BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle
Today we’re talking with Billy Cripe, founder of BloomThink and VP Marketing at CIBO about how to bring companies from under 10 million to 100 million plus. And I think we’ll also touch on how AI can transform sustainability in farming.
Welcome to BeyondSaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We’re a growth agency and for over 20 years we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead gen and conversion. Go ahead and check out tethos.com/podcast for a free report summarizing what nearly 20 amazing tech leaders have shared on how to grow your own tech company. And today I’m really excited to explore tech company growth with Billy Cripe. He is.
founder of BloomThink, and he serves often as a fractional CMO where he offers in-demand teams of experts to deliver hyper growth. Currently, for example, Billy is VP of marketing at CIBO, and I think it’s been for five years, solving climate impact problems across the agricultural value change, which I find very fascinating and interesting.
And fun fact, I hear that you were a hype generator for 10 years as a master of ceremonies. So that sounds like you have a fun life here. Welcome, Billy.
Billy Cripe
Thanks for the opportunity to be here, Jason. I appreciate it.
Jason Niedle
So I’d love to offer listeners a quick tip. Do you have a golden nugget or something fun to offer here?
Billy Cripe
sure, so the latest technology that I’m absolutely gushing about right now is a small feature inside of Notebook LLM, which is an LLM system from Google that it’s a little bit different from say perplexity or chat GPT or some of the other LLMs and that you get to upload your content corpus and then interact with the LLM on that.
Corpus of content now it’s been trained against all the other you know big data sets But it’s very intelligent now the little golden nugget that I have for you is inside notebook LM There is a little button that says create audio overview and I swear to God you hit that a couple seconds later You have a full 14 to 22 minute podcast with two human voices a male a female they’re interacting talking about the stuff that you just uploaded
And it blows my mind. it might put us out of business, but it is absolutely wonderful for things like, hey, I want to review everything here, but I don’t have time to sit and read it. I want to listen to it either during my workout or on my commute.
And it’s ready to go, you know, just in seconds. It’s absolutely phenomenal.
Jason Niedle
That is super cool. I haven’t been doing golden nuggets. ran out around episode 10 or something. But that just made me think of something that’s been blowing my mind lately and it is a little bit related. Have you tried the deep research feature on chat GPT?
Billy Cripe
Yes, I have It’s it’s very cool. I love the chapter and verse citations that it gives I love that it’s know, it’s it’s hyperlinked I’ve only had one situation where it ended in a 403 error so it seems to be it’s it’s really good and it it’s so what amazes me is how fast the the llms have come from
Jason Niedle
So cool.
Mm.
Billy Cripe
The earlier days, which was really only a year or two ago where the hallucinations were rampant throughout the content that they would generate. They sounded good and it was like, I want to go check up on that. And the sources or the quotes or the things that they were referencing literally didn’t exist. Well, now it’s like, no, here’s where it is. And you can find the information where it So there’s a lot more confidence in.
Jason Niedle
Right.
Billy Cripe
what the LLMs are citing and how they are weaving it together. It’s a lot more of a reasoned approach, which I really appreciate.
Jason Niedle
When I’m doing my discoveries, I’ve taken several clients lately and I’ve said, examine the industry and examine who’s doing what well and who’s not doing what well and now look at my client and now find opportunities for growth there. And it gives this giant report with 60, 70 sources and it’s like a really good foundational starting point. And of course you have to do real work after that and figure it out. But there’s so much data that would have taken me hours and hours and hours to find and solve the right there.
Billy Cripe
Right.
That’s just
Exactly. Now take those sources, load them up into Notebook LM and interrogate those sources directly with Notebook LM or have it put together a little overview podcast for you and listen to it. Yeah, it’s absolutely phenomenal. I just did this for a client where we had to go through literally thousands of pages of government regulation.
Jason Niedle
Exactly, right? How cool would that be?
mmm
Billy Cripe
Documentation and talk about something that nobody no human being wants to sit and read and try and parse this Upload it have it generate a summary and now you can start interrogating it with your keyboard And then I ended up, know having it output a little you know, 20-minute summary overview It’s not gonna give you a dissertation in that overview But it is gonna give you the gist and that’s gonna be enough at least for somebody like me who’s helping lots of companies across various different industries
grow or scale up, it’s really becoming an invaluable tool.
Jason Niedle
I love that. All
right, well, tell me a little bit about BloomThink and your fun fractional CMO roles.
Billy Cripe
Yeah, you know what BloomThink started in 2011 and it Came out of my career with with big tech some out there in in Northern California a little bit north of where you you are at and You know, I had done computer programming and then product management and then product marketing kind of that was the kind of the evolution there and I started up my own thing because in my opportunities working with
big tech around the world, I was interacting with different industries. We were taking a core basis of middleware technology and implementing it in all different places for all solving all kinds of different problems. And that was really attractive to me. And that then really dovetails into people with an idea startups and younger companies who are like, Hey, we want to do a thing, but we’re not really sure how to orient it or target it or support our organization. Our sales organization, our channels, our partners, whatever.
