What’s the secret behind crafting successful go-to-market strategies that stand the test of time and market shifts? In this episode, Mark Kilens, people-first GTM champion, shares how do you align customer problems with product offerings amidst the rapid commoditization of software development, and what role continuous learning plays in this ever-evolving landscape. Join us as we unravel the mysteries behind sustainable marketing, experimentation, and the pivotal role of people-first approaches in activating exponential growth for brands.

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People-Centric GTM: Mark Kilen’s Framework for B2B Growth

Why don’t we start with the signature question, which is, how do you view and define go-to-market?

For me, it’s pretty simple. It’s obviously not, but the way you define is pretty simple. You’re just trying to match people’s problems and products. That’s it. Right? I mean, it’s it’s much more complex than that. But at a minimum, if you don’t focus on those three things, and focus on executing those three things really well. On the people side, the problem side, and the product side, you’ll have you’ll have some tough times. 

No, I agree. I like the way have you simplified it. It is Yes, three things, which are people, then problems, and then the products, right, and you start with the people first and then their problems. And yeah, once you get into the mechanics and the machinery of what is go to market, then you need to bring in the different parts of the organization. It’s product marketing, sales, customer success, tech, everyone in between, and more

A lot of moving pieces, a lot of it’s very complex, it’s more complex. You know, how big the organization is, you know, obviously, based off what you sell, how you sell it, who you sell it to super important. Yeah, it’s, you know, it gets complex. I do think, though, that the CEO should ultimately be the one to always decide on the most important go-to-market decisions, they are the person running the go-to-market. Usually, the CMO, maybe CRO, is the one that is going to be the closest partner to the CEO to make sure the go-to-market plan that they design and the decisions they’ve made. gets done.

Yeah. And then so many things, I’m sure we’ll double-click on all of those things in our conversation the next 45, 60 minutes or so. Pretty cool. So let’s take a step back. Why don’t you introduce us to the person Mark? I mean, forget the go-to market and the leadership stuff and the leader and what do you do as a professional? But But who is Mark? And what is what has been your career journey like so far?

Yeah, I live in Massachusetts, I have two young kids, and another one on the way. Been b2b go to market for about 17 years now. The longest stint was almost nine years at HubSpot. Yeah, then I joined three other companies before I started my own thing, but seven months ago, can’t please only been seven months feels like two years, but seven months ago called Tack. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, it’s it’s all about continuous learning. For me, it’s, if you’re not learning, that is a problem. And I don’t really care who you are. I really think that’s true. I mean, the reason why you are probably so happy as a child, for the most part, is you’re always being exposed to new things, new learnings, new adventures, new people, new subjects, all these things. So for me, learning is foundational to a person’s well-being and happiness. So I’m always seeking out how to learn. 

Very cool. Yeah, I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile. You started at Sales Quest as a research analyst. Well, therefore, what two years, four months, and then you grew into an on your brought into or grew into the role of director of marketing were there. 

I mean, I was a bootstrap startup during the great recession, you kind of do anything you can write and that’s how I found out about HubSpot. I went to Google and typed in how to generate more leads. You can guess what came up HubSpot I used HubSpot for a little bit was like, wow, this is going to transform the industry. I think inbound marketing is going to be huge. The assumption was right after all through the teamwork of 10s of 1000s of people who made that happen. But yeah, I mean HubSpot was an incredible experience. You know, the 140th employee I left there’s 3000 people so helped to kind of go from 15 million to 600 million in revenue. Joined a company founded by two HubSpot leaders. It was actually the two people who founded Pavilion. At drifts, you know, 25 million to 90 million in like three years, you know, private equity firm acquired us for a nice valuation. And then did a quick stint as a CMO of an early-stage 5 million or so dollar company called AirMeet. And then I just saw this opportunity in front of me and I was like, I gotta do this other opportunity. The time is right, the market is saying that this kind of time is right. And I think from here, I’ll probably go on and probably build some software at some point, we definitely have some ideas brewing and whatnot. But the way in which you build software today is being disrupted. So yeah, we’re not going to build it. I’d say the ways in which I saw at HubSpot or Drift even because it means, I’m not a coder, but I now can code which is pretty cool. 

Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was working on helping out my son, my younger one, for one of their, Lego League projects. And one of the things that’s required is doing a community, project that helps or shows impact in the community. Right. And what I’m helping him do is he, whether he’s like a fifth grader, so 10 years old, so he’s not into coding yet. But just the ease with which you can bring together and stitch together like markups. And the flow in a matter of 15 minutes is amazing. So it’s a no-code platform. And he was able to do it in 15 minutes. So to your point, yes, we quote-unquote, marketers, we are not coerced by designers by profession. But with the advent of like, low code, no code platforms, and AI Gen, it definitely makes our lives easy, for sure. 

Oh, Yeah. I mean, that’s where like, you know, if your only differentiation is software, you’re in big trouble. You know, you know, at a minimum, you’re gonna need something else like brand or data, or some type of proprietary distribution. You know, the most famous one, is Google buying apples, right? I mean, you know, you need you need something. Because yeah, creating software is only going to get easier, just like how starting a business has gotten so easy in the last 10 to 20 years. 

Yep. And software is going to be more and more like a commodity. It’s eventually the brand that really differentiates and why buyers are attracted to you, right, the best, or most recent example that comes to my mind is liquid IT. They’re amazing in terms of what they’re doing in terms of brand building brand awareness and attracting their consumers. And at the end of the day, if you look at the product, it’s nothing Wow, our mind. It’s not like a major invention, right? It’s flavored water at the end of the day. But what they’ve done with their branding, and the messaging, and they’ve actually created more than just a committee, it’s almost like a movement.

Well, just people first go to market. I mean, people are gonna be your key differentiator. It’s always been that way. But, you know, you just kind of forget it to some degree. And I mean, if you think about Nike, what is Nike’s most important differentiator people Michael Jordan? 

Yep. Exactly. And talking about that, yeah, I’m reading this book, Shoe Dog. It’s phenomenal in terms of just hearing and listening to his story, the struggles, early struggles, and then how Phil Knight has built is a huge lesson in itself.

Yeah, and of course, early days, there’s always like, these advantages you can find, right? There’s, I mean, you know, to be a good business owner, it’s not just people, I mean, there’s true economics behind that you got to you gotta find, you know, find the advantages and how you actually either, like build the product, you know, distribute the product, what the product does, right, like how it works, but that means Yeah, everything at some point, there’s a spectrum of commoditization, right, so it’s going to get ripped off commoditized or whatever enough. 

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Let’s go back to your career trajectory, something that pops into my mind and which is unique, and its kudos to you is, that you have a knack for picking the right opportunities, the right companies especially when it comes to HubSpot and rest. So what is your if you have a formula, and you want to share it with our listeners, like what is your founder in selecting a role and company?

Are the big problems in the right people? I mean, it’s it goes back to those three things, problems people, and then if you know if those things align, you’ll figure out the product. So yeah, I think everything boils down to like, pretty much in the startup world. Yeah. People and problems decide the market both people being like, who could you be? Who could be your customers but also, who will you be working with? Who is creating the brand and the products? Who doesn’t go in under the who’s hiring? David Ken’s first hire at Drift, when they started, was a recruiter super deliberate. He worked at performable, at HubSpot. So yeah, I mean, it’s I think I think it´s those two things.

Very cool. Early in your career, you have gravitated towards more of the teaching side of things like the academy at HubSpot, and then content and community at Drift.

