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Proof is what GTM leaders need to make fast and furious decisions that keep their businesses alive and thriving.
The Proof Point hosts conversations anchored in the reality of day-to-day life as a revenue leader. No algorithm-hacking, talk-track headlining buzz statements around here. We’re hosting conversations between GTM leaders so we can gather the facts and provide you with the tactics and tools you need to bulletproof your strategy.
Join host Mark Huber every other week as he invites the best GTM leaders into the conversation.
Jason Widup [00:00:00]:
One piece of interesting advice I got a while ago was when you're in there setting the goals, you should make them as low as possible. Without that, you like that. You almost couldn't say with a straight face. So, like, if you can get to that point where you're just like two, you know, and see if they'll, you know, will they bite? And then you set that kind of like, maybe you have some buffer in there where you can exceed that.
Mark Huber [00:00:29]:
Here's what go to market teams are missing proof. That's what I think of every morning when I fire up LinkedIn and scroll through boring manifestos and endless lukewarm takes. Opinions are cheap and proof is gold. I'm Mark Huber and this is The Proof Point, a show from UserEvidence that helps go to market teams find ideas, get frameworks, and swap tactics. Each episode includes an unfiltered discussion with the biggest names in B two B SaaS. To help find The Proof Points that I'm in search of, youll learn from sales, marketing and customer success leaders in the trenches where I asked them, seriously, what actually works for you? One of our guests actually told me this, felt like we were having drinks at a bar and talking about work without all the B's. And that pretty much sums it up on why im so excited for this new show. Join us every other week for new episodes.
Mark Huber [00:01:17]:
Hot takes always welcome.
Mark Huber [00:01:21]:
On today's episode of the proofpoint, we went deep on proving marketing's impact internally. This is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart right now because it's something that I'm working through as a first time vp of marketing. So when I invited these three guests, I was super excited to record because they schooled me on this. First up, Pranav Piyush. He's the CEO of Paramark and he's got an interesting vantage point because he talks to so many marketing leaders about this topic. Next up, Megan Boone. She's the vp of demand generation at Redis.
Mark Huber [00:01:53]:
She was a little jet lagged, but.
Mark Huber [00:01:54]:
She held her own here. She had just gotten back from her world tour in India and Singapore. And then last on this episode, I don't really need to introduce him because I co hosted a podcast called Demandgen U for 65 episodes, I believe. Don't quote me on that. He is a fractional CMO and marketing consultant of B two B SaaS companies. Jason Widow this was a fun one. Enjoy. So Jason, why do you think that so many B two B marketing leaders and teams have a hard time proving their impact.
Jason Widup [00:02:25]:
Okay, so this is like a three pronged problem, I think the first thing is we don't know how to set goals. And even in that area, there's a couple different things here. So, first, if we're only setting goals with things that can be measured, we're just going to miss out on a whole swath of things that could move the needle and help us prove value. So that's the first one. But that kind of leads into the second main point, which is about trust. So, like, to be able to do some of the things that are not measurable, you've got to have the trust of your company leadership. So if they don't trust you, they're going to be very honed in on those metric, those things that can show KPI movement. And so you're gonna miss out there, too.
Jason Widup [00:03:10]:
So those are two of the things. And then the third thing, which actually, you helped me better understand when we worked together, is internal marketing and the importance of that. So I think a lot of times, like, my specific experience is like, well, I don't want to bother everybody with all this stuff that we're doing, but that's the opposite of how you should think. Right? How else are they going to know that we're targeting this segment over here? They'll never see that. Or we're doing this email. They might never, ever see that. Just the importance of internal marketing to help prove the value of what you're doing as well. So that's kind of, you know, those are the three areas I think we go wrong.
Mark Huber [00:03:43]:
So before I let Megan and Pranav chime in and basically respond, that answer, Jason, I'm proud of you because we've recorded a couple podcasts together before, and one of the things that you struggled with before was you would name how many points that you would make, and then you would either respond back with one fewer or like, two more. So you stuck to three. So I'm proud that's, you know.
Jason Widup [00:04:03]:
Yeah, it's the clearer head.
Mark Huber [00:04:07]:
So, Megan, how does that stack up to, like, what you think really causes b, two b marketing leaders to struggle with this?
Megan Boone [00:04:13]:
Yeah, well, I love that answer, first of all. And I also love the measurable goals piece here and aiming for, you know, answering the number of questions that you say you're going to answer. I think that's an author KPI. But, jeez, I will challenge you. I agree fully with the two segment points, but for the first one, I actually do think you can measure almost everything we're doing. I still think it's directly measurable. And so I know Pranav has some great points with marketing, mixed modeling, but also just finding what that right KPI is. It's not always going to be a direct conversion from what you're doing, but I do think that you can measure the impact of marketing through a KPI.
Megan Boone [00:04:48]:
In honesty, anything you're doing.
Pranav Piyush [00:04:49]:
So first off, we broke the first rule that Mark told us before we started recording, which is we're not going to talk about the three m's, the marketing mix model. Is that right off the bat? Yeah. No, but I was having a discussion with Bill Makitis recently, the ex CMO of Slack and Zendesk, and in the first five minutes of my conversation, he was like, Pranav, the days of marketing is not measurable are over. You can measure everything. Now the challenge is the cost of measuring might be too high and we can talk about that. It's not always accessible for every brand or every startup of every size. And it may not be worth it. The juice has to be worth the squeeze.
