From metrics to money:​ How to win your CFO’s confidence (and your next budget)

0:05
Hi, welcome to From metrics to money, How to win your CF, OS confidence, and your next budget.

0:12
I am so excited to have Joe Oakley with me today.

0:18
It takes a lot for me to wrangle him into participating on these things.

0:23
But you know, job I shared with you a few weeks ago, I was with other marketers and we were talking about budgeting.

0:30
We were talking about, you know, how we work with finance and our CF OS.

0:35
And, you know, I shared that you and I have great conversations about all things marketing that you’re really marketing savvy.

0:43
And they were all envious.

0:45
And I thought, well, I should force you to come on and do this with me so that we can share your insights and help lots of other marketers.

0:53
Before we jump into today’s content, why don’t you take a second and introduce yourself?

1:00
Yeah, no problem.

1:01
Thanks Bo for the lovely introduction.

1:05
So my name is Joe Oakley.

1:06
I’m the CFO at Alkimer.

1:10
I’ve been in the CX space here at Alkimer for the last 6 plus years.

1:15
And as you might expect, I’ve spent the last 25 years in technology and services services organizations within corporate finance, primarily dealing with budgets and and annual plans and figuring out how to fund programs and and grow businesses.

1:31
So I really appreciate everyone taking some time on a Friday afternoon to come and listen to U.S.

1:37
chat.

1:38
Awesome.

1:39
And for those that may not know me, I’m Bo Bandy.

1:43
I’m the CMO here at Alkimer and I have worked in lots of different marketing functions from content to product marketing to the mangen.

1:51
And so have often faced the challenge of how do I get either my entire marketing budget approved or how do I get funding for a very specific initiative or area of marketing.

2:04
And so this is a topic that I, I love talking about before we jump into today’s content, maybe kind of agenda and a few housekeeping items.

2:16
Obviously, this is being recorded and we will share content afterwards.

2:22
Also in the announcements section, you’ll find a, a link to download the E guide.

2:29
That’s the companion piece to this.

2:30
So be sure you do that.

2:33
With that, Joe, I think before we really get into this, let’s start with the poll.

2:39
I am really curious about, you know, understanding what what today’s participants are facing when it comes to the challenges in working with their CFO or finance team, four options.

2:53
So we have, they’re not aligned on the metrics that matter, ability to prove results of marketing programs.

3:01
Perhaps they’re struggling with a disagreement on budget expectations or they’re facing unreasonable expectations around forecasting.

3:11
What’s, what’s your guess on what challenges people are facing?

3:17
I I think it’s maybe related to getting to the, to the data and metrics that they need or get being able to access the data that they need, generally speaking.

3:27
Yeah, I mean, my guess if I think about it, I think you and I have probably actually discussed every one of these at different points, right, where I want to do something and either, you know, we’re not aligned on what the outcomes going to be.

3:45
I, I actually think, you know, a lot of folks are in planning for next year right now.

3:50
I think maybe it’s going to be unreasonable expectations around forecasting.

3:56
Let’s see, let’s, I think we’ve given folks enough time.

3:58
That’s everyone’s favorite problem during budget season, I’m guessing so that it may skew that way since it’s no, that’s right.

4:05
All right, taking a look at it, it looks like by far ability to prove results of marketing programs is the biggest challenge here.

4:15
So no, no real surprise.

4:18
It’s exactly I think what you said.

4:20
So let’s jump into it, kind of take us through the metrics that matter.

4:26
What are the things you care about and why?

4:29
Great, thanks.

4:30
Thanks, Bo.

4:30
So maybe before I jump into the specific metrics, maybe I’ll talk a little bit about kind of what I think the CFO does.

4:38
And so like what I spend my time doing and when I go to CFO conferences or talk to peers, you know how they think about their jobs.

4:45
And, and really at the simplest level, what I do most days is try to figure out how to deploy capital in the most efficient, highest ROI way.

4:56
So a lot of times, and, and you know, I may be oversimplifying it a lot.

5:01
And I do this actually as part of my data job, which is I’m trying to figure out when I’m talking to somebody and they have an investment requirement or they want to deploy money or they want to spend more or hire people.

5:12
I’m trying to figure out, does this fit into a pure revenue generating opportunity or is this an overhead, right?

5:20
And I’ll tend to put things in one of those two buckets.

5:23
And my goal with overhead programs are to overall reduce the cost.

5:29
So how do I do this as efficiently as possible?

5:32
And so the conversations I have are about how do we, how do we do this faster or cheaper or with less resource or less, less technology spending or whatever that might be.

5:42
What I’m ideally trying to do is take those dollars I save and deploy them towards projects that are going to ultimately generate revenue that could be through new customers, retention, higher value per customer.

5:54
And I think really the trick is or the, the strategy if you’re in a marketing department is figure out from the very beginning how to frame whatever project or whatever initiative you’re working on in terms of things that the finance, your finance partners, whether it’s the CFO or somebody within else within finance really care about.

6:13
So understanding what metrics they are really focused on.

6:17
It’s really kind of interesting how often people think they understand what I might be tracking or what I care about, but maybe don’t really know.

6:25
Make sure you understand the definitions and then figure out how to talk about your projects in terms of that language.

6:33
And so I think that’s like kind of like a quick lead in to a couple metrics.

6:38
I’d also say finance people are lovely.

6:42
They’re always willing to chat with you.

6:43
There’s somebody you should have a finance friend somewhere within your organization who can help you understand exactly how your company might cap calculate metrics, these metrics or similar metrics.

6:54
Everyone has a slightly different definition.

6:57
If you don’t have that friend or you don’t have these metrics, these are really good starter places for any one of these metrics.

7:04
No one’s going to tell you you did it completely wrong or tell you that your results are invalid.

