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Insights Unlocked
Finding the content-market fit your customers care about with Ross Simmonds
00:46:35
Discover how to find content-market fit, scale with smart distribution, and use AI to create faster, better content with Ross Simmonds
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- [00:02]
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Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode I'm joined by Sangram Vajray, co founder of Terminus and GTM Partners and the man behind the Flip My Funnel movement from back in the day. We dive into how that idea came to life and what it taught him about a truly customer first strategy and the benefits of building a community over a traditional spray and pray pipeline approach. We also talk about how AI and fractional leadership are changing the go to market game. Enjoy the show.
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Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world. From concepts to execution.
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A
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal content marketing manager at User Testing and and our guest today is Sangram Vadre. Sangram is the co founder of Terminus and GTM Partners, best selling author of Move and the original mind behind the Flip My Funnel movement. He's a powerhouse in the go to market strategy, account based marketing and community building. Welcome to the show, Sangram.
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C
Nathan, it's good to reconnect and we were talking before it like it's 10 years of connection and doing different things. So we definitely take the OG cup home today.
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A
Yeah, well, yeah, you are definitely the og. I am the OG Coat tail hanger honor.
- [01:36]
C
I think you're much more than that. And we'll find out soon, we'll see.
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A
Yeah, well we'll prove, we'll prove just not even worthy of that. Sangram, before you were known for flipping the funnel and building GTM playbooks, you were trying to solve real problems for real people. Can you take us back to that early journey and share how focusing on the customer shaped your approach to everything that came next?
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C
Yeah, you know, before Flip My Funnel, it was me running marketing at Pardot and when Pardot got acquired by Exact Target and then Exact Target by Salesforce, that all happened in like six months. So I went from a $10 million Pardot company that got acquired for 100 million by exact Target and then re together got acquired by 2.5 billion by Salesforce. All of a sudden I find myself from about a hundred people somehow working, trying to do things to 10,000 employee company and iconic brand like Salesforce and I will never forget this, this conversation. We're talking about Kevin Babaski who was at Acton and became a manager at Exact Target through this acquisition. And he said, Sangram, whatever you're thinking, when the acquisition happened, they eat Exact Target. He said whatever you're thinking, just think 10x. And Nathan, I'm like, okay, well, I guess 10x budget, 10x resources, 10 initiatives, 10x events. Like, I was thinking that six months later, Salesforce acquires exact target on us. So he's like, sangram, you remember the 10x conversation? I'm like, yeah, I do. I'm thinking 10x. Forget about that. Think 100x. I'm like, what does that even mean? Like, my brain cannot compute that. And it took me about six months. Nathan, that, that I feel like where he was trying to take me and guide me. And what I learned in that experience is it's once you become a category leader or become someone who actually can change and have message out there that changes the market, you really can do anything. You really define how the market is going to behave and work. You can set the pricing, you can set the, the positioning around it. You can set how customer. The best customer behavior looks like. So in many ways you get to define the future in a particular category. And that's really what I learned at Salesforce, which when I started Terminus, that I brought that learning with me. And that's why when we were just a few folks sitting in Atlanta with no funding trying to build this thing called abm, I was like, we can't just sit here and say we are the best. We have to do it differently. And. And that's really how the Flip my Funnel movement was born. And. And I think it's really taught me a lot about how I went about things.
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A
Well, and can we talk more about that? Like, what was that moment? And I don't. I've not heard the origin story, but I've heard it secondhand. Yeah, that it was some mark tech event you were at and there was a whiteboard involved. But can you. Can you tell us about that and just tell us how what the flip my Funnel. You know, some people are new to this industry. Some people who've not, you know, they've not tracked Flip my Funnel or they're not marketers or UX designers or something.
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C
They're way younger than we are.
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A
Yeah, most likely that. Can you just tell us what that is and what it was and kind of what it has become? Yeah, and the origin story too?
