← The SaaS Revolution Show
The SaaS Revolution Show
How You.com 10x’d MQLs with multithreaded marketing
00:33:55
The SaaS Revolution Show with Alex Theuma and Kady Srinivasan, CMO at Freshworks and former CMO at You.com. Kady shares how she rebuilt the You.com GTM strategy from the ground up after multiple pivots. Rather than trying to fix broken SaaS playbooks, she replaced them with a multithreaded marketing model that 10x’d MQLs and grew ACV by 86% in just two quarters. Alex and Kady discuss: - Why traditional GTM playbooks break down in the AI era - What multithreaded marketing actually looks like in practice - How to structure marketing teams for ownership and speed - The role of prompt marketers and AI-native workflows - Using AI as an execution accelerator, not a strategy shortcut - The differences between selling to AI natives and AI laggards - The reality of operating with a complex, multi-tool GTM stack
Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:01]
A
We went from our MQL volume was super low. We 10x'd our MQL volume by doing these things. In the course of just one quarter, ACV went up 86%.
- [00:13]
B
Welcome to the SaaS Revolution Show, a podcast by SaaS Talk. Here we interview SaaS founders from around the world who've been there and done that as they share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses, their operations, their path to securing investment and more. Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your wellbeing and navigate the complexities of this ever changing industry. I'm your host Alex Diemer and together we'll explore the good, the bad and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success. Meetings at Events Suck We've changed that with Meetup coming to SaaS USA this April. Meetup is a one to one meetings program that'll deliver over 12,000 pre scheduled 15 minute conversations with the partners, customers, peers and investors who can move your business forward. No more wasted time, just purposeful meetings with exactly who you need to meet. Register by March 20th to secure your place at the AI and B2B Software Industries largest meetings event. Find out more at sas.usa.com meetup. Welcome back to the SaaS Revolution Show. I'm your host Alex Thumer, CEO founder of SaaSDoc, also General Partner at Back Future Ventures. Delighted to be joined today by Kadi Srinivasan who is The CMO of you.com also has a fantastic CV being heads of Marketing sort of global for Dropbox Klaviyo High Touch, Lightspeed Commerce, Very credible CMO here on the podcast that we're going to touch into some of the shifts that you.com has been making around AI but also going into the GTM changes that Caddy has been putting into place. Again with a specific lens on AI. So really excited to jump into these topics. It's all very relevant in today's fast changing market. Welcome to the show.
- [02:30]
A
Thank you so much Alex. So great to be here. I've been following you guys for a while and super exciting to be here.
- [02:35]
B
And this is actually ahead. I forget to mention that SASOC USA in April in Austin you'll be speaking at your first SASOC event. So very grateful for that and that would obviously be our opportunity to meet in person which AI is also driving a bit of a in person resurgence. I'm seeing this on a on a day to day basis but we look forward to that and obviously what you're going to be speaking about there Caddy. I found it super interesting that you know, you dot com, you know, is around sort of 100 million ARR company but has made a bit of a pivot you, you know, at this stage from what was, you know, consumer search platform towards enterprise, you know, AI tools. Maybe you could give some insights. Maybe it's obvious, right, because a lot of companies becoming AI first but as to a pivot, you know, of a company of that size and why that, why that was made and then from your side, you know, coming into the role, you, your priorities around the marketing strategy to support that.
