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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 Rudnai (00:02.414)
Okay seems frozen, okay. Okay hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I am Tom, just as I always have been. I don't know why I still feel the need to introduce myself, but there we go. Let's get straight into it and instead introduce my guest, Dave Boyce. So Dave, do wanna say hello to everyone?
Dave Boyce (00:20.931)
Also Dave and also always have been. Good to see you, Tom.
Tom Rudnai (00:23.854)
Good to see you mate. Look, rather than me kind of give a rundown of what you've done in your life, do you want to maybe just give everyone a quick introduction to you, what's brought you up to this point?
Dave Boyce (00:36.559)
Sure, well I've helped build and sell five SaaS companies, some with more success than others, one to Amazon, one to Oracle, some to private equity. And now I'm on the advisory side with Winning by Design, working with startup and mostly scale-up stage growth companies on their revenue architecture and compounding growth strategy.
Tom Rudnai (01:02.222)
Awesome, five SaaS companies is a pretty good record. I guess one thing I'm always interested to know, is there a step along that journey that you would say was the most formative for you in terms of your thinking and your own kind of development and learning?
Dave Boyce (01:18.403)
Yeah, for sure.
After four and a half years at Oracle, I stayed at Oracle after we sold the company to them and ran kind of had a global role. I left and went all the way back to the beginning, like brand new kind of straight startup. And then we took that company, we're living in Boston and we moved it to Silicon Valley. Honestly, Tom, everything that I knew about.
enterprise software got challenged when I landed in Silicon Valley because it was all being done differently. This is what led me to writing the book that I just published. But what I learned is that in Silicon Valley, they were optimizing for usage, not contract size. They were optimizing for velocity, not logo prominence. And so all these companies like Twilio and Dropbox and DocuSign and Shopify and
They were building significant Atlassian, significant businesses, but they were doing it on like a flywheel that I had never seen before. So I had to relearn everything. And because I was in charge, I also had to make sure people got paid. And I had to raise money, and I had to make sure the unit economics works. So that was a big formative, you know, I had been an employee up to that point, and now I was having to actually chart the course and the game had changed.
Tom Rudnai (02:41.934)
Yeah, I mean, that's the journey that I've been on over the last two years. So I'm gonna try not to turn this into a public therapy session here. definitely feel that it's interesting. I was talking to someone else recently as well who had always been working in much, much larger companies now broken off to start his own startup. And he was like, wow, I didn't realize quite, he didn't realize quite the impact that the brand that he'd always had behind him had.
Dave Boyce (02:44.782)
Right?
You
Dave Boyce (03:06.83)
Hmm.
Tom Rudnai (03:08.62)
I guess what was your experience like from that perspective? And you kind of talk as if it was liberating going into the startup world, but were there lessons from what you did at Oracle, which is such a different environment that you think maybe in startup land we could take some positives from?
Dave Boyce (03:25.623)
No.
Tom Rudnai (03:26.702)
But what do you really think Dave?
Dave Boyce (03:28.079)
I really know the only thing that I told myself when I was asking myself that same question the only answer I could come up with that with to that question was maybe I've learned how to beat Oracle like because I've been inside maybe I've learned how to beat the old you know take on the take on the big behemoths with you know with all of their
unagility or comfort behind the way that it's always been done and maybe I know where their weak spots are. But nothing else, Tom, honestly. Yeah, at Oracle I learned how to hire and run globally. I learned how to fire. I learned how to restructure. I learned how to fight for budget. None of those things are the things that are your challenges as a startup CEO. So if I eventually grew a...
start up all the way up to global prominence and I wanted to stick around like Mark Benioff then, okay great, now I learned some stuff, but no, it didn't help me much at all. In fact, when I was in Silicon Valley, I learned and I was raising money, I learned to not say that I had been at Oracle. And I learned to not say that I had an MBA from Harvard. Both of those two things were dings against me. Like people wanted me to have dropped out of Stanford in the CS program.
Tom Rudnai (04:31.502)
Yeah.
Dave Boyce (04:53.731)
They did not want me to have finished my degree much less like an MBA degree and they didn't, they really didn't want me to have worked at a big behemoth like Oracle where I'd learn all the wrong things. So I kept all that stuff on the DL and we just sold on the merits of what we were building.
Tom Rudnai (05:08.622)
Yeah, it's funny, know, isn't it? Like it's almost a better qualification than an MBA is being a dropout because everyone's looking for the outliers, right? And I think we're a little bit less Silicon Valley here in London, but there's still an element of that in our kind of startup culture, right? Everyone wants to be an employer. It's interesting hearing you talk about Oracle as well. So I've never worked in a company quite that large, but I've worked in much larger companies in my time. And honestly, I always have, I tend to think that you should be able to take something from everywhere you go. Everywhere does something right, but I kind of...
Dave Boyce (05:15.407)
That's right.
Tom Rudnai (05:37.26)
Yeah, I didn't really get much from it either.
Dave Boyce (05:40.687)
You tell yourself that, but it just doesn't play out that way. You get a paycheck. That's what you get. And hopefully you save money along the way so you'll have some flexibility later.
Tom Rudnai (05:50.209)
Yeah, think the one thing that I could say is it reinforces the value of building a genuine moat, right, because you have these fairly slow cumbersome, uninspected organisations that are not in any one regard now exceptional, that continue to plod along and do relatively well and protect their position despite not being operationally excellent. And it kind of shows the importance when you do build a start-up on putting a focus on that.
Dave Boyce (06:12.633)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dave Boyce (06:19.427)
Yeah, yep, I agree with that for sure.
Tom Rudnai (06:23.502)
Cool. then obviously the other thing, there's two big things that I want to talk to you about today, right? One is what you're doing at Winning by Design, which I think is really, really interesting. And for our audience, which is mostly marketers, I'm really interested to like dig into what a lot of that means for them and how they should operate day in and day out. And the other one is the book that you obviously recently launched with, with Freemium, which I think links in, again, like how, yeah, from a marketer perspective, kind of unpick the implications of a lot of that.
