Transcript:
Monica Evans:
This is the Marketing Hero podcast by ClearPivot, turning marketers into heroes. Welcome to the Marketing Hero podcast. I'm your host, Monica Evans, and today I've got Saylor Bowler on the call today. She is the senior product marketing manager at Nylas. How are you doing today?
Saylor Bowler:
I'm well. Thanks, Monica.
Monica Evans:
Cool. Well, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do for Nylas?
Saylor Bowler:
Sure. So I'm actually an atypical marketer. I'm a sales person turned marketer. I started my career fresh off an undergraduate degree in clinical psychology and fell right into commercial real estate, where I started off as a file clerk in a legal department, got into leasing, made my way into property management... Which I like to jokingly say is like getting a real life MBA because you're managing budgets and marketing and leasing, which is the sales aspect. You're doing community relations. You're managing your staff. It really is a little bit of everything.
That actually led me out to Colorado, where I worked in the senior living industry for about six years and there really started digging in even more to the marketing aspects of my job. I became a marketer because I often felt that the corporate level marketing was sometimes out of touch with the local markets that we were in, and I found myself often being a sales person army of one, where I would have to re-educate a customer or educate them from scratch with a little more detail and accuracy than that broader umbrella marketing was able to provide.
After a while, I went from saying like, "Surely there's a better way to do this," to, "Well, maybe I could do this better," to, "You know what? I'm going to try to do this myself." I decided I wanted to spend more time being proactive, where sales is a bit more reactive. You're talking with people who've already been nurtured to a degree to you, or you're perhaps cold calling... The dreaded cold call and your strategic messaging's already been done for you. I wanted to be more on that strategy and really focus on creating compelling reasons to engage with the brand I was working with.
Nylas is actually a pioneer of productivity infrastructure solutions, so we really own the communications layer of the software development stack. Our products are built to help software developers create products faster, bring them to market faster and better, without having to become subject matter experts on every little thing. Communications, any developers out there listening, if you've ever had to dive into Microsoft documentation, that is not a fun way to spend a day. So, we take that burden off of you.
Our initial offering was connectivity APIs, where we allow developers to connect to any email calendar and contacts platform in the world with an out-of-the-box solution. So, for those developers that need to build productivity features into their applications, we're the only platform that allows you to easily leverage communications data to deliver those intelligent workflows and create frictionless user experiences.
So, right now, Nylas is serving about 450 customers and growing. We have over 50,000 developers using our platform.
Monica Evans:
Wow.
Saylor Bowler:
We process about a billion API requests and 20 terabytes of data every day. That's also growing.
Monica Evans:
Oh, geez.
Saylor Bowler:
Headquartered in San Francisco, and we've got offices in New York. I'm based in Denver. We have Toronto, London, and Amsterdam, as well. So, right now we're in high-growth mode with about 55 million raised to date at our most recent series B rounds. I was employee number 95 in May. It's now October. We're over 130 employees.
Monica Evans:
Wow. Yeah. How long has Nylas been around?
Saylor Bowler:
Nylas was founded in 2013. Christine Spang, our founder, is an MIT grad, and she started out building email solutions. We've evolved from there. We recently were very fortunate to be named to the 2020 Inc. 5,000 list of America's fastest growing private companies. So, I've been busy in these first few months.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. You just hit the ground running when you get hired.
Saylor Bowler:
Yeah.
Monica Evans:
Perfect. So what is your role and what does a typical day look like for you?
Saylor Bowler:
Yeah, so my title is Senior Product Marketing Manager, and I'm really focused on a couple of different things. One is reshaping our brand to reflect some new artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities for the communications tech stack, and I specifically own the go-to-market for bringing Nylas to enterprise companies globally.
Monica Evans:
Oh, wow. So, what type of marketing campaigns do you do for Nylas? Is it ABM? Is it lead generation, or do you do a little bit of everything?
Saylor Bowler:
We do a little bit of everything. We're actually hiring an engagement marketing manager right now, which is fabulous, along with a slew of other positions, and that person will really own a lot of our email marketing. But one of the first campaigns we were running when I first started, so I can't take any credit for it, is a campaign we called Space Cheetahs. Our company mascot is a cheetah, symbolizing speed and agility, and there's just a lot of strong ties in the developer community to space with for all different reasons.
