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Inbound Success Podcast


What do the most successful inbound marketers do to get great results?

You’ve heard the stories about companies using inbound marketing to dramatically increase sales, grow their business, and transform their customer relationships, but not everyone who practices inbound marketing knocks it out of the park.

If you want to know what goes into building a world class inbound marketing campaign that gets real, measurable results, check out the Inbound Success podcast. Every week, host Kathleen Booth interviews marketing folks who are rolling up their sleeves, doing the work, and getting the kinds of results we all hope to achieve.

The goal is to “peel back the onion” and learn what works, what doesn’t and what you need to do to really move the needle with your inbound marketing efforts. This isn’t just about big picture strategy – it’s about getting actionable tips and insights that you can use immediately in your own marketing.

Oct 23, 2017

Looking for creative approaches to getting in front of a difficult-to-reach C-suite audience?

On this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, I'm interviewing Patrick Shea, the VP of Demand Generation at Boston-based Cybereason about how he fused a classic inbound marketing approach with account-based marketing and direct mail to reach and convert executive level buyers of the company's enterprise-level cyber security software solution.

Listen to the episode here, or read the transcript (below), to learn how Patrick's ABM campaign increased lead conversions for Cybereason.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, my guest is Patrick Shea, VP of Demand Generation at Boston, MA-based Cybereason and the former Director of Global Marketing Partnerships at HubSpot.

Here’s what Patrick and I discussed on this week’s show:

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome to the Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Patrick Shea, who is the VP of Demand Gen for Cybereason. Welcome Patrick.

Patrick Shea (Guest): Thanks Kathleen.

Kathleen Booth: I would love for you to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your company, and give us some background on where you came from and what you're doing now.

Patrick Shea: I'd love to. I am VP at Demand Gen at a company called Cybereason. We're a Series D startup in Boston. Been around for a few years. We make end point detection and response software, which is kind of a really big deal in the cyber security world right now. It basically allows companies to feel good about detecting and investigating and mitigating their risk around suspicious activity on their networks and end points, which is like your cell phone or your server or your laptop - things where the bad guys try to get an entry point into your broader network. We protect those. And it's really a hotspot in the cyber security market right now. I've been here about six months.

Prior to joining Cybereason I was at HubSpot for a little over six years where I did a lot of stuff - obviously a very high growth period for the company over those six years - so I did segment marketing, I did field marketing, I worked on SMB marketing for a while. I think the biggest effort and the biggest lift I did over there was around partner marketing. I helped to grow out the integration marketplace and the integration partner community, the sales partner community, and the agency partner reseller communities.

Kathleen Booth: When you left HubSpot it was a pretty big company. It had undergone an IPO. How big is Cybereason and what was that like making the transition?

Patrick Shea: It's a great question and it was, and continues to be, a transition. When I started at HubSpot, which was back in 2010, I was employee 110 and when I left, gosh, I don't even really know the global number but there were definitely over 2,000 people just in Boston. It was a really big jump and just a big, great company with all the big company stuff that goes with it. That made the transition really interesting because Cybereason is about 300 people. 

Kathleen Booth: It's still big, but just not nearly as big as HubSpot.

Patrick Shea: Yeah. It's all relative, right? It's big but it's not as big as the thing that I had just departed, so it really has been interesting shifting back to a size company that was almost like HubSpot in 2011. But also it's been really interesting to change industries as well and I'm sure that people that are listening that have changed jobs recently, if you've changed from one industry to another, that's the most difficult part of changing a job or making a career change. I thought that the size of the company thing would be much different. And it is different, but going from one industry to a totaly different industry, that's been the biggest part of the transition.

Kathleen Booth: I've actually worked with some cyber security companies and as a marketer, my observation is that one of the hardest things is that it's so highly technical. If you come from a marketing background, you don't necessarily have the technical chops to dive in and be able to really understand how the product works right away and what it does, and to be able to talk to the audience that you're trying to sell to in a way that is meaningful to them. Has that been something that you've had to deal with there?

