Welcome back. I'm your host Maia Morgan Wells. On today's episode of The Marketing Hero Podcast, I'm talking with Dave Fink, founder and CEO of Postie. Over a 20 year career, he's generated hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue, powered viral sensations like Dollar Shave Club, and helped launch celebrity startups for Jessica Simpson, Mary Kate and Ashley Olson, and Kate Bosworth. Now as founder and CEO of Postie, he's out to reinvent direct mail marketing for a digital world. Our conversation focuses on the story of how Postie developed and executed their own go to market strategy and marketing plans. Dave Fink, welcome to the show.
Dave Fink:
Thanks for having me. Really glad to be here.
Maia Wells:
So we're going to start out with a question we like to ask all of our guests, Dave. What is your favorite part of your career and how did you figure that out?
Dave Fink:
It's a great question. And I think when you get to be my age and you've been in the business world for over 25 years, there are lots of different moments that you can look back on and see faster acceleration and personal development or achievement or whatnot. But I think recency bias plays a heavy hand in your memory. And right now I feel really fortunate to be a part of building and running a company that's been built in our mind's eyes from a cultural perspective, and especially navigating all sorts of craziness, transition to distributed work during COVID and reemergence of the workspace during the post COVID time and space.
The one thing that's remained very consistent is who we are culturally as a company, the type of people that we've worked really hard to onboard support, develop the overall tone. And that really lends itself to the work environment we've created that I think makes us a special company, creates tons of longevity in our employee base. And regardless on whether the task at hand is challenging or easy, whether the client engagement is successful or less successful, we're hitting key milestones or struggling, that the culture never changes. And so to sum that up, I really think that at this point in my career, I'm most proud of the environment that I've participated in creating and the way that we're hopefully enhancing our team's lives, which then translates into, I think the way that we're perceived by clients and partners in the world.
Maia Wells:
Can you tell me a little bit more detail about that culture? What comprises the culture? What is it like? What are the main elements or values that you're trying to instill in your employees and in the work environment? I'd like to dig into that a little bit more? What is the culture?
Dave Fink:
Sure. So we're not one of those companies that has those five bullet point value statements. We try to build culture more authentically and organically, and really a lot of that's leading by example and being very, very thorough, hiring slowly and ensuring that we're not just hiring for capability. We're also hiring for potential and personality and quality of individual. So I would say some high level themes that go into the culture that we're trying to build.
One, we try very hard to hire for capability over previous achievement. There are people that have been in great environments and have been able to achieve. There are really, really capable, smart people that just were in not the right fit and did not have the opportunity to achieve. So we go more deeply into what someone's potential, what someone's capability, what someone's desire and motivation. And we want to create an environment where they have freedom and flexibility, regardless on whether they're an entry level position or a very senior leadership position to stretch their legs and really contribute at a high level, which tends to resonate with them as an individual. And that sense of achievement becomes more than just a job.
So that's something that we focus very heavily on. We also, I think, fancy ourselves as enjoying being surrounded by really smart people, really thoughtful people, and that can be thoughtful in their field, PhDs in machine learning and data science and physics, biology make up our data science teams. And we have a number of VP of engineers that are running different product divisions. And our services organization are just the highest level thought leaders in the space. And our sales team is very much not a boiler room sales mentality. It's a very consultative group of people. And so Jonathan, my co-founder and I, have always just gravitated towards very deep thinking type people. And we've hired the type of people that we like spending time with, which encourages us to put in long hours ourselves and really lean in with our team.
So those are, I think some of the unique, personal qualities that we aim for and the type of people that we hire. And then the foundational stuff really stems from, I think our belief that there are two big buckets of company types that exist out there. And both can be very successful on one side. And they're more numerous, I think, is the opportunistically type built companies. And what I mean by that is more companies are built because there's a founding team that has some domain expertise and a vision of how do they launch a company and understands how to manage a P&L and go to market in that space or build product or services in that space.
And that's great. And there are many, many very successful companies. There's a fewer number of companies that are mission driven. And when I talk about mission driven, I don't necessarily mean that these are companies that are going out and trying to save the world and solve the most challenging social or political problems. What I mean by that is that the business was founded with the mission of solving a very specific pain point or problem. And that can be a small nuance problem, or that could be a more macro problem, but that the entire foundation, that business was built with that mission at hand. And I think that's our company, that's Postie for sure.
