Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Julien Sauvage, the GVP Marketing lead at Clari delves into go-to-market strategies, emphasizing the importance of understanding the buyer’s perspective and aligning internal teams. Julien shares his career journey and insights on breaking down silos within marketing teams. He explains how he structures his marketing organization at Clari to foster collaboration and shared goals. 

The episode provides valuable takeaways on effective marketing strategies, the significance of emotional engagement, and the necessity of integrated teamwork in achieving business objectives.

Listen to the podcast here:

Collaborating With Sales For a POV That Resonates: Insights From Julien Sauvage

Signature question: How do you view and define go to market?

Yeah, I love that question. It’s a road and yet narrow I feel like. So my attempt would be to talk more about the people and the buyer. So I would I would say something like changing to me, go to market is changing how your buyer thinks and acts so that they end up identifying the problem and find you as the solution. They choose you, they keep you and they’re happy with you.

Right? I love yeah, I love the succinct way, the the way you describe it. I mean, I love the fact that first of all, you start with the buyer. That’s number one, right? It’s not about internal people and functions and so on.

Yes, those are important. But you start with the buyer. And I also love the fact that you called out how you’re helping the buyer think and shift and act so that they see you as a solution for that problem.

Yeah, I think too often. Thanks for reading between the lines. And this is very unprepared. So it’s not like a definition I have off the shelf. And I just use it over and over again. But I think I’ve seen definitions where people tend to over-rotate on the act piece or on the think piece. Right. And we both know that actions without thinking or thinking without actions are pretty much useless. So I think it’s both sides of the brain of the buyer, how they feel, how they think, and ultimately how they act.

Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to thinking I would actually add one more complexity to this how do you make the buyer feel right? And it starts with that. And then if you leave them with the right emotion or the urge or the desire, then they think in that direction and they act 100%.

Yeah, I’m glad you said that. I like the I know we’re going a little off script. Well, there’s no script, by the way, for any of you listeners, there’s no script. But yeah, the emotion, the feeling is so important in my mind. And that actually is my definition of of brand. I was, I was being asked what is brand to you the other day. And there’s no unique definition, as we all know. But like while I really like things that people would say around, it’s how people think of you when you’re no longer in the same room, you know that’s your brand. Or they would talk about, you know, changing how people feel. To me, it’s the first impression, the first emotion that you as a vendor can trigger to your buyer. And that would be what will stick to them. And then the rest becomes, you know, easier in a way. So it’s the first emotion you can evoke with your buyer.

That would be my definition. Definition of a good brand.

Very cool. Yeah. I love the fact that you articulated, the brand as well. And you tied in the brand in the go-to-market piece. And then of course, the other topic is the nuance, which we alluded to, but then we didn’t cover a whole lot, which will cover a whole lot in the remaining conversation, which is about now that you got the mind on the buyer. Now, what do you think about the internal teams and the alignment, the execution?

Yeah. I mean, are you asking me the question now?

It’s up to you. I just had to share that. It’s up. Yeah, yeah. Take it off from there.

Yeah. I think at the end of the day, it’s kind of like. I know it’s going to sound very theoretical, but the internal alignment and the internal team that you would include in a good market has to be aligned with what the buyer needs for you to effectively go to the market to them.

Right. And so I think with that in mind, certain companies may be smaller markets. They have a pretty straightforward and good market motion because their buyer wants one thing. And we pretty much know what this thing is. And as such, your good market team internally should be, you know, A’s and Aces making that up. But sometimes the market is more mature. The solution is more developed. All the post-sales aspect matters. A lot of the marketing education, because it’s a newer category, matters a lot, and as such, your internal go-to-market team also has to mirror that. And then on top of the traditional ask duo, I would add CSS, Post-sales, implementation consultants, marketing, and the whole thing. So it really depends on your market and your buyer at the end of the day.

Fantastic. Let’s switch gears here. I know you can go on and on for this entire show, just on a good market topic, but let’s switch gears here. Yeah. Tell us about your journey, your career journey so far, and what led you to what you’re doing here to that clarity.

Yeah. Good question. I mean, so my journey has been very, I would say incremental in a way, like I started back in France, pretty technical, roles. I was in data science before data science was hot and the thing and then moved into a solution engineering role and then back in 2013, I think it was I got the opportunity to become a PM. And that’s why I came to this side of the ocean and came to the States, to San Francisco, where I live today. And then incremental in the sense that I then became like, I went from the PM IC to a PM lead or a given product line that was back at Salesforce, and then I became the VP of PM. And then on top of PM, I added customer marketing, and then on top of that I added corporate marketing and brand and now events. So it’s been a good I would say, almost linear and incremental journey for me which which I’ve enjoyed. So today I lead brand, corporate marketing, product marketing, events, and many other functions at Cleary.

And yeah, I’m very passionate about tying all these functions together. I’ve seen so many silos within the marketing organization that I do not have experience with those silos and the pains that come with it. And I don’t want my people to have to go through the same pains that I’ve been through as an I see in my past life, so very passionate about good market and marketing and trying to, like, break the silos as much as possible.

Very cool. Yeah, often we keep hearing about silos and how broken marketing and sales are, But I love the fact that we are talking about breaking silos within marketing. Yeah, across the functions within marketing allow that fact.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I have many times maybe it’s like sometimes the bigger companies, right? But like you have a brand doing its thing and PM is doing another thing. And I’ve seen plenty of examples of that at Salesforce, to be honest, where you know, like brand and corporate marketing would own the main Dreamforce keynote, for example.

So they created their messaging and their narrative on their own. And then if you’re a PM while you own the keynote for that one product line, I was on Einstein, for example. So my team and I would own the keynote for the Einstein product line, I mean product keynote. But of course, you then create your own thing, and then at the end of the day when you have that big kind of review meeting with your CMO, they see messaging that doesn’t map, they see a weight. The corporate keynote talks about ABC. You guys talk about def you know WTF? Yeah. So that’s a good example of silos across the board and brand. And PPM is a classic one. But of course, brand and growth is another one. Mobs can also be on an island, and so there’s silos everywhere in the enterprise. And it’s our job as leaders to try to break them as much as we can.

Yeah for sure. Let’s go back in time. I mean, you said you started off in a technical individual contributor role, and I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile, very interesting set of brands that you work with, right PSA Peugeot, Renault, and Airbus France.

Leading brands in France, and SFR as well. And then you come to the Bay area. You’re not in product marketing yet. You’re not in marketing. You’re still in the sales pre-sales side. What prompted you or what gave you that moment? Or what is that moment like? Like you said, hey, you know, product marketing is what I love.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I actually came here as a PM. That’s the that’s the transition. I would say the transition from technical roles to a C is pretty, you know, easy to understand. Right. But then the transition from SC to PM I think also makes a whole lot of sense. When you think about it. You end up, you know, like going deep into your market knowledge, your product expertise, and so that you can do a nice technical pitch and you can do a nice demo and you can do things. The difference between an AC and a PPM is that you move from a 1 to-1 capacity that would talk to that one account, and then PPM is one to few or one to many, but you end up being the champion, the wingman, the wing woman of your product.

So, I think the transition from sales engineering to PMS makes a whole lot of sense. And yeah, that’s what made me come here back in 2013, PM in France wasn’t as big. I don’t think it still is that big, to be honest, sadly. But yeah, that was my transition.

Very cool. And right after your role as a senior PM at KXEN, you jumped to Director of Product Marketing at SAP. That’s a nice jump. I mean, talk to us.

Yeah, so it takes KXEN was small it was an I don’t know six people marketing team. Right. The marketing team was six people I believe give or take. And so I was the sole PM there and we got acquired by SAP. That’s that’s why. And so SAP believed in me, invested a little bit in me and made me kind of, you know, move up the ranks. And I became a director there. But then shortly after I left and went to Salesforce because, you know, as a young, still somehow young back then, ten years ago, French marketer, you, you know, you come to the Mecca of marketing, Silicon Valley, and you want to work for like, the cool brands.

And that felt like Salesforce was a cooler brand for me.

So that’s why for sure. And then at clarity, and maybe even just in the prior roles, you started building, not owning, not just product marketing, but the other aspects of marketing, like, yeah, how was your pitch like to your leaders as to, hey, invest, I believe in me, I got this and then how are you showing results?

Yeah, I don’t think that was the pitch. I think typically I you you just do it right. Like you try to seize every opportunity in a non-opportunistic manner. But you know typically I would I don’t know I would like I would, I would, you know, I would do my normal like scope of work. And then on top of that, I would see opportunities that other teams wouldn’t pick to do a little more. And then I would just go ahead and do them with the, with the those team’s permission, of course. And then my leader would see the impact and, you know, the quality of work.

And as such they would be like, oh yeah, well, maybe Julian should own that as well. So I think it’s less a pitch and it’s more like you go out and you try and you do it and sometimes you fail. By the way, excuse me, but you just, you know, you just you step up, you this there are always opportunities for everybody to step up and try to own more if they feel like it.

Yeah. And was this I mean, I’m trying to go back to the time when you actually did this and was successful. First time looking at your LinkedIn, it seems like maybe it was at Gong. I don’t know, because you were on product marketing and customer marketing?

Yeah. Well, I was brought in to do both customer marketing and product marketing, so that was like part of the initial role. But I think the role expanded into I ended up having thought leadership as well, which then moved into a different part of the org. But that was part of my thing and I touched, I forgot, I forgot now a little bit of category, a little bit of enablement, a little bit of like programs and stuff.

So, you know, and sometimes you, you know, you those functions stay with you. But I always say even if they don’t, it was the best learning, you know, like I think everybody the only reason and way to grow and own more is to just be really curious about the variety of things and try these different things again, not stepping on anybody’s toes, but just offering to help when there’s a gap. And that’s how you show your worth and that’s how you you learn.

Very cool. And then on a lighter note, because you’ve traveled and worked in across geographies, across companies, across roles, how does your family? How do your family members describe what you do for a living?

Oh my God, I do that in French or in an in English. Go for.

It. Both. And then you can translate it for us.

Yeah no I don’t I don’t I’ll stick to English. That one. Yeah, I think a lot of, a lot of my friends and my family are not in tech.

And marketing in tech is… It’s not as in France. It’s it’s not as big as it is here in the Bay area or in the US, say. Right. So the first thing I’ll say is I don’t think they understand marketing. I think they see me as selling okay. Selling stuff. Yeah. And so typically they would say like, oh yeah Julian. Yeah, he’s doing his thing. He’s selling software to other people. Setting software? Okay. Yeah, that’s what they would say, right? Because at the end of the day, tech as we know, starts by setting to other tech companies and then they breach or cross the chasm. so I think that’s how they would describe it. He sells like an app to other people selling apps. Okay.

But that was I mean, it’s actually a compliment. A marketer being called as sales a salesperson is a.

Yeah, that’s right man. Yeah. I don’t think it was meant as a compliment from them, but I’ll take it.

I’ll take it. Very cool.

So coming back to your role at clarity. So yeah, I mean, I’m sure a lot of the listeners are not familiar with clarity. So what does clarity do and what do you do and who do you serve your customers?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So Clari is one of the leading tech companies. We. Our offering is around a revenue platform. That’s how we call them. The revenue platform automatically captures data, uses analytics and AI to analyze it, and then suggests, the next best actions, executes flows and automation as well as gives insights to mostly three personas. Rev tech I’m sorry, rev ups, CRO, and the actual sales rep. So we are mostly doing that, I would say. yeah, we’re trying to see the value props around the CIO persona. It’s a little new to us, I think to the whole market. But like most, our audience is revenue leaders and revenue practitioners. And we set up a revenue platform.

Got it. So revenues cross and sales reps and individual contributors and sales managers maybe that’s right.

Are there specific segments industries geographies?

Yeah. Good point. Yeah we’re global and we’re cross-segments I would say we’ve been really successful with I would call them mid-market. Plus, you know, like Zoom, Aacta, those types of companies, they’re all up on the website. And then we started to see really good traction with the actual enterprise accounts. Some of the names I can’t disclose, sadly, because they don’t want us to talk about them, as you know, but like really big Fortune 500, even Fortune 50 companies. So I think it’s encouraging for anybody in tech. It’s obvious that it takes time, but people do end up crossing the chasm. And you can break free from just sitting to, to, to same companies as yourself, and doesn’t have to be just tech setting to take as per my or your point. Yeah.

Fair enough. And then since you’re responsible for marketing, talk to us about the marketing, like how you structure your team, the budget, the number of people, break of the functions, and so on.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can break it down entirety because we’re a private company, right? So like at the high level, there are various parts of the team. We do, I have five of them PM content which includes customer marketing. Creative marketing, which is the visual branding. Yep, corporate comms and exit comms and events. These are the five. Yep. Then under another leader, there are marketing ads and campaigns, and the website is part of marketing ops at Kerry. That’s the way the team is structured. I don’t even know how many people we have, give or take total, but we’re clearly as a whole seven, 800 company employees. So we’re not big, but we’re not small either.

Fair enough. And then from a budget investment, I’m just talking about like a percentage split. Not not specific. Like, yeah, a budget split point of view. Where do you invest in terms of programs and what kind of programs?

Yeah. Good question.

So the programs the heavy investments would be, I would say mostly brand and corporate marketing. That’s the big the big-ticket items. So in there, you would find things like Gartner and Forrester or subscriptions. We all know how, you know, expensive. Those can be, a lot of content, you know, working with agencies, copywriters, paid sponsorships, big, you know, professionally produced content assets, including multimedia. That type of stuff. So it’s, I would say the bulk of the ticket items or the money goes to corporate marketing in my case, yeah. We all know PM work is less costly in a way because it’s more like internal facing right, like cells and demos and whatnot, Excel’s pitch decks and whatnot. We do have some nice little things around product videos and product tours and, you know, that type of stuff. But in the grand scheme of things, the investment there is a drop in the ocean of the brand and corporate marketing world.

Yeah. And you also mentioned a very important point early on, Julian, which is being the orchestrator and breaking down the silos within marketing. So how do you as a leader, as a marketing leader, like how do you structure and orchestrate, like product marketing to brand to content, demand, events, and corporate, and so on?

Yeah, it’s a good question. Well, first off, I feel, you know, lucky enough and grateful to have all these teams under me. Like, I think it naturally breaks the silos. If you have one leader, then the teams just get together more, so it makes it easier, I would say. The other thing is we have a cadence. We run our marketing business with a bunch of marketing cadences. So a cadence what is the cadence? The cadence would be a weekly, monthly or bi-weekly meeting with not a whole lot of people, just a few key stakeholders in which we really inspect every aspect of the marketing business that matters, independent of the team and the function.

So it wouldn’t be like, oh, a PM cadence, for example. It’s not that it would be more a middle funnel cadence, or it would be a content and brand metrics cadence or top of the funnel, you know, website. Everybody touches the website. So it’s more, I would say by channels or by stage in the funnel. And, that’s a great way for people to just get together and work together. I really believe that silos are like hard to avoid in the enterprise. They just happened, right? But the easiest way is to just like, put people to work into the same work streams, and then they get to know each other and then they realize they’re actually doing great work together. Yeah. So that’s the way putting people in into the cadences, into the work streams, sharing metrics is a big one as well. I like having shared KPIs. The same KPI would be shared by two different people from two different teams. It’s going to break the silos there.

Yeah. Those types of tactics.

Yeah. And if I have to echo or give an example, maybe I’ll take the example of like, hey, we need to move mid-market KPI for this month. In that way you would structure someone like, of course, there have to be UPS or some marketing ops. There has to be a content person, there has to be a product marketing person and maybe someone else likes design for sure. Yeah, content, and so on.

Exactly. Yeah, I think I think the best way to create silos is to keep the cadences about the team and not about the work. Right. So it should be the opposite. The cadence is about the end product optimizing a given program a given channel or a given stage of your funnel. And then the team would kind of like self-organize itself to make that cadence happen.

Yeah, this is great. And then I’ll blow it up. Leveling this, I’m sure you must be mapping all your marketing KPIs to the business objectives and sales, and maybe even customer success like post-sales.

Yeah. So how are you running that cadence?

Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, it’s not it’s not perfect. Never is. I don’t think any company can say, oh yeah, I have everything. All my OKRs are perfectly mapped out. There’s a beautiful, you know, Russian doll structure. The way we’re doing it is I don’t even know if I should start bottoms up or top down, but like, yeah, we have our. Well, first off, marketing is mostly measured against pipe, creation pipe influence. Right. As it should. A little bit of pipe maturation and velocity as well. And if you go all the way down to PMS, they should own metrics. Own as in they contribute the report on IT metrics like competitive wind rates and ASP. Right. If you have good sales assets and good messaging, you’re just going to sell faster and more and bigger. So that’s kind of the that’s kind of the way the way we we try to map things to like the bigger picture is we have we share the same goals as the company.

So for example, I’m going to make those up, you know, accelerate growth, keep innovating on product, and dominate the category. These could be three company goals. We would then have the exact same goals at the departmental level, like marketing. And then we of that three kind of North stars, if you will. We then map our programs and our targets against those. So that’s the right way. We kind of like, you know, match company level with departmental level, like sharing the same goals and then, you know, like the tactics and the mix would and the targets would differ by, by department. that’s the way. And then, yeah, as I said, like every person in my team has three KPIs. I try to have a mix of like what I call a yes-no KPI. Like, did you complete that program? Yes. No. You know, like, it’s just like completion. Yes. No. Yeah. One leading indicator and one lagging indicator.

Leading indicators would be a number of downloads pipes and whatnot. Lagging would be actual you know closed one revenue or pipe velocity that you’ve influenced with your program.

Very cool. I love the fact that you have three KPIs for each individual, and it’s not always black and white, but you do enforce a black-and-white. Yes, no, and then a leading and lagging. I like that structure. It’s very clear. I mean, most often I see like lagging. But anything is controlling the input and the output is the effect and the activities on the input.

That’s right. Like if you just do lagging like it’s so downstream that there are so many touch points and things that can happen between your program and the actual thing that you’re measuring as a lagging indicator. Right? Like it’s just it’s almost unfair because like, you know, you like you don’t control the cell cycles, right? There’s a there’s no way. So but I still want I don’t want people to just have a leading indicator and be like, hey, I’ve created my pipe, I’m out.

So I think I think, you know, bringing in the leading and lagging. The thing is a good balance and for people to stay accountable, but also not being measured against things they can’t control. Yeah. Very good.

Yeah. So this is awesome stuff, Julian. I mean, I love the fact that you how you share. First of all, thanks for sharing those details on how you structure, how you think about marketing, breaking all the silos, and how you also think about KPIs and alignment within and outside of marketing. Now, switching gears to another but related topic, as you and I know go to market, there are two sides. I mean, you will always not be just successful but always be failures as well. So share with us samples of like a good market success story and a good market failure story.

