You have no moat (With Bethany Stachenfeld)

If 4 developers at a unicorn got a $1m check, could they copy your feature? Well, yes. We discussed why this question is stupid, and how to build true competitive advantages.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:11) - Remote Work and Team Dynamics
• (02:47) - Exploring New Features and Innovations
• (04:59) - Customer Experience and Building a Moat
• (15:05) - Sticky Features and User Retention
• (17:52) - Salesforce and the Challenges of Switching Providers
• (18:34) - Bad Industry Practices and Network Effects
• (19:38) - Building Ecosystem Benefits and Integrations
• (20:38) - Strategic Partnerships and Preferred Partners
• (23:34) - Customer Feedback and Product Development
• (27:27) - Efficient Growth and Competitive Advantages
• (33:23) - Outbound Marketing Strategies

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Creators and Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

Guest

Bethany Stachenfeld

Co-founder & CEO at Sendspark | AI Personalized Video at Scale

What is The Revenue Formula?

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Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

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[00:00:00] Toni: it takes your competitor six months to copy your awesome feature.
[00:00:04] So how do you stay competitive?
[00:00:07] Bethany: They're like, that's a cool feature. I want to come. I want to see more. But once you have them, then you have to really like. Sink your roots in to make sure that they're ingrained in your, platform and your experience in more ways. So when your competitor launches that feature in, you know, nine months, it wasn't really just about the feature anyway, maybe that's what brought them in, but that's not the reason that they stayed , if you can separate those two things, what's bringing people in and what's keeping them, that's going to help you build a stronger business
[00:00:32] Toni: That's Bethany, co founder and CEO of SendSpark.
[00:00:36] And with her, we talk about building a moat.
[00:00:39] Before we jump into the show, today's is to you by EverStage, the top sales commissions platform on G2, Gartner, Peer Insights,
[00:00:49] and Trust Radius with more 2000 reviews from customers like Diligent, Wiley,
[00:00:55] Trimble, and more.
[00:00:57] Visit everstage. com and mention Revenue Formula unlock a personalized sales compensation strategy session with one of EverStage's RevOps experts.
[00:01:08] And now, enjoy the show,
[00:01:09] We we got a lead from someone to ask you about why you're moving to Seattle.
[00:01:15] Exactly.
[00:01:16] Bethany: Who asked that? A
[00:01:18] Toni: Yeah, who? That's, that's a good game to play now, right? But you high fived the person. You high fived the person not long ago. You high fived the person in Austin last week, he said. So it's like, that's another Oh,
[00:01:28] We, we talked to Max from Warmly just earlier today.
[00:01:33] And then we're like, Hey, we're talking to Bethany later. You know, what questions should we ask? And he was like, that question is like, okay. We don't, we don't even know what it means by the way. We have no clue.
[00:01:42] Mikkel: Yeah. So why Seattle? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:46] Bethany: I had a better reason. So I love Austin. I've tried so hard to move to Austin for the last like 10 years. And I finally got here and I'm so happy to be in Austin, but I am married and my husband went to medical school and after medical school, you have to go to residency wherever they tell you to. And so we're going to Seattle.
[00:02:07] Toni: how does, how does that work with Sendspark actually kind of tell, tell us
[00:02:11] about
[00:02:11] Bethany: Well, we're remote. So I can be anywhere.
[00:02:14] And and the team is all over it. We, we do try to get together in person. Like I love, I love being remote, but like having that in person time. So we'll just kind of wherever we are or wherever's in the middle, we'll just kind of go there and do some in person stuff. And since we have a lot of team in Latin America, we actually go to Mexico City a lot, like, or
[00:02:32] like Mexico, because it's kind of in the middle.
[00:02:34] Austin's also kind of in the middle, I would argue.
[00:02:37] Toni: Yeah.
[00:02:37] Bethany: As a stretch, Seattle, not so much, but it's, you know, as long as we're all in US ish time zones, it all works
[00:02:42] out.
[00:02:43] Toni: There you go. That makes it very easy for you to move around. Obviously. I didn't know that you guys were remote.
[00:02:47] Mikkel: And I also heard you were breaking into kind of the whole pet space because now you can lip sync dogs apparently with sense spark. Is that true? Did I get that right? Did my research pay off?
[00:03:00] Maybe we can lip sync this in post. Yeah, yeah,
[00:03:02] Toni: we
[00:03:02] Bethany: we have a new lip sync model. We actually have a lot of new stuff coming out. One of them is a lip sync model. And so I was testing that and I was also testing something else. And just, you know, when you test a lot, you're kind of getting bored. You just start doing like weirder and weirder stuff. So I was like, you know what?
[00:03:16] This video, my dog will record. And I did not expect the lip sync to work. And I, I like laughed so hard seeing her little like.
[00:03:26] Mikkel: but I also feel like at that point the bar for you to You know, laugh is also, it also decreased quite a bit. So it's a good mix usually when, when you enter that realm, obviously we could talk about that for ages. Yeah.
