The Growing Importance of Customer Intelligence

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Mark Evans: How well do you know your prospects and customers? In theory, the more that you understand the people who matter, the more effective your marketing and sales are. Well, that's marketing one zero one. So it's always surprising, even shocking, when companies struggle due to a lack of customer insight. As customer intelligence becomes more important, services like Clearbit are becoming a key part of the technology staff. On today's podcast, I'm talking to Kevin Tate, Clearbit's chief marketing officer. Kevin has more than twenty years of experience across the technology spectrum within sales, marketing, and product. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Kevin Tate: Hey. Thanks for having me, Mark. Glad to be here.

Mark Evans: Let's start with Clearbit one zero one. Tell me at a high level, what does the platform do, and how do customers use it?

Kevin Tate: Clearbit helps companies grow faster and smarter using data. And, broadly, there's a couple of different parts of that. First, we've got, a market intelligence database that includes a 100 plus attributes about every company with a website. How many employees do they have? What sector are they in? Where are they located? What technologies do they appear to be using? And on and on and on. And so companies use that as, like, the foundation of a of a smart and focused go to market. But the second piece is how do you put that to work at all your different customer interaction points? So we have a platform that lets you use that to target ads more precisely or personalize your website with very specific information or something we we just launched last week, something that lets you see who's visiting your website but not filling out forms and then know which of those companies fit your ICP and even who to contact at those companies to start a conversation.

Mark Evans: Now from the outside looking in, I think some people see Clearbit as an email retrieval service. You can easily find someone's email based on different factors, but it sounds like the platform has really expanded in recent years. Is that sort of an accurate assessment of where the company sits right now compared to six years ago when it started?

Kevin Tate: Yeah. Yeah. Six or seven years ago, the, I think a lot of people first saw Clearbit when we had our our, Gmail plugin that would let you figure out, hey. What's what's someone's email address based on my my interaction or company? And, yeah, we've come a long way since then. And, really, the the data activation platform now consists of three areas of putting that data to work. And, not surprisingly, they kinda map to what a, a go to market team might wanna focus on. Somewhere about improving the operations and the speed to lead around your ICP customers, and there's a lot of automations and hooks and syncs to Salesforce. Then there's a bunch of stuff we do with the website specifically. How do you see who's coming but not identifying themselves? How do you personalize? How do you integrate with other things like chat? And then we even have an an advertising piece that helps you kinda fill the funnel with more good fit customers. But a lot of it really centers on your ICP and how do you really understand your ideal customer profile with as much precise information as you can and then act on that to to focus your funnel.

Mark Evans: I do wanna talk about ICPs in a couple minutes, but one of the things I wanted to focus on was the launch of Clearbit Capture. It's a free service that recently hit the market, and I'm really interested in the strategic plan when it comes to from a marketing and sales perspective because, obviously, you can seed the market with a free tool like this. It provides some functionality. There's there's value in it. You get the weekly report that tells you who's hitting your website, which is awesome for a lot of people. It gives them some some good insight. When you guys were developing that that service, what were you thinking in terms of in terms of how you go to market? Was it a matter of broadening your your footprint, adding utility? What was the thinking behind that?

Kevin Tate: It's a it's a great question, and kudos to our growth team who, for, some time now has been investing in free tools, like, useful tools for companies who are trying to use data to to understand their market better. And when when they created the weekly visitor report, the idea was how do we help companies gain insight into, into signals that were previously hidden? So one of the it's funny. One of the original ways we talked about this in one of our ebooks was this idea of overt intent signals. You know, people filling out a lead form, raising their hands, signing up for the webinar, downloading the ebook, all overt. But if you're lucky, only 2% of your web traffic is showing those types of overt intent signals. And so the other 98% are showing, you might call covert intent signals. They're visiting the pages. They're checking out the pricing page. They're going to very specific documentation. Great signals. First party intent signals that tell you a lot about what they're trying to do, but there's no way to act on those unless with something like the weekly visitor report, you have some insight into which companies are coming and experiencing your your content and interested in what you have, but haven't explicitly, you know, filled out a lead form. So with the weekly visitor report, we wanted to provide companies with some of that insight. And in a somewhat, you know, PLG style motion of our own, Let's give people a real taste of the potential here. And then you mentioned, Capture, which we we just launched last week. It's really a compliment to the weekly visitor report. If you are a Clearbit customer, then you can actually take those companies that are visiting your website that are a good fit based on very specific ICP criteria and add them directly to Salesforce as a new lead or as a new account. And we'll even put in key contacts based on roles and titles that you tell us you wanna start a conversation with. And so that's the kinda end to end connection from, wow. I didn't even know they were here. Now I have a way to try to start a conversation with what appears to be a really good fit prospect.