- [03:43]
A
Yeah, yeah, sounds great. Yeah. U.com is, has actually has had two transitions. One is from a consumer search engine perspective to now what we call ourselves as an AI infrastructure company, AI search infrastructure company. So went from being a consumer focused company to an enterprise company and then we also went from being in the application layer to more on the infrastructure layer. So that was yet another transition. So if you can think about, we are now trying to sell to enterprises a set of picks and shovels in the tech stack. So it's a very different audience. Everything is different. So when I stepped in, I'd say we were going through the transition. So it was very confusing to a lot of people in the company. Who is our icp, what do we need to target, what do we want to sell to them, what the value proposition is and all that stuff. So I've basically rebuilt the entire go to market strategy from ground up. We've landed on this idea of AI laggards and AI natives as the two kind of Persona type companies that we want to go after because they're very different in the way that they build versus buy tools. And then secondly, I've clarified what does it mean to go and sell to an AI laggard versus an AI native? What are the differences? How do we want to think about the value proposition? What do we want to put in front of them? And they're significantly different. And they're different from even a SaaS playbook perspective. The way you market is very different. So in doing all that I realized that the traditional way of marketing, organizing marketing doesn't work anymore. I couldn't have just a PMM function that would go and figure out how do I talk to a CIO at an AI laggard and then now I'll build another playbook for a CIO at an AI native. It just, you know, that kind of stuff doesn't work. So I've blown it all up and I created this, what I call the multi threaded organization and I talk about this a lot. So this, it's the idea that one, if you're a founder engineer, listening to this, you'll kind of understand this. You have to create a lot of parallelism. So you have to run a lot of different things in parallel. So there's one portion of that second is there is no longer I am a content person, I'm a website person. A person now has to do all of it together. They have to think about content, how it shows up on the website, be able to track and report it, connect it to Salesforce, do all that stuff. So it's threaded, it's woven together. That's the second component. Then the third thing I've realized is you can't just ship things out there and let it go. You have to create a flywheel. So you have to do X and then Y and Z and that compounds back to X. That becomes a compounding flywheel. So if you do these three things, this is how you can get an edge over the market. Just a proof point there is we went from our MQL volume was super low. We 10x'd our MQL volume by doing these things. In the course of just one quarter, ACV went up 86%. So this thing is working and we are going to continue to do that. And I can dig into some of the details but I've changed the full nature of marketing and I think this is the future. I think the future is this multi threaded model.
- [07:10]
B
We should definitely dig into it. And so you managed to do this all in one quarter. Let's understand how you manage to do that. I guess first of all in a quarter and what that looked like from I guess the team structure, hierarchy. Did you have to bring some AI experience AI native marketers in to help with this and yeah, maybe share a bit more around that.
- [07:37]
A
Yeah. So I would say I did it over the course of 2/4 setting the ground level strategy and then we saw the results jump up in one quarter. When you started activating what I, I got lucky because we have some really talented generalists on the team who are also already thinking 360 degrees about everything that was going on. Super smart people, but people who took a lot of ownership about specific outcomes and that's the most important thing is right like you need to be able to say I need to drive a certain number of opportunities from this, this thing that I'm doing and it doesn't matter what it's supposed to be. I, I have to think really broadly about. It could be I'm driving content, it could be that I'm giving a specific nurture sequence to a salesperson. It could be so many different things. So I lucked out in that I have a couple of those people on the team. Then I brought in what I call prompt marketers. And these are people who have a deep native AI fluency. They know how to work with Zapier and N8N and make and they know how to work with APIs and they know how to build apps with relet and things like that. So these people are able to now take the workflows that we had or that I had in my mind and just convert that into an AI process, connect all the dots. And that has been a great accelerator because then you can say I put a switch on and then it just sort of flows. Right. And then the third thing is, I think what I got lucky with is we have a lot of people inside the company, are forward deployed engineers who are doing some of this with our customers. And so I was able to take some part of their brain and then be able to do it. The thing that is very important is you have a lot of tools out there you can actually leverage. I talk about a company that I love, it's called Brand Light, another one that I love called GrowthX. And it's a matter of just being able to bring them on super quickly, onboard them quickly and then get them rolling and then see the results and test it. So everything moves at the speed of AI, right? It's crazy. In Klaviyo I took nine months to ship a website refresh. Here I did that in five weeks because you can change so many things. So I think that there's a lot of hygiene, hygiene stuff that needs to happen. There's a lot of tool absorption that needs to happen. Bring the right people in who have the right mentality and then really execute. Like disciplined execution is where it needs.
- [10:13]
B
To be on the prompt marketers. So obviously you're a company of a particular scale. Do you have a viewpoint on like every company, depending on what size should be looking to hire prompt marketers? Does it matter whether you're 100 million ARR or 5 million?
