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Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
Casey Carey:
If I look back 10 years from now, and we say this was a time when most businesses rethought how they operate, then I would be very happy to have been a part of that, and contributed in some way to that.
Peep Laja:
I'm Peep Laza. Don't do fluff, don't do filler, I don't do emojis. What I do is, study winners in B2B SaaS, because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win? This week, Casey Carey, CMO at Quantive, an expert in B2B e-commerce and growth marketing, from heading upscaled marketing departments at giants like Google to helping build teams from the ground up at scrappy startups, Casey's expansive career has given him a wealth of knowledge, and an experience to draw on as a marketing executive. In this episode, Casey shares some of that knowledge with us, as we discussed, creating a culture that prioritizes learning from failure, the importance of timing, and why he believes brand investment is more important than ever. Let's get into it. Some companies win and others don't. Do you have a working theory about why some companies are winning? What's the secret ingredient, if you will?
Casey Carey:
I think there's a couple of things in that question. One is, there's table stakes that we all have to have. We have to have good products. We have to solve real business problems. There's almost, if you don't clear those hurdles, you have no chance of winning, if you're not coming to the table with having all those boxes checked. Really, the question is more about how do you set yourself apart? How do you gain an advantage over time? Particularly from a marketing perspective, it's all the same. It's a sea of sameness, right? We don't have technology differentiation. If we think we have a great feature, somebody will copy it in a short period of time. We're using the same channels, we're using the same data, most of us are using the same vendors, and we're using the same strategies, right? How much advantage can be gained by being a little bit better than your competitors in all the same things, right?
It's hard to create a significant advantage in those areas. One of the areas that I've seen works really well is focusing on talent, creating a really high-performing team, but then also not just hiring them, but also creating an operating model that allows them to realize their full potential, right? We're going to war with the same weapons, but my team is much better trained, and much better at performing, and operating in the environment.
Peep Laja:
Well, let's unpack some of those things. Let's start with talent. How do we define talent, and then how do we get more of it?
Casey Carey:
The way I think about it is, in most cases, we're going to hire role related knowledge, right? Do they have the experience, and skills to do the job we're hiring them for? We're all going to do that, and we're going to hire the best experience we can, for the roles and compensation package that we have in place, right? Once again, that's table stakes. What are the intangibles that you can hire for above that that really make a difference? One, I would argue is general cognitive ability. Basically, are they smart?
Peep Laja:
How do you figure out what their cognitive abilities are?
Casey Carey:
Behavioral questions, problem solving questions, things like that. Can they identify, analyze, and recommend solutions to problems, right? Are they critical thinkers? Ask them questions about things that may not be their current area of expertise. Can they actually hypothesize or fill in the gaps on things that they may not be super knowledgeable about? Those kinds of questions really help do that. If you hire really smart people, it gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of how you can apply those resources to meet the needs of the businesses, and can they adapt, because they have that base fundamental. And then the last one, and this is a huge one for me, is this notion of leadership without authority, and that particularly in a marketing team, it's highly collaborative, it can be cross-functional. It's an environment where you really want to break down the hierarchy and the bureaucracy, and you want the talent to be able to be empowered to make decisions, to collaborate with their stakeholders, to really drive the business, so them coming to the table every day, thinking and acting like a leader, even though absolutely no one is reporting to them.
It's not about authority. It's about your role in the organization, and that you're not a service function or an order taker, but you're actually strategically driving the business.
Peep Laja:
Google is famous for its people analytics. They look at their top performers and then go back to their hiring assessments to see what these people said in their interviews, or how they scored on their assessments, to understand what predicts workplace success in all functions except software development, previous work experiences, not a success predictor at all. Hence, Google liberally brings logistics people to run sales, HR execs to run logistics, and marketing people to run procurement. It doesn't matter. What does matter? Two key things. One, high conscientiousness, personality trait of being careful and diligent, and most importantly, cognitive abilities. When I first read it, I was taken aback, but then I did more research, and I learned that cognitive ability really is the most established, and well-studied of all psychometric constructs, and the single best predictor of workplace success, even in job categories with low cognitive load, but even more so in those with a higher one. Their head of people used to be Laszlo Bock, and he wrote a book about it called Work Rules. Here he is, talking about this.
