The Transaction

What would you say if your CEO told you they wanted to speak with 100 customers in 100 days? That’s exactly what our guest, David Politis, did and he still thinks it’s one of the best things he’s done in his career.

David, the Founder and Executive Chairman of BetterCloud and Host of Not Another CEO Podcast, joins co-hosts Craig Rosenberg and Matt Amundson for a must-listen episode for founders, CEOs, and B2B execs. David explains why having a smaller TAM (Total Addressable Market) is actually good for smaller or newer-stage companies. There are also great discussions about when landing a big customer can be a bad thing for your company’s roadmap, why meeting with customers is so critically important for leaders, and how to stand out as a sales rep to book meetings with decision-makers at ideal customers.

Also, Matt gets a very meaningful head nod and Craig is called an inspiration, a high that his ego may be chasing for a long time.

Critical Takeaways
  • Narrow down both your ideal customer profile and your ideal buyer persona. While this may seem counterintuitive, the larger your TAM (Total Addressable Market), the slower your company will grow. When you try to go after too many customer profiles and buyer personas, your budget, time, and effort get dispersed across them and it’s harder to gain a real foothold in any niche from which you can later expand beyond.
  • When you focus on one key buyer persona within one ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), you can delve deeper into understanding not only how they will use your product, but also what your product actually means to them. For example, when Matt was working in marketing automation, he was able to understand that his product gave buyers a seat at the revenue table and made their jobs easier.
  • Especially for early-stage startups, there is nothing that is more valuable than talking with your customers. Those conversations function as critical data points that you can use in every aspect of the company, from writing messaging and crafting sales narratives to building new features and raising funds. 
  • Proving to people that you and your email or message aren’t just automated is harder than ever now, so to really cut through the noise and get noticed, you need to do things that can’t be automated. In-person and handwritten things work well for this.

Sponsored Segment
Ringmaster Conversational Marketing - The Transaction is sponsored by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through Branded podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/
Interested in becoming a sponsor of The Transaction? Contact thetransaction@samguertin.com

Chapters
00:00 When Craig Met David, His Forever-23-ish Wunderkind
06:07 Stop Supersizing Your TAM, Narrow Down Your ICP
09:34 The Dangers of Landing a Whale Client & How To Handle Your Big Fish
18:11 Which Comes First, The Product or The Persona?
23:19 Why a CEO Would Want to Meet 100 Customers in 100 Days
30:48 Sales Reps Need To Take The Opposite Approach to Automation
41:50 Creating Memorable Moments for Prospects & Customers Through Events
47:50 Matt Provides His Expert Critique of David’s Art Exhibition

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Epic Quotes
  • “In the early stage, every customer conversation is gold.” - David Politis
  • “There's nothing that you can do that's as valuable as meeting customers, once you're an executive.” - Matt Amundson

Connect with David

Shoutouts

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Creators & Guests

Host
Craig Rosenberg
I help b2b companies grow revenue by enabling GTM excellence. Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners
Host
Matt Amundson
CMO, Advisor, Data-Driven Revenue Leader. Chief Marketing Officer of Census
Producer
Sam Guertin
Podcast Producer & Marketer at Ringmaster Conversational Marketing

What is The Transaction?

Welcome to The Transaction. The #1 Go-To-Market podcast on the planet.

Hosts Craig Rosenberg and Matt Amundson, two legendary go-to-market leaders in their own right, talk weekly with the best sales, marketing, operations, and product leaders in the B2B SaaS world to understand what's working in the new playbook of the post-ZIRP market.

But Craig, Matt, and their guests don't just talk theoretically, they share the stories and actionable tips, tactics, and strategies behind what's driving revenue growth that you can take and implement in your own go-to-market roles.

From ABM to PLG, from MEDDIC to MEDDPICC, the world of business is constantly evolving. We’ll cover the who, what, where, when, why and most importantly how you get… The Transaction.

TT - 034 - David Politis - Full Episode
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Craig Rosenberg: [00:00:00] by the way, Matt, I met David when he was like, honestly, I know I called you the 23 year old wonder kid, but like, how old were you when we first started working together?

David Politis: I think it was 23 or 24.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. So like we were, yeah, I know it was Tippett and we, we somehow managed across David's company, which is Vocalocity down in Atlanta. You get the deal. I go down there and I'm like, dude, this guy is amazing. And he's 23 years old. Now, as David will tell you. Through the next 20 years. I kept calling him 23 years old. Um, I still do when I introduce him, and he's not anymore, but it, it was pretty cool. But here, fun facts about him. So he is down in the a TL.

He used to take me out. We went to the, uh, US Rashard Evans knocked out Chuck Liddell in the Georgia Dome with me. Um, that's one. Number two is he ordered, he used to order H and H bagels before like Goldie [00:01:00] and, or whatever, what was the, uh, the food delivery,

Matt Amundson: Gold belly. Gold

Craig Rosenberg: all this stuff. Like, he was, he was getting his H and H fix, which I can truly appreciate, truly appreciate down there.

Um, and then number three, he used to just do, he used to drag me out with, you know, he's 23 in Atlanta, right? And the company, he said, I'd be like the old guy. Just sort of hanging out with these guys. I was, I, David, I don't know if you tell you, I was the worst conversationalist. Like we'd go to opera or whatever.

And like people would be talking to me and I'd just be like, I'm literally not a great guy to talk to. it was, it was unbelievable. And, uh, so anyway, but I had some of the best times with this guy. He.

