“My passion and what I focus on is what I call Evidence-Based Marketing. We need to be focused on metrics that confirm our marketing campaigns, activities, designs, color choices, font choices, brand personas, and these fluffier squishier marketing concepts. We want to make sure that they have an effect and that effect can be measured.
When I was a lot younger in my career, and I was promoting, "Look at all of the leads we've gotten. We've got all these top-of-funnel leads, and look how good we're doing." I was patting myself on the back. The Chief Financial Officer turns to me and says, "Billy, nobody gets paid in leads. You get paid in dollars. Do you like dollars, or do you like leads?" That stuck with me.
It was a critical learning moment for me: that idea of nobody getting paid in leads. You could transpose that to say; nobody gets paid in the number of logos or brochures you produce, and people get paid in dollars.
Everything marketing does, from brand awareness to identity, marketing campaigns to demand, and lead generation, is still crucial. Still, they have to be measured to be effective so that they can translate into dollars or whatever is the thing that is most important for you and your organization.
Every campaign that we do, every marketing activity, every spend that we make needs to demonstrate how we are moving the needle. What's the evidence that this is effective?”
- Billy Cripe, VP of Marketing, CIBO
//
To listen to more The Life-Long Customer podcast episodes, follow us on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/company/thelifelongcustomerpodcast/
Follow the host Brad Hammond https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-hammond
#thelifelongcustomerpodcast #customerjourney #marketingleadership #b2bmarketing
“My passion and what I focus on is what I call Evidence-Based Marketing. We need to be focused on metrics that confirm our marketing campaigns, activities, designs, color choices, font choices, brand personas, and these fluffier squishier marketing concepts. We want to make sure that they have an effect and that effect can be measured.
When I was a lot younger in my career, and I was promoting, "Look at all of the leads we've gotten. We've got all these top-of-funnel leads, and look how good we're doing." I was patting myself on the back. The Chief Financial Officer turns to me and says, "Billy, nobody gets paid in leads. You get paid in dollars. Do you like dollars, or do you like leads?" That stuck with me.
It was a critical learning moment for me: that idea of nobody getting paid in leads. You could transpose that to say; nobody gets paid in the number of logos or brochures you produce, and people get paid in dollars.
Everything marketing does, from brand awareness to identity, marketing campaigns to demand, and lead generation, is still crucial. Still, they have to be measured to be effective so that they can translate into dollars or whatever is the thing that is most important for you and your organization.
Every campaign that we do, every marketing activity, every spend that we make needs to demonstrate how we are moving the needle. What's the evidence that this is effective?”
- Billy Cripe, VP of Marketing, CIBO
//
To listen to more The Life-Long Customer podcast episodes, follow us on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/company/thelifelongcustomerpodcast/
Follow the host Brad Hammond https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-hammond
#thelifelongcustomerpodcast #customerjourney #marketingleadership #b2bmarketing
Introduction: 0:04
From Revenue Rhino, I'm Brad Hammond, and this is The Lifelong Customer Podcast. We're interviewing successful sales and marketing leaders in discussing ways in which they're building lifelong relationships with their customer.
Brad Hammond: 0:19
Welcome to The Lifelong Customer podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hammond. And today, I have Billy Cripe from CIBO Technologies. Billy, it's really nice to have you on.
Billy Cripe: 0:27
Brad, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Brad Hammond: 0:30
I'm really excited. And yes, we were just talking. For those listening, Billy has got a really awesome guitar wall behind him, and he's got a microphone and everything. He's all ready to go.
Billy Cripe: 0:41
You know, after a number of years of performing and then spending, of course, the last year and a half working from home, it made sense to have a reasonable setup here that was both comfortable and functional. So yes, we got it all set up.
Brad Hammond: 1:00
Very cool. Well, can you tell the listeners a bit about yourself? Who is Billy?
