Market-to-Revenue: Recent Episodes
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🚀 Rocket-fast interviews with GTM operators in sales, success, product, and marketing. Meet go-to-market talent you need to add to your must-recruit watchlist, unless they recruit you first! Hear answers to 6 burning questions from talent across the GTM community. Learn more → https://market-to-revenue.com
Tell yourself, “I can do hard things.” What does the data say? What is the insight I can pull from the data? What is the creative idea I have based on that insight? Take the hassle out of the purchase journey. What product-market-fit means for a new segment of users. Focus over speed. Strategy over plans. Regaining SEO. Meaning, difference and salience. Understand what motivates your customer, how they view your product, or the problem that it solves. You find that tension in their lives then you solve for it.
Here’s what Katy McFee said about Shea:
Shea Cole. So I worked with Shea at a company called Fullscript. She is the VP Marketing there, and she is a force. So this woman, she is just like a branding queen, and she took that company from very early days to like explosive, massive rocket-growth and was very instrumental in making that happen. So, I think she would be a fantastic guest for you.
—Katy McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Generating new leads using content marketing. We're super focused on SEO and high-quality content. Our customer base are professionals, they're healthcare practitioners, so we make sure that our content is written by other healthcare practitioners, and filled with keywords, but also extremely evidence-based. We get a lot of cheap, high quality leads that way.
2) Email marketing. Then, once our customers come into our our funnel, and they become existing customers, email marketing. So, we take that same content that we wrote on our blog to generate leads, and we email it to them just to keep our customers engaged, to remind them that the content is there, and it keeps us top of mind, which drives that platform usage.
3) Take the hassle out of the purchase journey. The last way that I'll highlight is that we take a lot of care to make sure that we take the hassle out of the purchase journey for our customers. Healthcare practitioners are recommending supplements through Fullscript and then their patients are coming onto our platform to purchase supplements. We want make this dead simple for the patients. We want to take all the thinking out of it. So what we do is we analyze the order behavior of the patients. We analyze the dosage instructions of the practitioners. And based on that, we know when a patient is running low on their supplements and we reach out to them and we say, “Hey, it's probably time to refill. Click here to refill.” And so, they don't have to think about, “Hey, it's, it's probably time for me to log onto Fullscript and place an order. We do that thinking for them. It comes right to their inbox. They never miss a day in their treatment plan. Super simple, but very effective.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) I recently came back from a maternity leave. And I'm in Canada, so that's a long leave. It’s anywhere up to a year. Mine was eight months. Two days after I came back from maternity leave, we acquired one of our biggest competitors. So my whole plan for onboarding, and getting lots of attention from the team so that they could get me up to speed on what was going on, all went out the window, because everyone was so wrapped up in, “Oh my God, we just acquired a company. How do we merge two teams?” This is, I think, a really good example of what it's like to work in a high growth company, because you have to embrace that chaos and set aside your expectations for anything to be smooth and just be resilient. Otherwise, you don't survive.
2) Regaining our SEO traffic after a 50% drop in 2020. I told you earlier in the show that we're really focused on driving leads through SEO. Back in 2020, Google had a big algorithm change and it impacted the health and wellness space more than many industries. We saw our SEO plummet by almost 50%, and this was a big lead source for us. So hugely problematic. At the time, we were focused mainly on just producing high quality content, and what we learned through this is that's not really enough. We had to step up our technical talent and bring in SEO expertise to really get ahead of those algorithm changes and manage that more technical side of content marketing. So now in 2022, we're back up to the site traffic that we were at in 2020. It took us that long to get there because that's how SEO works. You just have to claw your way up bit by bit by bit. We had to actually relaunch our entire site, take a little hit that way, but then regain. But, we got there.
3) It's really unrealistic to expect that everyone is going to love having you as a boss. So, I think this one might be a little controversial. It's something really important that I learned recently about managing a team and being a leader. Early on in my career, I really cared about being that manager that everyone loved to have as a boss. I still really care about my people and I really want to be a great manager, but what I have to learn was that it's really unrealistic to expect that everyone is going to love having you as a boss, because the truth is that some people are just not going to like you because you have to have tough conversations when you're leading a team, especially when you're leading a big team. Sometimes, people are not going to understand how much you appreciate them, because, as a manager with multiple levels underneath you, you have to let your managers that are underneath you manage their people. That means, sometimes, you have to step away from the relationship. Not everyone is going to appreciate where the cards fall for them, but as long as you try to be as empathetic and fair and transparent as you possibly can be, then, you're doing your best for people and you just have to make peace with the fact that not everyone is going to love you.
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
1) We are reaching a plateau in our media buying because we were doing everything in-house, and I think that that was the right choice for us at one time, where we were small and bootstrapped and scrappy and we could do a good job in-house. Now, we've grown to a size where my team needs to be focused on other things. As our paid media starts reaching a plateau, we're reaching diminishing returns, we are moving to an external agency to buy that media. So, let's see if this works. I'm super hopeful. I think it will allow my team to focus on other channels, and on creative, and on research. So, I think it's the right decision for us right now, but we're at a transition point.
2) We are switching to a new marketing automation tool, and unfortunately we've made that switch a couple times, because finding the right automation tool is so important and you don't always get it right. The other thing is: as you go through different stages of growth, a super simple tool might be the right tool for you at the beginning because your team can learn it really quickly, but then as you scale, you might need something a little bit more complex. So, switching to a new marketing automation tool means getting the right technical talent, getting the right consultants to help you set it up, getting buy-in from the engineering and data analytics teams to make sure that everything is flowing smoothly from your CRM to your automation to your attribution and your reporting. Everything needs to work in tandem. That's a huge problem that we are solving for right now.
3) What product-market-fit means for our new segment of users. Lastly, as a marketer, I'm coming to a really interesting point in our journey with our industry, and with penetrating our industry, because you always want to go after the leads that convert the easiest, and that's actually, I think, a direct quote from one of your previous guests. For sure, we did that in the beginning. That was naturopathic doctors for us because we enable practitioners to dispense supplements to their patients, and naturopathic doctors use medical grade supplements as basically their core tool for treating patients. So, they are the low hanging fruit. They are the early adopters for us. However, they're a very small market. So, we have reached a point where we have extremely high penetration with naturopathic doctors. They no longer remain the most attractive prospect for us. And so we have to move on to a very attractive prospect, which is medical doctors. And we have actually a lot of them on our platform already, but because there's so many of them in North America, we still have very low penetration with them. The product-market-fit for medical doctors is not the same as it is for naturopathic doctors. Some of them use supplements a lot, but a lot of medical doctors are kind of of the mindset where it's. “Yeah, supplements can be helpful for you, but they're not used to being the ones who supply supplements.” And so the product marketing challenge is a really interesting one because we have to come in and convince them that this is something that they need in their lives and say, “Look like you may not have considered this before, but your patient outcomes will be better if you are the one supplying the supplements because you can control the quality of those supplements and you can actually observe whether your patients are continuing to take their supplements, or whether they fall off the wagon, and then you can have that conversation with them. Why did you stop taking them? Is it because it's not working? Is it because it's too expensive? Is it because this is not the right treatment plan for you and we need to take baby steps or we need to change something?” That's a conversation that is not gonna happen if the patient just says, “Okay. My doctor told me to take fish oil. I'm gonna go to Walgreens and buy fish oil.” Then, the practitioner doesn't know if they did it. They don't know if they got the right one. So, it's all of these really interesting product marketing challenges that we have to work through to try to figure out what product-market-fit means for a new segment of users.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) “This is not a strategy This is just a plan. Go back.” I find that having a very clear approach for how you think through a strategic problem is super useful. This is something that I use as a coaching tool, but I also use it for myself anytime I am challenged to come up with a strategy and I actually have to sit down, put that strategy into a deck, or put it into action, in a go-to-market plan. What I do is I always follow these steps: 1. Look for the data and analyze what the data says. 2. Find the insight in the data. That's not just what the data says, but what the data means for you and your business. It's trying to find some little piece of tension in your customer's lives that you can solve for. 3. After you find that insight, that's when you can find your creative solution that's solving for that tension. How are you gonna do it? Only after you've gone through those steps can you then say what your plan is. That's the really important piece. You never tell someone what your plan is until you've gone through those steps. What does the data say? What is the insight I can pull from the data? What is the creative idea I have based on that insight? Early on in my career, I had a mentor tell me that a deck I had, a strategic deck I had put together, was not a strategy. He said, “This is not a strategy This is just a plan. Go back.” That was a game changer for me that led me to come up with this model that I always start with now every time.
2) The Meaningfully Different Framework. Another framework that I use a lot, especially when it comes to marketing, is a framework that I learned from Millward Brown. They have something called the Meaningfully Different Framework. It is a way that they measure a brand's power score. It's a brand equity measure and they actually measure three values. Meaning, difference and salience, which is basically top of mind awareness. They find that brands that have high scores on meaning, difference and salience are the most powerful brands. Even if you are a startup that doesn't have the budget to actually measure those things, it's super helpful to think through them. When it comes to, for example, CPG brands, I used to work in beer, we found that some brands are well positioned to win just by being really strong on one of those measures. So a brand like Budweiser, right? That's a macro beer. And if Budweiser has super high salience and stays top of mind, they win. However, a premium product, like Stella Artois, for example, has to be high on either meaning or difference in order to demand that price premium. When it comes to a startup, an up-and-coming brand, and when I'm applying this model to my thinking in tech, I try to check all three boxes, because why wouldn't you? So for Fullscript, for example, if I can say to a practitioner that you are going to have better results for your patients and your practice is going to grow faster if you use this product, that's meaningful. If I can say to them that our catalog of supplements is bigger than any of the competitors, that's different. If I show up at every one of the trade shows that they go to that year, and if I'm in all the trade pubs, and if their colleagues are talking about us, then that's salience. We're top of mind.
3) Tell yourself, “I can do hard things.” So the last mental model that I want to talk about is one that I actually had something different in mind, and then this came up just this morning and I thought, “Oh, this is actually a really good one that I wanna talk about.” And it came from my personal life, but I use it in business now all the time. So when I had my first child, I really decided that I wanted to stay away from the hospital if I could. But, that meant that I had to give birth in a birth center with midwives and it was going to be unmedicated. I was trying to work my head around how hard that was going to be. So, I signed up for this hypnobirthing class, super crunchy, but it was helpful because what it does is it helps you think through, “How am I going to deal with this pain without being medicated?” One of the things that they preach is you cannot run away from the pain, and you can't pretend that it's going to be easy and just stick your head in the sand. You have to respect the pain, and pay homage to, and then walk right through it. And so they teach this mantra that you are supposed to apply every time, your brain wanders to that place where you're focusing on how hard it's going to be, or how hard it is in the moment. What you do is you tell yourself, “I can do hard things.” You respect the fact that it's hard, but you say, “I can do hard things.” The beauty of that that I've learned ever since that experience, while I apply that to other moments in my life, is every time you get through something that's really hard, you have more evidence for yourself that you can do hard things. And so, every time you tell yourself, “I can do hard things.” You believe it more and more every time because you've done it. In a startup environment, where it's high growth, high pressure, high speed, and you have those big, hairy, audacious goals in front of you, you can very easily get overwhelmed because we're human. But, since the beginning of human existence, humans have been doing very hard things, and that is evidence that we can do hard things, so there it is. We've come a long way, and you just tell yourself, “I can do hard things,” and then you walk right through.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Go back to the roots of good marketing. I'm not gonna try to reinvent the wheel here and just remind people to go back to the roots of good marketing. You start with a customer insight. I see a lot of people skip this step, and so that's what I always try to remind my team. What's the insight? You have to understand what motivates your customer, and how they view your product, or the problem that it solves, and find that tension that I talked about earlier. You find that tension in their lives and then you solve for it.
2) Focus and say no strategically. This is something that can be really hard, especially in high growth environment, or in a startup environment, where you hear all the time, “Speed is our biggest asset.” I've heard that so many times in my career and I agree, move fast for sure. But I don't think speed is ever going to be your biggest asset. Focus is going to be your biggest asset. Look through all the ideas because when you're just starting out, there's 1 million different things that you could do to go to market, to improve your brand, to improve your funnel, but you need to figure out which ones to say no to, strategically, or to say not now, and then you need to document those things. Because as there's turnover in leadership, or on the board level, which there will be, people are gonna wonder, “Hey, how come you didn't consider this?” And, you want to be able to put forward the small test you did to decide whether you were gonna say no, or the priorities you had at the time which led you to say no, so that it doesn't look like, “Well, you just didn't think of it before.” No. We said no strategically so that we could focus.
3) Pick a day, or a half day, where you're not going to take meetings. Another really big one for me, and this is less about marketing and more just about managing people, and managing your time, and managing your mindset, is pick a day, or a half day, where you're not going to take meetings, because it is really easy to fall into the trap of being in back-to-back-to-back meetings all day, every day. And then, when you get to the end of the week, you have endless emails or Slack messages, and you haven't had time to think through your problems, to write, to learn, to listen to podcasts, to just talk through something with someone completely off the cuff and randomly. So, this was a game changer for me and for my team. We don't hold meetings after noon on Fridays. Some people take that time to clear their head, other people take that time to work through problems, but whatever you choose to do with it, you will be in a better state of mind on Monday, or going into the next day, because you took that time and you weren't running from every meeting to the next meeting.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
1) What marketing campaign or marketing tactic did you see recently that you thought was really smart? I love to ask people what marketing campaign or marketing tactic they saw recently that they thought was really smart. I find that it's less about what campaign did they point to, but the why. Why did they think it was smart? Because that kind of points to their line of thinking and how they would approach a marketing problem, as well. Plus you learn some really smart things when you ask people that.
2) What’s your goal? Another question that I ask people is what their goal is, and what they're trying to get out of, whether it's a job, or a point they're at in their lives, just because I want to be helpful. If you don't ask people, why are you here? What are you trying to get out of this? Then, how do you deliver on that? And so I think that that comes back to my appreciation for finding the tension in people's lives, and even as a marketer, trying to relieve that tension through your product. It also applies to interviewing someone and understanding what they're looking for, and making sure that you foster their engagement by delivering on that as best you can.
3) How did you think this went? What could we have changed? I just like to ask people for feedback. I think that's the best question that I can ask anyone around me. How did you think this went? What could we have changed? And have that super transparent conversation. I find that transparency is something that has been lacking in the business environment of late. I'm seeing a trend with organizations actually starting to bring transparency back into their core values because it has been lacking of late, and along with that comes asking for honest feedback, asking for honest opinions, and then making sure that you can respectfully disagree with someone and have a debate while still walking away from it totally appreciating each other.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Candy Lee is someone who I worked with when I was working on Budweiser. She is now the CMO of a company called Homebase. She is just an amazing human and an incredible marketer. I think this comes from the fact that she got her roots in CPG. So, she learned brand marketing, and then she moved to tech where she really had to learn performance marketing. She will bring to the table the best of both worlds.
2) Marc-André Campagna is someone that I came across recently through my network. He is the founder and CEO of a Canadian internet service provider called Oxio. What's really interesting about his approach is they aim to be kind of like the VICE News of ISPs. They do things drastically differently, sometimes controversially, but when you talk to Marc, what you realize is that it's very strategic. I think that you'll have a very interesting conversation with him.
3) Brandon Chatreau is a friend of mine who is a Product Lead at Shopify. I used to work with him at Fullscript and he's a super charismatic guy. The reason why I think he'll be a really good guest for you is because the problem that he's working right on right now for Shopify is a super interesting one when it comes to turning your market into revenue. He is working on making sales tax “delightful” as he puts it. I think what that does is he's proving that sometimes the non-sexy side of your business can be the best place to find loyalty from your customers.
Connect with Shea on Linkedin → Shea Cole
Work with Shea → Fullscript
Convert for the endgame, retention. Marketing is a lot like dating. Sales is where you're getting a little more serious. The wedding is where they convert to be a customer. You got your onboarding, which is your honeymoon. Woo-hoo! This is going to be awesome! But guess what? The bulk of that whole relationship is the marriage, which is retention, and it is not tactical, and it is challenging. Which is why for your post-sale team, they're really relying on you to choose those right dates and attract the right people to get into these long-term relationships with.
Here’s what Ryan Paul Gibson said about Anita:
Anita Toth. The first guest I would think of is Anita Toth. Anita is interesting. She's on the customer success side and she has a great name. She calls herself The Churn Crusher. We've talked a couple of times and what I like about her is she is, like me, hyper-focused on a part of a business that is very important for long-term success. Churn is going to be such a big metric for SaaS companies going forward. How do you keep customers around for longer, and why? How do you succeed in that? And she just lots of fun. So I think she's the first one.
—Ryan Paul Gibson, Founder of Content Lift → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Establishing partnerships with key companies that also serve our ICP. So what we look for in an ideal partner is that they're complimentary to what we do, and this allows us then to combine our marketing efforts. And the one thing we do is, each quarter we identify and look to develop one type of a partnership with, like I said, a company that is doing something complimentary and already working with our ideal customer. So that's the first one.
2) Creating content that really speaks to the pain points of our ICP. What we've chosen to do is just focus on four pillars for all our content. So for us, it's customer feedback, churn, customer relationships, and voice of the customer. And that's been really helpful because it's really easy to start creeping outside of that. Those four pillars really keep us focused then on our ideal customers.
3) We use storytelling everywhere we can. So this might be from personal founders stories. So I'm the founder. So my personal stories to client stories. We're an agency that collects customer feedback. Not such a sexy topic for a lot of people. We love it, but what we do is we use techniques like customer interviews to help bring the hard data we collect to life. So this way, potential clients can better see themselves in the story than they can just looking at the numbers. So those are the three ways that we do that.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Ooh, this was, this was fun.
1) Going up-market to now sell voice of the customer programs to Chief Customer Officers who are employed in much larger companies than we've served up to this point. So it meant doing a lot of research to understand how they see their issues, how it manifests for them, and what's at stake for them if they don't solve the problem. We're in the process of finding out how we can leverage some of our content and just adapt it to this new ideal customer profile.
2) This seems so trivial, but putting in a new system to start culling old content that doesn't serve us well, or finding new ways to refresh it. We use it for our two main ideal customer profiles. So this is for Chief Customer Officers and Customer Success Leaders, and we do have a small third ICP, Customer Success Managers, but it's been harder than anticipated because it's really difficult to throw away, discard, stuff that you've put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into, and if you can't adapt it, it means it's got to go. So that was actually harder than I thought. Sitting down and deciding what we're going to keep and, and what needs to go.
3) Saying no to opportunities that don't align with our vision of making happier customers across the world. So as a company grows, there's some tempting opportunities that we've had to turn down because they pull us from our vision. But I wouldn't say we've overcome this yet. We've been kind of pulled to the side a couple of times. It's a continuous issue that we have to deal with, but we know that if we stray, then it could potentially ruin us. So that's been really challenging to stick to our guns when we see shiny new opportunities and just say no to them. Nope. We're not going that route.
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
1) Well, we're hiring our first CMO. I'm just starting to chat with potential CMOs, so this is a huge step for us. We're going to start with a fractional CMO first. I want to see what it's like to work with a CMO, and then eventually we will hire someone out of that experience full-time. Gut rather than just like jumping right in and hiring someone full-time, we've decided to go the fractional route. It will just help us also better understand, what does the CMO need from us and how that relationship works? So that's one roadblock.
2) Finding new ways to market to CCOs. So like I mentioned, we're going upmarket now and our other two ICPs, so Customer Success Leaders, and our very small group of Customer Success Managers, are very active on LinkedIn. So we've devoted like 80% of our marketing efforts there. It makes sense. They're congregating there, as well as in some Slack groups. But, Chief Customer Officers are different. They're on LinkedIn, but they're not necessarily active like our other two ICPs. So our challenge has been, now we have to come up with a whole new marketing strategy for this new group. It's been a bit challenging. I think we're going to go the old school road of cold email. I think that's where we're headed.
3) Creating new content, of course, for those Chief Customer Officers and creating new funnels. They definitely buy differently than our other ICPs, who may or may not have budget, but Chief Customer Officers do hold budgets. So, we have to figure out what is that buyer's journey like and how are we going to facilitate that through our marketing?
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
Okay, Chris. So like full disclosure, I had to look up what mental models are. I know what they are, but I was like, “but really what are they?” So this gets a bit esoteric, but I think it's worth talking about, because I did look them up and these are things I use. I just didn't know those are the terms.
1) Create routines for my success. So my morning routines look boringly similar every day. But, what this helps me do is conserve energy so that I'm not wasting a lot of time and I can really get in my work and focus.
2) Here's one of the esoteric ones: it's called Bayesian Thinking. We should continuously update our probability estimates as we come across new information. So, essentially when you come across new data, you shouldn't blow it out all out of proportion. Like, “Email marketing has tanked! Zero response rates!” Just crazy stuff like that. We hear stuff like this and then we don't update our thinking. Is this accurate? Is it not? So, the thing is that you should use it to update confidence in your existing beliefs, and if you do, what happens is your reasoning will be more nuanced, accurate and useful. So, when you information comes in, questioning your thinking on it, but you don't have to panic, or what most people do is get very rigid. So you're just looking at your beliefs. How does this information affect my beliefs? What can I learn from it?
3) We've heard of Occam's Razor. I didn't know that there's Hanlon's Razor. So here it is. Never attribute malice that can be adequately explained by neglect. So in other words, when something happens, and it looks like somebody has “Done something to me.” Maybe it wasn't a malice thing, but maybe they just didn't know. And this is particularly important as we're hiring and working with new team members that I look at myself and say, Did I provide this person the information they needed to do that part of the job? Is this malice? Probably not. It's just neglect. They didn't know that they needed to do that. Or I didn't explain myself. Or I didn't give enough resources for that, to be successful in that task. So this is something I'm very conscious of. I do have other employees I work with, but particularly for a CMO, because I've been doing a lot of the content myself, and I feel it. There's going to be a little resistance in being able to pass it over. Like I said, especially if I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears in, it's going to be a little bit challenging to hand that over. So it's called Hanlon's Razor.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
This is a fun one.
1) Looking to convert for the endgame, which is retention. Some marketers agree with this. Most marketers either haven't heard of this, or it's something they're not interested in practicing, and that's looking to convert for the endgame, which is retention. One of the challenges, I work on the post-sale side, so with customer success teams, it's all about retention. But, it's really hard to retain a very poor fit customer. You can throw as much money, support, resources, time, energy, into them. And if they're a poor fit, they're a poor fit. And they're a poor fit because what happens on the pre-sale side. So both marketing and sales. Customer success is a gold mine of information about how customers think, feel, what problem they're trying to solve, how they viewed their problem and how they view their solution. As a marketer, yeah, I used to have a Facebook ad agency, so I do understand what it's like to be on the pre-sale side. Understanding like, “How does your solution fit in with their bigger ecosystem, their bigger problems?” The more you can get all of this info from customer success, the easier it makes your job to come up with marketing campaigns that are much more targeted to those specific issues and those customers’ way of thinking. So, for me, it makes sense if you can. It might mean your leads go down, but if the quality of them goes up, and revenue for the company goes up, well, then you end up looking like a hero. Especially, if you can show that, “Hey, we changed our campaigns. We're attracting less leads, but way better ones. Wow. Look how it is on the backend that we're retaining customers. Our customer lifetime value has increased, our retention revenues have increased, all from our marketing.” And then lastly, just about customer marketing, this is now a burgeoning field that is really, really growing quickly. We're already seeing it in marketing with the separation between pre-sales marketing and customer marketing. So that's one, sorry, I went a little long on that, but I’m very passionate about it.
2) If you don't have a customer success team… then meet with support, meet with your professional services team, meet with whoever is post-sale and talking to the customer, and find out what your customers think, feel, and this is the biggest, how they conceive of their problem relative to the other issues going on. It's not just about your solution, your product. How did they see the problem? Because if you can manage to see it through their eyes, then you can position much better to attract those, again, good fit customers, which is what you want.
3) Focus on yourself and not on what the competition is doing. Marketing can get very tactical. I'm more of a strategy person. Again, I had a Facebook ad ad agency in the days when we were still using Power Editor, like that's how long ago it was. Tactics were changing constantly, but you get tired of that versus, “Okay. Our strategy is to start attracting better fitting customers.” That's a strategy. A tactic is, “We're going to change whatever color button on one of our landing pages, and AB test and see how it goes.” So, those are my three suggestions for that
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
1) Tell me more. So, we do customer interviews, right? We're speaking with people all the time. It's not a question, but it's my favorite thing to ask. “Tell me more. I'm curious, can you tell me more…” That is one of my favorite things to ask. And then of course I was going to say my second and third favorite are kind of similar, but let's get away from that…
2)Thoughts? I will ask this question, “Thoughts? Your thoughts?” And that will be an email, just like that. Thoughts? Or I ask, “Thoughts?” if it's a conversation like this, where we can see each other, they can see I'm kind of like, not shrugging, but encouraging you to speak.
3) How did you feel about that? Or how does that make you feel? Buying decisions are made on feelings first, rationalized second. And even for something like gum. “Oh my God, my breath smells bad. I don't want others to think badly of me.” Feeling. “I'm going to buy this gum and solve that issue.” Right up to really big things, like if you work for an enterprise company, the people who are championing your product have a lot at stake in terms of their status, how others are going to view them, maybe their job might be at risk. So, it's understanding that that decisions are made on emotion first, and then rationalized. So I always ask about feeling. Business settings. I sell B2B. “So how do you feel about what I'm proposing? How does that make you feel?” And then, of course, I also ask, “What do you think?” But I want to get the feeling. I want to get a sense of, “Alright, what's really going on?” So that I can tailor how I'm speaking with them or, or the other questions I'm going to ask, to go a little deeper. So those are my, I'll call it 2.5 because the first one's not really a question, but I use it as a question.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
Oh my God. So I’m so excited by these people. I hope that they can come to the show.
1) André Chaperon. I've been a huge fan of André Chaperon, Tiny Little Businesses, for years. He is a pull marketer, so he believes in building worlds that your customers want to enter, and because your values align, they end up staying with you for a very long time versus using, again, this tactical approach. He also has a partner now, Shawn Twing, and really all they do is email marketing. That's the only thing. You sign up for their list. They're not on social. Wow, they have done very well over the years by doing this, building a world, and then pulling people into that world with their content. So, love, love André for that.
2) Justin Welsh. Another guy that I have just started following, his name is Justin Welsh, he's on LinkedIn and Twitter. So Justin's got almost like 200,000 followers on LinkedIn. Even though he uses tactics, his overall goal is to make customers happy. So he's also looking down the funnel, and on the post-sale side, Uh, he's got a great group, which is like $99 a quarter. I went in and learned so much about structuring LinkedIn posts, and structuring Twitter posts, in a way that you can repeat and reuse. And it's the structure, that really works well because he's a great copywriter. Using that structure, you put in great content, and then, of course, you end up getting a lot of engagement.
3) Ann Handley. Love of my heart, Ann Handley. She's with MarketingProfs. She's, I think, a few years ago was one of LinkedIn's biggest influencers. She is just fabulous. So she is a writer. Her newsletter, goes out every two weeks, so biweekly. She puts 8-10 hours just into that newsletter, and when you read it, it's so incredibly engaging.
I don't subscribe to a lot of newsletters. Big surprise: André’s, I do. I read Justin's, and I read Ann’s. And that's why I'm recommending them because these are top notch people who really know their craft well, and align with my worldview, which is to bring readers, bring leads, to bring people into your worldview versus trying through, you know, I'll call them sort of spammy tactics, we've all encountered them. So it's a very different approach, and it really aligns with my value around customer retention and keeping customers for life.
Connect with Anita on Linkedin → Anita Toth
Work with Anita
June 2022 · Interview by Chris Morgan, Host of Market-to-Revenue
15 minutes with Meet Darren Sharpe, Chief Revenue Officer at SuiteSpot. Be maniacal about what’s working. Doing great homework. Connecting inbound and outbound channels. Prospect discovery. Client feedback loops to drive product innovation. Shifting a pricing model from features to platform. Pareto principal. Opportunity costs. A culture of coaching allows your team to collaborate in all things. Talk within your client's own words. Asking: What's important to you? What drives you? Is there a connection here where I can help solve?
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Katy McFee said about Darren:
Darren Sharpe. I met him in a sales leader peer group that was put together by The Lazaridis Institute which is an organization where hyper-growth companies are selected to be part of this program. He has just a super impressive, smart, long-time sales leader who gets it. Goes into a company, figures it out, deep dives, and like creates this huge growth for whatever company he touches. So, he's a CRO right now at SuiteSpot, but has been a revenue leader for many years, and has lots of great value that he can share.
—Katy McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
We're fairly traditional. We have an inbound channel, and outbound channel, and a partner channel. I think it might be more and more interesting is how do we uniquely leverage those channels for our success?
1) Outbound channel. So one, if we look at our traditional outbound sales channel, I’m incredibly proud of our BDR team's ability to profile, research, and connect with the prospects. So we look at it as value-based sequencing plus hyper-personalization, and I'm really proud of the outcomes that are coming there.
2) Inbound channel. Then, we tie that with our inbound PPC strategy, looking at the exact same personas and trying to hit the same people so that our outbound and inbound are connected. So you're connecting with the LinkedIn ad as we've we've sent you that message really trying to drive, “Hey, can we understand you as a prospect's problem? Could you see value in a quick connect or a quick conversation with us?” So really, on those inbound and outbound channels, how are we creating new conversations?
3) Partner channel. The partner model is interesting from a startup perspective. Anytime you're developing a partner channel, the key is timing. How do you not be everything to everyone, but create highly valuable bilateral partnerships. So for that one, I'm really proud of the work we've done of defining the right type of partner and being able to service them. And as we scale, we expect to see that partner channel becoming a bigger piece of our business. But today, we're dominantly led by the inbound and outbound channels.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
As a startup, we are constantly in the path of positive change. So I'm going to mention three things that we are constantly working on, but I'm really proud of the work we've done to position us for success.
1) Prospect discovery. This is a tough balance between interrogation and value-based discussion. And we've recently really flipped our scripts and really tried to shift the discovery goal to making sure the prospect understands our interpretation of their problem and how it's affecting them individually. And, that's shift has been, instead of going to the standard, “Hey, are you experiencing this industry problem?”—”What is the personal impact of this problem, and how is it affecting you guys?” It's a small change, but that shift in discovery has really shifted our sales model. Where now, and like, we're not original here, but we're really focusing on client pain, focusing in on the impact to each individual prospect.
2) Client feedback loops. Before I came on board at sweet spot, we hadn't done a great job yet. So, we've introduced the customer advisory board. We've introduced a quarterly business review process. And, we’re greatly mining a lot of great data from our existing clients, and really trying to twofold: increase the dialogue between existing client and SuiteSpot, “How do we build a better foundation?” But, also learn from them. Learn from them, from product, not only how we've deployed, but product innovation, and we're now seeing great innovation come out of that feedback loop. We’re really excited about where that takes us.
3) Shift in our pricing model. The last thing, and this is a change that many SaaS companies go through, is a shift in our pricing model from a feature, or a modular-based, model to platform. Our value to our clients was greatly in the entirety of our platform. Because of some legacy pieces and how have we grown up, we had clients buying different modules and not buying the entirety of the platform. So, we made a difficult business decision to make this as a shift. We're going to shift our existing clients from a feature-based to platform and we're going to present, in a new way, the product as a platform. So it's a great success on that front. That's a big change both from our CS teams and sales teams of how we are telling clients what they are purchasing and what we're delivering. So, really proud of those changes.
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
Got it. Well, as I said to you earlier, I'm not interesting. So this is probably the things that a lot of folks are currently going through.
1) Really hyper growth scale dashboards. How do we get as much actionable data as we scale? So I run inside sales, outside sales, client success, and marketing. Having the right growth dashboards and caring about the real indicators that we need, that's something that I'm working on with my peer group, with our executive leadership, because in a world of so much data, how do you really come down to actionable evidence data? How do we look at those dashboards and say, “This is the right leading indicators for X or for Y.” I think it's one of those things that, roadblock may be a harsh term, but it's an evolutionary piece. It's a piece that we're really developing right now.
2) How you quantify value. In any way, in a sales cycle, you want to show your value. How you quantify value, especially from the midpoint of the sales cycle to the end, through that negotiation stage. So we're looking at the decision link, but also more trying to internalize, and how do we quantify, the specific value that this client is going to take, or this prospect is going to take, from leveraging SuiteSpot. And part of that leads into the last roadblock…
3) How do you speed up your sales cycle? I don't know any revenue leader who wouldn't say, “Hey, if I could take 30 days out of my sales cycle, or if I could take X out of my sales cycle…” Again, not original, but can we create more urgency within that sales cycle? And the way that we're trying to do that is I mentioned earlier, “Hey, how do we better understand prospect challenge? How do we quantify our solution?” Those two things together are really trying to allow us to earn the right to ask for the business earlier. That's really a path that we're going now. How do we show enough unique value, show our understanding of the prospect challenge, to create a buying agreement earlier than our traditional cycle?
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Pareto Principal. As I came up in my career as an individual contributor, one that stuck with me was the Pareto Principle. Results are not equally distributed. Oftentimes people call the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule. I look at this all the time in understanding, “Not every opportunity is the same. Not every prospect is the same.” I use this all the time to help drive focus, because, as sellers, we can be distracted by the shiny thing, and we can treat a call, like a call, like a call. When in reality, some calls are worth a hundred times more. Some prospects are worth a hundred times more. Reminders of that, to drive the right focus and energy in the right spot, has helped me as an individual contributor and still as a leader.
2) Opportunity cost model. On the same idea of focus. I've been taught an opportunity cost model. There’s a great executive leader, Paul Kerr, who always talked about the casino chips example. Whether you're a startup, or how big you are, no matter what, there's a limited number of chips that we're going to invest in certain things, in people, in technology, in campaigns, and in go to market. Understanding that each chip that you place, every choice, comes at the cost of another. This has really taught me to hone in on our top selling activities, our top clients, again, to drive focus, and understanding that every investment we make is going to pull away from something else. So we have to make sure that if we're going to be dramatically more successful, because we put the chips on this pile, that there has to be a level of belief that that's the right investment for us.
3) A culture of coaching. I don't know if it’s a mental model, but I support a culture of coaching. I believe that, especially in growth models, that your team should be coached, and support coaching, every day. So we talk about, in our teams, being able to collaborate in all things. This allows everyone to be rowing in the right direction, but by creating a culture of coaching, you allow all of your team members to manage up, to manage down, to coach each other, to have a voice, and it can really drive for your team members feeling like a part of something. As we build growing teams, a way to keep everyone engaged on the right goals is to allow them to collaborate and all things. I think that that piece is really important for us as we scale.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Hyper-personalized email sequences. So, I mentioned earlier on our outbound. I believe strongly in doing great homework and hyper-personalized email sequences. I think there's lots of different thoughts on the value of email sequencing. I think as a component of your outbound strategy is one of those channels, when leveraged right, can be incredibly powerful. So, I'll challenge those that aren't doing it to think about it, but look at what's right for your product, what's right for your prospect, and how do you incorporate that into a LinkedIn strategy, a call strategy, and a value-based messaging strategy, that's trying to create curiosity with prospects. So, that piece, I think that people should definitely try. I've talked to different revenue leaders who are getting away from email sequencing and getting away from email. I do think it's absolutely worth the squeeze.
2) How do we become industry experts? One thing that we're trying do from our side is, “How do we become industry experts?” Talking within our client's own words. And one of the things I like to do is bring subject-matter experts from outside the organization in to speak to really help frame the client problem in their own words, but not in an environment where we're selling to them, a guard-down environment where we can dive in. I'm talking about all members of the team. When all members of the team better understand prospect challenges, in their words, in their language, in their shoes, we can all of a sudden bring messaging back that shows empathy, has value to them, and showcases industry expertise. So all things that we want to develop every day.
3) Just be maniacal about what’s working. The last thing that go to market teams need to realize or try is just be maniacal about what's working, and have no sacred cows. Improve on what's working every week, but only keep what's working regardless of the investment. I work with other revenue leaders who maintain campaigns and investments because, “That's what we've always done, or it's what we believe is the right path.” But, are seeing no ROI. We have to be, as leaders, willing to cut the cord and say, “No we're done doing the things that aren't driving material value for us or our prospects, and we're going to lean in to what's working.”
What are 2 questions that you love to ask and why?
1) What's important to you? My favorite question to ask a client or prospect is, “What's important to you?” It's an interesting component that we assume what's important to folks in business all the time, and I think that can be a great priority setting landscape. That's one professionally.
2) What drives you? In that same way, on the personal side, is “what drives you?” I get that those are two separate things, but I like to know people's motivation. I want to know what they care about the most and why. That allows me to better understand, “Okay, this is what's keeping them up at night. This is what motivates them. Is there a connection here where I can help solve that problem?”
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
I've broken this up a little bit from leadership, revenue leadership and CS. So I'll start with CS.
1) Chris Basil is the Head of Customer Success at a company I used to work with, Essential Accessibility. He has done an amazing job of scaling a team that is under high pressure. It's growing incredibly fast through a hyper-growth SaaS model. His ability to define process, change process, and be a fantastic leader to that group, I think he has a lot to say
2) Chris Black is a CRO at Jolera. So Jolera is the MSP for MSPs. I follow his content on LinkedIn and know Chris well. He's an empathetic leader and he has a great vision for where Jolera is going. It may be interesting to have a conversation.
3) Terry Mirza. From the leadership perspective, I've worked closely with Terry Mirza at Compugen. So he's now the President of Compugen, one of the Canada's largest IT integrators. He has a unique perspective on revenue building through multi channels, team-building across what is a huge and displaced team. I think he would bring a lot of value to this podcast from senior leadership perspective, managing what is now a hundreds of millions of dollars business.
Connect with Darren on Linkedin → Darren Sharpe
Work with Darren → Careers at SuiteSpot
June 2022 · Interview by Chris Morgan, Host of Market-to-Revenue
13 minutes with Anthony Murphy: Founder of Product Pathways. Predicting the future. Strategic discovery. Seeking out early adopters. Balancing short-term revenue versus long-term vision. Modeling the future. Hiring. Technical architecture and debt. Capacity. BJ Fogg's behavioral model. Shipping super early, even when it's a concept. Setting goals. What needs to be true?
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Really good question and an interesting one for me. As a product coach, I don't work with a single team. I work with multiple clients, multiple companies and product teams all over the world. But, one of the benefits of that is I get to see interesting challenges.
1) Predicting the future. If I think about some of the clients I have right now, probably one of the most interesting I'm working with now is what I would deem as a horizon three product. Essentially, the horizon model is near term, mid term, far term. They're essentially shaping the future doing some really cool, market-leading AI, 3D rendering technology, but a cool market for that doesn't exist today. So how do you convert that into revenue? That's a whole other challenge. We’ve been spending the last 12 months in doing that. Part of it is ”Well, what does the future look like? How do we predict the future?” So we've been spending a lot of time doing modeling on previous trends, like the rise of chat as opposed to calling people up, and all these other trends. Essentially, using them as predictive models to try and predict the future. Predicting the future in order to create a market in order to create revenue.
2) Strategic discovery. We need to have confidence in all those things. They are just models. It doesn't mean that that’s exactly what the future's going to hold. We need to be able to validate some of that, gain confidence in it, and really calculate the value of whether that's something that's worthwhile doing.
3) Seeking out early adopters and innovators. We spend a lot of time naturally seeking out early adopters and innovators. They really are our core market today. If you think about the diffusion of innovators, they're going to be on core market today. And then one day, that will become an everyday thing that everyone's using, and then we'll really crack into that. But that’s one of the things that we really focused on. That's a real hard thing to do, especially it's a B2B product. So how do you work out B2B innovators? It's it's a unique challenge, but that's definitely where our revenue is coming from today.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Working with lots of clients, I see some common challenges. I spend a lot of my time working with startups, or product managers in startups and a lot of scaling companies.
1) Balancing short-term revenue versus long-term vision. I think the biggest challenge that companies dealing with right now, as well as another client of mine, is balancing short-term revenue, or that's stability of revenue, versus long-term vision and gain. If you use that client as an example, their market, their future, doesn't exist today. So it's hard to make revenue off something that doesn't exist, but you need to make some revenue, you call it the completely investment-funded. That's not gonna work out longterm. You need revenue, but there's a danger of starting to fall into this trap of building something for today and missing out on that future, and not being ready for that future, when it comes. So that's a huge kind of challenge. I mean, I've been overcoming it in some of those ways that I've kind of mentioned before.
2) Modeling the future. That's a really interesting one. We really overcame that by looking at previous trends and building a few models around that, but a super unique challenge that I haven't had to deal with before.
3) For one of my clients, they had really big retention issue. Classic leaky funnel. You got plenty leads coming in, but not everyone is staying in there. So, I spent a lot of time with them, reshaping their product strategy to understand those gaps and balancing that. It was a good challenge.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
1) Hiring. I'm working with a VP of Product at the moment at a growing startup, and probably the biggest roadblock we have right now is just c. They’re growing, they’ve got to grow, got to go with it, get more people, but the market's super competitive, and I think most people and most product leaders and people in product and tech know this, salaries are through the roof. People are hard to come by, negotiating is a huge challenge, especially when you're a small company and you can’t really pay Microsoft will Facebook salaries. It’s super competitive. That's probably one of the biggest roadblocks I'm working with with them at the moment.
2) Technical architecture and debt. This is a real start-up and scale-up kind of problem. Technical architecture and debt. It's really common for companies, the way we start, start-ups will just hack it together, basically. Architecture, from a technical product point of view, often is monolithic. We don't have to think too much about the future, cause it doesn't matter. We might not have a company in 6-12 months time, so it doesn't matter. But then there comes a point in time where you start to get product-market fit. You start at the scale and start to grow. And then all of that debt and architecture starts to hinder you since, essentially, it becomes a bit like chains. It becomes a big roadblock, because then you want to grow as quickly as possible, but suddenly you're constrained by your architecture, your tech debt to grow that quickly. So you then start to balance all these big bets that you want to do, and these cool new features and functionality to grow a company against the fact that, “Hey, we don't actually have a scalable platform. How do we overcome that?”
3) Capacity. A roadblock I'm dealing with right now with clients in the same space, in startups, is just capacity. There’s always a million things we want to do. When you're a 200 plus scale-up is one client, or even a small 15 person startup, you only have so much you can do because you only have so many people.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I really liked this question actually, and it made me think, because I use a lot of mental models.
1) All models are both correct and incorrect at the same time. I have an overarching mental model that is all models are both correct and incorrect at the same time. What I mean by that is I think they're all about 80% correct. There's obviously always exceptions. It's a really good one that keep in mind because you just can’t anything as a 100% applied to everything. It's not going to work. You need to use different models and apply it. Some models that I've been using recently. This is where my headspace went to.
2) BJ Fogg's behavioral model. I love that. It just talks about motivation versus, essentially, behavioral change, or habit change, and which is highly applicable in the product space. Especially when we think about shipping new features or even new products. How do you get people to change their behavior? How much motivation is needed? How easy, how hard is it? I think it’s a fantastic model for that.
