Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Welcome to Demand Geniuses, the podcast for revenue focused marketers. Each season, we talk to geniuses of the b to b marketing world to reveal the secrets to their success that can help you grow your revenue and progress your career.
Tom Rudnai:Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first ever episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm Tom Rudnai. I'm the host that you're going to be stuck with for these episodes. Before we get into this one, I want to just very quickly pause and say please do hit follow on your platform of choice, Spotify, Apple, to make sure that you don't miss any future episodes. We have some really awesome guests coming up from marketing leaders at public companies to marketing leaders at much smaller companies and topics that that get into everything from the future of business models in a kind of AI driven world to content leaders that are building pretty awesome b to b streaming services.
Tom Rudnai:So a lot of good stuff that you won't want to miss out on, so do hit follow. I promise I won't ask you to do that every episode just this time. Today's guest anyway, getting into the content is Mike Beach. So Mike has been in marketing for thirty years or more, he won't thank me for telling you that, across telco and then more recently SaaS. He was the CMO at DeX, which is a fairly large accounting platform for SMEs, with a kind of product led growth model, and then more recently has flipped over to the enterprise side, as VP of marketing at Causalence.
Tom Rudnai:And that's what we talk about mainly, where he's navigated them through the early stages, some really interesting insight into how to kind of keep all of go to market and obviously particularly marketing on tracks and aligned as you navigate through early experimentation with messaging and pivoting and making sure that everything runs smoothly through those processes. So really great episode. I hope you all enjoy it. And, let's let's get into it.
Tom Rudnai:Mike, talk to me a little bit about your role at CausalENSE. Obviously, you've been there for, I think, coming up on a year now. Also, what what is Causal AI? I think a lot of people on the call will be interested to hear about something other than generative
Mike Beech:AI. All one big happy family AI, surely.
Tom Rudnai:It was invented three years ago, right?
Mike Beech:Yeah, if you believe that, I did a degree and it had AI as one of its components. That was a long time ago. Yeah.
Tom Rudnai:I commented. Just got bigger, that's all.
Mike Beech:Yeah, so I head up marketing, VP of marketing at CausalLens. Have spent many years focused on causal AI, which is basically the technology or an AI that's trying to understand the cause and effects behind data, so not just the seeming alignment of data, but the actual, if you change this, it will happen through that data. Where we've actually moved to more recently is taking that beyond that, because it's all working in the data science space, It's moving that into the, well, how can we make data science more accessible and AI generally more accessible for the world, but, yeah, those people who are trying to drive their businesses on data. So we have developed the first AI data scientists, So AI agents that can do the mundane stuff, can clean your data, can analyse your data, then start building models for you, and then actually you can then, in a good generative AI sense, sit there and talk to your AI to ask it about the data and what you should be doing about it. So it's, yeah, generally speaking, we're trying to do, mission is all about making data science accessible for anyone.
Mike Beech:That's what
Tom Rudnai:I mean, a super, super relevant mission, right? And I can imagine, I don't know if you've seen this, AI has been around a long time and you obviously predate the kind of ChatGPT release. But have you seen a real uptick in demand and focus from a lot of different places since then? Like, has it been good for business?
Mike Beech:Yeah, I think we'd all know that, yeah, three years ago, AI didn't exist according to Google search and things like that. And now it's all you can hear about. So absolutely, On the one hand, it's been brilliant because suddenly every conversation, even front page of the newspapers, all talk about AI. The downside of that is if you're a company with a particular area and a particular focus, you try and get your search rankings up into the top page. Yeah, so good from a general awareness perspective, but actually it sort of clouds the picture and some of the nuances of AI because everybody just thinks it's chatty bitty.
Mike Beech:And of course chatty bitty can do everything, surely.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, okay. Well, and I guess that has a lot of knock on effects throughout how you said it, right? Because it changes the goal, I'm going away from script a little bit here, but changes the goal a little bit for sales, for marketing, because it's not so much. Presume about generating awareness, there's a lot of awareness and a lot of top of funnel demand out there, but it's kind of filtering through that and qualifying the people who actually understand what they're talking about with causal AI, and that's what they're here for. How does that fit into the different channels that you prototype?
