The ONLY WAY to Drive Referrals in 2024 Feat. Julia Winn | Ep 22

Ian Binek (00:02.148)
Julia, thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing?

Julia Winn (00:05.706)
Good, thanks for having me on, Ian.

Ian Binek (00:08.983)
Pleasure is all mine. I'm so excited to be talking to you today. I think the insights that you're going to be sharing are going to be really valuable. think especially because I was on your LinkedIn, I'm kind looking into you a little bit and you talk a lot about marketing and sales alignment as well as some cutting edge strategy stuff too and keeping up with those kinds of trends. So I'm really excited to just get right into this. And the first thing that I want to ask you is just, you know, let's just get started. Did you tell me a little bit more about air traffic control

what you're up to right

Julia Winn (00:39.726)
Sure, yeah, happy to. So I'm the head of marketing at Air Traffic Control. We are a teeny tiny little startup and we've really prioritized being in the HubSpot ecosystem. So Air Traffic Control sits in between HubSpot and your CMS, which is sometimes HubSpot, sometimes something else like Webflow, et cetera. And we basically generate interest graphs based on kind of content preferences and viewing history from your contacts.

And that allows you to create really ABM style content experiences for anyone in your database. So super easy way to do ABM. We don't do, you know, kind of signals. We're not Sixth Sense. We're really like brass tacks help you get in touch with the people in your database, prospects and customers and serve them up the content that's most relevant to

Ian Binek (01:30.797)
That's awesome. So the kind of interest graphs that you're generating, I is there a way you can kind of describe that? I mean, you say you're not signals, so what does that look like, at least from like an auditory standpoint? Obviously, we don't have visuals here.

Julia Winn (01:44.588)
Yeah. Yeah. So I think the easiest way to think about it is like if Ian and Julia are both in the database and Julia clicks on a blog piece about rhinoceroses, then it's very likely that the next piece I might want to read might have something to do with rhinoceroses. Maybe you click on a blog piece that's about planes. And of course, this is a very random non B2B example here, right? But it's very likely that you might be interested in something to do with aviation.

all of these little kind of topics would be populated in air traffic control and then sent on the backend as custom properties in HubSpot. And that allows us to automate what the next best content solution or prep, sorry, the next best content piece would be for you to consume in an email and an ABM style landing page. The applications are really limitless.

Ian Binek (02:39.043)
That's incredible. Yeah, and I imagine you can probably create some sort of dashboard inside of HubSpot that probably pulls those custom objects in as well. And if there's a lot of similarities, then that's like, great, like we should definitely create this content in between the contacts too, is what it sounds

Julia Winn (02:56.334)
Yes. Yes. Well, I think so on the back end of ATC, basically what we have is a content utilization score and topic radar. So it'll show you like maybe you have 300 pieces of content and you have all these people that are really interested in rhinoceroses, but you don't have any pieces on them. Like you better go and start creating a piece on that. from that sense, it kind of helps with content creation and making sure that you're aligning your content production to your target audience.

And it's very likely that if someone in your database is really interested in rhinoceroses, that your target market is probably also interested in rhinoceroses. So you better go write about it because it's actually going to help your inbound as well as help you nurture people that are in your database.

Ian Binek (03:39.447)
That's awesome. So I guess this is such a nice product, but also HubSpot is such a very popular CRM. I don't know what percentage of the market, but it's a huge percentage of the market that's using it, right? So I would love to hear, what are your strategies or tactics that you're using to get in front of more people to use ATC? And yeah, I just would love to hear how you're driving your company's pipeline.

Julia Winn (04:06.946)
Yeah. So I think the first thing we had to do was ruthlessly prioritized on a product and marketing perspective, which CRM to kind of go with. you know, early on, you know, perhaps someday we'll have a Marketo integration, perhaps, perhaps someday we'll have Pardot Salesforce marketing cloud integration. But right now the HubSpot ecosystem is such a rich environment and our product plays so well with

that the very first thing we had to do was validate our product by getting listed on the HubSpot app marketplace. And anyone that's ever done that knows it is not a small task. There's a lot of product backend. There's a lot of documentation. There's app installs and just proving that we work really nicely with HubSpot, right? So we did that first, which obviously gets us a huge boost of just being on the marketplace.