7:10
But you know, always ask the question and try to get alignment.

7:13
So if I kind of like jump into, you know, a few slides on a couple key metrics, some obvious ones, customer lifetime value.

7:21
So how much is a customer worth?

7:25
Ultimately, everything marketing does is about driving revenue, but there’s a whole bunch of metrics that precede that, and customer lifetime value is one of those.

7:36
So the basic level customer lifetime value is how much is a customer buying from you over what their lifetimes, whatever their lifespan is.

7:46
So if they spend $100,000 a year, an average three-year life, you know the customer lifetime value is $300,000.

7:54
You can get much more complicated in terms of how you calculate that, how you think about expansion or contraction across that kind of a quick tip, like if you’re not sure how to calculate your customer life, it’s actually really simple from a mathematical perspective.

8:10
If you understand what your customer churn rate is not in dollars, but in like an actual number of customers over a given.

8:17
If you just divide 1 by churn, that mathematically equals your true average customer life.

8:24
And it’s, it seems simple, but it, it proves out and it’s, it’s accurate.

8:28
So it’s an easy way to figure out your life from one simple number.

8:33
I’ll go to the next slide here.

8:36
So here’s the other side of that.

8:38
So customer lifetime value is what I get.

8:40
How much does it cost me?

8:43
So we talk about a lot of enterprise businesses talk about CAC, retail businesses talk about it as it’s as simple as saying what is the cost from complete sales and marketing perspective to acquire a new customer divided by the number of customers that you acquire.

8:58
In any given some more complex views of this, you might look at sales and marketing spend from 1/4 before compared to the customers that you acquired in the current quarter.

9:09
So you can adjust for the sales cycle within that.

9:14
You can also make it purely a a a new business customer or you can add in components of upsell cost if that makes more sense for your business in the numerator.

9:25
But having a really good understanding of what it costs, even if it’s a simplistic view to acquire a customer is kind of core to this overall component.

9:35
And you can get way more complicated.

9:37
There’s sort of LTV to CAC and other metrics that you can drive off of these two metrics that we’ve just talked about.

9:43
But if you don’t know what a customer is worth over time and you don’t know what it costs to acquire a customer, it’s really hard to build a business case that sort of resonates with a finance person.

9:56
Customer churn, again, this is a base metric.

9:58
So often you’re not trying to maybe retain or to grow or, or find a new customer, but your program may really be based around keeping the customers that you already have.

10:11
And candidly, those are the the best customers to go keep.

10:14
They’re often the cheapest customers to retain, right?

10:17
It’s very expensive to find a new customer.

10:19
It’s a lot easier and a lot more efficient to keep a customer you already have.

10:24
And again, this is a very simple view of it.

10:25
You can get way more complicated.

10:28
But fundamentally, if you’re just looking at the number of customers lost in a period, any given.

10:33
You can measure this daily, monthly, weekly, annually, divided by the number of customers at the beginning of that.

10:41
That gives you a good idea of your customer churn.

10:44
If you take a reciprocal, if you take 1 minus that number, that’s effectively your customer retention rate.

10:51
We tend to look at this denominated in dollars of retention.

10:55
We will look at the count as well.

10:56
So understanding how your finance team thinks about it, are they really focused on the count of customers or they focused on the dollar retention is an important understanding and it’s the same, the math is the same.

11:07
You just start with beginning dollars, you know, as the denominator and the numerator would be lost dollars during that.

11:16
So Joe, we talk a lot not only at Alchemer, but with our customers, right about customer experience and that fits right in, right.

11:25
If we can improve the experience for our customers, we, you know, improve the the customer return rate or I guess reduce the customer return rate.

11:34
When you’re looking at CX programs and funding CX programs, what are red flags that you’re like, oh, if I if, if it lands on my desk, I’m there’s no way I’m approving it if I see XY or Z?

11:47
Yeah, a lot of time, yeah, it’s a good question.

11:49
A lot of times I’ll see programs that don’t have a hypothesis.

11:55
That’s like all they form.

11:56
So back to kind of my original comments, I’m interested in like, there’s just things we have to do as a business.

12:02
Is this an overhead project?

12:04
Like you need a new tool or you need to spend money just to keep the lights on and do some of the basic things?

12:09
Or are you doing something that’s going to make a difference to our top line?

12:13
And so often the projects just get presented as a request for spending.

12:16
I need this tool or I need to engage this third party agency to help me with something, but you don’t the, the, the people requesting don’t provide me any context.

12:29
So the first red flag is like, is there actually a hypothesis?

12:31
Like what are you trying to do and what are you trying to accomplish?

12:35
The second thing that’s kind of a red flag is I don’t expect everything to immediately drive a return, right?

12:42
Some things take years to actually result in a top line impact, but I’d want to know what the milestones are across time and then how are we going to measure progress towards the ultimate goal that’s been outlined in that hypothesis.

12:58
So if someone comes to me and they’ve got an idea about how we’re going to go drive something impactful for the business, that’s something that I care about because there’s been some alignment around what matters to the business.

13:08
They’ve got an idea about what they’re going to do and how it’s going to impact that.

13:12
And they can articulate how what I’m going to see as the first step, second step, third step towards that ultimate goal, like what those milestones are.

13:20
I have AI have a lot of confidence in making an investment in that If it’s just an ask for spending because XYZ is important obviously, right?

13:29
Like no one has ever said, you know, talking to our customers is a bad idea, but but why do I need to spend more to do that if it’s not going to drive an outcome?

13:39
Sure.

13:40
So I think what I heard you say is if I want to get my program approved, I need a hypothesis.

13:49
I need to articulate how I’m going to measure that, preferably kind of both near term, some sort of a kind of leading near term indicator and then what’s the long term and the timeline for that and have a good understanding of what it that, what a realistic timeline would be.