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C
Yeah, the origin story was I was in the. As we started Terminus, I just wanted to take a flight to San Francisco. There was Scott Brinker's first. He was once first or second Martech event that was happening in San Francisco. So I'm like, you know what? I'm just Gonna take a flight, go and just sit and absorb and think. Sometimes the five hour flight from Atlanta to San Francisco and just being outside your own echo chamber just opens up some new thoughts and ideas. I sat there and it was phenomenal. And at that Martech event I saw Jill Raleigh speak and I'm like, Jill Raleigh, she is a salesperson. What is she doing at Martech event? Because I had this siloed view of the world at that time. And when I was flying back, I was sitting. At last it was five hour flight. I was sitting in the middle seat, the two people next to me were really drunk and the Internet was off and it wasn't even working as well. Even this is like 10 years ago, right? So I had like a 5. What do I do? So I literally asked the air hostess, can I have a napkin and a pen? Just to scribble and get my brain like going and doing something, is that nothing to do? So I created the traditional funnel which is brought at the top, narrowed at the bottom and out of pure boredom. I wish I could say that I was so brilliant that I created this thing in this conscious thinking. No, I literally was so bored, I literally flipped that napkin upside down. And I said, what if the funnel was flipped? What would that look like? And I started to create this idea of what if it was in B2B? We don't go after everybody, we should be going after the right people. So what if we identify the right accounts as opposed to anybody? What if we then engaged on the right with them on the terms like whatever platform they're on, what we then turn into advocates? What would that look like? And that was if upside down funnel. And I took a picture of it and when I landed I posted it on LinkedIn and at that time five people immediately liked it, which means it went viral in 10 years ago. And people were like, man, you should be doing something, this is a great idea. So then I wrote a blog post and almost 10,000 people literally commented and engaged on that one. Because that idea of the traditional funnel looking different was. Everybody knew the traditional funnel. So a new picture of that in a different way just made people rethink. And that led to creating a flip my funnel roadshow that we did. And even then we used, we brought in, we can talk about how we brought competitors in it to do, not just initially for paying for it, but it actually turn into more of an industry event. We had like five customers at that time, but we have 350 people attend a flip mouth on event. And every event we would have 25, 30 new customers join. So and we would go to different cities and do it. We have the competitors with us. We also invited industry analysts to that event. So all of a sudden media started to show up to these events. So all of a sudden it became an industry event. And typically nobody has ever done that where you launch an industry event before you launch a customer event or something. Most companies launch customer events. So we just launched an industry event and that just became a thing. And it ended up turning to a podcast, turned into a book and it was, the rest was history.
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A
And it really resonated. Why do you think it resonated so much with people? I mean it's, it's an incredible story just how. And, and you're kind of like going over quickly, but it's like tens of thousands of marketers are like, yes, I understand it, I get it. Why, why, why do you think it resonates so much?
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C
You know, at that time Forrester came up with this study and we anchored that stat to this, to this new, new upside down funnel. And the study said that less than 1% of the leads turn into customer. And the actual number was like 0.45. But less than 1% sounds better and easier. And what that meant was that 99% of the EFF is putting in to drive revenue is not doing anything. It's actually wasted. And we were like, well imagine if your CFO and CEO looked at your revenue and said, okay, tell me what are we doing here? And you're saying of the hundred dollars we spend $99 or resources are not delivering revenue. That's what that study literally pointed to. That means your job's a doom. Something is not working. There gotta be a better way. I don't know what the way is better way, but at least we need to change the way things are not working the same. So when we connected that particular stat to this known funnel that everybody knew was broken, but they all were working as a coin operated lead machine in that to try to see what you get. Like a gumbo machine. And nothing is coming out of it. You just keep dropping into it. And the force is like, put more, put more. And people realize this doesn't work. But nobody really had until that point flipped it and say, what if you're doing it completely wrong? What if we could do better? And so we didn't have as a terminus at that time, we didn't even have a product really to sell. We just had an idea of a better way of Doing this thing. And so that the fact that we, and the fact that we didn't say that this is a terminus event, we said it's a Flip my Funnel event. And we invited people that are not. So it was not about a pitch of like, look at how great we are. But people are smart, they knew who was behind it and we were positioning it and all that kind of stuff. But by making it Flip my Funnel. In the hindsight, again, I wish I could say, man, I knew and planned everything perfectly. It really just happened because when we were launching it, I was trying to launch a terminus oriented event and nobody would pay for it. And then I'm like, well, what if you call it Flip my Funnel? Because I just wrote something on LinkedIn that went kind of viral and they said, yeah, yeah, if it's Flip my Funnel, we'll pay for it. So that gave us the idea about the $8 domain called flip my Funnel and literally said the event is now Flip my Funnel. And when you take a step back and think about that's why Salesforce calls it, calls it Dreamforce, that's why HubSpot calls it Inbound, that's why Gainsight calls it their Pulse conference. And the point is people would rather be part of a movement than part of a product oriented thing, even though the product company might be funding it, supporting it. So I think there was an emotional, it was a perfect timing of this, this timing of where people were frustrated. The funnel didn't work. The data shows that less than 1% turns into customers. That showed that whatever they're doing is not doing well. And then it wasn't a product company trying to push a product. It was an idea. More so than here's the solution.