Laszlo Bock:
But the reason we ask about general cognitive ability, because again, the science shows that the number one best predictor of job performance is a job test, where you actually have someone do the job. Well, for most of the jobs we all recruit for, that would take a lot of time and effort, and we couldn't do it, and the jobs are ambiguous anyway. But equally good is general cognitive ability. How well can someone solve problems? How curious are they, and how fast are they at picking new things up? We ask about that, because we know it's highly predictive.
Peep Laja:
How do you facilitate such a culture? Is there a name to this model that one can learn?
Casey Carey:
Yeah. I'd refer to it as a modern operating model and frankly, a lot of tech companies, a lot of software companies operate in some version of this. It's never been named, but if you look at the most successful companies, there's a lot of common attributes within these companies, and even teams within them. I saw this a lot at Google. Google, not across 150,000 employees, but definitely predominantly within Google, you see these types of this operating model, this type of talent, these types of approaches, and see them work very, very effectively. Particularly, if you're hiring great talent, like you want a model that untaps that talent, and unlocks that talent, allows them to achieve the best possible that they can. It's really a combination of mindsets like an operating framework, and then a cadence are the three pieces that comprise it.
Peep Laja:
Can you tell me a little more about that? What does that great system or collaboration look like? What did it look like at Google? How have you set it up in your current team?
Casey Carey:
It's interesting, right? Having left Google, and it's been a couple of stops in different companies. What I've found is really, if I operate my team this way, it becomes almost a shining example for the rest of the company. People start asking like, "Oh, you're doing those OKR things. I notice your team is really engaged in leaning in a lot of these discussions. What are you doing to create that?" Now, what's that? Culture, right? Mindsets are hard, because they tap into the nature of culture and back to, you got to hire the people that have the ability to adopt them. But really think about five of them, and I'll run through them quickly. One is just a radical focus. Clarity and simplicity is an accelerant. It really allows you to make huge progress on the things that matter most and have a huge impact, so that's a big one.
Very transparent organization. Everybody has access to information, status reports, financials, priorities, all that stuff is readily available. One of the big ones I saw at Google was empowerment. The unofficial or informal org chart was basically a network diagram, and everybody has basically equal footing or equal setting at the table. It doesn't matter what your level is, what's your title is. When you're there at the table, you have an equal voice, and are encouraged to express that voice, and bring those ideas to the table. A shift from an activity focus to an outcome orientation. What are the outcomes we're driving, and what is the impact on the business? I don't care how much you did, I don't care how many things we counted, what really matters is what did we change? And then the last one is a learning mindset, and that what we're doing this week, and this month is going to be very different than where we are six months from now. Having that adaptability, and willingness to learn, just get better every day is critical to this approach.
Peep Laja:
Everything is changing fast, and growth mindset is needed at all levels of an organization. Fixed mindset is, this is what works, if I fail, it's because I'm not good enough. Growth mindset is, let's see what works, if I fail, I need to find another way that works. When challenges or failures arise, which they inevitably will, fixed mindset people tend to give up, whereas people with the growth mindset take it as learning, and want to put in more effort. I had this team member working on a project. Their first hypothesis was to try the obvious things to get the desired outcome. After many months of efforts, their results were not there. I sent him books, I sent him links to articles on how others had tackled similar challenges. I sat down with him to share my thoughts, and insights how we might proceed from here.
