Going outside the playbook with Randy Frisch, Co-Founder, CMO and President Uberflip
We’re back with the extended cut for Season 2 of Journey Map! On this episode, we’re speaking with Randy Frisch, Co-Founder, CMO and President of Uberflip. We talk about the importance of content experience, going to the movies, and play two truths and a lie.
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Transcript:
Welcome to Journey Map, the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world’s most interesting people. Today’s guest graduated from McGill in 2002 with a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing and then later on got his MBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University. From there he began his career as a Marketing Representative for Rubbermaid, and was soon promoted to its Marketing Manager. He was Partner and General Manager at Arya where he revitalized 20 year old businesses by developing B to B and B to C marketing plans. From there he went on to be the Chief Marketing Officer at Mygazines. Then in 2012 he takes a leap and co-founds a software company that empowers B to B Marketing and sales teams to create personalized content. He’s also author the author of “F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience to Drive Demand, Revenue and Relationships”. This guy is a marketing guru and really I hate that word but in this case it is the only appropriate one I could find. Our guest is none other than Randy Frisch Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Uberflip. Randy, welcome to Journey Map!
RF: Thanks Dave that was kind of a tour of my life, I was reminiscing as you were walking through that.
DH: Yeah, that’s the whole idea of what we’re trying to do here. So, Randy I normally start with a different question but I know that there’s something fun that you like to do so I’m going to actually just do it. So, I’ve heard that you love the idea of doing two truths and a lie, so let’s start there two truths and a lie about Randy and I’ll try to guess.
RF: Okay, two truths and a lie. I will go with the following: I survived a boat explosion a couple of years ago, I’ve got a tattoo, and I’ve lived in a suburb of New Zealand for part of my life.
DH: I’m going to guess that you do not have any tattoos.
RF: No, I spent some time in Australia which is close to New Zealand, but I’ve got a tattoo. So, yeah a lot of my friends can’t even believe that I did that one, but the boat explosion is a whole other story that people can find out on my LinkedIn probably buried there somewhere.
DH: Okay, nice I will make sure to go take a look. Under normal circumstances I would dive in, if we had a longer format interview style I would dive right into that, but that was fun thanks for entertaining it. You are someone who is very obsessed with the idea of customer experience and how to improve it, if you can think back what is your first memory that you have of the experience of being a customer of any product, service etc?
RF: That’s a great question, to me I think back to things such as going to a movie. You know going to a movie was an experience it was very different than watching that VHS tape, I’m dating myself here. Going to the theatre was an experience that elevated it beyond the film, it was everything that was happening around me. I think that was a little bit of the marketing that was within that, I knew it wasn’t the advertising etc. but that was how do I think about going into the theatre and why do I get excited about it? Is it the popcorn? Is it the seats? Is it the previews? The sound? It’s all these elements that brought it to another level.
DH: Very cool. So what about that experience which you may have not have had to think about ever, what in your day to day role now have learned from that early first customer experience or any customer experiences like that you had at a young age that maybe stayed with you and would lead to this ongoing career path of obsession with the experience the buyer has.
RF: That was not a canned answer I don’t think I’ve ever given that love of movies even though it’s truly genuine. I used to kid that I’d go there just for the popcorn, literally pick it up and take it home just to recreate that experience at home. When you think about that example I gave, sometimes you realize it doesn’t matter how good the movie is, it can be enriched by what is happening around us. I think now the case is that people go through these buyer journeys where the reality is that the content is important, but if the content is great but everything around it is terrible then we’re going to tune it out pretty quickly. Same thing if you have terrible content but everything around it is great, you’ll stick around a little longer and you’ll be curious of what might come up next. So I think when we think about buyer journeys and complex buyer decisions we’re really there to be taken on a journey. To enter into something and say I’m going to trust you because it looks like you’ve got your s**t together around me, I’m going to expect that something is going to come up that’s great.
DH: Right, I want to share something with you because as I wrote the question I realized that I have my own first memory. I’m going to share it with you because it’s a fun story, so I’m probably 9 years old and I grew up in this very small town of 1,600 people. There’s an elementary school, a church and a mac’s convenience store or originally mac’s ….
RF: I believe those are now Circle K’s or something like that.
