Ryan Bonnici - Chief Marketing Officer @G2 (Formerly @HubSpot, @Salesforce, @Microsoft; Writer @HBR, @Forbes) - The Inbound Marketing Playbook, The Art & Science of Marketing Metrics, Ryan's Hiring & Retention Methodology; B2B Brand Building

Guest:

Ryan Bonnici - Chief Marketing Officer @G2

(Formerly @HubSpot, @Salesforce, @ExactTarget, @Microsoft; Writer @HBR, @Forbes)

Guest Background:

Ryan Bonnici is the Chief Marketing Officer of G2 Crowd, where he’s driving the growth of the world’s leading B2B technology review platform that’s helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. With previous positions leading global marketing at HubSpot, Salesforce, and ExactTarget, Ryan’s marketing and SaaS expertise has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and LifeHacker. 

Guest Links:

LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

How We Grew Our Organic Traffic to 1 Million Monthly Visitors in Under a Year

The Most Important Marketing Metric You're Not Measuring

Learn.G2.com

Episode Summary:

In this episode, we cover:

- The Inbound Marketing Playbook

- The Art & Science of Marketing Metrics

- Ryan's Methodology - Hiring and Retaining World-Class Talent

- B2B Brand Building - What can we Learn from B2C?

- Social Media Strategy - Ryan Talk's the Talk AND Walk's the Walk

Full Interview Transcript:

Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to the Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy!

Naber:  Hey everybody. Today we have Ryan Bonnici on the show. Ryan is the Chief Marketing Officer of G2, formerly known as G2 Crowd. They have a $500 million evaluation on $100 million capital raised, where he's driving growth of the world's leading B2B technology review platform that's helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. With previous positions leading global Marketing at HubSpot (who IPO'd back in 2014, they currently have a $7.5 billion evaluation), also Salesforce (who also IPO'd, they have $124 billion valuation), and ExactTarget (who Salesforce purchased). Ryan's Marketing and SaaS expertise has been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, Entrepreneur.com and Life Hacker. Here we go.

Naber:  Ryan, awesome to have you on the show. How are you?

Ryan Bonnici:    I'm doing well, Brandon, thank you so much for having me.

Naber:  Good. It is amazing to...I can see you right now, see your lovely hair, and hear your lovely accent, which is always a treat for me. You're in Chicago right now, correct?

Ryan Bonnici:    I am, yeah. I moved from Australia to the US a few years ago, and it's beautiful, sunny and warm outside, so I can't complain.

Naber:  Awesome. I've done some solid research on your personal and professional, from all the content you've put out there, and I'm pretty convinced, based on the moves that you made, that you're doing your penance for growing up in beautiful, best in the world to live Sydney and Cronulla, by trying to attempt to live in the coldest, major market cities in the US - in Boston, Chicago.

Ryan Bonnici:    Haha, yeah...this is true.

Naber:  No slag on those cities because I love both of them. Lived in Chicago for about five years as well. Hey, let's jump in. So, I know that you've had such an amazing career and, in the intro everyone's heard a lot of your accomplishments as well as a bunch of the companies you've gone through. So, what we'll do, I think today is we'll jump into some personal stuff first, for maybe a few minutes, and go through what it was growing up as Ryan Bonnici, and then we'll hop into some of the professional, and that'll be the meat of what we talk about. Sound okay?

Ryan Bonnici:    Sounds amazing.

Naber:  Cool. Trinity Grammar School, growing up in Cronulla, going through all the interesting things you did in your childhood to become the person you are today - which I believe, a perennial overachiever, which I'll talk about in a second. But talk about a little bit about, maybe three or four minutes, on what it was like being Ryan Bonnici as a child and growing up.

Ryan Bonnici:    Good question. Gosh, I think in one word, what it was like growing up as Ryan Bonnici as the child, would be "lonely" a little bit. Yeah, I was an only child. And, my parents wanted to have more kids, but they stay separated when I was young. And then I got back together, and they eventually divorced, but they didn't really want to have a second child because they weren't sure about what was gonna happen with their relationship. And so, I don't know. I remember just growing up and always wanting a brother or sister or someone to play with. And so, I definitely feel like I was a very different person then than who I am now. But I don't know, I think that shaped me to be honest, in good ways and in bad ways. So I think, early on and growing up, decided that I was going to put my self worth on my accomplishments, which I wouldn't recommend people do necessarily because you will always be unfulfilled because you're always trying to get the next best thing, or to make yourself better, or be better. And flash forward 30 years, and through a lot of therapy, I've been able to unfold a lot of that stuff. But, yeah, I don't know, that's probably the one word that would best describe me - maybe "lonely", and probably not very social. Which is bizarre, because I think across Linkedin, and Instagram, and Twitter, and different social networks, I probably have a few hundred thousand followers, which I share a lot of content with. So, I come across really social, but I'm secretly just an extroverted introvert. I grew up in Sydney, Australia. I didn't really focus all that much on school up until year 11 and 12, which are the two final years of high school, in Australia. And I don't know what it was, but something just clicked in my mind, and I was like, I really want to get a really good GPA because I want to be able to get into any University in the world. And so I worked my butt off and I got a 4.0...

Naber:  Wow.

Ryan Bonnici:    And then went to university for a year, and I was a bit burned out at university, and then I took a couple of years off from studying to be an international flight attendant, which kind is random.

Naber:  That's pretty cool.

Ryan Bonnici:    Really fun. It helped me save up to buy my first investment property back when I was 19...

Naber:  Wow. Wow.

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, and then I can jump into the career stuff, or happy to answer more questions on the growing up, or wherever you want to take it, Brandon.

Naber:  No, that's good. That's good. Let's pause there just for 30 seconds, and then we'll hop into some career stuff. But, you mentioned, you mentioned the word "lonely", and you've talked about - in a lot of the content you've put out around mental health, mental health in the workplace, and how it shaped you professionally - can you talk a little bit about that? Because you're really passionate about it. And, I think that's probably a good place to start because you talked about how some of the events in your childhood had shaped you up until who you are today. Can you just give us a little bit more about that, and how it shaped you as to who you are right now?

