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Proof is what GTM leaders need to make fast and furious decisions that keep their businesses alive and thriving.
The Proof Point hosts conversations anchored in the reality of day-to-day life as a revenue leader. No algorithm-hacking, talk-track headlining buzz statements around here. We’re hosting conversations between GTM leaders so we can gather the facts and provide you with the tactics and tools you need to bulletproof your strategy.
Join host Mark Huber every other week as he invites the best GTM leaders into the conversation.
Mark Huber [00:00:00]:
Opinions are cheap and proof is gold. I'm Mark Huber and this is The Proof Point, a show from UserEvidence that helps go-to-market teams, find ideas, get frameworks and swap tactics. AI isn't just changing how we market and sell. It's raising the bar for go-to-market leaders. So what does it actually take to lead in this new era? David Boyce joins me on The Proof Point. To break it all down, we're talking real world AI use cases, leadership habits that still matter today and will matter tomorrow. And what separates the next wave of go-to-market leaders from everyone else trying to catch up. David is the Executive Chairperson and EVP of Product at Winning By Design.
Mark Huber [00:00:43]:
He's helped companies like Adobe, Uber Eats and Calendly rethink how they grow revenue. And lately he's been digging deep into how AI is reshaping the go-to-market playbook. That's what we're getting into today. We'll cover what's actually working with AI in go-to-market, what's mostly hype and how the best leaders are adjusting their mindset, team structure and strategy for an AI first world. Enjoy. So, Dave, I have to ask, what's harder, adding a new go-to-market motion or becoming an Eagle Scout?
Dave Boyce [00:01:14]:
Oh, I would. It's been a while, Mark. I did become an Eagle Scout. Did a lot of drudgery becoming an Eagle Scout, but I think, let me say this, tuning a new go-to-market motion is harder. For sure. You can add them all day, but get them right is pretty tough. All right.
Mark Huber [00:01:32]:
Which I think we'll get into here in a little bit. But becoming an Eagle Scout, that's like a pretty extensive and long process, is it not?
Dave Boyce [00:01:39]:
Dude, I don't know how you went way back in that. I don't know where you found that.
Mark Huber [00:01:44]:
I did my research.
Dave Boyce [00:01:45]:
I'm like 57 years old, so that's 40 years ago. Yeah, it's long. It was cool though. You're out on your own, learning how to survive, learning how to build things, learning how to cook things, learning how to distill water and then, you know, other stuff like citizenship. And I think it's pretty good prep. I've got five kids who are Eagle Scouts out of the six.
Mark Huber [00:02:08]:
More impressive. Yeah, well, I. I just recently listened to one of the latest 20 BC podcast episodes with Harry Stebbings. Are you familiar with Harry or know who he is?
Dave Boyce [00:02:19]:
I know who he is. Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:02:20]:
So I did not talk to nine people in your life like he does, but I did do a little Bit of research to make sure that I was prepped.
Dave Boyce [00:02:26]:
Wow. That's a good job.
Mark Huber [00:02:29]:
Well, awesome. I'm really excited about this topic, mostly because we're going to talk about a few different segments that are incredibly relevant to B2B SaaS companies and go-to-market teams and then we'll save a little bit of time for something exciting that you have that you are just about to launch at the end. So I have to ask and I'll tease the final segment out. Is the book finished yet? Is it done?
Dave Boyce [00:02:50]:
Book is finished. I hit the final send on Sunday two days ago. It's amazing how many final sends you do though, so.
Mark Huber [00:02:57]:
I'm excited to chat with you and get going here. So first thing we want to talk about just leadership in this whole new AI driven world that we are living in as go-to-market operators. So what would you say is the biggest leadership mindset shift that go-to-market leaders need in this new age of AI?
Dave Boyce [00:03:14]:
It goes beyond kind of go-to-market leadership, but it really applies to go-to-market leadership. But AI is changing everything, Mark, and not limited to go-to-market, but definitely focus on go-to-market. And what it really requires of us as leaders is curiosity. Like a mindset of curiosity. If I can't retool, I will become extinct, which means I actually have to roll my sleeves up and I can't teach other people how I used to do it. I can't rely on the idea that I've got it figured out and now I'm going to convey that to you. My, my young padawan. No, that's not going to work.
Dave Boyce [00:03:53]:
Like I actually have to get curious alongside of my people. And then there are some things that I have learned along the way, being more senior, that are going to fall into place. But it's not the mechanics of how you get it to work. The mechanics of how you get it to work is changing. And I got to be curious and learn that.
Mark Huber [00:04:09]:
How do you create kind of a culture of that or how would you recommend? New leaders are trying to instill that mindset in their teams.
Dave Boyce [00:04:16]:
The coolest thing I saw, it's a portfolio company of Insight Partners, which is a good partner of ours. They've got a CEO who for the last 18 months. This is 18 months. Of course, LLMs have been out for a while in the public retail even 18 months ago. But for 18 months he's been insisting that each of his direct reports come back to him with one way that they're using AI to do their job better that includes finance, that includes legal, that includes hr, that includes go-to-market, that includes engineering. And for 18 months been checking in every one on one. So they actually know, oh wait, he's actually, this isn't just a throwaway thing. He's actually paying attention to it and then you know it.
