Author: Hannah Wehrly

A Napier Podcast: Interview with Tim Langley - CANDDi

In this podcast episode, we interview Tim Langley, CEO and Founder at CANDDi, a digital intelligence tracking platform.

Tim shares his journey to founding CANDDi, and how the platform can help B2B marketers be more proactive by gathering data which allows them to engage with leads both at the top and bottom of the sales funnel.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Tim Langley - CANDDi

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Tim Langley

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 the latest episode of marketing b2b technology from Napier. Today, I've got Tim Langley, who's described himself as the founder, the CEO and chief dogsbody at CANDDi. Welcome to the podcast, Tim.

Tim: Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike: So, Tim, I mean, I mean, the first thing is, you know, how do you get a career that lets you end up with Chief dogs by the CANDDi? Yeah. How did you get to this point?

Tim: Oh, you know, I think that's, I think that's a very easy question to answer. So I grew up and studied maths at university, did a year working for a for a startup, and then decided, You know what, I think it'd be fun to be running my own business. That was nearly 20 years ago. And how'd you get how'd you get a title like, Chief dog's body? Like anything? Isn't it? The joy of running a business is you keep every title until someone else wants it. And in 20 years, no one's wants to take that one from me yet.

Mike: Yeah, I must admit, last week, I found out how many employees it took to change a light bulb. And the answer was only one they asked me and then I do the light bulb changing. So I totally understand.

Tim: It's like the classic computer science joke, isn't it? How many? How many software engineers to take change a light bulb? Not it's a hardware problem. They don't, they don't they don't get any better. I'm afraid.

Mike: I was gonna say I think you now qualify as having the best software engineer joke on the podcast. So congratulations for that. I'm, I'm interested. I mean, you mentioned having to do a lot of CANDDi but you're actually also involved in a couple of other companies. Can you tell us a bit about that as well?

Tim: Yeah, all sorts of CANDDi now is is 13 years old. And we have we've always prided ourselves as kind of being like the innovators in the space so we're 20 strong person business 50 Universal we're developers. So very very thin on the ground for sales marketing business, very much innovation development building things.

And first business I've got involved first spin out business and all of them all of these are spin out businesses from CANDDi but two and a half years ago, I met a chap called Adam Herbert who was very experienced within the data industry we started a business together called go live data go is the it's the UK is best source of b2b marketing lists marketing data we start from UK companies house and then find the online profiles and all the all the thermographic data around the around the organisation so so that's that's that's go and then I also started a business called comply and comply is very similar to go but with a financial crimes lash and anti money laundering hat on so comply has been very very busy over the last four and a half months while a number of our larger customers have started to ask us Can you guarantee there's no Russians involved in our customer base so yes, life is exciting with with those two strands but but no cat candies always been my baby so And fortunately, fortunately should be some fun things to talk about the CANDDi as well.

And everything around data which I think is really interesting

it's all it's all around data that's been it's been my passion for say for 20 odd years now has been data and then specifically people and marketing data.

Mike: Cool. So CANDDi is spelt ca n DD I guess the the most important questions is why CANDDi is it a lot of sweets?

Tim: We get all things really in fact, we have a we have a number of American customers and they struggle with the word CANDDi we often get is that see and die it's actually got a funny little story really. So just before starting CANDDi I've had, as I mentioned, I've been been running businesses 20 years, I had a couple of businesses that went well. I had a couple of businesses that didn't go so well.

Just before starting CANDDi, I was consulting for a actually a digital agency in Manchester as was at the time, which is a company called and digital and, and started pitching to and basically looking at the stuff they were doing and they had an awful lot of trying to pull together different data sets very manually, and so started pitching to them around. I reckon if we did a bit of less than a bit of this and a bit of this, we could build a product out of this. And they went Tim That sounds amazing. We'd love to be your first investors. I wasn't even looking for investors but sounds amazing. They said there's one criteria though. The company name has to include the words and digital. It's just kind of one of the things they did.

So the real name of a company is campaign and digital intelligence limited. But that's such a mouthful, but we then went okay, what can we really call it? But But do you know what? I love the name CANDDi, I wouldn't change it for the world. But if I had to do it again, I wouldn't call it CANDDi. The number of iterations of the name I own ca n ddi.com C A N N di.com ca n d i. serwotka. It's like an SEO nightmare trying to trying to get the word. The word CANDDi.

Mike: Okay, so a memorable but rather hard to spell name? By the sounds of it. So I mean, can you tell us what problem CANDDi solves.

Tim: So the core of CANDDi, we want to be putting a name and a face against an otherwise anonymous website visitor. So when I first started, and actually when we demoed the software to people, we start with this slide that's got this big black hole in the middle, and all kinds of different marketing channels around the edge. So be it SEO bit PPC, the email marketing vs. Social. But the fact of the matter is, there's a billion different ways to get people to come onto your website, which is great. And within reason, they all work. And you then have traditional, I call them traditional, but traditional tools such as Google Analytics, which can give you like the aggregate numbers.

So yesterday, you had 100 visitors onto your website, 20 of them came from SEO, and 30 of them came from an email campaign you run. And you know what, that's for a lot of art for a lot of our b2b customers. That's not a bad kind of scenario. The problem is, and this is a bit and this is a bit misses of if you like the hypothesis statement that started the business, but the problem is, you can see what's getting people to the website. But then the thing we hear time and time again, they land on the website, it's like this black hole, you know, people are there. But it's like having a shop window and just you can see people walking by. But unless you can reach out unless you can engage with them unless you ultimately unless you know who they are. It's very, very little you can do from a sales perspective, you just have to hope and pray they fill in a form on the website.

And in many instances for b2b, especially especially growing and sales focused b2b businesses, they want to be a bit more proactive, but just wait and hope somebody comes and fills the form. And so so what we do, we integrate him with all of our digital marketing channels via SEO via email marketing, we integrate him with them, we use those to pick up signals, and then either identify the company, or potentially identify danger, the actual named individual, and be able to say, it's not just a random visitor, this is Mike Maynard, from Napier, he's a really high prospect.

