Trancscript:

Rick Currier (00:01.38)

Hey Ryan, how's it going?

Ryan Patel-Francis (00:02.796)

Good, Rick, how are you?

Rick Currier (00:04.549)

Well, last time I talked to you, you had just gotten off a boat or no, wait, you swam across. Remind me, you swam across the bay and then took a boat because the tide shifted you, right?

Ryan Patel-Francis (00:13.774)

Yeah, well, so I do Alcatraz crossings with my swim club. I've done it 16 times now. actually did one two weeks ago. So they take you out on a boat and then you jump in and then swim back. the tide and usually from Alcatraz and then to what is the aquatic park in San Francisco. But when the tides are really strong, you end up swimming into Crissy Field.

Rick Currier (00:27.632)

Yeah.

Ryan Patel-Francis (00:41.218)

So you have to hop back on the boat and swim back. So yes, that is what I was doing about an hour before we chatted last time.

Rick Currier (00:46.257)

No, you look fresh today, so no swims this morning. I love it. Well, thanks for joining. Why don't you give the audience a little background of who you are and where you work.

Ryan Patel-Francis (00:49.55)

No, no swimming this morning. I thought about it, but I didn't do it. I didn't do it.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm Ryan Patel Francis. I work at a cybersecurity company called Abnormal. From a background perspective, I majored international politics and history. I thought I was going to be a diplomat or a historian. And then I decided I'd rather make money. So I ended up in tech marketing because I moved to San Francisco in 2009.

2010 something like that and I was looking for a job I'd planned events in the past and I'd actually was a paralegal for a little while in New York City and during that time I used a product called I manage so when I went to my first interview The my boss my soon-to-be boss was like, you know how to use this product? I was like, yeah, it's apparently go know how to use this product. She's like, you know how to plan event. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I planned events at restaurants. She's like you're a marketer now

Okay. And then some of it was, guess, like, good luck, good timing. And then I worked some early sketchy jobs. But then I've had a pretty good run at solid companies like DocuSign, Appirio. were the, they're not part of Wipro, but we were like the premier Salesforce integrator at the time that I spent about six years at Mongo and I've been two years at abnormal now.

Rick Currier (01:58.255)

Hahaha

Rick Currier (02:23.537)

Very cool. What are you doing at abnormal?

Ryan Patel-Francis (02:26.286)

I run revenue marketing, which is inclusive of the demand functions of marketing and the sales development team.

Rick Currier (02:34.629)

Very cool. So what can you tell me about that specific title? I know from my perspective, we're seeing the rise of the chief revenue officer, which can oversee marketing plus sales. How do you define revenue marketing?

Ryan Patel-Francis (02:48.684)

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like the tech bullshit title of the day, in my humble opinion. But the demand, well, the reason why I chose it was because when I started abnormal, I was taking over the SDR team for the first time. sometimes, know, SDR teams are always, I guess, opinions and conflicts on where the SDR team should live. And the

Rick Currier (03:09.265)

Hmm.

Ryan Patel-Francis (03:18.09)

demand gen title was the one that I was interviewing with. But I'm like, it's not, it's not encompassing enough. And I, and I also felt that it would feel too distract, too marketingy and too distracted from sales for an SDR organization role of Intuit. So since it has sort of become the hot thing over the past like two years, I was like, this does kind of make the point. And, and it felt like the right thing to do. And it landed actually quite well with team. So the

that transition was actually, I think, much easier by calling it revenue marketing. And in fact, I am in the process of evolving my field marketing organization. And I'm effectively going to start calling them revenue marketers as well. And partially just to get rid of the stigma of field marketing being just some folks who do an event in a region and then they're

Rick Currier (04:01.681)

Hmm.

Ryan Patel-Francis (04:11.948)

completely disconnected from how the business works and what the impact of what they're doing is, right? So it's just to both make a statement that we're making that change, but then also like that this title does have some cache in it now that I think will actually help, you know, the long-term trajectory of these folks on my team as well.

Rick Currier (04:29.339)

So how has your perspective of field marketing changed over the years? mean, it sounds like you're making some changes now. What has been the evolution of your strategic thinking of field marketing over your career?

