Unlocking the Power of Data: Transforming Metrics into Actionable Insights

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John chance My guest today is Pete Caputo. He's the CEO of Databox. He's a former VP of sales at HubSpot and currently specializes in helping companies grow by implementing sales and marketing excellence. This company, Databox, is a business analytics software company that helps companies monitor, report, predict, and improve their entire company's performance in one spot. So, Pete, welcome to the show. Thanks, John. Appreciate the intro and great to be here. So I just described your business, but let's just take the non-marketing speak and just say, what does Databox do?

0:50Yeah. Well, I think the biggest problem that we solve for companies is that their performance data is all over the place. So marketing is like the worst, where you have website analytics, like Google Analytics, maybe HubSpot. You have SEO data from Semrush, HREF, Search Console. You have social data, ads data, et cetera. It's everywhere. And so what we did is we built integrations with all those tools, recreated the visualizations and the charts and the metrics that you're used to seeing so that you can click and basically have all that data in one spot, view it, set goals against it, forecast performance on it, benchmark it against similar companies, et cetera, et cetera.

1:32So before we get more into that, I want to go backwards a little bit in your entrepreneurial journey. You were an early HubSpot person. In fact, when Brian and Dormesh were actually creating it and wrote the book Inbound Marketing, that's when duct tape marketing was really around. And I had a lot of conversations with them early on. I should have gotten on the partner train. That's one of my big regrets in life. A whole lot of people were pitching CRM-ish kind of things at the time. And I miss that opportunity, but still have done a lot with HubSpot over the years. But talk a little bit about being in an early start company now that it's public.

2:09And I know you've got a lot of opinions about what's going on there, but I'm curious just kind of what it was like to start, you know, in that small company that really blew up. Yeah, a hell of an experience. I had no idea at the time when I was joining. I was running a startup of my own and making a living but not going anywhere. And I did that for several years, about six years. So when I joined HubSpot, it was like, ooh, a steady paycheck. and other people that seem really smart and doing digital marketing, which is what my startup was. So it was a step up from what I was doing. When I look back, it was actually quite risky.

2:45I was 15th employee. I remember the 100-person party, like the 100-customer party. I remember we went and grabbed beer and pizza and celebrated that we had 100 customers, paying us$250 a month. So do the math, that's being our grand annual revenue. So really risky startup that I joined. but obviously turned out quite well. And then I stayed there for nine years. I was the first person to go from individual contributor at sales rep to manager, director, and MVP. And so I grew a big team there. I started the agency partner program that you passed on and built that up. And that became about, and now is about 40 % of HubSpot's revenue.

3:25I stayed there until that team was a counter million in annualized revenue, which was around 2016. And so HubSpot since then has gone crazy. I think as a company, they're doing$2.2 billion in annual revenue. And 40 % of that, or roughly, I don't think they show it publicly that often, but about 40 % of that is coming in through partners. So it's a billion-dollar business at this point. So quite an experience. And I know you didn't get on here to talk about HubSpot, but I have one more question to dive in there. Because that partner program is a lot of agencies who you work with still today. hey, that's really your target today.

4:02And I work with a number of HubSpot agencies and I'm hearing some grumbling that they got to a point where they said, oh, I know you were with us a long time, but we're doing something different and here's the new program. I'm hearing some grumbling. It happens when companies grow, but, and I know you're not, I know you're still a big fan of HubSpot, but I'm curious how you feel like that move has really turned out for them. So HubSpot execs are used to me being bluntly honest because i was bluntly honest as an employee well so i'm happy to continue with that reputation but yeah so they definitely made a bunch of changes i think the the net of it is it went from hubspot teaching a business model to follow to more of a partner program where you're reselling and that like i don't think a company with a hundred thousand or however many customers they have, I think it's way over a hundred thousand, it can continue to be a business.

