HockeyStack

Are you running marketing tactics in silos? Or worse... just pushing out random acts of marketing 😬 Sam Kuehnle and Emir talked about how to start thinking about marketing as an ecosystem that amplifies your brand last week. If you want to catch the entire webinar it's here (ungated) on The Flow > https://lnkd.in/gEcpMHav

Last quarter we closed a B2B company with $6.3B in valuation and $150M+ in revenue. In my customer interview (always interview new customers!), I learned 3 key things we did in our sales process to win the deal: 1. Matching content with the sales process Here’s an exact transcript from Gong with one of the buyers: “It feels like you are listening to our internal conversations and writing content about it. We always share your content on our Slack channel. And our AE was able to match the exact same language and tone in the sales process to uncover our pain points and show the product in a no BS way.” I try to speak the customers’ language in my content while also sharing learnings - then we see what resonates and implement the same language into our sales process with new talk tracks and slides and better rep training. The hardest part about this is the landscape (and the product) is changing fast! So this is not a one and done process. We are constantly tweaking our content and sales process to match the language of our buyer. 2. Not running a poorly executed free trial (or any trial at all) This buyer did a trial with a competitor twice before talking to us. Both failed. Why? Reporting needs a ton of resources from both sides. You need to set it up in the right way, do an internal launch, train people, and be able to show insights from the existing data. Most vendors do not provide enough CS resources for free trials. Plus, when it's "free", customers naturally don’t feel the urgency. In the end, both sides fail. 3. Don’t force your narrative onto the prospect This buyer told us every other vendor was trying to force the “credit” mindset onto them. Repeatedly, their sellers would highlight by how using their product marketers can find the source of a deal and give credit to the right people. We know that's a losing mindset. Customers don’t want it. This customer even told the vendor explicitly they don’t want it! But the vendors kept pushing THEIR narrative and how they wanted to sell vs how the buyer wanted to buy. The customer wanted to understand how to invest their time, money, and resources to get the maximum outcome. Not to find THE touchpoint that led to a sale. TAKEAWAY: You pre-win deals by captivating champions with your content. If sales is aligned with marketing (or vice versa) you win again in the sales process. This is one of the most important initiatives in your GTM. And pushback on requests that are "standard practice" but don't help the sales process Blindly following trends like free trials isn’t going to help you win.

We are spending $200K on organic Linkedin social this year. Some people would say it’s 100% untrackable. But that’s not true. Here’s a breakdown of everything we're doing (and how we are tracking ROI on each part): BACKGROUND: From the very early days, LinkedIn social has been a key part of our growth Our first 15 customers heard about HockeyStack from my profile. Then as time passed, we invested in many other channels, but I continued posting here almost every day, working with influencers, and helping grow others’ followings Our strategy is simple: We have a content calendar shared with everyone in the company. I decide on the weekly/monthly themes and important events. We create content for the company, turn it into different formats, and I write my own content using these themes and personal stories HockeyStack’s content gets about 3M impressions a month, our company page grew from 0 to 15K in a year, and people continue talking about HockeyStack non-stop. Here are 3 ways we track it: 1. Tracking ICP followers I see my profile and overall LinkedIn as a distribution channel and track weekly follower/connection growth in our ICP in a spreadsheet We then cross-reference these with our target accounts, tiers, and strategically target them with outbound, and send connection reqs with other people who are active on LI This is custom built with the help of @Kyle Williams and it helps a lot to see if we are reaching our ideal profile From there, we are looking at ICP visitors to the website from LinkedIn, and what they do on our website We also do self-reported attribution and track mentions of Linkedin via Gong calls - usually we can pretty easily see the correlation between mentions on sales calls and the follower spreadsheet. 2. Visits & Conversions We group company page visits and social visits together under "LinkedIn social” and look at a few things like: - Are they ICP? - Which pages they visit? - How are they turning into pipeline? Then we retarget them with ads on other channels & LI, emails, and offers like webinars 3. Connecting with engagements This is not as much about reporting (though you should track it), but if you are running ads on LI and have an exec posting regularly (you definitely should) it’s a great additional benefit if you connect with people who engage with your ads so they continue seeing your content We see incredible value from this + reaching out to them directly on LinkedIn to spark conversations (which we also track). TAKEAWAY: Not EVERYTHING is trackable BUT there are many things on Linkedin that you can see and take action on. Track what you can, make better decisions, and value qualitative feedback with quantitative.

🔥🔥 NEW HIRE FRIDAY 🔥 🔥 We're so happy to welcome Ross Fisher as our Head of Customer Engineering! Some fun facts about Ross: 🌽 He hails from the great corn state of Indiana, but loved visiting San Diego, Hemet, and Hollywood when he was younger 🤖 He is big into home automation (Home Assistant/ESP32), OSS vehicle autonomy (OpenPilot), 3D printing/maker culture, and general geek tomfoolery 🔷 He was the last person still around from the early days of Compose (after being acquired into IBM) and got to be part of the evolution of customer needs and logos over time Hoosier Customer Eng leader!!?? Welcome, Ross!

