Mastering SaaS Marketing – Shane Murphy-Reuter @Webflow

Todd (00:01.196)

Shane, hello, welcome to the show.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (00:09.998)

Mostly. Yeah, mostly.

Thank you. Great to be here.

Todd (00:18.156)

Yeah, I know the pleasure is generally all mine. Well, maybe you can start off with a quick intro. You're obviously the CMO at a Webflow, but who is Shane?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (00:25.718)

Yeah, that's a very, that's a big question. Yeah, so currently at CMO at Webflow, I spent the last 15 years or so in marketing. I actually started in London for about 67 years working in telecoms and really the first half of my career was in B2C actually in the telecoms industry. And then moved to AdRoll, which was my first B2B role and did a year in Dublin, which then brought me out to the US. And so really since then,

I've been working in marketing leadership roles at kind of hyper growth, um, SaaS companies. Um, my kind of sweet spot has been that like hitting around a hundred million error and then kind of trying to, um, uh, keep the company accelerating through that point, um, zoom info, which is my last job was probably larger scale and we were, we crossed a billion.

ARR while I was there, so that was kind of the outlier, but then Webflow is much more back into that kind of like sweet spot for me. So yeah, just really love marketing, you know, love doing things like this, getting to chat about marketing is always fun and yeah, got two kids, got a dog, a wife, live in the Boston area. That's it. Yep.

Todd (01:43.908)

Busy life, good stuff. Thanks for the intro. Well, listen, you have tons of experience. I'm as a marketer myself, I'm really interested to pick your brains on some really complex marketing topics. So they're all of the CMO and some other strategic areas as well. Maybe you can just explain for most people know what web flow is, but maybe you can explain what is web flow. It's a super important company in this kind of no code movement. And sorry to kind of go off on a tangent here. I don't know if this is true, but

Um, I remember listening to a podcast. It was like Tim Ferris podcast. And I forget the, the WordPress, the guy that found his name. I think the company is automatic. And I remember him saying something like, I remember him saying something like some huge crazy number, the proportion of websites that are run by WordPress. I don't want to say it was like 50% or some crazy number. What is web flow and it's about 65. Yeah. What is like, what is web flow and kind of, yeah, maybe you can explain a bit more about the market you guys are operating in.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (02:17.422)

Thanks for watching.

around 65.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (02:35.102)

Yeah, so if you think about like, you go further back, you think about the WordPress market. If you're a person or a designer trying to design and build a website and launch it, you effectively need three things. You need a design, right? So you actually go into a figment or something and make this what it looks like. You need a CMS, which is WordPress. And then, which is really difficult to actually bring it to life, you need a developer to go and code those designs to be the front end that sits on top of the CMS being WordPress.

And that's very complicated, right? A designer doesn't know how to code. They don't know how to stitch that all together. And so the first innovation in the market where the likes of Squarespace and Wix launched as these very simple template based website builders. The problem with those is they swing almost too far the other direction. If you're a designer, you're really pinned into these templates. You can't actually design whatever you want. You lose all of the power of that code.

because you're so pending. So Webflow launched to solve that problem. We already call ourselves a visual development platform. You are actually coding. So it's creating clean code in the background. You have all of the power of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, all at your fingertips. But rather than manually coding, you're manipulating that code through a visual interface. So as a designer, I now can actually build websites in an interface that is very typical that I'd be in.

much more like a Figma style experience. So what that means is as a designer, if I'm an agency or an in-house designer at a company, I can now design what I want the website to look like and launch it with a click of a button and without the need for using developers, which are very expensive, it can also be challenging in the handoff. And so, yeah, we're really trying to find that sweet spot between manual coding and the more template-based.

website builders like a Squarespace or a Wix. And so far it's obviously been that sort of value proposition has really exploded. And, you know, we're still growing at a rapid, rapid rate. And while we're not, yes, over 50% of the websites on the internet are quite built on Webflow yet. Like we're definitely catching up.

Todd (04:55.84)

Yeah, good stuff. Maybe you can give some context into the, I think the last numbers I saw the company was valued in the billions. I think it was 4 billion, I think a hundred million ARR and maybe you can put, is that those numbers still accurate?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (05:08.778)

Yeah, yeah. So our last valuation was just over 4 billion, which is I think April of last year, right, just before the crash. So, yeah, we're still valued at that. Obviously, there's been market changes and we're part of a company, so it's difficult to know exactly. But the good news is that our metrics have really continued to go from strength to strength. Like, you know, the 100 million, we're well past that now. I'm actually not sure if we shared, but like we're well past 100 now.

And, you know, much like most of the companies, we've been really focused on getting to cash flow positivity, which, you know, we're on track to achieve that pretty, pretty soon. And actually, maybe it's a topic we can talk about later around how we've on the marketing side, we've doubled the ROI of our marketing spend while still growing new customer volume. So like a big, big part of our job is to help with that efficiency. So yeah, still officially valued at just over 4 billion, well past 100 million now. And

getting to the point where we're gonna be casual positive so that we're in charge of our own destiny, which is great.

Todd (06:16.18)

Yeah. Exciting times. Um, one of the things I was, I was doing some research for this podcast and I found something you wrote on Twitter and you put when choosing your next gig and you put in brackets as a CMO on your way to being one, be really careful to choose one that suits your skills and one that you're culturally thrive in. So why did you, I think you've been at a web flow for around a year. Why did you choose web flow and why did web flow choose you? Why was it a good fit?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (06:43.11)

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, um, I think there were two parts of that, as I mentioned, is the cultural part, which I'll talk about in a second, but there's also the, um, matching your skills. So different companies have different go-to-market strategies. And I use ZoomInfo as an example. ZoomInfo's go-to-market strategy is fully sales led. They are, you get a lead in, hand it to a salesperson, they sell the deal, and they close it and manage it.

