Author: stratyve_ant2yf

Kyle Lacy: How Innovative Marketing Strategies Can Change Your Business Growth 

Posted on by stratyve_ant2yf
B2B 9 | Product Marketing

B2B 9 | Product Marketing

 

There is one undeniable and undisputed truth in business: if people have tremendous experiences using or buying your products, they will probably stick with you no matter what. And by knowing which product marketing strategies to put in place, no one can stop you from achieving favorable customer feedback and higher revenues. Kyle Lacy of Lessonly joins Vijay Damojipurapu to explain how offering excellent product experience and finding the right target market can lead to a major win for any business, eventually achieving a “forever orange” status. He also emphasizes how to properly align marketing and sales, which can improve not only business operations but the way employees and partners connect with one another.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Kyle Lacy: How Innovative Marketing Strategies Can Change Your Business Growth

I have with me Kyle Lacy who’s a CMO at Lessonly. I’m super excited. I looked up Kyle’s background and I said to myself, “I definitely have to get Kyle on the show.” The reasons are number one, you have a very storied and accomplished career, all the way from being a Founder to being part of an IPO, part of an acquisition. You also are now running marketing, not like a typical marketing organization but someone who’s responsible for revenue, which is unique in the B2B SaaS industry. I also liked the aspect that you are a three-time published author. Welcome, my friend.

I don’t think I’m going to live up to that intro. Thank you for having me. I am a three-time published author. I would not recommend picking up any of the books because they’re out of print, but if you want to go learn about Twitter marketing in 2012, it’s a great book to pick up.

I’m sure all those basics still apply. Since the show is all about go-to-market. My signature question that I start with each and every guest is how do you define go-to-market?

A lot of go-to-market is defined by the top of the funnel and net new revenue. We look at go-to-market full cycle at Lessonly. We have an inbound team, an outbound team, and a team that focuses on customer marketing and expansion. For us, go-to-market is about repeatability and an amazing experience. We focus as much on the design and the experience of the brand as we do demand. That is a very fine line and it’s hard to balance. The goal is that you are driving growth but also making it a beautiful experience.

I’m curious, one thing that you didn’t touch upon and I want to pick your brains on that is talking about the product and the user experience of the product. Can you expand on that as well?

It depends on what your model is. Now, product-led growth is on the tip of everybody’s tongue. You want the product to lead, and sales and marketing to follow. Lessonly is a sales-lead company. For us, it makes the experience great on the front end for the prospect. The product is so easy to use that the experience is great when they first stepped foot into the product, and then continue to make the experience great, and I got this from ExactTarget where I spent some time, surprising and delighting your customers. If they get a random box of goods from you that’s all personalized to them, that is surprising and delighting them that your competitors will never be able to handle.

When I say an amazing experience, it’s from the chat on Drift on our website, all the way to the implementation of the product, to the usage of the product. If we can’t retain them and expand those accounts and those customers, we’re not a viable SaaS model. It’s very important. We have to remember that all these customers are not accounts. They’re humans. We try to apply that as much as possible to how we market Lessonly from pre and post-sales.

Being in a business and building a community requires empathy, with people all riding one single boat. Share on X

It’s all about the full loop. It’s not the traditional funnel as we know, which was more about a decade ago. That’s gone. That’s extinct. Let’s switch gears a bit over here. I want to understand how you grew in the various roles. What did you take from each of the roles? You started off as a founder. You had your own company, and then you switched from being a founder to an employee from a VC perspective, as well as how you advised and how you grow in a marketing capacity. Can you share some insights and lessons from that?

I started an agency and that’s where I wrote the books because I learned that fake it until you make it is a very real thing because I was 24 years old trying to sell something. When we started the agency, we were doing design work. I was designing logos and brochures and all this stuff that you think about. We realized that we were getting beaten by everybody in the sales process. That’s when I learned the value of pivoting. For us at the business, it was, “What can we sell that people will listen to us?” That was social. It was talking about Myspace. We sold our first product to this company that was selling Myspace pages to churches.

We didn’t sell any. We sold zero of them. What that led into was consulting and teaching people how to use Twitter and LinkedIn and all that stuff. Building a company, I learned the value of pivoting and also the value of what ego plays into a sales process. There’s a fine balance with how much ego plays into your self-worth. Personally, I put way too much self-worth in my early twenties in my professional career. When we burned the business to the ground, I took a huge hit mentally from a mental health perspective. I learned very quickly you should not put your whole self into work, even though I don’t think I’ve learned that very well.

ExactTarget was a customer of mine. We had a thought leadership team. That meant we did a ton of research, a ton of content marketing when content marketing was not cool. We spoke at a bunch of conferences. Through ExactTarget, I learned the value of culture at scale. The year I joined, I’m positive we hired 500 people. What was brilliant about ExactTarget and the Orange culture, which what it was coined, was it didn’t matter how big it was. Our customers were talking about it. We were talking about it. There’s a Facebook group that’s still active that has 2,000 people in it. That’s called Forever Orange.

It’s learning culture at scale, which we’re starting to apply at Lessonly as well. At Salesforce, I learned the value of brand. You can love it or hate it but that is a marketing machine. I also learned that I don’t want to work for 50,000-plus person companies. In Lessonly, overall it’s empathy. It’s the number one thing I’ve learned. It’s how are you empathetic to yourself, your team, your customers, your prospects, and remembering that we’re all in the same boat here. We’re all human. We’re all trying to buy and sell stuff. It’s very important that you take that into account when you’re trying to build a company because it’s ultimately a community. That’s a very long answer but those were the points, the pivots.

That’s exactly what I was looking for and what my readers will value as well. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being honest. Not many people are comfortable in disclosing and stating that, “I burnt myself to the ground when I started my own company.”

B2B 9 | Product Marketing
Twitter Marketing For Dummies

I’ve done that a few times. A lot of my self-worth is in my professional career. I don’t think that will ever change. It will never change. It’s something that fuels me. Through that process of owning a company, I realized that you have to have a team. You have to be able to support that team. You have to be able to make sure that the team believes in the mission and values of the company. If you can’t do that, it’s going to be very hard for you to scale. That’s what Lessonly has done extremely well. We have core values that have scaled from 15 people to 215 people.

At the same time, if you go back to the time when you founded your agency, back then you didn’t have revenue yet. You’re trying to figure out or you’re hoping that it’s branding, and that’s something that you can offer as a service. That’s not what the market is willing to pay you at that time. How did you find your first set of customers and revenue stream back then?

There was me. The value was I learned personal branding. I learned the value of building a community and a network of people, but it was just us. I taught myself graphic design in school. I didn’t go to school for it. I got a marketing degree. When I graduated, I started doing logo designs. This was before you could go buy something on Design Pickle for $55 that looks better than what I was doing.

Also, do something on Canva.

I’m glad that I did not start a company like an ad agency. At that time, we were selling accounting firms and manufacturing companies and all that stuff. It was a matter of what story can we tell that people resonate with. In 2009, 2010, social was a tsunami. It’s a value of understanding where the market’s at and taking a risk. We took a lot of risks but that’s part of owning and starting a company.

It’s all part of your life learning and life lessons. That’s what it is. Something that you didn’t touch upon and which I want to get your thoughts around is you also work at a VC company and initially, you’re doing marketing there. After that, you switched and transitioned to being a marketing advisor.

I forgot OpenView. That’s like the most learning I ever got in my entire career. I’m sorry, OpenView. I do respect you and I love you. You know I do. When I understood that Salesforce is not going to be for me, OpenView who’s a Series B venture capital firm out of Boston recruited me to run marketing for the firm but also consult the portfolio companies. We went through a rebrand for OpenView. I got an MBA in SaaS working for a venture capital firm that understands how to grow companies. I want to put a period on that. A venture capital firm that understands software companies is very important. You got to see the inner workings of all these software companies. You got to see what grew and what didn’t, what leadership worked and what did it. For me, I saw a market leader in ExactTarget. The year I joined, they had already won the market. We hired 500 people that year. With Salesforce, I saw what it takes to build a giant. At OpenView, it was A and B rounds. I fell in love with the A and B round stage and that’s where I’ve stayed.

There is a fine balance with how much ego plays into your self-worth. Share on X

That explains why you are at Lessonly now.

Lessonly is a portfolio company of OpenView. I highly recommend anyone that wants to get into executive-level leadership at a software company to spend some time in a venture capital firm if you can do it.

How did he get that role? Was there a lot of networking, cold calling or cold emails?

It’s all about networking. This is the importance of building a community and mentorship. When my company was failing, I had met Scott Dorsey, who was the CEO of ExactTarget at the time, at a community event. We had both gotten 40 under 40 for the Indianapolis Business Journal. I met him at an event and I randomly emailed him and said, “Scott, we met for 30 seconds. I need your feedback on a problem I’m having with my business.” He spent 45 minutes on the phone with me driving home from work one day. Every single career decision I’ve made from that point is because of Scott, just because of that phone call.

Scott was CEO of ExactTarget. We were bought by Salesforce. Scott Maxwell, who’s the founder of OpenView, was an investor in ExactTarget. When they sent a note to me that they were hiring a director of marketing, Scott Dorsey pushed me towards that. I’ll never be able to repay him because my entire career is built off of that one phone conversation we had. For OpenView, it was a good referral and Lessonly is an OpenView company and Scott Dorsey is on the board of Lessonly. It all comes full circle.

It all started with that 30-second conversation.

B2B 9 | Product Marketing
Product Marketing: In go-to-market, there is a fine line between brand design and experience.

 

I’m glad I didn’t screw up in that 30 seconds.

Let’s dive a bit more into how you structured your marketing organization at Lessonly. I know we chatted a bit about this earlier. Expand that. What is your whole thought process around marketing being responsible for revenue and how are you doing that now?

We measure everything by direct source like what was the first touch in a certain timeframe. For me, I had to be able to own a huge chunk of that direct source revenue because when you do, you have a seat at the table. It is very important for creative and brand-driven marketers to have a seat at the revenue table because then you can do creative and brand-driven campaigns. We’re very lucky that when I joined, they already had a pretty strong organic strategy. For us, we set the team up in stages or even channels. We have an inbound team. We have an outbound team. We have an expansion and experienced team that has to do with customer marketing.

The goal initially was, “Let’s figure out inbound. Let’s get inbound working and growing. Let’s figure out what’s blowing up the website and redo it.” At the same time, we brought the BDRs and SDRs under marketing. We have a commercial segment and enterprise segments. We have two teams and we did that for a lot of reasons. The main reason was to force alignment between marketing and sales. The reason that you want to own a revenue number and you want to be responsible for revenue numbers in marketing is threefold. Number one, you want to have the bandwidth to be able to do creative things. We can launch a clothing line.

We can do a board game. We could do a golden llama. We can do a user conference because we support 60% of net new revenue as a marketing team. The second thing is sales and marketing alignment. If you are producing the revenue, there is no choice other than to align because if you don’t, you guys are lost. We’re all lost. The third reason is that seat at the table so that you have the ability to ask for more budget, to build out more budget, to make decisions in a way that’s meaningful and not just because you’re a brand and communications team.

Let’s double click on that marketing and sales alignment piece. Personally, I’ve seen that as a challenge in my other roles when I was looking for other employers. At the same time, that’s been something close to my heart in the last couple of years where when I was doing and leading marketing at a Series A company, it was all about marketing and sales alignment. Yes, marketing can generate all the MQLs. Let’s not even talk about MQLs right now. That’s a whole different story. Even if you generate all the leads, somewhere, somehow things would get dropped then passed back over to sales. It’s not that it’s intentional, but things happen. Talk to me about how you are creating and enhancing that marketing and sales alignment. Does it start with BDR under marketing or is it a lot more than that?

It goes to what we were talking about before. If you source 60%, 70% of revenue for a sales team, they’re going to align to you. Shared definitions, like marketing qualified lead. There are a few other forums out there, but we have one form on our website and that’s request a demo. We don’t feed content leads to the sales team. Marketers do not feed content leads to the sales team because you’re going to screw alignment up. I hope that nobody’s doing that now. I hope that we’re far beyond that, but I know that we’re not.

A team must believe in a collective mission and values. If you can't do that, it will be very hard to scale. Share on X

Are you talking about data content?

Yeah. Just because somebody downloaded an eBook, it doesn’t mean you need to put a headcount on following up with them. Open it up. Dave Gerhardt said this years ago. I don’t need to rehash this. It’s a shared definition and it’s also meeting weekly. We have a funnel and pipeline meeting that we meet every week and it’s all the revenue leaders. It’s CX, sales, marketing, and it’s run by revenue ops. We go through the pipe, the goals, the metrics, and that aligns everybody. Even if it can be tedious, you’re at least seeing everybody weekly. For me, that’s the main thing. It’s being open and asking clarifying questions. It’s making sure that you are communicating appropriately and effectively. You have to be joined at the hip with the sales leader. There’s no other choice. If we were doing great events and direct mail, you’re just an afterthought.

Neither would you have a seat at the table because that’s not directly sourcing revenue.

They’d put me under a CRO or something. We don’t want that.

Let’s talk about product marketing. You didn’t mention about product marketing, even though it has the function and the second word in that is marketing. Somehow it doesn’t appear under marketing. Why?

We’re pretty unique in the fact that we have a very large revenue enablement team. The way that our revenue enablement team is built out is that it has sales engineers, solutions consultants, sales enablement, and we added product marketing. The reason why is because it is the center point of all the revenue teams. It lives in between everyone. If you want alignment, it pretty much comes out of the revenue enablement team or revenue productivity or whatever you want to call it. When we were looking at product marketers, you might have questions about failures. Maybe I’ll save this for the failure section. It made more sense to house the product marketer there. Product marketing, because of messaging, positioning, competitive analysis, lives within revenue enablement

B2B 9 | Product Marketing
Product Marketing: If you are producing revenue, there is no choice but to align. If you don’t, everything would be lost.

 

Typically, product marketing does all those things, which includes positioning, messaging, competitive sales enablement, but there’s also the piece around the launch. There’s also the piece around go-to-market strategy and execution. Who does that?

That is shared between marketing sales and revenue enablement.

It makes sense because Lessonly is primarily a sales-driven organization.

We don’t have a free trial. We’re sales-led. For me, it’s how do you continue to build the product into campaigns and messaging and make it fun. We’re working towards that. We have a great product marketer that joined us. I’m excited for us to continue evolving that.

You mentioned that in Lessonly, you moved all the way from SMBs or mid-market to enterprise. That transition is hard. A lot of companies cannot make that transition effectively, or they’re stuck and they focus on one vertical. How did you make that transition and what are the lessons learned there?

Just a clarifying point, we added enterprise, we didn’t transition. We still have a commercial segment, SMB segment, bread and butter, repeatable. It works well. I have a lot of learnings for moving up market, which we could spend an hour talking about. For us, number one, we put sales headcount towards it. If memory serves me correctly, we had two commercial/mid-market reps that we thought would work well in the enterprise. We moved them into enterprise and we created an enterprise sales unit. We had enterprise SDRs. If anybody’s thinking about doing this, you need to take notes here. You need more than two sales reps to try to figure out if something’s going to work or not.

For what we did, it worked for the most part but if we would have taken the bet and risked it and hired two others and had four enterprise AEs, we would have learned more. We would have had more data. We would have been able to make better decisions. The second thing is product marketing. We didn’t have a product marketer. If I would have pulled the trigger and hired a product marketer years ago, it would have been an easier transition for us because it has all to do with messaging and business outcomes and all this stuff. It was not built into our DNA as a company to talk about that stuff. The biggest thing is you have to make the commitment and it is not cheap, both from a headcount perspective as well as a budget perspective.

You cannot apply a commercial go-to-market model to an enterprise go-to-market. Share on X

From a timeline perspective, it took you probably 18 to 24 months before you started seeing the learnings, and then applying those learnings.

We started seeing revenue twelve months in, but not from post-sales. It is amazing. The implementation team, the services team, the account managers. Go-to-market, we’re about 80% of the way there, so 24 months. It depends on sales cycles as well.

It all boils down to the difference in the go-to-market motion. When you talk about go-to-market for mid-market versus go-to-market for enterprise, it’s different but it does. Number one, the deal size is different. It’s bigger. Second, it’s a complex sale cycle. It’s a lot of touchpoints, be it buyers or influencers on a committee. You also need to have a lot of educational material, which almost borderlines branding and awareness. It’s all of those pieces.

You cannot apply a commercial go-to-market model to an enterprise go-to-market. It’s the difference between we know we know how many demos we need to get in commercial to confer X amount of ARR. We’re in a named account model and enterprise. It’s very different. You have to have prioritization and understand what you want to accomplish. Go-to-market is easy compared to the product when it comes to enterprise. The amount of time and energy you have to spend trying to figure out like accelerations and the roadmap and all that stuff when you have huge deals come in, it’s a walk in the park for go-to-market compared to what product has to deal with.

I’ll challenge you a bit on that, Kyle. The reason being when I say go-to-market, it includes product. Somehow, there’s a notion that go-to-market is mostly marketing and sales and then customer success, but then it starts with the product. The product plays a key role because if you expand go-to-market, you need to, first of all, understand the market. The features and the road map will then line up to the product. That’s my little mission behind this whole show. I want to expand that whole thought process in the industry. I don’t know how successful I will be, but there’s this notion of any talk about go-to market is mainly marketing and sales.

It depends on the product. If we’re talking about Expensify, Mailchimp, Calendly and Postscript, that’s product growth. The product is first. We could talk about that all day long because that’s the future of software if it’s not already here. I’m 100% in agreement and marketers need to understand that.

B2B 9 | Product Marketing
Product Marketing: Marketers do not feed content leads to sales because you will screw up the alignment.

 

What are your big goals for 2021?

For us, it is fully understanding what it means to support a sales team and customer service team when it comes to sales readiness and coaching. That’s what we sell. We focus on everyone from a software sales team all the way up to a huge call center. Number one, it’s understanding the market. Number two, it’s getting back to the routine. After 2020, we have over 200 employees and the majority of them are in Indianapolis, and we were all in an office together. Despite the fact that it’s been some time now since we went remote, there’s a lot that’s changed. There’s a lot that happens when you’re all remote, even from a hiring process. The majority of our jobs now, the people are probably not going to be in Indianapolis.

For us, it is continuing to evolve the product and positioning because that’s what you do if you want to stay ahead. Understanding the remote culture and making sure that we are being community-oriented to everyone, not just the people in Indianapolis, especially when we go back to the office. Number three, it’s evolving and being more creative as a marketing team. We will constantly try to do that. That’s what makes this whole thing fun. If you want to do a board game, do a board game. If you want to do a user conference, do a user conference. I love Dooley’s webinar where they make people eat hot sauce and answer questions. Stuff like that. We got to have more fun in B2B marketing. The B2C marketers are looking at us like, “Come on, this is boring.” You’ve got to be more consumer-oriented, in my opinion.

Think of it this way. B2B, you’re selling, you’re doing business to business, but at the end of the day, it’s humans who are the buyers.

Here’s another one. Don’t send me a blanket, a t-shirt or a Yeti bottle. That’s it. That’s my 2021 thing. Don’t send me crappy swag. If you’re going to send me something, let’s do this right. 2021, the year of cool swag. No crappy swag. For those of you who are reading, that is a joke, but please don’t.

When it comes to talking about those, you mentioned about expanding or strengthening your messaging piece, strengthening your sales and support. If you were to have an extra budget, who would you hire or where would you invest in and why?

It’d probably be on the customer side, the customer marketing. We have a great customer community called Lamination. That’s a mobile app. It’s awesome. It’s highly engaging and more support there. Customer marketing partnerships and expansion, that’s where I would focus if I had more budget.

In order to make B2B marketing more fun and productive, it must become more consumer-oriented. Share on X

Let’s move on to the closing segment over here. I got a bunch of questions here. If you were to look at the industry across over to your peers, who would you call out or who would you do a shout out to as someone who’s executing the go-to-market very well? I know you mentioned Dave Gerhardt. We talked about Chris Walker in the B2B space. Besides those and in addition to those, who would you call out and who would you give a shout out to?

For sure, and not because he’s a great marketer because he’s a brilliant human being, is Anthony Kennada. He’s the CMO at Front. He was the CMO at Gainsight. He grew Gainsight from $0 to $100 million in IPO. He truly understands this idea that there’s a human element in all that we do as marketers. He does it in a way where it seems easy. I have a lot of respect for him. A lot of respect for Ryan Bonnici, who’s now at Whereby, who was at G2. I worked with him at ExactTarget. I could rattle off tons of people. I have two more. Jeff Reekers who’s the CMO at Aircall. He’s an amazing person. Andrea Kayal who’s the CMO at Electric.

I’ve heard of Anthony. I have not heard of others but after this, I’m going to make a note for myself and look them up and study them. That’s something that I’m doing here on the show. I want to host the good talk leaders. It’s a butchered term, by the way. People who think from a human perspective, be it whatever function.

Jeff and Andrea would be great. They’re great human beings.

I’m going to reach out to them. If I have trouble, hopefully, you can do an introduction.

If you want me to introduce you, you’re going to have to remind me, though.

B2B 9 | Product Marketing
Product Marketing: You need more than two sales reps to figure out if something’s going to work or not.

 

Thank you. My last question. If you were to go back in time to your first day when you’re doing go-to-market, it’s probably when you are doing the agency. What advice would you give to your younger self?

This is what I would say and I know I wouldn’t accept it as a 24-year-old. It would probably be, “Don’t take things so seriously. If you lose a deal, don’t let it ruin your weekend,” but I know myself well enough that it wouldn’t change anything. I would probably say don’t take things too seriously. For me, I love what I do so much that it is part of me. I will always work in marketing. I’ll always work in software. I will build businesses until the day I die. Don’t take things too seriously but also have fun is a better way to frame it. Earlier in my career, I was so focused on succeeding that I didn’t have fun. There are positives to that. I worked extremely hard but I feel like I aged twenty years when I was 25.

Lucky you and clearly, you’ve come out with a lot of humility from that whole experience. I can see that in you as a person. I also see that other aspect, which is a lot of times, especially in our society, we associate success with monetary gains, awards or rewards, but if you dig deep, a lot of success comes from failures.

It also comes from building great teams. I love seeing people that I managed at ExactTarget in leadership roles. Tim Kopp, who is the CMO at ExactTarget at the time. Now, he’s CEO at Terminus. He has over ten people that were on his team that are all CMOs. That’s what I want to do. The whole reason you want to be a leader is to build people up and see them succeed in the future. That’s why I do it, other than the fact that I love marketing.

I know we’re coming up on time. I can go hours and hours on this and I can see that in you as well. We should do a redo and come back at a later point in time. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure and I’m wishing you and Lessonly the very best.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

 

Important Links

 

About Kyle Lacy

B2B 9 | Product MarketingServes as a Chief Marketing Officer at Lessonly, a training and enablement software company based in Indianapolis, IN. The team consists of amazing designers, growth marketers, customer marketers, field marketers and inbound/outbound sales reps.

