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Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
Lindsay Bayuk:
I view my job more so as almost the conductor of an orchestra. And so my job is to ensure we're hitting all the right notes and everyone's playing the same song. If digital and brand are playing two different songs, it's not going to sound very good to the marketplace.
Peep Laja:
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff, I don't do filler, I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win?
This week, Lindsay Bayuk, CMO at Pluralsight, a leading e-learning platform or tech skills. In this episode, Lindsay breaks down her key lessons learned as a CMO. We discuss metrics you need to pay attention to, the importance of words, and why go-to-market is a team sport. Let's get into it.
You are a CMO that has a product marketing background, which I think is unusual. Do you think this is the model for the future or a fluke?
Lindsay Bayuk:
I definitely don't think it's a fluke. I think historically there's been kind of two flavors of CMOs, especially in the last maybe decade or so. There have been really hardcore digital marketing CMOs that different CEOs or exec teams wanted to hire because they thought that was the thing you had to crack to be good at marketing was you have to be really knowledgeable on digital. And then I also think you've got CMOs who have that product marketing background. So I don't think it's a fluke, ultimately, and I think the product marketing CMO is bringing more of that market landscape, competitive landscape strategic, positioning sort of background and lens where maybe they're not the technician who's great at all aspects of marketing, but they're bringing that more strategic lens to the business.
Peep Laja:
The average tenure for a CMO, they say it's 18 months. And you've been significantly longer at your role now. What's the difference between the CMOs whose tenure is long versus those that depart early?
Lindsay Bayuk:
I think there's a lot of different factors. Sometimes it can be the circumstances. So it can be a tumultuous time in the business or maybe not a great fit of the CMO with the executive leadership team. But I think a lot of it, especially these days in the economic climate that we're in, comes down to CMOs being able to articulate the impact that marketing is having on the business. And being able to say, "Hey, look, here's the outcomes that we're driving. Here's how we're moving the company strategy forward. Here's how we're fostering brand advocates, and then ultimately here's how we're driving impact on revenue or bookings growth."
Peep Laja:
There's a very popular saying these days that life's too short to work for a CEO that does not get marketing. What's your point of view on this?
Lindsay Bayuk:
Completely agree with that. I think there's definitely folks out there who just maybe haven't been exposed to great marketers, haven't found thought partners that help them. No CEO, unless they have a marketing background, is ever going to be an expert. But if they can understand the impact marketing makes on the business, then they can understand why marketing is so important, especially these days, to driving growth. Yeah, then I think you're set up for a healthy partnership. And if you don't have that or can't get it, if you have CEOs out there that think that marketing is spending a bunch of money on ads and nothing more, yeah, it's probably not going to work super well.
Peep Laja:
New CEOs aren't expert marketers, but a CEO who understands marketing will open doors for CMOs to move faster, experiment more creatively, and ultimately see better results. So much of running a successful company comes down to communication and collaboration. So how do you get your CEO on board with something that they don't understand the importance of? Dave Gerhardt, former CMO at Privy, once asked Drift's David Cancel...
Dave Gerhardt:
As the CEO, how do you want to be managed up? Because I think so much of the job and marketing is getting on the same page with the CEO. How do you want us to work with you?
Peep Laja:
And Dave replied...
David Cancel:
The ideal for me is that for me to understand the way that person thinks, which is specific to my personality, I have to understand how they think, how they make decisions. It doesn't mean that I agree with them. It's okay, I could totally disagree with them, but they have a logical framework that they're using for how they make decisions so I can understand where they're coming from. If that's true then it lets me have a large level of trust and skip through all the details I don't need to be involved in. But for me it has to do more with trusting them on the creative side and knowing that we're aligned from a vision standpoint.
Peep Laja:
Your CEO does not need to weigh in on the minutiae of every marketing decision, but they do need to understand the big picture and be aligned on the vision. That starts with trust built from effective communication of process and intent.
So Pluralsight is quite big, post IPO, 2000-something employees. So I'm curious, so what are the metrics that you as a CMO monitor? What are the results or the marketing impact that you communicate then to your peers?
Lindsay Bayuk:
So the top things that we look at in my org are marketing originated pipeline, marketing originated bookings, and then we're a little bit unique from maybe some other B2B SaaS companies where marketing owns a revenue line for a specific portion of our business. So those are really the top three metrics that I'm measured against, that my team and I drive towards and that I communicate to our executive team on the board.
