From Good To Great: How Account-Based Marketing Revolutionizes Sales And Marketing Alignment With Kristina Jaramillo

Posted on August 16, 2023August 27, 2023 by stratyve_ant2yf

Account-based marketing is the secret weapon that unites sales and marketing. It unlocks unparalleled growth and drives personalized interactions that resonate with clients, leaving generic approaches and missed opportunities far behind. In this episode, we have exceptional marketing strategist Kristina Jaramillo to discuss the world of account-based marketing and its game-changing potential in revolutionizing go-to-market strategies. She highlights the critical role ABM plays in bridging the gap between sales and marketing teams. Drawing from her experiences, she shares how she identifies the ideal personas, the importance of understanding clients’ evolving needs, and how to tailor content for a personalized customer journey. She also reveals the common pitfall of marketing teams falling into a sea of generic messaging, missing the mark on differentiation. Kristina reflects on her go-to-market journey, imparting valuable advice, from the power of challenging the status quo to the art of qualifying prospects efficiently. Tune in now and learn how to seize the ABM advantage!

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From Good To Great: How Account-Based Marketing Revolutionizes Sales And Marketing Alignment With Kristina Jaramillo

I’m looking forward to my conversation with Kristina here. Kristina, welcome to the show. I’m looking forward to our engaging conversation around ABM and everything else.

Thank you so much for having me, Vijay. I’m looking forward to it, too as well.

The first question I ask and this is a great conversation starter and my audience loves this, which is, how do you view and define go-to-market?

That is a good question to start off with because everyone has a different take on it. I would say go-to-market is all-encompassing. It’s a step-by-step plan that’s designed for everyone. It’s not just a marketing or a sales thing. It’s how we are going to bring new products, new solutions, any kind of ideas we have as an organization to new customers, existing customers and accounts to drive and capture that demand and eventually revenue.

You touched upon different aspects over here. You’ve touched upon product, marketing, sales, and even customer success. I love the fact that you are pointing out that it’s all of these functions together. That’s what it takes to bring a product or a service to market.

It’s definitely a team sport.

As you and I know, both of us have worked at different companies and with different clients of all various shapes and sizes. Clearly, go-to-market is broken in many ways. One of the things that I’ve seen is a lot of the leadership talk about go-to-market involves all these functions, but when it comes to putting it to practice, that may not be happening for various reasons. For example, marketing finger-pointing to sales and sales doing it the other way around is one example. Also, the other flavor that I’ve seen play out is marketing doing its own thing. Sales is doing its own thing. They may come together, but they don’t bring in products.

I also think it’s different KPIs. When marketing is not focused on revenue, like sales or customer successes, it gets very tricky and it gets messy. That’s why they think the finger-pointing is, but if we’re all on the same page at the end of the day, we want to move revenue or have X goal, then I think that’s much easier for the go-to-market strategy. If we’re saying we want marketing-qualified leads or sales-qualified leads, but revenue is much more concrete and an easier goal to get everyone behind.

When marketing is not focused on revenue, like sales or customer successes, it gets very tricky. It gets messy. Share on X

I don’t know how much of it is being put into practice, but at least I’m seeing more and more conversations happening in the social world and with the people I’m talking to, especially with marketing moving away from MQLs as one of the KPIs versus the revenue numbers and even pipeline numbers. That’s more material.

That’s more important. It’s also how we’re improving ARR, GRR, NRR. Everything has to be tied to revenue in some way, shape or form. Otherwise, you’re doing tactics and you’re going through the motions. If it’s not going towards that specific goal of whatever the focus is, if we want to retain, we want to expand, we want net new, whatever that focus is, as an organization, whatever’s more important to them. If you’re not tying back to revenue, you’re going to get lost in the tactics.

I was speaking with another guest right before we hopped onto this and what he mentioned is something that I like and not many people are thinking about this. Go-to-market is always evolving. It does not stay. Go-to-market in the early stage is different from go-to-market at $5 million or $10 million, and go-to-market for one product is different from go-to-market for a different product.

I think we’ve all learned that business leaders, marketers and sales leaders, everything is always evolving. Whether it’s the market, whether it’s our organization or our customers, we have to evolve with them, otherwise, we’re going to get left behind.

Something else that I started seeing, especially because I work a lot with my clients around product marketing and go-to-market, one of the things that I emphasize on is how much of the customer insights are you actually caring about and bringing into the organization. I was in a conversation with a company that was doing $100 million in revenue. When I said, “We need to focus on customer insight,” she was going, “Okay, Vijay, that’s good, but do you really want to talk to customers?” I said, “Yeah, it is customer insights for a reason, so I do want to talk to customers.”

It’s interesting because so many companies will have the value that they believe they’re delivering or their solutions are delivering to the customer, and then the customer will say, “Yeah, we agree,” or “No, we don’t agree.” This is what we actually see that you do for us best. It could change your whole go-to-market strategy if you speak to those customers and say, “We didn’t realize that we were delivering another value that they appreciate even more.”

Switching gears. Can you share with the readers your career story? What got you into where you are now and why did you pick this path, or maybe the path picked you? What is your career journey like?

After school, I did go into corporate. It was working for me. I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to be my own boss. I started on the side, working with a content marketer. He had a content marketing firm and we’ve evolved into a one-to-one ABM. That’s why our organization is called Personal ABM. We focus on those one-to-one interactions. We always noticed through working together that the more relevant we got to the individual, not just their persona, industry, or company, the better the conversation was, whether that was around the marketing side of the conversation or the sales side.

The more relevant and personal we got to that per individual than the buying committee, the better everything went. That’s how we evolved. We went from content marketing to article marketing to social marketing with LinkedIn. We noticed that LinkedIn was the best platform for B2B. We’ve always done B2B. That’s how we’ve gotten to where we are. The more relevant and personal we can get, the better.

The more relevant and personal we can get, the better. Share on X

What is the rationale or thought process behind naming your company Personal ABM?

For people that are familiar with ABM, the three buckets of ABM, there’s one-to-one, one-to-few and one-to-many. We focus strictly on the one-to-one. We are working with clients that have contract values of at least 100K-plus, even into the multimillion contracts. These are deals that are not going to happen in 2 weeks or 30 days. There are 3, 6 and sometimes 18-month selling cycles. These clients, the prospects that they’re going after need that more personal attention, hence the personal relevance and the Personal ABM side of it. ABM has been defined by the tech that’s involved with it. What’s been synonymous with ABM has been ABM tech and we are the opposite of that.

For us, ABM tech can feed into your one-to-one approach. It’s almost like ABM Tech has made account-based demand gen. It hasn’t been account-based selling, marketing or account-based experiences being delivered. Once you automate it, it’s very hard to get as personal and relevant. I’m not talking, “Vijay fits this role in this organization.” I’m talking about what’s important to him in his role, not as just a marketing leader.

