Episodi
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Tell yourself, “I can do hard things.” What does the data say? What is the insight I can pull from the data? What is the creative idea I have based on that insight? Take the hassle out of the purchase journey. What product-market-fit means for a new segment of users. Focus over speed. Strategy over plans. Regaining SEO. Meaning, difference and salience. Understand what motivates your customer, how they view your product, or the problem that it solves. You find that tension in their lives then you solve for it.
Here’s what Katy McFee said about Shea:
Shea Cole. So I worked with Shea at a company called Fullscript. She is the VP Marketing there, and she is a force. So this woman, she is just like a branding queen, and she took that company from very early days to like explosive, massive rocket-growth and was very instrumental in making that happen. So, I think she would be a fantastic guest for you.
—Katy McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Generating new leads using content marketing. We're super focused on SEO and high-quality content. Our customer base are professionals, they're healthcare practitioners, so we make sure that our content is written by other healthcare practitioners, and filled with keywords, but also extremely evidence-based. We get a lot of cheap, high quality leads that way.
2) Email marketing. Then, once our customers come into our our funnel, and they become existing customers, email marketing. So, we take that same content that we wrote on our blog to generate leads, and we email it to them just to keep our customers engaged, to remind them that the content is there, and it keeps us top of mind, which drives that platform usage.
3) Take the hassle out of the purchase journey. The last way that I'll highlight is that we take a lot of care to make sure that we take the hassle out of the purchase journey for our customers. Healthcare practitioners are recommending supplements through Fullscript and then their patients are coming onto our platform to purchase supplements. We want make this dead simple for the patients. We want to take all the thinking out of it. So what we do is we analyze the order behavior of the patients. We analyze the dosage instructions of the practitioners. And based on that, we know when a patient is running low on their supplements and we reach out to them and we say, “Hey, it's probably time to refill. Click here to refill.” And so, they don't have to think about, “Hey, it's, it's probably time for me to log onto Fullscript and place an order. We do that thinking for them. It comes right to their inbox. They never miss a day in their treatment plan. Super simple, but very effective.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) I recently came back from a maternity leave. And I'm in Canada, so that's a long leave. It’s anywhere up to a year. Mine was eight months. Two days after I came back from maternity leave, we acquired one of our biggest competitors. So my whole plan for onboarding, and getting lots of attention from the team so that they could get me up to speed on what was going on, all went out the window, because everyone was so wrapped up in, “Oh my God, we just acquired a company. How do we merge two teams?” This is, I think, a really good example of what it's like to work in a high growth company, because you have to embrace that chaos and set aside your expectations for anything to be smooth and just be resilient. Otherwise, you don't survive.
2) Regaining our SEO traffic after a 50% drop in 2020. I told you earlier in the show that we're really focused on driving leads through SEO. Back in 2020, Google had a big algorithm change and it impacted the health and wellness space more than many industries. We saw our SEO plummet by almost 50%, and this was a big lead source for us. So hugely problematic. At the time, we were focused mainly on just producing high quality content, and what we learned through this is that's not really enough. We had to step up our technical talent and bring in SEO expertise to really get ahead of those algorithm changes and manage that more technical side of content marketing. So now in 2022, we're back up to the site traffic that we were at in 2020. It took us that long to get there because that's how SEO works. You just have to claw your way up bit by bit by bit. We had to actually relaunch our entire site, take a little hit that way, but then regain. But, we got there.
3) It's really unrealistic to expect that everyone is going to love having you as a boss. So, I think this one might be a little controversial. It's something really important that I learned recently about managing a team and being a leader. Early on in my career, I really cared about being that manager that everyone loved to have as a boss. I still really care about my people and I really want to be a great manager, but what I have to learn was that it's really unrealistic to expect that everyone is going to love having you as a boss, because the truth is that some people are just not going to like you because you have to have tough conversations when you're leading a team, especially when you're leading a big team. Sometimes, people are not going to understand how much you appreciate them, because, as a manager with multiple levels underneath you, you have to let your managers that are underneath you manage their people. That means, sometimes, you have to step away from the relationship. Not everyone is going to appreciate where the cards fall for them, but as long as you try to be as empathetic and fair and transparent as you possibly can be, then, you're doing your best for people and you just have to make peace with the fact that not everyone is going to love you.
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
1) We are reaching a plateau in our media buying because we were doing everything in-house, and I think that that was the right choice for us at one time, where we were small and bootstrapped and scrappy and we could do a good job in-house. Now, we've grown to a size where my team needs to be focused on other things. As our paid media starts reaching a plateau, we're reaching diminishing returns, we are moving to an external agency to buy that media. So, let's see if this works. I'm super hopeful. I think it will allow my team to focus on other channels, and on creative, and on research. So, I think it's the right decision for us right now, but we're at a transition point.
2) We are switching to a new marketing automation tool, and unfortunately we've made that switch a couple times, because finding the right automation tool is so important and you don't always get it right. The other thing is: as you go through different stages of growth, a super simple tool might be the right tool for you at the beginning because your team can learn it really quickly, but then as you scale, you might need something a little bit more complex. So, switching to a new marketing automation tool means getting the right technical talent, getting the right consultants to help you set it up, getting buy-in from the engineering and data analytics teams to make sure that everything is flowing smoothly from your CRM to your automation to your attribution and your reporting. Everything needs to work in tandem. That's a huge proble...
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Convert for the endgame, retention. Marketing is a lot like dating. Sales is where you're getting a little more serious. The wedding is where they convert to be a customer. You got your onboarding, which is your honeymoon. Woo-hoo! This is going to be awesome! But guess what? The bulk of that whole relationship is the marriage, which is retention, and it is not tactical, and it is challenging. Which is why for your post-sale team, they're really relying on you to choose those right dates and attract the right people to get into these long-term relationships with.
Here’s what Ryan Paul Gibson said about Anita:
Anita Toth. The first guest I would think of is Anita Toth. Anita is interesting. She's on the customer success side and she has a great name. She calls herself The Churn Crusher. We've talked a couple of times and what I like about her is she is, like me, hyper-focused on a part of a business that is very important for long-term success. Churn is going to be such a big metric for SaaS companies going forward. How do you keep customers around for longer, and why? How do you succeed in that? And she just lots of fun. So I think she's the first one.
—Ryan Paul Gibson, Founder of Content Lift → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Establishing partnerships with key companies that also serve our ICP. So what we look for in an ideal partner is that they're complimentary to what we do, and this allows us then to combine our marketing efforts. And the one thing we do is, each quarter we identify and look to develop one type of a partnership with, like I said, a company that is doing something complimentary and already working with our ideal customer. So that's the first one.
2) Creating content that really speaks to the pain points of our ICP. What we've chosen to do is just focus on four pillars for all our content. So for us, it's customer feedback, churn, customer relationships, and voice of the customer. And that's been really helpful because it's really easy to start creeping outside of that. Those four pillars really keep us focused then on our ideal customers.
3) We use storytelling everywhere we can. So this might be from personal founders stories. So I'm the founder. So my personal stories to client stories. We're an agency that collects customer feedback. Not such a sexy topic for a lot of people. We love it, but what we do is we use techniques like customer interviews to help bring the hard data we collect to life. So this way, potential clients can better see themselves in the story than they can just looking at the numbers. So those are the three ways that we do that.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Ooh, this was, this was fun.
1) Going up-market to now sell voice of the customer programs to Chief Customer Officers who are employed in much larger companies than we've served up to this point. So it meant doing a lot of research to understand how they see their issues, how it manifests for them, and what's at stake for them if they don't solve the problem. We're in the process of finding out how we can leverage some of our content and just adapt it to this new ideal customer profile.
2) This seems so trivial, but putting in a new system to start culling old content that doesn't serve us well, or finding new ways to refresh it. We use it for our two main ideal customer profiles. So this is for Chief Customer Officers and Customer Success Leaders, and we do have a small third ICP, Customer Success Managers, but it's been harder than anticipated because it's really difficult to throw away, discard, stuff that you've put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into, and if you can't adapt it, it means it's got to go. So that was actually harder than I thought. Sitting down and deciding what we're going to keep and, and what needs to go.
3) Saying no to opportunities that don't align with our vision of making happier customers across the world. So as a company grows, there's some tempting opportunities that we've had to turn down because they pull us from our vision. But I wouldn't say we've overcome this yet. We've been kind of pulled to the side a couple of times. It's a continuous issue that we have to deal with, but we know that if we stray, then it could potentially ruin us. So that's been really challenging to stick to our guns when we see shiny new opportunities and just say no to them. Nope. We're not going that route.
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
1) Well, we're hiring our first CMO. I'm just starting to chat with potential CMOs, so this is a huge step for us. We're going to start with a fractional CMO first. I want to see what it's like to work with a CMO, and then eventually we will hire someone out of that experience full-time. Gut rather than just like jumping right in and hiring someone full-time, we've decided to go the fractional route. It will just help us also better understand, what does the CMO need from us and how that relationship works? So that's one roadblock.
2) Finding new ways to market to CCOs. So like I mentioned, we're going upmarket now and our other two ICPs, so Customer Success Leaders, and our very small group of Customer Success Managers, are very active on LinkedIn. So we've devoted like 80% of our marketing efforts there. It makes sense. They're congregating there, as well as in some Slack groups. But, Chief Customer Officers are different. They're on LinkedIn, but they're not necessarily active like our other two ICPs. So our challenge has been, now we have to come up with a whole new marketing strategy for this new group. It's been a bit challenging. I think we're going to go the old school road of cold email. I think that's where we're headed.
3) Creating new content, of course, for those Chief Customer Officers and creating new funnels. They definitely buy differently than our other ICPs, who may or may not have budget, but Chief Customer Officers do hold budgets. So, we have to figure out what is that buyer's journey like and how are we going to facilitate that through our marketing?
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
Okay, Chris. So like full disclosure, I had to look up what mental models are. I know what they are, but I was like, “but really what are they?” So this gets a bit esoteric, but I think it's worth talking about, because I did look them up and these are things I use. I just didn't know those are the terms.
1) Create routines for my success. So my morning routines look boringly similar every day. But, what this helps me do is conserve energy so that I'm not wasting a lot of time and I can really get in my work and focus.
2) Here's one of the esoteric ones: it's called Bayesian Thinking. We should continuously update our probability estimates as we come across new information. So, essentially when you come across new data, you shouldn't blow it out all out of proportion. Like, “Email marketing has tanked! Zero response rates!” Just crazy stuff like that. We hear stuff like this and then we don't update our thinking. Is this accurate? Is it not? So, the thing is that you should use it to update confidence in your existing beliefs, and if you do, what ...
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Episodi mancanti?
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15 minutes with Meet Darren Sharpe, Chief Revenue Officer at SuiteSpot. Be maniacal about what’s working. Doing great homework. Connecting inbound and outbound channels. Prospect discovery. Client feedback loops to drive product innovation. Shifting a pricing model from features to platform. Pareto principal. Opportunity costs. A culture of coaching allows your team to collaborate in all things. Talk within your client's own words. Asking: What's important to you? What drives you? Is there a connection here where I can help solve?
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Katy McFee said about Darren:
Darren Sharpe. I met him in a sales leader peer group that was put together by The Lazaridis Institute which is an organization where hyper-growth companies are selected to be part of this program. He has just a super impressive, smart, long-time sales leader who gets it. Goes into a company, figures it out, deep dives, and like creates this huge growth for whatever company he touches. So, he's a CRO right now at SuiteSpot, but has been a revenue leader for many years, and has lots of great value that he can share.
—Katy McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
We're fairly traditional. We have an inbound channel, and outbound channel, and a partner channel. I think it might be more and more interesting is how do we uniquely leverage those channels for our success?
1) Outbound channel. So one, if we look at our traditional outbound sales channel, I’m incredibly proud of our BDR team's ability to profile, research, and connect with the prospects. So we look at it as value-based sequencing plus hyper-personalization, and I'm really proud of the outcomes that are coming there.
2) Inbound channel. Then, we tie that with our inbound PPC strategy, looking at the exact same personas and trying to hit the same people so that our outbound and inbound are connected. So you're connecting with the LinkedIn ad as we've we've sent you that message really trying to drive, “Hey, can we understand you as a prospect's problem? Could you see value in a quick connect or a quick conversation with us?” So really, on those inbound and outbound channels, how are we creating new conversations?
3) Partner channel. The partner model is interesting from a startup perspective. Anytime you're developing a partner channel, the key is timing. How do you not be everything to everyone, but create highly valuable bilateral partnerships. So for that one, I'm really proud of the work we've done of defining the right type of partner and being able to service them. And as we scale, we expect to see that partner channel becoming a bigger piece of our business. But today, we're dominantly led by the inbound and outbound channels.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
As a startup, we are constantly in the path of positive change. So I'm going to mention three things that we are constantly working on, but I'm really proud of the work we've done to position us for success.