Tom Rudnai:How does it fit into your marketing strategy?
Mike Beech:So I almost ignore Gen AI as a technology and being out there and just say, right, we have particular problems that we can solve. We have to talk to people about their problems and how we solve them. And the fact that we're solving them by a branch of AI is not the main point of the conversation. It's just, yeah, that's useful, and we have to explain it and explain where it is, but it goes back to, sort of first principle is marketing. What's your problem?
Mike Beech:What's your pain points? How can we solve those best for your business? And talking through that, because if people recognize their pain points, they're interested in talking to you. If they don't, they're not interested in talking to you.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, okay, let's take a little bit of a back step, I guess, because I've kind of skipped ahead. I wanna hear a little more about the the kind of bit the the mini pivot that you guys have done recently, because I think that's something that's gonna be really interesting for listeners. But I guess first, talk maybe set the scene a little bit of how you look at marketing's role within CallZones. What's kind of unique or challenging?
Mike Beech:Yeah, so I'd say in some ways very traditional in the sense that we are a B2B enterprise sales engine, go to market engine, so you have your marketing team trying to create that of top of funnel awareness and interest, and then you are passing that on to a sort of sales team to work through quite a long sales cycle, a typical sort of nine month sales cycle for enterprise sales. So very traditional from that perspective. However, flip that around and say, well, we're a startup and we're trying to find those particular pains on what works best, and actually, there's a lot of work on, well, what's the right messaging? Should we be testing this? So a lot of message testing, a lot of content change, so yes, a lot of content was causal to start with, which perhaps took us down into much more of a technical community that wasn't really a buying community, so flipping that to think, okay, so that's not worked as well as we would like, so how do we start talking more problem focused?
Mike Beech:And that sounds like, oh, it's just a piece of content on a website, but actually it's the whole way you approach the market, how you're talking, your messaging, your messaging on the website, the messaging in the sales deck, how the salespeople first pick up the phone and talk to people. It actually flows all the way through what you do from a go to market perspective. So yeah, it's that we have to be aligned, because the last thing you want to do is have a marketing message that says one thing and a salesperson that says something completely different as soon as you start talking to them.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, okay. And so is there anything that you guys do? How do you create that alignment? Was there like a cadence that you work with alongside sales?
Mike Beech:The joys of being a small company, when there's only a small team, you kind of sit next to each other and you talk to each other on a weekly, if not daily basis.
Tom Rudnai:More aligned than you'd like to be then.
Mike Beech:Yeah, exactly, and if I compare and contrast to bigger companies I've worked for, the challenge has always been, yeah, you're not sat next to each other, you're not working there day to day, whereas small company, we're in the office two days a week, the same days, so you get to see people, you get to talk to people. Yes, we have meetings, but also you just around, we only have one coffee area, so you're around the same coffee area. We love Slack. There's loads of Slack messages going backwards and forwards, so it's much easier for a 50 person company to keep in touch with everything that's going on, and that's total people. So go to market, even much smaller team than a several hundred people company where you're in multiple geographies and things like that.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, okay, and I know your last role at DeX, that was a much larger marketing team, right? Was it a bit of an adjustment switching over to?
Mike Beech:Yeah, that's my two extremes. I'm probably the smallest marketing team now and the largest one, the role before. So the one before, the team size was as large as my current company, so yeah. Okay. Yeah, and everybody was marketing, and you're across The US, Europe, and Australia, so you're working across all time zones as well.
Mike Beech:So yes, there are some specific challenges when you've got that sort of size team, that sort of geography and variations. But I think for DeX, the go to market message was much more straightforward. It was a clear value proposition where you're aiming. People know what you're talking about, you don't have to do a lot of explaining. It's just that why are you better, why spend the money kind of thing.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, okay. So thinking about that same problem, like alignment with sales, is it something that you had to take on a little bit more proactively at Dex and does it give you more of a role or less of a role?
Mike Beech:I'd almost just say it's a different role. There's a lot more doing Coral Lens in terms of hand to hand working with the sales team. So at the moment, we are particularly focused on ABM because it's high level accounts, so account based marketing. So it's working with the sales team on, okay, how are going to do the research on these companies? How can you get crafted messages to individuals and pulling that together and helping the sales team create those?
