The Transaction

All right, well, we're on, and since we weren't hitting record while we were confronting AJ about not, about the amazing paella parties and other things he puts on, we have come to the realization that Matt has not been invited to the paella party.

That's not the realization that we came to.

dude, you said you had got invited to one, but AJ keeps the list, so you would have been invited to multiple, not one.

Well, I'm just saying I just saw one.

I saw one invite.

There may have been more.

You might have walked by me or Sydney Sloan's desk and seen our invites, but you weren't invited, but now you are, and there's one coming up.

All right.

Well, the peninsula has gone paella crazy, so I have to come.

From ABM to PLG, from Meddic to med pic, the world of business is constantly evolving.

We'll cover the who, what, where, when, why, and most importantly how you get The Transaction.

I'm Matt Amundson, and he's Craig Rosenberg.

Let's get started.

Man, I'll tell you, I just was, Azus and, Ryan Azus and I were driving back from the city the other day, and we were just marveling at AJ's social schedule.

Like, cause he's having fun, but he's always learning.

Like, and it's from, he creates these social settings where he can hang out with go-to-market people.

There's something bigger than just the fact that AJ is like my major networker in the world.

He's global with this thing too.

But, you know, there's like a real business value there that I think is completely underrated, by the way.

Agreed.

You're super kind, Craig.

I mean, my few point on it is, first of all, I love this content, I love this work.

So that part makes it fun.

The second part is, just the people who do it, I mean, folks like yourselves, it's just fun hanging out with you guys.

And then if we get to do it and like, you know, have a nice experience, have some good food and drink in a nice setting, like, what could be better?

And I think one enabler for me is my kids are, you know, pretty much, you know, into adulting now.

So I've got a 17 year old who's like super mature and a 19 year old.

And so they're actually starting to work with me, and my older daughter in particular.

So it's kind of that work-life integration or work-life family integration, the sacrament from GTM Partners was just posting that over the weekend.

And yeah, my daughter's been working with me on a go-to-market leader society this summer.

It's been fun.

Yeah, I was about to say, yeah, he puts him to work.

dude, we met on some things.

He's like, oh, well, my daughter's take care of that.

And then she was taking pictures at one of the amazing event we went to at your house with the 16 course omakase menu, Matt.

Hey, so there's going to be more, once I get through go-to-market paella on September 15th, which is in between Saster and Dreamforce.

What's coming next are more small executive dinners.

And I basically learned that from you and Alvaro, Craig.

You guys used to do these super amazing dinners for Topo.

And I met the best people at them.

And you did it in like Michelin, two-star Michelin, three-star restaurant.

So I was like, it was one of the highlights of my year.

And so I want to bring that back.

And so doing it in like a kind of a, you know, in a private home just makes it a little bit more intimate.

And so yeah, that one time was amazing.

We had two Japanese chefs and we did this big omakase thing.

I'm going to do more of that.

So there's like a CRO, CMO, and CCO dinner coming up soon that's in the planning phase.

And we'll probably do omakase.

Sweet.

No, dude, do not miss that one.

By the way, everyone, welcome to the show.

I just want to say AJ Gandhi, Chief Growth Officer at Marlin Equity.

And like, as you could hear from our initial conversation, literally, he is the guy who has done incredible work in bringing together go-to-market folks, operating partners.

That's the group that we did.

I mean, like, if AJ is in the group, he's gonna bring everyone together.

It's an amazing thing.

So I'm not sure what you're most known for.

I think equal amounts, you know, like because we, some folks run into you, you know, via your amazing events and other folks work with you directly.

I remember just a sudden, so I had heard all about AJ.

So I was, RingCentral was a customer of TOA.

AJ gets over there and they're like, dude, this new guy is just kicking ass and taking names, right?

And so I had my first meeting with him and it was, I won't bring it up, but he was, I was like, holy crap, this dude's game is tight, just literally.

It was someone had presented him a dashboard and I was unfortunately on the call, which by the way, like in this guy, it was the worst dashboard I'd ever seen and AJ's like, well, we're gonna have to fix it.

But the big one was, this was incredible, Matt, you're gonna love this.

So AJ is like one of the first things you wanted to do was to document the entire customer experience.

So I go into this room, there's like 18 people in there, AJ's leading this.

And he's got the walls are papered, okay?

I still to this, this was so memorable.

I never had where I was sitting in the bleachers watching Amazingness, you know, we would typically have to effectuate workshops, whatever, I was just there.

And he's like, we are going to literally, down to every detail, go through the entire customer experience.

He had, you know, you had marketing there, you had SDRs there, you had every, it was a make.

I mean, they were going up on the wall, putting everything up.

And then AJ starts to ask really good questions.

They start to, you know, make some adjustment because you have to get everything.

And then they took that, right, this big view.

And then that's where they were able to sort of start with, like, what can we go and prove?

Obviously, you know, AJ is an operations guy, so they can layer numbers in there.