Mark Evans: When I look at the technology landscape, the idea of identifying companies that hit your website, there's lots of different companies out there that are doing it. It's a very competitive marketplace. There's a lot of companies that are point solution. And, obviously, what Clearbit is doing is becoming a platform, a multifaceted platform. And I do wonder from your perspective, and, obviously, you're gonna be biased here, the way that a a customer will look at point solutions versus platforms. Because if you're if you're using point solutions, you're you're you're cobbling together your own technology stack. There are advantages, best of breed. You pick what you want. You're not tied into a particular platform. But the the con is that you're not everything is seamlessly tied together. And that sounds like the ClearBit philosophy. Let's get this unified platform for marketers and salespeople for that matter. So that's one stop shopping in terms of customer intelligence.

Kevin Tate: It's a great point. And and as you and as you say, there's there's often both in the market. Part of our non so secret plan, as you point out, is to provide this foundation, but also be flexible enough that innovative marketers can choose those best of breed solutions for other parts of their stack. So a a good example is we work very closely with, and in fact, power a lot of the chat providers and email marketing providers and personalization platform providers, lead scoring and routing providers. Those are all partners of ours. And we find that our customers wanna be able to mix and match. They wanna be able to architect a go to market stack that is that is truly strategic. Like, it's truly thoughtfully created for their go to market, and they also wanna be able to power lots of different motions with that stack. Most of our customers, there's an inbound component. There's an outbound component. There might be a PLG or a free trial component. There's a high volume website and, you know, ad driven component, and that's okay. We can power lots of those. And to your point, I think the advantages of some of the more an all in one or or single solution can be tighter workflow and you get you know, you kinda have end to end reporting because you're doing one thing with it. But often, you're just doing one thing with it. And so while there might be solutions that are better at, say, I don't know, an enterprise sales motion, or how do you how do you focus BDR's time in a specific way? We believe ultimately that the flexibility to use those those solutions but not be hemmed in to, to a single motion, is really important, especially during these times as a lot of marketers are are looking for new strategies and avenue.

Mark Evans: You know, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn like a lot of people these days, and it it is pretty amazing when you hear marketers talk about the fact that companies truly don't know their customers. Because a lot of marketing and sales aren't effective or fail because of a lack of customer insight. And I see this as a sort of marketing one zero one or sales one zero one. The more you know about your customer, like I said, off the top, the more effective you're gonna be. Yet a lot of companies struggle with visibility. They just don't have a a clear picture about who matters to them. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that marketers, for example, aren't spending hours and hours on on the phone every week talking to customers, looking at social media, reading research reports. In some ways, you could argue a lot of them are making educated guesses, and that's not a good place to be.

Kevin Tate: Yeah. It's a and I think educated guess accounts for a lot of it. It it's interesting because maybe the difference is between making assumptions about your customer versus forming hypotheses and then being able to actually test those. And I and, you know, I I I say that with love because I've spent my whole career in in in b to b go to market, and you have to do both, and you have to you have to have conviction. But the the reality is that today, there's so many great sources of data and signal that you can start to treat those more as hypotheses, and things are gonna change. Right? So one of the things that we've been particularly working with customers on since we've seen a market shift, and since we've seen, customers take a a new look at their customers around things like if and how their ICP has changed, especially the cost of customer acquisition for different segments of that ICP across different channels. And then to get more specific, maybe their buyer personas haven't changed. Right? Maybe they're still being bought ultimately by the same types of roles, but maybe the jobs to be done of those personas have changed a little. Right? A common one during these times is, something that would be far too manual for anyone to, you know, not throw technology at. When budgets get tighter and things are a little different out there, yeah, maybe you can live with manual for a little while. Right? So you may find that what was a compelling reason to buy your product has become a little less so or doesn't stand up to the CFO's, you know, do we have to have this right now? Helping companies form those hypotheses and then really look at the data and and look across their systems to find signal and see patterns is, I think, part of what, you know, keeps marketing interesting and exciting. But it does require that that mindset, not from from assumptions moving to more to testable hypotheses.