Yeah. Yes. There’s there’s many of them I think on both sides. The success story I would have in mind first would be our recent one. So this is going to be a clearer example, our recent announcements around the fact that we just surpassed $4 trillion of revenue under management.

Revenue under management. That’s a that’s a new metric. And that’s one of the reasons why I like it. So what we did there was we strong. We sent a strong signal to the market that the company is doing well. There is momentum. But also more importantly, you know, we’ve reached a specific milestone which then helps us amplify our POV in the market with that credibility. The fact that we’ve, you know, reached that point in itself doesn’t matter a whole lot. It just gives us the credibility and the momentum to then have a seat at the table and be listened to or be heard by the audience. And then what we did of that is, well, you know, because of all that data flowing through Clari’s revenue platform, we have learned so much. And our gift to you, buyers and audience is we’re going to share those learnings with you. Yeah. And that that was so it’s classic thought leadership play right? In which we used kind of an internal thing to create momentum, create awareness, and then have the credibility to express our POV.

And so that was a massive success that happened I think, a little over a month ago. Now we’ve got time as the time is a blur. But like we had a really strong social activation and takeover, a bunch of follow-up assets and campaigns, omnichannel of course, social website, email in product, you name it. So it was a really nice, nicely done kind of omnichannel takeover to, you know, to make noise in the market. And of course, that week we saw not only did we see I forgot the exact number, but like almost a million social impressions, a 20% increase in web traffic, a big spike, more demo forms. So all of that demand that you create actually gets captured and of course, translates into the pipeline. So that’s a good example. Yeah. Let me pause here. See that? I mean, do you have any questions?

First of all, congratulations to you and the team. That’s a big achievement and campaign for sure. I do have follow-up and drill-down questions in terms of like who was the lead? Was it you or someone else, and how did you or that person think about a campaign was like a campaign brief? And then how was it structured in terms of execution output and metrics?

Yeah.

So the lead, I would say would be a combination of myself and Devin, my head of content at Clery, Devin Reed. But then, of course, a lot of people were, you know, contributing to this from, you know, the social team to the PM team and whatnot. The exact sponsor was Andy, our CEO. He was very he stayed very close to this, which I think makes it a success. Right. If you want a big, big market-moving moment and not just yet another campaign. Yeah. And your CEO has to be bought in and give you feedback and direction and, and amplify. So, so that’s that was the kind of the, the crew, if you will, the cast. And then. Yeah, we had our strategy deck for it. You know, talking about the, the why we’re doing this. What’s in it for us? What’s in it for the audience, the, you know, metrics and the targets in terms of expected outcomes, the bill of materials, the deliverables, the races, the owners are like down from strategy level down to like the tactical details.

So from start to finish, was it like one, 2, or 3 months or even?

Yeah. That’s why yeah, it’s a good question. Everything was very, very fast. It’s like it went from an idea to full execution in frankly less than a month, which is crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was it was very intense but very rewarding at the same time. So my advice to every marketer would not be to rush through things like, like that. I think typically you do that big integrated campaign and lightning strike if you will, talking about category here. You do that once a quarter. So you give yourself like three months to execute. Ours was a little more condensed in terms of timeline, but it ended up being very successful.

I think it’s a combination, right? One is you need to strike when the moment is hot or when you hit the KPI. Not like it was done like six months ago, kind of a thing. Yeah. At the same time, you want to make sure that it’s thought through like you’re 80% through versus 100% perfection.

For exactly.

KPIs, assets, and so on.

Exactly. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah. There’s like that’s the thin balance that every hard bar inside every marketer has to strike. Right. Like like the time is now and it’s market-relevant now. But at the same time, you need time to execute and have the quality of outcome. So how do you balance speed and quality at the same time?

Fantastic. No. Thank you for sharing that. This is a great go-to-market success story. Yeah. On the flip side, the go-to-market failure story.

There’s a story. Yeah man I have I have so many. It’s like everybody else. I fail a lot, but I keep trying. I can start with maybe I’ll do two, two stories. One is going to be still at clearing is not everything is perfect. That clearly never is anywhere. And the next one would be Salesforce. So I’ll keep it short. Clearly, I think back to the kind of category thing.

So we launched, we can call it a manifesto if you like the category POV. It was before my time to over two years ago. Now I believe it was in, I guess exactly two years ago in June 2022. And so it was like really well received by the audience, the market. That’s where we introduced our villain in our story called Revenue Leak. And so the story’s about, you know, using a revenue platform to identify the leaks and then prevent them from happening. Right. But the story was a bit much. It was if you go and look at the actual narrative deck, like the beginnings of some, and then it starts becoming like there’s too many concepts kind of thrown together.

Is that the 50 slides that are shared on LinkedIn?

There are multiple decks shared on LinkedIn. I feel really good about the $4 trillion LinkedIn. Yeah, I can. I’ll send you the it’s. Com slash thrive like thriving thrive. Yeah, it’s great. It’s amazing by the way. It’s like an amazing POV.

It’s just a little too much right? Like because then we end up talking about collaboration and governance. And it’s just like. And so we threw a lot at the audience. It still worked. What didn’t quite work? 100% was the reps felt like it was a little too much. And so they sometimes would have a hard time articulating what that’s, you know, market level POV actually means for their one buyer that they’re talking to right now today. And so and it’s not a sales enablement issue like that. Sales enablement is such a scapegoat for all the things in the enterprise. It’s awful. So it’s a company issue, right? Like if you have almost a bit of a bloated POV with too many ingredients to it, then you know, your buyer might get lost or your reps might get a little overwhelmed. So that’s sort of a bit of what happened. We saw that and then we trimmed it down a little bit, removed the fat, and removed a few concepts that were great but not fully helpful to the story.

And now we feel like we have a much better, just simpler story to tell. So I love the.

The fact that I mean, a lot of companies, a lot of leaders go to market leaders. Think about having a point of view. You should have a point of view. And lots of people feel proud that, hey, we actually released the point of view narrative, which is important, but allow the fact that how you guys nailed the problem was at the rep level, you can have a point of view, but people on the front line, if they’re not able to execute, it’s not going to land. You won’t see the KPIs and outcomes. Simple.

Okay. That’s right. Exactly. Yeah.

And so how long did it take for you to find that problem?

I think I would say it took us longer than I thought. Maybe a year. Something like a year, you know, because, like, what’s what’s shocking is that we have a lot of, like.

Well, I’m a tech nerd. Like, I really love, you know, having the tools and the apps for me to do my job a little better, me and my team. So we have a variety of apps and we’re we’re recording the calls and the sales calls, and then we use an app on top to analyze that. So we could tell that the adoption of the full POV was lagging, but we or people using the POV like reps in cycles, right? That would result in a much higher ASP. So it’s kind of like I’m going to make up the stats because I can’t disclose the stats. But assume that your POV is only used fully by 60% of your reps. But for those using it then it yields a 40% higher average selling price. So we were still like okay, let’s convince the remaining 40% of the reps to also use the full POV because they saw that it helps sell bigger deals, right? But still, there was a lot of resistance. And I can’t blame anybody because I do think that fundamentally the pop was a little too much to absorb and to, you know, to use.

So now we streamlined it. As I said, we haven’t lost on deal size lift, but the adoption of the new POV amongst sales is much higher. Very cool.

Yeah. Good stuff. And then the second GTM failure story.

Yeah. Salesforce. Yeah, yeah, this one is this one is more funny, I guess, than anything else. I don’t even know if there is like a good lesson to be learned, because I guess the first one, my lesson from that failure would be don’t boil the ocean and the more sophisticated POV isn’t the strongest. Like sometimes simple is better. This is more right and tracks adoption and track impact, right? That’s my learning. All right. So the second quick failure story would be Salesforce. It was my last year as an employee. So back in 2019 doing Dreamforce and I was on the Einstein team. And so we had 20 2019 was an 18 I believe like the explosion years, the years of the explosion of smart speakers.

Like it was just like Alexa, all the Alexa and all the Google homes and all of that stuff. Right? And so we thought that it’d be a good idea to have an Einstein smart speaker. And so we actually had an Einstein-shaped smart speaker, which you could talk to to ask him or them, I guess. Hey, Einstein. Like, what are my top three opportunities in North America in tech right now? And then Einstein would respond to you with a fake British accent, because that’s one of the voices we tested, and it’s the one that people loved most for smart speakers. And he would be like, oh, I believe that your top three opportunities are over. So it was a fun moment and a fun demo at the Einstein keynote, but then it really confused the heck out of our audience. People felt like this was the thing they could buy. Like, I think we even got pressing. Is Salesforce now entering the hardware market they’ve been saying no software, so maybe they want hardware.

And it was just and the whole thing was a little cringe and very cheesy and obviously fake. And I don’t think he was I think it was a fun project, but I don’t think it helped. It was it was kind of bad marketing in a way, you know, like just creating more confusion in the buyer’s mind. So that’s that was my lesson. Like, think about it. Yeah. Like it’s it’s cool to have a fun activation like this. But if you’re if you’re going to end up confusing your buyer, then don’t do it.

Yeah, that’s definitely a funny story. I mean, I can imagine, especially in a keynote or even a customer meeting someone doing that demo. But then someone asked me, hey, can I buy Einstein? It’s a whole different conversation.

That’s right. Yeah. And like, I remember we had a plan of like, we would ship because we had, like, because those were custom made. Right? So very expensive, as you would imagine.

And then so we had to plan for like ships, 50 of these smart speakers to like the key locations like the EBC executive business centers of Salesforce so that people can use that. And it’s just it became like a logistical nightmare, and we just kind of gave up on it.

So switching gears a little bit, but again, on a related note, what are the one, 2, or 3 go to market skills that people approach you for? They say, hey, you know what? I’m struggling with positioning storytelling or brand or demand or events. Let me go and talk to Julian. So what are the skills and how do you build those skills?

People outside of Clari like inside or.

Outside like like if I’m working on the positioning or a pitch deck or a brand new, like, brand building exercise. Yeah, I’ll. I’ll think. Okay. Julien is the person I need to go to.

Yeah, I think my brand is very much PM because of my background.

Yeah. Which is a curse and a blessing. Like, I’ve tried to not be seen as the only PM guy because now I own pretty much the full stack. Right. But yeah, having said that you would come to me with questions around positioning, strategic narrative category design, brand, making bold brand campaigns and visuals, and identities and ideas. Yeah. and I think actually team leadership, like, I don’t should maybe write more about this. I try to write every day on LinkedIn and post, but like, I’m really passionate. The one thing that keeps me happy, that gives me joy isn’t a great story. It is not a successful launch. It’s not a bold brand move. It’s making my team happy and successful. Yeah, and I know it sounds cheesy, man, and I don’t care. I always say I have all the right to be cheesy because I’m French, I like cheese. Yeah. but, yeah, like, so people would come to me with like, leadership advice on how to best structure and grow the team.

Yeah. I mean, those are all amazing skills, by the way, people, leadership skills. You also mentioned, brand positioning, storytelling, and so on and so, and by the way, I’ve seen storytelling be used a lot. People say, hey, tell it to me or create this asset or a paycheck in a storytelling manner, but then it just gets thrown out or thrown and the term gets used way too often and people really don’t know what it means. Oh yeah, maybe you get like a one-minute thing of how would you approach storytelling, maybe in a campaign or a pitch deck?

Yeah, storytelling. I agree, it’s one of the most overused and not well-thought-through words in B2B marketing tech, right? Storytelling isn’t. It comes after. It comes after you have your positioning actually comes after you have your messaging down, and it comes after you have your POV. So like typically you start with the positioning statement like this is who we are. This is how we’re different.

And then you start messaging like defining your messaging around it like well how would you convey that? Yeah. And then you have a POV like this is our POV on the market. We believe that there is a big, big problem out there that hasn’t been solved. And it’s a revenue leak. Yeah. For example. And then after that, you can start crafting your story. And so a story typically has the usual elements. I mentioned the villain which is a revenue leak In our case, the hero crew is the hero for us. The obstacles to plugging the leak. In our case, it’s the old legacy tech Salesforce CRM you know, and then you the story would have all the transformation like here the hero journey going into the expected outcome and the bliss. But that’s what it is. So story. It’s just at the end of the day. Storytelling to me is the the thing that comes after you’ve nailed your positioning, messaging, and POV, and it’s just an elegant way of combining all these elements together to tell a cohesive, cohesive narrative.

I think the biggest takeaway for the listeners is the way you sequenced it. Julie, and I love the fact that you sequenced it more often. A lot of times I’ve seen, like leaders say, hey, trust me, a storytelling tech stack in a storytelling format. But then a lot of elements, foundational elements are not there. So the best way to think about this is to have the positioning done. Check. Messaging. Yeah. Check. Point of view. Very important. Yeah.

And then and then the story by the way like POV depends on every company, right? Like in my mind, POV comes first, like POV is market level, and then positioning is you in the market. So I think you need the POV on the market before you talk about yourselves in that market. So the actual order in my mind is more POV positioning messaging story. Yeah.

Very cool. I know we are coming towards the end of time over here. Yeah. The last couple of questions for you.

What resources do you lean on to stay up to date on the different topics?

Yeah, it’s a good question. I wish I was one of those persons who, you know, would say, I listen to X amount of podcasts but I don’t I don’t listen to a whole lot of podcasts. Sorry for people listening to this. I try to do well. I subscribed to a few newsletters that I find helpful. I like Miss Stratton’s newsletter called Punchy on Messaging. I read that every religiously, every Saturday morning, of course. lucky enough to have Devon Reid on my team at Clari. So I read his stuff. I read the category Pirates, Substack, and the newsletter. So that’s the way I consume information. I have a few books as well here. That’s one of the one of the Bible categories. Yeah, for sure. Play bigger. But yeah, I’m mostly like a short-form content type of consumer. Like more newsletters and even LinkedIn posts. I agree, I mean.

There’s a lot of good content coming out on newsletters of late, and I’m a big fan and a big consumer of really good newsletters for sure. Yeah, yeah. And then if you were to go back in time, what advice would you give to your younger self on day one of your go-to-market journey?

Oh my gosh, to my younger self, like it has to be about me. well.

Yeah. I mean, if you were to meet or redo.

Or people who are in that phase. And you’ve been through that.

I’m thinking because I don’t have a pretend answer, I would say it.

There should be no, no pre and stuff.

Yeah. No no no never. You’re right man I think it would be go deep. go deep. Keep going deep. Going deep into the relationships with people. It’s all relationship-based, right? It’s the people you meet. So spend the time to go deep with the people, the key people you’re meeting.

Forge those relationships. Find your mentors. So going deep into relationships, going deep into product expertise, even if you’re non-technical, don’t be scared like you can. You can open the product a little bit and like take a look at it and try to, you know, get into the technicalities a little bit if you can. And going deep into product knowledge, the voice of the market, the voice of the customer reading things, and it is reported. And from that POV, I think at any stage of your journey, you can have a POV on things, you can go deep on things. So that would be my advice for going deep into relationship products and the market.

Very cool. I love the fact that you can put it into like two words and go deep. And because for me that encapsulates staying curious. Yeah. And being intellectually honest with yourself. Hey, you know what? Okay, I know so much. I’m being humble, right? And it would.

It was a good one. Now I realize I might, I might replace my go deep by staying standing curious.

But I think they go hand in hand. Go hand in together. Yeah, yeah.

This is awesome. I mean, I wish we could talk more about this, but it’s been a great conversation. Julian. So good luck to you and the team at Clari.

Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Leo Bosuener founder of a product launch agency specializing in Product Hunt shares his career journey from freelancing as a B2B consultant to focusing on product launches. He emphasizes the importance of aligning product, sales, marketing, and customer success teams for a successful go-to-market strategy. Leo discusses the iterative nature of go-to-market efforts, the role of clear messaging and case studies, and the value of patience and continuous learning.

Listen to the podcast here:

Product Hunt Launch Secrets: A Conversation with Leo Bosuener

Signature question: How do you view and define go to market?

Yeah. Great question. I really like that as an opener. So I think the success, well, the essence of a successful go-to-market strategy lies in the seamless coordination between product, sales, marketing, and customer success teams to deliver a unified customer experience. So I think, like all of those are super critical and vital. And before, I think it’s very important to like before you even consider like whether you’re ready to go to market, I think it’s super important to consider your target audience, defining your product’s unique value proposition, and then selecting the most appropriate sales and marketing channels. That’s something that we obviously work on quite a bit and then also ensuring exceptional customer support. So we’ve seen it too many times where products prepared for the GTM but didn’t have their customer success teams dialed in.

And then that can lead to all sorts of issues, right? And ultimately, I think your go-to-market strategy isn’t a one-time effort, but more like a dynamic process that evolves with your business and market conditions over time.

Oh my God, I think you are one of the rarest or fewest guests on the podcast who has literally taken all the right elements of go-to-market. You covered the alignment between product marketing and sales, and you didn’t mention customer support and success earlier, but you added in very appropriately. You also mentioned ICP, and then you also hit the most important point, which is it’s not a one-time effort, it’s an iterative thing.

Exactly. I fully agree with you, and I really appreciate the feedback from an expert just like yourself.

Yeah. And I mean, I listen to and I hear and learn from founders, marketing leaders, product leaders, and revenue leaders. And it’s pretty much along the lines of what you stated earlier. But more often than not, they leave 1 or 2 components.

When they shared their thought about go to market. But this is the message of the essence of the podcast, which is my little effort in trying to promote or amplify the message that go to market and encompasses all these functions. And it’s not a one time. It’s an iterative, ongoing process.

Yeah. Fully agree. And just like I said, like we see that so many times that companies only focus on like let’s say two functions, like only sales marketing, but they forget about like customer success and like product teams or they only focus on like product and customer success, but then they forget to like, consider sales and marketing and like how to kickstart the engine for growth. So I think all of them are equally and crucially important.

Yeah. Very cool. Let’s zoom out a bit. Why don’t you talk to us about your career journey and what led you to start your own agency that turned Product Hunt? I mean, it’s a very unique space. So really curious about learning your journey and what they do to what you’re doing today.

Yeah, happy to dive in. So after college, I bounced around from like a few larger organizations until I decided that working for, like, large corporations wasn’t really my thing. So then I actually started freelancing as a B2B consultant. And in the beginning, I just I mean, like anyone who’s like, early on doesn’t really know what they’re doing. I focus on, like, anything and everything, like any kind of growth channel that I could deploy to drive traffic and user signups. So I focused on creating content, SEO, and PPC, mostly for like B2B, and SaaS companies until I realized, like if you’re trying to focus on everything, most likely you’re not going to like, master any particular thing. And a recurring topic that we saw and that we had like SaaS companies reach out to us and repeatedly request help for were like product launches and like general like product launches, right? So you can obviously do like the PR angle, which is something that we’ve done in the past, or like for example, like content, and like announcements, as I mentioned as well.

