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Welcome to the Revenue Rebels podcast, hosted by Alan Zhao, Co-Founder of Warmly.ai.
We feature B2B SaaS revenue leaders who have challenged traditional methods to achieve remarkable results.
In each episode we cut through the fluff and dive deep into modern tactics used to achieve success: intent-based outreach, social selling, B2B Netflix, video marketing, warm calling, customer led sales, influencer marketing and more.
On the show you can expect episodes with those who create demand - marketing experts, partnerships gurus and social media superstars and those who capture demand - outbound and inbound sales experts, leaders, and practitioners.
Our goal is to shine a light on modern, effective and unique revenue generating methods and equip you with the insights you need to unlock your next strategic advantage.
We're huge proponents of signal-based selling and signal-based, data-driven B2B go-to-market as a whole. Ask us what "Autonomous Revenue Orchestration" means and we'll be more than happy to shine a light on our vision of what the field of B2B revenue will become.
For more content, check out our YouTube page and LinkedIn newsletter!
Phil Carpenter: [00:00:00] Well, what if you made something like Google, but just for travel and over the course of several years, we built a big business and a big brand around that idea and ultimately sold that to kayak for 200 million to get there when there's good work that's been done on the product. When maybe there's been some early sales work, but there's no marketing, right?
Phil Carpenter: I like to enter pretty darn early. Um, because if you do that, then you can really own that process of defining. How do we talk about ourselves? How are we going to be different from others? Um, and then, you know, beginning to push this thing out into the market and listen to the feedback, like listen to what the market tells you.
Phil Carpenter: Right. Cause you might have industry analysts who, for example, just say like, that's BS, like, I don't, I don't believe it. And here's why. And look, you know, that's one voice and, you know, take it for just that. It's one [00:01:00] voice, but, but those people can be really smart. They sit in the middle of sort of everything that the honeybees in the industry, you know, they go from flower to flower to flower.
Phil Carpenter: So listen.
Alan Zhao: All right. Really excited about this one today. We have on here, Phil Carpenter, who is the CMO of Alice technologies. The world's first AI construction project, planning, scheduling, and managing platform that is disrupting the 12 trillion construction industry by saving customers millions of dollars and giving them weeks of planning time back.
Alan Zhao: It seems like an ambitious goal, but Phil is no stranger to disruption through category creation. He's had big exits doing this in the past. I first heard about Phil reading the book, play bigger. Which is some would say the book around category creation and how to dominate the market. It's the playbook that Warmly uses, and I'm curious to hear more about Phil's thoughts on it today.
Alan Zhao: Welcome, Phil. Thank you very much. All right, so [00:02:00] let's get a quick background on you and the companies you help to do category creation for.
Phil Carpenter: You bet. So I'm currently the CMO of a company called Alice Technologies, which is in the construction technology space. And we are specifically focused on an area that I'll describe in greater detail called construction optioneering.
Phil Carpenter: Uh, and, and we work with very, very large, uh, general contractors and owners, principally in the, uh, industrial, uh, and infrastructure segments of construction. Uh, so that's, that's one area. Uh, and then the second, which was earlier in my career was in the B2C space. And some colleagues and I created what was the very first travel search engine at the time.
Phil Carpenter: It was a company called Sidestep. There literally was no such thing as, as travel search until we sort of scratched our heads and thought, Well, what if you [00:03:00] made something like Google, but just for travel? And over the course of several years, we built Uh, a big business and a big brand around that idea and ultimately sold that to kayak for 200 million on both cases.
Phil Carpenter: You know, we were creating categories from scratch and as a marketing guy for me, that's really fun. Intellectually, it's my Super Bowl, right? Uh, if you, if you can do that, there's a ton of value in it. And I felt really grateful that I had the opportunity to do that once. Yeah. Little did I know I would have a chance to do it for a second time in my career, and I find it really fulfilling.
Alan Zhao: Yeah. The first time it was a consumer, this time it's in B2B, a little bit different, but the same ambitious play. And it's just, it's so cool to, to take on the giants, to basically. Make something happen from nothing. Solve some of the most nebulous problems. Do what no one else can do. It's really exciting stuff.
Phil Carpenter: Yeah. Yes, indeed.
Alan Zhao: [00:04:00] So, what do people need to know about category creation? We can start there.
Phil Carpenter: First of all, that it's hard and takes time. Right? You know, this is definitely a room wasn't built in a day moment. Uh, And it's, it's hard for so many reasons. Um, one, because, you know, you're carving out white space in a market.