David Politis: And uh, everyone loved when Craig came to town, everyone, we would talk about Craig's coming, everyone would get excited for that week, you know, um, but that UFC fight was one of the, I mean, that was before the UFC is what it is today. That was a, that was a, [00:02:00] we, we almost didn't make it out of that place.

Alive. We,

Craig Rosenberg: threw, spilled his beer all over him. And I'm just going, I actually, truthfully, I had no idea. Oh my God. I thought we were gonna get, and I'm like, I had no idea . So, um, anyway, um, David, you haven't met Matt.

He's like, uh, my boy forever. Also, he can relate because I still, like, you bring up the fact that he's 15 years younger than me

Matt Amundson: 10, 10. It's 10.

Craig Rosenberg: that I watched him while he was on the UCLA football team, the back of his jersey and remembering out there. [00:03:00] you know, I'm just happy that you guys are connected because, uh, Matt, David, it's been like amazing for me. I, you know, he was my. Customer for a long time and sort of, um, he sort of viewed me as a guy that was helping him, but I used to learn everything from him.

And so, you know, I tell stories about the 23 year old all the time, even when he wasn't 23 anymore, the decisions that he was making and the way that he worked was incredible. And then, um, so, you know, he had vocalosity at a young age. Bought by Vonage, uh, he did this company called BetterCloud, which he was the CEO, founder of, um, they had an outcome with, um, uh, Vista, I believe, right?

A couple years ago. Yeah. This guy is a winner. He's New York. Through and through, by the way, so you guys can talk about whatever you want, but he's [00:04:00] one of the most amazing executives, um, that I've known, and I've been able to watch him from Emory all the way, you know, he was practically still in college when he started vocal at Vocalocity all the way through.

So now he's got a podcast, which everyone can follow, um, just great clips coming out from that, by the way, David, really

David Politis: Thank you.

Craig Rosenberg: You're probably learning more. So it's just everyone, this is David Politis, one of the, uh, my favorite guys of all time, and, uh, he's a repeat, uh, guest, which is, you know, for us, like forever for the audience seats in honor, in our opinion,

Matt Amundson: Yeah. It's an exclusive club.

Craig Rosenberg: there's a membership fee, which we'll come back to later. Um, but anyway, it's, uh, David Politis. So David, thanks for coming on, buddy.

David Politis: you very much. Thank you. I'm really excited about this. I enjoyed our last conversation and I tell everyone that will listen that, uh, and I'm not exaggerating when it comes to [00:05:00] marketing, B2B marketing, demand, ABM, all of that. I really have, my entire foundation is built on what Craig taught me literally 20 years ago and it's amazing how much of that is still relevant today, actually.

Craig Rosenberg: Thank you, buddy. I appreciate that. I need that actually on the marketing side, because, you know, at the end of Topo, I had to buff up the sales stuff and somehow I became a sales expert. And I'm like, dude, I used to write about marketing automation in 2000, what, seven, Matt, or something.

Matt Amundson: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: Still in junior high.

So the, um,

it looks so much younger than me too. Anyway. All right, let's start the show. Here's what, uh, we're going to, you know, we've had you on the show. So this might be interesting in terms of. If anything's changed, it's the last time we had you on, but you know, as you know, the way we like to start things is, what's something that the market thinks they're doing right?

It could be an approach, best practice, methodology, anything. They're actually wrong and they should be thinking [00:06:00] about doing it a different way. What is it and what should they do about it?

David Politis: So, the first thing I would say is, I, I think it's the same thing that I said last time we, we did this seven months ago, which is, um, people, I, I think a lot of companies in an effort to have as large of a TAM as possible. Or a sellable address market of Sam as possible. They, they are going after multiple personas, multiple customer profiles.

And it actually is, it's, um, it's debilitating in my opinion, in many ways. And, and it slows the growth versus. Speeds up the growth, which is what people expect. And so I've been spending time with literally at this point, I think dozens of SaaS businesses of all stages. And what I see in so many of them, I'd say [00:07:00] more than 80 percent of them is that they are trying to expand their business.

Versus getting more narrow on both the ideal customer profile and the ideal buyer persona. So for example, and I'll actually use my own examples from my career, because I've been sharing these with people as I've been having these conversations. At Vocalocity, we were selling a cloud PBX, a phone system to micro SMBs, sub 10 employees.

That was our target market. And there was a day, I'll never forget it, we got a big customer, big prospect, a hundred. Employees. That for us was 10x the size of our normal customer. And they bought from us. They bought, which was amazing. I mean, it, it made the whole quarter in like basically one deal. And then from that point on, every conversation was what features do we need to add?

Let's keep going after those customers. And it derailed really what we were, what we were doing as a business and the machinery we had built because we were, we had this [00:08:00] one big account and maybe one or two other prospects that never closed. And so that was going up market. And then at BetterCloud there was a period of time where we said, Oh, our buyers, we're selling to the director of it.

That was our target market. That was our persona. And then all of a sudden we said, Oh, you know what? The CISO, we got a CISO who got super excited about what we're doing. They bought for 200, 000. The CISO, that's the other persona. But when you do those things, all of a sudden the messaging, you need two, three different playbooks for, for messaging.

Your website needs to talk to all of those groups. If you want to build community, that's basically impossible because those personas don't want to live in the same community. That is That's the number one thing that I think people and it's hard in times like this in the market when when things are tough and Growth has slowed.

