Latest / Content, Briefly / Paddle: CMO Andrew Davies explains how execs think about content

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Paddle: CMO Andrew Davies explains how execs think about content · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  We believe in helpful content. I know it sounds really obvious [laughs] but we wanna be the most helpful brand in SaaS. That's one of our marketing and overall company metrics. We wanna be the most helpful brand in SaaS.
• 0:11
  Every time I sit down with a founder, I don't care what they're asking me, it could be to do with our product or not, I just wanna help. So our content has to be helpful. That's a bar we wanna draw.
• 0:19
  [instrumental music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly.
• 0:26
  I am very happy to introduce you to Andrew Davies, who's the CMO at Paddle, and actually the very first CMO we've had on this podcast.
• 0:32
  I brought Andrew on because someone tipped me off that Paddle's content is exceptionally good, and that it might be interesting to chat with Andrew. And indeed it was. The content is very interesting.
• 0:42
  They do kind of all the standard stuff you would expect from a SaaS company, but they've also made a really significant investment in video. We talk quite a bit about that.
• 0:49
  They do a lot of original research using their own data that they get from their product. They have a podcast. So there's, there's quite a bit going on. We talk in detail about all that.
• 0:57
  We also talk about the CMO's perspective on content and how he thinks about content probably differently than the way the day-to-day content marketer thinks about it.
• 1:05
  And he had some interesting thoughts and some good advice actually to help content marketers level up in the way that they think about it. So lots to learn here.
• 1:12
  We don't talk so much about execution and the tools they use and things like that, although I do hope to have some folks from the Paddle content team on to cover that stuff later.
• 1:19
  We talk more at a higher level about strategy, about his vision, and about his day-to-day life as a CMO. So anyways, lots of good stuff in here. As always, I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too.
• 1:30
  Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today with Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle. Andrew, you're our, our first CMO, and so I have a whole new set of questions to ask you about your perspective on content.
• 1:41
  But maybe first, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners, and tell us a little bit about your career. I think you got your start in management consulting, is that right? Wow.
• 1:50
  You're going back into the archives now. Great to be here, Jimmy. Thank you for having me. [laughs] I ended up being sponsored by Deloitte Consulting to go to university, so I needed some money to pay for it.
• 2:00
  They paid for it. So I worked in their, um, in their technology, media and telecoms audit function and then in their strat consulting function, basically for a gap year and then during my holidays of college.
• 2:11
  And, um, after doing that for a little bit, my one goal beyond any academic prowess or aspiration was to graduate with my own business so I could say no to them at the end.
• 2:21
  And managed to do that, and founded a few startups at university that hopelessly failed, and then one as I finished university that, that ended up doing okay, and over a long and winding road, we raised VC, grew it and exited it in twenty nineteen.
• 2:35
  I then joined- Oh, very cool. It was a content personalization engine actually, so very much in the content space. Clients like SAP, Intel, Salesforce, et cetera.
• 2:43
  And we then became part of an insight-backed roll-up, where I ended up running a whole bunch of, you know, global marketing for them, brand demand, digital content function included.
• 2:52
  Um, but we bought a bunch of other companies, including Optimizely.
• 2:55
  So we were this commerce cloud, content cloud, experimentation cloud, personalization analytics, about fifteen hundred people after those different acquisitions.
• 3:04
  And it was a, a mess of a couple of years trying to put together the different systems and processes, ICPs, et cetera. Loved it.
• 3:10
  Still love that business, but left it two years ago to join Paddle as CMO, where I've been, yeah, for two and a bit years and having loads of fun helping software entrepreneurs around the world scale globally with their payments and tax compliance and all the rest of it.
• 3:23
  Very cool. Y- I was mentioning to you before we started recording that I was using Paddle the other day.
• 3:28
  Kind of without realizing it, I subscribed to this software called CleanMyMac, and I needed to buy another license for my wife's computer, and I found myself on a Paddle domain, you know, that deals with their payments, and I was like, "Oh, perfect timing."
• 3:42
  So I have only a small insight into the product, but could you give us a better sense of the product itself, who it's for, what it does? Of course. Yeah.
• 3:51
  So if you're a entrepreneur or, you know, part of a founding team or executive team scaling a self-serve software business,
• 3:59
  when you put a checkout up on your site, Stripe or whoever, as soon as people from other countries start buying from you, which happens almost immediately if you do your job right, you can sell everywhere immediately.