Ryan Patel-Francis (04:39.374)

Yeah, the the I've done it. I mean, effectively, I was, you know, part of an events team at DocuSign. And then when I moved to a period, I was running field marketing and demand. But but our motion was heavily events, big strategic events like we had because at a period we were

Aligned, like the channel was the most important part, right? And our channel was Salesforce, right? Getting leads from Salesforce to integrate Salesforce into companies, right? So go doing things like Dreamforce and making these big splashes were a great big deal, right? But it really wasn't until I got to Mongo that I started to realize that field marketers can have a much bigger impact on

I mean, that sounds kind of silly when I say that loud, frankly, but field markers have much bigger impact on the business if they understand the business and if they are ensuring that whatever activities they're doing are achieving that objective. And the objective is not just to have an event and to fill it up, right? The objective is often to salesperson X says, you know, I have really poor champion relationships in these three accounts. The marketer can come back and say, I have a great idea.

of a more technically oriented event, know, because champions in this context, particularly at Mongo are very technically oriented. They want to get their hands dirty. They want to play with stuff, right? They want to actively engage in something. like you could create an activity, whether that be a webinar or an event or whatever, that is really relevant for this audience that actually captures their attention. And you know, what field marketers can do is they're offering something

to our audiences, to our customers or prospects, without at least overtly requiring something in return. We're just giving, right? Salespeople are taking, it's their job. But the beauty of a really well positioned field marketer or a field marketing program is that we come with a less salesy lens and we allow folks to engage with us in order to achieve the objectives that the sales team has, know, for the down funnel or wherever it is.

Rick Currier (06:46.415)

Yeah

Ryan Patel-Francis (07:04.172)

So that the and what I've seen over time is that and I noticed this when I started at MongoDB that I had I inherited a really, really strong team. Some folks to even meet till today. And you're going to hear the dog barking in the background if you haven't that you usually have two types of folks in a field marketing organization. You really strong events folks who are really, really good at planning an event, but they don't necessarily

either understand or care about like the specific business or objectives that are tied to their events. They're really good at producing an event, but then you have other folks who are effectively mini salespeople. So when you can identify these two personas as separate, I think, you can then build two complementary teams where you have a really strong events marketing team that produces incredibly strong, engaging events.

but then a really, really well-targeted field marketing team that understands the business objectives of what marketing is doing. If that makes any sense.

Rick Currier (08:09.839)

Yeah, it does for people that might be thinking of their own organization. You know, what advice do you have for them if they want to follow this approach? mean, what other teams you need to get involved? What kind of buy in? Just what advice if we're going down this road, where do we start?

Ryan Patel-Francis (08:24.14)

Yeah, building out what I would call a real field marketing or I guess revenue marketing or the first thing I think is like the identifying the personas that you have. Even some of the recent hiring I've done in the field marketing org. I haven't really I haven't necessarily this hasn't played out in every role to be clear, but I haven't necessarily looked.

Rick Currier (08:27.609)

Yeah.

Ryan Patel-Francis (08:47.736)

for people who have traditional field marketing titles, who have had field marketing in their job for job title for like 10 years. I look for people who have had demand roles, which usually implies that you're a little more dialed in to how a funnel works and what sales objectives are. I've also had a lot of success historically with Mongo. We built a really, really solid ABM team.

And I'm talking like high touch at one to one ABM where I had one field marketer, one marketer who was dedicated to six, five or six accounts. Some of the best ones on that team were actually XSDRs because they have experience talking to customers. They understood what the sales team needed, right? Because they were the linchpin between the two of them. So part of it is also just making sure that you get the right profile and the right historical mix, right, that the person has done.

Rick Currier (09:28.401)

Hmm.

Ryan Patel-Francis (09:43.534)

I think another element of it is making sure that you have that the sales team really understands what they should expect out of the role, right? Because if anyone has had a job in tech for more than 10 years, their field marketer was most likely someone who threw really good events. That's a really good thing to be clear, right? But they wouldn't expect this person to understand how a deal cycle

progresses or you know, what the different personas in an opportunity look like and why they matter, etc, etc. Right. So it requires both the marketing organization and leadership, but also the sales organization to understand what they expect out of this person so that we can hold that person or team accountable to make sure that we achieve what we're trying to achieve with it. That part's honestly some of the one of the hardest parts. It's changing the perspective, you know.

