Conversational Marketing's Impact For PLG Companies Feat. Jacob Boneta Ep 21

Ian Binek (00:00.95)
Jacob, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. How are you doing?

Jacob Boneta (00:05.738)
I'm good Ian, great to be here and then thank you for having me for

Ian Binek (00:13.285)
Thank you so much for being on. Like we mentioned before, it took us so many tries to get this to work. I think fate is just going to make this a pretty great conversation. I can't wait to get into the answers,

Jacob Boneta (00:25.07)
For sure.

Ian Binek (00:26.88)
Cool, well, I want to start it off by talking about Grafana. I want to hear about your role there, what you're doing, and also maybe just a little bit of intro about the company itself would be awesome.

Jacob Boneta (00:37.164)
Yeah, so Grafana Labs is an observability platform. This is, I think we're going on our 10th year or just celebrated our 10th year. I've been here about a year and some change, maybe near a year and a half. Time has flown, but it's been good, man. I work in growth, and so I'm a growth manager. And my specific focus right now is around lifecycle marketing.

And so within Grafana Labs, obviously they have like our suite of products. We have a ton of different things around observability that we offer or products that we offer to our users. And then within that, we also sell our cloud offering, which is basically a packaged version of that. And I specifically work within that group. So I focus primarily on the self -serve experience.

and those users within that. So yeah, I'm a growth marketer under this cloud function. And the way that I typically try to explain my job to people.

and it's true at Grafana, especially so because though I focus on life cycle here, ultimately my job is solving problems, right? So I come in and my primary goal, is to identify kind of the core of a problem and then just find some potential solution for it.

So in a lot of ways, I explain what I do as part -time investigator, part -time therapist. And, you know, as somebody who also works in the optimization space, especially working with clients, like it's likely the most important part of my job is to understand that at the end of the day, when I am looking for those solutions or problems, there's typically somebody who has already worked on something about it, or maybe I'm optimizing that thing that person has worked on. So there's a lot of empathy.

Jacob Boneta (02:36.69)
that's needed and being able to like build that trust with that stakeholder and kind of get them to champion that problem with you. So that's what I do and Grafana in a very tidy nutshell, we do so much, but I think as a high level, that's what we're up to.

Ian Binek (02:53.994)
That's so cool. So many things about your role just kind of give me a little bit of like flashbacks to my last full -time role. So I was a growth lead at a venture studio. And so I was kind of doing like a similar thing, right? Like all of these like investment companies, they have problems and you need to identify them. And what's really cool about your experience

Jacob Boneta (03:08.461)
Mm

Jacob Boneta (03:17.399)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Binek (03:21.834)
there, at least I was like kind of snooping you a little bit on LinkedIn and I saw you used to be an agency owner, which awesome props to you. So cool. And also you just like a lot of rich experience across a lot of different roles. So I think in order to be in a role like yours, you need to have an understanding, a very better than just basic understanding of basically everything in the market, the digital marketing ecosystem. So it's so cool that like you can

Jacob Boneta (03:31.98)
Yeah.

Jacob Boneta (03:38.021)
yeah.

Jacob Boneta (03:45.006)
for sure.

Ian Binek (03:51.52)
hop into this role and then people are like, okay, let's just talk to Jacob because he'll solve your problems for you. Like that's so cool, man. I love that.

Jacob Boneta (03:58.575)
I think that'd be probably the most flattering feedback someone could give me. I don't know if I've recalled somebody word for word saying that, but yeah, that would be, that's the ideal, right? Like, and in a lot of ways, there's so many challenges that come with that as well, because, I mean, it's not even the common like phrase around like,

Jacob Boneta (04:22.73)
idea of like master of none, right? Where like you're good at everything but you're not really mastered. It's like no, you have to be a master at a lot of these things. And I think ultimately like the success came from just my natural curiosity. I grew up as a Y baby. I was put in therapy as a child because I couldn't stop asking Y at like two or three years old. And you know at the end of the day my parents just wanted to say because I said so. But yeah that is always that's been a part of my career is asking Y. Like why do we do something a certain way

know, it's never, the intention is never to be.

fully controversial and anti what is happening today, anti -establishment. But the idea is really like that there's always another way to think about things. And so that curiosity has always been what has allowed me to be successful and willing to solve problems that some people don't even see as problems. So it's a fun job. I really love what I do. I don't know if I had told you, but I technically started my career when I was a musician nearing a decade ago.

where like I didn't even know I was being a marketer, but I was trying to build this business, which was a band and trying to tour with no money and like trying to differentiate as a music group. you know, I fell out of love with music, but then fell in love with this concept of growth and growing businesses overall. So there's a lot of reciprocity that I get out of this type of work and it's really exciting for me. So.

