In this episode, we’re joined by Lina Tonk, Chief Marketing Officer at Recurly, the leading subscription management platform helping brands unlock recurring revenue at scale.
Lina shares how Recurly empowers companies across industries—from airlines to fashion—to innovate with subscription models and elevate the subscriber experience. She talks about the power of partnerships, the critical alignment between marketing, sales, and product, and why marketing should own the full pipeline. With practical examples and sharp strategic thinking, Lina offers a fresh perspective on what it takes to drive growth in the subscription economy.
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The Business of Marketing podcast is brought to you by Path 7 in partnership with Advertising Week. Path 7 helps brands scale partner marketing with seamless content distribution, real-time lead data, and consistent brand experiences, powered by partners built for performance.
So I’m delighted to welcome Lina to this edition of the Business of Marketing podcast here recorded live at Advertising Week Europe. Lina, thank you for joining us today.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s nice to be here, being in London, and it’s an amazing place to be right now. It’s buzzing today, day one.
So tell us a little bit about your role and tell us about the business and why you exist.
Yes, so the role itself, I’ve been with Recurly for about a year. Actually, I’m about to hit my one-year anniversary. Congratulations. So yeah, we have been in subscriptions management and an exciting time for the market too. I actually come from HCM tech, which to me was just as exciting. I’ve always been in SaaS tech, but subscriptions had me really intrigued. The market had so much to unlock and it had so much opportunity, fast-moving market with so many different brands and verticals coming through out of nowhere. I think a lot of people think subscriptions and they think streaming and that’s uniquely to it and it is everywhere right now. And I think it’s going to continue to take off.
But a little bit about me. So before Recurly, I spent almost a decade on HR tech. I spent some time on benefits. Some of my time was spent in sales, short period of time. I lost a bet. There’s a long story about that. We’re not going to talk about it. But it kind of gave me a great view of how sales feels about their roles every day, what they go through, how they carry a bag. So probably one of the reasons I worked so well and closely to CROs today. But passion to me, lots of things. I’m very marketing driven with data, being close to the customers. Loyalty is important to me. So Recurly was to me a perfect fit initially because of the market, but also the product. I fell in love with the product. I wanted to find a product that we could just really expose out to the world globally. And yeah, it’s an exciting time there for us.
Yeah, it certainly is. And we’ll get more into that in a minute. But I think the kind of ubiquity of subscription, the ubiquity of SaaS, as you said, the dominant kind of role it plays now on almost every business today.
Who are you trying to reach as Recurly and how do you go to market?
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting now because like I said, it’s not when people think of subscriptions, they used to think streaming, right? We can go out right now to the world and there’s just so many different verticals. I come off of a meeting this morning with airlines and they’re trying to open up their unlock the future revenue streams through subscriptions, which back when you wouldn’t even think about airlines doing that. We work really closely. We’ve had one of our customers, Alaska Airlines, just acquire Hawaiian Airlines too. But how creative they have been able to become while running subscriptions with us, it’s probably one of the coolest thing I would say about subscriptions.
Tell us more about that.
Yeah. So I think when I even me, when I first joined the subscription market, to me, I was like, okay, I’ll sign up and then you leave and you go. That’s it. But it’s the creativity that merchants have to have today to go after it. So for example, let’s talk about an airline as an example. They can get so creative. They can get creative with subscriptions on bags, subscriptions on loyalty programs, subscriptions on seats. And they’re just trying to unlock what thatworld looks like. Every merchant almost has that opportunity today, but it’s a beast too. Like, as a subscription management billing for us engagement, we’re doing it pretty much all today. You have to have the ability to provide everything they’re gonna run into. So if you told me early on, you know Recurly from back in the day or early days, when you look at it back then and today, you wouldn’t have thought that, for example, the flexibility of payments will come into such a standard that has to happen.
So if you want to grow globally, you better know that you have to become so flexible on payments and what you’re offering. That’s a big one right now, and that you have to be innovating for them all the time.
