🚀 How do the big guns of #tech fire out market-winning campaigns at lightning speed?
On the latest episode of the @thesaascast , Pat Proulx from Knack shares how they supercharge marketing engines for the likes of @Adobe @Google .
We’re talking speed without the slip-ups, campaigns that capture customer attention without cutting corners. 🚀📈
🎧 If your mission is to stay in the lead, this is your playbook.
⚡️ Powered by: Build with Assembly
🚀 How do the big guns of #tech fire out market-winning campaigns at lightning speed?
On the latest episode of the @thesaascast , Pat Proulx from Knack shares how they supercharge marketing engines for the likes of @Adobe @Google .
We’re talking speed without the slip-ups, campaigns that capture customer attention without cutting corners. 🚀📈
🎧 If your mission is to stay in the lead, this is your playbook.
⚡️ Powered by: Build with Assembly
Welcome to another episode of the SaaScast. Here we have a simple rule no jargon, no fluff, just bite-sized advice from some of the biggest names in the SaaS world. Patrick, it's great to have you on the show today with us. Before we dive deeper into everything that's interesting and exciting about the platform that you and your team have built, why don't you quickly introduce yourself? And instead of me introducing the company, this time I'm going to pass it off to you, just to shake things up a bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sounds great. Thanks for having me on, jason. I'm Pat Prue. I am the CTO and a co-founder here at NAC. Nac is a SaaS platform for enterprise marketing professionals to be able to build out their emails and landing pages at scale, while keeping everything on brand and compliant. That's sort of what we do here at NAC.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing, as I was getting to know you and your platform a little bit, I know you're focused on enterprise and predominantly large enterprises. You've obviously built this incredible business, considering you have clients like Google, Square and Box using your platform. Those are tech titans. It's amazing that they're using a Canadian company, a SaaS company, to help them solve a really interesting thing that's been on my mind a lot more, which is the art and science of speed marketing and how rapidly that's changing. I guess my first question to you is you're able to make it up to 95% faster? I think we all agree speed and accuracy is really important in business, but how were you able to pinpoint so early on that it was a problem for companies? Or was it maybe something that you involved it involved into?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a bit of both. It was something we had to fight early, but we also had to evolve into what we do now. We originally were a template library for marketers to be able to download templates, have them styled to their brand and send it over to the marketing automation platform. But even with that, all the emails, if there's anything that was not on template you need to get into the code. I don't know if you've ever played with email HTML and email coding.
Speaker 2:It's a huge pain. There's a very small number of people who are really good at it and just the amount of testing, the back and forth, things that could go wrong, are huge. So it can take forever to get an email from an idea to the end state where it's been approved and can be sent. And especially at the enterprise level where you have very strict branding, very strict compliance, it makes things really really slow, and our CEO owned a marketing agency that worked with a lot of these large companies and so he saw firsthand how slow it was for them. And being able to have a no code platform to be able to deal with all those little changes and making sure it's on branding compliant just speeds up that whole process and gets the coding out of there, which is where a lot of the slowdowns happen.
Speaker 1:And so I can imagine for an enterprise, it's really putting the power back into the marketing team and enabling them to move faster, because, again, it's not creating these support tickets requesting a minor change. That might take two, three days. They can just go in there, no code required, make the updates and then send it out through whatever platform that they wish to send out for their email campaigns, which is actually something that got me thinking. So when we were talking before, I learned that very early on, you guys decided to make a really tough decision, which was whether or not to own the ability to send an email through the platform, and so when you kind of told me why and I don't want to steal you, steal your, your thunder, so I'll let I'll let you share why you guys made that, that choice, it really left me with this Correlation back to what the problem was that you guys were trying to solve and how. That's like disseminated into how you're building your company. So, yeah, why don't you share?
Speaker 2:sure that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think from from our perspective there's there are a lot of established, established players in the marketing automation platform space and one thing they had in common was they were all terrible at Enabling them and marketers to be able to build emails and landing pages, and I think from our perspective we saw that as a really good opportunity for us.