Ian Binek (05:34.633)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (05:54.464)
That's so cool. Yeah, it's just so cool to talk to another growth lead that has a similar experience. I won't even get into some of mine. We'll save that for another podcast. But I'd love that, you you're talking about growth, right? And people hear this, people throw this word around a lot. But I would love to kind of get a little bit nitty gritty and talk about maybe like one or two of the strategies you've used before with the cloud offering or with, you know, it doesn't even have to be from Grafana. It could be from another one of roles, right?

Jacob Boneta (06:01.602)
Yeah.

Jacob Boneta (06:06.274)
Mm

Ian Binek (06:24.128)
I'd love to hear about some the tactics you might be using now or strategies you've used in the past that have helped actually drive growth for the organizations you've been working with.

Jacob Boneta (06:33.804)
Well, I think one of the bigger drivers and you know, I won't take full attribution. I'll take whatever bear attribution I can for this, but like one of the biggest drivers for Grafana success has been basically give it away, give it all away. Right. Give them the product and the, how to build that product too. Right. So we have a major player for our inbound is the open source software side of Grafana where a user

doesn't even have to talk to anybody on the Grafana side and can run their own Grafana instance.

on their own. Now there's some challenges that come with that, but as an inbound tool, it's incredible. We have customers, we don't even know our customers. We find them in the wild all the time. We'll see videos, we'll see like a SpaceX video with a random Grafana dashboard. And you're like, what the heck? That's awesome. And so it's it's a really cool perspective to have, but it's an incredibly useful inbound, like from a marketer's perspective, incredibly useful inbound strategy. I think that became a value and it's something

that we continue to strive, especially with this cloud offering, which is just give it, right? Give it to them. We have, I think we launched before my time at Grafana, they launched a free plan that we called the actually useful free plan. And the whole concept in that is like, obviously we can't give you a hundred percent usage for free, right? But we do limit the usage criteria that

Ian Binek (07:57.44)
Sure.

Jacob Boneta (08:09.492)
users get on free, they get the full product. They get every single tool that we have, within reason. And they get to understand what these products are before they ever have to fully commit to this.

Ian Binek (08:15.766)
Sure.

Jacob Boneta (08:21.56)
think I was watching one of your other interviews and they were talking about the longevity of the life, sorry, the sales cycle of B2B and then B2D, it's the same exact space where it just takes time. You're not always sure if this is the right product. And then there's a lot of other products that exist out there that do or say they do very similar things. And I think our philosophy in a way is to give it to that user upfront, let them try it themselves. And it's my job to

sure that they get that best experience from a life cycles perspective and seeing the right parts of our product at the right time within context. So yeah, those are some really interesting pieces there. As far as tactics and growth, think within life cycle, from a self -service perspective, it's really easy to, or it's really hard to...

Deliver personalized content when you don't know the full context of the conversation So what I mean by that is in a traditional sales org or process There's a rep per account

and that account has a few heads, right? A few faces, real people that are back there. And they can have that conversation with them. What are you using us for? What do you want to use us for? What are you not even considering us for? All of these questions that at scale, when I have tens of thousands of orgs signing up every single month and tens of thousands of users within those orgs, it's like, how do you have that conversation? Right? Because at the other side, there's this unspoken rule or

relationship that you've decided or boundary within that relationship, which dictates don't sell to me. I'm here from a self -serve perspective. I only want to deal and figure this out on my own. And I want like minimal, minimal interference here. so within that, big challenge is like, how do you have that conversation? And how do you pass the sniff test ultimately when you do want to have that conversation so that you're not marketing and you're not sales.

Jacob Boneta (10:36.556)
which in the B2D space is a big no -no in general. So it's a lot of challenges in that. All that being said is, like, that's something that we work towards. We hold the inbox and we hold all of our messaging incredibly sacred. It's not untouchable, but it's incredibly sacred. And within that, what we try to do is personalize that messaging as much as possible and have these at -scale conversations with these users. So we use in

notifications a lot to basically have users self opt into things. It's not necessarily even something that they...

that they fully know they're being signed up for something, if that makes sense. We're not necessarily using their data in unhealthy way, but it's basically, great example is we have usage limit campaigns that basically when a user hits a certain limit within their tier, we want to let them know. It's not always intentional. Sometimes it is. Long story short, when it isn't, we want to make sure our customers know that as soon as we know that within data limit reasons.

Ian Binek (11:43.56)
Yeah

Jacob Boneta (11:46.592)
And then we want to make sure that they have some way to reconcile. So we'll try to guide them through these bots to self -service that support without having to talk to support, talk to our sales team. But on the back end there, too, there's also the option for them to say, I did this. I wanted to do this. This is important to me. I'm scaling. This is an important time period for our business.

