Marketers of Technology
00:00:00 · Scott Logan, Andres Figuera
[00:00:00] S0: Never wanna put a stage zero meeting set into a pipeline dashboard because your sales team is gonna get murdered by your leadership saying, well, you have all these meetings. Where are those in the opportunities? Hey, [00:00:18] S1: everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Marketers of Technology. My name is Andres Figuera, and this show is brought to you by Front Lines Studios, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're looking to launch your own show, we offer a full podcast as a service experience. You just show up and host, and we handle everything else. And with that said, let's dive into today's episode. Because today, I'm here speaking with Scott Logan, head of growth at Wyllo, the only CX first end to end risk intelligence platform that helps ecommerce merchants manage fraud, policy abuse, and customer experience across the entire commerce life cycle. So, Scott, how's it going, man? A pleasure to have you on the show. [00:00:55] S0: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's going well. [00:00:57] S1: No problem at all, man. We're really happy that we're able to host this for you. And, Scott, just so that we can hit the ground running, would you be able to tell me a bit further about your background, how you came to become head of growth at Wyllo, and then what Wyllo does in your own words?
00:00:57 · Andres Figuera, Scott Logan
[00:00:57] S1: No problem at all, man. We're really happy that we're able to host this for you. And, Scott, just so that we can hit the ground running, would you be able to tell me a bit further about your background, how you came to become head of growth at Wyllo, and then what Wyllo does in your own words? [00:01:09] S0: Yeah. My journey started probably a little bit different than a lot of marketers. I started in sales. And then from sales, I thought, this is awesome. I love the sales cycle. I love the pursuit. But the commission quarter to quarter was a lot of stress. And so I was like, I think I'd like to get into the marketing side, a little more of the creative and technical side, and join marketing operations... First marketing operations team for Optum, a UnitedHealth Group company. Did that for about four years and then started to move into b to b software demand gen teams. I guess that transition into... From operations to demand gen was, like, 2011. And then just have been basically building out teams for different sized companies from publicly traded to private to startups. [00:02:01] S1: Okay. And then how long ago did you enter Wyllo?
00:02:01 · Andres Figuera, Scott Logan
[00:02:01] S1: Okay. And then how long ago did you enter Wyllo? [00:02:05] S0: So I joined Wyllo maybe two... Little over two months ago. So fairly new. And they're a fairly new company. They have been focused on and are focused on the retail space. So merchants are addressing their payment fraud and returns fraud issues and policy fraud issues. And our software goes in and helps prevent and stop any active fraud and finds the bad actors so that the merchants can still give a very high level of customer experience and only make changes for the bad actors who are basically stealing revenue. [00:02:44] S1: Okay. And then how are you creating awareness for the potential customers and generating demand so that they know that Wyllo exists and it's a product that can work for any merchants that might need to use it? [00:02:55] S0: Great question. So that's part of what I was brought on to do. There hasn't been formal demand gen marketing for a few years now. And so I came in to help build that out. It's primarily been partner and sales led up to this point with obviously the standard web traffic and things driving inbound. So now I'm building out a brand awareness and demand gen strategy for the company. And my approach, because of my sales background, is always to blend the branding elements and the awareness elements into demand gen so that there's always a way to point back to sales revenue. My whole philosophy is how do we help sales sell more faster? And it's... I believe that's the entire purpose of marketing.
00:02:55 · Scott Logan, Andres Figuera
[00:02:55] S0: Great question. So that's part of what I was brought on to do. There hasn't been formal demand gen marketing for a few years now. And so I came in to help build that out. It's primarily been partner and sales led up to this point with obviously the standard web traffic and things driving inbound. So now I'm building out a brand awareness and demand gen strategy for the company. And my approach, because of my sales background, is always to blend the branding elements and the awareness elements into demand gen so that there's always a way to point back to sales revenue. My whole philosophy is how do we help sales sell more faster? And it's... I believe that's the entire purpose of marketing. [00:03:43] S1: Amazing. Amazing. And then while marketing Wyllo, you mentioned that it's not that old of a company. Right? It's pretty new as well? [00:03:52] S0: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Maybe six to eight years. Some of our competition's been around for a lot longer than that. [00:03:58] S1: And when approaching customers, do they already know what you guys do? Do you feel that you would have to educate them in the features and the product that you're providing?
00:03:58 · Andres Figuera, Scott Logan
[00:03:58] S1: And when approaching customers, do they already know what you guys do? Do you feel that you would have to educate them in the features and the product that you're providing? [00:04:05] S0: Yeah. When they know about us, they know what we do. But it's the... Getting the awareness out there from stealing basically the share of voice from some of the players who've been around for a while, have much bigger marketing teams, have been doing some more robust stuff for some time now. So we're just trying to create a differentiating story to tell through our customers use cases and putting a demand gen engine behind that. [00:04:33] S1: And in terms of customer use cases and creating that different story, what are the channels that are working best for you in that regard?
00:04:42 · Scott Logan
[00:04:42] S0: So what's working best is a tough one because marketing hasn't been here for a little while now, or at least not in the formal demand gen sense. So what we are focusing on are the things that I've seen a lot of success with recently, which is I feel like you absolutely have to focus a lot on the AEO side of search, so the AI search optimization. Right now, we're in a critical time where those AI search engines are now being very heavily used. Maybe even six months to twelve months ago, they were maybe being used seldomly. Now they're being used very heavily. And the way you structure your website, the way you structure your code from the backlinks to even enter content links are way more important and significant now. And making it so that... Making your website very easily crawled, very easily read by the AI crawlers and people. So that's the new trick. It's not using the old SEO tactics, which you still have to have some of that built in, but gearing it more towards AEO is important. And then on the traditional demand gen side, email is being hurt right now. If you have a a a long standing list, long standing domain ranking, and you have a built up, I've seen companies that I've talked to say they don't struggle as much with that. But if you're a newer brand, a newer company, that can be a huge challenge. So bringing back some of the old tricks from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago on campaigns where maybe direct mailer's a little bit heavier, maybe retargeting is a little bit heavier, maybe field events. If you have a core group of people that you can pursue for very specific sales cycles or product use cases, then that type of stuff is working really well in incorporating some of that into the modern ABM tactics.