I did all of this, so we could have another go at it, to change our approach to try something different. Instead, he quit. What he had done hadn't worked, and so he blamed his ability, and perhaps was too afraid to try another approach. I believe that quickly adapting and changing it up is a must. Having spent a good chunk of my career starting businesses, build, measure, learn, and experimentation, the search for what works has been instilled in me, but it's not natural to everyone. I see folks get stuck on a swipe file mindset, or get defensive about their ideas. I saw this quote in Marvin Lao's newsletter that sums it up nicely. It's about trying and learning. It's a learning mindset. Things are changing so fucking fast. The only thing I can do to stay safe is to learn how to learn, because things will constantly be changing underfoot. The same idea applies to how companies operate and learn, through constant testing, as Marvin explains here.
Marvin Lao:
Growth is not this sort of overall curve, it's spiky. The reality is that nine out of 10 of the tests that you run are actually going to be inconclusive. But that's actually okay, because you're learning through every single test, even a failed test, you're learning new things. The best companies, over time, even if you've learned those small things over time, think about how if you run, I would say, Facebook back in the day, they're doing five to 10 tests like a month, right? It's probably more now. You think about the knowledge that you're acquiring by running this methodology over and over and over again, the incredible knowledge you're getting about your user base, about your audience, about your messaging, about your product, it becomes a massive competitive advantage over any of the startups that you actually, your competitors, right?
A lot of people go and say, "Look, oh, I ran these four tests. I didn't learn anything, so I just stopped doing it." I'm like, "You're an idiot." This is actually a systematic process you have to do over and over and over again. This is why it's hard. This is why most companies actually do not do this.
Peep Laja:
How do you systematically create, and encourage this growth mindset?
Casey Carey:
Yeah. This is actually one of the harder ones, right? Some people will come to the table naturally with that mindset, which is awesome. You should look for that, and hire for that. But you've got others that you have to encourage, and help them develop, right? If you have an existing culture that punishes failure or doesn't encourage risk taking, it's going to be really hard to have a growth mindset active in the culture, right? You have to start at that high level and say, "This is what we care about. This is what's important to us." One of the things I did at Google, I was trying to figure out a way to make this real, so we actually created a quarterly failure report. What we did is, we sat down at the end of each quarter, and we documented three or four things that we failed at. The reason I did that was to create an environment, where we're actually celebrating failures.
Obviously, the big win there is what did you learn, and what are you going to do differently, and really connecting that too. Almost taking this idea of failure, and codifying it, and putting ceremony around it really makes that statement about we care about learning, we care about risk taking, and we're going to celebrate it along the way.
Peep Laja:
Is that like the move fast and break things, same mentality?
Casey Carey:
Yeah, same mentality. I think there's another dimension here, and this is, it is really powerful, it's just the idea of feedback, and that it's not the manager to employee feedback, it's peer to peer feedback. If you can create a culture that's founded in a learning mindset, and feedback is part of that learning mindset, and that every day I'm looking to get better, and I'm asking my peers to provide that feedback, and that opportunity for growth, if you can unlock that piece of it, you will 10X the learning mindset, and the power that comes from it.
Peep Laja:
To play the devil's advocate here, how do we balance high standards with permission to fail? Let me give you an example, if we say, "Hey. Yeah, it's fine to make mistakes as long as we're learning," and then people could get sloppy, careless, shipping half-assed things. It reminds me of Steve Jobs said, "Everything is either fucking great or total shit." It's like binary. I'm with you about celebrate learnings, and we screw it up. Okay, so what? But what if that's permission to do a shitty job?
Casey Carey:
I think it's a really important distinction, right? Quality is never sacrificed. If you're shipping quickly, you're reducing the scope of the quantity, but the quality's always still an expectation, and it's something personally, I'm very passionate about. I think sometimes as marketers, we get lazy that we're just shipping stuff, and that we're not paying attention to the quality. It goes back to more of that outcome mindset, and that actually quality matters most in driving the biggest impact, and the biggest outcomes, so we're actually going to do less, and we're going to do it better.
