How to Automate Organizing and Using Data to Create Content that Drives Results with Dan Adams, VP of Revenue at Switchboard Software

Narrator: Welcome to Page One or Bust! Your ultimate guide to getting on page one of search engines. In this episode, we're talking to the VP of Revenue at Switchboard Software, where companies like Spotify, Meredith Corporation, and Pearson go to turn data into valuable information to make important decisions. You'll hear from Dan Adams who shares insights from his 20 years spent in technology and SaaS. He reveals secrets that can help you navigate the data explosion and improve online campaign results. But before we get into it, here's a brief word from today's sponsor. Page One or Bust! is brought to you by DemandJump. Get Insights, drive outcomes with DemandJump. Get started creating content that ranks at: demandjump. com today. And now, here are your co- hosts, Christopher Day and Ryan Brock.

Christopher Day: Hello. Welcome back to Page One or Bust! This is your co- host Christopher Day, the CEO of DemandJump. And as always, I'm joined by my co- host, Ryan Brock, the Chief Content Officer here at DemandJump. How's it going today, Ryan?

Ryan Brock: Going well. Excited to be here.

Christopher Day: It's going to be an amazing podcast today. We are coming at the world of SEO content, go- to- market strategy from a totally different angle today. We're joined by Dan Adams, the VP of Revenue at Switchboard. How's it going, Dan?

Dan Adams: Hey, it's going great. Thanks so much for having me on today. Really appreciate it.

Christopher Day: Absolutely. So a little bit about Switchboard. Switchboard is a powerful data automation platform that aggregates disparate data at scale, both reliably and in real time, to make better business decisions. Today, we are going to dive into some hot topics: exploding data and digital transformation becoming a way of doing business. This is a major topic. Excited to get your expertise on this one, Dan. Plus, we are going to talk about the relationship between marketing and sales, and go- to- market strategy. So with that, let's kick it off. Dan, tell us a little bit about your journey first to becoming the VP of Revenue at Switchboard.

Dan Adams: Sure. Really appreciate it, Tove. I love evangelizing new technologies. And that passion has been developed in me since the early 2000s. But really grew when I was employee number seven of a young startup called Apptio, in Seattle, in 2008. Ended up becoming their VP of Sales and really look for unique technologies that are solving business challenges at the right time. And I think I found that with Switchboard. And I think it's because the world is exploding in data and I look forward to talking to you about that today.

Ryan Brock: Fantastic. So where are you based now?

Dan Adams: I'm a Chicagoan. So over my shoulder, you might see Coach Mike Ditka.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, the Coach.

Dan Adams: The Coach, the greatest coach ever. In fact, funny thing is, my sales team from a former company got that for me at Christmas one year just because they knew that I loved the Bears and I was The Coach for the team that year.

Ryan Brock: That's amazing. I grew up in Chicagoland and I wasn't even planning with the orange and the navy today, but I'm so glad that everything came together here.

Christopher Day: That's pretty funny, Ryan. You're exactly right. Those colors exactly match. So Dan, you say that-

Ryan Brock: I'm good at colors.

Christopher Day: You say that data and digital transformations are now a way of business. Can you tell our listeners what you mean by that?

Dan Adams: Sure. Across numerous industries. So I'm looking at the big industries like retail, financial services, e- commerce, media, advertising, gaming, et cetera, et cetera. What people are finding is that they have too much data.

Christopher Day: Yeah.

Dan Adams: So much data on where are their customers coming from, what are their customers doing? How do they best target their customers? I think there's a quote from a distinguished Gartner analyst, Don Feinberg, who said, " Data has become the most important asset of any organization, and the ability to do data analytics is more critical than ever."

Christopher Day: I think that's spot on, right? Marketers and sales folks, for that matter. But marketers have, there's no shortage of data out there. And so how do we get that data though to tell us a story?

Ryan Brock: Right. Because I remember telling my mom at the advent of Facebook that she didn't need to be afraid because nobody cared about her. Not in ... in the most loving way possible, right? I'm telling her your data, no one's trying to figure out what Sandy's doing, having for breakfast today. And now I have to fess up and say, actually, I might've been wrong about that. But the comfort is there's so much data, you can just disappear into it, right? But I don't know. Is that a good thing, is that a bad thing? It just seems mind- boggling to me.

