← The SaaSiest Podcast
The SaaSiest Podcast
204. Madhav Bhandari - VP Marketing, Storylane - How to Win in a World of 150,000 SaaS Tools: Pattern Interruption is your real mote
00:56:03
Loading summary
Transcript143 lines
- [00:03]
A
You are listening to the Sassiest podcast in the world. Born in the Nordics. Democratizing B2B SaaS knowledge everywhere.
- [00:11]
B
Hi, I'm Daniel.
- [00:12]
C
And I'm Thomas. And we are experienced SaaS professionals that are curious about how other successful SaaS companies go to market scale, build winning teams and great products.
- [00:22]
B
Join us on our journey as we speak to SaaS leaders trying to get hold of their secret sauce.
- [00:26]
C
And today's guest is Madhav Pandhari, the CMO at storylane.
- [00:31]
A
Looking at your portfolio, you just got to build that muscle of identifying patterns and then finding creative disruptions from it. And they come from all places and all walks of life.
- [00:44]
B
Let's talk about something every SaaS CFO and revenue leader is chasing right now. Smarter growth. Scaling a recurring revenue business isn't just about winning new customers. It's about staying in control of subscriptions, billing and compliance without the chaos. That's where Unium comes in. Unium delivers AI powered subscription management and billing, giving SaaS and subscription businesses a single source of truth for contracts, invoicing, revenue recognition and analytics. One native tool that kills the spreadsheets, automates the busy work and serves up real time metrics, turning complexity into clarity and helping you scale with confidence. Check out unium.comsassiest to see how leading SaaS finance teams power smarter growth with Unium.
- [01:28]
C
Hello and welcome back to the Sassiest podcast. I'm hot and you're cold. How are you, Daniel?
- [01:36]
B
I think that's a fair description right now. We probably have negative 2 or 3 right now and it's been windy and this morning when I walked from my house into my little office that I have in the garden here, I walked by two planters that have fallen over because it was very windy. So we definitely still have proper winters over here. But winters are also nice. Like, you know, you probably are very hot in Thailand and sweaty and it's like sticky. There's downsides to that as well.
- [02:08]
C
Yeah, but you can always go inside to the air condition. I think we have 30 degrees now and you know we are always pulling through. At Sassiest, I think you have like three people with fever at home and your wife broke her ankle and I have had all my three daughters to the hospital and also this night I had to go with my wife the whole night but we're still kicking and we just made a really interesting podcast episode that we hope that you will enjoy. Besides that, now we are starting off our CEO and executive networks. We have a fantastic CEO kickoff next week in Stockholm where we gather 60 B2B SaaS CEO scale ups. Really looking forward to that. And we also have a Chro dinner also the very same week. And after that, the regular online sessions start where we have more than 600 people active in the network. So now it's starting for real, Daniel.
- [03:08]
B
It is starting for real, and I think we should just get right into it. It's a great episode, great guest here. We're going to talk about pattern interruption, essentially. And I mean, not to offend anyone here, but a lot of us, we sound the same, we look the same, it just feels the same. And if we can't stand out, it is the race to. To average. And if it's the race to average, then the only thing that we can differentiate on is price, and nobody wants that. So we're going to talk to a fantastic CMO here that has truly mastered how to interrupt patterns and how to stand out and how to be the number one priority when somebody makes a short list in their category. So we should all listen to this and let's see what we can learn.
- [03:49]
C
Let's go. Today we are super excited to have no other than Madhav Bandari, the CMO at storylane. Here's a guest in the sassiest podcast. Welcome, Madhav. How are you today?
- [04:03]
A
Doing amazing. And Thomas, like, great job. You just got my pronunciation exactly
- [04:12]
C
okay. Because we didn't sort of try it out before. I just went for it.
- [04:16]
B
I'm happy to hear that because I sometimes make fun of him because he always says the name of the guest and some names or maybe not more as common for us. And like, he's really turning into a pro here. I don't know. Thomas, is it you? And Chatgpt, you're like, he has a cheat code here. He does something to get the names right.
- [04:33]
C
It's the same thing that you do when you're meeting people and you always find some sport connection. So I'm doing this linguistic exercise instead.
- [04:42]
B
Yeah. So speaking about sports, are you a cricket fan?
- [04:47]
A
Well, I mean, I am, but I think one of my top sort of players kind of retired, so I've kind of lost.
- [04:55]
B
Who was your top player?
- [04:56]
A
Virat Kohli. Who's like this? I don't know if you follow cricket,
- [05:00]
B
but like a little bit. Enough to get in trouble. But then when people talk a lot about it, then I don't know. I don't know.
- [05:04]
A
I don't know.
- [05:05]
C
Daniel has all the channels, so he probably, you know, sees his one little Once in a while.
- [05:10]
B
Like what amazes me with cricket is that, you know, a game can last like days.
- [05:15]
A
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [05:16]
B
Like literally days. It's like you play a full day and it's like nobody wants. So we continue tomorrow?
- [05:21]
A
Yeah, yeah. That's crazy.
- [05:23]
B
Anyway, like we're not going to talk too much about cricket. So Marav, tell us, like, who are you? Like for us, you are famous. You're a LinkedIn celebrity, you're a fantastic CMO. You've been listed everywhere as a CMO to watch. And I personally have a crush on your jean jacket, like the storyline, branded jacket. But like if we set all those sides, all those things aside, who are you? If there's somebody listening to this and they have no idea who you are, how would you introduce yourself?
- [05:56]
A
You're incredibly sweet to say all of those things and hype me up, but yeah, I think it's maybe 10% of that. I would say who am I? Is a very tough question. But yeah, I mean what I do right now is I run marketing at a company called Storylane, but I've also been in marketing, especially in B2B tech for all this, 15 years now, so done it at a bunch of companies and I, I would say I sort of specialize in that early stage, like say like 5 million to 20 million sort of ar. I mean, 20 million. I mean the limit is. Because I haven't really crossed beyond that.