Peep Laja:
Tell me more about the metrics that really matter versus the marketing metrics that are more like vanity or nice.
Lindsay Bayuk:
Look, I'm a big believer in you should measure a lot of things. Different teams within marketing need to measure things like, yeah I'm going to say it, website traffic. You do need to know those things. But ultimately, to your other point on CMOs that stick and have longer tenures, I think what's most important to a CEO or CFO or board is that marketing's driving things that move the needle for the whole business. So for us, when we do our planning every year we align on a marketing originated pipeline number, which we measure through our attribution model. So we use a very simple last touch attribution model to help understand how much pipeline is coming from marketing, how much pipeline is coming from business development, sales, and partner. And it's very, very simple. And that's intentional because we want to be able to explain it to any sales rep, any sales leader. Like anyone in the business should be able to understand how marketing gets air quotes credit for the pipeline that we generate.
And then the secondary metric that we care deeply about is called marketing originated bookings. And we care about this metric because it's the qualifier in pipeline. If we're generating a ton of pipeline and none of it's converting into bookings, it's probably not very high quality pipe. So if we're generating high quality pipeline and it's turning into bookings, it tells us we're spending money on the right things, we're driving the right messages into the marketplace, and ultimately we're helping sales close deals, which is ultimately what we're here to do.
Peep Laja:
I saw the CMO of HubSpot last week, Kipp, talk about metrics that he cares about. And he said, while funnel optimization is nice, you increase the conversion in this step by whatever. Really it's Mickey Mouse game because the big game is distribution and driving the people into the pipeline or the funnel to begin with.
Lindsay Bayuk:
Well, I think that's true for marketers. I think it's the stuff that we look at is, you're right, are we driving traffic? Are we growing our audiences? That's what marketers care about. But if you're telling your CFO that you're growing traffic, I don't know if they're going to care that much. I mean, maybe they will and that would be lovely. But ultimately I think CMOs or marketing leaders need to understand what metrics do you and your teams care about that are leading indicators, like what Kipp said, "Hey, how am I growing my audiences? How am I growing traffic, subscribers, followers, leads? Those types of things." And then marketers know how that is then fueling those business outcomes. But to different audiences like your board you need to be able to say, "Hey, I'm actually moving the needle on growth," and not just reporting out kind of hand waving metrics like marketing teams did however long ago. Like just, "Hey, we delivered X number of leads," so. Right? It's the first rule of marketing, know your audience. So you got to be able to communicate different messages to different audiences, even if they're internal.
Peep Laja:
As an organization grows, breakdowns in communication can muddy the waters. When it comes to alignment on directionality and goals, everyone wants budget from CEOs, CMOs, the board of directors, but then talk about esoteric nerd metrics the C level doesn't care about. What they will care about is customer and revenue retention, LTV, pipeline dollars and so forth. To get buy-in from across the company on projects your team cares about, you need to be able to communicate their value using metrics and signposts everyone understands. As HubSpot CMO, Kipp Bodnar says, "Internal functionality depends on clear goals and common incentives."
Kipp Bodnar:
Humans are incentive based creatures, right? Incentives and alignment around goals and incentives fix everything. If you have a problem collaborating, it is because you have competing goals or you have competing incentives against those goals. And so job one is to be very clear on those goals and make sure the goals are aligned between, whether it be marketing and product marketing and sales. We talked about attribution. Once you have your SLA, your attribution, all of that set up, it's actually very clear. The incentives are aligned and then you just come up with a check in and communication process around that. Most people fail because they don't set that foundation and instead they just go and kind of over-index on the relationship building side, which is really important. But the relationship part can be secondary if you've got the right foundation and infrastructure around goals and accountability.
Peep Laja:
You've been at Pluralsight for six, seven years, so you've seen quite a bit, the growth over the years. So if you think back of those moments where Pluralsight experienced, let's say faster than average growth, what was happening on the inside? Was it successful campaigns you deployed or just market timing or what was going on when you experienced significant growth?
Lindsay Bayuk:
I think some of that was, there are a couple different points in time that that happened. And I'll give you one example that focuses on positioning and messaging. And so there was a point in time right before I joined the company when we referred to ourselves as hardcore developer training. Do you think most adults, specifically engineers, like training? If you went to an engineer and you were like, "You need to do some training."
Peep Laja:
No, I think no.