Peep Laja:
We need to reframe the way we think about that fail fast, fail often mindset. It's not about failing, but learning. Yes, it's important not to be afraid of failure. The word seems so final. Let's focus on learning often and fast. Like Casey says, "You got to have both, high standards and a culture of learning." The balancing act is that quality should never be sacrificed. You get speed from reducing scope and quantity. Do, fail, learn. The final ingredient in this recipe is trust. You create a culture where risk taking is encouraged. You have to create an environment where your people feel safe enough to risk failure. Casey did that by formalizing how his team processes failure via his failure report, if there are other ways to build that culture of trust. Here's Photobox's Jody Ford breaking down the formula he uses to build trust in his organization.
Jody Ford:
What are the component parts of trust? How do you even discuss trust in an organization, where we're all about our OKRs, we're all about our strategies, but when you're trying to lead a team, how do you create trust? First of all, reliability, it's that sense. Are they the person who throws you in front of the bus, when they're presenting to the CEO, or can you rely on them in those moments of need? Next up, credibility. This is what we spend all of our time doing. Our professional qualifications, are you an engineer's engineer? It's the quality of your pitch book, how smart are you at the whiteboard. Another component, intimacy. When you begin to unpack that, it's about being vulnerable, it's about being human, and it's about being authentic. Things we are beginning to talk about in a professional environment. And then there's a final factor here, which is about self-orientation.
If you are only in it for yourself, it doesn't matter how good those three are, people don't trust you. You can think about people in your life, you can think about politicians, or business leaders. You have to be able to show that you care, and you're going to do things for others, not just for yourself. This equation, when you can do these things at scale, they're hugely impactful, and drive trust far quicker, and allow the organization to move, as a result.
Peep Laja:
When we look at the company you were at, Quantive, you guys have had some very impressive growth. Some numbers I was able to find online, it's like 400% a year, 300% a year. Pace has been very, very quick. What do you attribute this success to?
Casey Carey:
Yeah. We've been very fortunate to be, to some degree, in the right place at the right time. But it was hard-earned, at the same time. A lot of the growth is just coming from organizations, particularly coming out of the pandemic and just, I'll quote some of the things we hear from some of our prospects. I don't know what's going on in the company. I don't understand the status of these things. I see instances where we're working crosswise, we're not aligned, right? We're seeing is either senior leaders or executives within companies really looking at strategically, how do we create that alignment? How do we create the right priorities, and how do we create the agility around how we operate, and the direction of the business, and whether it's the age of uncertainty around pandemics, and then recessions, and other things, or it's new generations of work that have different expectations? There's a lot of megatrends that are really, I think, making companies set up and look and say, "We actually need to operate differently, because the environment's changed. The status quo is not going to get us there, and we need the tools in place."
I think, ultimately, it's an outcome of the digitization of work in a lot of cases, right? That's changed the rules and expectations, and so how we strategically think about the business, and how we execute those strategies is now front and center for the leadership teams.
Peep Laja:
It's interesting that you did not say, oh, it was that ABM campaign we launched story. It was, oh, there still we're killing it. In the bigger picture, how do we win, and how do we grow 2X year-over-year or whatever? There's a bigger macroeconomic thing, suddenly there's demand for something. Then there's overall strategic play, like business strategy was just right for the time. And then there are the tactical things like that ABM campaign. How do you think about all these things in terms of how they fit together?
Casey Carey:
I think being in the right place, with the right product, at the right time is hugely important. Timing is a big part of it, right? There's plenty of examples of companies who had the right idea and the right product, but the wrong time, right? Hate the term category creation, but in some ways, I almost like to think about it more as a movement, right? We see businesses changing or wanting to change, and strategically thinking differently about how they go, and we just happen to have some technology that can help with that, right? How do we take advantage of that moment in time, and really, ultimately, create a bigger movement around that, right? If I look back 10 years from now, and we say this was the time when most businesses rethought how they operate, and the expectations that they have, and in terms of how they empower people, how fast they run, how agile they are, how strategically they're making the right choices, those types of things, then I would be very happy to have been a part of that and contributed in some way to that, right?
