Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Proof is what GTM leaders need to make fast and furious decisions that keep their businesses alive and thriving.
The Proof Point hosts conversations anchored in the reality of day-to-day life as a revenue leader. No algorithm-hacking, talk-track headlining buzz statements around here. We’re hosting conversations between GTM leaders so we can gather the facts and provide you with the tactics and tools you need to bulletproof your strategy.
Join host Mark Huber every other week as he invites the best GTM leaders into the conversation.
I've been thinking more and more recently that that whole narrative on LinkedIn about, you know, don't work for a CEO who doesn't get marketing. I think it's don't work for founders who don't love the problem more than they love the product.
Speaker 2:Did you just think of that, or did you were you sitting
Speaker 3:on that one? Because that's money.
Speaker 1:I'd I'd never worded it that way.
Speaker 4:So I
Speaker 2:love Oh, yeah. To you. Well, credit card. I've heard that before. I have to give
Speaker 5:a shout out to Robert at scale. We've yeah. He says that too. Love the problem more than the product.
Speaker 3:Here's what go to market teams are missing, proof. That's what I think of every morning when I fire up Linkedin, scroll through boring manifestos, and endless lukewarm takes. Opinions are cheap, and proof is gold. I'm Mark Huber and this is the proof point, a show from user evidence that helps go to market teams find ideas, get frameworks, and swap tactics. Each episode includes an unfiltered discussion with the biggest names in b to b SaaS to help find the proof points that I'm in search of.
Speaker 3:You'll learn from sales, marketing, and customer success leaders in the trenches where I ask them, seriously, what actually works for you? One of our guests actually told me this felt like we were having drinks at a bar and talking about work without all the BS, And that pretty much sums it up on why I'm so excited for this new show. Join us every other week for new episodes. Hot takes, always welcome. On this week's episode of The Proofpoint, we talk about brand awareness and creating demand and how a lot of people use those terms interchangeably when they don't mean the same thing.
Speaker 3:First up, he's the founder of a new agency called Storybook Marketing, Liam Maroney. He's somebody who I've gotten to know on LinkedIn over the years. I even bought him a really bad Christmas sweater last year and made him wear it online, and he was a really good sport about it all. Next up, she's a new CMO and actually a 4 time CMO at a company called G2. I think you may have heard of it before, Sydney Sloan.
Speaker 3:She brought a ton of amazing stories and experience from all of her years working at big startups like Drata and SalesLoft, and now G2 as well. And last but definitely not least, the guy who actually inspired this episode topic with his LinkedIn drawings, Sam Kienle. He's a VP of marketing at Luxo, and somebody that I've known here and there over the years and actually got to work with for a bit when he was at Refine Labs and I was at my last company. We went long on this topic and for good reason, the discussion was that good. Enjoy.
Speaker 3:Alrighty. So, Liam, I feel like if you read LinkedIn every day or every week, like many of us do, including the group on this podcast, you'll see that people talk about brand awareness and demand creation as the same thing. Is that the case?
Speaker 1:I do not think that is the case. I I'm a little bit of, I don't wanna call it a, a nemesis of the term demand creation, but I do think that the term brand awareness is largely either misunderstood or is put into way too small of a box for what it actually is. And I think my my belief of why that is is because I think that brand has not historically been a big aspect of the SaaS tech world. I think it's we we are not typically a long term thinking industry because so much of the industry has been about exits as quickly as possible, going from raise to raise. Long term is not exactly part of the DNA of the industry, and so brand awareness and brand building is kind of the minority in a lot of the cases.
Speaker 1:It's largely about driving pipeline, driving leads, driving new near term business, and I think that what has happened was that that part of the world got bigger and bigger. Demand generation, when I first started it, was a lead generation function. Its job was to get leads, nurture leads, convert leads. That was what it was. And then it got bigger, not for any sort of land grab, but because I think it was trying to fill a gap that was very obviously there when you're trying to do long term growth, which is you need to have some form of a brand to drive and extract demand from.
Speaker 1:And I think it started to blend together, so this idea of demand creation, I think, became synonymous, but I don't think they're the same thing. I think that in reality, brand awareness and I think where it gets undersold, it's not simply what do you do and maybe why do you do it. It is also the and why you should choose it. I think it goes farther than just pure awareness and recall. I think brand awareness drives revenue, and I think it's perceived to not.
Speaker 1:And I think we think that demand creation is the extension of getting it to turn into revenue, and I think that's not true.
Speaker 3:So before we get into the meat of it, I got a funny question and to actually kick us off now. So, Sam, I'll get into what inspired this, but have you always been a drawer? How long do these drawings take? Like, what goes into this? Tell me, like, what's happening before you have your first cup of coffee and you start drawing on LinkedIn.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I'm not notoriously known as a doodler. I wasn't in high school. I wasn't in college, but I think just when I got to the B2B world, everything is always so overcomplicated. Right?
Speaker 4:It's people wanna sound as smart as possible. Let's use jargon. Let's use acronyms. Let's talk about streamlining your god knows what. And like, she's using these big words that don't make sense to overcomplicate.
Speaker 4:And I've always been on the mindset, like, if I can reduce something to to simple terms that I can understand, that's when it finally clicks for me because it's like getting rid of all the noise of understanding it. So that's what I like to do with all these concepts, and that's where, I guess, I've have become more visual in that sense. Like, if I can take this vague thing that everyone talks about it, get it on paper and a super simple doodle that my 2nd grade art teacher would be proud of, that was really just where where this all started. And, you know, the LinkedIn algorithm liked it. So and other people liked it more than the algorithm.
Speaker 4:So I was like, okay. Like, this is landing with other people. It's how I teach. That's how I learn is by teaching others, so to speak. And that's why I post so much because it forces me to think and to say things concisely.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, I, I was never a good art student, though, unfortunately. So, hey, I'm glad that it's paid off somewhat, though.
Speaker 3:So not to put you on blast, but I know there are, tools that you can use, especially for direct mail where it makes it look like it's handwritten and it's not. Do you actually draw these, or are you using a tool?
Speaker 4:I actually draw these. I've all sourced that. I won't like, direct mail, I like, every every couple of weeks, I send 5 thank you notes to new customers. I will write those. That's, to me, one of those things that it just seems disingenuous to to outsource somewhat.
