Transcript

Mike: Well, Neil, Ariel, thank you for getting on with me. I know ahead of time, I had sent over the core questions that we look to answer in NBSD for the MO Pros. So I appreciate you taking the time to try to cut through some of that noise for us. It sounds like you have set the stage a little bit in a few slides. So you will probably be able to answer most of the questions we like to ask and just those few slides. And then we are definitely looking forward to seeing what the product can do. So we really appreciate you taking the time to create what we really enjoy calling the no bullshit demo.

So I will leave it to you to kind of take it from here. But why don’t you run us through automaton and what it is all about?

Neil: Yeah, thank you. And we appreciate being on the no bullshit demo. I mean, Ariel[?]’s demo skills are amazing. So I would like to see you maybe quiz[?] her a little bit as she is demoing to see the flexibility of the system. But at the end of the day, you can think of automaton as an automated monitoring for revenue operations, right? Our platform monitors the website marketing, and your sales tech stack to ensure that data is flowing as expected. Think of us just as like the pager duty or New Relic for marketers.

And whether it is from lack of training, software updates, on manage integrations, or simple human error, mistakes happen. Mistakes can go unnoticed for weeks, or for days or for even months. And in many organizations, when I was at Microsoft, for example, we spent thousands of hours proactively testing the system. A lot of companies that we see only will put out fires, and so they are spending thousands of hours putting out those fires.

And so, automaton was built to sort of rectify those two situations. So we borrow a lot of well-known concepts from the software development world. So we make it easy for the users to do a smoke test or a regression test, or we put it in layman’s terms make it easy for an ABM campaign, for example, to get approved from appealed marketer. And then we have all seen sort of this representation of the marketing stack from SAP and martec[?] 8000. All of these tools have sort of added to the complexity of explosive growth and complexity? right. And given this plus given silos communications break down, and websites are taken down on accident, people are shifting things in salesforce.

And then from an organizational perspective, we tried to rein in that complexity. We have marketing ops and sales ops. And then we said, “We are going to combine those and make it Redbox.” And then like, “Oh, bring in the web team. Meet every week, and we will call it the circle of excellence.” And all those sort of worked but communication problems are still happening. And so the only way that we found to actually fix the situation was to ensure that we are doing automated tested, regression testing, putting trackers around so that if anything goes down, we get notified.

The marketing ops person gets notified before, like the sales or revenue leader comes across and asks, “Hey, is that lead system down?” So this is the way that we found just to remedy those situations. Automaton has been around for a little while. We got to rid[?] Microsoft and IBM. That is where the team comes from. These are a small sampling of the companies that we work with. Typically, we will work with an organization that has somebody with the title of senior director, VP of Marketing operations, which I think is everybody on this call.

And then they typically have between five and fifty people working at our organization. They typically invest in two or more marketing tools. Like Marketo, Eloqua, on 24, or sales loft. And when we think about our pricing, everyone wants to know how the pricing is. We base our pricing on usage, and we hope that represents the value that you are getting, right? So from a small plan, you can think of a single-use case, maybe testing two integrations. Marketo, the web, maybe email.

Medium plan, you have three or more integrations, like a drift Marketo. And then you are starting to oversee a global operations team. We have several campaign managers that you would like to test their campaigns before they go live. And then on the large plan, think global demand kind of on stage of serious[?]. You have four more integrations, hundreds of thousands of leads a month. Thousands of assets and dozens of campaign managers. So it is really on a pricing level how you can sort of think of us because testing is still relatively new. And then I am going to turn it over to Ariel. She is going to do the demo. We are going to show you three things.

One, the real-time monitoring, right? Effectively, how do we watch the lead go through the system and track everything that is supposed to happen along the way, which is really exciting. Of course, not everything starts and ends with leads. So she is also going to show you alerting so you get notified when something goes down within your stack. And then she is going to pull it up and show you how easy it is to create a test in real-time. So with that, Ariel, I am going to go ahead and turn it over to you.