So, we worked with an external agency that helped us develop a gamified experience that we could invite developers to join via email, and they would move through this experience where they were assisting Captain Nyla, which is the name of our cheetah, through this space launch mission. They had to tackle various obstacles that were very specific to developer challenges. So, it was us basically using our key brand values and reasons to believe taking them on this journey that they were clicking buttons and engaging with and dodging asteroids and navigating through wormholes and all of this other cool stuff.
At the very end of the campaign, once they were successful, they would have the opportunity to complete a form, and since COVID, we're not able to reach people in their offices, like we used to be. This form was requesting a personal address, so we were, in essence, refreshing our contact database at the same time with these targeted accounts. Then we would actually send them a physical spaceship to assemble. So, it was very hand touch and interactive and had those a digital and a physical component, because who doesn't like getting something in the mail that isn't a bill.
Monica Evans:
I know. I mean, you don't really hear that too often, these days about direct mail campaigns. So, that's a really cool idea. What was the outcome? Was it a success?
Saylor Bowler:
I would say yes. I think we had a wider audience than a traditional ABM campaign, but the return on investment was strong. We were surprised actually by the amount of people who were willing to engage and give us a personal address so that we could send them that gift afterwards. That was an untested way of doing things. And this was a campaign that we had planned to execute prior to COVID and had already began working on, so ending from confirming a professional address to requesting a personal address, we really didn't know quite how it was going to go. So we were pleasantly surprised.
Monica Evans:
How long did the campaign run for?
Saylor Bowler:
We ran it starting in... It was right when I first started. So, the last week of may through the end of July.
Monica Evans:
And then, how many series of emails did they get up until they got the thing in the mail?
Saylor Bowler:
It was a wave. It really depended on at what point they chose to engage with the virtual interaction. If they got that first email clipped right through and completed the mission, they would get that spaceship within five to seven business days. So, anytime between the end of that first week, all the way to the end of July, depending on how many emails it took for them to engage.
Monica Evans:
No, that sounds really cool. So, that was-
Saylor Bowler:
It was really fun. I remember seeing it and going, "I've never seen anything like this," and as a marketer, I had never marketed to software developers before. I was familiar with the C-Suites, the non-technical C-Suite, and I was familiar with the technical C-Suite. But developers really are special people. They're super smart. They love to get right to the point, but they're not afraid to dive into really technical information. Getting the messaging just right for a lot of marketers can be challenging because you have to strip away all that frou frou, fluffy stuff and flowery verbiage or anything remotely salesy sounding. It's just a turn off.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. I've worked with many developers, and their inbox for subscription is like zero to none. The information has to be extremely engaging for them to even want to give any kind of information. So, that is-
Saylor Bowler:
Yup, it is all about what is the value that you can provide? Yes.
Monica Evans:
So, that's impressive. Kudos to Nylas for that one. So, that was a campaign that was starting to run when you first got hired on. What about since you've been at Nylas? What type of campaigns have you run, and what has worked for you that you've seen?
Saylor Bowler:
Yeah. So, we've primarily been running lead gen by persona since the time that I've been here. We typically focus on our developer audience, especially with our growth segment companies. Getting into the commercial and the mid-market areas, we look a lot more at product leadership and technical leadership, really just testing out different things. Because we're in the middle of a strategic brand pivot on the heels of an acquisition of a company that's allowing us to build out some pretty significant artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities on top of our captivity offerings, we're just letting our lead gen campaigns run right now.
But we're gearing up to do more of this introduction to productivity infrastructure campaign that really focuses on... Okay. So, if the connectivity layer is the foundation of this developers communication tech stack, the next thing is gathering intelligence off the data that you're pulling in from your customer's applications, and then automating off that data is the next layer. Then finally, the user experience layer at the front end.
So, we need to run a campaign and we will run a campaign that focuses on educating the market about this new category that we're creating. That'll be my next big initiative, and then alongside that, I'm working with an agency to do some persona research, but more on that later. The other campaign I see us running in Q2 of next year is going to be around that evaluation roadmap or how to buy a productivity infrastructure solution.
