Navigating the Evolution of ActiveCampaign with Adam Tuttle
In this episode of The Conversion Show, Erik Christiansen interviews Adam Tuttle, who shares his extensive 13 year experience with ActiveCampaign, an email and marketing automation company. They discuss the evolution of ActiveCampaign, its market position, the impact of AI on sales operations, and the importance of building relationships in sales. Adam also reflects on his time in Australia, highlighting cultural differences in work-life balance and the growing tech scene. The conversation emphasizes the need for companies to adapt to changing market dynamics and the significance of human connection in sales.
Transcript
Adam, we've been working together for, you're one of the first people I met in the industry, I think. How long have you been in ActiveCampaign?
Adam Tuttle (:Same, back at you. Literally. You are literally the first.
Adam Tuttle (:I am just shy of 13 years in July, so I guess I got a few months, but yeah almost 12 and a half and change
Erik Christiansen (:13. Yeah.
I remember your first office in Chicago I visited during IRCE. What number employee?
Adam Tuttle (:Number nine
Erik Christiansen (:Is there still some OGs there?
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah, there's, there are five people in the company that have been here longer than me at this point. know, yeah, and a couple, like one of them, I think is nearing 20 years. That would include the founder as well. So, but yeah, there's a, there's a few like old, old OGs around. And then the funny thing is now that like, like one of my friends,
who came in when I had already been there several years. He's hitting like nine years. like all of sudden all these people are kind of hitting this nine, 10 year mark, which is kind of wild. So I think there'll be a few people that hit a decade within the next like 12 to 18 months, which is pretty crazy.
Erik Christiansen (:I think it says a lot about a company too when you have long-term employees.
Adam Tuttle (:I totally agree. I totally agree. Yeah, it's a space that is...
very interesting to me because there's, you know, again, to your point, like often, I mean, even two years is kind of a long time, but I think the market has collapsed a little bit in the sense that it's not quite like, you know, five years ago, you could literally go find a new job every other month and nobody cared. That's probably not the market that we live in today, but I think that people that have been here this long at that point, we're just stuck. We'll never leave.
Erik Christiansen (:So active campaign, we've watched the growth. Where is active campaign positioned today in the market?
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah, so we've always taken a really strong position on SMB. So I think if you like look at, you know, let's call it under 100 employees. I know that SMB can be kind of interpreted depending on who's saying it. But let's just say for our purposes, our sweet spot is probably that 100, you know, two employees up to 100.
Now, with that being said, we have enterprise customers. That would be thousands of employees, things like that. But I would say the majority, it's kind of like the 80-20 rule. 80 % of our customers probably fall into that.
zero to a hundred category and then the others are mixed up with a small amount being like the solopreneurs and then the other half being more mid-market enterprise. We've definitely seen more mid-market enterprise over the last few years which has been exciting to see that we're able to support them you know for a long time as you know sometimes the especially nowadays with the amount of data that comes in with emails like trying to send out you know when you and I met we could barely
send out, I mean 100,000 emails for us would take you know three or four hours to send which is not acceptable in today's world but ten years ago that was like maybe acceptable tolerable but you know now we're we're well over a million an hour for customers and things like that so we can handle those larger accounts when needed but I think the really exciting piece is with the market like and with AI which is you
maybe the piece we can chat about a little bit is you're now seeing companies that used to take 100 people to run being run with 30 employees and generating massive amounts of revenue because their efficiencies are really dialed in, which is wild. So it's a different ballgame. That's the truth.
Erik Christiansen (:It is. And, in the last 13 years, you know, I've seen your own role. You were growing the sales team in Chicago. Then you went to Australia for what? Four years? Three. Picked up his family, went to Australia. I thought that was the greatest move. And now, and the last year we were talking about activation and onboarding.
Adam Tuttle (:Just about three, just about three.
Erik Christiansen (:Where are you and you you know, it's exciting that you can kind of move around and shift in a company Where is your current focus?
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah, so my current focus as of the beginning of the year.
Last year I was kind of well I reported to our VP of sales and I was like a fixer of problems So he would say go do this or like we were starting to do events again for the first time in several years We had no sales processes and he's like go build the sales processes So I went to all the events I figured out how we capture the leads how we get them into our CRM How do we know all of that stuff? How do we partner with marketing? So everything's tagged properly across all of the places and things like that and then
Then at the end of last year I transitioned back into ops, which was where I worked for a while, several years ago. Which was a good fit because more and more of the projects I was taking on were falling into the ops bucket. So it was truly just more of a natural transition. So I worked under the vice president of sales ops specifically. And my role is, the title is really long, but it's the senior program.