By the way, I’m a big believer in personalized and doing things that don’t scale because at the end of the day, that’s what matters. I want to double-click into this thought process and frameworks that you have, if you can share. What type of clients or companies do you engage with?

B2B, obviously, they are typically what we’ve worked with, with people that are on the technology, SaaS, supply chain tech space. They have to have a minimum of $100,000-plus to get the ROI on our programs. An ideal client would say, “We’re using Demandbase. We’re using Terminus. We’re using 6Sense. We might be using all of them, but we are having a problem getting past filling the pipeline. Pipeline, we’re good with. We’re having problems with stage progression, with accelerating sales cycles and with moving them further in their buyer’s journey.”

That’s where we can say, “Do you want to use ABM to accelerate sales cycles? Do you want to use ABM to protect and expand or is it a retention play? Where is the red in the business? Where should we put it into the focus?” That’s how we can figure out where we’re going. They have a defined need. They’re using tech. It’s not working for them to get everything they want as far as they want. It’s the next evolution of using the tech to go back and see, “What are those interactions that we’re having? What are those experiences that we’re delivering? How can we improve them so that we can apply those learnings to the one-to-few and one-to-many?”

This is super helpful because I’ve seen companies that operate in, “Do you want to set up an ABM program? We can do that right from the processes of frameworks, the teams that you need to have in place, which ABM tech to select, install, and onboard the folks on?” That’s just one other piece. That’s an entirely different piece versus what you’re focusing on. You and your team are focusing on, “You got an ABM program running, you got those ABM platforms that are running, but for some reason, your ABM programs and campaigns that you have been running is not penetrating in account ABC or region ABC.”

You’re not getting the maximum ROI. These are the bigger players that you want to push through the funnel. Maybe they engage for some reason or at one point and they went cold. We have to figure out what is it that happened. Is there an internal strategic priority that we need to better align with for them to get that conversation moving?

What do you see that are typical “problems” or barriers? Clearly, they got to the point that this ABM team has been running. They developed and designed the program and campaign in a certain way. They got some traction with some of the folks within that specific account, but some things happened. There was some sort of barriers to why people were not engaging anymore. From your viewpoint and experience, what do you see as those barriers?

It’s because they were telling everyone’s story with that client. Let me give you an example. We were working with a conversational AI company called Uniphore. They were trying to penetrate a with AI particular bank that was one of the largest players. If I said the name, you’d be like, “Okay.” They were sharing content, messaging, and articles with them on the importance of AI, but it wasn’t working for them because we did a little research and we found out that this particular bank had already developed their own AI internally.

They were sharing the wrong kind of messaging and the wrong kind of content with them. We switched the conversation away from the use of the need for AI in their call centers, as opposed to how can we optimize it? How can we better improve it? How can we layer this solution on top of what you’ve already done to achieve X, Y, and Z? That’s a very different conversation than brand awareness, generic thought leadership, and things like that.

It comes back to Marketing 101. It boils down to what phase or what stage your buyer is in. Clearly, in this case, the bank knows about AI, versus this company was trying to educate and sell them about AI, which was like night and day. There’s a gap right there. You can clearly see the reason why they did not engage any further. You and your team did some digging around and found that that’s not the type of content you should be putting out versus it’s more about educating. “Yes, you guys know the value of AI in support or contact center teams, but this is why you need to talk to us, this company.”

“These are the gaps that we see in your current processes. This is where we see room for improvement and optimization.” You’re coming to the table saying that you understand their organization and their issues as opposed to blanketing them or putting them in the same pile of, they’re a bank. They have this issue.

For me, it pains me a lot because ABM stands for Account-Based Marketing, which means you should be knowing that account inside out, but clearly that’s not the case.

No, because I think a lot of people rush into ABM and say, “Let’s retrofit what we’re already doing into our existing processes, existing systems, and put in the tool, slap it in, and it’s going to run the same way we’ve been doing it. They’re not changing interactions. You’re not changing experiences. You’re not as focused.

Going back to that becoming targeted demand gen. It’s moving away from what it could be. That’s why I think it should be account-based revenue. How are we going to, as a team, get to revenue for this account? What is that going to look like? What kind of play, campaign and content messaging? What does sales need to do? What kind of enablement do we need as a whole to move that account forward?

Hence, why this one-to-one personal approach has to be for your biggest ticket clients or prospective clients because it’s labor intensive, a lot of research needed and a lot of moving parts to get going. It’s one of those parts of ABM that it depends if it fits your organization because one-to-one to other organizations might be, “We have a customized landing page for X, Y, Z company. We’re doing one-to-one.” That’s not the flavor of ABM that we do, but that might work for someone who maybe has a $10,000 solution.

It’s almost like an automated campaign even. It’s at an account level. You cannot do a landing page-type campaign with a true ABM client or situation. In this case, especially if it’s like $100,000-plus deal, a campaign go to check out this landing page, click, and say, “Click to talk to sales will not work.”

If it does work, it’s going to be few and far between, and you’ll have to do it hundreds and hundreds of times to even. You’re wasting your time if you want to close that one account or a couple of accounts that look like that. You could take those learnings and then scale that way. I think people jump into it and scale right away instead of slowing down and stepping back and say, “How can we scale this effectively, efficiently, and slowly so that we’re setting ourselves up for success in the long run as opposed to just getting it out there and getting it started and launching it right away?”

Clearly, you’ve uncovered a major pain point when it comes to executing ABM. Let’s go back to the earlier part of your days when you started Personal ABM, your own company. Earlier, you were developing content and then social media, but somehow you identified this gap within. There’s a pain point and people are willing to pay for it when it comes to personal ABM. Walk us through that journey. How did they arrive at that point?

It’s interesting because we were typically engaging with marketers in the beginning, and they’re like, “The strategies you guys are putting together are for specific selling conversations. We realized that there was that gap. Typically, we’ve seen that marketing is brand awareness, lead gen, PR communications and things like that.

We were in the marketing place of specifically helping a sales team, maybe senior sales leaders depending on the organization because of the size of the deal with their enterprise accounts or their bigger accounts. We are marketing for selling conversations. I know it sounds interesting and odd because you feel like marketing should be for selling, but it’s not always. It’s usually automation, brands, and campaigns. We are kind of the opposite of that.

Initially, with your account marketing, your clients and personnels were in the marketing team and function, but then you figured out your ideal or evolved persona is more in the sales, like account executive or regional sales manager.

It’s interesting. Sometimes it’s even product marketing, VPs of sales, sales enablement because we’re doing that bespoke work for them. It’s not necessarily this is beyond BDRs and AEs. It’s way from that demand gen side or lead gen side.