It's hard to actually stay focused But but in my experience getting more focused results in literally better [00:09:00] metrics across the board It's it's it's almost counterintuitive the less the smaller the target market the higher all the metrics are gonna be the better but that's That's what I've seen in every single company that does that.

So that's the first thing.

Matt Amundson: Yes. Yes, yes, I see it all the time. So, you know, in addition to being, you know, a founder and having a bunch of successful exits at this stage in your career, you do a lot of advisory, you do a lot of investing. So you're lending your expertise and your subject matter expertise to lots and lots of different people.

Now, very easy to get overly excited about that big customer that comes in. And not just comes in, but actually closes. And that can drive your product team to want to, to your point, start adding new features, adding enterprise grade features to your product. And it causes confusion in marketing in sales and in product.

How do you avoid that? [00:10:00] Or what are the steps that actually signal to you that like, Hey, this isn't just a one off. There might be a real there there.

David Politis: Interesting. So I, I think it depends on the stage that you're at. If you're in an early stage business, there's a lot more trial and error, but my advice to people is to do that trial and error sequentially, not all at the same time. Because when you're doing the trial and error all at the same time, how do you know if anything's going to work?

You're telling your team call the hundred person company, the five person company and the thousand person company. It's, it's impossible. So that's trial and error on a quick, in quick succession against those different target markets. And that's based on conversations you've had or whatever the case may be.

We can get into the detail there. If you're a little later stage, I'll walk you through actually something that, Warburg. Warburg was one of, Warburg Pincus was one of our investors. They invested in 2020 and BetterCloud. And when they invested, they said to me very quickly after the investment, they said, Dave, when we go [00:11:00] through your customer base, when we do all the analysis, we can see that there is gold here.

There is a segment or two segments that are gold. The retention is through the roof. The sales cycle is short. The ASP is high. The CSAT is high. Like they could see that and they said, what we're going to do is segment your entire customer base, which was thousands of customers at the time with you. We went through, segmented all of it with all the attributes, location, uh, you know, uh, size, industry, every attribute you can imagine.

And we cut up the customer base into hundreds of mini segments. And then we, you can, when you look at the attributes, it becomes glaringly clear which segment. Is the one that you're actually being successful in. When it's all blended together, you may have a net retention of 110%. When you start ripping it apart, you may have a couple of segments that are at 130, 140, best in class.

It's telling you right there in the data. It's so [00:12:00] simple, actually, that when we went through the process, When we got the results, I was like, this is, it's, it's almost too simple. The data tells you the answer, but we want to believe, oh, this segment, it's just recently that segment hasn't been, you know, I'm going to, so I think in the early stage, it's about trial and error.

In the later stage, it's about using the data to tell you where to go. Take it

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Yeah. And the one thing that I always recommend to people is if you know who your core buyer is, continue to market to that person. You know, the, the big ones, they may come in and it's okay to be opportunistic about that. What's not okay is to go out and diverse your marketing investments, your enablement investments, and start saying, Hey, you know what the reality is, the reality is we serve four or five different ICPs and two to three different personas within each one of them.

Stick with your core, invest your marketing dollars there, invest your messaging dollars there, and invest your sales enablement dollars there, because [00:13:00] Big people, bigger companies, or just companies that are outside your core, they'll come in, and if you want to close them, close them. You don't have to turn them away, but you don't want to be diverting a lot of your go to market investment into that space if it's

David Politis: I, that is, I love that because actually that's exactly when we went to our sales team after we did this process with Warbird, we said to them, Hey, we're taking our Salesforce database that has, I think it was 8, 000, uh, Contacts or or companies that we were targeting and we're gonna take that down to 4, 500 and people said wow That's you're gonna remove out of my territory that that many accounts.

So yep. These are the accounts that are gonna close these So we did that but to your point It was a very important point that that Warburg told us that I told the team is hey That doesn't mean that if someone outside of that group calls us and says, I really want your product and I'm going to buy your product.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't sell it to them, [00:14:00] but we should be super explicit. That we're selling them the product that we have, not the product that they may want, not the product that the other competitor has that services that target market. But I think what you just said is super important, which is it's about the marketing, the outbound, the messaging.

But if they come in and they want it, that's always going to happen and you don't want to turn those customers away.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. That helps alleviate the fear. I think the, the, I have a couple, uh, points. Um, one is, I think what David said, um, about the targeting is really important, which is Mm-Hmm, , yeah. It solves real strategic business metrics. Yes. You know, I think, uh, I think people, you know, when you, the people that try to do it without.

Sort of the reason why, you know, like they fail because it's marketing going, well, we're going to be ABM. And I just ran this through zoom in phone. Here's the target account list. It's [00:15:00] like, you know, even when you're early, you know, you, you want to have, this is a strategic decision on who you're going to sell to.

So I'll give just a couple examples and thoughts. So one was we had Chris Dagnon from Snowflake at our go to market summit, David, and he got up there and he's like. The first thing I did is I said, we're not selling to the enterprise. And the way he said it was so interesting, right, Matt? He was just like, I don't care. I mean, they can come in and beg me and I'm saying no, because of what you said, David, which is like, he's like, I'm not going through all these processes that you're going to make me go through. He's like, we're going to sell. This was early when he's like, I want fast. So he's, this is a strategic decision.

I want to sell what's on the truck. I want to sell it fast. Right. And to do that, I cannot sell to Citibank. Now, by the way, even when they were picking up steam and I'm not sure today, cause I can't give that up today. I have no idea, but like [00:16:00] he was maniacal about that. And those decisions were strategic decisions.

