94 - How modern SaaS teams build scalable growth systems - With Alex Laventer

Kalungi: Thank you for uh, for joining us again for another B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks episode. And you're uh, joining us for a first, um, after Mike Northfield and I launched this podcast many years ago and Brian Grav and I continued that after Mike pursued some new adventures, we actually never had guests on this podcast. And uh, today we're going to change that. We are going to invite some of the people in our network, people that work for some of the clients of Colungi, some thought leaders in the B2B SaaS industry that we learned from, to share some of their thoughts here with us. And today we start that with Alex Lavender. Alex, you uh, and I have met each other I think it was 2004, 2005, around those times after I had left Microsoft and uh, joined a very early stage startup to run their, basically their global team. The team in Russia had built a great product and then uh, I was asked to go commercialize that. The company was called Akumatica, a cloud erp company. And Alex was one of my first hires. He was uh, still, I think. Were you still in college? I think you were interning with us initially. And then Alex actually became our first real growth hacker who helped us do a lot of things that also ended up in the things I learned and that we ended up doing with Kalungi for many of our clients. Alex, do you want to give a quick intro your own background, your journey so far?

Alex Laventer: I actually think the story of us meeting is super funny. So um, I was a sophomore in college and couldn't find a job, um, and sort of just went through Craigslist and kind of went down the list of uh, jobs in D.C. um, and somehow landed as a marketing intern as um, the digital marketing manager on Stein's team. Um, so that really kick started my career into tech, um, entirely off Craigslist. Um, so more recently I spent kind of the bulk of my career working entirely at B2B SaaS companies, um, primarily dev tools, startups selling to developers. Um, last six years I've spent my time leading growth at Datastax, which is a cloud database company. I joined right before they launched their cloud products. So really in the early days helped figure out how do you drive, you know, signups, how do you instrument the product to understand usage, how do you send emails? So I think just a really interesting experience from literally nothing to successful thousands of clients, tens of millions of dollars in ARR. So super fun experience. Um, Datatext was recently acquired by IBM at IBM I'm leading go to market for their AI agent product called Langflow. Um, again another popular um, open source tool, 140k starts on GitHub. Um, so really just worked for these developer tools, companies figuring out how to commercialize. Um, yeah, so that's kind of what I'm up to now.

Kalungi: They couldn't have found a better person to lead that. Alex, for me you actually educated me on, educated me a little bit on this term um, when we caught uh up a couple of months ago for you, for me you are. But now I think a lot of people call go to market engineer. You're a great example of that for me. Although now it also gets mixed a little bit with SDR work and some of the early stage company selling motion. But I always called what you did growth hacking as in kind of where marketing and technology intersect, right. And doing things that are relatively untested, learning fast, a B testing, hacking, um, your way through multiple channels, multiple ideas, uh, to drive growth. Um, and that gets like today's episode's all about growth, right? How do you define growth, Alex?

Alex Laventer: Yeah, for sure. So as I kind of think of growth in two buckets, um, the first bucket is growth marketing, right? So this is primarily a role that sits in the marketing org. The outcome that this role drives is I think mostly like a product sign up or registration. So these are things like your SEO program, your paid ad program, right? This person figures out how do we kind of educate the world on your product with the goal of getting people to sign up. Um and the second bucket is product growth. Um, and this is primarily once folks have signed up for your product. How ah, do you drive usage? Um, you know sign ups do nothing if they're not actually using the product, right? So they're focused on activation, they're focused on usage, they're focused on uh, monetization. Um, and I think at smaller ah, startups this is one role right where you have a growth person who's focused on both driving signups and making them productive with your product. I um, think at larger companies this is kind of broken out right? Where you have your um, growth marketing folks reporting into marketing and you have your product growth folks reporting into the product team. I'm curious, is that how you think about things like what are you sort of seeing with how your clients are structured?

Kalungi: It's a great question. I think growth has been also evolving as uh, it was a little bit grow at any cost and it was all top line. Right. And this was in the 90s, 2000. At some point it became I Think a mantra for VCs to use the term. That also led me to write T2D2, right. Tripling your ARR two years in a row and doubling it three more years in a row. Which was a little bit under the, under the sort of philosophy of growing at all cost, right. It didn't matter really if those growth, those unit economics were very sustainable or profitable. But that has changed, Alex. I think growth cannot be achieved at all cost anymore. It has to be sustainable growth. It has to be growth in what many clients or companies call their ideal customer profile. Uh, growing in a way that you become a category leader, that you become a change agent if you're standing, if you're doing something really new, right. You're trying to be a thought leader. So I think also the metrics that you mentioned are, it's a nice mix of how you would measure those. But growth of course is also something that has to happen at a certain speed for it to matter, right? Growing slowly versus growing fast. And I think that hasn't changed. I think the appetite for uh, the markets, the people who work in relatively smaller software companies. But then also when you've had a lot of experience also getting through the scale up phase and now with IBM at a very large organization. The reason that you and I are doing work that is usually defined as growth is because that still matters everywhere, right? There's really with the current state of technology and innovation and now AI, if you don't grow, you're basically shrinking, right? You're basically falling behind. Can you talk a little bit? I remember when we worked early both at Akumatic and then later at mightycall where you led the marketing function, that you were one of the first people who were very passionate to also be a coder, right? I think you were very strong uh, on the marketing side where of course art meets science, writing content and Systems and HubSpot. I think you were one of the first people who used HubSpot. But where did you feel, hey, I have to learn to code and be able to do that too. And why.