Speaker 4:It's like, if you're gonna go through the the pain, so to speak, of handwriting something, do it yourself. Right? That's the whole reason that you're giving value with it. So, yeah, all these, I do it myself. I tried some of the the online, not Figma, but other alternatives where you can make it look like it's handwritten.
Speaker 4:I'm like, that takes more time than me just pulling out this notebook with my $5 pen and just writing it here, taking a picture, and uploading it. Way easier.
Speaker 5:That's right. I'm just gonna say that's how I start my LinkedIn post too. So I'll write, like, ideas for posts and then take a picture of it. Because I think so too. That authenticity of, like, your handwriting, like, just also stands out because nobody does it.
Speaker 5:So Mhmm. Love that, Sam.
Speaker 4:I love it. I love it.
Speaker 3:I'm too embarrassed to draw publicly because our class was never my strong suit, but I have no shame in admitting I have a stack of 500 sheets of printer paper. I'm always just writing stuff down old school. I'd rather write it down and think through it,
Speaker 4:versus type. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So he's the same way through it. Works better.
Speaker 5:You listen too. You listen differently and yeah. Yeah. And I translate it
Speaker 3:totally. Absolutely.
Speaker 5:I am old school though.
Speaker 3:So, Sam, we'll overlay the graphic that really, inspired this post, but I want you to walk me through what you drew, how you explained it, and then we'll have, really the fun part of the discussion from there.
Speaker 4:It stemmed from a conversation I was having with Justin Norris on his podcast. We were talking about YouTube ads, and I'll go down this rabbit hole in a second. But it basically got into brand awareness, demand creation, everything that everyone's talking about, and our conversation led us to talking about Monday.com. Basically, there was a point in time where every time you went on YouTube, you would just see Monday.com. All the time.
Speaker 4:All the time. I I couldn't open anything without it could be a cat video. Not that I watch cat videos all the time. It could be marketing related. It didn't matter.
Speaker 4:Like, what how you were segmented. That's what was gonna show up. And so I quickly learned. I'm like, hey. Monday.com is a company.
Speaker 4:Great. I know who they are. Monday.com is a project management tool. Great. I know exactly what they do.
Speaker 4:But in the course of all those ads, they never really said, like, how they were different than any of the other project management tools, like, what their strong point of view was or any element of differentiation. It was basically just like Monday.com project management over and over and over beating me to death with that. And to this day, I use Asana or I use Basecamp. Those are the 2 that I've done because Monday.com might be better, but I align with the other ones, or they never given me a compelling reason to want to move. And so we were talking about Monday.com YouTube ads, and there was basically just like the saturation effect that they created brand awareness.
Speaker 4:They absolutely created brand awareness. I know who they are. I knew what they did, But where we started getting to, it's like, well, why didn't you ever buy them? Why didn't you ever use them? And that's where we got this little moment of, like, they never created demand with me in that, like, what was compelling about them?
Speaker 4:Why did I want to choose them? And that's where I started to say, like, oh, this is interesting as we're talking through this. Like, what's brand awareness at its simplest terms? Liam's probably gonna rip my head off for this. I wanna get his thoughts on it, but it's like, okay, I know what you do as a company, and I know why I should choose you.
Speaker 4:And that's how I oversimplified brand awareness. And I was like, okay, well, how do I make someone want to choose me? So when they do come to market, when they are ready to purchase, they do that. And that's why I was like, that's the extra step that demand creation answers. So I wanna stop for a second because I know this is probably gonna be one of the best parts of the conversation, getting the m to be like, no.
Speaker 4:No. No. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 4:Here's where you're right. Here's where you're wrong. I don't know what it is, but, like, that was the oversimplified version of it.
Speaker 1:Before we can get into that, I actually don't fully agree that Monday.com didn't do a really good job early on. I think their problem was they changed their positioning, their messaging, and their product, and it got progressively worse. It turned into exactly what it was supposed to be competing against. Because I I did buy monday.com at, like, 2 companies to replace Wrike and to replace Asana, and it was because I loved their advertising. They had subway ads, and I I think they did these regionally because I saw them in New York, and I saw them in London where they had, like at the time, they were very topical.
Speaker 1:They had ads that were, like, the there was a New York City mayor race, and they were, like, organizing New York using, like, an interface. So you saw what the product did. It was very clever. There was a prime minister race in England at the time, and they were, like, stack ranking them. And they were funny.
Speaker 1:They were good ads, but they also showed how the product worked. I actually thought they did a stellar job, and I think its benefit was that it got it had to me, the demand came from the fact that it was easy to use, incredibly easy to onboard. And then, like, a year later, it stopped being that. It turned into a very corporate program because they added features nobody was asking for. They were trying to make it enterprise friendly, which was everybody's failure.
Speaker 1:Like, I think they did a great job early on. I think their problem, if I were being genuinely academic, it's that they they were not practicing what would be a typical 4 p strategy at all. Their product was being invented by somebody other than customer insights. It was being invented by investor value. It was being, like, you know, enterprise opportunity.
Speaker 1:I think that's where they went wrong, not in their inability to articulate why Monday.com.
Speaker 4:Interesting. And so you said they started to go upmarket more to enterprise. Did they go broader with their overall, like, we're for everyone? Did they start to do a little bit more of that too?
Speaker 1:Went with the generic headling topic of I can't remember. It was something nonsense jargony, like, you know, organize everything or some absolutely meaningless term. Like, you could list the man it wasn't even monday.com did this. Drift did this. Like, everyone did this.
Speaker 1:They end up turning into the exact opposite to what made them originally interesting.
Speaker 4:So that's one of the biggest things I look at with demand creation and brand awareness is, like, who are you messaging with or, like, what audience are you going after with your messaging? Because I find brand awareness is like talking to your TAM, anyone who could possibly use it. Whereas I say demand creation, that's specific to your ICP. Who are the actual people who would use it, would buy it? Not everyone at a company that could, but it really is getting more detailed prescriptive because that's a layer where I always say, like, Monday.
