Insentric by Demandlab

Mike Rizzo: Hey everybody, welcome back to another no bullshit demo today. I am super excited to be joined by not just one individual, but a few individuals from this team. And you will see why, uh, they are thought leaders in their own rights. They also have a breadth of experience, uh, so you’ll kind of get to learn a bit about all of that.

So, uh, to kick us off, I’m going to go ahead and hand it over and allow them to introduce themselves. Uh, Chen, why don’t you, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Chen Bian: Thank you, Mike. Uh, I am Chen. I am the head of revenue here at, uh, DemandLab, uh, where we have created the Incentric product that we’re talking about today.

Um, very happy to be here with you and, uh, I’m going to hand it over to Hey

Casey Grimes: there, so I’m Casey and I am the Director of Product and Innovation here at DemandLab. And basically we’ve been working on this product in Centric that we’re pretty excited to show you today.

Josh Hoffman: And Josh Hoffman, head of sales and partnership at demand lab, uh, based out of Denver and previously founded a couple of SAS companies.

So trying to, you know, get this, uh, going and help sell and bring in partnerships for Incentric.

Mike Rizzo: I love it. Well, thank you all for joining. It’ll make for an interesting episode of the no bullshit demo series, because we get to hear different perspectives, which I am actually a super fan of because they’re really getting the full picture of what it’s like to, uh, check out Incentric and your team.

So this is, this is pretty cool. So as we always do, we’re going to sort of walk through the questions. And the first of those questions is what is the product? What does it do? And why does it exist?

Chen Bian: When we first created the product, it was really around solving a lot of the reporting and data needs that we were coming across as consultants.

So these are trying to solve for the problems that, um, have existed in marketing and marketing operations for a long time for the reporting and not just in attribution, but in like reporting and data in general. Um, so. It’s not specifically a reporting platform. It’s not specifically an attribution platform, and it’s not specifically a visualization platform.

What it does do is it takes over some of the work that marketing ops has traditionally have to have had to do in terms of data architecture. So, you know, when they have to, like, dump a whole bunch of data, put in their own architecture, clean up the data to get the reporting. So this essentially. Replaces all of that.

Um, it does the architecture, it does data cleanup for your UTM tags, and it actually comes with a starter kit of reports that are not your typical default reports in terms of like, hey, how many clicks did you get? How many opens did you get? It actually answers some really interesting questions. That as a team with decades of experience in this area, we know to be important.

Um, and effectively what we would love to be able to accomplish for every marketer and marketing ops professional with this tool is that they never dread another QBR.

Mike Rizzo: Ooh, I like that. Yeah.

Chen Bian: So why does it exist to like, take care of that sinking feeling you get every quarter?

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Never dread another QBR.

I love it. Okay, so we’re going to keep working through these questions. Uh, typically this is where, you know, a team might open up their deck or their product or a little bit of both. Um, so let’s talk about why a marketing operations professional would use your product and ideally maybe share, um, three or more examples where it really shines.

Chen Bian: Yeah, so Casey’s definitely going to be opening up the product to share some reports at this juncture, but to, you know, give you the, the story, it’s really that it helps you identify. Well, the 1st thing it helps you do is identify things that are in effective. This is the 1st Part that I really loved about this product when Casey for said, like, hey, I’m working on something cool.

Um, and the reason for that is every marketing team gets told to do more with less and we’re like, okay, but what about all the things that don’t actually do anything? In fact, it might be hurting you. Right? So that’s kind of the 1st thing it can surface. Um. And, uh, and there are some, some reports Casey can show for that.

The other things it does is surfacing opportunities. Um, it surfaces, like, it allows you to celebrate some successes. So, what campaigns are working, the great results that you’re getting, um, the other parts that we’ve been able to tease out are, like, Operational reporting. So you are the first to know when something is broken, as opposed to sales being the first to know.

Um, and then you’re getting that very angry call. Yeah.

I’ve seen that before.