Rick Currier (10:34.894)

Yeah, so let me ask you about that because I know that the sales marketing bridge is kind of a challenge that a lot of marketers are facing, whether it's on your side, the partner marketing side, you name it. Is that really a top-down approach? Are there programmatic things you're doing to connect sales with the marketing side? What are you seeing work in terms of bringing those organizations together so they're rowing in the same direction?

Ryan Patel-Francis (11:00.514)

Yeah, that the tops down or bottoms up thing is a really good way to look at it. I've thought about that before, but that like at Mongo as an example, we prided ourselves on being called PG culture, right? Like the sales team were heavily monitored, that they had enough pipeline in their names and they were expected.

It was expected that they controlled their pipeline destiny full stop. So, a lot of what I spent a lot of time proving that marketing was having a beneficial impact to their business. And then the success I ended up seeing actually was in field marketing, which is honestly when I started to uncover or really understand.

What field marketing could really do was taught to me by some really strong field marketers I had at the time, who were, they were embedded with the field. They spent more time understanding how the field operated and supporting deal cycles than they did actually planning events. And then I was able to prove out in pieces, like in pockets, here's what a really strong relationship could look like. And then that sort of fed up into larger, or let's say,

Better strategic alignments further up the chain, right? And these things always change, you know, and as soon as you feel like you have it done something screws up and you know, you have to start all over again, but But that's how it was at at Mongo at at MNORMAL. am now that My current boss and the sales organization generally speaking I roll up into the president go to market. So he oversees My peers are the CRO. They had a product marketing

course, role customer success, etc. And abnormal, they expect marketing to deliver a certain amount of pipeline, actually a significant amount of pipeline, like much more than you would expect in a company of our size. So you almost have the it's the inverse opportunity and problem, right? Is that is that you that you're expected to deliver this thing, which is great, but then

Ryan Patel-Francis (13:16.654)

How can the marketing support in different parts of the buyer journey? That's been the big thing I've had to unpack and get alignment on it. can't say I have a little alignment to be clear, it is, okay, sure, marketing can deliver you that last meeting, that last touch meeting that turns into an opportunity. how can marketing help drive awareness that would allow you to PG easier? And then on the other end of the funnel, philosophically understands that

marketing has a big impact in progression, but you know, we're still trying to prove 10 years later what, how you can actually measure that in aggregate. You understand it at the deal level, right? Like any rep will be like, Oh my God, thank God this event happened because I never would have met this CISO, right? But we start aggregating it becomes infinitely more complicated. So now it's my current, you know, I think project of sales alignment is making sure that we're all aligned on

where we want marketing to play into parts of the funnel because we only have finite resources. it's very, my past two roles have been completely different in how I've had to make sure that we have sales and marketing alignment in varying degrees, which of course has always been varied degrees.

Rick Currier (14:30.287)

Yeah, well, mean, from my perspective, that's how we grow, right? We got to change and have new challenges. Let me ask you a little bit about partner marketing. I know last time we talked, you mentioned your perception on channel, marketing through the channel, selling through the channel has kind of changed. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about how does your organization approach channel partner marketing and however your thoughts changed over the years.

Ryan Patel-Francis (14:51.79)

Yeah, and to be clear, can only speak to a certain level of depth because I'm honestly still learning this because I never... So when I came to Abnormal, the CRO, Kevin, he's phenomenal. He sat me down and I was like, I don't understand this channel stuff. This is going to be my home, but you have to teach me this stuff. And he was like, we're a channel for this organization. What does that mean? And he's like, well, every...

deal we do, more or less, gets processed through the channel. So I'm like, well, so we're just giving margin away, like even if we find the opportunity, you know, so that like at first, bless your Congress seems kind of Why would give money away, you know, and then, you know, over the months, a couple of years that I've been there, you you start to realize

particularly in cyber and maybe I'm wrong about the particularly in cyber part, but it feels particularly in cyber because it's so relationship based so much more than other so much more than other technologies I've sold, like the element of trust by definition, to this audience, which is very wary by on purpose, like the relationship is really important. So we have a I had a really great, we have a really great field see so Patty, who just joined us about one.

two quarters ago and I had her come to marketing offsite to talk to the team. And we were asking her about like what are her feelings about the channel? And she said, I forget her, you know, her guy's name, but he, she was like, I don't make any decision unless I talk to what's his name at guide point. And Patty has been a multi-time ZISO, right? And very tech forward, right? Like, like she's been cutting out a lot of stuff, but, making that statement that it reinforced like the,

Now I got it. And of course, as you would expect, when you get an opportunity from the channel, it tends to be infinitely more qualified. So when we were mapping out our buyer journey when I started, we effectively dropped in. A channel opt would effectively dropped in at qualified pipeline in my mind. You didn't have to do any of the vetting stages because the channel rep knows the account well.

