A CMO’s Approach To A Go-To-Market Strategy With James Kessinger

Posted on May 10, 2023May 18, 2023 by stratyve_ant2yf

The go-to-market is all about connecting with your customers to buy your product or service. Who better to facilitate this than a Chief Marketing Officer? In this episode, Vijay Damojipurapu sits down with James Kessingerto discuss the vital role of the CMO in the go-to-market. James is the CMO of Hushly. Prior to that, he has been charting the waters of his career in the field of marketing, customer success, partnerships, revenue ops, and sales. He takes us across his journey and imparts great insights into a CMO’s approach under this strategy. James shares how he has shaped the go-to-market at Hushly and how it has evolved since taking on the role. He also talks about some of the go-to-market successes and failures he has observed, especially among marketers. Full of helpful information from his rich experience, James gives a great show to help you bring your strategy to success. Tune in to not miss out!

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A CMO’s Approach To A Go-To-Market Strategy With James Kessinger

I have with me James Kessinger who is the CMO of Hushly. He’s coming from a very varied and accomplished background. We will get into a lot of those details during the episode. Stay tuned.

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Welcome, James.

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

I always start the show with the signature question. How do you define go-to-market?

It’s always a fun one. I look at all teams in the company working toward a common set of goals with measurements and ownership of who’s doing what, which is ultimately led by a CEO. That person owns the go-to-market. At the end of the day, we all support that go-to-market function. That’s how I define it. It’s everybody working toward that common set of goals and with measurements because you have to have measurements.

You are the only one on the show who said that go-to-market is “owned“ by the CEO. No one has ever told me that.

I can’t change a sales comp. If you want to enter a new market or a new country, the CEO has to make decisions.

Both you and I and many others subscribe to what Sangram Vajre and his team and others are prescribing, which is go-to-market is not owned by one person. It should be owned by the CEO who has the entire gambit across all the functions. You did call about the CEO owning the metrics and then driving or guiding each of the functions but if you double–click, let’s go to the next layer, how would you as a CMO approach the go-to-market motion?

Largely, it comes down to what are we trying to achieve because my role is broader than the CMO aspect. I have to look at all functions, whether that’s customer success, sales, or even our dev op stuff, not just marketing. They all play a role in terms of what we’re trying to achieve and what we’re trying to do. Ultimately, once you’ve established this is what we’re trying to do, my job as a CMO, and probably most CMOs for that matter is to help orchestrate a lot of that to happen and making sure, “Is everybody pulling together? What do we have to do?”

Marketing touches everything from pre-sales all the way through post-sales and loyalty at the end of the day. That’s part of the go-to-market. You have to be able to touch the entire evolution of a customer and/or market on what you’re trying to do. That for me is understanding what we’re trying to achieve and who we need to rally together to get that because in the beginning, you may have to have a smaller set of folks and then broadly, you expand that out over time.

That’s all very internally focused. Let’s say you and the team are going after a specific market. How do you define the ICP? How do you do the research and the assumptions around your go-to-market?

We had to do this late last year because we were entering a brand new market that we had. We need data. Without that, you’re flying a little blind. You need to understand why are you making the decisions you’re going to make. For us, it came down to the data. I look at it as we had a set of customers that are more profitable than others but also, they’re using more of our products. The time to close is a little different and a little shorter. Ultimately, we have bigger relationships there.

For us, that was one of the reasons why we chose to nail down the cybersecurity path. We were heavy in technology as a company in terms of our market but when I look at it, let’s focus on this vertical specifically, which is cybersecurity. Is our ICP correct within this? Broadly, it’s correct for what we’re trying to do in tech but let’s make sure it’s correct here too.

That for me is where the data comes in. My job is to help look at how our past business has been looking from a close-one perspective. What do the deal sizes look like? How long does it take to close things? What are we losing? How much of the product are they using? It’s the consumption aspect of it. How many people do they have in the product? Can you start to define that ICP a bit more and then nail it? Ultimately, from there goes everything else. You have to get the messaging and your content ready. You have to start building things around that once you make a decision to go there but the data drives it, “Are you going in the right direction first? What direction should you be going?” That’s what we did.

The data really drives you in the right direction. Share on X

I’m sure we will double-click on several of the aspects over there. Let’s rewind a bit over here. Why don’t you walk us through your career path? You’ve got a very interesting career path. I‘ll double-click on several of the things but I want you to tell your story and how you became the CMO.

I’m the COO and CMO. It’s a bit of a dual role. I’ve been in Hushly for five years. I started as the CMO and moved into a broader role that encompasses more additional responsibilities. Overall, I’m responsible for marketing, customer success, partnerships, revenue ops, and sales. My career path didn’t start there. I started working in enterprise companies that were in growth mode at their time, which is pretty important to say because those companies today are either gone or in the twilight of their heyday if you want to call it that. I started at MCI Telecom.

Its heyday. It was outmaneuvering AT&Ts and Baby Bells way back then. I stayed there for four years. I went into Cisco which at the time in 1999 was a leader in networking and expanding out of their core customer base, which was enterprise, and moving into service providers. It was a new market with new buyers. They were expanding all their products and service business.

Ultimately, I spent fourteen years there. I spent quite a bit of time and did everything from services marketing, partner marketing, and segment marketing, which is the SMBs for service providers. I carried a bag. I was in sales for a couple of years. After Cisco, I went into a smaller company for about a year, ran their channel sales and marketing, got recruited to work in VMware, and ran their American big partner organization for about three years.

That’s where I cut my teeth and built my career because you could do so much in these big companies. I left the big company life and went into my first startup called CloudVelox. We got acquired VMware a year later, which was crazy. Instead of staying in IT, I was using the product of the company that I’m at now, which is Hushly. Rather than rejoin VMware, I jumped into the MarTech industry and moved to Hushly.

I can talk to CISOs and CIOs. You have all the messaging. You can talk to folks but it was interesting to me to talk to marketers, market to marketers, and sell to marketers. It was fun. That was what drew me there more than anything else. I get to touch technology, be involved with it, and talk to marketers pretty much all day, whether that’s practitioners, directors, or all the way to the CMOs. That for me was a fun run here for the last few years here. That’s my story.

You mentioned MCI. Here’s a little bit of my background. I came from India. I was doing my Master‘s. Back in those days, we were all purchasing the MCI calling cards to call back home. It was crazy. After that, I was in the telecom industry at Fujitsu Network Communications and even Microsoft. We were selling to MCI.

We got bought by WorldCom. UUNET was the actual backbone of the internet way back when. That was it. WorldCom became Verizon.

It looks like we might have interacted, not directly but we were selling to the same customers when I was at Microsoft working on the Mediaroom IPTV platform. You were maybe involved at Cisco in the IPTV world. We did cross paths but not directly. Here we are, finally touching ways.

It’s a small world.

You also mentioned selling two marketers in your role at Hushly. It’s almost like you are dogfooding your product and trying to showcase or get folks on the marketing side to adopt your product. That’s a challenge. I experienced that personally when I was at SugarCRM. I was a product marketing director there. I had to use the CRM but at the same time, I was selling to marketers and salespeople around CRM.

We’re all skeptical. I’m probably the biggest skeptic out there for sure. Our inboxes are full of marketing. Honestly, I get SDRs and PDRs. In every agency, everyone is flooding your inbox, and then you got the normal sales reps calling you and trying to sell everything. We are very skeptical buyers if you want to call it that, which is good. The good news is I understand that. I come from a level of understanding. It is about having to prove what you’re doing, which is good.

We’ve got a good product. Without a good product, it’s hard to do any marketing honestly because you’re fighting against your product. If you don’t have a good product in the market, it makes it much more challenging than if you’ve got a product that people care about. You’ve got advocates out there, you can show an ROI, and you’ve got people using it and willing to pay for it. That makes your job that much easier because you can now start to showcase and tell different stories versus if you’re making up a story that’s maybe not true.

Without a good product, it's really hard to do any marketing. Share on X

Your case is unique. Visual marketers get to that point. In your case, you were an avid user of Hushly. You loved the product and then moved over into Hushly, selling and getting others to adopt Hushly.

I was able to at least bang the drum before I got here. It was fun. It worked. The product worked for me, which is one of the selling points of why I came as well. It worked for me and I get it. These are problems that are in the industry. We were a single product back then. Now, we’re 9 or 10 products. It was unique. It solved a unique problem. It was a great story.

Let’s double-click on that. What does Hushly do? Who do you serve? Who are your customers? You mentioned marketing but let’s go into the use cases and the pain points that you solve.

For us, B2B companies or any industry is who we’re laser-focused on. It’s not a B2C. While it could be used there, we don’t go there. We’re heavy technology. We’re in cybersecurity. Our personas and the people that we sell to are digital marketers. They’re folks that care about SEO and SEM and paid marketers. Because we’re an experience and conversion platform, it comes down to the demand-gen marketer. You care about, “How do I activate my content? How do I educate buyers out there and get them to convert?” The demand-gen marketers are probably the main persona that we care about and sell to. Around that, it’s the content marketer. Content is the fuel for your engine.

If you think about the advent of the whole account-based marketing thing that has gone over the last few years, it’s field marketing. Field marketing and the ABM market are out there. They’re the ones that are at the pointy end of the spear because now you’ve got technologies like ours, 6sense, Demandbase, and the other guys. You’ve got the ability now to drive not just one-to-one models but one-to-one in a scalable fashion in terms of being able to use unique page ad things, different ad structures, all of the outbound sequences, and everything else.

It has made that marketer a little more efficient, and since that role has gotten bigger, the ABM marketers have. You have a little bit of that blended demand-gen and ABM marketer that we try to pull together because they’re critical for us. I see that one, and we have people buy our APM side of the platform. We get introduced to demand-gen marketers later.

That has been an interesting one. That’s the main one out there. The ones that are still there because I’m a big partner marketing guy are their partner marketers. There’s a lot of indirect stuff that goes on. They have these big MDF budgets. Is the vendor out there? How do I get partners to activate these partners on digital campaigns and be able to use our technology but at the same time, use our content and things and help them market better their services and their uniqueness?

Part of what at least I’ve been helping some of the partner marketing teams now do is leverage our technology and use it across however many vendors they want. The idea is to try to now tell a story but be scalable with what you’re doing, even if it’s making your Salesforce lounge. You’ve got another lounge over here at Cisco or whatever is in your quiver as a partner out there. You should be able to have different stories for different things, capture your leads as they come in, and understand those leads are attached to accounts.

I’ve been studying CMOs and something that sets up other CMOs and go-to-market executives in general is it typically revolves around three pillars, which is content, which you mentioned earlier. Build a winning go-to-market. It’s typically around content. You have a community, and then it’s experiences/events. These are the three typical playbooks that I’ve seen. There are more. I‘m curious. How have you shaped the go-to-market at Hushly? How has that evolved over time?

There are two things. As with any small company, it’s sales-led first directly. Unless you get out of the gate with a partner model, it’s sales-led. Now, with the advent of a lot of this product-led growth stuff where I can come on and turn on a product for somebody and let them try it, and then they hit their maximum pretty quick, “If you want more features turned on, give us money.” We started with sales-led growth. We have moved into some partner-led activities.

The community stuff is something that we’re part of but we’re not probably driving a large community. As we continue to go, I’m looking at where can I put my foot and my stamp on various other communities that help drive relevance for us because communities take a long time. You have to have somebody dedicated to that who can drive conversations, stimulate the community, and build the community for that matter. That’s a different lift.

PLG is a whole different motion. Your products, your back end, and everything have to be set up. Your sales model is different. Your marketing motions are different. Whenever you take any one of these go-to-markets, you have to be prepared for it and thought through. You have to think through what you’re going to do. We looked at PLG. We’ve got a couple of products we could probably turn into that but we need to make some fundamental changes in the product to do that.

Before, we were like, “We’re PLG.” Let’s fix these things and make sure that we’re ready to be one-touch because you don’t want to have a bad experience. The bad experience is going to screw you up. Once those things are done, then the rest of it you pull together, which is like, “The product is ready. Are the rest of the pieces of the puzzle ready to go with you?”

Especially the last piece that you mentioned around PLG takes me back to my time when I was hired at GoSite to lead their PLG effort. One of the things that we did was we said, “We are all in on PLG.” That was about 12 to 18 months prior to my joining. It’s hard to let go of your existing go-to-market motion that’s working. There are a couple of things. You want to target or move upmarket from micro. In our case, it was micro businesses like one owner to quantify employees and then move to 20 to 50 employees and above. We were selling primarily through inside sales.

That was still happening but at the same time, we wanted to go and move everything to PLG but there are bigger questions that we need to answer. First of all, are the buyers and the users that we are targeting comfortable trying the product on their own? Will they make the jump to move and purchase? Even prior to that, are there onboarding hurdles? Those are the challenges that we ran into.

Those are legitimate. Think about it. It’s the person in the company. If you say, “We’re SMB. We want to move to the enterprise,” that’s still a pretty big lift. You need a different Salesforce. You get a different comp structure. You need different marketing. Is your product ready? Is it enterprise-class? Here’s a short story on this one. In Cisco, we were going reverse. We were enterprise and certified. We started up this small business group. Think about it that way. It’s a purpose-built product and everything.

You can’t go down to the SMB and have an enterprise-lite product. You have to talk to the SMB. Small doesn’t mean stupid. We did all these focus groups. Small doesn’t mean we’re dumb. We’re businesspeople. We run a business. We don’t need an enterprise-lite product. We need an SMB product. It needs to fit what we’re trying to do. We did purpose-built products.

You have to do the work, whether that’s going up or you’re coming down, or whether you’re trying to do a completely different motion like the PLG versus a sales motion. You have to think through it. There’s a lot of big lifting that has to happen when you make one of those changes. The people that started a PLG product that want to go on sale are in the same boat. They have to now figure out, “What kind of salesperson would sell this thing?” It’s not going to be that you’re selling the PLG because you got that. What are you selling if you’re trying to sell it at the enterprise? Is it a seeding strategy? Do you need the seeding strategy wrap? You have to go through it.

We can go on different go-to-market mistakes but we’re not going to cover them in this episode for sure. Taking a step back more on the lighter side, how do your folks and your family describe what you do for work?

I have five little kids. I would say, “He talks on Zoom or Skype, sits on his computer all day, types on a keyboard, and makes some interesting pictures, graphics, and slides.” That would be pretty much the extent of “That’s what dad does. Dad says he’s in marketing but I don’t know.” It’s hard. I have elementary school kids. They’re not going to grasp what I’m doing, whether I like it or not.

Let’s get into the next section, which is around go-to-market successes and go-to-market failures. It’s a segment that the audiences love to dig into. As you and I know, go-to-market involves more often than not more failures than success stories. I‘ll leave it to you whether you want a success story or a failure story but we should cover both for sure.

We covered the success one a little bit earlier. It’s probably worth saying. At least I’m proud of it. The idea is to get alignment across all parts of the company and go after cybersecurity. It was nice to make a decision because it started with the data. It wasn’t a bunch of conjectures or somebody saying, “We have to go this way because we think it looks great.” You look at the data.

That for me was the big piece but before we were able to make that decision and before we had the data, I knew we were trying to do it. It was also about operational excellence. We had to get our operations in order because with startups, you can build and keep running, and you got a lot going, but if you don’t take the time to also connect a lot of the dots in your infrastructure, you have bigger headaches as you get bigger. I’ve seen that as well. As you get big, you got human middleware being thrown in there.

For me, the big piece was getting operationally efficient, meaning getting HubSpot working properly and understanding the data flows because we use it for CRM, not just the map. We’re using it for both mapping our product in there and what we’re doing with all the analytics platform stuff. Everything that we’re doing is pumping all that data in and understanding that 360 of the customer, where they began, where they ended, what they start using, how long it takes to onboard, and all that stuff.

Taking all those things into account was a success for us, and then being able to use that data, make a decision, ultimately move into that market, and full force head in there. I was in there a little earlier in November or December, but as a company, I was trying to seed. I’m doing more of a seeding strategy but then in January, we pulled budgets around there. We got things worked out on sales and CS.

Everyone is singing the same song sheet and driving through there. That for me was probably a good success. We’re seeing success. That is a good one to start with. When you think about go-to-market failures, God knows I got them from way back everywhere. It’s always interesting. I heard this from a leader way back, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” Whether you win or lose, you have to keep trying stuff, but making a decision that isn’t grounded in enough data is always a failure that marketing has to be aware of.

You can make decisions in sales, “This thing is going to probably come in. We know it’s coming in. We’ve got it as upside rather.” There’s enough data out there to understand that you only have about ten conversations that have happened. It takes twenty to be able to close a conversation. You’re not going to close this thing this quarter. You’re not near it. A lot of the predictive stuff is getting fine-tuned out there but marketing has always had that.

For us as marketers out there, your failure is going to start usually at the data. If you cut something too short, that’s a risk as well because if you cut it short, then not having enough runway and enough data to say whether something was a success or failure, that’s as bad because you’ve altered the outcome, “We’re going to run this for a quarter. This thing was terrible.”

As marketers out there, your failure is usually going to start with the data. Share on X

The reality is if you know your sales cycle is 6 months or 9 nine months, and you’re running campaigns, messaging, and stuff, it takes a while for some of these things to catch up. You have to understand you’re taking people on a journey with your content and your sales team. Everything is stitched together. You have to give them time to play out. What too many executives do, whether that’s CEOs, COOs, and even CROs because sales is guilty of this as well, is “This thing is not working. We have to get out of here.” it’s like, “It’s actually working. What we’re seeing is incremental successes come through.”

Ultimately, what you start to see down the road is you’ve got a close-one business and better engagement. You’re getting more at-bats. That’s where I’ve seen stuff for me in the past. I’ve cut it off too early and I make a conscious effort now to say, “This is going to run for this long. I want to see these milestones hit right in terms of some incremental successes along the way.” You have to be able to see some things because you have to tweak them.

Marketers always need to be trying things but also tweaking things. Ultimately, you’re trying to tweak it to make sure that it’s not just “We leave it out there. Hopefully, it works. It didn’t work.” You need to be working with it the whole way and understanding the ebbs and flows. Like ABM, you have to have weekly cadences with sales. You have to understand, “These things aren’t working. These 20 accounts are engaged while these 40 are not. Why are these guys engaged?”

It’s about digging into the details and the data, understanding and working the problems that you see, and ultimately trying to make these things successful. That for me is the big number. The biggest failure I see is not letting things run long enough and not using data to make decisions. Sometimes you have to buck the system, especially as a CMO. It’s a hard position to be in because you have to be able to tell the CRO. If you’re reporting to a CEO or COO, you have to tell them, “We’re going to lean into this a little further.” You have to make the call.

A lot of the time, you need to have a seat at the table. They have to respect you. Respect is earned and all that good stuff. At the end of the day, you’re there for a reason. You’re there because you know your job. You’re not the CRO doing the CRO’s job and predicting and forecasting. That’s not what you’re doing. You’re doing marketing and helping them tell the story, get the at-bats, and sell to accelerate. That’s where you need to be. You need to be able to own that and the market transitions, “We see a market transition happening. We need to be able to capture that.”

You covered a lot of important points when you were mentioning the success but more importantly when you’re talking about the failure. The key lesson that at least stood out for me was, first of all, not letting something run long enough. Typically, in go-to-market engines and teams, I’ve seen people try something for a couple of weeks or a month and then pivot.

It’s terrible. You can’t do that. If you’re going to do something that short, then don’t do it, honestly.

That’s one. The second one you talked about is around data or using data to make a decision either to pull the plug or to show that we are making incremental progress and then you continue that. Can you share a specific example? You did mention one around ICPs. Is there anything else that comes to mind either from VMware or Cisco?

We were doing a program. We built part of the marketing concierge. I was using an external agency to see “How do you help these smaller long-tail partners out there?” You have your top 100 if you want to call it that. They don’t usually need a lot. You give them some money, and you can approve their plans but then how do I help serve a lot of these long tails?

What we used was a concierge program. The concierge was like, “Think about the fractional CMO world of a fractional CFO. I have a marketing person that’s here to help you plan and execute marketing campaigns on your behalf.” For most of the smaller partners out there, it may be a team of one. Sometimes it’s a salesperson dumping as a marketing person.

It was a great success but you’re not going to see that right away because they’re in the same sales cycles as your company. What we’re able to start to show was that over time, they’re inbound because it’s now about the partner. The inbound leads for them were going up. Their meetings and at-bats were starting to go up. Their deal regs were going up. You saw that over the course of two quarters.

What you started to see were incremental things happening in Q1. A lot of things had to happen but when I started to do the measurements, it was like, “Let’s look at six months, and then we can reverse. Do we see any little things happening?” There are some green shoots here and there but broadly, what you started to see was that happening over the course of the year. We were able to do $400 million in the pipeline, which is pretty huge. I had a whole slide on the thing. We were able to do $80 million a quarter in a net new pipeline and activate partners that were selling either nothing or next to nothing for us.

This was for them a big boom because now they’re getting business from us and a little bit of money, which was a marketing concierge. How do we help them do that? For us, it was great because in the aggregate, looking at more of the program or the application of stuff. For individual partners, some did well, some didn’t, some did okay, and some didn’t do great. At that point, it’s like an ABM strategy.

You’re going to cull the herd a little bit, “These ones are doing good. Let’s put more in. Maybe we move them to a different model.” You begin to evolve but that for me was pure go-to-market play which was, “We need to do something not just for the 80/20 rule, probably 90/10,” 10% of your partners are probably driving 80% of your business, “How do I activate even the next level down because I can get these guys going for multibillion-dollar companies?” That can be a big jump. That’s important. When you get advocates, they’re going to get more certifications. They want to start selling your stuff.

One other thing that you touched upon earlier is we need to convince the CEO, the CRO, and others around, “We need to extend this initiative, campaign, or program a bit more even though we‘re not seeing.” That’s one area I have personally struggled with in my previous role. A COO and even the CEO asked me, “I‘m not seeing any leading indicators moving on this. Is this going to work for us or not on this specific paid digital as an example on LinkedIn or Facebook?”

There were some points where I said, “The data is showing otherwise,” but I had a tough time. It was a challenge for me personally, especially as someone like an INTJ who is very data–driven and thought–driven. I used to struggle to give a response. What is your advice? If a marketing leader is in that position, how would you frame that?

I can use my example in that one, especially ads because ads are very subjective but now, it has gotten a lot better. When I look at ads, let’s say LinkedIn. You can pretty much start to see early indications about what’s working or what’s not quickly. I’ve noticed that even with us. That’s where you’re not waiting a quarter to adjust your ad strategy for sure. That is a real-time endeavor that’s happening.

We’ve got five content pieces out there. We’re swapping them out every two and a half weeks with different ad structures and different-looking ads. Sometimes you’re re-skinning stuff every month but it’s because I’m seeing immediately when things are going up. They hit a plateau and then start to fall out. If I take that same ad and re-swizzle it with different content, a new call to action, and a different graphic, it can go right back up.

On those kinds of things, the leading indicator is, “How many downloads are we seeing? What are we seeing?” That’s an evolution. It’s the lead strategy. I’ve got leads coming in from various companies that are doing certain things. We’ve got them to dial this one thing from LinkedIn. We’re going to get them into a bit of a nurture flow. We want to get them back to our website and start consuming content.

That’s what we’re measuring, “How much consumption is happening? What personas do we see engaging with? Are these in our ICP?” All those come together, and then we start to see meeting requests coming through from these LinkedIn ads that were then on our side. You have to be able to start. That takes time. You turn on the garden hose. It has to go from the beginning all the way out toward spring. It’s the same thing with any of those strategies.

You have to have the ability to understand that you can affect some things upfront and tweak those things because if you don’t have ads that are working upfront, you’re going to know right away. You have to get your content right and your message right. You should start to see. Ultimately, the later stages are where you start to see, “The consumption is happening. The downloads are happening.” You start to see the demo request or the meeting starting to happen.

Those are long plays. That’s SEO. You have to get your domain authority. That’s a long putt. SEO is a year because you have to build it over time. You have to understand, “Are you going after your keywords and your long-tail keywords? You need a lot of content. You need to start getting rocking.” It takes time to build that up. That’s where the ad strategy can help you short-circuit some of that but it still takes time to get that earned media versus everything else.

Once those two strategies are together, your ads are probably going to be at the end of the day driving the majority of your inbounds and that stuff but over time, you will see that the other SEO that earned media is starting to drive as much if not more, helping your ads for that matter, giving you a little more lift than what you’re doing, and even reducing your cost of it as well. Those are where I see the big ones.

That’s a great explanation of that. You can attribute and measure the performance of many of the channels, especially digital. You can see the feedback loop coming in 1 to 2 weeks and know if it’s working or not. SEO will take time, six months at least, if it’s working or not but then there are other channels like a community or a podcast. You may not be able to show attribution right away.

It’s people doing the big awareness campaigns. The more you can push things out there about your brand and who you are, you’ve got a good community. You’re nurturing this community out there. Those are all seeds. You’re sprinkling seed in the ground at the end of the day because you’re trying to show thought leadership. You’re trying to show you’re different. You’re trying to get advocates out there.

Even if you’re not flogging everybody in the community about who you are, you’re stimulating conversations about B2B in this case. You’re having a B2B broad go-to-market conversation out there. It’s not like you’re trying to hammer somebody over the head with, “You have to buy this.” All those are seeds out there. Communities are good for that. You get people that naturally will be like, “What is this person all about? That was an interesting podcast. I should look at what they’re doing as well.”

The community stuff and a lot of the things that you see out there are all strategies that help earn your brand. There’s a lot of work that has to happen on the brand, especially for small companies. When I was at a big company, I was always a steward of the brand. What you don’t want to do is you’re the guy that ended up getting on CNN or CNBC, “Sorry about this,” and walks into the back.

You’re a steward of that brand. You didn’t build that brand. That brand was built long before you got there. You’re now having to take that brand and keep pumping it up. At the end of the day, they built that over time with you hopefully on the bus. In the startup world where I’m at, you have to build the brand. You’re building demand, and you have to capture the demand at the same time. It’s a different deal.

You have a varied skillset working at large companies, keeping up the brand, driving demand, and working with the different partners, go-to-market channels, and then the younger startups or the smaller companies. You have a breadth of experience, skillsets, and strengths. Coming back to strengths, what would you call out as 1, 2, or 3 strengths of yours when it comes to go-to-market? What do people reach out to you for?

I would start with this. Problem-solving would be the first one. I can typically look at any situation, quickly diagnose the problem, and place several scenarios in my head with multiple solutions. I tease out ways to have better outcomes. I’m a logical thinker. I use data but I also use experience to help guide my thinking because God knows I’ve made plenty of mistakes. That to me is one of the areas that I know people come to me for. The other one is I get things done. Let’s make sure we get it done because you can’t pontificate forever. You can’t have analysis paralysis. You have to be like, “We have to get them.”

I like to jump in, do the work, and then bring others along so that everyone can see the vision and the outcome but you have to be able to start some things. The big executive companies always have these huge edicts out there, “Do this.” You have to take these edicts. It’s like a CEO, “We’re going to go here. We have to figure that.” You have to go, “Here’s how we need to get here.” You should be able to diagnose problems but get something done. There’s enough time to analyze and do things.

That’s one of the things I probably have excelled at from being in big companies and watching these things. Now, at a small company where you have to not just have your edict out there, I’ve also learned to start doing that, and then bring everyone with me, “Do you see where I’m trying to go? Do you see the vision?” You’re leading the charge on that as well.

That for me has been a big one because what you’re able to do when you bring people along is you’re able to have that output more refined because it’s not just you. You’ve got more people helping you refine things. They’ve got the unique experience they bring to the table. In the end, you’re showing results and you’re able to get things done. If you’re only doing a strategy without any execution, it’s like having a theory that you can’t operationalize. Those are the two. It’s problem-solving and I like to get things done.

That’s pretty cool, especially the second point that you mentioned about getting things done. I can’t recall the exact name. I don’t know if it’s Frank Slootman or a couple of others who mentioned strategy. When you boil it down, it’s all about execution. Execution helps you build your strategy, not the other way around.

Every strategy fails at execution. That’s what it is. If you can’t execute, then the whole thing is dead.

Every strategy fails at execution. If you can't execute, then the whole thing's dead. Share on X

Switching gears, we are coming up on the last couple of segments. I know you need to do other things over here. Who do you lean on? What resources do you lean on like people, mentors, communities, or podcasts? How do you keep up to date on not just go-to-market but even clearing your mind and being fresh all the time?

Honestly, I talk a lot. I talk to real people, whether that’s our customers or other marketers, and listen. A lot of times, you have to listen to what’s going on. I’m in these communities. I’m in a bunch of different ones. I like to be a bit more of a fly on the wall. When you’re coming from a MarTech company, you’re talking to marketers. I try not to interject too much because it looks like you’re selling but I like to understand the conversations that I’m seeing because I like to take things and boil them back up. Are they seeing bigger problems? What’s happening out there?

For me, it’s more listening and reading between the lines of the different conversations that I have. That’s how I stay up to date because I understand the things I’m seeing, where customers are saying it’s going, or general people like, “We’re using this. We’re doing that. Have you seen these things?” Those are interesting to me. Communities help because they curate different types of conversations.

Sometimes people are more comfortable in a smaller community or a little group. You will get more real unvarnished opinions if you’re chit-chatting with somebody. That to me is the big one out there. Staying active in those communities and having those conversations is the best way. I read some books here and there but I’m a book on tape versus reading because I read a lot of stuff on email every day. I try to save my eyes. Honestly, those are my main outlets.

If you were to look back at your career, who were the 1, 2, or 3 people who played a role model, a sponsor, or a mentor that moved your career and created certain inflection points?

There are three. I’ll preface this. Two of them are from Cisco because I spent so much time there. The first one would be a gentleman by the name of Mike Farabelli. He was our VP of Services back then. He went on to Microsoft and became one of their GMs there. He had an awesome work ethic. He gave me room to try anything and fail. He also had some good feedback and some good mentoring honestly. He would be one. I haven’t talked to Mike in years.

Lauren Ventura would be my next one. She was a manager of mine. She hired me into Cisco. I worked for her twice at two different companies, believe it or not. She was a great manager and a great leader. She was there for me, even to this day. I’ve worked for her twice. She’s smart. She’s another one who gets things done. There’s something to be said for those kinds of people. She’s very analytical, thorough, and everything else. She was great to work with for that matter.

The last one I would probably say is my current CEO and co-founder. I’ve been here for five years. For me, building a company from an idea and then trying to nurture that idea into a business and continuously grow and evolve is truly amazing to see. It’s hard being on the ground floor, and I’ve been able to see that, and doing a bootstrap for that matter. We have even taken the money.

