Philippe Gamache  0:00  
What's up guys, welcome to the humans of martec podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil ganache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing What's up everyone today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Maya voy a founder of growth labs in the author of GTM. strategist mind started her career bouncing from government consulting journalist intern and program manager roles and she then kick started her entrepreneurial journey and launched growth lab, an early version of her consultancy where she moonlighted as a consultant. She also worked at Google on speech ops, where she led a team of nine on a globally coordinated technology project. She later worked for various startups across London and Brussels leading marketing comms and growth strategy. And she worked remotely for a web three blockchain startup based in Hong Kong, and she took on the role of cmo where she raised over 20 million in growth capital and attracted 16,000 early adopters. She's also a mentor at the Swiss entrepreneurship program, and she's the author of the acclaimed and best selling GTM strategist, a comprehensive guide on launching a new product and gaining product market fit. And today, she's doubled down on her consultancy growth lab where she's worked with brands like Heineken, Bayer, mero, and product lead. She has also taught growth principles to more than 50,000 students around the world, including employees from Tesla, Apple, Deloitte, Adidas, wow, what a wild and amazing journey. Thank you so much for your time today.

Maja Voje  1:43  
Well, I don't know what to say because ads. One point I feel a bit of a very old when you are reading this, right. So like there was a lot of history to unpack here. But on the second hand, man, I would just have you on all the world stages that I'm on because you do a much better job in introducing me that I could possibly do. So congrats, high five, and let's get that get this flowing.

Philippe Gamache  2:06  
Awesome. Appreciate that. This episode is brought to you by our friends at knack. launching an email or landing page and your marketing automation platform shouldn't feel like assembling an airplane midflight with no instructions. But too often, that's exactly how it feels. NAC is like an instruction set for campaign creation for establishing brand guardrails and streamlining your approval process to knacks no code, drag and drop editor to help you build emails and landing pages. No more having to stop midway through your campaign to fix something simple Knack lets you work with your entire team in real time and stops you having to fix things midflight check them out@naqt.com That's kn a K, and tell them we sent you. This episode is brought to you by our friends at revenue hero, I can't think of anything worse than finding out a lead waited a week for a response from sales. That's why we recommend revenue hero, it's the easiest way to qualify leads based on Form Values or enrich data and route them to the right sales rep. Their product is packed with a bunch of behind the scenes superpowers that ensures qualified leads are assigned to the right reps following your custom round robin rules and sending key data back to your CRM. That means more qualified meetings for your reps. We all know they want more of those. But more importantly, no more waiting time for your potential customers. They back all of this up with the best product support out there offering 24 Five support on Slack Connect for all customers, no matter your pricing plan. So if you want to three extra conversions with the same traffic, go to revenue hero data yo and tell them we sent you, your sales team will thank you for it. Let's let's get going. I've got a cool question to start us off with. I would love to know for all the listeners that are aspiring Meyers out there who want to be a CMO one day or want to be a growth advisor in a couple of years. What should they be working on today?

Maja Voje  4:08  
antastic my main boring advice would be to stick around for some time. Because a lot of times I see people like doing a little bit of this a little bit of that and not like really experiencing their entire journey. But the wisdom come from just like going through this stage of launch planning to just like executing the launch. And it's crazy that this is the time when you eat pizza and drink your monster drink. And then just like making sure that whatever we did there is scalable and repetitively. So I really think that the wisdom of leading this thing to just like see a couple of those patterns and personally, I just see it as speed learning period. Of course you will have to work your ass off. But the plus side is that first of all, you're not playing with your own money, which is important and you're not Get along, you can have mentors, you have team members, you have like this wonderful polygon to learn. And I would just like that before you are free to five years in business, I don't think that you could be as peers, but just like the better and recognition side of the business, then afterwards, oh, Grant first consults later, would be my best advice. But don't hold yourself, like trapped by your imposter syndrome or whatever like this. Because once you have achieved something, the probability, just like the chance that you can do this three or five times more is incredible. Because you know, the pattern, you have lived the path, and you are just like changing the client in your head. So do a little bit of intermediate, if you have to be a mentor, be just like a little bit of a part time consultant, and see if it works for you. Because this lifestyle is a little bit different. And it's not for everybody, but it's sweet. It's really sweet. And once you're into the game, you really have to focus on just like making sure that you still have a very good connection with the industry, not saying stuff, which is like five years old or something like that, because you don't want to do this, this would make you a dinosaur and obsolete, but at the same time to just like when you learn something, could we multiply this, could we help more people by just like using the same framework or something like that. And that makes me passionate about my work.