Mike: That's fascinating. So I mean, particularly, what you're trying to do is catch people between arriving at the website and filling in the form, which is where a lot of people disappear. So that that makes a lot of sense.

Tim: There's two bits really so.

So there's one bit which is, and if you look through the whole aid or awareness, model, awareness, interest decision action, crikey, I nearly forgot it. So one piece, one piece, which is a piece you just alluded to there, Mike is the very top of the funnel, capturing people went between arriving on the website and filling the form, when they're still in that kind of role.

Do I know who you are? Am I interested enough. And we in that gives that gives, that gives our customers that gives our people use our software, the opportunity to try and get involved with people who might otherwise disappear.

The second piece though, which is actually equally as valuable, often we'll find that that prospects will come to the website, they'll fill in a form to download a lead magnet or to get a piece of content, etc. But they're not yet ready to buy. They've expressed interest, but they're not ready for the decision or the action phase. And so so then what happens is they'll then come back to a website or number and actually sorry, just to jump in, but but if if you jump down their throat too fast when they're just at the interest phase, you ended up turning them off rather than turning them on because well I'm not I'm not ready yet. Just give me a break.

So so the second bit were canned is really useless because we're tracking computers because we're watching the activity that people do on the website. We can say look, this person, they filled in a form, but probably not quite ready for a really a really full on conversation. Drop them an email back, don't bother making a phone call to them yet. What then happens is they come And back to your website a month, a week, six months, a year later, they don't necessarily fill in a form again. But CANDDi goes, that's interesting. I've seen this person, I've seen this computer. And so we can then give this much richer picture for the people who've already filled in forms and give you an indication of when the right time to engage might be. So kind of hits both sides, both the very top of the funnel, but also the people who are getting hotter starting to get closer towards being able to make that decision and take action.

Mike: That's interesting. So that that towards the bottom of the funnel, I think you're acting quite like a marketing automation platform might do in terms of tracking people, and understanding where they're visiting and potentially, you know, driving actions from that. Would that be right?

Tim: Yes, so, so can the marketing automation is always been an interesting space for us. And it's not something we have yet. I use that carefully. But it's not something we've yet wandered into, we integrate with. So when we when we look at when we look at the whole space of people in a similar position to CANDDi bars, there are a number of organisations a number of competitors who do company level IP tracking, we can talk about that in the future. But that's, that's really about identifying the company based on the IP address that someone's coming from.

There's also a number of organisations which which you mentioned the HubSpot bit eloquent bit my calf, so the the full service marketing automation plays, who do everything for you. And one of the things we've always said they are great pieces technology, if you're going to put everything into their stack. It's interesting, but a number of our larger customers, one of the things they get out of CANDDi, they use marketing automation platforms, for the automation, as it says, but they they actually what you discover is they use multiple different platforms. And each platform tracks and identifies its people. But they don't have that holistic view goes okay. And especially when people are using third parties as well. So they might use a third party to do their data send. And then they use their own platform to do their nurturing. And then the salespeople send their own emails and, and they end up with all these little pots of data. One of the pieces can do those as pull all of that together to give this slightly more holistic, almost a customer data platform or CDP. So yeah, marketing automation is a really unlock much automation has been a very interestingly growth space over the last 13 years, as a CANDDi, we've we've kind of cut this interesting place that goes on one hand, providing the providing a lightweight marketing type platform, and the other hand providing stdp and provide the actual the data the pulling it all together for for the larger organisations.

Mike: That's interesting. I mean, the other thing as well is when I use CANDDi, and just so people know, we actually are a CANDDi customer at Napier. So we are CANDDi users. When I use it, it feels much more sales focused than any kind of marketing automation platform. I know clients when they've tried to get sales teams to use the marketing automation platforms. It's it's fraught with difficulty. It's not what sales teams like it's hard enough to get them to use the CRM. So I mean, is that another benefit that it's a more sales friendly presenting activity?

Tim: You took You took the words right out of my mouth? We you're absolutely right. Once one time we used to we used to describe it the keys in the name, isn't it? It's marketing automation. And with a joke, you almost don't want your sales team to be going into it because you want them focused on what do I need to do today. And then one of the pieces we have in CANDDi is very focused lists off here are people that were on your website yesterday, here are people are taking action today. So from a sales side, it's very great. I need to tick these boxes versus let me go and wander around and have a look at all of the all of the reasons why not to be making not not to be making sales or not to be making the contact or calls. Yes, CANDDi came from a very sales focused background rather than rather than this more generic marketing piece.

Mike: Definitely, no, I think it's really helpful to sales teams. I want to step back, you briefly mentioned the identification of anonymous visitors. So working out which company people are from, can you explain a little bit more about what CANDDi does to work out which company people are from?

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. So let's start by talking about how the industry does it and then then I'll talk about some of the additional pieces which CANDDi does. So the core the core of company identification has always been IP tracking and using IP addresses. So as I'm as I'm sure majority of your listeners know, Mike, when anytime you connect to the internet, your computer gets given an IP address and that's how Have a server knows how to communicate with your computer and your computer to communicate the server. And servers or technology like CANDDi can capture these IP addresses and go, Okay, here's an IP address 81 point 27.1 to four point 17, etc, etc, etc.

Now every every IP address is registered to an organisation. Most IP addresses are registered to internet service providers, so Virgin Media, British Telecom, etc. But for medium and larger businesses, they generally have their own, what would be called a static IP address. So this would be an IP address registered in the name of that company. And if a visitor comes from behind that company's IP address, you can say somebody from Napier was on your website yesterday. And that can be useful. There's a number of problems with just relying on IP addresses. So one problem is that when when all you have is IP addresses, you've got no way to know whether it was one person coming 10 times, or 10 people coming once. If you if you imagine an office full of people, you also don't know who it was that was coming from from behind the IP address. Sometimes Sometimes that can be okay. So with as an organisation, you're very, very focused in who you who you market to who you sell to, you can go general, on balance of probability, the only person who's going to be coming on our website is going to be the CFO, or is going to be the facilities manager, etc. But actually, it might just as well be, but it was one of them, it was one of their managers, or even it was the office intern who was tasked with doing the research.

