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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.
Tom (00:03.47)
Okay, hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses podcast. I am joined here today by Mike Beach. So I'll give you a little bit of an introduction to Mike from a professional perspective. So Mike's got a long career in marketing across SAS and telco from what I can see. Most recently he was CMO at a company called Dext, which I correct me if I'm wrong Mike, but automated bookkeeping for SMEs.
and they're now leading the marketing team at Causalen. So right on the bleeding edge of Causal AI and I want to hear a bit about that as well. Mark, have I got my intro right? Mike, sorry.
Mike Beech (00:36.591)
You have done well, you have done well, well done Tom.
Tom (00:40.97)
Excellent. Well, I mean outside of that, well, Mike, the person, human being, not the work robot. What's going on in your world at the moment?
Mike Beech (00:50.471)
wow, gah, a non-work question. I, well, I'm a dad and actually my children are grown up, so I'm actually a granddad as well. So I have a little grandson who's tiny, tiny, tiny. So that is a new addition to the family. So making things happen. As well as that, I did have, he's gone now, I have two dogs.
Tom (01:12.238)
And do they get on with the grandson? Everything's friendly.
Mike Beech (01:16.659)
everything is friendly. They're a bit like, what the fudge have you done bringing this thing into our lives? Especially now that said grandson is crawling. So was fine in the first few months because no movement now it's a, what's this thing moving towards us? Yeah.
Tom (01:21.535)
You
Tom (01:30.86)
Yeah, okay, so it's like a little bomb of chaos that you've just dropped into the family and we can see what happens.
Mike Beech (01:35.983)
Yeah, but one of my dogs is a, well they're both Labradors but one's particularly food obsessed. So he has worked out that where there are babies there's food. So high chair, sit underneath it, you will find all sorts of things coming over the top of it. So yeah.
Tom (01:46.72)
Okay, very clever.
Tom (01:53.642)
Nice, that sounds like a wholesome family scene. Anyway, so Mike, talk to me a little bit about your role at Corsolens. Obviously you've been there for, I coming up on a year now, and also what is Corsol AI? I think a lot of people on the call will be interested to hear about something other than generative AI.
Mike Beech (01:57.293)
Ha ha!
Mike Beech (02:05.455)
Yes, I'm the first one.
Mike Beech (02:12.975)
All one big happy family AI, surely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, if you believe that I did a degree in that had a eyes one of its components that was a long time ago. So yeah, just got bigger. Yeah, I had a marketing VP of marketing at causal lens. We have spent many years focused on causal AI, which is
Tom (02:17.55)
It was invented three years ago, right?
Tom (02:28.876)
I comment.
Mike Beech (02:42.563)
basically the technology or an AI that's trying to understand the cause and effects behind data. So, you know, not just the seeming alignments of data, but the actual, you know, if you change this, this 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, is moving that into the, 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 clean, can do the mundane stuff, can clean your data, can analyze your data and then start building models for you. 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 what we're trying to do, mission is all about making data science accessible for anyone.
Tom (03:47.278)
which is, I mean, a super relevant mission, right? And I can imagine, I don't know if you've seen this, but, so AI has been around a long time and you obviously predate the kind of chat GBT 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 (03:56.399)
Thanks
Mike Beech (04:05.441)
Yeah, I think we all know that three years ago AI didn't exist according to Google search and things like that. And now it's all you can hear about. absolutely. On the one hand, it's been brilliant because suddenly every conversation, even the 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.
That's, 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 chat GPT. And of course chat GPT can do everything surely. So yeah.
Tom (04:50.424)
Yeah, okay. Well, and I guess that has a lot of knock-on effects throughout how you sell it, right? Because it changes the goal. I'm going away from scripted a little bit here, but this is interesting. It changes the goal a little bit for sales, for marketing, because it's not so much, I 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.
Mike Beech (04:58.287)
Of course.