Speaker 4:They they did that. They went upmarket. They went to all these places, and they they tried to broaden out their messaging to where it became relevant ish to anyone who could buy it, but not really to the people who were their core users, the 80% of people that probably make up their revenue.
Speaker 3:So, Sydney, you're, by my account, a 4 times CMO. I'm not a math guy, but is that correct?
Speaker 5:Yeah. All in one hand.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 3:how does this compare to, like, how you think of this at the executive level? Because if you go into board meetings and you're just talking about brand awareness the whole time and it's not, you know, creating demand, I'm sure you might not be in the best of spots.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I mean, I I started my career at Adobe. Actually, I started my career at a very small company that Adobe acquired. And so when I think about the power of brand, I mean, Adobe's brand is one of the best in the world. And I remember where, you know, our our sellers before we were acquired couldn't get a call with our buyers.
Speaker 5:Like, they would they would try everything, and this is a while ago before all the new tools come out. But they tried everything, and then it magically began to Adobe, and they can get a call with anybody. Anybody. And it was just this huge shining moment. Now, of course, everybody that they're reaching out to just wanted a copy of Photoshop, so they just bring the box with them and put it on the desk and say, now let's talk about our enterprise products.
Speaker 5:But you saw the power of brand and its ability to open doors. I call it, like, the red carpet. Like, we're rolling out the red carpet, building a brand so our sellers and buyers can meet each other, you know, easily. And having been in some very competitive mark markets, so the SalesLoft versus Outreach battle, the most recently Vanta versus Drata. You know, that that power for brand supremacy was real, and it it gets you in the door.
Speaker 5:If you do a great job of associating your brand with the problem that's trying to be solved in your buyer's mind. So I I agree with the TAM almost because you still do wanna have that affinity in with the the buyer in that world. So, I might take it down one step into ICP to get to the buyer piece. And, you know, then you get invited to the party. And hopefully that you're invited first.
Speaker 5:By the time we left I left SalesLoft, like, 70% of our net new business was coming inbound. And when you don't have to pay for, for your branded search terms anymore, you know you've won. When it comes to the executive level, and those were questions that the board wanted to know, is, like, is your brand stronger? You know, why aren't you investing as much in brand? Was you know, because your competitors are doing it and and they're always the first in the door.
Speaker 5:And my answer to that is if we don't know who we are yet, like, if we haven't really solidified our brand, the one that we're willing to put all our investment into and our our founders or our executives are comfortable being that company for the next 5 years, I don't wanna start investing in that yet. So that hard work of really establishing who am I, like, they were talking about. What do I what do we stand for as a company beyond the products we sell? That's an exercise that leadership needs to go through so you can show up consistently. And, you know, thankfully, I'm at g two now.
Speaker 5:I think our brand is very strong. We do know what we stand for. It resonates with buyers and sellers. And so that's not an investment I have to make to establish the brand, but I do still need to make the investment to keep the brand relevant in the in the buyers minds or in the sellers minds in my world. Like, it's end users and the companies that we sell to.
Speaker 5:So it's a bit of a different brand challenge for me personally, which I love. But hope hopefully, that path through all the brands that I work for, like, the challenges, but I'm I am brand wins every day. And companies don't invest early enough in building their brand, so they pay way more in the long term in demand capture. It's just, like it's bad math.
Speaker 1:I have a bad tendency to get, like, fox hold into, oh, I'm the academic marketer. I'll go back to the textbooks. And and I do, truthfully. But I do think that, like, for my personal experience coming into SaaS was that I had gone to college for marketing. I had a very textbook idea, and I went and I was in b two b for a few years until I went into b two b tech and then into b two b SaaS.
Speaker 1:And then I was sort of effectively told none of that stuff applies here anymore. Put it away. There's a whole different world here, and it was a different type, like, all new acronyms, all new sort of styles of marketing. What I've come to feel in the last year and a half, 2 years certainly, is that the more I look outside of SaaS and I look at the more traditional classic marketing approaches that other industries are taking, especially b to c, it's still very applicable to what's going on right now. It's just that we don't seem to, like, connect the dots on it.
Speaker 1:Because a lot of what you've said, I think, it matches all the theory, like, exactly matches most of the theory. Like, you look at the, you know, Bennett and Field theory about brand building and sort of, like, brand versus act activation, all of the kind of, like, you know, textbook stuff. It follows exactly what you're saying that you the theory, generally, that I've subscribed to is that brand awareness alone can grow a business. It just doesn't efficiently do it very well, whereas demand generation, lead generation, demand capture, whatever you call it, done alone cannot grow. It hits a plateau very, very quickly, and the math bottoms out very, very quickly.
Speaker 1:And the main reason we haven't seen that as much in SaaS is because it was buried in VC funding where you could run at extraordinarily inefficient paces and never be found out. So you could lead gen your way to growth, and you just look at the customer acquisition cost and go, oh, that's, like, ridiculous. It was like that Scott Galloway thing when he wrote the original post about Casper mattresses, where it turns out for every mattress they were selling, they were losing $300. He said it would have been better to just stuff a bag full of $300 and send it to people than sell them the mattress. That's the reality of the unit economics, And I think when you pull back and that's not there, you don't have that cushion, you have brand is the only way you can grow.
Speaker 1:Like, it's it's genuinely and, like like you said, you it gets you in the room, but you can't buy your way into the room unless you've got deep, deep pockets and lots of ability to run at a loss for years.
Speaker 5:I'll I'll add one more point of view there, Liam, in the b to b SaaS tech world, which, you know, I've buried in for the last 20 years. I think the the extra challenge there and and, you know, it's like bringing a b to c mindset to b to b brand building is really critical, and that means you're building brand for people. And and I always like to think, like, what's the lifestyle brand? How do I connect with people? And so often, I think founders don't, you know, they don't come from this world, and they love their product so much.
Speaker 5:And so how many websites do you go to where the product is front and center? Even money.com, you were just saying. It was all about the product. And it's not about the people. And I think that you, you know, how do you build a connection, a meaningful connection when you're staring at a product UI versus, you know, fee getting the feeling?