- [06:32]
B
It's like soon, soon enough.
- [06:33]
A
Yeah, so it's kind of like. But like I think it's that phase where it's like, okay, the company's starting to pick up a little bit and then you know, like you start to like build out the motion for it. So that's what I've worked on for more than a decade. And yeah, and then I, I'm actually a computer science engineer, you know, like as a background and then just happened to enter into marketing because I was very interested to understand how like I wanted to build my own startup but I didn't know how. So the next best thing was to join a startup and understand how the business operates. Right. And then so I started, I joined a very early stage startup, did sales, marketing, cs, you know, even product management to be honest. And then, and then just trying to connect the dots, you know, what works, what does it take from 0 to 1, 1 to 10, 10 to 20, you know, like all of that and that's when I just, you know, like got deeply involved into it. So even today, if you ask me, like I'm Definitely not the most creative person or anything. Like, I think the reason why I'm in marketing is to just like solve like business problems. That's how I sort of deal with it. Like, if there's a problem that we're dealing with, oh, you know, we're stuck at a certain revenue we want to get out of it. Right. Like, that's how I would operate it. Not like, okay, oh, we have this channel. We need to make that work. Like, that's not how I operate.
- [07:46]
C
And where in the world are you right now?
- [07:48]
A
Right now I'm in Delhi, India, which is kind of like where I'm based out of. But I oscillate between San Francisco and Delhi because the stolen sort of founders and the exec team is all in the Bay Area. So I spend like, you know, I guess like almost, I would say once every quarter there for a couple of weeks and I'm back here. So that's what's happening with me right now.
- [08:09]
B
Okay, you're on the road quite a bit. So tell us a little bit about storylane. Like what do you guys do?
- [08:15]
A
Yes, it's a demo automation software. It was like a new tech that came in 2020, which is basically like there was a lot of people that were kind of frustrated with getting on sales calls with people. And then just like being able to see the product was like three weeks away. Right. And then like this tech, what it provides is that you can basically create like a front end replica of your product and, you know, put it up on the website so people can see the product, you know, at their own pace, click around in the buttons and all of that. And then, you know, when they actually want to talk to sales is when they can sort of reach out. So that's kind of like the space we're in. And it's particularly for sales, marketing and now lately, CS teams as well. All right. Yeah. And so we've been around for four years.
- [08:58]
C
All right, so I used to work as a sales engineer within pre sales. So would that put me out of a job?
- [09:03]
A
No, it's not that. I think it's more like, I'm glad that you asked because what happens is that usually a sales engineer is supporting like an insane amount of ae. So like the SE to a ratio is. Is crazily wild. Right. So every AE wants like, hey, I want my sales engineer in the demo. So what we're saying is that, listen, you don't have to get on every demo, you know, like focus on like the high leverage deals and the rest you just create demo templates that AES can like that's vetted by you, but the AES can use it in their calls.
- [09:32]
C
Okay.
- [09:33]
A
So basically five AES can like we have like a company where there's 50 SES supporting thousand AES.
- [09:40]
B
Yeah.
- [09:40]
C
Okay.
- [09:41]
A
And nothing's breaking right now. So that's kind of like what we're talking about. Yeah.
- [09:44]
C
And then you risk, minimize some, some of these creative AE like demos that they are doing on the fly. Right.
- [09:52]
B
I feel an insult coming here. Like, you know, I built my career on the back of Thomas demos.
- [09:58]
C
No, but you know, the sort of the interaction or the. Yeah. With me and Daniel, we have that background. Worked a lot together with the AES sales and Internet connection. So. But super interesting. And what can you say about the companies that sort of buys your solution? Is there certain verticals, sizes of companies or who do you attract?
- [10:21]
A
Yeah, so we go after mid market and enterprise. So think of a company that's I would say like at, I don't know, not in terms of revenue, but it'd be like a company that's generally either in, let's say hr, tech, manufacturing. Generally any tech company that either wants to try out a free trial option but you know, doesn't want to sort of, it doesn't make sense for them or they have like a sort of issue with like the sales engineers being like deeply under, like the team being very under resourced with ses. Right. And the. They just don't maybe have the budget for that. Or it's just generally like CMOS looking to understand, hey, how do I improve conversions with like a new content format? Like it's usually these companies.
- [11:05]
C
So would you say that this is a category that is well known now or just people don't realize that this exists?
- [11:12]
A
I think it is getting there. So I would say in terms of B2B tech particularly, there's quite a few people that are aware about what the interactive demo tech is, especially in the us. Europe and the UK generally are slightly behind on that. Okay, but in terms of how many have actually implemented, there's actually not that many.
- [11:33]
C
Okay.
- [11:33]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [11:34]
C
Cool. Would be cool to see it in action sometime. Maybe try out it on Daniel and see what happens. But to put some figures behind your business, just to understand sort of where we are, what can you say about your ARR, number of customers and employees and so on?
- [11:51]
A
Yeah, so we, we basically crossed 10 million ARR, I think in September of last year.
- [11:57]
C
Nice.
- [11:58]
A
And right now we are probably between 10 to 15 I would say at this point and sort of navigating the journey to maybe well hopefully cross 20 million by the end of this year. So we're on track. But yeah, we'll see about that one. And then we are angels trapped in the sense like no additional funding and no plans to raise any money on that one as well.
- [12:20]
C
Are you profitable?
- [12:21]
A
Yeah, we're profitable.
- [12:22]
C
Okay, nice.
- [12:23]
A
Yeah, so that's the dream, right? Like you've got to sort of. And we're also like fully remote and like I think the team size in total is 50 people at this point.
- [12:31]
C
Okay. Yeah. And do you serve any particular markets or do you focus your marketing activities or of any particular markets?
- [12:40]
A
We just focus on selling to, you know, pre sales and marketing and sales. Right. Like so the whole GTM stack basically and then mostly to B2B tech companies. Anyone who has a software product that they're selling. Right. Is kind of the market that we're going up.
