Mark Organ is a Canadian entrepreneur and author, renowned for his contributions to the marketing and SaaS industries. He is the founder and CEO of Influitive, and the founding CEO of Eloqua, a marketing automation platform acquired by Oracle for approximately $1 billion. Organ is also the author of the best-selling book The Messenger is The Message, which explores the power of customer advocacy in modern marketing. Additionally, he serves as a CEO coach at Categorynauts, guiding executives in building and scaling their businesses.
Key Takeaways
(00:00-12:55) Eloqua’s Evolution and Customer Marketing
(12:55-20:21) The Evolution of Marketing Automation Companies
(20:21-33:51) The Importance of Customer Advocacy
(33:51-42:54) Developing Categories and Serving Specific Personas
(42:54-53:38) Content's Role in Creating Categories
(53:38-01:05:48) Building Industry Categories Through Disruptive Innovation
(01:05:48-01:09:59) Persuasion Techniques in Marketing and Sales
(01:09:59-01:11:24) Leveraging Content Marketing for Performance Improvement
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Building Brands with Customer Advocacy
Mark Organ, founder of Influitive, emphasizes the power of customer advocacy in building successful brands. Drawing from his experience with Eloqua, he explains how businesses can leverage loyal customers to accelerate sales and foster long-term brand loyalty. Organ discusses creating "fighting brands," using customer experience to differentiate in competitive markets, and turning customers into advocates to build lasting value.
1. Eloqua’s Evolution and Customer Marketing
Mark Organ, Founding CEO of Influitive and a B2B leader, coach, and category maker, explains the origins of the idea behind Eloqua and how it evolved into the buying experience space. At the time, the experience of sellers was really poor as they were often talking to prospects who weren't interested in buying. The internet was emerging as a place for buyers to go when they were interested in buying something. Eloqua was originally a chat product, a lot like what you might find with Intercom today. And when they put the email engine on top of it, they created a product that was completely different from everything else at the time.
We were focused on B2B and it was a proactive chat product, we needed all these pretty sophisticated analytics to understand what you know, what territory a prospect was in, what they were interested in, to connect them with the right person, and, as a result, built a product that was completely different from everything else at the time.
— Mark Organ
2. Evolution of Marketing Automation Companies
Mark discusses the history of marketing automation and how it has evolved over the years. He examines the success of Oracle's purchase of PeopleSoft and Eloqua, how user experience was the weak spot for Eloqua, and how Eloqua's success in the high-end market created a vacuum in the mid-market. He also talks about the strategy of creating a "fighting brand" to prevent Marketo and HubSpot from dominating the space and the impact his strategy had on the industry.
You can't win everything. I wanted to create what's called a fighting brand, right? So you create a fighting brand so that companies like Marketo and HubSpot have a difficult time getting too much oxygen.
— Mark Organ
3. The Importance of Customer Advocacy
Mark goes deeper into the concept of customer advocacy and how it differs from the customer experience. He explains how the best quality customers are more likely to come from a customer channel, such as referrals or reference calls. Drawing from his experience at Eloqua, Mark explains how providing an amazing experience for customers can result in an outpouring of advocacy. Mark's research revealed that advocates want to feel like they are part of the team and that their identity is connected to the company they advocate for.
If you want to close deals faster, if you get a reference call, one-to-one reference call in there, they close faster. If you've got the right case studies on your website, if you've got now, you've got G2 and trust radius and and gardener peer insights type of things going on, when, when prospects are seeing those and it resonates with them, they're much more likely to become not just a customer but a successful customer.
— Mark Organ
4. Content's Role in Creating Categories
The speakers explore how modern businesses have to spend exponentially more money to gain customer attention that is already scarce, fragmented, and overwhelmed. The founding ideas behind Influitive are discussed, including the challenges of building new categories and the role content can play. Customer-driven content is the best content, and it can help create a movement that leads to a new category. Mark also draws parallels between religions and revolutions to new categories and how content is critical to creating a movement.
What if we serve those people who think differently and give them everything that they need for success? That is, to me, what great categories are built around, and less around disruptive technology.
— Mark Organ
5. Building Industry Categories Through Disruptive Innovation
Mark shares his insight on how no-code technologies are creating a disruptive innovation that empowers non-technical people to build complex solutions and generate far greater value than they used to. The speakers discuss how this enables a new category of process engineers to be paid more than ever before and how customer marketing has gone from being a backwater to becoming the main event. Mark explains how trends such as the exponential growth of content and the dominance of social media have contributed to this shift. He outlines his advice for entrepreneurs looking to build a company by betting on these people and giving them the tools they need. Finally, the speakers consider the implications of this for marketing organizations during this difficult economic time.
I think no-code is creating a whole bunch of exciting categories, and the reason why it is it is a disruptive innovation, right? Because now you're giving non-technical people the ability to build really amazing, powerful solutions, right?
— Mark Organ
Check the episode's Transcript (AI-generated) HERE.
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