Speaker 5:I always say that a brand is, like, touches every sense. I want it to smell, taste, sound, all of it, the same every time when a a potential customer has an interaction with it. I I literally make candles for every company I work for because I want it to smell the same. And so that, I think, is another part of this challenge of, like, really building a meaningful brand that stands for something because of this affinity for product that some people can't get over.
Speaker 1:I think it's such a good point because I think I've been thinking more and more recently that that whole narrative on LinkedIn about, you know, don't work for a CEO who doesn't get marketing. I think it's don't work for founders who don't love the problem more than they love the product.
Speaker 2:100%. Did you just think of that, or did you were
Speaker 3:you sitting on that one? Because that's money.
Speaker 1:I'd I'd never worded it that way, so I
Speaker 2:was off Oh, yeah. Full credit card. I've heard that before. I have to give
Speaker 5:a shout out to Robert at scale. We've yeah. He says that too. Love the problem more than the product. And and if you're doing a workshop, like, you know, just it it's so true.
Speaker 5:So true.
Speaker 4:There is you'll have to listen to this. Yuri Levine over at Waze. He wrote a book on this. I listened to I think it was one of Lenny's podcasts or something like that. But the title of it is, before I completely butcher this, fall in love with the problem, not the solution.
Speaker 4:And it's this exact concept. Like, yeah, go listen to that podcast. Can't recommend it highly enough. I know it just completely took us on a small tangent, but to your point, like, the best founders, and this is what he always talks about all the time. Like, when he looks at it from a venture standpoint, from a company he wants to start, he's just like, I don't love the problem.
Speaker 4:If I don't get fully interested in it, I'm not excited about it. I'm not gonna go spend my time there. And I think that says a lot about it.
Speaker 1:And I think when you look at the brands who everyone aspires to be in the b to c world, they all exhibit that. Zappos wrote a literal book on customer obsession. You know? I mean, Amazon is very, very customer obsessed. Apple is very customer obsessed, like, down to the feature and experience and box opening.
Speaker 1:Like, customer obsession and problem obsession is the norm in very successful b to c companies. It has
Speaker 4:to be. Yeah. I can tell you that.
Speaker 3:Next episode that goes live of this next week is about customer obsession with Jill Riley, Mark Oregon, and Evan Huck, my boss and CEO. So that is perfectly unplanned. I love it.
Speaker 4:Small tee up. So what do you think though about there's no I'll call it, like, a POV obsession because everyone has to dilute. Like, oh, we can't say that. We can't put it on our website. We can't turn off this one small segment.
Speaker 4:Everyone's worried about getting canceled, saying the wrong thing where that's why everything ends up blue, talking about ROI or streamline this. Like, it's so just kind of blah. Like, they're really like, how many b to b companies can you name that have a point of view? Like, Nike's commercial. Like, we aren't for losers, or I forget the the whole concept of,
Speaker 1:like is not for everyone.
Speaker 4:Winning's yeah. Like, what b to b company could put out? I didn't
Speaker 5:like it, by the way. I didn't like that one.
Speaker 1:I didn't like the spirit
Speaker 5:of it. I wasn't At all. Like, well, that's not very inspiring during the Olympics. Whatever.
Speaker 2:But at least but
Speaker 1:it you know, I wrote post this, and I know I got, like, roasted for having an opinion on it because I loved the ad and hated the message, but I loved that they had a very clear message. And they have been consistent on that in previous Olympics because they had an old one, which was you don't win silver, you lose gold. So they've already taken this position before. I don't personally like it. I think it's against the spirit of what the Olympics is, but it got them to stand out, whether it's a successful one, whether it will alienate people.
Speaker 1:Who knows? I think we we mistake standing out with being controversial, and I don't think I think you can there's this idea that, like, no one shares the content that people make in b to b because we think it's boring. We think the problems are boring, but they're interesting to the people that we sell to. It's just it's very the difference is it's very hard in SaaS to try and you have to give so much context for it to make sense. When you talk about Nike, everyone gets Nike because it's Nike.
Speaker 1:It's a universal thing. But if you're working in, you know, like, the recruiting space, you have to go, well, you have to understand recruiters first, and you have to understand their world, and let me set up the things that go in there. But, like, what's interesting to them is very interesting. Like, their problems are interesting. I don't think controversial is the only way to stand out.
Speaker 1:It's passionately loving the problem that they are dealing with. That makes you stand out.
Speaker 5:And making it personal. And making it personal. Right? It it touches an emotion. It's a it's the emotional reaction that you have that builds the affinity.
Speaker 5:So remember when I started SalesLoft, and this is back in 2018, And, I was talking to, one of our investors, and he's like, well, you know, they they do this sales love thing all the time. It's kinda weird, like, using love. And and so I'm, like, wired, like, okay. We're gonna go in and we're gonna, you know, refresh the brand. And and it was so core to how SalesLoft felt.
Speaker 5:Like, the mission statement is we're gonna create a world where sellers are loved by the buyers they serve. That was the mission statement. And so that's what sales love meant. It was, like, deliver the the the idea of service, you know, service orientations, servant leadership, like, really and and the way that we amplify that, which I feel very strongly about is the company loved on our employees so they would love on our customers. And so we were an employee first company.
Speaker 5:We're in a product first company. We're in a sales first company. We're actually employee first company. Do you know how great that feels? And when people feel great about the brand they the company, a a k a the brand they represent, they deliver that through every single interaction.
Speaker 5:And when you're thinking about a brand experience, it's about the consistency in the way it shows up, especially through your brand ambassadors, who are your employees and your champions. And it was just a light bulb moment. Like, it was so clear, like, it was love. It meant something and it and love is an emotion and a feeling that, you know, finally, we just leaned into. Like, absolutely, let's do it.
Speaker 5:And and so it did stand out because, like, a lot of b to b companies don't talk about emotions or, you know, or love or or hate and all these things. And and and what I what I loved about it was how we lived it. Even when we did the rebrand, it was, like, in 2021, I wanna say, it was most important to activate our employees first. Like, they were activated 5 months before we activated it in in market. And we we we had a whole plan of going in, and they were so proud.