Director of GTM operations and the way that I would break that down is I work on our Sales Ops team who reports to our CFO. So I think just understanding the chain of command is important there. And I try to make sure that the programs that we're running, so I do a lot of project management. Are we doing what we need to do to get those done? I also spend a lot of time
looking at like our OKRs for the year and trying to say like, okay, what are the things that we could implement that will help?
Adam Tuttle (:accomplish those goals. And so it's kind of a twofold thing of like manage projects, make sure that the GTM motion, especially from the ops side is kind of conducive because of how long I've been here. I tend to get pulled into a lot of the other ops work. Maybe like, I don't want to say an advisor. That sounds a little pretentious, but like as an advisor and that, so I do that. And then I focus again, I'm trying to just help us find ways to make our sales team more efficient, more effective at what they're doing.
I think that that is where I that's like where I love to nerd out is is like that piece of it That's one that like really gets me excited and trying to just yeah
Erik Christiansen (:Well, let's talk about that more efficient. mean, us too, is, Travis and I have been having a lot of conversations. Okay. Where do we plug AI in to be more efficient in our own operation? What, what's your model strategy presently?
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah.
Adam Tuttle (:So we are learning where to use AI right now. So I don't even think that we have a model. think that would be a bold-faced lie. What we are trying to figure out is what do we want our model to be found, what should its foundation be? So that's kind of where we're looking at it. Or identifying where little ways that we can start implementing AI, and does that actually work?
Right, so like you can learn quickly at a small scale if you just say this is our plan.
although we've never done it all at once, think then what happens is you get locked into something and then what you do is you create inefficiencies because you've gone so far down the rabbit hole on something that wasn't great and now you're trying to backpedal and you basically acquired tech debt. And that is like a worst case scenario for me. So where I often start is what is a problem that I'd like to fix? How could I fix it manually?
Erik Christiansen (:Yep.
Adam Tuttle (:And then along that journey, are there places where I can put in AI bots into it, right? Or is there a way that I can make this more efficient? I think that AI, honestly, it's a little overrated right now.
What I mean by that is everyone talks about AI, but nobody actually seems to know how to use it. Or very few people. There's certainly experts on LinkedIn. You can read on LinkedIn, There's people that like, Jordan Crawford's one guy. The dude's like a wizard. He really understands this stuff. But there's like one Jordan and many, many, many, many, many people that don't fall into Jordan's bucket. So I think like...
Erik Christiansen (:Well, I like what you're saying in terms of the same way you build software is you look at tasks that humans are doing and I look for ways to automate it through software. In terms of understanding your operational size, how big of a team are you managing right now and how big is ActiveCampaign currently?
Adam Tuttle (:Yep. Yep.
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah, so Active Campaign is, I think, last night, just under 1,000 employees. So we're in that ballpark. We've been over 1,000 at times, but we've been less than. Our sales ops org is.
Erik Christiansen (:Yeah, big operation.
Adam Tuttle (:about a dozen, maybe a little bit more than that. Yeah, right around a dozen. Right now we've just hired a few new people, so that's where my brain's at. I think that we could use more, we'll get them eventually. the, let's, going back to this point, right, like one of the things I've been working on this year is you know, as a founder, you, whether it be from your customers and such, you get 100 requests in that time.
Internally you probably have people slacking you.
or have at times where they're like, Eric, what do you want me to do about this? How do you want me to handle that? Well, is like that on steroids. Every time there's a problem, someone's going to ops, like, I need you to help me fix this. The problem is they don't get a response in five seconds, maybe five minutes. They go to the next person and opt, and now you create this. So I deployed Jira into our ecosystem for one, as a ticketing system. So we created a whole ticketing portal, so our internal stakeholders, our customers,
as I like to think about it, can use that and submit requests. And then I also created a secondary project management system. if it was a request like that's standard, we get them done all the time, know, end of the month. Like, hey, can you review this deal? It's not appearing on my exactly numbers. OK, cool. Let's check it out. It's usually something pretty standard. Keep it a ticket.
this is actually a project. This is going to take like an hour plus of work. I'm going to have to involve other people. we move it over. Excuse me. The first one was a ticket. Then we move it over as a project. So that's step one. We've started to build some automation into that. There will be opportunity for AI to play a role in like surfacing, know, cadences and different things like that. But the first piece is to get the foundation established.
Adam Tuttle (:and really understand why your processes lie. And I think that that's a mistake that a lot of companies make. Like have a friend right now, he runs a company that they basically refurbish and resell surgical power tools. So that's their business.