The second the second problem, if you like with with IPS is, and again, go back to when CANDDi started 13 years ago, everybody browse the internet or predominantly browse the internet from behind their work desktop computer. These days, I don't know about you and me but it's the iPad, it's the phone, it's the coffee shop, it's the whilst whilst commuting to and from London, etc, etc, etc. Those are the times I'm more often do my awareness interest. And in those instances, very rarely will someone show up as coming from behind a static IP address. Generally, they'll be on a on a mobile connection or on a home broadband. So that's the IP tracking piece. Now we do a few bits deeper than that in CANDDi. So CANDDi, CANDDi uses cookies to track rather than IPs. So we drop the first we can talk about cookies, I'm sure privacy will come up in a second, but we drop a first party cookie on the device. So that means we can track when that computer comes back to that specific website. We don't follow you around the internet, we only track you on that single single company's properties. But because we do this, we can pick up when a visitor comes from behind multiple IPs. So if you use the computer in work, at home, on the train, on the coffee shop, we would see that as the same computer across multiple different IP addresses. And then we can plug into other types of data to go, who's this person likely to be?

Mike: So what you're doing is you're you're almost looking to see when this cookie gets associated with the company. And then you know, that person obviously works for that company because they're behind the firewall.

Tim: Yes, number one is we look for when that cookie gets associated with the company. And then number two, if we're really lucky when that cookie gets associated with a named individual. So if Eva fill a form and click an email, connect through LinkedIn, in that instance, we go up. And now it's not just about the company, it's about the actual person after company.

Mike: Perfect. Okay, so how do people use this data? I'm interested, particularly in the anonymous data, you refer to the fact of there could be a challenge and knowing who from the company visited the site? You know, do you find people who have value, you know, suddenly seeing a particular customer increase activity? Or how else do people use this data?

Tim: So we spoke earlier about the difference between or some of the differences between sales and marketing. And we very definitely have two different types of users. So for the Sales User, even the company level data can be useful. We've built over over the last period of time, we've built a number of plugins to try to help identify otherwise anonymous people. So we have we have the ability to see who the key employees at the company are. So you see somebody from Napier communications, we go okay, that's kind of intro and then we got kind of interesting here of a key people that work at that organisation.

So you can go we have Have a plugin for Outlook and a plug in for Gmail. So if you actually know somebody's applicant or know people at the company, you can send them a one to one individually email. And obviously, as I'm sure you know, one to one emails have far higher open rates far higher click through far higher engagement, we have a plug in for LinkedIn so often are so often our Sales Users that they'll go okay, somebody from this company, let's go on to LinkedIn, let's see who's at that company? Who am I already connected to? Who could I connect with, make the connections? And then when people are when their connections start to engage, we can then identify them on the website. That's kind of a sales side. With the marketing side, it's much more around, is our message going out to the right kind of people? If we're building a message aimed at UK businesses? Do we tend to see UK businesses coming onto the site? Or actually, is it American businesses or Canadian businesses or, or so we've our marketing teams, we give them that bit more of a generic, but actually drilled down to the company in the thermographic details. I don't know you're aiming for large businesses, but it seems most of the stuffs being read by smaller businesses, okay, maybe allows you to rethink where rethink the type of content and rethink the information you're putting out there.

Mike: That's really interesting. And presumably, if, if I'm running an Account Based Marketing Campaign, I can actually measure the impact on traffic from the accounts I'm targeting, in CANDDi to see to see the move.

Tim: Do you know what Account Based Marketing campaigns marketing has probably been one of the biggest buzzwords over the last few years?

Mike: It's certainly one of our biggest certainly our fastest growing service, actually, it's definitely working. And I think one of the things we found is, of course, when you start an Account Based Marketing Campaign, you don't necessarily run it as a lead gen campaign. And so it's quite hard to get those results. And certainly seeing the data in CANDDi definitely helps.

Tim: It often gives that tangible are slightly more tangible. We know we're doing the right thing, whilst it might take a number of months to actually see the the lead numbers actually tick through. So yes,

Mike: Definitely. So I mean, Kenny is obviously pulling in a lot of data, both personal and also firmographic. You mentioned before, I mean, there's always the GDPR question, what's the privacy implications on what you do? What are marketers need to be aware of?

Tim: You know, what is? The $64,000 question, isn't it about privacy these days, and it's also changing and evolving so much both. It's both a legal perspective, but also a technical perspective, and everything that's going on under the covers, so, so few pieces, and let's let's go through and try and get some these time. But please feel free to ask about any of the any bits that go through. So piece number one, obviously, is the GDPR. Ankle, so let's just talk about that.

So CANDDi only captures data from people coming on to our customers sites, but that's where we build our datasets from. So we rely on the fact that our customers have a legal basis for holding that data. And CANDDi, simply a data processor of the data our customers control.

What I mean, say there's, we don't own any of the data from your site. It's your data, you get to choose or you get to make requests as to what you want to do with that. Now, for most of our customers, they rely on legitimate interests as their as their legal basis. And in a b2b world, that makes a lot of sense, I would not use CANDDi, I would not use technology like CANDDi in any in any form of high risk data or very, very, very, very personal data. So if you're doing anything with children, or if you're doing anything with medical records, this wouldn't be the right type of tool to be using. But if you're a b2b business, if you're if you're selling to other other b2b companies, or other other b2b organisations, then the legitimate interests, the ability to say, look, we saw someone came onto our website, they are a genuine prospect for us. That's why we're tracking them. That's why we're that's why we're doing this. The second side, which which I touched on the beginning, is about cookies, and about first party but versus third party. So this is this is whereas GDPR was the buzzword of of 2018 2019. That buzz word of 2020 2223. Almost certainly is going to be the fact that if you read all the articles, cookies are dying, they're going away. No one's ever going to accept cookies anymore, etc, etc, etc. And the truth of matter is, in the same way that GDPR made us think carefully about what we were doing with marketing data. But it didn't stop marketing. Unit didn't destroy the industry and all of the above, the same is going to be true with with the first party versus third party cookies.

