Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at TripActions, on creating the #PassThePlane Challenge

Brian Bosche:
Hi everyone. This is Brian Bosche with the Creative BTS Podcast. And I am so excited to welcome on Meagen Eisenberg from TripActions today. Meagen, how are you doing?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Doing well. Good to be here.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. And I'd love to kick off, you have a long career, a very impressive background and career. So I would love for you to kind of give a quick overview of what you've done to become the chief marketing officer of TripActions.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Sure. So I've been at TripActions for about a year as their CMO. Prior to this year, I was at MongoDB for four years as their CMO. And we took them public in 2017. And before that, I was at Docusign, which is also doing quite well in the markets these days as we do digital transformation. I was there for three and a half years as their VP of demand gen. And also, over this course, I've been an advisor to about 20 different tech companies, mostly B to B, a couple B to C. And I've seen I think seven acquisitions in the last two years, and three of them go out of business, so I've seen both sides of it. But yes, it keeps you fresh, and I think there's nothing like being at a tech startup.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. I mean, for me being at a startup for five years, and now at a larger company, Smartsheet, it is really interesting how with so many employees, you can get sucked into the company and not really see out of it. So seeing what startups are working on is a great way to kind of find the different ways companies are approaching the market.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes, so true.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. So to start off with, I would love to just learn a little bit more about TripActions. So you joined a year ago. What kind of prompted you to get excited about this company and kind of the mission going forward?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. So we believe in the in person connection, really bringing those things that bring people together and move people, businesses and ideas forward. The irony of we are in business travel, so things are on hold, but we actually believe the mission still stands because if you think about it, it's to move businesses forward, and all of us need to move our businesses forward in the next couple months.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. And so is Zoom almost your biggest competitor right now? Moving away from-

Meagen Eisenberg:
No. Actually, Zoom's a customer.

Brian Bosche:
Oh, that's great.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah, yeah. We are mutual customers.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. So there's always a balance between in person and doing Zoom. I think a lot of people are feeling the Zoom burnout right now. And I was always like, "I can do everything from Zoom," but the in person energy does matter so much, and I feel that right now, for sure.

Meagen Eisenberg:
There's an Oxford economics study that's out right now that talks about the value of business travel and how it will negatively impact companies and their revenue this year if we don't get back out on the road with our customers.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, totally understandable. Coming in, this is your first year as the CMO. What kind of things were you thinking about when you joined, building the brand, building the marketing department? Take me through a little bit of the last year and your thought process there.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Sure. So we grew from 10 to 50 in the first year. And really, it was building out the team functionally. We built out the product marketing team, the corporate marketing, social media, influencers. We built out our systems. We added probably 25 different technologies to our martech stack.

Brian Bosche:
Wow.

Meagen Eisenberg:
We might even be at 30 right now, so we really rely, we believe and in tech and the innovation and the advantage that tech gives you. And then the creative side, we added creative resources and we expanded globally in Europe, EMEA, and Asia. So those teams all built out, as well as field marketing. Now we've cut back a little bit on the events side, as you can imagine. But marketing is that balance of art and science, so your art, your brand, but the science is the demand gen having predictable pipeline. And you need those different functions to bring that to market and make sure that you're driving the demand, the inbound. But if people don't know about you and haven't heard about you, you haven't done the awareness balance, you won't bring in the demand. So you really have to have all of those functions up and running, so we were doing that and scaling. I mean, the company added over 800 people last year, up to 1100. [crosstalk 00:04:17].

Brian Bosche:
Give us an idea of the stage of TripActions. I know you've raised hundreds of millions in the last couple years. So where are you at as a company in terms of your stage?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. So we're five years, and we've taken a little over 480 million. We did the very large round in June of 280. So I would say we're a mature startup.

Brian Bosche:
Mature. Yeah, well, after five years, we got to eight people at Slope, so 480 million and hundreds of employees is a pretty impressive growth rate there.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes. Yeah, the hit product market fit pretty early, and are very aggressive on making sure they're focused on our customers and what they need.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. And so how does that change through these different giant funding rounds, your outlook on marketing the company? As you hit these stages, is there different focuses? Or walk me through that a little bit.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I think in the early, early stage, you're mostly focused on product marketing because you're trying to find product market fit. You're understanding your buyers, the personas. Who are your first 20 customers? Why do they buy? What are the key things to sell to the next 100 customers? So I think you start up very heavy in product marketing. And then as you start to grow and you get awareness and take traction, you take on your first 1000 customers. And we have 4000 customers now. You start to, you really have to be thoughtful of your brand. And you have to align the entire company around one story as the marketing, so that's product, that's engineering.