4:59They chose not to continue to be a business model advisor to agencies, which is the way the program started, right? We were helping these agencies improve their cashflow by switching away from project work to retainers, inbound marketing retainers. And that's, I think that time has passed. HubSpot doesn't even really talk about inbound marketing that much. They talk about the CRM. And so HubSpot, I think, recently has made painful for some but necessary changes for both their business as well as, I think, for the partners. And what's happening now, from my observations, and talking to lots of partners, is that HubSpot is really bringing partners into deals and leveraging them for service, sales assistance, and service, so that HubSpot doesn't need to continue to build a massive services team and can rely on agencies to do the very customized, personalized work to make a CRM and a market automation and a services platform work.

5:58So I think it's the right move for HubSpot to change it where they have a smaller number of partners that they're referring or bringing into deals where they can really control for the quality. And those partners are big enough and capitalized enough to be able to offer a breadth of services that help the customer implement the entire HubSpot product suite. So I think they're making necessary changes. But yes, it's painful, I think, for the smaller agencies who don't get those referrals. They also change the commission program. So the commission starts to expire, especially for those smaller firms that don't keep up with selling new licenses.

6:32Definitely, I think what we'll see, my prediction would be that there's a little bit of a rationalization. There's fewer small partners, more big partners, maybe more specialized partners who specialize either in a type of service or a niche market that can bring expertise that HubSpot doesn't have internally. But again, these are things that happen in a maturing partner program. Yeah, and it's a proven model. I mean, it's a Salesforce, you know, kind of model. I'm bringing those partners in. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So let's go back to data. You started to describe what you've done with DataBox. I'm curious, there are a lot of other tools out there that claim that same space.

7:08Agency Analytics, for example, is one that comes to mind. How do you tell people, here's what we're trying to do that's different? Yeah. So the most unique thing that we do is that we turn data into KPIs. still provide a level of flexibility in terms of what data metrics somebody wants to show and how they're going to show it and how they're going to visualize it. And it really enables a custom reporting platform. So I think when we're comparing to companies like Agency Analytics, I think the flexibility of our system is really good. When you're comparing us to companies more like business intelligence tools, where we are strong is our native integrations.

7:48So turning the data that gets pulled from APIs from, say, a HubSpot or Google Analytics or whatever, and translating that for the user into the metric that they're used to seeing. So sessions by referral source, sessions by organic, sessions by paid, right? And all the way down to the keyword level or the ad level. We recreate that. So it's point-click and using making choices and dropdowns as opposed to what many BI tools do is like, okay, get your data into a warehouse. So then once you do that, learn how to write SQL or use this thing and look at all your data and then extract the right metric.

8:21So what that net that allows is somebody who's not extremely technical to get in and get set up relatively quickly with the metrics that matter from the different tools that they have. You know, what has always irritated me with some of the tools in that similar space is the data is there in real time, but there isn't a real handy way to go. well, let's look at last quarter, you know, and compare, like, have we grown? Have we, you know, have things changed? It's like, nope, here's today's data. And I always find that sort of irritating with a lot of the tools. Yeah. Some of the, I think the lower end tools where it's, they are easy to set up, but it's because they've coded it exactly the way they've coded it.

9:02And so there is that lack of flexibility. We actually spent two years doing a project that we internally called custom date ranges that allowed the user to just change it to any date range in the past. ranges, month to date, whatever date range you could want on the fly as they're looking at the dashboards. Believe it or not, it was an extremely complicated problem to solve. And that's why it exists, right? Yeah, and that's why there's lots of tools that don't bother. And when we did it, it really just caught us up almost with what the native tools provide. And so it was a big project. We didn't, frankly, get a lot of return because it's kind of table stakes, I think.

9:41Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So how big, I know the answer to this, but I'm going to tee it up for you anyway. How big does a company need to be? Because a lot of times people think about data and data warehouses and BI tools, we're talking enterprise stuff. But how big does a company need to be to where this type of implementation makes sense? So we have a very inexpensive starting price point. I think, don't quote me, I think it's$59 a month. I should know that. But so we have a very low starting price point. So we have lots of small businesses that use us. Our sweet spot of like customers that stick with us for a long time and use the product in the way that we kind of intended it is that like 11 to 250 employee mark.

10:24We have many customers that are bigger as well, but there's, you know, there's a smaller number of companies that are that bigger. So we have a lot of customers, our big percentage of customers in that 11 to 250. It's generally whether they, you know, they have, they have ongoing marketing and advertising activities, they have salespeople or shopping cart or a subscription. And they're, you know, they have multiple people doing things that improve the performance of the business and what, and they're, each of those people are using multiple tools. That's when our product becomes valuable, especially for an owner.