Speaker 2:And then it also With regards to just risk right, having all of their customer lead lead data and having to have access to that introduces a lot of risk. All the GDP are kind of sending Laws and things like that. By being just the creation platform, that's not something we need to To deal with on at a risk level. So it really made it easier for us to to kind of get started and, and especially at the enterprise level, the stakes are a lot higher when it comes to their level of risk that they're willing to to take. So being able to say, hey, we don't have access to any of your customer data, we don't do any, the sending, we just do the creation, was a kind of a nice Space for us to be in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I would assume it would like simplify and obviously speed up the sales process as well. Right, because you're dealing with less technical complexity and less regulations in In background that you'd probably have to go through as an organization. So what I saw from that was again that the Speed of the theme of speed rather and I love that that that was seen so early on in in the in the company's creation. So you know, I guess there's I Often think about what's the correlation between pumping out campaigns faster and what like. What's what's the average ROI that you see, you know when you apply speed versus you know what we're doing today, which might be a little bit slower and more thoughtful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think one of my kind of favorite examples from one of our clients was a very large pharmaceutical company who, when COVID hit, wanted to start kind of Flagging things and talking to their consumers about COVID and they weren't able to get their first message or first email out for Two whole months. So their first email that mentioned anything about COVID to their kind of customer base was kind of late May 2020 and they obviously that's kind of like you want to be able to the little too late.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you want to be able to respond to the market markets shifting.
Speaker 2:You want to be able to engage your customers early and I think that's a big problem if you have six to eight week turnover on or turn around on an email right for throughout the whole life cycle that customer is down now down to like four days.
Speaker 2:They've gotten emails out from had a when they decided they need an email to when it was approved and ready for launch down to four days, which let's you be a lot more responsive to what's happening kind of in the market and engaging your customers early in. But it also let's you try different things too, right? I think there's a big piece that, yeah, you want, you want to be doing a lot more a b testing, you want to try different things, and the quicker you can create new types of emails, the more you can try those things and get feedback that kind of you can use for future emails. So I think you end up with better performance by being able to test different things, and I think so. On the return side, I think we've Seen some really good improvements there. But then, just on the investment side, for the return on investment, just not having to spend two months and yeah, way cycles and all that that reduces the investment as well.
Speaker 1:So I think the on the ROI front we see some some really really good Results yeah okay, and so I guess, when you're starting to think about, like you, the future need within enterprise, you know there's emerging technologies like AI that have both like a practical application for your platform, for your customers and you know everyone's kind of in this this that's dabble and try things out phase. So how do you see like AI affecting your company? And then how do you see technology like AR are influencing content in these brands that you work with through the, the things that your platform does, which is landing pages and emails?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, on the AI front, that's that's something we're kind of diving headfirst into. We also were taking maybe a bit more of the Apple approach of like let's see how things go a little bit to make sure what we release is something of high value. So there's a lot of people who are releasing AI things and some very cool stuff, but I think in terms of the actual value that a lot of that AI functionality is providing is somewhat limited. And I think, especially at the enterprise level, where there's a lot more compliance, just more more brand guidelines and things like that, we wanted to take a bit more of a thoughtful approach. So we're we've done a few proof of concepts. We're just talking to our customers. We're looking to partner with some of our customers to really make sure that what we are kind of developing there isn't just kind of fluff that kind of might look cool but doesn't really help the marketer.
Speaker 2:But we are, we have a kind of a two year vision and we're currently in talks with the, the IWAP program for Government of Canada to really invest in kind of AI for NAC.
Speaker 2:So it's yeah, so it's something we're taking very seriously.
Speaker 2:I think there's there's a lot that can be done there, especially when it comes to be able to kind of guide people and help them optimize their emails and then jump in the right direction in terms of like, just turn around time as well, right, if you, if you can generate kind of 90% of it Based on kind of best practices and what's shown really good success, I think that would provide a lot of value for for our customers and yeah, so it's something really we're really excited about.
Speaker 2:On the AR front, to be honest, we haven't done too much thinking there. Yeah, I think at this stage, we're just going to be able to really think about this stage. Yeah, we're still in a bit more of a traditional campaigns emails landing page. We've talked about ads, a little bit like white papers and things like that. There are other areas within marketing campaigns that we could get into right now. I think, being in the enterprise space as well, you often see like once you start seeing things gain some traction at the smaller size, then that might kind of peak our interest a little bit more.
Speaker 2:But right now it's not something we've put a ton of thought into.
