Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:00)
what would you say the biggest differences are and let's focus on companies where you're setting up a go-to-market motion maybe rather than trying to claw it back a little bit, which I think is a whole different question and probably a much harder task. Like in terms of, let's say I've just raised a series A, I'm looking to build an efficient go-to-market motion.
What are like the fundamentals that you focus on on day one now and how does that maybe differ to 10 years ago or five years ago?
Louis Fernandes (00:32)
This is the thing I think that certainly my thinking hasn't changed that much over that time But how thinking per se has changed I think is quite a lot. I mean, let's start with the fundamentals The fundamentals don't change and anybody who's ever studied Kotler will think of the four P's of marketing product price place promotion And you sit there and you go. Well, how do I apply that to GTM? Well, first thing is what's what's my product? What is the product actually?
you know, solving a problem for. It can have all the bells and whistles in the world, but if it's not actually solving a real world problem and has a real world use case and I don't have a proper vision of what my MVP is, then you know, what the hell am I doing? If I don't understand what it is I'm solving for.
or I think it might be this or I think it might be that, or I could be all things to all people, well then I'm screwed before I even start. So being able to really understand what my proposition is, really understand which markets it serves, and then understanding really in detail those intricacies of my ICP, my ideal customer profile, that match that, that's absolutely fundamental.
So I think that that's where I would always start.
Tom Rudnai (02:01)
Do you think that's
something?
question.
Cause I think that was something that was also in focus, has always been in focus. The difference has been potentially the way that you then allocate resources to go after that particular ICP. So I'm one of these people, I've kind of been trained as such over the last eight years or so. And ICP has always been a very front of mind thing that you're educated on very early coming into any commercial role. So it wasn't that that was ignored. Like where do you think the...
problem came in how we used to operate before because we still did look at these fundamentals we just seemed to make bad decisions off the back of it.
Louis Fernandes (02:50)
Right, okay, quite straightforward. You might think about your ICP, how many people actually really enforce it? And this is where the problem lies, because what we do is we then build compensation structures that reward people for closing deals, regardless of who the deal is with, whether it's the right deal or the wrong deal for the company, which is paying on revenue. So immediately you start going down that kind of a route, and it becomes, well, so long as I can line my pockets, what do I care whether it...
actually fits an ICP or not. It doesn't matter to me, I still get paid. And that's where bad behaviors then start creeping in. And because people aren't paying attention to that, you then end up effectively selling things to people that were never a good ICP fit for you in the first place. And certainly probably not right for the proposition. At which point you implement something, it doesn't go well, because it was never gonna be a fit in the first place. They churn.
your cost of acquisition goes through the roof and your lifetime value is in the toilet.
Tom Rudnai (03:55)
Yeah, well, it's interesting. It comes back to me. What I hear there is it comes back to a similar problem to what we spoke about before right at the start, which is specialisation. And I think one of the things we did very smartly in SAS is we realised that it makes sense in a commercial function to specialise and have different people own different chunks of the bio journey and things like that. But what we probably did that I don't think was that smart is we built KPIs around those specialisms and that kind of distracted everyone from the broader goal. So
Louis Fernandes (03:57)
There's your problem.
Tom Rudnai (04:23)
As a content marketer, you got your KPIs around top of funnel metrics. You then move down funnel in marketing and then into sales and everyone owns just their piece. We got very fancy with how we try and attribute that to the whole, but it leads to people going after the wrong things.
How, guess, so how would you approach it differently in terms of structuring something now? Like if you were gonna go into a new organization, how would you approach aligning, like creating incentives for different teams in a way that gives people ownership, which I think is what that system does very well, but still keeps everyone's eye on the broader price?
Louis Fernandes (04:44)
There's only one thing.
Mm-hmm.
So it starts with the overarching objective. What is the job to be done? What are we trying to achieve? And then you have to be really specific about how you define it. We are looking to achieve XYZ revenue growth in these markets, selling to this ICP with this proposition. Right? So everybody then needs to align around that. So we start building out comp plans.
Personally, it's not about things like getting really tactical around, well, actually what I need is I need, I'm gonna pay somebody on a number of leads. Who cares? Do those leads convert? Do those conversions lead to revenue? And do they lead to revenue in the ICP accounts we've defined? If the answer is no, why am gonna pay for that?
So you've got to get aligned around making sure you understand what is it that we're paying for that drives the behaviors and compensation drives behavior, who knew? So you get to the result that you want. If you're not aligning around that result, and this is across all departments, then any surprise that you don't get there.
Tom Rudnai (06:21)
think the challenge
is, I guess, because I'm completely with you, guess to play devil's advocate a little bit, the flip side is everyone focuses on the single north star, which is always my approach, right, of revenue, but you then lose ownership of your goal a little bit, right? Which I think is another challenge.
Louis Fernandes (06:40)
Is it just revenue though? But I challenge you on that Tom, is it just revenue or is it profitable, sustainable, predictable revenue?
This is where the definitions become important. Because if you just say, actually, all I'm interested in revenue growth, okay, I can get some short term revenue growth and I might sacrifice next year to achieve this year's targets. But then it becomes about sustainable, predictable, repeatable, you know, all those good things into the right ICP with the right value proposition. And there are some solid lessons there from other people. You only have to look as far as
Things like a book I'm sure you're familiar with, Crossing the Chasm. mean, Geoffrey Moore talks very, very eloquently about don't start picking off too much too early because you end up blumonging and getting distracted. And the same is true with multiple different sales motions. You're too early in your revenue journey to suddenly have three, four, five different sales motions targeting different segments.
because you don't have the scale structure or resources to be able to do it. And then guess what? Your economies of scale don't work out. So your unit economics collapse, your unit economics collapse, suddenly your profitability is down the toilet. It all becomes a vicious cycle. So you've got to really think about these things and be very intentional about which markets you're entering, when you're entering those markets, which customers you're serving.
What is it you're serving them with? What are the problems you're trying to solve for? And can you do it in a sustainable way?