• 4:09
  We call it born global. When you start doing that, suddenly you've got all kinds of issues with currencies and price points, and are there fraud in certain regions, and chargebacks, and then the fun of tax compliance.
• 4:21
  You'd better charge the right VAT or sales tax in every single region and then build relationships with every local tax authority and remit that tax, apart from all of the subscription management, reporting, all the rest of it.
• 4:31
  And we take all of that. So Stripe, we have multiple Stripe accounts that sit under our hood as well as other payment gateways that we can route between.
• 4:38
  We solve all the tax compliance for you so you can sell everywhere in the world fully compliantly, fully optimized, and do it from day one.
• 4:45
  And we serve, yeah, businesses from zero dollar revenue all the way through to hundreds of millions of revenue.
• 4:51
  Then we also, through an acquisition, have a metrics product to look at all of your MRR churn benchmarking, a pricing business that helps, you know, big SaaS businesses with their pricing, and a retention business that helps you save on your churn.
• 5:03
  So that's really the business we have, and we serve about three and a half thousand entrepreneurs globally with, with their businesses. Wow. Very cool.
• 5:09
  Are the pricing and retention parts of the business, are those services that you offer or are they software as well?
• 5:15
  So the pricing, pricing team, Price Intelligently, which was through the acquisition of ProfitWell, they are a... it's a consulting business, a services business. Retain is very much a software business.
• 5:24
  It just sits alongside your billing stack, and it just saves you revenue from involuntary churn and helps with cancellation flows when someone hits cancel.
• 5:33
  The science says you've got about eighteen seconds to invade that cancellation pathway to find out some insight or hopefully downgrade them or pause their plan or do something to save that revenue, that logo, and so that's what our software does.
• 5:45
  Okay, very cool. I wanna ask you about the ProfitWell Price Intelligently thing for sure because Patrick Campbell's a content marketing legend himself. But maybe first, it's rare that we have a CMO to ask questions to.
• 5:56
  This is the fifty-something episode. You're our first CMO, and I have a couple questions related to that, that I would love to queue up for youYeah, probably the first one is just, you know, I...
• 6:08
  There's this kind of recurring theme amongst content marketers that they complain about their managers, and that conversation usually goes something like, "I'm a content person.
• 6:17
  I feel like I know what we should do, but my manager doesn't get it." And the manager might be like, you know, director, VP of marketing, maybe it is a CMO in some cases, and they say, "They don't get it," you know?
• 6:27
  "They are not giving me enough time to do it all," or, "I don't have enough resources to get done what I need to get done."
• 6:32
  Or, you know, "They want me to report in a certain way, and it's time-consuming," or all these kinds of things. And I would love to hear your perspective as a CMO.
• 6:41
  When you hear like the content team says, "I don't get..." Like, what, what do you think when you hear that? So, [laughs] I think a few things.
• 6:49
  [laughs] Firstly, I think of the, you know, the Ann Handley book, Everybody Writes. So one of the problems that all marketers face is that everybody thinks they can do marketing.
• 6:59
  So you sit around an executive team, I sit around an executive team, and you know, I don't think I'm a great CTO, or I'm a great CO...
• 7:05
  CPO, or I'm a great head of HR, whereas actually often in teams, in software businesses, you're growing them, often people will look and think, "Oh, I know a bit about marketing. It makes sense."
• 7:16
  I think that is then compounded when you come to content, because within the microcosm of a marketing team, you know, not everyone thinks they can optimize PPC, not everyone thinks that they can manage the- Mm...
• 7:24
  you know, the HubSpot, but everybody can write. [laughs] And so everybody's a marketer, [laughs] and then suddenly everybody's a writer.
• 7:32
  So I think there's a double issue there you've got to deal with, where the basics of the craft, the basics of the practice is, it's innate in every human, the want to communicate, and we've all learned the basics at school.
• 7:42
  And so I think that's fundamental to this challenge. And particularly I see content as an investment, right?
• 7:48
  I'm managing budgets and headcounts in order to achieve a business outcome over different time frames, whereas the person who's creating that blog post or that video or that, you know, whatever it might be, podcast, it's their craft.
• 8:01
  They're wanting to make sure it's done with excellence. And so you have to make sure you're thinking about it in multiple different ways rather than just poring over the one thing as an artifact of your craft.
• 8:09
  Okay, that makes sense. There was a thing we used to say back in my agency days that was something like, "Writing is an art, but content marketing is a channel."
• 8:18
  Something to that effect, where like content marketing is a place where the creative folks can come and express their creativity and flex those muscles.