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, sure. So I think mental health is just something that, I think it impacts everyone to some degree. Some people have good mental health, somebody will have poor mental health. And I think everyone will experience poor a mental health, at certain times of their lives. I think for me, and my family anyways, there's definitely a genetic component because my mum, my mum's mum, there's quite a significant amount of depression and suicidality in our family. So I think some of my own experiences growing up, as well as some of just my genetics, I think predisposes me to have more issues in that space. Which I think I used to view as a problem, but now I just view it actually as something that needs to be trained in the same way that I train my body by going to the gym, I train my mind by going to therapy and doing different therapeutic modalities. And so, I think growing up as an only child and experiencing bullying when I was in primary school, just sort of...I think you attachment to your friends, your attachment to your family, your attachment to these key figures in your early years is really paramount in your formation of the world, and relationships, and whether or not you, when you interact with someone, whether you are going to over-index for them being trustworthy, or you're going to over index for them being someone who's going to take advantage of you, or whatnot. So I think for very good half of my career, I was definitely the latter. So I, unconsciously anyways, viewed everyone around me as a potential bully. And so that meant that I was super competitive and was always thinking about how people around me were going to, I don't know, get in my way, or take me down, or stabbing in the back, which sounds really dramatic. And it wasn't like I was going through my jobs and literally thinking that, and like planning behind the scenes. But I think what I've learned for therapy now, is that I think, and in some ways, I think I've grown a lot of empathy actually toward those parts of me that felt that way, and still sometimes do feel that way, because they were defensive and they were protective, right? They protected me when I was young by not trusting peopl..kids, when I was younger. It protected me from enduring more bullying. But once I was no longer at school, and in university, and at work where that doesn't really ever happen all that much, still sometimes happens, but not all that much, it's definitely less helpful of a strategy. So I think that shaped me in some ways and meant that I focus more on, I'll talk about it a bit later, but I think in career success you really need to focus on relationships and results, the two R's. And I think, it probably meant for me the earlier on in my career, I over-indexed on results. And I think now I do a better job at,equally indexing between results and relationships.

Naber:  Wow. That's great. That's a really good framework for people to think about. Thank you. And then I really appreciate you sharing all of that as well. We're lucky enough to know each other personally and professionally, which is really cool. So, I wish we had three hours, four hours, 10 hours to talk about this stuff right now. So that's actually a really good segue. You mentioned getting into university and then getting into your first few gigs and over indexing on results. Can you walk us through some of your, just walking through your professional jumps in the roles that you've had? Maybe in three or four minutes, and then I'll hop into a couple of questions about some of the superpowers I know that you have, and some of the things you've written about as well, so we can get a little bit more of your mindset.

Ryan Bonnici:    Sure. Yeah. So, I basically started, my career in tech started at Microsoft, into Microsoft for their, I forget what it was called, but it was basically their accelerator program, their leadership program. Microsoft either hires people that are fresh out of university that they identify as folks with leadership potential, and they fast track them to management, or they hire people with 10 plus years of experience. Microsoft almost exclusively never hired anyone with from one to nine years. So I entered through that leadership track, and that was my first exposure to Marketing. I always knew I wanted it to be a CMO. And weirdly, I always knew I wanted to be a CMO before 30. So yeah, I started my career at Microsoft. And then, after spending some time there and learning a lot about B2C Marketing, a company called ExactTarget, which was based out of Indianapolis, in the US, was growing internationally. And Microsoft was a really big user of ExactTarget's email Marketing platform, of which I was a user. And so when they launched Asia Pacific, they hired me as their first Partnerships Marketer. So I then joined ExactTarget, and spent a few years at ExactTarget. And there I really was able to move up, in both experience and in leadership. And so, I built out a big team there across Asia Pacific while I was at ExactTarget. And then ExactTarget was acquired by Salesforce. So I was able to then spend a few years at Salesforce running their Marketing for Asia Pacific. Again, a really remarkable super innovative company, but quite a bit smaller than...a little bit bigger than ExactTarget, but quite a bit smaller, the Microsoft. So I was running all of their B2B Marketing. And so, at ExactTarget, I suppose I was able to really refine, I would say my enterprise B2B Marketing playbooks. So how do you work with Sales to create net-new Sales opportunities for Sales, as well as nurture and accelerate existing Sales opportunities to move them through Sales process faster. So it's very high touch, low volume game, the enterprise B2B playbook. And I had done that for quite a few years and really enjoyed it, but I felt I had really pushed it to its extreme. And, at that time, I was really interested in the company called HubSpot because I was fascinated by how they were doing Marketing, and I love their product. And so I then moved to HubSpot, and was the first Marketing hire in APAC, and then built out their APAC Marketing Team across Sydney, Singapore, Japan. And what I loved about HubSpot, and what was really important to me in my journey, was that HubSpot was still B2B Marketing, but it was B2B at scale, right? So we were selling our software platform, which was an all in one Marketing and Sales platform to small and medium businesses. I think the average sale was about a thousand dollars per month, for HubSpot. And so when you're selling a product that, it's less about high touch and more about, high volume. And so that was really important to me because, eventually I still do want to start my own company. And while I love the enterprise playbook that I used at ExactTarget and Salesforce, when you're throwing big events and doing a lot of that high touch, high hand holding activities, it's really expensive, right? We're talking millions of dollars. Whereas at HubSpot, we had much tighter budgets because we were much more focused on ROI-focused Marketing, and the biggest driver and the most effective driver for ROI-focused Marketing and B2B, and in B2C actually in a lot of senses, is content Marketing. It takes a little bit more time than some of the other strategies, but once you build up traffic from content, the leads, and the MQL's, and the revenue just keeps flowing. So I love...probably prior to G2, my time at HubSpot, those three years, the most proud, time of my life. It was also really challenging, but I learned so much in that first year, about how to do scalable Marketing. So I'm so grateful to have worked there, and just genuinely love the team there so much. I then moved over from Sydney to the US with HubSpot to run their Global Marketing in the sense of digital, social, brand campaigns, PR - and that was fun because it exposed me to another part of Marketing that I didn't have as much exposure to in APAC. And then about, gosh, a little under two years ago, then moved to G2. And the reason why I wanted to move to G2 is that I love B2B, but I think eventually I realistically want to get back to B2C or a B2B / B2C role. And what I love about G2 and a lot of the most innovative businesses today - like Uber, Airbnb, they're all marketplaces...