Speaker 1:And so landing pages and emails that's like a part of the marketers' recipe for driving early awareness and through demand generation campaigns, and so I've been thinking a lot lately. There's so much noise on a lot of these things. Let's forget email, because we all complain about that, but even on LinkedIn now, you really have to do something incredibly unique or special to stand out, and then, moreover, it's up to, I think, 10 times now that you need to do that in order for them to remember you. So I get why speed's important, but I think the thing that we're all still trying to figure out more on like let's focus this question on the enterprise, B2B side. Maybe let's think about companies like us, right? What advice do you have to get through that noise and that clutter? You guys have built an incredible company. Your customers are amazing. They're big brands.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the way that we look at it from our emails and landing pages, our campaigns internally kind of attack is. I think if we engage with our customers and our customers love our platform and love what we're doing and we provide valuable insights and thought leadership into the marketing space, people will want to read those emails, People will want to go to our webinars, so engage with our content. So I think it's one of those things where if you're just sending emails to try to sell what you're selling and you're not providing actual value with it, people are just going to put you on ignore, right. But I definitely you just even.
Speaker 2:Personally, I get a ton of emails, I get people trying to sell me things all the time, but I do have, like, some of the products that I use that I love using, that I'm invested in.
Speaker 2:I definitely do keep those newsletters and those emails in my inbox that I read them and I take the time to go through them because this is something that impacts my job. So I think that's kind of how we look at it is. If you're providing really good content that people engage with, that provide value to people, it's going to stay relevant, right. And I think email is one of the only mediums where you can still directly reach somebody right, Whereas like LinkedIn, you put it out there, you know if they're following you they'll see it. Landing page if they happen to go to the page, they'll see it. But email you can tailor it directly and you know this person is getting that email. So it's a bit of an interesting medium in that respect and I think when we get to personalization and things like that, there's a really good opportunity there For email to be a differentiator.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think AI is going to help marketers solve the conundrum that a lot of them are struggling with right now, which is, you know, digital marketing has gotten increasingly more noisy and our lives have gotten increasingly more back to normal and even more so busy.
Speaker 1:So if content is the key, like you're saying, it is to hook me in and keep me there, and you know, I think contents the key to get me to know that you exist. But during that engagement phase, I think there's a lot of opportunity for AI to start helping marketers build the brand connection with these prospects in intimate ways where, again, it makes it feel like it's just for me, it's more personalized, like we think about the experience we get on Amazon, for example. They know us very well, right, and look at how big they are, right, so you know. Just to close things off, two final things. Do you have any books that could help companies like us Understand? You know, one speed marketing, or two like how to win in demand generation, things like landing pages, emails, linkedin, like those types of things, or even blogs that you like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say, hmm, from a demand and perspective and marketing. It's a little less my field. I'd say like from a, so I'm more on the building a product. So I think one of the kind of key books for me early on was inspired by Marty Kagan and just yeah, I think that was as someone building a product, so being able to work really closely with your customers to understand what they want and providing value to them. I thought that to me that was a bit of a game changer, coming from an engineering background, to really understand the process, to make sure that we're building a product that provides value and that people will love, versus just kind of pumping out features that we think they'll want. Yeah and for. Unfortunately, on the kind of yeah, marketing, demand gen side, I don't have any books that kind of stand out to me that might be helpful for for markets.
Speaker 1:Okay, no, that's totally fine. You know, I always say like a good resource if there aren't a lot of like thought leaders yet that are really painting what the future might look like and how companies like us can win through demand generation in this new digital age that's moving at lightning speed. It's always good to look at those companies that are clearly winning, that are doing that well. You have many of them. So I guess, for our listeners, if they want to learn more about your company and how you can give them an unfair advantage over their competitors, which is speed and accuracy, where can they find out more about your company?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you can reach us at enactcom. That's our website. You can also reach out directly to me. Send me a request on LinkedIn. Okay, and yeah, always happy to chat, whether it's about how we can help from from max perspective and how, what we do, but also just in terms of building products and if you're somebody since SAS and trying in the same space, trying to get ideas on how what kind of strategies might work and how we've done it, and I'm always happy to talk through that stuff as well.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. It was great chatting about something that's been on my mind for quite some time and getting your thoughts and perspective on it. Congrats on all your success you guys have been having. I can't wait to see how you're going to apply AI to really personalize these experiences and make the content truly stand out and be unique. All the best for the rest of the year and we can't wait to see what you cook up next year.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me on, Jason. It's been great chatting.