Ryan Patel-Francis (17:17.23)

probably right like knows the person he or she you're talking to quite well understands that like they are in the market to buy something so they're effectively qualified by the time that they arrive which means that they progress through the through the funnel like about 2x as fast and about twice the size right or something like this is what we were seeing so then you know once you once you learn all those things then you're like okay now I understand the benefit of us being able to do two really important things that you know again still getting my arms around us

One, just making sure that we're spending enough effort and money to get the mind share of the channel, generally speaking, right? Because the like, I think they're called red cards. They're like the different, all the different vendors that they can sell is in the hundreds, you know? So it's like, well, how do you get that? How do you get their mind share? That's, that's, that's never going to come out in a last such attribution model, right? That was impactful. that's

Rick Currier (18:11.737)

I was just going to ask. That's probably a hard thing to measure, right? Yeah.

Ryan Patel-Francis (18:14.222)

It's a terribly hard thing to matter that the thing I've asked recently for us to start thinking about is, can we at least met like side by side be like, okay, we invested $100,000 into guide point. Did we see deal wretches increase in a month or, you know, two months, whatever the time period is, do we see this happen, you know, and, and, and we do, you know, so, so there's an element of of this, so that you just have to believe.

that this level of investment is important. And then the other thing that I found really interesting that like, you know, some of the folks who I respect a lot at abnormal who have done this for a long time is like, they strategically give deals to the channel, right? So that it's a give to get thing, right? So like, that whole thing is something that I'm learning that's been super interesting on the strategy that must be applied.

to make sure that you get what you need out of the channel and how that is also different, so different channel partner by channel partner, segment by segment. The complexity, I like complex things, the complexity is actually a really fascinating thing to figure out. And recently I hired a fantastic leader to lead the West and one of her big selling points was that she really understands the cyber channel ecosystem.

you know, particularly of the regions and how those change even down region to region, like city to city, you know, which has been a complicated thing for us to get our arms around. But I feel like we're finally starting to figure that out and see the impact from it, from a marketing perspective, at least.

Rick Currier (19:38.34)

Hmm.

Rick Currier (19:55.089)

So let me ask, yeah, no, no, that makes sense. So let me ask you when you're investing into the channel to try to increase deal-rage overall, you know, without giving away any proprietary tactics or strategies, but just best practices, like what kind of programs are you seeing work out there? What doesn't?

Ryan Patel-Francis (20:09.646)

Yeah. So, my team, in and of me, is uniquely clever. like, just I'll give a program example. they're, well, I guess, how do you say this? They're making assumptions that many of the sales rep type personas, you know, are into fitness.

And so they did this big program called Fit for Success where they do these little fitness challenges and give away cute little swag. They have people come into the office. They do a little bit of an enablement session. And then they may or may not end with a call out afternoon. So it's a half day program that they get really great engagement from. the most important thing that you can do, to my point, is that

You have to be, you have to differentiate yourselves from the competition that like all of the other vendors that could possibly talk to them, which is, which is in email security, which is our bread and butter currently, right. But we're evolving past this, but in email security specifically, but also just like just the time suck of anything else that could be selling. Right. so I, the, the differentiation is important. Another thing that we've seen with, I call this like fits and starts is that is being able to, it's being able to like automate.

content consumption, right? So like the, this is how this is explained to me, you know, like imagine how, you know, you're enabling a sales organization, but internally, but they only have to understand our stuff. You don't have to go enable these, these partner sellers who then have all these things to understand. So you need to make the consumption of content and our messaging and

our differentiator is really easy for them to understand and remember so that they can actually differentiate us when they're in these conversations with, know, CISOX. So we haven't, this hasn't launched yet, but we're in the process of building this. This is like, it's sort of, it's a GPT for the channel so that they can effectively ask and query.