Dave Boyce [00:04:58]:
As I was told the story one quarter, then the next quarter, by the third quarter of check ins in my one on one, like, show me the thing that you're working on, they start to get curious. Okay, I actually did try it. Now I actually do have AI doing contract reviews. I actually do have AI doing book reconciliations. I did find a cool tool that allows me to do debugging. Of course the engineers were already there, they didn't have to be dragged there. But. But just requiring me to get my sleeves rolled up on a, almost like a direct report by direct report basis is a good way to instill that culture. Because as soon as I finally kind of get over the reticence and I get my hands on some tools, I start to get excited about it. And that can infuse some curiosity.
Mark Huber [00:05:40]:
That's awesome. Mostly because I did not know about that story at all. And I just told my team probably a few weeks ago that, hey, I want everyone experimenting with new use cases, like far beyond how we've been using it, which is just basic outlining and copywriting and editing and chatgpt. I feel like I might be on the right track, but we'll have to record another episode in a couple months and see what new use cases we've uncovered as a team.
Dave Boyce [00:06:05]:
Totally. And you will. It'll be exciting.
Mark Huber [00:06:08]:
So leadership is changing more than ever before. What would you say? Some of those typical leadership skills and competencies that might feel a little bit more obsolete in this new AI go-to-market era.
Dave Boyce [00:06:20]:
You know, it's interesting, Mark, I'm. I've already told you how old I is, so I am. So the cat's out of the bag. But I'm going to my 25 year business school reunion in a few months and I'll be speaking there. And I'm thinking about kind of 25 years of career and the 25 years of career that everyone in the room will have had and all of the kind of transitions that we've all gone through and how we've become successful and what we've had to lead through, et cetera. And it comes back to what we were talking about earlier, that lots of aspects of leadership are important, but here's the one that can't be the end all and be all. And I'll use a Dead Kennedy's reference. I'm a punk music fan.
Mark Huber [00:07:02]:
Love it.
Dave Boyce [00:07:03]:
They've got a song called California Uber Alles. Charisma Uber Alles. Doesn't work. Like, charisma is not going to get me to the. To the promised land. Right now. It's great to have charisma, but that charisma has to pull people into the battle. And now and I actually have to be curious alongside of them.
Dave Boyce [00:07:20]:
We have to be mechanics. We got to figure out how we're going to make AI work alongside of humans in an integrated environment. And so I can't just rely on charisma. I also have to rely on curiosity and fundamental architecture.
Mark Huber [00:07:35]:
I love that. Kind of want to attend the talk too. You got a lot going on between the book, this presentation that you're going to give. That's a lot in your world.
Dave Boyce [00:07:42]:
Yeah, they're related. Promoting the book.
Mark Huber [00:07:45]:
I figured as much. So one of the things that you said that I found really interesting was that AI won't make poor go-to-market processes good. It'll only make them happen faster. Can you unpack that for me?
Dave Boyce [00:07:59]:
Oh, man. So I sat down with a guy. This is going to go back 15 years. AI has been around, by the way, for like 30 years, 40 years even. We've just, it's just been commercialized and made easier to access. And now with generative AI, it has more of a human interface. But like 15 years ago, I sat down with a Salesforce executive guy named Shahan Parshad, and he was talking about what he wanted to get out of his team, his sales team. He was in an ops role.
Dave Boyce [00:08:24]:
And I said, all right, well, if your team were a computer, how would you give it instructions? We're sitting at a Starbucks and he's like, wait, hang on a second. I'm like, if then statements, simple like pseudocode, if this, then that, and like loops like, you know, until you're done with this, do the following things. Could you write out instructions for your team? He's like, that's a good question. We worked on it for a while. But Mark, like today we have that opportunity. We can literally program our go-to-market. We can. And it used to be harder and now it's easier because we can get AI to do whatever we want it to do.
Dave Boyce [00:09:01]:
We just have to be able to articulate it in instructions. If we can't, then we're going to be scaling chaos on top of chaos. If you just rely on the native capabilities of a foundational model to go sell. I'm sorry, but you know, Anthrop, Claude doesn't know how to sell, and ChatGPT doesn't know how to sell. They know how to speak and they can fake their way through it. They know how to emulate being a human being in a conversation, but they know how to sell. They don't know the principles of it. So we actually have to be able to articulate the process.
Dave Boyce [00:09:30]:
Once we can articulate the process, then it will actually scale. But if we can't, then it's just going to be chaos and hallucination on top of chaos and hallucination. It's actually going to get worse. We're going to be digitizing dysfunction.
Mark Huber [00:09:43]:
And I think I'll kind of be hard and make fun of myself for a little bit here, but when I first started to use ChatGPT, and I'm using the Pro version now, experimenting with Claude a little bit more, I would get really discouraged when I would try it at first because I wouldn't spend the upfront time in the prompts, and I would spend a little bit of time on it. I'd see the output, and I get really discouraged and be like, I'm not going to waste my time doing this. And I don't know what forced me to make this shift, but in the last probably six to maybe eight months, I'm just spending so much more time on prompt writing. And once I realized that the output is only as good as the input, really like most things in life, my usage of it has skyrocketed. And it's something that I'm making sure that our entire team thinks with and adopts that same mindset, too.
Dave Boyce [00:10:32]:
I used to kind of like, dismiss the idea of prompt engineering. I'm like, oh, you're trying to be an engineer. You can write sentences like, okay, great. So now put prompt engineer on your resume and you expect to make $200,000. But it's more. Here's what really brought it to life for me, Mark. The new deep research function on ChatGPT. I dug into that a little bit.