Mike Beech:Not necessarily doing it for them, but nevertheless using whatever tools and techniques we can find to really make sure that on a day to day or week to week basis, they've got material they need to go out and reach the market, as well as then, yes, inbound leads, yes, handing those over and that sort of flow through. So there's probably, I'd say marketing here at CausalLens, much less involved in the closing part of a deal, whereas obviously at Deck, of it was only done online, so it's almost a pure marketing close.
Tom Rudnai:It makes me think of something one of our other guests on the podcast, Joel Harrison, said, which is marketers need to change their perspective a little bit and not be a support function for sales, right? And I guess that's a balance you have to tread. How do you support sales without becoming a sales support function? How do you look at that?
Mike Beech:No, totally. And I'm laughing because obviously been through a few companies and seen a few things where, yes, absolutely, will mention no names or certain salespeople who would definitely consider marketing a support function. I imagine if you go back in time, probably marketing once upon a, yeah, was created the brochures for the salesperson to give out during their sales process, when they meet people, have something pretty to hand over kind of thing, long time ago. No longer now, I think people do recognise, and certainly board level and most grown up companies will recognise the different roles that sales and marketing have, and the need for the two teams to work together well. And having spoken to quite a few private equity companies, venture capitalists and things like that, really are keen on marketing sales dovetailing well and understanding how that works and how to make that an optimum fit.
Mike Beech:And most CROs, Chief Revenue Officers, as they're now called rather than sales, understand the need for marketing and then understand the value that sales can bring, dovetailing into that. So I think in more recent years, I've found it less of a challenge to just be the, yeah, let's create the pretty colored pictures for sales.
Tom Rudnai:Well, think one thing that's changed is there's more buy in from outside of marketing. So I think I'm very conscious. My background was as a sales rep, and it's getting harder and harder to talk to buyers, right? They generally speaking, the days of having a kind of weekly catch up, which is always what my boss was saying, you need to be having a weekly stand up almost with your prospect. I'm like, they don't wanna talk to me.
Tom Rudnai:And why would they? There's 11 people involved in the buying decision. It's gonna take six to nine months. Why would any one of them take such ownership of it as to have the weekly catch up with me? Right?
Tom Rudnai:It's a very big ask of a champion. But so I think that always made me recognise as part of why we then launched Demand Genius, We recognised the need for more support in staying front of mind during that long complex sales cycle and doing it without being annoying.
Mike Beech:Yeah, that last bit is always the hard bit, isn't it?
Tom Rudnai:Because otherwise your alternative is every two months, like, Any update? Or every two weeks, sorry.
Mike Beech:Yeah, exactly. Any update? Have you got the budget approved?
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, and you reach a point where I'm out of creativity. I'm out of other things to say. But yeah, what it sounds like you're saying is you're getting a lot more buy in than historically when you've maybe had that problem to solving it.
Mike Beech:Yeah, absolutely. I find there's a lot more buy in. And with that buy in, there's also an expectation. There's an expectation on what marketing will deliver as part of that. I mean, again, if I compare and contrast to the early part of my career, marketing there to be brand and presence, as long as the colors were good and the pictures were good, job done.
Mike Beech:That was marketing. Not anymore. You're never going to get away with that now. So yes, it's part of it, but it's quite a small part of what marketing's asked to do now.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, well it's the flip side of it, right? I always say our kind of specialism is with content marketing, you have to show, if you want to be taken seriously, you have to be able to draw that line from what you do to revenue, but the problem you're gonna have is then you're gonna be held accountable to it.
Mike Beech:Yeah, yearning for the good old days when you just have to make things look good, that's all. Talk to me a
Tom Rudnai:bit about one thing I'm interested to get out of this is understand how you organise yourselves and how you measure success. In terms of your marketing KPIs, do you have a North Star that you work towards, and what is that?
Mike Beech:Good question. I'm going to start with Dex, so compare and contrast. Dex was much, much more clear. It was qualified leads, and we could measure, we had definition for what qualified was, and then you could measure how many of those you got, and in which region, and through which channel, all that good stuff, and then you'd measure the closure rate of those, and all of that, when you've got a one month sort of sales cycle, six week sales cycle, those measures work really well because during the year, you can see how you're doing. There's no escaping from it.