Jon Taylor  6:32  
I love I love this concept of pattern recognition, right? Like, as you've done your your first few years in business and marketing, you kind of get these reps and where you start to be able to recognize these patterns. At the outset of your book, one of the things that you make a really great point about, you know, is simplicity. And I think one thing that teams and folks who don't have a lot of experience in marketing and growth do is they try to boil the ocean, right? Like there's all these things and cool shiny objects. But like, I think that the best folks, like folks like yourself are recommending simple strategies because they work. Why is it so hard for us marketers to keep things simple? And how do you help teams to recognize the value of simplicity and go to market strategies?

Maja Voje  7:14  
I have a two layer answer here first party will like the second one you will not. So the part of the answer you will like is that sometimes the smarter you get, the more you complicate, right? The more you know your product, the more variables that you can think about in this equation, the more likely it is that you're going to come up with a really complicated plan and make your life a living hell by just like being in this analysis, paralysis, not doing shit and just like going to your rabbit hole of learning and constant overthinking about what is going on without anything being launched on the market. And this is like the curse of intelligent. The second thing is just like you know, when you are like in a bigger company or something like that GTM comes with a bunch of responsibility. And sometimes it is easier to surround yourself with like five different consultants with like different team members or something like that, to just like, prolong this responsibility of decision maker, right. And here, it's very, very important to save space for decision making, because we will get it wrong. A lot of times we can try. But we shouldn't be punished because there are more unknowns as knowns in our go to market journey. And that makes the best organizations in which the best like GTM science is being made when like failing is learning and we are doing experimentation. We are using scientific method. And we're just trying to be a little bit better a little bit wiser every single day. So it's very, very culture related as well. Hope that helps.

Jon Taylor  8:53  
Yeah, one of the things that I find like kind of frustrating as a digital marketer, particularly when I was in house and trying to learn the trade of being, you know, going to market and having growth strategies, like I worked, started my career in growth and growth and spent six years working at a startup and things were going really good. They're like every you know, we're getting funding, and we had all this momentum. And then in a later life, I worked at a at a startup where growth wasn't happening. It was tough, right? We're doing GTM strategy after GTM strategy and nothing's landing. It was frustrating, right? Because all the case studies out there are really focused on the unicorn companies like hey, build a great product and everything else will happen. But what if your product is good, but not great? So and I know you've got a lot of lessons from you know, working in greedy startups and and working with gritty teams like What lessons do you learn from these greedy days of startup marketing that you can apply to your GTM strategies?

Maja Voje  9:50  
The first one is that product is never going to be good enough that shoots always something that you can fix. There is always an excuse that you can spend like another free man Throw something like that in your office and make it more perfect. But this is like the trap of overdoing things right? The sooner you can go to market and just like get these feedback loops of customers, the more likely it is that your GTM is going to be successful. And sometimes product BRUCEI because we are touching on this field of Product Market Fit question at the moment, something product is not even a problem. Sometimes we don't know what to say in order to attract the right customers. Sometimes we are targeting the wrong market segment and in another use different segment geographically or just like sort of graphically, it could be okay. But in this one is not. So I'm always saying that this is like a moving target that there are like a lot of different iteration. And just like I like to start small, by just like doing these things that don't necessarily scale. For example, posting to social media groups. I was like working with one CRM. This is like Mardi Gras, or podcasts. So I will be very generous with this type of examples today. So there was like new CRM, which is AI assistant, and it helped funders to do whatever I know, it's boring, because you have heard this speech for like 50 times already. But hey, we posted this invite for their Beta in a Facebook group of 10,000 people and more than 100 people joined, it was like write a nice return post. And it was just like the first 100 users that they got. And based on reverse engineering data data, they soon realize that they don't stand a fighting chance in E commerce. And just like in larger service businesses, however, the segments that they can serve are just like this sole entrepreneurs, consultants and people who know that they should have CRM, but they really don't have it, because it's just like a decision that they're prolonging. And their pitch became just like, Okay, let us do your hard work for you let us remove the hassle out of the thing that you love, which is your business. This was the first iteration. Then they applied for Y Combinator, based on the 500 signups that we got based on their Beta. But they actually started selling, they actually started to do demos. And they secured I think 10 or 20k of monthly reoccurring revenue for just like having a product which didn't exactly existed. But upon further research, they went and people did in this AI enablement of CRM and other CRMs because they discovered that they don't want to build another CRMs. Right. So was this a failure? No, every iteration was a huge success, because they learned a bunch and they actually got generated a couple of clients a couple of like monthly reoccurring revenues. And I think it was a huge success. But little did we know, when we started out that this is how it's going to play out. So my message here is just like the speed of iteration, you cannot overstate it is you have to let your product out in the wild. And just like do it another example. Another, like vivid example that I can share, just like today, I was talking with a friend of mine, who is like a big expert in email marketing, right? And there is like this big change in email deliverability. Right now, I'm sure that you know it and like are the settings right and what so not. So what the guys did is that they scrape data from Facebook ads library, and just like somehow figured out who doesn't have the right types of settings, and their email outreach campaign is going to be like, Hey, we identified that this is not right. In your software, this is how we can help you would you pay us 100 euros in order to settle this out for you, I'm sure that it is going to be a smashing success, because they are hitting on an immediate pain point in the right point of time. And what I'm saying here is really that this is like something that you cannot copy something which is very proprietary and very, like ambiguous to the companies and you just have to go out there talk to users think a little bit subversively not copying another HubSpot or whatnot, because this is not going to work. This is not going to work in 2024.