We have what I call subscription newbies and subscription old timers. The subscription old timers have known subscriptions forever; this is what they grew up doing, so they understand the back end of it very well. But the newbies are coming in. Most growth marketers, growth of companies are coming in and they’re being told, “We need a new revenue stream; let’s go through subscriptions; let’s get creative; let’s go unlock it.” So it can get quite tricky for them because then, and this is probably where our tagline works really well, that is “get ahead of what’s next.”
That is our role on all this is showing them with all the data and the trends that we see on the data that we have: this is what we believe it’s going; this is where we believe you could go; and how do we do better within our own software to provide insights to guide the way for them? Because it’s so unlimited right now.
I love this concept of unlock, right? You know, at the end of the day, the market is only ever going to be so big. And you know, at the end of the day, you know your acquisition kind of, you know, right doesn’t, you know, make sense anymore in terms of the CAC and so forth, right? So it’s like how do you unlock? Yes, and you’re enabling and empowering your customers to do that, right?
And even the fact that you’re using the word creativity, I think is tremendously exciting. Can you tell me a little bit more about, you know, whether it’s the airline use case or another one? Like, give me some of those examples of kind of, you know, people being really creative with the data and your kind of support in terms of unlocking new forms of a new way to think about subscription?
Yes, well, I just had a chat with this another big brand with us, Newly, who I don’t know if you know it well here just yet, but it’s in the US right now, and they’re Urban Outfitters. So what they did is they created a model to rent clothing, so it’s brilliant. We have a bunch of those, you know, all over the world, right? Like the box of the month and you get your clothing and whatnot. But I think what is very special about Newly is it’s become big, big. They are trying to unlock the next stage of what they will do.
As they were renting clothing, they realized that there were so many possibilities, which this is another one that is really good on making the subscriber experience the best it can be. So how do I make that subscriber feel things, do things to stay with us? I’m a Newly subscriber; I actually, they became a customer of ours. We just renewed them, and I absolutely love the brand because I use it.
As a subscriber, I’ve seen their progress on unlocking for me. For example, one of the things that they do is people are demanding, and that’s the thing: subscribers continue to demand more and more. They are demanding that when they return their box, they immediately get to order their next box. Well, what does Newly have to do to be able to enable that? Well, go to Recurly and say, “How do we build this in the back end? How do you make this work for us?” Well, here’s how brilliant this is: you arrive with your box to drop it off, and when you’re arriving at the store alone, you can unlock your new box, and it’s all done through that unlocking of building it behind the scenes so thatsubscribers have that experience they absolutely love it. I was gonna say, I mean, what a delightful experience you’re creating. Yes. How important are partners to Recurly? We live in ecosystems, right? So tell me a little bit about how you think about the role of partnerships in your growth strategy.
Yeah. So, so important. I just actually walk here from a meeting with WorldPay, which was an excellent meeting. Our partnerships are so important to us. So today we have so many partners by our side where what is important, and this meeting specifically we talked about this, is the value that we’re able to provide them and the value that they’re able to provide their own customers by bringing Recurly into the table and us doing the same thing. There is a need for WorldPay when you sit down and talk through it. So how do I make that connection and how do I make that partnership? Like I said to WorldPay today, how do we make that partnership be a friendship? How do we like connect with each other so we can do good for each other?
PayPal, Avalara, Adyen, like they’re all very important partnerships to us. And what’s really good about it is the value that together we can provide our own customers. So it’s not uniquely to, I need to do things for Adyen or we want to do things for each other. But who ends up getting the final value is the customer. Not the partner, not us. To me, that’s like where it all comes together.
So partnership is to Recurly today, we see it as a great opportunity and I’m starting one of the reasons I’m actually here for this meeting as well. And we plan to get, the way we say we plan to get intimate with our customer, which is one of our winning strategies at Recurly. We plan to do the same with our partners today. We run over 20 events a year with them. And all over the world. And so they’re critical to the future of the value we provide to our customers.
