3 Signs your GTM is weak

Weaknesses are awesome. If you can identify them that is. We discuss three common GTM weaknesses and how you can identify them...

So you can start fixing them and getting better.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (03:23) - Parenting Challenges
• (04:22) - Go-to-Market Strategies
• (05:35) - 20-20 vision
• (06:22) - 1: I'm just not motivated
• (12:37) - You're a bad leader
• (15:04) - It's products fault (of course)
• (16:30) - Handling Bugs and Product Frustrations
• (17:09) - Building a Billion Dollar Business
• (22:17) - I'm not listening to you (the customer)
• (26:24) - The Value of Qualitative Data

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Creators and Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

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Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, 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.

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[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Hohlbein. You are listening to the revenue formula with Mikkel and Toni. In today's episode, we share three hidden signs that you have a weak go to market.
[00:00:11] Enjoy
[00:00:12] Before we jump into the show, today's is to you by EverStage, the top sales commissions platform on G2, Gartner, Peer Insights,
[00:00:22] and Trust Radius with more 2000 reviews from customers like Diligent, Wiley,
[00:00:28] Trimble, and more.
[00:00:30] Visit everstage. com and mention Revenue Formula unlock a personalized sales compensation strategy session with one of EverStage's RevOps experts.
[00:00:41] And now, enjoy the show,
[00:00:43] Mikkel: so we had um, we had a fun week last week. Basically, everyone was completely sick. As in, crazy sick.
[00:00:54] Toni: Well, this time I wasn't sick, it's all on your
[00:00:56] side.
[00:00:57] Mikkel: And it's amazing, yeah, and the funny thing is you and I, we're going to meet up tomorrow and probably then you're going to get sick, you know, I'm going to transport something
[00:01:04] Toni: I'm gonna put like a mask
[00:01:06] Mikkel: yeah,
[00:01:07] Toni: I think.
[00:01:07] but besides all of this sickness thing, you told me, and you didn't tell me actually why. So this is the first time I'm hearing it. You told me you had a little bit of an adventure last night.
[00:01:15] Mikkel: Oh yeah. So to top it off like I just said, the kids have been sick for like a week even my wife and then yesterday, you know, everyone pretty much almost except one ready to get back at it, right. Four out of five ready to get back to work and school and daycare and blah. And then my son, he's like, I got something in my eye.
[00:01:35] It's like, it hurts. Okay. Can I see? And I couldn't see anything. And then, you know, he just rubs his eye. Everything is good. He's quiet. We're chilling. 20 minutes later, all of a sudden his eye has just swollen, like. He can't open his eye, swollen level.
[00:01:50] Like, like someone seriously punched him in the face. And I'm just like, what happened? And I had to go and wake up mom who was napping and kind of look at this thing. And you go as a parent, it's like, I'm not a doctor. I don't, I don't know what brought this on. Was it because he rubbed his eye or was something in it?
[00:02:10] It's just like, you know what? We probably need to call someone now and figure out what the heck is going on. They're like, yeah, you probably just want to go to the ER just to be safe. So come by
[00:02:24] at,
[00:02:24] Toni: what's, really important to know for all the U. S. folks listening an ER visit in, in, in Denmark, it's not really the ER by the way, but it also doesn't cost you 20, 000 bucks. So it's like, as a parent, you, you more or less, you know, it's, it's like, you don't want to, it's like really,
[00:02:39] It's like, do we,
[00:02:40] Mikkel: do I have to? yeah,
[00:02:42] Toni: but, but you know, it's, it's not otherwise, otherwise it's
[00:02:44] actually
[00:02:45] Mikkel: While you play through this thing, while we don't go there, kid gets blind, I'm gonna hear about this for the rest of my life. We're going, we're going there. So no, so that's, that's what I was up to. That was a fun little excursion,
[00:02:58] Toni: And it turns out it was
[00:03:00] just what some. It was just some like, like, what is it like an allergic
[00:03:04] reaction or
[00:03:05] Mikkel: you know what, that's what I love about doctors. They're like, so, he doesn't have anything in his eye? It doesn't look like an allergic reaction or an infection. I mean, we're okay sending him home if you're okay. So it's like, wait, what, it's up to me now, or so, so, you know, it's like, inconclusive, I would
[00:03:23] say,
[00:03:23] Toni: Same, same story, a little bit different though. One of my sons, you know, he's jumping around, blah, blah, suddenly he's limping.