I apply the lessons learned while working at a venture capital firm, an IPO, an acquisition by one of the largest software companies in the world to drive revenue at Lessonly.

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! http://stratyve.com/

The Go-To-Market For Scaling Startups With Ajit Deshpande 

Posted on by stratyve_ant2yf
B2B 8 | Go-To-Market

B2B 8 | Go-To-Market

 

Businesses go from one level to the next. The further you are along, the more complex your business strategy will become. In terms of the go-to-market, startups and mature businesses also differ in their approach. Taking us through these stages, Vijay Damojipurapu invites Ajit Deshpande, the Vice President of Demand Generation at Marqeta, Inc. Here, Ajit shares his thoughts and observations between startups and businesses that are further along in the game and reveals some of the best practices of go-to-market leaders. He gives pieces of advice to leaders on building traction and scaling up—from marketing to leading a team with experimentation—and then reveals how they are working towards their goals in the company as a FinTech startup. 

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

The Go-To-Market For Scaling Startups With Ajit Deshpande 

I have with me Ajit Deshpande, the Vice President of Demand Generation at Marqeta, who is based out of Silicon Valley. Ajit has a unique profile and track record in the sense that he has grown in the ranks and in the roles of go-to-market oral function all the way from marketing planning, business operations, marketing leader role, now in Demand Gen. At the same time, he’s been active in the whole startup ecosystem. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

—

Welcome to the show, Ajit.

Thanks, Vijay, for having me.

I always like to start off with the real key question around the whole theme of this show which is around go-to-market. How do you define a go-to-market?

When you think of a corporate entity in any company, there are two main roles that exist in the company. One is the role of making something, whether it’s a product, service, software, or whatever and then there is the role of selling it. When you boil it down into those two things, go-to-market is the second half. For something that exists, how do you find the right customer for that product, service, or the solution that’s been made? Finding the right customer, reaching out, selling, retaining the customer in the long-term, and then hoping that the customer becomes an evangelist. That whole process or gamut is go-to-market. When you think of it in terms of corporate functions that will then contain marketing, sale, customer success, deployment, and it will include support operations. A lot of these teams work together to get the go-to-marketing going. That, to me, is a go-to-market.

I like the broad perspective that you bring to the table. This is a common theme that I’ve seen occurring with the go-to-market leaders I’ve been speaking with. It’s always a very holistic and broad perspective. The reason why I share this is I myself have been guilty of this whole process years ago when I started in product management or even a product marketing role. For me, back then, go-to-market is all about how to get this thing out of the launch door. It’s all about the launch process but over the years, my perspectives and insights have evolved.

It’s in line with what you shared and the various guests have been saying as well. It’s an inside view but at the same time, and more importantly, an outside view of, what is happening outside the company and how we tie those two things together? As you said, you build and innovate but how you take it to market. It’s an ongoing process. Share with the audience about your journey, how you started specifically go-to-market role? If you go back in time, how did you evolve your journey and how did you land at the role that you’re in now?

I’m an engineer by education and training. I studied mechanical engineering in India. I did my undergrad there then I came to the US.

You did your undergrad from one of the top Institutes in India.

At the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay is where I finished. I immediately came after my undergrad to Stanford to do Master’s in Mechanical Engineering. I’m a hardware engineer by education. After that point, I did another eight years of engineering work all in the Bay Area in Semiconductors and then in Cleantech. I was a robotics engineer. I designed robots for these industries and it was all great. It’s quantitative, solid work, and satisfying in its own silo, so to speak. Part of it, for me, was I didn’t understand what happened after my work was done.

Marketing is just making the right offer to the right person at the right time. Share on X

These robots then got integrated into other systems. That system then would get sold to a customer. The customer would make chips and then those chips would come back to me through our laptops and then phones. It was a little bit of a roundabout existence to connect what I was doing, the end outcome for the consumer. I was always curious as to what being closer to the customer’s need and customer validation might feel like. I did go to business school with that intent, which was to transition out of engineering and into more of a business role. I didn’t know what I would do in business. I wanted to explore it. I went to Berkeley towards the end of the last decade and did my MBA there. During this time, I originally explored finance as a function.

I looked into multiple different streams within finance, investment banking, I did some Hedge Fund work, venture capital work, and I was doing all of this pro-bono exploration during business school. I realized that it was the technology piece of it that was still exciting to me. I tried my hand in venture capital and recruited into it heavily. I was able to get into the VC world at a firm called Opus Capital back in 2012. As it turned out, none of my hardware experience mattered because Opus focused on software investing for the most part even though it was B2B enterprise. They hired me partly for my drive and my perceived potential to figure things out.

When I went to Opus with all the hardware experience that I had, I had to learn everything from scratch. I had to learn about databases, networking, mobile SaaS, etc. In that process, what was logical for me was to look at all of these early-stage investment opportunities that the Opus came across. I came across from the lens of how these ideas would scale and get taken to market because I was not necessarily a technical architect that would get into the weeds of the product based on my previous experiences. The go-to-marketing came second nature to me as I was looking at startup. As I was doing that, I had a lot of these notions that are developed on how marketing, sales, and customer success might behave.

After two years of doing it, I started questioning whether I had the right notion in the first place. I decided to move from venture capital and try to get into the business side in a functional role. As I was recruiting, I was hired by Salesforce back in early 2014 onto their marketing team to lead business planning. I would never have expected myself to be a marketer at that time. For me, marketing was like any other aspect in go-to-market. It’s big in many ways, unsolved problems. You could think of it as a challenge and with first principles, you could solve all of that.

I thought it was an excellent opportunity for me. I went to Salesforce and marketing and then I spent five and a half years there learning about various facets within marketing whether it was the business planning piece that I started with or over time I scaled into various other aspects, mostly on the marketing operations, analytics, and strategy side but then in the process, I got exposed to marketing quite a bit. More so, I got exposed to a lot of top-notch people at Salesforce that is at the forefront of B2B marketing.

I learned a lot from them. I understood their psyche and my own psyche, so to speak, and I got more and more interested in that piece of it. Later on, I went from Salesforce to Stripe. A lot of it was driven by a couple of objectives. Number one, as I understood Saas to be an excellent go-to-market business model, I also had this notion that with all the consumption-based aspects that were happening in the FinTech world, that things might be different and interesting to understand. Stripe was one of the key companies that have been driving that thought process forward. I was at Stripe for a year where I was more in the finance team that supporting sales and marketing.

In that sense, I involved in go-to-market strategy but from the financial angle. After a year of doing that, I transitioned to marketer which is also in the FinTech space, smaller startup than Stripe but a leader in card issuing as the category. With that transition and back into the marketing role where I’m now responsible for Demand Gen, I go from high touch events to account-based marketing, inbound online paid, Demand Gen, SEO, and to marketing ops. A much broader scope across Demand Gen and it’s a way for me to contribute to this company’s success.

That’s a great journey there. I can go into several of those areas and we can have a deep dive discussion around those for the value and benefit of the audience. You clearly being very closely associated with the go-to-market when it comes to early-stage startups. When you were at Opus, you are seeing that and evaluating businesses from that point of view but at the same time, at the other end of the spectrum, you have been very closely involved with go-to-market for the more mature businesses at Salesforce and Stripe, and now at Marqeta. What are your broad thoughts, paradigms, or observations that you see on early-stage versus more mature?

One way to boil it down is that when you’re on early-stage or a small company, it’s pretty much hand-to-hand combat. You are going after that next customer, next small business, and next small vertical that used-case that you’re willing to put a lot of energy into winning. That’s the focus for a smaller company. What that also means is that the objectives are simple and the alignment across the go-to-market chain. When you think of marketing, sales, and customer success, everyone is extremely aligned on that objective. Once you go past a certain scale and you go into the large company more, you’re looking at aggregate sophistication.

B2B 8 | Go-To-Market
Go-To-Market: When you think of marketing, sales, and customer success as a startup, everyone is extremely aligned on their objective. Once you go past a certain scale and go into a large company, you will start looking at aggregate sophistication.

 

Before we go into more of the larger scale, it’s easy to get the alignment between go-to-market functions like marketing sales, success, or support but the challenge is there’s no playbook into how, which market segment? Who is my customer, who within the customer, how will I engage them, who is the buyer, what is the buying cycle look like, it might hit my revenues, and forecast? It’s all topsy-turvy at least for the first couple of years until we hit scale. Any thoughts on that?

That’s the beauty of innovation and being in a startup because you’re trying to do something that is brand new. The existence of the lack of playbook being in place is a logical outcome of your own pursuit. It is in some ways a competitive advantage to come up with the thought process and a playbook to create that winning combination for yourself. With that said, the absence of a playbook is somewhat compensated by the simplicity of the objective, which is I need to figure out which customers might like my product. How do you find that out? You interview five prospects and you find the one that resonates on your thought process. There is a lot of manual needs to the work and a lot of ingenuity that has to be brought in but at the end of the day, because the goal is a relatively simpler goal to go for, the efforts can still bear fruit.

That’s broadly my thought process. Number two, when you think of go-to-market, matter product, user experience, or any aspect associated with the business, the logical first principles-based approach to looking at any of these situations typically will be a winning approach more often than not. Marketing is making the right offer to the right person at the right time. If you could find the right person, you could make the right offer when they are ready, you will succeed. The question is, how do you get it done?

Simple concept but hard to execute.

It is very hard to execute but you can use first principles and say, “This is how I can plan my work to get the best of what resources I have.”

Clearly, you’ve been very closely involved in startups, not just from an operational but even as an investor and advisor. If you look back and step back, what do you see the common 2 or 3 top recurring themes as best practices and something that you would share with founders and go to market leaders for the early-stage startup? I’m talking about seed or even Series A.

Is it from the standpoint of go-to-market?

Yes.

The few principles are objectives that any founders should have. I’m getting into a little bit of a philosophical thought process but hopefully, it’ll all connect together. Number one, one has to be extremely unbiased in their thought process. A lot of entrepreneurs and corporate individuals, entities are biased in terms of the potential for their product to succeed for what the customer may or may not want, etc. and that bias affects a lot of the decision-making. Can someone be unbiased in their thought process? Number two, always customer-centricity makes a difference. What does that mean? Any startup for success as to monetize what they are building. If what they’re building is not used by anyone then it makes no difference to the world that is a product.

Customer centricity always makes a difference. Share on X

They have bigger problems in the sense of entity will collapse.

That could be but more so, every action for individual and founder has an opportunity cost. That opportunity cost is they could be doing something else. If they’re putting their time into solving a problem then that problem is something that the customer needs. Being customer-centric and unbiased, those would be your starting points. Again, going back to first principles. How can someone envision the future? Can you imagine where you’d be five years from now? Can you slowly peel the onion back from five years later? What does that mean for next year? What does that mean for three years from now?

What is my five-year goal? If my five-year thought process is to be the dominant CRM company in the world, then how do I create the CRM market? How do I get ready to sell into it? What products do I need? What will the technology landscape be in five years? To be imagining it, boiling it down, and bring it back to the eventual tactical outcome, that’s the third aspect of it. The fourth piece of it, which is personal for me but in the startup world, this is something that a lot of successful founders to practice in the first place. It’s always to be doing something, iterating, getting to the next step, not be thinking about something, big strategic objective, and rather small wins will combine together to get to the final outcome.

Going back your first point, it’s all about having that intellectual curiosity. That’s how I term it. When you say unbiased, you need to be sincerely and seriously honest with yourself and led data. Sometimes, not always data will dictate but you need to be intellectually curious and honest with yourself. To your last point, it’s all about the market pull you in that direction. Switching back and going down to the more scaling part of the business which are being closely involved on a day-to-day operational basis over the last few years. Continuing on your thought process there, we are moving the needle from go-to-market for early stage, which is all about building traction to now, you’re talking about go-to-market for scale up. What are your thoughts, lessons, and advice for the audience?

As a company matures and scales up, it’s filled by the nature of its evolution. It will start becoming a combination of a lot of specialized functions, so to speak. For example, at market, we have sales and BD team that exactly understands what our product-market fit is. At a very early stage, they can gauge pretty well whether a prospect is right for us to pursue or not and it saves us a lot of time from their perspective. We are not engaging with prospects, which will lead us to a dead-end because FinTech is a rapidly evolving business. Time is of the essence as far as getting product-market fit at scale. Our BD team is smart. Our marketing team on what we are doing is as full-scale as it can be for the resources that we have. What that means is we could do many different ways of getting to market.

We could have the website be extremely sophisticated. We could have big Demand Gen and scale. We could do SEO and account-based marketing. There are all these things which we do to some extent. For us, a lot of the goal is to try to create the right mix of effort from our side in order to match up with our sales goals. That’s the other piece. For me, as we look at marketing, the scale of the company makes a massive amount of difference. In a small scale startup, you could use one channel, one tactic, and that may be enough for you to feed your entire sales objective.

As you get to a marketer style thing, you are looking at more of a full-scale marketing effort that has elements of almost anything that you can think of within marketing but with prioritization and a mix of objectives or channels based on the skill that we are looking for. As you go further into a large company such as Salesforce, you’re doing everything at massive scale. You are doing everything from 60,000 people dream force down to an end event portfolio of hundreds of events, lots of digital marketing, a pretty sophisticated website, and so on. At that point, every single channel is a necessity. For a marketer, it is a question of prioritization.

You shared about the different go-to-market channels and Demand Gen avenues. You mentioned about ABM pieces including events, inbound, and outbound from a combination of email to SDRs and BDRs, and then the account executives closing the deal. What is your broader approach or what is the guidance to the team? When I asked this question, I think about you are given the charter for the next 3 to 6 months. How do you guide your team and what experiments you need to experiment, at the same time, you need to deliver on those across this channel? How do you approach and give guidance to your team?

Let’s start from the last part first and then I’ll get to the first part of the question. Experimentation is a cultural thing more than anything. What that means is at any given skill, you’ve got to be experimenting all the time. One utopian goal that we have, at least for myself, my team, and the product organization, is we would like to experiment with 10% of our resources all the time. What that means is if I have $100 to spend on digital advertising, we should be trying to invest ten of those dollars on things that we don’t know much about. We know for the future whether these things work out or not. On the fringes, there is value to having some investment in experimentation, always, in the perspective of what it is that you’re doing.

Do you report those on your weekly/monthly dashboard?

B2B 8 | Go-To-Market
Go-To-Market: The beauty of innovation and being in a startup is how you’re doing something that is brand new. The existence of the lack of a playbook paves the way for a logical outcome of your own pursuit.

 

In B2B marketing, it’s very hard to break out the impact of one piece against all the other things that are happening. The end goal is still an end goal which is we need to deliver leads and pipeline to the sales team. To the extent that we are doing it with the resources that we have, you’re okay. To the extent we are not doing it, there’s a problem. The point here is experimentation is more of execution on the scientific method. What that means is you have a hypothesis that something might be interesting and you put in some investment and some resources into it. If it works out, great. If it doesn’t work out, you move on and go back to what is the basics and what works for you. That’s one piece.

There’s two levels of experimentation. One is within a given tactic and then there is the experimentation around tactic mix. Should I be doing more online and less events or vice versa? It’s an experiment. It’s all the same money that is being invested across these things. There is a significant amount of art form to try to figure out what decisions will result in that mix shifting more time. That is part of the challenge and part of the opportunity for a role like mine. That’s number one. Your second piece was more around how Demand Gen, whether it’s events, ABM, or inbound, etc.

How does it align with your quarterly?

How to think of it in the context of the company’s objective so to speak? At least from my personal perspective, that part is more of a top-down thought process. The way that I personally look at it is in Demand Gen, sales have certain goals. That certain goal that is downstream on revenue translates to a certain goal upstream at leads, traffic, or conversion rates, etc. That’s the starting point. The next question is, what is the mix I’m going to use to achieve, what are goals that I need to deliver? That would be based on what has worked in the past and, correspondingly, where is it that I need to grow? There is always that eventual plug, which is the rest of it has to come organically.

You could call it a miracle, product-market fit, or some vitality in our scale or brand and all that. There is always an organic component to all that we do. Once we’ve figured out what it is that we are looking to shoot for, then the next thing is for us to make sure that there is resourcing across each of these key initiatives. To make sure that we all measure ourselves back with the understanding that at the end of the day, whatever it is that we are projecting is not going to happen. That will be some variant of what we think is going to happen.

However, the total of all of our mistakes will still end up to be zero. That’s what we are looking for. We are pretty much looking to, again, have that point of view to make sure that we are invested to feed or achieve the objectives associated there. For us, whether it’s the experimentation culture or the delivered results culture is to be this passionate. It’s to evaluate whether we achieved or underachieved because of intent and how much of that was luck. How much of the market is turning in our favor or against us is what matter. Look, evaluate, trade, fix more.

One thing is very clear based on what you’re saying, Ajit, it’s very clear in your mindset as to how you’re applying a financial portfolio management thinking into this. You mentioned about you win some and you lose some but the net game should be zero. It is the same mindset that you’d use when you’re building a financial portfolio. You’ll have some stocks or some investments where you’ll hit it right out of the park and others which can go downhill. At the end of the day, are you net positive? It’s the same mindset that you are applying.

I would extend that a little bit further. Every leader for every function thinks the same way or at least should be thinking the same way. Whether it’s the CFO of the company saying, “Should I invest in sales, marketing, or product?” They might same think, “Where is the biggest bang for the buck for what I have?” It’s the same thing with the salesperson saying, “Which deals should I put my energy into?” The product person is saying, “What features are important?” Every one of those things has that logic. I want to also say that every function has its own complexity and nuances.

Marketing also has those nuances. At the level of making decisions on what to do in marketing, such thought process make sense. At the end of the day, marketing is a very massive art form. Marketing needs the intuitive feel, brain, and gut feel of the marketer to be the right intuition and the winning field. That is very much driven by the marketers themselves being smart and more right than wrong and all that. The right people in the team make this difference happen. That skill, intuition, and thought process comes with experience and time. If a team has great people in it, it will be very fun.

FinTech is a rapidly evolving business. Time is of the essence as far as getting a product-market fit at scale. Share on X

How big is your team? Can you also share some details around your MarTech stack?

The marketing guard at Marqeta is around twenty people. Demand Gen is 1/4 of 1/3 of it. The company overall is 500 people. As the whole entity scales, so with marketing, Demand Gen, and every that function within. As far as the MarTech stack, it is robust from the standpoint of addressing all the automation needs that we have but we still have some ways to connect all of the elements of the stack together. Our MarTech stack at its core is represented by three nodes. Node number one being the Salesforce, which is where sales puts all of that information. The question is, how do you break it down? Node number two is HubSpot, which we have data from all of our campaigns. This is how we have done all of our campaigns, whether it’s our email campaign or outbound campaign. All of that goes through HubSpot.

The third mode for us is Engagio, which is the entity that helps us consolidate the work that is happening on both sales and marketing from the standpoint of the end account. With Engagio, we can look at what meetings are happening, who’s coming to our website, who’s responding to our campaigns, who are we sending emails to, and all of that. Those are the three core nodes. Around those nodes, we have a lot of different MarTech elements. We have content delivery, project management, ad service team, and lead enrichment, and all sorts of things that would be required for a typical effective ABM program. The last piece for us, as I said, is continue to connect all of these together so we can have a more holistic view on an ongoing basis.

That’s an art form. How are you thinking about your goals or objectives? Can you share a bit about that?

From the standpoint of where we are as a company or FinTech startup, that comes a lot of companies with lots of transaction volumes as our key customers and also prospects for us to go after. As we look at our ecosystem of prospects, we are focused on high touch marketing as an ongoing thing. We are not as focused on super small business marketing. That is not the right product-market fit for us at this stage. Our goal is to keep figuring out better and more effective ways to convert our prospects into customers for these high volume type account. That’s our goal.

I don’t think that is going to change for the period of time. Within marketing as we evolve, we have a pretty solid MarTech stack that allows us to in silo be effective at any given tactic or approach. One of the big goals for us is to go from there into a true influence approach in marketing. Now, we can track success at every step but our goal is to look at the big picture in a one-click automated manner. That’s one of the big goal for us, number one. Number two, the goal to be a good partner to sales. That goal was a 2020 goal, it will be a 2021 goal, and it’ll always be a goal for us.

In FinTech, the beauty of the evolution is new use cases would come up every single day and every single week. A lot of inbound interest comes to us with use cases even we don’t think of. The goal for marketing is to help discover those use cases, help figure out what the potential and possibility is with those use cases, work with sales to close the loop, and make sure that we are ready and defining the category around all of these use cases. Startups innovate and companies are building out all of these use cases. In fact, ranging from the largest banks all the way to the smallest FinTechs, everyone is thinking in a unique way. As someone that provides the infrastructure for a lot of this evolution, our goal is to be ready for it. As we go forward, the goal for marketing is to become better at evaluating and anticipating, and then be a partner that is more true at the top of the funnel than who we are now. That’s an ongoing pursuit as well.

Is it your team or is it in combination with product marketing or some of the functions that you identify all these use cases?

It’s all of us together. Partly it is because we only have so many people and we don’t have the luxury of having 50% of agencies that can do the research for us. We are this crappy organization. There are some other aspects to it. Sales team gets the most exposure to all these upcoming teams. We have to leverage them and they have to leverage us for making sure that all the execution and positioning is in place. That exploration within sales and marketing at the top of the funnel, those two pieces are very important. Beyond that, it happened at every single level. For a marketer who is a startup at this point in time, our exec team will come up with referrals and use cases. Our board will send things done our way and say, “I have this portfolio company that is trying something.” We get exposed to this innovation from many different angles and our goal is to be effective at responding to it.

I’m extrapolating and continuing the discussion on the 2021 piece. If you were given an X-number of dollars, where would you channel that? Would it be more on the OPIC side or more than a headcount, or is it a combination of those?

B2B 8 | Go-To-Market
Go-To-Market: Don’t think about something as a big strategic objective; rather, think of small wins and how, when combined together, they get to the final outcome.

 

Headcount would likely have much more impact than necessarily OPIC’s. That is also because we don’t have a very massive universe of decision-makers that we are going after. We are looking to engage with payments professionals that are working on transaction volumes at scale. These professionals are becoming more and more common across many different companies. Even your classic tech company now is starting to have payments professionals to automate, whether it’s their internal corporate expenses or any of the use case within. First of all, payment is becoming more common but broadly speaking, the universe of decision-makers that they’re going after is not that massive. There’s not so much for us a money game in the outside online paid work. What it is for us is, do we have the right content that we can put in front of these prospects as they’re exploring?

Content is a big objective, especially in FinTech, the better the content can be in terms of quality in terms of its ability to explain our business to our prospects, the better suited we are. Content is a big priority if we’re given more resources. The other piece, as we think of customer-centricity, if I were to look at scaling up, I would look at ways and means to get insights out of customer product use, scale, retention levels to get that intelligence to be a feeder into the marketing thought process. That would be the second objective. Beyond that, marketers are scaling across all facets. The more we keep doing what we are doing, we’ll still continue to get returns. It’s not like we are anywhere close to getting diminishing returns for anything. The more we invest, the better we are going to do with marketing.