- [12:55]
C
But is it predominantly us or Europe or Asia or.
- [12:59]
A
Yeah, I think so. We are like in terms of our existing customer base, I would say like it's almost 70% US and 30% of the world. But Europe is sort of like a very fast growing segment in the sense it's. It was insanely surprising that how I think One of our AES basically focuses only on Europe and I think last year she basically crossed a million in you know, from it. Okay, so we are like, we've been spending a lot of time like growing in Europe and UK is another really big market for us.
- [13:34]
C
Oh, interesting. Sounds like you are on a very interesting trajectory and going to hit that 20 million soon.
- [13:41]
B
Yeah, I mean really cool. And what we wanted to discuss with you a little bit is it's a crowded space, not your space, but any software category. There's like so many options. A lot of us, we sound the same, we look the same and sometimes it feels like it's the race to average because if we all look the same, if we all sound the same, well, what's the difference? And then like the nightmare scenario is that we all have to just compete on pricing.
- [14:10]
A
Who.
- [14:10]
B
Who's the cheapest and most affordable solution. But I know like the reality is much more nuanced here. It's not how the reality actually looks. And you guys have really managed to stand out here and I know you're writing a book on how to avoid the sameness trap by something called pattern interruption in marketing. Like what does that mean?
- [14:32]
A
Yeah, that's a great one. So I think so My realization generally is. So you're 100% right. I think every software category is now getting crowded. Like, ours is especially brutal. I think anybody in Martech or sales tech is like the worst affected in terms of like, just it's insanely crowded. Right. But also, like, I mean, there's also like this very common report that, you know, like literally every speaker on a conference mentioned, which is the Martech Landscape report. Right. In 2011 there were like 11,000, well, 1100 vendors. And I think 2024 there was like 15,000 vendors. Like, you can't really see any logos. And I think with vive coding and, you know, cursor and all of these different tools that are making features and products really fast to sort of ship. Right. Like, we could be at 50,000 products in MarTech. But it's not just Martech. It's also like, I looked at the software listings across G2, right. So 2019, I think in total there were like 50,000 listings. And in 2024 there's 150,000. Right. Wow. So you've reexed across categories. Right. So it's not like there's literally maybe a handful of categories where there's very little competition, but even those are going to get crowded. So the question now is that if products are easy to copy, like, sure, there's a craft into making the product very sort of scalable for enterprise and all. I get that. But I think the GTM motion is more important today than ever before. In the sense, like, you can build the most amazing product, but if it doesn't sort of stand out, you just. You'll never get customers. Right. So that's the big problem. And that was also like the business problem that I sort of was sort of handed maybe like two and a half years ago when I joined Storyline, which is just like, we had a great product, we were growing fairly quickly, but we were also not visible in. You know, like, what used to happen is that there'd be deals that would happen where there'd be like two or three competitors and we wouldn't even be in that consideration set. So even if we had a great product, we wouldn't like, be able to win that deal. Or let's say we would enter that deal as not the first vendor, but like the third or the fourth vendor. Right. So what happens is the first vendor decides the narrative. And basically now you compare the first narrative to like the second, third, fourth vendor. Right. So you're at a disadvantage. Right. So we wanted to flip that. So how do We a show up in the deal conversations. But also, how do we become the first vendor that these people see so that we can have sort of an unfair advantage, right? And I think that was definitely not going to happen if we just went with, you know, the standard route, right? And I can tell you this for a fact, that no amount of money can sort of help you get more visibility in the sense, like, visibility is not equal to, you know, more money money spent, because we have competitors that have raised, like, 80 million, okay? Which is insane. And, you know, yet their brand visibility, you know, is like, maybe one tenth of what we are at. So that's probably, like, misconception that I want to share with everybody is just that, you know, 40 million does not equal to you sort of having, like, this many brand searches or whatever, right? And that's kind of what we were, like, sort of we want to solve for. And then one of the things I sort of start thinking about is there are certain companies that did really well in terms of standing out despite being bootstrapped, despite being sort of profitable, despite not having, like, big financial muscle or anything. Right. One company that comes to mind is Basecamp, right?
- [18:03]
B
Yeah.
- [18:03]
A
And I always used to think, like, how are they standing out? Right? And, like, the simple idea that came in my mind is that, you know, they basically go against the direction where everybody's following and, like, just a simple thing, right? Like, okay, if everybody has the same website, we're gonna go, you know, in another direction. Right?
- [18:20]
B
We had one of the founders in the podcast, and he's definitely. What's the right word to say here? Contrarian. He doesn't. He doesn't shy away from going the opposite direction.
- [18:30]
A
Yeah. Was it David? David, Yeah. I think he was the cto, right? Yeah.
- [18:36]
B
Yes.
- [18:37]
A
So I think, yeah, like, that's. I mean, if you see their podcast, their books, everything is just, like, very contrarian takes, right? And so I think that that was sort of like, the idea that, okay, when my CEO came to me asking, like, hey, how do we stand out? How do we be different? That's a very directionless question. Like, you know, you ask something like, today I go to my team, and I'd be like, hey, we need to come up with this crazy idea that we can go viral with on the spot. Nobody can come with ideas. And also, it's a very directionalized question. Where do you even start looking? So I think that was a problem I was also dealing with. So I came up with something like, how about we look at patterns in the industry? In our ICPs and our competitors. And we try to disrupt those patterns because that's a lot more direction focused way that. Okay, if everybody is hosting webinars, right, let's put an end to it and let's, you know, maybe sort of do a different take to it. And that's when we had like an event called Demo Dundees, which is styled on the office theme. Right. So it was about constantly finding patterns and interrupting them.
- [19:41]
C
All right.
- [19:41]
A
And that's basically what pattern interruption is all about.