I mean, everyone is a teacher, I think this is where like the word education teaching community content saw it, I mean, you know, a, my opinion is a good marketer is just a good teacher, at the end of the day, right? You know, Liquid Death is teaching you that you want this thing because they’ve, they’ve trained your mind. And through the use of psychology, human psychology, behavior analysis, right? Who resonates with you, in some way? And they’re teaching you that, most likely subconsciously, through those efforts, right? They’re saying to you, either through someone you already respect or trust that is drinking Liquid Death. And that person is teaching you most likely, again, in this example, probably subconsciously, that you need or want both, you need water. So that’s never mind, knees out the door, you want that type of water. And here’s why you want that type of water because it means something to you. I mean, it’s every salesperson is just the teacher at the end of the day, just the good ones. I mean, you know, there are obviously exceptions to that. But I learned that I thought through my time at the University of New Hampshire, studying a ton of different things, I changed majors five times, and I was very restless with what I wanted to do. And you know, I even did undergraduate research for a year and it was published through one of the professors who used to be the dean of the business school there. And, you know, I spoke at a conference as an undergrad, remember this vividly about the research we did. And that just showed me all of that, like the importance of education, the importance of teaching other people how education outside of say like the weather and the money and money is was one of the top five if not like, the third most powerful thing? In the world. So yeah.

Yeah. So what are the techniques? I know, we’ll get into maybe probably in maybe a GM success story or failure story, right? What are the techniques that come to your mind Mark when it comes to growing? Inbound at an academy? Or how do you grow a community? Like, what was your thought process like and how did you gravitate towards that? And what did your higher-ups saw that, Hey, Mark, is the right person right fit for this role?

Well, I mean, it was HubSpot was an experiment. I mean, that was that was me using customer empathy to its fullest. I was a customer. I saw a problem. HubSpot needed to do more to support its customers, there was an opportunity to teach more people how to use HubSpot, the software plus inbound marketing, to get better business outcomes. I joined HubSpot with the idea, idea that I was going to actually do it, I realized quickly the culture that Domitian and Brian created, which is exceptional, allowed for that, especially at that time of the company. So I just worked nights and weekends and built it up with the help of people around HubSpot. It was like four months into joining Hub Spots, five months in, I started working on it. And then just pursued that for a year and a half and just showed two things. business value. 

So what was the value to the enterprise that was HubSpot, you know, they call it or maybe they still do an EV enterprise value? And then CV customer value. What was the value for the customers? And that’s it right? And you built it through a deep partnership with customers through the voice of the customer, you know, it’s like, and that’s where a lot of founders get stuff wrong and how they do their go to market. How did they their product, they just built it like in their own mind or their own team and you build it with other people. That’s by the way how you build a community if you actually want to start a community. You build it with other people. So like, Yeah, I mean, I look back and I don’t think anything I did was like remarkable, quite frankly, I just it’s relentless execution. I don’t think a lot of people spend enough time pursuing something for you know, two years, three years it takes to pursue something to see really great results, you know, you can’t give up after a year. Definitely not. Unless you’re extremely lucky for it to hit. And even after two years, you know, you need more time. So you have to dedicate time to things. And then that’s I think one of the downfalls that people just make is they just don’t spend enough dedicated consistent effort on something.

Yeah, I mean, a couple of thought process topics, we can dive into. To your point. For any experiment, first of all, someone has to have the mindset to do an experiment, create a mindset, an experiment, which you did, on nights and weekends at HubSpot, experimenting with and doing which became HubSpot Academy. Right. So that’s one thing. The second is you need to give it time. It’s not like, Hey, you try it for 1,2,3 or six months, it takes much longer than that to see if it’s really worth investing and seeing some traction that it’s worth investing in. So how did you build a business case? Or how did like termination others see the value at HubSpot, that, hey, this is something that we need to invest in, in building that?

In building it, I mean, I just did it no one I mean, they could have stopped me, there was again, like it was a very different time then. And a lot of the issues that companies are facing or can’t address correctly start with the culture of the company. Yeah. And it starts with the CEO, the leader. So if you’re a co-leader listening, you got to ask yourself, like, how good am I at creating an environment where Jerpoint experimentation, and just the act of trying things and doing things is taught? It’s not just tolerated, but is recognized and rewarded? 

Yeah. Exactly! 

So a lot of issues just come down to culture. And those that are people issues, I think it was, who was it? 99% of all businesses, people 1% Is everything else? I pretty much 100% believe that. Um, so anyway, like, for me, it was just trying stuff out and then collecting early data points, you know, listening to what the CTA was initially, initially a customer success type initiative. And then you know, after time, we realized this could be a huge, you know, creator of more demand at the top of the funnel will help turn demand into revenue, and it does all those things today, but it was just like, how do we help our customers be more successful with inbound marketing better understand it and how to do it with the HubSpot software? And back at that time, it was very simple software’s blogging, SEO, some social media keywords, etc. It’s gone into email a little bit. And we just showed not just the data and how it was helping but also like, what was what was the customer’s reaction? What would a customer say about this? 

What do they think feel like? And from there, you just, you just worked and worked to teach people why this was a good idea. Looking at the data said it wasn’t a good idea, then we would have pivoted or stopped doing it or whatever. But like, the data and the feedback, we’re saying, keep going, keep going, keep going. We kept iterating and iterating and iterating. And then sometime in like 2012, I think it was like March or something we got funding to do as a three-person team mean to other people. And kind of the rest is history in terms of like how that’s grown. Now. It’s like, I think 60 people, plus a big supporting team of people. Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s impressive. I mean, they, you know, and we deliberately did it too, I was able to sell it so much through the help of other people. It wasn’t me selling it, it was the data of the customers. 

And then the other people who were involved at HubSpot, helping me sell it, people who led the partner program, people who were on the CST, and people who were CSMs like those, the more people you can get to help you sell something. 

Yeah. 

Market something, the easier it theoretically and probably will be. So that’s another lesson. And that goes into your question on community building. You’re just trying to gather enough energy and energy in the form of people to help you, you know, continue it or bring it to life or get that funding that investment, whatever that goal might be. 

Fair enough. And again, it goes back to the number one thing which is culture, right, having that culture of encouraging, and, and supporting people doing experiments. I think that’s what that’s where it all starts. So that brings me to what you’re doing today with both ClubPF and TACK. So why don’t you tell our listeners what are those things and what are you trying to do over here but for those initiatives?

Yeah, I mean, Tac is three things. It’s a media company and a go-to-market firm at the end of the day, and we’re focused on people first go to market. The three things that are part of Tack are we have a media side of the business where we help companies, and brands produce shows, and we produce our own original shows, it’s part of usually what we call the Tack network, tacknetwork.com. So that’s one leg of the stool in the business. The second leg, the second part of the business is ClubPF a community all about People First go to market for people who are in go to market, marketers, CEOs, entrepreneurs, it could be anyone, anyone who wants to learn about this new way to go to market, join the club. And it’s not just teaching marketing, right? It’s teaching how to bring products, and the people who have problems together in a way that is efficient, and sustainable, but ultimately creates a like, sustainable, lovable brand. Like really activates the word-of-mouth flywheel. And you know, if you get some kind of critical mass, you build an ecosystem with this approach. This is just how all the great companies have gone to market over time. And some of them lose this over time. But people first go to market is something that we’re teaching and talking a lot about in the community and club. And then the third one is we coined it on demand go to market services, it’s Tak GTM. And that’s just helping go to market leaders. Find the right people to solve the problems they have. So like, the classic example is like it’s Uber for go-to-market leaders, a go-to-market leader once it gets to this destination called Tack GTM. Who’s the Uber know we’ll find you the right driver and the right car to get you to the destination 

Nice. Pretty cool. All right. 

So Mark has great insight, as well as thought-provoking comments that got us going down a different path. And something that you said, By the way, I fully agree with you, which is, every company, every business, every founder, they always start with people first. But then as they grow somewhere along the line, that focus gets lost. So tell us more. I mean, I fully agree with you, I want to understand your thought process and what you’re trying to do at TACK and helping your customers on that.

