Mark Boothe: At the end of the day, it all comes back to, are your customers successful and are they getting value out of your product? And I think that too often, not only marketers, but companies in general can get short-sighted by the sale. You get them to a deal and then you're good. No, that's when the real work actually happens.
Kailey Raymond: Hello and welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing. I'm your host, Kailey Raymond. Building a strong community around your brand and focusing on strategies that create loyal advocates is an investment that pays dividends. By fostering a sense of belonging and actively engaging with your customers, you can create champions who not only stick around, sometimes even when they change jobs, but also help evangelize your product in an authentic way.
Kailey Raymond: This long-term strategy requires you to really listen to your customers. And once you do, you'll be able to continuously improve the customer experience based on their feedback. Domo's Mark Boothe and I discuss how community can improve LTV and your bottom line, the role of AI in ensuring customer data security and privacy, and the importance of listening to customer feedback.
Kailey Raymond: Today, I'm joined by Mark Boothe, Chief Marketing Officer at Domo. Mark brings over 15 years of experience and is driving Domo's business growth through marketing initiatives. In his previous role as VP of Community, Partner and Field Marketing, Mark and his team has created new and strengthened existing programs to address the customer pain points and create a sense of community. Before joining Domo, he spent more than 10 years working in customer relations and marketing at Adobe, and he worked at Instructure as a Senior Director of Customer Marketing. Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark Boothe: Hello there, Kailey. Thanks for having me.
Kailey Raymond: I'm excited to talk to a fellow data nerd here on the show today. Mark, I know you've kind of seen a lot of different sides of marketing throughout your career, a lot of different fields of discipline, but tell me, in your own words, how you got to where you are today as CMO at Domo.
Mark Boothe: Yeah, I am a big believer that relationships matter a lot. The only reason I'm here is because of good relationships and good people that have gotten me places. I started as a public relations person back at a company called Omniture many, many, many, many years ago, another data company. And did PR for a bit, worked a lot with customers, loved it, and had the opportunity, had the person who was running customer marketing leave. I was pretty fresh out of school, and for some reason, the Director of PR decided to take a chance on me and let me run customer marketing, and that kind of kicked off a big part of my career because somebody took a chance on me.
Mark Boothe: I spent over 10 years at Adobe after we were acquired and then kind of followed a lot of those Adobe people, a couple of friends that went to Instructure after I'd done a lot of cool things and learned a whole ton from one of the best brands in the world at Adobe, followed some people over to Instructure, spent some good time there, and then again, followed another past Adobe person over here to Domo. So I'm a big believer in surround yourself with greatness, and you'll at least turn out okay, and I've turned out at least okay just because of the good people that are around me.
Kailey Raymond: Everybody's going to sound off in the comments to let us know whether or not that assessment is true.
Mark Boothe: That's hilarious. That's hilarious.
Kailey Raymond: Just kidding, Mark. That's great, and one of the things that I think is really great, and we share this in common, is having that background in customer marketing in particular, I think gives you a real empathy for and understanding of that customer experience and that journey and centers them in a lot of the decisions that you make. I'm forever grateful for my experience in customer marketing, and it makes me think in different ways.
Kailey Raymond: So very cool that you had a similar experience, and somebody took a chance on you. That is a very common thing in careers that a lot of people don't necessarily always admit to maybe, so appreciate you bringing that to the table. Tell me about your role in the marketing organization as it relates to customer experience. How is your team building those customer experiences and journeys at Domo?
Mark Boothe: Yeah, I mean at the end of the day it all comes back to, "Are your customers successful, and are they getting value out of your product?" And I think that too often not only marketers, but companies in general can get short-sighted by the sale. You get them to a deal and then you're good. No, that's when the real work actually happens. What you're trying to do is build lifetime value. A customer who stays with you for one year is not near as important to you as a customer that stays for three, five, seven, 10 years. So the end goal is always going to be, "I want our customers to become maniacally focused on getting value with our solution." You want to create stickiness. You want to make sure that your tool, Domo, for us is just an integral part of how they get success, how they make their customers successful. And so leading with the customer, leaning in on community is something that has never been more important at Domo.