Dave Boyce (06:27.683)
Okay? Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (06:51.744)
I guess first, one thing I'm actually just quite curious on as a bit of a detour, launching a book, you just got through a lot of the kind promotional period, you got up to number one I saw at one point, what was that process like? Because from the outside, really, really stressful.
Dave Boyce (07:07.757)
Yeah, well, I'm still doing it, Tom. Like, I'll be in your neighborhood next week. I'll be at the Forrester B2B Summit in London, and then I'll be in Belgium later in the week, and two weeks from then I'll be in Riyadh. I'm still traveling and promoting the book, and I actually think that's the easier part, like the hard part.
I spent two and a half years writing, editing, rewriting, then a year ago it was pencils down because the traditional publishing process lasts so long. So I really couldn't do anything over the last year. I was just hoping that the book would still be relevant by the time it came out. But that two and a half years, that's the hard part in my opinion, like the research and trying to kind of, trying to take all of my experience, but I decided, Tom, I hadn't nearly had enough.
exposure to the market to write the definitive book. So I went hard. went and interviewed people who had done it before at places like Atlassian and HubSpot and MongoDB and Dropbox. And I needed to figure out how had it been done in the first generation, how is it being done now, how could you do it in... And by it, I mean product-led growth and automated go-to-market.
How could you do it as a retrofit into an existing business? How could you do it if you were a non-software business? I went hard after that and then trying to distill that all into first principles that would be applicable that someone could follow, like a playbook that someone could follow. That's hard work. It took me two and a half years to get to something that I was proud of. And now, having done all that work, like yesterday I'm sitting with managing director at a private equity firm and he's read the book and he's got
questions and he's kind of asking me the questions one at a time and and I've thought about them already like I did the work I've thought about them we have a real conversation about fundamental and foundational principles and I feel very prepared so now when I go on the road and we're speaking we get questions it all feels that's actually the easy part in my opinion
Tom Rudnai (09:16.344)
Yeah, I mean, there's a lesson in that for everyone, right? Like the preparation, the reps that you do, and then when you get to game time, it just feels easy. Is it interesting to the way you said it, like...
Dave Boyce (09:22.543)
Right.
Tom Rudnai (09:25.314)
keeping it still relevant. And obviously over the course of those two and a half years, the world and the particularly in our pocket of it and kind of technology has changed an awful lot. How disruptive was that to your process of writing it and how much value do you place in? Because a lot of what you've described is interviewing people who have built this before. How applicable do you think the lessons and the playbooks that they have from that are to what's now coming in the next five or 10 years?
Dave Boyce (09:51.437)
Yeah, that's indeed the challenge. A lot of founders who had a great outcome or CEOs who had a great outcome will stand on stage and say, I had a great outcome. If you do what I did, you will be successful too. And then they proceed to give you their lottery ticket number. It's like, no, it's not going to work the same. You can't just assume that.
that you got lucky in there for someone else if they do the same thing is going to get lucky. You have to think harder about that. Like you got to take a much, much broader perspective and you got to think about first principles. You got to drive it down, kind of drive that success down into first principles that you that you've seen over and over and over and over again patterns like pattern recognition, distillation. So yeah, just because Dropbox did a referral program where you get two free terabytes of storage when you refer a friend.
But they did that in like 1999. That doesn't mean it's going to work today. Like it's not. Like it's not, you don't, so we're not, we're not talking about tactics. We're talking about first principles. Like how would you structure and measure a business? How would you structure a growth team? How would you run sequential experimentation? And, Tom, I took a lot of, a lot of, well, I think kind of PLG in general and automated go to market has taken a lot of cues from digital marketing.
like A-B testing and experimentation and deprecation of failed experiments and promotion of and leaning into experiments that are working and really paying attention to the outcomes, not just the inputs and kind of structuring that. That's a lot of what we do in product-led growth. And so I took all those learnings from everywhere and just tried to get to core principles that would stand the test of time. And then what I was worried about, Tom, is that AI was gonna change everything. Like I could see it coming, we could all see it coming.
And I was worried that kind PLG would be yesterday and AI would be tomorrow. So I did write that kind of in the book, you the stuff that we could see coming. And then it turns out that all of the AI native companies that are breaking records left and right, Lovable and Mistral and Cursor and Replet, they're all running on PLG rails.
Dave Boyce (12:12.813)
Like the way they acquire customers, the way they activate customers, the way they monetize customer, it's all the PLG rails. No humans involved in the beginning of those journeys, like nothing slowing them down. Of course they all have enterprise sales teams to catch the bigger ones and go monetize. But PLG rails is the core of their growth engine. And I'm like, wow, I think I may have just gotten lucky. Maybe a little bit lucky. I mean, we worked hard, but those core.
fundamental principles still apply. We're de-laboring the go-to-market process. We're taking anything out that would slow it down because of the involvement of a human, putting it on rails, we're letting it run, and now AI native companies are doing the same thing.
Tom Rudnai (12:58.336)
And what you said before a second ago about the growth engine, think is the big thing that we've taken in B2B go to market from, as you said, digital marketing, particularly B2C, where they always looked at it, or I think arrived at that sooner as looking at it as a customer journey. And there's a growth engine that we build around that to influence it. Whereas B2B, think for longer, we climb onto campaigns and to sales reps and to sales processes and all of these isolated
Dave Boyce (13:19.043)
Yes.
Tom Rudnai (13:26.356)
stacked activities that we think produce growth rather than looking at it as a holistic machine. I think adapting to that mindset is one of the really important things at the moment because it allows you, build your machine and then you can kind of, it doesn't really mean you can have humans in there, you can have AI in there, can blend the two in ways that optimize the whole, right? Maybe one day.
