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Welcome to GTM News Desk, the podcast where Mark Kilens and Rachel Elsts Downey bring you real talk backed by real action. Twice a month, we cut through the noise to deliver the essential resources, news, and expert takes you need to create impactful, People-first GTM motions. From trending topics to clickbait headlines, we sift through the clutter to highlight what truly matters in the world of B2B Go-to-Market.
With nearly 25 years of combined experience working with top B2B brands like Drift and HubSpot, we’re sharing our insights and advice to help you navigate the best (and worst) GTM strategies. Whether you’re a startup founder or a CMO, tune in to GTM News Desk for analysis, candid discussions, and actionable tips that prioritize people and drive real results.
Nick Bennett [00:00:00]:
Everyone's putting AI into their product. But how do you articulate that unique value that makes it more important in today's market? Because everyone has it.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:00:10]:
If leaders aren't willing to make the hard decisions and hard trade offs, then their teams are just in this churn cycle.
Mark Kilens [00:00:16]:
Don't have your product description be an all in one AI powered, intelligent blah like that is just garbage. Real talk backed up with real action. This is GTM News Desk.
Nick Bennett [00:00:31]:
I'm Nick Bennett.
Mark Kilens [00:00:32]:
And I'm Mark Hillens.
Nick Bennett [00:00:33]:
Let's see what's trending. What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of GTM News Desk. We have a great one in store for you today. For those that don't know, I'm Nick. I'm joined by Mark. Hey Mark, how you doing today?
Mark Kilens [00:00:53]:
I am well. What's going on?
Nick Bennett [00:00:55]:
Ah, not much. Not much. I am excited because we're going to be talking all about product marketing, customer marketing, lifecycle marketing. Today we have a fantastic third guest. Before we jump in, we're going to jump into headline number one and this is an article from Gartner, actually that talks about the three key trends for product marketing leaders in 2025. And I'm curious after I go through these, if you disagree with any of them, because I know your background, you know, you, you love product marketing, you're really strong in it. And I'm curious as someone that isn't really a product marketing person, if you disagree with these. So first one is the article talks about the growing specialization in product marketing.
Nick Bennett [00:01:40]:
So it's becoming more specialized. It's more of an increased emphasis on upstream activities to ensure that the product meets the customer expectations and market demand. So it's not just like, hey, we need everything middle of funnel, bottom of the funnel. It's validating market insights early in the development to help mitigate the risk associated with misaligned products. So before I go to number two, agree or disagree with that one, I.
Mark Kilens [00:02:04]:
Mean, yeah, that's, that's user experience research in my opinion. I think I've been talking about this on the GTM blog. We have untacked GTM.com, but a few articles I recently wrote around user experience research. Uxr. I think it gets at this, which is product marketing has done or is traditionally done a lot of the research in trying to understand customers. But the best product teams have user experience researchers validating the product requirements document, even a prd. And I feel like the best companies moving forward are going to have a really strong UX Research component, with a really strong product marketing component, with a really strong product management and engineering component that they all leverage AI, but they're taking a much more thorough look at the competition, the customers, the market and understanding where is the white space and where is the opportunity to create something truly differentiated and innovative to serve the customer against what they're feeling in their pains. So yeah, I would agree with that.
Nick Bennett [00:03:06]:
Number two, and I'm 99.9% sure you'll agree with this one. But it's the necessity for unified go to market strategies. So the article talks about 50% of tech CMOs and product marketing leaders report that there's a lack of collaboration with revenue functions in their organizations. I don't know how many people they surveyed specifically, but 50% say they have these issues and it's hindering their customer expansion goals because of this. And the article goes on to talk about how, you know, obviously you have to address these challenges. How do you create that unified team? Is it a reporting structure? Is it, you know, taking more ownership of specific things, especially as a product marketing leader and using that storytelling? So curious. Agree or disagree? I'm going to guess you agree.
Mark Kilens [00:03:55]:
But well, Gartner owes me some money because I term United go to market. So Gartner, I expect a royalty check very soon.
Nick Bennett [00:04:05]:
Love it. And the third one, you actually kind of already touched on it, it's transformation through generative AI. So basically they're saying that gen AI is significantly impacting product marketing. So what was interesting is it talks about how leaders really need to enhance their teams with AI tools that in clearly differentiate the offerings compared to their competitors. So it's like everyone's putting AI into their product. But how do you articulate that unique value that makes it more important in today's market? Because everyone has it. That was actually out of the three they talked about that one the most. Which, you know, I guess no surprise it's AI.