Phil Carpenter: That's often busy with other, you know, other players doing other things. And you're trying, you're trying to define an area of play that is new and different, and then communicate to the market what that is and why it is valuable. So there's, there's sort of an intellectual exercise. You know, that you have to go through first, which is again, defining what is this sector.
Phil Carpenter: And how am I going to talk about it in a way that people will understand? And then the next piece of it is it's very execution focused. It's getting out there and [00:05:00] evangelizing this new segment and helping people understand again, you know, what is it, why does it matter to, to me? Um, and, and, and how will I, uh, how I participate in this segment?
Phil Carpenter: Um, so it's, again, it is hard and it takes time. Um, But it can be
Alan Zhao: incredibly rewarding. And what, what are some of the benefits of the category of creators or the category of Kings?
Phil Carpenter: Well, I mean, the brilliant thing about being a category creator is you go first, right? So you get to define the field of play and then, you know, kind of advance your argument and help people understand why it's important.
Phil Carpenter: And you have the opportunity to stay ahead of the pack. It's a bit like running a relay race. Yeah. And having, you know, a 32nd advantage, boom, you know, you're off the blocks. You're out there. You're spreading down the track and it's going to be a while before others. Catch on to what you're doing, but if it's valuable, [00:06:00] they will catch on and they will follow, but guess what?
Phil Carpenter: You know you're ahead now. It's on you to maintain that leadership It's not an easy thing to do, but but if you can and if you can just keep sprinting ultimately the the value of the The entity that you create can be quite high.
Alan Zhao: Then you create the flywheel, the brand starts growing. All of your supporters start talking about you.
Alan Zhao: They align themselves to you. I think I read the statistic. It was like 71 percent of the market cap. Of the category goes to the category King and then second, third, or fourth and et cetera, are fighting for the rest. So definitely huge benefits here. Um, let's, let's dive into the two pieces that you mentioned, which is defining the category and getting the messaging, right.
Alan Zhao: And then we'll talk about the second piece later, but how to communicate the category. So maybe we can go through some of your examples in the past. How did you define the category?
Phil Carpenter: So we'll start with the one I think that will be really easy for folks to understand, and that's this idea [00:07:00] of a travel search engine.
Phil Carpenter: Um, back when we first did this, you know, there were generic search engines, right? And, and, you know, before. Google, there was Yahoo and AltaVista and, and, you know, many, many others InfoSeek right in the early, early days of, of search engines. But there was no such thing as a vertical search engine, you know, no search engine for jobs, no search engine for travel.
Phil Carpenter: Um, it was generic search, right? So, so conceptually there was this category creation idea of like, okay, well, what if we could, we could do search just within a, uh, within a, within a segment. And, and we had based this company on core technology that was really distinctive. Uh, it was, it enabled basically the engine to go out and capture information that was inherently very fluid.
Phil Carpenter: So if you look at the availability and pricing of things like airline tickets or hotel [00:08:00] rooms. You know, they change all the time, particularly in air, right? So if you can look at many different places and capture that information and bring it together and hold it for long enough to consumer, for a consumer to take action.
Phil Carpenter: That's very distinctive, right? And there was nothing like that at the, at the time. So, so, you know, it took, it took some thought to look at, well, great, we've got this core technology where we could, we apply it and, and, you know, travel was absolutely just screaming at us. To, to begin there because of the, the nature of the, the underlying information and, and then kind of paint the picture of, you know, the advantages, uh, that go, that go with that.
Alan Zhao: Did you come up with the process of category creation or was that something that you're formulating as you go? Like we should probably make some noise around this new topic, this new thing. We're going to call it a category without having a name for it.
Phil Carpenter: Yeah, [00:09:00] no, I, I didn't come up with this, with this category creation concept.
Phil Carpenter: It existed, you know, long before I, I executed in it. And look, people do it all the time in other segments as well. You know, they could do it in food and bed, they could do it in consumer goods. Uh, so they're, they can do it in services, right? So there, there are lots of different examples of people doing similar things.
Phil Carpenter: Um, but you know, I happen to put it to, to work in two really different areas. Alan, as you said, I mean, you know, B2C, B2B, they can be often different. And yet the tools that you use. To make the magic happen happen or are in fact, um, pretty similar.
Alan Zhao: Awesome. Okay. So now that you have the right message for this new travel category.
Alan Zhao: For Google search travel. How did you get the message out there? What was the process, the people that you had to put in place, the time horizon, the planning can just start from the beginning.
Phil Carpenter: Yeah. So look, our, [00:10:00] our feeling was we needed to get kind of the rest of the world excited about what we were doing, uh, and, and particularly influencers, right?
