Don't create a category, do this instead (with Kyle Coleman)

Kyle is back on the show - this time we grill him on category creation, and finding a problem to market instead.

He should know, he saw a category and problem get created at Clari, and is running the playbook again at Copy.ai.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:45) - The TLDR of Kyle's presentation at Exit5
• (03:27) - Are you differentiated?
• (06:44) - How are you going to get the sale funded?
• (09:42) - The stupid & simple questions to ask
• (15:30) - Practical Implementation and Results
• (18:55) - Am I the GTM bloat??
• (23:18) - The Copy AI Pitch
• (25:03) - Creating a Category Narrative
• (26:23) - The Lightning Strike
• (27:42) - Focusing on the Problem vs. Category
• (30:24) - What changes in the day to day?
• (32:33) - Lessons Learned at Clari
• (38:59) - Connecting Positioning to Demand Generation
• (43:01) - The AI Tailwinds

Sources & mentions

• Brendan Huffords TL;DR of Kyle's presentation
• Play bigger, Christopher Lochhead & the category pirates
• Drive by ExitFive
• Check the framework here

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Creators & Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

Guest

Kyle Coleman

CMO @ Copy.ai || Helping companies eliminate GTM Bloat 🐡

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.

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

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Mikkel: Are you the right category?
[00:00:02] and if you aren't, should you go and create one?
[00:00:04] Kyle Coleman: I think it's far more important to identify the problem and evangelize that problem than it is necessarily to quote unquote, create a new category.
[00:00:12] Mikkel: We invited Kyle Coleman back on the show
[00:00:15] to share his experience with building a narrative
[00:00:17] that creates pipeline.
[00:00:19] Kyle Coleman: You have to go high inside of organizations. If you're selling through individual contributors and managers, you might have some success, but your ceiling is going to be just lower than if you sell into the executives.
[00:00:30] in order to compel those executives to take action, you need to attach yourself to a problem that is an executive level problem. And you need to make sure that the executives understand your point of view on how you're going to take them from this universe of the problem existing to this world where you've solved that problem and all the things that's going to unlock for them.
[00:00:50] Mikkel: Do you want to know exactly how he did it? Well, keep on listening because he'll share his playbook in this episode. Enjoy!
[00:00:58] Kyle Coleman: I thought he was going to stand off, off screen the whole time.
[00:01:01] Toni: Yeah. It would be better for the audience, wouldn't it?
[00:01:05] Kyle Coleman: I hear a lot of feedback
[00:01:07] on that front.
[00:01:09] Mikkel: There you go. I missed the entire joke here, which is funny, which is the funny part. Um, yeah,
[00:01:14] good, good, good.
[00:01:16] So nice to have you on. And the thing is, I was just saying to Toni, maybe we should ask Kyle if he wants to be a regular guest, but now I'm on the fence. I gotta say I'm on the fence. Now it's uh, it's what two months ago we recorded, I want to say something like that. super excited actually to get you on again.
[00:01:35] it was great fun last time and it was definitely one of the top episodes. so maybe we can beat it today.
[00:01:41] Kyle Coleman: Wonderful. All right. So it's the royalty check I assume is in the mail.
[00:01:44] Mikkel: yeah, yes,
[00:01:47] all, all, all three and a half dollars
[00:01:49] there should be.
[00:01:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, we can put you on, on OTE. That's totally fine. can, we can do stuff like that.
[00:01:56] Now we're talking. I mean, the marketing guy is learning some sales talk. It's osmosis.
[00:02:01] Osmosis, all of it.
[00:02:02] I feel like we probably need to kind of cut the beginning of the conversation into this, you know, because we're like already going.
[00:02:07] He always does this and it's like, oh, it's so easy to do in post production. What's going to happen? And I literally just some clickety clack. I literally had to tell him today. It's like I was editing one video. So the, the video files, they're like 30 gigabyte because it's 4k My laptop just stops working at a point when I zoom in enough on the timeline. Tell us more Mikkel, it's really interesting. No, I mean, your intro last time was printers. So, it's at least an upgrade. Let's do the kick off question for Mr. Coleman here. Okay, so, we saw a LinkedIn post. That's usually how we do all these episodes.
[00:02:42] We just peruse LinkedIn what's there and what should we talk about.
[00:02:45] But we noticed one thing, and it was actually not you posting. It was someone posting about you. And you were presenting at Exit5's Drive Conference that Dave Gerhart and team has created. And you talked a bit about the whole, let's say category creation that happened at Clari and Copy AI.
[00:03:02] And we found that, super interesting. So we were wondering, can you give us like an AI summary on what this presentation was really about?
[00:03:09] Kyle Coleman: An AI summary, of course. Well, first of all, great to see you guys again. Pleasure to be here. Um,
[00:03:14] Toni: you.
[00:03:16] Kyle Coleman: so shout out to the exit five team, to Dave and Dan and all the rest. Like it was an awesome, awesome conference in Burlington, Vermont, which is a beautiful place. Especially we were there in September.
[00:03:25] Perfect time of year, just gorgeous. So shout out to them.