Mark Evans: Let's talk a little bit more about ideal customer profiles and buyer personas. Question number one would be, how do companies identify their ICPs? And number two would be the value of buyer personas. Buyer personas are a really great marketing exercise. We like to create them. They combine creativity and some objectivity and research, but we never use them. I mean, at best, sometimes they they you have posters on the wall like the Mailchimp example, but they usually collect dust. Or talk about both and talk about sort of how you develop and then then how you actually extract value from them on a on a regular basis.

Kevin Tate: So I'll say and and here speaking more as the head of marketing for Clearbit and how we think about it, ICP can be super powerful. And I think there's almost a top down and bottom up way of looking at it. The top down is whiteboard level market segmentation and how do I think about who I'm gonna go after and what my beachhead and all those things are. But then there's also a bottom up piece where you can look into your CRM. You can look into your customer history and events and say, who is it that ends up buying, or who is it that ends up falling out at certain stages? And I think marrying those two, perhaps one is more strategy and one is more rev ops. How do you put those together into a view of what do you want your ICP to be and what is it really? And how do you and how do you find your your way through that? I tend to believe, and our customers tell us, that some of the most actionable ICP criteria is also some of the simplest. How many employees do they have? What market or country are they in? What technology are they using, right, can be an often an eye opening one, and using that criteria to then tailor your message to those buyers. So even starting a conversation knowing, well, you appear to use Stripe for payment processing and you use, you know, this for risk management, I know a lot more to start that conversation with you as a marketer or salesperson now than if I'm just addressing you as a financial services company.

Mark Evans: Peel back the onion a little bit in terms of the Clearbit operating system and how you extract that insight into what customers and prospects are thinking. Because in theory, we're all supposed to talk to our customers. But in practice, at a company as big as Clearbit, how do you actually do it? Like, what are the different ways that you do it? You know, is it regular Mhmm. Conversations with new customers? Are you holding focus groups? Walk me through some of the sort of the tactical tools that you're using.

Kevin Tate: For us, it it plays on both the ICP and the buyer persona side. So I'll kinda talk about both. On the ICP side, the highest level, we break it into customer size. We have what we call growth commercial and enterprise customers. And, we know that a lot of the themes and the value propositions and the use cases are similar, but what's interesting and different about those segments is often the role that Clearbit plays in their stack. A very early stage company, maybe they just got their series a funding. A lot of those companies will buy Clearbit as the first or one of the first things in their tech stack because they'll say, I wanna start with a strong data foundation, and this is gonna be the thing that literally kinda holds my TAM and my ICP and the intelligence around it as I get going. Then that's very different from, say, a company that has, 250 or 500 people in it. They've got a number of things in their stack. They might have five or six big rocks in their Martech stack, and they've got they certainly got a CRM. They may or may not have a data warehouse. They've got several technologies on the website. So we're often one of five or six key pieces. And as I mentioned before, we work with a lot of those companies as partners. So engaging with them is often about, boy, how do we fit into their stack to make the whole thing better and smarter? And it depends a lot on the recipes that go with the technology they have. And then that gets even more complicated when you're talking about a company with 50,000 employees or a 100,000 employees where it's almost hard to talk about the company at that point because it's happening inside of a department or a very specific go go to market motion. Understanding that ends up being a big part of how we think about our ICP and then how we think about the buyer personas in there. And, again, I've, you're absolutely right. Too often, those things end up on a a slide or a poster somewhere never to be used. We find it useful to think about our operations persona, which is often focused on data and integration and, lead enrichment and intelligence. Our marketing persona is often focused on the website. How do I get more leads to the website? How do I get more higher quality? How do I make everything create more funnel from that, including advertising? And then we have the stack visionary. Right? The person who is taking a broad look at this and saying, we want to start by understanding our ICP and then roll that intelligence through a whole strategic go to market motion that includes both those things. And and those are different conversations. Right? And they lead different places and different starting point. I returning to the idea of jobs to be done, I find that to be one of the more actionable parts of the persona. You know? Once you get past, I don't know, you know, you know, Ollie the operator, and you can actually say, okay. Well, what's he trying to do? Oh, well, he's trying to figure out how to score leads instantly and route them based on okay. Got it. Let's talk about how we can make that job better versus kind of this abstract idea. So we think a lot about jobs to be done, how we enable them, and why we're able to do it in a way that's more valuable.