3) Classic flywheel model. I've been doing a lot of work around product strategy. So, definitely, that's been in my head, and Wardley Mapping has been as well. For those who aren't familiar with it, look it up. It’s super big and complex for me to explain it, but it's been super useful with Horizon 3 product, and that client, just because it's a really good way to map out things that are early innovations versus later in their life cycle when products become commodities. So it was just a really good way to map out the market, do some modeling, thinking about where do we want to target, how do we want to position ourselves, and all that.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Launch early. I know that sounds so simple, but launch super early. Like, even before you have a product. I've done that several times now. Put something up there. Pre-sales, or even just a pitch on it, and see, AB test it, to start to see what type of traffic are you getting from it? I worked with somebody who said, ”Sell the vision first and then built it next.” I thought that's a really good way to frame that. Because if you can’t sell the vision, even when you build it, you're gonna have a big problem. I think shipping super early, even when it's a concept.
2) Westendorp price sensitivity test. I don't see people do this enough. Just a really good test. A good thing to put into discovery, especially if you launched a new product, or changing the price point, or those types of things, just to see. where that price point sits and how it resonates with, and actually have some discovery, some research, that backs up the price that you set in for your product. I think that's important.
3) Setting goals. Another one that probably seems over simplified, but what I like to do when I launch new products is I basically go, “If this is to be successful, what needs to be true at the end of the first week? What needs to be true at the end of the first month? 60 days? 90 days?” Essentially, I'm trying to measure success. You're looking for signals like, “Are we going in the right direction? Is this successful?” If not, then we can pivot, and we can do it at different intervals.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
It depends on the context, but some of my favorite questions, for asking users when I'm looking at market research. Some of my favorite questions are:
1) Have you tried to solve it? Or how are you trying to solve it currently? Or how have you solved it in the past? Essentially you looking for patterns, like “We’ve been building this big spreadsheet to try and solve this problem.” You're like, “Oh, cool. Tell me more about that.”
2) Tell me more about that. That’s probably another question. I love to say, “Tell me more about that.” I do that with my team as well and other people that I coach. It’s just a great way to dive into things and get people to talk more.
3) Pause and just have silence. Maybe the last question that I'll throw in there, won't be a question. It’s something that I like doing, and it works really well as a technique, and you can do it in anything, market research, customer interviews. Pause and just have silence. If you create an uncomfortable silence, nobody likes it. You want to fill the space, but just hold the space. And sometimes the best question is no question. Then, the person will start talking and they'll start talking about something super interesting and super relevant. I like doing that. Good technique.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
3 people came to mind pretty, pretty easily, actually. I work with some awesome people and know some really good product leaders.
1) Adrienne Tan. She's the founder of Brainmates. She's also on the Board of the Association of Product professionals, which I'm also Director of, which is something I do in my part time, but all-around an amazing product person. She's the always giving people wisdom and she should be great. She's always good to talk about these things and always up for it as well.
2) Erin Soo Kee is somebody who came to mind as well. She’s a Senior Product Consultant at a product consultancy called Product Rocket. I think she's just an awesome product leader. She's got some really good go-to-market experience. She's launched really complex b2b products in large enterprises. She would have some interesting things to say around that.
3) Büşra Coşkuner. She’s a fellow product coach. She’s in Switzerland actually, to get some geographical diversity in there as well. I think she's got a wealth of knowledge, I always love talking with her. I learned so much when I talk with her every time, so she came to mind as well.
Learn from Anthony → Product Pathways
Connect with Anthony on Linkedin → Anthony Murphy
Take a long, long, hard look at your go-to-market process, not from the perspective of what you're currently looking at, but put yourself in the shoes of your colleagues. If you're in sales, take a look at the marketing side. If you're in marketing, look at customer success. If you’re in customer success, look at sales. All of those things, if you want to be successful as a business, it's not about I, it’s about we. It means you need to learn, understand, and really look at what is the entire journey and get really buyer-centric from that perspective.
Here’s what Arthur Castillo said about Craig:
Sometimes we are too obsessed with our ICP. I heard Craig Handy talk about this where he looked at the ICP qualifications for previous years, Closed Won revenue for a client of his. He found that 60% of the Closed Won revenue technically would have been disqualified because it didn't meet their ICP qualifications. So a lot of the time, again, let's ask about where they're trying to get to? Or, maybe what they tried to do prior to reaching out to us, because often it could just be a simple switch or a tiny little product feature now that can expand an entire new industry and TAM for us, yet we’re disqualifying them. So, let's talk to those people, understand not necessarily where they're at today, but where they’re trying to get to.
—Arthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) PLG (Product-led growth). This is a big part of my role at Shopify. We, in a RevOps perspective, talk about “right person, right time, right way,” and I don't think there's a better “right person, right time, right way” than someone who's already engaging with your product to a certain degree—whether that's from a free trial perspective, whether that's from a basic plan, or even a big plan—and going with them and growing with them, providing that value for them when they need to see it or additional add-ons when they need to see it. The beauty of product-led growth is you have the visibility to what they're doing. You have the visibility to their performance, their challenges. You see other customers that have similar experiences. So being able to not only reach out to them in a very meaningful way, or the right time, but then also for them, in many cases from a self-serve perspective, say, “Oh, Hey, I want that, and I could get it, and I'm going to do it. And I don't need to have a million meetings to engage that way.” So that's a big piece there.
2) Referrals. From the Jameson's Strategies perspective, referrals. Huge driver for us. I only once went outbound. The real thing for me is: in a market where I think I'm coming with it with a product that is not common, we call it RevOps as a Service, and you're seeing a little bit of pop up, but it's not super common, and there some skepticism in that. So, having a warm referral, where someone's like, “Hey, this changed the game for us. So this really helped us. How do we pass that off?” And so we're really adamant to say that's meaningful for us, but we provide that value, and we naturally provide that value, so that people want to talk about it, and want to share it. That stems over to the third one.
3) Upsell / Cross-sell. This is prevalent in both Shopify and Jameson Strategies perspective. Sometimes the best barrier-to-entry is a little one, or one that is low-risk, or one that is a no brainer. And though, you believe deeply that the value is there, and I firmly stand by this, is that you don't sell something and believe it, you know the value is there, and sometimes you need to walk before you run. And so that entry-level where, “Okay, let's come in on a low plan if it's Jameson or let's come in on a low plan for Shopify,” and then you start to see, “Okay, these people care about me. They value me. They're providing me with value constantly, and they have a path for me to grow as I grow.” And so, I think to the question of how you turn your marketing into revenue, the micro concept of your market, as in your customers, how do you grow that? That is something that, if done right, is a safer, more consistent, and a more human approach to growth.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
I struggle with this question a little bit, because I was thinking, “What have I overcome?” It's always a constant struggle.
1) Making a tight budget tech-stack run like a sports car. I was playing around with this term, it’s like an engine swap of a Ferrari in Honda Civic. But the reality of this is that, especially from a smaller business perspective from the Jameson Strategies side, you have a budget, and especially in an approaching downturn, I don't want to throw into all these licenses, and all the op services, and is this the right tool? Is this the right tool? So the asks are huge. We want all of these things. But, the budget is like, “Ah, I can only buy a quarter of it.” So one of the challenges that is always a roadblock, but something that we've been very successful in overcoming is, “Okay. Can we make this and squeeze as much value as possible?” It's not always pretty, and I'll be upfront about that, but the bottom line is you're trying to achieve something. How do we help you to do that? That's been a consistent thing with a lot of clients. We get them to that particular point and then they prove that value in that, in that business case, and then they continue to grow. But sometimes, we've got to stretch a little bit outside of our box at the beginning. So that's a big one.
2) Forming a super alliance. This is from the Shopify context. There's a lot of things going on. There's a lot of investments happening. What are we building? When are we building it? How are we we doing this? There was a really interesting topic that my team and another team both had a lot of skin in the game on, so at first, well, who owns this? We want to drive with our direction. They want to drive with their direction. It took a few deep breaths, really thinking, “How do we put our merchants first? How do we put our customers first, and come together with a meaningful relationship?” And what that basically formed is, and we talk about it as like our step-sibling, this alliance between we call the project something, they call it something else, but it’s the same goal, same objectives. We just have different lenses on it. We always approach it with, “How do we win together?” That aligns us, which has been really strong and really powerful. So, that's been a huge one.
3) Growing a team really quickly. And so from the software perspective, towards the end of 2021, we restructured a little bit. So, a good portion of what my team was responsible for, my team moved to a new group, but then we inherited a lot of new requirements and new expectations, plus the revenue growth of the company. In that scenario, we need to fill these seats, so huge push. Thankfully we had a fantastic recruitment team, but doing hundreds of interviews, and engaging on a meaningful level, while also realizing, “Hey, I need to double in size, but I also want to add to the culture. So that was very challenging, but I'm happy to say we successfully did it. It's phenomenal. I'm loving all the new people that we have working with the group.
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
1) Time. I'm sure you probably hear this all the time. It's a constant struggle. Juggling that, not only within work, but also within your personal life, your personal life balance. I can get really like laser focused on something, but as someone who embodies my work life, finding that balance is incredibly tricky. The other thing, too, in our perspective, in a digital world, where neither of the businesses am I in-person, that whole sense of, “Let’s just hop on a hangout.” I've heard this many times from people, “I don't want to get on a meeting without agenda,” or, “This didn't need to be a meeting.” But, on the flip side, it's like, “Well, why couldn't it have been for the perspective of some human interaction? There's a way for us to not get mixed up in the way we're typing and read into things. Let's just get on a call and have that chat.” But in doing so, the calendar looks really, really nasty. So, that roadblock is, as expectations and everything started to grow and change, how do I have to adapt that without losing that human connection with a growing team, and a growing client list, and so on and so forth? So that's a big one. I don't know if there's an answer, but I'm certainly not going to stop. I'm too stubborn to stop searching for one.
2) Prioritization. This is especially true across the board. I call it separate from time, in the sense that you have a lot of things that are out there that we could do, a lot of ideas, a lot of projects that could produce value. You have a finite amount of resources in a certain set period of time, and, of course, you ask marketing, “Hey, what's the most important thing?” In sales, “what's the most important thing?” And sometimes, there are different things. Of course, to them, their thing is the most important thing. And so, how are you objectively, and collaboratively, identifying the priority? From my view, and my fear, where the roadblock lies is that by systemizing this into a really concrete process, you lose the human level of this. You talk about what the average number of kids people have is 2.5, but you and I both know you can't have 0.5 of a kid. So when you're talking about prioritization, it's like, “Oh, this is prioritized because this score was slightly higher.” But, does that make sense? Is that a human approach to the business? We're serving humans as our clients, and so in that case, it doesn't always work like that. That’s a big struggle. What's the balance between those two things?
3) Tech debt. It almost needs no explanation, but the reality is, as businesses grow, whether they're big companies or small companies, they grow very, very fast when they're on the right track, and they end up buying technology to solve problems. Without a really good long-term strategy around that, that stuff starts to build up, and we like to joke around and call it a Frankenstein system, but that's, in essence, a bunch of different parts that were never really meant to work together. Then, you start to investing time in decoupling that and rethinking that, and in the early days, it's no problem, but as you get bigger, and as you want to pivot, that weight makes it incredibly difficult for you to do things. The minute you start, and this is a big one for me, the minute you start making decisions not based on what the best decision is for the business, but based on the amount of effort it would take to make that change, you've gone down the wrong path. So, that's a big thing. How do you identify that early on? If you rack up a big financial debt, likelihood is you're not going to just try and go pay it off all at once, which is unfortunately how tech debt is associated. Instead, you get yourself on a payment plan, and you start to pay that debt off. And so, I encourage you to think about tech debt in that same way, where just because it's not a problem now, it’s best to believe that exists, so how are you effectively, without having to like rethink everything, slowly getting yourself in a better position over time?
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) I think of myself as an artist. This irritates so many people when I say this, but I say it nonetheless, I think of myself as an artist. I approach things from the perspective of an artist. This probably could be totally inaccurate, but this is what I say. This is why I'm going to say it again. Pablo Picasso, famous for his abstract art and everything, one could say, “Oh, I can do that. I can throw some paint on the painting and be like, I'm an artist.” But the difference being is like, can Pablo Picasso make a hyper-realistic, I-thought-this-was-a-photograph painting? Yes he can, but he chooses not to. So in this case, could I do that? No, I cannot. I can throw paint on the thing, but I can't make it look like you. That perspective, to me, is, when you understand the book, you understand the science behind it, uou understand the process, going into a perspective of, “Okay, is this actually the right thing to do? Or can I make some creative decisions, or creative directions, that go outside of what you would expect and create something beautiful?” And that almost is like a mutation, but I like to call it art, in this case. It irritates some folks, but the mental model is, I'm not trying to be rigid. I'm trying to be artistic in the way that we approach revenue operations.
2) Big vision. Again, this one probably gets me into trouble all the time, but I'm always thinking about the next thing. I'm trying to think about the big thing. I just despise mediocrity, and that perspective is, “Great. We've done this now. How do we do it a million times? Like, how do I million times X this thing?” I'm always onto the next idea.” For me, that means, and not in a negative way, don't settle, but for me that means, don't get comfortable in what you're doing and keep thinking about what's next, what's next, and drive yourself there. That, for me, is this constant thing when I wake up in the morning, to say, “Okay, what am I going to do next?” And I'm excited for it. I don't know what I'm going to next, but I'm excited for it.
3) A human approach. Anytime someone asks me how you build a team, I say, foundationally, it must start with psychological safety, and that means that people feel comfortable to be able to make mistakes, have failure, whatever those cases may be. All of that stems from the fact that in business, it's very easy for you to objectively say to someone else like, “Oh, I can't stand them.” Or, “I don't like them.” Or, “They're doing X or Y,” and you can totally take the human out of them, and that's awful. From my perspective here, you have to realize this is a person in front of you. Someone loves them. They have children. They have parents. They have friends. People care about them. When they go to an interview, they go home and maybe their, their son or daughter says, you know, “Hey, how did the interview go?” They deeply want their parent to be successful. Or, the parent asks, “Well, how was your day?” And like, “I had to argue with this person.” It's a human. And so whether it’s selling. marketing, internally building things, I always remind myself, there's a human in front of you. Speak kindly, speak softly, speak in a way that is putting them first. That's a big one for me.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Build adaptable foundations, not scalable solutions. I hear the term scalable, like, “Is this solution scalable?” It's coming from a good place, but I deeply believe that it's wrong because if you build something scalable for now, you are compromising what the best thing is for right now. And quite frankly, I think you're arrogant to the fact that you think you can predict the future in a level of detail. That means your solution you made today is going to suit yourself two years down the road. Instead, what I would then say, and I think is a better term, is adaptable foundations, which generally starts from the data. So thinking, “What is the best thing I can do right now? And how do I future proof it by meaning that I will need to change this? It's inevitable in a year, six months, two years, I will need to change my approach, but how do I engineer it now that when I do change that approach, it's built to be able to allow that to happen.” So in this case, one of the things I always say is footnotes kills funding. So in a company that's growing Seed, Series A, Series B, you report on something a certain way, and then you're like, “Oh, well, we had to change all this, and so we don't have year over year, but we're trying to…” No, that's messy. So, how do you, again, from a granular perspective on the foundation, create something that says, “We know this is going to change.” So think of it, but you don't know how it's going to change. So just do your best to predict that, but it starts from the data side of things. You need to spend more time and attention on that one.
2) Embrace the multi-armed bandit. This is where Arthur Castillo was mentioning about your ICP, and getting too focused on that. And so the term, the multi-armged bandit, it's a statistical model, and it's basically the balance between exploiting and exploring. The assumption is that if you continue to exploit something that you know, so, in essence, your ICP, you're just capitalizing off of what you know today. But the reality is, in the world and in business, your product is an adaptable piece of the market as it continues to change. And so if you don't spend time on exploring what that is, AKA speaking to people who, right now, are not a fit for your product, then you don't know what to build. You don't know what's coming down the line. Yeah, you don't want to put all your time in explorer because those deals are probably not going to close, but by having a healthy balance between that, the most profitable, most successful direction, is fluctuating back and forth from that because the explorer will mean that your exploitation down the road will be infinitely higher. Otherwise, if you just continue to exploit, your known world remains your known world. That's a really important one. And that's where you hear the term, “Build for where your clients are going. Not where they are today.”
3) Tension metrics. I've had some great people in my life also really focus on tension metrics. The assessment here is if you measure an individual thing at a point in time without taking into consideration, what came immediately before, and what comes after, what you're doing is you're only seeing one little picture of the story. So this is really common for sales saying, “Oh, our win rates are really high.” Okay, but are you losing things from the initial lead qualification stage? For example, are you being really super critical where you’re having waste, where you're saying, “No, I'm not going to work this deal.” But really, it could have been a great deal because you're obsessed about that win rate. Or maybe, you win rate is really low, but, “I'm just pushing things through the pipe.” But then, you have a huge churn rate. So it's like, “Okay, well, why is that? Are you overselling?” So the really important thing is a holistic picture of your entire go-to-market process, and for every thing that you measure, part of that measure should be what good looks like from the measure before and the measure after it, and it all comes into balance. If you're not doing that today, you should be doing that because that's so important for creating a healthy business overall.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
Questions are so important. I love that.
1) How do you define success 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years, for yourself? This is an interview question that I ask, but I also will ask people in general. I think it's a really good one. Some folks will say this is not a good question, but hear me out with this. So the first one is I generally say, How do you define success 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years, for yourself? There is no right answer to this question. You can be like, “I don't know. I haven't thought about it.” And what it tells me is you're living in the moment. You're not worried about that stuff. You're not worried about success for yourself. You're satisfied there. Some people come out with, “Ok, one year, I want to do this. I want to have a car. I want to have this. I want to have a house. I'm going to be married. Five years, 10 years, whatever.” I love to ask people that question because, A) if they say things and I know what matters to them, what's important to them, then we can continue to talk about that. But B), it's just interesting to see the perspective that folks have on short-term versus long-term and like, where are they looking right now? That's really important.
2) What motivates you? I think understanding on a level of what people are motivated by is the biggest driver of how to work best with them. When people are open and honest, and that comes from psychological safety, and they tell you what they're motivated by, then you can work in such a way that’s great with them.
3) What important truth do very few people agree with you on? A Peter Thiel question, which comes from Zero-to-one, which is my favorite book. For example, I answered that question with, from a RevOps perspective a lot of people say, “We're trying to break down silos.” I don't think so. I think silos are great. I think silos help build your craft, get people really good at what they do, but it's been the RevOps person's job when we actually ship and speak to our buyer and our customers, we don't ship those silos. We take all the best thinking and brainpower and processes out of those silos, and we put those together and create that holistic process that the customer's like, “Oh great. I'm speaking to this company.” But that's one of those examples where, if someone really thinks about like, “As an expert in my field, what do I know that other people won't agree with me on.” Tell me about that. I love that because it's such a window into someone who's put thought into something that's just taken as a given. I love that question.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Fahd Alhattab. He's the Founder of a Unicorn Labs. A good friend of mine. He's built this business, bootstrapping it himself. He got his start in motivational speaking and transitioned to leadership and leadership development from a corporate standpoint. He's absolutely brilliant, unbelievably engaging. I think his big focus is, is that if you had more Fahd in the world, if you had more Fahd involved with corporations and whatnot, then you’d have a hell of a lot better leaders out there. So from that perspective, but also from the perspective of like he's gone as a solo person, building a team, building a business, and really working well in his go-to-market strategy. It's a really impressive story.
2) David Andrews. This guy I think is the human embodiment of a machine learning. And I say that from the fact that, I don't care who you are, he will at out-work you. Absolutely brilliant account executive, unbelievably methodical about how he goes to market and how he sells, and does so with a smile on his face. So, if you want to think about how do you create discipline from an account executive perspective and how do you contribute to the overall business, not from a very intrinsic perspective, but someone who's like the definition of team player, you’ve got to speak to him.
3) PJ Goupil. He is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Agency Fox in Montreal, Canada. PJ really impresses me because he's a big thinker. A big, big vision kind of person. And he's disrupting the way that the real estate rental market is going by providing these like really interesting marketing, go-to-market experiences. What intrigues me from him is to as twofold is that I think you, you would see his company as like a marketing agency, but the reality is, is it's more like a think tank. They just approach problems with such unique and interesting perspectives. And the other side of it is that he is not a win-at-all-costs kind of person, but he's the kind of person that is willing to try just about anything. And so he's had many failures, many successes, and just a really interesting business perspective on how you go to market.
Connect with Craig on Linkedin → Craig Handy
Work with Craig → Jameson Strategies and Shopify
47 minutes with Mo McKibbin: Head of Customer Support and Success at Moxion. Sales as a strategy, not a skill set. Helping the right customer solve the right problem, in the right way, at the right time. Building the entire customer operational process from scratch. Tight feedback loops between the customer and the business. Making customer success a whole company sport.
20 insights. 8 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
I'm in the camp that sales is a strategy and not a skill set. When I think about driving growth at any part of the funnel, whether it's more obviously pre-sales, but also post-sales expansion adoption, it's really all just about helping the right customer. And when I say the term, customer, I also mean pre-sale customers. For me, everyone's a customer, whether or not they bought. So, helping the right customer solve the right problem, in the right way, at the right time. Maybe that problem is, "I need to find more information about how to do my job better." That would be content, videos, best practices, things like that, and that is helping them solve the right problem that is relevant to the ecosystem of your products, at the right time. Maybe it's, "How do I apply this product to achieve this value proposition that I bought into during the buying process?" That would be more on the customer success side of like, "We're in the product now. I need to apply the product to achieve this desired business goal." So that would be solving the right problem, at the right time, for the right customer. All of the operational theories, or structures, or methodologies, that I do is built around that concept. It's a little bit more holistically. Less about what sales does, or support does, or what success does, or what marketing does. It's more customer-centric because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you're a product-led growth company, or a sales-led growth company, or marketing-driven, or whatever. At the end of the day, the only thing that's driving revenue is the customer buying your product. So it's all about, "What will a customer find valuable in this moment? How do we consistently deliver it?"
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
So as far as putting this into three bullet points:
1) Investment in customer experience has contributed mostly to any sort of growth of businesses that I've had the joy of creating processes and operations for. That usually works, not only just by achieving incredibly high conversion rates – because I try to create approaches that are really tailored towards exactly delivering that right experience at the right, the right information to solve the right problem with the right time – but also word of mouth, and loyalty, and advocacy, and expansion. So I would say, I have no insights in the top-of-funnel or demand gen sort of world, as much as, it is all about nurture, conversion, solving problems, and then delivering a great experience that then causes word of mouth, loyalty, and expansion. So, the way that we do that from a tactical sense, is we create operational segmentation to facilitate scalable personalization. Now, that is a lot of buzzwords. I really like to take things apart and organize things. So, I like to organize my customers by operational segments, lifecycle segments, and personalization segments. So, operational segments has to do with the amount of touch that a customer requires. So a really common would be the difference between what is a low-complexity self-serve customer versus a high complexity enterprise customer, are probably the two ways to think about that. Then, personalization segments is, “What is this customer's desired outcome use case?” A good example for a tool that everybody uses, because it's the OG project management tool, is take something like Trello. If you're using Trello as a software company, you're using it very differently than if you're an event planner. Personalization segments are a little bit like, “What are the common goals that our customers are using these products for? And how do we create paths for them with enablement, with videos, with what we introduce them at the right time that are actually aligned with their goals?” There's a self-serve version of that, but then there's also a high touch version of that where it's more like coaching and consulting to get enterprises on the right path or change management within that. So, I think that that was just a big “one.”
2) After you break apart your operational segments, it's optimizing both for digital and human touch. I am of the mindset that you actually need both because you have to help customers the way they want to be helped. Some customers prefer self service and want to do all of that exploration on their own. They want to get information and they don't want to talk to anyone unless they absolutely have to. I'm a buyer like that. The only time I've ever bought something that required me to get on a phone or in person was my house. But, some people also really need it. Some people really need that extra help. I've acquainted it before as, “What is a better experience if you're in a hardware store? Is it somewhere where everything's really well outlined, so that you know exactly where to go and what to pick up for what you needed for your hardware product? Or is it something where someone greets you at the door, and they ask you about your project, and they give you consultative advice on what to do and how to pick things up?” The truth is actually both are great experiences, depending on the customer. If I am a seasoned person who knows what they're doing, and I want to get up and running right away, I want to just get in, get out, self-checkout, make it as seamless as possible. If I am starting a project on my bathroom, and I have no idea where to get started, I want to talk to someone and make sure I don't screw anything up. So, operational pathways based off of that segmentation, that's what it's trying to facilitate to create both a self-serve path, and so you can actually optimize the times that human touch is valuable and has an ROI because everything else is automated. So it's not one or the other. It's that they have to both work in tandem in order to work it successfully and scalably.
3) Once these operational systems are in place, I think the most important part of this puzzle is actually building feedback loops between the customer and the business. And so, by that I mean, between the voice of the customer and product, the voice of the customer and marketing or growth or however you're calling it, the voice of the customer and engineering, all of these arms of the business that have some sort of customer impact, building these feedback loops is, essentially, the investment in customer experience that causes customers to feel listened to. It makes it more of a relationship. From a product standpoint, you're building the right product for the right customer. If you can facilitate these feedback loops in a way that you can quantify, and understand, what customers want the most, essentially the impact it would be on the business from a growth and marketing standpoint, if you are building these feedback loops between what the customer is actually saying they find valuable, it makes it easier to then deliver to the top-of-funnel demand gen people that it's, "Oh, these are what we should be saying. Our value props are because this is how we're going to attract more successful customers.” And then, obviously, the most common on the support side of things, the success side of things, is engineering, because most people equate it with talking about support. But, I think the thing that I do that's kind of weird is that I think of it as feedback loops throughout the whole business, not just on the technical side.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
I'm going to be a bit vulnerable. I constantly feel there's little battles all the time that are like, "Did I actually win this, or solve this, or it it just like a series of like minibuses advancing through the temples?" So, to be completely vulnerable, I don't know if I've ever solved any problems, but I do win tiny battles sometimes, and that is enough for me.
1) Making customer success a whole company sport. I think a lot of customers success leaders and support leaders will resonate with this. A lot of companies pay lip service to the value of it, but when it comes down to it, their decision-making processes are actually still quite a bit top-down, or hierarchal, or like, "No, that's for product to research," or "No, this is for marketing to figure out and then tell you," and like create kind of these top-down approaches. In order for the models that I usually create, operational systems, to be successful, it's actually all about the middle-out. So, it's all about aggregating feedback from the customer and facilitating these feedback loops between these departments, and the customer. Customer success is a really like misunderstood discipline to the point where I think even people in customer success don't all understand customer success. So I just call myself customer success because it's the closest thing to what I do. I can share how I define it. I don't really think of customer success as a team, or a department, or anything like that. I think of it as, "What makes our customers successful using the product? What is the easiest, most frictionless way to get them there?" And then, building operational processes that has those two goals in mind. Which is a whole company sport. When I think of what a Head of Customer Success is, it's the owner of that feedback loop, and the processes, and the cross-collaboration that comes into place. When you have teams, and people, and other leadership, cross-functional leadership, that are used to working in more traditional, top-down decision-making and siloed departments, it becomes a little bit like, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this? This is my job.? Don't tell me…" It becomes a really tricky territory to navigate. It can be especially challenging if you don't have buy-in from C-level, if you don't have buy-in from the CEO, if you're not getting championed. There's always some leadership that's like, "This is so cool. I'm so on board. Please meet with me. Let's get your team's feedback. What are the customers saying?" Totally want to. And some are just like, "This is not your place." When trying to relationally navigate those, I think that's probably the biggest challenge for everybody in customer success. Because people just don't know how to deal with this team. Some people just think it's a glorified support team, or account management team, and then they're treated as such. If you treat a support team like it's a cost center, it's going to become a cost center. Or, if you treat account management like all it is is just like upsells, you're not actually going to get value out of the insights. The customer insights, and the relationships, and the ability to fill those feedback loops, is the thing that is valuable about the role. So, as far as overcoming challenges, that's one of the challenges that I feel like I'm constantly navigating. I originally was an actor and a comedian and I always think about the Steve Martin quote, "Be so good they can't ignore you." That's essentially the strategy that I try to take places. I'm just going to keep showing how valuable this feedback is, and how much the customers are buying more, and using more, and sharing more. It's essentially the way to overcome that organizational tension. It's hard, because I feel like people who gravitate towards support and success are usually highly empathetic, which means they're not usually like toot-your-own-horn types of people. So, I find that the best way to overcome that is to be a cheerleader for the department, the work, and the success. You have to say it over and over and over again and get people on board. Eventually, people are like, "Oh yes, this is valuable. You will get a seat at the table.” But, it can definitely be a slog because of those. We're talking about like decades of business structures and people's MBAs on operations. The truth is, we live in this totally new ecosystem and landscape of business that we can't actually apply by the same rules, because the way people buy is changing. The way we sell is changing. The way products help businesses, everything, is changing. So if we stuck to the old models, we're not going to actually have any success. So that was kind of a lot.
2) Building the entire customer operational process from scratch. This one I really do feel like I really overcame and it's great. So, I was just at a start-up – and I'm I still there, but we were aquired, so it's not really a startup anymore – where I literally built the entire customer operational process from scratch. I mean, it was like taking it out of 1996. Their sales process, they wanted them to call a sales number to a very specific, only-for-sales person to take these calls, and didn't want videos or anything, because it's like, “Oh, our competitors could steal our information.” It was a really old-fashioned sales process. Oh, the other thing is too, is they also treated all customers the same. The Moxion platform, it's a full production workflow platform for Hollywood productions and studios. Batman was on Moxion, Jurrasic World was on Moxion, really major productions, but also major studios. And so in the beginning, we were kind of treating, And so in the beginning, I wouldn't say they were treating everyone the same, but like definitely there was like a difference in attention that they would give like a production, like Batman versus like a production like, I don't know, some documentary on Netflix. There was some difference in touch, but it wasn't like it wasn't operationalized at all. When I started talking to customers and identifying the operational segments, it was revealed there's actually two entirely different customer types that we're kind of treating as the same. We have a studio customer type that uses the product in a totally different way than a production customer type. So we were onboarding studios the same way we were onboarding productions and they are a totally different set of needs, set of complexities. The way they utilize the product is completely different. Everything is different for these two types of customers. And yet, they're really intrinsically linked because the studios are actually who give you the productions. So, it ended up being kind of like discovering that, “Oh, actually what you have here is like almost like channel marketing or a franchisee type relationship where you have the studio, and then they give you productions.” And so, then there's a production buyer, and a studio buyer, that are inextricably linked, but they're actually two totally different customers that require totally different operational processes and amounts of touch. So once we kind of teased that out, it honestly made everything super smooth sailing. Because it was like, “Oh, now I know how to structure my team. I'm going to hire a studio success person that's going to be my high touch CSM. They're going to take care of the studios. Production Success is going to be my velocity success team. They're going to be a little bit more like support-driven growth methodology and do everything full lifecycle. Now we know exactly how to direct customers into the right path so that we can get them up and running right away, so it's not just handling every single person like they are a special case.” So I think that was a pretty notable challenge that had been overcome.
What is a roadblock that you’re working on now?
I do have one major roadblock. Again, to be in a state of vulnerability, I don't know how I am going to survive this, but maybe talking about it will at least help other people who are in similar situations. Come find me and be my support group, or maybe get a braintrust together, because this has to be one of the most common problems for startups.
1) We were recently acquired. I've gone from someone who had a lot of autonomy on things like operations and toolings and systems. Obviously, I'm passionate about it, and have very strong opinions, and they work really, really, really well. like we like 4x’d our growth in like a year and a half, just from switching our operational processes. I wouldn't say just from that, but we actually don't have any top of funnel marketing, no demand gen. Everything was expansion, loyalty and word of mouth. Like every single thing. So, I think that's pretty remarkable, and also our customers are Amazon, Disney, Apple, Netflix. I think it's pretty remarkable for not having any go-to market, except for basically our customer success team and a CEO who's really charismatic and a great salesperson in his own. That's it. That's like what our go to market team is. So, um, so anyway, so I. I don't. So constantly, what I'm hearing is, “What you're doing is so cool. It's really impressive what you did. It's not how we operate at Autodesk. So, how do we break these things apart and move them into Autodesk processes?” And again, this is kind of what I was talking about with the siloed approaches or top-down. Well, the point is you can't, you can't actually do it. It's a totally different way of operating, and we can either stop operating that way, and just operate in your way, but it's gonna be a complete organizational overhaul. Um, So I just like, they're leaving us be for a year, but after that, they need to start integrating us. Seeing this tsunami of change coming, and you can't fight the tsunami, that's not an option, you will lose, like it’s an 11,000 person company, I'm not stupid. But like, “Well, do I run or do I surf?” I don't know what the right one, I'm not particularly great at surfing in real life. I've done it. I enjoy it. But, the exhilaration from it comes from like, “Oh my God, I didn't die today.” So that's the major thing. Honestly, it's taking so much of my energy, because I like oscillate between, “Oh, this is a really cool opportunity for like change management in an organization and understanding how these pieces fit.” And then it's also like, “I just need to tear apart something that I just gave birth to that I'm really proud of and give pieces away to different departments.”
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
It's so funny, because we talked about this in the initial conversation that I don't really think of things in terms of mental models. But then, I saw one of your LinkedIn posts about other people's mental models, and I was like, “Ooh, I think I can like at least package one into something cute.”
1) The Home Edit Model. I'm calling it the Home Edit model. I don't know if you watch the home edit. I think I mentioned before, I love organization. In general, I'm a relatively organized person when it comes to my house. I just really love systems that work. It just like eliminates chaos. If you don't have to think about stuff that doesn't matter, you have so much more space to think about the stuff that does matter.I love my parents, but they were both very disorganized people, and so I feel like I grew up in this very disorganized environment and I had a really hard time navigating it when I was a kid. Now, as an adult, I'm just like, “Systems for everything.” The Home Edit is an organizational show on Netflix and essentially, their Step-1 is just like, “Take everything out of the pantry or take everything out of the closet. Just take everything down.” I do this in my physical space. I do this in my like intellectual space, or in work. When I started the operational process of the company, I'm just like, “Give me all the customer data that you have out of Salesforce or HubSpot, whatever. All of the customer data. All of the processes. All of everything.” Then, I just like lay it out in a huge matrix, and put everything in like little piles of like, “Who are the buying roles? What are the use cases people are using things for? How are they using this?” Essentially, taking everything that might be on like an ideal customer profile type of thing, and just taking all the data and just organizing it into piles and then talk it. That's where I get my operational segments, and my personalization segments. From there, it becomes talking to customers and that's where I get my customer journey. So then, I start to map trends among those customers in terms of how they do things, what they're doing, what their goals are. And then, I line it up with these like organizational piles, until we create a system out of them. So, I'm calling it the Home Edit.
2) Inversion. So, and especially when it comes to Customer Success, I think is a super relevant. Who are our most successful customers? And then how do we take what they're using things for, what they find valuable, and what's happening right now, that's like really, really working, and then how do we throw that up the funnel so that, we can have more information, or demos, or videos, or things that then reflect all of those to basically attract the right type of customer. So just taking everything, instead of top-down thinking, thinking like, “Okay, these customers are successful, how do we get there? How do we get more of them? How do we do that?” So I utilize that technique, or mental model, a lot.
3) Circle of Competence. The other thing I do very frequently, which I'm not sure is a mental model, but I did look up mental models and one of them was called Circle of Competence, and this is definitely a way I operate. I am just a super old soul that must have just come from when we were just egalitarianism, wandering humans. So, I just love working collaboratively with people on things. I have only the piece of the puzzle that I have, but then there's other people who have pieces of puzzles and experiences that I don't have. So essentially, what I'll try to do is get as much of a plan, or a thought, together on paper as possible, so there's some sort of like focus to the discussion, but then completely open it up to anyone that is involved to get feedback and point of view, and adjust. Sometimes it's funny because ometimes people will see me bring together a document, which is literally just me throwing my thoughts on paper just so I have an organized way of framing how I'm thinking, and some people will think that like, “Oh, did you intend for this to be the finished product?” And it's like, no, I intended this to be like the jumping off point for other people to start l weighing in and things like that. And that's usually how I work with my individual team. We’ll think of what some problems are. I'll put some of my own thoughts on paper, and then like just open it up to everybody, just adding their thoughts. Sometimes we end up on something that's very different from what it started, and sometimes we don't, and sometimes it's just a more fully-fleshed out version. So, collaboration and working with more minds.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Tight feedback loops with your customers. People build healthy relationships when they feel like they're being listened to, and responded to, and that they're part of the relationship. So the way that we do this at Moxion, and also did it at HelpScout, and this is where that support-driven growth sort of methodology is, we almost treat our support team almost like miniature customer researchers. So, when feedback comes in, we have like a series of questions to make sure that we're getting the heart of the problem that they're trying to solve, as opposed to a specific feature requests or things like that. Then, we actually track and aggregate all those trends internally and then bring them to product. When we see the biggest trends are bubbling to the top, we segment those trends by impact. So, either it's like high-value customers or high volume customers. The other thing that we do is have a differentiation between a feature request and a problem area. We actually call them hot potatoes, but a problem area is probably a better way to think about it. A feature request is something that is straight up, “yes or no.” For example, “Do you support Dolby Vision?” Yes. “Do you support X?” No. Like, there’s not more than one way to peel a potato. It's like a yes or no answer. That's a feature request. A problem area is one of those things where sometimes the customers ask for a feature the way they would solve a problem, but that might not be the best way to solve that problem. So, if there's more than one way to peel a potato, it's a hot potato. So when we get hot potatoes, we try to identify what they're trying to accomplish, what their end goal is, how much pain it's causing them. So when can relay that to product, we can bring it in a way that is not a poor way to solve the problem, and they can actually think about how to solve that problem, but the problem still exists. So we have some really good operational systems in place where we aggregate these. Obviously, I'm a HelpScout fan girl for obvious reasons, but HelpScout JIRA has like a really solid integration where you can log or link anything from HelpScout. But then, on top of that, if it gets closed in JIRA, it actually reopens in HelpScout, so it creates this really awesome thing where you can connect all of these issues to particular things on the roadmap. And then, when they're either released or decided that they're not going to do it, it automatically opens up, so then you can immediately get back to the customer requesting. So this is great for win-back. I mean, this works for every side of the funnel, because from a pre-sales perspective, if a customer is asking for something, and they didn't buy because it's not released, it gets reopened immediately. We can reach back out, and be like, “Oh hey, this thing that you wanted, we have it now, do you want to try again?” Then also, when you have those types of tight feedback loops to the customer, then they really feel like they're being listened to, and those are actually the kinds of experiences that increase trust, advocacy, loyalty. I would say if you're don't have tight feedback loops with your customers, that's like step-1 customer experience that you’ve got to put into place. And the best way to do it is with the places that your customers are delivering feedback, which is mostly sales and support conversations. Because only a very small amount are going to fill out feedbacks, or surveys, or like things like that, and it's like important to have that stuff, but nobody's going to write support, asking for a question or delivering feedback, and then also do a survey. So, you have to aggregate the feedback exactly where your customers are getting it and giving it otherwise, you're just getting such a very limited sliver of who thinks what, and it's honestly like a pretty biased group of people that fills out surveys. So that's one number.
2) Operational segmentation. I spent a lot of time in the beginning talking about this, but just to put a button on it, operational segmentation by complexity and by goal or use case. So I call them personalization segments versus operational segments. Lifecycle segments are also good to have, but that's more of like the overarching, “What happens at what part of the process.” That is how I believe it's possible to create really personalized experiences at scale. A lot of folks questione the ROI of customer success because they think of it as working individually with customers to identify their goals and how to get them there. I think part of this has to do with my weird background of coming from a bunch of startups, so I've worn a lot of hats besides support and success and sales. I've also worn a product marketing hat, and there's actually a beautiful marriage between customer success and product marketing. One can be related to the engagement and understanding of the customer's goals and then product marketing can essentially scalify it and make that self-serve, digital touch approach to it. Two sides of the same coin: do the Home Edit technique, find your little operational segments, create those personalization pathways, and then create a digital version and use that digital version to also inform and enhance your high touch version. They should be best friends together.
3) Use that segmentation to create paths to nudge customers along the next step in their buying and adoption journey in multiple different ways. Once you have these operational pathways outlined, let's say you have, from Moxion, we have studio success, we have production success, but then on top of that, that's even layered, where we have, especially production success, you could use it for a production, you could use it for post-production, you can use it for finishing, you can use it for different parts of the film production lifecycle, which all have different ways of using the product and different goals, and different even sometimes different people are involved in those. Find out, “What is their primary goal? Are they using it for remote camera-to-cloud, for production? Are they using it for finishing review, with color review, at the very end stages?” Once you find out their primary goal, which anyone can just do from a dropdown menu. It's not brain surgery, just ask “What are you using Moxion for?” Okay, you have your answer. So then, making sure that their self-serve enablement path follows, “What are all the activation points? What are all the value points? What are all the things that they need to get on board as quickly as possible with that specific pathway?” Some people think like, “Oh, is the best way to do this in-app? Is the best way to do this over email? Is the best way to do this with human touch?” My answer to that is, that is what should be determined with your operational segments, what are the best channels to do this, but you probably should always do both email and in-app, because if you're just doing it in-app and they don't log in, it doesn't really matter. How much investment, in terms of reaching out, and making sure that they accomplish these milestones, and putting meetings or things in place, should have to do with how complex the customer is, and how much ROI that they have at the end of the day.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
3 questions that I love to ask customers:
1) What are you trying to accomplish?
2) How are you currently doing this
3) How much pain is this causing?
Actually, it works for your team, too. Anytime someone comes to you with a problem. Get to the bottom of, What are they trying to do? What is their goal? What are they trying to accomplish? How are they currently doing this, in terms of what's not working? Or what are they trying to fix, and then, how big of a deal it is. That gives you so much insight into, “Okay, well, is this just somebody venting in a moment because they're irritated, but at the end of the day, it's actually not that big of a deal?” That works both for customers and your team. I think so many people try to give help without actually really understanding the core of a problem and what they're trying to do. It seems so basic, but like I think it maybe comes from thinking you have to help, or thinking you have to know everything. Very frequently, I see people jumping in and trying to solve problems before they even actually really know what the problem is that they're trying to solve. Always stepping back, and asking those questions, is going to make sure that you're giving the actual right help to solve a problem.
Who are 2 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Jake Bartlett. First of all, I'm going to shout out this person because they just connected me with really cool people that I'm really excited to work for, but also him and I are on so much of the same wavelength for how we think about customer experience and the relationship between customer experience and growth and that realm. I do believe he is on tour with his band right now. He's a drummer, but he really is also a go-to-market customer experience leader.
2) Mercer Smith. The other person who is like-minded in the way that if you're looking for more of like my brain type of thinking, she is a huge customer experience superstar, across all. She's just like the best coolest human, too. So definitely her.
For people who love what you are saying, what should they go do next?
1) Join the Support Driven community. There's actually a really awesome community. It's so funny, because there’s this hidden side of go-to-market that is mostly Customer Experience and actually hiding kind of in Support in the shadows. So there's like a really awesome support community called Support Driven. It's a Slack community. I've been in part of that community for like 6 years. I'm giving a conference talk / workshop in Portland in June that is through that community. It's really a holistic customer experience communit. It's gathered around people who deliver support, but it also covers customer success. It's just a group of people who loves to deliver amazing customer experiences. Everyone has so many opinions about everything. I find in support communities, there's definitely like support people who are like, “Support should have nothing to do with revenue and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And then there's people that are like, “No, actually, everyone needs to have a stake in revenue because we're all building this business together. Support is actually driving a lot of value. When you cut that off it becomes it becomes a cost center, and then you do actually deliver a terrible customer experience because it's not being resourced effectively because there's not like a tied revenue.” So, I love that community because there's both sides of that in there, in the support community. It's just so funny how many people have all of these opinions about whether or not support is part of go-to-market or not. So, joining the Support Driven community.