Pranav Piyush [00:05:37]:
And so there's other nuances of whether you should try to measure something or not. It is all measurable, but it comes with a cost. Now, one thing that I think about is even the wording around proving marketing's impact internally comes from the perspective of a defensive mindset, which is I'm having to justify, I'm having to prove, I'm having to defend, I'm having to come from a position of weakness. And that, I think, is the ultimate, I would say sadness, of the state of marketing right now, where I think if we reframe the conversation to be much more positive and focus on, hey, how are we going to help the business grow? And now you're talking about placing bets and saying, this is a capital allocation decision of, I'm going to invest more in this or in more in this or more in this. And it's a portfolio of bets that help you figure out the next level of growth. And then the whole conversation changes. Right. I don't care about proving impact.
Pranav Piyush [00:06:42]:
I care about growing the business. And that's coming from a position of strength. So I know that was not your question, but I would say that I think might help marketers in thinking about pushing the ball forward.
Jason Widup [00:06:56]:
I don't know if you can convince me that everything, that everything is measurable. I honestly don't. There's just so many little nuances that happen in somebody's journey that I just don't believe are measurable. The simplest one is me putting out an organic LinkedIn post about something. I could look and see who might have tactically engaged with it or commented, but I can't see the number of people it was impressed to that actually took something away from it. And then that actually led them to either getting a half step to come, maybe they didn't even visit my website. A half step there, and then they saw me somewhere else, and that was a third of a step. And then they took whatever the remaining fraction is.
Jason Widup [00:07:40]:
There's no math in this, this episode. So whatever that gets them the rest of the way there to my website, or I just have a conversation with somebody.
Jason Widup [00:07:49]:
You know what I mean?
Jason Widup [00:07:50]:
So I'm having lots of conversations. I find somebody at an event, I'm like, oh, hey, did you check out one of my clients, x, y or z? And these are obviously smaller scale things. So the larger scale things probably can measure. You can look at an impact study, you can do things like that. But these kind of smaller things, it's kind of like these little things just build up to the point where you're like, well, okay, let me go to the website. Okay, let me check them out. Let me get a demo. So, yeah, I don't know.
Jason Widup [00:08:16]:
I need more convincing.
Pranav Piyush [00:08:18]:
I love that, Jason. I love it.
Megan Boone [00:08:19]:
Yeah, I think that's a really fair point. And I'll kind of back up what I said, what you measure, which is like, you're not going to know the individual impact of every individual tactic and thing you're doing, but objectively, from like, a marketing strategy perspective, am I spending my time in the right way? Like, yeah, I do think we can find the right KPI's for that. But to your point, yeah, an organic host, a conversation at a networking event. No. No way.
Pranav Piyush [00:08:43]:
If you take a step back and think about this, right, Jason? So what you're talking about is what influences a human being to take that next action, and what influences somebody to listen to this and go like, oh, I'm going to go check out redis, or I'm going to go check out peak b, two b, or I'm going to go check out paramount. And that is, to your point, immeasurable. Because until Elon Musk makes neuralink into a marketing attribution tool, that's not happening. So until we can read people's minds, there's nothing to measure. There's nothing tangible. If you look at the words. I care a lot about the meaning of the words. Measuring means that there's something physical that you're trying to, or something tangible that you're trying to measure, and there isn't anything around that.
Pranav Piyush [00:09:28]:
So you're absolutely right about that. And it's a little bit unfortunate that the word measurement is used the way it is. I think model is a much better way of looking at it. You're modeling a reality or you're creating a sub model of what the actual reality is. That's why attribution models, marketing mixed models, they're all trying to model what might actually be happening in reality. But it's not reality. It's just a model. It's a toy airplane, and it's the best representation that we have of what might be happening in reality.
Pranav Piyush [00:09:58]:
And I do think that when you look at it from that perspective, you can actually create some very realistic models, and they're never a reality. Right. And this is why I talk a lot about experimentation, and that is the truest way of getting to cause and effect.
Pranav Piyush [00:10:14]:
Right.
Pranav Piyush [00:10:14]:
And that's where you're trying to get precision on I did something, did it have an impact? And then you get into sample sizes and statistical validity and all the jargon around that. But there's truth in what you're saying. But I think I'll also challenge you and say that shouldn't be an excuse to. Not to try to model the best version of reality that you can.
Mark Huber [00:10:39]:
So, Pranav, can you asking for a friend, aka me, can you just explain at a high level what marketing mix modeling is? Yeah, I love asking for a friend. I might be asking for Jason and myself.
Pranav Piyush [00:10:53]:
It's interesting. It was invented in, I think, the seventies or the eighties by people at PNG and I believe MIT or Harvard, I forget. But one of these larger institutions and the problem that they were trying to solve was pretty simple if you think about it. There was no digital back then. It was tv, radio, newspaper and retail stores and in store promotions. And so what these smart people at PNG and these universities figured out is what we actually need to do is look at our historical data, literally in spreadsheets, the version of spreadsheets that existed back then, and said, every time we have increased our investment in radio, in this geography, it has led to an increase in in store sales by x percent. Or every time we have reduced our linear tv in this state, it has reduced our in store sales by y percent. So all you're doing is looking at the trends of investment and the impact on your sales numbers.