• 8:26
  But it has to be done towards a business objective, which needs to be measurable, which needs to be, you know, team needs to be aligned on it, that type of thing. Which maybe- Yeah...
• 8:35
  that's frustrating for folks who, you know, feel that they have the creative gift and wanna get their stuff out in the world, you know. Yeah. And, and I hear that. You know, I guess I have a unique lean towards content.
• 8:46
  You know, the business that we built and sold was a content personalization engine. We then became part of a roll-up of content technology, Optimizely and NewsCred and Insight Software, and a whole bunch of others.
• 8:58
  And so I have a leaning to it, but also in a digital world, content is the currency for every interaction. It's how we communicate, and so it's utterly fundamental to everything that we do within the marketing practice.
• 9:11
  But I do think it's really important for us to understand where it sits within, you know, the value chain, where it sits in the business model.
• 9:18
  So if we're all building some form of go-to-market engine, some kind of demand engine, and content will be critical to that entire demand engine, but particularly critical in certain elements of it.
• 9:29
  And so part of the challenge for everyone who's perhaps new into a marketing organization is to understand their business and to understand how marketing plays a role in that business.
• 9:39
  And it's when you're looking at it from that perspective, then actually you can understand how you can learn, grow, get promoted, go through a career path because you understand, you know, if we're gonna break it down, you're...
• 9:50
  we- the cog you are in the machine. But when you understand that, it doesn't... it's not to kind of reduce the impact you're having or be diminutive.
• 9:57
  It's to understand all of the other things you've got to relate to, engage with, and line up with. And when I think about content, there's two things that I know we have to give our content creators.
• 10:09
  Many, many more things as well, tools and skills and the ability to collaborate, blah, blah, blah. Two fundamental things. Number one is proximity to the customer, and number two is time.
• 10:19
  If we give them those two things, then good stuff can happen. And so part of my job is to allow people those two things. So as a CMO, that's the gift I can give to people who are creating content. I love that.
• 10:30
  That's great. That's such a different lens of thinking about it than- Yeah... here's a list of keywords we could write about, you know- [laughs]... with that being kind of the, the main thing.
• 10:39
  You know, one thing that also comes up related to marketing leadership is often reporting and attribution- Mm-hmm... which is notoriously difficult for content marketing. Mm-hmm.
• 10:49
  And I myself have been down the attribution hole a few times and have come back out knowing less than I did when I started is how it felt. It's like- Yeah...
• 10:57
  oh my God, this is so complicated to measure this in the way that I wanna do it. Yep. And I think a lot of teams struggle with that. It does seem like a lot of teams are able to agree on something that's close enough.
• 11:07
  Is that how you think about it? That like, let's pick a metric that's close enough that like roughly correlates with business growth or SQLs or whatever?
• 11:14
  Or do you prefer that there's a very fine-tuned model that tells you exactly what's going on? I don't believe there's a fine-tuned model you can build that tells you exactly what's going on. Oh, that's good. That's...
• 11:23
  I love it. So we could talk for hours about this, but a few principles that I believe. The first one is you need to train the leadership team to understand that attribution is never gonna cover all the bases.
• 11:33
  So yes, we can aspire for it, but let's train everybody to understand that it's gonna be flawed, and there's gonna be problems, and it's gonna miss things.
• 11:40
  Number two, I love using self-reported attribution wherever possible. Mm. Yeah.
• 11:45
  So we have, you know, feeds of notifications coming into Slack channels for all kinds of different, you know, whether form fills or self-serve requests or, you know, ops that are being created where people are saying where they heard about us, and that's where content shows up all the time.
• 11:58
  YouTube is where they've heard about us. The podcast is where they've heard about us. You know, our film work is where they've heard about us, wherever it might be, and those things just won't get picked up.
• 12:06
  Gong is another great source of attribution for us- Yeah, Gong's amazing... when people are noting where they heard about you. So firstly, train everyone that attribution doesn't work, and you've always got gaps there.
• 12:15
  Number two, make sure you're looking at self-reported attribution so your customers can tell you.
• 12:19
  And then thirdly, absolutely, from those two bases, build what you can in order to understand the flows and the journeyAnd, and you, none of us believe in this linear funnel that people follow.
• 12:30
  It's always much, much more complicated than that.
• 12:32
  But yeah, over time, you can get a very good understanding of which items of content perhaps are gonna be instrumental or start being instrumental in, you know, sales, which pieces of content might be really good at opening, they're good for demand creation, but not very good for closing, for demand capture.