It’s even more of a challenge because you’re having to do things that are unnatural versus how you can spend willy-nilly out there. It has been interesting. He has been an interesting one. I’ve learned a lot probably more of a business lens by dealing with Jeff. That has been interesting for me. He’s one of the influences. He’s helped me grow from that pure business perspective.

I learned about the fact that Hushly is a bootstrap. Building a bootstrap business is a huge challenge. We talk about building tech startups, assessing and validating your problems, and then doing the product–market fit. I’m trying to do a fundraising. That’s a whole different thing. I imagine the money that you need to run your business has to be generated by your business to grow. That’s another level of challenge.

You’re running it on invoicing. It’s failing at invoicing, and then you run out of business. That’s what it is. When people talk about efficient growth, this is efficient growth. It’s how you get efficient with what you’re doing. You apply that to any funded business. You need to get efficient. There are always ways to get more efficient but it’s a must-have for a bootstrap.

One final question for you is this. If you were to turn back the clock, what advice would you give to your younger self?

It’s probably not related to marketing. I would say, “Stay long your Tesla call options for ten months longer, and you’re not working again.” That would be it, honestly. I had some great call options out there but I digress.

I never expected that response. On that note, it has been a great conversation, James. There are a lot of insights, anecdotes, and lessons for our audiences. Thank you. Good luck to you and the team at Hushly.

You bet. Thanks.

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Sharpening Your PLG Mindset: Understanding The Customer Journey And Staying Relevant In The Market With Dirk Schart

Posted on April 19, 2023April 18, 2023 by stratyve_ant2yf

Success in go-to-market strategy and product marketing requires a deep understanding of the customer journey and a PLG mindset that prioritizes user adoption and growth. By combining different perspectives and experiences, we can build innovative approaches that drive lasting impact in the global market. In this episode, we have special guest Dirk Schart, Senior Director, Go-to-Market & Marketing at PTC. Dirk discusses go-to-market strategies and the customer journey, drawing from his experience and expertise in startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. Dirk dives deep into the PLG mindset, discussing how it has helped him succeed and how other leaders can adopt this approach. Dirk also brings a unique perspective on the global market, having a global-crossed background. Tune in now and gain valuable insights into what it takes to build successful marketing campaigns and drive growth.

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Listen to the podcast here

Sharpening Your PLG Mindset: Understanding The Customer Journey And Staying Relevant In The Market With Dirk Schart

Welcome to the newest episode of the show. The newest can be your first, umpteenth, 5th, or 10th. I’m thankful for taking the time to check out the show where I get to meet and have a conversation with inspiring, thoughtful, and influential go-to-market leaders. I have the pleasure of meeting Dirk Schart who is a well-known and established product marketing and PLG leader. He is here with us. Welcome to the show, Dirk.

Vijay, thanks for having me.

It’s my pleasure. For the audience, Dirk is joining us from Germany. Dirk, you are the 2nd or 3rd guest who is outside the US. I’m excited about that.

That’s great. We bring a little bit of the European perspective and combine that. My background is across the globe. I grew up in Germany, but I used to live in Spain and the United States. Let’s combine all of these different perspectives.

I’m looking forward. I always start the show with this question with all my guests. How do you view and define go-to-market?

It’s a great starting question. It’s not the easiest question, to be very honest. There are so many different definitions. I want to start with this. What is important for me besides the definition is that go-to-market is a journey. It’s a loop. It’s not a one-off thing. You do something and plan something. In the past, we talked about the launch of a product. You launch it, you have the Big Bang story, and then you’re done. You go home, and that’s it, “Let’s see what’s going to happen.”

That’s not how I understand a modern go-to-market. For me, go-to-market is more the strategic plan, including the execution of activities to make a product available to its users, show the differentiated value, drive adoption, and build the basis to grow the user base. It’s that whole loop. A couple of years ago, I built a framework, not for go-to-market but more to understand how the customer journey works. That’s very similar. I call it the Five Stars. It’s how customers see our product and how they try it out and see if that works. You go into adoption, rate, and share.

Often that second or last part is cut off. We think, “We bring it to market and then back off. That’s it,” but then afterward, the adoption, the word of mouth, and the customer advocacy are where the real game starts. That’s why it’s a loop journey. That’s how I define that. I mentioned one thing, which is super important in that definition for me. Show the differentiated value. I’m sure we will come back to that, but I’ll highlight that because I hear often, “We will launch a product. It’s better than XYZ.” For me, there are no better products. Different is better than better. I’m focused on differentiated value.

That’s a great point. How you framed the go-to-market and how you started the conversation reminds me of and takes me back to my initial days of product marketing. What I’m going to share is a rookie mistake of a lot of the folks, especially within product marketing where they think they “own” go-to-market. It’s typically around, “It’s all about the Big Bang launch. We are done.” It’s a bill checklist. The sales enablement, value prop, pricing, and messaging are done, but that’s just one point in the whole customer journey. It’s an ongoing thing. What you mentioned is it’s not a once-and-done thing. It’s a continuous evaluation or iteration process of keeping the buyer and user journey in mind.

You highlighted a very important point there. You said the product folks owned it. I’ve seen many companies where sales own it. When people talk about go-to-market, they mean sales. One of the big things here is to combine them. It’s marketing, product, sales, customer success, and engineering. All of these different departments have to come together to make that go-to-market plan a reality. It’s important.

You nailed the premise of this show and what I’m trying to do on LinkedIn and all the different channels. Go-to-market is not owned by one function. It’s an amalgamation. It’s a collaboration effort. It takes the entire cross-functional team, starting with the product and going on to the marketing side, the sales, the customer success, and not just that. You’re also talking about the executive or the leadership. It’s all of these things. To your point, the previous start that I was at, when people talked about go-to-market, it’s sales. How do you take a product to a market and sell it? It’s all about sales, but then the definition or the view has to expand.

That’s also how I understand marketing. My background is in different areas. I have experience in sales where I started my career in marketing. I was also in the role of a product owner. That helps a lot to understand how these different business functions work if you’re responsible for different things. You can leave that bubble you’re in as a marketer often. What do sales need? How does the product build that thing? What are their challenges? What do we have to do to bring all of that together?

It’s exciting if you can get all of the people engaged, motivated, and passionate about an upcoming launch. It’s one of the best things you can have. You should not forget the customers. They also can be involved in that go-to-market process, not at the end of it and say, “Customer, that’s what you get,” but have them involved before, ask them for feedback, have a better face, and stuff like that. There are a lot of different people involved.

We can go on and on about this one topic and one question. It’s a good segue into the next piece. Share with our audiences your career journey, your personal and professional milestones, what brought you to the place, and who you serve.

My background is in marketing and communication science, which influenced my marketing career a lot. The way I see marketing and the way I do marketing is about perception and how people perceive different things. That’s where my background is. I lead the global go-to-market and marketing for PTC‘s Vuforia business. PTC is a Fortune 500 company based out of Boston. Vuforia is a business that builds augmented reality solutions for manufacturing companies.

Marketing is a lot about perception. It’s understanding the different perceptions of people. Share on X

I joined PTC as part of an acquisition. I was working for a startup called RE’FLEKT where I was a CMO. I built our US business based out of the Bay Area. We became part of PTC. It’s a very interesting experience to see how that works. I’m now bringing all of the experience from what we have together with what the PTC folks do. It’s great learning from both sides.

Before that, I was with Hyperloop, Elon Musk’s transportation project where I was in a mix of a product and a marketing role. I built their European hub in the SaaS business. There are many interesting things. In the augmented reality business, we patented a technology that is called Augmented Windows. That’s super interesting. It lets you look outside of the windowless Hyperloop capsule with head motion, capturing cameras, and stuff like that. It’s very interesting.

Before that, I was at a corporate. I started my career in sales. It’s broad, not a typical IC type of marketer, which helps me a lot. I call always a business marketer a person who has a different understanding of different segments and knows how to run a business, which helps me a lot. Whenever I have some time left, then I mentor startups for the German Silicon Valley Accelerator, especially startups coming from Europe and going to the United States. I’m helping them to understand what is different in marketing and sales. That market is so different from what Europeans do. I love new challenges, different startups, and different products. That’s my background.

It’s pretty diverse. You started in sales business dev, worked in non-tech companies initially, and then moved into tech. Having Hyperloop on your resume and background is a cool conversation starter in social settings and parties. The fact that you were a CMO of the startup which got acquired by PTC says the breadth, depth, and good market expertise that you bring to the table.

It helps a lot with understanding how the other functions work. I was with different industries, especially with Hyperloop. Hyperloop is a technology company. That’s how it is defined. It’s building a transportation system, working on the software side for it, and redefining completely what a customer experience can look like in the future. That’s not only a fun project because it was one of the most interesting projects in the last couple of years. It’s an unbelievable and super-talented team. That was great. There’s the acquisition of joining PTC with all the experienced people there and combining our startup experience with that. I’m thankful for having the opportunity to go through all of that. It’s great learning.

Let me double-click on something. I don’t know if it was Elon Musk who was on the interview team or maybe some of his leadership who was part of the interview process for you. Prior to your role at Hyperloop, you were the Head of PR and Marketing at RE’FLEKT. It has nothing to do with products and such but then you were hired as a product manager. What stood out? What did the folks see in you? What attracted them?

I worked with Hyperloop before. We also had a project together with RE’FLEKT and Hyperloop. The Hyperloop leadership knew me and hired me as a leader to build a team from scratch, open the European hub, and bring that whole thing to life. It was less about going into any product details. It was much more about building a team and building the strategy for what product we need and what is needed to make that happen. That’s what they saw when they worked with me. I built that for RE’FLEKT and other companies. Plus, Hyperloop is an LA-based company coming from California.

I had experience at that time working in different countries in Europe but also in the United States. That was the reason that they said, “We want to have a leader that can build that whole thing and has the experience on how to figure out what the market needs and what the problems are.” That’s the marketing part of customer discovery because it was very early. What exactly do customers expect in the future from a Hyperloop app? What is needed? How can we change that whole market? Some of these things are still in stealth mode until Hyperloop was released and built. That’s why they hired me.

It’s that inquisitiveness and curiosity and having that open mindset. Even though you didn’t call out any of these explicitly, I can sense it. Coming from an augmented reality startup that’s very tech-oriented and maybe more selling to B2B versus Hyperloop, the audience is the consumer. It’s different. How did he go about that mindset shift?

First of all, for me, everything is about learning. I’m a lifelong learner. I always want to learn new things. One of the things I’m quite good at is diving into new topics quickly, understanding how things work, and then making it happen. The other thing that is very interesting point is the discussion about B2B and B2C. For me, in marketing and also other areas, B2B and B2C are not far away from each other as some people might think. When I started the first B2B company, I said, “We don’t need user experience because that’s B2C. We are here in B2B.” For me, it’s always about taking B2C things into B2B and the other way around.

Everything is about learning. Share on X

We have different audiences, and they have different expectations, but coming back to my favorite topic of perception, at the end of the day, we’re all humans. The guy who sits in procurement in B2B companies or who is a decision maker in training or a service department or wherever in the marketing department, at the end of the day, it’s a human being. That’s it. We all have the same way to make decisions and the same structure. Some are more visual. Some are more factual, but at the end of the day, it always comes back to perception.

That’s why in that switch between B2B and B2C, there are specific areas. If you’re looking for an expert on how to do eCommerce or Google Ads for different things, that might be different, but in building the strategy and executing the go-to-market plan, there are many elements you find in B2C and B2B. That’s good. I love to take B2C stuff to B2B because I don’t like when people build a go-to-market for B2B, and it’s boring. We don’t need all of these exciting things because we’re a B2B company.

They say, “I know,” but now imagine the guy who makes a decision and writes a check. That guy goes home in the evening. She or he will then have an Amazon app to order stuff, DoorDash to order food, Netflix, and all of that great stuff. Why should they have the boring stuff at work? I don’t see that. You mentioned PLG at the beginning. PLG is bringing B2C to B2B. That’s for me the essence of what we do. Finally, we’re targeting the users, not only the buyers, and coming top-down and bottom-up in not only one thing.

We share a lot of thought processes. That’s what attracted me to PLG, even before the fact this whole PLG became a fad in the last couple of years. PLG at its core and essence is about how you connect the dots between the end user and the product. It’s simple. There’s nothing in between. How do you help them see the value quickly within a couple of days or a week ideally? If not, you lose them. That’s the essence.

There’s a lot in it. It’s because we also had that discussion at PTC. How much of that can we use? We’re coming from enterprise software. We’re now on a journey or a transition to SaaS software. Our customers are manufacturing companies. How much of that can we use? What I often like to say is there’s one thing to implementing a pure PLG strategy, but the other thing which I try to show my teams is to use the PLG mindset. It’s what you said. You have that product. Focus on the end user.

This is a different way to think about it. It’s a different persona. That’s something we realized back at RE’FLEKT when we started to turn one of our products into a more bottom-up and PLG approach. It’s about the mindset. Think about it. What can you do to reach that user? What can you do to make that user happy and change the user’s habits to use something new, not the existing solution anymore? That’s what it is about. It’s changing habits, and that’s not easy.

On a lighter note, how would your family describe what you do at work?

That’s an interesting one. I had that conversation with my son. He asked me, “What are you doing all day long when you are on these calls?” I said, “I’ll show you. It’s better showing than telling a story here.” He plays Roblox. One day, he came and said, “There is an option to create assets like t-shirts and then sell them.” I said, “I’ll show you what I do in my job.” I helped them and said, “This is how you figure out which shirts the people like there. You don’t create something because you like it. It’s not about you. It’s about the folks there.” You find a nice way to explain it and show it. You have a nice booth there in Roblox. I said, “I’ll take that sign. You go around and make people aware of it.”

I showed him the whole thing. He sold a couple of shirts. Was he more successful because of me? I don’t know. He probably was smart enough to figure it out without me, but in the end, he said that I help people to find products and make people understand why they’re helpful in a very simple way. That’s how I showed him and how he explains it. He probably says it differently in his words. It’s much nicer than I can do as a boy.

There’s nothing that beats the whole teaching and showing experience. In this case, your son gets it and applies those lessons in a Roblox virtual environment.

I love it. The cool thing is they sit in front of that thing all day long if you don’t stop them, but at least I said, “He has to learn something. I want to see an outcome there.” That’s why I now do these things with him. I said, “Where can we learn something?” I bought a couple of Roblox shares so that he can see and follow, “Does it go up? Does it go down?” He reads the news and stuff like that. He gets an understanding of what’s behind all of that. That’s important that the kids learn that.

That’s a great insight and a great way in how you are teaching your son. You’re applying and helping him see products, marketing, and “sales” also. You need to sell that product eventually. You’re helping him realize and see those concepts for himself. That’s pretty cool stuff. Switching gears and going into your current role at PTC, can you briefly describe what you do? What is your charter? What are you responsible for at PTC?

My team and I plan the go-to-market and all the marketing activities for Vuforia. Vuforia is PTC’s augmented reality business, building work instructions for manufacturing companies in a visual way. We bring the products to market. We help with the content, the thought leadership, and all the typical marketing activities. AR is still an early technology. It’s a little bit different from what you have when you do marketing automation software or a CRM where everything is already clear. The value is proven. The value propositions are clear.

It’s more about, “Which one of these? Do I need Salesforce? Is HubSpot better for me?” We have a different situation. We are early in the market and still in a transition from early adopters to mainstream markets, which brings different challenges. Besides the typical go-to-market, we are a lot in understanding how that transition is happening, what the customers need, and how the buyer’s journey is changing. All of these things are covered by my team.

Who are the customers? Who are you going after? Going after is a very wrong term, but who are you focusing on in this?

A typical customer profile is larger manufacturing companies, automotive machinery, and MedTech. It’s all these companies building machines, cars, medical devices, and all of these things. The profiles are different. We have three different audiences or target groups. The first one is the buyer. They’re typically executive-level. We have what we call the creator. These are the people who create these instructions and manuals.

The third one is then the frontline worker who is what we call the end user. Different audiences make it a little bit more challenging for us because we need to understand who needs what in a journey, what problems they have, and what formats we have to deliver, educate, and show what they can do with our products and solutions and how we help to solve the problems in the manufacturing industry.

What are your typical KPIs? What are you and your team measured against?

At the end of the day, it’s always the same thing. It’s revenue. For me, that’s important. We don’t go only in smaller metrics and say, “How many people read our newsletter and stuff like that?” Revenue is the first one. The pipeline is the second one. They measure not only what the marketing source is but we are looking into what is the impact of our activities and how we help sales to generate pipelines and to win new customers. A lot of our strategies are ABM-focused to target very specifically.

That’s important. In AR, you can do a lot of different use cases there. Customers expect us to help them and guide them through these use cases and then tell them which ones work best. That’s why we’re very focused there. Everything around adoption, retention, and NRR is a very important metric. The net revenue retention rate and customer satisfaction with NPS are the high-level metrics. You can see it goes from acquisition to retention and customer satisfaction. That’s important for us.

We’re focused, especially because AR is a very specific topic. What can we do on the retention side and the adoption side to have happy customers? Coming to the P&G, the B2C mindset, and all of these things, we ask our customers to share the message, rate our solutions, give us rankings, and all of these things so that they help us to market our products, not only closing the loop after we sold.

These are the typical metrics. We go down and look into things around account engagement. What can we do there? On the retention side, for example, we go deeper into feature adoption. What impact do our activities and campaigns have on feature adoption? I also hear a balance between acquisition and retention. We’re going further down into pipeline acceleration and pipeline quality, especially because we target very focused. For us, it’s important to see. Do we have the right personas? Do we have the right opportunities based on our use case strategy and all of these things?

I love the fact that your emphasis is across the entire customer journey, unlike many or most of the marketing teams who are focused only on top of the funnel building a pipeline, and that’s about it. This is where your background and thought process comes into play. It’s not just about getting folks in as a salesperson. As a business dev, you saw that piece, but then once you started going into the product side of things and working closely with the customers, getting a customer in is one touch point.

In the end, how are you helping them see the value and adopt the various features of the product? As they’re adopting, where are they? How are they rating it? Are they satisfied? That’s where the NPS comes into play. The NRR is eventually, “Are they churning? Are they expanding? What about it? How are they eventually helping spread the word? Are they evangelists evangelizing on your behalf?”

It’s all about making the customers happy and showing them value. That’s why I talked about differentiated value at the beginning. What do we do differently? Why should customers come to us and buy our solutions, not use the existing solutions or another solution? Why do they have that differentiated value? When you have the adoption and get that right, then the engine is starting to run. That’s a traction point there.

On the other side, for sales, it’s super important that we help with coming to that point and that we help with expansion. Instead of only chasing new logos, we all want to have new customers. There’s no question. They’re great customers and companies we want to have, but we’re super happy to have the ones we have already in our portfolio. We want to make sure they have everything to scale and grow.

We focus on the programs we run. That’s the goals we defined for 2023. It’s simple. A) We make it easier for our customers to understand the value and what they can do with our solutions. B) We make it easy for our sales and customer success teams to expand customers, win customers, and provide the value the customers expect. It’s all about making it easier for customers and our teams.

I’m sure across your journey, you’re seeing both go-to-market success and go-to-market failure stories. I’m sure it’s more of failures, and those are the learning experiences. Can you share one success story and one failure story? We can tease more details as we go along.

I’ll start with a success story. The first one is brand new. It’s what we did at PTC when we started what we call the use case-based approach. In AR, you can do a lot of different use cases. The technology is very broad, but customers are using visualization technology, especially in different areas. It might change in a couple of months, and it might change in a couple of years completely. That’s why we said, “We focus on specific use cases where we got feedback from our customers. The impact is the biggest.”

On the other hand, we saw the adoption data and usage data. We came up with the concept to focus on specific use cases. The great thing here is it’s not only the success in terms of how much market share we win and how many customers we win. For me, the biggest thing is the alignment we got from leadership, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Everyone knows the use cases. Everyone knows why we have them, which business problems we solved, and what the value is. It’s an easy one.

I said, “You get everything because we have everything to market, sell, and expand, whatever you need.” You don’t see that alignment very often. Usually, there are discussions, “Not that. We need to go in a different direction.” Let’s say it’s a marketing discussion. In the end, they do different things. That’s one of the things where I say, “That’s great.” I’ll take learning before I come to another successful one. We did exactly the opposite back at RE’FLEKT where we said, “We’re a startup. We can do it.” We tried to serve too many use cases in all industries at the same time. Why? It’s simple. As always, it’s because of the fear of missing out. We said, “There, we see something. Here, we see something. There is a signal.”

“Let’s throw something at the wall and see what sticks.” That’s a mindset.

Plus, we were so convinced about what we can do as a small startup that we had the idea to even add a partner program. We were not ready at all. Our customers or the technology wasn’t ready to be sold through that channel. We were not ready. That was a big learning in the go-to-market. Stay focused. Avoid the fear of missing out. It’s not going to help you. You can make any of these areas and industries happen. At the same time, you can make any of the marketing channels happen.

Avoid fear of missing out. It's not going to help you. Share on X

There are companies that use events or SEO. You can make all of them happen if you focus on it and have the experience and expertise. That’s a learning I took from the fear of missing out and being too early with offering a broader scope. That cost us a lot of time until we repaired it. That’s something I can only recommend avoiding, especially for startups. It’s not only a startup thing. I see that also in larger companies. They have more resources, but it is often very blurry. The strategy is not clear.

Here’s the last thing. We talked about the P&G before. We had two products at RE’FLEKT. One was a typical enterprise product and one, which was very simple, was a remote support tool. During the pandemic, there was a lot of demand. What we did is we used the P&G mindset. We did not even know exactly how that works. We tested it and said, “We need to come up with a concept that targets the users.” We talk to the users now. That’s what we did. Our team was involved in the product and said, “We understand why they want to have that and why they need that.” It’s a completely different way to think.

In the end, we had 300% more trials and better conversion rates, but the best thing, and what I never forget is customers were happier because we had 30% to 40% fewer support tickets. They found all the documentation. They got a different onboarding. They didn’t need to wait. They had everything ready. That was a huge shift in our strategy. That’s why I said, “We did it as a typical enterprise AR startup.” That’s a great learning of what you can do if you have that mindset.

These are great success and failure stories. I want to double-click on that failure story that you shared. You emphasized one point, which is the fear of missing out. The subconscious mind drives people, the marketers, the leaders, and the sales folks, “Let’s go after this industrial segment. Let’s go after this manufacturing segment. Let’s go after this new territory or new geography. It’s not just the US but even Germany, Australia, Canada, and all the English-speaking countries.”

That’s where we run the risk of spreading ourselves way too thin. We don’t know if we’re addressing the buyer in manufacturing versus a user in Australia. It’s completely different. Coming back to your success story, you said, “The formula for success was focusing on certain use cases.” Did you have to educate the cross-functional team and the leadership, “Let’s not spread ourselves too thin and focus on only these use cases,” or everyone was aligned starting from day one?

The process was quite smooth, to be very honest, but the reason for it was that we did our homework in positioning. What I have seen a lot in my career is that companies, especially startups don’t spend enough time working on positioning. It’s the same thing. They think it’s a one-off thing. You do it and spend an hour, and then it’s done. It’s not. It’s one thing I always tell the startups. I mentor that this is something you can learn in Silicon Valley. That’s what startups get right in the Bay Area.

Focus on your positioning. What exactly is your market? Where is your differentiated value? What is the right profile behind that? When you understand that, then you will figure that there are specific use cases or replication fields of customers where you see signals and indicators for growth. That’s exactly what we did. We could have never done that only as a marketing team. There’s no way that you can change a strategy that significantly.

The reason was that we realized we are the market leader. PTC is the market leader in that area. We can serve all of these customers, but the question is not about, “Can we make all of that happen?” We can. We have enough people, but how can we provide the most value to our customers? Our customers expected us to understand, “Where can I use that technology best? What are the best use cases? How can I do it? How can I bring that change to my company?”

That was the starting point for us. We listened to the customers. We need to guide them. We are the guides helping them to make it happen. That’s how we built that strategy and got customer feedback. We had the customers, and then it was a very easy one. We said, “A) We have our data. B) This is what the customers are telling us.” All of us were involved. When the sales were involved, the product was involved. All of them understood that.

For products, it’s much easier to build features, define features, and define a roadmap if they know this is our focus, not that. Otherwise, they have to build everything for everyone. They were thankful for that. It’s the same for customer success and sales. We have a situation when we say, “Do we need to add more use cases? What other use case do we add?”

Sales also want to have more new stuff. That’s a normal thing. That’s okay also because sales get always feedback from the market and are very close to the customers. The positioning was the foundation, showing what the customers want and expect from us as a market leader. We have a different role from what we had as a startup before. As a market leader, you need thought leadership and category leadership. You need to provide guidance. That helped us a lot to build that together with the customers.

Going back to the basic, which is data, that comes from talking to the customers and showing that to the customers.

It’s as easy as that, but it’s not.

Going into the final segment here, now I see that you’re pretty active in terms of publishing your views on go-to-market, product marketing, and PLG. You’re carving out time in broadcasting. Those are top-of-mind for you. How do you stay on top of all these things and carve out time to even create content?

That’s another fear-of-missing-out challenge. First of all, I love books. I read a ton of books. It’s a little bit challenging because I love to read several books at the same time. I cannot wait. There are a couple of books I read over and over again like Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff of Salesforce. I can only recommend reading that. I recommended that to my team. There’s Trillion Dollar Coach by Bill Campbell if it comes to leadership, but also things like high-tech marketing. There’s Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore to understand how the markets evolve and change. That’s one thing.

The second thing is talking to people. I love talking to people. That’s why I love to be part of the Peak Community and all of the folks there because you meet people from different backgrounds. Communities and talking to customers are big things for me. Podcasts for me are part of the books. I do my daily walk usually at lunchtime and then listen to podcasts.

The last thing is mentors. I have mentors. I always had mentors, and I have mentors now who help me to challenge things, bring things back, and remind me of things where I think, “I thought that was great. It wasn’t.” That’s an essential part for me. I want to learn. That’s also the culture I built for my teams. Failures are allowed. I encourage everybody to make mistakes. That’s the only way to learn and improve things. These are the things I do.

Failures are allowed. Make mistakes. That's the only way to learn and improve things. Share on X

That’s pretty cool stuff. I love the fact that you’re constantly looking for ways to learn and stay on top using books and communities like Peak Community. You and I are part of the Peak Community. Here’s a shout-out to Peak Community. For you as an audience, feel free to reach out to me or Dirk. We will share more insights into how and why you need to be part of the Peak Community.

Besides Peak Community, you also talked about podcasts. While you walk, you listen to podcasts. There’s something else that you hit upon, which is mentors and folks who helped you shape your thinking and the process, which you thought was the right way but then it was not. Who are the 1, 2, or 3 folks that you are grateful for, and who shaped your career and the person you are now?

I’ll mention 1 or 2 that you would not expect. They’re not mentors but people I admire. They did something very special in their business. The first one is Jimi Hendrix. There are a couple of guitars here in the background. Music, heavy metal especially, is important to me. Jimi Hendrix took guitar play to the next level by doing things nobody did before. There are a lot of examples of what he did, which always reminds me of not even thinking outside of the box. It’s thinking without a box. It’s leaving the comfort zone. How can you define your style? That’s something you can do in guitar playing, but that’s what you also can do in go-to-market or marketing. What is your style? What is important for you?

That’s one thing. The second is Steve Jobs. Probably many people say that, but for me, he was a master of simplifying things. He could simplify a message everybody understands. That’s unbelievable. When you read my stuff, you will often see the rule of three. People already know me. My team also knows that. That’s our perception. How does our brain work and stuff like that? I have had many mentors over time. I have mentors now and mentors in the past. There’s one guy I want to call out. Tom Rice is a mentor in the Bay Area. Tom helped me so much when I started in the United States where I was CMO.

I built our business with his brutal feedback and so much good advice. I could have not built the business I built without his advice. I remember one time he invited me to dinner and asked me how is it going. He had to listen to a 30-minute complaint, “It’s not working as I expected. This is not working there.” In the end, he said, “I’m not going to ask you that question anymore. The next time, I will ask you how your family is.” I got it. That’s good to have mentors like Tom.

Here’s the final question. If you were to turn back the clock and go back to day one of your go-to-market journeys, what advice would you give your younger self?

Focus. It’s as easy as that. It sounds simple. It’s not because of the fear of missing out, but that’s what I tell everyone. When I think back, we did a startup of 15 people trying to implement 15 marketing channels. There’s no way to handle it. It’s about focusing on one thing. Make it great.

Those are pretty strong parting words. Thank you so much for your time, Dirk. Good luck to you and the team at PTC. We will cheer from the sidelines for your success.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

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The Holistic Approach To Marketing: How Arbinger Is Changing Approaches To Marketing With Lisa Sharapata

Posted on April 5, 2023March 29, 2023 by stratyve_ant2yf

Marketing isn’t just about selling a product, it’s about understanding and shaping the mindset of those you serve. Whether they are consumers, retailers, or both. In this episode, Lisa Sharapata, the CMO at Arbinger, shares her incredible career journey from creative design to marketing. She dives into the unique challenges and opportunities of the B2B2C model and how Arbinger is reshaping marketing. Lisa also discusses the importance of performance management and shares other strategies for success that have helped her rise to the top. She also introduces the concept of the inward versus outward mindset and explains how it can transform both individuals and organizations. If you are looking to gain insights from an accomplished marketer with a unique perspective, then tune in now.

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Listen to the podcast here

The Holistic Approach To Marketing: How Arbinger Is Changing Approaches To Marketing With Lisa Sharapata

In this episode, I have the pleasure of hosting Lisa Sharapata, who is the CMO at the Arbinger. Lisa and I have been crossing paths and spoken on and off over the last few months. I won’t get too much into the details and spoil the fun here for all of you readers. Welcome to the show, Lisa. I’m super excited to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

The signature question I always ask my guests and I start the show with this one. This is what the readers love to hear as well from the guests, which is how do you define go-to-market?

It’s a hard thing to define. Also, I’m guessing every guest here said something a little bit differently and if I even asked everyone in my company how they define it, it would be different. For me, it is the holistic approach to how you are going to market. That includes what is your product, what’s your product offerings, how are you pricing and packaging, and positioning them to go to market. It’s your brand and your marketing strategy. What channels are you using? Is it inbound primarily, outbound, and those types of things? How are you looking at customer expansion? How are you looking at lifetime value? All of the different gadgets and things that we have control over for how we are approaching taking our product to market and making revenue.

