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š Rocket-fast interviews with GTM operators in sales, success, product, and marketing. Meet go-to-market talent you need to add to your must-recruit watchlist, unless they recruit you first! Hear answers to 6 burning questions from talent across the GTM community. Learn more ā https://market-to-revenue.com
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Sep 1, 2022
š§āāļø Shea Cole: Fullscript, VP Marketing
Tell yourself, āI can do hard things.ā What does the data say? What is the insight I can pull from the data? What is the creative idea I have based on that insight? Take the hassle out of the purchase journey. What product-market-fit means for a new segment of users. Focus over speed. Strategy over plans. Regaining SEO. Meaning, difference and salience. Understand what motivates your customer, how they view your product, or the problem that it solves. You find that tension in their lives then you solve for it.
Hereās what Katy McFee said about Shea:Shea Cole. So I worked with Shea at a company called Fullscript. She is the VP Marketing there, and she is a force. So this woman, she is just like a branding queen, and she took that company from very early days to like explosive, massive rocket-growth and was very instrumental in making that happen. So, I think she would be a fantastic guest for you.
āKaty McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Generating new leads using content marketing. We're super focused on SEO and high-quality content. Our customer base are professionals, they're healthcare practitioners, so we make sure that our content is written by other healthcare practitioners, and filled with keywords, but also extremely evidence-based. We get a lot of cheap, high quality leads that way.
2) Email marketing. Then, once our customers come into our our funnel, and they become existing customers, email marketing. So, we take that same content that we wrote on our blog to generate leads, and we email it to them just to keep our customers engaged, to remind them that the content is there, and it keeps us top of mind, which drives that platform usage.
3) Take the hassle out of the purchase journey. The last way that I'll highlight is that we take a lot of care to make sure that we take the hassle out of the purchase journey for our customers. Healthcare practitioners are recommending supplements through Fullscript and then their patients are coming onto our platform to purchase supplements. We want make this dead simple for the patients. We want to take all the thinking out of it. So what we do is we analyze the order behavior of the patients. We analyze the dosage instructions of the practitioners. And based on that, we know when a patient is running low on their supplements and we reach out to them and we say, āHey, it's probably time to refill. Click here to refill.ā And so, they don't have to think about, āHey, it's, it's probably time for me to log onto Fullscript and place an order. We do that thinking for them. It comes right to their inbox. They never miss a day in their treatment plan. Super simple, but very effective.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) I recently came back from a maternity leave. And I'm in Canada, so that's a long leave. Itās anywhere up to a year. Mine was eight months. Two days after I came back from maternity leave, we acquired one of our biggest competitors. So my whole plan for onboarding, and getting lots of attention from the team so that they could get me up to speed on what was going on, all went out the window, because everyone was so wrapped up in, āOh my God, we just acquired a company. How do we merge two teams?ā This is, I think, a really good example of what it's like to work in a high growth company, because you have to embrace that chaos and set aside your expectations for anything to be smooth and just be resilient. Otherwise, you don't survive.
2) Regaining our SEO traffic after a 50% drop in 2020. I told you earlier in the show that we're really focused on driving leads through SEO. Back in 2020, Google had a big algorithm change and it impacted the health and wellness space more than many industries. We saw our SEO plummet by almost 50%, and this was a big lead source for us. So hugely problematic. At the time, we were focused mainly on just producing high quality content, and what we learned through this is that's not really enough. We had to step up our technical talent and bring in SEO expertise to really get ahead of those algorithm changes and manage that more technical side of content marketing. So now in 2022, we're back up to the site traffic that we were at in 2020. It took us that long to get there because that's how SEO works. You just have to claw your way up bit by bit by bit. We had to actually relaunch our entire site, take a little hit that way, but then regain. But, we got there.
3) It's really unrealistic to expect that everyone is going to love having you as a boss. So, I think this one might be a little controversial. It's something really important that I learned recently about managing a team and being a leader. Early on in my career, I really cared about being that manager that everyone loved to have as a boss. I still really care about my people and I really want to be a great manager, but what I have to learn was that it's really unrealistic to expect that everyone is going to love having you as a boss, because the truth is that some people are just not going to like you because you have to have tough conversations when you're leading a team, especially when you're leading a big team. Sometimes, people are not going to understand how much you appreciate them, because, as a manager with multiple levels underneath you, you have to let your managers that are underneath you manage their people. That means, sometimes, you have to step away from the relationship. Not everyone is going to appreciate where the cards fall for them, but as long as you try to be as empathetic and fair and transparent as you possibly can be, then, you're doing your best for people and you just have to make peace with the fact that not everyone is going to love you.
What are 3 roadblocks that youāre working on now?
1) We are reaching a plateau in our media buying because we were doing everything in-house, and I think that that was the right choice for us at one time, where we were small and bootstrapped and scrappy and we could do a good job in-house. Now, we've grown to a size where my team needs to be focused on other things. As our paid media starts reaching a plateau, we're reaching diminishing returns, we are moving to an external agency to buy that media. So, let's see if this works. I'm super hopeful. I think it will allow my team to focus on other channels, and on creative, and on research. So, I think it's the right decision for us right now, but we're at a transition point.
2) We are switching to a new marketing automation tool, and unfortunately we've made that switch a couple times, because finding the right automation tool is so important and you don't always get it right. The other thing is: as you go through different stages of growth, a super simple tool might be the right tool for you at the beginning because your team can learn it really quickly, but then as you scale, you might need something a little bit more complex. So, switching to a new marketing automation tool means getting the right technical talent, getting the right consultants to help you set it up, getting buy-in from the engineering and data analytics teams to make sure that everything is flowing smoothly from your CRM to your automation to your attribution and your reporting. Everything needs to work in tandem. That's a huge problem that we are solving for right now.
3) What product-market-fit means for our new segment of users. Lastly, as a marketer, I'm coming to a really interesting point in our journey with our industry, and with penetrating our industry, because you always want to go after the leads that convert the easiest, and that's actually, I think, a direct quote from one of your previous guests. For sure, we did that in the beginning. That was naturopathic doctors for us because we enable practitioners to dispense supplements to their patients, and naturopathic docā¦
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Aug 1, 2022
š„³ Anita Toth, Chief Churn Crusher
Convert for the endgame, retention. Marketing is a lot like dating. Sales is where you're getting a little more serious. The wedding is where they convert to be a customer. You got your onboarding, which is your honeymoon. Woo-hoo! This is going to be awesome! But guess what? The bulk of that whole relationship is the marriage, which is retention, and it is not tactical, and it is challenging. Which is why for your post-sale team, they're really relying on you to choose those right dates and attract the right people to get into these long-term relationships with.
Hereās what Ryan Paul Gibson said about Anita:Anita Toth. The first guest I would think of is Anita Toth. Anita is interesting. She's on the customer success side and she has a great name. She calls herself The Churn Crusher. We've talked a couple of times and what I like about her is she is, like me, hyper-focused on a part of a business that is very important for long-term success. Churn is going to be such a big metric for SaaS companies going forward. How do you keep customers around for longer, and why? How do you succeed in that? And she just lots of fun. So I think she's the first one.
āRyan Paul Gibson, Founder of Content Lift ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Establishing partnerships with key companies that also serve our ICP. So what we look for in an ideal partner is that they're complimentary to what we do, and this allows us then to combine our marketing efforts. And the one thing we do is, each quarter we identify and look to develop one type of a partnership with, like I said, a company that is doing something complimentary and already working with our ideal customer. So that's the first one.
2) Creating content that really speaks to the pain points of our ICP. What we've chosen to do is just focus on four pillars for all our content. So for us, it's customer feedback, churn, customer relationships, and voice of the customer. And that's been really helpful because it's really easy to start creeping outside of that. Those four pillars really keep us focused then on our ideal customers.
3) We use storytelling everywhere we can. So this might be from personal founders stories. So I'm the founder. So my personal stories to client stories. We're an agency that collects customer feedback. Not such a sexy topic for a lot of people. We love it, but what we do is we use techniques like customer interviews to help bring the hard data we collect to life. So this way, potential clients can better see themselves in the story than they can just looking at the numbers. So those are the three ways that we do that.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Ooh, this was, this was fun.
1) Going up-market to now sell voice of the customer programs to Chief Customer Officers who are employed in much larger companies than we've served up to this point. So it meant doing a lot of research to understand how they see their issues, how it manifests for them, and what's at stake for them if they don't solve the problem. We're in the process of finding out how we can leverage some of our content and just adapt it to this new ideal customer profile.
2) This seems so trivial, but putting in a new system to start culling old content that doesn't serve us well, or finding new ways to refresh it. We use it for our two main ideal customer profiles. So this is for Chief Customer Officers and Customer Success Leaders, and we do have a small third ICP, Customer Success Managers, but it's been harder than anticipated because it's really difficult to throw away, discard, stuff that you've put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into, and if you can't adapt it, it means it's got to go. So that was actually harder than I thought. Sitting down and deciding what we're going to keep and, and what needs to go.
3) Saying no to opportunities that don't align with our vision of making happier customers across the world. So as a company grows, there's some tempting opportunities that we've had to turn down because they pull us from our vision. But I wouldn't say we've overcome this yet. We've been kind of pulled to the side a couple of times. It's a continuous issue that we have to deal with, but we know that if we stray, then it could potentially ruin us. So that's been really challenging to stick to our guns when we see shiny new opportunities and just say no to them. Nope. We're not going that route.
What are 3 roadblocks that youāre working on now?
1) Well, we're hiring our first CMO. I'm just starting to chat with potential CMOs, so this is a huge step for us. We're going to start with a fractional CMO first. I want to see what it's like to work with a CMO, and then eventually we will hire someone out of that experience full-time. Gut rather than just like jumping right in and hiring someone full-time, we've decided to go the fractional route. It will just help us also better understand, what does the CMO need from us and how that relationship works? So that's one roadblock.
