This Won't Scale: 41 Plays From The Drift Marketing Team To Help Your Business Cut Through The Noise, Grow Faster Than The Competition & Thrill Your Customers

by Dave Gerhardt

Instead of spending all their time looking at dashboards and worrying about funnel metrics, the Drift marketing team has focused on creating great experiences.

Even our podcast, it’s not called “The Drift Podcast” or “Conversational Marketing.” Nope, it’s called Seeking Wisdom.

In 2009, Marc Benioff published Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry.

And this year, at our annual conference, HYPERGROWTH, the fastest growing marketing and sales conference in the world,

DC and Elias made a conscious decision to start marketing before they started selling.

Instead of owning the supply, you need to own the demand.

So that became our focus — how do we get inside the minds of product marketers? How do we get close to them? How do we get them to think about Drift?

And that set the stage for the next three plays: Do your homework, go hand-to-hand and build an audience.

What if we could get 10 product marketers to love Drift? If we could get 10, we knew we could get to 20.

To get the first subscribers to our newsletter, Dave started combing through LinkedIn and Twitter, searching for people doing product marketing and sending them personal messages that went something like this: “Hey. I’m starting a newsletter just for product marketers. We’re curating the best product marketing content from around the web — from podcast interviews to videos to blogs. I thought you might dig it — and also have a few stories of your own to contribute. Can I send you a link to subscribe?”

At Drift, we call this approach hand-to-hand combat. And it’s the secret to how we got our subscriber base started. And later on, we used the same tactic to get a thousand people to attend our first-ever HYPERGROWTH conference

What Is Product Marketing? Largely because of that first seminal piece, we got our first ten subscribers. Then a hundred. Then a thousand. We had gotten into the minds of product marketers by creating a piece of content they could rally around and show to their friends and co-workers who didn’t truly understand what they did.

But the trick here is that you can’t enter a crowded market and then do things like everybody else. Instead, we entered a crowded market knowing that we were going to focus on something that a lot of SaaS companies hadn’t.

In the first stage known as the Edison Stage, companies can compete on commodities. All they need to win is a better product.

However, as the market matures, scaling up production becomes a priority. And so in the Model T Stage, companies must learn to deliver consistent quality at scale.

In the third and final stage, known as the P&G Stage, features and mass production capabilities won’t get you very far. To compete, you need a brand to differentiate your company from the competition.

Your brand is the combined experiences a person has when they interact with your product and your company. It’s the emotional moat that makes them want to work with you instead of a competitor.

You need to craft a consistent story, where every touchpoint, from an ad to a blog post to a podcast episode to an email to the product, builds on the same core values and adds to the experience.

And our goal with content is not to squeeze every click and lead out of it but to spread our brand as far as possible and make our content free and easy to share.

Stop reading SaaS marketing blogs. There will always be a new tip, trick or hack to figure out — and that stuff comes and goes. But there’s one thing that has never changed in marketing: people.

DC pushed us to focus on the timeless lessons in marketing and to really dig in and understand copywriting, human behavior and social triggers. And when he suggested that we ditch the marketing blogs, he had a good point.

So we flipped it and started studying the classics. Instead of spending all our time learning about things that we’re going to change tomorrow, we went back in history and studied the classic branding, advertising and copywriting books to focus on learning all these timeless lessons about the things that don’t change.

The best way to win customers and build a brand is to be you. To be real. To be authentic. To be human. And that lesson has been true for hundreds of years — but it’s even more important today with all of the noise and competition in the market.

that’s exactly why we love video as a marketing channel, because when it comes to being authentic and real there’s no channel quite like video. You just can’t fake it. And there’s nowhere to hide. When we talk about video, we usually mean scrappy, low production stuff with minimal editing and no script whatsoever. Sure, we have the high production videos too — but the biggest lever for us has been real, first-person video shot on an iPhone. This is the reason why channels like Instagram and Snapchat have blown up: Because people want the real life, reality TV — not always the highly manicured videos. But even though Snapchat and Instagram sound obvious, not a lot of brands — especially in the B2B space — have understood the value of authenticity and copied that style for their marketing.

It’s just our way of saying: “Hey, you’re talking to real people and not just some faceless corporation. We’re here if you need anything.” Video is one of the most authentic forms of marketing there is today.

Showing our faces is actually one of our brand values. And what we mean is that everything we publish needs to have a real face on it. And so we even have a landing page checklist that enforces the rule: You can’t ship it until it has a face. And not just a stock image of a random person, but a real Drift employee or customer — that’s the rule. No stock photos. The reason why we’re so bullish on real faces is simple: It makes our brand more human. But it wasn’t just stock photos that we ditched — we got rid of cartoons and animations in our content as well.

So if you’re looking to make your brand feel more human, this is the easiest place to start: Add real faces to everything you do.

Dan realized there was a whole other part to marketing that he hadn’t even scratched the surface of. Things like writing amazing copy. Designing a beautiful advertisement. Or constructing messaging and positioning your product — where the true talent in marketing lives.