Dave Boyce [00:10:58]:
They put $10 million worth of prompt engineering into that. $10 million worth of prompt engineering. And if you go through, like, what they're doing, they're first going out and, like, scanning for possible sources, then they're reading each of those sources, then they're loading that into a context window, Then they're rereading that and reevaluating it, goes through a whole kind of series of sequential things. And those are, those are instructions that somebody had to figure out that would produce after 11 minutes or 19 minutes or however long it takes to spin on your deep research task, produce that kind of well researched and annotated result. $10 million. So if we want a good result, how much prompt engineering are we going to put into it? Or by extension, how much process design are we going to put into it? If we were to answer the Shahan Prashad question, how much detailed attention we need to put into what we want out of it. And once we've documented that, will we get it reliably back? Yes, of course we will. If we don't do it, then we're just going to get garbage back.
Mark Huber [00:11:58]:
Exactly. Now in my kind of story of using primarily ChatGPT and Claude, I felt like I was just getting around to it and then this whole AI agent wave came around. It's hold on, I'm just figuring out how to use AI at a 201 level. Now I have to worry about AI agents. So AI agents are starting to take on a ton of more just human go-to-market tasks. So do you have any stories that come to mind where you've seen this work really well?
Dave Boyce [00:12:24]:
We're early days. Everyone wants AI agents to be the answer to everything. And that's fine, there's an agent for that. Got it. Okay. But you have to kind of back up and you know, I was on the phone with a, with a really courageous kind of go-to-market ops guy the other day. Former. He's like a special ops guy, like still moved into industry, really courageous, still doing like triathlons, like super courageous.
Dave Boyce [00:12:48]:
He wants to get into this and the question that one of the people on my team asked him is, okay, so let's get focused. What is the thing that you're trying to impact? Like what are you trying to accomplish? Because if we can define that, then we can go pick the, you know, we can design the process and pick the agent to go after that. But if you just want to pull an agent off a shelf and have it solve your problems, that's going to be tougher. Now to his credit, that's not what he was saying. But, but the, but I thought the question was really focusing. So when we, we've got a couple of agents, we've got three agents underway right now, an inbound kind of, this is at Winning By Design where we've got an inbound SDR and outbound SDR and what we call a GTM intelligence agent. And Each of those are targeted at a very specific task. The inbound SDR has to do better than the form fill at qualifying and dispositioning interest.
Dave Boyce [00:13:40]:
The outbound SDR has to do better than we were doing on cold calling. And the GTM intelligence agent has to do better on handoffs. Okay, great. So then you just define that and you make sure you've defined what success is, what the inputs are, what the process is and what the output is, where the handoff comes from, where the handoff goes to. And then you give that to an agent and then you start measuring. All of this has got to be measured against foundational understanding of your kind of data model and your results and your customer journey. But so that I'll know, oh, yeah, it is actually doing better than my form fill, because I know what my form fill was doing before and now I know what this is doing. I'm measuring, it's the same things. So that's just a brief anecdote, but that's how we think about it.
Mark Huber [00:14:23]:
And I feel like most people out there at this point in time might just not realize that measurement piece is so important and kind of establishing what the baseline was versus what you're testing that AI agent against. I'm a B2B marketer. I feel like B2B marketers love shiny, fascinating new objects. And this is one of those things that everybody is just so excited about, but they're not really thinking about the process, the use case, the baseline, how you measure it. They just see AI agents everywhere and think, hey, I gotta do something with this. Or their boss has told them, go spin up some AI agents, and they don't know where to get it started.
Dave Boyce [00:14:57]:
All of that is true. I would not want to throw a wet blanket on any of that enthusiasm. And also make sure you know what you're trying to solve and that you're baselined and you're measuring. Yeah, because that's the way you're going to optimize it. Like, after two weeks of having our inbound SDR agent live, we did a review. Like almost a performance review. Okay, so how many conversations has it had? Let's look at the transcripts of those conversations. Is it going off the rails? Is it resolving to handoff as often as we want? Is it paying attention to icp? And by the way, the answers to all of those things were not glowing.
Dave Boyce [00:15:31]:
The first performance review of our AISDR was not perfect, but the cool thing about an agent is you can correct it. You can build that into the instructions and Then she doesn't forget. Like, she keeps executing according to the adjustments that you gave her. So that measurement and adjustment loop, just like we used to do with the marketing automation tools, it's amazing.
Mark Huber [00:15:53]:
Yep. So, last question on this before we get to the rest of the episode. I feel like pretty much everyone who listens to The Proof Point, what I'm about to ask you is probably keeping them up at night. So you made a bold prediction. Prediction that 70% of go-to-market jobs will be transformed by AI and automation. For B2B marketers, how should they prepare for this shift?
Dave Boyce [00:16:15]:
Totally. It is happening. It's happening. We all know it's happening. And those of us who are older than 30 will remember some of those shifts that already happened. If I. If you're older than 50, I turned.
Mark Huber [00:16:27]:
35 in about five weeks. So I feel like I've seen like mobile first is one of the big shifts that I remember. I was at Accenture for a bit and we were just moving. I started at Accenture right out of school. So I remember on prem software installs back in the day too. Yeah, totally.
Dave Boyce [00:16:44]:
And now you can just. And now you literally just spin up an instance and you've got dynamic capacity and like. And so. Oh my gosh, what did all of my DevOps and production ops, what are they going to do once Amazon takes all that over for us? Oh, they're going to figure out how to be good administrators of cloud instances. That's what they're going to do. They're going to retool. What are the marketers going to do when we stop sending catalogs in the mail? Oh, they're going to figure out E commerce. That's what they're going to do.