Christopher Day: So we were on a call this morning with a major agency, major household name agency here in the United States, and they were talking about the context of data. They were talking about, well gosh, why don't you care about search volume? We really care about search volume. And so we really got into a deep dive discussion around that, that data bias. Not letting data bias creep into the data that you're actually leveraging to make better decisions. And search engines don't provide search volume on questions, for example. Or if you look at many, many tools out there, search engines or tools that leverage from data, from search engines, search volume is different all over the place. And it's just flat out missing for some of the places that massive search volume happens. One example that's being questioned. And so when you talk about data and digital transformations are now way of business, are there any examples that you've come across? One example would be search one that I just mentioned, but, and if none of them come top of mind, that's totally fine, but any examples of gaps in data or trusting data sources that actually are encouraging the wrong behaviors that you've discovered over the years?

Dan Adams: Oh, wow. So your search engine example is really good because if you can't break down the data and find out what type of, you have to get more granular data.

Christopher Day: Yes.

Dan Adams: So high- level searches, the fact that Switchboard, in April, has seen a 500% growth over the searches or hits on our website since January of this year.

Christopher Day: It's amazing.

Dan Adams: Is great. But what are the insights from that? You really need to take it a layer deeper and you really need to start getting more granular. And that's where we start to see better decisions come out of it.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, are you ranking for your name or are you ranking for pain that's something you can solve. There's a difference.

Christopher Day: Yep. I totally love it. Talk to us about, so just building on that, tell us about a time where you've leveraged data science to drive growth. What are some of the metrics that are important to you, important to Switchboard, and how you measure that success as you start to break down data and results?

Dan Adams: Yeah, so at our current company and past companies, I've always attempted to work with Marketing and with Finance to combine data and get a really good look at three things. These are the three things that I live by and I always like to work with my marketing friends on them is customer acquisition cost, the returns on our advertising spend, so where are we spending our dollars and how is that benefiting us, and then, what's the overall lifetime value of getting a new customer?

Ryan Brock: Interesting.

Dan Adams: Those are the three that we have solved for at past companies, solving for here. If you can get those, you get, I think, a very high level understanding, from sales perspective, of how to utilize the data and best grow your business.

Ryan Brock: So then, so with the second metric in mind, what has been your perspective on SEO over the years specifically? Because my experience has been that SEO is the hardest thing to actually qualify with or quantify with an ROI number. And what has that experience been like for you?

Dan Adams: What we've found was we could not compete just on spend on Google AdWords or similar. There were other companies that were much more well capitalized that could outspend us. So then we had to look for an alternative path of how to get those first page rankings. And I've got to say it, guys, I don't mind with you, but one of the great things that I found at that company was DemandJump, and it really increased our ability to get in front of the right customers at the right time without having to overspend to get those leads.

Christopher Day: Yeah, I think it's spot on. Back in the... 20, 30 years ago, you could brute force your way with paid efforts, paid media, let's just say, generically, and you could have success with that. And it wasn't... costs would add up if you did more and more, but it wouldn't necessarily put you out of business or you wouldn't go broke, right, on those paid efforts. And the sophistication now today with all the smart devices, think about our phones, think about the speakers that are sitting inside of our homes that are listening to us talk, et cetera. The complexity of the internet and all of the data that's in the internet that is more based on now human actual behavior, using the words that are actually being articulated verbally or through fingertips, which all gets back to basically, neural networks. The human brain, we think the human brain, the internet have a lot in common. And so we used to be able to brute force our way with paid efforts. But now today, technology is catching up to that actual human behavior. And so the reward is going to the organic alignment of the companies are organically aligning to the actual customer behavior. Because the internet was built for you and I as individuals. It wasn't built for companies. It was built for you and I, as individuals, that when we ask a question or make a search, they want to deliver us the best experience they can possibly give and they don't care at all about the company. So then how does the company align to the actual customer behavior so that you can win? Were there any, as you started that shift, anything come top of mind that, you're like, gosh, we were really focused on X, which was based on our domain expertise versus Y, that we discovered our customers actually care about. And by aligning to that, we built digital trust. Anything come to mind?