1) Prospect discovery. This is a tough balance between interrogation and value-based discussion. And we've recently really flipped our scripts and really tried to shift the discovery goal to making sure the prospect understands our interpretation of their problem and how it's affecting them individually. And, that's shift has been, instead of going to the standard, “Hey, are you experiencing this industry problem?”—”What is the personal impact of this problem, and how is it affecting you guys?” It's a small change, but that shift in discovery has really shifted our sales model. Where now, and like, we're not original here, but we're really focusing on client pain, focusing in on the impact to each individual prospect.
2) Client feedback loops. Before I came on board at sweet spot, we hadn't done a great job yet. So, we've introduced the customer advisory board. We've introduced a quarterly business review process. And, we’re greatly mining a lot of great data from our existing clients, and really trying to twofold: increase the dialogue between existing client and SuiteSpot, “How do we build a better foundation?” But, also learn from them. Learn from them, from product, not only how we've deployed, but product innovation, and we're now seeing great innovation come out of that feedback loop. We’re really excited about where that takes us.
3) Shift in our pricing model. The last thing, and this is a change that many SaaS companies go through, is a shift in our pricing model from a feature, or a modular-based, model to platform. Our value to our clients was greatly in the entirety of our platform. Because of some legacy pieces and how have we grown up, we had clients buying different modules and not buying the entirety of the platform. So, we made a difficult business decision to make this as a shift. We're going to shift our existing clients from a feature-based to platform and we're going to present, in a new way, the product as a platform. So it's a great success on that front. That's a big change both from our CS teams and sales teams of how we are telling clients what they are purchasing and what we're delivering. So, really proud of those changes.
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
Got it. Well, as I said to you earlier, I'm not interesting. So this is probably the things that a lot of folks are currently going through.
1) Really hyper growth scale dashboards. How do we get as much actionable data as we scale? So I run inside sales, outside sales, client success, and marketing. Having the right growth dashboards and caring about the real indicators that we need, that's something that I'm working on with my peer group, with our executive leadership, because in a world of so much data, how do you really come down to actionable evidence data? How do we look at those dashboards and say, “This is the right leading indicators for X or for Y.” I think it's one of those things that, roadblock may be a harsh term, but it's an evolutionary piece. It's a piece that we're really developing right now.
2) How you quantify value. In any way, in a sales cycle, you want to show your value. How you quantify value, especially from the midpoint of the sales cycle to the end, through that negotiation stage. So we're looking at the decision link, but also more trying to internalize, and how do we quantify, the specific value that this client is going to take, or this prospect is going to take, from leveraging SuiteSpot. And part of that leads into the last roadblock…
3) How do you speed up your sales cycle? I don't know any revenue leader who wouldn't say, “Hey, if I could take 30 days out of my sales cycle, or if I could take X out of my sales cycle…” Again, not original, but can we create more urgency within that sales cycle? And the way that we're trying to do that is I mentioned earlier, “Hey, how do we better understand prospect challenge? How do we quantify our solution?” Those two things together are really trying to allow us to earn the right t...
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13 minutes with Anthony Murphy: Founder of Product Pathways. Predicting the future. Strategic discovery. Seeking out early adopters. Balancing short-term revenue versus long-term vision. Modeling the future. Hiring. Technical architecture and debt. Capacity. BJ Fogg's behavioral model. Shipping super early, even when it's a concept. Setting goals. What needs to be true?
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Really good question and an interesting one for me. As a product coach, I don't work with a single team. I work with multiple clients, multiple companies and product teams all over the world. But, one of the benefits of that is I get to see interesting challenges.
1) Predicting the future. If I think about some of the clients I have right now, probably one of the most interesting I'm working with now is what I would deem as a horizon three product. Essentially, the horizon model is near term, mid term, far term. They're essentially shaping the future doing some really cool, market-leading AI, 3D rendering technology, but a cool market for that doesn't exist today. So how do you convert that into revenue? That's a whole other challenge. We’ve been spending the last 12 months in doing that. Part of it is ”Well, what does the future look like? How do we predict the future?” So we've been spending a lot of time doing modeling on previous trends, like the rise of chat as opposed to calling people up, and all these other trends. Essentially, using them as predictive models to try and predict the future. Predicting the future in order to create a market in order to create revenue.
2) Strategic discovery. We need to have confidence in all those things. They are just models. It doesn't mean that that’s exactly what the future's going to hold. We need to be able to validate some of that, gain confidence in it, and really calculate the value of whether that's something that's worthwhile doing.
3) Seeking out early adopters and innovators. We spend a lot of time naturally seeking out early adopters and innovators. They really are our core market today. If you think about the diffusion of innovators, they're going to be on core market today. And then one day, that will become an everyday thing that everyone's using, and then we'll really crack into that. But that’s one of the things that we really focused on. That's a real hard thing to do, especially it's a B2B product. So how do you work out B2B innovators? It's it's a unique challenge, but that's definitely where our revenue is coming from today.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Working with lots of clients, I see some common challenges. I spend a lot of my time working with startups, or product managers in startups and a lot of scaling companies.
1) Balancing short-term revenue versus long-term vision. I think the biggest challenge that companies dealing with right now, as well as another client of mine, is balancing short-term revenue, or that's stability of revenue, versus long-term vision and gain. If you use that client as an example, their market, their future, doesn't exist today. So it's hard to make revenue off something that doesn't exist, but you need to make some revenue, you call it the completely investment-funded. That's not gonna work out longterm. You need revenue, but there's a danger of starting to fall into this trap of building something for today and missing out on that future, and not being ready for that future, when it comes. So that's a huge kind of challenge. I mean, I've been overcoming it in some of those ways that I've kind of mentioned before.
2) Modeling the future. That's a really interesting one. We really overcame that by looking at previous trends and building a few models around that, but a super unique challenge that I haven't had to deal with before.
3) For one of my clients, they had really big retention issue. Classic leaky funnel. You got plenty leads coming in, but not everyone is staying in there. So, I spent a lot of time with them, reshaping their product strategy to understand those gaps and balancing that. It was a good challenge.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
1) Hiring. I'm working with a VP of Product at the moment at a growing startup, and probably the biggest roadblock we have right now is just c. They’re growing, they’ve got to grow, got to go with it, get more people, but the market's super competitive, and I think most people and most product leaders and people in product and tech know this, salaries are through the roof. People are hard to come by, negotiating is a huge challenge, especially when you're a small company and you can’t really pay Microsoft will Facebook salaries. It’s super competitive. That's probably one of the biggest roadblocks I'm working with with them at the moment.
2) Technical architecture and debt. This is a real start-up and scale-up kind of problem. Technical architecture and debt. It's really common for companies, the way we start, start-ups will just hack it together, basically. Architecture, from a technical product point of view, often is monolithic. We don't have to think too much about the future, cause it doesn't matter. We might not have a company in 6-12 months time, so it doesn't matter. But then there comes a point in time where you start to get product-market fit. You start at the scale and start to grow. And then all of that debt and architecture starts to hinder you since, essentially, it becomes a bit like chains. It becomes a big roadblock, because then you want to grow as quickly as possible, but suddenly you're constrained by your architecture, your tech debt to grow that quickly. So you then start to balance all these big bets that you want to do, and these cool new features and functionality to grow a company against the fact that, “Hey, we don't actually have a scalable platform. How do we overcome that?”
3) Capacity. A roadblock I'm dealing with right now with clients in the same space, in startups, is just capacity. There’s always a million things we want to do. When you're a 200 plus scale-up is one client, or even a small 15 person startup, you only have so much you can do because you only have so many people.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I really liked this question actually, and it made me think, because I use a lot of mental models.
1) All models are both correct and incorrect at the same time. I have an overarching mental model that is all models are both correct and incorrect at the same time. What I mean by that is I think they're all about 80% correct. There's obviously always exceptions. It's a really good one that keep in mind because you just can’t anything as a 100% applied to everything. It's not going to work. You need to use different models and apply it. Some models that I've been using recently. This is where my headspace went to.
2) BJ Fogg's behavioral model. I love that. It just talks about motivation versus, essentially, behavioral change, or habit change, and which is highly applicable in the product space. Especially when we think about shipping new features or even new products. How do you get people to change their behavior? How much motivation is needed? How easy, ...
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Take a long, long, hard look at your go-to-market process, not from the perspective of what you're currently looking at, but put yourself in the shoes of your colleagues. If you're in sales, take a look at the marketing side. If you're in marketing, look at customer success. If you’re in customer success, look at sales. All of those things, if you want to be successful as a business, it's not about I, it’s about we. It means you need to learn, understand, and really look at what is the entire journey and get really buyer-centric from that perspective.
Here’s what Arthur Castillo said about Craig:
Sometimes we are too obsessed with our ICP. I heard Craig Handy talk about this where he looked at the ICP qualifications for previous years, Closed Won revenue for a client of his. He found that 60% of the Closed Won revenue technically would have been disqualified because it didn't meet their ICP qualifications. So a lot of the time, again, let's ask about where they're trying to get to? Or, maybe what they tried to do prior to reaching out to us, because often it could just be a simple switch or a tiny little product feature now that can expand an entire new industry and TAM for us, yet we’re disqualifying them. So, let's talk to those people, understand not necessarily where they're at today, but where they’re trying to get to.
—Arthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) PLG (Product-led growth). This is a big part of my role at Shopify. We, in a RevOps perspective, talk about “right person, right time, right way,” and I don't think there's a better “right person, right time, right way” than someone who's already engaging with your product to a certain degree—whether that's from a free trial perspective, whether that's from a basic plan, or even a big plan—and going with them and growing with them, providing that value for them when they need to see it or additional add-ons when they need to see it. The beauty of product-led growth is you have the visibility to what they're doing. You have the visibility to their performance, their challenges. You see other customers that have similar experiences. So being able to not only reach out to them in a very meaningful way, or the right time, but then also for them, in many cases from a self-serve perspective, say, “Oh, Hey, I want that, and I could get it, and I'm going to do it. And I don't need to have a million meetings to engage that way.” So that's a big piece there.
2) Referrals. From the Jameson's Strategies perspective, referrals. Huge driver for us. I only once went outbound. The real thing for me is: in a market where I think I'm coming with it with a product that is not common, we call it RevOps as a Service, and you're seeing a little bit of pop up, but it's not super common, and there some skepticism in that. So, having a warm referral, where someone's like, “Hey, this changed the game for us. So this really helped us. How do we pass that off?” And so we're really adamant to say that's meaningful for us, but we provide that value, and we naturally provide that value, so that people want to talk about it, and want to share it. That stems over to the third one.
3) Upsell / Cross-sell. This is prevalent in both Shopify and Jameson Strategies perspective. Sometimes the best barrier-to-entry is a little one, or one that is low-risk, or one that is a no brainer. And though, you believe deeply that the value is there, and I firmly stand by this, is that you don't sell something and believe it, you know the value is there, and sometimes you need to walk before you run. And so that entry-level where, “Okay, let's come in on a low plan if it's Jameson or let's come in on a low plan for Shopify,” and then you start to see, “Okay, these people care about me. They value me. They're providing me with value constantly, and they have a path for me to grow as I grow.” And so, I think to the question of how you turn your marketing into revenue, the micro concept of your market, as in your customers, how do you grow that? That is something that, if done right, is a safer, more consistent, and a more human approach to growth.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
I struggle with this question a little bit, because I was thinking, “What have I overcome?” It's always a constant struggle.
1) Making a tight budget tech-stack run like a sports car. I was playing around with this term, it’s like an engine swap of a Ferrari in Honda Civic. But the reality of this is that, especially from a smaller business perspective from the Jameson Strategies side, you have a budget, and especially in an approaching downturn, I don't want to throw into all these licenses, and all the op services, and is this the right tool? Is this the right tool? So the asks are huge. We want all of these things. But, the budget is like, “Ah, I can only buy a quarter of it.” So one of the challenges that is always a roadblock, but something that we've been very successful in overcoming is, “Okay. Can we make this and squeeze as much value as possible?” It's not always pretty, and I'll be upfront about that, but the bottom line is you're trying to achieve something. How do we help you to do that? That's been a consistent thing with a lot of clients. We get them to that particular point and then they prove that value in that, in that business case, and then they continue to grow. But sometimes, we've got to stretch a little bit outside of our box at the beginning. So that's a big one.
2) Forming a super alliance. This is from the Shopify context. There's a lot of things going on. There's a lot of investments happening. What are we building? When are we building it? How are we we doing this? There was a really interesting topic that my team and another team both had a lot of skin in the game on, so at first, well, who owns this? We want to drive with our direction. They want to drive with their direction. It took a few deep breaths, really thinking, “How do we put our merchants first? How do we put our customers first, and come together with a meaningful relationship?” And what that basically formed is, and we talk about it as like our step-sibling, this alliance between we call the project something, they call it something else, but it’s the same goal, same objectives. We just have different lenses on it. We always approach it with, “How do we win together?” That aligns us, which has been really strong and really powerful. So, that's been a huge one.
