An interview with Antoine Rage, CEO at Mention
We sit down with Antoine Rage, CEO at Mention. Mention is the leading tool for brand monitoring, social listening and reputation management for enterprises and agencies.
How did you end up at Mention and what problem does Mention solve for its clients?
Hired 4 years ago. Mention is a Social Listening platform. It enables brands and agencies to monitor the web, listen to their audience and manage social media.
As the CEO, what are your main responsibilities at Mention?
Align owners and employes objectives. Structure the company to meet our targets. Facilitate each employee work making sure they are supported the best way to bring value.
How do you lead your team to organize and improve the marketing-sales process to increase sales and enhance the customer experience?
We love saying to be successful we need to focus on People, Product & Profits in this order. In any project, we will Care (customers, employees, stakeholders...), then empower each individual so we can Pursue our NorthStars. In this specific matter, we will make sure together with all stakeholders who gets knowledge (individual contributors, managers, Board) we have the best people and process in place + develop our product meeting the customer needs. Once this done, sales (profits) should naturally come.
At ColdFire, when we look at our clients' Marketing and Advertising strategies, they vary greatly. Some have found a single, scalable client acquisition process while others thrive on a mix of top-of-funnel strategies. How would you summarize the overarching revenue-focused strategy of Mention, and what key elements does it encompass?
Our revenue comes only from inbound. Organic traffic is generated thanks to our marketing efforts (SEO, content...). Prospects end up visiting our website and then do a free trial when our value proposition is meeting their need. According to their needs, customers can either purchase and use our tool on a self-service motion or have the support of our commercial team to pick the right plan and then be consulted while using the platform. Simple acquisition model and adjusted support for conversion and adoption according to the customer profile and needs.
What is an efficient marketing technique that you've implemented at Mention or previous companies, which you believe is underutilized by most management teams - and why do you think that is?
Qualitative content creation and stand-alone tools who can bring value to prospects while also understanding the value proposition of our paying Product.
Has your C-level team experimented with some kind of cold outbound strategy (like cold email)? If yes what was the general outcome and if no, why not?
We tried in the past without success. Our low ACV and lack of culture on this type of acquisition made us focus on strengthening our inbound value prop instead of building another acquisition machine.
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