Alex Laventer: Yeah, for sure. So I think um, if you think about marketing today, um, you're just using a ton of tools, right? You have your CRM, um, Salesforce, you have your marketing automation system, something like HubSpot or Marketo. You have your analytics tools both on the marketing site and the product side and then you have your marketing website, right? Which is entirely new beast. Um, a lot of in the early days was how you connect all these tools together and you do that Entirely with code, right? So I initially got into coding, um, just to solve problems, right? How do you connect HubSpot with your marketing site? How do you get all your product usage data into HubSpot? Um, so that was kind of initially what got me hooked on kind of coding, right? To solve kind of these integration problems. Um, as I got deeper into the product growth world. It's also very technical, right? You want to instrument your product with something like segment that's entirely writing JavaScript code in your front end. Um, you want to start running AB tests, right? First you have to implement the AB test, which is code. Then you have to figure out the product feature you're actually testing, which is also code. Um, so really I got into coding just to sort of solve these sort of problems on both kind of growth marketing and the product growth side. Um, what's interesting with AI, right, specifically like quad desktop and Opus, um, this almost becomes less necessary, right? Because all of the kind of problems I talked about, um, AI is kind of perfectly, um, positioned to solve these problems. Um, so initially I sort of got into coding for those reasons. I think AI can sort of solve a lot of those, um, today.

Kalungi: Yeah, that's a really good point. Uh, I wonder how that today aligns with the other foundation of marketing to make sure you're targeting the right audience, right? Because a lot of the things you're talking about is the execution, uh, and optimizing that, right? Optimizing conversion optimization. That's optimization twice there. Optimizing conversions, optimizing speed of your funnel, optimizing deal value, increasing that ARPU expansion, getting more channels to work well. So you get MQLs from a diverse set of sources. So all those things are about execution, execution, execution. I have, but I have a rule in sort of when we at Columbia, when we do marketing, uh, execution for our clients, that it starts with the foundation and call that strategy, if you will, before you jump into tactics. Meaning that execution without the right offer is the best way to burn through all your marketing budget, right? You can do all the testing you want, but if the what you have to offer is just not going to, not resonating with your market that you're focused on, it's not going to go anywhere, right? That's why product market fit is such an important milestone before you start really doubling down on execution. And then even if you have a great offer but you're in the wrong market, that's a great way to become irrelevant, right? So let's talk a little bit how you're sort of your approach to growth and the combination of technology and coding, etc. And content, all those things together, how that applies to that more strategic side of marketing. When you think of picking the right audience and knowing that you're attracting the right people into your pipeline, right things like ideal customer profile, how do you, how do you look at that? Um, Alex, also, as you've got multiple types of companies.

Alex Laventer: Right, Yeah, I agree. So I think those pieces can absolutely not be automated or I think it's even hard to optimize that sort of developing that strategy with AI. Um, I've always found that the best way to sort of figure out who your audience is is just kind of talking to as many users and customers as possible. Um, so in the early days of building the Dataset Azure business, um, we just spent a ton of time understanding, like talking to our users, understanding, um, what are they building, what's their profile? Um, you know, I think a lot of people get stuck with like, oh, how do I, how do I talk to a ton of users and customers? Like, it's hard to reach out to them. Um, I think it's really important. You just kind of put in the work to talk to them. We have lots of success with gift card programs to get people to talk to us. Um, but really was critical for figuring out who our audience is. Um, was just kind of talking to as many folks as possible, interviewing them, understanding common use cases, um, which the sort of work that cannot really be automated or you can use AI to develop.

