← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Is Product, Sales, Or Marketing- Led Growth Right For You?
00:18:34
Loading summary
Transcript37 lines
- [00:00]
Benjamin Shapiro
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com.
- [00:26]
From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate.
- [00:36]
Rob Friedman
Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
- [00:42]
Benjamin Shapiro
Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
- [00:54]
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. In this podcast you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that you technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
- [01:15]
Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro and today we're going to discuss everything led growth. Joining me is Rob Freeman, who is the VP of marketing at ezo, which is a provider of innovative asset intelligent and management solutions that are trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide. Their credibility is backed by a vast global clientele and a proven track record in multiple industries. And today Rob and I are going to talk about is product sales or marketing led growth right for you? All right, here's my conversation with an old friend, Rob Friedman, the VP of marketing at Easy O. Rob, welcome back to a new style of the Martech podcast.
- [02:00]
Rob Friedman
Thanks, I'm excited. Thanks, Ben, I appreciate it. It's good to see you.
- [02:05]
Benjamin Shapiro
Excited to have you back here. It's been a long time. You've changed companies, you've got a new job, you got a new role and might I say a better video setup. The background's looking good.
- [02:15]
Rob Friedman
Thank you, thank you, I appreciate it.
- [02:17]
Benjamin Shapiro
Great to have you back and congratulations on the new gig. Excited to talk to you a little bit about a topic that I think confuses all marketers right now, which is not just growth strategy, but picking a lane. It's what I call XLG something led growth. We've got sales led growth and product led growth and marketing led growth. And now there's founder led growth. Which LED growth should we be choosing? Let's start off at the top and broadly sort of. How do you think about the difference between the various XLGs?
- [02:49]
Rob Friedman
I love how you put that. Starting with the product led growth. How are you bringing in Those users, expanding them, retaining them. And when all that rests on the shoulders of the amazing product you're selling, that's product led growth. And I like to think of that going beyond freemium, that there is many different flavors of product led growth. Some of them still involve demos. There is a place for those, there is a place for using tools like a storylane or something to be a virtual demo type experience in your product led growth GTM motion there and then even enterprise software can even have a PLG motion to it.
- [03:29]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, so product led growth, I think of product led growth being the general ethos is we've built an onboarding funnel that does not rely on people to sell the product. And you mentioned the word freemium. Someone can come in, trial the product and then either moved into a usage or a subscription based pricing model. So how is that different from marketing led growth versus your sales led growth channel?
- [03:57]
Rob Friedman
The ideal candy for a product like growth is one that has short sales cycles. Your buyers are well educated, tech savvy, they're well seasoned tech buyers, they don't need a whole lot of handholding. But if you've got something that's a little more complex, if it's got a longer buying cycle, product led growth isn't going to cut it. People are going to get into your tool, they're going to get lost, they're not going to have great experience, it won't convert. So that's where you need, that's where the sales led book. A demo type motion works best. And then one of my favorites is the marketing led growth of being a marketer and that really shines. Marketing led is also called kind of full funnel or omnichannel approach. And this is where the marketing owns the entire customer journey from SEO thought leadership and building that demand gen engine across many, many channels, wherever that buyer may be and helping guide them through the discovery and investigation type phases of their buying journey. So that's, I think it's a best used when you have strong content creation teams. When you're able to do that multi touch attribution to make sure you're measuring that roi, that's when your motion can be more of that marketing led growth.
- [05:15]
Benjamin Shapiro
I think of product led growth being a traditional SaaS mechanism. Right. I think of marketing led growth being sort of the old school way of sales and marketing which goes back to like the Procter and Gamble, right? Like the marketer was at the center of the hub and spoke system where their job is to get the message out there, help manage the distribution channels. Right. Get my people to like Crest toothpaste and then they can go onto the website and buy Crest toothpaste. But they're also just going to go into Walgreens and when they're sitting there looking at the wall of products, they're going to remember the marketing and pick the brand. So I think of that being more of like a CPG centric growth strategy. Then you also get into this sales led growth. How is sales led growth different than the other two?
- [06:05]
Rob Friedman
So sales led growth is definitely for those more complex products, the ones that aren't straightforward, that it's not necessarily the easiest for someone to just swipe their credit card, put in their login information and self onboard. So really it's like when there's going to be a more intensive onboarding process, it really shines at those higher ticket items and those enterprise solutions that have long relationship building processes to them. And I think you see markets where there's a personal connection and trust are paramount to making the deal work. It's going to take meeting them in person, perhaps doing on site visits. It's not just a simple transactional relationship.