That's great for my sales team. They love seeing that. That's them raising their hand saying, we want to use more of this. Please help. And so it's this like sniff test kind of approach to a human interaction and conversation, but at scale. There is no manual interjection there. All of this is done through our in -app messaging tools.

Ian Binek (12:14.679)
Sure, right?

Ian Binek (12:33.054)
Absolutely. I was taking a bunch of notes when you were talking, but I think what's really cool one, just like going back to earlier when you started talking about this, an inbound strategy, PLG, very common now, but like, don't know how long Grafana has been doing it. I don't know if this is like a recent thing or if you guys have been doing it for years now, but either way, Getting that user in, especially in the B2D space, like what you're saying, right? They don't like to be marketed.

to or sold to. They want to just try it out themselves. So I love the kind of balance that you're kind of put in where it's, hey, like you need to like drive growth, but at the same time, you cannot really talk to these people unless they want you to talk to them, right? So it's really cool. There's a company that we use a lot inside of our agency. They're called Data Box. You may have heard of them before. They're pretty popular and like the

Jacob Boneta (13:03.692)
Yeah.

Jacob Boneta (13:16.864)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Binek (13:30.442)
dashboarding space, but they have this, they're the same thing, right? Like in a sense, they're, you're, getting market or their marketing to marketers and sales. So it's a little more okay to talk to them. but it's all PLG. And, what's really interesting is I think the way that they break through that barrier of trying to start a conversation, without being too pushy is offering to build like a dashboard for you.

Jacob Boneta (13:42.224)
Right. They get it.

Jacob Boneta (13:54.584)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Binek (13:59.858)
after you connect something, they just have like an assistant that's like, hey, I'm a real person. I'll build this dashboard for you. You're interested, right? Isn't that kind of like a pretty interesting way to break that barrier? that's what I initially thought of when you were talking about it for Grafana. And it's probably maybe a little

Jacob Boneta (14:00.076)
Nice.

Jacob Boneta (14:05.934)
for sure. Yeah.

Jacob Boneta (14:15.018)
Yeah, and it's something that we definitely are building towards, right, is like this personalization at scale, right, because to a degree, DataBox has that.

they have that incentive because they have a very cut and dry product offering, meaning they do the thing they do well. At Grafana Labs, we're called Labs because we have a dozen or so different products with all different use cases. And when you land in that cloud experience, to a degree, a part of the value is that it's semi sandboxy. You can do whatever it is you need to do with those tools. But how do you?

How do you at scale?

Jacob Boneta (15:03.95)
How do you at scale?

teach somebody to be in that creative element, right? And like know exactly what they're going to be doing. How do you lead them to water basically when you don't know they're thirsty, right? And like the simplest way of saying it. But this has been something that my leader, David Dorman, who's kind of started the cloud experience near four years ago now, this is what we've been working on, right? That's what they've been working on. I've joined the team recently to continue that conversation. And now that AI is becoming more adopted, think

Ian Binek (15:15.858)
Exactly.

Jacob Boneta (15:36.294)
getting closer and closer to being able to build these sort of like contextual recommendation engines that allow us to know just based on first and third party data, rather than having to directly ask, which is not always an easy thing to your point. For what it's worth, we do talk to our customers and we can't, they're not always against it. Like we have these conversations, but it's at scale. mean, if I literally tens of thousands of users coming in every single month, it's like,

Ian Binek (15:52.118)
Sure, yeah.

Jacob Boneta (16:05.603)
even if I talked to five of them, like it's not enough to really get.

to build out campaigns for that. mean, a part of my work is to build to a degree like these drip campaigns or these point in time campaigns that talk to these use cases and share education around what products they're using. The challenge is if I branch that off just by product, I have 12 branches, right? 12 different versions of an email. And then just tactically, that gets incredibly difficult if I have hundreds of campaigns, right? So now for every email I send, I need to send 12.

So it's a problem and definitely an opportunity, I think, that AI is a part of that solution.

Ian Binek (16:48.658)
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, kind of on a similar vein. mean, one, what you were just talking about with the emails and our very first podcast in season two, we actually started having guests. had John Farrar on and he owns like a whole lifecycle marketing agency and they do that. And he uses AI a lot to differentiate messages. So if anyone is interested in that, I highly recommend that episode. And then.

Jacob Boneta (17:03.586)
Nice.

Jacob Boneta (17:08.248)
for sure.

