99 - A Sneak Peek Inside T2D3 OS: How to Turn Your GTM Playbook Into a Repeatable Growth Engine

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Very excited to have you here. We are going to Talk all about T2D3 and everything that you've built, you've been building around turning the book that you wrote about, uh, five years ago into an operating system that, uh, is now centralizing what B2B SaaS companies can use in order to grow. And I'm very excited to ask you a couple of questions around what was at the core of building, uh, this new project and what people can expect to get out of the box and how to make the most out of this new tool.

Speaker A: Yeah, very exciting. I've been working on this now for about five, six months, but of course, it's been in my head not much longer, ever since, well, even before starting Kalungi, one of the things that helped start Kalungi was that when I became a fractional cmo, Antoine, I had a lot of pleasure using software and templates to make my work more predictable. Standardize it. And we use an acronym called Stop, Standardize, Templatize, Optimize, and Productize. And it was always pretty hard at Columbia to get to the productized part because we, we have standard methodologies, best practices. We have a lot of that, uh, in our playbooks that we sometimes share with clients. Some of those are internal. Turning that into a software product was always tricky because we felt that we constantly were adding more to our playbook, that we had new plays and new best practices and new templates. And it was also something the Klungi has always been probably a little busier than we like it to be. Always have a lot of clients. And so we never, honestly also set enough time to turn everything that we did in the last eight, nine years now with Columbia, into a product that people could also use when they wanted to do a lot of this themselves. So now AI comes around. I'm a software developer by training. That's why I started my career. And, um, now that it is a lot easier to focus when you build software, to focus on the business side of it, the communication, the content, the workflow, and less on whether the button is the right shape or where it's green or blue or yellow. Um, I got a lot of energy. Uh, this is probably now six months ago or so. And then about four months ago, we really started building, got, uh, a lot of energy. And so, hey, this is the time. Let's sort of turn all this intellectual property that have all this experience, everything that we've learned from clients, into something that everybody else can use, even if they cannot afford or they're not interested in hiring a Kalungi, uh, consultant or Columbi cmo. So that got us very excited. The other part of this is that the, um, audience that we service, a lot of the marketers that have read T2D3, that are part of our community, that have done the masterclass, kept asking, hey, Stein, where's the new version of T2D3 that has all the AI prompts? And that tells me how to use Claude and tell me how to use all these new AI tools? I had Jasper and all these tools that allow you as a marketer to build content, to build, to do design, to do all kinds of project management, all these things, they're now so much easier. Right, where's the updated version of our T2D3 growth manual, which still, by the way, is totally applicable. None of those things have actually aged, uh, that much. But of course you don't do those things the same as you did it six years ago. So that's Antoine, uh, how the T2D3 operating system was born. And it started, uh, relatively quickly, I think in a couple of weeks we had something that we felt was worth sharing and we already shared it with some fractional CMOs. They got very excited about it. And it was basically an app version of our Playbook, right, Where people could not very different from when you use Monday.com or asana or trello or some form of project management tool where they could just use that themselves. And it had a couple of other, um, aspects added. We'd love to use okrs and when we manage marketing for the OKR management module in it. And it had a lot of, uh, the templates that sit behind the Playbook, like how do you do this, how do you do that, how do you, how do you manage an event, how do you set up your marketing automation system? All these things that we have really templatized over the years. What, ah, nurture campaigns do you need as a B2B SaaS company? I think our Playbook, at some point, when it peaked out, at some point then we started standardizing it a little bit more again and cleaned it up. But somebody had 1200 different things in it that you had to do in the course of, let's say 12 months if you wanted to do everything that you could possibly do as a B2B SaaS company on the T2D3 growth journey. Uh, so that's kind of what we poured into the app. Uh, and that was the first iteration. But then we started to show it to people and it became very clear that we needed to take a completely different leap to make use of all the different capabilities, um, with AI right now. And, um, so I'll do a quick demo in a second, but it's become now something I think of a much bigger magnitude. Uh, Antoine, where you can argue that what started with the book Syntropy, where we said, hey, what are the things that AI is not going to be doing anytime soon? The curation of phenomenal content, the creative side of marketing, the super communication part you talked about, it involves human communication. All the flaws that come with that, the team dynamics, the things that you do when you have conflict, uh, all these things that are much harder to scale with AI. How do you as a human do all that and then envelop yourself and completely surround yourself with not only Every Cloud and ChatGPT and Canva and HubSpot, MCP Connector and all the things that you, of course should be wired into, but also a system that organizes all those things that you're not every day reinventing how to set up your projects in cloud, how to, how to run your agents, what goals to run into your cloud coding environment. All those things, of course, should not be new and completely redone every time when you do a nurture campaign or when you start, uh, a marketing strategy for a B2B SaaS company. So the product really, um, brings all those things together. So that's what we built, Antoine. And you've seen some of it. Maybe give a little bit of your thoughts before I kind of show some of it.