Kalungi: Hey, it's time. I just wanted to pop in for a second and let you know about something we've been running. If growth has started to feel a bit inconsistent and it's hard to know where to focus this next, we're doing something called the T2D3 Growth Workshop. It's a 45 minute working session where we look at your go to market approach and build a custom plan for driving pipeline and growth. You can scan the QR code on the screen or head to colungi.comworkshop to apply. All right, let's get back to the episode. I'm going to tell everybody a secret. Alex. Uh, yeah, this is the first, uh, dear audience, Kalungi been around since 2019 in its current form, but there was another Colungi before that, called it Colungi 1.0. And it's when Alex and I said, hey, after we had worked together in a couple of startups, we said, hey, let's build something that is actually going to be really Meaningful for what we called like organic channel optimization. When you would use tools like SEMrush or M Mos Moz or uh, tools. Ah, like that ahrefs. It was relatively easy to get like things like click data and call it the lagging metrics of organic search marketing. Right. But what Alex and I thought was interesting, uh, to add to that is is there a correlation between how long you've been in market? For example, when did you start publishing content under your domain URL? What's the quality of that? How much time did you spend building that content? And can you actually correlate that to all the things that you can find in the Moz data in the Google Analytics data? Right. The fact that content starts to rank or not. So we actually. Well, we actually. You, Alex, built a tool that allowed a marketing manager to actually correlate some of these columns software signals like, when did I first publish. Start publishing content? Right. How did I kind of warmed up my, my domain authority early stage when I had none. Right. I just registered the DNS, uh, domain name and then correlate that to all this other data. You want to quickly talk a little bit what you were coding there, Alex, and how that kind of helped you form your thoughts on how to do growth hacking later?

Alex Laventer: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think, um, this again was like sort of the reason I got into, I focused on becoming more technical. Um, yeah, like 10 years ago, I actually still think today it's very difficult to connect all the data, um, from a bunch of different tools to understand how your content is really doing. Um, so this was kind of one of the early technical challenges like we were passionate about. Um, can you sort of pull all this data from a bunch of different sources, um, to really understand like, um, what is driving content performance? Um, I think it's interesting like how much kind of content generation and content performance has changed. Um, I guess it's interesting just how much kind of LLMs have sort of just like changed the game. Right. And um, I think there's a lot of kind of folks in the marketing, in the market overdoing it with lm, um, content creation. Um, how do you think about that piece? Um, do you, what are your, what are your kind of clients think?

Kalungi: Yeah, I always go back to the, the first rule of um, marketing, not just M. Marketing in general. Be relevant. Right. Add value. Um, whether I write for an LLM or write for an SEO algorithm or I write for a paid search ad. If you answer the question, is this relevant for the people that I'M trying to be relevant for you have a high likelihood to win. You just have to be extremely honest with yourself when you answer that question. So when you, for example, you have an idea, and I do this almost every day, I try to write down a question that someone asked me, Alex, that I felt I was, I was equipped to give a meaningful answer to.

Alex Laventer: Yeah, yeah.

Kalungi: Um, and then when I give that answer, I try to kind of think about, would other people benefit from this? Right. And then before you start building the content, you want to kind of Google it, or today, you know, put it in an LLM and see if other people already answered the question, maybe had a better answer than you. Right. And then don't bother, you know, don't add noise. But if you feel that the answers that pop up are just not great or they're not specific enough for maybe the context in which you had that, then by all means, go write the content. And I think that always is more important, that discipline, then whether you're using the right keyword or whether the blog is 2,000 words or 200 or 20,000. Right. Or whether it's published in a certain channel or in a certain format. And it doesn't mean you also don't want to add things like the right metadata, et cetera, because you, of course understand that not all this content is initially seen by human eyes. Right. So you have to add the data points that the digital eyes can recognize, metadata added to an image, or all those things that you do need to make sure your content can be discovered, it can be understood. Understood. But not just for the sake of trying to rank. You should just start with, am I doing something that's going to be relevant? Um, which also helps you with your own reputation, which I think today in the age of AI, it's so easy for everybody to be a publisher and to be a writer. That relevance is extremely important. But it also means you can hurt or help your reputation by doing this. Well, Right? Yeah, that's my thought on organic and content, Alex. And it honestly hasn't changed much from when you and I did this.

Alex Laventer: Yeah, I, I, I, I totally agree. I, I think I, I totally agree with your thoughts on not kind of overdoing it for SEO. Right. Start with, like real original thoughts, and that's how kind of the best content is created. And then kind of, once you've done that, make sure you've kind of done all the SEO basics. Um, and I guess I'm curious, like, how are you using LLMs as part of your Writing process. I, I think like a lot of the world is thinking I can just plug my keyword and generate pieces of content and that'll magically drive traffic. Um, I guess, like, what are your thoughts on that approach? And yeah, I think that's terrible. Yeah.