[00:03:27] The purpose of the presentation was to have people thinking about The flywheels that they can create across their marketing and sales and entire go to market function. And what are, I think the mistake that a lot of people make is they really over index when they're thinking about go to market and they're thinking about pipeline generation, they're thinking about revenue, they over index on the, what Chris Walker would call the demand capture components of that funnel. We're going to do these events and we're going to serve these ads, or we're going to send these outbound emails, and we're going to, this is how we're going to create pipeline. And what I was trying to, the point I was trying to hammer home at the event was, yes, we need to do all of those things, but you can't skip the things that are upstream of that, which is to say, why should people care about the events that you're doing, the emails that you're sending, the ads that you're serving? And I think a lot of companies, especially a lot of startups, but this is, I think plaguing all of technology. They focus entirely on their product. They think the best product wins. They market a lot of the features or capabilities of their product. And frankly, it's just not that interesting. It gets lost in the sea of noise that every single one of our buyers is experiencing right now.
[00:04:37] And there's no real compelling narrative that differentiates one company from another. And so to hammer this point home, one of the slides in the presentation I gave at this event was prior to my joining Copy. ai. This was in my interview deck when I presented, you know, the panel presentation as part of my interview for Copy AI. I had four screenshots of Copy AI and three other competitors or quasi competitors, and I just said to the executive team that was interviewing me, like, you tell me what the differentiation is here. Like, if I swap the logos, would you even be able to tell,
[00:05:09] would you know, all of these words are the same and more important, all of these words mean nothing. To the audience. You, executive team at Copy. ai, are technologists. You've been obsessed with AI for three and a half years. That's longer than most people have known how to spell AI. And yet you're indexing toward these things, you're going to lose people immediately. So we need to change, if we are, repositioning from a PLG perspective. Application to a sales led enterprise tops down type company. We need to fundamentally change the top line messaging that we have, the positioning that we have, the category that we are in. So that was the impetus for my starting at Copy AI as a CMO. That was the sort of beginning of the presentation that I gave during the exit five conference, and I hope that's a useful lead into this conversation today.
[00:05:58] Mikkel: I think we're going to have so much fun today because, I have an onboarding slide I use, and I'm not gonna lie, I use it at every company I've worked at. It's uh, the Orange Juice Test. So I basically have a picture of a aisle in a grocery store with orange juice. And it's just, you know, you know what I mean? You have that mental picture where it's just the same, the same, the same, the same. I think it's, it's a really difficult task though. And how, how do you start, start such an endeavor? Because one thing is just showing those founders that, hey, you're not standing out here on the shelves. How do you start the journey of then changing that position?
[00:06:35] Which it almost kind of is really. So
[00:06:38] Kyle Coleman: it's
[00:06:38] a great question. So I think
[00:06:39] there's two different threads to pull here. And then from there, there's a lot of different avenues.
[00:06:44] Thread number one, how are you going to compel a company to make a purchasing decision in 2024 and beyond when everybody is tightening the purse strings? And everybody is frankly a little skeptical of technology that they've bought and has under delivered, let's say, on the promise.
[00:07:00] So people are skeptical. So how are you going to get that project funded? It has to be an executive level sale. How is your product going to be sticky? It has to be entrenched at the executive level. So that's point number one. You have to go high inside of organizations. If you're selling through individual contributors and managers, you might have some success, but your ceiling is going to be just lower than if you sell into the executives.
[00:07:24] So that's point number one. Point number two is in order to compel those executives to take action, you need to attach yourself to a problem that is an executive level problem. And you need to make sure that the executives understand your point of view on how you're going to take them from this universe of the problem existing to this world where you've solved that problem and all the things that's going to unlock for them. So, executive level problem. Selling to, and hopefully creating a lot of stickiness at the C suite inside the organizations that you speak with. If you can find the right way to architect your narrative against those two things, you're going to be in much better shape than focusing entirely on your technology, your capabilities, your features.
[00:08:07] Mikkel: this is super interesting. and we're going to start unpacking, I think your playbook. Now starting with this point here, right? so there's two facets you mentioned. It's like, how to buy, basically the ROI uh, you need to kind of define. And we've had an episode with Sangam Vajre he has a really good framework.
[00:08:23] GoToMarketPartners has a great framework you can use to figure out the ROI. And then how do you tackle the execs? How did you go about this at Copy. ai? Like, how did you take these steps practically speaking?
[00:08:33] Kyle Coleman: Yeah. So I, I don't want to push back too much on the ROI framing cause I do think it's important, but I think it's less important than a lot of people think. Like you are at a very high level. You don't necessarily, when I've purchased technology, I've never been super compelled by, you know, the ROI numbers that are given to me, like, Oh, you're going to get 546%.
[00:08:53] It's like, come on, this is all bullshit. What compels me is you've made it, you understand my business, you've made an effective business case. You've talked to me about how you're going to help save hard costs inside the business, whether that's personnel spend or program spend or tech spend or something like that, and that's the case that I'm going to take. To my executive team, that's the business case that I'm going to really attach myself to, and that's what I want reported against in the quarterly executive business reviews that we do. So like, you don't, I don't think you have to get super mired in the 800 row spreadsheet that has all of the levers and knobs for your super precise ROI thing.
[00:09:30] It's just not that compelling to executives, frankly. But putting that aside and actually answering your question, the, the way to start this journey of positioning, repositioning, and understanding the executive level problems is.
[00:09:42] Asking people, and this is what I did inside of Copy. ai. I, for the first few weeks that I was at the company, I must've had 60 or 70 different conversations with employees, with customers, with investors, with board members, with everybody I could speak with.