Mike Beech (05:18.443)
Yeah, it's trying to bring people to the detail of AI, if that makes sense. great, people understand AI. Unfortunately, let's be honest, there's been many AI projects and not many of them have generated value. yeah, people have explored but not generated value. It's trying to make sure that we're picking up the right kind of challenges and problems to solve, rather than we're just trying to create a piece of text for you. It's not that, that's not what we do, it's much more...
nuanced and detailed than that. So it is trying to get people to understand there are different forms of AI that have different purposes and different uses and not all AI is the same. Whereas at the moment it probably just feels a bit like that.
Tom (06:04.802)
Yeah, okay, so how is that fed into your actual kind of, or maybe this is quite a broad question, but how's that fed into the different channels that you prototype? Like, how's it fed into your marketing strategy?
Mike Beech (06:16.526)
So I almost ignore GenAI as a technology in 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, yeah, sort of first.
First principle is marketing. Yeah, what's your problem? What's your paying points? How can we solve those best for your business? And talking through that, because if people recognise their paying points, they're interested in talking to you. If they don't, they're not interested in talking to you. So almost put the AI bit to one side.
Tom (07:02.766)
Yeah, okay, so focus in on that rather, and it stops you from in conversations, getting drawn into conversations about things that aren't really your specialty and drawn into the broader landscape.
Mike Beech (07:14.541)
Yeah, absolutely. you don't get into the, yeah, well, which LLM do you use? Which is it? that, which, okay, we can talk about that. That's actually not exactly what you're trying to really get through there.
Tom (07:24.93)
Yeah, okay, makes sense. Let's take a little bit of a back step, I guess, because I've kind of skipped ahead. I want to hear a lot more about the kind of the mini pivot that you guys have done recently, because I think that's something that's going to be really interesting for listeners. But I guess first, maybe set the scene a little bit of marketing's role, or how you look at marketing's role within Calls at Ends. What's kind of unique or challenging about that, in terms of where you sit within the broader sales cycle and things like that?
Mike Beech (07:50.737)
Mike Beech (07:54.529)
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 sort 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, typical sort of nine months sales cycle for enterprise sales.
very traditional from that perspective. However, flip that around and say, 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 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.
Tom (08:47.341)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Beech (08:47.469)
So flipping that thing, okay, so that's not worked as well as we would like. So how do we start talking more problem focused? And that, yeah, it sounds like, 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.
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 who says something completely different as soon as you start talking to them.
Tom (09:24.856)
Yeah, okay. And so is there anything that you guys do? Like what's the, how do you create that alignment? Was there like a cadence that you work with alongside sales? it?
Mike Beech (09:32.975)
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 weekly, if not daily basis. 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 working there day to day. Whereas small company, we're in the office two days a week, the same days.
Tom (09:42.446)
More lines than you'd like to be then.
Mike Beech (09:59.929)
So you get to see people, you get to talk to people. Yes, we have meetings, but also you're 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, yeah, 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, yeah, several hundred people company where you're in multiple geographies and things like that.
Tom (10:28.76)
Yeah, okay, and I know your last role at Dex, that was a much larger marketing team, right? So was it bit of an adjustment switching over to?
Mike Beech (10:34.19)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's my two extremes. I'm probably in the smallest marketing team now and the largest one that the role before. the one before the team size was as large as my current company. yeah, when you got and everybody was marketing and you're across the US, Europe and Australia. So you're working across all time zones as well. 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.
Tom (10:46.796)
Okay.
Mike Beech (11:05.241)
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 why are you better? Why spend the money kind of thing.
Tom (11:20.366)
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 Dext and how?
Mike Beech (11:28.599)
Yeah, that was just going through the what's the what's the marketing process to get good quality leads and that includes what how much qualification should be done and how much can you do automatically because it's not the Dex model doing thousands of leads a month. Yeah, you haven't got time for individual people to go through each and every one of those to try and grade them. So there was a lot more of a process and making sure you're nurturing those leads through till they are ready, whatever.
ready means, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. And then having that handed over to the sales team. And that wasn't just one straightforward process. There was, if you were, let's be honest, a lower value person, so individual sales. There was no sales team for that. It was all online. It was an e-commerce transaction. So you'd be passed through an electronic salesperson, so to speak.