Mark Boothe: I know, I mean speaking as a data nerd, our customers, if there is an active member of our community, a customer is more than 20% more likely to renew. Well, that's not because of some magical superpower that the community has, but what it is showing you is that if someone is in the community, they are more likely to ask questions. They're more likely to answer questions. In the end, they're more likely to get value with the tool. The vast majority of times when you have customer churn, it's because of customers who aren't seeing value.
Mark Boothe: Now, of course, there's going to be times where there's tech consolidation or there's a new executive comes in and they want to bring in this other tool. That's great. And that happens. But the vast majority of the time, if they are getting true value out of your tool or solution, your customer churn is going to be significantly less. So we are laser beam, maniacally focused on how do we get our customers to be value, value, value receivers from Domo all the time.
Kailey Raymond: That's great. I think that anchoring this conversation there is incredibly important. I often feel as though sometimes marketing can be short-sighted and you're thinking about one side of the funnel to your point of like you just sign on as a customer, job done, pat yourself on the back. But at the end of the day, the metrics that you're anchoring on, LTV, time to value, those are the things that really matter. At the end of the day, it's infinitely easier to, in theory, maintain a dollar from a customer than it is to get a net new person and warm them up and get them excited about who you are and what you do.
Kailey Raymond: One thing that you mentioned too is community. I want to dig in there a little bit more. Why is community more important now than ever? Talk to me about that trend. I feel a difference in that trend now, but I'd love your take on that.
Mark Boothe: Yeah. And before I dig into that, Kailey, I'm going to semi-correct one little piece. As marketers, so often I think marketers don't even focus so much on the end goal of ACV. They focus on, "I brought you in at the top of the funnel."
Kailey Raymond: Oh yeah.
Mark Boothe: I got the MQL. We got sales to accept it. And it's like, "But you know, if we don't get ACV, none of us hit our goals." So that's one of the things that marketers have to get out of their own way. Who cares? In my opinion, the MQL is not dead. There's some people who would say that. You need an MQL to get to a SAL, to get to a SQL, to get to pipeline and all of that. But the end goal is not MQL ever. The end goal is let's get really qualified people who want to buy, let's nurture them and bring them along that whole journey. So that in the end, they become value added customers who want to stay with you for three, five, 10, forever. That's the idea.
Mark Boothe: Jumping into the community thing specifically, that was a big shift. A big shift that we made at Domo. There were some really good community efforts and things that had been put in place prior to when we really went full force on community. But there were some challenges that the team was dealing with related to community. So we had a big push about a year and a half, not quite two years ago. At that time, the community function was kind of straddled between marketing and customer success. And there was some great stuff that was happening in community. Community is hard because it can't be a departmental focus.
Mark Boothe: It has to be a company focus. It has to be something that the entire company buys into. But the leadership was spread across multiple different organizations. And so that made it difficult. We had a pretty good forum. There were some idea of awards and recognition. There were some events. But it was kind of the beginning of really an effective holistic community program. And so there was a team who went and did a holistic study, a heuristic study, sorry, that looks, for anyone who's familiar with heuristic studies, essentially, you're looking at different competitors to see how you rank on things like UX factors, user centricity, findability, ease of use, and whatnot.
Mark Boothe: And they looked at some of our big competitors. And we weren't in a great place. Again, there were some good backbones, there were some good things in place, but there was a lot of stuff lacking. I mean, there were similar but disjointed programs that created confusion. There was untailored and really unimpactful forum content. The branding wasn't consistent.
Mark Boothe: There was a lack of transparency across teams. You even think of the power of community and what it can do for a sales rep, for an account manager. If that information is being tied back to, for example, a CRM record, there was limited tracking and measurement. The sharing on social media was minimal. Nominal execution of UGC. The web experience was lacking. And so we had a lot of work to do. When you look at the other, what was it? I think it was five, five competitors that they looked at. This third party that did the research. We didn't fare well. We were kind of at the bottom of the barrel as far as what we were delivering. And so we jumped in to solve that.
Mark Boothe: When you look at what were the pain points that, in our opinion, a community should solve, it should solve for things like, "One, I didn't know that Domo could do that." You should start eradicating that thought, which is a massive problem across tech where people are like, "Oh, I thought you just did ETL. I thought you just did visualization. I need to hire Domo experts and I can't find any. Community should solve that problem. I need a place to keep my team updated about the new things in Domo. Hey, what about a template library?" Those are all kinds of things that a community could and should solve.