Chen Bian: Yeah. Yeah, so Casey, you got some reports to show us. Um, so this report shows is you shows you the bounce reasons over time. Um, so there’s a few things to highlight as soon as we, we get it up on the screen here. Um, number 1 is that it’s a great operational report because it lets.

It makes the marketers the first to know when you do have a spam issue, um, where you might have been blacklisted or something like that. You’ll see a very clear vertical spike. Um, it also highlights if there are parts of your database that need cleanup, um, to try and open more of it for targeting. Um, but what the number one thing, and it seems like it should be simple, but this is one of those things where so many things in marketing ops are, right?

When you’re like, it should be simple, and yet it’s not. Um, Is the presence of a trend line. So if you’ve ever tried to get this report out of anywhere else, you could get a snapshot and then you would actually have to time it out and then manually bring out the data. Right? So it’s either that or you do a big data dump and then you have to do all of the architecture in the background.

So the amazing part about this is that you actually get to see the trend.

Mike Rizzo: Right? Right. That’s super helpful. Yeah. And like, It’s that little nerdy bit of detail that really matters, right? It’s like this point in time, these timestamps of when these things are happening so that. You know, you can report on the health of your, your system, right?

Your go to market, uh, activations. And that is the bread and butter of being a marketing operations sort of product manager in my perspective, right? Where you’re, you’re responsible for maintaining a really effective and efficient go to market and how can you show that, um, without trend lines? So that’s really cool.

I like it.

Chen Bian: Yeah.

Mike Rizzo: Very good. Yeah.

Chen Bian: So in this particular, um, data set, you get to see your top performing programs. Um, one of the things that I do want to highlight is that we can actually do this for multi instance. So if you have 2 or 3 instances of Marketo, um, we can actually bring it all together. Um, this is something that we come across a lot of times in like enterprise where you might have Different product lines, and you need some consolidated reporting.

Um, but yeah, this is a dashboard. Um, and you can see, uh, what some, one of the interesting things is the source and channel campaign before is, like, how many touch points you need before somebody MQLs. As marketers, uh, sometimes we err towards more is better. This chart will clearly tell you that more is not better.

Mike Rizzo: Not always, right? Not

Chen Bian: always. Um, and also that like, there is a real like diminishing, um, return and it’s not a straight line. It’s like exponential. Um, so those are the things that. We wanted to highlight here. Um, there’s also a chart in your lower right hand corner around just top performing programs. Um, this is just a very easy way to visualize like, hey, what’s working?

What’s not working? What’s converting people? What’s making mqls versus just like, oh, did they download this report? You’re looking at it from a much more higher level perspective.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, Naturally, this opens up more conversation, like more questions for me, but it like absolutely is, uh, I think an aggregate to like the, the ability to like pull it across multiple, uh, portals is super interesting.

And I, I like. that from, from this lens, you’re not really like, it almost doesn’t matter the naming convention. Like imagine for a moment that they have different like lead source, uh, names in these two different platforms. Uh, but I like that this at least aggregates the data in a way that like, like, it seems like it’s normalizing to a degree, right.

Cause you’re using shared metrics.

Casey Grimes: And it’s trying to sort of handle those real world situations because as consultants like we know for instance that you’re not going to have like a perfectly cleaned up lead source list or an industry list, etc. So we can either visualize all of that out for you or break it up and consolidate as needed.

Basically, we know the real world pains that points that you’re going to go through. We’ll probably show this kind of stuff. So we also want to not BS you and show you that kind of stuff as well. So we

Mike Rizzo: appreciate you showing off the product a little bit. Now let’s talk a little bit about, uh, the integrations that are most frequently used within your sort of.

Tech stack and ecosystem in order to see Encentric shine. Um, can you share what integrations are most frequently used?

Chen Bian: So, um, Marketo is the most common one. The second one is Salesforce. Um, we do have a HubSpot connector coming online. Uh, Casey promised it to me as a Christmas present. It might end up being a Chinese new year present, but you know how that goes with product roadmap.

But it is coming. Um, uh, the other things to highlight would be that if you have anything already integrated into, um, your Salesforce or Marketo, it is, those are things that we can also report on. We do have a client that has Sales Loft attached to their Salesforce, and we’re able to grab data from there as well.