Pranav Piyush [00:12:00]:
Now, when you do this across multiple channels, across tens of years of data, that's basically a marketing mix model. And you don't have to do that in a spreadsheet. You can do that through now, machine learning, etcetera, etcetera. There's lots of other stuff, but that's what you're doing. You're understanding the relationship between investments over a period of time and the impact on your sales. It gets a little bit more interesting in b two B, because you don't have sales, you have something else that's leading metric, all that fun stuff. But we can talk about that.
Jason Widup [00:12:30]:
And the volume is lower, so it's a little bit harder to get all that rich data unless you're spending a lot of money and having a lot of different experiments like you mentioned, too. So I think that's important. But yeah, that's one of the things I've always run into with just b two B in general is just like the low volume of activities we actually have to create a model with, you know, and like, how significant statistically can that be given those low volumes? And so I was working with one client that got just an f ton of visits to their website. I can't remember if this is a PG or not. So.
Mark Huber [00:13:04]:
Rip on demand.
Jason Widup [00:13:06]:
I know, yeah. Own it down. And they have a conversion on their website, so they convert to free trial on the website. And it was just so nice to finally have all of this data and we could see where people were coming from and where who converted, and not only that, but then who converted from the trial to paid and really kind of hone in that way. But most of the places I've worked, the volume is just nothing quite there from a b two B perspective, to be able to get really confident with. You know, sometimes you think you'll see something pop and you just know. You're just like, well, it's clear it's working. But then other times, if it's not clear, I find the volume problem to be a problem.
Megan Boone [00:13:47]:
I think that's super fair. I've used some tools, too, or talked to my team about this, where, you know, claim statistical significance and we're talking like ten form fills versus eight. Oh, man, that's really. I don't think we can say that.
Jason Widup [00:13:59]:
Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:14:02]:
So, Jason, I'm going to have you tell a story real quick before we bring it back on the rails. So we've already broken one rule which I asked and encouraged. Marketing mixed modeling attribution. One of my favorite stories of many that you have told me over the years is what you learned at tableau about attribution. So can you school us on that.
Jason Widup [00:14:24]:
Yeah, yeah. And that was a place where we did have a lot of volume and we had a lot of spend going through marketing. And so we were like, oh, no tool that exists out there is going to be good enough or accurate enough for tableau. And we're an analytics platform anyway, so shouldn't we be doing this ourselves? And so I hired some fancy consultants, we actually hired a PhD, like, professor of this stuff to come and advise. We build attribution modeling based on, like, Markov chain modeling. I can't even, I can't even tell you what that is now. It's just another fancy word, I think, for, like, look back at what happened before and what it's probably just a fancy word for. I don't know, marketing mix modeling.
Jason Widup [00:15:11]:
But it sounded good because it had a guy's name on it, right? So, like, where are you going to use the Markov chain modeling if you don't know what that is, this is too sophisticated for you. It was an easy way for me to sell it up my own chain. But no, we spent a good quarter million dollars on building this model, refining it, building the tools inside of tableau so we could visualize it and see it. And then at the end of the day, it basically just kind of mirrored last touch attribution. Like, well, I guess that's his experiment. An experiment for us to see what we could do and if we could learn anything more. But, yeah, it was not a success. I would say.
Pranav Piyush [00:15:53]:
That is, Jason, I think that is the unfortunate reality of most marketing. Well, a couple of things. One is, I think you did justice by saying analytics and attribution are two different things. Tableau as a marketing analytics company and why are you having to go hire an attribution provider? There's some inherent interestingness to that point. Then the second point of, like you talked about Markov chains, and there's so much jargon, the data science jargon in this industry, that we all don't talk about to each other in simple, plain English. And therefore, I think it becomes useless because the translation from data science to marketing is impossible. And I would say the winning player in this category has to break through that. If you can't explain it to a CMO or a VP of marketing, you're not going to win.
Pranav Piyush [00:16:53]:
And the question about that specific project comes down to the data that was fed into that model, because that is the actual issue, which is we work with customers all the time and the data that we receive is, has lots of issues and lots of cleanup that we have to do for customers. And without that, none of it really matters. And if you're only looking at touch data and click data, you're kind of stuck with the last click model anyway. So it's a very fair observation. I think a lot of companies struggle with exactly that.
Mark Huber [00:17:28]:
So Jason and Pranav, you're sitting in different seats at the table. You're talking with other marketing leaders, but right now, in your current role, like Megan, you are a marketing leader right now. So how do you have these conversations internally? And then Jason and Pranav, you've both been in that seat before, so I'd love to see how it compares to what you did.
Megan Boone [00:17:47]:
Yeah. Honestly, I think most attribution is total bullshit, to be honest. And I think it's kind of a breath of fresh air, the way I communicated internally, which is that, transparently, which, look, it's. It's not a science. And I think we can try to figure out, like, how much money are we spending? Is it influencing the right things? But I think coming to the table with, hey, it's not. I think, Jason, you made this point. Pranav, you made this point. I'm not defending my investments.
Megan Boone [00:18:11]:
How can I grow this company and what's working, and how do we get the right feedback loops going? I think approaching it that way was just like, hey, we just need as much data as we can get. How do we get feedback? Because we want to make. My job is to make the sales team as effective as possible. They're not successful, but I'm generating leads, I'm generating pipeline. Doesn't matter. I'm not going to go around and celebrate that internally. So if the sales team is crushing it, I'm crushing it. I know I'm doing my job well and coming and saying it from that perspective, like, we're a partner, we're only successful as one team.