Mark Boothe: So what we went and created, we call it Domo Central. And it is for us, it's this single global customer-centric hub and program where these members come together and they're enabled and supported and recognized so that they can start investing and growing their Domo skills. So that's what we launched. We launched it about a year and a half ago and it's blown up in a really, really good way. So for us, Domo Central and community is much bigger than just a community forum, which is really important and a key component and tactive of a good community strategy. But it includes that discussion forum. It includes educational support. It includes events. It includes advocacy opportunities. It includes UGC content, customer advisory board, product feedback, and the list can go on and on.
Mark Boothe: So we launched that and as part of that as well, there was a piece that's now part of this program that we call Domo Connections Tour. And it was exactly what it sounds like. It was an opportunity for us to connect mostly with our customers, but there's of course, some prospects that come as well. We kick that off here in the fall and we do 11 in the US and Canada, 11 different locations. And it's an opportunity for these customers to come together, to learn from each other, to hear new product that's coming out, to just understand all that they can do from a product perspective.
Mark Boothe: Another thing that we launched as part of that community effort was we've got to be preparing the future rock stars. And that means getting into universities. And so we launched a program that we call Domo for Higher Education. And we created curriculum with modules, lives in Canvas LMS, and any professor or student can get access to Domo for free today. They can go and learn all about what's happening in this space. And we hosted a big case competition last year where we had a big number of universities that signed up for it. And we had a gave away $50,000. And now we have multiple of those team members on the Domo team now who participated in that competition, learned Domo.
Kailey Raymond: Oh, what a virtuous little circle.
Mark Boothe: It's just amazing. But on top of that, you look at some of the results that we saw pretty early on. I mean, active usage, of course, shot up significantly. Questions answered in the forum shot up significantly. Unique visits shot up significantly. It's just this virtual cycle of what happens when you invest in helping your customers to be successful. The end goal is not get them to a deal. The end goal is get them value and make them successful. And in turn, that's going to mean they'll stay with you for a long time.
Kailey Raymond: I 100% agree. I also love how holistically you are thinking about this. This is a web experience. This is an event experience. This is a digital forum for people to connect. It runs the gamut from people that we want to nurture into new Domo users when they are students all the way to these experts that might be able to help you implement your Domo instance or... So I think that all of these things are incredibly important and impactful and is building just a really robust strategy.
Kailey Raymond: And a lot of people forget that investing in your customers is also a way to get prospects in the door because they can help you tell your stories. So I think that that is one of the things that people start investing in is customer stories, customer reviews, and they start there as opposed to giving the value back first in the form of a community.
Kailey Raymond: So I've noticed this shift over the past couple of years with marketing organizations reinvesting in community where I think that for a long time, the tide had shifted it towards other parts of marketing and now there's, what's old is new again. So I'm personally excited about that trend. I know one of the things that you've also been focused on is AI. I think that's kind of the elephant in the room as it relates to some of the big macro trends that folks are following as it relates to customer experience.
Kailey Raymond: And so I wanted to dig in and see if you had any examples or highlights that you wanted to share of how you or your customers are leveraging AI, machine learning, predictive analytics. What's your take on what's going on right now? Anything interesting to share?
Mark Boothe: Yeah, I think the big thing to remember is depending on the company and the industry and potentially the exec staff, there's always going to be a lot of interest with AI. For me, it comes down to, is it safe? Is it secure? You can't put data at risk. And that's one of the challenges depending on how you're using it and where you're putting it and what model you're using and whatnot. There can be some challenges there.
Mark Boothe: So making sure that you're being really wise is important. We talk about Domo being this really intelligent data platform that helps strengthen that entire data journey with things like simple integrations, accessible interactions, intelligent automation. But what we're doing is we're allowing you to easily connect and transform and automate data and all of your data needs in a single platform that's accelerated by AI.
Mark Boothe: So we're in a day now where you can literally ask questions to your data. You don't have to be a heavy coder. You don't have to be a coder at all. We're at a time where you could say, "I want to know which rep is doing the very best in this region. Show me a visualization that does that." Like, we are in a time where AI is smart enough that it can get you the answers that you want. Now, what Domo has done a really good job. Sometimes AI seems a little bit like a black box. It's like, "Well, is that real? Where'd it come from?"