Brian Bosche:
It's so hard.

Meagen Eisenberg:
That's marketing and sales. And so I think you ebb and flow into, you're going between product marketing, brand, demand gen. Right? Because once you have product market fit, you need to scale and you need to take market share. And you do that through demand gen, and so you need those three pillars on your team. And usually, not one person has all, so as you build out your teams, you bring in experts in each of the functions to build it out.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And having the one story is something that I see every CMO, every marketing team, to go back to, is it starts to get repetitive when you're on the marketing side because you hear it so much. It's almost like a VC pitch too, when you're a startup. You're like, "I'm saying the same thing over and over," but you have to. People just have to keep hearing it over and over.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes, because as you hit new people, they haven't heard it over and over. Actually, I think people change the story too fast and thinking that it's getting stale. It should change as your product and your product market fit needs to change, then you can adjust your story.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. I mean, if you can-

Meagen Eisenberg:
If it's not resonating, you should adjust your story for sure.

Brian Bosche:
Yes. But if you can get a sales person to just instantly recite what the brand mission is, that is rare and very difficult. So if you're at that stage, you definitely have found something success.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes, yes.

Brian Bosche:
So diving in a little bit more to TripActions, B to B, travel management. So you're in the travel industry. We're obviously in a global pandemic right now. So industries are being affected in many different ways. I'm at Smartsheet, Zoom, Slack, Teams, those collaboration tools seem to be really taking off. But for TripActions, travel is going down. Reading some articles from your CEO, it seems like you're still making sales, accounts are going up because companies want better ways to manage this once we get out of the pandemic. But travel is kind of on hold for now. So how have you kind of pivoted your marketing to kind of match where we're currently at in our current climate?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. So we are a business travel and expense platform, so we also have a corporate card called TripActions Liquid. And right now-

Brian Bosche:
I saw that. Amazing.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. More than ever, you actually need to track your expenses and control costs. And CFOs is at very much top of mind. And imagine if you don't have everyone on a corporate card, and they're spending and you don't know your expenses until a month later. There actually are some legit expenses for people at home. They're expensing their monitors, maybe you're allowing them to expense lunch. There's different things that people need. And as we start to come out of the lockdown, we will do local travel. We will meet people for dinner. We'll do small groups. Maybe we'll do rental cars. And so I'm making sure we're giving them the right tools for their employees, so they can put the right expense policy in place, and then have realtime data, where they're not waiting for someone to submit receipts. It's automatically showing up on the platform that you're using.

Meagen Eisenberg:
The other things is, as travel started to get impacted six, seven weeks ago, we quickly pivoted for what our customers needed. We always had a duty of care when you had a live traveler map, and you knew where your travelers were at. And you could locate, and you could see and run all the reports on future travel. But we didn't have things like blacklisting locations and routes, and bringing in realtime data from the CDC. So our engineering time over a weekend built out a connection to the CDC and brought in level one, two, and three countries, because as you imagine, first it was Asia. And there was a couple countries in Europe, then it was Europe, then UK. And as it went across the world, as a travel manager, you need to quickly block your travelers from booking future travel, and so they built that out.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Then they allowed to blacklist, so you could blacklist certain routes, continents, countries, cities, airports. And then your finance team needs to understand the impact financially, so we built out a lot of reports so they could see credits when you cancel flights, and what that looked like in carrying that cost. And so the smart thing our company did, and being a very tech agile company, we built the functionality that the new product market fit for the world that's coming. And we'll reverse it, right? As the world starts to open back up, we call it route based recovery. They'll build that out.

Meagen Eisenberg:
And so from a marketing standpoint, I need to launch those features and make sure our customers know that they're available to them and they can use them. And then prospects, who found themselves in a situation where they were unmanaged, now need to manage. Can you imagine if you didn't have a platform people were on? You didn't know who was traveling where. You can't go to consumer sites and pull that data. How do you get it? And so you're right, our sales have actually gone up. We had our second largest month in March because people who had unmanaged needed managed. And larger companies needed better visibility and data on their platform. And so while, yes, we're usage based, and revenue's not coming in from those, as we climb out of this, we will see the revenue on that return.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. I didn't even think about people aren't traveling, but that means there's mass cancellations and rescheduling that still have to be managed.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes.

Brian Bosche:
So even though people aren't actually getting on the planes, you still have a tremendous management problem that you have to solve.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes.