Patrick Shea: Yeah, absolutely. And it's been good to just fall back on the inbound methodology. That's kind of been my North Star and I know how to market. But understanding the buyer and the persona is really challenging for the reasons that you mentioned - there really is no technical overlap between me and the buyer at this point. Working at HubSpot, we were marketing software to marketers, which I did for six years. I had Scott Brinker's landscape of sales and marketing tools memorized and I understood where all the connection points are and I was pretty articulate around the value of APIs and connection points and custom code options and different cool integrations to make things better. Now I have to go back and start a little bit from ground zero, especially in cyber where there's a technical gap. But it's interesting that there are commonalities like tools that are trying to connect to other tools. Tools are trying to be platforms. That's kind of the same across the world but the buyer, the technical prowess, all that stuff is just much different.

Kathleen Booth: I don't know about you but I also find that to be one of the most fun parts of marketing. Having come from an agency background, I've worked with so many different companies and one of the things that I really enjoy is actually having to learn about these other businesses. It's fascinating. You get a window into how things are made, or how stuff works. And you get to learn "how the sausage is made" in all these different industries that are not your own, which is kind of fascinating.

Patrick Shea: Yeah. It's been great to exercise that part of the brain and learn something new over again, yeah. It's five or six years in an industry or even two or three, it's, you get to the point where there's a ton of familiarity and you use that as your advantage. When you switch up, it's, "Okay. How long is it going to take me to learn this and understand what my competitors do and how are we different? But also how does the industry dictate that? What do customers want?" If there's anybody listening who has changed jobs and changed industries, that's been much more difficult than company size. But it's also been a lot of fun, like you said. A whole different part of the brain getting worked.

Kathleen Booth: And with all those learning opportunities, I think come windows of opportunity to do things differently and to shake it up and that's one of the reasons I was so excited to interview you today. You come from such a true blue, inbound marketing background at HubSpot, where they set the standard for how it's done. They're hugely evangelistic about that approach and I know that you're a big fan of it as well, but when you and I first talked and you had moved to Cybereason, one of the things you said to me is, "I can't just do that because we have to move fast and we need to take another approach." And so you've been using account-based marketing, which is a huge buzzword right now in the marketing world, to generate leads for Cybereason. I'm excited to learn a little bit more about what you've been doing there and to share that with the audience.

Patrick Shea: So am I, yeah, excited to dig into it.

Kathleen Booth: Let's start out by defining account-based marketing. And this isn't going to be the dictionary definition. This is going to be the Patrick-Kathleen definition, so I'm going to ask you to go for it. How do you define it?

Patrick Shea: I define it as if you think about inbound marketing as this playbook that engages the top of the funnel and pulls, ABM has a little bit of the spirit of inbound, but it's a much more targeted approach at a much more finite, defined set of accounts. And also the "account" is a word that does not end in an "s." So it seems singular but it's a plural word. A very big part of account-based marketing is having a marketing playbook against that defined, finite set of accounts that engages multiple people at a company. I think when you're taking a look at inbound metrics and inbound playbooks that make sense, it's, "Okay, we got somebody from this company and that's great. Now we got a way into this company." When you're doing account-based marketing, that spirit is very much alive but the playbook then branches out to, "Okay, this is a super super valuable account. There aren't many more like it in the world. I need to white glove treatment this thing and how am I going to engage four, five different people at this account, knowing that the account is very large and you can justify multiple campaigns across multiple roles at the company?"

Kathleen Booth: I always think of inbound as "First, let's attract them, and then let's qualify them" and with ABM, it's the opposite. "First let's qualify them. Then, let's attract them."

Patrick Shea: That's a great way of thinking about it, and ABM is also a marketing philosophy or playbook - whatever you want to call it - a strategy used against higher sized deals. So you can make that justification really easily, whereas with inbound, it's like you put stuff out there and you measure what hits you. It's almost like you measure the size of the hit you can make with ABM.

Kathleen Booth: That makes sense. It's not really worth doing unless the account is a marquee account.

Patrick Shea: And you think you can actually add value there.

Kathleen Booth: Right. So before we dig into the specifics of what you did for the campaign, can you tell us a little bit about the audience? You sell a cyber security product. Who are you selling to? What companies and types of buyers?