14:09
And kind of, you know, with that, again, what am I, what am I measuring?

14:12
What’s the impact?

14:13
And if I come to you with all of that kind of thought out, I’m, I’m starting from a good place, then yeah, like, and a good example is NPS, right?

14:20
Everyone, like everyone wants to move NPS up and people want to invest in that.

14:25
But what do we want to do?

14:27
How do we want to accomplish a business outcome from that metric?

14:31
And so Step 1 might be we’re going to improve MPs, that’s going to translate into higher customer lifetime value, which will ultimately translate into better overall business results.

14:44
And then here’s how I’m going to measure our progress towards those outcomes.

14:49
Awesome.

14:50
I know we’re going to talk a little bit more about MPs, so I think you’ve got one more metric here to talk to us about average.

14:56
Yeah, I, I, we got into the weeds into the interesting stuff before.

15:00
I Yeah, that’s right.

15:01
That’s what we should do.

15:03
Yeah.

15:03
So average revenue per user is another core metric.

15:06
This one’s pretty self-explanatory.

15:08
It’s another big thing that most companies, whether you’re consumer or B to B, really care about.

15:13
So how much revenue per customer can I produce?

15:18
So this again, you might have a specific program that impacts this or you might be looking to impact several of these metrics with an overall CX or VOC program.

15:30
Again, if I just kind of wrapped up with like these are very simple, easy to deploy metrics.

15:37
Step 1 is often getting to this core data, whether you’ve got it in marketing or whether finance has it, likely somebody has it.

15:44
If you don’t have this information starting to collect, it’s super important start to measure these things as a baseline and then start to measure how your programs impact these metrics over time.

15:57
Awesome.

16:00
We’re gonna kind of stick with that thread because I think to your point, like having these metrics is really important, but I think I’ve certainly run into challenges in past roles where it it’s hard to get that even though finance has it, it kind of opens up this debate and you mentioned it earlier, right on how do you want to even measure lifetime value and increases there?

16:25
Like is it on growth?

16:27
Is it just new business?

16:28
Like there’s so many variables and I think sometimes it can for marketing be really hard to pin people down.

16:35
So I want to talk a little bit about how I’ve approached that, like working with you kind of some of the things that I’ve said, OK, we’re going to, I’m going to get a win this way.

16:46
Before we do that, I’d really love to hear from our audience on what the greatest challenges and then they’re facing when it comes to measurement and analytics.

16:57
So what are the challenges you’re facing?

16:59
What’s the greatest challenge options, Insufficient tracking on marketing campaigns, lacking customer insights and sentiment, inability to access customer data, or a lack of clarity on the metrics finance needs.

17:16
All right, what’s your guess on this one?

17:17
Where do you think our audience is going to come in at?

17:19
I’m hoping it’s not the last one.

17:22
Just personally, that doesn’t look very good for my profession, but probably #1 is my guess.

17:29
I think people struggle with getting to the data.

17:32
Yeah.

17:33
And having it be, you know, the data that they need and that they can use.

17:37
Yeah.

17:38
I mean, I, I, I have a tendency.

17:40
I think I agree with you, right?

17:41
Like it’s hard to figure out how to, how to measure everything.

17:45
I do think sometimes in marketing it can be hard to maybe access the customer data.

17:53
I think folks that pick lack of clarity on the metrics finance needs, I suspect it’s people that you already described, right?

18:03
They’re throwing a budget ask over to you and they’re saying, hey, I need this tool to do this thing.

18:09
And then they’re hearing a no.

18:11
And so they walk away going, I don’t know what finance needs.

18:14
That’s my guess.

18:15
Let’s see how we did.

18:19
No surprise, you nailed it top of the list.

18:24
Insufficient tracking on marketing campaigns is the number one here.

18:29
So let’s talk a little bit about how some real examples of how I’m doing it here at Alkimer.

18:37
So under the category of customer acquisition costs.

18:41
So we we run paid programs with third party review sites.

18:47
So like G2 Kaptara, there’s, there’s several others out there.

18:54
We like these sites, right?

18:56
The audience is a high value.

18:57
They’re actively, you know, looking and shopping for tools, doing comparisons.

19:02
We have seen that these sites are also a, a good source of referral and direct traffic for us.

19:08
So we want to make sure we’re showing up there, you know, in this new AI world, we also know that reviews are driving Geo results.

19:18
So it’s important that we show up well on these review sites.

19:23
And then again, we’re using paid programs to get intent data to get targeted leads.

19:29
The problem is, is that it’s been pretty expensive for us and one of the ways to bring that cost down is to get have more reviews on those sites.

19:41
So we’re getting a kind of an improved ROI.

19:44
So that was that was our goal, right.

19:46
So we wanted to increase the number and frequency of reviews sort of as a spin off of our NPS program.

19:53
We didn’t want to add time and we certainly didn’t want to add money from the marketing team.

19:58
So what we did is we and I, we got another slide in here, another example on our NPS program, but we took the folks in our NPS program that were giving us A9 or A10 on likelihood to like likeliness to recommend.

20:15
We 24 hours after they took the survey, we now send them an e-mail and we asked them to go out and give us a review on one of these sites.

20:25
We don’t incentivize them to do it.

20:26
We just simply ask like since you’re a fan, would you go and and do this on our behalf.

20:32
The first half of this year, our cost of acquisition was just under $6000.

20:38
We not generating very many reviews, spending a lot of money and not getting much in terms of MQ LS.

20:48
In June, we implemented this program to ask again our promoters to review us.

20:54
We’ve seen our review count double.

20:57
We decreased our investment there and we’ve seen more MQLS coming out of the site.

21:01
So really cut our cost of acquisition in half for this program.