Speaker 5:And it was just, like, you know, almost get emotional about it because it was just it was such a defining moment at that stage of our company and the role that everybody got to play into it versus, like, new colors, new logo, you know, like, ta da moment. Like, it wasn't. It was it it had to keep the emotion in the way that we moved forward as a brand, and how important it was for me to make sure that everybody felt that same passion for it that that they had felt all along. So emotion is good. Emotion is good.
Speaker 3:And this is the perfect, excuse to veer off script when you tell awesome stories like that. So, Sydney, did you have to kind of, sell that maze like, massive project internally, or was that something that the leadership team was already talking about? Walk us through that process.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I will say that every brand refresh I've done coming in as a CMO has fabulously failed. Every time. Every time. Having a drawdown.
Speaker 5:Like, I was ready to launch, and it just fabulously failed. But I couldn't get it right the first time, and I don't know why. I don't know. Maybe it's something with me. Maybe it's something of the journey that the team needs to go through to really understand what it means.
Speaker 5:So we had done a, my first brand effort, at SalesLoft back in 2018, 2019 was emotionally intelligent sales. Nobody actually knew what it meant. I thought it was brilliant. I was like, what? Totally lost.
Speaker 5:And so it took a while for our CEO, Kyle Porter, to kind of come to come to realization that it was time. We actually had a brand infringement. We were going to register our brand mark globally, and we couldn't do it. So it's like, we have to do it. And then deciding how deep we wanted to go into it, that he was ready yet.
Speaker 5:He was like, Sydney, I have to chop down the the tree in my backyard and remove my tattoo. Like, it was really hard for him because so many times the founder's brand is the company brand, and you're renaming their job. And so they have to really be ready for that. And so getting them to buy into the process, the role understanding the role that they wanna play in that was huge. And and we were we were making that pivot point, that pouring point to moving up market and being enterprise.
Speaker 5:And so we we joked that I think he had paid $75 to, like, brand.com to get his first logo and used a $25 coupon. So I'm like, you know, the $50 you spent, like, after 10 years, it it paid back, and we knew we wanted to show up different. We knew we wanted to show a level of maturity. The company had evolved, the products had evolved, and the brand had to evolve with it. And that's how we got there.
Speaker 5:But it was a, we started in October and we launched in September. It was a full top to bottom, big band brand refresh, 11 month project. We shut marketing down for, a month and a half at the final stage just to be able to execute on that last mile. You know? I don't know if I'll get into one of those again, but it was great.
Speaker 3:That was gonna be my follow-up question, but you just answered it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It was great. So much work, though. I literally had to take a year and a half off after.
Speaker 3:So, Sam, I was gonna say that you're new ish to your role, then I looked at your LinkedIn profile before, and you're not new to your role. But remember back to the early days of when you started, did you have to try and sell this, like, approach of, you know, hey. It's not just about, you know, increasing brand awareness, but it's converting that to demand and focusing on demand creation as well.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, that was a big part of it, especially recruiting software. I mean, throw a rock, you're gonna hit 10 different platforms out there. You think martech, sales tech is is concentrated. There's a lot of options out here.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, how do you show up in a way that's gonna help you stand out again without being blue and talking about how you're a little bit different, like or a little bit better? Like, we had to play the different game, not just the better game. And luckily, we had a killer product that were on the flip side of the VC, which is I think why this also works is, Liam, you're talking about the, like, VC money. You don't have the opportunity to play the long game with the brand. You're either getting your next round in 18 to 24 months or you're out.
Speaker 4:Like, good luck. Whereas we've been bootstrapped, and they were 10 years in before they made their 1st full time marketing hire. And so they had a killer product, and they were creating a new category with it. So there were some things that lined up where we had to kinda go about this in a way that then said, okay. How do we get people to know who we are without blending in with everyone else?
Speaker 4:And that meant having a little bit more of a point of view, but also educating on, like, why were we different than everything else? So luckily, the CEO and the CTO, these 2 cofounders understood this because they've been doing founder led sales and building it by themselves for years. I mean, there were less than 50 employees by the time that I got here 2 years ago. They were invested in the long term side of it. And so that's where I think that it panned out in the sense of, okay, how do we bridge this gap between creating brand awareness in a way that helps people understand, like, yes, we're like what you use right now, but different.
Speaker 4:We're not just this, or you think you want this, but you actually need that. And telling that story in a way that isn't so out there that nothing lands. They don't understand. Like, I have no idea what Loxo does even after they've just said all this stuff to, like, oh, you're, like, the tool that I use to intake all of my applicants and applicant tracking software, but you also allow me to go and find prospective candidates and email them and do all these things as part of my day to day workflow that I've realized I'm using 10 different pieces of software to do it. So how do we help guide them along that journey?
Speaker 4:And that's where we were taking a brand awareness approach to because we're like, no one's in market to buy something like this right now. They've got 10 different pieces of software that are in contracts either month to month or through the next 3 years. So we had to educate them as part of this and basically just showing them, like, there is a better way once you're ready, but you can't force people into something like that. And if we tried to do a lead gen approach, like, we would have I would have burned through. We don't have a big budget.
Speaker 4:I would have burned through my budget so fast. My CEO would have been like, why the hell did we hire
Speaker 2:this guy? He has no idea what he's doing. It's not turning into pipeline. So that's where
Speaker 4:taking the brand education side of it really panned out. And to this day, we don't have, like, a hard ad or anything that's like, get a demo now. Like, buyers are smart. They know how websites work. Go to the top right corner.
Speaker 4:When you wanna talk to someone or try the product, you can. It's right there for you. Yes. We have BDRs. Yes.
Speaker 4:We have AEs who go and do do work, but it's it's really helping people come to that understanding on their own versus trying to force it prematurely. And that's what I felt like a lot of demand gen previously was doing was forcing people in in too early. So it's this kind of like middle ground where the leadership was saying, cool. Yeah. We're on board long term, but, you know, you have to put up some w's along the way.
Speaker 4:So showing quarter over quarter, like, hey. Pipeline is growing. People are sick of what they're doing right now. There just hasn't been a better way. So when they see this, they're interested.
Speaker 4:So we were able to show that, and we're continuing to grow. It's been 8 straight quarters of up into the right, which is always good. But, you know, is it as fast as if we just injected a half $1,000,000 per quarter into it? I don't know. Probably not.