Most of my career up until that point had been at the likes of AdRoll, Intercom, and actually prior to that B2C, where your job as a marketer is, number one, a lot about building the brand, given that you're a much more scaled company going after small business all the way up. And then a lot of your job is to be a very commercial leader. You typically run the self-serve business. So like at Webflow, I own the self-serve.

revenue number, which is about 85% of our revenue, because you're not just handing to a salesperson to own revenue. And so the role of a CMO in a company that I'm more used to, which is a combination of product-led growth, like a self-serve business, plus the sales led to like expand it up, is very, very different than if you go into like an enterprise driven sales led company. So you just need to be really, really careful that like,

And your experience and the things that you enjoy doing and are good at are matching with the company's strategy. And I would say this publicly that I zoom in for, I don't think there was quite that, like I was only there just over a year and there wasn't quite that alignment. You know, I think that for them, go off and find somebody who's much more focused on that, like kind of lead generation of sales driven motion.

And so there's that. So I think that's really critically important. And then, you know, on the cultural side, you know, culture is, I've thought a lot about this. Culture has come in all different shapes and sizes, and there isn't one that's necessarily good or bad. And you just need to make sure that it fits who you are. I'll give an example, I'll actually give a sporting example, which sometimes I'm great, but like, I've thought a lot about like.

Chelsea Football Club under Jose Mourinho, right? And Barcelona under Pep Guardiola. Both extremely successful. Could not have been culturally or strategically more different. If you were a player on Barcelona, who tried to go play for Chelsea under Jose Mourinho, you would have been extremely unsuccessful and vice versa because Jose Mourinho's strategy was, I'm gonna have the strongest, fittest people who wanna play direct football. We are gonna like...

bash our way through and it was extremely successful. Pro Guardiola's is much more like, we are gonna strategically think about this tap it, tap it, tap it until we pass the ball into the goal. Both really successful. You just wanna make sure that you're not a Chelsea style footballer trying to play for Barcelona or Barcelona style footballer trying to play for Chelsea. And so, you know, digging in on what the type of culture you might be joining.

by either talking directly to the people, but actually more importantly, probably back channeling. You can do a lot of work where you probably know people who work there and reaching out to those people to understand that fit, I think is really, really important. And so yeah, I encourage anybody taking a job at any level, really to figure out that they fit into it.

Todd (10:20.856)

So, webflow more of the Barcelona or the Chelsea?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (10:25.071)

Well, interesting. This is like, I would say, I think we're still trying to find our feet there. The football analogy is kind of combination of culture and also strategy, right? And more like go to market motion, right? I think Webflow, we had been so successful for many, many years.

in large part due to having extremely high product market fit in a certain market segment that it just like exploded. And I think that now as we think about going on the next curves of growth, we actually do have to like think about making sure that our culture matures with us and making sure that like, so we actually did do internally a bit of a reset on our like core behaviors and making sure that they were

We were ensuring that we were like holding a high bar around like delivery, making sure that we had the ability to move at pace. Whereas I think in the past we had been maybe a bit more, maybe Barcelona is an unfair example, but like extremely thoughtful about everything. Like everything took like, everything was very strategic, took a long time to like get to an answer. Everybody had an opinion, which is good for like certain really kind of sticky hairy problems, that's great.

But I thought a lot about meeting companies who didn't have two gears, in particular marketing departments. For some things, that's great. Sometimes you've got to kick it into the other gear, which is like, okay, we've got to move and not overthink this. An example would be like AI is here, right? We were at risk at Webflow of really overthinking our AI strategy and not getting it to market and to was perfect. And...

It was a really good, I think, moment for us to show our new sort of focus on being able to move fast in certain instances. And we all got in a room, spent two days together figuring it out, and then just got into market and said, here it is. So we kind of were able to kick into that second gear. Anyway, sorry, so I didn't directly answer your question, but I think one of the things we might talk about later is how companies and marketing teams can shift as you grow.

Todd (12:26.466)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (12:46.582)

And I do think that like being able to figure out how to shift that culture appropriately to mature, but as an organization, as you, as you get bigger is important and the main thing that I've seen from certainly more San Francisco based tech companies is a lot of focus on like thinking deeply, very strategically, maybe moving slowly, maybe not being as kind of top-stand directive when you need to be. And as a result can.

not keep that growth going because aren't moving fast enough to crack into new markets and opportunities. And so we've done a lot of thinking about how we can kind of rebalance that.

Todd (13:27.824)

Yeah, understood. Maybe just to kind of set the stage in the context, I can imagine going into a company like Webflow, I'm not sure of it, I'm not sure the definition of hypergrowth, but it's certainly a fast growing company with a huge potential, lots of new hires, investment, pressure. I can only imagine going in as a new CMO in that first, you know, whatever, 60-90 days, that must be a really, really important time.

How do you think about that? What have you learned going into CMO in that kind of first 90 days? What are some of the lessons you've had from that?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (13:58.59)

Yeah. I would say it was actually a good example of those two gears as well. I would say that you need to simultaneously figure out the like strategic part, um, as well as, okay, how can I add value quickly and kind of prove yourself? And so on the more strategic part, really it's about understanding. You've got to understand like the company's strategy.

You've got to understand the team, you've got to understand how it's set up, you have to understand your goals. So basically how currently are you all set up in order to like over the next two, three years? And so that's a lot of like just chatting to the team, reading all of the strategic documents, picking out what it really means, making sure that like you have a full understanding of the context that you're about to execute within because if you're

slightly misaligned in understanding of the strategy,

and you start then sprinting to deliver, you could really end up then like a completely wrong path and that you need to pull yourself back from. So I think the first part is really understanding the strategy, the company, the team, so that you can therefore set the marketing strategy near the end of your 90 days. That said, I think to be successful, particularly in marketing,

trying to figure out what are some low hanging fruit that are like, obviously you can just go grab hold of it, not overthink it and actually just deliver value are like really important. So an example for me at Webflow was when I joined, we were in the middle of doing a lot of pricing and packaging changes. And the project was kind of swirling a little bit with a lack of like kind of leadership ownership and focus as a project. And I was like, great, that one like.

done this multiple times before, it's relatively well defined. It just needs a leader to like grab it and get it delivered. And so that was a good example of like a relatively low hanging fruit. There was like pretty reasonably large impact that I was able to like grab hold of to kind of prove it. So I think you're, you know, as a CMO and generally as somebody in your job, I would always encourage you to like really think about like, am I spending like...

balance of my time at the right level of like strategic thinking, as well as like execution or just like short-term delivery value. And so for in the first 90 days, that's critical too.