[00:03:30] It's
[00:03:30] Mikkel: yeah,
[00:03:31] Toni: says, ow,
[00:03:31] my,
[00:03:31] Mikkel: as you do,
[00:03:32] Toni: my, my, my foot hurts. And we're like, okay, yeah, yeah. Come on, you know, sleep on it. And then if it's still there next morning, then, you know, And it's still the next morning.
[00:03:41] So what do we do? We're like, okay, I think he needs to get an x ray now. Kind of, it's just our responsibility now, right? He has to get an x ray. So kind of drive him in, he gets an x ray. The doctors are like, yeah, we kind of see something there, but you know. We can't really put a cast there. So just go home.
[00:04:00] Mikkel: yeah, yeah, yeah, I know,
[00:04:03] Toni: And that's just now, and what should we do? Like, maybe he doesn't jump that much anymore for a while. And maybe you give him some painkillers for a while. It's like, okay, cool, cool. Thanks for the solution. And then, you know, but I think it's like, especially with those small kids, there is no solution. Right.
[00:04:19] And these doctors just send you back home.
[00:04:21] Mikkel: No, exactly.
[00:04:22] Fortunately when it comes to go to market, you and I have plenty of solutions, plenty of solutions. And the last solution we gave, by the way, the go to market engineer, it kind of blew up on LinkedIn. What happened there? It was crazy. It was
[00:04:33] crazy.
[00:04:34] Toni: people were a little bit upsetty about this but it's, you know, folks, it's all okay. It's all okay. I think we looked it up there around like 207,
[00:04:43] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:04:44] Toni: go to market engineers. And I think, you know, 40 of them is basically SDRs for clay
[00:04:50] or
[00:04:50] Mikkel: No, but you know what I also thought about? I thought about academics. It's like if every researcher just, if they just all agreed on everything, would we as humanity Actually progress or would we just kind of stop there? They're done. Everything is good.
[00:05:04] Now,
[00:05:05] Toni: I, I gotta say though, I understand the RevOps anxiety around this because on the one hand side, they're kind of trying to grow into a direction where it's really difficult to do that. And I still think that's the role to totally do it. But at the same time, while, you know, the, the function is struggling to grow in this direction, there's now also pressure from below already.
[00:05:23] That's like, that's uncomfortable. You know, you don't, you don't want to be like that. So, so I understand, I understand the reaction. but since we are now Dr Mikkel and Tony and helping you with the go to market, what is it, what is we're going to chat about today,
[00:05:34] Mikkel?
[00:05:35] Mikkel: Yeah, I was gonna say speaking of anxiety we're gonna talk about three signs that you basically have a weak go to market
[00:05:41] Toni: Yeah.
[00:05:42] Mikkel: And it's funny, like some of these things, thinking back just on career progression and places I've worked. It's like, you just notice certain things as soon as you hand in your resignation or, you know, you get fired alternatively, but as soon as you're like, I'm done with this place, you start noticing certain things that you didn't really notice before.
[00:06:04] And uh, it's obviously 2020 hindsight. And I think, you and I just talked through some of the things we've seen at least. And we're like, yeah, we probably should do ourselves a favor and just recording this and trying to share what are some of the things that is, can be pretty devastating or at least hold back a performance for a go to market team.
[00:06:22] So we have three areas. We're going to look into, and I think the most, most common area and probably also the most I want to say visible is the one you kind of mentioned, which is the whole morale of the team.
[00:06:35] Toni: The morale of the team. So shocker, we're not starting with some AI solution to something good old fashioned, right? I think and I've seen this I joined a company as, as the CRO and, and this was the first thing almost that just, you know. It was so super obvious to me going into the organization because I think you're right.