So I started up BloomThink and got really deep in with some angel investors and some early stage companies who are all looking for a little bit of help, but they’re not yet ready to kind of jump in with both feet to build up a whole marketing department or hire a CMO, they know they need some. And that was a great niche for me. keeps my ADD happy and I get to keep on learning all about new things and new technologies and new approaches.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Billy Cripe
I’m dangerous enough with technology and code to be able to understand what’s going on, although I wouldn’t trust me to write a lick of production code anymore. And it really helps to focus in on that startup and scale up growth mindset. I really found a passion for hyper growth, hyper focused demand gen and you know, really building that momentum around growth and problem solving.
And what I found through doing BloomThink, and which I’m still doing to this day, is I get engaged with a company or several, and eventually one of them says, let’s stop dating, let’s get married. And we come on board, I come on board for a certain amount of time, help them grow up and scale up. What I don’t do well at is…
sitting behind a keyboard or a spreadsheet and just working on budgets and cranking out marketing budgets and marketing reports all day long. I like to get my hands dirty. I like to go out and talk to people and to listen most importantly to companies, to salespeople, to product managers, to users, end users. And that allows me to kind of absorb all of this information, synthesize it, repackage it, and then reflect it back to the market, which is really a
critical mechanism for driving hyper growth or scale up opportunities in these companies. For a little while, I was chief marketing officer at Field Nation, a human capital management platform that created a marketplace. In the early days, pre-pandemic, this was 2012 to 2016 or so, when the contingent workforce was just starting to become a thing.
Jason Niedle
Mm.
Billy Cripe
Didn’t even talk about fractional CMOs. It was like contingent workers and you know fiver and up work and some of these other platforms We’re just starting to ramp up and field nation all found a niche. They’re still around today doing great in field service workers so skilled licensed workers who are out building data centers pulling cable and running You know, they’ve got to have they’re building the cell towers and and doing the the real, you know high wire acts literally
out there and the big companies that need these services, they don’t have the internal staff to deploy a thousand people around the United States or around Europe. So they find contingent workers on a platform. Did that for a little while, took them from about 10 million to about 120 million. Then a PE firm that I’m connected with said, hey, we need your help over in cybersecurity. What do you know about cybersecurity?
I said nothing, but I know marketing and I know how to integrate companies so, we took a division out of this big company and smashed it up with a smaller cybersecurity startup out of Utah and then pulled in an Israeli company with some really cool technology and mashed that up all while we were also going from an on-prem
you know, solution with servers and blades and racks in a data center to a full SaaS cloud solution. So that was absolutely mind blowing. Started that with as a fractional CMO. And then we said, let’s stop dating. Let’s get married for a little while there. Came back to, Minnesota and started working for another, ransomware reversal company out of Silicon Valley.
Again, super cool technology. got to learn all about symmetric key intercept and how decryption works in the deepest guts of the bios and stuff. More than I could, I can’t even give it due credit in explaining it here, but some really, really neat tech. And then in 2020, another guy who I used to work with back in the early 2000s became CEO of a greenhouse gas accounting company, CIBO Technologies.
And he said, hey, we need help with marketing. I’ve just taken over this company. We’re doing some restructuring. Can you come in and help? I came in on contract. Again, we said, let’s stop dating. Let’s get married. I’ve been with them for five years. And then at the beginning of this year, this calendar year, I just went back on contract with them. And I’m wrapping up my contract there with CIBO Technologies.
Jason Niedle
Can you say
weeds when you’re working with agricultural companies?
Billy Cripe
It’s deep in the weeds.
there’s so many dirt and farming and plant puns. It’s so, it’s disgusting. I love it.
Jason Niedle
So your title is Fractional CMO and you talked about listening and repackaging. Like what is at the heart of that title or VP Marketing? What’s at the heart of that that makes what you do special?
Billy Cripe
I found that it’s really about listening to what’s going on out in the market, synthesizing that, repackaging and reflecting it back to the market. Nobody gets paid in leads. And this is one of the things that I learned early on by a CFO who I have immense respect for, kind of took me under his wing after I was, you know,
waving a reporter out in the air, look how many leads we have in the MQLs and the SQLs and the funnel and blah, blah, blah. And he said, Billy stop, nobody gets paid in leads. He said that to me 15 years ago and to that day that still resonates with me. I’m like, that is the lens that we need to look at the world through. Nobody gets paid in leads. the way that we get those dollars is
by solving problems, making people’s lives easier, solving a critical problem that they have for their business. And that’s a really exciting opportunity for us as marketers and as growth professionals to really get into because we’re not trying to extract as our primary focus, extract dollars, extract value, we’re trying to provide and give.