Ian Binek (17:14.088)
what you were talking about with AI, I we use AI a lot inside of our agency in a similar way to personalize outbound emails that we're sending to people and trying to get in contact with. So we have the AI analyze the job title, analyze their about section on their LinkedIn. And then it's essentially writing that first sentence for us in an email. And then we're filling in the blanks afterwards with kind of like our offer, right? But it kind of sounds

Jacob Boneta (17:33.123)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (17:43.87)
I mean, you can do the same thing internally too, like with the marketing emails that you're doing with those inbound leads that you have. Like it is getting incredibly personalized, which is really cool. And also like maybe a little bit scary, but it's still great. It's great for the user experience.

Jacob Boneta (18:00.182)
I would say it's less scary than those AI sales folks. I don't know if you've gotten one of those calls recently, but where they're literal. Yeah, those are the real, the real spook within that workflow. I am curious, like how is the AI outbound world working and like, how's it been working for you? I haven't touched outbound in a minute for what it's worth.

Ian Binek (18:07.382)
We've got a couple.

Ian Binek (18:13.021)
yeah.

Ian Binek (18:22.558)
Yeah, for sure. mean, yeah, let's go on a quick tangent here real quick. In terms of outbound, right, and the tool that we use the most is Clay. We use Clay all the time. And they have this thing called Claygent, which is like their AI agent. And it's basically a row in a database that, for every contact that we have in that database, it will then reference their job title and their

Jacob Boneta (18:46.978)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Binek (18:50.806)
position at the company and all that stuff I mentioned. And then we give it a prompt that we've engineered to be very direct, very templatized. That way it doesn't go off and be whimsical and say some weird stuff. And so it's very templatized. We basically give it the first 10 words and we're like, can you fill in the last 10? And so it can't really go off on a tangent. And if it does, then it's like, I will know because I have conditional formulas in there to make sure that nothing crazy is sent.

Jacob Boneta (19:07.512)
Cool.

Ian Binek (19:19.006)
I've heard some things from like other outbound marketer, like there's this thing called like inbound led outbound. And so I call them outbound marketers, which the whole thing, right. But, you know, I've heard people, people having the AI reference, like, posts on people's LinkedIn. And occasionally you'll have someone that posts something like really sad, like on LinkedIn and the AI will reference it in an email. And it's

Jacob Boneta (19:27.414)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (19:48.498)
not good. It's like, why would you reference that? Right. So we have like conditionals in there to like, it's like avoid like sad topics, like, you know, all this stuff, so you don't talk about that. But, yeah, yeah, that's how we use it. And it really helps because it helps break through that barrier of like, is this a real person emailing me? Is it not? Obviously, you have to follow all the best practices to land in their inbox. And you're still putting a lot of time to like build that database up, but it's the economies of scale of sending

Jacob Boneta (19:49.883)
no. That is rough.

Jacob Boneta (19:58.904)
For sure.

Jacob Boneta (20:11.899)
yeah.

Ian Binek (20:18.762)
hundreds of emails a day that really works

Jacob Boneta (20:20.42)
Yeah

It changes the scale on the one to many, right? it, and this, it's really important right now for marketers and sales folks to be using it. It's definitely like to your point around like the prompt engineering side of it. You'll spend a lot of that if you're doing it for generative AI right now. Like a lot of it is just how do I generate the right messaging with the right tone? Something that I've been working on is around that tone and style side of copywriting in

Ian Binek (20:38.538)
Mm

Jacob Boneta (20:51.893)
And something that I found actually AI does relatively pretty well is

is taking guidelines that you give it. So for reference, self -serve guidelines, version one exists within my database. And I can give it that guideline and say, only make recommendations based on these things and only write based in this way, basically. And so I've written a few automations to improve our copywriting processes using AI in that way. And that's been really helpful. So it's not necessarily writing the emails, but it's giving us this like,

Jacob Boneta (21:32.014)
this way to optimize the writing across different writers, if that makes sense.

Ian Binek (21:36.552)
Yeah, no, exactly. mean, I've had a few people, a few leaders that we work with as clients reach out and we don't offer content marketing services in our agency. Like we do pay per click. Like that's what we do. I'm still doing content marketing inside my agency and I'm trying to stay on trend with that stuff. so whenever someone's like, hey, can I just replace my content marketer with AI? I'm like,

No, unless you really set up this really elaborate process that has AI in a lot of steps. Otherwise, I don't know. It's probably just better for you to keep a content marketer in. I know what you're saying, but it's really interesting to hear both sides.

Jacob Boneta (22:08.615)
Good.

Jacob Boneta (22:25.77)
It's the equivalent of like, what, five years ago, just giving Google or Facebook your money and saying, auto -optimize this budget. No, man, you could. It's not going to do the best, but it's going to benefit one of them.