Todd (16:29.332)

Yeah, just in my own experience, and obviously we're an agency, we work with more than 50 SaaS companies, albeit these are going to be smaller companies than a Webflow. One of the things that the stumbling blocks I've often found in marketing is when we go to work with a SaaS company and they just have really poorly defined positioning, I guess positioning is very much part of that strategic piece you spoke about. So, and I often find that's a huge blocker, right?

Who is the customer? What value, just kind of like positioning marketing 101. How important is it to, and kind of how fundamental is that in the kind of the strategy piece to have really well-defined positioning.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (17:10.154)

Yeah, it's crucial. Like if you think about marketing, relatively straightforward, your job is to like craft a story that is compelling and then communicate it in the market such that people like hear it at the right time, right place. Pretty like at a highest level, pretty straightforward. I do feel like these days, companies have over-corrected to the performance out of marketing a little bit and are much more just about like, let's just get

Todd (17:36.748)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (17:39.918)

a message out in front of our target market. And as a result, they end up having a really terrible like LTB to CAF because people aren't engaged with their ads or they're generally, they're not getting a lot of like organic growth because their messages and resonating markets so people aren't like coming in search of them. And so the thing that I've always tried to do in my early days at any company is,

look at do they have a clear messaging house? And if not, then working on it. And we've actually done a ton of work of trying to figure out my view of what that messaging house should look like for like a B2B SaaS company. There's a lot of them out there for like B2C, which aren't fit for purpose for B2B because they're too light on the actual solution and product side. And then there's some on the B2B side, which I think are two actually products.

and solutions oriented in missing the brand story. And so not to get way too deep on it, but like for me, basically the pyramid is at the top, you've got your purpose or your mission, right? So for Webflow, that is to give everyone developer superpowers. We wanna make sure that anyone can build for the web because building for the web is like writing was, you know, hundreds of years ago. It's like a skill that people should have.

Todd (18:51.217)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (19:04.37)

Underneath that then is your aspirational customer. What is the, who is the customer and what are the things that make them kind of motivated both emotionally and functionally. Then under that there's the all world, new world story. So like, I actually gave you some of it, started this for Webflow. It's like, what's the old way? The old way is like handwriting code or terrible template builders. It's the new way. Well, the new way is like a visual development platform where you can manipulate code in it.

anything or you need to have that story down. And so you've got to get that new one. That's like in your solution level. This is the problem that we're trying to solve for people. And then under that, then you start getting into more of your product messaging. Here's an as a result, this is what we've built. Here's how it works. Here's the value, here's the proof. And then to your point around like target segments, usually companies have like multiple segments that they're going after. We go after agencies on one end and on the other side we go after what we call like in-house design teams.

within a company. And so at some point of that pyramid, here's what I found. Oh, Lord, Siri. At some point in that pyramid, you want to go left and right and create a parallel one for your different audiences that is relatively aligned, but that gives space for each audience to breathe. And so it's critically important to have that all the way down. Because if those things aren't connected, you should be able to say, hey, our mission

Todd (20:09.124)

Ha ha ha.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (20:32.37)

As a result, this is what we built all the way down, such that it's connected. And so, yeah, I think it's critical that as a CMO or in a marketing team, if you don't have that nailed, it's a really big problem. And we're literally working on this. I'm going to be working on this today with my team, actually. I went for it. We put something light in place when I got here, but we're reimagining it right now. So if you don't have that, probably want to get that locked in.

Todd (21:02.96)

Interesting. So how do you tackle that problem then? I mean, I'm not sure what you can share here, but how many people are involved in this? Is it a workshop? Is it like, how do you approach solving that problem at Webflow?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (21:13.502)

Yeah, I think it kind of depends on the degree to which the story is known internally, just not really written down and codified. So at Webflow, I actually think the story is pretty well known. We just didn't have a common way of describing it. So for example, visual development platform, that's what we work on. Other people would say we're a website builder or whatever, like even just like codifying similar language to be used.

So in a situation like Webflow where actually the story is pretty well known, it just needs to be codified, that can be a smaller group. Right now, it's my head of PMN and one of his kind of strategic direct reports working on a DREDLY with me. And then we're obviously sharing it with a number of stakeholders like our CEO and those sort of folks to make sure that it's like what we're delivering is bringing it properly to life. If however,

you're in a situation where, like maybe when I was at Intercom, Intercom, the story was really confusing. It was like, are we live chatting? Are we like a customer engaging platform? Are we a support tool? Like conversational marketing was becoming a bit of like a category. Do we want to latch onto that or is it too narrow? That was like a much more, in those situations, forming a...

broader team of some of the key folk in the business, like your head of product, your head of product marketing, your CEO, to work on it together, I think a broader group is really important. If it's really hairy, sometimes getting in an agency to help is critical as well so that you don't navel gaze. It's a big risk that you kind of navel gaze and say, yeah, people love this, it makes total sense, yeah, like the value is really clear. And somebody who's like,

not internal, they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah, so agencies can also help if you don't have the internal sort of support.