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A
Right. I mean, you have two, you're nailing two things that you're, you know, nobody wants to go to a conference where they know they're going to get sold to. Right. They just want to go to a conference. They want to learn more. They want to get better at this. And two, that you were, I mean, just the whole fact that this, you know, the 1% and understanding, like it's so much easier to understand the one person rather than trying to understand 100 people and sell to 100 different people. Right. Understanding your one true audience. I'm not going to remember who has it, but it's, you know, you're, you're 1000 true fans rather than the million people who aren't buying from you.
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C
Yeah.
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Type of thing.
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C
Especially if you're in B2. B I think that was the really nail in the coffin there where you are not selling a shoe, right? You're not Nike. You don't. You're not saying I'm going to do a television ad. You should know that our best customers are people in financial services industry with 100 employees or more in North America. Like what you. I mean, that's the point of B2B. Otherwise, what's the point of B2B? So we have an advantage in a way. If you really look at it like we kind of should know who our buyer is. So this whole idea of like they just keep going after more and more and more and more and. And you, you know, Nathan, this is, this might be interesting to you and your audience too. In the process of research, I was talking to a few people and they said, you know, in the early 2000s, the typical sales, the pipeline to revenue ratio was 1 is to 2, meaning you just need 2x pipe. And that was more than enough. And as we got into 2015 at that time, it's like 4x5 pipe is like normal or 5x pipe. And actually having a 5x pipe shows how ridiculously bad your processes, your targeting is, your ICP is, your positioning is all of it. Because if you need 5x the pipeline in the hopes that you will close one was again just gigantic problem. The funnel needs to be even more broader. Well, it's killing you. You're losing money, you're wasting and people seem to just keep doing it in absence of trying something new.
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A
The, it's. It really just, it changed how marketing's done. And I'm just wondering what, what do you think is the impact of that movement of flip my funnel of, you know, everyone talking about ABM and stuff like that today? What's that impact today? How are businesses understanding their. How has it changed how businesses understand their ideal customers today?
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C
Oh man. Well, I'll share one personal in it and then you know, one. Maybe more than one externally, one personal is for me even before the PE Termulus got acquired by PE firm and all that stuff. So there's a financial outcome. But I saw people getting jobs as an abmer and celebrated and they're now the VPs or CMOs at different companies. And I still get messages, man, that thing changed my life, that changed my career. I would have been like a content manager or a demand man, whatever it is that they might be. But now they have like a. They have a vision of their role that just was much more valuable to, just to me personally the day that started to happen, Nathan. I felt so fulfilled that I was part of, you know, creating something that actually made change for hopefully thousands of people. And then there were, there are still today agencies, lots of agencies just doing, using our frameworks that were created 10 years. They're literally using our frameworks and building a whole 5, 10, $20 million business. So I feel very fulfilled in terms of the outcome of that initial flight and the napkin and a pen that, you know, the outcome ROI on that was very high, personally, in that sense. On the flip side, I think there's a lot more technology now available to do. A lot of the things that we were talking about at that time, there wasn't as much. It was primarily ads or primarily basic direct mail. And, you know, that was the scope of it. The idea was there, but the technology wasn't really there today with all the stuff. And we haven't said AI yet, which is pretty awesome, by the way, you know, that we want, you know, we don't want to just throw AI just to say it, but I think that technology is so much more advanced now where you could literally. There is no excuse in another way for people to not do one on one anymore. You, there should not be a single email in your way of whatever prospecting you're doing today in the marketplace. There is no reason why it's not one on one and very specific, very intentional, very connected. And that was the promise of abm, is that you should know your target accounts and your customers and you should know what they're saying and how to engage with them. You shouldn't say, no, I'm sending a very customized email. And all it does is kind of bold, puts their name at the top. Like, you know, that was the high, that was the personalization of 2015. But today there is no reason why every single message shouldn't be as personalized as possible if you know and you're doing ABM the right way. So. And I think I still feel there are 90% of the companies who are.
