ActiveCampaign's Playbook
Join us for an insightful session with Adam Tuttle, a seasoned leader responsible for managing customer experience at ActiveCampaign. In this engaging conversation, we'll dive deep into ActiveCampaign's unique playbook for elevating Customer Experience (CX) from the moment a visitor lands on their platform to becoming a loyal customer.
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- All right, welcome to our next session.
So this session's called "The Active Campaigns Playbook",
elevating CX from visitor to customer.
And I have a special guest with me today,
Adam Tuttle from Active Campaign, Adam, how are you doing?
- I'm doing great, thank you.
- Good, so Adam and I actually go way back,
I don't know way back,
but at least we used to work together at Active Campaign,
and Adam's still at Active Campaign,
and he's got quite a journey.
So maybe let's start there
before we get into the thick of things here,
but tell us one a little bit about Active Campaign,
you can give the pitch about Active Campaign for those that know,
and then I'd love to go,
just go down like your personal journey
while at Active Campaign.
- Yeah, so Active Campaign, very like simply high level,
we started as an email marketing platform many years ago,
but I would say like really over the last decade have pivoted
to be very centric to like marketing automation.
So that's kind of, I would say the foundation
of everything that we build or do.
We also have a CRM in there,
so kind of email marketing, marketing automation, CRM,
but even those things tend to center around automations,
and so, and we've been doing it quite a while,
got customers in about 180 countries globally,
so yeah, it's really, really fun.
- Kate, can you mention how many hundreds of thousands
of customers now?
- Do you remember?
- I will say more than 170,000.
- Nice, 170,000.
And actually one other question on that,
like what's, I know there's several,
you said like several types of countries,
you know, what types of customers are usually
the best fit for Active Campaign that are using Active Campaign?
- Yeah, so I mean, we definitely have like a variety, right?
So I would say we've probably more focus on SMBs
over the last, you know, forever,
but we definitely have mid-market,
even a few enterprise, but I would say kind of our sweet spot
is like the upper end of SMB,
and maybe the kind of bottom barrel of mid-market.
And again, sometimes, you know,
that's kind of the cool thing about softwares like ours,
you know, generally speaking is,
not everyone that's in an enterprise company
or a large company needs an enterprise solution
for what they're trying to do.
And so we can often meet the need,
just kind of depending on, you know,
what's going on with where the customer's at
and what they're looking for.
- Nice.
And so let's kind of dive into what's probably most important
is understanding your background a little bit, Adam.
So give us a story of, you know,
your journey so far at Active Campaign.
- Yeah, so I've been with Active Campaign
for just over 11 years,
kind of getting close to that 11 and a half mark.
I started when the company was very small,
so right now we're about a thousand employees,
maybe a little bit under that.
I started when we were at nine employees,
and I started in a support role.
And so I knew nothing about tech, nothing about SaaS.
I didn't even know what SaaS was.
Just put that in even bigger context,
like I didn't even know who Mailchimp was,
who at that point was a very big competitor.
And so I started in support,
and those first few years were very scrappy startup, right?
Everyone kind of did everything.
I was one of probably two people
that didn't write code in the business,
so again, very different than it looks today.
Had early kind of roles in like early versions
of our customer success teams,
worked on our channel partners for a bit,
did all of that, and then I started the sales team.
So I was one of the first account executives,
started that sales team, did that for about a year and a half,
went into sales leadership as a manager for a bit,
and then I moved my family to Sydney, Australia,
and I opened Active Campaign's first
international office in Sydney.
Was the director of sales for APAC,
and covered that region we live there for,
about just over two and a half years,
then came back, put myself into ops,
because I realized that with where I wanted my career to go,
like 10 years down the road,
I needed more ops exposure,
so I was in ops for a couple of years,
and then just a year ago I started a team,
we called CAT or customer activation team,
which is really, I think,
where we'll kind of tie into this conversation,
but it's kind of like a,
if sales support and success all merged together
and created like a hybrid, it would be this team,
and that's what I've been working on for the last year or so.
- That's awesome, so first of all,
I apologize for having you describe
11 years of Active Campaign in a minute and 30 seconds,
but I think you did a really good job there.
But yeah, so I'd love to center this conversation
around the CAT team, honestly,
because for the audience,
when Evan and I were talking earlier in the month,
like it organically came up,
and I thought it was really interesting,
because it was a mixture of automation,
understanding the customer,
and what customer experience really is.