Brian Bosche:
And kudos to your team to reacting so quickly to that because it's very difficult to change so quickly across the entire company. Are you seeing anything about how kind of you're focused on maybe demand gen, versus product marketing, versus brand right now? Are you focused more on the product marketing to support the launches of those new products? Is that focus changing at all? Maybe pull away from brand.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Actually, I think more than ever, content and enablement and pipeline matters more than ever. So from a product marketing standpoint, as we launched all these new products and features, we needed to enable the field. We needed to update our website. We need to rewrite all our copy and make sure it's very on ... It's to what people need and not tone deaf, so product marketing was busy taking all the new product stuff that we're releasing and enabling the field. Corporate marketing was busy updating our website and social and all of that. And then you want to create content because people right now are at home searching for information. We launched a community, community.tripactions.com. That allowed people to quickly search on any topic around coronavirus and brought a lot of people in to look at it and be able to contribute and find information.

Meagen Eisenberg:
You need to bond with your customers now. They are trying to learn, trying to get information. And you want to be that trusted resource to them. It's not always about money. It's about building, and that's where I think your brand comes in. Are you delivering value that they need in the moment? And when they start to travel again, and when they start to do other things, they'll remember who their trusted partner was and who helped them get home, who helped them get the reports they needed, all of that. So product marketing's a go, brand is a go.

Meagen Eisenberg:
And then of course, you have to be smart about building pipeline and demand. It's different. You're not going to run events if ... We had big plans for events this year. One, you cut budget like everyone else did, so that was an easy cut. But you're shifting to more online office hours to bring value to CFOs, the procurement officers, to travel managers. We're bringing them together to exchange ideas. That's a new way. Direct mail, you can't send it to their office anymore. But there's all these creative things people are doing to bring, to still get direct mail. I actually had Matt Heinz is targeting on marketing practices and consulting. And he sent an email, I'm starting a CMO book club. Do you want to join in? We'll send you your first book, and then we can talk about it in a few weeks. I gave my personal address. Right?

Brian Bosche:
Yeah.

Meagen Eisenberg:
You're going to add value. I love that. Right now, we need to learn more than ever. Continual learning is a big deal. People, in times of recession and depression, they go back to community college and they learn and they retool because they want to come out when the market comes back up, and they need a job. They need new skills. It's a new environment. And so as businesses, we need to provide training and course work, and maybe certifications right now, making our target audience even better at their job and what they did before, because I know they're home. They're a captive audience. Maybe they're bored. A lot of people want to learn and maybe even be distracted, so let's help them get out of here stronger. This week, we launched TripActions Academy, so for travel managers and EAs, so they can be experts around policy management, business travel, continuity, running these reports, all those topics.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Those are two very common themes I see, where it's almost most marketing teams I've talked to now are shifting to value add. How do we help? How do we give value add? And then even for ... I'm in a lot of marketing communities where there's new grads coming out and trying to apply to marketing jobs or creative jobs. And there's just not a lot available right now. So the advice is always go back and retool. Gain a new skill. Make yourself a multifaceted marketer. Or maybe you're weak on data analysis, or maybe you're weak on the creative side, and just adding to that. So any way to add to helping educate, and even if you're in a current position and you just want to adapt to the new world, the people are hungry for that right now.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes.

Brian Bosche:
And talking about kind of collaborating as a team, it sounds like you're launching a lot of stuff right now.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes, we're busy.

Brian Bosche:
Which is very busy, and you're spread across multiple locations. So talk me through a little bit kind of how your team is structured, where the different officers where marketers are, and your creative teams. Everyone's working from home. We'd just love to hear kind of how, and even how you've structured product demand, brand. Are they all under one umbrella? How do you structure things at TripActions?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. So I have it structured functionally, so I have a product marketing team. I have a corp com brand team. I have a growth demand gen team, systems team, and then Europe and Asia. I would say 40% of the team is in San Francisco, 30% ... I mean, if we were in an office, 30% is in Palo Alto. I've got a couple people in the Midwest. I've got a couple people in London, Sydney. We've always had the ability to collaborate and work. I think the trick is aligning everyone around the same goals and I'm very clear on priorities. And we have a stand up meeting in the morning to reiterate. What are the things we're focused on? What's the progress we've made? And then we bring the team together to check in. So it's a new world, but there's some cool things people are doing. I like the emoji check in on Slack. People, you just ask for emoji check in, and people kind of put how they're feeling.

Brian Bosche:
Oh, I like that.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah, there's some cool things that people are experimenting with. We do a Zoom walk, as long as people socially distance. We get in and we walk around our neighborhood, our house, our apartment.

Brian Bosche:
Together?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes, all on Zoom. And you can see some people are walking by water. Some people are walking on their sidewalk. They're not near people, but they're outside. They're walking with their kids, or they're walking their dog, so it's cool to see.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. It's been nice on Zooms. I feel like I've gotten to know my team a lot better because I can see homes, neighborhoods, kids, dogs.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. It is true.

