sort of starts there.
That’s zero.
And it’s just different when you’re in the mid-market.
So we find that appealing.
We’re excited about our mid-market customers.
They’re loyal, they’re happy, and we can find more ways to add value.
One thing I especially like about the mid-market
is kind of echoing what you were saying about the buying processes,
the buying committees.
They’re there, but they tend to be more reasonable in size and a sales
cycle tends to be more reasonable versus the enterprise as well.
Yeah, the and that’s true as well.
I’m not averse to, you know, enterprise selling an enterprise focus.
You just have to build your business around the economics of a sales cycle
that can be six months, can be two years.
And, and you have to have a certain type
of sales team and compensation plans.
And it’s just a different business.
It’s not better or worse.
It’s just different.
So you have to design for it.
We’re really focused on the mid-market.
So the mid-market is the middle child, right?
But there’s there’s a lot to be said for that middle child.
There’s a lot of opportunity there. Yep.
Yep. That’s right.
So let’s talk to a salesperson
because that’s the typical type of person that listens to Closing Time.
What advice would you have for a salesperson
that’s selling to the mid-market?
They’re discerning buyers and they do have buying committees.
It’s not as complex as enterprise, and they more than
small business, they’re looking for the solution for them.
Right?
And they’re very focused on understanding
their vertical, their industry, their business.
So if you’re
not a vertical solution, you at least need to,
you know, articulate or build messaging
and build your pitch as a salesperson
to really clarify that understanding of their business.
It does benefit you as a salesperson to be working in
maybe several lanes, maybe not one.
Certainly one is ideal, but if your company isn’t vertical,
if it’s horizontal,
you can be a horizontal solution and still accommodate certain industries.
You need marketing support to do it.
No doubt. So make sure you have that.
But learn the industries and it might be three,
it might be five, might be eight or ten.
I wouldn’t recommend more than that as a certainly as a salesperson,
but understand the industries you’re selling into
so that you can speak in their language and,
and that that really is almost a requirement to the mid-market.
So in thinking about the conversation that a salesperson has
with a small business buyer and an enterprise buyer,
how is the conversation different when you’re talking to a mid-market buyer?
Sure.
Small business is going to be just because of the economics of it
for your company in going to market for small businesses,
you’re going to have you know, it’s going to be lighter touch, it’s
going to be less time, less involvement.
And, you know, you might be on the clock.
You know, you might be directed as a salesperson in an environment
like that, to not spend more than 15 minutes or more than a half hour.
You might be trying to talk to 20 or 30 people a day.
When you get to the mid-market,
the economics change, right?
The lifetime value that you’re selling, that is the opportunity there is greater.
So you can invest more in the sales process, You can spend more time.
The range of things that you’ll be talking about are greater.
There are buying criteria
that have nothing to do with the product and the product experience.
It might be SOC 2 compliance.
So they may be, you know, very sensitive to regulatory issues,
especially depending on the industry they’re in.
So you need to understand that.
You also need to understand, you know, their their process.
They’re all going to have a different process around buying.
And so there’s all these buying criteria that are way beyond product
and you need to understand that, you know, depending on the business
and what sort of profitability targets they have,
you might build a small team, you know, for that sales process at the mid-market,
certainly at Enterprise, you’re going to have
you’re going to have to have a range of people
with a range of expertise supporting you in that sales cycle.
But even at mid-market, you know, you may need technical account help,
you may need you know, your in-house counsel,
you know, to weigh in on contracts.
There’s just a broader range of things to consider and to deal with.
And, you know, we see that because we
both brands have been serving both small business and mid-market.
And it’s just a very different set of activities.
Great stuff, Steve.
So starting today, these two companies are one,
what can customers of Unbounce expect
and what can customers of Insightly expect with this merger?
You can expect a broad integrated solution,
not tomorrow, but certainly not a year from now.
And it will happen in increments and it will accelerate as we do this.
You know, you can expect to see more
artificial intelligence and machine learning application to the CRM.
That is
sort of the bailiwick of of the Unbounce brand.
We have a we have a large team that does that and
and that has that’s how the landing page solution has become much more
than a landing page solution.
It’s really become an experimentation platform.
And that’s through, you know, good application
of a machine learning.
We as well on the on Unbounce brand
were early to generative A.I.
and we were honestly attempting generative A.I.,
not attempting, we built some generative AI solutions
before chatGPT came on the scene and blew up and all of that.
So you can expect to see that in the CRM, you know, fairly soon
and you can expect to see a bigger investment
in the marketing automation platform because, you know, the Unbounce folks
understand that buyer, understand those use cases very, very well.
So you’ll see the platform become, you know, more comprehensive.
The combined org Unbounce will still be in the independent landing page space.
That’s a very healthy business for us,
but you’ll see a much more combined solution
with CRM being the entry point
for that business.
So that’s what you’ll see.
Well, I can tell you from the inside that folks on
both brands are really excited about the future.
Steve, thank you so much for joining us on Closing Time.
Great. Thanks for having me.
And thanks to all of you for tuning in to Closing Time.
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