And so I guess like,
could you maybe take us right before the CAT team,
like what was the kind of the situation,
what was in place,
and then the challenge at that time?
- Yeah, so you had, at that point,
our work like many companies in the last couple years
in TAC, especially,
we had a large sales team, SDRs, AEs,
different types of AEs, all these things.
And then you had the support side of it as well,
BDRs trying to do outbound,
and it was just, it was bloated.
I think that's just the best way to put it,
it was just bloated.
And so we started looking at the business need,
and saying, we don't always need,
like we're a pretty transactional business.
A lot of times people, I mean,
we still generate hundreds,
if not thousands of accounts a month,
just from people signing up through the website.
So it's pretty like simple to get going platform.
And so what we looked at is like,
does everyone always need this like long sales process,
or can we streamline the process,
be a little bit more hands-on with the customer.
So instead of trying to qualify somebody up to
a sales rep over here, or a sales rep over there,
maybe that's the solution sometimes,
but maybe it's not.
And when we say maybe it's not,
what we are looking at is,
what if we could create a really great experience
where someone comes to us,
we say, hey, like what brought you to active campaign?
And they're like, oh, I need to,
I want to switch this provider,
and I like it, I need marketing automation,
but I don't know where to start,
we're like, cool, we'll help you build your first automation.
And so we build it with them on a call,
or we help them set up an integration,
or we help them build a pipeline to the CRM,
whatever it might be,
we get those questions answered,
and then we help them sign up.
And now that's obviously a very like,
that's how we wish they all went.
On the flip side of that,
what we also do is like,
my kind of model to the team is identify the pain point,
and then identify who's the best person
to solve that in their business.
So in a lot of cases, it is sales.
Maybe they need legal negotiations
on a contract, or they have,
we can't solve their problem quickly.
Like, maybe we can help them with that first piece,
but they have like five more pieces
they need to figure out over the next month.
That's not my team's job.
My team is gonna help like during our two week trial period,
can we help you get converted,
can we solve your pain point,
and if we can, we will,
and if we can't, we're gonna do everything we can,
and then we're gonna get you connected to the right person.
And so that's really where this idea came from,
a year ago, as we started diving into it.
- And so just to clarify, like,
then so before this, it was just a mix of different sales teams,
and you had a sales team that was just qualifying
and sending them over to closing sales.
- Yeah, and so let's think about,
from a customer perspective side, right?
So let's say that I'm on an SDR team,
and I'm qualifying this lead up,
and they have a problem, like maybe a bug,
or they think there's a bug, or something like that.
- Well, in that case, then the SDR group
creates a support ticket, they hand it off to support,
they might follow up, but it is,
you've now disconnected,
and my team tries to just go and solve the problem.
So we actually get on a lot of times
where someone's like, this automation's broke,
I built it, it didn't work,
and we're like, oh no, we can help you fix it.
So we'll go into it with them,
we try to help them get it fixed,
we help try to solve the problem,
and so that's where you see like,
we're trying to figure out who is the best person
to create a great customer experience,
and can we streamline that process as much as possible,
as opposed to, I'm just worried about a quota,
I just need to get it passed off to somebody else,
or I need, you know, we just want to remove
some of that behavior, at least on like level one,
and try to help the customer really just enjoy
their overall experience with us.
And then, again, if we need to get them
connected to the sales 'cause that's the best fit,
we can sell that and be like, hey,
you really need to talk to this person
because they're gonna be able to help you answer A, B, and C.
Oh great, you know, so it's just,
it's a more fluid process for us.
- And I guess I wanna point out something
for all the listeners here, because
you think of things differently from like a B to C lens
to the B to B lens, and I find this conversation
really interesting because like, in a B to C company,
like you're just trying to answer that question
that's coming in as fast as possible,
hey, where is my order?
And you're trying to automate and get them that answer
as soon as possible done.
And I think what Adam's trying to do,
and again, correct me if I'm wrong,
is providing that same sort of philosophy,
but on a B to B side, is someone early in the process
of like, there's a simple pain point.
How can we solve that as fast as possible
without having you go through several different steps?
Do I have that right, Adam?
- Yeah, 100%.