But we realized that we had really good success for a very particular type of company when it comes to like launching their own product. And so then we decided to like niche down and only focus on offering product launch services on the product and as a platform specifically. And I’ve been running with that ever since.

Very cool. Yeah, it’s a typical, again, go-to-market scenario, right? It’s a best practice, which is. Yes. Ideally, you would want to lock in on a niche and an audience and a problem, a specific one. But it’s super hot early days. You want to spread your wings and then figure out and then iterate. And what you’ve done so well is okay now. Yes. Growth B2B, absolutely. But then Product Hunt and for startups.

Exactly. And again, like we still like I speak to dozens of founders every single week just to see where they’re at and whether they’re like, what channel is the right channel for them to to launch on and get more traction, and visibility from.

Right. And often we recommend things that are not in line with our service. So sometimes we make recommendations to start up with content. Or we even have like people reaching out to us that have more of an SLG strategy rather than a plg strategy. And if it’s anything SG related, I’m like, hey, just focus on like content and outbound and on like PPC platforms rather than doing something like Product Hunt. So it really comes down to what the company is what its needs are and what its strategy and approach are obviously as well.

Yeah. So I just want to dig into some of the other aspects of how you shaped or how your career trajectory got shaped. in so many ways. Right? Yes. so one critical thing that you did mention is you’re not a large company guy. So yeah, no go on your own. So kudos to that. Not many people realize. And even if they realize not many people have the courage to make that decision and jump.

Yeah. I’m actually curious at some point to hear your background on that as well.

But yeah, what I’ve noticed is that I’m way more excited to be in the startup space where things are like super fast-paced and constantly evolving and changing. And if you’re working like a large corporation, if you might have done that in the past, you know how slow things are. And like if you want to push things forward, if you have like really cool new ideas, like it’s so frustrating to get anything done. And within startups like for better or for worse, they move really quickly, right? That might also then include like frequent pivots depending on where you at in your journey. But I enjoy that environment and the fast-paced like respect aspects of it a lot more.

Yeah for sure. I mean, yeah, sharing my experience and perspectives as well. Definitely. What you did mention aligns with what motivated me to go down the path of doing things on my own, which is large companies. It’s good, it’s scale, but at the same time, as an individual, you can only do so much that’s within your control.

A lot of the things are not within your control, and it’s an entirely different skill set. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an entirely different skill set to influence larger groups or other teams within a large corporation. yeah. For better or worse, it is what it is. But for me, I enjoy the fast pace and a lot of learning as well. I mean, that’s the other thing that I look forward to is learning at a quick pace, doing new things versus the same thing repeatedly over and over. So some of these things got me attracted to working and moving more towards the early stage and younger companies.

Yeah, 100% agree with you there. I feel like every time I stop learning, like when I’m at like the learning curve is starting to plateau, I feel like it’s time for me to start doing new things and not that’s a bad thing, but I feel like many people in larger organizations, they sometimes they at certain times just become more comfortable where they’re at and they’re like, they stop pushing the boundaries and like the envelope and like what’s possible.

They’re just like, we’ve been doing this for like, such a long time. It works. It doesn’t work great, but we’ll just stick with this for an hour, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So then you transition into B2B as a B2B growth expert. So what was that process like, especially like how did you get your initial set of clients, what kind of projects did you do, and so on?

Yeah. Great question. So for us, the way that I approached it in the past is that when you’re starting something like a consulting company or like an agency, it’s more like a sales growth engine. Right? So, so what are the things that you can do? A lot of it would be like targeted outbound using like lead intelligence platforms and really having a good grasp of who it is that you want to be going after and who would find the most value in the services that you propose. And that’s something that’s actually still super valuable for us nowadays, in the sense that we have a pretty strong lead prequalification mechanism, like when we take on new clients like we need to make sure that they are 100% sure like of who their target users are and that they’ve tested everything extensively.

So yeah, that’s essentially like how I started the agency that we did like a ton of like, targeted outreach. And then it’s just a matter of like conversion rates, right? Like, how many people do you have to get in front of until someone says yes? We’re very fortunate that the more we honed in on our offer, that’s the higher response rates became. And so then nowadays, like, we’re pretty well known in the space, and now we have a lot of inbound and we still do outbound. And then we obviously do content as well.

Very cool. Yeah. So inbound outbound and content. So they’ll say different channels and then of course reference. Clearly it’s a big channel for you guys. Exactly. Yeah. So curious. Like what is the iteration process like? And your thought process in terms of assessment. and how did you narrow it down to, hey, Product Hunt offer is the one that we need to do, like walk us through that iteration process? Yeah.

Great question.

So the first consideration was results like how can we produce results in the most efficient and quickest manner possible. And then also like what does the competition look like. Right. So if you’re offering like SEO services for SaaS companies, that’s a that’s a red ocean. Like that’s very tricky to get any traction in that market. Right. 

Like I mean you don’t see results right away. It takes long to see any traction.

And the thing is, with startups like we just discussed, they move really quickly and they have little patience. So telling an early stage like precedes B2B SaaS company like, hey, we’re going to need like half a year until you got to get any significant amount of traction from your SEO endeavors, then, yeah, it’s going to be a hard sell. Right. And so then the thing is, like with the other channels, like let’s say you consider like PPC, like paid ads and Google or LinkedIn or any other platforms. Those are pretty capital-intensive.

And again, that’s not something that all early-stage startups have access to. And so then when we tried out all these different channels, at some point we realized when we focused on like launches on like indie hackers or content promotions on Reddit or let’s say, Product Hunt, you could drive results relatively quickly. By quickly, I mean still like a month of preparation, right? But a month is better than six months for SEO. And that the results were actually, like, really good when it comes to a CPA perspective. So like cost per acquisition, like how much do you have to pay for a new user? Sign up if you’re running LinkedIn ads versus how much it would cost you if you consider and factor in the time that your team needs to prepare for a successful launch and like how many users you can get from it. But it really depends on like what your product is. So for example, nowadays when we have inbound queries from, let’s say B2C companies like something like a, like an I travel product, right?

For those types of companies, we still recommend focusing on other channels, like yes, you could still get something out of launching on Product Hunt, but for something that’s more like consumer-facing, we recommend hey, like try influencer marketing on TikTok depending on what the product is. Absolutely right.

Yeah. I mean, that actually brings me to my next question. I mean, there are so many besides the more quote-unquote traditional acquisition or awareness channels, which we talked about, like SEO, PR, and a bunch of others. You also mentioned the new, quote-unquote, new-age channels like influencer Reddit. Those are all new and upcoming. So, yeah. What was your experience like and why did you focus on product only versus influencer TikTok or Reddit?

Yeah, so I think it comes down to who we prefer working with. So like our ideal clients are like considered like Slack, Asana, and Notion these guys but super early on. Right. But those types of products. Whereas if you would want to go after clients that might be interested in like influencer marketing campaigns on TikTok.

It’s going to be more like B2C travel, saving apps, or anything that you can market to consumers directly, and we just enjoy it more like the productivity, like SaaS space. We also like I’m a big fan of like sales enablement platforms, sales intelligence platforms, or any kind of productivity tools. Like I’m a massive fan and user of like super human email. Like that’s probably one of my favorite tools that I came across on Product Hunt. So yeah, that’s the clients and the companies that we focus on and that we enjoy working with the most.

Right. Cool. Yeah. Good stuff. So I think that’s a good segue into like, who are your quote-unquote ideal clients, like who should reach out to you and what should they expect?

Yeah. Great question. So we typically focus on serious startups that have a PLD motion. So as I mentioned early on like we’ve tested lots of different approaches and we’ve looked at the results between PLD versus SLG. Plg is definitely our bread and butter.

That’s where we can derive the best results. And we make sure that, like everyone that we get in a call with and where we’re trying to figure out like, hey, is this actually a good fit just yet? We see what the onboarding flow looks like and whether it’s like streamlined. We’ve made sure basically we ask our clients like, hey, how many people have you gone through this? Because we want to make sure that, like, if you’re actually launching on product and, and you open the floodgates, that there aren’t like bugs that are happening on the back end, and then all of a sudden you get a ton of like, negative user feedback. So yeah, we try to incorporate a holistic approach between like consulting on the front end and then also making sure that like the client is actually ready and getting the assets ready and everything on the back end.

Got it. So there is a qualification process to see that if I mean a couple of ways. One is to see if you are the right agency for the CDA series a company.

That’s one. The other one is product. If Product Hunt is the right channel and if now is the right time, there are quite a few things. So walk us through the checklist. So if I’m a series A founder and I’m trying to figure out the next growth hack, if you will walk me through like a checklist of what to expect and what to do?

Yeah. Great question. So fully transparent. Right from the beginning, we typically turn down like 70% of the people that we talk to, not for like malicious reasons, but just because we want to make sure that they are in the perfect state to get the most out of it. Right. Like for us, it’s we follow, not necessarily like a hard sell approach, but more like a consultative selling where we’re trying to figure out like, hey, is this the right solution for you at this moment in time, could be the right solution for you, but maybe like the next quarter, right? So the first thing that we take a look at is like as I mentioned before, like what your onboarding flow looks like and what it is like on your website.

Can I come to your website? And social media users nowadays have very short attention spans, not just in production but also on other platforms. So if someone comes to your website, is your marketing copy is so concise that within 10s they can immediately understand what your product does and who it serves. Yeah, and let’s say if I’m in the target market, would I want to sign up right away? Right. So superhuman is like an example of that. Like I come across that website and I’m like, yep, sign me up. And so that’s the first thing. Then the second thing on the call, we ask them like what other marketing channels they’ve tried already. Because for us, it’s important that you’ve experimented a little bit and you ideally have like a few results already. So if you’ve tried outbound, what do your response rates look like? If you’ve tried PPC, what your cost per acquisition, what is your cost per acquisition look like? And based on those metrics, we can then make recommendations on whether a product and launch would be the logical next step, or whether we recommend trying other channels first.

So if I talk to startups that haven’t done any marketing just yet, we typically recommend like depending on what the product is like, hey, try influencer campaigns, try organic approaches or anything else first, and then finally, if they’ve tried other channels, they have a very smooth, self-serve onboarding flow. Their website copy is crisp and clean, they have a few hundred users on the product and there are no bugs. Then we are able to help them.

Yeah. So clearly you’ve gone through so many iterations of the discovery process. You know, what are who is the ideal client? And when is the right time for them to invest in Product Hunt?

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Very cool. So one question. Are you solo or do you have a team?

No, we have a team of five full-time employees.

Very cool. And like when you are building out your team like this is more of an agency growth approach or a question like, at what point in time did you realize that, hey, I need to build out or hire maybe freelancers or a team? Yeah.

And what are the roles like?

Actually very early on. So obviously, like anytime you have like an agency, you typically hire like customer success managers first because depending on how many clients you have at some point it’s just like a bandwidth issue, right? Yeah. And then after that, we hire like partnership advisors. So people who were really good at trying to figure out like, hey, what are the companies that we wanted to go after and how can we create synergies with, let’s say, VC funds so that they would send us their portfolio companies? So that was an important step as well. And nowadays is like just building more of what we already have. So more customer success people more marketing assistance and more partnership advisors and strategic advisors for partnership collaborations.

Very cool. More on a lighter note. What does your family think? What do you do for a living?

So okay, for them just venturing into like founder territory, like starting your own thing, right, is something that is hard for them to grasp. Yeah. And then what we do specifically, I think they would just say like he’s in tech and leave it at that is my assumption.

Very cool. Yeah. And did he have any friction or challenges? Hey, why not go the employee route versus why are you starting your own thing?

Luckily I did not. So my family was very supportive when I left the corporate world and I wanted to start my own thing, that they trusted me and they’re like, okay, well, we don’t have any experience in it, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out. So I was very fortunate in that regard that my entire family was supportive and didn’t hold me back on anything.

Very cool. So something that you said earlier actually caught my attention, Leo, in terms of, I think one of the important criteria that you mentioned, whether CS, a company can be successful on Product Hunt, is a solid website with a clear marketing message, a clear copy.

And because if you’re talking about Plg, it has to be very evident for the individual user to see if this product is right for me or not, whether I should invest my time in even signing up for the free trial. So flipping things, I checked your website, and social growth labs, and very impressed with the way you thought about it, designed it, the content, and messaging. So walk us through your approach to designing redesigning or developing the message, the copy, the visuals, the resources, and so on for your own website.

Yeah. Great question. So for us, we want to focus on our like users in mind like the ICP that we’re going after, which are B2B and B2C SaaS companies that follow Plg. One of the main things that I mentioned earlier is that people nowadays have very little time. So we want to make sure that like we put our main marketing message at the very top, above the fold without having to scroll. And I think that’s true for the greatest SaaS companies today.

I think like Calendly actually does a fantastic job at that. So there’s Monday, like a few of the tools that do a really good job where they position their marketing message right at the very top. And then we want to go right into like, what is it that you can get out of using our service? Or let’s say if you’re a SaaS company, like, what can you expect from the product? What are the pain points that users typically face? And then we just focus on case studies, because that’s the main thing that that our clients want to see is what we’ve found, and we’ve dissected them between B2B and B2C case studies. And we’ve seen by using tools where you can essentially track like heatmaps on your website, where most people like click on what they check out. And it’s literally they spend 30s reading the main value proposition on our homepage. Then they click for two minutes to five different case studies, and then they book a call. and we do have like tons of free resources on our website as well.

But few people read that. It’s literally just like, what can I get out of this? Is this relevant to me? Who else has used this before and what results have they seen? And then users or clients decide whether it’s relevant for them and book a call or not.

Yeah. So in a nutshell, what you’re saying is what really is helping, at least in your sales process, is a clear messaging in the hero section. That’s the first thing on the top level of the site. That’s one. The second is case studies, because everyone wants, sociologists that that’s very critical and then schedule a meeting or book a call. It’s those exact things.

We’ve also tried to pay attention that we select very different case studies because if you scroll through some of them, you can actually see that there are some startups that we’ve worked with that have received hundreds, if not thousands of signups. And then there are startups that we’ve worked with that have received dozens of signups, but all of them considered it a success depending on what their product was.

Because if you’re selling a B2B enterprise solution, which again, is not what we typically work with, but we have tried it a few times in the past and their contractor values are like thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then even if you have like 20 leads, that’s a great success. Whereas if you’re selling like a, like a SaaS, where the freemium model is like a 999 paid plan, then you’re going to need like a few thousand signups to, to make it work.

Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah, I’d like to take maybe a minute or two just to go through the copy and the messaging on your website. And this is more for the listeners as well. I’ll be reading out snippets of it because. So on the home page up front. You mentioned Product Hunt Marketing Agency, so it’s very clear what you do. And below that, in the subtext you mentioned, increase your user sign-up by up to 300% and gain brand awareness, increasing revenue.

So it’s a very clear value proposition and what someone should expect when they work with you and your agency. So that’s really key. And then the text that you have in the bowl over there, we are 100% performance-based. If you don’t get your results we don’t get paid. That’s a bold statement. That’s a bold offer. That’s a bold guarantee.

Yeah. This is actually so for my background in performance marketing. Right. So when I was a B2B consultant focusing on growth, I was always performance-based because my notion is like, I only want to get paid when I deliver results. And so when I did this, traditionally speaking in, let’s say, P2P and PPC plays, I would charge profits like a percentage of the profit rather than like a flat retainer because anyone can charge a flat retainer and not drive profits. But if I’m driving profits and I’m taking like 5 to 10%, then that worked really well. And so we continue to have this model going forward.

Very cool.

And did you write the copy yourself?

Yeah. And we did this. And this is again what we recommend our clients do. So typically the products and the teams that we work with, they’re building for like a few years and just working on the product. Right. But we always want to make sure that they’ve informed all of their like whatever they’re building, whether it’s like new features or like the whole product, the way it’s designed, that it’s all been informed by customer feedback, right? So we’ve been on like thousands of calls, and we have tried to figure out what are the main things that our clients are looking for and what are the main things we can help them achieve. And the first one was always like brand awareness and early adopter feedback. Again, early-stage startups. The second is just to drive traffic and signups. And then the third one is to get in front of tech bloggers, influencers, and investors. So like the PR angle. And so we try to embed that in the copy at the very top of our website.

Pretty cool. And did you do an exercise of hey, I’m looking at all your discovery calls, customer case studies, and even recordings like how did you arrive at those like 4 or 5 sentences?

Yeah, we do actually. So within RCM, we have like custom activities where we plug in. What is it that the people are looking for? What is it that they’ve tried so far? What is it that they want to try going forward? And then we’ve just analyzed all the data across thousands of calls and categorized it in what is most important to our clients, and then used that to inform our marketing.

Very cool. All right. Switching gears, so another popular segment for this podcast and for the listeners is a go-to-market success story and a go-to-market failure story. So if you can share, you clearly have tons of case studies. So I’d love to hear a success story and a failure story. That’d be great.

Yeah, sure. So when it comes to a success story, we’ve worked with a company called did they essentially have generative AI agents? I personally love the product because that’s one of the things that I’m most excited about when it comes to using AI.

Essentially, using generative AI avatars and agents to help facilitate the process on customer success teams and cost-poor teams and streamline the process, reducing the query times and just getting better responses quickly. So essentially, they have a few different products. They’ve been around for a bit now, and one of the launches that was very successful is this avatar feature where you can embed it on your website, and then you feed it with your company’s knowledge base, and instead of having to come to a website and chatting with like an intercom chat agent, which those things can be automated or human powered. You are essentially chatting with an AI avatar, which those things can be quite fun, and if they’re fed by the entire knowledge base of the company, then chances are that you’re going to have your questions answered way faster than if you’d have to wait on, like, a human-powered intercom chat. So that went really well. And again, like for them, if you consider go to market, they’ve had everything dialed in from their sales team, their marketing team, their product team, and their customer success team.

So it was actually quite easy for us to work with them because they were so well prepared. And then when it comes to failures. So I wouldn’t necessarily consider anything a failure. I just consider it like a learning experience. I don’t think I wouldn’t want to consider like that, that we’re failing in life. I feel like it’s either we win or we learn something. And I think the learning piece is actually quite crucial because if you don’t learn if you never fail, that means you’re not experimenting enough, you’re not trying enough new things. And so we try new things all the time. And that often comes with like, well, learning lessons. Right? And those are super important for us because we have this model that everyone’s allowed to fail, but ideally not more than once, because we want to make sure that you learn from, every failure and like a valuable lesson. So one of the most important lessons that we’ve learned throughout our journey of, like advising companies on launching a product hunt, is like, what works well? Is it plg or is it SLG? In the beginning, we didn’t have any idea, so we tried a lot of slow approaches.

None of them works. So actually there it took like 2 or 3 times until that lesson really sunk in. But nowadays we refrained from taking on any clients that have slow motion because we just know it won’t work on Product Hunt as the platform.