2) Join the Launch Awesome community. Honestly, I am starting to work with another company in a consultative capacity that just launched another really good Slack community, but it's more on the product marketing side. My realm of belief system is in this weird, ambiguous, sales, support, success and product marketing blob. So, if you are resonating with what I say, and you are more on the product marketing side of stuff, there's a product called Launch Notes. Launch notes has a slack community called Launch Awesome. There's some like pretty impressive product marketers in there. It's just starting to spin up, but it looks like a good brain trust is happening there. Hopefully, if it has the same sort of momentum as Support Driven, I think it could be what Support Driven is for customer experience professionals, I think that could be for product marketing professionals, which is another unsung hero group of the go-to market team.
3) Three books that I recommend. One of them is not a support book, but it’s still really influential to me and how I think about things and operate. The three books that I recommend anyone to read who just wants to think more about customer experience, especially like frictionless experiences or things like that:
1) The Effortless Experience. Probably everyone's already read anyway, but I'm just going to say it, which is the Effortless Experience. The whole methodology is built around the fact that people don't really care that much about delight when it comes to service. People care about frictionlessness and effortlessness. So, how should you curate the most effortless experience at any part of the funnel? It’s going to drive more loyalty and expansion than anything else.
2) Uncommon Service. Also a customer experience book called, Uncommon Service. There's a whole bunch of good takeaways, but one of them is, “It's okay to be really bad in some areas to be really good in others.” At Moxion, we had no official sales and marketing, but like to really invest, then, in delivering like meaningful customer experience is what drove growth.
3) The Extended Mind. It's not a customer experience book, but it is all about how people learn, and how people process information, and how the traditional means of educating or learning are fundamentally broken with how people learn and process information. As I said in the beginning, sales is really just about getting the right information to the right customers, in the right way, at the right time. That book has really helped me think about integrated approaches to helping people learn, because I think education is the new sales. There's all sorts of things in that, that at least from the enablement and product marketing perspective, just in terms of the importance of interactivity or community, or doing things versus showing things, and having multiple different types of mediums for people to consume and learn, and and how it's different for everyone. So, I think that that really helped me expand how to help people in ways that they can adopt and absorb information. So that way I would recommend that book to anyone.
Connect with Mo on Linkedin → Mo McKibbin
23 minutes with Vlad Blagojević: Co-Founder at Fullfunnel.io. 80/20. Thinking long-term. Account-based demand generation on LinkedIn. Frequent and regular marketing activities. Consistency. Co-creation. Continuously iterating on our offering. Making sure that people actually do the stuff that's important. Entering the US market. The most important skill that you should develop as a marketer is asking questions of your customers.
Show transcript.
Here’s what Dani Woolf said about Vlad:
Vladimir Blagojević. First, I definitely recommend Vladimir Blagojević. He's the co-founder of fullfunnel.io. I actually follow him on LinkedIn and he's helping B2B marketers who market to people in accounts that have a long sale cycles, like me. Helping us do things a little bit more strategically and methodically. I think the way he educates B2B marketers with his smart playbooks is awesome. It's so useful. And he's one of those people who understands the value of simplicity and practicality. And again, people who do that are going to win.
—Dani Woolf, Director of Demand Generation at Cybersixgill → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) We have a calendar of what we call frequent and regular marketing activities. So for example, both Andrei my co-founder, and myself, will write and post LinkedIn posts and engage with our audience. We have our own community, the Trenches, which is a B2B marketing community, where we also engage every day. Every week, we run our own podcast, the Full Funnel B2B Marketing podcast actually live, with B2B marketing leaders, where people from our community come can ask live questions and engage with some of the best minds in the market. We run a weekly, I forgot to mention, we have actually two newsletters. We have monthly webinars. Two times a year, we also run a B2B marketing summit, a Full Funnel B2B Marketing Summit. The last one, I think, had more than 5,000 subscribers. If I reflect, we only really started a little bit more than a year ago, working together with Full Funnel. Thanks to all these activities, we grew our newsletter to more than 12,000 people, got LinkedIn following right now is about 25k between the two of us. We had probably more than 10,000 people subscribe and attend our events. Just in 2021, from these activities, we generated 61 inbound opportunities. This frequent, consistent communication works really well for us.
2) So how do we convert, let's say, all that attention, and all that awareness and demand, into revenue? What we basically do is we help B2B tech brands with six figure deals implement proven playbooks to drive awareness and demand and land six figure opportunities with, let's say, 20% plus of target accounts. So when you're in that situation where you need to land large deals, you don't need a lot of clients, but you need the right ones, how do you maximize that? How do you actually get opportunities with, let's say 20-40% of targeted accounts? And we like to use those playbooks. They're tried and tested. We’ve implemented them so many times. We have them implemented as a digital on-demand course. We have cohort courses where we go work with group of companies implementing those. We have one-on-one consulting as well, and that's how we actually help our clients and earn our revenue.
3) So, how does that happen? So normally, most of our consulting clients are inbound or referrals, so people who are just coming to us, and we actually almost always have to say no a lot of times. Digital products, we sell, usually, during launches and from our email list, while the cohort courses, actually, the group courses and coaching, mostly come via one-on-one chats and engagement on LinkedIn email, our slack group, et cetera.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) The problem that had the biggest impact was when we started Full Funnel, Andrei and myself decided that we are never going to do any execution. We're not going to work as an agency. We just want to be purely advice, courses, et cetera. So that wasn't easy, but it is something that we managed to build.
2) Changing the way that we work, and for myself, changing the way that I work. So that, instead of like being busy, busy, busy, I can devote maybe 50%, to maybe sometimes even 70%, on really high-leverage activities. I mentioned all the activities that we do online. I mean, it's just the two of us, and we have the client work, and we are building the products. And so, the way that this works is by being able to focus on the 20% of activities that generate the 80% of results.
3) Making sure that people actually do the stuff that's important. We started by selling, other than one-on-one consulting, those digital courses, and we saw that people are not really implementing stuff. That's a problem with courses. When we launched, and decided to launch the group course, this was one of the reasons. We, again, applied the 20/80 principle to really focus on making sure that people actually do the stuff that's important and make all this experience, very interactive and immersive so that people actually, during the sessions are engaged, are listening, doing stuff, and actually implementing and getting results. This is working and I'm super, super happy about it.
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
1) We are continuously iterating on our offering, on our products, and how we monetize or help our clients. Currently, we are working on a program. We have all these playbooks, but what we want to offer our customers is a program where they can go from zero to account-based marketing, which is one of the things that we help our clients implement in a quarter or two. So, we are creating these larger programs and combining the different pieces of the puzzle that we have created so far.
2) We want to replace all our one-to-one consulting income with courses and digital products. And we really want to focus even more on the things that we enjoy and we know bring a lot of impact and results. We want to publish more books. We want to do more events. We want to create more content and just focus on content creation, creating those courses. And eventually also hiring a course manager. Being able to just focus on creation of knowledge and just promotion of what we do.
3) Entering the US market. If you look at our sales, just pure digital sales last year, probably 80% of our market, in terms of our audience, is in Europe, while maybe 50% of sales, digital sales, came from the US. So, definitely, it's a growth market for us. But, when it comes to like group courses, when it comes to one-on-one consulting, we do have US-based clients, but they always say like, “Oh, wow. What you guys are doing is so in depth. We never really expected that.” They're always surprised at the level of detail, at how practical this is, and how effective it is, what we're teaching them, and what we're doing with them. But somehow, they get surprised by it. So in other words, it's not what they expect. And I think there is some perception issues that we might need to solve, or the way that we communicate is just different. There's a lot of competition as well, especially in our space, marketing and sales space, that's probably the most competitive space and the most of the eexperts are US-based and people tend to work with their let's say people from the United States.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) 80/20. So I already spoke a lot about the 80/20. We try to look at 80/20 everywhere. We are already ruthless about, we have inbound leads, like which leads are we going to spend time with? Every week, we disqualify a lot of people who are asking to talk to us. In the way that we prioritize and plan. There's so many ideas. There's so many things that we could be doing, but we spent a lot of time thinking. Thinking about what we should be doing and what are those, let's say, the 20% of activities that will make 80% of impact. So this is like the model that has been the most successful for me and for our company.
2) Thinking long-term. They're all related, but the second one is thinking long-term. If you look at all the marketing activities that we are doing. Being there, everyday, posting on LinkedIn and doing all of these things. It's not like you're going to start posting on LinkedIn and you're going to get an avalanche of leads, or you're going to run a webinar and you're going to close like five deals. That's not how it works. It takes time. And especially, it takes time to build authority, to build thought leadership, to build an audience that actually knows, likes, and trusts you. People give up too early, usually, because they expect this to be linear, but the good news is that there is a compounding effect. Really. It' like with investment. At the beginning, was it Warren Buffett who said that the vast majority of his wealth he made after he was 60. That's exactly because of that. But, he wouldn't have made it hadn't he invested continuously over time before that, and hadn't he thought long-term, and it's exactly the same thing in business. I see this everywhere. A lot of bad decisions are made because people don't think long-term.
3) Consistency. Related again, it's about consistency. It's really, really important. Whatever it is that you're doing, especially when it comes to like demand generation, audience building to be consistent. Always thinking, “Done is better than perfect.” Let's make sure that we get, like I said, get this out daily, weekly, whatever. And that means that, sometimes, instead of making it super nice, and super good, and pretty, or whatever. You need to get it out there. Actually, it's a good thing, because while you're iterating, and thinking about it, you're not really learning. You're really learning when it's out there in the market. Your first version of anything is not going to be good, one way or another. It doesn't matter how hard you try to make it good, it's still going to suck. So the only way to make it better is to get it out there. Get the feedback from the real people and then do it again and again, and bring the next version, the next version out there.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Co-creation. Definitely co-creation. Like you and I are now doing. You're co-creating content together with me. So, you can co-create with your buyers. This is something that we have been doing for ourselves and with our clients. We have been seeing like amazing results. For example, I decided to build relationships with top marketers, and you know this right, with top marketers in my home market. Just wanting to start talking to Heads, VPs, Directors, and CMOs in the largest B2B tech companies. And I started and I built a list of 20 accounts that I wanted to build a relationship with and engage and activate. And actually, I had to stop the outreach after 11. I was inviting them to podcasts, that was one of the main plays that I used, and I had to stop at 11 because 8 of them said yes. And I'm not talking about people who are used to appearing on podcasts, and people maybe who are very active online and sharing and creating content, but people who are working, simply, in enterprise as executives, they're busy, they're maybe not used to appear in public, and it's just an amazing way to not only create these relationships, but also like learn a lot about target accounts. You have a conversation, and you're learning. Just unbelievable. We see that over and over again with our clients. It doesn't have to be a podcast. It can be a market research report. It can be a write-up post. It can be whatever. And in weird industries, like we did a play like that in the HVAC industry, the manufacturers of HVAC equipment, and again, out of 30 accounts, we have conversations with 11 of them. It's just amazing. I mean, no way, had we like done other things, like send cold email, run some ads, that we would have so many conversations, so much insight into target accounts. So co-creation, from that perspective, with buyers, but also just co-creation with, what I like to say, with people who your buyers trust. So this would be influencers, their peers in other companies, niche media owners, like podcasts, but also, maybe in some cases, associations depending on the industry, it can be different things, but co-creating with them. It’s probably what they know in the music business, and the movie businesses, the fastest way for you to grow your audience is to tap into existing audience. Like, the warmup act, or the opening act on a rock concert. They get the audience of the bigger band. And it's exactly the same thing that you're doing here.
2) Account-based demand generation. There's a lot of talk about account based marketing on the one hand, and there's a lot of talk about demand generation on the other hand. A lot of times, when people talk about demand generation, unfortunately, what they really mean is like running some ads, and maybe doing lead generation, et cetera, but what we saw works really well, especially for companies with large deal sizes, is being very strategic about who you're targeting, as you were doing account-based marketing, but then, running these different plays like co-creation and doing stuff for example, on LinkedIn, et cetera. to really create awareness with the right people. Because, at the end, you don't need a lot of clients, you need the right clients. That's why this works. What a lot of companies do, unfortunately, when they do account based marketing, they maybe run some display ads, or create some awareness there, but not really really at the level, I mean, that's not very effective, and then they run basically some sort of cold outreach. And cold outreach doesn't really work because people don't know you. They don't trust you. There's lack of awareness. You also don't know them. You don't know a lot about them. You don't know whether they're good fits. You don't know whether they are searching for a solution right now, at what stage they are, et cetera. So if you do account-based demand generation the right way, you can get the best of both worlds. Let's say the inbound and outbound, we call it sometimes the all-bound marketing.
3) Really, again, account based marketing account based demand generation, specifically on LinkedIn. For B2B companies with six-figure deals, it's probably the best platform, not for all industries, but for a lot of industries. That is the platform that makes this, let's say, all-bound account based demand generation, really, really easy and effective because not only that you can create and distribute content in a very targeted way, but you can also engage with your buyers and the people that are connected to. We talk about this like four different audiences, proxy audiences, that you can get on the buyers radar, but also you can just directly engage with them. You can post thoughtful comments, you can have non-sales conversations. There are so many things it can do on LinkedIn. It’s just amazing that not many, many more companies are doing that.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
So really, If I'm thinking about my prospects or my customers, I mean, that's probably the best invested time is talking to your customers, interviewing your customers, and understanding not only like the demographics, firmographics, who they are, but really understanding why or maybe better said, when, so,
1) What are the things that are happening in their business that made them search for a solution like ours?
2) Did something specific happen to trigger that research? What kind of problems were you trying to solve? et cetera. Really understanding the triggers, but also understanding how they buy, like what the steps they go through, who is involved, what kind of criteria, purchase criteria, they have, what kind of objections they have.
3) Why they chose you instead of your competitors? Really zooming in, into the whole buying journey, understanding in the buying journey, why they buy from you, what kind of value they're getting, is probably the best time you can spend. It’s probably the most important skill that you should develop as a marketer is asking questions of your customers and understanding your customers.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Andrei Zinkevich. I know that I can only mention one from my company, but whether I worked with him or not, I would definitely, definitely recommend you spoke to {}, which is really the man that I learned most of my B2B marketing knowledge from. He's my co-founder, but he was also kind of a mentor and a teacher to me.
2) Peep Laja. Another person that I would definitely recommend you reach out if you haven't already is Peep Laja, the CEO and founder of Wynter and CXL. He’s probably, in my opinion, one of the best experts when it comes to B2B marketing strategy and messaging, and just a really, really good guests. He would be an amazing guest for your podcast.
3) Corrina Owens. Senior ABM Manager at Gong. And she's just such a lovely person and such a good marketing leader. I love her advice and tips. It's always so practical and it's also in a way non-conventional. When she talks about marketing, when she talks about, for example, ABM and marketing for enterprise buyers. I mean, I learn in every conversation, and the stuff that you can actually put in practice and apply.
Connect with Vlad on Linkedin → Vladimir Blagojević
16 minutes with Jason Bay, Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting. “Inbound-ish.” Dial in the content. How to get people to ask for help when they need it. Getting people to take action on what they learn. Regret minimization. Socratic method. Bite-sized content that is immediately actionable. Myself as a bottleneck. How to systemize and get a team around me. What if I'm wrong? Show transcript.
Here’s what Meghann Misiak said about Jason:
Jason Bay is someone I work with very closely. He is the king of outbound. He's a great prospecting trainer and he has a program called Outbound Squad. The results speak for themselves. He has a lot of incredible followers and is a great trainer.
—Meghann Misiak, Founder of The Path to President’s Club → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Inbound-ish. I teach companies outbound, but I don't do a lot of outbound to get business. I've been fortunate in that regard in the last couple of years that the inbound engine works pretty good, but I still do a form of outbound. I call it “inbound-ish”. The way I look at client acquisition is you have inbound methods on one side and outbound methods on the other side. If you're listening, imagine a piece of paper, you’ve got inbound on the left, outbound on the right. What I look at on the inbound side is the organic content that you create. That could be blog posts, stuff on your website. Then there's also guest content, there's third-party content. Getting on guest webinars, guest podcasts, et cetera. What I do is, I try to use those forms of content that I create, whether that be through LinkedIn content or being on someone else's podcast like this or a webinar, and I use that to drive traffic to my website, or if it's a LinkedIn post, I use it to get likes and comments on my LinkedIn post. Then I'll proactively reach out to those people. I'll still do outbound on those. It's just a little bit warmer. That's a really big strategy.
2) Posting daily on LinkedIn. Where I get most of my business from is posting daily on LinkedIn, every weekday, posts, so that people will engage on it. A lot of them are already target market. I'll just reach out to them directly, to set up sales calls. Or to get them in my programs.
3) Partnerships and co-marketing efforts are really big thing that we do and webinarshave been huge. We just did a webinar with ZoomInfo last week on cold calls. We got almost 2000 people to sign up for it. Again, I'm building my list at that same time. I'm able to see who reached out and signed up for this webinar. And who can I engage with directly and kind of do this “inbound-ish”, this warm outbound, so that I can get clients.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Where to start? This one made me think a bit. Dude, running a business is hard. It really is. It's a lot of fun because, for me, I sort of grew up in sales. That was my career. And then I spent two or three years in marketing. But if I had to do a job where I only did sales, or only did marketing, or only did some sort of fulfillment, it would be really boring for me. The thing that makes this hard is also the thing I love about it.
1) Dial in the content. Specifically, we have a client program called Outbound Accelerator. It's six weeks. I'll take companies like Gong or Zoom, who’ve been some of my clients, through a six week accelerator with their team and it's really hands-on, “How do we outbound?” What I've really focused on is, how do I reduce the complexity of how I do this so that one, it doesn't drain all of my willpower fulfilling this, but two people get better results and it's just easier for them to do, so I think trying to figure out how can I teach less and say no to more things and really dial in the content and really, really focus on, hey, what are the handful of things? If there was one thing each week, during the two, one-hour training sessions that I needed everyone to take away, what's that one thing? And really distilling it down and simplifying it. It's just been so hard to find those things that will move the needle the most. We completely revamped our course content. Again, a lot of it is, how do we take 10 hours of content and whittle it down to the best two or three hours that's going to get the best results.
2) Figuring out how to systemize and get a team around me to support me. Another thing that's completely unrelated to that is our marketing. Just like you, I have a podcast and what we'll do with our podcasts is that, we'll take that, we'll chop it up into video clips. We'll re-share it on LinkedIn. I'll share it to my email list, getting mileage out of content. It sounds really nice in theory, to be able to re-share it all these places, but you need good systems in place. Otherwise, I end up being the person to spend all the time to do that. Figuring out how to systemize that and get a team around me to support me has been a really hard problem that we recently figured out how to do.
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What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on right now?
1) Myself as a bottleneck. In terms of roadblocks, me, I've always been the biggest roadblock in the business. I have three virtual assistants that work with me full time. I basically consider them full-timers even though they live in the Philippines, they work with me full-time, and then I have a couple of contractors I use to help with coaching. Those folks don't work with me full-time yet. I ended up being the bottleneck in most of the instances. I just got rid of myself as the bottleneck with marketing. I am trying to get rid of myself as the bottleneck with delivery and coaching and actually executing the trainings. That's a big thing that I'm working through.
2) How to get people to ask for help when they need it. I think engagement is really tough when you have a paid community of people, like in our Outbound Squad program, it's for individual reps. They pay a certain amount of money every month to get group coaching, course content, and then access to a Slack community. We have 85 people in there right now. Getting people to engage in a virtual environment. It's tough. It's something I'm still honestly trying to figure out, how to get people to ask for help when they need it. That's something I'm trying to figure out right now, actually.
3) Getting people to take action on what they learn. I am getting better at that, but this is what I've done the last 14 years, is coach and train salespeople. I'm still learning so much. A guy, Sam Ovens, he runs a company called consulting.com, what he talks about is “eating our customer’s complexity”. I thought that was interesting. A small example of that is, if I teach you Chris, “Hey, when you make a cold call use a permission based opener, it sounds like this: “Hey, Chris, Jason with Blissful Prospecting. I know I probably caught you in the middle of something, but you got a minute for me to tell you why I'm calling and you can let me know if want to keep chatting?” I could just say that to you. Or what I could do is, I could say that, scripted out on a piece of paper for you, on a document, and then I could share it with you and I can make it easy for you to not have to do any thinking, to take action on it. I think “eating the complexity of my clients” and spoon-feeding as much as I can, without doing it for them, is something I'm always trying to figure out.
What are 2 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I love that you asked this question. I've only recently gotten into my mental models. There's a really good book, I think it's called Mental Models. There's a couple of volumes that are pretty good.
1) Regret minimization. Most of these I use with my wife, Sarah, when we make decisions, either with the business or financial or career type stuff, one is regret minimization. That's a mental model from Jeff Bezos talks about that a lot. That's a really simple one. It's, you know, “Hey, 10 years from now, what am I doing right now that I would most likely regret?” And when you put that lens on things, it's like, oh gosh, wow. Me spending so much time and prioritizing work over family time, I would regret that in 10 years. So much, just starts to become really clear when you apply that mental model.
2) Socratic method. Another mental model that I like, that's really old is, Socratic Method. When you have to make really big decisions, just forcing yourself to think about a question I like to ask myself when I really want to do something that's kind of a big decision: “If this was the wrong decision to make, what would make that true? What would make that statement true? What would make this the wrong thing to do? Even though I think it's right. What other outside sources have I asked?” I think that's really big.
Let's go with those two for now. Those are the two big ones.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
This is a tough one, because I think there's so many.
1) Bite-sized content that is immediately actionable for your target market is super important. I always think of everything through an outbound lens. How can we make it easier for salespeople to start conversations with prospects? When you have nothing insightful to share, it's really hard to start conversations unless people are ready to buy. How do you do the equivalent of, I help salespeople with cold calling? How can I, with a sales leader, share something that's a LinkedIn post that has one tip that would take five minutes to consume and then immediately start using. That's really effective. I'm creating a ton of value for that sales leader and a ton of value for their team. How can I create more bite-sized content that helps people that's immediately actionable? Maybe it's a different way of thinking of something. Maybe it's a framework, maybe it's a tip or a technique or something they could forward to the rest of their team. I think it's hugely underrated.
2) Personalized videos I think are really, really big. I'm working with a client right now that has a solution. It's primarily for software companies, but with complex solutions, like a DocuSign, let's say, when people need to figure out how to do stuff, they go to the help file. And usually they can't find what they're looking for. And when that happens, people get really angry and they churn. They don't use the tool as much, so they help get rid of all that. One of the triggers that they look for is people talking in public forums about complications they have with the tool. That would be a really cool to put in a video. I reach out to you. “Hey Chris, I noticed that there's a bunch of people struggling to find XYZ feature on your product. I wanted to show you how we eliminate this problem for other companies by doing X, Y, Z.” Being able to visually show someone's really powerful.
3) Messaging matrix. This is something really simple that can be repurposed across departments. But what I find, is that there is a lack of clarity around the customers of the business and what they actually care about. Nothing against marketers. I am one by trade and I do a lot of marketing, but most of the time, when I see a persona built by marketers, it's very, “Oh yeah, Chris is, he's a typical persona and, he's a white guy (from your appearance). It's, I don't know how old you are, but there's this age demographic. He likes to wake up early in the morning and, and get Starbucks.” That's not really that useful. You know what I mean? I think the big thing is, you want to build what's called a messaging matrix and you want to have these four things on it: priorities. What do these people think about, care about, on a daily basis, independent of your solution? If I was to ask this person, “What are your top two or three things that you care most about in your current job right now?” What would those things be that they would say, and then I want to talk about current solutions. How are they getting the job done on those priorities right now? Are they using tools? Do they do it in house? Is there spreadsheets they use for it? What is the way that they're getting it done right now? What are the problems that get in the way of that? What are their aspirations? What do they want to accomplish? When you have those four things across your personas, you have something that can be used to make content. Salespeople can use it to sell better. People can use it to prospect better. There's all kinds of things that you can do that are really effective. If everyone just teams up, does a couple of workshops, style sessions, someone takes ownership over it and leads it. And you say, “Hey, we're going to come up with our personas in the language that they talk, in their words, in our customer’s voice.”
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
1) What if I'm wrong? I alluded to that earlier with the Socratic Method. I like asking that, because it makes me think from the other side.
2) What's this person feeling? I think that's something that's super important. I think we tend to, in sales, especially with bigger deals, where there's a lot of money on the line, we tend to just think about the numbers. Most of the big sales that I've landed, there's a very emotional aspect to that VP of Sales and why they want to bring me in. Yeah, the numbers need to sort of make sense, but a lot of it is them trying to prove something within their organization, to leverage for a promotion or some sort of power, in a lot of cases, too. That's a question that I like to ask myself a lot.
3) Are you having fun? The last one I would say is, are you having fun? I ask myself that question a lot. I've tried really hard. Fun is one of my theme words for this year. I tend to take my work very seriously and forget that, dude, life is short and you can be really serious about what you do and, and, make some good money and also have fun. Those things aren't mutually exclusive. “Are you having fun?” is a question that I ask myself a lot.
Who are 2 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Ethan Parker. He is VP of Revenue at a company called AltiSales, and he's also Head of Sales for me here at Blissful Prospecting, for our Outbound Squad program. I think he would be a good person to talk to because he's just got a lot of experience with this type of thing. I mean, he sold a $40 million deal as a sales rep. Pretty cool stuff. He's doing a lot of really cool stuff now with account executives and with outbound on our side.
2) Belal Batrawy. He's another good guy to talk to. He's Head of GTM at GTM Buddy. He is just the master at provocative messaging. So coming up with ways to come up with email messaging or cold call openers or marketing messaging, that's provocative and gets people's attention. He's pretty good at doing that. So I'd recommend reaching out to him too.
Learn from Jason → Blissful Prospecting
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Listen to Jason’s podcast → Blissful Prospecting Podcast
15 minutes with Katy McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action. Helping new, aspiring leaders who are stuck in their career get to the executive level. Distractions. Balance. Lack of patience. Work when you work best. Show up as the person who want to be today. Creating focus and intentionality. Do less to do more. Focus on data, structure and process. Ask yourself 3 questions daily: What is the goal? What is the bigger picture? What has been successful in the past?
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Brandon Fluharty said about Katy:
Katy McFee, out of Ottawa, Canada. I've recently come across Katy on LinkedIn as of a few months ago, and I've been really impressed with her voice, particularly around empowering other females to step into a leadership role, in a go-to-market role, sales role. She's done it herself. She's done it successfully, and I think it's a really important voice to highlight and put a spotlight on, because I think it's an area that needs improvement in the sales and go-to-market space. There’s still a male dominated voice in the go-to-market world, and I think bringing diversity is just good for business. Ut’s the thing to do as human beings, but it's also good for business. So, she's an awesome one to bring onto the show.
—Brandon Fluharty, Founder of Be Focused. Live Great. → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Content. Yeah, so first it'd be content. I post on LinkedIn every day, and that has been probably the biggest source of leads. Just people, inbound leads, based on content that's been posted and interacted with.
2) Free help. I'm going to call it free help. This one was kind of accidental, actually, but there have been times where I've offered a free 15 minute call to help someone work through a negotiation, or a quick chat to help them think through a problem, and lots of those have actually led to deal flow.
3) Community. So, just building a community with like-minded individuals, engaging with their content, getting to know them just in a really genuine, curious way has been really big for creating new connections, people referring individuals. And so those would be my top three.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Getting involved in LinkedIn. The first one actually is related to the first question, which is getting involved in LinkedIn. Posting original content, posting videos, that is something that I have never done, until the end of January. The first time I ever posted an original post, that came from my brain, and I found this very daunting as someone who I'm extroverted, but I'm also shy. It was a big leap for me, to be able to put my ideas out in the world, to record videos of myself and then share them with a whole bunch of people. That was a big one for me to overcome.
2) Creating the focus that I wanted. When I initially decided to launch Insights to Action, my plan was to do a number of different things. I was going to do some sales consulting. I was going to help with business strategy, maybe even some sales training, and then also leadership training. But what ended up happening as I got into it, as I started to really launch the business, is I realized I wanted to niche down a little bit. I wanted to find my sweet spot, my passion, and really devote myself to that. What I ended up coming to was working with aspiring leaders, new leaders, who were kind of stuck in their career, and especially women, who are trying to get to the executive level, and who are hitting barriers, and who are having trouble getting to that next level. That is now the sole focus of my business.
3) Managing my time as a solopreneur. That's something that's new to me as well. I'm managing a number of different clients at once, a number of different types of activities. Just having to manage that sheer volume of different types of tasks, I found a little bit challenging. What I've done for that is just simply color-coding my calendar. It sounds really simple, but I have different color-coding for various different types of activities. It's really effective for letting me know where I'm spending my time. Am I spending too much time in a certain area? How can I be more efficient that way?
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
Good question.
1) Distractions. First one, I'm going to call distractions. Again, this ties into me creating a focus for my business. I get a lot of interest and inquiries for things that are outside of my mission and outside of my vision. Forcing myself to say no to those things, because they can eat up a lot of time. I've noticed that sometimes I slip up and say yes, and then I regret that. So that's one. I'm still working on it every day.
2) Balance. I am big on the anti-hustle thing. I believe that you can be a strong salesperson, be a strong leader, be a strong entrepreneur, and still maintain that balance in your life. For me, though, that is, again, something that I continuously have to work towards and remind myself why I'm doing this and what's important to me in life. I'm getting much better at protecting my time and creating healthy boundaries.
3) Lack of patience. I tend to want to be like 20 steps ahead. Just enjoying the journey, and this is something I talk about too, and I post about this, it's taking my own advice and really embracing the journey and not worrying about where I'm going to be one year, two years, five years from now.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I love this question.
1) Work when you work best. By that, I mean, understanding yourself, knowing what types of tasks, maybe you find more mentally draining, and when you do your best work. For me, I schedule flow tasks in the morning. So, when I want to be creative, maybe I want to write content, maybe I want to work on a presentation or my website, I try to do those things in the morning, because I know that I am mentally sharpest in the morning. If I leave those things for the end of the day, then I'm going to really struggle to create quality work.
2) Intentionality. This is something I talk about, whether it's in your life, whether it's as a leader, whether it's as a business owner. Being really intentional about how you spend your time, how you communicate with people, what you're prioritizing, and keeping that end goal in mind. To me, being outcome-driven, and being intentional, are very closely linked. Intentionality is something that I really apply across all areas of my life.
3) Future continuity. What that means is showing up as the person you want to be, or the leader you want to be, today. I think that's a really powerful mental model that you can use, really to connect your future vision, or your future state, with where you are now.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
Three techniques that go-to-market teams needs to try:
1) Do less to do more. One thing that I'm really big on with respect to, especially to sales teams, or really to anyone, is “do less to do more.” So, really understanding what activities are going to move the needle, and focusing time and resources on those activities. I think that's really important because especially in the SaaS space, there's always a lot happening. I've been part of hyper-growth companies, and there's oftentimes 15 competing priorities. I always would ask my team, “What's going to move the needle? What's the one thing that's going to move the needle?” That's number one.
2) Data focused. Second thing I'm big on is, and this might not be something that's new for people to try, but really becoming data focused. This is still something that I see with companies that I work with, where they want to scale their sales org, and yet, they don't have a handle on what their core sales metrics are yet. So, becoming really data focused, as early as possible. Understanding what your core sales metrics are, what things you need to focus on, and really investing in those resources early on. So, an example I can give you: when I was running a sales team, I was supposed to hire a number of AEs, and I gave up one of those head count for a sales operations person, because I knew the importance of having access to that data when I was making business decisions.
3) Having a focus on structure and process. I think a lot of more mature companies get this, but depending on where you are in your journey, I am a big believer in putting the right structure and process in place and the sales will follow. You want to create a system where you can hire an AE and it's very clear to them what they need to do, how they need to do it, what your ideal buyer looks like. That is really the best way that you can scale your revenue org.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
Three questions that I ask myself, and that I also encourage other leaders to ask themselves:
1) What is the goal?
2) What is the bigger picture?
3) What has been successful in the past?
I really find that when you're stuck in something, if you're stuck in which way to go strategy-wise, if you're unsure about a hire, or a direction, or whatever it might be, I always take a big step back and ask myself those three things. So, what's the goal? What's the big picture? What's been successful in the past? I used to have it in my calendar. As I was moving into senior leadership, I actually had a reminder in my calendar every morning that would alert me and ask, “What's the goal? What's the big picture? What's been successful in the past?”
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Darren McKee. So one person I was going to recommend is Darren McKee, and I reached out to him. but I believe you know him because he mentioned to me he's been on this podcast before! I thought it would be fun to just mention I was going to shout him out, but someone has beat me to the punch. I mean, he's great. He's a Director of Growth. He posts a lot of really valuable content. He helps people break into SaaS, and he's just looking all around like great guy who helps out a lot of people and who has a lot of good things to say. So, thought I'd give that plug, even though he's been on the show before.
2) Shea Cole. So I worked with Shea at a company called Fullscript. She is the VP Marketing there, and she is a force. So this woman, she is just like a branding queen, and she took that company from very early days to like explosive, massive rocket-growth and was very instrumental in making that happen. So, I think she would be a fantastic guest for you.
3) Darren Sharpe. I met him in a sales leader peer group that was put together by The Lazaridis Institute which is an organization where hyper-growth companies are selected to be part of this program. He has just a super impressive, smart, long-time sales leader who gets it. Goes into a company, figures it out, deep dives, and like creates this huge growth for whatever company he touches. So, he's a CRO right now at SuiteSpot, but has been a revenue leader for many years, and has lots of great value that he can share.
4) Salman Mohiuddin who is an Enterprise Sales Rep. So, he's at Asana. He was previously at Salesforce, and he has built his career in enterprise sales. I met Salman through LinkedIn, actually, and I was consuming his content. He has a lot of really valuable stuff to say. He's really great at helping the community. He posts a lot about sales tips, about careers, about getting hired. All around great human. I had the opportunity to connect with him on a call a little while back and he’s got a lot of knowledge. He's a great guy, and I think he'd be a good guest for you.
Connect with Katy on Linkedin → Katy McFee
Work with Katy → Insights to Action
18 minutes with George Valdes, Head of Marketing at Monograph. Don’t be afraid to challenge your market. Ask, “Why do you think it needs to be this way?” Starting the community. Hire subject matter experts who understand the memes and inside jokes of the industry. A lot of those inside jokes are coming from pain. When you understand the memes of the industry, you can probably create your own. Identifying blockers. Move fast and playbook things. Irreversible and reversible decisions. Building an exceptional brand. Enabling workflows for architects.
18 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Enable workflows to happen for architects and design professionals. First off, it's helpful to set the context that we service architects, or in the broader sense, design professionals. So essentially, everyone that is part of the pre-construction process, you can think of the construction process being mostly general contractors, we're really trying to enable workflows to happen for that group of people.
2) A very simple pricing structure. In terms of them how we convert the market into revenue, we have a very simple pricing structure that's on a per user basis at this point. We mostly target the largest segment of the industry, which is the SMB market, so small-medium sized businesses. Anywhere between 1-person firms all the way up to around 60-person firms. In the US and in Canada. So, we're very specific. We're really honed in on this market because we feel that this is where the most underserved area of the industry. That's the main lever.
3) Building an exceptional brand. Part of our go-to-market strategy is building an exceptional brand because we get to speak to such a specific audience. A lot of our team comes from the industry, I myself have a background in landscape architecture and architecture, we're able to speak specifically to the pain points that the industry has, with an authentic bent. We're very authentic in our own experiences. We're able to connect with people, even on an emotional level, which I think is very unique, and very special, about what we're doing here.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) One that's always very difficult to pull off is a user conference. We did our second user conference, called Section Cut, about a month ago. It's hard because it's so many different moving parts, but we have a really amazing team here that was able to work asynchronously, autonomously, and in many different ways, while collaborating, at the same time, to execute an amazing show for our customers and our broader community. So I think that’s one. It's almost like two in one because it's just such a difficult endeavor to pull off.
2) Finding the right person to join our leadership team. The other thing that's been difficult, that we've been able to accomplish recently, is we have now a full leadership team. I think this is important. Robert, up until recently, our CEO, was really heading up sales, and I think we now have a team in place, with our new head of sales, that's going to allow us to really focus in and solve even harder challenges as we move forward. I think that one, just finding the right person. Why it's difficult, I’d say, is because we have a very unique culture here at Monograph. We operate, not only remotely, fully remote, but we also have a 4 day work week. And so, finding a leader that can resonate with that, as part of the challenge of operating the sales team, was really important to us, alongside the fact that, culturally, they had to really be a good culture fit, and a good addition to the team.
What are 3 roadblocks you are working on now?
1) Splitting the funnel from a “free trial” motion to a “book a demo.” We're actually going to shift, not fully, our GTM, but mostly. It's an interesting balance. We're basically going to be splitting the funnel from a free trial motion to a book a demo. The reason for this is that we're seeing higher conversions on booking demos at the moment. So, one of the things that we're doing is essentially pre-qualifying through our website folks, and then routing them appropriately to a free trial of they're out of, let's say, our ICP, or ideal customer profile, and then routing them to booking a demo. This is a whole cross-functional motion that we have to be fully aligned on in order to make it work. And so I'd say this is one of the biggest challenges.
2) We’ve recently adopted an OKR model, and the team has various levels of experiences with this. And so, it's making sure we're building the right cadences to be able to move the needle on these OKRs in a way that gets everyone rowing in the same direction.
3) How to tease out the nuances of our product to the market? We've done an exceptional job of building a great brand, and one of the things that we're working on now is how to tease out more so of our products, like the nuances of our product, to the market. That’s a piece that's really top of mind for me, that I feel very confident we can crack, because we have an exceptional team in place now on the marketing team that can help pull that all together. But, it is one of those things where, as we've been building out more differentiation in our a product, we want to continuously make sure we're having that differentiation to the community.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Irreversible and reversible decisions. I like this idea, borrowed from Amazon, of, “There are two types of decisions; irreversible ones and reversible ones.” Or like, “There's two types of doors; one-way doors and two-way doors." I learned this a lot during my time at WeWork, about the importance of being able to move quickly with relatively little information. This was actually a very helpful mental model to decide on how fast to move on something. Obviously, depending on the budget of the things that you're working on, in my case, I was working with a project that any one location that I was helping to open up was, for pre-sales, about a million dollars in budget. Thinking about the trade-offs of that, and just communicating that, was really important. But also factoring in, “Okay. Who do I need to bring in, and how quickly?” Also, making it very clear for them whether this was something that we need to move slow on or be quick on.
2) Move fast and playbook things. We use this one here at Monograph: move fast and playbook things. It's about the idea that we should do things that don't scale at first in order to understand whether they work, as quickly as possible, meaning that you're always going to make the trade off between quality and just execution. If you can narrow your hypothesis down on what you're trying to examine, and you can make that trade-off on quality, because it's not going to impact the actual answer you're looking for. So as a really clear example, let's say you want to know whether a specific channel, or a specific form of content, might work. You could spend the time belaboring on like how perfect that piece of content is, or you could really just answer the first question, which is like, “Does this new asset work in the wild, period?” And then, as you start to learn from that, then you might optimize on quality later, while also thinking about scalability, which resonates with the playbook part, of playbooking it. That was also something learned really hard during my time at WeWork. Building things up to a point where it can help other people who are blocked, because it you would just be able to move quickly.
3) Identifying blockers. It kind of ties everything else, but it's like, “Can you identify the magnitude of the problem, and whether it's really a problem?” Because sometimes, and I use this with my team sometimes to help them think through a challenge that they might have, sometimes people feel that the scope of work needs to encompass X amount of things when, again, if you focus on like, “What is real question to be answered here? What is the real hypothesis that we're trying to solve?” That kind of like zero-to-one mentality. We just have to solve that first basic question and then we can cut back scope. I think it's tied to this idea of, “What is the magnitude of the problem that we're trying to solve?” Or like, “What is the magnitude of the scope that you're factoring into the initiative that you're trying to roll out, and does it need to really be that complete? Can we get to an answer faster with less scope?” I think that is from my time heading a product team where it was really thinking about this problem through the product lens of like, “Okay, what's the MVP of this?” Or like, “What's the main question we're trying to answer and how do we build just the main thing that will help us get to the next question?”
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Hiring subject matter experts. Very important—I mean, I think it's even applicable to B2C, and some companies are adopting this—but it's about hiring subject matter experts. Like, “can you hire your customers to be part of your team, whether that's in product, marketing, sales?” Especially in B2B, it's really important, because often the first thing you're trying to do is build trust. Relatively quickly. As an example, the mission statement of the marketing team is to educate and inspire the world's design professionals to be better at business. The fastest way we could do that is actually hiring folks within the marketing team, and within the rest of the team, that also come from the industry. And so, you might be making trade-offs at that point about deep, let's say, channel expertise, or things like that. But, what you gain from it is something that would take someone who might have deep domain expertise in the channel, or at least within marketing, it might take them a very long time to understand the nuances. One way to think about this too, is if your industry had memes about it, does your team understand those memes? Because memes are like the inside jokes that you have to be an insider, typically, to understand. Otherwise, it goes over your head. If you can operate at the level where you can even understand the memes, then I feel like you connect more deeply with your customer. Because a lot of those inside jokes are coming from pain. Any comedy comes from some level of pain. So, you really intuit some of the problems that they face. I think that is incredibly valuable for a team to hit the ground running fast.
2) Starting the community. Alongside with this is starting the community. We’re very inspired by marketers like Dave Gerhardt and Chris Walker, and when I joined the team as the fifth employee, first person in the marketing team, this idea of like, “How do you build content once such that it can be used as an asset in many different ways, over a long horizon span?” That was really, really fascinating. That's something we've taken to heart here, at Monograph, where we run a weekly webinar, where we invite some of the most interesting architects in the industry and interview them about things that they hardly ever get interviewed about. Which is, how do they run their business? That strategy alone has allowed us not only to produce great content and podcasts and other things that we're doing, but it's also allowed us to go from me interviewing friends to a team of us interviewing the head of the State Department’s Office of Oversees Buildings Operations, OBO, essentially, the office that manages a $20 billion budget for the State Department around the world to build embassies. That happened in less than a year's time. It just kind of shows the power of being able to build things with longevity, but you can produce various assets from it after the fact.
3) Don't be afraid to challenge your market. This goes back to the idea of, when you understand the memes of the industry, you can probably create your own, which means that you have an authentic voice, and can you earn people's trust really quickly. I hate the thought of being a vendor. It's so impersonal. If we're considered a vendor to a company, I feel like we haven't done our job properly. We should be considered more as consultants or trusted advisors. And so, that means that we have to be very comfortable with challenging the preconceived ideas of our industry. This is why hiring subject matters is so important, because it helps you earn that trust really quickly.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
Why do you think it needs to be this way? I love that question. I think that question can apply to other facets. Whether it's an interview question, because what it alludes to is, “Does this person either deeply understand a problem, or what's the lens through which they see the problem?” And hopefully, from that question, you can then figure out a potential solution, if it's a problem, or whatever. That's a really ripe question to move from. I'm going to leave it at that question because I think I can use that question three times.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Emily Kramer. Definitely think Emily Kramer at MKT1. She's a marketing advisor. Was the former VP of Marketing at Carta and Head of Marketing at Asana. She's phenomenal. When you talk to her, she can go from like high-level strategy to really in-the-weeds tactics. It's very refreshing to just talk to her because she's also no bullshit.
