Full Funnel Conversion Optimization - With Guy Yalif, Founder and CEO - Intellimize

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We are joined by Guy Yalif, the founder and CEO of Intellimize, and a former colleague of mine many, many years ago. So today we'll be covering three main topic areas with Guy. First, the evolution of website personalization. Second, the metrics behind conversion optimization. And third, going beyond website conversion to customer and revenue optimization. Guy, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your background to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Guy Yalif** (1:11)
It all began 20 years ago when I worked with this amazing guy named Ray Reich. It's great to reconnect Ray. Very, very happy to be spending time together. Brief background, I used to design airplanes for living, and now I'm a kid at a candy store every time I fly. I then spent 10 years as a product guy, 10 years as a marketer, and then was privileged to found Intellimize with two friends I've known for 19 years. As a business, we intelligently optimize websites. We personalize them for each unique visitor in the moment to create high converting websites that drive revenue.

**Ray Rike** (1:44)
Well, first of all, I didn't know that you designed airplanes, so I guess that is why Intellimize is flying so high right now. But now that I'm done with my dad joke, we did meet back in 2002 in a, by the way, we didn't call it SAS back then, but it was a multi-tenant hosted application sold via an annual subscription at QRS, Quick Response Services. But before that, I had been part of the first generation of marketing automation software, even before Marketo. One of the first inventors of Marketo was Don Peppers. Don Peppers and his partner coined a phrase and wrote a book. This is 1994 guy called One-to-One Marketing.
And many first-generation marketing automation platforms tried to achieve that one-to-one relationship in a digital manner. So 20 plus years later, why are we still talking about trying to achieve web personalization on a one-to-one basis?

**Guy Yalif** (2:45)
Don is a legend. And boy, have we been talking about, oh, this is the year of one-to-one marketing forever. In my humble opinion, the biggest reason is that it's hard to do in practice. The biggest reason is that most of us spend most of our time thinking about segments and creating rules for them. If they're in this segment, show them that thing. Like, oh, on a website, as an example. If they're a high-value prospect, funnel them to sales. If they're a low-value prospect, keep them away from sales. Have them go to self-serve sign up. And in the 20 plus years since Don said that, I think the inputs to those rules have taken some time, but have gotten a lot more sophisticated. You know, in B2B, we have predicted lead scoring. We have de-anonymization of businesses and a bunch more. In B2C, you know, there's a whole bunch of privacy-inducing questions that enable us to know whom we're talking to more. So that's one. Two, us mere mortal marketers, we tend to top out at a few tens of rules. Like if we did a rule per city in the US, we'd have more than 100,000 rules to create and maintain over time, which no one can do. Machine learning can help here, but it's not what most people are used to. When marketing automation was teeing up personalized e-mails, I think that got to one-to-one sooner because you would take an individual's action and show them an experience with their name in it, but still it was segments with triggers. In ads, actually we'll talk about ads later on, but ads got there sooner. I feel like the science problem to do one-to-one marketing on websites instead of doing segment marketing is really hard because you don't have Google levels of traffic. The very last thing, people change. It's one thing to decide what to show each user. It's exponentially harder to decide what to show each user now versus a few minutes from now. The science to do that, I mean, we don't know of any that existed five years ago.
It's a challenge and problem to solve.

**Ray Rike** (4:47)
Interesting. B2B Marketers talk about your ideal customer profile. It's usually cohorting, account, firmographic, tentenegraphics, etc. into a segment. Then we talk about buyer persona. Now we have a different messaging and content for the CFO versus the CMO. You're taking it down to the next layer and it's based upon me as a unique individual and my historic activity engagement behavior on your web properties and off of your own web properties, Guy, or just on your own web assets and digital assets?