[00:06:54] I think that there's a moment of clarity once you leave an organization and there's a moment of clarity when you join an organization and you know, everything in between is like you're somewhere in between basically a fan boy and a, and an addict. Like it's somewhere in between there. Right. And especially when you're a leader, you will have to sing the company song.
[00:07:15] Right. I mean, that's your responsibility. Right. And now the funny thing is this is kind of you, yourself cheating, you know, basically happens because so what, what people have found out if you say something out loud, even though you don't believe in it or you disagree with a statement, you are now more likely to actually kind of agree with it.
[00:07:36] That, that's an, that's an actual thing that happens. Kind of, they found this out in, I think, prisoner of war camps in Asia, somewhere, Vietnam war or something like that. They were like, experiments like this conducted where people, they needed to read out loud that they support the communist party, you know, American POWs basically.
[00:07:52] And because they were reading this out loud to a, you know, their friends and everyone knew they were being forced to do it. They were now believing it a little bit more. So I'm saying that, you know, leaders do, you know, kind of do the same stuff, right? There's a, you know, company isn't really going so well, but let's.
[00:08:08] You know, let's do rah rah and kind of tell everyone that everything is going well, right? And and that leads to this, you're kind of cheating yourself, right? And, and, you know, the next step then becomes, well, let's set, you know, ambitious targets. Let's just, let's just kind of set something that we can all get excited about if we were to achieve it.
[00:08:26] Or let's you know, create, you know, situations where maybe we don't have enough resource to get it. We just need to go and get it and let's, let's go guys, right? We can figure this out. The flip side of this whole thing though is and, and, you know, this happens again and again and again, it's like while you're trying to sing the company's song and while they're kind of, you know, beautifying everything up, you're actually creating kind of a bad morale issue on the back end of that.
[00:08:49] And that's, you know, due to a couple of reasons, one very simple one, you know, setting stretch goals for sales, for the company, for individuals. They're not achieving it. Lots of frowny faces on the sales floor, right? And frowny faces on the sales floor usually translates to frowny faces everywhere else.
[00:09:07] And the thing is here, which is so. So stupid your company can be growing extremely fast. Everything is extremely going extremely well, the CEO, the CFO, everyone can be yelling from, you know, the rooftops that everything is great maybe because it is by the way. But still the, the feeling of the morale in the company will be one of losing, you know, not making it comparatively being weaker than maybe your competitors and so forth.
[00:09:35] For silly reasons of simply not getting to, you know, hitting the target, achieving what you thought you're going to achieve. And, and those things you know, I call it kind of the vicious cycle, right? Because then, you know, once everyone is losing belief in, in achieving something, then actually in order for that to go back, you need to go even further down in your target setting, which might not work out in order to create, you know, new confidence in order to push it up again.
[00:10:00] And like, once you're stuck in this bad morale issue. It's usually not just one team. It's usually across the go to market getting out of that really difficult, really difficult.
[00:10:10] Mikkel: I think it's also a target is such a difficult one because it also acts as a magnet, right? If you, if you set it to though, it's bullshit people will relax too much. You will not, you know, reap the full potential of your organization and vice versa. If you set it too high. People are going to go like, what are they smoking up there in that boardroom?
[00:10:30] It's like, no way that's going to happen, right? So it is such a tricky exercise to navigate. But what I always found kind of weird is, I've never experienced that the targets get changed.
[00:10:42] Toni: Yeah,
[00:10:43] Mikkel: Right? It's, you set targets for a full year and new facts will present themselves throughout the year. Why not use that to adjust, right?
[00:10:53] I think there could be something around you, maybe not just announcing the full targets for the year, but doing it quarterly instead and kind of taking that approach, giving you some flexibility from a leadership perspective. But I agree. It's one of the most obvious ones you're in, you're unable to basically set effective targets and it's like a whiplash effect on the entire team
[00:11:12] that,
[00:11:12] Toni: And the, and the issue is it's, you know, the, the, the difficulty with targets is they kind of need to align. You can't tell the organization that they only need to grow a million and you can, you know, until the board 10 million. Well, what most people are doing is they're telling the board, we need to grow 10 million.