[00:03:37] Toni: And I will, one more question. Okay. So I actually have been a customer of yours and tried it out.
[00:03:43] And we send like those, those video messages on LinkedIn and it was always watermelon. You know, I remember I said, still the cases that still the filler word, or is it, did, did you know guys, did you move on from that?
[00:03:54] Bethany: so it still is. It won't be necessary to say watermelon for long. Like soon, you'll just be able to take any word
[00:04:03] that you want. But I kind of like the watermelon. Cause
[00:04:06] sometimes when people are on LinkedIn, they'll be like, Oh, I know sunspark, Hey watermelon. And so
[00:04:10] it's kind of
[00:04:10] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah,
[00:04:13] yeah.
[00:04:16] Bethany: going forward is you record the video using your like fallback.
[00:04:20] So you would just say, Hey there, you know, I was checking out your company, blah, blah, blah. And that's like your base. And then you can go in, like personalize those videos. And then that way. If you don't have a variable, it just uses the fallback naturally. So I think we're going to switch to that soon, because it makes more sense.
[00:04:34] But for now, we,
[00:04:35] yeah, we got the hay
[00:04:36] Mikkel: I mean,
[00:04:37] So if you get an email with a video where it goes, Hey, watermelon, you also know you're dealing with a boomer rep. Yes. So, you know, that's also that that's also that maybe you're the boomer in this conversation, maybe you didn't get what
[00:04:49] Toni: Beth and I were talking about. It sometimes doesn't matter.
[00:04:51] Sometimes at
[00:04:52] Mikkel: night when I can't fall asleep, I ask that question. Very worried, very worried. Anyway, thanks so much for hopping on.
[00:04:58] One of the reasons, or I guess the main reason I was like. Well, we need to talk you posted on LinkedIn about one of the most annoying questions a VC can ask.
[00:05:10] And I just wanted to maybe, can you rehash what, what is, and I get that's probably a few but there is an, an, a stupid question they ask every now and then.
[00:05:18] Bethany: Well, the question is usually, why could your competitor not build this? And
[00:05:23] the answer is simply, well, anyone could build anything.
[00:05:26] If we were able to do this, likely other people could figure it out, how to do the same thing unless you're literally a magician. Or have some like really, really secret sauce.
[00:05:37] And especially in software, you're not usually getting like patents, right? So anyone can build anything, but I think what VCs really mean to ask is what's your moat? And then there's different ways to answer that question.
[00:05:49] Toni: Yeah. And obviously, I mean, so our audience usually kind of the, on, you know, operators, 10 million plus and so forth. And, and they are. So I think what's going to be really interesting today to kind of, to really just dive into what are the, you know, what is the mode that you can actually build on the commercial side?
[00:06:06] You know, what are those things there? Because especially the, you know, technology side, just as you mentioned, like most of us are working on this application layer of, of software, not below that, and we don't have any. You know, secret models of a building, anything like this is really just, we're combining stuff that other smarter people have done.
[00:06:24] We're combining and kind of delivering a very specific use case. Right. So let's, let's, let's dive maybe kind of into the first thing here. So what would be, what would be a, your initial response of like, how do you think sense park is creating that mode?
[00:06:37] Bethany: Yeah, there's some things we're doing to really create a moat. And the way I think about it in the most simple terms is. You know, the reason I have a moat is so if someone builds the same product, your customers don't leave. So the real question is how are you getting customers to stay and like continue using, loving, advocating for your product? We get really complicated. I think there's a lot of different things, but the simplest, most kind of obvious one is just build a really good customer experience. If your customers are super happy. with your product, with a value they're getting, you know, the price doesn't feel excessive, it feels like they're paying the right amount. Even if someone comes along with a slightly better, slightly cheaper product, if people know the experience with you is really good, like, they're still going to say, Hey, I'm, I'm good. And so that's, that's the number one thing you can do is build
[00:07:23] just quality customer
[00:07:24] experience.
[00:07:26] Toni: And it's, the, the, the thing is, right, whenever someone says this out loud, it's like, Oh, this is boring. It's like where's the hot
[00:07:32] take what's, what's, what's the, what's the special thing, you know? But I totally agree with you. I absolutely agree with you. Right. It's kind of really this. There, there's a lot of folks offering and promising specific outcomes and, you know, solutions to problems, but at the end of the day, does it actually fully work?
[00:07:49] Does the product work? Does the onboarding work? Does the, you know, is the, is the experience a good one? You know, do they want to share it with other folks in the, in the organization or in the industry, et cetera, et cetera, and all of these things really come from a. Hey, this has actually fully worked for me.
[00:08:04] My problem is solved and it was a pleasant experience. Right. And all of that, if you boil it down, it comes down to, to what you just said. Yeah.
[00:08:15] Bethany: that being said, providing a good customer experience is actually very, very, very difficult. And I think two things really matter for that one is, is really knowing what your customers came to you for and what their, we'll call it a problem, but like what their use case really is.