Kailey Raymond: How did that work? Is it always winning? How do I trust it? Yeah.
Mark Boothe: Exactly. Domo likes to show you where did that come from? Where'd the data come from? How did it get to that?
Kailey Raymond: Nice.
Mark Boothe: And so we're all in on AI. We've got, I met with one of our great partners, GUIDEcx, just recently. They're actually a customer and a partner. And seeing what they were doing with Domo and AI was pretty inspiring. Because again, we're in a day now where you don't have to be a data scientist to be able to get really good insights from data. You don't have to have a PhD. Not that there's anything wrong with getting a PhD, but AI allows even a layman like me to be able to ask data questions and get answers that will help you drive the business.
Mark Boothe: Domo is really focused on that line of business. The people who are similar, whether they're heavy analytics users or they're a business leader like myself, who just need answers quickly and can't wait for days or weeks to get an answer. AI gives you the ability to find those answers right now, really quickly. Also, when you look at the trend of AI, I'm really intrigued to see what happens over time with content. There's already so many really cool options of how to create content, how to synthesize content, how to make sure you're putting out the best content from an AI perspective, how you're running marketing campaigns.
Mark Boothe: I would just say for any marketers or data people out there, make sure that you are using AI in a safe and secure way, being really responsible with the data, but push the limits of innovation with AI because that's what it can help you to do. And it's not a, hey, well, maybe I should look at doing this in a couple of years. You're late. Go. Start moving.
Kailey Raymond: Totally. I like what you're saying is, I don't want to have to wait necessarily to be able to find the insight that I'm looking for. I think that that is a really kind of crucial, I don't know, selling point for sure of AI, but just in general is like this idea around being able to have that collaboration without conflict across organizations by being able to integrate your data and give access to data to all teams is critically important. And so not having you and I sitting here as marketers wanting to probably create unique audiences and segmentations and things waiting for a BI team or somebody to pull that for us. That real time value of that data, we know that the value of that data deteriorates really quickly. And so being able to do that in a timely fashion is incredibly important.
Kailey Raymond: By the way, I would imagine that that team is also thrilled that they don't have to create another bespoke segmentation for you that might only be used once. And so I do think that there's value that kind of both teams are staying with a lot of what the capabilities of AI are bringing today, which I'm personally really excited about. I'm wondering, collaboration across the business is kind of one of the things that I just mentioned. And I see that as something that can be challenging often and making sure that you're having you're giving access to everybody the same information. I'm wondering, besides collaboration, or maybe you want to riff on that, what's the biggest challenge when somebody is trying to create a great customer experience and journey?
Mark Boothe: Yeah, the collaboration piece is important and tough, especially when dealing with data, because you've got to start looking at privacy, of course, you've got to look at permissions. You want to make sure that people are armed with the kind of data and information they need to best do their job. You don't want them to have information that would get them in trouble or that could harm someone else. Privacy is incredibly important to us at Domo. So we have things in place to where the right people see the right kind of information.
Mark Boothe: There is information that I need to see that one of our managers of social media doesn't necessarily need to see. So you got to be really careful when you're collaborating across an entire company between sales and HR and marketing and product and everything else, making sure that you have those PDP policies in place so that you are seeing and other people are seeing what they need to be successful and not what's going to get them in trouble or would hurt someone from a privacy perspective.
Mark Boothe: Jumping on and talking a little bit about that customer experience. What's the biggest challenge? Time, I think, is the biggest challenge and making sure that you're making and taking time for those most important interactions. For a marketer or a product person or a salesperson to not regularly be talking with customers is a miss, a huge miss. You can't develop product in a vacuum. You can't create marketing that speaks to the right audience at the right time and the right place without understanding what those real challenges are. Things like what we've built with Connection Store, the great stuff with Community or DomoPalooza. The list could go on and on, gives us the opportunity to engage with customers.
Mark Boothe: I had a really good meeting in person when I was out in London just recently with the CTO of one of our, a really big customer. And it's just intriguing to be able to hear what they deal with, what the challenges are, but how can you expect to create best in class solutions for your customers if you're not regularly taking the time to figure out what they need?
Mark Boothe: So I think that, the key, honestly, for a really good customer experience is stop talking, open your ears and listen, listen, listen, listen. And that doesn't mean listen to one and then go make all of your changes. No, listen to a lot and then figure out what is it that I need to do to create the very best customer experience and then go and develop and build and create programs that will help those customers, again, to be able to get the most value they can.