Kalungi: And I think that's not just an LLM approach. I think people used to do something similar when they hired a copywriter on upperwork. Right. And the copywriter on upwork is replaced by an LLM now. Right. But you could do exactly the same thing. Oh, I need to rank for these keywords. I want my clients to find me when they ask, oh, best CRM solution for dental practice management, Whatever. Right? That's your keyword focus. Then the worst thing someone can do is either toss that over to an LLM or toss it over to a, to a copywriter, say, bake some content out of this, because what happens then? And the human way of doing this is exactly the same way as now. The LLMs do it. What happens? The LLM or the human will do nothing else than type in those keywords into a search engine, See whatever pops up, then we rehash that content. Right. Either combine some things, maybe add a little bit here and there, try to make it look different, try to fool the algorithm that it's kind of original. None of that works, right? None of that works in a sustainable way. What does work is asking yourself, okay, if this is the keyword phrase that I want to optimize for, because I do know my audience, the audience that I care about, that I try to serve is searching for that that you say, okay, when I type that in, I see all the content that pops up. What is missing? What is the area where I can actually add, uh, value. And I think the main thing that you need to hold yourself accountable to is to ask yourself what is the unique signal that I bring? And thought leadership, I think, is a word that requires a little bit of maybe. I, uh, have an opinion on that. Let me share my opinion on what thought leadership is. Thought leadership doesn't have to be a super creative, mind blowing new idea. It could be as easy as you actually having an opinion. Right. And actually adding something because you, you, you disagree with something or you think some people are, are using a certain tool the wrong way. Right. And, and having an opinion is plenty good when you want to add value. This is a great example where a blog that I wrote on, uh, on T2D3 or on Columbia, I actually don't know which website it was first about the um, the difference between SDRs and BDRs. Alex and I wrote this 10 years after Salesforce invented what an SDR and a BDR was and how it fits in the sales journey, et cetera. But I kept getting These questions from CEOs, from marketing leaders, from sales leaders. Hey, what should I call? I got an outbound salesperson, I got an inbound one. I got someone who does boat. What do I call them? And the reality is, when I type that into Google, you get all kinds of different answers, right? And there were five other acronyms in addition to SDR and bdr, right? Inside Sales Rep, isr, and many other versions of that. And then I thought, well, if I type this in and it's so confusing for everybody, I can actually add value. And I wrote a blog that basically was nothing else than organizing the content that already existed, but in a meaningful way, in a way that nobody had done before, and basically explained that none of these acronyms were unique or they were, uh, owned by anybody. And it was more about what you think someone would have to do and how you then use whatever acronym that fits best for your audience so they actually understand who they're speaking with. That blog became the highest ranking blog for the Columbia SEO Performance for many years. Easy. And even though there were 20, 30 other articles that were older, that were longer, that were probably better written, because I did the copywriting myself here, I'm not an English native speaker. My writing is not very good. But since it was something that people did actually ask for it, it started ranking really well. And now to come back to your question. How do I use NLMS every day? I have never been more productive when it comes to my content production because I pride myself on trying to come up. And I usually do this in the morning with something interesting that people might be interested to hear more about. And then for me to be able to speak that into my phone or to type it in a relatively unstructured way into. Into a, Into a document and be able to use LLMs to organize my thoughts to then, of course, do the grammar and the spelling correct has allowed me to talk about, to publish things that I think are really meaningful, that people actually ask me questions about without it being delayed by me having to go find a spelling copywriter, uh, or someone who's able to maybe turn it from 2000 into 800 words, because that fits the LinkedIn post type of format, right? And I think that work is totally fine to be done by an LLM. And then you have to decide how Much of the LLM, um, how do you call it, Specific way of doing things. You want to be part of your voice. Right. Some of that is actually good because the LLMs learn from how most people write. But if you don't like the bolding, if you don't like the horizontal lines, if you don't like the type of language, then create your own voice. Right. I usually use Claude because it's a little more flexible where you can create your own voice characteristic. Um, but that's how I use it, Alex.

Alex Laventer: And that is how I, that's the bulk of my kind of LLM M marketing work as well. Um, I think like the other big mistakes that people make with content generation that I think we've always talked about is, um, amplification is critical. Right. Like Stein, I still remember 10 years ago we had this kind of crazy process where like you would have to post on social within, you know, two hours or something. Crazy. Um, where, um, I don't know if that, I don't think that's important. But I think a lot of folks invest all this time in kind of creating the perfect piece of content and don't invest enough time in how do you get it out to the world other than kind of Google Organic. Right. So things like creating a checklist of kind, um, of places you should post. Right. Taking advantage of email newsletters. Um, like I think that's kind of a common mistake where you invest all this time in the content, not enough time in the amplification, and then sort of wait around and kind of unsure, um, of what your content didn't perform.

Kalungi: I love that you brought that up because that goes back to us building 1.0.

Alex Laventer: Sure.

