The Future of B2B Buying Experiences and the Role of AI in GTM with Jaleh Rezaei

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Future of B2B Buying Experiences and the Role of AI in GTM with Jaleh Rezaei

Podcast Title: B2B Marketing with Dave Gerhardt
Host: Dave Gerhardt
Guest: Jaleh Rezaei, Founder and CEO of Mutiny
Release Date: May 22, 2025

In this insightful episode of B2B Marketing with Dave Gerhardt, host Dave converses with Jaleh Rezaei, the visionary Founder and CEO of Mutiny. The discussion delves deep into the evolving landscape of B2B marketing, the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies, and the pressing need to prioritize buyer experiences in an increasingly saturated market.

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1. The Evolution of B2B Marketing and AI’s Impact

Jaleh Rezaei begins by reflecting on his journey in the go-to-market space, highlighting his experiences at VMware and Gusto. He underscores the shift from relationship-centric, one-to-one marketing approaches to scalable models necessary for reaching a broader audience.

“I think now, over the last two and a half years, AI has literally taken what you were doing and multiplied it by at least 100. And that's also what makes me super excited about it, but at the same time, it's broken the stuff that was possible and started to make a lot of the things that I wasn't doing possible and rebuilt my toolkit.”
– Jaleh Rezaei [05:06]

However, he raises a critical concern: the initial misuse of AI has exacerbated existing problems in GTM strategies.

“The V1 of using AI in go-to-market teams has been very much about ourselves and our own efficiency... we're just spamming everybody in the universe with more content.”
– Jaleh Rezaei [05:06]

2. Challenges in Current GTM Strategies Due to AI Misuse

The conversation shifts to the unintended consequences of leveraging AI for efficiency. Both Dave and Jaleh lament the decline in outbound performance and the inundation of automated, impersonal communications that alienate potential customers.

“Outbound performance is down by 71%... if they can tell that they're getting automated AI emails, they're less likely to recommend that brand.”
– Jaleh Rezaei [05:43]

This misuse of AI has led to oversaturation across marketing channels, diminishing the effectiveness of traditional strategies that once yielded high engagement rates.

3. Prioritizing Buyer Experience in the AI Era

Jaleh emphasizes a paradigm shift from quantity to quality in marketing efforts. He advocates for a renewed focus on creating exceptional buyer experiences, drawing inspiration from Jeff Bezos's customer-centric philosophy at Amazon.

“We desperately need to refocus back on the buying experience and the buyers themselves, what do they want? How do we create a great experience for them?”
– Jaleh Rezaei [06:47]

He posits that the future of AI in GTM lies in tooling that enhances the buyer's journey, ensuring that technological advancements elevate rather than inundate the customer experience.

4. Changing Role of Marketing Leaders in a Tough Market

Addressing the challenges faced by modern marketing leaders, Jaleh notes that the role has become significantly more demanding due to market conditions and the pervasive noise generated by AI-driven strategies.

“The job is much harder... buyers are a lot more discerning... channels are getting saturated way faster than before.”
– Jaleh Rezaei [13:07]

He advises marketing leaders to adopt creative strategies and prioritize speed without sacrificing the quality of interactions, thereby navigating the complexities of a tougher market landscape.

5. Simplification and Alignment Between Marketing and Sales

A major theme in the discussion is the critical importance of alignment between marketing and sales teams. Jaleh highlights findings from a recent survey indicating that aligned teams are significantly more likely to exceed their revenue targets.

“Teams that are aligned are 2.3x more likely to significantly exceed their targets, and misaligned teams are 2x more likely to miss their targets.”
– Jaleh Rezaei [33:26]

He advocates for simplifying marketing strategies by focusing on core objectives and ensuring that both sales and marketing are collectively driving towards shared goals.

6. Strategic Insights and Actionable Strategies

a. Black Hat Strategy for Scaling Partner Programs
Jaleh introduces the "Black Hat Strategy," a method for scaling partner programs by setting audacious goals and quickly iterating based on real-world feedback.