2) Ailyn Mendoza. Ailyn Mendoza, who is actually Director of Customer Experience, here at Monograph. Highly recommend interviewing her. While I know that GTM is typically thought of from the lens of marketing and sales, I think that Customer Experience is actually a critical component to that, because if you don't have a team member that's focusing on retention, it's a leaky bucket. That whole idea of GTM really should extend itself to Customer Experience. She's a phenomenal person to talk to. I'd be super curious about learning about her mental models of what she applies to the industry. She's also just a sharp thinker and is an awesome person to work with.
3) Miriam Mark. CRO at Compete. She was my former boss at WeWork, and I learned so much from her about what it means to manage with both empathy, but also to really lead. It was a wild time at the time that we were both there, but she was just an amazing leader, and I think it'd be amazing to learn more about how she operates.
Work with George (and me) → Monograph is hiring!
Here’s what Andrew Miller said about Matt:
Matt Baxter. He's currently a Director of Product at Bestow, where I worked before Monograph, and he's just a great product leader. He was taking a brand new business unit to market when I was on my way out, and it was a huge project, and it was just so much fun to watch Matt do his work. I know he’d have tons of interesting details to share about the go-to-market challenges that he faced.
—Andrew Miller, Senior Growth Product Manager at Monograph → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
The three ways that I thought of really all revolve around making life insurance more accessible for people.
1) For individuals, life insurance is typically a multi-week long process that requires some doctor's visits. And so it's a really big barrier for people to actually go and acquire it. And so our platform cuts that down to just a couple of minutes and basically an instant decision. So that's one kind of with direct individuals.
2) Through empowering life insurance agents. So, they are really a key, critical part of the process for people to kind of navigate and figure out really what is going to work for them and what their needs are. And so we also use our platform to empower those agents, to do their job faster and easier.
3) Using our platform to enable other life insurance carriers to be able to sell term life more efficiently. Term-life insurance is typically a pretty low margin business, but it's something that people really want and need, and so we've been able to take our platform and make it available to life insurance carriers so that they can use it to sell life insurance faster in the same way.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Offering life insurance carriers our platform. That was basically what kind of my last year it looked like. It was taking the Bestow platform that we had built to sell directly to customers, and reorienting it, and evolving it, to be able to be the software as a service offering. And so there was just a lot of alignment and coordination across pretty much every team at bestow to take this one way that we knew of working with things, and the way that we thought of our platform, and kind of shifting it from a perspective of not just something that enables us to sell to our customers, but to be able to enable others to sell to their customers. And so definitely learned a lot of lessons just around giving people the right context, helping people understand why their pieces matter to this big, huge, whole of a project.
2) Scaling the Bestow product team. So when I joined Bestow, about two and a half years ago, we had a team of about four or five product managers. And now, our team is right around 20 now. And, that's just been a lot of learning around figuring out how to get all these products managers, and different product areas, to coordinate with each other, understanding the dependencies between them. How we can enable each other to ship faster and not get in each other's way as we're trying to get products out to market? Just learning how to coordinate with that group and to do it in a way that we actually enable each other instead of just have to work around each other has also been, I think, definitely a hard problem to solve, and something that we've been working on.
3) I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this, but I think especially the last two years, working from home. For me, I've got three young kids, from nine years old to three years old, and working from home, whether they had school lockdowns or when it's in the summer and they're at home, has definitely taught me a lot about just flexibility between work and life, where it's not as straightforward as just leaving, going to an office, and coming back a couple of hours later. But definitely learning to have more flexibility with that and give more grace to myself and to others.
What are 3 question that you love to ask and why?
1) What's just one thing that I can do, and feel like I've checked off, to start moving in that direction? So I was thinking about that from kind of a couple of different angles, for myself and others. One of the first things that came to mind is whenever I am getting started on somewhat of an ambiguous effort, or I don't really know kind of where to start with something, kind of the blank slate problem, is just identifying something that I can do to make just even a little bit of progress in the direction that I'm trying to go. Even if it maybe doesn't totally solve the problem that I'm trying to go for, it doesn't provide all the answers, I find just getting momentum on it is really helpful. So I always ask myself, “Okay, what's just one thing that I can do, and feel like I've checked off, to start moving in that direction?”
2) What is something that feels harder than it should be? A question I really like to ask my teams and coworkers as we're working through things, and looking for ways to improve things, is asking, “What is something that feels harder than it should be?” And so, I think it's a really good way to expose areas that maybe you've lived with in your product or your process, that some circumstances have changed, and you don't really have to live with that anymore, and you can find ways to improve it. Or, it just allows you to have some reflection and some areas that maybe have been difficult to figure out and untangle, and people have kind of avoided it, but it's an opportunity to really look at it and say, “Are we okay with it being this hard? Or is it hard for a reason that we can actually change and improve?”
3) What differentiates you or makes you more effective than other people in your role? One that I really like to ask others, just in terms of learning from them, and especially when I'm interviewing a product manager candidate is asking, “What differentiates you or makes you more effective than other people in your role?” So whether you're a product manager, if it's like other product managers, or engineer, and things like that, I think it's a really interesting question because I don't think a lot of people enjoy talking too much about the best parts about themselves, so it gives them an opportunity to reflect on that. But it also opens up, shows, what's important to them, and what they really like to focus on.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Get the problem as visual as possible and as quickly as possible. The first thing that I thought, and this is probably a whole bucket of mental models, but whenever I'm trying to work through something or figure out how things relate to each other is I try to get the problem as visual as possible and as quickly as possible. And so whether that's using my whiteboard and just writing it out or getting some sort of online whiteboard like Miro and just trying to map something out with sticky notes. I find that being able to visualize the problem space can help you to uncover patterns and figure out how things relate to each other differently than you might, even if you were writing about the problem, or if you were trying to explain it to somebody. And so, I know not everybody's a visual thinker, but it's almost always the first tool that I go to when I'm trying to understand kind of the landscape of something.
2) LNO framework (leverage, neutral, overhead). Another thing that I like to use, and this is really just for prioritizing my own tasks and things that I need to get done, is something that I've heard of called the LNO framework, which stands for leverage, neutral and overhead. Basically, it's a way to kind of look at the things that you need to do and understand of how much effort and time you need to put into any one of those tasks. They're all things that probably need to get done to some degree, but basically what it allows you to do is, especially if you have any kind of perfectionist tendencies, it basically allows you to really put the most effort into the things that you're going to get the most out of. So, if you can look at a task and say, “Hey, if I get this task done, it's going to provide a lot of leverage. And, either it's going to allow me to take a big leap in this problem that I'm working through, or maybe it's going to enable others to do their work better.” Then you see that as a leverage thing, and that's something that you really want to spend a good amount of time on to get right. But, if you're looking at something that's neutral, or even something that's overhead, those are things that you can allow yourself to maybe not put in 100% percent of your best effort into, just because there's not going to be a huge payoff out of it, and you can kind of allow yourself to just check off that box and move past it.
3) Thinking in probabilities versus thinking in right and wrong. Another one is really just thinking in probabilities versus thinking in right and wrong, especially when it comes to forecasting or trying to predict what's going to happen. Particularly if you're bringing a new product to market, or you're trying to launch something, and you're trying to understand what the risks might be involved. I find a lot of times it's easy to say, “Oh, I think it's likely this is going to happen. Or, I think it's unlikely this is going to happen.” But really, it makes it hard to have a conversation around it, and so if you can actually put probabilities to things, even if it's just something that you pull out of thin air, and you say, “Well, I think we're 70% likely to succeed in this effort.” It creates an opportunity for a conversation, for somebody to say, “Well, what can we do to get that closer to a 100%? Or, are we okay with 70%? And maybe that's what we want to live with.”
What are 4 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) The written problem statement. So I think I mentioned writing earlier as opposed to visualizing things, but I do actually really believe in the written problem statement. Both in terms of the person who's trying to define what the problem statement is, because I find that when you have to write out the problem, it really requires you to understand it fully, and you start to see just some of your own holes in the way that you've assessed it, or some areas that you need to spend some more time digging into, and then it also allows people who are reviewing it to really spend some time interpreting it, understanding what you meant by it, maybe catching things that you assumed that everybody else was aligned on, but you need to find some alignment there. And so I think having those written problem statements is super important.
2) Along with that, creating time within meetings for silent reading of those problem statements. And so, everybody's busy, not everybody has a time to do pre-read, spend time on the pre-reads before a meeting, but even if you just take 5-10 minutes out of your 30 minute meetings, so that everybody can fully read and digest it, it can really make that discussion more effective.
3) Working on visiontypes. The other thing that we've been experimenting with lately at Bestow is working on visiontypes. We define those as basically really fuzzy, future-looking prototypes for things we're trying to wrap our heads around, but we really don't have a defined scope of what it's going to look like. We found that doing this really allows us to create something tangible that we can have a conversation around and talk through. Even if it doesn't cover all of the boxes, or it doesn't check all of the regulatory issues that we might think need to think about, they kind of provide just this visual flow. Someone can interact with, and talk through, and I think it's a lot easier to get in the mindset of, “Is this going to work? Or, is this in the direction that we want to go even more so than a set of requirements, my written requirements, might be able to indicate?”
4) What would happen if we waited three months to do this or nine months to do this? Asking a question for when you're working on prioritization of things, which is, “What would happen if we waited three months to do this or nine months to do this?” It's a more specific way of asking, “Why do we need to do this now?” Thinking about the future state, and somebody says, “Oh, we really need to do something. Or this is a really big opportunity.” Projecting into, “Well, what if we didn't have this in three months or nine months? Would this really still be an issue, is this an issue that we can live with? Is it something that maybe isn't as important as we thought it was?” And so, it can really help to actually quantify the opportunity and the problem that you're talking about.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
This is a great question. I really liked the chance just to chat about people that I've really enjoyed working with. So, I had a few people in mind.
1) Kaushik Sahoo. He's an engineering manager that I used to work with, and despite being in the engineering organization, he's just got such a great product perspective on what is really needed to ship something. He and I have worked on some great things and his partnership has just been crucial to be able to get those things out the door.
2) Ben Newell. Who's right now Senior Director of Stitch Fix. And I haven't ever actually worked with Ben, but he and I have been in a lot of the same product circles. And I've gotten to watch a lot of great talks that he's given and he just has so many great insights on how to do product well, and how to run product teams, that I've always just looked up to the things that he's shared with that.
3) Sylvia Cento. One person from my own company is Sylvia Cento. She's the Director of Technical Program Management at Bestow, and she has just been critical to so many of the things that we've launched at Bestow recently. She just has an incredible ability to get people together and helps you identify blockers and plans of attack to break those things down and actually get the things out the door that we're trying to ship.
Work with Matt → Bestow is hiring!
Follow Matt on Twitter → @mbxtr
Achieving your customer's business outcomes. Develop advocates. If your renewal was up today, would you renew? Solving for in-person events again. Design your customer maturation model. Onboarding 2.0. Introducing automation. Confirmation bias. Inversion. 80/20 principal. Figure out your balance between capturing wallet share of your customer base and new logo acquisition.
Here’s what Sean MacPherson said about Kristi:
Kristi Faltorusso. Someone I don't know personally, but I feel like I know her personally because she gives so much back to the CS community through sharing her playbooks, is Kristi Faltorusso over at ClientSuccess. Her focus on showcasing how customer success is a revenue driver and how CS leaders can get to the level of other leaders in an organization is spot on. She's given back so much to the CS community and leveled up so many leaders in the last several years. And honestly, she's one of the top CS leaders in revenue operators out there!
—Sean MacPherson, VP, Customer Success & Experience at Alyce → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
I oversee the customer experience teams. I run customer success, support and services. Three main ways that we're converting that into revenue:
1) Achieving our customer's business outcomes. So, for our organization, keeping our customers satisfied with a value prop of what they came into the business with, helping them achieve that. That helps drive retention and net revenue retention as well. So keeping them, and growing them.
2) Developing advocates. It also helps facilitate developing advocates. Our customer success team really fosters the relationships. Again, going back to the value prop of helping our customers achieve their goals, allows us to develop advocates who are, hopefully, out there in the wild selling our product behind our backs. Telling their peers, their organization, why they need to have us, the value they're getting from us. That's a huge proponent of how we're thinking about that.
3) Industry thought leadership. Our team spends a lot of time really honing in best practices, understanding the shifts, the market landscape. And we do believe by selfless giving, by just sharing those thoughts and insights, that we help elevate the community as a whole, hopefully that education and enablement will bring folks back when they're ready to purchase. We think about that as a full lifecycle in terms of how we're driving revenue for the business overall.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
I wish I only had three hard problems, but three that we've recently solved for is:
1) Solving for in-person events again, at scale, in the community. I think everyone is generally very excited to get back in person and spend time together. Especially in the customer success community, where folks are generally pretty close. But, getting in person is really important for a lot of individuals. Now, we're still navigating some of the changes in the landscape. We still have COVID issues and concerns, people with compromised immune systems, who are still hesitant to get out there. But, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is the best methodology for us to do that and how we should be approaching it. For us, it's been a lot of these little in-city location events, and we've found that folks feel safer, they feel more comfortable coming together in these smaller cohorts, in their areas, as opposed to flying somewhere, going to larger events where they just don't feel as safe. So, we've seen tremendous success with really focusing in on these smaller, intimate setting events in the locations where folks are.
2) Empowering our technical support team with better access to customer data to help them prioritize their efforts. In customer experience, we know how critical the customer support experience can be, how impactful positively, how impactful negatively, it can be if it's not executed well. We've spent a lot of time making sure our team in the customer support organization, not only has access to really smart, intelligent customer data, but understands what that data is telling them and how to use it to prioritize their efforts. This ensures that our larger customers, customers who are at a point where maybe there are some challenges they’re overcoming, they're getting the time and attention that's necessary to help keep the momentum going. To get things back into a good place. Also, with customers who are extremely satisfied, how do we continue to build on that momentum? But, that prioritization based on data has helped us deliver a better experience overall.
3) Education and enablement for both the community on customer success thought leadership, as well as ClientSuccess as a technology. For us, we believe that rising tide lifts all boats. How do we make sure that we're educating the community around customer success best practices? How to go into an organization and execute? How to get buy-in? Things of that nature. Not super intuitive for everybody. For a lot of leaders, they're a bit newer. So, we've really focused on helping them understand: how do you do this? How do you do it well? How do you execute flawlessly? And then, obviously for our customers, how do they maximize the value of ClientSuccess and figuring out, again, how do we train and enable at scale? Education and enablement has been a big focus of ours and we've had some really great success with some core programs.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
I also wish I only had three roadblocks, but, three things that we're really doubling down our efforts on:
1) Designing a customer maturation model that translates against people, process and technology, to guide our companies through their own journeys. I think a lot of technology providers would assume that the customer journey happens with you. It doesn’t. It's happening with, or without you. Technology is one component of a customer's journey. So, we talk about it, you know, our partnership through a customer life-cycle lens. Customer maturation is really critical because we want to help customers identify where they are, but more importantly, what do they need to do to get to that next level? So really designing something that we feel like is helpful, it's engaging, and designs a map for our customers to help them advance their program in their organization.
2) Onboarding 2.0. Any company, especially in the SaaS space, understands the impact and the value, of a very strong, well-executed onboarding program. We're really focused on designing this 2.0 model, which is designed through a customer lens and highly flexible. So instead of us creating a checklist and saying, “here's everything our customers need to do in onboarding,” because, who are we to determine? We now take their consideration of what they're focused on. It's all built around their goals and then helping them design programs and parts of the products that help support the execution of that. Helping them get faster time to value.
3) Introducing automation into our customer lifecycle. We like to think about this as augmentation. Now, we're not trying to move to a fully digital landscape where we're only supporting our customers through technology from a push motion. We want to find out: what are the ways that we can really help our team drive more time and attention around the things that are gonna be valuable to our customers? Reducing administrative overhead, communication, but also helping our customers get access to things at certain points in time that are going to be critical to their success. So, that automation in our life cycle is going to be a pretty big project for us.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
This was a fun exercise for me to go through.
1) Confirmation bias. This one is important. I've been a customer success leader for about 10 years now, and I have some preconceived notions of what works and what doesn't work. And, I've got to check those. I can't depend on what I know to be true because every thing depends. It depends on the market, the customer, the product. And so, really trying to protect myself from that confirmation bias where I'm going to over-index on the way things always worked. Or, what I've seen success in. Really understanding ways to challenge that thought process and be more successful in my own right.
2) The inversion mental model. This one I liked because it's super easy to understand what success looks like, but it's hard to design programs that help you get to a state of perfection. It's almost impossible. So, this allows me to understand, “Well, what do I want to avoid? What are the outcomes that we want to prevent from happening and designing something that really helps us avoid failure?” It has helped us figure out a way to progress in our process evolution and not strive for perfection. So, that's been really helpful for us. It's just kind of flipping it on its head and thinking differently about it.
3) Pareto’s Principle. The 80/20 Rule. I think a lot of people are familiar with that. 20% of the work generates 80% of the returns, all of those things. Trying to focus on the things that have the most impact to our business and doubling down our efforts and our focus around that.
So those are three things that I think not only myself, but our team, is really starting to hone in on is how do we think about things through those lenses.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) You definitely got to figure out your balance between capturing wallet share of your customer base and then new logo acquisition. I feel like there is a very disproportionate focus around new logo acquisition, and people don't really focus enough on how do you grow your customer base. Speaking to customers in a different way than you speak to your prospects. It's not the same messaging. The same things don't resonate. So, really focusing on that. Growing your install base and new logo acquisition, finding that balance there.
2) Doubling down your focus on your ICP. I see folks that really are trying to boil the ocean, eat the elephant, give me an analogy, it feels similar, right? You're going to go after too much. It'll bring you to revenue, but you're going to see greater churn. You're going to see your product roadmap evolve in a way that's probably not going to drive a lot of value from your ICP. So, just focus on who your core ICP is, and really focus on selling to them, keeping them, and evolving your product to support them long-term.
3) Leveraging your customers to help sell your product. I think we all understand the power of advocates, but we don't leverage them enough. What we've done at ClientSuccess has really helped build our customers into our sales engine. Help them share their stories, their successes. Get them out there in the community advocating for us. In a realistic way that ties back to the successes that they've had, but nurturing those stories, curating those individuals, and making that a core part of our program has really helped us bring in more visibility, more leads, and then obviously convert to more revenue.
What are 3 question that you love to ask and why?
1) How does customer success play a role in your evolution, in your business? First question. I'm going to go to my customers, because that’s where we spend a lot of our time. So questions I love to ask my customers: I want to understand how customer success plays a role in their evolution, their business. As they think about go to market, how are they leveraging customer success to drive their business forward? I always learn a lot about where customer success sits in their their organization, the value prop, the buy-in, cross-functional support. So just understanding what role it plays in the longevity of the company helps me understand and learn a lot.
2) How do you feel about our partnership? Good question that I always ask: “How do you feel about our partnership?” I know that that sounds like such an obvious one to ask, but for me, I want to know how they're feeling. Capturing sentiment and feedback at any point in the customer journey and experience is super critical. So for me, asking something like how they feel about that is really important. Because I can lean in, learn, and hopefully drive some action as a result.
3) If your renewal was up today, would you renew? Anytime I'm engaging with my customers. If your renewal was up today, would you renew? Because at the end of the day, we're in a recurring revenue model. If my customers do not feel confident in continuing that partnership, I have to intervene immediately. So I almost always have to ask that.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Jay Nathan. I'm going to start with my buddy, longtime friend, Jay Nathan, who is the Chief Customer Officer over at Higher Logic. Jay has a long-standing career in customer success as a practice, as a profession. He's not only been the Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic. Before that, he owned his own consulting firm where he was working with really large enterprise organizations, helping them understand how to build, how to scale, power their customer success business. He is a tremendous resource to our community. Somebody who I think your community would find a lot of value in, as well.
2) Kristen Hayer. My next recommendation would be Kristen Hayer. She is the co-founder and CEO at the Success League. She is somebody else, again, in the customer success space. She's doing a great job really breaking down how to educate, and enable, in customer success, for practitioners, folks that are building out their programs. She helps to not only educate and enable, but really build out her consulting practice, as well. Where, again, she's a long time player in the space. She has a lot of history and that legacy knowledge of the customer success evolution, what it's looked like, and the impact it has to business. As well as getting buy-in. I think she does a great job of helping organizations find their voice to get organizational support around customer centricity.
3) Maranda Dziekonski. My dear friend Maranda Dziekonski over at Swiftly. She's a Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly. She’s somebody else with over decade experience in customer success, sales, account management, right? She does a great job of understanding the nuances of commercial motions and how that benefits customer success. You don't need to play it safe. You can sell, and be in customer success, really well and drive a lot of value for your customers. So, I think she has a unique kind of mindset around, ”How do you do it? How do you do it well?” And not being afraid of taking in all those metrics into their business.
So those are three people. I could probably list a dozen. But I definitely think that your community would benefit from learning from all three of them.
Work with Kristi → ClientSuccess is hiring!
Connect with Kristi → Kristi Faltorusso on LinkedIn
Kristi’s Best Practices → keepingCSsimple.com
Market through your customers. A bad-ass, true social media presence. Your customers are on social? You're on social. Fire your social media consultant and stop producing super basic boring stuff. Nobody wants that corporate version of you. They want an authentic version of you. Invest in community. Dark funnel. Customer referrals and user-generated content. Theory of leverage. Self-determination theory. Emotional withdrawals and deposits. Building a customer advisory board. Read Robert Cialdini's book, Influence.
Here’s what Arthur Castillo said about Dan:
High leverage principles. I was taught this by my manager, Dan, as I moved into Marketing. So in trying to explain it, a high leverage activity is maybe something that you create once, a system or a process, and that you can reuse it. So we're not starting from scratch. Whereas a low leverage activity will be, I'm doing it once, so I'm having to recreate it from scratch. I'm really not building any systems or processes. So it's helped me understand, “How do I create this so I'm going to be scalable? How do I do things maybe once or twice and it serves me for a longer amount of time?”
—Arthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Let's say, “How do we take our TAM and convert that into customers?” I'll take a segment of that right now. Two of our primary buyer personas at Chili Piper—we’re a tool that basically manages inbound lead flow amongst other things with complicated lead routing, and all kinds of cool stuff—but our primary personas are 1) Demand Gen, because they want the ads that they bring traffic to the website to convert, and 2) Revenue Ops, because they don't want to deal with this manual lead-routing situation. So the first question you need to ask yourself is like: “Where are these people? Where do they hang out? Are they at events? Are they in communities? Are they on social? Are they grabbing beers with their peers?” And then from there it's like, “Okay, how can we be there, too?” So three areas that we focus on to convert these folks into customers:
1) Community. We look across a lot of the top communities. For us, for the RevOps persona, it's like WizOps, Marketing Operation Pros (an excellent community run by Mike Rizzo and Co), Pavilion, Modern Sales Pros, Demand Curve. There are a bunch of them. So you're like, “Okay, this is where ICP is. They're active here. How do we be active too?” Well, the solution isn't: when your solution comes up to be like, “Oh, pick me! Chili Piper! Right here!” It's to have your customers and advocates authentically want to engage in those communities. So one way we convert our market into revenue is by ensuring that our customers are supported, active, healthy, and receive gratitude whenever they evangelize for us. Within PlanHat, which is our customer management system, we have information on what communities certain people are active in. Then, across all these communities, many of which we’re sponsoring, we have social listening mechanisms in place using a tool called Charla, and also in some cases, the founders of these communities are contracted to alert us when our solution comes up. So, when our solution comes up, naturally now, a lot of customers chime in organically. If not, maybe we'll give them a little bit of a nudge. So, that's one space that we do it. Community. We surveyed all of our Closed Won customers from 2021 and 20% said they heard of us first from a community. So shout out to all the communities out there. RevGenius. There's a new one launching soon, which we can't tell you about, but it's really, really exciting. Sales Assembly, they're just awesome.
2) Social Media. Maybe you've seen us on LinkedIn. When I joined the company in 2020, over two years ago now, wow, we had about 37,000 organic impressions per quarter. Last quarter, that number was 2.7 million organic impressions. Just from the company account. Not from employees. Not from customer advocates. You can look, actually, in a granular level, and see what percentage of your audience is in different personas. We brought our rev ops component up from 3% to 8%. So it's being active there. Your customers are on social? You're on social.
3) Customer referrals and user-generated content. You'll realize they all have a theme. So within social media, I do three real types: you have your company page, you have your employee evangelism, and then you have user-generated content. A while back, a friend of ours, Sara McNamara, who's not a customer, and she's not paid to do anything, she’s just a bad-ass marketing ops leader, made a post about Chili Piper and how we can do really complex lead routing, all kinds of cool stuff. Got like 40,000 impressions. So then we were like, “Maybe this led to revenue.” We actually went into the post, took all the people there who were mentioned, who liked or commented favorably, enriched that using LeadIQ, and then uploaded it to Salesforce as a campaign. We can now see the influence of social media user-generated content on our pipeline. It turns out that the dark funnel is still dark. We don't really know what's going on there. But we do know that 80% of our inbound, and last month was our best ever month for inbound, just comes from people Googling chilipiper.com. We believe that comes from organic user-generated content and just a bad-ass true social media presence.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Dark funnel. Looping back to the first one, it's this dark funnel thing. I feel so lucky. I report directly to the CEO. I manage PR, community, social media, events, customer marketing, and then a bunch of other random things, including our foundation, but a lot of these areas where we're putting a lot of effort into, it's not trackable. It's not like when someone mentions our solution in a community, we're going to be like, “Hey Rebecca, please comment. And then tie this UTM link to your comment with a demo.” That's so inauthentic. It just seems slimy to me. We want to keep it organic, want to keep it real, but when you do that, you sacrifice tracking. So, being able to operate in the dark funnel and get buy-in to take these activities, to spend this money, is a big problem we're focused on. Fortunately, we have two co-CEOs, Nicolas Vandenberghe and Alina Vandenberghe, who just get it. They get marketing. They understand it. So, they've allowed me to grow this team out to around 8 now, where we operate in the dark funnel. But, it's tough still. One easy way to solve this is just to put on your demo requests form, an attribution, not a dropdown, but, “How did you hear of us?” Leave it open-ended. That way you can get credit for dark funnel activities. Alyce does an amazing job at this, where they have Nick Bennett, like a mega influencer, who’s also like the nicest guy ever, who's able to just go out there and produce content without tracking it, because when folks come inbound, they're saying, “I got brought here by Nick Bennett.” Those are a couple of ways you can overcome them. We're still working to overcome them, and candidly, I want to get more hard data on the dark funnel, so I can hire more of a team to just do user-generated content. Our senses are that this is really working for us, but like, it's not in the CRM, you know?
2) Building our customer advisory board. Like many things, we chose to be incredibly extra for this. A lot of people build one customer advisory board. I was like, “I'm gonna build six. Let's build six!” Everybody is like, “Oh six is too many.” But, it's actually been totally amazing. The problem we are facing is we have so many incredible organic evangelists across our customer base, but they don't all share a lot in common. Like, you'll have the CEO ofSendoso who loves us, and then you'll have Sarah from Gong who loves us, and they're both amazing, but they might not share the same problems. If you bring them all together in one room, it might be a little weird. Our solution, instead, was to create six different groups of our customer advisory board, each united by a persona, each owned by the person who kind of owns that persona within Chili Piper. It's been amazing. A second problem we had with it was, “How do we ensure that these folks feel respected, cared for, and that they're activated?” So, Taylor, who runs our customer marketing department, actually, we aligned her comp to a customer advisory board health score, which I just think is awesome, because it ensures that we're going to have that activation, which not only helps us, but it makes it feel that the cab members are happy. And then, what do you know, we've had our cab for four months now, over 35 members have announced it, we're looking at over 600,000 organic impressions, but each of those is worth 10 from the company account, because if I tell you, “Hey, I'm great!” They're gonna be like, “Sure.” But if your best friend, someone you respect, says, “Dan's really great.” Then it's going to carry a lot more weight. So, that's how we solve that.
3) Ensuring representation in our communities. We're still working on it, but the first step was to figure out which one of our customers is active in which community? Eventually, we want to ascribe a community health score to all these communities, as well. That's kind of future state. We've got a lot going on now, so haven't been able to get to it yet, but I'm excited to do it in the future.
What are 3 roadblocks you are working on now?
1) Marketing Ops. Okay. So the first roadblock, and our CEO, if you're watching this right now, I know he's so busy, there's no way, but we got to hire marketing ops, right? So Arthur and Adrian, the events team, are really incredible, but there's a level of sophistication we want to do that kind of requires marketing ops. So, we're at a point in the company where there are two paths we can take: We can train Arthur and Adrian on how to be HubSpot experts and do all this stuff. Or, we can specialize. They can keep focused on building the brand, doing amazing events, building our in-person events community, and ultimately, shepherding deals to close. And, we can have a marketing ops person manage the plumbing, so to speak. Some of the things we want to do are pretty complex. For all the events we invite, we want to have unique invitation cadences going out from the person who's going to be there, have a tier one list, a tier two list, a tier three list. And like, particularly if your events people are running around all the time, you don't really have time for that. So, that's one problem we're really facing.
2) The dark funnel. We operate a ton in the dark funnel, but there's always this lingering fear where it’s like, “These QHMs (qualified held meetings) aren't associated any specific program! They've just Googled chilipiper.com.” One easy way you can get around this to ensure that demand gen, essentially, doesn't take credit for organic stuff, is you take out ad spend against your own keywords. Like, someone searches for Chili Piper in Google, and then it's like, did you mean chilipiper.com? Like, I'm curious what you think, Chris, do you think that's demand gen sourced or is it something else? If someone is Googling Chili Piper, and then they click on a cost per click ad taken out against Chili Piper by Chili Piper. “Did you mean chilipiper.com?” Would you characterize that as demand gen? That's my question. Even though they clicked on a paid ad.
Chris: I've run into all this type of stuff, too. Like the SDR sources something through an email, and this outbound comes inbound through a book demo. They answer “Google” was the way they found out about us.Yeah. So here's my hot take. I'm wearing our “Nothing but hot takes” hat in honor of our podcast relaunching, Demand Gen Chat, which is going to be really exciting, but what you want to look at and measure is what caused them to Google Chili Piper? They Googled Chili Piper because some of their friends told them about it, or they saw something on social, then they clicked on the ad. An easy way to unblock this organic stuff is just to ensure that demand gen isn't taking credit for organic social and you do that by making sure the paid ads that convert based off your own keywords are actually attributed to the direct organic bucket, rather than this demand gen bucket, because they wouldn't have clicked on the ad if they didn't Google Chili Piper. I would say that's the real mover, getting them to Google is what you want to be measuring.
3) Managing expectations. This is the best problem in the world. I report directly to our founders and CEOs, and they're super hands-on. I am just so grateful for it. But you know, and we can get into this and the mental model question, I use a theory called Self-determination theory to help manage the teams that I serve. And it's sometimes difficult to have a consistent, coherent, long-term strategy when you're kind of getting pulled in different directions by executives. So finding the ground to push back and say no, to say no to projects, is something I've always struggled with because I just want to say yes to everything. But I know that I can’t.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Self-determination theory. The first one is self-determination theory. Since I joined Chili Piper, and this is nothing against the company, I think it just has to speak more with the great resignation, but I've been here two years and every single marketer has left, apart from all 8 of those folks who are on the teams that I serve. None of them have left. Five of them have gotten promotions. Two of them have bought houses. And the reason I think this is, is because of this thing called Self-determination theory. So what self-determination theory states is that people's satisfaction in work is going to increase with incremental units of responsibility, not incremental units of pay. So basically, what I'll do is rather than saying, “Hey, do this.” I will facilitate a conversation where we both discuss the value of the broader thing. What's fascinating is, I'll often enter these conversations with an idea of what I want, and then 90% of the time, the conclusion that we reach is different from the idea that I want, but way better. When people feel in control of their own work, when they feel like they have autonomy, and actual respect, when they're happy, then they're not going to leave, they're going to produce their best work, and they're going to see a path for leadership. When people are micromanaged, it just sucks all the motivation out of them, and they're going to leave that company. So that is one theory.
2) The theory of leverage. Shout out to Pete Kazanjy for this. It’s basically a way to organize how you go about doing things to ensure that you are always being high leverage. This was something that was taught to me by Pete Kazanjy while I was the founder of Modern Sales Pros.
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1) The lowest leverage thing you can do is one-time work that will be done once and can't be reused. Sometimes really necessary, but it's super low leverage.
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2) Doing work that can be reused and templated.
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3) Doing work that creates tooling, which allows others to do more.
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4) Doing management that enables others to do work.
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5) Creating a recurring system and process by which #1 is more effective.
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6) Creating recurring systems and processes by which #2, #3, and #4 are more valuable and effective.
It’s a great way to think about your own efficiency. “Am I building capacity? Is the way I'm doing this task going to make it easier to do the same task next time?” If not, sometimes that's necessary. Sometimes you gotta just do it. But other times, you should reevaluate and make sure that you're templating stuff along the way, and things like that.
3) Emotional withdrawals and deposits. A third mental model I use a lot is the concept of emotional withdrawals and deposits. I could step back for a second and say literally all of Cialdini's work. The godfather of Influence and Modern Persuasion is super central to everything we do. But this isn't some of his work. It's the theory of emotional deposits and withdrawals. It's a great way to think about your advocates. If you're asking, asking, asking, asking, eventually, they’re gonna like be, “Chill out.” You need to balance your asks with your gives, right? And then, sometimes, you want to create programs that are entirely gives. We're launching these in-person events series and I'm able to invite CMOs to these events. We had one recently. It was amazing. It was like CMO of Gong, Intercom, GlassDoor, SVP of Slack. It was just like an incredible group. There's a difference between emailing someone and being like, take a demo, pitch slapping them, and emailing them and say, “Hey, let's get you a really nice dinner with your true peers.” If you focus a lot on balancing your deposits and withdrawals, you'll find you're able to build long-term, lasting, meaningful relationships with your customers. And, if you haven't noticed from so far, we want to market through our customers, that's core to everything we do at Chili Piper.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Fire your social media consultant and stop producing super basic boring stuff. Kind of an admittance here, when I first joined Chili Piper, we had a consulting firm pushing out all of our content, and they were doing what everyone else in the industry was. It looked the same. It was boring. So, we did this analysis across all the major B2B brands and at this point there was one that really stood out to us. It was Gong. I was like, “What's Gong doing?!” It turns out what they were doing was actually rotating through different social media posts archetypes. So companies like, here's a great example, Outreach and Lean Data. Outreach has actually gotten a lot better recently, but when I first started, it was like, “Here's another white paper. Here's another webinar. Here's another blog.” All look the same. All with the same graphic designer, And sure, maybe 5% of your audience finds that relevant, but what if you could produce 20 different types of content, each relevant to 5% of your audience, and then cycle through all 20 of those in a week? Well, then you'd hit everyone in your audience with something that's completely relevant to them. The GTM technique that other teams need to try is to think about diversifying their social media calendar to appeal to their different personas and also to appeal to different types of people. Some people want to laugh. Some people want to be inspired. Some people want to consume video content. Some want to consume long form broetry or whatever. Some want to see pictures of dogs. You can literally have your cake and eat it too. Just give it to everybody. Give it to everybody. Give them all the things. Brand consistency is a misnomer that a lot of folks cripple their brand using because it just gives them no personality, no flavor. I hear this a lot where it's like, “Don't post from your company account. Post from your individual account because that's what gets more engagement, on average 8x more engagement.” But here's my theory on this. It doesn't get 8x more engagement because of the algorithm. Obviously, LinkedIn wants people to post from their company accounts. It's like the business social media network. It gets 8x more engagement because everyone's company page is like super basic and stale and corporatized. And nobody wants that corporate version of you. They want an authentic version of you. So that's the first thing. Dispense with the boring social media content.
2) Invest in community. But not in a way to like claim your stake on it. Try and support communities. The people in these communities are smart. They're the top leaders in the industry. So, what you want to do is ensure that they are supported. Support the founders of the community. Give them money when they're starting. Sponsor their events. Add women and people of color to their communities if they're not diverse enough. Add your customers. And then, you'll find the revenue will come. It won't be trackable. But, it'll come, and it'll reflect itself in the people who Google your company name or go right to your company website.
3) In-person events. They're back. We're doing them. We're doing all these dinners. There's like 20-30 people in attendance and we've had a ton of success. If anyone's interested in that, they can reach out to me, because we've built an in-person events community, and we're taking sponsorships. We're already working with Vidyard. We're working with Reprise, working with Sendoso. And it's kind of like Field Marketing as a Service, but it's just really fun. Get people live and just hear what your customers have to say. Sit your customers right next to your prospects at a table with fancy dinner and drinks, and then sit back and watch the magic happen.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
We just hired a professional development team at Chili Piper, professional development coaches, and I've been taking this training on how to be a better manager, which is a skill you should always be honing. I'm going to give you two questions, and then I'm going to give you an archetype for questions.
1) Ask open-ended questions. So questions to not ask are yes or no questions, or leading questions. I think I made a mistake earlier when I asked you, “What do you think is causing demand gen?” It was like, I already knew the answer. You knew the answer. I didn't give you an opportunity to express your creativity. So what I would say is to avoid leading questions where it's like, “Do you agree with me that this is your priority?” Yes or no questions, those essentially are not questions. They're just fake statements from a manager that pull autonomy and creativity out of your employees, in a negative way, because it’s like, “Why did you ask me a question just to get me to say something?” Instead, you want to focus on open-ended, non-closed questions.
2) What excites you the most about all the work you have on your plate? One I really like to ask a lot of times is, “What excites you the most about all the work you have on your plate?” That will give you a great example of something that you can dive in on, and it will actually help you build out leadership trajectories for folks, because if someone's like, “Man, I just love marketing ops.” Then, it's your job as a manager to find them a mentor. Obviously not me, cause I'm not a marketing ops expert, but find someone who can develop them in that skill. So, “What do you enjoy most amongst your work?” It's just such a great question. And then, “What do you enjoy least as well?” Because those are the things you want to try and automate, delegate, find ways to do less of, if they're not bringing you joy. If you're happy in work, you're going to be productive in work, and you're not going to leave. That’s so important.
3) Does this project excite you? Where does it sit alongside your priorities, both in terms of the impact of the business and how much it's going to fulfill you as a person? Another question I like to ask all the time, when someone comes to you with a new project, and they're like, “I want to do this.” And then, you're like, “Oh, sure, but you got a lot on your plate, and maybe you can't do it.” That'd be like a really snarky way. Like, “Do you think you can do this amongst your other priorities?” It's like, “Don't call me out, bro! Like chill out.” So what I like to ask is, “Oh, I love this. I'm curious. Two-part question. Does this project excite you? And, where does it sit alongside your priorities, both in terms of the impact of the business and how much it's going to fulfill you as a person?” That’s just such a great question, because it allows people to go through that analysis of self-prioritization, themselves. If you're spelling it out, like “Don't do this. This is a priority.” Then, they're not going to learn those skills. They're going to keep coming to you with the same questions. Like, you want to push as much back as possible onto your team so that they can learn, onto the team that you serve. It's not your team. You're there to support them. Not the other way around.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Gemma Cipriani-Espineira. I know I can only nominate one from our company, but I want to nominate Gemma, our Chief Customer Officer, because we have a pretty wild net-negative revenue retention number. We have amazing revenue retention. In fact, there's massive expansion on base and it's just because your customers are core to everything. You don't have happy customers? Word’s going to get out. You can't control your brand. You can't. Your customers, and the experience they have, that's going to dictate how your brand is perceived by the market. And for that, you need a really strong customer-facing function, both customer support, which rebranded. We rebranded it to the Department of Customer Love and Customer Success, as well as Implementation and Onboarding. So that's huge. You got to talk to Gemma. She's amazing.
2) Lori Richardson. Another operator I would suggest you talk to is Lori Richardson. Lori Richardson is the founder of so many things, but also Women Sales Pros. And she's a wealth of knowledge. I don't want to essentialize her impact into women's issues, but I will say she's one of the pioneers of ensuring that women are represented in sales and sales leadership. And we still have a lot of work to do, but I would honestly chat with her and just talk to her about like tactical sales stuff. Because, beyond being this like amazing leader of the women in tech movement, she's just like more bad-ass than anyone as a practitioner. Knows everything about sales. Knows everyone. It's just the best person, you got to talk to Lori. She's literally… She's amazing. I can't say enough about Lori. She's really good.
3) Jen Igartua. She's the CEO of Go Nimbly, and it's just a really cool perspective she has. So, what Go Nimbly does is they are a full service revenue operations consultancy firm. So imagine that you're an early stage company, or maybe even a later stage company, and you're trying to answer these complex revenue ops questions. Maybe you need a Salesforce administrator, maybe all this stuff, but you don't have that knowledge internally. And the war for talent is making it impossible to hire revenue and marketing ops right now. You could reach out to Go Nimbly and they'll give you the most amazing consultancy. They'll build out your marketing stack, your rev ops stack, your sales stack, all of this stuff. Why I think she'd be amazing is a lot of people are limited by the experience at their own company. Right? But sometimes, moving at the pace of experience just isn't fast enough. So, I personally find that Jen must have just such a cool insight because she's digesting marketing ops problems, marketing ops successes, sales and marketing ops wins and losses from like a hundred different companies at the same time. It’s something I couldn't even fathom. I learned a lot from just what we do at Chili Piper. Imagine if I was talking to 40 different companies at the same time. She's awesome.
Three really awesome practitioners for you.
What should people who love what you’re saying go do next?
1) Read Robert Cialdini's book Influence. So, my background is in political persuasion, where I worked for Bernie for years, and before that, I worked for other nonprofits where we'd go out and we'd have conversations about like what people believe in. I fundamentally believe that all sales and marketing starts with emotions. So, if there's one thing I'd recommend, it would be to read Robert Cialdini's book Influence. It's just incredible. He has these six principles that he calls Weapons of Influence, where it's like, have you ever noticed that when someone's like, “You're great.” You instinctively want to be like, “No, you're great.” Have you noticed that, Chris? We're like psychologically primed to follow all of these cues, and they're just essential in marketing, and people don't use them enough. If you're like, “Man, I don't have time for a full book right now.” There's an amazing 10 minute YouTube, just search “the science of influence and persuasion” and then you'll find this like handwritten, 10-minute YouTube video that'll cover, honestly, 60-70% of the stuff in the book. So that would be my recommendation.
2) If you're trying to increase your conversion rate on inbound leads, my recommendation would be to go to chilipiper.com. Google it. We won't be able to credit back to this podcast, but, that's okay, because your company will benefit from it.
Work with Dan → Chili Piper is hiring!
23 minutes with Shri Apte, VP Revenue at Triplebyte. Starting from the outcome. MECE frameworks. Bias to action. Heavily dogfooding your product. Marketing from a position of expertise Overcoming barbell distribution in the performance of different account executives. Understanding what drives renewals. Marketing two separate products. Consistent messaging and keeping cohesion. Driving cross-product upsells.
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Patrick Coleman said about Shri:
Shri Apte. VP of Revenue at TripleByte. Great guy and TripleByte is a fantastic business. We’re big fans of really anybody operating in the space to make it easier for more people to get jobs in coding and realize the benefits of the internet economy. Big, big fans.