Dave Boyce (13:46.553)
Super well said. You want to go on tour with me?
Dave Boyce (13:53.391)
Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it.
Tom Rudnai (13:55.535)
I think, I want to come back to that and I think what's probably useful because I think a lot of our audience won't be so familiar with what I think from freemium product growth, that kind of thing, very familiar words, but probably what you're doing at Winning by Design and the kind of revenue architecture model and bow tie model that you've got there is probably an interesting concept to introduce a little bit first before we really get into it. Like, guess, do you to give us a bit of an overview of that?
Dave Boyce (14:17.604)
Yeah.
Sure. Well, you know, I had started writing my book, or I had the idea to write a book. We had just sold a company, and I was kind taking some time, and I called Jaco von der Koi, who's the founder of Winning by Design, and I was like, hey, Jaco, what are you guys doing about product-led growth? And he was like, why do you ask? I said, because I think the future of software belongs to it. He's like, OK. So.
So you've had the aha moment too. I'm like, if what you mean is like that I think that we're going be running machines, growth machines going forward, then yeah, I've had that aha moment. And that just hiring more salespeople and throwing them at the problem is not going to work. Yeah, I've had that aha moment. He's like, yeah, we believe the same thing. We just don't know when it's going to happen. But we do. And I had known Jaco for a while. I know he's a first principles thinker. So he said, why don't you come over here and figure it out? Here's what I love about winning by design.
is that they are model and framework and first print principles driven. And I'll say we are, because I've been part of it for four years now. And even though that was applied kind of during the growth at all costs, kind of zero interest rate policy, was applied to the model of like hire, onboard, train, manage, coach humans as fast as you can so you can get everything going up and to the right. And we'll help you.
plug these reps into a model and we'll help turn the crank on that and you can afford to hire as many as you want because money is free. Like, yes. But the underlying architecture of that was always kind of stage driven. You mentioned the bow tie. So the bow tie is kind of traditional sales and marketing funnel, turn it on its side, awareness, education, selection, commit. And then you open it back up as if it were a bow tie on the other side, which is everything post commit.
Dave Boyce (16:13.827)
which is onboarding, adoption, expansion, renewal and expansion. So that kind of framework underpinned everything, all the revenue architecture that Winning by Design was working with. And I just took that bow tie and applied it to the same, to the customer journey or the growth engine that we're doing with automated go-to-market. Just changed the names a little bit so that PLG people would be familiar with it. So it's awareness, acquisition, activation.
first impact habit, and then monetization. So I'm actually got people in the product before I monetize. And then of course, it's about retention, usage retention, renewal and expansion. So those first principles really work across the board. Winning by Design now is working with a lot of AI go to market and they fit into the exact same model. And so what I love is that if you can get the first principles right,
they can stand the test of time.
Tom Rudnai (17:15.694)
And those first principles, what I'm hearing is the sales led, product led, freedom in whatever label you want to put. They're the same basic thing, It's the sales process, but then it's do you get people to adopt it? The mechanisms and the levers by which you do that are relevant to the tactics, but not to the mindset and to the way that you should approach constructing your go-to-market engine. Is that fair?
Dave Boyce (17:39.695)
Yeah, so here's an example. Recurring revenue is a function of recurring impact. First principle. Doesn't matter if you went to market sales led, marketing led, product led. No way is someone going to pay you money again and again and again if they're not getting impact out of your solution. Okay, cool. So put impact right at the center. Whether you're selling it, whether you're marketing it, whether you're just letting people get their hands on it with a free trial or a free forever version.
Tom Rudnai (17:46.734)
Mm.
Dave Boyce (18:09.281)
It's got to deliver impact. It's got to deliver impact definitively and on a recurring basis. And then you have a recurring revenue business. Cool. So we're just going to architect that in. That's an example of a first principle. Another one you already mentioned, which is this is a growth machine. It's a system, like systems-based thinking. The stuff that you do at the front end in terms of how many kind of, how wide your aperture is as you pull people into your funnel affects things as far down as renewal. Like,
You let too many people into the funnel and only half of them experience recurring impact, then you're going to have a renewal problem. You stay too tight on the front end, you're going to have a revenue problem. So you've got to balance. This is a system. The things you do up front affect the things on the back end, and the whole thing needs to be tuned around impact.
Tom Rudnai (18:58.786)
Yeah, that's really interesting. And if there's any marketers listening to this thinking, you know, this is all very kind of, it's most of what I'm looking for, ethereal or yeah, all very kind of.
Dave Boyce (19:08.926)
yeah, theoretical, yeah.
Tom Rudnai (19:10.126)
Theoretical, yeah, like I urge you to take this seriously because I can promise you this is what CROs these days are being taught and how they're thinking, right? think most CROs are probably in Pavilion or somewhere like that and this is exactly what's being taught there. So it's a very useful thing to understand the context that you're operating in. I love what you said recurring revenue function is a, sorry, recurring revenue is a function of recurring impact. I think that's really interesting and I want to get into in a second.
the role that marketing has in delivering that impact in your mind. guess, like one thing, I still hear a lot of people talk in terms of the traditional funnel. Like, how do you think about the funnel? Is it a useful framework still? Is it completely defunct and irrelevant? And why is the bow tie a more useful framework for thinking?
Dave Boyce (19:43.651)
Love it.
Dave Boyce (20:03.053)
Yeah. So I think the funnel is useful as far as it goes. gets right. It gets you right up to, closed one in kind of sales terms, right? Like awareness, education, selection, closed one boom done. And many, many of us who are of kind of my generation have been to many, many board meetings or quarterly business reviews or pipeline reviews where the goal was to call and hit a number. And what number was that? The bookings number, like.
