Fermàt CMO on Customized Customer Journeys

Rabah Rahil first appeared on this podcast in September 2022. He was the chief marketing officer of Triple Whale, an analytics platform. We discussed customer acquisition, attribution, and more.

He’s now the CMO of Fermàt Commerce, a SaaS provider of customized customer journeys. Founded in 2021, it has raised nearly $30 million from venture capitalists.

In our recent conversation, Rahil and I discussed Fermàt’s software, target customers, and his role with the company. The entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.

Eric Bandholz: Tell us about Fermàt Commerce.

Rabah Rahil: Our software allows merchants to offer customized customer journey paths — from a click on an external ad to a product detail or category page to a conversion. A traditional sales funnel has multiple stages, such as the ad, the landing page, the product detail page, the cart, and the checkout.

We provide the tools for sellers to customize that journey with different landing pages, product detail pages, carts, and upsells. We shift the thinking from a funnel to more of a hub and spoke, with the hub being a conversion.

We create a separate site on a subdomain linked to Shopify, such as Shop.beardbrand.com. This allows us to build custom product detail pages so sellers can test offers and journeys. Sellers can send traffic to a Fermàt product page and a merchant’s own page to test conversion rates, order sizes, and other metrics.

Bandholz: So merchants can build conversion paths for their specific niche. Is that it?

Rahil: That’s exactly right.

Bandholz: What size company does Fermàt target?

Rahil: We work best for companies spending at least $50,000 monthly on Facebook and annual revenue of at least $10 million.

We find those two metrics are the biggest indicators of success. Our software is expensive. We’re driving a ton of value for companies with the scale to make it work. Our plans come with an account manager and a chief revenue engineer. We’re considering stripping that down to using use the platform via self-service.

Bandholz: What’s your sales process?

Rahil: The chief marketing officer typically signs off on it. We’re up-market right now, selling to monster companies with a lot of bureaucracy, such as head of acquisition, head of growth, media buyer, and other roles.

When a company comes on board, we’ll focus on its optimization goals for the first 30, 60, and 90 days, whether it’s average order value, first-order subscription rate, products for purchase, or whatever.

Bandholz: Triple Whale is a much larger company. How did you adjust?

Rahil: At Triple Whale I managed 30, 40 people. That’s just not me. I’m not a general. I’m more of a Seal Team Six commander. I want to attack big, complex problems with a bunch of specialists. Managing a large staff destroys that. It’s not right or wrong; it’s just not my preference.

I work off of something called RACI: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. With clear lines of responsibility, you don’t have this conflict of people fighting over fiefdoms.

Bandholz: Where can people follow you?

Rahil: Our site is FermatCommerce.com. I’m on X and LinkedIn.