[00:08:31] And it could be different. And like at Sunspark are. Our customer use case is very different than, than looms, even though, you know, a lot of the products look similar. So to provide a good customer experience, you need to know why your customer is coming to you and then to knowing how you're really solving that problem and doing it well. And so it's easy to say, Oh, product customer experience, but that's actually like a huge nuance. big complicated thing. And I think it actually extends beyond the actual product and has to do with emails, community, like LinkedIn, social, all of that does play into the customer experience as well, even though it's outside of your actual platform.
[00:09:09] Mikkel: I mean, it makes me think of one of the first at least SaaS companies I, you know, actually used early on in my career was MailChimp. And I still, to this day, remember when you were to send. An email campaign. The most like nerve wrecking moment was hitting that send button. It didn't matter if it was 10 people on the list, by the way.
[00:09:27] And they had this monkey paw finger going towards a red, big red button. It was just in captured the moment perfectly. And this is just. One out of so many things they did really well. So, and I think you're right. It's, it is incredibly difficult to to kind of do, what are some of the things? I mean, so I get the whole use case piece.
[00:09:45] What specifically has that, this meant for you tactically? What are some of the things you've done? Are you okay to unveil some of
[00:09:51] Bethany: Yeah.
[00:09:51] for sure.
[00:09:52] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:09:55] Bethany: you say that about MailChimp because I remember using MailChimp too and you hit that button and you're like um, so I think there's things we do in the product to. To, like, help you, help guide people how to be successful. This is, there's some stuff that hasn't been released yet, but what I've been, like, heads down working on with my co founder for the last month is just revamping the onboarding experience to really distill, like, what are people trying to do and how do we get them up as quickly as possible using the product. We also do things outside of the product, so we're pretty active on LinkedIn and And we'll always be like throwing shout outs to our community and like highlighting people who are really successful with a product. We'll ask them to share what they're doing and then like circulate that. So that kind of gets them more attention.
[00:10:37] And especially for our customers who are agencies or, you know, might sell to other people in this space, like we try to amplify them and always. That we can to show like, Hey, we're actually here for you. We're not just trying to help you make a video. We're trying to help you grow your business. And we'll do that with our product and just everything else we have. So we'll do that. An example of that too. I'm a big clay user and I post a lot like clay videos and ways that you can use clay and sense bark together. And last night I just got a package for them with like a grow hat and a bag. And I thought it was really cool. It was like outside the product, you know, but they made me feel special as a customer.
[00:11:11] So there's things like that that we're trying to do to just make you feel like. While using sense bark, you're, you know, part of this community of people that's trying to grow your business in an innovative way. We're going to do that with the product and we're going to do it with any other channel at our disposal.
[00:11:25] Mikkel: So, you know what I think conceptually, a lot of companies and teams, they want to do that. They want to create that, let's say experience outside of the product in order to start building. Quite frankly, I don't think it's about necessarily building a mode. It that's an outcome of it, but it's more about delighting the users and the customers.
[00:11:43] But I think actually it's, it's difficult for them sometimes to even make the case for why should you be spending time on. You know, sending very specific swag or creating experiences for those customers. How do you is there a way you can maybe share to reframe how people should think about this stuff?
[00:12:01] Bethany: Yes. So my background's marketing automation and the way I like to think about just customer, I'm going to say customer acquisition, but I also mean acquiring new customers. activating them, expanding them, right? It's all like, as a funnel. And in the funnel you have these key trigger points where someone is ready to like, move to the next step, and you want to help them move there.
[00:12:23] So it's like, at a high level your trigger points might be like, someone visits your website, someone signs up, someone upgrades, they get value, they expand. Like, these are the key things. And if you're mapping out your funnel, you have those points, but then you have to do everything else to get people from stage 1 to stage 2 to stage 3. And move forward. And so that's when you start getting creative and maybe you're noticing like, all right, we're getting a lot of people that are signing up for our. Free plan, but they're not activating. Well, what can we do? Well, okay. Like, let's think about community. Let's think about other things. Cause there's only so many like tutorials you can send. Of course you do want to do that, but you might just want to be more creative, but it always comes down to what is that like ideal happy path we want our customers to go down and how do we make sure, you know, add other bumpers to keep them on track.
[00:13:10] Toni: So a very traditional way of trying to you know, build a mode is, you know, build a feature that people just love. Right. And then the, the flip side of this nowadays is like, well, you know it's probably going to take. And I think you mentioned this specific is going to take what six, nine months, you know, at, at the most for a feature that is successful to, you know, for someone else to just come in and say like, Oh, we are now also got that.
[00:13:33] What, what is your, what is your thinking around that? How do you, how do you deal with that? And you know, how do you, are you trying, you know, still keep building a moat, you know, despite the ability for someone else to come in and copy a
[00:13:44] feature.