Phil Carpenter: Now this is sort of early days of social media. But traditional journalists at that time were, you know, really influential. And, you know, so I remember when we launched, you know, we had gone, gone out and literally done, you know, face to face meetings with the Washington post and USA today and, and all of the other kind of big and influential publications of the time that we're going to reach lots and lots of consumers.
Phil Carpenter: And we sat down next to them and we showed them what we did. It's. And we compared it side by side against Expedia. Um, and, and they were stunned, you know, they were stunned at the differences that you would see when you search, you know, hundreds of websites for travel deals all at once. As opposed to just, just something, you know, just, just [00:11:00] one, one source.
Phil Carpenter: And we even, we made this super clear within the product by, uh, adding a feature to it that, um, automatically opened alongside. Competitive sites like Travelocity or Expedia or Orbitz. When you were searching, you would install this little piece of software. And then when you were hunting for travel, it would, it would compete for you.
Phil Carpenter: And it was like that old, you know, uh, soft drink process, the Pepsi challenge, where it would go side by side, right against something like Expedia. And, you know, you'd see like, Holy smokes. Like I can get tickets to Paris for a hundred dollars less per ticket. If my family of four is traveling there, I'm saving 400 bucks.
Phil Carpenter: Like that's. That's non trivial, right? Why, why I should buy a good French meal with that, or three, right? And not spend it on the same airline, uh, seat that I would have gotten otherwise. So, you know, harnessing the technology to, to help [00:12:00] make our points. Was really important. Um, in, in that case, and, you know, the same has been true and Alice, right?
Phil Carpenter: So Alice is construction technology and specifically we're focused on the world of construction scheduling with very large and very complex projects, right? So you can, you can think of a nuclear power plant or a 50 story office tower or a highway, right? These are projects on which people are spending.
Phil Carpenter: Uh, you know, awful lot of money over a long period of time. And, you know, we have been able to, again, we base this on very, very powerful and distinctive technology and then show the advantages. It's, you know, I think people appreciate when you can get in front of them and, and kind of prove it right visually.
Phil Carpenter: And, and when they realize that they can now build the project that they had in mind. Faster, [00:13:00] cheaper, with less risk. I mean, they're really excited about that. Because, I mean, think about construction as a category. You know, most projects, more than 80 percent run over budget, uh, and, you know, beyond the original time frame.
Phil Carpenter: And, I mean, what other, what other category do you know, Alan, where it's okay to fail 80 percent of the time? It's just, that's not okay. Um, so, so, you know, being able to show someone like, look, there's a different way, there's a better way proving to them that you can do things with this new approach that are, uh, distinctive from the past has been incredibly helpful to us.
Phil Carpenter: And again, in now, today, You know, 20 years later, um, the social media world is incredibly important, right? So we're all over that and using the power of influencers there. Of course we use [00:14:00] media as well, but it's not consumer media. It's not USA Today or, you know, New York Times. It's it's engineering news record, right?
Phil Carpenter: Which is the premier, you know, construction focused trade publication or, you know, it's, it's Ken in the UK. Um, so construction or the communication piece of it has once again, been super important because it helps you define the category, communicate what it's all about, and then, you know, keep it over time.
Alan Zhao: I love that. Step one is to have a good product that is differentiated. And I think you said this before is it's better to be interesting and definitely not boring and to stick out, be distinct.
Phil Carpenter: Yes.
Alan Zhao: So, uh, step one, make sure you have a good product that is actually distinct and there's a differentiator with the market.
Alan Zhao: And then I guess step two in this case is to amplify that, get the right messaging across that would resonate. and not land on deaf ears.
Phil Carpenter: Fuel the flames, [00:15:00] right? You really just, you just need to spark that interest and like, I mean, just like a forest fire that spreads, right? If you've got a really strong product with distinct advantages and you've carved out a world for yourself that is new and interesting, um, word of mouth will power this, right?
Phil Carpenter: And help you, um, help you drive the adoption amongst the target audience that you're pursuing. It doesn't matter whether it's B2B or B2C, the same principles apply.
Alan Zhao: So when you're entering a new company, The founders have a vision. The existing leadership has a vision. How do you formulate this vision of what the new category is going to look like?
Alan Zhao: Who attaches the name? What does it look like? How does that process come together?
Phil Carpenter: So first of all, I like, I like to start relatively early, but not. [00:16:00] At the earliest of stages, Alan. So you, you know, I have been, I've been the 12th guy in my startup experience three times, like if I had a, if I had a football jersey, it would say 12 on it.
Phil Carpenter: Right. Uh, and, and what I, what I like is to get there when there's good work that's been done on the product. When maybe there's been some early sales work, but there's no marketing, right? I like to enter pretty darn early. Um, because if you do that, then you can really own that process of defining. How do we talk about ourselves?