It’s not surprising you say that content is a big challenge. Who I spoken with like the different CMOS and even the VP of Marketing at different organizations so far continue to say, it’s content. If I have to bubble it down, especially around the notion of, “Am I understanding my buyer and the user well enough?” Again, it goes back to not having the bias. Going back to a startup world where you don’t have the internal bias but then truly and out of curiosity, you’re trying to understand the problems of your buyer and the user. If you package all of that into content, that’s the key.

That mindset and skillset is extremely hard in the tech industry. That’s a recurring and resonating theme that I’m seeing across in the tech space. I have some pointers and guidelines as to what I’ll be sharing with my clients. That’s something that I can do offline. We’re coming up on time, so going into closing section over here, if you were to look outside in the industry across the B2B SaaS space, Salesforce, or other industries are hurting in the Startup world, who would you give a shout out to those 2 or 3 whoever leaders from go-to-market perspective who are thinking and executing very well?

Generally, I’ve been very fortunate to have been a part of Salesforce for such a long time. To be extremely honest, marketing is a first-class citizen in a large company. There are lots of large companies in the B2B world where overtime, marketing gets relegated into second-class citizenship a little bit. In many situations, sales become more and more powerful and then it starts becoming a one-way path a little bit more. The innovation died away but at Salesforce, that’s not the case. Lots of execs at Salesforce and everyone that I’ve had a chance to engage with have been accomplished and impactful on their own. I was lucky in that as someone that initially started their time at marketing doing business planning. I was a little bit on the buy-side.

I was able to ask questions to every single entity within marketing at Salesforce, if not to understand then to probe. Over time, there’s been a lot of friendships that have been built. A number of them are CMOs. CMO at Marqeta, Vidya Peters is from MuleSoft but now that’s a part of Salesforce. She’s been a highly impactful leader at Marqeta. I wouldn’t want to not name anyone but if you think of any exec Salesforce now, a number of them have been there for a long period of time. They’ve been inspiring on their own right. For me, it’s more of a shout out to that ecosystem. I’d say more of a shout out to the fact that they have been able to be so impactful for such a period of time. It’s helping out the entire tech ecosystem with all that they’re doing there.

Well said, Ajit. I completely agree with you. Salesforce is one of the few large organizations where marketing is a first-class citizen in your own words. It’s part of the DNA and it comes from the founder. If you look at Marc Benioff, he’s completely a marketing and a sales visionary and that trickled stone. Salesforce overall has been fortunate to have that whole thing and is still embedded in the DNA. The final question that I have for you is, if you were to rewind time and go back to the early days when you started in a go-to-market function, what advice would you have or what advice would you give to that person?

Let me make a couple of comments and then I’ll get to that piece. When I started at Salesforce back from my time at Opus Capital then I transitioned from venture capital into marketing, my whole thought process was someone that is smart can come in into marketing, look at the entire landscape, use hopefully, first principles driven approach, can understand the problem, solve the problem, and optimize the situation. That was the thought process that I came up with. Years later, when I left, I was nowhere close to having a solution to any of this. There’s one learning here which is to understand that go-to-market broadly, even something that is as black and white as sales is still an art form.

It is as good as what you make of it. It is as good as the effort that each individual in that organization puts in. The goal for a go-to-market lead or even a contributor needs to augment their strengths in pursuit of product-market fit for their company. That’s one advice. The other advice that I would give to myself, which I aligned to that shortly after was simplicity wins as complex as you can think, marketing, sales, or any of these things might be. The simplicity piece is what rules every day. Do you believe in your product?

As complex as you can think marketing might be, simplicity wins. Share on X

Do you think your product is a winner? If it is, then figure out how best to showcase it in the right way. Keep it simple, keep it to the point, and think of it from the perspective of the other party. The other party understands less about your product than you do by default then bring it down to the level that they will understand it. If there is a need with your thought process, they will become customers. To the extent that they are customers and you continue to keep them happy, they will become your evangelists. That’s what it boils down to.

I think of those two words. The words that summarize everything are simplicity and empathy. That’s what I would say as well. Well said, Ajit. Thank you for a wonderful conversation. It was a pleasure to have you on the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast and good luck to you, Ajit, and to your team at Marqeta.

Same to you, Vijay.

 

Important Links

 

About Ajit Deshpande

Vice President of Demand Generation at Marqeta, Inc

 

 

 

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! http://stratyve.com/

The Power Of Building Empathy In The Go-To-Market With Charlie Wilson

Posted on by stratyve_ant2yf
B2B 7 | Building Empathy

B2B 7 | Building Empathy

 

Allowing your customers to understand where you are coming from and how they can personally relate to what you have to offer is the best way to build the go-to-market. By building empathy with your audience, you’re on the right track towards starting a successful connection. Joining Vijay Damojipurapu is Charlie Wilson, Chief Revenue Officer of cannabis provider Greenbits. Together, they discuss how to maximize human interaction to achieve an unparalleled customer experience, as well as the importance of well-targeted product manager-marketer collaboration. Charlie also talks about the most crucial marketing points every start-up business must know, especially in this time of pandemic and with the go-to-market gradually becoming an independent function.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

The Power Of Building Empathy In The Go-To-Market With Charlie Wilson

I have my friend and someone I look up to from a go-to-market perspective. His name is Charlie Wilson. He is the Chief Revenue Officer at an upcoming and high-profile startup in the legal cannabis space named Greenbits. Charlie, I’m turning it over to you. Welcome. How are you doing?

Thanks, Vijay. I appreciate the kind words and it’s great to connect.

As always, I start off with asking the first question. My significant question is what the show is all about, which is how do you define go-to-market?

At the end of the day, it’s about putting together a bundle in an approach to create brands, both perceived and real. Making sure that you’ve got the right audience and you’re ultimately delivering an experience that’s well-coordinated from the internal perspective so that it’s experienced and perceived that way from the external perspective. At the core, that’s what it’s all about.

There are a lot of moving pieces below that to make it happen. It’s not about what we in the company see from either a product or a services perspective, but how all of this ties back to the customer, the buyer and the user.

Your success in go-to-market is going to be a function of having to find those things well and coordinated those things well internally, which is why I really orient around that, as opposed to more an outward-looking perspective than an inward-looking perspective.

I’ve been speaking with my clients as well as several other guests. It’s always a combination. It’s not easy where you always constantly need to have your eye on the market on the external perspective. At the same time, you need to be grounded in reality and grounded in perspective as to what can we deliver and still be sincere as a company and a brand when we’re looking to deliver value to the customer in the market. Let’s dive a bit back, let’s rewind a bit. Let’s talk about your evolution as a Chief Revenue Officer. How did you start your career and what led you to actually take this role and go down this path?

Never allow yourself to be stuck in just a single role or field forever. Share on X

It’s a story journey. I was an engineer as an undergraduate and graduate student. I had a focus on technical skills but early in my career, I never practiced pure engineering. I was in management consulting, so I had a broad base of experience. I joined the strategy group at Visa and a large organization. I had an opportunity to see a diversity of things. Through those experiences, I got interested in sales and marketing side of the equation. I never would have considered myself a salesperson or marketer in my early days.

I came to value and appreciate obviously the importance of those parts of the business and the relevance of those parts of the business. I started to cut my teeth in some sales roles, increasingly marketing roles and have evolved down that journey for the last several years. Most of my career has also been industry-wise and FinTech. My journey to Greenbits in particular wasn’t so much cannabis-driven, it was more of a business model-driven in terms of understanding that SaaS and FinTech intersection and seeing the opportunity within this particular vertical, which as you can imagine firsthand, it’s unique and evolutionary or evolving continuously.

Quite a few things that I want to double click in what you shared. It’s definitely a good journey. This is something that I keep reminding to several folks that I meet with as well as to the audience. Nuggets and lessons for the audience is you don’t need to be feeling stuck in a specific role or a specific field. You mentioned about you started off as an engineer but never saw yourself growing in that role and that’s where you start exploring and going down the path of more on the business side but more on the marketing and imagery to the sales and not the revenue ownership piece. I think that’s one piece. I am curious if I double click on that. What really attracted you or pulled you away from engineering towards more on the business side, starting with the marketing piece?

One, it’s a general interest and fascination with characterizing the business world. I think the technical background provides some important underpinnings that in this day and age are table stakes that many years ago were probably perceived as luxury. I don’t think sales and marketing disciplines historically were as data-driven as analytically focused. Clearly, for the last several years, they have become that way. Having that foundation and leveraging that foundation in the area where candidly I’d probably had more interest in the marketing side and the sales side. Being able to break down the market, segment that market, understand where you can set yourself apart, differentiate yourself, ultimately bring somebody through a buying journey and to a close sale. Seeing the enjoyment of that dynamic with both enterprise customers, which are a different beast, as well as small businesses and tailoring the go-to-market experience based on some of those customer profile dynamics.

I was looking forward to and wanting to push you on that piece, which is, I know you’re big on the small customer piece or the small customer segment. Early on in your career, you started off with customers and markets that are more enterprise-focused but somewhere along the line, you got pulled towards serving the small to medium businesses and the retailer. Tell that story. I want the audience to take away from that as well.

I was at Visa in my early days. Visa’s client-based are banks. Many of those banks are large. Those types of conversations and deals are more enterprise. In subsequent roles, I was still in an enterprise context. Probably the biggest thing that attracted me to small businesses was when I met my wife who happens to be a retail small business owner. I didn’t grow up in a family of small business owners but upon meeting my wife, I saw some of the trials and tribulations that a small business owner goes through. Small businesses in particular, they usually get into their business because of their craft and their passion, not because they like to do payroll or taxes or all the other things that are associated with running a small business.

It was also synonymous as my own career progressed, you had the opportunity to serve small businesses. They’re incredibly on and underserved. They’re incredibly difficult to serve. It’s a fun challenge from this side of the table. It’s what led me for probably the last few years to have a focus and an emphasis on delivering great products and experiences and getting those into the hands of small businesses, particularly a mom and pop-like stores. That’s true in our industry. We work with a lot of characterized enterprise, probably a stretch to mid-market like businesses in a traditional context but also a lot of new to retail, single-store operators. Pursuing a passion, a dream in cannabis and chasing that opportunity. We get the opportunity to bring them a suite of services that makes their lives hum a little bit easier.

B2B 7 | Building Empathy
Building Empathy: Small businesses usually start with the owner’s passion and not because they love to pay their taxes or do payroll.

 

First of all, from your personal experience, you actually can connect with that target persona or the buyer. I think that’s key for anyone in product marketing, sales and even to that extent of customer success. You need to have that empathy piece. From your story, it was clear that in your case, your wife, as a small business owner, you could see the tribulation that she is going through and she went through. You’re bringing that empathy piece to your current role, which is essentially helping Greenbits build a point of sale or compliance and the various other technologies. As you’re selling to the legal cannabis retailers, who are mostly small to mid-market as of now, that’s the majority of the market. That’s the key. The point I want to hit is the empathy piece and nothing like building empathy from your own personal experience.

It’s understood but I think it’s still often missed. You’ve got a lot of smart people who have good ideas, they can build great technology, can analyze and break down a market but I think a lot of times, businesses and groups miss the mark in terms of that true empathy and true understanding of the experience that the recipient on the other side is experiencing. We still struggle with this and work to improve this. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other side. When you think about a small business owner in particular, the breadth of things they have to deal with, in many cases, they are the sales organization, the CEO and the human resources departments. They play a lot of hats.

A lot of times they’re in that situation because they have a passion for baking cupcakes, for instance, or mountain biking and selling retail mountain bike parts in a retail environment. Not because they like to do those other things and often, they’re underwater and those other things. If you understand that, you appreciate that and you incorporate all those other distractions and stresses that are on those businesses, you can be more effective in positioning and getting your product or service to that audience that’s very underserved because they’ve typically been difficult to serve, historically.

Building on that point of empathy, which is very crucial in the whole go-to-market piece. Personally, from my own experience, I’ve had the good fortune and been grateful for all the several product marketing or even head of marketing roles. In that capacity, as a head of marketing, my responsibility and you have the company-wide customer, which is the market segment but the internal customer is sales. Sales is the number one customer for the marketing team and something that I’ve realized after I’ve started the company that I’m running, Stratyve, which is serving or helping essentially the B2B SaaS companies build go-to-market either clarity or go-to-market efficiency.

I’m playing and wearing multiple hats or roles and at the same time, I’m actually wearing the role of a salesperson. Ever since I’ve embarked on this journey, where I need to do the outbound or I need to do prospecting. I need to help understand the buyer from their pain points and their challenges was this internal from me, “How do I close the sale?” That’s an entirely different mindset. Personally, again, going back to the meta point that we’ve been talking about, which is building empathy and nothing like having a personal experience to build that empathy piece.

I think something that has impressed upon me, the more I’ve progressed through my career, that domain experience and that firsthand experience is critical. I think of myself and lots of people can go into an environment that they’re unfamiliar with and be successful, but I will tell you to have that domain experience to have the firsthand experience is valuable. Not to say that it can’t be overcome but it goes a long way in establishing that empathy and unlocking or uncovering, or at least being aware of some of those intangible elements to be successful in serving a particular segment or audience or individual.

In your role as a Chief Revenue Officer, you have the complete visibility into what the marketing team is and should be doing as well as the sales team is and should be doing. You got that end-to-end perspective. I want to hear from you as to how you create that alignment and empathy piece, not between the two or across those two functions but even with the whole buyers in the market.

There is nothing like building empathy from your personal experiences. Share on X

It’s not rocket science but data-driven, clear and concise communication. Those things allow you to make sound decisions around where you put your energy and they allow you to execute effectively. Much of the working world is about the human interaction and to the degree that you’ve got sound communication between those organizations, you’ve got a common understanding between those organizations and others. You can be at a heck of a lot more effective. I think where things break down or where they succeed, it’s less about the specific disciplines of marketing or sales per se. It’s more about common sense and foundational things like structured communication and effectiveness there. There’s always going to be a good tension between sales and marketing in terms of where one ends and the other begins.

We try to impress upon our team and our organizations that there’s not a black and white line or a clear line. There’s a very healthy overlap. You used the term empathy. The more that the marketing team is empathetic to the experience and what the sales organization is going through, the more effective they can be in assisting or helping in that respect. Conversely, the more empathetic the sales organization get to the things that the marketing organization is trying to take on. You see some companies, particularly startups, there’s a notion like, “Everybody in the company does a role in customer support,” because you build empathy for the customer. The more the sales organization can spend time and live the life, so to speak, and the day of the marketing organization and vice versa, the more the marketing organization can live a day in the life of the sales organization. I think the more effective they can be individually and certainly collectively. It’s never easy to get that quite right but that’s what we strive for.

I want to get your thoughts. There is a growing notion around the whole revenue team which comprises both the marketing and the sales, but there’s also the whole new field of revenue ops. I want to get your thoughts on those.

We actually have a role open for a revenue ops individual. Historically, I think we probably looked a little bit more like other businesses are certainly where the trend or the precedent was before we had sales ops and marketing ops. I talked about the empathy and the communications but the other piece I talked about was the analytics and the data. The degree that you have somebody in the revenue opposite role, you’ve got somebody in the interstitial space between sales, marketing and arguably customer success. The by-product of that is you get data and analysis and insights in an unbiased and independent fashion. You’re not getting the skew or the biases that maybe the marketing organization or marketing ops person might put on a situation or conversely the sales ops.

You’ve got somebody who is sitting in that interstitial space to make sure that the organization at large is getting the most relevant information and guiding and the most appropriate sound direction. You remove some of the silos. You remove some of the biases and some of the potential areas of tension by looking at that across those functions, as opposed to within those individual functions. We’ve embraced that and have adopted that end of the process of continuing to expand that.

This is something that’s been playing on my mind especially when it comes to the go-to-market. This show is all about go-to-market. Even the work that I do of Stratyve is all about go-to-market. If I tie it back to the experiences that I’ve had previously when I was working at other companies, it was mostly around product marketing, “owning go-to-market.” If you’d be in the shoes of a product marketer, it’s extremely challenging. Product marketing can come up with a good market strategy but to execute and make things happen both within the broader marketing organization, as well as with the sales organization is extremely tough. It’s not within the scope of that role. That’s something that’s been playing on my mind and seeing the trend playing out in the industry, which is the go-to-market piece is slowly beginning to come out of product marketing. It’s more of an independent function, more of an independent team on a role that’s sitting across and outside of marketing sales or even customer success to that matter.

I would extend that and in my mind, two of them are the most influential individuals in the organization, depending on your designer and depending on obviously the industry and who you’re serving are the product manager and the product marketer. Those two individuals and those two roles are at the center of the universe. To your point, they’ve got to drive, coordinate and organize a lot of different individuals and functions in order to be successful. We look at it the same way. That product marketing role is critical, particularly in our industry where finite universe of operators and a lot of word of mouth. The ability to clearly convey the benefits and the products and create great experiences within the product and the service is critical to our overall sales and marketing success. In our particular industry, I would say those roles are even more amplified than they may be elsewhere.

Going back to the whole rev ops role, I’ve also seen the rev ops role reporting possibly into the CFO organization as well. The CRO/ CFO is a dotted line because at the end of the day, it’s about alignment but at the same time, that role has to stay true to, “I’ll be hitting the numbers. I’ll be hitting the metrics that we need to hit as an organization.”

That’s fairly similar within our organization. Particularly on the analytics side, you want the finance organization to be close and then again, very consistent in terms of understanding the data, the sources of data and what the data is explaining or telling us. My organization, which is not a finance organization but there are a very close collaboration and a very keen interest from the finance organization in terms of those insights, knowledge and those experiences.

Switching gears a bit over here. Essentially, we highlighted or talked about how you as a Chief Revenue Officer of Greenbits, come up with maybe the 2 to 3 key go-to-market programs. How do you think about it from an annual goals perspective as well as break it down into quarterly goals to a functional individual? Sharing that piece will be insightful for the readers here.

I’m a big believer in usually fewer is better and simplicity is better.

B2B 7 | Building Empathy
Building Empathy: Being data-driven and having clear communication allow you to make sound decisions on where you should put your energy.

 

It’s extremely hard to do it. The reason being is the shiny thing syndrome, as well as they say the fear of missing out. This whole matrix is playing out there.

In a startup, oftentimes you have to do many things. I think you have to be incredibly focused on what’s critical. If I go from the long horizon to increasingly shorter horizons, when we map out the annual priorities, we try to focus on a small number of critical initiatives and basically, work your way back. I personally like to break things down into 90-day periods. It’s enough time where you can make tangible progress and have the freedom to be able to demonstrate and make that progress but it’s also not so long that you run the risk of getting too far off course. Backing down from those 90-day periods of those three-month periods, you’re starting to further decompose the objectives and meeting that annual target or goal by the individuals or the groups themselves.

I think that the criticality you get what you measure and what you had said, it’s important that you’re measuring things that don’t create a red herring. An MQL is only as good as the quality and the integrity of the definition of that MQL, for example. Making sure that you’ve got not only the right metrics but the right definitions behind those metrics to make sure they’re unfortunate drive in the right behaviors to ultimately hit those annual and multi-year objectives.

If I have to extrapolate on what you mentioned here, you’ve got their annual objectives around the revenue numbers, the sales booking numbers, the pipeline metrics. When it comes to marketing, you got MQL piece but then there’s also the inbound traffic, outbound campaigns and so on. Tying all of these into the various initiatives that marketing and sales have to do for the next 3, 6, 9 months. I think that’s critical.

We generate deals from both outbound activity as well as inbound activity. Making sure that we get the right mix and the right balance there for our business and where we can be uniquely differentiated and competitive.

In doing all these things, how are you thinking about the big initiatives for 2021? I have a follow-up question after that, but let me stop here. How are you seeing 2021 for your organization?

We socialize this with our board. We’ve gone through a planning exercise for the year ahead. As a company, we’ve got four priority initiatives over the course of the next year. Two of them are initiatives that are new to us. There will be a big element of go-to-market relevance in the year ahead and our ability to execute effectively will be critical to our success but again try to maintain a finite number. We make sure that we were focusing on the things that we can get the greatest leverage from that can most substantially move the needle, advance our business forward, advance our customer’s success in the most profound ways over the course of 2021. Some of them pertain to new geographies, new products and services that we want to attach and introduce to our customer base.

The follow-up question I had is what do you see are the big challenges? You did mention about go-to-market as a big piece for 2021. What do you see are the key challenges?

It’s the coordination across the organization. I’m fairly confident that we’ve got the segmentation right. We can figure out where to identify these people, get the right messages in front of these individuals. It’s ultimately bringing those things together in unison where the messages get to the right people the right times, the execution of the product development hits the market the right point in time and lines up nicely with all of that. It’s not too dissimilar than what I think people experience in any other business or service offering a product or a service offering.

I was actually in conversations with a couple of my clients as well as with some of the guests who are CMOs and VPs of marketing and to share with you, Charlie, a couple of things that are top of mind. One thing is around, 2020 has been a challenging year from a COVID perspective but at the same time, all of these marketing leaders have been and are still very proud in how they have had the team pull together and still execute. Maintain that focus and still execute from an operational perspective, a mental health perspective and being dialed in perspective. One challenge that comes up is, “Now that I’ve done that for 2020, how do we do that with 2021 without being too diluted or being fatigued by this whole notion?”

I am proud and I applaud our team for 2020 now. I would say 2020 has had its challenges. For our particular industry, we’ve been fortunate. Our businesses thrived. I think our customers’ businesses have thrived and have been in a position where they’ve been able to operate and they’ve been able to continue to grow and expand. There have been hiccups, nonetheless. 2020, looking back, was a successful year. I think the team did a great job with lots of fluidity, uncertainty and challenges. An interaction like this where everything has gone to remote. I think technology companies and our teams are generally well-suited to make that natural transition to a fully remote work environment but there was transition and change and adjustment nonetheless. The ability to have the in-person interactions, collaboration, that’s been null and void which has made things difficult.

The go-to-market piece is slowly beginning to come out of product marketing and become more of an independent function. Share on X

The part that’s been most challenging is the ability to have those interactions with customers, whether it be in the sales and marketing experience or with existing customers. That’s been the part that’s probably most challenging. I’d say going into 2021, we feel good. There’s some momentum that we need to maintain. There’s fatigue but I’d characterize our fatigue is the fatigue of the startup, not so much 2020 derived. Personally and myself, I’m very optimistic about 2021. I feel very fortunate around 2020 and take that we’ve actually got momentum behind us as we go into 2021 where I recognize some businesses are probably feeling like they’re having to dig themselves out. Fortunately, we’re not as subject to that as some.

Double-clicking on that. Your customers and the market use of the legal cannabis retailers. From an outsider perspective, I’m assuming that clearly their businesses would have been hit but at the same time, not getting too much into detail of why cannabis sales would take off. I want to get your thoughts on and your view on how the industry overall has been affected or not been affected. I want to get your perspective on that.