“You set a bold goal... then imagine you've failed and identify what went wrong. Synthesize that into key levers and act swiftly to validate your assumptions.”
– Jaleh Rezaei [20:07]

This approach encourages rapid experimentation and validation, enabling teams to efficiently scale successful strategies.

b. Mapping the Target Account Universe
He also discusses the importance of clearly defining and mapping out the Target Account Universe, allowing both marketing and sales to focus their efforts cohesively on high-potential accounts.

“Companies are now able to map out their TAM... we've mapped out our universe. There's a hundred thousand accounts, fifty thousand accounts, whatever.”
– Jaleh Rezaei [29:18]

This alignment ensures that all marketing and sales activities are directed towards a well-defined set of targets, enhancing overall effectiveness.

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Key Takeaways

1. AI as a Double-Edged Sword: While AI offers unprecedented scaling opportunities, its initial misuse has led to content oversaturation and diminished outbound efficacy.

2. Buyer-Centric Approach: The future of B2B marketing hinges on prioritizing exceptional buyer experiences over sheer volume of outreach.

3. Alignment is Crucial: Strong alignment between marketing and sales teams significantly boosts the likelihood of exceeding revenue targets.

4. Simplify and Focus: Marketing strategies should be streamlined to focus on core objectives, ensuring clarity and effectiveness in execution.

5. Rapid Iteration: Adopting strategies like the Black Hat approach facilitates quick validation and scaling of successful marketing initiatives.

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This episode offers a compelling exploration of the current state and future direction of B2B marketing, emphasizing the need for thoughtful integration of AI and steadfast focus on the buyer's journey. Jaleh Rezaei's insights provide valuable guidance for marketers aiming to navigate the complexities of today's market and build sustainable, impactful GTM strategies.

Transcript

[A]

This episode is brought to you by Webflow. If you're a B2B marketer right now, you're probably being asked to do more with less. Less budget, fewer resources, tighter timelines, and you're expected to somehow grow pipeline anyway. They don't say do less, but also we're shrinking the goals. They say do less, but do more. That's why more teams are switching to webflow. Webflow is the website experience platform that helps you consolidate your stack, reduce program spend and move faster. Instead of juggling a dozen tools and waiting. Webflow gives marketing and design teams the power to build, launch and optimize sites all in one place. With no code flexibility, dev level control built in a B testing, SEO, localization and AI tools. They've got everything you need to turn your website into your highest performing channel. So you can check out webflow right [e-mail] exit5webflow.com exit5 bonus. Since you like to get marketing examples, I often reference them as a great marketing website for someone who sells to a bunch of different Personas. So check them out. Webflow.com Exit 5 you're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhart.

[B]

Exit 511234 Exit 51221234. Action. I'm Jali Rezai. I'm the founder and CEO of Mutiny. We help sales and marketing teams deliver truly personalized one to one experiences to their target accounts.

[A]

All right, so you started mutiny in 2018. Did you see this? Like, I mean I don't know who did, but I think about back to like my time at Drift as an example, I'm like, man, I wish we had some of the AI stuff that's available now. Back then my house would be bigger.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I'm just curious like you know, to talk to a founder who's in the mix selling this, you know, in the sales and marketing. I think this is the most exciting time to be a marketer, but I'm biased. I'm curious to hear what the journey you've been on with mutiny since 2018 and kind of where the direction things are going, what the direction is that things are going in today for marketers.