Mike Beech:So that sort of a lead funnel, yeah, and there was various measurements up and down the funnel, cost of lead, the customer acquisition costs, all those good things, but they all fared from, if you're trying to grow, you want more leads. So that was the north star, many things there. I think at causal ends, it's been more of a challenge to work out, well, what should the north star be? So we went through, I would have said most of last year, probably trying to say, Okay, we're needing awareness preference, kind of that lead gen, but not quite the same as more of a top level lead as a way of doing that, and perhaps finding that's not we could get a lot of interest, but it wasn't hard to work out because it takes months and months and months. It's not really converting, so now it's trying to work through.
Mike Beech:But we're still on leads, we still want interest, but we want the right sort of leads and the right sort of people, and it's defining what that is. So a north star of still wanting engagement, still wanting interest, but the right sort, which is probably a really hard thing to measure, but it's more about, okay, so what are people engaging with? Hopefully, what are people engaging with? What are they looking at? Can we flow them through the journey?
Mike Beech:So right, these are really important people, go for them. Not based just on that title.
Tom Rudnai:But it must be a challenge, particularly with something that's at the bleeding edge of technology like Corson Edge, because it's interesting. And that brings research students, that brings tourists. It creates different problems. I don't think anyone ends up on an SME accounting platform website, really, unless they're an SME that needs to do accounting.
Mike Beech:Yeah, I mean, you're talking about, I guess, that 90% of people who turned up their website were the right sort of people. Yeah, now it's very, yeah. I mean, you can spot, yeah, we have things like if you haven't got a business email address, we're not interested. We'll talk to you, you can have the content, but we know you're not a real lead. If you've got an education, so from a .edu, then you're probably not our target market.
Mike Beech:Having said that, we have actually got some universities interested in using the product for real, so you've to be a little bit careful throwing those out.
Tom Rudnai:That's a lesson, open minded, yeah.
Mike Beech:Yeah, so you're of like, okay, yeah. So I did have one who was like, look, I'm really interested in finding out about your product because we'd use Zipfiche. And I'm like, oh, you're real. We thought you were just a research student, yeah.
Tom Rudnai:That's really interesting though, because the SAS playbook is you go super narrow and it's like the crossing the chasm thing, right? We're gonna be very deliberate about every move that we make, and we're never gonna have conversations outside of that ICP because it's a waste of resources. But then you are gonna close yourself off to potential opportunities, and in that startup phase, you're potentially missing where you're actually going to find your PMF or
Mike Beech:Yeah, exactly. I think that's the So I love Crossing Casm, one of the first business books I ever read and trained on, implemented all the rest of it. But it does require you knowing, either you're in a category that's easy to define and you know where you're going, you know who the innovators are and who the next people are, but if you don't, you've got to explore a little bit more and work it out. You've to work out who are the first people, who are those first tranche of people who are going to take you and start building your business around. And if you're not 100% sure on that, yeah, there has to be a little bit more open mindedness and a willingness to go back and try again if needed.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, I think that makes sense. And this is going off topic again, but do you look at the skills differently when you're hiring based on that? Because it's a different kind of later on, once you've got a defined ICP, it's about ruthlessly executing a strategy within that, right? Earlier on, there is more space for general curiosity and experimentation.
Mike Beech:Yeah, I think Is it different? Certainly there has to be, in the early phases, an openness to experiment and try things out. I would say you should have that no matter where you are. That's one of my things in the market, you should be exploring and changing and looking to do things differently and improve on things anyway. Yeah, the day you stop learning is the day we're burying you kind of thing.
Mike Beech:So that open mindedness, I think, yes, in a startup series A, even series B when you're scaling up, I think there's still an element of you've got to be open to change and doing things differently. And if you're not, you're probably in the wrong company or the wrong role.
Tom Rudnai:I'm going to change the topic a little bit. One of the other things that I wanted to get into, which we've touched on a bit, but is the pivot that you've kind of done recently, right? And I think part of it is to go after a much more defined ICP and use case. I guess, you maybe, we had a bit of an intro, but talk a bit more about what are the changes that you've made, and most importantly, why you felt now was the time that you needed to do that as a business?