3) Growing a team really quickly. And so from the software perspective, towards the end of 2021, we restructured a little bit. So, a good portion of what my team was responsible for, my team moved to a new group, but then we inherited a lot of new requirements and new expectations, plus the revenue growth of the company. In that scenario, we need to fill these seats, so huge push. Thankfully we had a fantastic recruitment team, but doing hundreds of interviews, and engaging on a meaningful level, while also realizing, “Hey, I need to double in size, but I also want to add to the culture. So that was very challenging, but I'm happy to say we successfully did it. It's phenomenal. I'm loving all the new people that we have working with the group.
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
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47 minutes with Mo McKibbin: Head of Customer Support and Success at Moxion. Sales as a strategy, not a skill set. Helping the right customer solve the right problem, in the right way, at the right time. Building the entire customer operational process from scratch. Tight feedback loops between the customer and the business. Making customer success a whole company sport.
20 insights. 8 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
I'm in the camp that sales is a strategy and not a skill set. When I think about driving growth at any part of the funnel, whether it's more obviously pre-sales, but also post-sales expansion adoption, it's really all just about helping the right customer. And when I say the term, customer, I also mean pre-sale customers. For me, everyone's a customer, whether or not they bought. So, helping the right customer solve the right problem, in the right way, at the right time. Maybe that problem is, "I need to find more information about how to do my job better." That would be content, videos, best practices, things like that, and that is helping them solve the right problem that is relevant to the ecosystem of your products, at the right time. Maybe it's, "How do I apply this product to achieve this value proposition that I bought into during the buying process?" That would be more on the customer success side of like, "We're in the product now. I need to apply the product to achieve this desired business goal." So that would be solving the right problem, at the right time, for the right customer. All of the operational theories, or structures, or methodologies, that I do is built around that concept. It's a little bit more holistically. Less about what sales does, or support does, or what success does, or what marketing does. It's more customer-centric because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you're a product-led growth company, or a sales-led growth company, or marketing-driven, or whatever. At the end of the day, the only thing that's driving revenue is the customer buying your product. So it's all about, "What will a customer find valuable in this moment? How do we consistently deliver it?"
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
So as far as putting this into three bullet points:
1) Investment in customer experience has contributed mostly to any sort of growth of businesses that I've had the joy of creating processes and operations for. That usually works, not only just by achieving incredibly high conversion rates – because I try to create approaches that are really tailored towards exactly delivering that right experience at the right, the right information to solve the right problem with the right time – but also word of mouth, and loyalty, and advocacy, and expansion. So I would say, I have no insights in the top-of-funnel or demand gen sort of world, as much as, it is all about nurture, conversion, solving problems, and then delivering a great experience that then causes word of mouth, loyalty, and expansion. So, the way that we do that from a tactical sense, is we create operational segmentation to facilitate scalable personalization. Now, that is a lot of buzzwords. I really like to take things apart and organize things. So, I like to organize my customers by operational segments, lifecycle segments, and personalization segments. So, operational segments has to do with the amount of touch that a customer requires. So a really common would be the difference between what is a low-complexity self-serve customer versus a high complexity enterprise customer, are probably the two ways to think about that. Then, personalization segments is, “What is this customer's desired outcome use case?” A good example for a tool that everybody uses, because it's the OG project management tool, is take something like Trello. If you're using Trello as a software company, you're using it very differently than if you're an event planner. Personalization segments are a little bit like, “What are the common goals that our customers are using these products for? And how do we create paths for them with enablement, with videos, with what we introduce them at the right time that are actually aligned with their goals?” There's a self-serve version of that, but then there's also a high touch version of that where it's more like coaching and consulting to get enterprises on the right path or change management within that. So, I think that that was just a big “one.”
2) After you break apart your operational segments, it's optimizing both for digital and human touch. I am of the mindset that you actually need both because you have to help customers the way they want to be helped. Some customers prefer self service and want to do all of that exploration on their own. They want to get information and they don't want to talk to anyone unless they absolutely have to. I'm a buyer like that. The only time I've ever bought something that required me to get on a phone or in person was my house. But, some people also really need it. Some people really need that extra help. I've acquainted it before as, “What is a better experience if you're in a hardware store? Is it somewhere where everything's really well outlined, so that you know exactly where to go and what to pick up for what you needed for your hardware product? Or is it something where someone greets you at the door, and they ask you about your project, and they give you consultative advice on what to do and how to pick things up?” The truth is actually both are great experiences, depending on the customer. If I am a seasoned person who knows what they're doing, and I want to get up and running right away, I want to just get in, get out, self-checkout, make it as seamless as possible. If I am starting a project on my bathroom, and I have no idea where to get started, I want to talk to someone and make sure I don't screw anything up. So, operational pathways based off of that segmentation, that's what it's trying to facilitate to create both a self-serve path, and so you can actually optimize the times that human touch is valuable and has an ROI because everything else is automated. So it's not one or the other. It's that they have to both work in tandem in order to work it successfully and scalably.
3) Once these operational systems are in place, I think the most important part of this puzzle is actually building feedback loops between the customer and the business. And so, by that I mean, between the voice of the customer and product, the voice of the customer and marketing or growth or however you're calling it, the voice of the customer and engineering, all of these arms of the business that have some sort of customer impact, building these feedback loops is, essentially, the investment in customer experience that causes customers to feel listened to. It makes it more of a relationship. From a product standpoint, you're building the right product for the right customer. If you can facilitate these feedback loops in a way that you can quantify, and understand, what customers want the most, essentially the impact it would be on the business from a growth and marketing standpoint, if you are building these feedback loops between what the customer is actually saying they find valuable, it makes it easier to then deliver to the top-of-funnel demand gen people that it's, "Oh, these are what we should be saying. Our value props are because this is how we're going to attract more successful customers.” And then, obviously, the most common on the support side of things, the succe...
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23 minutes with Vlad Blagojević: Co-Founder at Fullfunnel.io. 80/20. Thinking long-term. Account-based demand generation on LinkedIn. Frequent and regular marketing activities. Consistency. Co-creation. Continuously iterating on our offering. Making sure that people actually do the stuff that's important. Entering the US market. The most important skill that you should develop as a marketer is asking questions of your customers.
Show transcript.
Here’s what Dani Woolf said about Vlad:
Vladimir Blagojević. First, I definitely recommend Vladimir Blagojević. He's the co-founder of fullfunnel.io. I actually follow him on LinkedIn and he's helping B2B marketers who market to people in accounts that have a long sale cycles, like me. Helping us do things a little bit more strategically and methodically. I think the way he educates B2B marketers with his smart playbooks is awesome. It's so useful. And he's one of those people who understands the value of simplicity and practicality. And again, people who do that are going to win.
—Dani Woolf, Director of Demand Generation at Cybersixgill → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) We have a calendar of what we call frequent and regular marketing activities. So for example, both Andrei my co-founder, and myself, will write and post LinkedIn posts and engage with our audience. We have our own community, the Trenches, which is a B2B marketing community, where we also engage every day. Every week, we run our own podcast, the Full Funnel B2B Marketing podcast actually live, with B2B marketing leaders, where people from our community come can ask live questions and engage with some of the best minds in the market. We run a weekly, I forgot to mention, we have actually two newsletters. We have monthly webinars. Two times a year, we also run a B2B marketing summit, a Full Funnel B2B Marketing Summit. The last one, I think, had more than 5,000 subscribers. If I reflect, we only really started a little bit more than a year ago, working together with Full Funnel. Thanks to all these activities, we grew our newsletter to more than 12,000 people, got LinkedIn following right now is about 25k between the two of us. We had probably more than 10,000 people subscribe and attend our events. Just in 2021, from these activities, we generated 61 inbound opportunities. This frequent, consistent communication works really well for us.
2) So how do we convert, let's say, all that attention, and all that awareness and demand, into revenue? What we basically do is we help B2B tech brands with six figure deals implement proven playbooks to drive awareness and demand and land six figure opportunities with, let's say, 20% plus of target accounts. So when you're in that situation where you need to land large deals, you don't need a lot of clients, but you need the right ones, how do you maximize that? How do you actually get opportunities with, let's say 20-40% of targeted accounts? And we like to use those playbooks. They're tried and tested. We’ve implemented them so many times. We have them implemented as a digital on-demand course. We have cohort courses where we go work with group of companies implementing those. We have one-on-one consulting as well, and that's how we actually help our clients and earn our revenue.
3) So, how does that happen? So normally, most of our consulting clients are inbound or referrals, so people who are just coming to us, and we actually almost always have to say no a lot of times. Digital products, we sell, usually, during launches and from our email list, while the cohort courses, actually, the group courses and coaching, mostly come via one-on-one chats and engagement on LinkedIn email, our slack group, et cetera.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) The problem that had the biggest impact was when we started Full Funnel, Andrei and myself decided that we are never going to do any execution. We're not going to work as an agency. We just want to be purely advice, courses, et cetera. So that wasn't easy, but it is something that we managed to build.
2) Changing the way that we work, and for myself, changing the way that I work. So that, instead of like being busy, busy, busy, I can devote maybe 50%, to maybe sometimes even 70%, on really high-leverage activities. I mentioned all the activities that we do online. I mean, it's just the two of us, and we have the client work, and we are building the products. And so, the way that this works is by being able to focus on the 20% of activities that generate the 80% of results.
3) Making sure that people actually do the stuff that's important. We started by selling, other than one-on-one consulting, those digital courses, and we saw that people are not really implementing stuff. That's a problem with courses. When we launched, and decided to launch the group course, this was one of the reasons. We, again, applied the 20/80 principle to really focus on making sure that people actually do the stuff that's important and make all this experience, very interactive and immersive so that people actually, during the sessions are engaged, are listening, doing stuff, and actually implementing and getting results. This is working and I'm super, super happy about it.
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
1) We are continuously iterating on our offering, on our products, and how we monetize or help our clients. Currently, we are working on a program. We have all these playbooks, but what we want to offer our customers is a program where they can go from zero to account-based marketing, which is one of the things that we help our clients implement in a quarter or two. So, we are creating these larger programs and combining the different pieces of the puzzle that we have created so far.
2) We want to replace all our one-to-one consulting income with courses and digital products. And we really want to focus even more on the things that we enjoy and we know bring a lot of impact and results. We want to publish more books. We want to do more events. We want to create more content and just focus on content creation, creating those courses. And eventually also hiring a course manager. Being able to just focus on creation of knowledge and just promotion of what we do.
3) Entering the US market. If you look at our sales, just pure digital sales last year, probably 80% of our market, in terms of our audience, is in Europe, while maybe 50% of sales, digital sales, came from the US. So, definitely, it's a growth market for us. But, when it comes to like group courses, when it comes to one-on-one consulting, we do have US-based clients, but they always say like, “Oh, wow. What you guys are doing is so in depth. We never really expected that.” They're always surprised at the level of detail, at how practical this is, and how effective it is, what we're teaching them, and what we're doing with them. But somehow, they get surprised by it. So in other words, it's not what they expect. And I think there is some perception issues that we might need to solve, or the way that we communicate is just different. There's a lot of competition as well, especially in our space, marketing and sales space, that...
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16 minutes with Jason Bay, Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting. “Inbound-ish.” Dial in the content. How to get people to ask for help when they need it. Getting people to take action on what they learn. Regret minimization. Socratic method. Bite-sized content that is immediately actionable. Myself as a bottleneck. How to systemize and get a team around me. What if I'm wrong? Show transcript.
Here’s what Meghann Misiak said about Jason:
Jason Bay is someone I work with very closely. He is the king of outbound. He's a great prospecting trainer and he has a program called Outbound Squad. The results speak for themselves. He has a lot of incredible followers and is a great trainer.
—Meghann Misiak, Founder of The Path to President’s Club → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Inbound-ish. I teach companies outbound, but I don't do a lot of outbound to get business. I've been fortunate in that regard in the last couple of years that the inbound engine works pretty good, but I still do a form of outbound. I call it “inbound-ish”. The way I look at client acquisition is you have inbound methods on one side and outbound methods on the other side. If you're listening, imagine a piece of paper, you’ve got inbound on the left, outbound on the right. What I look at on the inbound side is the organic content that you create. That could be blog posts, stuff on your website. Then there's also guest content, there's third-party content. Getting on guest webinars, guest podcasts, et cetera. What I do is, I try to use those forms of content that I create, whether that be through LinkedIn content or being on someone else's podcast like this or a webinar, and I use that to drive traffic to my website, or if it's a LinkedIn post, I use it to get likes and comments on my LinkedIn post. Then I'll proactively reach out to those people. I'll still do outbound on those. It's just a little bit warmer. That's a really big strategy.
2) Posting daily on LinkedIn. Where I get most of my business from is posting daily on LinkedIn, every weekday, posts, so that people will engage on it. A lot of them are already target market. I'll just reach out to them directly, to set up sales calls. Or to get them in my programs.
