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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
00:00
Welcome to Demand Geniuses, the podcast for revenue-focused marketers. Each season we talk to geniuses of the B2B marketing world to reveal the secrets to their success that can help you grow your revenue and progress your career.
00:21
Hello everyone, Tom Rudd and I here. Welcome to episode four already of Demand Geniuses. Doesn't time fly when you are editing all of the episodes in one week? Today's episode is with Felix Danczak. Now I've worked with Felix for about five years or so. He's one of the largest brains that I've come across. Now I think there's two things to say about this episode. One is I need to ask you all for a little bit of patience. We had some connection problems.
00:49
And so it will at times sound like Felix is underwater. I can assure you he's not. But I do think it's really important that everyone listens to it. Felix is on a bit of a kind of work sabbatical at the moment and he's been directing that very large brain towards thinking about the implications that AI is going to have, not just on marketing tactics, marketing strategies, but on how we construct businesses and the underlying models.
01:16
And I think it's just a super useful, slightly meta episode to think about how you need to, over the next three, five years, start shifting the way that you personally adapt with the rate of change that we're seeing, which is already quite incredible. So yeah, I apologize for at times the quality of the audio, but I think it's a super important episode and I would really encourage you to stick with it. So yeah, thank you. Thank you for listening and let's get into it now.
01:45
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. My guest today, I've known actually for about five years or so now at least. know I'm probably still going to butcher his surname. Felix Dankzak. Dankzak. Yeah. Good enough. Good enough. I get the same. In my school, I had everything from Rudini to Redeye. So I feel your The pain of having weird consonants in one's name. Yeah. Is yours Polish as well?
02:15
Yeah, mine's Polish. Yeah. Mine's Eastern European as well, which the Brits are struggling with. Anyway, as I say, I've worked with Felix now for five or six years. He most recently was the head of global marketing at Zuora. Before that, COO at Zephyr, where he was stupid enough to hire me. So this is probably going to be the most that I've ever dismantled the credibility of a guest at the start of a podcast before. And then currently...
02:42
kind of enjoying, enjoying a well-earned sabbatical or break. What are you feeling that way, Felix? I've been feeling it with working really. I mean, I can't help myself. I've been doing a little bit of gardening on a true to form of gardening leave, suppose. But predominantly I've been thinking about how businesses grow in the next age. I think, yeah, I took over the marketing organization at ZUWARA just over a year ago now, whatever, year ago. But just as GPT was...
03:11
kind of jumping onto the scene really, which already sounds horribly dated. And I see there is another industrial revolution coming. And I think that sounds really preppy, sounds scary, but I really do believe it. Like I think there's something that's about to fundamentally shift in the way businesses are going to have to operate. I like connecting the invention of the seed drill changed the agrarian economies forever. We are still living through the repercussions of that first industrial revolution. And I think we're about to see another one. And I've been thinking quite hard.
03:39
about what that means for businesses. And the rules of economics aren't going to change, supply and demand are still in balance and so on. But how do we grow? How do we change? Just in the last three months while I've been off, we've seen everything from deep seat to Manus AI, I know if you played around with it. And that pace of change is getting faster and faster. It's silly to say, oh, fast change, but it's borderline scary how fast we are moving compared to five years ago. And I think it's going to really change it. So I've been thinking, I've been doing a lot of thinking.
04:08
It's a long way of answering that. knew you weren't going to say yoga. Yeah. No, I've tried being flexible. It's not for me. Yeah. That's not quite my style, but yeah, you're right. We have that for a long time. think, I I was wondering before this podcast, how I would reflect on that. think you were like one of the, one of the earliest hires we made, actually, I think probably, um, one of the, if I say one of the finest hires we made, I'm proud of that. I'm proud of my high. You, um, pay him for that. Everyone.
04:37
Um, but you can thank me later all the same. I will. Yeah. And we saw all the way through Zephyr and into Zewora and now, and now into Demand Genius for yourself, which is fantastic. So yeah, a lot of thinking and a lot of worrying. Yeah. We aren't prepared for what's next. I think people tend to fall into two camps that I see, right? You're either worried by it and scared by the change or you're really excited by it. I know for me, that depends a lot on my mood, right? Because it is a big shift that's happening. And I think it's very human.
05:07
scared of that, even if you're the most kind of growth mindset, positive person that you can be. I think that's true. And I certainly have days when I'm positive about it. And I think, although I think I have more days when I feel slightly negative about it, but I think that's just, as you say, that's ultimately a human reaction to, we're not particularly great at change. The pattern matching in our brains doesn't want change because then we can't match it to patterns and that's how we are built. But I do think there's something about this change that's taking place.
05:35
which for me is particularly hard to handle. As someone who I consider myself relatively good at handling change. I mean, I've worked in startups for over a decade now and we've seen everything, you know, from the year 2000 to 2025 that really dates me. Um, and you know, we've seen a lot of, I remember the dial-out mode, dial-up mode, which I don't even know if you know what that sounds like, I remember that. I just about do. I remember being on the internet and my sister shouting that she wanted to use the phone and so I had to get up.
06:04
think how far back that makes us sound and actually 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago now. But there's something about the change that's happening now about how fast it's happening that makes it very hard to comprehend. It's hard almost just to keep up with a development, let alone think about how a development might impact me or impact my business or how I'm thinking. And I think there's something specific for me about, and I'll go back to where I think the concept of a new industrial revolution.