Tom (12:19.574)
I think they've been sent to a chief.
Mike Beech (12:20.129)
Whereas if you were a medium value, yeah, you'd go, you got to go so far and then go sales. And if you're a high value, you'd be going to sales very quickly. So it's also working out the potential value of the lead as you're going through in that process and when appropriate to hand over and get sales involved. So that was all part of the Dex model.
Tom (12:39.694)
Yeah, okay. And so it's quite a big shift, like big companies are small, but also from what sounds like a PLG type, go to market model, SME, to quite the extreme end of enterprise, right? And I know you were kind of always, always very like, remember, I, for context, for people listening, I actually know someone who's worked at Causalens, and one thing they would say to was kind of like, throw your biggest problem at us and we'll try and solve it, right? Which is super extreme in terms of...
Mike Beech (12:44.611)
I'll be there. Yeah.
Mike Beech (13:04.783)
you
Tom (13:07.17)
we're gonna be so consolidated in a long sales process. So in the context of those two things, how do you look at lead differently to now and how far along the process does marketing take it? Does it give you more of a role or less of a role?
Mike Beech (13:21.015)
I'd almost just say it's a different role. Yes, all of the awareness, the generating of leads are still there. There's a lot more doing causal ends in terms of hand-to-hand working with the sales team. At the moment, we are particularly focused on ABM because it's high-level accounts, so account-based marketing. It's working with the sales team on how we're to do the research on these companies. How can you get crafted messages?
Tom (13:24.291)
Yeah.
Mike Beech (13:48.655)
to individuals and pulling that together and helping the sales team create those. 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 the 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. it's, there's probably less, I'd say marketing here, causal ends, much less involved in the closing part.
of a deal, whereas obviously at Dex some of it was only done online, so it's almost a pure marketing close. But there's probably a lot more helping the sales team during that process than there would have been at Dex.
Tom (14:19.427)
Yeah.
Tom (14:33.27)
Yeah, so you end up having to work a lot more closely with them. 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 support function for sales. 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 (14:53.595)
No, totally. And I'm laughing because I've obviously been through a few companies and seen a few things where, yes, absolutely. I will mention no names of certain salespeople who would definitely consider marketing a support function. No one we jointly know, so you're all right. Yeah.
Tom (15:06.158)
Don't go and scrap my question, was boring. Mention names.
Mike Beech (15:19.215)
I mean, if you go back in time, probably marketing once upon a, yeah, it was created the brochures for the salesperson to give out during their sort of, yeah, their, yeah, 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 recognize and certainly board level and most grown up companies will recognize the different roles that sales and marketing have and the need for the two teams to work together well.
Having spoken to quite a few private equity companies, venture catalysts things like that, they really are keen on marketing sales dovetailing well and understanding how that works and how to make that an optimum fit. And most CROs, Chief Revenue Officers, they're now called driving the sales, understand the need for marketing and then understand the value that sales can bring dovetailing into that.
Tom (15:59.641)
Mm.
Mike Beech (16:17.463)
I think in more recent years I've found it less of a challenge to just be the, yeah, let's create the pretty coloured pictures for sales.
Tom (16:25.358)
Well, I think one thing that's changed is there's more buy-in from outside of marketing, right? 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. Then why would they? There's 11 people involved in the buy-in decision. It's gonna take six to nine months.
Mike Beech (16:45.359)
Good luck.
Tom (16:52.63)
Why would any one of them take such ownership of it as to have the weekly catch up with me, right? 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, right? 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 (17:15.247)
That last bit is always a hard bit isn't it?
Tom (17:18.806)
Yeah, well because otherwise your alternative is every two months, like any update, every update, or every two weeks, sorry.
Mike Beech (17:24.655)
Yeah, exactly. Any update? Have you got the budget approved?
Tom (17:28.494)
Yeah, and you reach a point where I'm out of creativity, I'm out of other things to say. But yeah, but what it sounds like you're saying a little bit is you're getting a lot more buy-in than historically when you maybe had that problem to solving it.
