Jacalyn Beales’ Post

Fun fact: working in marketing is such a wild ride, and you learn a lot (even when you don't necessarily want to 😂 ) Here's some stuff I've learned after 14 years in this career... 👀 Your role as a manager isn't to be the fun bff—it's to help guide, support, prioritize, and maintain a backbone for your team. If you're a nice person, that's a huge bonus. Relying on playbooks is an excuse to not take time to understand your customers, what they need, and how your company can serve them. Similarly, playbooks are only as good as the people who implement them. You may have a few bad bosses before you get a great one—I know this firsthand, after working for years before finally having awesome leaders like Keshila Vallot Shannon, and Kyle Coleman. Type-A folks work really well when they have Type-B folks on their side, because it creates balance—something Nathan Thompson and I will dive into on our upcoming podcast 👀 Showing up for your team at work is critical, even on the days you don't feel like you can/you're not able to do your best. Dark social isn't a new thing...at all—marketers just now have software and platforms that can measure the influence of people posting on LI 🤷♀️ If you don't care about/believe in the product or service you help sell, you have no business selling it. It's okay if you take people's advice with a grain of salt—no one really knows what they're doing 100% of the time. Take 👏 time 👏 off 👏 Being a marketer means you will be asked for ad-hoc marketing advice by everyone, all the time—your uncle, his neighbour, your brother, you name it. While your parents won't really get what you do 😂 (seriously...up until a couple years ago, my dad thought I was in e-learning, teaching???). Recruiting processes are absolutely twisted when it comes to hiring marketers, and you'll have some wild, wild stories to tell. Become best friends with the MOps/RevOps folks at your company—don't question it, just trust me on this one. Salary isn't the only thing you can (or should) negotiate 😉 Take opportunities to work remotely somewhere else, especially if you can meet up with coworkers or visit old friends along the way. When searching for your next role, prioritize finding a leader that cares as much about their team's success as men in tech care about their reputations on LinkedIn 😚 Finding a great networking group where you can learn real-world stuff from fellow marketers is so, so crucial (cough *Brendan Hufford's ALL IN - SaaS Marketing Community*cough) Make sure you have an outlet for stress, creativity, etc outside of work—whether it's going to the gym, taking trips, painting, spending your nights reading...whatever you enjoy. Very little will shock or surprise you as you grow in your marketing career, so when something does, keep your chin up and laugh it off 😊 Anyway, here are some more life pics just cuz ✌ #marketing #marketingb2b #lifecyclemarketing #marketers

My coworker asked me a question about AI and lifecycle that made me 😵 "How do you foresee AI influencing customer retention?" When Nathan Thompson asked me this last week, not gonna lie, I froze. See, I've thought a lot about how our own platform here at Copy.ai helps me with lifecycle work—but no one's ever asked me if I think AI is going to impact customer retention specifically, let alone how 😯 After shotgunning my iced latté, I sent Nathan a [rather lengthy] VM where I sound far more professional than I usually do 😂 To avoid putting you through the same torture he experienced when listening to it... Here's the TL;DR 👇 AI is going to help with speed-to-retention. That simple. And here's why I think so: Everyone talks about speed-to-lead and speed-to-market, but the speed of retaining customers is just as critical. (Especially when customers are spoiled for choice, many have shiny new object syndrome, and GTM bloat is on the rise). But... ⚡ AI can help lifecycle (and other) marketers sift through mounds of data, insights, and research to understand why customers stay or churn. ⚡ Using AI to find commonalities and causalities in that data will allow lifecycle folks to quickly action on updates, improvements, and re-hauls of their key channels and activities. ⚡ Having AI break down endless data streams means folks like me can spend more time on supporting customers, and less time stuck in data trenches. ⚡ AI can make objective, data-backed suggestions on what various user types need, which helps me adapt more quickly to their evolving needs. It can help me spot trends, understand churn risks, and more. Like I said to Nathan: I can't actually work on retaining customers if all of my time is spent drowning in surveys, dashboards, campaigns, reports, and other data sources that can eat away at DAYS of my time 👎 And often, this data paralysis = slower speed to lead, market, and retention. So, yeah, my hot take is simple: Smart lifecycle marketers (and similar roles) will focus on leveraging AI to improve speed-to-retention. Let AI help you make quicker, data-informed decisions 🤷♀️ Does this mean I don't trust my gut, don't do my own research, don't talk to customers, don't study our data? Nope. But like Cicero said: more is lost to indecision than wrong decision. And, sometimes, speed really does matters when making decisions 🏎 #lifecyclemarketing #lifecyclemarketingtips #gtmai #gtm #speedtomarket #lifecyclemarketers #marketingtips #ai #marketers