Kalungi: Yeah. One of the things that we did there, we measured the delta between when you publish something and how much amplification you do and whether that actually impacted longer, uh, term performance, the performance of this content, a month later, two months later, etc. And what's really cool, when you use those examples, that it goes back to the two fundamental questions that I think every marketer must constantly ask themselves. Who's it for and what's it for? And if you are publishing content to make sure people will join your live webinar a week later, then amplification is very appropriate because you want relative quick attention. You want to make sure this is seen by people who may not be following you. The organic search algorithms are not going to pump up this content anytime soon. Right. Because most of that algorithmic behavior is based on how many people over time like, like subscribe to your content or share it with others. Right. Or time on page and bounce rates and all that. And you're just not going to get that very quickly. So I think amplification might be help. So there's a framework, I always have frameworks, Right. Alex? There's a framework that uh, I built a while ago called wow how now. And it is kind of to talk about these three types of content that all have a place and some of these should be amplified or does not. So wow content is what I call the evergreen type of thought leadership where you want to be helping people in a way that's going to be relevant next month, next year. It's not going to be aging so quickly. So these are important questions where you feel you have something to say that's wow content. You could argue thought leadership, etc. But I think that word might be a little overused. Could be also just because it's interesting, because you're doing something contrarian, because you're asking yourself questions that other people don't dare to ask. Right. So all that falls in that wow category of content. I don't know if that needs a lot of amplification. That should do. The implication should be done by the content itself. Right. And you're writing this also not to be seen, maybe in the next three days. If it's seen in the next few months, that's totally fine. And you almost want it to be self amplifying because that's the real test whether your, your thought leadership content was actually any good. And then the how content is what I call kind of the evergreen content that's more of an educational factor. Right. And some of that will be uh, time specific. Right. If you're educating people on something that's happening right now, some amplification might be warranted. Right. If you're talking about something that's happening in a certain industry or to a certain product category, then make your how content a little bit more seen by people who you may have to amplify it for. Totally fine. But then the last type, and that's by the most important, probably part of your content stack, your educational content, because it makes you the trusted guide, it allows you to help your audience, uh, along their journey, et cetera. But then the last one, it's the one where I think amplification is most useful, is now content. Right? This is the content that's not evergreen, that's relatively time specific, is reacting to the news, it's reporting on the news, it's Maybe sharing things that are only relevant for the next three weeks. For example, announcing a webinar and yeah, amplify that by um, all means. Right. And be ready to pay for a little bit of extra attention. Ah, if that's worth it. But and again, only if that means that's what you're trying to achieve with your audience. That gets me. So your amplification gets me to something else. I wanted to ask you, um, Alex, how you think about paid channels? Right. When we are in marketing, we're basically doing three things. Sorry, two things. Fundamentally, we try to change people's behavior and we try to change what people believe. Right. And sometimes we're willing to pay for that. Right. To pay for the eyeballs, to pay for the attention, to pay for someone to show up, up. How are you thinking about paid channels these days? And now also with ChPT or OpenAI starting to get into the ad business.

Alex Laventer: Right.

Kalungi: Um, how are you thinking about paid channels? When to use them, how to be how, how to use it for your specific icp, but maybe also to do other things.

Alex Laventer: Yeah. So, um, paid I, I, I think is still an important marketing channel that modern, um, connect a B2B SaaS, ah, marketing team should be taking advantage of. Um, I think the big pieces for the most important pieces for paid in my mind are one, you need to make sure you have good instrumentation. Right. All of these paid platforms have some sort of tracking mechanism. Um, you absolutely need to make sure all of the tracking is set up before you um, scale paid. Right. So an example is if you're kind of um, a uh, product startup, right. You need to understand, um, how much traffic are you driving from paid ads? How many signups is that actually driving? Um, so tracking absolutely need to make sure that's set up correctly. I wouldn't run any paid without setting that up. And I think that's like a common gotcha where you like keep investing more and more in paid and like the tracking doesn't work at all. Um, the second piece I think is super critical is the offer. Um, right. You need to be doing kind of constant experimentation with like what is the actual landing page and offer you, you're driving people to, from the paid ads. Um, I think in terms of offers that are most successful, um, I've always had the most success with like an online training webinar type of offer. Right. Like Facebook ads to your correct audience, driving folks to a webinar. Um, and then the other offer I've had great success with is just kind of a Product registration. Um, again, I'm more focused on kind of these developer tool products. Right. Where maybe an ebook is less interesting. Um, but I think like, like make sure you're tracking a setup. Make sure you're constantly experimenting with the offer. Once you've sort of figured the offers that perform well just kind of constantly optimize.