Dave pushed Dan — and the whole marketing team — to read books from the greatest marketers in the world — like how David Ogilvy approaches ad copy and Dan S. Kenney writes sales letters.

in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Dr. Robert B. Cialdini breaks down the psychology behind why people say “yes.” There are six universal principles behind persuasion: 1. Reciprocity – pay back what we receive 2. Scarcity – people want what they can't have 3. Authority – people follow credible experts 4. Consistency – consistency with past actions 5. Liking – people say "yes" to things they like 6. Consensus – looking for what others have done Dave printed out these six principles and has them taped to the top of his desk. That way every time he writes a new email or blog post he makes sure he hits all of them in his message. Now all of us on the team do that. It’s our recipe for writing great email, blog and landing page copy.

It’s simple math, really: If you have a marketing team of three in a company of fifty people, wouldn’t you rather have all fifty people making noise about the brand than just the three?

So at Drift, we try to bake internal marketing into everything we do and make it part of our weekly rituals as a company. The marketing team joins the weekly sales meeting at 12 PM every Monday, and the marketing team presents every Friday at 4 PM at our company Show & Tell. And we take both of these opportunities as seriously as we would an external speaking opportunity because the mission is clear: Get people onboard with what we’re doing.

Instead of your resume, pedigree or former accomplishments, we care about the results that you get after joining the team. Almost everything resets after you join the team at Drift and you’re expected to prove yourself in a new environment. Because a common mistake that many fast growing companies make in building teams is that they take someone’s track record at a different company as proof of their future performance.

But what results should you drive? To answer that question, we write 1/7/30 plans for each new employee. These outline what you should achieve in your first day, your first week and your first month at Drift. It’s one of our most important checklists because it makes sure success is clearly defined for new employees. We sweat over outcomes rather than outputs.

That’s why we ask everyone to do a project with us before they even come in for their first interview. This filters the candidate pool because not everyone wants to do it — but the ones who are hungry to join Drift do it gladly. It also helps us get a feel of what it’s like to work together and to see how someone thinks and operates.

And to make promotions as transparent as possible, we’ve come up with this internal 9-point checklist that we use to justify career progression: 1. To be considered for a promotion, you need to own a number. If you’re in SEO it can be organic traffic, if you’re in content marketing it can be website traffic and if you’re in event marketing it can be the number of tickets sold. The important part is that everyone has a number and that they’re committed to growing that number. 2. Speaking of ownership, you also need to own the area of marketing you’re responsible for. No one will micromanage you and you’ll get to figure stuff out for yourself. The catch, however, is that you’ll also be accountable for that area. And so if something breaks, it’ll be up to you to fix it. 3. Another thing we require you to do is to plan and forecast your own success. As a company, we have some pretty lofty goals, but it’ll be up to you to dream up yours — and then report on the results. 4. If we want to keep going after hypergrowth, and we do, we can’t settle for good enough. So to get your next promotion, you need to constantly raise the bar in your current role. You need to make it difficult for yourself to find someone to take over your role. Only then are you ready to move on. 5. You also need to master your craft. Be it through video tutorials, books, role models or mentors, we’re expecting you to be a leading talent in your current role before you move onto a new one. A part of ...

That’s why an essential part of the learning process is documenting it. After a product launch Dan would write an “after action report” to document how the launch went and specifically call out mistakes or issues. Each month’s after action report is reviewed early in the preparation process for the next launch. That way the marketing team would never make the same mistake twice.

come up with better titles for our blog posts, write email copy for another teammate

And because we’re naturally subjected to other companies’ marketing on a daily basis, we’ve been able to create what we call “swipe files” — these secret stashes of screenshots, links and screen recordings that we store in Trello, Evernote or Google Docs for inspiration.

Instead of inventing something from scratch, go out and look for well known patterns that you can copy and innovate on.

long-term relationships with people who are 20-30 years ahead in their careers.

each person on the marketing team has at least a mental if not a physical list of all the people we’re currently studying and trying to learn from.

Third, we’ve realized that we don’t need a formal mentorship program in the company to learn from our co-workers.

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it’s better to enter a market first than to do it later with a better product.

it’s better to create your own category than to try to compete in a crowded one.

But the trick here is that the category can’t just be about the company — it has to be about something bigger. So instead of only talking about Drift, we also spend a lot of time trying to grow the category of conversational marketing. That’s why we started the Conversational Marketing University (cheap plug: drift.com/university) and that’s why we wrote the book on conversational marketing (cheap plug #2: drift.com/book).

Another important lesson that we took from the Salesforce playbook goes back to organizing events. And not just webinars or local user groups, but also big conferences that give us the opportunity to meet our customers and prospects face-to-face. But instead of opting for a traditional sales and marketing conference with 45 minute keynotes from fellow Boston SaaS folks, we decided to do something different. Again, we wanted the event to be bigger than us. Bigger than marketing and sales.

Give It A Name Speaking of names, you’re probably starting to notice a bit of a pattern: We’re pretty big on naming things. The Hypergrowth Curve, hand-to-hand combat, Seeking Wisdom. Just like every one of our landing pages needs a face, we don’t rest until every event, every framework, every concept and every video series has a name.

And what we’ve learned over time is that the name doesn’t have to be perfect. And not everyone has to love it at first. It just needs to stick.