Kailey Raymond: I think oftentimes what can happen is, and I've been a victim of this, is that recency bias. You have a conversation with one person and you've really empathetic to them. You're sitting in their shoes and you want to solve their problem. And then that becomes the everything. So I'm wondering, how do you think about building that feedback loop across all these different parts of the organization to ensure that customer insights are being used in product, in marketing, in sales? Is there any methodology, process, hacks, tips, and tricks that you found along the way?
Mark Boothe: Yeah, I think that the real key is just making sure that you're programming it and that it isn't an after thought. Too often, it becomes an afterthought. It's kind of like investing. If I don't have money that goes into a certain account or what not, that's savings better said than investing, then you don't do it because you don't think about it and becomes an afterthought. Whereas if it is automated, if it's okay, every week, every two weeks, every month, whatever I am meeting with, I want to hear. And that could even be for some people as simple as, let me go listen, see what's happening on social media. Let me go see what's happening in the community forum. Let me go to some of these events to be able to make sure I have a really good pulse on what our customers are saying. But you have to make sure that it is that is programmatically part of your process.
Mark Boothe: It cannot be an afterthought because you'll look back in that bank account many years later and say, well, how come I don't have more money in there? Because stuff happens. There's never enough time to do everything that you want to do. So make sure you're programmatically planning on how you'll listen to and engage with customers.
Kailey Raymond: And maybe this is something that you already answered in the way that you articulated this. But you mentioned like having people spend time in the right places and maybe spending time with customers is that action. But as you're building your customer journey, there are obviously moments in that, that are meaningful, that are changing customers kind of perceptions of you. These are the stage gates of making sure that somebody is kind of achieving higher LTV if we're really talking about kind of the bottom line of the business, but like great value in the form of customer and the way that they see it. Talk to me about that map. Have you found any of those key moments besides spending time with a customer that you're like, this is the thing that we're driving towards or even a way to talk to people about how to do that?
Mark Boothe: Yeah, the focus has to be again on getting that customer to value. Think of a brand new customer. Too often, I think the companies see that as, okay, we close the deal. Who cares?
Kailey Raymond: And? Yeah.
Mark Boothe: Great. Fantastic. Now a lot of the heavy lifting begins. How quickly making sure that you have processes in place to where, whether it's a customer success, manager or whatever you call it in your organization, whether it is a consulting manager who's going to start helping them get kicked off, whether it's an AE who is continuing to kind of drive and own that relationship? What happens immediately after through that journey leading up to becoming a new customer? But then even more importantly, once they become a customer, how are you going to get them to value as quickly as possible? What are the touch points like? What are the calls look like? What are the things that depending on their use case as well, it could differ? How do we get them to a place where very quickly they're not like, oh, we still can't get this implemented? We're still not getting value.
Mark Boothe: No, we want them very quickly to be like, yeah, we got a pretty crazy ROI and we're only a month in. That's what you want. And so don't leave it to chance. Don't leave it to, well, when the customer reaches out to me. No, you've got to be all over that experience. You have to make sure that things are set up in a way that the customer knows exactly what they need to do so that they can be successful because success for them is success for you but you have to get them to success. Success is not the close deal. Success is we got them to a close deal and then made them really successful and they stayed for forever.
Kailey Raymond: The work never ends.
Mark Boothe: The work never ends. Amen.
Kailey Raymond: I'm going to shift gears and working for a data company, I'm really curious to kind of hear your perspective on this, which is the namesake of the show. How would you define good data, Mark?
Mark Boothe: Oh, it's a good question. I think that early on, I probably would have thought, well, just capture anything that you can. And then after you can figure out what to do with it, you can get yourself into analysis paralysis really quickly if that's what you're doing. Make sure that you have a plan and a purpose and an end goal for what you're doing. Now, there may be some of those things where you see value and you understand that in the future, it could be valuable. So you're going to set up the measurement methodology to be able to get that data. But that I would make sure that that isn't the majority of what you're doing. The majority needs to be, this is why we're collecting this is, and this is what we're going to do with it. And this is how we're going to create more value because of that data.