Megan Boone [00:18:41]:
I think is the best way to communicate that internally.
Jason Widup [00:18:45]:
One of the things that's super important, especially, like, if you're taking a new marketing leadership role, is you want some quick wins first that are measurable, you don't want. Maybe the first thing you don't do, come in and say, we've got to do a bunch of out of home ads. You know, the things that are just like, our problem is we don't have enough billboards, so don't walk in with that, but maybe walk in with just trying to understand, you know, okay, where are some challenge spots? Which of these areas can I tackle and have visible results that I feel confident in that I can move the needle on and that will start to build that trust so that you can go back and say, like billboards, you know, we don't have enough of these or whatever your kind of maybe harder to measure play might be. So yeah, I think it's important when you start out, you do have to have some KPI measurable wins to begin with. And so that, and then I just go back to the trust thing and I would try and work that out before you even accept a new job. So spend time with the CEO or whoever it is that you're going to be reporting to. Ask them like, can we meet in person before we take this job any further? Spend a couple of hours with them, talk about philosophical things in marketing or in your life or whatever, and just are we on the same page? And can we start from a position of trust or can it get there because people that either don't understand marketing or that you can't develop a trusting relationship with, it's just going to be like really hard. Even if you do have some of those numerical wins under your belt, I think it's still going to be a hard thing to just be able to do the right mix of things if you don't have that in place.
Pranav Piyush [00:20:30]:
I love what both of you said. I'm going through this right now. I have a little bit of money to spend on our own marketing. It's like, okay, how are we going to spend this money? Am I going to create a podcast? We do have one. Are we going to spend more on content on our blog? Are we going to spend more on my organic social? Are we going to spend more on sponsoring communities and events? Or do I finally start advertising? Do I do CMO dinners? And the reality is, until you've reached a few million dollars in revenue, a lot of that decision making better come from the founders about their this is going to sound super weird coming from a measurement provider based on your gut feel and what you're seeing day to day talking to customers. Because guess what, or whoever is kind of in a customer facing role in those early days because you are talking to customers and prospects every day, and that is data. It may not look like data because it's not on a spreadsheet, but that is data. And you're making those data informed decisions about where you're going to invest your dollars.
Pranav Piyush [00:21:34]:
Data doesn't always come in the form of first click, last click, spreadsheet data. It comes in many different ways. And you can still make smart decisions based on those conversations you're having with customers.
Mark Huber [00:21:47]:
All right, asking another question for a friend, that is me. And I know that Evan and Ray listened to The Proof Point, so I'm giving away the answers of the test here. Pranav, how do you go about having those types of conversations with co founders? Because I myself, at times, I'm big on qualitative feedback and email replies and LinkedIn comments from people that actually matter in your ICP and all these other forms as a way to fill in some of the gaps that I might not be able to quantify. But how do you best go about those conversations?
Pranav Piyush [00:22:19]:
I mean, a little bit of a cheat code on my end because my co founders are living and breathing the same problem that we talk about. So they understand marketing. They understand marketing measurement pretty well. And we can see that when we invest more in LinkedIn organic, I actually look at our impression counts on a daily basis for my profile for the company pages and see the correlation with those with our website visits. We don't do any advertising, we don't do any SEO. So the only thing that's driving website visits is our LinkedIn content. There's nothing else to it. So it's pretty simple for us to have that conversation now.
Pranav Piyush [00:22:58]:
When we layer on more complicated stuff, it becomes harder and we also have to be real, right? I can go look at our podcast and it's a great podcast. But hey, our distribution is not there yet. We started three months ago and we've got 15 episodes. So if I become like one of those folks who's like, oh yeah, podcast, like, it's going to crush it. Let's just keep going. It's a little bit of an intellectually dishonest argument. It's like it's a seed, it's a bet. It's going to take a couple of years to play out.
Pranav Piyush [00:23:29]:
And that has to be how we think about the investment. It is not going to drive 90% of our pipeline right now. It might drive ten or 20% of our pipeline two years from now. As long as you think about then you make a conscious decision of, am I going to continue investing an hour every two weeks into that thing? Because I'm expecting results two years from now. I am. I'm comfortable making that decision. But if something changes in the business, we might have to change that calculus.
Mark Huber [00:23:58]:
Megan, is that how you think about it and your role?
Megan Boone [00:24:00]:
I think there's a couple interesting points that Pranav made that really resonated with me. One is finding what the metrics are and the internal story needs to sell. Mark, same for you. If you're getting anecdotal feedback from folks, that is attribution. I think that is on the story. It's not always going to be easy. It's not always going to be in a tableau dash world though. So I'm not a tableau fan.
Megan Boone [00:24:19]:
Sorry, Jason. No, true to thought spot forever, Jason is either. Yeah, totally, totally fair. But um, you got to do some work to figure out what is that story you're trying to tell and what are those metrics. But then also like lining up that budget and everyone's at a different point in their journey. So there's no, I don't think, perfect math for how much should be, you know, direct attribution, direct pipeline generating and how much should be big bets. But I love, you know, the concept that resonates the most with me is like the hamster wheel versus the flywheel. If you're over indexed on pipeline generation, like, that's nothing really our jobs, to be perfectly honest.