[00:13:44] Bethany: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think about it exactly that way. Like if you build a feature that is so powerful, people love it. If it's good enough that a bunch of people are coming to you to use this feature, it's going to get on your competitor's roadmaps. But at least you have like a six to nine month advantage. And I think you can use that time of when you are the leader. In the space to build content, use cases around it. And especially if you can get people to use that feature in a way that's like very, very sticky or from that feature to use other features you have that are sticky or just become integrated in your community, then it's almost like that feature is like the, the lure driving people in.
[00:14:26] They're like, that's a cool feature. I want to come. I want to see more. But once you have them, then you have to really like. Sink your roots in to make sure that they're ingrained in your, in your platform and your experience in more ways. So when your competitor launches that feature in, you know, nine months, it wasn't really just about the feature anyway, maybe that's what brought them in, but that's not the reason that they stayed.
[00:14:45] And I think as a, as a, you know, marketer or business owner, if you can separate those two things, what's bringing people in and what's keeping them, that's going to help you build a stronger business because it might just be a cool, flashy feature. That's great for bringing someone in. Maybe that's. That use case isn't even that sticky or something else, but you got to make sure you got the stickiness to
[00:15:03] balance it
[00:15:04] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:15:05] How do you actually know you have a sticky feature?
[00:15:07] Bethany: A sticky feature is either something that people use a lot, or it's something that maybe they don't have to use a lot, but they can set it up once and get continued value for it. And I would compare like that to something that maybe somebody uses one time and they're like, oh, this is so cool, but they never need again.
[00:15:25] It could be a great feature, but if it's not like something they're going to either keep using or continue getting value out of. That person might sign up, pay, have a great experience, and still cancel the next month, and it's still going to come in its turn.
[00:15:37] So, the sticky features are, you know, what's keeping people long term. And, and I think sometimes like, I've personally definitely gotten those a little bit confused, where you, you get really excited about a feature, people love the feature, but it's not sticky. So it's not actually, like, driving retention, or, you know, adding a moat the way you'd want it to. It's just something flashy to bring people in. And so you need to make sure you have those, like, recurring, recurring, usage features as well.
[00:16:01] Toni: Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, a mode can also be just building a habit in, in your user base, right. And kind of almost, I feel like this is almost what you're referring to here by. Not only having something that's creating recurring value, right. And therefore recurring, you know, revenue. But also it's just a thing that is starting to be just ingrained in the organization and kind of, that's how we now do the process and it would actually take, you know, someone to break the inertia of changing that process
[00:16:27] Bethany: Yeah.
[00:16:27] Toni: to kind of get away from the product and get away from the feature, whatever it's kind of, you're, you're, you're offering there.
[00:16:33] Go ahead.
[00:16:34] Bethany: Yeah.
[00:16:34] I was going to say like a hundred percent, like building a habit is really sticky. Also building like something where the, the more time your users using it, the more ingrained they become. So think of like a website builder or like a blog or help center, right? It's like once you spend all that time creating this content, it adds a lot of friction to moving. And maybe there could be a way to like import all this stuff, but you may not trust it. So I think, yeah, habits, something that like the more you use, the more ingrained you become. And also things that involve multiple users. I think that is a benefit. There's a, if one person can make a decision to switch. There's not that much, like, friction to it. They could
[00:17:11] just switch. But when one person has to force, like, 10, 20, 30 other people on the team to switch, that's actually going to be a ton of work, because they've got to get everyone else to agree to switch. So having, like, bottoms up pricing or, like, a bottoms up model where you can get more users is a really strong note as well.
[00:17:28] Mikkel: I've also seen, and this is probably a bit more old, old school, but the lock in which is just, you know, another version of a sticky feature. So thinking about something like WordPress, just as an example, you can start installing plugins, start connecting it to other tools. At some point you have so many blog posts, so much content on there, switching is just, it's unfeasible.
[00:17:48] It's, it's, it's, it's a crazy undertaking to switch.
[00:17:52] And we've, you and I have talked about stuff like Salesforce. If you run a fairly big team and have Salesforce running, ripping that out, that's not a small thing anymore.
[00:18:01] Toni: No. And I mean, there, there, there are some terrible stories in the industry, actually kind of it's I think a data provider for sales teams start with a Z and it's is, is public.
[00:18:09] And I think they, they literally kind of to your point you know, someone made the decision to move away from them and then their, their AMs or something like this. And then they just called up individual sales reps and was like, Hey, do you agree with you know, us churning you use us a lot? Are you, are you, you're, you're agreeing with that?
[00:18:26] So like, you know, I think a lot of people didn't love that approach, but but basically that's, that's what these guys did right in order to leverage what you just said there.
[00:18:34] Mikkel: So we talk about bad patterns. There was also the company starting with a C removing the cancellation flow and forcing
[00:18:43] Bethany: that's a
[00:18:43] Mikkel: can keep going down.
[00:18:44] Bethany: I mean, Yeah.
[00:18:45] you can always take off your cancellation button
[00:18:47] and then that'll decrease churn for a
[00:18:49] week.
[00:18:50] Toni: you just sent us an actual letter,
[00:18:52] Bethany: Yeah.