Phil Carpenter: How are we going to be different from others? Um, and then, you know, beginning to push this thing out into the market, uh, to, to magnify. That messaging. So I think it's like, it's critical to, to start early as a marketing person, because then [00:17:00] your fingerprints are all over it. Right. And, and you really, um, owned that, that process that ultimately gets you to, to category definition of leadership.
Alan Zhao: That makes sense. I mean, they hire a CMO leader at the 12th employee. They're really wanting to own this thing. And
Phil Carpenter: my, you know, my model has always been Alan. I, I build a small internal team of what I call really good athletes. So people who are great marketers play across a lot of different sort of marketing disciplines.
Phil Carpenter: And then I supplement that with very distinct skills. Um, from either individual contributors or small firms, right? So, uh, I will hire, uh, you know, a PR agency in the countries that matter, matter to me. I'm usually small to mid sized, right? I don't go big. Um, and I will hire a graphic design, uh, [00:18:00] either a firm or a single individual.
Phil Carpenter: You know, I'll look for people who have skills in SEO. I'll look for skilled people who have skills in SEM, right? I don't need all of those skills. Under the roof all the time, but I need them. Right. And I would much rather go out and hire the experts on the open market who are really, really great at certain things.
Phil Carpenter: And, and use them as I need them.
Alan Zhao: In, in light of category creation, when you first join a company, what's your plan in the first 30, 60, 90 days? How do you think about that?
Phil Carpenter: I think it's really important to, to start with the larger task of developing a hypothesis of how am I going to define this category?
Phil Carpenter: And look, it's informed by a lot of things. It's informed by your knowledge of the customer. It's informed by your knowledge of the product. It's informed by your knowledge of the competitors and, and those things take time to [00:19:00] develop, but you know, as quick as you can, you're going to kind of want to get to the point where you've got.
Phil Carpenter: You've got a hypothesis, right? And then you're going to, you're going to put that out there in the market and you're going to start to promote the idea. You're going to evangelize the concept. You know, you're going to talk at conferences. You're going to, you know, speak to the media. You're going to engage with influencers or industry analysts or all, you know, all the people in the ecosystem and start selling your idea.
Phil Carpenter: Now, the thing that's also important is to then listen to the feedback, like listen to what the market tells you, right? Because you might have industry analysts who, for example, just say like, that's BS. Like, I don't, I don't believe it. And here's why. And look, you know, that's one voice and you take it for just that.
Phil Carpenter: It's one voice, but, but those people can be really smart. They sit in the middle of sort of everything that the honeybees in the industry, you know, they go from flower to flower to flower. [00:20:00] So listen, right? Uh, for goodness sakes, listen to what the customers have to say, right? Because sometimes, you know, you get out there with this.
Phil Carpenter: hypothetical, you know, positioning as you, as you were to define your category. And you'll have customers who tell you like, look, that's not. Working for me, or I don't think it's quite right, but it's close. And it could be this, um, and then be willing to tune in. Right. Because I think that's, I think that's very important with this, this, um, category creation concept.
Phil Carpenter: It's quite fluid and you may get close coming out of the shoot, but you're probably not going to be perfect. I mean, who's ever perfect. Right. But you need to be open to tuning things along the way. Right. And, and then working really hard to have that thinking ripple through everything that you're doing, right?
Phil Carpenter: So if you get input from a customer, for example, that really [00:21:00] causes you to think differently about, uh, how you're, you're, uh, you're messaging, then, you know, rapidly move to, to make that, uh, visible everywhere. It was funny. Um, I remember vividly a time when I was at Sidestep and, uh, we were doing consumer research, right?
Phil Carpenter: So it was the classic, you know, hide behind a mirror, eat a lot of M& Ms and, and, you know, talk to have a, you know, a facilitator talk to people for you, right? And gather, gather information. And specifically we, you know, we were looking to. To, uh, crystallize a tagline, right? Which is a, a very pithy articulation of who you are and what you do.
Phil Carpenter: And I remember there was one woman with whom we spoke who looked at our language and she said, no, you're not, you're not the travel search engine. You're the [00:22:00] travelers search engine. I mean, it was just literally. You know, the addition of a couple of characters right to that and for us, mind explosion. Wow.
Phil Carpenter: She is so right. She is so right. And we then took that and rapidly moved to have it part of everything. We. You know, it's, it's on the website, it's, it's on the t shirt, uh, you know, it's, it's in the email marketing that you're doing, you know, so, so if you get those insights, like those gifts from the market.
Phil Carpenter: Um, just remember, Hey, we're, we're playing in a fluid world and try to bring those insights into the positioning, into the market as fast as you can.