Patrick Shea: I think the easiest way to answer this would be, Fortune 500 and Global 2000 large companies that have real security needs. When I say security needs, they've got big networks worth protecting and - I don't know - security teams of anywhere from five to 50 people, so security's obviously a priority. Security is something that is being discussed at the Board level. I mean, I'm sure you can go to the New York Times or watch CNN or pick up a newspaper any day and it's basically a game of "who got hacked?" That stuff is popping up more and more, so security is becoming more of a C level discussion at these larger companies. So we're trying to do a couple different things. We're trying to engage the people that actually make or drive the decision, as well as those who use the tool. If you want to make the marketing equivalent of this, it's like, "This is my blogger and my landing page person and the person that's doing email marketing and the person that I've got doing CRO."

Kathleen Booth:  They roll up their sleeves, do the work?

Patrick Shea: Yeah, so we've got to prove our value and we've got to prove our chops and we've got to prove to those people, which are security analysts and security directors, that we can do the work that they need to do and that we can help them do their job better. But also, because these are large buying decisions that involve connecting stuff to their networks and their servers need to go down in order for something to go in, these are really considered buying decisions, so we also need to have air cover all the way up the top of the buying chain. And that's the VP of IT or the Chief Information Security Officer. So, like I said, it's like that account is a plural word. You got to have exposure, buy in, and be able to prove value across a wide breadth of positions in a large team.

Kathleen Booth: And from my limited experience working with cyber security companies, one thing I've come to appreciate is that, we as marketers are always trying to get conversions and we tend to define that as somebody who fills out a form and gives us their name and email address. The challenge is that I have never met a more privacy-focused group of people than cyber security buyers and this is a crowd that does not willingly part with their email address. 

Patrick Shea: It's the whole premise of the thing. It think you just put it really accurately. These people are actually in charge of keeping people out. That's the main mission of their job. It's their core function and purpose at their companies - keeping people out. So invasive marketing is the easiest thing for them to pick on and turn off.

Kathleen Booth: That makes anything you're doing to generate leads incredibly challenging so that's one reason I'm super excited to talk to you. I feel like if you can make this approach work with your audience, then it's got to be a home run for people in other sectors. So you have this audience that's hard to reach. You have this complex web of buyers within the target accounts. Tell us a little bit about the overall structure of the campaign that you ran.

Patrick Shea: It's kind of an early campaign. Our marketing team has grown significantly in the last six to 12 months. I'm not going to get the approximate numbers correct but it might have been six people when I joined and we might be closer to 20 now.

Kathleen Booth: Wow. Holy cow.

Patrick Shea: Yeah. We added some great brand people, some great creative people, some great marketing operations people. So the campaign that we ran also ran with a lean team, which is cool. It was created with the input of a few different people versus "let's hunker down, look at a bunch of data and get something out there." We had a hunch. We ran with it. It worked.

Kathleen Booth: So this like the agile equivalent of a minimally viable product?

Patrick Shea: I think so. It just kept getting better. So it's also a story about how to make continuous investments as it continues to work. It goes back to how you break through to a buyer persona whose job it is to not have things get broken through. Email wasn't going to work. I think anybody in the cyber security marketing world would tell you that you get a lot of opt outs. Open rates are low. And it's also a group of people that have lots of certifications. Cyber security directors and analysts are always trying to maintain certain certification levels, which means that they're members of lots of associations and they get lots of emails about training courses and stuff like that. So it's even harder to write a good subject line because there's just tons and tons of training emails that are being surfaced and put out in front of these people. So it's always hard to be the best email that they get of the day. So that was a challenge, but I also think that email open rates and having a valuable email strategy is worth pursuing, so we've made progress and inroads there.

But what we said was, "Look, what's the most valuable space to get something in front of this person?" And at the end of the day, we decided that's their desk. Emails are not an effective way for us to break through. These are people that are on webinars all day. They're flying to different cities to do training. We don't think we can outclass any of that stuff right now. So we need to break through in a different way. So we fused this ABM approach, which was one part working with the sales team to identify the definitive list of targets that we wanted to initially go after, and creating something that was memorable, something that was in the true spirit of inbound marketing. Something that was remarkable, something that would be remembered, something that would be received, something that would get talked about, something that would be valued - and we needed to get that on to their desk. 

Kathleen Booth: And it can't be a USB, right?