both internally from people searching for ABM style content experiences and also validating to any outbound motion like, look, we're here, we're real, like you can trust us. So that was a huge thing. And then in terms of other activities that we're really prioritizing, it's honestly been a really different playbook than most of the other startups that I've been at, of which there are many. So we haven't, for example, prioritized

an SEO driven content motion. Like when we write content, we really are just trying to be helpful and useful to our audience. Like I am not stuffing anything with keywords. I'm not worried about site traffic because that's not something that my audience particularly, that's not how I think they're going to find us. So being really real and actually being able to like not have a filter on when we write content is super fun for one thing. But in addition to that, you

we just started noticing that the people that are using us, the customers that are using us, they love us, right? So word of mouth is everything. And also how can we kind of scale that up? So what we did was create a referral program wherein we are working with several agency partners. We currently have 14 to kind of say like, look, here's the people within your, you know, your purview who are a great fit for us. We're not for everybody. We're not for people that don't prioritize content production, for example, or people that aren't on HubSpot.

Julia Winn (06:25.614)
But these 10 people that you're working with are. So want to introduce us? Let's go ahead and actually have an official referral program. So that's been something else that we are really, really focused on. And we will be at inbound at HubSpot this year. So we're not going to be there with a booth, but we'll be there sharing word of mouth, sharing product news and everything else. So we're really excited about that as well.

Ian Binek (06:50.957)
That's awesome. Is it fair to say that you're sort of doing, you're using ATC to write this content for your prospects as well?

Julia Winn (07:00.822)
yeah. yeah. We totally eat our own dog food as my founder Nick would like to say. So, you know, just the other day I was looking at the back end there and I was like, we really don't have a lot of pieces on like social media and how, you know, we don't have a lot of pieces on how AI is changing SEO. Like, I'm going to go write that right now. And it's actually gratifying as like a startup marketer to be able to just write a piece of content and be like, check the box. I did something today because everything feels so ongoing and so huge.

that it's just like a lovely thing to be able to go and do. we are absolutely using our own product to be able to send out content that's relevant to our audience.

Ian Binek (07:41.889)
Yeah. I love that you mentioned too, that you're not just writing content for the SERP, right? Like in for to rank higher in Google, you're just trying to write quality content. We just had a guest on yesterday. He's the manager of SEO at G2. And he was talking all about how you can't really over index on like the hacky trendy stuff, like using AI to write blogs and stuff for you and trying to

keyword stuff, modern day keyword stuffing. So it's great to have two guests on in a row essentially that are talking about the same thing. think there's a ton of, we have agencies that listen to this and then we also have a lot of just like specialists or lower level employee kind of style people that listen to this. they always come back and say, like, why aren't you doing like this massive AI push and pushing it a lot of content? it's

It's not really a long -term solution to the problem. And I love that you're focusing on the word of the mouth, the customer experience, and then the referrals. mean, that's like the bread and butter of what you're doing

Julia Winn (08:49.09)
Well, hey, I'll take being in that camp with someone from G2 every day. And I think one thing Nick and I were talking about, and I've been at startups where it was totally the right play to do like SEO -driven content and AI -driven content and everything else. But what I think we're starting to realize more and more is like, OK, you drove a lot of top of funnel traffic. How's that working out for you? Are those people actually valuable? Are they actually?

you know, looking to become one of your customers or were they, for example, looking for how they could integrate this data solution, you know, to a different plugin. And now they have their answer and they're not your target market and yay, you drove traffic, but who really cares? Like in a lot of ways, that's just a vanity metric. So, yeah, it's, it's been really lovely to just be like, I think this would be really valuable. look, yes, it would. And I don't have anything on it. That's what I'm going to write about today.

And we are also writing with our agency partners. We're writing pieces for them, thought leadership pieces. They're writing for us. We're cross promoting in a way that I haven't been able to do at a lot of other brands just because we're prioritizing that referral and kind of word of mouth mechanism.

Ian Binek (10:03.169)
Yeah, and that cross -promoting is sort of an SEO play in and of itself, but it's better, it's more than that, right? Because you're on social media as well, so, and they're probably plugging

Julia Winn (10:11.246)
Totally. And some things that work for SEO now work 10 years ago and some super don't. Like this is going to be a great backlink for me. Like that's awesome. This is totally helping with my SEO. But am I going to answer the 18 people that are like, hey, do you want 18 backlinks? Like, no, because that worked like in 2005 and it doesn't work now. So just stop it.