21:08
For folks that heard you talk about cost of acquisition earlier, they may be thinking, well, OK, but this isn’t your overall cost of acquisition.

21:17
And that’s totally true.

21:18
But I think as a as a marketer, one of the things I’ve found is if I can show up with a business case that looks like this for one initiative that obviously would impact our overall cost of acquisition.

21:30
It really helps me bring you a complete picture, Joe of like, hey, here are the things we’re we’re going to do and then we’re going to measure and what we’re hoping to get out of it in this anything you would you wish I had done differently or you’re like, hey, you should have showed up with this other thing too.

21:48
No, I mean, I think, you know, we were aligned around this sort of initiative.

21:53
Maybe just to comment on your, your point you just made, which is like customer acquisition cost at aggregate at a corporate level on an annual basis is something I report to the board, but it’s not an actual actionable result.

22:07
And so like I care about what the components are against a target.

22:12
So like I want to do it at a program by program level or a initiative by initiative level.

22:17
I do think, you know, the one thing I would mention here, which we’ve talked about and we’ve gotten this question before is like, how do you actually get people to respond, right?

22:26
Like so how do you effectively get the, the sample or the, or the responses that you need?

22:31
So maybe you could kind of comment on that.

22:33
Yeah, you’re talking about the NPS program.

22:36
Yeah.

22:36
Like how do you get, It’s a great question.

22:40
Let me, I’m, I’m gonna jump ahead actually, and we’ll come back to my second example in a second.

22:45
We’ll jump to my third.

22:48
So NPS program for those that aren’t familiar, right, is Net Promoter score.

22:54
It’s used to kind of measure customers on are they promoters, detractors or are they passive, meaning they’re just kind of neutral.

23:03
So we obviously as a company that provides software for this, we run an MPs program.

23:10
One of the things that we worked with your team on, Joe, when you guys did a great job of identifying was wow, we’re, we see that our neutrals are actually our most at risk customer group, right?

23:24
And so we kind of were like, how could we, how could we help in that?

23:29
How could we make a change with that, right.

23:32
We think about how, how do we improve our survey response rates?

23:38
So we don’t offer an incentive.

23:42
I think there’s pros and cons of that, but I think the market research researchers out there would say for an NPS, you really shouldn’t incentivize.

23:50
We don’t, but we’re really thoughtful about how we ask, right.

23:55
So we make it on a really regular cadence.

23:58
We ask if we haven’t seen somebody in the platform in a while and they come in to use it, we’ve automated asking them right after that.

24:06
We again ask on a regular cadence.

24:08
We are, we keep sort of the questions set very small.

24:15
We don’t have to ask things like name and e-mail and those sorts of things.

24:18
We really just ask the key questions, which also helps our response rate.

24:23
So lots of tips and tricks on MPs.

24:25
And if that’s a topic that you know, as an audience member you’re curious about, I’d say come to our website.

24:32
We’ve got a lot of resources specific to MPs.

24:36
So in this case though, we were really focused on, OK, how are we going to target our passive responders to improve their retention rate.

24:44
So again, we we knew from the MPs that they were sort of neutral about it.

24:50
So we took that segment on the marketing side and started running kind of education and kind of value.

24:58
I wrote value during here, but truthfully it’s probably value awareness campaigns to help customers understand how could they get more out of the platform, what were new ideas for using it, sharing other customer stories with them to help them really engage and understand, you know, that there was more they could tap into.

25:18
We worked really closely with our customer success team on kind of what the topics for this would be and where they thought there would be opportunity.

25:27
This is a really great example of I don’t, I don’t have a result yet for you because it’s kind of one of those where we need to let it run.

25:34
You know, if we survey folks, I think no more than quarterly, but more it’s more like twice a year.

25:42
So we need to put our program in place and we need to let it run.

25:46
But what we’ll be looking at is within that customer base, has their NPS, have they moved their NPS response right?

25:53
Have they shifted up into a promoter or hopefully not, but maybe they went backward and are now less happy.

26:01
So we’re initially looking for their NPS response to change.

26:06
And then our long term metric here is obviously retention, right?

26:10
So do we see the customers that were in this segment that we’re targeting?

26:13
Do we see them stay for a greater period of time?

26:18
So Bo, you mentioned a couple programs that you guys, you know, on our team here at Alcamer put in place from your perspective, like where were the biggest analytics or data gaps that you experienced in terms of trying to get to numbers that we could use to talk about how these were moving the business forward?

26:38
Yeah, I mean, I, I’m not sure that we had had or have huge gaps.

26:46
I think it was more in that we needed to be intentional about the segments, right?

26:54
So like in that last example, we didn’t just say, oh, we want to improve our retention, so we’re going to go run these campaigns to all of our customers, right?

27:03
Like we used NPS as a segmenting tool to go and find a customer group that we could go and engage with.

27:10
I think, you know, we on the NPS, which is very common.

27:14
The last question is an open text box where they can kind of share their thoughts and comments.

27:18
We actually kind of scrape that and use our AI tool to understand what people are looking for.

27:27
They’re looking for specifically, right?

27:30
Are there some key themes?

27:31
Are there complaints around a particular issue, right?

27:34
Are there, are they raving about something, right?

27:37
And it gives us on the marketing site insight to go lean into those opportunities, right?

27:43
If they’re raving about customer success, it tells us we should be doing a lot more to market how great our customer success is and how that differentiates us.

27:52
So I think here I’m really lucky because we have a lot of that customer data available at other places that hasn’t been the case and it’s been much harder to understand what we should be talking to our customers about.