Billy Cripe: 1:06
Yes, sure. So I'm Billy Cripe. I run marketing, and my specialty is really focusing on B2B technology marketing companies that are either in a startup or in a pivot mode. I actually started my career as a developer. I was slinging code and writing code out there, and that was really fun. I wasn't that good at it, and they said, Billy, marketing is the place for you. But I always loved doing it. And that taught me to be able to understand kind of the deep parts of technology and to be able to talk to developers and engineers, and that has absolutely helped me be able to translate kind of deep engineering and developer level features and functions into kind of higher level, more simplistic market speak and value proposition.
So that's been my trajectory. And I've worked for very, very large multinational organizations, traveled the world on their dime and seen all the insides of the airports and the upstairs of the big airplanes and the small ones too. And then also have been with small startups, some that have failed, some that have exploded and some that are still kind of going along. And that's what keeps me going. I love the innovation space, the real fast, nimble marketing space, where everybody is in everybody's business because everybody is kind of mission-focused and oriented around disrupting the market or bringing some new cool feature to the marketplace. And I love telling those stories. So that's what makes me tick.
Brad Hammond: 2:51
I love that. That’s awesome, man. And can you tell me a bit about CIBO Technologies? What are you guys up to? What are you doing? What does your market look like?
Billy Cripe: 2:59
So CIBO Technologies is a technology platform that is focused on agricultural technology or ag tech. And really what we do, I like to talk about it as business intelligence for agricultural land. CIBO’s mission is all about scaling regenerative agriculture. And regenerative agriculture is kind of the next generation of sustainable agriculture or sustainable farming. And it is really designed to both replenish the land, create healthier food networks and food systems, which create healthier crops and then healthier people and animals as a result. The big benefit around regenerative agriculture is it helps to solve climate change.
And so when we talk about doing regenerative agriculture, a lot of those farming practices are all about pulling atmospheric carbon dioxide down and sequestering it in the soil to help remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. It's also about reducing greenhouse gas emissions through the various farming practices that are out there and doing things like reducing chemical inputs or fertilizers and things like that, that help them reduce runoff and all of kind of the downstream, literally in many cases, effects of that.
CIBO Technologies has 2 sides of our platform. The one side is all about what we call in the industry MVR, or monitoring verification and reporting. And then on the other side, it's all about grower or farmer engagement and enrollment. And so what our platform does is it uses advanced technology, computer vision and modeling and simulation and deep artificial intelligence like literal deep neural networks to do the MVR, the monitoring verification reporting, so that we can look at the entire United States, for example. And using satellite photography, we can run those satellite photos through our deep learning neural networks and understand what's going on in those photos from what sort of tillage practice is going on. And some of those tillage practices have very good climate benefits. Some of them are less beneficial to the climate.
We can tell what crops are being planted. We can tell how mature they are. We can tell if there's irrigation going on. We can filter or cover crops going in. So all of this stuff around regenerative agriculture, we can see when that's happening. And that's really important for verifying that certain practices are happening because the whole agricultural space is very decentralized and highly distributed obviously, right? It's all about land. And it's much too vast even in the U.S., let alone globally speaking, to send people out to go measure soil every 4 meters and check carbon content of soil and chemical contents of soil. And so we use the MVR capabilities, the computer vision and deep learning to watch and to see what's going on, to verify that practices actually happened.
And then on the other side, we use our simulation capabilities, modeling and simulation, to have a very deep understanding of what is the outcome or the effect of these different management practices. And that's everything from what is the corn yield on that particular piece of land going to be, to how much carbon is actually being sequestered in the soil because of the practices that we have observed going on. And so we bring these technology capabilities together, and we give businesses, big agri businesses or anybody with agriculture in their supply chain, the ability to monitor and verify what's going on. And we help engage the growers or the farmers into programs that are there to reward them for doing these practices, and that might be the ability to produce carbon credits and then sell them on a verified carbon credit registry.
There might be a big food company out there that says, hey, we want to put a sustainably regeneratively farmed label on our cornflakes or on our beyond burgers or whatever it is that they're making. Well, in order to put that label on their product or to pay a farmer $0.05 more a bushel for sustainably farmed soybeans, for example, they need to be able to confirm that the farmer actually did the practices. And so we are that kind of intel inside for those companies to be able to enroll farmers and programs that are going to give them new revenue and confirm that they actually did the stuff that's going on with being able to do that at scale. And that's kind of the big magic piece.