- [10:32]
A
Yeah, I think every company should in my opinion. The reason is back to what I was talking about, the multi threaded systems. You can't really do that at scale if you don't have people who are automating these things. When we talk about automating frequently, we end up going into this rabbit hole of who does that. Is it a marops person, is it an IT person, is it a engineer? And marketing usually doesn't have anyone that can actually create those workflows, AI workflows. And so if you hire a prompt marketer, it doesn't matter if you're small or big, you can start to apply them to those little flywheels. Whether it's small or big, you will need that kind of automation to happen. So my, my thing is in the future, these are the people who are going to become the experts about taking a plan or playbook and then putting that into the systems that you're building, the tech stack you're building.
- [11:39]
B
And other example you mentioned about, typically updating or launching a new website would take nine months. I think we're probably all familiar with that. But getting it done in five weeks maybe again, just shed a bit more kind of light into that. Like what tools did you use? How did you manage to get that done, fully updated? I imagine you had hundreds of pages, content, et cetera. So curious to learn more about that.
- [12:04]
A
Yeah, I think it's a lot of it is the nine months, A lot of it is the planning process of who do we want to speak to, what kind of ICP do we want to go after, what is the messaging? And there's continuous iterations of that and we cut all of that down. Nowadays you can like basically prototype an entire website using a lovable, for instance. And so you, you take, I, I take my thoughts on what it should be, what it should look like, articulate it, put it in front of our designers and this is the kind. And then there's like a quick, you know, back and forth of what it should be and then we ship it, we see if it works or not. So the cycles, the iteration cycles are super rapid. And then we said, okay, there are 80, 20 rule, so you.com had built up a bunch of web pages, most of them were not getting any traffic, et cetera, et cetera. Why do we even need to migrate all of that, cut it all out, take the top 10% of your top performing pages and then migrate that over and cut the rest. Now the interesting thing is get into content for a second because in the world of AI, content is becoming more important, but the right kind of content, not AI generated slop content. So for us, I had this vision that content is going to be the most important differentiator because we need to educate our people on what this is. So I said we need to have the website that is so extensible that we can generate thousands of pages of content or relevant content and set it up. So as long as my team came back with here's a framework where we can rapidly create new blogs, new case studies, new X, Y and Z, then it doesn't like I don't need to see all of it in live action. I just have the framework. I know it'll just be going so that's what happened is we went from having a really messy, confusing website to something that really communicates what we are about and has the basic MVP stuff in five weeks. And now we have the extensibility every week we add pages and pages that keeps adding up. So in nine months I bet you this is going to look a lot better than what I had at Klaviyo because we have been on the journey of updating it.
- [14:23]
B
The 10x MQL. It's a combination of just putting this multi threaded system in place with the MQLs. Is this majority driven through inbound? Are you doing outbound as well? What does that look like?
- [14:38]
A
Yeah, it's majority of it is inbound. The number of MQLs from outbound is very small, but they're high ACV. So there's a couple of, couple of things that went in there to drive that MQL Volume one is the obviously the clarification of the ICP and who we are going after that makes it ton of a difference. But we put in place these two flywheels. One was around content so we created really high quality content using AI that would then go into newsletters and prospects, downloaded those newsletters. Then we would route those leads depending on ICP fit, et cetera, to the right people or to the right nurture programs. And then that would inform and those conversations, sales conversations would then inform us about future topics we wanted to write about. And that became content that went into newsletter. So you can see there's that flywheel that just worked beautifully and we got so much stuff out of it. That was one big contributing factor. And then the second part of it is we tried these really cool things like our founder social. He would post some things. We would go scrape all the people that responded to him and engaged with him or we would filter that for ICP fit and then we would nurture. Sorry, enrich them and route them to the sales team. Nurture them. In some cases we would want. We would invite them to specific things like events and all that stuff. Actually I got a Niner suite as well. So we have the Niner suite where we host people. And then those conversations with those folks then led to more topics of thought leadership that then Richard and Brian would post about. So you can see there's another flywheel that happened there.