10:58We have a persona we call Decision Maker Dave. And that is the person that usually signs up for our product. And the person that logs into our product most frequently, they usually though delegate the setup of our product to their managers or, you know, I mean analysts, but usually just their managers. And so it tends to be those small business owners that want that visibility into the performance of their entire company without bugging everybody. They want it real time. They want to be able to explore it themselves. They want to be able to track performance to goal, you know, this month or this quarter across the team.

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12:12That's right. Just go to a desk team 360 dot info, book a discovery call, and you'll receive the special duct tape marketing 10 % off because, hey, your pal John always takes care of you. So that's it. Go to desk team 360 dot info and book your call today. So one of the big words when we talk about anything today is prediction or predictive. I mean, AI, that's really what AI does. So increasingly, we're going to expect that kind of performance from everything, including our dashboards that we set up. Instead of them being rear view mirror, we want to see what's ahead. How are you addressing kind of that trend?

12:53Yeah, so we have a bunch of things in play around AI and predictions and also really guidance for how to improve performance. But to answer your question very specifically, we have a standalone forecasting feature where once you connect your data sources, you can select from different metrics that we would pull from there. And then it forecasts it automatically for you based on your historical performance. So that's pretty new. It's a standalone feature. We haven't even integrated it with our custom dashboards yet or custom reporting feature working on it. But yeah, it's very much important piece of what we consider a set of features that are important for really managing the performance of business.

13:37What we observe is that a lot of companies kind of just like do reporting as a check the box activity. It's like, yep, I sent you my results. Go check it out. And it's either good or bad. It's almost like a report card that, you know, after you're taking your test. But in reality, in business, we get to go and take the test again in a way, right? Where we can say, we got next month, we can change it up. We can do something different. We do more or less, right? We could try something completely new. So there's a bunch of features we're building. Forecasting, benchmarking, which allows companies to compare to their peers.

14:08Correlations, which automatically detect correlations between leading and lagging indicators, which is a really difficult concept, I think, for a lot of marketers to grasp. And so we're trying to make that easy because it's so important. to understand the things you do today that will impact next month and next quarter. And so that's just some of them. There's a few others that we are working on that are in the works that will launch this quarter and next quarter. But we think there's an opportunity to help companies make decisions by kind of giving them those types of functionalities that help them not just predict the future, but also think about and think about what they could do to impact the future.

14:44Yeah. So I do want to talk, you mentioned benchmarking and benchmark groups. which is a kind of an educational initiative that I know you do alongside this. I do want to get to that, but I want to ask about one more topic that drives me crazy. And that's attribution. I have people that join our fractional CMO program that have been following me for 10 years. And, you know, I run an ad and they see it. Oh, yeah, I remember John's out there. 10 years later. So what are some ways that people can start thinking about attribution in a more effective way? Because I don't think many of the tools do a very good job.

15:19No, I think if you're only using Google Analytics or any automated website analytics tool, if that's all you're using, you're seeing maybe 25 % to 50 % of what's actually happening. Because if you write a book and it gets sold through Amazon, you don't even know who that is, let alone whether they read it, right? And I know you've written a bunch of books. You have a podcast. There's no way to connect your podcast to your CRM to see, hey, they listened to 10 episodes and now they're in our funnel, right? There's so many things now that happen to actually be the more effective marketing tactics and channels that aren't measurable by the tools that most companies use.

15:57Now you can measure like how many downloads that I get on my podcast. You can measure how many. So often you get a report from Amazon to say how many books were sold. And so you can see directionally whether that content is resonating with your audience, but you can't connect it to the sales or sale that you got unless you ask. And so I think we're back to, you know, 1990s marketing attribution, 1980s before the internet was around where when you called somebody's business, they asked, oh, how'd you hear about us? And they said, word of mouth, a friend referred or yellow pages or saw you at a trade show two years ago, whatever it was.