So third party cookies effectively are cookies that follow you around the internet. This is where you go and look at a dishwasher. And then you go and read a news article and it says buy this dishwasher. Now that's driven off of third party cookie, first party cookies, or just a bite, they only collect data on that one website on that one company's on that one company's property. So that much more about, and we've said this for years, and candidates are technology. And the best way to use this technology is to help. We help companies build relationships with people and organisations who want to have relationships with them. If if you think about it from sales perspective, at the end of the day, even if I come onto your website, if I don't want to have a relationship with your business, it's pointless trying to force me to because nobody wins. Or what happens is you waste marketing money, you waste sales time. Whereas if it's just that I do, but I just don't quite know how to get started. Well, that's a great prospect for you. I feel like I'm getting it does any of this make sense? Certainly, I can talk about privacy till the cows come home. So

Mike: I think it's very important that the differential you made about first party and third party cookies, and that's quite technical. But you know, it really is at the heart of the new regulations are impacting third party.

Tim: Correct. We in fact, actually going back a number of years, we coined a we coined that Scripture, we call it the pub landlord conversation, if you've got a couple of minutes, but so the public landlord conversation says, and by the way, candies were based in Manchester, we're in the centre of it, we're in fact, within the Northern Quarter, if anyone knows those Manchester well, but so for the last five years, I've been going on a Friday night finish work, obviously, COVID notwithstanding both, so I would go to the same pub on a Friday night with a team in CANDDi, and we'd sit down, we'd have a beer, just let off steam at the end of the for long week. And, and obviously over time, I'd start to build a relationship with the pub landlord. And, and so I'd go in there once in one day. And he goes, and it must have been a really bad week, because you could read on my face as a bad place. And he says, Timmy says some, you look like you've had a tough week, why don't you sit down, there's a pint of Guinness, he knows I drink Guinness, there's a pint of Guinness, just it's on the house, have a few minutes, just get get stress off. And then when you're ready, we'll have a proper conversation. And I went, you know what, that's really, really good. But the landlord recognised who I was he new or like drinking Guinness, he saw us in a bad mood. That's a great relationship, and the fact that I want to have a relationship with him. So I go, brilliant, that's great customer service. That's a good analogy, if you like have a first party tracking, where we want to have a relationship.

Now the counter to that is maybe I jump on a train to London and I walk into work into a bar in the middle of Shoreditch. And the landlord goes, You're Tim Langley, I've seen you on the internet. I'm going to run a mile party. Obviously, everybody has their own definitions of what they feel comfortable sharing and what they view as, as personal and private. And except for but that to me is the distinction between the two, I get to choose and I get to I get to choose who I want to have a relationship with. And on the assumption they want to have a relationship with me. We have a beautiful, beautiful situation. The one where they pull together data, but I'm not necessarily aware of. That's uncomfortable. That's not something that's not something that's good for me as an individual. It's not something that's good for a business either.

Mike: I love that explanation. That's That's fantastic, really clear differentiation there. And absolutely, I think everyone would run a mile to finally have a stalker, it's, it's scary.

Tim: It's a very English analogy, though it doesn't translate so well across the pond.

Mike: So, I mean, I'm mindful of the time here. I mean, just looking at installing can do it. Obviously, there's quite a lot is it does that mean it's complicated to instal and manage?

Tim: It's super well. It's super simple to instal and manage. It's literally put one line of code on your website, we take care of everything else, where, where it can be more complex, maybe complex as the wrong word. But where it can be more more challenging is sometimes it involves sales teams and sales people starting to change their behaviours and think a bit more about how they actually want to engage and how they actually have a go about contacting for days. I think it's fair to say the days of cold calling, picking up the phone and just go Hey Mike, you want to speak You now are probably passed, it's definitely a much more subtle approach. And so we, when we start working with clients, we have a very strong customer success team. And they work very closely with people trialling CANDDi, and very closely with our customers to help them think about how to best use this within their business. So technically, it's simple, but, but sometimes, sometimes we dive a lot deeper with customers to really help them get the best out of it.

Mike: That's really interesting.

Tim: So I mean, presumably people, they look at the data, and they might go back and see if somebody already care about somebody or you know, suddenly, it's an instant, this is perfect, I can understand, oh, when they look at these products, I didn't know this customer is interested these products, that that must be a great feeling. But sometimes it requires a bit more time and effort to dig deep to find that the information that matters.

And sometimes it requires a bit of, as you said, then a bit more lateral thinking. So we've had times we've had times when we've had people say, Well, I know these people already, why do I need to know they're on our website. And actually, they'll then spread it out to the wider team. And maybe it's the account manager who goes, you might already know those people, Mr. salesperson, but my goodness, I really want to know, another one. Another one we find is sometimes we'll see people go. And they'll see customers looking at their terms and conditions or their contract terms. And you go, Whoa, that's a red flag, you might want to know about that. If your best customer is looking at terms and conditions, that's a good indication, it might be time to start touching base and say, Hi, how are you again? So yes, that's kind of the wider picture thinking. But when people are thinking very linearly, sometimes they don't always doesn't always jump out as immediate benefits.

Mike: No, absolutely. I mean, we have, you know, in marketing, running a marketing agency, if people look at the client's page, or they look at the People page, or they look at both, it's a real indication that they're interested. So I totally understand that.

Tim: Exactly. Yeah. So if somebody wanted to try CANDDi, I mean, it's a line of code on the website. That sounds simple.

Mike: But is it easy to get a trial? How do you how do you, you know, let people test the product?

Tim: Yeah, so we, as with many SAS businesses, we are a free trial first business CANDDi.com/register. Or just go to WWE did we CANDDi.com. And there's plenty of ways to to register from there. When we work with people, we do a 30 day free trial to get started. And during that free trial, our customer success team are regularly reaching out touching base, just trying to make sure that we can give you the best possible experience of software to hand. So very, very, very simple, very, very easy to get started. We We love having new people on board.