06:33
It's a fundamental, I think, paradigmatic or axiomatic shift in the basis for how we build businesses. So the first industrial revolution, mean, there are dozens of industrial revolutions and they all have a niche you want to go, but I think really fundamentally one, which was the machine industrial revolution. haven't really had to call it anything except the industrial revolution, which was that scale and efficiency are in somehow intrinsically linked. If you can get really good at doing one thing and you can do it really well, then you do it
07:03
bigger and bigger and bigger, you'll make more and more money. You'll do it for cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. You'll be the best gain in town and then off you go. That's why we had massive wall mills, right? You you could do it with a seed drill. You were better than a farmer with a hoe. And that was, and it's been true all the way up to pretty much the day, that basic paradigm that scale and efficiency is why we had things like blitz scaling as a concept. Get really big. Don't worry about how much money you spend because when you're big, you'll make all the money. If you're the only one left standing, you can't not make money. And inherent in that.
07:32
The only one left standing was because you're the biggest and therefore you're the cheapest. have the best efficiencies of mean, efficiencies of scale. Those two things are indelibly linked in our language. And I think what we're seeing with the beginnings of, I'll call it the AI revolution rather than the industrial revolution, just to separate the two in our minds, is a, perhaps a different paradigm where efficiency and scale of the business itself are not indelibly linked.
08:00
that perhaps the businesses that will succeed, that can be the most efficient, will not be the ones with the most number of people or doing one thing hyper-specialized and getting so good at it that everyone else goes out of business. Because of the toolkit that, and I cautioned word AI because it can mean a lot of things for different people, but the broad scope of the AI toolkit allow us to do. You can now have companies with one developer that would have had have had a hundred developers.
08:29
don't need a team of, unless it's my background here, but a team of marketeers with a content team and a brand marketing team and an event management team. I think we're very closely getting towards a scenario where you need a team of one or two marketeers with a bunch of agents underneath it. I mean, the simplest example is, which you know well is, you really need to write your own content anymore? Answer, probably not. mean, the new creative writing tool from GPT, from chat AI is already frankly better than most of the writing we all do anyway.
08:58
especially with little tweaking and it's only going to get better. So I think there is something, the breaking of this relationship between scale of business and scale of success and efficiency is, and that's hard to get out of that because all of our knowledge, everything we know, everything we think, all the models, the mental models we use for building businesses are built around this kind of circle. a chief executive officer, make decisions. You have a hierarchy, have teams of teams of teams. And like we don't
09:27
Do think that's going change? Um, because it's not going to be faster. We could get into it, but maybe that's a too much detail too early on, but I think there is something crucial changing. And I don't know because it's a paradigmatic shift. It's not a faster typewriter. It's not doing something a little bit faster, a little bit better. It's actually a fundamental change in the way we think about business. And that's hard. Yeah, it's hard. It's scary. I think we can get into it because one of the things that I want to understand for me today is like,
09:54
As a business owner and then as a marketer, as a leader, as a marketer, how do you set yourself up to this change? So a lot of that is like, how do you structure your organization? I think it's super interesting though, that is that, that point about scale and efficiency no longer necessarily go together. I've been thinking a lot about how it's felt for a long time, like we in B2B go to market are obsessed with volume, right? Because there is a direct correlation between volume and success. We've built linear go to market processes.
10:22
that are all built around particular conversion rates and if any conversion rate declines, volume can be the answer to solving that. But the problem is that only goes so far.
10:34
I think it only goes so far and it's going less and less far because of one of the kind of separate trends to the AI trend. There's the fragmenting of markets, right? I mean, they are, they are, but they are, although they are connected and we can get into that. But you're absolutely right. If you've got a problem with the number of leads you have or your pipeline, however you want to construe it, the easiest answer is we'll just have more of it. Even if conversion rates are worse, if you have more of it, that will reduce more deals, right? It's a simple scale problem.
11:03
And that's okay as long as the market that you're going after is uncapped. But there's no such thing as uncapped, not anymore, not really. As markets fragment, and why, and we'll get into why they're fragmenting in a minute because these things are linked, but as markets fragment, the number of people in your SOM, your serviceable, obtainable market is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Service accountants, I don't know. But actually you're no longer just servicing accountants, you're servicing accountants in the UK.
11:30
Okay, but you're not really servicing all the accounts in the UK, you're servicing accounts in the UK in the mid market, in independent firms, to have this specific problem. And the reason that's happening, because you've suddenly just gone from a town of, I don't know how many accountants there are globally. Somebody tell us the answer in the comments. But you've gone down to probably 10,000, you know, even by just three, three drop downs. And the reason that's happening is because it's getting easier and easier to build and there's more money to do that.
12:01
is that the number of products available for each niche are expanding and expanding. Simultaneously, the ability of those people, those target markets to talk to each other and to do product discovery, independent of your marketing is getting better and better and better. mean, it's almost a fact the university acknowledged that SATA GPT and that it's ILG are killing search because at the moment, if I want to know about a product, I won't Google it anymore.
12:31
I don't know how long, I know this sounds, this sounds a little silly, but how long will we say, oh, just Google it? Will it be just, well, just AI? Yeah. Talk to Sam. You know, like, you know, uh, he'd missed a trick that I think Ask G could have called that back. Yeah, exactly. But you know, what happened to that search engine? as markets fragment and as more and more products sprout to fill those niches because of the models.
13:00
we believe will drive success, then the number of people you can speak to effectively, efficiently, gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And then for me, that's when the old models, the classic PLG model, or indeed the SL product-led growth or sales-led growth models really begin to fall apart from a go-to-market perspective. Sales-led growth falls apart because it's too ex-
13:27
Well, they're both too expensive for different reasons. Sales growth falls apart because it eats its own tail. Sales people, you work with me, you started in the SDR team, you have a certain cost. You cost 45, 50, 60 grand a year. And then as a salesperson, you cost me exponentially more, though you made us plenty of money as well, so I'm not complaining. A good salesperson is going to set you back total cost of business $200,000 without breaking sweat and more in the enterprise space. And that means they have to generate 600K just...