Mark Evans: Take me into the weeds. Let's go let's go further in terms of Ollie the operator. Do you you talk to Ollie the operator? Call him out of the balloon and go, hey. I wanna find out how you do your We do. On a on a discovery call or a sales call. How do you find out what they're saying?

Kevin Tate: Ali Ali is not, is not one of our personas, by the way. We have we do have, we do have an optimizer, but it's I'm saying Ali the operator. Sounds like a children's book. It's a children's book for marketers. Yeah. So a couple things that end up mattering a lot. I will say one of them is, we use Gong for all of our, you know, sales and CS interactions. Being able to use that for customer research is so, so powerful. And and, you know, as as both the marketing team and executive team, we'll share snippets and say, you know, listen to this eight minutes where they talk about how they're moving from this platform to this more integrated way of going to market or how they're thinking about using our data in this way. And, I mean, there's just no substitute for that customer voice. And then more recently, we have all hands meetings every week. You know, we're all on Zoom all over the world. And, we started bringing in customers who will do ten, fifteen minute interview with our head of services and just focused on what problems are you trying to solve, what role does Clearbit play, what should we be thinking about. And, again, no substitute for for hearing from those personas. And I think for us, what it has done is clarify those two personas in particular, that operations, rev ops. It's about systems and data and integration and speed to market and and visibility, and that that marketing or demand team who is just about how do I make sure I'm creating and capturing the very best leads, and I'm I'm helping my sales team make the most of them.

Mark Evans: Let's shift gears a little bit, and this goes back to your days on the revenue side. There's a lot of talk these days about marketing your marketers being revenue leaders, and this is particularly relevant because the focus these days is leads leads leads. Brand awareness, thought leadership, that kind of thing is important, but leads seems to be the thing that a lot of companies are focused on. It becomes the priority in tougher times. Can you break down what marketers as revenue leaders actually means and why it's important? And how prevalent is this idea that a marketer has to be both? And I guess the other question would be, how does a marketer transform themselves into a revenue leader? Loaded question. Lots of lots of different answers. Great questions in there.

Kevin Tate: Well so, first, sort of personal story. I had I had been on the the sales side and biz dev side for a few years. And then, actually, when I when I first moved to Portland, I worked with this company, Unicrew, the human capital management, and I hadn't I hadn't officially worked in marketing until then. What really drew me to it was the way marketing was organized aside from, like, corporate and PR was by industry. And so as the industry marketing lead, I took on our retail segment, which was our our biggest segment. And as a marketer, to your question, my my measure, my goal was not was not leads. It was revenue. It was to grow the ARR of our our largest retail segment, quarter over quarter, year over year. And I think that ultimately is the starting point. Right? If you if you want to position yourself as more of a revenue leader as a marketer, then make sure revenue is your target, and make sure that's the thing that you're gold on and planning for and creating a contract with sales around. Not only because it, you know, kinda gets a seat at that table, but it also just really widens the aperture. Right? The field of view gets much broader for why and how you're organizing your go to market if you're taking a quarter or a year's view of revenue as opposed to what can, to your point, easily become a months or weeks or even days view of leads leads leads. And I think a lot of marketers are feeling coming out of this market shift and a little bit different landscape. The leads leads leads, it paint you in a corner after a while. And when we're all competing when you're doing that, we're all competing for the same demand gen dollars. We're all spending b to b ad promotion on the same three or four platforms, and all the prices go up and all the yields go down and a little a little tire kicking in the funnel suddenly means that some of these things don't pencil anymore. And so what we're seeing is we're seeing marketers, I guess, swing that pendulum back a bit more to, okay. That was crazy. Now we need to make sure we're thinking about long term awareness and interest and capturing those intense signals and building a more robust pipeline that we think about in terms of quarters, not what was my lead count today.