Mike: Brilliant, so So just go to CANDDi ca n ddi.com, or one of the other versions you've got. And and try it out. That's a great message. I mean, it's been really great talking to you, if people are, are interested in finding out more or maybe have a question, is there a way they can get ahold of you on the internet?

Tim: There's 100 ways to get ahold of me on the internet. But so tim@CANDDi.com or reach out to me, Tim Langley on LinkedIn. I, in fact, it is it's the joy of growing, building a growing businesses is there are more and more people in the team to work to take over stuff. But actually, I really enjoy when people reach out and ask me questions. And it's sometimes it's just really nice to actually touch base and understand the kinds of things people are actually interested in asking about. So we're more than happy to answer any questions.

Mike: Perfect. And I mean, that's brilliant. You know, if people are interested in a software product, they've got the email address to the CEO. That's, that's a pretty compelling.

Tim: I told you, we were kind of different in that space, but

Mike: awesome. Well, I really appreciate this. It's been such a good conversation not just about CANDDi, but about cookies, about privacy, about all sorts of things. Thank you so much for being on the podcast him.

Tim: Thanks very much for having me, Mike.

Mike: Thanks very much. 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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Hannah Wehrly

A Napier Podcast: Interview with Sarah Bond - Lucky Orange

In this podcast episode, we interview Sarah Bond, Vice President of Marketing at Lucky Orange, a website conversion optimization tool.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Sarah Bond - Lucky Orange

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sarah Bond

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 the latest episode of marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Sarah bond. Sarah is the Vice President of Marketing at Lucky Orange. Welcome to the podcast, Sarah.

Sarah: Thanks, Mike. Excited to be here with you today.

Mike: It's great to have you here. So, I mean, the way we normally start is asking a little bit about career history. So can you tell us a little bit about your career and how you've ended up at Lucky Orange?

Sarah: Absolutely. So I actually have a little bit of a secret. Although I'm vice president of marketing. Now, I'm actually not a marketer, by background or education. My career has led me into marketing. But I actually got my start in graduated from college with a degree in public relations and advertising. And as soon as I graduated from college, I, my first job was serving as a leadership consultant. And from there, I jumped into actually doing journalism, and was writing for a weekly newspaper for a while, you know, I love writing, it's one of my passion areas. So I did that. And then after I got done doing writing, I said, you know, I really, really want to get into public relations. And so my next job was doing agency side public relations, and did that for a while and then moved over into the corporate world, doing PR for a fortune 500 healthcare technology company. And it was while I was doing PR that my manager at the time came to me with an interesting opportunity to move over to the marketing side doing digital marketing. And it was real leap of faith. For me, I think at the time, I knew what HTML stood for. But I had no idea what online marketing was what paid search was, I didn't know anything about websites other than publishing news releases to websites, and my role is PR. But I kind of made that leap of faith. And I learned that I really enjoyed the digital marketing side of things. And from there, just kind of use that as a jumping off point to do a variety of different marketing and comms tasks and have led internal communications teams, I've led brand strategy and brand identity, as well as in house creative services team. So graphic designers, video production, and all sorts of different marketing, ranging from Product Marketing focused on go to marketing strategies, and just really the gamut of anything and everything marketing, to even doing some civic engagement strategies. And all of that kind of broad marketing career led me to Lucky Orange a great opportunity to get in with a smaller company than where I was at when I left the company that I had previously been at. It was about 22,000 people. And so I made the jump to a company of less than 20 people and absolutely love it, and couldn't be happier than where I'm at, at Lucky Orange where I get to do a little bit of anything and everything marketing and communications related.

Mike: That's, that's great. That sounds like a fascinating career, and probably not something you had like this 1020 year career plan. It sounds like it was very dynamic.

Sarah: It definitely was, it was one of those, say yes to the opportunity when it arises, type of strategies. And if you had asked me when I first got started my career, I would have told you, I'm going to be doing public relations for my whole career and would continue on with that. But really, when the different opportunities presented themselves, I jumped at it because I love learning new skills and new tasks. And it is what really keeps me energised and excited about my career and being able to dive in and get my hands dirty and marketing. I just really I love that opportunity and have been fortunate to have a career that's given me a lot of opportunities to continue to grow and stretch my skills.

Mike; Oh, that. That's awesome. That sounds great. Right? So before we dive into the company and what you do, I've got to ask what you must get asked all the time. Why the name Lucky Orange.

Sarah: It's an interesting name, isn't it? It's definitely not one that you can infer what we do just based on the name. But that's a little bit by design. When our founders were coming up with the name for the company. They wanted something that was interesting and differentiated in the market space and that would allow them to grab people's attention and they really landed on Lucky Orange and we've kind of embraced it from there and incorporate it in everything that we do.

Mike: That's great. So I mean, it's certainly memorable. I guess that you know, the things that have asked that is, so you're Lucky Orange, I've got no idea from the name, what you do, can you tell us what you do?

Sarah: Absolutely, really at the core of what we do is we help people who have a website, understand what people are doing on their site, so that they can improve their conversions on that site, whether it's an E commerce site that's looking to grow sales, or a b2b site that's looking to generate more leads. And we offer a suite of tools that help people understand website visitor behaviour. So from heat maps and session recordings that let you see the most popular parts of your site to drilling down into what a very individual user is doing to surveys and live chat that allow you to engage directly with a person who's on your site to ask them firsthand what they're struggling with, or what they're interested in, to really get that into in the understanding of the customer so that when you understand them better, you can create better experiences, you know, if you're a user experience designer using Lucky Orange tools, you can not only create a really beautiful website experience, but one that's also highly functional. And that converts to someone who's a solo entrepreneur who's trying to understand why they're getting all this traffic, but why it's not converting and turning into sales or leads.

Mike: Right sounds like there's a lot of things there. So I mean, you're packaging different tools up, I mean, maybe we can just go and explore some of those products kind of unpack the the tools first. So I think the first thing you talked about was understanding recording user sessions. So, you know, this is a technology where you're watching what people do on the website. I mean, can you give me some examples of what marketers might do with that data? How they might use it?