Nick Bennett [00:04:46]:
But it really talked about how product marketing leaders should hone in using AI to differentiate their product and their storytelling and everything else compared to everyone else that is a competitor of theirs.
Mark Kilens [00:04:59]:
Yeah, I mean we did a whole episode on this. We had. I'm blanking on her name now. We had a lot of fun talking about how stupid it is to mention AI more than once basically in any of your messaging and positioning. No one gives a shit about AI. They give a shit about how are you helping them solve their pain and problem. How do you do it uniquely and differently? What's the value? How fast can I See value? What's the expected outcomes? How much is this going to cost me over time? You know, why are you better than xyz? Potential solution other than yours, like AI is just, you know, I don't know. Yeah, it is definitely some sort of bubble.
Mark Kilens [00:05:39]:
Who knows how big, how small, whatever. But don't have your product description be an all in one AI powered, intelligent, blah like that is just garbage. So yeah, love it. Segment number two, story number two of the week before we talk to Rebecca. So depending on when you're listening to this, this has either already come out or is coming out. The release I believe is early May, usually like May 6th. And I had the honor of working with this gentleman, Nick, named Scott Brinker at HubSpot for a couple years and he still runs ChiefMartech.com and he did a quick article about the upcoming report that he does. He's been doing this for I think almost 15 years now.
Mark Kilens [00:06:22]:
I can kind of look really quick the State of MarTech 2025. It's got it. Yeah, it's at least 15, if not more years. Definitely read through the whole article. There's an amazing graphic he's put into this article about the long tail of Martech. And when you think about a positioning product marketing standpoint, what type of Martech is your product like? It's most likely not one of the major platforms, aka HubSpot. It might be right to the right of that, going from left to right where it's a kind of a leading horizontal type of solution. Maybe like a sixth sense, if you will.
Mark Kilens [00:06:57]:
I don't know if they're even leading, but something like that. Or it could be all the way on the other end where it's an early stage startup. You know, shout out to our friends at Rev Sure R E V S U R E Rev Sure. You know, it's an early stage startup using AI but using new technology to help with attribution, data modeling, other things. When it comes to the marketing and sales funnel and then even past that, even further to the right, there's all these like consumer apps that you could make but now there's like agent first apps or agent built software. So when you think about like where your product tool, product suite, platform. Scott talks about that evolution as well. Nick fits into this.
Mark Kilens [00:07:43]:
It's an interesting thought exercise. It's also going to give you a lot of information about your competitors potentially and where you fit into the Martech landscape. And what type of, you know, software are you? Are you. He calls it the head, the Torso, the tail and the hypertail. And then he does talk a lot about AI. He has this approximate diffusion of AI technology marketing. March 2025. Great name, right? Approximate diffusion kind of dispersion almost of AI technology.
Mark Kilens [00:08:09]:
In MarTech, he thinks we're in this chasm between early adopters and early majority. So there's AI agents, AI gentic workflows. The chasm is where we're kind of at, and then AI assistance. So all that to be said is studying, you know, the future landscape of where your product could go and where your competitors are kind of going is always a good exercise to do. It goes back to the common UXR research. And I just think in today's world, knowing like, truly what you sell in relation to, you know, how you're positioning against something else is important because there's companies, Nick, and I'll say this last thing, there's companies that are like almost positioning against something that just doesn't make sense. Like, hey, I'm an early stage startup, but I'm going to position against 6 cents. But like, it's not even apples to apples.
Mark Kilens [00:08:58]:
It's like, what, what are you doing? Like, does. It doesn't make any sense. And it goes back to kind of the ICP segmentation, the ICP definition you have. But this is a really thoughtful way to think about where your product exactly falls in this Martech distribution tale, if you will.
Nick Bennett [00:09:10]:
Yeah.
Mark Kilens [00:09:11]:
Now, I love it.
Nick Bennett [00:09:11]:
I mean, Scott's a brilliant person. I always, I, I always look forward to like, when he puts out like all those tools. And in the article, it's interesting I said, last year the marketing technology landscape surpassed 14,000 commercial solutions, thanks in part to a large, obviously AI native martech startups that were out there. So I'm just curious, like, how many from 2024 to 2025, like, does that 14,000 go to, you know, 16,000. 20,000. Which is ridiculous even, you know, to say. But it's just, there's so much out there. But it's one of the best reports that, that I see every single year.