The smart, innovative companies unafraid of AI are doing something the rest aren't 👀 They're hiring great people who are becoming proficient in AI. Not firing great people in favour of replacing them with AI. There IS a difference ⚡ One helps drive the success of the business while proactively eliminating GTM bloat. The other just fast-tracks mediocrity and failure in the business. Those smart, innovative companies are focused on streamlining their GTM engines and helping their people optimize their time...with AI. The others aren't. My advice? Don't worry about AI stealing your job or replacing your skills ✨ Worry about working for companies that think AI > humans. #marketing #recruiting #marketers #recruitment #gtmbloat #gtmai #gtm #ai #marketingtips

Fun fact: After working in marketing for over a decade, I've learned a lot from remote work, career transitions, job hopping, and balancing life. And it's all taught me some important stuff, like... 👀 If a company isn't comfy with remote work, it's because the company isn't confident in it's ability to lead remotely. Most marketers will, at some point, fall into the two-bite-brownie trap—the idea that a couple stellar wins are all you need to build your career or success on. Whatever your role, one of the best things you can do for your career in marketing or sales is to learn basic MOps tasks & functions. TRUST ME ✨ It's [not so surprisingly] very easy to get caught up in instant-gratification-marketing, so you need to jump at every chance to strengthen your long-term strategy muscles. Skill and career agility are more important than chasing job security, which doesn't exist, anyway. If you're going to be difficult to work with, you've gotta be really, really, realllllyyy good at what you do—the marketers who get it, get it 😉 To move from an IC role into management or higher, you've gotta ask for or take opportunities to hone your management chops while you're still an IC. A strong social following or sphere of influence does not always equate to skill, knowledge, or experience. Being a "fun" or "chill" manager can actually be one of the most damaging things a leader can do to their team. Fun doesn't = effective. When/if you have the opportunity to transition to a different role, take it. Nothing is permanent—you can always go back, but don't miss a shot you could take. The older you get, the more you realize chasing titles matters less than stuff that helps you live a full life (like great benefits, solid equity, a fair salary, remote work, etc). The adage of "you're either up, or out" is true, and is one of the reasons job hopping shouldn't have a negative connotation ✌ The best advice you'll receive in your career will probably come from people working in the 'trenches' with you. You're either learning, or earning—if you can do both, you've struck gold 🥇 If you want to be a good people leader, keep this in mind: look out for those beside you, and behind you. Work-life balance isn't a thing, but you can choose how much of yourself you give to your career. Do not—and I really mean, do not—base your worth or career success on how influential you are on LinkedIn. No one's gonna remember your viral LI post on their deathbed (and you won't, either). I wouldn't trade a single negative experience in my career for anything—they taught me how to advocate for myself, and be a good boss in the roles where I've been a people manager. What lessons have you learned during your career? 👀 P.s. here are more life pics, just cuz. #marketing #marketingb2b #lifecyclemarketing #marketers

Hot tip🔥 If you want a quick + easy way to gather user insights and customer research, do what we do 👀 Spend 1 hour each day fielding support tickets. That’s 5 hours per week your team can round-robin on helping CS. Here’s why we do it (and why you should, too): ⚡️ You get to have live, human conversations with your users/customers. ⚡️ There’s no red tape or wait times getting sign-off on conducting formal research, holding CABs, etc. ⚡️ Real-time insights and feedback are literally right in front of you—forget rooting around in endless surveys. ⚡️ You’ll get lots of helpful ideas for content marketing, demand gen, and lifecycle campaigns. ⚡️ It’s an easy, free way to gather insight on fun stuff like time-to-value, sentiment, CSAT, and more. ⚡️ You get to help your CS team. ⚡️ If user or customer retention’s an issue for your company, you can find out why in real-time. ⚡️ It’s a productive way to train new teammates on your product + users and customers. ⚡️ Puts faces to the names of the folks on your team that users and customers engage with. ⚡️ You end up learning a lot about the JTBD, challenges, and pains of your ICPs. Did I mention it’s also super convenient, given you don’t have to onboard another tool, pay thousands for research every quarter, or burn time trying to organize CABs? In other words, it’s a quick, easy way to understand your customers and eliminate GTM bloat (like tech or tooling bloat). And everyone on your team can do it—in fact, they should. 1 hour per day = pure gold ✨ Plus, it never hurts to help out customer success 💜 #lifecyclemarketing #lifecycle #lifecycletips #marketers #marketingtips #gtmbloat #gotomarket #gtmai