In the common threads that I’ve seen and heard from the different guests, one thing that stands out is it all starts with the customer, the buyer, and the user persona whom you’re serving with your products and services. It always starts with that. After that, you need to work internally as well as with your partner ecosystem as you are serving your customer base and user base. That’s been a common thread and that’s what you referred to as well.

You also touched upon the different channels. That’s a big factor in the go-to-market, which is what are the different challenges inbound? Is it outbound? What type of motion? Is it product-led sales, product-led growth, sales-led, and so on? Something that you touched upon that not many of the guests have touched upon, Lisa, is it’s not up to the point where a person becomes a buyer or a team becomes a buyer or customer. A lot of heavy lifting happens after or once they become the customer. You also indicated the different metrics around that. I think that’s a very important point we should focus on. That’s a great start for sure. Why don’t you walk us through your career journey? A quick summary of what brought you to the point of where you are now and who you serve.

I started in graphic design and I love telling that story because I didn’t know anything that I know now when I came out of college. I was more focused on the creative aspects like branding. I worked for an agency and what I quickly learned about myself was I want to understand my audience. I want to understand the why behind what I’m creating. This side of things is very subjective. However, if I knew who I was serving with that piece at that moment or what the purpose of it was, it was so much easier for me to do something effective. To get those answers, I ended up becoming more of a strategic player in the marketing world by moving in-house.

I enjoy and prefer to be working for one company instead of a whole bunch of them so that I can be the driving force behind the why we’re doing what we’re doing and how we’re going to do it. Over time, I moved into B2B tech. I was in that space for over a decade. I’m now with a company called The Arbinger Institute, which is a leadership development and culture transformation. We will move into the tech space, but I’ll say for right now it is nice to be more focused on, “We’re trying to get that product market piece down and understand our audience and how we can best serve them before we grow into that new world.” It’s been a breath of fresh air.

Sometimes it’s better to work for one company instead of a bunch of them. It allows you to be the driving force behind why you’re doing what you’re doing and how you’re going to do it. Share on X

I think you are one of the rarest people or the fewest people who have started their career in creative design and worked their way up the marketing chain, all the way up to a CMO. It’s very impressive and very inspiring. I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile. Earlier on, you started in the creative world. You are at Richmond American Homes. It has nothing to do with tech. You are in the retail space, which is Kohl’s and Jockey. You are at Encompass and you are the marketing director serving the retail world. Is that correct?

Yeah. It’s called the B2B2C model. It was very interesting because we were creating a product to sell to retailers, but we also had to help them sell through to the consumer. Again, I learned a ton about understanding my audience and it’s all applicable. It all comes down to the same things. People buy from who they like and trust and you got to create a great experience. It was helpful.

I’m curious. You made the jump from a creative design space to retail and then something happened. You moved to Teradata into the tech world. What were some of the key factors or was it by accident or by design? How did that happen?

The first company that I worked for outside of an agency was called eCollege. They were one of the first IPO tech companies back in the day. One of my old bosses from that company was at Teradata and she was like, “This would be the perfect place for you. You’d be such a good fit here. There’s so much you can do.” She sold me and she brought me in and the rest is history.

Since then, you’ve worked at big brands including 6sense. You’ve worked at Mindtickle and BoostUp.ai. It was a tech startup and then you also ventured and played the role of an advisor. You are currently an advisor with Hushly and now you’re a CMO at The Arbinger Institute. Switching gears here, you did mention at a very high level what you do with Arbinger. For the benefit of our readers and also to set some more context here, do a quick 30 seconds of what Arbinger does, who you serve, what are the different challenges, and how we are looking to reshape the marketing and go-to-market there.

Arbinger started many years ago and it’s based on this concept of mindset being the thing that is going to change outcomes. One of the things that have resonated with me is you can’t change behavior in a meaningful lasting way without changing your mindset first. Think about your New Year’s resolutions and statistics around how many of those behaviors don’t stick because, without a fundamental shift in your mindset, it’s hard to change your behavior. Over time this has become more of a focus on B2B, on corporations and how we help them to achieve their desired results through a change in mindset. The premise comes down to this concept that with an inward mindset, we’re treating people like objects that do not matter.

They’re objects. They are obstacles. They are things in our way basically of getting what we want. For an organization to achieve its results, everyone needs to be collectively working together. If everyone has their own agenda, you will not get the collective group as a whole to achieve those results. You run into silos. You’re going to run into people. Some people will shut down. They’ll quit and resign. You’ve got other people who you are going to have no situational awareness of and be pushing other people who then are not as engaged.

You’ll run into all these different problems when you have that kind of mindset. We’re focusing on leadership development and helping create leaders who can see others as people whose objectives and needs matter as much as theirs do. When you look at things from that perspective and you’re all in it together working towards a common goal and objective, you are four times more likely to achieve those results.

It’s our primary focus. We also have a solution called Performance Management which is more on the performance side of things. One of the things we say is don’t hold people accountable but create accountable people. If I’m sitting over your micromanaging telling you what to do when I walk away, are you going to keep doing it? You want to create a culture of people who are accountable to the bigger goals who want to do what they should be doing.

The third piece is outward inclusion. It’s a DEI product offering, but it’s focused again on inclusion and belonging and putting your biases aside. Seeing people as people who matter as much as you do. It’s amazing how much of a difference having a culture of inclusion and belonging creates. Google did a study quite a while ago now to figure out what creates the most productive teams and what they found was psychological safety was the number one thing. If you don’t feel comfortable coming in and being able to speak your mind and help things go right to say, “I’m seeing this,” or bring new ideas to the table, that psychological safety piece is one of the biggest things that keep companies from achieving their results in performing. It’s all connected and we’re helping companies overcome those problems.

I think you’ve touched upon a very important point, which is the inward versus the outward mindset. A lot of times, especially at workplaces, I personally experienced it myself when I was leading and building a marketing team. There is always this constant pressure of delivering on the pipeline goals, the metrics as well as, “Where are we at in a critical launch that we’re looking at? There’s a major new branding and our website redesign now, where are we at?”

There’s a constant stream of things that are being thrown at the marketing leader. Again, it depends on the environment and the safety net that it’s created by the leadership team overall, more often than not, that pressure for a marketing leader is being pushed into his or her reports. It also goes sideways in terms of the peers and that’s when a lot of the blame game and finger-pointing happens. Generally, it comes down to the inward mindset, which you did point out very aptly, Lisa.

Blaming others instead of taking accountability is one of the biggest red flags.

Blaming others instead of taking accountability is one of the biggest red flags. Share on X

Who do you serve and what is your go-to-market like? I’m not expecting you to disclose any competition.

One of the things I’ve done since we got here is tried to narrow down our ICP fit because now it’s become a joke. Something I was saying when I was interviewing here is we should technically be serving anybody who has a soul. The sky is the limit. If you can see the humanity in others, then this work, if you get into it, should make an impact on you and your life. It’s not only in the work environment. It’s holistically. I’d say about 30% of our business is Federal government. Another 20% is in the public sector, state and local, and the rest is corporate. Again, we’re trying to keep that a little more narrow so that we aren’t boiling the ocean with our go-to-market to get started. This product can help anybody.

How would you define your go-to-market at a broad level? Do you have a sales team versus do you heavily rely on inbound versus a channel or partners?

We’re in build mode big time right now. We hired a full sales team to support our go-to-market. It was all referral-based up until probably mid to late-2022 and repeat customers. We’d bring in some new ones here and there, but it wasn’t like this crazy new inbound come there. There wasn’t much going on with the marketing effort there. Now, we’re looking to make it much more holistic. We’re building the account-based marketing revenue engine and we will be going outbound. We will also be trying to pull in more inbound, create more awareness, and start to grow again more holistically using a multiple-channel approach.

Lisa, we dive into what Arbinger does and what you’re doing at Arbinger around the go-to-market, and who you serve. It’s pretty cool stuff there. Something else that I ask my guests that pretty much everyone enjoys and talks about is the scenarios that entail both a go-to-market success story and a failure story. In your case, if you were to go back in time, what would you call out as a go-to-market success story and why? Also, your lessons and learnings from that.

One of my biggest successes was when I was back at Aprimo. At that time, we did not realize the extent of what we were doing, but we made an acquisition. Let me give you a little backstory. Aprimo was a marketing resource management newbie that created that space. It did not exist back in the day. They became the leader on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for thirteen years running in that space. Teradata acquired them for a crazy amount of money back then.

It then sat on the shelf for seven years in Teradata’s portfolio and there weren’t a lot of advancements made to the technology. They were only reaping the return on investment until it got to a point in which the marketing business unit of Teradata got to private equity. They sold the Aprimo entity and a few other small things bundled together and we went back to the name Aprimo, which they had purchased the rights for.

We pull out and basically, time had stood still for seven years with the exception of hundreds of thousands of customizations that were made because our technology was on-prem at that time. We’re in this rat’s nest of a mess and a whole bunch of new competitors came on the market at that time as well. One of those was called Workfront. You may have heard of Adobe acquiring them for $1.5 billion a couple of years ago.

Workfront came in and a few other competitors. They were SaaS. They were cool, UI/UX, slick, and everything for Aprimo was turned on its head. What we did was we acquired a company called DAM. They were a digital asset management company. We created a new platform and a whole new go-to-market strategy and story. We changed the whole space on its head because now we could integrate what you’re doing with your resources with the actual creative that you are producing and everything flowed. We also had a piece that could measure the ROI, even the amount of hours that were spent. Everything that you were doing against it.

The success piece of that was we became the leader again. We changed the whole landscape. If you look at the go-to-market maturity model, we were getting back into this, “What’s our product market fit? Do we even have one anymore,” to becoming the gold platinum standard for a platform in our space? It was amazing. It was pretty cool to be a part of that.

I’m looking at some of the numbers. While you were there, you took the company from $12 million AR to $50 million in three years. Those are some crazy numbers and growth for sure.

With private equity too, I’ll say it. We have a huge budget.

You also mentioned repositioning yourself and finding a new product market fit. How did that thought evolve? Can you dive into some of the details there?

It was a strategic part of the acquisition. When we looked at why would we buy this DAM, there were a few things that did for us. First of all, they were based in EMEA and we did have customers in EMEA, but it opened up that market for us. Second of all, they were more mid-market and we were more enterprise. It helped to bring together those worlds and expand our TAM. The third piece again was nobody else could do this. They had to buy 2, 3, or 4 different things to do what we could do with this integration. We had a platform story and a huge advantage, especially with the analysts. On top of that, part of that strategy was we also hired one of the analysts in the DAM space to come work for us. We went into it with a plan.

You and I know and everyone knows that go-to-market is not always up and to the right. There will be challenges and bumps along the way. If you go back in time, what would you share in terms of a GTM failure story?

From there, I went to 6sense. They’ve gone up to the right for sure. After that, I went to a company called Mindtickle. It was a great company and they’re still trying to figure things out there but the thing I think that was the fail there in the same vein as they were sales enablement, sales-readiness. This a platform that could not only ramp, train and coach your reps and your customer-facing folks but also measure success.

There was a grid. You could see, “Here’s where someone’s strengths and weaknesses are. Let’s give them this training. They’re not as good at objection handling.” They had a sweet spot and a good story and we got $200 million in nine months between two different funding rounds and new investors coming in. They had a different idea of what the go-to-market and what the product should be than the current. That was adding call recording.

I’ll say this was something hard-fought. It’s a huge market but it’s also a space the Gong and Chorus are. “There are established players in this space. Let’s stick to what we’re good at.” There was a vision of how this information would help feed this engine to be able to see someone’s capabilities in how they’re performing but it was like, “Should that be an integration?” It only became this huge distraction. A lot of resources and time went in into trying to figure this out. How do you position it? We took our eye off what we already had established as our product market fit and tried to create this bigger platform and go into this new market. It wasn’t our sweet spot and it hurt.

I can put myself in the shoes of yourself and the team there. It’s a challenge when the go-to-market is “dictated” by the investors. That’s a huge challenge. Yes, it’s a big market. You got big names like Gong and Chorus and going after call recording and sharing. Going after a pie in the bigger market is pretty attractive but the question then becomes, “What is our unique advantage, especially if you’re not in that space already. Why would someone consider us a “new name” or a smaller brand in that market versus more established players?

One of the stories I love is the HubSpot story where they were trying to go into SEO, blogs, and CMS. What they found was where they got the best ratings and where they were doing the best was in emails, forms, and marketing automation. They scaled back, focused on that, and now they have SEO components. They added a CMS. They can build on it, but they went smaller before they could go bigger. Again, when you have limited resources, where’s your sweet spot? Figure that out and build off of that.

Now that you brought up HubSpot, which is a great success story. It’s amazing how they created a new category. They did focus on the specific like marketing, email, and forms that were their sweet spot initially early on but then they started going and telling the bigger narrative around inbound. They created this whole new category, which is amazing. What they’ve done is pretty inspiring, but that also leads to a lot of the “marketing leaders” and executives to start saying, “Why don’t we start doing a category creation model,” which is not the right play for many of the teams.

You and I have talked about that in depth. Most of the time, category creation is not the right answer. It sounds fun and exciting, but it’s a lot easier said than done. It can be a very big distraction and a huge revenue and resource strain. Do you need to do what’s always against it?

I think it’s Nick Mehta of Gainsight who mentioned this. Creation looks very attractive, but keep in mind, if you are going in and you need to go all in, then estimate about $5 million or even $10 million hot cash being put into that, plus all of your team, energy, and resources. Even after all this, even after putting in for so many years, there’s no guarantee you’ll come out fine.

I’ve talked with Nick about that and I’ve done the Play Bigger. I’ve gone through that and the workshop. I even looked back. I think Aprimo was the closest to that. Back then, category creation wasn’t that big of a thing but I look back and I’m like, “That was probably the closest ever I came to doing that.” We talked about it and we spent millions of dollars on the acquisition first just to create the platform and then we had to put everything into making it work.

Coming back closer to home and more towards your inspiring and amazing success story, Lisa, what would you call as 1, 2, or 3 superpowers when it comes to go-to-market?

There are a couple of things. I would say first, I’m very data-driven and it has served me well. Back to even just understanding my audience and what makes them tick. Looking at the data and having intent data, doing A/B testing, seeing what’s working, and what’s not working, but also being able to then convert that into ROI and CAC. Also, present that in a way that’s, “This is the data behind this.” Going to work for Teradata when I did, the CMO I worked for back then, her name was Lisa Arthur. She wrote the book Big Data Marketing and that was what our division was building and it was new. I feel like I’ve always been at the forefront of innovation, new technology, and these types of concepts. It’s served me well.

Building off of what you shared, there have been a few mentors, advisors, and people that have played a big role in your career success. Who do you call out as really pivotal?

Lisa was great. From there, I worked for someone named Ed Breault. He is still the CMO over at Aprimo. He inspired me. Not only is he an amazing leader. He brings out the best in people, but he was always leading edge and he knew how to position things. How to win over the hearts and minds of the entire organization. We made a transformation to account-based marketing using 6sense before it was a thing.

He got everyone on board with it. I’m watching how he did that. We still talk periodically and he’s been a great inspiration to me. Also, being a part of communities. I’ll say the Peak Community has been a life-changing organization for me. It has made the biggest difference. It’s blessed the day-to-day. I would say it’s more the big picture and the relationships I’ve made and people lifting each other up. Always have someone to go to if I have a question. Someone who’s always willing to help. It’s been a game-changer.

Always have someone to go to if you have a question. Someone's always willing to help. It will be a game-changer. Share on X

I totally second that. I know you and I first met through Peak, but having said that, Peak has played a very important role even in my own life, especially in terms of who we can lean on. For example, I was looking to build a marketing strategy for a startup and I want a different set of eyes to look at it and give me feedback, an outsider perspective. There are folks in Peak who are ready to jump in on a call and then give the feedback. It’s amazing. Plug for Peak. I think it’s natural and it’s important. Our readers who are interested in and committed to growing your go-to-market and marketing career, definitely look at the Peak Community.

Reach out. We can give you a link.

Reach out to me, reach out to Lisa, or anyone, for sure. The final question to you, Lisa, is if you were to go back in time, what advice would you give to your younger self?

Have faith in yourself and go do what you want. Don’t wait for a time when you’ll wish you had started earlier. Share on X

I think the biggest thing is that I can do it and have faith in myself. I feel like I’ve second-guessed myself a lot and part of it was because of where I came from, but I don’t know that it would’ve mattered. It was not having full confidence. I might put on the game face, but deep down, I was always second-guessing myself. Over the last few years, I’ve finally gotten to a place where I’m like, “I can do this. I see it. I can see the big picture. I know what needs to be done.” I finally feel like I’ve gotten to a groove and a rhythm where I’ve got even the right resources and the people. All the things are in a place where I can enjoy what I’m doing. I wish I would’ve started earlier.

That’s a key piece of advice. Even now, I have been feeling the same, which is, do I have everything within me and myself to do what I’m setting out to do this year in 2023? I’m doing something different and something bigger. There’s that constant “Imposter syndrome,” which we always face. Again, coming back to folks and coming back to your support group, this is where having someone like the Peak Community and even others like your friends and family plays a big role. It’s great chatting with you, Lisa. Good luck to you and your team at Arbinger. Have a wonderful day.

You too. Thanks, again, for having me.

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Achieving Business Success Using A Customer-Centric Approach With Amy Borsetti

Posted on March 15, 2023March 30, 2023 by stratyve_ant2yf

If you cannot deliver genuine value to your target market, you can never address their needs and convert them into loyal clients. For your business to succeed, implementing a customer-centric approach flawlessly is a must. Vijay Damojipurapu sits down with Amy Borsetti of Asana to share how defining their ideal customer profile and spending more time with them leads to better business strategies. She explains how they achieved go-to=market success by optimizing the customer value piece. Amy also talks about setting business goals around the needs and interests of your target audience to consistently deliver the right level of impact.

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Listen to the podcast here

Achieving Business Success Using A Customer-Centric Approach With Amy Borsetti

I have the pleasure of hosting Amy Borsetti who is the GM of Americas at Asana. I’m pretty sure you must have heard of Asana, and we’ll talk a lot more in detail. I’m super excited to have you. Welcome to the show, Amy.

Thank you. It’s great to be here. I appreciate it.

Let’s get started with the signature question, which is how do you define and view go-to-market?

When I think about go-to-market, there are probably three lenses that I tend to look through. For any given organization, it’s how can you collectively drive as much customer value as possible based on your ICP or your Individualized Customer Profile? What you are here to put value in the hands of customers and how do you do that most effectively? There are certainly multiple teams that hold different roles in doing so.

At the center of that is the team itself. How do you rally a group of connected or disconnected individuals to be able to deliver that value? Ultimately, if you do that well, your outcome is going to be business results. Ideally, you’re looking at growth and the path to profitability, depending on where you are as an organization. You can invest more in your vision and mission, and you create that incredible virtue of cycle.

I like the way how you “simplified it.” You covered all the key aspects there, which is it always begins and ends and starts everything in the middle with the customer and what problems they’re dealing with. You also touched upon the second very important ingredient, which is the team. You have a good understanding of the customer, the ICP, but how do you bake that in, groom, guide, and nurture your team toward that ICP problem? The third is if the first two are done well, the business outcomes.

A lot of folks put the business outcomes first, but I would argue that while that can generate short-term revenue and growth, if the customer isn’t put at the center, that just has a short lifespan.

I’ve hosted over 30 guests on my show, ranging from Y Combinator founders, investors, CMO, CROs, and CPOs. Across the board, that’s a common theme. It always starts with the customer and the customer’s problems.

That’s great progress.

Let’s transition a bit. Why don’t you brief our audience about your career journey and your growth path? Clearly, you’re a sales leader, but you started not as a sales leader on day one. What was your journey like? How did you end up where you are and what you are doing now?

Thanks for asking. I have a background in human behavior. That’s where my starting point is. I got my Master’s in Behavioral Psychology many moons ago, and used to work with kids with severe behavior problems. Thinking about crossing the chasm to sales might feel a little strange, and there was certainly a lot in between. At the end of the day, I am a student and a little nerdy about why humans do what they do. That could be why they invest and buy as well as how we show up for one another.

With that, I would call it an obsession that has led me through a lot of different paths. One of which that has been helpful for the role that I am in now and even the roles I’ve been in for the last few years is after working with kids and crossing into the corporate arena, I was out there building learning programs for customers and clients in the old high-tech world, FinServe, and stuff like. That felt very similar to working with kids with different deficits that needed help. That experience of building programs to help people get better has been a transferable skillset that has pulled through even in my role now.

I spent quite a bit of time in sales. That was during my time at LinkedIn for many years, growing and building that team there. At the end of the day, my team was accountable to help the sales team be better. Going back to how we started, it was all about being able to deliver more value for our customers. Having spent quite a bit of time trying to understand how you motivate salespeople, how you ensure that you are making the right investments for them to even be able to execute your go-to-market strategy and failing a whole lot, winning some.

It was helpful as I made the move into sales itself. Usually, you find quite a few sales folks that run the path, maybe go into sales leadership, and move into sales enablement. This is perhaps different than what you might see in the market. I have found that experience and that obsession helpful to keep me grounded in what will matter most, which is if I don’t help my team be as successful as possible.

I came off a call before this one to talk about how we do this differently in 2023. I ultimately can’t deliver on the go-to-market. That journey has been a fascinating one. Here, I find myself now after spending some cycles as a formal sales leader prior to joining Asana, and now at Asana as the GM of Americas, and I formally look over our revenue teams while also spending quite a bit of my time rallying the entire AMER region. That means that I’m working very closely with customer success, marketing, certainly our sales engineering team, and many others to be able to bring a connected go-to-market strategy, including product and BDR. You name the team, we’re together trying to do the best thing for our customers. That’s a bit on the journey if that’s helpful.

You validated some of my thought processes in terms of for anyone to serve a human being. It’s funny, we had to call them out as human beings. Not many people see them as people or individuals. You need to understand the psychological aspect and what drives them, what motivates them or why they don’t act in a certain way and you happen to be the second guest on my show who majored in Psychology. The other is Ali Wendroff. I interviewed her, and she is running global sales solutions. It’s a similar path.

At the heart of it is how we create the conditions for which people can thrive ultimately. You can roll that up to how we create the conditions to be able to also help our customers thrive. With that in mind, you end up having some principles to do the right things.

I’m sure my readers want to know how you made these transitions because making the transition is not easy on what you’ve done there. Earlier, you are helping or teaching kids, and you moved into a corporate role. Before you were at Convergys, Deloitte, SweetRush, and LinkedIn, each role was different. What is your advice for people who are in a job search scenario and situation now? How to make that lateral or complete shift compared to what they were doing in their previous role?

I’m going to get a bit cerebral for a moment but it was the past few years. It wasn’t in the midst of it that I knew what I was doing with intention. At the heart of that, it is getting clarity on what’s important in your life and what you are trying to manifest, so start there every time. Sometimes you don’t know the answer, you don’t have all the answers and you don’t know perhaps what you want to do right in front of you, let alone in 5 years or 10 years.

Pushing yourself to examine this and its life first, work is a part of life. It’s no longer over here. When you take that layer and if you begin to get clarity on, perhaps it’s like, “What is the next company type? What is the next role? What is important when I think about mission and vision or whatever the list is in stack-ranked order? It’s a big forcing function. It’s wildly helpful.” When you look at your existing role, there are skillsets that you have gained that you’ve mastered or you’ve become fluent at that will serve you or not. Generally, they will, but how well will they serve you in a variety of different paths as an important reflection exercise?

For example, when I was running a sales enablement team, I knew that I was a good people leader, and I had built a set of skills that would serve me when I was leading any team. It didn’t matter if they were in sales or they were in some other type of function. I used some of my mentors and my sponsors to get critical of how well am I. How well do I do with the skillset? Where do I need improvement? How transferable is it?

People leadership is one thing. Within the realm of sales enablement, as you can imagine, I have built a set of competencies in sales but I hadn’t led a sales team. What it came down to was, “Do I understand the core metrics, the process, and the tools to be able to run the team effectively?” I knew I had some gaps and they would be overcome. I had some confidence there because I had done this other assessment on these other core skillsets. When I made the move to sales, this was a real turning point, I moved into a business where I had competency with my customer and it was differentiating.

What I mean by that is I moved into LinkedIn learning, and I had been in the world of learning, corporate learning, sales enablement, and human behavior for fifteen years prior. I had been a buyer of technology. I was learning technology for enough years to know what it meant to be on that side of the table. When I started looking for this sales role, I identified areas where I could begin adding value to my future team right away. I set up these minds of the buyer sessions with the sales team to begin to explore how I could add value before ever being in the role itself. It’s doing the job before you get the job.

You have to have a deep understanding of your competence to take that type of lead. Ran these sessions and started to get engaged in some projects because I had my eyes set on this role. When it came to the interviews and things, I already had stories about the business so I felt different. It was the first time I’d done anything like that. Reflective exercise and not only holding up the mirror yourself but having other folks holding up the mirror. For you to understand where you’re good, where you’re great, and where you have the opportunity is such a critical part of that process.

We digressed a bit but this is critical, especially given the market conditions and the situation now. Thanks for sharing your reflective exercise and how you transitioned. Coming back to the role at Asana, you are the GM of Americas. How would you define your customers? Who do you serve and how do you define the go-to-market overall?

Asana is an incredible platform and we are very fortunate to serve all types of customers across all types of industries. We’ve been successful in those areas. We have an incredible product-led growth engine where the product itself has a lot of virality to it. With that said, when we look at 2023 in particular, we’ve made some predictions, and I’m pretty bullish on this, given the market conditions, many companies beyond tech are facing new challenges and having to look at business a bit differently. Look at a way to be more profitable, efficient, scalable, and repeatable.

This year we have a material focus on elevating the role and investing in operators. We think about the role of the operator a few years ago at organizations. It feels different than the role of the operator now. These are folks that like to wake up thinking about efficiency. I have been in this mindset that all business leaders arguably need to be in for a while. We’re finding a ton of traction to help operators, help their executives and their collective teams do things better, and help their teams thrive along the way. We’re here to change the way the world works and help humanity thrive. It’s an incredible vision and we are making wild traction across the board, which is great.

Operators are people like content marketers, for example, who are trying to put the content editorial and help the executor around content strategy and execution.

That’s certainly a bullseye of ours. If you think about marketing operators that are right there with the CMO looking for ways to where we’re getting the right content, customer and time out, that’s one example. You can think about PMOs that are global and centralized ops that are working with the C-Suite or senior leadership team on establishing your annual strategy, goals, and OKRs, and helping them ensure that the work gets done. There are certainly more functional operators. Marketing ops is one example. Rev ops, product ops, and IT would be another.

Your role at Asana as GM of Americas is there. That includes the SDRs and AEs. Is that the majority of your team or do you have other supporting teams? Of course, you’ll have the ops and admins supporting those.

The way that the team is structured in 2023 is I have all of our sales segments, AEs, and AE managers as well as sales engineers in our channel function. We have globalized certain areas. I still work very closely and have a dotted-line connection to these teams in those ranges from customer success to your point to BDR, etc.

Shifting gears a bit over here. GTM or Go-To-Market is not always up and to the right. There are success stories and failure stories. If you can, share one GTM success, either from a current or previous role, and one GTM failure story.

I think that the from-to is important here. I can look at my current role. When we think about a truly integrated aligned go-to-market, we had this tremendous product-led growth and we still do. It almost created conditions where we didn’t have to be as integrated as we would aspire to be. I’m trying to ensure that you have a product-led growth engine, you overlay a sales-led growth engine, and these things are working in concert with marketing and product. We have opportunities and in 2023, we made a bold move to ensure that we like to lock ourselves in the room, figuratively and literally, to put our customers at the center and one Asana customer journey.

How the ideal experience for our customers is they begin to invest with us and invest more in the value that they should receive, the outcomes they should experience, and what it means for all of us to come together and deliver on each of those stages. We’re doing this in a very material way and it has been a tremendous way to look at how we optimize the customer value piece that I talked about at the top.

To get clarity on what the handoffs look like, how do we do this better, what is the role of our product-led growth engine, our product team, customer success, and every single team along the way? We have work to do to continue to improve this, but it’s fundamentally different than the way we were looking at go-to-market before. I’m excited to see how some of this turns out mostly in our eyes of ours.

In a nutshell, you did a deep dive into your operator journey because you’re targeting the operators. Do you have the operators for Asana? Did you dive into the operator journey across maybe the PMO, the marketing sales, and even other functions as an example?

What’s interesting about the operators, they are both buyers as they carry the purse of their executive and they’re also great mobilizers. We looked at what outcomes would we need to serve the operators as a conduit to the business. What does it look like when we do this well and don’t do it well? Being able to hold the mirror up and have some real authentic conversation, which was had on how well have we been delivering thus far. We have tremendous examples where we have been delivering off-the-charts value. There are other areas where we certainly have room for improvement. The next steps become a prioritization exercise and how we do this well.

That’s your GTM success story and obviously, that’s being played out. It’s something that gives you and your team the confidence that this will lead to success and the metrics that you’re doing.

We’ve done quite a bit of work on assessing our addressable market where we can drive even more value. How quickly from a velocity standpoint, customers have transitioned through this customer journey. We’ve already pointed out where we believe from a hypothesis perspective on where we can deliver value faster. We’ve stood up even pilot teams to start to unpack some of this. A different level of rigor around measuring whether or not we are making traction. We’re implementing an agile testing ground to ensure that our hypotheses are either tested and they’re working or they’re not and we do something different about them quickly.

That reminds me of my time when I was leading PLG at a Series B startup before. Now I’m running my GTM constantly company-serving founders and GTM leaders. Prior, while doing the PLG motion, the key there is to ensure that we have the ability to record the data and the conversions across each and every touchpoint of a free trial.

That’s number one. While we are doing that, we see where are the drop-offs happening in terms of the free trial. Is that in onboarding the different questions that we are asking? Are we asking the right questions or not? In the activation, we see them going to that product dashboard, but they’re not clicking because technically if you don’t engage the user on day 1 or day 2, you lose them.

That new user experience is critical.

On top of this, the PLG is the self-serve motion. To your point, you also have the sales-led motion. I was looking at with the head of sales in terms of how we define and map and identify the PQL and the PQA on how we do the handoffs.

It’s like the people in our meetings.

I lived there. I’ve done ELD, sales-led and marketing-led. It’s as good as living through your meetings daily. Switching gears here. What is a GTM failure story that comes to your mind?

Failure is a funny thing. Every time I hear failure, I hear feedback when done well. You can take this exact story and have to go back 2 or 3 years. Imagine what would have been possible if our go-to-market strategy was wildly connected. Asana has been making incredible progress, especially upmarket. In the enterprise, there are many wins. This exercise of identifying what we need to do to be integrated, the from that that came from is the failure. We weren’t doing it perfectly before.