[00:11:30] And then they're telling the organization, we need to grow 15 million, right? Kind of that's, that's the alignment misalignment you're
[00:11:35] allowed to do, but not the other way around. Right. Targets are not allowed to be just motivational, but in many, in many cases they are. And the thing is really, it's like, you can smell it when you walk on the, on the sales floor and the morale is, is down.
[00:11:48] And people don't believe that they can hit their targets and then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy kind of getting out of that. You almost need to fire your way out of this actually kind of, especially when you're in a new CRO, new VP of sales, you know, walking into, into a team like this. You have two options, right?
[00:12:04] One is to lower targets and pick the fight with the CFO because that will be adversary to be like, Hey, dude, we can't, you know, then the business doesn't make sense of those other targets. Or the other one is you fire all the non believers and and kind of load up new people, kind of erase the collective memory.
[00:12:21] Of, of the bad morale, right? Those are your only two options. And both of them are really terrible. Really
[00:12:26] terrible,
[00:12:26] Mikkel: kind of expensive also. You know, it's not cheap to just replace books.
[00:12:30] Toni: but I'm just telling kind of, once you have that smelly feeling, then that's probably a really good sign that something in your go to market is off.
[00:12:37] Mikkel: Yeah, and I think the other one as well is in that whole morale realm, besides just the numerical targets. And by the way, lots have been written about how to navigate this. It's just to say, if there's some pain around targets, that's definitely leading to morale issues, right?
[00:12:51] The other is the leadership, right? They can also heavily lead to morale issues, not necessarily around targets, but it can be the decision making process. It can be how they communicate or lack thereof. It could be all kinds of things. Do you have any kind of great examples of, you know, your own leadership causing low morale?
[00:13:10] No, I'm kidding.
[00:13:11] Toni: So the, no, I mean, one that I'm really terrible at, have been terrible at. Maybe I'm, I'm not sure if I'm becoming better at this. I'm not quite sure about this, but low comms, insufficient communication. And that's, that's such an obvious one that happens all the time because it's when you're 10 people, 20 people, you don't need to communicate and re communicate,
[00:13:29] Mikkel: yeah,
[00:13:30] Toni: but once you're a hundred people, you need to over communicate and getting that jump right, really difficult to do.
[00:13:35] And what then happens on the backside of that. Is all the stuff that isn't being understood correctly or isn't being understood at all because it hasn't been, you know, explained. You know, what people are doing is they're filling in the worst possible, you know, puzzle piece that connects those two storylines.
[00:13:53] And that then kind of leads to negative morale, right? And then, you know, you have like, Oh, you know, we're doomed as a company or Hey, you know, these leaders you know, in, incapable and, you know, you know, insufficient to kind of lead this company, yada, yada, yada. And then from there, it's really difficult.
[00:14:08] I'm not sure whom you need to fire, but like really difficult to get out of
[00:14:11] that
[00:14:11] Mikkel: It's also, I mean, the thing about communication, which, and why I kind of hate it a little bit, it's, you need to repeat that message frequently, like to the point where you're sitting at lunch and you almost want to throw up repeating that same message just for retention, for the team to kind of know what the priorities are or why we're doing something.
[00:14:29] Toni: My, My, rule of thumb is Once people start complaining about this being repetitive, then you started scratching the surface, you know, then you still need to go further than that. But again, right. Kind of all of this is connected to bad morale. It could also be hiring the wrong people, firing the wrong people, like doing all of the things that, you know, lead other people around the organization to lose faith in, in, in the leadership team, basically.
[00:14:52] Mikkel: yeah. So that's one point of a week go to market boy. We started with a soft one, so let's go for, let's go for another one, which is actually a way to not blame the go to market.
[00:15:04] It's the pace of shipping. We're going outside of go to market. Why are we talking about this? Well I can speak from a marketing standpoint.