[00:18:53] Toni: but so what, what most folks always dream about VCs in particular, by the way but it's like network effects. And when, when I think about it for most of the products out there, it's like, geez, this is really difficult to get to a network. Have, have you thought about this and maybe trying to build something into, into your product or kind of how, how have you been thinking about
[00:19:15] Bethany: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:16] Love network effects. Figma is my like big inspiration company there, right? Cause it's like, you use it, you share, you get more seats on board. So there's things we try to do to add collaboration into the product. We've also tried to add more like viral loops. On the product is like when you send out a video, it says like powered by sense bark, but people don't usually like to keep that.
[00:19:37] So they turn it off.
[00:19:38] One thing though, that we've been investing a lot on lately that you reminded me of is like the ecosystem benefit. So like once people are using you with our CRM or their data tool or something else. You know, it just becomes a nice workflow that works together. And so it's harder to remove.
[00:19:53] So we've spent a lot of time build, both building our own integrations and opening up our API. So other people can integrate with us. Like Clay built an awesome integration with us. Expandy just built an awesome integration with us. And then like, once you have those connections and people are good using the two platforms together, I think that creates a lot of stickiness.
[00:20:11] And it's hard to copy because integrations can take a while.
[00:20:16] Mikkel: I think it's also like one I've seen and maybe you also working in these areas, just like integrations, there's partners as well, which is also kind of an ecosystem and I think once you land a partner it's going to be difficult for, I mean, sure, a competitor can also land that partner, but they might not be the preferred one because they weren't the first one.
[00:20:33] Is that also kind of part of your thinking in terms of ecosystem?
[00:20:37] Bethany: Yeah. exactly.
[00:20:38] Like you have the preferred partner and, you know, realistically you kind of want your customers to use that preferred partner because that's what your help articles are designed for and your sales team like knows how to sell and understands their product. So we have taken that approach where like, you know, we have partners that we're much closer with on, you know, data space, we are closely with clay. We have like email preferred partners, LinkedIn preferred partners to send the messaging. And, and then it's nice because you can go to market with them. And if you were to have too many partners, they don't really want to partner with you because if you do a webinar with, you know, you, your customers and their customers this week and then next week you're doing that same webinar with their competitors, then their customers are now being introduced to their competitors.
[00:21:18] So it's, it's often better to go a lot deeper with a fewer partners. You just have to like pick really strategically the ones that you work with. And hope that they're going to be the best partners over at least like the next two to five year time horizon.
[00:21:31] Mikkel: I'm curious about this one because also I remember this at least from when, when you and I worked together at Falcon, we always wanted to punch up right. Punch above our weight, get a partner. That's like way ahead. And you mentioned Clay, who's, you know, what were they valued at now? Two and a half billion or one billion?
[00:21:47] No, only 1.
[00:21:48] Toni: 2
[00:21:49] Mikkel: billion. Yeah, you know, so I'm just wondering, like, how how have you, how have you gone about some of these partners where maybe they're kind of, let's say, out of your league almost? How have you gone about landing some of
[00:22:00] Bethany: I think you want to punch like a little bit above your weight, but not like ginormously above your weight.
[00:22:06] Like, you know, we've reached out to HubSpot to partner several times. I don't think anyone has responded to us, you know? But you know, there are like. The nice thing too is once you start kind of having this play and building your own audience, you have a lot to offer partners.
[00:22:20] So, Clay's valuation is quite a bit higher than ours, but we do have, like, a very good audience and reach, and it's a good it's a good use case. So, you know, I don't, I think, Clay, for example, they have a much better audience and a bigger reach than we do. They're not, like, So excited about ours, but the actual use case is very strong and part of their brand is giving, you know, go to market engineers, these really creative ways to build automation.
[00:22:44] And so video gets to be a piece of that and, you know, we do recommend them to our customers. So it is definitely a two way partnership. So they get to kind of have this feature integrated and our audience. And I think, you know, we try to be really good partners to them and refer them as much business as possible to, but, you know, it, it's more close. It's not like if we were to partner with HubSpot, especially when we were reaching out like two years ago we don't have anything
[00:23:07] that, you know, they'd super notice or benefit. Like you want your partnerships to be mutual. Otherwise, it's not really a partnership.
[00:23:14] Toni: I also sometimes think a mode can also just be excellent execution, right? Just being really good at, you know, building the company, growing revenues, getting more customers in. And one of, one of those ways of doing this also just to. Very intently and purposefully listen to your customers and kind of listen to what they want to do.
[00:23:34] And do you have like a playbook around that? It's like, Hey, this is, this is actually how we're kind of taking this feedback in this, how we're working through this. And this is, this is what enables us to build the best next features of the best product or the, you know, do the next service delivery in a way.
[00:23:49] Do you have like a playbook for that?
[00:23:51] Bethany: Yes. The Playbook's evolved a bit over time. I 100 percent agree. And I think it starts by really defining who you want your customers to be.