Lindsay Bayuk:
Probably not, right? So anyway, so we described ourselves that way, which is accurate. It's technically accurate, we do training. But when I joined, one of the first things that we did as a bunch of market research, I joined as a VP of product marketing. We did a bunch of market research, competitive research, customer research. What we came back with was the thing that our target audience really cared about, so these are engineers, VPs of engineering, was the skills of their teams. What they really cared about was, "Do my teams have the skills to build the products that we're trying to build?" And so we actually, after all of this research, changed the way that we talked about what we did from hardcore developer training to technology skills. We're in the business of up-skilling technical teams. And part of that pivot along with some of the product improvements that we made really drove a lot of very fast growth, but it was about articulating the problem that we solved using the outcomes that our customers and market really wanted most.
Peep Laja:
And in this case, you were communicating to the team lead, the economic buyer, who bought it for their teams as opposed to the learning?
Lindsay Bayuk:
Exactly, yes. And that was part of the shift as well. So it was aligning the needs of that economic buyer with how we communicated what our product did.
Peep Laja:
Too many marketers think they're doing positioning and messaging work, but are in fact creating taglines and fluffy content and then rolling it out in a half-baked manner. The key to your positioning is to get clear on which problems you solve and for whom. It's kind of like picking one thing to be famous for. And that one thing also determines who cares about that. Pluralsight did it right. Through gathering buyer intelligence they learned what really mattered to the buyer, the outcomes they really cared about, and then positioned their product through that lens.
Tell me more about some other milestones for messaging and positioning and how it's evolved. You talked about this one big shift. Have there been any other milestones along the way?
Lindsay Bayuk:
There were a couple of iterations in there. So we really went from training to tech learning, was the exact phrase that we used. And then ultimately we got to tech skills and up-skilling. And so there were a couple iterations in there where we're learning and testing and getting more and more clear on the language that would resonate. And so if you ever want a case study on great product messaging and positioning, we got warmer every time, but it wasn't quite until we got to this skills language that we really nailed what our buyers were looking to accomplish.
Peep Laja:
Tell me how you landed on this insight. Was it you did a bunch of customer interviews, surveys? How did you find that language?
Lindsay Bayuk:
Yeah, so look, I'm a fan of surveys. I think they can be really insightful. But ultimately it was a bunch of customer interviews asking buyers, "Why did you buy? What are you looking to solve? What is it that we uniquely help you with?" And so a lot of those qualitative interviews helped us land on that language. And I will say that I'm a big fan of interviewing customers or prospective customers and just using exactly the language that they use and putting that on your homepage and in your marketing materials. Just use the language that your audience uses. Don't overthink it, I guess is what I would say.
Peep Laja:
Customer research is amazing if you use it right, you have to understand what it can do and not. Using it to mirror language that resonates with the customer, as Lindsay says, is powerful. However, it won't tell you what to do or how to differentiate your business or how to innovate. In interviews, people talk about things they already know and have seen before. They want better and slightly improved. That's why innovative stuff does so poorly in focus groups and surveys. Strong user research will tell you what elements of your brand, style, and identity your customers and fans really like, what resonates or what falls flat. That will help you refine your brand and positioning, identify what makes a difference, and get rid of the fluffy stuff. But customer research is no substitute to a strong point of view. Be careful not to follow everything people say or you'll become just like everyone else.
A marketing team at Pluralsight is pretty big, I imagine. How many people in the marketing work?
Lindsay Bayuk:
Yeah, we're a little over 150 people.
Peep Laja:
And how is that structured into teams?
Lindsay Bayuk:
I'll just go through my direct reports, maybe that's easiest. So I've got a VP of communications, a VP of marketing ops, an SVP of global demand and field, an SVP of brand, an SVP of integrated marketing, and an SVP of digital and self-serve marketing.
Peep Laja:
How are you juggling each of these teams and make sure that no, they're all aligned in terms of what they're trying to accomplish and so on?
Lindsay Bayuk:
So all of my directs are total pros. They are all experts in their area, but they're all passionate about marketing and they challenge each other, they challenge me. We discuss and debate a lot. And I think building that team camaraderie is really a critical part to ensuring you've got a well oiled marketing machine.
I would also say that we do a lot of collaborative planning, and so we've got a lot of different processes built out around campaign planning where teams are coming together each from their respective functions to ensure that as we're building out messages and campaigns for the quarter, for the half, and for the year that we're all aligned and operating as one. I view my job more so as almost the conductor of an orchestra. And so my job is to ensure we're hitting all the right notes and everyone's playing the same song. If digital and brand are playing two different songs, it's not going to sound very good to the marketplace. And so yeah, we have a lot of collaborative planning exercises to ensure all the teams are working together. And then my directs and I are really assessing what's working, what's not, how can we drive closer alignment and collaboration across the teams?