Our onboarding NPS score hovers around 4.3-4.5 out of 5 ✨ Here are the 5 rules of thumb we follow to consistently improve and maintain that score 👀 We use a 5-pt scale for onboarding NPS to help measure user success and gauge passive users, detractors, and promoters. These are the 5 rules of 👍 we follow to maintain a consistent score for onboarding satisfaction 👇 1️⃣ Daily user research We don't wait for CABs or quarterly surveys to understand how our customers succeed with our platform. Instead, we spend an avg of 1-2 hours/day fielding support tickets, reading past CS threads, and diving into support channels in our Slack. Real-time customer and user insights. 2️⃣ Quick NPS surveys Our NPS surveys are max 2-questions, and for onboarding, all we ask our users to do is: - Rate their onboarding experience on a scale of 1-5 - Provide free-form, honest, open feedback about how we can improve Goal is to make it as painless and quick as possible to give feedback. 3️⃣ Quality > quantity We do a few things really well vs. a lot of things half-assed, such as: - Implement feedback into our onboarding sequences weekly - Personally address responses to onboarding comms from the people who send them - Check-in with customers after we've solved their challenges - Tailor onboarding to JTBD and immediate value 4️⃣ Segmentation over saturation I'm not interested in spray-and-pray onboarding—which is why we don't onboard everyone the same way. As marketing and lifecycle consistently grow here, we're always looking at segmenting onboarding not just by JBTD, but by: - A user's inherent, intrinsic need for AI (what's the real WHY?) - What will help them become an innovator and champion in their company - The GTM bloat we can help them avoid with tech stacks, resources, wasteful activities that suck time and money, etc - Product-based onboarding Your need for AI might seem and sound similar to mine, but we're different people—our onboarding should be a little different, too, ya know? 🤷♀️ 5️⃣ Time to value There are 2-3 TTV metrics I keep my eye on: - time to basic value - time to immediate value - short time to value These all sound the same, but the aim with our onboarding is to: a) ensure people can get started easily, even if they're not AI pros b) help people DO what they need to do, the minute they hop in c) make it simple for people to adopt features without tons of hand holding Now, our score isn't too shabby 🌷 But it's not "easy work". Our marketing team spends everyday making sure onboarding touch points and interactions are valuable and helpful for our users. And if that score dips, we figure out why and fix it. You've got to have a team of people who genuinely care about your users. That's the real secret 👀 #lifecyclemarketing #lifecycletips #emailmarketingtips #marketingtips #customermarketing #lifecycle #marketers

Here are the steps I took to hold down the marketing fort here as a team of 1 for most of April...while still getting my stuff done 👀 For context, our marketing team here at Copy.ai is 3 people—myself, Nathan Thompson, and Kyle Coleman 😮 We've done a lot of cool stuff as a team of 3 (like help build a category, nbd). But then April rolled around, and both Kyle and Nathan went OOO—enjoying PTO and pat leave, as they should 💜 That's left me as a team of 1 for most of the month, which isn't as scary as it sounds. Here's what we put in place to make sure our ship stays its course 👀 ⚡ I used our platform to: - automate a slew of repetitive tasks—like setting up multiple NPS surveys - pipe data and results from lifecycle nurtures into into Slack, custom Notion tables, etc. - create and automate the production + distribution of content for events, landing pages, microsites, and other owned media. - create a handful of nurtures for our new Pardot efforts, giving me time back to focus on the setup of our instance and reporting. ⚡ Automations have allowed me to give more love and focus to prospects that SQL through our lifecycle activities—in other words, our platform is enabling me to nurture and help sell said platform 😎 ⚡ Nathan Thompson was able to automate 2 weeks' worth of content tasks using custom Workflows he built here that are INSANE (he's the goat). ⚡ Kyle Coleman gave me free rein to make strategic decisions around our tech stack, events, vendor onboarding, MOps setup, and other tasks that a lot of CMOs would hold close to the chest. This all allows us as a team of 3 to make moves, big bets, and strategic calls on initiatives, like... - helm the setup of our MOps - organize onboarding for a new team hire - setup nurtures - helm new platform onboarding Even when that team of 3 becomes a team of 1 for a bit 😜 Pair all of that with founders (like Chris Lu and Paul Yacoubian) who give you autonomy to make informed choices, let you do your thing, and trust your team... And it's a pretty solid recipe for getting s**t done so your team can actually enjoy being OOO. Probably the most stress-free I've ever felt, despite juggling 12+ different things at once. This is just one small piece of the GTM pie that AI empowers 💡 If a team of 3 can help build + launch a category, go OOO, enjoy PTO, and still ship at the volume of a 6+ person team, you can eliminate GTM bloat, too 😉 #gtmbloat #gtmai #marketingtips #lifecyclemarketing #gotomarket