Todd (23:12.692)

Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Thank you. I think we've kind of already, my next question is kind of around strategy and I'm not expecting you to tell us what, you know, uh, an effective B2B SaaS marketing strategy, cause obviously there's tons of context and variation, but maybe if we speak about, you know, web pro product led predominantly 85%, I think you said product led and then there's some sales support in there as well. We, you obviously understand workflow deeply. What are the kind of the pillars?

of the marketing strategy. We've spoken about positioning, we've spoken about the messaging house. What are those big pillars that make up the strategy for you?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (23:50.474)

Yeah, like I think about marketing in three broad pillars and there's the product marketing. So it's all of your positioning. How do you tell your story? And then how do you take new products and stuff to market? There's then brand marketing is the second one. The product marketing team will give the story to the brand marketing team. And the brand marketing team's job is to turn it into marketing campaigns and

assets that will engage somebody. So like using Intercom as an example, we might decide that we're like a live chat to everybody, like how do you take that to market? And like a clever brand team might say, we're showing a campaign called In Your Corner. Intercom is always in your corner there to help. It's like this emotional thing. You come to the campaign, you come to the assets, all that. And then the third pillar of it is your

growth and demand gem team who typically own the channels of execution of those campaigns. And that those are very technical, analytical folk who are going to make sure that those campaigns are put into market in the channels that are most likely to engage the appropriate target market. And so if you think about those three pillars, then that's kind of like how you make the sausage, right? It's like...

get your position right, work with the brand marketing team to turn that into like campaigns and the growth and DG team to put it in market. Then the, so now you're set up sort of like with the right machine. Marketing strategies then need to operate at different levels. And the three broad different altitudes are brand, solution and product.

Todd (25:41.002)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (25:41.546)

At the brand level, what you're trying to do is go out to the world and build your brand and have them like understand and resonate what you are and who you are and why you should care. And so typically those campaigns are a bit more emotional and the media that you're using is typically to go after like a new audience. So like billboards, mass media, do Super Bowl ad, whatever you might want to do. Because what you're trying to do is just engage people in understanding who you are.

And as you move down those altitudes from brand to solution to product, you're more likely talking to either your existing market or your existing customers, like a product level, you're talking to your existing customers. You already get the value. You already care about Webflow. You just need to know that we've just launched this new product that you can like buy or, or change the way that you work. And therefore the way that you position a product, hand it to like a brand team or I do a big emotional creative thing for a product launch.

And the channels of communication would be much more like your email marketing or in-app messaging. And so I think about like our marketing strategy from that kind of like, it's almost like that matrix of like, are we set up to have solid positioning, a great brand team who can bring it together and a great child strategy to make sure that that can bear about that kind of sausage making is really, really thoughtful. And then am I thinking about it at the multiple altitudes? And my general.

having now worked for a sort of four hyper-growth tech companies. My big lesson is that typically speaking, in the early days, the founders and everything did a really good job of building the brand. They just do it naturally. And then over time, for whatever reason, all of the marketing activity ends up flowing down to the product level. They are doing a great job of communicating the new products that they've built to their existing customers.

Todd (27:30.891)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (27:37.002)

And I've totally forgotten about going and building a brand because we've got a great brand. It's like, yeah, no, you know, you've got a great brand within your echo chamber, but beyond which you sit in the middle of, but nobody else knows about you. And so, and, and obviously these tech companies are pretty product driven, right? Like that's their technical, their tech. And so always the gravitational pull is dying internally, dying to the product. We're launching this product. We worked so hard to build it.

marketing, you got to support it, you got to support it. And I'm like, no one cares. It means the customer's scared. But that's not the market opportunity. Only less than 1% of the websites in the world are built in Webflow. 65% are built on WordPress. Our solution is way better than WordPress. Like way objectively, and I love WordPress, like I've said that, and so it's not a knock on them, but I genuinely believe Webflow is 10 times better. It's like a combustion engine car versus an electric car.

Why are we spending all of our time trying to convince existing Tesla users that now you can like do this thing on the sat-nav thing, like a new little product thing, rather than going out into the world and convincing them that electric cars are the future? And so anyway, it's something I'm pretty passionate about, as you can see. And so I think like as marketers, one of our key jobs internally is to like make sure that, and bring this back to your original question, from a strategy point of view, that the...

CEO and the whole company understand this messaging house and the importance to have marketing supporting the high level brand, the solution level and the product level. And one of the things I often do is show when I joined last six months, here's all the stuff we've done here at the product level. Here's what we've done at the solution level. We've done nothing at the brand level. And you think that we're going to go and like have rapid growth for the next, you know, five years.

And so anyway, that I think is critical in making sure that your strategy is balanced across those different altitudes and that you're not getting sucked down into the product too much.

Todd (29:48.06)

Just thinking here, one of my follow up questions was going to be, what is the hardest part of all of that? And I feel like maybe it's more on the getting everyone up to the brand side. Do you feel like it's also, maybe this is more of a marketing issue, but do you think because also the, by the way, I also call brand like demand generation as well. That'd be another way that you would call, you know, brand demand generation. Do you think that it's also because it's harder to measure, everybody just wants to say, we spent X, we got Y.

Here's the outcome. Do you think that's also a barrier to why people want to invest less in that brand?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (30:23.114)

Yeah, 100%. Like the safe thing to do as a CMO is not to do what I just said. If you want to have a good reputation internally, typically speaking, you do a great job of launching the new products and like your homepage gets really into the detail of how cool the product is. The CTO is going to love you. The CPO is going to love you. The CEO is likely a technical product person who's going to love you. And what will happen is you will.

have short-term impact because you will do a good job of getting the existing customers to be able to spend more on those sort of things. And so you might have a solid couple of year run wherever it allows you. The problem is that the company itself will peter out. And so, because you failed to go and match the market opportunity. And so, yeah, and to answer your...

point directly, yes, it's just easier down there because it's like, you can measure really directly, certainly the impact that you're having on the existing customers with things like email marketing or in-app messaging and all that. From a demand gen point of view, it's very easy to measure more of your kind of like lead generation campaigns and like sign up generation campaigns. And therefore you can stand up from the CFO and he or she will love you as well because you're showing the ROL.