Dave Boyce [00:17:09]:
They're going to figure out marketing automation. That's what they're going to do. They're going to figure out prompt engineering. That's what they're going to do. They're going to figure out the tools and the agents that are made to help them not be the machines, but operate the machines in that way. It's kind of like an industrial revolution. What are all the people with picks and shovels going to do? Oh, they're going to drive the tractors. That's what they're going to do.
Dave Boyce [00:17:28]:
The tractor is not the enemy. The tractor is going to help me step up my game.
Mark Huber [00:17:33]:
Love that. Yeah, I actually worked at a company, it was a startup called uptake in around 2017 and that was what they were calling at the time like industrial AI and the industrial 4.0 revolution. So it's interesting to see that come full circle in non industrial ways as well.
Dave Boyce [00:17:48]:
Totally.
Mark Huber [00:17:50]:
Love it. Earlier you mentioned curiosity is one of those critically important skills for go-to-market leaders. Are there any other skills that come to mind outside of curiosity?
Dave Boyce [00:17:59]:
Like a core skill for to be a go-to-market leader? In this new world where I'm going to be having systems and people work side by side, both of those entities, the robots and the humans, are going to be accountable. Back to something. What is that something? In my book I talk about a growth model. That's something in product-led growth, it's a growth model. I need to understand where growth is coming from. It's coming from acquisition, it's coming from retention, it's coming from expansion. And in product-led growth, acquisition and monetization are two separate things. So it's also coming from monetization.
Dave Boyce [00:18:31]:
Got it. Okay. But what is that model that defines that in the broader world beyond product-led growth? We might call that revenue architecture. So I actually got to get good at understanding what are the sources of growth. How do those reconcile into an overall growth model? What's the revenue architecture that sits behind that? And then how do I hold myself accountable when the robot comes back to check in, how do I know if she's doing a good job or not? Back to our kind of baseline and measurement thing. When he human comes back to check in, how do I know if he's doing a good job or not? And then how do I get those things all operating on this in the same operating system? That's a level of kind of systems thinking that hasn't always been required, but I think it is required going forward if we're going to get a human and robot world working together in GTM.
Mark Huber [00:19:17]:
So I'm very familiar with Winning By Design and all of the impressive work and methodologies and really customers that you all have had over the years. What you just walked me through. Do you find that Winning By Design is having to educate your customers on all of that, or are they coming to you kind of halfway there and they actually know what they need?
Dave Boyce [00:19:36]:
It's a privilege when we get to educate someone. It's not an obligation, it's a privilege. Like we love being in that mix. And what I would say to that, Mark, is we usually engage at kind of VP leveling up. Okay, so I got a head of Customer Success ahead of marketing, ahead of sales, have a head of RevOps, a CEO, a CFO, and all of those people have an MBA in Go to market. They already have an MBA in go-to-market. They just got them from different universities.
Mark Huber [00:20:05]:
I love that.
Dave Boyce [00:20:06]:
So the tough thing is to then get them working on a system together. Like, I can't tell you how many times I've been in a board meeting when the head of marketing has stood up and shown a chart where they're over delivering and they declare victory and they leave the room and then the head of sales says, we'll get them next quarter. We didn't quite get it. These deals we didn't lose, we just pushed and it's going to be fine. So how is marketing succeeding and sales not succeeding? We got to be measuring again against the same things. We gotta be operating a system. And so the real education is to get everybody plugged into revenue architecture and that has been a privilege of Winning By Design. We've got the most popular course in the pavilion community, it's called Revenue Architecture and we've deployed that.
Dave Boyce [00:20:50]:
We now have over 2000 certified revenue architects out in the world and scaling rapidly. That's going to help us a lot in this new process and systems first world.
Mark Huber [00:20:59]:
I love this story that you use because my mentor Kyle Lacy, who I don't know if Kyle, he's a CMO at Jellyfish, used you, I believe at Jellyfish and we've been meeting for coming up on two years this fall and before my first board meeting presenting in person, he used basically that exact example of if you do anything, do not do this. So that has forever been ingrained in my head of do not celebrate whatever marketing is doing. If we are underperforming on the most important side of the house being bookings and retention.
Dave Boyce [00:21:30]:
That's a wise man. He saved you some pain.
Mark Huber [00:21:33]:
Oh, he saved me a lot. You mentioned some of the customers are at a broad level of what you all have to do and how it's a privilege to educate. Are there any companies and really go-to-market leadership teams that you're working with that are doing this well and adopting this?
Dave Boyce [00:21:47]:
Oh, for sure. And you know this especially if we say this, thinking broadly as systems and process based growth that really does allow you to scale. Think about. If you don't have your systems and processes documented, think about what you're going to run into at $10 million, at $20 million, at $30 million. We've seen a lot of these companies just hit the wall because they're trying to stack chaos on top of chaos. But there are companies doing this super well. I'll give a huge shout out. He already knows I'm his fan.
Dave Boyce [00:22:19]:
Rob Giglio at Canva doing an amazing job. Amazing job. He runs the, he's the chief customer officer. He runs all the kind of growth initiatives that involve humans and they've built that on top of product-led growth and they've built it in a real way where when a customer wants to speak with a human, she can speak with a human. When she wants to, they're not quite here, but we're going to get there. When she wants to speak with a robot, she can speak with a robot. When she wants to just get her hands on the product and start trying out. That's been a, that's been a hallmark of Canva's success from the very beginning.