[00:09:55] And I asked them these stupid, simple question, which is, what is the problem that we solve for whom, and what is the impact of solving that problem? Those three simple questions. And 60 or 70 conversations later, I had, guess how many different answers, 60 or
[00:10:10] 70 different answers. And so the job from there is to collate.
[00:10:15] The job from there is to understand what are all these different, why are we able to solve all these different problems? Why do different stakeholders across our company, the head of engineering thinks this, but the head of sales thinks this, like, and it's a pretty, it's related, but pretty different. Like what is the right unifying principle that will allow us to tell a consistent story to get everybody on the same page.
[00:10:36] And again, going back to what we talked to, making sure that we're solving the executive level problem. I don't want to go in and just talk about weird. The problem that we're solving for companies is they need to use AI. And we're an AI company. Not compelling. I need to make it, I need to attach it to a real problem.
[00:10:52] And it starts with like spending a unbelievable amount of time, just interrogating people to try and understand what are they seeing in the market? What are they feeling? And then we can do the synthesis later.
[00:11:03] Toni: so both. Revenue leak so this is the Clary problem people that know, don't know this. And GTM bloat, which is the, the copy AI problem. both of them super short, two, two words, two, you know, very kind of very concise in that sense. High level, to the point that making. But people could also say it's abstract, it's fluffy
[00:11:26] when you read it, you don't immediately know what it is, right?
[00:11:29] It's not the, yeah, I have revenue leak at home, for example, it's, it's, it's, it's not the, oh, you know, schedule your, your, your, your meetings with a calendly link or kind of send a loom video, kind of, it's not that level of simplicity, right? It's a little bit higher level sure people were like, Hey, Kyle, this is too high level.
[00:11:47] This is a problem. What's your, what's your answer to that?
[00:11:51] Kyle Coleman: The, the answer is, comes from the reaction that you get when you have a chance to present the full point of view to the executives that you're trying to compel. I promise you, I love Calendly. I use Calendly. CRO doesn't give a shit that it's going to make booking easier for reps.
[00:12:07] They don't care. So there has to be something higher level or else you're never going to get an org wide deployment of Calendly.
[00:12:13] You might still get that PLG motion because the sales rep's like, great, this is going to make scheduling a lot easier. But the CRO is, there's no way you're going to compel her to make a decision based on that messaging.
[00:12:22] So I did all of my interviews. I understood the problem we solve for whom we solve it and the impact of solving it. I collated that and synthesized it into a short, very short, like 30 second, maybe 60 second POV, point of view narrative that goes something like this. And I'm going offhand here. I'm not reading from my slides or speaker notes, or forgive me if I get this a little bit wrong, but it goes something like this. The last couple of years have been rough for go to market teams. Your customer acquisition costs are skyrocketing, your lifetime values are decreasing, and your company valuation is plummeting. And the, one of the main reasons for this is your go to market engine is the most expensive, least efficient part of your business. The problem that's plaguing your go to market engine is this problem of go to market bloat. It's the accumulation of all these investments you've made across technology and processes and hyper specialists across your go to market engine that are delivering underwhelming results. AI can solve this problem, but only if implemented correctly, you need a go to market AI strategy that is systematically infused across your entire go to market engine. And if you do that, well, you can flip the script and you can turn that go to market bloat into real go to market velocity. That's sustainable and enduring, and it's going to fundamentally change your financial profile, making you attractive to public investors, private investors, if you're raising money and everything in between.
[00:13:42] Let's show you how.
[00:13:42] Toni: Yeah.
[00:13:43] Kyle Coleman: so that definition of go to market bloat and being able to kind of draw it out and attach to executive level metrics, when I'm presenting that to executives, they are always nodding and they're like, yes, this is the biggest problem we've been trying to solve for the last couple of years.
[00:13:59] And the only lever we've really had is like cut technology spend or lay off a shitload of people, and it hasn't solved anything. Because we're still, we still have the same problem of really manual processes and inefficiencies and all the rest, siloed people, siloed data. And so we, like they're nodding along and you're right immediately.
[00:14:19] They've never heard this phrase before, go to market bloat, but that's very intentional. Because now it sticks in their mind and the reaction is the right reaction, which is first a little quizzical, like, huh? And then, ah, I get this now. And the real litmus test for me guys is that by the end of the presentation, whether it's a five minute call or a 15 or 30 minute meeting or whatever, by the end of that call, they are using the phrase back to me. They are talking about bloat. They are talking about velocity. They've adopted the language. And I'm like getting chills thinking about it right now. Cause like it's inception. You're, you're, but it's, you're not necessarily manipulating people. They're already thinking about this. You've just given them language to communicate it.
[00:15:00] And this is the problem that we're attaching to. And so now when we're selling our go to market AI platform, otherwise known as copy AI, we're not attaching to like, what's the email open rate of our outbound emails. Like all of that stuff is super low level. What we're attaching to is how are we like fundamentally changing the CAC at this company? How are we changing the light, the LTV, the NRR, the NDR, all of these metrics that actually matter to executive teams, to boards, and that's what we're measured against.
[00:15:30] So if we can have, you know, a 5 percent decrease in CAC, that's going to pay for everything, every investment that they're making in our solution.
[00:15:38] And so that's the, like we plant the seeds early. We get to executives a lot earlier in our deals as a result.
[00:15:45] And ever since we rolled out and finesse this messaging, we've Our ACVs have tripled and our deal cycle times have been cut in half. We've had 20 percent or better AR total growth and total ARR for five straight months. So we're going to grow four to five X this year. As a result, you know, it starts of course with the product, but then it goes into the positioning and then it pays off with pricing and packaging. But it's that kind of one, two, three punch. That's all interrelated. That's helped the company accelerate in an unbelievable way.