DH: Yeah! So that’s the town basically and there’s a very small public library. I’m biking from my house to the Mac’s. I pick up a froster, probably a very large one and I’m biking back to my house and I don’t know what I was looking at maybe it was a girl, I was 9 years old, probably not what it was. I don’t know what I was looking at but I’m on my bike, froster in one hand, one hand on the handlebar and I’m turned around looking behind me and I didn’t even see it coming but I smashed my bike into a parked car. I flew onto the hood of the car and actually cracked the windshield of the car, froster everywhere and I’m pretty banged up. A few funny things happened, one is I never told whoever owned this car that this happened which I now realize is one of my life regrets, because I’m only imagining someone coming out and seeing their car like this with no explanation would be pretty unfortunate. I decide to straighten the handlebars and the wheels and I bike back to the Mac’s and I don’t even know why I thought this was an appropriate thing to do but I basically just walked in and I’m all banged up very clearly and I was like “I spilled my froster I got into an accident, can I have another?” and the lady working behind the counter was like” yes of course absolutely are you okay?” and she gives it to me. I think that there is a dual lesson learned there one is that as a customer I think that sometimes we forget that it’s okay to ask for stuff and I know that for our business sometimes when we have gone through true evolutions or pushed ourselves outside of our comfort zones and have had really significant benefits is when a customer has said hey can you do this? Or hey can you get this thing? Or whatever we might not normally do or not something we have thought about before. I think there’s this really interesting role especially in B to B environments that the customer plays in their own journey. I was wondering if you had any examples of that either from companies you have been running when a customer comes forward with a kind of question, or a quest, or something weird like that or when you’ve done that yourself and what the outcome was?
RF: Yeah, it’s funny as you were telling that story it was triggering similar ones for myself. The lessons I take from your story and some of my experiences is that things are going to go wrong in business that’s just the reality none of us can get it perfect, and when those things go wrong you will judge a company much more on how they react to something wrong than how well they deliver perfectly everyday. I know we didn’t go into my boat explosion, but literally my entire family was on this boat and the boat exploded. The boat sank to the bottom of the ocean, and we had to swim to shore and it was a very dramatic experience. The care from everyone at the car rental company where I lost the keys at the bottom of the ocean, to the hotel we were staying at and the care they had for us, the money that the boat driver gave out of his pocket. Similarly, I recently bought a car and I ordered this car, and it was three months until it was going to come because I needed a special seat configuration in the second row. Sure enough the car comes and it’s the wrong car, they built the wrong seat configuration. So what do they do? They own their f**kup. They said listen we’ve got to build one again and it’s going to take another three months, but they gave me a car in the meantime to use. It’s those situations where things go wrong and you have to go outside the playbook. In the B to B world and the complex areas we sell here at Uberflip and other companies have been involved in, it’s about having a little bit of empathy and realizing what that customer is going through at that moment. At the same time you’ve got to create the right culture and lines of communication for people to feel comfortable to speak up. I think in today’s world there’s a lot of instances where the customer says rather than speak up I’m just going to switch vendors. We see that all the time, telecom is probably more a B to C consumer angle where we do that the most, if our signal is continually not working we don’t even want to troubleshoot that, we’re just like I’m going to switch from… I’m not even going to list a telecom company because ones are not always better than the other, but we default back to changing. I work with Telus very often because I find that their service is at that next level. There’s some things we can do, one of the thing we’ve started to do over the last couple of years here at Uberflip is we put together what’s known as a Customer Advisory Board, and a Customer Advisory Board is when you say I’m going to take a segment of my most important customers, and we’re going to bring them together face-to-face a couple times a year. When we do that, we get to learn from them, we create an environment that is designed for very open communication, but as well they learn from each other. When they learn from each other, and they start to share with each other you start to create a bond with that company that goes beyond you and that company it goes to the community that you’re a part of. I think some of the things like that, whether it’s the boat explosion, my car being screwed up and how they dealt with it, how in a more complex environment we try to create that environment. I think that’s the real key.
DH: Right, well listen I want to shift gears a little bit. Earlier in your career as I mentioned in the intro you spent some time selling I’m assuming a lot of plastic containers. What is the biggest lesson you learned selling such a consumable and how do those lessons play out for you day-to-day?
RF: This is a real story. When I took the first job with Rubbermaid I took the job mainly because I wanted to be in marketing and the job title was field marketing rep, which I thought meant that I was going to do marketing for those in the field, I didn’t realize that I was going to be in the field. For the first roughly year at the time that I was with Rubbermaid, I was going Walmart to Walmart with a logo car which I would drive within a territory, and I was there to make sure our product was well represented on their shelves. Ultimately, we realized after a few months of being in our roles that we were glorified stock boys, that’s what we called ourselves stock women in some cases. There is one time that I can tell you I had to build an aisle display, think about going Walmart and there are these fancy boxes with all the products in them. I had to build that, and the store manager didn’t want me building it in the back warehouse area, and he was like I’d rather you build that out in the parking lot. I was like really? But you do what you’re told so I go out there with all these cardboard boxes and this big gust of wind comes and the box pieces just go all over the parking lot. I’m sitting there and I just start to punch the half built tower that I made and I said to myself I’m going home and I’m quitting. Luckily I didn’t, and it’s funny about a year in I was promoted, I went into this product marketing role and I got into this role where I had to figure out how we would get the product into stores like Walmart and others. I remembered in that moment that I have such a better understanding of what’s going to work and what’s not going to work at the store level. I think that’s sometimes what we have to learn through our career is that it feels like we’re maybe in a role that isn’t us that we’re capable of more, but if we don’t start somewhere, if we don’t start to understand how the business operates it’s very hard to run the business.