Ryan Patel-Francis (22:25.792)

all of our, all the information that we make public to them so that they can help with messaging, cetera. And they're even going to be able to deploy campaigns on our behalf, which of course benefits them because, if they get the lead, get higher margin, et cetera, et cetera. the self-serve scalability piece, I think, is a really important one. But you need to balance both like that hand to hand, you know, shaking hands and kissing baby stuff with the ability for

Rick Currier (22:34.79)

Hmm.

Ryan Patel-Francis (22:53.324)

these folks to self-serve in equal bits, think, because you still have to differentiate ourselves, but at the same time, we're never going to hire a 40-person channel marketing team at the size of company that we are, which you would technically need if we were going to enable them to the quality that we do with an internal team.

Rick Currier (23:11.161)

You know, I think it's interesting because when you approach differentiation, it's not just in the messaging, it's part of the experience. You're getting really creative in the events that you're bringing to market as the program. So think that's a really good takeaway for people out there. It's not just as simple as putting it on the content, but let's shake hands at these unique different experiences and then back that up with the enablement piece that you're doing. I love the GPT stuff. You're really leaning into it.

Ryan Patel-Francis (23:30.307)

Yes.

Ryan Patel-Francis (23:34.13)

And our name's abnormal, by the way. So like, like, if we don't lean into that, to differentiate ourselves for and I honestly don't think we do well enough at all yet. We've been talking about this at marketing leadership levels that like we got to lead into the abnormal stuff. It's too good. You know, like, and when we own our name, no one else does. So we can do whatever we want our name, right. So

Rick Currier (23:50.715)

Yeah.

Rick Currier (23:54.127)

Yeah, that's cool. I love it. I love it. I want to ask a little bit about team building because I know a lot of teams out there, they're looking for talent. There's a lot of great people out there looking for jobs. How do they stand out? What's been your approach to building teams? And then when you get a really good, let's say, integrated marketer on the team, what impact does that have to the organization?

Ryan Patel-Francis (24:13.218)

Yeah.

Ryan Patel-Francis (24:17.262)

I-

Historically, I've been...

I'm trying to map this question out in my mind. like that I like to have fun at work and I like to be around fun people and I don't think you can Like work at the level of intensity That we're expected to and I have a good time that is that gets termed as culture and then culture gets termed as

something that you can sort of fall back on when you're like, I don't know if I like that person enough. And then what ends up happening is that you end up building a team that isn't diverse enough, you know, and it didn't really make up particularly, particularly in marketing and in revenue marketing in general. Well, I need a lot of different ways of thinking in order to be effective. And I feel that I have built so my point my earlier point is I've been guilty of that in the past.

of hiring people that I might want to go have a glass of wine with and not necessarily the person who actually is going to force us to make change and be better at what we are doing. I believe, ask my team, but I believe I've done and we've done a really strong job at abnormal. I have a very, very diverse team of folks who come with very different perspectives, very different skill sets.

Rick Currier (25:32.273)

Hmm.

Ryan Patel-Francis (25:51.438)

My digital guy who I just hired, Abdullah, I'm not going to give a last name, no one could go hire him. But he is phenomenal. He is an AI genius. He can code himself. I don't need someone who can write beautiful decks for the context of digital. I want someone who can do the work. Abdullah can do both, God. But that was sort of a mental shift I had to make.

You that it was, you want a really strong operator in some roles. In other roles, you want someone who will sit at the 30,000 foot view level and put pretty decks together, you know? And I've recently hired a really strong integrated marketer, you know? And this is a role that I've tried to fill multiple times. I never did it well. And she's come in and been a

incredibly strong organizing force at abnormal. It's been profound, the amount of impact that she's been able to make and the ability to integrate the different parts of marketing in ways that everyone feels seen and heard and that you can actually integrate the work that we do. that, you know, that she presented to the entire marketing team about this, you know, big rollout, you know, it's like nine months in the big rollout of the integrated marketing framework that she and a consultant

that I used for a while Stephanie, who introduced me to you. They built this, they built a fantastic framework and then they launched the marketing team. Now when you tell a marketing team, like, hey, we're going to ensure that we integrate all parts of marketing into it, know, so that we're all parts of a campaign. So we're saying the same message across multiple channels at the right to the buyer journey. Like who's going to say, no, it's dumb, I don't want to do that. But obviously what happens is when you start doing the work,