He was talking to me about his tech stack and he was like, oh man, one of my guys sent me this AI tool, we need this. I went and looked at it I was like, you're like a hundred steps away from needing this right now. Like we have, there's other things that have to be put in place first. Like we really need to get your CRM dialed in. We really need to get your marketing automation dialed in. And a list of five other things that if he doesn't have those punched in and really tuned in.
Then he switches and also starts throwing AI bots at things like... Hasta la vista. Good luck.
Erik Christiansen (:You talk about the foundations, which is your customer data. Did you ask them, do you have the email addresses of every one of your customers? It's like, then don't talk to me about anything else. So we're kind of talking about being the conversion show. SaaS, sales conversion, is what you're looking at.
Adam Tuttle (:100 % I did, yes. And he did not. So that was a step number one.
Yeah, exactly.
Erik Christiansen (:internally. What being in this space, what are you seeing from the sales org with deal flow, with not necessarily number of deals, but we opened up with today's market, Klaviyo is this emerging 800 pound gorilla. Is it 800 pound? Is that the phrase?
Adam Tuttle (:Maybe a thousand. Yeah, it is 800 pound gorilla, yeah.
Erik Christiansen (:Yeah, but you know, it's the eight ton gorilla right now. That not just ESPs, but you know, the traditional ESP is now trying to be the all-in-one encompassing marketing platform. We're seeing that.
th,: Adam Tuttle (:I think the
I'm gonna give you two sides of this. think that, first of all, yes, you have, think the ones that I kind of enjoy watching, honestly, are Klaviyo and HubSpot. Watching HubSpot grow as aggressively as they are, now they're really doubling down on their CRM side. They're really starting to go after Salesforce, which is kind of fun to see. Can you dislodge that beast that's been around forever? It's like an empire, right? Salesforce is an empire. We're not sure if they're the good guys.
the bad guys yet but like they are an empire and HubSpot I think is trying to disrupt that which is really exciting. I think that when you look at the market as a whole with the it has never been easier to start a business than it is today so even though there are big players like Klaviyo I'll throw in active campaign
HubSpot, etc. There are always new players coming around and I think that the market is kind of ripe for that disruption. I think like 100 % there are players that are just crushing it. What will be interesting to see is can they keep that momentum going.
The other side of it, which I find honestly just incredibly, incredibly fascinating, is what you kind of on with the all-in-one market. So you'll remember, like when we first started hanging out, if you looked at just email marketing, that marketing automation was kind of emerging, but email marketing was really where it was at. You had MailChimp, Constant Contact.
Adam Tuttle (:GetResponse, a few others, iContact, yeah, Exact Target for Enterprise, like those were your big ones. You'll remember Keep, formerly Infusionsoft, Entreport, some of those guys were kind of pushing into the SMB marketing automation space. But for a while, was just all they did was email marketing. And then...
Erik Christiansen (:exact target.
Adam Tuttle (:Everyone made this kind of brand pivot to become all in one meaning we're your email marketing and we're your CRM and we probably have landing pages
That's what all in one meant. And then you tied in your just who knows your e-commerce on top of that, right? Like those were the pieces that you were like, you know, we built the integration with Justin on active campaign years and years ago at this point. Then I felt like about five, six years ago, active campaign and others tried to make this like separation. We're like, no, we're not all in one because all in one is sloppy. We're the best at marketing automation.
And we just happen have a CRM as well, which is tied into our automation stuff. And now things are shifting back to where people are like, I think last year especially, people were very budget sensitive. So going to build a frankenstein approach where you have active campaign as your email marketing, marketing automation, pipe drive, or whoever has your CRM, Shopify as your e-commerce.
You know, you're just tacking, tacking, tacking. What they wanted was more of the central model where all the data flows into.
So again, you still have your Just Do It Rose, you still have your Shopify, stuff like that, but everything's really, really well centralized in a single place. And that manages now your SMS, your WhatsApp messaging, if you're outside of the United States, your email marketing globally, your landing pages, your chats. They're wanting that back again. And so I think what we're going to see is there's a few companies like Beehive that are
Adam Tuttle (:really like we do newsletters right like they're like that is what they do but even they're starting to build out like websites and different things like that so I think the all-in-one is kind of making a resurgence I'm interested to see if that's sustainable because my prediction is that it all-in-one becomes more expensive
with people being able to spin up platforms with much less overhead as far as number of employees because of the power that AI produces, right? You can now run a company off of a team that is, let's call it less than 30. If you have the right people that are like brain childing this, right? But what they can do is now run a company that used to take 100 people to run or 50 or whatever. So as you know, as a founder,
If you could cut your overhead of employees by half and produce higher results, you can sell that for cheaper. People are much more willing to jump on cheap or affordable. I want to say affordable. That's the right word, right? What's more affordable? I, I, I'm wondering if in like two to three years, we're going to see this where people are taking this. Like I have this micro tool.