And so, yeah, I think you're right, but you need like, the one here, I'll just say, and sorry, I'm waffling a little bit now, but what I've always said to my teams is like, as a marketing team, and this is most important for a CMO, you need to be the most financially literate person in the room, so that you earn the right, that when you say we're gonna go invest in the brand, the CFO turns around and she's like, yeah, I trust you.

Todd (32:19.841)

Yeah. Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (32:21.442)

And so I've spent a lot of my career, like anytime I heard anything in a like board meeting, the exact meeting, like a term that I'm like, well, I don't actually understand that term, like NPV, how does that work? I'd go and I would learn it backwards. Spent a lot of my career figuring out how to like do detailed financial analysis. And so that like now, you know, our VP of Finance, Ivan, he 100% trusts.

When I say we have to go invest in this brand, we're not going to be able to measure it, the direct stuff that we're doing, but we can measure the overall impact of the campaign. And he's like, yeah, I get it. Like, I understand the need for it and let's go for it. And so again, advice maybe for other marketers or more junior people coming up is like, you need to be as financially literate as, this is a hard one, but it's possible.

be as financially literate as the person in strategic finance or FP&A or whatever team it is that you're working directly with. Learn Excel. So do people use Excel anymore? Run Google, run Google Sheets. Because it will stand to you, it'll stand to you through your career.

Todd (33:37.964)

do you, so with all that in mind, how do you justify demand generation when it is difficult to measure? I think it's difficult to justify a huge expenditure over a long period of time without that kind of feedback loop. You know, you need to kind of go all in like, okay, we're going to invest in brand, we're not going to see the impact of this for another 12 months to, you know, whatever it is. I guess a couple of questions, like firstly, how do you approach that?

So that's a really big, I mean, you've seen some of these big companies, like I don't know, clickupmonday.com everywhere you go, it's full of like the top of final brand, actually not all top of final brand, but they have a lot of output. How do you approach that problem and how do you scale that machine?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (34:21.13)

Yeah, honestly, I think most everything is measurable. It's the degree to which it's directly attributable and the degree to which it's a direct response, meaning you'll see it immediately. So let me explain. A paid search ad, somebody searches for a web design software, our ad comes up, they've got high intent, they click on it and they sign up. That was a direct response, because it was immediate.

And it's directly attributable. We are directly able to say, go click, uh, sign up. Good job page search. That's, that's pretty easy. Now. Yeah. You can get into the whole conversation about attribution and, you know, one touch attribution versus multiple touch attribution. Honestly, in B2B, I've done this so many times that that argument is so overstated that typically the number of touches in the Patrick conversion is pretty low. And therefore the single touches are fine.

Todd (35:16.778)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (35:19.95)

One level up would be indirectly, not directly attributable direct response. So that would be, let's say you've got a podcast ad running where it's got a very clear offer to sign up with some sort of like discount or whatever. You want somebody to take a direct response. And it's not directly attributable because it's a podcast ad. You can't see the person click on it. Those ones, it is absolutely possible to measure.

the overall impact of the campaign by doing like whole group. So what you can do is like say, let's do a big push in San Francisco. Let's see what happens with our branded search volume or traffic from San Francisco and to see the overall uplift that we're seeing from the campaign. And you should be able to see it because it is more of a direct response, even though it's not directly attributable to that specific like ad.

Todd (36:16.46)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (36:16.93)

And therefore the conversation with the CFO is like, hey, here's the overall impact of the campaign. Don't ask me which specific ad really drove it. And then the really hard ones are the not directly attributable, not direct response, right? So it's something like imagine like your investment in like comms, let's say you have a five person.

PR team and they're helping get just like build your authority pre IPO, getting you coverage in various places. Like it's extremely long-term, very difficult. So therefore it's not direct response. It's not directly attributable. You can't see what it's driving. Those are like the really hard ones and arguably like even TV and those sort of things. If you're doing, depending upon the message is like in that category as well. Those are the ones where

Todd (37:10.944)

I mean here now as well Shane, you're also on this podcast right now. What's the ROI of this, of this hour? Yeah, indeed. What are you doing here, Shane?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (37:14.614)

This is an example. No one's ever been able to say, oh, I watched Jane's thing on the Upraw Media. But those are the hardest. But like what you want to see there is that over time that you can track things like your branded search traffic and the trend in it. And you do want to see that over time as you're investing those things that that is starting to increase, particularly in, yeah, like maybe regions that you have a bigger focus in. So that's where really the

The head of finance and the company need to like just buy into it as an important part of the strategy. And you use a certain amount of judgment in the short term, but that is by distance the hardest to measure.

Todd (38:00.676)

I guess the second piece of that question is, with all that in mind, how do you go to that? You've got the trust of the CFO, I think you said now, how did you in those early days go and communicate that and get buy-in for those big budgets from the CFO?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (38:18.466)

Well, the reality is we're on a journey. So companies like Webflow invest relatively little in that like top, top bucket. Today, Webflow, the vast majority that we're investing is in the direct lead to a real direct response. And yeah, actually, well, cause we just have a lot of like brand awareness anyway. And there's certain things that we invest like in our community team and those sort of things that are just known as like good investments that are helping to like build a brand. But most of our...

Todd (38:32.148)

No, interesting.

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (38:48.094)

In fact, almost all of our media spend right now is in direct digital direct response. And we have spent in the last year, I was like, job one is to make sure that that spend is extremely great ROI. And so we've got to the point where we've halved the CAC. And we're now at a point where we were at like an eight month payback. And so it's extremely like

that's really strong for a B2B company. And literally, I think it was last week, obviously the CFO and the CFO were going, this is amazing, is this sustainable? Like what a great job. And I said, it's absolutely not sustainable. But they, now they trust me, right? I'm like, hey gang, look what we did. Here's how we did, you know, they're like, we trust, right? So the conversation I had was like, this is what we've done. What we've been doing is our brand is like, imagine your brand as a field, right?

