How to Make B2B Marketing Exciting – Dan Ruby – Nobl9

Mike is joined by Dan Ruby, VP of Marketing at Noble9, a leading reliability platform that helps manage and monitor application reliability. Dan discusses the challenges of marketing a product that aims to keep issues unnoticed by end users and how storytelling can make a traditionally “unexciting” product compelling and engaging.

The conversation also covers the importance of data-driven marketing, balancing brand building with lead generation, and innovative campaign strategies.

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About Nobl9

Founded in 2019 by ex-Googlers Marcin Kurc and Brian Singer, Nobl9 is the premiere Service Level Objectives-based platform for driving a reliable digital experience. With a strong enterprise customer base as well as strategic investments from Cisco and ServiceNow, Nobl9 is recognized as a bleeding-edge solution to modernizing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) strategies, ensuring that reliability is not measured primarily by availability, but rather by users’ ability to do what they expect to be able to do within an application.

About Dan Ruby

Dan is an eighteen year veteran of digital marketing, with the vast majority of his experience coming as the head of marketing for various B2B SaaS organizations in the Boston area. He has been acquired at various points by Google and Snap, and is currently the VP of Marketing for Nobl9, a B2B SaaS platform for user-centric site reliability. He holds a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri as well as an MBA from Brandeis University. He occasionally teaches an undergraduate course on marketing at Bentley University.

Throughout his career, Dan has become increasingly stubborn about the fact that marketing must focus on creating value for potential leads, and is quite fond of telling anyone who will listen that “nobody gives a **** about your product, give them valuable information, not product pitches.”

Time Stamps

00:00:42 – Dan Ruby’s Career Journey
00:02:09 – Overview of Noble9
00:05:48 – Challenges in Marketing a Reliability Product
00:07:03 – Using Stories to Make Marketing Exciting
00:12:43 – Balancing Brand Building and Lead Generation
00:17:07 – Innovative Campaign Example: DORA
00:22:24 – The Importance of Partnerships in Marketing
00:22:41 – Best Marketing Advice Received
00:23:41 – Advice for New Marketing Professionals
00:25:44 – How to Contact Dan Ruby
00:26:18 – Closing Remarks

Quotes

“Marketing is such an interesting field. It takes pretty much any skill set and makes it useful.” Dan Ruby, VP of Marketing at Nobl9

“Nothing is boring if you can make it into a story that resonates.” Dan Ruby, VP of Marketing at Nobl9

“You can find partners who believe in your product, believe in your company, believe in your people, who will work with you.” Dan Ruby, VP of Marketing at Nobl9

Follow Dan:

Dan Ruby on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielruby/

Nobl9’s website: https://www.nobl9.com/

Nobl9 on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nobl9inc/

Follow Mike:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547

Transcript: Interview with Dan Ruby

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Dan Ruby

Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.

Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Dan Ruby, who’s the VP of Marketing at Nobl9. Welcome to the podcast, Dan.

Dan: Hi, Mike. Great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Really excited to chat with you this morning.

Mike: That’s great. Let’s start off and find a little bit about you. Can you tell us a little bit about your career and why you’ve chosen Noble 9 as your current company?

Dan: Yeah, so I did my undergrad in broadcast journalism. That didn’t work out, so I got an MBA and kind of fell into marketing just because marketing is such an interesting field. It takes pretty much any skill set and makes it useful. Being in Boston, surrounded by a ton of B2B startups, I’ve worked for various sizes of B2B enterprise companies, mostly in the tech industry. What brought me to Noble 9 is I basically kind of knew the founders because they had been acquired by Google a couple of months after a company that I had been working for was acquired by Google. So I got introduced. It’s a unique product. It’s selling to a customer that I know pretty well in the IT operations reliability DevOps space. I’ve got a really strong team here that I inherited, so it’s been a great landing spot for me.