It’s really interesting because you’re starting to talk about growth in terms of events and the critical kind of relationship you have with partners to drive that kind of growth. You know, what sort of, you know, other kind of techniques are you using to kind of drive your growth? Obviously, you’re here at Advertising Week, engaging with prospects and customers here, deepening those relationships. What other kind of channels and activities are kind of working for you?
Yeah, from the marketing perspective, if we want to get like super functional on it, number one is the one I just said. We just released the What’s Next series. So I do have a big events background in my belt. So I do believe that being in person creates tremendous connections. One of the things that we change about the way we do events at Recurly and we announce this series that has just started, we’ve come out of Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, Miami, Chicago, New York City, just recently. And so just recently.
And what I found at this, the way we design it wasn’t a series where we’re going to bring prospects and we’re going to have the chat with them. It is a series where prospects, but also customers can attend and learn from each other and go in, have whether we do a lunch, we have a dinner, we do a panel. We want them to come out of it learning something new about how they can unlock, how they can get ahead. And in many of this series of events, we actually bring industry experts that actually happen to work with our competitors as well. But our whole goal, and I say it to the team often, is to make the market better. We as Recurly will make the market better and will make the market get ahead.
So our customers are loving this series because they get to talk to our future customers, which helps us a bunch. So whoever’s not doing that, I highly recommend it. It’s I think there’s been hesitation from a marketing perspective in the past in many companies to do it because they’ll say, well, we don’t know the healthof the customer. We don’t know if they’re just going to go complain and whatnot. And I always say, don’t be scared about that. That’s actually a great opportunity. If they’re not happy, the prospect will find out a way that you sit down with them and solve whatever is going on with them. So I think that’s a great unlocking experience. 100%. The service recovery principle, right? Yes. Turn them into your greatest advocates. Yes. And as a strategy, I love it. And you’re almost kind of, you’re practicing what you preach, right, as well. As Recurly, you’re doing the same thing as you are for your customers, right? So, you know, that’s a beautiful flywheel that you’ve got spinning there. It’s great to hear.
Tell me a little bit about sort of the concept of working with product and sales and marketing, because you talked a little bit about that at the beginning, right? And you’ve obviously had the background there for a little bit of time. So tell me more about how do you like to kind of set that up, that holy trinity. It’s interesting you’re asking me this today on the first day of Q2, when I do spend up till one in the morning with my CRO. Well, you look great for it. It must have been good numbers. It was really good numbers. I said, this was very tricky. My CRO was back in Atlanta yesterday, and I’m here in London. So he’s just like texting me at 12. And then he’s like, answer the FaceTime. And I’m FaceTiming him because we’re trying to celebrate together. We just like hit a tremendous quarter. Year over year, quarter growth was tremendous. Marketing did great. So we were just all day around 2 p.m. when you, we were having a good one.
But look, it is the most important relationship that you will have. It’s your relationship with your CRO. And the CRO’s relationship with the CMO is the most important relationships. It is, I find it very tricky to gain growth and to gain really fast growth or accelerated if that relationship is not solid. There’s just got to be on every CRO relationship I have ever had, even the difficult ones. I’m like, there’s got to be something we have in common because it makes it very difficult. This is the person I talk to every single day, who I call my partner in crime. And thankfully at this moment in time, you find me with one of the best ones, relationships that I’ve ever had.
But one of the things that I think is very important about that relationship is just being crystal clear and being very direct with each other. This is not, when you think about the old days on how marketing and sales work together, it was sales calling out marketing because they’re not giving them enough pipeline of marketing calling on sales because they’re not following up on the leads. It’s like the same old story. Can that still come up? It’s always going to come up. It gets milder and milder as I think the teams see the connection between the CRO and the CMO. They’re running with the same exact metrics. They’re both very clear when we’re in this together. We’re doing it together.