[B]

I definitely agree this is the most exciting time to be building for go to market teams. But in general just this is the most exciting time to be a founder because we just got this amazing technological innovation that is going to make everything a hundred times better. And so yeah, absolutely, I think it's a great time to give you a little bit of context on kind of my story and how that connects to everything that's going on right now. I started my career in go to market in PMM at VMware. And I was working with the sales team closing, you know, million dollar plus deals. And that was a really interesting way of entering the go to market space because I didn't know anything else. I didn't know how the scaled version of everything was done. Right. So what I did was we'd work with the sales team and we would research every single account, we would look at their earnings announcements, we would look at their press releases, we would spend a bunch of time with the sales team to figure out what did they care about, what was important. And then we would Translate that into one to one decks and ROIs and roadmaps and all that stuff. Right. And then after that I went to Gusto and there, you know, we had a really low acv and so we had to really lean into the scaled model. And so for me, it was this experience of I had to trade relationships for scale. And that's just sort of what I needed to do to be successful and reach lots of, you know, small businesses at Gusto. And I think that's kind of been the journey for a lot of go to market leaders. You could either do the relationship centric, one to one stuff that doesn't scale, or you could do the scaled version that is not great for the buyer and sales doesn't like it. But hey, you reach a lot of people, right? I mean, I started Mutiny to fix that problem. I saw a lot of opportunities for how technology could help with that. But to your question of what's going on now, I think the way we're using AI right now has made that problem like a hundred times worse. And you know how this is, right? The V1 of any new technology is always very limited, right. We look at what are we doing today and then how do we apply that technology. Right. Like when mobile first came out, Uber and DoorDash were not the first apps that were released, Right. It was like the ruler app on your iPhone. And so I think when I look at what's going on with AI right.

[A]

Now, that's a great example, by the way. It's like there was a flashlight app, right?

[B]

Yeah, totally.

[A]

Now, like, it's all baked in. There's like a crazy parallel between what's going to happen with AI and SaaS, right. It's a good example. Right? You're a marketer, is a good storyteller.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, and so like what are we doing with AI today? We've basically taken that scaled model, right, that I was familiar with and you know, most sales and marketing leaders were using and we've hundred x that more stuff faster, right? Hey, why have all these BDRs manually write emails? These kids are all out of college. Let's automate them, right? Why write thoughtful content and blog posts? Like, let's just use AI to power out more stuff, right? And so I think the V1 of using AI in go to market teams has been very much about ourselves and our own efficiency, right? Like how do I pump out more stuff faster? And I think if you look at the data, a lot of that stuff is backfiring. The outbound performance is down by 71% according to the latest report from Bridge Group that I was looking at. I was looking at another report that came out where 50% of people were. If they can tell that they're getting automated AI emails, they're less likely to recommend that brand. It just kind of goes on and on. Like we're starting to see the aftermath of just spamming everybody in the universe with more content. I mean, look at your own email, your own phone, right? I miss calls from my doctor because I can't pick up my phone because I'm getting so many fricking, you know, robo bdr phone calls.

[A]

Crazy. I just was saying to my wife, I'm like, let me, I'm going to change my phone number. She's like, no, we just memorized your phone number. You can't change it. I'm like, no, we need to change this phone number.

[B]

You know, that's not a bad idea. I have tried to have my assistant remove my phone number from so many different databases and it just doesn't matter. All day it rings, I can't pick it up. My email is the same thing. And so I think if I'm in go to market as a leader. These are not great trends, right? Because outbound used to be the primary way that we generated pipelines, especially in the enterprise, those larger accounts. And we're basically burning those channels to the ground because we're rendering them useless because they're just becoming spam. And so my point of view on the space is that we desperately need to refocus back on the buying experience and the buyers themselves, what do they want? How do we create a great experience for them? Jeff Bezos, I think does a really great job of this with Amazon, right? Of if you want something to last for a Long time, you have to focus on creating the best thing for the end customer. And I think when it comes to go to market teams, that's the buyer. If we create an amazing experience for them that they want to come back to. I think that's the next frontier for AI. That's the generation of tooling that's going to stick around, that's not going to get saturated, because the more we have of it, the more it just raises the bar for everybody.