We get up every day, very much focused on the mission behind the problem that we're trying to solve. And we make that very clear in all of our communication, whether it's with our product or engineering or data science teams or services or ops teams or sales teams or marketing teams. And I think that just that theme gets carried through everything that we do.
Maia Wells:
Can you tell me a little bit more about that mission? Is there a mission statement that all of these different departments live by? One is what is it? And the second part of that question is how do you maintain that consistency across all of these different people who are working in different areas of the business?
Dave Fink:
Yeah, that's a constant struggle, especially in a world where many of us are still working distributively and we're not sitting shoulder to shoulder in an office space anymore. The mission of Postie really stemmed from pain point that we, as marketers were feeling and that the marketers that we worked with were feeling. And if you think about the evolution of marketing, the last call it 15 years or so, really the common theme has been the dominance of two behemoths of walled gardens, Google and Facebook. And I think anyone who's in marketing has spent a tremendous amount of their time and energy and team build, focusing on how to play in those walled gardens. And there are many businesses that have singular fail points. Facebook goes down for them, iOS 14 rolls out and the algorithm changes everything. They no longer can target on mobile, et cetera, and their entire P&L falls apart.
We've seen that day in day out. We started seeing that risk about seven years ago, where we just had this over-dependence on Facebook. Facebook certainly reared its ugly head and made it known that it's going to do what it needs to do to appease Wall Street and that's its mission. And so really the mission of Postie was how can we leverage a 20 year knowledge base of quantitative marketing across a number of digital channels and take the technology and data and knowledge and workflow and apply it to other channels to help diversify the typical marketers demand gen stack.
The channel that we started falling in love with and realizing was big, scalable, had lots of interesting use cases of data similar to digital, had direct measurement, had the ability to test optimize, happened to be direct mail. So physical mail, but our mission wasn't, "Hey, let's recreate direct mail." Our mission was, let's give marketers some other big, powerful tools that could help them take back more control of their marketing stack and pull it away from the two headed monster.
Maia Wells:
And so how do you try and infuse that mission into the everyday business, especially in a dispersed team?
Dave Fink:
Yeah, so I think that comes from both really thorough onboarding. When you hire someone new, it comes from constant reinforcement through formal conversation, as well as informal conversation that permeates each division. And it's thinking about how we tactically train our teams to differentiate ourselves in the market, whether it's by product, whether it's by use of data, whether it's by the way we run ops, whether it's by marketing and storytelling and dimension, whether it's by sales and services. And an example may not be so obvious would be take our sales team. We definitively believe that initial discovery call with a prospect client sets the entire tone for the entire relationship. They could become one of our biggest clients three years from now. And that initial discovery really, really laid the foundation. And what I mean by that is a good discovery call becomes just very naturally inquisitive.
And so we try very hard to practice and train and educate our account executives to not go in and sell, but to try and learn as much as they can about a prospect's business and tease out some of these potential pain points that we think that they may have, and that we may be helpful for. Well, if you think about that, by focusing a lot of energy on not just the Postie pitch or the elevator pitch or all these things that so many sales teams focus on, but focus more on engaging clients and the inquisitiveness of learning about their business, that really helps us. I think that establishes our interest in really solving problems.
We try and do that every step along the way. When a product person or engineer brings a product idea, it may be shiny and exciting and something neat leveraging the latest technology, but we'll go very deep and questioning what led you to this product idea? What problem does it solve? What pain points have we seen that we're not currently solving? How does it enhance some core feature that is delivering value in the market? So I think it's not so much the grand gesture of standing on a stage at a quarterly company training, it's just the little threads that get woven into the day in day out way that we all engage with each other and externally with clients and prospects.
Maia Wells:
All right, Dave, so mission driven company, definitely keeping an eye on that mission with every small thing that everybody is doing, but I'm sure that you went about developing some sort of go to market strategy in the beginning, right? Can you tell me more about that process of taking it from the idea from the mission into that go to market plan and how that then influences your marketing plans?
Dave Fink:
Yeah, sure. And I will be honest, I in hindsight wish we got a little deeper on our go to market planning. We started out with this hypothesis of, could we leverage technology in this 20 years of knowledge and digital to build really a channel management or ad serving solution for the direct mail space? And we looked at it and we said like, "Hey, this is a $50 billion space. And there's nothing out there that even resembles this set of tools that we're interested in building and that we as markers would want." And we didn't know if that was because it just had not drawn the attention of the entrepreneurial community yet, or if it's because people tried and it just was too hard, it wasn't possible. So really the first six months were all about, could it be done? What needed to be built? And it was just a dedicated focus on product, product, product.