Ian Binek (10:36.299)
Exactly.

Julia, I noticed on your LinkedIn you were talking about clay and I would love to hear a little bit more about what you were doing with clay and how you're kind of using it and maybe like an inbound sense or maybe an outbound sense as well. But it's a new tool. It's picking up a lot of traction and I love to see marketing leaders using it because I think a lot of salespeople like to use it for obvious reasons. But if there's a reason to use it inbound, I love

that out. So I would love to hear more

Julia Winn (11:12.05)
Well, I mean, I will preface by saying like, yes, I'm in marketing, but I am at a four person startup and we're all wearing a lot of hats, right? So there's times actually like a former colleague of mine the other day was like, I thought you were in marketing, not sales. And I was like, yeah, sorry. But so I think more so our use case is outbound, right? But it's also driven by what we are seeing inbound.

We have some really specific parameters for what people that are successful with our platform have. They are HubSpot customers. They've prioritized content production. They have at least 150 pieces of content on their site. And they maybe have a mix of content. So maybe it's a blog and a podcast and a webinar. And what's super cool about Clay is not to knock, Apollo is a great platform. Zoom Info, great platform.

But, know, like I can go in and be in those platforms like, okay, job titles, demographics, maybe some technology, you know, find some people and, you know, validate them. Do they, you know, actually have deliverable email address? Okay, potentially. But in Clay with the plugins that you can use, like for example, the SEMrush plugin, you know, I can actually go in and I can say, not only is it 150 pieces of content, this diverse types of content,

but I can look at what your site traffic is, what your bounce rate is, what your time on site is, and then I can really determine how can we help you improve from that perspective. Like, well, that's really great. You have a super high bounce rate, so maybe you're not writing content that's super relevant, or maybe you're not serving up content that's super relevant to your audience. So just having all of those kind of filters that you can add in is amazing.

I will also just shout out that the Clay community and customer support is so exceptional that from a marketing point of view, to be able to be in there and be learning from everybody that is using this from either a sales or marketing perspective and this speed at which they will get back to you when you're like, wait, I have a question is remarkable. So I think super highly of Clay and I know everybody is talking about them and there's a lot of overlap with other pre -existing platforms,

Julia Winn (13:32.598)
I also just, from a brand perspective, think their brand is amazing. I love the design. I love their new website design. So I think that's kind of inspiring from a marketing perspective as well. And I'm sure they will be all over Inbound and everything else. And we'd love to play with you, Clay. So if you want to have us on or do anything, we are totally down.

Ian Binek (13:56.003)
That's a great answer. I love that you kind of mentioned like this inbound led outbound approach that's becoming a very popular hashtag that I'm seeing in a lot of LinkedIn content. I think what you hit the nail on the head really, mean, outbound really is just demand gen, right? But it's really targeted demand gen. And using Clay, you're able to piece together this SEM rush data.

And what's cool about this, and I think people don't realize this from a marketing perspective because they're not necessarily sending sales emails or sequences, is all of that data that you scrape from Clay using the SEMrush plugin, you're able to use as a variable in your email. And then you can have conditionals too. if you have 150 pieces of content, then the message is going to be different than if you have less than 150 pieces of content. I think that is so cool.

And there's really no other tool out there that I know of right now that's doing that, at least as easily as you can do it inside of clay. So I love that you're using it and I'm glad you're seeing results

Julia Winn (15:01.964)
Yeah, I mean, I should screenshot kind of like what what our fields were at some point because it was really, really cool. And once I started, you know, I got some help from customer support and then I was in there and I was like, OK, like conditional logic, like blog, true. Yeah, like they do have a blog. They also have a podcast and they have syndicated news. It is just it's it's really, really a neat platform. And it feels like it gets more robust every day. Like it feels like about three weeks ago.

it might've been really good for finding accounts, but not so good for validating people within those accounts. And now all of sudden I was like, look at this is all validated personal email addresses that we can get from these target accounts. So yeah, it's a very, very cool platform and I can't wait to see what they do next.

