Productivity with Peace of Mind | Elvis Abeltins from DeskTime

Rick Veronese: Pathmonk is the AI for website conversions. With increasing online competition, over 98 percent of website visitors don’t convert. The ability to successfully show your value proposition and support visitors in the buying journey separates you from the competition online. Pathmonk qualifies and converts leads on your website by figuring out where they are in the buying journey and influencing them in key decision moments with relevant marketing experiences like case studies, intro videos, and much more.

Stay relevant to your visitors and increase conversions by 50%. Add Pathmonk to your website in seconds. Let the artificial intelligence do all the work while you keep doing marketing as usual. Check us out on Pathmonk.com.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Pathmonk Presents. Today we have a special guest with us. It’s Elvis Abeltins from DeskTime. He’s our newly hired CMO. It’s been a few months, right, Elvis? Welcome to the show.

Elvis Abeltins: Yeah, thank you for having me. Hi everyone. Yes, I joined the DeskTime team around four months ago. So yes, pretty new to the job, but it’s been a pretty eventful period. I think I’ve already jumped into all of the work pretty much instantly. So yeah, it’s been exciting.

Rick: I can only imagine. The first few months are always crazy. The first month alone can be overwhelming for any position, and I can’t imagine what it’s like being a CMO at DeskTime. I’m just curious—can you tell us a little bit about DeskTime? What’s at the heart of what your company does, and how would you describe it to someone new?

Elvis: To put it simply, it’s software—a tool that helps improve productivity. DeskTime is an automatic time-tracking tool that helps you measure how you work, how teams work, or even how an entire company operates. It provides insights on how to manage time better and complete tasks more efficiently.

At the same time, DeskTime also gives employers the ability to implement employee wellness programs, like flexible work times or shorter workweeks. With this tool, you can precisely track how much you work, what breaks you’re taking, and implement policies accordingly.

For example, we use DeskTime internally, and we have a flexible workday start time. We can start work anytime until 11 AM, and then it’s up to us. DeskTime ensures we complete our required working hours. Since we measure productivity, we’ve also successfully transitioned to a 35-hour workweek. DeskTime helps us track productivity and ensure everything runs smoothly.

That’s the short version, but there are plenty of other use cases I can mention along the way.

Rick: That’s really interesting, and it’s cool that DeskTime doesn’t just focus on efficiency but also on wellness—how you manage your time. We all have different peak productivity times. At least for me, that’s definitely the case.

I’m also curious—what’s your ideal customer profile (ICP)? What kind of businesses or industries do you serve best?

Elvis: Technically, anyone working with a laptop can use DeskTime, but we’ve defined our ICP into more specific categories. Typically, it’s companies with a few hundred employees. Smaller teams and freelancers can also use it, especially for tracking billable hours.

Generally, our customers are in IT, software services, or finance—industries with anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand employees. We also see a significant number of remote companies using DeskTime because it provides what we call “peace of mind” for managers. They can ensure work is being done even when employees aren’t physically present.

Rick: I like that—the “peace of mind tool.” Let’s say I’m a manager who needs to oversee my team’s workload. How would I find out about DeskTime?

Elvis: It depends. As a CMO, I hope we reach you through the perfect advertising or an account-based marketing strategy. Maybe even through PR, since there are different ways to approach it.

Typically, many customers find us through Google search, which is common for most companies. But we’ve also had big successes with PR. DeskTime has been around for nearly 13 years, and one of our biggest successes was an article we published about the “52/17 rule.”

We analyzed data from the top 10% of the most productive employees across all our customers and found that the most productive people work for 52 minutes and then take a 17-minute break. This article was picked up by Mashable, Business Insider, Inc.com, Lifehacker, and other major media outlets. It went viral, and even though we published it ten years ago, people still reference it today.

So PR is something we take seriously. We constantly think about how we can leverage our data to generate insights that provide real value. But, of course, we also use paid advertising, account-based marketing, and all the usual B2B SaaS tactics.

Rick: That’s interesting. Out of curiosity, is that article still bringing traffic?

Elvis: It is. Not necessarily the original article itself, but since it spread across the internet, there are now dozens—maybe even hundreds—of articles linking back to it. We still see it being referenced when we do media monitoring. Plus, we resurface it ourselves from time to time in new content and studies.

Rick: That’s a great example of evergreen content. Elvis, we’re coming to the end of the interview, and we always do a round of rapid-fire questions. Are you ready?

Elvis: Sure, let’s do it.

Rick: What’s the last book you read?

Elvis: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** by Mark Manson.

Rick: What’s one single thing your company is focused on right now?

Elvis: Growth—finding new ways to scale and expand.

Rick: If there were no boundaries in technology, what’s one thing you’d want fixed for your role today?

Elvis: A tool that predicts ROI and effort for every marketing idea instantly.

Rick: That would be amazing! If you could automate one repetitive task, what would it be?

Elvis: Emails. A tool that summarizes all emails, archives the irrelevant ones, and suggests replies for the important ones.

Rick: What’s one piece of advice you’d give yourself if you were restarting your journey as a marketer today?

Elvis: Don’t wait for 100% of the information to make a decision. If you have 60-70%, make the call, take action, and learn from the outcome.

Rick: That’s along the lines of “done is better than perfect,” right?

Elvis: Exactly. We literally have a poster in the office that says that.

Rick: That’s a great philosophy. Elvis, thanks for being on the show. If someone forgets everything we talked about today, what’s the one thing they should remember about DeskTime?

Elvis: Just remember that there’s a tool that helps you be more productive while giving managers peace of mind and employees the flexibility to work efficiently.

Rick: Perfect! Everyone, check out DeskTime.com. Elvis, thanks again for being here. It was great having you on the show.

Elvis: Thanks for having me.

Rick: It was a pleasure.

Elvis: Have a good one.