[A]

Yeah. It's like we've been given access to this unbelievable tool that allows you to infinitely scale copy and messaging, but we're using it in kind of the same shitty way that we. It's like you can't use it in the, like, 2009, 2010 context. It's like, back then, you may have been the only brand that was, like, doing a decent job with email. And I remember I used to be able to write emails that would have a crazy open rate, because my emails would be like, I would use a lowercase subject line. I would use plain text, no personalization. The subject line would be like, question about Mutiny. And nobody was doing that. And so I would guarantee to get an open from you. Right. It's like, but you can't play that game anymore. Or you were the only company that had a blog and you were the only company writing about a certain thing. And so you rank for all these articles and you got all that traffic. Like, none of those plays work anymore. All that stuff has gone away. And so instead we're just, like, sending crazy amounts of email, crazy amounts of noise. I love this trend because I think on one side, people see AI as, like, ruining marketing and taking everybody's jobs. I see it as. It's actually gonna make marketing get back to, like, what really matters, which is, like, founders need to have a truly differentiated product, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's not just marketing messaging. It's like, you're gonna have to place a stronger emphasis on strategy as a company, which is gonna make you better as a marketer, and you're gonna have to do better outreach. You're gonna have to actually understand my business and then reach out to me, not be like, oh, Dave, I saw you went to Boston College. Go Eagles. You know, book, right? Yeah. Do you don't want to book a demo or. We didn't, you know, we did an event in Boston last week, and I asked the audience, like, you know, what's not working? That used to work. And this is a perfect example of this that you made me think of is like the gift card play, right? Cold email, like $25 to take a demo of Mutiny. And I'm like, I'd rather pay you. You might have the best product in the world. How about I pay you $25 so I don't have to take that meeting because I don't want to give you 30 minutes to an hour of my time. Like that worked 10 years ago, but doesn't work now. And I think it's going to put more pressure on you actually having to be remarkable and have to create interesting marketing that's. That's worth talking about.

[B]

Yeah, I totally agree. And being in this space, right. And building software, we have to make choices that are right in two, three years from now. And so one of the principles that I use to kind of simplify things and be able to predict the future, if you will, is just apply the universalism principle. If everybody had it, would it still work? And because my goal is if I build something and it's successful, is that everyone has it. And so if it was a gimmick and it is not going to work once everybody has it, that's a really bad thing for me because even if I do a great job, then no one wants it. Right. And so I think where you build things with longevity is when you go to the first principles of who's the end customer, how do we build a great experience for them. And that always lasts because if everybody, all of the customers, if everyone has this better experience and you genuinely believe that, that'll just raise the bar and that'll become the new standard because it's so much better. That's how you end up really winning. And I think go to market teams can also think about things in that same way of not just the short term gimmicky stuff. Although I will say those things can work for a small team if you're trying to hack your way to growth a little bit. But ultimately, if you want to get really big and you want to have channels generating millions of tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in pipeline, that same principle applies. Like you have to be doing something that's actually good for the end buyer, otherwise the jig is going to be up.

[A]

Want to talk about your backstory a little bit as a head of marketing? So you, you had gusto. You were first 10 employees. Ish. There. You ended up growing the marketing team to 20, 30 people. Wildly successful run four years, you know, did what I did, get that equity vested and then leave total respect. That's the first time in life where you have to figure out, wait a second, they're going to tax me, what, on the money that I haven't even earned yet? Which is a whole different. Yeah, but that was a decade ago. Ish, right? Roughly. Yeah, about a Decade ago now, October 2013. We're getting there. Do you think the job is different today for the head of marketing who's at a, you know, let's say at the time you're at series A, series B, Gusto. I'm just making things up. Like 50 employees, you know, seven to $10 million in revenue. Is the job the same or is it different? If you were taking that job now, would you be doing different things? Like, what does the world look like to you?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think there is certain fundamentals that. And first principles that stay the same. But I think that objectively, the job is much harder. By almost every measure today, it's harder. The most important one being that we are not in a bull market. If you zoom out and look at the numbers, everything was up and to the right, and that means that people were buying in a less discerning way. And there was budgets flowing, and you could get deals, you could grow those deals to be big much more easily. And you probably gave yourself lots of pats on the back and you thought you were amazing, and you probably were. But, you know, the market definitely helped a lot. And so I think we're just in a very different market today where that's not the case and buyers are a lot more discerning. And so, you know, you have to. And then there's also just a lot more noise. Right. Everything that we talked about around what's going on with AI, everyone desperately, in an attempt to try to make themselves more efficient, are just spamming the universe. And so channels that maybe before, to your point, you know, you could send a lowercase subject line, and that's all it took to break through. Right now you have to kill yourself to break through those channels. It just doesn't work as well anymore. And so you have to think a lot more creatively. I think channels are getting saturated way faster than before. And so, yeah, it's definitely a very tough job. And I think it's going to get tougher because of our misuse of AI in go to market today.