And you were probably presented the numbers when you walked in because Ring was pretty good at numbers, but it was really focused on the experience, man.

I tell that story all the time to people.

It's like, what an exercise.

I don't know if you remember that, AJ, but I was like, dude, this guy's got game forever.

We've been friends since I was like, dude, this guy is so good.

So anyway, that's my personal story on.

That's super kind of you, Craig.

What I enjoy most is being in person and doing deep hands-on problem solving.

Especially when you get a bunch of people in the room who bring different perspectives.

The goal is just to bring all that out and just be methodical about it and figure out, where's the 80-20?

Where's the biggest opportunity to drive improvement?

So yeah, I really enjoy stuff like that.

The cool thing is you're working on problems that are fun problems to tackle with good people.

So what's better than that?

I've never seen a session like that not go well.

You know what I mean?

Like where you just get everybody in the room and you just look at everything with a big macro lens.

I find that most of the time people are trying to solve these really minute problems and the benefit of solving them is you get a 0.3% increase in efficiency or throughput or whatever metric you're trying to affect.

It's actually when people are willing to take a moment to step back and look at the big picture and think about how all of go-to-market affects it, is usually where you get the biggest bang for your buck.

There's something about just being in person and being very tactile and physical and just writing the stuff on the wall that seems like there's no real software that's out there that solves that when people are all over the country and you're trying to use these digital chalkboards and stuff like that.

It's just you get everybody in, you put it up on the wall, the best type of work always comes out of those scenarios.

Yeah.

That's actually reminding me.

I actually have a conference coming up for Marlin, our Go-to-Market leaders Conference at the beginning of October.

I'm just plotting out the whole agenda.

Got a pretty cool framework I'm excited about on Go-to-Market excellence and executing the fundamentals well.

The key thing actually, this conversation is making me realize, I need to make sure I build in that highly interactive component where people do get up and IDA.

It's actually prompting me nicely.

One other thing I'll mention, I was known for this at RingCentral.

Even at Salesforce, companies do these QBRs and it's great.

You get the top 100 leaders together.

Benioff did that at Salesforce.

We did that at RingCentral.

Then people present for an hour and a half or for a day and a half.

We got all the talented leaders in the room and it's just excessive amounts of presentation.

I can actually say Benioff had a purpose.

He was actually, he's like, I have an agenda, I'm going to indoctrinate my leadership team on that agenda.

I think he was actually super purposeful.

At RingCentral, frankly, it was a good readout and people prepared well for it, but you wasted the talent in the room.

I actually, two QBRs in, created a bolt-on QBR where I said, hey, for people who want to, we're going to do an extra four hours, and we're going to do two or three breakouts, and we're going to bring all the teams together, we're going to solve different go-to-market challenges or work on different go-to-market initiatives.

We're going to side people out the teams of eight to 10, and you're going to go through this exercise and ideate and problem-solve, and then we'll come back together and share.

And it really became a thing, and I just kind of kept doing it.

And so I think those sessions are great.

That's awesome.

By the way, Matt, you added value to AJ.

Every now and then.

You might be in on the Omakasi now.

I think so.

So here's the question, AJ, that we start every show with, and then we'll take your lead from there.

So what's something that the market thinks they're doing right?

It can be an approach, methodology, best practices, et cetera, that they're actually wrong, and they should be thinking about it a different way.

What is that and what should they be doing about it?

Microphone to you, my friend.

All right.

Man, there are so many things that I think we need to rethink on go-to-market just given how times have changed.

Buyers are super discerning.

We have this dynamic where it's persisted for people to be hybrid and distributed.

It's hard to reach buyers.

Yet, I think a lot of the go-to-market playbook is still the old approach.

We need to rethink a lot of things.

I think the first thing that I would say is, well, there's a bunch of components to it.

The first one is, be realistic about what your growth objectives are going to be.

Public companies are still spending 40-45 percent of revenue on sales and marketing.

That doesn't even include customer success.

That's fine as long as you're growing at an acceptable growth rate.

I'm in private equity and we focus on real 40.

There are going to be some companies where it's not realistic to grow at 30 percent plus.

If so, then you should be dropping profitability.

I think that's number one is just being mindful on what's the amount of spend that you have and making sure you're getting a return on that spend.

That's number one.

Number two is, really think about where you put the money.

I came up through more of the sales ranks and sort of the kind of rev-up strategy ranks.

Over time, but certainly broadened, I did a lot of customer success.

I never officially owned the marketing function, things like sales developments, at least any kind of scale company.

But what I have recognized is so much of the buyer's journey is kind of self-managed now.

They don't want to meet with sales till quite late.

They don't want to meet with sales until maybe they've shortlisted the set of potential solution providers.

So does it make sense to put most of the money in sales versus marketing?

And I think it's just there's a lot of kind of muscle memory and instinct to just say, hey, we're going to add a ease, right?

You don't have sales capacity.

But let's just start looking at how companies are doing for the past 18 months, 24 months.