Philippe Gamache  14:29  
Great, great answers there. I love the two examples. Both of those are close to my heart. Like we had a full episode on the the email marketing Google sender guideline changes coming up. But also the CRM example I spent a full year and a half working for the CRM startup, their bootstrap company called close close CRM. And it was an interesting journey like with all the sea of CRMs and all the different like verticals like CRM for this vertical and that vertical like really listed and like CVS and portfolios of blah, blah, blah. So I can imagine how tricky it was. But I love this idea of like the advice you set around, like, just just get something out there, get some feedback, get that loop going so that you can make that pivot, like how do you do a pivot without having that information. And I feel like in your book, you'll also apply this to, like, once you've got an idea of the target market, where you're going, you want to start driving more customers there. So whether you're posting that on Facebook groups, or you're trying to go through one of the first channels like you've shared that there's seven key channels, and you recommend that early on T shirts focus on picking like two or three of those and that firstly, three to 18 months of the startup journey. Instead of like chasing new Hot Trends. Like we said, shiny objects are definitely like a thorn in our side and martec. But the seven that you have in your book are inbound, outbound paid community partners, ABM, and product lead growth. And I wanted to get your take on this. So like, I feel like we scoped the time horizon down in your book to like three to 18 months, right. And we almost have to rule out in my opinion, like inbound and community because SEO and building an audience, while very important in that first three to 18 months, there's such long tail investments that you like, you won't see the fruits of like all of that labor for many months after that, or even like a year plus GT and speak on that being an SEO. But like, have you seen companies get results in such a short time horizon with community like maybe your example there of just like posting on a Facebook group for the beta program is one of them. But curious, like what you think there?

Maja Voje  16:45  
No, that was an external community. This is not a community that I've built. Okay, I did build it. But it isn't the community that the company built. But nevertheless, the point is that if you can go where the audience is, it's going to be much faster. Even if you scrape like Upwork or something like that, or due to reviews or something like that, wherever you have a critical mass is going to be much faster. I'm a huge proponent of SEO myself, but I've been proven wrong before. In some categories, just like PETA people are averse readers, and they really want to consume startups. I'm not saying that martec is one of those because in the majority of cases, it's very difficult to just like compete against Pipedrive, cognitivism, HubSpot and whatnot. I mean, those bees are SEO savvy and on the, like, main keywords, you cannot outbid them. However, I would still let myself a prerogative if there is something which is really undervalued where I have a fighting chance to do and I wouldn't do it personally. And I wouldn't do I let my any of my team do this. But I've seen this example. So we can just not not completely exclude them and say no, SEO is trash, we cannot do this. The same goes with inbound. Because with inbound there are emerging channels. And there are just like this algorithm eating pushes when you win if you are just there in the right time and space, right. So for example, right now, it's YouTube shorts. And tick tock is green swimming, because I'm like 36. And I've been apart from some cooking recipes and Australian Shepherd videos, I don't use it very much. I think it's screen sucking, and it's terrible for your brain, but call me all you want. So it just like, for example, LinkedIn, LinkedIn is hugely important in our vertical way. We don't necessarily expect the immediate result, but we have to consider the broader buyer journey as well. Right. So for example, today, I'm talking with Jonathan and Phil. And of course, I will check you out on LinkedIn, right? If you're even real people are just like some bots who are setting. So how we create trust, and how we just like decide whether somebody is relevant if somebody is like trustworthy or something like that. So I'm all up for cosmetics. However, that gets really cringe when it comes to founder branding. Everybody's saying that I think is public is very beneficial. But I will tell you how it is takes two or three hours a day. And if you have a clear indication from customers that they spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and that they have like a very inspired how to find your technologies on LinkedIn, that's fine. That's an investment that might be worth it. If you get like 20 or 30% of your leads through LinkedIn. Of course you want to spend some time there Right? But if you are just like starting out I would always 100% Prioritize others people's communities and just like piggybacking on somebody's else's traction before I go and invest this long hours, and sweat and tears into building my own content stream, because it really is a long game. And I mean, I'm really feeling for my people. So we are overwhelmed, we have like, because of choices, we have very limited opportunities that we can start and we have to be right. And how to be right is to literally ask your customers, how do they find this information and go there. You can do other stuff later on. But this is what you're doing 80% of time.

