Want to know how a Customer-Centric Approach Transform Your Go-to-Market Strategy?
Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Vijay converses with Ryan Vong, a seasoned expert in marketing operations and entrepreneurship. Ryan shares his extensive experience, from founding Digital Pi to his current venture, Helix, and offers valuable insights into the intricacies of go-to-market (GTM) strategies. This blog post will break down the key themes and actionable advice from the episode, providing a comprehensive guide for listeners and readers looking to enhance their GTM efforts.
Key Takeaways:
- The Role of Revenue Operations (RevOps): Ryan describes RevOps as a crucial element for removing roadblocks to revenue, facilitating alignment among sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
- GTM Holistic Approach: GTM strategies are not just about marketing; they involve a coordinated effort across multiple departments.
- Four Ps of Marketing: Always consider product, place, price, and promotion in your GTM plans.
This episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders podcast provides valuable insights into the complexities of GTM strategies, the significance of clean customer data, and the entrepreneurial spirit that drives innovation in the B2B space. Ryan Vong’s experiences and lessons learned offer actionable takeaways for listeners looking to enhance their own GTM efforts.
Listen to the podcast here:
The Role of RevOps Data in Go-to-Market Success with Ryan Vong (Two-times Founder)
The most important thing when and how I start every podcast is with this question, which is how do you view and define go to market?
Okay, okay. You’re starting with a very broad, you know, a very broad question. Yes. but I’ll keep it concise and I can probably pontificate a little bit longer, but really, to me, go to market is the strategy and the tactical plans to bring a product or service to the market. So it is by definition really simple. And yet there are many, many pieces to it. you know, it can include, you know, I think back in, in the, you know, I’m a marketing person.
So I think back to when we were learning the four PS of marketing. Right. It’s essentially that in a different formulaic way, right? You still have the old product place, price, and promotion ideas, but Go to Market encapsulates the tactical plans of doing that. And it could include working across many more domains that we didn’t have. Like, you know, how do you support the product later? How do you know, what are what are the things that you work with finance or ops on and things that are sort of cross-departments?
Right. No, totally. I like the way you framed it. it’s funny, right? I mean, there are frameworks that are out there that have been tried and tested, and it still holds true to this day over decades, which is the four-piece. And, it’s clear that the key that I believe in, and what it should always start with is the person, but more so the problem set associated with the person. Right? As a marketing leader, I can have multiple problem sets.
I can have a problem set around ops. I can have a problem set around product marketing. I can have a problem set around, content marketing. I mean, you get the picture.
Yes, yes.
So yeah. So definitely the person and the problem associated with it and something else that I’ve noticed, I’m sure you must have seen this, which is the person and problem set will vary depending on the confines of the company and the market. And that’s where the whole ICP comes into play. Yeah.
And I think even within your own competitive environment, even if you have two companies doing the same thing. Yeah. Or selling to the same folks. Yeah. The constraints within the organization are different. So you can go to market motions and different your relationships with your suppliers, and channel partners, they’re all different. Right. Because it’s not the same company. And those constraints really, you know, when it comes down to go to market, you have to think through, you know, strategically and tactically how do I execute this.
Yeah. And those constraints change the narrative for both companies, even if they essentially sell to the same audience.
Yeah, completely. I mean, in my own personal journey over the last decade, if even if I just scope it down to the last decade, my understanding of go to market has evolved greatly. So as an example, as a product marketer, my view of go to market back in those days was around, hey, I need to take a product to market, which is just the launch and launch checklist. That is very nice. Now that I look back. In my understanding, back then it was a very naive understanding. What is now encompasses a lot more. It goes way beyond launch. It starts where before the idea conception stage. It involves different functions including marketing, product, customer services, and sales of course. Right. And it always keeps changing.
Yeah. I mean I think about just what you described there, right? If we think about just launch activities, what’s post-launch, you know, customer success was not a was not a thing you thought about back then.
When you’re thinking about launching anything, it’s but now it’s a really big component on how you support your customers post-launch. So the go-to-market strategies are, you know, they are the sort of the consistent refinement of those things all the time. and I think it’s that’s why so much focus has been put on there. And there are, you know, within the go-to-market, you know, there are so many different groups and functions that need to be part of it. Yeah. so it is definitely it’s funny how it’s these, it’s just go to market, but there’s so much to that. And that’s what I find very interesting.
Yeah. Very cool. All right. Now let’s take a step back over to your career journey. So if you can share with our listeners your career journey and what led you to what you’re doing today.