Dan Adams: Yeah, we're still learning that at my current company. So we're realizing that what we provide to customers is much more than what the industry would call ETL: Extract, Transform and Load. And so think of it as a pipeline and you can move data from point A to point B. But if you're removing a lot of data into point B and that's your data warehouse, and it's coming in from numerous different sources and it's not clean, it's not verified, it's not been transformed and unified, you basically have a data dumpster.

Ryan Brock: An unofficial term.

Dan Adams: A data dumpster. And I used one analogy with my mom. My mom's retired, she lives in Florida. She still goes to Barnes and Noble Books, bookstores. She doesn't do things online. She wants to go, she wants to feel, she wants to touch a book. I said, " All right, mom." Let's say you go to Barnes and Noble tomorrow to buy a new book. And they've got all the books there. They've got 20, 000 books, but they're all in a giant pile, co- mingled. How easy is it going to be to find the book that you want? Well, she said, " Honey, not very easy at all." Well, that's why they put them on shelves and they categorize them. If you could do that with data, then you can really start to make really good decisions. And that's what A, we're trying to do Sales and Marketing as a team here at Switchboard. But we also do that for our customers with our technology.

Ryan Brock: What were your first steps towards trying to align your content to the paying customers might be searching for, right? Are you starting with, I want to be better at data? Or are you looking for aligning with terms that are more transactional? I'm looking for this product or this service. What are those big topics that you've really put an effort into ranking for organically?

Dan Adams: Sure. And it's interesting because I mentioned it, ETL, Extract, Transform, and Load. And that is certainly one of the topics because it's a big topic, something people are searching for. If we can represent that and how we do that, plus so much more, which is get into what our core is, data automation or a data engineering automation platform. And then we get started a conversation via quick bits of information, concise blog content, and other things that allow us to shape and teach our potential customers on how we're so much different and better than what I would call old school ETL.

Ryan Brock: If you are a marketer and you're listening to this, this is the biggest, most important thing you can take from probably anything we've talked about on this podcast so far. We have time and time again, talked to marketers who are so afraid of saying, well, I don't want to write content about this old school thing, this old school concept because we're new and we're shiny and we're doing something better. But people don't know that yet. You need to meet them where they are. So that's encouraging to hear, the fact that you're willing to meet them where they are, provide the value that they're expecting from you where they are, and then redirect them towards the next best thing. That is what, I think, good ethical quality marketing looks like in 2022.

Dan Adams: That's what we're very much attempting to do. And really it's all about, and DemandJump has been this way for us since you're a partner of ours, if you can form a good partnership around seeking to understand what the business needs and then providing that to them, it's the best way to truly create that win- win scenario. And we tend to do it just like you guys do.

Christopher Day: That's totally spot on. So along those lines, what other tools are you using to help get your data, to help organize your data? So CRM tools, processes, keyword lists, et cetera. What are some other things that are critical in your tech stack?

Dan Adams: Sure. Our tech stack and the things that I, now that I've got the ability to bring in technology for my organization at my level, I'm always looking to make sure that we can identify our ideal customer profile. And so you need something and then... I'll give out two of the names. Not that they are the only ones, but ZoomInfo and Seamless are really good at helping you identify who should you be targeting, and then what key executives at that organization exist. What's their contact number, what's their email address, and is it verified. So that's something great, right? So as you're building out your ICP and you're figuring out who do we want to go after. Then, having that integrated into an outbound platform; again, numerous ones. We use a company called Outreach, which can automate some of the delivery but still allow you to do personalization and hyper- personalization. It's A phenomenal one- two punch, and then you end up storing everything into a CRM. And we happen to use it at this company, Salesforce, I've used HubSpot in the past. But you've got to have a core marketing, Marcom technology stack, and that's what we use for our sales organization.

Ryan Brock: So I'm hearing a lot of account- based marketing in what you're talking about. So it sounds like that's a big part of what your philosophy is with sales.

Dan Adams: Absolutely. At this organization, we definitely have to do it. We're an enterprise solution for growing digitally first organizations, and they want to have a relationship with you, not just a transactional, a lot of outbound spam.

Christopher Day: That totally makes sense. So let's leverage that and two, the next section of what we're going to deep dive into, and that's the relationship between marketing and sales. So talk to us about how you think about closing a loop between sales and marketing or what mistakes that you've seen and how teams are structured and what adjustments you've had to make.