Philippe Gamache  20:42  
Very cool. So to unpack that, like your answer is almost like those that inbound SEO stuff like it's important to do, but like some of the first things initially, is to find communities that are existing that have traction already. So it's almost like you're doing outbound in a sense, like you're going on these other communities. Maybe you're posting about beta Oh, I'm very, or something like that. Okay, yeah, definitely. And it different outbound, then, you know, like a lot of the outbound teams that are going to suffer in the next couple of months, with the Google sender guideline changes, you're going outbound to communities that exist already. And you know, the audience lives there, they're gonna find value in what you're posting about versus like cold email, cold outbound, there is still like value in that channel. But like you're focusing more on this community angle,

Maja Voje  21:33  
kind of, and there is one important nuance that we have to talk about this. So always get before you get, because if you come in an online community, and just like, Kay, we're launching this on product can't Why don't you up port for us that that spent, like, I mean, your intruder in their community, and nobody's going to celebrate your appearance there. However, if you just like spend a couple of weeks before and just like give a couple of useful information, it's either a value comment, or a value post, your post is going to be accepted much better. And if you have the chance to just like get the blessing from admin, if they are active, it's even better because this is admin improve, and nobody can argue with that. So just like for first 500 customers, this is my go to answer. Because people are they're actively searching for information actively, just like investigating what will be the best choice for them. So this for me is where the attention is. And it's kind of a no brainer in my stack.

Jon Taylor  22:35  
I think in your book, you mentioned this quite a bit and draw in like military lessons. And it's kind of a neat little something that works throughout the book. But like this idea of of drawing from Special Forces where they have this concentration of firepower, like, in my own career, I've seen it quite often where folks are like, yeah, like, all of these tactics are cool. Like, as Phil mentioned, I'm an SEO but like, Yeah, I've seen great results from SEO, but in the, in the first three to 18 months of you're just trying to get this this ship off the ground? Is it the best choice it might be? But you have to be able to make those decisions that makes sense for concentrating your energy. How do you coach teams on this? How do you get people to understand where are their strengths? Where does their product find a natural affinity with one of the channels that you've mentioned?

Maja Voje  23:25  
So I already touched upon this, it's always about like serving the existing customers and prospects, though, we need single source of truth. And this is usually like some sort of either competitive analysis analysis when they are getting the best traffic and the best customers or we do our own analysis. And I mean, with data, I can argue much better that this is it that we should post like 80% of our attention, our resources there and be fierce. And I love what you said about just like this intensity, this magnitude, because it relatively are very little, but we have to strike big. And I was kittens these actually, like when we were selling gaming computers, and there was just like this weird shortage of GPU. And it was like a really weird time in history. So nobody had like the memory cards and graphics cards in stock, but everybody tried to ride the momentum. So we were just like, listen, now we hire 16 influencers. We tell them exactly what time should they publish this and it will look like for a brief moment, but it will look like to our audience that we are everywhere. So that's kind of a magnitude that we were trying to create. Even though in reality we were a little bit like confused. And I started this thing going on in b2b space, because I think that influencer space in b2b is so undervalued. I mean, if you have a report and you just like hire a couple of like different b2b players that will be pushing this report out, I think that you can have this awesome traction that money cannot buy. But not only traction, also credibility, right? Also just like this moment on. So I do believe that there are a lot of underutilized opportunities. But the main question remains, where do people get relevant data for their decision making? So a lot of times in marketing, I see we should be doing like free blog posts, we should be doing like seven LinkedIn posts, we should be doing this and that and that. And these are just like, output metrics. It's just like, this is actually work. This is actually work. It's not connected with results. So this is input in your process. However, the question, which is better to ask is, how can we get, let's say, 1000 leads? How can we get, like 2000 additional users? How can we get like five additional partners from Scandinavia, regions and whatnot. And I think that we are asking the wrong questions. I

Jon Taylor  26:12  
love that point. I think, you know, seeing the forest for the trees type of thing, right? Like, we're easy to jump into the tactics of what we do because it feels good to be productive and to produce something. But is it connected to the results or not? This

Philippe Gamache  26:27  
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Jon Taylor  28:15  
And just drawing back on something you were saying earlier, like this idea of failure, right and continuous learning. One of the thoughts that I had, as was as you're talking is this idea of like productizing, your failures, right? Or you know that iteration a failure is too too long, too strong of a word, but just the idea of having this continuous iteration and learning. When it comes to product market fit, you talk about it being a moving target, how can this iterative cycle of learning from the market learning from you know how your initial customers are coming on board? How can it be, you know, how do you see it in terms of being a moving target? How can marketers think about this? Okay,