Many sellers are struggling pretty badly.

So yeah, I would say most people have enough sales capacity, especially when you think about high quality pipeline.

And that's why the average attainment of a lot of companies is something like 60, 70 percent of quota.

And so that to me says, well, you probably have a third too much sales capacity.

And we know what's also happened is the performance distribution has bifurcated much more too.

So you've got this bimodal situation where you got top sellers who are actually still doing quite well, even though it's harder.

But then you have this big clump of people on the far left of the, you know, the curve.

And, you know, they're really struggling.

So, you know, are they really the right people?

So I think that there are a bunch of places we can take this.

But I think the first thing I would say is, okay, well, if the buyer's journey is much more self-managed, well, maybe we should put more dollars into the places that influence that buyer's journey.

And that really is much more marketing.

So in private equity, even though I kind of came in with much more of the sales and customer success background, I can spend more time in the marketing function than anywhere else, because frankly, it's the one that is least developed.

And it's also candidly not as well understood, not nearly as well understood by CEOs, CFOs and boards.

So I'd be happy to share a lot more about that.

But let me pause for a second.

Well, first of all, Matt, of course, hold on.

Let's get Matt, the CMO, here's reaction, and then we will go from there.

Here, here?

I got a small rectangle to operate in.

But yes, I love what you're saying.

I think it's interesting, just being on the operating side, and you see, typically, I usually work in smaller businesses or growth businesses, and typically, the budget allocation of the total sales and marketing spend is about two-thirds go to sales and one-third go to marketing.

And over the last, prior to what we're experiencing here in the last 18 to 24 months, it was, hey, there's lots of inbound and it's all about lead capture.

And really, the transition now is all about creating more demand.

And the budgets aren't really there to do that.

And then you hear things like, oh, this company has great buzz and great word of mouth.

Well, that doesn't happen by accident, right?

That happens from marketing.

And when you're making the investments in growing that base of people who will eventually become your customers long term.

But I think we've gotten into a situation, sort of broadly, at least in the tech space, where we want pipeline because we have salespeople and salespeople aren't closing, so we need more pipeline.

So we can't allocate budget towards creating a market because we really have to capture the market.

We need demo requests.

And that is the big challenge, I think, for most go-to-market orgs right now is that, to your point, I think I see across the board, most people have about a third too many sales reps, and they're growing their sales teams, and they're expecting marketing to supply a much higher percentage of pipeline than what we've seen in the past.

I've seen organizations that are asking marketing to supply 70 to 80% of all pipeline, and they're not getting the budget, nor the time, nor the understanding from their peers on the executive teams, that, hey, actually we have to allocate money, time and budget towards actually building the next wave of customers that may not hit the demo request button for six to 12 months, but if we don't have a bigger addressable market, we're never going to have this influx of demo requests, or I want to speak to sales, or free trial users that we need in order to hit our goals in the future.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

And I think a big part of it is just being super purposeful of who you're targeting.

So we all talk about ideal customer profile.

And Craig, I think you and Scott and your team at Toboe just really did such a great job at grounding everybody as here's how to think.

So I've always taken that to say, okay, we'll defy the ICP in a really rigorous way.

And then we'll develop a target list and have it completely teared out.

You can call it whatever you want.

Psalm, CMTM, total relevant market is what SignRib calls it, et cetera.

But it's like you're focused on who you want to go after.

One of the challenges I do see, though, is people say, okay, great, well, let me go after them.

Let me see who's got intent.

Well, like 3% to 5% of people have intent.

So great.

Go capture, go pursue those folks, get in their cycles.

Generally, by the time you're seeing that intent, guess what?

Are other people buying that intent data?

Oh, just a few, like everybody.

So even the intent data, you're kind of too late.

So really what I think is critical these days is finding a way to accelerate the buyer's journey.

And that way you're guiding people towards intent.

But I think you even have to go a level before that to say, well, what is the problem that you actually saw for your ideal customer profile, for your ideal customer?

And how do you get them to realize that that problem is a big deal?

How do you elevate it?

Because buyers are super discerning right now.

And a lot of times, you've got a stakeholder, we've got companies that do compliance software.

And guess what?

The chief compliance officer, they're like, this is a super important problem, but they're not flush with budget.

So unless they get the support of the executive team, so finance of IT, they don't get to solve the problem.

So I think a big part of what needs to be done, and this is done by marketing, is educating the market and the key personas in your buying decision about, here's how to think about your problem, here's why it matters, and helping that person elevate the issue to an executive level to be a priority to solve because of the value that's realized from it.

And that's number one.

If you don't do that, you're not going to be successful selling much because they have to care first of all.

And that second, you have to teach them how to think about it, how to persuade other people that this problem is important when you're not in the room because you won't be most of the time, and then guide them on how to think about solving it and selecting.

So I think the thing that I've actually really embraced this position in messaging is one of the most important things, whether that's sort of like the category design advisor folks, Craig, that you've recommended or a firm we've used a lot is Ibrick Consulting.