• 12:48
  And you can start to then tweak and, you know, optimize that engine over time. But it takes time, it takes data points.
• 12:53
  And fundamentally, I think the question you have to ask behind the question of attribution, firstly, is the thesis, is why are we here?
• 13:00
  I think lots of marketers wanna be data-driven, but they miss the important question, which is, are we being a thesis-driven marketer before a data-driven marketer?
• 13:09
  Do we have an idea about why our customer buys, how they buy, how they decide, why they should care about, about us at all, where we should meet them, who they get influenced by?
• 13:18
  And those are much more fundamental questions that I think you need to spend time on before you go into attribution.
• 13:23
  'Cause if you build a great attribution model but can't answer those questions, you know, the whole thing is gonna tell you the wrong answer. That's very interesting. Is that the...
• 13:32
  or at least at Paddle, is that the content team's responsibility or is that, like, top-down marketing leadership, you know, has this deeper understanding of the customer and what they're trying to accomplish, and then that kind of vision trickles down into paid to demand gen content, social, et cetera?
• 13:47
  Yeah. It, it's a team sport, right? And so we've all got to contribute to this. But I'm also aware, like, I meet customers every single week multiple times, often face to face around the world as well as in Zoom calls.
• 13:59
  Our sales team do the same.
• 14:01
  So when I talked about customer proximity for the content team, I wanna make sure through Gong and through self-reported attribution and through speaking to people, they have that access themselves.
• 14:10
  But I'm also aware that I'm in a privileged situation of probably having more high fidelity access and more regular access than their roles allow.
• 14:18
  And so part of my responsibility and other people's responsibility is to disseminate that.
• 14:22
  And of course, our product marketing team's responsibility in, in Paddle, the content team kind of sit with the product marketing team, you know, part of their responsibility is to build that core kind of pillar content so we understand where we differentiate, why customers wanna buy us, who our personas are, and that can feed the content team.
• 14:39
  So yeah, it is a team sport, but those who have unique perspectives or unique right to speak because of the visibility, then we have to make sure all of that flows through the organization so everyone can benefit.
• 14:48
  Got it. That makes sense. You know, as you've built out and developed the content team at Paddle, what is your expectation of their ability to use and analyze data?
• 14:59
  Meaning, do you expect your content team to be in Google Data Studio or writing SQL queries, or is it not so tool specific and more that you want them to bring you the hypothesis?
• 15:10
  There's someone in the company who can figure out how to analyze it, but it's more about bringing an argument that could be analyzed. Yeah. So it depends on which kind of content we're talking about.
• 15:19
  So, you know, channel specific content. Let's take video. Ben and our, our studios team, they're in the detail of measuring YouTube Shorts and what we're experimenting with there- Mm.... and the channel specific data.
• 15:29
  They're gonna have to be responsible for that, 'cause that won't be picked up by some of our central kind of DG team or ops teams.
• 15:36
  But beyond that, no, most of this should be picked up within our normal reporting, within our DG function, and I'm not asking that content person to go and do all of the work themselves.
• 15:45
  I'm asking them to be aware of where they sit and how it influences, and to be able to go and pull that data if they need to.
• 15:51
  But they're certainly not writing SQL queries, and they're certainly not sitting in those dashboards all day long. Got it. Got it. Okay. That makes sense.
• 15:57
  You know, I should have mentioned at the beginning that actually the reason that we got connected is because I posted on LinkedIn and said something to the effect of, like, you know, the old content playbook is tired.
• 16:05
  I'm really not that impressed with what I'm seeing out there right now. And somebody commented, "Then you haven't seen Paddle's content, and you should talk to Andrew Davies." And I was like, "Cool. That... Awesome."
• 16:13
  And so I have now gone down the rabbit hole of exploring Paddle's content, and there is a lot to explore. It's very interesting. You know- Yeah. You mentioned video. Paddle's made a significant investment in video.
• 16:25
  Like, in the main nav, there, you know, resources, and then the first thing is the Paddle Studios. Could you talk a little bit about the video investment? Because the, the text part is somewhat obvious.
• 16:35
  Like, you know, every SaaS company has some investment in SEO type content, customer stories, maybe some product marketing content in there, but not everybody's doing video, especially not through a studio with a, a proper video team, documentary style content.
• 16:48
  I would love to hear more about that. So if we go back up to the why first, then we come down to the what we're actually doing there, the what. We believe in helpful content.