The other example I love was like, I remember early days, Gainsight and Metas, Nick Meta was just like, you know what? Our churn rate changes if we throw out the SMB.

David Politis: Um,

Craig Rosenberg: They just start out and they get, he's like, and we give them to our competitors. He's like, it's, you know, we, that, and that, if you take the strategic metric of churn, you know, the first thing they do is they fire the CS leader and they bring in all these people, they make these moves, which, you know, you might have to do, but also you could look at the data, even at early, that was like three and a half, four years in and just say.

I mean, look, this set of customer stays, this set of customer, uh, doesn't. And like, it's a strategic decision. And you're also with, you know, what both of you guys are saying is you're making that decision. Um, it's not just a targeting decision. This is like. How our resources are deployed. This is how we [00:17:00] do it.

So like that to me has always been big. I remember at, at Topo, we were just hot with ABM and someone come in and say, I want to do ABM. I'd say, why? Like, well, you're the ABM guy. I said, I know, but like, you gotta be solving a real problem here. Otherwise it's not going to work. And you don't believe that you're solving a real problem.

And there was a bunch that did and they did great. Right. And then there was a bunch that didn't. I remember we went in and did one and the CMO, we looked at the data with them and their sales team literally had all this stuff in their forecast. And if you looked at it, these certain, it was a vertical decision because these verticals didn't close.

There wasn't enough pain

David Politis: Hmm.

Craig Rosenberg: and we didn't know how to sell to them. And so I said, Hey, guys, like. We can't keep targeting these guys. And the CMO who brought us in is like, well, what, I mean, what do you want the sales guys to do? I said, wait, are you serious? You want them to just work deals? So they have [00:18:00] deals like that's not going to look at the data.

These aren't going to close. And I just didn't believe you have, this is a strategic, this is a big decision. So I love that David brought this up first. The other thing is on the persona for both, you know, both of you guys, like, Um, I wonder, I'm going to throw this to you both. I just wonder one thing sometimes with these companies, if you're not like a widespread PLG, like a notion where anybody put on an air table, um, or we have a new one motion, it's like a lot of people could, could go do it, but, um, let's just take those aside for a minute.

Um, and we had the rest of the world of software enterprise software. Um, When their purpose built for a person or a department like that, that is actually, you know what I'm saying? Like, we're talking about going back and going, well, let's only focus on this persona. It's like, it works better [00:19:00] if the founders built something for someone. Oh, like, you know, we have one that's, they sell to the chief accounting officer, you know, I'm like, dude, don't expand. You built it for them. Everything's built for them. The marketing's for them. There's two stakeholders. Let's not get crazy here. Let's beat this buyer, uh, ideal buyer persona until the end.

So I'll throw this to you guys though. What comes first here? Like, is the product built for someone or some group? Or are we throwing this out into the wild and then coming back and saying these are ideal buyer personas? Um, or, you know, I don't know. I, I just feel like as the more I look at it, it's like.

Who was this built for is kind of the key question when identifying the ideal buyer persona. Your thoughts? I personally think that you're building for, a particular Persona, and I think that you're really, you know, in the, again, early stage, you [00:20:00] may have three, four personas, but they probably are all in the same job function area, right? It's like, I'm, I'm building for IT. Is it the IT sysadmin, the director of IT, the VP of IT?

David Politis: I'm not exactly sure, but it is in the IT realm And then you can kind of zero in, and there's some, I don't know, elasticity, if you will, to that, to that persona, but, but, in my experience, when you build for that persona, to your point, Craig, it's not, it's, it's, It's also about like, I really believe in community in such a big way.

And if you think about it, when you're building for that persona, they start to feel a connection to the company and to the community and they're surrounded only by other people that are like them. There's like a building momentum there that I think is really important. Well,

Matt Amundson: I, I, I agree. I think, um, I think you build it for a person and [00:21:00] then you have to understand that person's, not just their workflows and the technology that they're using and the way they're measured, but also you have to understand like the, What does this product mean to them? Right? Like understanding what a product means to a person is really important.

And I think that's the one thing that a lot of companies miss is they think about our product is this, and it does this, but they don't really think about what does that mean for the person who ends up buying it when I think back to my days working in the marketing automation space, marketing automation had a really good understanding.

The vendors had a really good understanding of what the products meant. to their buyers, which was, Hey, this gets you a seat at the revenue table. This is going to make your work easier. This is going to enable you to deploy more programs. Like this is what it means. It means that you, it's you multiplied by 10.

That's something that I think most companies miss is they're just like, Oh, well, you know, uh, if you're, You [00:22:00] know, designing a product and, uh, you want to get a quicker feedback loop on, you know, how people are logging in. This helps you do that. And that's just what it does. That's just what the product is.

It doesn't tell that buyer what it means for them. And so. When you go deep on a persona, you start to understand their motivations, and you start to understand how they get promoted, you start to understand how they make more money, and if you can weave that story, that portion of the story into your narrative, that's when it becomes powerful, and that's when things like what David is talking about, communities start to emerge.

It's not like, Hey, we started a slack channel. Can you guys, uh, drop a couple comments in here? It's people start to start. They begin talking to one another and they're like, you know, I bought this product and then I was able to do, you know, my projects at half the speed. And so that it was, you know, twice as effective.