Mike Beech:Yeah, certainly, okay. So the big change was the realization that causal AI is brilliant, can solve a lot of problems, but it's quite a deep technical subject area. And what we're finding is within companies, it's a data science solution, so you're sort of trying to create a model to predict the future essentially from a data perspective. There's not many data scientists able to use it appropriately. So you sort of, let's call it the top 1%.
Mike Beech:So you've got a very small market of people who can use it. And what we were also finding is it was being used for innovation. So it's like an innovation club looking at it, which then doesn't necessarily lead on to future business within a company. So we certainly had a few cases of some very large organizations taking it, trying it, liking it, solve their immediate problems, but job done, right, move on. So that's not where you want to be from a long term business.
Mike Beech:So yeah, wanting something stickier. Also realizing that 90% of what we were doing when helping customers get up to speed with Corseil AI is sorting out the data, just cleaning it, getting it ready, all of those tedious, but if you don't get it right, processes that companies tend not to do. If you don't get that right, you can't make decisions based on data if your data's poor, simple as that, garbage in, garbage out. Yeah, eons old and still very true. So finding that, you're like, Well, we're setting up a platform to help with all of that.
Mike Beech:Hang on a minute. We can make that even easier for people. We've got AI capabilities clearly. We can make much more use of LLMs plugged into the platform to help create agents to do some of that work. So it's that realization that actually a lot of the value is in helping you with the data and getting up and running, not solving that difficult, as Alex said, that most difficult problem, yes, but that one difficult problem is one difficult problem as opposed to day to day everything you need to do.
Mike Beech:So that was the dawning realization through last year, and then coupled with the same time as the world moving from, oh, LLMs are everything, to agents. Twenty twenty five is going to be the year of agents, actually. We were there, I'd like to say months, not weeks, months before the rest of the world.
Tom Rudnai:And from your perspective, it gives you a lot more repeatability, right? Which I guess is a big part of what we're talking about.
Mike Beech:It's repeatability and it's day to day usefulness as opposed to just a big problem. And once you've solved the big problem, well, that's it, done, go away. Day to day is going to help, and in a business, that's what you want. You want to be able to deliver value every single day. That's the pivot and the shift.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, okay. And I mean, it's something that I think a lot of AI companies are going to have to do, though. AI, it's changing a lot of things, but I think it still mostly lives within the realm of experimental budgets. And we're trying things partly because it lets people go on podcasts and get up on stage and sound really, really clever at events. Not not in this case, obviously, but I think I think there is some of that.
Tom Rudnai:But I think all of them are trying to pivot and and well, not not to hone in on where they can be repeatably useful and kind of break out of that experimental budget.
Mike Beech:Yeah, exactly that. That's exactly where we were in the, the causal AI is an experimental budget. We do great things, but people are experimenting, and it's moving from that to a, No, you need to add value every single day, because that's what's going to keep stickiness and also help you grow. That's how you move into other parts of it. If you're working in enterprise, part of the big plus is you sell once, you sell 100 times because it just scales through.
Mike Beech:Well, only if you can help 100 different departments or 100 different groups within the enterprise. So yeah, you've got to be broader in terms of your applicability.
Tom Rudnai:And so why was now the right time to do that?
Mike Beech:Well, I would have actually said a year ago would have been the right time to do it. But if it's not a year ago, then you should
Tom Rudnai:do it now.
Mike Beech:It's more learning through the year and realising where things were, plus the trend and some of the technology around making agents work. I think if we came a year ago and said, Right, we've got these AI agents that can be your sort of AI data scientists, people wouldn't know what you're talking about. So the plus point is the world has shifted slightly further forward. People are generally talking about the need for agents and beginning to understand what that might mean, so you're not having to explain that bit. You're explaining that, yeah, but our agents are this particular problem and can work in this environment for you.
Mike Beech:Like, Oh, got it, okay. As opposed to Boston Agent? Is that some sort of James Bond thing that we're now adding or is it something different?