13:54
for you to break even in terms of all of the rest of your costs in the business. If you can only serve a very small market, are they really going to be able to do that? And so you have to raise your prices to meet that, which means you have a smaller niche, which means it's harder to do, which means the smaller niche. I think it ends up eating its own tail. So sales growth has an indelible problem in a world of micro fragmentation. At the same time, product led growth doesn't have the money. Product led growth is predicated on what we started with, right? That we'll just add more volume.
14:24
Um, you know, you'll convert enough product that goes off and free in the amount. It's much, certainly much cheaper entry level. pay with a credit card, right? And it risks 500 quid, not $500,000. That's a real challenge is, if you're still only speaking to 10,000 accountants and how do you reach those accountants? Cause they're increasingly not looking for the search volume. That search volume is increasingly congested anyway, because there's five other people who want to do it and they've got money, which means the ads are increasingly expensive. Um, ad costs have.
14:53
spiralled in the last 10 years. Neither of these two kind of classic models for building companies really working, at least as kind of intrinsic model, you pick one and go for it. Yeah, and I want to get into what replaces them then. I think let's go back a step. So we're kind of talking about markets fragmenting here. And I want to get more into why that's happening. guess, so I have a, I kind of view AI, I need to do inverted commerce there because whenever you talk to someone who works in AI about
15:22
AI as if it started in 2021, they lose their mind. But the kind of the wave of generative AI as coming in two phases, right? So there was the first, which was used for generic messaging, right? It enabled people who don't understand go to market marketing sales to go and do to a fairly low standard marketing and sales. And the result was that it just demolished all of our channels of communication. It became so saturated. And what we actually saw was a return to much more traditional forms of marketing brand community awareness, things like that.
15:50
I can see that potentially happening in the next phase because what we do is we enable lots of people to go and build kind of micro technologies, relatively low standard initially, but eventually we work out the kinks and it's just very specialized bits of technology. And I guess then what that, what you're kind of saying that does is it returns the product landscape rather than just to go to market landscape to a kind of a previous era a little bit where we're gone as a giant to
16:19
operate horizontally across lots of different use cases and lots of different types of businesses because it's so easy to build technology that you cannot sustain that giant because you are so easily disrupted. that kind of what you're saying? think that's about right. So I think I'd maybe structure it in kind of four steps. For me, discovery is no longer centralized. So it used to be that people went to market to look for something.
16:48
They would Google it or they would go to a trade show. But now they're looking on Slack groups. They're on Reddit threads, they're discourse, there's newsletters, there's WhatsApp groups for CMOs, private WhatsApp groups that there's no way that any ad will ever get into because they're literally a group on WhatsApp of 50 CMOs in the valley. So I'm sure we'll find a way. Yeah, we'll get there eventually, I'm sure. Or the AI chat response. And it's worth bearing in mind that every time you speak to an
17:15
an AI chat, it's a different response, right? It's never a carbon copy paste. So every single response anyone ever makes will be different, let alone all these different streams. That's a thousand different paths to the same outcome, which means fragmented attention and increasingly a fragmented base of trust. You don't have one vendor that you trust or one newspaper or one industry magazine that you trust.
17:38
There is now a thousand places that you go for validation or for support in picking your next product or service or whatever it is you're after. Coupled with that, expectations are hyper-specific. The personalization that we expect in our personal lives is bleeding into our professional lives as it should do. Like we don't, I don't, I expect the tools to be perfect for my use case, not just for everybody who's in, everybody in my space.
18:04
I work in B2B marketing for an enterprise SaaS brand. So why I want the tool to do what I want it to do, not what someone else might mostly want it to do. So that creates demand at the edge, not demand in the middle. And we're come back to that concept in the middle. think that's really important. Third, the internet killed, in some ways, the internet killed mass marketing because at same time it of goes back to that first point where you're fragmented. You can't reach all of your buyers with one campaign. Many of the buyers will never...
18:32
go on through any campaign. Unless you're selling butter. And don't get me wrong, TV is still a great place to sell butter. It's a really good place to drive big brand engagement with mass consumer products. Because your time is everyone. Because everyone's watching it. But only if you're selling a commoditized product, where people go, oh, I need to buy some butter. Oh, I remember I saw that logo, I'll buy that butter. I mean, the best ad campaign in the world, DFS Sofas. Everybody knows what DFS, in the UK at least.
19:00
Everybody knows what a gear fest sofa is. We've all seen those adverts at some point. The fourth point though, being is that AI is coming along, taking this hyper-personalization, taking this hyper-regulation of trust and attention and accelerating that shift. Because it's handling more and more of the discovery and the decision making for me. So every buyer's journey is now ultimately a unique algorithmic path shaped by their inputs, their contexts, and then the AI algorithms interpreting both of them.
19:28
No two buyers will see the same landscape anymore. And I use this language because it's really important from a marketing perspective, because we talk about the buyer journey and like, okay, what's the buyer journey and how do we shape our content and so on around that? Well, it sucks because now there is no, you can't think of your target market as a herd and you kind of trying to create a funnel associated to quote unquote, the buyer journey. You've even got a thousand prospects. They've all had a thousand fundamentally different buyer journeys.
19:57
And you can't optimize for all of them. It's incredibly hard. So I would say the simple way thinking about it is markets are fragmented because buyers are no longer behaving in clusters. They're no longer moving in. They're moving, they're no longer moving in herds. They're moving in streams and they're driven by signals that we have less and less control over. Roll back 10 years, I could control SEO, help, could kind of control whether or not I was high up in the search ranking organically.
20:25
I could pay for the ad so I could make sure I was at the top of the funnel there. Like I could pay to make it be at the event. I could pay to be at the trade show. on. More and more of that is happening in places that you can't, right at least today, we can't access in a, in a, in a paid way. You can only be done organically. So you can't rely on broad brush Zut yet and you can't pay for success, particularly in the way that PLG often achieved, right? Pay for success. Just make sure we're the number one search result and then I want to buy our tool, not their tool.