And we believe that if we built the product and could prove that the product could be built and then built it, that would be the foundation for a successful business. And again, it's just the nature of that mission driven approach. And we had a little bit of that field of dreams, I think, silliness of if you build it, they will come, which actually did work. Now worked because the founding team had such deep relationships through the consumer brand world, that we were able to have a number of conversations early on with CMOs and VP of demand gen, et cetera. And the same pain points that we were having definitively were through the data fabric of the brand and marketing world. And so the minute we would mention what we were doing, we hear things like, "Oh dear God, get me off of Facebook." "If this works, we're in, we'll be your first testers." So we had that luxury of confidence that we would have enough beta or alpha users to really prove product market fit.
And that served us really well. And we built a profitable business from year one. The bigger we got, we eventually started tapping out of our own network. And then it became more of a game of thinking about demand gen. And our chosen path was interestingly to not invest in marketing, which was a mistake, but definitively a mistake. We would do it totally differently if we could. Even though we've been successful, we invested in sales infrastructure. So our belief was we had a complicated product that had a high price point and was a high consideration sales cycle. And so we need to hire very thoughtful, very consultative sales individuals. And we did that. And the truth is the sales cycles, because of it, went really smoothly. However, we weren't feeding their pipe efficiently.
At one point we had a whole demand gen team that was really high paid account executives that were acting as their own SDRs. They were doing their own research, their own outreach. And so we then started trying to solve our own problems, which was well, hey, we have these really talented sales people. Wouldn't it be great if they were spending more of their time in sales cycles, less of their time doing research and outreach. So then we built out an SDR layer and all of a sudden that started working.
Then we had started looking at these SDRs a year in and said, "These are incredibly talented people that are very successful, but they're limited in their time. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a top of funnel lead flow going so that we could get prospects a little deeper into their decision process by the time they even engaged with our SDRs, certainly by the time an SDR introduced them to an account executive." And that finally led us to, that's so silly. We're a marketing technology platform here that's not marketing at all. And so became now let's build out our marketing team. Let's build our demand gen, let's build out a real holistic go to market. And we've been leaning in over the last, call it year and a half, and low and behold, it's like, of course, that works. So we did it a little backwards.
Maia Wells:
So now that you know what you know now, what would you have done differently? Would you have started by building out that top of funnel lead gen engine first? What would have been the vision looking back with 20/20 hindsight?
Dave Fink:
We would've done it simultaneously. So we certainly would've invested in the same three buckets, but at the same time. So we would've looked at sophisticated, deep thinking, consultative account executive layer, but not as many. We would've looked at, at the same time, complimenting that team with an aggressive SDR team, motivated SDR team. And at the same time, building out our marketing infrastructure, everything from product marketing to lead generation, to demand gen to lead nurturing and retention that just would've happened simultaneously. And I do think that we would've accelerated even faster. I'm not complaining. I'm very happy with where the business is, but unquestionably, if we were to start today, we would've hit all three of those layers at the same time.
Maia Wells:
So now that you do have all of those layers in place, can you take us through a typical buyer's journey with your company, what that looks like, and when do they move through the different stages and maybe even how you help them to do that?
Dave Fink:
Sure. And I'll take the ideal funnel, which isn't how a hundred percent of deals get done, but I think at this point, a high percentage of them. So stage number one is really defining our ICP. So we have a product offering that's appropriate for a very broad ICP, but nonetheless, there are lots of companies that fall outside of that. And so when you start thinking about actually investing in demand gen, and then the time of your sales team and your sales leadership team and your SDR team, et cetera, you want to make sure that everyone's focusing budget and time on accounts, that if you engage in a sales cycle, they truly are likely to be good fits. So that's where it all starts is mapping out our ICP from an account level. And then it's mapping out those organizations to understand who the potential decision makers are and who the potential decision influencers are.
And in cultivating an understanding of what each of those teams look like. Then from there, it's feeding our demand gen. So we run all sorts of programmatic media targeting that ICP and the prospect buyers that we've mapped within those ICP. And that's certainly all of the digital channels. We eat our own dog food and leverage offline media like direct mail, but we really take this educational process, lots of promoting of case studies and white papers and research data points and examples of use cases, what capabilities that Postie and the channel provide that are different than the way that someone might traditionally think about direct mail. And the ideas we're really trying to warm someone up to who Postie is, building that belief that an investment or desire to make an investment from the potential buy side, before we even have personal contact with them. From there, we're trying to feed our funnel, but we're also at the same time running direct outreach with our SDR team and some cases, our A's as well, trying to engage those individuals within our ICP in initial discovery conversation.