Naber:  Marketplaces, yeah. Two-side or three-sided marketplaces. It's amazing.

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah. And they're really fascinating, and super complex and difficult. But I wanted that challenge. I think, if you look at my roles from moving in B2C at Microsoft, to Enterprise B2B, to SMB B2B, I don't like it when I'm comfortable, because I don't feel I'm learning. And I find it takes me a year to basically, without sounding an arrogant douche bag, it takes me a year to become an expert at something. So, my first year at G2 I was hopeless maybe. First year at HubSpot, I wasn't hopeless, but I didn't feel I could add as much value necessarily as the other marketers on the team had been there longer. And I find, typically it takes me six to 12 months to learn everything from that industry and that company and the existing people on the team. And then at the six to 12 month point, I'm able to have a bit more of an integrative understanding of what we should do next because of all of the experiences that I've had. And so, yeah, I always find that when I do my best work is from years one to three, the end of years one to three. Yeah.

Naber:  Very cool. That's actually amazing to know about yourself. You know, wot many people really have that self reflection, understanding of where their best work comes from, how long it takes them to be good at something, what the expectation of themselves, and how to manage that. That's, that's great. I've always been so impressed, impressed by your career, for a lot of reasons. You've accomplished more in a shorter space of time than most, and at really high velocity. But a lot of people that do that, they usually go usually a "T". As in they usually have a lot they have very thin breadth across a lot of things, but a lot of depth in one thing. You have depth and so many things across a Sales and Marketing spectrum because of you're unique set of circumstances, that you both put yourself in, and that you were put in a for the roles and responsibilities that you've had. All the way across, operations, digital, and Sales, and Sales Development. You actually, mentioned that, your job is part marketer and part Sales person and one of your articles. And I think that that's just a true testament to your background, your experiences, to have that mindset. But one of the things I want to talk about right now, you just mentioned, all the amazing businesses you'd worked with. I want to talk about talent. And how you think about attracting, pipelining, hiring, retaining great employees. So you and I both subscribe to the same mindset, I believe, from the content that you've put out there and from having conversations, that talent and hiring is the number one priority for every business. And should be for every single hiring manager as the CEO of that hiring process. So always be pipelining, even and especially when you're not hiring so you can get rockstars on your team, regardless of having readily available headcount or budget, regardless of of having those things open. So let's break those things down. attract pipeline, hire and retain. You talk about in some of your content, I think it was in an Entrepreneur.com article, you talk about not just thinking about Sales and Marketing from an inbound perspective, but thinking about recruiting, hiring and attracting talent from an inbound perspective. Can you talk a little bit about that mindset, and how you apply that to the way that you hire talent?

Ryan Bonnici:    Sure, sure. Yeah. So, I think the reality is, and the way I think about recruiting is, most people that are actively looking for a job are actively looking because they're probably not good at their job, and that's the reality. And people that are good at their job, they don't look for jobs. They are constantly...they're working hard, they're doing a great job for the company that they're at, and it's businesses that intrigue them that they might want to speak to. So, I'm at a loss for words for the exact word that I described this. I did a talk on this once at a big HR conference in Singapore. But you've got people that are actively in the process, and then you've got your inactive folks. And you're active folks make up something like 10% of the pool, and inactive or dormant candidates, which again, that's not the right word for it, make up 90% of...

Naber:  Passive candidates.