Mike Beech (17:32.271)
You
Mike Beech (17:42.221)
Yeah, absolutely. 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. mean, again, if I compare and contrast to the early part of my career, marketing there, to be brand and presence and as long as the colors were good and the pictures were good, job done. That was marketing, not anymore. Yeah, 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 (18:11.116)
Yeah, well, it's the flip side of it. I always say that our kind of specialism is with content marketing and 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 going to have is then you're going to be held accountable to it. it's blessing and a curse at the same time.
Mike Beech (18:32.687)
Yeah, yearning for the good old days when you just had to make things look good, that's all. Yeah. Now you have to back it up with numbers, absolutely.
Tom (18:36.95)
Yeah, I know. I know, but you have to actually show that you're doing work. It's like, I was going to bring up Musk and Trump and the email to show what, let's not go down that route, we'll cut that bit. So talk to me a bit about one thing I'm interested to get out of this is understand how you organise yourselves and how you kind of measure success, particularly so.
Mike Beech (18:46.255)
Not yet.
Tom (19:03.855)
In terms of your marketing KPIs, I do have a North Star that you work towards and what is that?
Mike Beech (19:09.843)
good question. I'm going to start with DEX because it's a 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
Tom (19:18.85)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Beech (19:39.043)
during the year, you can see how you're doing. There's no escaping from it. So that's sort of a lead funnel. Yeah, there was various measures up and down the funnel, the cost per lead, the customer acquisition costs, all those good things, but they're all fed from, if you're trying to grow, you want more leads. That was the North Star. Many things there. I think a causal lens, it's been more of a challenge to work out 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 a, you know, 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, but we still want 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? So, right, these are really important people. Go for them. Not base it just on their title. Yeah.
Tom (20:52.27)
Yeah, well, yeah, but it must be a challenge, particularly with something that's at the bleeding age of technology like Corzine, 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, SME accounting platform website, really, unless they're an SME that needs to do accounting.
Mike Beech (21:14.119)
Yeah, I mean, you're talking about, I guess, yeah, it's 90 % of people who turned up the website were the right sort of people. Yeah, now it's very, yeah. Cause we do, I mean, you can spot, yeah, we have things like if you haven't got a business email address, we don't, we're not interested. We are 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, yeah, so from a .edu, then you're probably not our target market.
Tom (21:22.158)
Mm.
Mike Beech (21:40.175)
Having said that, we have actually got some universities interested in using the product for real. So you've got to be a little bit careful throwing those out. Yeah. you're sort like, OK, yeah. So I did have one who was really interested in finding out about your product because we'd use it for this. You're like, oh, you're real. We thought you were just a research student. Yeah. So yeah.
Tom (21:46.094)
Yeah, that's a lesson, open-minded, yeah.
Tom (22:00.686)
think that's really interesting though, because like the SaaS playbook is you go super narrow and it's like the crossing the chasm thing, right? We're to be very deliberate about every move that we make and we're never going to have conversations outside of that ISTP because it's a waste of resources. But then you are going to 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 (22:24.687)
Yeah, exactly. think that's the love crossing chasm. One of the first business books 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. Yeah, you've got to work out who are the first people, who are those?
first bunch of people are gonna 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 (23:04.078)
Yeah, I think that makes sense. do you, this is going off topic again, but do you look at the skills differently when you're hiring based on that? Because it's diff, it's kind of later on, once you've got a defined ICP, it's about ruthlessly executing a strategy within that, right? Earlier on, when you need that exploratory, there is more space for general curiosity and experimentation.
Mike Beech (23:24.783)
Yeah, I think it's a different certainly there has to be in the early phases an openness to experiment and try things out I mean, I would say you should have that no matter where you are in That's one of my things as a marketer. You should be exploring and changing and looking to do things differently and improve on things anyway Yeah, yeah, the day you stop learning is the day we're burying you kind of thing. But um, grim, but
Tom (23:44.44)
Yeah.
Tom (23:51.374)
you
Mike Beech (23:53.569)
So that open-mindedness, think, yes, in a startup, Series A, even Series B, when you're scaling up, I think there's still an element. 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 (24:09.336)
Yeah, no fair point. I think so coming back to a minute ago, there's a question that I had in my head which was, so you mentioned, you're focusing in on lead quality as a kind of guiding star rather than just pure lead volume. How do you, yeah, how do you go about ascertaining that? Is that a?