Kalungi: Hey, it's time. Quick note. Before we keep going, I just wanted to mention something we've been working on and are offering for founders who are thinking seriously about growth and pipeline this year. It's called the T2D3 Growth Workshop. It's a focused 45 minute session where we review your go to market m market approach and build a custom go to market plan so you're clear on what to prioritize next. If that sounds useful, you can scan the QR code on the screen or head to klunki.comworkshop and apply. All right, let's get back into it. Got it. When you um, think about the value of paid from an ROI perspective, how do you mix getting people into the top of the funnel versus using paid to nudge people along? Using paid to establish yourself in maybe a new channel or a new category. So you get some traction using it also to test certain things. Right. Because you. And then you use that data maybe to not continue to use paid, but to optimize your. Where do you kind of like to use dollars to solve a problem?

Alex Laventer: Yeah, I think I'm um, the two kind of buckets I've always had the most success with for paid. And it's super important that you sort of decide this upfront is awareness campaigns. Right. Where maybe you care less about a product sign up. Right. You're just trying to drive views to a blog post. Right. So, so using paid to drive kind of broad mass awareness has always been important. And I think you, and I'm curious how you think about this, Stein. Like, I think you always should kind of dedicate like a percentage of your marketing budget to just these awareness activities. Um, and the second bucket is more just kind of like direct demand gen.

Kalungi: Right.

Alex Laventer: So this is like real leads. Um, so I, I've had the most success of focusing on awareness and then kind of driving leads. Um, I've used paid less of kind of pushing people further down the funnel. Um, for that sort of activities I'd focus more on kind of things, um, like email and other channels.

Kalungi: Yeah, I had the uh, the. I was blessed with working at Microsoft when some of the original leaders, like Bill Gates himself, but also Chris Capsella, the cmo, there were great teachers, right. And there are a lot of things to say that I took with my foundational marketing, um, education. And one of the famous sayings by Bill was if you have a great product, you don't need marketing and sales. Right. And of course that's come full circle with the product led growth, um, momentum movement of the last 10 years. What it really comes down to is how much does the marketing sale get done by the value proposition, by the offer. Right. Versus how much do you have to educate the market. Right. And whether you call that awareness or conversion or consideration and then conversion is really nothing else than where you happen to meet people in the funnel. Right. There's always, there's always going to be people who are not um, aware. But most, if you actually have done a good job picking the right market, a market where there's a lot of potential fit for your product, it means that a lot of these people have the actual need already. You don't need to tell them about the problem, they're experiencing that problem already. So what you're really trying to do is make sure they know where to go next. Right. On the journey that they've already started. Right?

Alex Laventer: For sure.

Kalungi: So uh, when you think of that especially kind of product led growth where there's basically no need for, not even just not paid marketing, no marketing at all, right? Yeah. Um, all the way to, to, to paying really expensive salespeople who come with a network, who come with a Rolodex where you, you don't even settle for just marketing expenses. You're paying, paying people for their existing relationship. You're basically buying customers. Right. When you do sales by. How do you think about that sort of spectrum?

Alex Laventer: I think, um, most modern sales teams, sorry, most modern marketing teams are doing a combination of the two. Um, right. They have, they're both focused on kind of driving, uh, bottoms up signups. Right. And they're also sort of focused on kind of top down executive audience. Um, so I don't think of it as like either or. I think of it like you should be doing both. Um, and that's kind of always how the sort of companies I've worked with have thought about the problem as well.

Kalungi: What are some mistakes that you've seen people make when they try to optimize for early funnel metrics?

Alex Laventer: I think just not focus on both. Right. I think um, you want some folks on your team focused on driving product registrations. You want to closely track them through the journey. Um, but at the same time to kind of Continue growing. You need to be driving sales led activities like a successful outbound program at the same time. Um, so I think just kind of the mindset that you're either doing PLG or you're doing sales sort of can get you into trouble.

Kalungi: Great. Uh, let's pivot a little bit here. Uh, back to the GTM engineer. Um, that's getting a lot of attention. Alex. Uh, when I wrote Syntropy, I kind of collapsed the 20 or so different roles in marketing into these new, I call them job families. The scribe, which is everything that has to do with writing and words and voice and language and the sculpture, where everything around design and visual, including web design and websites, et cetera, sits. And the navigator, basically being the new cmo, navigating their way through all the technology and the people capabilities, superpowers. But then I also had the engineer and the engineer in my eye was more about rev ops automation. Absolutely. Some of the things that also are part of sales, um, enablement. But I think the go to market, the GTM engineer, the way it was coined by some other marketing leaders is a little bit different. Give me kind of your, your definition of it.

Alex Laventer: Yeah. So I've always felt like there's, you should have technical roles on your market team. Right. Um, six years ago I had like a growth engineer on my team to solve the sort of problems we talked about earlier. Right. Integration of systems, a, B, testing, analytics. All of those are kind of technical problems. You need engineers to solve them. Um, I think the GTM engineer is just kind of the next iteration of that growth engineer, um, with more of an AI focus. Right. So think about things like um, follow up. Right. Um, today a lead comes in, the lead gets scored. Eventually it's assigned to an SDR who might take um, you know, a day to send kind of an email template. Right. I think those are the sort of problems that a GCM engineer is solving. Right. Like when a lead comes in, we should be able to um, do the research, um, and draft an email and kind of put that in the inbox of a, a BDR who can then hit send. Right. So think about like automated lead workflows. Think about um, think about the sort of manual processes that can be mostly automated with AI. Um, that's the sort of problems that are being solved by GDM engineers.