[00:16:14] Mikkel: Yeah, I kinda like this Litmus
[00:16:17] test because I was going to ask next, how do you know whether you have the right problem? And I think your point on while you can see them adopting your language and another challenge, at least we've discussed in the past, going through these kinds of exercises is also.
[00:16:30] Is it going to be believable that we can actually solve this problem, right? If you're back to the calendar booking example, are they really going to believe that we're going to make a material impact on whatever big problem we're creating? How, how do you go about making sure that that works out as well as you're building the problem?
[00:16:48] Kyle Coleman: So you have to, it has to be paid off with the demos that you show, the product capabilities that you have. Like if there's no through line between the narrative that you show, the demos that you have, and then how that actually turns into implementations, then obviously. You're going to lose major credibility.
[00:17:05] So you have to make sure it's, it's easier said than done, obviously, but you have to make sure that you have that through line and that you have that messaging that is cascading across every single thing that you do.
[00:17:16] So when I'm talking to, as an example, when I'm talking to chief marketing officers, The go to market bloat that I am focused on, I'm talking to them about using AI for content creation or some, you know, maybe some smaller use case like that.
[00:17:30] And the go to market bloat that I'm talking about is this cabal of agencies and freelancers and consultants and PR firms and all this huge mass. Like we're talking five figures a month, easy at small companies and sometimes six figures a month, just being spent on this. And when I talk to other CMOs, that's the bloat that I'm focused on. And I just needle the pain and I just ask them about, you know, how many writers do you have on your team? You don't even know. How much are you spending? 25, 000 a month on a PR firm that gives you how much thought leadership? One article a quarter. Okay. We can do all of this for 3k a month. And like, it fundamentally changes the way they think about things.
[00:18:11] So you really needle the pain, you continue to attach to the elements of the problem that you've defined. So in this case, the go to market bloat is this over investment in all these, the cabal of external resources. And you make the business case because you're able, you're able to say, you can keep some of these folks and I'm sure some of them are doing great work, but all of them probably are not. And so you can justify the cost of this by straight, keep it budget neutral. At a minimum and take the cost out and reinvest here. And I promise you, you're going to see these results. And then during an implementation, it's very clear on what we need to do. We need to outstrip the performance of that content creation you know, machinery that they had before and just use AI to do a lot of it.
[00:18:52] Toni: I have a super down to earth practical question, actually.
[00:18:55] so
[00:18:55] when you think about the positioning and the problem statement and it's on your website, right. you
[00:19:00] know, some people would give the advice, Hey, who, who in the organization, who in the, who in the, in the buying organization, who's going to do the research, who's going to find you, It's probably not going to be the CMO. It's probably not going to be the CRO. you know, it's going to be someone lower, further down in the pyramid, so to speak. Right.
[00:19:17] will there be alienated by running into a high level problem like this and be like, Oh, GTM bloat. Maybe he's talking about me. Maybe I'm the GTM. It's like, have you, have you, have you, have you thought about, and I'm sure you have kind of, you know, how did you, how did you
[00:19:32] how did you cross that basically?
[00:19:33] Kyle Coleman: Yeah. It's a really good question. And the, the answer is that it's not that we don't care. It's that every single leader inside their company is aware of where this exists inside their organization. So the SDR leader knows, Oh, we have, you know, five different tools for data enrichment. What are we doing?
[00:19:56] We're not using them all. We have all of these licenses for this technology. And we've, you know, 5 percent of our team logs in every month. We're not using this. So everybody knows where there's bloat, whether that's across this application sprawl that they have, or they know where the inefficiencies exist. And I'll just keep using SDR as an example
[00:20:13] here. Like it takes our SDR three hours to build an account plan. What if we could do that in five minutes? What, how does that change? And we help SDR leaders think about this. It's not just that, okay, now your team has two hours and 55 minutes to send a billion more emails.
[00:20:28] Like, no, no, no, that's not what we're talking about here. They have more time to execute much more thoughtfully, creatively, strategically, the, you are going to scale intent. You're not going to scale volume. So here's how you're going to scale intent across your buying group, which means you're going to compel a more executive audience, which means you're going to create higher velocity pipeline at a higher clip, which means. You don't need as many SDRs next year. And I don't mean lay people off. I mean, we're going to get back to responsible growth and we're going to be able to extend your SDR ratio from one SDR to two AEs, let's extend that to one to three, maybe one to four. And now SDR director, you're going to be a hero inside of your business.
[00:21:06] You're going to be able to take this over to your finance partner and say, here's my headcount plan for next year. And it's 50 percent less than you thought it was going to be. That's a savings of, at some companies, seven figures on
[00:21:16] personnel spend. And so this is how the, this is how we're having, This version of conversation with, it's normally at a director plus level, if I'm honest guys, like
[00:21:24] I understand it can be somewhat threatening to, to folks that are a little bit lower level, but people that are lower level individual contributors, I should say, they understand this as well.
[00:21:32] Like we talk to content marketing people all the time. The wrong perspective is, Oh, this is going to take my job. The right perspective from content marketing people is I spend all this time doing work I don't want to do. Codify my best practice and let me go do the podcast and do the video stuff and do the higher leverage, more fun, more human type stuff.