That gets people excited and that creates incredible value and that it creates incredible stories that it creates a gravity that is attractive to to the rest of the market that you’re targeting to new markets to people from a hiring and and Cultivation standpoint, know for organizations that want to grow that way It really is kind of the the secret sauce is you know as far as I’ve I’ve found and I’m still worried, right? So there might be something more else out there, but for right now it’s doing really pretty good
Jason Niedle
I don’t know what-
And it only happens with listening and hearing what their needs are, understanding those, and then making sure that you’re actually delivering the value back in that. I just had a tech CEO on last week who said he was obsessed and worked, you know, 18 hours a day, seven days a week. And the first thing he did is he went and interviewed 300 of his potential prospects and clients one by one to figure out what they really wanted. And I’m like, yeah, that’s obsessive. But at the same time, you knew more than Gartner knew at that point, right?
Billy Cripe
right?
Jason Niedle
And is it surprising that your company went from zero to seven million in a half a year?
Billy Cripe
Exactly, exactly. If we’re out there all shouting and there’s so many tools and techniques for pushing messages out into the world,
we may have 80 % of it right, but it’s still going to be missing the mark and we’re going to be out competed and outperformed companies who have taken the time to focus on that core message.
Jason Niedle
So how do you quote unquote listen? Initial interviews you mentioned, but what happens after that?
Billy Cripe
Yeah
This is where and I’m fortunate to have worked in both computer programming and product development and product management before I ever got into into marketing. But continually refining that. And that is everything from informal focus groups.
to being out there and voraciously consuming everything that you can. Most importantly, talk to your customers. Have the customer advisory boards or the user advisory boards, even if they’re informal, right? Use Slack or Teams or, use Google Chat to, you
convened these informal user groups. And of course, there’s incentive software out there that actually works pretty well to incentivize this sort of participation with your users, with your prospects, but you have to continually be listening to that.
And if your development cycles are really long because you’ve got complex software or manufacturing or whatever, you’ve got to do your due diligence ahead of time, not only to know what the market wants today, but to know that they’re still going to want it at the end of your product release cycle or your manufacturing cycle or whatever. Things are changing that fast.
You can be pivoting so much and not necessarily 180 degree pivots, but you can be switching directions or reprioritizing so much that you never get anything out or never get anything out that’s fully baked. And so that’s the challenge is to do that balancing act.
And then you built a really great solution for a market the size of one. And that’s a really hard way to scale a business, especially when they’re a very important early adopting customer. So that is really a challenge, but you want to look at adjacencies. I’m a big fan of spiraling up and outward from this core. And so that means at every step along that spiral,
Finding those adjacencies whether those are adjacent markets adjacent use cases And then I’m also a huge fan especially from the marketing side of the world on remix and reuse of of content of themes of you whatever I mean this this Podcast that we’re recording can be chopped up and reused into you know a number of you know LinkedIn posts and social media posts and maybe a video and maybe
Jason Niedle
Don’t
worry, I’ll send you clips.
Billy Cripe
Right all of the things like let’s let’s reuse that that’s how we can achieve an economy of scale with this well let’s do that with our product with our services offerings and then there’s still really no substitute in my opinion for the you know for the customer’s testimonial for the success testimonial because winners win and Winning is attractive to people who are unsure. It’s a confidence builder out in the market
Like, well, they did it. They’re like me and they use this or they implemented that or they bought that service and it really helped them. I can see how that would help. How that would help me.
Jason Niedle
It makes me think about two things. I just had a client and I interviewed his top 10 current customers and really understood, and he doesn’t have that many consulting, and I really understood what he was doing in that regard. And then now that we’re talking about it, it’s making me think, well, he wants to go to a broader market and I need to make sure to not apply that one market of people who can spend $2,000 a month to the people who are spending 50 bucks a month.
Billy Cripe
and
Jason Niedle
completely different audiences and I need to understand that other audience separately.
Billy Cripe
Right. Yeah.
And their drivers are going to be different as well. You can lean into the areas of overlap. Or you have to figure out a way to convince those fifty dollar a month folks that,
this is actually worth $2,000 a month, and I’m going to go ahead and lean in on that.
Jason Niedle
Yeah, right. And then the other thing that made me think about is, I was looking at a voice instructor and testimonials is key, but it’s also the brand names, right? If she were teaching, I don’t know, Christina Aguilera, then she could charge 500 bucks an hour instantly, right? With one name, you know? Which is like the logos that you see on the bottom of every, you you work with IBM and this and that, right? Then therefore you must be valuable.