Mike: That sounds great. I mean, I love the thought about, you know, part of the reason for being at a company is actually the team that’s there. Um, that’s super positive before we go any further. I’m sure that, uh, given I know a little bit about the company, probably a lot of listeners won’t be familiar with noble nine. So can you explain what the company does?

Dan: Yeah. So noble nine is a reliability platform. So site reliability, software reliability, app reliability, that kind of thing. And we are, built from the ground up around what’s called service level objectives or SLOs. And basically what SLOs do is you set an error budget for a period of time and then you just track in real time as that error budget dwindles down to ideally zero by the end of the period. So what it does is it lets you set up your IT backend and your applications in such a way that errors are acceptable, but you really focus in on the ones that actually impact the user journey. So it’s, it’s a different way of measuring reliability and kind of allows you to a lot more quickly react to changes in your, what we call the error budget burn rate before they become outages.

Mike: And so presumably the concept behind this is there’ll always be problems, there’ll always be issues, but what you’ve got to do is if you keep them below a certain level, then hopefully the end users won’t actually notice.

Dan: Right. It lets you do a few things. One is the reliability, you know, monitoring and making sure that your service is reliably performing. And the other is, you know, determining if you’re overspending on IT investment. If you’re spending a million dollars a month keeping a server at 99.999% uptime, but that’s not positively impacting your user experience, you’re wasting money. With Google, if Gmail is up, that doesn’t mean that every little service connected to it is running perfectly like predictive type. If your predictive email typing is delayed or is not working, you’re not likely to notice. So it’s all about focusing on the user journey and making sure that that’s as free of roadblocks as possible.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense. So are you primarily selling this product into IT teams, to IT managers? Who’s your primary audience?

Dan: Up until about a year ago, our primary audience was a group of engineers called SRE, Site Reliability Engineers. And they’re kind of the first line of defense in any enterprise organization, making sure that their services and their system are reliable. One of the things we found, though, is while they love the product and they’re great as advocates, They almost never, or they rarely, I should say, have budget. So what we’ve been doing is we’ve been kind of poking around with a couple of different potential key audience profiles or key buyer profiles. And, you know, we’re finding that like engineering managers, engineering directors, and product people. will have interest and need and also budget. You know, it all kind of goes back to Bant. Do they have budget? Do they have authority? Do they have a need? Then it’s kind of almost up to sales to determine whether or not the timing is right.

Mike: So it sounds like it’s, and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, maybe not the most exciting product. I mean, basically it’s designed so that from a user point of view, nothing happens, nothing goes wrong. I mean, does that present challenges when you’re trying to market it and get people excited about the product?