Mike Beech (24:23.673)
Yes.
Tom (24:30.114)
And does it impact the handover process and the output for you as marketers? Is that a sales led process to go and qualify it or is that something you take responsibility for? We're gonna capture more data. Yeah, how do you approach it?
Mike Beech (24:42.111)
A bit of both. We're certainly upped the amount of data capture enrichment that we're doing from a marketing side. Again, that's deploying. Some of that is trying to capture informants and things. Yeah, absolutely fine. But some of that is also using enrichment tools. HubSpot has Breeze now. There are other tools out there like Apollo, Clay, to name a couple that we're using just to try and make sure you got the best possible data set.
Tom (24:49.687)
and
Mike Beech (25:11.599)
to pass on to sales. And like I say, part of the ABM work we're doing is helping with that sort of like deep research on people and individuals and companies and what they're going for. So there's certainly that side of it. but yeah, ultimately, still rely on an enterprise sales, still rely on a salesperson being able to get through on the telephone typically to somebody or my Zoom call at least, to talk to somebody and then really understand is what's the real...
pain point here, what's the situation? What are they really looking for? Are they just exploring or are they actually they have some business problems they think we can work with and therefore it's worthwhile trying to create a proof of concept around that. I don't, trying to capture that sort of detail, yeah, fresh and answer automatically and through marketing would love to be able to do one day, but yeah, that's probably a dream rather than a reality. So yeah.
Tom (25:56.27)
Yeah, it's no such thing.
Tom (26:05.688)
Yeah, okay, but so it's changed, it's not really changed your, if I'm hearing you right, it's not really changed how you approach an MQL, for example, but you are able to enrich a lot more information into an MQL on the backend, and you use that to, like, I guess how, what's the filtering process to work out, therefore, of our 103 generated, which ones are gonna count, or do you count them?
Mike Beech (26:28.087)
And so we have a lead scoring. We still do that. That's the thing, all right. But yeah, we still use lead scoring and also just closeness to our ICP. yeah, is it the right size company? Is it the right persona? Are they senior enough? It's those kind of basic measures that again, you feed into a lead score, but also absolutely used to say, hang on, this person is, yeah.
Tom (26:32.621)
Yeah.
Mike Beech (26:57.965)
We have talked to people like this and they tend to be the right sort of people to talk to. So this is worthwhile following through. So yeah, it does mean there may be some really good opportunities when not prioritizing as highly, but that's, yeah, you've got to start somewhere.
Tom (27:11.576)
Yeah, no, makes sense. Okay, cool. 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. guess, you maybe we had a bit of an intro, but talk a bit more about what the changes that you've made and most importantly, like why you felt now is the time that you needed to do that as a business.
Mike Beech (27:39.211)
Yeah, certainly. So the sort of 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.
Tom (27:52.59)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Beech (28:08.333)
So you sort of, let's call it the top 1%. 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 was like an innovation club being 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. yeah, wanting something stickier. Also realizing that 90 % of what we were doing when helping customers get up to speed with causal 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 is poor. Simple as that. Garbage in, garbage out. It's, yeah, eons old and still very true. So finding that, you're like, we're setting up a platform to help with all of that. Hang on a minute. We can make that even easier for people. Yeah, 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 was that realization that actually a lot of the value is in helping you with the data and getting up and running, solving that difficult, but as you said, Alex said, that most difficult problem, yes, but that one difficult problem is one difficult problem as opposed to day to day everything that you need to do. So that was the dawning realization through last year. then the coupled with the same time as the world moving from, oh, LLMs are everything to.
agents, 2025 is going to be the year of agents. actually, we were there, like like to say, months, not weeks, months before the rest of the world, realizing that that was a way forward. that does the pivot to a, look, we've already got the platform. It already allows you to create agents. What we have added is the ability to create custom agents. So you create something for your data. So it cleans your data the way you want it cleaned as opposed to generic. Yeah.