Sure, sure. Now, like like I started with the the background, but funny enough, like, I actually originally thought I was going to be an engineer, and so I thought that was the thing.
But I really got involved in marketing early on. we’re talking 98 around that time frame. So when, when a small little company like Google was first launched and you still had Yahoo, it was the big player. You had all those things. I started getting involved really in search marketing and that was the a big, you know, thing back then. and, you know, that led to a whole lot of interactive digital marketing and led into, you know, quite a few functions in marketing.
And then in the last ten years, I have been spending a lot of time around marketing, operations, revenue, operations, growth marketing, like around those functions. Because I started a company ten years ago called Digital Pi that, focuses solely on the Adobe ecosystem. We did marketing automation consulting, and, you know, where we were, what the kind of work we did was really in the nexus of all of these things. So all the tools, the systems, you know, all the marketing plans. They all come together for like some level of tactical execution and activation of these plants.
Right. The products, the tools, and the service we provided enabled that because all the best plans can’t do anything, you can’t do anything with it unless you have a way to distribute and reach the customer. So, you know, the last ten years were focused solely on that. I had a really successful, exit out of that. And we were acquired by Markel, which was a Dentsu agency. You know, and really, in that period of time when I was there, it really allowed me to even, you know, really focus on, like, the entire go-to-market because some of the, you know, the, the, the, the clients we had were much larger. they had much more sophisticated, things going on.
Some healthcare companies had hundreds of products that had a market, and there were a lot of things that just, you know, opened up my eyes to how difficult this problem can be. And yet, you know, it really helped help with the appreciation of the different emotions that are involved in getting something out to a market.
Yeah. Totally cool. I know you had a good exit with Digital Pi. Congratulations to you and the team on that. But just curious. I mean, what led you to go down the path of entrepreneurship and opening and finding or starting digital pie in the first place?
Wow. You know, I think at the time I was, you know, working on a lot of startups. So, you know, in the Bay area, you’re around lots of startups. and I had, you know, taken a big interest in technology. I went and built out a lot of marketing automation sort of procedures, processes, and platforms. So the entire sort of engine that helped run it. I really enjoyed that. And I figured it was time at some point to just take a, take a chance to work for myself to really further my sort of domain expertise in this, and see more clients because, I mean, the trade-off is you work for a company and you learn a lot about the company in the specific ways.
But when you start to see multiple use cases, right, it really breaks the depth of your knowledge. And I really enjoyed that process. So I started on, you know, taking on clients. And at some point, it was just apparent that I needed to bring more people on. you know, and it just kind of it kind of grew from there. and, and that’s sort of, you know, in a blink of an eye, it’s like ten years. That’s how that’s how that kind of fell, you know, or that’s how that ended up. So yeah.
Now very cool. I like the way you framed it. I never somehow thought about it, but I like the way you framed it, which is when you’re an employee working for a company, you are more involved in the workings of the company a whole lot more. Not to say that you won’t focus on the product and the market and the person you are solving for, but if it’s a ratio and if you need to put a number, it’s typically like 70, 30, 70 on the company side and 30 on the market product side or person side versus when you start something on your own, and especially the point which you emphasize, Ryan, which is around you want to get deeper into a specific problem set, looking at different ways the use cases are thought of or implemented or the challenges.
That’s it’s and it’s interesting because once you turn into, you know, your and you have your own company, right? Go to market becomes near and dear to you. Yeah. Because now all of the things that you’re, you know, are coming to you like, right? You have to make decisions on that. and so it’s really interesting. It’s beyond marketing now. I mean, you have a lot of other functions that are under your peripheral, you know, that are under your sort of guidance. And that’s really helpful If you really want to learn more. Like, there’s no better way to learn more than start your own thing. I can, I can tell you probably learn things you don’t never want to learn. But that’s that is the journey.
Yeah. That comes with the fun stuff. And that’s how I was how I would see it as well. Right. Being a founder myself, you get to deal with things that you wouldn’t typically look into because you are the owner of each and every problem and scenario that occurs in your company.
Shifting gears. So had you started Digital Pi, you grew it up to a certain point, and then you had a good exit selling it to the market. And then you are now again going down the path of being a second-time founder. Okay, Felix, tell us more about that.