2) Finding new ways to market to CCOs. So like I mentioned, we're going upmarket now and our other two ICPs, so Customer Success Leaders, and our very small group of Customer Success Managers, are very active on LinkedIn. So we've devoted like 80% of our marketing efforts there. It makes sense. They're congregating there, as well as in some Slack groups. But, Chief Customer Officers are different. They're on LinkedIn, but they're not necessarily active like our other two ICPs. So our challenge has been, now we have to come up with a whole new marketing strategy for this new group. It's been a bit challenging. I think we're going to go the old school road of cold email. I think that's where we're headed.
3) Creating new content, of course, for those Chief Customer Officers and creating new funnels. They definitely buy differently than our other ICPs, who may or may not have budget, but Chief Customer Officers do hold budgets. So, we have to figure out what is that buyer's journey like and how are we going to facilitate that through our marketing?
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
Okay, Chris. So like full disclosure, I had to look up what mental models are. I know what they are, but I was like, ābut really what are they?ā So this gets a bit esoteric, but I think it's worth talking about, because I did look them up and these are things I use. I just didn't know those are the terms.
1) Create routines for my success. So my morning routines look boringly similar every day. But, what this helps me do is conserve energy so that I'm not wasting a lot of time and I can really get in my work and focus.
2) Here's one of the esoteric ones: it's called Bayesian Thinking. We should continuously update our probability estimates as we come across new information. So, essentially when you come across new data, you shouldn't blow it out all out of proportion. Like, āEmail marketing has tanked! Zero response rates!ā Just crazy stuff like that. We hear stuff like this and then we don't update our thinking. Is this accurate? Is it not? So, the thing is that you should use it to update confidence in your existing beliefs, and if you do, what happens is your reasoning will be more nuanced, accurate and useful. So, when you information comes in, questioning your thinking on it, but you don't have to panic, or what most people do is get very rigid. So you're just looking at your beliefs. How does this information affect my beliefs? What can I learn from it?
3) We've heard of Occam's Razor. I didn't know that there's Hanlon's Razor. So here it is. Never attribute malice that can be adequately explained by neglect. So in other words, when something happens, and it looks like somebody has āDone something to me.ā Maybe it wasn't a malice thing, but maybe they just didn't know. And this is particularly important as we're hiring and working with new team membeā¦
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Jul 27, 2022
š·Ā Darren Sharpe: SuiteSpot, Chief Revenue Officer
15 minutes with Meet Darren Sharpe, Chief Revenue Officer at SuiteSpot. Be maniacal about whatās working. Doing great homework. Connecting inbound and outbound channels. Prospect discovery. Client feedback loops to drive product innovation. Shifting a pricing model from features to platform. Pareto principal. Opportunity costs. A culture of coaching allows your team to collaborate in all things. Talk within your client's own words. Asking: What's important to you? What drives you? Is there a connection here where I can help solve?
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Katy McFee said about Darren:Darren Sharpe. I met him in a sales leader peer group that was put together by The Lazaridis Institute which is an organization where hyper-growth companies are selected to be part of this program. He has just a super impressive, smart, long-time sales leader who gets it. Goes into a company, figures it out, deep dives, and like creates this huge growth for whatever company he touches. So, he's a CRO right now at SuiteSpot, but has been a revenue leader for many years, and has lots of great value that he can share.
āKaty McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
We're fairly traditional. We have an inbound channel, and outbound channel, and a partner channel. I think it might be more and more interesting is how do we uniquely leverage those channels for our success?
1) Outbound channel. So one, if we look at our traditional outbound sales channel, Iām incredibly proud of our BDR team's ability to profile, research, and connect with the prospects. So we look at it as value-based sequencing plus hyper-personalization, and I'm really proud of the outcomes that are coming there.
2) Inbound channel. Then, we tie that with our inbound PPC strategy, looking at the exact same personas and trying to hit the same people so that our outbound and inbound are connected. So you're connecting with the LinkedIn ad as we've we've sent you that message really trying to drive, āHey, can we understand you as a prospect's problem? Could you see value in a quick connect or a quick conversation with us?ā So really, on those inbound and outbound channels, how are we creating new conversations?
3) Partner channel. The partner model is interesting from a startup perspective. Anytime you're developing a partner channel, the key is timing. How do you not be everything to everyone, but create highly valuable bilateral partnerships. So for that one, I'm really proud of the work we've done of defining the right type of partner and being able to service them. And as we scale, we expect to see that partner channel becoming a bigger piece of our business. But today, we're dominantly led by the inbound and outbound channels.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
As a startup, we are constantly in the path of positive change. So I'm going to mention three things that we are constantly working on, but I'm really proud of the work we've done to position us for success.
1) Prospect discovery. This is a tough balance between interrogation and value-based discussion. And we've recently really flipped our scripts and really tried to shift the discovery goal to making sure the prospect understands our interpretation of their problem and how it's affecting them individually. And, that's shift has been, instead of going to the standard, āHey, are you experiencing this industry problem?āāāWhat is the personal impact of this problem, and how is it affecting you guys?ā It's a small change, but that shift in discovery has really shifted our sales model. Where now, and like, we're not original here, but we're really focusing on client pain, focusing in on the impact to each individual prospect.
2) Client feedback loops. Before I came on board at sweet spot, we hadn't done a great job yet. So, we've introduced the customer advisory board. We've introduced a quarterly business review process. And, weāre greatly mining a lot of great data from our existing clients, and really trying to twofold: increase the dialogue between existing client and SuiteSpot, āHow do we build a better foundation?ā But, also learn from them. Learn from them, from product, not only how we've deployed, but product innovation, and we're now seeing great innovation come out of that feedback loop. Weāre really excited about where that takes us.
3) Shift in our pricing model. The last thing, and this is a change that many SaaS companies go through, is a shift in our pricing model from a feature, or a modular-based, model to platform. Our value to our clients was greatly in the entirety of our platform. Because of some legacy pieces and how have we grown up, we had clients buying different modules and not buying the entirety of the platform. So, we made a difficult business decision to make this as a shift. We're going to shift our existing clients from a feature-based to platform and we're going to present, in a new way, the product as a platform. So it's a great success on that front. That's a big change both from our CS teams and sales teams of how we are telling clients what they are purchasing and what we're delivering. So, really proud of those changes.
What are 3 roadblocks that youāre working on now?
Got it. Well, as I said to you earlier, I'm not interesting. So this is probably the things that a lot of folks are currently going through.
1) Really hyper growth scale dashboards. How do we get as much actionable data as we scale? So I run inside sales, outside sales, client success, and marketing. Having the right growth dashboards and caring about the real indicators that we need, that's something that I'm working on with my peer group, with our executive leadership, because in a world of so much data, how do you really come down to actionable evidence data? How do we look at those dashboards and say, āThis is the right leading indicators for X or for Y.ā I think it's one of those things that, roadblock may be a harsh term, but it's an evolutionary piece. It's a piece that we're really developing right now.
2) How you quantify value. In any way, in a sales cycle, you want to show your value. How you quantify value, especially from the midpoint of the sales cycle to the end, through that negotiation stage. So we're looking at the decision link, but also more trying to internalize, and how do we quantify, the specific value that this client is going to take, or this prospect is going to take, from leveraging SuiteSpot. And part of that leads into the last roadblockā¦
3) How do you speed up your sales cycle? I don't know any revenue leader who wouldn't say, āHey, if I could take 30 days out of my sales cycle, or if I could take X out of my sales cycleā¦ā Again, not original, but can we create more urgency within that sales cycle? And the way that we're trying to do that is I mentioned earlier, āHey, how do we better understand prospect challenge? How do we quantify our solution?ā Those two things together are really trying to allow us to earn the right to ask for the business earlier. That's really a path that we're going now. How do we show enough unique value, show our understanding of the prospect challenge, to create a buying agreement earlier than our traditional cycle?
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Pareto Principal. As I came up in my career as an individual contributor, one that stuck with me was the Pareto Principle. Results are not equally distributed. Oftentimes people call the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule. I look at this all the time in understanding, āNot every opportunity is the same. Not every prospect is the same.ā I use this all the time to help drive focus, because, as sellers, we can be distracted by the shiny thing, and we can treat a call, like a call, like a call. When in reality,ā¦
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Jun 28, 2022
š®Ā Anthony Murphy: Product Pathways, Founder
13 minutes with Anthony Murphy: Founder of Product Pathways. Predicting the future. Strategic discovery. Seeking out early adopters. Balancing short-term revenue versus long-term vision. Modeling the future. Hiring. Technical architecture and debt. Capacity. BJ Fogg's behavioral model. Shipping super early, even when it's a concept. Setting goals. What needs to be true?
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Really good question and an interesting one for me. As a product coach, I don't work with a single team. I work with multiple clients, multiple companies and product teams all over the world. But, one of the benefits of that is I get to see interesting challenges.
1) Predicting the future. If I think about some of the clients I have right now, probably one of the most interesting I'm working with now is what I would deem as a horizon three product. Essentially, the horizon model is near term, mid term, far term. They're essentially shaping the future doing some really cool, market-leading AI, 3D rendering technology, but a cool market for that doesn't exist today. So how do you convert that into revenue? That's a whole other challenge. Weāve been spending the last 12 months in doing that. Part of it is āWell, what does the future look like? How do we predict the future?ā So we've been spending a lot of time doing modeling on previous trends, like the rise of chat as opposed to calling people up, and all these other trends. Essentially, using them as predictive models to try and predict the future. Predicting the future in order to create a market in order to create revenue.
2) Strategic discovery. We need to have confidence in all those things. They are just models. It doesn't mean that thatās exactly what the future's going to hold. We need to be able to validate some of that, gain confidence in it, and really calculate the value of whether that's something that's worthwhile doing.