[00:21:52] So we're starting to like free people from the shackles of how work gets done today so that they can go and expand the channels that they work on. And frankly, I do work that for many of them, not for all of them, but for many of them, it's just more interesting and higher leverage.
[00:22:04] Mikkel: So I want to get even more practical because we could let this go now and move on, right? But I also just, I see a scenario where you've been the meeting room and everyone goes like, okay, GTM bloat. High five. It's decided. All hands. Okay. Team go to market bloat. That's the problem. And we solve questions.
[00:22:22] What, what do you do once you've kind of defined what the problem is, what needs to happen internally? Is there any kind of documentation? What needs to get built here in order to start using it?
[00:22:31] Kyle Coleman: Yeah, I, I wish we, if I could share my screen, I could show you like the whole, we use Notion internally for our collaboration. So like I have all of this documented.
[00:22:40] All of the way that we've thought about the category, the key language to use, the sales collateral that falls out, how to talk about it at an executive level, how to talk about it at an individual level, like up and down the food.
[00:22:51] Like I said, it takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of buy in from the executive team and it takes unbelievable repetition inside your company over and over and over and over again to make sure that it's actually cascading and sticking in all the right ways.
[00:23:07] Mikkel: I'm going to put you on, the spot here.
[00:23:08] Can we share this template in the show notes with the audience? So if you're listening right now, you'll go, ah, that sounds awesome. I really want, I have that thing. So I can start looking at, do we even have it?
[00:23:18] It's basically copy AI pitch.
[00:23:20] Yeah. So, but, so they can follow like clearly you've thought about the structure and it's so much easier sometimes to follow the footsteps when there's already, Oh, that's the way to go. Right. So would that be possible? Otherwise we'll just. Cut it out, you
[00:23:32] Kyle Coleman: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:23:33] Toni: I actually
[00:23:33] Had like one thing in between, right? So. In the now world, you know, in the presence, we're like, Oh, GTM bloat.
[00:23:40] That's obviously what it is. And everyone bought into this and high five. And that's actually, but I know how this is in the executive room when, when this is being brought up and being presented. Right. And then people are like, Oh, I'm not so sure. And maybe this, and, and it's usually not just one idea.
[00:23:55] It's usually two or three. And then you have the CEO sleeping on it, waking up and flip flopping and like, ah, you know, It's like, how do you, how do you create this lock in, right? How do you make this, how do you get to the point where like, no, shut up, founder. I know what you think, but this is the right thing.
[00:24:12] And here's why kind of, how did you get to this lock in basically with the organization or with the executive team rather?
[00:24:18] Kyle Coleman: Yeah, this it takes a couple of things. Number one, it takes an executive team that is open minded and is I'm going to say more risk tolerant because this type of approach is risky. It's a
[00:24:32] lot safer to go and serve ads that say AI for content marketing. We can quadruple the content you create. Way easier to go and do that.
[00:24:42] It's way harder to have an executive team commit to this longer term play. That's more disruptive and frankly, just more interesting to do. So it takes executive level buy in. It takes an executive team that understands the benefits of making a bet and winning that bet. So that's number one.
[00:25:03] And the way that you can compel an executive team to do that, it takes some salesmanship internally. Like, sorry, marketing leaders, you gotta be a seller. If you want to
[00:25:11] be a leadership
[00:25:13] and now I'm sorry, if you want to be a leadership function inside your organization, you need to sell the ideas. It's plain and simple. Like you need to go on the internal roadshow and you need to get people on board one by one by one by one.
[00:25:25] So after I created this category narrative, I went and shopped it around to every single leader. I got their feedback, some of the feedback I incorporated and some of the feedback I said, thanks, but no, thanks. Like, great idea. Cutting room floor can include everything. This week, we are not going to market by committee. We're going to market by how I know is the right way to do this. And you have very valid thoughts, but I can't incorporate everything. So went across the entire executive team and then all of their direct reports. So that was maybe 15 or 16 people for us and had the same conversation with all of them, presenting, getting feedback, telling them thanks, but no thanks. And then just committed to it as a company understood. And there's a, there's a book on this. It is the book on this. It's called play bigger. And I should say, if I, I'm embarrassed I haven't already, I am shamelessly stealing a lot of this from Christopher Lockhead and the Category Pirates. Like, this is not my thinking.
[00:26:16] It's my thinking for how it's manifested at Copy. ai, but this isn't by no means my blueprint, so if you want the book on this, it's called Play Bigger.
[00:26:23] And in that book, they have this concept of the lightning strike moment. Which is a very different way of thinking about marketing. The way a lot of people think about marketing, especially from a program spend standpoint, is they will just peanut butter spread their budget over 12 months, and it'll be a pretty even amount of inattention that they will get for all 12 months. The lightning strike methodology is put all your eggs in one basket and make a real splash in the market. Once every three months, once every six months, something like that. And the virtue of doing this is it galvanizes the company. It's exciting. It's exciting for employees to see the LinkedIn takeover or to see the billboard or to see the wall street journal ad or like to see their company making waves and once you make, you commit to that lightning strike day and that moment and your website changes and you've done all the internal socialization, you've done the LinkedIn stuff and all the rest, like your company's pretty bought in because they've been hearing about it for a few months and now they see it out in the wild and it's pretty exciting.
[00:27:20] So it takes the right mindset on the executive team. It takes the right leadership on the marketing team. And it takes the right coordination in the execution.