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, your passive candidates are making up...they're the best candidates, but they're not the ones coming to job boards and looking for you. And so you really need to be focused on how do you attract them. And so I'm a really big believer in that, for really key talent. you need to be proactively meeting, and building relationships, and learning about people and what they're doing and working on. And so I probably do job interviews...I interview about, I don't know, maybe five to 10 people a week. Sometimes for roles and I don't even have open. And when I say interview, that's a very loose term. It's more so, 50% of those might be official interviews, 50% of them are literally just coffee catch ups - where I've sent a note to let's say, the Head of PR at a big marketplace that I won't say because I have spoken to someone recently in that space, and I'm like "Hey, I absolutely love the PR that you're doing at your company. I read a few of these stories, and they're fascinating. Would love to just sync up marketer to marketer and see if we could learn from each other and just chat" And I genuinely actually do, I just want to get to know these people and learn about them. And all of the best hires I've ever made have been passive candidates, because it's based off of their work, not them being actively in the cycle. So whenever I see a great company running a great campaign, I'll look at, okay, who runs campaigns at that company, and I'll then stalk them on Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, and slide into their DM's, and work out a way to meet with them because I'm genuinely interested in their craft. And it's not a Sales pitch because I am genuinely interested, and they can see that and they get it. And that's how I open up. That's how I like to fill funnel right now. That's not to say I don't work with a recruiter. I have a recruiting of here at G2 that's constantly hiring roles for me. But most of my director and above level roles, I rarely, rarely hire...not because I choose to, but I find that most people that I will hire at director or VP level will be folks that I have found myself. Because I think that if you're a passive candidate...and I get emails all the time from recruiters and I'm passive in that I'm looking for a new job, but I rarely respond to them. But if a CMO or CEO at another company that I was really interested in, reached out and said, "Hey, love what you've been doing at G2, and how you completely changed the brand, and how you've grown traffic, and I listened to on a podcast - would love to catch up." That's something that I'm like, yeah, YOLO. I want to meet other smart folks, and I like to hear that the things that I'm doing are getting noticed, selfishly. And so that sort of thing - that works. And so that's how I think about recruiting. I'm pretty process oriented. When I'm going off after a candidate - a passive candidate - I'm a little less process driven because it's very much that I am just looking for great people out there. When I'm in Director-level or below interview, when someone's in our active recruiting cycle, and whether or not we've found them or they found us, I use a bit of a case-based method for how I interview. So I basically start off the interview, where I want to learn a bit more about them. But then I asked them a pretty simple question of, "What were you brought into your company to impact?" And so this has helped me really quickly understand, if they give me a really long answer or they can't answer that, it just shows me that they don't really know why, what their role is at the company. So I'll ask them that to understand. So if someone asked me that at G2, I'd say "Well, I was brought into G2 to drive more Sales revenue, increase our brand, and drive more traffic. And then I'll follow it with a specific task. So I asked them, "Can you please describe the task, or the challenge, or the project, or the problem that you were brought in to solve?" So they might say, "Well, I was brought in to to increase our MQL to SQL conversion", right? Or Blah, blah, blah. And then I will ask them, okay - after whatever they say - then I'ill ask them, "How did you measure your success on that thing?" And then they might say, and this is the worst response ever, they might say, "I wish I could measure it, but my company doesn't really care to measure those things." And then I would dig in further, "Oh, okay, that's okay. Let's say your company did measure those things, how would you want them to be measured?" And that way, I can work out is their brain thinking about measurement in the right way? And then after I understand the measurability component, I then go into action. So, "What projects or tasks did you specifically work on to reach success?" And what that helps me understand is - did they actually do the job? Because companies have lots of successes. We as a Marketing team have done a ton of success, and we talk about it as a team. So it would be easy for someone to take ownership, or pretend that they drove the success of the team, or something else. So this "actions" thing is important to me because it helps me understand, from start to finish, what was their involvement? Did they partner with someone? Where did the idea come from? Did they hit roadblocks? That's really key. And then I'll ask them, "What results we're actually achieved?" And then I'll go into timeframes, "So, how long did it take to get here?" and scale around what would they maybe do differently, or would they do it again or not? And so, that's just really quickly, at a high level, the case flow that I like to go through when I'm interviewing a candidate that has a core set of skills that I'm trying to get deep into and understand how they think. Separate to that though, I think, for me, I really care about people that are data-driven, growth focused - so they have experience in growing things. And the data stuff, the growth stuff, that will come through in this case method that I use. I want people that are lifelong learners, that are obsessed with...if you do want to work on my team and you aren't on social media, and you aren't obsessed with how ads work, and how tracking works, and how digital works - this isn't the right team for you. So I can tell from a lot of their online presences already, whether or not they're probably going to be right for me. And yeah, that's high level how I think about the actual nitty gritty process of it. And then when it comes to retention and growing employees, I have a pretty direct approach where I connect with most people on the team every other month. I connect with, obviously, all my direct reports every week. But I try and encourage them to really understand that transparency is the most important thing to me. And I try and mirror that to them. And by being really transparent with them and sharing with them, what I am working on, what I'm finding challenging, why I can't do what someone has asked me to do, and giving them the logic. And I think today with employees, that they crave to understand "why?" you as a leader make the decisions you make. And, I think, for a long time, leadership decision were made behind closed doors, and people were just told what to do. And I think Gen-Y's, and most employees now in today's workforce, want to be involved, and want to be able to share their opinion, and I'm really encouraging of that. But I also explain that this isn't a democracy. And I want everyone to share their opinion, so that I can make the best decision. And I might make a decision that is different to what you want, but that doesn't mean that I won't listen to you and respect your opinion. But I have to make a decision at the end of the day, and I might have a broader perspective than you because I'm getting all of your input, and then I have all the inputs from my job, and being on a leadership team, that you might not have. So yeah, that's really quickly, I guess how I think about, recruiting, interviewing, and then developing and retaining employees.

Naber:  That was great. You did my job for me - all the way down to the method, and the process you use, some of the questions you ask, the examples you gave. I really what you said around the vulnerability and transparency of communication...openness of the communication within your team. You write about that and some of the things you read about making sure people can share.

Ryan Bonnici:    I really think...I can always keep doing a better job, this is something that I need to work on - partly, it's something that I have needed to really focus on consciously, because it's so different than my style a few years ago. And I think that's partly through a lot of therapy, and a lot of my own work, I realized that some of those defenses that I used to have as a child that were helpful then, weren't helpful as an adult, as a leader in business. And so I've had to develop there further. But I think that...this is a bit of a, not a sad story, but I had a colleague yesterday who I love that they're on my team, they're amazing, who we were meeting for a one on one, and they texted me and they said...let's see if I have the message (*searches phone with Ryan Bonnici style, focus, grace, and precision)...it was basically, long story short, "Hey Ryan, I'm really sorry. I'm not going to be able to make our one on one right now. I think I'm having a panic attack, and I might head home." And naturally I was, "Please, do what you need to do for it, and take care of yourself." And I don't think an employee would have sent that to me previously. They might've said, "I'm out sick" or something. But I have said to my own employees in the past, over slack, when I was having an anxiety attack at some point, I just canceled all my meetings that day and took a mental health day, pretty publicly. And I was like, "I'm out today guys, I'm taking a mental health day." And I was in the office, and I had to go home because I just wasn't feeling it. And the amount of people that texted me after for that to say that they appreciated me being so public with that helped them feel they could bring their whole selves to work. And if they are feeling similarly, they don't need to lie about how they feel. They can just be open. And not to say that they have to, but I think again, it's all about sort of living it yourself, and showing others that they can do the same thing.

Naber:  Totally. Setting the standard, demonstrating the standard, so you can hold the standard. I talked to someone about that, about culture the other day and I believe it's the exact same thing with mental health in the workplace and openness of communication. That's a really good example. Thanks for sharing that. And you keep that openness, from a retention perspective, I think the openness that you keep with the way that you talk to your employees and the way that you talk to your teams - it sounds from the way that you're writing and the example here, I read an article that you'd written the other day, sorry I read the other day that you'd written, talking about encouraging your best employees to consider outside job offers, and having that very open dialogue and open discussion. Can you talk a little bit about that mindset and what that means to you?

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, sure. So I think part of it is that too many leaders and people in business tip toe around the idea that people are going to work for a company forever, right? And I think the reality is that the average lifespan of a marketer at a company is, gosh, two years maybe. And so yeah, if you look at my track record, it's three years on average.

Naber:  I read the other day, it was something like - those coming out of college right now are poised to have something like 13.2 employers throughout their life.