Going back to what my audience loves about this show and what they look forward to is a go-to-market success story and a go-to-market failure story. If you can walk us through a go-to-market success story first. It is your choice. You can walk us through the failure first.

Let’s do success stories first. I have to give you a little bit of background, so bear with me. We were working with leadership at a UK ITSM analytics firm. They were a SaaS. They were trying to create a new category for them. It was Capacity Planning as a Service or CPaaS. They were looking to become an international player, but they hired a research firm. The research firm said that they would have to break out of their finance niche category because they were known in the financial industry, so they had a lot of work to do.

They needed to create demand for a new product and a new category into new markets. They’re basically almost starting from scratch. They brought on a PR team, drove awareness for that category, invested in intent platform. They had 6Sense, Demandbase for ABM and intent. They were driving awareness pipeline growth but limited stage progression and revenue improvement. Something that I talked about earlier is that we’re filling the pipeline but not getting any further.

We noticed that they had tried to retrofit the lead process they had. They were trying to plug and play the technology instead of building that foundation to see stronger revenue growth for ABM. There was that handoff between sales and marketing versus, “How are we going to work together? How are we going to align and orchestrate as a team?” They were missing the fact that ABM should change that whole selling conversation, changing the sales process, the motions, and the interactions.

We noticed that they didn’t have that content to support the selling conversation. Most importantly, they didn’t have the content to support internal selling conversations. After they’ve done all they can with a demo or whatever it is and shared all their content, what’s going on behind closed doors and how can we support them?

They had defined their ICP, but they didn’t segment that ICP. They treated all those opportunities the same. They gave everyone the same attention, focus, and approach, no matter if they were tier 1, 2, or 3, so we had to adjust that. There was also no strategy for how the go-to-market teams were going to use that intent to engage in closing those in-market accounts that were identified by 6Sense.

They had a lot of activities and cadences, but there wasn’t coordination. That’s how it boils down to sales and marketing coordination. How are we going to work together? They also lacked a strategy for organizations that were stuck in the status quo. These are the organizations that weren’t responsive to their campaigns, accounts that maybe showed previous engagement but disengaged for whatever reason, stuck in the buying journey. We noticed it was because they didn’t see that differentiation to create a buying consensus. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that you can create that internal buying consensus.

We did a little bit of research. We spoke to the sales and go-to-marketed teams. We realized that a lot of the companies that they were targeting outside of their niche or financial industry didn’t understand their tool or how capacity planning would actually help their organization. There was a lot of education they still needed to do. They didn’t see how it would impact the team internally, the business, P&L and how it would impact their infrastructure and visibility gaps within the organization with their IT processes. How does it impact homegrown tech they were already using?

We had to make sure that we were changing that sales conversation to see how the business issues were related and how this tool could fit them. In order to drive growth, we came to the realization that we needed to slow them down to speed them up. We had to get that strategy right before they actually tried to go-to-market as successfully as they wanted to.

What we did was made sure to increase their relevance across all channels. That’s LinkedIn profiles, content they’re sharing and messaging specific to decision-makers that the teams wanted to connect with. We also changed the sales and marketing motions across the buyer’s journey to make sure they were progressing towards revenue. We made sure that the sales and marketing conversations were fully aligned, because a lot of times, marketing might say one thing in their messaging and the selling conversation might be something else.

We needed to take those calculated steps together. We took that personal account-based approach and we aligned with the customer’s needs, their business as a whole, their needs for whatever they wanted to do as an organization for the next couple of years so that we can improve the interactions and then further scale.

Just because this ITSM changed the focus on improving those interactions in the buyer’s journey, they were actually acquired by another group. We played a role in that because, before the acquisition, they were able to gain customers like JCPenny, GoDaddy, British Airways. Now, they were acquired by a larger group that had worldwide reach and this particular organization was based strictly in the UK.

Let’s double-click. There are so many points that we can dive deep into. The first thing is, what prompted them to reach out to you? Did they reach out to you or you found them?

I think we engaged them. We engaged them because we noticed that they sounded the same as everyone. A lot of ITSM firms sound the same. I’m not sure if this’ll resonate with you, but it’s all about better people, better process, better technology, whatever that actually means. It’s very vague to me. I don’t understand what that means. I need it spelled out. We noticed that they were not standing out from their competition. That was how we opened up the conversation with them.

You reached out to maybe their sales leader or a marketing leader?

In this particular organization, it was the marketing leader, and then we were brought in to work with sales as well.

How did you structure the engagement? Based on what you mentioned, it sounds like you had to do the account research and audit and research. That was the first piece, and then identify the content gaps, and then deliver that piece of content, enable and train the account teams.

That’s why we worked with the marketing team first to identify the gaps. We created some of the content as well to fill in those gaps. We then showed them how to use it in the one-to-one conversations. They then were able to do it in the one-to-few and one-to-many. When they started doing campaigns and they could improve those interactions based on the content, based on the messaging and positioning.

You created the template and playbook for the one-to-one, which they could then use it for the one-to-few and one-to-many.

Yes.

How long was the engagement? How long did it take for them to start seeing the ball rolling in the early results?

For them, it was 3 to 6 months, but we wound up working for them up until they got acquired. We were working with them for about three years, and then the acquisition changed everything. Yeah, 3 to 6 months, and then they started realizing. A lot of change management goes into this because marketing is so focused on campaigns, scaling, and automation that you have to retrain to think a different way.

Marketing is so focused on campaigns and scaling and automation that you have to retrain to think a different way. Share on X

When you’re creating a new category or creating a new market with a new tool that nobody knows about, it takes a lot of teams to do. They worked internally on brand awareness. We worked on getting the larger deals that we knew that they had engaged with but needed a little more support in order to get the sales conversation moving.

What I like about this is the retraining. It is a fact that you need to give personal attention to doing the account research and doing things that once scale in this case. Versus marketing and sales are so trained and the mindset is so wide into doing things that scale and automate.

I’m not saying don’t do them. I’m just saying you have to do this as well as a supplement to optimize them. We talked about it earlier, evolving. Marketing is always evolving. This is a way to evolve it and make it better.

Especially in your case. I’ve seen this play out where a marketing team or sales team realize that whatever they’re doing, they have been doing is not getting the results. They need to bring in someone from an external place, like an external team and augment their internal teams. That’s what played out over here. You mentioned that engagement was for about three years.

We did work with them for a while. Yeah, three years.

Very impressive. That’s a very long engagement.

It was a complicated platform because I had to get my mind around what capacity planning as a service was and why it was so important, so I had a lot of education on my side as well. Once they were having sales conversations with bigger organizations, it made it very exciting on my end because I knew what we were doing was working, so it’s one of my favorite clients and one of my favorite stories because of it.