Patrick Shea: It couldn't be any of the standard chochky stuff because these people also will plug nothing into their computers. So we did a lightweight brand exercise and we said, "Okay, what do we do? What are we great at? What is this really high high level, intrinsic word that can describe what we do?" And what our software basically does is hunt. You deploy Cybereason on your network and we hunt for malicious activities. We hunt for the bad guys versus sending you notifications when the bad guys show up. So it's a little bit more of a proactive versus a reactive platform. So we said, "Okay. What do you need to hunt? Let's have a little bit of fun with hunt." What we came out with creating some awesome branded nerf guns that we could send to all of these cyber security geeks and people that are working in these cyber security companies. They like Star Wars, they're totally into that persona. We buddied up with people that we've got at our own company that are cyber security professionals to do this as well. And we landed on this cool-looking nerf gun. And so we got this thing and sent out a couple of batches of them. And the conversion rate of mail hitting the desk to, "Will you take a meeting? Yes, I'll take a meeting," was pretty high.

Kathleen Booth: Quick question on that. Sorry to interrupt, but so I've done some dimensional mail in the past and I'm curious as how you handled this. So when we did it, we always had it delivered via FedEx or UPS so that we could get the delivery notification. We would know exactly when somebody signed for it so we could then time the follow up. Did you do anything along those lines?

Patrick Shea: We did exactly that. I did a talk on this at INBOUND a couple weeks ago. I said I showed up at Cybereason I had this nervous tick. Where are the workflows? Where are the triggers? Where are the notifications? So much of what we were doing was a cold approach and timed with mail, but then we did the exact thing that you just mentioned. And so what we've got is some workflows and triggers and notifications and lots of stuff that happened on the backend that all fires from the delivery notification.

Kathleen Booth: That's so cool that you can do that and you know that at 3:30 Sandy signed for that nerf gun.

Patrick Shea: You've got to care about the product and you've got to care about the process. It's really easy, thankfully, to optimize that process with stuff like delivery notifications that kick back to APIs, that's really cool stuff for marketers to tinker around with. But it's got to be something that's good. You're going to build this. You're going to build and hone and perfect this process that is built around something that's just getting ignored or swiped off the desk or thrown in the trash or actually doesn't even get from the admin to person that you want to break through with.

Kathleen Booth: So you delivered these nerf guns. Somebody got it. They signed for it. You got a notification that they signed for it. Then what happened?

Patrick Shea: Well then it kicks back to the sales rep at that point. At the time that we started the campaign, we had a core group of sales reps that we were trying this out with. So they would jump right on the phone. Or they would send an email, and we had various emails that were working well. As we moved further, and we saw different parts that were working, we fused ABM and inbound once we got through week two week three of this.

So we said "Okay. Hey, we're having really good luck with companies like this." And when I say "companies like this" it's because a sales rep would hand carve out a list for us. What we then used that list for was finding some similarities. It might be "half of them are in this city", or "half of them are banks." So the kind of inbound marketing mindset that we have said, "Why don't we see if we can go through our database and find people that we've got opt-in permission with or people that we've met at trade shows that fit that criteria?"

Then we started sending our nerf guns out to people in that broader set. And that's where we started to get a little bit more creative with the follow up process, because then we were almost doing more than reps could handle. We bumped into some bandwidth issues and they were like, "Okay. Well, I still have this list of 20 or 25 or 50 that are really important to me and I'm going to follow up with those one to one." And then we were like, "Okay. The marketing side of us, we want to go beyond your target list." We have that kind of top of the funnel approach. And that's where we rely more on workflows.

Kathleen Booth: Sounds like you had a tiered approach.

Patrick Shea: Yes, absolutely.

Kathleen Booth: You might have your class A accounts and those are the ones that need to get a phone call. Now, was the goal of that phone call to schedule a meeting?

Patrick Shea: Yes. It's that introductory phone call so we think we've got a win there too where we've got something really fun and, to use that word again, remarkable. The first part of the definition of what remarkable is it's memorable. And we would see tweets and people would actually email us before we could reach out to them. They'd say, "Thanks a lot. I've already lost half of the bullets," stuff like that, which was really cool and we could tell that we were definitely making some sort of a breakthrough whether or not the call happened then or not. We would always be associated with that and it would be a warm return whenever we just make it. But we had a tiered approach and what it allowed us to do was to experiment on the backend on some of that lower tier stuff to see if we can set that initial meeting without having a sales rep have to make four, five phone calls. Because this campaign was a handful of phone calls to set the first meeting. We shrunk that considerably with this memorable mail piece. And we were actually able to set meetings without sales reps having to be super involved because we knew that there was this representative slice that we could go after.