Billy Cripe
Yeah, right,
from a go-to-market standpoint, those are trust proxies that I’ve been trusted by this company. Well that lets me know that at least, they did their due diligence and that, they’re willing to let, Sebo or to let Billiard, to let Bloom think, to let Jason put their logo on, his webpage. Okay. I’m willing to.
Give them a listen. I’m willing to give them a try. I don’t think anybody’s going to sign a contract on that basis, or make a purchase agreement. It absolutely does open the door. And having those trust proxies are really important. It’s all about boosting confidence. We live in a noisy marketplace. And so anything that you can do to say, you can trust what I’m doing to at least open the door to have that conversation.
Jason Niedle
Opens the door.
So our audience here are tech CEOs and a lot of times they’re not marketing people as much as they are tech people. Do you have kind of an arc of a strategy when you come in to look at the marketing? Do you have a broad structure that you look at that maybe they can think through their marketing with?
Billy Cripe
Mm-hmm.
There is an approach i’ve been doing this for 20 plus years and so i’ve developed. I guess i’ll call it a playbook But I like to think of it more like a marketing pantry. Because what we’re doing here is we’re taking ingredients and we’re crafting something
And in some organizations, we’re gonna craft for speed. and throughput, right? It’s fast food and it’s gonna be tasty and delicious. We’re gonna sell a lot of it. It’s gonna be cheap. Other organizations, you want full on white glove concierge level treatment, Michelin star level, the substance here. And that’s gonna be much more of a bespoke process. It’s gonna take a little bit longer, but the quality is gonna be so much higher. And there’s no right or wrong.
I call it my little marketing pantry, and then I have a whole series of different recipes that can be optimized for speed and throughput or for gourmet deliciousness. But the very first thing that I do, I tell even prospects, you need to do this, or you can hire me to come in and do this. We need to understand your target addressable markets.
Who are we talking about here? And so many CEOs are so bright and they’ve invented a thing or they’ve coded an app or a program. They’ve created something that’s really cool. And now they’re like, well, now what? They don’t necessarily have an idea of how to go forward with it. A friend of mine calls this an accidental CEO.
I’m running a company. What am I supposed to do? He comes in and helps advise the company. Sometimes he brings me in to help run and structure marketing so that they can grow and scale. His name is Pete Steggy, and he runs his consultancy B2B Clarity for what it’s worth. But I love his thought process there around this accidental CEO.
Who is it that we’re marketing to? And a good example is when I was first at CIBO Technologies, one of the very first things that I did way back then is they were starting an app that was essentially Zillow but for farmland. And one of the first things that I did, is a deep TAM analysis on
how much farmland in the United States is being bought and sold and what’s the value of that? And we very quickly discovered just doing that research that something like 5 % of all farmland that is bought and sold in the United States in any given year is on the open market. All the rest of it.
is a handshake deal with the neighbor or it’s sold to a family trust or to the nephew or the son. It’s not on the open market. so having a Zillow for Farmer, there’s not enough throughput here for us to build a business on something that’s geographically constrained to the United States.
Jason Niedle
Mm.
Billy Cripe
So we quickly pivoted away from that. Now there’s some really cool underlying technology, they’re doing amazing things now with greenhouse gas quantification and sustainability programs. But in those early days, we knew we needed to get something out. We knew we needed to have some talking points, It wasn’t going to go anywhere because there’s not enough market there. And so that’s a really important approach.
And for organizations that have, services offerings, there’s productized services offerings where they’re serving many different industries, so then you have to understand the TAM for each of those industries that you’re serving. Not just, we’ve got smart consultants and they all have PhDs, but also here’s how we’re going to be able to deploy them and deliver those services. And here’s what the dollars available are. And here’s what the competition looks like. And here’s how we are differentiated.
Here’s what the buying cycle looks like, If we’ve got enough, runway from fundraising or whatever for 12 months and the buying cycle as an average of 18 months, that’s not a good recipe for success, even if you’re brilliant, It’s just, understanding the mechanics of all of those go-to-market motions and figuring something out at the beginning.
Jason Niedle
you
Billy Cripe
So you have to understand the value of your market and how long is it going to take you to go from first touch to first dollar? And then how are you going to maintain and persist those folks will go on after new business. Once you have those three key levers, then there’s not many more levers that you can pull or that you need to pull. Everything else after that becomes tactics to drive awareness, engagement, and sales opportunity. Those are the three elements that I focus on.
A lot of marketers out there these days are like, you’ve got to use HubSpot AI or you’ve got to use Marketa or this tool or that platform with the Adobe suite is fantastic. It’s like you want all of these platforms and I’ve used all of them throughout my career They’re all great. They all do kind of the same standard stuff and they all have kind of areas of specialty That’s great, at the end of the day those aren’t
winning you business, it’s your story, your engagement, and your proof points out there in the market with that authentic voice that are gaining the awareness, earning you those rights to engage with the market, and then yielding those opportunities that you can bring over the finish line.