I think we touched upon so many points there in your GTM success story. A lot of foundation fundamentals, as well as what is missing in the marketing and sales team and why they need a very Personal ABM touch. That was a great piece. On the flip side, as you and I know, it’s not always success all the time. Walk us through a recent GTM failure story.

I have a couple of them. There’s the one that we were talking about earlier about the conversational AI. They weren’t aligning with gaps, but let’s talk about Digisuite. They came to us. They were looking to get a stronger pipeline growth from their existing ABM accounts because they wanted to fuel 4x growth over a 4-year period. That’s what the leadership team had come to a goal for them. After we started looking at the business, we saw that the real issues didn’t lie with the pipeline. They thought it was a pipeline issue. We realized it wasn’t.

It was that they were facing heavy discounting because they were going up to competing with people or organizations like Binder. They were continually losing enterprise deals to trusted legacy platforms. In their case, it was Sitecore and Adobe. They were basically getting squeezed for their deal cycles. We took a lot deeper dive. We noticed that the go-to-market teams were focusing their conversation on pain points that were similar to their competitors. They were not able to drive engagement across the organization.

They sounded very identical to competitors and they failed to teach, to differentiate, and to show where there were gaps in their competitors like Binder. There were gaps in legacy platforms or other competitors that they had that didn’t integrate like they did to integrate across the organization as opposed to being just maybe a marketing tool because they were a digital asset management organization. A lot of organizations are using these particular tools or dams in marketing, but there are other ways that they can be used. They weren’t showing the gaps and the impacts across marketing, across advertising, PR, their eCommerce and sales operation.

There were at least a dozen ways that the organizations could have been leveraging this tool that our client wasn’t discussing. We changed the conversation. We changed the interactions and the account experiences where those sales and marketing were making sure to come to each touchpoint, each interaction, whether that’s face-to-face, digital, email, phone or however they were interacting with a point of view about their prospects business.

What’s going on internally, just because we changed those conversations, they were able to increase their new logo ARR by 55%. They had two times increase in deal sizes and over 100% growth in expansion in ARR, because they were differentiating themselves and changing the conversation to see how they could impact the whole organization instead of a small department within that organization.

A recurring pattern that I’m seeing and hearing is, a lot of times, the marketing teams or these companies, the product marketing, it might be product marketing or other functions within marketing, the messaging is not differentiating versus the competitors. That’s one thing I’ve seen. That’s what stood out for me as you’re sharing this story.

In the prior case study, for me, what stood out is they did not identify or do the research around what type of content will resonate with the specific account. It boils down to what I mentioned, which is customer insights and, for whatever reason, either the product team, marketing team, or maybe even the sales team. The sales team, to some lesser extent, they do not stay in touch or they’re not very close to their prospects or customers for some reason. That is a gap that you guys are filling for them.

Yes, absolutely. We also noticed that one of our clients that we brought on, they had aggressive growth goals for 2030. I think their leadership came to them and said they want to reach $1 billion market share by 2030. They had an ABM program in place. They were using another firm, but they were still missing quarterly and yearly goals.

What we noticed was that the teams were engaging with the low-level users of their solution versus the VPs, the decision-makers, and the C-suite. They were having a conversation around regional conversation or regional discussion versus national discussion or how we can help the whole organization, not just one particular area.

They didn’t have the right KPIs, processes, or contents in place to engage those VPs, COOs, or CFOs who manage the budget for the whole organization and how they will impact the whole organization. That’s another thing that we’ve noticed. They’re having conversations across clients that we worked with about how the solution will fit or play into one area as opposed to what the solution will impact more than the one department or more than the one goal the organization is trying to achieve. You have a different conversation when you can say, “We’re going to impact these five things,” versus just the one.

It goes back to thinking about and building a successful go-to-market playbook. When you’re targeting users, it’s more like a PLG approach, versus if you’re targeting the higher-ups, like the VPs, the C-level suite, it’s definitely ABM, especially if the deal size is in the $50,000 or even $100,000-plus range.

There are bigger buying teams. We all noticed. As the last couple of years have shown, they’re getting bigger and bigger. CFOs are on deals we’ve seen with clients who have never been on the deal before. We have to make sure that we’re speaking their language, talking to what’s important to them, and how we can fill those gaps for them so that they have a stronger incentive to buy.

How do you approach your clients? What I’m hearing is a recurring pattern over here. You close the gap or you start off with customer research doing primary interviews and then uncover what content is relevant at that specific account or the team, and then create that account. You don’t just stop at account level. It’s more about using this account, how you integrate, and you start tracking that in ABM and CRM platforms across the board. How do you find your clients and what kind of services do you offer across the board?

Typically, we want to make sure that the client has a certain solution price point if we can figure that out. We also want to see what kind of technologies they’re using. Are they evolving their ABM approach or is ABM not even on the radar for them because then we have to do too much education and it would take too long? As well as we see that they got funding to fuel a particular growth. Are they trying to leverage into a new market? Are they trying to new regions of the world? What is that funding being used for? Is it being used for sales and marketing? We can speak to that and be more relevant that way.

It has to be, maybe they showed intent, whether they attended one of our webinars or one of our podcasts or things like that. It has to be a couple of things that trigger the event. We then do a little research of how our solution can fit into them. We’re constantly looking for ways to disqualify prospects only because we know that our solution is not for everyone. It’s not going to fit for everyone and the conversation will make sense for everyone.

We offer a couple of things. We do account-based intelligence and enablement. I was mentioning earlier how one of our clients was targeting banks. We did research on the particular named bank, not just banks that fit the criteria and fit the ICP. We will do account research for them so that they make sure they’re addressing what’s going on internally.

We also have one-to-one services. If you know that you’ve identified these couple of dozen accounts that are engaged or went dark for whatever reason and we need help to progress the deal, then that’s something we can help as well. We also have account-based enablement, accounts-based intelligence, the one-to-one. That’s the three ways that we play. We just revamped the website, so I’m trying to figure it out.

In a nutshell, that’s what I was getting at. We talk about other companies or other clients’ go-to-market. Versus now, we articulated your go-to-market. What stood out for me is that you first of all have a clear ICP criteria, do your account research, and are present on different channels, podcast or LinkedIn or webinar, and other events. You qualify and disqualify whether you need to have a further conversation.

I try to do it as quickly as possible only because I’ve learned the hard way.

This is something that I am learning as well. I know we are getting more into our personal territories, but the best salespeople, I’ve been studying them. They are very quick at disqualifying opportunities.

They have to stay hyper-focused.

I know we are coming towards the end of the conversation. Let’s switch gears over a bit. If you could turn back time and go back to day one of your go-to-market journeys, what advice would you give to your younger self?

