On today's episode of The Marketing Hero podcast, we welcome Nick Topping, head of marketing and business development in the Americas for SafetyCulture. It's a SAS company that makes the most used checklist and inspection app eye auditor. This lively conversation gets into product-led growth and the freemium model. So let's just jump on in and learn together. Nick Topping, welcome to the show.
Nick Topping:
Thank you so much.
Maia Wells:
I want to start with a question that we like to ask all of our guests. What's your favorite part of your career, and how did you figure that out?
Nick Topping:
Yeah, for sure. I think my favorite part is definitely working very closely with our sales and GTM teams. I actually started my career in sales, so I did sales, both inside and outside sales for about 10 to 12 years before I moved into the marketing realm. And I think that just really helped me learn what sales people were looking for, how they operated, what problems we were looking to solve for them, and go from there. So that is definitely my favorite, as well as the individual growth of members on the team. It's just awesome to see people that you can help get where they want to go in their career. It's so fun to be a part of that.
Maia Wells:
Absolutely. And that's part of what we try to offer here with this podcast, is ways that young marketers or marketers who are earlier in their career can get inspired and learn about things. So definitely love that part of your mission. One of the things that you said is interesting, Nick, because it's a unique career path, right? We don't often see a veteran sales guy going into marketing. Can you tell me more about that? How did that happen? Why did you leave sales, go into marketing?
Nick Topping:
Yeah, for sure. So I graduated with a marketing and management degree, and a minor in e-con just because I was so close. So when I came out of college, I was looking to get into a marketing role, but there was a limited amount at the time, and it seemed like there was a lot of sales roles open. I knew I eventually wanted to get into marketing, but decided to jump into sales and see how it went. And it went pretty well. I did well at it. I enjoyed it. I'm very competitive. So I think that aspect really helped, but yeah, I started selling enterprise healthcare systems and doing inside and outside sales and always knew that marketing was where I wanted to get to. And when I had the chance to do that, I jumped at it.
Maia Wells:
Do you think most marketing people understand what sales people need and what they're looking for?
Nick Topping:
I think they want to, and I think some of them definitely do. There's lots of great people out there that are working very closely with their sales teams and things like that. So I think being in sales and actually going through the grind of starting over every quarter, and cold calling leads, and doing all that stuff, I think it just helps in a way when I'm talking with some of the sales leaders or sales folks and AEs that I work with, it just helps them verify that I've been in their shoes before. I know how they feel. I know what they're looking for. They don't want to hear about MQLs all the time and things like that. So it just helps me chat with them a little bit further and go a little bit deeper on how we can help.
Maia Wells:
Makes a lot of sense. I think oftentimes marketing people forget that we're really in like a service role. We're serving the sales department, really. I mean, if you think about it that way. So I think that's an interesting way to look at that. Have you ever had an example in your sales life where marketing just didn't get it, they just didn't get what you wanted? Can you give us any example of that where you just feel like the marketing team fell short?
Nick Topping:
Yeah, for sure. I think when I was at a company called Perceptive Software, and we were selling large enterprise healthcare, enterprise content management systems. And a lot of what we were doing was done really well, but there's a lot that goes into taking a lead and warming it up before a salesperson would get it. And as we were ironing our processes out and growing, we got a lot of leads that just weren't very good. They had download an ebook. They had downloaded some content, a white paper. And in marketing size, sometimes, depending on what company you're at, those are qualified leads or somebody that's interested. But as many of us know, they need nurtured a little bit more than that. It takes a little bit more to get them interested. And I think those were getting handed off a lot and overwhelming a lot of the sales folks to where we were reaching out to those people and they didn't know what we were talking about. I think that still happens with business development reps and SDRs today. So that's one philosophy that's changed over time. I think a lot of marketing departments have gotten better at that, but I've seen that quite a bit at a few companies I've been at.
Maia Wells:
So it sounds like you would advocate for maybe a tougher scoring system when you're doing your lead scoring, where you really have to take several actions to score up to be an MQL, or to even be contacted by an SDR, for example.
Nick Topping:
Yes.
Maia Wells:
Less MQL, but higher quality is what I'm hearing.
Nick Topping:
Yeah.
Maia Wells:
Okay. Interesting. I think a lot of revenue teams are doing that now, and really working more closely together, even with SDRs, business development reps under the same leadership, which I think is what you're doing because your title is marketing and business development, and it's a hybrid role. So tell me a little bit more... Let's talk a little bit more about the trend torn revenue teams. And we've been hearing that a lot, the revenue officer, or the VP of revenue. And so, of course, this is buzzword bingo a little bit.
Nick Topping:
Yeah.
Maia Wells:
But I think what you're talking about really speaks to that because we're trying to work together and move this train forward together, sales and marketing, working more closely. Talk to me a little bit more about that trend, how you are doing it in your particular role, and what are the results of aligning more closely with the sales teams?