[A]

Because of our misuse of AI.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, to that model that we're talking about. Right. Which is just pumping out stuff faster as opposed to really focusing on how do we deliver a better experience to the end Buyer and then how do we make ourselves faster in that process? I think if you can do those two things really well, you are well ahead of most people in marketing. And the reality is that most people are not really focused on those two things. I actually wrote an article about this. I don't know if you've seen it or not, but it was in first round. It was about how to speed up marketing.

[A]

Oh no, give me the summary. I like that headline. There are a lot of marketing needs that how to speed up marketing.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I share a bunch of tactics in there from, you know, my days at Gusto and then I think it was also like early days at Mutiny when I wrote that. But I think like the number one tool in there is to prioritize speed as a top value and priority of the team. So looking at what is the number one goal for us as a marketing team and are we moving as fast as possible towards that goal? You know in your gut if the answer to that is yes or no, you don't need fancy dashboards or anything like that. And if the answer is no, let's say you're trying to move up market as fast as possible and then we say, okay, are we moving up market as fast as possible? If my life depended on this, would we be doing things differently? And if the answer is no, then you need to make some changes. And often that's a combination of restructuring, refocusing, maybe different type of technology. So I think the end customer experience and then speed remain the two principles that CMOs and marketing leaders can follow to set themselves apart from their peers.

[A]

Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails, well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't. That's why we love Knack here at exit 5. Knack is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performing emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nac. If you're tired of hoping the email you sent looks good across all devices, just test it in nack first. And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part, everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see knack in [e-mail] Exit 5. That's K N A K.com Exit 5 or just let them know you heard about NAC from Exit 5. That's us. The speed one is a good one. But I often, I love to go fast and I often realize that through my own team and working with other people, the marketing team is often really busy and everyone is burnt out. I never have doubt that. Like, it's not that nobody's working right. But the challenge is it's like we gotta make videos. We need videos for LinkedIn. We gotta be on LinkedIn. So we're making LinkedIn videos and we gotta be doing ads and we gotta be doing webinars and we gotta go to this event. There's so many things to stay busy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And if you really take a step back, like not all those things matter and not all those things actually deliver the results. And I think one of the challenges with speed is it's easy to say go fast, go fast. And I'm guilty of this too. And go fast just means doing more. When I've learned now through multiple companies that, man, it's almost always a strategy thing and like, we can go fast, but we need to all a go fast in the right direction. And we have to be clear about the things we're going to say no to. And it's usually only one or two big things that are going to move the needle. Right. I was at a company where we decided to go upmarket and that was the rally cry from the CEO and the board and the founders and they presented it at the company. But half the company was still stuck in the old business world because the comp plans were still wrong, the incentives for the execs were still wrong. I think you have to be aligned on strategy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the question that I asked you earlier about like, you know, what would you go back and do you know what's changed? I think outside of AI, maybe this is just an experience. 1 My own answer to that is just now seeing this game a bunch of times, I'm realizing how important it is to be aligned on the company strategy to be successful as a marketer. Right?

