Crafting the ultimate inbound experience with Nico Ferreyra, CEO of Default
Crafting the ultimate inbound experience with Nico Ferreyra, CEO of Default
Don't sleep on the impact of optimizing your inbound processes
Thanks to this week’s newsletter sponsor:
Tired of manual reporting and KPI Audits across different channels? Revlitix brings your sales and marketing data under one roof, reports KPIs that you want, and automates audits with AI signals so you can easily identify, understand, and fix leaks in a go. Learn more »
Want to learn how you can partner with the OpsScale newsletter? Reply to this email to get the details.
Is the inbound experience the final frontier for demand-generation-focused digital marketers?
Outbound prospecting is all over the map these days.
The proliferation of artificial intelligence will eventually mean that more questions will turn into prompts instead of searches, reducing the effectiveness of search engine marketing (though we still have a ways to go on this one)
Word of mouth is growing by leaps and bounds, with new tools popping up to help people leverage their networks when making purchases.
Product-led growth gets leads into the product immediately and changes the marketing focus.
B2B influencers are just getting started - as companies become more nuanced about utilizing these individuals and groups, specialized offers and signup flows will proliferate.
All of these items are turning the existing Marketing playbooks on their head. Not only are the strategy and tactics used to get someone to visit your website, and fill out a form evolving, but so is the need to offer a highly personalized and efficient follow-up to any inbound inquiry that comes your way.
Differentiation is the name of the game when it comes to prospect experience and how your team is enabled to execute that plan. Ops teams need to be prepared to support the frequently evolving needs of their Marketing team as the requirements of an ideal inbound experience evolve.
How Default came to be
In a recent conversation, I sat down with Nico Ferreyra, co-founder and CEO of Default, a recently launched software company focused on making it 50% cheaper for the next 10,000,000 Internet businesses to get from $0 to $100 million in ARR. And how are they doing that? By focusing first on the inbound experience.
The Default story starts like many other startups - with a pivot. Nico and his co-founder were originally building a virtual office product at the beginning of the pandemic.
In building their business, one pain point stuck out to Nico and the Default team - it had been overly difficult for them to piece together the infrastructure needed to provide a relevant and cohesive experience to their inbound leads. They had strung something together with a few point solutions, but figuring out who had submitted what form when was, let alone trying and derive any attribution data from their activity was painful.
This wasn’t the first time Nico had tried to piece together an inbound puzzle.
“When I was in college, I was interning at this company that had been bought out by a PE firm. We had a 1200-person company and we had a two-person marketing team that was sort of trying to figure out our inbound flow. They were spread too thin to even think about optimizing the inbound flow, which led to an issue with missed leads” Nico said.
He continued, “I ended up with this Excel sheet where I was taking these “Contact Us” form submissions and was trying to figure out how much money we were leaving on the table - it was around eight figures of pipeline a year. ”
The scale is different for various businesses, but no business can afford to pass up on their version of $10,000,000+ of pipeline a year. The simple logistical value of being able to adequately capture all of your inbound traffic is a must-have mechanism for any business.
Bolstered by these experiences, the team shifted their energy towards building a tool that would enable businesses to capture and act on their inbound lead traffic in a much more efficient and scalable way.
The Default product suite now encompasses a variety of inbound-focused functionality, including web forms, meeting scheduling (both post-form submit and meeting links, lead qualification, routing, automation and workflows, data enrichment, and integrations with a variety of core GTM tools.
Nico also alluded to the fact that some significant releases are pending soon as well, with an emphasis on automation.
The philosophy behind Default’s approach
As highlighted above, the status quo we’ve gotten so comfortable with over the past 8-10 years, especially in the B2B SaaS world, is evaporating right before our eyes.
Buyers are no longer content to follow the same cookie-cutter process to schedule meetings, watch demos, and make a purchase decision.
Nico highlights, “You need to make it easy for yourself to grow. What that ultimately comes down to is that marketing needs to spend money like bringing people to your website. However, you also need to instrument your funnel in a way that makes it easy for any inbound submission to be a shot on goal, right?”
He then illustrates a common scenario that I’m sure most of us have experienced at some point. He says, “If a good lead comes through your form on the site and your SDRs are too busy or your AEs are not paying attention to inbound or they're treating those leads as second-class citizens, you're probably losing a lot of money.”
Default has taken a platform-first approach, allowing organizations of all sizes to mix and match the features that they need right away, knowing that other, closely related functionality is easily available when they need it. That was a highly intentional decision.
Nico said, “Bundles when you build them correctly, do afford customers everything they need. And they afford you this depth of integration that you otherwise wouldn't really get.”
There’s always a lively conversation among Ops pros when it comes to choosing point solutions vs. a do-it-all platform, and that’s not likely to go away in the future. Every modern-day platform was once a scrappy point solution that did one thing really well.
The most important thing to consider when making a high-level decision around building off of a platform or a collection of smaller tools is to understand two things:
What are the requirements I have right now, and how will they change or evolve over the next 12-18 months?
Which tool(s) are the best fit for meeting those requirements considering my budget and the team I have the support the tool?
Ultimately, your stack will likely become a mix of platforms and new solutions you’re experimenting with or ones that have a highly niche use case.