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A
Not doing it well and are they not doing it? Are they just not taking the time to figure that out? Is it? Is it. I mean, it does take some effort to kind of get it set up right to, to be, you know, the, the adage. You got to slow down to speed up. Do you think it might be.
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C
There's some. That. There is certainly some of that. There's also. I would just call it out. I think people are doing ABM as part of many things and that's when you lose it so for example, the big shift that I'm seeing is this idea of rise of services as a software, right? So the idea is that the companies. So the idea of hiring somebody who's an ABMER Today in 2025, having somebody as a full time abmer in a company that only does 5% of their job is actually ABM because they have 80 other things that they're putting on them. Then actually getting a hundred K plus dollar solution to do basic ads and intent and signals and signing a three year contract with them and potentially change all the change that's happening in the marketplace. That's like a half a million to a million dollar investment into a program. That sounds crazy now because today that shouldn't be the case that it shouldn't cost you this much to run ABM program. It should actually cost you a lot less than any other program you run because it's so target should be so targeted. So what we are seeing is that companies are actually hiring fractionals, agencies and all of those people who are expert at ABM and saying, hey you, here's your 10,000amonth, go run an ABM program for this. That's all you're gonna do for us. And we would pay you well and 5k, 10k without really paying for the software, without trying to pay. They have an agency who has licenses with all these technology and they're using the right technology at the right time. So nobody's locked into this long term contract as a customer. That is a big shift, Nathan, that's happening right now in the marketplace where vendors, technology vendors have to figure out a way. Well, not everybody's gonna buy another hundred thousand dollar software anymore. It's just not gonna happen. They might grow into it as they use it, but they're not gonna start with that, which is what happened five years, ten years ago.
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A
Interesting. The I'm gonna shift a little bit as your career shifted also. Right. And you went from flip my funnel into writing move that came out in the early 2000 and twenties. 21. Yeah, yeah, 21. Can you give us an idea of what that framework is?
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C
Yeah.
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A
And how people can use it?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. Well, so. And it kind of is a story of my career, as you said. So like some people have said that my whole career could be setting like three acronyms. MA for Marketing Automation with Bardot and ABM with Terminus for Account Based Marketing. And now GTM like you know, go to market. So there you have it. That's another way to kind of pull it up together. What 20 years of all, all the work is. But in 2021, when we wrote that book Move, I. I feel like I personally was going through a journey where when I was running marketing at Pardot, I was a marketer and I was looking at the world from that lens. And. And then I looked at everything else as like, well, sales are not closing, more deals, Sales problem, sales sucks. Like, that was pretty much my point of view and thought process at that time. When we started Terminus, which was account based marketing, to bring sales and marketing together. And as I became a co founder, I had a different perspective, slightly better perspective of sales. But then we had a retention issue and I said, well, maybe the customer success team sales sucks. So I kind of went from like, who sucks kind of thing. And then finally as I got through the egg towards the exit of Terminus, I could realize that, oh, actually we never really had a marketing problem or a sales problem. What we really had is a go to market problem, a business problem that we didn't really look at it. We kept pointing fingers at everybody. But truly the problem is a go to market. So I started doing a little bit more research on it and I started to interview all of these folks from Brian Halligan, who was the CEO of HubSpot at that time, to a ton of investors who had unicorn level exits. And in every way I would ask about 51 different questions to them. And that was also part of my Philip platform podcast. And one of the questions, well, who owns Go to Market and how do you define go to Market? Like, these are very basic questions I thought I knew. With a couple of exits under my belt, I was so enlightened in that I became a student of it, which is why Brian and I wrote the book Move. And the book Move MOVE stands for the acronym Market Operations, Velocity and Expansion. Those four questions, where can you market? You know, how can you operate more efficiently? How can you grow? The velocity question, and where can you expand? These four questions became the the hallmark of every company, no matter what size they are, as they move from a problem market fit stage to a product market fit stage to a platform market fit stage. We call it the three P's in the book. So as you move through these is really where the transition happens and magic happens and you need to think about your business. So as I went through all of it, the book really became a part of it. And it was fascinating that we sell MOVE today more than actually in 2021, because I think Go to Market has trended way up and people are trying with all the AI stuff and everything, people are still searching. Better strategy, a better way of thinking. And I think that's really what the future is like. You got to think better. You probably can execute things faster now, but if you're executing wrong things faster, it will only give you worse results. So you gotta. The thinking of thinking is truly important.