Nick Topping:
Yeah, for sure. I think that you drive the best results when you're on the same page. You can get on the same side of the table and say, "Hey, what are the goals we're going after? Can we tackle 35% of your revenue?" Or whatever their goals are, that sort of thing. So I think it just helps work more closely together. I think sales, SDRs, BDRs can fall under marketing or sales, but the closer the marketing teams can work with those folks, the better. So we're constantly in contact with them after each campaign we run. We launch a battle card for each campaign, and follow up with them and say, "Okay what's your feedback? What were your conversations like? Where did they go?" We're constantly looking at the ROI from pipeline, and revenue, and that sort of thing. And then that just helps us develop better content or campaigns as we move forward, or shift and say, "Hey, let's pivot and go over here as things don't work, and throw fire on the things that do work."
Maia Wells:
So how do you actually do that? Because aligning these two teams is probably pretty difficult. I see that operating in campaigns or sprints is maybe a good idea and analyzing your activities after each one. But tell me, how does that actually look there at SafetyCulture? How do you actually do that?
Nick Topping:
Yes, for sure. So we have a few different methods of doing that. We try and keep up on all of our marketing calendars and things like that. So the BDRs can know what's coming down the pike, know when campaigns are launching. We have a monthly, weekly meeting with them, a couple standup meetings to jump into one of their meetings and say, "Hey, here's the next campaign that's launching. Get some feedback on how the first one went, or the most recent one, that thing." And these can be just quick 15 minute meetings where you stand in a room and talk about things that are going on. So I think the more you can do that, the better. There's different ways that they can log things in Salesforce as well that we can see as our CRM and things like that so we can track some of the data and some of the other stuff that they're seeing. So I think that really helps, I think.
One of my mentors in the past told me, he who has the data that wins, he or she. So we try to look as much as that as we can, like I'm sure marketing and GTM teams too.
Maia Wells:
Yeah. And most people who are working in software, or SAS, or tech, or IT in any way, we all love data so much.
Nick Topping:
Yeah.
Maia Wells:
One thing I wonder about is, how do you prioritize campaigns or initiatives that the marketing team will focus on?
Nick Topping:
Yeah, for sure. We turn back into our numbers from a revenue and by blind perspective. So when we're planning out our year, or our calendar, that thing, obviously we want to have a good marketing mix and a good mix of stuff that's going out at any given time, like it's new logo or expansion campaigns. So we do that, and then we back into what do, we think we're going to get from a lead number from this? What are we going to get from a revenue number from this? That thing. And then that'll help us forecast where we want to go and where we think that campaign can be successful or not. So those are the main things we do. And then we also always look at ROI after things are done. So how did something go? Could it have gone better? That thing. And we always look for four to 5x ROI on pipeline from what our initial investment was. And that's our benchmark for some of those campaigns as well.
Can we talk a little bit more in concrete terms about SafetyCulture and your products? Because I know we mentioned iAuditor, which is that flagship product. When you're talking about revenue and 5x-ing your ROI on marketing spend, I think it would help us to just get a little bit more concrete about, what are you selling? How is it sold? Is it a monthly subscription? Those types of questions, so we can picture, what are we pouring money into? How are we getting money out?
Nick Topping:
Sure. Yeah. SafetyCulture is a global technology company, made famous by iAuditor. So that's our flagship product. It's the world's largest checklist app. But we've actually evolved since we created that product to become more of a workplace operations platform. So now we're used more than 28,000 organizations from cafe Pacific, to Ikea, small, large companies. But really, what we do is we help organization perform checks, train staff, report issues, automate different tasks, and communicate better to continuously improve their operations. So that's our main goal, is we support workplaces to improve each day. And most recently, we've helped a number of businesses through their operations lens, and training, and complete the whole continuous learning circle.
Maia Wells:
And so it sounds like that might be pretty long sales cycle. If I'm just guessing, when you're saying names like Ikea, and running their whole operations, it seems like that would be a pretty hefty sales lift. Talk to us a little bit more about that sales process. Once you do get a really great qualified lead, maybe they're qualified further by a business development rep of some kind, what happens after that and how does the money actually flow? Is that a yearly subscription? Is it a monthly thing? Talk a little bit more about that part of it.
Nick Topping:
Yeah, for sure. I think that's the most interesting part about SafetyCulture, is that we are a product-led growth company. So a lot of our leads come from app downloads. You can actually download our application on your iPhone or Google device via the Google Store or app store. So once you do that, our hope is that you can use that for free. So it is free to download. Hopefully, customers can do that, start experiencing some value, start thinking outside the box on different ways to use it, different ways that it can impact their business, and then it'll grow from there. So people can upgrade to the paid version. So there's always that organic growth, which gives you a little bit more access to features, like analytics, and business trends, and some of the training aspects and things like that. So there's always that organic growth in the background.