Very cool.

Yeah, again, I mean, so many of our thought processes aligned over here. Leo, in terms of the way you rephrased, there’s nothing like a failure. It’s more like feedback and a learning experience. so kudos to you for highlighting that value. And also it looks like that’s a core value within your team as well. So kudos to you for that. So appreciate that. Going back to the success story and the failure story, let’s dig in a little bit more into each of those. So what was the duration like the approach in terms of what you had to do in terms of coaching them and what they had to do in terms of preparing like a list and driving virality if you will?

Yeah. So for the success story, like the first thing again, that we do, like on any other intro call is figuring out like what other marketing channels they’ve tried before and what results they’ve seen.

And for them, they’ve actually done like a few different channels. Anything from like content, influencer marketing, paid marketing, and SEO. And, for that company, they actually wanted to use the product primarily for the brand awareness that they would get from it because they’ve had so many other channels that drove a significant amount of user signups already. Like I always considered, if you’re getting like, let’s say, 2 to 5000 new users per month already, then launching a product might not necessarily be worth your time if you’re doing it only for the user signup perspective. If you’re doing it for brand awareness, sure, then that still makes sense because you’re not going to get the same credibility, social proof, and like brand recognition from running ads on LinkedIn that you would get from a successful product and campaign. Right. and then we worked with that team to make sure that the assets that they had already on file for other social media platforms, that we would format for the product and audience, because, again, production users, they’re very tech-savvy, and there are a lot of them are early adopters.

So they want to come to a product, understand it right away, understand whether it’s relevant for them or whether it isn’t. Then come to the home homepage, check it out, sign up, get started, try it out, and ideally do all of that within like a 5 or 10-minute time span. Then they come back to the product and provide valuable feedback. So we just had to make sure that like their onboarding flow was optimized for the product and the experience that users expect on the platform. And that was it. And then we basically helped them spread the message across various social channels. That’s part of our main value proposition. And again, like one of the key things here that I always tell to our clients, if you’re a big company, you have like a decent-sized email list. So like anything over like 5000 subscribers, an email is what you really want to do make sure that if you want to leverage those folks to support you for your product launches, that they’re properly warmed up in advance.

You don’t want to be blasting a list of 5000 email subscribers on the launch day and say like, hey, we’ve launched on product, and come support us because that will definitely backfire. So we basically help our clients as well, like warming up their audiences if they have any.

How long was the warmup time like, what are the steps like for the warmup? What you mentioned is very critical. Yeah. The launch. Yeah.

Yeah. So we do require like a lead time of one month. Got it. And then, for the failures. So the SLG, approaches that we’ve tried in the past. It’s essentially the same process in the sense that we’ve made sure that the onboarding flow, which for SLG usually requires like a call that was pretty streamlined. Again, I’m pretty sure like the people behind it. Calendly, they would know all about it, like what it means to have like a streamlined booking experience. And there are so many SLG companies that still don’t have that right, which is quite fascinating to me.

But we made sure that it can be that it was as optimized as it could be for SLG and that the assets were optimized on Product Hunt. But what we failed to consider, what we didn’t know at the time, is that few users, on the product hand, will actually have the patience to sign up for a call and then wait three days until they can actually speak to a sales rep and then understand the tool. And by that time, no one would come back to Product Hunt and provide feedback. So that’s why those approaches typically don’t work as well.

I mean, sharing some of my own personal experiences when I was at a company responsible for product-led growth and overall growth at a series B startup. One of the things we did was so prior to my joining the role, we were primarily inside sales lead go-to-market notion. And the pivot idea was to go from that to plg. So my message to the team was always the points that you mentioned, Leo, which is if you are really serious about product growth and if you’re driving decent traffic.

We were like 300 to 500 a week, recent traffic coming on to sign up for the product, but it’s really critical for that user to see the value, ideally on the same day or the next day. After that, you lose them. They lose you. Yeah. That’s it. It’s over.

And they’re also trying to layer on sales assistance. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t call it a sales lead even though this is the thing. Right. The startups this is where I really feel that the mindset of the leadership team is really critical. Yeah, especially if you’re transitioning from sales lead to product lead or even sales assist product-led growth, it’s really critical to make sure that, hey, it’s not about delivering so much like a daily, weekly, monthly quota for your sales team. It’s about delivering value from a customer success perspective to enabling guiding and onboarding that free trial user initially.

Yeah, no, I agree. So many companies, just focus on getting the user signups, but then they lose them right after because they haven’t optimized and streamlined the onboarding.

And as you said, if you like, we consider like time to value. So how long does it take from the moment that the user signs up they get value out of the product? And if that takes more than a day, then again, you’ve lost the activity and the retention of that user. They would have signed up once, and they won’t be coming back if they don’t get the time to value immediately. And I feel like that’s just like a societal change in general. Like people nowadays just expect instant gratification. So if you sign up for something new you want to have like the shiny thing that you were coming for right away and you don’t want it to be delayed. Right.

Yeah. And it also actually is a prerequisite if your onboarding process and if you’re looking at the stats internally, the metrics of, hey, is your pretrial user getting value and converting to paid within ideally a week or less than that? Maybe if you’re not seeing those, maybe that’s an indication that you’re not really ready to push product growth so much.

And maybe the Product Hunt launch is not right for you at this time. Yeah.

Very cool.

All right. I know we are, reaching towards the end of our scheduled time. So switching gears here. What resources do you lean on to educate yourself about growth, product, and or maybe things outside of work?

Yeah. So good question as well as we both talked about already, I think both of us are pretty big fans of like continuous learning and personal development. So for me, I focus on listening to my favorite influencers and seeing what content they put out there. So, for example, I’m a big fan of like Lenny recently did a newsletter collaboration with him as well. I’m always staying up to date on what he’s sharing and honestly, like your podcast was great as well. I only recently discovered it when we started chatting with one another, but I think it’s so crucial to listen to industry leaders who come to podcasts and share their wisdom to understand like what’s working in different companies, right? Because sometimes, or I find it’s quite common that you’re just so heading down focusing on your own company, on your own startup, on your own endeavor, not paying attention to like, what’s happening around you.

But I think it’s quite important to understand, okay, what are the market trends like? What’s working for other people? And are there maybe some things that we can copy and try in our own startup to see whether that works the same way for us?

Very cool.

And yeah, the final question for you, Leo, is if you were to turn back, plug, and go back to day one of your go-to-market journey, what advice would you give to your younger self?

So I think, one of the things that I still struggle with in the state is just patience. So my main, my main recommendation to my younger self would be just to be more patient. If you know about the marshmallow experiment. tell me more.

About that, I don’t.

Know. So the marshmallow experiment, I think they ran it in the 60s at Stanford. I could be mistaken here. So. So don’t quote me on it. But it was essentially an experiment where they put kids in a room and they.

Yeah, I think I know what you’re talking about. Yeah, but for the listeners, just complete the story. Now I get it.

Okay, so they gave kids the choice to either have one marshmallow right now or let’s say the researcher left the room and he told the kids, like, if I come back in 20 minutes and you haven’t eaten your first marshmallow, you’ll get two. So that’s essentially like delayed gratification, which I seriously struggle with. So when it comes to like go to market strategies, just be more patient with like the lessons that I’m going to be learning. Because many times when I was learning lessons, I was like, man, this sucks. Like, why didn’t this work right now? And I was just frustrated at the moment. But I failed to consider that in the long run, this would teach me something very valuable so that it wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Now, totally, 100%, right? I mean, there are so many things and advice you wish we could give to our younger self, and that’s definitely one of my things as well, is how to balance a sense of urgency and having patience.

Yeah, it’s a dichotomy. I mean, you need to have both every single day.

Agreed. Yeah. For sure. If you have too much patience, then whereas a sense of urgency. Right. And what gets you, like off the ground and get moving?

Yeah. And one of the things that I found interesting and curious to hear thoughts is especially when it comes to good market initiatives and experiments, more often than not, people want to talk about the KPIs like maybe it’s revenue take. I mean, let’s take revenue as an easy example everyone can relate to. Yeah, but so many steps have to fall in place. And that’s where I believe in looking at leading indicators. And then the revenues are a trailing indicator at the end of the day. Yeah for sure. Yeah I mean just go back goes back to yeah. The whole thing about patience is the leading indicator. Right. So I need to be patient to see that end result play out 100% degree.

And like like you said, like the leading indicators will tell you whether you’re doing the right thing or the wrong thing right now.

But if you’d only like to pay attention to revenue, then you wouldn’t be able to make any valuable decisions up until like a month after you tried a new initiative. Yep.

Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where sales expert Tom Slocum shares his comprehensive approach to go-to-market (GTM) strategies. As the founder of The SD Lab, Tom brings valuable insights into marketing plans, sales motions, and customer success. 

Learn about his journey from a sales representative to an entrepreneur, his strategies for building and scaling SDR teams, and the importance of collaboration and client involvement in crafting effective messaging. This episode is a treasure trove of actionable advice and nuanced understanding of modern marketing tactics.

Listen to the podcast here:

Expert GTM Insights from Tom Slocum: Building Effective Sales Teams, Collaborative Messaging, and Optimizing Outbound Efforts

Let’s start off with the signature question of the show, which the listeners love. And that is how do you view and define go to market?

Such a good question. This one’s so finicky. You know, you get people always talking about GTM leaders, you know, all this different stuff and influencers and whatnot. For me, how I define GTM, first and foremost it is to go to market, right. Go to market. Right.

And I think it is a full holistic view of an organization proactively going to their market. So they’re going after their ICP, their buyers, people that would be needing help in solving the problems that this that your organization solves. And that means what’s the marketing plan? What’s the sales motion? What are all the pieces in there? You know, how is CSM going to run? What’s their goals? And really putting a holistic view together on going proactively to your market and making sure that the entire engine runs as a full piece. It’s not just outbound, it’s not, oh, phone calls and emails and that’s going to market. I just don’t believe that. I think, you know, to be a GTM leader is those people that would sit in a room with a CEO, a CRO, and a CMO and a board and be able to actually lay out a plan on on what we would be able to do to get you into your market, find success there, and be able to grab market share and funding and growth as a very holistic view.

Completely agree with a lot of those points. I’m sure we can add more to that, but what you tell and what you share, Tom, actually reminds me of my time back when I was exposed to go to market for the very first time as a product marketer about, what, five, ten years ago or so. So for me, when people talk about go to market and there’s a hey, product marketing owns go to market, you’re responsible for it. My view back in those days, it’s a very limited view, which is do we have all the right elements for the launch? That was it, right? I mean, it’s almost like a bomb checklist. When I say bomb, it’s a bill of materials checklist kind of thing, which is okay, do we have the training material, has sales been trained on it and support as well? Do we have a pitch deck, web page pricing and so on. It’s more like a checklist kind of thing. But over the years, for me, I’ve had the good fortune of leading marketing teams, working with CEOs, sales leaders and other counterparts.

My view of the good market shifted and evolved, thankfully. Yeah, it’s a lot in that it’s not just, hey, do we have the list of things for the launch? But also how are we? First of all, do we have the right definitions of our ICP? What are our big metrics? Not just launch, but beyond that? And how are the different parts of the organization evolving? But there is also another element. So goes back to what you mentioned earlier, which is very internal centric, which is okay, how is the marketing, how the marketing, sales, customer success working hand in hand, but then having an external view? I mean, who are we solving this problem for? Who is it that we are solving this problem for? Right. And then is that messaging coming across? And how are we measuring that leading indicators and so on. So there’s also an element of product I mean yes, marketing, sales, customer success. They’re critical but without product.

There’s only so much you can do. But not much we can do. Yeah.

Yep. And that’s it. You know, making sure that it’s actually what your market needs. Are you listening? Are you pivoting or are you implementing the feedback, you know, quickly? All of that is part of, you know, going to your market. You need to make sure things are ironed out. Now, some things can happen on the fly. There are adjustments. Even in my own company. You’re right. You start in one direction and a few months in years in, you might pivot to something completely different. and it can, you know. Go through a rebirth, but that’s simply just by listening to the feedback of your market, really getting into their world and understanding, and then aligning, you know, the ship to, to go that direction. Yeah.

So let’s take a step back. Big picture. why don’t you share with our listeners your career journey, professional journey and what you do and what led you to what you’re doing today.

Yeah, so I am a 16 year sales vet. I started in 2007, started in financial services, at Discover Card, and then I moved into for profit education for a couple of years, dealt with a couple layoff, within that space just because there were for profit schools. So it was a lot around numbers and different things, not state funded. and then I moved over to companies like GoDaddy, Yelp, SMB, web design, and paid media. And then I jumped in around 2015 when I was at Yelp, I really fell in love with just booking the meeting and hunting for business more so than a closer. So I always kind of explained, like I kind of had like two two jersey retirements, like in a sports, you know, I’ve got the number 24 and the number eight like Kobe, because for almost a decade from 2007 to 2017, I was a full sales cycle rep. I did everything sourced, closed, didn’t matter where I worked, I had to own everything. to where.

Then in 2015, 2016, I started discovering just what an SDR was. So in 2016, I joined a company and was just purely an SDR and I absolutely loved it. It was great. It was stress free. It was just booking the meetings, making sure things were qualified and hoping to ease on the back end what they needed to do. And then in 2017, I had my first chance to get into a leadership role, and I built and helped scale a SDR team over three years from 0 to 30 enterprise space. We had a great run. It was a lot of fun. After that went on a second run, grew a team from 0 to 7 and that was during Covid. And so during that time, I got to learn how to manage remotely through all of that, being fully remote after having a 30 person SDR team in person. And then in 2020, I found a community, just because of Covid, things started happening. People all over the world secluded. So I fell into a place called Rev Genius, which is a sales community with like 40,000 people.

Right? When I joined, it was only like 2000, led by Jared Robin. And he kind of took me under his wing. I fell in love with the community side of it. It lived in slack, and I ended up birthing a micro community in there called Rev League, where I had about 2000, 2500 folks that were SDR sales leaders. And I recreated this virtual sales floor for people with cold calling, workshops, competitions, tech that we provided them as partners, help people land jobs, all that good stuff. For almost three years we had an eight week curriculum. We would cover all that good stuff. Then I jumped back into the sales motion and I went to be a VP of sales for an SDR boot camp, and I helped them move from the UK to the US market in five months. And then that run ended abruptly. And next thing you know, I didn’t know where I was going to go. I had been in the community for a while. I then went into this organization to help them.

I didn’t know where to go. I wasn’t looking for a job or having any pipeline. So after talking with some friends, you know, I’ve been in the game for 15 years. At that point, it was time to go all in because when running the community and doing that stuff, I started getting side hustles, right. That’s how it always starts. People were coming to me for workshops and hey, help my organization. You get SDR land very well and go to market. So I launched The SD Lab in September of 2022, and I birthed my own consulting and outbound agency, September of 2022. So we’re now in month 19. I am just a few months away from entering year three. And, you know, it’s just been really fun. Now I’m the founder. I am building this business out to where we’re helping organizations either build an internal SDR motion and a go to market plan, or we’re just doing it for them and are doing an outsourced appointment setting. So if the org doesn’t want to do the whole lift and re haul internally, they can just give it to us to help them find proof of concept.

You know, put some meetings in the pipeline before they look at building one internally, if at all. so full, full house, outbound agency got a crew now, about six months away from that three year kind of move. and that’s just been a journey. So about, you know, 16 years now, I’ve made 500,000 cold calls and counting. I still actively co call every day. It’s my number one channel. And now, you know, after all those business, you know, doing ten years of an individual contributor and full sales cycle rep to another five, six years as being an SDR land and helping, you know, build out these teams to now, you know, almost two years being a, founder and CEO.

Very cool. I mean, quite a few nuggets, that pop out to me in your storytelling. I mean a couple of things. One is early on in your career, you worked at big brands, reputed brands. I mean, discover, GoDaddy, Yelp and so on.

And reputation is another one. And you go into different aspects of sales. While doing that, you fell in love with SDR specifically, right? Is the SDR just creating opportunities, creating meetings and creating the next step for account executives to close? So that is a sweet spot. And something else that popped out as you’re sharing your story is being part of a community. Rev genius. And a quick fun fact sidenote Jared Robbins on this podcast. Great guy. We learned a lot. Yes, in that conversation with him.

Was a strong mentor of mine. I owe a lot to that guy. We had a good relationship. We still talk very often. even after I kind of pulled away from the community side. But, yeah, a guy took me under his wing, and basically helped me get to where I am just by giving me the opportunity to kind of build a micro community there. And I was community manager of Rev Genius for a while. Ran with the team, help them go from I think we were like 2500 members when I joined to almost 30,000, 35,000 by the end of the run.

Yeah. help with sponsors and, you know, closing deals on the back end with us. And then, like I said, running that little micro community in there. Great guy. Yeah.

And then something else that popped out is, as you are very active in Rev Genius, creating the micro communities and running workshops around SDR and go to market broadly. Something else that popped up for me was folks started reaching out to you in terms of workshops, hey, can you do this? This is your sweet spot expertise. We have a gap here, right? It’s almost like it is not almost. It is inbound and referral. Yeah. For you. That’s you putting yourself out there with your expertise.

100%. You know, I always preach this when going to market or with organizations is the best way to get your outbound to transition and kind of funnel your inbound. Is this not about pitch slapping? It’s not talking about your value prop, but it really is just about giving, giving and giving some more in that entire time and running a community that was free.

One, the no. None of those reps being a part of that channel paid a thing. We ran for two and a half years before we put a paywall up and started offering a curriculum and a more structured process. But for the first two years I ran that it was just me spilling 15 years of knowledge, and people would pop in with questions and say, hey, I can’t get over this objection. This is what they said, you know, or me building out a resource and saying, hey, here’s five tips that really worked with me and could call and try them out. So it just builds a lot of trust and credibility. And when I was hoping to end up with these skills and these eyes, well guess what would happen. They’d get promoted, their numbers would influx, they would start kicking butt to where when a manager asked him what changed, what’s been going for you? Oh, really? Being in Tom’s community and Tom, he’s met with me three times in this last month and just been really helping me to where then next thing you know, the manager was DMing me, hey, what would it look like to help the whole team? Or, you know, I saw what you did with them.

We’re really stuck in that process. Or you know, we don’t really have a good SDR handoff, you know, would you come in and do a workshop? and then I started ending up on podcasts like this, and it just started letting people see who I was. My thought process. And all I did was just give because I didn’t have a business at the time also. Right. I was a director at a company, I was getting paid, I was building my team, so there was nothing for me to gain. So I was just unloading everything I had of any tip I could give, any conversation that could be a part of right where then? Yeah, it started building out the side hustle because then people just started coming to me. Naturally, I started succeeding in those and I was like, oh, I have a little bit of a business model here. Maybe this is something I could get into. And then my hand was forced, you know, in September of 2022 and I went in and now it’s been great.