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A
Is there, is there a community? Is there a GTM community? Is it, is there an equivalent of Flip My Funnel out there?
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C
I think I'm taking a different approach. So one is I write a research note called GTM Monday which over 175,000 people read it. And again Nathan, what's interesting about that, if I were to go old school creating a blog, I would be paying a second mortgage to email 175,000 people in a traditional marketing automation world. But now it's on substack and it's free and I know all the people and I can download anywhere time I want, so it's free. So it's crazy how that that works. And because it's a research note, people share it all the time. On any random day we have 3, 400 people sign up, which is just insane. So GTA Monday is our research and community. I've done roadshows just like Flip My Funnel to Teach Go to Market but it's at the executive level. That's where we focus on. And now in the last three years as we have done so much work in it, we have seen people take our frameworks and build a business around it. So what we're trying to do is we're seeing a rise of fractionals in the marketplace go to market. CMO anybody with 10, 20 years of experience, we are now certifying them on our Go to market operating system. That allows them to do advisory work and workshops, the strategy part in it and they can even execute if they wanted to or find a partner to do that. So we are certifying and only those certified partners, we are building a community for them to become a 250k to a million dollar book of business. Because we believe that in the next six months, if not already, there's going to be mass exodus of executives in their 30s, 40s, 50s plus where they would need to find more than one way to make their revenue thing. And the flip side is as a fractional, it's actually really valuable to the executive, to the CEO that's hiring because you get somebody who had tremendous amount of experience at almost fraction of the cost. But it's not cheap, right? Like so, so These fractionals would make 10k a month with 3 clients and that would be 30k in some cases. That's way more than they would have done in a full time job. So you don't need to have thousands of roles, you just need two or three clients and that's very possible. So we feel like this is a very good time to have a good amount of experience and build something on your own. And I'm kind of trying to help that part of the world right now.
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A
Interesting. It seems it sounds sort of like what, as I think about it, like the fractional is like today's version of top tier consulting.
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C
Yes.
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Global consultant. Right. I mean you, you were hiring those guys and men and women because they had all this experience from all these other companies that they worked with. Well, isn't that what a fractional is doing? I'm bringing my experience, expertise with this company over to this company, to this company and bringing it all together. You really don't need me for 40 hours a week. You only need me for a few hours a week. Interesting.
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C
Yeah. And if you think about like, like one of the fractionals is like, I'll just give a quick story. Is, is Lydia who has been in legal tech for 20 plus years and when she was starting to write about fractional cmo, we had this conversation and she clearly quickly realized that oh, she has 20 plus years in legal tech. So to any legal tech company she's like the best asset. They don't have to explain her the business. And so she, and but she needs only two or three clients to make whatever money she's making. So she, once she became fractional she never went back and now she's hiring other fractionals to do some of the work she needs to get done at it because the work is not different but the having that business conversation. Oh yeah, this is the ICPO. So now we think that that 10, 20 years of experience and if you can niche down on like what is it? Did you, were you good at 10, 20 years? Did you work in entertainment or financial services or legal tech or PE firms or small or big or tech, whatever that is. Everybody has some sort of niche around it. So if you can help that and craft an offer around it, you can still use the go to market operating system to implement it, but the doors will be open when you are. In a way it's a new abm if you, if you think about it, we are trying to really help fractionals target the right accounts that they can actually work with. You don't need. You don't need to be a LinkedIn influencer to have three or four accounts paying you 5, 10k a month.
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A
Yeah, the going back to that GTM strategy and that is the responsibility of everyone, you know, everyone on the executive team, everyone in the organization. What's, what's one thing that leaders can do to keep the org aligned around that customer centric growth around that GTM strategy.