• 16:57
  I know it sounds really obvious, [chuckles] but we wanna be the most helpful brand in SaaS. That's one of our marketing and overall company mantras. We wanna be the most helpful brand in SaaS.
• 17:05
  Every time I sit down with a founder, I don't care what they're asking me, it could be to do with our product or not, I just wanna help. So our content has to be helpful. That's a bar we wanna draw.
• 17:14
  We wanna be data backed. Again, sounds really obvious, but through the Profitable acquisition, we sit on thirty-six billion of ARR data from software companies. Oh, wow!
• 17:23
  So we have a unique ability to see inside how companies scale by seeing their financials, their fundamentals.
• 17:30
  And we can bring massive credibility as well as insight when we speak because of that data that sits behind it, and we try and make sure that all of our content is backed by that. We also believe in episodic formats.
• 17:40
  This is something that Patrick Campbell was just so, so good at building.
• 17:44
  Episodic formats mean that over time, you're able to build a niche audience that has some affinity and sub-subscription to the format you have built, and it's so much better than one-off scattergun type programs.
• 17:59
  And so, you know, one of the pieces behind the panel studios is, yes, we have these certain topics we wanna speak about, and then we build episodic formatting around it.
• 18:07
  So yeah, it's gotta be helpful, it's gotta be data backed, it's gotta be episodic. And, you know, increasingly, we're working on how it could be influencer partnered or influencer led.
• 18:15
  So working with people who've got a, you know, a distribution, an audience that is similar to who we wanna go after and partnering with them.On that.
• 18:22
  Now, with all that background, the video stuff makes more sense, right?
• 18:25
  Because video is able to do all of those things in a really compelling way and, you know, what we wanna be doing is creating video that is all of those things, and that people will be willing to watch on a Saturday morning.
• 18:36
  It doesn't have to just be educating them about the problems they're facing at work. It could be inspiring them or entertaining them. And so I'm willing to make those investments.
• 18:44
  We're willing to make those investments because I fully believe that if you don't invest in brand, you pay the price in customer acquisition cost every quarter from now until you end up selling the company.
• 18:56
  And so we're not just investing in things that are gonna be conversion in demand, we're investing in things that are gonna help just people understand their business, how they grow, how they scale, and they're gonna understand that Paddle is an advisor that can help them on that journey.
• 19:09
  And we fully believe as a business, if software grows better, faster, safer, we'll take a piece of it. That's fascinating.
• 19:15
  You know, before the call, I was actually watching one of the videos on the site and it was called How Starbucks Lost a Hundred Million Dollars in Australia. Yep.
• 19:22
  And my initial reaction was, "How does this relate to Paddle?" Mm. Then I thought about it for a second and, and I realized, okay, they're internationalizing. Yep.
• 19:29
  I bet a lot of businesses wanna internationalize, and I bet they run into a lot of payment issues. But the video is not a tutorial on how to use Paddle.
• 19:37
  It's a very interesting breakdown of Starbucks' business and what happened when they went into Australia. I found it to be fascinating.
• 19:43
  I thought it was really interesting, and that type of thing seems like it has more of a, an appeal to, you know, the masses rather than just the Paddle customers, which, you know, that's wonderful.
• 19:54
  I imagine the percentage of people who like actually become Paddle customers in the same way as text content is relatively low. But it speaks to this branding effort that you're talking about.
• 20:02
  Like, it establishes Paddle as this really high-end content brand, which is really important and possibly has been overlooked for the past couple of years as so many companies have been just going so hard on SEO content as their primary content function.
• 20:17
  And, and we always want to experiment at the edges of where our customers are really interested to find out where those opportunities are.
• 20:24
  One of the challenges, I think, for someone who is in a content specialist role is do they have complete clarity on what topics are good and what topics are off-piste?
• 20:37
  And I think it's really important to understand the strategic narrative of the business and the kind of core pillars of what you have a right to speak on, and make sure that what you're doing sits within those.
• 20:47
  So for our overall content plan, there are three things we talk about. Born global, so internationalization, so that would tick that box. It sits under the internationalization theme.
• 20:57
  Number two is a bit more of a geeky one. It's merchant of record. So our business model is that we're a merchant of record.
• 21:03
  We're a reseller of all of our software companies, so we transact over a billion dollars a year on behalf of our customers, and because we're that layer between them and their customers, we can deal with all of this fraud and tax compliance and other stuff on their behalf.