Mike Rizzo: Okay. That’s really cool. All right. Nice. All right. So we’re talking about Marketo and Salesforce pending, no pressure, Casey, a HubSpot, but, uh, for those watching, make sure to check back, uh, for, for whether that has been released and keep your eyes on the product. Cause I know we have a big HubSpot ecosystem in our community as well.

So let’s talk about the average size of your customer base. Where does that fall?

Chen Bian: I call it, um, mid sized with overworked marketing operations professional,

which I

Chen Bian: think is every oversized or, um, mid sized org. Um, but really I think we’re looking, if you have marketo instance with something like 250, 000 to a million records, that’s really our sweet spot.

Um, It’s you know, for us, it’s like, do you have reporting needs? Um, and if you’re much smaller than that, oftentimes you can afford to, like, just run an Excel. Um, you know, versus like, if you’re much bigger than that, our guess is you have an analytics team behind you. Um, you know, um, with, uh, larger capabilities.

This is really about bringing

Enterprise level proficiencies, um, and solutions to the mid market.

Mike Rizzo: I love that. Very cool. Uh, it helps people sort of, you know, right size in their mind. Like when, when do I need to start thinking about this? Right. That’s why we always ask that question. All right. So another fun one that, uh, I think all of us are familiar with in marketing operations.

Like let’s be real. What’s the reality of the average time to complete an implementation for this product?

Chen Bian: No bullshit answer. It only takes 15 minutes to set up. Um, okay. But there is a data load, right? Like we got to get the data from somewhere. Um, for the size of databases that we’re talking about, that usually can take up to a couple of days, um, just for all the data to transfer.

Um, so plus that, if you. Own all as a marketing team, um, you own your marketing automation platform and you own all of your data. It will go faster because you don’t need permissions from elsewhere. Obviously, if you’re working with your team, then it really. Depends on some of their scheduling, which can slow you down.

Um, in our experience, marketers tend to run real fast and everybody else says slow down. So, yeah,

Mike Rizzo: but 15 minutes

Chen Bian: of actual work and then the data load. That’s really all there is.

Mike Rizzo: Okay, very cool. Um, let’s talk about the pricing model. Oh, go ahead. So

Chen Bian: actually, um, Casey, do you want to show?

Mike Rizzo: Sure.

Chen Bian: Yeah, like we’re actually going to show you the, the setup.

Panel like we are not afraid of this. It’s actually really simple.

Casey Grimes: Okay, cool. Let’s see it. I love it Like we literally have everything broken down step by step of what you’ll need to do and that it is literally just a matter of What are your keys? What are the fields that you would like to report on once that’s all set up and basically in centric works in the background?

To go ahead and dynamically calculate all of that for you So whether it’s your fields your filters, what have you It does it all out of the gate. Therefore, you’re not sitting there fussing about how do I customize this report? How do I get everything to work just for me? Because it does that natively.

Mike Rizzo: All right. Um, let’s dive into your pricing model. Um, can you tell us a little bit about how the pricing model is structured? How do people subscribe? All that kind of stuff.

Chen Bian: It’s actually, uh, Integration based. So for a version that is connected to your Marketo or your marketing automation platform only, um, it’s 2000 a month.

Um, to add the Salesforce connector is 6, 000 a month. Um, and. There are some extras, so because it does come with kind of a starter kit of reports, if you do need custom reporting built, because you have custom objects or anything like that that needs to be handled, um, there, it does come in at extra cost because we do need to build that for you.

Um, and we do also want to be clear. It does not come with, um. If you need a full data re architecture, if you need full data cleanup that does not come with the product, please talk to your nearest agency or consultant to help you. Um, yeah, in terms of, uh, everything else, it’s really. You call Josh and then he helps you navigate things.

Mike Rizzo: I love it. So Josh, you’re our go to person, uh, at least at this point in time for the, for the pricing conversations and the best deal you’re going to offer the best deal and hopefully the

Josh Hoffman: foreseeable future

Mike Rizzo: as well.