They do really great positioning messaging work.

The key thing we're focused on is name the problem, elevate it to the executive level, and then provide an innovative point of view about and shape the thinking of your target customer.

That's how you start to get things done.

You're really focused on once you've done that, then you can focus on accelerating and nurturing the buyer's journey.

If you do that, you put yourself in a position to be successful.

But if you took one of Matt's things, which was his softest of the list, is it important?

Yeah.

Let's face it, but let's do it.

We got AJ, so understanding, I think, what that implies is like this takes time.

I made it harder hitting for you, Matt.

Thank you.

Yeah, you bet.

Anytime, anytime.

I think one of the, by the way, Matt was giving you the champion side also because oftentimes guys in our position are like, no, these guys suck, show me the money.

What you're saying is, I get it, we have to anchor the, there's a big exercise which is the anchoring on the ideal customer profile and what the problem that they're trying to solve is.

The second part is how do we get that message out to them?

What Matt's saying is, I agree, but bro, I get in there, I've got no time.

How do you handle that, AJ?

And how do you set expectations?

I got a second part you guys said, which I think is tied to it.

If not, we can separate the two.

By the way, AJ, part of the understanding though, is to the board level.

And so how do you help people with that?

So let's go, go, go and then let's figure that out.

Yeah, there's a lot there, Craig.

So first of all, I've always liked your concept of the double funnel, and that is the traditional funnel.

And that's really more for the who's in market.

And for those folks who are in market, they can still come in as MQLs, SQLs and come opportunities.

So that's one type of funnel.

But then there's a second funnel, and that is more the flip, as I think people call it.

And that is, hey, let's start off with our target accounts, and let's see what our progress is in engaging them, meeting with them, developing opportunities, progressing those opportunities and winning deals.

So you do need both funnels.

I would actually say there's a third funnel that needs to be way more methodical than it is today.

This is the customer funnel.

So look, everyone's focused on the base for the past couple of years, because selling has been harder.

But you need to think about it and just be super methodical to say, okay, I have a new product.

Well, is my entire customer base a good fit for this product?

No.

Who are the ones who are 5X more propensity to buy it than others and why?

And let's create a target list on that.

And then let's have an ABX funnel for that target list to say, these are the opportunities that we think all are based on what their business needs are.

We think it should be a really good fit.

And let's make sure that we're engaging them.

Let's make sure those sales reps are actually selling that product.

Let's actually have dedicated people running kind of campaigns and maybe even dedicated BDRs if you're a large company with scale to make sure that you're going after it.

So I think that's number one.

It's just thinking about all the different funnels that you can have.

And I could add another funnel that's a partner-centric funnel that says, hey, well, here are our key partners.

Let's look at their install base.

Let's look at the install base that's in our ICP.

Let's make sure we're doing enough for, and again, key partners means handful, like three to five, five to ten, not like the 15 to 100.

And let's understand what those are.

And then let's hold those partners accountable.

Hey, are we getting in front of those together?

And do we have a strong and a value proposition?

So I think that's number one is make sure you're looking at all the opportunities.

And by the way, this is an opportunity for marketing to play a role in all of them.

They should play much, marketing should play a much bigger role in customer marketing than they do because they're still a buyer's journey to manage within customers.

And then they should be doing the same thing with partners.

So I think one of the ways that you kind of address the need for speed, the need for demand is, well, make sure you're good at the demand capture because there are people in market.

Make sure you're there and you're scooping those up and you're nurturing them and guiding them to you.

But then you have to proactively develop the next set.

And that's really more the ABX funnel.

And then get the things that are, what's nice about customers and partners, I actually kind of look at this when we're kind of writing metrics reports.

When you're going for new logo, you start with like an SQL, then it's a stage zero, then a stage one, then a stage two.

When you get it from your customer or from a partner, it really starts at stage two.

It's much more developed.

So pipeline is not pipeline when it emerges.

It's something that should be a faster sales cycle, higher potential to win in your much better position.

So I think that's where I'd start is just to think about holistically, but in a really structured way, all the places that you can get pipeline.

The Transaction is presented by Ringmaster, the go-to branded podcast team.

You know, when Craig and I were thinking of starting this podcast, we had all the ideas in the world.

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You know, I have a mention for you.

I know that you're a devoted listener to the pod, but I might mention an episode it sounds like you may have missed.

I'm just kidding.

It's really good, you'll like.

It's Jen Igartua.

Okay.

From Go Nimbly.

Her thing was that the sort of old school lead scoring that Matt was nodding the whole time.

He's been through the whole evolution of this.

So it was like, Yeah.

That of it hits a score go is no, that was what the market was wrong about.

And what she's talking about is essentially outcome driven scoring, which is what you were talking.

And the most of our examples were against the customer base.

Exactly what you said, where we have the data now.

And she's like, it's not just one thing.

You could take product data and combine it with two or three other things and say these people are more likely.