Dan Adams: Yeah, so things have been learned in the past and mistakes have been made. But it truly is best when the, let's say, at your organization, the highest level sales or marketing as a VP. So VP of revenue sales, like myself, here at Switchboard, and a VP of Marketing. Both of those individuals should have the same common boss. At our organization, it's a CEO. Next year, I hope it's a CRO, hope that's me, but... It's all about me, right?

Christopher Day: I love it. No doubt it's going to happen. The track you're on. It's awesome.

Dan Adams: I appreciate that. So if you're both aligned and reporting into the same individual, that person can also make sure that you're staying in alignment, right?

Christopher Day: Yup.

Dan Adams: And also, you should just have, at least weekly, if not even more often, conversations between those two. And we have at least once a week and actually more ad hoc where myself and the VP of Marketing are coordinated and making sure that we're very well aligned. So we've done it very well here. I have been at other organizations where it wasn't as well aligned, and sales was off doing its thing, and Marcom was doing off its thing and they weren't coming together perfectly. You're wasting time, you're wasting effort. And so that's what you try to get rid of in most organizations. And through years of experience and a lot of gray hair, I think we've done a pretty good job of that now.

Ryan Brock: Outside of that common leader between the two, maybe playing some interference, who do you think ultimately does or should steer the direction? Is that a fair question to ask?

Dan Adams: It is. And I've heard this from VPs of marketing or CMOs, some people have said, we are" the most sales focused marketing organization." I love when someone says that and they say it because they think that and they really... Marketing, a lot of times, in my mind, is truly helping generate revenue for the organization. That revenue responsibility falls on the VP of Sales and Revenue. So everything should be aligned around customer acquisition. And how do we make sure that both parts of the organization are doing everything possible to stay aligned on those goals.

Ryan Brock: A hundred percent. Dan, I, before coming to DemandJump, I owned a marketing agency for 10 years. And the relationships that I had, the customers that were my favorite were the ones who brought their sales leaders to our meetings. And they were our customers almost. We had maybe a marketing director, but what we really had was clear direction from a salesperson about what do you want? Bring me this kind of lead or this kind of person or whatever the case might be. And if anything, it just focused us and it helped me say no to so many things that would've wasted our time. And I think that if we had had that in every single situation, it would've been better. So I tend to agree. As a marketing guy, myself, I love it when sales is very clear. This is what we want. And I'm like, great. I got my lane. I'm going to stick in it and bring you some nice presence, hopefully.

Christopher Day: Are there any examples of vanity metrics that you saw, cause teams to get off track over the various things that you've done over the years?

Dan Adams: I would say the one, similar to the topic we were talking before about searches. So web visits, web visits without any detailed information.

Christopher Day: Yep.

Ryan Brock: Yup.

Dan Adams: Really is flying blind.

Ryan Brock: Yes.

Dan Adams: So it could be great that we've got more people visiting our website. Kudos, everybody. Let's pat ourselves on the back. Now, who's visiting and-

Ryan Brock: What are they visiting.

Dan Adams: What portions of the website are they visiting? And how long are they staying? How many, on average, how often do they visit? Or in a unique visit, how many pages have they viewed? And then the golden nugget is: What organization is that? So company. And then linking it into, okay, at that company, who are the top executives that might fit our ICP, that might have been looking because of outbound targeted efforts, tying that all back in together. I can't tell you, Tove, when you've been on our website, but because of some technology that we've adopted, we can tell when DemandJump has visited our website, and then we can hope and assume or take a more educated guess. Well, we were outbound targeting these four, three or four individuals. Let's go back to one of them because they might be ripe for the technology now.

Ryan Brock: There's a time five years ago where my company's website ended up getting triple the traffic over the course of three months, and it was just insane. And I didn't dig into it. I was just very proud of myself. And eventually, it wasn't three months, it was maybe six weeks or so, and eventually, we looked into it. And some image I'd ripped off from somewhere for a blog post was reused on some other blog post or something, or ended up ranking in Google Images or something. So I'm getting all this traffic from a picture of Walter White from Breaking Bad and it has nothing to do with my business. But I felt great for maybe a few weeks there. I was very proud of myself.