Friction starts. It's like oh second I own this part of the funnel or I own that message or no I'm supposed to own this piece of content or whatever, right and And she's been I think very good at definitely in assuring that that that There's the right level of input and the right level of voice of each of the constituents in this process We're not done yet, by the way, like I only will ever be done

Ryan Patel-Francis (28:15.906)

But we're on the precipice of a level of interlock that I've ever seen in my entire career, which is really exciting. I can't say enough how important it is to have that role.

Rick Currier (28:23.909)

Sounds like we're going back to your.

No, it sounds like we're going back to your diplomacy days of working, know, making sure we're not stepping on toes and getting people involved and feeling part of the process. Right. want to, as we kind of close out here, I want to talk a little bit about AI and innovation in terms of, you know, how you're utilizing AI. What are you experimenting with? Anything you're comfortable with sharing with the audience in terms of what you're seeing?

Ryan Patel-Francis (28:33.462)

Shit, you have to be the ultimate diplomat. That's the most important part of the role. It's very true, it's very true.

Ryan Patel-Francis (28:51.502)

Yeah, I mean, one of the neat things about abnormal and I didn't, we're living it. we don't like it. The perspectives I get actually are through interviewing candidates. And, you know, I joined abnormal. So it was two years ago, I left Mongo and when Mongo was, so this is two and half years ago, I Mongo, let's say. and they,

It was when the AI boom was really happening, right? And Mongo is actually very well positioned for AI because of the way that it stores data, right? But we did have a strong message for it at the time, right? So to a certain extent, the message had to be retrofitted. I feel like they've actually done a really good job of it. And it's not AI washing, it's genuine. I come to abnormal.

Abnormal has been AI since the beginning. It's by definition AI, right? Machine learning before that, whatever. But at Abnormal, when they started, the stories I've been told have been like, they'd walk into, the founders would walk into a CISO and they'd be like, this magical AI is going to help you identify a phishing email. And they're like, okay. So they actually pulled back from that messaging at the beginning and then...

when this boom happened, you know, two or three years ago, whatever it was, became infinitely, know, abnormal became infinitely more relevant. It also just happens to be hands down the best tool you could possibly have to identify fraud in email, like as it happens to be, right? But because we're an AI native company, our CEO had a big pushback about a year ago where he was like, everyone must

start thinking about things from an AI native perspective, leadership on that, right? Fits and starts naturally, right? But we effectively got a like a blank check isn't the right word, but we were incentivized to be like, go do it, you know, we're not going to put a bunch of restrictions on you. We've since had to be like, okay, we don't need this many agents, know, like, let's be a little more specific about how we're going to utilize

Ryan Patel-Francis (31:14.278)

how are we going to utilize AI? But what I'm talking to the candidates, they're really impressed by how liberal we are with AI usage internally, because a lot of other companies have gone the other direction, because they're freaked out about it, and they want to put a bunch of rules around it. And people can't experiment around, especially security companies. So some of the folks, I won't name names, but some of the folks that we've recently hired on my team and others were like, I can't believe how AI forward you are.

Rick Currier (31:31.535)

Especially security companies too. Right. Yeah.

Ryan Patel-Francis (31:44.078)

you know, which is which was reassuring for us to an extent because, you know, I mean, to me, at least I don't know. I can't speak for everyone who's been there for two years or more. But like it because the change is happening so quickly, it feels like you're never doing enough or you're never keeping up fast enough. then when you see other companies who are dealing with it, like, oh, wait, we're actually we're actually doing pretty good. Like we're doing, know, I'd say we saw a long way to go, though, to be clear. So, you know, some of the ways that some of the ways that we're utilizing

AI internally, I mentioned the concept of, you know, the, the, like the partner GPT that we're building, right? we, have completely reorganized and this is something that we're, starting to market a lot more. We completely reorganized our engineering department to be much more AI first, which, you know, if, if, if you think about it, the old way that an engineering department was built, isn't, you have to retrofit it to in the, in the age of AI. So we spent a lot of time doing that.