Megan Boone [00:24:56]:
It's demand generation, which is going to be different. One kind of fuzzy here. But how do we get off the, like every quarter feels super painful to how do we start to make it easier? That's the flywheel. So to Pranav's point and hey, I'm going to do this podcast. No, it's not going to generate pipeline this quarter, but I'm going to do it. I'm going to start to invest. I'm going to build an audience and make sure I'm selling that internally the right way so people understand why you're doing it. They have the trust that you're doing it and then you can show the momentum along the way.
Megan Boone [00:25:24]:
So it's just about finding the right balance. But you still need to show up quarter over quarter wins on the board. So you need to do both at the same time.
Jason Widup [00:25:33]:
The product you're marketing is really important, I think, as well. If you don't have product market fit, there's really no amount of marketing that can fix that problem. So I think that's another thing to look at is just make sure we've got actually a solid product that we're putting money behind here and that we're actually having wins with, with customers. And then another little cheat thing that I've learned as well with founders is if you can figure out something that they're passionate about as well and mix that in, in some way. So it's like if, if they are passionate about posting on LinkedIn but they're not there yet. Cool. Hey, this is part of our strategy. You getting onto LinkedIn, or if they're not, then definitely not including that.
Jason Widup [00:26:14]:
If they're like, really? Ah, I hate LinkedIn and I hate, then don't come to them. Like, all right, here's what we're going to do. You're going to get on LinkedIn every day. You're going to post something. So I think finding that and just kind of like prodding and searching and kind of figuring out what are things that they, and pushing the envelope a little bit that they could be comfortable with or could be interested in, because then if they're invested in it too, it's more likely to succeed, or at least you might get a little bit more leeway on the timing or budget or something like that.
Pranav Piyush [00:26:42]:
I think. One thing I was going to add here, Mark, I know you're, you're going to go on here at the earlier stages. You have to concentrate your bets more. And I think a lot of us end up trying a whole bunch of different things and it actually hurts because it's the operational cost, all that fun stuff. But also for you to see impact and for you to do your best job, you have to concentrate your bets to be able to see the impact. An example of this is if I spread my advertising dollars across LinkedIn, meta Twitter, and I'm just making this up. TikTok. Nobody's probably doing TikTok.
Pranav Piyush [00:27:20]:
And B, two b. Maybe somebody is. You spend ten k, ten k, ten k, ten k, and your baseline is like nothing. It's going to be much harder for you to tell what's working, what's not working. But if you take all 40 of that, put it into one channel for a month, and that gives you more breathing room to see the impact from that channel before you go and try something else. So I do believe in the idea of concentrated bets at the earliest stages, for sure.
Mark Huber [00:27:45]:
I love that. So maybe we use that as the example. How do you have that type of conversation, Pernav? Especially when, you know, leadership and the CEO might not come from a marketing background? Like, do you go about that conversation any differently?
Pranav Piyush [00:28:00]:
I think so. If I were doing this again, right, if I were to step back into a marketing leadership role, here's what I would do. The first thing is understanding the baseline of the business. What that means is, however you define it, handraisers, leads, qualified opportunities, whatever your leading metric is for the business, what has the actual growth rate and volumes been week over week, month over month for the last twelve months. To me that is the starting point. That's your baseline. Now the question is you're often going to see when you come into that role that somehow the number that's being forecasted for the next twelve months looks dramatically higher than the number over the last twelve months. The first conversation that I would have was like, why are you doing that? And that conversation is probably more useful than the conversation about the bets you're going to make.
Pranav Piyush [00:28:54]:
Because if you can't align on what is fundamentally going to be different between the last twelve months and the next twelve months to have that inflection point, you're never going to get on the same page. So, right, sizing the forecast of the plan, whatever you use for the internal terminology, is step one. Step two then is to say, okay, like if the natural trajectory of the business is this way, right, we're going from this point to this point and then you're projecting to go and have an inflection point. You realize that you're not going to get there with the same budget you had for the last twelve months. So what is the additional budget that you're going to invest? Let's have a conversation and are we all on the same page? Are we going to invest another million dollars? Then I'm going to talk about, okay, 70% of that budget is going to go towards the same activities that we did in the last twelve months because hey, it did get you this pipeline or this last twelve months. We're going to take the remaining 30%, we're going to put them on those additional bets. Then I need to figure out where those additional bets are. That's a conversation that you're having.
Pranav Piyush [00:29:53]:
I'm listening to the market, I'm listening to prospects, I'm listening to customers. I've done my research on where they hang out. I've done my research on what messages they care about. And that's going to give you. Here are the three bets, five bets that we're going to make. By the way. Four out of those five bets are going to fail. Only one is going to work.
Pranav Piyush [00:30:10]:
This is statistically the answer. If we go talk to, exactly. Hopefully if you go talk to Microsoft and Google and Amazon@booking.com and you ask them how many of your experiments actually work, they'll tell you the answer is somewhere between ten to 20%. So are you really going to be better than those large companies and you know exactly what's going to work?
Pranav Piyush [00:30:30]:
No.
Pranav Piyush [00:30:30]:
Right. So that's the framework of the conversation. Right. You understand the baseline, you understand the additional investments to inflect that baseline, and you split your budget up into business as usual and expands.
Mark Huber [00:30:42]:
So it sounds like a big part of that is setting expectations. Is that fair to say?
Pranav Piyush [00:30:50]:
Oh, totally.
Mark Huber [00:30:52]:
And I think that's something that I've struggled with at times, too. So, Jason, I'm curious, and Megan as well, how you've gone about trying to set realistic expectations on timing, success rate, like, you name it.