Todd (39:18.561)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (39:45.666)

and loads of crops in it. And DemandGen is coming in and just like cutting the crops. Right, you've got great brand awareness, DemandGen is gonna come in and like farm all that love and demand. If you, what will happen is if you're just farming, your output in a year is gonna be amazing. It's like we've just spent all of our time cutting all of the crops. Hero.

And then the next year comes and it's like, oh, we didn't rotate the field. We didn't put down any fertilizer. Oh my God, the crops aren't growing. And so the ROI of the campaign starts to get really terrible because now the farmers are going in, you got 100 people trying to cut down crops and there's nothing there because you haven't invested in the brand. So the story that I had, literally used that analogy with them. I was like, what we're now gonna do.

is we're going to have today the way we measure our CAC as we break it out into what was spent on media and what was spent on the team. We are going to have two more categories. We're going to have our evergreen campaigns, which we have right now. They're high performing, high ROI campaigns. That we will continue at like an eight month payback. We're going to agree how much are we willing to invest in test campaigns where we're okay that they have low ROI.

and for a certain number of months while we test them out to see if we can turn them into evergreen. And the ones that don't, you cancel them. So that'll be part of our CAC. That part of our CAC, we're okay as a bad ROI because the idea is that you're trying to like, figure out what ones would work. And then the next part of our CAC will be our investment of brand. That's our crop rotation. And that part of our CAC, again, I'm not gonna be reporting back on the...

um, LTV to CAC ROI that spend because it's just so hard to measure. But what I will ensure is that our mix of our investment between those different categories, um, ensures that overall we're still in a decent place from an ROI perspective, um, and that, uh, that we are able to at least like. At the different campaign level, like at the brand level, have a conversation about is it driving an uplift?

Todd (41:46.529)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (42:08.866)

So anyway, it's a journey that I've gone on. So like what I would say, this is by like earning the trust. I think that I come in day one and been like, hey, we gotta start investing in the brand, whatever, and they're like looking at the CAC going, your CAC is up at like 16 months. And now you wanna like to spend millions on this thing that you're telling is not gonna be measurable, like go away. So now what you do is you earn that trust, show that you know what you're doing.

Todd (42:09.154)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (42:35.286)

And then you come and say, this is what we're going to do next. And that's where we are as a company right now. And so, anyway, I think the macro sort of message and lesson is, you need to earn the trust of the head of finance and whoever else is in financial decisions at your company, so that you have the ability to invest in things that are not as measurable.

Todd (43:03.84)

I have so many potential follow-up questions, but I can only, with a limited time, I can only choose one. So I'd be crazy if I didn't ask you how you managed to improve. Did you say you doubled the ROI of the campaigns? How do you do that?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (43:15.094)

Yeah. Yeah, it was relatively, honestly, it was not like rocket science. It was mostly media mix optimization. Well, a combination of media mix optimization and conversion rate optimization. So we, I'll talk about the conversion rate stuff first, because it's maybe easier. And we reoriented our web team to be much more focused on partnering with the growth team on driving results. So like when I joined, I think in the first six months or so,

don't even know if we did one conversion rate experiment. Now we have so many queued up that we actually, we couldn't do any more because we just don't have enough traffic to like get to StatSig. So they're just backed up. We're about to launch a massive homepage experiment. We're always doing pricing page experiments. It's like 90 page experiments. And so our conversion rate has improved quite significantly. And then on the media side, the first thing was just going like.

Todd (43:55.276)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (44:11.65)

what is our media mix and what do we think is driving? We were investing a lot in Facebook, a lot in YouTube. And at the time the team were like, oh yeah, it's driving conversions. If you look in Facebook or you look in YouTube, their attributions, like of course it's saying that. Let's see what happens when we, we actually ended up, yeah, basically, you know, which is kind of wild. We went from a place where I think our paid search was about 30% of our investment. Paid search is now like 95.

Todd (44:17.048)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Todd (44:39.108)

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (44:41.622)

percent of our investment.

Todd (44:43.616)

Yeah, it's the highest-intent channel, right?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (44:46.05)

highest intent, but also the most measurable. And as a result, you're able to optimize. If you can't really measure the thing, you can't optimize it. It's just like, it's a bit of a talk. And then within the paid search, that got us kind of half the way there, just by like channel mix. And then within that paid search, we implemented a... So a lot of like heads of the kind of growth or media, whatever companies will say, oh, it's a portfolio.

Todd (44:53.656)

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (45:15.874)

So as a result, don't double click and look down at the ROI at the campaign level. Kind of like, yeah, it's a portfolio. Just look at the total outcome. Like, yeah, wait a second. If I've got a portfolio, if my investment manager says, we've got a portfolio of investments we're making here, I'm not okay that like half of them are terrible return and half are good return. I'm gonna stop doing the terrible return ones. And so...

Todd (45:22.028)

There's some magic formula, it all fits together Shane. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (45:44.578)

What I'd encourage any head of marketing to do is basically decile your campaigns into what are the top 10%, 20% there, all the way down in buckets of ROI. And then have a chat with the team. How many of our campaigns are in the above one ROI? Or let's say how many are two, if that's the goal, two X, LTB to CAC. Great, evergreen, keep those going. How many are above one? Okay, well, we need to optimize those, at least they're not burning. How many are below?

one and how many are like below like 0.5. And then you need to make sure that the ones that are below one that like, they have to be tests. You have to have a theory of how you're gonna optimize them to be positive. And if you can't over a certain time period, turn it off. And then you have to agree what you're willing to put into those lower ROI ones. And so by doing that, we were basically able to...