Speaker B: Yeah, before you walk us through what a CMO actually does using, you know, takes advantage of the tool. I can talk a little bit about my experience with the tool and then ask you a couple of questions, but I'm super excited about the, what this does and how it bridges the gap between the strategic portion of being a fractional CMO and kind of what I've been doing for the past five years and what you've been doing for, you know, with hundreds of B2B SaaS and what I've been doing with a, uh, little bit over 20, uh, B2B SaaS companies. It's that first piece of, uh, bringing the customer along their growth journey, very much along the concept discussed in T2D3, but then also combining that strategic part and good market planning with the execution and all of what you just ended with, which is connecting the right agents, making sure that you have your entire tech stack connected to the app. So. So it is the one source of truth and built and keeps on learning, learning feedback loops and whatnot. Uh, so that that bridge between both strategy and execution hosted within the T23Os is what gets me the most excited. I've been using it for an um, intense two weeks right now with one of my engagements and seeing all of the power of having such uh, uh, access to such a powerful uh, system. So that's what I'm excited about. But let me ask you a couple of questions. I'm very intrigued to know and understand what was the moment you figured out that the next version of T2D3 was not going to be a paper version or rather something much bigger than that.

Speaker A: I found myself in the last year or so, year and a half to be almost incapable of read a book or even read a, read a blog article, read something for longer than five or 10 minutes or to stay focused on something longer like even a video. I do fall into the people who listen to three hour long podcasts sometimes. So there's a couple of those that I do listen to. But other than that, when it's really about doing work, it's extremely hard for me to not constantly go, oh, I can just type in a prompt and, and, and get this thing that I would take three hours to master or to, to read about it and to watch a couple of videos to just do it while hacking my way through it. Right, and winging it sometimes a little bit, but getting a, getting good results. And so when I realized that I thought, well, rewriting a book or components of it with all kinds of instructions is just not going to be the way that the modern CMO or the modern student, if you will, is going to consume this. Um, so yeah, that's I think where that realization came. And then you start using things like cloud code and you realize how easy it is to build things that are really valuable. Where people of course are not going to be impressed by um, the quality of the coding because everybody can do that. But if the content that you put into it is really good, and ah, we hope it is, we'll show you in a little bit bit here, um, then you can build something meaningful. 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 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 kalungi.comworkshop to apply. All right, let's get back to the episode.

Speaker B: One thing that I believe this tool does that was very hard before was to also enlighten the user on what are some of the decisions that should be taken and the ones that should not. So I'd love to hear from you if you have a concrete example of what's the one. Go to market decisions that you've seen companies, SaaS, companies between 1 to 10 million AR or 10 to 20 or 30 million in AR. What are the GTM decisions they took that kills the company faster than they could have and how the T2D 3OS can change, how teams can see what decisions to take and what not to take.