20:55
You need to send now as marketeers, we have to see the signals that are coming in organically and respond dynamically. And that's hard. There's two new things at once. We have to see something happening for every different buyer in every different way. And it's changing all the time. And then we need to respond in the way we're talking to them in real time. We were just kind of getting to grips with the first of those two. Yeah.
21:23
And now you've suddenly got to be able to optimize in real time as well. Otherwise we'll probably lose out to the other company, the other investor. Talk me through, so when you talk about responding to the signals, what are the signals? What do you mean by a signal? So let's say I'm a fan of worked examples, so just pick one, but like you can apply this in a lot of different places. But I would say a market signal might be in a B2B context over the last month.
21:51
We've suddenly seen, how many GOM calls would you say an organization is doing a day? Let's pick a random enterprise, they've got 10 salespeople, they're 15 calls a day each. That's 150 calls. then another one. Yeah, just to the mass TV. Suddenly in those 150 calls, we're suddenly seeing a new competitor suddenly appear. And that new competitor, and at the same time, price has suddenly started being, it used to be the fourth thing people asked. And now it's the third.
22:21
Five years ago, we wouldn't have even known that was happening because we didn't really have these gone course to listen to. even if we did know, we probably wouldn't have done anything about it. Okay, prices got a bit more important. But now I think that would be a really important market signal. Over the course of one, price got more important to two buyers. And that means you need to be able to react to that in the way you position. If it's an SLG approach,
22:50
You need to be arming your salespeople with price objection handling faster, better. But I'm not from a positioning perspective. You've got to immediately ask yourself, why is price suddenly more important? Is it a macro problem? Or is it that one of my competitors has suddenly started trying to undercut us? Now you don't know that always, but you might find it out because of the signal. That's what I mean by a market signal. need to be looking at, it's one, let's say you've got three ads running. How easy you are to use is one.
23:20
as cheap you are, I don't know why you have an attitude, but I've set an example. Yeah. One on your feature set and they all have roughly the same conversion. And then suddenly one kind of does better. You need to be able to respond to that immediately. Cause it's probably, why is it being, where is it coming from? We don't always know. You can't know, but suddenly that feature or that price, that price ad or that either use ad is suddenly more important than it was a month ago.
23:48
And you need to be able to jump at it immediately because people are moving faster than they were before. That's what I mean by a I think you need to set to the market. Well, think, so I think marketers are always trained. We've got so far away in life from marketing fundamentals that you're trained when you hear signal, I think you think intense signal, right? It's a buyer raising their hand with a deliberately or accidentally for your product. I think one of the interesting things is.
24:14
So there's a lot more people talking about now the fact that you can, you can fall in and out of product market fit. And I think what you're saying is that process is going to be 10, 50, it's going to constantly grow the speed with which you will fall in and out of product market fit, right? Because new competitors are going to sprout up. So that game of whack-a-mole that you play as a marketer is suddenly just getting so much more difficult and it probably shifts where the
24:39
difficult part of marketing is because actually it's keeping up with that, not optimizing a final buyer journey because that's just going to happen. Yeah, I think so. But I think it's also recognizing that these are parts of a broader whole. And this is where it gets really hard because we're not really talking about marketers doing marketing or salespeople doing sales. It's actually an entirely different way of thinking about how your company is changing, optimizing. I'll give you, I might do a worked example, right? So.
25:08
Let's imagine over the past three weeks, the demo requests from the streams or from marketing, sorry, demo requests from marketing teams, external, your prospects have gone up by 25%. Some of those requests are talking about whether or not you can automate campaign handoffs from HubSpot.
25:32
And you also know that competitor has just launched a versitilized integration with HubSpot. And you're seeing LinkedIn chatter and Reddit threads asking for, are there any alternatives to this competitor? Bearing in mind, you also have to have a market sensing system to know those three things in the first place. And not all marketing teams are set up to be monitoring what's happening on LinkedIn and Reddit threads. So we've got to, that's almost step one or step zero. The old responses or the responses that companies tend to do today.
26:02
I'll go, oh, well, you know, we're going to ignore that. Or we don't need to worry about that because that's not our core persona. We don't do market handle. Like we don't automate campaign handoffs. That's not what we do. We do something else. Oh, that's a competitive film. Oh yeah, we're better than that. Right. It's easy. It's so easy to do that. Or you've already got a campaign running around marketing operations. So, you know, we'll see whether this succeeds. Basically, fundamentally, you don't change anything. The best.
26:30
I think what might happen is you take the need for integrating with HubSpot and you put it at the back of your product roadmap queue. We're like, yeah, we need to do that. Yeah, we should get on that on. And you speak to the product team and they go, sure. And it goes on the queue. And the queue, as you and I both know, in fact, anyone who works in the industry knows like that queue is an endless queue.
26:51
We spent about a year at Zephyr arguing over the queue and why what I wanted should be right at the front of that queue. Right. Exactly. this is not even, this isn't even a prospect demanding it. This is you're seeing some signals that some people coming in are asking about it. So it's right at the back. But in a new world, we have to see this as a live market signal. I would say, imagine this worked example, spin up a marketing specific landing page immediately and use case content immediately about automating HubSpot handoffs. Immediately.
27:21
We need to launch a lightweight version of that integration as quickly as possible, even if it doesn't work very well. Cause if you don't have it and they do, and people are asking about it, you're going to lose that business immediately. You can't say, well, it's on the roadmap. It'll be there next year. People aren't going to accept that anymore because of the fragmentation of demand. You have to have something available now. other thing is as you, think it's going to be really difficult to re recapture lost advantages. yeah, your use case pops up.
27:50
the AI decides this is the best platform for it. very, I think it's going to be very difficult to go and disrupt that. Right. Because once you're known by the algorithm as not good at HubSpit and off, it'll be very hard to change that. Unless that's they build into it. And it might be, I guess you could say it's going to be within the interest of Sam Altman. We'll just make him the proxy for AI at this point.