16:34And so if we ask those questions on forums, on our website, on our Zoom sales calls, then we can start to actually get a piece, a much better picture of which marketing is working. The problem is very few companies are doing that in any kind of structured way. Well, and I tell you, too, you'd take that with a grain of salt, too, because we have a lot of organizations we work with where we use that model and people don't remember where they hurt. They just pick one. Yeah, I think capturing a form is tough because people are like, I'm just trying to get through this form. I want to put a call to sales plan.

17:07I just want this stupid ebook. Why am I asking that question? But when you get somebody in a sales conversation, they will usually like, oh, yeah, I've been following you guys for this. And listen to your podcast. You get a little more context. But then there's a whole process of grabbing that data, organizing it, and then analyzing it, which requires humans to usually take it. So for fun, we'll sometimes put my great aunt told me about you as the first choice. And, you know, when we get a bunch of those, we know they're just getting through the form. No, it's important to have an open text field, I think.

17:38So let's go back to the benchmark groups a little bit. And again, I'm just going to open it up and you tell me what you're doing with that and what you've seen and how somebody might be able to participate in that. Sure. So it's a free product. It's available at benchmarks.databox.com. You can go there, sign up, get access to benchmarks from tens of thousands of companies who have opted in. And they've agreed to anonymously, I shouldn't put that in quotes, they agreed to anonymously share their performance data in order to access a benchmark that allows them on a report to see here's how we compare.

18:12And we've organized those companies once again, and honestly by company size and industry and type of business and so forth. So you can go in and see how does my Shopify performance metrics compare to other e-commerce companies with 50 or more employees or something like that? Or how can I go and see how my HubSpot performance metrics compare to other companies that are SaaS companies? And so completely free, we're on a mission to like help companies just understand how they should be performing because I think it's really hard and confusing for most small businesses to figure that out. Not only is it hard for them to even know what metrics to track, it's hard for them to know, is this good or bad?

18:56And so that's what we're trying to answer. Could somebody theoretically bring their own group? Like, here's my, I want to benchmark my customers, something of that nature? Yeah. So especially B2B, obviously. We're coming up, we're just short of about 100 partnerships, which is what we call them, where other companies decided to say, I want to build a benchmark of my own. So we have an agency, for example, that only works with mental and behavioral health clinics. And they have 200 of those clinics as clients. And so what they did is created a group. They can add their clients to it or ask their clients to opt in.

19:33And then once that's done, it automatically calculates the benchmark. And so now they, that agency is the owner of the only, I think the only proprietary benchmark for behavioral mental health clinics that want to measure their Facebook ads, Google ads, Google analytics, and search console performance. performance and nationwide because they have nationwide coverage so they can even see like how is your performance in texas compared to your performance in pennsylvania and so they have this amazing data set that they now can go in and say to a client or prospect like you're you're you're spending a lot more than the average and your results are less or you know you could probably afford to spend a little bit more to keep up with your peers and and if we were able to increase our reduce the CPC, cost per click, maybe you can justify that.

20:20And that would ultimately yield more results. So it allows them to go in and consult objectively to either a new prospect or client. Awesome. So it's effectively bringing in, it's very focused on advertising and kind of a core set of - Marketing, social media, CRM data. We have a lot of sales data, some finance data, although people are a little less likely to share that even though it's anonymous. So it's a lot more marketing and sales data. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Pete, I appreciate you taking a few moments to come and chat with the listeners of the duct tape marketing podcast. You want to tell people where they can find you, maybe connect with you and certainly find out more about data box.

21:00Sure. Yeah. So I'm very active on LinkedIn these days. So Peter Caputa on LinkedIn, there's two of us, but one doesn't post. So, and I post almost daily. So I'm pretty easy to pick And you're Peter Caputo IV as well. I am IV, yes. I'm IV. My great-grandfather, father, and my son are all Peter Caputo. So, yeah. And there's actually a Peter Caputo IV. That's what I meant. There's another guy in Germany that's IV. Just crazy. Oh, funny. So, yeah. And then Databox is just databox.com. Just like if they see the video, they can see it on my hat here. But databox.com, just like it sounds. Awesome. And we'll have it in the show notes as well.

21:37So, again, appreciate you stopping by. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.