Tom (30:06.467)
Thank
Mike Beech (30:28.397)
this will just turn this date into this format kind of thing. So that's a pivot. And then talking to customers who are, yeah, some of their biggest problems is, yeah, I've just got to do this every week. It takes me all week to do. And by the time I've done it all week, I should have had the answers on Monday to process for the week and now I haven't. So it's just taking too long. So speed it up, scale it up. One customer who analyzes data, but can only do it for the whole of the geography. And what they really need to do is go down to city level.
Tom (30:45.592)
Mm.
Mike Beech (30:57.401)
but they just haven't got the time and capacity to get down to that level. So again, we'll create agents to do it for you. Now, instead of your team of 10, you've got a team of 100, 1,000, however many you need, off you go. Now you can do it by area within city if you want to. So it's sort of suddenly giving people scale and speed that they didn't have before.
Tom (31:16.866)
And from your perspective, it gives you a lot more repeatability, right? Which I guess is part of a big part of what we're talking about. You can grow a bit more.
Mike Beech (31:21.761)
It's repeatability and it's day-to-day usefulness, as opposed to just a big problem. Yeah, and once you've solved the big problem, well, that's it, done, go away. It's day-to-day, it's gonna help. And that's what, yeah, in a business, that's what you want. You want that value, you wanna be able to deliver value every single day. that's the pivot and the shift.
Tom (31:27.203)
Yeah.
Tom (31:43.522)
Yeah, okay. And I mean, it's something that I think a lot of AI companies are to have to do though. think so. AI is changing a lot of things, but I think it's still mostly lives within the realm of experimental budgets. And we're trying things partly because it people go on podcasts and get up on stage and sound really, really clever at events. Not in this case, obviously, but I think there is some of that. But I think all of them are trying to pivot and trying to hone in on where they can be repeatably useful.
Mike Beech (32:04.665)
Bye.
Tom (32:13.006)
and kind of break out of that experimental budget.
Mike Beech (32:17.901)
Yeah, exactly that. That's exactly where we were in the causal AI is an experimental budget and 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 gonna 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 pluses, you sell once, you sell a hundred times because it just scales through.
Tom (32:24.29)
Yeah.
Tom (32:32.163)
Mm.
Mike Beech (32:43.181)
well, only if you can help 100 different departments or 100 different routes within the enterprise. So yeah, you've got to be broader in terms of your applicability.
Tom (32:51.756)
And so why was now the right time to do that?
Mike Beech (32:55.727)
Well, no, would have actually said a year ago would have been the right time to do it. if it's not a year ago, then you should do it now. It's more learning through the year and realizing 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 AI data scientists, people wouldn't know what you're talking about. that's 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 the, but our agents are this particular problem and can work in this environment for you. Like, got it. Okay. As opposed to what's an agent. Is that some sort of James Bond thing that we're now adding or is it something different? Yeah.
Tom (33:44.568)
Hmm. 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. Cause that was going to 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. 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 (34:17.377)
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 Causal AI. So I'm not sure whether that's good or bad. I'm going to take it though. So it's all good. So yeah, there are certainly people out there who will know us for Causal. And that's still part of the, yeah, still in the product. So it can still do some pretty decent stuff on the Causal side of things that we haven't taken out.
Tom (34:25.601)
Yeah.
Tom (34:30.839)
It counts.
Mike Beech (34:43.791)
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 it's, yes, we have gone to our customers. Yes, those we're helping, we're talking about, have you thought about using agents to do this and to help you with that? 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 it. So a lot of our target
personas, the 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 (35:23.352)
Yeah, okay. Okay, makes sense. I'm gonna switch into, so what we like 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, gave you a couple of these to prepare you, but the first one I didn't, so we'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 prioritizing doubling down on?
Mike Beech (35:39.308)
Mike Beech (35:49.495)
Ooh, channels?
Tom (35:51.766)
or channels, tactics, of, yeah, anything that's really been working.