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C
It's great. Great for first of all I'll say that I was shocked at the answer of the question who owns go to market. So that's number one then the book obviously reveals that, but I'll just give you a heads up on that is every CEO said they own go to market. Every CEO and every executive team that we interviewed underneath, they had no idea who owns go to market. So it's a classic challenge in most company what that ownership looks like and we go in depth with how that works. So that's number one. Second, I think there is a clear need to make sure that the entire business is surrounded around this one metric. If you have to pick one, which is nrr net revenue retention. If your health of your organization literally could be measured in any way, it will be NRR. And if you are 120% plus NRR, you already know you can double your business without hiring net new or getting net new customers in about 3.8 years. So being a business, and I learned the hard way at Terminus and Pardot and all of it, the value of a customer expanding is insanely valuable. That's why Snowflake has gone so much. Because they are one of the few companies that have 120% plus NRR. That's why Salesforce has done so well. Because like how do you, how do you think about these big companies building 10, $20 billion, how do they grow? And they don't grow literally through net new, they actually grow through existing and expanding in it. So if any company, if every company and anybody listening to this, if you're thinking about customers, that's really what the health of the customer Are they growing with you? If they're not growing with you, no matter how much you bring in from the top of the funnel, it's going to be a leaky bucket all day long. So NRRR is the one thing that brings alignment, that brings tough conversation and debates. It will help you ask the right questions. It will. For example, one of the questions we help people think about is not where can we grow? It's the worst possible question you could ask because it could mean that anything you can grow any direction. But if you ask the question where can we grow the most? Now you're becoming intentional. You're going to have a debate is that if we can grow the most, if we can grow the most in this area, do we have potential target accounts for this? Do we have a point of view that supports this? Do we have technology and product that can do that? Do we have customer success trained to support that? Do we have enough gross margin on that product in order for that? So when you, so when you ask the right question, it just opens up a different set of thoughts and ideas that will actually make an NRR really is a central force that brings that together.
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A
I hadn't really thought about that. But that, I mean you really have to have all that dialed in to have that NRR at 120% or whatever it might be.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Yeah, there's, there's no faking it there.
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C
You can, and there is no, you can have fancy dashboards and you can have a lot of false positives. I've done a lot of false positives. Traffic to the website is up. MQLs are up. Right. And all of it. And then the next week, like a quick story on that. Three weeks ago I was talking to this cmo. She posted almost a week before that they had a $50 million pipeline that she helped create. And she was talking about that on LinkedIn. And a week later she was laid off. And, and so she was just, and she was trying to figure out what she did this next. And we were talking about fraction, all that. And I asked her like, okay, so what happened? Like you, I literally, you posted that you created 15 pipeline. Like what do you think you didn't see? And she said it wasn't the right pipe, it wasn't for the right reasons. It was for customers that are churning. So that pipe didn't mean anything for the business. It meant a lot for me to show up and do all that. But if I would have taken the time to decode and understand the business that what works or whatnot off that 50 million, only 5 million was a good, actual real money. The 45 was there and it was long term. And even if it materialized, it will be not in the right areas where the business really wanted to grow. And, and so she just didn't read it. And, and I think about that, man, there are so many of us just are still around these vanity metrics and thinking that they will take us further and keep boasting about what they do and yet we just don't pay enough attention towards the business that we are in. And if we all can spend more time understanding what are our top two or three metrics that change the course of our business and align all the work we do for those areas, we would have less jobs being out. We would have less pipeline. You know, nobody needs 50 million pipeline. She didn't need that. She needed a 10 million good pipeline. Literally, she said, if I would have just focused on that five and closed more, or if I would have done more than five to 10, we would be a better off company. I would have had my job, like all of it. And so people keep saying AI will take your job and this and that. Some of it is true, some of it is just made up. The real reason why people do that is because they have no idea what the business is important, like what's working for their business. If they understand that, they would know, oh, it's not working. Our NRR is 70%. Of course stuff is not gonna work. Like, they would be ready and they will see the writing on the wall, but they don't. And I think there is, there's a lot of personal responsibility. People need to take in this.
- [33:39]
A
Yeah, it's. It goes back to what you were saying earlier about you never needed the 4.5 pipeline ratio. You just needed, you needed to understand truly who your customer was. And that other two, you know, two x was just waste. It was just, you know, they were never going to buy from you, never going to be the right fit. And if you can truly understand who your customer is, then you know who to talk to. You know, how you don't have to worry about all that kind of stuff or you do have to worry about it, but yeah, you have a better chance. Yeah, right.