Mark Kilens [00:09:48]:
So that's why marketing to marketers is a very hard job.
Nick Bennett [00:09:54]:
Yeah, it's fair.
Mark Kilens [00:09:55]:
All right, let's talk to Rebecca. What do you think?
Nick Bennett [00:09:57]:
Yeah, let's jump into it. You're in for a great conversation. People will see you there.
Mark Kilens [00:10:01]:
Giddy up.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:10:10]:
Welcome to segment number three. Thank you for staying with us this long. You are in for a treat. We have someone amazing here and I'm going to let her introduce herself in a second. But Rebecca, thank you so much for joining Mark and I, we are incredibly excited to have you.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:10:25]:
Great to be here and I'm excited to chat all things B2B marketing. I have a background in B2B SaaS marketing specifically started in just general digital marketing as so many of us do, and then found my way really focusing and specializing in product marketing and the market research. So that's what I've done for the last decade or so, focused on using market insights and research to create really effective high growth marketing strategies for mission driven companies. And I'm also a Forbes contributor writing about things like big data and the impact of tech on society. So it's great to be here and chat.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:11:01]:
Love that. Well excited. I think this conversation is going to be fantastic. Mark and I like to poke jokes at each other as well. So you know, if you don't, don't be afraid to poke fun at us as well.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:11:13]:
Challenge accepted.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:11:15]:
Absolutely. So let's dive into it. So the first thing that I want to kind of understand from you is Mark and I, big believers of people, first go to market how the traditional go to market model often falls short. And so in your mind, why does the traditional GTM model often fall short when it comes to customer retention and advocacy?
Rebecca Shaddix [00:11:34]:
I think there's a lot of reasons, but one that I found pretty pervasively across industries, across companies is devaluing the research and the market insights that go into crafting differentiated strategies. I think a lot of teams are really playing to the mean. It's not risky. If you can't fail big, you can't win big. And so if we just kind of say what do we internally like think sounds good, look online and like the tone of and try to emulate, that's just mediocrity. And so if you're really willing to take big bold swings, you have to anchor that in pretty defined market insights based on your unique audience. And that takes time. And that means that sometimes you're doing research and iterations and testing things as opposed to just shipping and moving on.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:12:17]:
So the appetite to do that, the appetite to fail big and the appetite to try things that probably won't work because the lead somewhere bigger is just not one that a lot of companies have. There's a lot of pressure on marketing leaders to produce pipeline pretty quickly, pretty consistently, pretty predictably and that yields safety. You just do things that are safe, that you've done before and can kind of iterate on and you'll just get incremental results from that. If you can't fail really, really big. You're not going to win big. But you need confidence that those failures will be learning because you understand your audience really well.
Mark Kilens [00:12:52]:
So I have to ask, we've talked about this on this show before and by the way, this show is a spoof off of SNL.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:12:58]:
Nick Tolkien.
Mark Kilens [00:12:59]:
So did you watch the 50th year anniversary Rebecca this past weekend?
Rebecca Shaddix [00:13:05]:
No, I didn't.
Mark Kilens [00:13:06]:
Oh shoot.
Nick Bennett [00:13:07]:
Did you?
Mark Kilens [00:13:08]:
Yes.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:13:08]:
Yeah, it was one. I didn't know it was gonna be that long. It was like two and a half hours.
Mark Kilens [00:13:12]:
It's on Peacock. I'm sure it's on Peacock.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:13:14]:
Yeah, it was. I thought it was really good.
Mark Kilens [00:13:17]:
I know who's Nick's character. I'll share it later in the show. I got a perfect character for Nick. But my question is gonna pivot Open AI deep research tool. What do you think about that?
Rebecca Shaddix [00:13:29]:
Love it as an input with really specific prompt engineering, really specific calibration of what you're looking for and asking a decided sources. So the conclusion that it draws is going to be based on the inputs and the questions that you ask. I always ask a decided source and then I go to that source myself to see why. I often will ask after a prompt for it to write a summary email explaining its rationale. Here's the conclusion. You came to write an email to my executive team explaining this decision. Cite your sources. Because that's been a good weeding tool of do.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:14:08]:
I agree with that conclusion? Love the research. Love the ability to pull in a whole bunch of sources quickly. Things that I may not ever find because they're on page 40 of Google, but they're really good input. Love the tool. It needs constraints.