3) Partnerships and co-marketing efforts are really big thing that we do and webinars have been huge. We just did a webinar with ZoomInfo last week on cold calls. We got almost 2000 people to sign up for it. Again, I'm building my list at that same time. I'm able to see who reached out and signed up for this webinar. And who can I engage with directly and kind of do this “inbound-ish”, this warm outbound, so that I can get clients.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Where to start? This one made me think a bit. Dude, running a business is hard. It really is. It's a lot of fun because, for me, I sort of grew up in sales. That was my career. And then I spent two or three years in marketing. But if I had to do a job where I only did sales, or only did marketing, or only did some sort of fulfillment, it would be really boring for me. The thing that makes this hard is also the thing I love about it.
1) Dial in the content. Specifically, we have a client program called Outbound Accelerator. It's six weeks. I'll take companies like Gong or Zoom, who’ve been some of my clients, through a six week accelerator with their team and it's really hands-on, “How do we outbound?” What I've really focused on is, how do I reduce the complexity of how I do this so that one, it doesn't drain all of my willpower fulfilling this, but two people get better results and it's just easier for them to do, so I think trying to figure out how can I teach less and say no to more things and really dial in the content and really, really focus on, hey, what are the handful of things? If there was one thing each week, during the two, one-hour training sessions that I needed everyone to take away, what's that one thing? And really distilling it down and simplifying it. It's just been so hard to find those things that will move the needle the most. We completely revamped our course content. Again, a lot of it is, how do we take 10 hours of content and whittle it down to the best two or three hours that's going to get the best results.
2) Figuring out how to systemize and get a team around me to support me. Another thing that's completely unrelated to that is our marketing. Just like you, I have a podcast and what we'll do with our podcasts is that, we'll take that, we'll chop it up into video clips. We'll re-share it on LinkedIn. I'll share it to my email list, getting mileage out of content. It sounds really nice in theory, to be able to re-share it all these places, but you need good systems in place. Otherwise, I end up being the person to spend all the time to do that. Figuring out how to systemize that and get a team around me to support me has been a really hard problem that we recently figured out how to do.
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What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on right now?
1) Myself as a bottleneck. In terms of roadblocks, me, I've always been the biggest roadblock in the business. I have three virtual assistants that work with me full time. I basically consider them full-timers even though they live in the Philippines, they work with me full-time, and then I have a couple of contractors I use to help with coaching. Those folks don't work with me full-time yet. I ended up being the bottleneck in most of the instances. I just got rid of myself as the bottleneck with marketing. I am trying to get rid of myself as the bottleneck with delivery and coaching and actually executing the trainings. That's a big thing that I'm working through.
2) How to get people to ask for help when they need it. I think engagement is really tough when you have a paid community of people, like in our Outbound Squad program, it's for individual reps. They pay a certain amount of money every month to get group coaching, course content, and then access to a Slack community. We have 85 people in there right now. Getting people to engage in a virtual environment. It's tough. It's something I'm still honestly trying to figure out, how to get people to ask for help when they need it. That's something I'm trying to figure out right now, actually.
3) Getting people to take action on what they learn. I am getting better at that, but this is what I've done the last 14 years, is coach and train salespeople. I'm still learning so much. A guy, Sam Ovens, he runs a company called consulting.com, what he talks about is “eating our customer’s complexity”. I thought that was interesting. A small example of that is, if I teach you Chris, “Hey, when you make a cold call use a permission based opener, it sounds like this: “Hey, Chris, Jason with Blissful Prospecting. I know I probably caught you in the middle of something, but you got a minute for me to tell you why I'm calling and you can let me know if want to keep chatting?” I could just say that to you. Or what I could do...
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15 minutes with Katy McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action. Helping new, aspiring leaders who are stuck in their career get to the executive level. Distractions. Balance. Lack of patience. Work when you work best. Show up as the person who want to be today. Creating focus and intentionality. Do less to do more. Focus on data, structure and process. Ask yourself 3 questions daily: What is the goal? What is the bigger picture? What has been successful in the past?
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Brandon Fluharty said about Katy:
Katy McFee, out of Ottawa, Canada. I've recently come across Katy on LinkedIn as of a few months ago, and I've been really impressed with her voice, particularly around empowering other females to step into a leadership role, in a go-to-market role, sales role. She's done it herself. She's done it successfully, and I think it's a really important voice to highlight and put a spotlight on, because I think it's an area that needs improvement in the sales and go-to-market space. There’s still a male dominated voice in the go-to-market world, and I think bringing diversity is just good for business. Ut’s the thing to do as human beings, but it's also good for business. So, she's an awesome one to bring onto the show.
—Brandon Fluharty, Founder of Be Focused. Live Great. → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Content. Yeah, so first it'd be content. I post on LinkedIn every day, and that has been probably the biggest source of leads. Just people, inbound leads, based on content that's been posted and interacted with.
2) Free help. I'm going to call it free help. This one was kind of accidental, actually, but there have been times where I've offered a free 15 minute call to help someone work through a negotiation, or a quick chat to help them think through a problem, and lots of those have actually led to deal flow.
3) Community. So, just building a community with like-minded individuals, engaging with their content, getting to know them just in a really genuine, curious way has been really big for creating new connections, people referring individuals. And so those would be my top three.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Getting involved in LinkedIn. The first one actually is related to the first question, which is getting involved in LinkedIn. Posting original content, posting videos, that is something that I have never done, until the end of January. The first time I ever posted an original post, that came from my brain, and I found this very daunting as someone who I'm extroverted, but I'm also shy. It was a big leap for me, to be able to put my ideas out in the world, to record videos of myself and then share them with a whole bunch of people. That was a big one for me to overcome.
2) Creating the focus that I wanted. When I initially decided to launch Insights to Action, my plan was to do a number of different things. I was going to do some sales consulting. I was going to help with business strategy, maybe even some sales training, and then also leadership training. But what ended up happening as I got into it, as I started to really launch the business, is I realized I wanted to niche down a little bit. I wanted to find my sweet spot, my passion, and really devote myself to that. What I ended up coming to was working with aspiring leaders, new leaders, who were kind of stuck in their career, and especially women, who are trying to get to the executive level, and who are hitting barriers, and who are having trouble getting to that next level. That is now the sole focus of my business.
3) Managing my time as a solopreneur. That's something that's new to me as well. I'm managing a number of different clients at once, a number of different types of activities. Just having to manage that sheer volume of different types of tasks, I found a little bit challenging. What I've done for that is just simply color-coding my calendar. It sounds really simple, but I have different color-coding for various different types of activities. It's really effective for letting me know where I'm spending my time. Am I spending too much time in a certain area? How can I be more efficient that way?
What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
Good question.
1) Distractions. First one, I'm going to call distractions. Again, this ties into me creating a focus for my business. I get a lot of interest and inquiries for things that are outside of my mission and outside of my vision. Forcing myself to say no to those things, because they can eat up a lot of time. I've noticed that sometimes I slip up and say yes, and then I regret that. So that's one. I'm still working on it every day.
2) Balance. I am big on the anti-hustle thing. I believe that you can be a strong salesperson, be a strong leader, be a strong entrepreneur, and still maintain that balance in your life. For me, though, that is, again, something that I continuously have to work towards and remind myself why I'm doing this and what's important to me in life. I'm getting much better at protecting my time and creating healthy boundaries.
3) Lack of patience. I tend to want to be like 20 steps ahead. Just enjoying the journey, and this is something I talk about too, and I post about this, it's taking my own advice and really embracing the journey and not worrying about where I'm going to be one year, two years, five years from now.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I love this question.
1) Work when you work best. By that, I mean, understanding yourself, knowing what types of tasks, maybe you find more mentally draining, and when you do your best work. For me, I schedule flow tasks in the morning. So, when I want to be creative, maybe I want to write content, maybe I want to work on a presentation or my website, I try to do those things in the morning, because I know that I am mentally sharpest in the morning. If I leave those things for the end of the day, then I'm going to really struggle to create quality work.
2) Intentionality. This is something I talk about, whether it's in your life, whether it's as a leader, whether it's as a business owner. Being really intentional about how you spend your time, how you communicate with people, what you're prioritizing, and keeping that end goal in mind. To me, being outcome-driven, and being intentional, are very closely linked. Intentionality is something that I really apply across all areas of my life.
3) Future continuity. What that means is showing up as the person you want to be, or the leader you want to be, today. I think that's a really powerful mental model that you can use, really to connect your future vision, or your future state, with where you are now.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
Three techniques that go-to-market teams needs to try:
1) Do less...
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18 minutes with George Valdes, Head of Marketing at Monograph. Don’t be afraid to challenge your market. Ask, “Why do you think it needs to be this way?” Starting the community. Hire subject matter experts who understand the memes and inside jokes of the industry. A lot of those inside jokes are coming from pain. When you understand the memes of the industry, you can probably create your own. Identifying blockers. Move fast and playbook things. Irreversible and reversible decisions. Building an exceptional brand. Enabling workflows for architects.
18 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?1) Enable workflows to happen for architects and design professionals. First off, it's helpful to set the context that we service architects, or in the broader sense, design professionals. So essentially, everyone that is part of the pre-construction process, you can think of the construction process being mostly general contractors, we're really trying to enable workflows to happen for that group of people.
2) A very simple pricing structure. In terms of them how we convert the market into revenue, we have a very simple pricing structure that's on a per user basis at this point. We mostly target the largest segment of the industry, which is the SMB market, so small-medium sized businesses. Anywhere between 1-person firms all the way up to around 60-person firms. In the US and in Canada. So, we're very specific. We're really honed in on this market because we feel that this is where the most underserved area of the industry. That's the main lever.
3) Building an exceptional brand. Part of our go-to-market strategy is building an exceptional brand because we get to speak to such a specific audience. A lot of our team comes from the industry, I myself have a background in landscape architecture and architecture, we're able to speak specifically to the pain points that the industry has, with an authentic bent. We're very authentic in our own experiences. We're able to connect with people, even on an emotional level, which I think is very unique, and very special, about what we're doing here.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) One that's always very difficult to pull off is a user conference. We did our second user conference, called Section Cut, about a month ago. It's hard because it's so many different moving parts, but we have a really amazing team here that was able to work asynchronously, autonomously, and in many different ways, while collaborating, at the same time, to execute an amazing show for our customers and our broader community. So I think that’s one. It's almost like two in one because it's just such a difficult endeavor to pull off.
2) Finding the right person to join our leadership team. The other thing that's been difficult, that we've been able to accomplish recently, is we have now a full leadership team. I think this is important. Robert, up until recently, our CEO, was really heading up sales, and I think we now have a team in place, with our new head of sales, that's going to allow us to really focus in and solve even harder challenges as we move forward. I think that one, just finding the right person. Why it's difficult, I’d say, is because we have a very unique culture here at Monograph. We operate, not only remotely, fully remote, but we also have a 4 day work week. And so, finding a leader that can resonate with that, as part of the challenge of operating the sales team, was really important to us, alongside the fact that, culturally, they had to really be a good culture fit, and a good addition to the team.
What are 3 roadblocks you are working on now?
1) Splitting the funnel from a “free trial” motion to a “book a demo.” We're actually going to shift, not fully, our GTM, but mostly. It's an interesting balance. We're basically going to be splitting the funnel from a free trial motion to a book a demo. The reason for this is that we're seeing higher conversions on booking demos at the moment. So, one of the things that we're doing is essentially pre-qualifying through our website folks, and then routing them appropriately to a free trial of they're out of, let's say, our ICP, or ideal customer profile, and then routing them to booking a demo. This is a whole cross-functional motion that we have to be fully aligned on in order to make it work. And so I'd say this is one of the biggest challenges.
2) We’ve recently adopted an OKR model, and the team has various levels of experiences with this. And so, it's making sure we're building the right cadences to be able to move the needle on these OKRs in a way that gets everyone rowing in the same direction.
3) How to tease out the nuances of our product to the market? We've done an exceptional job of building a great brand, and one of the things that we're working on now is how to tease out more so of our products, like the nuances of our product, to the market. That’s a piece that's really top of mind for me, that I feel very confident we can crack, because we have an exceptional team in place now on the marketing team that can help pull that all together. But, it is one of those things where, as we've been building out more differentiation in our a product, we want to continuously make sure we're having that differentiation to the community.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Irreversible and reversible decisions. I like this idea, borrowed from Amazon, of, “There are two types of decisions; irreversible ones and reversible ones.” Or like, “There's two types of doors; one-way doors and two-way doors." I learned this a lot during my time at WeWork, about the importance of being able to move quickly with relatively little information. This was actually a very helpful mental model to decide on how fast to move on something. Obviously, depending on the budget of the things that you're working on, in my case, I was working with a project that any one location that I was helping to open up was, for pre-sales, about a million dollars in budget. Thinking about the trade-offs of that, and just communicating that, was really important. But also factoring in, “Okay. Who do I need to bring in, and how quickly?” Also, making it very clear for them whether this was something that we need to move slow on or be quick on.