In your inbound use cases, clearly defining a role for each tool involved in the process is critical. Without clearly defined swimlanes, it can be so easy for a critical data point to go unrecorded, or for conflicting reports to be pulled from different tools.
Because a typical marketing team spends the lion’s share of their tactical budget on driving inbound demand, a miss here is not a good look for any Ops team.
The “Default” choice
One major recommendation Nico and his team received as they engaged with experienced investors in the early stages of building Default was that if they were going to build a tool, they should build something that could serve as the “system of record” for a specific set of data.
The inbound motion is a challenging space to try and establish this approach. There are so many relevant systems involved in even just tracking a simple form submission for an average medium tech company.
You’ve typically got some variation of the following stack:
Your Website/CMS
Your form (either from the CMS or your Marketing Automation tool)
Your web analytics tool(s)
A data compliance tool
A meeting scheduling tool
User experience tracking/mapping
Other tracking cookies/pixels
Web personalization tools
Your Marketing Automation tool
Your CRM
Data validation
Data Enrichment
A product analytics tool
A CDP
And on, and on, and on…
So if someone asks how many form submissions you had in the last month, what tool do you use? What about if they want to limit it to just submissions from enterprise companies? Or submissions from the UK? Or from your ICP?
Establishing which tools are part of your inbound process and the role they play is critical.
You’ll want to identify tools that meet your current needs but are scalable for the future as well. In tech stack math you want to remember that often the best approach is addition by subtraction, so you have a streamlined and well-orchestrated process for both executing a memorable experience and capturing all of the relevant data needed to do so.
So what does a MarTech CEO recommend looking for when buying tools?
I was interested to hear what Nico looked for when buying, especially Martech tools for a company like Default.
He said, “In marketing and sales software, a lot of teams don’t spend money on research and development. Companies like Gong and Salesloft are two of the big exceptions, as is Apollo. You really want to look at how these companies spend their money.”
“You also want to understand, historically - how much have they shipped?” he continued. “One thing we hear a lot of our customers say is that their legacy vendors haven’t really changed in the last four years. On the other hand, we have dozens of changes in our change log, and we’ll never stop shipping. For the foreseeable future, we’ll spend more than 50% of our money on product development.”
So what does this mean for you as a Marketing Ops manager?
Nico mentions, “I think if you're a Marketing or RevOps manager and you're getting pitched by four or five different vendors, I think you want to dig in and figure out how they’re spending their money. A great indication of this is, what's their 6- and 12-month roadmap.”
“You’ll also want to understand what the historical precedent is for this company making changes in the past. Everybody wants to talk about their customers and say they're going to help you do more with less, but at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. You’ll want to strongly consider how much a company actually ships.”
I appreciated this feedback. It’s a great angle to take when it comes to evaluating vendors. It’s a fairly common practice to walk through the upcoming roadmap with a product manager and understand some of the cool things they’re teasing (but can’t give an exact date for).
You’ll want to validate the company’s ability to deliver on its promises, though, by looking back at everything they’ve actually delivered. How much a company is committed to improvement and how they’re demonstrating that commitment should be a strong indicator you can consider when making a final vendor decision.
What does the future of inbound marketing look like?
For someone so involved in thinking about inbound marketing, I was curious to hear what trends Nico sees becoming relevant over the next little bit.
The SDR role is a hotly debated topic, but Nico is in the “SDRs are here to stay” camp.
He said, “I don’t really see the role of an SDR going away completely. I think there are situations like high-velocity or product-led sales where automation can play a large role, but there are a lot of situations where light sales engagement works well.”
“If the SDR is asking some qualifying questions or they’re pushing qualified self-service leads to book a meeting, that’s a key activity. There’s always a potential for automation, but I don’t think that role goes away entirely.”
Another point he emphasized is that companies that know who they’re selling to and make it as easy as possible for those leads to get into the sales process will win.
He illustrates that point by talking about scheduling, a core Default functionality.
“One thing you can do that will have an outsized impact is just adding scheduling to your website. If you don't have a ton of volume, it doesn't make sense for you. But, if you do have volume and you have an idea of what your best customers look like and how to disqualify and qualify customers then you should instrument your funnel in a way that does that.”
Buyers already differentiate potential vendors based on their demo request experience - I came across these two LinkedIn posts recently, and I’m sure you see similar ones all the time:
If you haven’t taken the time to review the tools, orchestration, and strategy supporting your inbound experience, now is a great time to start. As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and this is a first impression where there’s quite literally revenue on the line.
Wrap Up
I enjoyed my conversation with Nico - I’m excited to follow along as Default continues executing on its mission to build the inbound system of record and make it cheaper for businesses to accelerate their growth. I’ve had the opportunity to use the platform in my consulting work, and I do feel like they’re working on something great.
If you’re interested in learning more about Default, you can book a demo here, and learn more about their offering on their website. Nico is a great follow on LinkedIn, you can connect with him here.
Regardless of the tools you decide to use, taking another look at your end-to-end inbound experience sometime this year is probably a beneficial exercise. In my experience, it’s been something that’s always needed some fine-tuning, which as an Operator is a fun exercise to go through.
Some quotes have been lightly edited for context and clarity.