Brian Bosche:
It's kind of nice. You see the personality more.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. It's true. I think we'll come out of this stronger.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. And as the CMO, do you have VPs from each of those departments kind of rolling up in that morning standup? Or what is that actually like practically?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I have my VPs are in, and we check through what we're working on. We raise any flags we might have. And we have a brainstorming. I think one key part about this time is you need to constantly brainstorm and come up with new ideas, fresh. It's a different world. And I want people to be looking at social media, looking at consumer marketing. How can we apply what they're doing? What got your attention? What made you read that? What email did you see? What LinkedIn post? Because those are the things if you reacted, there's probably a version of that for B to B. And you want to be creative. There's a lot of noise out there, and people I think appreciate authentic, creative, we care about you, in a way. I don't know. We're all humans. Right?

Brian Bosche:
Yes.

Meagen Eisenberg:
So we want something that we need to be lifted up a little bit.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. I've been in B to B for a while as well. And it's all just humans. There's no B to C, B to B, really. Everyone is human, especially now where you're at home all the time. So yeah, what catches your attention on Instagram or on Twitter is going to be the same whether it's a B to B company or B to C.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes.

Brian Bosche:
So there's not too much there.

Meagen Eisenberg:
We saw some of the B to C companies, like McDonald's was separating their arch. Kind of their public service PSA announcement was let's do a little social distancing. So we took our circle and square, which were all about bringing people together, the circles and squares, but we separated it and said, "Hey, let's put it apart for a couple weeks," and hashtag social distancing. Those are the types of things that you can help with what we're trying to do right now to protect people.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. And a lot of people don't have insights into kind of: What is a day to day of a CMO like? So when you're in these stand ups, how do you view your role and where you can have the most value right now is across the teams?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's a balance of tough love and motivation. Right? These are kind of tough times, but you have to make sure your team's focused. You can't afford for productivity to drop and people to get caught up in what's happening. You need to help them focus and move forward. And then you also need to motivate them and cheer them on. And we're working hard. I think within the first couple weeks of this, it's 15 hour days. We're working weekends. We're trying to make sure that we're supporting all the cool things we're doing with products, [inaudible 00:19:17] our sales team, doing right by what we need to do. And so the team's been really busy. So as the leader, it's a balance, making sure you're clear and aligned on goals, and you're marching forward, but also, you're cheering them on.

Brian Bosche:
Having the empathy.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes, yeah.

Brian Bosche:
And have the empathy for maybe what they're going through.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Definitely, yeah. It's a messed up time.

Brian Bosche:
Yes. And so Creative BTS, we love to behind the scenes on specific campaigns, so people have actionable or whatever buzzword, to actually take forward on these learnings. So would love to hear a little bit more about pass the plane challenge. That campaign, I've seen it across social media. It reminds me of a lot of the B to C Tik Tok challenges I see you doing, where you're making videos yourself.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Love Tik Tok.

Brian Bosche:
And kind of the user generated content. So yeah, take me through kind of the high level of pass the plane.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I mean, we were in the first week or so of everyone working from home and working remote in this kind of new world, we were trying to ... And just like everything that was going on in the market, and there's layoffs and furloughs, and it's a tough time to be in the travel industry. And so we wondered, "What can we do?" How can we connect? We're all on Zoom. What are the creative things that we could do? And we're brainstorming. And someone came up with this idea of let's build paper airplanes. Let's throw it at each other. And we can't be together, but how can we connect while being apart? And so we went home that weekend and we started to build paper airplanes and video us building them, and then throwing it.

Meagen Eisenberg:
And then we created a video of throwing it. And then the next person created a video of throwing it to the next person, and they ... Even with families, I have three kids, my kids started doing it. They were having so much fun building these airplanes and going in the yard and throwing them. And my dad, he's isolated right now because of everything going on. He's 74. And I challenged him, and he videoed himself. He propped the camera up, making an airplane, and then throwing it. And he threw it to my nephew in Albuquerque, and so he got involved in it. It really brought it home for me when I saw my family doing it, and what we needed. We're trying to homeschool right now. We're trying to work. And it's relevant to us. We're airplanes. We're hotels. We're travel. And so we kicked that off, and we launched it for the company. And while we were launching it, we saw our across the board support agents, or travels agents. We saw our sales team and products start building planes. Our executives got involved.