And then I got promoted, right? Like I bought this and it helped me in my career. And that's something that most products miss.

David Politis: love that. [00:23:00] I agree with that.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, by the way, he's loved two of your comments,

David Politis: I, I I have. I have. We haven't met each other, but I feel like, you know, you're just, same, same wavelength.

Matt Amundson: More podcasts at 8. 30am Craig, that's the answer.

Craig Rosenberg: Oh, man, you for priority run 18 miles. Okay. By the way, I did want to on your point, though, Matt, I will add something you will love about David. Basically, as the CEO went to the company and said, I want to talk to what? A hundred customers in nine,

Matt Amundson: Oh yeah, I listen to that podcast. That's my favorite podcast from the original show.

Craig Rosenberg: dude. And like, if you, but this actually, I'm tying it actually differently to Matt's point, which is like, talk about deep understanding of the customer from the town. I mean, uh, and, and by the way, fun fact on that. So a bunch of people really liked it on LinkedIn, on your little snippet there. And then one person wrote, that seems like a lie.

I'm like, [00:24:00] bro, like, let me look at your career and just,

David Politis: ha. Ha

Craig Rosenberg: talk about, uh, not understanding founder mode. Uh, so, but, but, um, but yeah, it's David, like you did that later though. But like, um, you

David Politis: I did that. I think I, I did that throughout. I just didn't do it in a concerted effort of a hundred customers in a hundred days. But the reason I went to the a hundred customers in a hundred days, 'cause I had lost touch. With that persona that I, and it was 'cause of Covid Ho honestly, for me, because I had been spending so much time on the road pre Covid, you know, 2019, I think I did 50 flights in a year, basically, to events, to customers, to this.

And then I, and then it obviously went to zero, and I felt so disconnected that in 22 was when I did that, because I felt like I needed to kind of re reconnect with that, with that persona, because I, I used to do it in person, you know? So, but to your point, yeah, that was, uh. [00:25:00] I recommend that type of thing for, for every founder.

I think it's, it's really empowering actually because when you go through that process, especially in a concerted way like that, you come out with, with findings that make it very clear to the company, to the customers, to the market that you are the expert because no one else went and did that, you know?

And uh, so I, I stand by that. That, that still is one of the best, best initiatives I've probably ever done in my career in 20 years.

Craig Rosenberg: but if you were going to, so let's say I'll take a page out of Matt's first question, which is like, so take that idea of like, By the way, I don't know that it's obvious to everyone that you need to be talking to customers. I mean, 150, you know, uh, trips to go meet with customers is amazing, but like I'm, I'm starting out, um, well, actually who cares?

You could be starting out or whatever. You're a CEO founder. Like what should I be doing? Just trying to meet [00:26:00] with, uh, customers each week day. Like what, I mean, what, what, what,

David Politis: You should be meeting with customer, I think in the early stages, I mean, you know, every stage you should be meeting with them a lot, but in the early stage, I think every customer conversation. It's every customer conversation is gold because those conversations that tells you the stories that you can use to then go and sell the next customer that those are the stories that give you the credibility with your team.

When you talk about building a feature, those are the conversations that give you the ability to go raise money from investors and say, I'm the, I'm the domain expert. I may not be in that job, but I'm the domain expert because I've talked to thousands of these customers. So I think those conversations are, are, should be happening as often as possible, going to meetups, hosting the meetups, you know, when you talk to one customer, ask them if they have another customer they can introduce, I mean, another person in that same job that they can introduce you to.

So [00:27:00] that's my, that's my opinion. I, I really, I think about. My fundraising efforts and I can always think about I would give quotes Oh, I spoke to the head of it of this hundred year old car insurance company in the middle of nowhere And they're making the move to sas and if they are then everyone is they weren't a customer of ours at the time But I could use that When I went to have those conversations and you can't do that unless you have firsthand experience.

You can't read that. You can't hear it thirdhand. Like that's not, it doesn't give you that credibility in my, or at least the, the, yeah, I think the credibility on that front.

Craig Rosenberg: And then Matt says CMO. Matt, how often do you talk to customers?

Matt Amundson: well, when I started a new company, I try to talk to customers as much as I possibly can. So usually, like, I'll set the goal with the customer success team is that I want to meet with five customers a week for the first month that I'm there. So I try to get 25 [00:28:00] conversations in the first, you know, quote unquote 30 days.

Uh, but then, you know, The thing that I do is I always do customer dinners, always, not prospect dinners, customer dinners, because, you know, the good thing about being here in the Bay Area is generally if you're selling SaaS, you're, you know, you've got the majority of your customers are here, so you should be spending your time getting coffee, having dinner with these folks.

There's really no There's, there's nothing that you can do that's as valuable as meeting customers. I think once you're, once you're an executive, there's nothing that you can do that's more valuable. The reason for that is, you know, at best what you can do is research, right? You can read Gartner reports.

You can read, you used to be able to read Topo reports, uh, and you can come to your own conclusions about things, but there's that. At the very best, you're coming up with a really good hypothesis. When you talk to customers, you get truth. And the thing that's always interesting to me as a marketer is, you know, you have 10 conversations with [00:29:00] customers.

You're going to really figure out the way they talk about your product. As opposed to the way that you want the market to think about your product. And so you cut to the truth. It's much easier to create messaging when it's coming from your customer's voice, because you'll hear the consistency. Why did you buy?