This piece of advice would actually probably apply to personal and business, but speed up to slow down. A lot of organizations are trying to scale and I understand the need, but they’re also forgetting that they’re going to scale with wrong interactions and wrong experiences, so they’re not having the desirable impact.

If we can take a step back, then we can scale correctly and more efficiently as opposed to having to go back to the drawing board and saying, “We scaled right away, but all the messaging was wrong, so now we have to start all over again.” You might not realize that until a couple of years down the line when it might be either too late, depending on your organization, or require way more work because you’ve been at that particular framework for so long.

The final question before we wrap this up is, what would you call out as your wanted superpower or skills? What do people approach you for around go-to-market?

I would say that I am a big believer of the challenger sales, so I am a challenging status quo. I would say a lot of things on LinkedIn, on my podcast, in my writing that maybe goes against marketing 101. I’m not a big believer in campaigns. I know that they’re a necessity, but I go against that. I think people would say that I stand out for that.

Also, being a woman business owner and being in business for over ten years and having this business is something that’s not as common. In marketing, I’ve seen the men and women, but I haven’t seen as many marketing firm leaders in the female aspect. I would say those 1 or 2 superpowers. Also, the fact that I’m a multitasker because I’m a mom, but that comes with the territory.

Thank you for our wonderful conversation, Kristina. I totally enjoyed our conversation around ABM, what you bring to the clients, and what you do around go-to-market. Kudos. Good luck to you and your team.

Thank you so much, Vijay. I appreciate it.

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RevGenius: Building An Amazing Community With Jared Robin

Posted on August 2, 2023August 27, 2023 by stratyve_ant2yf

It is uncommon to get disenfranchised from your career and journey toward your passion. Discover the remarkable journey that led today’s guest to success. Jared Robin, the Co-Founder of RevGenius, navigates through his journey to find his core in building an amazing community. He also shares how LinkedIn helps him acquire amazing people around his business. Jared also explains the value of diversity and inclusivity in a community. Today, we are thrilled to embark on an incredible journey with the one and only Jared Robin. Get ready to dive deep into this captivating episode!

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Listen to the podcast here

RevGenius: Building An Amazing Community With Jared Robin

I hope you’re having a great day or evening, whatever may be the case. Here I am, super excited to have a new guest on the show. I’m thrilled to host Jared Robin. As you may have heard, he is a man of many backgrounds and many achievements, one of which is the RevGenius community. Without further ado, let’s welcome the guest and dive into the details here. Welcome, Jared. I am super thrilled.

Thank you for having me. I’m so amped to be here.

Likewise. The first question I always ask each and every one of my guests, and this is where discussions get going, is how do you view and define go-to-market?

A cohesive plan and strategy to bring your product or service to market. It is plain and simple. There are lots of nuances in there from different sales motions, marketing, rev ops, etc., and the nuances between the plan to do it. It also is continuously evolving because it’s not just bringing it to market. It’s also when you’re in the market recalibrating, doubling down, and scaling.

Especially the last portion that you mentioned, I believe it’s Sangram Vajre and quite a few others who mentioned thinking of go-to-market as a product and it is evolving. You have a version one. It especially depends on the stage of the company or the stage of the product you are in. It’s going to evolve. You need to be in touch with your market, customers, and segments. Depending on whom you’re targeting, it has to evolve, plain and simple.

There are no two go-to-markets that are identical, even if the founder is identical. There are nuances. There’s so much that could change including the actual market.

You have grown up the ranks, especially in sales. You started your career at FedEx. Why don’t you share your career story, and then we can deep dive into the specific timelines over there?

I went from being an individual contributor at FedEx to being a Head of Sales at early-stage companies later on. What a journey. I went from a Fortune 100 company seller to technology sales. I was running a fashion magazine on the side, and then culminating before running sales and growth for a couple of two-sided marketplaces early that didn’t find product market fit. One of them didn’t. The other one could have and should have, but there were some nuances that the founding team didn’t address that probably held us back from that. I certainly felt like we were there. Also, being the first seller leader at a marketing agency before the pandemic and then founded RevGenius.

If I were to go back in time, you are talking about companies like Granify. You were at Flipkart, which is pretty impressive.

I was at a company that sold Flipkart. That was Upstream Commerce. I was the Director of Enterprise Sales there.

You were at Granify. What did Granify do back in the day?

Predictive analytics and eCommerce. We looked at 400 attributes every second of every visit of every website visitor. We were able to understand who was going to buy or not buy on their website. We then figured out what they needed to see, when they needed to see it, and how they needed to see it to overcome the why and get them to throw something in their card and close the deal. We held ourselves accountable against a control group to show that we were impacting revenues. That was several years ago before all this AI stuff. That sounds pretty close.

Something that catches my attention is you started off as a sales individual contributor then went into more of biz dev, and then eventually sales executed roles. You also crossed or touched upon different industries. You touched upon eCommerce. FedEx is completely and entirely different. You went into leading a digital fashion publication magazine. You were editor-in-chief.

I did that as a side project.

What is driving you to pursue all these different diverse activities?

I went into FedEx because I was a supply chain major. My dad met a FedEx rep at a barbecue. I’m like, “Wow.” I wanted to go into sales, not the supply chain part. This was a logistics company. It meshed both together and made a lot of logical sense and a pretty good career progression. I left that because my ambition wasn’t being satisfied. It was hard with a Fortune 100 company to put your stamp on things. Even if you were in leadership, that would’ve taken a lifetime to get to the director level. VP level may or may not have happened, but even if you got there, it is still hard to put your stamp on that company. You could have, but it was a long path and one where I didn’t feel I was driving enough impact.

I went into tech because I wanted part equity in something. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. At Granify, we didn’t have a product-market fit early. I got to create something that I wanted and realized that fashion was something I liked. I figured that out along the way. We built a fashion magazine and got 10,000 monthly readers to it. We built quite a bit of credibility in the fashion industry and won international fashion film awards in other countries. We were in other international fashion film festivals. That appeased my creative side.

I ended up putting it down because, and we’ll talk about this later, from the go-to-market perspective, it didn’t generate any money. I wasn’t thoughtful about the plan to do it. I thought a passion project would turn into a money project by osmosis but realized later that intentionality is an important factor in a lot of things. Also, I could have probably stuck out, gotten smarter people, and brought in somebody to leadership to help my gaps. I probably should have.

During the daytime, I found an opportunity that bridged this technology and fashion together, which was Swipecast. It was a two-sided marketplace where I brought on the first sales connecting models, photographers, and hair and makeup stylists to brands. I had a salary doing that. That wasn’t a high salary. I took a pay cut to do that, but it was a passion.

After everyone there was let go, I went to a two-sided marketplace called Portion, which was art on the blockchain. I love this idea of creativity and technology meshing. I told you about the fashion part. I told you about the tech part. We never hit product market fit there. Investors stopped investing and all of that stuff.