Ariel: Thank you, Neil. As Neil explained, Automaton makes sure your configurations and integrations are working as expected every day, and alert you and your team when something breaks, which helps limit the impact of outages. The homepage displays a dashboard with the status for each of the functional groups you want to monitor. We also show the number of test runs and if you are running into any problems for the day. Our tool connects via API, native integration, webhook, or email to each piece of your technology stack.

Each connection is independent of each other and can be set up in less than fifteen minutes. We make getting set up easy by providing starters that make building scenarios a breeze. What is a scenario exactly? A scenario outlines the tasks and processes that should occur upon a catalyst, but to the form fill, lead routing website, or other action. This can be designed to mimic your expectations of your system. From checking that tab[?] for firing from your web state[?] to web SLA monitoring and Salesforce, automaton is the first marketing automation tool that allows you to do end to end testing across multiple disciplines of a business.

Today, we are going to be following Peter Parker, the head of marketing operations for Horizon labs. He has four counterparts that create their center of excellence. Covering website management to sales op. Each responsible for critical components of their overall stack. On his way to work today, you are receiving alerts that enterprise ABM campaign that they spend ten thousand dollars a month on if not directing to the right page. He can click on the alert and see immediately that the webpage is down.

Peter remembers the web team was doing a refresh on the website and thought that this could be the reason for the outage. Peter immediately reaches out to his lead team, sharing a screenshot of the URL and error on the page. The web team responds back that they have received the awareness on[?] or almost finished fixing the page to retry the finals[?] minute. Now Peter can go back to automaton and hit run. Verifying the page is back up and running that the form is submitting as expected, and the form is sitting as expected.

In less than 30 seconds, Peter was able to identify an issue, push for resolution backed by data. It was able to save the company a significant amount of money. Once the test passes, the data is then deleted out of the system to make sure your environment is safe clean, and reporting stays accurate. Another unique feature of automaton is the ability to do real-time monitoring on live leads as they enter and move through your system. This includes validating that high-value leads are sinking to the right sales queue with the correct fields and the expected timeframe.

Allowing you to be proactive in system pickup and decrease in pass[?] and closing real opportunities. Let’s take a look at one of Horizon’s use cases. Pricing is a global company with pretty strict SLA requirements. Their CRL has said that they should call and follow up with any leads that fill out the contact us form within ten minutes. Most companies do this by building a dashboard report in SFDC to track their progress. However, those reports do not allow you to react to cue clogs as they are occurring.

So Peter and their sales director like to monitor how often their sales team is unable to meet this SLA. This allows them to ensure leads that are not followed up within ten minutes or made a priority in the sales queue. And today, for our last example, we are going to show you how easy it is to build a scenario from scratch. The first component is the catalysts. Think of that as a starting point of your leads journey and the subsequent steps you are going to validate. So what is a validation? A validation is the expected result of the test. So if you would like to test a form fill, it is pretty easy to do.

First, we are going to navigate to a web page. Then we are going to drop in our URL. Now the tool is pretty smart. It will auto-populate checks that are available for that page. For example, you could check that your Google Analytics is firing. That a conversion event occurred or even that a playbook fired. But for this, we are going to check that the form is submitting as expected on this page. The second component is input. This is where we add tokens that populate dummy data to make sure each lead comes in as a unique lead.

Now, if we want to increase the complexity of the test, I can add additional steps with input from different systems. When I am ready, I can schedule the test to run out of reoccurrence, or in real-time. I can also determine who should receive this alert, whether it is a single person or a group of people. I can hit save and view and then when ready, I actually run the test. And that is automaton.

Neil: Thank you, Ariel. So marketing ops sits at this crucial juncture in the revenue chain and in the organization, right? Like it has purview over everything, and it is responsible for everything. Yet, it does not actually have the ability to go affect some of that change. So as we were building this out, we put ourselves in the marketing ops situation of how do we make everybody’s lives and marketing operations easier and allow them to get more of their job done in a faster basis. So that is what we were hoping for in this application. Mike, how would you like the demo?

Mike: Yeah, that is awesome. Super to the point. [laughs] Definitely NBSD status. So we like that. That is for sure. It helped me understand just as I am a buyer thinking about your product. The runs component. When you say run on the test that we just got done creating, for example, that would count as a run I would imagine against those limitations on the pricing?