Kalungi: Got it. How do you balance um, that responsibility lying within the traditional marketing and the go to market team, if you will, the commercial team versus the actual product team. Alex. Because that's where I also feel with product LED growth. It's sometimes tricky if you're really doing something innovative that makes the efficiency of your go to marketing efforts really go up and the effectiveness or you're just actually moving the problem and figuring out hey, what's my icp? What's the Persona? What are they looking for? How do I make sure my product now instead of my content is most relevant, just is moved to another team but it's still the same challenge.

Alex Laventer: Yeah, I guess like I've seen this role kind of float between marketing teams and product teams. Um, I sort of think this is more of a marketing problem than a product problem. So I think kind of the best setup is this role lives within marketing. They work closely with the marketing ops and rev ops folks, um, to sort of automate the pieces that can now be pretty automated pretty nicely with the help of LLMs.

Kalungi: Yeah, I've often seen when product led growth is really successful it's because the people that are in product are actually a very good sort of combination of technical capability wheels, understanding behavioral economics. Right. And what people are trying to achieve and being able to interview people with white hard lettering, interview techniques and all those things that are traditionally maybe more um, seen in marketing roles.

Alex Laventer: Yeah. I think as marketers, um, some of the best ways we can make progress at a company with PLG is just kind of making sure that, that the important business metrics are visible and you know, reviewed by the folks within product. Um, so I, I think I've seen it both ways. Sometimes it lives in marketing, sometimes it lives in product. I think regardless of where it lives, the most important piece is just, just making sure you're tracking the most important business metrics and kind of regularly presenting them and exposing problems and all, all that goes with that.

Kalungi: What are the most important metrics for you?

Alex Laventer: Um, I, I think you absolutely need as, as kind of a smaller startup you absolutely need a um, common view of like a funnel. Right. So things like how many registrations you have to, how many engage registrations you have to how many customers. Right. Obviously there are more stages than most funnels, but you need a basic funnel. Um, so I think like that piece is, is most important and a good way to kind of align with um, cross functional on folks.

Kalungi: So one of the fundamental things around product led growth is to measure whether you're creating value. Right. These value milestones, metrics that show you the product is delivering on its promise and it's shown to you by the actions the user takes. Right. They're actually um, maybe uploading their data into the product, right? They're using it with a regular interaction of all they, they start using more. Right. Uh, how do you combine that with your kind of marketing effort? How do you, how do you integrate those things? Alex?

Alex Laventer: Yeah, I, I think that piece is absolutely critical and um, the way that I, I think the best way to solve this is with like some sort of product qualified lead. Um, so I, I think probably most listeners are familiar with an MQL or a marketing qualified lead, right? Essentially that's um, someone lands at their website, fills out a form and has kind of done enough activity on your website to qualify. Right. For SDR sales outreach. Um, I think what most modern um, product teams are doing today is they're introducing a product qualified lead or pql, right? So the way to think about it is it's a combination of an MQL with product activity. Um, so I think the way you sort of get marketing and product on the same page is you introduce this metric and make sure that, that everyone across the company is looking at it weekly and can tie their activities to the number of PQLs. Right. Um, so an example of this is you want your digital marketing folks driving paid digital to understand, um, how many PQLs are generating each week by campaign. Um, so that's always been kind of the way that I've been able to successfully kind of connect folks.

Kalungi: Can you tell a little bit of your own experience the last couple of years with whether it was a data stacks at IBM maybe it's actually nice to compare like all these different models, right? Product led growth, sales like growth. What if you seen work and where it's been, where it's been disappointing sometimes has a team really, you know, cracked their teeth on something and then had to go do something else?

Alex Laventer: Most, most companies have done both. Right. Sorry, I'll start all over again. Um, all of the companies I've worked at recently have combined the two. Um, there's been a big focus on product led growth, right? Driving registrations, making sure those registrations actually use the company, company use the product. Um, there's been a big focus on kind of what's called sales assist, right? Like once someone qualifies as a pql, um, they are handed over to the sales team. Um, so I think it's almost entirely been everyone's focused on plg. Um, the sales assist component has also been equally important, um, in driving kind of success with the PLG mission.

Kalungi: What do you mean when you say sales assist, Alex?