Dan: It does. And it’s been doubly challenging because again, up until about a year ago, SLOs as a reliability philosophy, if you will, they weren’t mainstream. You know, Google every year puts out the SRE handbook. And Google has been promoting SLOs in that. But if you go into enterprise organizations, up until fairly recently, you’d go in and you’d say, hey, you ever heard of SLOs? And they’d say no. And then the sales and marketing process becomes teaching them about what SLOs are and why they matter. And anything in IT is a reasonably dry subject. So trying to make it exciting is, it’s a challenge, but like any enterprise B2B marketing endeavor, you want to show value first and foremost. You want to say, look, if you implement my tool, if you buy my platform, you will see greater productivity, greater revenue, lower, you know, costs, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time, kind of everybody is saying that. So how do you differentiate? So one of the things that we’ve really kind of focused on is all of the different ways you can use Anensilo. I’m going to kind of jart a little bit here, as my mom would call it, when somebody crosses three lanes of traffic without looking. One of the ways that I’ve made it exciting is that I’ve started using them for my own marketing metrics. You know, marketing metrics are the lifeblood of a good modern marketing organization. You have to know what’s working. You have to know what’s not. You have to know ROI, you have to know ROAS, and a lot of the stuff that would really tell us a story comes in daily snapshots or the static look at something. So one of the cool things about my product is you can take any dataset and feed it in. So what I do is, I’m a big HubSpot user. I used to consult, I used to be a HubSpot implementation consultant for a third party, and I love HubSpot. But what I’ve done is I’ve built a private app inside of HubSpot, just for data collection, connected that to Google BigQuery, and then connected BigQuery into our platform, because we have a native BigQuery integration. And what you find about SLOs is they work gangbusters on anything that’s a ratio metric. So a couple of the things that I’ve been kind of piping in there for sales enablement, because I write, you know, the scripts that are outbound sales reps use, you pipe in number of phone calls made, number of pickups, and then number of actual conversations had. You pipe those both in as ratios and set an error budget on that. Say, I expect 10% of pickups to become conversations, on average, over the course of any three-hour period. And so I track my error budget. So every time that SLI, which is Service Level Indicator, is not met, it throws errors, takes errors out of my budget, and I can see that drop down over time. So in real time, I can see, well near real time I should say, I can see kind of the trajectory and I’ll also get alerts if all of the sudden my error budget drops precipitously. So I’ll get a slack from Noble 9 saying your error budget burn rate has tripled. And you go, oh, crap. Something is wrong with the scripts. Or you can say, same time, you can say, hey, your error budget around connect rate has dropped precipitously. And I say, oh, well, that means the list or the people that we’re actually calling were not called the right people. It’s really cool to get these real-time alerts around when things aren’t going right. Before they become a massive issue, I can quickly pivot and quickly change. And then going back to your actual question that I’ve kind of spieled well beyond, honestly, that’s how I make it exciting as I tell stories about it. How do people use it? How do I use it? How do our engineers use it? We eat a lot of our own dog food. And so we put out case studies and stories and just little best practice guides based on what we’ve managed to accomplish internally using our own tool set. Nothing is boring if you can make it into a story that resonates. And for the audience that we’re talking to, It may be a dry subject, but making a story around it is going to resonate. Because an SRE is going to read that and go, oh my God, yes, I’ve had that problem. Or a product person is going to read that and say, yes, I have a problem with not knowing why people are churning from my app. And I have to go to seven different places and figure out what metric is relevant. You just got a burn rate. Look at it.

Mike: Fascinating. I mean, it’s great. I love the way that you use stories. But the thing that strikes me is clearly stories are an important part of your marketing, but it also sounds like you’re very data-driven as well.

Dan: I am extremely data-driven. Yeah. Like I said, I kind of fell into marketing. I had an MBA and a journalism degree. Didn’t know S from Shinola. when it came to marketing. So I’m pretty much self-taught since then, but I’ve always had kind of a engineering mindset. I thought I was going to be a computer engineer. In fact, I thought I was going to do a major in comp sci and journalism, and that almost killed me. There’s objectivity to data. And data is like, it’s like a puzzle that I like to be able to kind of work through and figure out what’s working, what’s not, what’s right, what’s wrong. What does the data tell you? Cause there’s, there’s that, that cool balance of creativity and just like hard objective metrics that for me is just fun.

Mike: It’s like figuring out a puzzle. I love that, you know, almost scientific approach, but I’m interested to know, you know, obviously when you’re running marketing for a brand, you’ve got to look at balancing both brand building and, you know, the more direct measurable, you know, lead generation and use of SDRs. How do you do that? How do you achieve that balance while still being focused on, you know, analyzing and using the data?