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, that makes sense. And, I'm really open with people because if you look at my track record, I've done the same. And so what I really want to encourage people to do, is if reaches out to you for a job offer because they think you're a good fit for a role, you should respond. I mean assuming you want, you don't have to, but you should...and I do this, I would always respond to them. So recruiters hit me up all the time, and they be like, "Hey Ryan, I have a CMO role or CEO role at this super sexy high growth company, blah, blah, blah." My first message back, I have no niceties, I'm like, "Thanks for your message. What is the company?" Because that's all I care about, right? Who is the company that we're talking about? Because there's heaps of roles out there, but I don't want to work for just anyone or for everyone. And so once they tell me that the company is, then if it's an interesting company, I might chat to them or their leadership team to learn a bit more. And I think why that's important is because it helps me solidify to myself if I am in the right role myself. By chatting someone else and seeing what other roles are available and by asking questions I can work out, "Oh gosh no, in my role today, I'm so much happier." But it also helps me have a baseline understanding of - what roles are out there? What are the typical skillsets that are needed,? How much are people paying for my skillset? Which helps give me visibility into, do I need to be asking for more money at my current company, or am I paid fairly. And so I think if you treat your employees really, really well, and be open and honest with them in that, they're not probably gonna work for you forever, and that you want the best for them in their career, because you understand that they'll then be an advocate for you and your company afterwards, then they're a little bit more open about these things. And so, and yeah, I just do that with my team, and I practice what I preach. And so it means that that encourages folks to feel open about that they can come to us and say, "Hey, I have this job offer from this company. I don't necessarily want to leave, but they're offering double what you guys are offering me." And if this is an employee that's amazing that we couldn't do without, then we'll try and do whatever we can to keep them. And that might mean more responsibilities, if they've shown that they deserve it. It might mean more pay. It depends on why the person's making the decision, right? And that's case by case, but I think you can get a better understanding of that, and help them see as well, by asking them questions about the role and the company...I often times find that I will uncover things that they don't know, or haven't realized. Like, they haven't asked how much budget they might, or who their boss is going to be, or if they were told that they could run a team - but is it going to be in writing that they will get to run the team? And just these things that they haven't asked. And they start to then realize, holy shit, I have so much more potential and bandwidth here on Ryan's team. Yes, the grass might seem greener on the other side because they're offering more money, but there's a reason why they're offering more money. It's because they can't get good talent. So, I don't know, and by doing that they may realize that, yes, they should leave, or not. And so, I think I preface always these conversations with my team with a bit of an asterisk, in the sense of that you might go through that process and come to us and say that there is this offer that you're going to take, and we might say to you, if we don't feel you are contributing well on the team or you're not someone that we want to change the situation for, you should take the role.

Naber:  Take it.

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah. No, exactly.

Naber:  That's the best case scenario for everybody too, it's great.

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. You should take that role because we think that you are paid fairly, and as per your last performance review, we've made it pretty clear to you in terms of what you would need to do to get to the next level, and you haven't done that yet. So, we're happy for you to stay here and keep developing you, but if it's money that you want, you're not going to get that here until you put in the work that we've shown you. And I think just from having that dialogue, they can better understand how much more quality coaching and development they are going to get with you than another company. And they can then make their own decision. So that's how I try and think about it.

Naber:  Awesome. Thanks. Thanks so much for the multiple, multiple layers you went into with that. And you've been, you've been at so many businesses where you've had just amazing people at those businesses, built awesome cultures. I think one of the things that people want to hear about is, how you think about talent. We just talked about that. And then also, a couple things around the science of what you've done. So building Inbound Marketing Engines, you've been at the Mecca of Inbound at HubSpot. And I couldn't even count on two hands how many amazing people I know at HubSpot, and how many reasons I love the culture there, as well as love the products. And so even people outside the business feel that way. But, tell us what you learned at HubSpot about building Inbound Marketing Engines that translates to G2 and how you've built that engine right now, as well as every subsequent Marketing engine you're going to build. What translates that everyone should be doing as they're building their Inbound engine.

Ryan Bonnici:    Gosh, okay. So, I mean, as you mentioned, working for HubSpot has taught me everything that I know about Inbound. And that was actually, when I mentioned before why I was so grateful for work there, was I just was able to work with the smartest Marketing minds, and I just fucking love that team, and miss them so much. They're a big customer at G2 actually, and I got the chance to head back to Boston last month because we recorded this amazing customer success video with their CEO, Brian Halligan and Kip Bodnar, their CMO. And they were talking about all the value that they get from G2, and why they couldn't connect with their customers if it wasn't for G2. And so it was so fun to get to go back there and profile this company that I was so proud to have worked at, and that was a big customer of ours. It was really quite nice. Look, what I think what I learned there is that...HubSpot literally wrote the book on Inbound Marketing. And so, I think what I learned about was just how to take a really data driven approach to drive, to creating content that drives results. And I think, blogging and writing, Content Marketing is something that can be done really...most people do it horribly wrong. Because everyone can write, so everyone thinks they can be a blogger or a content marketer. And anyone can actually write good content, if they have the right training or if they use the right assistance tools. The problem where I think most people go wrong with content Marketing is once you've decided what you're writing about, if it's not the right topic, you can't optimize it for something whereby no one searches for that topic. So, optimization, SEO optimization when it comes to content Marketing, happens before topics are even selected, before pen touches the paper. And that's why my VP, Content & SEO is an SEO by trade. He ran SEO at Atlassian, and now leads SEO and Content for us G2. And the reason being is, you need to look at...you to just start with keyword research and work out, okay, where are people searching? And which searches indicate that this person is our persona that we are trying to attract to our website, blog, etc? And then you need to work out, okay, how high quality are the keywords in relation to the persona - like, is 50% of the traffic that we're going to get for this keyword with a million searches going to be our buyer persona, and if so, that means 500,000 of the 1 million is going to be out traffic. Or, alternatively, there could be a 700,000 terms per monthly searches that has a 90% percent alignment to your buyer persona, which is going to be higher than that 500,000. But if you just chose the biggest number, you might not get as much of the right people. And so we take a super data driven approach. And we, we literally published, just yesterday, I had the team publish a playbook. And it's a five part playbook - on learn.g2.com (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew), which is our learning hub - which was literally the entire play by play that we created to create a blog at G2 just last year, around seven months ago, that went from zero visitors to over a million monthly visitors within seven months or something like that. Insane growth, right? This blog now makes up...this blog is driving millions and millions of visitors, and it hasn't existed - per month, I should add - and it hasn't existed for more than a year now. You know, HubSpot's blog drives about 6 million monthly visitors, but HubSpot been working on that bad boy for about 10 years.