[00:15:11] One of the best. You have, and the best things that can happen throughout a year is actually great commercial releases. What I mean by commercial release as well, it is basically a new solution, not just a small feature that completes potentially a new use case will unlock more budget with existing or new customers, right?
[00:15:34] Read. You can get more revenue out of it and it will kind of create some attention on your company in a good way. And you want to make sure to have those one kind of hero or, you know, you have antiheroes was like, Hey, I don't ever want to become that type of person, then you have heroes. Like I want to, you know, emulate that pattern for me on shipping.
[00:15:53] It was actually drift back in the day. Now sales loft, I believe they're under. They had a great cadence of shipping quarterly and making a big splash around something every quarter. So it looked like they had immense momentum as a company. It's just a great way to retain kind of that top of mind share.
[00:16:13] And I think yeah, that was a key way for them to actually attract attract more revenue.
[00:16:18] Toni: So, and I think kind of on the one hand side, you can kind of see it as a ammunition for marketing releases. You know, you know, if someone isn't shipping fast enough, then suddenly you're running out of ammunition, right? Kind of, this is the point you're making.
[00:16:30] I think even broader, it's taking care of bugs, very simple stuff, right?
[00:16:35] Kind of there, there's so many frustrations in your product and as they come up, guess what? You know, they will alienate users and eventually lead to churn. It's just, it's just inevitable, right? You know, ability to not release bugs with new future releases and the ability to, you know, take care of them. That, that is that for me is sometimes a very good sign of you know, strong go to market and, and basically kind of shipping kind of that sits behind that because you basically make it extremely easy for the go to market teams to be successful.
[00:17:05] I kind of, that's what we're talking about. I think it was the founder of Gong.
[00:17:09] Who was, who was being asked in a, how do you build a billion dollar business? And he said, very easy. You just need to do two things. One thing is build a great product that doesn't need a sales team. And as a next step build such a great sales team that doesn't need a good product.
[00:17:24] Right. But at the end of the day, you know, we, we know where the reality is and kind of having a great product obviously helps you with all of that stuff. Right. And again, this, this is, you know, major feature releases. For me, this is taking care of bugs and stuff, and it's doing smaller things. So actually what I've seen great, you know, product teams are doing, and then also kind of being able to, to ship this thing fast is to squeeze in things that weren't debated back and forth a thousand times, and then, you know, decided between CRO and CPO whatever.
[00:17:57] And then now we're building this thing, but a team that is also able to. You know, ship small tweaks like, Hey, this, this button was misplaced. We need to put it somewhere else. People didn't see it or whatever it might be. Right. And, and getting this into a cadence and getting this out and providing this momentum, this, this, this, it, you know, positive pressure.
[00:18:19] To the go to market team, making the go to market team maybe feel like, Oh, wait a minute, these guys are doing a really fantastic job. We're, we're kind of the weak ones. I know that level of self reflection rarely happens on the go to market side, but you know, those are, those are great signs of your, your product team doing a fantastic job and then, you know, obviously this leads to a strong go to market
[00:18:38] afterwards.
[00:18:39] Mikkel: And I think there's a couple of things also, by the way, to unpack here. Notice we're not discussing quality, right? This is not in an excuse. To lower the bar by no means, like you can't ship something that doesn't work, right? It's just, it's just not going to work out in the end, right? So it's not a substitute for you to lower the, lowering the bar on, on quality.
[00:19:00] I think the other struggle that will happen and will kind of also show that there is a weak go to market motion, because this directly impacts your go to market, is you set out with a plan to release something, but along the way You discover that that's actually really difficult to accomplish, or there's lack of alignment, or you didn't have a good enough process or excuse, excuse, excuse.
[00:19:22] We need to now actually strip away functionality in order to meet the deadline, terrible outcome for everyone involved, because what used to happen here is, well, now we ship the campaign, go to market, go sell it. And marketing is usually the first one to go, well, excuse me, but this was supposed to support a customer service use case, but now there's no ticketing system.
[00:19:49] So it's just not gonna work. Then it hits sales and they're like, they're pitching the thing and the prospects go, well, so where do all the tickets go? And it's like into the void. We don't have a ticketing service, so sorry. It's gonna, you know, so it's also, I think that kind of focus and it's almost also tied to the whole.