I guess I like paying and I guess that’s probably. Well, Yeah, shortly. it’s it’s a funny story, but shortly after I exited and sold, and then we finished our earnout period. my wife had asked me to, you know, consider staying home for a few years and just taking a break because of all the previous years. yeah. and, you know, I, we took the summer off. We did, you did the usual things, right? You do lots of travel and whatnot. And, you know, fortunately, I have, you know, I have children and younger children still. our schedules are incredibly tied to their school schedules. Yeah. So, you know, whether you want to travel for six months or not, it’s not up to you whether you want to sleep in or not.
It’s not up to you. Right. So that’s true. You know, so for for that reason, I was like, you know, the let’s let’s, you know, let’s take the summer off. Let’s reconsider. and afterward, you know, I really decided that I really liked what I did. I found entrepreneurship, I found building, you know, to be equal. You know, I wouldn’t say equal. I’d say frustrating. And yet the rewards are so much better, so much higher. You learn so much about yourself. You learn so much about your, you know, the community of people you work with. there’s so much in that entire process. And then you also find other like-minded folks who are like, I can see why you would do I could, I could already tell you, you’re going to do this again. Even as much as you say you won’t because there’s a there’s a certain element of just, you know, I’d say it’s just a certain zest for that like that.
There’s a, there’s a, there’s a drive there. Right. And you can’t stop somebody from that. So I enjoyed it. So now we started I started helix probably going to be about a year now. the one thing I, you know, wanted to focus on this time was actually around customer data. I think that I’ll, I’ll, I’ll call it a little bit of tangent. I think the one thing we did in the nexus of all of the work in rev ops and growth ops was you’re starting to see a concept of, you know, how difficult it is to have a modern data stack, right? So many tools get brought into your environment that essentially interconnect with each other, and share data with each other, but there’s nothing to manage. All of that. And data becomes really important at this point because there is a shred of truth in every one of those systems around your customers. But there’s no single one that manages one sort of golden record of a customer. Right? The way, the way you used to think about.
MDM. Yeah. So I thought this was a really, really interesting problem to solve. I also look that I being big, you know, or language models being a big thing, right, that you’re building on top of your data set. And I remember looking at you know, clients and their data and it’s like 60% of it is wrong. They’re talking about building AI on top of it. And I said well how would you be comfortable if you’re getting, you know only 40% accuracy on it? It’s like whoa whoa whoa. Why what. That doesn’t that’s not good. I’m like yeah, but that’s that’s your data. And your AI is only as good as the data that you put on top. You know, whatever you’re pulling out. And there’s a lot of governance, you know, things that need to happen, a lot of security around what the AI should access, what it should display. So I think that the whole field right now is growing and is really interesting and continues to be.
But then you get down to the fundamental building blocks of what all this means is, like you still need a really solid sort of data strategy. You know, for a marketer, customer data is huge, right? Correct. The biggest driver of growth is to understand the customer. So we focused on that. That’s the whole sort of mission that Helix is on. You know, part of the reason I named the company helix is because it’s the DNA of the, of the data, you know. I thought anyway yeah. As a marketer, you know my brain goes that way.
No that’s good. I love the fact and I also love the fact that how you’re emphasizing, the need to have clean. And, I’m looking for the right word, clean, and relevant data. I don’t know if it’s relevant, but it will in turn, for the AI model, the foundation model to produce more trustworthy results. Yeah. Key and currency for that?
Yeah. Accurate. Precise. You know, persistent data.
And I think the problem is it’s persistence has been the thing that is missing. A lot of these tools like things are out of date so quickly. On every update, there’s something out of date. And that data isn’t persisted across all the applications that use that same data. Yeah. Like your address changing in one place should be changed in every place that has your identity associated with it. Yeah. Right. But that’s not always the case because all these things aren’t connected. And so things are again out of sync. And I think even the worst cases are trying to ask someone if they’re still a current customer and not getting the same answers. That’s kind of scary. Like, yeah, you know, are you charging this? Are you, you know, is this person still paying like these customers? Is this client still paying? Like, you’ve got to know these things right. And sometimes I don’t know. I understand the complexity of keeping up with those things, especially if you have like a SaaS business.
Right? That is pretty ephemeral, like whether it’s whether somebody’s buying and not buying the following month or whatever, their models are. Right. And these things are getting again, they’re complicated, but yet they’re important problems to solve.
Yeah. So I know it’s been only a few months since you launched Helix officially. I mean, a stage where you have paying customers yet or are you still in the discovery design customer phase?