Maja Voje  28:54  
the first thing to Antec is to have a really good metrics and analytics, right? So you need to know, what does product market look like for you. And I don't care if you use conversion rates in order to measure it, I didn't, you would use retention rates and just like smarter metrics than these, but if you see for two or three months in a row that your conversion rate is just plummeting, I bought react even sooner. So, there are a couple of indication just like you know, how it is when you are tracking these mechanisms, you can react and I rather perceive this sooner than later. So I definitely want to have my measurements in place. And once is, could be like a random thing, but when it is a repetitive sample, I will definitely be proactive to investigate and later on. So step number one is to measure it. Step number two is to just like find the right thing which is going on here, right? Because a lot of times I see company He's panicking, okay, whoa, this conversion rate is plummeting. Now we should run a discount or something like that. But this is not the right reaction. This is not the grand cause of what is going on, maybe there is an additional competitor. Maybe there is somebody who's like literally eating the cream out of your market in order to optimize for adoption, and you have to fight a little bit differently. So make sure that you understand the ground reason why this is going on. And then really observe the churn, who are the customers that are going away from you, and where exit interviews and just like during customer interviews will give you better insights than anything else that you can do in business? To just like, understand what was the missing particle, why they didn't want to continue this journey with you and try to work better. And just like revenge, this is getting serious. There are other factors to the equation. So there can be a severe technological change, such as AI was in marketing, right? So that was a severe one. And we had to react on these fine people sooner or some people later we all know how it goes. But nevertheless, once we achieve product market fit, once we think that everything is okay, it can still go radically wrong, and how to correct it. Step number one is to timely indicated, so that we are not like sugar blabbing, right. So Batman people vacation like maybe next month will be better, right? But that we indicated in the right time. The second one is to identify what the hell is going on. And the third one is to just like plan the corrective measures of how can we do better?

Philippe Gamache  31:49  
Such a great answer. I think that understanding what is going on is a bit of an art and science, right? Like, sometimes even with the best tracking in place. You mentioned conversion rate monitoring, but also retention rate monitoring. Even with the best metrics, like the best, like monitoring practices and dashboards, you won't have all of the answers of what is going on. Like John and I both lived our first startup was in a dashboard, startup. And our CEO would often Oh, I didn't know that cool. Yeah, it's called Klipfolio. Tiny little company in Ottawa, they're still they're still kicking around today. But we always joke around this idea that our CEO would like tap our shoulder at like, every week or so. And just ask us, like, why are trials down? Like why? Why is this metric down? Why is that down? And even though we had a good understanding of the is this down? Or is this up? We didn't have the answers on on why. And I feel like that's where qualitative data comes into play a little bit here. And this ties in nicely to my next question like we've, we've asked a bunch of our guests, recent guests this question around, does everything need to be a test, and you call this out beautifully on one of your posts on LinkedIn, he touched on it in your book as well, that this idea that traditional experimentation often emphasizes the need for massive sample sizes. And it creates a misconception that experimentation is only this thing that large companies or teams with large traffic can actually like use and make use of reality is though, that there are multiple ways to apply experimentation principles in GTM efforts beyond these, like statistically significant tests, right. And one of those examples that you talk about is qualitative research, I would love for you to unpack that further.

Maja Voje  33:45  
Perfect, I'm very happy that I have a platform to talk about this because people usually hate when I start to say that maybe statistical significance is not everything. And maybe that we can like pick up signals in order to make better decisions before we ever achieve statistical significance. That's a little bit of a controversial statement. But listen, like when I'm making decision in the go to market stage, I have very little data to operate with, right? So what's better? It is better to just like do this prototype of an offer and send it to 10 friends, or is it better that I just posted it on like some sort of Facebook advertising campaign and see what happens? Because again, I will never understand why. For me, the winning answer always is to first learn in that to what is radically wrong and correct the obvious because usually even if you bring in 20 people in the research, five of them will probably say the same right? So I'm searching for the veterans, I'm searching for the stuff which is being and these are like the big points that I want to address. And later on. Okay, I have this Stan now on the sample of 20 people or something like that this is it. Now let's try to present this perfected version to 1000 people and see what happens. So it's kind of a experimentation loop when I'm first trying to get interception. Because in GTM, I don't know much, right? I don't have like years and months of data. This is like, a luxury that I will have later what I would be running for real experimentation. So in the first part, it's merely an inception. And I'm just asking myself, is it inception? Or could other like 20 people confirm that I'm onto something here, right? When I say people, I mean, ICP, ideal customer profile, not my mother, not my end people that I strategically selected. Okay? Once I have these patterns going on, I can go and like test them with significant statistically significant city has to come this but I wouldn't be very comfortable of just like saying, Okay, this is like the new software that we invented, we would like to do like, open rate optimisation for email marketing. This is my stamp on a landing page. Let's roll this out. Let's put like $2,000 in order to promote this and see what happens, I will do it. If I would be an E commerce but not in tech.