Alan Zhao: I love that story. I wish we had more customers that gave us those aha, wow, mind blowing moments. We definitely need [00:23:00] to do a better job of getting those focus groups together.
Alan Zhao: What, one of the channels that I found that'd be really useful for this is actually LinkedIn. Thoughts out there, because in my mind, I'm always thinking like, this is what the dream, this is what reality, this is how it's going to look. And then I posted to LinkedIn and you're right. It fine tunes it because the real practitioners out there who do it for 10 years.
Alan Zhao: Who understand the market, the tool, how they use existing solutions. They'll provide feedback. Like we, we, we actually don't want that. Here's what we do want. We don't want a consolidated tool that does everything all at once. We actually want more flexibility and it's taught me a lot. So any, any other tools or mechanisms to collect feedback that you're using at Alice Technologies today?
Phil Carpenter: When I was a, uh, early in my career, uh, I worked at Intuit as a product manager. Okay. And we used to do what at that time we called follow me home research. And, and I worked on QuickBooks Pro, which is their small business accounting product. And what that means is that we would go to the place of business of [00:24:00] the customer.
Phil Carpenter: And, you know, these were people who were running, uh, coffee shops or pizza parlors or daycare centers, like, you know, small businesses, like classic small businesses. And we would. Sit with them and watch them use the product, right? And it was so informative, it was so humbling, right? Scott Cook, who was the founder of Intuit, you know, he would, he would remind us, he's like, look, you guys, remember that your target market Uh, they're not accountants, right?
Phil Carpenter: They think general Ledger was a civil war hero, right? . So you, you, you gotta meet 'em where they are and, and that idea of meeting the customer where they are and going and engaging with them, you know, these days, of course, it's a lot, it's a lot easier 'cause you can do, you can do it virtually, right? You don't have to literally go to [00:25:00] the place of business.
Phil Carpenter: Um, we've been doing an awful lot of that at Alice recently, and I think it's been incredibly helpful for us. You know, we just launched the most significant new product that we launched since the beginning of the company. And, and the decisions that we made, the decisions that shaped that product really came from these just deep and detailed conversations.
Phil Carpenter: With customers. Um, and they're, they're so humbling, Alan, right? Because, you know, you think is the product guy or the marketing guy like you, that, you know, the deal and, and then people school you, you know, and, and it's just, it's so great though, because. You know, from that, that kind of humbling, uh, experience, you realize like, Oh, this could be so much better.
Phil Carpenter: I, I knew what I need to [00:26:00] do now. And, you know, in our case, look, we were very, very early to this idea of putting artificial intelligence to work in the field of construction scheduling. Um, and you know, we launched in 2015, you know, AI took off in a crazy way. Of course, in 2013. And now in 2024, people are figuring out how to, to really put it to work.
Phil Carpenter: But we were early, we were ahead of the market and, you know, construction is a segment that is not often a leader in tech adoption. And honestly, we were, we were ahead of the, Ahead of the market, and it was from talking to these customers in great detail that what we actually knew then that we had to do was sort of [00:27:00] rewind and approach this process in a somewhat simpler way, embrace some existing technology.
Phil Carpenter: Um, and again, meet them where they were. And, you know, when you're creating something new, sometimes you can be really far out there. And, and that's interesting, and it certainly captures a lot of the market's attention. But if you're too far out there, then your product market's fit is not strong enough, and the adoption doesn't, doesn't, uh, come.
Phil Carpenter: And so, in our case, These revelations caused us to sort of make this change and look, it's early days, as I mentioned, like we literally just launched this product, but the feedback has been really good so far. And I'm super enthusiastic. Um, about. What I believe will happen for us here this year and grateful, like really [00:28:00] grateful that customers were willing to help us see the way.
Alan Zhao: I like that a lot. Even if you have a vision, it doesn't necessarily mean you need to explain the vision all at once. You can just position yourself, the product so that they'll eventually move into that future vision that you see. And then when that happens, it'll happen and it all makes sense to them then.
Alan Zhao: Today, something different. Awesome, Phil. Thank you so much for your time. How can people find out more about you?
Phil Carpenter: Easiest thing is to find me on LinkedIn. Just look, you know, uh, Phil Carpenter, Alice Technologies. I'm happy to connect with people there. And, you know, I am a real marketing enthusiast. So like eager to talk to your listeners about the issues they're struggling with.
Phil Carpenter: Uh, always like to, uh, You know, lend an opinion and, and hope to be able to be helpful. Fantastic. I'm sure plenty of people are reaching out. That's my hope.
Alan Zhao: Anyways.