Josh Hoffman: Yes. Happy to happy to work with

Mike Rizzo: anyone on that. I mean, you might get a promotion and not have to do that job.

That’s where my head was going. Um, so you talked to, you know, Chen, you mentioned, uh, additional customer reports can be sort of. Added some services, so you know that those are those are ancillary additional sort of purchases that you can make. Are there actual like set up costs? You know, I think of certain marketing automation platforms when you buy them, they sort of force you to buy like an onboarding package or.

Or what have you. Um, do we have any of those in there?

Chen Bian: Yeah. So there’s no, like, you must buy this onboarding package. It comes with a client success. It comes with some onboarding. It comes with some training for the team. Um, the, uh, you know, Most people find that there’s some work that they need to do in their data to make reporting better.

Um, that is not atypical. Um, we try and navigate around it the best we can. Um, but overall, I would say, like, set up costs are going to be Pretty negligible, especially if you are, like, if you have a marketing operations team, which at, you know, at the size we’re talking about, most people do, um, or if you’re already working, uh, with a consultant or agency, um, most of the time, we see, you know, In those circumstances, we see that like people’s data are in like pretty good shape.

Um, it’s never going to be perfect. We’re marketers. Um, you know, no one sits around going like, man, I really need to UTM tag everything. It’s never going to happen.

Mike Rizzo: For sure. I really wish all the things were UTM tagged. It’s the more common statement, I think, right? Yeah. Very cool.

Chen Bian: Josh. Do you want to talk about the reporting readiness check that we’re putting together?

Josh Hoffman: Yeah, no, that’d be great. We also have a free, we call it a report readiness check that you can actually sign up for before, you know, getting involved or too involved. Um, and that’s basically seeing the service and the tool with your own data. Um, so we’ll pull enough data that you can kind of get some valuable, valuable reports, um, and you can actually see those reports with your own data.

So. Uh, a nice way to kind of get your feet wet and then see if this is the right fit. And, and, you know, that’s actually when we can find out, is your, your data ready? Do you need a little bit of support before that? Um, and kind of give you a grade of what, what that looks like.

Mike Rizzo: Okay. That’s really cool. So, so this is like, Hey, I’m not sure.

Am I going to get the. Uh, maybe the utility out of this product, uh, quickly or when will I be ready? Right. So you, you sort of instrumented a, a stage to be able to like figure that out sooner. Yeah. And just

Josh Hoffman: to, just to add to that, you know, not everyone is ready. Not everyone has the data that’s gonna make these reports valuable.

So we, before wasting or using anyone’s time, we wanna make sure that this is something that you can actually give value out of.

Mike Rizzo: Okay, very cool.

Josh Hoffman: No, I love

Mike Rizzo: that

Josh Hoffman: idea. I mean,

Chen Bian: that is the no bullshit offer because anyone who is like anyone who’s ever seen a demo of any reporting product, it’s like everything looks good when you have demo data, right?

Like 100 percent of the time, it works beautifully with demo data. And it’s really when you get like your own data in that things can get really hairy. So we wanted to offer people the chance to see it with their own data.

Mike Rizzo: Yep. Yep. That makes sense. Very cool. All right. So let’s talk about the internal teams that are typically involved to get fully implemented.

Um, you made mention of a couple of teams you might run into earlier in this recording, but what do you see as like the most common set of teams that, um, You know, a mops person might have to interact with to get implemented with your product.

Chen Bian: Yeah. So, um, marketing itself, right? Because they do ask the business questions that we’re searching for reports and answers for, um, uh, marketing operations.

If you have platform operations teams, sometimes they’re the ones to take care of some of those APIs and integrations. Um, otherwise your I. T. team. Um, If you do have an in house analytics team, that may be something that you want to collaborate with. Um, but it’s not necessary to get started.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah. But it’s a good call out, right?

Something to think about, like, who could I bring in to, to make sure we all get the value we need out of this, which I think from every evaluation and implementation perspective, those that have done it a few times, like, Get as many stakeholders, uh, sort of aligned as quickly as possible, but also don’t put too many cooks in the kitchen because

Chen Bian: it could really slow things down.