So we're using really neat advanced technology in this agricultural space, which, when you're not in it, it's kind of like, really, it's farming, like that doesn't sound very exciting. But I'll tell you what, the innovation in the agricultural sector, it's mind-blowing. Everything from combines and harvesters and farm machinery runs through satellites and GPS all the way to new innovations in genetics and then creating new cultivars or plant varieties that can grow anywhere.
And that's really important when we're dealing with climate change because we still have a world to feed and that feed needs to be healthy, and it needs to be done so in a way that we can feed the world without damaging the planet anymore. Well, actually helping the planet to recover. So that's a big, long description of what we do at CIBO Technologies. But really, we are all about scaling regenerative agriculture.
Brad Hammond: 8:58
Love that. Really cool. It sounds like a really exciting space. And I think that kind of leads into our next question here, which is getting into today's topic, which is evidence-based marketing. So you mentioned to me this is something that you do at CIBO, and it's one of the practices that you have. So let's talk about that. What is it? How do you define it? Why is it important?
Billy Cripe: 9:20
Yes. So evidence-based marketing is really something that I'm passionate about. It really seeks to move the world of marketing out from the fluffier kind of, oh, this is all about how we are perceived in the marketplace, and we want to have good feelings about us. All of those things are important, and I don't mean to besmirch the reputation of folks who have done incredible work in those areas. But my passion and what I focus on is what I call evidence-based marketing, which is to say, look, we need to be focused on metrics that confirm that our marketing campaigns, our activities, our designs, our color choices, our font choices, our brand personas, kind of these fluffier, squishier marketing concepts, we want to make sure that they are actually having an effect. And that effect is able to be measured.
I heard a saying a number of jobs ago from my Chief Financial Officer. And it was at a time when I was a lot younger in my career, and I was promoting, hey, look at all of the leads we've gotten. And we've got all these top-of-funnel leads and look how good we're doing. I was patting myself on the back. And he turns to me, and this is in front of the rest of the executive team, and he says, Billy, nobody gets paid in leads. You get paid in dollars. Do you like dollars? Or do you like leads? And I want, yes, like dollars. And that's really stuck with me. And it was said with a smile. He's one of my great mentors and still is a great friend.
But that was a really important learning moment for me. And that idea of nobody gets paid in leads, you could transpose that to say, nobody gets paid in the amount of logos or brochures that you produce. People get paid in dollars. And so everything that marketing does from brand awareness, to identity, to marketing campaigns, to demand and lead generation, which is still very important, but they have to be measured to be effective so that they can translate into dollars or whatever is the thing that is most important for you and for your organization, right? So maybe in a nonprofit or another type of an organization, they don't need to focus on dollars as much but maybe it's enrollments or maybe it is sign-ups. Maybe it's people taking free samples.
But it's that thing that you're counting that is the end goal of your organization, not just your marketing team. That has led me to, over the years, develop a playbook and a series of metrics, really kind of 5 key metrics that I use, maybe we can talk about those in a little bit, to drive to this idea of evidence-based marketing. And every campaign that we do, every marketing activity, every spend that we make needs to be able to demonstrate how we're moving the needle, what's the evidence that this is effective.
Brad Hammond: 12:35
I love that. I think I've seen a lot of marketers even refer to this as kind of narrowing the funnel. So you have all those SQLs and leads and all this stuff, but does that actually translate to sales-qualified opportunities? And when the sales team is calling all these leads, is there actually a deal there to be won? And I've seen this trend and the shift where it's like narrow that funnel and actually figure out all the way through. Is it generating deals?
And I think when you look at that, I'd love to hear some of your playbook of how you're going about doing this and how do you know if maybe I'm a marketer out there listening, I am getting a lot of leads and that's our primary metric. How do I move more to evidence-based marketing, away from we got 1,000 leads this month, we've succeeded?