DH: That sounds like a great lesson learned and you have a whole bunch of other lessons learned. I read as much as I could of the book that you wrote and had published which is aptly titled “F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience to Drive Demand, Revenue and Relationships” which instantly drew me in. What are some of the other main tenants that went into the book that you wrote?
RF: Yeah, absolutely. First of I never thought I was going to write a book, you know if you went back to a high school yearbook I’d be most likely to be unable to finish any of the books that were assigned for reading in class. So, the fact that I actually went and wrote one was a little out of character for me. I do a lot of speaking and a lot of the ideas that I’m out there trying to explain are really around category creation and you know one of the challenges sometimes with category creation is helping people understand what you are versus what you aren’t. Over the last couple of months I’ve done a lot of meetings for our business right the stage we’re at now talking about strategies of a business that might acquire a business like ours, or speaking to other growth and private equity investors that invest one day down the line. Very often when you’re in the market with a disruptive technology you need to explain what you are, and others around you will very quickly rush to try and pigeon hole you into something that they understand and something that they know. In our case that is very often content marketing, we are often thought of to be a content marketing solution, and in theory if you go back to what content marketing was supposed to be call it ten or fifteen years ago we would have fallen into that. Ultimately content marketing became more of a practice round creating content, not creating content and leveraging content, and distribution and everything around that. It very much went around creating. We think about the reality where we’ve got a lot of people in the role titled content marketing manager, their role very often used to be a journalist in the past if they were on this podcast talking about their journey map. One of the things that we realized along the way, this was probably about three years into starting the business this was 2015 is that we had to distance ourselves from content marketing as a category, sort of wave the white flag and let it belong to those who created the software they created. We had to find the right terminology, and the terminology that we rallied around was content experience. Content experience is very similar to the question you asked me at the beginning Dave which is where do I think of great customer experiences and from me that was going to the movies and everything that surrounded me. For our content it’s how do we get it in front of someone ultimately and I’m sure a lot of your listeners are marketers based on some of the guests I’ve seen that we have on here, when we think of our role as a marketer it’s to invest in channels to get the attention of our audience. We often spend so much time optimizing those channels right? Someone here for sure is listening who optimizes email campaigns, or optimizes add on google ads, or LinkedIn or wherever you’re placing ads. Direct mail is hot all of the sudden, social will never go away. All of these channels that we have to grab the attention, but ultimately every one of those channels is going to get us to click and then take us to a destination. That is ultimately where the content experience comes in; it’s how do we line up the right assets so it feels like we handpicked content for you, like we know what you’re actually looking for.
DH: Okay, that makes a ton of sense. So you’ve been dancing around Uberflip in some of your answers so let’s dive in there. The decision to start Uberflip can you walk us through that? And what was Uberflip day one versus what it has evolved into?
RF: Sure, you know Dave you and I before we went live here were talking about how we’ve both been in tech for ten years. I’ve been doing this for ten years, I joined my Co-Founder when he had another business you alluded to it, it is called Mygazines. It was very small, he was trying to figure out a go to market, he had heard I was looking for something. We kind of worked at it for about a year and my ultimate advice to him was we don’t go to that market. That market was media publishers, it was a very challenging space, but we took a look at what we had from a product perspective and we realized that it was a page flipping technology at the time but we had built a lot more beyond that, but there was a need for marketers around e-books. Now we often talk about an MVP that was our minimum viable product to get in front of marketers and start to learn what they needed. Our business had changed so dramatically since then, back in 2012 when we started this business we were $50 /month buy it online you don’t have to talk to a sales rep so you’re talking $600.00 a year. Now our average deal is between $50-$70k a year, we’ve got customers who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with us and it’s a very different way we go to market, it’s a very different customer that we have to support and that comes back to a lot of changes in business models. Not always the smoothest along the way, as you kind of articulated someone is going to come in with a split frosty and you will truly have to be sympathetic for them.
DH: When you think about Uberflip today and where it’s going to go with the idea of content experience there’s more and more channels that will keep coming up. How do you in your role see this evolution as a Co-Founder tied to this product itself but how do you see your role headed in the next ten years in this field where you’ve doubled down on content experience evolving?