3) Seeking out early adopters and innovators. We spend a lot of time naturally seeking out early adopters and innovators. They really are our core market today. If you think about the diffusion of innovators, they're going to be on core market today. And then one day, that will become an everyday thing that everyone's using, and then we'll really crack into that. But thatās one of the things that we really focused on. That's a real hard thing to do, especially it's a B2B product. So how do you work out B2B innovators? It's it's a unique challenge, but that's definitely where our revenue is coming from today.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Working with lots of clients, I see some common challenges. I spend a lot of my time working with startups, or product managers in startups and a lot of scaling companies.
1) Balancing short-term revenue versus long-term vision. I think the biggest challenge that companies dealing with right now, as well as another client of mine, is balancing short-term revenue, or that's stability of revenue, versus long-term vision and gain. If you use that client as an example, their market, their future, doesn't exist today. So it's hard to make revenue off something that doesn't exist, but you need to make some revenue, you call it the completely investment-funded. That's not gonna work out longterm. You need revenue, but there's a danger of starting to fall into this trap of building something for today and missing out on that future, and not being ready for that future, when it comes. So that's a huge kind of challenge. I mean, I've been overcoming it in some of those ways that I've kind of mentioned before.
2) Modeling the future. That's a really interesting one. We really overcame that by looking at previous trends and building a few models around that, but a super unique challenge that I haven't had to deal with before.
3) For one of my clients, they had really big retention issue. Classic leaky funnel. You got plenty leads coming in, but not everyone is staying in there. So, I spent a lot of time with them, reshaping their product strategy to understand those gaps and balancing that. It was a good challenge.
What are 3 roadblocks that you are working on now?
1) Hiring. I'm working with a VP of Product at the moment at a growing startup, and probably the biggest roadblock we have right now is just c. Theyāre growing, theyāve got to grow, got to go with it, get more people, but the market's super competitive, and I think most people and most product leaders and people in product and tech know this, salaries are through the roof. People are hard to come by, negotiating is a huge challenge, especially when you're a small company and you canāt really pay Microsoft will Facebook salaries. Itās super competitive. That's probably one of the biggest roadblocks I'm working with with them at the moment.
2) Technical architecture and debt. This is a real start-up and scale-up kind of problem. Technical architecture and debt. It's really common for companies, the way we start, start-ups will just hack it together, basically. Architecture, from a technical product point of view, often is monolithic. We don't have to think too much about the future, cause it doesn't matter. We might not have a company in 6-12 months time, so it doesn't matter. But then there comes a point in time where you start to get product-market fit. You start at the scale and start to grow. And then all of that debt and architecture starts to hinder you since, essentially, it becomes a bit like chains. It becomes a big roadblock, because then you want to grow as quickly as possible, but suddenly you're constrained by your architecture, your tech debt to grow that quickly. So you then start to balance all these big bets that you want to do, and these cool new features and functionality to grow a company against the fact that, āHey, we don't actually have a scalable platform. How do we overcome that?ā
3) Capacity. A roadblock I'm dealing with right now with clients in the same space, in startups, is just capacity. Thereās always a million things we want to do. When you're a 200 plus scale-up is one client, or even a small 15 person startup, you only have so much you can do because you only have so many people.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I really liked this question actually, and it made me think, because I use a lot of mental models.
1) All models are both correct and incorrect at the same time. I have an overarching mental model that is all models are both correct and incorrect at the same time. What I mean by that is I think they're all about 80% correct. There's obviously always exceptions. It's a really good one that keep in mind because you just canāt anything as a 100% applied to everything. It's not going to work. You need to use different models and apply it. Some models that I've been using recently. This is where my headspace went to.
2) BJ Fogg's behavioral model. I love that. It just talks about motivation versus, essentially, behavioral change, or habit change, and which is highly applicable in the product space. Especially when we think about shipping new features or even new products. How do you get people to change their behavior? How much motivation is needed? How easy, how hard is it? I think itās a fantastic model for that.
3) Classic flywheel model. I've been doing a lot of work around product strategy. So, definitely, that's been in my head, and Wardley Mapping has been as well. For those who aren't familiar with it, look it up. Itās super big and complex for me to explain it, but it's been super useful with Horizon 3 product, and that client, just because it's a really good way to map out things that are early innovations versus later in their life cycle when products become commodities. So it was just a really good way to map out the market, do some modeling, thinking about wā¦
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Jun 23, 2022
šØ Craig Handy: Shopify, Head of Revenue Automation, Tooling, & Enablement + Jameson Strategies, Founder
Take a long, long, hard look at your go-to-market process, not from the perspective of what you're currently looking at, but put yourself in the shoes of your colleagues. If you're in sales, take a look at the marketing side. If you're in marketing, look at customer success. If youāre in customer success, look at sales. All of those things, if you want to be successful as a business, it's not about I, itās about we. It means you need to learn, understand, and really look at what is the entire journey and get really buyer-centric from that perspective.
Hereās what Arthur Castillo said about Craig:Sometimes we are too obsessed with our ICP. I heard Craig Handy talk about this where he looked at the ICP qualifications for previous years, Closed Won revenue for a client of his. He found that 60% of the Closed Won revenue technically would have been disqualified because it didn't meet their ICP qualifications. So a lot of the time, again, let's ask about where they're trying to get to? Or, maybe what they tried to do prior to reaching out to us, because often it could just be a simple switch or a tiny little product feature now that can expand an entire new industry and TAM for us, yet weāre disqualifying them. So, let's talk to those people, understand not necessarily where they're at today, but where theyāre trying to get to.
āArthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) PLG (Product-led growth). This is a big part of my role at Shopify. We, in a RevOps perspective, talk about āright person, right time, right way,ā and I don't think there's a better āright person, right time, right wayā than someone who's already engaging with your product to a certain degreeāwhether that's from a free trial perspective, whether that's from a basic plan, or even a big planāand going with them and growing with them, providing that value for them when they need to see it or additional add-ons when they need to see it. The beauty of product-led growth is you have the visibility to what they're doing. You have the visibility to their performance, their challenges. You see other customers that have similar experiences. So being able to not only reach out to them in a very meaningful way, or the right time, but then also for them, in many cases from a self-serve perspective, say, āOh, Hey, I want that, and I could get it, and I'm going to do it. And I don't need to have a million meetings to engage that way.ā So that's a big piece there.
2) Referrals. From the Jameson's Strategies perspective, referrals. Huge driver for us. I only once went outbound. The real thing for me is: in a market where I think I'm coming with it with a product that is not common, we call it RevOps as a Service, and you're seeing a little bit of pop up, but it's not super common, and there some skepticism in that. So, having a warm referral, where someone's like, āHey, this changed the game for us. So this really helped us. How do we pass that off?ā And so we're really adamant to say that's meaningful for us, but we provide that value, and we naturally provide that value, so that people want to talk about it, and want to share it. That stems over to the third one.
3) Upsell / Cross-sell. This is prevalent in both Shopify and Jameson Strategies perspective. Sometimes the best barrier-to-entry is a little one, or one that is low-risk, or one that is a no brainer. And though, you believe deeply that the value is there, and I firmly stand by this, is that you don't sell something and believe it, you know the value is there, and sometimes you need to walk before you run. And so that entry-level where, āOkay, let's come in on a low plan if it's Jameson or let's come in on a low plan for Shopify,ā and then you start to see, āOkay, these people care about me. They value me. They're providing me with value constantly, and they have a path for me to grow as I grow.ā And so, I think to the question of how you turn your marketing into revenue, the micro concept of your market, as in your customers, how do you grow that? That is something that, if done right, is a safer, more consistent, and a more human approach to growth.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
I struggle with this question a little bit, because I was thinking, āWhat have I overcome?ā It's always a constant struggle.
1) Making a tight budget tech-stack run like a sports car. I was playing around with this term, itās like an engine swap of a Ferrari in Honda Civic. But the reality of this is that, especially from a smaller business perspective from the Jameson Strategies side, you have a budget, and especially in an approaching downturn, I don't want to throw into all these licenses, and all the op services, and is this the right tool? Is this the right tool? So the asks are huge. We want all of these things. But, the budget is like, āAh, I can only buy a quarter of it.ā So one of the challenges that is always a roadblock, but something that we've been very successful in overcoming is, āOkay. Can we make this and squeeze as much value as possible?ā It's not always pretty, and I'll be upfront about that, but the bottom line is you're trying to achieve something. How do we help you to do that? That's been a consistent thing with a lot of clients. We get them to that particular point and then they prove that value in that, in that business case, and then they continue to grow. But sometimes, we've got to stretch a little bit outside of our box at the beginning. So that's a big one.
2) Forming a super alliance. This is from the Shopify context. There's a lot of things going on. There's a lot of investments happening. What are we building? When are we building it? How are we we doing this? There was a really interesting topic that my team and another team both had a lot of skin in the game on, so at first, well, who owns this? We want to drive with our direction. They want to drive with their direction. It took a few deep breaths, really thinking, āHow do we put our merchants first? How do we put our customers first, and come together with a meaningful relationship?ā And what that basically formed is, and we talk about it as like our step-sibling, this alliance between we call the project something, they call it something else, but itās the same goal, same objectives. We just have different lenses on it. We always approach it with, āHow do we win together?ā That aligns us, which has been really strong and really powerful. So, that's been a huge one.
3) Growing a team really quickly. And so from the software perspective, towards the end of 2021, we restructured a little bit. So, a good portion of what my team was responsible for, my team moved to a new group, but then we inherited a lot of new requirements and new expectations, plus the revenue growth of the company. In that scenario, we need to fill these seats, so huge push. Thankfully we had a fantastic recruitment team, but doing hundreds of interviews, and engaging on a meaningful level, while also realizing, āHey, I need to double in size, but I also want to add to the culture. So that was very challenging, but I'm happy to say we successfully did it. It's phenomenal. I'm loving all the new people that we have working with the group.
What are 3 roadblocks that youāre working on now?