I don't know if that's a word, but this micro tool to do my SMS. But because of how data connectors are getting so strong now, people literally just plug in and be like, push all the data into this data center.
and then grab it out here and you know it just feeds everything. I think like the overhead is of IT and all that's gonna be much less. Again, I don't know but that's where my kind of Alice in Wonderland approach goes.
Erik Christiansen (:Okay.
Erik Christiansen (:Yeah, well, what we saw was the consolidation of the Martech stack over the past few years. We saw the term good enough, which you mentioned HubSpot. HubSpot's notorious for being good enough.
Adam Tuttle (:Yes.
Erik Christiansen (:They will build a feature step and build the initial, but you can't go any deeper than what you need. But for the majority of the market, that's good enough. The best in class is starting to come back, which I'm really happy to see. People are recognizing, as we build into the more mid-tier enterprise, it's that ground of
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah.
Erik Christiansen (:I had a great conversation with a gentleman from HootSuite this past weekend about the biggest mistake most SaaS companies make is they skip out of SMB and just try to sell enterprise.
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah.
Erik Christiansen (:And it's great to hear Active Campaigns still invested into the SMB. The micro tools, what I wrote down here, that you did, that you said, like that. Because what we're seeing at Just Dino, it's really been the last two years, and a lot more this year, is that...
Adam Tuttle (:Very much so.
Erik Christiansen (:We have these one trick ponies that are being built and they're able to speak to that good enough market where they just want to solve one problem and they're willing to pay for a SaaS platform that also services the problem and then at an affordable rate and they also, that same company can present ROI and value.
Adam Tuttle (:Right.
Erik Christiansen (:very clearly because they're only focusing on solving one problem in our situation, be it opt-in rates or list growth. There is a problem there though that it's not holistic for the whole company because you're only trying to solve
Adam Tuttle (:Yep, yep.
Erik Christiansen (:the one problem for your department or your job title. So if you're at Active Campaign and you're on the op side and you're seeing all these great new leads come in, but then you see your sales team's close rate going down because they're trash leads, and that's just one example. The other would be, you know, talk about email marketing and open rates and, you know, everything you talk about when you come up.
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah.
Erik Christiansen (:quality.
Adam Tuttle (:Yep.
Erik Christiansen (:what's the terms in email marketing, I'm blanking right now, but deliverability and all of that, you actually build up, your company becomes less healthy. So what is the balance moving forward?
Adam Tuttle (:a deliverability and yeah.
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, man, that's such a loaded question. I feel like we could probably spend like three hours just peeling back the layers of the onion on that. I think that...
What companies get into trouble is that they are often looking for a silver bullet. So they're looking for that thing that just magically solves all of their problems. And you have to address problems one at a time. Problems might feed into each other, But I think that if you can take that step back and take a very hands-on, tangible approach.
to like camp, I see this all the time, like can I test version A versus version B, what can I learn from that? Right, can I do these little things? I ran a test at the end of last year and it was really exciting the results we got. So I was thinking about like, again, kind of my role is often to think about like how do I help the teams get better or how do I improve our conversion rates or things like that.
So I was looking at our AEs as a whole and I was like, okay, what can I do to help them? And I said, in my opinion, there's really only four things that an AE can control. Their connection rate, so if a lead comes in, how many leads are you getting connected to? And like, specifically on the inbound side, it was pretty narrow. What is your conversion rate or your closing rate?
Adam Tuttle (:I think it is important to separate out what I'll call is a win rate, which would be like the net total of all leads coming in versus a close rate, which would be ones that get into your discovery stages, right? Where you're actually having conversations with them. You need to see that, differences. So those things, I'll bucket together. The average revenue per sale, really simple, and then turn within 90 days.
Other than that, a rep doesn't have too much control. There's lots of little things underneath those, but those are the big ones. So I said, okay, well, let's start with connect rate. That's literally step number one. And I took, so I had this theory that like we were letting the AEs write their own emails out to a new lead, whether it didn't matter how it came in, just say like, hey, Eric, thanks for checking out ActiveCampaign.
because we wanted them to personalize the email.