Because, you know, because we tend to focus
on the SMB market, we often have small businesses
that are just a couple people,
or maybe it's, you know, they might be an e-commerce store
that does a million dollars in revenue,
but they're a team of like five, right?
So, and sometimes the problem is that like,
the thing that I think anecdotally,
this is just from my experience as a whole,
is generally speaking, not always,
but generally the problems that people are trying to solve,
especially marketing automation,
are not like life-changing or revolutionary.
It's pretty straightforward.
And yes, there's a lot of ways that you can approach that.
There's nuance to the business and things like that,
but I don't think that we need to over-complicate.
And again, sometimes if you can help someone solve
just that first piece,
or you can remove that first barrier,
then they're willing to run with it.
They're willing to say,
"Okay, yes, this actually meets my need."
And that's all we're trying to do
is tear down that merry first wall,
that barrier to entry for them,
so that they can like, see the full potential,
or see the opportunity,
but we don't need to help them set up their entire account,
usually in the first go.
We just need to make sure
that we can solve that for initial pain point.
- So talk to us a little bit about like your team
in terms of like the skill sets that they have,
and how do you teach them those skill sets?
- Yeah, so what we did when we created this team
is we hired 100% originally in-house,
and we literally hired people from sales.
We've hired former SDRs.
We hired support reps from our support teams.
We hired people from our customer success team.
And so we kind of brought this amalgamation
of people together,
and everyone for the most part
had been in the business at least a year.
So they had a really strong foundation,
and we wanted that because we felt like,
especially to kick it off on the right foot,
you couldn't spend six-month training people.
We had to get people that were a little bit more
like already invested in the tool,
they knew what it was.
And we had to really focus on that group
of like the soft skills of kind of teaching like,
great, you solved the problem,
but remember to send the customer order afterwards,
or ask them if they're ready to buy, right?
So there's some of those like kind of sales skills
that maybe don't come as naturally to someone in support,
or it hasn't been the motion that they're used to.
So it was more teaching those soft skills.
And then what we've looked for,
for new hires that have come in from the business,
outside the business, excuse me,
in the meantime, are people that are probably,
for the most part, in that like one to two years
of experience, so maybe they're just even like
right out of college, they've had a few like good internships,
things like that.
But we want people that are ready to like,
solve problems and that are curious.
And I think that that's really important
is we can hire a lot of people that are talented,
but if they're not curious,
if they're not willing to kind of ask those questions
and dig a little bit deeper,
then we're probably not gonna align perfectly with them.
The other thing that I would say for me
was incredibly important on version one,
was every manager I brought in,
so I have four managers globally.
Each one of them has sold active campaign in the past.
So they had a foundation in sales,
but you know, having watched them all for quite some time,
I knew where their skill sets like,
they were willing to go a little bit deeper,
they were willing to jump into tickets and chats
and things like that.
So you kind of look for the people
that were like a good fit in that sense,
but yeah, that piece was also really important.
Me as I wanted people that had actually shown customers
the product before I had walked customers
who understood the value that we're adding,
because then they're gonna be able to teach their teams
and coach their teams on those things,
no matter where they come from.
- So it's like, if I were to again clarify that,
it's like a, I would just say two parts,
like one is the product expertise
and the other part is just the curiosity on the other side
of the prospect's business
and merging those two worlds together.
- Yeah, and in fact, we actually call the team internally,
we call the product experts.
Like that's like their official title
is that they're a product expert.
And so that's where we spend a lot of time.
And then again, yeah, just making sure that they can,
you know, again, help the customer get going.
That's really the goal at all.
And it's been really, I mean,
there's lessons to be learned all the time,
but it, for the most part, has really worked well.
And it's just now continuing to adjust levers
and tweak knobs here and there
to just really get us to an optimal state.
- Now, I wanna take this conversation
just to the next level.
And if the answer is like, we don't do much,
that's perfectly fine, but when it comes to automation
and utilizing some sort of AI,
whether that be something as simple as chat GBTU
or just understanding more of like the data coming in,
is that something that you and your team work closely with?
- Yeah, so we use our automations
very, very heavily internally.
So we use our own tool for our entire work.
Generally where ours fall right now is kind of twofold.
So the first side of that would be like our routing.
Like I said, I've got team members right now
in four continents and a few extra countries.
So we have a lot of teams, we have languages,
so we have team members as speak Spanish,
Portuguese, Italian, French.