And then she said, you build a playbook for that score, right?

Which is like, it was amazing, right?

She's like, we used to have these, we used to have basically bulk scoring, the number hits this, let's go.

And then we run the same playbook.

Her thing was, you triggered me on this where you're like, well, look, this, when this combination of factors comes in, you have, they're more likely to close.

And here's how you should play it.

Because her example she gave was that it was one of her customer success type application clients.

And she's like, and these guys, they're, when their ticket volume drops and their NPS score drops, that they are actually more likely to expand, right?

And she's like, and here's how you play that.

Yeah.

That was incredible stuff.

As you were talking, I'm like, you know, part of this process here is that, I guess, against all the funnels, man, the partner one is, can be tough, but like, you know, in terms of using lots of scoring mechanisms.

Yep.

But there was a lot there.

And I sort of want to combine that with what you're saying, which is like part of the issue with how we approach things before and what you guys were talking about today was how we sort of, not just how we use data, but how we approached what we know and what type of playbook we ran against that.

Really interesting.

Anyway, just a side note for you.

I think I'm about 12 episodes in to the pod now, so I'm a little behind.

I don't know where you get that.

25, 30 now.

It's like it's been a busy few months and I think you know, I was running with the bulls during July.

Oh, that's great.

Oh, man.

I'm so jealous.

We didn't get to talk about that.

We were too busy.

We weren't talking about Paella, so we were close.

On the first thing you said was about spend.

And is it just about, I thought you gave a really good sort of math update that Matt sort of confirmed in his mind, which is like, well, you know, we're paying for reps that won't hit the number.

But like, when we talk about that is, and maybe as we further connective tissue to what you were talking about from a marketing perspective and buyer journey perspective, what are the areas where you can help people bring spend in line, besides what you already mentioned, which was a big one.

Yeah.

And not lose, I know that there's different growth rates, but like where it's a good solid trade off.

Yeah.

Any other things you mentioned there?

Sorry to go back.

Yeah, no, I mean, so surely we talked about sales and I would love to chat about talent a little bit.

Sales talent, I think it just needs a lot more attention, but let me stay on marketing for a moment.

You know, I think it's great that marketing has become way more analytical.

The question is, has it become too analytical?

And I would actually argue yes.

So, what this whole attribution discussion.

Oh yeah, here we go.

I love it.

Yeah.

I'm sure you've never talked about this on the pod before ever.

Well, not that much, honestly, but this is just a hot button issue for me.

So I'm excited.

We've got overboard.

It's like, we've got overboard and as a result, we invest in, you know, we spend a lot of money on SEM, PPC, display ads, because I can have attribution.

And you know, LinkedIn, Google say thank you very much.

You know, SEO at least is, you know, it doesn't cost much.

It's really more of a strategy of executing it well.

But I think just, and also the intent data folks, oh, it's like, hey, I can measure it all.

The reality is for upper mid-market, upper mid-market enterprise.

We know this.

I mean, Craig, you were kind of educating the world about this like, you know, in the mid 2010s.

It's like, hey, it's a registration of all kinds of parties that are guiding the buyer's journey on this.

So to think that you can come up with some kind of algorithm that's going to say, well, it's exactly X.

You know, you should have something directional.

You should certainly look at it, but don't be a slave to it.

And I think that's one of the issues.

Like I was chatting with the CRO this past week.

They're like, well, you know, marketing's only supposed, it's not like contributing X percent.

And I'm like, well, does that never really mean anything?

That's just based on your measurement methodology, whether it's last touch, first touch, it's a hybrid touch, whatever.

It's like, how about this?

How about we talk about, move the ICPs and what's our progress at sort of penetrating those accounts?

And let's get marketing, sales, working together, and, you know, along with like customer success and product to say, well, how do we go engage that ICP?

And I think so, in particular, for a mid-market enterprise, you need to take much more of that approach.

So be informed by those metrics, because it is very useful to get a sense of, hey, you know, what marketing channels and tactics are working.

But don't let that just drive the answer.

Go to market is a team sport.

Pipeline generation is a team sport.

And you need to come together just in a more thoughtful way.

And so I just think you have to be careful there.

The reason that's super important is because, first of all, be the head of marketing, CMO, whatever you want to call it.

But it's probably the most heterogeneous set of functions to manage.

I got inbound demand gen, outbound demand gen, I got product marketing, I got marketing operations, I got corporate marketing, I got corporate marketing, I got brand, I got creative.

These are totally heterogeneous functions that one leader is supposed to be the master of.

And what the experienced marketers know, I don't know all this stuff.

I know where my spike is.

I'm going to make sure my team has the right set of capabilities across the other elements of it.

And that's how I'll be successful.

But now take it to the CEO, the CFO, and the board level.

They don't understand all these sub-functions.

They don't understand, okay, well, my marketing stopped working.

And my marketing leader is saying, hey, I need more product marketing, or I need more, you know, ABM, or hey, I really do this thing in the tech stack.