Dave Boyce [00:22:52]:
So now the customer is in charge of how she orchestrates her journey. Rob has been systematically removing kind of self interest, like quota retirement interest from that equation so that sales reps don't mess her journey up. Sales reps show up to help.
Mark Huber [00:23:07]:
Interesting.
Dave Boyce [00:23:08]:
They show up to help. They show up to further her the customer's objectives and they don't let their own quota objectives prevail.
Mark Huber [00:23:17]:
I mean, what you just described is kind of the dream, so.
Dave Boyce [00:23:20]:
Right.
Mark Huber [00:23:20]:
He come to you all with this very expansive vision or how did that work out?
Dave Boyce [00:23:25]:
Yeah. And he would admit we're not there yet. Like we're working on this piece by piece. But we worked with rob at both DocuSign and HubSpot and, and he didn't get all the way where he wanted to get at either of those places, even though they both have good visions. And so Canva is where he's like, we're going to get there. So he did come to us with that vision, but it was a very shared vision that we had developed over the years together. Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:23:52]:
Love it. So we just talked about some of the successes. I think a lot of people are scared to make mistakes in this new AI era. So what is one big AI go-to-market leadership mistake that maybe you've seen right now either firsthand with some of your customers or heard about?
Dave Boyce [00:24:09]:
So, you know, we talked about curiosity. Here's just a way to think about. Let's say you're in charge of something, some aspect of GTM and you're afraid of making mistakes. There's an investment model that you'll hear referred to. There's some weird names for it like aggregate project planning. I have no idea why it's called that, but if you just think about 70, 20, 10, 70, 2010, I'm going to invest 70, 70% of my kind of investment capacity. Time, energy, money, focus on just optimizing the business that I have right now. I'm going to invest 20% on incremental improvements to the business that I have right now.
Dave Boyce [00:24:47]:
So I'm going to color outside the lines a little bit, adopt something new. I'm going to reserve 10% for possible breakthrough innovations. So that 10% could be something that I fully expect is going to fail, but if it doesn't, it can make a huge difference. The 20% is probably going to succeed and make me better in some way, shape or form. And the 70% is keeping the lights on and keeping everything going. But if I give myself permission to think in that 70, 2010 mindset, once in a while I'm going to discover something in the 20 that really works. And once in a while, I'm going to discover something in the 10 that really works. And if it doesn't, it's fine, I can shut it down.
Dave Boyce [00:25:27]:
I haven't spent too much money, but I want to put real energy there because that gives me a chance of staying in front of my competitors.
Mark Huber [00:25:33]:
It's all making sense to me now. I've heard Kyle talk about that kind of ratio before, and I always wondered where it came from. So maybe that came from Winning By Design.
Dave Boyce [00:25:41]:
No, I don't think it's Winning By Design. I love it. I think that's a lean manufacturing thing actually, Mark.
Mark Huber [00:25:47]:
I'm a marketer, so this is interesting to me. You recently hired Jack at Winning By Design, which is an AI agent, and I'm admittedly still learning about AI agents, if you couldn't tell based on our conversation here. But now we have to worry about managing AI agents in humans. So what does this new world look like?
Dave Boyce [00:26:08]:
Yeah, let's get. Let's just orient ourselves. If we just think about first principles of revenue architecture and we've been through a couple of weird years, you and I, and probably everyone listening to this concept podcast has been through a couple of weird years. Starting in 2022 when the rug got pulled out from everybody, funding dried up. Growth at all costs was over. The stuff that I used to do, I can't afford to do anymore. So now is growth going to just screech to a halt? We're paying like two and a half times for the growth that we have, but our growth has halved since 2022, so everything has changed. So it turns out that is not a sustainable set of circumstances.
Dave Boyce [00:26:47]:
The market's impatient, public market's impatient, private investors are Impatient. We're all impatient. Operators are impatient, shareholders are impatient. We have to get back to growth. Growth still correlates two and a half times stronger with valuation than profitability. So the main point is growth. So now we got to think about, all right, in a world where AI and humans are working side by side, is the point of AI to make it cheaper? Secondary, the point of AI is to unlock growth. So then you got to think about, all right, so is it unlocking growth by doing a better job than a human? Like literally swap an AI out for a human? In most cases, not maybe in a few cases, yes.
Dave Boyce [00:27:31]:
But there's another way to think about it. So we Jack, we didn't swap a human out with Jack. We didn't have an inbound sdr, we had a form. So all AI had to do is re is do better than the form. But if we had an inbound sdr, then, yeah, we might have swapped out. Let's say we had a team of 15, maybe we swap one of them out for an inbound SDR and we start seeing how we can do. But there are other things to do too. AI doesn't necessarily have to replace humans, it can just replace drudgery.
Dave Boyce [00:27:58]:
What's some stuff that I do every day that I wish I didn't have to do? Maybe an AI can do that. And then the key is that I will take my newly freed up time and I'll trade it not for golfing or Netflix, but for growth. Like, I'm going to go work on some higher order things that only a human can do that allow me to be the operator of the machine. So when we think about humans and AIs working together, maybe they're working on the exact same job, or maybe AI is leveraging humans and in both cases we want it in the service of growth.
Mark Huber [00:28:31]:
I love what you just said, because when I first heard about this, Which, I mean, ChatGPT, I think formally launched externally, when was that? Like November 22nd. I think somewhere around that time frame.
Dave Boyce [00:28:44]:
Might have even been 21.