- [19:44]
C
So do you have other examples of when you have disrupted what. Yeah, the else of the competitors are doing? Yeah, something that worked really well or maybe you tried something out Because I guess, you know, every pattern interruption experiment doesn't work. So could you share some of those experiences?
- [20:04]
A
100%. I think it's a portfolio. Right. And the portfolio one is basically driving 80% and the rest are experiments. But you need to go through those experiments to find that one winning one. I'll share the biggest one that we've had, which is so in SEO as well. Right. Like the traditional SEO path that everybody takes is they would create a blog article and then they put it out.
- [20:24]
B
Right.
- [20:24]
A
And that's what we were doing for three years. It was like the standard blog that we used to put out, but it's too slow. Like, I think in three years we went from zero to 15,000 traffic a month and AI, you know, with the AI cost content creation gone down to zero, it's just very hard to stand out. So we basically started thinking, okay, what, what can we do? So we came up with an idea that what if we were to go after our ICPs? Like, I was really inspired by the SEO strategy that Zapier has. I don't know if you know about it, but they basically targeted integration keywords like calendar, Salesforce integration. And then they created a page for it and they created 100,000 pages. And that was the seed of where Zapier, sort of, at least in the initial growth that took them past 100 million. Error. Right. So I was thinking about like, okay, what is a opportunity that people haven't seen and how can we find it? And the experiment was that There were our ICPs that were searching for these tutorials for the tools they use. So we are targeting sales and marketing folks. We, you know, an example is Salesforce, right? Like, how do I merge a custom field in Salesforce, you know, how do I connect my Salesforce to Pardot, you know, all of those different queries. And I knew that we can Do a much better job by just adding a demo in there. So, like, the page used to be. I think the experiment was, does Google need text to rank? And then what we did was we added just a demo showing how to merge a custom field in Salesforce, no text at all. And I think we published that with I think like 100 pages. And it was like immediately we saw like, I think, I think about 60% of the pages were ranking in the first page. One out of five pages started ranking number one, outranking Salesforce, HubSpot, Ahrefs, all of these big tools. Right. So I was like, okay, this is an interesting opportunity. So we scaled it up to 7,000 pages and now it's like.
- [22:14]
C
So do I understand correctly that you used your product to show a demo of how you did something?
- [22:20]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [22:21]
C
Instead of just having text.
- [22:22]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You can actually just go into the website. There's like a tutorial section in the footer and actually see it. But I like, it's basically the storyline demo that we had put in there on the website. Okay. And yeah, I think now we're at 7,000 pages and it's about quarter million in traffic. And that not have been possible with blogs. And it's not just traffic. Like, there's actual data. So like our PLG revenue particularly. So we've got a PLG motion, a sales led motion. PLG signups grew by 3x and I would say, like signups as in paid subscriptions. And what was interesting was we actually saw a few enterprise deals come in because the companies that were looking at like these Salesforce tutorials were fairly big companies. Right. So it was like, it was a very, very profitable thing. I would say, like one of the leading ones. Why we went from like the 2 to 10 million journey so fast. And that is again, this comes back to the whole pattern interruption, right? Like, everybody's following the same SEO playbook. What can you do to disrupt that pattern? And somewhere you find like these sort of interesting plays.
- [23:23]
C
But it sounds like it's a lot of work for you guys, setting up demos for that many different sort of tutorial setups. But of course, you're. You're the pros at that. But. But anyway, it sounds like a lot of work.
- [23:37]
A
It actually wasn't. I think it's like if you. Because I have a background like my. I grew up from SEO, like, that was sort of like the channel that. That's like the deepest channel that I know about. Right. It's more about like systems and process. So it wasn't us doing it. We were actually working with many contractors and virtual assistants to actually create those pages. Yeah. And we set up the entire page structure and everything, all automated. So really the only effort the contractors had to do was go actually create the demo. The rest of the page was all done and created. So we were actually producing pages that I would say like one every hour. What was. So think of it, more like 200 to 300 pages a week being published.
- [24:20]
B
Wow, that's amazing. That's a lot. So I'm curious here because like everybody wants to stand out. Just like you said, you know, if you don't like, you're not going to be pre selected or not on the shortlist. If you make the shortlist, you might be option number three, which is a losing game here. So everybody wants to stand out and everybody wants to find these elements where they can break the pattern. I'm interested to find out how do you actually identify and decide on which patterns are worth breaking versus which are not? Because I'm going to give you an example, like sitting where we sit now. We feel that there's a strong pattern that every SaaS company and their executive teams, they've decided we're going to be thought leaders. So you see all of them taking to LinkedIn and becoming thought leaders and so on. Maybe that's a pattern that's worth jumping on. Everybody should do it or not. But sometimes maybe there are certain patterns that. How do I know that this is not the right thing to actually bet on that we need to go in the other direction. How do you decide that? Is there a framework for that?
- [25:25]
A
Yeah, so I have a framework, like inside scrubbing, we call it pipe, which is basically pattern interrupt portfolio engine. So the way we've done it is so like the first step is pattern identification. But you're 100% right. Not every pattern is worth going after. Like an example is that you could literally wear a duck suit and stand in the center of Dreamforce and get a shit ton of attention, but it's not going to drive your pipeline.
- [25:50]
B
Right.
- [25:51]
A
That's where a pattern interruption doesn't make sense. But the I is so the way it is like, so the P is basically identifying the patterns. The I is basically finding the interruption guardrails. So what are the guardrails particularly? It could be a bunch of things, right? Does it fit into the buyer journey? Where does it fit into the buyer journey? Is it educating about your product? Is it on brand, is it off brand? There's Multiple things that you can look at. And that's how we basically like, the way I work with my head of brand or head of product marketing is basically like, we sit down and it's like, okay, you know, here are the campaigns like, you know, we could potentially do now, which ones actually make sense, Right? And I would say like almost 2 out of 10 ideas or maybe 1 or 10 idea actually makes it through. So that's why the, the guardrails have processified it. Like, they won't even come to me until they know that, okay, this is the answer that, you know, for like these interruptions. But to your question about how do you like, find. I think your initial question was like, how do you find these pattern interruptions that will actually change that outcome that we were talking about, right?