- Can I stop you really quick on that Adam?
So I think that's super, really,
that's super important.
Like just talk about the customer experience.
So you're saying to me that no matter where you're at
in the entire world, almost no matter what language
that you're speaking, you're able to connect with someone
in as little as what amount of time, is that true?
- Yeah, it should be like almost same day
from creating a trial.
And now that would be, yeah, for the big languages,
like I said, English, Portuguese, French, Spanish,
German, Italian, that's kind of where we fall at this point.
But those are the, for us, those are,
anyone that speaks those languages
is probably a great fit for a customer for us.
And so the automation piece is trying to figure out
how do you get thousands and thousands of trials a month?
One to decide do we actually, like,
are we the right person to talk to them?
So there's that question that we have
and there's criteria that we look for
and we can't talk to all of our trials,
we don't have the capacity for that.
So we try to identify which ones we think are the best ones
that are more likely to convert,
which ones are really wanting to see
if active campaigns are good fit for them.
And then you have routing to all of the different regions.
And then sometimes within regions,
like we have a Dublin office,
we have Italian, French, German, Spanish,
and English speakers within that office.
And now we're sending the different deals
from the different places to them.
And again, automation does all of that.
So it's a humongous part of what we're doing.
Secondly, we have a one-to-one email tool.
So it sends out an email from my Gmail to you directly.
And once our rep gets a deal inside of the CRM,
we're in opportunity,
we start automatically emailing it
from the rep offering to get on a call with them,
giving them their calendar, things like that.
It expedites the process as a whole.
Those emails are language specific,
again, using automations for that.
And yeah, it's a really like an involved process on that,
but it's a lot of sorting data, looking at data.
And then again, saying, oh, like we need to move this here,
we need to move this there.
And trying to get them connected
to the right person inside of our business quickly.
- Yeah.
When it comes to the email side,
so just to understand that a little bit more,
the email is automatically being sent out.
And what's kind of the focus of that email?
Why send out that email?
- The focus of that email is to get on a call with a customer.
So that is what we're trying to do
is to get them on a call with us.
And because we want to provide that hands-on product
expert service,
what I 100% do not want my team doing it
is just having someone send them an email,
them sending a couple of help articles
and then hoping that they upgrade.
I want them to have conversation.
I want them to have Zoom calls.
I want them to meet with people face to face and be human.
And so I think that's one important thing of this whole,
like as we think about customer experience,
you can create a great customer experience
by starting off with heavily, heavily invested
inside of automation.
So we do a huge amount of work in there
and data processing and sorting and things like that.
All of that is geared towards,
we want to get you connected to a human.
And so it's not to simply automate the whole process.
Like we'll do that as much as we can,
but not every single customer is just going to buy
on their own.
Like we know that, that's no business has that, right?
So our whole goal is to get people where it's,
it's really focused on, again, identifying the right people
to have those conversations with,
but then getting them on the phone with us
and making sure that we're helping them quickly
and representing the company in like a human way.
- I just want to stop you on that,
because I think my head was actually going
into the direction of, there's now so many tools out there
and features out there where, hey, we know that this is
a Brazilian Portuguese lead that just comes in.
And I'm using that example,
because I remember that I had to campaign this,
such a big area for you guys.
And, okay, now you can automate a message,
like in that language, knowing their IP,
but what I think you just said is super important,
is like you have to back it up in the human experience.
And that's something that you cannot, at least in this point,
have it AI kind of figure that out for you.
And I'm just glad that you brought that up.
- Yeah, I think, listen, I think like, obviously AI
is like the buzz word right now,
and it's going to continue to grow in power.
But what I view as the most exciting part about AI,
at least from my seat, right?
So purely the context of what I do,
is one, it will help our customers,
because we are starting to build more AI functionality
into our platform, such as the ability
to actually have it build automations for you,
from a machine, like you tell it what you want it done,
and it'll build it all for you, which is incredible.
So that helps this, that small business owner
that's never done this before,
get off on the right foot.
That's super exciting.
But I think that the other piece that to me is,
I'm always looking at ways that I can better automate my
processes that I don't want to be human.
E.G., trying to get the meaning booked, right?
Every time that someone has to send an email,
and there's times for that, right?
So we actually do have our reps,
like they flip back and forth between a machine
sending an email, and then trying to, like,
really like hyper personalize an email.