We are trying to make sure that we superpower our sales-led motion by doing the right things on the product-led side and getting visibility into exactly what you’re saying with lead drop-off. Making sure our lead funnel is there and that we’re unearthing the intelligence of our platform, which is incredible. It’s to ensure that our outbound motion is meaningful to our customers and it’s through intelligence that is going to get us there. I would argue you can look at what was a failure in part, although we are successful despite ourselves. Now we’re aligning in this new way. I’m excited about where that ultimately will take us and the feedback that we have received along the way with what was to what will be.

That’s the story at Asana. How about in your previous roles, maybe at LinkedIn, something that you can share, or even other roles for that matter?

I can share a couple more broadly with prior organizations but there have been instances where the ideal customer profile has not been clearly defined. You get to a place where at the center of the go-to-market, you need to know whose problems are you solving and how specifically are you solving them. Where have you solved them in the past and how do you talk about them? We’re talking about that quite a bit here at Asana as well. I have been a part of organizations where that is not clear.

You have lots of motions. The sales team is reaching out to a number of different customer types and is broader and less specific. The narrative isn’t quite tight and aligned to an ICP and ends up being less meaningful to the masses in a market that we have where we got to get focused on profitability, efficiency, and repeatability. Our customers want that level of ROI. If the narrative isn’t there to get down to value, it’s tough for the sales team to be able to drive the type of value that we want. There have been instances in other organizations that I’ve been a part of where that clarity is not there. You end up wasting a bunch of time from a sales perspective because you’re going after anything you see versus being very targeted in your approach.

That was a great context setting there where you shared both a success story and a couple of principles or approaches of why there are GTM failures and how to rectify that. Coming back to a point that you mentioned, I was looking at your 23 predictions video. One of the things that it called out is around goal setting and how to set meaningful goals. Would you call that one of your friends?

I’m trying two different things over here, like goal setting. What are your critical GTM skills that you feel have been successful or helped you realize the success in your GTM journey? At the same time, you hit on a very important point, which is relevant to a lot of folks, GTM or not, which is goal setting and pointing down the goals.

I would say skills first at the heart of who I am as a human. I’m a deep collaborator and the heartbeat of a great go-to-market strategy is collaboration. You can’t get there without it. The concept of being able to build relationships, bring people together, get alignment on what matters most, and create a psychologically safe environment for folks to be humble, critical and have enough respect for themselves to inspect themselves.

The heartbeat of a great go-to-market strategy is collaboration. Create a psychologically safe environment for everyone to be humble, critical, and have enough self-respect to inspect themselves. Share on X

That probably is at the heart of one of my superpowers that have been meaningful here and at other organizations as well. Now when it comes to goals, to your point, this is broad, but it’s also very specific to go-to-market. As we came together as a group and we aligned on how we were going to move forward together, at the crux of that is what are our shared objectives going to be.

Where do we have dependencies and how are we going to ensure that we are making traction? It means we need to be clearer and smart about what the goals are and have a process platform insert Asana in a very deep way to be able to, in real-time, assess progress and take action quickly. The beautiful part about being at Asana is we get to leverage our platform for this stuff and we are on top of the GTM list in terms of a goals platform. That helps serve our go-to-market team in achieving the goals that we want to achieve.

The other piece of this that I imagine you’ve experienced is you have an offsite, you have something, and you set a bunch of goals or you come out of there and you set goals and everyone’s got OKRs. They then sit in some deck on some platform and they are revisited every quarter maybe. The operators are out there trying to get and gather status reporting multiple hours a week to try to roll up the right level of progress to pick your favorite executives. The whole process is manual. It’s probably not the type of work that operators even like doing. I say probably but I know this deeply with talking to our customers.

The real intelligence that allows decision-makers and business leaders to make faster decisions is making sure that your goals are intelligent. The only way you can do that is you connect the goals to the work that’s being done. There’s never been a platform to do that until Asana. There are a lot of goals and platforms and it’s the goals. You make them more automated. Maybe you make that chasing a bit easier, but they only become intelligent when they’re connected to the work.

Having a tool like Asana helps but something else that I’ve seen helps in at least making sure that you’re tracking toward a quarterly goal is to visit weekly and even on a daily basis. How do you plan your bi-weekly sprints and how do you split that into? What is my priority? That’s one exercise I did literally before I jumped on this interview with you. I did my two-week sprint planning. What are my priorities? 1, 2, 3 or 4, sequence them, and even allocate the time. A lot of people overlook the aspect of assigning time and maybe they think writing the sales forecasting report will take maybe about an hour. In reality, it takes about 2 or 3 hours and that’s a big miss.

When you think about it, you’ve got the foundational layer. You have tasks that you need to get done that are aligned to set goals. There are projects that those tasks are aligned with. There are portfolios and multiple projects of work that would ladder up to the goals of the company. If there is a disconnect there, there’s a problem with prioritization. You can get to a place where you can take the highest strategic goal of a company and you should be able to zoom it down to a task of an individual on a specific team. It should all be connected in an ideal state and that’s what we’re trying to do.

I was not planning to deep dive into goal setting to look at a video there. I thought that this is a good topic for all. Zooming out a bit, who would you give credit to and who are you grateful for in your career journey when it comes to sponsors and mentors? Who are those 1, 2, or 3 people who played a big role in your career success far?

I’ve got a couple of big standouts. I was very fortunate to work with a gentleman by the name of Mike Derezin. He’s now the COO over at Chainlink, but he was at LinkedIn with me. He’s the one that took a chance on me to bring me from sales enablement to leading enterprise, large enterprise, and strategic accounts within LinkedIn learning. How I would describe him is he’s tough, wildly analytical, and a very smart business person. He’s a true operator but what he would do in practice to help me get ramped up was profound. He would be tough in a forecast meeting, for example. Tough in that like he’s asking the questions you know you should be asking yourself before you ever get to that room or maybe you’re not.

He wouldn’t ask the question and put pressure on you in the meeting. He would certainly do. What he did after was the most profound part, which was to pull me aside and go like, “Do you understand why I’m asking you these questions?” We would be able to do quick huddles so I could learn. It wasn’t about getting pushed and trying to scramble. I was pushed and scrambling and he would teach me. He was very intentional about that process. We had a few years together, which was profound and he’s a master of change. I got to see what it looks like to have a leader that follows through, holds people accountable, and arguably not sets the standard himself but demonstrates the standard.

There were a lot of different ways that he was paramount in my learning as a leader and that never stopped. We continue to have a strong relationship. He was an incredible sponsor as I was trying to assess my next play after spending nine years at LinkedIn. He’s the guy I call when I’m working through issues now or I have thoughts or questions that I’m trying to unpack a go-to-market approach. He’s my person. He’s certainly one and there are a couple of others. I’ll let you lead the way on how deep do you want me to go in.

I love the way how you called out, where the mentor or the sponsor was tough. At the same time, ensuring that he created room for you to learn and understand the context. It’s not just pushed, but, “Go figure it out. I’m not going to give you support.” That is not the approach. That’s a critical balance. Very few leaders have that and work on that skill.

I’d never experienced it in that way until him. He’s very special and it’s been interesting to also try to emulate that. I don’t have it nailed yet in myself. It’s a story that I’ve shared with my team, myself, and others like you many times. When you can figure out that balance and carve out the time, you get so much more value out of your team, but also put value into your team, which is a thoughtful process.

Going a few years back or a decade-plus in your career journey, clearly, it didn’t come naturally to you that you’ll be successful in a sales role. You are an educator. We are working with children and something outside of you or someone gave you confidence. Is that a safe assumption?

Yes, it is safe. There was a gentleman by the name of Peter Kim, also an incredible friend of mine who I was chatting with him years ago. We were early friends about having spent much time with kids with severe behavior problems. I’m like, “I want to get into the corporate arena.” I didn’t even know what that meant. I had my Master’s in Behavioral Science, so I had done a bunch of organizational behavioral management work but it was academic.

He introduced me to a woman, Amy Haggarty, who was over at Convergys. She was in a performance consulting role working with organizations on essentially elevating their workforce that came in a variety of ways. He was like, “I’ve got this friend of mine who’s over at this company. Let me introduce you.” He was truly the conduit for me to get into the corporate arena. I did not get the job initially. I interviewed and she hooked me up with it with a number of people. I entered with getting a job in instructional design. There are people formally trained in instructional design, and I was not.

I could tell a story and connect the dots between what I was doing with kids and what I could do with adults, essentially high-functioning adults, generally speaking. Amy teased it out of me and connected me with folks at Convergys and it was about maybe three months after that when they had given me a call and said, “We’ve got headcount and it’s not specific to a specific account that they were working with. Will you come over?”

I was like, “Absolutely.” It’s my birthday too so that was memorable. It was only through relationships that I ever would’ve got in. A lot of people, to your point, are trying to get in or break through into some other industry or whatnot, the power of relationships and creating them if you don’t have them. Fortunately, you have platforms like LinkedIn where the world is much more connected professionally than it ever has been and it has in some ways leveled the playing ground. Now there’s still a privilege and all things packed into it depending on what family we were born in and how connected are they. There are certain variables to consider, it is a lot easier than it ever has been to make that.

Building relationships is much easier thanks to platforms like LinkedIn. The world is much more connected professionally than it ever has been. Share on X

One final question. I know you need to wrap up and jump to our stuff at work here. What advice would you give to your younger self if you were to remind and go back to your day one of the GTM journeys?

I didn’t always have this perspective of putting the customer value first. If I could rewind myself to the early 2000s, it was there when I was working with kids. It’s very obvious who’s most important. This transitioned to the corporate arena and all the different various jobs and companies I’ve worked at. It wasn’t until this moment where not the COO at LinkedIn, Dan Shapero, had this keynote, and he was talking about the definition of customer value. It was all about value in the eyes of the customer, not in the eyes of the business.

It was profound, and it made me rethink how I thought about go-to-market and how I thought about business in general. This paved the way for my thinking and what I get re-grounded in every time. In any decision that I make, I’m always looking at it through three lenses, team, customer, and business upside, downside, in both directions or all three directions. If I could go back and give any advice to my prior self, it would’ve been, “Put that at the center of everything you do and the good will come.” It might have put me in a different place quicker. I’m also not one to live in a ton of regret. Every moment is a moment of learning. That would be the one thing tied to go-to-market.

You touched upon a very important point there, which is when you are working with the kids, the kid is a customer. You are in touch with the customer day in and day out every single minute, every single day versus when you shift the corporate role, there’s a gap. You’re not in touch with a customer as regularly as you should be or need to be.

The more time you spend with customers, the better you become every single time. Share on X

It’s like when something is in your face. You’re deliberately working one-on-one with a child or parent so clear. In a sales role or a role like mine, if we can bring that principle to play, how much time am I spending with my customers? The more time I spend with customers, the better off I am every single time. It never fails. There’s a reason for that because they get closer to how they define value, which means I begin to get closer to how I can deliver it.

We shared a lot of insights, so thank you for your time. Good luck to you and your team.

Thank you so much, Vijay. It’s been great to spend time with you. Take care.

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Delivering Customer-Centric Go-To-Market Solutions In Programmatic Advertising With Ali Wendroff, TripleLift

Posted on March 1, 2023March 14, 2023 by stratyve_ant2yf

Our guest today defines go-to-market as a strategic iterative process of delivering a solution based on an opportunity in the market. To her, everything comes down to positioning. It’s all about understanding the goals of your clients so your product suits their needs. This is how Ali Wendroff approaches go-to-market strategy in her position as Senior Director of Global Engagement at TripleLift. In this conversation, she shares her journey from her first job in an ad tech company to her present leadership position in a global leader in the programmatic industry. Join in and learn about the ins and outs of go-to-market strategy in this fast-paced core industry!

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Listen to the podcast here

Delivering Customer-Centric Go-To-Market Solutions In Programmatic Advertising With Ali Wendroff, TripleLift

In this episode, I have with me Ali Wendroff, who is the Senior Director of Global Engagement at TripleLift. I am excited to have you on the show.

No worries. Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.

This is what I always start off the show with, and this is a very intriguing and interesting question. It takes the conversation in a lot of directions with the speakers and even the readers enjoy. Ali, how do you define go-to-market?

I put a lot of thought into this, but I would define go-to-market as a strategic iterative process of delivering a solution that’s based on a need or an opportunity that has presented itself in the market. I think what’s most important in terms of the go-to-market process is positioning. It’s all about your audience. It’s fully understanding the goals of your clients to ensure that the product or solution suits their needs and identified gaps.

I think it’s far from a one-size-fits-all approach, and it’s rather entirely about the voice of the customer, which varies even within an organization with whom you might be engaging with. If you can’t answer the why, why it matters, why your clients should care, why it solves a problem, why should they want it, and why it speaks their language not yours, then I don’t think you have done enough legwork or homework to fulfill and validate the journey that you are planning to take them on.

I love the fact that you are emphasizing so much the customer and the whys of the customer. This is something that I keep pushing both at the places where I worked as well as with the clients that I consult with, which is the whys of the customer. Simple things like taking the time to go and interview the customer. This is the easy trick, and unfortunately, a lot of folks in marketing and sales miss out, especially in marketing and maybe even product.

When you interview the customer and ask questions like, “What are the objections like or what are your fears when you were looking to buy a product or service?” Another question can be, “How would you explain and define or talk about our product and services to appear in your industry?” Those are something we can use in the copy as well.

Though you might be the company bringing a product to market, it’s not about you. It’s about whom you are bringing it to and making sure that you understand them and speak their language in order for it to make it out of the go-to-market funnel and hit, in my opinion, with the most intentional impact.

Though you might be the company bringing a product to market, it's not about you. It's about who you're bringing it to. Share on X

I love the way how this show got started. A great description and opening. Why don’t you tell a bit about yourself, your journey, both personal and more professional, and what made you arrive at where you are now?

I’m a born and raised native New Yorker. I went to the University of Maryland, and I was a Psychology major. I love people and I love networking and relationships. I was pursuing the path toward child psychology and relationship based. I graduated and what we like to say is I was birthed into programmatic. I remember my first job and I showed up in a suit. I still won’t live that down to this day. It was a site for sore eyes walking into a very casual ad tech company and I was fully professional. As they always say, you can never be overdressed.

I started actually at an ESP-ish-like place CPXi, where I was fresh out of college. I was ready to learn a new industry. I was surrounded by folks that seemed to be hustling and I worked for three account executives covering basically all of North America learning the weeds and getting my feet wet. Following that, I made my way over to PubMatic where I worked with key leaders who all through the years remained mentors and friends. I think this was where I feel I was seen. I learned to grow wings here.

I was given a runway with the sky seemingly as the limit. I came in as an account executive, more junior, and a good portion of the team was out either on maternity or for other reasons. I ended up inheriting a massive book of business very early on and was empowered by those around me to learn, embrace, and succeed.

There were a lot of diverse skillsets teachers. We were like a family back then and I was on the DSP side managing roughly 25% of the entirety of the DSP business. Here, I also learned the balance between the publisher side and the ad solutions team. I started to spearhead the PMP growth and what I call my PMP love story, but the joy of being at the epicenter.

What is PMP?

It’s the Private Marketplace. It is a form of the transaction by the deal, which back then was only hitting the forefront versus where it’s now, which is booming but where I was at the time, I was still sitting on the DSP ad solution side and being able to develop these PMPs, you had to sit in between supply and demand. This is where I think my love of being at the epicenter of that intersection began. From there, I moved to Kargo, a mobile-first SSP at the time that was largely managed when I got there. I was brought there to build their programmatic stack on the business development team.

Here, I got to know the agency and the direct sales teams. I worked alongside their business as a consultant almost and what have you because the goal was to start to transition some managed brands, agencies, and advertisers to programmatic, which was quite a unique experience. It’s hard to get a managed team to want to move dollars to programmatics. That was a learning experience and a challenge, but ultimately, we were able to scale the programmatic business nearly 100% and integrate the programmatic team into the sales org.

Kargo at the time was really a dominant PMP business as well. I was still staying in the line of the private marketplace deals-based transactions. From here, I was brought to TripleLift, and I was brought on to the supply side as the PMP market maker. This was a huge moment for me. I wanted the role so badly. I knew it would be a challenge. I have also never been on supply directly. I was so curious as to how to translate all of my buy side work and working with advertisers and the demand side into a supply strategy.

I spent over a year or so in this position and I wore a bunch of different hats, but I drove the majority of the success for TripleLift PMPs by hustling between supply and demand to build that market and drive revenue. Also, developing custom go-to-market plans for each publisher based on their business models that would suit their commercial teams. You probably are seeing a little bit of a theme here. After some time the epicenter was calling me back and I love TripleLift.

I realized that the buy side was tugging at me and my current boss now, I’m Sonja Kristiansen, the Chief Business Officer of TripleLift, floated the idea of this DSP engagement team in my head. I had approached her to think about what my next path within the company would be, and bells and whistles went off. Now, there was no roadmap. It was, “Here’s what we are thinking, build it. Build something completely new.” I enjoy living in ambiguity. At the time, I had spent and now I moved over and ultimately developed what is now the DSP Global Engagement team. It was born back then and a few years later, it’s a global team of ten supporting big tech teams and additional service model DSPs as consultants.

I love the way you are from an individual contributor in the sales and then moved from demand to supply to being in the epicenter of the marketplace. I love the fact that your psychology background played a big role in all of these things. Would you call that your magic skill or is that the powerful skill that you bring to the table?

What everyone likes to think is so automated, but I always would say I’m old school. What I have learned along the way is relationship-building and being respectful of those that you work with and that a team of teams approaches and collaborating takes a village. I think from my early days in psychology, I love people. I’m very curious. I enjoy learning, asking a lot of questions, and listening to some of the pain points, the gaps, or successes and understanding what’s behind that.

I think that it empowered me to lean on experts around me, and also understand the core functionality of go-to-market, which is what are the needs of the clients? What do they need and how can I help deliver solutions in a way that best suits them, which therefore transactionally would suit us as well as tier-one service partners?

You also mentioned, and this word kept coming up in your overview, which is programmatic. For those of us who are not in the industry, can you give us a quick primer? What is programmatic?

This is always a tough one of what you are going to get. I like to think of programmatic as all of the tech and behind-the-scenes of powering online advertising. To boil an ocean into a really simple phrase, all of the online ads that you might engage with on your phones, on your tablets, or any form of media at this point or channels out of home. In order to get that and deliver that experience to you, the programmatic industry is what powers that. Also, the tech that is involved in doing that and making sure that the right ads are delivered at the right time in more of an automated kind of behind-the-scenes way that you wouldn’t think as second nature shall we say. It’s all the behind-the-scenes work of what it takes to put an ad in front of you as a consumer.

For me, when I’m a marketer or when I’m trying to build an additional marketing campaign, in my mind, I’m an individual and I go directly to LinkedIn or Google or Facebook versus your clients. What you are streamlining is not for this one individual who’s looking for maybe 5 or 10 ads, but we are looking for thousands or even millions and millions of budgets as well.

There is certainly a one-to-one type of relationship between programmatic and reaching those key consumers, but there are larger audiences, one to many. I think that we see that a lot in how media gets transacted these days as well with so many different buying methodologies and even the evolution of how to reach consumers appropriately, how to do it right, but also how to make sure it’s sending the right message from brands to the right people.

I know we can go deeper into this one topic, programmatic, especially with everything that’s going on in the search world, plus the ChatGPT and AI and everything that’s happening. Search is going to evolve for sure, but that’s a huge topic in itself. If you have an opinion, we can spend 5 to 10 seconds or whatever.

I think this is an interesting time for the tech industry. I would say it’s the first time in all of my years in the industry that I think I could say I’m even overwhelmed. It’s so fair to be self-aware. There are so many new players and new media streams. You have retail media that’s now surpassing CTV and new narratives coming out and search and then the deprecation of the cookie, and what have you.

However, what it comes down to is where I was and where things started. You were expected to learn everything and be the expert on all things. I think where we are now, it’s about not only understanding how each of these different modes of media or channels or programs impact your business but also, how are consumers interacting with each of these. Are they overwhelmed?

What does it mean to have a package that hits on all the points of what a consumer is looking for and how can we as programmatic experts or what have you simplify this? How can we digest this when we could barely digest it ourselves? I think it’s so important to stick to the core competencies and principles of what our audiences and what brands are trying to do to reach those consumers and understand those pathways in order to not boil the ocean of the Lumascape these days. Also, make it easier, more seamless, and more efficient for our clients.

This is a huge overhaul and upheaval that’s happening in the industry. Many touchpoints are affecting so many areas across the business models of different tech companies. Not only that, for me as a marketer, I’m challenged to come up with the content and what channels to use for my content now.

We are seeing that, and that’s something that is super important for my team but I always say being nimble. Be flexible. Everyone always wants the same outcome, which is whatever success means to you but the journey to getting there is much more important because you can’t be afraid of delivering a solution that might fail. You can’t be afraid of having something underperform. Instead, you have to do the legwork to understand the goals and what work.

You have to be able to invent and reinvent your own wheel, your own narratives because they are going to change because the ecosystem is changing. Also, new partners are being introduced and it’s exciting, but it’s a consistent hustle where being able to balance that is so important with clear messaging, clarity of goals, and defining the needs in a way that doesn’t feel like they could go in 800 different directions.

With that as a background and context, what I always ask and this will be useful and enlightening for the readers is if you can share a go-to-market success story and a go-to-market failure story. You can pick your choice.

I would say a go-to-market success story is about a few years ago when I launched this team, it was about a year in and social platforms was are booming between TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and what have you. There are many others. What we were looking at is native at the time. TripleLift is naturally an omnichannel SSP. Native was our core business and we have since evolved it to CTV, OLV, you name it.

Back then, we were working with our key DSP partners to understand how to make natives seem a lot easier. When you say what is native advertising, even when I joined TripleLift, I was like, “What is native?” What am I doing? For people that aren’t familiar with it, it’s ads that match the look and feel of the publisher’s page. That’s what native means to us. However, when you don’t know what it is, you think that there are so many different creatives and overhauls that have to happen.

Instead, what I started to see is the majority of the brands have a social strategy in the market. They have social assets. They are working to generate greater followings on those platforms and they should keep doing that. What I did build was social to native extension. Repurpose your social assets and extend them to native and the programmatic ecosystem.

What this did was it made native easy. It made it efficient. It made it seamless so that anyone in our DSP platform that had buyers that were transacting on social and were working with various teams within an agency could very easily say, “You don’t need to reinvent assets or go through a new creative process.” Instead, here are spec sheets specific to each DSP as to how to take that social video and run native video. Run instream or how to take that standard unit that runs on Facebook or Instagram like a more standard asset and run a beautiful native image ad seamlessly.

The goals prove to be far more successful in a programmatic space than they were in social. Naturally, there are different goals. It’s not discrediting any platforms, but realizing that brands could not reinvent their wheel but extend and grow their share of voice across the programmatic ecosystems and their consumers. It balanced their social strategy well. This was where we got native on the map of an evergreen strategy. The way in which people look at social is the way in which they should look at native and build that without having to do anything all too different than they were already doing.

This was a big success across our book of business. A lot of our key partners looked at us as thought leaders. What was the most impactful for me was I felt like I was able to educate our consumers and our clients. Our clients are not clients that most view as clients. Our clients are DSP internal account teams. Some might say they are a little bit forgotten along the way or the activators, but being able to educate them about what they could do and how they can extend their partnership reach with existing buyers. We saw a tremendous increase as it relates to native adoption, our partnership with each of our key partners, and that they felt supported in this narrative too.

Going back to the early part of the discussion, which is keeping the voice of the customer and understanding that. Also, educating them and bringing them along in the journey. I can see all of those elements or ingredients being played out in this story. Kudos to you.

At least they could say, “I’m tried and true.” I know you had asked about a failure. Along the way, it’s so important to have failures. It’s so important to realize what doesn’t work. I would say that the go-to-market failure that I would address here is when I was back in my first role at TripleLift as the Private Marketplace Market Maker. I tried to develop what I called a prestige PMP package.

The idea here was how can I scale one-to-one PMP to one to many packages for premium publishers. Back then a lot of asks were, “How can I get more premium publishers in one deal with a fixed rate?” I had built this idea of, “Let’s package them together by vertical.” This wasn’t necessarily about performance. This was much more about branding and reach because measuring a lot of publishers at the same time is harder to do back then.

I built these tent-pole and vertical packages. I was so excited about it. I felt that as a one-woman show driving one-to-one PMPs one by one was not going to scale eventually. This I thought was great. This is going to be an easier way to do this. It went to the market and I will never forget it. I was troubleshooting all night with one of our previous co-founders like, “Why isn’t this working” Some publisher is working and one is not. We have the highest win rates but I realized at that moment that I didn’t do enough homework.

It lacked the depth and the research to understand what wrappers are these publishers on and what are agreements we have in place. How do they operate their marketplaces? How is our tech built to support this on behalf of buyers that have different buying strategies? My idea was a little shortsighted and I realized then that I need to take a step back. I’m not done with them yet. They will come back around, but instead, I transitioned it into a commercial piece of, “Tent-poles and vertical alignment for publishers is appealing to our buyers.”

It was the mechanisms of the way in which we were building these deals that I didn’t do enough exploration on. It taught me to say, “What worked,” which was buyers were interested. It was the execution piece that didn’t play out. I shifted that in terms of working with our product marketing team to make it more of a sales enablement play and change the structure of how these deals are constructed.

I will tell you that I’m still not done with them and I hope to come back around to reinvent that vision but I learned from it. You got to go deeper. You have to ask more questions, “What did I miss?” It’s still on my mind and I hope to solve it one day, but at least we were able to become a much more impactful player in the curated deal space in audiences, tent-poles, and vertical but I have yet to crack that code and I will have to go back to it.

I’m sure you must be getting called out for that persistency of yours.

I am persistent. I will give it that. I’m willing to go the distance. I don’t take no very well, but not because I don’t like a no, but because I think a no is one step closer to a yes. Even if I have to burn it down and rebuild it, I am all about finding it. If there’s a will, there’s a way.

This is where I can see your sales mindset coming, which is no, is fine, but no, doesn’t mean never. It just means not right now.

I will come back around and let you know when it works.

It was a great story there. I love the way where you never ever gave up. Again, bringing your sales mindset and thinking to the fore here. Also, something that caught my attention, and again, it goes back to how we define go-to-market, which is yes, you are in a hurry to get that product out. You could see that, but at the same time, you have admitted it after the fact. It happens to all of us, which is we are in a rush and get it done more but then in hindsight, we realized that we missed a critical research piece, especially on sales enablement or how to package or how to portion it for our customers.

Even back then, I was so used to running like a chicken with my head cut off a little bit, but in a singular mindset that when you do bring something to market, there are so many different skillsets and experts that are involved between the product and the deals team for that specific initiative that didn’t go as planned. It taught me to go deeper. Go the distance because you might not have all the answers, but bare minimum, scoping things out and really making sure you do put the time in. Legwork to me is 90% plus of a successful go-to-market.

Legwork is 90% plus of a successful go-to-market. Share on X

With that, as the context and backdrop, how would you define TripleLift’s go-to-market strategy specifically you and your team’s role and function within that?

I will speak to TripleLift first. TripleLift is an omnichannel essential marketplace for better ads that can drive better results. Ultimately, we are an organization that has always cared deeply about consumer experience, client trust, and efficiency. We develop products based on solutions that clients, whether it be advertisers or publishers are looking for or a market need. We deliver them with education and end-to-end support across native display video and CTV.

What it takes for us to typically bring something to market are four phases. There’s the pre-alpha, which is about discovery, understanding competitors, and what the minimum viable product would be to capture market opportunity. It’s a lot of gathering feedback and research inputs. From there, it moves to alpha, which is when product and engineering build the pipes and want to test and test again and verify. Also, understand what’s going on in the environment as it relates to performance, reporting, and basic functionality.

Once it passes that stage, it gets into beta, which is, “Check. We know how it works, but now we want to understand what will drive our customers to buy.” This phase may include a focused beta group of clients, a value test for a hypothesis, scaling out and understanding the audience fit, and understanding the bugs or performance levers that are important to our consumers. Lastly, it moves to GA, which is the official launch where there are training materials, demos, and more. This is when all audiences that are meant to take this to market are enabled and we are ready to sell it at scale.

Where my team comes into play is typically in the beta stage, I would say. To speak about my team, the DSP engagement teams’ services are DSP internal account teams. The account executives, account managers, and biz dev strategists. There are a lot of different titles depending on the organization at large and different divisions. We function as commercial consultants. It’s a layer that very few SSPs if any have because we provide direct service to the hands-on key folks or those that are working with brands and agencies on media planning and the like.

Many forget about these teams at DSPs or look at them as the activators or the pipes, but expect them to handle all the heavy lifting and execution. Whereas, we choose to educate these partners of ours on what our partnership is like with that DSP and TripleLift. What’s enabled, what can they do, and how can we bring them custom materials or custom opportunities solutions that fit the voice of their persona and support them in the market however they need?

Each DSP structure and persona differ. There are a lot of different playbooks and narratives even per product or channel, but we sit almost at the front end of the sales cycle and are typically one of the first teams to bring new solutions to market in that beta stage. What we do is we partner with product marketing to construct or shift narratives that are going to market that best suit our various DSP personas and establish proper positioning.

We understand how this answers the why. Why would this product validate a need in the market for our DSP partners? It allows us to gain feedback on the product, the brand, and the vertical and agency levels depending on the DSP structure through our channel partners. That’s where we sit and how we work with and collaborate so intensely with our internal teams as well as on behalf of our clients in the market.

It sounds like it’s a pretty complex product, and the annual contract value would be in 6, 7, or even 8 figures. That’s a sense I’m getting. Obviously, it’s a complex sales model with a heavy touch and high relationship involved.

I think what’s most important to us is making sure that it’s not about us. Go-to-market is not about you. It’s about whom you are bringing the products to and what matters to them, how that suits their models or possibly solves any gaps, and how that slides in so that it becomes easy and seamless. We are able to then prescribe and walk through end-to-end how to implement a solution in that way.

Switching gears a bit over here. You did talk about one of your superpowers, which is psychology and sales. Would you give a lot of credit to those in terms of your career growth? How would others or what do others call or tell about you? What is your magic or superpower?

I asked a couple of key mentors and colleagues this question. I figured it was the fairest way to answer it and also where I could get some humor in some responses. Some of the responses were, “Bringing straightforward energy and clarity.” It means speaking the customer’s language and knowing their business as well or better than them. I think this goes back to what we have talked about as legwork. I try to embody those that I’m speaking with, their needs and understand as much as I possibly can about their individual role when taking something to market.