Yeah, we built this new approach. It’s an evolution of inbound marketing to some degree, it brings together these seven pretty common growth strategies. And we built this model that helps businesses bring products to the markets to match the way people buy. That’s the easiest way to think about it. So yeah, I’m happy to go as deep as you want. I was actually on a podcast earlier today where we spent 45 minutes going through the whole thing with examples in detail. But yeah, just need to let me know. 

Yeah, go go for it. Why don’t you introduce us to the framework? And let’s and based on that, we can go into like a couple of boxes.

So yeah, I mean, the the framework has, like I said, The Seven growth strategies surrounding the sixth in the center is partner low growth. So partner-like growth is not a sales-only thing. It involves everything like right now, this is a former my opinion, a partner like growth, you’re interviewing me, like you’ve done with many others on this podcast, to create content, which is content like growth, that and use it to activate your community-led growth strategy. So you you alone, just in this one example, have activated three of the seven growth motions, how well did you activate the activated? And that’s a whole other question. Um, but there are partnerships, right? And there’s all these types of partnerships. Before we go, before we go any further though, the definition of this model is, that it’s a strategy that uses storytelling, relationships, and partnerships to help businesses create, capture, and convert demand into revenue. That is, that is what it’s trying to do. The three things are the most important to really, you know, hit on there. It’s storytelling, relationships, and partnerships. Within the model, were you gonna say something, sir?

No, go for it. 

Within the model, there are these three channels, I mentioned, community-led growth, which is the tip of the spear, it’s how you activate the audience engaged in the conversations, create an interest for the brand, then there’s member-led growth that’s much newer, if you can call it that. It’s probably the newest and least understood one in the entire model. We can double-click on that if you want to. But that’s about how to create a deeper relationship with the audience that you now have their attention to and how you pull them into the brand in a way that allows you to learn more about them and allows them to learn more about you and strengthens the relationship. 

Then customer-led growth is when you’ve created and captured that demand. Now, how do you convert that demand into new demand? How do you convert your customers into advocates, partner with them, partner with your customers, and spin that flywheel to do those three things you need ways to build trust and value within that audience and within the markets. 

The three things that we recommend you use and it’s very common, our content like growth events event like growth and products, product lead growth, to build that trust and create the value that is pretty much it’s definitely needed to turn someone into a customer because the old way of companies being gatekeepers is so long gone, the customer is in full control for the most part, so you need to empower the customer so that they can see that you’re your trusted, reputable, whatever word you want to use entity brand that they would want to possibly give you their hard-earned money to. To trust with and to solve those problems. So that’s it at a high level there’s so much to unpack and we need multiple podcasts probably. But it’s why we like I said built ClubPF and other resources.

Yeah, no, I completely. I get in fact I align with So many of those different go-to-market motions. And something that I’ve been saying over and over on my podcast as well as with the customers and the clients that I work with, right? So if you try to uplevel, the winning go-to-market playbook. So I’ve been studying go-to-market leaders for a good part of like past five years. And think of the analogy, Mark. So the NBA, the National Basketball Association, you got Legal For 30 teams. But there’s something magical about the top one, two, or three teams, that something they do over and over again, that they end up being in the playoffs and the champions on a consistent basis. So they’re doing some habits, they’re doing some actions, that’s creating that winning playbook for them. 

So if I take the same example and apply it to the go-to-market companies and go-to-market teams, it boils down to content boils down to community, and it boils down to experiences slash events. And I’m seeing a lot of parallels with the framework that you’re doing it Tack. And again, it’s centered around people, all of these are people-centric. If you think about content, how are you creating that valuable content and unique content that people can find only in your community or your place? An example of that that’s been done well, is drift, for sure. And gang, what they’ve done so well when he talks about community, you got some Graham, who’s been doing it for years now. He’s done that for at his previous company terminus, and now he’s doing it with the GTM partners, right, again, he’s actually mixing a couple of widgets, community, and events as well, in that, yep. So I see a lot of parallels with that framework and what you’re saying.

Yeah, I mean, you don’t have to, you don’t have to do all seven. And you probably shouldn’t, when you’re just starting out. The most successful companies do all seven, and even small companies like I was just giving someone an example today, there are small, you know, 10-person agencies. And I asked him a few questions. I said, Yep, you’re doing all seven of these things. And their mind was like, Oh, my God, I am. So yeah. And then I said, Well, how far and wide and deep you want to go there, you know, depending on who you sell to what you sell, what your product is, you know, why you sell it, your growth, ambitions, you all these things that create context to then tell, or suggest to someone how you would use this model? That’s what you have to consider. 

But yeah, I mean, you the, the thing that I always tried to do, and I learned this from Brian and Mash is study people and be human anthropologists, you want to be a human anthropologist because that will give you the signal of what’s going on in the lives of people or what could be going on the lives of people or give you some line of sight into like, what’s going to change, because of things that we don’t have any control over for the most part like AI?, because we can’t control you know, everyone developing AI, and how that’s going to affect people, your customers or future customers? start there, then start to look at the problems maybe. But you have to think bigger and wider. And from there, then you start to look at like, you know, well, what’s broken these days. 

And from a go-to-market standpoint, there’s, there’s a lot of stuff that’s broken. It’s kind of like between 2010 and 2020, it was easy living interest rates were cheap, at least in America, and not much changed for the most part when you had to think about your go-to-market. But now many forces have created a storm of change. And it’s probably because the status quo is finally kind of crumbled out from within itself and like you got to replace it with something. And also just the economic conditions have changed how people think about the value of things, you know when you think about buying something for your go to markets, or your front office, your back office, I should say, you know, the tech stack. But even if doesn’t matter, you could be selling to cabinet makers, which is one of our, you know, customers of ours that we’re working with how to like reach cabinet makers, cabinet makers, they need this. That’s actually how you want to go to market to cabinet makers. You don’t want to use ads, they’re not going to click on ads. We did the research. They’re going to mostly rely on word of mouth and through the places where they talk to one another on what cabinet-making software they want to buy.

I’m pretty sure so let’s make it even more real for the listeners which is if you can share a go-to-market success story and go-to-market failure story maybe at your time at Airmeet or Drift or even HubSpot. And then you can double-click in each of those areas.

Yeah, really simple. I’ll give you multiple. So they’re fast and you unless you want to go really deep. So success story is when you do a great job of enabling your sales and customer success teams with the content, the stories, and the process they need in order to serve the customer. In HubSpot did such a good job at this drifted a really good job. Airmeet was not a success story. We did not do a good job at that. And as some of those are partially my fault, like you, if you don’t, if you don’t enable your teams to be exceptional at what you‘re asking them to do. You know, I don’t know. I mean, you can’t really blame anything, you know, that starts with hiring by the way, and hiring for the right profile. But yeah, I mean, I’ll pause there, I have plenty of examples. I can go deeper than that. But I can just!

You know, for us to go deep. And it’s up to you. I mean, you can either pick Airmeet or Drift or HubSpot. Right. Let’s start with like, I totally agree with you that it starts with hiring the right folks and enabling and empowering them. But then let’s make it even more real and tactical and useful for the audience here.

What do you want to go deep into that?

How about the one addressed? 

Specifically? Like you when we go deeper, like how we did the training? Or how we enabled them post-hire like, what what piece?

So okay, if I look at your role at drift, your VP of content and community why don’t you walk us through an example where you had to hit a KPI or a goal or like 123 quarters? And how do you achieve that?

Well, yeah, so I mean, so the thing to know about me, and you ask anyone I used to work within any of these companies, I never just did my job. I actually did revenue enablement for a year at adrift, I enabled all go-to-market teams. So let me go back to enablement. Step one is to understand what people need to do in what timeframes. So a new hire comes in. Okay, this is the job we’re asking you to do in these timeframes. And these are the outcomes we really would expect you to get to in these timeframes. So it’s the job and the outcomes. It’s called backward planning to some degree. So using those things, to help you build a backward learning plan to help someone go from not knowing almost anything about this stuff, other than of course, what you innately hired them for, which is you know, in this case, a sales skills, salesmanship to knowing how to like to sell this complex thing and sell the story, the vision, the product, the features, how to work with the team, how to like, you know, do contracting, how to work with legal, all these things. Yeah. 