Speaker A: I think what a lot of marketers can probably relate to is that it's very hard, especially for early stage companies that just got funded or they're in a hurry for whatever reason. Right. They're out of money or they're so excited to get their product to be successful, is that it is extremely hard to nail your niche, to lock an ICP and to stay focused, to only try to land, uh, your value proposition initially with people who, you know will absolutely benefit from it. And one of the reasons it's hard if you're the CMO and you come in and you try to convince your clients that it's not helpful to go after three verticals at the same time or to launch in five markets, is that it is really hard for them to see progress fast in the one market they could pick. Right. And I think now that with all the AI capability, we can actually do content so much faster. We can get things so much, ship things so much faster. Publishing, email marketing, all the tools we have are accelerating in both volume and value. I think if you do this right, volume doesn't have to drive down the value, but of course there's discipline required for that. But when you can do all that now, it's actually easier to just, let's do only this part of the market first because you know you can do it in three or four weeks and you can actually see that happen in front of you. And you'll see what I mean with that when you look at the tool, how fast you can do things now. And that's, I think, one of the biggest changes, Antoine, uh, that it makes it easier for a company to be, not to be worried, to shut too many doors if they pick One ICP to go after for a couple of months because now they can do it in a couple of weeks and they can go to the next one after that. So that's probably the biggest learning.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: Want to see it?