They don't know how to evaluate it.

And as a result, I think a lot of good marketing proposals just fall on deaf ears because nobody knows how to evaluate it.

I would think that's really true of private equity because you get a lot of companies that, you know, aren't these, you know, fancy new startups, they're companies that have a much longer history that are out for 10, 20 years.

You know, you've already got some scale and people don't know how to evaluate marketing.

So marketing doesn't get that much money.

I would actually say, Matt, it's not uncommon for me to see marketing view like 20% of the good market budget, rather than a certain.

That's another part of this, is we have to educate CEOs, CFOs and our boards of directors on how to think about the potential return of different types of marketing investments and then how to measure performance.

Matt, did that also bring joy to you?

It did.

I've been fighting the attribution model battle for a long, long time because I do a lot of advisory for younger companies and they're, hey, we really want to nail attribution early.

I'm always telling them, what's the trade-off here?

Let's say you run a project and you spend 90 days figuring out attribution.

By the end, you know what you already knew at the beginning, which is like, hey, people like this asset, they click on these types of ads, they come to the website, they view these pages, and SDR reaches out to them and talks to them, and then hands it off to an AE, and then whatever our standard win rate is from there.

You spent 90 days figuring out or confirming what you already knew, and you could have spent that elsewhere in sales training, in enablement, in launching a new product.

It's a pretty lousy trade-off to make, especially at an early stage company, and I would argue it's a pretty lousy trade-off to make just about anywhere in any company's journey.

Of course, you want to know what are the things that work the best?

Sure.

But you don't have to take a wildly deep dive into that process.

And I think people make the mistake mainly because there was a category called marketing attribution software for a long time.

But there weren't a lot of big winners there.

Look, 80-20, it's really important to measure.

So, we have metrics and dashboards for our portfolio companies.

And we have maybe xDashboard, Craig, that you basically kind of taught me like 10 years ago.

We've got an SDR one.

I think you kind of taught me that one as well.

So we have all these things.

But 80-20, and get the insight.

They'll obsess over the figures.

And once you do decide how to measure something, they just measure it, watch it too.

They like to say, is it going up?

Is it going down?

Is it keeping pace?

How does it compare with others?

So I think people get overly wrapped in it.

And what has been lost, I think, because we've got this measurement-rich world, is a lot of the creative.

It's like, what are the creative programs?

Look, at the end of the day, marketing is about standing out in a noisy crowd.

And it is a noisy-ass world out there.

It's a sea of sameness.

Every channel is just overloaded with promotional stuff.

Email, now LinkedIn, now we're getting texts, we get phone calls, it's everywhere.

And so you have to do something that stands out.

But it's sort of the Craig principles.

Craig, you're paying me well.

I'll keep sharing more topoisms.

It's got to be tailored, it's got to be relevant.

You need a high-value offer.

And some of the creative and fun that makes it stand out, like gets attention.

Go back to the Salesforce protests, like the Oracle conference, and whatever, no more software, and like fun kind of gorilla type tactics.

I think those are the winning plays these days.

And that's why, you know, I think there's a lot of creative things with like, you know, direct mail and just a variety of things.

I've got some particular tactics that I feel work especially well.

But there's one thing to kind of get consideration.

But really what I think is most important are the things that actually accelerate the buyer's journey once they have some aware, educate them and then accelerate that journey when they recognize there's a problem and elevate that problem to the executive level.

When you do that, that's when you start to really move the ball on sale cycle duration, on win rates, on actually deal sizes as well.

And this is the key is like make sure that they, when you're elevating, when you're educating them on the problem and how to think about it and all the implications of the problem, you should also be quantifying what's the impact of this.

And whether that's cost savings, revenue gain, efficiency improvements, risk reduction, whatever, you need to be much more methodical about that.

And that's not a, hey, late in the process to win the deal, business days.

No, this needs to be across the entire customer life cycle.

It should be the beginning of self-discovery on your website.

And then you should have assets at each stage.

And it's not just acquisition, and then it's very much as you go to the right side of the bow tie, as our friend Jaco would say.

So it's like time to first value.

And what is that first value?

How do you verify the first value?

And then when you fully implement it, getting it more.

And it's not just enough to get the value, but the value has to be not just realized, but also recognized.

And so if you're in a junior level where your product's being used, and your original buyer or whatever, we're senior people, don't recognize that the value is there.

You haven't communicated it in a way that they actually engage in and absorb.

You're not going to be successful at retaining and expanding.

You know, I love the question that you guys ask in the show of, hey, what are people not doing well?

Or what are they doing wrong?

And I just think there's, people just need to step back and obviously forget all this stuff that they're doing.

It's the part of the standard playbook.

Take a step back and really think about, what are we trying to do here?

And how do we actually influx these virus journeys?

I know where you're leading me and I'm going to let you go there in a second.

But first, I did want to mention to you guys really fun thing that one of our portfolio companies, Bland, did this week.

Then they announced their Series A, they did a video.