Mike Beech (35:56.813)
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, you know.
focused areas. mean, yes, that's all part of the mix, but LinkedIn is our number one digital channel, which wasn't that wasn't the case for us at Dex, for example. So that's a little bit different.
Tom (36:38.382)
Well, I'm going to clip that up and get that on our LinkedIn just as soon as we finish this conversation. But no, that makes a lot of sense. One follow up question, I'm always really bad at quick fire questions, but that comes on the back of that. 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 putting themselves out there. And part of it almost is like a handholding thing, right? And giving people confidence.
Mike Beech (36:42.095)
There you go!
Tom (37:08.034)
Particularly when you're going beyond just the founder who let's face it we're ego-driven people. We love talking to them Once you remove the narcissism, how do you how how have you got people doing that and got them to embrace that?
Mike Beech (37:12.655)
No comment.
Mike Beech (37:18.191)
Yeah.
Mike Beech (37:23.151)
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 to mention any names, but 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 10 years.
Tom (37:33.197)
Yeah.
Mike Beech (37:51.187)
so or if they did it was liking something from 15 years ago I don't know. So yeah it's 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 that's what gives people a natural tendency and openness to be there so yeah you're certainly not going to get
company of 50 people you're not going to 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 (38:29.922)
And have they mostly been on the commercial side? And do you do 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 (38:40.591)
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. they are being, like we're doing here, they are being recorded, they are being clipped, they are being snipped into your soundbites and all the rest of it. And what we're doing there is we're getting Darko 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. So who perhaps would be a little bit more reluctant, but are actually happy when they're in that sort of in front of camera and microphone, but with others talking to them sort of thing. that's sort of, that's marketing helping. And then there's others who are 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 and you're like, right, good job, just keep it up. And from a company perspective, we'll make sure we repost, like, comment, all the rest of it.
Tom (39:44.951)
Yeah.
Tom (39:49.922)
Yeah, I mean the first bit is quite powerful if you can get people kind of naturally 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 and once that sweet dopamine kicks in from all the likes then that's the thing about social media is moreish isn't it?
Mike Beech (40:02.851)
Mike Beech (40:08.652)
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 (40:15.246)
I'm awful. It's either after one drink or late at night or something something about like an Instagram real it just appeals to you so I have to try myself out of it so badly. Anyway, I digress again back to the quick fire question. Yeah, that was the first one. The next one will be quicker. Okay, this is a bit of a hypothetical if I went tomorrow and I proved your plan a budget request right that like marketing dream that you'd love to do.
Mike Beech (40:31.043)
Quickfire, yeah that was one wasn't it?
Tom (40:44.91)
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 (40:51.919)
So I'd probably give you a general answer rather than specifics for the business. I 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 tool set 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 Demand-Genius obviously.
Tom (41:20.032)
Someone had to say it.
Mike Beech (41:21.153)
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, because 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 MarOpps team, so the marketing ops. And it's just, you just rarely get it, you rarely get people who know how to do it.
Tom (41:40.055)
I agree.
Mike Beech (41:45.815)
And yeah, actually it's probably going be one of the most, going forward, think one of the most impactful and important areas of marketing. So I'd build the team and give them all the money and tools that they want and get them playing quickly.
Tom (41:56.674)
Yeah, because my question was going to 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 think that kind of answers it, right? The key is having a marketing ops team that can get all of these individual tools singing together rather than let them risk becoming silos.
Mike Beech (42:17.293)
Yeah, absolutely. In the old days, so even before Dex, the previous company, one of my rules was we've chosen HubSpark as our marketing automation platform. It was right, any tool you like, but it has to plug in. If it doesn't plug in, we're not having it. Simple as that. 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 with 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. So, and if you can't...
If they'd be an individual tools, it's just, yeah, what's the point?
Tom (42:49.602)
Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think it's something that I think it's a problem that's going to be a solved problem pretty soon as AI agents can start doing a lot of the integration work, which is going to be, I mean, for me as a founder, that's incredible because the opportunities that brings in terms of opening up your TAM is pretty cool. Right, next one. what skill or trait has been the biggest needle mover in your career for you personally?