28:20
give businesses some level of control over their online perception because that's something they can sell. It's the same reason with SEO that it incentivized them to create a structure where people can control their online presence. would be, and I've thought about this a lot, it would make sense. You're like, great, we can fund our work. We can fund with advertising. Of course. Great. We know everything about it. It's natural language. It won't feel like an ad. It'll feel convivial and like the man is talking to me.
28:51
But I have some issues with it. One is that not even OpenAI necessarily always understand the emergent properties of how the AI is responding. It's happening in real time. They can't slot in what they think. And they know that the one thing that is going to kill my engagement with their tool is that it starts giving me answers that don't feel relevant to me. That's why I'm using it instead of Google, right? Is that I'm like, oh, it's giving me an answer I can trust, or it's giving me an answer that feels tailored to me.
29:18
If I go into the chat and go, hey, give me the top 10, give me the program management solutions best for an enterprise SaaS marketing team. I have a level of expectation it's going to be relevant, specific to me. If someone out there has been able to pay to have their, like maybe monday.com has paid to have their name in there first, and it doesn't feel relevant, I'm immediately going to stop trusting the response I get. And that disrupts Sam.
29:48
disrupts OpenAI's primary monetization technique at the moment, which is a direct subscription for me. That opens them up to all sorts of competitive threat. Okay. I'll use Claude instead. Well, it's going to be really interesting because I think there's a fundamental difference between the model of OpenAI and the model of Google, which is that
30:11
OpenAI is doing the job of telling you which answer to listen to, which removes the opportunity to have a couple of sponsored ones at the top. There's less user choice. Yes. That's why the bio journey becomes unique and thus very, very hard to manage. That's all the marketer is really trying to do ultimately is manage the bio journeys. But if you've got a thousand of them, you can't really do that. Or you have to respond in a very different way. So I think that's the challenge we're currently facing.
30:39
And that's why I go right back up to where we started the conversation is it's quite a scary thought because it's the levers that we are trying to control our levers that we don't really understand in a way that a faster typewriter, oh, I wrote some content and then people can search for the content. I, however, however complicated it is, SEO is very easy to get your head around. Like, okay, I have more of the keywords that linked to the thing. And I have some backlinks to high rated source. Like I can understand it. It's just, it's, it's not complicated.
31:09
But trying to work out what your content might need to look like for an AI to understand it in a contextually relevant way in order to hit some number of the people who are in your prospect list who are searching for something in their own chat, but who might be using entirely different language is really hard. Yeah. And meanwhile, you also have massive changes in the internal politics of their organization. So your understanding of your brand committee and all of those things. First of all, they're getting wider, but then are they going to shrink?
31:39
All of that is, every variable is evolving at a pace. Meanwhile, the thing that's really, really scary is that while all this is happening, which is hard enough, the ability to maintain a competitive moat within your own product is eroding like sand in the sea. Because you can now replicate features meaningfully from anyone, anywhere in days, not weeks.
32:05
Like you can start playing around with the tools like replete out there or lovable and so on. Like you don't need a team of devs working around the clock for two years to build a integration to HubSpot. That queue that you were talking about stops being a queue quite quickly if you can replicate things much faster. If you come out with a brand new feature that you're really pleased about that no one else in the market has, you used to be able to pretty much live off that for some time. Like that's the product life cycle. In a way, costs you some money and then you profit out of the back end.
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can't do that or the window for maximizing value from competitive differentiation is getting tighter and tighter and tighter. We saw that as a war. I've seen it as Zephyr. I'm sure you're seeing it Demand Genius. I'm sure anyone listening to this is seeing it. We've come out with new feature and within a few weeks or within a couple of months, everyone else has it too. It stops being a differentiating feature. So your ability to tell a positive story, demand capture gets harder.
33:05
Your ability to generate demand by having something new and shiny is getting harder. Your industry normalizes faster and your ability to tell the story you want to tell to the people you're trying to talk to gets harder. So what I want to do now, I think we've spent the last 30 minutes probably walking every listener up to the edge of the cliff. And what I want to do now is we've got 15 minutes to try and them all back from the precipice. Cause I do also have the belief that this is a very exciting time, particularly for a selfish perspective, early stage startup.
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so much better place to adapt to all of these shifts and to move quickly and agile than a lot of the bigger incumbents that I'm going to bump into along the way. But also a lot of our listeners are going to be within almost certainly large organizations than Demand Genius and are up to very, very large companies. I think there's two things that I want to talk about. One is how you adapt to this because it's not, I don't think there's
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or a strategy that solves this, right? It's about how you set up to adapt to the rate of change, but then also as an individual, how you set yourself up to do that. So let's get into each of them first. I'm going to walk back to the cliff because it's scary, right? But I also think if you're a small business, this is the most exciting time for 20 years to grow a business, in my opinion. I think it's the most dynamic moment in business for a generation. that sounds, again, that sounds equally ridiculous to say, but I do believe it. The first time
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in 20 years, I think the playing field is being releveled. And 20 years ago, it was releveled by a huge injection of venture capital, basically. Suddenly it was like, we'll give people loads of money to build stuff and maybe they can challenge the incumbents who've been there forever. But this time it's being releveled not by capital, because we've already got the monoliths out there, the Googles, the Meta and so on, who have more money than God, by distribution, by adaptability.
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The old incumbents, and I include Google and Meta and Co in this group, are ultimately quite slow. They built businesses in the old industrial model, nice big hierarchies, got thousands and thousands of people. The playbooks that they're running are stale. They're still thinking about PLG or SLG as like the model, the go-to model. That's how I should think. And once I picked it, that's off I go. But I think, and they're not listening to the market as much because they're used to a market where they can necessarily generate demand rather than have to capture what is.
