 Live from San Jose, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Wall. Welcome back to San Jose, California. Wrapping up our coverage here at QuickBooks Connect 2016, along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE here on SiliconANGLE TV, the flagship broadcast, and we're joined by Terry Hicks with the Chief Product Officer of Infusionsoft. And Terry, thanks for joining us here. Thanks for having me. We appreciate, by the way, show floor might look a little empty behind us. Keynotes, the afternoon keynote is still going on. Malcolm Gladwell, who we saw earlier on theCUBE, was talking just a little bit earlier. All right, so Terry, Infusionsoft. We've talked a lot about accounting needs of small business and payroll needs, what have you. But you have that sales and marketing niche carved out. Tell us a little bit about how you're filling that Infusionsoft for the small business community. Right. Well, what we offer is customer relationship management, marketing automation, e-commerce, payments, and analytics. So that really it focuses on, you know, there's three big problems in small businesses. How much money do I have? Do I have enough fuel to run my business? Do I have the right team in place? But probably the number one problem for small businesses is getting and keeping customers. And so that's what we focus on, is building engagement between small businesses and their prospects and customers so that they can continue to grow their business. And a lot of small businesses fail on good intentions, right? So by using our tools and marketing automation, we can kind of reduce the risk of failing to follow through and follow up with your customers. And so it doesn't have to be an intention that you want to connect with your customers. It becomes a reality in how you run your business every day, and that really helps. Give me a real world example. The level of service that I can get, like if I have a circle this big, I want a circle this big, I want a circle this big. How that works, kind of where your borders are, where you start, where you stop all of that. Because, I mean, it sounds like you're providing obviously need, but at the same time, people have budgets and they have concerns. The oyster's only, the world's only so big, right? Yeah, absolutely. Well, what we try to do is package our products so that it meets the range of customer needs, depending on how they go to market with their clients. So, if you have a direct sales force, we have a CRM package that is very much focused on managing the flow of prospects through to customers. And then also the CRM is used to serve those customers and make sure nothing's falling through the cracks when it comes to delivering on your service. So that's kind of in our base level of our product is the CRM. Now, if you have an e-commerce business, or you have a more advanced sales team, then you can move up and get additional functionality. That's, so that's one dimension. You get more functionality as you go up and that meets the needs, depending on what kind of business you are. And then also, because there's a wide variation in terms of small businesses, they range from zero employees all the way up to 100 plus. So we also have pricing that flexes based on the size and complexity. How many customers are you contacting? How many contacts do you have? How many times are you reaching out to those customers each month? So really, it allows small businesses to find the solution that's right for them and the price point that fits in their budget and meets their needs. The marketing automation piece is great. It's a classic marketing line, right? I think I waste 50% of my marketing budget. I just don't know which 50%. So what are some of the tools that you can empower small businesses with that before they didn't have the sophistication, they didn't have access to the software. It was too expensive or big that now they can leverage via cloud and integration with QuickBooks. Well, one of the things we try to do is design all of our software for wherever the customer is because like many, most of the time, small businesses get into a business because of their passion. They're a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. That's what they know, right? They know that domain. They don't typically know sales and marketing. So what we need to do is design the software that removes sort of the domain complexity and allows them to get the benefit without kind of having to come up a big learning curve. They don't have to get a marketing degree to figure out how to use our software. Now the way we try to do that is we start with goals. Most small business owners kind of know what the improvements are that they want to make in their business. They know, you know what, look, I need to get more leads in my business and then I want to have a clear process for following up with that. So in our marketing automation software, it starts with a goal. And then you just simply map out, like in the ideal journey of my customer, what are the different, you know, based on what a customer does, what are the next, what are the ways in which I should follow up with that customer and the software automates that. So really you think about it as we allow a customer to lay out the steps and then click into those steps and provide their content. What are their key marketing messages? What's their pricing? Who are the customers they're targeting? What is their branding, logo, color, tech key messages? And so in a very short period of time, they can lay out their ideal way in which they would take a customer that comes in through a particular lead channel and then say, here's the follow-up I want to work with them on in order to get them to become a customer versus a prospect. It's those that are arranged around campaigns, that are arranged around, I guess what is it, kind of how is it arranged in terms of the execution? It's a great question. The way it's arranged is, again, by goals and the goals are related to different stages in the customer life cycle. So whether you're thinking about getting new customers, improving the conversion rate of your leads to customers or whether you're trying to re-engage customers to get referrals, so the goals are really aligned to what are you trying to accomplish in your business to improve your sales? And so that's how it's really arranged. And so then you can form individual campaigns that are against each of those goals. Ideally, you might find a small business with four to seven different campaigns that they're running that connect with and communicate with customers that are at different stages in that perfect customer life cycle. And are most of your customers, is this kind of their first touch into marketing automation or do they have some experience with some other tool and it's really the story of the integration or some other story that separates you guys? Yeah, a lot of times small businesses start with a very simple, they start kind of with, okay, I know I want to email my customers, I know I want to text my customers, so they'll start with one of the email providers whether it's constant contact or MailChimp, especially if they've never run a small business before. So they're kind of like booting themselves up and figuring out what are the marketing tactics that they should be taking place. So that's very common for a brand new small business. Often our customers, though, this might be their second or third or fourth small business and so now they have a little bit more sophistication so they may start with us. It just depends on where they are in their sophistication as a small business owner. So how big is your business? How many people you have working for you? We have 625 employees, we serve 32,000 small businesses around the world and we are about 100 million in revenue. So and the market here, I assume you're here for a number of purposes, right? What are you finding out about this audience this week? What are you trying