Ian Binek (22:34.173)
Exactly.

Ian Binek (22:40.52)
Sadly, that's still the case today. have the automatic recommendations are set and it changes your bid strategy. I'm like, that's so, you can't just change your bid strategy and act like it's okay. Like that's very not okay. So I won't get into it. Yeah, Google loves it. Yeah, yeah, they'll take your money. Yeah, just more of a reason to work with an agency like this.

Jacob Boneta (22:47.992)
All right.

Jacob Boneta (22:55.074)
Google loves it. Google loves it.

Jacob Boneta (23:00.599)
Awesome.

Ian Binek (23:06.612)
Jacob, let's get back a little bit on track with some more questions. We kind of talked about AI, so we might not get into that AI combo there later on in the combo, but I want to hear about, you know, we talked a lot about hacky, trendy things, growth space. I want to get to your experience at IBM a little bit. I want to kind of hear how that strategy differed a little bit from the work that you're doing

Jacob Boneta (23:09.513)
you

Jacob Boneta (23:34.422)
Yeah, it was significantly different. mean, there are some similarities, obviously, and then the work that I do, that same investigator therapist work does not change. But my audience changed significantly. At IBM, I was working under what was considered Watson Health. So it was their whole Health and Life Sciences Department of Products.

or guess product suite. And yeah, the audience is significantly different. It was also kind of focused around...

enterprise deals. Grafana does that, but my focus at Grafana is around the self -serve experience. But at IBM, it was very much enterprise, was slower, turnaround. We had a list of accounts, and there was a huge emphasis on just content and website optimization, and specifically to try and personalize those experiences to those specific accounts to drive them into our funnel. And in contrast to what I do at Grafana, I I maybe at IBM had a thousand total

that were a potential TAM, Like at Grafana, that's millions and millions of users. So that was a big, difference. Obviously within that audience, the products are significantly different. So like being able to upscale onto these very niche products. mean, these were life cycle, like clinical trial products that are significantly different than observability and what I do today. But yeah, I think within that though,

there was a lot of the focuses and KPIs that we were held accountable to were different. And on top of that, IBM is just a huge corporation, a huge organization, right? Not even comparable to a private company or startup. But yeah, one of the things I found always interesting at IBM was their focus on, they termed it engagement, but I think it's used relatively.

Jacob Boneta (25:38.036)
and it's used in different areas, but basically we cared about users looking at multiple pages on our website. I think one of your interviewers had talked about

You know, there being like a number of like 30 something website visits before it's actually ever considered an MQL. Well, in IBM's case, they like, they live to that, that metric, whereas like we need more page views. The challenge and really what my job was there to do was the challenge with IBM is that they have 10 ,000 plus website or sorry, web pages. And because we were incentivized to get people to look at more pages, IE more

the pages were built that way, right? They were built with these major deep links. mean, some of these journeys within the website side had no end. They would just loop and you could never actually get to what do I want from this? What should I do with this? There was never like an opinion around what should our customers do?

Ian Binek (26:30.548)
That's wild.

Jacob Boneta (26:42.048)
It was very much like, click this link to go check out this page on this other area. And so there was a lot of incentivization around like, it wasn't intentional. think it was just like this byproduct of what KPIs they had, but like you would have links that were relatively redundant. Like I don't need to click into here to read the paragraph that I could have read on my website. So a lot of my work was just CRO work. So working with Adobe Target.

I think we migrated off of Optimizely when I first got there. But basically, Generic CRO optimized the journey and optimized the content that they're viewing to try and drive additional inbound traffic. So did this for thousands and thousands of pages that we owned and millions and millions of views and lots of inbound folk. But that was a little closer to the demand gen space and where I was actually aligned to a marketing team, whereas at Grafana, it's a...

It's different, right? Self -serve and enterprise have different sales cycles, different ways to approach them. And you're asking for things or you're asking for different things, right? At IBM, it was an ask for time. At Grafana, it's an ask for kind of like educating yourself, basically. Or like making sure you're doing the right thing in our products.

Ian Binek (27:55.176)
Yeah. I love that simplification of asking for like what you're just asking for. Anything that you're looking at on the internet, they should be asking for something like, you know, I relate to your position a little bit at IBM and doing the CRO work that you were doing because when I worked at a company called NCR, I did the same thing. I was a CRO there. We used Adobe Target.

Jacob Boneta (28:20.247)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Binek (28:23.03)
I did a very similar process to you, which was, you know, I was only there for like, maybe in that role for six to 12 months really, but it was interesting, right? And I think like when you're working at a larger company like that, like you said, it's usually, hey, like get more touch points and they have a better understanding of the customer buying journey. And they've

Jacob Boneta (28:42.168)
for sure.