That is where most companies do not spend enough time and money, especially startups, especially startups that are, you know, A, B that are post-product market fit. So you’re listening to your post-product market fit, and you haven’t hired an enablement person or training person. And you’re more than two salespeople. You gotta you gotta hire someone right away. Or you have someone do it as like 50% of our job. Because you want repeatability. Like you’re spending all this money on marketing, right? And other things to bring people into the funnel. And then if you if you don’t equip and enable the team correctly, you’re just basically pissing away the money at the top of the funnel. Yep. So what’s the point? Um, so yeah, I mean, the lesson here is that Drift we are very deliberate. We were very focused. David can sell really believed in this stuff. HubSpot was just machina came to this. When I joined HubSpot, they had the most robust training that an early-stage startup like ever had, I’m still proud to this day, they had one of the, I mean, it is incredible, like, remarkable, the training that I went through for being 140 person company, just insane. 

That, you know, that’s what you need to do. That is, I am 100% Convinced that so if I ever started to scale my business, that’s one of the first things I would like to hire or do like train everyone consistently, because at me, like, you know, we didn’t have that focus. And some of that was I probably didn’t impress hard enough to do that. We didn’t have the right people to do that. But yeah, I mean, that that creates a lot of downstream problems, and now you know, advising and working with a lot of companies. You know, I see it clear as day.

Yeah.

Yeah, cuz they are the day people are the ones that are delivered to your go-to-market. And when you don’t have sales and CS people and support people and even marketers alike, understanding why you do what you do and what you do and how it works. It’s gonna create problems quickly. 

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, for my own experiences working at different startups earlier, right? I mean, I’ve invested and been involved with my team and creating unique content programs, and unique content. But then, if we don’t carve out the time to enable, especially in Series A and Series B, or even if the startup is going or doing a pivot from sales lead to PLG, there’s always the pressure to show results. There is no time for experimentation, the C-level and the leadership cannot stand up to the board. They can but not to a large extent not enough, they’re not strong enough, right? And the pressure comes downwards onto the GTM, functional leader, and down to the individual contributor.

Well, yeah, and it’s, um, I like to call them enablement or upskilling programs, content is a part of it, right? The way in which you like, to package up your contents, you know, it can either be used for education, educational purposes, or maybe not. But yeah, no, I mean, I agree. Like, if you leave it up to the the people who do not know how to do that. Oh, good luck.

Yeah. Very cool. And then so what are your ways some of the programs or initiatives or experiments that are doing a tag to educate the startups around? Hey, you need to Yes, it’s good to invest in content programs or committee programs, but you also need to invest and give the time for new folks to ramp up. And they should be properly enabled. So any thoughts or any initiatives that you can shed light on? 

Not really because I can be the company that’s two people, it’s me, my co-founder, right? So it’s not it’s not like one of these other companies we’ve been talking about? I mean, I say we’re doing it from an external standpoint. So you know, what I saw and did drift in HubSpot and Airmeet to some degree, is the one-to-many, maybe one-to-one-to-few approach. And that’s why we actually started the whole business with a proof of concept, and an MBA of community and owned community, I should say, through ClubPF, so built up a membership. And then we were using that to educate people. We’re using just the classic content, lead growth, and inbound marketing playbook of creating great resources and educational content to teach people about it. But we’re not big enough. We’re only just over seven months into this thing that, you know, we have anything really formal, we’re going to be building what we are building, we’re not launching soon an on-demand course. All that other stuff, tell people to learn about it. 

But yeah, it’s crazy. I mean, you know, we work with big public companies and small Series A, you know, to Series D companies, and just the lack in I guess, yeah, just the enablement piece. But not just on the employee side, the customer side, the mean, and a lot of them these, I mean, they’re actually doing it, but they’re just doing it in such a brute force way, meaning they’re just using one to one resources that should be much more tactically deployed, meaning strategic CSMs versus training centric. CSMs.

Yeah!

It’s crazy. What I see and it’s, it’s, it’s because there is this is not taught in college. This is not taught anywhere, there’s no people regressing to, you know, what they know and think is best, there’s no harm. There’s no fault of their own. But um, yeah, there’s just the whole thing when it comes to software and SAS and startups in general, there’s just still so much education that can be had and done. And that’s why we tried to create a way that matches, you know, how people buy to match how you go to market and teach people about it. 

Yeah. So talking about community, like, what are some of the resources folks or communities and maybe books or people that you lean on around your own growth?

Oh, man, I mean, I’ve read, I read a lot of books. I don’t watch a lot of TV. I like right now the way I consume stuff. I do really curate newsletters. So I mean, let me just let me just look, because I don’t know all the names. I read about, I don’t know, 10 to 15 newsletters a week, which gives me access to hundreds of different ideas and articles. So you’ve probably heard of this one. I’m sure Benedict Evans is right. That is one of the 15. He curates a ton of great stuff every week. I mean, he’s got wanting 25 links in a week in that article. On the other end of the spectrum, I subscribe and I read almost daily, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times I know most of my passion. I don’t think any one of my friends does that, which is fine. But I’m a ferocious reader. I’m in the middle. You know, I got newsletters that are specific to any one of those different products, starting a product, but people first GTM kind of motions and strategies. So I’m trying to consume stuff that’s completely outside of what I’m doing. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, 10, gentle. I got stuff that I’m subscribed to for AI. I think books are good. Like, I like books. I like a good collection. I’m just looking at my books, nonfiction versus fiction. But they also just get dated so fast. It’s so yep, that’s the bad but that’s the problem with books at least from like a business book standpoint. So yeah, I don’t know what some of the favorite things you read. What are some of your favorite newsletters?

Newsletters? Yeah, that’s a good question. So I read, for me, it’s just not GTM-only newsletters. I also look at others outside. So things that come to my mind, let me look it up Sahil Blooms, Curiosity Chronicles. That’s a good one. It’s all about mindset. How do you keep pushing yourself even though you’re at the peak, but then you can do so much more? The other one is around health and fitness. Dango. I don’t know if you know him.

They’re all subscribed to that. I saw him I do. Yes. But yeah, okay. That’s good. 

Yeah, sure. And then new ones be familiar with this. Right? Exit five. They’ve got that. That’s one. Yep. I read. No, it’s

A good one to Scott’s newsletter. Just it’s on substack Scott’s newsletters. Very interesting. It’s once a week. You know, Shane Parrish, a great one. You know, podcasts. Fantastic. Lenny’s podcast is very good. And it’s more of an industry-specific ones. His newsletter comes out ad hoc, but yeah, I mean, again, it just goes back to what I said, I don’t know. 40 minutes to learn. Learn to be a sponge and then apply. You have to apply though. The biggest thing applying doesn’t mean going like actually applying. It could be just this, write something down.

Yeah. Well, very cool. So yeah, the final question for you Mark is what advice would you give to your younger self?

If you were to turn back the clock to day one of your go-to-market journey? 

Okay, So to like to eight to two, there’s a focus on 100% always on the customer, on the people. I didn’t learn that lesson until I was kind of like getting into HubSpot a year or two in so it was like, Oh, my God. Yeah. And actually, at that point, it was like 2012,13 Dharmesh created sold for the customer. Yes, FTC. Yep. That will never leave my body. So solve with the customer.

By delving deep into the nuances of your product, market intricacies, and understanding the needs of your customers, you pave the path to unparalleled success.