Jason Niedle
Cool. So you specialize in hyper growth. What do you see companies miss over and over again when it comes to actually getting there? Like every company wants hyper growth. Every company says they want hyper growth. What are they consistently screwing up?
Billy Cripe
I consistently see throwing money at, whether it’s email marketing or digital marketing.
They speak really, really well to the people who already love the product or the company. But I see so much money and resource being thrown that way without that going back to basics, understanding of what we’re doing, who we’re going after. I’ve recently seen a resurgence in kind of spray and pray email marketing, but we’re going to use a little bit of AI to personalize,
And clearly it was one of these things where somebody had mined either my LinkedIn profile or the company’s website and so they got some of these keywords right but did absolutely zero after that to tie what they’re talking about, what we need or who we go after the challenges is that you know
What’s attractive about the spray and pray models or the throwing a bunch of money at digital ads is you can get really big reach really quickly. You can be like, I can deliver a million impressions to your website in a month. And it’s like, yeah, you can. But those eyeballs aren’t the eyeballs that you care about.
Especially younger companies with, CEOs or boards of directors who are not necessarily schooled marketing and they need those quick hits. They hear the promises and they’re like, all I have to do is write a check or, send some money and then they’ll get me all these impressions. And then they, do that for three months, six months, a year sometimes and go, where’s the revenue?
It’s like that stuff doesn’t matter if it’s not translating into, the dollars or subscriptions or, you know, ARR and MRR.
Jason Niedle
Gets back to your earlier statement about, you know, leads aren’t paying bills,
Billy Cripe
Yeah,
yeah, nobody gets paid in leads, right? We’re not getting paid in these impressions. In fact, one of the first things I did when I came on at CIBO is I inherited a very expensive digital marketing contract and we had to basically buy our way out of that. Because again, it was one of these things where we were, the previous administration, right, I’ll blame that, I inherited a contract, but it was like, they agreed to this thing.
Jason Niedle
Hmm.
Billy Cripe
And the contract was delivering on the promise of the contract, which was we’re going to make your web traffic go up. And it was really high. came in, that was one of things I was impressed with at first. And I was like, well, who are these people? Nobody who matters. Nobody who would ever buy a thing from us. So it’s like, you remember back when,
Twitter was Twitter before it was X and Instagram was new and stuff and you could buy followers and they were all bots and fake profiles and stuff. That had a flash in the pan for a little while. It’s the same thing. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, know, other than having the vanity data point of look how many followers I have. It’s not doing anything and those followers aren’t real and they’re bots and eventually they get purged. So I still see a lot of that happening out there and
It’s hard to scale. It’s harder to scale good, thoughtful, deep research on an organization, on a prospect. But I think that it’s really important. That notion of hyper-personalization, I think, is really important. Once you’ve identified your addressable market and you’ve got your customer profile and you know what your buyer persona is,
You can really lean into a detailed account based marketing strategy,
it’s going to be something that is unique to them, not cheap, not garbage. But you can’t do that to a million people a month and keep your investors happy.
You can do that to 10 or 100 people a month and keep your investors happy. And you’re creating those moments of engagement after you have the awareness. And then that earns the right, typically, to have a conversation.
But those are things that have to be narrowly tailored and it takes time and it takes some deeper investment. You’re not gonna get as many people for a million dollars or a thousand dollars as you are with a spray and pray method. But that spray and pray method’s not gonna yield the result that you want.
Jason Niedle
One of our podcast guests was telling me that education was their biggest problem and trying to get people to understand. So they were targeting people and trying to get these videos out. And then they had a very narrow list of targets, like it was 20 or 30 people. And so I had seen this thing on Kickstarter where they have these tiny TVs and they’re 50 bucks and it’s a cute little TV that’s this big and you load it up with a USB and you could load your videos in there and you push the button on the front and it switches channels, which just basically switches to another one of your videos. And I’m like, hey, what if you just load it up like
Billy Cripe
Okay.
Jason Niedle
10 year videos on the TV and just mail the TV to these guys like 100 % guarantee they’re gonna watch it. You can make some record some cool intro, right? Hey guys, it’s blah blah blah, right? You know, it’s switch the channels and see what you learn.
Billy Cripe
Yeah! Right, right.
And how much cooler
is that than the lame email that you’re getting? It’s like, I made a video for you. It’s like, OK, I get it. Right, exactly. I’ve seen something similar. It wasn’t a mini TV. It was basically a postcard. And you flip open the top, and there’s a little small video screen. That’s because technology allows us to do that. I mean, it’s absolutely fantastic. And guess what? Yeah, each one of those devices
Jason Niedle
They’re gonna show everybody their TV.
Yeah, super cool, yes.