[00:20:07] If you have a strong pace of shipping, it also allows you to focus quite frankly, to say, well, we ship this thing. Now we're getting feedback from folks, let's actually implement that and, and ship that as well. Right. And I think it's just for me that's at least been a tricky one. And I think if you're unsure, Hey, are we actually, do we have a high pace or do we not, I think a good reference point is that there's at least a large key release happening once a quarter where the commercial teams are going, this is going to be awesome.
[00:20:39] That's
[00:20:40] Toni: Yeah, I think I think another indicator is how quickly can they react to things that are maybe being brought up by the sales team or happening in the market. So the, the sales team piece is pretty straightforward. Something happens on a customer call, it's being flagged, flagged, flagged, flagged, flagged, and then someone is building it, right?
[00:20:55] The, the other thing is obviously the whole, you know, and currently it's the AI shift. So what are we doing in order to address that? And, and then actually being able to react to these things, right? I think that connection is also pretty interesting. And. You know, we can always try and shift the blame around because ultimately you could also say that one of the reasons why it maybe Takes this team to ship You know, it takes a team so long to ship something is maybe there's a strategic fit.
[00:21:20] That's not working on Maybe you guys are not focusing enough, right? Maybe that's the reason for half ass product being pushed to go to mark and then go go sell it now, right? I mean we've all been there but really this dysfunction that is that is usually driving tons of frustrations and then also mediocre results on the commercial side.
[00:21:39] Mikkel: I think maybe also just to wrap it up, why it matters. It's, I hope everyone already knows, but there's this amazing scene in the bear. Basically the guy who wants to start a Michelin restaurant and you see his backstory where he's in the kitchen prepping produce. And he's, I think he's like taking peas out of the shell and there's a guy standing next to him and he's just like picked, you know, thousands of thousand peas and the other guy only done half and he's looking over like what he's like.
[00:22:06] Super fast. What is going on? And it's just imagine a competitive scenario, being able to outship the competition. That's something, you know, you can take to the bank eventually. That's something you take to the bank.
[00:22:17] So the last piece and actually, I would say also closely related to product is, are you even listening to the customers
[00:22:26] Toni: Yeah.
[00:22:27] Mikkel: And I think there's lots of mechanisms out there that make us think. Yeah, we totally are customer driven as a company. But it's lies, it's lies all of it. So what do I mean? It's a gone calls. You're recording calls so you can listen to them, but honestly, how many people are listening to those calls and how frequently are they, and are you able to use it for anything other than maybe sales coaching?
[00:22:51] Are you able to use it for decision making in any part of your go to market? I think it becomes more of a. It builds a perception of what matters almost like osmosis, right? It's like, oh, okay. I've heard now Tugong calls. They said this thing. So that's, you know, they probably care about that. That's now the truth.
[00:23:08] Right. But I don't think we've succeeded in for a lot of companies, instrumenting a solid process to work with customers.
[00:23:17] Toni: No, I think, you know, we want to be customer driven, customer centric, you know, you know, at the, there's always someone with a customer head on it, you know, has a seat at the board, at the table and there's, there's so many ways of saying these things, but, but really when you dig into most organizations It's very, it's first of all, it's very difficult to define what that is.
[00:23:38] Right. And you know, I totally get it, but the next step is, do you really actually believe that you're customer driven? Right. Kind of, is that really kind of the thing? And and for me, usually this comes down to You know, how much time is your collective organization spending on actually proactively listening to your customers, right?
[00:23:58] That's, that's the first step and, and don't get me wrong. Selling something is not listening to your customers. This is, this is your, your listening in order to react, right? You're not listening on to take in, understand, you know, process and then maybe kind of do some, it, this is not what this is about.
[00:24:14] I think if there's anything closest to listening, it's probably your. Support and CS teams, I would say, even though they have similar objectives actually, right? And when you really think about okay, there's like tons of people, you know, having customer conversations and listening to them, how's that, how's that Intel actually being taken into the organization, right?