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, okay. So it's a bit of a combination of it's kind of the right time for the business, but then also there's a bit of an education wave that you're able to ride. Because that was gonna be my next question actually was from your perspective as a marketer, it's obviously a big shift. You're known for one thing and you guys are kind of series A, so you're not a complete startup, right? You have brand equity and you have a reputation within a fairly small ICP, actually, so quite well known.
Tom Rudnai:How do you go about communicating that change? And it sounds like you had a helping hand there, and that was part of the thinking, but
Mike Beech:Yeah, the helping hand definitely helps. And I'm not going to say we've got it all perfectly right so far. I'm still getting inbound liens for CorselyAI, so I'm not sure whether that's good or bad. I'm going to take it though, so it's all good. There are certainly people out there who will know us for Corsely, and that's still in the product, so it can still do some pretty decent stuff on the Coral side of things, we haven't taken it out or anything like that.
Mike Beech:So it's more about trying to add layers on top of what we had rather than just saying, We used to do this, we now do this. So yes, we have gone to our customers. Yes, those we're helping, we're talking about, well, have you thought about using agents to do this and to help you with that? So that's all customer engineering closeness is helping with those. And then in a sort of fresh go to market, it's talking much more about, we're still data science, so we haven't changed yet.
Mike Beech:So a lot of our target personas, people following us on LinkedIn and things like that, they're still in the right sort of space. We're now just broadening the message as to what we're doing there and why.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, okay. Makes sense. I'm going to switch into, so what we'd to do at the end of these podcasts as we get near the end is go into some slightly more quickfire questions and a bit more general. So the first one, which I actually, I gave you a couple of these to prepare you, but the first one I didn't, so I'll put you on the spot there. Are there any channels at the moment that you're seeing really great results out of and kind of prioritising, doubling down on?
Mike Beech:Yeah, our main channel, no surprise, enterprise B2B, has been LinkedIn and creating content for LinkedIn, but also creating people. So Darko is our CEO and others within the team to sort of have a presence within LinkedIn. That works so much better for us than emails, any other advertising channel, promotion through other focused areas. I mean, yes, that's all part of the mix, but LinkedIn is our number one digital channel, which wasn't the case for us at Dex, for example. So that's a little bit different.
Tom Rudnai:Nice, well, I'm going to clip that up and get that on our LinkedIn just as soon as we finish this conversation. There you go. A follow-up question, I'm always really bad at quick follow-up questions, that comes off the back of that then. How do you so it's I think it's a huge pain point for a lot of marketers is trying to get those internal thought leaders to take ownership of being that and and putting themselves out there. And part of it almost is like a a handholding thing, right, and giving people confidence, particularly when you're going beyond just the founder who, let's face it, we're ego driven people, we love talking to them.
Tom Rudnai:But once you remove the narcissism, how have you got people doing that and got them to embrace that?
Mike Beech:So I think there are some people who are more naturally happy and open to be in a social media context, if we call it in a social media context. And so it's taking those who are happy to be there and building their presence and helping them with that. There are some people who are dead against it. I'm not going mention any names, some people just don't do. You can soon tell because you go on any of their social profiles and they haven't posted for ten years, or if they did it was liking something from fifteen years ago, I don't know.
Mike Beech:So yeah, there are those who are more open to it, and I can probably say this because I'm of an age, probably younger generations are much more open to that sort of, having been brought up on social media as opposed to being something that was introduced during our lifetime. So I think that sort of gives people a natural tendency and openness to be there. So yeah, you're certainly not going to get, a company of 50 people, you're not going get 50 people willing to put themselves out there, but you don't need that. Just a handful, two or three is a good starting point.
Tom Rudnai:And have they mostly been on the commercial side? And do you do things to proactively support them in creating the content, or is it more down to them and encouraging them to find their own voice?
Mike Beech:There is some proactive creation of content. So I'll give you some examples. Are, and this is actually with Darko, our CEO founder, we are doing videos with him at the moment, so they are being, like we're doing here, they are being recorded, they are being clipped, they are being snipped into your sound bites and all the rest of it. And what we're doing there is we're getting Duncan to interview people in the team to talk about a topic which, guess what, it's been pushed there by the marketing team. But yeah, they're doing a great job, they're creating content, but that's also starting to introduce other people in the company, who perhaps would be a little bit more reluctant, but are actually happy when they're in front of the camera and microphone, but with others talking to them sort of thing.