Mark Huber [00:28:45]:
Yeah, but regardless, I looked at it as a threat at first. Like I thought it was coming for me and my work and it was going to replace me. And I think the huge unlock that I've had recently is exactly what you just described. It's I can use AI to help with all of the drudgery and help me do a lot of those things in less time, probably better, and just removing my anxiety around having to find the time to do those things. So I can then Free myself up and work on the high value things, the growth things that I always found excuses to not have the time to do. So for me, that was a huge unlock, I would say, in the last probably six months. And it completely changed my thinking. And that's when I started to make sure that my team was really bought into this and hopefully using it in similar ways as me and then finding new ways that they can teach me how.
Dave Boyce [00:29:38]:
How's that going with the team? Is there universal stepping up to the task? Is there reluctance? Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:29:43]:
So I'm going to pick on my Director of Product Marketing, Alex Eaton, who I'm not going to tell him about this, but he listens to the podcast, so I can't wait for this to come out. Unbelievable. Product marketer, unbelievable. Just thinker and writer and really a creative mind. And when we first started to use AI a little bit more, he made every excuse or objection that I did. It's like, I don't really see the value in this, why should we be doing this? And just was very hesitant to start experimenting with it more. I reminded him about that conversation like two weeks ago when he asked if we could sign up for a Team Claude subscription because he had moved on from ChatGPT and wanted to start using Claude more. So I think we're all kind of using it in different ways, which we'll get into here in a bit because I'd love for you to kind of school me on ways that we can improve how we use AI.
Mark Huber [00:30:35]:
But I think everyone realizes that lean teams and especially lean marketing teams probably are the future if you can get the right mix of people in house and support them with the right sorts of systems and processes using AI agents and assistants like you've talked about here. We're getting more done with a four person full time marketing team than I got done at previous companies with 12, 15, 20 marketers because we have the right people and they want to use AI more.
Dave Boyce [00:31:04]:
And I bet you can still see more gears left to access.
Mark Huber [00:31:08]:
Oh, oh, yes, we're probably in. I think maybe we're just switching to the second gear. Maybe.
Dave Boyce [00:31:17]:
Yeah. Amazing.
Mark Huber [00:31:17]:
Absolutely. But no, it's been a pretty cool journey, especially over the last three to six months that I'll pick your brain on here in a little bit. One of the things that you recently presented on was AI-led growth first principles. So we already talked about process and systems and you broke that down. There's a few more that I'd love for you to break down and talk to me like I', in fifth or sixth grade, so I can understand them.
Dave Boyce [00:31:37]:
I got one, let's do it. So we're in. Go to market. Go to market generally in the kind of the sales-led world. Ignore the product-led world right now because product-led really paved the way on process and system-led growth. Like, we've learned a lot from product-led growth. That's going to help us in AI-led growth. But put that aside for a second and think about human-led growth.
Dave Boyce [00:31:59]:
When I need to grow one unit of revenue, I add one unit of quota capacity. If I need two units of additional revenue, I add two units of quota capacity. That's how we think. And we go into our planning year and we say, all right, so by how much do we need to grow? Divide that by an amount of kind of quota. Put some over assignment on it. That's how many new humans I need. Whether that's in renewals or whether that's an expansion or whether typically it starts with acquisition, like new account acquisition. Okay, great.
Dave Boyce [00:32:31]:
One unit of quota, One unit of new revenue. Two units of quota, Two units of new revenue. That is a linear function. It's a linear function and it's impossible to break. I mean, I can say, hey, can you carry a little more quota? Sure. But it's still fundamentally linear. Like one human can't do 10 quota units worth of work. But so I can't expect.
Dave Boyce [00:32:53]:
And back when, you know, back when cost wasn't an issue, if we needed 10 times the revenue, we'd hire 10 times the reps. If we needed 100 times the revenue, would hire 100 times the rep. We'd figure, figure out the cost later. We can't do that anymore. So now we still, our investors still want exponential growth, but they don't want us to pay for exponential expenses. So now we're kind of stuck. AI is an unlock for that. That's just a first principle.
Dave Boyce [00:33:17]:
Like linear systems can't deliver lint, can't deliver exponential growth. But exponential systems can deliver exponential growth. So now you think about an AI that's been carefully instructed on how to accomplish certain tasks with inputs, throughput and output. And she doesn't get tired, she doesn't take weekends, she shows up anytime she wants to. She can clone herself during peak hours. She will execute exactly like we asked her to. So if we've done the work of defining the process and we've gotten her productive, that can actually scale exponentially. If we can figure out where in our customer journey those key moments are, that could be scaled by AI, we've unlocked exponential potential.
Mark Huber [00:33:56]:
So I love that you used the word customer in that explanation because one of the things in our outline that really stood out to me was just, just redefining go-to-market as customer-centric. Because I feel like we've kind of lost some of that focus over the years. So what do you mean by that?
Dave Boyce [00:34:10]:
Well, you know, this gets back to the Rob Giglio conversation. Whose choice should it be whether I speak to a human to buy something, should it be the customer's choice or the rep's choice? If and lots of B2B companies are struggling with this, often, oh, that's an assigned account, therefore I own it. Therefore, if they want to buy 6 more seats or 10 more servers or 3 more locations, I'll handle that, thank you very much. They need to talk to me because I want to have a conversation about what else could we do? And I'm thinking about quota credit. But if the contract's already in place and all I really need to do is go click and have six more servers, like why wouldn't I be able to do that? It should be the customer's choice, not the sales rep's choice or the company's choice. So we are entering a world where we're less cost constrained. It used to be I can't provide white glove service to my smallest customers. They only pay me a thousand dollars a year.