- [16:27]
B
So if I engage in one of the founders posts, but I'm not your icp, do I get an invite to a Niners game or you need to.
- [16:37]
A
Be able to tell us that you can pay at least, you know, 500,000.
- [16:42]
B
Okay, I'm out. I'm out.
- [16:45]
A
But Alex, we can invite you to a Niners game.
- [16:48]
B
I'm back in. I'm back in. Know that I'm not going to buy anything. I'd love to. So we understand the strategies there and we've got the people there, but maybe share some of the tooling that you're sort of using as well. I mean, even from scraping, those that are engaging on LinkedIn, but maybe kind of more like fundamental tooling that you didn't have in place that has come in place during this period.
- [17:18]
A
Yeah, so the scraping is still done a little bit by hand because LinkedIn APIs are really difficult to work with. But the other stuff. So we've used 11. X with some limited success. We've used clay.com, obviously, it's a big clay IO, whatever. Clay is a big one for us. And then we've also started to use tools like Connect the Dots and Sumble, and they provide a much better way of connecting to the right people. Then of course, there's a bunch of Salesforce pieces on the email side. We. Oh, Gong. Gong is a big thing for us because we can then look into what customers are saying, how our value proposition is resonating, draw some insights from those Gong calls. So there's a bunch of different tools and then my team has access to Lovable. They have access to a lot of different things where they can do localized experiments and then be able to productionize it in scale. The other thing too important to remember is u.com is an agent building workspace. So we do a lot of our agent building in U.com itself and with it.
- [18:27]
B
So obviously pretty familiar with most of those tools, but let's say some of the new ones that you brought in, do you bring them in like in a sort of like a staggered way? So like, okay, guys, here's Lovable. This is what we want you to do with it. Spend a bit of time on that rather than, okay, here's five new tools and this is what you need to do. So what is your approach in how you introduce the AI tooling.
- [18:57]
A
In the beginning, I forced it a little bit because it's shocking. When I joined, we were barely using any AI at all except for content writing and shit like that. Sorry, not so then I would force. So every week we would have a standup. And one portion of the standup was everybody had to present what AI tool they used in the past week. And so that created a lot of discovery of new tools. My personal favorite is Gamma, the app. My God, I love it so much because it has cut down my almost everything. The way I think through stories, the way I think through presentation, all that stuff. So that happened. Then this prompt marketer that I hired that I told you about, she started a AI agent lab, weekly AI agent lab. So basically we would give them give the entire team access to Zapier or Make or Enaten, and they would just experiment with building agents. Now we also have a mini hackathon coming up from a marketing perspective for people to just go and build using our own APIs, build agents and apps. So I'm trying to force it now the team has become really comfortable using and discovering new tools. So that's happening.
- [20:21]
B
So coming back to something you said earlier about the difference in selling to AI natives and AI laggards, and maybe can you share a little bit more about that? Like I'm assuming, but I could be wrong. It's easier to sell to AI natives, but maybe I'm wrong there.