Todd (46:39.553)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (46:43.374)

pretty dramatically improve ROI, while also turning our new customer growth around. So when I joined March of the year I joined, our new customer volume grew 4% year over year. This March it grew 34% year over year with a half the CAC. And so that's wild. I do think the last year's comp was on top of the pandemic popping March before, so it was a hard.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (47:12.974)

comp. So it's a little bit like kind of choosing your stock to make you look good, but we are in marketing. So I think the combination of media mix optimization and then conversion rate optimization. The one area that we've not done a good job on yet, which is the next one to pick out is when I was at Petty Power, I talked about the three C's of marketing. There's coverage, meaning like your media mix. Where are you getting coverage?

How are you optimizing that? There's clicks. How are you improving the way that people interact with your ads and these conversions? So we've done a good job on the coverage side, like medium mixed optimization and conversions, like landing page conversion, whatever. The clicks part, we've not done a great job of like, making sure that our creative and ads are really well written or designed incredibly well and those sort of things such that we improve the number of people that actually.

and engage with the art to land on the landing page. And so that's the next sort of big opportunity area for us.

Todd (48:17.584)

Super insightful. One of the, just to kind of build on this, one of the challenges, one of the mistakes I often see a lot of people make, particularly in paid search, given yours is 95% of the budget, is that they try and exceed the ceiling of what search can deliver. There's obviously a finite amount of harvestable demand and search volume per month. So they reach that whatever, 85, 90%, whatever the magic number of search impression share, and they try to...

go beyond it and then you exponentially increase your CPA. So I guess the challenge is, yeah, common sense, media mix. Let's just try and spend the most money into our top ROI campaigns and then kind of cascade down. I don't know if you've seen that in your own career, people trying to push beyond that ceiling.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (49:01.258)

Yeah, well, I think that that's, yeah, as you go, the longer tail keywords and everything intent drops, right? Like, of course you're going to be on web design software, but you do drop intent as you go longer tail. I think we've been fortunate enough that we have a pretty solid demand. I'd say the U S as well. And so it was a big opportunity for us to start investing in those other countries, which meant that there was a lot more sort of a crack to sell, I suppose.

And, but it's true to say this is why I had the conversation with the head of, our head of finance and our COO, which is like, yes, this ROI is sustainable, but we're not going to keep growing out of both 50% year over year as a company. If we're just focused on maintaining an eight month payback period. And so that's where the like investing in these like test campaigns, but also the brand is critically important.

Todd (49:49.74)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (49:58.498)

Like you got to, you ultimately do need to invest in the brand so that you kind of get in front of a broader audience and you're not just harvesting existing intent, you're creating intent. So that's what we need to do next.

Todd (50:12.608)

One of the things I'm super interested in a follow-up question, maybe it's a selfish question because obviously we're run paid media campaigns, but I'm really interested in to, I always say one of the highest leverage things you can do is obviously with Google ads is to lean into the automation, right? You want to feed the algorithms with the best quality signal you can. So obviously in your case, you have a lot of volume, which is great because we don't just want to optimize towards someone, you know,

entering in for a free trial, they give you an email, they're in. We want to go as deep into the customer journey as we can. That's an indication of quality, right? And obviously you guys, I did the onboarding yesterday for Webflow. You have quite an in-depth onboarding, right? It's a complicated product. We're talking about building websites here. So how do you balance that kind of, well, basically what signal do you use in Google ads that has the highest quality, but also has the right volume?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (50:58.506)

Yeah, that's actually been a journey. And when I started, we were using signup and feeding that into the algorithm. And that was a mistake. Because to your point, there's too many people that might be looking just for like a website.

Todd (51:06.551)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (51:20.63)

that will click and sign up to Webflow going, oh, I can build a website in Webflow and go look at it and assume that we're a Squarespace and they drop in. It's like, whoa, this is a development platform. This is like for professional Webflow. It's like, oh, screw that. Now we are trying to figure out a way to create an environment for them that is more easy to understand, but it's not a core market. So we shifted it to first time subscriber, meaning activated customer. Somebody's actually swiped a credit card and is in his pain.

Todd (51:29.378)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (51:47.998)

And we are fortunate that we have enough volume to feed that in. And that actually improved the campaign performance quite a lot. And so yeah, we're now in that. The one that we're now trying is like, I mean, in our more major markets, we'll be able to do, because we have more volume is we broadly speaking have three types of customer segments, we've got in-house teams who are like...

designers, heads of design at a company like Webflow, big opportunity agencies, big opportunity that are a good channel for us. And then what we call our DIY customers, where people want a personal site. Me, who I just want like ShaneMR.com, just like as a resume site. The DIY customers just aren't really a fit for us, relatively poor retention. So even if they come in, they kind of turn off. So now what we're trying to do,

Today, we're feeding first-time subscriber data back for all those three. So you could have a campaign that's doing a lot of DIY that we'll still get like Google, like, oh, we're doing a great job. And, thanks everyone.

Todd (52:53.412)

Because you have to self-select that in the onboarding process, right? So you know that, because someone comes in and you ask them, got it, and then you bucket those off. Got it, that's super smart, yeah, yeah.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (53:01.558)

Exactly. And so we're looking at doing one of two things, either just feeding the in-house team and agency data back to Google or applying a LTV weighting to the different first-time subs. So hey, Google, you get 100 credit for in-house team, 75 credit for an agency, and like a 10 credit for a DIY, because the LTV is like a 10th of the in-house team one. So we're kind of playing with that. Right now, we're not.

feeding the back, we're manually looking at the split of those for our bigger campaigns and then kind of putting our finger on the scale.