Meagen Eisenberg:
And we build a micro site for pass the plane. We created a Facebook page and had a bunch of people come to it. Twitter, by the way, is hot. I don't know if you've noticed, the last five or six weeks, I'm all over it. I'm learning. I'm reading. They must have triple the traffic right now. We're all engaging on there. It's quick, easy, these little pop up town squares, where we can talk about a topic. And we saw it take off there. People started posting it on LinkedIn, so it's like it went through personal networks and then it went through our business network.

Brian Bosche:
Went through the business.

Meagen Eisenberg:
And our partners got involved. We saw flight attendants make it. We saw the points guy got on there, Brian Kelly. That was so fun. Best of Road with Carolyn [inaudible 00:22:24] and her team. So it was just this amazing thing and we've seen over five million on it.

Brian Bosche:
Whoa.

Meagen Eisenberg:
So it's got this really great reach, and I think it just lifts your spirits. It's just something that we can all do. You all have a piece of paper somewhere, or bill, take that bill and throw it. We had construction paper, so it was kind of fun.

Brian Bosche:
And for the actual challenge itself, the premise is you can get creative, build whatever paper airplane you want with whatever papers. You can put your own individual flair on it. You tag people, so I've seen people write on the paper airplane, tag people on the post. They'll throw it, and then I see the other people film catching the airplane as if someone's throwing it, grab it, and then they make their own and throw it to the next person. So it's kind of creating that chain.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. It's really cool. I saw someone in Spain send one, then someone in Germany send one. It's also globally understood. But it's such a concept that is not just US. It's a worldwide thing, and people get it. And also, it's nostalgic. I've found in the last five weeks, I'm very nostalgic, looking at photos, thinking about life.

Brian Bosche:
A lot of us are right now.

Meagen Eisenberg:
What our core is, what our values are. Think about: What do you really need in life? What matters? You're home having dinner with your kids and your family probably more than ever before. And if you're homeschooling, you're realizing how much work that is. You have a deep appreciation for teachers. There's a lot.

Brian Bosche:
Well, this definitely makes me nostalgic for in elementary school, we had Barnaby the bear that we'd send to different schools around the world. And they'd take a picture.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Oh, my gosh. Yes.

Brian Bosche:
They'd send it back, and then you'd take care of it for a while. And then you're like, "Oh, we've all had the bear."

Meagen Eisenberg:
I forgot about it. Yes.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, we all have had ... It brings those different classrooms together. This was before video conferencing, so it's almost like the modern video Zoom conference version of that.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes, very true.

Brian Bosche:
So to go into it a little bit more, you said you're into brainstorming. Who's in that brainstorming meeting? Do you work with agencies? Are you working with just the VPs? Who comes together to actually create that idea? What's that room look like?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I mean, that particular brainstorm was my kind of direct, there was eight or nine of us talking through it. But even on my all hands for marketing, almost every all hands, one or two days, three days a week, at this current rate, I always open up brainstorm. I want to hear your ideas. What are you thinking? What have you seen cool? Take that moment for expansive thinking. I think so many times we execute, or we have an idea, but people kind of tear it down before it has a chance to take off. And so creating a space where it's no bad ideas, it's expansive, just riff on it. Do your best to make it successful. We can go back and reduce it later. But let's just throw all the ideas out there and see what sticks.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. So it's your sourcing from anyone across the company. But for a lot of these meetings, it's also the directs to kind of have the balance between the two.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes.

Brian Bosche:
And once you say, "Okay. This is a great idea," you kind of go through the brain loops over the weekend on kind of stewing on it a bit. Is there a certain team that took this and ran with it? Is it product marketing? Is it corporate communicate? Who kind of takes the lead on something like this?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. So I will say I think we brainstormed this on Thursday and built it over the weekend.

Brian Bosche:
Wow.

Meagen Eisenberg:
So it's a mix. It's sort of like launching a product. Once you have an idea, so corporate communications, social and coms band with the messaging and that. And our creative team started building the landing pages. Everyone on the team made their own video, so that was sort of like every single person was challenged to make their own video.

Brian Bosche:
Proof of concept a little bit.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes, challenge the company on it. And then the web team built out all the web stuff. Coms reached out to all our influencers to get ready to tag them and organize groups to tag people.

Brian Bosche:
I saw that.

Meagen Eisenberg:
We enabled the filed to let them know it was coming. Our execs got involved. They all created videos. So just like you launch a product, almost everyone in marketing has a role in it. And then once you launch it, you're putting it out over all the channels that people would. I don't think we sent an email on it, but we did all the social channels and LinkedIn and Slack. And we got our CAB involved, which our customer advisory board, and we tagged them. It was good.