- [34:12]
C
For the right reasons. And when you look at all the funding people get or all the investments, 80% of that goes to Nathan for go to market. So and if you look at. And if you actually slice the 80%, 60% of that goes towards sales and marketing. And it doesn't really go towards customers. Less than 20% actually goes towards customers. And I think that needs to be flipped because that's what's killing the business. You can hire more, you can hire more marketing, run more campaigns, but if marketing and sales can work towards making your customers successful, man, it changes the ball again. And I've seen in our advisory work, we see that so often, and it hurts when they said, oh, you just got funding and you're gonna spend all of this money on new acquisition, when you have a leak, you know you have a leaky. But like, why, why would you do that? Why just put it in a bank and put in a dividend and make money on it. You know that you'll be better off doing that than actually putting it in like that campaign. So it. But you need to understand the business. If I can give, you know, if people want to, like, what do we take away from this? Is that understand the business. No matter what business you're in, you should be able to understand the business you're in. You owe it to yourself, to your career, for your company. It's a fiduciary responsibility. Especially as you go higher up in the company. You gotta understand the business like, what is good, what is bad? It's not business is not good. And launching a bunch of things is not good. Having more products is not good. Sometimes having more customers is not good. Acquiring companies sometimes is the worst thing you could possibly do. Sometimes good is being profitable. You know, it's really good. You know what good is, is actually keeping your customers and improving NRR from 85% to 90%. That is good. But that doesn't make headlines on LinkedIn or headlines on Wall Street Journal. And I think that, you know, this is real personal responsibility. People need to take on it.
- [36:12]
A
You were, we were talking, you had mentioned AI and this fear of AI and AI is changing how teams understand customers, create content, build communities. How do you say, how do you see AI shaping the future of go to market strategies? And what should leaders be doing now to stay both efficient as well as being human in how they connect with their customers?
- [36:34]
C
I feel like there's two main areas when I think about AI, especially when I think from a customer and company growth perspective. One is every individual should have a clear declaration for themselves that 30, 40% of the work they do, they should use AI to do that. They really need to free up. When we take a look at, look back a year from now, we would look at like, man, this was a lot of manual work we did. You should never. That's what AI should do, is to take away the manual work so we can do what God has gifted us with is creativity and thinking and all that kind of stuff. So manual work as much 30, 40%, it should just become a personal goal in life to make sure that you're using it. It will just serve individuals as well as businesses better if you did that. So that's one. The second part of it is that AI, when used right, actually can give Us so much insight. So especially with what you all are doing with customers. I was talking to advising a client. They have over a thousand customers and they're like, well, we normally do a cap customer advisory board and we kind of try ask questions and we look at it and we were just working with them and helping them. Like, well, why don't you deploy something where you track what your customers are doing in your platform? Every single thing. Not like just a quick heat map. You should be able to see every single thing. And then you should be able to see what are they doing outside. Are they downloading spreadsheets from you? What are they doing that? Can you get closer to that? Because if you do. What I'm excited about AI should do is that at one at scale, you don't need to talk to 10, the happy customers to tell that you're good. You can look at a thousand customers, see what they're doing. See what, like, oh, wow, 30% of them just download this every single Monday. Well, that should help you create a new product or a new process and then launch it. So I look at AI as a product creating another product. The future is that will guide you in that direction at a faster rate. There will be more products launched at a faster rate as opposed to ever done before.
- [38:40]
A
Yeah, truly, if we're, if we're using it to find the efficiencies, we can do that with our customers. Right? We can use it to find where, where our customers can benefit. Yes. All right, I'm. This is a part where I'll edit myself out, but I totally agree with you. I just don't know how to complete my thought.
- [39:03]
C
It is a fascinating thought when you really see the natural end result of that. Your product every day should be helping you create new products your go to market every day should be helping you get more efficient by every single individual working on becoming 30, 40% efficient around all of it. Because they're taking the crap out. They're actually focused on creativity and authenticity and all of it. So it's almost a pull. It's a pull in one direction of efficiency and taking the manual workout. And the second is innovation because you can, you should be able to see so much more, so much faster and so much more scale with your customers that you should be able to be able to launch new features and the right features much faster than ever. There is no more. Oh, it will take us six months to build this and put it. No, it's not. Oh, these three customers are asking this. All of that should Be data backed and not emotion backed at the end of the day.
- [40:03]
A
Well, and I just think about it. If you can think about it from the perspective of being a customer and what kind of joy you would get. And I, we have, I manage our video hosting and stuff like that. I work in all the content space and our platform we use is Wistia to host our videos. And recently they started sending me a monthly recap video of just like just the analytics. Probably an easy thing, but it was work I would have to manually do and they're just sending to me. And it was a joy to get that email and then like share that email with my bosses.