Mark Evans: Okay. I'm gonna push back on that.

Kevin Tate: Okay. Bring it. Bring it.

Mark Evans: Although, you know, you're in the seat and and you're seeing this in the weeds and strategically as well, I see a lot of desperation out there. I see a lot of companies that b to b SaaS companies that were fat and happy for two solid years as we went through this digital transformation revolution Yeah. Or evolution. I think a lot of marketers thought that the pickings were were easy. You did your marketing thing and the leads were generated and you got the MQLs and the SQLs and life was good. And maybe marketers got a little complacent. They relied on the same platforms doing the same things.

Kevin Tate: Mhmm.

Mark Evans: So a couple of questions for you. How has the economic landscape the changes in the economic landscape over the six months, what kind of impact have you seen in terms of the overall marketing landscape? And then how has that impacted the way that Clearbit is going to market and the kind of marketing that it's doing now versus what it did last year?

Kevin Tate: I'll speak about Clearbit and then kind of what we see in our customers. From a from a Clearbit standpoint, we are actually doing kind of more what I talked about in terms of that pendulum swing. So we were leaning further and further toward the end of last year into, call it, direct ad spend, trying to get people who were, quote, ready to buy to raise that hand and fill out that form, and let's let's get them in the pipe, get them in the pipe. And, we still do some of that, but our focus now is more on, okay. Look. Our customers are very smart. Our prospects are very smart people. They know how to get ahold of us when they want to. Let's focus more on things like the weekly visit report, like the, intent based outreach playbook, which we just published today. Let's assume that, with content and with tools and with a a real empathy and educational bend to what we're what we're doing, they'll raise their hand when they're ready. And I don't I don't need a team to chase them saying, hey. You ready to raise your hand? You ready to raise your hand? And in the same way that maybe, you know, things things were feeling for a while. So we're swinging in that direction, and it is a longer term bet. Now we're we're we're somewhat fortunate in that Clearbit's role in company stack of really helping you get more out of the stack you have and ring more pipeline out of your existing investments. Those things fit pretty well with a kinda tighter budget atmosphere. Right? So we are we're benefiting from some of that as as companies look to to get more out of what they have. From a customer standpoint, I think you're spot on. Companies are kinda going one of two ways. Maybe they're swinging that pendulum back to, okay. Got it. I can't just keep cranking up my, you know, social or display ad spend. But then we also see companies who are saying, yeah. You know what? Get on the phones, BDRs. Like, we just we gotta pack the pipeline. I need I'm it was 10 calls a day. Now it's 15 calls a day. And that's not wrong, or 50. Now it's a 100. That's not wrong. But for those customers, we're trying to do everything we can to help them make sure they optimize that motion. They've got as much intelligence, as much relevance, as much intense signal to work from as they do that more aggressive outreach. I think it kinda depends on what market you're in and what kind of motions will work for you. But I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot of pressure out there right now.

Mark Evans: In terms of the kind of marketing that Clearbit does, content is obviously something that the company leans hard into. I understand webinars is also a very interesting vehicle marketing vehicle for Clearbit. Are those the two main levers? What are the things that

Kevin Tate: You know, ebooks have been really big for us. Very fortunate to have a a big wake of the boat there. And like I said, we just we just published another one today. We find that that the ebooks and the ability to use those, you know, if you end using a lot of that content on the blog or in your or in your broader content promotion, it's a nice way to sort of give people a path, which which may or may not lead to Clearbit, but it certainly leads to a more data driven marketing approach. And that's kind of the the shepherding that that that we that we try to do. We're also big on the tools. Right? We talked about the weekly visitor report. We also have the TAM calculator. So actually creating meaningful and valuable tools, not just, hey. If you, you know, try this, you can get a taste of what you're missing, but actually use this every week to figure out who's coming to your website and what you could be doing about it. I think those are big, and we're gonna be leaning more and more into the free tools as well and linking those to the paid products.