What do you like about the product? What problems is it solving for you? They'll tell you, you have in your own mind what you think it is, but they'll tell you the truth. And whether or not you go verbatim with their words, or you sort of, you know, as all marketers do add a level of hyperbole to it, The messaging is always so much stronger when it's driven by conversations with customers, as opposed to, you know, a think tank of sales and marketing people all in a room, you know, with sticky notes, figuring out what the right thing is.

So that's the thing that I say, there's, there's, there's nothing that you can do that's more valuable because it's going to help you with your messaging. It's going to help you sell to your next customer. To David's point, it's going to help you raise because everything that's specific that you can get from a [00:30:00] customer, Hey, this customer said this.

makes everything feel so much more honest and so much more real than, you know, we built this with this in mind, right? Like that's fine, but it's not as good as, Hey, I had this conversation with the CISO of, you know, XYZ company, and they told me exactly this.

Craig Rosenberg: Oh, I didn't love that one, Matt, sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Matt Amundson: No, but I got some head

David Politis: You know, you got not, I did like, you want me to, I can say it at the end of every comment because I think so, you know,

Craig Rosenberg: okay nod you got, so I think this is great. All right, well, let's move on because we just were sort of, um.

David Politis: I want to, can I go back to, I want to go back to that first question that you asked me just cause I, at the very beginning of just what am I seeing? Cause I, I think. The other thing that I, that I see, which kind of comes off of defining the ideal customer profile, ideal buyer persona is really about How we interact with our prospects [00:31:00] and our customers, how companies interact with their prospects and their customers.

And what I've seen is, and we all have seen this, this proliferation of tools that exist now, especially AI automation tools in both customers, in sales and in customer success. There, it is just, I mean, when we started working together, Craig, 20 years ago, it was hard to get contact information for buyers.

That, that in itself was a hard thing to do and you had to do work to get that. Today, you can get that from a lot of sources for basically free. When we were, started working together 20 years ago, if we wanted to send emails, I mean, that was the early days of Marketo, the very early days of Marketo, right?

You had introduced me, I think, to Phil and John in those early days, and it was like those early days of Marketo, and I mean, you have to actually send the emails and you have to write the emails and send the emails. Now [00:32:00] there's tools to send emails, then LinkedIn messages, then call you, then do this. And then now with you layer AI on top of all that, and it's writing the emails and saying the things on the call and doing all that for you.

And my opinion is that actually we're going to enter yet a new generation essentially of customer engagement, prospect engagement, outbounding, that is more human. Less automated, more authentic, highly researched, um, curated. So for me, I'll give it just a couple of examples. Like on the new customer front, one of the things that I, we did a better cloud and I, I've been advising a couple of companies and they've now done.

So I've seen that it's worked multiple times as an example is actually sending SDRs, real people with, A bag, a swag bag to a prospect's office, physical office, getting past security up the elevator and hand delivering that [00:33:00] bag with the swag and a handwritten note to that prospect in their office. Not easy to do.

You don't want to do this if you don't have a defined ICP, an ideal buyer persona, because that's too many people to go after.

But the conversion rate Is like nearly a hundred percent from when the bag gets delivered to that person taking a meeting It's they have they have to even if it's just out of respect for how much work you did to get them that bag They have to do that right that that to me is an example another example Actually, this is interesting on the customer side This is a little bit different but on the customer side something that i've been doing with some companies is You have a customer post something on LinkedIn, a customer you have a relationship with, they post something interesting on LinkedIn, you like it.

But not only do you like it, you go into your internal Slack, share the LinkedIn post, and tell your team, Hey, there's one of my customers, there's a pretty cool post, can you guys amplify this? And what you see with a lot of customers, most [00:34:00] people's customers, is that they post on LinkedIn, they get 20, 30, 50 likes, and then all of a sudden you come in, and they've got 150.

Or a hundred or whatever, because you really drove that. They recognize that that builds a relationship with them in a way that, so I'm just trying to give a couple of these examples. I have a long list, but I feel like that is what is needed in today's world to stand out because there's just, I launched the podcast.

I put it on my LinkedIn and I swear to you, I get. Pitches right now for cyber security products for my podcast company of one person. It's like, would you need to secure your infrastructure? Our product, you know, secures all the day. I'm like, it's not even a company. And I'm getting pitches for literally CRMs, this for my one person podcast.

Like that's how automated it is, you know? And so anyway, that's, that's my, that, that, I feel like that's a, At least in my opinion, [00:35:00] that, that seems like a trend that we're going to see. It doesn't mean that there's no space for automation or the AI tools or anything like that, but I think to stand out with the key prospects, the account based marketing, the account based everything, that's what I think it's going to take.

Matt Amundson: I love that.

David Politis: Yes, I got one. I got one.

Matt Amundson: No, I, yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: Before you go, I'll just add this to you. Then I'm going to hand you the mic. Uh, you're not allowed to say you love this, though. I mean, honestly, uh, I need one at some point, um, is, um, so on, you know, as you're saying, so this kid wrote me, um, on LinkedIn said, you know, love the podcast, by the way, uh, he has like a, not it, call it a SMB ish, not like parakeet shops, but like tech companies type of, uh, target market.

And they've been doing hand delivered, [00:36:00] uh, Uh, you know, it's not direct mail, right? It's like swag, gifts, whatever. 50% conversion rate to close. No SDRs, that's obscene.

David Politis: I believe that. I believe that number.

Craig Rosenberg: I mean, the, he comes from a real brand. Anyway, okay, Matt, to you No saying I love this except for what I just said.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, I love what you just said.