Jon Taylor  36:23  
Yeah, I love I love that answer. Some of the some of the recent guests we've had have kind of been playing with my mind a little bit in terms of like the How much do we test? How much do we go to market? And like you also mentioned at the outset, one of the first questions or the first question we asked you is about like, how do you get into my issues down the road? But like this idea of how many, how many years have you spent in business, I think there's an aspect. And maybe you can comment on this, of intuition that comes with GTM. Like, you have to see it a few times and use your instincts a little bit and trust your gut a little bit, maybe,

Maja Voje  36:59  
but I'm being like a little bit skeptical about this. So I still want to search for my initial fright. Because right now in the sort of agent space, everything is like changing so fast. And what we did like five years ago, in order to get like those 20 millions or whatnot, right now, it no longer applies. And I have to live with this, right? So I might give a little bit of just like grand principles, what have worked well before. But I don't want to be these people in the room, you know, this person who just like 10 years ago, we did this stuff already. And we should do this again. It's very important for me to just like see if makes sense in this environment. Better condition is much easier with experience, because if you don't have like any experience, how can you bind veterans, I mean, it's more difficult. But nevertheless, I am trying to use logic and evidence all the time. But also be very mindful about personal preferences of people because they might end up self sabotaging themselves. And what I mean with this is that if I have a technical founder, who just like despises social media, and would never reveal anything about themselves, they're probably bound is a little bit off for me. Because just like the amount of energy and willpower that I would have to spend, in order to get this guy to write a LinkedIn post is just not there yet. But on the second side, a lot of people are just like mortally afraid of rejection. And that's natural. This is our amygdala in our brain. We don't want to be abandoned, but our tribe we want to be liked. And we hate to say no, right? So outreach, and any source of avoidance of getting a no is a big, big, big, big barrier as well, with my teams. I'm trying to overcome it, but it comes like in small chunks. So okay, now we will send out 200 emails, what's the worst thing that it can happen? Okay, everybody will sign off and like people will hate us, can we limit this? Probably, let's do 200. I, the situation was not that bad that we participated. So we could probably optimize a little bit and send out the other trade. Because not everything is business is pacifically rational. And sometimes, especially with the smaller teams, we come like in connection with a bent of mental chunk and just like personal things that we have to handle as well. And I'm all the time posing the question like, okay, is this European? Or are you afraid of this? Are you self sabotaging? Are you protecting your ego? Is that really something that you think and you want to impose this as a leader? Or do we have like a little bit of a mental junk here that we should clean?

Jon Taylor  39:58  
Something I find and fascinating I'm gonna tease out of of that it's just this idea of identifying your own biases like my my career, I've had a lot of success with content, inbound SEO and phrase we're using with AI is like, whatever, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But I feel like there's this rebuilding process. Like if you start a fresh company in a GTM role, you've got almost, you know, you have your, your, your biases, your intuition, your experience, but you also have to look at it with a very fresh set of eyes. How do you guys go about this mental reset with teams when you're coming in? And you're helping them like, Hey, I know, this is what worked. I know you don't like social media, you don't like outbound like, it's all distasteful. But you're growing a business here, like, this is the best channel for you to go OUT out to like, how do you approach that with your teams?

Maja Voje  40:46  
Okay, first step is great. Just like, oh, wow, this competitor is doing this, this and that. Are you sure that we are not missing out? Because we are not active on this channel? Why don't we launch and the second one is just like to frame them in a very, very, very manageable experiment that we could run. So based on this webinar did you did last week, will it be okay for you to just like, do a couple of snippets, and then we would post and just like see what happens. Luckily, usually the algorithms has this like first time content creator bush and appealing for them to just like, see the results, or we can like engineer the results a little bit, it's not a problem, if you think it's bad, good for the founder. And I would just like, little by little and reward, everything. This is the basic thing when it comes to like not only human, but also like animal training, right, because our brain is pretty much the same. So we are afraid of punishment. But whenever like this person will go away, and we no longer receive the punishment, our behavior will remain the same. However, people are gradually rewarded for what we are doing and like admitting to just like the small things that we're doing, they're piling up, and our behavior could radically change. I mean, I have two dogs that come we'll talk about this later. But this is how I did like the training of a T Rex called Australian shepherd. And it was never about like, This is wrong. This is what I told earlier. It was always like reward, reward, reward and ignore the rest. So not saying that people and animals are very much alike, which they maybe are. But nevertheless, it just like see the goods. And when it comes to the catastrophe, just don't let it be a catastrophe, do damage control in advance, do badgers?