We do have, paying customers. luckily, and, you know, I would say that we’re in a good place. You know, a lot of the concepts, ideas that we were incubating. all we’ve had to do was refine some of it, the approaches. Yeah. But it hasn’t been a, you know, full reboot on what we had originally thought. Yeah. you know, and I think a lot of it is just like, you know, the first part of Go to Market is like really thinking about, like the messaging and the positioning of. Yeah, like because we are an agency and we do services.
You know, our first, you know, when I first came out with this, I kept talking about data challenges. and that became apparent that everyone agreed to it. Yeah, but no one can fund it. and I said, well, why is this? You know, it took me a while to really figure this out. And they said, well, everybody agrees with you that, you know, bad data is not good for the company and that you needed to clean it. But it is everybody’s problem because everybody puts input data. Now, the problem with it is then who sets the budget for it. Because then it would be everybody’s, you know, budget and there’s no such thing. Yeah. and again, you know, learning, you know, even if I’ve done this before, you know, I don’t know this. Right? So I’m like, wow, that’s the terrible go-to-market. You know, the message is like you have bad data and we can fix it. But it’s like, who are you talking to?
Yeah, the ICP right?
That’s the person and the problem. Who are you speaking to and what?
Goes right back to that. Yeah. and I think refining those things to be very specific to our audience, I mean, we target, you know, revenue ops. Right? So the people that are in charge of revenue and there’s a, there’s a really solid reason for why this is important, right? Like simple things like, let’s just say, you know, you have an ABM strategy in there and you don’t have the right data for whoever you’ve identified in the ABM. Right. It’s like lead-to-account matching, like simple tactical things that cause issues in your revenue or just routing, you know, opportunities to the right area.
In this case, even the campaign performance, I mean, that very atomic level.
Yeah. Down to the very like, you know, down to that level of detail without, you know, sometimes it’s like, wow, I didn’t have this one.
I don’t know, there’s one field that wasn’t filled out, but the rest of it is good. And you’re not contacting this person.
Correct.
You missed out on an opportunity. It’s like wait, why? Because some rule sets, you know, are set in a certain way and it’s like, wow, that’s not good, right? So there are things that are, you know, yes, it’s missing and therefore it’s not going anywhere. And then there’s two, you know, the wrong information is going to the wrong people and then it doesn’t get followed up. Yep.
There’s a whole series of things there that happen in that way. And these are all like, you know, essentially when I think about it like from a revenue op, you know, function like optimizing those things that keep. Yeah. And so again, it goes back to we didn’t really think about talking about data from that perspective at first. And now we are spending more time on it. Let me understand the use cases and let me explain how this, you know, enables or helps the use case.
And I think that we are still obviously building a lot more of that to inform our, you know, our messaging, how we go to market with it, you know, who we go to market with it. Like, do we need agency partners to, you know, tie us together or companies that really do a lot of, I don’t know, campaigning, you know, sort of activation type work, but they don’t have a data infrastructure?
Right. Like so those help us figure out where we should position and where we should be, because what happens in the end if we find out that we’re best being an agency behind an agency, right, then I would partner with a bunch of different agencies. But like, it’s like those things that we need to find out. And we’re still working through a lot of these sorts of ideas.
I’d say no, really cool stuff. I love the fact, in terms of how you are really conveying the lessons and your day-to-day iterations of your ICP, of your problem statement, of your messaging.
Again, it all goes back to the fundamentals of go-to-market, and go-to-market constantly changes. I think that’s the main message for the listeners here. And yeah. Yeah.
And I think big or small, I think it’s you know, the closer you are to the customer’s use cases. Yeah. And even the language they use, the better. Correct. You know, I find that we, we, you know, we’re guilty of this in marketing. It’s like we tend to create terms or use terms that we think are, I don’t know, invented here. And this is awesome. But that’s not how somebody’s describing a problem to you. And you, you’re you’re seeing it in a different way. It might be the same. You could have the best solution, but you’re saying it in a way they wouldn’t understand it. Okay. Yeah.
One of the things. Sorry. Go ahead.
No, no. Go ahead.
Yeah. So one of the things you’re totally spot on on that.
Right. And one of the techniques that I’m testing out and it’s still early days is I list out a few problem statements and here are my observations. And when I speak with the ICP I would say does this resonate? Is this what you see in your environment?
Yeah.
Right. And then I just ask that question and I shut up, I just don’t talk, I let them speak and they open up. Do you know what all these resonate or points two and three resonate? And you know what? I’ll add a couple more to that.