In this episode, Rabi Gupta, cofounder and CEO of EvaBot (Eva AI) delves into the intricacies of go-to-market (GTM) strategies. With a wealth of experience spanning consumer products, B2B sales, and enterprise solutions, Rabi Gupta shares invaluable insights gained from overcoming setbacks and seizing opportunities. 

He also sheds light on the different flavors of GTM and discusses the critical success factors essential for launching and scaling businesses in today’s competitive landscape.

Learn from Rabi Gupta’s triumphs in sales success, as he reveals the essential factors that drive GTM effectiveness, empowering entrepreneurs to overcome challenges and achieve their goals!

Tailoring GTM Strategies: 2x Founder Rabi Gupta on B2C, B2B2C and selling to enterprises

Let’s step back and address and look at a much bigger perspective and journey and question around. How do you view and define go to market?

Yeah, it’s, it’s very interesting, because I mean, I’ve had like, three different type of products in my life until now, 11 years of being an entrepreneur, the first product was more like a consumer product, which we sold, you know, it had like, 5 million monthly active users in India back in like 2011, 2012. Then I had my second company, which was a, which is still what I’m doing. But it’s like the third product, like it’s another product in the company. The first product we had was more like AI for corporate gifts. And there, we started more as a viral product product lead growth. But there we learned a lot about, you know, b2b marketing. From there, you know, we started getting into sales processes, so build like mid market sales motion. And then from there, we start getting inbound into enterprises. So I started getting into enterprise motion. And, you know, in the last one, one and half years when things got really, really tough for salespeople, and for a lot of sass companies, including ours, and then, you know, this, this new ray of hope, which was like AI came into picture, we started building a new product. 

Because we were trying to sell to enterprises in a very tough market, we learned a lot of things like learned a lot of challenges that sales teams actually face. And then when this new AI came out, we realised that there are a lot of interesting ways in which some of those fundamental problems could be solved. And so our journey has been like, right through from consumer to like, you know, in a b2b to see and then from there, actually getting to b2b. So, I’ve seen a lot in terms of GTM.

Yeah, now, that’s what is unique about your background, you’ve seen b2c, you’ve seen b2b, b2c, and you’re seeing now you’re doing like b2b. So what do you think are the different flavors? I mean, have you found like, Hey, this is how and what I believe is go to market? And how are you helping shape your company and team around that?

Yeah. So again, like for different types of products, go to market can look completely different. You know, if you if you are in a consumer space, then you have to, of course, look at some sort of virality, and, or social, you know, things in the product that automatically help you grow, because, you know, paying Google and Facebook to help you grow is not sustainable at all in consumer space. So there needs to be some sort of either partnership. So just one example like, when we were doing a couch app in India, we built a very cool feature, where, you know, as you know, it had like, a lot of chat rooms, for people who are watching TV shows, right? So we had, we used to generate a ton of content around those TV shows and all of that. So then we went on and partnered with, like, these TV channels, which used to show that content as a ticker on TV when the show was live. And that gave us a lot of organic users, right? So things like that you have to think about when you’re in consumer space. When you do b2b to see because we came from a consumer space, we had a lot of ideas about, you know, how do you build a motion that kind of gives you virality in the product, right? So we did that and you know, so when we build this AI for corporate gifts, we try to create such a unique experience. 

In the gifting process, the person who received the gift remembered us even after like, three, four or five years, I remember the experience. So that gave us a ton of, you know, fortune 500 customers, right? For example, we started with real estate. And in real estate, you know, real estate agents are sending gifts to all these people who are buying houses, right. And all these people who are buying houses are working for some good company, right? And so we got Microsoft from there, because one person worked at Microsoft, he told his assistant, his assistant then called us and then, you know, we Microsoft became like, 100k account right for us. So things like that happened in that space. But then so so when you’re doing a product, lead growth, things like that is very important that you know, every person who is experiencing your product, they should really like it and have a very unique experience and talk about it and helps you expand.

Right!

Then the final frontier is actually enterprise sales, where you just do like outbound right, and you have to try to convince people and that is completely different than every other thing right? There, what we have learned is, you know, it’s all about building trust. I mean, a good product always helps, you can never win without a good product. So a differentiated product, a great product that solves a particular pain point is always helpful. But on top of it, you also have to do a lot of these relationship building things, you know, building trust, and then you have to be more patient, right? Things don’t close in like a day. Yeah, that’s the biggest challenge. 

For sure. I think, if I had to summarize, I mean, clearly, I won’t do justice. But the way you articulated actually told a chair Dr. GTM experiences across b2c, b2b, b2c and b2b. I think the common thread if I had to summarize is one is definitely you need to have a good product slash service that consumers or customers love, the users love that that’s one thing, and it should make the life easier. You did also touch upon one point, Rabi, which is to focus on one thing, one problem and then do it well, that leads to building the virality aspect. And then in terms of like growth, how can you now network/multiplier effect growth, and especially in organic and consumer, the example that he used of sharing user generated content with the TV channels? Right, all these are clearly unique aspects across like product, marketing, revenue, customer services, and eventually tying it to the problem with a specific user. 

That’s correct. Yeah. Yeah. 

Fantastic. So I’m actually eager and excited now all the more not that I was not but even more given your varied experiences. So let’s take a step back now, Rabi , and then why don’t you share with our listeners your career story? You’ve done your undergrad at BIT in Ranchi. Is that right? 

So BIT, this college is in Meerut. Okay? Yeah, it’s not BITS, BITS is different. So this is BIT in Meerut, I studied there. Luckily, I have two very good friends who then became my co-founders from college. So yeah, I mean, like a lot of great things happened there. And then after college, I worked at Wipro technologies for like, two and a half years. But during our college, we had a senior who was very involved with entrepreneurship. And we used to like, you know, just be very curious about like, both me and my other co-founder Satwick was with me, we both used to be very curious about like what is this like what is entrepreneurship and like? So he went to IT Bombay. At that time, IT Bombay started this Eureka business competition and he won a five lakh rupees prize and we were so amazed by all of that.

And so both me and Satwick, we wanted to build a company but after college, we just started working right. But two, two and a half years, I was like, No, I really want to do something. And because 2008-2009 was the time when the internet was really the internet, startups like Flipkart and all those guys were picking up right so there was some ecosystem getting built with some angel investors and all of that was happening right. So then we decided to just jump on at that point Satwick didn’t join but my other friend from college Ashish, both he and I like we both started this company. And then we raised some series like some small funding from Morpheus accelerator, raised some angel round, you know that Rajan Anandon like who right now works at Sequoia India. So we did, we did all of that and we built the product to like 5 million active users profitability. It was like a very hard journey. I mean, because like, it was a very young ecosystem. So everything was hard hit getting the right people. 

And you’re referring to the I-coach app at this point, right? At this point?

Yeah. Anyways, we did it for like four or five years, then eventually sold it to another company called Video Li, which was trying to expand into OTT space. And during that time, we were building on other video apps. And some of my friends told me to go and visit Silicon Valley. And I was like, Okay, I have a US visa, because that was the one thing that we provided for me was getting a US visa. Yeah. So I just came here. And I, as soon as I landed, I just loved this place. I was like, Oh my God, I didn’t even know that a place like this exists in the world. And I was like, I want to live here. Right? So. So what I did, like, I struggled, like for six, seven months stayed at Airbnb, we were building some apps at that time. But I was meeting a lot of people. And I wrote a blog post about my whole journey of moving to Silicon Valley on a business visa, and trying multiple things that got some views that got picked up by your story and other other publications. And then somehow, like, you know, few angels actually contacted me like, hey, you know, let’s catch up. 