It's voice AI and it's incredible.

Hey, guys, are you ready for this?

The video on Twitter, remember Twitter or X or whatever?

Yes.

Six million views for a Series A company.

Wow.

Okay.

Six million.

And you know how I found out about it was not on LinkedIn.

It did really well on LinkedIn.

I just didn't get a chance to capture the notes.

I was on Twitter and you know how the feed has gotten all screwed up.

Like there's all this stuff in the feed that I don't know these guys.

But it was one of those like Twitter or X handles where they do you know sort of ridiculous videos or whatever that just they're they're always in my feed and like the top three.

And that was the first one was that retweeting it.

And they wrote we're all aft because it's an AI voice product.

It's so good.

And it was a reshare of the video.

And like just as you think about creative stuff, these are a bunch of young guys doing a ton of viral activity.

And by the way, for everyone wanted to know, is the viral activity turned into back and stuff?

Absolutely.

By the way, I can't give you the numbers, but absolutely.

But at the end of the day, who kicked six million views for a company that's up, that's just coming to market, you take that any day of the week.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

Fun.

That was for fun.

I'm going to redirect you though.

Sales, talent, development.

Yeah.

You were kind of leading us there where you're like, well, we got to get them in there.

Now, we've got to accelerate them through.

Yeah.

Houston, we have a problem.

We do have a problem.

So, I mean, marketing is actually doing a lot of good stuff, and I think it's evolved a lot.

There are a bunch of things that they can't do, but I think we have a pretty serious issue when it comes to sales, talent, development.

Think about it this way, there's been this explosion of sales enablement software, right?

It's like all these enablement tools, they should be helping.

Our sales productivity should be going up.

But is it?

No.

Well, part of it is, hey, the buying environment has changed.

I mean, we had this period of a few years of easy SaaS sledding, especially during the pandemic initially.

It's like, okay, well, I'll just spend my money on tools because those tools are going to enable me to sell in this hybrid or virtual environment.

So there was a lot of SaaS that was bought.

There's a bunch of reasons why there are issues.

So one was that easy SaaS selling phase.

The second is, I think we've stayed too addicted to being virtual.

So people are mostly working from home office, and you need human connection to influence people and to help them solve problems.

So that's a problem.

A third thing is, I think this generation of sellers who grew up in the predictable revenue era where they're like, hey, I'm an SDR and I find out I have to do this number of calls and emails.

I know I have these super tools like SalesLoft and Outreach, and I can do all this stuff and it's predictable revenue.

It was for a while, but guess what?

Then all the little open rates and connection rates and reply rates started dropping and dropping and dropping as the volume went up and up and up and up.

Now, of course, email deliverability is an issue.

So all these things don't work as well anymore.

So these are things that have to shift.

Some of these young AEs who grew up in this predictable revenue era, where they learned BDRA, they actually haven't learned a lot of core skills.

Because they haven't been in office, they haven't been able to shadow, they haven't been in front of the customer, they haven't done real ride-alongs.

Managers have never been great at coaching, but virtual coaching is just harder.

So that's a set of issues.

There's another set of issues as well.

What I just see is for hiring, there's so much variance in how people evaluate candidates.

The reality is during the boom times, there was a period of like two, three years where just the standards for what you hire for were lowered significantly as well.

So you get a lot of people who aren't great, but just how they were evaluated.

So I think there needs to be a lot more assessment tools, much more structured in how you do hiring.

Then the final comment I'll make here is, what's needed is just the development of core selling skills, especially in the first half of the final, the first 40 percent.

I really like what Guy Rubin of EPSTA put out, this report on the different top sellers and core and low performers.

He highlighted five skills.

They do their prospecting, they're great at discovery, they're really rigorous on qualification, they're good at objection handling, and they're great at multi-threading through that buying process.

These are five core skills that really, I validate my own portfolio companies, very much distinguish the top sellers from the middle and low sellers, and these skills are just not work.

So we've got a lot of sales enablement work to do on that.

And I think it's great.

I think we know what to do, but you really got to go and do it.

And you've got to do sales enablement that's hands-on, that makes people practice and gives them the coaching and feedback.

So I just think that there's a lot of work to do here to make sellers more effective.

And right now, because you have too many, you should prune the bottom third, because they're not producing against their cost.

Matt has been on his soapbox since episode one of our old show on the core selling issue.

I mean, literally, Matt, I'm pretty sure first episode one of the old show was you saying, can we just get the core selling skills on the board, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It is a place where, especially in smaller businesses, where I see the least investment, and I mean both from a budget and from a time perspective.

And AJ, you bring up something that's really interesting to me, that is starting to become a little bit of a recurring pattern where you see the category explosion of things like either sales acceleration tools, like SalesLoft or Outreach, Marking Automation Tools like Marquetto and HubSpot, Sales Enablement Tools.

And I always like to, Craig and I have these conversations off camera.

I like to say like, hey, can we ever do a thing where we just go 10 years later, what did we get?