Jason Widup [00:31:07]:
Yeah, it's just gotten a little. I've just learned lesson after lesson over time, and I've been doing this for a long time. And so founders have to do this, too. You've got to be, like, wildly optimistic about things, but also intelligently pessimistic at the same time. And so because you don't want to just oversell yourself, and then you're just kind of like, yes, there's no way this can't work because I've done that. I mean, you've even seen me say that before, Mark. Like, this is going to work 100%. I'm confident about it.
Jason Widup [00:31:35]:
And that just fails miserably because you just really, you just really don't know. You know, even if you kind of represent your ICP or marketers selling to marketers. And it's like, still, I mean, there.
Mark Huber [00:31:44]:
Were also times, we think back to the metadata days where there were things that someone had suggested, maybe it was you, maybe it was me, and we actually didn't have very much confidence in it, and those were also the ones that were more successful than the things that we were, like, super confident in.
Jason Widup [00:31:58]:
That's true. Yeah. Yeah. So you never can really understand. You never really can tell, like, what's going to work and what's not going to work. And so, yeah, I just think the trying thing and trying to do things so you can do more things, trying to do things as an MVP. And so, like, if you just take, maybe take a subset of your audience and do it in kind of a half baked way and then see if that works, you can kind of maybe do more of those things to get to that final point of, like, all right, we're going to then really go big with this thing once we at least test the waters. And I think also just, like, talking to people, I think Pranavi mentioned this, just talking to people and talking it through and talking to people in your ICP that are friendly with you or customers and, like, just running it by them and seeing what they think and how they could even improve your idea.
Jason Widup [00:32:37]:
I think is helpful, too.
Megan Boone [00:32:38]:
Yeah, I think having kind of a council of inputs, if you will, but then also in terms of setting expectations, depending who you're sending expectations with. Is this above or below? Above. I think it's. You don't want to oversell it. I kind of like to set the bar at a healthy level. I try to overachieve it, but also make sure that people understand what their role is as well. And it depends on the level of investment. For me, for example, we have a pretty pricey global roadshow we're investing in.
Megan Boone [00:33:05]:
I need a lot from other teams, and so the more other folks feel involved, the more comfortable I feel selling it up, too. And then the other one is when you're talking down to your team, some advice I've been given that I love, and I try to internalize this quite a bit because I have very ambitious goals that a lot of people will say, like, absolutely no way. You sound crazy. Is winning is contagious. So you don't want it to be easy. You want to set the bar so people feel like they're striving. But people need wins to gain momentum. And so that's what I think about, like, selling goals to the team.
Megan Boone [00:33:38]:
You need to make sure it's achievable and they like, get that momentum. So they want to do more. They want to keep moving that bar up. But then if you're selling it to the executive team, they need to have some buy in. If it's something small, you can kind of downsell it. But again, I like to under promise over deliver as much as possible.
Jason Widup [00:33:55]:
One piece of interesting advice I got a while ago was when you're in there setting the goals, you should make them as low as possible. Without that, you almost couldn't say with a straight face. So if you can get to that point where you're just like two, you know, and see if they'll be, will they bite? And then you set that kind of like, maybe you have some buffer in there where you can exceed that. But, yeah, try and do it where you're just like, almost couldn't do with quite a straight face. Or if they challenge you on it, you know, you'd be, you'd have almost a hard time defending it and then there's nowhere to go but up. But, yeah, it's definitely not. This is an art. More science.
Pranav Piyush [00:34:38]:
I'll give you a fun story on this one. I was out of business and we completely, I was a marketing leader and a product leader at the time, and we changed something fundamental about the product in a way that was going to just dramatically change the buyer experience, the pricing, the packaging, the whole thing. And running it as an experiment, even though I'm a data guy, would have been really painful and hard because of the number of changes that we had to make. My CEO and I, we sat down like we're just going to do it, we're going to do it and then we'll figure out how to iterate from whatever the new baseline is. We did it. It happened to coincide perfectly with us getting acquired. And you can imagine what that led to given that the acquiring company acquired this product that had a pretty stable baseline and then now there was a completely new set of expectations to manage. And not running it as an experiment was a horrible idea in hindsight.
Pranav Piyush [00:35:41]:
So yes, it would have been painful, but that's also the nature of the environment that you're in. How risk averse is the environment or how risk friendly is the environment? Who the ultimate sort of decision maker is, what the board is betting on the right. All of these things will help you have that conversation internally. And you would use a very different argument with my CEO like, hey, let's go, go, go, versus the new acquiring company in the board. That's like, hey, we got to have everything, all the t's crossed and I's dotted before we launch this thing. So I think there's no easy answer. You have to know the people in the room and the people who are sitting around the board table making the decisions before you can have that conversation. Conversation.
Mark Huber [00:36:25]:
One of the things that Im kind of feeling right now and id be curious to get your take on this is when you are investing in marketing. Lets say its a dollar in in September. When can you start to see the impact of said dollar? How do you even go about that conversation? Because thats something where I feel like I try to set expectations around and probably im not doing the best job of it.
Jason Widup [00:36:49]:
Thats a tough one. Yeah, I think some things are going to have a more immediate impact, you know, so, or should like we're going to run these demo, these demo ads and hopefully that'll have. But I think you got, I mean, I guess it's like putting yourself in the shoes of the recipient in some way. It's like, well, how could this ultimately, how would this ultimately move me? And if it's something like a podcast, for example, this is going to be one of probably many things that they encounter about your brand and your company that's going to ultimately lead them to.