Naber:  Wow. That's a great proportional perspective for how fast your blog has grown.

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah. We are on track to hit 4 million monthly by the end of this year - that's goal that I set the team for the blog alone. Our total website, we'll be at about 10 million monthly by the end of this year. And when I joined G2 our traffic was around, it was less than a million a month. So, in two years to go from less than a million monthly visitors to 10 million, which is where we're on track for, that's fucking insanity.

Naber:  That's literally 10x. That's insane.

Ryan Bonnici:    And that's not just my work, it's not just the Marketing team's work. We have a great product team that we work with, we have lots of contributing content writers that create content...But majority that traffic's all organic as well, I should have said. We don't do any paid content. And so, yeah, that's one thing that I'm really frickin' proud about. Because, I mentioned earlier, relationships and results. Relationships are super important, but results are as well. I think, you said I was able to fast track my career. And, I was, I got the Cmo role at G2 when I was 29, and I couldn't have done that if it wasn't for really overindexing on results. And what I mean there, is if you tell me to hit a million monthly visitors, I'll hit four (million). And it's not because I'm trying to show off or anything, it's basically because I derive a lot of self worth through my work achievement. And, over time I'm getting better at disconnecting and finding self worth from who I am as a person, regardless of job, but that's still something that's really important to me. And so, I'm thankful for that part...that lonely boy role that I played when I was younger because it helped get me here, and I don't think I would change it looking back.

Naber:  Wow, that's an excellent answer. I love it. I hope everyone...I don't think people could write down notes fast enough as they're listening to that. So can we dive in one more layer on that? So two things. One, what are the phases you go through as you're thinking about building a strategy - for one year, two years? If I'm listening to this as a Head of Marketing or Head of Sales & Marketing, and I'm thinking about - what are the phases I'm going to go through? You've directed this movie multiple, multiple times. So what are the phases you go through as you're building a strategy. And then two, what does your scorecard look like do that you know how to measure it?

Ryan Bonnici:    So, I guess, it can be a bit different depending on if you've been doing content Marketing for awhile, or if you're just starting out, it's slightly different. If you've been doing it for awhile - and I wrote a big blog post Entrepreneur magazine called The One Marketing Metric That You're Not Measuring, which outlines this process in more detail. If anyone Google's The One Marketing Metric That You're Not Measuring and my name, they'll find it. But basically, if you've already been creating content for a while, step one would be explore all your Google analytics data, map it and connected to your CRM data, and worked out which blog posts are driving the most organic traffic, and what's the conversion rate of that traffic into leads, and leads into MQL's, and MQL's into revenue. And then you can start to connect, what content topics that I'm writing about? If I think of HubSpot, one content topic they might write about is Marketing automation, and another content topic they might write about is social media, another contents topic they might write about is Marketing budgets - because, all of those things are things that a Marketer would be searching for, and they sell to a Marketer. And so, you would then group all of your content in pages around those topics, and see, okay, in the aggregate how much traffic has the social media content driven to our blog organically, how much of those organic visitors to social media content have been converted into leads, etc. And you can start to work out what content topics are driving the most revenue at the bottom of the funnel. Yeah. Does that kind of make sense? Connecting the two?

Naber:  Yep.

Ryan Bonnici:    And then, so that would be what I would recommend you do if you've already got a lot of content, you are driving organic traffic, and you want to get a bit of an understanding of what is and isn't working. If you're just starting out fresh - and then once you've done that, you then can still do what I'm going to suggest now - but if you are starting out fresh, then what I would suggest is just, you know, your buyer persona better than anyone. Think about, sit down, and think about what does this person do in their day to day life. And I if use the HubSpot example again, the Marketing persona that we were trying to attract, I don't just think of about their job in the context of my software. So what I mean by that is, yes, HubSpot's platform does email Marketing and social media. So those were two of the topics that I touched on before. HubSpot product does nothing around budgeting, but we still created content around that topic because that was something that a Marketer needs help with. They create budgets - they go to Google, and they search for budget templates. So it's not just about creating contents that are close to your product, it's about creating content around topics that your buyer persona would be searching for regardless of whether or not they are looking for your product at that moment in time. Okay? And that's a really important piece because if you just create content topics around the things that are in relation to your product or service, they're way more competitive typically than other topics because that's, that's the simple "dumb" Marketer to thing to do. Sorry, that's a bit mean. I shouldn't say the "dumb" Marketer thing to do. That's just the thing that everyone does naturally. You don't have to be very creative to think about doing that. And so, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that, but you should be thinking broader as well. I feel bad now the saying "dumb" Marketer.

Naber:  Ha, I think people will forgive you based on all the valued you're delivering, so don't worry about it.

Ryan Bonnici:    And so, once you start to look into those different topics, that's when you start to do keyword research and using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. But, ideally come to G2, and search for the best SEO software, and we'll give you personalized recommendations. And then you can start to look at some content tools that are out there, and group these different topics to see what kind of volume of people are searching for the topics? How difficult is it to rank for these topics? So most of the different platforms will give a difficulty score of one to a hundred. A hundred - meaning it's impossible, you are never going to rank for this unless you are facebook.com. To one - any person that launches a new website can rank for it. And so you want to choose a mixture of difficult terms because they typically have higher volume, and a mixture of some easier terms because they typically have a lower volume. And the easier terms are good because they start to drive immediate traffic to your site because you can rank for them quickly. But also, once you start driving organic traffic, then you start to create the flywheel effect whereby, okay, all these new people that are reading your content are going to enter your subscription process. And then they'll be return visitors for email Marketing. As well as, they're probably creating, if they're marketers and that's who you're attracting, they probably have their own blogs. If they really liked what you wrote about, they might link to you. And then if they link to you, that helps you increase your domain authority, which then helps you rank for more difficult terms. So you want to be doing both. And I think that's a mistake that we made early on at G2, where...and it was my fault, I joined from HubSpot, and we had a domain authority of 92 out of a hundred at HubSpot. And so when I joined G2, I think we had a domain authority only around 80. So some of the terms that I wanted the team to go after very early on were just too difficult. And so we didn't drive any traffic to them until six months later. And the team was smart enough to say, "Hey, while we've created some of these really difficult, high volume content, we need to do some easier content that's going to be a quicker win in the meantime to get the flywheel going, to get Google noticing our site. I know I explained that really quickly to a certain extent, but I know we have limited time. And there's...I could talk about this literally for 24 hours. There's so many details to this, and it seriously...if anyone wants this step for step, they should just go to learn.g2.com (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew) because we published the playbook for this yesterday.