And there’s a lot of companies that don’t know how to build a sales motion. They just don’t. And I spent 15 years to where I almost say, like, I’m a brown belt at a karate level in sales, development and in sales. I’ve done 500,000 cold calls. I’ve worked B2C, B2B, I’ve done enterprise, mid-market, SMB. Anything you could throw at me, I’ve seen, and I built in skill teams. So I know how those work and making those decisions and hiring, firing all these things. And then the kicker was I got to go through the remote world, right? So then I got to learn how to manage in-house, but then also manage outs in the remote world. And most leaders right now are only learning about the remote world. Some of them don’t even meet their team anymore. They don’t. They’re just hiring out remotely and might not ever meet these people. Or some are transitioning from, you know, 20 years of being on a field floor to now learning how to do it remotely and they don’t know what the heck they’re doing, or how to keep their team motivated and in touch and without being a micromanager, all that stuff.

I got that experience too, and I did it well. So it’s just different. and it’s just valuable stuff that I can share. And the results, you know, and the impact that I bring speaks for itself, right? People are like, dude, you take my learning curve from 12 months down to three months, you know, four months. And before I know it, I’ve got a repeatable, you know, structured sales process that actually makes sense for how we’re trying to go to market. Fantastic.

So let’s dive into The SD Lab. I mean, you did mention what led you to The SD Lab. So tell us more about the lab, who you serve and what services are programs and products that you offer.

Yeah. crazy. You know, flab started, again September 2022. Started kind of throwing out the kitchen sink in the beginning. Didn’t really know what like my actual as we talk about going to the market, like, what is that package? What is it that you’re trying to do? I just kind of went all in no capital, no run rate.

It happened within four days. I was, you know, done being a VP of sales. And I said, hey, I’m going all in on this. So for the first four months, it was just kind of just consulting, coming in, helping organizations. I really went in on all in on founder led sales folks that were maybe 1 to 2 years in their business now looking to transition from founder led and get their first sales hire. And instead of hiring that player coach and kind of making those mistakes, get in between that spot and say, hey, let me come in first. Let me get you all set up, and then you can bring in that player coach. And they’re not having to formulate the plan for you and all those bumps and bruises. Yeah. So I started doing that. And then about six months in and all of pretty much last year people were pushing me and my deal cycles on. Well, can you do it for us? Like what about that? Right.

And I did not want to get into the appointment setting space. I didn’t think it had a bad name. I had plenty of friends who were doing it that were already reputable and doing it for a long time, so I just started outsourcing. Unfortunately, they were dropping the ball. It really wasn’t performing, even though these people were the best that I knew in the market, it still was just really rough. Yeah. And so, you know, up until September of 2023, so a full year later, after that first year of building a foundation of the business, kind of figuring out my products. So by month six, I was doing what my core offers are, were, 14 week revenue accelerator program, where I’ll come in for 14 weeks and we meet weekly. We go through your entire under the hood process. We’re looking at the three pillars: people, tech and process. So we’re going to look at your tech stack. We’re going to make sure everything’s in play. Find out if we can condense things, get you the right CRM, the right tools.

And that’s all custom to, you know, again what your go to market strategy, what your ICP. Not everybody needs all these tools. Look at your processes. Right. As a founder led to a lot of times you’re just running a gun and there is no process. You just do what you do every day and it works. So then trying to bring somebody in to come start booking meetings and run a sales cycle, they don’t know what the heck they’re doing because everything’s in your brain. 

You just did it every day, right? So I’d come in and fix that, iron that out, and then we’d look at people. I’d start helping them hire, find people in my network that might be a fit, help them build job descriptions, show up on interviews with them, and kind of help them find the pieces they needed. And then I built custom playbooks. I really enjoy building playbooks, so I started building them in Canva, Google sites, and some companies would just hire me because they were looking to scale, but their reps were all kind of doing something different.

So before they doubled their headcount, they wanted a unified playbook on like, what’s our messaging like, what is our process like? So I built them for them before they doubled up on their headcount. So when those people came in, they just referenced the playbook and they were right up to speed with the rest of their reps. Yeah. So I was doing that. That’s our main offer. And then in September of 2023, I dove into after some business mentors and some conversations, people were like, why not just do the appointment setting stuff? You keep putting it off and you’re actually getting more requests for that than the other stuff that you’re doing. Yeah, I said, okay, so I launched it. So, since September of last year, that’s what I’ve been doing, is now moving kind of really into just an appointment setting. because I want to change the statistics. I think the stat that I share all the time and I’ve seen is 92% of the companies that rely on outsource appointment setting fail.

There’s like an 8% success rate. And I realized when I was outsourcing it and giving it to people, it was just because nobody brought in the consulting element. It was more like a painkiller. It was just, hey, we’re just going to throw out meetings. We’re going to run our own messaging. We’ll just give you those meetings every month and let us handle it. And then it would just end up on a blind line item, and I’d be talking to these clients and prospects and they’re like, well, we’ve had this place for six months. We just pay them every month just because. But we’ve gotten like four meetings over six months. I’m like, what are you doing? And they’re like, are we forgetting it and leaving it. And it’s just been kind of running. So these new people come into the org and fire that, and they cut the line item and be like, Tom, we’re trying to look for a new company. So I bring in the consulting side where I’ve got my reps.

They’re going to do the code calls, they’re going to do the email, all the outreach. But I am going to be on top of that account with you. And we’re crafting messaging together. We’re doing buyer persona exercises like, I end the job if I actually do care. And I do want you to get numbers on the board. If that’s not happening, then what? Why is that? And I talked to a client earlier this week where he was like, oh, you craft the messaging with us or you will do it. And I was like, yeah. And he’s like, man, the last company we used, they just started sending emails without ever clearing it with us and just kind of went out there and we’re sending campaigns. They said, we’re tested, right? And like it didn’t do anything. And I was like, oh no, no, no, no, no. I would never represent your company without your involvement. Like, that’s crazy to me that somebody was just out there and it was like, look, we just wanted meetings.

So we trusted them. And I was like, no, no, no, no, we’ll build everything together. Because whether you work with me, you know, for the time or not, I want you to be able to build that internally and kind of figure out what your process should look like. So we’re building it and you’re involved. So since September I’ve been doing that. Now it’s going really, really well. Our ICP is really, you know, pre-series to series B, kind of where we live through their founder-led sales organization that’s, you know, pivoting, to running a full sales motion or obviously a series A or series B where they probably have, you know, 7 to 20 reps. Things are kind of broken. They’re not unified. One rep does it this way. One does it that way. You know, they’re potentially looking to optimize everything. and then industries, a lot of it was SAS for quite a while because that’s where I’ve been for about four years. So SAS kind of software as a service now it’s kind of getting into manufacturing.

Automotive, digital marketing agencies is where I’ve been targeting probably for the past like four months now, is we really found our sweet spot with digital marketing and media because yes, they know how to build leads and funnels and marketing stuff, but honestly, they have no idea how to run a sales operation. They don’t even know what an SDR is. They’re just good marketers. They build a cool product or, you know, platform to help you with your SEO. But they get all those leads, but they don’t know how to run it. So that’s been a good space for us. But we’re kind of going to non SAS industries companies that you know are looking for that outsource team to kind of take that recent client with like cryptocurrency that we got into. So just a little bit more unorthodox industries, but ones that could really use a sales motion and honestly appreciate my knowledge because it’s so foreign to them, even to this day. They don’t know about the video. They don’t know voice memos. They don’t know these innovative methods.

They don’t even know the tech stack. They get so overwhelmed with opening LinkedIn because they’re not tapped in. So hey, there’s five data providers. Tom, who in the heck is the right one? Like, I hear it every day, but like, how do I read through that? Yeah. So that’s where my expertise comes in. And so yeah, that’s kind of where we’re at now. we’re doing the accelerator program, custom playbooks. We do team coaching workshops. So if you just want to hire for, hey, come teach our team a little bit about cold calling or social selling or cold email. And then now, the outsourced, appointment setting services, trying to become a full house, outbound agency for these orgs that, you know, if you come to me, doesn’t really matter what you got going on in your outbound motion. There’s something we can do for you and help you. But as you know, when you’re going to market, you’ve got to be super clear on, like, who you’re working for and with and like a very niche versus a huge wide net.

But realistically, anybody comes inbound, we pretty much can work with them. But as far as our outbound targeting, we are fully in pre-series to series B digital marketing agency. And that’s kind of been our bread and butter for about four months now and kind of just targeting them.

Yeah. Very cool. I mean definitely excited to see how you grow as the lab from just yourself to offering different services and building a team. So a couple of questions that come to my mind as you’re sharing your story. One is how did you get your initial set of clients? And then I’ll ask the follow up later.

So that all came initially from my brand and referrals, to be dead honest with you, took a little while to get the outbound motion going. I was unknown to a large world of businesses, but on LinkedIn, I’ve been building there since, you know, July of 2020. When I got into Rev Genius, I didn’t have anything on LinkedIn before, then started getting in. Now I’m a top voice, 25,000 folks and so after almost two years from 2020 to 2022, before I launched, I had built up almost 20,000 people.

I was well known. So when I went all live and got to leverage LinkedIn, all my friends started helping me and finding me business or opening conversations for me. and that really, really was where I started. My outbound motion didn’t actually start working until almost month four. To be dead honest, it took probably 90 days to really let a campaign actually run. Let people be aware of what I could bring to the table. And then two, I just had to get some actual clients. I had some side hustle stuff going, but it was never under my brand of this company. Right. So I had to start getting a couple clients in, start to see how they were, seeing results, getting some testimonials, and then probably around month six and eight started really being able to now book stuff cold and outbound. But to this day, you know, for 19, 20 months now it’s been referrals. People that know me from either my client that worked with me opening up new deals, or my peers in my market being like, hey, I trust this guy, I genuinely do.

He’s doing appointment setting and consulting like, you need help, talk to him. So a lot of it comes through that.

Very cool. And yeah, I think you answered my follow up question, which is how has that GTM evolved? It sounds like it’s still your presence on LinkedIn plus referrals and inbound mostly.

That’s really it. My outbound motion isn’t really that solid. I’m not trying to do math outreach. I’m not spamming. Right. I’m taking on very few clients a quarter. you know, and doing what we can. And so it works. But I use my outbound to generate my inbound more. So I’m not pitch slapping in emails. I’m not trying to just throw out all these crazy 5000 emails a day. It’s more just to build awareness because, again, I’m brand new to a market even two years later, like there’s a lot of reputable outbound agencies. There are bigger organizations, ones. So I spend my time outbound to educate, give a lot of free stuff.

I create guides, resources, all kinds of things to where as I message you, whether you work with me or not, I am taking up. You know I am taking up space in your inbox or on your phone. You’re walking away with insights that you can implement for no cost at all. Write a guide, you know. Hey, I’ve been talking to other sales leaders. This tip’s been working for them. I’d love for you to try it on your team and let me know how it goes. That’s the type of email I’m just dropping free stuff to these people and then through my referrals. And then from that activity, I get people to hit my website, book a call, they’re coming in and they’re like, hey, got your email. Thanks. Yeah, we could probably talk about this. And then they’re coming through the website and booking. So my outbound kind of turns into my inbound which is what you want.

Yeah. Outbound more for education awareness and giving value that turns into inbound automatically.

Very cool. 

So yeah, great stuff. I think you emphasized and reinforced some of the key aspects of go to market in your own go to market, which is it’s not outbound and cold calling and setting up appointments. It’s more outbound to give value education. And then that turns into inbound. I think that’s critical in terms of demand generation and growing your brand and awareness out there and the credibility as well.

I tell a lot of founders, a lot of organizations, you know, activate your brand. You know, LinkedIn is a great resource. Now, mind you, for the listeners and stuff. Not every market lives there. I’ve worked with clients to move over to Twitter. Instead they’re going after cybersecurity engineers. Way different space. Maybe Facebook has a better play for you depending on who you’re working with. So the point being, create content. Get out. The thing about going to market nowadays, I started in 2007. This stuff really didn’t exist and a lot of it was 1 to 1, right? Emails, cold calling, just going out and just randomly calling people up and maybe seeing if they had a need.

Where now with social media being as wide as it is and so many platforms, you can get out to the masses with just one piece of content, and if it hits just right with the right content, you get a couple DMs and you turn them into a couple meetings and you now you’re just booking meetings by creating really valuable pieces of content that engage conversation versus having to pave the pavement as hard and going to 1 to 1, or adding a parallel dialer in so you can pick up a little bit of value. Covid really destroyed a lot of stuff, right? Email is so saturated it’s pretty bad. Then you’ve got cold calling where most buyers nowadays are 30 or younger, most sales leaders are at 30 or 35, and they’re not. They’re a little bit different now. They do DMs and social comments, and they’re not really picking up the phone, and they don’t want to pick up on no numbers. You’ve got Google and Yahoo strapping on spam filters, and now on your phone it’ll tell you if it’s spam.

So it’s just easier to create a brand for yourself. Really educate your space. Let people see who you are at a wide scale. I’ve done business with people in India, Australia, New York all over the world, and yet I live in my room right here in these four walls in Arizona. Right? You don’t, you never got to do that stuff. Right. so it’s just different.

Yeah. So do you have an example of a content that really worked? I mean, I completely agree with you. I just want to get more tactical into giving more value to my listeners of the podcast. So any example of content that comes to your mind?

One that definitely comes to my mind, that I’ve repurposed a few times is one that went super viral for me was what they call a carousel. So like on LinkedIn or Instagram, you know, it’s like slides and you kind of can put this complex idea together through a visual. And what I had shared was how I booked 12 meetings in a week.

And that was my hook. Here’s how I booked 12 meetings in one week. And then this whole carousel with breaking down just those common practices, my tonality and my phone call. I gave a script on what I was using, what was my email like, what was basically the process. And that thing got over 35,000 views and generated me like seven more meetings from people being like, hey, we could use you, you know, come talk to the team or hey, really like that. They got to save the carousel even and reference it moving forward. So it’s stuff like that to where this was just a great way to show them, hey, here’s how I did this, and here’s the full process. Take a look at it. And it was done. You know one too many got in front of 35,000 people. and it was very, very cool. Right. And it did. Well, carousels were really cool because you could take an idea. They’re the best things you can do online, like infographics, handouts, guides, things that people can save and reference.

Because that’s how they’ll take them. You know, for me, I want to bring my content to their team and find wins. So a lot of times I’d get DMs a week later and be like, hey dude, you were in our Monday meeting, some of my teams followed you, or implemented what you said on your cold call script, and they booked five meetings today as a team. That was incredible. Do you think we could talk further about this? Because there might be something we could do together. Now I’ve got a meeting. So that was the kind of stuff that really worked for me. Another one was a carousel in the SDR playbook. A lot of times that’s a broken process, right? So I guess what I’m getting at is highlighting a pain or problem that is really in your space of buyers and giving them that information that you probably repeat to every client you’re ever on the phone with. Like the real simple stuff. It doesn’t have to be high level, but it’s stuff that you’ve repeated on every call.

It’s a commonality. Everybody always calls me and says, Tom, what’s your best opener when you cold call? You’ve made so many. What have you found to be the best one? Well, now, after hearing that ten times, I flipped that into a piece of content. Hey, I hear all the time. What’s the greatest opener to work for you? Here’s three that I rotate. Let me know how it goes for you. And then I break those down on why they work and what it’s structured like. An example. That post will go viral for me. And then, you know, a couple of days I’m getting a couple DMs from either the reps telling me they used it and it worked, or a manager saying, hey, I brought that up in my team meeting team. Put up a couple of points with that. and it changed for them. One of my best ones was, I tell people all the time, like my opener, instead of saying, how are you? You could say, how have you been? So it’s a little bit more different in tonality.

It’s just like, hey, how have you been? How are things? And it makes it sound friendly or that you’ve spoken before? and that when I get DMs all the time like, man, I changed my, my opener to that and people actually talk to me, they’re like, hey, I’m actually okay, what’s going on? And then you pivot into, you know, hey, the reason for my call is, you know, I saw this. I saw that this is what led me to you, you know, where are you at with that? So stuff like that. That’s the stuff that has done well for me, is when I, like, can break down an actual process or something that’s saleable or something they can take to their team meeting. That doesn’t break my bank. What do I care about openers? That’s not going to affect my bottom line. That doesn’t do anything. Like if I put that content out there, it’s not going to hurt. It’s not like I’m giving out my secret sauce.

Right. but it builds trust and credibility because they’ll find wins in that. So I always tell people, give people stuff that they can make micro wins with. That’s how you get instant trust and credibility if you told me to go do something, if I go buy a TV right now and I’m not really looking, but I’m like, hey, I’m trying to do this with my TV. And this rep tells me, hey, you know your current TV, if you actually go in the back and do this, it probably does the same thing. why don’t you try that and then let me know I go home, I try that, I’m like, Holy crap, you change the whole quality of my TV right now. I’m going to go back to you when I need to get a TV, because you showed me your credible and I can trust you. And you gave me something that actually helped me without looking for anything out of it. You were just being a good rep and you’re like, hey man, timing may be off to get a new TV, but based on what you explained, here’s like three things you could do with your current TV that might buy you some time and Band-Aid until maybe that pain threshold gets, you know, the TV goes just, you know, breaks or, you know, the pain threshold of it isn’t there anymore.

Or it’s high. Then they trust you.

Yeah. And I think you just get a complete playbook or tactical playbook of how to build good LinkedIn content. So switching gears here, as you and I know, Tom. I mean, go to the market is a mix of success and failures. So from your worst experience, either from your time at the lab or with your clients, if you can share a success story and a failure story, that’ll be good. I’ll leave it up to you with which one you would go first.

Let’s go with failure because people always try to shy from that, right? I’ve, I’ve been doing this for, you know, 19 months. I’ve been in sales for 15 years, and they’re still failures. I even told you the stat without an appointment setting is 92% technically fail or have an unsuccessful relationship with the appointment setting. So in Q4, that happened to us recently. In Q4, we took on two clients, and we didn’t make it work. and it just didn’t really.

And after three months of working with us, we couldn’t actually generate any meetings for them. they actually rolled viewers. Now, that wasn’t a lack of effort. That wasn’t a lack of the numbers. And us, you know, doing everything we needed to do. But it was market fit. It was messaging. Sometimes, as much as I want to be there for the company and support them, they don’t even know their own stuff. There was one client in Q4 where every week he actually got frustrated at me because I had to push him and really dig in because he’s like, well, we’re going after, you know, high growth companies. I’m like, okay, cool. What does that mean? I don’t know, just companies that are looking for high growth and like, maybe they can. I’m like, no, but like, what is a high growth company? Like what are you looking for? And I had to push it to get frustrated. Then on messaging he couldn’t even relay or package up like what he was trying to position or kind of where I was in the first 90 days of my own company where he was just trying to grab it.