[B]

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think one of the things I point out in that article, and this is years ago, is you want to start with the end in mind. And so let's say you want to build a really successful partner program because you're already seeing some early traction around that. And by the way, this is something that I really believe in, that the strategies you should go really big on, there's signs of those already. You're already seeing a little bit of traction in the market. If you go and ask the last hundred people, how did you find us? You would start to see examples of that strategy. It's just not scaled. You haven't really figured out how to make it really big. You haven't made it easy. But consumers, like, typically when things are good for them, they like it, they find their way to you. And then I think your job as a marketing team is to figure out how to scale those things. And so one of the things that I would do with the team is the black hat strategy, which I learned from a growth PM that I used to work closely with. So you decide, okay, like, we want to build a big partner program, right? And we've got some good early traction. Even though we don't have partner economics and we don't have a partner program, We've already found a bunch of partners recommending us. And so we think this could be something that's really big. You then set a goal that is really bold and audacious. And I like to have a two to three year lens towards that goal so you can think really, really big. And so you'd say, okay, our goal is to get a hundred million dollars in pipeline or whatever through this channel in the next three years. And that means, let's do some simple math, that means a thousand partners each X number of referrals. So you build that very simple how. And then what we do with the black hat is we write down, okay, now imagine that we have failed at this goal. Like, it did not happen. We got maybe like at most 8 million in pipeline, even though we really tried hard, what went wrong? And then everybody writes down, okay, it could have been this and this and this. And then you synthesize that into a very small number of levers that actually matter for building the program. And so one of them might be like, there are not a thousand partners. Right. Like, how many times do marketing teams get something wrong because the TAM is off?

[A]

Absolutely. How many times does Dave get something wrong because the TAM is off? Yeah, absolutely. Like, are we sure there's a market here? Absolutely. Fundamental, number one.

[B]

Totally. Yeah, totally. Okay. And then, you know, we need to get the economics of this has to be right relative to the alternatives for that partner, because it's not like they're just sitting on their hands, right? They're using something Else, like, we are replacing something else for them. So how does this fit in and what does that look like? And so it just gets you to write out the levers that are going to be really important, and then the speed comes in after that. So then speed is. Okay. Let's say we don't know if there are a thousand partners or we don't know if we can make the economics of it work for the partner. Then the speed comes from, okay, today's Monday. By Friday, I need you to close a partner, go out there into the wild and close one partner, two partner, whatever. We think is a crazy goal, but that gets you to work through that whole pipeline. And then when you do that, it's really scary. By the way, whenever I would say that to our team, they would freak out. They're like, no, no, no, no. I need to build a deck. We don't even know what the model is. And I'm like, what are you building a deck for? We don't even know if they're there. Right. And so then you go and in the process of closing a partner, you validate your TAM numbers, and you figure out how I'm going to pitch them, and you do some research, and it gets you out of the basement, and it gets you into, like, prototyping and doing things, and it gets you to the truth a lot faster. So I think when I say, like, you have to be fast, I'm definitely with you. It's not about running around like a chicken with its head cut off. You have to set that little bit of foundation. But the thing is, that foundation is a day's worth of work, right? At Mutiny, the example that I always use is I'm like, if we were in YC because we did yc, right? And I'm like, if we were in YC and this was our goal, how fast would we do it? And if my actual answer today at Mutiny is really different than my YC answer, I'm doing something wrong. We're making a change so that we can get much closer to that YC speed.

[A]

Nice. I love that. It's great to hear you elaborate on that, because I do think so often we get caught up in these loops of just like, the default for any project is three months.

[B]

Yeah, totally. Or no, we have to do it, and then it seeds the market, and then in a year or two years, we see results. But I really think, and I don't mean to throw brand under the bus. I do love brand investments. And for anyone that follows Mutiny, we Do do a lot of brand stuff, but we measure it and we have leading indicators. And, you know, we do brand investments that ultimately connects to what our product does. Because I think brand investments that are just way too far off where you interact with that brand project, but then you have no idea who mutinies. We could be a shoe company. That's not a great brand investment. That often doesn't translate, but.