[00:24:00] Especially with more of like a lower price point, you get a lot of users on the platform. But for us, you know, we really decided like the, you know, the type of customer we wanted to focus on. And then we've worked very, very closely with people to get that feedback and be able to improve the platform. And it's funny, cause you're asking about a playbook and I think. Naturally as like a marketing person, I tend to be more data driven, but when it comes to stuff like that, I've actually become less data driven and more working just directly one to one and like watching them go through the onboarding and just like writing down where I think people might be getting confused or, you know, getting distracted from the goal and then thinking like, how do we add the bumpers to keep them on track?
[00:24:41] So the process is actually just very manual and it kind of goes in cycles. So. So, you know, in November I was working super, super closely with customers, like just part of the onboarding for a lot of the TARC customers want to work with alongside our head of CS. And that was November. And then December, January, I've been just like heads down implementing all that feedback with a product team. And then we're hopefully today we should have a pretty big release and then it'll switch. I'm going to be working hands on with the customers again. So it's kind of like a cycle of work really, really closely. Just be on the call. See what happens. Go back to product and then rinse and repeat. Usually with faster feedback loops and that we've made some big changes and that's why it was two months.
[00:25:20] Normally it's more like, you know, every kind of week or so feedback cycles, but the process is pretty manual.
[00:25:26] Toni: One thing that you mentioned there was also just honing in on the, on the customer side and I don't want to say, Oh, you know, it's important to select the ICP and so forth. But and, and maybe this is more of an open question. I mean, it feels like you've been always been very focused, obviously on the, on the BDI SDR, maybe sometimes.
[00:25:43] You know, found founder you know, role and and persona. Did that actually change over time? Kind of, did you, did you start in a different spot and then refine it to something else to narrow it down, to get even better and listening to the right feedback and even bad at marketing to those people get even bad at onboarding them, did you make decisions where you said like, Hey, actually, this is a pretty cool tool for those five different personas or ICPs, but you know what?
[00:26:08] We're going to cut three of them away.
[00:26:11] Bethany: It's actually been less about the people. So it's still BDR, SDR
[00:26:17] teams, still founders, agencies. Like it's, the people haven't really changed, but what I've gotten more focused on is actually the use case. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, where. Stickiness and sticky use cases really matter.
[00:26:31] So the ones that I've gone really deep on are the types of customers where they have very strong recurring use cases. So it could be an SDR team that's building this as you know, a standard process going forward, they want to operationalize videos or it could be a go to market engineer who wants to completely automate the video creation, but it's focused on who. Who has these like long term recurring use cases. And we want to make sure that sense bark is going to be the default solution for that, as opposed to someone who maybe wants to run a one off campaign or, you know, previously we had a
[00:27:00] lot of marketing around, you can use sense bark to embed a video in MailChimp or Clavio.
[00:27:05] So it plays in line that attracted a ton of customers. People signed up, they paid, they'd send their emails and cancel the next month. And so we're like, we don't want to do marketing campaigns. We want it to be. A habit or, you know, an automation or something that's going to be long term because I think that just makes a better business.
[00:27:22] Mikkel: Yeah. we're sapping through competitive advantages like crazy.
[00:27:27] And I almost want to jump out of that kind of topic for now, if, if you'll let me, because I, on one side, what is a competitive advantage if you're not growing and at least as far as I can tell from my LinkedIn feed, Sendspark is one of those businesses that's growing pretty rapidly.
[00:27:43] And I also just know we've, we've come from a phase where it's. A bit about efficiency all over the place. What's your take on that actually is, is this whole efficiency, is it too much by now or is, you know, where, where, where are we today? It's 2025. We can kind of, we can set the direction, I guess, the three of
[00:27:59] Bethany: Yeah, we've always been forced to be very efficient because we've never been super we've raised funding, but we've never had like an insane amount of money at one time so we've always been pretty efficient but I do think we've bounced back a little bit hard on the efficiency train because I think I think there's a real difficulty in not growing fast.
[00:28:22] Like, I've run Sunspark when we were growing really fast. I've grown Sunspark when we were growing really slow. And there's like, challenges with both sides. But I think that there's, there's a real challenge in like, a slow death. Or like, slow growth or stagnation. I think that's like, mentally draining for the founder.
[00:28:39] I think it's no fun for the team. People aren't getting new opportunities. People aren't getting raises. People aren't getting leadership
[00:28:44] opportunities. And, you know, no one wants to watch their competitors win over them. So I think that people, you know, you should be efficient. You shouldn't burn through all your money. But at the same time, if you're not growing, you, you might be like playing it a little bit too safe. And thinking that that's going to be helpful, but really that could end up causing a different point of failure.
[00:29:07] Toni: Yeah, I absolutely agree with this by the way. And I think, and I think, and so the one point that you're raising is like, Hey, there's a, there's a bunch of other effects that people don't talk about. Right. I think if you are a 50 million business, not growing that much, you know, it's kind of okay. But if you're, if you're like sub 10, sub five you're going to, you're going to end up having a team of you know, 10 people that you can support efficiently, basically.