So I met these angel investors, and like, I was able to raise 100k. And they just invested in me like, and there was like, really surprising about Silicon Valley. They were like, I don’t know what you’re doing, whether it will work or not, but I like you. So I will just invest 50k. I said, Wait, so, so I got 100k. And I’m like, okay, 100k is good enough to get started in India. Right. So I went back, built this small team, with my same co-founder, but then, at this time, Satwick, also joined me who was working at Hotstar at that time. And then like the three of us thought, you know, let’s start a new company. So then I in Satwick, we both came to us, again on business visa. And we thought, you know, what could we build? So one of the ideas was, hey, you know, let’s build something in gifting because we don’t have a relationship or network here. And the fastest way to build a network is to give someone something.

Oh, wow. Okay. 

We had a very weird idea. And then we thought, okay, we are both very bad at gifting. So how can we make the experience cool, right? Can we make it very simple? Yeah. And so we came up with this idea of Chatbot. Because during 2016-2017, chatbots were very popular. So we built a chatbot that used to ask questions from people and collect their data. And we made it very emotionally intelligent. So for example, if we just met, after meeting, I’ll send you a link. And I’ll say that hey, you know, thank you for the meeting. I just want to gift you something small. Just chat with this spot to get your gift. We realized that kind of, first of all, creates curiosity, right creates curiosity in the gift receivers mind. 

And second of all, they were able to share all the details, because it was not an awkward conversation. Right? If I asked you right now, I want to give you a gift, like tell me something about you. It’s very awkward, right? So the bot used to ask all the questions like Do you have kids? Do you like wine? Do you like coffee? Like what type of coffee you like us to ask all the questions. And we had a 99.9% chat completion rate. So that thing started picking up really fast, because if I send you a gift like that, you like the experience, and you’re like, hey, I want to use it for my team, I want to use it for me. 

And that’s how it started growing. But then when we started doing sales, we picked like an industry we first picked real estate and mortgage because we saw very repeat behaviour there that every time there is a closing, they want to send a closing gift. Yeah. So it started picking up really well in real estate and mortgage and then through virality, we got into Microsoft, Cigna, like a lot of these big companies that are customers.

Yeah, so actually quite a few nuggets over there. I can dive into many of those points. But one thing I want to get your thoughts on is how did you nail on real estate and mortgage or real estate? Audience? 

Yeah, so by that time, we had raised money from Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures and, and you know, they are like very smart people, right? So they were telling us that, hey, you know, BLG is good, but you’re doing it in a very generalized way. You have to pick a vertical and grow really deep in that vertical. So of course, it was growing randomly where there was no focused path to growth, right. So they told us to do that. And then we started exploring, okay, what are the areas where we can go and because we didn’t come from a sales background, we knew that we cannot do door to door sales or like in person sales, right? So, Satvik had some experience with marketing. So we thought, let’s put ads on Facebook and see which industries like this idea, right? And when we started doing that naturally, we saw more and more real estate people coming in through ads. And then we thought, like, why are they coming in, then we because we didn’t understand the real estate context in the US, right? 

Then like, our investors told us, oh, real estate agents, they, whenever they close a house, they want to send a gift. And I was like, Okay, that’s cool that there is a repeat behavior. So that’s how we picked that and what happened was because real estate agents were also sending gifts to their mortgage friends, for referrals, right. From there, it started going into mortgage as well. And in August, then we saw that there are a lot of big companies like Guild Mortgage, you know, loan depot, fair mortgage. So, we started getting, then we started selling into mortgages, right. So from pure marketing, it started becoming more of a sales motion. In mortgage. That’s how we got into the mortgage. Yeah.

Got it. Yeah. So that was during what? 2017,18, 19 till COVID time? 

Yeah, after COVID. So during COVID, we started doing the sales motion in mortgage. It scaled really fast at that time. On the back of it, we raised our Series A.

Got it. Okay, and, but that was not. So that was VZ. That was a gifting. Evabot. Yeah. 

VZ, was more like, you know, a company name that we then later changed to Evabot. 

Got it. So it was Evabot, and then you had to pivot. After that.

We pivoted Yeah, in the last one and one and a half years. So the gifting side was going well. But as soon as this, like the tech recession, and the ZURB era ended, first of all mortgages got a huge hit mortgage and real estate. So our revenue started dipping there because it was mostly usage revenue. The more you pay, the subscription was only 20%. So that was one reason. The other was all the big companies we were already targeting like Microsoft, you know, Cigna, they all had some sort of budget cuts or budget free fees, right? So we realize that, you know, it’s nice to have business, right? When the times are good, it will come back again. So, either you wait it out, or you build something new. And because in a startup, you always want to keep growing you don’t you never like.

Right. 

And there was this new AI. So both things combined, right like that. Okay, there’s a new opportunity as well. So we are trying to sell to mid market enterprises, we are seeing a lot of challenges. So we have an understanding about the problems in this space. Yeah, that kind of gave us good enough confidence to build something in this space.

Fantastic. And then, depending on comfort level, like what revenue point did you have to pivot? What were you clearly starting from zero to x number of dollars? 

Yeah. So with the gifting business, we crossed $10 million in total revenue, it was doing between four to $5 million in revenue, when we raised our Series A, it got to like almost half at this point, like it is still like the organic customers are still using it, but it is it is half of that. So we realized it as soon as it started dropping down. And like in the past one, one and half years, it’s more like starting up again.

Right. Right. And then something else that caught my attention, right? I mean, it goes back to having a good set of angel investors to always guide you and have faith in you. So going back to your point, when you came to Silicon Valley for the first time, people were just coming, reaching out and saying, Hey, I invest in you. Right. And that is a testament to the success you had with Ico chap. If you didn’t have that no one would reach out to you.

For that, that was one part. The other part was, of course, you know, when you meet you share your ideas and like with angels and like early seed stage investors, of course, because I had done one startup like I had some wisdom. And I did not like making rookie mistakes. So that helps. But yeah, I mean, yeah, if you have done one startup and you have failed miserably, that’s also a great thing to get started again!

For sure. And then the other point, the reason why I asked in terms of how you identified and arrived at mortgage, right, I think you also mentioned about Bloomberg, 1 of your investors or advisor, so, so my Uber point, Rabi is having good set of investors and advisors is really key in terms of when you’re facing a roadblock, or you’re hitting a wall or you don’t know what to do. And that’s my thought process, or that’s what is my takeaway, what would you say to that?

So two points. One is, you know, first of all, investors should be supportive. Right? Yeah, that is always like, number one. And, you know, we are fortunate that, you know, 99% of them are, especially during tough times, I mean, like, good times, everyone is happy. Sure. Yep. The second point is, yes, investors can definitely, you know, really help so, so, you know, we keep them updated, like, if not every month, because, you know, if things are hard, then you try to keep them updated every quarter, right? And you try to meet with them every once in a while. And like, try to, you know, share the problems and get some insights, also your board, in our case, Comcast is on board. So the board should also be pretty supportive of whatever you’re doing. I think that gives you the space to experimentation and make mistakes. And yeah, but sometimes, if you’re stuck with an investor who has, who is very opinionated, and also kind of controls the board, then it can become very hard. For sure. Yeah.

So switching on a lighter note, what does your family think about what you do? How do they describe you? Or how would they describe you, either your kids or wife or parents? How would they describe you? Your varied journey throughout?

Oh, that’s a very interesting question. I think I always try to be thoughtful about everything. So yeah, for me, you know, everything is important, like my friends, like family, work. So I try to give time to everyone. Like, luckily, my friends are also working with me. So you know, kind of that, you know, the world takes care of that as well. Sometimes. For family, as you know, in the US, you have very little support so my parents.. My mom is in India. So yeah, I mean, like, you have to then spend time with your kids and wife because there is no other option. 

How would your kids describe what they think that you do for a living? Your kids? 

Oh, my kid is just three years old. So he doesn’t know. He just knows that. Whatever I tell this guy he will do. 

I got it. Very cool. All right. 

So let’s go back to what you do today at Evabot. So why don’t you explain or just share a quick overview of who you serve? And who are your customers? And why are they buying your service and products?