Mike Beech (42:52.591)
Thank
Mike Beech (42:56.654)
Yes.
Mike Beech (43:11.535)
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, guess.
Tom (43:18.381)
Yep.
Tom (43:27.726)
think that technical background is quite key to that, right? It's something that I will work out.
Mike Beech (43:31.143)
That helps. When a lot of the change has been technology change, let's be honest, over the last 20, 30 years, yeah, being able to understand it just means it doesn't frighten me. It's like, yeah. 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 (43:46.702)
Well, I don't know, I'm not going to comment. was going to say that in case my dad listens to this, I'm not going to tell stories of that being the other way around.
Mike Beech (43:54.991)
Which is normal, that is the normal way round. But no, I still get calls from my kids about how to do things. So you're like, really? Come on. No, it's not. It's a really bad idea.
Tom (44:02.844)
nice, that's great.
But it's not good for them as well. Cool and then last question. I always say everyone listening to this is going to think, Mike's so smart, Mike's got it all together, he knows exactly what he's doing, he's just told us he's adaptable. What's the biggest fuck up in your career? That moment where your heart sank and you were like,
Mike Beech (44:22.179)
Ha
Mike Beech (44:26.863)
I can go very, very early on in my career. We launched a product and obviously we spent millions on the launch as in full net. was an old days. was a network attached appliance to do backup for devices. it's not appliances in those days were quite sexy. So plug them into network with all sorts of things. did market research. We did focus groups. went to Houston, Boston behind the glass listening to everybody and everybody was like,
This is brilliant, this is great. We flooded the channels, so it was a channel-based business, so you buy a lot of it, 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, were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, all this interest. we kept bumping up the forecast. So we'd forecast multi-million, very large business and yeah, lost money, nevermind that.
Tom (45:09.102)
I don't know.
Tom (45:22.632)
god, it makes me think of like when you tell a joke and it's just crickets.
Mike Beech (45:26.991)
But it was one of the, it was such a big, yeah, such a big miss that we actually did the analysis of, 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 and they only covered the top five. And it's like, you solve a problem outside of whatever the list is going to be.
Tom (45:51.352)
Mm.
Mike Beech (45:56.569)
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 so
Tom (46:04.91)
Yeah, I mean, it's not too good unless if anyone's starting a business, building a product, something like that, right? It's very easy to go on. 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 gonna indicate buying signals, right?
Mike Beech (46:28.383)
Exactly, It's the, it solves the problem. It's a price point. perfect. Well, good. But actually, will you get to this problem in your list or not? And it's like, well, no. Then you're in trouble. Yeah, fair enough. Okay.
Tom (46:38.638)
Yeah, then anything you would recommend, listen of this podcast, go and listen to, read, watch, do. Any recommendations?
Mike Beech (46:54.159)
I would probably use something like Perplexity or something like that and go and look up and find the content for some of the original work. It came out roughly the same time as Crossing the Chasm and that was by Michael J. Lanning and Dr. Lyn 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 (47:20.252)
Good time to fame that.
Mike Beech (47:21.729)
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 but just the way they question and the way they talk through it, it's kind of like really stood the test. A bit like crossing the chasm really. We've stood the test of time so yeah anything by those couple of people. Good stuff.
Tom (47:38.488)
Yeah.
Tom (47:49.494)
Okay, great. Well, I've not read that. So that's actually the second new book on my reading list. need to start, need to start asking people for more bite sized things because it's going to be next question is going to be, did you read it? Sounds good. And then lastly, 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 CauseLens or personally that you'd like to promote.
Mike Beech (47:53.711)
you
Mike Beech (47:59.457)
Yes.
Mike Beech (48:12.207)
From a Causal Lens perspective, if you have a data science team and you want them to do more, go faster, have a look at causallens.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 (48:31.886)
That's what we all need, more agents doing our work. Awesome. right, Mike, lovely to talk to you and thank you very much for coming on.
Mike Beech (48:34.115)
More agents, everybody needs more agents.
Mike Beech (48:41.411)
Thank you, Tom. Been a pleasure. a great time.
Tom (48:43.992)
Cheers.