Brian Bosche:
Yep. [inaudible 00:26:50] the influencers because I saw that and I was like, "How do they ... You don't see B to B influencers that much." But let's go back to that. To start off with though, a lot of marketing creative teams I talk to, it's hard for them to get approval on these creative ideas. Now you have the luxury of being the CMO. So when you're involved in the idea creation, it's a lot easier. But how did you get ... Do you have to run it by the different executives? How does this kind of get approval to kind of move forward? Or any general advice on kind of getting those approvals when you're not directly involved.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I mean, I certainly think if you're the CMO, you should be empowered to take it. That being said, I brought it up in our executive team. I said, "Hey, we have this fun idea. We're going to launch it. As I get more information, I'll share it with you guys, but would love to have you involved." Our COO loved it. He sent, he created planes with his kids, sent a video and tagged it. So it was, I don't know, I think if it's a good idea, it'll take fire. Right? If people, if you've got something that people love, they'll see it. I would, in these times, I actually think you need to move really fast. And anyone who does analysis paralysis, it's too late. You need to move really fast. You need to be smart. You can't be tone deaf. But if you hired smart and good people, you should trust them to take something and run with it.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, or you lose the opportunity. It just happens so fast.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes. Yeah. I always think about the, I don't know, it was a couple years ago, but dunking in the dark with the Oreo cooking, how fast they moved on that when the lights went out.

Brian Bosche:
Was that the Super Bowl?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes.

Brian Bosche:
The Super Bowl where the lights went out in New Orleans. Yeah.

Meagen Eisenberg:
I mean, so smart. Right? They took the moment. Or the Peloton ad where the vodka company got the same actress to then go to a bar with her girlfriends, just the smart ... Someone had an opportunity and seized it. If they had waited and gotten approval. And what does this mean? Are we going to upset? It wouldn't. But here, they took that moment and quickly turned it into something. That's what I think makes great marketing and also is the art and the fun part. It's great to have all the plans and execute and do all the things you're supposed to do, but it's fun when you get to do just spur of the moment creative ideas.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. I talk to a lot of sports marketing teams, and they have to ... If there's a home run hit, or if there's a trade, you have to jump on it so fast. Or I always think of ... I think Uber may be a more negative example, but when Uber had the search pricing with the airports, when everyone was kind of restricted. And then Lyft, it seemed like in one hour of launch, their free rides to JFK campaign. We completely missed on that stuff.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Seize the moment, yep.

Brian Bosche:
Just one day even is too slow. And it sounds like you were able to set up a structure of your marketing team over the course of the year to enable this type of speed.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes.

Brian Bosche:
Can you touch on that a little bit? If you come in new, or you don't have these processes in place, how else would you move this fast?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I mean, like I said, I think you have to organize it like launch of products. And we've probably launched a product every month, maybe every two months. We're constantly building and innovating and creating new things. And so the team just operates. It's like you're playing on a sports team. You all have a position. Right? And you can't play soccer with one person. Right? It takes the whole team, and so everyone has a position on the field. And when we go, you might have a captain on the field, and you might have functions, but everyone knows what needs to get done. And then you go through it.

Brian Bosche:
Yep. And so you mentioned building out micro sites for the social media posts. Obviously, a lot of user generated content to kind of build that swell. But what were the different elements of this campaign specifically? And how did you incorporate influencers into that? Because I saw some huge accounts create these and kind of spur that on.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I mean, the different elements, certainly landing page with a Facebook page, we created handles, which like an Instagram handle for pass the plane, a group in LinkedIn, a handle for Twitter. And we also didn't heavy brand it ourselves because we wanted to be able to make it not ours, but everyone, the industry, and we even invited our competitors to join in. So we definitely wanted it to not ... We wanted to include anyone and everyone and to just tap into what was happening at that time, so that was part of it. We had a communications plan in some ways, where we divided up the marketing team, and we gave them each 10 people to go tag just to help out. We trained people on stuff, just did social activation.

Brian Bosche:
Did you really target kind of Twitter, Instagram, to start with, and then saw a natural? Or did you just hope that people would use this across any platform?

Meagen Eisenberg:
We actually targeted Facebook first for the videos and everything to live on in a group because Twitter doesn't really necessarily have a group type thing where you can peek in and see where it's going. But we knew that videos work almost anywhere and that we could post them on Instagram. We could post them and tag it to Facebook. We could post them on Twitter. LinkedIn, we knew would be great. I think Listicles work well on LinkedIn.

Brian Bosche:
Did you see any Tik Tok traction? I'm a huge fan of Tik Tok as well.

Meagen Eisenberg:
We did. We did.

Brian Bosche:
You did? People are doing it on Tik Tok?

Meagen Eisenberg:
I did a Tik Tok.