In our company, we do something a little bit different: I report 100% on pipeline, no matter what kind of pipeline it is. So not just uniquely to marketing pipeline. So I report on pipeline, partner pipeline, on outbound pipeline, all of it. And I absolutely love it. Some CMOs have said to me, are you nuts? It’s a heavy lift to take. But I think I was on month one and even when I met my CEO today, a year plus ago, that was one of the things that I told him and I said, look, I can drive the function of marketing, yes, and the pipeline for marketing. I can run that. But I’m not your functional leader. It’s got to go beyond that because that’s when the power comes through because then marketing knows, oh, we’re helping outbound too. And we’re helping partners too. Well, now we have responsibility for all of it. And if we’re doing it right, no matter who you’re call calling, they’ve seen something from us. So our CRO absolutely loves that. So I think there’s abig buy-in from him because of that specifically. So I challenge some CMOs today that it could be a great opportunity to build that relationship trust and grit together. And that doesn’t mean we don’t have tough conversations, right? Like I, you know, he calls me out, I call him out. And when we’re having like tough months, we sit down and I’m like, look, this is what needs to happen. And he’ll do the same with me. So the most important relationship.
But then beyond that, there’s this one program I want to share with you that has been brilliant for us this year. So when I arrived, the teams were very separated. Sales was doing one thing, marketing was doing one thing, and they were calling each other terrible. The number one thing I said is we are going to double our conversion rate. If there’s anything I do, that’s what we will do. We triple them. But one of the things that it was very important was that these teams had to work very well together without us. So we can lead the way, they can see the connection, but without us. What is the job? The job is not to be needed eventually.
So we created this group that is called the Pipeline Warriors. They have their own shirts and like crazy hats. But the warriors actually work together two to three times a week to build on pipelines together. And it’s sales and marketing together. Sales and marketing leaders working together, whether it’s outbound, whatever it is, to get to the final goal. And they get that tension of the number two, but they also build that connection. We’re about to bring them into in person next week because they’ve done such a good job this quarter. So if you don’t have like for your listeners out there, if you don’t have a group like that, I highly encourage it. It works really, really well. I love it.
Thank you for sharing. I think it’s gold dust, like a mini MBA conversation here. So just talking a little bit more about the kind of the functional side of marketing. And I love this kind of marketing is a kind of function of pipeline. Pipeline is, you know, pipeline is the thing. Marketing is the means to the thing. Tell me a little bit about kind of how you love to kind of structure your teams. Like what are the roles? What’s the kind of go to leaner kind of team structure?
Yes, yes. So I’ve built this team so many times before and I feel like every time it ends up being very similar structure. Well, if it ain’t broke, right? Yeah, that’s exactly it. So I do believe when somebody comes into a marketing team, the first thing they’ll say is the most important team is the demand generation team. They’re the ones producing pipeline. I think that they’re all very important, by the way. The demand generation team’s job is to get all these activities out. But to me, the teams that you have to build very strongly and very early on have got to be your product marketing teams, which will be in charge of positioning overall. It will stream then into the content team. As we then build on that positioning that we’re providing, that we build on research and white papers and content that is going to be critical and important enough or the value enough for who we’re targeting.
So today my team is structured by corporate marketing on the design side, a very important team. They’re always looked as a team that says, oh yeah, that’s the creative team, the ones that make things look pretty. Let me explain this to you. If it didn’t look good, it’s not going to be good. So I think that team is very important. So I have my head of design there, have a head of content that runs all of social media, PR, AR, and all free form of contents as well. Very important teams. I think through that team, you get the boost of pipeline. That is the team that boosts everything for pipeline. That’s what then the demand generation team will use. And then I have for the demand generation side, I have someone running all of these:
Paid,
Contentication,
ABM,
Anything within demand generation uniquely
And we also have ops, how marketing works together, tech, marquech, how we’re using it, which is incredibly important. The connection of mark tech and revenue tech is one of the most
important things for growth. So whatever you’re using out there as your CRM and your marketing automation is critical for wherever you’re going to go in the future.