I nearly gave up on HockeyStack. Our first 2 products FAILED miserably. This year? We added 150 of the biggest logos in tech. Here are the different products that led to HockeyStack (and what I learned at each stage): When founders see me at an event, they ask: "How did HockeyStack grow this fast?" Now, from the outside, everything looks great. 0 to 150 customers in a year, including the largest B2B brands. A smart, hard-working team and a nice office in San Francisco. But it wasn't always like this... It took 4+ years AND 3 different products: 1. Product Analytics (2020-'22) HockeyStack started as a product analytics company that Buğra and I built out of his parents apartment in Turkey. The software gave customers insights into why and how trials turn into paid customers. It was a total flop. We spent 2 years and didn’t land a single customer. The charitable interpretation is we were too early, but we also just didn’t know what we were doing yet. It was a VERY saturated market with great players like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap. 2. Google Analytics Alternative (2022-'23) We pivoted into a GA4 alternative using our existing tracking tech. This was when GA was getting banned, everyone was tweeting about how awful it is, and SMBs were trying to move away from GA4. This product was the first one we called HockeyStack, and it didn’t fail in ALL aspects. We made some money, landed a few customers, but it was clear it would never get enterprise adoption. But something BIG happened... We acquired a single B2B SaaS customer. It was 100% luck. They came inbound and implemented it. Then they started asking for CRM integrations. We built the integrations and a few attribution models. Then they wanted extra features... So we spent HOURS talking to them. And we finally discovered the real problem HockeyStack needed to solve... Revenue Attribution for B2B. 3. HockeyStack (2023-'24) We built HockeyStack 1.0 with this B2B SaaS customer and a few others that were willing to build with us. We built, sold, and scaled really fast. This journey gave us 2 unique advantages: - The tracking script we built for our Product Analytics product was more advanced than website analytics scripts, which became super helpful when we pivoted as it was already better than existing platforms’ tracking tech - We never looked at competition - only built what customers wanted. In the end, we had a better, differentiated product ready to scale with a shared vision 4. HockeyStack (2024 - beyond) We are in a similar phase. We are building WITH our customers. And I am SUPER pumped to launch 3 new products very soon :) TAKEAWAY: As Steve Jobs said: “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future” Not every journey is linear. Everything leads to the next thing. Every failure you have will look like “luck” in a few years. Keep pushing.

Have you ever tried to get off the grid but a legendary question simply must be answered? Thank you for your dedication to DASHBOARDING IT, Lily Roosevelt, no matter the time or place. This week, our CS leader comes to us from deep in the jungle to help a customer who wants to understand how outbound activities influence inbound demo requests.

Your CMO gets asked to cut the budget by 25% and still increase the pipeline created by 10%. What do you suggest? You can decrease CPL You can increase the deal size You can improve funnel metrics Start with these: - Create a table that shows how much you’ve spent on ad campaigns and how much they influenced revenue with metrics so that you can find the underperforming ones - Create a line chart that shows the revenue influence of organic social and organic search - Create a funnel that shows the drop-offs across the entire funnel - Create a report with accounts that have high intent using HockeyStack’s ML-based intent score - Create a lift report that shows blog posts and other resources and their incremental revenue influence And send this email: “Hi Emily, Here’s a dashboard I built to show how our marketing performs right now and suggestions to be more profitable 30% of our spend was on these campaigns while they didn’t perform well in terms of engagement and revenue influence (Used HockeyStack’s AI-based attribution model trained with our historic data) Only 10% of our time and budget goes into organic social and organic search, but we are getting really high-quality deals from these channels. (Confirmed with attribution and self-reported.) We can spend more time on these channels, work with influencers, and diversify our content. These 65 accounts have high intent warmed up by marketing, but the sales team hasn’t reached out to them yet. We can notify them. At a 15% close rate, we can expect $300K in additional revenue this quarter. These blog posts have been working quite well, but we haven’t created similar posts or optimized them. We can spend more time on our organic search channel. The biggest drop off is visit to lead on our main landing pages. We are running tests with Wynter to figure out messaging on these pages. It will be hard, but with these optimizations, it’s definitely possible to create more pipeline with less budget. Thanks!” Optimize with HockeyStack Speak the language of C-suite to get more budget Prove your contribution and earn a seat at the table I am excited to reveal a few new things to build on this vision And help GTM teams even more

It's that time of year! When marketing needs to ✨ ROI ✨ extra hard to prep for next year's budget negotiations 😂 We've got a huge portfolio of Templates with example metrics to help you move the conversation from "what's working??" to "WHY is it working?" Here are three you can use for inspo right now: ⤴ ⤵ Measuring inbound and outbound activities at scale > https://lnkd.in/gbDniTYa ✍ Measuring content's impact on pipeline > https://lnkd.in/gfqxSJYD 🎯 Measuring ABM campaign impact and monitoring intent > https://lnkd.in/gfz_HFzT

It's spooky season. And nothing is spookier than being stalked for downloading a piece of worthless content. Are you ready for that demo? 🎃 😱

How do you start building an ecosystem around your brand? What does that even mean? Join Sam Kuehnle and Emir Atli tomorrow at 9:30am PT to find out 👀