Peep Laja:
A team that both collaborates well and challenges you is a winning team, but how do you find these people? During the hiring process, you need to watch out for too high agreeableness. If they're like 80, 90% agreeable, they're likely to be people pleasers and yes men. They are optimizing for being liked over getting to the best idea and not challenging stupidity. To low on the agreeability scale, and they're easy to get into conflicts. You don't want people like that. You want collaborators, but also challengers, disruptors. Here's former astronaut Garrett Reisman on why you should encourage your teams to challenge you.
Garrett Reisman:
We all have a tendency to want to be reassured that we're on the right track. We want to hear nice things. But the problem is you can fall into a situation where you have group think or your people, who are very smart and especially skilled in certain areas, know better but they're afraid to tell you. And this is especially true if you demonstrate qualities of being vindictive, if you penalize people for speaking out or having a dissenting view, if you come down on them because you're thinking that it's causing inefficiencies or slowing you down, then people really clam up. And this is a very, very dangerous trap for a leader to fall into. And no matter how smart you are and how well you know what you're doing, you're going to make a mistake at some point. And if there's nobody there to tell you, that feels confident in telling you, "Hey, just a second boss, maybe we should rethink this," then that's extremely dangerous.
Peep Laja:
You've said that go-to-market is a team sport. Can you tell me more about that?
Lindsay Bayuk:
I think it's just really important, or at least one of the lessons that I've learned over the last few years is at the end of the day, we're all here to drive growth. And if marketing comes up with a really clever campaign, it kind of doesn't matter if the incentives aren't aligned with business development and sales. No one go-to-market team can operate on an island.
We had an instance at one point where marketing was aligned to driving pipeline, like I talked about earlier, and we had another team that had a very different set of metrics. And what that did is it caused friction, we didn't have aligned incentives, and then ultimately this go-to-market engine wasn't quite humming the way that we wanted. And we needed to align incentives and just ensure that all aspects of all different teams, marketing, biz, development, and sales, were all working in concert together. And I think it's just really important everyone kind of looks at their functions and just thinks, "Okay, if I do well with my piece of this, that's kind of it. I don't need to worry about anything else." But I think remembering, no matter what seat you're sitting in, that all go-to-market teams have to work together if we're going to grow the business, is really critical.
Peep Laja:
Not everything is rosy at all times. So when you look back at your career at Pluralsight, what are some of the top mistakes or regrets that you could tell us about?
Lindsay Bayuk:
Too many to list and cover in this podcast. But I will say, I think in the last few years we've been through a lot of change. And in the moment, when you're in that change, feels like a lot. It can feel really stressful when you feel under pressure to deliver or if there's a big acquisition. And in those moments, as I reflect on them, I felt like that was all the change that I or my teams could absorb at that point in time. But looking back on it, I actually wish I would've been more aggressive on other key changes. I wish I would've made bigger changes in our org design sooner. Where maybe I did kind of a half step, I wish I would've gone all the way. I wish there would've been some individuals that we parted ways with sooner. I wish we had some ideas we wanted to do with our brand strategy, I wish I would've pulled those forward maybe six months or a year. So I would say I wish I would've maybe accelerated change faster than I was comfortable with or thought was possible.
Peep Laja:
So what are some of the strategies that have helped Lindsay and Pluralsight win? One, she focuses on metrics that matter.
Lindsay Bayuk:
What's most important to a CEO or CFO or board is that marketing's driving things that move the needle for the whole business.
Peep Laja:
Two, she understands the business impact of positioning and messaging.
Lindsay Bayuk:
I'm a big fan of interviewing customers or prospective customers and just using exactly the language that they use and putting that on your homepage and in your marketing materials.
Peep Laja:
Three, she understands that go-to-market is a team sport.
Lindsay Bayuk:
We discuss and debate a lot, and I think building that team camaraderie is really a critical part to ensuring you've got a well-oiled marketing machine.
Peep Laja:
One last takeaway from Lindsay.
Lindsay Bayuk:
I think remembering, no matter what seat you're sitting in, that all go-to-market teams have to work together if we're going to grow the business is really critical.
Peep Laja:
And that's how you win.
I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.