—Patrick Coleman, VP of Growth at Replit → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Inbound traffic. The first way that constitutes a good portion of our revenue is inbound traffic. Inbound traffic is an interesting challenge for Triplebyte because we have two products that serve the same customer base, but two very different needs of our customers. Our first product, which is free, Triplebyte Screen, is a self-serve, product-led-growth go-to-market, that enables technical recruiters to incorporate assessments into their hiring pipeline. Our other paid product, which is a pure sales-driven go-to-market strategy, enables technical recruiters to source qualified engineers, who have already taken technical assessments, onto their teams and into their hiring pipeline. Being really clear about messaging, about the needs of the person that is coming inbound and routing them to the right motion, is one of the key ways that we convert our market into revenue.
2) Outbound. The other way would be outbound. Our outbound strategy is fortunate enough to be targeted towards companies who very clearly telegraph their needs for software engineers. We can drive a lot of our outbound strategy by listening to software engineer job postings on ATS, on public job boards, on a variety of data sources, and make sure that our outbound strategy is timely to when the volume of roles that a company has open for software engineers experiences a substantial increase. We can be having those key conversations right when recruiters are feeling the need for increased pipeline most acutely.
3) Making the recruiters that work on our platform champions of our product. We want every single recruiter that interacts with our product that may move onto another company, to want to bring Triple Byte’s hiring and sourcing tools into their new organization and grow the number of champions that we have out there in the market by delivering a great experience to our customers.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Finding expectations for the average performance of account executives. The first difficult problem on the go-to-market side would be finding expectations for the average performance of account executives. We were seeing very much a barbell distribution in the performance of different account executives. We weren't sure what we could expect average performance to be, that we could set goals around that were motivating to both performers that we would want to keep, performers who were going to blow the goals out of the water, and effectively manage away people who are going to consistently miss those goals. It took a lot of digging into the specific processes of the AEs, how quickly they were responding to different components and messaging in their sales cycle, listening to a lot of Gong calls, that led us to recalibrate our training programs and produce more and more account executives that were performing at the top end of the barbell, and eventually, move up the average performance of the team, and set reasonable goals for all of the individual AEs.
2) Scaling our BDR team. The second hard problem, which actually dovetails well with the first one was scaling our BDR team. A big component to scaling our BDR team that was challenging, was maintaining win rates on outbound opportunities and ensuring that AEs were treating outbound opportunities with an effective strategy that gave customers more care and attention than the average inbound account may need. Obviously, we want to care and be attentive to all the customers in the sales process, but in terms of prioritization and where incremental efforts might lead to incremental wins, we wanted to make sure that time was being allocated there.
3) Understanding what drives renewals. Our final problem that we recently overcame was understanding what drives renewals. So after a customer has been sold, what exactly are the success metrics that we need to look at, and have our customers achieve, in order for them to have a very, very high probability of renewing. Looking at all the data across our lapsed subscriptions on a normalized basis, which was quite a challenge for our data team, and marrying that with anecdotal and qualitative information provided by our account management team, led us to a really, really clear understanding of exactly the results we need to deliver through our product for our customers, in order for them to continue to see value and renew with us for their continued recruiting success.
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What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on right now?
1) Marketing two separate products. The two products that we have, Triplebyte Screen and Triplebyte Hire, have two completely different go-to-market motions. While that's been an effective strategy for growing revenue, it does make the marketing of those two products, both on our website, as well as content marketing, as well as lifecycle marketing, extremely challenging.
2) A subchallenge of that is developing consistent messaging and keeping cohesion across the products. So that we're not pitching value propositions to one group of customers that they may get more leverage out of in another product. We don't want to tell screening customers that we're helping increase their hiring pipeline, when in reality, that's the main value prop of our hire product. That dovetails really well with the third problem:
3) Driving cross-product upsells and having customers use both of our products. Because they have two different sales motions, the type of customers that come into both of the products, and become users and adopters, very often have completely divergent profiles, and narrowing into the subset of customers that have needs for both of our products, identifying them in a scalable way, and assigning tasks to our account managers, or to our customer support team, to drive that double product adoption, is something we're still working on and refining.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Starting from the outcome. One of the mental models I find most effective when thinking through how we want to approach our users, how we want to approach decisions internally, how we want to approach our market, is starting from the outcome. So, looking at what is the output that we want to achieve from any given scenario. If it's a user, they've already paid for the product, what is it that that user wants at the end of the day from our product? If we're in an internal discussion about personnel, about allocation of resources, what is the end goal that we're trying to achieve? Having everyone kind of grounded in that thinking helps clarify, and make more efficient, a lot of the discussions and decision-making around those processes. One great example I’d give is: we were recently doing a lot of user research and brainstorming on how we could make our sourcing product more effective to our users. Starting with the outcome, our users want to hire software engineers. And, what our user research showed is at the end of the day, they don't care as much how that gets done, as long as the engineers are quality and are meeting their goals. And so if they could push a button and hire software engineers, that would be the most ideal outcome for all of our users. Sourcing Isn't something that recruiters love doing. And so, starting from the outcome here inspired us to kind of fully automate the sourcing process, which led to a feature which is actually launching today, that's going to give our customers a huge lift in the efficiency that our product brings to their workflow. Automatically matching them with candidates who want to talk to companies. Making their workflow now, logging into our platform and only connecting with people who are already interested in working at their company. Starting from the outcome gave us the ability to have that kind of thinking and drive that type of result for our customers.
2) MECE frameworks. A second mental model that suppots this, is MECE frameworks. So, it's a bit of a consulting buzzword, but I actually think it's really effective in breaking all the components of a journey into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive pieces. Mutually exclusive means that there's no overlap between these pieces, and collectively exhaustive means that together, they kind of paint the whole picture of a funnel, of a customer journey, of a internal process, whatever it might be. And the reason I think this is a powerful mental model is because it really drives you to fully understand every component of a funnel, or a process, in order for you to claim that it's mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. You have to do the work and really dig into, for example, if you're categorizing a customer base, what does a customer segmentation across a particular behavior really look like? That leads you to, “Well, why is that behavior so different in these two different segments of our customer base?” And so, thinking through that framework really helps to uncover like more lines of investigation and brainstorming that can eventually help you deliver more value to your market and eventually grow your revenue.
3) Bias to action. The third one, which powers the prior, is a bias to action. This is something that you definitely want to screen for in your hiring processes. It's something we really value at Triplebyte. Once you have that categorization in place, it's pretty clear which of those categories are good and which of those categories are bad, having a bias to action to immediately try to convert some of the customers, some of the prospects, whatever object it might be that you're dealing with in a negative state, and take action to move them to a positive state, can help, overall, increase the velocity with which your company moves and eventually delivers value to your customers and grows.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Heavily, heavily dogfooding your product. So one thing we are able to do here at Triplebyte, and I would highly encourage other teams to do if it works with the product that they're selling, is heavily, heavily dogfooding your product. Triplebyte’s paid product is a marketplace to source engineers, and we have sourced the most engineers on our platform, bar none. So, we source all of our engineering talent on there. This gives us a really good idea of what our marketplace looks like, the composition of it. It gives us really good insights into, as we release features, what's broken and what's not. Having people at your company be day-to-day users of your product gives you another level of information that you can't really get any other way. The one caveat to that is sometimes you can get over-biased to power users. So, because you're kind of having these people in the product day-to-day, you start to think more like a power user rather than the average user of your product. So, that would be one like cautionary tale. You want to make sure that you're getting like that color from customer feedback and keeping a tight loop with your customers, as well. But, would highly recommend dogfooding the product whenever you can.
2) Developing and communicating marketing from a position of expertise. Another technique that can be informed by dogfooding is developing and communicating marketing from a position of expertise. So, because we have such high close rates on engineers in our own hiring processes, because we're so efficient at recruiting engineers internally, we can take that, and leverage it in our product marketing. That gives us a way to reach customers who, regardless of whether or not they end up using our product, are genuinely curious about what things we might be doing differently that enable us to get the types of results, both with our product and in the general hiring market, that are addressing pain points that they're feeling pretty acutely.
3) Insights marketing. If the activity on your platform can serve as some kind of proxy for a larger market. So in our case, the market for hiring software engineers but in other customers cases, or in other companies cases, proxies for payment volume in the market. One big thing during the supply chain crisis was freight companies were talking through what trends they were seeing. That can also bring people who are really interested in that market into your sales process and help you close more deals.
So, those would be the three techniques I recommended go-to-market teams try.
What are 3 question that you love to ask and why?
I don't know if I can answer this well, to be honest with you, because they would just be the flip of my mental models. Whenever I approach a new situation:
1) What are we trying to do? What is the outcome here for a customer, for like the sales team? What are we trying to drive to?
2) What are all the pieces and steps between where the current state of the world is and what we want our outcome to be?
3) What actions do we need to take to eliminate those steps or make it a very, very high conversion from one state of the world to the other?
So, those are always my three questions when I like see something new or I am trying to explore a new product problem. They served me well so far.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Cynthia McGillis. So, the first operator is a good friend of mine, and she may be too busy right now, but I have to shout her out. Her name is Cynthia McGillis. She leads Revenue Operations at a company called Vercel. She is one of the most adaptable and resilient people I've met. There's never been a problem too big or too small that she hasn't been able to tackle, both in the traditional go-to-market sense, managing revenue operations workflows, but also when we worked together at Lambda School, now known as Bloom Tech, handling a lot of the more unconventional market-to-revenue funnel flows, namely the admissions and operations associated with admissions for students. Seeing someone excel in two very different areas is extremely impressive. But, she's swamped right now, so I don't know if she’ll be able to be a guest in the near term, but definitely someone you should talk to.
2) Anshuk Gandhi. The second person is someone who works at Triplebyte. His name is Anshuk. He's the VP of Growth here at Triplebyte. He fully manages our screening product and has taken that from zero to hundreds of, and near-thousand, monthly active users. He was, before, at LinkedIn, helping with their certifications team. He has a really, really broad depth of experience, and one of the best approaches to experimentation I've ever seen on a growth and go-to-market side.
3)Trey Knowles. Trey Knowles also works at Vercel, and we also worked together at Bloom Tech. Similarly, someone who excelled in kind of developing a sales motion for getting partner companies at Bloom Tech and is now selling a developer platform tool and leading a team of account executives. Being able to outperform at two very different markets, very different motions, and move from one to the other with unflinching enthusiasm is something really admirable. So, he would be the third person I would recommend.
What should people who love what you’re saying next go do next?
If you're at all interested in hiring software engineers, I would highly recommend you check out Triplebyte Screen. It's a completely free product. We have a huge library of assessments, spanning everything from traditional front-end development, JavaScript, all the way to cutting edge assessments, like Solidity development and blockchain architecture. So from web1 to eb3, we have all your technical assessment needs covered. You can create an account for free and start sending assessments to prospective engineering candidates.
Try Triplebyte Screen → Hire 2x Faster
Work with Shri → TripleByte is hiring!
Meet Dani Woolf, Director of Demand Generation at Cybersixgill. If you focus on the mission, you will make the money. Go talk to your buyer. Pick up the phone. Start building relationships with your buyer. Get out of the echo chamber right now. Do yourself a favor. You owe it to the world to unmute your mic. Becoming more technically literate to geek out with your buyers. Getting the team to simplify, then simplify again. The order in which you do things matters. Parkinson’s law of triviality.
16 Insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Ryan Paul Gibson said about Dani:
Dani Woolf. Dani is Director of Demand Generation for a cybersecurity company. I like her because I can tell we align with our philosophies on things around demand, which is you can't just ram a product into someone's face and expect them to think that they'll buy it, because that's not how B2B works. People just don't wake up and want to buy a solution. There's a process they go through of decision-making. Some of it's rational, some of it’s emotional, to eventually land on a list of solutions when the time is right. So, I think she'd be cool to talk to.
—Ryan Paul Gibson, Founder of Content Lift → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
That's a great question, and it really got me thinking.
1) We provide as much simple, practical—and the key word here is practical—honest, and ungated information as possible. In ways, or angles, that allow our buyers to learn something new that could be applied to their daily job. The key here isn't to expect that that there will be an immediate transaction. I just spoke to a buyer last week who said, and one thing that really resonates with me, “Time is the most valuable asset.” And so with that insight, we're letting buyers decide when their time can be used for our resources and assets, as well. It's that “pull in” versus the “push for” attention mindset. I think more organizations are catching onto that more simple, pragmatic approach to their strategy. Those are the companies who are really going to win, in my opinion.
2) We're building a safe space community and boardrooms for our buyers in our niche to have conversations amongst themselves about those challenges that are they're experiencing, that they're going through. And what that does is it allows them to ping pong new ideas on how to solve those issues. We’re they're, obviously, to join the conversation and help them find solutions to those problems in closed face-to-face intimate forums and areas. It's really been rewarding to see business grow from that.
3) Collaborating with customers and end users to champion our point of view in different channels. This is my favorite. If you're in the security field, word of mouth, trust, and credibility is everything. As a startup, it really takes a lot of time to build that credibility. So when you build authentic relationships with your customers, with your audience, with your end users, who then get excited by the opportunity to do really creative things in spaces that resonate with them and their audience, more trust, more visibility to your point of view will then occur. And that's been really, really pivotal for us since the start of 2022, especially. We're really doubling down on that into 2023.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Getting access to my buyers. It's really why I created Audience 1st podcast. For years, I wasn't able to get in front of customers, believe it or not, due to constraints from customer success or sales. It blows my mind to this day. It really does. So I just went out by myself and started engaging with buyers to understand their motivations. I wanted to know what their goals were, their challenges, what makes them tick, right?How do they go about evaluating solutions? What triggers them to even start exploring tools? To me, that was critical, so that I could use that information and those insights, along with my teammates, to create more thoughtful experiences and think about how to go to market versus just building a strategy solely based on assumption.
2) Break out of the echo chamber. To top that off, I found it frustrating and still do at times that other cybersecurity marketers in forums or on LinkedIn, talk to other marketers about how to do things. When I know for a fact that these strategies and tactics do not work in the cybersecurity industry. So I found it the responsible thing to do to break out of the echo chamber and share the insights that I'm learning on the podcast with other marketers and sellers, because it's crucial that they engage with security buyers in a more moral and ethical way. In the long run, and I think in the short term, that's going to provide them with that exponential growth that they're looking for in the first place. So, it's been one month since the launch of audience first and it's resonating so hard, which is really great to see finally.
3) Instilling my core values throughout my current organization. As marketers or sellers in cybersecurity specifically on the vendor side, we are equally responsible for protecting people. And if we're all about the profit first, before the mission of protecting people, we are going to lose the battle real fast as an organization. And so, when you come into a company that's fueled by appeasing investor profits, because we all know that loads of security vendors are just gushing with cash from investors, it's very hard to instill that mission-before-money mindset throughout the company. Because we're all stressed to double triple. I mean, I've even heard someone say that he has to 5x revenue, which is crazy. Fortunately, I've grown really comfortable to speak up and relay my core values across organization. And I see that it's sticking in the right places. So, so I'm very hopeful that the customer first, the mission-before-money mindset, will continue to thrive and grow at my company. It's a process, and it takes time, and you just gotta be comfortable with that.
What are 2 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
1) Becoming more technically literate to geek out with my buyers. It's one thing to have soft skills, which I think is needed on the buyer-side in security. Actually, and the marketing and sales side, to be honest. But, it's another to be able to geek out with your buyer and speak their language. I think marketers and sellers who are able to articulate challenges and solutions in buyer terms, and in more technical terms, I strongly believe that's a differentiator on its own. Like why wait for a sales engineer to answer a more technical question, if a potential customer approaches you and they have that question, when you can do it on your own, and much earlier in the buying process? Because, who knows if that security buyer will even have time for you again later down the line. Sometimes there are no second chances.
2) Getting the team and myself to simplify, and then simplify again. Because I do not want to over promise and under deliver in the organization or to my buyers. So, as a marketing team and an organization right now where I work, we're going through a lot of changes and transformation. Definitely for the good. And so that requires us to do things a little bit differently which is hard sometimes for people because we're so used to doing things a certain way. I'm notorious for biting off more than I can chew because I have so many ideas and I want to execute with my team. But it's not scalable. So now we're making it a habit to consistently identify and cut out trivial tasks, projects, programs that aren't making an impact on the business goal. And on top of that, simplifying the process of execution as well.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) I strongly believe the order in which you do things matters and the biggest gains are at the bottom. And what does that mean? Think of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Which is a five stage a psychology model. It states that the basic needs lower down in the hierarchy (and the pyramid), like food, water, shelter, security, and rest, must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs higher up in the pyramid, like relationships and accomplishments, and then, finally, that self-actualization. Achieving your full potential and creative activities. I like to look at the attainment of organizational success as if it were a hierarchy of growth needs. My strong belief is that most marketers skip to the sexiest part of marketing, which is the persuasion part. The copy, creative design, landing page design, channel optimization. Those hooks and triggers. Which, if you look at Maslow's pyramid, would be the equivalent to self-actualization. They skip the foundations, which is essentially validating everything you're going to do in the persuasion phase.
1) The basic need. Start with the goal. Do you even understand where you need to be in order to sustain and grow business?
2) Customer fit. Do you even know who your target audience is? Do you know their motivations and needs? What is their journey? Where do they evaluate solutions?
3) This is a huge one. Data and analytics. Do you have the infrastructure in place to understand if you're even investing money in the right place?
4) Function and delivery. Are your customers even able to interact with your organization correctly, digitally and offline? And then, usability optimization, right? Are your experiences usable and intuitive based on customer buying preferences.
5) Persuasion. Only then, can you get to the sexy part, which most start with first. The persuasion. Does your message even resonate with your audiences, motivations and needs?
So, the order in which you do things matters. The biggest gains are definitely at the bottom. If you focus on the foundations, if you can hone in on the foundations first, your conversion and business goals will be met. Then you can ask the question, “can we retain them now?”
2) Parkinson's Law. The second model that I like to focus on is Parkinson's law about triviality, or bike shedding, which is an observation about the tendency to waste time on trivial tasks while while important tasks go unattended. And I first heard about this model a year or so ago on the podcast, “Everyone Hates Marketers” by Louis Grenier. By the way, I really urge anyone listening to this episode to head over there and dig in. So much of what I do now is influenced by the no-bullshit information there that he shares. So when I heard that episode on bike shedding, and why marketers spend time on trivial tasks versus the important ones. I was like, “Holy crap. This is a really refreshing slap in the face.”
3) If you focus on the mission, you will make the money. I don't know if it's a mental model. it’s just something I say to myself, “If you focus on the mission, you will make the money.” A few of my guests on Audience 1st have said that, security practitioners, “If you focus on the mission, you will make the money.” And that's something that has really allowed me a breath of fresh air as a marketer, because I've seen in a very short period of time, if you do focus on the mission, you will start seeing that exponential growth that as a startup you're required to achieve.
What are 2 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Listen more, talk less, and actually apply what you've learned. It's not enough just to listen. You definitely have to process what you're hearing from your customers. Take those insights and apply them, selectively. Many buyers in this market, specifically in cybersecurity, are bitching about what vendors are doing publicly. Yet, vendors continue to run these shady tactics and it drives me nuts. So just listen and apply.
2) Do not focus on displacing competitors. It is a very expensive play and in most cases, security teams aren't even looking to replace solutions. Unless they're absolutely, incredibly disgruntled, then maybe you got a chance. They don't have time to replace solutions. It's heavy up, you know, it's heavy lift. They don't have budget or they're likely just needing to compliment your solution with your competitor, to be honest.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
I haven't met these wonderful people, but I've spoken to them on one occasion or another.
1) Vladimir Blagojević. First, I definitely recommend Vladimir Blagojević. He's the co-founder of fullfunnel.io. I actually follow him on LinkedIn and he's helping B2B marketers who market to people in accounts that have a long sale cycles, like me. Helping us do things a little bit more strategically and methodically. I think the way he educates B2B marketers with his smart playbooks is awesome. It's so useful. And he's one of those people who understands the value of simplicity and practicality. And again, people who do that are going to win.
2) Andra Zaharia. Who is just a rockstar gal. She is a cyber security content marketer. A pro. And host of Cyber Empathy podcast. She and I subscribed to the same mission. She's helping those in tech really understand how, and why, people connect through technology. And, helping us to really understand and make wiser decisions and be human at the end of the day. Which is required in in security and in technology.
3) Gaetano Nino DiNardi. He’s been off grid for a little bit. I hope everything's okay there. I really liked that he's not comfortable with the status quo. I like that he speaks up and challenges the audience. I think he is thinking about doing things differently as a marketer which is really refreshing. He’s been down low, so definitely worth having a conversation with him.
Work with Dani → Cybersixgill is hiring!
Listen to Dani’s podcast with her buyers → Audience 1st
9 minutes with Antoine Buteau, Business Operations at Replit. Balancing scale and experimentation. The risk of becoming too data-driven and copying playbooks from other companies. Growth attribution. Why Product Market Fit isn't enough. The importance of integrity. Pricing is an underrated lever. The Bowling Alley Framework to make sure users activate. Productivity and knowledge managment. Hiring. International GTM.
20 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Patrick Coleman said about Antoine:
Antoine Buteau. I want to give a shout out to Antoine Buteau on my team who leads BizOps for us. Just super sharp. Started his career as an engineer and then was a strategy consultant for software businesses. Just a brilliant go-to-market operator.
—Patrick Coleman, VP of Growth at Replit → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Patrick covered our plans in a previous podcast so I won't repeat what he said. Our go-to-market motion is product-led which means 3 things in how we convert our market into revenue.
1) Our free plan is good enough to make our users successful and have them build cool projects. We don't do aggressive features gating, so we're able to acquire the right target users and users are able to experience the full value of the Replit product.
2) Because our free plan is powerful and we're targeting developers, in-product education is important. The limit people will hit with the free plan is around resources. When we included a resource utilization component within Replit, we saw an increase in conversion from the free to the paid plan. Users were able to understand their usage and the benefits of upgrading.
3) The importance of community. We give tools so that creators can share and show their projects. This means that our users push the limit of the product and help us market what you can do with Replit. In complement, we have a community team that harness that creative potential by organizing events like hackatons and jams.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Just to make sure I don't repeat what Patrick said I have two.
1) Growth attribution. We had a sense of what channels worked best for us. We dug in the data and found insights on what channels get the most pageviews, conversion and retention. It's very useful to have this data so we can double down on what generates the most result.
2) International GTM. We have a large user base outside the US, so we wanted to test what would happen if we do country specific go-to-market. Prioritizing the country to focus on required alignment across the company and we wanted to make sure that we don't slow the entire team by requiring product changes. We went out in the market, spoke to users to learn about the market dynamic and adjusted some of our go-to-market initiatives. We saw strong interest and users were receptive to our efforts.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
1) Hiring. We have ambitious growth plans, so we need to hire great people that will fit the culture. The market is competitive, and at our size, a bad hire is still very costly, so we need to balance that out.
2) Balancing scale and experimentation. We have acquisition channels that work. When you're transitioning from a startup to a growth stage company, you still need to run a lot of experiments, but you also need to scale what works and that require a different mindset.
3) Data Infrastructure. As you scale, there's always a risk of becoming too data-driven and copying playbooks from other companies. Data can only tell you what happened in the past. There's usefulness to that, but there's still a lot of value in the craft and thinking from first principles. It's important that we continue building that infrastructure while also aligning people on a set of common taxonomies, questions, tools and how to use those tools.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
Being a manager now, three questions I like to ask are:
1) How do people like working?
2) What are their career goals?
3) What are their current roadblocks?
Basically when I manage a team, the first thing that I always make sure is: is it clear? Are the expectations clear? Is the strategy clear? And then, are the work and the priorities clear? Being able to map that to their personal goals is very helpful for me as a manager.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) For productivity, I use the Getting Things Done methodology. It's the best methodology I have found to instill focus and clarity on the work that needs to get done. I have confidence in my system which removes some of the anxiety around work.
2) For knowledge management, I use Roam Research. It's a note-taking tool that help you connect your thoughts and group them together in related bits of information. Being able to link information without friction and bringing notes in their context is super helpful when you have to do a lot of context switching.
3) The importance of integrity. I take it very seriously. Integrity means that you are trustworthy. Others can trust you to do what you said you would do. You can also trust yourself including living out your aspirations and visions for participating in the world.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Brian Balfour at Reforge wrote a great piece on Why Product Market Fit Isn't enough. Brian adds three other components to the well known Product Market Fit model. These should all be linked together and have implications when trying to move up or down market.
- Product Channel Fit - the concept that products are built to fit with acquisition channels.
- Channel Model Fit - that channels are determined by your business model
- Model Market Fit - your business model influences the target market and vice versa.
2) Pricing is one of the most important levers and I still think it's underrated. I like the Van West model, which is a multi-question model that indirectly measures willingness to pay instead of directly posing the question to potential buyers. Rather than asking potential buyers to identify a single price point, the Van West model helps assess a range of prices instead of just one. The simplest version of the model is to ask what the buyer considers an “acceptable” price (good value for the money) and at what point the price would start to get “expensive” (they’d have to think twice about buying it).
3) The Bowling Alley Framework, an onboarding model. The goal of the framework is to get the user to the desired outcome. You can use product or conversational bumpers to do that. Product bumpers might be product tours or progress bars and conversational bumpers might be in-app messages or direct outreach. You don't want to have a leaky bucket so the Bowling Alley Framework is useful to make sure users activate and retain.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Eric Tran. Co-founder at Hookdeck. They are building webhook infrastructure that makes it easier to develop, monitor and test from one place. I managed Eric in the past and I'm super proud of his progress. He's a hustler, has the right customer-first mindset and he's really good at experimenting with go-to-market motion.
2) Makoto. Head of User Acquisition at Hopper. I know Makoto since college and he's one of the sharpest mind on growing consumer apps. He's currently leading a team of marketers, engineers, creatives and data-scientist focused on deploying multi-million dollar monthly budgets to scale Hopper user growth.
3) Wes Bush. CEO at ProductLed. Wes wrote one of the bible of product-led growth before it was cool and he's sharing a ton of great content on how the motion is maturing.
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Meet Brandon Fluharty, Founder of Be Focused. Live Great. The concept of a personal operating system. Transformations over transactions. Thinking bigger with prospects. Staying committed to long-term thinking. Overcoming imposter syndrome. Level up your environment. Leveling up tools. Thinking like a designer. Discipline, flexibility, curiosity.
22 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Mehann Misiak said about Brandon:
Brandon Fluharty is one of my favorites. He is actually a million-dollar seller, which is like a huge goal for a lot of people. Just released an incredible e-book that talks about a lot of the things I mentioned in terms of not doing more, but doing better, and really aligning habits with your big P purpose, forming, and bringing in, a lot of strategies that will help you get there.
—Meghann Misiak, Founder of The Path to President’s ClubWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Content, community, and connections. I’ve been doing it with my business. I learned it really effectively at my old company, LivePerson.
1) Content. Putting out good, authentic content draws people in.
2) Community. Building, not an audience, but a community, where prospects can commingle with actual customers. I think having folks talk to those who are maybe 12-18 months down that path is a really powerful thing for those who are maybe on the fence of buying a digital solution, buying a transformation.
3) Connections. So, having those connections that are a level deeper, a bit more meaningful. And, I always liked to turn every meeting that I had with a prospect into more of a collaborative design session. Just a great way to get folks to open up, lead with curiosity, get those insights, and then use those insights in a really actionable way. You can actually cut down a lot of meetings in the sales process by turning your meetings into more of a meaningful connection and using design principles.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Overcoming imposter syndrome. So, as someone who's highly introverted, being in what is mostly perceived as an extroverted world, in sales, overcoming imposter syndrome was really important for me. Especially as I was leveling up, I needed to learn through working with a specific coach who specializes on imposter syndrome. And, what we realized is imposter syndrome is a healthy sign for high achievers, especially as you're elevating inside your career. So, that helped me to sort of repurpose my introversion, and being really quiet, into a sales superpower by being more empathetic, being a really good listener, being an over-thinker that helps me to look deeply into a company that I was pursuing as a prospect, and to be able to pull in insights that might be meaningful, and helpful to, to that prospect and lending that opportunity. So overcoming imposter syndrome was a big one for me.
2) Transformations over transactions. Less transactions, and thinking more about transformations. So thinking bigger with my prospects. And, by getting outside of the box of selling a one-off transaction, which is common in, particularly, the industry I came from SaaS, software as a service, the usual model is land then expand. I wanted to rethink that model and think, “How could I think, actually, more expansive, from the beginning, and open up the aperture of where we started? And then, make a more meaningful impact using our services, and using our solution, pulling in more people who could help a really large brand, like a Delta Airlines, a Chipotle, and United Healthcare to really go after big moonshot ideas, and challenges, that they were trying to solve for?” So second one: transformations over transactions.
3) Saying no more. A big one that really changed really the direction of my career in my life was saying no more. So this concept of slowing down in order to speed up, I had the temptation to want to hold on to every account, wanting to say yes to every opportunity. And unfortunately, what that was doing was just spreading me too thin and leading to a path to burn burnout. But when I worked with a manager and a coach who really helped give me some good sound advice and outside perspective of, “Hey, your best suited when you can go deeper with an account versus trying to work too many accounts at once. Why don't you slow down in order to speed up your progress?” And that was really profound and game-changing for me.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
1) Staying committed to long-term thinking. So, I've made the transition from intrepreneur as a individual contributor, a high impact strategic SaaS seller working for other large companies, public companies, to now being a solopreneur and saying no. As I'm trying to grow a business and stay focused on long-term initiatives and goals, that's been a real challenge. The best thing that's been helping me is the commitment to pillars and a theme that I said when I started my business, when I launched my business just a month ago, staying grounded to those operating principles versus saying yes to lucrative consulting opportunities, or coaching engagements, that are coming at me often. Great first world problem to have certainly, I'm very fortunate and grateful for that, but, I know that could lead down a path of tempting me to steer away, veer away, from my long-term vision and north star for the organization. So, playing the long game is definitely a challenge, and a roadblock, I'm trying to overcome.
2) Comparison syndrome. Sort of over imposter syndrome that creeps in from time to time, but a challenge that I'm currently facing a lot, that encounter is comparison syndrome. So comparing my business, or myself, to others that I might see being hyper successful in social media or other businesses that I aspire to be like and comparing myself where I am now. I think it's been a challenge and one thing I'm always trying to keep in the back of my mind is, you know, everybody's on their own path and I can't look at someone or a business that might be 18, 24, 10 years further down that road than I am and expect the same results or impacts, it’s just unfair and unrealistic. It's hard. It's hard in today's modern world when we're constantly bombarded with notifications and the dopamine hits of novelty of social media, to constantly see how well other people are doing and wanting to compare yourself. That's the second one.
3) Personal operating system. I'm really bullish on this concept of a personal operating system. So, refining my personal operating system in the sense of turning it into a thrive system. That's what I'm endeavoring on. And that takes looking at things like, how well rested I am, how I'm sleeping, how healthy I am, how that's integrated between my work and my life, so that I can be at my best when I'm trying to work. I can stay undistracted when I'm trying to do highly strategic work, and I can focus and get in flow states. So, fine tuning, tweaking, and evolving that personal operating system so it's a consistent thrive system. That’s something I'm really excited about working on.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) TEA. Time, energy, attention. This is going back to my personal operating system, or what would be my thrive system. The first one is TEA. Managing my TEA. TEA stands for time, energy, and attention. We all hear a lot about time management. It's important how you manage your time, because it is the one finite resource that we all have as individuals. So, being able to manage your time effectively is very important, but I think, equally, if not more important, is E, energy. Because you could have all the time in the world, but if you're sick, you contract COVID, what good is it? If you have that time right now, because your calendar's been cleared, sorry, can't take this meeting. But you can't fill that with high energy to actually accomplish something. That's why preventing burnout, monitoring sleep, prioritizing our health. Not falling into the trap of work-life balance, which really doesn't exist in modern society, for knowledge workers, focusing more on work-life integration. When you work is just as important as what you do. So, keeping that energy as high as possible so you can actually conduct elite work every day. I think that's really important. The A is your attention. It's really easy to get caught down the rabbit hole, scrolling, maybe Instagram or LinkedIn or starting in your inbox and responding to prospects or clients or managers or teammates and before you know it it's lunchtime. Then you're moving over to Slack. So focusing your attention and applying that in the right way is really important, too. So that mental model, TEA, keeps me in check.
2) DFC. Discipline, Flexibility, Curiosity. The second one is DFC. DFC stands for discipline, flexibility and curiosity. It's my operating mechanism for just about anything with a start, middle and end. So when a simple unit, it could be a single workday, it could be a sales meeting, a single meeting. It could be a sales engagement, a project, you name it. The way it works is, I want to, at the start of something, I want to be disciplined and I want to embody the athletic persona. Why? A world-class athlete knows how to warm themselves up, to get ready for intense training on a competition. If you can start, well, generally, the training or the game, your performance will go well thereafter. So you need to get your mind, your body and your emotions in a good state. That takes discipline. But during the middle,of a meeting or in the middle of the workday, you can't control everything. So that's when I need to be a bit more flexible, say like a creative artist. And I always think of like an improv comedian. You might throw out, something for that improv comedian to make a joke about, or a heckler in the crowd, or hey, Will Smith might come up on stage and slap you in the face. You gotta be flexible not panic, and be able to keep your composure, and stay professional. Flexibility is really important during the middle stage. And then at the end, that end of that workday, that the end of that project, the end of that meeting, the end of that sales engagement, I want to look back with curiosity, like a scientist would, and think not with emotion, but more with that curiosity so that I can look at whatever happens and view those things as data points. So two really important questions that I would ask would be, “What went well?” And I double down on that the next work day or the next meeting or the next sales engagement. And I'd also ask “What didn't go well, what could be improved?” And I figure out what the gaps are, so I can improve on it. That keeps the emotion out of it, and I'm not attached to that emotion, and allows me to progress even just by 1% better the next time I come back to whatever it is that I just completed.
3) Prep, plan, rest, effort, and perform. Having that curiosity allows me to, now, move into planning tomorrow. That's the last thing I like to do for the workday. Plan out tomorrow so that I can, R rest easy in the evening. I don't have anything weighing on my head. I've cleaned out my inbox. I've blocked off my schedule for tomorrow. I can rest easy. By getting proper rest, then I can give 100%, E effort, on my most important task, because I've already planned out the day and now I can execute on that. And then that delivers a good performance. I can look back on and evaluate that performance.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Level up your environment. We've all been thrust upon a remote first environment as sellers and go to market leaders. How do you put something in your background? For instance, a camera, leveling up your camera, leveling up your environment that makes you inspired to want to come and do good work every day. There are small things that we can implement that levels up our environment, and that will in turn level up the connections that can be had when we’re trying to pitch, or propose, or progress, an opportunity. I really encourage folks to think about how they could level up their environment.
2) Leveling up tools. The second thing is in that vein is leveling up tools. What can support that environment, what can support the way you need to work? A very good example of that is, you know, battling Zoom fatigue, that we've all also encountered over the past two, two and a half years. A great tool is a product called mmhmm, literally M M H M M. Started by the former founder of Evernote. It's an awesome video-based tool that can overlay on Zoom, or Microsoft teams, or Google Meet, and it can literally put you inside the meeting and the presentation, so it can be pointing at things, you can bring the presentation to life. That could be the difference between closing the deal or losing a deal. So find the right tools that work for you.
3) Thinking like a designer. And then the third thing is going back to thinking like a designer and designing systems. Being a systems thinker. I think the best way that we can scale our capabilities is not thinking about constantly hustling and grinding, but how can you put yourself in a position to take the good work that you do? Take your knowledge, build it once and then scale it multiple times. I think that's really powerful as individuals, as teams, as companies, to think about how we do that. A lot of it's going to come down to automating, outsourcing or even eliminating certain things or perhaps, you know, delegating or collaborating on the things that are redundant.
What are 4 questions that you love to ask and why?
I ask myself these questions and I encourage others that I work with to ask themselves these questions. I'm going to cheat a little bit. I don't think I can narrow it down to three. I'm going to color outside the lines here. I'm going to go with four questions.
1) What motivates me? I think that's a good one to constantly ask yourself as you take on really anything big, any big endeavor, it could be going into a new year, going into a new quarter, it could be re-evaluating your account list and starting to become more targeted with your, your account list. So asking yourself, what motivates you? That's going to bring about certain criteria that you start to define for yourself. And if you can align things like, what motivates you against your account lists, from a personality perspective, from a knowledge perspective, from an interest perspective, from an impact perspective, that's just good business.
2) What are your priorities? Understanding what motivates you, understanding what your priorities are, allows you to point your personal operating system in the right direction. And it helps you to manage your TEA, your time, energy and attention effectively. You can always ask yourself, well, is this a priority? Is this my most important activity that I should be doing right now? Should I be spending my time on this? My energy and my attention.
3) What went well? And then a third question I would ask is, well, the two additional questions that I ask myself when I'm curious, sort of at the end state of a day or a meeting or a sales engagement, you know what went well? And then just repeat that, double down, systemize that goodness.
4) What didn’t go well? Figure out where the skill gap is or what you need to do to fine tune your performance to be better at it tomorrow or the next time.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Katy McFee. My first one is Katy McFee out of Ottawa, Canada. I've recently come across Katie on LinkedIn as of a few months ago, and I've been really impressed with her voice and particularly around empowering other females to step into a leadership role in a go to market role, sales role. She's done it herself. She's done it successfully, and I think it's a really important voice to highlight and put a light on, spotlight on, because I think it's an area that needs improvement in the sales go to market space. There’s still a male dominated voice, in the good market world. And I think bringing diversity Is just good for business. Um, just the thing to do as human beings, but it's also good for business. So she's an awesome one to bring onto the show.
2) Jamal Reimer. Jamal is the author of Mega Deal Secrets. He is somebody who I've personally connected with as well over the past several months, a big influencer in the strategic and enterprise sales space. He's closed multiple eight-figure deals throughout his esteemed career. He’s putting a voice that is not so common, like myself, on the sort of the deeper end of go to market strategy and closing transformative deals with some of the world's largest brands at really big deal sizes. So I think that voice, and it's also important because, like myself, Jamal has come from ordinary beginnings, and failures, to achieving really extraordinary things, so he would be a great person to have on the show.
3) Ian Koniak. Out of Southern California. Really it's the three of us who are talking about these really big deal strategies, but looking at it more holistically of how you can bring a more humanistic approach to your sales approach, think more deeply about your purpose and your why and how that can impact your go-to market strategy and your sales strategy. Great for individuals, great for companies, great for teams. He would be another person. He has an amazing story about how he's had to overcome real big, big obstacles in life, like addiction to find the peace, and success, that he's had.
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Meet Meghann Misiak, Founder of The Path to President’s Club. What motivates you? The why. Starting a company is like staring all of your weaknesses in the face, or in the mirror, on a daily basis. Leveling up. Radical transparency. Make it okay to talk through the challenges transparently. Quick wins, dream clients and exploratory projects. Learning to not do it all. Being able to say no.
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Leslie Venetz said about Meghann:
Meghann Misiak. Do you know Meghann Misiak? She's incredible. I would highly recommend her. Absolute badass women in sales or founders in that ecosystem. That’s who I would recommend.
—Leslie Venetz, Founder of Sales Team Builder → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
I love this question, and it definitely blew my mind in the beginning, because I had never been asked this. I think you could approach this question in a few different ways. I think of it as quick wins, dream clients and exploratory projects. So, this applies, no matter if you're starting as a sales rep in a new territory, or if you're even a CSM, a customer service manager who is looking at their client list, or if you're a product person figuring out product-market fit.
1) Quick wins. For me, I started my company a year and a half ago. I was like, “Okay, who are the clients that are coming to me?” The inbound leads. Those are typically early adopters and there is going to be a very different sales and marketing strategy for them.
2) Dream clients. I feel like a lot of people get really stuck with only those inbound leads, but I really urge people not only to focus on those quick wins. Those can be great for business, great for just getting your foot in the door, but we need to keep an eye on that longterm goal of bringing in those dream clients, whether it's larger deals, the corporate clients, one client that makes up the majority of your revenue, or the majority of your quota. Really helpful.
3) Exploratory projects. And, we need to make sure that we're also balancing that with exploratory projects. Maybe it's not the quick wins. Whether it's new products, new industries or types of clients, we should always be bringing a level of innovation to make sure that we're continuously growing our product offering as well as continuously taking on clients that really could open up new streams of revenue and new types of audience.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
It was hard to limit it to only three.
1) I just started my own company. So, I have such a new appreciation for anyone who is a founder. So starting my own company, the biggest part was leaving the stability, and the structure, of a full-time role.
2) Forming the process. One of the hardest things about it was just forming the process. That's kind of the number two hard problem I'm dealing with. I tell people, “Starting a company is like staring all of your weaknesses in the face, or in the mirror, on a daily basis.” Your weaknesses definitely catch up with you. I had this really crazy vision of all the things I was going to do, and the only limitation is myself, and that's hard to deal with.
3) Leveling up. The third problem, or challenge, I'm struggling with is: once I formed the process for year one, it's leveling up. I feel like this is something a lot of people do not focus on. We are so comfortable with the status quo, with the, “Hey, like I finally feel stable.” And, in order to level up, a lot of times you have to completely change your process. You have to get uncomfortable again. For me, getting comfortable being uncomfortable is one of my core values, but it doesn't make it any easier to break those habits and to get to the next level.
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What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
Whew. So I'm covering from burnout, still, after a year and a half, and it's taught me so much about everything. About life.
1) Learning to not do it all. I honestly have realized that one of the main roadblocks that I'm dealing with, because of burnout, is just learning to not do it all. This is such a hard thing for top performers and for overachievers, like myself.
2) Being able to say no is really hard, but it does help me make sure I'm focused on the right things. Whether it's saying no to clients that don't align with the things that I'm doing, or saying no to projects or partnerships that would take away from my focus on the right things, it's really important. But again, it is such a hard thing because of my people-pleasing tendencies.
3) Being flexible enough to pivot. The third roadblock, apart from recovering for burnout being included in that, is just being flexible enough to pivot. To not only say no initially, but to say no when maybe taking on a client that doesn't align and you're like, “Oof, I need to be flexible enough, and live in my values enough, to realize when something isn't aligned. Saying no can be a little bit easier in the beginning. Saying no in the middle of a project is really hard. So, learning when to pivot and learning when like, “Okay, I tried something, but this is not what I want to do.” That's been a roadblock, but a fun challenge as well.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I feel like all of mine are pretty aligned right now, and they're very radically different after recovering from burnout.
1) Essentialism. It's a book. Check it out. It's life-changing. But, it really goes to understanding your priority. What is the one thing, like the one goal, that I'm working towards? My north star. My big “P” Purpose, and making sure that everything I'm working on is working towards that.
2) The why. Some of my coaching clients hate me when I do this, but I do this exercise which is called, “So what?” It's basically just challenging them. They're like, “Yeah, I'm working on this…” and I'm like, “Okay, tell me the so what? Like, why is that important? Why does that matter?” And, you can do this, whether talking to clients about what they want to achieve and you're like, “Okay, well, tell me why?” It's really frustrating, but it's critically important. So really getting to the why behind things, whether for me, it's like, “Why am I doing this training? What do I want people to get out of it?” If you're launching a product, it shouldn't only be cool and awesome and exciting, but like, “Why is it important?”
3) Meditation. When I'm stuck on those two things, the third mental model is meditation. I meditate on it constantly. Whenever I'm stuck. I've learned now to not just push through with more work, but to truly just take a pause. Meditate. What I find is that taking that break is incredible, like what clarity opens up for me.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
So, these are not tactical:
1) More companies need to think about their big P purpose. Not only for the team. I feel like so many companies are like, “These are our top 20 priorities!” If we can really rally around one big goal, for example, “Top clients. Our focus this year is bringing on these top clients. And this is why.” Or, “This is the revenue goal that we're working towards, and the why is because we're working towards IPO.” We should have a big P purpose, that everyone in the company knows, can articulate, like you stop someone in the hallway, or on a Zoom call, and you're like, “Hey, what's our big P purpose?” And they're like, “Yep. Here it is.” We need to do the same thing for our employees as well, because their purpose is, a lot of times, not necessarily at our own.