- [26:56]
B
Yes.
- [26:57]
A
So I think there, it's more like you kind of know what your portfolio is, your marketing portfolio, and what channels are going to drive results for you. So in our case, I know, for example, that there's an events playbook, there's an influencer playbook, there's an ads playbook, there's an SEO playbook. Like, I know these things are going to work for us. It's more about within these, what can I do to disrupt the pattern? Right? So in our case, let's say, for example, if we wanted to become, you know, like the first of three, become the first vendor that's discovered.
- [27:28]
B
Right.
- [27:29]
A
We had to come in front of our prospects before anybody else does. So that basically means going after the companies that are not in the market, but actually the other 95% that is just sort of there, right? So there the play is like, okay, let's focus on brands. How do we make the brand work? Right. It's about, okay, finding these unique event opportunities, finding these unique sort of audience segments in particular regions and doing a campaign there, right?
- [27:59]
C
Yeah.
- [27:59]
A
So, like, I'll give you an example again, maybe examples help, but it's like the way that started out was what we realized was that a lot of the US Marketing conferences that used to happen, especially like the niche ones where there were a lot of good ICPs that were coming in, we saw that one of our competitors was talked about quite a lot there while we weren't. And why was that? The reason. The reason was just like the influencers knew a lot more about the other brand and we. They weren't even aware about us. Right. So how do we get into that inner circle was the first business problem to solve. Like, how do we enter that? Right. So the first thing I did was I just started doing podcasts with all of these influencers. Like it was, I started a series called GTM on the Go. And it was like a five minute, five question series. And I just did that. And I'm like, I'm going to try to take like a piece of content and just get them to share it with their audience. Right, so. And also build a relationship. Right. So I did about 12, 15 episodes and that basically was like, okay, this was an in. Okay, these are the people that I want to target and they now know about storyline. Right. And then it was like, okay, the next thing is how do we do a campaign with them? How do we get in their network? It was step by step. And the metric that we were sort of optimizing for was like, how many brand searches are we growing? So brand searches, if I could quantify, it's basically how many people searching for storylane that are coming in in Google search console. So if you go in there and you look for brand search, you can actually see how many people are coming in there. So that was the metric that we were optimizing for. And I can give you some context there again, because you want numbers, right? We had 1500 people searching for Storylane every month. About seven quarters back today, we are at about 12,000 people consistently every month searching for Storylane.
- [29:49]
B
Oh, nice. That's a nice bump.
- [29:50]
A
Yeah. So. And once you have that sort of traffic, right, then you have a very unfair advantage. Right. Like there's people searching specifically for you. Channel agnostic. And that's why it was like the focus was there.
- [30:02]
C
So you mentioned that your products, you know, you work a lot with inbound marketing. People can discover the products online. They can see your solution. You mentioned the tutorial. So what is your main go to market motions? Is it product led or sales led or what does that look like for you guys?
- [30:20]
A
It's mostly sales.
- [30:21]
C
Okay.
- [30:21]
A
Yeah.
- [30:22]
C
So even if you get the leads inbound, then, I mean it's a sales process, actually land the deal.
- [30:30]
A
Correct. Because even if we PLG sign ups, the motion there is that. Okay, the PLG signup is good, but we want to see how we can expand that account.
- [30:38]
C
So when you come to that phase, when you actually have the sales representative interacting with the customers to land the deal, do you see that there is ways that you can stand out in that phase as well? I mean, they might be talking to your competitors and they are also sort of in the same phase. So any thoughts about that?
- [30:58]
B
And I'll give You a background story here, Madhav. Like, Thomas and I, when we used to have real jobs, last time we worked together, we represented a very successful and these days also at that time, a big product information management system. And I was running revenue there on sales. And I could sit in sometimes with my reps and listen to their session, even the best reps. And in my mind, I'd be like, great. Like, he or she, they got the story down. But deep inside I knew, like, if we remove our logo from the deck here and some of our branding colors and so on, this could be any one of our competitors saying exactly the same thing. We just sound like everybody else. And then we went through a big exercise with a very expensive American consultants to rebrand and reposition, to try to stand out. But we had this issue of, like, once we get in there, I was like, gosh, we did all this hard work, but we sound like everybody else in the sessions. Like, it's difficult to understand where we're different. The only advantage we had is, like, we came in first, which was, you know, a little bit of our saving grace.
- [32:04]
C
Yeah. And a big customer and partner community that I also think made a difference.