Ian Binek (28:47.988)
decided these are the thousand people that we are going to do business with in the next like decade. So let's just talk to them. Yeah. Whereas like Rafaana, it's like, here's a million people. We're not sure if we're going to do business with all of them. So just, you know, see what you could come up with. Yeah.

Jacob Boneta (29:01.602)
go figure it out, right? You tell us. And I think that's a lot of the difference in that work is, I mean, I think you can debate it's an ABM approach versus this PLG motion, but it's basically PLG relies heavily on collecting data on that user to identify if they are a good fit for these longer term contracts, which is also a part of my job. But then there's the maybe more direct ABM approach, which is just here are those users, right? Here they are, get them to talk to us.

and give us their time, i .e. then money at some point. But yeah, it's definitely a stark contrast. I I started my work in early stage. You mentioned agency work. I did that. tried my own agency in its own way.

Um, but yeah, I started very early stage, like five, 10 people companies. Um, and then I moved around, you know, the 30, 50, and then the hundred and then the few hundred. And then I somehow made it into IBM, which is a few hundred thousand people who work there. Um, and it was definitely, definitely an eye opener. And, um, for what it's worth, like in growth, I think I've found a better home in this, hyper growth stage company. It makes sense. Seems obvious, but until you've done it, I think it's a little.

little challenging to find. But yeah, like Grafana, like I think it's way better fitting for the type of work that we do in general, which is they have something that's working. You're not building necessarily everything from scratch. There is some data, there's some historical evidence of something working or not. And they're also incredibly hungry and are scaling with extreme velocity, right? Like just growing and just excited and hungry and

I love that mood. But then they also have budgets, That helps in comparison to your 10 person company where it's like, well, we're hungry, but we can't afford to eat. So yeah, so I'd definitely say it was a great learning experience. I think it's actually where I really dove into that empathetic marketing space, as I'll coin it, whereas in optimization, you deal with so many people and so many people's

Ian Binek (30:50.14)
Yeah.

Jacob Boneta (31:14.414)
that you did not create from scratch. And this is their baby in a lot of ways. And this is just so important to them for one reason or another, especially at an IBM where maybe that's their one project they've ever done or they've done for 10 years. And it was my job to tell them, hey, let's make it better. That's not easy to do. But it was definitely a learning experience to understand what was the right way to do that. What was the right way to approach these conversations?

How do I ask for permission to tell you what I think about something? And yeah, was a great learning experience. Definitely a challenge, but I'm happy to have been there.

Ian Binek (31:55.958)
That's awesome. Yeah, I'm we got to touch on that because I think it really does bring it like full circle and kind of round out your experience as a whole. So I want to get into my favorite two questions that I ask everybody on the podcast. And it sounds like you've listened to a couple of ours, so you probably know what they are. But I would love to hear what you think is the most underrated marketing strategy or tactic in 2024.

Jacob Boneta (32:21.498)
Underrated. Underrated is good.

Jacob Boneta (32:28.376)
We do so much all the time and we're always trying to learn. I think conversational marketing, I maybe touched on it a little earlier in like the, how we approach it at Grafana, but.

I learned this thing.

in my music days where I struggle with eye contact and maintaining that in a personal sense. And I learned in music how incredibly important it was on stage to make a connection with people, right? And it's something that I've carried for a while in marketing. And like, I think at the end of the day, ends up being this, how I look at that learning now is like, we are people, we are looking for connection and to get that,

in a marketing sense, you have to have an extreme understanding of your users, right, of what they are, who they are, why they're there, what they learn to get there, things like that. And ultimately, knowing those things make you better at this conversational marketing aspect. And what I mean by conversational marketing is like, how do I have a conversation at scale? Right. And that goes back to like those bots that we create at inner or using like an intercom or

you know, any other in -app solution or software, but at the end of the day, it's like, how do I build something that passes the sniff test, right? That, that educates my users and that has enough, flexibility to meet kind of the, the

Ian Binek (33:47.296)
Yeah.

Jacob Boneta (34:07.278)
the many use cases that I might see from a self -serve users perspective. But at the same time, how do I then also not overwhelm them? How do I make this feel conversational? How do I make it feel interactive? I think in a certain way, we maybe would call that gamification as well. I think that maybe is a little overused at this point, but conversational marketing is what I would consider is the most important. It's like, how do I have a conversation with 10 ,000 people at the same time about completely different things?

That's my underrated for sure. It's also not easy for what it's worth.