2) Radical transparency. I also believe in radical transparency when we think about moving towards that big P purpose, really understanding, and being comfortable, talking about what's working, what's not working. A lot of times, our teams are just defending themselves. Right? A lot of times in marketing, it's like, “Well, this isn't working because we haven't tried hard enough,” or, “It is working. We need to give it more time.” There's so many excuses in go-to-market teams today. We just need to make it okay to admit failure. Make it okay to talk through the challenges transparently.
3) Saying no to things. We need to be able, for leaders and ourselves as team members, to say “no” so that we can actually do meaningful work and dive into really important projects.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
Ooh, I love this one.
1) “So what?” So I've mentioned one of my favorites is. “So what?” It is the most annoying question because a lot of people are not prepared for it. They don't know why they're doing things or why it's important. They don't know, even when a client gives them a question or gives them a goal, asking, “So what?” and, I don't mean just asking “So what?” This question could come in a few ways, like, “Hey, tell me why that's important to you. Tell me why that matters. Tell me what you're hoping to get out of that.” But, it is one of the most critical questions in sales and in business. So many times, we're just throwing things out and we don't know why we're doing it. The core question is “Why?”
2) “How is your day going?” I really like “How is your day going? How is your week going? How was your weekend?” Especially with Zoom, we've lost a little bit of the water cooler talk. This question is a really great rapport builder for the beginning of calls. So many times we just jump in, or we say, “How's the weather?” Or, with personalization and relevance we’re like, “Hello, I see that you're in this location. Like, tell me. I've never been there.” Awesome? Cool? Just keeping it simple can be a really great way of building a relationship.
3) “What motivates you?” So many times, companies are trying to motivate us with the numbers and goals, and it’s so simple to simply ask people, “What motivates you? Why do you do what you're doing?” And most of the time, salespeople that I work with have never been asked this question. So I think it's a question that I would love to see more leaders, and more people, asking themselves
So, three questions. Three of my favorites. Hope that helps.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
This was the toughest question of all of these.
1) Brandon Fluharty is one of my favorites. He is actually a million-dollar seller, which is like a huge goal for a lot of people. Just released an incredible e-book that talks about a lot of the things I mentioned in terms of not doing more, but doing better, and really aligning habits with your big P purpose, forming, and bringing in, a lot of strategies that will help you get there.
2) Jason Bay is someone I work with very closely. He is the king of outbound. He's a great prospecting trainer and he has a program called Outbound Squad. The results speak for themselves. He has a lot of incredible followers and is a great trainer.
3) Jordana Zeldin. I love her so much. She runs a few projects. My favorite is called The Practice Lab, where it actually gives people an opportunity to practice their sales pitches and learn through doing, not just by training.
So, three of my favorites.
Work with Meghann → Shorten the Path to President's Club
Meet with Ryan Paul Gibson, Founder of Content Lift. Asking questions. Why? Why and how do people buy? After you decided on wanting to solve a problem, what did you do next? What made you trust X? Where to fit in the marketing landscape. Networking. Jobs to Be Done. Transcribe and go over everything again. Jump on calls with other peers.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what MJ Peters said about Ryan:
Ryan Paul Gibson. He owns a company called Content Lift and he helps companies interview their customers. So he is an expert on that marketing discovery call and he’s worked with lots of companies on their go-to-market strategy. Bet you he has some super interesting techniques that other GTM leaders should apply. —MJ Peters, VP of Marketing at CoLab Software → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
So my market, right? Like how I go about it? Being a solo printer is interesting because some of the things are the same as being a B2B marketer, because I am business-to-business, but there's also some differences. There's three things I just use and it's very basic.
- How I promote myself, which is LinkedIn, and that's my sole channel. I decided early on it's going to be it. And I don't deviate from that. I have a very specific framework and strategy there.
- Networking, but it's all digital networking. So, I'm in 10 different groups for B2B marketers and there that the strategy is different. Some is the same. I'm still trying to give people help, but I help more at a general marketing level as somebody who's been in B2B in marketing for 20 years. So, I will help and give people my thoughts and interact there. And often that will turn into people wanting to talk to me more.
- My website. Like any other business. And, that's very much designed around high intent. Informing people how I do things.
Those are it. It's a very simple process, and that's really high-funnel, mid-funnel, bottom-funnel. I use that framework. I hope I answered the question.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
- Figuring out how I was going to make a career for myself. Not as a marketer in a house. That was a big challenge, and I think I'm on the path.
- Figuring out like where I fit then in the marketing landscape. That was a big one because I was trying to be what they call, a fractional marketer, and that's just a fancy way of saying part-time. You'll see a lot of fractional CMOs out there. I tried to be a fractional CMO, and I’m not smart enough to be a fractional CMO. So, I went in as a part-time senior marketer, but I wasn’t really satisfied doing that. There were just challenges I had with that. So, I decided to niche down. How was I going to niche? And I found out. Just through a chain of events I got some research contracts to do customer research, because I had done a lot of them in my career, and I niched down into that. So I found sort of my path and it's great, because I wanted something that I can make a huge, big difference with a business and a marketing team, but have it be repeatable, consistent and provide more value than just me being sort of a part-time marketer for hire.
- Managing my time, which I think is hard for everybody. I don't know if I've solved that one yet, but what I'm really just trying to do is focus on the things I can control and have the most impact on, whether for myself, from our clients, because it's so easy to get distracted in marketing when you're a marketer, especially a marketer marketing to marketers, which is so meta, but being very specific about how you spend your time. Because there's only so much time in the day and in your life.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
Oh, there's a lot. I ask questions for a living. So how do you choose?
- Why? Why is actually one of the first questions I like to ask, but why is always contextual. Let's say I'm doing my work, I like to understand, “What were you doing to solve a problem before you bought a solution?” which is always a good one to understand as a marketer, because even though you're trying to sell one product, it really helps understand how, what they were doing before they came and bought your solution.
- After you decided on wanting to solve a problem, what did you do next? Often, we’ll ask, as marketers, “So how did you look for me? How'd you find me?” Which is fine, that’ an open ended question we'll ask. I like to know from that moment where they decided the pain was insurmountable, and they needed to solve it, what did they do next? The action they took. Because then what you can do is you can say, “Oh, I went to LinkedIn and posted and asked people what they do here.” Great. What happened next? And I just take them through that.
- What made you trust them? My favorite question to ask, though, is either for marketing or sales, but a lot more for sales is, “What made you trust the person, the solution, the team you chose, or the vendor you chose, or the sales team that you're working with, like what made you trust them?” That one is such a mindblower because usually the answers you get are not the things you will expect as the team that's trying to market and sell a product. It's often dramatically different than what you think it's going to be.
So those are my three favorite ones to ask.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
What do you mean mental model? Walk me through what one would be for you. So it grounds my thinking.
Chris Morgan: It’s how I theorize about things. Or, it’s the voice in my head. So one example for myself is I always try to look for the idea of an inventory. So, a type of thing that actually has many different variants, and I want to observe them by the same criteria. So I'll look all over the place for, “How can I think about this from an inventory or a database mindset?” That would be one example. Other examples that we'll hear is the Scientific Method as a framework for X.Okay. I'm with you now.
- Why and how do people buy? For marketing as a whole, my whole thing is, “Why and how do people buy?” That's all I care about really, at the end of the day, because if I understand why and how buyers buy, and the process of that, I can influence how they make those decisions. I try to ground all my discussions, and all my actions and marketing, around that thought process. So then, also, it makes me very choosy about what I do,
- Jobs to Be Done. I love the Jobs To Be Done methodology to have a more rigorous framework. Many marketers, or product owners, will know that one quite a bit, and founders, where it's really an innovation framework for understanding why a person buys a product and what's the end state they want to achieve with a product or a service. But what's great is that still works for marketing because it's still the same logical thought process that people go through.
- Transcribe and go over everything again. I don't know if this one's a model, but when I do my work for research, I transcribe and I go over everything again. I guess that's more of a technique than a model, but a reason I do that is if I can read and listen in a space, and I'm not distracted, and I can listen to people's actual answers around auestions like, “Why did you trust the sales team? What were you trying to do before?” I can see patterns and themes that emerge that will really help me improve either how I positioned in a market, how I try and sell a product, just how I communicate to people within, at different stages of a buying journey.
So those would be three things. Often, I don't think that way. It's such a smart way to think about things and I don't know if I'm that smart.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
- Jump on calls with other peers. One thing I would do, and I advise us a lot, jump on calls with other peers. Sales, or customer success, even product. You might not think that it's gonna give you anything, but as a marketer, it will, because as a marketer, you touch so many aspects of the organization that you don't even think of. So, I'd say jump on calls.
- Do customer success. If you can. Talk to customers, engage with customers, interact with customers. This is more probably soft SaaS, but we forget that service is at the end of that acronym. I spent most of my career in customer-facing roles and marketing is one. Interacting with the customers as much as you can is good.
- Active listening. Active listening in your meetings, in your one-on-ones. If you're talking to people because it's actually really hard to listen. I don't think people understand how hard that is. I was a reporter for three years. I worked as a TV and radio reporter and, boy, did I learn quickly how bad I wasn't listening. Active listening allows you to really hear what people are saying rather than you waiting to respond on what you want to talk about.
So those are three things that I think people might want to try.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
- Anita Toff. The first guest I would think of as Anita Toff. Anita is interesting. She's on the customer success side and she has a great name. She calls herself The Churn Crusher. We've talked a couple of times and what I like about her is she is, like me, hyper-focused on a part of a business that is very important for long-term success. Churn is going to be such a big metric for SaaS companies going forward. How do you keep customers around for longer, and why? How do you succeed in that? And she just lots of fun. So I think she's the first one.
- Dani Woolf. Dani is Director of Demand Generation for a cybersecurity company. I like her because I can tell we align with our philosophies on things around demand, which is you can't just ram a product into someone's face and expect them to think that they'll buy it, because that's not how B2B works. People just don't wake up and want to buy a solution. There's a process they go through of decision-making. Some of it's rational, some of it’s emotional, to eventually land on a list of solutions when the time is right. So, I think she'd be cool to talk to.
- Peep Laja. I know who you should talk to. Do you know what Peep Laja? So Peep has a podcast called How to Win and he speaks to SaaS executives, and Saas marketers, about how they are actually trying to win in a market. Not things about, “What's your latest hack and what’s your growth thing?” He’s like, “Tell me your strategy and how you're trying to position and win in a market.” Because the reality for SaaS is that it's going to become more competitive. With every month that comes, there's going to be more solutions that are copycats of each other that do the same things with feature parity, and they're going to be competing on price. It's just inevitable. That's every market. How are you going to win in that environment? He has a really interesting thought process about how you do that. I think you should talk to him.
Work with Ryan → Set up a chat
Meet Jacob Gebrewold, Commercial Account Executive at Klue. Consistently educating. Having a relentless focus on educating your market like you're creating a category. Referrals. Happy clients are the best sales team you could possibly ask for. Building a dope competitive enablement function and a killer Customer Success team. Asking: Who do I need to express care to right now? What’s on your mind? How can I help?
19 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Arthur Castillo said about Jacob:
Jacob Gebrewold. From Klue. He's new to the software SaaS space, and he's absolutely crushing it as an AE. I think he's a very unique content creator, and he understands how to stand up from crowd but also have buying conversations that engage his prospects, which by the way, are Product Marketers, and he's never been a Product Marketer. I think he's really changing the game from that perspective.
—Arthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Consistently educating. I would say the most important way that my team converts market into revenue is just consistently educating. I think that, of the buyers I get to work with, this starts at the immediate marketing team, thinking about the content we're creating, distributing that out, chopping that up, get it on social, get it everywhere it can be. That's good, but it doesn't end there. Our reps, from the SDR level, to the Account Executive level, to CSM level, we're constantly thinking about ways that we can be getting that useful information and in the hands of people, whether or not they're our client. Just the belief that, you know, it's a long life, and if you're just consistently helping and serving people, who are they going to come to you when they have questions they need answered? So that's probably the most important one.
2) We're present. Similar, in the sense that we’re present. We are there, consistently showing up. Even if someone isn't able to act on a service. Budget, timing, whatever it is, we don't just say, “Bye, I'll talk to you in six months.” We're present. I think the first really fuels the second.
3) Referrals. We have a lot of people that really enjoy Klue, and they talk about us, and they’re kind to pass us referrals. We heard about a conference where someone, who isn't even our client, was at, and they're a bit of a fan of ours, and they were talking about how our name was constantly coming up. We didn't have anyone at that conference. Happy clients are the best sales team you could possibly ask for.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Getting up early, because I'm not a morning person. So, I'm up at 5:45am. Starting the work day at 7:00am has been a hill I've been trying to climb for a minute. So, I'm glad I'm there.
2) Getting on the same page with some of my teammates. Particularly, I had a manager that had gotten promoted. She was the top rep at our company. We had built a really strong relationship, a really strong relationship, and she was my teammate, my senior teammate, so a lot of respect there. Then, she became my manager and I've just been really impressed with, and proud of, both of us for how we've worked together to co-create a really good relationship. That's a work. That's something that you can make yourself do, like any good relationship, and it's paid so many different dividends as a result.
3) Building a higher standard for myself around prospecting. I don't know that I would say that I'm far out of the woods on it yet, but I would say building a higher standard for myself around prospecting because I know it's something that I need to do. I know it's something that's important to do, and there are seasons where I've done it a lot, but having a consistent discipline, week over week, where I'm doing it well, rather than stops and starts. That's one that I think we're not totally out of the neck of the woods on that one there. I think we need a little bit more longevity before we can claim it as a total victory, but there's definitely been a lot of progress.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
1) What am I trying to accomplish right now? To say, “I like asking that question,” is kind of a misnomer. I need to ask that question. Because if I don't ask myself that question constantly, my brain just gets so totally off-track, down rabbit trails. It also helps in conversations just to make sure I'm focusing on the most important things. What am I trying to accomplish right now?
2) Who do I need to express care to right now? Whether that's new people on my team that are just starting and, I want to just be there to support them. Whether it's a prospect who I can remember, “Oh, I think they were going to get married right around now.” That, often, as a frame of reference, for just nurturing relationships. So, who do I need to express care to right now?
3) How can I help? Or, what's on your mind? Versions of a similar question, but, “What's on your mind?” is probably the one that's more “them” centered, and usually that takes us to a place where I could be helpful.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Atomic habits. It's interesting, I don't know that I've got a super comprehensive answer to this, but I would say that Atomic Habits has been one that's been really helpful for me as I'm started to rethink my habits fundamentally. And, that's not necessarily just work. It's personal life. There's a lot of pieces that that's helpful with, but however one thinks of habits, it’s essential to doing anything well.
2) MEDDPICC. One model that's been really helpful for me in thinking through deal strategy has been MEDDPICC. I've got a long way to go in understanding it better, but just for understanding, “Where are the gaps that are inhibiting me from being the best support to this person, getting their problem solved?” Shout out to David Weiss, who is just a fantastic mind on that, and I have under utilized all the support that he’s offered, but I've leaned on him quite a bit for that in terms of the resources he’s put together. So, MEDDPICC has been useful.
3) Gap selling. Gap selling as well, has been one, by Keenan. It's so helpful for understanding that people don't “care about you.” I think people care about people, but like they don't really care about you as a sales rep or whatever. They care about solving their problems. So, until you can really identify, quantify or clearly articulate, get them clearly articulate, that gap, you're not going to be able to help them with the service that you provide.
What are 4 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Having a relentless focus on educating your market like you're creating a category. Even if you're not creating a category, treat yourself like a category creator and that sort of thought partner. I don't know what it would be like to work on a startup team without that. It would suck.
2) If you don't have a killer Customer Success team, what are you doing? It's not really a technique. It's a much broader, strategic imperative. If you don't have a killer customer success team, what are you doing? It's where you establish those really happy clients that bring all those referrals. It's where you actually ended up proving up the value that you got into business to prove. It’s where you end up coming up with a lot of best practices that you can go back and share out into the market like a thought-leader partner. So, you should get a customer success team that's great.
3) Building a dope competitive enablement function. The simplest version of this is: crowdsource the best competitive Intel in your organization about top threats that are knocking you out in a lot of deals, and get that in actionable bite-size content, in front of your reps, where they're already living, whether that’s Salesforce, or a CMS, or something. Because, not having an understanding of one's landscape, it's really hard to be that consultative expert to a buyer when it's very clear you just know your little world. Even if we're not talking about de-positioning, ultimately winning a deal, just in terms of establishing thought leadership in a relationship with a buyer. Yeah, knowing your landscape, which often comes back to market and competitive intelligence, sourcing that, and then competitively enabling your teams with actionable insights where they're already living? Super underrated really great way to get a quick win in terms of Close Won revenue.
4) Finding ways to bet on people who wouldn't normally get bet on that are bright, and hungry, and ready to go. There's something in the constant LinkedIn conversation about giving a shot to underdogs that are scrappy. I know that that's a meme. You know, “I walked across the street on my way to a job interview and I passed by a dog, and I left them some food, and that dog turned out to be the CEO of… you know, never underestimate who you treat well and how they can come back to you!” I know people joke about it, or riff on it a whole bunch, but I still know a bunch of companies that are really old school about who they'll be willing to give a shot to, and they're getting left in the dust by companies that don't think that way. So, finding ways to bet on people who wouldn't normally get bet on that are bright, and hungry, and ready to go. Particularly, if they're from a background that's typically untapped by tech. There are outsized returns there. So I would say that's another one probably worth flagging.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) David Weiss. He's got an awesome MEDDPICC course. I think everyone would benefit from taking it. He's a really bright and warm person.
2) Marcus Knight. Marcus Knight is a phenomenal sales mind, and just an even better person. So I would highly recommend him.
3) Gabrielle Blackwell, because as far as SDR leaders who have locked down their craft, and really care about people, and done an incredible job creating content that other people have benefited from, Gabrielle’s just awesome.
So those are my three.
Work with Jacob → Klue is hiring!
Meet Sidney Waterfall, VP of Demand at Refine Labs. A go-to-market measurement system. Standardizing key metrics for success. Creating demand through content from subject-matter experts. Dark social. Removing friction for buyers. Route high intent leads directly to subject-matter experts or your best people. Funnel analysis. Habits and structure. GSD Time. Asking, “How does this work?”
22 Insights · 7 Questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Sam Kuehnle said about Sidney:
Sidney Waterfall. She's another VP of Demand here at Refine Labs. The reason that I love working with her is that she's rewriting the playbook for marketing measurement and how to report out on it so that marketers have a seat at the executive table. So, helping marketers just be more informed from operations standpoint, how to report effectively on revenue and how marketing is truly impacting the bottom line.
—Sam Kuehnle, VP of Demand Generation at Refine Labs → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Start with creating demand. It's a pretty broad term, but what we mean by that, and what we do at Refine Labs, creating content from subject-matter experts. Luckily, we have a subject matter expert who is our CEO, but there's a lot of other subject-matter experts throughout the company, in their own niche, in their own interests, that really focus on creating content, just to be consumed, and sharing their expertise rather than creating content with any expectation in return. And then, we, as a company, and as individuals, focus on distributing that content on social platforms and using dark social. So video, text, Slack communities, any ways we can get out that information to be helpful to others. So that's like one big pillar to be creating demand.
2) Dark social. We are leaning into dark social. We have actually put like most of our eggs in that basket, as a company and again, as individuals. So, that means participating and engaging on those channels. So LinkedIn DMs, comments on LinkedIn, other platforms that you can't track. Word of mouth communities, Slack, peer-to-peer, events, community events, Zoom events, things like that is what I mean when I talk about dark social. So leaning into dark social and then not worrying about attribution. So I call it leaning into unattributable marketing efforts, AKA dark social. So, that's basically how the majority of our revenue is driven here at Refine Labs.
3) Removing friction for buyers. We let buyers come to us when they're ready. We remove a lot of unnecessary friction. We let them fill out the form and convert when they're ready. We don't force that conversion. And, when they want to talk to sales, we make that as seamless as possible, and get them right to the right people, and allow them to immediately engage as fast as possible.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) A go-to-market measurement system. Sam may be alluded to this in the intro. I'm working on a pretty big project, which is defining a new, go to market measurement system. I’m working with a couple of people here internally and we're really excited to bring it to market. So one of the biggest things that recently overcame with that, a) it was a beast of a project, pretty intimidating, but super exciting to work on, but b) I was really trying to figure out, “What is our structure for documentation, for content and education, around this that we want to launch?” That took a lot of back and forth and thinking things differently. But that was recently something we aligned on, and now are starting to execute on. So it was kind of a big problem to solve for that.
2) Being the coach instead of the player. I recently moved into this VP of Demand role a couple of months ago. I love to be hands-on with my clients and I love to be in the weeds sometimes. So stepping back from being that day-to-day champion with the client and enabling my team, training my team, to be that, and then supporting them when they need help, working with them on strategy, being that coach instead of the player, that has been an internal problem that I've had to really focus on. I feel like I'm in a really good place with that with my team right now.
3) Funnel analysis. The third problem–surprise, surprise–also around metrics and Salesforce funnel analysis here. We do a lot of funnel analysis, go-to-market analysis, of what's going on with our clients. We have a really, really complex setup with data and a lot of different sources. Some of the data's in the data warehouse, some of it's product data, some of it's in Salesforce, some of it's in an Excel spreadsheets. So it became very, very complex to kind of put all of these data sources together, to be able to analyze what's actually going on in their business, and what's working and what's not. So that was a big, big project, and actually kind of fun. I kind of geek out on that kind of stuff personally.
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What are 3 roadblocks that you working on right now?
1) Standardizing key metrics for success. For how we believe that you should be reporting and what you should be reporting on. Weekly versus monthly versus quarterly. And to what audience. So I think that's really key when you're rolling out, or changing, or go to market strategy or the strategy that you're kind of deploying in your business. We are working on standardizing that across all of our clients right now. You normally just have the tendency to report on the same things, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. That doesn't really make sense and it doesn't really make sense for different audiences, so we're trying to define that, and standardize that, across the business right now. So, that's something I'm working on.
2) Enabling and training my team on certain new things that we're doing or certain initiatives that are rolling out. We do things very differently at Refine Labs, and not many people have experience running and doing campaigns and running strategic things how we do. So, it does take some enablement and training. I would say that's kind of always a constant. That’s always on there.
3) Building my personal brand. Again, this is kind of always-on, but specifically, right now, I'm getting comfortable with video. I'm trying to take this to the next step with video instead of staying with text. So, TBD, I started a few things, but trying to make consistent progress on that and not just do one or two things.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
First off. I didn't really know what mental model was, but I Googled it, and I get the concept, but I've just never really heard that term before. Now, I like it, and I'm going to use it all the time.
1) Habits and structure. Or habit stacking. So I recently read, I took the holiday time in January, to read Atomic Habits, kind of refresh on some of that. I hadn't read it before, but I heard really good things. It's a great book. Super actionable. So, I've been implementing a lot of habit and structure into my routine. I'm a creature of habit, and I like routine, but sometimes you need to update that, or change that, to set yourself up for new success or new goals that you might have.
2) Get shit done (GSD). I don't know if this is a mental model, but this is just my own mental model. I just call it, “Get shit done.” When in doubt, if I'm not executing, or providing value, or moving stuff along, I like check in with myself and I say, “Oop, you need to pull up, and you need to get shit done.” So, sometimes I block my calendar for “GSD Time.” It’s an acronym for that. That's how I like to structure my week. If I know I have got some big stuff coming up, I need dedicated time. I block out a GSD time.
3) Know when to walk away. Sometimes, by the end of the day, or sometimes by like Thursday or Friday, let's be honest, I'm not really in the right mind-state. My mind is like mush and I feel like I can't really do things. So I just go walk away, take a lap, take my dogs on a walk, or just be like, “Yeah, I'm done for the day. We're done here. This is the point of diminishing returns. I'm just going to come back to this in the morning, fresh, and knock it out. It's going to be 10 times better, and I'm going to do it in like half the amount of time.”
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Invest in dark social content and content creation. So, creating content for these types of platforms and how you deliver them. So, that could be starting a podcast, and then taking that podcast and distributing it, getting people to listen to it. That could even be starting to consistently post about your subject-matter expertise on different social media platforms, or even trying a new platform as a person, or as a brand. This could go either way, as a brand or for a person.
2) Route high intent leads directly to subject-matter experts or your best people. Let’s just skip that in-between, old-school step, where we got to get them on the phone with someone that's not going to provide them any value. Just route them straight to the information that they want to get to and the person that they want to talk to. It’s funny, I did listen, and of course, Arthur also mentioned that, and I was like, “Ah, I love this.”
3) Add self-reported attribution to your high intent conversion forms. Definitely need to add a field to your high-intent conversion form—high-intent conversion is going to be someone raising their hand, asking to talk to your sales team about your product—for what we call, self-reported attribution. So, that is a field that just asks, “How did you hear about us? Free text required on that conversion point. The insights that you will get from that is insane. We've implemented across a ton of different clients. It's wild. It's an additional touch point that allows you to understand other things that technology can not track. So, aka, “How'd I hear about you? I heard about you on this podcast.” Or X, Y, and Z.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
1) What are you trying to accomplish? So, this could be all three of those, honestly, but one of my go-to’s is, what are you trying to accomplish? A lot of times you’ll get in and it’s like, “We've got to do this!” And you’re like, “Whoa, what are we trying to accomplish here?” To me, I can ask that to myself, to clients, to customers, what are you trying to accomplish? So, that leads you to, “What is the actual output we're trying to get to? What's the actual, goal potentially?” It lets you level-set there, versus going straight into how we might get there.
2) How does this work? I ask, “How does this work?” a lot. Or, “How does that work for you? How does that work here? What does that mean for you?” Because working with a lot of different companies, everybody does stuff differently, but they'll use the very similar words. And so I like to like clarify, and ask, and not assume, how does that work?
3) What do you think? Probably just like, “What do you think? What do you think is best here? What are your ideas?” I'm an outgoing, kind of extrovert, so I like to talk, and I like to express myself, but not everybody's like that. So I like to ask people like, “Well, what do you think is the best option?” because not everyone is a talker like me.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
These are kind of all over the place, but all these people know what they're doing.
1) Dave Rigotti. He is a co-founder of a really cool new company called inflection.io and he's really redefining, and helping, the PLG space re-think MarTech. It's just super intriguing, plus he's just a super smart guy about all things MarTech. Started with Bizible, worked at Marketo and Adobe. So highly, highly intelligent. Great person to talk to, especially cause he's starting his own company right now.
2) Travis Tyler. The next one would be Travis Tyler from PandaDoc. Hilarious. Personable. I've never actually met him in person, but I feel like I know him. Great content producer. Just very entertaining type of marketer who thinks a little bit differently. So love that.
3) Karl Yeh. I met him, actually, through our Demand Gen Live community. He has a great success story about how he's flipped the script, transition from lead gen to more of a demand gen focus, and how he did that at his company. The results they're seeing is great. Plus, he posts a lot on LinkedIn. His content is very tactful. It's comical and he knows, and gives away, great tips for using video, or how to use video, and how to chop things up. So, super actionable tips.
4) Cassidy Shield. I'm going to add a fourth in here. I will have to also plug someone in the Refine Labs team, which should be Cassidy Shield. We just hired him a couple months ago. He started, I think, in January or February and he is a previous, essentially, kind of CRO, he was over marketing and sales at his previous company. And then we hired him as our Chief Growth Officer. So, now he's over sales for Refine Labs, and our internal marketing, and our internal growth channels. So, Carl's boss, essentially, but he is very plugged in. I feel like he not only from Refine Labs, but probably his previous company, has a lot of information. So I would probably say Cassidy Shield.
Work with Sidney → Refine Labs is hiring!
Meet Sam Kuehnle, VP of Demand Generation at Refine Labs. Today's buyers are very savvy. Talk to your customers more. Stay close to platforms. Seeing from the front. Staying at the cutting edge. Going against the grain. Running a win-loss analysis regularly. Focusing less on the competition. Attracting top talent. Positive word of mouth. Helping customers get unstuck in their growth and achieve their revenue goals.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Carl Ferreira said about Sam:
Sam Kuehnle. He’s a friend as well and a colleague. Just a world-class marketer. Bright, bright thinker. Extremely thoughtful. You're going to get way better answers from him than from me on some of these things. He strikes me as the type of guy who probably has some baked-out mental models. He's just a really, really bright marketing leader and does some fantastic work for our team and for our customers. —Carl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
- Creating and distributing relevant and shareable content to our ICP for free. So, give, give, give. Let them learn, let them understand who we are. I always say, “Today's buyer is very smart.” The easiest way to think about it is: many marketers say, “Here's our products. Buy our products.” But, they never speak about why you need the product, how it's going to help you do your job better. So, by creating that trust and awareness early on, and doing that for free, then they're going to keep seeing that little Refine Labs tag up top and when they finally feel the pain enough, Refine Labs will be top of mind, and that's where they’ll go. So that's the main way.
- Building a community of B2B marketers that go on to spread the word about us to their colleagues, their leadership, their peers. That word of mouth, that positive word of mouth, pays dividends long term.
- A sales team that solely fields inbound requests. To pay some kudos back to Carl, we have a sales team that solely fields inbound requests, and then they partner with prospects to make sure that they're going to benefit from our philosophy and how we approach it. So, we could win every deal that comes into us, technically, because they want to work with Refine Labs, but we self-select. What are the customers who truly will benefit from our strategy, how we'll go to market with them? We're not shy about also saying, “Come back in three months, in 12 months, when you get your next series. Or, it might just be a little bit too complicated for this to work.” So, those are probably the three main ways that I’d say that we convert our market to revenue.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
- We're a very, very fast-growing company. I joined as the 9th employee back in 2020. We just surpassed employee 100 this week. What you often find is that systems and processes, they start to break down at 50 employees, 100 employees, 200 employees, and we've had to adapt our company to ensure that a) employee happiness and balance are there, and b) customer satisfaction, results, are there. And then, if you do those two things well, you're going to have revenue at the end of the day. But, if you don't address those early on, especially as you're growing and things start to break down, then the business is going to falter as a result. So that's one of the first ones.
- To get more tactical, another hard problem is iOS 14 cookie tracking attribution, all that stuff that marketers have so long depended on, and how that's impacted marketing results. So, there's now limited data that's passing back to the platform. Our team has to be better at understanding the macro picture of what's working to drive your business results and not just look at: “This has a high click through rate,” or, “This has a low cost per click,” but, “We started to double our budget this month,” or, “We doubled down on this persona this month.” And then, understanding, did we get more handraisers? Are we seeing an increase in pipeline? Or was that, maybe, not the right move and we need to readjust? So, looking at the larger lens, as there's less visibility back in those ad platforms, has been something that we've had to overcome.
- Helping clients get unstuck in their growth. So to give an example of this, there've been instances where we'll have a client where we are able to successfully drive an increased number of high-intent handraisers, but they aren't closing as many at the rate that we would expect. So, what we'll do in that instance is just a quick Loss Analysis to understand, “why are we losing those deals?” And we found, in a couple of these, that it was due to pricing. So, what we do then is we'll work with the customer to illustrate, “Hey, there's a mismatch between what your market values your product at and how you're putting that out in your offer, so you either need to add more value or you need to bring down your costs.” We were able to do this with a couple of clients. They decrease their costs in those instances and very quickly you're winning deals again. So that's what we like to say, “Look at the larger lens of how do you impact your business growth and what all can you do, as a marketer, to successfully do that?”
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
- Biggest one: attracting top talent to join Refine Labs. It's an incredible market for job seekers right now, and then very, very competitive for companies to bring in that top talent. So that's a big roadblock that we're working on.
- Getting more businesses to adapt to this new way of marketing. Gated content, capturing emails, all of that, is really a thing of the past. It does not signal true buying intent anymore. Today's buyers are very savvy. They're doing their own research. They're talking to their peers. How do we get companies to update their marketing strategies to reflect this shift and use pipeline and revenue as success metrics or marketing and not this lead handraiser, where it's people who just want the content or the e-book.
- Understanding when is it a better time to use a product led motion vs sales led? So think like: free trials, self service. Or, a sales led, get a demo, talk to a sales rep motion. There's a number of factors that come into play with this. So your market, your costs, the list goes on and on. So, working to define when does one work better than the other, or should you offer both?
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
This one was a funny one. When I read this question, I was thinking like, “What do you call these mental models?” So, I'm a big fan of The Knowledge Project, Shane Parish. So when I saw that word, I was just like, “Oh man, I hope I don't do this some injustice.” So I was looking at like, “What are the names for these that essentially I use in my day-to-day?”
- First principles. How do you break down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble that from the ground up? So, from a marketing standpoint, this is helping customers achieve their revenue goals. We don't start with the lead and MQL targets, because that's kind of like the end game. So, what we like to ask a company is, “What's your company or marketing revenue goal?” and then we'll work backwards from that. There's way, way, way too many variables that we can play with to achieve that revenue target. So starting it from that side gives us much more flexibility than just saying, “You have to hit this lead number and everything else is going to stay constant through the funnel.”
- Seeing from the front. So, personally seeing the front before you make your decisions. Not relying on advisers, maps, reports, other things, which could be faulty, biased, have anything that happens when you play that game of operator. There are constant changes going on in ad platforms, how individuals buy today. What I like to do is stay close to those platforms, always in customer data, so I understand exactly what's going on and then use that to help make relevant recommendations to our customers, and our team, so we're continuing to stay at the cutting edge.
- Going against the grain. A lot of B2B software products are commodities in the sense that, “Crowded space, crowded category.” So, if you do what the market leaders are doing, you're going to blend in with everyone else. I found that there was a good blend between understanding what's of interest to your market, but also speaking to that in ways that your competitors are not doing so that you stand out more. What we usually see is the people who are over-focused on competitors are often playing this game of catch-up. But if you focus on the customer first, and you use them to draft your product roadmap and improvements, you're going to be at that leading edge because you're speaking to what your customers want, not what the competitors are doing.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
- Talk to your customers more. It's simple. I know you hear it from us all the time, but talking to your customers is going to inform you and it's going to help you iterate on your messaging to make it more relevant to them. You'll be able to find more insights on where you should be showing up from a platform standpoint, and you can use it to just find out how you can continue to add value over time. What do they care about this quarter, this year? What are they being held responsible for? And speaking to that, because that's what's going to make you be the company that they want to work with.
- Running a win-loss analysis regularly. This is something I often do, probably quarterly, for most of our clients is understanding why you win and lose deals. It's so easy, yet so often overlooked. It’s going to tell you exactly what you need to double down on. It's going to tell you what you need to course correct on. And as I said, if you have a good… I won't say most, most clients have a clean CRM but, just have your sales reps put in, “Why did we win this deal? Why did we lose this deal?” Just a quick dropdown. It doesn't have to be anything detailed, but are we winning due to price? Are we losing due to price? Is competitor showing up more often? Are we winning because of functionality? And then, using that to craft your strategy moving forward.
- Focusing less on the competition. I spoke about this a moment ago, but focusing less on the competition. Go against the grain, focus more on your customers, and really delivering on that, versus trying to play catch-up with, with the big market leaders who have way more budget than you do, already have a strong brand presence. So how do you start to carve your own niche out in the market?
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
This was the toughest question of all of these.
- Sidney Waterfall. She's another VP of Demand here at Refine Labs. The reason that I love working with her is that she's rewriting the playbook for marketing measurement and how to report out on it so that marketers have a seat at the executive table. So, helping marketers just be more informed from operations standpoint, how to report effectively on revenue and how marketing is truly impacting the bottom line.
- Tim Newborn. Another one is a former colleague of mine. He runs customer advocacy over at InVision. He is one of the best customer marketers that I know, he's been building and curating communities before community was a thing. He's been in this game for super long. He understands the value of relationships, talking to customers and really just showing that you appreciate them and their business overtime.
- Justin Wheeler. He's a CEO and Co-Founder over at a company called Funraise. They provide software for nonprofits. What I really enjoy about him is that he scratched his own itch. He was at a nonprofit and recognized that the software there wasn't good enough so he started a company to meet the needs of organizations similar to his. He's been his own buyer. He built exactly what is helpful for those growing non-profits. And I think just when you come from that space, it's very different than the CEOs who is brought in to scale and thinks more in terms of margins than they do about the customers.
Work with Sam → Refine Labs is hiring!
Meet Andrew Miller, Senior Growth Product Manager at Monograph. Do your research. Deeply understand how your customers make money. Run lots of tests. Trying to understand user behavior. Double diamond model. The rugged landscape model. Feedback loops. AB testing. Fake door tests. Aligning continuous delivery on the engineering side with go-to market.
13 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
As a product manager, a lot of my work is situated sometimes a little bit upstream from GTM. My teams tend to be made up of designers and engineers, and I do work closely with sales, marketing, and CX more on the GTM side. It’s a huge part of my job to ensure that we're building the right things so that we can take those to market and convert them into revenue.
- Do your research. Part of that process, to start, do your research. It's important to have confidence in what you're building and feeling confident that you're building the right thing. Have a hypothesis that when you take this product, or this feature, to market, you can convert it to revenue. When you're doing your research, you want to have a balance of qualitative and quantitative data. Go talk to customers to get your qualitative. Dig into your application database, data warehouse, industry stats, and market figures to get your quantitative.
For the second piece, I’ll split it into 2 categories, B2B and B2C.
- So in a B2B context, one of the things that's super important is to deeply understand how your customers make money. The better that myself and my team understands the business of our customers, the better we can make product decisions, because we're making those in the context of asking ourselves, “What's going to make our customers as successful as possible?” And that tends to be the best way to convert your product into revenue.
- On the B2C side, run lots of tests. Make small changes in your product and messaging. Observe the resulting behavior. Note any impact on your revenue. This is totally applicable to B2B as well, but I map it to B2C here because when you're dealing with consumers, you tend to have a much wider range of variability and it can just be a little bit more difficult to keep a pulse on long-term trends and patterns. So always be testing.
What is 1 hard problem that you recently overcame?
- Aligning continuous delivery on the engineering side with go-to market. One hard problem that's very timely. Continuous delivery, to put it simply, is when engineers are able to continually deliver updates to the code base on production. It's great on the engineering side because small incremental scopes of work that are continuously delivered to production results in fewer dependencies between engineering teams, results in less risk with each deployment because they're small deployments, and allows engineering teams to move super fast, which is awesome. However, on the go-to market side, this can actually create quite a bit of complexity because you have a go-to market team that's really trying to figure out, “How do we talk about this product or this update? How do we frame our product in a way that the market is going to react positively to it?” Meanwhile, the product is constantly changing, so it makes it a little bit difficult to grab on to certain messaging points for the GTM team. And so this is something that I'm working on, but really the entire product team at Monograph is working on right now, and Pete and Dixon are leading the charge. At least on my team, one of the solutions that we arrived at recently, quite simply, is feature flags. It's actually helped a lot because I was talking with Steven, my engineering manager, and explaining some of the dynamics there, we aligned on using feature flags because that allows the engineering team to continually deliver to production without those updates actually being available to customers yet. That gets the GTM team time to come up with the right messaging, and create their own strategies, to take it to market all at once, so they're not taking a feature that's constantly evolving to market.
What is 1 roadblock that you are working on now?
- Trying to understand user behavior. I'm at a new company, I'm at Monograph, I've been here for just over three months, and I'm really trying to understand user behavior. So, your application database, it's going to have lots of information about the records that your users are creating and manipulating, which is really insightful. We've been digging into that, but it won't typically tell you how your users went about doing it. It won't reveal their behavior in the product. For this, you need event tracking. You need solid instrumentation throughout your product that can capture and reveal the story of their behavior. Setting that up is a highly cross-functional effort in which product and engineering need to be super, super aligned. So, we've got a really good team working on this right now. It's a hard project, but it's fun, and I'm excited.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I love this question. I love mental models. I've got probably four books that are just filled with models. Some mental models, and just other models. Three that I do tend to fall back on often and work out:
- Double-diamond model. I see this most commonly applied to product management, but I think it's a wonderful, general model that can be applied to many, many contexts. So in the double diamond model, you have two diamonds next to each other, if you kind of just visualize that. If you go from left to right, the first time it opens up and then it closes. And then, the next time it opens up and then it closes. So what the model captures is a sequence of divergent thinking, followed by convergent thinking, followed by divergent thinking again, followed by conversion thinking. And typically, what I see is the first diamond is focused on product discovery, product definition. So you're exploring different feature ideas. You're exploring, you're diverging, and then you converge on the right feature. Then, you hand it over to engineering and then they're figuring out how they want to build it, and then they're delivering. I think it works great for go-to market as well, just applying divergent, followed by convergent thinking in go-to-market.
- The rugged landscape model, which is one of my favorites. So this one, if you imagine you're on a vast landscape and there's peaks and valleys all around you at different heights and depths. Your goal is to get up as high as possible. And so, one thing you could do is look around you, as far as you can, and find the highest peak, and start walking to it and walk up that peak. You might think when you get there, “You won.” But really, what you've found is your local maximum, which is different than the global maximum, which are two important terms in the rugged landscape model. So your local maximum is the highest peak that you can see. Whereas, your global maximum, if you zoom out all the way and look at the entire landscape that you can't see at once, there's probably some peak out there in the distance that's way higher than your local maximum. So, how do you find it? Finding your local max is good, but really we want to get to the global max. So one efficient way to go about finding a global maximum is to start in many different locations, and then in those different locations, you really are just searching for your local maximum, but from different starting points. The way this maps into product is your different starting points are your fundamentally different approaches to solving a problem. If you're taking something to market and you have three different theories for how you could take it to market, and maybe those three different theories are you different starting points, and then from there, you can iterate and AB test your way to the local maximum, hoping that one of those is the global, or is at least higher than the other two.
- Just feedback loops in general. Love feedback loops. So that's when the output of a system is fed back into itself and it can result in typically one of two scenarios. Either you have a positive feedback loop or a negative. A positive is when the system amplifies itself. This tends to result in kind of wild, chaotic, unpredictable behavior. Positive feedback loops are really fun. It's high growth situations. Negative feedback loops are when the output feeds back into itself and it tends to stabilize the system. It limits the system from exponential growth. These are nice because it results in a very stable and predictable system, which can be great if your goal is to be able to forecast revenue into the future, for example. But, if your goal is to be able to grow as fast as possible, then you're looking more for a positive feedback loop. We see both of these play out together, kind of layered on top of each other, in all sorts of scenarios. One easy example is looking at the stock market. So if there's kind of a buying frenzy taking place, you might buy a stock and that drives the price up just a tiny bit, which sends a message out to anyone who's looking that the price is going up. Maybe that company is doing well, which causes other people to buy the stock, which drives the price up more, and this creates a positive feedback loop, driving the price really, really high. That, in turn, can be limited by a negative feedback loop. You might call it sort of the invisible hand of the market, where analysts, or just different investors in the market, start to decide that the stock is overvalued and they'll start to sell it off. That'll drive the price down and that will kind of limit it. So it's just one interesting way that those two can play together.