He’s like, I don’t know, just anybody that will want to work with me. And I’m like, okay, we’ll go out and call. And my rep was putting in conversations. We were sending recordings and trying to work at it, but it was just there was too many problems under the hood and for what they were paying, you know, all the other stuff I couldn’t, I can’t, I’m not Superman and I can’t come in and save you. Right. This is a partnership, a collaboration. We are going to do everything we can to help you find success, but sometimes you just don’t have product market fit. And that’s in our book. Out of that three months, that was still a win for another client. Same thing. Very technical rev ups, Mops space, super technical. They have tried outsourcing three times and under like two years and it all failed. And so they came to us off a referral with like hey, this is going to be the best option you can get.

And we failed too. And she was like, I don’t understand. And I was like, look, your best option. And out of all of this still proves you need internal outsourcing. This isn’t actually a fit. Not all. Not everybody can outsource and say, hey, go book us meetings. There are some orgs where highly recommend, and your best option is to build an internal team. You need somebody in your org who lives and breathes it, understands it because again, we’re part time, we’re outsourced, we’re fractional, we’re of course we’re learning your product, your market. We’ve got the experience. We’re going to do what we can, but we don’t live and breathe it right. And we have other clients we’re supporting where if you get an internal team, that’s all they’re focused on. And so those were kind of two recent GTM failures that we had where we did try to help them go to market. And it wasn’t a failure per se. Yes, it was based on performance and meetings, but it was actually a win because both of them walked away with a plan of attack.

And now this is now what, in March, April, they’ve now gotten meetings. The one client came back and said, look, you helped me really exercise and go through. I left them with a full playbook of questions and frameworks to help him iron out his business. Similar to what I had to do helped him get clearer. And the other one brought in three stars, built it out with a good onboarding program, and is now actually getting meetings on the books. So it may be a failure per se, but it was, and it still showed them market fit and what kind of actual playbook they would need for go to market. I told you, every market is different. You have to really know your business. And maybe cold calling doesn’t even work in your industry. LinkedIn doesn’t work at 80% of the industry. So do we even need to talk about it? No. Some clients we do. So those are my failures, right. And why they were failures and kind of, you know, where we were at.

And then two on the success side.

Actually, before we go to the success story. Yeah, yeah, two things. And commentary that that sticks out for me is in a simplistic term, you cannot outsource your problem to an outbound agency. As simple as that. The reason, I mean, if I have to re articulate or reshape and share what you shared in terms of your clients failures, the first person didn’t know or they’re still trying to figure out who the IC is, and they’re outsourcing that finding the product market fit problem to your agency. And that’s where again, back to your stats. 92% of the outbound agencies fail. It’s because of that. I mean, first of all, you need to know yours. And then once you build a system, you can outsource that or partner with them. That’s one second too. Point, which is, first of all, figure out an SDR or outbound system internally and then you can scale up with an agency.

And that’s a big piece of it.

Now, some people, obviously I can help you get that structure to I get it. Not everybody has that, and they’re just trying to figure out market fit. I’ve had clients where they don’t. They’ve never even tested it. And they’re like, Tom, we’re not looking for meetings per se out of this success for us in the next three months. Is it just that we actually have something here? Like, is there a market for this is, you know, we just want to learn from the people you talk to because we want to see if before we double down on bringing an internal SDR, building out all this stuff, we just want to know if we have something first. So that was one of my clients for three months. There was really no expectation on meetings. It was just have conversations, go see what the market says, tell us what they’re looking for out of this product. And that was a huge win for them, right. Because then two months later they did realize, hey, there’s a market here.

This is good. Now they’re putting all their resources and doubling that out and scaling that. Right. So it’s a lot of times that too is yes. Sometimes you don’t even know if you have a market. We can help you. That’s why outsourcing is good because it’s less costly and less commitment. And if it doesn’t work, no harm, no foul. You kind of save yourself a lot of money, a lot of strength, a lot of tech that you might not even need because, okay, we could go buy all this tech, try this. But in three months, if it doesn’t work, we’re out 40, 50 grand that we could have put into other things right before we got here. Or now we got this tech and contracts that like, hey, this didn’t work, give it to us. We have tech. We have everything very low overhead for you. So we’ll go test it. And if it’s actually producing, cool. Now let’s pivot and start helping you build your internal operation.

Show you the tech we’re using that’s making this all possible. And now you have an actual plan moving forward.

Fantastic. All right. So switching to the go to market success stories that you’re going to share.

Yes. So then on the ones that did work, we had an opportunity, that I worked with a client that was a recurring client, for five months, last summer. And it was an organization where the bar manager was let go. things were kind of broken. They had seven servers, they had solution engineers, and they had eight inches. So this was like a company already in motion, making good money, doing great things. But this PDR manager was doing some stuff they had to Canham. They then, brought over their sales enablement person to come over top of that, didn’t know what they were doing. Sales enablement is very different from running an SDR team. Yes, enablement. But like they’re looking at it from a different view as a whole, as a company then, hey, how do I just work with SDRs? So again, another referral friend came in.

He was an aide at the company. He was like, hey, this is where we’re at. I’m going to set you up with this person. We ended up getting a deal. And so I came in and for three months it started off as and this was more a consulting deal, and I helped them redefine their SDR handoff. We did team coaching on cold calling email, social selling. We then went and partnered with marketing. I helped them roll out an ABM program, helping them align their sales and marketing department with a content calendar. All these things to get sales and marketing to actually be cohesive. My next thing you know, they had an actual, reputable and scalable process. Things turned around. Then in month four, they had me come back for messaging to just craft some cadences and some sequences for them. Then in month five, I actually got to work with their UK extension of their team. So then I got a referral from the US house and they’re like, hey, our UK side would like to do the same thing.

So then I went and did the same stuff on their UK team that was also their SDR department, but on that side. So that was one that was super successful. We had a great time. I was able to get under the hood, help them unify a lot of growing pains. You already had stars doing their thing. You already had A’s doing their thing. It just wasn’t unified. And they were looking to scale and bring in, you know, another seven reps. And before they did that and kind of, you know, maybe lose four of them, maybe lose half of that because it’s just the processes and stuff. We ironed everything out, tested it with their team. Everything worked out more numbers, more open rates, more replies. They then were able to scale. So that’s one. On the appointment setting side, we had an automotive org in Q4, that already reputable business in the automotive space. They had a new product that they wanted to test, so they built a new product based on feedback.

They wanted us to go out for three months and just pitch it to the market and see what the response was. So they gave us a very dedicated list. They said, here’s the 500 people. We want to work. Here’s the messaging. Just go see if these people will buy. We booked 45 meetings and 90 days for them to where we overwhelmed their pipeline. We paused in Q1 and they were able to work out those deals. They got tested that their market was good. They found out the product was fit. They did make a few tweaks based on what we were hearing on why people wanted to use this kind of platform for E-signatures, it was like a DocuSign kind of setup, but for automotive. And it worked out. So 45 meetings. That was another referral, actually. a friend from an older company back in the day, which was even cooler. Yeah. I worked with them. She was like, look, I trust you. We’re looking for this outbound. All.

You were doing it. Can you help us? so I took that on. and that was a success. That one worked out just because ultimately they did the heavy lifting, like you mentioned before, they knew their ICP. They already had tested stuff. They gave us the dedicated list of who we needed to call, already vetted. And they basically gave us a script on how they wanted this presented, what some objections were that we were probably going to hear where they were going and building the product with a couple of roadmap features, so it was really transactional for us. It was just a real setup. Get in, send some emails, do some cold calls. And we were able to generate about 45 meetings in 90 days, just being fractional for them. And now they’re running smoothly. That product is now reached out. They generated almost 400 400 K in Q1 from those opportunities. So things were good. and they might come back. But right now it was really just a test for them on that product.

And things are good.

Very cool. Yeah. Thanks for sharing both that go to market success story and failure stories. I think, quite a few lessons, reflections and learnings from that in terms of build your system and then outsource. Was outsourcing a problem? I think that’s very clear. And second is, I think going back to the good market success story, which you shared, just kind of like an e-signature for the auto industry, where they had the initial success and they required your company team services around setting up meetings to build pipeline. Again, once you have the ICP, once you have the messaging, the value prop, and here’s the contact list or accounts that you need to go after, just outsource that. That’s when they can see the success. Very cool. so another area of expertise which you mentioned. And we didn’t deep dive yet a whole lot. And I would like to get your thoughts on this. Tom is founder led sales. You did mention that. So what have you seen? I mean, where do founders really fumble when it comes to founder-led sales and advice on how to avoid it?

My best analogy.

So what I’ve found with founders is one, they love their baby very, very much. You don’t want to call it ugly. They really pride themselves on. Hey, I know what my market wants. I’ve been building. We’ve gotten some sales in, but the way I always reference it, and I even wrote a post on this because again, it’s one of those things I kind of go back to many times and share the story is it’s like a person who was a really good cook at home or, you know, really loved to cook and and connect with people via food. Okay. Well, now they want to open a restaurant because they’re like, my food is so great. People come to me, they want my food. They open a restaurant in 6 to 8 months. That thing fails like no other because at the end of the day, they’re really good at putting together food and that’s their baby. That’s what they love to do. But they don’t know a lick about business on that back end.

They don’t know how to run books, accounting, staffing, hiring, all these other elements. They just know how to make really good food that really connects with the people they give it to a mom being a baker and making goods for the moms around the neighborhood, right? Next thing you know, she’s opening a business. All that stuff is crazy, and you’ve got to have some knowledge or you make a lot of mistakes. So a founder led sales, that’s it. They don’t have a formal process. They built their product, they went out and they’re doing it the best that they can to keep their head above water. They’re looking at VC money to maybe give them some capital because they’re not getting, you know, the product in their hands. And then when it comes to, let’s say you being founder led, you’ve generated a couple, six figures in revenue. Now you want to bring in somebody. Well, now you’re hiring a player coach and you’re expecting them to build your business for you.

Well, you’re the expert, you know, like we don’t know. And now you’re holding this person’s hand because every day they’re like, hey, this customer said this. What should I say? Hey, where do I find this? Hey, what do I do here? And now the founder is getting frustrated because the whole point of bringing this person in was to relieve you. And it’s actually more of a headache because they’re asking tons of questions and they’re trying to get up here into your brain where all that stuff is that you’ve never put on paper or formulated or created a process around. So when I come in with these orgs, that’s really the pain is that they’ve already failed with the player coach or the player coach left them because they were getting paid peanuts and there was no process, no tech. And the founder was like, well, it worked for me. You know, I was doing this and I was great. So a lot of times that’s where it’s at, if they’re really good chefs.

They know their product, they’re engineers. A lot of times they build really cool products or they’re offering a service, but they don’t get a clue about ironing out an ICP, ironing out a marketing plan and strategy of like, what are you going to do there? Do you have resources you’re sharing? Which is okay because for most founders, just move, don’t be held up on a lot of stuff, right? A lot of times it’s just move, take action. You’ll make bumps and bruises. But after that first year, year and a half, you got to have a lot of that stuff ironed out by then, right? You really do. You should be taking the time to put in processes, build on notion, an entire knowledge hub, you know, do stuff to set yourself up to where when you bring in those next people, they can just catch right up to where you are and take off. Otherwise you’re in a whole problem. No onboarding. You don’t got tech, you don’t have a process, and they don’t know case studies.

The Org I worked with was running out of Excel for 16 months when I came in, that was their CRM, color coded files and sheets. And oh, we’re here with this person. And the SDR would double book things and the founder would get mad and be like, man, I already talked to that person. And it’s like, well, how am I supposed to know that? So guess what I did? I recalled and built them an entire HubSpot CRM within under like three weeks. And they were like, Holy crap. And the founder hit me up and was like, this is amazing. I can just go in there and like, I know where we’re at and all of this. And I said, yes, now you have visibility. Everybody’s on a page. They had dashboards to show the amount of activity. I’m like, gosh, I don’t know how you made it a year and a half on Just Excel. But that ain’t it. Don’t do that. so it’s stuff like that where they just don’t know that back end stuff and just kind of how to set their org up.

And that’s what I find at founder led sales is they want to transition, but they just hope somebody will come in and save them. they now know that they’ve got market fit. They know they’ve got a couple clients in. Things are going well, obviously time to scale and double up, but they just have no idea how to do that successfully.

Very cool. Again, I keep hearing this over and over from you, Tom, which is building systems. And you did mention the notion. So as the founder is seeing what’s working and what’s not, the ICP, the messaging, the pricing and all of the and even case studies put it out there. So it’s easier when someone comes on, it’s easier to onboard them and they can run with it and build from there up versus starting from scratch and picking your head and both of them getting frustrated and end.

That’s it. Yeah. And that’s where I hope. With the learning curve, you know, is like, look, you can go through this for the next two years and potentially bankrupt your company, piss off your VC, all this stuff, or lose people.

I had another buddy who did that, and he went through four phases in under eight months, and it was because there was no process and it was just, hey, let them solve the problem for us. And then you’re also paying a lot more money for that, because then you get in this pickle of, okay, now I’m going to hire Tom. Do I spend more and get somebody experienced and seasoned, or do I spend less and get, you know, somebody who may not know what the heck they’re doing? And I got to hold their hand, and then it’s in that pickle that they have a problem with, too, because it’s like, why do I have 100 K to give somebody and hope that they can build this out for me, but I also can afford 50 K, but then I know they’re not going to be like that. Great. They’re not. I still have a lot to do. So it’s always those kinds of pickles too, to try to help them navigate.

Fantastic. I know we’re coming up again at the end of the hour. A lot of good nuggets and a lot of good insights here, Tom. So the parting question for you is what advice would you give to your younger self if you have to roll back the clock to day one of your go to market journey?

A good one. In my beginning days as somebody going to market working in sales, I was really attached to the outcome. I was very fast paced. I talked a lot, I rambled, I would get very defensive in objection handling, my messaging wasn’t great. Now, looking back, I wish I could have. I could go back to him, you know, 15 years ago and share what I know now, which is, number one, detached from the outcome. Man, you’re not going to win. You’re not that great to where you can have a 100% success rate with every phone call or every email. Focus on other things that matter more.

Learning from those insights, just having a conversation, whether it goes to a meeting or not, taking advantage that you have somebody to talk to. Learn from them so that you can be better for the next call. Or go make a product or a guide or something that will help the next person. So just being insightful on, you know, letting go of that stuff like, yes, we’re going towards that and that’s what we’re working for. But it’s not all there’s other ways to win in the sales process. 

That is not just your identity of, well, how many meetings did you book and how much revenue have you driven? That’s not the only answer. so detached from the outcome was a big one for me. Pausing, slowing down. when you are talking to folks, in your messaging and when you’re going to market, don’t be all about your value prop and what they call pitch slapping and writing these really lengthy novel emails. I wish I could go back to myself and say, hey man, like write emails that focus on them and that are conversational and showing them how you can help you know that you understand their world and really seek to understand and then be understood.

A lot of times I made a lot of assumptions when going to market. I’d be like, oh, you got this broken and this and that, and they’d be like, where are you getting your information from? That is not correct. And I would get so frustrated and be like, oh, cool, just hang up because I’m already mad. where now it’s like, you know, seek to understand, ask questions, bring a natural curiosity and your go to market, because that will help you in the long run. And, you know, just focusing on your prospects and what gets them to want to buy, what are their pains and challenges, understand their world. Those are things I wish I could go back to my younger self and understand that, and then niching down and being very clear on your offer and what you want to help people with. Yes. Can you help everybody? Yes. Do you just want revenue? Yes. But at the end of the day, really, really make it clear.

Who are you working for, why and what can you do for them that will help you in the long run when going to market, especially in the early days of going to market, really, really iron out and put yourself through the exercise of who do you want to help? What inspires you every day? Who do you want to be working with and really drill down on just that one thing? That way your go to market strategy is super clear. Otherwise, if you’re all over the place, that’s just too hard. Like, how do you even create content for that? Or marketing collateral when you’re just everywhere? And oh, I can help everyone. You can’t help everyone. What are you trying to help? Really think about that. For me, it’s founders, number one. I really want to help founders that are trying to transition into becoming an enterprise company, a big deal company down the road. But they need help. That’s who I really, really, really want to work with.

And a market that I really want to work with is digital marketing, because it’s something I’ve done my whole career. I know SEO websites and honestly, they’re the ones that need my help the most. Are there other organizations and everybody else? Sure, those will come inbound and I will still take them and I will still do good work for them. But ultimately, the one that I really want to work with every day and help are these folks, because I’m going to win big there, and I’m going to show them how they can transition into that sales motion. So that’s another one. And then lastly, say no a lot more often. Be comfortable with that. I think when you go to go to market, you try to take everybody, you’re like, oh, cool, you want to pay me? Great. And you know dang well you shouldn’t take that client or you probably shouldn’t do that project. And there’s some times where it’s okay because it might push you and, you know, hey, believe in yourself.

You’re probably doing it. I took a couple projects that I really probably shouldn’t have. And then I killed it. Right. And I did well. And I was like, whoa. Like, I really didn’t think this was going to be good. And here we are. So just being comfortable with saying no, though, and really saying, look, it’s okay to disqualify people when going to market. if it’s not fit, it’s not fit. Let them know that you will replace it with somebody who’s better on your books that you do feel passionate about, that you do want to help. Don’t just say yes just to collect some money and, you know, do what you need to do.

In this episode, Div Manickam, product marketing leader, product marketing coach, and author defines GTM as a three-letter acronym focused on achieving alignment across stakeholders and teams within a company, particularly when launching new products or entering new markets.

Let’s step into the world of product marketing and discover the keys to thriving in today’s competitive landscape.

Listen to the podcast here:

Experiment and learn from failures, rather than seeing everything as either a total win or a total loss.

In this episode, Jessica Gilmartin, CRO of Calendly, shares her perspective on defining go-to-market and the importance of coordinating customer-facing teams like marketing, sales, and customer support. Join us to explore the challenges of serving diverse audiences and keeping employees focused on the customer through initiatives like a brand manifesto.

Listen to the podcast here:

Being Customer Obsessed: Insights from Jessica Gilmartin, Calendly’s CRO 

Let’s just get right in, which is how do you view and define go to market? 

So I really think of it as the coordination of the strategy and execution between all the customer-facing teams. So when I think of customer-facing teams, I typically think of customer support, sales, and marketing.

Understood, and where does the product come into play over there?

So obviously, the product is really important and plays a very different role, whether you’re a PLG company or an SLG company, I’ve worked in both. But really, I see the role of marketing as the liaison and a link between our customer-facing teams, our customers, and our product team. So very important, square rectangle, triangle, however, you think about it, but the product really is the definer of where we’re going. And sales and marketing are the ones who bring it to life for our customers.