[00:29:31] And, and that's not going to be fun for anyone, neither for the investors, nor for the founders and also not for the rest of the team. Right. So I think you have to go in the direction of spending the right amount that kind of gets you to the next goalpost. And I think what, what has been usually been connected with this whole growth at all costs is actually, Oh, outbound outbound is so inefficient.
[00:29:50] You shouldn't be doing it. Yada, yada. But many people are doing it extremely efficiently and extremely well. And kind of, it's actually an absolutely legit way of growing your business. So why, why wouldn't you do that? Oh, it's because we want to be efficient, but I think that's, that sometimes it's just stupid, stupid thinking, you know, that, that's how it's, that's how I sometimes see about it.
[00:30:09] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:30:14] Bethany: to send emails. Like, okay, your conversion rates are low, but you can do all this in like an hour and you're going to see, like, you could set up a campaign for a week and an hour and you're going to see results.
[00:30:24] Even you know, without spraying and praying, just getting a more targeted list and sending good, relevant messaging. I think I think people, I think it is harder. It's definitely harder than it used to be. But at the same time, you know, you can't say Outbound's dead when it's one of the like most cost effective channels to reach new customers.
[00:30:42] Toni: absolutely.
[00:30:43] Mikkel: No, it's like when they try to call, you know, that it's also still, also still number one. Phone is dead also.
[00:30:49] Toni: I mean, Revops is dead. It's again, it has to be a hot take.
[00:30:53] Mikkel: Otherwise, it's, no one's going to pay attention to the
[00:30:55] episode.
[00:30:56] Bethany: started a podcast called Everything is Dead,
[00:30:58] where like BoundNRT interviews people who are doing like super well at Outbound, super well at cold email, super well at cold calling. And it's like, okay, is it dead or are you just doing it wrong?
[00:31:08] Mikkel: There you go. Do you get a lot of complaints from people who thought this was going to be about the walking dead? And then it's like, oh, totally not it. Okay, maybe we cut this out, maybe we do, but anyway, actually, I wanted to circle back because accidentally this interaction with efficient growth and being a bit frugal, this is actually also part of a, having a competitive advantage, by the way, this speed of execution thing I don't know if we already talked about it, but you and I at least keep coming back to it it, it is a thing.
[00:31:37] And especially if you have like, what was the headstart six to nine months or something like this on a feature.
[00:31:43] Toni: So, I mean, I, I just, I just literally had a call with a VC just before this. And and he gave me this very brilliant advice of like, Hey, Tony, you know, if you, if you raise more money, that's also a competitive advantage.
[00:31:54] I'm like, Oh, really? No shit. Thanks. But I mean, you can turn this around and be like, well, you know, if you are efficient, if you, if you're able to deploy a cache more efficiently, yes, it can also lead to a competitive mode. Right. Kind of, I think that's what you're almost doing too right now.
[00:32:09] Bethany: Yeah.
[00:32:10] I think that's true. I mean We've been talking about whether or not to raise more money, like, and like we're kind of having these conversations now. And it's funny how many founders have told me we do the best stuff when we're running low on cash, because it just forces you to be so efficient, prioritize the right things, you know, and so, you know, maybe having less cash is a competitive advantage too. I don't know.
[00:32:33] Mikkel: It sounds like a coping mechanism. Sorry. I think, I think, I think we reached the end of the list here, right there. You know, it's
[00:32:39] Toni: like yeah, that's what it is. Wow. Do we have time for one last question? Yeah, we do. Yeah, we do.
[00:32:43] Mikkel: Do you have one?
[00:32:47] I don't know. So did we miss anything? Is there anything where you're like, Hey, so we covered her. Actually, we didn't even get to talk about this piece here. I'm just wondering because sometimes at least we as hosts. We bias the conversation in a certain direction. And maybe there's something we're like, Hey, we should, we should totally have covered this
[00:33:04] Bethany: Let me think. What's the most interesting thing you talked about in the last episode?
[00:33:09] Toni: with Max. About his well, generally speaking, we talked about his outbound playbook and how he took it from zero to one and now kind of using this to, to, to keep growing the business. Right.
[00:33:18] Bethany: I can share a little bit about our. flavor, which I think is interesting.
[00:33:23] So at Sendspark we do like, we do a lot of outbound, a lot of email, a lot of everything because one, it's part of our product. And like I was saying, email, email is really cheap.
[00:33:32] You should be sending
[00:33:33] emails. But what we try to do is is build brand awareness first, especially as like a startup, the biggest pushback early on is like, why do you deserve to exist?
[00:33:42] I've heard of your competitors for 10 years. I've never heard of you. And also. If people have never heard of you, maybe you get that meeting, but it's often a much longer sales process. And at a, especially a startup, right, you have to be growing, you have to be closing very quickly. And the faster you can speed up your sales process, the better, like you don't want to start a sales process.
[00:34:00] It's going to be a year. You want to start one that's going to be three months. You can show that information to investors, to team members, everyone feels the growth. And so we've invested a lot in brand marketing where we do social, like we do podcast, like we're trying to get our name out there. We do a lot of partnerships.