Mike Beech:So that's marketing helping. And then there's others who just, they're just good at doing content, we're just encouraging them and helping them if they need help. So one of the product guys and one of the other senior people in the team are sort of like happy pushing out content there, you're like, Right, good job, just keep it up. From a company perspective, we'll make sure we repost, like, comment, all the rest of it.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, mean, the first bit is quite a powerful way, if you can get people start to get involved in it but in support of other people's content and then you just get people a little bit more comfortable with it. Once that sweet dopamine kicks in from all the likes, then That's the thing about social media, it's more ish isn't it?
Mike Beech:Like I say, not something I've grown up with, so I'm okay, I find it fine, but you know, I get it, Tom.
Tom Rudnai:I'm all for it. Either after one drink or late at night or something, something about like Instagram reel. It just appeals to you. So I have to try myself out out of it so badly. Anyway, I digress again.
Tom Rudnai:Back to the quick fire question.
Mike Beech:Quick fire. Yeah. That was one, wasn't it?
Tom Rudnai:Yeah. Yeah. That that was the first one. The next one will be quicker. Okay, this is a bit of a hypothetical.
Tom Rudnai:If I went tomorrow and I approved your plan A budget request, right, that like marketing dream that you'd love to do, that realistically no one would be stupid enough to give you the budget to go and try, what would you go and do?
Mike Beech:So I'd probably give you a general answer rather than specifics for the business. Would invest in two things. One would be as many tools as I could possibly lay my hands on. So I think one of the biggest changes in marketing is the toolset, and that is changing even more rapidly now. So I think there's a whole host of tools that we can and should be using to like DemandGenius, obviously.
Mike Beech:But bloke.
Tom Rudnai:Someone had to say that.
Mike Beech:Yeah, yeah, of course. Which we could and should be using. But then the other side of it is I also want people who are curious and willing to try those tools. It's one thing buying tools, it's another thing actually deploying them. So I actually think one of the most underappreciated, underlooked parts of marketing is the MarOps team.
Mike Beech:I And it's just, you just rarely get it, you rarely get people who know how to do it, and yet actually it's probably going to be one of the most, going forward, I think one of the most impactful and important areas of marketing. So I build the team and give them all the money and tools that they want and get them playing quickly.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, because my question was going be actually off the back of that. Obviously a lot of people are trying to restrict the amount of bloat that they have in tools and they're trying to consolidate their stack a little bit, but I've seen that kind of answers it, right? The key is having a marketing ops team that can get all of these individual tools singing together.
Mike Beech:Yeah, absolutely. In the old days, even before decks, previous company, one of my rules was we've chosen HubSpot as our marketing automation platform. It was, write any tool you like, but it has to plug in. If it doesn't plug in, we're not having it. As simple as that.
Mike Beech:Just to get that, we've got to have one way of seeing what's going on in the world. I think it's a lot more sophisticated things like SAPIEN now. There's other ways you can do it. You don't have to be quite so strict, but there's still that need. They need to plug together and talk together.
Mike Beech:And if you can't, if there'd be an individual tools, it's just, yeah, what's the point?
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think it's something that, think it's a problem that's gonna be a solved problem pretty soon as AI agents can start doing a lot of integration work, which is gonna be, I mean, me as a founder, that's incredible because the opportunities that brings in terms of opening up your TAM, it's pretty cool. But next one, so what skill or trait has been the biggest needle mover in your career for you personally?
Mike Beech:For me personally, adaptability with a technical background. Things have changed so much since when I started. You just got to enjoy change. So that's kept me where I am, I guess.
Tom Rudnai:I think that technical background is quite key to that, right? It's something that-
Mike Beech:That helped. When a lot of the change has been technology change, let's be honest, over the last twenty, thirty years, Yeah, being able to understand it just means it doesn't frighten me. I'm one of those people where the kids still ask me how to do things technically rather than the other way around, so yeah, as long as that stays, I'm okay.
Tom Rudnai:Well, I don't know, I'm not going to comment. I was going say, in case my dad listens to this, I'm not gonna tell stories of that being the other way around. Which is normal.
