Interview
The Gist
- Narrative market fit is the future of SaaS marketing. Clio's success lies in creating a narrative that empowers its customers to think beyond their day-to-day, fostering a long-term vision for the industry.
- Customer obsession means truly understanding their pain points. Clio doesn't just sell software — it listens, educates and aligns its solutions with real customer struggles, creating lasting emotional resonance.
- Long-term vision is key to lasting success. Clio is focused on making decisions today that will ensure the company remains relevant and impactful for the next 100 years, not just the next quarter.
In this episode of The CMO Circle, Reagan Attle, Chief Marketing Officer at Clio, discusses how her company shifted from a legal tech tool into a powerful industry movement.
Reagan dives into the importance of a mission-driven marketing strategy, how Clio builds authentic emotional resonance with customers and why long-term brand strategy is the key to surviving in a fast-paced, ever-changing industry. If you're looking for actionable insights on how to go beyond just product features and build a movement that resonates with your audience, this is the conversation for you.
Table of Contents
- Episode Transcript
- Product-Market Fit vs Narrative-Market Fit
- Changing Behavior Through Trust and Education
- Prioritization and Long-Term Thinking in Marketing
- Customer Obsession at Scale
Episode Transcript
Michelle Hawley: Hi everybody and welcome back to another episode of the CMO Circle. I'm Michelle Hawley, your host and editorial director at CMSWire. Today we have with us Reagan Attle. She is the chief marketing officer at Clio.
Hi, Reagan. It's great to have you here today.
Reagan Attle: Great to be here, thanks for having me, Michelle.
Michelle: So we're going be talking a little bit about building a brand that goes beyond software and instead tries to create an industry movement. So a lot of software as a service companies, they build a toll and they hope somebody cares, but your focus as a marketer has been on creating a movement that reshapes the entire industry. So what strategies have worked for you in creating a movement that actually resonates with your audience?
Reagan: Yeah, absolutely. So we felt very intentional and very that it was very important for us to rally the legal industry around something that was bigger. And so what we've really done at Clio is it started with our mission. We early on created a mission that was bigger than software, bigger than us. And it was about transforming the legal experience for all, which is frankly more, it's bigger than what our, how our customers think on a daily basis. It's thinking about our customers' customers. So our core belief is really rooted in legal services should be accessible and efficient and client centered and everything we do is centers around that belief and that mission.
So whether it's product innovation or education or in marketing our thought leadership strategy, it is again anchored around that belief that legal services should be accessible. So we're building a marketing strategy that's not just about the tool execution, it's building education and helping lawyers and legal professionals think about their future of the legal practice, how they execute their relationship with their clients.
How they think about technology is then a critical partner and then executing that has been really important. So if we take a step back and we think about the tactics here, it's about thought leadership and really investing in the tools, the education, the materials that we can bring to our customer that helps them think beyond their day-to-day, helps them think beyond technology, helps them see Clio as a partner versus just that software provider.
Michelle: So I'm sure a lot of that would be understanding what your customers want, what their pain points are, their frustrations. So how do you go about creating emotional resonance with your audience in a way that's authentic and it stands out in a really crowded market?
Reagan: The emotional resonance piece, well... I think your customer has to believe that you care in order to emotionally resonate with them. Our customers need to believe that we care through our actions. And so what we're doing to show that we care or to bring that emotional resonance back to Clio is to actually care and to build the tools, to build the information to enable them.
We also look at how do we represent our brand to our customer-facing teams? How does our support team show up? How do they show that they care? How do they show that they resonate with the pain points of our clients? We spend time educating them on our value props and the things that matter to Clio.
We ensure that they understand our mission and what we're trying to accomplish. When we bring it back to our marketing execution, we really think about what our audience deals with day to day. Just for a little context, lawyers are, they have a tough job. They are one profession that is most impacted by mental health issues, by drug and alcohol abuse issues. And so, what we need to do is help create materials, information, a product that helps them on their day to day and educates them that there's a better way.
And so again, I think taking it back to our customers, really understanding what is their pain points, is their problems, are their challenges and figuring out how we as Clio can be thought leaders, can provide tools and assets, can enable our customer facing teams to work with them to solve for that.
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Product-Market Fit vs Narrative-Market Fit
Michelle: So a lot of people talk about product-market fit, but your focus is the narrative-market fit. Can you explain a little bit about what the difference is with that? And then how do you craft a story that your industry not only buys into, but it rallies behind?
Reagan: So it's an interesting way of framing. First and foremost, the legal industry is slow to change. It's historically been resistant to technology. And so going back to your first question, that meant we really needed to speak to our solution as a way that is both you know, aspirational, but practical and tied back to what their ultimate pain points are and how we're going to change that.