- [32:08]
A
Yeah. So what I would say there is this. It's a very, very, I guess, like this many answers to it. Like, what happens there where marketing has full control, I would say, in that entire conversation. So there's a product job also that needs to happen. In the sense, like, are we innovating? In the sense, like, do we have products that none of our competitors have? The other thing is like, are we leading the category? Not just in terms of like, whatever G2 motions or anything, but more like, do we have like, are we leading for like, okay, we built this and then we have proof that the competitors followed. Right. So that's a whole product led motion. And that's what another script that sales could potentially follow. Right. But what we do to enable sales is like, a couple of things. One is obviously there's a lot of product marketing work that happens and creating, giving them whatever enablement assets they need. But within those, the interruptions, I'll tell you, is like case studies, for example. Right. Like, everybody knows that the case studies are always biased. There's always good things about the product. Right. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, we went. We had our ROI 1,500% increase because of this product. And it's all good, good. Right. But I think buyers want a lot more real ones, and they also want something that's a little bit More contextually relevant. Because what case studies do is they talk about the outcome. Yeah, right. That because of this product we got this outcome. But most people don't know what's the stage of the company, what's the behind the scenes that happened. Company growing 3x. If it was a 10 people company versus 1000 people company, it's very different. So that context matters. So we actually changed our case studies to be more like the behind the scenes process. Tell me about when you purchase storylane to you sort of getting the outcome. And we basically explained that as a story and we packaged it like a recipe. So like the series was called Demo Kitchen and then we basically packaged it as a recipe and that became an asset that, you know, all of these salespeople could follow. Right. The other thing for example that we did is if you look at our website, we've dis like if you look this from like two years ago a, you need to look like a sort of, I would say company that's bigger than you actually are. Because that was another issue that we had. Like you're looking smaller than we actually were. Right. So whether that's in terms of the visual brand polish but also like surfacing the right sort of accounts and the language. Right. So right now if you look at our website, it's very, I would say mid market enterprise Y language. The logo is showing up the way the colors are chosen. It's not super bright but it's kind of there. Right. So again we're like kind of positioning towards that. Right. The other thing also is like when we have like another thing for example is that the feedback we got from sales was that the first call is just 30 minutes. Right. And if we spend the first 30 minutes demoing the platform to them, right. Then we don't have time to discuss about the next steps and things like that. And we want to move the deal forward. So what can we do about it? So another thing that we did was we started sort of another sort of there was like a email sort of campaign that happened before the call which is like we're going to send you all of the demo links and resources and everything, right? Playbooks and how you can use it. So they actually come in and be like, okay, we're self educated to some extent now let's talk about the real things, right? So it's just small, small things there that we're helping in, like closing there. But like my main job is like how do we just get quality accounts, these people and then they just have to Close those deals.
- [35:43]
B
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I want to come back to, I think what you alluded to earlier and you also mentioned it, that this pattern interruption, it needs to be some kind of a portfolio and you need to build a muscle where it's a repeatable exercise and not just, you know, a one off or let's do a brainstorm session and then we do it. Like, you know, if I'm listening to this, if I'm a cmo, like what does that mean that I need to build a portfolio? And how do I build this repeatable muscle? What's your recommendation here?
- [36:17]
A
Yeah, so I think the reason why I keep saying you need a portfolio is because there's a lot of companies or let's, let's maybe equate it to even just like the music business, right? Like why is for example Mike Posner a one hit wonder with like that I took a pill and Ibiza,
- [36:37]
B
like
- [36:37]
A
a Taylor Swift or a Coldplay, right. You know, like, which have like just, you know, they could create a greatest hits album, right? It's because it's like it was sort of part of the system, right? And that's what a lot of B2B companies also do is like they look for that one big viral idea and then they'll just basically ride on that wave forever, right? Like they'll talk about, oh, we did this and that's the only thing that they did. We needed to make it sort of built into the system, right? Like not just like in the way, like the, like actually build like sort of things. So I'll tell you a couple of things we do. One is every quarter we are a remote team. My entire marketing team is fully remote. But every quarter I bring them in sort of like a boardroom. And then we call that those days the lock in, which is basically like three days. We'll have everybody in the room, no agenda. It's literally looking at everybody's work and all of us sort of trying to identify patterns and then us collectively figuring out how to disrupt it. So like by the end of every quarter we'll have this lock in. And then through that the new campaign ideas will come. So there's never a single quarter in the entire year where we're not testing out pattern interrupt ideas. That's, you know, like for example, right now, one thing that like there's multiple interrupts that are going on. But like one is for example the CMO dinners that usually happen. There's just so many that are happening. It's almost become a pattern at this point. And so we've been trying to figure out how we disrupt the format, right? Like how they happen, how the conversations happen, the format of it. One example is that why do it in a restaurant setting, but why not book a VIP box at a Clippers game or something and then try to initiate conversations from there? It's basically making that a habit, like interruption. But also looking at the pattern interrupts in a portfolio style, you could call it top of the middle, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. You could call it width or depth, you can call it whatever you want. But you need to understand what are the interrupts that are more for wider awareness and what are the interrupts that are more for, like depth, you know, actually going and like driving that awareness for customers. So we've got campaigns that like, for example, you might have a campaign, this is one that we did in September where we basically created these flyers, which is like, Rome wasn't built in a day, but you know, your demos can be. And then it had like this whole sort of thing and then we had like somebody dress up as Julius Caesar and go and like, you know, distribute it at inbound and all of that. Right. That's more width as a portfolio. Right. But then the depth ones are, for example, the demo Dundees event I give you an example about. Or for example, we have this series called Finer Demos Club Webinar, which is taken from a reference of the Office, which is like Finer Things Club or something like that. So it's basically based on that customers want to learn from customers. So how about we create like a series which is off the record, so there's no recording available. It's just you one time you show up and we'll have them show like full transfer and metrics, but you won't get any recording. You can't save anything. Right. So we've been doing those sessions and trying to figure out how more customers hear about more use cases. These are all what I would say fit into the depth portfolio. Right. And that's why we. And I would say the split between the width and depth depends a lot on what the company's goals and things are. Like, for example, early on, I think the bigger bit was how do we drive wide awareness because we wanted to enter into that segment. Now, for example, our brand awareness is number one in the entire demo automation category. So now it's more about, okay, how do we keep a driving, more expansion from existing customers. There's a lot of depth campaigns going on and also B, if, let's say other companies that are also coming up with products that are competing with ours, how do we continue either refining the messaging or the way we present education about our products in like these depth campaigns? So that's how I sort of think about the portfolio for it.
- [40:32]
B
So, marab, I also wanted to ask you a little bit about how to get started with this process. So again, let's come back to. There's a bunch of CMOs listening to this. Marketing leaders, probably also CEOs and sales leaders, like, okay, we also want to stand out. We also want to interrupt patterns, like, where do I start? How does an exercise like this start? And I also wanted to ask you a little bit from your perspective and also what's your recommendation? Is there a person, should there be a person that leads the pattern interruption initiative or like, where does this responsibility actually live? Because sometimes we need. We see initiatives that if there's not a clear owner, it doesn't get done as nice. If they say, like, okay, we share responsibility, all of us, it doesn't get done as well as if you say, we all have a carry into this. But it's Anna that drives it. So who is Anna in your case?