[A]

Oh, that's good. Yeah. So, like, invest in the brand stuff, but it's got to have a purpose. Like, if the company's ultimate goal is to drive, you know, if we need $10 million in new pipeline this year. Oh, man, this is a good point. And it's really not articulate. You articulated great. I just want to, like, riff on it, which is like. Because people ask all the time, how do you measure brand? How do you measure brand? Well, if you just do some random brand. If you just buy a blimp and fly it over a beach somewhere and you're like, brand, Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But if you do something that's like, in service of a goal, like, our customers are at Saster, and instead of getting a booth at Saster, we want to do some crazy play that's in service of booking meetings and pipeline at the event. And that is how brand and that stuff works together. Is that kind of what you're building on?

[B]

Like, yeah, totally. I mean, I think the simplest way to think about it is how does our product connect to something that's really valuable for the customer? So everything that we do at Muni, I always look at it as, would I want this. Is this something that I would use? And so I think if you start with the end customer in mind and think about their situation and what their hopes and dreams are and what their reality is and how you plug into that and make sure that that is ultimately connected to your product, I think that's how you end up getting brand really. Right. I'll give you one example of one of the best brand moves that I've seen in the last couple of years. And of course, I can't remember the name of the company that did this, but it's a data science company, and they sold to data scientists. And, you know, one of the biggest challenges of data science is, like, no one really understands what data science is. And so they wrote a children's book on data science, and all of their customers would come in every month and they would download this book and they would read it to their children every night, explaining what mommy or daddy does. I mean, Isn't that just absolutely amazing? And it is one of the biggest pipeline generators for them. And so I think that to me is a great example of something where they're not really talking too much about their product. It's really about the mission of data science. And they touch on how that mission is advanced with technology and tooling, which obviously they play into. But it's really about this great experience. You know, they prioritize the book that they really would want to read to their kid. And then every time someone reads that, they're like, who's this company that gave me this amazing gift? And like, know so much about how technology plugs into data science. And then they go and, you know, they sign up for a demo for their product. So that's.

[A]

Well, I love that it plug. It plugs into like, it's like a. If someone wrote a actually good kids book about marketing, I would read that to my kids.

[B]

Yeah, totally.

[A]

And who happened to put it on? Oh, Mutiny put that out. Or whoever put it out. You know, that's a good example. It's gotta be genuinely useful in your role as CEO today. A lot of people that listen to this either report to the CEO, want to be an exec, want to work better with execs. What have you learned about marketing from the CEO perspective? That if you could talk to other CMOs or other marketing leaders or yourself from your past life, maybe you see how you used to talk about marketing, like from your position as CEO. How do we help people? Help the CEO do better with marketing, Help the company do better with marketing. You know what I'm trying to get at? Like there's gotta be some lesson now that you see it from the other way.

[B]

I think you gotta simplify. There's a lot going on in marketing and there's just the sausage making. It's just really hard to connect with. And I think engineers understand what salespeople do because it's like you go talk to customers and you take their money, you know, and it's simple. It's like you sell them our product and in exchange they give you their money. And I get that. And now we do that thousands of times. And that's how revenue is made. I think when it comes to marketing, we're all great storytellers externally, but we tend to just open up all of this complicated stuff and no one understands what the hell we're talking about. It's like, oh, you got to do the brand and then we warm up the account. Then there's the funnel and then you score them and then you move people down. And so I think you want to just get to a really simple story of how are you getting customers and what are your top two to three investments for doing that and why are you going to break through the noise when no one else does? So I think one of the trend where companies are now able to map out their tam, I think is a really good one for marketers. Right where before you had to do all this inbound stuff and there was this funnel. And I'm not saying those things aren't important, but I think the fact that you can outline the universe of companies that you need to go sell to and get in front of is a really great simplifier for orgs. You know, I was talking with the CMO at Amplitude and I'm increasingly seeing this where the whole company just doubles down, triples down on target accounts and says, we've mapped out our universe. There's a hundred thousand accounts, fifty thousand accounts, whatever. And we need to move the needle within these accounts. Now everything is simple. Salespeople care about accounts, marketing cares about accounts. They have customized pitches. Marketing can have a customized pitch to get into those. We can talk about wins. Okay, which accounts did you bring in that we didn't have before? Which accounts are in pipeline that we didn't have? So I am all about simplifying marketing. And it's not just, just a storytelling thing. I do think that if as marketers we take a hard look at ourselves, we also can probably find opportunities for simplifying our own strategies. And that way it's a lot easier to then bring others along and help them understand what's on, going, going on.