Billy Cripe
costs a little bit more than an individual email or a video that you record on your phone and be like, hi, I’m Billy. Jason, I’ve created a value proposition for you. Would you like to see it? That had its moment probably eight, nine years ago when that was new and novel. Now it’s just
Jason Niedle
What are you doing to grow your business and what are your growth goals?
Billy Cripe
So my growth goals, I’m looking for three new clients over the next six months that are focused on ideally my ideal customer profile are startup or scale out businesses that are in the sustainability or greenhouse gas or ESG space.
And they’ve got their B2B SaaS tech, right? So that’s where I’ve made kind of my area of focus. So B2B SaaS tech really focused on sustainability and ESG. Really, because I’ve really gone deep into that space really over the last five years. And there’s all kinds of innovations that are happening there. And so doing direct outreach to
Jason Niedle
Nothing nichey about that.
Billy Cripe
primarily to VC firms and incubators that are supporting these companies saying, hey, you’ve made a bet on 10 of these companies with your sustainability investment thesis. You’re hoping that one of them pops. Bring me in. I’ve got this experience. I know the players. know the businesses and I’ve already come kind of come preloaded with the TAM information and the ICPs to be able to go to market here.
The second thing that I’m doing to grow my business is I’m really leaning in on LinkedIn. I’ve been writing a series of long form articles on the future focused CMO. And it really seeks to distill
all of the new lessons that I’ve learned and then a lot of the new how AI is impacting marketing, especially in B2B SaaS tech. And when I say AI, I mean not just the LLMs that we’re using, the chat GPTs and perplexities of the world, but also the deep machine learning innovations that are happening kind of under the covers in a lot of these organizations. Being conversant in
in ML technology is important, especially because a lot of the startup companies are genius level folks who have built these models and these ML systems and then they’re training the data and they need more data. They’re so data hungry and they then are like, but it can do all of this cool stuff, but they don’t really know how to translate that out to the rest of the market. Like, well, look, I just went through the school of hard talks. So.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm. I see that over and over again. Yeah
Billy Cripe
Let me come in here. can help, you know, can help accelerate this. So I’m writing about this on LinkedIn and you can find that on my LinkedIn profile. It’s, know, linkedin.com/in/Billy.
So it’s some of this guerrilla thought leadership marketing that’s focused on that particular space, right? B2B, SaaS tech first, and then sustainability second. So that’s how I’m going after it. Now, my client, CIBO Technology, is growing in a very different manner than I’m growing BloomThink.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Billy Cripe
And
let’s see what technologies is leaning into is very detailed account based marketing with a hyper focused and this hyper personalization that I’ve talked about. They’ve hyper personalized their outreach on, on all the different channels, marketing channels. So that means not just email. also means LinkedIn ads. also means industry trade pubs. Also means podcasts, webinars, and then
We’ve got Q1 in the agriculture space is always the big conference and trade shows times because nobody’s farming in the Northern Hemisphere typically. So they go to trade shows or they go on vacation. I got our CEO, main stage speaking at World Agritech in San Francisco, one of the biggest agricultural technology conferences.
so It’s it’s not there’s no one like magic bullet for marketing It’s where are and the reason we picked these conferences in these events and this sort of this style of LinkedIn digital advertising is Because we had already done the research
in Q3 and Q4 last year to know where are our targets going to be? They’re going to be at these trade shows. Okay, let’s be there. Let’s be up on the main stage, not just in a booth or walking around hoping we bump into them. Let’s make sure that we know who they are so we can make sure that LinkedIn ads are going right in front of them. And those aren’t about, buy our thing, do our stuff. It’s just, here’s who we are. It’s pure brand awareness.
it’s a content rich environment to talk to and to have opinions about for people in that industry, right? So it’s, you can really nerd out on this stuff. But for the people who are in it, boy, their world is.
being shaken up and blown and new opportunities are springing up and old ones are dying out and it’s going really fast. And that creates a really rich environment to have an opinion, to speak with an authentic voice and to say, we don’t know all the answers because nobody does. And if anybody else, like our competitor, is telling you that they’ve got the answers, well, they don’t. And here’s why. So let’s get in this together. And at least then we focus on, our approach is…
You know, it allows for flexibility here and here’s why we can get started. Here’s what we can do starting right now. And here’s what we advise and counsel to wait on and what we advise and counsel to accelerate. And that is resonating with the, people and the companies who are interested in what CIBO delivers, which is why they grew, which is why we grew 100 % year over year last year. know, so getting that triple digit growth, it’s absolutely fantastic.
It gets harder and harder to maintain that pace the bigger and more successful you get. But for right now, it’s really, really good. Yeah.
Jason Niedle
Amazing.
Are there any strategies out there in sales and marketing right now or lead gen that have surprised you lately either because they used to work and they’re tanking or because you didn’t think it would work and it’s amazing?