But you and I both know that, and this is not disparaging anyone, but it's like you're busy. You're doing demos today. You've got follow ups. You've got all these things. You're not going to go research for like 20 minutes, right? It's like beautifully, like you're going to just say, hey, Eric, thanks for checking out our active campaign. Here's my link if you want to book a time. I'd love to see that you're in this. I think I can help you, right? Something like that. It's really generic. So I said, I think the speed to lead is more important than the person.
within the email. So what I did was I had our one-to-one email tool within ActiveCampaign, so it's just part of our automation functionality. I said as soon as a lead comes into the reps pipeline, send them an email and it said, hey Eric, thanks for checking out ActiveCampaign, my name's Adam.
Adam Tuttle (:I'm going to help you out as you explore our platform. I'm sending you an automated email through our automation tool just so that I can get to you quickly and make sure that you have a person that you can speak with. If you have any questions, I will follow up with a phone call soon. But just want to let you know, we saw the four reps that we did the experiment with. We saw our average connection rate go from 48%.
to 76 % in one month. So massive, massive improvement. Globally, across all teams, we saw it was about a 15 % improvement. significant, right? You can't deny there was something. Yeah.
Erik Christiansen (:What that that's incredible and what that brings to my mind is Travis and I were discussing what you when we talk about AI and where to implement is like okay where is the
What is the company in the future gonna look like? What are people gonna invest in? What are investors gonna put money into if it's just all AI? And it's the human mind. The fact that you were thinking, what can we do to automate our operation?
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah.
Erik Christiansen (:AI aside, it takes that human element to step back and go, okay, we can implement some strategies here to make our business more efficient. That's a perfect example.
Adam Tuttle (:Yep. Yeah. then if you, so like that, that was a hundred percent automation, right? But then what we tried to do, and we actually ran into some roadblocks. So, and it was just because of how like our license worked with chat GBT, but like there's road blocks can be overcome is after that, I would have chat GBT go out and find the domain. I would ask it to create me a summary.
of what does that business do, assuming that it's not like a freemium domain or things like that. But what does that business do? What are the offerings that they provide? Give me the last five news articles or blog posts that they have up.
and then drop that into a note for the rep. So therefore, instead of, now the rep's already got an automated email going out, creating the connection, talking about ActiveCampaign of how we're automating our own process, and now I'm giving them feedback, I'm saving them the research time so that what they can do is actually be human when they call that person.
Hey, Eric, see Justuno. Man, you've been in business a long time. You're one of the founders of Justuno. I that you like snowboarding. Like, you can go through all these things, right, and it gives you this information. We're not using AI to replace a person or automation. We're using the combination of these tools to make a human more human. And I think that's the piece that I would.
and I get a little passionate about it, but like I don't, I'm not trying to replace a person. What I'm trying to do is build their relationships with someone faster.
Erik Christiansen (:I love hearing that, know, humanizing element. Something we can discuss is LinkedIn. What I've been doing with my team is saying, look, find that person on LinkedIn and connect with them. So they see you're a person, they know who you are, and more importantly, when you do reach out,
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah.
Erik Christiansen (:they will be able to have a point of reference, an additional reference point of who this person is. So that when they do get that email from Adam, but then they just got right before that in their inbox a message, hey Adam, Tuttle just connected with you. It's like one, it's that one-to-one. So it helps build that relationship.
Adam Tuttle (:Yep.
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah, I actually just wrote a post about something similar to this this morning because I'd seen a post last night and kind of bugged me. It was basically saying like AI bots sending emails are like the problem with SDRs and AEs. was like, let's not pretend like AEs and SDR, BDR, whatever the title is. Let's not pretend sales emails have been something special for like years and years and the machine's breaking it. Like they're generic, they suck.
Let's just say, call it what it is. But what I kind of hit on was I've had two reach outs in the last couple of weeks that really stood out to me amongst the noise. And again, like you, probably get a bunch of day, get a bunch of connection requests. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so I'll get a bunch of connection requests. And it's usually like, hey, Adam, I want to connect with like-minded people.
As soon as I hit accept, because I accept every single person, so therefore my network's growing. But I accept every single person, and then all of sudden it's like, you know, it waits about five hours. It's like, hey, I think you'd be a good fit for my service, da da da, It's a lonely.
So I had one person on LinkedIn. I had made a post kind of ranting about something because I try to make my LinkedIn like when I think of something good or bad, I just write it out. Like if something bothers me, just to be honest, I never try to badmouth any person, but just like, hey, this was frustrating. And this rep saw that post, liked it, commented on it, and then reached out and made fun of the joke that I had made.
and kind of was like, yeah, but by the way...