Speaker 4:But we're playing the long game with it, and that's what what our our results are aligning to.
Speaker 3:And, Liam, you have a unique perspective on all of this because you're running an agency right now that probably has plenty of conversations on the same exact topic every single week. So what are you seeing from your vantage point right now on this topic?
Speaker 1:I think funny enough, on a personal note, I I'm acutely aware of what it's like to run a business that needs to turn a profit immediately, which radically changes your own marketing approach, and you think very differently about attribution and sourcing and customer acquisition cost. But I do think on the customer side, we typically work with customers who are probably series c and above. So a lot of them are are relatively mature. I think what we're seeing a lot of is how difficult it is to wean off of some of the old models. Like, lead gen, I think it's it's very easy to find a conversation on LinkedIn where everyone no one disagrees with the idea, but no one has a better idea of how do you start to shift the folks away from it.
Speaker 1:Like, I think, you know, I I'm having a conversation now with a couple of clients who are sort of, like, $100,000,000 AR kind of companies, and they're going through a very big internal conversation about, well, we tried to do all of these classic approaches. They didn't work. How do we get off that? And it's it's there's a lot of sunk costs that's very difficult to try and unwind RevOps functions and the way the attribution models are built. Like, you it it's easier to say it than it is to do it.
Speaker 1:Everyone agrees in the first meeting. We should be optimizing towards getting people to hand raise organically. We're all totally on board for that. How would we do that? How long will that take?
Speaker 1:Where will that be measured? How will we prove that it actually worked? And what I'm finding a lot is that this is certainly my opinion, but it's definitely my experience. The the way we measure is limited, and we have a very limited set of measurement tools in SaaS that does not capture the full impact of marketing. And a perfect example of that is what you said, Sydney, that it makes sales easier.
Speaker 1:That is already a value of brand, but you can't measure that with an attribution tool because that's it's incrementally improving the efficacy of sales. It's improving just the overall impact and effectiveness of the entire GTM motion. If more people show up to meetings, if meetings go better, if deal cycles get shorter, if win rates get higher, that's all a net product of brand, but it's very difficult to do it, and it's impossible to do it with multi touch attribution. It's impossible to do it with with the current tool sets. We have to look outside of them or at least know that it's not gonna take place.
Speaker 1:Now I'm getting very interested in things like media mix modeling tools, which I know there's very big limitations off from a data point of view to the world that we live in, but the concepts of causality and lag time and incremental lift, they're are they they're logical ideas, and I think people are coming to the ideas. There's just a really big difficulty in we're using a really very limited tool set. The best example I heard of it, it's like trying to measure climate change using a thermometer. It's just not going to give you the full picture. And more and more of what I'm seeing is that when you look at other tools, and, again, I'm not advocating purely for those tools, but I am what I'm seeing is that the story seems to be confirming that most of the value of marketing is not captured within those tools, so we're actually selling marketing short.
Speaker 1:And when you look at big companies, at least, and look at their datasets, what I've seen in those data is that often the things like the brand refresh may not work in 6 months, but it might work in 19 months, by which time the CMO is gone. So a lot of the marketing works better than we think it does, takes longer than we want it to, and we're measuring it with a very limited view, and I think that's a really big problem that is not easy to solve.
Speaker 5:Yes. And I think it's, you know, like, we'll even just take the refined labs point of view on this. Right? Because I think he's been talking about it the longest, this idea of the dark funnel. And especially now that companies won't have these crazy unlimited budgets because finally we're being responsible, I think we have to rethink how we build brands and really looking at, you know, where do our going back to people, where do our people live?
Speaker 5:How who who who are they influenced by? Like, reorienting to more of a a LinkedIn influencer strategy or community based strategies, partnerships, like, being more creative with how you you show up in a more efficient way. Again, I'll go back to brand consistency is king here. So how you show up is is what matters, but maybe we have to change the mix of where we show up and what we're asking our end users to do and trying to do that in a more efficient way. And so I think it's gonna challenge all of us to to rethink how we build brands in the future.
Speaker 5:It it's not dumping 1,000,000 of dollars into ads. I think you have to be that's why Sam, I kinda go on the TAM question. Like, I don't know if we can afford that. You know, do we have to be more segmented? And be like, okay, I'm gonna run a brand campaign to this segment of my ICP, and I'm gonna be you know, I'm gonna make sure I show up and the message is consistent and it's helpful.
Speaker 5:And when is their podcast when Gong doesn't get mentioned? So I will mention Gong. And so what I loved about what they did is they picked a persona. They picked not the buyer persona. They picked the user persona, and they served the seller.
Speaker 5:From day 1, that's where all that content went. I saw Devin on your podcast, big fan. And so, like, pick be specific as to who you're building your brand for and going all in on that and then finding where they live and being consistent in the way that you're serving them, I think is the path to the future versus billboard ads on a 101 and flush, you know, like, display ads everywhere you can put it. I just it's not efficient. It's not gonna work.
Speaker 1:I also think what I'd add to that is it's also really important to figure out how they want to buy. What I one of the biggest problems, and I've made this mistake when I came in as a VP marketing in house, was that I signed up for the task of, hey. All of it is outbound right now. We want it to be inbound by the end of next year. And that may not be the right thing where you're trying to divert and create a new channel that is the contributor of all of the pipeline.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, that may be the best path. Like, I've often heard it where events are where people buy in certain industries. That's the reality. It may be better to make that channel more effective by amplifying who has heard of it, how they've heard of it, rather than saying, events is too efficient. We wanna shift to LinkedIn to being the channel.
Speaker 1:Like, you have to follow the path that they buy, and partnerships are really effective, especially for companies with limited budget and limited brand awareness. Piggyback off of the people who already have it. Use it to your advantage.
Speaker 5:Share your customer bases. Absolutely. Share your event you know? Like yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think the the problem is that I think the one of my biggest gripes with SaaS has become that marketing is judged by its contribution, not its impact, and that's the wrong way of looking at it. If sales got better because marketing showed up, then everybody wins, but marketing has to be doing better at contributing pipeline than sales, and that's the wrong mentality.
Speaker 4:I'm trying to decide which rabbit hole I
Speaker 2:wanna go down, like you 2 were just sharing
Speaker 4:for the past 5 minutes here.