Naber:  Awesome. Do you remember, for the audience, do you remember what the title was?

Ryan Bonnici:    I think the title of it is literally, how we grew our organic traffic to 1 million monthly visitors. (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew)

Naber:  Okay, sweet. Very original title - that's good.

Ryan Bonnici:    Haha, yeah, very original.

Naber:  For everyone listening, I'll put the link to in the description of this, of this episode. (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew) Hey, last thing I want to talk about because I know we do have limited time, is one more superpower that I think is really clear to everyone - that both follows you on social, understands how your career trajectory has gone, as well as the businesses that you've helped build - is around brand building. You just went to Cannes Lions, and you wrote a Linkedin article about it being a big chance for B2B marketers to learn from top B2C Marketing strategies. And you talked about B2B brand building a little bit in that. You also have on social media, your following...you mentioned it a little bit earlier, but I couldn't believe the numbers that it was looking at. I mean, I could, but I couldn't at the same time. And you have 21,000 fans on Facebook, 56,000 followers on Instagram, 20,000 followers on Twitter, 32,000 followers on LinkedIn. Every single one of those platforms is extremely challenging to get even close to a fraction of that, let alone have that consistency. So could you talk a little bit about, building brand from a,B2B perspective, and then also from a social perspective where you can marry those two things together, however you think about it. But I think a lot of people are going to struggle with building their B2B brand because you mentioned, B2B is so far behind B2C and being able to do that.

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah. Yeah. So, I think B2B Marketers are traditionally the worst at building brands. And it's because, B2B typically, when you're selling to businesses, you're typically selling a higher value product. It's very logical, rational. You're solving a very specific problem. Which means that because it's so Sales driven, and because Sales focuses time on those pain points with prospects, Marketing just seems to always be quite clinical and boring and corporate. So the reason why I went to Cannes was because, I think the B2C world do a much better job when it comes to...When it comes to CPG, consumer package goods, and fast moving products, it's far less logical and rational, and it's far more emotional, and gut, and instinctual. And so their content and campaigns are always very visceral. They're very much about making you feel a certain way. They're about surprising you, delighting you, making you laugh, making you cry. And I don't necessarily think that, B2B should go completely down that path. But I think as a CMO it would be silly of me not to, it would be dumb of me. Here we go, I'll pay myself out and make up for my last comment. It would be dumb of me not to go to that event, at least once, because there's stuff that I can learn from that industry. And I think that's actually, funnily now that we talk about it, a very good proof of what I said before, that I am obsessed with learning from other people in other industries, selfishly because I want to steal all of their great ideas and apply them to my world, and integrate them better than anyone else. And I think I genuinely do a pretty good job at understanding many aspects of Marketing, more than I think other CMO's that have just stayed in one lane. And it's because I just push myself out of my comfort zone. So, yeah, I don't think B2B CMO's do a very good job at that. And I don't think we have done a very good job at G2. And so, I want to upskill myself so that I can help upskill my team, etc. I think, if you look at software today, right? There is something like 60,000 pieces of B2B software out there. There's probably, there's something like 250, maybe a thousand different email Marketing platforms. And so in the B2B space, B2B used to be a differentiator...so B2B software - SaaS - used to be, I think a thing that could differentiate you in terms of winning or losing. If you're a company that got in on SaaS and software early, that gave you an unfair advantage. And I think today everyone uses software. Everyone uses 50 different pieces of just email Marketing software alone. The software is less the differentiator today, and it's how you use the software. And so, once you move into a parody market where you're selling products that are similar to everyone else's...and not all software categories are like this. CRM certainly is, email Marketing certainly is, Social Media is kind of like that. These categories where there's tons of different options, they're all kind of similar. People, when they're making the decision, they're going to lean more into some of the emotive components because if your products are all the same, who wouldn't want to work with the brand that's a bit more fun, and is a bit more enjoyable, they like more. And so that's kind of my thoughts B2B branding, and that's why we at G2 went through a rebrand earlier this year, where we dropped the Crowd from our name, so we're just G2 now. We completely redid our logo, our brand colors, but it was more than just a visual refresh. It was more actually that we as a company changed our mission, and our focus, and shifted because we understood our buyers a little bit more. So that's what I would say on the B2B branding side of the house. On the personal brand and building your own brand on social, I talked about this at Drift's conference last year. I keynoted there and spoke about how to build your career and your brand. And I think sometimes people feel embarrassed to toot their own horn, and it doesn't need to be that. But I think the way I've always viewed it is that, the bigger my clout as a person, as a marketer, basically the more interesting I am to people so that they follow me, that they want to interview me, they talk to me, they allow me to talk at events - the more valuable I am to an employer. Because I already have a platform to talk to people, right? So, if you think of me in my current role, right? When I go into my next role at my next company - which no idea when that will happen because I love G2 - I've published content for HBR, for the World Economic Forum, for...fuck, there's just so many publications now. I all of these connections there because they trust me, and they know that I'm not writing Salesy content. I am exposing my flaws, and talking about wins, and I'm giving their writers something of value. And so when I go to my next company, now immediately I have this rolodex of companies that I can write for, and all the buyers they're going to say Ryan as the CMO, GCO, etc. of this new company. And I'll naturally...I'm a Marketer, so I'll naturally pull in a very natural, lovely way, a mention of that company that's super authentic to what I'm writing about, obviously - and, yeah, it's a win-win. And so, I think my lesson for folks listening that are yeah, okay, well it's easy to get press when you're a CMO and write for these companies - when I wasn't a CMO, I still was doing it. You just have to start smaller. And so the step by step process that I told people to do is - you probably already worked for a company, so tap on your content Marketing teams door and say, hey guys, hey gals, I would love to create some content for our company blog. And no content Marketers are going to say no to that because they have really big traffic goals, and they want more content. And say to them, hey, what topics do you guys need content around, and let's see if I can find a crossover of where I have a skill set and where you need content. And then work with them, publish some content, publish more content, that helps get you on the map. And then you then might get noticed by someone, and someone might ask you to write for them. But now at least you can at least proactively reach out to tier three publications, and say, "Hey, I write for insert company publication here', and here are a few links to some of my work. I just recently put wrote this piece of content about topic x, which I think would be a really good fit for your audience. I've pasted it in the email below, let me know what you think. And if you publish it" And that just kind of gets you up and running, you know? And so if that person doesn't reply, try another tier three publication. And that's genuinely how I did it. And then I went from tier three to tier two. And then when I started creating content for tier one, I referenced my tier two work, and you just slowly work your way up. And then after a while, you don't need to reference it anymore because people would just Google your name and they'll see all of the content, and that's the proof, kind of thing. So, yeah.