We actually see some sales teams, um, just because of the, the Salesforce integration and functionality there.

Mike Rizzo: So yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So a million dollar question, there are some pretty, uh, sizable investments made into Martech, uh, often in the enterprise, even in the mid market space that do require experts, uh, agencies and consultants to implement them, we’ve already heard that it’s pretty easy to set up.

Do you feel that there is a better chance of success? Like if I work with an external consultant or agency, are they kind of, Needed to be successful. Yay. Nay.

Chen Bian: So this question sort of depends on how much, like what kind of talent you have in house, right? I think from a setup and you know, basic value perspective, I don’t think it’s necessary to have a consultant or an agency.

I would say you would get a lot of value out of the product even without, um, that factor, but. You know, we love having been consultants. We love consultants and agencies, and we think they do bring a ton of value. Um, a lot of times when it comes to what report would be interesting, what kind of business questions we can answer, um, consultants, just, they bring a different perspective.

And a lot of times they’ll have a lot of context for the client. Um, for all of those reasons, like it. We think it’s, it’s a good thing.

Mike Rizzo: That makes sense. That makes sense. I think sometimes that outside perspective and just like being able to see around a corner, right. Um, or, or even proposing a new way to look at the data, right.

That you might not be thinking about, like often you get super close to your own data and you’re like, yeah, this is how we always did it. And it’s like, yeah, what is that? Really doing the best for the business. So, uh, I think it’s a fair point to make, right. And, uh, tap into the external help if you get it.

Chen Bian: 100%. Um, and, uh, Josh, do you want to run through some partnership, um, information?

Josh Hoffman: Yeah, I think the partners that really shine for us when working with in centric are going to be a lot of like the independent consultants that not only can help, you know, if you need help setting up, but it can also tack on services on top of that, that can really take advantage of the entire tool.

So it’s not just these reports, but how can we use these reports? Um, how can we change strategy? How can we remove a campaign? Things like that. So, um, you know, anytime, any, anyone that’s working with maybe an independent consultant or things like that. It’s really beneficial on that side.

Mike Rizzo: And are you, um, do you have a sort of, um, Rolodex to quote an old tool that we all used to use back in the day of, uh, partners in your ecosystem or are you seeking additional partners or both?

Josh Hoffman: We do, uh, we’re looking to grow every day. Um, we have a lot of resources and. Um, networks that we’re kind of tapping into that can really help this, uh, help us and, you know, again, coming from the consulting side, we know who are going to be the good ones, the, what the right fits for you. Um, so really making sure that’s not just here’s, you know, a list of consultants, but here are the listed consultants that we actually think are a good fit for what you’re looking for.

Mike Rizzo: Awesome. No, I appreciate you sharing that with all of us. Okay. So let’s keep moving through. Uh, we’ve talked about external agencies and consultants and some value add that can come from there. And it sounds like if you’re a consultant or an agency, and you think this is a really cool product, you should probably reach out to their team.

Uh, so let’s talk about support options. What are they? Do they cost more? Is it baked in? Tell us about it.

Chen Bian: So the current support options are there, are baked in, there, is baked in support, both for the product. In terms also in terms of like, um, client success and training. Um, really we want everyone to be successful.

Um, if you are interested in becoming a partner, um, we do also offer like partner, uh, like partner type training. Um, so. We want people to be using and comfortable in the platform, right? It’s not to our advantage to make that harder for anyone. Um, so we’d try and bake all of that in as much as we can. Um, it’s really when we run into larger needs when, as I said before, if you need a full data rearchitecture, if you need a full data cleanup, um, that is something to be discussed, uh, with either your agency or your internal teams, or, I mean, It would cost extra is probably the best way to put it.

So

Mike Rizzo: got you. Very cool. Um, all right. So let’s just sort of round out the final question that is, you know, typically a, it depends kind of answer, but would love any type of additional context you can, you can offer, what is the average time it takes to see success from implementing this product? So, you know, there’s, there’s value delivered back to the marketing and sales organization because these reports are now in hand, like, what would you say?