Dan Adams: That is a great example. That is a vanity. You were very excited. But did it create additional customers, relationships, revenue for the company? Maybe not at that point.

Ryan Brock: No. If anything, it maybe opened me up to some litigation that I was involved with before that.

Christopher Day: Oh my gosh, Ryan, that is funny. Oh, goodness. So how about any walls that have been accidentally formed that you had to break down between revenue and marketing teams to align on the common goal?

Dan Adams: Yep. Everyone's super busy. Never in the history of people have been busier at work. But sometimes, if there isn't alignment, I've seen marketing efforts that haven't been generating be the top two priorities. Top two priorities are inbound leads and sales accepted opportunities. And so we want to drive all of our marketing effort towards those two things. And that really helps us to then have the further picture of what does it cost to acquire a customer? What is the ROI of our advertising spend? But if all is based upon us generating more inbound leads and more sales accepted opportunities.

Christopher Day: Totally makes sense. All right. So how about go- to- market strategy? This will be our last deep dive of today. One thing, we had Sangram Varje on the podcast and he wrote this book called Move. He thinks about go- to- market strategy, it's a product, right? And that product is made up of your sales team, marketing team, CS team, product team. It is a unit. It's a true unit to move forward. But what has your past experience taught you about go- to market? Think about go- to- market strategy?

Dan Adams: Well, I would say he's actually a hundred percent correct. And so, we've talked today a lot about sales and marketing be aligned, but also customer success, engineering.

Ryan Brock: Oh, yeah.

Dan Adams: The product, getting feedback from customers or from prospects, and getting it incorporated to future versions of the product, is key and critical. Having customer success very well aligned with sales, and actually having sales looking out for customer success to pinpoint... I view it as a target. And in the first meeting with a customer, you may have four or five rings around the bullseye. You may not, in that first meeting, earn the right with your customer to learn what their true, boy, you hit the bullseye on value delivered to them, right?

Ryan Brock: Wow.

Dan Adams: But if you can land on the bullseye in your first couple meetings and then start to hone in on the bullseye as you turn it over to your CS team, Customer Success team, it makes their job so much easier to delight the customer, make them happy, make them referenceable, have them give referrals to their friends and family, and really have a combined marketing effort that aids all of your sales cycles.

Ryan Brock: Well, and this is why, we're talking about SEO, even the name of the podcast is Page One or Bust! And we were always referencing SEO here. But really what we're talking about is, what we're calling pillar based marketing. It's the flip side of the coin to the account- based marketing that you're talking about doing in your sales department. We're trying to say, to supplement that from an organic strategy standpoint, the first thing you need to do is understand what pain your customers are going through and then be able to align to it. And so what you just said is so profound to me, and it's such a good indicator of what we need to be doing with data. What is responsible data use in marketing in 2022? To me, it's in light of those critical conversations, one- on- one with the customer who's willing to tell you, this is exactly what I need and you're giving it to me exact way that I need it. You need data to tell you what your ICP is actually asking about. What are the problems they're trying to solve. Forget all that creativity that you got in your brain making you think, oh, well, if we just get the right slogan, or we make the cutest ad, or whatever the case might be, it's going to get through to them. Now, the only thing that's going to get through is bringing them some solution to the actual pain that they have. And for us, it's made all the difference in the world.

Dan Adams: And you're absolutely right. And it does take all of the departments working together towards a common goal. And that is your North Star. North Star is our customer. So our number one core value here at Switchboard is we're only successful when our customers are successful. The way that you do that is you're really always seeking to understand what is their key goal and objective that you're trying to achieve for them.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, it's spot on, guys. Dan, I just got to share this with you. I don't know, it was probably a year ago. I was in the platform playing around, and I loaded in a B2C example and I decided to load up lipstick. And I put in Maybelline and Revlon and all the major manufacturers of lipstick. And the platform showed that the most powerful, important connected question in the world around lipstick is: What does lipstick stand for? And not one manufacturer was answering that question. But there were various blogs. There were, I think we saw three or four blogs that somehow they were answering that question.

Dan Adams: Okay.

Christopher Day: And there's a lot of iterations of that question that we can see in the platform. But the core concept of if I manufacture lipstick and of course, gloss and matte and ingredients and organic and all these other things matter, but the most important powerful thing in the world, if I'm totally missing it, 50% of my opportunity just going down the dream because I'm not present. And so I love the whole concept of thinking customer first. What do they really want? What are they thinking about? What's their pain? Because you're either what? You're either solving a pain or fulfilling a desire.