1) Time. I'm sure you probably hear this all the time. It's a constant struggle. Juggling that, not only within work, but also within your personal life, your personal life balance. I can get really like laser focused on something, but as someone who embodies my work life, finding that balance is incredibly tricky. The other thing, too, in our perspective, in a digital world, where neither of the businesses am I in-person, that whole sense of, āLetās just hop on a hangout.ā I've heard this many times from peoā¦
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Jun 6, 2022
š¶ Mo McKibbin: Moxion, Head of Customer Support and Success
47 minutes with Mo McKibbin: Head of Customer Support and Success at Moxion. Sales as a strategy, not a skill set. Helping the right customer solve the right problem, in the right way, at the right time. Building the entire customer operational process from scratch. Tight feedback loops between the customer and the business. Making customer success a whole company sport.
20 insights. 8 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
I'm in the camp that sales is a strategy and not a skill set. When I think about driving growth at any part of the funnel, whether it's more obviously pre-sales, but also post-sales expansion adoption, it's really all just about helping the right customer. And when I say the term, customer, I also mean pre-sale customers. For me, everyone's a customer, whether or not they bought. So, helping the right customer solve the right problem, in the right way, at the right time. Maybe that problem is, "I need to find more information about how to do my job better." That would be content, videos, best practices, things like that, and that is helping them solve the right problem that is relevant to the ecosystem of your products, at the right time. Maybe it's, "How do I apply this product to achieve this value proposition that I bought into during the buying process?" That would be more on the customer success side of like, "We're in the product now. I need to apply the product to achieve this desired business goal." So that would be solving the right problem, at the right time, for the right customer. All of the operational theories, or structures, or methodologies, that I do is built around that concept. It's a little bit more holistically. Less about what sales does, or support does, or what success does, or what marketing does. It's more customer-centric because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you're a product-led growth company, or a sales-led growth company, or marketing-driven, or whatever. At the end of the day, the only thing that's driving revenue is the customer buying your product. So it's all about, "What will a customer find valuable in this moment? How do we consistently deliver it?"
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
So as far as putting this into three bullet points:
1) Investment in customer experience has contributed mostly to any sort of growth of businesses that I've had the joy of creating processes and operations for. That usually works, not only just by achieving incredibly high conversion rates ā because I try to create approaches that are really tailored towards exactly delivering that right experience at the right, the right information to solve the right problem with the right time ā but also word of mouth, and loyalty, and advocacy, and expansion. So I would say, I have no insights in the top-of-funnel or demand gen sort of world, as much as, it is all about nurture, conversion, solving problems, and then delivering a great experience that then causes word of mouth, loyalty, and expansion. So, the way that we do that from a tactical sense, is we create operational segmentation to facilitate scalable personalization. Now, that is a lot of buzzwords. I really like to take things apart and organize things. So, I like to organize my customers by operational segments, lifecycle segments, and personalization segments. So, operational segments has to do with the amount of touch that a customer requires. So a really common would be the difference between what is a low-complexity self-serve customer versus a high complexity enterprise customer, are probably the two ways to think about that. Then, personalization segments is, āWhat is this customer's desired outcome use case?ā A good example for a tool that everybody uses, because it's the OG project management tool, is take something like Trello. If you're using Trello as a software company, you're using it very differently than if you're an event planner. Personalization segments are a little bit like, āWhat are the common goals that our customers are using these products for? And how do we create paths for them with enablement, with videos, with what we introduce them at the right time that are actually aligned with their goals?ā There's a self-serve version of that, but then there's also a high touch version of that where it's more like coaching and consulting to get enterprises on the right path or change management within that. So, I think that that was just a big āone.ā
2) After you break apart your operational segments, it's optimizing both for digital and human touch. I am of the mindset that you actually need both because you have to help customers the way they want to be helped. Some customers prefer self service and want to do all of that exploration on their own. They want to get information and they don't want to talk to anyone unless they absolutely have to. I'm a buyer like that. The only time I've ever bought something that required me to get on a phone or in person was my house. But, some people also really need it. Some people really need that extra help. I've acquainted it before as, āWhat is a better experience if you're in a hardware store? Is it somewhere where everything's really well outlined, so that you know exactly where to go and what to pick up for what you needed for your hardware product? Or is it something where someone greets you at the door, and they ask you about your project, and they give you consultative advice on what to do and how to pick things up?ā The truth is actually both are great experiences, depending on the customer. If I am a seasoned person who knows what they're doing, and I want to get up and running right away, I want to just get in, get out, self-checkout, make it as seamless as possible. If I am starting a project on my bathroom, and I have no idea where to get started, I want to talk to someone and make sure I don't screw anything up. So, operational pathways based off of that segmentation, that's what it's trying to facilitate to create both a self-serve path, and so you can actually optimize the times that human touch is valuable and has an ROI because everything else is automated. So it's not one or the other. It's that they have to both work in tandem in order to work it successfully and scalably.
3) Once these operational systems are in place, I think the most important part of this puzzle is actually building feedback loops between the customer and the business. And so, by that I mean, between the voice of the customer and product, the voice of the customer and marketing or growth or however you're calling it, the voice of the customer and engineering, all of these arms of the business that have some sort of customer impact, building these feedback loops is, essentially, the investment in customer experience that causes customers to feel listened to. It makes it more of a relationship. From a product standpoint, you're building the right product for the right customer. If you can facilitate these feedback loops in a way that you can quantify, and understand, what customers want the most, essentially the impact it would be on the business from a growth and marketing standpoint, if you are building these feedback loops between what the customer is actually saying they find valuable, it makes it easier to then deliver to the top-of-funnel demand gen people that it's, "Oh, these are what we should be saying. Our value props are because this is how we're going to attract more successful customers.ā And then, obviously, the most common on the support side of things, the success side of things, is engineering, because most people equate it with talking about support. But, I think the thing that I do that's kind of weird is that I think of it as feedback loops throughout the whole business, not just on the technical side.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
I'm going to be a bit vulnerable. I constantly feel there's little baā¦
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Jun 1, 2022
š¤ Vlad BlagojeviÄ: Fullfunnel.io, Co-Founder
23 minutes with Vlad BlagojeviÄ: Co-Founder at Fullfunnel.io. 80/20. Thinking long-term. Account-based demand generation on LinkedIn. Frequent and regular marketing activities. Consistency. Co-creation. Continuously iterating on our offering. Making sure that people actually do the stuff that's important. Entering the US market. The most important skill that you should develop as a marketer is asking questions of your customers.
Show transcript.
Hereās what Dani Woolf said about Vlad:Vladimir BlagojeviÄ. First, I definitely recommend Vladimir BlagojeviÄ. He's the co-founder of fullfunnel.io. I actually follow him on LinkedIn and he's helping B2B marketers who market to people in accounts that have a long sale cycles, like me. Helping us do things a little bit more strategically and methodically. I think the way he educates B2B marketers with his smart playbooks is awesome. It's so useful. And he's one of those people who understands the value of simplicity and practicality. And again, people who do that are going to win.
āDani Woolf, Director of Demand Generation at Cybersixgill ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) We have a calendar of what we call frequent and regular marketing activities. So for example, both Andrei my co-founder, and myself, will write and post LinkedIn posts and engage with our audience. We have our own community, the Trenches, which is a B2B marketing community, where we also engage every day. Every week, we run our own podcast, the Full Funnel B2B Marketing podcast actually live, with B2B marketing leaders, where people from our community come can ask live questions and engage with some of the best minds in the market. We run a weekly, I forgot to mention, we have actually two newsletters. We have monthly webinars. Two times a year, we also run a B2B marketing summit, a Full Funnel B2B Marketing Summit. The last one, I think, had more than 5,000 subscribers. If I reflect, we only really started a little bit more than a year ago, working together with Full Funnel. Thanks to all these activities, we grew our newsletter to more than 12,000 people, got LinkedIn following right now is about 25k between the two of us. We had probably more than 10,000 people subscribe and attend our events. Just in 2021, from these activities, we generated 61 inbound opportunities. This frequent, consistent communication works really well for us.
2) So how do we convert, let's say, all that attention, and all that awareness and demand, into revenue? What we basically do is we help B2B tech brands with six figure deals implement proven playbooks to drive awareness and demand and land six figure opportunities with, let's say, 20% plus of target accounts. So when you're in that situation where you need to land large deals, you don't need a lot of clients, but you need the right ones, how do you maximize that? How do you actually get opportunities with, let's say 20-40% of targeted accounts? And we like to use those playbooks. They're tried and tested. Weāve implemented them so many times. We have them implemented as a digital on-demand course. We have cohort courses where we go work with group of companies implementing those. We have one-on-one consulting as well, and that's how we actually help our clients and earn our revenue.
3) So, how does that happen? So normally, most of our consulting clients are inbound or referrals, so people who are just coming to us, and we actually almost always have to say no a lot of times. Digital products, we sell, usually, during launches and from our email list, while the cohort courses, actually, the group courses and coaching, mostly come via one-on-one chats and engagement on LinkedIn email, our slack group, et cetera.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) The problem that had the biggest impact was when we started Full Funnel, Andrei and myself decided that we are never going to do any execution. We're not going to work as an agency. We just want to be purely advice, courses, et cetera. So that wasn't easy, but it is something that we managed to build.
2) Changing the way that we work, and for myself, changing the way that I work. So that, instead of like being busy, busy, busy, I can devote maybe 50%, to maybe sometimes even 70%, on really high-leverage activities. I mentioned all the activities that we do online. I mean, it's just the two of us, and we have the client work, and we are building the products. And so, the way that this works is by being able to focus on the 20% of activities that generate the 80% of results.