- [41:28]
A
I think it's the leadership. So in our case it's me and my CEO in the sense, like the CEO is pushing for pattern interruptions and sort of their version of pattern interruption is like, how do we innovate? How do we do things differently in the product side? In my case, it's more around demand gen and the whole GTM motion. So it's got to be driven through the leadership, you know, and downwards. And then like, I would say, like, as you sort of build it like, you know, as a muscle in the team, you know, it becomes like everyday language, right? Like it's, it's like, oh, we don't do things this way. You know, we always do it differently. So even if you go to any sort of basecamp employee, right. It's now probably built into their muscle, right? Like, that's what I would say. So that's one like, definitely leadership driven. But the. Yeah. So how do you get started with the pattern interruption? Right. I think it's more. So first is, I think you just need to become really good at identifying the patterns. Right? Like every company today has a bunch of patterns they're following that can or potentially be broken. So it's more like, I would say auditing what you're currently doing and basically sort of looking at like, okay, you know, if it's doing well, fine, that's great. If it's not doing well, like, you know, what can you do differently about it? Like, there's a few examples that I can share. Like one is, I'll just take the simple example, is most companies have the exact same sort of these four or five things, right? They'll be running a monthly webinar series, they'll have an email newsletter. They'll have sort of like case studies and you know, like the way they're usually done, they'll have a product comparison page that'll be like, I don't know, we are the perennial champions and the other is like the full loser. You know, green, red crosses, all of that, right? These are all things that are right there right now. It's more about, okay, everybody follows this and I think this is something to think about, right? Like most of these companies that, that are running these, right? I can bet you on it that the webinars don't have a lot of people coming in. So It'll be like 20, 30, 40 people. Unless they're doing something very different, right? Or the newsletter is hardly being read, or it's just being forcefully pushed out and they just have a high unsubscribe rate, all of that, right? So you look at those things and you try to do, okay, what can I do differently? Like a. It's like the same tactic in a different way. Or it is like, do I just drop this tactic altogether, right? Like some, like another example, what I see is that there's companies that start, let's say, podcasts or some sort of episodic series, right? And they just continue on it for years because, hey, you know, we have this reputation. I need to push out a new podcast episode every week. But why? You can always have seasons of things. So that's how. Like for example, when we did podcast, it's more like, let's do a 12 episode series. That way once there's an end date to it, it doesn't become cyclic. We put our best effort into each episode and then by the end of 12, we end it, right? And then if, let's say if there's people that are asking for it, you know, we can always bring it back. But it doesn't have to be cyclical in nature, right? So it's identifying. We're running podcasts, why are we running it? Is it even actually getting any views or is it getting enough views? If not, just end it like, okay, this is the end of season one. End of story, you'll get to season two. It's identifying these certain things. And I'll tell you, there are places where you can find these pattern interruption ideas. So one that I found very interesting, I was actually chatting with somebody a few months ago. They've actually built an agency around it surprisingly is that they look at how other companies in different categories are actually tackling the same problem. So an example is that how are the brand visuals used in a B2C company? So for example, if you're B2B the best way is like, okay, look at like, I don't know, maybe a very funky sort of, you know, like you've got those Tony's chocolates at, in Amsterdam, right? So look at that. If you look at the sort of shops, if you have been on those, right? Like they're like these really disruptive visual design, right? So and then can you take something from that into your own B2B category, right? Then it's sort of like a disruption idea, right? But that's more on the visual language. There's also things that like for example, what's working really well in another category might not actually have not even been tried in your category. So for example, like this is what happened with the influencer program, right? That B2C has a very, very mature influencer program, B2B doesn't, right? But what if you did that same thing in B2B and then you'll suddenly have like a lot of good results going on because essentially they work. So that's how you can find ideas. That's one way. The other way is like look at your own thing. So I'll give you another example. Right now we have a third product that's coming in. It's an AI native product, right? Now if you look at the entire AI suite of products, they all use some sort of a personality name. There's a Mindy, there's Ollie, there's a, I don't know, just every random person out there, right? But the issue is that everybody's doing that. At some point we're going to have personalities. But they're not self explanatory, right? Like okay, you have a Mindy, but what the hell is Mindy? Or you have an underlord. But what is underlord? You know, that's descripts thing, right? So why not disrupt that and maybe make a sort of more sort of non personality sort of a name and then you know like make it a little bit more self explanatory, right? So that's why we have a product called Lilly. We actually now rebranded to RepX because we wanted to sort of show that it has rep capabilities and all that. Right. So it's just looking at your portfolio, you just got to build that muscle of identifying patterns and then finding creative disruptions from it. And they come from all places and all walks of life.
- [47:30]
C
Interesting. I think both me and Daniel, we are thinking about how can we disrupt what we are doing and looking at that. So probably we will get some good ideas from this. We have to just lock ourselves up for a few days somewhere. Let's see when we find the time for that. But great. This has been great. Madhav, thank you for sharing. I mean if we're looking now, you have a great growth, you have a lot of things going on. But what is the future for your company? You mentioned a new product. Is that the main things or is there something else that you know that will happen the next 12 to 18 months?
- [48:06]
A
So there's, I think there's lots of things but I'll tell you an interesting one is that we are seeing a huge growth in expansions. Yeah. So like that was one of our fastest growing verticals as well. So like how do we. Because we have a lot of big accounts. Think of Alibaba, Amazon, Microsoft, all of these, these are like huge upsell accounts. So how do you upsell? Right. You either you know, upsell through different teams or you know, sell multiple products or different geographical regions in that, you know, like that's kind of. Or like sell AI usage credits, you know, based on product. There's multiple ways to expand. But that is one of our fastest growing things. So what we're looking at is how do we drive more relationship building with our existing customers and do a very heavy bit of a customer marketing playbook. That's kind of like a big focus area from marketing at this point.
