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Brian Kardon is the Chief Marketing Officer of InVision. Previously, Brian was CMO at Fuze, a cloud communications platform. During his four years at Fuze, the company grew from $30M to >$125M in revenue, Fuze was named the market “Leader” by Forrester Research, and the Fuze marketing team won the prestigious SiriusDecisions ROI Award for Demand Creation.
This episode features an interview with Brian Kardon, CMO of InVision. InVision is the leading digital product design platform powering the world’s best user experiences, whose customers include 100 percent of the Fortune 100.
Brian is a multi-time CMO and experienced marketing executive at companies like Fuze, Eloqua, Forrester Research, and Reed Business Information, the largest B2B publisher in the world.
“We want to make sure people have an amazing experience in the product and you can do a lot of marketing and put a bow around the box, but once they open the box, it's gotta be a beautiful experience. And so I spend a lot of time working with our product team to make sure that the product experience is wonderful: how they get onboarded, how they find us, how they download the product, and how do we encourage greater usage of the product? So we believe that the best customers are people who are not sold and marketed to, but are actually using the product.”
“I'd say the key thing we do is we test everything. So we used to for a while have a single call to action. That is, we want everybody, whether you're enterprise or you have your own little business to download the app. But now we have additional calls to action where you can contact a rep or speak to a rep or I'm interested in an enterprise conversation versus downloading it. So we're doing AB testing all the time with different messages and different calls to action. So basically on our website and other places, we have multiple calls to action.”
“If during that process, you want to speak to a human being, that's fine too. Of course we have AI bots on our website as well. So you can speak to a digital bot... I'm a big fan of passing to bots who can qualify them. All the data on lead response time, I'm sure you've been involved with organizations where people are very proud to respond to a lead in two hours and three hours. And we're seeing that the decay rate on conversions is like 15 minutes or five minutes or four minutes. And so rather than have it go to a human being that may not get to it right away, we prefer to have a bot respond. So we'd rather have fast response time rather than have a human being on the other end. The other thing is what we found, which surprised me is that a lot of people don't want to speak to a human; they're much more comfortable speaking to a bot.”
“The part of the playbook is to go slow to go fast. So I see a lot of people going really fast, but if you don't have the foundation of analytics, you're really flying blind. And so as marketers jump into a new job and they want to really show value right away. But if you don't have a good foundation of understanding, what's working, what isn't, you don't have a really good marketing automation platform that's configured the right way and the right MarTech stack and the right data stack, it's going to slow you down later. It's like engineers who have technical debt. Like you can never develop a new product if the foundation is cracked, you just can't build up. And so for marketing organizations, you've got to go slow to go fast.”
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Links
The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO by John McMahon
Connect with Brian on LinkedIn