What are 2 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
- AB testing. Everyone's familiar with AB testing. We got to do it. It's so important. The one thing I would emphasize with AB testing is I would discourage us from AB testing just to AB test. I would encourage us to really kind of think through, “What are our hypotheses? How are each variation and AB test connected to a different hypothesis? And also, what's the underlying theory that's driving those hypotheses.?” So if you imagine it as a hierarchy, you have your theory at the bottom, which results in a few different hypotheses, and then at the top, you have all of these different variations of your AB tests that are connected to the hypothesis. Some similar structure like that, that allows you to take your results and connect them back down to hypotheses and theories, that's the sort of framework that allows us to really learn effectively as a team, instead of AB testing and looking at the results and saying, “Well, I guess B won. let's go with B,” which doesn't always really get us to the next level of learning.
- Fake door tests. I’ve done this in applications a few times, but I think it could be really relevant for GTM as well. So if you have a product idea, and you want to get some kind of early signal on it, one thing that you could do is drop some buttons in your application, or some CTAs in your messaging, that suggest that the feature is there when it actually isn’t. You don't need to call too much attention to it, but what you want to look for is, are customers clicking on the button? Are they clicking on the CTA? Are they asking about it in demos? Are they inquiring and just interested in the possibility of that feature? And if they do click on it, there's a couple of things you could do. You could take them to a form to sign up for a waiting list. You could provide them some more information about the feature and ask for feedback, kind of explain what you want to do with it, and then ask for input to get some more qualitative information. It's just a really cheap, quick way to do some early testing and validation on your idea.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
- Mike Ivey. First one I would call out is Mike Ivy. Mike Ivy is one of the co-founders of Modern Message, acquired by RealPage in 2020. I joined Modern Message when they were about 10 people, and I worked there for five years, and Mike and I worked closely together for probably three of those five years. I just had a great time. He’s a great product thinker, good leader, and his co-founder experience means that he's well-acquainted with not just product, but every aspect of a business, including go-to market. I think he’d have a lot to share.
- Anthony Murphy. Super knowledgeable product leader and coach. I've had lots of chats with Anthony about product and about process. And I know he'd have a lot to share on go-to-market.
- Matt Baxter. He's currently a Director of Product at Bestow, where I worked before Monograph, and he's just a great product leader. He was taking a brand new business unit to market when I was on my way out, and it was a huge project, and it was just so much fun to watch Matt do his work. I know he’d have tons of interesting details to share about the go-to-market challenges that he faced.
Work with Andrew (and me) → Monograph is hiring!
Meet Darren McKee, Director of Growth at Wellthy. Sunday Nights. Social selling. Telling stories. Converting in-person energy to online calls. The power of coaching. Creating a great experience. People talk and people start to see. Understanding and being content with where I am.
16 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Jen Allen said about Darren:
Darren McKee. He used to be at BetterUp. He just moved over to an organization called Wellthy. Darren is someone that I think is a great example of someone who is very active on social, but productively. He's not active saying like, “This is why our solution is the best.” He starts really smart conversations that relate back to what he sells. I think he embodies a lot of the characteristics I think sellers should be thinking about today. —Jen Allen, Chief Evangelist at Challenger → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Yeah, that's a great question. For us, when we think about total addressable market, when we think about TAM, it's anyone and everyone. I think caregiving is a beautiful thing. One in five Americans are currently serving as caregivers. So for us, it’s:
- Telling stories.
- Creating a great experience for our customers, our partners, our clients, our prospects, and anyone and everyone.
- People talk and people start to see lives being changed through what we do day in and day out.
So that's the easiest way for us. We have an amazing Demand Gen team in Kayleigh, and Kevin leading marketing, but we're out here on a daily basis. Just telling stories.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
- Pivoting from the industry that I was in prior. I'm relatively new here at Wellthy. I've been here for about 6-7 weeks. Pivoting from the industry that I was in prior, I spent 3 years with a PEO in insurance and benefits, and then went into the coaching world, so I was selling into leadership and development leaders. One of the things that I thought was going to be challenging was, “Hey, how are you going to pivot into selling to total rewards leaders and caregiving?” But what I come to realize is when you're surrounded by insanely talented people, your ramp time gets dramatically increased by just learning from them and watching them. So that was hard, but we overcame it.
- I've never been at home this much in my life. I'll pivot outside of work. I think we've all had challenges with what we've gone through over the last two and a half years. And for any parents out there, whether we're talking about actual personal issues between having kids, or whatever that may be, it can be really challenging. But also, I've never been at home this much in my life. So having to adjust with a five-year-old, and a three-year-old, and a dog, and a wife all running around the house while I'm trying to be on calls was really challenging at first. But, I've learned to embrace that and love that. But, I'm not going to be one of those guys that says it's amazing every day, because it's a challenge and we have to consistently work on it, right? It's like anything in our lives. So, those are a couple of things.
What are 2 roadblocks that you are working on now?
- Converting in-person energy to online calls. I used to be out and about all the time. I was networking. I was at events. I was in person. I was traveling. So a little bit of a roadblock for me is, “how do I convert that energy that I have in person with someone to a zoom call like this?” What I've tried to figure out is, like I said earlier even in the first question, when we talk about storytelling, it has to be that because no one wants to see you walk through 15 slides, right? We want to talk like we're in person at an event and we're talking about Wellthy, and we're talking about caregiving, we're talking about your business and we're learning. So that was a roadblock at first, but I've been really working on it hard to try to understand how I can articulate myself and show up to myself on this little, tiny, two-inch screen as I would if I was at an event in public.
- Just understanding and being content with where I am. I don't know if you've followed my journey at all, or anyone listening has followed my journey, I'm a builder. So where I can kind of struggle and have a roadblock is when I'm not building, which is why I joined Wellthy. I joined here because I wanted to build. I wanted to create something and I wanted to be around a team of builders where I felt psychologically safe to fail, but also create new things and succeed in certain areas. So, there’s a couple. There’s so many more that come up to mind, though.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
- Sunday Nights. I can be really busy in my mind. I can have a lot of things going on in my mind, and oftentimes, it's a little bit hard to focus on that key, specific area. So something that I've been doing for, gosh, since early in my career, is Sunday nights. Sunday nights I get in that mental flow state of like, “Alright. What is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday going to look like?” What is it going to look like for my schedule, but it's also looping in my wife and sitting together with her on the couch and saying, “Hey, what's your schedule look like this week?” or, “Hey, what do the kids need me for this week?” And that gets me in the right state of mind. So when I wake up on Monday morning, it's not 8 emails, 6 followups, a meeting, and the kids going to school. Literally, they just walked out of the door. I normally take them every day at 8:30am, but we had this at 9am, so me and my wife had to communicate on Sunday to say, “Hey, you're taking over on this day.” So, I think that's really important.
- Time blocks on calendar from a mental state for me. You'll see me post a lot on that. I block times for my focus. I block times for my prospecting. I blocked times for my customers. So whenever somebody reaches out to me and says, “Hey, when can you meet?” I know that my prospecting time is going to be from this, to this, to this. I have been able to really focus on that.
- The power of coaching. From my past life at BetterUp, which a lot of you listening probably know that organization, and one that I hold deep to my heart and love everyone there, I learned the power of coaching. I learned the power of having someone outside of my existing team, helping me navigate life, and work, and career, and balance, and that's been a true game changer for me.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
- Social selling. Oh man, this is going to sound crazy. I probably made less than 10 phone calls at my previous company, outbound cold calls, and sold close to a million dollars in business, which leads me to the point of social selling. Go-to-market teams that aren't focused on empowering their teams to build their personal brand are going to really wish they did that 2-3 years from now because, I think we're merging into the fact of AEs and go-to-market teams almost being mini-marketers out there, right? Because we have the ability to impact the globe with our words and a personal brand versus being in your little market where you're going to these little events with 80 people. Now I can make a post on caregiving, I can make a post to total rewards leaders, and 30,000 people across the world see that. So that's what I would empower teams to do.
- In-person events, right now, for just teams, I think are looked over too much. We used to get that comradery where we would come in and we dabbed each other up, we give each other hugs, we'd fail together, we'd look at white borders together and strategize. Unfortunately, that just doesn't happen anymore. So, the teams that I see that are having little outings out and about, they're going on hikes, they're meeting with each other, they're having mini, little QBRs and all-teams meetings. I think those are key right now. I think it's a big retention factor as well because we all just need that. And there's some that don't, and that's fine too, right? We're all different humans.
- Understanding your team's personal hobbies and interests and leaning into them as a leader. This makes me think of something I shared this morning on LinkedIn. The CEO of Goldman Sachs is headlining at Lollapalooza as a DJ. So it’s understanding your team's personal hobbies and interests and leaning into them as a leader because, quite frankly, we're more than our 8-5. When we can really understand who each person on our team is, we can encourage them, and build them, and make them become who they want to be. While riding alongside of them versus managing them.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
Great question. There's so many, but three that come to mind straight upfront:
- Nick Kouma, who works for BetterUp.
- Dejuan Brown, who is someone that has just encouraged me for years and years when I first jumped into this go-to-market world, or AE SaaS sales world.
- Kellen Casebeer, Kellen's out on the west coast. Works for a firm called LEON.
Those three give you just an array of different mindsets and behaviors in how they show up on a daily basis. If you ever needed more, I could list off hundreds more, but those are three that are right top of mind today.
Work with Darren → Wellthy is hiring!
Listen ->
Meet Sean MacPherson, VP, Customer Success & Experience at Alyce. Lead with telling your customer stories. Customer-facing expertise. What will lead to the most impact for our customers? Ruthlessly prioritizing. The upsell flywheel. The scientific method. Constantly testing and iterating on things. Being comfortable with failure.
17 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Stuart Balcombe said about Sean:
Sean MacPherson over at Alyce. VP of Success there. Came from Drift. He has a really great perspective from a success point of view. What does it mean to build a go-to-market model that really makes customers successful? You probably talk to most people from early Drift days, but how do you tie your go-to-market motion with building a brand that is self-sustaining, and that is not just about the one-to-one things that you're doing, but actually rolls up into something much bigger? —Stuart Balcombe, Product Marketer at Arrows → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
- Customer-facing expertise. The first one is what I like to call a customer-facing expertise. So what that means is: being the expert on the challenge you are solving is key. In the past several years, the buying cycles have really changed. It's all about educating your customers, not only why you understand their challenges today, but how you will solve them in the future. With so many products out there, the switching costs are really low. So if you are helping your customers think about their challenges in the future, or if you aren't rather, they're looking elsewhere because software is a commodity at the end of the day, especially in growing markets.
- Customer-advocacy flywheels. Another way to look at this, even from a customer success angle, is customer-advocacy flywheels, as I like to call it. Advocacy in itself is such a key component to the success of everything: marketing, sales, and your customer efforts. Being able to tell those stories of success in the what, the how, and the why of their journey with your solution is such a powerful tool to leverage as any type of output. So whether it's like a traditional case study or more in a Slack group, like we've seen rising more and more today with the industry expert ones. So just being able to have more feet on the ground that aren't just your go-to-market folks.
- Lead with telling your customer stories. I would say the last one is it really does lead in this kind of like dovetailing into this is lead with telling your customer stories themselves. Everyone loves a story. One company I always look up to, one leader I always look up to is Bob Iger, who was at the helm of Disney for a long time. So everything they do, they do it with a purpose, an experience, and that's all wrapped up in a story. That’s because people love stories, and if you can take your customers on a journey throughout your funnel, they're going to be your biggest advocates over time, in terms of just your biggest customers, your biggest champions, your biggest folks on social, you name it, that story is going to resonate. I think that's really inspirational and into turning that market, or that network effect, into revenue.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Two big ones, just because they're really big ones, and I think everyone runs into these.
- Competitive markets. So we're in a newer space, in a newer market. So competitive markets, naturally they're challenging. It's so easy to build a product today. So as a market matures, you get so many competitors that are coming in that you have to really hone in on what you do and where are you going. We've had this struggle because companies come in with a fresh perspective of how to solve problems. You have to really focus on articulating why your vision, your product, and your experience, and what they should be investing in from the customer standpoint. And that's a big challenge as competitors are coming in fast and furious, especially challenging your sales, your sales narrative, or your market narrative, or even your customer narrative. Just being ahead of that, it's always a headwind.
- Turnover and the great resignation. I think the other one is, and this is a big one, like everyone has it, especially in the past couple of years, is turnover and the “great resignation.” I think again, everyone's having this challenge. And not only during the pandemic, but post-pandemic world. Specifically in my realm with customer success, it's exploded. Investors and companies are starting to really understand how these investments in customer success have long-term payoff in terms of lifetime value. So naturally it's created a lot of challenges in retaining talent. So we've had to really focus on why our company and our organization is one where it becomes a launch pad for careers in customer success. So we think about how are we investing in the careers of folks and how are we ensuring they have paths at our company? Or, they are getting the skills and expertise to take that on at a new company and grow in their careers because that's really where a lot of the narrative has started to change, pandemic and post-pandemic world.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
- Growth at scale. Every company runs into this at different stages. So how are we continuing to scale without heavy investments, but still giving a world-class experience because that's at the core of our DNA? So it's a delicate balance of testing new methods, or appropriate experiences, to be able to help customers get value on their own or self-serve that value. So this takes time, especially in new markets like ours where we're flipping the script. So we are constantly testing and iterating on things. Some of these things will work. Others will fail, but it’s all in an effort to try and scale our business and put our customers in control versus us in control. So we want them to essentially get to value without us, and we want them to feel empowered to get there.
- Ruthlessly prioritizing. At our company, we want to do everything. Being in a market that's traditionally working with agencies, we tend to think of ourselves trying to do everything. And that's a trap that you can fall into. We definitely fall into it. But the end of the day, we have to be thoughtful about what we do and what will lead to the most impact for our customers. So we are constantly reviewing, removing noise, to ensure we are focused on those right things for our customers that align to our vision.
- The upsell flywheel. I've run into this roadblock at every company. It's what I like to call the upsell flywheel. We have an amazing customer success or value-led motion that leads to upsell. But we haven't necessarily codified that to understand, “What are the exact behaviors that lead to growth in our customers, specifically?” It's been a challenge at every company I’ve been with. The goal is, “How do you create an alert system that tells you when it's time to have an appropriate conversation about new features or upselling?” Not just kind of peppering them all the time. We're just embarking on that behavior-mapping journey right now to figure out, “What are those key moments?” So instead of going to our customers and saying, “This is a great new feature.” When are they ready for that feature? When does it make sense for them? To actually start educating them about that based off of what we're seeing them do.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
- Inverting. This is always my favorite one. So, inverting a problem. I really credit this to David Cancel, who really helped distill this thoughout the company at Drift when I was there. It's about looking at the outcome and finding all the places it could fail. So you, honestly, don't go there. It gives you less of a cloudy view of how to find the right critical path and avoid all of those failure points along the way.
- Honestly, just being comfortable with failure. I think this is something that a lot of people struggle with, or aren't comfortable with, but it will help you learn and grow. So fail fast, test things, iterate. No one has a playbook for your business or the right framework. So it's all about testing it and finding the break points for improvement.
- The scientific method. It kind of goes with being comfortable with failure. I'm a huge nerd. One of my favorite YouTubers is Mark Rober. I love embracing engineering in everything I do with planning. So when we're looking to make a change, we have to make sure it isn't drastic enough that when it either is successful or a failure, we know exactly what made it so. So, making one change, testing it, and quickly iterating it is a constant philosophy of my team and the priorities that we take on.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
- Listen to your customer stories. This is my favorite one. Every sale, lead, and customer has a slightly different perspective as to why they're buying. Understanding those stories and who the people are in those seats are so key to being successful in selling cycles today. People want to buy into a vision. They want to hear stories about how other people got there. I think long gone are the days of feature selling or tossing out random metrics to really wow an audience. If you can tell a compelling story about where a person started, their result, and then most importantly, how they got there, you're going to win that customer every single time.
- Customer-led growth. What is becoming this more trending topic, which is called customer led growth, and credit to Chris Hicken over at NuffSaid for championing this philosophy, is focusing on the value customers receive versus the value the company thinks their customer should receive. So when we're making decisions about how to improve the experience with any part of our company, it's like, “How are you incorporating the customer data to make that decision, whether it's quantitative or qualitative?”
- Focusing on where to market, sell, and service where you perform best, and segmenting off that. Some folks call it ICP. So meaning, where you address your customer's problems the most, service is lighter because there's a clear path, and that segment of the market clearly resonates best with your customers. So essentially, it’s easier for them to resonate with why they're buying this, how to get there, and how to be really successful with it. You're going to spend a lot less time and money selling those folks, marketing to those folks, and servicing them.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
I'm going to cheat because I'm going to put one on my team.
- Ethan Walfish. I learn from him every single day. I'm so, so thankful that he's actually on my team. Ethan Walfish is our support leader. He's amazing. He's not only built an organization from scratch, and the structure to support it, but he did it people first. This is generally challenging, especially in support, but we have scale across all time zones and we've introduced global support with ease. He's also a massive contributor to the support-driven community and gives back to a ton of folks there.
- Howard Greene. A mentor of mine. He's a multi-time CFO with many scaling companies. Part of being a successful operator is understanding the business inside and out and the opportunities that presents. So he's my go-to person for advice when thinking, pressure testing new ideas, making sure we have the right barometers in place, thinking about how investments impact us three years out, et cetera, et cetera.
- Kristi Faltorusso. Someone I don't know personally, but I feel like I know her personally because she gives so much back to the CS community through sharing her playbooks, is Kristi Faltorusso over at ClientSuccess. Her focus on showcasing how customer success is a revenue driver and how CS leaders can get to the level of other leaders in an organization is spot on. She's given back so much to the CS community and leveled up so many leaders in the last several years. And honestly, she's one of the top CS leaders in revenue operators out there!
Work with Sean → Alyce is hiring!
Meet MJ Peters, VP of Marketing of CoLab Software. Understand your customer's job. Figuring out where to start. The marketing discovery call. Establishing credibility in a new role. Time management. Habit stacking. LinkedIn and Twitter organic as a recruiting tactic. Prioritize the segments of the market that are going to be easy to convert to revenue.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript.
Here’s what Carl Ferreira said about MJ:
MJ Peters. Gosh what to say? MJ was my boss here at Refine Labs and she is a VP of Marketing now at another awesome tech startup. MJ is one of these marketers that will be a CRO or CEO one day. She closed millions of dollars in business at Refine Labs and is probably one of the most sought-after marketers in B2B SaaS today. Think about how dynamic of a person you have to be to be a world-class marketer and be able to close half a million dollar deals and just knock them down. Just a genius. She really is just brilliant and you definitely got to have her on the podcast. —Carl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
So I am pretty new in my new role. This is the beginning of week 4 for me. So the answer I'm going to give is how I think about converting market into revenue and pretty soon we'll be doing all these things. Some of them are in progress already. In order to convert your market into revenue, which I love that as a concept by the way, you need to:
- Prioritize the segments of the market that are going to be easy to convert to revenue. So, figure out where you're going to focus. Almost every time I've started a new marketing role, there is an opportunity to narrow the focus from what the company is currently focused on so that you can do every other step of the process that much better, in that much more of a personalized way, for that segment.
- Understand your customer's job. Once you've figured out where you're going to focus, you need to understand your customer's job. You need to understand the key outcomes that they are trying to produce, and you need to understand pain points that they experience when trying to do that, or sources of frustration. I love to ask the question, “What is less than ideal about how you do that today?” That allows you to create and validate the messaging for each of those segments.
- And then finally, you're going to distribute. I think of distribution as both an inbound and outbound motion. So, here at CoLab, we are doing a lot of work to really align what our SDRs are doing, what they're saying, with what we're doing from a marketing perspective, to make sure that the customer gets the same experience, whether the touch point is inbound or whether it's outbound.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
- Establishing credibility in a new role. So week 4, number 1 is definitely establishing credibility in a new role. Something that I've found that worked for this, this is just reflection, this was not my game plan going in, but I got one people win, one operational win and one strategy win in my first four weeks. People win being building trust with the people that are on my team by showing them that I care about their career progression and helping them. So quick people win. A quick operational win was helping the team implement a new meeting structure that’s worked really well at a previous company. So bringing in experiences from past companies. Great way to earn trust as an exec. And then a strategy win. So going out and pulling customer insights into the organization that weren't there before and they're starting to inform the strategy.
- Figuring out where to start. There's so many things that you could do as a marketing leader in a new role. It really helped me that our CEO is super clear on the role of marketing in the organization. It's about making sure that we speak the language of our customers, that we understand their pain points. We are eventually going to be creating a category, so that's going to be a big focus of marketing, and then of course putting points on the board from a demand gen perspective.
- Getting buy-in for the first couple of levers I want to pull. So, when you enter a new organization, how do people make purchasing decisions here? How do we decide that we're going to take one step forward in this direction, instead of that direction? Who do I need to talk to? Who wields power and authority here? Figuring all of that stuff out. It's coming along.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
So, two of them have to do with our target market.
- A target market that is historically fairly slow to adopt new technology. So CoLab markets to industrial equipment companies, for the most part, and it's a target market that is historically fairly slow to adopt new technology. We're obviously a technology company, and we have to figure out how to compel people that, “Hey, this is something you need to do today.” And, digital transformation is not just something people like to talk about, but we need to start executing on these things, so we need to have a really compelling message to get people to adopt our tech.
- Same thing, target market. Sometimes we sell into an operations persona, and in manufacturing, I don't know if you've been on the ground with a lot of ops people from manufacturing, but they're tough, right? They're like, “I don't need any help. I'm going to do what I gotta do. I'm going to get it done.” So it's a persona that doesn't often want to reach out and ask for help. So again, we’ve got to meet people where they are and understand that that's part of the mindset.
- Coming back to category creation. I don't think that's easy to do. So, I don't know if it's a roadblock or just something that I'm anticipating being very challenging, but it's going to be really fun. I'm excited about that one.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I love this question. I have all kinds of mental models.
- Time management. How I think about time management. It’s funny, because I think there’s a lot of experts in time management that talk about all these things, and because I apparently don't read enough literature on that, I pieced this together over many years and then later realized that I could have just read a book and got the whole system. But, number one is, “How do I sort things that are coming my way to make sure that I make the decisions I need to make, that I take the actions I need to take?” So I sort it into 3 buckets:
- Do it now. if I'm going to do it, and it takes less than 5 minutes, do it now.
- Delegate, or say no. I try to do that right away, as well, because typically delegating or saying no takes less than 5 minutes.
- If I need to do it, but it's going to take more than 5 minutes, then I will time-block it. I've been time-blocking for a really long time now. I used to do it with sticky notes, then I did it with just my calendar, and now I use this awesome app called Motion, so that I don't forget things because things are flying at me all the time.
So, that's how I think about time management.
- Habit stacking. I just started reading Atomic Habits. Well, I'm probably about halfway through the book now, and one thing that I do already, that is referenced in the book, and that I might now do more intentionally, is called habit stacking. So if you want to create a new habit, then what you do is you stack it with a habit that you already have. My example from my personal life is that I'm pretty good at hydration, like I want to remember to drink water throughout the day, and I realized having read this book that I already have the habit stack. Each morning, when I drink my coffee, I drink ice coffee, so I use kind of like a pint class, and before I fill it out with coffee, I fill it up with water and I finish the water first. So, I've created a habit stack. I’ve just come across this concept, so I'm going to try and do that more intentionally with other good habits I want to form.
- Don't connect the bridge. I participate in this peer networking group that's called Upteaming. I participate once a quarter, I would say. It’s with other marketing leaders to discuss our challenges. One of the mental models that I learned through Upteaming is this concept called “don't connect the bridge.” It’s a great way for leaders, and probably just people mentoring others, to share inspiration and help others get through roadblocks in a different way than we've been taught. Basically, how it works is, we often jump straight into wanting to give someone advice, so we'll share our experience and we'll give advice. Don't connect the bridge instructs you to share your experience, but do not give the advice. Stop short of giving advice. Let the person who is seeking to benefit from your experience process your experience, in the context of the current problem they are trying to solve, and let them connect the bridge for themselves. I think it's super interesting. It's been super fun trying that out with the Upteaming groups.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
- The marketing discovery call. I posted about this yesterday, the marketing discovery call. So, we all know the sales discovery call. We ask customers questions so we can effectively position our solutions in the sales process. The marketing discovery call is a lot broader than that. The purpose of the call is seeking to learn, or seeking to understand, as opposed to seeking to position something. So, you basically are just gathering information about your customer so you can ask them about what a typical day in the life looks like. Or you can ask that question I referenced earlier in this conversation, “What's less than ideal for you?” And you can use that in all sorts of ways, whether it's bettering your product roadmap, improving your messaging, figuring out what segments to focus on, coming back to question number one. So I'm a big fan of the marketing discovery call.
- LinkedIn and Twitter organic as a recruiting tactic. When I started posting on LinkedIn, every day at the time, now I probably post three times a week, I had no idea that it was going to be like a superpower for my recruiting. I was just kind of doing it for myself and to learn. Now, I realize that I can get all-star candidates to apply to jobs because I have a personal brand. I think that's something that go-to-market leaders should consider when they're deciding whether or not to invest their time there. I don't personally have a huge Twitter following, but I think you could do this on Twitter as easily as you can do it on LinkedIn.
- PR as a content channel. This might not be applicable to everyone, but I've had a lot of success utilizing PR as a content channel. So I think a lot of people think of PR as a place where you blast out announcements about your company. Years ago I worked with a specialist PR agency that focused on only one segment of the market and they were able to add value, not only getting distribution for our content, but what kind of content is going to work well in this channel? So through working with them, I really realized that PR is a content channel, and it's another way that you can get quality content in front of customers, besides paid social, besides organic social, besides email, and actually, at the time it helped us reach a lot of customers that we were not reaching in those other places.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
Three people that I think you should talk to:
- Graham Immerman. He is VP of Marketing at MachineMetrics. They do all kinds of really cool stuff in their marketing with data because their product generates a ton of data. I think he'd have some cool mental models, and he just has a very interesting philosophy on marketing as a whole. He's a cool person to talk to.
- Ryan Paul Gibson. He owns a company called Content Lift and he helps companies interview their customers. So he is an expert on that marketing discovery call and he’s worked with lots of companies on their go-to-market strategy. Bet you he has some super interesting techniques that other GTM leaders should apply.
- Grant Duncan. Formerly of Voximplant about to start a new role. Don't know if I can tell you where that's going to be, but a super interesting guy. Super interesting marketing leader. Probably has a lot on his mind since he's making a new career transition.
Work with MJ → CoLab Software is hiring!
🎧 Listen to more episodes → market-to-revenue.com
Meet Patrick Coleman, VP of Growth at Replit. Bias to action. Seek pain. The best way to keep up as the market evolves? Be a perpetual beginner. Start with pricing. Know your persona. Let users realize some of the value before you ask them to pay, but still run a go-to-market motion. Freemium and product-led growth models.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript here.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
- Today, we're making money from individuals and businesses via our Hacker and Pro plans.
- We recently made our education product free so we can help every student around the world learning to code. The idea behind that was part of our mission to bring the next billion coders online. It's really important to us to be able to make Replit the default entry-to-programming experience. There are so many people around the world without access to expensive computers and powerful systems, and we just want to help every student and teacher around the world. Coding is a superpower, and we think more people should have it.
- In the future, we are excited about helping creators make money directly on Replit. A really cool story recently is that a young man in India who learned to code, and he builds on Replit, made more money in a month than his family made in an entire year. So these types of stories from our community are just really encouraging and we want to help even more of that to happen.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
This is tough. This took me a little time to kind of think through.
- Deciding to make our education product free was a pretty tough decision. It was performing well for us. But as our Hacker plan, which is for individuals, and the Pro plan revenue has been growing, we reflected more deeply on our mission to bring a billion coders online, and we knew this was the right thing to do. Anytime you do a big change like this, there's a little bit of anxiety and trepidation, but since we had made the announcement, the feedback has just been incredibly positive. It was only about a week ago that we made the announcement and we did. just a blowout week in terms of the reception, and number of signups, for our education products, so I'm very encouraged by that.
- We just put on our first-ever user conference, and a big part of the user conference was a crowdfunding campaign that we announced with WeFunder to let our community also participate in our upside. To make that happen was just an all-out sprint from the marketing team, the product team, Amjad our CEO, finance, legal, everybody was just all hands on deck to get this out in a record fast amount of time. And then, just great validation from the community. The round was oversubscribed in less than 24 hours.
- Over the past couple of years, we've seen a lot of professional users signing up for Replit. It wasn't really our initial plan to go build a product for professionals, but we started talking to these users and learning all of the really exciting ways that they're using Replit for everything from pair programming to technical interviewing to rapid prototyping. I could go on, but we ended up collecting excitement and interest via a waitlist, and then we ran a months-long closed alpha to just get tons of direct user feedback, and really dig into where the pain points were and what we could do to improve things. When we were able to finally launch the product to the public, reception was really fantastic as well, and we've got some big, big fans in the professional engineering community, too.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
- Even though we've made our education product free very recently, we still need to run a go-to-market motion to convince schools and teachers to use Replit. I think there's going to be some challenges with this, as well. The world is moving towards a lot more cloud and browser-based tools, and I think Figma is a great example of this in design, Google Docs, obviously, things are changing, but I think the coding world, in some ways, and particularly in the education side of things, has not entirely caught up to this yet. Not only are we needing to encourage people to use Replit, but also educating them on the benefits of working in the browser. When teachers come around, when they see this, and when the students get to experience using a tool like Replit, the feedback is just phenomenal. One of the most encouraging things is people being able to code on Chromebooks or mobile devices. They are a lot cheaper and more accessible. It just makes it so much easier for teachers to reach more students, particularly as coding gets to be a required subject in more and more places.
- Hiring. I would be remiss if I didn't mention hiring. We are hiring as fast as we can, but we still can't hire fast enough. So I'll just do a quick plug. If anyone listening is excited about our mission, please apply! We would love to talk.
- While our team was small and scrappy, and we were primarily growing via word of mouth, we neglected some of the more traditional, marketing, growth hacking, or acquisition channels. Search was one of these that we were performing very well on, but didn't give a lot of our mindshare to, and now that we're growing the team and really digging into a lot of like thefunnel metrics and traditional marketing and growth tactics, this is an area where I think there's a lot of room to grow Replit even faster. So that's going to be an area where I and my team are going to spend a lot of time in the coming six months to a year.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I really love this question.
- Bias to action. I deeply believe that moving quickly, but with focus, is the best way to fight both procrastination and perfectionism. It's rare that decisions cannot be reversed. Sometimes you have big decisions that can't be reversed and you should really plan for these. But most decisions are reversible. And for these decisions, speed is very much of the essence.
- Seek pain. This is part of our cultural values and operating principles at Replit I’m a big fan of this. We really believe that you can't learn unless you're shipping real things to real people, ad then you're digging into what's not working, and go fix it. I think our default mental attitude is to avoid hard things and look for the easy path, I'm really happy to be part of a company where we normalize that things aren't going to be easy all the time, and the best way to move forward and to grow, both as a business and professionally as individuals, is to dig into what's not working, where there's a little bit of pain. Apply that growth mindset. Keep iterating and improving.
- The idea of beginner's mind. At startups, things change so, so fast that often your old mental models about the way the world works, about the way that you should operate—I love Andrew Chen's Law of Shitty Clickthroughs—in marketing, what worked a year ago, or 10 years ago, is not necessarily going to keep working. So having that beginner's mindset, always approaching things from first principles, is the best way to keep up as the market evolves, and it's kind of fun to be a perpetual beginner and in wonder of the way that the business, and the world, is constantly evolving.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
- Start with pricing. Something that I've picked up on, and I'm a big fan of, is when you're building and launching products, and selling products, start with pricing. So, pricing should come first. I think a key to our early growth in education was pricing the product at an appropriate level so that teachers could really easily—and the free trial experience was a big part of this—try this out, use it, and then encourage other teachers in their school to use it, and that they could get it approved at their schools without needing to go through a lengthy approval process. So doing a bit of customer research, and then knowing your market, before running a lot of crazy pricing experiments, or trying to put a product out there first, I think will be really useful and drive a lot of growth.
- Freemium and product-led growth models. We're also a really big fan of freemium and product-led growth models. So I think letting your users realize some of the value before asking them to pay is a really smart thing to do. This is why we're seeing more and more businesses shift to this approach. It's the same thing in a more traditional enterprise sales model too. If you wat to get the next meeting, if you want to get the close, you have to give, you have to give a little bit of value too. You got to provide some information. You got to provide some impact that you're going to expect your customers to have so that they know this is going to be worth their time. This has worked really well for us with our freemium model.
- Knowing your persona is really key. Different audiences respond to different tactics. I mean, this is a bit obvious, but it really helps to remember this. We can reach the young coders on Discord and TikTok. We're not gonna be able to reach their teachers or the professionals there as well. I think it's easy when you're sprinting, and you're in this lean startup mode, and you just want to like put out MVPs really fast, to lose track of, “Who exactly are you building for?” I think one of the hardest things to do is in a startup is to stay focused. Knowing exactly who you want to build for, and which customers are not an ideal fit for you right now, is really important. It will help you not get into the this failure mode of trying to do too many things at once
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
- Antoine Buteau. I think I'm allowed one from my company, so I want to give a shout out to Antoine Buteau on my team who leads BizOps for us. Just super sharp. Started his career as an engineer and then was a strategy consultant for software businesses. Just a brilliant go-to-market operator.
- Shriram Apte. VP of Revenue at TripleByte. Great guy and TripleByte is a fantastic business. We’re big fans of really anybody operating in the space to make it easier for more people to get jobs in coding and realize the benefits of the internet economy. Big, big fans.
- Megan. The last person I want to give a shout out to, I'm still waiting for her okay to share her details, but her name is Megan, and she worked at another education software company when I was just getting started in my last startup, which was my first startup ever. She was both a friend, and a therapist, and shared so many little tips of business operations and go-to-market wisdom with me that I don't think I would be having nearly as much success as I had if not for her.
So, these are some folks that I would highly recommend chatting with.
Work with Patrick → Replit is hiring!
🎧 Listen to more episodes → market-to-revenue.com
15 minutes with Arthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper. Turn champions into raving fans. High leverage principles. A sales rep that broke into marketing. Bypass the SDR qualification. 83% show rates on first inbound meetings. Keep your brain activity as fresh as possible. Scaling the team and delegating. Ask about “where they're trying to get to.”
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript here.
Here’s what Carl Ferreira said about Arthur:
Arthur Castillo. Over at Chili Piper. They're a great team. We're a customer. Arthur is a dear friend and he just has such a unique perspective. He actually comes from sales and now is in marketing. So he's a fantastic resource. He really understands the entire revenue org, the entire customer journey, and is a big, big resource there for thinking innovatively about how those two teams can work together.
—Carl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs → listenWhat are 3 ways your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Inbound, for sure. Our marketing is responsible for driving over 60% of our pipeline, or more than that, and part of how we do that is we get our highest intent leads to book a meeting right there. So, instead of focusing on the classic “speed-to-lead, let’s get in touch with them in under five minutes,” although I think that's important, I don't think a lot of people are thinking about “speed to meeting booked,” or “speed to first meeting booked,” and we make that happen within minutes. So it really helps capture a lot of those high intent buyers, and for those of you that may or may not know, in B2B tech, less than 40% of those demo requests make it to the first meeting. So, you're leaking out 50-60% inbound pipeline, and we, last I checked, had an 83% show rate to first meeting, so pretty high there.
2) Next, our outbound model. So, I think our SDRs do an incredible job at multichannel, specifically mostly on email and LinkedIn. We get praise every day from the outreach that they send, as well as some people people try and poach our SDRs. So that’s a good sign there. The difference in what they do there: it's not necessarily as personalized as maybe some people think, but it's very contextual to how they do their job, and highlighting, “Hey, are you going through these changes? If, so this is how a customer in your space solved it.” So very contextual to the specific person they're targeting.
3) And then lastly, we turn Chili Piper champions into raving fans. So we're highly active and engaged on our social networks, specifically LinkedIn. We're always trying to give shoutouts to champions. One of the things that I thought was really cool: we did a thought leader series recently on marketing leaders. The prize for that was a trip for two to anywhere in the world. They obviously enjoy that, and we've used a lot of these distribution network effects of our Chili champions. We've noticed that when these referrals come through, they're closing at the highest rates, much higher than inbound or outbound.
So I'd say those three are inbound motion, our outbound motion, as well as turning Chili champions into raving fans.
What are 3 hard problems you recently overcame?
1) I am a sales rep that broke into marketing. It kind of happened by chance, but what I've noticed is that since I've been a little bit more vocal about this, I've actually had quite a few sales reps reach out to me and say, “Hey, your article really resonated with me about breaking into marketing. I'm trying to find my footing here in sales, but I think maybe I'm a creative and I'm better equipped to be in marketing.” So that's been pretty cool. And I've been trying to share a lot of how I've done that. I've wrote an article on my LinkedIn, so feel free to check it out to any of those creative sales reps looking to potentially break into marketing
2) Sticking with that theme, I will say project management is an ongoing problem that I'm trying to overcome. I didn't really have to manage a lot of projects as a sales rep, and now coming into marketing, you have to look at content marketing or product marketing, marketing operations, all of these different things to make sure that you're able to get things through. So that's been a change, but I also noticed that this was part of my skill set that maybe I was a little too afraid of, or didn't see a fit for it, and now that I'm doing it, I can see how it would actually be super useful for really anybody, sales reps, marketers, anybody, to better understand your project management.
3) Saying “no” to people. I'm still pretty guilty of not doing this, but I've noticed as I'm becoming maybe more of a public figure here at Chili Piper, I try and think of myself as a brand advocate, a lot of people would approach me before in terms of trying to apply for a role or maybe trying to pick my brain about something. As much as I want to do that, I am getting more and more responsibilities, and if I say yes to something that means I'm saying no to something else. I really have to push back a little bit. One tip I have for that, something I've been doing, is saying, “Hey, I can't do it right now. I get quite a few of these calls every week, or these asks every week, but let me know maybe what's top of mind or what position you’re interested in. I’ll create a five minute video trying to answer their calls and send it to them. It’s much more effective than hopping on a call with them, spending 20-40 discussing things that are top of mind fo them.
What are 3 roadblocks you are working on now?
1) Attribution model. We are last-touch attribution, but we are starting to shift that, and that was a little bit of a roadblock for us here in the Field Marketing and Community because it's not as direct response as maybe Demand Gen or Outbound Sales. So, just because they attended an event doesn't necessarily mean they're ready-to-go right after it. And, because we’re last touch attribution, a lot of what I’m comp’d off is kind of those qualified held meetings coming through events. So we are starting to change that more to an engagement model, and getting all revenue departments going after engaged accounts, I'm really looking forward to that.
2) Scaling the team and delegating. Coming into marketing, I'm actually a first time manager. So, I’d put scaling the team and delegating. I think being a new manager, I recognize where my strengths are, and sometimes I want to hold on to certain things, but at the same time, having those priorities, I do have to delegate certain things that maybe in the past I would have wanted to do. And with that, understanding how I want to scale my team here at Chili Piper from a Field Marketing side.
3) It’s funny, what probably got me into marketing was my LinkedIn presence, and I hadn't been putting as much time into that. So I'm trying to find a balance between executing on my job and my responsibilities while still staying top of mind and having that LinkedIn presence. That’s been a little bit of a roadblock.
What are 3 mental models you use to do your best work?
1) High leverage principles. I don't know if this is how it's labeled, but I was taught this by my manager, Dan, as I moved into Marketing. So in trying to explain it, a high leverage activity is maybe something that you create once, a system or a process, and that you can reuse it. So we're not starting from scratch. Whereas a low leverage activity will be, I'm doing it once, so I'm having to recreate it from scratch. I'm really not building any systems or processes. So it's helped me understand, “how do I create this so I'm going to be scalable? How do I do things maybe once or twice and it serves me for a longer amount of time?”
2) Touch it once. And this is for focus. Get your mind out of the gutter to all your listeners. I heard this from a book called Getting Things Done as well as other productivity books. And the concept is if you are getting ready to, let's say, tackle a task, make sure that you have the time ready for that. Email is a huge one. If I'm going to open my email, it's not to scroll through and see what messages I have. It's either to maybe delegate, maybe defer to later time, and say, “okay, this one's going to take a longer time. And if it's less than two minutes and I can respond right then and there, that's only when I'm opening emails.” So I'm not constantly being bombarded, making sure that if I'm opening up any of these tasks, I stay focused and I touch it once.
3) “Keep my brain activity as fresh as possible.” I don't know if this is necessarily a mental model. I try and stay, how do I say, “I keep my brain activity as fresh as possible.” So I know, even if for the trained professional, you can only stay focused 90 minutes at a time. So instead, what I try and do is find times in my day to do activities that I know bring energy back into my life. Whether that's taking a quick walk outside, getting some fresh air. I found meditating super helpful. A quick 10 minute meditation in the afternoon in particular has really helped me get that extra boost. I have been trying to get off the coffee. So I think in terms of productivity, how do I look at my day and have these built-in breaks that I know give me energy versus drain energy?
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Direct mail, but with the QR code attached. The first one that came to mind for this, and something we've been really experimented with recently is direct mail, but with the QR code attached. So I think direct mail is great. There's a lot of awesome vendors out there, but In terms of buyer journey, always thinking about, “how do we remove friction and make it easy for them to engage?” I think this QR code is really going to be this point of conversion where, “wow, thanks for sending me something. If I scan this here, it's an easy, direct path. For us, we either send them a quick video with a link to our Chili Piper booking links or a direct link saying, “Hey, we'd love to discuss a little bit more.” So that's been something really cool. We've already seen 80%+ engagement for anything we send out with a QR code, and much higher click-through rate than anything we've done in LinkedIn or emails. I definitely encourage people to look at that.
2) Bypass the SDR qualification. I think we are still looking at buyers probably where they were 10-20 years ago. Now they're much more educated than they ever were. They have access to peers, communities, LinkedIn where I can message you directly and say, “Hey, how are you solving this challenge?” Yet, we're still treating them as if they're starting from scratch. So we need to meet them where they are at in their journey. And oftentimes it's this SDR qualification call, um, with people trying to prioritize speed-to-lead that actually hurts the customer journey. And they say, “seriously, you're going to ask me questions like if I have budget, authority, timeline, when I’m so much further down the funnel, it actually harms your inbound process. Once you have a good understanding of your ICP firmographics, title, there's ways in which you can bypass that SDR qualification, get it routed straight to an AE, and we've seen win rates increase up to 3x doing that. Maybe for the edge cases, you can still route them to an SDR to help them understand, but I think bypassing that SDR qualification is huge.
3) Ask about “where they're trying to get to.” This is a tough one, because I think when it comes to qualification, we always talk about “where they're at today,” but we never ask about “where they're trying to get to.” I can't tell you how many times where even SDRs that are referring to me have they said, “the qualification doesn't really meet what we're looking for, but it sounds like they're pretty interested in setting up a call. Are you interested?” Sure, I'll take the call. And then, two weeks later, I figure out their reason, they’re raising Series A. So they're not qualified now, but two weeks later, they are? Silly process. Let's talk to them about where they're trying to get to. Another thing on that: sometimes we are too obsessed with our ICP. I heard Craig Handy talk about this where he looked at the ICP qualifications for previous years, Closed Won revenue for a client of his. He found that 60% of the Closed Won revenue technically would have been disqualified because it didn't meet their ICP qualifications. So a lot of the time, again, let's ask about “where they're trying to get to? Or, maybe what they tried to do prior to reaching out to us because often it could just be a simple switch or a tiny little product feature now that can expand an entire new industry and TAM for us, yet we’re disqualifying them. So, let's talk to those people, understand not necessarily where they're at today, but where they’re trying to get to.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
1) Alexine Mudawar. She's one of the most talented sales reps I've had the pleasure of knowing. I'm pretty sure she gets 300% quota every year, and that’s partly due to her writing a 50-page business plan every year on how she's going to hit her metrics and back until her goal.