3) Making sure that people actually do the stuff that's important. We started by selling, other than one-on-one consulting, those digital courses, and we saw that people are not really implementing stuff. That's a problem with courses. When we launched, and decided to launch the group course, this was one of the reasons. We, again, applied the 20/80 principle to really focus on making sure that people actually do the stuff that's important and make all this experience, very interactive and immersive so that people actually, during the sessions are engaged, are listening, doing stuff, and actually implementing and getting results. This is working and I'm super, super happy about it.
What are 3 roadblocks that youāre working on now?
1) We are continuously iterating on our offering, on our products, and how we monetize or help our clients. Currently, we are working on a program. We have all these playbooks, but what we want to offer our customers is a program where they can go from zero to account-based marketing, which is one of the things that we help our clients implement in a quarter or two. So, we are creating these larger programs and combining the different pieces of the puzzle that we have created so far.
2) We want to replace all our one-to-one consulting income with courses and digital products. And we really want to focus even more on the things that we enjoy and we know bring a lot of impact and results. We want to publish more books. We want to do more events. We want to create more content and just focus on content creation, creating those courses. And eventually also hiring a course manager. Being able to just focus on creation of knowledge and just promotion of what we do.
3) Entering the US market. If you look at our sales, just pure digital sales last year, probably 80% of our market, in terms of our audience, is in Europe, while maybe 50% of sales, digital sales, came from the US. So, definitely, it's a growth market for us. But, when it comes to like group courses, when it comes to one-on-one consulting, we do have US-based clients, but they always say like, āOh, wow. What you guys are doing is so in depth. We never really expected that.ā They're always surprised at the level of detail, at how practical this is, and how effective it is, what we're teaching them, and what we're doing with them. But somehow, they get surprised by it. So in other words, it's not what they expect. And I think there is some perception issues that we might need to solve, or the way that we communicate is just different. There's a lot of competition as well, especially in our space, marketing and sales space, that's probably the most competitive space and the most of the eexperts are US-based and people tend to work with their let's say people from the United States.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) 80/20. So I already spoke a lot about the 80/20. We try to look at 80/20 everywhere. We are already ruthless about, we have inbound leads, like which leads are we going to spend time with? Every week, we disqualify a lot of people who are asking to talk to us. In the way that we prioritize and plan. There's so many ideas. There's so many things that we could be doing, but we spent a lot of time thinking. Thinking about what we should be doing and what are those, let's say, the 20% ofā¦
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May 26, 2022
š¤Ā Jason Bay: Blissful Prospecting, Chief Prospecting Officer
16 minutes with Jason Bay, Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting. āInbound-ish.ā Dial in the content. How to get people to ask for help when they need it. Getting people to take action on what they learn. Regret minimization. Socratic method. Bite-sized content that is immediately actionable. Myself as a bottleneck. How to systemize and get a team around me. What if I'm wrong? Show transcript.
Hereās what Meghann Misiak said about Jason:Jason Bay is someone I work with very closely. He is the king of outbound. He's a great prospecting trainer and he has a program called Outbound Squad. The results speak for themselves. He has a lot of incredible followers and is a great trainer.
āMeghann Misiak, Founder of The Path to Presidentās Club ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Inbound-ish. I teach companies outbound, but I don't do a lot of outbound to get business. I've been fortunate in that regard in the last couple of years that the inbound engine works pretty good, but I still do a form of outbound. I call it āinbound-ishā. The way I look at client acquisition is you have inbound methods on one side and outbound methods on the other side. If you're listening, imagine a piece of paper, youāve got inbound on the left, outbound on the right. What I look at on the inbound side is the organic content that you create. That could be blog posts, stuff on your website. Then there's also guest content, there's third-party content. Getting on guest webinars, guest podcasts, et cetera. What I do is, I try to use those forms of content that I create, whether that be through LinkedIn content or being on someone else's podcast like this or a webinar, and I use that to drive traffic to my website, or if it's a LinkedIn post, I use it to get likes and comments on my LinkedIn post. Then I'll proactively reach out to those people. I'll still do outbound on those. It's just a little bit warmer. That's a really big strategy.
2) Posting daily on LinkedIn. Where I get most of my business from is posting daily on LinkedIn, every weekday, posts, so that people will engage on it. A lot of them are already target market. I'll just reach out to them directly, to set up sales calls. Or to get them in my programs.
3) Partnerships and co-marketing efforts are really big thing that we do and webinars have been huge. We just did a webinar with ZoomInfo last week on cold calls. We got almost 2000 people to sign up for it. Again, I'm building my list at that same time. I'm able to see who reached out and signed up for this webinar. And who can I engage with directly and kind of do this āinbound-ishā, this warm outbound, so that I can get clients.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
Where to start? This one made me think a bit. Dude, running a business is hard. It really is. It's a lot of fun because, for me, I sort of grew up in sales. That was my career. And then I spent two or three years in marketing. But if I had to do a job where I only did sales, or only did marketing, or only did some sort of fulfillment, it would be really boring for me. The thing that makes this hard is also the thing I love about it.
1) Dial in the content. Specifically, we have a client program called Outbound Accelerator. It's six weeks. I'll take companies like Gong or Zoom, whoāve been some of my clients, through a six week accelerator with their team and it's really hands-on, āHow do we outbound?ā What I've really focused on is, how do I reduce the complexity of how I do this so that one, it doesn't drain all of my willpower fulfilling this, but two people get better results and it's just easier for them to do, so I think trying to figure out how can I teach less and say no to more things and really dial in the content and really, really focus on, hey, what are the handful of things? If there was one thing each week, during the two, one-hour training sessions that I needed everyone to take away, what's that one thing? And really distilling it down and simplifying it. It's just been so hard to find those things that will move the needle the most. We completely revamped our course content. Again, a lot of it is, how do we take 10 hours of content and whittle it down to the best two or three hours that's going to get the best results.
2) Figuring out how to systemize and get a team around me to support me. Another thing that's completely unrelated to that is our marketing. Just like you, I have a podcast and what we'll do with our podcasts is that, we'll take that, we'll chop it up into video clips. We'll re-share it on LinkedIn. I'll share it to my email list, getting mileage out of content. It sounds really nice in theory, to be able to re-share it all these places, but you need good systems in place. Otherwise, I end up being the person to spend all the time to do that. Figuring out how to systemize that and get a team around me to support me has been a really hard problem that we recently figured out how to do.
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What are 3 roadblocks that youāre working on right now?
1) Myself as a bottleneck. In terms of roadblocks, me, I've always been the biggest roadblock in the business. I have three virtual assistants that work with me full time. I basically consider them full-timers even though they live in the Philippines, they work with me full-time, and then I have a couple of contractors I use to help with coaching. Those folks don't work with me full-time yet. I ended up being the bottleneck in most of the instances. I just got rid of myself as the bottleneck with marketing. I am trying to get rid of myself as the bottleneck with delivery and coaching and actually executing the trainings. That's a big thing that I'm working through.
2) How to get people to ask for help when they need it. I think engagement is really tough when you have a paid community of people, like in our Outbound Squad program, it's for individual reps. They pay a certain amount of money every month to get group coaching, course content, and then access to a Slack community. We have 85 people in there right now. Getting people to engage in a virtual environment. It's tough. It's something I'm still honestly trying to figure out, how to get people to ask for help when they need it. That's something I'm trying to figure out right now, actually.
3) Getting people to take action on what they learn. I am getting better at that, but this is what I've done the last 14 years, is coach and train salespeople. I'm still learning so much. A guy, Sam Ovens, he runs a company called consulting.com, what he talks about is āeating our customerās complexityā. I thought that was interesting. A small example of that is, if I teach you Chris, āHey, when you make a cold call use a permission based opener, it sounds like this: āHey, Chris, Jason with Blissful Prospecting. I know I probably caught you in the middle of something, but you got a minute for me to tell you why I'm calling and you can let me know if want to keep chatting?ā I could just say that to you. Or what I could do is, I could say that, scripted out on a piece of paper for you, on a document, and then I could share it with you and I can make it easy for you to not have to do any thinking, to take action on it. I think āeating the complexity of my clientsā and spoon-feeding as much as I can, without doing it for them, is something I'm always trying to figure out.
What are 2 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I love that you asked this question. I've only recently gotten into my mental models. There's a really good book, I think it's called Mental Models. There's a couple of volumes that are pretty good.
1) Regret minimization. Most of these I use with my wife, Sarah, when we make decisions, either with the business or financial or career type stufā¦
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May 16, 2022
ā®ļøĀ Katy McFee: Insights to Action, Founder and Principal
15 minutes with Katy McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action. Helping new, aspiring leaders who are stuck in their career get to the executive level. Distractions. Balance. Lack of patience. Work when you work best. Show up as the person who want to be today. Creating focus and intentionality. Do less to do more. Focus on data, structure and process. Ask yourself 3 questions daily: What is the goal? What is the bigger picture? What has been successful in the past?
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Brandon Fluharty said about Katy:Katy McFee, out of Ottawa, Canada. I've recently come across Katy on LinkedIn as of a few months ago, and I've been really impressed with her voice, particularly around empowering other females to step into a leadership role, in a go-to-market role, sales role. She's done it herself. She's done it successfully, and I think it's a really important voice to highlight and put a spotlight on, because I think it's an area that needs improvement in the sales and go-to-market space. Thereās still a male dominated voice in the go-to-market world, and I think bringing diversity is just good for business. Utās the thing to do as human beings, but it's also good for business. So, she's an awesome one to bring onto the show.
āBrandon Fluharty, Founder of Be Focused. Live Great. ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Content. Yeah, so first it'd be content. I post on LinkedIn every day, and that has been probably the biggest source of leads. Just people, inbound leads, based on content that's been posted and interacted with.
2) Free help. I'm going to call it free help. This one was kind of accidental, actually, but there have been times where I've offered a free 15 minute call to help someone work through a negotiation, or a quick chat to help them think through a problem, and lots of those have actually led to deal flow.