Naber:  Excellent. You've been doing this for so long - personally and professionally.

Ryan Bonnici:    Oh - The only thing I would add as well, Brandon, is that I think for...the biggest asterisk on all this before, and it's kind of like what I mentioned with content Marketing, if you don't have the right keyword and topic idea from the get go, you will fail. With building your personal brand and writing content. If you aren't authentic, and if you don't have something unique to say - that's key - no one's going to publish your bullshit. If I wrote a blog...that blog post that I wrote for Harvard Business Review about why I tell my best employees to seek other job offers - if I wrote why I love to run one on one meetings...like year, no shit, Sherlock. Of course we all know that that's important. Like, "Oh Ryan has a different view on career progression and letting people leave." That is interesting. So, that's where you need to be a marketer, and you need to think about storytelling. You need to think about your unique skill set, and how you can tell a story that people will want to read. Because I think if you don't have that from from the beginning, that no one will ever reply to you and this won't work for you.

Naber:  Love it. Unique and authentic. I've heard that over and over from a few different businesses that are great at it, people that are great at it...You've just been doing it for so long, that's extremely valuable, and thank you for the examples and all the detail. You're running short on time right now. I want to get one rapid fire question, and then we'll wrap. Is that okay?

Ryan Bonnici:    Sounds great.

Naber:  Okay, cool. So this is a question, and I explained this to guests each time, this question I usually ask people on their birthdays. Your birthday's not until October, October 3rd, I believe, and we both have October birthday, so I got excited when I saw that. It's not creepy, maybe it is that I know that. But anyways, the question I was asking is, what's the most valuable lesson you've learned in the last 12 months personally?

Ryan Bonnici:    The most valuable lesson I think that I've learned in the last 12 months...

Naber:  Personally, we'll get to professional in a second.

Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, I was just going to go there anyways. It was probably could be more...to be kinder to myself. I think has probably been the biggest lesson that I've learned in the last 12 months. Because I think, this job and this challenge, which was bigger than I had ever taken on, definitely pushed me to my limits last year. And I think, and I'm in a really good place now. But I got pushed into...and I'm saying "got pushed" is maybe just a defeatist way of saying that I let myself get too stressed out, or whatnot. As tough as I am on others around me, I'm 10 times as tough on myself. So that little Freudian slip of "dumb marketers" means that secretly, I think that I am a dumb Marketer. And that's, like fact. Like, deep down I'm insecure that I am that persona. But, I think, I've definitely learned over the last 12 months, through a shit-ton of therapy, to just be kinder to myself. Because everyone is fighting their own battles, whether you can see it or not, and most often times the folks that piss you off the most or that activate something in you, have something deep going on inside of them, but that what you're seeing is just their defense mechanism to help them avoid dealing with whatever it is that they were trying to avoid. And I've been there. And so, I don't succeed at being kind to myself and others everyday. But I think it's something that I'm actively working on.

Naber:  Awesome. Be kinder to yourself. I actually need to steal one more thing because I feel the extra two minutes is going to be worthy of the way that you feel after it, because you've given a lot of really good career advice. What's your best career...I think you're going to expand on it a little bit earlier. But what's some of your best career advice that you have for young professionals as they're navigating their career?

Ryan Bonnici:    Well, I think my best career advice that people today, young and old, would be that, we're really lucky today because of social media, it's so easy to find interesting people. And so I touched on before, in terms of what I do when it comes to recruiting, when you see a really cool ad, or if you think about the brands that you love, or the companies that you'd want to work for, going to Linkedin, to Twitter, to Instagram, and follow all of the leaders at those companies that are doing the awesome work. They're sharing content on how they think, how they feel on all of those channels. And so you can learn so much more about them that way. And who knows, maybe you can reach out to them because you study them so well, and you have a really poignant question to ask them that they think was an impressive question. And then they'll take time to have coffee with you. And then you get a job offer...I really think that the best way we learn and can grow in our careers is by looking out there and finding who are the best people doing the best work. Let's learn from them, and let's copy them, and let's recreate what they're doing in a better way. And so that's probably my best career advice. And I think next to that is just, don't forget about the relationships in career. And I think, I would say that that was something that I needed to realize a few years back. I think most people though over-index on relationships, and don't over-index on results. I was the other way around, which wasn't great either. But I think you need to crush your results, right? If your boss tells you to jump here, you jumped double there, or you jump to where they are asked, and show them something else that you jumped to where they didn't know they needed to jump. But you also need to do relationships, I think, at the same time. I think you can burn bridges if you don't do that.

Naber:  Awesome. Ryan, you the man. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate your time, brother.

Naber:  Thanks for having me. Brandon was nice to chat.

Naber:  Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening. If you appreciate it and enjoyed the episode, go ahead and make a comment on the post for the episode on LinkedIn. If you love the Naberhood Podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give us a five-star review on iTunes. Until next time - go get it.