[00:27:28] Toni: So I love this also kind of love that you've referenced back actually to the book, I think what what I was actually thinking about, right, because the play bigger folks and the pirates there, I forgot they also end up with a category name,
[00:27:41] right?
[00:27:42] And it's, you know, you didn't put on the website, hey, we're the number one GTM AI system, and it's now GI, GAS for the abbreviation, you actually went ahead and kind of rather put the problem first, right?
[00:27:57] And is that also by the book actually? I don't, I mean, I've read it, but I just don't remember, or, or did you kind of do a little bit of a twist here and kind of, Hey, actually, this is the more important thing to put front and center.
[00:28:07] Kyle Coleman: Yeah.
[00:28:08] It's a really good point. a lot of people get wrapped around the axle with category creation and they think that, Oh, I don't want to create, analysts create categories or I, it seems like too much work or it's going to cost a lot of money. We need a naming agency to come up with the name of the category.
[00:28:22] So like, I understand where they're coming from. It is hard. It takes a lot of bravado to go and do a lot of what we're talking about. And again, creating a name of a category is a hard thing. I think it's far more important to identify the problem and evangelize that problem than it is necessarily to quote unquote, create a new category. That said, they kind of go hand in hand. And as I was giving you the narrative around the problem of go to market bloat, I positioned the solution as go to market AI. And I kind of slipped that by you guys, but that's a really important part of our narrative. Go to market AI is the systematic strategic way of infusing AI across your go to market engine in order to combat and solve go to market bloat. And so of course the right way to manifest that go to market AI strategy is a purpose built go to market AI platform. And that then becomes the category we're in is go to market AI. The solution that we sell is the GTM AI platform. And the problem we solve is go to market bloat. And so it's all of a piece. And for the first lightning strike that we did back in March, you're spot on. It was entirely about the problem. Let's put bloat on the homepage. Let's hammer this home. Let's get all the thought leadership. Let's do all the activations. Like, like make bloat the main stage thing. In the most recent lightning strike that we did, we inverted it. And now if you go to copy. ai today, as of a couple of weeks ago, it's all about the go to market AI platform counter positioning against AI point solutions and AI co pilots. AI copilots, add to bloat, solve that with a single unified platform. AI point solutions, add to bloat, solve that with a single unified platform. And so, we're trying both. We're trying leading with the category. We're trying leading with the problem. We're trying to do a little bit of both. We have really great . Search engine results for the problem that we solve, because we have the thought leadership on that. And now we're going to have great search engine results for go to market AI, which as far as I can tell, is an unclaimed category that we are wading into to try and own.
[00:30:21] So we're doing both. But if I had to choose one, I would choose the problem.
[00:30:24] Mikkel: So now we're at a point where we've, you know, the listener has to find the problem. They've followed your steps in this framework. We're going to share in the show notes to basically document the problem. What do you do? Because you, we kind of now getting to the point where like we added to the website, we did the lightning strikes.
[00:30:42] What are the kind of the, the pieces that get created once you then know the problem? What does it change from a marketing and a sales perspective kind of in the day to day is what I'm wondering.
[00:30:53] Kyle Coleman: Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. So it changes everything. It changes everything. It changes the way that our sales team positions. So in the past, a sales meeting would be like, thanks for taking the call. Jump into a demo or, you know, maybe lightweight slides. Here's how we can help with sales rep productivity.
[00:31:12] Jump into a demo. Like the slides were kind of a throwaway, but now the slides are critical framing and it's five slides and it's three minutes. It's not like this long thing. It's Hey, the biggest problem that's hiding in plain sight right now is go to market bloat. It's the accumulation of all these investments and people and tools and processes and all the rest that we can fix with the right approach to AI across the entire revenue life cycle.
[00:31:36] Let's show you how. And so we're planting that seed early and it makes, it requires your salespeople to be consultative value add resources who understand how businesses function, like real business acumen. You can't come in and tell that story with any degree of credibility. If you don't have a real business acumen and truly understand the metrics that the executives you're talking to care about. And so it, it fundamentally changes the way that we position everything. Every sales call that we have, the requirements of our sales reps on the meetings that they do and the way that they position everything. Not just in that first meeting, but every step of the way.
[00:32:16] Toni: So, I mean, it's ultra practical, which I love, which I love. Kyle, what were one or two things that went wrong? Kind of, what are the things where, and maybe this wasn't Clari, maybe it's a copy AI right now. What are things where something blew up or messed up?
[00:32:33] Kyle Coleman: This was probably more so at Clary than, than at CopyAI.
[00:32:37] It's been, you know, of
[00:32:38] course, well, it's, you know, it's early days still at CopyAI. So that,
[00:32:41] you know, who knows, it could still go sideways. But I think a mistake that, that I made, and nobody else's fault, but this mistake that I made at Clary was I was not nearly close enough to the field. I, I was not nearly, Persistent enough with how the category messaging made its way down to every single layer at the company, especially the individual AEs and the individual SDRs, there was a disconnect between the story that we were telling at the executive level, the managerial level, and the story that was being told at the IC level, and it was because they weren't. They, they didn't have enough context to feel fully bought in on the problem that they were solving. They didn't have all the necessary collateral that they needed for customer stories and all the things that they needed to fully tell the story with confidence, they didn't have the training that they needed to understand that Clary, the impact of revenue leak and how executives are thinking about that and how our product solves it.