What are the questions these different personas are going to want to be asking to make sure that they're buying the right product for their business and that it meets the needs of their specific business, and then how you go about implementing that in the smoothest way possible to get the quickest, best return on investment? Or if you're in a position where you maybe don't have the budget, but you need to figure out how to create the budget, how can you pilot something in order to create budget and prove that ROI so you can then take it up the chain to your stakeholders and then multiply that value exponentially with a deeper deployment? So, those are two huge ones that are coming out.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. Does Nylas have a freemium and then different tiers, products at the company?
Saylor Bowler:
Yeah, we do. We do a freemium trial for our software developers that allows them to get a set amount of connected accounts for free for 30 days to test it out. Again, developers, direct, right to the point, they know right away if it's going to work for them, and we have a massively high success rate. So, honestly, if we can get someone to try the product and they see how much easier it is to just plug and play with us and then not have to manage all of the provider changes... Like every time Google or Microsoft or Yahoo makes a change, they don't have to go quarterback that, we take care of it, it's a pretty big no-brainer for them.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. No. So, do you have a lot of training tutorials and stuff like that, documentation that Nylas uses? I don't know if they use, I think Atlassion is a documentation platform that allows you to have all your information about your product, how to use it, that kind of stuff. Is that pretty well developed out?
Saylor Bowler:
We have a pretty extensive docs and references library. In fact, it's one of the better ones I've seen. I think Nylas was really smart in how they structured our marketing team. Way before I was ever hired to be the voice of the product and C-Suite personas, we hired a developer advocate, Ben, who I joke is my work brother. He's the ying to my yang. He's the developer voice to my product persona voice. He has spent the last year creating docs and references and blog posts that are SEO rich.
We, as a result of that, just dominate a lot of the SEO in our space. It is one of the most incredible SEO power moves I've ever seen, to be quite honest, and he's extremely talented and humble about it. So, yes, there's a massive investment in that. As far as what platform we use, I honestly feel like I knew this at one time and can't remember right now, but we do have a platform that we use to get our docs on the website.
Monica Evans:
You talked a little bit about Ben and how he writes the content and stuff, and obviously that helps you, especially for a product manager marketing manager, that is. How are teams typically structure at Nylas. I know it's a growing company right now. I mean, you went from 95 employees with you to now 130 plus. How are the marketing teams typically structured there?
Saylor Bowler:
Yeah, I think we've done a really smart way of structuring our team. To be quite honest, coming from a smaller SAS startup where I was part of a team of four and very much a marketing challenge generalist... So, I was across PR, I owned our analyst/influencer relations. I was writing blog posts. I was managing social media, doing strategy, writing the integrated marketing plan for the year. It was a lot. And in this team, when I joined, there were eight of us. Now we're going on 12 in four months, so growing quickly.
We're divided into two pillars, really. We have our VP who sits over both teams, and then there's the demand gen side where we have a director of demand gen and a demand gen manager who's just an absolute paid ad and SEO ninja. She's fantastic. Our engagement marketing manager will sit on that side. We have our creative director who handles all of our design and consults on product design, but we also have a product designer nested in the product team.
Then over on the product marketing side, you have our director of product marketing, and then myself as senior product marketing manager. We just hired one of me to assist with all of our new feature go-to markets. Dom is actually a transplant from our sales team, so he has incredible amount of Nylas technical knowledge and history, as well as in the field customer knowledge. He's very well versed at working with our product team, so just super excited to have him join us. Ben is on our team as well as our developer advocate, and then we also have Sam who is our director of sales enablement.
We really have a solid mix on the team, so our product management pod kind of functions in lock step with the demand gen side. The product marketing is a little bit more out in the rest of the company as we sit at the intersection of sales and product and are very ear to the ground with the leadership team in terms of the direction that they want to take the organization.
I left out our buddies in customer success. I've actually been working with customer success a ton, so I work really closely with them on our case studies program. That's another thing that I actually own, and we're working... I think we have like nine case studies in the pipe just for the next month and a half. So, our CS team has been very spiffy.
Monica Evans:
Yeah, that's awesome. So, it seems like the structure at Nylas is pretty solid in terms of you guys tend to work alongside, but also you guys have your own very different campaigns that you're running that just go hand in hand with each other. So, that-
Saylor Bowler:
For anybody who's familiar with HubSpot's funnel to flywheel evolution, we really run Nylas like a flywheel. It starts with our leadership team shepherding the direction of the organization, funneling down into engineering, who's building the product. Our product team is really shaping it and determining what needs to go out into the market next based on the demand that they're finding. Then you've got our product marketing team, who's bringing it to market and working out all the messaging and positioning, and we support on competitive research in conjunction with sales.
