“Really thinking about the mental health of the people on your team, and what might be going on in their lives outside work, I think is something that is super important that we don’t necessarily talk enough about.”

Jacqui Murphy

A few months ago, I sat down with Jacqui Murphy, Chief Marketing Officer at Auvik Networks. We had a terrific conversation, covering a long list of marketing topics, but ran at out of time before we’d covered everything I hoped to discuss.

Thankfully, Jacqui—great person who she is—graciously agreed to sit down with me again to pick up where we left off.

Be sure to check out our complete episode library for more insightful conversations with great marketers!

As before, it was a very rewarding conversation, and I think we covered topics that are useful and important to all tech marketers—from relative newbies to experienced vets.

Here’s the ‘table of contents’…

• [0:42] A discussion about Jacqui’s major take-aways from the Growth Marketing Conference in San Francisco, particularly the importance of tweaking and optimizing now that Auvik has learned how to grow quickly, and how they’re applying those important lessons: “This year is about—keep growing, now that you know how to grow incredibly quickly—but you need to grow efficiently now. You need to take all of those programs that you launched last year and that team you built last year and you just need to make everything more efficient.”
• [3:37] The Growth Marketing Framework, a scientific approach to experimentation and investigation of metric optimization

“We’re really trying to instil that scientific growth methodology throughout the whole revenue side of the business now: marketing, sales, partner success, business development…”

• [5:22] The challenge of changing human behaviour within an organization, in pursuit of the experimentation and optimization strategies: “More people are learning the process, more people are learning the process, and by thinking in a more disciplined way about how we are trying to effect change, I would say we’re actually changing things in a better way—in a more methodical way.”
• [8:23] Don’t p-hack!
• [9:02] Google’s iterative approach to experimentation and optimization
• [12:57] Why it’s so important to get out of your local bubble and to have contacts and mentors who’ve done things before: “I would love to see more people in KW and in Canada going to the Bay Area on a regular basis—there is so much learning to be had and so many interesting people to speak with.”
• [14:10] In particular, Jacqui wanted to speak with people who’ve scaled companies from $20M to $100M:

“What are the pitfalls that I don’t know about, that I need to figure out now—I’d rather learn from other people’s mistakes.”

• [17:19] That Canadian companies often look back and regret not going international sooner, and other ways in which we can move faster
• [20:53] Auvik’s extremely effective (and cost-effective) Summer Treat Wave promotion campaign, in which they partner with other companies who sell into the Managed Service Provider market, to cost-effectively expand their market reach
• [27:03] Auvik’s first acquisition—Talaia Networks—and the hidden complexities and surprises that come with such projects (I got to share my own recent experiences, too!): “It’s amazing how many different teams an acquisition touches…all of the teams.”
• [36:24] A great conversation about recognizing that the people we work with are whole people, who have lives outside work: “Really thinking about the mental health of the people on your team, and what might be going on in their lives outside work, I think is something that is super important that we don’t necessarily talk enough about.”
• [41:04] How investing in a culture of caring, of empathy, and of trust is actually a great business strategy—one that creates subject and domain experts, and keeps turnover low, and breeds organizational resilience
• [45:12] The clarity of focus that comes with experience, and the ability or wisdom to recognize the things that matter: “I also will give a shout-out to age—the older I get, the less I care about the stupid shit.”
• [48:21] The uncomfortable—but very real and very important—subject of sexism in tech, from the daily ‘little things’ to the physically threatening

“I don’t think that there’s any silver bullet in terms of how we can stop this bad behaviour, other than just when you see it, call it out—male or female—when you see it, call it out.”

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Header/Featured photo credit: Auvik/Jacqui Murphy, and Matt Botsford on Unsplash