And then, you know, the big one to me is product marketing. I will build that team before I build anything else. I’m so glad you talked about product marketing. I was going to ask you about it and you preempted me. So it’s brilliant. I’m getting a sense of sort of how you’re going to answer this question, but I think it’d be really good to kind of dig more into the kind of the pipeline side of things. What are the metrics that matter most to you?
Oh my gosh. So you’re not going to believe this. Very uncommon, actually. And then we’ll get into really fun pipeline metrics. But advocates is a very important metric to me. Knowing who from our customers is with us by our side and that we can do things for them. I see advocacy as one of the powerhouses of pipeline and growth. And I think it’s often overlooked. I think you need to keep that as a goal and also report on it, whatever it might be. And you can start small. I come from a company that’s six times bigger than the one I am today. And when we start advocacy there was the same thing. It’s like, oh, well, we’re going to start with 100 advocates. That’s not real. Start really small. Start with five advocates and learn what they need from you, not what you need from them. What do they like to do? Why do they like to go to conferences with you? They like you to expose them. They like you to just guide the way. They like in person. What do they want? What do they like? So advocacy I track very closely. Case studies, anything that comes from a customer perspective, I track that very closely.
So uncommon opinions. I thought I would mention that one first. But then when you look at pipeline, I mean, the big one to me is always going to be quarter to quarter pipeline. I do like intensity and I like to go pipeline month by month, even though we are always reporting on quarter basis. So to me, how is our pipeline growing quarter to quarter and how does that compare to the year prior? It’s incredibly important.
Conversions, I think I kind of hinted to that one. When I had arrived to my role, it was really low conversions. And there’s so much to unpack there because when you have low conversions, that means that and you’re meeting your pipeline goal, that means you’re sending so much stuff to sales that it’s not a fit. It’s not ICP. And what you really do is not only you’re wasting their time and their productivity time, but you lose a lot of trust within sales. And that’s very hard to get back. So that was my number one thing, making sure that MQL to pipeline conversion is tracked and is as good as it needs to be.
So when you look at SaaS right now, the average, I think Gartner put out a report just recently where they said that conversion should be anywhere around between three, five, three, eight, four is high. So I set up ours to four and we just hit 6%. That’s incredible. So that one’s critical.
As you get deeply into pipeline, you still have to be very close-knit with like, what does your all-time pipeline look like? What’s the health of that pipeline? And don’t be afraid from a marketing perspective. I think there’s a big risk on marketing saying, oh, you’re good. There’s your pipeline. Go take on it. No. What does that inside pipeline look like? Because whatever’s in there that you have converted is what’s going to guide the way for you to go produce the new prospects.
So staying very close to what do those brands look like? Are they leading the way on the size that you’re looking for? So ACV is going to be crucial as well. Am I bringing to the brands that I’m passing on to sales?They might be good, but they’re not the right size. Are we looking more into mid-market and enterprise? Is that the right size? Those are things that I look at very closely. If I had my CEO here, I would actually say, I think he would say that I like to get very into sales metrics. You’re almost, I say this with huge respect, you’re almost talking like a CRO, which by the way, I love. That’s a compliment. I let the CRO do their job, but if his sales cycle are starting to fall or his win rates, those are my metrics too. My product marketing team is measured big time on win rates. And then their length of cycle, if it’s starting to hurt as well, I don’t want it to be his responsibility. His team’s responsibility is like, let’s go look at the data and see what that’s showing us. And we might be playing a big part on that.
Another metric, and it’s probably the one that a board of directors really likes or private equity, they absolutely love this metric. And if they, I’m saying if they, oh, they had to pick one for marketing, what I would ask is what percentage of the pipeline is a contribution of marketing? They love that. Attribution, right? Attribution. So, because I am reporting on all of them today or responsible pretty much if I’m reporting for all of them today, that is an important metric. And many companies, you know, it varies today in SaaS where they’re going around the 35 to 40%. We set up ours pretty high because I saw the opportunity that we had. If we can keep our conversions, we’re around 50%, which is super high, super, super high. So for those listening, don’t do 50%. But that was my decision to make based on the emotion we had going on and the opportunity. But I would always recommend anything between 35 and 50%, depending on the emotion, right? It’s a partner side, you know, that’s going to be a little bit different. But I think that’s a healthy place to be.