Mark Kilens [00:14:23]:
It needs constraints. Give us an example, please. Yeah, what do you think?
Rebecca Shaddix [00:14:27]:
Making sure you're really clear on what you're asking for. So it is going to draw conclusions based on whatever you fed it before. If it's within a specific project, maybe inputs that you don't want it to consider. Be intentional about which project folder it's in, which sources that you've already uploaded it's referencing. Because you may think you're just riffing and it may think it's an input. So be really intentional and mindful about it. Be intentional and mindful about the constraints or the parameters you'd put on the sources it can cite. Does it need to be cited at least twice? If so, link.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:14:58]:
If so, check. I just wouldn't delegate decision making, just like I wouldn't delegate decision making to dashboards just yet. But maybe Ever really to any tool.
Mark Kilens [00:15:10]:
So you're a big fan. Is you're a big fan, but you got to use it responsibly. Okay.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:15:14]:
Yes. Use responsibly as an input. Like I would use an opinion from a sales leader. One input. Cite your sources, link me to the gong calls, tell me the customers that this isn't true for what isn't working for it. It's an input, a constraint that we can then filter. I think it's great. Really accelerates a ton of research.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:15:35]:
It's not going to replace. At least for me, at least yet my own research.
Mark Kilens [00:15:40]:
So do the inspection like any good researcher. Like inspects.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:15:43]:
Yeah, it's a great input. Really fast at consolidating sources you may not find. But it's not going to make decisions for me. What input.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:15:51]:
I like that. It's, you know, it's something that I've been trying to. To learn more and more about. I feel like just, you know, the whole AI thing in general, the, the prompts and how you I guess train it is what you'll get out of it. Like I've learned the better that I can make a prompt, the better output that I get as well. And I'm always looking for like better ways to do that.
Nick Bennett [00:16:11]:
So that's.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:16:12]:
That's helpful.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:16:13]:
Totally. I think I'd be like a junior employee, if you will. Yeah, like it's. You're onboarding somebody right out of college. This is what excellent looks like. Here's why. Here is your task. Here's why.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:16:24]:
These are the inputs I want you to consider. Here's why. This is the output I'm looking for. Here's why. For this audience, you're training it. What if you're doing delegate it to any AI tool, to any fresh out of college marketer. You're going to get pretty mediocre average stuff because all it can do is look at what else is out there and emulate it. That's where it's a great tool, a great input.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:16:46]:
Really great to brainstorm quickly. I'm thinking of this direction. Are there other terms? Given all of this research I've uploaded about our audience, what else should I be considering? What could perform differently? What's a bold different direction to consider? I haven't. Then you're giving it the inputs so you can have a differentiated strategy. You're going to get pretty mediocre raw outputs just on its own.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:17:08]:
Let's get into another piece around the post sale engagement. So when you think about modern organizations, I'm sure, there's lots of things that they get wrong, but in your mind, what do modern organizations get wrong about post sale engagement and how can they improve? Because a lot of companies that listen to this want to improve, but they need the blueprint to be able to get there.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:17:31]:
Yeah, there's a couple of big things that come to mind. Obviously every org is different, every buying cycle is different. There's two pretty common mistakes I see though. The first is this disconnect between saying our CS team is focused on relationships but then being pretty hard on accountability, strict accountability, without understanding holistically what's going on. I don't think you could have both. I think that if you're going to say, look, you, account manager, CSM are responsible for these hard metrics, be intentional about that and own that. If they have a pretty big book of business to manage, you can't say, we expect you to have very personalized, tailored, customized relationships with all your clients. And also numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers is all we talk about.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:18:15]:
So be intentional. If there's a big scoreboard up and it's all about the numbers, don't then say it's not because it's just not fair to the team to hear one thing and another. It erodes trust pretty quickly. And the second one is the handoff. So again, we often say it's the relationship. You account executive are responsible for closing this. The relationship is really important. But now suddenly you don't respond to any email you're copied on.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:18:39]:
The handoff was abrupt and quick. You haven't fostered the relationship or handed off the information you need. That's another misplaced accountability by metrics versus relationships that I see pretty quickly. Those two happen. And then a symptom of that is often not having the tooling that those teams need. Hand off information consistently in a way that's productive or effective to make meaningful introductions and then to have tools and resources to back up the very specific buying cycle steps that each of those clients needs.