3) Community. So, just building a community with like-minded individuals, engaging with their content, getting to know them just in a really genuine, curious way has been really big for creating new connections, people referring individuals. And so those would be my top three.
What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) Getting involved in LinkedIn. The first one actually is related to the first question, which is getting involved in LinkedIn. Posting original content, posting videos, that is something that I have never done, until the end of January. The first time I ever posted an original post, that came from my brain, and I found this very daunting as someone who I'm extroverted, but I'm also shy. It was a big leap for me, to be able to put my ideas out in the world, to record videos of myself and then share them with a whole bunch of people. That was a big one for me to overcome.
2) Creating the focus that I wanted. When I initially decided to launch Insights to Action, my plan was to do a number of different things. I was going to do some sales consulting. I was going to help with business strategy, maybe even some sales training, and then also leadership training. But what ended up happening as I got into it, as I started to really launch the business, is I realized I wanted to niche down a little bit. I wanted to find my sweet spot, my passion, and really devote myself to that. What I ended up coming to was working with aspiring leaders, new leaders, who were kind of stuck in their career, and especially women, who are trying to get to the executive level, and who are hitting barriers, and who are having trouble getting to that next level. That is now the sole focus of my business.
3) Managing my time as a solopreneur. That's something that's new to me as well. I'm managing a number of different clients at once, a number of different types of activities. Just having to manage that sheer volume of different types of tasks, I found a little bit challenging. What I've done for that is just simply color-coding my calendar. It sounds really simple, but I have different color-coding for various different types of activities. It's really effective for letting me know where I'm spending my time. Am I spending too much time in a certain area? How can I be more efficient that way?
What are 3 roadblocks that youāre working on now?
Good question.
1) Distractions. First one, I'm going to call distractions. Again, this ties into me creating a focus for my business. I get a lot of interest and inquiries for things that are outside of my mission and outside of my vision. Forcing myself to say no to those things, because they can eat up a lot of time. I've noticed that sometimes I slip up and say yes, and then I regret that. So that's one. I'm still working on it every day.
2) Balance. I am big on the anti-hustle thing. I believe that you can be a strong salesperson, be a strong leader, be a strong entrepreneur, and still maintain that balance in your life. For me, though, that is, again, something that I continuously have to work towards and remind myself why I'm doing this and what's important to me in life. I'm getting much better at protecting my time and creating healthy boundaries.
3) Lack of patience. I tend to want to be like 20 steps ahead. Just enjoying the journey, and this is something I talk about too, and I post about this, it's taking my own advice and really embracing the journey and not worrying about where I'm going to be one year, two years, five years from now.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
I love this question.
1) Work when you work best. By that, I mean, understanding yourself, knowing what types of tasks, maybe you find more mentally draining, and when you do your best work. For me, I schedule flow tasks in the morning. So, when I want to be creative, maybe I want to write content, maybe I want to work on a presentation or my website, I try to do those things in the morning, because I know that I am mentally sharpest in the morning. If I leave those things for the end of the day, then I'm going to really struggle to create quality work.
2) Intentionality. This is something I talk about, whether it's in your life, whether it's as a leader, whether it's as a business owner. Being really intentional about how you spend your time, how you communicate with people, what you're prioritizing, and keeping that end goal in mind. To me, being outcome-driven, and being intentional, are very closely linked. Intentionality is something that I really apply across all areas of my life.
3) Future continuity. What that means is showing up as the person you want to be, or the leader you want to be, today. I think that's a really powerful mental model that you can use, really to connect your future vision, or your future state, with where you are now.
What are 3 techniques that GTM teams need to try?
Three techniques that go-to-market teams needs to try:
1) Do less to do more. One thing that I'm really big on with respect to, especially to sales teams, or really to anyone, is ādo less to do more.ā So, really understanding what activities are going to move the needle, and focusing time and resources on those activities. I think that's really important because especially in the SaaS space, there's always a lot happening. I've been part of hyper-growth companies, and there's oftentimes 15 competing priorities. I always would ask my team, āWhat's going to move the needle? What's the one thing that's going to move the needle?ā That's number one.
2) Data focused. Second thing I'm big on is, and this might not be something that's new for people to try, but really becoming data focused. This is still something that I see with companies that I work with, where they want to scale their sales org, and yet, they don't have a handle on what their core sales metrics are yet. So, becoming really data focused, as early as possible. Understanding what your core sales metricsā¦
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May 13, 2022
š®Ā George Valdes: Monograph, Head of Marketing
18 minutes with George Valdes, Head of Marketing at Monograph. Donāt be afraid to challenge your market. Ask, āWhy do you think it needs to be this way?ā Starting the community. Hire subject matter experts who understand the memes and inside jokes of the industry. A lot of those inside jokes are coming from pain. When you understand the memes of the industry, you can probably create your own. Identifying blockers. Move fast and playbook things. Irreversible and reversible decisions. Building an exceptional brand. Enabling workflows for architects.
18 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Enable workflows to happen for architects and design professionals. First off, it's helpful to set the context that we service architects, or in the broader sense, design professionals. So essentially, everyone that is part of the pre-construction process, you can think of the construction process being mostly general contractors, we're really trying to enable workflows to happen for that group of people.
2) A very simple pricing structure. In terms of them how we convert the market into revenue, we have a very simple pricing structure that's on a per user basis at this point. We mostly target the largest segment of the industry, which is the SMB market, so small-medium sized businesses. Anywhere between 1-person firms all the way up to around 60-person firms. In the US and in Canada. So, we're very specific. We're really honed in on this market because we feel that this is where the most underserved area of the industry. That's the main lever.
3) Building an exceptional brand. Part of our go-to-market strategy is building an exceptional brand because we get to speak to such a specific audience. A lot of our team comes from the industry, I myself have a background in landscape architecture and architecture, we're able to speak specifically to the pain points that the industry has, with an authentic bent. We're very authentic in our own experiences. We're able to connect with people, even on an emotional level, which I think is very unique, and very special, about what we're doing here.
What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?
1) One that's always very difficult to pull off is a user conference. We did our second user conference, called Section Cut, about a month ago. It's hard because it's so many different moving parts, but we have a really amazing team here that was able to work asynchronously, autonomously, and in many different ways, while collaborating, at the same time, to execute an amazing show for our customers and our broader community. So I think thatās one. It's almost like two in one because it's just such a difficult endeavor to pull off.
2) Finding the right person to join our leadership team. The other thing that's been difficult, that we've been able to accomplish recently, is we have now a full leadership team. I think this is important. Robert, up until recently, our CEO, was really heading up sales, and I think we now have a team in place, with our new head of sales, that's going to allow us to really focus in and solve even harder challenges as we move forward. I think that one, just finding the right person. Why it's difficult, Iād say, is because we have a very unique culture here at Monograph. We operate, not only remotely, fully remote, but we also have a 4 day work week. And so, finding a leader that can resonate with that, as part of the challenge of operating the sales team, was really important to us, alongside the fact that, culturally, they had to really be a good culture fit, and a good addition to the team.
What are 3 roadblocks you are working on now?
1) Splitting the funnel from a āfree trialā motion to a ābook a demo.ā We're actually going to shift, not fully, our GTM, but mostly. It's an interesting balance. We're basically going to be splitting the funnel from a free trial motion to a book a demo. The reason for this is that we're seeing higher conversions on booking demos at the moment. So, one of the things that we're doing is essentially pre-qualifying through our website folks, and then routing them appropriately to a free trial of they're out of, let's say, our ICP, or ideal customer profile, and then routing them to booking a demo. This is a whole cross-functional motion that we have to be fully aligned on in order to make it work. And so I'd say this is one of the biggest challenges.
2) Weāve recently adopted an OKR model, and the team has various levels of experiences with this. And so, it's making sure we're building the right cadences to be able to move the needle on these OKRs in a way that gets everyone rowing in the same direction.
3) How to tease out the nuances of our product to the market? We've done an exceptional job of building a great brand, and one of the things that we're working on now is how to tease out more so of our products, like the nuances of our product, to the market. Thatās a piece that's really top of mind for me, that I feel very confident we can crack, because we have an exceptional team in place now on the marketing team that can help pull that all together. But, it is one of those things where, as we've been building out more differentiation in our a product, we want to continuously make sure we're having that differentiation to the community.
What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?
1) Irreversible and reversible decisions. I like this idea, borrowed from Amazon, of, āThere are two types of decisions; irreversible ones and reversible ones.ā Or like, āThere's two types of doors; one-way doors and two-way doors." I learned this a lot during my time at WeWork, about the importance of being able to move quickly with relatively little information. This was actually a very helpful mental model to decide on how fast to move on something. Obviously, depending on the budget of the things that you're working on, in my case, I was working with a project that any one location that I was helping to open up was, for pre-sales, about a million dollars in budget. Thinking about the trade-offs of that, and just communicating that, was really important. But also factoring in, āOkay. Who do I need to bring in, and how quickly?ā Also, making it very clear for them whether this was something that we need to move slow on or be quick on.
2) Move fast and playbook things. We use this one here at Monograph: move fast and playbook things. It's about the idea that we should do things that don't scale at first in order to understand whether they work, as quickly as possible, meaning that you're always going to make the trade off between quality and just execution. If you can narrow your hypothesis down on what you're trying to examine, and you can make that trade-off on quality, because it's not going to impact the actual answer you're looking for. So as a really clear example, let's say you want to know whether a specific channel, or a specific form of content, might work. You could spend the time belaboring on like how perfect that piece of content is, or you could really just answer the first question, which is like, āDoes this new asset work in the wild, period?ā And then, as you start to learn from that, then you might optimize on quality later, while also thinking about scalability, which resonates with the playbook part, of playbooking it. That was also something learned really hard during my time at WeWork. Building things up to a point where it can help other people who are blocked, because it you would just be able to move quickly.