Yeah, so, as I said, like, when we, when we started pivoting to this new product, of course, it was more like starting from zero, right, like, So, you have to do all the basic things, right, like, have an idea and then validate the idea, then kind of build something, talk to potential customers learn from them. So all of this takes time. So in the past, I would say six to nine months, we learned a lot about, you know, specific challenges that for example, our ICP is biz dev people like BDR, SDRs, AES right. So, we are sending to their head like VP of sales or head of biz dev or CRO, what we have learned is that most of the products in the market today try to sell tricks to salespeople that seem like, don’t worry about fundamentals, follow these tricks, you will get some leads. 

So everyone is just focused on tricks plus leads and like what are these tricks tricks are more like, oh, this person changed jobs, right? And send this person a wine and then ask this person to give you a meeting, right? It has nothing to do with whether this person is your right ICP, right? Actually need your solution? Nothing, right? The other trick can be, you know, this person, these people are hiring STRS. Now, okay, like, if I’m hiring SDR, that could mean 1 million things, right? That doesn’t mean like 1 million companies should now start reaching out to me, right? So all these things, basically, if you see, and then in the sales process itself, when the SDRs are BDR, they are reaching out to potential customers, they are talking very surface level things, right. And again, like following trying to follow tricks. For example, if you’re writing an email the trick is that the email should be as short as possible. Now, sometimes the emails are so short that they lose meaning. They don’t care, right? So basically, what we realized was at the end of the day, what is a really good sale process, right? Looks like it, right? So if you look at top 0.1 person salespeople, they do all the fundamentals, right? 

Right. 

So, instead of sending 1000 emails, they will say, I will send 100, very educated or informed emails, so that my conversion rate is higher, right? They will try to learn everything about the account, they are trying to reach out everything about the prospects they are trying to reach out, right. And I agree, this is a very hard process. So not everyone is built to do one point. We realize that LLM is more than the generation capability generative AI capability, right? The biggest capabilities they have is reasoning ability, and also coding ability, right? All these all these? What do you call that? Emerging behavior? elements. So we realize, let’s look at the emerging behavior, like reasoning capability, for example, analyzing tons of data, right? Just to give you an example, if you’re an SDR or an AE, if I could look at all the accounts you’re trying to reach out and look at their 10k reports earnings call news, right? 

Look at who are the prospects you’re trying to reach out look at their LinkedIn profile, the college they went to their experience everything right, and then crystallize the information, make it relevant to what you do as a as a company, make that as is relevant to you and then give you in a very snackable format that you can read and understand about the company. So instead of looking at a 130 page 10k report you just read three paragraphs relevant to your company that is today possible using the LLMs. So we thought that this is a fundamental thing to solve. If you solve the fundamental problems then eventually people would understand and buy.

Yeah!

So that’s how we started building on this idea.

Got it. So essentially, you’re trying to first of all, make the sales people, the outreach process more relationship oriented versus just follow these tactics blindly. 123 tactics that’s one thing. The second is you also make it easy for them to get the information that is irrelevant to build a relationship. Is that a fair summary? 

Correct! And when you do that you’re not doing anything, which is fundamentally incorrect, for example, it’s not cheating, right? If I give you the right information for a particular account and a person, the only thing I am doing is saving you time. I am not saying that let me do the let AI i do the outreach on your behalf, that would be cheating, right? So I’m telling you that, you know, you spent two hours doing this research. I can reduce it to two clicks, and then you have the same information that is more relevant. 

Yeah. Very cool. So this is super helpful. Clearly, the way you’re thinking about GTM, in terms of how you do the pivot, how you think about the ICP is what is the pain point and what is not the pain point and the value prop. All of those have clearly come from your vast knowledge of GDM success and decay and failure stories throughout. So why don’t you share with the listeners both a GTM success story and a GTM failure story? I’ll let you pick which one you’re gonna go with. But because it’s up to you, yeah,

I would say we’re like 99% of the GPM failure stories and maybe 1% of success.

But the 99% is actually powering that one person to a larger scale.

Yeah, failure is important. Correct. So GTL’s failure story would be, in a way, in our previous company, what we feel like the previous product, I would say, with EvaBot, but the gifting product, because it was mostly driven by product lead growth. It’s very hard to build relationships in those cases, right? So those businesses face harder times when, when the need for the product or the budget cuts and all those things happen, right? But if your hypothesis is if you build a more relationship driven sales process, like Oracle or Salesforce, right. And if the times are tough, they will try to sell some other things to you, right? Because the product is just, I mean, just one additional thing they are selling what they’re basically selling is the relationship. So I think relationship driven sales is the ultimate winner in any market. Once you’re able to do that, then you can just, of course, not sell bad products. But if you combine that with a great product, then that is a more sustainable strategy. 

Yeah, for sure. And going back to your journey, I mean, if we look at I-coach app, even though on surface, it has nothing to do with relationship, but if you see, for those who take it to the next level, they’ll see that it’s essentially helping build is helping the TV brands and the TV content producers build relationships with their users through UGC. 

Yeah, that’s correct. Yep. Yeah!

And same thing with a gifting can Oh, you’re doing it with Evabot, where it’s all about relationships. So if I have to capture your mantra, your unique value prop as a team, it’s about solving the relationship problems in different cases.

That’s true. And one other very interesting thing I recently realized is in all my companies, we actually worked on recommendations. So everywhere, it was all about, okay, you watch so many TV shows, let me filter out the best TV shows and give it to you. And then you know, you have so many ways to get a gift. But let me filter it out and get the perfect gift for you. And now we are doing it, you know, for sales in a way that you know, let me filter out the right information and give it to you.

Pretty cool. So, curious, how big is your team at you right now?

We were close to 23 People like 22-23 Yeah.

Okay. And so as a founder, because you’ve done so many go to market motions, I’m just curious and want to get your view of how do you view or what do you think is the role of Product Marketing overall in go to market?

Yeah, that’s very interesting. We recently hired a product marketing person, he is a good friend, he has been an entrepreneur. And I didn’t hire anyone in Product Marketing, because I know that it’s a very hard role to fill. And it’s, you need to have, you need a variety of skills, you need to have a deep understanding of technology products, and then you should fundamentally understand how do you market your product? Right. So we recently hired him and we are learning from him a lot. But yeah, the one thing I’ve learned is product marketing, again, like as the name suggests, it starts with the product. It doesn’t start with marketing. So like 99% of the people. We’ll see that there’s no product marketing. As soon as you reach out to them, they’re like, Oh, I will not write content for that. We have content writers, I will do ads, I’m like, That’s not product marketing.

Yeah. So what prompted you to reach out and hire a product marketer in the first place? Why does it take so long?

So yeah, again, comes from the failures that we have seen, right? So we realize that at EvaBot, the first product or around gifting, we did a very poor job of branding and marketing. And that is why you know, when you have BLG, it kind of kind of, you know, saves you from all the other mistakes you’re doing, right, including, not building a very strong brand and all of that. But when you’re doing sales, you know that people should hear about you and should know about you somehow, so that when you’re reaching out, they already kind of know your brand. And so we knew that there’s a major gap. 

And we had a lot of ideas, me and my other co-founders, but when we had other things we could never execute. So I think we always knew that the gap existed. And if we couldn’t, if we wouldn’t have found the product marketing person, we just found that gap might have still been there. So we are trying to fill the gap. And it’s, we see the benefits of it for sure. 

And what the reason why I’m asking this, Rabi is I’ve seen quite a few founders make that mistake. I also see like, Chief Product officers, or even chief market officers make the mistake of not hiring Product Marketing early on. So what is your advice to them in terms of having a product market? Or, like, what do you see are like the checklists or guiding guideposts about what they need to look out for and when they need to hire a product market? 