Mark Kilens [00:19:09]:
So how would you make the handoff better? Because I was at HubSpot for a long time, I saw HubSpot grow from like a thousand customers to I might have been around 80,000, it might have been 100,000. When I left and I was on the customer success team, I was getting customers from sales. I then eventually moved to marketing. But I was always fascinated about the handoff because my wife, who I did not meet at HubSpot, we met outside of HubSpot, but then she joined HubSpot and she was an account manager for quite some time and the handoff was always a very big friction point. So like how would you. What are some tactical things you could suggest people, organizations do to help with the handoff?
Rebecca Shaddix [00:19:50]:
I want to double click into that. The friction point I imagine will get tactical. I imagine that the friction started strategically and then cascaded into what you experienced tactically. So the strategic misalignment was probably sales leader incentivized to hit their metrics largely in a silo because we think of accountability with you are the responsible party for these metrics. So that may mean an incentive to close quickly and then move right on to the next deal with this account management lead who has an incentive to retain deals they didn't close with promises they didn't make. So I'm guessing strategically I actually think HubSpot is a company that does this very, very well and Marketo was a company that did this very poorly last I interacted with them. So but that is exactly it of the account manager who or the account executive who closed our deal, stayed on the thread, hopped on the first couple calls, handed off things pretty clearly was really accurate in their definition of what we were looking for and our pain points. So when they were on those first couple calls it was pretty smooth and they responded to emails.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:20:58]:
Then that handoff, we had a relationship. It's the. Here's a quick email intro. I'm never going to respond again unless there's money to be made from an upsell. That's the strategic misalignment that cascades tactically into teams hearing that they're gold on these numbers, but then sort of also hearing that they're expected to do something nebulous like relationships. What does that mean? They're not accountable for these metrics? Who's on first? That's where I think that to be really intentional strategically means that there's decisions and trade offs leaders have to make and if they don't, they're not willing to make the trade off and own it and say look, we should be accountable for this metric. Not this metric. They just sort of say yeah, we're collaborative team players.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:21:39]:
Then that cascades down to their team. So if leaders aren't willing to make the hard decisions and hard trade offs, then their teams are just in this churn cycle really of thrash between what they're hearing and they're actually seeing rewarded.
Mark Kilens [00:21:51]:
Your response gave me a new quote. Incentives create intention.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:21:58]:
You get what you insent, right. And that's where you really put your money, where your mouth is. If you say the most important thing, rah rah sko or RKO Revenue kickoff now, which is so trendy that this is everything you should care about. And then the metrics aren't there. And every day we look at a dashboard that doesn't have what we've just told you is the most important thing. That's where the dissonance starts. And everything tactically is downhill churn. From there, the same thing happens.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:22:25]:
I think actually in marketing too, we can say, look, these are the most important priorities. We're customer centric, not competitive centric. But if you drop in every press release a competitor posts into Slack with no context of what you want anyone to do with that information or why, then you've just bombarded them constantly with competitive, not even intel, just competitive crap, and then say, oh, but focus on the customer. We're not going to talk about them as much. We may not prioritize as much research, but here's a deluge of competitive crap. But the customer is first. And so I think that just the misalignment between what we do frequently and what we say is where all of the downstream pain comes from.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:23:04]:
I like that. Let's talk lifecycle marketing because I know it's not a new role, but there's a lot of people out there that might not know what lifecycle marketing is. I know probably between the three of us, we all do. But in your mind, you know, maybe you could just talk a little bit about what lifecycle marketing is. And then the second piece of that is how does a strong life cycle marketing approach turn one time buyers into loyal advocates?