Billy Cripe
The Trade show booths, I think are going the way of the dodo.
But investing in that and having a booth that you’re staffing for people to come around and be like, well, what are you giving away?
Areas where you’re in, they’re bringing in investors and they’re bringing in VCs and the booths are small little kiosks and you’ve got a founder here there and they’re, it’s basically, a pitch contest in a big exhibition hall. I think those are a blast. You’re seeing a lot of traffic going there where you’ve got in, you know, investors and
VCs and PEs and even bigger companies going, OK, what’s the newest technology that’s happening there? And they’re out there learning more than they’re looking to necessarily buy technology. But it’s also really good exposure for those startups and the startup communities. So I think that’s working well for the in-person marketing strategy and tactic. I really like podcasts and webinars. I like them mostly.
for me because they’re very efficient ways of getting out a lot of content and they act as a really great filter. you’ve got a platform where you can see who is engaging with that content, now you’ve got a really strong, intense signal that they’re at least open to a conversation. And I think that’s really, really important.
Whoever thought that email newsletters were gonna make a comeback. Like that is, that’s the thing that has surprised me and I love it. Right, right? It’s like, you’ve got an email newsletter? Well, what are they doing? They’re curating good content for me so I don’t have to do it. And then they’re summarizing it for me. And so by curating and summarizing, if it’s a person I trust, if they’re coming at it with an authentic voice and some credibility and they’re trusted,
Jason Niedle
non-stop.
Billy Cripe
Boy, are they saving me a whole ton bundle of time and awareness, and they may be saving me from making some costly mistakes, at least in the amount of time that I would be otherwise investing. So those are some of the things that are interesting to me.
Jason Niedle
Well, I was going to tell you something about trade shows. Trade shows oftentimes are you’re like standing in this corner waiting for someone hopefully to pass you by and talk with you. And he said, he found what he calls the trade show wing woman. In this case, it was a woman wing person. And her job is to go out there and she starts talking to people and, hey, you’re interesting. You you’re interested in that. Well, these guys over here doing that. And she brings people to their booth.
And they said they skyrocketed their results because they had someone out there whose job was to go find the right people and bring them to the booth. And I’m like, okay, that’s pretty genius.
Billy Cripe
Okay.
I really like that idea, right? Because the people, when they’re at the trade show, being there is already a filter for at least domain interest or topical interest. And so having that hunter or that fisher out there who can do that, that’s a really good strategy. But yeah, you can’t just sit back and be like, I’m going to wait and hope somebody comes by, picks up a pair of socks and that they’re the right person for me.
That passive trade show piece, I don’t think that’s working anymore.
Jason Niedle
I also had somebody on the show recently and they’re like, look, I don’t care about how many people I put in my funnel. I wanted initially two great partners, right? And those partners are generating referrals for him. And then he’s like, and I just want to double that every quarter. So my first quarter I had two, my second quarter I had four, I’m working on eight this quarter. And he was in hyper, hyper growth. And I’m like,
Billy Cripe
Okay.
Nice,
okay, okay.
Jason Niedle
You know,
and he said the number of people that I have sold this quarter, I couldn’t even have gotten in their doors in three years. Like if I’d been doing it on my own.
Billy Cripe
Because the channeling, right, that can scale, that can start to scale exponentially.
Jason Niedle
Yeah, so
finding the right channel and the right partner sometimes can be exponential and just having a team on there that believes in you and is willing to go out and do it. And I’ve seen that fail so many times too, right? A lot of times the team’s like, you’re little and I don’t care. But also if you have the right product mix and they see the fit and everything is right, then that can be epic as well.
Billy Cripe
Right.
You know what I do love is I love working with, finding prospects and finding either the influencer at that prospect or the decision maker and inviting them to be on a podcast with me. We did this at one of our most recent trade shows, the one in San Francisco. We identified a prospect and said, hey, we would.
We’re not working with you. We would love to someday. And they knew that. But we would love for you to be on our panel as a breakout panelist, right? So we had a breakout panel and a main stage panel. And just inviting them, no strings attached as an opportunity for them to share their success. I think people really respond well to that. And they’re like, yeah, let me talk about my stuff. And as long as you’re telling me, don’t have to buy anything from you or commit to anything, now you’ve developed that goodwill.
and an area where you’ve exchanged in front of other people, insight and topic, and you can see, oh, guess what? We are aligned like this, and maybe we ought to have a subsequent conversation. I think that helps. It doesn’t, it’s not 100%, you know, nothing is 100%, but it does a lot to do that initial outreach. And I think that’s the big takeaway that marketers and marketing leaders and fractionals such as myself,
really need to be advising companies to be intentional about marketing. Make that first step, make the offer, make the invitation, and then you’re gonna get people coming back to you and saying yes and doing it. And at the very worst, you’re building goodwill and you’re gaining knowledge and you’re becoming a thought leadership clearinghouse for the rest of the industry. And at best,
You’re putting somebody on a new pathway to becoming a client, a paying customer.