RF: My role here, I have a number of hats that I wear. I’m ultimately the CMO of a martech company. Which is a bit of pressure at times but it also means I’m out there trying to explain what’s changing in the market and why a solution like ours is so important. We’re ultimately dealing with an innovator’s dilemma, which often talks about this idea that there’s an incumbent that has owned an industry or that has owned a buyer for a long time. In our space the incumbent is the CMS, and the CMS the content management systems historically they were sold to the CIO’s and the Web teams or the more technical members of an organization. The shift that we’re seeing though, is that we’re seeing a new buyer come in that new buyer is a marketer. The marketer isn’t as technical, granted more technical than we used to be, but isn’t as technical but they need to get out content faster. I know this podcast will live right now, but we’re amid the coronavirus, and the coronavirus is a thing where the marketer needs to respond in the moment. I saw this amazing use of our software unfortunately with everything that is gong on right now where one of our customers is in the risk world. So risk and insurance called SAI within a day they’re able to spin up this destination endpoint for everything you need to know to help you evaluate your business. Historically with the CIO and the web team that would take weeks in a fast and nimble organization, so there’s this huge shift going where the marketer needs to take control. Our role within that will be continued to be weaved within that go to market strategies, which as we talked about those are the channels that marketers are using. Making sure whatever channel it is, as I said email, social and ads but if there’s a new channel how do we think about where we’re going to direct people to? That’s the world that I’ve seen change so much, this idea of a destination has never been more valued. You know you’ve got companies like Salesforce who launched a lightweight CMS for the first time last year, Vista Equity Partners put a billion dollars to buy acquia which is built on top of drupal. So lots of change and lots of investment that is going to continue to happen in this space.
DH: Our agency has a long history of working in enterprise content management from a UX standpoint but by extension we have to set up large CMS installations pretty often. I think that you’re right, there’s an interesting shift where the trajectory of the traditional content management system is anything from as open as Wordpress to as ancient as Dreamweaver. The basis is that they are written content optimized, I think that’s the biggest challenge that we run into. In a world of content vehicles and formats you need to choose the right one for the message that you’re trying to get out. Like the old saying if you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail, and I think that’s the challenge that the modern marketer has. Sorry we’re going a bit industry deep compared to what I normally do, but I’m nerding out so it’s fine.
RF: No it’s interesting, I’ll pick up on a point that you’re saying there though, which is when you and I, or some of our listeners when we use the word content we all mean different things by that too. It’s changing very quickly, you just hit on all these CMS they would change words. Think about it ten years ago if you or I got an email from a big company, and they were like “Hey Dave”, you’d be like holy s**t how’d they know my name? That’s so cool. Now when we get an email from a company, and they know our name we’re like f**k how’d we get on their list. The expectations have shifted so quickly there, but where we still get hooked is when you don’t know my name but you can actually surface content that I care about. Think Netflix, if you ever get that weekly Netflix email and they’re like we’ve got new content for you, I’m like man I actually want to see what Netflix got for me because I expect that they’re going to know the meat. That’s that level of expectation that I think as marketers, as business owners we have to shift to, not to get obsessed with saying “ok we know what industry you’re in”or “we know what your name is” more so saying we actually have the right content amongst tens of thousands of pieces of content just like Netflix has thousands of pieces of content right now, and we have twenty pieces of assets that will entertain you we will take you through a buyer journey.
DH: I think where we’re at is the age of contextual relevance and that’s the real kind of key consideration when we talk about content. How contextually relevant is that content, by definition people do actually enjoy being advertised to if you’re being informed as to things that are actually going to benefit your life in some way. If someone starts the search for a product by googling jeans and then as a result of that jean companies are now hitting me up on every other platform, in some way it is actually helpful, they’re helping me through that buyer decision even if it’s for an $80 purchase. I digress because we could have a whole discussion about industry specific stuff but I want to get back to my last couple points about you and your journey specifically. If you could go back to Randy as he is sitting in a movie theatre eating popcorn and immersed in his experience, and you have the opportunity to tell young Randy where he will wind up in life or at least where you’re at right now. Do you think he wants to know that answer or do you think he says no I want to see how this will play out on my own.
RF: I definitely needed it to play out. We hit on some of my highlights there’s also been lowlights along the way too, and they hurt when you’re going through them. Some of them have been with my time here at Uberflip, some of them are companies that I’ve run that didn’t go as well as planned before, and I think if you know that’s coming you’re probably going to avoid it. Whereas if you encounter those learnings they push you through and you take from that and it adds to how you’re going to adapt to that next instance.
DH: I love that question because we get responses on both sides of the coin and I always think it’s so interesting to hear the justification as much as anything. So listen I’ve taken up enough of your time today, I really appreciate you joining us on Journey Map, getting to know you a little bit better, nerding out a little bit on the industry was fun.