2) Move fast and playbook things. We use this one here at Monograph: move fast and playbook things. It's about the idea that we should do things that don't scale at first in order to understand whether they work, as quickly as possible, meaning that you're always going to make the trade off between quality and just execution. If you can narrow your hypothesis down on what you're trying to examine, and you can make that trade-off on quality, because it's not going to impact the actual answer you're looking for. So as a really clear example, let's say you want to know whether a specific channel, or a specific form of content, might work. You could spend the time belaboring on like how perfect that piece of content is, or you could really just answer the first question, which is like, “Does this new asset work in the wild, period?” And then, as you start to learn from that, then you might optimize on quality later, while also thinking about scalability, which resonate...
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Matt Baxter. He's currently a Director of Product at Bestow, where I worked before Monograph, and he's just a great product leader. He was taking a brand new business unit to market when I was on my way out, and it was a huge project, and it was just so much fun to watch Matt do his work. I know he’d have tons of interesting details to share about the go-to-market challenges that he faced.
Here’s what Andrew Miller said about Matt:
—Andrew Miller, Senior Growth Product Manager at Monograph → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
The three ways that I thought of really all revolve around making life insurance more accessible for people.
1) For individuals, life insurance is typically a multi-week long process that requires some doctor's visits. And so it's a really big barrier for people to actually go and acquire it. And so our platform cuts that down to just a couple of minutes and basically an instant decision. So that's one kind of with direct individuals.
2) Through empowering life insurance agents. So, they are really a key, critical part of the process for people to kind of navigate and figure out really what is going to work for them and what their needs are. And so we also use our platform to empower those agents, to do their job faster and easier.
3) Using our platform to enable other life insurance carriers to be able to sell term life more efficiently. Term-life insurance is typically a pretty low margin business, but it's something that people really want and need, and so we've been able to take our platform and make it available to life insurance carriers so that they can use it to sell life insurance faster in the same way.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Offering life insurance carriers our platform. That was basically what kind of my last year it looked like. It was taking the Bestow platform that we had built to sell directly to customers, and reorienting it, and evolving it, to be able to be the software as a service offering. And so there was just a lot of alignment and coordination across pretty much every team at bestow to take this one way that we knew of working with things, and the way that we thought of our platform, and kind of shifting it from a perspective of not just something that enables us to sell to our customers, but to be able to enable others to sell to their customers. And so definitely learned a lot of lessons just around giving people the right context, helping people understand why their pieces matter to this big, huge, whole of a project.
2) Scaling the Bestow product team. So when I joined Bestow, about two and a half years ago, we had a team of about four or five product managers. And now, our team is right around 20 now. And, that's just been a lot of learning around figuring out how to get all these products managers, and different product areas, to coordinate with each other, understanding the dependencies between them. How we can enable each other to ship faster and not get in each other's way as we're trying to get products out to market? Just learning how to coordinate with that group and to do it in a way that we actually enable each other instead of just have to work around each other has also been, I think, definitely a hard problem to solve, and something that we've been working on.
3) I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this, but I think especially the last two years, working from home. For me, I've got three young kids, from nine years old to three years old, and working from home, whether they had school lockdowns or when it's in the summer and they're at home, has definitely taught me a lot about just flexibility between work and life, where it's not as straightforward as just leaving, going to an office, and coming back a couple of hours later. But definitely learning to have more flexibility with that and give more grace to myself and to others.
What are 3 question that you love to ask and why?
1) What's just one thing that I can do, and feel like I've checked off, to start moving in that direction? So I was thinking about that from kind of a couple of different angles, for myself and others. One of the first things that came to mind is whenever I am getting started on somewhat of an ambiguous effort, or I don't really know kind of where to start with something, kind of the blank slate problem, is just identifying something that I can do to make just even a little bit of progress in the direction that I'm trying to go. Even if it maybe doesn't totally solve the problem that I'm trying to go for, it doesn't provide all the answers, I find just getting momentum on it is really helpful. So I always ask myself, “Okay, what's just one thing that I can do, and feel like I've checked off, to start moving in that direction?”
2) What is something that feels harder than it should be? A question I really like to ask my teams and coworkers as we're working through things, and looking for ways to improve things, is asking, “What is something that feels harder than it should be?” And so, I think it's a really good way to expose areas that maybe you've lived with in your product or your process, that some circumstances have changed, and you don't really have to live with that anymore, and you can find ways to improve it. Or, it just allows you to have some reflection and some areas that maybe have been difficult to figure out and untangle, and people have kind of avoided it, but it's an opportunity to really look at it and say, “Are we okay with it being this hard? Or is it hard for a reason that we can actually change and improve?”
3) What differentiates you or makes you more effective than other people in your role? One that I really like to ask others, just in terms of learning from them, and especially when I'm interviewing a product manager candidate is asking, “What differentiates you or makes you more effective than other people in your role?” So whether you're a product manager, if it's like other product managers, or engineer, and things like that, I think it's a really interesting question because I don't think a lot of people enjoy talking too much about the best parts about themselves, so it gives them an opportunity to reflect on that. But it also opens up, shows, what's important to them, and what they really like to focus on.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Get the problem as visual as possible and as quickly as possible. The first thing that I thought, and this is probably a whole bucket of mental models, but whenever I'm trying to work through something or figure out how things relate to each other is I try to get the problem as visual as possible and as quickly as possible. And so whether that's using my whiteboard and just writing it out or getting some sort of online whiteboard like Miro and just trying to map something out with sticky notes. I find that being able to visualize the problem space can help you to uncover patterns and figure out how things relate to each other differently than you might, even if you were writing about the problem, or if you were trying to explain it to somebody. And so, I know not everybody's a visual thinker, but it's almost always the first tool that I go to...
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Achieving your customer's business outcomes. Develop advocates. If your renewal was up today, would you renew? Solving for in-person events again. Design your customer maturation model. Onboarding 2.0. Introducing automation. Confirmation bias. Inversion. 80/20 principal. Figure out your balance between capturing wallet share of your customer base and new logo acquisition.
Here’s what Sean MacPherson said about Kristi:
Kristi Faltorusso. Someone I don't know personally, but I feel like I know her personally because she gives so much back to the CS community through sharing her playbooks, is Kristi Faltorusso over at ClientSuccess. Her focus on showcasing how customer success is a revenue driver and how CS leaders can get to the level of other leaders in an organization is spot on. She's given back so much to the CS community and leveled up so many leaders in the last several years. And honestly, she's one of the top CS leaders in revenue operators out there!
—Sean MacPherson, VP, Customer Success & Experience at Alyce → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
I oversee the customer experience teams. I run customer success, support and services. Three main ways that we're converting that into revenue:
1) Achieving our customer's business outcomes. So, for our organization, keeping our customers satisfied with a value prop of what they came into the business with, helping them achieve that. That helps drive retention and net revenue retention as well. So keeping them, and growing them.
2) Developing advocates. It also helps facilitate developing advocates. Our customer success team really fosters the relationships. Again, going back to the value prop of helping our customers achieve their goals, allows us to develop advocates who are, hopefully, out there in the wild selling our product behind our backs. Telling their peers, their organization, why they need to have us, the value they're getting from us. That's a huge proponent of how we're thinking about that.
3) Industry thought leadership. Our team spends a lot of time really honing in best practices, understanding the shifts, the market landscape. And we do believe by selfless giving, by just sharing those thoughts and insights, that we help elevate the community as a whole, hopefully that education and enablement will bring folks back when they're ready to purchase. We think about that as a full lifecycle in terms of how we're driving revenue for the business overall.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
I wish I only had three hard problems, but three that we've recently solved for is:
1) Solving for in-person events again, at scale, in the community. I think everyone is generally very excited to get back in person and spend time together. Especially in the customer success community, where folks are generally pretty close. But, getting in person is really important for a lot of individuals. Now, we're still navigating some of the changes in the landscape. We still have COVID issues and concerns, people with compromised immune systems, who are still hesitant to get out there. But, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is the best methodology for us to do that and how we should be approaching it. For us, it's been a lot of these little in-city location events, and we've found that folks feel safer, they feel more comfortable coming together in these smaller cohorts, in their areas, as opposed to flying somewhere, going to larger events where they just don't feel as safe. So, we've seen tremendous success with really focusing in on these smaller, intimate setting events in the locations where folks are.
2) Empowering our technical support team with better access to customer data to help them prioritize their efforts. In customer experience, we know how critical the customer support experience can be, how impactful positively, how impactful negatively, it can be if it's not executed well. We've spent a lot of time making sure our team in the customer support organization, not only has access to really smart, intelligent customer data, but understands what that data is telling them and how to use it to prioritize their efforts. This ensures that our larger customers, customers who are at a point where maybe there are some challenges they’re overcoming, they're getting the time and attention that's necessary to help keep the momentum going. To get things back into a good place. Also, with customers who are extremely satisfied, how do we continue to build on that momentum? But, that prioritization based on data has helped us deliver a better experience overall.
3) Education and enablement for both the community on customer success thought leadership, as well as ClientSuccess as a technology. For us, we believe that rising tide lifts all boats. How do we make sure that we're educating the community around customer success best practices? How to go into an organization and execute? How to get buy-in? Things of that nature. Not super intuitive for everybody. For a lot of leaders, they're a bit newer. So, we've really focused on helping them understand: how do you do this? How do you do it well? How do you execute flawlessly? And then, obviously for our customers, how do they maximize the value of ClientSuccess and figuring out, again, how do we train and enable at scale? Education and enablement has been a big focus of ours and we've had some really great success with some core programs.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
I also wish I only had three roadblocks, but, three things that we're really doubling down our efforts on:
1) Designing a customer maturation model that translates against people, process and technology, to guide our companies through their own journeys. I think a lot of technology providers would assume that the customer journey happens with you. It doesn’t. It's happening with, or without you. Technology is one component of a customer's journey. So, we talk about it, you know, our partnership through a customer life-cycle lens. Customer maturation is really critical because we want to help customers identify where they are, but more importantly, what do they need to do to get to that next level? So really designing something that we feel like is helpful, it's engaging, and designs a map for our customers to help them advance their program in their organization.
2) Onboarding 2.0. Any company, especially in the SaaS space, understands the impact and the value, of a very strong, well-executed onboarding program. We're really focused on designing this 2.0 model, which is designed through a customer lens and highly flexible. So instead of us creating a checklist and saying, “here's everything our customers need to do in onboarding,” because, who are we to determine? We now take their consideration of what they're focused on. It's all built around their goals and then helping them design programs and parts of the products that help support the execution of that. Helping them get faster time to value.
3) Introducing automation into our customer lifecycle. We like to think about this as augmentation. Now, we're not trying to move to a fully digital landscape where we're only supporting our customers through technology from a push motion. We want to find out...
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Market through your customers. A bad-ass, true social media presence. Your customers are on social? You're on social. Fire your social media consultant and stop producing super basic boring stuff. Nobody wants that corporate version of you. They want an authentic version of you. Invest in community. Dark funnel. Customer referrals and user-generated content. Theory of leverage. Self-determination theory. Emotional withdrawals and deposits. Building a customer advisory board. Read Robert Cialdini's book, Influence.
Here’s what Arthur Castillo said about Dan:
High leverage principles. I was taught this by my manager, Dan, as I moved into Marketing. So in trying to explain it, a high leverage activity is maybe something that you create once, a system or a process, and that you can reuse it. So we're not starting from scratch. Whereas a low leverage activity will be, I'm doing it once, so I'm having to recreate it from scratch. I'm really not building any systems or processes. So it's helped me understand, “How do I create this so I'm going to be scalable? How do I do things maybe once or twice and it serves me for a longer amount of time?”
—Arthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Let's say, “How do we take our TAM and convert that into customers?” I'll take a segment of that right now. Two of our primary buyer personas at Chili Piper—we’re a tool that basically manages inbound lead flow amongst other things with complicated lead routing, and all kinds of cool stuff—but our primary personas are 1) Demand Gen, because they want the ads that they bring traffic to the website to convert, and 2) Revenue Ops, because they don't want to deal with this manual lead-routing situation. So the first question you need to ask yourself is like: “Where are these people? Where do they hang out? Are they at events? Are they in communities? Are they on social? Are they grabbing beers with their peers?” And then from there it's like, “Okay, how can we be there, too?” So three areas that we focus on to convert these folks into customers:
1) Community. We look across a lot of the top communities. For us, for the RevOps persona, it's like WizOps, Marketing Operation Pros (an excellent community run by Mike Rizzo and Co), Pavilion, Modern Sales Pros, Demand Curve. There are a bunch of them. So you're like, “Okay, this is where ICP is. They're active here. How do we be active too?” Well, the solution isn't: when your solution comes up to be like, “Oh, pick me! Chili Piper! Right here!” It's to have your customers and advocates authentically want to engage in those communities. So one way we convert our market into revenue is by ensuring that our customers are supported, active, healthy, and receive gratitude whenever they evangelize for us. Within PlanHat, which is our customer management system, we have information on what communities certain people are active in. Then, across all these communities, many of which we’re sponsoring, we have social listening mechanisms in place using a tool called Charla, and also in some cases, the founders of these communities are contracted to alert us when our solution comes up. So, when our solution comes up, naturally now, a lot of customers chime in organically. If not, maybe we'll give them a little bit of a nudge. So, that's one space that we do it. Community. We surveyed all of our Closed Won customers from 2021 and 20% said they heard of us first from a community. So shout out to all the communities out there. RevGenius. There's a new one launching soon, which we can't tell you about, but it's really, really exciting. Sales Assembly, they're just awesome.