And we can now build software at phenomenal speeds. And marketing, obviously, like the biggest opportunity tends to be in digital and the digital team that I have is doing some really, really cool show. I'll some examples. They build a workflow where effectively you can take a white paper or a report. You can dump it in the front of this and it'll generate a webinar.

So effectively like it'll identify who the speaker should be. It'll write the brief. It'll write the questions that you should have. It will then schedule out the dates that you need to prepare for the webinar, et cetera. like, know, like webinars, one of the first things I did as a marketer, right? It would, that's a week's worth of work. You know, that you spend three or four hours a day, you have to call the people, hey, can you do this? Blah, blah. It's been boiled down to like, I don't know exactly, but like, let's say.

an hour's worth of work. Sure, it has to be vetted. know, nothing coming out of this is perfect. That's one example. Another example that's really cool is that we've hired this agency that is SEO agency that effectively writes a shit ton of content that we effectively ghost link, right? So we don't put everything like directly on the blog or even navigable on the website.

Ryan Patel-Francis (34:08.556)

But then it allows obviously machines to crawl all the content that we've created. then depending on how effective it is, just make it navigable or make the content better and better over time. I mean, I think anyone who's ever dealt with this knows that you see the benefits of SEO like what, three quarters, four quarters after you start, right? We started seeing an uptick in traffic, significant quality uptick in traffic within a quarter.

Rick Currier (34:35.567)

Hmm.

Ryan Patel-Francis (34:35.682)

Like the speed at which we started seeing results was astounding. And then because of that, this is a piece of this, you but because of that, organic traffic and our demo request numbers just went through the roof. So like the speed at which you can see results through doing old-fashioned ways of marketing through AI are really profound, right?

So that's just a couple of the things that I've been really fascinated by what the team has been able to do. They're probably, if they would watch this, they'd probably be like, he doesn't even understand all of the cool shit we're doing. But the fact that we're allowed to, and not only allowed to, but are expected to, has allowed the team to do some really, really fun stuff.

Rick Currier (35:15.409)

You

Rick Currier (35:27.599)

Now, one last question in terms of just sharing with the audience. You know, you're doing a lot of cool stuff. You've gotten pretty far in your career. You know, what's the one piece of advice you'd have for someone, maybe around a skill set. If you had to focus on one particular skill that's helped you get to where you are and what you're achieving today, like what advice would you have around that skill?

Ryan Patel-Francis (35:53.094)

Okay, this kind of sounds like a throwaway, but it's not really a skill. I call it curiosity. I'd say analytical curiosity. we're really good at abnormal, maybe too good. Where you can't take what you're given at face value. You actually have to be like, that doesn't make sense. Explain this to me, cut this data like this. I want to understand when I do this and this and this, are we actually doing well or not?

like that, I think to get to any level of leadership, have to be relatively comfortable with data and data analysis. and you have to be genuinely curious to understand answers to questions. that's probably been the most impactful thing for me. And, and, and also because I come from that marketing, right? Where the, that, that historically wasn't the most important skillset that I needed, you know,

But building that over time has served me greatly, I think.

Rick Currier (36:56.527)

Yeah, and I think these days too, especially with things changing so quickly, you can't just accept this is the way we've always done things, right? So just even being curious about existing things, like why are we doing it this way? So I love it. Yeah.

Ryan Patel-Francis (37:03.95)

100 %

Ryan Patel-Francis (37:08.578)

Like, this worthwhile? Is this actually achieving anything? You need to constantly question this. And then also be able to have the information and be quick enough to consume it so that you can make quick decisions. I don't think we're remotely where we need to be from that. I mean, I think as an industry, but also even at normal. Like the speed at which we can consume information and make decisions and change.

Rick Currier (37:14.406)

Yeah.

Ryan Patel-Francis (37:37.838)

I think we need to be 3x faster, 4x faster than we are today. I think that will always be the case, but I feel like the urgency to do it is much greater than it used to be because of how quickly things are changing.

Rick Currier (37:49.969)

Yeah, well, no doubt your team's kind of on that track to get there before I think some others. So thank you for coming on the show and sharing that I learned a lot and I'm sure everyone else did. So thanks a lot, Ryan. I really appreciate it.

Ryan Patel-Francis (37:55.309)

You bet!

Yeah, nice chatting with you, You bet.