We do sales enablement, and then you've got the sales team who is actually taking it out into the field, gathering some high-level feedback about the sales process and feeding that back into the funnel. And then customer success, who's really nurturing all of our customers, helping them connect and expand and deepen. As someone becomes a Nylas customer, the first step is our connectivity APIs, whether it's email, calendar, contacts, a mix or, D, all of the above. So, they might start with a handful of accounts and see how it works.
And generally from there, they add more connected accounts. That's the expansion piece, but then deepening is what we're bringing forth to market with these intelligence, automation, user experience capabilities. So, then customer success runs that feedback loop back into really all the other departments, but it starts with us in marketing. The case studies and then up to the leadership team, we try to reduce friction within teams and between teams and just create virtuous feedback cycles anywhere that we can.
Monica Evans:
Yeah, no. And speaking of the flywheel and HubSpot, what kind of automation tools do you use within Nylas? What kind of marketing automation tools, that is?
Saylor Bowler:
Yeah, our marketing tech stuff, we try to keep it simple. We have used HubSpot in the past, but about a year ago, shifted over to Marketo. That was pre me, and then we do project management through Trello actually, which is super effective for our teams. We use Salesforce. That's the umbrella, database, CRM for the entire organization. Those are our primary setups. Obviously, demand gen has their own suite of things where they're using Google Analytics and all those kinds of things to run reports and using SEMrush, those types of keyboarding and SEO tools. So, it's diversified.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. No, it sounds like that. We talked a little bit earlier on about persona research, and you said we can talk about that later. I'd really like to dive into how you guys conduct research for your personas and what that looks like for you.
Saylor Bowler:
Yes. So, when I worked at Nylas, we had used a research firm to sample over a thousand people, and in that research, it was really focused on developers, product managers, product VPs, technical C-Suite, and non-technical C-Suite. It was very statistical, and we did some desktop research and did some historic Nylas research and came up with really six core personas, knowing that as we were targeting growth organizations, the growth segment at the time, the developers were our primary persona.
Now, over the summer, as we've started to build up these AI and ML capabilities and are taking Nylas into the commercial and enterprise segments more deeply than we have before and with more of a concentrated effort behind us, the need to do some more in-depth narrative-based persona research has come up because it's really important to us that we understand who our customers are, what they need, how they think, where they buy, so that we can build the best possible product to serve them and we can reach them in the easiest, most natural way in order to make their jobs easier.
I was talking with a customer recently who said, "Look, Saylor. Nylas is going to be a career maker for me because I just saved my engineering team so much time and hassle by purchasing you versus spending a bunch of cycles and money doing trial and error and testing to build connectivity features." And I was like, "Well, that is great feedback to hear. Thank you so much. And I'm excited to see if you take advantage of the AI and ML things that we're building, because the lift that that takes off of a team is commensurate."
So, we'll see what happens down the road, but getting that kind of feedback just really drives home the fact that strong persona research is the foundation for a solid marketing set of initiatives. We're actually partnering up with an agency to do that in-depth more narrative-based research. I've used them before at a previous organization, and the end deliverable is really fantastic. It has everything from the reason this person gets out of bed in the morning to, what are their most important roles and responsibilities? What are the pains and gains of their job? What are the tasks of their job?
It really gets into, how do they measure success? How do they make decisions? What is their role in each phase of the buying process, discovery, consideration, decision? How do they research possible solutions? What information do they need to make a decision? What other products have they used, and what questions did they have about Nylas specifically? So, they also dig deeper when they're doing these customer interviews. We choose customers, we choose prospects, and we actually go to closed/lost folks and interview them as well.
And through each stage, discovery, consideration, decision, and also engagement, we come to understand their rational drivers, their emotional drivers, what messaging points work well for this persona, and what types of content work well, so that we can really hone in on the value that Nylas delivers for them when we're messaging. So, those benefits, those reasons to believe around the specific points, they're really well fleshed out and detailed.
I could turn around without lifting another finger and hand this deliverable to everyone on my marketing team, every one on my leadership team, everyone on my sales team, everyone in product, everyone in customer success, and everyone in engineering; and they would all find a ton of useful information here to consider in their part of the flywheel process.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. How long do they normally take to develop that research for you and put together that end piece?