Adam Tuttle (:Okay, it was like are you interested in like connecting? You know and she totally played off of what I said, and it was so funny So I responded back. I was like listen. I'm not a fit for your services, but like that was really good So she she took that humanizing just a little bit further where she actually looked at what I was posting Commented and then reached out is that hey we've been interacting And then the other person was I had actually made a comment on someone else's post an AI bot
scraped that, they sent me an email, a cold email, and he said, hey, I saw that you posted on this LinkedIn. People with your title often are good fits for what I do. Here's what I do. Do you think that this would work for you? And I was like, again, it gave me context. And that's what you're hitting on, right, is like when you have that relationship, you make the friendship, you're not just...
dropping your services in, you're like making a human connection. What you're doing is you're adding context. And that's where I think the machines often go wrong is it's all automated. It's streamlined in the process, but there's no context as to why it actually matters or how it's helping.
Erik Christiansen (:When you talk about the initial automated email that goes out from the rep, there's two benefits there. One, your marketing and ability of your software. That's something I always love, like dogfooding your own software. people, hey, we use, we built something that we ourselves use and here it is in action. We like to do that even with our own product, like on our site. And then the second is that the openness.
Adam Tuttle (:Yep.
Adam Tuttle (:Yep.
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah.
Erik Christiansen (:Like, look, hey, this is an automated email, but we're both benefiting from this. You're getting my immediate contact information. You know, you now have somebody and I'm not wasting my time. I'm leveraging this incredible software.
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah, no, I think that the hope that I had when we ran those tests originally was that we would see improvements, right? Certainly, that's what we wanted. And we actually had like a turn off plan. Like, hey, if the connection rate within one week drops by 2%, we kill it.
just it's done. We have to go back to the drawing boards. We had a kill switch ready to go. I think that the hypothesis was that there has been so much research done on speed to lead and the importance of speed to lead. So I think that it was taking advantage of data that we know in the market is valuable, speed to lead.
humanizing it a little bit saying hey this is a machine but I'm not a machine right I'm just using one to help me out the thing that made me and I've given this example to like a hundred different people because it made me so like nerdy and happy was the first day that we turned this on was on a weekend it was a holiday weekend in the US so it was a three-day weekend
a trial of active campaign at:Now, that is like a best case scenario. Like we hit the jackpot on one, right? Not everyone responded like that. But what it made me see was I've now improved the efficiency and the effectiveness of my team because we were sending out an email after hours. We now have engagement with someone instantly. We have their phone number from them asking us to call them.
Adam Tuttle (:And all we had to do is when they came in the next morning, they didn't have to do all of that legwork. All they had to do was make that first call, and the person's now expecting it from them. So it was a win, win, win, win, win, all the way down the board.
Erik Christiansen (:Well, you talked about working hours. We operate in a global community now. Can we touch on Australia for a bit? You spent three years there. reflecting back, would you take away from that experience, business-wise?
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah.
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah, love it. Love Australia.
Adam Tuttle (:Do you if I just give a smidge of context of why I was there? That would just, for the listener. Active Campaign was almost 300 employees. This was 2018. And we were opening our first international office. The focus of that office was customer support, customer success, and sales. And I was the only person in the company at that point who had done all of those jobs in some way, or form.
Erik Christiansen (:Yeah, okay.
Adam Tuttle (:You know, like my customer success stuff was a fraction of what it is or was even at that time, but like we had that, that role. So I volunteered. I had four kids ages eight, eight, five, and one. We just shipped everyone overseas for a few years and had the dream. And I ran specifically, I ran sales for Asia Pacific for active campaign. So that gives a little, little of context. I think.
man, there were so many lessons learned. I was there during the beginnings of COVID. So being in another country during that was interesting to see that not everyone reacted the same. For instance, in Australia, most people were back to the office within three months.
just living the life, at least in the part of Australia that we were in, the state we were in. That's actually a point to call it. Not all of Australia was that way. we're in New South Wales, where Sydney is. So we're in Sydney. Great surfing down there. I know that you love surfing. So that was interesting to see how businesses just operate on a different level. I think, to your point, Australians did not work 24-7.
Erik Christiansen (:state for you.
Adam Tuttle (:So I came out of the SAS golden age for America, right? Where like, yeah, everyone was just making money, hand over fist. It was just growing, growing, Active Campaign at that point was growing like 30 to 40 % a year. It was wild, just like, you know, was one on top of the other. And this is probably the greatest illustration of this. I moved over there in July. We're setting up the holiday party. Me and the other gentleman named Spencer that moved over there.
We're setting up the holiday party. We're pumped. We scheduled the holiday party on a Saturday. Because in the US it had always been on a Saturday. Well, if their people were literally like WTF, that's a weekend and that's my time. That's not the company's time. And they were gracious about it, but I definitely got some WTF remarks. like, very sternly was told like, moving forward, we'll have it on a Friday.