Neil: Exactly. So that would be a run.

Mike: Yeah.

Neil: So we see on the smaller plan it is like five hundred of those runs a month.

Mike: A month. Got it. Okay. And then in terms of– it does look really easy to set up. Probably no external agencies or consultants. For the most part, we are not looking at much IT support here, especially if the marketing ops person has access to embedding a code, right? I would imagine we are just integrating with systems via like credentials. Like web credentials, when you are hooking into these various systems. Is there any embedding of like a script that we need to worry about?

Neil: Yeah, so there is no embedding of scripts. So we actually sit on top. So as we are doing integrations, we are just following what your permissions are. So when we open up Marketo, it will just integrate and say, “What is your username and password?” And like a lot of marketing operations teams do not have access to Salesforce. They will have a user but then they do not want to– their sales ops team will not ask them not to get into Salesforce. All we are doing is following the permissions of that user that you are logging in as. So we are not embedded in the code and we are not sort of putting them down.

So it is really easy to get through security checks because we just follow the security model of the application that we are working with. And then we do not– like, there is no agencies. I mean, we have agencies that we work with our clients but nobody is contracting out an agency. We typically as soon as somebody in Marketo, and they know how to work Marketo, then they know how to work our tool. So–

Mike: Right.

Neil: Yeah, there is no sort of outsourcing to get this setup. Ariel is our customer success manager, and she owns sort of making sure everybody is successful and spends two to three hours teaching them how to build the tests, and then they are usually often flying on their own.

Mike: That makes sense. Well, that is cool. The last thing I would ask is just kind of around support. So you got Ariel. Is there a paid support model? Is it really just Ariel, and then whenever you need her, and that kind of thing?

Neil: Yeah, so as to support, we have Ariel and her team, and we are going that up. So there is no additional support, per se. It is included within the model. And then we have not really seen anybody sort of abuse it. So we never put any constraints around it. Everybody within the community has been really good about as soon as they have learned it and picked it up. They have gone off and sort of building their own test. So we have built it to be pretty lightweight and the fact is, there is not a lot of help once you start to figure out the test is[?].

So yeah, there is no additional paid support that is included in the pricing model.

Mike: Cool. That makes sense. I lied, I think I have one more question. And it is–

Neil: Okay.

Mike: It is kind of around ROI. What would you say that is the average time it takes like one of your clients to start seeing an ROI on the implementation of this product? Like, we get implemented, we start building out our tests, and then x days from now we really start to see the value of it.

Neil: Yeah, so everybody that we have worked with so far has found something within the trial period. So we usually offer a 30-day trial. And it is interesting. Almost everybody said within the trial, “Oh, well, what? Like one of our main websites went down, or I found this attribution that I never thought I had to go check.” And so I have been with the company now for over six weeks. We have on-boarded six clients, and each one of them said, “During this trial period, we found a reason to go ask my boss for the budget for this dollar amount.”

So typically, you will see it within 30 days, because a website will go down. Just like we showed them an example of the attribution getting messed up or something like that. So typically, we see an ROI within a month or two that justify the budget.

Mike: That is pretty awesome. Ariel, did you have a comment on that, too?

Ariel: I would say especially with the real-time monitoring capability that we can pick up sales within the first day of setting up. So as we are watching, we have come in through your system is what we mostly find is that leads are not thinking that people were not aware would[?] even broken. I have yet to be an instance where I have not seen an immediate catch within that first week of us working together only because we get insights based off of a robot technology that you may not see when you are manually testing.

Mike: Got you. Well, cool. Thank you both for doing an NBSD with mo pros. I am sure people will find this very interesting. I know we have seen a lot of commentary around testing and the need for that already in our community. So hopefully, we will be able to point people to this as a resource for them to consider in the future.

Neil: Yeah, absolutely.

Ariel: [cross talk] Thank you so much.

Neil: MH is also really busy and active on the community. So if you have any questions, we are both in the community. So feel free to ping us and we are happy to either talk more about testing because it is exciting. Or talk more about the product, of course.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you both.

Neil: Thank you.

Ariel: Thank you.