That ties into genuine relationship-building. As I mentioned, I love people. To put it in a quote, “You are incapable of acting or pretending as if you care. You care and you care deeply.” I appreciate that. What was also shared with me is humble confidence and persistent curiosity. I try to be as active as a listener and ask a lot of questions and I’m not afraid to admit what I don’t know to learn more.

It’s being a little bit shameless in nature but those are all core to building proper strategies. This is another good one. “Ali, the bulldog.” Tenacity with charm. The former only works with the latter, but I feel as though the way I would put this is a relentless drive to succeed and empower those around me. I love the hustle. To reference Radical Candor by Kim Scott, move the couches.

I don’t take no very well and I will be ruthless in terms of fixing something that isn’t working or rearranging the furniture, reconstructing a narrative, understanding the why, or burning it down and rebuilding it. I get joy in empowering those around me and succeeding. I love the hustle and that’s so important when you can go the distance and deliver. I’m fortunate enough to be passionate about what I do and work with people that I adore that are mentors and have a great team with me as well.

When you are answering that, I could sense your leadership, your vision, and how you operate. Kudos to you and I am going that extra step to ask that feedback from your mentors and peers and then articulating that so nicely. Talking about mentors, peers, and role models, whom would you credit or whom would you say played a major role in your career success?

It started with my parents. My mom has been a career woman. She was a glass-ceiling girl back in the day in the music industry. She’s always been a mentor to me and as she puts it, walk your walk and talk your talk. My parents have been very supportive of me, even though they can’t quite describe what I do. My mom will pull up my contact card in her phone and read out what I write for her, but she said it’s not updated but they consistently support me and keep me going as well as my fiancé to fuel my drive.

With previous managers and leadership, I have been fortunate enough to work with fantastic people in the space that have also become friends or remain mentors that saw me early on and saw something that I didn’t know I could see at the time. They fed the beast, is the best way to put it. I’m so appreciative of them as a network now and as I continue to learn.

One thing I’m also fortunate with is working for a difficult manager. Someone in my life was in a very difficult situation. I think it’s important to have that because I learned so much. I learned how I would want to manage very differently from them. I learned to be resilient. I learned to speak up and I think that it’s as important. You have to have fumbles along the way, but those that empower you, but also those that maybe want to do the opposite of that and how you can rise above that is as important to me for getting to where you need to be.

A great point about working with difficult managers. When you work with them and it depends on how you define difficult. It’s more that they are not the right or a good manager versus a difficult manager can also be where they push you and don’t take your first solution as the solution.

I would say that I would look at a difficult manager in the way that you described and don’t take the first answer as a great manager. I think that the worst manager is someone that is worried that you would outshine them or as a blocker. That was at a pivotal time in my career where I was fortunate that I had had confidence, experience, and support that allowed me to leverage the previous managers and leadership of I believe you always have to treat people with respect and build people up.

There’s no better thing than recognizing other people for their hard work. Being able to do that and have that support along the way, whether it be personal or work-wise is so valuable. I love to work. I have a work family. I’m fortunate to have a family, family, but it’s all about building relationships and keeping them intact. We are all in this together. It’s the object of this.

There's no better thing than recognizing other people for their hard work. Always treat people with respect and build them up. Share on X

A lot of the variety of topics that we covered so far, started off with how you defined go-to-market and then your career journey so far. We talked about the success and failure stories. We talked about your challenges as well as your superpowers or your magic powers, which is great. One final question for you and the audience love this question. They take a lot of wisdom from this, which is, if you were to turn back the clock and go back to day one of your go-to-market journeys, what advice would you give your younger self?

I support this question. If I could look back, I would say to myself back then, “Keep asking questions. Keep listening. Stay fearless and be curious. The journey has only just begun, but it’s your story to keep telling.” One thing that drives home for me on this is I was in an interview once and I was asked one of those out-of-the-box questions. “If you were part of a car, what would you be?” My response was, “I would be the sunroof.” They said, “Why?” I said, “I feel the sky is the limit.”

Keep asking questions. Keep listening. Stay fearless and be curious. The journey has only just begun, but it's your story to keep telling. Share on X

I was thinking you’d go for the engine or a wheel, but you went for the sunroof.

It was a quick-thinking moment, but it stuck with me. It came out and I was like, “That hits.” I still think, “Keep going. Be curious. Stay on top of what makes you happy.” As I said, be fearless and if there’s a failure, if there’s a misstep, it’s only a failure if you didn’t learn from it.

Thank you for a wonderful conversation. For all your readers, the big takeaway is to be the sunroof and do share. Thank you so much and have a great day.

Thank you so much.

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Criteo: Bringing A Richer Experience Through Impactful Advertising With Nola Solomon

Posted on January 19, 2023January 27, 2023 by stratyve_ant2yf

What does it take to bring a rich experience to consumers as a leading commerce media platform? How does a global technology company help marketers and media owners reach their goal? Get ready to tune in and join Vijay Damojipurapu on today’s show. In this episode, Nola Solomon, The SVP of Go-to-Market at Criteo, shares the value Criteo brings to consumers in the marketplace and how she empowers the sales team and channels. Vijay and Nola also touch on how the business has evolved. Hear more insights as Nola shares more about Criteo. Tune in to this episode now!

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Listen to the podcast here

Criteo: Bringing A Richer Experience Through Impactful Advertising With Nola Solomon

Happy 2023 to all of you. This is the first episode in 2023. Here I am. I‘m super excited to receive, welcome, and host yet another go-to-market leader. Welcome to the show, Nola Solomon.

It’s exciting to be here. Thanks for having me.

I‘m super excited. I‘m sure our audience is excited to hear what you have to share, as well as your journey and story. Your official title is you are the SVP of Go–to–Market at Criteo. We will dive into a lot more of your journey and what you do at Criteo. Before we get there, I always have the signature question I ask all my guests. I open the show with this, which our audience love. How do you define go-to-market?

I define go-to-market as thinking about how you bring what is coming out of products into the marketplace so that it starts to bring value to the customers that it’s meant to be for and for the business that is producing it. There’s a lot that goes into bringing something from products out into the market where it becomes usable and revenue-generating. Fundamentally, that’s what go-to-market is structured to do. With all of that comes continuing to have a client-centric mindset with everything so that you can help make sure that the products are the ones that the clients need to solve their problems. It’s informing the product strategy that way.

I love that definition. I love the fact that you start with the product. More often than not, a lot of the go-to-market leaders and people I speak with omit the product. They have the notion that it’s mostly the go-to-market teams, which is mostly sales depending on who you speak with. I love the fact that you started with the product, and then you also mentioned describing the value and what it means to the clients and the customers in the marketplace. The key to it all is how you bring it all together, then enable and empower the sales team and the channels.

That’s a key thing because ultimately, you want to be producing products that a customer wants and needs rather than what you think they want to need. You’re out there in the market trying to sell something that nobody cares about. There is an element of having to always have that client-centric mindset of understanding who your customers are, and what their challenges are, and making sure that the product roadmap is reflective of solving those needs. That makes the job of go-to-market a ton easier when you know that you’re bringing something out that’s much needed. It’s about making sure that the value proposition, the messaging, and the enablement of it are clear. It’s a virtuous cycle when it’s working well.

Your title is the SVP of Go-to-Market. I‘ve not seen this a whole lot. I would also predict that we will start seeing more and more of the official function of the title as go-to-market. How do you describe and why did you push on this title of go-to-market?

It’s funny because my name Nola is also not very common. It’s after Woody Allen’s Match Point movie where Scarlett Johansson’s character is named Nola. I met a lot of Nolas but they’re all very young like kids. I expect a new generation of go-to-market leaders to come up in the industries. The funny thing is that it’s a term that is not well understood by industries. Different companies have different definitions of what go-to-market is and what it means to them.

Go-to-market is thematically the essence of everything that is sales-facing. It’s an actual function to “Isn’t that product marketing,” and a component of product management. What was exciting about my role at Criteo was to come on and create the go-to-market function as a center of excellence and as a bridge between the client solutions organization and the product organization. I’m sitting at the epicenter there to be that layer of both communication but also activation and execution for everything that’s coming out of products and everything that’s coming in from the field.

Similarly, there are a lot of close partnerships with marketing, corporate development, and all of the back-office teams as well at the company. It’s an exciting place to be. Originally, there were pockets of this function at Criteo. There were different teams that lived in different places that were doing pieces of go-to-market. When I started talking to Todd Parsons who was our Chief Product Officer at the time about this role, he was like, “We need someone to come in and think about how we do go-to-market as a function at this company.”

That was exciting to me, especially with the fact that with my background, I’ve held a lot of different types of roles that have allowed me to have a 360 view of not only our industry advertising technology but also the different types of functions and roles within a company. I had a clear view of how I would create this.

That’s interesting. The CPO asking you to explicitly build a go-to-market function is cool. I have a lot of other questions specifically on this but let’s backtrack a bit over here. There’s a reason why I want to bring up this question later on. Why don’t you share with our audience about your career journey? You will see where I’m going with this.

I’ll start at the beginning of the AdTech career journey and work my way up. I fell into this industry completely by accident. Anyone who is in AdTech probably has a similar story. It’s a newer industry as well. It’s not something to be learned in school when I was in school. Now, there are classes, and I’m very jealous of those people. After a former life in book publishing, I went on to get my Master’s in London in Child Developmental Psychology. I started working as an ad trafficker at an ad network at the time before programmatic.

It was interesting because I got opened up to the world of AdTech, but I wasn’t super keen on trafficking ads. I was like, “There got to be more fun things to do.” Throughout my career, I was in London for many years. I ended up moving companies from where I was doing the ad operations types roles into doing more business development and account management for publishers throughout the Southern European region and France. I’m half French, so I have the advantage of being able to speak French fluently and sink my teeth on the more publisher sales-facing side and the whole supply side of the industry. In addition to that, programmatic was just starting to blossom.

I was learning what a supply-side platform was as that was becoming something in the space. It was an interesting advantage because it allowed me to understand quite technically how everything works in this very complex ecosystem that we call AdTech. My career then brought me out to Singapore where I spent a couple of years leading the supply team for my company at the time, Millennial Media. We got acquired by AOL. Anyone in the industry who has been in the industry for a while has probably had a stint at AOL.

That was interesting too because it expanded my view beyond Europe to all of APAC. I was traveling around to all the different markets and understanding the different nuances of not just customs but also how businesses operated. That allowed me to think about things from an international perspective, and not a US-centric perspective of “Everything will apply globally.” I ended up coming back to the US after some time in Singapore. I moved into a demand-side platform or a DSP, The Trade Desk, for a role that I was excited about and dig my teeth into the data world.

Everything was becoming clear to me that it was no longer about the ad format itself and only about the content itself. It was also about the audience. The audience is tied in with the data, who are you looking for, and the right user at the right time. It’s that old adage. I got to learn about the data space and all of the different ways that data interconnects in the back end to find the audiences and optimize your campaign so you’re targeting the right moment. You’re able to then measure the impact of your campaign and the ROI.

Learn about the data space and all the different kinds of ways that data interconnects in the backend to find the audiences to optimize your campaign so you're targeting the right moment. Share on X

After that, I ended up running a programmatic revenue team at a hybrid publisher and AdTech company called Dailymotion. That was an interesting role because I had the revenue P&L. We were driving the entire business for the company and about 80% of the revenue. That was a lot of fun in terms of partnerships and thinking about how we keep growing this business.

That brought me eventually to NBCUniversal to lead their programmatic product and strategy under their advanced advertising umbrella, which is moving into broadcast and the CTV world just as streaming was coming up. They were just starting to develop Peacock. I was working on how we enable programmatic advertising there. It was exciting. That was what I was doing when Criteo came knocking.

That’s super interesting and adventurous on your side. You started your career in London and Southern Europe, moved to Singapore, and then came to the US. You‘ve got a very global perspective. I do have a novice question. I‘m more in the B2B world. A lot of the sales happen through sales teams or maybe partnerships and channel members. How does the “sales and revenue gen” happen in the AdTech world?

It’s very similar because it is B2B. A company like Criteo is an advertising technology platform. It’s a SaaS play. It’s selling our technology stack to advertisers and agencies to leverage it to run their media campaigns and do their media buying. We’re dealing with businesses and selling our products to businesses. They’re using our products to then reach consumers to buy their products.

If you go back to your time at NBCUniversal, you were on the other side. Is it the demand side? Is that what you would call it for the ads?

I would call that the supply side. I am now focused on the advertisers and the agencies or those who have the medium or dollars to spend. At NBC and in other parts of my career before, I was on the supply side. I was working with the publishers who have the media inventory to sell. When you go on a website and see an ad, that’s an ad space they’re selling.

I was a novice in the space. Supply and demand are the whole thing now.

It’s the most ubiquitous yet complex thing at the same time.

My exposure is to the OTT world and cord-cutting world. I was at Microsoft as a marketing manager back then for IPTV platforms. One of our big customers back then was AT&T U-verse and others across the world like Deutsche Telekom, Singtel, and Bell Canada. I got to see more on the tech but also to some extent, the content side and how things were changing from cable and satellite to more of IPTV and eventually the cord-cutting.

Now, cord-cutting is mainstream. Five to ten years ago, that was not. It was still early days. It sounds like because of the shift in the business model, all these content producers had to rely on a different revenue stream, which is now the ad space, the programmatic, and the data–driven. If you can talk about that and how the business model has evolved for NBCUniversal and Peacock would be a great example there.

NBCUniversal has always been pretty innovative. They are thinking first and foremost, “How do we continue to be first in all the spaces?” It is an exciting place to be. What was fun about the role there is that they were leaning into programmatic in a way that some of their peer sets weren’t. For instance, there was a great understanding that this was a growing part of the space. At the same time, it was also balancing the reality of this giant broadcasting business.

This is what all of these broadcasters deal with and also publishers in general. They have had a big direct sales business and are used to transacting directly with the advertisers themselves. They were handling IOs and running campaigns on their own in their stacks, and outsourcing this to AI and technology to do it for them with some inputs here and there. Because of the efficiencies that programmatic brought to the space especially for the advertisers, it allowed for a lot of abilities to do things quickly and activate quickly, to measure and create real tactical ROI that could be seen.

That has continued to improve. It’s still a little behind on the CTV side but it’s making huge strides even from a couple of years ago. CTV continues to be a growing space. It became obvious that you have to follow where the money is, but you can’t blindly go there. For somebody as large as NBC and their peer sets, they have to be balancing all of the different ways that they interact with their buyers.

That’s pretty cool given that you’ve had such a diverse set of roles and responsibilities even across geographies. I don’t know if you have kids or not, but on the personal side, how would your parents describe what you do and what your role is?

My dad in particular is funny about it. My parents pretty much get it in the sense that they’re like, “We get that you are helping facilitate the serving of ads to me.” Sometimes I’m like, “That’s an interesting ad. It’s relevant for me.” Other times, I’m like, “I don’t care about that ad. Get it out of my face.” My dad is an author and a writer and was a former journalist. Ultimately, what they both appreciate is that advertising helped keep the internet free. It helps fund editorial publishing.

That’s something he inherently understands from having been a writer in the space but also because he had a digital publishing company in Italy a long time ago. He gets that. I’ll still get emails from them where they’re seeing the news about Meta’s fine in the EU or anything related to Google. They will be like, “Did you see this? This must be important for you.” I’m like, “I saw this last week when it first came out but you’re on the right track.”

I’m sure you must be excited to have a parent like that, and a dad who understands your space and who you can speak with and connect with on several bases. That’s exciting for sure.

It’s nice to be able to have some deeper conversations about what’s happening sometimes.

Coming back to your role at Criteo, can you expand on what your function and responsibilities are, how you are measured, and how you and your team are measured against?

The scope of the function of go-to-market sits as the centralized organization bridging between the client solutions group, which is the sales and revenue-generating group with some support functions, and the product organization. I have four teams within go-to-market that are operating as a unified go-to-market group but each has specialized functions and roles. Let’s call it the product-facing side of my go-to-market group.

I have my product solutions organization. They’re working hand-in-hand with the product managers to make sure that all of the feedback from the field has made its way into the product manager’s ear, and is being considered as part of the development of the product manager’s product strategy. They’re also deeply understanding what’s coming out of the product, what’s being built, how it’s going to get activated, and the value that it’s going to bring in terms of solving the customer’s challenges, and the value it’s going to bring for Criteo as a business.

They’re in charge of building the go-to-market plan, being the experts on that product set, solution set, feature update, or whatever the case may be. Also, being able to articulate, “This is how we’re going to bring this to market. If it’s something brand new, here’s how we’re going to run the POC, the alpha, the beta, and all the way through GA and beyond.” If it’s a feature update and something is in GA but it requires a change of behavior on the sales side or at a customer who’s using a self-service, there’s a go-to-market plan associated there.

How is that different from traditional product marketing? In my mind, that’s typically product marketing and product managers, to some extent, depending on the organization. How is your product solution team different from traditional product marketing?

At a company that’s the scale of Criteo of about 3,000 people, we have a very complex product suite within our commerce media platform. We have four main solutions and then we have these core assets that power them. It’s specialized to get into the nitty-gritty of something. Even as simple as our machine learning algorithms for campaign optimization.

The AI behind that and the number of different tweaks and things that need to be done that bring in the different data, audiences, and all of these things are all product work. Understanding what those are and being able to articulate it into a plan for how it then needs to be activated is where the product solutions team goes.

They’re not focused on, “How do I tell the story? How do I write all of the collateral materials and sales pitch materials?” That’s product marketing. They work very closely with product marketing, which is also within my organization. They’re focused on the storytelling and the narrative, making sure the documentation is there, and also the right type of materials that a salesperson is going to need to be successful in the fields.

It sounds like your product solutions team is a blend of the sales engineer and solutions architect.

I feel the need sometimes to attach other titles to it because it’s not exactly something that’s well-known as a scope. When you’re at a smaller company, you would have either a product manager and a product marketer doing some of that function, or a product marketer doing a lot of it. When you have the scope of the technology detail you have to get into and the amount of planning, organization, and project management that comes with some of these things, they are not necessarily always standing alone. They are intricately involved in some of the other things that are also ongoing.

It’s being able to think about the go-to-market holistically, “What’s our business strategy with this product? What is our goal for this product in terms of what we expect to get out of it?” It’s working with the sales teams or the sales leaders to make sure that we have that business plan and that business strategy attached. That’s where they shine. That’s where I see them being quite differentiated between product management and product marketing. They very much work as a tight trio.

Your first team is the product solutions. Thank you for going and explaining all the nuances and details there.

I do it on a daily basis. The product marketing team is the second group within my team. It’s focused on who are the personas that we are bringing, how we need to show up for them in terms of the narrative, the storytelling, and the materials, what’s the actual documentation on some of the more client-facing collateral on the product itself, and all of those pieces that you would think anybody would need.

They also own, “How do we name our products? How do we keep a centralized repository where everything is accessible and easily findable by a salesperson, and make sure that’s being used and being updated accordingly based upon whether the narrative is resonating or not with customers?” We’re tweaking that. We keep constantly improving. It’s not one-and-done. They’re closely focused on that.

They work a lot with our marketing organization because the marketing team uses a lot of that persona work and the messaging work for growth marketing activation. It’s used for the website. It’s used for the planning that we do between the product solutions group, product marketing, and marketing on press releases. We might want to bring out certain products. Those are tightly working together and understanding both the technical product side of it but more so, “How do you articulate this to this particular customer? How is that different from this customer over here?”

That’s product marketing. You have product solutions and product marketing.

I have a group called Solutions Consultants. This is the group that’s enabling and bringing it out to the market in terms of the actual rolling out. They train the sales teams. They are out there in the field supporting the sales teams and getting pulled into client meetings to help talk about the story and connect the dots with product experts or solution experts. Because of the complexity of our suite, we’re not selling one thing. We’re selling a suite of solutions.

Oftentimes we want to be there on-hand to help support the sales teams post-enablement even. There’s a lot to do in terms of planning the rollout, and getting that rollout and training done of “This is how we could think about bringing these types of products together for this particular customer because of their unique challenge and need,” or what they have told us in meetings. This is largely focused on newer solutions that a salesperson isn’t already well-versed in. The goal is to get everyone well-versed in everything. By that time, we got some new stuff. It’s constantly going on.

The fourth team is my strategic planning and operations group. That’s the group that makes sure that it’s all flowing, and that it’s not a big game where the pieces of the puzzle are connected to roll something out. That’s strategic planning, operations, and project management. That group also works closely with our business stakeholders and all of the other organizations outside go-to-market. We had inputs and outputs for the annual planning for finance, legal, and all the back office teams that need to be alerted and understand how everything is flowing from go-to-market. It impacts their roles in their day-to-day and some of their systems even. It’s making sure the ship is running tightly and we’re not missing the beat on anything.

Thank you for explaining and walking us through the four teams that you have under go-to-market. I would like to shift gears. As you and I and everyone on the audience side know, there are always successes and failures in go-to-market. It’s not just up and up. There will be downs several times. Going back to your time at NBC or at a time that you want to pick, if you can share both a success story on the GTM side as well as a failure, that would be good.

I’ll take both of them for Criteo examples. One of the big successes that we saw and that I’m proud of is the launch of our Commerce Max platform in 2022. It’s our agency DSP. For those who don’t know the terminology, DSP is Demand-Side Platform. It’s the buying technology platform for an agency or a brand to run their media dollars across the open internet.

This was a huge accomplishment for Criteo because one of the big areas that have been growing in the space that Criteo has been playing in quite a bit is retail media. Retail media is the monetization of retailers’ inventory on their retail sites, similar to what they have always done in stores with shelves. We’re turning all of that digital with things like sponsored products on display. That has been going on for a few years.

Criteo has built technology to service retailers to be able to monetize their inventories and for agencies to be able to buy these inventories. What hasn’t existed before and something that is deeply needed by the buying side of the industry is the ability to do this while also leveraging a retailer’s unique audiences to find those audiences when they’re not on the retailer’s site. They’re on any website here and there consuming their content. They’re on their phones consuming content. It’s being able to reach them in the right moment to bring them back to the retailer for point of purchase, and then being able to report on that in closed-loop measurement so you can see that drove that point of sale.

That was a huge accomplishment because it helps manage a lot of the fragmentation in this space already that clients need to otherwise use multiple different tools to spend that money in that way. We have brought it into one place for them. That was everything from a go-to-market standpoint. It’s in the market because there was a lot of education and listening to the customers, especially our early partners, in terms of what they need and what are their main pain points and building toward that.

It was an amazing collaboration of all teams at Criteo in products and go-to-market, sales groups, and the customers in terms of building this to what it is now, and then continuing to work with them as they have been hands-on keyboard to be able to continue to iterate and bring that out. I’m proud of what the team accomplished there. That was a huge win for the industry to be able to close the gap on some of these fragmentation challenges.

It sounds like a big win. Congratulations to you and the team there. I’m curious more about the strategic side, plus the tactical side of how you and your team think about the launch. I‘ve seen high–performing teams that define, “Here are the launch goals in terms of PR, customer rollout, wins, sales, pipeline, and so on.” What do you and your team think about that?

You always want to start with, “What are we trying to achieve? What does great look like?” That means putting some metrics against it. What are the right KPIs to measure? That depends too on what stage you are in the product life-cycle. It may not even be a revenue KPI yet. At some point, it becomes one. It’s having that established from the very beginning and knowing what you’re working toward. Especially when you’re building something new, you need a test and you’re doing some POCs. You need to know what you’re testing for. What does success look like?

You have to have that defined. Everyone needs to agree on that, including in this case the customer. If we and the client have different definitions of what success looks like for this POC, that’s not going to get us very far. It’s identifying, “Here are all the things we would want. What is the most important 1 or maybe 2 or max 3 that we can work toward, assuming that they’re all manageable in the same breath?”

We start there, and then it’s about making sure that we have the right processes put in place to make sure that all of the different steps along the phasing for all the different teams that are involved are happening. There’s a giant project management component there and regular roll-ups to steer the folks that need to be updated and keep track of whether we’re pacing on track here, and to roll that out.

Do you have a specific launch program management team? Is it the product marketing who is running that?

I do have an enablement function within the go-to-market group. It’s not run and operated by product marketing but they are giant collaborators in all of this because much of the materials are needed there.

That’s a super cool story. Coming back to my earlier discussion and topic, what is the GTM failure story? What are the key lessons from that for you?

Criteo is in its antiquity. It has been around for many years. First and foremost, it was a retargeting company, which was a company that focused on finding you again and again for you to purchase a product. That was enormously successful. They were the first ones to do it. To do that well, you need to be quick, you need a lot of data, and you need to know exactly who you’re targeting and target them with the right thing so that they are more likely to convert. It’s a performance play. That made Criteo extremely successful. You could consider that one product or a point solution.

You need a lot of data to know who you're targeting and target them with the right thing so that they are more likely to convert. So it's a performance play, and that made Criteo extremely successful. Share on X

As Criteo evolved because the space evolved, there was a need to create more solutions. You needed to have more things to sell than just retargeting. Even though we continued to be the best at retargeting in terms of a performance standpoint, other companies also have retargeting products and then other products too. To capture the bigger TAM, there was a need to do that.

We did that but one of the challenges that we faced as we rolled out other products is that we started to have not only what we would call a whole bucket of point solutions like, “Here’s the pitch for when you’re doing retargeting. Here’s the pitch when you’re selling an app campaign, a CTV campaign, or an online video campaign.” All of those were individualized as their sales strategies.

First of all, I created a ton of fragmentation within what we were doing from a go-to-market and sales standpoint. Secondly, as we started to bring those stories together, it also made it difficult for a salesperson to understand “What is the plan when I activate across all of those things?” If we are bringing the point solutions together, you’re not selling videos, retargeting, and CTV separately. You’re selling acquisition or retention to a performance marketer.

They’re either looking to acquire new customers or retain and grow their existing customer base and lifetime value. They can do that through a myriad of different targeting options, inventory assets, channels, and devices. We can offer them all of that through one buying tool. Being able to articulate the fact that we are doing acquisition and retention versus these point solutions was step one. The sales team’s challenge thereafter which became the go-to-market challenge was how we understand how to map all of the different opportunities into the bigger pitch.

That’s where go-to-market sets down and goes, “Here’s how we do these types of plays. Here’s the documentation for these step-by-step,” and how you would think about all of the different types of creatives, whether this creative is more conducive to an acquisition campaign, a retargeting campaign, or a consideration campaign because of the performance and the data that we have in our partnership with products. We were creating a lot of this mapping for the sales teams that then allowed them to be able to bring these stories together holistically. We have seen incredible success and adoption of these materials as well with over 40% growth in our acquisition products. It’s working.

It‘s funny how this theme continues to happen. It doesn’t matter which industry or what stage of the company you’re in. This is more common in mid to larger–sized companies where things become siloed. Sales teams do their own pitching. The product teams are doing their own thing. It‘s like horses pulling in all different directions, which are all targeted and going in one path. It’s cool. Going back to what you shared in your failures and challenges, and coming back to your launch in 2022, that’s a big shift that has happened at Criteo. Kudos to you and your team for making this happen.

Thank you. It’s a lot of hard work from a lot of different folks. It’s an incredible effort.

Double–clicking on that, what were the friction points or challenges? There had to be an alignment at the leadership level and executive team that needs to happen. It’s not good enough that the alignment happens only at that level. It has to trickle down at all employee stages. How did you work through those challenges?

A lot of what I jumped right into when I started at Criteo was the education piece about shifting away from the point solution mindset to this acquisition retention loop. It’s the virtuous cycle of how that helps form and grow a marketer’s business. First and foremost was how we effectively educate. It’s not because it’s a difficult concept but that’s not how historically we have been selling, and the story they were used to telling or the fact even that there were multiple products to bring together into a holistic story.

We launched what we called the Trailblazer event, which was this huge go-to-market undertaking with tons of content and materials for follow-ups that helped set the stage for what we were doing. It was all about repetition. It was about getting into the markets and having the team sit down, do office hours, go through the materials, and be available for questions until it became ubiquitously part of the everyday language. I joked with my go-to-market team, “The terms acquisition and retention weren’t even being mentioned at all. Now, everyone is saying it all around us.” They’re telling it to us, which is great. You know you’ve succeeded when someone is telling what you said to them back to you.

Did you have to bring in external thought leaders, influencers, consultants, and experts? Was it just the internal team who was doing all this education? A lot of that weight is typically given to a neutral or third party.

We largely did all of it in-house and leaned on the huge effort of the go-to-market team. There were a lot of collaborations with other organizations as well, and a lot of collaboration with the sales leadership team to make sure that they were also very involved and bought into having their leaders and their leaders’ leaders sit in and make sure that was getting digested and disseminated down to the teams. We even did competitions, pitch contests, and all sorts of things to make sure that it continued to land all through the chain.

We’re shifting more to the final segment and the last few questions for you, Nola. What are the key patterns or trends that are on your radar for go-to-market? What’s on your mind? How are you tackling that? Are you tapping into the communities? Do you have peers? How are you tackling all those issues and challenges?

There are a few things. First and foremost, it’s with the scope of the role. Are we achieving and doing everything we need to do to make our sales team successful? That’s critical. We’re continuing to analyze that and improve on that. My partnership with the sales leadership team is incredibly important as well as my leader’s partnership with their peer sets. That continues to be an area that we can always tweak and improve. That’s a big focus for me.

I like to do a lot of research on how other organizations do it, ask around, and listen in because it’s done differently by different companies all over the space. What might work this year may not work next year as our product evolves and as the market evolves. We have to be agile and flexible. One of my favorite things to say to my team is, “We have to create clarity out of ambiguity. That’s our job as go-to-market.” That means being comfortable with ambiguity and constant change.

As the market evolves, we have to be agile and flexible. Share on X

Specifically and personally, do you rely on communities, books, or podcasts? What do you turn to?

All of the above. I’m a huge nerd. I love reading all sorts of things, books, and articles. I love podcasts. I love this show. I have also a lot of business podcasts and writing podcasts I listen to. I find them all very relevant for go-to-market. At the end of the day, go-to-market is a lot of storytelling. It’s a lot about how you position things and how you think about what’s happening in the marketplace, apply it to your business and think about, “What does this mean now? What does this mean in a year? What does this mean in three years?”

I find all of those relevant even if they’re not directly related to go-to-market activities per se. Go-to-market always has to have a pulse on what’s going on in the industry and the space, macro and specific to the industry. There are client meetings and events where you get to sit down and talk with people, whether that’s more informally like this or over dinner or listening to some more formal content that can be educational.