28:06
So I think customer metrics is certainly a challenge and I think like most marketing organizations generally, we have to keep working on our attribution models to understand like what campaigns are having an impact where, you know, if I rewind to the review sites campaign that we, you know, are running, I, I’m not really measuring today the improvements that we see around traffic, website traffic, but we could, we just don’t feel like it’s a, a metric that we can get to super quickly and easily.

28:44
And so we’re not including it, but like, if that gets easier for me, then that would be a second data point that I’d be sharing with that campaign.

28:51
Yeah, that like that like really resonates because I think there’s two things that that made me think about.

28:57
One, as I think too often people use MPs as an aggregate metric and it’s the end in itself, right.

29:04
The measurement of MPs and what’s happening to it is the result.

29:08
And really I think it’s a means to an end and actually decomposing it and understanding the cohorts within it become make it a super powerful easy to use metric and almost everyone has it.

29:19
And I think that correlation, right, that correlation with the business outcome, there’s often that’s like where people, I think what we hear from, you know, people online and what we’ve heard from customers, like trying to correlate that with one of these business metrics is hard.

29:32
But I think the other thing that I think about with that is I’d rather have the team start somewhere.

29:38
So maybe you don’t have perfect data, but if you have directionally correct data, you can start to drive some business decisions off of that, like, and you can* that as you present it.

29:50
And, and really say here, this is the best we’ve got.

29:52
We’re able to get to this cohort of data and we can correlate it with this MPs data and it’s 80% correct.

29:59
But you can start to build some confidence around what you’re doing.

30:02
So like one, it’s like don’t use it as an aggregate tool MPs and then just figure out how to tie it to something that matters, even if it’s not perfect in the beginning.

30:14
Yeah, for for sure.

30:16
I agree with that.

30:17
And I think one of the things I’ve appreciated about your team and I think to your point of go find a friend and finance is a lot of times we’ve come to you and said, here’s the data that we do have and what we think it’s indicating, but we need a deeper, we need a deeper analysis on it, right.

30:34
And like we don’t have a business analyst on the marketing team.

30:37
And like you’ve been really generous to be like, I see what you’re seeing, but let me put somebody on it.

30:41
And then your team has like really gone to work, work and use their brilliant finance brains to help us really get to the heart of the data.

30:50
And that I think having that relationship and coming at it from the same kind of, hey, we have a hypothesis has been super valuable.

30:58
Yeah.

30:59
I’ve got one more example I’ll share on kind of how we’re trying to impact those big metrics, but do it in a really, again, a smaller, more measurable way.

31:11
So if we go back to the concept of average revenue per account, obviously we all want to see that increase.

31:17
And so one of the things we’ve been working on this year is how do we cross sell our Alcamore Pulse product.

31:24
I mentioned we had an AI product that’s Alcamore Pulse.

31:27
So we’ve been focused on how do we cross sell that to our existing customer base or upsell to our customer base.

31:35
You mentioned it earlier, right?

31:38
Selling more to our current customers is certainly cheaper than going out and trying to find a new customer.

31:43
And so if we can see Lyft in the customer base, that’s certainly more affordable for us.

31:51
So that’s what we set out to do.

31:53
Again, increase the number of customers who purchase.

31:56
Our approach here was that segment, we’re going to target the customers that don’t have it.

32:02
And there was a little more nuance to it, right, because we know it’s not necessarily the right product for everyone.

32:07
So kind of segmenting that customer set to find the right group.

32:12
And then the team did a really great job of building some webinars for them, some kind of content E guides, blogs, that sort of thing.

32:20
And then a whole bunch of emails.

32:22
We really went out to that segment and tried to talk to them about the value of of integrating it and bringing it into their feedback program, how they could leverage it.

32:32
We kicked that off late May, early June.

32:37
And since then we’ve seen twice as many customers buy in roughly the same.

32:43
And we saw a 31% kind of increase in in the revenue there.

32:46
So I think really promising, right?

32:50
I think this is again is another example where now we can take this to your team and say, look, here’s here’s what we did and where we think we have more opportunity and we’d like to put, you know, some investment into it.

33:01
And what would that look like and what would that take?

33:04
So again, not trying to measure the, you know, the increase in all of our accounts or at a really, you know, overarching level, just trying to pick specific programs and tie that to a business metric and show that we can, can have an, have an impact there.

33:24
Let me, I, we, we have another section to jump to, but while, while we’re getting there, we’ve got a few questions coming in.

33:33
I think maybe the first one that I’m going to throw to you, Jove, is when a program’s cost or results don’t match expectations, how should that be shared with the finance team?

33:44
So I think scenario here is maybe it’s, hey, we had a hypothesis that we could spend X and get Y, and maybe it’s turned out that we didn’t get Y.

33:56
How how do you want us to tell you about that?

33:59
Yeah, I, I would say, you know, at a high level, it’s regularly and transparently, right.

34:05
So it’s, well, listen, we’re all trying to do the same thing like, so if we First off, like we talked about going in it with a shared understanding of what we’re doing.

34:13
So like hopefully you’ve made your finance team, your partners and whatever’s going on.

34:19
And then what you should be doing is talking about the progress of that.

34:21
So how are we, how are we doing against those milestones?

34:24
Is it behind, if the program is behind, what’s our plan, right?

34:29
Do we still have belief in it?

34:30
Or are we going to like dial down the spinning?

34:32
We’ve, we’ve learned enough and this isn’t a good area to spend money.

34:34
We want to go somewhere else or it needs more time.

34:38
We’re starting to see some signs of life or some progress in these two or three, you know, early metrics where that’s like moving NPS up as an example.

34:47
We’re starting to see our passives move a little bit and you know, our hypothesis is that will lead to XY or Z.

34:55
And so we want to keep this program running ultimately like it’s, I don’t expect everything to work out.

35:03
What I really want to do is get to answers quickly, make sure that we’re putting money behind things that’ll work.