Ian Binek (34:40.637)
Yeah. Oh, it's not right. It's not at all. I mean, and I think that you can talk about conversational marketing and in like your sense, right, where you have 10 ,000 plus users, but you can also actually kind of talk about it in an agency sense where you have like 10 prospects that you're talking to right now and, and, or maybe just like a hundred, right? Like if you're doing a LinkedIn DM sequence, how do you do that without

sending five paragraphs and overwhelming the person that you've never talked to before, right? I agree with you. I think especially this year, I was just on a call with another agency owner and they said, this is probably the hardest year they've had with their agency. And they laughed at me, because they're like, you just started your agency this year, it's probably the worst year to start. And I was like, well, at least it's like the baseline for me. Like, yeah, it's only up at this point.

Jacob Boneta (35:10.157)
You're right.

Jacob Boneta (35:30.882)
Yeah

Right, only up. Only up for me here.

Ian Binek (35:37.588)
So I agree with you. I think it's all about developing that connection and not overwhelming the people you're trying to talk to. So great insight.

Jacob Boneta (35:45.208)
You know what's been interesting in the lifecycle space about it is just within the life cycle, have a ton of different channels and ways of talking to customers and.

Like that conversational piece, a part of conversation in general, like in the human form of this, right, is like we, you need to find the platform or the kind of vessel to do that. And it's very dependent user to user, person to person, right? Like some people love this Zoom interaction. Some people love face to face. Some people love just being on like a Discord channel and talking to their friends that way or their family in some instances. But something that I found really

is finding that within your users, segmenting them by those channels of preference. I've ran a few experiments at a few other companies even before this, where we try to identify within our user base, within the people that we are talking to every day, where do they actually have the most engagement. I've had a few B2B, where it was selling to marketing -esque e -comm folks.

And surprisingly enough, we found that email was just dead. It was just not working for them. And they didn't care. It just didn't open. Or you'd get these bot interactions, like the auto -open interactions. They never actually respond to these things. And we didn't really see much traction until what we found, like the SMS marketing side of things. And we were testing it kind of A -B test style to see which one with similar messaging and the same people.

Ian Binek (37:05.59)
See

Jacob Boneta (37:21.452)
Which one performs better? Right. And so what we found in that, that company's case was, you know, SMS was incredibly helpful for them. It was a lot easier for them to, I guess they were on their phone more than others. I don't know what the answer was necessarily. We didn't get quite that deep, but what we did understand is that our users preferred that communication style. And so we just doubled down and then stopped asking for emails. just said, give us your phone number. You know, obviously there's some trust needed in that and you have to build some rapport.

Ian Binek (37:33.366)
Sure.

Jacob Boneta (37:50.927)
But I think that goes back to that conversational marketing is like it's beyond what you're saying. It's how you say it. That's where you say it.

Ian Binek (37:58.966)
That's when you say it. That's right. All right, Jacob. Last question here. It's the flip side, which is what do think is the most overrated marketing strategy in 2024?

Jacob Boneta (38:00.79)
When you say it, yeah, that, mean, we've all been there. Mondays is the best day,

Jacob Boneta (38:17.87)
I have a list, I have a full list of things that I think we probably need to stop. I think it needs to start with, I got burned by this the other day. Why are we still hiding decline offer buttons? Why are we still hiding CTAs behind white text? Like, this is such a 2000, early 2000 tactic.

I don't know how it's working for any of y 'all, but stop doing it. Don't do it. It turns everybody off who has any self -respect, I guess. But in reality, I think there are

There's some struggle, I think you mentioned it even in like the outbound inbound of LinkedIn marketing right now, right? Like the, I mean, I believe the inbox is sacred in general, but like even at the personal and outbound level, I don't know how many of those LinkedIn paragraphs that we are getting right now of sales folks who are just trying to sell me something, which I'm totally fine with, sell me something.

But I think there needs to be a tweak and how we approach that, right? Like how do we actually send something that somebody cares about? AI might be the right way to get a conversation going, but it's definitely a big challenge around just like LinkedIn marketing and how people are doing it. I mean, I think I'm at a point now where like I just decline any sales title. It's like, I know what you're going to say. I know it and it's okay. I am all for it. I have that empathy because I've been on that side as

Ian Binek (39:44.627)
Yeah.

Jacob Boneta (39:51.386)
I've made those calls. I've been that person, been that face, but I know what it is. So don't do it. and I think there's just like, there's some people would do a really good job at this and who have found a really like organic way to like have that conversation using a platform like LinkedIn. I'll actually, I want to connect you with the founder of a company Banff .com. So B A F they do a lot of the LinkedIn. I think they consider like LinkedIn influencer marketing where like he's an agency owner. guy, Houston

and agency owner that like his whole company is based on how to turn people like you and I into influencers on LinkedIn. And he does some really good work and has a credible team that has some great insight into LinkedIn marketing. But yeah, cold LinkedIn messages that do not pass the sniff test I think is a big one for me.