Mark Huber [00:37:19]:
Let'S use a hypothetical, aka a very real example. It's sponsoring events, so use that as the lens.
Jason Widup [00:37:26]:
Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting there is if you can get. You can often get a list of the companies that are attending and just like, just take a little gander, you know, beforehand, how many of these companies visited our website. Afterwards, how many companies visited the website. But event is another one of those things where, I mean, depending on how you're attending these events, and I know you're not boosting it up, I don't think. I think you're doing more of like a meeting people and maybe doing some dinners and that kind of thing. And those could have immediate, you know, fairly immediate impacts and they're fairly measurable because, you know, exactly the dinners. For example, you know, who was there, you know, you invited, you know, who was there, you know, what happens to them afterwards. People you meet, you probably will kind of remember and see if they're, you know, if something happens afterwards.
Jason Widup [00:38:11]:
But booth presence at an event is a whole different ballgame. A lot of people are, too. You know, like one of my clients, they're in the association space, and, man, it feels like this space is light years behind. And so they are big event people. And so I come in, I'm like, what are all these events we're doing? These don't work. And sure enough, it is where literally more than half of our pipeline, probably like 70, maybe 60, 70% of it comes from, literally booth at an event. And so another learning for me, but so, yeah, some of those, you know, the booth, you know, somebody sign up, grab some money out of a money bag, and, you know, you get to sign up. If you sign up for a demo right here or whatever, you know, your gimmick is to try and get people there that can have an immediate.
Jason Widup [00:38:56]:
But again, other. Others of it is just, okay, I saw them there, and then they see another thing, like an ad, and then they see an email, and then they see a post on LinkedIn from a founder. It's just all those things make them feel like, oh, they keep reminding them subconsciously or consciously about you and your product, and so they can have really long term effects. But, you know, three months, you know, three months ish, three months, you know, to maybe see some results from that. Because after that, are they really going to remember that they saw you at the booth? I don't know.
Megan Boone [00:39:26]:
Yeah, I think to Jason's point, I completely agree with that. And I myself have been really surprised with the performance of events and I'm in a developer led space now and they crush people, love events and so we lead it heavily. But it's, again, it's about setting expectations. Like, what is the objective of doing this? Is it brand awareness? Is it relationship building? Then it's going to take a super long time to see that ROI. But if it's for us, we do a lot of pipeline acceleration. So we just look at pipe in the room. Like how much pipeline did we engage with at this dinner, at this happy hour? And then did we see a conversion rate differential? Usually we do. By the way, our events, we have a nice model.
Megan Boone [00:40:03]:
The ops team has done this well, wherever. If they come to at least one event, we close twice as, twice as fast as if they don't and we're like, cool, get as many people to events as possible. But it's, again, it's just, what is the purpose of the event? And then, and then I think that can help you. But it should, it should usually be pretty fast with events. It's big upfront investment, but it should come out quickly.
Jason Widup [00:40:22]:
Did you say pipe in the room?
Megan Boone [00:40:24]:
Yes.
Jason Widup [00:40:25]:
That's a new measure. I like that pipe in the room. That's the news. That's the new key in the room.
Megan Boone [00:40:30]:
It's a really easy way for like the top of funnel. If this is a pipeline acceleration program. Like, was there pipe in the room? Now you have to balance it with numbers versus dollars. We've got some really big swing gills, so you can like really crush with some of those. And actually two.
Jason Widup [00:40:47]:
I like that new metric for men.
Megan Boone [00:40:49]:
There you go. You know, I knew you wanted more metrics, so.
Pranav Piyush [00:40:54]:
Mark, I will. So my take on this is if it doesn't work within the first month, it's never going to work. So I take an extreme point of view on this and it's never going to work doesn't mean that you shouldn't invest in it. I'm just saying that whatever you did, either it had impact that you can viscerally feel right now, or it didn't. And I'll tell you, I've sponsored events when we had five figures in revenue and I'm thinking back to January, and we sponsored this thing and it was a small token amount of sponsorship, but I had pipeline worth like hundreds of thousands of dollars within the first month of that. From that event, I did another responsorship. And again, same exact deal. Again, it's easy for us because we are so new in the market.
Pranav Piyush [00:41:48]:
When you get to tens of millions in revenue, and you're now starting to think about, okay, where do I invest? And do I do a good, you know, do I invest more in events? It gets harder. But at the same time, whoever's organized that event should have clear evidence of, are there people who are interacting with your brand at that event in a way that is authentic and legitimate? And why would it take anything longer than, like, a week for you to see that in your CRM? That just means that somebody messed up something in terms of the operational logistics of setting up that event. That's my take. And again, if it didn't work in the first month, why will it work six months from now? Why would it work three months from now? I don't buy that.
Mark Huber [00:42:34]:
So, Pranav, you're going to see me at the event that I'm talking about, and we'll see if it's the same answer after this. We're getting close here on time. Megan, don't forget your story. Make sure you finish last here, and then, uh, bring it back. So, Pranav and Jason, first, what's, like, the biggest mistake that you've made in your career on this topic that you'd be willing to share for, you know, new marketing leaders, just as far as advice goes?