Jason Niedle
And hopefully
they’re also taking your social clips and they’re sending them out to the world or you put the proper lead magnet on YouTube and they find your content on YouTube and get the lead magnet like there’s a hundred ways to make this work, right?
Billy Cripe
Exactly. But you have to do that. You can’t just hope that it’s going to happen. And especially in small startup and scale up companies, there’s not that kind of depth of multi-channel understanding of how to operationalize all of the little bits. but that’s the name of the game, right? And in very large companies, you’ve got one person whose job it is just to do the
Jason Niedle
Well, that’s why they need you.
Billy Cripe
the YouTube lead magnets for one industry and one for every other industry that they target and then one for social and one for, you you’ve got, it’s, you’ve got all of the cogs in the machine and smaller organizations, it’s one person. Oftentimes it’s just a fractional.
Jason Niedle
Let me get you a couple more questions and I’ll let you get out of here. What advice do you have for early stage tech CEOs?
Billy Cripe
I think the biggest advice is get somebody else out there, get that social proof. Go after social proof. Get that first early customer, second early, third early customer, those early adopters, and extract the social proof from them to say, I believe in this solution, I believe in this product, here’s what it did for me.
And you have to do that in order to be able to spiral up and out like we’ve talked about in the rest of your market. When your customers can become your channel, or at least a proof point for the rest of your prospects, that’s what sells. And it makes it so much easier and faster to sell and to win those deals, because you don’t have to start from zero every single time. But that takes cultivation. You have to cultivate those
those early social proof points, those early customer referrals. And a lot of them are reticent to do so, especially if they’ve got big recognizable names. That’s a hard nut to crack. And sometimes it means, hey, would you be willing to take a reference call only if it’s private? And then one of the other things I love for
early stage tech CEOs to do is to build a win book. Have somebody like me come in or hire a contractor to build you a win book. And a win book can be, hey, here’s who we won, here’s why we won, here was the situation, here’s who we beat out and replaced, or here’s why we lost, right? And so that becomes an essential,
Now, a lot of these aren’t going to be publicly available. It’s not something you can put up on your website, right, most times. But equipping the sales force and your channel with that information is absolutely indispensable when it comes to giving them a leg up when…
they’re on their next sales call or their next in-person meeting.
Jason Niedle
So times are really feel pretty turbulent. know, there’s news every day about, what’s changing radically. How do we grow in this? Like what should we be looking forward to in this next year? And how do we focus our growth to manage all this?
Billy Cripe
I think it is really focusing and laser focusing in on who are you wanting to get in front of and what are you offering that’s going to make their life easier their product more desirable or
their cost of production go down. you have to answer that rather than just be like, Hey, I’ve got a thing. Would you look at my thing? Or would you look at the, you know, look at the cool things that I’ve built. It’s not about that. You go to market with some empathy. And I think that’s the big takeaway. Go to market with some empathy. Put yourself in their shoes. They don’t care about your company or how smart you are, where you went to school or how long it took you to develop this thing or that you’re using all the buzzwords.
What they care is what is it gonna do for me? So answer that, answer that so what question, right? And you’ve got to do that before you go to market. You can’t start with a conversation and hope that you just land on it. Do that soul searching first and then divide that up. That gets down into that hyper personalization, understanding your target addressable market and who are the specific people? Names, first names, last names?
titles, how long they’ve been at that organization, what is motivating them? You might get in front of them if you talk about their March Madness bracket or something, but that’s not going to be the same as delivering the value of what you’re delivering to them and their company, how you’re making their lives easier, their product more desirable for their market, not yours, or their cost of production and service go down.
Jason Niedle
I love it. And if I listen a little bit between the lines here, I feel like you wrapped us all the way. You took us all the way back to the beginning where you said, just listen, right? How do I know all those things that you just said? Just shut up and listen for once, you know? So it’s perfect.
Billy Cripe
love
it. Yeah, shut up, shut up and listen. Go to market with some empathy, shut up and listen.
Jason Niedle
This has been super fun. Tell us again where our audience can find you.
Billy Cripe
You can find me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/Billy, B-I-L-L-Y or at bloomthink.com. That’s bloom like a flower, think like what you do in your brain.
Jason Niedle
Awesome. Billy, thank you so much for being on BeyondSaaS For leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, we drop episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Niedle, at tethos.com. That’s T-E-T-H-O-S.com. We can also grab a free report on how to grow your tech company, just tethos.com/podcast. And of course, drop any questions for me or future guests, comments, and feedback. We appreciate that. Until next time, this is BeyondSaaS.