2) Jacob Gebrewold. From Klue. He's new to the software SaaS space, and he's absolutely crushing it as an AE. I think he's a very unique content creator and he understands how to stand up from crowd, but also have buying conversations that engage his prospects, which by the way, are Product Marketers, and he's never been a Product Marketer. I think he's really changing the game from that perspective.
3) Jed Mahrle. Last but definitely not least. I truly believe this guy's going to be a CRO. He's changing the way people approach business development. He runs global business development for PandaDoc and some of his tips I’ve read, I've never seen anywhere else. I think he's really a practitioner. So he's not just talking about things from his mind, he's executing in the field and then sharing what's working.
Work with Arthur → Chili Piper is hiring!
🎧 Listen to more episodes → market-to-revenue.com
Meet Leslie Venetz, Founder at Sales Team Builder. Make it about your buyer. Focus very heavily on referrals. Show up authentically to your community and to your market. Clarity about your ICP: it's not good enough to talk about everybody that could potentially buy. We really need to talk about who is most likely to buy immediately, at the highest price points, and renew, and be nice to work with, et cetera, et cetera.
17 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript here.
Here’s what Jen Allen said about Leslie:
Leslie Venetz. For those of you that don't know her, she was one of the earlier salespeople to get on TikTok. And I know TikTok, in many ways, is perceived as not relevant for B2B. But, she's a amassed a really big following. Some of the themes that Leslie touches on are things like women in sales, and diversity in sales, and how you show up and be your authentic self in sales, and just conversations that I think, as a result of COVID, as a result of like a deeper awareness of mental health, many times we, as sellers, are not comfortable having inside of our organizations. So I think she presents a really compelling view of things to be mindful of, things to be thinking about, as you navigate the sales role. —Jen Allen, Chief Evangelist at Challenger → Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Oh my gosh. That is such a hard-hitting first question. What are three ways that my team converts the market into revenue? Well, I don't have a team right now, so it's a bit of a trick question because I just left my corporate day job. I am a team of one, Chris. So three ways that I am converting my market into revenue:
- Focusing very heavily on referrals. And we all know referrals are gold. Often I don't know what people's needs are because they're not maybe posting about those needs, but they might be having a conversation in private with somebody in my network. So, showing a lot of gratitude for referrals, and making sure that if somebody gives me a referral, I always follow up to let them know how the conversation went, good or bad. That's been hugely productive for me.
- Showing up authentically to my community and to my market. To Jen’s really, really kind remarks, showing up authentically to my community, and to my market, and putting my message out there and understanding that it is absolutely not for everybody. Not everybody's going to get excited about conversations around mental health in sales, or inclusivity in sales. But, for the right piece of my market, not the qualified but the ideal, that's going to activate them and get them excited, and that's creating some inbound action for me.
- I have tried to be really thoughtful about the way I can connect with people and expose them to my content and almost use social like a nurture campaign. So my ICP are early stage founders that give a heck about inclusivity and respect for salespeople and putting buyers at the center of what we do. So connecting with those early stage founders, just to follow their journey, and maybe what I post will speak to them, and maybe our journeys will align at some point.
So I feel like interestingly, the three paths that I've been taking to revenue for Sales Team Builder in the early stages have all been sort of indirect, but still really powerful, and they're allowing me to put money on the books.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
- Having the courage to quit my corporate day job. That was a big one, and tied with that, in November, I also got an insane job offer, 460K job offer, like a life-changing amount of money. It sort of makes me get a little flustered even thinking about the fact that I walked away from corporate America after 15 years. I walked away from this huge, huge job offer to follow my intuition, to be able to focus a hundred percent of my time on Sales Team Builder. I think that was a huge one.
- Years ago, but something I just really started getting to the place where I can talk about it more openly, I left a job after a sub six-month stint due to really aggressive verbal harassment, sexual harassment. It was my first proper Head of Sales job. So, I was so proud, and my ego was telling me like, “Stick with it. If you just work harder, they'll see your worth.” And to snap out of that and have the courage to walk away without another job after only a few months, that was a really big one.
- Taking back control of my story. Just generally now taking back control of my story, and of my narrative, by talking about it, even though it's not easy.
What are 2 roadblocks that you are working on now?
- Just having a little bit of chill. So, I quit my corporate day job, and I said to myself, this was the narrative I spun to myself, Chris, “If you were going to another corporate job, you would take probably a month off. And then once you've gotten that job, you would have a month of onboarding. So Leslie, replicate that. Take February and March to do some certifications, to figure out what good looks like in this new avenue.” And my husband a couple of weeks ago was like, “You worked all day today. I thought you were supposed to be taking time off.” And I was like, “No, I've only been working like six hours a day.” And so, I think trying to find that balance, that's been a big roadblock for me. What does my new “good” look like? What do I carry forward? What do I leave behind?
- Deciding exactly where I want to focus. I'm a huge input person. I'm super curious. I want to get my hands in everything. So really having to force myself to say, “No. This is where your focus is.” And for GTM, we know how important that is, right? You need to know exactly who your market is, exactly who your ICP is, and that's what you need to craft your product and your messaging around. It's a lot harder too when you're the product than it has when I've done GTM for other products. So that's been a big challenge.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
- Definitely mindfulness. For sure. One of the amazing privileges—I’ve been dabbling in meditation for quite some time. I have a very busy brain, so it's always been something that I really struggle with—but one of the great privileges of being the full owner of my time is that I get to now start every single day with a short meditation, with journaling, with a workout, whatever it is that helps me be more mindful. That's a huge one that stretches across any profession.
- Intention. I think something really particular to sales is intention. Am I doing an activity because somebody, at some point, told me that those were important KPIs, or am I doing that activity because it actually creates that that key result, that end result, that is most important to me?
- Authenticity. A third mental model is just around those pieces of authenticity—which I know is such a buzzword, Chris. I know! But it is important—beyond a buzzword, we can feel when the brands, when the people, we are engaging with are coming from an authentic place. Whether that's cold copy that you just read and it kind of makes you cringe versus something you read they're like, “Oh wow. They actually really took the time to care about me.” Or maybe something less pinpointed, I think the new evolution of how brands, and how salespeople, engage, it must come from that place of authenticity and immediately letting your buyers know that you are trustworthy.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
- Just pick a lane and try it. This is something I see a lot of my early stage clients struggle with. Maybe this is twofold. Just pick a lane and try it, and It might not work, right? But, you won't know if it doesn't work if you don't pick that lane and really commit to it and try it.
- Clarity about who your ICP is. Really having a tremendous amount of clarity about who your ICP is. A conversation that I have a lot is talking about a TAM, talking about a total addressable market, is like sexy for like rounds and investors, right? But if we're creating our GTM strategy, it's not good enough to talk about everybody that could potentially buy. We really need to talk about who is most likely to buy immediately, at the highest price points, and renew, and be nice to work with, et cetera, et cetera. So I think really, really niching down, picking that lane, committing to it, to figure out if it works, or doesn't work, and then iterating. At least in my experience, that’s something that a lot of GTM teams struggle with.
- Make it about your buyer. I heard a very funny joke last week that product-led growth is the artist formerly-known as “freemium”. I was like, “Oh, that's a joke for a very specific audience!” There is this evolution that we are letting our customers tell us what the product should be, but there are still a lot of early stage founders who show up and say, “This is what the product is.” And if we're not putting our customers, our buyers, at the center of what we're creating, like what are we really doing here?
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
- Meghann Misiak. Do you know Meghann Misiak? She's incredible. I would highly recommend her.
- Kasey Jones.
- Jenny Anderson. I'm also going to give a shout out to Jenny Anderson.
Three other absolute bad-ass women in sales or founders in that ecosystem. That's who I would recommend.
Work with Leslie → Sales Team Builder
Follow Leslie on Tiktok → @salestipstok
🎧 Listen to more episodes → market-to-revenue.com
Meet Stuart Balcombe, Product Marketer at Arrows. Shifting the pricing model, shifting the ideal customer profile, shifting the positioning, and then aligning. How to use Charlie Munger's inversion, the Cupcake model, and guardrails. Go talk to more customers, repurpose absolutely everything, and look for ways to create proprietary insight.
19 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. View the transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
We have two motions. We have a relatively normal split. We have some inbound and we have some more outbound strategies.
1) Our outbound is a little more interesting to talk about. We use the Happy Customers podcast pretty specifically to have targeted conversations with folks. It is a more top of funnel marketing channel for us. But, we use that pretty specifically to 1) identify and have conversations with ideal accounts that we think should buy Arrows, but 2) we also use it as a research tool to really understand, what are the problems? What are the current pain points and the challenges that folks are having? It's a great way to have a conversation that is not sales-led, but helps align on how we think about the problem-space and the market as a whole. Then, there's no obligation on the back end of it. That's not the strategy, that we're going in, “Hey, this is going to lead to a sales conversation.” But the goal is to, in a very targeted way, have organic conversations that lead to a much more direct sales conversation. That is the primary way that we're doing outbound today.
2) We also have an inbound funnel predominantly driven by LinkedIn organic and educational, SEO-focused content on the website, which drives people into a demo flow. There’s two entry points, but ultimately the experience looks pretty similar. 1) You can request a demo, or 2) you can request a strategy conversation, or a strategy call, which is much more focused typically for folks who are a little earlier in their onboarding, or thinking about their high-touch onboarding program. We can in a fairly hands-on way, help you step through (we’re building a maturity-model around that), essentially answer the questions that you need to have answered before Arrows is actually a good fit for you. So we do that, both if you went to asking for strategy, and also if you come in asking for a demo but aren't quite ready. We are heavier on that education side.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
So the big one, I'm a little past 90 days at Arrows. The big ones that I've been tackling are shifting the pricing model, shifting the ideal customer profile, and then lining up how we think about the things that we prioritize on the marketing and product side to actually align to that.
1) From a pricing perspective, specifically, we moved from a seat-based model to plans as an Arrow-specific value metric. The goal there was to much more closely align the value. If Arrows is working for you, you should be using more plans, and you are happy to pay for more plans. Seats were, in some cases, a proxy, but didn't always map directly to the value that you're actually receiving.
2) On the ICP side, we've made a shift. This is sort of aligned with the maturity-model that I mentioned in the “how we turn the market into revenue” question. Moving from folks who are using ad hoc solutions, are less structured, and have less rigor around their onboarding program, to teams where their onboarding pipeline lives in a CRM. They are looking to optimize how they move people through that pipeline. Measurement and efficiency is much more important to those teams.
3) So that's been the big shift, which obviously comes with messaging changes and some product changes. Probably less changes on the product-side, but certainly narrowing in on: “This is the specific use case. These are the specific pain points. These are the ways that we are very differentiated for that group versus folks who are trying to solve different problems in their onboarding experience.”
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
1) The shifting of the positioning and aligning. I think this is just a common early-stage problem. You always have marketing positioning and messaging that’s at a slightly different stage than where the product actually is today. So, making sure that we are, as best as we can, lining those two things up. So it’s clear when you see our marketing, “this is the problem that we're solving.” The first experience with our sales team or success aligns with that, and it's moving you through that journey to bridge the gaps between the things that you wanted to do, and the things the product can do directly, or that you can do directly by yourself in the product.
2) Then, similarly, handling objections. It backs into a lot of stuff around the maturity-model. How do we help you bridge the gap or make sure that you have the things in place to actually adopt Arrows in this way? We found that even shifting to an ICP that is using a CRM (the reason there is that we have deep integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce), everybody sets up the CRM differently. We have found there’s sort of some reasons that setting up your CRM in a specific way helps you do other things, is more efficient. So helping people understand, “yes, you may be using the CRM, but if you are able to make this change, you will unlock this new capability.” Trying to do that earlier in the journey through content and education. That’s certainly always a theme. How do we move things that previously have been only once you buy the product or only once you talk to somebody? How do we move those things earlier? I know we’ve talked about this before. How do you move those things earlier so that by the time somebody gets to that point, they've already answered a lot of the questions that they might otherwise have had?
3) I don't know if it's a roadblock directly, but a very strong positioning angle that we're taking is going after some of the common onboarding metrics. We’ve found that there was a pretty big divide in how Success teams think about onboarding and how an onboarding team that lives under RevOps or under Sales thinks about onboarding, and measurement, and rigor, and all these things around that. So, we're trying to help. We try to have a very strong opinion on how you could do it and then make it really easy to actually do that with the product. Getting people to make that mindset shift is a process.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) The Cupcake model. It’s one that I am a huge fan of and it goes by a lot of different names. It’s talked about more in Product, but I like to think about it everywhere. Essentially, instead of going and trying to bake the full cake at the end, and getting there by making an individual slice and then adding another ingredient, and adding another ingredient, which means that the cake isn't actually that tasty until you get to the end… start with just a smaller version of the complete thing. So really trying to think, for anything that we're going to go out and try to do, what is the smallest, complete, valuable version of that? It's really helpful to be able to measure the impact much quicker and get signal. This ties to a belief that I have: the first version will be wrong in like 99% of cases. You'll be wrong the first time. So getting there faster and making sure that you get signal that you can actually use to make the next version better is important.
2) Defining guardrails. Essentially, what is this not, like explicitly? So the thing with Arrows, and this has been the core of the positioning shift, is: Arrows is not a project management tool. Which is very different than X. That's a big thing. High-level positioning. Arrows is not a project management tool. As soon as you do that, and you can do that at any level, but as soon as you say what this is not, you can then much more easily focus on what it is. And, it's much easier to say “no” to the things that are potentially distractions and shiny objects that don't align with that.
3) The third one, which came from Charlie Munger, is inversion. So, instead of thinking about, what is the success? What are the ways that this could be successful? What is the potential of this?… What are all the ways that we can fail? And similarly to how do we move value earlier in the journey? How do we handle the objections early? How do we identify all the objections as early as possible and handle them upfront? So that hopefully we don't even get asked the question. We're just already handling those things in how we design the campaign, design the product, and design the project.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Hopefully in 2022, everybody is doing this, but go talk to more customers. You can never talk to too many customers. I think finding ways to do that in a way that compounds is beneficial. This is why pretty much the first thing that I did at Arrows was start a podcast. It's just an excuse to go talk (it’s not just an excuse) but it gives you a really good reason to go talk to tens, there will be hundreds probably by the end of the year, of the exact people that you want to be talking to you because they're the people who you're trying to solve problems for. So looking for ways to talk to customers. It doesn't have to be a rigid, “this is an interview, and I'm going to ask you research questions,” right? There are ways to do interviews in a way that still gets you the unbiased insight that you want, but also can be repurposed and reused and other ways, which gets to my second technique.
2) Content repurposing. And I use this one pretty broadly. Repurpose absolutely everything. Content repurposing doesn't have to be approached as a waterfall. What I mean by that is it doesn't have to be linear. So you don't have to start at the beginning and go to the end. You can start in the middle and go backwards. You can start it in the middle and go forwards. So an example from Arrows: we record all these conversations for the podcast. Both with external folks and I also interview our Head of Success every week based on research and questions that we know our audience wants to answer and then we just go find the right people to answer those questions. Sure they might be recorded for the podcast, but they'll probably be published first in the newsletter. They'll be published on social first. So it's not necessarily that we created this big thing that we published and then we distributed it. We sort of break it up much earlier and repurpose from the start.
3) Look for ways to create proprietary insight. This is something that takes some thought to do, but is really impactful when you do it well. So, what are the things that only you can do? What are the things that only you can talk about because only you have the data. Typically it's data, or you may have had conversations, or you've made a connection that other people haven't made. Because pretty much everything is commoditized, product differentiation will only get you so far and probably won't last very long. People might be able to copy the features of your product, but they probably can’t copy the data that you have inside of your product, which is just one example of proprietary data. Just to give you the whole playbook: if you've recorded a podcast with 20 episodes, go pull the best clips across those episodes and pull them into something that's new. That essentially becomes a research paper that nobody else has because you did all the interviews. Whether you release the actual interviews themselves or not, you've created something that nobody else has access to.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
Yeah, this is a hard question. I can't keep this to three.
1) Marc Thomas. Powered By Search. Pretty much all things content and growth. The level of execution, it's impressive. And he also has this high-output marketing framework which is really great. He's really intentional about building systems and processes around getting the execution to a place where you can, not set it and forget it, but it's in a state where it's self-sustaining and you can go test the next thing.
2) Katie Mitchell. Sprig. Sprig has been on a tear. They are growing really, really fast. She came from b2c, is now working on a b2b product selling b2c customers, but has really interesting thoughts around how do you do social? How do you build a team? Lots of thoughts from being deep in scaling.
3) Amanda Natividad. SparkToro Again, all things content. But also, how do you do creative things with your marketing that, maybe are unintuitive and sort of don't scale in the way that you might think. A lot of marketers look only for the things that can scale and where you can see the top line potential of them, but she's great at doing things that aren’t necessarily that.
4) Sean MacPherson. Alyce. VP of Success there. Came from Drift. Has a really great perspective on from a Success point of view. What does it mean to build a go-to-market model that really makes customers successful? And I think you probably talk to most people from early Drift days, but how do you tie your go-to-market motion with building a brand that is self-sustaining? And that is not just about the one-to-one things that you're doing, but actually rolls up into something much bigger.
5) Kristen LaFrance. Repeat. She's Director of Community there. She has a ton of interesting experience from both DTC and SaaS. Lots of very strong thoughts on why you should build community early and why actually making customers successful is going to be the best driver of growth for the business.
Work with Stuart → Arrows is hiring!
🎧 Listen to more episodes → Market-to-Revenue
February 2022 · Interview by Chris Morgan, Host of Market-to-Revenue
Meet Jen Allen, Chief Evangelist at Challenger. Lack of leads? Lack of buyer alignment? Teach where prospects go to learn. When you are teaching in those spaces, don't teach the solution. Once you've won over someone on that message (they look at the problem the same way you do) make sure you don't fall short at the goal line by just assuming that they'll be able to socialize the problem inside of their business in the way that you would.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. View the transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
- Teach where prospects go to learn. What I mean by that is: instead of just relying on the traditional sales process to hopefully find someone who's ready to buy, figure out where your customers go to learn, with or without you, and make sure you've got a message there.
- When you are teaching in those spaces, don't teach the solution. Teach your interpretation of why the problem exists and alternatives to solving that problem. So make it problem-teaching, not solutions-teaching.
- Once you've won over someone on that message (they look at the problem the same way you do) make sure you don't fall short at the goal line by just assuming that they'll be able to socialize the problem inside of their business in the way that you will. So rather, spend time making sure you've armed them to go tell the problem story in the way that candidly you would tell it if you were in the room.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
- Lack of leads. This is very timely, it’s how I got this new job. I sold in the large enterprise space and I was a hunter rep (or someone who just focused on new logo acquisition). Last year, I was just seeing a dramatic drop in the amount of leads that were coming in the door. And so rather than just go back and beat marketing over the head with it and try to figure out what can marketing can do, that's how I started getting more involved in things like social and podcasting and that sort of thing to try to generate interest, again to my earlier point, where people go to learn. Have a presence there.
- The lack of buyer alignment that exists today. I think probably everybody feels this because now we're all, in many cases, operating virtually, we just don't have the benefit of customers who see each other in the hallway and can talk about the problems together. And so just having a really disconnected buying group that are coming on for Zoom, and then jumping into their next room, was a problem. It was just really difficult candidly to sell what I sell last year. So, part of what I did to overcome it was think differently about the agenda and the time that I was spending that with them. So, instead of trying to cram a ton into one call, because that was my one and only opportunity with the buying group, slowing that down and saying, “my first call them has to be on aligning on the problem. I shouldn't even get to solution in that call. If we align on the problem, then we can talk about solution. Then when we've aligned on the solution, then we can talk about pricing.” I think previously I was trying to just cram all of that into one meeting.
- “What else could I do to keep this job interesting?” This actually relates to number one. ****I'm someone who's always considered themselves to be a lifelong seller, and that was perfectly fine for me, but I started getting an itch last year and say, “I know I don't want to go to the manager track. I know I don't want to go down the enablement or a leader track. What else could I do to keep this job interesting?” And that's when I looked to turn what I was kind of doing on the side of my desk, in terms of the social stuff, into more of a formal role of evangelism.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
- Dispersed teams and figuring how to get customers to make decisions in a really effective but efficient manner, is still a work-in-progress. Like the second one above. That's something I candidly think will be on my to-do list for every single year moving forward. So, I would say that's still something I've made progress on, but still have more work to do.
- A different competitor for the same category of spend. Specific for our business, one of the things that I've observed as a result of everybody having to go digital, is now we have a different type of competitor. We play, traditionally, in the sales training / sales enablement space. But now, with many companies saying, “gosh, with virtual, we need to invest in sales tech, and we need to become much more sophisticated there.” It's not that they are a competitor in the sense of what we do, but they are a competitor for the same category of spend. So to summarize it, thinking differently about how do I frame against new and emerging competitors that may not be our traditional set.
- Socializing for the business. It relates to my new job because so few people have an Evangelist role, formally. I don't think it's really understood or understood how to use effectively. So, one of the things that I'm working on right now is socializing for the business. How does Customer Success think about where Evangelists can step in? How do AEs? How does marketing? Sort of playing nice in the sandbox with all those functions.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
These all come straight from the bible of the Challenger sale, so I am absolutely a convert on that:
- Make the “Pain of Same” greater than the “Pain of Change.” In every sales conversation I have, I am thinking about “how do I make it so that customers first see that the pain of what they're currently doing is much greater than the cost of whatever solution I'm asking them to implement?” And it goes a little bit beyond just the cost of the solution, more so around the idea that I can buy a better solution from you or somebody else. But I also, in the back of my mind as a customer, know that that road to better is going to be like my political capital at risk. It's going to be budget. It could be my team looking at me being like, “why did you change this process? What we were doing was good enough.” And so the mental model that I'm approaching every sales conversation with is: avoid the urge of building up the benefit of the upside of if they go with us, and really, really hammer home the cost of whatever they're currently doing. So I refer to that as, “make Pain of Same greater than Pain of Change,” which one of our clients actually came up with years ago. That's number one.
- That mental model, but applied to Opportunity Prioritization. So I think a big mistake I made early in my career, and candidly up until a couple of years ago, was when I would get a territory in January, I’d looked through and I'd say, “what are all the sexiest names, biggest companies biggest sales teams?” I'd spent a lot of time going after them, not appreciating that in many cases, their Pain of Same was not greater than their Pain of Change. They may have already had an established methodology. They may have built something. I would kill a lot of time and productivity trying to convince them to do something different when I had a ton of companies who maybe had no sales methodology at all. Or, maybe a ton of companies that were shifting the portfolio of what they sold from hardware to software. So, taking that pain of same mentality and applying it to opportunity prioritization would be number two.
- Cost of Inaction (COI). Sort of the same theme, but when we get to the point at which we are talking about solutions, another big mistake that I made previously, that I think have done a better job at (still work-in-progress) is: it's so easy for us to jump to ROI because every customer asks about it. At the end of the day though, that does very, very little for a company who perceives that the cost of changing is significant. And so one of the mental models that I learned from Challenger was this idea of Cost of Inaction. When customers want to run to ROI, they are trying to defend the value of the investment, but oftentimes the conversation that we need to have first is, “what happens if you do nothing?” We refer to that as Cost of Inaction or COI. So being really disciplined in making sure when I get to Proposal, or when I get to Solution, I'm not just putting up an ROI number, but I'm also giving a comparison point for what happens if you decide to do nothing differently about this problem.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
- Evangelism. So I'm biased, but if you have any sort of disruptive element to your business, and you don't have customers who are naturally going to gravitate to the new and differentiated solution that you offer, evangelism is such a powerful way to take some of the pressure off of marketing, and, candidly, sellers, to go out there and socialize the problems that you solve. Socialize the pain of same. Socialize the cost of inaction. I think it's a really cool thing, even if it's a side of the desk job, like it was for me last year, to have someone dedicated in your business doing that. So that's number one, evangelism.
- Challenger. Again, biased, but I think, personally, just because of my own experience with it: in a market where risk aversion, where cost, where all of these things are increased, and make it increasingly difficult for customers to buy, I could candidly understand 5-6 years ago, when the market was thriving, why people would opt not to do Challenger. But in an environment like this, when no-decision, status quo, these are some of our biggest competitors. I think right now, Challenger should at least be considered by anybody who is selling something that's disruptive. So again, biased. I have to say what I believe.
- What I described above around Opportunity Prioritization. Moving away from just the standard employee size, or sexiness of the logo, to try to pick which opportunities we spend our time on and actually thinking about it through the lens of, “what do we have to teach that customer and is that enough to actually make meaningful progress against their business problems?” So those would be my three.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
- Josh Braun. My number one dude. Josh Braun is one of the more influential people in my own career. If you don't follow him already, Josh writes content that is beyond helpful. It's stuff when I first read it, I started thinking like, “why is he not charging for it?” He does in his classes, but he also puts a lot of content out for free. So I view him as someone that's a real helper. I've, candidly, learned a lot about cold calling, cold emailing, cold outreach from him.
- Darren McKee. So he used to be at BetterUp. He just moved over to an organization called Wellthy. Darren is someone that I think is a great example of someone who is very active on social, but productively. He's not active saying like, “this is why our solution is the best.” He starts really smart conversations that relate back to what he sells. I think he embodies a lot of the characteristics I think sellers should be thinking about today.
- Leslie Venetz. For those of you that don't know her, she was one of the earlier salespeople to get on TikTok. And I know TikTok, in many ways, is perceived as not relevant for B2B. But, she's a amassed a really big following. Some of the themes that Leslie touches on are things like women in sales, and diversity in sales, and how you show up and be your authentic self in sales, and just conversations that I think, as a result of COVID, as a result of like a deeper awareness of mental health, many times we, as sellers, are not comfortable having inside of our organizations. So I think she presents a really compelling view of things to be mindful of things, to be thinking about, as you navigate the sales role.
Work with Jen → Challenger is hiring!
Listen to Jen → Winning the Challenger Sale Podcast
🎧 Listen to more episodes → Market-to-Revenue
February 2022 · Interview by Chris Morgan, Host of Market-to-Revenue
Meet Carl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs. How community-driven content, a commitment-based sales process, and delivering on promises drives 100% revenue at Chris Walker's Refine Labs. Ask yourself, if you're a sales team or a marketing team, “do I sell in the way that I like to be sold to? Or do I market it in a way that I actually buy technology?”
17 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript here.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
- Community-driven content. One of the biggest ways that we convert our market into revenue is community-driven content. I think “thought leadership” is the old way to describe that. We found that thought leadership was very “us” centered. It was like, “me, I'm the thought leader.” It didn't have this sense of community. Thinking about content, and distributing it, in a way like, “hey, does this provide value, but also create some kind of a communal experience for our fans, or our followers, whoever it is?” Really significant spike in revenue. Like literally a 100% of Refine Labs revenue comes from our organic presence and our community-driven content.
- Commitment-based sales process. So we bring people into the funnel and then the sales process that we've architected is really commitment-based. So it gets buyers and it gets sellers, my team, on the same page from a commitment standpoint. You want me to put together an executive briefing for your team? I'm going to need these commitments from you. Right? And that really moves a sales process along, really efficiently. It also weeds out buyers that aren't really committed to investing their time, investing their money, investing resources, committing to just explore new ideas and change. It really drives very high close rates of really, really good-fit customers.
- Deliver on our promises. This is the last way that we convert our market into revenue. I guess you could say this is like recurring revenue. Making sure that there is no churn, or very minimal churn. But, when we make promises and make commitments in the sales process, we keep those, and our services team keeps those, and we help businesses grow and they continue to give us their money to reinvest it using our strategies and frameworks into their business and their growth.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
- If you notice on LinkedIn, this is my first sales leadership role. I was at HubSpot as a sales rep there as an Account Exec and came here as Director of Sales at Refine Labs. One of the most interesting challenges that I've wrestled with is switching my mind from an individual contributor mindset to a leadership mindset. I want to jump in and close the deal so bad. I want to jump in and take discovery calls, take inbound leads, things like that. And I have to remind myself sometimes, “you were hired to do these certain things. You were hired to be a strategic thinker, to architect new processes, to enable and empower my direct reports to do their best work, to hire on talent that is better than me at certain things so that we can move the business forward.” That mindset shift has been a larger challenge than I thought. You know, I just love selling. So I'm getting out of that mindset has been something that I've been wrestling with and in process of overcoming.
- Story. When you sell fairly complex, new ideas, it can be overwhelming in a sales process to educate buyers on how you think, how you execute, and how you measure success. So, how do you distill that story and narrative down to something that is compelling and impactful, but still delivers the full meat and value of what the offering is? It's a big problem, if you can't do that well. You lose deals. You can be the best service provider, best tech vendor, best software in the world, but if you can't distill down what you do and what your customer gets out of it really simply, you're going to struggle to grow. So that's something that we're tackling.
What are 2 roadblocks that you are working on now?
- So like any startup, we're a small team that is growing. I wear a lot of hats. My direct reports, my sales team, they wear a lot of hats. We don't have an enablement team or anything like that, so there's some people doing enablement. We don't have dedicated designers, so we're throwing together our own assets. That's fun, but that's also a roadblock for growth. So the challenge is when everybody's spinning a bunch of plates, knowing when the timing is right to hire somebody that's better than you at spinning that plate, or expanding the team, figuring out that timing of when to do that so that you don't decelerate the business is something that we're working on. It is a work in progress, but a super fun roadblock to tackle.
- What does outbound look like? I don't know how much you know about Refine Labs, but we're a go-to-market strategy and research firm, and what does outbound look like? We're largely inbounds, like 99.998% inbound, but we do want to start and spark conversations proactively with our dream clients, with our target customers. So what does outbound look like for them? We want to shy away from the cold calling or the cold emailing. Not because we think that's necessarily bad or anything, but because it hasn't been innovated. A lot of the innovation is still happening inside those channels. “Use these subject lines. Use these cold call openers.” and we're really wrestling with what does innovation look like just outside of those channels? Can we discover new ways to proactively begin conversations with our target customers and our dream clients? And that's something that we're really excited to be tackling and working on.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
- Extreme ownership. I don't even know if it’s a mental model, but I'm a big fan of Jocko Willink’s work, Extreme Ownership. And I believe that's a mental model. That's a filter, or a high-resolution lens, in which I view my day, my life, my, the way I interact with my family, my work. And the model is essentially extreme ownership. Like everything that happens, happened because of something that I did. I own all of the outcomes in my world. I still use that mindset even when something happens outside of your control, there was something that you maybe contributed that may tip that first domino that resulted in something happening that maybe potentially caused harm to a relationship, or harm to your business, or something like that. So that's the first mental model that I use to do my best work. It’s just “I own everything.” Whether I own it or not in real life, I just take ownership of all of it, and I really empower my team to do the same. And we do some stellar work because of that.
- A moat model. Again, I'm making up the names of models at this point, but the concept of a moat is that you build a moat around your business, or a moat around your processes. There's a separation that that moat creates. Maybe you think of it as like a ring of fire, maybe I could find a better illustration than a moat. But the point of the mental model is that every process, every tactic that we do, we are asking ourselves, “does this contribute to the depth, or the width, of the moat? Are we different than our competitors? Are we different than the market? Are we helping our customers to be different than their competitors, with everything that we do?” And when you look at, and analyze, your strategies through this lens, it's really powerful because you realize a lot of this stuff that you're doing isn't moving the needle in those ways, and it really makes you second guess if this is even something that you should be investing your time. So that's the moat model.
- A time, value, opportunity-cost model. (Similar to above, there's some overlap here.) I look at everything. I calculate how much I'm paid per hour, all the way down to the hour, and then how much I want to be paid per hour, in a perfect world, and I filter my calendar events, my tasks, all of that. “Does this ‘worth’ what I make per hour? Is it generating that outcome that is that valuable when you look at your calendar, your tasks, your relationships in those ways?” (Not to say that personal relationships should like be monetized. You understand where I'm going.) Just being very thoughtful about how you spend your time, and if you're getting the return on that time that you intend to get. It can be really easy to do a bunch of stuffIt doesn't produce the results you're looking to produce, both in business, and in life, and family.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
Oh, man, we got a lot of opinions here at Refine Labs.
- Organic social. Just taking organic social more seriously. It takes time, but there's so much low-hanging fruit. I talked to CEOs every day that want to give us their money to run paid advertising, and one of the questions I love to ask is, “cool. What's the plan for the free stuff, for social? Your buyers are there now. You could spend $0 and go get your message in front of your buyers. It's going to take a little bit of work, and you're gonna have to log into LinkedIn, and you have to click the Like button, and start to think through content creation, but man, it snowballs so fast.” Like what you're doing with the podcast (another way), it snowballs so quickly and the results – again, it's a moat builder to go back to that mental model – cause nobody's still taking it seriously. It took us 2-3 years to build our organic presence to where it is today at Refine Labs, so it takes time. I just hit 10,000 followers. I've been doing this for two years, so it takes time. If you're not starting right now, you're still not going to be there in 2023 at this time. You got to get started. That's where there's a lot of opportunity. I see a lot of companies not getting started, so they're not going to be there next year either. The time is always right now.
- Creating content for consumption versus conversion. Here's what I mean by that: you scroll through LinkedIn, you will see organic posts that really push for a ‘Like’, ‘thoughts?’, ‘comment below.’ Polls are a great example. Very low value. Most of them, what were they designed for? Conversion. Some kind of engagement metric that could be seen and measured. They weren't designed for the consumption of a differentiating or valuable message. Same thing happens in paid advertising. You look at ads: creative teams creating ads that just point to downloading an eBook. That's an ad that's designed for conversion, but only 0.4%, if you're a rockstar marketer, of people are going to click through. What about the other 99.6% of people that will see that?Give them a compelling message to consume in the feed, using design and copy, so they can consume that, without caring at all for the conversion. The conversion is icing on the cake. That's how you create real demand. So that's the second technique that teams need to try. That's a big transformation, and a mindset shift, but it's well worth it.
- Ask yourself, if you're a sales team or a marketing team, “do I sell in the way that I like to be sold to? Or do I market it in a way that I actually buy technology?” I get nurtured to death by some vendors via email. And I'm like, “I don't think I've ever bought software because of an email drip campaign.” I barely read them. I suffer through like eight of them, and then I typically unsubscribe, and I think that's a pretty common experience. So ask yourself, “where do I want to be nurtured?” I'm on social all day. The last time I bought software wasn't from a cold call, it was from, “oh, I know that this CEO posted. I really liked them online. I decided to check out their product.” I just went white-hot inbound and got a demo. So think about how you buy as a framework for informing your strategy. I see just a lot of revenue leaders that run their strategies according to how a 2011 buyer would buy and they haven't even bought anything off a cold call, or a cold email, or some kind of a marketing email nurture campaign. So thinking through that, I think, is critical.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
Well, I only had 2 for a couple of other questions, Chris, I'm gonna try to make up here. So I got 4:
- Jen Allen. You got to talk to Jen. She's fantastic. She's Chief Evangelist Officer over at Challenger. Huge fan of Challenger. The content that she puts out on LinkedIn is very different. A lot of content on LinkedIn, especially in like the sales ecosystem, is very entry-level. It's for SDRs. A lot of prospecting tips and things like that. So Jen is a breath of fresh air because it's content designed for the closer, for the deal, for a more experienced closing type of rep, and I learned a ton from it. I consume a lot of her content.
- Arthur Castillo. Over at Chili Piper. They're a great team. We're a customer. Arthur is a dear friend and he just has such a unique perspective. He actually comes from sales and now is in marketing. So he's a fantastic resource. He really understands the entire Revenue org, the entire customer journey, and is a big, big resource there for thinking innovatively about how those two teams can work together.
- MJ Peters. Gosh what to say? MJ was my boss here at Refine Labs and she is a VP of Marketing now at another awesome tech startup. MJ is one of these marketers that will be a CRO or CEO one day. She closed millions of dollars in business at Refine Labs and is probably one of the most sought-after marketers in B2B SaaS today. Think about how dynamic of a person you have to be to be a world-class marketer and be able to close half a million dollar deals and just knock them down. Just a genius. She really is just brilliant and you definitely got to have her on the podcast.
- Sam Kuehnle. He’s a friend as well and a colleague. Just a world-class marketer. Bright, bright thinker. Extremely thoughtful. You're going to get way better answers from him than from me on some of these things. He strikes me as the type of guy who probably has some baked-out mental models. He's just a really, really bright marketing leader and does some fantastic work for our team and for our customers.
Work with Carl → Refine Labs is hiring!
Meet Mark Znutas, Vice President of GTM Strategy and Operations at Hubspot. The 3 go-to-market motions that drive revenue at Hubspot. Getting people aligned on strategy at different time horizons. Why Mark is focused on scale now. How to use the scientific method. Adding value before extracting value through product-led growth.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
I think we actually have exactly three ways of converting our market into revenue:
1) Through a direct sales team. We have an inside sales go-to-market model, driven predominantly through volume of customers. We have over 150,000 customers at HubSpot.
2) Through our partner channels. Our partner channel converts our market to revenue by reselling HubSpot software, and then also providing services to a growing ecosystem of HubSpot prospects and customers.
3) The newest channel that we have at HubSpot is our product team. So we have about a little over 15% of our new business comes through a product-led sales motion and that's new at HubSpot over the last five years or so.
So, those are three primary ways that we convert our market into revenue.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) The hardest one that I've overcome is defining HubSpot's long-term go-to-market strategy across an organization of now almost 6,000 people. Getting people aligned on concepts and making sure that they understand where the organization's going is part of my job. And it's hard, especially at that size and scale.
2) Creating a strategic planning process at our size and scale. We have a longterm vision. We need to translate that into an annual plan and getting that done is really hard. You have different teams across marketing, sales, customer success that have different interests. We need to make sure that we're prioritizing the right set of work to hit our plans in the near term, but also set ourselves up for growth longer term. And then we need to make sure that we have the resourcing and the budgeting to support it.
3) Building a team. In 2019, I was in a go-to-market strategy role and an individual contributor, and now my team's over 30 people. So building that team out has been definitely a hard problem to solve, but one of the most rewarding ones for me, for sure.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
1) Leveraging our systems to drive scale. We've got this incredible machine at HubSpot, but one of the criticisms that I have with our growth has been it's been fairly human centric, you know? You have to add a sales rep or a CSM to keep growing your install base. So we're really focused on leveraging systems and automation to drive scale. So we can scale from having 150,000 customers to 400,000 customers over the next few years. so that's one big one for us. How do we use our systems to really get outsized leverage? We call it nonlinear growth so that we separate our revenue growth and our headcount growth.
2) Demand generation at our size and scale. We have a freemium go-to-market motion. We have well over a million software sign-ups per year, but we're starting to see that there's limits on how to generate that demand through organic search and paid search. We need to start to think about new channels, like virality and partnerships, to drive growth in our demand engine over time. That's a big one that we're working on.
3) All about scale. Kind of ties back to my first point about systems, but we want to make sure that we continue to deliver a really great experience for our customers as we scale to hundreds of thousands of customers. We have a great experience for our customers today at our size and scale. We want to make sure that we don't lose that, and break that, as we start to grow our customer base pretty fast.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) The scientific method. It’s one that I love and that I talk to my team about all the time, and they probably think I'm a broken record. My observation here is that Growth teams and Product teams are actually really good at using the scientific method. They observe customers, they form a hypothesis, they experiment, they analyze the results, they draw a conclusion. I don't think we do enough of that on the go-to-market side. My team has really focused on driving go-to-market innovation at HubSpot. So I use this scientific method framework and mental model all the time. It's super helpful for me to frame up a problem and have a somewhat objective way of evaluating an outcome and proposing a path forward. So that's one.
2) Playing to Win. It’s a book and mental model that our CEO Yamini Rangan introduced me to. And it's really a way of thinking about developing strategy. That Playing to Win framework is first, defining where to play. So, who's your target market? Second is developing a strategy for how to win. How do you actually win in that target market? And then third, how do you build a management system so that you can define where to play and how to win? So that Playing to Win framework has been a powerful one that I've learned from Yamini over the last two years.
3) The Horizon Investment model. And the concept there is that you want to think about making investments on your product team or your go-to-market team in several different horizons. A simple way of thinking about it as in three horizons. you've got Horizon 1. And that's your immediate-term bets you want to make. And really the goal there is to hit your short-term targets. Horizon 2 is your medium-term bets. And then Horizon 3 are your big, more speculative bets. And I think companies that continue to innovate really think about a distribution across those three horizons and aren’t too focused just on Horizon 1 or Horizon 2. So I like that mental model and way of thinking about just how to allocate investment.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Product-led growth. I love the concept of adding value before extracting value. And that's one of the things that we talk about all the time with our freemium go-to-market motion. We try to add value for our customers. They can try our software before they buy it. It's been really powerful for us to have less reliance on our sales and CS teams and more reliance on really scalable motions to delight our customers. So that's one.
2) Chat-based go-to-market. That's been really powerful for us. One observation that we've made is that people want help in real-time today. You don't even want to wait 10 minutes. They get an email, a response. If you have a question from a vendor that you're working with, you want that answer in real-time and we've seen this be really powerful for not only our customers, but for HubSpot. So we've moved our support team to be chat-based and the value for customers is that they get answers in real time. The value for HubSpot is we can have one chat agent working with five customers, rather than just on one phone call. We've moved into chat-based sales, selling our starter product tier, which is our entry level tier, without a long sales discovery, negotiation and close, but just answering some questions for customers and they're ready to be on their way. Then we also have our CS teams increasingly in chat. So that's been really powerful for us.
3) The concept of voice of the customer. This is something that HubSpot introduced back in 2018. We wanted to really walk-the-walk on being a customer-centric organization. We created this team called Voice of the Customer. The team's really focused on understanding all of the different customer challenges. Challenges that our wide swath of customers have. Synthesizing those. Going to the executive team with insights from our customers. Holding ourselves accountable to really keep customers at the forefront of the way that we operate. And then, holding ourselves accountable to make progress and solve some of those customer pain points. So that's one that I think is really important for all go-to-market teams. Really staying focused and grounded in your decision-making based on customer needs.
Who are 3 operators that should be our next guests and why?
A lot of names popped up and I've been at HubSpot for a long time. So most of them are HubSpot names. And the three that I would say would be great guests are:
1) Mike Pici. Mike is currently in Executive-in-Residence at a company called Reforge. Before that he was a VP of Product at HubSpot. He was in sales. He's got a really unique background because he ran a product team but he also ran a sales team. So right at that intersection of product and go-to-market, which I think is on-trend with where the industry is going today.
2) Chris Miller. Chris runs the Growth team at HubSpot. I work with his team quite a bit on the go-to-market side. He's incredibly smart. Very much a believer in the scientific method and the way that he runs and operates his product team. Super sharp. He has really changed the way we think about growth product that Hubspot
3) Emily Haahr. Emily runs Support at Plaid. She ran support at HubSpot before Plaid and she also is super sharp. She really has a good pulse of customers and has that product-mindset that I think is important for pretty much all go-to-market operators in this day and age.
So Mike Pici, Chris Miller, and Emily Haahr are my three!
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February 2022 · Interview by Chris Morgan, Host of Market-to-Revenue