2) Social Media. Maybe you've seen us on LinkedIn. When I joined the company in 2020, over two years ago now, wow, we had about 37,000 organic impressions per quarter. Last quarter, that number was 2.7 million organic impressions. Just from the company account. Not from employees. Not from customer advocates. You can look, actually, in a granular level, and see what percentage of your audience is in different personas. We brought our rev ops component up from 3% to 8%. So it's being active there. Your customers are on social? You're on social.
3) Customer referrals and user-generated content. You'll realize they all have a theme. So within social media, I do three real types: you have your company page, you have your employee evangelism, and then you have user-generated content. A while back, a friend of ours, Sara McNamara, who's not a customer, and she's not paid to do anything, she’s just a bad-ass marketing ops leader, made a post about Chili Piper and how we can do really complex lead routing, all kinds of cool stuff. Got like 40,000 impressions. So then we were like, “Maybe this led to revenue.” We actually went into the post, took all the people there who were mentioned, who liked or commented favorably, enriched that using LeadIQ, and then uploaded it to Salesforce as a campaign. We can now see the influence of social media user-generated content on our pipeline. It turns out that the dark funnel is still dark. We don't really know what's going on there. But we do know that 80% of our inbound, and last month was our best ever month for inbound, just comes from people Googling chilipiper.com. We believe that comes from organic user-generated content and just a bad-ass true social media presence.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Dark funnel. Looping back to the first one, it's this dark funnel thing. I feel so lucky. I report directly to the CEO. I manage PR, community, social media, events, customer marketing, and then a bunch of other random things, including our foundation, but a lot of these areas where we're putting a lot of effort into, it's not trackable. It's not like when someone mentions our solution in a community, we're going to be like, “Hey Rebecca, please comment. And then tie this UTM link to your comment with a demo.” That's so inauthentic. It just seems slimy to me. We want to keep it organic, want to keep it real, but when you do that, you sacrifice tracking. So, being able to operate in the dark funnel and get buy-in to take these activities, to spend this money, is a big problem we're focused on. Fortunately, we have two co-CEOs, Nicolas Vandenberghe and Alina Vandenberghe, who just get it. They get marketing. They understand it. So, they've allowed me to grow this team out to around 8 now, where we operate in the dark funnel. But, it's tough still. One easy way to solve this is just to put on your demo requests form, an attribution, not a dropdown, but, “How did you hear of us?” Leave it open-ended. That way you can get credit for dark funnel activities. Alyce does an amazing job at this, where they have Nick Bennett, like a mega influencer, who’s also like the nicest guy ever, who's able to just go out there and produce content without tracking it, because when folks come inbound, they're saying, “I got brought here by Nick Bennett.” Those are a couple of ways you can overcome them. We're still working to overcome them, and candidly, I want to get more hard data on the dark funnel, so I can hire more of a team to just do user-generated content. Our senses are that this is really working for us, but like, it's not in the CRM, you know?
2) Building our customer advisory board. Like many t...
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23 minutes with Shri Apte, VP Revenue at Triplebyte. Starting from the outcome. MECE frameworks. Bias to action. Heavily dogfooding your product. Marketing from a position of expertise Overcoming barbell distribution in the performance of different account executives. Understanding what drives renewals. Marketing two separate products. Consistent messaging and keeping cohesion. Driving cross-product upsells.
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Patrick Coleman said about Shri:
Shri Apte. VP of Revenue at TripleByte. Great guy and TripleByte is a fantastic business. We’re big fans of really anybody operating in the space to make it easier for more people to get jobs in coding and realize the benefits of the internet economy. Big, big fans.
—Patrick Coleman, VP of Growth at Replit → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Inbound traffic. The first way that constitutes a good portion of our revenue is inbound traffic. Inbound traffic is an interesting challenge for Triplebyte because we have two products that serve the same customer base, but two very different needs of our customers. Our first product, which is free, Triplebyte Screen, is a self-serve, product-led-growth go-to-market, that enables technical recruiters to incorporate assessments into their hiring pipeline. Our other paid product, which is a pure sales-driven go-to-market strategy, enables technical recruiters to source qualified engineers, who have already taken technical assessments, onto their teams and into their hiring pipeline. Being really clear about messaging, about the needs of the person that is coming inbound and routing them to the right motion, is one of the key ways that we convert our market into revenue.
2) Outbound. The other way would be outbound. Our outbound strategy is fortunate enough to be targeted towards companies who very clearly telegraph their needs for software engineers. We can drive a lot of our outbound strategy by listening to software engineer job postings on ATS, on public job boards, on a variety of data sources, and make sure that our outbound strategy is timely to when the volume of roles that a company has open for software engineers experiences a substantial increase. We can be having those key conversations right when recruiters are feeling the need for increased pipeline most acutely.
3) Making the recruiters that work on our platform champions of our product. We want every single recruiter that interacts with our product that may move onto another company, to want to bring Triple Byte’s hiring and sourcing tools into their new organization and grow the number of champions that we have out there in the market by delivering a great experience to our customers.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Finding expectations for the average performance of account executives. The first difficult problem on the go-to-market side would be finding expectations for the average performance of account executives. We were seeing very much a barbell distribution in the performance of different account executives. We weren't sure what we could expect average performance to be, that we could set goals around that were motivating to both performers that we would want to keep, performers who were going to blow the goals out of the water, and effectively manage away people who are going to consistently miss those goals. It took a lot of digging into the specific processes of the AEs, how quickly they were responding to different components and messaging in their sales cycle, listening to a lot of Gong calls, that led us to recalibrate our training programs and produce more and more account executives that were performing at the top end of the barbell, and eventually, move up the average performance of the team, and set reasonable goals for all of the individual AEs.
2) Scaling our BDR team. The second hard problem, which actually dovetails well with the first one was scaling our BDR team. A big component to scaling our BDR team that was challenging, was maintaining win rates on outbound opportunities and ensuring that AEs were treating outbound opportunities with an effective strategy that gave customers more care and attention than the average inbound account may need. Obviously, we want to care and be attentive to all the customers in the sales process, but in terms of prioritization and where incremental efforts might lead to incremental wins, we wanted to make sure that time was being allocated there.
3) Understanding what drives renewals. Our final problem that we recently overcame was understanding what drives renewals. So after a customer has been sold, what exactly are the success metrics that we need to look at, and have our customers achieve, in order for them to have a very, very high probability of renewing. Looking at all the data across our lapsed subscriptions on a normalized basis, which was quite a challenge for our data team, and marrying that with anecdotal and qualitative information provided by our account management team, led us to a really, really clear understanding of exactly the results we need to deliver through our product for our customers, in order for them to continue to see value and renew with us for their continued recruiting success.
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What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on right now?
1) Marketing two separate products. The two products that we have, Triplebyte Screen and Triplebyte Hire, have two completely different go-to-market motions. While that's been an effective strategy for growing revenue, it does make the marketing of those two products, both on our website, as well as content marketing, as well as lifecycle marketing, extremely challenging.
2) A subchallenge of that is developing consistent messaging and keeping cohesion across the products. So that we're not pitching value propositions to one group of customers that they may get more leverage out of in another product. We don't want to tell screening customers that we're helping increase their hiring pipeline, when in reality, that's the main value prop of our hire product. That dovetails really well with the third problem:
3) Driving cross-product upsells and having customers use both of our products. Because they have two different sales motions, the type of customers that come into both of the products, and become users and adopters, very often have completely divergent profiles, and narrowing into the subset of customers that have needs for both of our products, identifying them in a scalable way, and assigning tasks to our account managers, or to our customer support team, to drive that double product adoption, is something we're still working on and refining.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Starting from the outcome. One of the mental models I find most effective when thinking through how we want to approach our users, how we want to approach decisions ...
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Meet Dani Woolf, Director of Demand Generation at Cybersixgill. If you focus on the mission, you will make the money. Go talk to your buyer. Pick up the phone. Start building relationships with your buyer. Get out of the echo chamber right now. Do yourself a favor. You owe it to the world to unmute your mic. Becoming more technically literate to geek out with your buyers. Getting the team to simplify, then simplify again. The order in which you do things matters. Parkinson’s law of triviality.
16 Insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Ryan Paul Gibson said about Dani:
Dani Woolf. Dani is Director of Demand Generation for a cybersecurity company. I like her because I can tell we align with our philosophies on things around demand, which is you can't just ram a product into someone's face and expect them to think that they'll buy it, because that's not how B2B works. People just don't wake up and want to buy a solution. There's a process they go through of decision-making. Some of it's rational, some of it’s emotional, to eventually land on a list of solutions when the time is right. So, I think she'd be cool to talk to.
—Ryan Paul Gibson, Founder of Content Lift → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
That's a great question, and it really got me thinking.
1) We provide as much simple, practical—and the key word here is practical—honest, and ungated information as possible. In ways, or angles, that allow our buyers to learn something new that could be applied to their daily job. The key here isn't to expect that that there will be an immediate transaction. I just spoke to a buyer last week who said, and one thing that really resonates with me, “Time is the most valuable asset.” And so with that insight, we're letting buyers decide when their time can be used for our resources and assets, as well. It's that “pull in” versus the “push for” attention mindset. I think more organizations are catching onto that more simple, pragmatic approach to their strategy. Those are the companies who are really going to win, in my opinion.
2) We're building a safe space community and boardrooms for our buyers in our niche to have conversations amongst themselves about those challenges that are they're experiencing, that they're going through. And what that does is it allows them to ping pong new ideas on how to solve those issues. We’re they're, obviously, to join the conversation and help them find solutions to those problems in closed face-to-face intimate forums and areas. It's really been rewarding to see business grow from that.
3) Collaborating with customers and end users to champion our point of view in different channels. This is my favorite. If you're in the security field, word of mouth, trust, and credibility is everything. As a startup, it really takes a lot of time to build that credibility. So when you build authentic relationships with your customers, with your audience, with your end users, who then get excited by the opportunity to do really creative things in spaces that resonate with them and their audience, more trust, more visibility to your point of view will then occur. And that's been really, really pivotal for us since the start of 2022, especially. We're really doubling down on that into 2023.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Getting access to my buyers. It's really why I created Audience 1st podcast. For years, I wasn't able to get in front of customers, believe it or not, due to constraints from customer success or sales. It blows my mind to this day. It really does. So I just went out by myself and started engaging with buyers to understand their motivations. I wanted to know what their goals were, their challenges, what makes them tick, right?How do they go about evaluating solutions? What triggers them to even start exploring tools? To me, that was critical, so that I could use that information and those insights, along with my teammates, to create more thoughtful experiences and think about how to go to market versus just building a strategy solely based on assumption.
2) Break out of the echo chamber. To top that off, I found it frustrating and still do at times that other cybersecurity marketers in forums or on LinkedIn, talk to other marketers about how to do things. When I know for a fact that these strategies and tactics do not work in the cybersecurity industry. So I found it the responsible thing to do to break out of the echo chamber and share the insights that I'm learning on the podcast with other marketers and sellers, because it's crucial that they engage with security buyers in a more moral and ethical way. In the long run, and I think in the short term, that's going to provide them with that exponential growth that they're looking for in the first place. So, it's been one month since the launch of audience first and it's resonating so hard, which is really great to see finally.
3) Instilling my core values throughout my current organization. As marketers or sellers in cybersecurity specifically on the vendor side, we are equally responsible for protecting people. And if we're all about the profit first, before the mission of protecting people, we are going to lose the battle real fast as an organization. And so, when you come into a company that's fueled by appeasing investor profits, because we all know that loads of security vendors are just gushing with cash from investors, it's very hard to instill that mission-before-money mindset throughout the company. Because we're all stressed to double triple. I mean, I've even heard someone say that he has to 5x revenue, which is crazy. Fortunately, I've grown really comfortable to speak up and relay my core values across organization. And I see that it's sticking in the right places. So, so I'm very hopeful that the customer first, the mission-before-money mindset, will continue to thrive and grow at my company. It's a process, and it takes time, and you just gotta be comfortable with that.
What are 2 roadblocks that you’re working on now?