Sarah: Sure. And like you said, Mike, it, it is for those who are unfamiliar with what a session recording does, it really is like watching a playback of what someone did on your website. So with a session recording, you can see the pages that they navigated to, you can see where they clicked on those pages, where they scroll down a page, maybe where they hesitated where they move their mouse. So it really is a helpful tool to let you see what they're doing. And, you know, we as a marketing team, at Lucky Orange, use our own tools on our website to understand what people are doing. And there are several different ways you as a marketer might use them. Let's say you just launched a paid advertising campaign, and you want to see what people from that campaign are doing? Well, you can filter by source, you can filter by any UTM parameter. And you can see, okay, my people coming on my Google PPC ads that are coming to my site from those ads, I want to watch and see if they're going through my page and scrolling through my page. And one of the things that we found very helpful, particularly when we have landing pages created for a specific campaign is to see just how much of the content people are consuming. And one of the things that we found after we launched our new website is that we have a very large video block on some of our pages, and that some people just scroll right past that.

So we've used that information to try and recreate the hierarchy of information to put other information that we think is more compelling on those landing pages to the top so that we can optimise that page to increase the odds that people will hit that call to action. So it can be very helpful in that regard as a marketer to do that. And also, if you're very content heavy site in our content marketing team likes to use our session recordings to see just how far down the page somebody's reading into their content. You know, there's, you can look at Google Analytics and see time on page, but you don't know if they just opened up that browser and they're sitting there. But with a session recording, you can actually see, okay, someone is actively reading my content and making it all the way down to the bottom of the page. And there's another tool that when we we switch to talk about heat maps, that can be really helpful from that perspective, too. But it's really great to let you see kind of the the guts behind what you might surface up in Google Analytics of highly traffic pages, high time on site, but what are they really doing when they're on that page? That's what a session recording can help you understand?

Mike: And with those session recordings, you're effectively looking at individual users. Is that right? That's right. Yep. So you're playing through individual users now. You just mentioned heatmap. So explain that. To me, that sounds like what you're doing is aggregating those individual users to try and give an indication of what's interesting. Is that is that as a good understanding of what it does,

Sarah: yeah, we should have you on the marketing team. Yeah, I mean, you explained it very well. A where session recording allows you to see what an individual person on your site is doing. A heatmap gives you the aggregate view of what people are doing on your site. So it lets you get a feel for those areas of your site that are getting a lot of engagement, or conversely, no engagement, which can be really, really helpful. Because in my past life as a digital marketer, for a very big company working on website redesigns, you kind of get into this design by committee process where every single line of business is going to tell you they need to be in the top navigation of the website, because they are the most important thing. And they are absolutely what's drawing people into your site, because everyone's looking for their content. Well, a heat map can actually prove or disprove some of those internal stakeholders, because it can show you well actually, on our main navigation, we get the most clicks on these lines of business, or these subjects or these topics. And we're not getting a lot of clicks here. So as a marketer, you can use that to refine what you're actually showing, and hopefully get people to the content that's most meaningful to them, so that they stay longer on their site. And there are some other ways that you can use heat maps to there's a version of a heat map that's called a scroll heat map, that instead of showing you chunks of the site, you know, clip clickable elements where people might be clicking on this will show you how far down the page a person, the majority of people scrolled.

And on a scroll heatmap, you have what's called the effective fold, which, you know, if you're thinking of it in terms like a newspaper, it's that point where 50% of the people are falling off. So it's effectively where the fold is that on your website. And when you're thinking about something like blog content, or even a product page, where you're maybe listing out a lot of features, a scroll heatmap will show you how far down the page most people are making it. So if people are stopping reading before they're getting to your calls to action, or if you're looking at it as a content marketer and saying, Man, I put all this time and energy and hours of work into creating these long form blog posts, but nobody's reading them. What a gift is that to be able to go back and say, I don't need to waste my time on these long posts anymore. Maybe I can write shorter, concise content that gets people there quickly and gets consumed all the way through. So they're really great analytics tools for marketers to be able to have to understand visitor behaviour on your site in aggregate, but also at the individual user level when you want to dive in deeper.

Mike: Awesome. I mean, in terms of making these recordings, so you're not watching people's eyes? Are you tracking the mouse? How do you understand what people are focusing on?

Sarah: Right? So a heat map is capturing where people, there are several different types. So it clicks heat map will capture where a user is clicking, so wherever they click their mouse, and you can see some interesting behaviour from that if you dive in and start studying heat maps, because, of course, you expect to see people clicking on things that are clickable, but a lot of people will also click as they move down the screen where you might see clicks in random areas. Or you might uncover issues on your site where people are clicking things that they think aren't that should be clickable that actually aren't. So that's something great that you can pass on to your user experience or development teams. But there are also moves heat maps that allow you to see where someone moves their mouse across the screen. So it's not capturing the click, but it's actually following that mouse movement. And there are some common things that you'll see user experience designers are familiar with an F shaped pattern, when it comes to consuming content on a website. And you'll see a lot of users will move their mouse as they read that content. And so if you're trying to kind of break out of some of those I hate here, people consuming this an F shaped patterns, you can study one of those mouse movement heat maps to really understand that. So that's, that's really what we're tracking is the movement of the mouse across the page. And you know, some things that we also capture. Lucky Orange allows you to see events within the system that happen like when someone highlights text will trigger an event that shows you someone as actually paying really close attention to this text. They found it very interesting. You know, I I like to think of it kind of how if you read on a Kindle, where when you have those popular areas that people read that kind of shows up in your Kindle text is underlined. It's sort of like that, where you can see people found this text really interesting enough so that they highlighted it. So we do capture things like that. And also things like rage clicks when someone clicks on an element quickly and repeatedly. We surface that up so that you can quickly find some of these pain points that people are experiencing on your site without having to sit and watch through a lot of recordings individually.