Billy Cripe: 13:29
Right, right. And that's really a good question, really important. And I want to make sure that you and that audience know, right? As marketers, we talk often about leads. It doesn't have to be just about leads. In fact, we, at CIBO, just started our return to work program, and we've moved into a nice new office. As part of that office build-out, we made some marketing purchases for some coffee mugs with logos on them and some gear for the office and some little welcome packs for people as they come back to sitting at an actual desk with other people around them. And certainly, those sorts of marketing spends and brand, everything had to be on brand and those brand spends aren't going to move the needle when it comes to leads or to potential sales opportunities.
But what they will do is to create a very inviting and warm and welcoming work environment, which then can move the needle. What's the evidence that this is effective? People like coming into the office even when they don't have to. Oh, now we are getting really highly rated, maybe on Glassdoor or on some of those other websites. Maybe we get a Best Place to Work in Twin Cities or in Boston or in St. Louis, where our offices are. We get a nomination where we win those awards. Those are some other sorts of evidence-based outcomes that say, look, what we're doing is effective. And we're not necessarily measuring leads, but we are measuring something that matters. When we talk about -- I think probably for the rest of the time, we'll talk about leads and about demand. But the thing that we want to be doing is to be, one, identifying what actually matters and then measuring the activities that are moving the needle to get to that.
So first, maybe a counter example makes sense. One of my favorite vanity metrics is web traffic or when you issue a press release, what's the distribution number? And whether it's an internal organization or myself, I've been guilty of this in the past, or a PR firm, for example, they're so proud to tell you, hey, we issued your press release and it's got a distribution up in the millions. And really what they're looking at -- or tens of millions, hundreds of millions sometimes. And really what they're looking at is what's the total readership of all of the outlets where this press release was sent through the wire. And that's the -- I mean, so it's a metric. It's not a lie. But it has absolutely no meaning. It moves the needle absolutely zero from a marketing or a demand standpoint.
Just because you could potentially get into a distribution like that doesn't mean that that's what you are. And so one of the things I tell any PR firm that I'm working with or an internal PR professional who's on my team, I tell them, look, I don't care about the total distribution that you might have. What I care about is, how many people are actually kind of clicking through to read this? Or how many actual people are coming through from this as a referrer to our website or the landing page that we have set up? And if there's a transaction on that landing page like a form or a credit card swipe or whatever it is, what's the actual number of engagements, of prospect engagements or end user engagements that this press release is generating? And that's a much smaller number. It's a little bit -- it's not as ego-boosting as, look at the tens of millions of eyeballs that we might possibly have had that really isn't real. And so that's an example of moving from a metric, which is “true” to a piece of evidence-based marketing, which says, look, this PR over this time frame generated 10 clicks and 2 transactions on our website.
And now because it generated those 2 transactions, now we have something concrete that we can hand off to the sales team or the partner management team or the customer success team, depending on who has clicked through. And there's different stages there, too, right? Now I can already hear in my head some marketing professionals watching this or listening to it, saying, well, but we don't always have that level of detail, Billy. And that's true. And that's why you have different stages that you can measure that are important. And so at the very top level, if you're looking at, well, what's the correlation between when we issue a press release and our web traffic? Is there a boost? Is there no boost? Does that matter? Does it matter only for SEO purposes?
I tell my executive team oftentimes, we need to have a really strong content strategy because even if no human ever reads it, it's really great for the SEO robots. And eventually, somebody is going to ask a question in a search engine and our content item is going to get us up as the top result or on that first page or above the fold or whatever. And that's going to generate traffic. So there's got to be kind of a discipline and the cadence for that.
So you can measure kind of each different stage of the game. So look at those correlations between your press release or your blog posts or your webinars and your web traffic. Is it moving the needle there? Even if you don't know who the people are, right, even if there's no registration form or sign-up form or anything like that. Of course, those are the ideal things. And in my mind, you always want to have an opportunity for people to consummate a transaction with you, whether that's trade their information for something that they can download or raise their hand in class to say, I'm interested in some more information but make it lightweight, make it easy. And now you've got -- you're looking for those handraises, and those handraises are evidence rather than just hope.