When COVID showed up in mid-March 2020, most of the United States and businesses in the United States had a tremendous amount of uncertainty and that was true with our industry. Fortunately, cannabis is not a federally illegal market, it’s a state legal market. You have a very fragmented market state by state rules and regulations. In our industry, for all intents and purposes, nearly every state with the exception of one deemed dispensary and deemed the cannabis industry as an essential business. They were able to stay open during those March, April, May months. The other dynamic is when you had a lot of people home probably stressed out, to some degree bored, anxious and a lot of real and understandable reasons.

Our operators not only remained open, they actually thrived in a lot of respect. Our customers, we’re fortunate through that process. There were lots of regulatory adjustments and emergency regulatory rules that people had to accommodate with curbside. Imagine our industry has cannabis plant involved and it’s a heavily cash-intensive industry. A by-product of that, as you think about, “Curbside pickup.” There are a lot of logistical challenges that come along with that dynamic when you’ve got a lot of cash and cannabis products outside the four walls of the store. Our operators had to accommodate and adjust to certain things for our customers. Fortunately, they were in a position where at least they had the opportunity to make those accommodations where a lot of other industries were purely shut down.

There were some things that were delayed. New businesses that were going through final inspections. Some of that got delayed. States and industries like Nevada, particularly Las Vegas, very tourism-driven segment of geography. Not a lot of tourism happening in Las Vegas. We saw operators there struggle certainly for a period but by and large, our industry has been fortunate. Our customers have had to deal with the fluidity that COVID has presented but fortunately, they’ve been open for business. In fact, we’ve seen record numbers during the balance of 2020. We’re hopeful and optimistic that that carries forward into 2021. In fact, you see the election, the general industry, our particular industry, we had five more states legalize through this latest election. We feel excited and confident.

Definitely exciting times for the industry as well as the players in the industry. I can see that happening. As we wind down a bit last couple of questions here, Charlie. You did mention about some of the goals for the big initiatives for 2021, as well as some of the challenges that you foresee. You mentioned about rev ops as being one of the key hires or somewhere you’re going to channel some more budget into. Can you expand a bit upon that aspect based on the go-to-market initiatives, what do you see as the key hires? If you had the extra budget, where would you put that extra money into?

B2B 7 | Building Empathy
Building Empathy: If the marketing team is empathetic to the experiences of the sales organization, they can be more effective in assisting them.

 

Prudent capital allocation is critical. We have much more opportunity than we do. Resources are at our disposal. There are a few different areas. I think the ability to expand our available market a little bit more quickly. It’s fragmented in the United States state-by-state and there are some nuances to the way that our industry, product and service works, where we have to be a little bit more methodical. We can’t blanket all states at once. There’s a vibrant federal illegal opportunity up in Canada. There are always areas where we could expand geographically faster. The product we’re a relatively new industry in a relatively new company.

In the grand scheme, your product and service offerings are still relatively immature. We’re in the early innings, we got a long way to go, so we can accelerate some of those capabilities that allow us to deliver more functionality to our customers. Drive price points and average revenue per account higher would be areas that we would look at. I think one that we’ve had in the back of our mind that if I could carve out a big piece would be on data and insights. There’s not a lot of knowledge around this industry. We have visibility and sit on a ton of data that I think we can package up in service to our customers with new insights and capabilities. That’s probably an area where if I had some additional resource and budget would carve out a new and distinct and separate initiative to go after that.

Expand on the data and insights piece.

You have emerging brands. You have CPG companies around various form factors. Infused beverages and edible products and bulk flour and pre-rolled joints, oils and tinctures. You’ve got form factors that manufacturers are trying to understand where consumer preferences. You’ve got a lot of new to the industry consumers. Either people that may be coming back to the industry, people that have never experienced the industry. There’s a ton of education on the consumer side. You can imagine the brand and the product companies are trying to figure out like, “What are the consumer trends and buying behaviors and patterns that inform their own product developments?” You’ve got dispensaries and retailers that are trying to establish their brand, build their own awareness, drive foot traffic into their stores and properties. Given that we sit on a large body of data that looks across that continuum, we think we can provide a lot of valuable services to our retail customers, as well as the brand companies, many of which are our retail customers as their vertically integrated businesses.

Data and insights and data signs and the whole notion. I think that’s a big thing from a go-to-market perspective especially. There’s going to be a continuous demand for the whole data science personnel and people with that skills. At the same time, the key is not the ability to run the data models but teasing out the insights and then channeling and coming up with the key go-to-market initiatives for marketing sales or even customer success. I think that’s key.

Leveraging that to inform where we go as well.

It’s great conversation, Charlie. I think you shared a lot of nuggets and advice for the readers as well as for your peers in the industry.

I appreciate it.

Last two questions. The first one in that bucket is if you were to look outside and across your shoulder in the industry overall, who would you call out or who do you give a shout-out to as someone who’s doing a great job from go-to-market perspective?

Our model is similar to some of the commerce models. The world of companies like Shopify and Square are two companies that have done a phenomenal job around understanding their market and communicating effectively to their target audiences. Building their product and service often and creating a comprehensive experience that is meeting the needs of their particular audiences, which both happened to be generally small business segments as well. We’re doing it in a vertical context but I have a ton of respect for the individuals within those businesses. The way that those businesses have generally operated from their early days to where they’re at now are incredibly prosperous and market-leading businesses.

In order to grow, soak up information anywhere and everywhere you can find it. Share on X

One final question before I let you go. If you have to rewind the time and go back to not your eighteen-year-old self but if you have to go back to your first day of venue to go-to-market role within marketing, most likely it looks like out of your engineering into the marketing team. If you have to go back, what advice would you give to that younger self?

I would say soak up information from anywhere and everywhere that you can get it. There are lots of nuggets of good ideas and new and different ways of doing things and a lot of unexpected places. The other thing and these are things that I embraced through that period, but I would reinforce it and probably try to amplify it. These things we talked about, understanding of empathy, a broader understanding that you can then dry in and create more narrow and targeted focus, breadth of reading. There are some people who read a lot of business books and there are some people who may read no business books.

I like to have a diversity of reading and try to consume as much as I possibly can. I would say too as much of that as you can because I think as you draw in these various pieces of knowledge that we’re in a world, that’s soundbite driven, very Apple news-driven. I try to abstain and I would encourage people to abstain from those little short snippets and actually read books. That’s where you get more complete thoughts. You get more diverse and interesting insights that make you a more complete person and that more complete person can deliver a better experience of whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re doing whether it be a marketing or go-to-market role or any other role. I think some of that is lost on society at large and certainly is lost on the younger generation because candidly of what they’ve been fed. I think that’s important. I’m reading Thinking, Fast and Slow as my latest book and next I’ll probably pick up a novel, whatever that might look like.

That’s a great piece of advice and a great note to end on. Reading and carving out the time to read every day or at least a couple of times a week. I think that’s important. I personally experienced a lot of growth. From that growth and insights, I’m seeing that on how it’s helping me shape my thinking and how I can help my customers better. That’s a key point there. Thank you for your time, Charlie. You’ve done a great service. Sharing your insights, advice and nuggets to the readers. Thank you for being on the show.

It’s my pleasure. Same to you, I appreciate what you’re doing and great service. It’s great to connect. Thank you.

 

Important Links

 

About Charlie Wilson

B2B 7 | Building EmpathyProven leader with a mind for the big picture and an eye for the details. Twenty years of executive experience with pioneering technology, payments, and commerce companies. A natural networker, a quick study, and strong advocate of payment solutions for cannabis retail. Earned two engineering degrees: B.S., Arizona State University; M.s., Stanford University.

 

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! http://stratyve.com/

Breadcrumbs: Scoring Leads The Way It Should Be Done With Armando Biondi

Posted on by stratyve_ant2yf
B2B 6 | Lead Scoring

B2B 6 | Lead Scoring

 

Lead scoring is a vital element that sits at the intersection between marketing and sales. It’s something that companies need to think about from an early stage. It is a simple idea but it is often so poorly implemented that it doesn’t produce a lot of the results it is designed to produce. Breadcrumbs attempts to address the fundamental flaws of this process through a simple interface where people can design their own lead-scoring model within a matter of minutes. The company is the latest among several startups founded by Armando Biondi, the former COO of the digital marketing platform, AdEspresso. An active member of the startup ecosystem since 2009, Armando has a depth of knowledge and experience when it comes to go-to-market challenges and strategies. He articulates some of these in this conversation with Vijay Damojipurapu, where he also shares the story of AdEspresso and the recent work he and his team are doing at Breadcrumbs.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Breadcrumbs: Scoring Leads The Way It Should Be Done With Armando Biondi

I have with me, Armando Biondi. I’m super excited. I’ll run through the background of you and all the great startup journey that you had. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

I looked at your bio. The reason I was excited and looking forward to having you on the show is a couple of reasons. One is around the breadth and depth of experience, having done either the C-Suite roles, the founder roles or even a board member role in six or even more startups. You have the depth that is needed for the go-to-market and the breadth. The second reason is you have been, and you continue to be, an active member in the whole startup community and startup ecosystem. You are an Angel investor, so that’s a big deal. You are also a mentor and a board member. You’re not seeing the go-to-market challenges from the companies that you’re working at, but you’re seeing it across the entire startup ecosystem, maybe tens or even hundreds of startups. I’m excited about that. Let’s start off with the most obvious and the signature question for the show, which is, what is your definition of go-to-market?

The way I think about go-to-market is the all-encompassing definition. Meaning, everything that has to deal with how you bring to market a product or service or the combination of the two. There are marketing, price, and packaging element around it. There is a service or a support element around it to some degree as well like how you fulfill the promise of it, how you commit to that promise and the mechanics behind it, so there is an element to it. Those are the main categories that come to mind when I think about the go-to-market.

Double-clicking or diving in from a go-to-market perspective for an early-stage company or a product will be different from the go-to-market for a more mature product. The flavor of go-to-market for a product line versus go-to-market for a company, it’s entirely different. I’m curious about your thoughts on those.

This is already a potentially big topic meaning that if you want to summarize it relatively quickly and up to you how much time you want to spend.

We have plenty of time. No worries about that.

If I think about the go-to-market from a startup perspective or at least stage company, the reality is that the vast majority of people tend to overthink things. If you think about successful companies out there at an early stage or successful exits up to $5 million to $10 million ARR or revenue if you’re thinking about the SaaS world, the idea is that most of those companies need to nail one go-to-market strategy/back. They don’t need too many on top of that. If you accept that thought, one of the things that you see over and over again is founders being constantly in search mode.

Not realizing per se that they stumbled upon something that is working so continuing to look for other things without doubling down on the stuff that’s working now and that can continue to work up to a certain point. These can come in flavors. It can come through an inbound, content, outbound or paid even for the B2C company that we’re talking about. The reality is that most of the budget and funding that any B2C company would raise through pay. You have to nail one go-to-market strategy to be successful or even lead to many more.

Being your first customer helps a lot because you gain a lot of insights into what's working, what's not, and what people like you need. Share on X

That will progressively change as the company matures and grows because at some point if there is one thing, which is always true about go-to-market strategies, is that there is a ceiling. They start to work less effectively or not as well as they were before. You exhaust that potential and you need to look for additional sources of growth. That is when you start expanding into multiple go-to-market strategies that you keep executing on in parallel and you have working in concert with each other and to drive growth.

Usually, what happens as well is that companies tend to move from high-performing, highly measurable type of tactics/strategies. If we’re talking about advertising DR, direct response-type of motion and as they evolve and they start topping out that channel, they start migrating towards the less performing and less DR type of channels. It’s more brand-related and intangible and then layer all the different strategies on top of each other. That’s very common when you’re thinking about these types of companies in motion.

That’s a good summary. That’s the last topic. We can pick and do an entire episode on that one question, but we have a lot of ground to cover over here. Switching gears a bit, I did a quick research and looked at your profile in how you grew up the ranks. You started out as an employee first and then went up to the VP of the C-Suite level and then somewhere along the way, the whole startup bug caught you. You’re done Pick1 and then the Batch 5 & 7 then, of course, AdEspresso, but now we’re talking about big names. AdEspresso got acquired by Hootsuite and then now you’re at MailUp. I’ll also let you share the new thing that you have on your mind. Walk me and the audience on how you grew from the ranks of “employee” to switching on going into the inside.

That realization is that I generally have always been a very bad employee. I’m not an employable person. The reason for that is I tend to get excited about hard stuff or hard things. I constantly challenge myself. As a consequence, I tend to ask a lot of the people around me as well. I am the most excited when I can participate in the upside of the value that I’m contributing and creating. The reality is that the employee world is not built for that. What you’re trading off when being an employee or when you’re making the decision, consciously or unconsciously, is creating security for the upside.

When you’re an employee, you have a series of guarantees, stability, paycheck, benefits and all that good stuff. To some degree, that takes away a little bit of the upside that you can get. You’re accepting that the upside is going to be captured by your employer. When I started realizing those things inside my head, I said, “It’s time to try this entrepreneurial thing.” I started my first company which was Pick1. I started my second one, which was social market research for enterprise companies based on Facebook. Based on that experience, they don’t go super far. We ended up selling that. It was a good outcome. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s great learning. As a consequence of that, I started AdEspresso realizing that Facebook cared more about the advertising side as opposed to the research side and was willing to produce data, but not keep data away.

AdEspresso is essentially Facebook advertising and split testing for medium businesses as medium enterprises. At the time, Facebook split testing wasn’t the thing. They ended up taking “inspiration” from many of the ideas that we had implemented in the product. As a company, we ended up growing very aggressively in three years from 0 to 50 people for about $6 million in ARR and about $300 million in Facebook advertising budget process through the platform on a yearly basis.

AdEspresso is one of the top five ad tech partners for Facebook globally and the number one by a number of advertisers because every ad partner was focusing on a small number of big advertisers while we were doing the opposite number of small ones. That led us to the relationship with Hootsuite and we ended up selling it to Hootsuite, which was an acquisition that made a lot of sense back in the days because social media management solutions out there on one side were the biggest mid-market, Facebook advertising partner on the other side. Through that experience and then stayed on with Hootsuite as a global head of growth operations, overseeing ads products within the portfolio as well as the ads that we showed up growing about 3X since then.

There are a couple of realizations. One, the laws for speed and growth to the obsession of not only growth but also efficient growth. You can spend a lot of money to buy a lot of growth, but that only lasts up to a certain point. Only a number of companies can do that because it’s a functional market that you have available. One of the things that are very interesting about the times we live in is that we live in a world where we have the biggest markets available in terms of the number of customers and companies in those. We live in a world with the biggest markets ever and the most accessible ever because everyone has a smartphone in their pocket and a credit card attached to that. It’s a lot of new dynamics that are different compared to many years ago where getting in front of customers was a very expensive endeavor. Nowadays, not so much anymore. That unlocks a whole city’s off new dynamics and behaviors, which are very interesting to observe.

B2B 6 | Lead Scoring
Lead Scoring: Go-to-market strategies have a ceiling. Eventually, they start to work less effectively than they did before.

 

You mentioned about AdEspresso when you started it. There was a Facebook audience and Facebook usage taking off on a daily basis. On the other side of the Facebook platform, you have the advertisers and into the edge, Facebook was investing a whole lot because, at some point in time, they need to monetize. How did you run to the idea of creating this platform for advertisers and what were the steps you took to test and get traction with the initial set of advertisers? After you land 5, 10, 15, 20, you see a blueprint laying out but learning was 5 to 10 is a key.

It’s a combination of two things. On one side, AdEspresso was born out of a need that we have as a concept. We were the first customer of the product to some degree and we are very clear. My cofounder, Massimo, had an agency back in the days when he was building products for bigger organizations on one side, on the other managing small Facebook advertising budgets on it. That’s one insight. Being the first customer always helps a lot because you have a lot of expertise, knowledge, as well as insights into what’s working, what’s not working and what the need of other people like you. The other piece of insight is tied to the realization that because Facebook back in the days was this new and upcoming ad channel that was trying to compete with Google.

They had stolen Sheryl Sandberg from Google to go and replicate the Google Ad infrastructure inside Facebook. The special insight that we had was realizing that there was a mid-market study that other companies were not necessarily paying attention to. If you looked at the Google history, you could clearly see that they started from enterprise big brand type of spenders and then bought down-market to the mid-market, and then smaller guy type of them. You can imagine that Facebook would follow a similar path. If you cared more or were particularly intrigued and interested in that mid-market space if you squinted, you could see that these people or this new wave of advertisers would be having money to spend but not much knowledge in how to do it. There was the opportunity in enabling them to tell that story through content, which is what we did and how we ended up winning the market and being a big household name when it comes to Facebook advertising.

Having that key insight was very smart of you. You say your cofounder, Massimo, who had that insight into, “As our customers, we are running into the same challenge that other advertising partners and customers would have.” The takeaway for me from all of this is where the big company like Facebook and Google are going after the bigger brands and the bigger budgets but then there’s a runway of, which is exactly what you tapped into, “No one is addressing the mid-market or even the SMBs or how do you tap into that pocket.” It’s a great learning experience for me as firsthand from all the experiences or insights that you have there. Switching gears over here. You did touch upon this, Armando, which is if you have to say the 2 to 3 paradigms into your common thread across the startups that you have gravitated towards from an investor or even startup that you founded. What are the common threads, if you will?

In terms of things that are different/have changed.

If you give an example of what you mentioned about AdEspresso.

There are a bunch of things that are significantly different. In particular, when it comes to go-to-market, the most fascinating thing that I observed over and over again is that if you think about now versus 10 to 15 years ago, it’s interesting because we tend not to think about it, but the internet is more than 25 years old, which is nothing if you think about it. We are the last generation that is going to remember a time before the internet. You think about the new generation, it’s like, “They thought it was there already. It was already a thing.” There was no ICQ or like that weird stuff. If you think about that and years ago, there was a significantly smaller number of people online.

An order of magnitude. If not, almost two. It was significantly more expensive to reach those people and was inefficient in building a business relationship that would lead to the transaction. Those are all things that are fundamentally different days compared to then. There is an order of magnitude and more people online that it’s significantly more efficient and faster to be able to establish that relationship with them and to turn that into business or relationship to get to the point where you execute the transaction. It costs almost nothing. It’s not nothing but comparably, it’s cheaper, faster and efficient to be relevant. I thought whenever there is an order of magnitude more of simplicity, there is also another magnitude more of competition.

It’s easier but also more crowded. It’s easier to reach them out, but how it stands out. It’s a different game in that sense because it’s not about being efficient as possible in reaching those customers out. It’s how do you stand out compared to everyone else who’s trying to do the same thing and reaching them out with the same level of efficiency. It comes down to that content adamant that I was mentioning before like, “What’s your story? What’s your brand? What’s your unfair advantage in terms of better perception or telling the story that’s closer to the segment or the cohort or the vertical of customers you’re trying to attract?” In that sense, going back to the other element around markets being the biggest ever, one of the things that are very interesting to me is that years ago, you will have niches of verticals of needs and problems that would be very small because many people are having those problems.

Brand has power. It talks about the story and the story is everything to people. Share on X

Now, those issues are tens, if not hundreds of millions of people or companies. You see these companies that are very super niche, very specific, and deep in how they define themselves and speak to an Ideal Customer Profile, an ICP. How they define that, they are specific in that as well. Because those niches are as big as ever, they end up being companies that are $10 million, $15 million, $20 million, $25 million, $30 million, $50 million companies a year. That is the single most fascinating thing that I can think of when it comes to go-to-market. The companies that end up winning now are better at this new game of standing out and how you do that in this new playground where everyone can be efficient as everyone else is a new compelling problem to address.

You have few thoughts and few comments over there but starting off on a lighter note, you mentioned something very relevant. By the way, we are disclosing our ages over here which I have no qualms around is we are the last generation and after our generation, everyone we’re born with the internet. On that, I took my kid to one of the safest local cities over here. He went and looked at one of the vending machines. By default, he was touching the screen and expecting that screen to be a touch screen. I thought that was funny and that’s something the audience would love. A couple of points, you mentioned about companies that are vertical and niche-focused and that itself is a very large space.

I’m sure there are several but one of the names that come to my mind is Veeva. The CRM for the healthcare industry. You’ve got big elephant or their Salesforce. When you talk about CRM, it’s Salesforce, but then you got the other players who are also making it big, which is Veeva and Surado. Your point is well-taken and well-noted which is you can pick a niche or niches depending on which part of the geography you’re from and you can create a big play for yourself because that’s a big market. Another example that comes to my mind and I was at the startup earlier in my career before I started my company. I was at Greenbits. Bits are essentially doing point of sale and compliance software for the legal cannabis industry.

It does a huge and growing market. You talked about point of sale, you’ve got Square and several others, but then you focus on the cannabis industry, you’ve got all these big players. Small players but aiming to be big. One other point that caught my attention in your narrative is the emphasis that you invest a lot in the story and the brand from the very early days of your startup. Not many founders do that. That’s a flaw in my mind.

We live in a world that’s extremely DR-oriented. You can measure anything and everything. It’s a very analytical and direct response. You put $1, you want to get $1.2 out. That’s good. The fact that you can do that is mind-blowing. If you think about it, it was never the case before. That as a consequence, thus take away a little bit of attention from this idea of a brand and brands have power. Brands talk about affinity and stories are everything to people. You use brands up there like Nike, Apple and Disney, there’s nothing more powerful than that.

This is where you are having that go-to-market DNA within yourself, that’s given you an unfair advantage compared to other founders who typically come from a very technical background. They don’t think about brand and storytelling from day one. Hats off to you and your team for investing in that from day one. That’s a good segue into what you’re doing with your latest startup. Do you want to share some story and background around that as well as how you’re investing in the brand? I looked at your website, it’s amazing. I can imagine those visuals and associate them with your company. I let you share those details with our audience.

The name of the company is Breadcrumbs. It’s a simple idea. We talked about this idea of efficiency and efficiency growth. The idea of marketing being a core of every company is a growth engine. The reality is that’s necessary but that’s not enough particularly in a world where you can attract a lot of attention. At some point, the vast majority of the companies that can do a good enough job will attract some attention. One of the elements that are always forgotten or thought about too late, or not truly understood. As a consequence, you dump a lot of resources and a lot of time to get an okay result if not crappy result is this idea of the scoring and fortification or how an MQL or Marketing Qualified Lead, becomes a high performing SQL or Sales Qualified Lead.

If you think about this element of the intersection between marketing and sales as functions within organizations, it speaks about lead scoring. The way this happens from a mechanical perspective is lead scoring. Lead scoring is an unsatisfying concept. It’s a simple idea but poorly implemented. You get a lead, you score this lead, you assign a body to this lead based on a series of criteria like how big is the company, how much revenue and funding, how many customers, geography and which industry. You then pass it over to your CRM and you put in the date. Every operator knows that following up on promising lead tomorrow versus three weeks from now is fundamentally different. The time element, there is a decay of that value. There is a shelf life that’s not yet accounted for in this system.