And I even had a sales VP one time say, hey, never, never confuse sales with implementation. He was like, don't worry about the rest of that stuff. We just got to land the number and the number is the bookings number. Well, you and I know that that's not where the story ends. Like it actually begins there. Like for customers, it begins there. Like as soon as I become a customer, that's the beginning of my journey. And now I have now whether or not I achieve kind of impact with the solution is going to
drive whether or not I renew and expand with you, whether or not and so when we have the bow tie, that's where that's where the bow tie opens back up. And actually, if we're doing it right, and we have a north of 100 % net retention, that means our customers are actually growing with us not shrinking, not a trading, but growing with us. And if you and if you look at so let's think about this for a second. Take a one I know
There are marketers from all sizes of companies on, but I'm going to take a round number that's just easy to do the math with. So you have a $100 million recurring revenue business, $100 million of ARR. OK, cool. How many of those million dollars entered your system from brand new customers during the last 12 months? Probably about 10 million of that 100 million. How many of those millions of dollars were expansions based on customers you already had?
Probably about 20 million. Okay, so 10 million brand new customers, 20 million expansion from existing customers. How many, how much was renewal? 70 million. Okay, so 70 million was just renewing existing contracts. 20 million was expanding existing contracts. That's all my existing customer base right there. Only 10 million was brand new customers who walked in the front door and were just starting for the first time. And yet we put all of our time and attention.
Dave Boyce (22:25.423)
on acquisition. if I were, you you said modern CROs are being charged with thinking about the whole ARR stack. Of course they are like that's like we care about the hundred million dollars. And just from a marketing standpoint, then you start to think, well, wait a second, how much of my marketing intention am I spending on acquisition versus my existing base? And then you start to rethink. You're like, oh my goodness, like we have, we got to take care of our 70%. We've got to expand into our other
20 % and yes, of course we still want to acquire. That's a much bigger aperture in terms of where I'm going to focus marketing efforts.
Tom Rudnai (23:04.12)
Yeah, think that's really interesting. There's one thing you said, which just seems so obvious, which is like, we have that mindset internally of the sale is the end of a journey, but for the customer is the start. And there's just bound that's going to cause friction that the customer is going to experience when you have one company feeling that way about it and one feeling in the other, right? It's such an interesting mindset flip for how we need to operate to avoid customers. It's just going to piss people off.
Dave Boyce (23:28.815)
I how you said that, yeah, because I I'm just going to say it like it is, Tom, like exit stage left all of the well-paid salespeople enter the people that get no respect and get paid half as much as the salespeople to start taking care of our customers, like those customers that are eventually 90 % of our revenue stack. Like, no, that ain't right. Like we need to care a lot about the whole thing. That whole machine is what's generating.
are $100 million of ARR.
Tom Rudnai (24:02.318)
Yeah, well, if incentive drives behavior, then the fact that as soon as someone at the start of your customer's journey, you kind of cut the incentives off dramatically, then suddenly there's this juxtaposition in the experience that people get from really fucking incentivized to not incentivized. that that's going to create this horrible initial experience of your company as a customer.
Dave Boyce (24:17.423)
Totally. Totally.
Dave Boyce (24:24.537)
And then we pull back marketing attention too. Like I ran marketing at Oracle and this is one thing I realized is why does our marketing shut off as soon as they become a customer? It's almost like you would think you would shower them with attention once they are a customer because that's the seeds for kind of the rest of their kind of revenue life with you. But you're right, we often don't do that.
Tom Rudnai (24:49.238)
Yeah, that was where I wanted to go next, with what the role of marketers should be in this kind of machine. But I guess there's going to be a lot of marketers feeling like they don't have agency in this, right? Because to an extent, are a slave or what you do is going to be dictated by what the people above you think you should do and therefore the KPIs that you're given and stuff like that.
Yeah, how would you what would your advice be to a marketer who is hearing all of this but being like, what do I need to do about it?
Dave Boyce (25:20.835)
Yeah, well, you one thing.
This is a long play, Tom, but we're well into it. You mentioned the term revenue architecture. That's term that's taken hold within Pavilion. There are 4,000 certified revenue architects now on the planet. You can take that course. You can take that course. can get your peers to take that course. can get your bosses to take that course. And it will just be a first principles kind of understanding of what you and I have talked about. So that'll soften the beaches a little bit for you as you're trying to...
you know, get common language and common understanding about what matters. Okay, fine. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna get the mandate to go, you know, spend a lot of time and energy on the right side of the bow tie. There is one thing that's getting a lot of attention though. That right side of the bow tie can and should be the source of opportunities on the left hand side of the bow tie.
And PLG companies have been doing this forever. I mentioned the Dropbox tactic of referring new customers. Okay, that was kind of the yesteryear version of it. But what's today's like Canva invites people to to evaluate and collaborate and contribute to designs. People who don't already have Canva accounts. Zoom requires, you know, invites somebody else to the call who may or may not have a Zoom account.
Tom Rudnai (26:45.934)
Yeah.
Dave Boyce (26:54.783)
Figma invites kind of inspection and kind of trials and, you know, basically feedback on application design. These are all kind of collaborative, multi-person experiences that pull people into the ecosystem of the product, and eventually some of those people become prospects for actually their own account. So we can use the right-hand side of the bow tie as a source of opportunity on the left-hand side of the bow tie.
That's something that all revenue leaders understand. If I don't have to go buy a brand new MQL, but I can actually generate it from my existing customer base, that takes 10 % of the burden away or 15 % of the burden away for what I have to do as a marketer. And it actually, if you model that out on a recursive basis, it takes a lot of pressure off of the system to get your customers working for you on the acquisition front.
Tom Rudnai (27:53.047)
That's really interesting what it's kind of building in virality, right? Which is again, it's nothing new, but I think it's probably overlooked in a B2B world and particularly in a B2B sales led world, which is good. Like, because every company that you've just described there is like the poster child for a great product led business. Are there sales led organisations that you have seen do a fantastic job of this and what are they doing that works so well?