to get at besides business? But in terms of what are you hearing from customers or prospective customers? In terms of what you're going to take back to your business and fine-tune? Well, there's a couple of different things. Number one, I already emphasize that there are really three problems that small businesses face, getting and growing their customers, managing their cash flow and getting the right people to work on their business with them. And so when we talk to small businesses here at QuickBooks Connect, we're hearing that same theme and we're using that as an opportunity to understand, well, are you using these kinds of tools today and if so, why? And what do you like about it? What don't you like about it? And if not, why not? You know, what's the barrier? So it really helps us improve our value proposition. I talked about we try to really focus on the customer and the problem that they're trying to solve and deepen our understanding of that. So it's always great to listen to your target customer. Now the other thing is most small businesses use more than one solution to run their business. So one of the most requested integrations for us is Infusionsoft with QuickBooks. Because, you know, you need to have a good bookkeeping and accounting solution along with a customer management solution. But if you look around the floor here, whether it's downtown or uptown, there are other parts of the puzzle that small businesses are using. So it's an opportunity for us to connect with partners in the small business ecosystem and say, how can we breathe these things together in a more powerful way that will bring simplicity and ease to the lives of our small businesses as well? So that's another big part of it. And of course, you know, into it, I'm an ex-intuit employee. I've worked there for 15 years. And so, you know, I'm very proud of what I accomplished when I was there, but also what the company continues to accomplish in terms of being a leader in focusing on the needs of small businesses and solving those problems. So, you know, the conversation just helps you trigger additional thoughts about how we can innovate and be inspired and solve the needs of our customers and of our partners in better and more powerful ways. And, you know, the power of going to, because the knock on trying to serve small business is, you know, the cost of sales is so hard, they're hard to get to, they're distributed, you know, how do you get them? And then have a product that's expensive enough to make it worthwhile, but really doing it this way through a platform like Intuit with an ecosystem is a very different go-to-market for you, because you're already kind of built into a mall, if you will, a platform that they're already there and looking to build out more completeness on the solution. So how has that, you know, really impacted what you've been able to do at Infusionsoft? Well, I think we're kind of at the beginning of that journey with Intuit, you know, and leveraging that platform. We kind of did it the hard way and built our customer base up by reaching out and finding small businesses in, you know, kind of a different realm. You know, QuickBooks customers come more through, you know, a financial set of advisors and we've been coming more through the marketing experts kind of advisors. So, but there is a very, there's a lot of similarity. So just like small businesses are not domain experts, typically in sales and marketing tactics and strategies, and they're not typically experts in accounting and bookkeeping. And so what really has helped us grow our customer base is our advisor network, which are marketing experts that support small businesses. That's been a great strategy. Now, one of the things that we hope to leverage in Intuit is that the accountants are such a trusted advisor that if they know about our solution and they trust it and they know about our ecosystem of marketing experts, that there could be real power in those networks coming together and complimenting one another in terms of how they're serving small businesses and getting them to success. Yeah, and in theory, if the software's doing more of the low level work for the accountant, those are the conversations he's having with the client around building your business, customer retention, lifetime value to customer, cash flow, the things that are directly impacted by that product. Well, in a lot of ways, the information that's in the infusion source system is a very strong compliment to the information that's in QuickBooks system. And so you want to bring those two things together so that the accountant or the marketing expert can advise small businesses much more completely in terms of what are the most important key performance metrics and how are you performing relative to other businesses like yours and really help them to up their game by looking at the data. So as into it changes its products and comes, we've heard several announcements over the course of the last 24 hours. I mean, what does that do for you in terms of what adaptations you have to make? And then obviously there's the customer reaction as well and how they have to adapt to what's going on. Well, in one way, I mean, it's just inspiring. I mean, what Sasan showed earlier today about a vision of the future of being more natural language kind of interface and really one that is helping you to solve a problem isn't inspiring. That's the goal we all hope for because as I said, small businesses are not necessarily experts in these areas. They have questions and they're time-starved. They have questions so they're plenty smart enough to really double down and study that area and figure out how to solve the problem. But because they're time-starved, they're really looking for smarter tools to help do that. So one thing is, it's just inspiring into it going in that way. And so how can we be part of the system that helps deliver on that vision and promise? And then be a contributor to, our own innovation should be a contributor to how we can make that world even better. I mean, when we think about our product development efforts, machine learning is a key driver and artificial intelligence is a key driver of what we're trying to do. I mean, we need to look into the insights of the 32, you know, we need to draw insights out of the 32,000 small businesses that are currently using our products, see the thousands of campaigns, the tens of thousands of campaigns they're running, see where the best practices are, see where small businesses can make improvements to the campaign and then make those recommendations. So the small business owner isn't guessing how can I get better results from my campaign. We're advising them on here's the two or three things that you should test next. This worked pretty well, gave you a 10% lift. Now let's go for 15, try these three things and let's see how that works. Well, it's just a great example and we've heard this time and time again today about the ecosystem and the symbiotic relationships within it and how ultimately the benefit goes to the customer but also the community grows and the community expands its capabilities. And so it really is, as you said, inspiring in that respect and obviously you're 15 years into it, you've put the pretty good use in infusion software. Yeah, I mean I learned most of what I know about small business while working it into it and that passion for helping small business succeed as the backbone of economies all around the world. When I showed up at Infusionsoft, I saw kindred spirit. So Infusionsoft and Intuit are both really champions of small businesses and should be working together to help them grow. The enthusiasm comes through, that's for sure. Terry, thanks for being with us. Thank you very much. Best of luck down the road. All righty, great talking to you guys. Terry Hooks from Infusionsoft and we're back with some final thoughts here from Quick Book Connects 2016 in San Jose in just a bit. You're watching theCUBE.