Speaker B: Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker A: Let me, uh, yeah, let me start sharing my screen. And for people who are only listening, I'm going to try to kind of tell you what the screen that people on YouTube will see, um, holds. So I always start with um, the typical Gantt chart view. Because this is what Colungi used to look like when you did an engagement with us. When you follow the T2D3 methodology, there's a playbook that has, uh, a lot of rows that basically tell you what to do in what sequence. Right. How long certain things should take. Um, so this is the world of the typical. You know, we need to go build an icp, right. And there's all kinds of things that go into that. And when you work with Colunga, you get access to all these different, uh, details, all the content that goes with that, like, how do you actually do that? How do you build that really good ICP? How do you build your P1, P2, P3 Persona? So all this is now in the tool and it has a full project management capability. All the things you would typically expect from, um, good kind of project management. But now, and there's things here like you're looking at timeline now there's basically uh, a full project, uh, management system where you can manage sections and tasks and modules, et cetera, and do action items and to do lists and all those things. So it has all that. Um, so yeah, you don't need other tools for that anymore. It comes out of the box. We also know, and there's ways here to visualize all this. We also, we're targeting mostly with this product, targeting mostly fractional CMOs and CMOs. So they will have an ability here to, to create reports for their clients, like weekly updates, et cetera, that they can customize with. What do you typically want to report on? Right. And in what order? Right. Do I want to show the Gantt chart or do I just want to show the progress towards our okr? So you can do all that, but what's more important is you do those things. That project management, of course, is in the greater context of the strategy that you're developing. So, um, I'm showing you an example of a small startup that's working on building their product and bringing that to market. And one of the first things they need to do, of course, is build kind of the foundation. And if you're a fractional cmo, you help them. You'll do some discovery first, understand really what is already in place. And I'll show you some of those pieces in a second. Um, but it includes also interviewing everybody. Maybe you do a survey, but then you have to build a foundation, get that ideal customer profile in place, figure out uh, if those um, customers really represent the Personas that you're trying to build, build the value proposition, brand voice, et cetera, but then allows you to go execute it, do the, go to market and not only the things you would do once or twice, and then maybe every year building your growth priorities, all those things. And if you've worked with Kalungi and with the T2D2 methodology, you'll recognize a lot of these things that are in here, like an unsolved matrix that allows you to do this quickly. You don't really need big workshops anymore. What's really going to be helpful for a lot of you is that um, in the tool there is a full library of everything that Kalungi and I before that learned all the growth initiatives that we see that are used, um, by fractional CMOs, by B2B, SAS commerce to grow. Right. Oh, I'm going to launch a mobile version of the product. Okay. I'll add that as an initiative, a growth initiative, maybe say that's going to add a million dollars in revenue. Um, and then you see that pop up here and that becomes kind of your, your strategic um, framework, uh, turned into tactics. Right. What is the actual growth going to look like? And, and all of this started uh, when I clicked here on the growth matrix. Right. And, and all these tools that you see here have similar things as what I just showed you. There's a full ICP module that helps you build that icp, the full module that helps you build all the Personas, build the value prop, do a brand voice exercise foundation and then create messaging. So all of that leads to you actually building your brand visuals, um, from the brand standards, uh, that you need as a company to the content that you need to build a calendar that actually, uh, oh, I don't have one here, so I'll just skip uh, through that quickly. But then also the day to day management. So there's an EOS style, um, meeting structure here that allows you to run one hour meetings that have uh, for example a bowler with um, metrics that you can track over time. Uh, there's tools here to quickly generate A stand up between you and the team and it pulls from what you've been working on, what's happening in your project, what's happening in your okrs. The same if you want to prep a quick one on one with one of your team members. So there's all these tools here. I'll expand this menu on the left. It gives you a little bit of a sense, um, to manage work. Uh, okrs is something I talked about already. So you'll have your okrs in the tool in a way that's relatively. It's simple enough for a small B2B SaaS company, but complicated enough and capable enough to really be useful. Um, complete to do um, system like action items that you can manage and track. There's a mobile app of course to track all this. You can build all these, you can build your own dashboards with some widgets. Um, the playbooks are very rich. Um, so I showed you a playbook that we're using for this client, but you have a library of all these things that are going to be um, coming across your path as a marketing leader, country expansion, doing um, um, uh, maybe customer onboarding program, demand gen, things like launching a podcast, pricing and packaging. So for all these there are actually full um, what do you call that, Full Playbook templates um, that allow you, so this is an example of that, that allow you to quickly have a starting point M in the app to kind of get um going. So uh, that's kind of the foundational philosophy. And then when you start, of course the first moment that you get going you'll do some kind of diagnostic. So there's a relatively deep module in the tool that allows you to. There's like 20, 30 pages here that allows you to really assess what's in place. How does your client or your prospect or your own company rank in all the LLMs? How does it show up? Um, what can you do about it? Can you add those action items or insights quickly to your own playbook, to your to do items? It shows you what queries are being asked of the LLMs and sort of what then comes out, what the LLMs actually say. Um, so a lot of this Antoine, is based on the work that we see you need to do as a fractional CMO. Right. Um, it assesses all the Personas, P1, P2, P3 along the buyer's journey. And then there's a lot more here that you would get from your typical like semrush type analysis. Right? SEO performance. There's a lot Here that you would normally have to gather from multiple tools. So all that is uh, going to be available in one tool set. And then a little bit building on the book that you're publishing this summer, Antoine, um, there's also this full level up section that includes things like disk assessment or um, how do you as a team level up? Uh, things like storming, norming, performing, all these things that go together with a lot of marketing, ah, execution. How do you basically manage a team? Um, and then finally we'll stop with a quick demo. It's not so quick anymore. Um, the go to market work is really built around how we as Kalungi manage engagement in the age of AI. Um, and what's a fundamental uh, insight there is that everything starts with the quality of signal. So we have this whole module called Core Signal. There is nothing else than turning all the information that you as a company have. So these are documents, recorded sales, um, calls, interviews with your prospects, with your Personas. All these documents, they give you signal, they tell you something about what is our value proposition, what are our Personas, what are our um, icp. So all these documents, they get basically managed here, they get parsed, they get interpreted. There's a lot of real detail behind this that you can inspect on how, and this is by the way, all AI, of course, how the system interprets those documents and what you now can use for your marketing. Um, so it's a company, but then there's also competitive signal. Um, so you have at the company level you uh, have a lot of information, but the competitors are also of course very important. So we have two modules, one that shows you everything about you and then the other that has all your competitors and how they do against the same kind of analysis and a lot of details around that. And then what we've kind of built is this, this notion of that signal is something that you as a CMO need to make um, clearer. Right. So we use this mining uh, analogy. You hold information, you turn it into, or then if you make it more um, better, uh, developed, it becomes an essay and then somebody will become concentrate. And we love to get it at some point to be the edge on the blade that allows you to do marketing really well. And everything travels through that kind of maturity or signal quality if you will, uh, to be the foundation for all the marketing you are going to do. And because we have this, it then becomes easier to build your icp, to build your Personas, to build your value proposition, to build your brand voice because you use your signal to do so. And when you have that, and that's then your go to market foundation here you see on the left all these modules, ICP builder, Persona builder, et cetera, where you do that, where you basically turn all that signal into what are the pain points, what are the triggers that um, drive my uh, Personas, my clients to actually look up and notice us and become maybe a potential prospect and all that gets managed here. And then once you do that, you now have access to these tools that allow you to also turn that into your marketing campaigns and execution. For example, there are agents here, we have a whole bunch of agents that allow you, like a blog writer, to turn the uh, um, the signal into blogs that get written on a, on a regular basis, that get published, you get connected to HubSpot, et cetera. So that's kind of, uh. Yeah, that's the tool. Anton, you've seen a lot of this, of course, but uh, yeah, thanks for