Dave Boyce (28:19.151)
I would say not a fantastic job, but we're starting to understand it. We call these things growth loops, and we're starting to understand how important it is. So I have been involved. I'll use winning by design as an example, but I did the same thing at Oracle. you see this. Actually, I'm doing this next week. Here's a good example. Next week, I'll be keynoting an event that Amazon is hosting.
for its customers. Okay, so and it's PLG customers are bringing in PLG expertise to speak to its customers of the AWS marketplace. So these people are coming in with all different backgrounds and all different experience with AWS. And they're going to sit next to their peers in San Francisco, I actually have to dial in because I'm going to be in London, but they're all going to be in person in in San Francisco next to their peers, hearing from me hearing from the
the head of growth at MongoDB, hearing from each other what's working, what's not working in our business. So if I'm sitting there and I hear what she's doing and how it's working, then I'm getting ideas and then I'm doubling down and expanding my use of AWS and the services on Marketplace. That is a natural reaction that, or a natural interaction that I can create that spurs demand.
customers talking to other customers, customers talking to prospects, sharing what's working, creating kind of that opportunity for those synapses to fire. I love those. I love diving into customers, helping them tell their own story, helping them communicate with their peers, and helping their peers get ideas from the success that's already happening. That generates real opportunity. I guarantee that they will track a lot of opportunity coming from out of that event.
Tom Rudnai (30:10.028)
That's really interesting because that's one thing that I do hear a lot of marketers talk about increasingly is kind of like the pillars of their strategy being content and community. And I what you just described as community and it's a kind of new, slightly more interesting approach to events. But I think that the framework of how they think about it is still very much left side of the bow tie.
they're not thinking about it in terms of how can we create a growth loop just always dependent on but that feeds into offline right it's it's a different way of thinking it but I bet there's so much you can unlock when you start viewing it in that way instead of just as a good channel
Dave Boyce (30:33.208)
Yes.
Dave Boyce (30:49.295)
I mean, you think about when you're making a purchase, you're going to spend some money or you're going to adopt some sort of a solution to help you solve a problem in your business. I am pretty sure you probably just don't take the marketer's word for it that this is an awesome product. I bet that you reach out to peers. I bet you look on the forums. I bet you kind of figure out who else is using it and you use your kind of informal influence network to see if would this be a good idea or not.
That's what I do. I don't want to take the marketer's word for it. So now all this is doing is just paving those paths, just make it easier for a prospect to talk to an existing customer and get that existing customer's success to influence the prospect's decision.
Tom Rudnai (31:38.095)
Yeah, I I'm British. The second I get even a hint that someone is marketing to me, I like recoil. It's a funny thing. Even marketers who are British, we hate being marketed to. We absolutely despise the notion that any of this stuff that we know applies to everyone in the world can possibly apply to us. We're in like that.
Dave Boyce (31:43.577)
Yeah.
There you go.
Dave Boyce (31:56.036)
you
Tom Rudnai (31:59.407)
But I think that's really interesting and I always love podcasts like this when I go and I'm like, I'm gonna take that away and think about that all weekend, which is like how we can think about growth loops more in a sales led world, because I think that'll lead to a lot of interesting things. I wanna dig into as well that a little bit and I think it's all linked very intrinsically, but obviously a lot of your focus goes on to freemium and product led growth. guess first question, freemium versus product led growth, is there a distinction between those two things?
Dave Boyce (32:28.173)
Yeah, for sure. Freemium is just a pricing strategy. It fits in broader context of product-led growth, which fits in a broader context of any automated go-to-market, which fits in the broader context of just self-service. Self-service started with, in the digital world, of started with e-commerce in the late 90s when we started having unfacilitated transactions and just buying things.
you know, online and then it pushed out to all of our phones when mobile, when phones became smart. And then it pushed into kind of the SaaS world. You know, now I could all of a sudden like buy software online without anyone helping me. And then it pushed into product led growth. freemium is just one pricing model within that, but it just so happened that a lot of people know what freemium means. You get the free version of the product, you pay for the upgrade later once you get one.
once your usage has expanded and no one had taken the term. So it's just a way to get attention on the book. It's, you know, freemium, good, I get it. So once we get them hooked, then we we unlock, then we dive into all of those other aspects. And Tom, I think AI is just an extension of all of that. Like, if self service started with e commerce, went to mobile, went to SaaS, went to PLG, now it's just going into AI where AI can de complexify a lot of complex purchases, I can get
way further down the track educating myself if I can go back and forth with an AI and I can self-serve into more and more complex corners of the industry.
Tom Rudnai (34:05.058)
Yeah, well, and what as you did that kind of diagram of freedom and then it basically any automated go to market and what technology is doing through automation and personalization is kind of expanding the scope.
of what considered automated go to market. And I think it's pulling more channels into the framework of a product led growth engine, right? Because now the scope of what can be considered part of your product is much, much easier to extend beyond the web application because you can have AI agents going and proactively taking actions outside of that, which I think is quite interesting. I guess.
Dave Boyce (34:37.423)
store.
Tom Rudnai (34:40.984)
So, okay, in that case, an interesting and annoyingly binary question for you. Like if you've got a crystal ball, which I'm reliably told that you do, like 10 years from now, software company will be product or every thriving software company will be product-led growth as a model, true or false?
Tom Rudnai (35:06.316)
discounting a couple of zombies maybe and...
Dave Boyce (35:08.943)
I mean, if you force me to say true or false, I'll say true. And then my little asterisk is it probably won't be in all aspects of their company, but will be in some aspects of their company. So you think about PLG for acquisition, that's a little bit higher hurdle, like self-service discovery and activation and usage of a brand new customer who's never been exposed to it. That's a little tough. But what about what about PLG for renewal?
Tom Rudnai (35:27.618)
Mm.