[A]

So basically, there's two things that I heard you say there. If I can just try to spit them back. Number one is just simplify. If I have the opportunity to present to the CEO, don't tell her the hundred things that we're doing in marketing. It's the one or two core things. And let's. I don't want to let you look in the whole house. I just want to show you the one or two.

[B]

No mice nuts. That's my expression with my team. I'm like, do not bring me mice nuts. I don't want 15m nuts glued together to make something big.

[A]

Yeah, well, I found that it's not even that the CEO doesn't care. It's that like if I have a meeting with you and I show you all this nonsense, you're not going to not give me opinions about that. So now all of a sudden, I've let you go and change 20 things that don't really matter. Like a CEOs like, okay, we change this color, the booth. She doesn't like how the booth look. None of that matters. Like, are we going to drive revenue from this thing or not? Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Then the other thing is some. My kind of takeaway is just about alignment. And I've interviewed a lot of people on this podcast over the years. The companies that are the most aligned between sales and marketing are always the companies. And you can poo, poo, you know, whatever you can say about ABM or not. But it's the companies that are doing this ABM motion together because it's the only thing that aligns sales and marketing. It's not. We're not arguing about credit. It's much harder in a company that has, like the multiple funnels where you have the high touch, high volume funnel and you have the sales funnel. Then it's like, whoa, whoa. We're gold on marketing source. It's like, nope, yeah, we just care about getting into these accounts. And sales does some things, marketing does some things. We work together and we measure success that way. That is the dream.

[B]

100%. And we actually did a sales and marketing survey recently that supports a lot of what you're saying. So it was 500 salespeople and marketing leaders. So it was a pretty big survey. And we got really deep. So we asked people about their targets. How are they doing on revenue targets? We asked them a lot about alignment. We asked them about the things that they do within their organizations to, like, really understand what's going on. Are they aligned? Do they want to be aligned? And then what are the things that the people that are aligned doing that's different than the ones that are not doing well? And what was interesting was, so 97% agree with you. Right? They're like, yes, we want to work better together, and if we do, we'll get more revenue. And we actually saw that in the revenue data as well. Teams that are aligned are 2.3x more likely to significantly exceed their targets, and misaligned teams are 2x more likely to miss their targets. Yet 82% on both sides fantasize about replacing each other. So.

[A]

So true.

[B]

Right? I mean, they. So they're misaligned. And when we dug into, okay, why, you know, everyone always goes towards goals. And it wasn't goals in the data because 70% of them felt that they had goal alignment. And I think that part of that is that we've had this big shift towards setting pipeline as a goal that I don't think was the case maybe 10 years ago. So I wonder if that's having an effect, is once you really align around pipeline, the goals tend to be more or less aligned. But the breakdown was all around the day to day execution. So sales felt like their context is not making its way into marketing. So they're not able to give feedback. The campaigns are not personalized to the buyers. All of the customer conversations that they're having are not really fueling what the marketing team is working on. And the messages they're putting out there, the leads that they're getting, they don't understand why, you know, the lead handoff is a big problem, right? Like they don't understand why this is a good lead and why this was sent to them, you know, and then I think like the reverse is also true. Marketing is frustrated that they're not able to collaborate with the sales team in the ways that they want. So I think the big takeaway was if I was still a practitioner. There is now a very clear business case. It's not just people's gut, right? Like, we can see that alignment leads to revenue and the breakdown is not just goals, but everything that happens after that. Right? Like, what are those high recurring interactions between these two teams? And how do you build better collaboration and information sharing in both directions?

[A]

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