It is interesting you made the change or jump from fashion to blockchain. It’s completely like night and day.

It’s not. Some of the principles are similar in terms of creativity. From a blockchain perspective, we were selling art and collectibles. We were selling creative products that were tokenized. Picture Artsy on the blockchain. There wasn’t enough interest from people in the art world to have blockchain behind the stuff. There was more interest in creating NFTs. That was the gap. We were trying to bridge the worlds together. It was a great learning experience nonetheless. Better GTM would’ve helped there, for sure, but the product market fit wasn’t there. I’m not even sure that that would’ve been perfect. I then stabilized after that whirlwind at a marketing agency.

Is that Deux you’re referring to?

Yes. It was Deux that dealt with eCommerce clients, so full circle. That was a good experience, but I lost my job at the beginning of COVID and decided to start a community. The community is important because that was one of the things that connected all of those jobs if you think about it. With the fashion magazine, we threw events. There were lines around the corner. There was a community of artists and designers that we were featuring.

In two-sided marketplaces, whether it’s Airbnb or ones that you might not have heard of like Swipecast or Portion, there’s a community of people. Marketplaces are like communities with a business model. Here are fractional CROs on this side. Here are companies that might need them on this side. They are all in a community together to learn and there’s a business model in between. I’ve been in two communities. Hanging out with friends and being a part of some exclusive communities for some time, inclusive communities, and all of that, I’m like, “Let’s do something that aligns at my core in community with that.”

It’s pretty interesting. It’s only in hindsight you’re able to connect the dots. You went and pursued your passion project around fashion.

It was a smart decision.

That led you to a different opportunity, which was around eCommerce.

Fashion didn’t lead me to eCommerce. FedEx led me to eCommerce. When I went to fashion, it was out of the blue.

That’s pretty interesting. That did lead you to Swipecast. Portion is the blockchain for NFTs and other creative forums.

My brother-in-law was the COO there. I wanted to get in and I had an opportunity through him.

I completely can relate to what you’re saying about marketplaces. To build one is super hard because you’re talking about two “communities” coming together and they’re finding values.

That’s the supply side and demand side.

It’s not easy. You figure out it’s the chicken and egg situation. Which one comes first? That’s a whole different ballgame.

Whatever people pay for comes first, and then you get the people to pay for it because you have their supply.

That’s correct. That led you to RevGenius. You identified that you wanted to do something with communities or build a community. Why sales, and how did you start out? What were your early days like?

Why sales is a great question. It’s because I became disenfranchised with sales. If you can’t tell, I tried everything in my power to get out of this from the side projects of running a fashion magazine to one foot in with any of the day jobs I had. I was in sales in cool industries to me. When I was thinking about what to create, I first wanted to create something in the creative space because that’s what I like. I wanted to create a community of creative directors, like an actual creative director community, because I thought the space was lacking it and that member clubs like Soho House, which I’d been a member of, are more of a social seed than the people doing the creative.

I asked my partner who is the creative director of a massive publication. She is the creative director of Cosmo magazine. I’m like, “Would you pay $100 a month to be in a community like this?” You watched her face not even comprehending what I was asking. I’m like, “I’m not even going to ask five other people. I live with you.” There is an opportunity there, but it is a fact that maybe it’s not mature yet.

The old-school creative space, fashion space, and art space are not ready for disruption and may never be, and that’s fine. The true creatives aren’t ready for disruption. I’m like “I like the idea, but I don’t like the space.” I looked back at the space I was trying to run from, which is sales, and said, “I need to make this for me right now in this space. If I don’t do it, who’s going to do it? Who’s going to have an open, inclusive, and free community for everybody?” That’s how we lift the space. We have to have access for everybody. There are other communities that are wonderful. They’re doing great. Having that free entry point was important because I felt like I could impact the most people.

In the early days, I didn’t even know I was going to build a community at first. A lot of things converged together. I thought that the problem that needed solving was that there was so much content coming out in so many directions and there was no place to centralize it. People might want to go to it. A couple of years ago, people did want to go to it. This time, I’m not as sure. You have to put good stuff in.

A couple of years ago, people wanted to go to a lot of it, multiple webinars a week. Maybe they still do if it’s good. They were curious and were looking at more stuff. They were more likely to go then. I thought we needed an Eventbrite for sales and marketing events and that it was going to be on a spreadsheet. Every Sunday, I’d sign up for every single mailing list so that I would know all the events and then pick my favorites or I’d sign up for every single mailing list that I respected. It was a lot.

We put a group together. There were four of us on LinkedIn in a message group. That grew to 25 or so. I was trying to circulate the events to them. I’m not sure that they ever went to the Google sheet. Maybe they did. What I did know is they broke the LinkedIn app every single day because they were talking to each other so much and enjoyed each other’s company. These were all salespeople or one-off revenue people. I had to move from LinkedIn to Slack because it wasn’t usable. At that point, I surveyed the landscape and was like, “Is there no open, inclusive, and free community for all revenue professionals?” If there was, I didn’t know about it. It didn’t seem like others knew about it either. We made it and started figuring it out from there.

There are so many points I want to deep dive into in all those things. The first thing that stood out is you wanted to create a community but at the same time, you wanted to test it out. You asked one of your fashion creative directors to see if she’ll pay $100. That is a very early test, and that’s critical. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to build a tech product, service, or community. It’s a simple test. Kudos to you for that. Moving away from that, something else that caught my attention is you wanted to do or pursue something in an area that you were “trying to run away from” initially, but then, you said, “I need to do it for myself.” It was more therapeutic and coming out, which is good.

I don’t know if it was therapeutic. I saw it’s such an obvious need. I’m like, “Whether it’s good or not, it’s important.”

You also mentioned that you brought together a few sales folks on LinkedIn initially. How did you identify those sales folks?

They were people who were around. They were people who were active on LinkedIn.

You knew them prior or you saw that they were active and then you reached out to them?

I knew them for a short period prior, not for a long period. A short period means some a month if I knew them prior. I forget how I met Galem. We probably went to a webinar together, hopped on a call, and then threw a Slack group together. She is the Cofounder of RevGenius.

We saw some people commenting on posts on LinkedIn that seemed cool and invited them into the group. It was one person and he brought somebody. We had the four musketeers. From there, I said, “Can you bring other people in that have the same energy as you?” They did. That’s how we got to 25 people.

That is very cool. It’s a common thread in the sense that number one, all are interested in sales. Second, they’re active. Third, it’s not necessarily that you knew each other but there was a common factor that was bonding, bringing all of you together to engage with each other.

Fourth, it was a social channel that we could use as a channel for acquisition.

That was LinkedIn initially.