Philippe Gamache  42:43  
Very cool answer. I feel like there's, there's a rebrand of the show. Maybe instead of humans at Mar tech, it's animals of Mark tech. But I want to go, I want to go back to one of your previous answers. You talked about the importance in qualitative research to chat with your ICP, and not with your mom or your grandma. And those are different types of feedback early on. And I love the concept in your book about early customer profiles versus ideal customer profiles when you're early and that GTM motion. So your first customer may not look exactly like your ICP, sort of a mix of GTM strategies and in Crossing the Chasm a little bit there. But we'd love your take on the types of martech decisions needed. When you're going after these early customers. We talked about like throwing that in existing communities asking for beta or like building in public a little bit posting a little bit on social media, but like from those early scrappy days, where we can grow a company to go after quite different markets. How can marketers kind of future proof their their tech choices as they're scaling up?

Maja Voje  44:00  
I would go in the grounds of just like understanding the mentality of an early adopter. Right? I'm an early adopter myself. So whenever I see like a product in demo, of course, I'm gonna give it a shot. I'm going to be very generous, very annoying human sometimes with my feedback, because this is what I like, just by freaking copy. I dare very much to genuinely love to test out new technologies. And there are a lot of people in tech in marketing who are just like this fright of being the first one to discover something and having been like heard by founders in order to just like, get these consultants to Geek. What is going on there? And yes, you can totally get on product and you can get them in online communities. They are sometimes very active and vocal on LinkedIn as well. And it's more of just like this shiny object syndrome. So there is something going on in the industry. I don't want to miss out on this And this is just like, either these people who are very much adventurous about their technology consumption, or people that have very little to lose. So these are usually early adopters. These are usually like solo entrepreneurs, so people who just like to have something for free and hope that it will fix their problems, right. And that could easily turn out to be anti person after you go, and just like wing the higher market share, right? Because those solopreneurs, or whatever indie developers were hooked by your product initially, I mean, they are valuable community members, you will always be grateful for their feedback or something like that. But it's very unlikely that you are going to build your $1 million business based on this specific client base. So it's very important to just like, whenever you start monetizing reverse engineer, who are the people who actually come back to the product, and are actually willing to pay for it. I have a beautiful example, I was talking with Enzo COVID jun.so. And he said that his early adopters were just like indie developers, but whoever ended up to pay for these were b2b SaaS owners. And it was B word that happened immediately after they introduced their monetization layer. And this is why I love to say, okay, they might say that they love it, but will they pay for it?

Philippe Gamache  46:27  
Very cool. Yeah, this, this idea of being willing to pay for it and monitoring the folks that are coming back. And like when you do start monetizing it, they open their wallets, and they're interested in paying for it, you have a whole chapter in your book actually dedicated to pricing, and you cover willingness to pay. For folks that are familiar with it, it's like the maximum amount of customers ready and willing to pay for your product. I've heard a lot of folks kind of say that it's not a very reliable or straightforward metric. And I'm gonna, like debate this with you a little bit, I'm gonna play the role of like, willingness to pay is not something I love. It's really

Maja Voje  47:09  
my favorite subject. Teachers love

Philippe Gamache  47:11  
it. So there's there's four arguments on like, why it's not straightforward and not that reliable. So number one is that it's based on self reported data. Surveys are unreliable. And preferences can be a lot different when it comes time to actually make a purchase, versus when you're just like filling out a survey. willingness to pay. Number two willingness to pay assumes that consumers make rational decisions. But we know that humans are very rarely rational beings. And this is especially true and martech. When, you know SAS, there's a buying committee, and there's like pre existing preferences and biases for certain tooling. Number three, is that willingness to pay is often seen as this static number, but really, it's the customers willingness to pay can fluctuate based on a bunch of factors impacting their business. And number four, willingness to pay tends to focus on individual purchases, rather than considering the lifetime value and the potential for upsells. Curious your take on this further.

Maja Voje  48:13  
My take on this is really, really, really simple. Create a PDF, create, like a PowerPoint presentation and try to sell it, try to pre sell it, people are like, Shut up and take my money, that means that you have something good going on slash, you're too cheap. So this is like the best willingness to test that you could possibly have. And the good news is that it actually makes you money and keep the lights on and call founds your development. So I'm not saying that this is always an option. But whatever I could be like collecting pre orders, or just like pre commitments or doing like a little bit of client co creation, by just like pre selling a little bit, that's fine. And in go to market stage. Again, we operate with more unknown unknowns from the get go. And you know what, you just make something up, the first approximation of price is something that you will probably do in the range of 20 to 30% of your competition are just like the existing alternative down there. And you will keep your fingers crossed, that it will work. So the first type of the price is something that you just want to go down test fit makes sense and what are the reservations later on, you could be playing with more sophisticated analysis. But here is my fundamental problem with this. The beginning you didn't know who's your target audiences who's paying for that, right? So the best you can have is just like this wiggle room from your competition from whatever you think that the customer will get from this one. And once you build like a couple of pilots, you could be thinking about the new pricing and other more sophisticated price mechanisms. But from the beginning guys You know how it is unit one hundreds playing customers. So don't overthinking just bragging, do something and see what happens and make sure that you are not testing this as a survey because you don't even know whom you should be considering as your target persona at the moment. So I'm anti survey, but I'm definitely into early monetization.