Ian Binek (15:50.659)
Awesome. We'll reach out to Clay and see if they can do a collaboration with you. Awesome. Julia, the next question is about AI. I'd love to hear your thoughts on AI, especially in the digital marketing industry. mean, there's a lot of people that are scared of it, and then there's a lot of people that are like, AI sucks. Like, I'm not scared of it. So I'm curious, what are your thoughts on it? How do you think it's going to shape the rest of this decade?

Julia Winn (15:54.777)
We're down.

Julia Winn (16:16.534)
Yeah, well, I don't think people should be scared. I do always say thank you when I see, you know, use AI just in case Skynet becomes a reality and, you know, we're in a position, I want them to know I was polite. But I don't think it can replace, you know, human touch in terms of content production and quality. I just don't. think sometimes you have really highly technical content. I worked at a data integration startup where we were primarily speaking to engineers, for example.

And because of that, we could use AI pretty effectively to kind of talk about how this integration worked with this integration, et cetera. Does that work when you're marketing to marketers or people in sales or creatives? No, it doesn't. And it can't produce the same quality and just production quality. But it can do other really cool things, like generate HTML blocks for you. It can take transcriptions of blog pieces and come up with fairly decent

hooks and summaries and everything else. I think it's great for outlines. When it comes to imagery, you know, there's so many cool platforms that are quite fun to play with. think my sons and I just did one the other day of kind of combining our dog with a buffalo and that was really cool. It came up with a great image, but am I going to use it exclusively for branding? No, I won't. And I might be biased because I'm married to a graphic designer, but I don't think it's ever going to be able to replicate a brand design.

Now, can a human come up with a great set of brand guidelines and then can AI potentially go and generate some imagery that will be great for a blog or something? Sure. But are they going to be able to effectively, you know, you know, design an entire website and brand collateral and everything else from that? I still think it's going to need like human tweaking. I think I don't think people should be scared. I don't think marketers should be scared. I think it can be a great tool to make things faster.

And to kind of check off some things that were previously quite dull for marketers, honestly, that now you can just do faster and then you can focus on the other things that humans do really, really

Ian Binek (18:24.173)
Great answer. I mostly agree. I do, as someone who's really, love just staying ahead of the game with the technology space and seeing how new tools are adapting. I do see how AI could replace teams, certain teams. And I guess that's just technology in general.

looking at the industrial revolution that replaced a lot of jobs. It created new jobs, but it replaces a lot of old jobs. And I kind of feel like AI is kind of trending that way in this decade. So I don't think people should be scared as long as they're willing to learn it. If they're not willing to learn it, then I think they are going to be on a back foot and that will ultimately just make it harder to get roles in the future. So I think we're kind of speaking the same language here, but I definitely think that

is some opportunities for it to replace some teams.

Julia Winn (19:22.902)
Yeah, I think that's fair. And the industrial revolution metaphor is a very good one, right? And I think, you know, yes, you can't be a Luddite that's just going to say, no, I don't want to do it. You know, you can't not realize that having something generate an outline for you instead of going through and doing all that, or synthesizing large, you know, data sets or something is not something that's going to bring value to you. think, I think we agree on,

You have to use it in the capacity that it will help and you have to be willing to kind of stretch yourself and say, okay, well, what are the really the things that I can do that it can't do? What are the things that I can do that are gonna end up being more quality? And I think as long as people do that, I think that, you know, they'll be just fine.

Ian Binek (20:07.883)
Yeah. A great example to talk about AI a little bit. I don't know if this is necessarily AI, but just automation is there are just certain industries that will always need the human touch because humans trust humans. Even if a machine is technically better. And a great example is like the airline industry. Like the planes can like take off and land and fly all on their own, like with the autopilot.

Julia Winn (20:29.133)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Binek (20:37.347)
people still want people in the cockpit in case there is any issues. And I think that's like kind of the same thing in marketing and sales and all these other highly human led things, I guess, that are very high risk in a sense.

Julia Winn (20:55.406)
Yeah, I mean, I live about 10 miles from San Francisco. And I can tell you that every time we go into the city and I'm driving and a Waymo comes up on my side and then a Waymo comes up on my other side, I'm like, oh, I mean, I get it. I understand the value proposition. I understand it could be safer than some human drivers. But but I just don't want to be next to next to that. And I don't want to be in a plane being piloted by A .I. No offense.