Chen Bian: Like instantaneously, really as soon as your data is loaded, um, because we have a starter kit of reports and the reports are not your like average report, you start getting really interesting data that you can act on right away. Um, one of those, this is like, I think I’ve told Casey this a million times, like my favorite report is called the MQL versus unsubscribe report.

Um, So Casey, hopefully it’s going to pull that up for us, but essentially it’s talking about like how many emails you send a person before they’re more likely to unsubscribe than they are to MQL. Yeah.

Mike Rizzo: This is nerdy and awesome. These are the questions that I like have ruminated over many a time. Right.

Chen Bian: Yeah. And now you have answers. And like, and because. MQL data, unsubscribed data, this is like how many emails they’ve received. This is data that’s available pretty much by default in like, you know, very normal architecture. It’s almost guaranteed that it’s data you will have in your system that can be absorbed.

So for basically to get this report for yourself, it’s 15 minutes of setup and the data load, and you can see this. And then you will know that. 8th, 9th, 10th email is really hurting you, you will know that you should send that second email because they are more likely to convert like it, it’s one report, but it just offers so much right exactly like the kind of questions you wonder over.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah, I mean, like, again, I think being marketing and marketing operations professionals in general, more questions come to mind, uh, so I’m going to ask you one, uh, it’s a bit of a curveball, but like, I’m, can you do like a cohort slice on this right out of the box or do we have to do something more custom?

Casey Grimes: Absolutely. That is the whole point of having these filters over here. Basically, anything that you go ahead and do. Pick out when you’re putting in those fields in that 15 minute set up are also things that you can filter and drill down to. So you can basically mix and match, make any sort of cohort that you need to figure out and sort of understand how people might actually behaving a little bit differently.

The

Josh Hoffman: other thing I would add to this is you can also be splitting your marketing and sales emails together. So we’re looking at an aggregate right now, um, but there’s a big difference between sales and marketing emails. I mean, they’re different. There are two separate things there. Um, so to be able to break down not only seeing the aggregate but also being able to break down what about sales emails, what about marketing emails, I think that’s very important as well.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, uh, word of caution to all of you who want to bridge those two things together, um, don’t point a finger. Yeah, as you will see,

Casey Grimes: often after the first email there might be some issues, but you’ll have to talk that out, so.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, let’s not point fingers, sales did a bad job or marketing did a bad job, let’s just, let’s just look at the data and try to optimize.

Well, you know, I’m just going to

Josh Hoffman: repeat something you just said, that’s, that’s a very important thing because it’s, it’s how common is it to see, um, Sales, you know, blaming marketing, and marketing blaming sales, and when you start to throw data behind it, you get actual data decisions, uh, data driven decisions, as opposed to making data, or making decisions based on vibes, or blaming people, or something like that.

So, the more you can bring accurate data to a conversation like that, the better conversation you can have.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I, I have to say that if anybody’s watching this at this point and has ever had a moment where they’re like, you know, the sales team is complaining about something and you’re, you’re pretty confident that like the sales touches are actually hurting things, you’re probably going to be pretty giddy to get in here and see if that’s actually true, but then don’t be like, see, I told you so.

And also remember what I found. You can also remember that sales is always

Josh Hoffman: right. That’s

Mike Rizzo: sales is always right. Oh, cool. Um, thank you all of you for sharing all of the insights and giving us a peek underneath the hood. Um, so where can everybody go to sign up and learn more about the product? Um, why don’t you give us, give us that destination.

Chen Bian: Yeah, so that is going to be incentric. com. Um, as long as I don’t get that wrong. Uh, so, incentric I N S E N T R I C T.

Mike Rizzo: Perfect. Awesome. Well, we really appreciate you doing a no bullshit demo. I hope all of you have enjoyed taking a peek at Incentric. Um, if you have any questions, obviously reach out to this team.

They are more than accessible. I’m positive you can find them in Slack too. They will also be at many of our events over the years to come. Um, but we really appreciate you all joining us for this