If you were to look back at your career, who are 1, 2, or 3 people that played a key role in your career growth?

It’s more than three people. There are three groups of people. My parents have always been unconditionally supportive and allowed me to galavant all over the world and never told me once to be careful. Secondly, I have had the incredible fortune of having some fantastic managers who have become mentors and friends even both while and after I’ve been working for them. They have helped guide me in my career both in terms of the opportunities I’ve been afforded and also in terms of the thought leadership guidance and partnership of exchanging ideas and debates, which I find so healthy for growth. That’s huge. My husband is also in the industry. He’s more on the technical side. He has been incredibly helpful in continuing to help me dig deep and learn exactly how things work so that I can more effectively talk to people that I don’t know about how they work.

You did it very well in terms of how you covered the three main stakeholders, parents, folks at work, managers, peers, and then at home, husband. The final question for you is this. If you were to turn back time and go back to day one of your GTM careers, what advice would you give to your younger self?

The number one advice I would give myself is to carve out more time to think. I’m hyperproductive. I tend to feel like if I’m not for some reason being as productive as I feel I should be, then I’m not doing anything. Sometimes sitting, thinking, and reflecting is not something earlier in my career that I valued as an actual activity that was moving something forward for me in terms of what I needed to do for my job or my development. Now, I very much understand the importance of taking time to think, absorb, digest, analyze, and then put it to some analytical use toward the job you’re doing or the problem you’re trying to solve.

That could be as simple as reading an article and then taking ten minutes to think about it, having a conversation, and then thinking that through after you’ve finished having the conversation or maybe jotting some notes down. I try to carve that time out now more regularly, which is hard. In some weeks, it’s easier to find some time to do that or not. That’s important because you’re in a constantly evolving space, so you have to be constantly on top of it. That doesn’t mean just reading it and being like, “I knew that happened.” It’s like, “What do you think about what that means?”

Thank you so much for taking the time. It was a wonderful conversation. Good luck to you and your team at Criteo, Nola.

Thank you so much. It’s a lot of fun.

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Krish Ramineni On Becoming Detail-Oriented On Your Meetings With Fireflies.ai

Posted on November 30, 2022November 29, 2022 by stratyve_ant2yf

With the prevalence of Zoom and other video meeting programs, it is much harder to remain detail-oriented, take notes, and pay attention to lengthy digital discussions. If you’re struggling with that, Fireflies.ai is your best answer. This AI meeting assistant joins your meetings to take notes, transcribe verbal data, analyze conversations, and a lot more. If you want to rewind and go back to your meetings because you forgot something, you can simply check in with Fireflies.

Join Vijay Damojipurapu as he talks to the Co-founder and CEO of Fireflies.ai, Krish Ramineni. Learn how he implemented NLP technology to create this AI-powered tool. Discover more information about its features and how Krish and his team spread Fireflies through word of mouth and product adoption. Check this episode out so you’ll never miss a single detail on your next meeting ever again!

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Listen to the podcast here

Krish Ramineni On Becoming Detail-Oriented On Your Meetings With Fireflies.ai

I have the good fortune of hosting and speaking with Krish Ramineni, who is the Founder of Fireflies. I’m so looking forward to it. Krish is one of those Forbes 30 Under 30. He made it to that list. I’m sure you will be in for a treat as far as good market insights are concerned. With that, Krish, welcome to the show. How are you doing? It’s bright and sunny here in San Francisco Bay Area.

I’m doing great, Vijay. The weather is awesome. I haven’t had a chance to step out myself. This has been quite a busy day. There’s a lot of exciting stuff here at Fireflies that we are working on. I’m doing well. Thanks for asking.

I always start my conversations with each and every guest with this question. How do you define and view go-to-market?

Go-to-market, for me, is about helping people understand that a certain technology, product or service is available but sometimes, even before you talk about the product or service, you have to help them understand if there’s a need or a problem that they are trying to solve. Go-to-market for me starts with awareness and education.

It’s about users’ customers helping themselves acquire a piece of technology or product for their business in the most frictionless way possible. I believe that it’s about letting people buy the way that they want to. The best go-to-market strategies are the ones that are able to take away those barriers and help guide users, buyers or admins through that decision-making process in the most seamless way.

I can see your definition in line with the product-led growth phenomenon that’s taking the go-to-market world and the B2B world by storm of late. There are many flavors of go-to-market. Your definition aligns with product-led growth. I heard you mentioned users and buyers seeing value by themselves and then helping them make the decision where they can take their action, “I see the value, and I’m going to purchase this product.”

There was a time when I was on the extreme end and said, “No salespeople and marketers. It’s only going to be product-led.” The only way you were going to be able to purchase a solution like Fireflies was you are going to see it, try it, buy it, and swipe your credit card. That was going to be the only way. My definition has expanded over time because not every person or buyer follows the same model. Some need more handholding than others. Some have custom requirements.

It’s about understanding the user and what triggers them to make that purchasing decision or that a-ha moment for them. Similarly, when you build a product and are a startup, you are looking for people to get that a-ha moment from the product, saying, “This is great. This is magical. I want to use it.” Even in the buyer’s journey, a lot of times with GTM, people are bombarding you with emails and account-based marketing.

Sometimes the SDR function is also part of the go-to-market team. Our first default response now is to say no. We are not even open to the idea, saying, “Why? Yes. I’m curious.” it’s like, “Don’t bother me.” How do you pique someone’s interest and get them to that a-ha moment, whether it’s marketing or from a product lens? At certain times, you can’t do it all with the product. You will need to have people and conversations.

Tell the audience about why you came up with the name Fireflies. What does your company do? Who do you serve?

Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant. It joins your meetings across Zoom and other video-conferencing platforms. It takes notes, transcribes the meeting, analyzes those conversations, and creates a knowledge base for you to search back through. If I want to remember a conversation I had with you where we were talking about GTM, I can search for the word GTM in my conversation with Vijay, and I would be able to pull that information up in a minute. I want to be able to remember all my conversations and also not have to do busy work. Meetings are expensive. We want to help people be more productive during meetings.

That was our simple value prop for starting Fireflies. The name Fireflies has an interesting background. My Cofounder, Sam, and I met in college. We worked on various projects. Many of them had nothing to do with B2B SaaS. We worked on drones. One of the things we did was build a drone delivery system. At night when drones fly around dropping packages, they look like Fireflies. We used the name Fireflies and continued using that name for all of our different projects.

Lately, we have had customers come up with their interpretation or story of why we are called Fireflies. One of the things that they came up with, which was very creative, was, “Fireflies is this silent fly on the wall in a meeting that sits and takes notes.” That’s a common idiomatic phrase. Another person said, “Fireflies is very interesting because usually, all of these conversations are hidden and buried after you leave a meeting. Fireflies is lighting up all of these conversations that are happening across an organization.” I give credit to our customers for it but we are running with that narrative for why we are using the name Fireflies.

That’s a very interesting story. The backstory there is around the drone using that in the night, and then you gave the name Fireflies. Something that is popping up when you are sharing those customer stories is that they see value in the product. It’s almost like, “I love the product. How do I give my interpretation or the version of that brand name when I’m using the product?”

Every person has a different way to describe Fireflies. When we get on customer testimonial meetings or interviews, a lot of times, people will see Fireflies in a meeting. When someone asks, “What is that thing you are using?” they will talk about it. They are saying what the solution is. It’s cool to come after hundreds of thousands of conversations.

There are 3 or 4 common ways people describe it to them, “It’s my personal assistant. It’s my note-taker. It helps me stay on top of things.” For our marketing too, let’s use these phrases because almost everyone seems to be using the same theme. Sometimes the best marketing is customer word of mouth. We do see those common things showing up.

The best marketing is customer word of mouth. Share on X

On a lighter note, what is your parents’ interpretation of what you do at work? How do they see that?

For them, it’s about me. Once, I was a Product Manager at Microsoft. I was working at a tech company, going and playing the game of a startup, and trying to be my own boss. That’s something that they see in the early days. A lot of people are like, “Why would you leave a nice comfortable job and do these things?” Over time, they have realized. I’ve even had my dad or other folks who work in tech seeing Fireflies in their meetings at their companies. When people you know, close family, and friends see it, it’s like, “I know this. I know who works on it.” That’s a game-changing feeling. They believe that I’m on a mission to make meetings better. That’s exciting.

There’s nothing like when your parents see and use the product that you are building. That’s an amazing moment in life overall. You also mentioned your career journey so far briefly. You mentioned meeting your cofounder at the university. You went to Microsoft and were a Product Manager. What prompted you to start your company and why around the space?

Going back like most Asian American kids, I thought I wanted to be a doctor in college. I quickly switched over to the engineering side or the technology side of things. While I was doing that, I was never passionate about engineering the same way I was about solving problems, working on projects, and getting groups together. The way I learned to code, how the technology worked, and learned about databases was not in a classroom initially but was working with peers.

In my freshman summer after my first year of college, we worked on an app together, and that idea, “We didn’t have any real internships at that time. Why not make our internship? We need something on our resume.” It turned into this massive tool that we ended up building for college campuses back then. We ended up getting hundreds of other ambassadors to help us market the product. It was a consumer-like product but was great because that was around social media time. It was exciting.

That got me thinking. Most people are using maybe 10% to 20% of the computer science skills that they are working on. There are few companies that are using deep tech or deep machine learning stuff. Technology is truly democratized. Anyone can start working on it. I was never afraid of how difficult a problem was going to be. You just start working on it. I had a lot of fun throughout college. I worked on several other projects. I did hackathons.

The way I met my cofounder he went to MIT. I went to UPenn. We met through mutual friends. My cofounder and I had never met in person for the first two years. We met on a video call. Every evening after our classes or problem sets were done, we would work on different projects and submit them. You win little prize money or awards for submitting to these hackathons. We competed in a lot of hackathons. I remember the first hackathon we won. We got $1,000 or $1,200.

We said, “Let’s take this money and then build some more apps. Maybe we can hire some freelancers to help us market or do other things with it.” That was the entrepreneurial journey. After I graduated college, I ended up graduating a year early. My cofounder was still in school at the time. I went off to Microsoft and learned a lot there. The discipline it takes to build enterprise software is very different. Here we were, kids hacking on a few things.

I got the perspective from both worlds of what it means to be fast, agile, and creative and then what it means to build software that businesses pay a lot of money for. The line is blurred from a technology point of view but from a go-to-market point of view, it’s different. You can take the same cool piece of technology, and someone is going to market it better than someone else. That could be the success point. That was the journey I ended up on. After my time at Microsoft, I reunited with my cofounder. I was there for a summer. I was supposed to go to graduate school but I had a summer off before that.

I went to Boston and stayed there for the summer. We started working on a couple of different ideas like hackathons and then said, “Why don’t we start a business, work on this for a few years, and see where it goes? We are not going to get an opportunity like this later on.” One thing led to another. We moved to San Francisco and incorporated the business. We went through 4 or 5 pivots and then landed on the voice space. That is the current version of Fireflies as it is.

Some of the traits or some of the stories that I’ve seen with successful founders is that they started working on a problem that they connected with. That turned into a startup. Was there a story around that for you and your Cofounder, Sam, where it was around recording transcription? “This is the new and emerging space. Let’s figure out and use AI to do something about it.” What is your thought process like?

It was a combination of both. We were fascinated by NLP technology. Everything we built early on was around how we understand text and conversations and help people be more effective. Honestly, our very first idea was, “I get 5,000 emails every day at Microsoft. Let’s build a tool that tells me which emails I need to prioritize.” It’s almost like Google PageRank for emails. For that, you understand what’s in the emails and rank it.

It’s a nifty productivity problem but maybe not a problem that someone is going to pay a lot of money for. That started as the initial project that we were thinking about, “How do I save more time because I can’t deal with emails?” A lot of people were out there building a brand-new emailing system. Our goal was not to build a new system but, “How do we take something that’s there and make it better or add new technology to it?”

Another idea we had in our journey for pivots and iterations is that I tend to do a lot of messaging over LinkedIn and different chat apps. I can’t remember all the promises I make to people. I use a bunch of different to-do lists but it’s very hard to keep track of who I’m talking to and what I’m saying. We built a Chrome extension that would track all the conversations I’m having with different people across different apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, and all these different apps.

Anytime I made a promise to someone saying, “I will send you the report next Friday. Let’s meet up next month,” it would automatically detect that using NLP and create a to-do list for me, “Here are all the tasks or promises you’ve made.” If someone promised to do something for me, it would also make all the tasks, pull out the dates and times, and set up automatic reminders for me.

If I had a chance to go and work on this project, I would because it’s fascinating. We even applied to YC with it. We got an interview day. It was an exciting project. However, for us, it’s a GTM thing like, “How do you now take this productivity prosumer-type tool and sell it to businesses or B2B? How do you make money on this? How do you monetize it?” That was a real challenge.

That’s why we took a pause on it but we took the same technology and learning and said, “There’s this huge blue ocean in terms of meetings.” For emails, I can at least go back and look at an email I sent two years ago. I can look at a chat message I sent two months ago but once I leave that meeting room with Vijay, I probably will not remember for one week what I discussed. I will not be able to recall that memory, “Let’s build a knowledge base of all of my meeting conversations and then run this NLP that shows me action items, dates, next steps, timelines, and deadlines.” That became what Fireflies is.

There are a lot of things to digest over there. You mentioned product-led growth. You gravitated toward product-led growth from the early days. Is it fair to say that you added on a sales-led motion more recently after product-led growth?

We are working on the sales-led motion as we speak. The way we look at our sales team is that we call them customer onboarding managers. We believe that as people come in, they are aware of the technology or interested in the technology. How can we help guide them through that process? What you would see typically in pre-sales is a fusion of customer success and sales because many of them are not starting from zero. They are starting with some knowledge of the platform.

We found that there are certain types of customers that need to turn on specific integrations or they have specific questions that they won’t be able to get answers to in the self-service. The majority of our customers, whether it’s a 1-person team or a 5,000-person team, can theoretically sign up, add teammates, build-out, and pay for it at a large org level without ever talking to sales.

I believe in the Atlassian go-to-market model. Zapier has a fantastic go-to-market model. Calendly had a fantastic go-to-market model. However, when we are building collaboration software, there are going to be different things that we need to go through. People have security questions. They want to know about our compliance stuff. We do a lot of work there as well. We want to be an enterprise-grade product that can be as easy to purchase and use as a consumer product.

Somewhere along the way, you realize that you need people there for those that need help. It’s less about us spamming people with emails and doing outbound. It’s more about how we build that inbound funnel and use the product-led leads. Maybe if there’s someone that is at the right stage to potentially purchase or upgrade, and they are from a high-value account, we should probably give them more attention and more of a white glove service. That’s where we have the salespeople.

Selling is less about spamming people with emails and more about building an inbound funnel. Share on X

There are two tracks that come to my mind. I would love to dig deeper into both tracks. The first is with PLG. It’s all about how can your target users find your product and self-onboard and how quickly can they see the value. It’s all about that. That’s one component. The adjacent component and critical part is the virality because that will reduce the CAC for you. At the same time, it shapes or translates to growth on its own. That’s the first track. Keep that in mind.

The second track is the PQLs or Product-Qualified Leads, which is the sales assist model you are talking about. Let’s deep dive into the first track. In theory, it all sounds wonderful. I was brought in to build a PLG at a Series B startup. We went down that path but it’s super hard. In theory, it boils into three steps. One is how you get users to find the product. The second is self-onboarding. The third is finding value and virality. Those are the 3 or 4 steps in theory. It’s easy but it’s hard to execute in the real world. Help the readers understand the challenges that you ran into early on. How did you work around those?

We were able to build a critical mass of initial users that were able to bring Fireflies to more meetings. That was the triggering point for virality. I will start with the first point, self-service. A lot of people can even experience Fireflies before they even sign up. They can see the bot in the meeting. They will have a conversation. Word of mouth is probably our number one thing. People talk about it. Firefly sends a meeting recap afterward the meeting to the people.

When it does that, they are able to view the transcript and the notes. They are like, “This is great.” We have a thing saying, “Sign up and start using it.” That’s where we get most of our growth. We don’t spend money on other channels like advertising or ads. It’s word of mouth and direct search traffic. It’s a result of word of mouth or seeing it in a meeting and saying, “What is Fireflies.ai?” Luckily, our domain name is the same as our company name. People tend to see that and talk about it.

We had a customer of ours who said, “I saw more Fireflies than I sell my SaaS software because I talk about it so often,” which is fantastic. A lot of times, people are going to be able to see and use it. We now have a free trial as well as a freemium function for the product. You get full access to freemium, where you have limited transcription, credits, and storage. Usually, people will hit certain paywalls and decide to convert on their own or go through the full free trial, get a lot of questions answered, and convert that way.

Through this process, we will also see some people who are like, “I see this. I want to sign up for it but before I sign up, I need to think about how I deploy this to an org. I need more of those IT-level questions answered.” They will request a demo. Usually, when we ask them, “How did you hear about it?” it’s like, “So-and-so told me. I saw it at a meeting. I’ve heard about this. This is exciting. I want to check it out for myself and see it to believe it.” That’s the motion.

We also have PLG. This is probably still the hardest one. A lot of people put very interesting flavors on PLG, “You are going to have a customer. They are going to respond back to you.” To be honest, many PLG people don’t want to talk, “Let me buy on my own. Don’t bother me. I might buy it for myself or a few folks but I’m not going to go and do an org-wide deployment. You are talking to the wrong person. I’m not the person that’s going to buy for my entire org.”

For PLG, you can do all the work but you have to not bother the wrong type of users. Maybe as you have people inside a particular domain start using it, you start doing org mapping. You have to do traditional account-based marketing. We are still figuring that out. That’s hard even for Series B, Series C, and later-stage companies. It’s not as easy as it is for other companies or how other companies make it seem.

I’m sure even for Slack, who are some of the greatest proponents of PLG, it took a long time for them to map out, “There’s a small group of people in this company using Slack. How do I get their IT admin to deploy Slack to everyone?” That’s a sales challenge on its own. PLG can give you leads but that doesn’t necessarily mean those leads are going to be the decision-makers in an enterprise org.

Product-led growth can give you a lead. But that doesn't mean those leads are going to be the decision-makers in an enterprise. Share on X

That’s where I do think there is a fundamental challenge. It’s not as easy as investors or other people make it out to be, “PLG is beautiful. It reduces your CAC. You are going to get all this.” One thing we have done well is self-service and the revenue we get from users’ businesses that way but to do enterprise-wide deployments, selling the department is one challenge. Selling to an enterprise org that’s where maybe you will need a sales GTM function. The PLG is a way for you to show them, “We have an in. There’s some value here,” but you still need to have effective ways to have those conversations.

This is a good segue because I ask each and every guest of ours or whoever comes on the show for them to share a GTM success story and a GTM failure story. It’s your choice. You can pick either a success or a failure. I would love to get your thoughts and personal experiences from those.

There are general ones I’ve talked about where we have seen the virality work, and these things work. With GTM failure, there are a lot of enterprise-based companies. They will put fancy names on the existing technology and say, “This is insights. This is going to tell you all of this stuff.” They will take the core technology features and functionality and put layers of stuff. They will call it revenue intelligence, deal intelligence or some of these fancy words for basic stuff like analytics.

What we have found is that it works when you have salespeople selling and selling that sauce but it doesn’t work when you have a self-service PLG motion where people are like, “Say what it is and how it works. I don’t want you to use crazy acronyms or special words.” That works when you have a great sales team, and you can sell on the narrative but we found that it’s much more effective to be able to say exactly what the technology does and simplify what you can do with that technology and the basic features. That has a way more success rate for us at the type of customers we are targeting at the PLG level.

We try to do traditional B2B marketing where you will go through the entire website and a few pages, and you are like, “I don’t even know what their product is.” They are promising all these benefits and then saying, “Talk to sales,” but I have no idea what this product is. When we tried some of those experiments in the early days, it was not effective. It didn’t pique people’s curiosity as much as, “Let me show you, not tell you.” That was something I noticed.

If you can share the success story and the early days of Fireflies, that would be great.

2019 was when we first started working on the alpha version of Fireflies. Later at the end of 2019, we raised our first seed round and then kept working. We got into the beta. We did a broader rollout in January 2020. A few months later, the pandemic happened. All hell broke loose. It was crazy. These technologies were becoming more front and center. Everyone was spending time on video conferencing. We built Fireflies for a world where it was going to be hybrid for in-person as well as remote. If it’s in person, it would join through a conference line.

We built it for that world but everyone went to video conferencing. We are this fledgling startup. This is starting to pick up and take off. We have to build the platform for scale. You can’t glue things together. We were fortunate after our seed round in the last couple of months of 2019 to rebuild our entire architecture from scratch. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to handle the incoming demand that was coming in 2020. We kept scaling up.

Before you go to scaling up, how did you get the word out that there’s this product named Fireflies? Who was the initial audience?

We launched to a handful of folks in our network, our friends, and maybe 200 people. We had a waitlist of a couple of thousand people. We didn’t have this million-person waitlist like some of these other companies. Those people were originally the drivers. There was zero spending on marketing. In the early days, we gave a lot upfront of transcription credits and stuff. We encouraged people to share Fireflies. There was also that word of mouth and showing up in meetings.

Did you send out emails, drive people to a landing page, and say, “I’m interested. Add me to the waiting list?” Is that how it does?

We had a ranked waitlist where if you share with more friends, you go up the waitlist. We tried that strategy as well. We did product hunts. We did a lot of outreach, launches, and relaunches. Every time we had a new video conferencing platform, we supported it, “We now support Zoom. We are now supporting Google Meet.” We would do an announcement about that. There were a lot of announcements for new things that we did when we had a new CRM integration.

Every integration connection was a new announcement. Every integration we built was an announcement. We knew that this was starting to work when other people started to bring their Fireflies into meetings with us. You start to see it full circle. We could track in the early days when we had our initial customers here in San Francisco, California Bay Area. They would have a meeting with a customer in Atlanta, Georgia. We said, “Why are we blowing up in Atlanta, Georgia? Why are there so many other companies using it?”

Those people brought it back to people in the Pacific, Northwest, and Seattle. That person brought it back to the original user, which was in San Francisco, California. We started to see that flywheel. It’s a firefly hopping around the map. That was something that we thought was very cool. It sounds like there’s some crazy magical thing that we had to do but we built virality into the product. We incentivized sharing and people to talk about Fireflies and share the recaps and all of that.

Was it a freemium or a free trial?

Initially, in a good part of 2020, we didn’t even charge. Until we started seeing traction, we didn’t even charge for the product.

For the entire duration of 2020, it was all about product adoption.

For the greater part of 2020, it was all about product adoption. It was only in the later part of 2020 that we started monetizing.

Can you share some stories about the pricing? What did you think about the pricing? Who were the initial set of folks you would go to pitch and test the pricing? What is that like?

There were a couple of suggestions from folks and advice that other people gave. One was, “Go to enterprises or mid-market, charge $20,000 to $30,000, and sell it like a sweet solution.” We didn’t feel like that would fit with our model. It’s a great way to get quick revenue but you are going to tap out after 10 to 20 deals. You are going to have to hire more salespeople and do all of that.

The best advice they say is, “Close a bunch of deals yourself,” which I’ve done before we hired other comms people but that is if you are doing a sales-led company. Instead, we said, “Success is going to be if we can get to some amount of revenue where we never even have to talk to the person, and they are purchasing on their own. That is success for us. That is the Holy Grail or North Star for our SaaS.”

Success is getting revenue without even having to talk to a customer to buy your product. Share on X

We started looking at different pricing options. One was, “Do we price by utility? How much do you use it?” We realized a lot of people don’t want to worry so much about transcription, “I can’t use it in these many meetings or that many meetings.” We don’t want it to feel like AWS because AWS is great for developer products but it’s not great if you are buying SaaS solutions.

People want à la carte, “I buy ones. I can consume as much as I want. I want a buffet.” We were one of the first people in the industry to do that, and we made it unlimited usage. You can pay one price per seat. We started experimenting with seats. Initially, there were a lot of individuals paying for Fireflies. Over time, we said, “Fireflies is great as an individual product but how can we make it even better as a team product and a multiplayer product?” We realized there’s a lot of value in creating a team product.

Even Calendly, in the early days, was a single-player product. For the most part, it is a single-player product but they have come up with some creative ways or added certain things. A lot of times, for many companies, a multiplayer product has admin controls, admin access, admin safeguards, and stuff like that. For us, there’s inherent value if you have a workspace with your sales meetings, teammate sales meetings, and HR meetings all in one central place. We are building a living, breathing, and self-updating knowledge base or workspace. That is magical.

I’m looking at your pricing page. It was $0. It’s free forever. You have Pro, which is $10 per seat per month. The Business is $19 per seat per month. Was this the price that you launched with? Was this something that you iterated? Clearly, it has to be the second one. How did it evolve to this?

Surprisingly, this is the pricing we started with. We got lucky there. We had a gut instinct. There are a lot of people that say, “Why are you making it so affordable when your competitors are charging $100, $200 or $120 per seat?” I know some of the competitors in the revenue intelligence space. I wouldn’t say competitors because we also focus on a diverse set of personas. We are not just sales. We want every person inside an organization to use it. They are charging $120 per seat. Plus, they have an implementation fee. You must pay $10,000 to $20,000 to get the platform set up.

Why are you not charging that level when you are offering powerful technology that’s 90% of everything that’s there, plus some other stuff? We had in the early days four tiers. That’s one thing I do remember. Early, we had 4 tiers and simplified it down to 3 tiers. The other tier was where it was an audio-only tier where you got more storage but then we realized, “Let’s keep it to three tiers and make it available.” It was easier for people to decide.

How would you define your ICP? How did that evolve from day one?

This is the hard part because we have many different personas and industries. If you were to ask Dropbox or Calendly what their ICP is, it’s very difficult or even Zoom, for that matter. We believe our general umbrella is that any knowledge worker that has meetings in the corporate space is very important to us. There are different types of meetings. There are internal meetings like operational meetings that you have. There are customer-client-facing meetings. You have candidate-based meetings. I look at it as the four Cs. Your Customers, Candidates, and Colleagues all form your Company.

That’s how I think about it. In any conversation that’s happening, the voice of your organization is what Fireflies is helping you capture and build a knowledge base around. Instead of comparing to other AI tools out there, let’s look at what great knowledge management tools of the past were and now are. You look at SharePoint. Every enterprise has SharePoint. It was a fantastic tool back then. You have other wiki software. Atlassian has its wiki software.

There are so many of these different wiki software but the problem is whether I’m using Google Docs, Google Drive or Dropbox, all those documents will end up getting stale if I don’t update them. If someone is not updating those articles or help desk stuff. Whereas with Fireflies, every conversation is automatically updating your knowledge base. I don’t have to manually update it.

Years ago, we had a very different conversation about pricing and how we should charge customers. After all our learnings, we have another thought process around pricing and how we should charge. If a new person is hired, and we never updated that knowledge base from years ago, they are going to onboard with the wrong mindset. That is very expensive to untrain and retrain, whereas if they are using Fireflies, they now are able to get up to speed.

We also use Fireflies almost as an LMS where when we have new people that are onboarded, we say, “Listen to these Fireflies recaps on our best sales calls. Listen to these on what to ask the candidate when you are interviewing them. If you are a first-time manager, this is what you should be asking for. This is why we made an important architectural decision. You asked about why we are using this technology. You are getting onboarded into the code base, so go ahead and take a look at all of this stuff.” I don’t have to ever repeat myself. I say it once. It’s equivalent to me saying it a thousand times in a way, which is funny. That’s the one thing that helps all of our teammates.

That’s a very interesting use case. Typically, when we talk about recording meetings, it’s mostly in the context of customer sales and sales coaching but what I’m hearing based on what you are sharing here is that it’s almost like an internal LMS or Learning Management System. These meetings happened. As an example, I want to understand why the scaling and architecture changed. I type that in, and it’s all there versus having to talk to people or even worse, not knowing who to talk to in the first place.

The best part is that we want you to be able to consume that data without having to sit and listen to the entire 30-minute or 40-minute meeting. You can look for the word integration or architecture, jump to that point in the call, and listen to that snippet or soundbite. If I had great feedback or customer input that came in through this meeting, I will highlight that 30-second clip created into a soundbite and share it with the team. How can we help you consume and get knowledge in 5 minutes instead of 50 minutes of listening to that call or reading a 50-page transcript?

It looks like you got that early traction. You are looking to scale. What are the different channels? For PLG, some of the popular channels are virality, word of mouth, referral, organic, inbound, SEO, and even paid. These are the popular channels or even affiliates. I’ve seen affiliates also coming up on the charts now. What are the channels that you are excited about and something you are exploring as you scale?

We are exploring other channels like affiliate and referral marketing because a lot of these people are saying, “I’m already referring Fireflies to so many people. Can you have some incentive where I get more transcription credits or get paid for that?” We are exploring that. This is coming from user-generated interests. We never had an idea of doing this but there are a lot of people that are willing to advocate and push Fireflies. We want to be able to push that.

There are people creating content about Fireflies. When I go on Twitter, they are like, “Here are the five best tools that I use for AI that help me be super productive.” They list Fireflies. How can we streamline and supercharge the customer conversations, the customer voice, and what customers are saying? One of the things we are exploring and still learning about is how we set up a great referral program for existing users that refer other users and then how we set up a great affiliate program for people that want to drive traffic to our website or convert and then get paid to do that.

I always believe that could be a great strategy. We also see interest from consulting firms and other types of folks that want to implement a solution like Fireflies at larger organizations. That has been less of our focus because we want to go direct to our customers but it is also something that we could potentially explore in the future.

We are coming up against time here. In the last part of this interview, I would like to get your thoughts on what resources you lean on. Do you have a network of founders, a network of advisors, podcasts or books? What resources do you lean on? For example, we talked about new channels for scaling. How do you figure that out? What’s your process?

I like to look at what the best companies have done, what lessons they have learned along the way, and what works for them. I have to assess, “Is that right for me, our business, and our ACV?” I don’t like to look at what’s trending as a word. This is very common in the early days when advisors or even when we go out to fundraise. A VC will say, “Have you heard about this? You should try it out,” without having any context of what it is or how it works. We are fortunate to have great VCs that are part of our board and are able to think thoughtfully about what it is that we need to build that is relevant to our business and filter out all the white noise that’s around.

I like to look at what the best people in those companies have done and the takeaways we can learn from them. I also read a lot. There’s a huge community around PLG of companies that are talking, “Here’s what we have done. Here’s what works. Here’s my Substack, my podcast, and my YouTube video.” For all other things GTM and beyond, SaaStr is a fantastic community. They help us think a lot about benchmarks, metrics, what VCs look for, and what metrics we should track ourselves against. There are a lot of great folks out there that are providing insightful content.