I was like, got it. Got it. So that was like one lesson learned was, you know, my expectation was, or like even over Christmas, the first Christmas I was there around like November, end of November, my sales team that I was running was like, so when are we taking off for Christmas? I like, what do you mean? We've got quotas to hit. They're like, no, no, no, no. Like we usually take off.
I was like, no, I need you in the office. Well, I didn't realize that the country of Australia, not sad, the country from December 14th through January 7th is a ghost town. Like cafes, restaurants, they just shut up down. They're done. Nope, they're not working. And so like, and I remember getting on the bus one morning. Normally I was on like a double length bus, know, a hundred people, standing room only, I get on seven people on the bus.
Nobody was going into work. And just recognizing that work-life balance means very different things to very different countries. I think that you can get away with, as an American, you can get away with a lot because we kind of lead the world in many, cases. But if you really, really want to be market effective,
Adam Tuttle (:you better learn how to speak the speak of the country. And that's not just a literal language. That is like their business practices and their business cultures. I just learned after that that my quota would be 50 % attainment in December. Didn't matter how hard we worked, we would have to try to fill in from like Asia, things like that. But like, I should have in New Zealand, no, Asta La Vista. So I think that that's like, there's a lot of lessons, but as you think about like,
marketing, selling to people in different countries and different places. There is certainly benefits to doing some due diligence and not assuming that they do business like you. Sending messages not on weekends, right? In some countries that's totally fine, others wait till Monday, be respectful of their weekend. You know, be respectful of their family time after hours. Like if I were marketing in the Australian market, although I do think it's changing some and I
Like but I mean this is a good thing like they prioritize their families and they prioritize their mental health by getting out and going to the beach like that's wonderful and If I were not sure I probably wouldn't send an email after 6 p.m. Ever unless it was like a transactional email. That would be the only use case right? And I would even say now I'm just thinking of this now dang it I should update our emails, but I would even say something like hey Understand that you're working hours of this. I will call you in this
time frame. Otherwise, just be sensitive to that.
Erik Christiansen (:when you went over there and set up.
we were considering the same thing and business operating hours for us, we'd get the tail end of their day. Do you see a benefit for your current customers that you had to being there during the working hours?
Adam Tuttle (:Oh yeah, 100%. When we went there, I think because we're in, still, they're still in office there, we still have team members on the ground. One, again, learning cultural differences. Australians love talking to Australians. They want to be their friend, they want to be like food mate, right?
If you can establish that relationship, and it's genuine, right? It's not a transaction. I'm talking like a genuine relationship. You have a very good chance of closing. Like very good chance. Obviously, you to have the right product offering and all of that stuff as well. But having a physical presence there literally meant something to our customers there. It also was a humongous selling point.
So for us be able to say, have an office here, we're investing in Australia, we're investing in New Zealand, we will operate in your working hours. That actually meant a lot to Australian customers, knowing that, especially for something like ActiveCampaign, where it can literally make or break your business, right? It is where the customer lives, it is where their data is stored in a lot of cases, it is how you market. People make a lot of money off of email marketing. They expect it to work, to be able to have support team members.
If I had to do anything, the sales team would be very important. I would probably start support first in Australia. Just to show we care.
Erik Christiansen (:There's something about that too, because there's this camaraderie amongst Australians that I love, where their competitors are their friends. And they talk about a word of mouth industry. They will recommend to their competitors to use a product that's working for themselves in business. That's something that completely...
Adam Tuttle (:Yes.
Yeah.
Adam Tuttle (:Yep.
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I remember like I met this gentleman at a conference, something or other. And we were kind of like mutually like, not, we weren't competitors, we were mutually beneficial. And he was just like, wow, I think my customers would do, I know a lot of them already use ActiveCampaign. He's like, I'm hosting a, like a monthly meetup in two weeks, why don't you come up to Brisbane, you know, fly up for the day and.
you can speak for like 30 minutes. I was like, oh sure, that'd be great. 50 people in the room. I was blown away and like literally half of them were like, we already use ActiveCampaign and they're standing up and saying, I already use ActiveCampaign. This platform is amazing. You should all use it too.
And it's like that again if they believe in something they will speak it from the mountaintops and But it's all about the relationship right like and that's it's really special like it's a really beautiful thing I I was on like when people would give me their cell phone number Customers and they wanted me to give them theirs. I did not like that first because I was like
my god, but they just want to pick up the phone and text you. Like it's not that they want to pander to you or like be a no- They just want to like- they want to be your friend. That's it. It was- it took me some getting used to but it was- it was truly beautiful.