• 21:15
  Oh, wow. Similar to like the Apple Store does, the App Store does- Sure... for any apps, right? So MOR and that, that business model and how we're the best MOR is the second one.
• 21:24
  The third one is monetization, acquisition, pricing, packaging, retention, which sits around a couple of our product lines, but every growth company is interested in how they monetize.
• 21:33
  So those are our three pillars, and as long as we're talking within those and we're continually making sure it is resonant to our target customer, I'm willing to experiment, and some of it works, some of it doesn't.
• 21:46
  We did a whole YouTube kind of short series on tax compliance. We took country by country and just geeked out on the weird and wonderful taxes in their country. Not just software stuff, all kinds of things.
• 21:58
  And it was really fun, really creative, but no one sitting on Instagram wants to spend 30 seconds learning about the specific nuances of Italian tax. And so great, we, you know, learn something and we move on.
• 22:09
  That's so fascinating. We've mentioned Patrick Campbell and ProfitWell and Price Intelligently a few times. I would love to ask you about that. Mm-hmm.
• 22:16
  So for folks who are not aware, Patrick Campbell founded a business called ProfitWell. That's the SaaS side, and then Price Intelligently, that's the consulting side.
• 22:24
  This goes, I, I don't know, way back, 12 years, pro- probably longer than that. Yep. And Patrick, as I mentioned earlier, is kind of a content marketing legend.
• 22:32
  I mean, he was creating huge amounts of content for these businesses way back in the day, and I actually first met Patrick in, uh, 2014 or 2015, and we talked about like some freelance writing thing which ended up not happening, but later got to know him as a customer of Animals, where I used to work.
• 22:47
  Mm-hmm. And video runs all through this narrative. Like, he was doing video very early on in his pricing tear down series. It was really cool. Yep. The content footprint is massive.
• 22:58
  Anyways, I think about two years ago, Paddle acquires ProfitWell and Price Intelligently for like $200 million. Okay.
• 23:04
  And Patrick's written all about this and how it's impacted his life, and it's really cool, and he's still there too, I think. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
• 23:09
  I would love to know, if you're able to share, how much content affected Paddle's interest in those businesses. It made a difference. It was one of the things that was behind the strategy of the acquisition.
• 23:23
  We believed that the products had very little overlap and could be combined, and they sold to reasonably similar ICPs.
• 23:31
  Um, we believed that together we'd be stronger than apart, and we believed that there was a whole bunch within the ProfitWell engine, content engine included, that Paddle wanted to go out and build, and therefore by bringing these teams together, we could immediately just start going and benefit from their back catalog [chuckles] all of the archives they'd created- Yeah...
• 23:51
  rather than starting from scratch. So yeah, it was definitely a factor within what we did. Yeah, yeah. And was all the content migrated over to the Paddle domain? Yeah. It's actually pretty much all done now.
• 24:01
  We were very careful with it, but the last 18 months was firstly shuttering the Price Intelligently site, bringing all that content across to Paddle, and then was slightly more slowly bringing the content across from ProfitWell.
• 24:14
  Now, there was a huge amount there, and so it was a case of, you know, I've done this with the roll-up we did previously when we were acquiring all these businesses.
• 24:21
  None of them quite had this amount of content, but still the, the complexity of doing the technical SEO around that and the forwarding is important to get right.And Jess, who actually brought with me as our VP of pro- marketing from Optimizely, she steered that whole process of making sure that we looked at all of it, decided what we wanted to keep as is, what we needed to customize, whether creatively or copy-wise, and what we just needed to leave.
• 24:44
  And it's been really significant how it has improved the paddle.com, you know, position in rankings, its overall traffic, its conversions, et cetera.
• 24:53
  So yeah, we've gone on that journey, and we're really satisfied with the results. I love it. Really cool. You also made a documentary about the acquisition- Yeah... which I think is called We Close Tomorrow.
• 25:03
  Is that right? We Sign Tomorrow. Yeah. We Sign Tomorrow. Okay. And it's really good. I mean, it's... there's the kind of video production aspect of it, like it's extremely well done. Mm-hmm.
• 25:12
  It's not like Loom videos turned into a YouTube video. You know, it's like, it's like a real documentary.
• 25:17
  [laughs] But it's also there's, there's an element of vulnerability there, where you're documenting this very real story, which, you know, it's very emotional, especially- Yeah... for Patrick, you know- Mm-hmm...