Kathleen Booth: So to that last point there, in most cases are you sending the nerf gun and are they being put into some kind of an email follow up sequence that then converts them to the meeting?

Patrick Shea: Yeah. And it's nothing overly complicated. We're really just trying to be the voice of the rep. We've got the opening line. I know it's come through multiple versions. I haven't seen the most recent one, but it probably starts with some sort of nerf gun-related joke. And there are a hundred you can make there. But it's really just about making that initial connect with the sales rep, and we went from a situation where getting replies was strange to now we were getting replies to be the norm.

Kathleen Booth: Great. So you're doing this very focused ABM approach with the dimensional mail which is the nerf gun. You've got the individual phone call follow up, then you have the others that are kind of put into more of an automated sequence for follow up. The goal is to get the meeting. Are you backing this up now that you're a little bit further into it with any sort of content or any more of a classic inbound approach? Is that sort of behind it or?

Patrick Shea: Yeah, absolutely. Because now we've got a warm opening where we didn't really at that point. How do you nurture a prospect when marketing can't do it? Because for some of these people we still don't have an email opt in. Our sales team uses different email tools and outreach tools and stuff like that. What we try to do is we say, "Look, we targeted this account on purpose. What are the types of things that are important to them?" And we have a grid of content that we rely pretty heavily on where it's like, "Okay. Here are three different buying personas. What stuff do we have for each persona? Here are industries where we've seen success. What's content that we have for success?" So once we kind of land that mail, sort of speak, then it's up to the rep to kind of manage the process. In some cases, they're jumping right on the phone, which is fantastic, and they can turn their notes into the follow up process. But they rely heavily on that kind of content grid.

Kathleen Booth: So if you don't have opt ins, are you doing any kind of advertising to try and stay top of mind with that audience until you're getting the opt in? Because I imagine you could do LinkedIn ads that target anybody working at company X with certain titles. Anything like that?

Patrick Shea: I don't know that we've had a really successful playbook in place on LinkedIn right now, but we've got a couple people on the creative team here that are trying to come up with quirky, fun, creative retargeting ads, because that's obviously a big part of it. And what we found is that while we might not be getting a ton of opt ins, if you land a really great piece of mail with a really clever insert and it's well branded and memorable, the first thing they're going to do, whether or not they've heard of you or not, is they're going to go to your website. So then you drop that cookie and you get to follow people with retargeting ads and display strategies and stuff like that. Yeah, all of which we've experimented with.

Kathleen Booth: Are you seeing good results with that? Can you track whether those people are coming back to the site again?

Patrick Shea: We're seeing people come back to the site. We wish that we were doing more thematically with that nerf gun which was obviously a huge first win of an impression. So we're wishing that we were doing more stuff with that. We're doing some stuff on the website right now to hopefully pay that off a little bit more. But the results are good. We haven't said, "We went x amount of nerf guns and then from those nerf guns or from that direct mail campaign, we saw an uplift in traffic." I would hope that it's happening but we don't necessarily have that report firing. But what we're seeing is that if we had a top list of 100 accounts, without this campaign, maybe we get into 25%. With this campaign, we've at least had starting conversations with 50.

Kathleen Booth: That's great. So did you have specific goals for the campaign?

Patrick Shea: We did have specific goals and it was tied back to revenue. We were working off of this list that sales gave us. I forget the exact number, but say sales gave us 1,000 top accounts that they want to go after. So there was a subgoal - make this campaign hit all 1,000 accounts. That's not an exact number, so I'm going to do some easy math because it ends in a bunch of zeros. We were targeting a 25% conversion rate, so that off of those 1,000 target accounts we could set up 250 meetings.

We had a target account list that marketing started with and it was like, "Look, run this campaign against these 1,000 targets." But there was a bottom of the funnel goal there that was like, "Well, if we have that many go out, touch this many accounts that we think we've got, something that we can deliver value to, then we should turn that into x amount of initial calls which should allow us to fill the pipeline with at least x amount of logos that we might be able to make an impact with."