I think we could do an entire podcast just about metrics, right? It’s really fun. And I’ve got one more to ask you. Even though we’re running out of time and you’ve probably got a massive schedule to go and see another customer. So I apologize, but I have to ask you about the point you’re making earlier around unlocks, right? And unlocking and the creativity that you as a business kind of apply to your customers to grow their business, change and expand and scale the way they think about how they can use subscriptions to grow their own business. What metric do you use to kind of measure and sort of, you know, is it net revenue retention? Is it how do you kind of attribute, you know, and what metric do you use to kind of measure that unlock power that you’re talking about, which is fascinating to me?
Yeah, I think we still have to look at the business metrics are going to be very important. I’m a true believer that the top metrics of the company have to match up to everything that goes down. So marketing should be attached to those top metrics at the top. So in a very simple way, so first of all, at the top, it’s going to be revenue, right? And TPV is going to be critical and subscriptions like how much are they growing on their own and how, you know, how much are they being able to build on when it comes to the future? That’s a critical metric for us. When you look at how merchants are behaving today, you got to think about subscribers. You know, that’s, you know, TP plays a big part of that. How is their subscribers growth coming along? How are they measuring against it versus their goals? So I think that will be like number one when I put myself on from sitting down from a merchant perspective. Overall, us as a business, I think we need to look at it day in and day out if they’re growing or growing, right? And if they’re growing, we’re doing well for them. We’re doing what we said we were going to do for them. But that ties into revenue at the top, right? For us. What is, you know, what is our revenue goal as a company and how are we tracking to that revenue goal? And then after that is just a whole other podcast of bookings and all that fun stuff. We’llhave to bring you back for the next series. Okay, you were going to say something. Sorry. Retention. It’s a podcast of its own. I’m very passionate about retention. We have our new customer officer, Rachel, who came along. It’s got to be almost seven, eight months ago. We doubled down on the customer and what we were going to do for the customer. Retaining customers is so important. Absolutely.
And I couldn’t agree with you more, which is why I wanted to ask you the question, because as you said, what you described at the beginning of this conversation about how you’re helping your customers grow, by default, then correlates directly to that retention level, that advocacy, and so forth, right? And so you kind of cracked the code there, but I agree with you. I think you need to launch a, you need to write a book. You need to publish an MBA paper. You need to, whatever, on retention. I think you are pioneering this in you and also in Recurly.
From this conversation, I’m tremendously excited. I’m also conscious of your time. But I’m also almost answering my last question in a way, which is kind of like, what are you most excited about right now? Retention. A hundred percent retention. It’s twofold for me.
At Recurly, being able, we don’t want to lose, who wants to lose customers? Nobody wants to lose customers. And if you’re at risk of losing a customer, understand if they’re not the right fit for you, that’s okay. You have to let them go. And that’s okay. But that is a retention strategy as well. But also the ones you want to keep, that you know they’re the right fit, and that you’re the right all around, you got to do the things that they need for you to do in order to make them successful. And there’s so many different things to unpack there that you can do.
But then on the other side of subscriptions, and you probably have looked at it, but our state of subscriptions shows how the shift from acquiring to retention has completely changed. So now our merchants are concentrating on retaining because over time, that is what’s making them grow the most.
So people that cancel and go are actually returning people. Subscription services that provide pausing, tremendous. Nulidas. So retention. I’m very excited to see our own industry turning into a retention industry because what that really does is we’re going to progress so much together. It goes back to your point around partnership and collaboration and ultimately shared value, right? Value, exactly.
Yes. Oh, Lina, it’s been really great having you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining us. You too. Thank you so much for having me. That was a lot of fun. We created another three podcasts. The Business of Marketing Podcast was brought to you by Path 7, powered by partners built for performance.