35:08
If something’s not working, you know, shift those dollars away from it into something else where it is going to work and then continue that way.

35:16
And I think if you’ve got that relationship with your finance partner, whether it’s ACFO or somebody else, they’re going to be really supportive of whatever you’re doing and they’re going to give you time to sort things out.

35:27
I think the worst case scenario is, you know, defensive conversation or a lack of information generally makes me feel like we’re wasting money as like my default position.

35:37
So an honest conversation with data to support your point of view and what you’re asking for is always the place to be.

35:44
I think that’s a nice transition, right?

35:47
So kind of what we’ve been talking about is like how do we put together a, a business case for, for fun getting funding.

35:55
So maybe we’ll, we’ll tackle this together.

35:57
But I think first and foremost, right, you’ve been really clear, like we on the marketing side need to get finance involved from the very beginning.

36:05
Make sure you understand kind of what, how we’re thinking about something, why we’re thinking about it #2 align with corporate business goals.

36:17
You know, any, any commentary here?

36:19
Like should we try to be?

36:21
I, I shared 3 examples where we were pretty specific.

36:25
Is that good enough?

36:26
Should we be more specific?

36:27
Should we try to tie the overarching goals more kind of what’s your thought there?

36:32
Yeah, I don’t think, I think these sub components.

36:35
So we talked about ARPU, we talked about moving LTV, we talked about moving retention.

36:40
I think you need to tie your your plan, whether it’s an annual plan or quarterly plan to like sub components of the overall corporate metrics.

36:50
Like it’s really hard to say I’m going to improve revenue or I’m going to improve bookings or ARR overall because you can’t really you can’t measure back against those large numbers.

37:01
So I think that middle ground of outcomes is the right place to like link things up and from a from an alignment perspective, love that.

37:13
And I think specific to the marketing team, right, like if you have a sales LED motion, you don’t marketing doesn’t close the deal, right.

37:23
And so it’s really hard.

37:24
There’s so many other variables in there that we can’t control.

37:30
Yeah.

37:30
All right, so covered that.

37:32
I think next one, start with the benefit statement.

37:36
You know, I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory.

37:39
This is what we’re setting out to achieve our hypothesis.

37:43
As we’ve been saying #4 make a case for your solution.

37:49
I’m curious about the things in parentheses, actually.

37:51
So tell us what you’re thinking.

37:53
Do you want us to bring you options?

37:55
Should we bring you good, better, best?

37:58
Like what?

37:59
When you say options, what are you thinking about?

38:02
Yeah, I think so.

38:05
I think there’s two different axes that matter here.

38:09
So one, let’s start with the easy one, Cost levels or cost have has the team I’m engaging with considered how to optimize this, right?

38:19
So are they bring me the most expensive bespoke solution that’s, you know, 30% more than we really need to achieve the outcome, right?

38:28
So it’s like the very coolest, most expensive tool or the right set of tools that’ll accomplish the outcome.

38:34
So I always appreciate that someone’s considered the cost of their program and what they really need and has been sort of diligent about their asks.

38:42
That’d be 1.

38:43
So maybe it’s not even options as much as like, you wanna know that we’ve done our homework.

38:50
So like, it could be that that bespoke solution is the right thing.

38:53
But you wanna understand, I looked at these three other platforms that cost this much, but they don’t work for us because of XY and Z.

39:03
Yeah.

39:03
So if it’s the, if it’s the most bespoke, most expensive solution, why did we land there?

39:07
Why do we need that?

39:09
That would be.

39:09
So that’s on just kind of the like tactical side of it on options.

39:14
I’m always really interested in this kind of crawl, walk, run approach.

39:18
So do I have to go all in?

39:20
Do I have to commit, you know, this entire budget or can we start this off and earmark dollars later in the year once we’ve sort of proven that this is working right?

39:31
So it’s really easy to scale or it’s much more effective to scale your program down a little bit and, and ask them to ask your finance team to set dollars aside if it’s working and if it’s paying off and get get the yes on a smaller deployment of whatever you’re doing with an understanding that you’re gonna come back and ask for funding when you’ve prove proven out some touch point or some milestone along the way.

39:56
So like, I think those are the two things.

39:58
And when I look at someone who’s making a case, they they’ve really thought about what they need and they’re giving me some optionality and how to start.

40:06
Because that DE risks it for me.

40:08
If it’s a multi $1,000,000 investment and I have to commit to the whole thing, I’ve got a lot more questions.

40:13
I’ve got to do a lot more diligence.

40:15
If I can like tiptoe into that or just wade into that and commit a little bit of capital to see if it works out, then I’m a lot more likely to not dig in and ask a whole ton of questions.

40:27
Yeah, I love that.

40:30
We have a good question around what would you advise a marketing leader to stop saying or start saying to get finance buy in faster?

40:38
I mean, I think you just covered it, but anything else that you would add?

40:43
Well, I if I like oversimplify it, it like if I the thing the stop saying is I need this PO or contract signed today, you know, and it just comes across and we’ve never had a conversation about it, right?

40:56
I don’t I don’t know what it is and I don’t and it’s like, OK, well, why, why when what where like I have all the questions.

41:06
SO22 questions on that.

41:09
Is there a dollar threshold for you that you’re like, you know, oh, if it’s if it’s under 5K or it’s under 10K or it’s under 30K, like just fine.

41:20
Like I’m not going to question it.

41:21
But like if it comes across my desk and it’s over a certain amount, you better believe it.

41:26
Yeah, I would say there definitely is a dollar threshold, not just close my personal dollar threshold because that’s just too much information for Beau.

41:33
I knew it in terms of getting her things approved.

41:37
But here’s what I would say, I think any amount that’s more than nominal, there’s probably somebody who has to approve it, whether it’s the CFO or somebody else doing that job.