3) Identifying blockers. It kind of ties everything else, but it's like, āCan you identify the magnitude of the problem, and whether it's really a problem?ā Because sometimes, and I use this with my team sometimes to help them think through a challenge that they might have, sometimes people feel that the scope ofā¦
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May 12, 2022
š¤Ā Matt Baxter: Bestow, Director of Product Management
Hereās what Andrew Miller said about Matt:Matt Baxter. He's currently a Director of Product at Bestow, where I worked before Monograph, and he's just a great product leader. He was taking a brand new business unit to market when I was on my way out, and it was a huge project, and it was just so much fun to watch Matt do his work. I know heād have tons of interesting details to share about the go-to-market challenges that he faced.
āAndrew Miller, Senior Growth Product Manager at Monograph ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
The three ways that I thought of really all revolve around making life insurance more accessible for people.
1) For individuals, life insurance is typically a multi-week long process that requires some doctor's visits. And so it's a really big barrier for people to actually go and acquire it. And so our platform cuts that down to just a couple of minutes and basically an instant decision. So that's one kind of with dā¦
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May 11, 2022
š„ Kristi Faltorusso: ClientSuccess, Chief Customer Officer
Achieving your customer's business outcomes. Develop advocates. If your renewal was up today, would you renew? Solving for in-person events again. Design your customer maturation model. Onboarding 2.0. Introducing automation. Confirmation bias. Inversion. 80/20 principal. Figure out your balance between capturing wallet share of your customer base and new logo acquisition.
Hereās what Sean MacPherson said about Kristi:Kristi Faltorusso. Someone I don't know personally, but I feel like I know her personally because she gives so much back to the CS community through sharing her playbooks, is Kristi Faltorusso over at ClientSuccess. Her focus on showcasing how customer success is a revenue driver and how CS leaders can get to the level of other leaders in an organization is spot on. She's given back so much to the CS community and leveled up so many leaders in the last several years. And honestly, she's one of the top CS leaders in revenue operators out there!
āSean MacPherson, VP, Cā¦
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May 10, 2022
š¤ÆĀ Daniel Cmejla: Chili Piper, Director of Partnerships, Community & Social Media
Market through your customers. A bad-ass, true social media presence. Your customers are on social? You're on social. Fire your social media consultant and stop producing super basic boring stuff. Nobody wants that corporate version of you. They want an authentic version of you. Invest in community. Dark funnel. Customer referrals and user-generated content. Theory of leverage. Self-determination theory. Emotional withdrawals and deposits. Building a customer advisory board. Read Robert Cialdini's book, Influence.
Hereās what Arthur Castillo said about Dan:High leverage principles. I was taught this by my manager, Dan, as I moved into Marketing. So in trying to explain it, a high leverage activity is maybe something that you create once, a system or a process, and that you can reuse it. So we're not starting from scratch. Whereas a low leverage activity will be, I'm doing it once, so I'm having to recreate it from scratch. I'm really not building any systems or processes. So it's heā¦
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May 9, 2022
š¦¾ Shri Apte: Triplebyte, VP Revenue
23 minutes with Shri Apte, VP Revenue at Triplebyte. Starting from the outcome. MECE frameworks. Bias to action. Heavily dogfooding your product. Marketing from a position of expertise Overcoming barbell distribution in the performance of different account executives. Understanding what drives renewals. Marketing two separate products. Consistent messaging and keeping cohesion. Driving cross-product upsells.
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Patrick Coleman said about Shri:Shri Apte. VP of Revenue at TripleByte. Great guy and TripleByte is a fantastic business. Weāre big fans of really anybody operating in the space to make it easier for more people to get jobs in coding and realize the benefits of the internet economy. Big, big fans.
āPatrick Coleman, VP of Growth at Replit ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
1) Inbound traffic. The first way that constitutes a good portion of our revenue is inbound traā¦
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May 7, 2022
š„Ā Dani Woolf: Cybersixgill, Director of Demand Generation
Meet Dani Woolf, Director of Demand Generation at Cybersixgill. If you focus on the mission, you will make the money. Go talk to your buyer. Pick up the phone. Start building relationships with your buyer. Get out of the echo chamber right now. Do yourself a favor. You owe it to the world to unmute your mic. Becoming more technically literate to geek out with your buyers. Getting the team to simplify, then simplify again. The order in which you do things matters. Parkinsonās law of triviality.
16 Insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Ryan Paul Gibson said about Dani:Dani Woolf. Dani is Director of Demand Generation for a cybersecurity company. I like her because I can tell we align with our philosophies on things around demand, which is you can't just ram a product into someone's face and expect them to think that they'll buy it, because that's not how B2B works. People just don't wake up and want to buy a solution. There's a process they go through of deā¦
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May 6, 2022
āļøĀ Antoine Buteau: Replit, Business Operations
9 minutes with Antoine Buteau, Business Operations at Replit. Balancing scale and experimentation. The risk of becoming too data-driven and copying playbooks from other companies. Growth attribution. Why Product Market Fit isn't enough. The importance of integrity. Pricing is an underrated lever. The Bowling Alley Framework to make sure users activate. Productivity and knowledge managment. Hiring. International GTM.
20 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Patrick Coleman said about Antoine:Antoine Buteau. I want to give a shout out to Antoine Buteau on my team who leads BizOps for us. Just super sharp. Started his career as an engineer and then was a strategy consultant for software businesses. Just a brilliant go-to-market operator.
āPatrick Coleman, VP of Growth at Replit ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Patrick covered our plans in a previous podcast so I won't repeat what he said. Our go-to-market motionā¦
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May 5, 2022
š Brandon Fluharty: Founder of Be Focused. Live Great.
Meet Brandon Fluharty, Founder of Be Focused. Live Great. The concept of a personal operating system. Transformations over transactions. Thinking bigger with prospects. Staying committed to long-term thinking. Overcoming imposter syndrome. Level up your environment. Leveling up tools. Thinking like a designer. Discipline, flexibility, curiosity.
22 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Mehann Misiak said about Brandon:Brandon Fluharty is one of my favorites. He is actually a million-dollar seller, which is like a huge goal for a lot of people. Just released an incredible e-book that talks about a lot of the things I mentioned in terms of not doing more, but doing better, and really aligning habits with your big P purpose, forming, and bringing in, a lot of strategies that will help you get there.
āMeghann Misiak, Founder of The Path to Presidentās Club
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Content, community, and connectionā¦
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May 4, 2022
āÆļøĀ Meghann Misiak: The Path to Presidentās Club, Founder
Meet Meghann Misiak, Founder of The Path to Presidentās Club. What motivates you? The why. Starting a company is like staring all of your weaknesses in the face, or in the mirror, on a daily basis. Leveling up. Radical transparency. Make it okay to talk through the challenges transparently. Quick wins, dream clients and exploratory projects. Learning to not do it all. Being able to say no.
21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Leslie Venetz said about Meghann:Meghann Misiak. Do you know Meghann Misiak? She's incredible. I would highly recommend her. Absolute badass women in sales or founders in that ecosystem. Thatās who I would recommend.
āLeslie Venetz, Founder of Sales Team Builder ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
I love this question, and it definitely blew my mind in the beginning, because I had never been asked this. I think you could approach this question in a few different ways. I think of it aā¦
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May 3, 2022
šĀ Ryan Paul Gibson: Content Lift, Founder
Meet with Ryan Paul Gibson, Founder of Content Lift. Asking questions. Why? Why and how do people buy? After you decided on wanting to solve a problem, what did you do next? What made you trust X? Where to fit in the marketing landscape. Networking. Jobs to Be Done. Transcribe and go over everything again. Jump on calls with other peers.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what MJ Peters said about Ryan:Ryan Paul Gibson. He owns a company called Content Lift and he helps companies interview their customers. So he is an expert on that marketing discovery call and heās worked with lots of companies on their go-to-market strategy. Bet you he has some super interesting techniques that other GTM leaders should apply. āMJ Peters, VP of Marketing at CoLab Software ā [Listen](<https://market-to-revenue.com/mj-peters-colab-software-vp-marketing>)
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
So my market, right? Like how I go about it? Beā¦
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May 2, 2022
šĀ Jacob Gebrewold: Klue, Commercial Account Executive
Meet Jacob Gebrewold, Commercial Account Executive at Klue. Consistently educating. Having a relentless focus on educating your market like you're creating a category. Referrals. Happy clients are the best sales team you could possibly ask for. Building a dope competitive enablement function and a killer Customer Success team. Asking: Who do I need to express care to right now? Whatās on your mind? How can I help?
19 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Arthur Castillo said about Jacob:Jacob Gebrewold. From Klue. He's new to the software SaaS space, and he's absolutely crushing it as an AE. I think he's a very unique content creator, and he understands how to stand up from crowd but also have buying conversations that engage his prospects, which by the way, are Product Marketers, and he's never been a Product Marketer. I think he's really changing the game from that perspective.
āArthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Pā¦
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Apr 28, 2022
šĀ Sidney Waterfall: Refine Labs, VP of Demand Generation
Meet Sidney Waterfall, VP of Demand at Refine Labs. A go-to-market measurement system. Standardizing key metrics for success. Creating demand through content from subject-matter experts. Dark social. Removing friction for buyers. Route high intent leads directly to subject-matter experts or your best people. Funnel analysis. Habits and structure. GSD Time. Asking, āHow does this work?ā
22 Insights Ā· 7 Questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Sam Kuehnle said about Sidney:Sidney Waterfall. She's another VP of Demand here at Refine Labs. The reason that I love working with her is that she's rewriting the playbook for marketing measurement and how to report out on it so that marketers have a seat at the executive table. So, helping marketers just be more informed from operations standpoint, how to report effectively on revenue and how marketing is truly impacting the bottom line.