[00:34:14] And then based on the people who've engaged with our, with our LinkedIn or our community in some way, those. You know, we'll qualify and that becomes the target list for outbound. So we're not starting at zero. We're starting at brand familiarity and that's
[00:34:26] been the, probably the biggest thing to speed up the sales process and increase conversion rates.
[00:34:31] And we'll almost never do cold outbound without doing a marketing push there first to just kind of warm things up. So, especially if it's a small budget, you need to move fast. You need to get results right away. I'd, I'd recommend that approach.
[00:34:42] Toni: no, absolutely. And I think we so we used to work on, you know, build a different company. We kind of shut this down, building a new company right now. Let's see kind of how we stitch this episode together, my friend. You have fun with it, but actually kind of, we had the same, the same thinking, and that's how we found you guys eventually you know, build up a founder brand active on LinkedIn, got a lot of, you know, audience built there, and then we were thinking, okay, how can we leverage my face?
[00:35:06] And my LinkedIn appearance, basically, how can we leverage that to tap into, Oh, I know this guy. And you know, the, the first thing I did was, so we did with kind of a GTM engineer, I think nowadays you would call that guy that we hired like a GTM engineer was just kind of record those videos. And then sent them out and you know, I did this for one, one full day or something, you know, I did it in between as well, but it took one full day.
[00:35:29] And I just couldn't do it anymore. And then, then he found you guys and then we started using exactly that play with that. So I also know watermelon and all of those things that come around this, because, you know, you. We were actually thinking about this as like different you know, heat levels of a pool.
[00:35:43] I'm not sure if you can say it like this, like, you know, a pool is the same heat everywhere, but like if you had different buckets, let's say it like this, right. And you have like a massive, completely cold ocean, but then you have maybe one small, tiny water bucket. That's a little bit lukewarm. And maybe that's a better place to start and sort of trying to, you know, trying to kind of literally boil the ocean.
[00:36:02] I'm going to say it right. And so I totally love this approach. And I think early stage teams should be thinking about this, but I think even later stage teams where this really kind of comes to fruition for me, at least kind of in, in larger scale teams is really like. You know what sales and marketing, maybe we should be working together.
[00:36:20] Maybe we should be having the same account list. Maybe we shouldn't be kind of fighting about in one up all the time. Maybe we should just be going for the exact same, you know, tag list of accounts and sure there will always something happen outside of these, by the way, kind of like no, no problem, but let's send to all of our resources, focus on this one thing.
[00:36:39] And there's, I think some, some brand research and it's like in the FMCG space. It's like. A person needs to be like has, as a, basically gonna be engaging with this product seven times or something like this. It needs to be faced with the product seven. You know, I, I forgot what it was like, well, guess what?
[00:36:55] If you combine outbound with some, you know, LinkedIn with some ads, with some, you know, webinar with some other stuff, that's how you get to the
[00:37:02] seven times. Right. Instead of trying to spread this across everywhere. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly.
[00:37:06] Bethany: we've done exactly that where our sales team says, Hey, this is a target list. These are people I want there, you know, the right titles, they're cool in the space, like we want to work with them. And so they give marketing that list. And then we just start running ads towards them, which is like a super,
[00:37:19] you know, you're paying for that, but it's not like crazy expensive.
[00:37:22] And then by the time the sales people reach out or do the cold call or the text or the video, whatever it is, they've already seen the ads a couple of times. So you're, you're way closer to that seven touches.
[00:37:32] Mikkel: yeah, I also think the great thing, at least since working out of this stuff is the release of the thought leader ads really enable you to also change how things are perceived because you're identifying more with a person and then you will do with a logo, right? So I think and also if you're going to then run the playbook of outbound.
[00:37:49] With that person, that level of familiar familiarity is gonna play into, into your favor at the end of the day. Right. So who knows, maybe someday Mark Benioff is gonna do cold outbound with with some of these tools. That would be pretty I, I'll think so. I think so.
[00:38:01] Toni: Yeah. Yeah. That would be pretty awesome.
[00:38:02] I think. So that, I think it's gonna do that. Bethany, thank you so much for spending some time here talking with us about competitiveness in the age of ai, basically. And then in the end. You know, I think you said it geeking out and outbound and how that could be done best in the smartest way.
[00:38:19] Mikkel: We can probably always do a follow up where we just, we just continue that conversation for an hour, two hours, just talking outbound until we are exhausted.
[00:38:26] We could probably, it seems like we could do that.
[00:38:29] Toni: Wonderful. Bethany, thank you so much for, for spending the time and thank you everyone else for listening. If you haven't done this yet, hit the record, you know, the subscribe button, not the record button, the subscribe button and follow. It's free and it helps us to grow the show.
[00:38:40] So thank you so much. And thanks, Bethany.
[00:38:42] Bethany: Thank you. Thanks.
[00:38:44] Toni: Wonderful. Bye bye.