Where they're at, you know, 10 years after marking automation is email marketing way better now than it used to be.

10 years after sales acceleration is sales prospecting, way better than it used to be, you know, 10 years post sales enablement is sales enablement way better than it used to be.

And the reality is I don't think the answer is yes, but obviously like the world is very different 10 years later.

So the challenges are different and in most cases much more difficult.

But it's funny to just kind of say like, oh, this is a category that created some billion dollar winners.

And I'm not sure that it created a lot of winners that were customers of it.

AJ was so excited by what he said.

He froze.

Oh, there he is.

Oh, AJ, did you ever?

Oh, you're back.

Okay.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Sorry about that.

No, it's okay.

Yeah.

I had these winners really driven value.

I think it's a super interesting question, Matt.

Somewhat on the demand side, it's tactics when they become overused no longer work.

You have to go to new tactics or old becomes new again.

But I think it really is a great question.

Look at CRM, or what was it called before?

Salesforce Automation or SFA.

It's like there's this false promise.

Really all it came was like system of record and a database, but that's all Salesforce is.

It's all CRM and it's a very expensive one.

Well, Matt, that's a can of worms that you just opened at the end of the show.

We have to have episodes where we do that.

I just want to take an episode, get a couple of experts on and say, market automation 10 years later.

Yeah, let's grab John Miller.

Let's grab, I mean, Sangram was doing the stuff at the beginning.

Yeah, John Sangram.

I do have a quick closing thought, which I think is the go-to-market is a team sport, but, and I just think it's huge at a bunch of levels.

So certainly the core protagonists need to work together better, the marketing, sales, customer success teams.

I think there's a lot that is missed by not engaging professional services and support as well, because really what determines your success, especially in a world where people are doing smaller deals up front, it's much more seed and grow.

I think that seems to be a winning strategy right now.

Well, that means time to value, time to first value and sort of realize value is huge.

That needs PS and support or big.

The third thing I would say is, the CEO is the ultimate revenue leader.

Some CEOs really know how to bring everybody together, some people really don't.

The CFO needs to understand the investments that are proposed to them and know how to trade them off, especially for marketing.

They need to know how to evaluate, especially when attribution isn't perfect.

Then the other team I think needs to be stronger is the talent team, the CHRO and the HR team.

I think go to market is the most expensive function in a company by far, which means it has the most people.

So you need to make sure that you really have a great team for bringing in talent, evaluating that talent, developing that talent, and retaining that talent.

I think a lot of companies have a lot of work to do there.

And the final comment I would make is, look, there was a lot of media over hiring that was done just out of desperation in 2021, 22, and probably 1918 as well.

It's time to flush that talent.

There's much better talent out there right now.

And if you're running a company, you owe it to yourself to have the best team that you can.

And while it's a harder environment right now, what actually does thrill me is the fact that there's really good people out there again.

Two years ago, I tried to hire a CMO two and a half years ago.

It's like super mediocre people were complete prima donnas with all kinds of offers and getting stupid money.

And most of those people actually now are employed.

They took those big fat jobs and didn't perform and got fired.

So you just got to make sure you got a winning team.

And that's the great thing about this environment, even though it's harder, you have the opportunity to build a winning team.

And if you know how to run a winning team and you're thoughtful and have a little bit of a unique viewpoint on what works and go to market versus just doing the same old plate book that everyone else is doing.

I actually think you can do quite well in this environment, but it's that easy for sure.

That was a good end.

Great end.

Cool.

Now, before we get off though, AJ, we're still recording your thoughts on Matt using the phrase small business instead of startup.

I'm sorry.

I you keep doing it.

You keep doing it, bro.

I'm talking about ice cream shops and laundromats.

That's what I'm talking about.

Which, you know, they are different things.

I think generally startup people can go, hey, it's small, but it has a high growth potential.

And it's going to have a lot.

It should have a lot of momentum versus small businesses.

So it's just, you know, it's kind of a nitchy.

It's how they roll.

Yeah.

So I think they're kind of different things.

That speaks to the whole ideal customer profile thing is, you know, small businesses like who they fit well for.

Of course you like all businesses to grow, but like, you know, when I was at RingCentral, like every business needed a phone system and they needed phone, they needed video, they needed messaging.

And it made sense to go with like RingCentral because you got all those three things in one package for much less.

And even though Zoom was kind of a better product, it's just better.

So small business sometimes does very unique needs, but that's different than a high-growth startup.

Yeah, so based on your definition.

Yeah, so I'm right.

No, you're wrong.

Because you keep saying with the small businesses I work with, you work with startups.

All right.

I'm going to start saying startups now.

I'm good.

Specificity wins.

All right.

AJ, thanks, brother.

This was The Transaction and that was a great show.

That was a great show.

I appreciate it.

Hey, pleasure.

Thank you guys.

Thanks for having me on and come enjoy some paella and omakotri.

Yes, yes.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Transaction.

Craig and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end.

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