Yeah, yeah. No, I did that. I did that for my goodness over the course of nine months so far. Yeah, I’m still doing that by the way. Yes. You know we changed some positioning and we had some ideas probably two months ago. And it took some time to find some of my, you know, the ICP folks that, that, that run this on a daily basis. I’m like, does this make sense to you? Like when I talk about, I don’t know, we were like, you know, lead to revenue.
And they’re like, yeah, I know it’s it’s too broad, right? But it’s like, you know, we were about to like get all behind it, right? The whole thing changed our lives. All that good stuff. you know, but I tested on a few people that, like, it doesn’t make sense in our organization. Maybe it makes sense, bro. They’re just trying to be nice. Like, I’m like, how do you? How would you describe this problem? Right.
Exactly.
Yeah. So it’s great. It’s great. We are again, I think it’s awesome to just continue to stay up to date and listen to how people describe. Right? Yeah.
The problem and another technique that I’m using or testing out is after they describe the problem. And if I see that it’s resonating with them, I then follow up with the question, which is how do you build a business case within your organization?
Yeah.
And then I just shut up and listen to what?
Yeah.
Yeah, I, I do I do appreciate the folks that, you know lean in to help with that. I have found and again maybe it’s just the folks I’m you know talking to like lately it’s more of a, would you go this way or that way to build a business case. And I kind of give them an option just because it’s so hard to get the time to talk to them. Yeah. You know, and then I’m, I feel like I’m adding extra work by asking them to sort of think through an abstraction of how they would present it. And so I say, would it help if I did this or this? And it gives, it gives it better momentum I think. but again I, you know there are folks who would love to just sit down and you know, advise and help with that. And I appreciate that. I don’t get a lot of those by the way. I just get a lot more like people who want me to like, and present something, and then they give me an opinion.
Yeah, it’s. Probably easier.
But it makes sense. It’s easier.
It’s a lot easier for sure.
All right.
Now this is good I mean the conversation is definitely starting with the more technical and insightful lessons that we can share with the listeners. Let’s get even more specific. As you and I know we have seen this, which is go to market is not always up to the right. You’ll have go-to-market success stories and go-to-market failure stories are lessons. So if you can share either from your current experience, I think you’ve been sharing it with Aelix. But if you go back to your time in Digital Pie and if you can share a success and a failure story, either for Digital Pie or for one of your customers, that’d be a good segue into our next section.
Yeah, I can definitely. And I’ll have to preface that it’s probably from my current viewpoint in the world, which is all centered around data, you know because I think about how would I how would my business today solve some of the things I saw in the past? So I think about it from that perspective.
One story I think I share in different ways that come to mind was, you know, we worked with a company on social security software. but they didn’t sell directly. It was through resellers. And some of the, the things that they were struggling with, you know, was really on the renewal side. So they find that there was probably a good 40 to 50% drop every year at the annual review. and I think they had a, their go to market was really what we, we talked about earlier like it was to launch to acquire customers.
But then the follow through, the rest of it was the post-sale, the like, the support, the everything that happened afterward was missing in in their entire like there wasn’t even like a real thought because they were selling through resellers for thinking the resellers should handle some of these, you know, problems. And I think we asked I said, so who’s the expert in this software? You are the reseller. And they’re like, what do you mean that you know?
Well, the resellers know they have their list, they have the audience, but they’re never going to be able to answer some of the questions, you know? Right. You don’t have a team training their team. They don’t have support staff. They don’t have any of these folks, to help with this renewal. And as successful as their campaigns were to acquire losing half of that after the year, it was terrible.
They had a huge leaky bucket.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was terrible, you know, and again, I think if you think about, you know, what we would have thought about a long time ago, we’ve been like, hey, marketing is super successful. What do you mean? Like, look at what we’ve done, right, right. And then you look at the other side of it, which is, oh my gosh, like, we can’t any of these people. The churn is huge, right? 50% is not a small number. And this is a, I don’t know, multiple multiple millions I mean, talking 100, $200 million.
Yeah. You know, a company that’s doing this right. I’m like, this is a lot. So we started to really, you know, I would say a lot of it was because, again, there were gaps in the go-to-market for sure, and there were gaps in their data set like they didn’t know the customer, their resellers, and customers. And there was no way to get them help. Right? Because the systems weren’t tied together. Like there’s no way to funnel it back to the corporate, you know, the company who has experts to help, you know, because they positioned their experts to help the resellers, which is fine. But it’s again, it’s a sale through model.