41:47
And so I think context is always valuable for whoever that person is like at least pre sell it to whoever has to sign off on it, whether that’s an e-mail or a Slack or just a drive by a cube.

42:00
Like it goes a long way in streamlining things.

42:04
And then options, like I said is, you know, you know, how do we, how do we can we approach this in a, in a strategic, A tactical way?

42:10
That doesn’t mean I have to commit a huge amount of capital.

42:12
Yeah, you, you mentioned like don’t send it and tell me it has to be signed today.

42:19
We say create a sense of urgency, but that’s not what we mean.

42:22
So what are you looking for around urgency?

42:26
I’m, I’m always willing.

42:28
I mean, we experienced this with our customers a lot.

42:30
I’ll talk to our sales team and they’re like, it’s sitting on the CF OS desk.

42:33
We don’t know why.

42:34
And I’m almost always like, I know why it’s sitting on their desk is because somebody gave them a quick overview of it in a, in a drive by.

42:43
They’ve done 1000 things that week and now there’s a request for a bunch of spend.

42:48
They, they’re, they haven’t, someone hasn’t gotten them comfortable with it.

42:52
And now they’re just, they’ve moved on to something else, right?

42:56
They looked at it and they said, well, I don’t have all the facts to make this decision.

42:59
I’m gonna go do something else.

43:00
And it ends up sitting for days and days.

43:02
And so I don’t think it has to be a lot of context, but like, depending on the ask, I would say a conversation or an e-mail saying this is coming.

43:11
Sense of urgency always works.

43:12
If it’s like, hey, I’ve negotiated some discounts or I have to get this done by Friday to stay on the timeline that we discussed, I’m always going to prioritize getting those things done if I understand why the urgency exists.

43:26
So urgency is good.

43:27
Just give some context.

43:29
Yeah, All right, I think the others are pretty self-explanatory and we’ve got a few more slides to get through.

43:37
I I actually love this and I wish people would adopt this kind of one sentence business case for lots of things.

43:46
So it’s it’s very straightforward, right.

43:48
We propose to do blank in order to what’s the business outcome to bring the benefit of savings or revenue.

43:57
And here’s the cost, right?

43:58
I think it’s just such a simple, like straightforward way to like start the discussion.

44:05
What does it work for you?

44:07
Yeah, yeah, this is where I’d want to start.

44:10
Obviously, I’m going to like dig into areas.

44:13
And then the good news is if you just start with this, you’re going to learn what else you need, right?

44:19
I’ll have opinions about what the outcome is and are we perfectly aligned and how do I want to measure it and what do I want to see.

44:27
And so you got a, you’ll get a lot of information just by starting this way.

44:31
Yeah, love it.

44:34
All right, So we also, I mean, we’ve been talking about CX programs, NPS programs, etcetera.

44:41
You know, we, you and I have talked about this as a formula for, for calculating kind of the ROI on your CX programs.

44:50
You want to talk to it a little bit?

44:52
Yeah, I, I kind of view this as your, as your into your report card in some ways, like a metric like this where we’ve talked about how you’re measuring every single program or sub components of a, of a bigger CX program and how you’re showing progress against milestones.

45:09
I think coming back at the end of the year or at the end of 1/4, whatever your reporting cycle is and saying here’s, here’s the net impact I’ve had from my investment.

45:19
You want that in your finance partners because Bo and I have some of these metrics in terms of our pipeline efficiency.

45:26
And so I know when she comes and asks for a certain type of spend, I know what I’m gonna get just default and if those are really easy yeses, right.

45:34
So coming back and reporting on the overall outcome of your program, whether it’s this metric or you or you design a new one, is a really great way to sort of like capstone whatever activity you’re doing.

45:47
And like I said, every company has a, a, a reporting cycle, whether that’s quarterly or annual that I think it makes sense to measure these things on and it’s a good way to show the value you’re driving.

45:59
Yeah, I’m, I’m gonna say, I think people should keep in mind that this could be your overall CX program, but more likely it’s probably 1 initiative within the CX program, right.

46:15
So like I shared, you know what we’re doing around sort of better engaging our passive net promoters.

46:24
And so like I might use this formula just to measure that initiative and I’ll probably put together four or five slides on the different CX focused initiatives.

46:35
But I’m not trying to say, OK, it’s, it’s this whole universe of things.

46:39
And I’m gonna give you 1 number because that just gets too complicated.

46:44
And you know, I don’t know when I do that.

46:47
I’m, is it gonna be a green light, Joe?

46:50
No, right.

46:51
Because when we talk about budgets every year, it’s where we do what’s, what are all the things we’re doing and what’s the efficiency of each one.

46:59
The whole sort of like, trust me, it’s all working, you know, works for some people, but most of the time CF OS are too skeptical to buy the trust me, it’s all working.

47:10
Yep, approach.

47:12
Yep.

47:13
All right, last slide.

47:15
And then I know we’ve got a question waiting.

47:16
So this one is, is really more like tips for 26, right?

47:22
So I think for all the marketers that are have joined us today, you know, these are the things you need to think about as you put together your plan for 26, whether that’s getting more from your current budget or asking for new.

47:38
So I think one, it’s, it’s understanding the metrics that matter to the, to the CFO, to the finance team and how you’re going to contribute to those.

47:47
I think keeping it it simple.

47:50
So start small and 0 in on the metrics account, I think we’ve talked a lot about this right, in that like don’t try to measure the whole CX program, try to measure one or two initiatives.

48:00
You know, I think we’ve talked a lot to bullet 3 on measuring both the short and long term value.

48:06
So like can you measure a reduction in cost or an increase in this?

48:10
And then how does that tie into the overall number on a long term basis, prioritizing quick wins?