Mike Beech:That is the normal way around. But no, I still get calls from my kids about how to do things. So you're like, really? Come on.
Tom Rudnai:Cool. And then last question. Everyone I would say everyone listening to this is gonna think, oh, Mike's so smart. Mike's got it all all together. He knows exactly what he's doing.
Tom Rudnai:He's just told us he's adaptable. What's the biggest fuck up in your career? Like that moment that where your heart sank and you're like, Damn.
Mike Beech:I could go very, very early on in my career. We launched a product, and I'll be able to spend millions on the launch, as in, was old days, it was a network attached appliance to do backup for devices. Appliances in those days were quite sexy, so plug them into network with all sorts of things. We did market research, we did focus groups, I went to Houston, Boston, behind the glass, listening to everybody, and everybody was like, yeah, is brilliant, this is great. We flooded the channels, so it was a sort of channel based business, so you'd buy a lot of it.
Mike Beech:It was hardware, loads of inventory, loads of software. Flooded the channels, and yeah, it didn't sell. But guess what, during that, during all the focus groups, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, all this interest, so we kept bumping up the forecast. So we'd forecast multi million, very large business, and yeah, lost money, never mind it.
Tom Rudnai:Oh, God. It makes me think of when you tell a joke and there's just crickets.
Mike Beech:But it was such a big miss that we actually did the analysis of, well, how did we get it so wrong? How did the research go so wrong? And it just, I mean, a real basic learning for me, which was, yes, people loved it, loved the concept, loved the idea, price point was all right, everything was good. It just wasn't in their top five priorities, they only covered the top five, and it's like you solve a problem outside of whatever the list is going to be. Great, people say they love it and they say they'll buy it, but they never get to it, and that was, yeah, it was a don't forget to ask, where does this appear in your priority list.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, mean, so that's a good lesson for anyone starting a business, building a product, something like that, right? It's very easy to go on, and it's something we had to be quite conscious of when we were prototyping Demand Genius, right? As you get on calls with people and you're trying to validate it, but you have to try and dig deeper because they might say, Yes, this looks great, but it's like, Okay, how does it stack up in your list of priorities? And that's what actually is going to indicate buying signals, right?
Mike Beech:Exactly, exactly. It's the, Yep, it solves the problem. It's a price point, Oh, perfect, well good. But actually, will you get to this problem in your list or not? And it's like one there.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, fair enough.
Mike Beech:Yeah, fair enough, okay.
Tom Rudnai:Yeah, cool. And then anything you would recommend, listen of this podcast, go and listen to, read, watch, do? Any recommendations?
Mike Beech:I would probably use something like Perplexity or something like that and go and look up and find the content for of the original work. It came out roughly the same time as Crossing the Chasm, and that was by Michael J. Lanning and Doctor. Lynn Phillips, and it was all about building market focused organizations. And for anyone who needs to know, Michael Lanning was the first person to come up with the term value proposition.
Tom Rudnai:Good claim fame, that.
Mike Beech:That's his claim to fame, and that was the first set of content on what do you need to do to create a great product, and it was around value propositions. And I don't think anything has changed since then in the sense of you have to deliver value. It's pretty obvious, just the way they question and the way they talk through it has kind of really stood the test. A bit like crossing the chasm, really. We've stood the test of time.
Mike Beech:So yeah, anything by those couple of people. Good stuff.
Tom Rudnai:Okay, great. Well, I've not read that, so that's actually the second new book on my reading list. Need to start asking people for more bite sized things, because the next question is going to be, did you read it? Then Velcie, just before we let you go, anything, just give you a quick second, if there's anything you'd like to plug or anything you're doing at CausalEns or personally that you'd like to promote.
Mike Beech:From a CausalEns perspective, if you have a data science team and you want them to do more, go faster, have a look at causalens.com and have a look at what we're doing. It will supercharge them. It will help them really deliver value to your business. So go and get them some agents. They'll be very happy people.
Tom Rudnai:Awesome. Alright, Mike. Lovely to talk to you, and thank you very much for coming on.
Mike Beech:Thank you, Tom. Been a pleasure. Been a great
Intro:exactly how your content connects to revenue and how you can use it to close deals faster, head to www.demand-genius.com. Thanks for listening.