Dave Boyce (35:38.765)
Like I already have the product and all I need to do is renew. Does that take a human? A lot of software companies, you'd be shocked, Tom, maybe you wouldn't, still require a human conversation just to renew the contract that you already have. Like why don't you just click a button? it's because we haven't built that yet. Well, let's build in renewals, then let's build in expansion, then let's build in kind of like new feature discovery. Let's build in kind of like...
We can build self-surface into all aspects. And so if you say that, and then AI can help with that too. AI can spot where the opportunities are to surface, you know, a new feature discovery and a new kind of package upgrade. All of that can be built in. And I do think all thriving companies will do that. We just have to, we have to pull the humans out of those little interactions where if a machine can automate it, we should be automated.
Tom Rudnai (36:31.01)
Yeah, and particularly as that, the scope of that extends beyond just the product, which I guess is always the limiting factor a little bit at the moment, right? Is if you take out the humans, you limit yourself to one channel of communication, which often makes it harder to communicate complicated things and to kind of harass people in the multi-touch point way that we now like to harass people to get them to buy our products.
Dave Boyce (36:55.535)
I mean, you can imagine. So one of the case studies in the book is, this is a wild one, but is John Deere, the tractor company. Like, holy crud, that's not product-led growth. That's a half a million dollar purchase. Like, there's no way. But now all of their modern tractors are outfitted with computer vision that can tell the difference between a plant and a weed. Precision spraying that can spray the plant with fertilizer and the weed with...
with Weedkiller. They can spot pesticides. It automatically takes soil samples, measures the pH, measures the water saturation, and then sends signals back to the cloud to get reconfigured pesticide, reconfigured seed, reconfigured fertilizer, and can reset the irrigation schedules. So now I've got a commerce engine on the back end of it.
that's being updated and reorders are being placed based on kind of this information collection machine that's just driving along my fields. That's wild. It's similar to what you have with your printer at home. The ink is running low. It tells you you've got a reorder. You can imagine that reorder just getting kind of placed automatically. Now I got commerce just happening based on ongoing consumption. It could happen with your refrigerator. You know, you're out of milk. Computer vision sees that you're out of milk. It places a new order.
These are things that are going to happen over the next few years. And you're right, it's not only for software companies and it's not only in the domain of the product because AI can be a purchasing agent on our behalf attached to things that we just use every day.
Tom Rudnai (38:34.254)
How so as a marketer, how do you think in the context of that world, I should be approaching my role? take, let's take the, let's go outside of software. I think it creates a more kind of exaggerated example, which is maybe useful. I used, my job used to be to market printer cartridges. Now that's happening automatically. Like how do I adapt to a world in which I'm trying to supplement and support product led growth rather than like replace it?
Dave Boyce (38:51.075)
yeah.
Dave Boyce (39:04.601)
Yeah. Well, I'll just be riff with you for a minute, Tom, but I really, really like the Clayton Christensen framework of jobs to be done. Like, if I can figure out the job that somebody believes they have in order to make progress in their life, you know, and when you apply that to printer cartridges, my job is not to order a printer cartridge. Like, the job I have as an individual who owns a printer is...
Tom Rudnai (39:13.272)
Mm.
Dave Boyce (39:33.761)
is convenience. I really, I never want to think about my printer cartridge. I don't want to, like inevitably you go to print the one time in a year that you have to print something, you go to print and you find out that you're low on whatever and it's going to look terrible and you're frustrated. My job is to avoid that. So if I were a marketer, I'd be marketing into that need. Like the job is to not ever worry about your printer cartridge. So now I'm not selling printer cartridges, I'm selling
I'm selling convenience or I'm selling kind of ease of mind. Like get it when you need it, get it when you need it. And by the way, what else could I hire for that job? Maybe I could send it to a printer down the road. Maybe I could get like a print, send it to a cloud printer. Could it be get delivered to my house through DoorDash? Like that would be another way to get ease of mind. But that's the job to be done. And I want to solve it. And I'd market it in a different way. I'd market it as kind of ease of mind probably.
Tom Rudnai (40:29.538)
you know, that's interesting to just be like, that it's like in and around your product, what are all the jobs to be done? And then you can look at, okay, where are the ones where I can most add value myself as a, as a marketer. it's, there's an interesting contrast to the like classic.
job of a marketer though, because what you've just described is like embracing invisibility a little bit. You shouldn't be seen, you should just be felt in an improvement in their lives. Whereas typically marketers are about noise and being seen. That seems like quite a big shift in how you need to think.
Dave Boyce (41:03.299)
Yeah, yes and how do I how do I make it invisible? you make it invisible by making sure you're in the Epson system or making sure you're in the Hewlett Packard system or making sure. So I am going to help you understand how to get that to happen in your life. It just means you got to have the right piece of equipment connected to the right Internet. And then after that it's going to be invisible. But I do need you to make a purchase. I to get you to opt into my system so that we can make all that happen for you. So yes and right like.
You do have to do something.
Tom Rudnai (41:35.948)
And in a way what you're describing is actually, it's still a lot of the focus. Like if you were, if you were designing a within a revenue team, a market, like designing the KPIs for marketing team, what would you say they should be treating as their North star? And how would you apportion marketing's focus on either side of the bow tie? If I had to again, get you to put a very crass percentage on it.
Dave Boyce (41:57.455)
So I'm going to go back to this conversation I had yesterday with this PE guy. He asked me, what is the most critical metric that I want to see in the boardroom? This isn't specific to marketing, just in general, that I want to see that maybe we're not seeing right now. And we talked back and forth about it. We were both honing in on the exact same thing. In my opinion, Tom, it's usage.
Like I want to make sure that whatever this product or service that I've sold you is being used because recurring revenue is a function of recurring impact and referring impact is a function of usage. So if I can see that whatever I've sold is being used and that usage is going up, all the rest of it's going to solve itself. Okay, so now you come back and say, okay, well, what does marketing have to do with usage? That's on the wrong side of the bow tie. We're on the left side, usage is on the right side. Well, it has to do with targeting.