And then what we've done is a lot of people still like to talk to people and still like to work with a sales representative or customer success folks, especially when they're implementing a larger type of solution. So we've layered on different ways to hopefully have SDRs reach out to those folks that we can see what they're trying to accomplish in the app, their demographics and firmographics. What industry they're in, what company they're with, how many people are in that organization, what's their title, that thing. And then that goes into the scoring on maybe when we need to reach out to those folks. So it's a great model to have because I think most people, we see anywhere from 15 to 20,000 app downloads a month, which is pretty crazy. So we actually have too many leads to call. We can't call all of those people. We'd like to, but hopefully, the product does well enough to get them interested, get them activated in using it, and then experience some value and grow from there.
Maia Wells:
Right. And I love that you labeled that product-led growth or PLG. Let's talk about that a little bit at a higher level for those of our listeners who have not heard about that yet. What is product-led growth, Nick?
Nick Topping:
Yeah, for sure. I think product-led growth is really a business methodology where user acquisition, expansion, conversion, retention are all driven primarily by the product itself. So it really helps to create this company-wide alignment from teams from engineering to sales and marketing around the product as the most sustainable, scalable way to grow the business. So that's what we try to do. And we try to work closely with each team here at SafetyCulture to develop the right features and functionality, give the right feedback on what we're hearing in the field from our customers, and what the engineering team can build, and that thing. And hopefully, it really just helps the product drive the growth of the business. And then you can layer on different aspects, such as enterprise sales or partnerships, and things like that to create separate funnels, essentially, but really the product should drive the business forward.
Maia Wells:
And so what is the difference between product-led growth, which you just described, and a freemium model? I think that those might be synonymous and maybe not. So let's ask that because some people will call it, "I'm running a freemium model, they get access to a certain level of our product." And it sounds like that could be pretty similar. What's the difference between those two things?
Nick Topping:
Yeah. I think they are pretty similar. I think the freemium model is just a way to go about increasing that product-led growth. So that's how we try to do it, is offering much of our platform for free so customers can use it, experience some value, start seeing what impact it can have on their business. And it's really this land and expand type of model. So we're typically starting pretty small with an organization, will grow in from maybe a manager level, sometimes a director level, and it grows up through the business. But we like to... Our CEO, when he started this company, essentially it started more as a safety organization. And he didn't want to put a restriction on it from a free or paid perspective. So I think the freemium model really allows itself to gain customers, and gain people that are interested, and see if they can hopefully get some value.
Maia Wells:
Yeah. And whether or not that company ends up being on a paid model, they may be safer for using the free model anyway. So that sounds like a really great mission. Absolutely.
Nick Topping:
Yeah, for sure. And a lot of people stay on the free model. That might work for them, but hopefully, over time, from a business perspective, we can move them over to a paid model, or it gives us a wider marketing base to go after as well. Generating those leads, and contacts, and customers is a little bit easier with a flywheel model such as that.
Maia Wells:
How do you actually take people from that free model into the paid product? Are you running email nurture campaigns? Are you doing soft touches with them with webinar material to help them use the product better? Are you using product data, tool tips? Talk to us about that little black box between the free and the paid. How do you actually get them to pay? We all want to know that.
Nick Topping:
Yes. Yeah, for sure. There's a few different ways we try and do that. You definitely mentioned a couple of them. So there's ways in the application. They can upgrade. There's ways in their account once they log in online on the website of things that they can upgrade as well. So hopefully, we're not asking for that too early. So there's different queues and things that are built in to say, "Hey, this might be a good time to do that," whether it's a number of inspections or checks or a number of people they've added to their team, that thing. So there's a lot of growth marketing that goes into it. And even just coloring different buttons, certain colors in the application, and things like that as you go through it and trying to guide people a certain direction so they can get some value early on because that's one of the biggest things is, if they don't experience value within the first week or two, they're probably not going to come back to the application. They're going to move on.
So hopefully, that's the case. And then after that, we definitely have some webinars, and getting started guides, and some boot camps, and things like that, where you can join both in person and virtually. We'll go to a few event., we'll have a customer conference. And then all the emails, and nurtures, and stuff like that, if we can identify who those folks are, and the industry, and what they're trying to do, we'll try and serve them up some really good content to hopefully help with that.
Maia Wells:
Well, that all sounds very exciting and definitely valuable for the people who are using your free model. I'm wondering, on a personal note, what are you most excited about for the rest of this year?
Nick Topping:
Yeah, for sure. I think we're looking to change up some of the stuff we do with regional marketing from an America's perspective. So our company's actually headquartered out of Sydney, Australia. So we work across the globe quite a bit, but we have a really good local lens that we can put on thing and the spin that we can put on things here in the Americas. So being a product-led growth company, we haven't done much with ABM yet. So we're working towards some of that personalization, and some target accounts, and growing our business that way. So I think that's one of the most exciting things, is launching some of that, and hopefully, building a separate more, I don't know if traditional is the right word, MQL funnel, and going after some of the larger businesses that we want to see success in and that may or may not be using our product at this time.
Maia Wells:
Very exciting. Well, Nick Topping of SafetyCulture. Thanks for joining The Marketing Hero podcast. It was a great pleasure to talk with you today.
Nick Topping:
Thanks so much. Appreciate you having me.