B2B 6 | Lead Scoring
Lead Scoring: In this environment where everyone can be as efficient as everyone else in reaching the market, the companies that end up winning are the ones who are better at standing out.

 

What we believe is that it should be a more sophisticated way of thinking, talking, measuring and acting on these leads more programmatically at scale, more dynamically including this time element. Not only the time element, but there is also conversation around lead scoring being most of the time a BlackBox. No one ever in the history of the human species ever trusted the BlackBox. It’s your company, you want to know what is going on. You want to see what’s inside. That’s another fundamental flaw of how lead scoring has been thought off so far. What we are doing with Breadcrumbs is we want to give people more freedom and a simple easy-to-use interface to create and design their own lead scoring model in minutes instead of weeks of work. It’s not only faster but it’s also better because it does take into account that timeliness element that no one has considered. That’s the idea around it. We’re building a product. Hopefully, it’s going to be useful for other people out there.

I personally have seen having run marketing teams in different companies earlier. I’ve seen initially early on, there’s no lead scoring. There’s this constant fight between marketing and sales. The quality of leads you pass, you are just meeting a quota, but I’m not meeting my sales quota. That constant tussle is there. If you go to the next level, which is, “Now we start assigning a score to each lead, it’s more of a personal opinion and bias versus taking the data out there.”

The relationship between marketing and sales is flawed all the way through from the very early stage to the very later stage. If you think about it at the core, that type of antagonism is due to the fact that marketing measures in a very quantitative way. How many leads are you getting on a monthly basis and sales measures leads in a very qualitative way? How many of them are closing and how fast? There’s a fundamental disconnect between those two things. There is a need for something that translates one language into the other from your marketing stack to your sales stack or from your marketing teams to your sales team.

There is more general awareness and acknowledgment that’s happening. At least, I’m seeing based on the marketing and sales leaders I’m speaking with which they do realize the friction and they’re consciously looking to address that now. If I hear or speak with any of the VP marketing or even the CMOs, back in the days, it was the top KPIs or MQL are traffic coming in. Now, there’s a lot of awareness and alignment on, “That’s good to have metric but the real metric is how many leads am I giving for the sales to close this quarter or this year or the next quarter?” There’s that element which is marketing celebrating that they hit their MQL quota versus marketing is celebrating their sales hits, their number for the quarter. That shift is happening now. I’m seeing that.

Everything is crazy if you think about it. We can talk about this however you want. Now, information is still very siloed. If someone visits the pricing page of your website five times, we don’t know about that. If someone starts and is very engaged with the product, someone else from the same company signs up for a trial, and someone else visited your pricing page, you want to know about that. There’s traffic around not only timeliness but also frequency, recency and the costing of that activity in time. There are activities happening very close to each other disproportionality amplifies value. That also is not captured or represented in any way.

People talk about intent to purchase and all of these are key attributes. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of technology out there to build and incur with that intent. The aspect that you are mentioning, I’m eager to see how it takes off. I’m cheering for you guys. This is a core problem in the go-to-market space and I’m looking forward to the success story of that.

It’s mind-blowing to me thinking about this. One of the reasons why we started Breadcrumbs in the first place is that even the most sophisticated people, the ones that do it like it should be done, spend six months and several hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement iteration one. Because it’s so time-consuming and energy-intensive, they never touch it again. Meanwhile, their social organization or their marketing organization changes. Their strategic priorities as a company and pricing structure change. The idea of having something that’s significantly more flexible and not only you can implement it in minutes instead of weeks, but you can iterate on it as quickly.

It’s extremely powerful. The most sophisticated people not only have one lead scoring model, but they have multiple ones. They have one for acquisition, attention, upselling or sale. Not only they have one for each and every one of these things, but they test multiple models in parallel to see which one performs the best based on which assumption. The more you can enable that, the more you can enable companies to be successful in accelerating their growth trajectory because if you can identify programmatically higher-value opportunities for you as a company and boost them up to the sales team, everyone’s going to benefit from that.

Based on what you’re saying here, there’s some sense of a machine learning aspect that’s going on. The machine has to do the job which people are either not capable of doing or it’s time-consuming that they ignore to do that.

The most sophisticated operators think about growth as something that can be designed through a combination of strategy and tactics. Share on X

I saw a counter-intuitive thought there. If you talk with a lot of people in the industry, they will speak about ML for a long time and they will use this in their pitch as well. We think that machine learning is valuable. We also think it shouldn’t be the whole story, meaning that what machine learning can do is essentially digest a whole lot of data and find others there and surface things that will be hard to see or hard to compute otherwise. That’s by and large. What that doesn’t include in the conversation is what about the strategic direction that the company wants to go after for the next 6 to 18 months. Even if you are an enterprise company or your customers have been $50,000 ACB but either shape wants to go downmarket. Optimizing for and prioritizing $25,000 to $15,000 ACB, machine learning is not going to know that. How do you balance those two things out?

Data model and data modeling is a vast topic in itself. At some point in time, I would love to get a data scientist to talk about the impact in the go-to-market but that’s a topic for a different conversation though. I’m sure you’re spending a lot of time there but in the next 6, 12, 18 months, what do you see are the key go-to-market challenges are broadly the challenges for Breadcrumbs.io?

For us specifically, but you can generalize this to every company. Going back to the two things that I mentioned. On one side, how do you stand out in a world where everyone can reach anyone very effectively and how do you do it better. It’s a very interesting question. We can talk about tactics there.

The story, brand, colors, and visuals that you have on the website is pretty cool. It’s one part you need to scale it out and see everything.

I appreciate that. I love it. The other thing is how do you tie things back to growth? You can do a great job at all levels and then struggle anyway to generate revenue and/or to grow. One of the fundamental ideas that I’ve been thinking about for a lot and partially led to this Breadcrumbs initiative or, in general, it’s a very powerful idea is engineering growth. Meaning when the word engineering usually refers to technology and product, how you build stuff and that’s usually coding. If I think back to AdEspresso experience or the companies I’ve been involved with, what I see is the most sophisticated operators. Thinking about growth in terms of some things that you can design and the way you do that is a combination of strategy and tactic. Tactic for the short-term and strategy for the long-term.

You always have these three timeframes in front and center, short-term stuff, mid-term stuff and long-term stuff. If you think back to the most successful companies out there like Facebook, Google, Uber or Slack, you look at their growth trajectories, you notice, most of the time, inflection points. It’s breaking points where they were going in one direction and at some point, they tipped up and afterward, they’re going in another direction. What happens there? That was sometimes happen by chance. Other times, it was intentional. It was researched and experimented on for a while and implemented the right way or they had been implementing this for six months and waited for the right moment to deploy that. If there was something that was interesting to you at some point, but I think the most sophisticated operators or go-to-market growth revenue people out there, they most of the time, think about growth in this sense.

They’re the usual set of tactics, milestones and goals that you need to hit when you are in a very early-stage company. That’s a playbook that you’ve done over and over. That’s the least of the challenges for you and the team and then there’s the market aspect. You can control the market only so much. There’s not much but you are investing in the story, the brand and your milestones that you want to hit over the next 6, 12, 18 months. It’s a good initiative there. If you were to look at and share some of your investment areas if you were to hire 2 or 3 hires in the next 6 to 12 months, who would they be and why?

We’ve been covering the bases. Strengthening the engineering team, marketing, sales and support. Now, we are looking at the sales function. That would be the structure for and at this point with the company, we are about fifteen people involved. With that specific addition, we are going to have our base covered. For the next 3 to 6 months, it’s going to be a function of growth and market validation. Engineering, product and design would be a topic. You can never get enough of those. One thing in operations, we didn’t strengthen too much operations just yet. It’s going to be a topic very soon.

If you are to extrapolate, you’re going to invest in the product side, engineering side, sales of course, and the revenue. In Breadcrumbs.io, who is your target market for the next 6 to 12 months? Is it the small, medium size, similar to what you did with AdEspresso? Is it the enterprises or a mix and why?

B2B 6 | Lead Scoring
Lead Scoring: There is a need of something that translates one language into the other from your marketing stack to your sales stack.

 

It’s mid-markets. One of the other thing behind Breadcrumbs is people or companies think about lead scoring too late in the game, they should start earlier. We want to start early with them and grow with them. We want to help them grow and we want something that’s easy to set up and implement at first. It grows in sophistication as the complexity and maturity of the company grow as well. It was more of that growth, but we do want to start simple, easy early. In that sense, the companies we are optimizing or focusing on for now are generating $1 million to $5 million or $2 million to $10 million types of annual revenue. They have a marketing engine that works that’s generating a few hundred leads per month or more. They have a system motion, so they have an initial sales spot off and a couple of people that they hire. It’s the initial adversarial relationship, marketing and sales and things that are not picking up yet.

At least, from a hypothesis point of view and even from a validation point of view, that’s a good sweet spot to start off. That’s where the most pain is felt initially. Coming back to my Greenbits days where I was the head of marketing there, I see that we were in the single-digit like the $4 million or $5 million range, and that’s where the whole marketing and sales friction as the CEO and the CROs say, “Get me the leads.”

That’s the sweet spot when this topic becomes when we get paid.

We are heading towards the closing. I know you need to get back to other more important things for Breadcrumbs.io. One final question for you is if you were to do a shout out to 2 to 3 professionals or peers in the industry who are doing go-to-market very well, who would you look up to for inspiration, advice or brainstorming?

The company that I very much admire, which is HubSpot. They’re doing an extremely good job at go-to-market. They have been for a long time now.

Can you speak names there?

No, but they are doing a great job. For younger companies, no specific name comes to mind. The golden standard for me is absolute when it comes to go-to-market both because they have a lot of the elements that do contribute to a healthy growth trajectory. You can see that in their revenue. They have an inbound first. Atlassian is another one. They have an inbound first type of go-to-market like a bottom-up. You should list up very cheap and they end up being very expensive. They have a cross-sell, upsell type of mechanics that they built in the product. They not only have self-service of great paths but also commercial enterprise ones. It’s the most sophisticated go-to-market that I can think of right now.

I can see where your inspiration for your go-to-market is coming from. It’s the bottom-up approach. It’s clearly there. It’s a wonderful conversation, Armando. Thank you for your time and good luck to the Breadcrumbs team and to you as well. I’m looking forward and I’ll be sharing from the side.

Thank you so much and best of luck to you too.

Thanks.

 

Important Links

 

About Armando Biondi

B2B 6 | Lead ScoringAs part of Hootsuite’s Senior Leadership, he oversees all things Ads from a GTM/strategy perspective. He also oversees all things Inbound on a series of properties generating more than 2M unique visits monthly, as well as other high-potential special projects.

-Co-founder @BreadcrumbsIO (previously Co-founder & COO @AdEspresso, acquired by @Hootsuite). Angel investor in 150+ startups. Board Member @MailUpGroup.

He also served as a Mentor/Advisor for more than 15 startups and currently serves as an Independent Board Member. He likes to pay forward and have fun doing some angel investing (75+ startups so far). He love to learn new things, he accepts to suck until he becomes good, and doesn’t stop until I’m awesome.

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! http://stratyve.com/

The Right Way To Create A Working Go-To-Market Strategy With Bhaskar Deka

Posted on by stratyve_ant2yf
B2B 5 | Go To Market Strategy

B2B 5 | Go To Market Strategy

 

Coming up with beloved products is one of the most challenging aspects of running a business. With a well-thought and properly targeted go-to-market strategy, this process can become easier and way more efficient. To shed light on how this part of the business works, Vijay Damojipurapu interviews Bhaskar Deka, the Vice President of AI & Analytics Products at EdCast. Bhaskar goes deep on how they approach the go-to-market in their company, from using silos to their full potential, discussing their current top priorities, and considering more than one marketing direction. He also shares how to maximize resources in doing analytics and why mentorship is something every business person should never set aside.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

The Right Way To Create A Working Go-To-Market Strategy With Bhaskar Deka

In this episode, I have Bhaskar Deka, who is the VP of AI Products at an up-and-coming startup named EdCast. Bhaskar, the reason why I reached out to you and I’m looking forward to having this conversation is for various things. One is you’ve got a tremendous background in the product side where you build and collaborate very closely with the engineering teams on the product. You’ve got a good and deeper perspective on AI and data science. I was impressed with your background working with larger companies, essentially the high-growth teams within other companies. You also got a good track record working with startups backed by top-tier venture capitalists. Welcome to the show, Bhaskar.

Thank you, Vijay. It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me.

I start off my show with this very standard but an important question for everyone in the cross-functional teams, how do you define go-to-market?

I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been working for big companies like Oracle, Informatica in high-growth areas, as well as startups with successful exits. I’ve seen how go-to-market in particular is applicable in both for product lines, which are well-established versus product lines, which we’re still defining. Let me go back and say that fundamentally, there is a good alignment between both go-to-market as well as product management functions. What it entails is that you have a strategic component to it as well as an important or personal component. If you think about the strategic component, the go-to-market is about how do you define the overall market that you’re going after? What opportunities are there for the creation of value for our customers? If it is an existing product landscape, then what kind of competition is already out there? How would you create your unique value proposition that will differentiate your product from the rest of the competition? In the case of a new product, how would you create a new category altogether? That’s a strategic component.

When you think about it from an execution standpoint, how would you then go ahead and position and place their product around it? The classic 4Ps of marketing: Product, Placement, Price and Promotion. Those aspects need to be thought through, and that’s where the collaboration between the product team and a go-to-market team comes into play. For successful products, both in established as well as a startup scenario, you want to think about product and go-to-market teams thinking about those things and the strategic part, as well as the whole operations part. At a high level, that’s where I see that strong alignment. In the case of a startup, it can be a bit interesting because you might not have a go-to-market function yet. The founders might be acting as the people and in some cases, you don’t even have a product person. The founders are being product persons themselves. As you start going beyond your product-market fit to an actual scalable product scenario, then that distinction of GTM versus product and that collaboration comes into play.

B2B 5 | Go To Market Strategy
Go To Market Strategy: When designing a product, think about its immediate value and have a long-term vision of where you want to go.

 

Thank you for sharing that. Go-to-market has got both the strategic, the big picture aspect, there’s also the operational and the tactical aspect. The way I see it, and I’m sensing from what you mentioned is it’s an ongoing activity. It’s not a one-time activity and it involves collaborating with cross-function teams. Let’s shift gears a bit. Can you share your journey and important milestones, both from a professional person’s point of view, as to how and why you got attracted or pulled into a product role and data science, and some of your most recent roles and accomplishments?

I’m fortunate to have my journey in the engineering product, even a bit of product marketing and data science. I’ve been fortunate to have done work in multiple vertical domains. I started off with financial services and risk management in automotive, pharmaceutical and now learning space. My journey after my Bachelor’s and Master’s in Computer Science, I spent the first half of my career in engineering. I was a hands-on engineer. I became an engineering manager. I spent eight-plus years of my time at Oracle, mostly in the engineering space. Post my MBA, I joined the product function. The reason I was interested and intrigued by the product function in general was that I love engineering and building cool products, but I was always thinking about why you build it and how it is going to solve something for our customers?

Being in product, I think you can straddle those two areas that you were thinking about how does it solve your customer pain points and problems, and in a for-profit world, how do you make money about it working with the revenue team and the marketing team? That aspect of being able to work with engineers and build a product and as an ex-engineer, understand their constraints and the problem solving that they’re doing, but also being able to go to the other side of working with marketing and sales to be able to position their product. That’s what excites me. The other aspect of it is also going back to my journey, even when I was at school, I was a bit confused about which direction to go because I loved math, I was good at math, but I was also interested in literature. Back in those days, you either go to Engineering or Medicine.

I can connect with you, Bhaskar, but for context for the various readers from different parts of the world, this is a typical Indian parent and student mentality, the child mentality back then. You typically have two tracks, which is if you want to make money, if you want to have a good career and a good journey professionally and personally, that’s what our parents used to preach back then, “You either go to engineering or a medical profession, or you go into a technical and engineering degree.” I was in your seat and I can relate. I’m sure a lot of the folks that are from the sub-continent and the Asian region can connect with this.

Thank you for giving that context. Things have changed now. I’ve seen my nephews and my cousins and how it’s a different world now, even in places like India. Going back to the product, what I love about the product is that you should be both buoyant and a quant. You need to be able to be data-driven, understand how you’re solving problems and being data-driven around it, but also like a quant being able to distill your messages in a very short format and connect to your audience. The other aspect is being comfortable with ambiguity. Those are the things that excite me about being a product leader. I’m grateful for that journey of being an ex-engineer because it helps me connect with my engineering partners well.

Understanding value is where the partnership between the product and go-to-market begins. Share on X

Looking at your track record, you also had good stints at different startups like Skupos, and now you’re at EdCast. What got you excited to be at EdCast, and what’s your role at EdCast?

In the past few years, going back to my journey, my Master’s specialization was in AI and in those days, we were going to AI winter at that time. It used to be called expert systems. In the past few years in my start-up journey, in addition to being a product leader, I’ve been building data science teams as well. The most recent one was at Skupos. I had a product brought in to build a product team. Along with that, I also built a data science team because of what we do. What attracted me to EdCast is first of all the space itself, which is a talent and experience management, and we call ourselves Netflix or Spotify of learning.

Our founder, who I have a lot of deep respect for, is a serial entrepreneur and has done multiple startups with successful exits backed by a top-tier basis. This is for startups. He’s defined a category as the founder, and the opportunity for AI in the space, which already we are a leader in that, to do even more, especially in areas like one of my personal interests is reinforcement learning. It is where a lot of work has been done in the enterprise world and supervised and semi-supervised learning, what you do with labeled data. Tapping into human experts and how they think, how they work and how they learn translating that into what you can do in talent and experience management, I think there is an enormous opportunity there in a product suite like what we have at EdCast. It attracted me to come in and be the head of AI Products at EdCast.

From a timing point of view, as well as from the alignment of the market trends, the need in the market and there are technology trends, based on what you mentioned, it’s all coming and gelling together. Where there are a stronger need and a pull in the marketplace, be the sales team, be the marketing team, even for that matter, the product teams and even for the HR. You’ve got different functions who are constantly wanting the individuals to always up their game and be learning from the different learning management platforms or the knowledge management platforms. On top of that tying the AI, figuring out the patterns, figuring out what works well and what is best suited for this individual based on his or her learning curve, tying those two pieces, those are exciting patterns of trends that are aligning. From what you’re doing at EdCast, how do you define or how do you look at the vision and the roadmap for a product? You don’t need to get into the confidential but broadly, how do you define that?

It goes back to the first question we started our show with about understanding the market and having a unique product proposal. One thing that is unique about our environment and that our founder, Karl Mehta, who is a pioneer in this space. The company got started at Stanford. He worked with a lot of thought leaders in that space. In many ways, we are defining a category and there are other companies that came into it and we have great traction in some of the big enterprises like Boston Consulting Group and NASSCOM in India to name a few.

B2B 5 | Go To Market Strategy
Go To Market Strategy: Relying on subject-matter experts is something every business should consider when delving into areas out of their expertise.

 

One of the things from a product leadership standpoint, especially in the AI space that we constantly look at is you have a real problem that you’re solving now. If you think about learning experience management and experience management, you’re thinking about giving a person in an enterprise, giving his or her role about the department that she is in and the role she does, how do we provide the most personalized, relevant, contextualized and timely content to that person? What then helps that person in her journey? Brenda was a software developer, but she wants to go into product management. Sarah is not a person who had successfully made that transition. We will be able to connect the experience, the journey and the pathways that Sarah went to and make that available to Brenda so that she can have a similar experience.

That value of being able to learn from another person and not only that individual content but also her specific journey is invaluable. If you also think about from the context of as a leader in my organization, I’m trying to do a big change management initiative and I want to know who are the people with the right skillsets that’s out there. You can think about cohorts or subclasses of people with similar skills that help me understand the landscape. The reason I also brought up reinforcement learning is because, in addition to what you can learn with existing label data, a lot of work with human experts feeding into the overall pipeline, you can make it even better.

From a strategy standpoint, that’s how I look at it. Think about the immediate value that you’re creating, but you have a long-term vision of where you want to go. That’s where the partnership between a product and a go-to-market is critical. You need to be constantly listening to your customer and being customer-centric, but as a product manager or a product management leader, you can’t be everywhere. You need to partner closely with the GTM team who are constantly talking to customers and how do you learn and partner with the real customers? Refining your roadmap or learning more from how they’re receiving or saving it are all very important aspects.

You mentioned about product and then you mentioned about go-to-market. In your mind, it looks like you are seeing them as two different entities versus in my mind, I see go-to-market as a product, you’ve got marketing, you’ve got the revenue teams and you’ve got customer success. Based on constraints on the organizational chart and leaders, there’s no one central function that has a complete interview, other than maybe the GM or the CEO. That’s one of the challenges for me personally. I’m trying to address and figure out what is the right way to address this, because go-to-market, you can say for a product, “You’ve got a vision and a roadmap that you need to execute and deliver against.”

For marketing, “You’ve got these various campaigns and programs, even sales enablement are launched for this customer even.” You need to do that. From sales, “You’ve got this quarterly quota and you can implement ABM or several other tactics. Go figure it out and get your sales revenue goals hit for the company.” Customer service is similar. Coming back to the earlier question, I want to put you in the hot seat about your thought process of product and then this go-to-market. Would you reconsider the perspective?

Start-up businesses must always have a grand vision of where they want to be as the first step. Share on X

It varies from company to company. It also varies from the stage of the product. Company to company would mean well-established market leader in one space, versus a startup defining a new category or getting into the space. Your point is well-taken that if we think in silos, we cannot be successful. That’s where I would start off with. If product is only thinking, “I need to work with engineering, build a product. I got my input from marketing. I know where to go but I’m going to build it on my own.” If marketing on the other hand thinks only about, “I need to do campaigns and product has given me all the materials. I’ll measure it to a tee and I’ll get successful.” Sales think about, “I’ve got a product. I’ve got my data collaterals. I’m going to go and sell it.”

The point you’re making is you need to be joining the hip in these functions. In many ways, the organized small structure would vary from company to company, but that full alignment in that journey about how you started with a pain point for our customer and then how you position the product. You mentioned an important stakeholder with a customer success, especially in a cloud world, “How am I keeping my retention rate to be 95% or above?” Making them delightful customers as opposed to make the sell. Even though we would execute in silos, if there’s such a thing, we need to be aligned on the strategy, joined in the hip all throughout. There are various mechanisms that you can have to go to and not having a regular product council where all the stakeholders meet constantly.

Those are all the mechanics of doing it. The key point here is that the leaders are fully aligned across all of that. I couldn’t agree more on that. The reason I brought up about the stage of the company is in a startup, all of them could be together. One person could be wearing the hats, especially go-to-market and product together. The other thing I want to make is that even when you have grown up or you’re a part of a big company, product management, since that’s my area of focus, always has this component for outbound versus inbound. Your inbound product management is more focused on building the product and having the right engineering partnership. The outbound is always about working with your customer-facing or customer success or sales and marketing. That partnership collaboration, the sooner you have it, as opposed to, “I’m going to go and build it on my own,” is what makes people successful. It’s a continuous journey and that alignment is needed across all three of them. I want to go back and say that I’m 100% in agreement with you. We have that status and the alignment, and we should be thinking end-to-end, but then execution maybe you do it in your little area.