1) Becoming more technically literate to geek out with my buyers. It's one thing to have soft skills, which I think is needed on the buyer-side in security. Actually, and the marketing and sales side, to be honest. But, it's another to be able to geek out with your buyer and speak their language. I think marketers and sellers who are able to articulate challenges and solutions in buyer terms, and in more technical terms, I strongly believe that's a differentiator on its own. Like why wait for a sales engineer to answer a more technical question, if a potential customer approaches you and they have that question, when you can do it on your own, and much earlier in the buying process? Because, who knows if that security buyer will even have time for you again later down the line. Sometimes there are no second chances.
2) Getting the team and myself to simplify, and then simplify again. Because I do not want to over promise and under deliver in the organization or to my buyers. So, as a marketing team and an organization right now where I work, we're going...
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9 minutes with Antoine Buteau, Business Operations at Replit. Balancing scale and experimentation. The risk of becoming too data-driven and copying playbooks from other companies. Growth attribution. Why Product Market Fit isn't enough. The importance of integrity. Pricing is an underrated lever. The Bowling Alley Framework to make sure users activate. Productivity and knowledge managment. Hiring. International GTM.
20 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Antoine Buteau. I want to give a shout out to Antoine Buteau on my team who leads BizOps for us. Just super sharp. Started his career as an engineer and then was a strategy consultant for software businesses. Just a brilliant go-to-market operator.
Here’s what Patrick Coleman said about Antoine:
—Patrick Coleman, VP of Growth at Replit → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Patrick covered our plans in a previous podcast so I won't repeat what he said. Our go-to-market motion is product-led which means 3 things in how we convert our market into revenue.
1) Our free plan is good enough to make our users successful and have them build cool projects. We don't do aggressive features gating, so we're able to acquire the right target users and users are able to experience the full value of the Replit product.
2) Because our free plan is powerful and we're targeting developers, in-product education is important. The limit people will hit with the free plan is around resources. When we included a resource utilization component within Replit, we saw an increase in conversion from the free to the paid plan. Users were able to understand their usage and the benefits of upgrading.
3) The importance of community. We give tools so that creators can share and show their projects. This means that our users push the limit of the product and help us market what you can do with Replit. In complement, we have a community team that harness that creative potential by organizing events like hackatons and jams.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Just to make sure I don't repeat what Patrick said I have two.
1) Growth attribution. We had a sense of what channels worked best for us. We dug in the data and found insights on what channels get the most pageviews, conversion and retention. It's very useful to have this data so we can double down on what generates the most result.
2) International GTM. We have a large user base outside the US, so we wanted to test what would happen if we do country specific go-to-market. Prioritizing the country to focus on required alignment across the company and we wanted to make sure that we don't slow the entire team by requiring product changes. We went out in the market, spoke to users to learn about the market dynamic and adjusted some of our go-to-market initiatives. We saw strong interest and users were receptive to our efforts.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
1) Hiring. We have ambitious growth plans, so we need to hire great people that will fit the culture. The market is competitive, and at our size, a bad hire is still very costly, so we need to balance that out.
2) Balancing scale and experimentation. We have acquisition channels that work. When you're transitioning from a startup to a growth stage company, you still need to run a lot of experiments, but you also need to scale what works and that require a different mindset.
3) Data Infrastructure. As you scale, there's always a risk of becoming too data-driven and copying playbooks from other companies. Data can only tell you what happened in the past. There's usefulness to that, but there's still a lot of value in the craft and thinking from first principles. It's important that we continue building that infrastructure while also aligning people on a set of common taxonomies, questions, tools and how to use those tools.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
Being a manager now, three questions I like to ask are:
1) How do people like working?
2) What are their career goals?
3) What are their current roadblocks?
Basically when I manage a team, the first thing that I always make sure is: is it clear? Are the expectations clear? Is the strategy clear? And then, are the work and the priorities clear? Being able to map that to their personal goals is very helpful for me as a manager.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) For productivity, I use the Getting Things Done methodology. It's the best methodology I have found to instill focus and clarity on the work that needs to get done. I have confidence in my system which removes some of the anxiety around work.
2) For knowledge management, I use Roam Research. It's a note-taking tool that help you connect your thoughts and group them together in related bits of information. Being able to link information without friction and bringing notes in their context is super helpful when you have to do a lot of context switching.
3) The importance of integrity. I take it very seriously. Integrity means that you are trustworthy. Others can trust you to do what you said you would do. You can also trust yourself including living out your aspirations and visions for participating in the world.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Brian Balfour at Reforge wrote a great piece on Why Product Market Fit Isn't enough. Brian adds three other components to the well known Product Market Fit model. These should all be linked together and have implications when trying to move up or down market.
Product Channel Fit - the concept that products are built to fit with acquisition channels.Channel Model Fit - that channels are determined by your business modelModel Market Fit - your business model influences the target market and vice versa.2) Pricing is one of the most important levers and I still think it's underrated. I like the Van West model, which is a multi-question model that indirectly measures willingness to pay instead of directly posing the question to potential buyers. Rather than asking potential buyers to identify a single price point, the Van West model helps assess a range of prices instead of just one. The simplest version of the model is to ask what the buyer considers an “acceptable” price (good value for the money) and at what point the price would start to get “expensive” (they’d have to think twice about buying it).
3) The Bowling Alley Framework, an onboarding model. The goal of the framework is to get the user to the desired outcome. You can use product or conversational bumpers to do that. Product bumpers might be product tours or progress bars and conversational bump...
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Meet Brandon Fluharty, Founder of Be Focused. Live Great. The concept of a personal operating system. Transformations over transactions. Thinking bigger with prospects. Staying committed to long-term thinking. Overcoming imposter syndrome. Level up your environment. Leveling up tools. Thinking like a designer. Discipline, flexibility, curiosity.
22 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Brandon Fluharty is one of my favorites. He is actually a million-dollar seller, which is like a huge goal for a lot of people. Just released an incredible e-book that talks about a lot of the things I mentioned in terms of not doing more, but doing better, and really aligning habits with your big P purpose, forming, and bringing in, a lot of strategies that will help you get there.
Here’s what Mehann Misiak said about Brandon:
—Meghann Misiak, Founder of The Path to President’s ClubWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Content, community, and connections. I’ve been doing it with my business. I learned it really effectively at my old company, LivePerson.
1) Content. Putting out good, authentic content draws people in.
2) Community. Building, not an audience, but a community, where prospects can commingle with actual customers. I think having folks talk to those who are maybe 12-18 months down that path is a really powerful thing for those who are maybe on the fence of buying a digital solution, buying a transformation.
3) Connections. So, having those connections that are a level deeper, a bit more meaningful. And, I always liked to turn every meeting that I had with a prospect into more of a collaborative design session. Just a great way to get folks to open up, lead with curiosity, get those insights, and then use those insights in a really actionable way. You can actually cut down a lot of meetings in the sales process by turning your meetings into more of a meaningful connection and using design principles.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Overcoming imposter syndrome. So, as someone who's highly introverted, being in what is mostly perceived as an extroverted world, in sales, overcoming imposter syndrome was really important for me. Especially as I was leveling up, I needed to learn through working with a specific coach who specializes on imposter syndrome. And, what we realized is imposter syndrome is a healthy sign for high achievers, especially as you're elevating inside your career. So, that helped me to sort of repurpose my introversion, and being really quiet, into a sales superpower by being more empathetic, being a really good listener, being an over-thinker that helps me to look deeply into a company that I was pursuing as a prospect, and to be able to pull in insights that might be meaningful, and helpful to, to that prospect and lending that opportunity. So overcoming imposter syndrome was a big one for me.
2) Transformations over transactions. Less transactions, and thinking more about transformations. So thinking bigger with my prospects. And, by getting outside of the box of selling a one-off transaction, which is common in, particularly, the industry I came from SaaS, software as a service, the usual model is land then expand. I wanted to rethink that model and think, “How could I think, actually, more expansive, from the beginning, and open up the aperture of where we started? And then, make a more meaningful impact using our services, and using our solution, pulling in more people who could help a really large brand, like a Delta Airlines, a Chipotle, and United Healthcare to really go after big moonshot ideas, and challenges, that they were trying to solve for?” So second one: transformations over transactions.
3) Saying no more. A big one that really changed really the direction of my career in my life was saying no more. So this concept of slowing down in order to speed up, I had the temptation to want to hold on to every account, wanting to say yes to every opportunity. And unfortunately, what that was doing was just spreading me too thin and leading to a path to burn burnout. But when I worked with a manager and a coach who really helped give me some good sound advice and outside perspective of, “Hey, your best suited when you can go deeper with an account versus trying to work too many accounts at once. Why don't you slow down in order to speed up your progress?” And that was really profound and game-changing for me.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
1) Staying committed to long-term thinking. So, I've made the transition from intrepreneur as a individual contributor, a high impact strategic SaaS seller working for other large companies, public companies, to now being a solopreneur and saying no. As I'm trying to grow a business and stay focused on long-term initiatives and goals, that's been a real challenge. The best thing that's been helping me is the commitment to pillars and a theme that I said when I started my business, when I launched my business just a month ago, staying grounded to those operating principles versus saying yes to lucrative consulting opportunities, or coaching engagements, that are coming at me often. Great first world problem to have certainly, I'm very fortunate and grateful for that, but, I know that could lead down a path of tempting me to steer away, veer away, from my long-term vision and north star for the organization. So, playing the long game is definitely a challenge, and a roadblock, I'm trying to overcome.
2) Comparison syndrome. Sort of over imposter syndrome that creeps in from time to time, but a challenge that I'm currently facing a lot, that encounter is comparison syndrome. So comparing my business, or myself, to others that I might see being hyper successful in social media or other businesses that I aspire to be like and comparing myself where I am now. I think it's been a challenge and one thing I'm always trying to keep in the back of my mind is, you know, everybody's on their own path and I can't look at someone or a business that might be 18, 24, 10 years further down that road than I am and expect the same results or impacts, it’s just unfair and unrealistic. It's hard. It's hard in today's modern world when we're constantly bombarded with notifications and the dopamine hits of novelty of social media, to constantly see how well other people are doing and wanting to compare yourself. That's the second one.
3) Personal operating system. I'm really bullish on this concept of a personal operating system. So, refining my personal operating system in the sense of turning it into a thrive system. That's what I'm endeavoring on. And that takes looking at things like, how well rested I am, how I'm sleeping, how healthy I am, how that's integrated between my work and my life, so that I can be at my best when I'm trying to work. I can stay undistracted when I'm trying to do highly strategic work, and I can focus and get in flow states. So, fine tuning, tweaking, and evolving that personal operating system so it's a consistent thrive system. That’s something I'm really excited about working on.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
<... -
Meet Meghann Misiak, Founder of The Path to President’s Club. What motivates you? The why. Starting a company is like staring all of your weaknesses in the face, or in the mirror, on a daily basis. Leveling up. Radical transparency. Make it okay to talk through the challenges transparently. Quick wins, dream clients and exploratory projects. Learning to not do it all. Being able to say no.
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Leslie Venetz said about Meghann:
Meghann Misiak. Do you know Meghann Misiak? She's incredible. I would highly recommend her. Absolute badass women in sales or founders in that ecosystem. That’s who I would recommend.
—Leslie Venetz, Founder of Sales Team Builder → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
I love this question, and it definitely blew my mind in the beginning, because I had never been asked this. I think you could approach this question in a few different ways. I think of it as quick wins, dream clients and exploratory projects. So, this applies, no matter if you're starting as a sales rep in a new territory, or if you're even a CSM, a customer service manager who is looking at their client list, or if you're a product person figuring out product-market fit.
1) Quick wins. For me, I started my company a year and a half ago. I was like, “Okay, who are the clients that are coming to me?” The inbound leads. Those are typically early adopters and there is going to be a very different sales and marketing strategy for them.
2) Dream clients. I feel like a lot of people get really stuck with only those inbound leads, but I really urge people not only to focus on those quick wins. Those can be great for business, great for just getting your foot in the door, but we need to keep an eye on that longterm goal of bringing in those dream clients, whether it's larger deals, the corporate clients, one client that makes up the majority of your revenue, or the majority of your quota. Really helpful.
3) Exploratory projects. And, we need to make sure that we're also balancing that with exploratory projects. Maybe it's not the quick wins. Whether it's new products, new industries or types of clients, we should always be bringing a level of innovation to make sure that we're continuously growing our product offering as well as continuously taking on clients that really could open up new streams of revenue and new types of audience.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
It was hard to limit it to only three.
1) I just started my own company. So, I have such a new appreciation for anyone who is a founder. So starting my own company, the biggest part was leaving the stability, and the structure, of a full-time role.
2) Forming the process. One of the hardest things about it was just forming the process. That's kind of the number two hard problem I'm dealing with. I tell people, “Starting a company is like staring all of your weaknesses in the face, or in the mirror, on a daily basis.” Your weaknesses definitely catch up with you. I had this really crazy vision of all the things I was going to do, and the only limitation is myself, and that's hard to deal with.