Dan: It’s hard because, you know, brand building is still kind of nebulous in terms of pulling data. You can say we got this many impressions or you can say you got this particular share of voice. I mean, share of voice is great because I’ve mostly worked for smaller companies with, you know, startup funding. a particular run rate, I kind of have to default to the generation of leads. But brand building doesn’t really move the needle in the spaces that I’ve worked in nearly as much as lead generation. You want the brand to be prominent, but it’s like I’m trying to build the brand with tools and techniques that also can generate leads. So it’s about, you know, it’s about compelling content. It’s about taking, taking our messaging, taking our content beyond the niche that we live in, kind of an overarching view of, you know, DevOps, reliability, SRE, and presenting ourselves as experts in a space. we’re very fortunate to have on our team, the guy who literally wrote the book on SLOs, a guy by the name of Alex Hidalgo, he wrote the O’Reilly book on service level objectives. So a lot of it comes down to then leveraging personalities that we have either within our organization or within our broader sphere of influence and working with a lot of partners on co-marketing stuff because, you know, our reach is not that huge. We’ve got strategic investments from ServiceNow and Cisco who are both massive, you know, the 800-pound gorillas in a lot of the space that we work in. So trying to work with them, trying to work with, you know, we do a lot of webinars where we invite in guests who have their own audiences and who can speak authoritatively. So we’ve, you know, we’ve had guests from Deloitte. We’ve had guests from AWS. And I guess the way it kind of works out for me is I trust that the brand growth will occur organically while I am focused primarily on driving and nurturing leads through the sales cycle. You’ve got to know what the economic realities of your organization are. If we don’t build enough leads, if we don’t close enough leads, we’ve only got so much investment now. We’re doing well, I should say, but you’ve got to build that runway for yourself and let the brand grow semi-organically. As long as you’re putting out authoritative content that is interesting to the people that you’re wanting to talk to, then you should have some success because they operate in their own little networks as well. And if you write a white paper or do a webinar, that is of interest to one. you want to invite them to share it within their networks. Hey, we just saw this cool thing about, you know, e-commerce getting ready for Black Friday and reliability and go from there.

Mike: I think it’s a really interesting discussion, Dan, because you gave a really good overview of those kind of challenges in a startup where you’re dealing with limited resources, you don’t have unlimited branding budgets, and you’re also dealing with really quite compressed timescales to grow the business. So I think for a startup, you gave a really good view there. I love that. I’m interested, you’ve talked about that at a high level. What about a specific campaign? Do you have an example of a campaign you really felt delivered great results or was particularly innovative?

Dan: Yeah. So you’re in the UK, so I assume you’re familiar with DORA. I know it’s not, UK is not EU anymore, but DORA is a new regular, a banking regulation. And we did a campaign around, it was a multipoint campaign that that was focused on compliance, reliability, and risk people in banks that either were based in the EU or did business in the EU, which is, you know, most of the big ones. And we put together, you know, this was when I said we had Deloitte and AWS as guests. This was a roundtable discussion with Amazon’s head of EU regulation, regulatory compliance. and a guy from Deloitte who focuses on the finance industry and has really good insight into the regulatory statutes that either exist or are about to. And so we kind of built this integrated campaign where we would reach out, be it via paid acquisition, not a ton of it, We would talk a lot about it on social. We would take any news articles about Dora coming and share the news article and say, hey, by the way, we’re having this roundtable discussion with some real solid experts, wrote some articles about it, worked with our wonderful PR team to kind of seed some conversations about it within the press for Try to get some earned media around it. And then we had the webinar. It was well attended. It was extremely compelling conversation, provided you’re interested in, you know, EU banking regulations. And it was really informative, actionable. You know, it was value being created. And then after that, Once it’s done, you have the recording. You share the recording with everybody that you know in the banking industry. You cut up the recording into little snippets here and there, and you use them for short-form videos, like Google Shorts or Instagram videos. God help us, TikTok. And, you know, you walk with with your sales team, say, all right, here’s a fresh new whole selection of short, medium, long form content that you can share out with your with your contacts, with your leads in the banking and finance industries. And then you make sure that the content that you’ve created you can repurpose it into as many ways as you can. And I’m still working on a white paper follow-up to that. For people who don’t want to watch a video, distill the outcomes, the main points of the webinar into a white paper series of blogs. yada, yada, yada. So you keep hitting that particular campaign, the key notes in that campaign over and over and over again, but with fresh and interesting and compelling stuff. You know, I teach marketing occasionally at a local university. And one of the first things that I want students to understand is that there’s a hierarchy of content. There’s the very top, there’s you know, an industry expert with unique data or unique insights. And then below that is some schmuck like me with unique data or unique insights. Below that is an industry expert with an opinion. Below that is some schmuck like me with an opinion. And then down here, about three feet below the floor, is a pitch about your product. You got to give value. In enterprise B2B, oh my god, is it congested. This isn’t 20 years ago when we could just call somebody on the phone and say, hey, I want to tell you about my product. It does this. And they’d be like, yeah, right, tell me. Everybody’s so inundated with marketing messaging from every possible angle. You got to give them value. This integrated DORA campaign was so good for us because we focused on very specific, very timely value. That was probably a longer spiel than necessary, but I get a little worked up over content and the difference between good and bad.