With some portion of those at different times throughout the year and different times throughout the month, we finally get hand raisers and we're scheduling. In most cases, we don't need to qualify them because we've already qualified them prior to putting them into our ICP funnel. And so we'll engage in a discovery call and that leads back to what we talked about before, where during that initial call, our goal is walk away from that call really understanding the client's pain points and needs, their dreams and fantasies, understanding what their buying journey looks like. The problems that if we could solve would be an easy yes, for them. We want to understand what they're currently doing in their marketing stack, what they're currently doing in the direct mail channel. And hopefully at the same time, educate them at a very least high level, giving them a product and Postie company overview so that we're doing this trade. They're sharing their needs and their challenges, we're sharing our capabilities and some of our solution.
At the end of that call, the goal is to reach consensus that it makes sense to have a follow up call, ideally with anyone that would be involved in the buying decision to actually walk them through a demo. And because we have a very deep product that is differentiated, that demo call tends to be a mic drop moment for us. They're very few circumstances. We're fortunate we're where a prospect walks away at that point, it isn't somewhat dumbfounded that the capabilities exist in direct amount.
We're just doing things very differently. And during that demo call, the goal definitively is not just to show off our product, but to use all the knowledge that we pulled from that discovery to make sure that we're using the time that we have with these busy people wisely to help them walk away, not just with the while Postie has amazing capabilities, but they really understood, Postie really understood which of those capabilities solve the pain points that we have. And at that point, the goal is to get to a place where we have enough information, they have enough information, so they believe that we're a good solution for them. And that we can move to the third phase of the sales cycle, which would be presenting a proposal and starting to wrestle with them on mapping of the ideal engagement.
From that point, we try to move to overcoming any objections that exist, oftentimes between that stage and the final closed law stage. There's this internal on the buyer side phase of building consensus internally. So the type of commitments that are being made with us, you usually require a number of different individuals signing off on. And that's the hardest part because we're oftentimes not directly involved in that. And so we are constantly looking for ways to leverage marketing support to feed additional content along the way that helps the buyer, that's running the process on the buy side to build consensus internally, knowing that we're not going to be there to control those internal conversations. And when it all goes well, that ends up being a signed contract. And then we move that to the onboarding and an executional phase.
Maia Wells:
Thank you for taking us through that. So if you are listening and you are in the process of having a startup in your life, there you go. Dave has just mapped it all out for you. Just follow the instructions, you'll be great. I have to ask you, Dave, I heard some doggies in the background. What are your dog's names?
Dave Fink:
We have an 11 year old 17 pound fluff ball named Ella, and then we have an 80 pound one and a half year old fluff ball named Skylar.
Maia Wells:
Ella and Skylar. Okay, well, welcome to The Marketing Hero podcast, doggies. Thanks for joining us.
Dave Fink:
They're famous.
Maia Wells:
Before we go, I would like to just ask you one last question, which is, if you can share with us the juice on a challenge that you have faced, I'm sure that marketing a company, building this company from scratch, as you've been talking about kind of backwards, starting with sales and then getting marketing involved at a later point. I mean, that's got to be challenging. So what was the most challenging part of that and give us the juice on how challenging that was, what happened and what was the solution?
Dave Fink:
Gosh, there are so many challenges just today alone. It's hard to isolate one specific challenge. I think it's very time specific. A real challenge that we all had to face was how we migrate from a workplace environment to a distributed environment and not lose momentum, not lose our interpersonal connections with each other. And probably the number one micro challenge in that category would be how we onboard and indoctrinate new hires into the Postie culture, knowing that they're sitting in front of their computer in a room by themselves for most of the day. That, I mean, definitely is a challenge we've all faced. And I think some companies have done it better than others and some are okay with distributed work on an ongoing basis and others are fighting like heck to try and get employees back in the office, because maybe they didn't succeed as much in keeping that culture. So I would say we could be here for a whole podcast talking about the challenges.
Maia Wells:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dave Fink:
It's constant, but that was a big one for sure.
Maia Wells:
Definitely challenges all around. Thank you for sharing with us about that, and your successes, and the entire customer journey that your prospects go through. All of that information is extremely helpful for our audience here at The Marketing Hero Podcast. Dave Fink, thanks a lot for joining us.
