With Carolyn Hayashi, Senior Marketing Manager at Bill.com
Carolyn Hayashi, Senior Marketing Manager at Bill.com, speaks about experimenting with content to expand the top of the funnel when it comes to converting free trials, why data is important for setting yourself up for success, and working cross-functionally to engage with customers.
Carolyn Hayashi is the Senior Marketing Manager at Bill.com. She began her career as a legal assistant before joining Growth Capital as an office manager and eventually rising to Growth Associate. Five years later, she started with Bill.com as Growth Marketing Manager, eventually transitioning to Senior Marketing Manager.
Where does marketing’s core responsibilities end within the PLG funnel to convert free trials?
We're really collaborative. One of the initiatives that I get to be involved in that excites me most is this really highly cross-functional team. Our meeting every week spans marketing, sales leads, product, and analysts. That meeting is for keeping in touch, collaborative brainstorming and cross experiments that we can run to really optimize congruence throughout the funnel. All of us definitely have our main KPIs for conversion through the funnel.
The product team is more focused on units that are converting to customers whereas marketing has more of a focus on top of funnel and making sure to drive volume there. At the same time we want to make sure to drive quality users.
While we have our main KPIs there's a lot of focus on what all of the teams can do to improve conversion throughout the entire funnel. For instance, we've put effort towards reducing potential junk users or routing them appropriately. That in some ways can, can lower the top of funnel volume, but at the same time we're improving conversion.
How do you use cross-functionality to engage with customers?
From an execution perspective even though our cross-functional meetings that include members from different teams are kind of a balance between high level and IC, it really helps us in terms of executing cross-functionality. We're all aligned on a customer volume goal as a group.
Even though we do have our separate north star metric for the group, it becomes a really natural way to come out of that meeting and set up ad hoc things with the product team on things that we want to collaborate on and really be able to execute there.
How can MOPs use data to succeed?
I see them more as sort of a strategic partner in helping to define KPIs and building up the reporting initiative.
For instance, I know that marketing ops is always focused on really trying to maintain a clean Marketo instance and how that works with Salesforce. Even beyond the heavy lifting of all of that technical infrastructure and maintenance, every time I've interacted with our marketing ops team, I feel like it's more initiative focused. The context that they have for how our systems work really puts them in a unique position to help guide me and kind of plan for scalability in terms of tracking results.
Understanding how the data that flows through helped me understand how the reporting will work when we get test results for these different things. With the digital user journey, it was helpful to understand how campaigns can build into that or can be structured. response events or KPIs for different types of campaigns can help us tease out how valuable a touchpoint was within that user journey.