Mike: Sorry. I love the enthusiasm, Dan. I mean, I think talking about content in that way is, is awesome and really fascinating where you’re talking about mixing kind of a newsjacking tactic alongside using really the brand equity of some of the speakers. I thought it was a great, a great campaign.

Dan: I was very pleased with it. We have wonderful partners. And having people in your corner as a startup or as an enterprise, you can’t do it alone. You can find partners who believe in your product, believe in your company, believe in your people, who will work with you. Yes, because it helps them too, but also because they see the value in you and a relationship. You’ll go a lot farther.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, partnerships are so important. I mean, Dan, it’s been fascinating. I think we’ve covered a lot of interesting things. Before you go, there’s a couple of quick fire questions we always like to ask people. And the first is, you know, I’m always interested to know what’s the best piece of marketing advice you’ve ever been given?

Dan: Best piece of marketing advice? Ironically, it was an insult from a long time ago. like 2009, I worked at a startup and I reported into the CTO and he used to call marketing the last bastion of unaccountable spending. And on top of that, he called me the last bastard of unaccountable spending. And ironically enough, that became the best marketing advice that I ever got because I wanted my spending to be accountable. And that was really the kick in the butt that I needed to get into the whole data-driven side of things.

Mike: That’s awesome. I love that the insult became advice. I mean, that’s the best revenge, I think, for an insult. The other question we like to ask is about helping people who are new to the industry. So if you were talking to someone who was looking to start a career in marketing, maybe a graduate, what would be your advice to them?

Dan: Think about what your skill set is. What do you do? What do you love to do? Like, if you’re trying to get into marketing and you have a passion for coding, great. That’s going to fit really well. You can get into marketing operations. You could get into web development. Kind of adjacent to that, Learn enough HTML to be dangerous. Again, this comes from years and years of startup work, but not having to wait for somebody to fix an issue on your website is worth its weight in gold. But think about what you love to do and think about how that can be leveraged to create value for potential customers. You know, that that will help because whether it’s podcasting, whether it’s coding, whether it’s writing, whether it’s you know, design work, whether it’s just pure strategy, if you can take what you love and hone that to fit or to not to fit because that feels like you’re putting it in a box. But if you can hone what you love in such a manner that you can confidently say this will interest and compel potential customers in this kind of industry, you’ve got a lot stronger of a starting point. I think that marketing, when it comes to marketing, marketing training is secondary to whatever your real passions are and find a way to work that in.

Mike: I love that. I love the idea of using, you know, what you love to actually add value. So Dan, this has been great advice. It’s been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate it. If people want to get in contact with you, what’s the best way to reach you?

Dan: You can find me on LinkedIn, linkedin.com slash in slash DanielRuby. Pretty easy. You can email me at druby, D-R-U-B-Y, at Nobl9.com. That’s pretty much the two easiest ways. I have long since abandoned Twitter.

Mike: Brilliant. Dan, thank you so much. It’s been a great conversation. I’m sure there’ll be some questions. Thanks so much for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.

Dan: Thanks for having me, Mike. It was a pleasure.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.