And it has to do with messaging. Like if I can landing on why the job to be done that you have is a good match with the solution that I have, and I can target people who have that issue and care about it, those are the people that are most likely to stick around, are most likely to use it, and are most likely to be a long-term customer. Now we have to rethink how we incent marketers. I can't tell you how many board.
meetings I've walked out or I've been in where the marketer declares victory and then walks out, you know, because they have X number of MQLs and boom, it was over target and you know, aren't we great? And here we go. And then the head of sales or head of revenue comes in and says, we didn't get it. We'll get them next time. Like that's a disconnect. Like that means I've got a big wide aperture. letting anyone in the front end of the funnel and sales is having trouble closing and we'll just take that one step further.
let's say sales closes them, but then they're not using the product, then that means it's not going to monetize, at least not on a recurring basis. And then I've got a problem. So I got to connect marketing all the way to usage in some way. It's got to be connected in some way. And I think that's a challenge. I don't have that solved, Tom. But if I were a marketer running marketing right now, and if my CRO was in charge of all recurring revenue, not just bookings.
Tom Rudnai (44:11.406)
Yeah.
Dave Boyce (44:20.771)
I would try to get really close to her in terms of targeting. Like, let's get the right ICP in that's most likely to close and most likely to onboard successfully and most likely to use on an ongoing basis, because then you've got tailwinds on renewals and expansions, and we're going to grow our ARR number.
Tom Rudnai (44:41.966)
Yeah, I like that. I always think of revenue should be everyone's North Star, but usage is just kind of a step further along in that. Do you look at, I'll maybe answer my own question, but when you say usage there, do you mean usage in the aggregate or do you mean usage at a kind of per person or per account level?
Dave Boyce (45:01.743)
So in the book, we kind of simplify it. think usage is different. In some cases, it's burning tokens. In some cases, it's log-in, daily log-ins. Or in some cases, it's the generation of a report or percentage of licenses that get kind of used. So you're going to define that kind of depending on your business. But in the book, we look at cohorts. So I have.
100 new users enter the system and activate new accounts. Okay, cool. Six months later, how many of those 100 users are still actively using the product? Oh, what do you mean? On a daily basis, a weekly basis or a monthly basis? Oh, let's just start on a daily basis, 11%. Okay, is that good, bad? I don't know. What about on a weekly basis? 34%. Oh, that sounds a lot better. 34 of our 100 customers.
users are still logging in on a weekly basis and using the product. Okay, great. What about on a monthly basis? 79%. my goodness, that's maybe this is a weekly product and maybe I need to be optimizing for that. So I look at it as a percentage of a cohort. So I've got a cohort of new customers. What percentage of them still a year later, two years later, three years later have the same or more usage? And we're going to measure that. And hopefully, Tom,
The cohort that I generated a year ago has, sorry, the cohort that I generate this year will have better performance than the cohort that I generated a year ago, because hopefully I've improved the targeting, I've improved the messaging, I've improved the onboarding, I've improved the understandability of the product. So anyone I bring in today is gonna have a better experience than someone I brought in a year ago.
Tom Rudnai (46:53.263)
Super interesting. I've got one more question before I get on to some quick fires. She's like, so you it sounds like I've interviewed and done workshops with an awful lot of people who thinking this way and doing a really good job of it. What, particularly with marketers that you speak to, what are the skill sets that link all of the skill sets and traits that link all of the best ones?
Dave Boyce (47:17.359)
Systems thinking. I know that's a big word, but systems thinking. Like when I meet a marketer who thinks about, like you were saying, the revenue machine, I know they're going to be solving for the right things. They're going to be curious. They're going to ask the next question. They're not just going to drop the leads off and then go get a coffee. They're going to think about how marketing contributes to the whole system. And that's a certain trait.
that's a certain type of individual. think we architects and systems thinkers in marketing, not just kind of transactional MQL generators. And you can hire for that. You can screen for that.
Tom Rudnai (48:04.397)
No, it's just one thing I think about the demand genius when we come to build out and expand our marketing team is I think I'm going to ban the word campaign because it's just not how I want to think. It's not to say that there's never a justification for like a seasonal
approach to how are we going to like, if you're looking at the top of the funnel, how are we going to go and hook people in and at the awareness stage, right? There is seasonality and a place for campaigns, but I just don't want that to be language that fits across because I want everything to be focused on how do we build a better functioning machine. And I think they're kind of, they're kind of juxtaposed a little bit.
Dave Boyce (48:37.956)
Love it.
Tom Rudnai (48:42.893)
Ben Ray, that's me on my soapbox now and we're here to listen to you on yours. let's get into a couple of quick first before I let you go and get on with your day. So I guess first of all, what's an AI use case or an AI tool that you absolutely love that just kind of blew your mind?
Dave Boyce (48:46.895)
I
Dave Boyce (49:03.823)
I think you told me you were gonna ask me this question and I'm not sure I prepared it.
What I really love for our customers is the AI use case of role playing. So there are companies out there who have avatars that will allow me to role play a discovery call, a close call, a negotiation. The simple ones are just like door openers, but that's not interesting to me. I get so much practice on cold calls already, but what I don't get much practice on is
kind of hardcore negotiation or stakeholder management or conflict resolution. So we built an agent internally where we can go back and forth with that agent on a practice basis. And that means that our rep, and by the we're working with other companies on this exact same thing. Our reps get practice in the difficult conversations, the infrequent conversations. So like you said before,
By the time it's game time, I've already run it six or seven or eight different times. Ideally, I'd be doing that with my manager, but managers don't always have time, or they don't always invest the time in role playing and coaching. So now I can just do that with an agent, get ready for game time. When I go in, I feel prepared.