[00:33:36] Like we just didn't do a good enough job with that entire through line. It's hard. And it was a lot harder at Clary because Clary was an 800 person company at the time with. You know, five, six, seven times as many sellers as we have at Copy AI. So like way harder to do that. So the lesson I learned and put into practice over the summer months here at Copy AI was I got in the field myself and I went and had the first calls and carried a quota and sold against this problem and positioned our solution against this problem and proved to the sales reps that this is an effective way to sell. And it
[00:34:14] was pretty, pretty unassailable by the end of three months when, you know, I'm number one on the leaderboard and we have all this documentation that this story is resonating. We're attaching to executive business problems, fast deal cycles, and you can do this too. And all the resources that you need are at your fingertips.
[00:34:31] Toni: yeah, I also think, so first of all, fantastic story. Like the marketing leader going out into the field, being top of the leaderboard, doing all of that stuff, you know, I wish I had a marketing leader like this. I think we're about done recording now. So, but actually kind of another takeaway here, right? If you do the If you do the positioning uh, super high level towards the executives you know, number one, it's like, oh, you know, who's researching the website and maybe it's not the executive and then they don't, they don't connect.
[00:35:02] They don't understand this. And we talked about this already, but you're kind of pointing actually in another direction here, but it's like. If you're too high up and too fluffy it's really difficult for the individual contributors in your own organization to fully get it, speak about it in confidence, you know, maybe have a conversation with a C level on the other side and not feel like they're just reading out a script of stuff that they don't actually understand, right?
[00:35:25] Kind of getting that bridge done. Needs a lot more heavy lifting the more complex and high up the problem actually becomes at least this is what I'm what I'm hearing From you when you when you talk about the the run in that you had at Clary
[00:35:37] Kyle Coleman: That's exactly right. And a lot of that can be solved by being really thorough in the thought leadership that you create as a company. Again, lesson learned inside of Clary. If, if I could turn back the hands of time, 18 to 24 months, I would pin down my CEO, my CRO, and my CFO. And I would just for like literally I would do a half day off site with them in a recording studio similar to what you guys have and I would just be peppering them with questions and getting customer insights and over and over and over again about how to do it. Has revenue leak manifested at companies that you've seen at companies that you've run? How have you seen it solved here? And I would just create this huge library of thought leadership that we can then turn into written content and podcast content, video content, whatever else it may be. And that's very similar to what we did at Copy AI.
[00:36:29] And so like I've learned a lot of lessons about the right and wrong ways to do this, but being extremely thorough about all the breadcrumbs that lead back to your high level positioning. So that you can share all of this with your sales reps and with the field. And then of course, with the market is extremely important.
[00:36:48] It's hard to do. It takes time and energy and effort. And you've got a million other things to coordinate because you're coordinating as a marketing leader, the execution of the lightning strike. But I think you absolutely need to do that. The last thing that I'll say on this of what can go wrong is this is a three legged stool here.
[00:37:04] You need the category strategy to be complemented by the company strategy as we've been talking about. So sales
[00:37:10] reps, marketing team, everybody has to be singing the same song. The third leg of the stool is the product strategy. Your product has to pay off the story that you're telling. If you can find the right ways to infuse the language that you're using in the market into your product, If you can make sure that the roadmap that you have is, and the products that you're releasing are always going to be in service of solving the problem that you're evangelizing, like this is a critical component that's very hard to do. And so I, I, I'm not going to say necessarily that went wrong at Clary. Cause I think they did a, we did a pretty nice job of that, but I can definitely see that disconnect happening between product teams and go to market teams who are almost always operating in silos.
[00:37:49] Mikkel: I mean, I've felt that pain and it's almost back to what we talked about earlier on believability. You sit there in marketing and I'm just going to say C level cooked up a vision for where we're going with a new product release, but it's really a fraction of what you need in order to sell the thing you're talking about.
[00:38:05] So when you're going to show it, you end up with, okay, so should we Fake the screenshots. We kind of have to because we will take it on the chin and I'd rather that the sellers take it on the chin, right? So it's kind of, that's critical. And uh, I think that's also why it's, it's definitely a C suite exercise, right?
[00:38:21] It has to be with the leadership, in this case, the founders. So you make sure it's a, as a collective that also the product is followed through.
[00:38:28] Kyle Coleman: Yeah, for
[00:38:28] sure.
[00:38:29] have
[00:38:29] like a
[00:38:29] very,
[00:38:30] clear that any holes that I'm poking in the execution of this at Clary is solely my, like I was leading this and so any of the shortcomings, like I, I don't want to cast blame on anybody who's, who was there at the time or is it
[00:38:43] currently there? Like ultimately this was a failure of leadership for anything that went wrong on me and I, again, turning back the hands of time with the benefit of, of you know, the, this
[00:38:53] retroactive site that we have. Yeah.
[00:38:54] Hindsight, we could we would do things differently. So, you know.
[00:38:57] First time, first time, through it.
[00:38:59] Mikkel: So you mentioned um, We fixate quite often on the whole demand capture part because it's so easy to measure, but you also need to kind of go out and create some demand with this stuff.
[00:39:10] How do you take now this whole positioning exercise and start creating, I would say even the ad level, right? How do you start connecting the dots? How do you make money with this now? Yeah, Exactly. It's called the revenue formula, you know.