Rebecca Shaddix [00:23:30]:
I think the second question started hitting on my answer to the first. It's thinking holistically about the entire life cycle, which isn't a neat flywheel or line ever. Everyone has their own offshoots and lifecycle marketing really is designed to put structure and framework to how we think about which stages people are in and what they need. So consistently based on their actual engagement, refined consistently over time, what do people need when they're in these different stages, when we've identified that they're interested in this topic based on this content of keyword, what cycle does that then shoot off and documenting it in such a way that the entire internal team can follow. So I think that a big component of lifecycle marketing is very clearly defined lifecycle stages that you can diagnose speaking to any rep. What does it mean if we say somebody is in this lifecycle stage? And I think it should be tailored to every organization Every touch point. I've never done any two that look exactly the same. And scoring of what it takes to move somebody between stages really should be based on an understanding of where you are, but an understanding of where you are as an organization too.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:24:41]:
It doesn't have to be too complicated. It can be a Figma board that's really clear. We know yes, in human speak, if a prospect does X, Y or Z, they are in this stage. What it takes to move your exit criteria is very clearly defined. We have the content for it. We've probably organized our internal enablement by those lifecycle stages. This is relevant and I usually do that. And whatever tool is relevant to the team, it can just be a spreadsheet that we've just called an enablement spreadsheet.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:25:12]:
These are the assets that make sense to send after these meetings. Here's why, here's how you can track them, here's how you can replace them, here is exit criteria, objection, handling, etc. It's relevant to that stage. It's just being mindful about documenting the entire life cycle and then filling in the tools the team needs. It should be as simple and straightforward as a startup needs, or as complex and nuanced as a later stage enterprise needs, but really just mindful of giving people the tools to diagnose and then move people through that life cycle and back and forward.
Mark Kilens [00:25:45]:
One question before we get to the deeper, more exclusive content, because I think you have some interesting mental models and frameworks around some of the things we talked about that we'll get to in a moment. Last question though, for people listening on the podcast. Now you started to hit hint at it. When do you think a company should invest in life cycle marketing?
Rebecca Shaddix [00:26:06]:
I think when free tools are breaking and if you've invested before something feels broken, you're probably going to have to recalibrate and spend a whole bunch of money up front that you may not recoup. Lots of exceptions. But at the point when a spreadsheet and a Google Drive folder and a Figma jamboard and HubSpot files is not working for a number of reasons, you can't track things that you want to, etc. You can't track things with data you're going to use, then it makes sense to replace it. Dropping in a complex tool that takes a whole bunch of contractors to implement, a whole bunch of guesses to configure, and a whole bunch of time to enable the team on is probably not going to reap the ROI that you're looking for. Usually.
Mark Kilens [00:26:53]:
Oh, we should unpack this more in the extra content then. Because I I've many several, maybe not many several kind of follow up questions to that because I like how you kept that kind of open ended yet it was specific enough.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:27:07]:
A clear problem you're solving. If you can't define the problem statement, our reps aren't clear on what content is converting. Our reps can't streamline the volume of outbound. They need to do a clear problem statement that you're solving for, then you're ready. But a lot of the things you do manually in the sheets are how you're going to configure the tool and it's just going to be really bumpy and clunky and expensive to configure a tool answering questions you haven't even bumped into yet because it has to be iterative. So the change management of this is the biggest part. Change as little of the workflow as you can because the output is what matters. When the internal processes are so clunky and cumbersome that it takes a long time for reps to get up and running, diminishing returns when it's so clunky and cumbersome with the existing free tools off the bat that everybody knows how to use.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:27:58]:
But you're not getting data that you will act on because collecting a whole bunch of data to not act on, it doesn't matter. But if you're not getting data that you will act on, you're not getting people the information they need, then you have clear hypotheses that are broken, then.
Mark Kilens [00:28:12]:
It makes sense to up tool problem statement. Great answer. That's like I'll give that two thumbs up.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:28:21]:
Glad to hear it. Yeah, and I think I think about marketing in general. Clear problem statement, clear hypotheses, then probably two to four hypotheses. We have this very clear problem. Here are two to four hypotheses about what could be causing it. Here's how we'll test them in order. That's how I think of any marketing campaign too. It's too often we start with hypotheses.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:28:42]:
Changing this button will increase conversions, but to what end? There's probably three other explanations for the goal and we haven't even aligned on what we're solving for. Everything downstream misalignment stems from that lack of the alignment of the problem statement priorities. Then you're testing these hypotheses because they connect to these problem statements which connect to business level metrics. If you skip any of that, you can't really go hypothesis to business level metrics without a whole bunch of assumptions that are not going to hold between more than about two people.
Rebecca Shaddix [00:29:13]:
Awesome. Well, if anyone else wants to join us, we're going to jump over to the exclusive piece now. We will see you there.
Mark Kilens [00:29:24]:
Thanks for joining us on this episode of GTM newsdesk presented by TAC Insider. To dive into the exclusive content with our guest today, head to the link in the Show Notes to subscribe to TAK Insider until next time. I'm Mark Hillens.
Nick Bennett [00:29:39]:
And I'm Nick Bennett. Keep it people first, everybody.