Dave Boyce [00:35:05]:
They're going to have to be self service. But now I can provide white glove service because I can actually put a fairly capable AI agent in front of that person that can help them solve problems in a conversational style with hardly any marginal cost associated with that white glove interaction. So I can be way more customer-centric about with the way I design who gets what kind of service when and whether it's delivered by a robot, by the product itself, or by a human.
Mark Huber [00:35:33]:
Love that. So I want to talk through a little bit on what we're using AI for both our marketing team and our sales team. But I want to make sure that we have more than enough time to talk through freemium and your book. So we don't have to go into too much detail here, but I feel like we're about to hopefully graduate onto. I love using the college course analogy of the 201 level. We've been at the 101 level for a bit, but on the marketing side, we've really been using it for basic outlining and copy editing. And I think that's where a lot of marketers start right now what we've started to do more of is using it for data analysis, especially in times when you're in a pinch and you don't have an analyst to go hand this off to. I'm raising my hand.
Mark Huber [00:36:16]:
That's me. And then other times what we've been doing is there are three core Personas that we really market to at the end of the day. And we've been using prompts to act as one of our core Personas in our ICP to then analyze stuff that we are about to ship or launch and have really AI poke holes in it. So I think that's kind of where we're at right now from a marketing perspective. On the sales side, one of the things that really excites me is how we're starting to use it more for account research and having a POV on that particular account before we get into that first call with the prospect. Because as a buyer, you just, just respect who you're talking to so much more when there is an actual POV that's about you, the buyer and not their company. Are we still on 101 level? Are we approaching 201? Like where else could we start to experiment a little bit more?
Dave Boyce [00:37:09]:
You could think of three archetypes of, of AI. One is AI as an analyst. Go write me a report. Okay, thank you very much. Two would be AI as a co pilot. Help me scale, help me do a better job at what I'm doing. I'm always going to be human as a in the loop. And three would be AI as an agent.
Dave Boyce [00:37:27]:
So autonomously executing tasks in the background. So it sounds like you guys are doing analyst and you're doing copilot and you haven't yet started doing agent. Totally good. Let's get there. We can probably do more on all three of those fronts.
Mark Huber [00:37:42]:
Absolutely.
Dave Boyce [00:37:44]:
Just two ideas for you. Just question for you on the marketing side, do you have any flow that's fully self service from awareness all the way through to purchase?
Mark Huber [00:37:53]:
No, but now my marketing brain is thinking of how we could potentially add something like that.
Dave Boyce [00:37:58]:
I would recommend just the tiniest thing. Maybe it's a tangential thing. Just get something fully automated all the way through purchase if you can and just see how that works. Just experiment with that. That's going to unlock a lot of possibilities like it probably is right now in your brain.
Mark Huber [00:38:14]:
Oh yeah, yeah. No, I'm excited.
Dave Boyce [00:38:16]:
And then on the sales side, I would think about all the information that is locked inside of phone calls and emails and see if you can get that out. That's what we call a GTM intelligence agent.
Mark Huber [00:38:29]:
We are working on that right now. So I forgot to bring that up. All right, so we're on the right track. We're about to pass the 101 test onto 201. So I'm a little bit harder than we should be. All right, so the exciting part. Freemium, the book.
Mark Huber [00:38:40]:
Is this your first book? Have you written books before?
Dave Boyce [00:38:42]:
First book.
Mark Huber [00:38:43]:
How did this idea come about?
Dave Boyce [00:38:46]:
Just hands on experience. When I moved from, I helped build. Build a. Come and build a selling company in Boston. First gig out of business school. Our average contract value for that company was a subscription product for $1.2 million average. That is an enterprise sale. That is the value based sale.
Mark Huber [00:39:06]:
Yeah.
Dave Boyce [00:39:07]:
Huge. That's a bit. That's way different. I moved to Silicon Valley and people were giving their B2B software away. This is in the age of Dropbox and Twilio and Zendesk desk. And if they're charging under the limit of a credit card so that managers could just. Departmental adoption.
Mark Huber [00:39:23]:
I've done that, yeah.
Dave Boyce [00:39:25]:
And, and then I'm building my company using like Skype and Docusign and like whoa. This is a totally new world of enterprise software. The more I learned about it, the more I became convinced that self service freemium product-led growth is the future. Like putting the customer in charge is the future. So I built a whole company based on that. We sold that company. I. I built another company that had a hybrid.
Dave Boyce [00:39:50]:
We sold that company and I just, I was, I realized in many of my conversations, Mark, that not everyone had the benefit of those kind of product-led growth experiences, especially from the inside. Most people who were now in decision making positions within a software company had grown up in a sales-led only world. I was like, why don't we get these secrets out of Silicon Valley and get them out to the economy, capital E so that the rest of us can operate on the same playbook. So that was the idea.
Mark Huber [00:40:21]:
Love it. So I feel like many go-to-market leaders like you pointed out, might not have PLG experience. So what are some common mistakes that you see them unfortunately making when switching from sales-led to PLG?
Dave Boyce [00:40:33]:
I'd say two things. One is building the next. You brought this up in the beginning. Building the next go-to-market not adjacent to the current go-to-market. I fundamentally believe you do need, and I've learned this by hard experience, you need to build your next go-to-market adjacent to your current go-to-market so you can leverage some of the strengths. So I'm if I'm going down market, great, then let me do a. Let me do a sales assist motion first where I'm sourcing customers that are then going to be serviced by a salesperson versus going all the way over there and building something completely separate. That's all self service from beginning to end.