Yeah, so once you have a good product, of course, you know, you build the product by talking to your customers, like, at least not by talking to everybody, at least have them around when you’re building your product, so that you’re not building in blind, right? So one is that once you have the product, then the thing is okay, if some people like it, right. And if you say you’re selling to any community, say we sell to a sales community, you might be set into the IT community, and it can be anything, right. So depending upon the persona and where they go, for example, our persona goes to LinkedIn, right, and they are on LinkedIn most of the time. So you have to have a very strong presence on LinkedIn, and like thought leadership in that. So once you have a product that you kind of feel that people will see value, but now you just need to reach out to a lot more people. At that point. As you’re doing sales or marketing, you should start thinking about product marketing. 

So why did you hire? Why wouldn’t you recommend a brand or a content or demanded person? What is unique about the product market?

That’s very interesting, so we have done all of this, right? Because when you raise money, you basically try to just hire people, and you make a bunch of mistakes. We made a bunch of mistakes, whoever we hired, we then had to fire 90% of the people. And it’s not on them. It’s basically on us because we we we didn’t we didn’t realize who we needed to hire first. We hired head of marketing, we hired marketing people, we hired Head of Content content people, like we didn’t realize that they can help and then scale. A solution, a scale up process that is already working. 

Correct. 

They cannot build the process to build the process. You again need an entrepreneurial mindset, right? You need someone who will say that what you’re doing doesn’t, for example, the new product marketing person, he said that, Oh, you don’t need to hire anyone. I will first build the motion, do everything. And when I can’t scale myself, then I’ll ask you to hire the right people. So that is the right way, right? You need to find the right person who understands how the product works, and then understand where these communities go and then start building relationships. And then you can scale that process. 

Yeah, I mean, the way I’ve seen this work, and I’ve seen this personally on my side as an employee, as well as with my other clients, to your point is you the first marketing hire once you have a product that has some traction, the first marketing hire should ideally be someone who’s Senior who can do it independently, but who is essentially a product marketer, who can do multiple things, who can think brand who can think go to market strategy who can think demand, all of these things, positioning messaging, channels, content, all of these partnerships and then to point once that person reaches a stage where, hey, I think we have tractions in ABC but beyond this, I cannot scale myself, I’ll be the bottleneck, then hire the next function. Maybe

it’s demand, maybe it’s brand, maybe it’s content, depending on the gaps. 

That’s true. Yeah. By the first time I realized marketing is a very, very different type of role than any other role.

Correct. Now, this is super good. I mean, I’m actually glad I don’t know what came to my mind to ask this question. But I’m actually creating what I’m calling as champions of Product Marketing, you will definitely be one of them, I’ll showcase you on the webpage. Seeing other CEOs and even CROs realizing this, the role of Product Marketing and when to hire product marketing. Right. Thank you for sharing that advice. And hopefully, that’ll help save the trouble and mistakes for other founders in their go to market journey. Yep, that’s quick. I know we’re wrapping up almost like 5-10 minutes against the time. I know you have other things that are easy to take care of, as well, Rabi. So switching gears, by the way, I didn’t I didn’t cut you off, where you did share, go to market failure story, but not a go to market success story.

Yeah, I mean, for us to go to market success. Small wins, right? Like yesterday, we had a win. So today’s a great day. But yeah, go to market successes. I think I and my other co-founders always believe in doing fundamental things and be happy about it. Versus again, like trying to find tactics to do it. So I think that more than more than success stories, it’s more about more, it’s more about you know, you have to spend time, right? Like, everything takes time. So if you’re doing anything, which is fundamentally right, it will take some time. So we knew that, you know, okay, this new product will take time, but eventually it will happen. And we had to learn a bunch of things like should we do free pilot? Should we not do pilots? So we tried with three pilots and it didn’t work, then we removed the pilot? And then And then yeah, eventually we are at a stage with this new product where people are buying. 

Very cool. And are you comfortable sharing the revenue range with this pivot?

With this pivot? I mean, it’s, I can share, but it’s like, it’s more like, you know, a seed stage company again.

Fair enough. Yeah. No, it goes back to the Uber point, which is, eventually investors bet on founders who can pivot. They don’t bet on products. I mean, if they have the right founders, founders will always figure out how to make it work and pivot. And, and that’s a testament to you, that is exactly what you did. Right? And that’s a testament to you and your team. So I’m thrilled and super happy for you guys. So the other pieces are like, what resources do you lean on? When it comes to really understanding go to market like best practices? What’s working? What’s not working? In your case? You didn’t mention tactics, but the bad tactics for sales? So what resource do you lean on to improve your go to market thought process? 

Yeah. So as we started learning more about enterprise sales and bear market sales, we first of all, we do have a very good advisor on sales. Like she has a lot of experience. So one is that if you don’t have the experience yourself, have someone as an advisor or consultant right. Now, who gives you tips like, how are you reading calls? How are you asking questions, like all those things, right? discovery calls, discovery questions, all of that. But the second thing is, we look at like a lot of these influences on LinkedIn, we have really good content. So there are two types of influences on LinkedIn. Right? One, again, will use tactics. Other ones will write very thoughtful posts, right? So we follow those people who write thoughtful posts, and we try to get their content. So sometimes that content is paid, for example, I think there’s some p club. 

Right. 

So that content is pretty good. 

Chris. Chris. 

Yeah. 

He’s amazing. 

Yeah. So we try to learn from all these sources. And then YouTube, you don’t find a lot in terms of open information. Yeah, I think that’s what especially for this, this new GTM that’s, that’s where we are learning from and then by the way, the other thing which I would highly rate is having some potential customers but as advisors, so that, hey, no strings attached. You don’t have to buy my solution. Just be on my side. give me feedback every two weeks or every month. And we have like three or four people like that, who are their top sales leaders. But then, you know, they just give unbiased feedback on the product and our GTM.

What is in it for them? Why will they sign up? Even though they’re not buying anything? 

So sometimes, you know, you can offer from your side. See all I always offer either advisory equity or some cash component because I know that it’s their time. But then if you, you should not attach it to the point that, hey, you have to eventually get your buying team to purchase it, because then it becomes more biased!

Or it’s very transactional against the ethics of relationship building.

Correct. So it’s like, okay, we value your time, we’ll give you either equity or cash. But then you just give unbiased feedback. If at any point you feel that your team can benefit, then let’s talk. 

Pretty cool!  And then, the final question to you is, what advice would you give to your younger self if you were to go back, go back in time and start day one of your GTM Journey? 

Oh wow! Yeah, I would definitely do the product marketing thing more earlier. That is for sure. Yeah, the other thing is.

By the way, I didn’t endorse or prompt you in saying this. It came from you!

Definitely. The other thing we would do is yeah, try multiple things like when the product is early, right, like when you’re just launched, you feel that the product is a must have, right you by default thing. So a product becomes a must have when customers are ready to pay for it. Right. Before that, and especially in tough markets and easy markets, everything was must have, right, like people were just buying all the tools. In a tough market, I think when someone says I’m ready to pay for it, that means you have that must have or you have reached that tipping point. So before that, I think we did less experiments, I think we should be doing more experiments to get to that point quickly than data.

Yeah. Very good piece of advice. Yeah. And that’s something that I’m reminding myself as well and trying to get myself to do, which is to experimenting in terms of positioning messaging with channels, which ICP, what is written, anything, what is not, to your point? It’s an ongoing cycle. I mean, as a founder, you will realize that whatever got you from zero to one will be different from what will get you from one to five, one to 10, five to 10, and so on. So that experimenting mindset has to be there. Maybe at a later point, once you get to the 20-50 to 100 million mark. Rabi, I would love to have you on the show again, and ask you around how you’re building the experimenting culture in your team once you have like 200-500 people employees?

Yeah, you’re making sure that I don’t repeat my mistake, right?

Yes, for sure.