Brad Hammond: 19:50
Totally. Yes, I couldn't agree more. We have this conversation all the time when it comes to podcasts. A lot of people are like, well, how many podcast downloads are we getting there? What's the distribution list of all this? And we look at it more so like, well, who is listening? Is our target audience listening? How much of that are they listening to? And are they joining our community and seeing all of our other marketing? Versus like, did we get 10 million downloads of the episode? So this very episode, the listenership might not be 50,000 people, but it's going to be a lot of other CMOs and software and these very specific individuals and then those that are part of our convenience of two sides. Couldn’t agree more.
Billy Cripe: 20:32
Exactly. Now if your business model is, hey, we do this podcast because we make our money through advertising on the podcast. I mean it's not here. But then, yes, then you need that really wide listenership and readership. And then you need to adjust the content and the strategy and the marketing of that content as a content creator to achieve that really wide kind of broad but shallow distribution. And then your advertising revenue streams are going to be much more attractive, right? That's like the YouTube model or any of the big commercial podcast story models that are out there.
So there's a time and a place for that. But when you're going into deep educational content, where like the conversations that we're having, like your other guests and whatnot. That's about driving engagement and awareness and creating community, creating this nice safe space of community, where we can swap ideas and hear stories from each other about what worked and what didn't work. So that hopefully we can avoid the mistakes that other people have made without feeling that pain.
Brad Hammond: 21:40
Totally. So for the other marketers out there listening, I'm sure there's people in all different places of this evidence-based marketing journey. And for those that are maybe earlier on in that journey, what are some things I can start doing kind of boots to ground as I'm looking at my marketing strategy? And is it evidence-based or is it not?
Billy Cripe: 22:02
Right. I think that first step is really looking at -- when you're looking at your strategy, and this is a great time to be talking about this because most marketers out there with any sort of a team or a budget are starting to be thinking about or eyeballs deep in the 2022 calendar year planning, whether it's budget planning or content calendar and event calendar planning. All of that stuff is typically happening starting last month and going through the end of the year. As you're going through your plans and your strategic planning, you want to be thinking about, okay, what is this activity that I'm doing? Even if you've been assigned a budget, right? Let's say you're working at a big organization and they've given you a $100 million budget. That would be awesome, by the way. But in the startup world that I work in, that's never the case.
But let's say, you've got that big budget. What are the activities that you just assume, right? What are the things that you assume that you're going to be doing? And how are those tied back? What are the results that those are tied back to? I worked for one company where we use the OKR model, right, which is the objectives and key results, right, coming out of Google and whatnot. And so the big hairy audacious goal at the top of the company was, hey, we want to achieve this much revenue in the year. Okay. Well, how many customers? It's the key result to get to that revenue number. Well, it's a number of net new customers and a number of new -- of software renewals or decreasing churn and attrition by a certain amount.
Okay. How do we get new customers, right? Now we start getting into that realm of demand generation and marketing. What are those activities that we're going to be doing, spending money on? And even if you don't have a dollar that you're spending, you're spending your time or you're spending your team's time, and that equates to money. That's a resource that is zero sum. So think of it all in terms of that. What are those activities doing that are going to move the needle to achieve that key result? And if your key result is we need brand awareness, okay? That's squishy. Brand awareness, where? Among what audience and what market segments and what publications? And what does that look like? Does that mean 3 earned media articles a quarter? Does that mean 12 organic mentions? Does that mean 500 paid placements?
I don't -- it's going to be different for everybody. But you want to get really crisp on that, and you want to identify what does success looks like so that when you come back to your executive team or your Board or your CEO or your VP of Marketing, whoever you report to, you say, we were successful. And they say, how do you know? And then you can say, because we achieved this goal within budget. There's a couple of key metrics. I guess maybe if I could talk about those kind of 5 key evidence-based metrics that I use and then how they apply across that playbook. The first one is really having a good understanding of your customer acquisition costs and the lifetime value of a customer, right? So if you land a new customer, how much are they worth to the company? Are they worth $100? Are they worth $10? Are they worth $100,000 every year with an average tenure of 3 years, right? They’re a $300,000 customer? Who knows?