3) Leveling up. The third problem, or challenge, I'm struggling with is: once I formed the process for year one, it's leveling up. I feel like this is something a lot of people do not focus on. We are so comfortable with the status quo, with the, “Hey, like I finally feel stable.” And, in order to level up, a lot of times you have to completely change your process. You have to get uncomfortable again. For me, getting comfortable being uncomfortable is one of my core values, but it doesn't make it any easier to break those habits and to get to the next level.
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What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
Whew. So I'm covering from burnout, still, after a year and a half, and it's taught me so much about everything. About life.
1) Learning to not do it all. I honestly have realized that one of the main roadblocks that I'm dealing with, because of burnout, is just learning to not do it all. This is such a hard thing for top performers and for overachievers, like myself.
2) Being able to say no is really hard, but it does help me make sure I'm focused on the right things. Whether it's saying no to clients that don't align with the things that I'm doing, or saying no to projects or partnerships that would take away from my focus on the right things, it's really important. But again, it is such a hard thing because of my people-pleasing tendencies.
3) Being flexible enough to pivot. The third roadblock, apart from recovering for burnout being included in that, is just being flexible enough to pivot. To not only say no initially, but to say no when maybe taking on a client that doesn't align and you're like, “Oof, I need to be flexible enough, and live in my values enough, to realize when something isn't aligned. Saying no can be a little bit easier in the beginning. Saying no in the middle of a project is really hard. So, learning when to pivot and learning when like, “Okay, I tried something, but this is not what I want to do.” That's been a roadblock, but a fun challenge as well.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I feel like all of mine are pretty aligned right now, and they're very radically different after recovering from burnout.
1) Essentialism. It's a book. Check it out. It's life-changing. But, it really goes to understanding your priority. What is the one thing, like the one goal, that I'm working towards? My north star. My big “P” Purpose, and making sure that everything I'm working on is working towards that.
2) The why. Some of my coaching clients hate me when I do this, but I do this exercise which is called, “So what?” It's basically just challenging them. They're like, “Yeah, I'm working on this…” and I'm like, “Okay, tell me the so what? Like, why is that important? Why does that matter?” And, you can do this, whether talking to clients about what they want to achieve and you're like, “Okay, well, tell me why?” It's really frustrating, but it's critically important. So really getting to the why behind things, whether for me, it's like, “Why am I doing this training? What do I want people to get out of it?” If you're launching a product, it shouldn't only be cool and awesome and exciting, but like, “Why is it important?”
3) Meditation. When I'm stuck on those two things, the third mental model is meditation. I meditate on it constantly. Whenever I'm stuck. I've learned now to not just push through with more work, but to truly just take a pause. Meditate. What I find is that taking that break is incredible, like what clarity opens up for me.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try...
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Meet with Ryan Paul Gibson, Founder of Content Lift. Asking questions. Why? Why and how do people buy? After you decided on wanting to solve a problem, what did you do next? What made you trust X? Where to fit in the marketing landscape. Networking. Jobs to Be Done. Transcribe and go over everything again. Jump on calls with other peers.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what MJ Peters said about Ryan:
Ryan Paul Gibson. He owns a company called Content Lift and he helps companies interview their customers. So he is an expert on that marketing discovery call and he’s worked with lots of companies on their go-to-market strategy. Bet you he has some super interesting techniques that other GTM leaders should apply. —MJ Peters, VP of Marketing at CoLab Software → [Listen](<https://market-to-revenue.com/mj-peters-colab-software-vp-marketing>)What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
So my market, right? Like how I go about it? Being a solo printer is interesting because some of the things are the same as being a B2B marketer, because I am business-to-business, but there's also some differences. There's three things I just use and it's very basic.
How I promote myself, which is LinkedIn, and that's my sole channel. I decided early on it's going to be it. And I don't deviate from that. I have a very specific framework and strategy there.Networking, but it's all digital networking. So, I'm in 10 different groups for B2B marketers and there that the strategy is different. Some is the same. I'm still trying to give people help, but I help more at a general marketing level as somebody who's been in B2B in marketing for 20 years. So, I will help and give people my thoughts and interact there. And often that will turn into people wanting to talk to me more.My website. Like any other business. And, that's very much designed around high intent. Informing people how I do things.Those are it. It's a very simple process, and that's really high-funnel, mid-funnel, bottom-funnel. I use that framework. I hope I answered the question.
Figuring out how I was going to make a career for myself. Not as a marketer in a house. That was a big challenge, and I think I'm on the path.Figuring out like where I fit then in the marketing landscape. That was a big one because I was trying to be what they call, a fractional marketer, and that's just a fancy way of saying part-time. You'll see a lot of fractional CMOs out there. I tried to be a fractional CMO, and I’m not smart enough to be a fractional CMO. So, I went in as a part-time senior marketer, but I wasn’t really satisfied doing that. There were just challenges I had with that. So, I decided to niche down. How was I going to niche? And I found out. Just through a chain of events I got some research contracts to do customer research, because I had done a lot of them in my career, and I niched down into that. So I found sort of my path and it's great, because I wanted something that I can make a huge, big difference with a business and a marketing team, but have it be repeatable, consistent and provide more value than just me being sort of a part-time marketer for hire.Managing my time, which I think is hard for everybody. I don't know if I've solved that one yet, but what I'm really just trying to do is focus on the things I can control and have the most impact on, whether for myself, from our clients, because it's so easy to get distracted in marketing when you're a marketer, especially a marketer marketing to marketers, which is so meta, but being very specific about how you spend your time. Because there's only so much time in the day and in your life.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
Why? Why is actually one of the first questions I like to ask, but why is always contextual. Let's say I'm doing my work, I like to understand, “What were you doing to solve a problem before you bought a solution?” which is always a good one to understand as a marketer, because even though you're trying to sell one product, it really helps understand how, what they were doing before they came and bought your solution.After you decided on wanting to solve a problem, what did you do next? Often, we’ll ask, as marketers, “So how did you look for me? How'd you find me?” Which is fine, that’ an open ended question we'll ask. I like to know from that moment where they decided the pain was insurmountable, and they needed to solve it, what did they do next? The action they took. Because then what you can do is you can say, “Oh, I went to LinkedIn and posted and asked people what they do here.” Great. What happened next? And I just take them through that.What made you trust them? My favorite question to ask, though, is either for marketing or sales, but a lot more for sales is, “What made you trust the person, the solution, the team you chose, or the vendor you chose, or the sales team that you're working with, like what made you trust them?” That one is such a mindblower because usually the answers you get are not the things you will expect as the team that's trying to market and sell a product. It's often dramatically different than what you think it's going to be.
Oh, there's a lot. I ask questions for a living. So how do you choose?So those are my three favorite ones to ask.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
Chris Morgan: It’s how I theorize about things. Or, it’s the voice in my head. So one example for myself is I always try to look for the idea of an inventory. So, a type of thing that actually has many different variants, and I want to observe them by the same criteria. So I'll look all over the place for, “How can I think about this from an inventory or a database mindset?” That would be one example. Other examples that we'll hear is the Scientific Method as a framework for X.
What do you mean mental model? Walk me through what one would be for you. So it grounds my thinking.Okay. I'm with you now.
Why and how do people buy? For marketing as a whole, my whole thing is, “Why and how do people buy?” That's all I care about really, at the end of the day, because if I understand why and how buyers buy, and the process of that, I can influence how they make those decisions. I try to ground all my discussions, and all my actions and marketing, around that thought process. So then, also, it makes me very choosy about what I do,Jobs to Be Done. I love the Jobs To Be Done methodology to have a more rigorous framework. Many marketers, or product owners, will know that one quite a bit, and founders, where it's really an innovation framework for understanding why a person buys a product and what's the end state they want to achieve with a product or a service. But what's great is that still works for marketing because it's still the same logical thought process that people go through.Transcribe and go over everything again. I don't know if this one's a model, but when I do my work for research, I transcribe and I go over everything again. I guess that's more of a technique than a model, but a reason I do that is if I can read and listen in a space, and I'm not distracted, and I can listen to peo... -
Meet Jacob Gebrewold, Commercial Account Executive at Klue. Consistently educating. Having a relentless focus on educating your market like you're creating a category. Referrals. Happy clients are the best sales team you could possibly ask for. Building a dope competitive enablement function and a killer Customer Success team. Asking: Who do I need to express care to right now? What’s on your mind? How can I help?
19 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Here’s what Arthur Castillo said about Jacob:
Jacob Gebrewold. From Klue. He's new to the software SaaS space, and he's absolutely crushing it as an AE. I think he's a very unique content creator, and he understands how to stand up from crowd but also have buying conversations that engage his prospects, which by the way, are Product Marketers, and he's never been a Product Marketer. I think he's really changing the game from that perspective.
—Arthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper → ListenWhat are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Consistently educating. I would say the most important way that my team converts market into revenue is just consistently educating. I think that, of the buyers I get to work with, this starts at the immediate marketing team, thinking about the content we're creating, distributing that out, chopping that up, get it on social, get it everywhere it can be. That's good, but it doesn't end there. Our reps, from the SDR level, to the Account Executive level, to CSM level, we're constantly thinking about ways that we can be getting that useful information and in the hands of people, whether or not they're our client. Just the belief that, you know, it's a long life, and if you're just consistently helping and serving people, who are they going to come to you when they have questions they need answered? So that's probably the most important one.
2) We're present. Similar, in the sense that we’re present. We are there, consistently showing up. Even if someone isn't able to act on a service. Budget, timing, whatever it is, we don't just say, “Bye, I'll talk to you in six months.” We're present. I think the first really fuels the second.
3) Referrals. We have a lot of people that really enjoy Klue, and they talk about us, and they’re kind to pass us referrals. We heard about a conference where someone, who isn't even our client, was at, and they're a bit of a fan of ours, and they were talking about how our name was constantly coming up. We didn't have anyone at that conference. Happy clients are the best sales team you could possibly ask for.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Getting up early, because I'm not a morning person. So, I'm up at 5:45am. Starting the work day at 7:00am has been a hill I've been trying to climb for a minute. So, I'm glad I'm there.
2) Getting on the same page with some of my teammates. Particularly, I had a manager that had gotten promoted. She was the top rep at our company. We had built a really strong relationship, a really strong relationship, and she was my teammate, my senior teammate, so a lot of respect there. Then, she became my manager and I've just been really impressed with, and proud of, both of us for how we've worked together to co-create a really good relationship. That's a work. That's something that you can make yourself do, like any good relationship, and it's paid so many different dividends as a result.
3) Building a higher standard for myself around prospecting. I don't know that I would say that I'm far out of the woods on it yet, but I would say building a higher standard for myself around prospecting because I know it's something that I need to do. I know it's something that's important to do, and there are seasons where I've done it a lot, but having a consistent discipline, week over week, where I'm doing it well, rather than stops and starts. That's one that I think we're not totally out of the neck of the woods on that one there. I think we need a little bit more longevity before we can claim it as a total victory, but there's definitely been a lot of progress.
What are 3 questions that you love to ask and why?
1) What am I trying to accomplish right now? To say, “I like asking that question,” is kind of a misnomer. I need to ask that question. Because if I don't ask myself that question constantly, my brain just gets so totally off-track, down rabbit trails. It also helps in conversations just to make sure I'm focusing on the most important things. What am I trying to accomplish right now?
2) Who do I need to express care to right now? Whether that's new people on my team that are just starting and, I want to just be there to support them. Whether it's a prospect who I can remember, “Oh, I think they were going to get married right around now.” That, often, as a frame of reference, for just nurturing relationships. So, who do I need to express care to right now?
3) How can I help? Or, what's on your mind? Versions of a similar question, but, “What's on your mind?” is probably the one that's more “them” centered, and usually that takes us to a place where I could be helpful.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Atomic habits. It's interesting, I don't know that I've got a super comprehensive answer to this, but I would say that Atomic Habits has been one that's been really helpful for me as I'm started to rethink my habits fundamentally. And, that's not necessarily just work. It's personal life. There's a lot of pieces that that's helpful with, but however one thinks of habits, it’s essential to doing anything well.
2) MEDDPICC. One model that's been really helpful for me in thinking through deal strategy has been MEDDPICC. I've got a long way to go in understanding it better, but just for understanding, “Where are the gaps that are inhibiting me from being the best support to this person, getting their problem solved?” Shout out to David Weiss, who is just a fantastic mind on that, and I have under utilized all the support that he’s offered, but I've leaned on him quite a bit for that in terms of the resources he’s put together. So, MEDDPICC has been useful.
3) Gap selling. Gap selling as well, has been one, by Keenan. It's so helpful for understanding that people don't “care about you.” I think people care about people, but like they don't really care about you as a sales rep or whatever. They care about solving their problems. So, until you can really identify, quantify or clearly articulate, get them clearly articulate, that gap, you're not going to be able to help them with the service that you provide.
What are 4 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
1) Having a relentless focus on educating your market like you're creating a category. Even if you're not creating a category, treat yourself like a category creator and that sort of th...
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