• 25:29
  trying to sort out how he's gonna possibly sell, like, his life's work. Really interesting. Yeah. And I'm, I wonder what that says about Paddle's view on content marketing, that it's a, a real story.
• 25:39
  It's quite vulnerable. Uh, you don't exactly know how it's gonna go when you start- Mm-hmm... filming it also, you know.
• 25:45
  But it, it speaks to your commitment to sharing real world experience, telling actual stories, not just pumping stuff out because, you know, that's what the playbook says to do. Yeah, totally.
• 25:56
  If we go back to how we started talking about why we do content, it's helpful. Genuinely, I think it's quite a helpful look behind the scenes.
• 26:03
  It's also founded on a very specific piece of customer insight, and that sounds really formal. It's based on customer insight.
• 26:10
  The founders we serve, they're building businesses, and they either want to acquire other businesses or be acquired.
• 26:15
  And so we had this unique moment in time where we could put cameras behind a process that no one normally sees and give value to our audience. And so that's what we did.
• 26:23
  And it was great because we knew, you know, PC and the team there were super up for this type of thing. So we suggested it. They said, "Oh, we're already thought about... thinking about something like that. Let's do it."
• 26:32
  I went to our general counsel and said, "As long as it's locked away in a Dropbox until, uh, you give us permission, you happy for us to record all the Zooms to see where we get to."
• 26:39
  And then I went to a friend of mine, Pip Piper, who's an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker, and now runs a charity helping underprivileged youth get into filmmaking, and said- Oh, wow...
• 26:49
  "Pip, just come behind the scenes, help us create this story." And what he did, which was really, really good, was we had... You know how this stuff works.
• 26:56
  We had days' worth of footage, and he was really disciplined about leaving 99% on the cutting room floor and focusing everything down on what he felt was the best story, which was these two founders and the two people behind the acquisition and what was happening there and the rationale in there and all this stuff, and he just stripped it all back, and it made it quite an emotional piece.
• 27:16
  Yeah, it's wonderful. You know, I wonder, this is sort of a small thing, but I do wonder, you know, video's increasingly more and more important. I feel there's a tension between the rise of video and the rise of remote.
• 27:29
  Mm-hmm. Do you feel that way? I'm just... I mean, it's like now you have people all over the world. Like, are you hiring local teams everywhere and then sending it to a producer in some central location?
• 27:38
  Like, it seems complicated. I haven't done it myself, not personally. Do you find that it's complicated? Yes, but that's not a reason to not do anything.
• 27:47
  Case in point, we've just done a new series that's out on Paddle Studios now called Born Global.
• 27:51
  So again, that internationalization theme, where we've gone and found the first, you know, series is six episodes, six software founders based in parts of the world that are non-normal for software companies.
• 28:02
  So not the US and not the UK. I think there's maybe one UK person.
• 28:06
  And we've gone, and we interviewed them at SaaStock, a big conference where we knew we could get them all to attend, and did deep interviews about their background and how they built their companies and how they started in this small economy and now sell around the world.
• 28:18
  But then for all of the B-roll and background footage and other interviews, they just took their phones and went to their school or went to their parents' house or walked up and down their road- Oh...
• 28:28
  and submitted all of that.
• 28:29
  And so you've got this really nice juxtaposition of very high quality in studio at conference footage for the interviews, and then loads of background work that they just did remotely, and they were so up for it.
• 28:40
  We'd be pinging them, you know, "Can you get this? Can you get that? Can you go and find a good shot of your local cafe where you work?" And that would just come to us, and we'd just choose the bits we wanted.
• 28:48
  So I think you just gotta be creative about this stuff. Yeah. That's cool. I love that. I mean, yeah, I guess phones, they can do everything now. That's awesome. I wanna be respectful of your time.
• 28:55
  There is one kind of career related question that I wanted to put in front of you, which is, how do you become a CMO? Like, what's the path?
• 29:02
  You know, there's a lot of folks in our community that are experienced content marketers, and they're thinking about their career over the next couple years, and they're thinking, you know, maybe I wanna be a marketing leader, you know, director of marketing, VP, maybe a CMO one day.
• 29:15
  So I'm just curious about, like, the path to get here, the skills you rely on in your day-to-day job, and, like, maybe even the things that you would look for in an up-and-coming marketing leader too. Yeah.
• 29:25
  I laughed when you asked the question 'cause I've never tried to be a CMO. I was a co-founder. I ended up taking that remit.