Brian Bosche:
I'll have to check it out.

Meagen Eisenberg:
I did it with our head of social media and our head of coms. And we did, because I was here and I did SFO to Seattle down to Palm Springs. And we passed the plane around. Yeah, we don't have that many videos on Tik Tok for TripActions, but we have some, and that's on there. I have a handle where I put one on. Yeah, having kids, 10, eight, and five, they're all over Tik Tok.

Brian Bosche:
Really? That early?

Meagen Eisenberg:
I mean, these dances, oh my goodness. Savage, or whatever, I tried to do it. I pulled a muscle. It's hard.

Brian Bosche:
I started my account I think nine months ago just doing creative tips every day. And it is a pretty special creative community.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes.

Brian Bosche:
And you can grow really fast. I'm slaving away on Twitter for years, and you get a couple thousand followers. And you can get tens of thousands in a day on Tik Tok. But a lot of B to B brands, they're not quite there yet. I think the demographic may be a little too young right now. But I see everyone during quarantine is posting their own Tik Toks on Twitter, so that might change.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I've learned a lot from my kids. They're always begging me. I won't actually let them have a handle, but I have one, and then I'll let them use mine to post. Yeah.

Brian Bosche:
Well, it's almost a good place to source ideas. You can kind of see what types of things, dynamics go viral. Pass the plane's a good example. This is a very viral, shareable thing that you have enough creative ... You have an actual structure as a creator, where you know what you're supposed to do. But there's enough creative individuality that can come into it, which is the perfect little recipe that you see on Tik Tok just going viral on those trends every day. I could go on Tik Tok B to B forever, so we can move on a bit. But going after these influencers, going through to post this content, what is the goal there? Once this campaign's over, once you get through this, what were some of the key metrics that your team has set up, where you say this is really a success or not?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I mean, I would normally say on marketing campaigns, "What's your success criteria? Measure it. Did you hit it?" We've certainly looked at some of the stats, but we didn't set up metrics of success in this particular case. It was showing solidarity in the industry. It was partners, competitors in the travel industry took a hit. There's something sad about it. Right? But we still want to be connected. We're all used to being on the road, road warriors, traveling. We missed our airports and even the airport food, which sounds odd. But those favorite restaurants you found if you had to go to New York all the time.

Meagen Eisenberg:
And so we didn't set up metrics for success out of the gate. And I don't even know that I have metrics for success. I feel excited by what happened with it. 5.1 million reach and growing, every day it keeps more and more. I think that's amazing. How it made us feel, people that have tagged and said, "Oh, I saw that. I love seeing the videos," seeing partners or people like a group in the Philippines did really like a two and a half minute video between, I don't know, eight or nine people.

Brian Bosche:
Whoa.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Seeing that, those sort of things, I think matter a lot. And our company, just our morale as a company and coming together and passing it. I think those are all things that maybe are not measurable, but are worth a lot.

Brian Bosche:
And when you're seeing that and you're continuing to add to it, how do you keep it going? What's the maintenance like on this type of campaign? Do you kind of roll it out? Yeah, go ahead.

Meagen Eisenberg:
As we see the videos we posted out on all the channels, so we continue to do that. We continue to like, post, share, invite others and tag people. I would say in the first two weeks, I was obsessed. I was looking for the videos. I was just having ... It was really part of an enjoyment for me to go look at all the channels and find it. Now I'll go about once or twice a day and just check what's going on.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, that makes sense. There's always a life cycle to these things.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes.

Brian Bosche:
And it's fun to see them and to see them continue moving forward. With this, everyone's working from home right now. You're across multiple locations. What has collaboration been like on all these different creative elements? It's harder now to go through the review and approval process and get feedback on creative work. How are you kind of managing that creative collaboration as a team? Even anything from the micro site to the videos you're posting.

Meagen Eisenberg:
We always are ... Review and approval actually is the same as it was before because we've always had remote resources, not in the office. I have an alias that hits all the directors and above in marketing. And all you need is two directors and above to approve.

Brian Bosche:
Okay. So it's having that set process up front helps a lot. Many people don't.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Well, but by sending it to everyone, directors and above, we all see it. So we all have a chance to look at it. And I actually look at every single thing that goes to that alias. I will look and make sure that to approve it, I may actually send an approval to the person. But I review everything that goes out because that's the final touch point. And that's an opportunity, if you're in coms, you catch a messaging thing, a design thing. If you're in product marketing, you make sure it's on message. If you're systems, you've got it. If you're in social media, everyone has a chance. And we really reduce the amount of errors of anything going out. And we align as a team when all your leads are on an approval alias, even though they only need two. And some people will think, "Oh, that slows it down." No, we can get approvals back in five minutes because we have access to 10 people to approve something. Right?