- [06:47]
Benjamin Shapiro
I think that in sales led growth there's the enterprise B2B software. I'm sure everybody that uses Salesforce probably has a Salesforce rep of some sort. So you get these big sales teams that are going in and not only telling you why the product is great, but also helping you with the onboarding and managing sort of the ongoing customer relationship. That's sort of the tech version. I think there's also like car salesman, like that's sales led growth. You go in and it's the car salesman that's buying you the car. And a little bit of that is relationship driven. How much do you like the car salesman and how shiny is the suit?
- [07:22]
Rob Friedman
I mean, I've got a perfect story for that. I just bought a car.
- [07:25]
Benjamin Shapiro
What'd you get?
- [07:26]
Rob Friedman
I got a Hyundai Santa Fe, the new one.
- [07:29]
Benjamin Shapiro
Okay.
- [07:29]
Rob Friedman
And there's a Hyundai dealership so close to my house that on a nice day I could walk to it. So my wife and I went in there when we were doing our due diligence and just kind of wanted to look at different vehicles, test them out, met a salesperson, did not click at all. This person was pretty much a stereotype in a negative way. We went, ended up going to a dealership 28 miles down the road in new bruffles. I'm in San Marcos, Texas, all the way down there. Wonderful dealership, like the salespeople it's the same vehicle, almost the same pricing relatively. And we were able to negotiate a good deal. Liked the team. That's the one we bought from, not the one that's super close to our home because of the salesperson. And we made it a very long sales cycle. I think we were shopping for this car for like six.
- [08:14]
Benjamin Shapiro
You made him earn it. Good for you. I want to move on when we got this sort of dynamic of all right, there's marketing, sales, product LED growth. I'll even throw in founder led growth, which is kind of a hybrid of marketing and sales led growth. You got your founder is the face of the company who is pushing out content and being the marketer and then trying to get you to engage with them. Honestly, that's our marketing strategy is I try to be out there everywhere I can. Hopefully people know like and trust the content we produce and my face is okay, it's not the worst, it's not the best face, but recognizable. And then when they think about doing podcast production, they know who to look for, where to go. Let's blend those into marketing and sales. How do you figure out which version of XLG your company is the right fit for?
- [09:06]
Rob Friedman
I mean some of it you just have to be inward focused and be honest with yourself about the product you're selling and who your ICP is and what is going to appeal to them. Are they the type who don't want to deal with a person like your tool is simple enough, they just want to make that login, kick the tires for seven to 15 days and then if they like it, it works for them, add their credit card and be on with it. Or is it a demographic that might be older, maybe more appreciative of a touch experience? So some of it's knowing your buyer, some of it is knowing your product. Are they going to be able in a product LED motion get to those wow moments and see instant value? It's really how quickly will the user experience the payback? If that payback is going to be quick, those wow moments are readily apparent, then that's a good, good match for your product LED growth. But if it's a highly regulated industry or highly complex, it's probably not a good fit for product led. You should probably do more of a sales led growth emotion.
- [10:12]
Benjamin Shapiro
What I'm hearing from you is the variables that go into it are one, how good is your product? How easy is it for someone to get value in a self service model? Two, seems like there's a little bit of price Point here. Yeah, sure, I'm willing to throw down a credit card as a trial. There's some variability here but like people aren't using a product led growth to buy a car. With the asterisks of Tesla, people seem to just go and buy them online. But is it a relatively low reoccurring charge? There's also the usability and understandability of your product that seems to sort of fit into the product led growth. And honestly I think of it as like the price points, 9.99amonth to like a couple hundred dollars a month reoccurring subscription based model. Sometimes it's usage based, like can you easily use the product and not create a lot of cost of goods sold? That seems to fit into product led growth. Now you get into sales and marketing led growth. What's the difference?
- [11:15]
Rob Friedman
So if you look at marketing led growth and you mentioned Salesforce earlier, Salesforce is a great example of a sales led growth machine. Very good at it, aimed at larger enterprises, very complex tool. You definitely need some more handholding with onboarding. But then if you look at one of their counterparts, one of their competitors, HubSpot, that's marketing led growth right there. They are a media machine. They put a lot of focus into content creation, SEO and marketing strategy and they were willing to put those investments in to all those different channels from podcasts to newsletters to commercials and big events and it's paid off for them. So it's like they both took two different routes and both have seen tremendous success. And I think HubSpot and some other good examples of that, it'd be like Semrush is another good marketing led growth company. They've proven the old adage content is king. But being an avid chess fan, I like to say that strategy is the queen and we all know that's the more powerful piece. And if you are just building content without a strategy, without a very clear plan for that content, your marketing led growth probably won't experience the same success like Semrush or HubSpot did. But when sales led growth shines, the challenges there can be scaling, how do you scale hiring, training, good sales teams. Not all sales leaders are created equal and I find it can be more unpredictable with the potential for longer sales cycles. You got a lot of personalities involved, a lot of people, and if they don't mesh like me and that car salesman, it's not going to fly. That is one of the challenges with a sales like growth is you're putting a lot of people into it.