Really, almost a tectonic shift. It may be 10 years before that becomes significant, but we see definitely the green shoots of that happening. And then back again, we still have to run. We still have to be good at what we do. We have to run ABM campaigns. We have to be great at paid search. We will chase and run after new things that we think will drive the business. Community-led growth is a big thing, right now, that we're investing in. Interestingly, we serve all markets, so we've got a free forever unlimited user products. We're doing PLG at the low end of the market. We're running enterprise sales plays, and motions, and the Fortune 1000 or 500 companies, right? Our goal ultimately is ubiquity. If you read Jeffrey Moore, he will tell you that that's a recipe for failure. We believe the time is right, and that we can pull it off, so we're a little crazy in that regard.
Peep Laja:
Timing is everything in business, and luck, and timing are very closely aligned. I ask at the beginning of every episode, how much is strategy, and how much is luck? The conclusion I've come to, is that around 50% of the reason that people win is luck. That's not to say that these people aren't smart. You also have to execute well, whatever the idea is. Planning for timing is very hard. No one saw COVID coming, but a bunch of companies that started right before it won big, because they were solving problems that became massive during those years. As an example, problems like hiring remote employees, and taking care of their payroll globally. These kind of companies were lucky with their timing, and they won big. Getting your timing right may be difficult, but observing trends in the market, in order to create your own luck, is something you can do. Here's Drift's David Cancel, on a previous episode of How to Win, explaining how he did just that.
David Cancel:
At this point of being an entrepreneur, and being curious, I think about in terms of not necessarily what I want to create, but really about spotting trends that are happening, megatrends, changes in human behavior. When I looked at them, and spent a lot of time deeply thinking about them, I thought that everything that I had built in the past, which was solely marketing and sales software, it was made for a world that didn't exist anymore. That it was made for a world where the companies were scarce, and because of that, they could dictate their sales process, and the delivery process, and inflict that on the buyer or the customer, because those customers and buyers had no choice. We were going to a world of infinite supply and in that world that we thought the power would shift to the buyer, to all of us, the individuals. That was the observation, and it was a pretty quick aha moment and being like, if that's true, and if our timing is right, that both of those conditions need to be correct for it to work, then everything has to be rethought, reimagined.
Then we need to create new categories. We've created one, but there had to be probably multiple categories to describe this, and all the software, and all the services, and more importantly, the human processes that we're used to would all have to change.
Peep Laja:
Now, if you're a company number 250 in a already mature category, you're an email marketing tool, while there's a lot of demand for what you sell, there's also, it's sameness everywhere. Everybody has every feature, and big companies have built up a lot of brand equity that as a new player you can't really copy. What would you do in that circumstance?
Casey Carey:
I think the answer is, A, can you find a different place to play? Usually, that's identifying a niche, finding a space that's underserved that you can build out, and claim ground in. If you're successful doing that, maybe one of the big players will buy you, because they see that opportunity. Or you can use it as a beachhead maybe to grow into a broader position within the market, right? But always believe competing head-to-head against the market dominant players is never a way to win, right? You're going to be under-resourced, you don't have the brand, a reputation. Your cost of acquisition's going to be extremely high, the deck is stacked against you, right? You really have to find those areas where you can be different, it's underserved, the big players don't care about it or haven't paid attention to it. And then how can you leverage that? It's interesting, some of the big players, the smarter ones will play the second, but scale strategy, right?
They wait for other companies to identify these latent needs. They look to see, is it a real thing or not, and then they will either copy or acquire that technology, and roll it into their overall offering, right? Big companies are really good at that. Even if you find and stake out that ground, if it's big enough, like I said, you may get acquired or you may have a competitor coming into your space pretty quickly.
Peep Laja:
You said that you believe that in B2B, brand is now more important than ever. Can you elaborate on that?