Speaker 3:I'm also surprised it took 40 minutes of recording for Liam to say my biggest gripe in b to b SaaS. I thought we'd hit that in, like, 5 minutes in.
Speaker 4:Oh, it's so true. So one of my favorite things about where we work is we look at our our sales and marketing. We just call it the GTM team. We don't get caught up in the attribution side of it. And how we know our marketing is working better is before we started, BDRs would call 60 hours a day, you know, the good old fashioned predictable revenue model machine.
Speaker 4:And people be like, who are you? What do you do? You know, that old thing. And then 2 years later, now when the BDRs call people like, oh, lock, so I know what you do. They they give us the pitch back.
Speaker 4:Our CEO still does the founder led sales and people. I said, Matt, give us a year of being on the podcast. You're gonna go from people are gonna ask you about the company and everything else to getting on demos with you and be like, I know you already. I know what you're gonna say, and they're gonna try to sell themselves on why they're a customer for you versus why you have to sell them. And that, Liam, is exactly what I think good marketing does on the sales side.
Speaker 4:Again, yeah, you can't it's not gonna show up in a visible model. It's not gonna show up anywhere else. But those the interpersonal sales side and the growth of the company, I think those are the inflection points where it makes the job easier for BDRs. It makes the job easier on the disco where you don't have to do the full, like, here's what we do. Here is our our origin story, but, like, they get it already.
Speaker 4:So they understand whether it's a unique point of view or just at least, like, what you do and how can benefit them. I think that is a to your point, like, a very intangible result of good marketing that you can never measure that quantitatively. A 100%.
Speaker 3:So, Sam, in the early days when you're pushing this strategy and you're trying to get your CEO on board, what are some of the metrics that you're looking at to prove this out? And then I'll ask Liam and Sydney the same question because their experience is a little bit later stage than where you're at right now.
Speaker 4:So I'll do quantitative ones. I'll do qualitative ones. So quantitative ones are going to be, like, the Q1. Like, you have to give these things times. These are not light switch.
Speaker 4:You can just go and start doing brand awareness, start doing demand creation, start doing lead gen, whatever it is. Like, it's all gonna take time if you're doing it properly. So I I say in the Q1, alright, what are we gonna look at? We've got our baseline of whether you did nothing before or something before, but just understand, you know, get your historicals and that's okay. Since we started doing this quarter later, are we seeing new users come to our website, but not just new users, because you could pay for those content syndication, you can get those for pennies on the dollar.
Speaker 4:I look at people who are coming with direct as their source or organic as the source because they're choosing to find us. Right? They're not being paid to to insert our funnel. I look at high intent pages, namely, like, pricing page, the demo page. Are more people coming and looking at those because they're only gonna look at that if there is some type of curiosity, at least, like, oh, what could this look like for us?
Speaker 4:Is there any interest there? So those are the 2 on the website side in the first 90 days. And I say, like, hey, there's cherries on top. If we do start to get an increase in, like, hand razors, the high intent hand razors, like, I want to talk to sales. I want to try your product.
Speaker 4:That's the first ninety days. And I say the first half of the year, we should start to see a little bit more of the down funnel impact to that. Are your conversion rates going better from lead to opportunity? Are the conversations starting to get easier with the sales team on those fronts? So those are the very hard data points that I'll look at.
Speaker 4:Refine Labs methodology, we'd still ask, how'd you hear about us? And it's fascinating to get responses there because so many different things that won't show up in any attribution model are surfaced there. And that's not to give it credit, but it's just understand what's working for us. Like, where are these places that are that are working? So, Sydney, I know you said you worked at, like, Vanta before.
Speaker 4:Like, go run LinkedIn ads for the IT security audience. They're not on LinkedIn. Good luck. Like, you can push 1,000,000 of dollars there. And, like, it'll work somewhat, but it's a lot harder than for the marketing, sales, recruiting crowd.
Speaker 4:Like, you have to know where you should be spending your time. Like, yes, you should absolutely know who, but where is the second most important part of that? So are the channels that we're pushing harder in, especially, like, when I tell my CEO, hey. Go post more on LinkedIn because that's where our audience spends our time. Let's go get on this podcast.
Speaker 4:Like, again, there's no direct UTM link that you can click on after listening to a podcast to say, I wanna go talk to them. So marrying all of those together is how I was basically able to say, like, hey. Here's what's working. Here's what we were betting on, and then this is panning out. This isn't working.
Speaker 4:Here's what we're tweaking. Here's what we're killing, and just continuing to iterate off of that. Honestly, just communicating that was the biggest part of keeping their trust. It wasn't so much as saying, like, here's the game plan 90 days in. Exactly what we're gonna do for the next 2 years to hit our hypergrowth goals.
Speaker 4:It's no just this worked. This didn't. This failed. This this you know, like, how does it evolve? That's what they care about the most is just knowing that you're working towards that.
Speaker 4:And that's how I was able to tell that story and and keep us on the track of him saying, okay. Like, this is working for us. Keep doing what you're doing.
Speaker 3:Sydney, how does that compare to what you've done at, all the different late stage startups that you've worked at?
Speaker 5:I'm gonna be way more tactical. I think when when the question was, like, how do you convince your CEO? And to me, it's understanding what they care about. And so, at SalesLoft, it was, you know, showing up on LinkedIn, LinkedIn followers, his personal brand on LinkedIn, and so that's where we spent time. We, you know, spend half an hour every week working on his post strategy and, like, getting that those that that connection.
Speaker 5:It's similar with Godard at at g 2. Like, you know, he he where he wants to see the brand, I make sure that we're working on that because that's meaningful to them. A lot of times, it's meaningful to the board as well. You know, put them in your campaigns so they're seeing your work. And then when it gets mentioned back to them from people they're talking to, oh, I saw that thing.