Todd (53:37.624)

Google is definitely pushing on the target CPA was the best bidding strategy for some time and they've really started pushing on this target ROAS. In fact, somebody in turn on Slack yesterday shared, I think Google, you got to take what Google's numbers with a pinch of salt, but they said on average we see a 16% better ROI with campaigns that run target ROAS. So yeah, I, although I'm not necessarily sure I'm buying into the 16%, I do think there's a movement towards it is more precise. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Couple of questions, because we're almost at the end of our time together. Um, just on that, you said something before you, uh, I'm interested to understand how, um, who's the kind of a charge of who's kind of the voice of customer internally, who does most of the customer research, because you said, I think you said something like the product team passes that information over to the brand team and then they have to go and make a campaign. Who's in charge of like customer research and how is that fed into marketing?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (54:30.262)

Yeah. So when I started my career in consumer marketing, I was always responsible for the research. And B2B that's a lot of time, certainly at our scale, there isn't a team that is dedicated to like a voice of the customer or customer research. Certainly my last two companies, the only team that's existed is the product research team whose job it is to like work.

directly with the product managers to give them customer insight in order to run their campaigns. And so they tend to, those teams, start with a relatively narrow focus on what they're generating insights for. And so in the last two places that we've taken those teams and kind of expanded their remit, such that they are responsible for the generation of broader customer insight that the whole company can use, like marketing included. And so, yeah, so right now, like at Webflow, and this was the same at Intercom,

those teams sat within the product org. And that's not, I don't think you've designed it that way from scratch, given that they're supposed to support broader customer insight. And like you might put them in like a more central sort of biz ops team or something like that strategy team. But given most companies start, the product team need that insight to develop their product. And so it starts in the product team. And so...

rather than trying to like reorg the whole thing, let's just expand the remit and the reporting lines don't matter that much. So yeah, it's typically the product research team that ended up being responsible for it. And then the PMM team within marketing is supposed to work very, very closely with that to ensure that like the PMM team are briefing that team on the types of insights that we need from a marketing perspective, and which will be a little bit different from a product perspective. Like a lot of the time we need a lot more core motivational research and what's really, really like.

drives people both functionally and emotionally. So yeah, that's how it's worked. Last two companies have been out.

Todd (56:32.652)

Thank you. Um, okay. Last, last question. Um, recently, uh, kind of personally, I've been, um, obsessed, obsessed as a strong word, but been very focused on how can I work smarter and not harder. So what are the highest leverage things that I can be doing? So beyond just, you know, making sure we're prioritizing the right staff or working on the right thing, because the CMO, you're, you're, you're managing a huge team, hyper growth company.

How do you think about that? How do you get the most leverage from your time?

Shane Murphy-Reuter (57:04.906)

Yeah, it's honestly, it's hard. Um, I think having really clear priorities is like really important. And like, that's obvious, but, um, it's really only later in my career that I realized what that actually means. Now what I do when I plan with my team is everybody sets out their goals. And then I choose what I believe are.

true needle mover projects. I could be, before I call them move-mountain projects, I'm like, these are the projects where I personally wanna be involved for what it could be because I have a certain insight or whatever experience around it. And secondly, I think really move the needle for the business. The other projects you all can run with, you don't need my approval, I might steer here and there reactively, but these five projects, I want, they're my like,

personal needle moving projects. And so I think that driver for that priority is really, really important so that both your team understand which projects they should bring you in and also it focuses your time as well. And what I've been doing, which has been really effective is on those needle moving projects, every two weeks the team have to do a new update for me and where they record a update going through what, and if it's like, I feel like it's not being fast enough or I'm like, oh, I'm not sure of that.

we'll then call a meeting where we'll sit down live and get into it. And so Loom has been an incredible way for me to be more effective as a leader, like without standing meetings on every needle moving project once a week. And then I think we were talking about this just before we actually hit record, but creating space as a head of marketing for thinking time and writing time is really important.

When I started my career as head of marketing, voted admiral and ended up just in meetings, literally from the second I started to the work until the end. And so what you end up doing is your whole role ends up being reacting real time to information that people in your team are giving you. So you sit in the meeting and go, hey, hey Shane, I've got a proposal on pricing and packaging of this new product. Okay, here's what you think.

and you have five minutes to make a decision, that's not gonna be a quality decision. Your job is to improve the quality of your decisions. If you do that by 10%, it's hugely beneficial. So one of the things that I've done to improve that is two things. One is pre-read, so getting them to send me looms beforehand so that I can at least 24 hours before, watch it for my thoughts, and then when we get in the meeting, firstly, we need a shorter meeting, but I can be way more effective.

And then just generally making sure that I have time in the day for thinking. And luckily I'm on the East coast. So I, in my morning time is like pretty effective there so that I can write down my thoughts and send it back really thoughtfully. Um, and so, yeah, I think that that's like the big thing is like really being prioritized, making sure that you're getting pre-reads so that you can really soak it in and have a, uh, thoughtful response and then just thinking, writing time is like critical.

Todd (01:00:25.484)

Well, incredible advice. You've also made me feel a little bit better because we also recently introduced loom videos. So for example, our OKRs, every two weeks we do a loom video just because it's so much easier to, because one, it focuses the person to really think about what they're gonna say and then they might start again and then they can chop it and they can edit it. And then secondly, you can watch it on your own time, which is hugely beneficial so you're not being reactive like you said, and you can respond in your own time and you can do it in a much more thoughtful way. So.

I'm all game for anything that chops down meetings and being reactive. So, um, yeah, you made me feel a bit better. So true. So true. Um, Shane, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This is, this has been awesome. Where can people find you if they so wish to.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (01:00:56.918)

And you can watch it at 2x. 2x is the most important. 2x that.

Yeah, I'm on Twitter. Shane Murphy is my handle with an F in the Murphy, M-U-R-F-Y, it's a bit weird, but Murphy was taken. So Twitter's probably best, yeah.

Todd (01:01:21.908)

Yeah, good stuff. All right Shane, thank you so much for your time and speak soon.

Shane Murphy-Reuter (01:01:25.666)

Cheers Todd, talk to you soon mate.

Todd (01:01:27.672)

Thank you.