Jon Taylor  50:24  
It's a great answer. And you know what, it's time is flying for us. We were at the end with our last question here. This has been an awesome part. Jealously, like, I know, our listeners have enjoyed this. But I have just thoroughly enjoyed being able to pick your brain for the better part of an hour. So. So thank you so much for joining us. And thank you. So what question we asked.

Maja Voje  50:44  
Thank you. Yeah,

Jon Taylor  50:47  
it's been an awesome conversation, I'm going to have to go back and jot down some more notes. One question we ask all of our guests, and I'm really curious, your take is about happiness and success and how you stay balanced. So you're an author and advisor, mentor, public speaker, newsletter, writer, teacher, you're also a rural retreat curator, a Canine Sports Coach, and a classical harmony advocate. So one question we ask all our guests is, how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you how do you keep balance?

Maja Voje  51:19  
Well, I'm in Benjen, I don't work anymore. Now just messing around with you. For me, it's all about protecting my mornings, right? Mornings are so important for me, because if I just like wake up and see like this gazillion emails, my brains just get fucked. And I can no longer think straight. So it's very important for me in the morning to see some sunlight to have a little bit of a tranquillity. And I don't want to say that I cannot live if I don't have my one hour morning routine, but I do function much better. I get up, not in this cortisol reactive stage. But something more purposeful something which is like really more meaningful for me. The second thing, and I'm so happy to have this question, because just like today, one of my mentees said that we had like a little bit of a phone call. And she said that she's struggling with overspending too much, right. And she's a very successful entrepreneur, just like her problem is that she spends everything what she makes, right. So it's not like the best mechanism of wealth building. And I was just like, she was asking if she hire like a financial coach or whatnot. And I was just like, you don't have a money problem, you have happiness problems are probably our compensating for something which is very painful for you, which you feel very frustrated with your job. So try to find these pockets of joy in your life, a lot of them are for free. Because for me, the privilege is to just like, go out with my dogs enjoy a little bit of a sunshine and eat something which is good and have a little bit of more certain Myers Mater. But nevertheless, I think that this there isn't us. I mean, we are so conditioned, that we should be doing this, and this and that. And this is how we should look, this is what we should do. This is like our extra curricular activities that we should be engaging. But at the end, I also think, I think it comes down to introspection, and just like reflecting on what is really important. And for like John, it might be that like he's, I have this right? Or feel it might be that like he's getting the latest technological gears and the best like podcasts and possible. So don't not to judge yourself. And just like be honest to yourself of what really makes you happy. What sparkles the joy, and you can run a diary if you want, you can hire a therapist if you want. But for me, it's just like, what makes my heart sing? What is this? If I had to relive this day again? What will be the highlights? This is my answer.

Philippe Gamache  54:04  
Such a cool answer my we were talking about flying that. So we asked this question to like all of our guests and I feel like I do these like recaps at the end of the season mashing up everyone's answer together. And there's a lot of common threads and folks like repeat some of the same stuff. You're the first one to talk about introspection, in a sense, and a lot of folks mentioned routine but the way you broke it down as like morning routine and getting some sunshine before I look at my emails. That's really cool. And I really appreciate that that thought there and your answer and I feel like there's there's some self reflection I need to do myself because like I crawl out of bed and I open my phone I open slack and the first thing I do I haven't even been hit with sun so really appreciate that.

Maja Voje  54:51  
Yeah, or just like kiss your partner or bet your animal or whatever. It's just like there are so many other choices that You could be faking it just like did it not the first piece of information that you want to throw yourself in when you're starting today. You're so gentle when you wake up. So just treat yourself nicely. I love

Philippe Gamache  55:12  
it. Thank you so much for your time. This is super fun. Awesome chat. Really appreciate your time.

Maja Voje  55:17  
So permitted

Philippe Gamache  55:26  
folks, thank you so much for listening this far, we really appreciate you being here. Just wanted to call out two things before we go. Number one, the best way to support the show is by signing up for our newsletter on humans at Mark tech.com. We send you a quick email every Tuesday morning letting you know what episode just dropped. We include our favorite takeaways. So if you don't have time to listen to that one, no pressure we have you covered with some learnings anyway. And number two proceeds from sponsors this year to have allowed us to venture into video. We recently launched a YouTube channel where we publish full length episodes. So if you want to see our radio faces, check that out. That's it for now. Really appreciate you listening again. Thank you so much.