That’s the point. In the big picture, you have one go-to-market team thinking in one direction, but then when you get into the execution and tactics, you cannot have the majority or all of the product and marketing and sales in one direction. If it’s a new product versus a mature product, each person or each role will have their own responsibilities. This is where you need to be dialed in and you need to have silos. Silos have come into existence for a reason, but there’s also a constant theme. Someone or a team within a company has to be thinking about the cross-functional aspect. Going back to what you mentioned which is you got the big picture and then you got the mechanics of the QBR and the weekly or the bi-weekly sprints, if you go back to either the current role or the last one or two roles, what would you say as an example and something that strikes your mind as to, “We as a team have achieved a wonderful go-to-market?” Does any of that come to mind for you?

People always talk about pivoting being a way of life in startup, which is in many ways true. If you look at a journey of a startup, you might have started with something, but you ended up with something else altogether. However, I call it pivoting with a plan. You don’t do pivoting and say, “This didn’t work. I’ll go and try the other one.” The successful startups always start with a grand vision of, “Here’s the space that I’m going after and then I’m trying it here,” but they always think about the other areas. Going back to your point, the way things come together, and I can give a few examples where in my previous one, we had different customer segments that we were thinking, “Our product is applicable to all of them.”

B2B 5 | Go To Market Strategy
Go To Market Strategy: It’s okay to pursue multiple things at once, but always have one thing as your true calling.

 

As the team came together to QBR and our multiple stakeholders, learning from customers and our product deployment, we honed it down and said, “No, this is a big enough space. If you think about the US versus the global market, and you think about the existing players or lack of existing players in there, let’s focus on that.” One area was like that. Instead of being multiple vertical-focused, we went ahead with one vertical. That was a well-enough market in a big market that led to our successful exit. If we had tried out multiple verticals, probably it wouldn’t have the same success. That is an outcome of having that honest dialogue on multi-login in which multiple stakeholders are coming together.

The point you bring up over there is critical. This is a challenge. Be it a small organization or even larger organizations, it’s about having that focus and the ability to say “no” to the rest of the opportunities. There’s that constant fear of missing out. It plays a lot in the minds of individuals, be junior med or even educators, but the successful go-to-market teams with the right leadership have that discipline of saying, “No, because we are going to focus on this one segment or initiative.” I bring up that point, it’s about that focus for not just for the next one month or one quarter, but it’s at least for a year.

In the product role, I always think about the fact that the most successful product managers are good at saying no to the right things. With experience, you get also better at it because there are many things that you can do, but how do you come up with it in a data-driven way? You can’t be right all the time, you can’t predict the future, but how do you have a framework working with multiple stakeholders, the framework of evaluating where you want to go, whether it’s the big picture about what products and portfolio you would have, down to at the end of a BM level, what features you’re building? That’s supercritical.

Going back to a story that you mentioned. Normally, we’re talking about product language here. You mentioned Brenda and Sarah, the two personas. You did a good job in framing that story because that’s clearly etched in my mind. You’ve done that bit of storytelling really well. The Brenda and Sarah example that you mentioned, clearly you got the charter as to how you can bring or help people like Brenda and Sarah within the different parts of the organization, and were looking to make that career change or thinking about how to grow in their roles. From a view point of the coming months, what are your top priorities? When you think of those top priorities, what do you see as potential hurdles and how do you plan to overcome those?

The key thing here is that product managers live by the roadmap. We as a product leader, one of the key roles is to build that roadmap. It’s not something you build and it’s a living document or artifact, and it needs to have two different aspects at a minimum. One is how you build and maintain something, which is more external focused. They’re going to talk to customers and partners. The other one is how you build something and maintain it, which is more internal focused working with the engineering and the customer success team.

The most successful product managers are good at saying no to the right things. Share on X

That aspect, that’s why you’re only thinking about getting the multiple sets of working together, quarterbacking that is something I enjoy and strongly believe in. Whether it’s product council or other QBR mechanisms that you have, that aspect of thinking from a portfolio all the way down to the tangibles of the story level, epic stories and the agile world, is how I think about and constantly measuring it. One important stakeholder I left out, which a lot of times is now subsumed within the product team is the user experience team. Sometimes you have that in a design team is out of even product.

Thinking about the customer journey and doing some rapid prototyping validation with a customer is a key part of it. That’s the other thing that I’ve missed out over there, which is once you have that working with some lighthouse customers, maybe your customer advisory board or whatever form it might be. That’s where another touchpoint between the go-to-market function and the product function is super critical. You want to be thoughtful about, given the set of customers I have, what are the segments that I can play in? Having great representations from each of those, because you could otherwise be building a product which feels nice to SMB market or one part of SMB market, but it doesn’t apply to enterprise or the other way around if you’re going after both of those as an example.

Thank you for bringing attention to something that I omitted and something that we’ll keep in mind going forward is the user experience and the design team are a key component of the go-to-market aspect as well.

It’s a good point because it’s not only the segments and the hypothesis of the prototyping at the early part of the journey, but also having product analytics once the product is in place and working with customer success and product together about whatever we set out to do, whether it’s working or not, measuring it. That input is super important for your roadmap. Things that you thought will work but didn’t work, and then you did a good amount of A/B testing initially, but then later on the product is in production and then people are using it. Learning from it and having that feedback into your product roadmap.

Can you share some of the tools that you use for analytics? I know for marketing and even for sales, we had a market tech stack and the sales tech stack. For product and for analytics, what is your tech stack look like?

B2B 5 | Go To Market Strategy
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Fortunately now, there are a lot of products available. In the interest of being vendor-neutral, I won’t name names, but the way I would call out is that in a product world, as compared to several years ago, first of all you have extra tools now that does portfolio planning of product, all the way down to creating roadmaps that you can share with stakeholders. There used to be days when you would have Excel spreadsheets and you have PowerPoint slides or Google slides. That’s what you do and it’s not a scalable model, but now there is structured content that you can put in all the way from your product portfolio planning that goes down to integration with your actual delivery mechanisms and to your Wiki. I’ve used quite a few of them in my product leadership role and pluses and minuses, but I won’t name any particular product. That one area, let’s call it product portfolio and then the roadmapping tool.

The other big area is in learning about the product itself and how it’s being used. We are not fortunate to have our products. It used to be that you will take Google Analytics and you try to fit it, embed it into it and there’s a Google Analytics expert who gives those reports of you. Now they are all down to specific areas that it can go after. You also have tools in the design space about how you’re building prototypes, and that leads us to Adobe Suite of design tools, but tools that integrate nicely with it. The key point is measuring what you’re able to do and not the set of tools that are out there. A lot of good literacy around the web, since I’ve used multiple of them and was successful, there have been multiple startups and big companies. I won’t name names in specific, but those two categories as a product person, you need to keep an eye on. The thing about roadmapping too, some of this can be a bit expensive or even the analytics too. For a startup, my advice would be to start with what you can do with free tools first. There’s the advantage of a paid version of a product as you scale-up, but start with free tools and then move up where you have a great subscription. It is how I’ve successfully used it.

In short, use Google Tags and spreadsheets when you’re low on budget and in a startup mode. The key point is to chase the habit within the product teams to use the more mature and advanced tools.

That reminds me of something that whether you are using a spreadsheet or a tool as an example, there are some fundamental structural things that you have in the roadmap. I made the distinction between external versus internal. In the internal one, I’m using examples from my AI world. You’re writing a recommendation engine, so you want to think about collaborative filtering. You want to think about your metrics factor addition. Those things are needed for your data scientists and your engineering team, but to the end customer, you are talking about personalized, contextualized content that you’re delivering. Having a taxonomy hierarchy of your components and roadmap, those are needed irrespective of whether you are using a mapping tool or using your Excel or PowerPoint. If you’re low on budget, that still doesn’t free you up for not having that taxonomy. It’s also easier than once you have taught to in that structured manner to move from what you have currently to a tool.

You did mention a couple of things that you are excited about and something that you are constantly keeping our eye on and studying. You mentioned various aspects of data science. Can you go a little bit deep into the things that you are looking out for and you are curious?

Each one of us has blind spots. We need to start there and look to the mentors to point them out. Share on X

Especially in the AI space, there are three major parts. If you’re not thinking about general AI, if you think about machine learning in particular, the three major parts, you have your supervised learning, semi-supervised learning and enforcement learning. There have a lot of advances being done, especially in the enterprise world now in the first two areas. If you talk about reinforcement learning, people still talk a lot about robotics or talk about games, but the applicability of that enterprise is enormous. That place is where I’m interested about. A related area of that is transfer learning. When you’re in robotics, you have trained your left arm on the robot. When you’re training the right arm, you don’t start from scratch. You transfer the knowledge that you had on your left arm.

A similar context institutionalizing that in the enterprise world, the reinforcement, in particular, there’s this sub-domain that’s called inverse reinforcement learning. You start with thinking about an expert first and then the other way around. Reinforcement learning has the concept of aids and rewards. You think from the other way around. That’s a sub-area that I’m particularly interested in and I do a lot of reading and I follow the literature. I’m deep into the scientific and academic community, what they are doing with their applicability into the enterprise world.

It looks like you lean on the scientific community and the various books or technical journals when you’re going deeper into those. If you go up one level from a go-to-market, are there resources that you lean on to improve your go-to-market management?

I would take a step back and talk about my journey as opposed to this specific area. Since I’ve been fortunate to have worked in multiple domains, that’s something that excites me because my constant team has been data, AIML in the product side build, but the domains have been different. I would give an example. When I joined Xtime, which was a successful startup bought by Cox Enterprises, that’s an automotive domain and I’m not even a car person. I drive an old car and for me, it’s a mode of transportation from point A to point B. I questioned myself, I’m excited about the business opportunity, but I’m not a car person. There are a lot of people who are passionate car lovers.

The first thing I did when I joined was, “How can I learn from experts?” A dear friend of mine, Gregg Manson, who ran Customer Success at Xtime. He was an amazing expert, who was a VP of Operations at AutoNation, a multi-billion-dollar company, the biggest car dealership in the country. Gregg taught me so much about what happens in that world. Tapping into him and it was a synergistic relationship because every time I’m thinking about how do I have a prototype with some of the customers in that space, I know I can rely on Gregg. I also can get things refined with his thinking. Using Gregg as an example, I always rely on not only what you can learn, but tapping into experts and especially business apps. I also tap regularly with my Kellogg Business Community in the Kellogg School of Management over those professors or people who are in the industry. There’s so much I can learn even in half an hour conversation with an expert. I’m trying to face a lot of materials that’s available as literature.

B2B 5 | Go To Market Strategy
Deep Work (Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)

You bring up good points. This is something that I’ve seen when I speak with other go-to-market leaders is it’s often that you don’t have expertise in all the functional areas that you need to do your job well in. Relying on subject matter experts and domain experts, the example that you mentioned about Gregg, where you needed to ramp up on the whole auto industry, that’s a great example. That’s something that I’ve heard from other go-to-market leaders as well as to how they ramp up their learning on the gaps, and where they need to figure out or get car parts and perspectives. Tying back to your example, which is as you’re building the product for Xtime, you also need to connect with the various personas in the auto industry. Who do you lean on?

It’s role-independent in some ways. Mentoring aspect is important. When I made that transition from engineering to product management, a couple of people who helped me a lot who are still mentors for me to this day, Walter Hauck and Tony Gazikas, were the CIO and CTO of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. I knew them even before I spent some time there, but this was while I was still at Oracle. As an ex-engineer and engineering manager, I thought I was good at problem-solving or a person problem solving a good framework. What they helped me was refining my thinking about the customer at a business but also, more importantly, the people management aspect of it. Pfizer as a company is well-known for its framework around it. Particularly from both of those leaders, I learned so much about the competencies that the product leader needs for the people management aspect. I’m grateful to have them as mentors. I reached out to them with questions and thoughts of scenarios I’m going to run at.

The value of having those mentors, you can accelerate your thought process. Mentors are key in pointing out the blind spots, which you may not be aware of. Each one of us has blind spots. We need to start that and look to the mentors to point that out. Bhaskar, it’s a great conversation. You’ve shared a lot of value to myself and for my company as to what I should be thinking in terms of go-to-market. You also shared a lot of value to the various readers and the product, marketing, revenue and customer experience teams. Thanks to you, you pointed out even design and user-experience teams. These are all great points that you shared. The last question that I have is if you were to rewind the time and go back in time, what would you tell your 18 or 20-year-old self now that you’ve seen your journey and where you are now?

First of all, thank you for having me. Any discussions like this, I learn a lot as well. Your key point about thinking holistically and not thinking silos, the GTM aspect is spot on. That’s a takeaway for me not to execute in silos but think together in that space and how we do it better. That’s a constant thing. Thank you for doing that. I love Jeff Bezos’ point about the regret minimization framework as the way he approaches life. I won’t say I have too many regrets in that aspect, but I would say one thing about it in that as much as I enjoy being in different verticals and aspects. It can be also tough. One book I’m reading now is called Range by David Epstein. He talks about generalists. It’s an interesting book especially for GTM folks to look into. If I could go back, I mess with this all day, I was confused about which direction to go because I love literature or that big picture world, as opposed to taking in a bit of micro-level like engineering problem-solving.

I would tell myself, “Don’t be confused.” My mom was a big influence on it saying, “Go down the engineering path. You can still come back.” That’s what I did essentially. I went to engineering and then my MBA got me into great talk partners who came from Humanities and Liberal Arts background. It’s a cliche, but the journey is more important than the destination. I would say don’t be confused and whatever your passion is, follow that. I would live it that. It may be not a thing I can say is that my daughter who’s in high school is having a similar moment. I see she’s good at writing and she is good at math. I’m giving her the same advice, “Follow your heart, but keep in mind that it’s okay to have interests in multiple, and you’ll learn what’s the right calling for you.”

On that note, a book recommendation and someone that I started admiring is this author called Cal Newport. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his son.

I’m not.

I would recommend that for you and something that you can share with your daughter as well. One book is around the whole concept of Deep Work, where these days, our human minds are distracted. Shallow thinking is becoming more and more pervasive, versus if you ask someone to sit down for 60, 90 minutes or even 120 minutes, and do one thing, people struggle now. His book on deep work is one and something that I would recommend for your daughter and for the kids out there, and the parents out there as well as they’re guiding their kids is So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

Thank you for sharing that. I’ll keep that in mind.

Thank you for a wonderful conversation, Bhaskar. I enjoyed the conversation. Personally, I’ve taken a lot of learnings. I appreciate the time that you’ve taken.

It was great chatting with you. I’ve got a lot of takeaways myself. Good luck with the rest of the sessions you have. I look forward to learning more from the shows that you will have. Thank you.

 

Important Links

 

About Bhaskar Deka

B2B 5 | Go To Market StrategyProduct & Data Science Executive with experience spanning diverse functional areas, including product management & marketing, and engineering management. Successfully led product management, data science, and engineering teams in both established public companies (Oracle, Informatica) as well as start-up/young companies through successful exits – funded by top tier VCs such as Bessemar Venture Partners, Insight Partners, and Toba Capital.

Product Management experience includes leading product strategy, definition, go-to-market strategies for product suites in multiple data and business domains. Extensive experience in scaling product organization from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Engineering Management experience includes leading engineering in a start up environment to build and launch a global online marketplace used by millions of users around the world.

Deep technical knowledge in areas of Cloud – Software as a Service(Saas), Infrastructure as a Service(Iaas), big data, analytics and AI/machine learning. Certifications in AI and Deep Learning from Stanford University.

MBA from Kellogg School of Management, a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Boston University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology, India.

Rhythm Guitarist, Tennis player, and Biker.

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! http://stratyve.com/

Marketing Across The Spectrum: From Startups To Industry Leaders With Shashi Kiran, CMO Of Aryaka

Posted on by stratyve_ant2yf
B2B 3 | Aryaka CMO

B2B 3 | Aryaka CMO

 

Marketing is the perfect job for people with co-dominant brains because it demands both right-brain creativity and left-brain execution. Before becoming the CMO of Aryaka Networks, Shashi Kiran had more than two decades of experience in business and technology roles across a spectrum of organizations, ranging from early-stage startups to industry leaders. Trained as an engineer but tempered in the industry as a marketer and a leader, Shashi has had the most experience in marketing and product line management, with some roles straddling the two. He joins Vijay Damojipurapu on the show to talk about the nuances of marketing for early-stage startups versus that of more established organizations. They touch upon the importance of getting everyone on the same page as to what marketing means, building a dynamic marketing team and culture, keeping the team focused on set marketing goals, and the biggest challenges and opportunities for marketing in the present day.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Marketing Across The Spectrum: From Startups To Industry Leaders With Shashi Kiran, CMO Of Aryaka

I have with me Shashi Kiran, the CMO of Aryaka. As a way of introduction, as well as background, the reason why I’m looking forward to this conversation with you, Shashi, is your track record with various industry leaders including Cisco and Aryaka, as well as your involvement in the whole startup ecosystem. It’s a fascinating and exciting background. Welcome to the show, Shashi.

Thank you for having me, Vijay.

I have a bunch of questions for us to get started. As you know, this is the show around B2B go-to-marketing. How would you define go-to-market?

I look at it as the way to transfer value from the point of creation to point of consumption. B2B is a fairly complicated landscape with different decision-making levels, different target personas, different geographies, and regulatory requirements. In this context, to be able to rise above the noise, there’s a degree of brand awareness that you need to bring in. There is a greater degree of messaging clarity that you need to bring in terms of clearly identifying who you are, what you do, differentiation, your value proposition. Being able to feel the resonance of that value through different stakeholders, whether it be your employees, salesforce, channel partners, technology relations, or customers. That is all of what is driven by a go-to-market entity. It’s a broad foray, but if you can successfully transfer that value from the intent of the creator to the need of the consumer, then that’s a job well done.

In your last line, you hit it well, which is you shift your focus more into the consumer that you understand. That’s where the empathy and the listening are key not just from a CMO individual perspective, but how do you build that DNA into the outbound go-to-market organization. I think that’s key. A funny story and more of an incident from early in my career. The way I was thinking about go-to-market is typically from a traditional product marketing outbound which is, “We got this launch coming up. How do we line up the various things, including the collateral, positioning, messaging, sales enablement, as far as the pipeline goals we need to hit?” That is go-to-market. It’s a one-time event. That was my notion earlier many years ago, but then my perspective shifted. You validated and explained that well. That’s a great perspective. What will also be valuable for the audience over here is if you can share your journey from a personal as well as from a professional perspective on how you grew in the ranks of marketing and how you became a CMO, that would be great.

I’ve been fortunate in my journey. I’m an engineer by education and a marketer by profession. It was clear to me as I was doing my undergrad that I wanted to go into something that involved people, a balance of creativity and logic. In marketing, you see it as a bit of a right-brain as well as left-brain activity. There is a lot of creativity that you need to apply but to the point that you were making earlier about doing a launch or doing something in a more tactical way, executing against a certain deliverable, that requires a logical approach. Usually, the most successful marketing organizations are the ones that can combine creativity with execution.

I enjoy that. Fortunately, most of the jobs that I had, the responsibility that I was given far outweighed the title I had. That allowed me to learn more, make more mistakes upfront, and establish a good network of people that value you and you value them. Technology becomes a by-product in such environments because technology keeps changing. You have to still perfect your craft of how do you message, position, scale and execute. My career has been a combination of some startups and some larger companies. I’ve had roles in product line management with P&L responsibility. I’ve had marketing roles and roles that straddle the two like in my position. I oversee the product management technology partnerships as well as marketing in all of its forms.

When you reference companies like Cisco, I had more of a product and solutions marketing role there. The portfolio I had was large, tens of billions of dollars. It was one of the largest portfolios that Cisco had in the networking domain. At the same time, we realized that in a lot of things that we do, there are multiple fast through mechanisms whether it be our sales teams or channel partners or other stakeholders. What we create and what we put out goes through a series of filters. Sometimes, it takes a long time for you to realize the impact of what you did. There isn’t an immediate feedback loop. I have worked in such companies where I have scaled a lot of these go-to-market initiatives, helping grow businesses from zero to multibillion-dollars in revenue. We’re taking advantage of ecosystems that are built with a lot of sales teams, large channel partners organizations, direct marketing or direct sales.

The most successful marketing organizations are the ones that can combine creativity with execution. Share on X

That has been one element of my DNA. At the same time, for the last few years, I have been more immersed in startups. After I decided to leave Cisco, I joined an early-stage startup, which was to help determine the new product-market fit and getting an idea off the ground. That ended up getting far fairly quickly at a series of startups in the cloud-native application delivery space. I joined a mid-state startup, which was building routes to market. It had an Israeli engineering team. For me, it was great to work with that culture. We also solidified a lot of routes to market. Part of this journey had also been getting in front of investors to raise funding. We raised the next round of funding.

I was looking to join a later state startup where you can apply these principles of scaling to grow. Amongst the other offers, Aryaka came my way and looking at the opportunity, I felt it was a good combination of a company that had already established a good product-market fit, had solid technology. The problem to solve was in terms of scaling the go-to-market. I grabbed it with both hands and I have been with this company for a few years now. We have the product management team as part of the CMO organization as well as the sales development team. It gives us a greater amount of ability to qualify things at the head end and thereby target people and messaging as well as streamline a lot of things, which is a positive thing.

Startups require more hands-on abilities, more confidence, a propensity to make mistakes, learn from them, and also be able to get feedback and not have a thin skin. You need to be able to absorb the feedback and react quickly in terms of changes that we want to make. A lot of other companies give you the ability to apply yourself at scale and it comes with its own share of complexities. For me, I’ve enjoyed both of these worlds. I frequently look at how do you infuse the startup mentality into a bigger company and how you bring that big company scaling function into a startup. That’s the dynamic that I enjoy solving.

You’ve touched upon several points over there. Initially, you were growing up in the product organization, but at some point in time you felt the urge to move more into the marketing side, the mix of both analytical as well as the creative side. You also touched upon an important point, which the people in Silicon Valley will resonate with this well, which is at some point in time, you want to experience that startup culture, the startup DNA. I felt that as well. I’ve worked at larger companies including Ericsson, Microsoft and Juniper Networks. I felt that urge to grow and go into smaller companies as well as earlier stage companies including seed, series A and several others.

I clearly see that and you have grown in the ranks well. The other question or the thought process that comes to my mind and I would like to chime in on this is, what do you see are the nuances or the variations? How do you think about go-to-market from an early stage, finding a product-market fit position point of view versus scaling and growth? Clearly there’s an overlap but there are also different approaches to both.