Erik Christiansen (:I just spent a few days snowboarding with some Aussies and it was so much fun. It's a blast. Would, I've been thinking about it, would you recommend I pick up my family and go spend a year there?
Adam Tuttle (:It's the best.
Adam Tuttle (:I think yes, 100 % if you can make it work. pros and cons, right? So my boys were all really small. At that point they were all homeschooled. So it was really easy for us to jump in. We jumped in their school years, run on different cycles than ours do. So they literally start the school year at the start of the year. And so like, you know, where our started in the fall, things like that.
I think just know what you're getting into. That's really my best advice. My boys have so many flu... They talk about Australia almost every day.
We just hit four years of returning last week. they still talk about it. Even my eight-year-old, who was four years old when we came back, they still talk about the restaurants we went to. They still talked about the people we met. They still talk about some of the sales reps. They're like, I like that guy. He was really nice, things like that. I think that the mindset that we had, and this might not be for everyone, but when I started paying taxes in multiple countries, I got a financial plan.
and I went to them and I said, what do I need to have for when we come home because we're gonna need a new car. We kept our house, we needed, there was some, we knew that we were gonna have some pretty big expenses. He gave us a number and I said, great, I'm gonna save up for that, gonna spend everything else. And we lived our best life and we, because we knew that it was temporary, we knew that it wasn't forever.
We went to all of the cafes and cafe culture is humongous and I'll show you. We went to all of the museums.
Erik Christiansen (:I just learned that they absolutely love coffee. When comes to that coffee, they're claiming they are the extraordinary.
Adam Tuttle (:They are, they are. they, except they don't like what we drink, they would not consider coffee. They do not like American coffee at all. It's all like lattes, like milk-based espresso drinks. But like within our two blocks of our office in Sydney, we have 15 cafes that were all like top-notch. It was just amazing, you know? But so like I said, I, if...
I think at this point, my boys are older now. I've got high schoolers. I would never pull them out of high school at this point just because it would be really hard for them. But my wife and I are like, if we can afford it when we're older, we're 100 % going to live in Sydney for three months a year.
It was, was in a, and like my boys gotta go to Bali because I was speaking at a conference. I just paid for them to come with. They've traveled to, they've been all over the world because of that experience. And they've got to see the Great Barrier Reef and you know, national parks that were made out of volcanoes. Like just some incredible things. I'm unbelievably grateful for that experience. I feel so blessed. Like that's a one in a million lottery ticket. And I hit the jackpot on
I recognize that. I'm deeply, deeply grateful that I got to do it with them. But if you have that opportunity, or at least go spend a summer there, like, hell yes, please. It's unbelievable.
Erik Christiansen (:That's some choice words for Australia right there. There's some incredible things coming out of that country. When it comes to retail as well, I look at, I often talk about product innovation and I just looking around my house, my trampoline is a spring free trampoline. I wear shark bands.
Adam Tuttle (:the best.
Adam Tuttle (:Yep. Yep.
Erik Christiansen (:there's apparently sharks when you surf. But there's so many smart products that are coming out of there and great people. I'm really happy to hear you had a positive experience.
Adam Tuttle (:See you
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah, it's an amazing place and I could probably ramble on forever about all the... I mean the tech scene is growing there. I mean obviously like Atlas Inn comes out of Australia. Amazing, amazing tech company. Humongous, right? Like they're based out of there. I think the thing that I find with Australians is they're pretty scrappy.
Erik Christiansen (:Yeah.
Adam Tuttle (:just based on their history. They're a pretty scrappy bunch. And I love that. And I think that what seems to be shifting, and has shifted, is that I think for a long time, the tech world didn't take them seriously because they're a small country, right? It's like 27 million people, give or take. It's not a...
a colossal country, anything like that. But that doesn't sell them short. And I think that as the world has become more globalized and the 24 hour day is really a 24 hour day, I think that that has given them the end they needed. And there is a lot of innovation. There's a lot of hard work.
hard work coming out of that. They like to play hard, when they work, they work. And I think I would probably be more inclined if I had capital to invest in Australian tech companies than Amera right now, just because I think that they're a little scrappy. That's a bold statement. I don't have the money to invest, so it's all hearsay in the moment. That is my money that's being invested.
Erik Christiansen (:Well, you four kids. Adam, great catching up today. It's been too long. All right, well, special thanks to Adam. I'll do a proper closing later, post-editing. But unless there was anything specific you think we should touch on.
Adam Tuttle (:Same man, always a pleasure.
Adam Tuttle (:Yeah.
Adam Tuttle (:man, this was so much fun. Thank you.