Craig Rosenberg: God.

Matt Amundson: no, it, it, I remember in 2015, which was the last time I really closely managed an SDR team,

David Politis: bit of

Matt Amundson: stressing to them, Hey, we have to impress upon our prospects as much as humanly possible that we are a person who's trying to get a hold of them. And that they are not in some kind of automated sequence.

Or marketing automation, drip campaign, or whatever. You have to demonstrate to people that you're a real person. And back in those days, there wasn't as much LinkedIn automation. So a lot of that came from just, you know, [00:37:00] getting into their LinkedIn, following them, making comments on their posts and whatnot.

Um, but the real flex back in those days from my BDR team was like, look how personalized this message is, or I Sent this person. I know that they're a huge fan of the University of Michigan and I sent them a University of Michigan tiny helmet with a handwritten note and that was the flex. And that's how we got meetings.

That's how we got meetings today. The flex is, Hey, I hacked my way through outreach or sales loft or, you know, Apollo. Uh, and some LinkedIn tool. And I was able to send 15, 000 emails today. And I'm just like, Oh shit. And the conversion, we used to be like, Oh man, conversion rate on this stuff is so bad. It's 1%.

Now it's like 0. 01%, right? And it's always, it always reminds me of a conversation that I used to have, um, with the [00:38:00] founders separately, but both the founders of outreach and sales which was, you know, it's not just about. Hey, I sent a lot of emails today and I was able to get a 1 percent conversion rate.

Actually, the amount of people that you turn off with your bad emails is so high. And like, the one thing that I think about often is, you know, they talk about this, like when marriages fall apart, it's not that you're acrimonious, it's that you're apathetic, right? And so when people are just like, if I see something come from this brand, I just don't even care.

That's when you know that you're dead and sending these mass emails and sending these mass linkedins to the point where you're just like, oh, I see this person pop up. I'm not even going to click it to unsubscribe. That's how little I care about it. That is the state that we're getting into. So we have to have some sort of return to, hey.

Let's make this as human as possible. Let's show personalization. Let's show that we did research. And I think in today's day and age, the only thing that you really can [00:39:00] do is what you described, David, which is you physically have to go there because almost everything is built to resemble a human being, human beings behavior.

And it's so hard to demonstrate that you're not a robot, you're not AI, and they're not in some automated sequence.

David Politis: The best, the best outreach I've ever had personally to me, someone found an article, I was interviewed in the corner office of the New York Times and someone found the article The physical paper, cut out the article, framed it, wrote a handwritten note about why they liked what I said, and then sent it to me.

And so it arrived in the office. I had to take the meeting. I mean, you can't not take that meeting. You know, like, that's That to me is, I was talking to one of my former heads of sales and he said to me, what he would do is he would take golf cards, like instead of basketball cards or baseball golf cards who no one collects.

And he would take a random golfer and send the card with a handwritten note as to why the person he's sending it to reminds him of that golfer. He doesn't know the prospect. And he would send [00:40:00] it to them. He's like, it's just something. That clearly, someone had to sit there, do this, get the card, put it in the thing, and, and the conversion rates, to your point before, Craig, on these things are all high.

I, I, every one of the, the, these kinds of initiatives, they're significantly higher, you know, than anything you can do in an automated fashion. They take a lot more work. But I also think, Matt, to your point, I think it also like starts the relationship off. On the right level. Cause it's like the reason I'm responding is because you really cared about who I was, you did research.

However, you found this information. I appreciate that. That's going to start the entire sales process versus like, please, please talk to me, please, no, don't hang up, please. You know, that's a very different way to start a relationship with the customer.

Matt Amundson: I totally agree. And you cannot be deterred if you get that meeting, the person says yes, and then they say, Hey, it's not the right time. Because the impression that your brand and that you as a person just made on that person means that the [00:41:00] second it is, they will literally pick up their phone and call you.

They will literally pick up their phone and call you.

Craig Rosenberg: So, but I will go back to something and then I want to make sure that, um, as we talk about David's point, we, there, we expand the purview. So one is you gotta know, you have to be locked in on your ICP and your ideal. Uh, buyer personas in order to do this. I know you've said this, but this is really important, right?

Because, um, all the things you guys are talking about, the research and the context of knowing what these people are going through, these are the things that make you superpower. And by the way, even if you use AI. So to, to get your first draft together or whatever, your knowledge of the person, the market, the type of company would allow you to put the proper edits in to make it interesting.

Thank you. But let's move from that to what you brought, like, uh, prospect events, when we think about, like, extreme value. You know, [00:42:00] uh, you, uh, we talked, I remember Matt, when we had Megan Eisenberg on, she's like the greatest manager and she's like live events, dinners, live events, uh, setting up meetings at shows and like, um, and so I just want to take that further, which is like, even for me, you know, I'm trying to do a CRO event.

I'm talking, I got, you know, Ryan Azouz from zoom is working with me. And he's like, dude, with CROs, you got to do something like so spectacular. That they can't say no and, and then you'll get them here. And it's like, say, you know, it's, it is, you know, cause we understand the persona, we know that they're busy.

They're going to cancel on you to go take a sales call, whatever. It's like, what's that thing that they can't say no to. And I think, you know, if you know, your ideal customer profile, you can go big or go home, like he was telling me, the one thing he went to was like, the giants will allow you to have batting practice, right?