But do you need to know what the lifetime value of your customer is and then how much it costs to acquire that customer. And that is everything, not just the one campaign, the last campaign that touched them before they became a customer. It's kind of everything. And you want to have your customer acquisition cost to be less than your lifetime value of a customer. And it's kind of the blinding flash of the obvious. But all too often, as marketers will get stuck on lifetime value of a customer, we may know what that is. And then we'll go down and we'll look at -- and hey, for this campaign, a customer acquisition cost was $35 or was $500. All too often, we're not tying those 2 things together. And if your customer acquisition cost is higher than the lifetime value of a customer, you're losing money. You're literally losing money.
There are only a very small handful of situations in which that's okay. And sometimes it's okay when you're very early on in a startup, and your goal is to get any customer, any paying customer, by hook or by crook even if it costs you money to get them because you want to start spinning up that flywheel. But that's a very narrow time frame typically in a very early stage company. And you've got to have really good eyeballs on what your spend is there because, typically, you don't have buckets and buckets of money to spend on that. So you want to make sure you're getting the right sort of customers in that environment.
But generally speaking, right, you want your entire customer acquisition cost across all of your marketing spends, right? It includes your marketing automation subscriptions and your website maintenance subscriptions and all of the things. You want to take your total number of customers and divide it by your total cost and now you have a cost per customer for marketing. Number of customers divided by your marketing budget, including headcount because we all support customers, and there's your cost per customer. What's the lifetime value of that customer? And if those are out of whack, then you've got some work to do. And it's not just you, right? It's you and sales and your customer success team and your support teams and things, but that gives you a really good sense of what's out there because all too often, marketing is blamed for spending a lot of money and not having any impact or not having any results.
When you know what those numbers are, whether they're good for you or bad for you, at least you know what you're going after. And more often than not -- actually, I've never had a situation where a Board or an executive team is like, hey, we really wish we didn't know that information, Billy. So you make sure that your customer acquisition cost is less than your lifetime value. You also want to know what your demand to dollars conversion rate is. So this is your typical funnel. And again, another blinding flash of the obvious, but what is the actual conversion rate, not from MQL to SQL and SQL to opportunity and opportunity stage 1 to opportunity stage 12.
Those are important metrics for the operational management of marketing and/or sales and sales enablement, right? So those can be very, very useful. So it's not to not look at those, but you want to know what the overall demand to dollars conversion rate is. So that you know, hey, we've got to go out and get new customers and if I've got a 2:1 conversion rate, I need 2 good prospects for every customer I expect to get. And then because I already know the previous metric, I know what the lifetime value of that customer is going to be. And now I can start to make my budget very effective and very efficient.
Now all that's good, but we live in a world where time continually marches on. So the third metric that you want to know is your runway to revenue, right? That's the timeline. How long does it take from first touch to first dollar? If it takes 18 months, that's a long time of spending on those different campaigns to acquire that customer. If it takes 3 weeks, that's a much different story. And so you really want to have a sense of that blended runway to revenue. How long does it take to go from that first touch to first dollar? And that's going to be very different across industries.
It's very different in enterprise software and SaaS software versus utility-based SaaS software, where you might have -- if you can have one kind of low level per side, you did some work in cybersecurity for a number of years. If you're selling to a SOC analyst, who is able to swipe his or her credit card and spend $12 to get -- $12 every month to get access to your platform, that's a much different kind of runway to revenue than it is to try and sell a 6-figure deal to a big enterprise where they've got to have a big rip and replace event to bring your software in or your hardware or whatever it may be. And so you want to have a really good sense of what that timeline is because you could have an incredible conversion rate. But if it takes you 2 years, you better have 2 years of funding runway for your marketing operations to actually get there or you're going to run out of money before you close the deal.
So that time element is really important. That was the third. So the cost to acquire a customer less than the lifetime value of a customer, the demand to dollars conversion rate, the runway to revenue is number 3. The fourth is your daily active users over your monthly active users trend. And this is a trend that's important for your customer success, for your user success team. And from a marketing standpoint, it's your user engagement. It’s just what tells you, are you out there marketing shelfware versus stuff that's actually really interesting to use? Are you a flash in the pan and then people forget about it? Or are you doing something that is a necessity to working operations. And that's very much SaaS and software-oriented.