Ian Binek (21:10.541)
Yeah.

Julia Winn (21:25.548)
you know, but can it help, you know, design and put together pieces of an engine or something else? Like, yeah, that seems, that seems reasonable. So it's just about finding a balance,

Ian Binek (21:35.619)
Absolutely. All right. So I have two questions left for you, Julia, today. I want to hear about your overrated strategies of 2024 or tactics even, right? I want to hear what you think people are focusing on. I mean, maybe they're wrong. Maybe they shouldn't be focusing on, or maybe it's just overrated. I'm kind of curious what your thoughts

Julia Winn (21:59.212)
Yes, I am a bit biased on this and from being in B2B marketing, but something that drives me crazy and I think annoys people more than drive value is like B2B mobile text messaging. you know, obviously like cold calling has been around forever, right? Like that's like Glen Gary, Glen Ross. So it's not I'm not going to say like calling on the phone, but

I think what happened is, you know, everybody goes remote. Like I don't have an office number anywhere. I work from home. When you call me on my iPhone, like you're calling me on my personal number. When you text me on my phone and I haven't even registered for your webinar and you're reminding me every hour about it just because I did register for something a month ago, like that's just annoying and you need to stop. So again, totally biased, but I think it feels really, really intrusive.

particularly for like B2B. Now, if it's my doctor's office reminding me about an appointment, like, okay, that's a completely different application. But that kind of bugs me. Other than that, I mean, in terms of like modern strategies, I mean, I think there's some things you can point to about like using AI to, you know, to make sure you're posting on LinkedIn every day, for example.

because you went in and said, okay, need to be more of a thought leader, so I need to post every day, because everybody's telling me I do. So hey, let's come up with 30 days worth of this thing, and that's just keep pressing post and post and post. I post on LinkedIn too, I get it, but I really, again, with the human value thing, think that people want that more. think someone that does that incredibly well is like Zoe Hartsfield from Apollo. posts.

you know, very, very frequently, but it is really value driven. And you can tell that she's not just coming up with this, you know, kind of random arbitrary content calendar. You can tell that she's using her own history. You know, she's very transparent. I find that like really refreshing. And apparently so do like the other 70 billion people that are following her. I don't know what her actual follower count is, but, um, you know, I think like when you just see the same thing being generated again and again, and it just doesn't read

Ian Binek (24:06.699)
Yeah.

Julia Winn (24:13.506)
like a real human, like that is quite dull and I think people should stop doing that

Ian Binek (24:20.941)
The AI generation is really bad. I agree. I don't even know if I really want to add too much on it other than we did have a guest on about two weeks ago. Her name was Amy Stewart and she was the director of content at a company called PayScale. And she talked all about how they never use AI and their whole...

Julia Winn (24:23.44)
You

Ian Binek (24:44.323)
Basically how they drive pipeline for their business is through this 100 page report that they create every year on all of the insights that they gather from their platform. And then they just post about it. And she talks about how people that are using AI, it's just regurgitate like regurgitated content. So it's not new or thought leadership at all. It's just pulling from someone else's some arbitrary person on the internet. You don't even know if this person's credible or not. It's just coming from AI. So

Julia Winn (25:13.742)
Holy

Ian Binek (25:14.104)
It's bad, it's really bad. think a lot of people are so focused on posting every single day on LinkedIn, it's better to put, equality is always going to be better than quantity in that circumstance. And yeah.

Julia Winn (25:24.61)
Yeah, like something you value to post every day, like go for it. like, you know, it's similar to like content production. Like if you read another, like in the landmark age of, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever, you're just like, no, no, like go take that and go work on it for two hours and make it actually human and then post

Ian Binek (25:36.939)
Yeah, you could just tell.

Ian Binek (25:48.291)
Exactly, exactly. And I think it goes down to people think that LinkedIn posts are just like, oh, like this should only take me 30 minutes and then it's only out there for the day and then it's gone. But in reality, like you're building a relationship with people that might do business with you in the future. So this is like a forever thing, even if you only get like 10 likes on it or 20 likes, like it's still really important. So you should spend time

Julia Winn (26:15.352)
Yeah, totally. It's your brand, right? It's either your personal brand or your professional brand. And you you need to, you need to guard that very tightly, I

Ian Binek (26:25.027)
Absolutely. All right, last question. Similar to overrated, I want to hear about your underrated strategies and tactics in 2024.