It still is, but it’s way more organic. It was organic then. The definition of organic is not paying for it. When I say it’s more organic, I was reaching out to people then and asking them to join. This time, I’m not and they’re joining.

I can see some parallels. It is similar to my show. I’m sure you can relate to this. Initially, I used to reach out to the guests. Later, I’ve been seeing a lot of inbound coming in. It’s less of an ego boost. It’s more of validation that there’s something that I’m doing which is right and it’s resonating. Those like-minded folks are getting attracted to it.

You’re being seen. That’s it.

It is pretty cool. That was year one or the first few months where you had 25 to 50 folks in the RevGenius community.

25 was the first couple of weeks, three weeks. We then started acquiring about 1,000 people a month. It was 1,000 in month 1, 2,000 in month 2, and 3,000 in month three.

It was all because either you were reaching out or folks in the community were reaching out to others and inviting them. That is very cool. Something else that caught my attention is you kept mentioning a community that is diverse and inclusive. What do you mean by that? What did you see that was missing in other similar communities from diversity and inclusivity?

The ability to come in at no cost allows every type of person to come in. The act of putting a fee down excludes people. The act of requiring a certain title to come in excludes people. If you have both those levers, it could exclude a lot of people. Removing those allowed everyone to come in and have the energy that everyone is welcome in. Combined with that is how it got promoted.

That is very cool.

That’s important because you need to lift the whole world.

You mentioned titles. You mentioned the ability to pay or need to pay.

Some communities are paid and you need a title or something. In some communities, you don’t have to pay but you need a title. In some communities, you might have to pay and you don’t need a title. The fact that you have neither and you create an environment that’s welcoming to everybody in addition to that helps quite a bit.

That is very cool. You mentioned a couple of things, which are inclusivity and diversity. You talked about not needing to have a specific title and also not needing to pay for membership. Those are the two main criteria.

Since we have paid memberships as well for senior leaders, to be clear, it was important to have an entry point that is accessible for all.

I’m looking at the timeline. You started Rev Genius. The early days of RevGenius were right around the time of COVID. That helped. From a timing point of view, you couldn’t ask for anything better. Clearly, that helped, for sure.

It helped people wanting to be in a digital community, for sure.

Since we are way past the COVID days, especially around people, you’re talking about digital events fatigue.

Bad events fatigue is real. Good events, if they’re digital or in person, people will show up.

Let’s expand and expound on that. You mentioned organic acquisition. Is it still organic, most of your growth from a new membership perspective?

Yes. We’re not throwing a lot in the top, so to speak. We’re fixing activation. We’re improving activation and engagement following first. It’s a long project. We have 37,000 members. We have enough to go crazy and bring a ton in. We need to have a plan to have everyone hit value as fast as possible.

We need to plan to have everyone hit value as fast as possible. Share on X

From my personal experience and even from others that I’ve heard who have been part of communities, people get excited. It is initial excitement. They join the community, but then, there is something missing or lacking after some point. Maybe it’s week 1, month 1, or something. How did you tackle that gap or the pain?

That’s activation. I onboard people directly. I give tasks on how to hit value as quickly as possible. I understand what people want. It’s about the intake form, and then it’s about creating programming that meets their needs. It’s not easy.

That was one of the reasons that motivated me to have you on the show. It’s not easy to build a community. You guys have done something. Even 36,000 is not a small task with what you guys have done.

Thank you.

That is what got me excited about having you on the show. We are double-clicking on the various topics. Clearly, there have been such stories and failure stories as you’re building along.

It’s hard because if you’re bootstrapped, you have to build with a really small team. You’re constrained by resources.

You also mentioned in the early part of your career, you started a passion project without intentionally focusing on bringing in money or making revenue. Has that changed? Are you looking at the monetization angle for RevGenius? How are you doing that?

I do this full-time. I pay a team of seven. The government’s not giving me checks to do that. That’s a real burn. That’s a real payroll. We monetize through sponsorships. That’s our primary driver. RevRoom is growing. That’s membership paid for VPs in C-Suite. We’re looking at other products to potentially add as well that are probably aligned with 1 of those 2 drivers. Either the companies pay or individuals pay. I don’t know who else would pay, but it is aligned with either sponsorship or individual memberships.

It is sponsorship or membership. I would assume that happened not necessarily in year 1 but maybe in year 2 or year 3.

It happened about 6 or 7 months in when we got our first sponsor dollars. I could have probably gotten it earlier, but I pushed it off to understand what we had because the members were so tight. They were so fiercely linked to one another that I wasn’t sure how bringing a sponsor in would counteract the vibes that were there. I also knew that I needed to bring in revenue in some way.

This is a saying. It’s very easy to follow. You need to take care of yourself to take care of others. From an entity perspective, you need to take care of the initial members and yourself personally for the benefit of the bigger pursuit and vision of RevGenius.

You have to take care of yourself personally because you can’t take care of the members at your downfall.

Walk us through how you approached or identified that initial or first sponsor.

They came to me. When you’re growing 3,000 members a month and everybody’s hitting and hollering on LinkedIn, people will see that. That’s a key takeaway. When you’re giving such immense value to those you serve that they’re screaming from the rooftops and you’re not asking them for anything, people will notice. That’s an anomaly. Everybody asks for something. They’re like, “Are you kidding me? Who is this psycho?” That’s how you create a movement.

You really hit it on the head.

They’re like, “Who is this psycho? He must be creating a movement.”

I love this. That is the peak of our conversation. We hit it at the top level over here. It looks like I ticked something on your side and we are hitting it at the right level over here. You cannot pursue a community initially to be like, “I’m going to do this so we can monetize,” versus delivering value and keep delivering value so much so that your customers or users scream and promote. That’s what you guys did.

There was so much value that people got from adding RevGenius to their LinkedIn profiles. That’s a cool growth loop. Thank you. Some people are getting more value than we’re getting from it. That’s phenomenal. I had somebody reach out to me from India. He said, “My firm got let go by a US client, but because I had RevGenius on my profile, they hired me directly instead.” I never met this person. I define that as a value at $0. Are you kidding me? Getting a job is a big value driver for a lot of people, especially if they don’t have one. It is very big.

I keep driving us back to that initial 6 months to 1 year. That was a crucial phase. Clearly, you guys hit that product market fit back then. You got started getting inbound sponsorship requests. What are the high-value activities that the members were seeing in their first 1 to 3 months?

Networking. It was having a connection with so many people. It was also being a part of something really cool and fast-growing. There’s a lot of value to being a part of the wave. There are so many events that people associate with or tie themselves to because of how many people are going for it. How many people want to run a marathon? In the New York Marathon and all these marathons, before there was an event around it, how many people honestly wanted to run 26.2 miles?

Not many.