Yeah, for sure. And in fact, I love this. This is the exact reason why I started this podcast because there are so many perspectives on how people view and define think of go to market, there has been one variation. And this I think, really captures the essence of the go-to-market for me, which is it always starts with “who are you solving for”? And “what is the problem that you’re solving”, and “how are the product and the solutions”? And then you have all the go-to-market aspects, which is exactly what he talked about, which is you got the marketing, you got the sales, you got the customer success support. And then of course product, and bringing all of these teams and functions together again, going back to the problem and for who you’re solving.

Yeah, and I would say that the function that is most left out is typically customer support. What I have found so interesting in my career is how much people think about, you know, the initial signing customers up and getting their revenue, and how little we think about supporting our customers once they are customers. And I think that that’s such a big mistake. And it’s something that I really spent a lot of time thinking about. So now when I think about go to market, I think that the relationship between sales, marketing, and support is incredibly important. And something that I just think a lot of people are alike.

Yeah, absolutely. You’re spot on on that. Right? I wish more people thought about customer support and leaned on customer support, even in turn in terms of thinking about the cold market. So as an example, if I like a product market or building content and campaigns in marketing, I would absolutely lean on the customer support team or even the customer success team in identifying and sourcing, like how are the customers? How are the customers changing because of a product? Better is it bad? Why not write and tell the stories to bring and build that brand about your company?

Yeah, nobody knows your customer is better than your support team and your customer support managers like nobody. And so if you’re not taking advantage of that, then I think you’re missing out on a lot of that richness.

Yeah, fantastic. So you did mention, actually, even before I get into the details of that, so why don’t you share with us your career journey and story and what you do at Calendly today?

Yes, so I have a super weird journey. If you’ve ever seen my LinkedIn, it does not look like most other CMOs or CROs pass. So I started my career in investment banking, I did that for quite a few years and then realized that I wanted a career change. I just didn’t know what it was. So I went to business school, which was a great opportunity for me to reset and took my first marketing class and fell in love with marketing there and ended up getting a job at Dell as a brand manager. And my husband, I always kind of talked about moving out west. And we moved out here and said to start my own business and started the chain of yogurt stores, which turned out to be very, very successful and sold those and somehow ended up stumbling my way into tech marketing. So that could be a whole other podcast about that whole process. But a lot that was that was the short version. 

No, for sure. I don’t know why I didn’t. By the way. I noticed that you did your undergrad at Cornell University. And I got my MBA from the Johnson School. Oh, nice. So we have a common connection there. 

Yeah!

Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. So yeah, let’s dive into several of those aspects that you didn’t mention you started off your career in investment banking and back to business called Wharton. And then more and more into the brand and the marketing side of the world. So what really attracted you, and what aspects of marketing and border market did you gravitate towards?

So when I first took my first marketing class, what I realized was how important both the creative side and the data side were. And, and I knew I already obviously had all the data, you know, my background in banking, I had a lot of financial background, a lot of financial knowledge and interests. But it was when I started taking marketing classes that and realized how much of it was an art, as well as a science. And I realized, gosh, this is such a great way for me to bring together both parts of my brain, and really think about the beauty of marketing and storytelling and customer engagement, but also grounded in data. And so I think that that’s something that I’ve always taken with me through my whole career is really focusing on the art of storytelling, the data creative, but also the data. And I think that really, any successful CMO kind of has to have both and be interested in both. 

Yeah, yeah, I see that your first role after your MBA was being a brand manager at Dell. So that’s the creator and the storytelling side. And somehow something got into you and your husband so you decide to start a yogurt store chain. So what is why I mean, why didn’t go down that path?

To be very clear, my husband did not start with me. It was emotional support. But that was about it. So when I moved to the Bay Area, I reached out to a good friend of mine from business school, and she was interested in starting in business, she had been looking at business ideas and asked if I would be interested in starting a business with her. And so we thought, Gosh, this sounds really cool. I was young in my 20s. I thought, why not? And then we just started batting around a bunch of different ideas. And I think, for me, what was the most important was finding something that I was really passionate about. And then again, going back to the creative and the data, which is, what do we love to do? 

But then also, where do we think that there’s a big market opportunity? And one thing that we kept thinking about was that there are, you know, a lot of unhealthy choices for food, you know, so if you want to give yourself a treat, get ice cream, and cookies and cupcakes, but very few healthy options. And we thought there’s got to be a market for health-conscious women who want to bring their kids who want to bring their friends who want to treat after a hard workout. And that just didn’t exist. And so we kind of kept batting ideas around and we ended up coming up with the city of yogurt. And then the more that we thought about it, the more that we felt like we had a really unique opportunity to build something that was something that we personally believed in, but also felt like it was a big opportunity.

Yeah, I mean, sure, and just share a personal story and experience from my own thing, which is having been at business school, yes. I’m thankful for all the courses the professors and the guest lectures and the speakers who share their experiences. And I so wish I could apply a lot of those things. So as an employee, myself at different companies, I got to think about and be responsible for applying maybe half or even less, yes, marketing, sure sales, kind of, sort of, though, because I need to interact with them. And there is a financial aspect. But it was truly only when I decided to go down my own path. That’s when it really kicked in, in terms of the sales. I mean, there are different aspects of sales even before that there’s a psychological aspect, which is, why does a human being any person care about it? Why should they care about you in the first place, even if it means giving you one second of their airtime? 

Yeah. 

And for me, when I got in, when I started going down that path, that’s when it really hit me all those fundamentals of a little part of what we learned at the school, but a lot more from life lessons outside. 

Yeah, I have a lot of conversations with people who are interested in going to business school, and they asked me if it’s worth it. And my my perspective, you know, obviously just mine is that I think it’s incredibly valuable. If you don’t know what you want to do if you’re switching careers. And it’s an incredible opportunity to meet a lot of super smart people understand their career paths, and get exposed to, you know, amazing guest speakers and professors and, and, you know, different subjects and sort of learn what you love to do. If you know, if you’re like a tech marketer and you want to stay in tech marketing, you’re probably not gonna learn very much, you’re better off just staying in your job and sort of advancing that way. 

Yeah. Imagine not just the time that you spend like one to two years, but even the opportunity cost and the tuition. Even those one to two years if you decide to go down the path of starting something on your own. That’s an invaluable experience and lessons learned from that itself, if done.

It’s not cheap. 

It’s not cheap. Yes. Yes. Fantastic. So yeah, we got stuck at the yogurt shop and yogurt business. So going forward. So after that, you joined Google. 

So some Yeah, so So basically, I was at a startup. So I joined us as the first marketer at a wonderful social media startup. And we just hit the definitely right place at the right time. And we ended up getting bought by Google. So I was there for a few years. And that was a really amazing experience, I learned a ton, and I think, what I learned a lot was that I really am very passionate about building businesses. And so as much as Google has a great culture and a great company, I’m fundamentally an entrepreneur at heart. And so that kind of really solidified to me how much I enjoy working at smaller companies, and just having an impact, you know, sort of a broader impact on on a company. And so that was very helpful for me. And so I’ve kind of been at various stages of startups ever since that opportunity.

Fantastic. And then you grow. Then you shifted more into this C-Suite and senior roles after that, which are Chief Operating Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, GM, CMO, and then CMO now CRO at Calendly. Yes. Very cool. Yeah. So tell us about what you do at Calendly, who do you serve at Calendly? And the role of AI in all things?

Yes. So if you’re not familiar with count, I think most people are but it’s it’s basically the world’s largest scheduling automation platform. So we really help people create better meetings and more effective meetings. And it’s, it’s incredibly rewarding to be accountable. Because everybody loves it, everybody uses it, it’s so fun. No matter where I am, I could be literally under this totally happened, I was in a with a guy who was coming down the mountain after skiing. And I said I was, you know, CMO account leader, oh, my God, let me tell you all about how I use Calendly and how critical it is in my workflows. And so it feels really good to be to be selling something that people use to, to feed their families. And it’s really important for me to be able to have a job that I believe contributes in a really meaningful and important way. 

So I run, I run all our go-to-market functions on our sales and marketing teams. And we sell to anyone from solopreneurs up through the largest enterprises in the world. And really, the common factor is, you know, anybody that relies on external meetings for their success. So we typically sell to recruiters, entrepreneurs, small business owners, salespeople, marketers, customer support, and financial advisors a really big market for us. And then when we look at industries, it’s typically you know, sort of technology, financial services, professional services. So that’s kind of how we think about and generally, sort of individuals to small teams within those organizations. And, you know, of course, AI is something that we think about a lot, the one thing that we take very seriously is the fact that we have millions and millions of users. And we want to be extremely careful with how we deploy it and make sure that it is valuable. And they show that it really enhances our existing customer’s workflows. You know, I think we all talk a lot about AI. It’s kind of like a requirement these days. And I think what’s interesting, we can only do a status scheduling report. And one thing that we learned was that you know, 94% of our respondents said they were really interested in using AI, and only about a third of them are actually using it. So I think that that delta to me is kind of that hype, that, you know, we’re I think we’re at the mass of the hype cycle. And so anything that we do and anything that we’re working on, we want to make sure that it is really valuable.

Fantastic. So something unique about Calendly is, as you mentioned, right different personas, different segments. It’s a b2c, it’s a b2b. And I don’t know maybe there’s also a partner angle where it’s sort of a reseller angle. So how are you thinking in terms of how you position Calendly, even today versus going forward? And who is the primary message targeted towards? 

So I think, you know, because we have the plg angle, we have the SOG angle, which I’m used to from Asana, you know, it’s something I’m very comfortable with. And I think a lot of companies are going this way, you do have to be really tailored and targeting in your messaging, it’s hard to have one message for everybody. And so you know, if you go to our website, we very explicitly focused on sort of small teams, we focus on that recruiter, salesperson, marketer, customer support persona, but we make it really easy for you, if you’re an enterprise customer, if you’re a financial services customer, we make it really, really easy for you to try to get to that information as quickly as possible. 

So I think the important thing is just trying not to boil the ocean with trying to have every message on your homepage, but getting people as quickly as possible to pages that speak very deeply to them. So if you’re a financial services company, you’re one click away on our website from getting a huge amount of extremely tailored information like case studies, and you know, and talk about your security and integrations with financial services platforms. So I think that that’s a really important part is to be incredibly thoughtful about understanding the customer journey and making sure that you’re just getting people to the right place. So you can have a very specific message for them. You know, obviously, also in our advertising, we try to be really sophisticated and how we segment our customers and make sure that when we are serving ads to them, we’re doing it in a way that feels really relevant, really meaningful to them. But it’s hard. It’s really hard. 

It is. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Maybe, yeah, I was not thinking about this. But then just based on what you shared. Jessica, it is what really attracted to what attracted you towards Calendly, what are the big challenges that you’re thinking about in terms of pushing your team towards?

So the reason I came to Calendly was, it’s always about the people. And I’ve learned after all these years that, you know, the places that I love to work the most are the ones that I enjoy the executive team, I have a good relationship with the CEO. And I feel and I feel like marketing is respected, and has a seat at the table. And that was very clear that that was the case here. So that’s number one. Number two was just I love the product, I’ve always loved the product. And so you know, it’s hard for me to imagine selling a product that I didn’t love and believe in. And so that is really valuable and meaningful for me and I love the product so much. And I know everybody else loves the product. 

And the third thing is just that it’s so interesting for me to be at a company that is in this sort of scaling phase, where we have strong product market fit, we have millions of users, but I feel like there’s so much opportunity and there’s so much more to do. So I love you know, coming into organizations that are still having to solve really hard problems, and we’ve got lots of problems to solve. And because that is really fun for me. And so, you know, some of the problems that we think a lot about are, you know, how do we tell this message? How do we focus? How do we sell to everybody at the same time, but also being really specific? How do we get people to understand how sophisticated Calendly actually is when a lot of people think of us as a scheduling link? And so it’s a really interesting problem to solve where it’s we have incredible brand recognition, but not everybody actually knows all of the things that we do and all the very sophisticated and complicated use cases that we solve for. And so that’s for me, like really fun is thinking about, like, what’s our brand message? And how do we get that out of the market?

Very cool. Yeah, and I’ve heard this, you haven’t heard this, say, or you mentioned this quite a few times and your own conversation, which is being customer obsessed. And maybe if I had to deduce there’s also the data angle, you didn’t mention going back to your earliest job. There’s a data angle. So how do you tie or combine both? And do that at Calendly?

Yeah, so I probably have a broken record around being customer-obsessed, because I just don’t know how you can do great marketing, do great sales do great products without really deeply understanding your customers. And I’ll give you an example of sort of how we did this recently that I’m really proud of. So we recently codified our differentiators from our competition, super important, right? Understanding, how are you different? How do your customers see you I know like a lot of companies would just hire an outside firm and do this whole big research project and come back, and you know, with a lot of like, very big words, and it sounds very sophisticated, but ultimately not necessarily grounded in what our customers are actually saying. 

So we took a very different approach. And we started by interviewing our customers, we interviewed our support teams, we do your salespeople, we have this great service that looks at all, a lot of our closed, lost and closed one opportunity and actually interview live those, those sales, those prospects, and those customers to understand why we won and lost those deals. So we took sort of all of that information, both at our community, we looked at our support tickets. And we looked at online reviews. 

Then we basically organized all that data to come up with the four pillars that really differentiated us from our competition. And then we like ran that by our salespeople, we actually, you know, my team actually got on calls with customers, and, you know, did the pitch to them, they got feedback and whether it resonated or not. And then after all of that, they felt comfortable rolling it out. And I think that that process of using customer language and using what our customers actually say and did, really helped make it really powerful and really specific and meaningful and very effective.

Very cool. You did mention a couple of data sources you didn’t mention about the support tickets, you didn’t mention about the close loss and close one. So how did you tease out the way I’m reading this, Jessica it’s almost like going back to the drawing board figuring out and doing like a positioning and messaging exercise in terms of who is currently and what are the alternatives are out there. Why should anyone care about that? 

Yeah. 

And the brand pillars the value pillars? 

Yes. Yeah. Brand pillars should come from why your customers are buying from you and to me it is so rewarding when we look you know, I still look all the time obviously about why we win deals, why we lose deals, and you see that language being parroted by our customers is so meaningful to me because it means that we’ve got it right. You know, when our customers say, hey, you know, I bought, can we because you had the best security? Or because you had these integrations with Salesforce. And you know, our competitors didn’t. That makes it very clear to me that we have a right. 

Yeah. And so how are you making? Sure, because you did mention you serve different personas, you had got the individual people, the buyers from a big portion, they can be like solopreneurs or freelancers. And then you have the agencies, and then the different personas within an enterprise. So how are you making sure that you’re actually servicing and targeting most of these personas?

Yeah, and I think you obviously can’t get it 100%. Right. I mean, there’s no way. And I think the just making sure that when you’re looking at the breadth of customers when you’re looking at review sites, we’re looking at all this, that you’re really taking a representative sample. So I think, you know, what I have definitely seen mistakes happen is people will only look at enterprises, or they’ll only look at small businesses, I think it’s really important for you to look across the organization, look at all those personas and figure out the commonalities, you’re not going to get it 100%, right. But you should get it to about 80 to 90%. And then of course, if you have certain use cases, or personas or industries that are very different, then that’s totally fine. I mean, it’s fine to have a set of differentiators that are specific to one industry if they are very different than another one. And obviously, even within countries that can be very different. So what you know, what Germans care about is very different than what you know, people in the UK care about is different than what the US cares about. So it’s important to also take that lens and be willing to adjust. But it should be, you know, a 20 to 30% adjustment versus something completely new for every single customer that you serve. Is that if that’s the case, then it means that you’re not you’re not getting it right.

Yeah, I mean, I’m going through a similar exercise myself, I’m working on one and I’m working with a Chief Product Officer of a 100 million plus company that’s launching a brand new product in the auto industry. And then on the other side, I’m working with a co-founder at a pre-seed and angel-funded startup who is looking to come out of stealth. And I’m doing similar exercises just who is reserving Why should anyone care about us? What are the alternatives that are out there without our product or service? And the core pillars, the differentiator’s exercises that came out? And I’d love to get your thoughts on this Jessica is a manifesto. It’s actually a brand manifesto, or it can be a product manifesto. But typically, it’s a brand level. It’s all about what we stand for. Why should someone care? And to even give their time or dollars for that matter? And what can they be confident about our promise to them? Yes, to spend time with us? Right? So so curious to get your thoughts. Do you have? Or do you currently have a manifesto initiative or a project or maybe that’s in the pipeline? 

I wouldn’t say we have a manifesto. But I think we have a lot of different things. So you know, we do brand surveys, I think that, again, it always comes back to what our customers are saying about us. And so in our brand survey every year, we asked, you know, what are words that you would use to describe Calendly. And that’s incredibly helpful for us, because we take that, and that’s the language the customer stories we use. But I love the idea of a brand promise, I think that completely makes sense. And I think the important thing is for everybody within the organization to agree on that and to live that every single day. Because if you know, every person that’s interacting with a customer should understand that and should live that. And, you know, and and express that. 

And I think like, for example, I think of the Four Seasons, that’s gonna be the classic example of a company that has a brand promise, and every single solitary employee lives and breathes that. And that’s always something that I think a lot about, which is how do you make sure that no matter what the situation, everybody comes back to what are your core values, which to me is kind of similar to the brand promise, the core values are internal, the brand promise how you express it externally. 

Yeah, yeah, totally. And that’s exactly I mean, that’s one of the primary reasons why I pushed for working with these folks in terms of why you really need to have a manifesto, because every, it’s very common and very often you have new employees coming and joining onboard and and even the existing employees, they lose sight in their day to day work as to what they’re doing and why they should put in and the customer obsession or customer focus, right, it’s almost reminder because very often again, it’s not intentional, we are so in the weeds in our day to day on a week to week basis. And then it’s it’s really good to step back and just do like a 10-15 minute read of the manifesto that reminds you as to this is what I’m trying to do. This is why I should invest in this initiative, even though there are a lot of challenges of friction. 

Yeah, and the way we do that is just bringing customers in all the time. Yeah. So we are constantly bringing and we’re bringing customers into all hands. And it’s to me, it’s incredibly rewarding. I think it’s rewarding for everybody to understand the tie between their work and then real customer value. And so when an engineer launches the future, and then a customer talks about how important that was to them, that is that to me that that like a manifesto, that’s the moment that people recognize how important their work is. And so it’s constantly reminding them that we are building for real people, and we’re solving real problems. 

So yeah, we touched upon a lot of points over there in terms of customer obsession in terms of talking about the different teams that make up the go-to-market. But curious, I mean, are you in as a CRO at Calendly? How do you actually manage a line? I think that’s the biggest challenge when it comes to go to market. Typically, what I’ve seen from my own experience and others, Jessica is, there’s like a one to two-day workshop we do every quarter, we talk about alignment, we talked about the big goals, but then between the workshops, and between the quarterly, something happens, things don’t fall in place for what really happens. How are you making sure it doesn’t happen currently? 