Fun fact: I've been in marketing for nearly 14 years now (dare you to guess my age 😅 ). And this crazy career has taught me some really important things, like... 👀 I'm an extroverted introvert—having to travel, network, and spend days surrounded by crowds at tradeshows for work has taught me this 😂 I reset best when I get to spend time alone. A lot of people will either get it, or they won't—and there's nothing wrong with that. Remote work is better than being in the office everyday (there, I said it); it makes meeting up with your coworkers that much more special. Taking time to travel while working is critical—whether you tend to go far (like myself) or stick close to home, take the opportunities to see the world, experience how other cultures work and relax. Processes and documentation are very, very, very underrated...until you need them. Layoffs, let-go's, and career let-downs don't define your worth, both professionally and personally. Seriously, let that s**t go. Doors close so better ones can open, ya know? Find hobbies and interests outside of your career—you'll thank yourself later. Learning and earning knowledge that benefits you at work doesn't have to just happen via LinkedIn, podcasts, etc.; you can learn from books and music, art and literature. Listen to your gut—always. It's the perfect combo of listening to your head and your heart (sappy, I know, but hey). It's good to have a balance of type a and type b folks on your teams. Everyone has a different approach to how em dashes should be used, and as an em dash enthusiast, I can say with great confidence...do you, boo. 9 times out of 10, it's better to apologize than ask permission when you want to try something in your career. Not all criticism is constructive, and not all feedback is helpful. If you can learn how to give truly beneficial feedback or advice, you're already a better leader than a lot of leaders out there. Being nice at work is the right thing, but being a doormat isn't—it'll take you a few years and unique experiences to learn how to navigate being nice with being perceived as "weak". Hint: the two are not the same 😊 You'll probably make some big and small mistakes, experience what it's like to work with a not-so-great leader, and wonder when your big break will come—it will. Give it time. Oh, and one more thing: admitting you don't know the answer to something, and asking for help, is perfectly okay. Anyway, here are some life pics ✌ #marketing #marketingb2b #lifecyclemarketing #marketers

Hot tip 🔥 If you're going to use the "choose your own adventure" tactic on your site to replace demo request pushes, you have to actually let people take their own adventure 😉 Lots of folks lately are cheering on the "burn the demo request form!" anthem, telling you to let people choose their own course. That's cool... But those same folks are also recommending you give people the option to just contact the company or subscribe to a newsletter 😅 Most of these "solutions" accomplish the same thing—they give people the illusion of choice. If people aren't ready for a demo but want more info—like insights into your product—they should be able to actually TAKE their own adventure. Think: ⚡ Sandbox environments ⚡ Group demos ⚡ CAB recordings ⚡ Interactive tours of specific product features or capabilities ⚡ Oroduct roadmap walkthroughs ⚡ Skip-the-line demo bookings for folks that want one ⚡ Ungated product webinars You catch my drift. Giving people the illusion of freedom in doing something other than submitting a demo request doesn't work. But giving them too many options doesn't, either. Your Sales team is still going to pounce on those folks and send them crappy LI DMs. Your Marketing team is still going to shove them into a random nurture based on outdated lead scoring. Instead, actually let people see the product. Let 'em play with the product. Let 'em try and test it without a credit card 😉 In other words, ungate your product experience. Your competitors aren't going to suddenly outpace you. Your prospects are just going to have a better experience before the demo 🤷♀️ Oh, and please please please don't replace "Book a Demo" CTAs with "Contact Us" buttons 🙏 #gtm #gotomarketstrategy #b2bmarketing #b2bmarketingtips #demandgen #demandgenstrategy #marketingtips #gtmbloat

As April fool’s comes to a close, I’d like to thank every SDR that didn’t prank me by sliding into my DMs with a pitch today 🙏 #marketing #marketingtips #marketers #b2bmarketing #b2bsales