Tom Rudnai (50:29.006)
I love
I use case which is about quality not quantity and I think that very much fits the bill there I also think it's an interesting thing. So one thing I thought back on my soapbox again Then like I think marketers should be living in Gong. They'll pick your you know, cool recording software of your choice Every bit as much as sales reps and I think that has to be an immense amount of value Probably not as much but to marketers getting experience of going and working with those kind of role-play things I think the best marketers increasingly are those who can blend some sales skills and vice versa
I don't think it's necessarily something that is just for a sales rep.
Dave Boyce (51:03.951)
There's a lot of intelligence in there. There's like locked into our kind of conversations is probably 90 % of unharvested insights and a bunch of them for marketers. Yeah. We actually pump all of that into an agent also, all of those conversations into an agent that you can then go have a conversation with over Slack. But I think it would be great for product developers and for marketers to figure out like what's creating
ease of use, what's creating dissatisfaction and how do I go all the way upstream and fix that with targeting and messaging.
Tom Rudnai (51:39.449)
Yeah, love that. It helps kind of solve that disconnect. Anyway, these momentum quick files are my bad. Next one, what skill or trait for you and you personally here has been the biggest needle mover in your career?
Tom Rudnai (51:58.384)
pauses.
Dave Boyce (51:59.795)
This doesn't come naturally to me, Tom, just deciding whether I should, you know, this doesn't come naturally to me, Tom. So I've had to work on it, but it has been a needle mover. And that is empathy. Like as soon as I shifted, and this was in my forties, embarrassingly, this is like true confessions right now. You said we weren't going to do mutual therapy. I'm doing some. As soon as I shifted my mindset from how can I be the most awesome person in the room?
Tom Rudnai (52:02.999)
Anyway.
Dave Boyce (52:27.535)
to how can I help these people succeed in their careers, everything kind of changed for me. So empathy, like thinking about humans and how they are going to be the best version of themselves is what helps you scale a team and a company.
Tom Rudnai (52:44.823)
Yeah, it's funny how I think often our biggest strengths are both, it's our genuine strengths and it's also our biggest weaknesses because a self-aware person will take a weakness and often turn it into a strength at some point in their career and that tends to be where we do our best work, the stuff that we just okay at. I think often we stay okay at because you never feel the need to solve it.
It also reminds me of someone gave me some very good advice about marketing and messaging, which was kind of exactly what you just said, is stop making yourself the hero. It's like if you think if you have the hero, the guide and the villain, the villain is the pain point. Almost every brand makes themselves the hero because it feels great, right? But what you should be doing is making yourself the guide and making your customer the hero. And I think there's a lot of...
Dave Boyce (53:26.545)
I love that. That's so good.
Tom Rudnai (53:29.118)
I can't claim that one, that one wasn't me. I also can't remember who to cite, so apologies to whoever that was. Yeah, I'm fine with that. May I ask my podcast? This is me. And then final one before I let you go, or give us a recommendation is, what for you personally biggest fuck up in your career? Everyone's probably gonna think you're quite smart after listening to this and I want to dispel that notion.
Dave Boyce (53:30.841)
Mm-hmm.
Dave Boyce (53:35.023)
I'll just say it was you.
Dave Boyce (53:52.949)
I was just talking to a CEO yesterday who I advise and I took a trip down memory lane because he's dealing with some of same things I was dealing with.
Dave Boyce (54:09.926)
not moving fast enough. Like, you know, when you're a founder, and this will be a little therapy for you and me, when you're a founder, you generally can see what's working and what's not. and...
Dave Boyce (54:26.703)
And it is hard to lean into those insights because not everyone on your team can see it. You've asked them to do it in a certain way that's not working anymore, but they're working really hard. Now you're going to ask them to do it in a different way, or you're going to say like that everything has changed. That's a hard leadership challenge. Sometimes we wait, sometimes we let them finish what they're working on. We let it kind of play out. wait.
longer than we should to make changes in the business, especially in the early days. And in one business in particular, think, I mean, we had a fine outcome, but we could have had a way better, we could have had a market leading outcome if I would have had more courage and I would have led with more conviction. I would have made radical changes as soon as we could see the signals. just, I didn't, I didn't want to have the fight with the board. I didn't want, I had just hired people into something and told them where the direction we're going. didn't want to change on them. I didn't.
want to offend kind of the people who had been there for a long time. Forget about that. Like everybody wants to be part of a winning team. The goal is to win. We need to win. we can get by the time all the dust is settled and we've won, the people who have been along for the journey are going to be super thankful that you made those hard decisions and that you led them with conviction. And so just for me, just do it faster.
Tom Rudnai (55:49.271)
I think that's great advice. And then finally, one recommendation for everyone, like I'm thinking like a book, a podcast, a thought leader, and then afterwards we'll turn everyone again with your book. So I want someone else's first.
Dave Boyce (56:01.645)
Yeah, for sure.
Dave Boyce (56:06.745)
So I talked about Clayton Christensen and Jobs to Be Done. I always recommend his book called Competing Against Luck. It's not his most famous book, but it's a really good book to think about what humans are actually looking for and what the real job to be done is and then how to match that with marketing a product.
Tom Rudnai (56:27.959)
Awesome. And then finally, I won't make you do it if you've got this far and found all this very interesting, then I think you will find Dave's book as well, Freeman, very, very interesting. I've actually ordered mine today. In the meantime, I've got a perplexity summary from it. But it's en route and...
Dave Boyce (56:42.53)
Night.
Tom Rudnai (56:46.285)
Yeah, if I get half as much value as I have from this conversation, then I think I'm going to enjoy it. So yeah, I've loved this day. Thank you so much for joining and everyone who's listening, then thank you for kind of joining us on this podcast.
Dave Boyce (56:59.363)
Thank you brother John. Have a great weekend and thanks for being you and thanks for pushing into the future and pulling us all with you.
Tom Rudnai (57:06.666)
thank you man. Love that. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Dave Boyce (57:08.463)
Alright, bye.