Yeah, I mean, you just can’t be once a quarter. So we and obviously, I have to say I think every marketer should run sales. Because it has been really game-changing for us, I thought we were really aligned, I thought that we were very sales-centric. But it was only when we were actually ingrained in each other’s day-to-day that we saw so many opportunities for more alignment. So I think it’s just really been game-changing for us. So I’d say the number one thing is just you have to have the teams feel like they’re part of the same team. So you know, the sales operations team, the marketing operations team needs to be meeting constantly, they need to be sharing feedback with each other they need to be I think one of the big things too, is there need to be looking at shared data. Because I think what I’ve seen one of the biggest issues is when sales has a bunch of reports that they’re looking at marketing has reports they’re looking at, and they don’t, they’re not looking at the same data. And oftentimes the data is even more complex. 

And so I think having a shared set of dashboards and a shared set of goals. And then we meet every single week as leadership, team, sales and marketing. And we talked about those shared goals. We talked about the pipeline, we talked about the work that marketing is doing to drive the pipeline, we get feedback right away on, you know, hey, this campaign was great, this campaign didn’t, didn’t work great, you know, you’re sending us a bunch of leads, these are really good leads, these aren’t. And so I think that that’s really important is just the constant alignment and feedback and marketers being open to that feedback and sales, giving feedback in a constructive way. I think just everyone being part of the same leadership channels, the same strategy discussions, so that we can understand that when things move really quickly, everyone is aware of them. And then they can share their opinion right away versus like a month later, when we realize, oh, we made these changes in sales. Do you really understand the ramifications of that?

Yeah. So something that comes to my mind and this is something that I’ve seen as a marketing leader and a growth leader previously in my previous roles, is, to your earlier point, whenever I’m tasked with leading marketing teams, I make sure that the folks in the marketing team are playing or playing the role of a salesperson, either one day a month or once a quarter just sitting there, as calls listening to the calls. So that’s really crucial. That’s one that’s one way to build empathy. The other. And the other piece is a mix of PLG. I mean, you did mention the go-to-market motion. The cycle currently is a mix of PLG and SLG. And in between, maybe it also includes partners. So when you have that weekly meeting, the alignment between marketing and sales, I would presume that it’s mostly around the sales lead aspect or sales assist aspect. But what about the product lead aspect?

Yeah, so we have totally different committees and motions for that. So that is really our growth marketing team and our demand gen team working really closely with our product team. So we have actually our support team. So we have an operating committee and a steering committee really just focused on the first 30 days of a customer’s lifecycle. And so we’ve got really tight alignment between, you know, how do we get those customers to the site to sign up? What do the lifecycle marketing efforts look like? What do the in-app notifications look like? What’s the first sort of product experience? And then when, what does that trial experience look like? And then that post-trial experience, and so I’d say we have tighter alignment than I’ve ever seen here, either here or at another company, because we identified, you know, a couple of leaders within each group, and they meet very, very frequently. And then the executive team, we’ve formed a steering committee. So then this team will come to us with their recommendations, their ideas or blockers. And our job is really to help them move quicker.

Yeah, I think a couple of things, especially when you’re looking at a plg motion. One thing to keep in mind is the time. I mean, there are so many flavors and so many aspects. One is what are the different channels in which you’re on the radar of your target users and how are they signing up? That’s one aspect of it, and once someone has signed up, are they seeing value within the first day or two for them to actually use the product? I think that’s the biggest step right within the first day or two after signing up, if they’re not using your product, it’s as good as you lost them. 

Yes, has to be you have to hit them from all sides. So it can’t just be email, it can’t just be in products. It can’t just be in-app notifications, it’s got to be a combination of all of them. And you also have to have really great support, you have to have opportunities for people to, you know, ask questions at the moment so that they can understand those blockers. And so having that consolidated view between support and marketing and product is incredibly important.

Right. And that’s that exactly goes back to my earlier point, which we started in our conversation, which is the role of product in go to market. Yes, for sure. Yeah. Something else that I want to get your thoughts on is? How do you see the difference in terms of roles, responsibilities, and outcomes between growth and dimension?

So I think it depends on every company, you know, Asana definitely was very different than Calendly. So my perspective is that the demand gen job is to get people to the point of action. So whether that is to sign up, or a lead, and then growth marketing, his job is to take them from action through to revenue. So we’ve got, you know, demand gen team is really focused on all of our top of the funnel advertising, you know, basically everything that we can do to drive awareness to drive people to our site to sign up. And then growth marketing is responsible for our website, conversion, activation, and then all of the emails, the nurture, emails, peak URLs, anything that really supports someone understanding why they should move from signup through to a conversion page conversion, or a paid lead that goes to sales. 

Yeah, and you’re totally spot on, right? I mean, growth and demand take different shapes and perspectives, depending on the leader as well as the organization. So I’ve seen one definition of growth, which goes beyond just the signup and the initial revenue, there’s also okay, how do you think about expansion? How do you convey this to customer success? That, hey, by the way, this account is a quote, unquote, it’s a dirty word, but it’s right for expansion. Yeah. And that is growth. It’s not just from the initial awareness to sign up to initial conversion, but even the adoption and expansion piece.

The adoption experience piece is incredibly important. I think that that’s the one that is often missed by growth marketing teams. But nobody knows how to market to customers better than marketing does. And so when you think about, especially in a plg motion, just because a customer signed up, as you said, doesn’t mean they’re going to use the product. And so marketing can play an incredibly, incredibly important role in creating really strong content, and really thinking about the customer journey after a signup, to enable a customer to understand why they should use this product that they signed up for. And then, you know, what are the features that they’re missing if they didn’t continue to pay? And then also, as you said, over time, great, you love it. So how do we then encourage you to think about the value that you might have if you now have three members of your team 10 members of your Team or 100 members of your team on Calendly? Right? 

And then there’s also product marketing. I’m assuming there is a product marketing function at Calendly. What is their charter and the biggest challenges, if you will?

I think it’s just the same challenges that we all have, which is they are really doing two separate jobs split between the PLG motion and the SLG motion and supporting both, they are totally different. And they support me, it’s basically two different jobs. And so really figuring out how to prioritize that is, is challenging. So you know, they, they really have two fundamental fundamental jobs. The first is that, is helping us launch products, not surprisingly, right? So they do a fantastic job of that. And the year they launched it both within our sales channel, but also within our field G channel. The second is they are really helpful in helping us to understand our customers well enough so that we can build really high-quality materials for them, for onboarding. So one thing that we’ve actually done over the past few months is we’ve looked at all of our onboarding materials and tried to make them much more specific. And so when a customer joins, we try to ask them, you know, but when someone signs up, we try to ask them, Hey, are you a salesperson or we try to, or infer that if they, for example, do a Salesforce connection, we kind of guessed that they’re a salesperson. And then we try to take them on a very bespoke path for salespeople. And so you know, they can now view an on-demand webinar about what it’s like to you was counted as a salesperson versus just an M, it’s different if you’re a recruiter, and it’s different if you’re a financial advisor. And so I think that creating that very customized path is really important. And like growth marketers, that’s not their strength in creating content. They’re extremely good and understand the customer and think about experimentation. But you have to partner with people who deeply understand our customers and our product to be able to create really high-quality onboarding content.

Yeah, that’s a key, right? It’s super hard for someone to be really good at in terms of like growth experiments and hypotheses and how you test it out versus at the same time, can you also create the content. It’s extremely hard for some.

Yeah, I think it’s, it would be unfair to ask the same person to do both. It’s just not the same thing with demand gen, you know, the people that really deeply understand our channels, and deeply understand how to experiment and how to think about reducing cost per sign up, they’re not creative. They’re not, they’re not like amazing at, you know, building beautiful designs and thinking about our ad copy and how to do 50 variations or a copy, you just, it’s just not fair to ask them to do it. And so you really have to have that specialization, and you have to have dedicated resources to really helping the demand gen team, think about let’s create a 100 variations of ads and see what works. 

Yeah. Very cool. So I’m sure in your many, many roles as a hands-on executable player, and as a C-suite leader, you must have seen a lot of go-to-market success stories and go-to-market failure stories. So if you can share one of each, I’ll let you choose which one you want to start with first. 

Sure, maybe I’ll start with the failure story. I don’t actually believe that anything is a failure just because we’re all experimenting so much. I mean, I really encouraged my team and challenged my team to experiment nonstop. And like, of course, not everything that would be successful. So I’d say like, I don’t really think about campaigns that are not successful as failures, I think more about the process, that could be a failure. So one example recently was we launched a really huge campaign, it was everything, I think it touched every single person in marketing. And I think we were like, exercising a lot of muscles that we hadn’t exercised before. And it was during the retrospective that one person got really upset because they felt like they hadn’t been heard. And they felt like the process was really chaotic. And to me, I felt like there were like quite a few failures in that, which is, you know, maybe we didn’t have a culture where people felt comfortable speaking up, and sharing in the moment that they were frustrated. And so I was upset that you know, if somebody is upset, they should be able to speak up, and we should be able to fix it, that should be our culture. The second is that we just hadn’t thought through the process well enough to be able to understand how to get those touch points at the moment. And so like I took from that, that we really have to train our team on how to give feedback, how to give feedback in the moment how to beat the learning culture. So I’d say for me, the failure is never in the outcome, the failures of the process. So does that make sense? 

Yeah, in fact, I can pay any sense that you’re a good leader and a good people person, just based on that story. 

I try. I mean, my job is all about people. My only job is to attract and retain great people and keep them motivated and excited to do great work. That’s what I tell people. So that is my job. And then, oh, go ahead. 

No, I’m just going back to your point. There’s no failure, it’s more of a learning. And how do you take that learning and apply going forward totally aligned on that as well? 

Yeah. And if you don’t give people the room to not succeed, then nobody will ever try anything. I mean, that. And the reason I do marketing is because I love to try new things. And I love to experiment, I love to learn. And I love how marketing is so dynamic. And I’m, I’m hoping that everybody that works on my team feels the same way. And so if you’re not creating an environment where people can feel safe to make mistakes, then you’re never going to be able to progress, which I think would be a big shame. 

Yeah, for sure. And then go to the market success story. Let’s!

So I am actually really, really proud of this one. So, one of our big challenges which which is a great challenge to have is that we have an enormous amount of leads that come into our website, just an unbelievable amount. Because our product is so viral, and everybody knows it. And we have a kind of a very typical lead flow, which is somebody would sign up on their website, we would do some data enrichment, we would eventually get it routed to the right sales team, they would reach out and that will be you know, then maybe a small percentage of those who responded actually booked the meeting. 

And I thought gosh, you know, we’re scheduling company we got to this a little better. And so we worked really really, really, really closely with the sales team. And we’ve iterated probably 30 or 40 times on this. But we really have an amazing process now where we use calumnies on products. So I’m also super. And whenever a, someone comes to the website, and they want to support, or they want to talk to us about, you know, a small team deployment or a large enterprise deployment, we get them immediately to the right person. So they basically come to our website, we do all sorts of data enrichment, but also people’s, you know, sort of fill out forms and right on the website, and plus, they would self select. And either if they want support, or if they’re a very small business, they can chat right away with a support agent and get exactly what they need. If they want a small team deployment, they can set up a meeting right from our website and get to one of our Velocity Sales Team reps. 

And if they’re a large enterprise, they can schedule a meeting right at that moment, and talk to an enterprise rep. And that has been game-changing for us, you know, we’ve seen just absolutely skyrocketing in terms of our lead to opportunity rate. Our salespeople love it, we don’t have you know, lead purgatory where leads just accidentally get routed to the wrong places, though, it sounds very nuts and bolts, but you know, when you think about these precious leads that come to your site, and we’re now able to capitalize on them, and most importantly, we provide a much better customer experience, because customers don’t have to like wait anymore, they can get exactly what they want in the moment. I’m incredibly excited about it. I’ve just been really, you know, really energized by the feedback that we’ve gotten. And I just think it’s just a great a better experience for everybody. 

Yeah, and I can sense why this is really critical, right? I mean, for me, if I’m on the other side, I love but I’m a big user of Calendly in my day to day, it just makes my life so easy and so comfortable. And if I sense that I need to speak with someone in support, or get someone, let’s say, get someone on the other side who’s in sales. And if I don’t hear back, it’s going to be frustrating. So I’m excited that yes, the product is exciting. But there’s also the other elements, the people the processes that have to be really tight, not just a product alone.

Well, also the way that people buy is totally different than it was a few years ago. I mean, people are only buying after they’ve made a ton of decisions on their own. So people have done all of their own research, they’ve usually narrowed it down to a couple of vendors, and then they’re reaching out and they don’t want to wait a week, they want to wait even a couple of days, like they want to talk to someone right at that moment. So if you’re not responsive to them, and you’re not getting back to them, they’re just gonna go with somebody else. And so the way I think about is like every one of those leads is real dollars to calumny its real value. And because usually, those leads have done their research, they’ve educated customers, and I want to take advantage of that as much as I possibly can. 

Yeah, very cool. So in our conversation, I mean, he’s been speaking for about 40-45 minutes or so there’s so many aspects that came that popped out for me about you, I mean, the person Jessica, right? And so I’m curious, like when others reach out to you, or when they are struggling with a challenge in terms of go to market? What are those one or two things that they say, Hey, you know what, this is something that I need to speak with Jessica about?

So I’d say for sure. It’s around just orchestration of very complex workflows, and like, so basically, how do you take? How do you take very, very, very complicated systems and people and data? And how do you sort of make sense of it? I think that that’s something that is very underrated when people talk about being a CMO like everybody thinks about being a CMO, as you sit around and have a bunch of just, it’s like the ad was a madman where you sit around and talk about branding, I don’t get to do that very much. I’ve got lots of people that do that. And I’m very jealous that they get to have really interesting conversations about brands. That’s not what I do, though, you know, so much of what I’m doing is, really, is, is providing the strategic direction for my team. 

So, you know, obviously, I have access to information that my team doesn’t have because I’m talking to the board, I spent a lot of time with the other executives. And so you know, really understanding what’s our product direction, you know, who are we selling? To? What, what, what’s the path forward? What are we what does success look like in a year or two? And so I’ve got to then take all of that information and work backward and say, How can I share that with my team in a way that they can understand and digest it, and then turn those big strategic priorities into ways that they can execute and to very clear goals. And so that’s a really big part of what I do, which is just, you know, create that strategic direction, give them the information that they need to be successful. And the other thing that I think a lot about is talking to my peers, and really thinking about where is the direction going. Where’s marketing going? So how do you know, it changes so much? And so I think that that’s really important is, you know, and when I share with other folks that asked me, you know, how do I think about what a modern marketer does? And how do I think about that blend between the traditional marketing tactics of email and you know sort of Google search and billboards and all kinds of home, and product marketing and messaging with all this stuff that we’re seeing new, which is social influencers? And all the dark, social, all the things that are incredibly important, but then how do you balance those things? 

Yeah, no, I’m glad you touched upon product marketing, right? I mean, for me, I do have a bias because that’s my expertise. And that’s a service I do provide, but at the same time, to be fair, and when I look at it from a good market perspective, unfortunately, product marketers are almost, quote-unquote, abused, and not seen in the right way, because they’re seen as reactive order takers, and hey, by the way, sales need this content or a pitch deck. I saw hated to the core versus product marketing done, right are like your growth engines?

Yes. Yeah, I always joke, I say I have a no martyr rule, which is like my product marketer job is not to just be a ticket taker for sales and product, they need to be at the need to be, you know, at the table, making decisions, and our product marketers understand our customers better than anybody else within the team. And so they’re the ones that are really driving those insights. So they are, and our product marketers are excellent, I have a fantastic team. And so they are partners, true partners, with the product team to figure out what is our how are we bringing products to life. You know, how are we bringing them to market? What’s the customer value? What’s the story there? So they are definitely not order takers, and I would never, ever have a team that was order takers. And the same thing on the sales side, you know, it’s like, Hey, you’re, you’re a partner to them. And your job is to figure out what they need, and to suggest things to them and to work together with them to come up with the priorities, and to come up with a roadmap, but you’re not just you know, they’re not just giving you tasks that you complete. That’s not what a good product marketer is.

Fantastic. And clearly, again, going back to your career and growth journey, I’m sure a couple of people must have played a big role in your inflection, at your inflection point is shaping you. 

Yeah. 

Who are those people who come to your mind in terms of mentors? 

Yeah, so I definitely have so many I mean, I’ve been doing this for a while. I’d say the first one was this woman, Darcy, who I reported to at Dell. And she was the first person that gave me really hard, but really good feedback. And it really changed my perspective on how I showed up at work. And from what I learned from her was that you could be really direct, but also really kind. And so that’s something that I take with me all the time is that the kindest thing that you could do is give people feedback, so they can be better. So that’s like, for sure. I really respect her and really appreciate everything she did for me. The second one is, that when I was at Google, it all came back to feedback. Because it’s how it’s hard. But that’s how I get better. So when I was at Google, I was incredibly lucky to be accepted into this leadership program. And it literally changed my life, it changed the entire trajectory of my career. And there was a VP of ads, her name was Lisa developer, and she concepted and executed, and built this whole program on our own. And it was extraordinary. And I absolutely would not be here without that program, because I got some incredibly difficult feedback during that process. And I changed my whole perspective on life and my career because of that. And so I’m super, super grateful. And then probably the final person that has been really meaningful for me was Dave King, who was the CMO of Asana. And I reported directly to him. And he just has a way of building relationships and caring about you. And I just learned so much from him in terms of how I want to show up as a leader every day, you know, he, when he left Asana, he put together kind of a little dossier on me to give to my new boss. And it literally, I was like, God, you know me better than myself. And that was like, that is the kind of leader that I want to be as somebody that people say, you know, they know me, and they care about me, I could trust him with anything. And I would always want people to have that kind of faith in me. 

Yeah, I think you’ve touched upon two points. And thanks for calling that out. It eventually depends on the impact that really happens during the performance review and feedback time. And feedback plus being kind. I think that’s a real combination if you really care about that person.

Yes. I mean, the worst thing that you could do is care about a person and not give them the tools to be better. Right?

For sure. All right. So the first I mean, I don’t know why I say first, but it’s the last question. I so wish this was the first I just know that speaking with you, Jessica. Yeah. The last question is what advice would you give to your younger self if you wanted to go back in time on day one of your go-to-market journey?

Say don’t worry about any of the external trappings of success. Don’t worry about money, don’t worry about the title. The only thing you should worry about is finding a culture where you really enjoy the people that you work with, that you feel like you can make an impact, and that you love what you do every day. Fantastic.