Kathleen Booth: Without getting into specific pricing numbers, your product is an enterprise level product. So it's not like a $10 a month subscription that you're selling, otherwise you wouldn't be doing account-based marketing. How long is the sales cycle normally for that kind of a product?

Patrick Shea: I think it's safe to ballpark us in the seven to nine month range.

Kathleen Booth: Are you finding that using this approach is helping to shorten that at all?

Patrick Shea: No.

Kathleen Booth: Not yet?

Patrick Shea: I think coming from HubSpot and more SMB marketing as opposed to enterprise, we were used to workflows and campaigns having an impact on the sales cycle because the average sales cycle was 45 days. So if you could point to something that made it 35, you were like, "Whoa! Let's do more of this," because that's shrinking it by a week, which is a large percentage of the actual overall length. It's not about shortening the sales cycle here. If we really wanted to shorten the sales cycle, you'd need something that cost a different amount of money. This is a long, considered process. What we hope is that we're just getting more "at bats" with this campaign and if we make that cool, really memorable first impression, that the win rate is also there as well.

Kathleen Booth: Tell me a little bit about your technology stack because you made a casual reference earlier to the fact that you have some technology that you're using to track things, to run the campaigns. What have you got going?

Patrick Shea: So we're on HubSpot Enterprise. We've been on it for six months and our sales team is super into Salesforce. We're using Drift for website chat, which is cool because if we know that people are on that Nerf list, then they've been to our website before. We can greet them in a unique way, which is pretty cool. I believe we're using Perfect Audience for a lot of the Facebook retargeting stuff that we've done. Again, that's not totally perfect because we're trying to run a lot of campaigns for people that haven't necessarily been on the website. So that hasn't been a total slam dunk, but I think that we're getting better there. And we've just been between a couple of different vendors around the whole, "How do we get the mail delivered?" I think Harte Hanks has been in the conversation. They're a pretty big company. Then we've also experimented with some of the smaller guys. But yeah, the initial way that we're making those decisions is who has that delivery notification that we can work with?

Kathleen Booth: Now are you planning to do more ABM as you move forward? Is that something that you see being a really big part of your strategy?

Patrick Shea: Yeah, it is. And I think that a big part of our strategy is to break the strategy up a little bit. We have defined ABM right now as a playbook that we're running, near the top of the funnel because we're trying to get that first introductory meeting, that first introductory call. What I'd like to see us do is redefine that definition for different parts of the sales process. And I think that that's something that is kind of interesting and unique about our approach. And I think it has a lot to do with us being inbound marketers. We've got this one set of playbooks that help us get that first meeting. And our sales reps have stuff to choose from, and there's varying levels of success and effectiveness, but it's really up to them based on the account. How can we replicate that philosophy at different stages or the funnel because it is such a long sales process with all these different starts and stops?

Kathleen Booth: So what are the lessons learned from what you've done so far? Good and bad.

Patrick Shea: Good and bad? Absolutely always push on top of the funnel, even if it feels like your sales reps are like, "Hey, we just really want to talk about these 25 accounts." You should make sure that you count your base, that you cover your bases on those 25 accounts. It's really hard to do attribution reporting in the enterprise, so at the end of the day, you want to at least make sure that if there 25 super highly valuable companies and targets, that you and sales at least have the same line of sight on those. But you should always, always, always find out what your definition of "top of the funnel" is and push it. And for us, it was taking a hybrid ABM/inbound approach and going after accounts that we weren't talking with. That was the hybrid - it was because we all knew the value of the top of the funnel. We weren't just going to do it with blog traffic yet.

Kathleen Booth: Got it. So if somebody wanted to start using this kind of approach, if they hadn't done ABM before, they've got a high dollar value sale, any words of advice?

Patrick Shea: It comes back to making sure that you you've got good hygiene at the start. It comes back to data cleanliness because when you do direct mail, it has to go to the right person. If it doesn't work, and you have physically landed something in this office with the wrong person, what do you do from there? Do I need to send something different to different people inside of this company? I've got something that is successful at x cost that works at this level. Am I good there or do I need data and information up the ladder, down the ladder to have a better impact.

Kathleen Booth: Well, this was so interesting. I appreciate you sharing a lot of this information with us and I'm excited to watch what you guys do next because it sounds like you've nailed the top of the funnel. If you cans start to carry that through to the middle and the bottom, it's going to be interesting to see what that does to your whole sales cycle.