And so I understand. Now that's the world that I come from. What that really tells you from a marketing standpoint is where do you need to focus your value proposition creation. Because the more you have a really healthy daily active/monthly active user ratio, that means that your users are incorporating your product or your service into their daily operations, which means you've hooked them. You created a habit for them. And it's a good habit because whatever you're doing is going to be good and unique and efficiency-boosting, capability-enhancing software and services. And I'm sure everybody who listens to that is in that same boat.
And so you really want to be focusing on that user engagement metrics so that you can again adjust your marketing campaigns. You don't ever want to forget about your existing customers. You want to not just be sending them a newsletter every month and be like, hey, we release that thing and this person spoke at that event. Those are good and those are fine, but you want to be out there talking about new use cases. Here are success stories. Here's how these people used -- this company over here, this person over here used our software service in a new and unique way. And guess what, you could too. That's going to create new opportunities for your existing customers to recognize situations where they could be using your product or service in a new or adjacent way.
And the goal is to spiral those customer engagement opportunities upward and outward from your starting point, which might be very narrow. It might be a very narrow use case and a very narrow value proposition. That's great. That's how you get started. But the more you can expand that out, right, the greater value in utility you can have. That means they're engaged with you more. Your renewal rates are going to go up. You're going to get better product and service feedback from them. You're going to get more highly engaged customers, who then are much easier to turn into evangelists and advocates for your company. And that is a way of scaling your marketing reach without having to spend a whole lot of dollars. So that's really good. So that's number 4.
And the last one is one I like this very strategic kind of level, and this is one that it never ceases to impress the Boards of Directors when the Head of Marketing can come up with us. This is that your company's overall growth rate needs to be bigger than the growth rate of the target addressable market. So your company might be growing at a very healthy pace. It might be growing at 10% or 12% a year, right? Anything in the double digit is going to be great, really, really strong growth. But if the market place, if the market that you participate in is already growing at 100% year-over-year, then you're losing market share. So just because -- growth is important, hands down. But just because you're growing doesn't mean you're gaining market share. If the market is growing very, very rapidly, which in the case of CIBO Technologies, there's a number of markets that we participate in that are growing very, very rapidly, right?
Carbon credit market is exploding. The alternative plant-based proteins market is exploding. Even the regeneration and sustainably grown products is exploding. Anything that deals with ESG goals or Scope 3 emissions is exploding because everybody wants to do it. And of course, we're in the middle of the big environmental conferences like COP26 right now and the UN Climate Week just happened. So everybody is coming out with their big proclamations, their big boardroom commitments to help solve climate change and reducing their carbon footprint.
So there's a lot of attention in these spaces. So the market is growing really, really big. And what I want to be focusing on at CIBO is, hey, is our growth at our company, is that matching and ideally outpacing the overall growth of the marketplace? That means we're gaining market share. And that gain of that market share is really important because not only does it give us a competitive advantage, and I'm all about having an unfair competitive advantage, but it gives us something actually to measure and to quantify. And as that starts to plateau, right, if our growth can continue as the TAM starts to plateau, that's even better for us. If our growth slows and my executive teammates and the Board is, oh, no, your growth is slowing. What's going on? If we can demonstrate with evidence that the overall growth of the market or the TAM is slowing at an equal pace, then we're not actually losing market share. And so those are important evidence-based metrics to have. So that's the 5 that we had.
Brad Hammond: 36:51
I love that. So we got a fun question for you as we wrap up here and that is, what's the craziest marketing initiative you've ever done?
Billy Cripe: 37:00
Oh, my goodness. Well, it's interesting that you phrase it that way, the craziest marketing initiative, because crazy can be good and crazy can be bad. So I've got 2 that come immediately to mind. The first crazy bad was we dropped $1 million on a big event. Between the booth and the giveaways, and there was sponsorships and I don't even think we had a speaking slot at that event, right? But the name was out there. The booth was gorgeous. We had these awesome giveaways. We had pinball machines, which were super cool. We had a ton of traffic coming through that booth. And after 1 year, we had one lead. And that lead did not close. I’m just going to put that out there.