48:20
You know, I think when you see something that’s working, go do more of it, prepare for unanticipated costs and build flexibility into your strategies and then reduce costs with a unified CX platform.

48:34
I think you know, Joe, these five and six can kind of go hand in hand, right?

48:38
The preparing for unanticipated costs and I think, you know, kind of unifying your, your tool staff, we said CX platform here, but I think for marketers right across the board, like I’ll, I’ll say like an unanticipated cost we often face is when one of our vendors decides they are going to increase our technology cost at renewal, right?

49:02
And as much as I think I’m good at planning, like there’s just some of that that I can’t see.

49:08
Like I didn’t know that, you know, this tech vendor was going to come in this year and this was the year they were going to do 20% increases like because they, that’s what their business needs.

49:20
So I think, you know, when that happens, I have a tendency to go, OK, great.

49:24
How do I consolidate this?

49:25
Right?

49:25
Because we see a lot of redundancy in the marketing tech stack.

49:29
Other places where, you know, you’d recommend people prepare for what may be an unanticipated cost.

49:37
Are there other categories that you see being gotchas for people?

49:41
Yeah, I think, I think tools is a, you know, or systems is a core area where people often get surprised whether it’s like a 5% overrun or, or a major uplift.

49:51
I think build flexibility into your programs, right.

49:55
So don’t don’t get so wedded to a, a tool that you don’t have a way to get away from it if you need to.

50:01
That’s like I, I always try to approach it that way, like so that you can go shift.

50:07
And I think, you know, as you put your money to work within a program or a initiative like, you know, I, I’m really focused on optimizing the cost that I can.

50:16
So really reduce the costs that you can manage.

50:18
So you can put as much money as possible into the things that are gonna have the biggest impact, right.

50:24
So whether that’s the people that you’re gonna hire to support it or the money you’re gonna spend on, you know, with third parties, make sure that you’re, you know, really optimizing where your dollars go across a program.

50:38
Love it.

50:40
All right, I think we’ve got, we have a couple minutes left.

50:45
Let’s take a couple of questions, if you don’t mind.

50:50
So question one, looking ahead to next year.

50:53
So right in this theme of 2026 planning, looking ahead to next year, what’s the single most valuable thing our CX program could do for the business?

51:03
It’s a good question.

51:04
So it’s a, it’s a challenging question because it could really vary by business.

51:10
But if I had to like put a stake in the ground, I would say retention is probably almost #1 for everybody on the planet who has customers and, and simply because it’s much cheaper to keep a customer than it is find a new customer.

51:26
So I think starting with retention or focusing on retention is rarely going to be a bad place to, to start.

51:34
And then I think, you know, again, within CX programs, you’re probably collecting lots of different data points during your kind of customer journey that you know, as a team CX is using.

51:48
And I think if we assume marketing as a separate team and or you know, sitting under marketing, all that CX data is so rich for marketing, right, to be able to segment our customer base to go run campaigns to them and understand them.

52:04
It’s rich with insights on what customers want more of it can tell us where maybe we’re not talking about a program as much as we should.

52:13
So I think, you know, really getting into that CX data can unlock lots of lots of things that are important for the business.

52:22
Definitely.

52:24
I think, you know, last one is similar, right?

52:26
And tight budget year is what criteria should you use to decide which marketing programs get funded and which don’t?

52:33
Maybe I’m going to ask it differently to start.

52:37
Does your criteria change, Joe, if it’s a tight budget year?

52:42
So back to kind of where I opened, is this an overhead project or does this Dr.

52:46
outcomes for overhead type initiatives?

52:50
It definitely changes.

52:53
I think that’s where you see corporate wide initiatives to you know cut 20% of your software tools spending, things like that.

53:01
Rarely do programs that drive top line or believe to drive top line get substantially reduced in a healthy business.

53:13
And so I think that’s how I would prioritize my spend.

53:19
And your finance partner or CFO is going to be really appreciative if when you bring your budget, you’ve pre done that, right.

53:26
Whereas you’ve looked at ways to shift your own budget from things that are where you can save money towards things that are actually going to drive an outcome versus having to try to do that process with the FPNA team or the finance team.

53:40
Love that.

53:41
I think we should all be focused on how do we, how do we drive outcomes, how do we grow revenue?

53:46
But sometimes you have to spend some money to do that.

53:50
Well, it’s and then it’s, listen again, it’s like those get approved, right?

53:54
So it’s like I’m gonna do XYZ.

53:56
That’s super important.

53:57
We all agree I need to spend a little bit money.

54:00
I’ve really looked through my budget as hard as I could and I’ve saved a part of that.

54:03
But I need you to go fund the other 50%.

54:05
And here’s how I’m gonna show you how I’m doing a good job and how I’m making progress against that.

54:10
It’s pretty compelling case against, you know, if I’m stacking that against a whole bunch of other requests that’s got a really good chance of making it.

54:18
Yeah, well, awesome Joe, we are right at time.

54:22
You have shared a ton of great insights.

54:24
I think everybody that has joined us today or watches on demand later is going to be highly successful in winning, winning funding for their for their initiatives.

54:37
So thank you.

54:38
I know even even in this conversation, you gave me some good ideas to be more successful in my asks or to go measure some things differently.

54:47
So thank you.

54:49
If you’re joining us today or on demand, please scan this QR code, share your feedback with us.

54:56
You know, we’re happy to send you follow up materials.

55:00
We’ve got some great content on this topic.

55:03
And if you’d like to engage with us and talk about how Alkimer can help you run your CX initiatives, including NPS programs, we would be happy, happy to share more on that as well.

55:15
So thanks to everyone who joined us today.

55:17
And Joe, thank you again for your time.

55:20
Thank you very much.

55:22
Bye.