Patrick Shea: Yeah it should be cool. I think we've had some success in the early innings so we'll see where we go from there.

Kathleen Booth: Maybe we'll do a follow up at some point to this. The sequel. So before we finish up, two last questions for you. The first one is "Who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well, company or individual?"

Patrick Shea: I don't know that I have an individual answer, although somebody that's doing really, really interesting, high end, branded stuff - this hit the news in the past week - Pizza Hut is making jackets out of their pizza warming boxes.

Kathleen Booth: No way. That's so interesting.

Patrick Shea: That's just brilliant. KFC put the colonel in the latest WWE wrestling game, which is also fantastic. The colonel is a personal brand to me. He's a real person, so maybe that's my answer there. But I think a company that's doing an awesome job of content marketing right now is Santander Bank.

Kathleen Booth: Oh really?

Patrick Shea: They've got this Prosper and Thrive site, which is really interesting and it's basically aimed at, I would guess, people in their 20s to 30s that are maybe starting to make money and starting to save for the first time, or maybe have debt that they're trying to get out of, college or otherwise. But it's thehub.santanderbank.com and Prosper and Thrive is the name of it. It's this huge content hub. What I think companies like that do, I think their heart's in the right place a lot of the times where they've got really valuable newsletters and emails with a good two or three paragraphs of content that can help people wrap their head around something. What banks and financial institutions don't seem to be great at is assembling it all in one place. They're making it somewhere that you can go back and explore and find relative content and get good recommendations on what you should read next. I think financial institutions do a good job of sharing and helping people learn, but I haven't seen anybody organize it and library-ize it, if that's a word, better than Santander has, so Prosper and Thrive, it's thehub.com, santanderbank.com.

Kathleen Booth: Awesome. I can't wait to check that out. That's one I have not heard about so thanks for sharing that. Second question is ... I feel like as marketers, everything is changing so fast. The technology's changing. The approaches are changing. How do you stay current? Where do you look for the latest, greatest thinking, cutting-edge ideas, etc?

Patrick Shea: I follow a lot of different people on Twitter. I have a Twitter list of marketing people that I follow. It's public off of my profile, Patrick Shea on Twitter. You can follow it off there. I'm constantly adding people to it, but my favorite website these days is Marketing Dive.

Kathleen Booth: Another new one for me.

Patrick Shea: It's where I found out about Pizza Hut making jackets so they've got a special place in my heart right now.

Kathleen Booth: So when are you going to order your Pizza Hut jacket?

Patrick Shea: I don't know if I can afford it.

Kathleen Booth: And the big questions is does it come smelling like a pizza?

Patrick Shea: It should have some sort of sensory trigger.

Kathleen Booth: Right. Can you choose a flavor? I want the pepperoni or the veggie.

Patrick Shea: Right. Staying warm and smelling like pepperoni.

Kathleen Booth: Exactly. Just don't go hunting or hiking with it, right?

Patrick Shea: Exactly. Lots of good stuff though and I think HubSpot's blog is a good place to stay in touch with marketing methodology stuff and stuff that's working and stuff that's not. Marketing Dive is much more campaign focused. So it's like what Facebook is doing or what Toyota is doing or what Honda is doing. So it's kind of like an overview on campaigns. If you don't watch a lot of TV and see a lot of commercials or you don't live in Japan so you're not seeing that Japanese campaign, it's a good place to see what the major brands are doing from a campaign perspective.

Kathleen Booth: Great. I can't wait to check it out.

Patrick Shea: Yeah, please do.

Kathleen Booth: Well, the last thing is, I'm sure there's going to be people with questions, what's the best way for them to reach you? Is it that Twitter handle?

Patrick Shea: My Twitter handle (@mpatrickshea) is good. 

Kathleen Booth: Great. Thank you Patrick for joining me. Appreciate it.

Patrick Shea: No problem Kathleen. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the show and I look forward to maybe being back some day.

Kathleen Booth: All right. Well, that's it for this week on the Inbound Success Podcast. Do subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher. Give us a review if you like it and if you know somebody who is doing kick ass inbound marketing work, let us know so we can interview them. Thanks a lot.