1 or 2 maybe because they are idiots. You have these marathons. It’s like a notch on the ladder for what people are doing. People are training all the time. They are praying that they get in and then paying for the opportunity. They have created a movement. There are other things outside of what the actual marathon people did, like the health stuff and all of that. You don’t need to run a marathon to be healthy, do you? No. You don’t need to run a half marathon to be healthy. You could run 2 miles 3 days a week and eat well and do very well.

That was my story several years ago. I never could have even thought of or dreamt of doing a half marathon. I trained myself and ran three half marathons within a span of 1 or 2 years.

That’s amazing. There’s a lot of value in being a part of something is where I’m getting at. With belonging, there is value in belonging. If you said you had 5,000 members, how many members got a new job? Maybe 50, maybe 5. I don’t know. Maybe 500. Them being a part of something was invaluable. They were part of something cool. That’s what culture, being a part of something cool. Why do people wear a certain company or T-shirt? Why do you need a Gucci T-shirt? It’s culture.

There's a lot of value in being a part of something. There's value in belonging. Share on X

How do you see RevGenius spanning out? What is your big vision? Where do you want to take this? You already have 36,000 members, which is no small amount.

North Star metric has moved correctly to more about the value that the members are getting in engagement and things that we could measure. We can measure net new members. If we’re at 370,000 members, there’s value in that. I don’t know if there’s value in 370,000 people being in the same Slack together unless it’s organized very incredibly well, and I sense it wouldn’t be. We want to create the defacto most important space for go-to-market and have it be community-driven. We want to create a category that becomes important because of the impact it drives on the space and the world. I want to be helpful to so many people.

The vision is to build out collaborative growth, which is what community ultimately is. It is to help pass the message, not just to leverage X for go-to-market of Y. X led growth, but it is to sustain X and make sure that the pie is bigger in the process, not leverage events and not care about the people that come. I’m not saying that people do that, but lift the people up in the process so that we can create a higher ceiling of abundance for everybody. Community when done right is the most powerful thing in this world. It’s right next to love. It’s a connection to love, which is the most powerful thing in this world. It is a positively powerful thing. Fear is equally as powerful, but love could solve that.

That is cool. I’m pretty impressed with what you guys are doing. Do you have a breakdown of the professional backgrounds of the members, like sales versus marketing versus product versus founders?

Yes. We’re probably about 50% to 60% sales. Rev ops and marketing are next. They are 15% to 20% each, and then customer success. The community is about 60% to 70% manager and above. We are about 42% directors and above, which is quite a lot of directors, VPs, C-Suites, and a bunch of founders. About half the companies in our community or a little less than half, like 40% to 45% of the companies in our community, are 1 to 100, and then maybe 15% over 1,000. It’s a pretty normal range for that many people. In RevRoom, everybody is VP or above. We have two senior directors. We have companies from Series A to public companies.

That’s very cool. What advice would you give to folks? Maybe they’re in the SaaS tech space and are either starters or mid-market. What advice would you give them? A lot of things that we are hearing are all about community-led. People are impatient. They want to see results in months 1, 3, or 6.

If you want to see results in months 1, 3, or 6 and you do all that, then you don’t care about the community or anything outside of the company. That doesn’t mean that it’s not going to work, but it means you’re full of crap. You need to care about the community. A lot of people who do community-led work do care about the community, but they have a gentle balancing act with getting results.

If you set up growth metrics, do things the right way, and drive enough value, the results will come. The advice I’d give for people who want to lean into the community is to love the people that you’re serving. Understand. Do the things that don’t scale, especially with community. Even if your company has scaled already and you’re launching a community, have a human touch to onboard the people at least in the beginning. When in doubt, have a human touch in so many spots. It will show the people when you show up or the leaders on your team show up that you care. That’s felt in a big way.

I told somebody people are always asking about what platform you start on. I’m going to keep it super simple. Start on a platform you’re already on. It’s this simple. It could be a text message. You have WhatsApp, Slack, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Whatever you have, start on one of those, and then figure it out before moving to Mighty Networks, Discord, or all the other ones. If you don’t have it, there’s a good chance most people in your space don’t have it, too. If they had it, you would have it. It’s not that it won’t work and all of that. I get it, but start simple. Start with something that’s in your hands already. That’s my two cents.

That is a great piece of advice.

Also, have a point of view when starting a community. That’s important. Many communities don’t have it. They serve certain people, but they don’t have a powerful point of view as to why people should pick. If there are two sales communities, why one over the other? One serves AEs and one SDR. That works for a while until the second one comes that also serves AEs. Why one or the other? It’s the point of view.

Be ferociously behind your people. Make sure that you’re solving an actual problem with anything that you create. People don’t need a 500th community necessarily. They need something that hasn’t solved their problem yet. If you have a company and you’re creating a community, it’s obvious to create a community to support your company.

People don't need a 500th community necessarily. They need something that hasn't solved their problem yet. Share on X

If you’re doing sales engagement, you could be like, “This is my sales engagement community.” I understand, but what part of that person’s life do you want to deal with? An AE, SDR, rev ops leader, or whatever, where are they struggling not to get help with? What part is it consistently? How can you drive value to that? That also is aligned with your product in a way. What problem can your product solve that’s an actual problem there? How can you build a community and take your product out of it because you’re not trying to sell something that’s related and that hits people’s needs? That’s all. Thank you for reading.

This is a great piece of advice. If you were to tie it back to RevGenius’ early days, the point of view that you guys took, and the initial pain point, what would those be?

I was talking earlier that our point of view was okay, but it wasn’t as strong as it was going to be. We’re evolving it. Our point of view is that there needs to be a single place for everybody. It’s a good noble point of view. Maybe it is a movement. Maybe I’m not giving it enough credit, but other people came in with similar things and there wasn’t anything that differentiated.

There needs to be a single place for everybody. Share on X

The problem we’re solving is that there was no place for everybody at the time. It was important for us to bring together sales, marketing, rev ops, and CS in one space. It doesn’t sound niched enough. I heard that a long time ago. I don’t hear it anymore because GTM is evolving so much. Alignment’s evolving. People’s roles are evolving. People’s titles are evolving. You have demand gen running outbound for some companies, not SDRs. If you have sales, it’s going to be myopic if you don’t have everything. It was critical for us to have the whole revenue work.

That’s pretty cool. I know we can go on and on. There are so many things I want to deep dive into.

We’ll come back. We should do part two.

We should do a take two in a few months’ time. This has been great. The final question for you is if you were to give advice to your younger self, what would that be?

It’s going to get really hard, but your older self has your back. We’ll make sure everything is okay, so do what you’re going to do.

That’s Fantastic. This was a wonderful, full of energy and passionate conversation. Thank you so much. Good luck to you and the RevGenius team.

Thanks. You mean the world to me. Take care.

Thank you.

Important Link

RevGenius

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