Right? So that didn’t really help. I think that was, you know, one of those, like, scenarios where, you know, we did put some things in place that I think eventually held we, you know, as manual as it was back then, we at least finally were able to get like visibility and who the end customers have suggested some sort of preemptive way to not communicate to them on the day of renewal versus, hey, you know, have you thought about doing it three months before? And, you know, just to get a sense of, you know, what’s going to happen? And then, you need to have these, you know, this end users information or get your resellers to send this message out, right, so that they can if there’s trouble, they know about it right before it happens.
So I thought that was, that that ended up being successful. But I think it was like, again, to your question, that was that started off pretty, you know, it was lacking. I’d say. and in the end, it turned out to be much better. Okay. No, not that the entire problem was solved. It was just, you know, having a way to think about it. we did see, like, the renewal rates come up because they were preempted. They actually moved it back to like six months, like halfway through. Then they had a better proper onboarding process to get people successful right away. So there was there was like a lot of those changes that they had to make. Right. which I thought was interesting that they did, you know, these were sort of, you know, things you would think today are important. Yeah. But I’m talking maybe ten years ago they were sort of not. Yeah. Which is, which is, you know, I don’t know.
You know. Yeah.
You actually encapsulate it so correctly, which is I mean, that’s the essence of this podcast and the message which is when you think about go to market, it’s not just top of the funnel and getting to a sale or buy decision. It’s beyond that and how you keep the customers happy. And not to say that these customers or these people are looking at it from the wrong intention. It’s just the constraints of the resources and so much to do and only so much bandwidth or money and budget. Yeah.
And yeah. And I think, you know a tech was a lot different then. Right. I mean ten years ago there were a lot of tools that would integrate, you know, some of this information together. So I can see why, you know, the conditions were there. Again, we go back to like you have a you could have planned all this out. And if there was no ability to do it, you can right. The constraints of the company.
So totally. So that’s a good market success story. And do you have like a go-to-market failure story or a lesson?
You know, I think that was a failure story that I sort of thought through. In the end, it ended up being successful. Okay. And these were typically brought in when there were issues. I think we started getting a reputation for I, As you know, the saving the read accounts. Yeah, that’s the way it turned. and I think we, you know, I have to say, our team always did a great job in being able to turn around something that was, you know, provided a lot of value, which was really a testament to our team and the company we built. Right. They were not just looking at it from a, you know, a very sort of focused lens on this is all we do. And, if we needed experts in different ways of looking at this problem, we did bring them in and that helped.
Yeah. Right. because our services agency, we were not a product company where the only thing we knew was our product. That’s the difference. So I would say yeah I mean it was success. It was a failure turned into a success. I have probably lots of those similar stories where they started off, you know, in that same way. Yeah.
Very cool. And then just a quick note on or if you can touch upon like how the exit and the purchase and sale to Michael happen at digital buy. If you can share some insight like how you positioned or did they approach you, was it inbound or how did that happen?
We actually, knew that this was eventually the route we were going to go. So the first thing is the intention was that already. I personally did not want to turn our company into a lifestyle company where, you know, it funded a great lifestyle, but no one else benefited. I wanted a company where everyone who worked there benefited in some way.
I also knew that our agency was bound by the things we did, which might not allow the team to grow the skill sets they wanted to grow. Yeah, right. And, you know, from sort of like from that concluding conclusion, I’m like, you know what? Let’s make it intentional that in, you know, if we were to plan and exit, what would it take? we grew our business.
We got on the Inc 5002 times in a row. we just kept our, you know, our, our growth numbers pretty, pretty high. Yeah. and it helped with solving real problems for customers. and then at some point, you know, when you start making your way into the, the, the, the awareness of some of these agencies who are looking to build out, you know, the services we were, we started getting approached and I think, it was rightly it was by design we need we knew we had to work on who we were, what we represented to the market, and why we were so valuable to any agency.
You know, and what made us different? Right. What is your what is the one thing that you guys do really well? and that you can say that this is who we are and why we are so good at what we do. Right? We created a, you know, although we’re a services agency, we created a product, you know, the product helped our consulting work. Yeah. We were able to develop that. We also developed a framework for how you deploy certain things on the Adobe platform, like it was, you know, the gold standard we actually identified.
And we said this is the way it should be done. We put that on the map. at that point, we had, you know, suitors, and we had some great conversations. The reason I decided to go with Merkel in the end was their mission and ours aligned perfectly. their goal was to create the largest B2B agency in the world. Nice. A very simple mission, right? It’s a very simple statement, but the mission.