Dave Boyce [00:41:07]:
So that's number one. And by the way, if I was going up market, I'd say the same thing. If you're all PLG, don't. Your next move is not enterprise. That's a completely different game. You're building a whole different company. Your next move is something adjacent to PLG. So that's number.
Dave Boyce [00:41:21]:
That's the first mistake I've seen. The second one is just understanding. Like this is. It's a well understood game. It takes mindset, talent and time. I outline this in the book. Mindset is around empathy and generosity and metrics. We can talk more about that.
Dave Boyce [00:41:38]:
Probably we don't have time today, but there's a mindset around like getting in the customer's shoes, understanding how she makes makes decisions. Generosity is like, oh, that's what you want to do. Cool. Here you go. Take it. That's really hard for some people to get their heads around. Take it and if you like it, you'll keep using it. If you keep using it, you'll hit thresholds and then you'll want the premium edition, the team edition that you want an enterprise.
Dave Boyce [00:42:02]:
That's great. But for now, solve your problem. So generosity and then metrics is measuring how it's going. That's my mindset. And then talent and time is just. I want to put my, my, some of my best and brightest on this. Like if you're going to figure out an end to end self service, you can't give it to the intern. I wouldn't.
Dave Boyce [00:42:19]:
I'd give it to someone pretty smart and then I'd give them some time. Like they're going to launch, they're going to learn, they're going to adjust, they're going to calibrate and that thing over time is going to find product market fit and go-to-market fit and then it's going to come into its own. So you are going to have to give this a little bit of time. Experiments take time. Put your best talent on it. Put your best mindset on it. If you can do that, most of the rest of this just plays out.
Mark Huber [00:42:45]:
So two more questions, easy one at the end. Because what's a marketing podcast without a. A pitch about the book so we'll get into that in a sec. But harder question of all of the companies that I was expecting to read about that are applying PLG principles, John Deere was not one of them. So how is John Deere applying PLG principles? And what can other traditional industries learn from those companies?
Dave Boyce [00:43:07]:
It was such a cool case study to learn about the CEO of John de Are, like, presented at. At the CES show in Las Vegas. Like, headline presenter, like, what? Why is a tractor like, yeah, but if you think about it, and this goes back to Marc Andreessen, if software is eating the world, products are becoming smart. Software is being embedded, sensors are being embedded. RFID is being embedded in all of our physical products. As soon as the product is smart, it can sell itself. In theory, it can. At the very least, it can sell content contracts or upgrade or maintenance contracts.
Dave Boyce [00:43:41]:
It product extensions. I could. I literally was in Italy and subscribed to a car key downloads to my phone. I unlock the car, I get in it, I drive it, then I park it. Okay, great. And then I walk away from it. That's just a new modality, right? And all products are going to have that.
Dave Boyce [00:43:58]:
So once, all products. So John Deere saw that coming and they said, all right, we could put sensors in our tractors. We'll put computer vision in our tractors. Computer which can now tell a desired plant from a weed. We'll put precision spraying in our tractors, which can now spray fertilizer on the desired plant and weed killer on the weed. The computer vision can see whether I have pests and I can spray pesticide can also take. And then the contractor can take soil samples.
Dave Boyce [00:44:28]:
It can adjust irrigation levels, it can adjust for fertilizer formulation, and then it can send that upstream into its ecosystem. And so that everything that arrives on the farm arrives in a way that's supports the types of seeds, the types of fertilizer that I need. So now the tractor almost becomes a Trojan horse to the kind of business of farming.
Mark Huber [00:44:47]:
It's incredible. Yeah. The company that I told you about earlier, Caterpillar, was actually one of their first investors in the early days. So it's cool to see it come full circle and really be talked about and adopted eight years later.
Dave Boyce [00:44:59]:
Totally.
Mark Huber [00:44:59]:
Dave, this was an amazing conversation. You schooled me a ton. I had a blast. But before we stop recording here, I gotta ask, where can we pre-order Freemium?
Dave Boyce [00:45:08]:
Oh, man. Thank you. It is called Freemium. And why is there no book called freemium? I have no idea. You want to open a pizza restaurant and pizza.com is still available so we grabbed it. You just go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Target or Waterstones. Depends wherever you get your books. And I tried it before this.
Dave Boyce [00:45:28]:
Just type in Freemium. It'll be either the first or second result. It's being published by Stanford University Press. It comes out in August, but you can pre-order now. And the reason I would love for you to pre-order now is because all presales accrue to first week sales which then get momentum out of the gates on bestseller lists and algorithms.
Mark Huber [00:45:47]:
I know how important all of those things are as a marketer. So you've got one book sale coming from Chicago, Illinois in about 15 minutes. So Dave, this was a blast. Everybody who's listening, we'll see you next time on The Proof Point. Thank you You.
Dave Boyce [00:45:59]:
Thank you brother.
Mark Huber [00:46:00]:
Thanks for listening to The Proof Point. If you like what you heard during this conversation, you probably will like Evidently, my bi-weekly newsletter where I share my biggest hits and get honest about my misses as a first-time VP of Marketing. You can subscribe using the link in the show notes here. In this episode, The Proof Point is brought to you by User Evidence. If you want to learn more about how our Customer Evidence platform can help you build trust and close deals faster, check out userevidence.com.