Marketing is a bit of a misunderstood profession. What I mean by that is when you talk to ten different people, their view of marketing can be ten different viewpoints depending on the lens you are viewing it from. Some will look at it purely as a branding and advertising activity. Some will look at it as generating collateral, getting your leads ready and a website. Some will look at it as a demand generation, “Where are my leads coming from?”

If we can be more blunt there, you can also get to hear from other teams, “Can you put some lipstick on the pig and make it look pretty.”

I’m sure we have made a lot of pigs look pretty in our careers. The point I’m trying to make is you can’t take one thing and say, “I’m done in the context of marketing.” It’s a nuanced profession. You can go deep in certain areas and you need to be good enough to connect the dots in the other areas. There are some people who come in especially when you get into the level of a CMO. I look at a lot of my peers. Some people come in purely from an advertising or a branding background. They’re good at proliferating the message on a global scale. Some others come in from a product background. They understand how to position message and craft the differentiation. Some others are mostly on a demand gen level.

B2B 3 | Aryaka CMO
Aryaka CMO: When you talk to 10 different people, their view of marketing can be 10 different viewpoints, depending on the lens they’re viewing it from.

 

Regardless of which function they come in from, maybe product event or some cross the chasm from engineering to marketing, it is important to see what is the problem that needs to be solved, and apply yourself into taking away that weak link from your marketing value chain. I look at different companies that I have been involved in. In some you hired a good product-market fit. The challenge was how do you let more people know about it.

In other cases, you had a good degree of brand awareness, but when you start to bring something out, how do you ensure that you’re maybe not cannibalizing something that’s already there or do it in a way that is non-disruptive? Those challenges will vary and you have to look at it in terms of the stage of the company, and what fuel do you want to put into the fire and see how can you scale things. It also goes into hiring the DNA in different companies at different stages. To see, is that the right background or DNA that we want to bring in? Those are all that’s going to make that whole journey work better.

Let me put you a bit more into the hot seat position over here. I’m sure you must have encountered this in a couple of startups or even the other areas. I don’t think there’s a problem in the larger companies. I’ve not seen or heard from the other marketing leaders. The question to you is I’m sure he must have dealt with situations where the CEO doesn’t get what marketing is even though they hire a CMO or the head of marketing. How do you tackle that situation?

You have to educate people and you have to get them to your point of view. That means being proactive in terms of sharing your thoughts, getting the buy-in early. It isn’t necessarily just the CEO. It could be a lot of other people, board members, sales leaders or maybe somebody even in the media around those communities. The thing that you’ll encounter is everybody has an opinion about marketing. Part of the challenge as well as the opportunity is how do you rationalize some of these opinions? Everybody wants to get involved in naming a new product or creating a tagline. Everybody feels that the version they’ve come up with is the best. You have to be able to synthesize these things.

On one hand, you have to ensure everybody is participating because you want them to feel a sense of ownership with what you bring out, which is where you create a ripple effect. You’re not going to get that scale, the ripple effect if your own organization, your own CEO, your own sales team doesn’t resonate with what you’re trying to put out. They need to be active stakeholders. For that reason, the participative nature of any engagement is important. The second aspect is once you’ve framed your PCs, once you have taken these opinions, eventually it’s your call to decide on the path you want to go. CEOs understand that well with the consensus builder’s decision-makers. They do understand that, “Yes, I’ve got these ten opinions but there is a reason I’m going to pick one.”

As a CEO or a leader, that is something you are paid to do. You have to make a decision, take a stand, and then comes the aspect of making sure others understand the reason for the stand that you have taken. In an organization that is vibrant and scalable, the best messages are not the ones that the creator is articulating, but what somebody who’s two steps away from the creator is able to articulate without things getting lost in translation. It means they need to absorb it with the same degree of clarity that you do and feel as if it is their own thoughts to carry. If we can make that, there is a bit of education, stakeholder engagement, and then stakeholder buy-in, then you will see a lesser degree of confusion and more involvement. That is the recipe for successful scaling.

You touched upon the messaging and you come up or launched a new product line. I’ve seen that with my several clients, which is each team member be it in sales or be it a GM, or even the founder or the CEO, each of them has an opinion around what the messaging should be as well as what the tagline should be. Taglines are a catchy “sexy” activity and everyone wants to get involved. At the same time, there is that aspect of the point which we discussed and you touched upon earlier, which is it’s not about us, it’s about the resonance with the consumer.

Will it resonate with that customer? That’s key and there’s that whole gray area. You will know when you launch it. You will only know it maybe 3, 6 or 12 months later on. Let’s dive a bit more into how you organize your marketing team. You touched upon that lightly, but you have the product organization as well as the outbond marketing organization. I would presume it’ll include the dimension, brand and creator. Can you share a bit more about how you structure your teams?

The general philosophy of hiring is to take somebody who complements you. Share on X

Each of these organizations brings teams in based on what problem we’re trying to solve. In my role, I have three leaders reporting to me. One is the VP of product management, the other is the VP of product and solutions marketing, and we onboarded a VP of demand gen. We also have a marketing operations team as well. Each of these functions has its own specific mandate. You will find these functions to be fairly common across different organizations. Depending on the size of the organization and the activities that they are undertaking, you will see more or less people being added to it. It’s more important to look at the type of people that we hire in general and this is probably more exacerbated now during the pandemic where everybody’s working from home.

We had to onboard people through Zoom interviews that we have never had a chance to meet in person. For them also, they have to come up to speed on a number of things being home, and without necessarily the luxury of a whiteboarding session or somebody who can walk them through things. Culture becomes important. At the same time, we look at people who don’t require a lot of hand-holding. They should be able to make decisions on their own. There is a degree of empowerment that we need to put in where they feel confident to take decisions, make mistakes. The important thing is to be able to create clear pathways for communication, information sharing, and a feedback loop. These are things that I keep pressing on. Generally, the philosophy of hiring for me is to take somebody who complements you.

I give the analogy of if all of the fingers of our hand were the same lengths, you could never close it into a fist function. The team is your fist. You do need fingers of different sizes that come together with complementary strengths. That in a way goes to form a formidable team. If you are to hire everybody who thinks like you, if you’re to hire a yes-man team, then that fist is never going to get developed. It’s like being in an army where everybody wants to march in sync. You will never get the diversity of opinions and hard processes.

If you double click and you asked your team to work on a major campaign which runs over the next 1, 2, 3 quarters. Do you structure your team in such a way that you have the product marketing, owning the messaging, and then at the same time closely working with the creator, writer, content, social media, and demand gen? That’s one thing I’ve seen with the various clients, as well as the other organizations. There’s a challenge as to how to structure because you are the CMO and you own the entire marketing function, but if one doesn’t pay attention, it’s easy to get logged into silos. Imagine product marketing having their own set of KPIs, content and social having their own set of KPIs around each. How do you overcome that challenge as a CMO in breaking down silos even within a marketing organization?

One of the key things is to make sure that everybody is sharing information. We have to proactively create forums for people to share the work that they’re doing. I view the key aspect of roles such as ourselves is being able to connect the dots. Each dot could represent as a certain function. That function needs to be good on its own merit in a standalone capacity. If you want to drive a multiplicity of outcomes in a powerful way, then we as leaders need to take ownership of connecting the dots. Part of it is the culture that we establish where everybody understands not just their roles and responsibilities but how they function relative to others. Who to reach out to for help? Who do you offer help to and you do something?

There are fleeting problems when any new team getting formed. You can bring some tools in that will help ease the process. In my career, I have never seen a tool substitute genuine human intent and the need to collaborate. We have to foster that and make sure everybody understands that it is for the common good and establish common meetings, common information sharing mechanisms, common goals where the interdependencies are clearly mapped out. You do this for the first few times then it becomes second nature to everybody.

Any new person that you bring on board assimilates into that culture, that workflow. It’s at the formational stage that we need to think of some of these things. Maybe you grow to such an extent where you don’t know all the members of your own team. There have been instances in my career in the past where the team sizes were big that I may not be knowing intimately what every person does. That is a different order where you need to make sure your leaders and the processes at all there to help make that happen.

One of your primary jobs is to break down silos in such a way that there is a constant sharing of information. That sounds like that is a big goal and focus for you and the marketing team. Do you also think about and frame shared KPIs or goals in the context of a campaign?

B2B 3 | Aryaka CMO
Aryaka CMO: Leaders need to take ownership of connecting the dots if they want to drive a multiplicity of outcomes in a powerful way.

 

We have been self-disciplined about it. At an organization level, we were aligning to things like OKRs, but OKRs are not meant to break down into a lot of execution level information. It’s for common goal setting. If you truly want to have predictable outcomes, then it is better that you have a good line of sight into the execution elements. This helps bring better structure across the different members of the team. It also aligns expectations, if you do execution reviews and if they present their plans, it allows you to connect the dots better. We have been disciplined about setting our goals for each quarter in a way that it aligns to more or less the day-to-day activities of the individuals across the different teams, and then map that to some of the higher-order objectives. If we can create that linkage, then it brings more predictability for us across the entire team.

For the leaders that I’ve spoken with and I’m in touch with, that’s the intent. It’s easier said than done. There is a challenge of what I’ve seen play out. There are quarterly offsites for doing it like a quarterly planning or QPRs. There’s great outcome, great energy during that first couple of days. People lose sight a week or even a month later. We identify the goals, but a week, a month later typically if you’re not conscious, we switched into a firefighting mode and we lose sight of the goals that we set out. When it comes to the end of the quarter, we’re scrambling. I’m sure you can relate to that. How do you handle or how do you try to avoid such situations at Aryaka?

Some of our goals are meant to be through the year. For example, we say, “We will grow at 40%.” That’s a goal at a high level. That number can be taken and a sales team can interpret its action plan for that differently. The marketing team can implement its action plan differently. I’m giving an example of how everybody can take a higher-order organizational goal, then develop plans in a way that allows you to achieve some of those objectives.

If you’re saying, “I’m going to grow 40% or 50%,” or whatever the number is across the year, it means that you need to have a certain set of building blocks in your own daily, monthly, quarterly cadence that will allow you to drive more predictability. We’ve been disciplined about taking something like that and then saying, “What should our quarterly plan be? What new products are we going to introduce? What new launches are we going to do? What agencies are we going to bring onboard? How many opportunities are we going to commit ourselves so finance can model the revenue impact?”

Each of them boils down to certain initiatives, certain projects that become the quarterly big rocks that we track, and then we communicate it. Part of it is not just setting a goal for yourself, but I make it a point to announce our goals to the entire world. We proactively share it with almost the entire company even though they may or may not be interested in the marketing goals. The moment you stand on a rooftop and say, “This is my goal,” that’s your commitment to the universe. It automatically binds you to execute on that. The team has done a good job in terms of saying, “These are the big rocks we are going to commit to each quarter and here is how it fits into the bigger picture,” and then being able to manage, track, and build upon those. It’s always a work in progress but that’s the system that we have this time.

You’ve covered how you break down silos and how you help not just the marketing team, but even the entire organization, how you educate them about the marketing goals and how you execute via marketing sales or even the engineering or finance for that matter. Going into 2021, what do you see as the top 1 and 2 challenges and then the opportunities for marketing from a good market perspective?

We have adapted well. If you were to ask me in the March and April 2020 timeframe, we were all having a sense of trepidation in terms of how the organization is going to deal with this particular situation. How are our customers going to adapt? Are we going to lose business? Are we going to be able to attract employees of the right caliber? Are we going to be able to retain them? Are we going to be able to execute the programs that we said we would? Now, I look back on what has been somewhat of a tumultuous period in the last six months of 2020. We’ve done extremely well. We didn’t lose any customers. We gained a lot more that came our way because they liked the way we were helping them, manage change in their own business, and help them transform their infrastructure.

It’s been a company-wide effort. At the same time from a marketing perspective, we have hired some good talent. We haven’t lost any significant amount due to attrition. The teams are being fairly committed and meeting their timelines. We also try to have fun in the process. Everybody’s working from home and some have gone back to other cities than the cities where they were working globally. I don’t think we’re past this pandemic yet. I would like to say that we’ve all figured out how to adapt, deal with it, and portray a sense of confidence for ourselves, our customers, and it is business as usual. With that in mind, I don’t think we have any other way of saying this than to continue to challenge ourselves.

There is no one recipe for surefire success in this digital world. Rising above the noise is a process of constant experimentation. Share on X

The metrics that we have set for ourselves, we shouldn’t be watering those down. We should be sticking to our growth targets or product delivery timelines, and how we go to market with maybe partners. We’re looking at 2021 as being another year where we will continue to gain market share and increase messaging clarity. One area I’m personally looking to put more effort in is in elevating our brand. In the last 3 to 4 quarters, we have spent a lot of rejiggering our product mix, overhauling our pricing, then we completely refreshed our messaging, positioning websites, and then we started to put in a lot of building blocks for demand generation.

We’ll get more predictability, more intent-based data-driven activities. Now, I’m ready to scale all of those and put more emphasis on elevating the brand globally. That would be an area that I’m going to put more emphasis on even as we harden a lot of the foundations that we have laid across the teams and we won some good, big deals, some of the biggest in the ten-year-old history of Aryaka in the last quarter of 2020. We would want to continue to build upon that and scale our organization.

Kudos to you and the entire Aryaka team on that. You guys had a fascinating and fantastic quarter. I’m wishing you and the team the best so that you can continue to outpace and outshine yourself. This is great stuff, Shashi. Thanks for sharing a lot of details. As we head into wrapping up this show, the last couple of questions for you is, what are the top areas that you’re curious about specifically when it comes to go-to-market? What resources are you leaning on? You mentioned growing the brand awareness globally, that might be one area. I’ve seen leaders leaning on podcasts or even peer networks and rev gen, and a couple of other communities. What do you and your team lean on?

We are constantly experimenting there. I don’t think there is one recipe that is a surefire success all the time. Especially nowadays where a lot of activities have become digital and in-person events have been curtailed. There’s a lot more of an information overload, people are getting invited to more virtual events, a lot of emails, a lot more phone calls. We have to continue to figure out what pathways allow us to rise above the noise. It’s a process of constant experimentation. I wouldn’t say what worked for us two quarters ago is going to work for us this quarter because of the behavior shifts that are happening rapidly. We do multiple things. We have gotten into a place where we can predict certain outcomes, which it is always a hard thing to do for a marketing organization to be able to forecast and predict.

That’s the muzzle that we’re trying to bring about. We are investing in more intent-based tools and more data that has refined applying principles of AI and things like that where we can, and to create greater points of engagement and conversion. I don’t think we have any big challenges in terms of attracting more people to hear what we do, but we are now putting more focus on how many of them can we convert into being active engagers and buyers in taking the next step forward. Those are bringing in some interesting learning.

For Aryaka, your customers are a mix of enterprise and telcos. Can you share a bit more about the customer space?

We call ourselves a cloud-first run company. What we mean by that is we allow enterprises to get the network and security delivered as a service for them. Many of them are used to now consuming applications from the cloud as a service. Our theses are that the network should be no different. Can you make your network as easy to consume as you could any application from the cloud? Can you make it as responsive? Can you make it as agile? Can you make the experience to be overwhelmingly positive that there is no other solution that they would consider? We are a fully-managed solution for advanced wide area networks. We fall into the category of a managed SD WAN provider.

In reality, what we do is make it easy to consume network, as well as security. We’re seeing this convergence of the two happen and deliver that as a service globally to enterprises for any site or user. We have built out a global network. This is a layer two network with built-in application acceleration and optimization capabilities. We have established points of presence globally that allow us to target any knowledge worker with a sub-30-millisecond latency then we have an edge footprint, which is our services edge node. We can host security or remote access on top of that and connect to different cloud providers, SaaS providers or private clouds, essentially delivered multi-cloud networking. The whole construct of WAN including the last mile, we take ownership of getting away the complexity and being able to manage and deliver all of that as a service.

B2B 3 | Aryaka CMO
Aryaka CMO: You need to have a certain set of building blocks in your own daily, monthly or quarterly cadence that will allow you to drive more predictability.

 

Good luck to you and your team. Brand and growing the brand awareness is one piece, but then there’s also the whole notion of how do you track if you’re growing the brand because you won’t know it until 3, 6 or 12 months later. In addition, you need to continue to do your messaging, the portfolio pricing, as well as the whole dimension. One final question before I let you go, if you were to give a shout out to your peers in the industry, who are those top 2 or 3 good market leaders that you look up to who inspire you and who you learn from?

There are a lot of people that I learned from. Some of the people are not necessarily marketing people, but they do a ton of different ideas. Our CEO, Matt Carter, comes in from a marketing background himself, probably more from B2C marketing. You draw many of your inspirations from people in startup environments. A lot of CEOs are marketing savvy. A lot of my peers have gone through a similar journey as I have. Every time you get together and brainstorm, we try to reach out to each other and say, “What’s working in your role?” I’m also an advisor to a few startups and venture firms. I draw a lot of inspiration and ideas from people who are trying out something new for the first time. They haven’t cracked the go-to-market nut, but there’s bright directional learning that happens there. It’s a combination of these different people. I’ve had some good bosses in the past as well as much as I have right here.

Any names that you want to share?

The thing with that is I’m always going to leave somebody out. I would rather keep it more inclusive than offend somebody that I leave out.

Shashi, thanks for being on the show. Good luck to you and the whole Aryaka team.

 

Important Links

 

About Shashi Kiran

B2B 3 | Aryaka CMOA proven executive with 20+ years of experience in business and technology roles. I adopt a growth mindset and enjoy driving outcomes that create impact, value and deliver a positive experience. Building trust-based relationships based on integrity, authenticity and avoiding politics are core to my personality. I’ve been involved in marketing, sales, business development and product management at large global companies and smaller startups. Love solutions and connecting the dots to win big! Meritocracy, passion and humility are key ingredients of my team-building formula.

Recent focus areas include: Data center, Cloud, Networking, SD-WAN, Software, Automation, DevOps, SaaS, Security, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for service engagement across Enterprise and Service Provider markets

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! http://stratyve.com/

The Go-To-Market: From Rock Bands To Marketing With Reid Genauer 

Posted on by stratyve_ant2yf

 

Many marketing leaders and entrepreneurs stumble into the space by sheer discovery. For Reid Genauer, that is from starting a rock band all by himself, which eventually led him to learn the vocabulary and skills to go and transition into the marketing world. In this episode, he joins host, Vijay Damojipurapu, to share with us that colorful and bright career journey and the lessons it taught him that shaped his thinking as a marketing leader. Notably, he dives deep into the go-to-market that companies need to utilize. Reid also answers some key questions that are often faced by many leaders in the industry. How do you manage that debate between product finance and marketing? What are your goals for the next six to twelve months, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic going on? All of this and more in this insightful conversation.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

The Go-To-Market: From Rock Bands To Marketing With Reid Genauer 

I’m super thrilled and excited to have Reid Genauer on the show. As a way of introduction, Reid has a very colorful and bright career that started off in a rock band or music band all by himself, and then transitioned into the marketing world. Reid, welcome.

Thank you. It’s great to be here. My friends and family would describe me as colorful as well.

You have a very distinct bio in the sense that you didn’t start off in the marketing career. You started off doing your own music and rock band, but something triggered you to get into marketing. Can you share your thoughts on what led you to this journey?

As a teenager, I had a passion for music. There was no question in my mind that’s what I was going to do. I was going to go out and play in a rock band. I started writing songs in the seventh grade. My future is like this question mark. If that canvas was painted black waiting for the color, it was like a point of light that I headed towards. There is a whole side story about my musical life that’s interesting in achieving and chasing that certainty. I was supporting myself and then at the age of 22, 24, there was ten of us full-time doing this as bottoms up, DYI, which is the norm these days. This was in late ‘90s. We were a little ahead of the curve. I wouldn’t have called it this then, but looking back we needed strategy, positioning, infrastructure and go-to market.

What was fascinating is we bootstrapped it and learned these things as we went. After nearly ten years of doing that, I went to business school. I was like, “That was called strategy, positioning, product-market fit, go-to market in the forms of direct mail, newsletters and such promotion, etc.” We recorded our own records, produced them, distributed them ourselves. We were vertically integrated. It was a very painful transition for me personally, but in regards to my personal and professional growth, it was transformative in that I had all this raw material and all this real-life experience. All of a sudden, I had the context, the vocabulary and the skillset to not only describe it but replicate it in another setting.

I don’t think of myself as a marketer. I think of myself as an entrepreneur. That go-to market happens to be the piece of the puzzle that I was trying to impart. I have to be honest coming from this life as a songwriter and an entrepreneur. At the time, I did brand marketing, private equity/finance or consulting. Part of the reason I don’t want to be in a band anymore is I played in 48 out of 50 states. I’ve been in transit for the last several years.

For the benefit of the audience, are you talking about your time at Cornell Johnson School while you’re doing your MBA and you’re trying to figure out what next?

Yeah. I was evaluating the three main rounds. Consulting for me was a deal killer that you had to be gone all the time. I wish I knew more about venture capitalism and private equity. What it comes down to was my dad was a commercial banker. He wore a gray suit every day. I was like, “No, check that one off.” I felt closest to the creative process. There’s the behavioral science part of marketing, which is interesting. It’s like being an anthropologist. That was how I landed on that channel. Ultimately, I wanted to get to where I am, be part of a leadership team, and guiding the direction of an organization.

This is something that I’ve seen especially with the various product or even marketing leaders and even entrepreneurs. It’s all about the opportunity or what they need to do to get to the next stage. In your case, when you are trying to build up the rock band and trying to increase awareness, bring the audience, create publicity and get to the channel or the customer segment, you need to figure out all the various pieces, which you refer to as the positioning, the messaging, the marketing strategy, the various channels and so on. I see a single thread running across even with the various entrepreneurs, which is “I’ve got this cool product, but is this product serving the customer segment?” Even if I step back, who is the customer segment? What is the pain point? It’s a constant circle of questions, insights and hypothesis, which leads you to a natural good market state of thinking.

I have two responses to that. One is that tends to be the way that I approach assessing a company, whether or not I want to be a part of it or if I want to create it. Where I extend my energy and where I need to focus as part of the executive team is to look at what the critical path is like, what’s the blocker here? That’s an interesting way because many times throughout a company’s growth, you hit a roadblock. It’s understanding what that roadblock is and what the “medicine” is for that particular pain point. It might be across any one of those. It’s not always in historic marketing definition.

That’s why I like to use the term go-to market because it could be somewhere else in the company’s DNA. What you said is important to focus on. I came to these two roles ago at Magisto, which is an automated video editor. It’s the notion of product-market fit. Part of what drew me to marketing is the behavioral science part, the anthropological part. It’s not a criticism. It’s an observation even of myself. I think there’s an abundance of technology in Silicon Valley and technologists. There’s an abundance of good ideas. There simply is not enough focus on product-market fit and on what that means, that it’s not a destination, it’s a journey.