[00:24:34] And when I see a lot and, you know, my own fault as well you, you always are being a little bit dominated by the next big deal. Or the next big opportunity, basically, that is driving some of the, Hey, we're listening to that one customer really well. And and then the other thing is, and this is, this is just scientifically proven to be a poor approach, but everyone, every human being basically does it.
[00:25:01] It's, you kind of come to a conclusion of what you want to do. And then you're looking for a material that's supporting
[00:25:08] Mikkel: yeah. Confirmation bias. Love it.
[00:25:11] Toni: right? And then you go around and kind of ask, don't they, don't they ask you about this all the time? Isn't that actually the problem? Right. And obviously the rep, you know, talking to maybe a boss or superior or something like this, and also the rep don't have perfect recollection of all the conversations, recency bias, and Hey, they want to close.
[00:25:28] And and I think what we've seen is. You know, getting, getting around this actually listening to the customer. It's difficult and people don't end up doing it. And if they don't end up doing it, I think this very much leads to kind of poor product being built, you know, probably low shipping, kind of low, low low commercial results and stuff.
[00:25:49] But I think when you, when you walk into an organization and you don't have the founder or the founding team anymore, that is really deep down into the product and really kind of understands and really cares, you know, and. And there's no one else doing this anymore. I think that's a sign of a potentially soon to be, you know, we go to market.
[00:26:08] Maybe this is a leading indicator actually more than, and it's a sign of, you have a week go to market. But if you don't have, you know, a handful of people that really understand all of that stuff and really bring it together and keep it up to date. I think that's, that's, what's going to eventually result in a poor go to
[00:26:24] market.
[00:26:24] Mikkel: I also just want to say, imagine for a second that you had no quantitative data anymore. It was just no longer available. It was gone. Boop. Don't have it. Can't use it for any decision making. I think in that scenario everyone would go like, yeah, that's just clearly not going to work out, is it? It's the same thing with qualitative data.
[00:26:44] It's, it's the exact same thing when you talk with a customer, run an interview and do stuff like that. And I think the, the tricky thing is as a company grows you get less and less access to customers because more people want to have access, right? So think about it. You're going to train them on a new feature.
[00:27:01] You're going to run renewals and upsells and expansion. You're going to have recurring customer service conversation. You're going to announce new features and then you're going to do CSAT surveys and NPS surveys and oh, by the way, marketing, can we do an interview with this client for an hour for a case study or like for understanding?
[00:27:19] It's no, forget about it. There's going to be so many reasons not to do it. And I can just say, having done it at least a couple of times with just the deals that were closed won to understand, Hey, you know, what was the experience actually like why did you, why did you go for our solution and did you consider any competitive alternatives and what were some of your objections like, wow, what would have kept you, what was really close to keeping you from buying?
[00:27:46] I'm just telling you that kind of stuff. Yeah. This is where you end up with a stellar positioning. You end up with a awesome sales pitch because you already know what the objections are going to be so you can handle them. And the sad truth is if you just go and talk with one sales rep, two sales reps.
[00:28:07] Like, to your point, they're going to be, okay, I just lost this deal yesterday. If I had this, you know what, this deck about pharmaceutical production companies in Middle East specialized in this thing, then I would totally have closed the deal,
[00:28:22] Toni: And I think it's like the, the, the angle here is actually really interesting, right? Because it's listening to customers doesn't only mean building the right product. It also means selling it to them in the right way, marketing it to them in the right way. I kind of, those are also things that you want to pick up and understand.
[00:28:38] Right. And I think, yeah, I think doing these closed one close lost interviews, trying to understand what was it actually that kept you from, you know, going for this versus for something else. Really insightful. I mean, on the one hand side, it kind of. It gives you some of the objections or the, the, the detractor reasons, right?
[00:28:55] That you want to tackle on your website and the FAQs, for example, right. But it also kind of gives you an understanding of. You know, what were the almost reasons someone didn't, didn't go for you. Right. And then that usually gives an indication for a company that is slightly different or we don't have a complete believer sitting there on the other side, that would have probably been a deal killer at that point, right?