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moving really quickly. So if you can build a business that is listening to the market in real time and is moving at the speed of the market, you will, I think, outrun anybody, however big they are. Because you can't, it's no longer, at least right now, it's not pay to play for the first time in a while. You can't, like we said, you can't pay to be in an AI search, at least right now. So that means everyone's free, everyone's open, it's an open field. And that is so exciting. At the same time, the thing that's scary,
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has made it cheaper to test, faster to build and easier to learn pretty much everything. You don't need a five-year plan and all you need is a five-day feedback loop. Build something on replete, get it out there, see what happens, put an ad out there, see what happens, and within five days you're going to get a reasonable signal back about whether or not you're on something in PMF terms or not.
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And I think if you can operate on that, five day plan, the five year plan, you're going to thrive in this chaos. No, not struggling. So if I'm a leader now, what do I need to do to get towards that? It's obviously not going to be one step, but how do I need to change my org structure? What processes need to need to come into place? What technologies can help you? Let's start with the first principle is, and for me, this is about decision making at the edge. And now that can mean that doesn't mean something different in technology, but
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I mean it in terms of who in your organization is making the decisions, the cold face that will impact the customer that will appear on the website that will, you know, that, that you will mean that you sell or you don't sell. And typically those things tend to, the more important they are, the more they have to be centralized. Most businesses, if you're going to make a big change to your price, you know, it's going to go through some kind of pricing committee or it's even going to go to the CEO or it's going to go to the CFO or whatever it is positioning the same.
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Zora, I ran and owned positioning and no one was going to damn change it unless I was part of that loop. That's going to have to change. Like leaders today who are by and large used to this model of like, I'm mostly in control. Even if I do distribute autonomy to my teams on a day-to-day level, big changes are mine to make. Right? You don't just change the vision of a company without telling anybody. It goes without saying. Except it's going to have to stop.
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going without saying. We're going to have to start allowing our teams to make changes when they see something happening in the market. Giving the trust. We always talk about, often talk about, know, I give teams, I trust them, I give them total autonomy. We don't really, we let them pick this event or that event. We let them publish blogs without me reading them, but that's not autonomy. Not really. Autonomy is saying,
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You saw your competitors drop prices, we'll drop our prices. Why didn't you, why, why are you even having this conversation with me? Yo, you've already dropped them. Great. Fantastic. You saw that one of our competitors has launched a new feature. The product team is already building it. Great. Great. It didn't need to come to me. We didn't need a committee meeting. We didn't need a decision making process beyond the teams at the edge. So I think that's kind of almost principle one. Principle two is it's going to have to be a lot more cross-functional. Inherent in what I've just said is.
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You're going to need someone from product and someone from marketing and someone from sales, all kind of connected together to be able to make those changes happen in real time. I think we're going to see fewer silos. Instead of marketing owning leads, sales owning pipeline, products owning the roadmap, we're going to see what I call a market pods, but you can call them only like small teams, buying two specific segments or use cases. So, and each team, which comprises all of those functions,
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We'll own everything for that slice, whether it's discovery, positioning, execution, delivery. Like in each of these pods, let's go back to that example around accountants in Yorkshire who work for mid-sized firms. You might have a team just focused on those people. You'll have a go-to-market strategist thinking about what those people in Yorkshire need. It's snowy outside today. Let's change our ads to reference the local snow. I mean, like, look at that level. You're going to need a product or solution owner who can make meaningful changes to the roadmap in real time.
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You're probably going to need a sales or outbound or an outbound or an inbound motion owner, someone who's focused on what are we hearing in the gone course? What are we seeing in the ad changes? What do we, how do we, what do we need to enable our sales teams or marketing teams with? And then you probably need a data analyst to bring this all together. These teams typically today are all sitting really far apart.
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And we need to organize ourselves vertically, Well, we've organized ourselves around the model of an industrial revolution where everyone was hyper specialized and got really good at doing one thing. You guys grow wool, you guys pull the wool, you guys weave the wool, you guys make jumpers. You guys do marketing, you guys do sales, you guys do product. Doesn't work anymore. We have to get tighter because people don't just want.
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one kind of jumper anymore and want it really cheap. What they want is a jumper that's fitted to them in the design that they want. And that's a price point that matches them. The way we need knowledge to disseminate has changed, right? Previously, we wanted knowledge to disseminate vertically. You organize yourselves in these sales pods because it allows sales expertise to filter down to the bottom. Now the actually is product engineering expertise to filter across the sales. So I think that's a really elegant way of putting it.
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We used to build ourselves for the dissemination of functional information, how to do marketing, whatever it was, how to do sales. Now, the information that needs to be distributed is the market information. What is my market thinking now? What are they asking for now? It's why I turn this content market led growth rather than product led growth or sales led growth or anything else. Because you're radically focused and this goes well beyond.
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customer centricity. This is all about what is the market saying right now? What is my prospect talking about today? And then reacting and dynamically altering too. And so, as you said, you need a different organizational structure to fit that. We go further by the way. I also think we need to change the way we think about budgeting, which is common today to think about budgeting in kind of annual cycles or quarterly cycles. Well, usually an annual cycle, but quarterly.
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deployed in a quarterly way. Probably going to need to, but if you don't know what's going to happen quarter by quarter or even month by month, because you're going to have to change the way you deploy your capital to meet your market where they want to be met. And you can't necessarily predict or guarantee that you're going to spend in a certain way. Because there's an obligation. You have to be able to expand and contract. So you've got this idea we're going to drop prices massively because it's just what the market
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needs. So we can't keep spending on those really expensive events anymore because we don't have the revenue to deliver it. Or those accountants we had in Yorkshire who were buying like hotcakes last quarter are now all stuck in their homes because it's snowy. These poor accountants in Yorkshire. so they're not buying. So we should move the money somewhere else and do something different with it. We don't want to buy ads in advance anymore. Now we want to be doing events for the accountants in Tahiti because suddenly the market signal is telling us
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they're buying right now. If a campaign is working, do want to pour fuel on it now? You don't want to wait till next quarter when you've got some more budget. But if a campaign isn't landing, you don't want to let it run this quarter because you kind of paid the ads and you've got to spend the money you've got this quarter anyway. Kill it now. Spend it on something else. So I think we need to rethink the way we think about budgeting. We talked about enablement, but I think enablement is really important at giving people really full control. But I think what's connected to that is what leadership does become.