Dan Adams: Yeah.

Christopher Day: At the end of the day, it's one of those two things.

Ryan Brock: Well, that's a great story because what the hell kind of question is that? I don't even know what that means.

Christopher Day: Right?

Ryan Brock: So you actually look at the data. You don't know. You just don't know what people are talking about.

Dan Adams: Yeah. Right. And we're constantly doing that with and for our customers. We've got some fun, great customers. One of my favorites is, well, Spotify is a wonderful... But Orange Theory Fitness, they really were looking at how do they get people to invest an hour and pay for an hour of time and then sign up for a membership? What's the best way to do that? Right?

Ryan Brock: Yup.

Dan Adams: And so, we and they went on a data journey with them. And we came up, can't give you the insight because this would be part of their outbound marketing reach. We give them some specific answers of what was working better and what were some of the best ways to entice new member enrollment. And then that engagement of the new members so they became lifelong members. They used data to answer those questions.

Ryan Brock: Beautiful.

Dan Adams: It was pretty amazing.

Ryan Brock: That's amazing.

Christopher Day: All right. We're going to go into the rapid fire round to get a few just quick hit, high level questions. Let it rip. Here we go. What is something that you have wanted to test, but you have not yet? Anything come to mind?

Dan Adams: More automation. Automated outbound and being up more diverse. Just we haven't felt like we could yet. We're doing personalized.

Christopher Day: How about top three marketing or sales tools that you just can't live without?

Dan Adams: So ICP profiling tools. SCL optimization, so what we're doing with you guys at DemandJump. And then, intent research to find out at the back end who actually is visiting you on your website.

Christopher Day: Love it.

Dan Adams: That's great.

Christopher Day: Well, how about your best piece of advice for a revenue leader?

Dan Adams: Get alignment with your VP of Marketing and then push that out to the other parts of the organization. But if the two of you are very well aligned on your goals and you can pick out an ideal customer profile, what are their pains? What are we trying to solve? You can really start to move the needle very quickly.

Christopher Day: I love it.

Ryan Brock: Wise words.

Christopher Day: Yep, absolutely. Anything we didn't hit today, Dan, that you want to touch on? Make sure the audience hears.

Dan Adams: Gosh, I think that the thing that keeps me up at night these days is how to hit the number each and every quarter.

Ryan Brock: Yeah. Because we have more data, we have more knowledge, and so we have better forecasts. And that's a double- edged sword, isn't it?

Dan Adams: Yeah, it absolutely is. So we are a data centered company. Our CEO uses that data, so it keeps me on my toes. It's definitely the wave of the future. And we're very, very proud to be providing that to our customers and been very thankful for the relationship we've had with DemandJump.

Christopher Day: Well, thank you very much. The analogy I think about with your comment there is we're all hamsters on wheels. It's like the faster we run, the faster we have to run.

Dan Adams: Yeah.

Christopher Day: It's never ending. Well, all right. Thank you very much. So how can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about Switchboard and purchase your solution?

Dan Adams: Sure. Real easy to reach me at: dan @ switchboard- software. com. Go to: switchboard- software. com. Or they can hit my cell phone, ( 312) 399-3663.

Ryan Brock: That's awesome. Ryan, that's a first.

Dan Adams: Bold move.

Ryan Brock: I think that is bold.

Christopher Day: Yeah. We live for boldness here at DemandJump and you just crushed it, Dan.

Dan Adams: Appreciate it.

Ryan Brock: True salesman. True salesman, right there.

Christopher Day: Absolutely. I love it. All right, so ladies and gentlemen, you just heard some great expert advice from Dan Adams, the VP of Revenue at Switchboard. So we are signing off, along with Ryan Brock, our Chief Content Officer at DemandJump. This is Christopher Day, the CEO of DemandJump. And until next time, we'll see you soon.

Ryan Brock: Thanks, everybody.

Narrator: Page One or Bust! is brought to you by DemandJump. Know the exact content to create to increase first page rankings and drive outcomes with DemandJump. Get started for free today at: demandjump. com.