An overt example of that is oftentimes companies are going, “Why aren’t we growing?” In effect, they’ve met the edge of their addressable market and they have to expand. You have to go through a very aggressive product-market fit cycle. There are other more nuanced ways. I spent a lot of time in video. If you look at all the video applications out there, many of them deliver the same basic gain or solve the same basic problem, which is I need to create a go-to market video. Little things like how you described the benefits, the UI and getting at those features can make all the difference. That’s a nuanced part of product-market fit. It’s like, “Do I have to become a video editor or is it very intuitive on how to kick something out that’s high quality?” If you listen to the customer in almost anything you do and it’s just not enough. Tony Hsieh is like the Dalai Lama of customer-centric go-to market. I aspire to be as one with it as he is. That’s what it comes down to.

It’s all about listening and empathy.

Related to that, the other observation I have is that in the absence of valuing that, holding that as sacred, because everyone says it’s one thing to say it. It’s a spectrum, but it’s another thing to do it as a core competency, as an organization. If you don’t, what you tend to wind up doing is burning valuable cycles on product iteration that may or may not be going down the right path. There’s a bunch of reasons that it happens. It’s somebody’s personal pet project. You’re looking at what competitors do. Sometimes it’s not an apples to apples fit. You do it because they did it, but for your business, it’s not right. I’ve been guilty of this before, sometimes by my own motive and sometimes because there’s pressure to do it. Driving more traffic to a product that doesn’t have fit is like putting a band that stinks in front of a huge audience. It doesn’t matter how big the audience is if the music isn’t any good. It’s a lot of that where it’s like more traffic, better traffic. If the drummer can’t keep it timed, you can put a bigger audience as you want and the lead singer is up, it’s not going to work.

Notionally and in principle, leaders across the company, the C-Suite or even one level below get that. You hit upon a very important point, which is due to the various pressures either from the top leadership or from the board or from the investors, there’s this pressure of, “We don’t care, you need to deliver results.” There’s the irony and circular dependency of in order for you to deliver the results, you need to understand the market. It’s like, “It doesn’t matter. Keep pumping money and deliver the results or drive traffic.” At what point in time would you step up as a leader? I’ve seen that personally. I’ve struggled at various times. I’ve seen others struggle as well.

That’s a complex question because the other reality, it’s easy to sit and pontificate about this stuff generally. It’s harder when you’re in the tag of war. We all make the same mistakes over and over. It’s like a trip around the sun. You learn something each time. For me, either if it’s in a new role or if I’m at a company that you can feel and seeing the numbers is plateauing, that’s often when the realization hits me and I need to take a step back and look at the bigger problem or the bigger opportunity, and why we’re not capturing. We go through an audit almost of how we’re structured, what we’re offering, and what the market trends are.

There are three stools, the company itself, your current, future and past customers in some cases, and the market itself. You should be doing it in a very awake fashion all the time. You get sucked into execution and it’s unavoidable because as a startup, you have to live to fight another day. It’s the George Washington thing. Sometimes you have to compromise on doing things that are short-term and inherently flawed to keep the patient healthy enough to get to the emergency rooms.

As a startup, you have to live to fight another day. Share on X

Looking back at your journey, after the MBA, you started in brand marketing at Snapple, and then you grew in the ranks. You moved a bit into the consumer and the B2B space. What would you say are the real inflection points or how did that journey shape your thinking as a marketing leader?

Once I made the decision to stop doing music full-time, I was doing a product-market fit evaluation on myself. I realized that part of it was rational and part of it was gut that I wanted to be at the intersection of technology and media. I wanted to be an entrepreneur because all of those things have creative components. I tended to work at companies that deal with mass creativity, eMusic which is independent music, Fox Mobile where I launched over the top television, and Magisto which is social singing.

B2B 2 | Go-To-Market
Go-To-Market: Many times throughout a company’s growth, you hit a roadblock. It’s understanding what that roadblock is and what the “medicine” is for that particular pain point.

 

There’s been the literal creative and then there’s the broader definition of creative. Auto mechanics and accountants can be creative in how they approach their jobs. Company building and entrepreneurship is a creative exercise metaphorically and literally. You’re building a company. It’s like building a tree fort. I always loved doing it, but what do you do once the tree fort is built? You sit in it for a day and then you go and build the next one. Larger companies for me were never attractive. It’s equivalent to sitting in the tree fort or making slight improvements to it.

I knew this is where I wanted to be. The tech industry has changed so much since I went to business school in 2000. There was no Google. There was no on-campus recruiting. I had a job offer from Unilever. I chose Snapple over Unilever because it was less traditional and a better fit for me. I looked at it as part of almost like finishing school for my MBA. It’s what you do and I’m glad I did. First of all, even though I took data-driven marketing and entrepreneurship at school, it’s focused on brand management. I went and put the skills that I learned to use.

I acquired other ones. I took that into the tech world. It’s been an interesting journey. The first company I went to work for was eMusic. I knew them because I had been distributed by them when digital music first hit. I forget what the other one was. It’s like Audio Lunchbox or something. There were two of them. I was like, “This is an interesting company. This space is going to grow.” When I went there, digital music was like 6% of the market. I don’t know what the stat was then, but it’s the bulk of them. It was fascinating. What was very clear early on were two things. One was, there was no role for me long-term and no career path without doing data-driven marketing, growth marketing.

That’s where I got my ninja skills for that component of go-to market. I’d say there were three big takeaways. Two is that those companies need strategy positioning and branding like any other company. At the time, they didn’t realize it. Interestingly, they are leading the way in terms of how you deliver that to the consumer because of the digital disruption. When I started working at eMusic, the word brand was almost a four-letter word. I was like, “Don’t even utter it in my presence.” It’s because people didn’t understand what it was.

You turn around and X-teen years later, they’re the ones that are defining it. A lot of consumer-packaged goods and physical products are looking to digitally native companies to understand how to articulate a brand, and how to position a company in a digital world. It’s a different exercise. The last thing I was going to say is that the power dynamic is very different. As a brand manager, you are a GM more or less. You’re a little king in a way. If you could have seen me two years, I’m not sure you would have given me this responsibility.

First of all, the technology, not that they’re holding anybody ransom, it’s just the nature of these businesses. The technologists are the power center. If the band can’t play, then there’s only so much the marketer can do. They tend to have more of the resources depending on the business. If you have a product that has any technological sophistication, you’re going to have more of the employees there. The ways that the functional departments interact is distinctly different than traditional companies. It’s better and leading the way. It’s still flawed within tech companies, but it’s much more integrated than traditional.

You hit up on a couple of key points, one which is very relevant to the audience and to this show is the balance between product, which you refer to as a technologist, and the data that the marketing team, be it brand or product marketing, or even other like data-driven marketing operations. That data which they had to bring to the table and justify budget are investments. This is a constant challenge. I’ve seen that play out at the C-Suite level as well. Do we allocate more budget and resources to engineering, which is incremental or new features, versus dedicate X amount of dollars for investing in a new brand? If not a new brand, what are the campaigns that we need to run? This is a constant struggle. How do you manage that debate that goes on in the C-Suite between product finance and then marketing?

I’d go back to my original answer. It’s imperfect because there are things like personal ego. I’ll talk to some of the forces that often drive us to make the wrong decisions on that front. The core for me is looking at critical path. Let’s say a company is more mature and the basic infrastructure, because the pace of innovation is so rapid, Moore’s Law, it may be that you have such institutional debt in your infrastructure. That’s your critical path. You can’t do the things you know you should do because the code base is either so old or Millennium Falcon-like. In that case, as a marketer, you have to do this balancing act.

I would argue to give up some of my marketing budget to fix that so that we can then take a step back so we can move forward. If we take an honest assessment of saying the onboarding experience, we look at the numbers and we say, “We’re driving tons of traffic.” They seem to be qualified and they’re falling off at this point, then I would argue for a product. If it’s something stupid like the onboarding process and the UI is confusing, I would argue for that. If we have this amazing band that’s been practicing for ten years in the basement has invented a new style of music, the world loves it and it’s just a matter of bringing it to them, then I would fight for more budget on my side.

It’s never that binary because you have to live to fight another day. You tend to focus on your needs and wants as a department head. If it’s truly a technology company and/or product company, the core activity of what you do is invent. Oftentimes, I’m tempted to say an injustice because it sometimes feels that way with me, but it’s not an injustice. It’s a bias. There’s a second reason for this. One is this is what we do. We don’t have to justify the budget. We’re in the business of inventing things so we have to fund that.

When you have to live to fight another day, you tend to focus on your needs and wants as a department head. Share on X

The second is true customer or product-market fit is very inter-departmental. It can be fed by mid-level employees, but it has to be driven from the top. It’s uncomfortable. You have to be able to distill all different forms of the quantitative and qualitative information. You need to toggle between TED-like 100,000-foot observations and ground level observations to find it. Either the leadership doesn’t have the time to do it because they’re running the company or they don’t like it because it’s not as binary as some of the other functions.

Lastly, advertising is the most binary at least in the short-term. You spend a dollar and you see the return. What you don’t see is the lifetime value. That is hidden in the product-market fit. It’s hidden in the product execution. It’s hidden in the institutional debt. It’s much harder to read. It’s why we tend to focus on the head of the funnel. In general, my thesis is listen to the customer and focus on the end of the funnel first. What are you truly selling before you dump? It’s not a way of getting out of my job. I look at that as part of my job, as part of our go-to market to say, “We can go out and start spending money, but what are we selling it to who? What is the core value?” It’s often not even in what you’re selling.

Tony Hsieh is a genius. He’s selling happiness. The product happens to be shoes. Most companies are like that. There are some exceptions. Network routing, I’m not sure you would argue. You could say you’re selling stability, but there’s an emotional benefit to most products, B2B and B2C. You have to start with and then say, “What’s the functional benefit after that?” There’s a path to market that starts with, what’s the core of what we’re selling? Do we understand that? Oftentimes when you unpack it, you don’t or the company doesn’t. Maybe 2 out of 5, or 5 out of 5 of the leadership team does, but there isn’t good middleware to communicating that to the rest of the company. They’re not sure why they’re executing every day. They just come in and march.

You touched upon several points in what you covered. One point I’d like us to deep dive into further is the challenge area that you mentioned, which is the go-to market is not owned by one single function. It’s a cross-functional initiative. Most often what happens is the mid-level people would see it like a director of product or sales, or even director of customer sales and marketing would see that. Their views and effort or impact that they can make is very siloed within that one function. It has to boil up to the C-Suite, the top-level leadership, who has a broader view or come from it.

In early-stage companies, it does by definition. As the company grows, it gets harder for the leadership to do it and/or they never loved doing it in the first place.

Everything in motion, it happens. The go-to market motion continues to go on. As long as the results are delivered, it’s not a pain point.

When you hit some plateau or snafu, you start to ask the question of, what is it here? Is it we’re not bringing in enough people or we don’t qualify the leads well enough? The value proposition isn’t strong enough. The pricing structure is wrong. There are all questions you start to ask. It’s a nuanced, but powerfully different answer depending at what stage company you’re in. The question is still the same which is, what is our process for gathering that information, distilling it and executing against it? I don’t think there’s one single answer, but here’s something that I propose. If the leadership team agrees at something critical ideally in the ongoing DNA either in the inception of a company or an inflection point, which is a generous crisis, what’s the process for doing this?

I also think it’s a lot to ask of middle management to do on their own because it takes some pattern recognition or helps to have it, and it’s not so much the seniority as the way the individual’s mind works. What product-market fit is you have to be able to watch seventeen televisions or more like read five articles, watch seven televisions, listen to nine podcasts and talk to 100 people at once. That takes a certain type of brain to be able to find the signal to noise in that. What I would recommend for any company is that there’s a pyramid where there’s an agreement on these are the things we need to know and these are the ways we’re going to gather the information. That information gets packaged and sent to a central owner and even the content itself in a central repository so it all lives in one place.

There can be a hypothesis and observations presented to either senior leadership or presented by senior leadership to a CEO. At some point though, the senior leadership and the CEO has to get their hands dirty at not only in synthesizing the end outcome but listening to at least one radio station, watching 1 or 2 television shows so that you have your own sense of the market and your own touch by which to assess the larger data sets that come in. If you don’t, it lacks context. Not that I’m genius about it or anything, but I’ll see something different than somebody else will.

B2B 2 | Go-To-Market
Go-To-Market: Driving more traffic to a product that doesn’t fit is like putting a band that stinks in front of a huge audience. It doesn’t matter how big the audience is if the music isn’t any good.

 

There are a couple of thoughts running in my head. One is someone like a GM or a COO, depending on the stage of the company and size of the company. There’s someone central who is viewing all these seventeen television channels, who is reading all these magazines, listening to the podcast and then synthesize it, boiling it down to 3 or 5 insights. Who is that one person and how often does it need to happen?

The hard truth is the CEO should be running it. It depends where many tech companies are challenged that the CEO is not doing the job they should be doing, which is being a CEO. They’re still busy being head of a product or technology. If the company is mature enough that the COO and the various department heads, or if the CEO is being a CEO, he or she should be able to do that, raise money, have a vision, understand the market, translate that vision of the company and hire the right people. That’s your job.

For some reason, we cannot generally say all these things, but will you say that this is an opportunity for an outside person or a consultant to bring in and build that muscle? It’s more of reminding or bringing in that outside perspective for the CEO to make the decision.

I was starting by pointing out what should be, but what you’re saying is that’s not probably the reality and I tend to agree with you. My bias is not to lean on a consultant to do that because it has to be part of the company DNA. Maybe to get you oriented and help you jumpstart, maybe as one of those voices. My experience is a consultant can’t come in and do that work for you because they’re not part of the company. They can come in and maybe hold up some blind spots that you have or be one of those many sources of information.

The 1 or 2 times that I’ve been most successful at it, there have been consultants who have lent various positioning like broad generalists who deliver information, focus groups or survey companies, third-party data, consultants who come in and work with you to sort through it all. There are roles for consultants. To put that in a consultant’s hands would be blasphemy in my opinion. That would be like handing the car over to my fourteen-year-old to drive. That’s not responsible. The short answer is the CEO has to be involved, to what degree is questionable, and in the absence of that, it can be a CMO, a head of product, a chief strategy officer, these relatively new CXO or Chief Experience Officer. That one strikes me as the most obvious CMO or CXO working in tandem with product. That’s how I think of that.

As we move more towards closing, I’ve got last few questions for you. One is what are your big goals for the next 6, 12 months? How are you going about prioritizing from a go-to market perspective? If you had an extra budget, which area or where would you invest your resources, either in key hires or bringing in external experts?

I know the nature of this question is more tactical, but I’m going to answer it with what I call a Bill Clinton answer, a politician’s answer. It’s partly what interests me most right now is that even prior to COVID, there’s a disruption that’s going on globally in more than marketing. What sums it up for me is the medium is the message. Any of us in marketing and media refer to that phrase. I went back and read it because I wasn’t 100% sure I understood it. The notion is that media messages and stories are an extension. It’s an ecosystem and an extension of the human nervous system and human psychology, sociology and market.

The medium is the message. Share on X

It’s deep observations that came from this guy before things like the internet even existed. His point is that there are two ecosystems. One is the nature of the message and the medium. My message might be talking about customer development. If I were to deliver that in a written, scripted pen and quill message on parchment paper, that would be different. It would affect you differently receiving it than if I typed it on a typewriter, than if I telegraphed it to you or if I called you on the phone or if we did a video. The nature of the medium affects the message, the richness of it and the quality of it. With 50% of the world not just on digital but also on social, it means we are connected to each other in a way we never have been.

The medium is social and it is video. It’s not to say there aren’t others, but that’s the central one of our time. The message is the individual new narrative. It’s me. Look at what we spent an hour doing, telling you my individual narratives. That is inherently different than the history of humankind, which has been top down narrative. Here’s the story, consume it. To the extent that you want to debate it, you do it as water cooler chatter that’s perishable. It’s not a body of media. Nowadays, it’s the largest body of media and it’s the largest dataset in the world, personal opinion. When you think about go-to market, you have to think about that. I would call it a crisis for anyone who needs to deliver a message to a large group of people. That’s one.

The perception is that there is not a Unilever, and to some degree there isn’t a Unilever playbook exactly. There is a tool chest. Where it’s interesting as it’s being defined from the bottom up. It’s native digital companies and it’s companies run by Millennials that understand how to do this. It has to be synthesized and adapt it for larger organizations. That’s one. Two, part of that playbook is redefining how we conceptualize knowledge. When I was a kid and you wanted to learn about George Washington from home, you opened the Encyclopedia Britannica and there were four paragraphs, and that was knowledge.

Now there are new findings and new information being added at such a staggering rate that part of the playbook for any go-to market, any company has to be that learning is the new knowing. There are certain static things that we can depend on. Here’s how we deliver brand. First of all, let’s make sure a company understands what the difference between corporate ideas and branding. There are still concrete truths. A large part of it, the tip of the sphere has to be learning what is now and adjusting.

This applies to both the B2B as well as the consumer companies.

I would say as much because companies for the first time in history are competing with consumers for attention. Let’s say you’re a CTO looking for a CRM solution. You’re the CRM provider. You think of all the information that’s bombarding the CTO both directly business related and otherwise. You’re fighting all of that noise to land your signals. How do you do it?

You raised a very important point. People tend to forget that even though you’re doing a B2B marketing and sales program, at the end of the day, the receiving indigent is the customer.

We talk about LTV, retention and users. We should use the word people more and consider them. At some level, there’s still this hangover from the industrial revolution where go-to market was advertising. It’s not. Marketing is more of a sales cycle than it is an advertising exercise.

Marketing is more of a sales cycle than it is an advertising exercise. Share on X

Have you heard of this book Scientific Advertising?

No. Do you recommend it?

Absolutely. This was written way back in 1920s and I was reading it. It says the exact same principles that we as go-to market organizations try to implement as best practices. It’s 100 years old. It’s the same repeat. They’re still trying to do the same thing.

It’s the same with McLuhan. He said, “The medium is the message.” That was 1917 or something. It’s still relevant now. I appreciate that.

B2B 2 | Go-To-Market
Go-To-Market: Media messages and stories are an extension. It’s an ecosystem and an extension of the human nervous system, psychology, sociology, and the market.

 

One final question, any shout out to 2 or 3 go-to market leaders who you see or you look up to as role models or peers that you use them as a sounding board or speak with them?

I don’t know Tony Hsieh well. I’ve met him once or twice but I look up to him. He understands this and the reason I call him the Dalai Lama is because you have to be able to hold some of this woo-woo looser ideology to execute the tactical part. He does. The guy is selling happiness. He’s convicted and he’s succeeding. He’s a great example. Another one is the guy who started SaaStr, Jason Lemkin. He wrote a blog post on how he goes to market. It’s fascinating to read because in it he says, “I honestly can’t tell you what works, but I can tell you what I do.” What’s so interesting is he does what I was pointing to. It’s all bottoms up and it’s almost all him. He goes and participates as an individual in the attention economy, within the tribe that he is speaking to. He’s built a healthy business and the largest community of SaaS-based B2B organizations on the planet by doing exactly what I was describing. That’s how it translates. I got inspired myself by answering that question. It’s a great read if you can find that blog post.

Thank you so much, Reid. It’s a wonderful conversation. You shared a lot of insights into how companies, individuals and leaders should think of a go-to market. As a wrap-up note, if someone wants to reach out to you or learn more about you, where can they find you?

It’s at Reid@ReidGenauer.com or LinkedIn is another decent one. It’s like my fifth inbox of the day to check. I’d start with my email.

Thank you once again. As always, you showed practical insights and thought leadership material for people to think about and up-level their go-to market. Thank you.

 

Important Links

 

About Reid Genauer

B2B 2 | Go-To-MarketEntrepreneur, Leader & Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) with deep experience in product market fit, data-driven growth, branding. Proven track record of scaling early-stage tech companies. Industry thought leader for mobile, social, video, music & media.

I’m a new bread of marketing executive and support a new definition of marketing that spans disciplines and cross-functional teams. One that marries the power of story with data-driven insights and agile product development. Consumer sentiment is no longer perishable water cooler talk but rather the largest living body of media the world has ever known. Digital culture is defined by a nuanced set of social norms, unfathomable velocity, and oceans of information. My “superpower” is finding the signal amidst the white noise of the Attention Economy and translating that into product-market fit, corporate strategy and high impact execution. I’ve successfully launched and scaled B2C and B2B products by leading with customer needs, hearing their voice and answering it.

LEADERSHIP STYLE:
I’m energized by leading diverse personalities, interdisciplinary teams and inspired digital businesses. I help my teams succeed by fueling a culture of curiosity, passion, and possibility. With a high degree of emotional IQ and interpersonal trust, I help my teams deliver focused strategy, decisive tactical execution, honest analysis and iterative scale. I live at the cross-section of data, technology, and imagination. I love what I do.

COMBINING CRITICAL THINKING AND IMAGINATION:
I value decisive decision-making informed by a combination of analytics and conviction. The entrepreneurial sense of possibility inspires my belief in vision and imagination as a driver of value creation. Business intelligence, data analytics, and insights supports that belief and informs my actions.

MARKETING EXPERTISE:
(B2C, SMB, B2B2C)
-Scaling Start-Ups
-Product Market Fit
-Branding/Positioning
-Go-To-Market
-Customer Acquisition, Retention, and Revenue
-Product Marketing and CRM
-Business Development, Partnerships, and Sales Enablement
-Analytics & Customer Research
-Earned, Owned and Paid Media at Scale
-Paid Media
-Media Relations,
-Content Marketing
-Social Marketing
-SEO/ASO 

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! http://stratyve.com/

B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast: A Show That Deconstructs How Top Good Market Leaders Operate

Posted on by stratyve_ant2yf
B2B 1 | B2B Go-To-Market Leaders

B2B 1 | B2B Go-To-Market Leaders

 

Welcome to the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders podcast! The show where host Vijay Damojipurapu deconstructs how top good market leaders operate. In this pilot episode, he gives you a brief view of the exciting things to expect from the show. Get into this journey to more knowledge with Vijay, guiding you to navigate the industry while becoming the better version of yourself.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast: A Show That Deconstructs How Top Good Market Leaders Operate

The show where I deconstruct how top good market leaders operate. You’ll hear the strategy, their budget, what works, what doesn’t, how many people are on their team, their roles, who reports to who, how they set goals and more. Let me share some backstory. This is the second show. What I observed during my first was that I enjoyed the deep conversations with my guests and they did too. Conversations that reveal how they think about their journey and what inspires them to get better. Here is what you can expect from this show. You’ll get to listen to folks who are responsible for product, sales, marketing or even customer success teams. My desire is not to stop there. I’ve been listening to various podcasts across several domains over the years. A common pattern that stood up for me is that the podcast host speaks with experts and deep thinkers from diverse and adjacent fields. When it comes to the show, you can also expect to read about investors, entrepreneurs, professors and even bestselling authors. Get ready to read, learn and become a better version of yourself.

B2B Go-To-Market Leaders podcast is the show that deconstructs how top good market leaders operate. Share on X

B2B 1 | B2B Go-To-Market Leaders
B2B Go-To-Market Leaders: Read, learn, and become a better version of yourself.

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! http://stratyve.com/