So that's crazy bad. And one of the challenges there is that we did not use evidence-based marketing to look at the past performance and see what's actually working for us or other people. I mean, that's the cool thing about evidence-based marketing is you don't have to go through all the pain of learning this. Go look at what other people are doing and how they're performing, ask them. Most marketers, right, like me and anybody else, like you and anybody else in this role, we love talking about what we did that worked and sometimes even what failed. So just asked, hey, did that work for you? Did that not work for you?
One of the crazy good though, the crazy kind of fun thing, it also happened to be at an event. And it was a big event in Florida, one of the big convention centers in Florida. We had a booth location directly next to one of the happy hour stations, one of the alcohol stations, right? So it's open bar during some of these convention center floor hours. And instead of being out there and we picked it for that purpose. We picked that location for that purpose because we knew it was going to be high traffic. But we also have this crazy idea of, hey, they're going to be getting free booze over at that place. That's going to be their retox station. Let's be the detox station. And so what we did is in setting up, we hit all of the drug stores probably within a 20-mile radius, and we cleaned them out of 5-hour energy drinks and little hydration packs, and we had those on our tables. So that as people were coming by or waiting in line to get their beer, their mixed drink or whatever it was, we had those little 5-hour energy drinks and some hydration packs there.
And then we had them out, even more importantly, the next morning with littleTylenol packs as well. So it was kind of the day after the big event of the evening for the conference and the convention. And I’ll tell you, we got more engagement just from that and from people coming by and saying, hey, I'm so glad you're here. And then they were willing to stop and talk and stop and listen. And we got highly qualified leads, and we were able to follow up with people. And they're like, oh, yes, you're the ones who saved me that day. And now just by having -- I wish we could say like, oh, we planned this really hard. No, like we got there and we're like, okay, we know we're in this location. I know what we should do. Let's go get all of these 5-hour energy drinks and Tylenol hydration packs.
So that was a whole heck of a lot of fun, and that's one of those things that any time we're doing an event now, I'm like, hey, is there going to be a beer station and well, what's going to be around? Because we should have something like this.
Brad Hammond: 41:00
That's genius. I love that.
Billy Cripe: 41:01
It was so much fun and people were very appreciative, right? It's better than a squishy ball or a stupid clicky pen or whatever else you get, right?
Brad Hammond: 41:10
Yes, totally. Love that. Well, what final word of advice do you have for other marketers out there listening today?
Billy Cripe: 41:16
I think it would be, look, talk to your peers, get involved with the communities and ask them what's working for them, even your competitors, right? One of the things I just did at CIBO Technologies is I set up a conference panel at a big conference in Las Vegas, which is coming up for us and our 2 biggest competitors. And all I did was I called them up and I asked them. I said, hey, what if we could get this thing set up. I think it'd be really great for the marketplace for the -- we're all going after the same customers. And we're all mission-driven, right? At the end of the day, we all want to help solve climate change and scale regenerative agriculture. We've got different ways of doing it. We compete, yes. And they all said, yes. I mean, it took some doing, but they all said, yes.
And that sort of communication, even with people who you compete against, I think is really important. And we're not out there to have a got you moment with anybody but rather to be up there and say, look, there are some strong things that make us different from each other. And there are some -- and you get to ask us all because we're all sitting up here, and it's moderated by an independent journalist, who's highly respected. And you know what, the cost of doing that was the cost of getting to the event. Like we pitched the session, no cost to have the session. The journalist came out and declined any honorarium to maintain his independence, which is fantastic. And our competitors are out there and they're coming out on their dime because they get the same opportunity.
So it doesn't have to be expensive to do it. But we do know the evidence is that our joint markets are asking for, hey, help us understand and disambiguate this marketplace because it's new and it's the Wild West and it's emerging. And so talk to each other. And that's okay. You don't have to do everything that everybody suggests but get out there and talk to each other and tie those activities back to measurable results.
Brad Hammond: 43:32
Love that. Well, thank you so much for joining here on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.
Billy Cripe: 43:38
Yes. I really appreciate the opportunity, Brad. It was great fun to talk with you, and best of luck.
Brad Hammond: 43:43
It's been amazing.