Mike: As fascinating. I'm interested because a couple of years ago this recording of user sessions got a quite a lot of bad publicity but To clean I think Europe around confidentiality, privacy and GDPR. I mean, what's the situation now? What do you do to ensure privacy?

Sarah: Absolutely. And I think that's a great and very important question. And it's one we take very seriously because our tools are designed to help people who have websites create better experiences on behalf of the user. And that's really our goal. And with the user, the end user in mind, whether it's a b2b customer, or it's an E commerce shopper, which is the reason why we are GDPR and CCPA compliant. But we also take steps to ensure that we're really focused on the behaviour on the site and not the information that's being entered into the site. So we automatically block the recording of any keystrokes. So when a visitor to a website is typing information and on a site, you won't actually be able to see in that recording, if they're typing in their username or their password, instead, you just see Asterix reflected in the recording, because we really do value that privacy of the person visiting the website, we also have tools where we allow our customers to surface up to their website visitors, here's the information that we're recording on you, here's how to manage that. And here's how you can opt out of that if you don't want that information recorded. Because it really should be a diagnostics and an understanding tool. It's not about gaining the visitors information. So we really do take that seriously. And we also offer a layer of protection above that where people who are managing their websites can say, I don't want this information to come through. So I want to scramble the text. So instead of saying, You seeing on our website recording where it says click here, you can actually choose to have that text randomly scrambled so that you can still do all of the diagnostics, things that you would be able to do. But you're not capturing that in a recording, which financial institutions, for example, find very helpful because they may have someone who's coming in and helping audit the site or do some troubleshooting. And they don't necessarily want the person watching the recording to see that information. So they can use tech scrambling features so that you can still understand if there's an issue on a site where maybe there was a button error, you can still see that without seeing the actual information. And you can designate parts of the site as sensitive data collection. So if it's something that wouldn't normally be flagged, you can go above and beyond by designating CSS classes as sensitive and we won't capture that information.

Mike: That's really cool to know that you've got that protection. I think, particularly for users, it's important to know that protective protection exists for sure. So I'd like to move on and talk about some of the other features in Lucky Orange. We've talked about, you know, recording user sessions. And we've talked about heat maps, you know, to quite technical web design things. You know, the next thing I've seen on your website is live chat, which is just completely different. So explain how that fits into a, you know, a package of products. That includes a very technical products. Why Why did you go to live chat?

Sarah: Absolutely. So I think a lot of people do look at that, especially when they compare Lucky Orange to our competitors who don't have live chat and you say, why is live chat tucked in there? Well, at the end of the day, when our founders created Lucky Orange, what they were really trying to do is create software that allowed them to better understand people who are coming to their website, and recordings and heat maps and form analytics are great tools to allow you to retro actively go in and study that. But when you couple our Live View tool, which lets you see what people are doing on your site, right now, with something like live chat, you have the opportunity to see people who are struggling on your site and reach out to them and say, Hey, how can I help you? Is there something you're looking for. Or if you see a technical issue happen when you're using that live view to cobrowse with a customer, you can go in and chat with them and resolve it so that you're not only trying to optimise for conversions, but you're really saving the sale are saving the lead before you lose that lead, which we think is really critical.

And there have been studies that have shown when you couple live chat with live view that people have an close to 90% higher satisfaction rate than they did on sites where they don't have that opportunity to chat and to cobrowse with a support agent. And we just feel like it's a really great opportunity to not only help customers when and where they need it. But when you pair it with a tool like surveys where you can proactively reach out to people where you think maybe they're having an issue or maybe you've watched session recordings and you think I see a lot of people getting hung up on my shipping and return policies page. I wonder if there's a problem there. Well You can trigger a live chat to engage people when they land on that shipping policies page. Or you could have a survey, which we offer within Lucky Orange to ask people, do you have any questions? Do you need more information that we're not providing and get some of that firsthand feedback so that it's not just one directional, but you really to understand that customer experience, have the opportunity to study what they did, but also to engage with them while they're on your site, which we feel like is a really important part of that sort of closed loop ability to understand customers better.

Mike: And that makes a lot of sense. I mean, you mentioned something, I think it'll be quite interesting to our b2b audience, which is form analytics. I mean, a lot of b2b websites, it's all about generating leads, capturing leads, I'm really interested, you have some examples of how people have used those form analytics to improve conversion rates?

Sarah: Yeah, I certainly do. And I can tell you, as a b2b marketer, myself, when I came to Lucky Orange, this was one of the tools that, you know, my jaw kind of hit the floor, because as a marketer, in a b2b organisation, you really want to generate those leads. And that's what you're handing off to your sales team. And that's, you know, how you get business done at the end of the day. And when I learned that there was a tool that allow you to see which fields people were abandoning, I just couldn't believe that this wasn't more used throughout the industry, because it is really powerful. I mean, if you've got a form, and a lot of times, you know, when marketing's working with sales, they're like, Okay, what is all of the information, we need to populate every single form in our CRM, so you get these really long fields. And this is where form analytics can come in. And be very handy because it helps you understand where people are dropping off. And one of the examples that we've seen is that when people are filling out a form on a website, they don't want to talk to a person on the phone. So when you ask for that phone number, a lot of people will abandon the form at that field, because they don't want to give their phone number. So that is one really great piece of insight that we've seen for b2b marketers is, if you don't need that phone number, if you can build the relationship first with them via email, do that. And then once you've gained their trust, once they show further signs of engagement, then you can ask for that phone number down the line. Another thing to look for on forum analytics is fields that get repeated because this is often a sign that your field may be confusing, or it may need some more instruction. So if you can do some of that inline description within your form fields, you know, we've all seen that in forms where it asks for a phone number, but it has very specific expectations. Or if it asks for an address, if you're trying to get that information, and it wants it in a very specific format that people if you don't explain what that format is, then people will have to continue to repeat that field. And oftentimes, they'll abandon because they just get frustrated with the form fields.