But the idea of it all comes back to,
hey, like, we really want you to connect with us.
And we want to be human, we want to help you.
And I think like the machine that is now going in AI,
is hopefully going to make us even more effective at that,
and help us to get those meetings scheduled right away,
so that instead of the rep having to spend two hours a day
going through a pipeline and chasing down a bunch of people,
the machine's actually helping get those people
in front of them quickly, so we're able to help more people,
and then it becomes a pretty big snowball at that point.
- And so, I guess like I have to ask this question,
which is like, is it a hypothesis still,
or is it proven that like,
you want to connect with people in person on a meeting,
because you're more likely then to convert them
to a great prospect and a customer,
and have you seen that in the data?
- That's why like, you don't want to solve this
just through a chat experience or through an email.
- We definitely see it,
and even the fact that somebody comes into my team's pipeline,
they have a higher chance of converting,
even if we don't talk to them.
So like, that means that like,
we're talking to enough people that is kind of,
you know, bringing up the entire like base behind it, right?
So we're definitely seeing the impact there.
What we don't have enough data on yet,
because again, the team's only been going for 12 months,
is, and what I suspect will happen,
I would say early indicators are pointing
towards this being true, and time will tell,
is that the lifetime value of the customer will be extended,
because they had a great experience up front,
and the platform stable,
like there's like so many pieces, right?
But one thing that I always like kind of challenge
my teams on, is, you know,
sometimes it's really easy when you think about
like churn and contraction and all of that stuff,
that once you make that sale,
once you help that person get upgraded,
well, tough luck, like, you know,
like onto the next one, right?
But my philosophy has always been that
if you can provide a really good experience for someone,
if you can be human with them,
they probably will stick with you longer, right?
Like, unless there's something that's just gone horribly wrong
for them, but if they just get going,
you just send them a help article,
they're like, ah, I think this works.
Like, there's that seed of doubt from the beginning,
because they felt pressured into buying something,
that, you know, whatever it might be.
- Yeah.
- I think that that's been causing,
so my speculation is, yes, we are definitely seeing that,
the more that we talk to people,
we have better conversion rates and things like that.
The real testament will be down the road,
is our lifetime value of the customers that we interact with,
beating out like our self-service models.
And again, I would say early data says yes,
but time will really tell.
- And so last question,
we'll wrap things up here, Adam.
Take off your active campaign hat,
and I still wanna ask you that same question,
which is that if you just think of customer experience,
say the tools that you use,
the places that you go,
the things that you buy,
do you think that human element
is always part of that equation,
and should be somewhat a part of that equation,
or do you think that there are businesses,
it depends on the type of business where,
no, the human element of it can be pushed to the side.
It's a broad question, but I just--
- Yeah, it's a super broad question.
I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
So what I mean by that is,
I think businesses like e-commerce,
even think about you go to McDonald's now,
you don't have to order,
you can either order on a hat of time,
and then you just go to the drive through
and give them a number,
and you pick it up and you leave.
That's an automated process, right?
It's removing that need for human,
but I still believe that in B2B, especially,
I think that the need for human
will always be there to a degree.
What I think that this will allow us to do is be,
hopefully, is more human, right?
What I think that we're gonna start seeing is,
more and more tools have those initial steps,
or maybe like, okay, I send up for a trial,
or maybe I purchased directly through a website,
something like that,
and then the human side will be just more
to make that person feel supported,
and it'll be more of a, again, a relational thing
as opposed to being just purely transactional of,
here's your checklist, let me give it to you, right?
Okay, let's automate the checklist,
but if you don't do the checklist,
I'm gonna call you and say,
hey, are you having trouble with the checklist?
Can I help you?
So I think there's things like that,
but I definitely don't see,
at least in the next decade,
the human side just purely going away,
but I do think that things will become
more and more personalized,
and I guess for me personally,
I don't think that you can just hyper personalizing
this without a human touch at some point.
- Okay, well, Adam, thank you so much for your time.
It's been super interesting talking with you,
and I'm hoping everyone here also has enjoyed the time.
- Yeah, thank you so much, I really appreciate it.
- No problem, and again, thanks to Adam, his team, congrats,
and good luck to the future,
as well too, with building out that team.
- Thank you so much.
- All right, bye everyone.
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