Ian Binek (40:31.115)
Nice.

Ian Binek (40:47.048)
Absolutely. There was something you mentioned was you're getting, and we talked about this, you get the paragraphs. You get the paragraphs from people. Auto connects, know, there's ways around this. don't think AI is, AI is a part of it and you can solve it with like part of it, right? But I don't think that AI is like, the saving grace now, everything's changed because we're using AI in our LinkedIn DMs now.

which I know it's not what you're saying, I think some people think that.

Jacob Boneta (41:19.227)
It lowers the barrier of entry for sure. So I feel like if anything, it's going to create a initial problem, right? Like we'll see more of it because of it, but I think eventually it can become that.

Ian Binek (41:23.574)
It's gonna become more, yeah. Yeah.

Ian Binek (41:29.938)
Yeah, I think what I, and it goes through my head anytime I write a message now or anytime I'm creating an ad or landing page is I call it the bowling ball test. And it's basically like the bowling ball analogy kind of comes from when someone talks to you about something and anytime they say a buzzword, they hand you a bowling ball. And obviously you can't hold on to more than like one or two bowling balls without just dropping them, right?

So that's like whenever I write a sales message, I'm thinking, what am I asking for in this message? Am I asking for, not only am I trying to get a call with them, am I also trying to take their time? Am I also, am I taking their time in the future? Am I taking their time now? So when I started out, I sent maybe a paragraph or two in my outbound. Everyone's done it. But you gotta think about it. When you send,

Jacob Boneta (42:11.522)
Yeah.

Jacob Boneta (42:20.556)
we've all done it. We have all done it. worry. It happens.

Ian Binek (42:26.932)
your paragraph or two and you're outbound. This is what you're asking. You're asking, hey, can I have one to two minutes of your time right now to read this message? Then can I have you respond to this message? And then can I have you book time with me? And then that's taking time in the future. It's like you're asking for like three or four things. Whereas if you just go in and one sentence or two max and you say, hey, like I have this free report, can I give it to you?

Jacob Boneta (42:56.662)
Yeah. Dude.

Ian Binek (42:57.12)
Boom, and it's helpful. That's like, you're asking for like one thing, you know, and it's not bad.

Jacob Boneta (43:02.764)
Well, it's this plague of asking for time. mean, how much, that is all we care about in B2B, right? Because it's the nearest thing to asking for money. I mean, it's the next door neighbor to money, right? It's like the biggest ask we can ask that is free, ultimately. And so it's such a challenge and I'll definitely put that challenge out there to anybody is what else can we ask for? What else is there? And I totally agree with you. I've had to learn this myself is like even in emails to colleagues

Ian Binek (43:18.866)
Exactly.

Jacob Boneta (43:33.088)
to to friends, even text threads, ask for one thing. Ask for one thing first, only one thing and make sure it's very easy. I used to run some text message marketing where a big part of our success was that we asked these relatively bullying yes, no questions. Are you the right person? Yes, no. It's like, how do I make this?

Ian Binek (43:55.092)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jacob Boneta (43:59.246)
A lot of the times we default to making it other people's problems. And by it, mean, we make the work the other person's problem. How do I make it so dead simple for you to answer this? That it's a no brainer, right? Yes, no, no, I don't care. Yes, I care. Right. But you asked for my time. Now I got to go look the schedule. Now I got to go do, I got to go ask my family. What are we up to next weekend? Like, there's a ton in that. So yeah, stop asking for

Ian Binek (44:21.982)
Exactly.

Ian Binek (44:27.69)
This is great. This is great, Jacob. All the questions I feel like really led down to some organic conversations around other topics. So really appreciated the time, Jacob. That's all I have for you today. But thank you so much. This was a great conversation,

Jacob Boneta (44:40.856)
fish

Awesome, man. Yeah, I loved it. It was a good chat and hopefully get some good views out of this.

Ian Binek (44:50.354)
Of course. And then real quick, Jacob, if anyone that's listening wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach out?

Jacob Boneta (44:57.324)
Yeah, reach out to me on LinkedIn. It's Benetta Jacob. That's my profile or handle, however it is on LinkedIn. Shoot me an ad. Honestly, shoot me a big paragraph. It'll make me laugh and I'll add you in there. I think that'll be perfect. But yeah, shoot me message on LinkedIn. I'm super open and willing to chat. So looking forward to it.

Ian Binek (45:06.695)
Awesome.

Ian Binek (45:19.282)
Awesome. All right, Jacob. Well, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day,

Jacob Boneta (45:23.884)
You too, see ya.

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