āSam Kuehnle, VP of Demand Generation at Refine Labs ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team convā¦
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Apr 17, 2022
š¤ Sam Kuehnle: Refine Labs, VP of Demand Generation
Meet Sam Kuehnle, VP of Demand Generation at Refine Labs. Today's buyers are very savvy. Talk to your customers more. Stay close to platforms. Seeing from the front. Staying at the cutting edge. Going against the grain. Running a win-loss analysis regularly. Focusing less on the competition. Attracting top talent. Positive word of mouth. Helping customers get unstuck in their growth and achieve their revenue goals.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Carl Ferreira said about Sam:Sam Kuehnle. Heās a friend as well and a colleague. Just a world-class marketer. Bright, bright thinker. Extremely thoughtful. You're going to get way better answers from him than from me on some of these things. He strikes me as the type of guy who probably has some baked-out mental models. He's just a really, really bright marketing leader and does some fantastic work for our team and for our customers. āCarl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs ā Listen
What areā¦
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Apr 16, 2022
šĀ Andrew Miller: Monograph, Senior Growth Product Manager
Meet Andrew Miller, Senior Growth Product Manager at Monograph. Do your research. Deeply understand how your customers make money. Run lots of tests. Trying to understand user behavior. Double diamond model. The rugged landscape model. Feedback loops. AB testing. Fake door tests. Aligning continuous delivery on the engineering side with go-to market.
13 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
As a product manager, a lot of my work is situated sometimes a little bit upstream from GTM. My teams tend to be made up of designers and engineers, and I do work closely with sales, marketing, and CX more on the GTM side. Itās a huge part of my job to ensure that we're building the right things so that we can take those to market and convert them into revenue.
* Do your research. Part of that process, to start, do your research. It's important to have confidence in what you're building and feeling confident thatā¦
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Apr 15, 2022
š Darren McKee: Wellthy, Director of Growth
Meet Darren McKee, Director of Growth at Wellthy. Sunday Nights. Social selling. Telling stories. Converting in-person energy to online calls. The power of coaching. Creating a great experience. People talk and people start to see. Understanding and being content with where I am.
16 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Jen Allen said about Darren:Darren McKee. He used to be at BetterUp. He just moved over to an organization called Wellthy. Darren is someone that I think is a great example of someone who is very active on social, but productively. He's not active saying like, āThis is why our solution is the best.ā He starts really smart conversations that relate back to what he sells. I think he embodies a lot of the characteristics I think sellers should be thinking about today. āJen Allen, Chief Evangelist at Challenger ā Listen
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
Yeah, that's a great question. For us, when we thinā¦
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Apr 14, 2022
šĀ Sean MacPherson: Alyce, VP of Customer Success & Experience
Meet Sean MacPherson, VP, Customer Success & Experience at Alyce. Lead with telling your customer stories. Customer-facing expertise. What will lead to the most impact for our customers? Ruthlessly prioritizing. The upsell flywheel. The scientific method. Constantly testing and iterating on things. Being comfortable with failure.
17 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.
Hereās what Stuart Balcombe said about Sean:Sean MacPherson over at Alyce. VP of Success there. Came from Drift. He has a really great perspective from a success point of view. What does it mean to build a go-to-market model that really makes customers successful? You probably talk to most people from early Drift days, but how do you tie your go-to-market motion with building a brand that is self-sustaining, and that is not just about the one-to-one things that you're doing, but actually rolls up into something much bigger? āStuart Balcombe, Product Marketer at Arrows ā Listen
What are 3 ways thatā¦
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Apr 13, 2022
šĀ MJ Peters: CoLab Software, VP of Marketing
Meet MJ Peters, VP of Marketing of CoLab Software. Understand your customer's job. Figuring out where to start. The marketing discovery call. Establishing credibility in a new role. Time management. Habit stacking. LinkedIn and Twitter organic as a recruiting tactic. Prioritize the segments of the market that are going to be easy to convert to revenue.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript.
Hereās what Carl Ferreira said about MJ:MJ Peters. Gosh what to say? MJ was my boss here at Refine Labs and she is a VP of Marketing now at another awesome tech startup. MJ is one of these marketers that will be a CRO or CEO one day. She closed millions of dollars in business at Refine Labs and is probably one of the most sought-after marketers in B2B SaaS today. Think about how dynamic of a person you have to be to be a world-class marketer and be able to close half a million dollar deals and just knock them down. Just a genius. She really is just brilliant and you definitelyā¦
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Apr 11, 2022
š Patrick Coleman: Replit, VP of Growth
Meet Patrick Coleman, VP of Growth at Replit. Bias to action. Seek pain. The best way to keep up as the market evolves? Be a perpetual beginner. Start with pricing. Know your persona. Let users realize some of the value before you ask them to pay, but still run a go-to-market motion. Freemium and product-led growth models.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript here.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
* Today, we're making money from individuals and businesses via our Hacker and Pro plans.
* We recently made our education product free so we can help every student around the world learning to code. The idea behind that was part of our mission to bring the next billion coders online. It's really important to us to be able to make Replit the default entry-to-programming experience. There are so many people around the world without access to expensive computers and powerful systems, and we just want to help every student and teacherā¦
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Apr 10, 2022
š¶ Arthur Castillo: Chili Piper, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community
15 minutes with Arthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper. Turn champions into raving fans. High leverage principles. A sales rep that broke into marketing. Bypass the SDR qualification. 83% show rates on first inbound meetings. Keep your brain activity as fresh as possible. Scaling the team and delegating. Ask about āwhere they're trying to get to.ā
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript here.
Hereās what Carl Ferreira said about Arthur:Arthur Castillo. Over at Chili Piper. They're a great team. We're a customer. Arthur is a dear friend and he just has such a unique perspective. He actually comes from sales and now is in marketing. So he's a fantastic resource. He really understands the entire revenue org, the entire customer journey, and is a big, big resource there for thinking innovatively about how those two teams can work together.
āCarl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs ā listen
What are 3 ways your teamā¦
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Apr 3, 2022
š¤© Leslie Venetz: Sales Team Builder, Founder
Meet Leslie Venetz, Founder at Sales Team Builder. Make it about your buyer. Focus very heavily on referrals. Show up authentically to your community and to your market. Clarity about your ICP: it's not good enough to talk about everybody that could potentially buy. We really need to talk about who is most likely to buy immediately, at the highest price points, and renew, and be nice to work with, et cetera, et cetera.
17 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript here.
Hereās what Jen Allen said about Leslie:Leslie Venetz. For those of you that don't know her, she was one of the earlier salespeople to get on TikTok. And I know TikTok, in many ways, is perceived as not relevant for B2B. But, she's a amassed a really big following. Some of the themes that Leslie touches on are things like women in sales, and diversity in sales, and how you show up and be your authentic self in sales, and just conversations that I think, as a result of COVID, as a result of like a deeper aā¦
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Mar 10, 2022
šÆ Stuart Balcombe: Arrows, Product Marketer
Meet Stuart Balcombe, Product Marketer at Arrows. Shifting the pricing model, shifting the ideal customer profile, shifting the positioning, and then aligning. How to use Charlie Munger's inversion, the Cupcake model, and guardrails. Go talk to more customers, repurpose absolutely everything, and look for ways to create proprietary insight.
19 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. View the transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
We have two motions. We have a relatively normal split. We have some inbound and we have some more outbound strategies.
1) Our outbound is a little more interesting to talk about. We use the Happy Customers podcast pretty specifically to have targeted conversations with folks. It is a more top of funnel marketing channel for us. But, we use that pretty specifically to 1) identify and have conversations with ideal accounts that we think should buy Arrows, but 2) we also use it as a research tool to really understand, what arā¦
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Mar 9, 2022
š¤ Jen Allen: Challenger, Chief Evangelist
Meet Jen Allen, Chief Evangelist at Challenger. Lack of leads? Lack of buyer alignment? Teach where prospects go to learn. When you are teaching in those spaces, don't teach the solution. Once you've won over someone on that message (they look at the problem the same way you do) make sure you don't fall short at the goal line by just assuming that they'll be able to socialize the problem inside of their business in the way that you would.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. View the transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
* Teach where prospects go to learn. What I mean by that is: instead of just relying on the traditional sales process to hopefully find someone who's ready to buy, figure out where your customers go to learn, with or without you, and make sure you've got a message there.
* When you are teaching in those spaces, don't teach the solution. Teach your interpretation of why the problem exists and alternatives to solving thatā¦
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Feb 27, 2022
š§ Carl Ferreira: Refine Labs, Director of Sales
Meet Carl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs. How community-driven content, a commitment-based sales process, and delivering on promises drives 100% revenue at Chris Walker's Refine Labs. Ask yourself, if you're a sales team or a marketing team, ādo I sell in the way that I like to be sold to? Or do I market it in a way that I actually buy technology?ā
17 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript here.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
* Community-driven content. One of the biggest ways that we convert our market into revenue is community-driven content. I think āthought leadershipā is the old way to describe that. We found that thought leadership was very āusā centered. It was like, āme, I'm the thought leader.ā It didn't have this sense of community. Thinking about content, and distributing it, in a way like, āhey, does this provide value, but also create some kind of a communal experience for our fans, or ouā¦
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Feb 26, 2022
š§Ŗ Mark Znutas: Hubspot, VP of GTM Strategy and Operations
Meet Mark Znutas, Vice President of GTM Strategy and Operations at Hubspot. The 3 go-to-market motions that drive revenue at Hubspot. Getting people aligned on strategy at different time horizons. Why Mark is focused on scale now. How to use the scientific method. Adding value before extracting value through product-led growth.
18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript.
What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?
I think we actually have exactly three ways of converting our market into revenue:
1) Through a direct sales team. We have an inside sales go-to-market model, driven predominantly through volume of customers. We have over 150,000 customers at HubSpot.
2) Through our partner channels. Our partner channel converts our market to revenue by reselling HubSpot software, and then also providing services to a growing ecosystem of HubSpot prospects and customers.
3) The newest channel that we have at HubSpot is our product team. So we have aboā¦
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