But not easy for sure. Yeah.
And I think that I was drawn to that. I think, you know, you know, the way I thought about it, if we can associate and be successful in this mission, everyone in our company benefits from it, right? Yeah, right. To be the best at something. It’s amazing. Right. And I think all of the things that come from it, you know, on the monetary reward rewards all the career growth, all of those things would come naturally. and so that was really the driver for the decision. Yeah.
Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. That was unplanned but thought it would be beneficial for the listeners as well just to showcase or show the thought process of how a founder thinks about an exit and what steps need to be taken. That’s helpful. So if we were to summarize like 1 to 2, go to market skills that you’re known for, for example, either your peers or your industry or customers.
When they think about, hey, you know, we have this XYZ problem and we need to talk to Ryan, what would that be?
I think it’s still like fundamentally in you know, I would put it in the, the still back in this revenue ops, you know, lens of the world. Yeah. We’re really good at identifying the roadblocks to revenue in a tactical sense. Right. If you have demand Gen if you have, you know, sales operations, if you have a market, you have all these groups, but then how do you work them all together to, to to really get you the clearest line of sight to revenue, removing every hurdle between its path. Like we are really good at that. Like whether it’s a data issue, whether it’s a process issue, whether you don’t have something, whether it’s, you know, you’re saying the wrong like we really are, I don’t know, in the years sort of refined that skill set because we were working so closely with where the sort of the engine of all of this came together.
Right. you know, because I think there’s definitely there is an, a company I think that doesn’t have like a, a good idea of how they should go to market or a plan, a strategy like that. That’s fundamental. Like it’s there. I think the problem comes in when you need to execute that plan, lots of holes start to appear there. And you know, we’re not a company that will help you build a go-to-market strategy. But we can look at your go-to-market strategy and say, these are the things we need to do to make sure that that revenue is optimized. That path has not been obstructed in any way. Whether it’s like your system, you don’t have the right people to do whatever it is. Right? and we’ve done a lot of those things and it’s, it’s just a, it’s just that area, where we like to focus on.
Very cool. I love the fact that how you emphasize the tactical and the execution piece, because strategy, it’s super hard to get strategy, but more often than not, really good people have strategy in mind.
But then when it comes to execution and tactics, especially around like in your case, LiveOps, which is the people, the tech stack, and the system and process.
Yeah, all game is a whole different ball game. And it is its detailed work. It is necessary and it’s, it’s and I think it’s just a lot of times it’s, it’s siloed within the groups. You know, they’re functionally, you know, I get I get, you know, odd things where it’s like we have everything in our Salesforce instance. I’m like, okay, but I can only touch the leads. I can’t touch the contacts. I’m like, what I like. It’s like, what? Yeah, you think you.
Have everything, but you cannot touch it. You can only touch a subset.
Yeah. So I say it’s these things like let’s work together on like really unblocking like do you need access to this? Yes, but I can’t touch it. You know who defined that rule, right? Like what happened in the past that created this, right? Like there’s always some genesis.
Like somebody messed up something and they put a really hard rule in this thing. And I said, guys, this is like, this data is owned by you. And in order for you to do this work, you need X, right? Like, let’s rethink this part. So I think you know again it it always falls down when it comes down to how do I get this moving? how do I and, you know, a lot of the I think it’s, you know, acceptable to say I have a strategy. Now let’s go execute. And, you know, like it’s supposed to happen right away. Right? It’s part of the strategy is to think how long it takes to do these things. Correct. Yeah. Right.
And other specific tech stack technologies that you specialize in, you or your team specialize in, like Salesforce, Marketo, or others.
Yeah. I mean, like for us We focus on, you know, B2B less common and B2B is. Salesforce, HubSpot, HubSpot, Marketo.
You know, we’re now a reseller for, we’re actually a, an agency partner for a company called synchrony, which I really, I really encourage everyone to look at because, like I said, you know, ten years doing 400 different implementations and thinking about the modern data stack and the number of tools that are in there, and each one having a piece of data that needs to be, you know, sort of consistent and persistent. That alone solves so many problems and that, you know, there’s a lot more that that does. But fundamentally, I, I need we needed a data platform that allows us to Asynchronously connect all this data quickly and actually have it persistent throughout all the applications. This was like I needed this problem solved. And then when we sort of found the software and, you know, through relationships, I’m like, that’s actually the problem I’ve been trying to describe when it comes to data. So we set up so quickly to become, you know, a partner to deploy it.
