When CMO Andrew Hally arrived at Bynder in September 2019, the company had already established itself in the digital asset management category and enjoyed strong inbound site traffic. The bad news was that for Bynder to grow beyond the startup phase, it needed to significantly expand outbound activities, a challenge further complicated with the arrival of the pandemic in March 2020. Hally’s journey is instructive for just about any startup looking to get to the next stage.

After breaking down departmental silos, Hally worked with his team to identify five vertical markets for highly targeted outbound activities. Importantly, the sales team agreed to focus its efforts on these same verticals. Testing at every step of the way, Hally then found powerful partners with review sites including Capterra and G2 that provided “intent data” of prospects who were ready to buy. Add in a customer-centric content program and an array of product enhancements, and Bynder was able to scale up well beyond Hally’s pandemic-tempered expectations.

Subscribe to Ad Age now for the latest industry news and analysis.

What was your mandate when you arrived?

The first mandate was to be a leader. There was a little bit of a vacuum and, at some level, just showing up was a bit of a victory. A second mission was to start breaking down some of the silos. Bynder is a broadly dispersed team across nine time zones. You combine that breadth with a while without a leader, some silos had really built up.

We needed to break down those silos, as always grow demand generation and then eventually to give the brand an update. That’s something I’ve seen a couple of times when you go into a startup to scale-up situation—that brand and positioning that worked really well as a startup starts to run out of gas and you need that second stage rocket engine to really get into orbit.

How did you start to break down silos?

I did one-on-ones with all 35 or so people on the team and really listened. That provided my data set. I also sat in on every meeting that happened and just listened. I got a long line of notes and from that, I started to see where some of the breakdowns were. I formalized a marketing management team meeting on a weekly basis and worked with that team to optimize the value of an hour spent together when we could.

Then, to the people dimension and getting the right people in the right roles, I was so lucky that there's just such strength on this team. Sometimes in the more junior roles, it was promoting some people into having more responsibility. There was such a wealth of talent in the organization.

What changed internally?

Bynder, in the original startup phase, really built a great brand presence within the creative community. There was a healthy foundation here to start with, and a lot of inbound demand. Digital Asset Management is an established category, so we could spend on Google AdWords, review sites, the places where buyers go to find out about platforms, so that was already working fairly strongly.

The thing that we started to add is to complement that with a more systematic outbound capability. There are six or seven verticals, five verticals that we’re very strong in reach, and a set of geographies, so we started to build out a database to have a proactive component to marketing as well.

How did you align with sales?

Before I got there, Bynder had done some good analytical work had established five industries really had an outsized propensity to buy and the ability to pay. There are other strong verticals outside of that, but those five were really our strongest for us. We were able to rally around those and partner with the sales team which started formalizing and building the business development reps team as we built the database and joint motions to proactively prospect into these attractive verticals.

Was there anything that worked especially well?

I’ll tell you another thing that's a real winner for us because we’re an established category—intent and getting intent signals. We've piloted that. That works very well and we're rolling that out more robustly internationally. We started off by piloting intent from a couple of the review sites such as Software Advice, G2, Capterra.

Prospects can go to these sites, and you can get a sourced lead from them, but if they don't go that far, you can get some insight into organizations that might be starting the buying process. That can help inform your process you can implement outbound programs to take advantage of that. You can also do highly targeted social media advertising to try and tilt the field in your favor a little ahead of time.

What helped you maximize the conversion?

It's just classic testing and optimization. Our head of digital just does a great job with that. Maybe six months ago, we tested a new set of landing pages for Capterra, which is a great source for us. You're always looking to test different things and squeeze out another 1%, 2% of conversion.

The digital head also tests varying the spend levels. Is it worth paying extra to get up to the very top or is it the better ROI on second and third? Then there are different categories. These vendors have an interest in having as many software categories as possible, so they come up with these new ones and you’re like, “Is anyone really going there?” We'll test the new categories. It’s classic testing there on how you get them to click and reach out to you.

What about following up?

Here's where it helps to be building out that database. We should know every business that is a consumer brand in the U.S. with more than 500 people. If you've got that and you've done some mapping to try and find out your key personas, then when the company comes in, there's actually a decent chance you might already have talked to them at one point. If you're able to reach out to them, you can.

Now one thing we do learn and it's kind of obvious—I don't think this is any great breaking news here—you don't want to be obvious about it. You don’t want to say, “Hey, we were spying on you, and we know you were looking at software.” You just want to reach out and be present and be top of mind as they get their process going.

Did you get to doing branding work?

That was going to be a key project for Q2 of 2020 but, as you may recall, some things happened that kind of scrambled our eggs. We put it on hold. We trimmed back the marketing spend a little bit and put the brand update on hold, not so much because of the spin but because this had the look of something so disruptive it could actually impact the way you want to talk about your company.

Also, it turned out there's a lot of really important things to do with our customers in the short term. We moved to an agile footing and every three weeks we put out new content based on what we were hearing from Bynder’s topflight customer success managers (CSM) team. That was intense but rewarding in that collaboration with the CSM team and realizing we were going through the same things. As marketers, we felt like everyone's in the trenches together, and it was an interesting though intense time. 

Subscribe to Ad Age now for the latest industry news and analysis.