So a few ways that we do that is, you number one, we lead with data. We have a very educated audience that is, you know, our learners by nature. And so we lean into that. Every year we've developed our legal trends report that provides the industry and our customers with insights that they just can't ignore. So we're not just telling them a story that you have to believe, we're actually giving them a very practical and very realistic view of the industry and the things that they need to do differently to be successful. Our narrative is really about empowerment.
So, and not about fear. Again, you're dealing with an industry that's slow to change, that the stakes are high. If they make a mistake, it can easily go into a larger issue that affects their career. And so for us, have to talk to them with that, with hope, with empowerment, with focus on the outcome if they don't adopt technology and what they stand to gain. You know, they stand to gain more time. They stand to gain happier customers. They stand to gain stronger financials. And so we focus on that positivity and the outcomes of what that change will do to bring credibility to our product.
And I think the last thing is we really keep our customers' voice central to our story. We know that as Clio, we can talk about the things that they can do differently and the things that they can evolve into. But really our customers that have been successful doing that are our most effective champions of adoption. And so we tell our customer stories. Share, have, you know, referral programs and advocacy programs. And we really support the channels that are speaking to what our solution can do because, again, we think our customers need to hear it straight from their peers.
Changing Behavior Through Trust and Education
Michelle: A lot of software companies like to talk about disrupting industries. For a lot of them, it's just adding new features to existing workflows. I think we're seeing that a lot with AI right now. People are taking something, they're embedding some AI features and they're like, hey, we have this whole new product, it's going to change everything. But really, it's not that much different. So how do you actually change behaviors and expectations across an industry?
Reagan: Well, we've done that and it's taken us time and we continue to invest in that.
I think, you know, shifting behaviors and moving folks through change is really starts with trust. If you want to, you know, demonstrate that your solutions are the right solutions, you have to show your solutions in a way that builds that trust. So in our industry, it's about security, it's about reliability, it's about ensuring that they're able to do their job better, not worse or not even the same as what they were doing before. I think trust is earned through showing.
So how do we show client outcomes? How do we show the journey? How do we be proactive with communicating the expectations that they'll see throughout the journey? We spend a lot of time on education. Education is a huge part of shifting behavior. So it's about not just providing the software to enable these lawyers, it's providing the resources, the training, the community where they can share best practices and information with, as I said, their peers.
So, I keep mentioning this, but such a big part of our strategy is around thought leadership. It's about showing not saying. It's about believing that our customers can do differently and can do better and bringing them through that journey. And look, change is incremental. We've been, Clio has been here since 2008. We are still educating on many of the same things that we've educated, you know, 18, 17 years ago. And, you know it takes time, but it is something that we found to be very successful and very important when you're taking an industry, a customer, through a big shift.
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Prioritization and Long-Term Thinking in Marketing
Michelle: So taking a step back a little bit and kind of looking at the internal operations or how your marketing team operates, how do you decide what to focus on when everything feels like a priority?
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Reagan: My team will laugh at me. But at the end of the day, prioritization is the key. We prioritize around impact. So I have a saying that impact over activities, really being looking at, it's easy to say I've done this, that, this, that, this, that, this, that, this, that. It's harder to say what I've done has this impact on what we're trying to accomplish.
So, reviewing the things that we're doing to understand what the impact is. We're a very data-focused team, have as sophisticated attribution as we can. We spend a lot of time reviewing what's working, what's not. That helps craft what our priorities look like in the following month, day, quarter, year. It just depends.
I think also thinking long-term is really key. if you're only thinking short term, then everything can end up being a priority. But thinking long term, you're also thinking about what the impact can be. I think about this over the course of a year or the course of two years, that might spin up a different priority because of that.
Like I said, priorities are really important, but using the impact to understand what yours are is how we do it.
Michelle: Talking about long-term strategy, if part of that strategy is to scale up operations, how do you go about doing that without letting hyper growth burn out your team or your brand?
Reagan: So there's a saying that's like hypergrowth requires, hypergrowth of a company requires hypergrowth of the people within it. I probably got that half right. But what that saying is, is that when a company is going through hypergrowth, I really believe that it creates a requirement for the employees within it to go along that journey and to really grow and develop yourself so you can have a continued big impact. And that can be hard. That can be taxing. And I absolutely recognize that, but it can be a lot of fun too. And it can be such an accelerator in folks' careers.
So, you know, part of it is how do we avoid burnout? Well, we try to put things in perspective, you know, we try to prioritize, which I've already chatted about. But we also have to recognize that the there's some really, really positive things that come from being a part of a company that's this exciting, being a part of a company that has this much impact. And you know, how do you, what are you getting personally from investing your time and effort into that?
Michelle: With hypergrowth, I'm sure there's a lot of confusion that can occur during that. Things are moving fast, things might be changing fast. How can you make sure that your employees can keep their heads on straight and stay focused on the long-term goal?