• 29:30
  We got acquired, and then I kind of told myself I was gonna go and co-found another business, not take a CMO role, and then the Paddle opportunity came along.
• 29:38
  I was doing some consulting work for them, and I just thought it was too good to miss. Have... Uh, having fun with a company rather than just defending or pushing the marketing team's agenda, I think is, is one thing.
• 29:48
  The second thing is customer proximity. I've mentioned that phrase a couple of times.
• 29:52
  I consider it one of my most primary responsibilities to be with customers and prospects on a very, very regular basis, multiple times a week, and to bring that insight back into everything we do.
• 30:05
  And so I find in most conversations in companies that are good, that care, that have got CEOs that are customer obsessed, et cetera, being able to say, "But I spoke to," or, "The customer research says-" Mm...
• 30:18
  or, "When I spoke to Bob or Kathleen, she said," brings a whole different level of credibility to when you are pitching ideas or asking for budget or trying to work out what you can do next as a project.And so customer proximity would be the second thing I'd really think about and make sure you're getting close to.
• 30:33
  And the third thing is people who rapidly rise up that ladder have normally taken some risks. And you have to work with your own level of risk tolerance and decide when that's right.
• 30:44
  But you've got to decide, you know, projects that you wanna back yourself 'cause you really believe that they've got a future, or roles that perhaps you don't, don't feel quite ready for but you think you can make an impact in, or relationships where that person could be distant from you but you've decided to get really close to them.
• 30:59
  You've got to take some risks in that process if you wanna go through that pathway fast. But those are the few of the things that I think are really important outside of all the more technical aspects of marketing.
• 31:08
  Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.
• 31:09
  You know, there was an article I read years ago, I wish I could remember the author, so I apologize that I can't cite them, but essentially it said that, you know, your career starts based on your technical skills.
• 31:18
  Can you design? Can you code? Can you write? [laughs] Whatever. And then as you go along, the skill set changes, and eventually it just turns into, can you get shit done or not, you know? Mm-hmm.
• 31:26
  And getting shit done often means wrangling a bunch of people to help you and to advocate for it. Yep. And there's a lot of soft skills that come into play.
• 31:34
  The way you communicate, the way you build those relationships, and- Yep... build trust among your team, and et cetera, et cetera, so.
• 31:39
  Which sounds like that's kind of exactly, at least part of what you bring to your role in Paddle too. Yeah. Hope- totally.
• 31:44
  And the best people within the teams I serve are people who by innate knowledge go and build, by intuition go and build those relationships really well. Across the teams- Right...
• 31:54
  outside of marketing, into product, into sales, into IT, into our finance team. You know, our CFO, we get him on our programs. And they build those relationships, and they manage up really well.
• 32:05
  They understand what level of insight and what cadence to bring to me and those on their team.
• 32:10
  And, you know, there's that classic saying of, you know, if you wanna get promoted, then find out what your boss cares about and go and fix it.
• 32:16
  And I think that's part of it as well, is managing up and making sure you have a visibility from your boss's seat as well as just from yours. Yeah. I love it.
• 32:24
  You know, usually we spin off, like, one 60-second clip from the podcast that we share, but I think we might make, like, 10 or so from this one.
• 32:30
  [laughs] Because, like, there's a few things that you've talked about that, like, they just come up so frequently in our community, and, like, now we know the answer.
• 32:38
  So I wanna save these snippets and share them with people. [laughs] Seriously, Andrew, thank you so much for your time. It's so good to meet you. We'll put a link to Paddle in the show notes.
• 32:47
  I would really encourage people, go check it out. Like, see what the content is like, particularly the studio stuff.
• 32:51
  It's, it's really impressive, and I think there's a lot to glean from the way that y'all have approached that. Mm-hmm. But then how about you personally?
• 32:56
  Can we send folks to LinkedIn or Twitter or anywhere else to connect with you? Yeah, of course. For the, you know, content geeks out there, I know we've dived on video, but text is really important for us, too.
• 33:06
  One of our top performing pieces of content is every month we do a SaaS market report based on our data. So it's kind of a Bloomberg-type report on what's going on in SaaS. Oh, very cool. Okay.
• 33:16
  Well, I'll grab links to podcasts, guides, reports, dinners, all that good stuff in the show notes so it's easier for people to go find. And your LinkedIn, too. So Andrew, seriously, so good to chat.
• 33:26
  Next up, I wanna have your content team on, 'cause I would love to hear more about the, you know, how you take the vision and then you execute it. So maybe we can make that happen soon. [outro music]