- [40:42]
C
Wow.
- [40:43]
A
And like I never asked for it. I was like, I never thought about using it this way. I always just like, oh, this is how I have to go get my analytics on our hosting platform. And now I get this email. Just a quick summary tells me all my, you know, my top hits or whatever it might be. And that's. I'm sure I had some sort of role with them, I hope and it's exactly what you're talking about. Were your customers downloading this thing? We'll just give it to them anyway. Just you know, each month, give them to them on each Monday when they download.
- [41:11]
C
Yeah. And if they're doing it taking a step further, they're seeing that. Oh, and Nathan is now sharing this because you are forwarding this. They should be able to see that then they should be able to. Okay, well maybe now let's talk. Everybody's doing what Nathan, what do you, what else do you need? Do you need an executive summary? Do you need a drill down? What will make you in like this indispensable. Even though there will be another video tool out, there are hundreds of them. Like this makes it mine. And, and now imagine further. You could, they could or anyone could say is like. Well, not everybody doesn't need the same information neither what is the most important information. So this is not a standard call to some API that only gives those eight elements. You are going to get what elements you want because those are what you look at every single day. So thus customization and product innovation at scale has never been more possible than.
- [42:05]
A
Now as we wrap up. You've talked about in the past about the journey from being a dreamer to a doer and eventually a driver. For someone listening today, what's the next best step they can take to make their go to market execution Truly customer first man.
- [42:23]
C
The dreamer duo driver is a true fascinating framework. I've used that almost for 10 years now with hiring, with the way I think about it, and it helps me recognize my own limitations and gifts and what other people are working around me. As you think about an example of that is at early stage in Terminus, we hired a head of customer success. On paper, a perfect individual, had a lot of references and all that stuff and bombed in a week. We were like, oh, it's not the right person. And then we hired somebody similarly in marketing and they bombed. And I'm like, I thought I knew marketing and I thought I understood how to hire. We've hired over 100 people at Salesforce and look what. Why can't I do this right? And the point was, in that early days at Terminus, we needed somebody who could come in and we didn't have a customer success department, so they had to build it. So somebody who could actually be a dreamer, like chaos is their friend. Whereas on the marketing side, we already had a lot of set place. We don't need a dreamer over there. We need somebody who's a doer driver who's like, oh, I'm going to create a sense of urgency. I'm going to make sure all these things are done. So it wasn't the skill set, it was the mindset that was keeping them from being successful. And we missed that. We missed that complete. I missed that completely. And so since then, I've been more mindful of like, well, okay, we can check the box on all the skill set, but do you have the mindset for the role and the time where we are and all that stuff and that a little nuance that you can't really get without having spent time and ask the right kind of questions to them. So I've done a whole study and write and speak on that one. So it's really fun. And when it comes to go to market, I think it's the same thing you got to figure out. And right now everybody's a dreamer because everybody is trying to figure out how to do this stuff. And everybody's also a doer because everybody has their own chatgpt and they're trying to do it. I think the future is going to be someone who can actually say, take a full step back, create their own LLM, own chat GPT, instance of it version of it that they have fed the way they think the fed they will operate. We're almost like, hey, all my experiences in it. So it's almost indispensable part of you that you're just making sure you're just putting like, we have put our books, our thoughts, our transcripts, our calls, the way we and then asking, okay, this is how I think. This is how I operate. And if it becomes smarter and smarter and smarter with you, it wouldn't really matter what job and where you are. You can take that with you and say, oh, this is how I think. Change that to now think like this or use these phrases or thinking or this industry detail and do the same kind of work for me. So now you will become much more efficient. So nobody's going to lose all the work and learning they're getting unless they are not training their chatgpt to be another analytical, strategic thinker. Almost make them think the way you think. And there's all these tools are to help you do that.
- [45:32]
A
Thank you so much for being on the show. I really enjoyed our conversation. How's someone learn more about you, your thought leadership, your podcasts, the GTM Monday's newsletter and the work that you and the team are doing at GTM Partners or even GTM University?
- [45:50]
C
Yeah, I mean just go to my LinkedIn and in the featured section you will have all those options and you can pick which adventure you want to go on.
- [45:59]
A
Yeah, you're all over the place. Hey, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for this conversation.
- [46:03]
C
Nathan, it was a pleasure. Thanks man.
- [46:06]
B
Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already. Don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.