43:31
Leadership becomes not about making decisions, but about encouraging psychological safety, learnings and tracking outcomes. So I came up with a model, I get the idea of Zerora, I call it the failure yield ratio, which I don't really care whether or not this campaign is going to succeed or fail. Right. We can't guarantee it. We can't in this market. But the one thing we can really control is how much did we learn from it? And then how much can we implement as a result?
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Because the problem with a lot of this iteration, any iteration is that people don't want to change things because change might mean that they fail and failure by and large means that we lose and we don't like losing and failure means I might lose my job. It might mean we haven't done a good one. means I'm going to get told off. means also failure is bad. However, it's fail fast. Don't worry about failure. We're not built to think that way. That's not how most people are wired. But if you start incentivizing people to fail, you get something different.
44:29
You say, okay, I want to know how many things we learned from this, whether or not they succeeded or failed. And I'm to give an equal score to whether or not it was a failure or a success. And that's how I'm going to incentivize you. Then you start seeing more interesting results. But as a leader, it's your job to give people and to get them to trust you. You really need it. When they complete, when they spend half a million dollars on something and it just doesn't But as long as you will learn.
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and you understand why, and you know how you're going to change for next time, but no one's in any trouble. No one's going to get fired. That's your job. That's the job of the leader. And it links to everything else you've mentioned, right? One part of surrendering control is that you're surrendering control of a higher and higher value decisions. You have to accept sometimes our business will contract because we made a decision lower down. And I have to trust at the top of the organization that that decision was hopefully right. And if not, it was necessary. A decision had to be made.
45:29
But it is super difficult and it leans more in with a smaller number of humans that are more empowered. All of those little things that you have to do to get the best out of humans become 10 times more applicable. It changes how you think about hiring. Maybe you're being asked this, I certainly am by people with kids at the moment. What should my kid be thinking about doing? What should they be doing in? Because the world is changing and 15 years ago we were all saying your kids should learn how to code. That was really important.
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It's a commodity now. My answer is thinking about, think laterally, become a generalist. Right. If you can start understanding how to take, learn how data works. I don't mean like how to do it data input. mean, understand data as a science, not data science, but understand what a graph means. Understand what a 2 % rise is versus the 4 % rise and why that's different. What's a standard deviation?
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And should you be worrying about that here? Or what's two-star, what is your Six Sigma? Because that's important. Because if you confuse those tools to analyze what the machine is telling you, you're going to be able to make data led decisions and minimize some of those risk failures that you're talking about. I think we're going to end up with far smaller number of people. You're not going to have a marketing team of 50, you'll have a marketing team of five. You won't need a team of brand marketers. You'll need one brand marketer with five agent, agentic AIs underneath them.
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doing specific things. don't need, even today, don't need one content, you don't need five content writers. I'm sorry, I think you can get by with one, but they've got one tool writing blogs and thinking in that way. You've got one writing this way, you've got one writing that way. And frankly, there are tools that will produce videos now, know, Sora does it just fine. So that's changing. But the person who's in control of all those levers needs to be a different, needs to be not super specialized in being a brand marketer.
47:24
They need to be able to think more broadly about understanding how and interpreting data. Of course, it's qualitative. That doesn't mean we need a bunch of scientists running our teams to think naturally and apply data to new problems. That's going to be crucial. And we need to start hiring for that. I think it's the rebirth of the generalist, which I'm grateful for because I am one.
47:45
Fantastic, because that was going to be my next question is how do you set yourself up for success in this world? I think it's also really interesting what you mentioned. Yeah, smaller teams with less specialist knowledge, because I think a lot of what we're talking about is where the world is going. Even with where the world is, I think if you're a marketer, one thing that has struck me recently is the extent to which all of the different disciplines within marketing have become 10 times more interwoven. So having an SEO specialist isn't very useful because...
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content now feeds every different channel and it's serving every point in the bio journey. So just being super super expert, I had a rank content top of funnel, not that useful. You need to understand how your specialism connects to the bigger picture. I'm conscious of time. So I'm gonna, I think this has been a very like meta pretty, pretty awesome episode. I'm gonna summarize quickly and then we'll get into some quick fire questions. I think in terms of what we've spoken about and how people should react to it and correct me if I'm wrong here. I think from an organizational point of view, think there were three things, right?
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You have to get comfortable surrender and control. So you delegate much, much higher value decisions further down the chain, whether that be to a human or an agent, there's a human need to get comfortable with that. The second one is the need to drive genuine cross-functional alignment. It's something we're working on at Demand Genius in terms of between marketing and sales. And I think it's super important now to operate as a revenue function. But I think it's fair to say the next step of that is going to be encapsulating more and more.
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kind of either side of that into product and engineering. And then the last one is changing the way that we budget and make decisions. It's kind of linked to the first, I guess, a little bit, but made decisions at an organizational level to operate on a much, much faster cycle that reflects the way that we need to move. And in order to excel in that world as an individual, it's about becoming a generalist. It's about excelling at learning. It's funny how all of these things, just like a lot of, they come back to core principles, right? It's can you build?
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the right mindset to adapt to change and to learn and to be curious. Yeah. I think that's partially because we are at the beginning of something new. It wasn't around in the 1780s. I would imagine it felt a little similar to some people that they saw this, suddenly there was a steam engine. And that was different to everything they'd seen before. And it's probably quite hard to just build a set of rules for, oh, now we, this isn't how we work now. This is, this is.