Mike: That's, that's fascinating. So you can actually see in those analytics, where people are submitting the form, getting an error and then having to reenter it. So you get to see those and always live those problems with users. That's awesome. So you've got all these tools? I mean, one of the things one of the other features you've got is conversion funnels, which I guess is, you know, is ultimately what we're trying to do, you're trying to make the website more effective at converting visitors to become customers or leads. There's lots of different conversion funnel tools from you know, Google Analytics all the way up. Can you tell me a little bit about what Lucky Orange does and how you differ from some of the other suppliers?

Sarah: Sure. So you can look at a conversion funnel and other tools like Google Analytics. And for those who aren't familiar with conversion funnels, it's essentially a predefined set of steps that walks you through the pages that you expect someone to visit on their way to conversion. And a conversion funnel will show you as they go from page to page or step to step on your website, where they're dropping off. And we're lucky orange is different than a tool like Google Analytics is that let's say you've got a four step conversion funnel. And you see that when people get to that third step, they drop off. Well, you can dial into that third step, and you can watch a session recording from there to see and understand exactly why someone's dropping off. And you simply can't do that in a tool like Google Analytics, because they don't have that capability. And so you not only know where people are dropping off, but you have the opportunity to watch some of those recordings and see, is it a technical issue that they're encountering? Maybe that's preventing them from getting to the next step? Or is there something that you can infer from while everybody's looking at this stuff? Shouldn't when I look at this page and I study these session recordings, it seems like everyone's hovering over the price or hovering over this piece of information.

And then they're abandoning. So that could be an indicator to you there. And you can take that information, if you know that people are abandoning on that third step on that third page, right before they convert, you can set up a survey, or you can trigger a live chat so that when people get there, you can ask them for more information, is there anything I can help you with today? So you can take that hypothesis that you formulated by watching those session recordings, and then do some first person research with those people who are coming to your website to, you know, either do a survey that you can have running when you're not available, or use that live chat when you are available to trigger on that specific page to try and get a better understanding of why people aren't converting?

Mike: Oh, that's awesome. I mean, there's other features as well, we haven't had time to cover. I mean, one of the things I have to admit is I do this podcast for selfish reasons, I want to learn things. So I'm gonna take advantage of the opportunity. You know, there's so many different tools you've got there for optimising websites. If I was looking to optimise a Napier website, I mean, where would I start? How would I begin?

Sarah: Yeah, that is a great question. And it's one that we get a lot from people. And I would say the best place to start is really going in and looking at those pages where you have a high conversion probability. And starting there and study those and figure out look at some session recordings on the pages that you know, are critical to conversions and see if you can uncover why people aren't converting there. And then as a marketer, I would go in and analyse those campaigns where I'm spending the most money to get people to my site and see what I can glean from those.

Mike: That's great. And you've got all these tools available for when you actually need to use them once you've done some investigation. I mean, perhaps, you know, one of the things we need to talk about is price, it sounds like this should be a very expensive package having all these different tools together. I mean, is it inexpensive product.

Sarah: It you know, for us Lucky Orange is a tool that we created as something to help us solve problems for our own small businesses that we had. And that's something that we keep in mind from a pricing standpoint is that we certainly know there are a lot of our competitors out there who charge enterprise prices, and you won't find those enterprise prices on their website. And that's something that we keep in mind, when we're pricing our products is that we do want to help small businesses, because that is how we got our start. And we certainly scale up to enterprise customers, we have fortune 500 companies who use our products and international businesses, Shopify Plus customers, big household name brands, who would recognise but we also have a lot of customers who are in that Shopify piece of the market, or who are just getting started, who desperately need analytical tools like this. And so that is something that that we do think about, and that we do factor in and we want to be affordable to those companies who, you know, are core to why we started Lucky Orange in the first place who, you know, we really want to help them succeed and thrive. And we don't want Lucky Orange to be a tool that a small business owner can't afford, because we really do believe these tools have the potential to help them grow and unlock their business.

Mike: That's perfect and really good to hear. So, I mean, we're coming to the, to the end of our time now. So I'm interested in anything we should have covered. Are there any secret features we've missed out or anything else that you feel you should tell us?

Sarah: Yeah, you know, I think the key to conversion rate optimization, which is what you use lucky, orange tools to do as a marketer is you have to be programmatic about it, you have to constantly go in and study the data, and that the insights that you gain and learn about your site on one day and the changes that you make that may be working, maybe need may need to be revisited in you know, a month or two months or three months and that it's not a let me do it once and then I'm done with it. As behaviour changes on the on the internet as people's consumption patterns change as what they are interested in, you know, popularity trends and fads changes. Conversion Rate Optimization is an ongoing process. And it's something that if you are looking to do more of or to get started with I encourage you to think about the time that you'll have to commit to it on a weekly basis and block out some time because it is something you know, studying data, anyone who dives in on the analytics, you know, you have to make time for it. And it is something the more programmatic you can be about it the more that you can dedicate time and resources, the better results that you'll have because you've committed to going in and learning and under See any more about your visitors so you can make those more impactful experiences with your website?

Mike: That's great advice. Thank you. So I'm sure you know, everyone's excited and interested. I mean, everyone wants to increase conversion rates on websites. So if people have questions, or maybe they want to try the product, how can people go about, you know, either getting hold of you or testing the product for themselves?

Sarah: Sure, the easiest way to do that is just to go to Lucky orange.com. You can sign up for a free trial, you get seven days to test out the tool. And there are also free plans available. So if you try it out for seven days, and you want to keep going with it and want to play around with it a little longer than you can trial, a free plan on Lucky Orange. And that's really the easiest and the best way to go in and learn more about it. And from our website. If you have more questions. Our support team is always available through our website, or via an email at support at Lucky Orange. And they're an awesome group of people who love helping our customers. And it doesn't matter if you're on a free trial, or a free plan or a paid plan. We help all of our customers and support them equally.

Mike: Oh, that's perfect. I'm sure people listening to podcasts will want to try it. I mean, Sarah has been really interesting talking to you about the tools and about how people can improve conversion rates. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being on the podcast.

Sarah: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Mike. Thank you.

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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Hannah Wehrly