- [48:53]
C
And of course your book. So when it, when will it be out there?
- [48:57]
A
So the draft is already, it's in production. So it's probably a month, month and a half from now. The COVID design is currently being created. So yeah, it's probably Febnd is what we're going to go for. Just need to figure out like how to make distribution happen. Like I don't even know how to get something on an Amazon bookstore. So all of those things.
- [49:17]
C
No. And I think you should also bring some books to the Sassyest conference in May where you also will be on stage. Right?
- [49:25]
A
Yeah.
- [49:25]
C
So that would be a great opportunity to get a hold of the book but also to talk to Marhav. And we are really looking forward to have you. If you get to have one more person on your team, what kind of person would you like to add to your roster?
- [49:41]
A
I was thinking about this yesterday. It's a very timely question.
- [49:44]
B
Yeah.
- [49:44]
A
An AI content creator.
- [49:46]
C
All right.
- [49:46]
A
I want somebody to be able to use these descript and all of these. There's like a bunch of these AI tools and, like, people are creating these really creative, fancy films for, like, these AI tools. I want somebody who can do that and bring some sort of interesting ideas to life to stand out for us.
- [50:04]
C
And how can you get in contact with you?
- [50:07]
A
Oh, man. Like, I mean, if you have an amazing sort of any sort of B2B portfolio which is built through AI, just share it with me on LinkedIn. Very active there.
- [50:18]
B
Okay, fantastic. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time and we look forward to seeing you again here in a few months Already, like, you know, time flies here when you'll visit us in Malmo. Super excited about that.
- [50:30]
A
Yeah, I'm super excited. Well, I hope you guys have a good one. Thank you so much for inviting Thomas. I wish you all the best with your family and hope becomes better.
- [50:39]
C
Yes. Thank you.
- [50:40]
B
Thank you. Take care now.
- [50:41]
A
Take care. See ya.
- [50:46]
B
All right, Thomas, I know you're passionate about marketing. We all are. But I know it's close to your heart, and I want to give you credit for all the good things that we do here. On the marketing side, if you think, think we have something fun stuff. If you like the name Sassiest. Oh, I gosh, here's a personal rant. Like, we have a lot of people that say Sassiest is such a cool name. And I hate to admit it, it was Thomas idea. And I also hate to admit it that maybe I was a little bit iffy in the beginning. He had to convince me a little bit. But a lot of the cool stuff, the pinkness, the name, some of the fun stuff, like, Thomas, you're the brain here. So listening to a fellow marketeer here, what did you learn today?
- [51:26]
C
I learned that, you know, you can't just step back and do what you always done. I think that you always have to be top of your toes and looking at what happens in the market and, yeah, see what you can do differently. And I mean, they are doing this on a quarterly basis. They are setting a strategy, they are executing on it. Not everything flies, but also suddenly some things takes off and then you double down on that. I think it was really inspiring to hear what they did, sort of replacing the regular blog post with these demo centered posts. And not just that they did a few of them, that they actually set up a structure so they can do masses of this hundreds a week. And I think that was quite inspiring. And I don't know exactly what that would, you know.
- [52:21]
B
Yeah.
- [52:21]
C
How you could replicate that in our world. But I think that was a really smart move of them that also showcased their product, not just, you know, driving traffic to your website, but also showcasing your product for all potential prospects.
- [52:36]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, what had me thinking here and I think we've all been inspired. Slash, maybe we've all at some point fallen into that trap. Like if you come to log into LinkedIn or if you come to a sassiest event even like we put people up there to tell you like, hey, here's how we did XYZ to take us from A to B. So it's about like listening to somebody that had success, people opening up LinkedIn and you get inspired by somebody that did 1, 2, 3 and they achieved these results. And then if we all do it again, it becomes this sameness exercise. And I know that there's a lot of leaders and marketers out there. Like the CEO comes and say, look at these guys, they did this, we should do something similar. So listening to Marhav here again made me think like if you're going to be different, if you're going to have the guts and the, or going to build the muscle to really be disruptive, it needs to be a management process and project. Like you need to have that openness from the top that, okay, we're going to do some things that are very, very different. Because also what you alluded to here, Thomas, in the beginning of the episode, there's going to be some pattern interruptions that just don't work out and then there needs to be acceptance for that in the organization that we are going to be different. And on the chase of being different here. There's going to be some things that fail and that's okay for sure. But to support this overarching goal, we're going to have to have this management buy in. And it can't be like he said also like, you know, it's not just a brainstorm session, a one off. It's something that you built into DNA. So I think that's, that's the important that it's, it's, it happens repetitive. The entire organization is aligned on it that we're going to build things differently here. And I thought that was refreshing, again, to be reminded of. Yeah.
- [54:34]
C
And I think having heard Madhava here, I encourage you to be attentive of what you see on LinkedIn and other places, see what they do and think about how did they come to do this. And also take the opportunity to come to Sassy Est in May in Malmo, meet Marhav and, you know, try to get hold of his book and everything. But I mean, keep a lookout and maybe you can sort of reverse engineer how they think.
- [55:04]
B
I mean, if anything, I think what speaks for their story is like there are 50 people bootstrapped and they're gonna break 20 million euros in AR this year. I mean, it's efficient. What they're doing works.
- [55:18]
C
Yeah.
- [55:19]
B
So, like, being different and standing out has always worked and will always work. You just need to find out what that means to you in your world, how you get there for sure.
- [55:29]
C
And with that, thank you for listening to this episode. We are looking to, looking forward to meet a lot of you during the year at the conferences, at the meetups, at the network, group sessions. And yeah, if you want to reach us, you can reach out on LinkedIn. You can email to danielassius.com or thomas cecius.com with a th and well, see you around.
- [55:55]
B
Take care. And stay.