Alex Laventer: By sales assist is, um, you are it's not entirely a self service purchase process. Right. There's one model where you know, you come into the product, you start using the product, you don't talk to anyone and you convert to a customer. Um, sales assist is once you've really used the product, you've done enough activity to qualify as a pql, a sales rep will reach out to help you and end up closing the deal. Um, so the difference is whether it's entirely self service or there's some sort of sales involvement. Once you are deeper in the funnel,

Kalungi: have you, how do you think about customer acquisition costs? Have you been successful in kind of getting a total view of what it actually costs to convert someone from not interested to buying to being an ongoing subscriber that incorporates a lot of all these touches and seeing kind of how certain models give you a lot of extra efficiency?

Alex Laventer: Yeah, I think um, absolutely. I think like that's one of the most exciting parts about kind of modern marketing where if you kind of instrument your product properly with all kind of your ad tracking tools, um, you can very easily track um, a user who comes from a Google Ad, then registers that then becomes a customer. You can, can calculate um, the cost to drive a customer.

Kalungi: When you coach people, Alex, or when you make these decisions yourself, do you have a simple way to kind of structure when you use product LED versus marketing led versus sales led? Like we have a model that is basically just using acv. Basically. Oh, if the ACV is too small, you cannot afford to hire salespeople. Right. If it's too big, maybe product LED is just not going to do justice to the value of the product and you're going to get whatever 10 bucks per month per user, but you could get $100,000 for. Right? How do you think about that? Do you have some kind of rules of thumb or how do you approach that?

Alex Laventer: Yeah, I think um, what you just described makes sense to me. I've most recently worked with companies where um, the average deal size is large enough that you can afford to do both sales LED and product led. But um, that absolutely makes sense, right? If you're selling a $10 a month product, you probably can't afford to have a salesperson person and you should focus entirely on PLG. Um, for like an enterprise SaaS business, you absolutely can and should do both. And kind of the most problems I see are when you're too focused on one or the other.

Kalungi: Any other thing, like a practical advice that founders could learn from you today if they're seeing for example Inconsistent pipeline or they're having a hard time understanding the numbers. Any tricks or tips?

Alex Laventer: I really believe just kind of nailing your instrumentation is critical. Right. I think before you heavily invest in marketing, making sure one, you've defined a basic funnel, you have basic funnel stages, and two, you have, um, the instrumentation in place to actually track users flowing through funnel. I would really start with those pieces before you layer on additional marketing programs and optimize.

Kalungi: What is your. Just kind of wrap this up. What is your, your plan for 2026 to keep leveling up? Alex, what is the mountain you're climbing? What's the thing you want to learn that's really scary and maybe hard.

Alex Laventer: Yeah, I think right now I'm just totally obsessed with how, um, AI is changing marketing, so experimenting daily with how to use LLMs, um, to optimize a lot of the hard problems in marketing that we've been trying to solve the last 10 years. Years.

Kalungi: Any experiments you can share with the listeners that you've done lately that you learned something from?

Alex Laventer: We're doing a ton of work with lead scoring, right? Like consider, like how you used to do lead scoring where, um, it's entirely based on activities. Right. We're doing a lot of experimentation with can an LLM do a better job of lead scoring than an algorithm you develop? Um, and we're really playing a lot with the automated workflows. Um, I think think a lot of the automation today is human in the loop, right? We don't automatically send an email. We have like someone review it before it's sent. Um, I think just playing around with like, how can we automate all of this? Right? How can we kind of remove the human loop step? Um, so pieces like that are just super interesting and just kind of drastically different than how marketing was 10 years ago.

Kalungi: That's a great example. I remember our team when the HubSpot AI capability and then what's called Breeze, I think when they started to roll it out, there was a little bit of data enrichment of your contacts and your company records and it was a little bit disappointing. It wasn't very good. And then I think the team started to add their own prompts and it made it a little bit better. But yeah, there's so much, um, upside there to make that. And then of course use it to drive your automation, etc.

Alex Laventer: Absolutely.

Kalungi: Any parting thoughts, uh, Alex, anything else that you think people should have top of mind as they, uh, go into this year?

Alex Laventer: Make, uh, sure you figured out your tracking. Right. It all starts with good tracking and a good definition of a funnel.

Kalungi: That's your signal, right? The real data that you can rely first party data, right? Not buying it or cooking it, but you can learn about your own traffic and your own customers. It's great to have you, Alex. Thank you for joining.

Alex Laventer: Yeah, thanks.

Kalungi: All right, that's a wrap. Thanks so much for watching and sticking with us through the episode. We really appreciate it. And just one last reminder, if you're looking for a clearer plan around your go to market strategy and where to focus to drive pipeline and growth, the T2D3 growth workshop is available. It's a short working session where we'll review your approach and build a custom go to market plan for your business. If you haven't already applied, scan the QR code on the screen or head to kalungi.comworkshop. thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time.