[00:39:20] Kyle Coleman: That's right exactly. None of this matters if it doesn't
[00:39:24] generate revenue, again another one of my
[00:39:28] favorite quotes ffrom lockhead
[00:39:28] at the Category Pirates is he says, marketing that doesn't generate revenue is arts and crafts, arts and crafts. I couldn't agree more. And so like the, the interesting thing about the answer to this question, guys, is it is, it does a couple things.
[00:39:41] Number one, it answers your question, but number two, it shows the manifestation of the go to market AI strategy that we have internally. And so the answer to this question is you have your top level positioning and you have this interesting thought leadership. If you don't have a demand capture moment for that, then what was the point of it? Like, you need to compel people to go to the event or to read the thought leadership piece or to listen to the podcast or to go to the landing page or like there has to be something that you're driving people toward. And so, hopefully, you have your top line positioning, you have the activation to do the advertisements and you're driving people, let's say, to an event and this is what we did in March.
[00:40:22] This is what we did in October for Lightning Strikes One and Lightning Strike Two. That the event pays off the POV, the narrative, that is basically the campaign narrative for, in March, the new category creation, and then in October, the, as I talked about before, the like anti copilot, anti point solution messaging. And so the, the main event that we did was our executive team. It was myself, my CEO, and my CTO. Bringing forth this narrative and bringing forth the thought leadership from that event. You can use that transcript to create all sorts of follow on content for social, for long form content, for newsletters, for email marketing, yada, You can repurpose the recording of that event over and over and over and over and over again because you're not marketing to a standing army.
[00:41:06] You're marketing to a marching parade and you can use the same messaging Like countless times, and your audience is never going to get sick of it because they're probably only going to see it once or twice. So reusing that stuff is really important, but we're going to use AI to create all of that downstream content. And the interesting thing about that is we're going to end up creating more demand capture moments. People are going to come to our blog or they're going to come to our homepage. They're going to come to more events. They're going to raise their hand and request a demo. In that demo meeting, what's going to happen? Our sales team and our solutions team is going to tell the same story and then explore whatever use case the person wants to explore that creates yet another transcript using that transcript. We then create all the other downstream content using AI. To create more newsletters and emails and ads and blog posts and whatever else it is.
[00:41:51] And the flywheel feeds itself and it continues to spin. So we have the right thought leadership creating the right transcripts from events and meetings that is creating more content, that's driving and creating more demand. We're capturing that demand with these offers that we're making and the flywheel continues to spin.
[00:42:09] And so this is how we're thinking about things. And the, I really have buried the lead here. Maybe we open with this and work it back in, but I've been here for 10 months. I have spent now 21, 000, 21, 000 in 10 months on demand gen programs, and we've created 26 million in pipeline.
[00:42:28] And it's
[00:42:28] Toni: Yeah, I think we'll, we'll cut this into the beginning, maybe, you know.
[00:42:32] Kyle Coleman: organic.
[00:42:33] Content driven, it owned events, like you don't need to spend trillions of dollars on
[00:42:39] Google ads. Like, you need to have a point of view, you need to own that point of view, and you need to market it like a madman. And, you know, having a social following is obviously helpful, but this flywheel really spins when you have a differentiated point of view.
[00:42:53] Toni: So we probably need to maybe cut here and stuff. And we need to also be careful of your time, but because I'm just the guy.
[00:43:01] do
[00:43:01] you think, so this whole top down approach the excitement around this, There's also a little bit of just uh, just
[00:43:11] a generative AI movement. And uh, you know, basically something coming from that hype that's kind of happening right now across the whole spectrum, right?
[00:43:19] And we're not just talking copy AI versus some of the other logos in that, in that little box, it's like, no, it's like 150 billion investment into, I don't know, open AI, or maybe it wasn't the investment, maybe it was the valuation, but you know what I mean, right? There's so much other stuff going on.
[00:43:34] It
[00:43:35] is like almost an honest question.
[00:43:37] Do you think that, you know, how much does it help you guys actually of, how much do you think that that tailwind is making it possible for you to actually talk to the executives, get their buy in and then, you know, sell a much larger, wider distributed deal?
[00:43:51] Kyle Coleman: Yeah, it's a great question. and there's definitely an element of, you know, having the right market tailwind or whatever it may be, but it's only useful, like the wave is only great if you actually stand up on the surfboard, otherwise you get crushed. And so the way that I think about this and the way that we approach it is yet another concept from the category pirates, which is dam the demand.
[00:44:11] That's D A M, not, not the swear word, damming the demand, which is to say there is a lot of interest in demand for AI right now, and But it's for like ChatGPT. And so when we're doing our marketing and we have this in the campaign, we recently launched, we have a lot of marketing around the co pilot experience. And we can say, you thought you wanted ChatGPT. You thought you wanted everybody in your business to have a license to ChatGPT. What you really want is a go to market AI platform. And here's why. So we take, we take that demand, that market pull that exists, and we dam it, and we redirect it to our point of view. And so it takes skillful, it takes some artistry to do that. It obviously helps if there's market pull, but again, it's only as useful as you actually being able to compel the audience to your point of view.
[00:44:57] Mikkel: Kyle, thank you so much I think we're going to cut it here now, Mikkel. We have to. This was awesome. I think people loved it. Uh, we'll have some stuff in the show notes to, to share with folks. And um, thanks again for being here and maybe we see you another time, Kyle.
[00:45:11] Kyle Coleman: My pleasure, gentlemen. My pleasure. Thanks so much.
[00:45:14] Mikkel: Wonderful. Have a good one.
[00:45:15] Bye.