Casey Carey:
I think it goes back to, in a lot of ways, particularly mid to bottom of the funnel. If we look at the buyer's journey, competition is ferocious, right? We're all running paid search, we're all running display, we're all running APM, we're putting on events, and we're building communities. We're all running the same playbooks, trying to capture as much in market demand as you can. At that point, it's a transaction. It's based on price and features, and so it's not where you want to start the relationship, it's at the bottom of the funnel. The idea behind brand is, if you believe every buyer will come to the table with a preferred vendor when they start their journey, you should do everything you can to be that preferred vendor going into that conversation. That's how I think about our brand investments, and why brand is so important as part of our overall growth strategy is, we want to be the preferred vendor when that decision process starts, because we know if we do that, we can have higher win rates, we can command a higher ASP, all those types of things.
I think it's a great question, given the times right now, because what's happening is, with depressed demand as part of an ongoing economic uncertainty, everyone is doubling down on demand capture, right? Me and all my competitors are getting as good as we can get at demand capture. Some of us will have an opportunity to actually create a moat long-term, and invest in our brand, invest in the things that give us an advantage in 12 or 18 months when times turn around, right? Interestingly, the last 10 years, having financial resources, everybody had it. It was kind of a equal playing field for the next 18 months, it's no longer equal. Those who can invest, and build moats over the next 18 months will be the long-term winners.
Peep Laja:
How do we ensure that we get inside the buyer's consideration set, and build up mental availability, so when they're ready to buy, they think of us? One key aspect, do non-stop marketing to all category buyers. Here's Byron Sharp, author of How Brands Grow, to explain.
Byron Sharp:
One of the clear lessons, and it doesn't really matter what size your budget is, whatever size your budget is, spread it out, so that you have coverage. I mean, that will help you actually gain more reach, but you need that coverage over time as well. Every day, some consumers make a decision to buy, and you never know when they're going to come into the market, right? You've got to be there. If you go off-air for six months, well, that means the six months is the minimum distance since they last saw something from you. For some, it'll be much, much longer than that. It's a cultural disease we have in marketing, campaign orientation. Yeah, that's right. Do campaigns, do a big burst, feel very excited by it, and then stop, and have a rest, and regroup, and plan. This is quite bizarre, because the market is still going on, while we're doing all this resting and planning.
Peep Laja:
Winning on brands, so meaning that buyers come in already preferring you as a preferred vendor. That means that, A, you need to nail the mental availability game. You want to advertise broadly to all category buyers, so they know about you. But also, you need to win the brand preference war, so they actually prefer you. How do you do that?
Casey Carey:
Yeah, you're right. It's a combination of awareness, but then it's perception and preference, right? That's where it gets hard, and it's really, and not surprising the answer, right? It's customer advocacy, third-party validation, helping. This is part of our ubiquity strategy, helping people come in with low friction, free products, great support, lots of resources, because everybody is in a different maturity, and so are we investing in those who are in the early stage, and are we creating that brand preference as they mature, and their needs become more sophisticated, and advance into more paid offerings, right? Investing in multiple parts of that journey, so that we can help create that preference at the right time.
Peep Laja:
What are some strategies that have made a major difference across Casey's career? One, create a learning mindset in your company culture.
Casey Carey:
You can create a culture that's founded in a learning mindset, and feedback is part of that learning mindset, and that every day I'm looking to get better, and I'm asking my peers to provide that feedback, and that opportunity for growth. If you can unlock that piece of it, you will 10X the learning mindset, and the power that comes from it.
Peep Laja:
Two, don't underestimate the importance of timing.
Casey Carey:
I think, being in the right place, with the right product, at the right time is hugely important. There's plenty of examples of companies who had the right idea and the right product, but the wrong time.
Peep Laja:
Three, build a moat around your brand.
Casey Carey:
Those who can invest, and build moats over the next 18 months will be the long-term winners.
Peep Laja:
One last takeaway from Casey.
Casey Carey:
I think sometimes as marketers, we get lazy that we're just shipping stuff, and that we're not paying attention to the quality. Actually, the quality matters most in driving the biggest impact, and the biggest outcomes, so we're actually going to do less and we're going to do it better.
Peep Laja:
That's how you win. I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn, or Twitter. Thanks for listening.