- [20:39]
A
Yeah, I'd say that you're right that in some ways it's easier to sell to AI natives because they understand the potential of what AI can do. And that's the biggest difference with AI laggards. Do you know the consumer moments of truth. So you have a problem identification layer, then you have a solution identification layer, and then you kind of go down the path for AI laggards, they don't even know they have a problem, right? So you have to start there. You have to go to them and be able to say, look, your thing X outcome can be so much better if you used AI in this way. And so you're defining the problem for them and then you're saying, oh, by the way, we have a solution that can help you with this. Your customer onboarding experience can be so much better if you integrated this and this and if it showed this X, Y and Z. And then, oh, by the way, we can help you do exactly what you want. So it takes another level of effort to be able to go and sell the problem. And then sell the solution. So you need to have so many things right. You need to have the right content and the thought leadership, education. You need to have the social proof that somebody has gone through that journey. You need to have salespeople who are so technical that they can come up with use cases that help drive this forward. So it's a lot of different things that you have to get right when you're selling to AI laggards. Now that's one thing. Second thing is, and I advise a lot of different companies, really awesome companies. One thing that I found is they don't adequately take into account how risk averse these people are. When you go and try to sell to a Fortune 5000 company, if you're selling to the CIO office of the CIO, they are really scared about how this will impact governance, risk, security, data retention and particularly if they have global footprints, you know, GDPR in Europe and like so many different things. So you have to be very forward or security forward if you will, around talking about that stuff and you have to be able to understand their considerations. And then I think the third one is most people aren't going to buy from a small AI company. Um, if you're going after big enterprise companies, they won't buy and say I'm going to believe you right from the beginning. They, they usually have what, a few hundred people in their organization. They're going to have to need some change management and people management as they kind of bring you in. And AI companies, founders that I'm seeing, they don't adequately prepare for those conversations. They assume that once they sell, it's done. Like, you know, AI companies like me, if somebody pitches me, I like the idea. I'm like, okay, let's go try. It doesn't matter. For me, risk is low. Not the case with AI laggard. So you have to be really careful about selling the security stuff. First you have to change management is important and then you have to sell the problem. Those are the three things that I'm finding that are very different from AI natives.
- [23:51]
B
What about the impact of AI then on email as a channel? I guess what we're seeing and experiencing, probably this ever increasing amount of emails being received, a lot of it being AI slop, not all. It's a bit harder to go through your inbox and maybe just an impact on effectiveness. So how do you view email as a channel for you.com and what are you doing maybe to cut through the noise of this problem?
- [24:25]
A
I think it's when you're doing cold outbounding. It doesn't work at all. We've tried with SDRs, AI SDRs. It just doesn't work. I think where it works is very specific use cases where you have people who are coming to your website and you retarget them with specific information that they would be interested in based on their context X, Y and Z. In those narrow slivers of use cases. It does work. Like you can see some response rates go up. This is what coming back to what I said about being parallel. So you have to identify these slivers and run them in parallel. That's how it adds up to a whole. So the other thing that's very important is what I'm finding with email is it all depends on the quality of the first party audience that you have collected. And so I see a lot of companies actually starting to invest in building their own first party audiences. Whether it's they collect it on like a substack type of a thing or whether they have their own internal developer community type of a thing. It's such a smart move. You publish relevant content, you build your audience and then you keep growing that. But you have to be very careful about giving them exactly the right kind of relevant content. To your point, no slop. It's something that's educational. So what we have done with U.com is we have focused exclusively on education and thought leadership. So we do things like five AI use cases you should know about that are working the governance checklist for CIOs, that kind of stuff. And that's the only thing that works. That's because it's grounded in actual real world lived experience that we bring to the table. It's insightful, it's not slop. It's based on interviews with other customers. Our own CIO is actually really smart and we pick his brain for what's on his mind and how he's. So it's deep. It's deep content that's relevant and if you use that in email it works like gangbusters. But the thing is use that to build your audience and then give more content that then continues to build your audience. That, that's a frame. I see.
- [26:39]
B
And with your content, I think you did mention it. So okay, you're getting content ideas from speaking to customers, from sales conversations, which I think is really smart. I also wish we did more of this and probably will do is one of my takeaways from the conversation. Right. But are you using. Do you ever like purely publish AI written content or Is this, is there a human element of the content person working with AI tooling to then have the output of what you're putting out there?
- [27:13]
A
Yeah, no, we don't ever publish AI. Only AI generated content. That hurt, in my opinion. It hurts our brand. So we, this company I mentioned, Growthx, they're phenomenal, I love them.
- [27:27]
B
What do they do?
- [27:29]
A
So they help generate AI, they help generate content at scale, but they have a unique model where the human writes the outline, AI fills up the outline, then they use AI to do fact checking and make sure it's accurate. Then a human reviews the content and makes edits and that kind of stuff and then we publish it. So like you said, human in the loop at the right points of time. So it becomes a really strong thing. But we are leveraging the two power of AI. And so we do like, I think we used to do one ebook or one white paper, like once in two months type of a thing. Now we do four or five a month.
- [28:09]
B
Okay. Wow.