Speaker B: walking us through and showing some of the capabilities. Even though there is so much more to unpack here, this is very helpful. As we close today, uh, I want to close up with one question and uh, maybe a quick example of what's the decision you think this OS has surfaced since you've been using it that you would have not seen or taken in the past?

Speaker A: Yeah. One of the things that I always find it's so easy to jump into execution, um, and asking the strategic question like, where are you actually on the journey? Have you reached product market fit? And these questions that are what we have used as gates to determine have you reached product market fit? Have been around forever. Antoine. None of these are new, but having them available in a tool like this, it's relatively easy for people to do their own assessment and then turn it into the next step is the actual economics of the plan. Like how are you going to get to T2D3 growth levels? What are the unit economics that really underpin that? Right. How many clients do you have today? What are they paying you today with your ar, what are your CHURN rates, what are your customer acquisition costs, etc. And tie that entire growth expectations? How do you see churn develop? How do you see ARPU grow? How do you see your MQL volume grow? And what are the initiatives that will underpin that? Making it so easy to do that here has really helped. Um, you kind of see that it's all very easy to use, very dynamic, very visual, make it easy for people to not skip these steps so that you actually build a real plan before you start executing and you turn that, it's the other part that I like. You turn it into okrs. So you have actual. Now you have this grand vision, like in three years or four years from I'm going to be 100 million ARR company. But now here you basically say, well, what am I actually going to do the next 90 days, um, to get there, right? And these are just OKR examples. There's a whole library here. That's the other book we published, the book Finish Line Fridays. It has thousands of okrs that you can, you can say, hey, I'm um, a seed round um, company and I want to get some uh, field marketing okrs, right? Then you can basically use this tool to find um, these examples that allow you to quickly say, hey, what are good MVP level uh, okrs, for example, right? What are good okrs when I'm in product market fit stage. So making it super concrete, Antoine, and then committing to it, commit my okrs that then become your plan that you now in this tool can relatively easy execute on, uh, with a very specific project with the right tools to manage your team, to grow your team, to develop your team. I think that's really what this is unlocking where we don't just jump into, okay, let's go, uh, publish some blogs next week, right? Or build a website. But we put this framing around that it makes it easier also for the marketing leader to communicate to their stakeholders, to their team and to be focused on both strategy and execution tactics at the same time with the same level of focus.

Speaker B: Very well. Stein, thank you for walking us through T2E 3OS. Looking forward to seeing how we continue evolving and thank you for your time. Talk to you in the next podcast. Thank you, sir.

Speaker A: 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 colungi.com workshop. Thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time.