Look at some of the best companies and what they've done. Take away what you can learn from them. Share on X

David Sacks used to have a lot of great SaaS stuff on how you build a SaaS operating system. How do you build that machine? If you can get people that have done it from a reputable source where it’s a similar business or maybe it’s a PLG, a similar price point, or value-add type of product, it’s much more relatable. I’m not going to look at a company that does $200,000 ACV average deal sizes and how they do webinars. That would be cool for us to figure out but I would want to look at how a company that does one-to-many customer success or webinars that is of our size, price point, and type of industry.

If you have to look back at your career, who are those 1, 2 or 3 people that played a pivoted role, either mentor, sponsors, or role models?

Jason Lemkin had a profound impact on everything we do, especially when we were new to SaaS. He’s the godfather of SaaS in terms of helping founders learn about the community. He’s fantastic. I’ve said it many times before. There are some exceptional disciplined founders that I look up to that have gone the atypical path where they don’t raise crazy amounts of money. They are very disciplined. They had humble beginnings like the CEO of Calendly and the CEO of Zapier.

We have Expensify. A lot of these companies have built these monster giants without having to raise capital or spend unnecessarily. They are intentional. Atlassian is something I brought up. They had a very aggressive model back in the day where there were no salespeople at all but they have a similar notion of sales where it’s more of an advanced form of customer success that helps upsell and get in. They used a lot of resellers to help deploy Atlassian products.

I look at those folks and say, “Especially in a market where we are heading into a downturn or a potential recession and where capital is drying up, how do you be the most disciplined company out there? How can you learn from that?” Growth is fantastic. Growth is important. Growth at all costs only works when capital is infinite. When you don’t, we are going to start seeing more people adopt PLG and these other methodologies in 2023.

Growth at all costs only works when capital is infinite. Share on X

Personally, I’m not a big fan of growth at all costs because that will drive bad habits across the board and the GTM teams. I’m just sharing my thoughts. It’s pretty amazing and inspiring that you are focused on how you grow in a very disciplined manner without raising a lot of funds externally. The final question for you is this. If you were to turn back time and go back to day one of your journeys, what advice would you give your younger self?

Persist with an idea until a certain point of failure. What I mean by that is people say, “Throw 1,000 different ideas at a wall and see what sticks,” but to make an impact, if you have a wall and you are trying to hammer and break that wall down, you are not going to hammer it at 1,000 different places. You are going to pick one point and keep drilling until it cracks open. This is another way of saying, “Focus matters.” You want to pick that area and keep chipping. Instead of 1,000 hits, you only need to do 100 to break through.

Ideas are great. Throwing a lot of things on the board is great but if you do too many at once or have too many ideas, conversations, and different things, you will get distracted very easily. You won’t be able to find a breakthrough or where the gold was initially. I talked about that Chrome extension I built or the email tool. If we went deeper, we would have probably gotten to a point where we said, “We can build a business around this.”

That mindset is important for founders because it’s not going to happen in 12 months or 24 months. It’s going to take time. If you see anyone out there who went from 0 to a unicorn in 12 months, you must also ask yourself, “How defensible is that? If it’s that easy for them to build a $1 billion business in twelve months, is there a defensible moat?” To be honest, for most startups, it’s going to be very difficult and painstaking. You have to be willing to go through that grind.

I mentioned that was the last question but I have a follow-up question based on what you answered here. Focus is important but something that I’ve seen especially in the GTM teams and when you are scaling, is this. How do you figure out where to focus? You mentioned the different channels. How do you know which channel to focus on? Early on, I’ve heard people saying this, and something that I’ve seen is, “Place and do multiple experiments at the same time and then pick which one to focus on.” Would you agree with that? Do you have a different view there?

If you have the resources, do it, but most small companies won’t have those many resources. I would rather pick one, fail fast, and then move on to the next one. I found more success instead of parallel processing to go single-threaded and go very deep. Have a metric you want to hit, an amount of traffic you want to drive, or a number of signups you want to try. Set yourself an idea, “I’m going to run ten experiments here. I’m going to do this in this period.”

We struggle with this as well all the time. Sometimes you want to chase shiny objects. If I run 2 experiments on 10 different ideas, it may be less valuable than running 10 experiments on 1 idea, failing within 1 month, 2 months or 3 months, and then going on to the next thing. I would rather go all in and invest in that. If it doesn’t work, I will go to another one. If you have a lot of resources and have four-person teams that you can run on different things, you can do that as well. Neither is a wrong answer. One is going to be more expensive than the other. That’s all.

Thank you so much for your time. It was a wonderful conversation. I’m wishing you and the Fireflies team the very best.

Thank you so much, Vijay. I had a great time as well.

Important Links

About Krish Ramineni

I love building and scaling products/platforms/APIs that simplify the way people work. Deeply invested in Voice AI, RPA, and enterprise workflow software.

At Fireflies.ai, we’re automating work from meetings. Actively hiring across product, engineering, sales, and marketing.

Gartner’s Top 25 Enterprise Software Startups. Featured on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine: 12 Founders Changing Business 2020.

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Sales Forecasting As A Go-To-Market Org With Holly Procter

Posted on November 23, 2022November 23, 2022 by stratyve_ant2yf

The biggest skill you need to learn when entering the market is sales forecasting. Knowing and hitting your numbers is an important ability to possess, especially as a sales leader. You need to have the right methodologies and processes in place to achieve the highest levels of market success. This is where the company Clari excels at. They help go-to-market orgs overhaul and run their ultimate revenue processes.

Join Vijay Damojipurapu as he talks to the SVP – Global Head of Sales at Clari, Holly Procter. Learn more about her career journey before she got into this company and what she is doing now to support go-to-market orgs across the country.

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Listen to the podcast here

Sales Forecasting As A Go-To-Market Org With Holly Procter

In this episode, I have with me Holly Procter, who is the SVP and Global Sales Leader at Clari. For those who have been avid readers of the show, this is the 2nd or even 3rd speaker from Clari. Again, no affiliation or anything. It happens somehow by luck, faith or whatever you call it. We do have a series of speakers coming in from Clari but all in all, you will be in for a treat. Welcome to the show, Holly.

Thank you so much for having me. We appreciate your bias for Clarians. I will try to do my best even though you’ve had some good nuggets from other Clarians too.

As with every guest, I start my show with the key question that’s top of mind for all the readers, which is, how do you define go-to-market?

When everyone thinks about go-to-market, they start with the basics of how you sell your product. You sell your product through generally a handful of channels. That would be inclusive of both partners and also your direct sales team. Over the years, we’ve certainly expanded our view of go-to-market to include pretty much anyone that might touch revenue.

At Clari, I think about our go-to-market teams in our tip of the spear, what we call revenue development, which is our SDR function. Even before you get to RevDev, we think about the funnel. You are thinking about all marketers. You are thinking about content teams and people that might engage with your audience, even if that audience is not an active prospect or customer success. We have a deep sales engineering team and even post-sales, so people are responsible for implementation services. Anyone that touches revenue, which is any pre-customer and post-customer experience, we define as part of our core go-to-market team.

That’s more expansive than what I’ve heard from others. Not from my show guest specifically but from others in the industry. Again, you can clearly make out the provision that they like by asking this question. What I’ve seen is that folks who are in sales think go-to-market is sales and nothing else. Folks who are in marketing, and especially those who are in product marketing, think they own go-to-market but lo and behold, sorry, you are in for a rude shock. You clearly don’t own product marketing. Customer success, I’ve seen off late the connotation shifting to include customer success, which is good. One gap that I saw in your definition or your perspective, Holly, is how come you left out the product.

It’s a great point. I love our product leaders. If they are reading, I hope that they will take my apology. The product is massive. What I would say, and part of the reason why I didn’t include them, is that we probably haven’t yet figured out how to crack the code on incorporating them as a close loop in our process and how they play a role in touching the customer experience outside of building a great product but no question. That informs everything we do. I will give you an active example.

We are now going through planning for 2023, as most companies are. A big part of our planning process is figuring out what product features we are going to announce and launch in 2023. That will deeply inform how much and how many accounts I can assign based on what new open accounts we might unlock in line with the product roadmap functionality. It’s such a core part of the way that we build the business and product go-to-market.

That’s the thought process. That’s what I’m seeing. That’s a shift happening in the industry, which is product also becoming a core part of the go-to-market. Even within the product or outside of the product, there is a design that has a big impact on user experience that translates to the sales and how quickly you can go close and customer acquisition costs, and so on.

Anyway, enough rant on the go-to-market piece. I would love to hear your story. What has been your journey? I’ve looked at your LinkedIn profile. You had a very blessed career and a very interesting career path. You started off as an employee at the university you graduated from, then now you are the Global Sales Leader at Clari. Walk us and our readers through that journey.

I’m from Nebraska, originally. I got both my undergraduate and graduate degrees from Nebraska and then decided to work for the university under the guides that we had an asset that was a facility. We were trying to figure out how to monetize this facility. It was this huge rec facility, and we were trying to figure out if there was a path to monetizing both access to the asset and the building. Also, what else did we have?

We had access to a population of people, and that population of people was a student body that made purchasing decisions on a regular. We created this event called Get REC. It was called Get REC because it was held at the Rec Center and basically allowed every business in the town to come in and put up a booth that wanted to sell to college students.

They ended up paying us several thousand dollars to come in and do that. Figuring out a healthy way to monetize our assets and get additional funding for the university was awesome. A great first job, and then I moved to San Francisco. I was tech robust and eager to move West. My first job in San Francisco was at Gallup, the Gallup World Poll. The thing that I was so excited about with Gallup, I don’t know if you follow any of their research but they are an academic company. It’s stewards of research.

A big part of what Gallup does is sell both employee engagement research and customer engagement research. I fell in love with the company for many reasons. One of the big things that they talk about with their leadership development is that the employees join companies and leave managers. It was this big, huge part of the thing we were consulting around. It was where I grew fond of leadership, education and development, the process of being a student, and becoming a great leader. I got some deep education on how to be a good boss. This was before I became a boss. I then was eager to go into tech, so I joined LinkedIn.

At Gallup, you were leading what BizDev or was its sales?

It was biz, and I was a seller. Our motto was fewer larger relationships. At the time, McKesson was one of my biggest customers. I’m spending a lot of time with them on leadership development and employee engagement. Incredible experience in consulting because you get to go wide. Not necessarily deep. Lots of exposure to different business processes across tons of different business types and unique companies. It was an incredible experience there over years. Living in San Francisco and not in tech, which felt like a misnomer, so I decided to move to LinkedIn. I started with LinkedIn right before we went public, and then I left LinkedIn, and we were owned by Microsoft.

A lot of things happened over that six-year window. My role inside LinkedIn changed almost every year. I led pretty much every customer segment, so from our smallest customer all the way up to our largest key accounts and in a couple of different lines of business. Both our talent solutions business and the sales navigator product when we launched that product, which is now over a billion in revenue.

It was incredible to be able to build something from the ground up based on an amazing asset, which is the LinkedIn network. I learned a million things from LinkedIn but one of the things that fueled the next phase of my career was selling into sales leadership, which is what a selling sales navigator did. As go-to-market professionals, there’s something meta about selling to sales leaders. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

As go-to-market professionals, there's something sort of meta about selling to sales leaders. Share on X

I get to talk to my peers all the time. It’s probably how you feel getting to talk to other experts. I learned from my customers regularly, which is incredible. I fell in love with sales leadership. Not just being a sales leader but working with sales leaders at LinkedIn. As I mentioned, I led all different customer types and in a couple of different lines of business. I felt like I had deep exposure to lots of different parts of go-to-market orgs.

The other thing I will say about LinkedIn, outside of it being a phenomenal company, is that it demonstrated to me how it should be done, how a business should be run, how to take care of your people, how to build a sustainable business, how to build a moat around your product and how to inspire a huge audience of a global talent pool. Best in class across many vectors that matter when building a sustainable business, so forever grateful for my time at LinkedIn.

I took all those learnings, decided to gamble a little bit of in the startup world, and went to WeWork, where we could spend the entire episode on that. Maybe we should grab a beer to do that. It was quite the run. I spent a few years at WeWork leading up to our at Ben failed IPO attempt and just wild run. I was running our mid-market business across the US and hired over 70 people.

My last job was to eliminate them all. It was a wild experience but if LinkedIn taught me how to lead in peacetime, WeWork taught me how to lead in more time and a major benefit to both. I learned a lot and worked with some incredible people at WeWork. I was there in the Adam Neumann era but I would say one of the things that I learned the most about WeWork was how to pressure test growth and ask yourself the question if something could be done faster, bigger or at a lower expense.

Challenging the status quo of, “If we can do that in six weeks, what would it take to do in two days?” It’s asking the question of pushing the boundaries of what you think is possible. Whenever I got a question from WeWork that was like, “I need you to do X, Y, and Z.” I always thought it was insane. Most of the time, we delivered.

There was something to that, which is that if you can apply enough pressure and enough resourcing, what you are able to accomplish is pretty incredible. I learned a lot there too. The next up on the rung for me was that I was eager to get back into the software. I was eager to get back into the ecosystem. I mentioned selling into sales leadership and so moved to Clari. Clari was, at the time, mostly an enterprise product. They were overhauling forecasting. It was their bread and butter.

Over the last few years, it has been incredible to be a part of a team that I deeply admire and respect. Our leadership team is phenomenal, led by Kevin Knieriem and Andy Byrne, which is so strong. Working in a space that has blown up when you think about revenue and sales tech is exploded, which is awesome to be a part of for lots of reasons.

First and foremost, as a seller, our function is last to evolve. Almost every other function had innovated and supplied its employee base with new technology to become more efficient and smarter in their work, except for sellers. We are finally getting our moment. Our moment is here, and we’ve invested, and you are seeing a huge amount of not just venture capital but excitement from investors.

A seller's first and foremost function is to last and evolve. Share on X

Analysts are all over the space. It’s blowing up. If you look at sales tech similarly to the way that you looked at MarTech of the 2000s, it is hopefully going to follow a similar thread, which is lots of investment, tons of companies, and ultimately consolidation. It will be interesting to follow the space over the next ten years or so to see what happens.

Clair has expanded from being a forecasting platform that could help people overhaul a process to going into tons of different workflows. How do a company and a go-to-market org run their ultimate revenue process? How do you inform a rep to a manager one-on-one? How do you inspect opportunities? How do you spot risk? How do you ensure that your pipeline has enough coverage? Ultimately, how does a CRO define to the board and the leadership team if they are going to meet, miss or beat their number? It’s a very exciting time for us to be a part of.

Two things stood out for me. One thing you talk about is being meta, going back to LinkedIn, and selling to sellers. It reminds me of my time at SugarCRM, where we are selling to sellers and marketers. We need to be great at doing marketing and selling. That was a big eye-opening experience for me. You are preaching but are you doing the right things where you can lead by example?

I always say to my sales team, “We are demonstrating a sales process to the sensei, to the people.” Their inspection of our sales process, you can imagine, is going to be diligent. The way we show up in these moments is so critical. I would say that one of the things that are so incredible for me as a sales leader is the number of outreaches that I get from a head of sales or CRO complementing my sales team and asking if they can hire them. It is the best compliment because I know they are a tough critic.

There’s something that I want to pick your brains about clearly, you are an expert. You have been in sales, from a sales rep to leading a sales team, to now you are technically a business leader representing sales at the board level. How did you master or how are you continuing to master forecasting and prediction? That’s the biggest skill to learn.

From my personal experience, I have been at startups and worked with sales leaders. More recently, when talking about forecasting and missing the forecasting, here is a big miss where we forecasted $800,000 in a quarter, and eventually, sales closed at $30,000. I don’t want to go in there but clearly forecasting and being able to hit the number is a huge skill. What advice would you give to our readers on that?

It’s massive, especially as you move into sales leadership. As a sales rep, you are generally responsible for calling a number but very few orgs hold a rep accountable for their accuracy around that number. Part of that is because they don’t have a lot of diversification. If they miss one deal, it could throw their number off by several hundred percent, and that’s tough. Not a lot of accountability at the rep level. A little bit more so once you move into frontline leadership.

Naturally, when you get into executive leadership and sales leadership at the highest levels, the forecast is the thing that you are expected to get right. It’s table stakes to be effective in the role. If you don’t have a good methodology for how you get there and you have to put a good process in place, you are screwed. When you go into a board meeting, you are going to get eaten alive, and you need to be able to defend your call.

All that to say that there’s so much that is unpredictable in our environment that there’s no amount of machine learning, AI or fancy software that’s going to call COVID or the current downturn. Even the rise of PLG businesses is much harder to forecast in that environment because you are responding to market factors that you may or may not be able to predict. Velocity is all over the place. To get to the root of your question, there’s a handful of things that are core to getting this right. I’m going to walk through some very specific examples here, so forgive the granularity.

That will be the most useful for our readers, for sure.

One of the first things that you have to get right to get a good and predictable forecast process is sales stages and forecast categories. The terminology that you use inside of your sales org to call the way a deal is represented is critical to getting the overall process right. What that means is that you need defined stage criteria. This is what must be present inside of your deal for this to be considered a stage 2 or 3 deal however you have laid out your stages. Most companies have 4 or 5.

Within those stages, from qualifying to pricing and negotiations, however, that is enabled for you that it is crystal clear to a rep and impossible to argue when something has moved into or out of a stage. For example, in my world, we might say, “To move to stage three, we have to have been named vendor of choice.” This means we have to have gotten from the customer, the prospect, an indication that we are the partner that they want to partner with.

We might still need to get through security. We might still have an outstanding MSA but they have said, “We would like to move forward with Clari,” and now we know we have to move towards our paper process in getting a deal done but we have been named vendor of choice. That is a requirement to move into stage three. The requirements associated with stages and forecast categories are critical, and ensure that you’ve defined them. All of your leaders are managing to it is so important.

Now when you look across every single deal, you know that you are looking at the same set of requirements. You don’t have one deal that’s being represented differently than another deal with a different set of requirements. It’s foundational to getting a forecasting process in place. Second, there is no silver bullet inside the forecast. Therefore, you need to have a set of data that you can triangulate against.

For me, what that is, first, I have a rep roll-up. The rep roll-up is inclusive of all of the outstanding inventory. A lot of companies will do a bottoms-up view, which is deal by deal. They will say, “This deal is either in or out, or this deal has X amount of probability.” You have this bottoms-up view to informing one point of your triangulation process.

The next is you have a manager override or a manager commit. You have your leaders pressure test the rep-level forecast to see where they would agree or disagree based on how they might be called a deal. For me, the third layer is using AI. Specifically, inside a Clari, there’s a module called Pulse. Pulse is looking at historical data, and it’s making a prediction on how that quarter or a next quarter might shake out, looking at conversion rates and the amount of pipeline that we have to see how we might land. That means every single time I’m calling a number, every week, I’m triangulating between what the actual inventory says at the rep level, how my leadership team thinks we are going to shake out and what the machine says. Between those three, I’m landing somewhere in the range.

The first point you made is supercritical, which is my takeaway from that is defining very clear entry and exit criteria for each stage, where there’s no argument. There’s no ambiguity. Seller A can argue, “This is how I see it,” versus seller B will see it completely differently.

It’s black and white.

You use Clari, obviously in-house, and shout out to Clari. For those of you who are reading, if you are curious, check out Clari. Going back, if you have to go back in time and pick either a GTM success or a failure story, can you share one from your most recent time? That will be a great eye-opener for us.

I’ve got lots of both. Do you want me to share one of each?

Yes, absolutely.

There’s obviously recency bias here but I will share a failure. I will use one at Clari, which is we initially set up our go-to-market org to be geo-specific. We were going to have these little hubs. The hubs would be like if you owned Minneapolis, you were the CEO of Minneapolis Clari. Your job was to map out all the businesses that resided in Minneapolis, to get in with the Chamber of Commerce, to set up local events, and to create a community across companies that might sit in Minneapolis. You owned that geo. That’s how we structured it. This is pre-COVID.

You moved to a world where geo is almost completely irrelevant. I remember the moment when I knew this was a failure. I had an incredible rep who I very well love and still with us, who sold our first logo in Toronto. He said, “I planted a flag in Toronto, and it happened to be a relatively small deal.” You love getting a deal. A deal is a deal. I will never not celebrate a win but the win was that we landed in Toronto.

I was like, “This is one of our best reps. He is trying to crack into getting a small deal in Toronto. Why do I care if we are in Toronto? Do you know what I care about? Revenue. Why do I have him focused on these geos when there’s much bigger fruit if I were to distribute, let’s say, the market of New York?” We made this decision to move from a geo-based model to an account-based model a few years ago and never look back.

It was such a better distribution of our opportunity. Also, it allows us to hire pretty much anywhere and so we can get better talent without needing to focus on the geo. That was one, and I learned that way. A success, I will say, is that we were a pretty enterprise-focused company when I started. Most of our customers were enterprise customers.

There was a lot of trepidation to go down-market. People were fearful of the impact on ASPs. People were fearful of not having the support resources to support the velocity business. It took a lot for us to go down-market. One of the things that we did was pilot it with a handful of apps and gave them our smallest potential customers to see what they could do. This small team, we call it emerging. They exploded. It was all the fish that were jumping into our boat.

We decided to take that as a signal and say, “If these are a bunch of leads that are coming our way, what if we put capacity against it?” It did something with it instead of letting them come to us. It started with a small team and let them run wild for a quarter before we knew that this was a no-brainer place to invest based on the interest that we got and the success of that team. My regret there is that we should have done it sooner.

One question for each of the scenarios there. For the failure scenario, you mentioned you moved from geo to account level. I’m going to take a hypothetical example over here. Let’s say it’s Home Depot. That’s the account you are trying to break into. Were you assigning a rep to break into, let’s say, Home Depot in Michigan State versus Home Depot at any location? Is that the shift they are talking about?

We organize the account by HQ location. If Home Depot were headquartered in Minneapolis, then it would be owned by the Minneapolis rep but wherever the HQ location is would dictate ownership.

I had a question regarding your success scenario, which as you can clearly relate to this moving upmarket. Our down-market is super hard for any organization. What is the thought process for you and the leadership team at Clari on how you define the success criteria? Was it verticalized or how did you think about framing the team? Can you share some more insights about that?

It is a tough and big strategic decision. We operated more as an enterprise-grade company. We had enterprise customers. Most of our market position was geared toward the enterprise. That start there, which is how do you tailor your messaging and your market position to be attractive to different segment? Something we had to face in something we still deal with a little bit is you will see the SMB customer ask us, “Are we big enough for Clari or is it too soon for us to find value and benefit out of Clari?” If they are a former user, they never ask that question because they know what the value is to them.

For the general population, that’s where you need to start. Reeducate the new population of people that you are going after and why you are right for them. That was the one. One of the big changes that we went through as well is that naturally, at the market, you see enormous complexity. Both in the buying persona and the number of people involved in a purchasing decision and also for us technically. You are integrating with data.

The way that data is structured can be very complex. Nuance for that unique customer. How do we simplify our process so that we could move through complexity at a different speed when we go down-market? We had this internal hashtag that we talked about. There’s a guy in my team named Adam Wainwright, who I will credit with this.

He labeled it supersonic. Supersonic was the charter for that team, which is, how can they move through a process quickly? If somebody said, “The average sales cycle time was 45 days, how could we get it to 30?” Everything we did was through the lens of supersonic. Taking what was a cumbersome process upmarket for a complex cycle and trying to figure out how we remove friction to get to a supersonic process.

I got some more follow-up questions for you on that. When someone goes to your website, you get the messaging, everything directed at the person who relates to like an enterprise customer, the ICP, versus when you are looking to go midmarket or down-market in your scenario. There’s the messaging, pricing, also other different aspects which we won’t get into. I’m sure you will share. Again, how did you think about that or how did you attract the initial set of your target midmarket customers?

Specifically, do you mean in the messaging that would be attractive to that?

It might be outbound because, obviously, you won’t be driving a lot of inbound or maybe you already have those in your pipeline, in your list somewhere, and then you segment that as the potential midmarket. What strategy did you use for those?

Firstly, we had to make a decision on what we would use to define segmentation. What was the best marker to signal that this type of company was indeed different from this other type of company? We ended up using just employee count. There’s a good debate on whether or not we should use sales employee count. The reason why we didn’t use sales employee count is that it’s harder to get that information and also different by industry.

Employee count is generally representative of the size of a go-to-market org that would be attractive to Clari. That was the first thing we aligned on. Not revenue, and that was by design. Employee size is the place that we started, and then we drew a line in the sand for us around a thousand employees. The other exercise you had to go through was, where does a cycle become differentiated? What is the line in the sand that says, “When you are below a thousand, you operate like this. When you are above a thousand, you operate like this?”

Those two things require a different sales motion, a different set of resources, a different market message, and a different price. Therefore, we are going to treat them differently. That is an intellectual exercise that should be run with product marketing. Hopefully, you have an ops function that can help support the data around that suggests, “You should stand up a motion that looks fundamentally different for this customer than that customer.”

After we went through the academic exercise to come up with an answer, then you go to trial and see if that’s, in fact, right. I will say that as our product and our go-to-market org have evolved, we have made some type of change to our segments most years. We collapse and expand. As we add more skews to the product, the way that we think about supporting them is different.

I will give one other example, which is in the presales side of the business. When we sell to a prospect, we segment by employee size, as I referenced. As soon as we sell that and it passes to the customer side of the house, and it’s going to be run by an account management team. They segment by revenue. Not by the revenue of the company but by the size of the deal that we did with that prospect. For them, the way that it makes sense to organize is how big of a deal it needs to be serviced and, ultimately, ensure that we can make that customer successful in a different way for different needs to segment.

Especially for customer success, it’s more of an expansion opportunity. Clearly, that makes sense. That is super helpful. Did you allocate six months or a year for this “experiment”?

We had prepared for six months and ended up making a decision after three. The reason why we decided after three is because it was so obvious that it was successful. We had done twenty new logos or something in a month. It was clear to us that applying resourcing there made sense. The other thing is that you get feedback anecdotally from your prospect base.

The number of customers that we had spoken to that appreciated got onboard with our supersonic approach and appreciated that they could move fast but it didn’t feel like a clunky, stodgy enterprise process. The feedback I got from many CROs in that space was aligned with the process we had put in place. It was very clear that we were going to make the investment. If you know that you are going to make the investment, why not move fast?

Let’s switch gears. We are coming to the final segment over here. What are 1 or 2 or 3 things within the go-to-market arena that you are curious about? What’s causing you to go deeper into research and shift your thinking from a go-to-market perspective?

There’s a ton. In no particular order, I will say the things that have been top of mind to me here. One is around intent. There are so many amazing new signals that we can incorporate into our sales process to try to find intent which means that we are going to use so much better at attaching the right accounts to the right resources. If we know the accounts that are warm and we put them with our bestsellers, we should be able to do all kinds of things. Not least of which is increase our revenue.

Lots of exciting companies. We happen to partner with 6sense. They are phenomenal on this front. Lots of intent resourcing here that changes the game for us. That’s number one. The other is around business models. The other thing you are seeing a lot more of is consumption use cases and usage-based models, and PLG motions. There are all these new ways outside your standard license-based model to structure the way you capture revenue from a customer. That’s super interesting to me. We will only see more advancements in the way that pricing in packaging is structured, especially in software. Those are two that are hot for me now.

There are so many ways outside of standard license-based models to structure the way you capture revenue from customers. Share on X

The first one is intent, clearly. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about how you define intent. It has always been there in good market teams. You need to identify the intent signals but there has been no clear black-and-white way to identify them within the sales stack and marketing stack. That has been the biggest gap. Of late, I’m seeing more companies like 6sense.

There are others as well who are helping. They are also adjacent solutions that can say, “Plug this. Stick stack into your solution, and you can see the intent signals.” That’s from a tech perspective. I would like to get your thoughts on within the go-to-market team. How will you define whether this is a high-intent versus a low-intent account?

We use the signal that we are getting from 6sense primarily for us. We also use some G2 data, so we layer those on. The other thing for us is diversifying the leads. Not all leads are created equal. How do you ensure that you’ve got the right lead scoring so that it gets the right urgency that’s required? Naturally, a demo request or referral for us is high intent. We want to ensure that the speed to lead is short and that we can get connected to the buyer as soon as possible.

For us, that meant we instituted. I will give you an example. A product called Caddy. We are new to using it. It is the ability to book. If you book a request for a demo on Clari’s website, you would be directly connected to the AE that owns the account instead of bifurcating and moving away, going through all the other channels like being to an SDR or someone to do a qualification step. If it’s a named account, we already know that that’s somebody that’s already qualified by default, and we want to ensure that there’s as little drop-off as possible. That’s some of the mechanics that you have to optimize in the go-to-market.

One other topic, I have been coming across this topic also, and I speak to other go-to-market leaders. There has been a constant debate as to who owns the SDR team. Is it sales or marketing? What is your thought process around that?

I’ve seen it in both different departments. It obviously works in both places. At Clari, Kyle Coleman owns our SDR org. He is like LinkedIn famous.

He’s an SDR champ. I see him on LinkedIn. He is a true champ.

Deep expertise in the function, and so we are lucky to have him for lots of different reasons but that’s one of them. For me, he’s probably one of my biggest partners. There’s nobody I spend as much time with as Kyle in orchestrating a sales motion for us. Where it lives is much less important than the alignment between the two orgs.

Even if it lived in sales, naturally, so much of the lead flow you would hope your SDRs are responding to is generated by marketing. If it lives in marketing, it must be responsible and accountable to sales. This is why there’s no obvious answer to this. Either way, there are tradeoffs. It’s not a perfect answer, no matter what. The alignment between the 2 orgs and, arguably, the 2 leaders is the most important thing.

Moving to the last couple of questions here, who would you credit if you were to go back in time? Who have been your code mentors and sponsors? Who have been the role models that helped you get to this point in your career?

I’m so lucky because I have many. You said 2 or 3. I will start maybe in logical order. The first time I ever went on a sales call like as an adult with a full-time job and going out to see a customer. I was with a guy named Aaron Nadolza. He and I both worked together at Gallup. We were going to our first big sales meeting.

It was his meeting, and I was just shadowing. He took me under his wing and taught me how to sell. Everything from how to set up a good meeting, how to follow up on the meeting, and the real basics of customer engagement. That’s like the least exciting thing he’s taught me over the years. I have now worked with him at three different companies. I followed him on LinkedIn. When I went to WeWork, I brought him over to be my boss.