Saylor Bowler:
Typically, the customer interviews take within about 30 days because we do a bunch, and end-to-end it's about three months. I would ballpark it at about three months to do this depth of research, including the desktop research, including creating the end deliverable, including conducting and scheduling all of the persona interviews. It's actually fairly quick turnaround to produce an asset this valuable.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. And it gets everybody on the same page within the company. There's no ambiguity whatsoever because this is what your customers, your prospects, and your audience is saying; and you can't refute it. This is what it is, and we need to work towards it in capturing this audience, which is ours across all-
Saylor Bowler:
The real benefit I find to doing it this way is that when it's time to do the interviews with those different personas, it's not anyone at Nylas doing the interviews. It's this third-party agency, this marketing agency that we've partnered with doing it. And that really allows our customers and prospects to open up deeply and share a very candid experience.
At my previous company, this was super helpful because the leadership team and a lot of the sales folks had been out there in the field for a while, so they had their own set of beliefs around who the audience was and what they wanted. In some ways the persona research validated that and others, it didn't. It showed that other things were more of a priority, or it brought up things that we were doing in sales that were more of a deal killer. So, it allows us to just focus on what mattered most to the customer, not what we thought mattered most to the customer.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. No, I mean, every company should do a persona research, a very in-depth persona research because it's easy to do the basics, but they don't really give you what you need to really create content and target your audience if it's just on the very high level. So, this sounds quite impressive.
Saylor Bowler:
I'm impressed having a big depth to that research. So doing the interviews, doing the desktop research, hunting around the internet, seeing where these people actually live and breathe in the digital world, looking at our anecdotal Marketo and Salesforce data... Excuse me, our quantified Marketo and Salesforce data, it takes a village of information to create this kind of well-rounded perspective as opposed to just being like, "Well, I think they like this, and I think they like that," or, "Based on this limited segment of 20 customers in my automation platform, I see they're engaging with this." You can get real narrow real quick and that might take you down the wrong road.
Monica Evans:
Yeah, I agree. So, in terms of metrics, as a product marketing manager, what would you say is the most valuable metric you track?
Saylor Bowler:
Yeah. The most valuable that's a tricky one. I mean, I always look at ASP, so really are the contracts that we're spelling getting larger, especially because I'm focused on bringing Nylas to the enterprise. By default enterprise deals are bigger, so if your ASP's going up, you're selling bigger deals typically to bigger customers. But I think it's really important to keep track at the organizational level of the metrics.
What's the ARR doing, your annual recurring revenue? What's the monthly recurring revenue doing? How are you tracking on new logos? Are you acquiring new logos? Then of course, what's your churn, and what's your contraction? Really as a company, it's I, think ASP, ARR, CAC, so customer acquisition costs. Net [inaudible 00:31:26] score is something we watch really closely letting us know how our customers feel about the brand and if they'd recommend us to others in the industry.
As a marketing team, we look really closely at conversion rates, ROI, bounce rates, those kinds of more in-depth metrics. like you said, ASP is my target. It's my OKR of choice, and looking at that across growth, commercial, and enterprise segments, as well as the whole, is really indicative of our success.
Monica Evans:
Great. Well, we're at the end of our podcast, but we always like to leave with a question for our guest. That is, if you could be a superhero, which one would you be?
Saylor Bowler:
Yeah. I think maybe because I'm an '80s baby, and there's the movie getting ready to come out, but I would have to go with Wonder Woman. I like her strong, empowered female stance. I also like her curiosity. She's in a new world, and she's constantly asking questions and wanting to know why or why not. That I can very much relate to. I also think she's a very strong superhero. She has a lot of fortitude, and I aspire to be like that personally and professionally.
Monica Evans:
Yeah. No, definitely. She's a great role model for just not children but adults alike. I have to agree with that. Well, thank you so much, Saylor. I really appreciate you hopping on with me today.
Saylor Bowler:
Thank you so much, Monica. I appreciate you having me. It's a wonderful, wonderful podcast. I've listened to some other recordings, and just it's a great group of folks that you have on here. So, I'm pleased to be included.
Monica Evans:
Thank you. You've been listening to the Marketing Hero podcast by ClearPivot. Be sure to join us next time. For more information, visit www.clearpivot.com.