50:05
Don't worry. I built a playbook for how we build trains. It took a long time to work out exactly how to use these things. The steam engine happened and then they kind of went, oh, okay, we can use it to transport. Yeah, people thought when they, the first steam engines, people didn't want to get on those railways because they thought they wouldn't be able to breathe at 30 miles an hour because they thought that they would be moving too fast for the air. So you have to start with principles. What's changed and what might then change the results? What are the second order? You can't build rules yet. We're not at a point, anyone telling you they've solved.
50:34
This is how, this rule book is how to build. This rule book is, it will solve all the problems you've got. I think they're probably selling snake oil because we don't know, but we can set with principles. And I think those principles are change resistant. Yeah, that's awesome. Let's, let's, let's leave that there. What I'm going to do now is get onto just some quick fire questions, Felix. So potentially we've the answer to this here, but for you in your career, what's been the biggest needle mover?
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Oh, that's an interesting question. scale or trait in terms of your own development and advancement? I think it's probably been the most successful, but also perhaps the one that set me back the most. So it's a double edged sword, but I probably try and answer the question before it's been asked. think there's pros and cons there. Anyone who knows me listen to this will be smiling. No. I think it's been a willingness to engage with pretty much any problem from a first principle basis.
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For better or for worse, I think I can probably work anything out as long as I start from the first principles. And I'm willing to take risks and go for it, see what happens. Nice. Second one. A lot of people are going to be listening to this thinking, God, Felix sounds smart. I want them all to know that you can at times be an idiot. So what was the biggest, the biggest fuck up in your career? There are so many. The heart stopping moment. You're not allowed to say hi to me before you do.
51:59
never say such a thing. My biggest f*** up. This is going to one those moments where you have to edit it together. I think the biggest career f*** up I ever made. Not treating the two people I worked really... I set up a business straight out of university and although it was my idea, we all three were equals and I don't think I could ever quite let go of it being mine. So when the time came...
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us to sell the business, not for a lot of money, but for all the things. I didn't involve them enough in that process and that thinking process and that engagement. And I didn't treat them with the, I was 21 and 22 and sort poison vinegar, but I think I didn't quite understand yet that success is a team sport. It doesn't matter whether it's your idea. It doesn't matter whether whether you're the CEO, it's all of you together. And I regret not treating.
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those people with the respect that I now would have completely given them. I think that was the biggest career fuck up for me. I learned some really valuable lesson. I'm I learned it early, but I regret it to this day. Yeah, I think that's a super self-aware answer. I think it's something a lot of people can probably resonate with though, For me, think as we scale the mind genius, think it's very easy to forget the level of contribution, but also sacrifice that other people make. You see your own sacrifice.
53:26
But even if it's a bit like, okay, they weren't at risk of not paying their mortgage, they didn't have quite the sleepless nights that you had as a founder or CEO, they still gave up three years of their life to go and build this idea that you had with you. And yes, they got a salary, yes, they had a bit less at risk, but that is still, if all we have in this world is time, right? That's what 3 % of everything they have that they gave you.
53:52
Yeah, there is a conception of business that says you can't worry too much about the people in your organization or your teams. Like they've made their choices, they're adults, and they can make different choices if they want to. And there's an extent to which that is true. Like you're not responsible for people's mistakes or people's lives. I think in some particularly, late stage capitalism, I think has taken that too far. I think we are, if not responsible for them, we have a duty to make sure that we recognize the sacrifice of time from other people, regardless of what they're paid.
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or that they could get a job somewhere else. They're choosing to work with you and that should be respected regardless of what it is they're doing. no, a hundred percent. And to expect more than is reasonable as well. Last one is one recommendation that you have for everyone in terms of a book, podcast, a thought leader to follow that you recommend they go and check out that you think is helpful. Podcast, it would be In Our Time, which is a BBC Radio 4 podcast for American listeners.
54:52
This has going on since 1998 and every week they discuss a pretty much topic at random for 45 minutes live and it will enrich your soul. But I think it will also, you never know what you're going to learn and where you're going to find the next piece of information that will put something else into place. I think in a moment of intense change, learning from moments of change or things that are inventions of the past and how things are put together on a principles level.
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be helpful. So I would put that as my podcast because a book would recommend, rather than suggesting ones that people have probably suggested before, I would suggest Our Lives in Their Portfolios by guy called Brett Christopher, which is a book about how private equity firms are shaping the world in which we live. And private equity is getting more more important. It's very easy to kind of see it as this shadowy other. There's like VC, very exciting.
55:49
Then there's the public markets, kind of big and slow, but we can invest in those. And then there's this private equity thing and we don't understand enough about them. And I mean, certainly has a perspective in that book, our lives in their portfolios gives a sense of it. But I think it's, it's a world that we don't understand well. I don't think enough people understand what BlackRock is. I think it's worth understanding, especially as you're scaling. It's the most, one of the most likely exits for any businesses of private equity, always going to involve private equity.
56:16
And I think really understanding very early on how they operate, how they think is helpful. Nice. think that's awesome. Yeah. Someone described BlackCork the other day to me as the biggest company that you've never heard of. Um, which I think for a lot of people is true. You don't know what they do is just this shadowy presence. I think somebody wants to describe them as an octopus. Um, not in a, not in a pleasant way. Cool. No, cool. Well look, Felix, thank you very much. I think that was an awesome episode. think it's nice to have one that gets a little bit away from.
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marketing tactics, marketing strategies, what campaigns are working, what campaigns aren't and think a little bit more meta about the direction we're heading in and how you can succeed. Thank you, everyone. you, I really enjoyed it. See you next time. Same to
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If you're a B2B marketer and you want to understand exactly how your content connects to revenue and how you can use it to close deals faster, head to www.demand-genius.com. Thanks for listening.