- [12:57]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah. Your sales LED growth is really dependent on having a big enough, long enough sales cycle, high volume, high value, longer sales cycle which needs customization and attention from a real person.
- [13:12]
Rob Friedman
Right.
- [13:12]
Benjamin Shapiro
It's not just about getting the message out there. It's about customizing and finding the fit. Right. And I do think that there's a world here where you get the smarketing LED growth. You have to have marketing to build your brand. But fundamentally the marketing is driving the creation of leads. And I don't want to go to MQL and SQLs because we don't ever talk about those things. But basically Glengarry Glen Ross, I can't say that is marketing drives the leads and then the salespeople need to close them to drive the business. There is a hybrid between the two of these.
- [13:45]
Rob Friedman
Absolutely. And we see that at ezo we've got both motions product LED and sales led growth active.
- [13:51]
Benjamin Shapiro
So how do you evaluate the difference between the models? Being someone who has multiple different types of XLG models that you're applying, how do you figure out what's successful for you?
- [14:03]
Rob Friedman
For us it goes back to knowing our product and knowing our buyers and knowing that we've got a couple of products that are very easy to onboard. They're more SMB mid market focused so they lend themselves to people just can log in self service our easy office inventory tracking system and our easy rent out people can just run that themselves that very little handholding needed. But then we got some more complex ones like our CMMS tool, that preventative maintenance platform that's great for maintenance teams but that takes some setup, takes some integrations that takes to make that work for them. So that's going to be more of that sales relationship driven growth model. And same with assetsonar. So it asset management is very complex. There's a lot of moving parts and because of that complexity at a certain scale from like mid market and above to enterprise, that is definitely a sales led growth motion.
- [14:58]
Benjamin Shapiro
I think a lot of moving parts resonates with me when you're talking about asset management. It's literally a lot of moving parts.
- [15:05]
Rob Friedman
Literally moving tracking them.
- [15:07]
Benjamin Shapiro
What I'm hearing from you, and maybe this is the most important thing to think about is that you can have different types of XL G depending on what your product, your brand does not need to stick to all sales LED or all marketing led. You can have a down market starter product which is product led. You're marketing your core product and then you've got an enterprise sales led strategy as well, it's not one size fits all. So for the companies that are thinking about, honestly for me, like I'm thinking about, what is the right Mechanism for our 2025 go to market? Should we be focused on more content and being marketing led? Should we go do more cold outreach and focus on sales or just build a product like our podcast that tend to attract people into our sales cycle? How do you figure out what's right for you and what do you do sort of in the short term to figure out and test the right model for your business?
- [16:03]
Rob Friedman
Some of it is being very deliberative about your testing. You don't just throw things against the wall, but with purpose. It is worthwhile to try out an outbound marketing sales led strategy to help build up your pipeline. While you continue to make the great content on your podcast and you continue doing the marketing led growth things and you start to measure which channels are bringing not the best, not the most, but the best leads in which ones are the bringing the ones with the highest lifetime value, the stickiest ones, the ones who are repeat customers. So there is some testing you should do and you shouldn't ignore one for the other right out the gate.
- [16:41]
Benjamin Shapiro
I think that with most things in marketing, it's both an art and a science. And with figuring out your growth strategy, you need to not only take a good look in the mirror and understand what your product is, what are its strengths, how easy is it to use, but what does your customer need? What type of relationship do they want to have if they're looking for hand holding, you're going to be a sales led growth engineer. If you are a company that needs to rely on building a brand to create awareness and position yourself to be the experts. All right, now you're looking at marketing led. If you have a distribution channel where you're being stacked up against everybody else in a commodity type setting, your brand matters. Your marketing led. If you've got this amazing product that just tends to have virality and is really easy to use, you're probably product led. Fundamentally, you got to understand what your company is and who your customers are, the relationships they want to have. All right, and that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks again to Rob Friedman, the VP of Marketing at ezo, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Rob, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can send him a message on X. His handle is robfriedman. That's R O B F R E E D M a N. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Ezo IO. If you'd like a summary of this podcast or if you'd like to apply to be our next guest speaker, head over to martechpod.com you can also find the MarTech podcast on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or even on TikTok now. And if you'd like to contact me, let's connect over on LinkedIn. My handle is Benjschaft B E N J S H A P. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Foreign.
- [18:56]
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.