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Got it.

Meagen Eisenberg:
We only need two. So I love that, and it doesn't matter where you are to send it to that alias, we all see it.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, that's interesting because I haven't seen ... You try to definitely balance visibility across the team and leadership with speed. And that's always the balance, is we want people to see this, but we don't want too many cooks in the kitchen. So that does sound if you have the right team in place and good reviewers, the fair, effective reviewers, giving everyone ... That seems like a good solution to giving visibility while keeping the speed up. I haven't actually heard that before. Interesting. And any challenges in that collaboration process? Top challenge you've seen.

Meagen Eisenberg:
I think the desire to actually be in person. While we're making do with this all over Zoom and video conferencing, there's nothing like having the energy of your team in the room and the feeling connected and appreciated, and the smiles and-

Brian Bosche:
Just the energy in those rooms, it's fun. Yeah.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I mean, we're making do with it, but I only imagine if we were all together, even what more could come and will come from it. So I think that's one. And then the other challenge is your just budget. Right? Everyone's cut budget. People cut head count budget in the last couple weeks. And so being smart about your money, trying to do things that don't cost money, trying to ... Influencers are very helpful. They have a reach and a network, and working with them and hoping that they tap in and like your idea to help you is I think a challenge you need to be ready for. Right?

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Well, instead of taking on this enormous production yourself and creating all these videos, having these user generated content challenges is a good way to do that, especially being ... Yeah, it helps a lot to do that. You see a lot of different companies doing that, especially sports now. I feel like ESPN is all just trick shots now of people doing it at home. But yeah, it seems like ... So B to B influencers, as we round out our time here, did you have those preselected? It sounded like you did from previous campaigns.

Meagen Eisenberg:
We work with a lot of influencers in the market. They're part of the travel industry. They've spoken at events. And they work with our partners. And we work with all the suppliers, the airlines, the hotels, and all the inventory that we would have on our platform. So I don't know that we selected them ahead of time, but they were a natural extension of us. And they were dealing all with the same things we're dealing with.

Brian Bosche:
And I assume there's a lot of travel influencers. That's one of the most popular topics across influencers. And all your target customers are following those people because they have a passion for travel.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes, yes.

Brian Bosche:
So that's a nice fit. A lot of B to B companies struggle with that. Who's the smart sheet influencer? Are people following the project management nerds and experts out there? Which isn't as popular of a topic than travel, but that sounds like a nice fit even with the B to B company. It makes a lot of sense. Okay, so moving forward, we're obviously still in this pandemic. Future's very unclear. How do you see this affecting the TripActions brand moving forward? And kind of what is your outlook moving forward on how are you going to market this to your audience?

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yeah. I mean, people want to connect. They're going to get back to travel. We're already seeing countries start to get their plans ready and the different stages. We will continue to focus on what our customers need to get back to business. We will help them with route based recovery and give them the information they need to safely allow their travelers to travel, to create policies for essential travel versus nonessential, to make sure that they have the information. There's going to be, your executives are going to need to travel. You're going to go see your customers. You're sales team is going to need to travel. These $100,000 deals are not going to happen over video conferencing, at least not at the speed at which you need them to. There's nothing like the relationship building side of it. So our company is positioning and building for what we need for when we come out of this in the next month or so. And I think that's the right approach, and to continue to focus on our customers and what they need.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. And it sounds like you're launching products very quickly, both on marketing side and on the engineering side, where I love what you said earlier. Now more than ever, you need to have more control and more insight into the travel policies, travel practices, expenses especially. And it's not going to go away just because travel may be restricted or kind of taking a much longer time to come back, but that [inaudible 00:42:56] makes a lot of sense. Great. Any parting shots for the marketing creative audiences out there? I like to always reserve a little time for that.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes. Of course, you have to do pass the plane, hashtag pass the plane. Please go find us. If you're not on Facebook, find us on LinkedIn. Just search. Take a quick video. It is fun.

Brian Bosche:
I'll do a Tik Tok.

Meagen Eisenberg:
You'll enjoy it. Or Tik Tok, you have to tag me. I'm @meisenberg. Or follow me on Twitter. Follow us at TripActions, you'll see it too. Or pass the plane handle. But yeah, I invite everyone to do this. It's awesome to do with your kids, even with your company.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, across our team, it sounds fun as well. I need to send paper airplanes to my team.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Yes. I would love it. And then send me the video.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Sounds good. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Meagen. I really appreciate it. And best of luck going forward.

Meagen Eisenberg:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.