- [28:10]
A
The volume has increased a lot. I think the most important thing about content too is it's so easy to slide into average stuff and you won't even realize it. So you have to be very, very careful about whether it's like you're creating the right prompt. I mean, sometimes my prompts are like 75 lines long type of thing. Whether it's creating the right prompt or appending the right context with all of the data and making sure the AI understands it and then really quality checking everything that comes out of it. You have to be very careful about what you're doing.
- [28:47]
B
You've brought in a lot of change within the team in a very quick or short period of time. When you look ahead now to the, you know, the next 12 months, what are you, how are you seeing, you know, AI within marketing? How are you viewing it? What, what more change do you need to bring in? Or do you know, like, because he's moving so fast. Right. Actually, maybe in six months time, what you're doing now, I don't know, is it going to be relevant?
- [29:19]
A
Yeah, I think so. I think that's a constant fear is what I'm doing now could easily become irrelevant. But I think where I see all of this is going is this, these flywheels that I'm talking about. I see the bigger and bigger versions of it that we are trying to put in the system. And I think my hypothesis is the more we do that, the more data we collect and the more we generate better feedback for the loop and that makes it stickier, more competitive. And that's my hypothesis anyway, that I think will hopefully that's what we are moving towards. So I think that's one thing we are going to push forward on. The second thing is the go to market tech stack has become incredibly complex. Even with a company our size, which is a smaller company relative to others. We have 22 tools in our tech stack, which is crazy to think about and that will only increase that fragmentation. Then the question is back to like these prompt marketers, right? Do we use more of those to stitch all of it together or do we just get rid of a bunch and consolidate? Like those are all big questions for me that I don't know what how to think about. If I had a big company that had these things that were all ingested properly, it would be a no brainer right now. I don't think any of us have the one tool of choice to be able to power the systems that we want. So that would be the second thing. And the third thing is this person that I found, my prompt marketer, I found a couple of them, but that took a lot of networking for me to find the right person. They're not out there yet. How do we find those people? How do we identify the right potential? How do we train them up in this new way of thinking? How do we identify the DNA that's required? That's the other thing for me on my mind.
- [31:15]
B
Yeah. Well, it's very new. I guess the question on that, can you train your current marketers to be prompt marketers or is it a very specific type of person? And obviously some are already out there, have made that evolution to their kind of skill set. You found them through networking or your way, but within the existing team. Could people be retrained if they want to, to be prompt marketers?
- [31:41]
A
I think they can be. I think there's a. It's almost like you need to have the right amount of hustle and ownership and learning and curiosity and discomfort with not knowing a lot of things. I mean it's certainly true for me. Like I get so overwhelmed when I think about trying all these new tools. Like I started using descript for some personal LinkedIn stuff. Oh my God, I got so quickly overwhelmed. What do I do? So you have to be able to work through that type of thing. And then I'd say, you know, funnily enough, you need a certain amount of common sense and practicality as well, because the world is yours. With AI you can do so much. But what makes a difference and has an impact is all a very small sliver of things. And so you need to have a little bit of that intuitive understanding of is this actually like, you know, meaningful and would people care about it? So I, I am trying, I'm going to try to train my marketers. I'm also going to try to find and shape the, the new generation of marketers, if nothing else, because those, those kids are going to be the ones I'll be working for someday. So.
- [32:53]
B
Yeah.
- [32:54]
A
Yeah.
- [32:54]
B
Too right. Well, Caddy, it's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. It's really got me excited to meet you in person at SAASOK USA in April in Austin. So very much looking forward to that. And I thank you for coming on today and sharing insights into this rapid transformation move towards AI GTM sort of systems that you brought in. So thank you for sharing that on the show today.
- [33:23]
A
Absolutely. It was a pleasure being here. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to share the stuff we are working on.
- [33:30]
B
Thanks for listening to the SaaS Revolution Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and follow the show. It helps more AI and B2B software founders to discover the podcast and keeps us bringing you the leaders who are shaping the future of the industry. For more resources and to join the SASTOC community, head to sastock. Com.