I think like I think it’s, it’s the for us, it was the missing element because of where we were. We work right in that middle. Right. So it was really important to have a data platform.
Very cool. Switching gears and switching topics to a different context or totally over here. Clearly an expert in DevOps. So what are the 1 2, or 3 things that you do to stay on top of the trends and what’s happening in the real world?
Well, I think that I’m part of a few communities, you know, marketing pros or marketing ops professionals. is a it’s a really diverse community of mops, rev ops, and sales ops leaders. you know, there are some individuals in there. you know, I’m part of the CMO Alliance. Like, I listen to a lot of these, you know, and it’s I don’t have a particular person in mind besides, like, maybe Scott Brinker or somebody, you know, who there’s a lot of, like, you know, sort of vision type things.
And then, you know, you have Gartner putting out, you know, content. there are obviously a lot of those out there. But I like again, on the tactical level, I mean, these communities that people will post very specific problems. And the way they describe it is like, you know when you’re reading the Gartner paper, it’s like 1000 levels up, and then this person is describing this problem this way, right? And I tend to hone in on those messages. So I followed those and I read a lot on the modern data, you know, blogs, about how, you know, there’s a whole concept of, you know, data platforms or, you know, data first platforms, which is a different spin, newer than, you know, modern data stack. It’s like a data-first stack and what that shape looks like. And how do you set up governance for it? And so I like those that are really interesting. you know, there’s those are really interesting, you know, blogs to read.
I also follow certain companies, like as Scale. They talk a lot about this, which is great. And obviously synchrony puts out quite a bit on their autonomous, data platform. So, you know, it’s like a lot of these things are newer. I tend to look for, I don’t know, like really clear-cut tactical use cases and problems. Right. And so when, when, when I see sort of, I don’t know, fluffier material out there, I’m like, I’ll read it conceptually. Like I kind of get it, but I’m looking for like, hey, we did this and we had this problem and this is how we fixed it, you know, and I don’t know. So to me that comes a lot more through the community.
Yeah. No, I hear you I mean communities are great sources of people literally opening up their minds about the problems that they’re facing today for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well just to be respectful of your time, the final question for you, Ryan, is if you were to turn back the clock and go back to day one of your go-to-market journey, what advice would you give to your younger self?
Are you talking about like a year ago, you know?
Which one we’re talking about?
Yeah, exactly. No. Day one of a go-to-market journey ever since you went down this path of DevOps. Yeah. Like, what is that point at that time?
I think I would have done a little bit more, you know, validating the sort of ideas that I had. I got so excited. I just started a company the minute I got back from vacation. I’m like, this is what people want. This is what you know. And I thought, you know, I thought because I, you know, we did 400 different implementations. Like, I would know the answers, right? I was, Am I really wrong? Right. Like it was like and I think I would if I had taken the time to really talk to the ICP. You know, like. Like what we spent a lot of time talking about, like, what did you think about this? And like, really, really get to know describe a little bit more carefully than I did instead of all the excitement.
Right. That would have helped. And, you know, I say that because, again, as a founder, the minute you start something, you’re burning cash. Yeah, right. And Any of you have no projects and you’re burning cash. That’s not a good way to go. Now, if you’re a little bit more careful about it and you did it, you would have to make fewer adjustments. I think that would have that. I would have told myself, hey, talk to a few more folks, at least have a number, and then you get a certain level of comfortability with what you’re trying to do and then dive head in. Right. You know. Yeah.
Yeah. It is what it is.
I mean it goes back to our entire go-to-market discussion. Right. How we started this podcast, which is again go to market constantly shifts. And for you as a successful founder with an exit, you had to go back and learn. And again start fresh from scratch and talk to your ISPs.
It goes back to those fundamentals again. And not to say again, I’m not trying to be a preacher. I myself am guilty of making those mistakes. I’ve been there, done that. I’m still doing that.
Yeah, we all are. You know, and I think these discussions are great. You know, I think, it helps remind others who might be in a similar situation. Absolutely. I think it also is like, you know, we made a pretty good sized pivot, you know, like within the first few months, as I’m finding things aren’t working. and it’s okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, it really is. It’s it’s it’s like you’re not stuck on your strategy forever.
You know? Yeah.
So I think that’s important to to really give yourself a little bit of grace when it’s not going right.
Yeah. Excellent. That’s a great way to end the podcast.