[00:29:16] Kind of really that kind of learning. That also means listening to customers, at least from, from how we're seeing
[00:29:21] it.
[00:29:22] Mikkel: Here's the thing also, like what I'm trying to say is. Love quantitative data. We've obviously used it heavily, total believer. It just can't tell you everything, right? You can tell you, here's your win rate. It sucks, but why does it suck? Like why? And, and the thing is actually talking with customers or those who didn't even make it to become a customer, it will help you understand that things data can't, you know, quantitative data can't tell you, which is preference.
[00:29:50] Motivation for buying, like, why did they prefer this over that? Like, what, why are they looking for this use case and not that use case? Was it, was it price that moved them to buy or something else? And I think a great example of this and someone who's mastered it is Richard Branson. He basically, I don't know if this is true or not, but it's just a great example anyway, starting Virgin Airlines.
[00:30:15] They did a survey of the market to figure out why, you know, what are the factors, you know around choosing who to fly with. And it's obviously, well, do they fly to the destination? What is the cost? Is it direct stuff like this? They couldn't compete on any of that. But no one was competing on the experience.
[00:30:34] So they installed crazy lights on the flight, right? They had, I think they're one of the few who started with real cutlery, not just the plastic stuff and, you know, part of that experience instead. And so it will just tell you things that you won't get from the quantitative data. And I think if you're not actually doing that as part of your go to market, if you don't have a week go to market today, you will certainly end up having one.
[00:30:57] Toni: one, one other example that I recently jumbled into was like um, a hundred million dollar company. So an AR um, operating on, you know, five or six different markets, like fairly standard thing. Sales reps were speaking five or six different languages. Like, obviously we're in Europe, you know, they go.
[00:31:13] And on the quantitative side, they were like, well, 10 percent conversion rate, 15 percent conversion rate. Okay. Well, you know, my, my thing was like, well, you need to go and, you know, segment this out in bad outbound, maybe this is different, blah, blah, blah. Kind of, I think all the things we've been talking about for a really long time.
[00:31:29] And yeah, we did that and it's like, it's still the same thing, kind of. We, we don't, you know, and it's like, well, maybe there's different competitors. And it's like, do you know what the real answer actually is? Listen, listen to what they're saying. You know, what is happening on those calls? Like that, that is, that is the level of.
[00:31:47] Insight you have to go to, in order to really break the, the log jam of trying to figure this conversion rate thing out. Right? You see, it's like, well, but they're both following madic and spice and what have you. It's like, but what are they saying on those calls? Like at the end of the day? That's, that's really the question, right?
[00:32:03] And I think if you aren't doing, and if you don't have a discipline around that. I think it's going to make it difficult for you to to have a strong go to market actually. So therefore the inverse is true. If you don't listen to your customer, both on, you know, what they're being sold, meaning the product and how they're being sold to then you're probably going to end up having a shitty shitty go to market behind
[00:32:24] it,
[00:32:27] Mikkel: that's it. So hopefully, and I think probably this is a completely irrelevant episode, by the way, because obviously all our listeners. They're awesome. It's not like all the other go to market software startup podcasts. It's like, obviously these guys and girls, they get it, they get it. So there's no problems.
[00:32:45] Hopefully it's all,
[00:32:46] Toni: so Mikkel, I need to correct you. It's actually only the ones that have hit the subscribe button already. Only those ones are the ones that know things. Everyone else in between, you know, on their
[00:32:57] Mikkel: they're missing, they're
[00:32:58] Toni: on their way,
[00:32:59] Mikkel: And by the way, we would love to get some, you know, we would like, love to listen to our customers, which is you dear listeners. So if you have any feedback for this show hit us up on LinkedIn, drop us some, Hey, here's like really hate it when you do this thing, or would love to hear more about blank reach out to us it always is super cool to know who's listening what do you folks care about so we can create some better content.
[00:33:21] Toni: Boom. Thank you everyone for listening. Thanks Mikkel for today and have a good one. Bye bye folks.