Mark Boothe: Good data is capturing and leveraging more importantly, the data that will help you and your customer. Remember that they're, they go hand in hand, get value. If you're not getting the customer to value then it's going to be a short-term solution that won't work out for either organization.
Kailey Raymond: Beautiful. This through line that you're creating is value. It's driving value, making sure that you're delivering that and always kind of keeping that customer centered in mind. It's always good reminders. We talked about community as one example, but I'm wondering if there are any other campaigns or programs that you would want to highlight of how you're using good data at Domo?
Mark Boothe: Let me give you an example. We started a little while ago running a program that we called Chef Events, and they are exactly what they sound like. It's a virtual meetup. We send boxes of food out to prospects and customers. We have some kind of, sometimes celebrity, sometimes other just chef who cooks with them. They get the opportunity to learn a little bit about Domo, but to also have just a whole lot of fun. Pretty simple, pretty inexpensive from a cost perspective and driving absolutely amazing returns. We're looking obviously at the data here regularly. The team's done some really good work on audience. Who is the perfect audience for these kinds of environments, for this kind of experience? And that's been just an absolute home run for the marketing team, where we're leveraging that as a big driver of what's driving demand for us.
Mark Boothe: Another idea, we do a lot of work with paid and organic search. A good majority of what we're driving from a marketing perspective can be tied back to those two channels, paid and organic search. And we are exceptionally data-driven. Being Domo, I guess that makes sense, but we rely on data and we make decisions about spend regularly on data and efficiencies and optimizations. And I could show you dashboard stuff that I use as a CMO to make sure that we know what's happening from an efficiency perspective. How is it moving through the funnel? Yes, we talked about MQLs earlier. MQLs are as important as getting a customer in. That's it. I don't care if it takes a million MQLs or 10 MQLs.
Mark Boothe: I would rather have 10 really good MQLs than a million that an ADM or a sales team has to fight through. You have to be using data to see where in the funnel are things working the best. You have to use data to be able to look and say, which of our reps are most effective with the leads that you're giving them? I was just this morning doing some digging into that specifically at the rep level. I know exactly what it costs us from a sales accepted lead perspective. Well, if I've given this rep 50, 100, whatever the number is, sales, and they haven't gotten me a one-to-one return on that investment, I'm concerned. I'm concerned. And the data's, it's not like the data's hard to get to, but you have to start thinking just like a sales team wants to keep marketing accountable, I want to keep sales as accountable and marketing as accountable as anyone, because at the end of the day, if we don't get the ACV that we need, none of us are going to do the kind of things at the company that we want to.
Mark Boothe: This is not about marketing accountability or sales accountability. It's about company accountability and making sure that our customers, again, are getting to value. It's really hard to spread a team, marketing or sales or anyone else, too thin by saying we gave you a million MQLs and you only turned out X number of closed deals from it. Yeah, well, because you're sending them on a wild goose chase.
Kailey Raymond: Yeah.
Mark Boothe: Focus on the stuff that's actually going to drive you returns.
Kailey Raymond: Nobody wants a million MQLs. That's for damn sure. That probably means you're spending way too much time and money in the wrong places. And to your point. Your sales team is working a whole lot of leads that might not be super relevant. My last question for you, Mark, is if you have any steps or recommendations for somebody that's looking to up-level their customer experience and that strategy that you're building, what would that be?
Mark Boothe: Yeah, it's hard because it will differ depending on the organization that you're in. It depends on where you're at in that journey. Start wherever you are. Don't wait. Start now. And the place to start is to listen to your customers, figure out what it is that they really need and want, and then start developing and deploying. That is step number one. Maybe you're in a place where, hey, we have a community forum that's really, really moving. Okay, well, is the interaction all that it should be? Is the web experience up to snuff? Do you have both a virtual and in-person kind of event structure that will help to deepen and further those relationships? Are you rewarding? Are you motivating? Are you giving an exchange of value to the customers in the right way? You got to start somewhere. Most people already have some semblance of some kind of community, but you got to start somewhere and it has to start with listening to customers and then developing based on what they say.
Kailey Raymond: Beautiful reminder to folks to make sure to insert that feedback loop into their daily and weekly rhythm. Mark. Thanks so much for being here. I'm so glad that we spent a lot of time talking about value exchange and community and the importance there. Always a great lesson to go back to.
Mark Boothe: Thanks, Kailey.