Mark Evans: The other area that wanted to talk to you about, and I mentioned all the time that I tend to spend on LinkedIn, which is, I guess, good and bad, is Clearbit's approach to LinkedIn. There are some companies that have fantastic LinkedIn pages. Gong is an is an example that people raise on a regular basis. As LinkedIn has become more of a a content platform as as opposed to HR, how is Clearbit using it? Have you figured out how to leverage it in terms of from a marketing and sales perspective, or is it still work in progress?

Kevin Tate: I think it's well, it's certainly still a work in progress, but I think you're absolutely right. Has become a, it's funny. I remember this word, the platisher, from ten years ago in content publishing and platforms. And I think in a way, LinkedIn is becoming as much that as as its HR focus from before. And I think we use that. We use LinkedIn as the primary channel for our content and announcements and discussion. And then to your point, it's interesting when I think about the voice of the customer that gets shared around and people can see how how the market is reacting, it's very often screenshots of LinkedIn threads. Right? You know?

Mark Evans: And Mhmm.

Kevin Tate: And which is funny. Right? But that's where the conversation is happening. And for us, it's often about, like, recipes. Oh, I'm using Clearbit plus this chat partner plus this personalization partner. Here how here's how I'm putting together. And you can see people having deep best practice dialogues in these LinkedIn

Mark Evans: chain.

Kevin Tate: We're starting to look at it more and more like a community. So and then how do we participate and support the community of data driven marketers who are sharing ideas and meeting one another and ultimately trying to further their their companies and their career on LinkedIn.

Mark Evans: One final question, and you mentioned the word community, and there's a lot of buzz in the marketing world about community. What are your thoughts on community? People talk the talk about community, but walking the walk is a lot more difficult. Is that something that ClearBoot is looking at, is embracing? Like, how do you equate or bring in community into the into the ClearBoot ecosystem?

Kevin Tate: It's a great question, and it's something we wanna do more of. I'll say this fall, we participated in some events. We participated in HubSpot inbound and, disaster and the, Dreams Force and and Opstars with LeanData. And that was some of the first in person events we've done a long time. And to me, it reminded me that community was, for us, as much about the partners and how we fit into their journeys and the way we are sort of better together in our customer stacks as it is the customers and then hearing from the customers and hearing what, you know, what they're really working on, how excited they are about what they're doing. There's a there's a big opportunity, I think, at Clearbit that I would like to figure out how to tap into, which is that I think because we work with a lot of innovative, data driven marketers and growth teams, they they talk about and they they tell us things about Clearbit almost like it's their tradecraft. You know? Almost like a like a designer would talk about, the Adobe toolset. You know? Well, this is how I do what I do, which I which isn't always the case. Right? And so I'm trying to figure out as a marketer, how do I harness and support that and, you know, how do I help them do what they do and also advance their their companies and their careers as a part of this this community. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there that we're just starting to tap into.

Mark Evans: If a company or a person is interested in getting started with Clearbit, where do they start?

Kevin Tate: I think the easiest and best place to start is with that weekly visitor report I mentioned. You know, you can go to Clearbit and you can sign up for a demo and you can look all around our data activation platform and see the pieces. But I think the weekly visitor report is one of the one of the most fun ways to just start discovering pipeline and opportunity that you might otherwise have missed.

Mark Evans: Great. And if people want to learn more about you, I guess LinkedIn is the best place to go.

Kevin Tate: I'm on LinkedIn. Maybe not as much as you are, but close. Okay. Sounds good.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks for the the great insight into what Clearbit's doing and the customer intelligence landscape. It's it's good to talk to people who are who are in the weeds and and seeing how the the market is evolving and shifting amid very, very challenging times.

Kevin Tate: Well, thanks so much for having me, Mark.

Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I work with b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO and strategic adviser and as physician and messaging consultant, emailmark@markEvans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. We'll talk to you