Jason Widup [00:43:01]:
I mean, I guess I'd say, and this is kind of, it's a life learning experience, too, but just having faith and trust in yourself and what you're capable of doing. And I think for so much of my life, personally and professionally, I didn't have a lot of confidence in what I was doing. I needed outside opinion to tell me that things were going well. I didn't trust my own view of things. And so I think working on myself and helping to develop that confidence is something that I wish I would have done decades, almost like, you know, 15 years ago. And it would have really helped, because I remember seeing marketing leaders that I would work for, that I would really respect, and how well they could, I don't want to say defend, because, like Pranav was saying, you don't necessarily, but sometimes you have to. They would just, like, either present something with such conviction or defend something so intelligently. Well, against, like, the CEO or.
Jason Widup [00:44:03]:
And I just was in awe of that. I was like, I don't know if I could do that. I would probably just like, okay, you're right, it didn't work. You know, let's. All right, let's try something else. So I think that's probably one of, that's for me, I think one of the bigger learnings
Mark Huber [00:44:15]:
Love that. Pranav?
Pranav Piyush [00:44:17]:
Yeah, I was thinking about what the biggest mistake is. I was leading a product marketing team before starting Powermark product marketing and customer marketing and it was a larger organization. There was a lot to sort of unpack and repack. It was a couple of companies got acquired. That was a complicated, messy sort of situation that we found ourselves and it was really, really hard to define the role of the product marketing team in that environment. Okay. It was just like everyone was like, yeah, I don't know what these people do. It was like just rent on a listening tour, all that fun stuff.
Pranav Piyush [00:44:54]:
And when I ended that role and I decided to quit and start Paramark, I realized one thing, the hardest thing for that team was not having a clear high to a metric that was important to the CFO, to the CRO, to the CEO. And you'll notice I didn't say the CMO. The CMO obviously cared and understood product marketing really well. But if you can't tie your activity and output to an outcome that the business cares about, nothing else matters. You can have lots of great Kumbaya sessions and hey, we love sales and sales loves product marketing. Nothing matters if you are not driving quantified outcomes to a business metric. So that's my lesson is like, I wish I could have changed that earlier in the process and we didn't get there fast enough.
Mark Huber [00:45:48]:
Love it. Alrighty Megan, you're on the spot.
Megan Boone [00:45:50]:
I'm on the spot. I don't know if I have a good story but hopefully I have a good perspective which is for me by either failures or my advices. Not getting overly stuck in the spreadsheets of marketing, that was super important. That was a tough one for me. It's my comfort place. I want the numbers to be perfect, but it's about internal relationships. Remember the humanity of it all. We're in a creative profession and we need to be able to be creative and so make the spreadsheets work in that respect.
Megan Boone [00:46:20]:
But that's been a failure of mine. Is trying to over engineer the whole model. We like that word today, the whole.
Megan Boone [00:46:26]:
Model of it all.
Megan Boone [00:46:27]:
It's important to make sure that you build that trust internally, but you got to take bets. And I think to Jason's point, trust your gut, trust yourself and try things and be ready to fail. Failure is a good thing. You want to fail often.
Mark Huber [00:46:40]:
All right, great perspective. I'll let you off the hook. But you were just across like the world. What was the craziest travel story that you can share from your international roadshow in India and Singapore?
Megan Boone [00:46:53]:
I don't have a crazy, you know, it wasn't a crazy travel adventure, if you will. It was 95% working inside of a hotel, if you will. But it was still. It was still. It was a wonderful trip. And again, I think as marketers, we don't oftentimes get to see our work come to life in a physical way. And so that was a really magical moment, especially post Covid. Did something crazy happen? You're putting so much pressure on me.
Pranav Piyush [00:47:21]:
What was your favorite meal?
Mark Huber [00:47:22]:
30 hours, like, travel day. And you had to go right into a meeting. Isn't that crazy?
Megan Boone [00:47:26]:
Yeah, that's true. I guess that could be considered crazy. I do that to myself, though. That's on me. Food was the highlight, though, for sure. Crazy travel. Again, I said I didn't get sick, and that was the highlight for me. I was eating everything that I could and loved every bit of it.
Megan Boone [00:47:42]:
I'm a big fan of Indian food and then all at the various cuisines of Singapore.
Pranav Piyush [00:47:47]:
Did you do, did you do crab, chili crab in Singapore or. No?
Megan Boone [00:47:50]:
I did, yes. And it came. We came with the gloves and the bit. So that was, that was a treat. I appreciated that.
Pranav Piyush [00:47:56]:
I'm curious.
Mark Huber [00:47:57]:
Well, what is this? I haven't eaten lunch yet, but I doubt that I'm going to be able to find that here.
Megan Boone [00:48:01]:
Yeah.
Pranav Piyush [00:48:02]:
Chili crab. Mark, if you. If you ever go to Singapore or Southeast Asia, it is the thing to try. It's basically just a crab with chili. And you get like these little. Did you get the bows, the buns? Yeah, you dip it in the sauce.
Megan Boone [00:48:16]:
It was. It was excellent. Anything, in my opinion, that comes with a bib and gloves to eat is going to be an excellent.
Mark Huber [00:48:23]:
That's a pretty good life rule to have.
Megan Boone [00:48:25]:
Yeah, exactly.
Mark Huber [00:48:28]:
Amazing. Well, this was a blast recording with you all. I know. I definitely learned a ton. So I'm excited to get this out on the podcast. So thank you for recording with us. We appreciate it.
Jason Widup [00:48:37]:
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Pranav Piyush [00:48:39]:
This is great.