I’ve worked with him for many years. I’ve learned a million things from him. The big thing outside of sponsorship, as you mentioned, is that he certainly sponsored me but he just deeply invested in me to teach me everything he knew. I was afforded his life experiences. I didn’t have to go through them myself, which was so incredible. Aaron has made a massive impact on my life.

When I went to LinkedIn, I worked for a leader that didn’t just change my professional trajectory but changed me as a human. His name is Peter Kim. Pete was the best boss that I have ever had. I remember specifically a one-on-one we had where I was asking him for some career advice. He basically said like, “Holly, I am yours. Use me however you want to use me but I believe in you. I’m here to develop you.”

What changed in the course of our interaction was that I did start to use him. A mistake that people make is that most people want to invest in high-potential talent. Where there’s often a mismatch is that the talent also has to go and engage and make good use of their resource. I took Pete up on his offer. I used him for everything, and honestly, I still do. We got to a place where he could give me advice about my whole life, everything from how to structure my mortgage to which job to consider or not.

Ultimately, it’s still your decision. It’s still your life but to have people that care deeply about you and therefore are interested in you making the right decision is so important. The last one is my current boss, Kevin Knieriem. He’s the CEO at Clari. He has invested in me in lots of different ways. One of which is to empower me to make my own decisions, build out an org, and be able to stand up for something that I knew was right.

I feel so empowered in my role now. Having limitless belief changes the way you operate. When you know that the person above you is in your corner and rooting for you in every way changes the way that you show up at work every day. Back to the comment, I made earlier about Gallup and that people join companies and lead managers.

For all the leaders reading, it’s a deep responsibility that we have as people leaders at any level. Whether you are leading leaders, managers or reps, someone’s happiness depends on the way that you approach them. You, as their boss, get to empower them. You get to ensure that they are going to have a good day or a bad day. That’s something that we shouldn’t take lightly. I have been lucky.

As a leader, someone's happiness depends on how you approach them. You have to empower your people and ensure they will always have a good day. Share on X

That’s a great piece of advice there. For all readers, it doesn’t matter if you are a people leader or someone who’s reporting to a boss. You will have both up and down for most of you there. Hopefully, someone will take this as an inspiration to sponsor and grow someone’s career and vice versa. Ask and take, go full advantage of your manager because they sincerely care for your growth. That’s the message. Last question here, Holly, which is, if you were to turn back the clock and go back to your day one within the go-to-market career journey of yours, an amazing career journey for sure. What advice would you give your younger self?

One of the biggest things I have learned, which is so critical, is that much of the career decisions that we make can be convoluted when you start to add in title and comp and roll scope. You can get attracted to those things but one of the things that probably has the biggest impact on your return is the quality of the company. You are picking the right horse to bet on.

If you pick to be the assistant at the right company versus the CRO at the crappy company that goes nowhere, the fact that you have a big title, a big comp or whatever but the company doesn’t succeed. It ruins the whole game. Picking the right horse is 90% of the battle. If you take what is perceived to be a lateral move or even a step back in title and comp is so insignificant in the grand scheme of life and a long career. It’s so much more important to pick the right company and invest in the right company that you believe in over the long haul. It’s a big learning for me.

I have nothing to add to that. That’s a great piece of advice, for sure. Thank you so much, Holly. It has been wonderful speaking with you. Thank you for sharing all the wisdom and insights. Good luck to you, your sales team, and the folks at Clari.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on the show. It’s great to spend some time together.

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Launching Your Go-To-Market Business In A New Market With Joyce Zhang Gray From Alariss

Posted on October 19, 2022October 21, 2022 by stratyve_ant2yf

Go-to-marketing strategies can differ based on location. If you’re starting a business overseas, you have to look out for certain things if you want the best brand-customer relationship. With Alariss, that won’t be an issue anymore. They help international founders launch their brands in the US. They help build their team, raise revenue, and lead with their product. Join Vijay Damojipurapu as he talks to the CEO and founder of Alariss, Joyce Zhang Gray. Learn why it’s so difficult to enter a new market. Discover how building relationships and partnerships are key to go-to-marketing. Find out some attributes you want in your go-to-market team. Start launching your business with Alariss today!

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Listen to the podcast here

Launching Your Go-To-Market Business In A New Market With Joyce Zhang Gray From Alariss

I’m super excited to have a fellow San Francisco Bay area member on the show with me, Joyce Zhang Gray, who is the Founder of Alariss Global. She is with me. She has obliged to be part of this show. I got introduced to Joyce by one of my earlier show guests. I looked up Joyce’s profile, and it stood out. It’s a unique profile. Talk about Ivy League. She has checked the mark for the Ivy League background and Harvard undergrad and Stanford MBA. After that, she’s got a very varied offbeat track, but it all laid the right stepping stones to what she’s doing now. With that, let me welcome you formally, Joyce. I’m super excited to speak with you.

Thank you so much, Vijay. Thank you for the kind introduction and for inviting me to your show.

It’s my pleasure. We should talk about this at some point in time in our show. You’re a former employee at Y Combinator. You’re the first business person at Human Interest. I know someone at Human Interest. It’s a great company. They allow what they’re doing in the mission. You did that. After that, you took on roles outside of the US, which is in Asia, and tried to build the go-to-market functions. You also played the role of a UN ambassador. Did I get that right?

The timeline and the titles might be a little bit off. I worked for the World Bank. I also worked for the Federal Reserve, which is the central bank of the US. That was earlier in my career. During that time, I was overseas. I worked in Africa, Latin America, and Asia on behalf of American tech companies launching in Asia. At Human Interest, I was the first employee, not just the first business employee. I started talking to them in the midst of Y Combinator. I joined right after they finished YC, and we could be off to the races. I’ve experienced the depth and breadth of big companies, small companies, government agencies, and the US, as well as many other countries. I’m delighted to share some perspectives on this show.

This is all in a very short time span as well. This is super impressive and inspiring.

Thank you. I don’t know if it’s that short. I’m not as young as I used to be, but I appreciate the compliment.

I’ll start off formally here. I always start this with this question with all my guests. How do you define go-to-market?

I define go-to-market as the core function of a revenue-generating business. It is how you get to and appeal to and deliver value in many ways to your customers. Go-to-market will oftentimes be sales and marketing. Sometimes it’s customer success as well because it also involves upselling. Much of the revenue generated by many companies, especially B2B companies, is through expansion revenue, not through new revenue generations. Go-to-market covers all these functional areas and more.

I completely agree with you. I would also expand and add products. This is something that I see a lot of functional leaders at small companies or even startups and large companies. They miss the holistic piece, especially in a technology company, a product-based critical role in go-to-market. The big trend that’s going on in the industry nowadays is the whole product-led growth. If you talk about go-to-market and lead product, that’s a big wide. I completely agree. That’s something I’ve seen play out, which is strong and impressive go-to-market leaders cross-functionally across these functions. It’s marketing, sales, revenue, customer success, and so on.

Having a great product that customers want to use, delights them, and want to share is what one assumes. In many companies or tech companies, you can divide it into two categories. It’s either the people building or the people selling. They’re selling what someone else is built, and the builders will continue to build and iterate based on what can be sold. It’s correct. I would also say even with product-led growth, it would be a misconception that the products can sell itself.

I know a lot of amazing tech founders who assume, “If I build it, they will come.” People need to learn about the product somehow. That’s where I focused on the other functional areas when I described go-to-market because I was assuming that there would be a preexisting product that’s very strong as a baseline for what’s needed to go-to-market.

With that, you mentioned the words sales and selling. Tell and share with our readers the story of what you do now and what led you to start at Alariss Global.

I’m the CEO and Founder of Alariss Global. As a CEO and Founder, you’re the company’s first line of defense for sales and the last line of defense for sales. Most tech founders go into selling or building, but for the person on the business side, especially the CEO, some of the major responsibilities I have and that other CEOs usually have would be customer acquisition/go-to-market. This can include managing marketing, sales, and account management.

As a CEO, you're the first line of defense for sales and the last line of defense for sales. Share on X

The other piece is internal recruiting. That’s incredibly important, building your team, which is also another form of sales. Selling people on your vision and a career with you is highly important. Finally, it’s fundraising, which is another form of getting capital into the company so you can continue to grow. Those are some of the major responsibilities. There are other things, business operations, finance, and everything else that go into the CEO’s role, but those are the ones that are most relevant for this conversation.

You also asked why I started Alariss Global. I started Alariss Global from a place of real need. I, myself, was launching companies in other markets, going overseas, and realizing how inefficient it was and how I was not most equipped to be able to launch as effectively as I wanted to. When you’re in a new market, you have to learn and get up to speed quickly. You might also be operating in a market where you don’t speak the language. You don’t understand the culture. You don’t have connections locally. It’s a long and very manual process of building your brand and credibility, building your networks, figuring out how to partner with the right lawyers, accountants, and recruiters, and finally, building your team. After you build your team, you can start generating revenue and attracting your customers.

I thought that a lot of this could be a leapfrog, especially with modern technology. Why have an ex-pat go into a market they don’t understand and spend a lot of time and money effectively when you could immediately spin up a local GTM team, a Go-To-Market team that is highly specialized, highly professional, and knows exactly what they’re doing, and they can start generating revenue for you from day one? That was a lot of the impetus behind Alariss Global. I wish Alariss existed for me when I was doing this. Because it didn’t exist, I thought I would build the solution for everyone else.

That’s a story of all the successful startups where the founders experienced paying themselves. They did some quick early market research and found that, “There are no viable solutions, so why don’t I solve this problem?” Can you expand on that? I also want to emphasize that because one of the core audiences for this show is the founders and aspiring founders. What led you to that decision point where you felt that this was a pain point and a large business problem with a huge turn and opportunity?

It was clear to me that it was a large pain point that I wasn’t the only one who faced when I had friends who reached out to me. The light bulb moment for me was when I had consistent outreaches from many different types of people and friends who are founders across India, China, and other markets who would ask me for connections or referrals in the US because I was perhaps one of the few or most trusted American friends that they had. I could empathize with and understand them because I had lived and worked with them before in those markets. It was a good reminder to me.

Sometimes as a founder, this is your own form of go-to-market. It’s your personal brand and network. Oftentimes, for founders, who’s going to trust a no-name company out of the blue? It’s usually going to be your friends, your family, and the immediate network that gives you that benefit of the doubt and knows you and your reputation so they can take a risk on you. Once you have those early believers, it does accelerate to something more.

That was when I first thought a hint that this was a large and very strong pain point that many people I knew faced. I did a bit more research as I was helping my friends and found other people who faced the same problem. I started to scale it and began Alariss more as a consultancy with always the belief that I would turn it into a tech company. As a consultancy, it gives you a few benefits as a founder. Some people call it bootstrapping, whatever you want to call it. It does give you revenue right away. When we talk about go-to-market, the single source of truth is following the money or where the money is.

In go-to-market, the single source of truth is to follow the money. Share on X

People can tell you all sorts of things. They can tell you, “Your product is amazing, Vijay. This is so revolutionary. I love it.” They tell you all these nice things, but they’re not willing to pay you for your product. This is great. This feedback is very flattering, but it doesn’t pay the bills. It doesn’t lead to a viable company. You need more than just people who will tell you what you want to hear. You will need them to tell you what you need to hear. Sometimes what you need to hear could be things like, “I would buy it, but these are the other competitors that I’m looking at or other vendors that are offering something similar.” Maybe the price point isn’t quite there, and then you start to hone in on it.

When you start getting people paying you for that, that’s when you know you’ve hit upon the true hurdles that you need to gravitate towards. Even when building a startup, I started it as a consultancy because I wanted to see what is painful enough that people will part with their hard-earned money and give it to someone else to solve for them. Finally, within that realm of different things that people find painful enough that they’ll pay for it, what is something scalable and repeatable that I can productize? That’s how I came to build GTM teams.

It reminds me of the time when I started my consulting company, which is Stratyve. I was not thinking about starting or doing anything around consulting and offering GTM services. About a couple of years ago, someone reached out to me and called on LinkedIn, and it turns out that the founder had this company based in India. They were looking to do a go-to-market entry in North America. They needed help building what should be the go-to-market plan, the business case, the positioning, the messaging, the target users, and the use cases. That was inbound. I was thinking, “I don’t offer this for free. I have all these skillsets, but you need to pay for it.”

Going back to your question, people will seek advice, but are they willing to part their hard-earned money? In this case, he said yes, and that was a quick validation. I said, “It falls in line with what I’m known for and what I enjoy doing.” People are willing to part their hard-earned money. We’re completely on the same page. As part of market validation, are people willing to spend on your services or products? That’s fundamental, especially in the early days. That was a core piece and the driver. You got the business validation around incorporating and why you started Alariss Global. Let’s expand. Who are your customers? Who do you serve? What products or services should they be coming to you for?

Our customers are some of the most ambitious and globally-minded tech founders as well as executives based all over the world, outside the US predominantly, who want to go-to-market and expand their team into the US. We say we’re a global expansion company, but our main focus is US expansion. It could be a founder based in Bangalore, Tel Aviv, Beijing, Cape Town, or Sydney. We’ve worked with clients on every single continent.

We’re very lucky to have had that opportunity. The pain point we’re solving is they want to grow their revenue. They want to enter new markets because it’s about customer acquisition and growth. Sometimes, you’ve either saturated your local market quickly. Let’s say you’re a Singaporean or an Israeli company. The market is quite small in your domestic market, so you start thinking overseas fairly quickly.

You could be a company that’s based in a very large market. Let’s say you’re based in India, but perhaps you’re a B2B SaaS company. You know that the B2B SaaS market is a bit more limited in India than in the US. It could be that you are already a unicorn, and you have tapped into or exhausted almost all of the markets in your domestic market already. Onwards and upwards, you want to IPO. If you want to IPO and become listed on NASDAQ, then you probably do want to have some presence in the US. Those are usually the types of customers we’re serving, the pain points they’re feeling, and their ambitions and motivations for why they want to work with us.

What is Alariss Global’s go-to-market strategy or plans if you can share that? You need to spread awareness. You also need to talk about, show and display your credibility, expertise, and case studies. What is your go-to-market? What does that look like?

One thing I want to emphasize here is that our go-to-market has dramatically shifted and changed as we’ve learned things and become more aware of our own capabilities and limitations in these markets. We started off with a lot of experiments. That’s something I want to emphasize to every founder. You don’t know what you don’t know, and just because it worked for someone else doesn’t mean it will work for you. If anything, if it worked for someone else, it might mean that there are no more opportunities for others who are later joiners to copy what was done previously. That’s something I want to emphasize. It’s important to read all these growth handbooks. It’s important to listen to shows such as Vijay’s, but you have to figure out your own path in this journey.

I looked at a lot of benchmarks, but the difficulty is we’re defining a new category. We’re not helping American companies launch overseas, which is what most of the benchmarks I saw did. We’re helping overseas companies or international companies launch in the US. Still, I tried a lot of the same tricks of the trade. I looked into SEO, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, used social media, some outsourced SDRs, and all the different tools and tricks. The vast majority did not work. Luckily, two things did start to work. One was referrals and word of mouth.

That, as I mentioned early on, is always valuable. I was lucky to have a deep network already in the tech sectors of a lot of major overseas tech hubs. Getting friends to share news about me and offering very big discounts to the first customers so they could test out our products, give us feedback, and work with us, started to work a little bit.

Another is we would ask for referrals from the customers we worked with to new customers. Finally, we started to hit upon looking through channel partnerships. Channel partnerships are very difficult. It’s now become one of our main growth channels, but at the beginning, it was difficult because selling to a channel partner is even harder than selling to a customer. You’re trying to convince someone to open up your Rolodex to me and put your reputation on the line so I can have a shot at your customers. That is a hard sell. You need to first build up credibility. It’s important to go first through some referrals. We found a bottoms-up approach worth quite well for us.

If we had portfolio companies from a particular venture capitalist that liked us, we would ask them to share and promote us to that VC. Later, the VC would come to us and say, “A couple of my portfolio companies mentioned that they liked working with you. Maybe we should have a partnership or a volume discount for my portfolio company.” The channel partnership then starts to make sense because you’re not just a no-name risk that they’re taking that could impair their credibility. You become an augmentation of their brand and their reputation.

If they already know that companies they’re affiliated with or working with like you and trust you, then it’s very easy for them to come in and partner with you, and even better if they can take credit for negotiating a discount. It’s a win-win on all sides. You get the deal flow and save costs on your GTM because referral revenue comes with a much lower cap than a lot of other revenue. They also win because it makes them look good, and this is something their partners, customers, and portfolio companies want anyway.

If I had to summarize your go-to-market, initial traction, an initial set of customers, and leads that came through your own network, how you got started is you tried SEO, outbound, and so on. You would build your traction through word of mouth, your own network, and then referrals. It’s the same playbook. It’s the same thing for the channel partners. I’m a big believer. All the prominent startup advisors say the same thing. If you’re a startup, do not lean on channel partners as your primary go-to market. That should not be the first source.

You validate that thought process once again. For all the founder readers over there, this is the real mantra. Don’t lean on and pitch to your investors that you’re leaning on a channel partner as one of your good market strategies, not initially, at least. In your case, it came through reference. It came inbound. In this case, it was a VC who invested in one of the portfolio companies. That was your customer.

Another thing I would point out here is that it is very challenging. I know how it feels like a chicken and egg problem. If you are trying to build a relationship or a partnership from scratch, but you don’t have those, how do you build it? If you can’t build it because you don’t have preexisting relationships, it feels like an impossible task. Things do evolve. You work with a combination of the tools you have at your disposal and what works.

I know other people who have amazing networks, but their network is irrelevant because they’re building a B2C product. B2C is all about customer acquisition and user acquisition at a massive scale. Just because you know a couple of friends from business school doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly get a million followers on your new social media app. It does depend, and that’s also why I mentioned a lot of go-to-market is highly personalized and individualized.

A lot of go-to-market is highly personalized and highly individualized. Share on X

What I’m sensing, and for all the readers out there, is that this is not your traditional product or service. It’s almost like you are building a platform play here. It’s a two-sided platform. The one set is your customers. The other set is all the salespeople across the different calibers and roles. Share your story about how you’re thinking about this two-sided marketplace. Going back to your chicken and egg analogy, it’s the same thing. How are you managing and maintaining that two-sided marketplace growth?

This is where it’s interesting because a lot of marketplaces have elements of both B2B and B2C. For a B2B marketplace, they still usually make money from the 2B part, but it is still important to have the 2C part. Many people liken this to building two companies at once, which is why marketplaces are incredibly difficult to build, but they are very difficult to unseat once you’ve built it. It’s a hard business model, but once you’ve cracked the code, it is something that is incredibly valuable and hard to copy. For the chicken and egg, I think about who is paying for this.

It goes back to what I said earlier, follow the money and the source of truth. I analyze the market. The job seekers could potentially pay, but most of the time, they won’t. Very good candidates don’t need to pay to get a job. If you ask someone to pay, you might not be getting the best candidates. Secondly, if someone doesn’t have a job and is looking for a job, they inherently have a limited ability to pay. By charging one side of the market, you are limiting and restricting your pool of supply, and you are getting worse supply. It was clear that that wasn’t going to be the angle we would tackle. We then looked at the 2B part, which we always suspected was going to be the better side to charge. The 2B side has high amounts of skepticism.

It’s this concept of how you get someone to part with their hard-earned money, especially if they’re founders and people who have to be frugal and scrappy. What value can you demonstrate to them? What can you show them as value? That is important to understand what value you bring to your customers. For them, the value was something that was difficult for them to get access to themselves. It was revenue generation quickly in a market that was highly important to them, with people that they otherwise didn’t have access to because it wasn’t within their network. We started by thinking about seeding this side of the marketplace as the most important. If you seed the 2B side of the marketplace, if you have great employers and jobs on your platform, the job seekers will come to you and be more likely to trust you. That’s what we did, and it started to play out.

You hit upon key points there, Joyce, especially in a two-sided marketplace. It’s about who will see the value and who will part with their hard-earned money. That’s where you go. That’s a B2B place or the play. The B2C is building your network of salespeople. Do you specialize in a specific industry? How do you build an asset, that sales talent pool?

That’s a great question. That’s more on the product side. To our earlier point, product-led growth or having the products involved in the GTM is highly important. Assessing the sales talent is part of the reason companies use us. Like I said, it’s core to the product that they believe this is a marketplace of competence and trust that we, with our experiences in the US and our networks, know how to both attract the right types of people and screen and filter out those who aren’t so great. We have a combination of online assessments as well as phone screens and interviews that we do.

We usually look for a couple of key things which are incredibly important when founders are looking at building out their go-to-market team. We look for intrinsic motivation and drive. Sometimes some people can call it hustle. Startups love that phrase, so I’ll call it hustle. For a startup, why I say intrinsic motivation drive is because it can’t be as simple as your boss telling you what to do and looking over your shoulder, or you get paid a lot of money, and therefore you are doing it. It has to be something more because sometimes startups don’t have a lot of money, and founders don’t have a lot of time. Management can sometimes fly out the window, and people need to be self-motivated.

The second thing we also often look for is the ability to communicate well. I know it sounds so simple, but for someone in a go-to-market function, it’s critical. It can be verbal communication or written communication. Also, it has to be effective asynchronously because the founders we’re working with are usually based overseas. There are many time zones that separate them from their American GTM team. Even in the US, if you live in Hawaii, New York, or Colorado, those are all different time zones. Even for our team, we’re distributed across multiple time zones because most of our team is either on the East Coast or the West Coast of the US. There’s a three-hour time difference.

You want to be respectful of the time. For example, it’s 2:00 PM in San Francisco on a Friday. I know I’m going to stop messaging my US team on the East Coast once I’m done with this show because it’s going to invade their family time and their weekend time. I don’t want to do that. Communication is important. The last piece I said, which also ties into communication, is empathy. Empathy is so incredibly important. Like the example I gave, I don’t want to impose on people on their personal time and family time if I can help it. I’m empathizing with them because I want to know how I would feel in a situation. I also want to know how I want to treat others.

It’s so important for GTM talent to have strong empathy. Also, it goes beyond just working with clients and customers and getting their trust, but also working with diverse and global teams. It is important to be empathetic and patient because there are times zone and cultural differences. Sometimes you have certain situations that pop up that are less than ideal, but you need to empathize. If you always put that thought at the forefront of your mind of, “Everyone’s working hard. Everyone’s trying their best,” then even small things or mistakes can seem very immaterial.

Those are all great points. The more I listen to your story and approach, I’m being reminded of these unicorn companies like HackerRank and HackerEarth, similar to what they’re doing for developers and helping these employers find great developers. You’re doing a similar playbook for sales.

We are, in some ways, like the inverse of a lot of these developer companies.

Let’s switch gears a bit over here. Can you share a success or a failure story? It’s up to you what you want to share. I don’t expect you to share anything confidential and private, but if you can share a go-to-market success, not for Alariss Global, but for one of your customers, like what the situation was. Have you helped them in their go-to-market in a new market?

I’ll do that. I’ll share success. Those are always more fun. I’ll keep names and privacy intact. I’ll make it a bit more anonymous. We have worked with quite a number of different companies all around the world. In one company we work with that’s in the industrial automation and AI space, the team had tried for many months to hire someone in the US but was unable to. They were starting to fall behind because it was a venture-backed company. They were at the seed stage. The problem is the longer you delay being able to deploy that capital, and nowadays, when founders raise money, 90% of it goes towards the headcount. Very little has to go towards other things like where you pay a little bit of your cloud subscription fees to Heroku, your CRM, and G Suite or whatever. You buy everyone laptops.

Beyond that, especially with distributed teams, what else are you spending money on that is on compensation, bonuses, and benefits? They were having a hard time hiring someone, and it was frustrating them because they were starting to miss their revenue targets because it was taking so long to get someone in the market. The founders themselves were already fully at capacity. They couldn’t keep being the only salespeople because sales and go-to-market can accelerate. It can grow exponentially, but it is still going to be limited based on the number of go-to-market people you have on your team, especially for B2B of a certain ACV above $50,000 a year or so. A lot of decision-makers and a lot of your buyer persona expects to be able to talk to someone and have their questions answered.

It was starting to be frustrating. The hero in the story here was that they found Alariss through a referral. They started working with us, and we were able to get them the right person and get that person onboarded within a month’s time. To some companies, it might seem crazy like, “I took six months, and it only took a month.” Keep in mind that the American labor market is incredibly dynamic, and salespeople are good at selling themselves. If they can’t even sell themselves, how can you have confidence they can sell your product? A good salesperson, if they’re on the job market and are actively starting to interview, can get competing offers and other offers within two weeks. It’s important to remember this is dynamic. It moves quickly.

It takes a month from start to finish, starting with sourcing, screening, and attracting the salespeople and all the interviews they have to go through back to back with the different founders to finally offer letter negotiation and then onboarding. That is a lot of work to pack into one month, but it can be done, and it should be done because the longer it drags out, that means perhaps the company wasn’t moving quickly enough and wasn’t making decisions fast enough. They were losing a lot of candidates in their pipeline.

Perhaps they were working with the wrong sourcing partner or strategy for finding candidates. Whatever it is, it could be tough. After the person started working for the company, and it was a great mutual fit, the person had the exact engineering but also sales background that the company needed, and the company offered this person great growth and trajectory for advancement that the person couldn’t otherwise get from staying as a mid-level or mid-market AE or senior AE at a much larger company.

Becoming the head of North America right away for this company was exciting. A few months in that this person was hitting, achieving, and exceeding revenue targets, the company wanted to hire more people, and then they were able to use this momentum, and the revenue that was being generated to close a very sizable series A with an American investor, even though this company was headquartered in another market and the founders because of travel restrictions were unable to come to the US at the time.

That’s a great win-win story there. It’s a win for Alariss, but clearly a win for the salesperson who got hired. He or she’s on a different growth trajectory, and for the founders as well, because that whole approach of working and partnering with Alariss led to them raising series A in the US market from a US investor.

Let’s switch gears again to a different topic. You have a wide network from your undergrad and grad schools, and you work with different organizations and communities. If you were to share some of the best practices and what resources you lean on, be it podcasts, books, communities, or mentors, what resources do you lean on for your personal and professional growth, especially given how stressful, but at the same time, fun the founder journey is?

The founder journey is stressful. You’re right in that. I’m lucky my husband has been such a bedrock of support for me from the beginning. He was my boyfriend at the time when I started Alariss. I quit my job and started Alariss. It was all these highs and lows. It was a bit of a strain on our relationship at first. We had been dating for a little bit, but it was probably a side of me he hadn’t yet seen how high the highs can get and how low the lows can get. I’m so lucky that I have his support. That means the world to me, and it means a lot.

With other people for inspiration, I have a couple of other friends who are founders that I will text or call up. Everyone’s busy, but people make time for each other. I’ve been so touched and floored by how generous people are with their time, even though it’s limited. I remember, in particular, some of my female CEO friends are ones that I found I resonated with even more or others who are minorities and are founders in the US because there is a special shared experience. There are certain elements that are unique. For example, I had my first child while I was running Alariss and while I was fundraising.

That is a different perspective when you ask a friend who’s been through pregnancy, hormones, pitching, and fundraising than if you were to ask a founder friend who had never been pregnant before or was a male and had gone through pregnancy vicariously perhaps through his partner, but hadn’t experienced it himself. It’s incredible to find a community and find either comfort, solace, or advice. Finally, my team has been great. I am so appreciative of how hard they work and how much they care. It makes me want to be a better leader. It makes me want to run a better company because they believe in me.

The founder's journey is a difficult one. Find a community where you can get comfort, solace, and advice. Share on X

I’m so happy and grateful to you and the people supporting you. This is fundamental where you have “the right set of support system.” Things are unique when it comes to women founders and women leaders. They have their own unique set of challenges. As a man, I can “relate” to it, but it’s not the same thing. My wife and I have these conversations as well. She keeps sharing these experiences that she’s seeing at her workplace, and it’s different.

I completely respect that. Kudos to you and all the support systems that you have in place. We’re wrapping up. Coming to the final question here, if you were to go back in time and to the day one of your go-to-market journeys, possibly, maybe it’s that first day at Human Interest if I have to recall your career path and journey, what advice would you give to your younger self?

The beginning of my go-to-market journey was when I was living in China, working for an American tech company. This is right after I graduated from Harvard with degrees in Economics and International Relations. I worked at the Federal Reserve, which is a perfect fit for my degrees because it combines economics and international relations because I was working on a lot of policies that pertain to our international stakeholders and partner central banks around the world. I go from this very ivory tower, high-level policy, intellectual stuff. Most of what I did was memo writing and research, both in school and at work. I show up in China, and I have this glossy notion of what my job would be.

It’s going to be like I’m a diplomat in some ways. I’m coming as an American to China to build offices in China. I had never worked in business before, so I had this conception that it was almost like being a diplomat. You go, spread around the country, meet people, and shake hands. It’s great. I showed up, and they said, “Your title is sales director.” I said, “What?” I had thought at the time, as perhaps a lot of people who go to these types of universities do, I thought sales was a dirty word.

It’s that guy who keeps trying to push the used car sales or random people following you on the streets, trying to hand you flyers, trying to push things on you that you don’t want. That was what I thought sales was. I started off being a little bit apprehensive, and I didn’t even want to say or admit that I was doing sales, but that’s what it was. When you’re growing a business overseas, that is exactly what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to sell the company and the product in a new market.

Later on, over time, I embraced it. Now I have tremendous respect for it. I use the word sales all the time. I own it. The core piece of my responsibility is to sell the company, the vision, and our product. At the time when I was first beginning, I had too many apprehensions. That’s something I would want to share with founders and especially those who find themselves in a GTM role. The only reason people look down on sales is because a lot of people give it a bad name, but like anything in the world, that’s meaningful if you work hard at it and are good at it. This is a crucial function. It’s a crucial skillset to have.

That’s a great piece of advice. For me, I was having the same notion, plus I was also having a fear of selling. I started my consulting company Stratyve, reached out, and spoke to a different set of people because I needed to wear multiple hats as a consultancy service delivery person, but at the same time, marketing and even different functions within sales. You got the outbound, the BDR piece, and then you have the account executive piece who is negotiating and closing. I was also studying top-tier salespeople, and a common theme that surfaces, and I’m sure you would agree with this, is that great salespeople are great listeners. It’s completely contrary to the popular notion that’s being floated out in society, which is salespeople talk and talk. On the contrary, great salespeople listen more than they talk.

I agree. You’re a very good salesperson, Vijay. You’ve been a great listener. Thank you to everyone on this show.

Thank you for your time. I wish you and your team the very best. Thank you so much, Joyce.

Thank you. You too. Take care.

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