It's an event. It's like you invite [00:43:00] them to a box. I mean, we all like in this, we get box invites every what? You know, month,

David Politis: the

Craig Rosenberg: practice on the field. Um, he's like, couldn't say no to that. And he's like, I went there and by the way, we were in line trying to get up there to hit.

And so, uh, but those 55 folks that they got to that event. All are, you know, not, you know, that is a way to get to these guys that stands out above the rest, that there's no possible way you could have emailed your way into that,

David Politis: first

Craig Rosenberg: right. And I know that you've talked, you know, I don't know your guys reaction.

It was, we think about things like, how do we, you know, we need to, this is a joint marketing, SDR sales effort. It's about the personalized plays. It's about unique plays to get above the just insane amount of communications that we get.

David Politis: What I think [00:44:00] what you just said, Craig, sorry to interrupt Matt, but I think what you just said, Craig, is if you know your ideal buyer persona and you know the ICP and you have all the data that we talked about in terms of retention rates and growth and sales cycle, you You can really put, for most SaaS products, you can put quite a bit of capital behind acquiring a new customer.

Not if you're going to blast everyone, but if you know this is the exact customer and it's going to have 140 percent net retention, close in 60 days, you know, be at 80k ASP, that type of customer, you can put a lot of money behind getting that customer and, and curating the kind of event you're talking about, right?

And that's why one of the things that I said, you know, when we were talking before is like, I worked with a company. We literally found the top restaurant in the country and said, we're going to host an event at the top restaurant in the country. And you would think that's going to be crazy expensive, but in reality, they have a private room where they host these events.

It's a [00:45:00] separate kitchen. And you know, you pay 500 per person, all in food, drink, taxes. 500 is actually not too bad. That crazy, but you can't get a reservation at that restaurant ever. So now you're going to get invited who turns down it's the same as the batting practice. No one turns down that reservation That that that invite and I think that that's the opportunity You just but but it takes back to the point of thoughtfulness Back to what matt was saying about the persona like you have to understand And what do they like to do?

And what's going to get them interested? What's going to get them excited? We did something at BetterCloud where, at one of the big conferences that we went to, you know, we actually got a suite, the largest suite at the hotel that we were staying at. We got the smallest booth, but the largest suite. In reality, it's actually much cheaper.

And what we did is we said we'd made little cards for special invites and essentially an eight of them and when people came to the booth and we knew that they were one of the target customers we gave them this [00:46:00] special invite that was only for eight people to come to the suite and we had a bar and we had a whiskey tasting of the best whiskey you can buy.

Again, when you put it all together, it's actually cheaper than the bigger booth with thousands of people that are not really your target market, but it's. I think it's being creative and it's, you need to have the right DNA in marketing and in sales because they, to your point, if they don't work together on this, if marketing does it, no one's going to actually come up with the coolest idea.

No one will show up. And if sales does it, they probably won't come up with the best idea or execute it the best way, you know, and, and so you, you kind of need them to work together. So I, that's, I, I think that that's what stands out. You know, in, in the markets back to the city, it's creativity, it's differentiation.

It's, it's really hyper targeted. And by the way, I think all the people who went there and did the batting practice, they're also with a bunch of other people they want to be around and that they can learn from. And I [00:47:00] think that's the same thing.

Craig Rosenberg: The community thing that you guys are talking to is like, man, that's so important. And Matt said that, you know, the, the community develops organically, but we put them in position to go do that, you know, and so like, um, and, and just going back to the company that targets accounting, um, that I was talking about earlier, their series B, they get 300 people to their events.

Because they know their persona, they know what they want to talk about, and they know that they're craving for community. I mean, these elements, you can't, it's invaluable, right? It's just, you know, as you guys keep going back to community, I don't want to lose that, you know? Here we bottle that from this conversation.

All right, so that worked. David, thank you, man. Um, Matt, I did not record your compliments on his artwork in the background. Please do, so you get one to love this out.

Matt Amundson: It's a well [00:48:00] curated art collection in your background, David.

David Politis: you.

Craig Rosenberg: All right. So, uh, well, I'm glad you guys got a chance to meet.

Yeah. And, um, uh, you can tell David is incredible. Uh, what's it do? I only fall. I follow your podcast via video on LinkedIn. But if someone wants to listen to you, what's the name of

David Politis: Yeah, the podcast is not another CEO podcast. That's what it's called. Um, and uh, so far I'm on episode 11 now. So, still, still early. But I'm having, to be honest, it's much harder than I thought it was going to be to ask the questions first. Being asked the questions, um, but I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm loving it. And to your point, you said earlier, Craig, I am learning a lot from these interviews that I'm doing a lot.

And, uh, it's some pretty inspiring stories, um, that, that I'm hearing from people's backgrounds and how they got to where they are. And, [00:49:00] um, so I'm, I'm really, I'm really loving it. And to be honest, Craig knows this. I mean, it was actually doing the podcast with you that inspired me to start To start this and so thank you for, for that inspiration.

And, uh, hopefully I can keep it going. It feels like in the podcast world, it's the challenge is keeping it going. And, uh, I hope that I can, I can keep it going. Um, the way you guys have, cause I think it's, uh, you can see how it builds on itself, you know, over time. So anyway, thank you for, for having me here.

I really, I always love these conversations.

Craig Rosenberg: All right, that's the transaction. Let's go.

Matt Amundson: Yep. Craig, did you hear you're an inspiration?

Craig Rosenberg: I'm going to keep recording.

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