Speaker 5:Like, that is the the soft side that gives the validation when they're seeing it and hearing it from the people that influence them. So I always put that into the equation of, like, brand building is making sure, like, is my are the people that I need to convince seeing that? And then doing all the reports in terms of influencers and followers and, like, you know, the the reach statistics and making sure you do a baseline ahead of time before you start investing in brands so you can show that, especially to the finance person. I think, you know, when you're talking about brand, you also have to have the CFO in mind and making sure they're educated and aware of what the investment's gonna pan out and what to expect to see from that. One of the things that I did at sales often, I get to work with Chad Gold again now at g 2, so I guess it worked, was, you know, the same question that we always get, which is my least favorite question from the board.
Speaker 5:If I gave you a $1,000,000, what would you do with it? Like, I hate that question. Absolutely hate that question. And, and so, you know, I think when they asked it, I said, I don't want it. Don't give it to me yet.
Speaker 5:I haven't built the engine that confidently will tell me, like, where this investment then generate revenue, you know, this much revenue, which is what I care about. I help the company generating revenue until the engine is built consistently and I know and I can start to predict by tweaking dials, which by the way, takes, like, a couple of years to build, then I'll ask for it is my answer. When I'm ready, I'll ask for it. And we did. We after the brand refresh, we'd built all the engines and we did a whole shark tank pitch to our CFO and said, give us a $1,000,000.
Speaker 5:This is what it will generate in terms of of awareness and demand creation and revenue. And we delivered 120% on that goal. And so I could go ask for it again. And so I think, you know, that takes time, that takes trust, that takes all those other pieces. But going back to your question, it's like, understand what they care about, your CEO, your CFO, orchestrate for them, and then still have to deliver on on your goals.
Speaker 4:I like that you said you wait. You waited on that because Liam earlier saying that building the brand awareness it drives inbound is inefficient. To me, that's always the most efficient side. That's where you get the the low cap, the the great payback periods. And so when you start to add in the paid dollars, the heavy paid dollars, it gets wildly inefficient pretty quick.
Speaker 4:And so I always tell people, I'm like, you can't spend your way to product market fit. Like, this is no everyone knows that. But if you have a really strong brand base and then you ask for that $1,000,000, like, that's where yeah. Sydney probably could have grown your company at a relative quip, a 120%. Absolutely not.
Speaker 4:But when you have that strong base beforehand and then you layer in the the demand creation side, adding the paid dollars into some of that, that to me is the the magic part of where it happens. So it sounds like you have to have your like, the fundamentals. You have to have those all in place if you wanna do the rest properly and and truly scale over time.
Speaker 5:I mean, I my I don't wanna downplay previous companies, so it's like I walked in and I was like, holy shit. We're spending how much? Like, to we and we were treating brand awareness as demand capture, and it was just like bananas. But we did have product market fit. We did have a very strong competitor, but it was so inefficient.
Speaker 5:And and I was looking you know, where you see, like, as soon as you start inspecting the buying journey or, like, okay. Well, what happens when somebody hand raises? Like, how many of those actually show up and convert to leads? And and then and then if you put math next to it, you're like, okay, you've you've asked us to spend this much to generate this much pipeline, and then put a dollar figure on, oh, the 30% no show rate on first meeting booked, that's how much we wasted. So do you think we should go fix that now?
Speaker 5:Like, you know, chase after those? Like and it it's just like this, you know, you just see money kind of flowing outside of of and and it's just you and so I think if you're trying to help people understand, if you have the good fortune of being in a situation where you have money to that much money to spend, like, just take it back to the dollars and, you know, like, why we need to pull back. And and it's hard because, you know, you're growing in a a fast clip and it's all being funneled through the investments that you're making, but it's crazy inefficient. And it's just like, as a leader, it's not sustainable. And so how do you raise your hand and be like, this this isn't gonna work, and pulling in the CFO and the CEO and trying to be way more efficient.
Speaker 5:I mean, I pulled back too hard. All again, like, failures are lessons. You know, when I came in, I was just like, we are like, I just wanna cut money out and give it back to finance right away, and it was too fast. So the Google algorithm didn't like that and punished us for it, and then we had to build it back, so I do it differently. But still, I think, you know, as leaders, we come in and see, like, the map, and you're like, this this is not sustainable.
Speaker 3:So we are just about at time. Liam, any final thoughts on that last question?
Speaker 1:I would agree with everything that was said. I think that, tactically, I I'm completely on the same page as that. What what I would add is just that I think that a lot of what we often don't get time to do is, like, I think there's the show what was clearly not working and cut that wasted spend of things like Google Ads and things that are well talked about on LinkedIn. But I think the other bigger problem is make sure that marketing is articulating what problem it is specifically trying to solve. I've also said that salespeople are extremely good at identifying marketing problems because they're the ones who face the realities of it.
Speaker 1:They are, however, very bad at diagnosing the solution to that problem because you ask them what they're dealing with, and they'll go, they don't know who we are. They think we do something else. They think we're way cheaper than we actually were. It's really problematic. And then you go, okay.
Speaker 1:And how would we solve that? And they'll usually say, case studies. Send me to more events. Give me more leads. In reality, you have to try and back up a lot of what I spend my time doing is challenging the, well, where is that consideration set actually being developed?
Speaker 1:How far back is that really happening? And are you doing things to address that problem? Because that's the real problem that will cause long term impact. It's too easy to optimize towards end of funnel efficiency, and you should start there because you need those wins for sure, but you can't end there. And that, I think, is the other piece.
Speaker 1:If you find inefficiencies, reallocate them towards longer term thinking, but know what those are.
Speaker 3:Alright. So last question. Sydney, this has absolutely nothing to do with anything that we talked about, but you were just in my city last week, and we love eating in Chicago. What was the best thing that you ate in Chicago while you were here last week?
Speaker 5:Oh my goodness. Mashed potatoes. I've had everything I had, like, a twice baked potato at, like, oh, it's a steak house that starts with a g.
Speaker 3:Gibson's. Gibson's.
Speaker 5:Oh, that's interesting. Order a steak. I'm like, oh, I wanna get light. I'll just have a potato, and it was this giant, like, stuffed big potato. It was, like, crazy good, but, yeah, probably not as healthy as I was hoping I'd be.
Speaker 4:You can't go to the Midwest and not get a a very hearty potato. I can tell you that.
Speaker 3:Well, this was awesome. We, went long, but it's because I enjoyed the conversation so much. Thank you, for joining me on the proof point. This was a blast.