Reagan: Yeah, absolutely. So again, very rooted in our mission. Our mission is our ultimate. And we remind our employees of that on a regular basis, but it's an ethos of who we are in our company. We also use OKR frameworks to really provide clarity for our teams and our company what the key priorities are for our business and what we're ultimately trying to do with our strategy.
And those don't shift. Our strategy doesn't shift. They might evolve. They might get broader and bigger and more specific in some areas. But they're pretty consistent. And so we then take our company OKRs and we create marketing OKRs off of them. And we do this on a quarterly basis. And so we're able to go, how is our work contributing to the company priorities and things we've identified as the most important? And how do we measure that and how do we reflect on that in a timely way that allows us to reshift, refocus, complete and move on? And so it provides that anchoring point for folks around what they should focus on, what's most important to both the marketing and the company ultimately.
Michelle: A lot of software companies have a shelf life. They burn bright at first and then they kind of fizzle out. I think we're going to see that with AI going back to that again. So many companies came out promoting these AI platforms. I've seen predictions that this year there's going to be a lot of companies closing, mergers and acquisitions. How do you make sure, like what's your long game for making sure that your brand stays the course for the next however many years to come?
Reagan: I've been doing this for a while, so I've seen all the ups and downs and dips and valleys the markets, of companies, and you know, I think what you're saying is really real. But what I really love about Clio is we actually have a very clear, I guess, communication around this. We're building a hundred year endurance. That's what we set as a framework for how we think about what we're trying to build here. Hopefully last longer than 100 years. I won't be here to see that, but I believe that there's the opportunity to anchor around how do we make decisions that a company that wants to be here and have a credible impact on the legal industry, how do we make decisions that align to that?
And we've made a lot of decisions that align to that. And I think it just shows in, when you start making those decisions across the company, it starts to show in how individuals make decisions. And so we talk about what we're trying to do. We share what we're trying to do. We bring it up in our OKRs, in our decision-making matrices. And again, it goes back to that.
There's some short-term things that we should be doing, and then there's some long-term things that we should be doing. And how do we enable people, the time and place, to value the long-term strategies and to value the long-term priorities, and how do we give them the space and time to do that?
Michelle: Yeah, I think that's always a challenge in marketing, valuing the long term because you don't see the payoff as soon as with the short term.
Reagan: We have, I mean, and I think the really interesting thing is about that is it's usually the long-term things that you can't measure. And so when you're part of a very data-driven marketing organization, those things are easily, they can be lost, right? Because you're measuring and you're looking on a monthly basis, what's driving MQLs and what's driving revenue for the business. But we also, I believe marketing is half data, half science, half, what's that saying? Gosh, I'm terrible at saying. It's art and half science. Marketing is half art, half science. And you really need to ensure that you're thinking through those things that are long-term, that are a bit of art and making sure that you're spending time investing in those and creating space for your team to invest in those.
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Customer Obsession at Scale
Michelle: One more question kind of about customer obsession. And you've talked a bit about understanding your customers, actually caring about your customers and what you're providing for them. So what does it really mean to be customer obsessed at scale?
Reagan: I don't know if I see customer at scale as different than customer obsessed. I think the difference is that when you have 10 customers, there's an opportunity to do a lot of one-on-one things. Then when you're as large as us with over 150,000 customers, you have to think about it a little bit differently in terms of some of the programs that you roll out that can touch multiple people at a time, but at the end of the day, if you're really customer obsessed, you're still spending that one-on-one time, regardless of the size. And you're bringing back those insights that you get from that one-on-one time, those one-on-one moments, those one-on-one insights, and you're thinking about, how does that translate into something that I can use for multiple customers or that I can bring into my product that can have, you know, and ultimately an impact to multiple customers.
So I think, I think scaling, finding programs at scale is interesting and important at our site certainly, but still spending that one-on-one time is invaluable and critical.
Michelle: Do you see other software companies in the industry when they have that hyper growth and experience, is the customer centricity something you see that's often lost?
Reagan: I mean, I it depends. would have a hard time blanketing all companies. I think it can. I think there's a series of things that can happen when scaling an organization and when you're focused on growing, is usually a company of our size, you are focused on growing. But we're really focused on growing with the impact of our mission. And so it allows for us to be able to tie that back. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say that not everybody has that. And I spend very little time thinking about when people are maybe not doing it the way I would do it.
Michelle: Well, thank you for being here today. It was great hearing your expertise.
Reagan: Thank you so much, Michelle. It's been great chatting with you.
Michelle: Thank you everyone for tuning into this episode of the CMO Circle. As always, don't forget to check back next month for an all new episode. And if you're interested in seeing more, check out our other CMSWire TV shows. See ya.