Julia Winn (26:36.43)
Let's see, underrated. think I have been just like kind of regurgitating my own beliefs throughout this entire conversation. But I do think that going through and creating content to create value for your audience using a platform like ATC is very helpful. But you can also do it without. Like just talk to your customers. Talk to people.

Like we get so, I think the example from PayScale is really, really cool. But I'll give you an example. We're using AppCues as our kind of in -product support, right? So onboarding journeys and everything else. And that provides us with a whole bunch of really, really cool analytics about where people are dropping off, where they might need more support, where they're asking questions about how do I make an email template? So that's great from a point of view of like, okay, I've got some of this data.

But when you actually drill into it and you actually say like, Daniel, why weren't you able to create this email? And he's like, well, I didn't know how to make the template. And it's like, okay, so now I need to divine, you know, some sort of an onboarding experience that literally is going to make him a module that he can drop in. Cause he's not in marketing ops, you know, he's, he's a marketer that's using a platform, but like he's never really worked with the HTML before. So I need to go ahead and support him on that. And I can see from a like meta.

perspective that happening with app queues within my platform and from some other analytics tools that we use. But until I actually understand why by having words with this man, you know, I can't really help him. So I think underrated most of all is just that value of human connection of, know, not just with your customers, but with your team. Sales and marketing talking to each other instead of competing with each other is huge. Right. So we just, you know, I

there can sometimes be this kind of competition push and pull between what's the attribution of this lead or this piece of pipeline or whatnot. And once we can actually just stop it and drop the ego, sit down, forget about the hubris and say, okay, we are just gonna talk about what did that customer say to you? And what is this prospect saying to me? Then we can actually make some cool things happen. So I

Julia Winn (28:58.09)
overarchingly, if any of that made any sense. It's just about listening and talking to human beings face to face or, you know, computer screen to computer screen as much as possible. I think that is the thing that can't be replaced by AI and is just really, really valuable.

Ian Binek (29:15.723)
Yeah, no, it did make sense. And I think like you said, you're using that human connection to drive more organic and thoughtful content. We actually do something like that in our agency where we have a listening Zapier bot and anytime someone asks a question in any one of our channels, it throws it into an Airtable database.

And then we'll review those questions on a weekly basis and decide like, hey, like we want to make content from this question or this question showed up like five times. This is definitely something we should make into an ebook. And so I love your answer. I think that's like very thoughtful. And I think that more people need to do stuff like

Julia Winn (29:56.142)
Totally, and I can't credit, I will shout out some credit to former CEO that I worked with, Michael Papay, who I worked with for years at Waggle. And after Series A, our company got quite large. And one of the things that we started implementing, and apologies, Waggle people, if there was someone else that was kind of responsible for this, but we would do lunch and learns for customers. And we started just doing it internally so

product could sit down and say, we're building these things and this is why. And people can ask questions and we would do this once a month from, know, this is what marketing is doing. These are the things that we're sharing. Everybody has an opportunity to kind of pitch it and, you know, chime in with some feedback questions so that we all actually understand and are aligned on the same goals. So I think, you know, that's probably the genesis of where I kind of got this like crazy desire for everybody talking all the time and everybody being really

transparent but it just works better like that. Life works better like that. Business works better like that. So I'm and will always be a huge

Ian Binek (31:00.841)
said. Well Julia, that's all I have for you today. I absolutely loved talking to you. I think we had some really great insights. I learned a lot, so I'm sure our listeners will learn a lot too. So before we wrap up, Julia, could you let us know how people could get in touch with you in case they wanted to talk more about ATC and anything that you talked about today in this

Julia Winn (31:22.53)
Sure, yeah, I am on LinkedIn. So you can find me sparingly posting human related content on LinkedIn. And then you can find air traffic control on the HubSpot at Marketplace or at our website, airtrafficcontrol .io.

Ian Binek (31:39.059)
Well, thank you so much, Julia. I hope you have a great rest of your

Julia Winn (31:41.986)
Thank you. Thanks for the time, Ian.

‍