BSMS98 - Leveling Up Together: Building High-Performing B2B SaaS Teams

Foreign. Welcome back everyone. Thank you for listening to the B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks podcast. I'm here joined with Antoine, who was newly minted a couple months ago as the new CEO of Kungi as Brian has stepped into an executive CMO role. Also still on the team. Super excited to do a podcast here with Antoine and you'll probably see a lot and you'll hear a lot from him in this podcast going forward. Welcome, Antoine. Thank you, Stein, and happy to be here. And I'm very much looking forward to our conversation today about a very interesting and fun project that you've been working on for, let's say since the beginning of the year on turning T2D3 into a full operating system embedded within an app. So thanks for having me and looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, listeners, you'll hear us interview each other because we've both been up to something. Antoine has been finishing and really writing a book that he and I have had in our minds for a while and he's not taking it over. It's about to. It's about to be published. So we're going to talk about that. I'm going to interview Antoine about that and then he'll interview me about how we're envisioning the world of B2B SaaS marketing to dramatically change and how we are trying to play a small part in that with some of the software we're developing. Antoine, let's start with you. So the book that we're going to talk about is called Level Up. I'll show it here to people who are watching us on YouTube. And level up is a book that was probably envisioned by us over the last couple of years in the form of one of the values that Kalungi has always lived by leveling up together. As we have always seen marketing as the perfect catch all and fertile soil for people who sometimes early in their career don't know exactly what they want to do. They end up in marketing. And then I started Colungi, seeing a lot of talented people doing that and not necessarily having a lot of tools to. You didn't maybe. Well, maybe even if you did a marketing degree, you did an mba, for example, that didn't always fit what smaller early stage software companies were really looking for. And Cologi came like a training ground for a lot of enormously talented people. And Antoine, you were one of those people who started at Colungi and that value leveling up together led us to work on a lot of areas that are more about people development and management and coaching in addition to all the work around. What do you do as a B2B SaaS marketer? So that was a little bit of the backdrop. But Antoine, I think you took it to a whole new level. Tell us a little bit about what the book is about. Yeah, absolutely. So actually before I talk exactly about what the book is about, I like to frame it with the story. And this entire book is, I guess, part of my journey into marketing. And so I think it came to me with this idea about two years ago. I think it was mid or late 2024. And when I read through the first iteration of what this project was, it really reminded me why I actually really enjoyed being part of Kalungi. And I really aligned with the value of leveling up together, which is at the core and at the center of why this book even exists. That value of leveling up together is something that I found at Kalungi in a very similar way that I did in my sports background. So I come from a very non marketing background. I try to be tried to become a professional soccer player on my, on my early days and ended up not becoming a professional soccer player, which brought me to the US and eventually the US brought me to New York City where I thought I was going to be a diplomat and I worked at the UN and eventually I want to stay in New York City. And I fell into marketing not by choice, but kind of by default. And I landed at Kalungi. And what attracted me there was very much that idea that Stein I really built the company around, which was these group learning sessions where we were really learning as a group and leveling up together by bringing insights and building a shared knowledge data bank of all of what we were doing. And this reminded me very much of what team work looked like on the field. And I thought, well, actually what about really diving into this and building that parallel between sports and business? And of course with the people at the core of the framework align with the value of leveling up together. And this is where and when this book was born. And so all along through this entire book, it's very much a guide on how to manage and extract the most out of your team by giving them the means they need to be their best self and be the most performant professionals that can be. And at the same time, as a manager, understanding how to mitigate risk increase potential. And the book goes through multiple different ways you can implement different frameworks in different situations, going from personal IT assessment to situational leadership or many of the Frameworks that I've been discussed and that we had learned at Kalungi that I thought could be very applicable and very much aligned with how a B2B SaaS organization can grow and make the most out of its people. But yeah, that's kind of like the background and some of the themes that we talk about in the book. 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 and or head to kalungi.comworkshop to apply. All right, let's get back to the episode. Yeah. What's really exciting, Antoine, is that you paired the journey that some of us have been on with you, the professional journey, with your own journey as a professional athlete and figuring out how you constantly can level up. Professional development and personal development are all so important now that we have more tools than ever before with AI, especially where also professional development is now also psychology. It includes a lot of things that people maybe were not as aware of as you should be. Now, how do you deal with something that will always be faster and more accurate than you and cheaper? Right. And how do you turn that into an amazing amount of superpowers without is running you over? So this is also, I think one of the reasons the book took maybe a little longer than we initially expected. We talked about it on this podcast, I think before is because the world has changed so much. It needed updating and you've done a really nice job incorporating that. What I like is that it helps people to reach one's potential, Antoine. And I feel you've done it in a way that does honor brings honor and humblestone. Also, some of the other things we've done at colungi, like the T2D3 book, for example, was known to be very practical. I think you've done that as well and doing that with, with all these frameworks that have been around forever. Right. A lot of human development and professional development frameworks you. You touch on are not new, but you've put them in the practical setting that most marketers today in 2026 kind of can really use and make it super easy to understand and not be too academic. Right. Be useful and usable, practical to do basically the three things that I always get super excited about. You. You do work that, that is meaningful, right? You leave something meaningful behind, you lead the work that otherwise wouldn't happen, would not have happened without you doing that. And then most importantly, you learn something new while you do that, right? That's where the leveling up becomes very, very specific. Tell me about your favorite frameworks or best practices or tips or tricks that you wrote about in the book. Yeah, absolutely. So I think my favorite section is the third part of the book, which is trying to align building high performing teams and pairing it with systems. So, and that's one of the reasons why the book has taken a bit longer than what we had planned initially is that all of the frameworks that we discussed in the book are now almost applicable to how we manage AI as almost an extension of the team, and how it's now a multi layered system where both the team and the tools have to be almost integrated as a whole. And one of the key concepts, right, or one of the frameworks that we discuss in the book that I think is one of the most valuable is the Super Communicator. We build within the tool some digital assets that you can actually use outside of just while you read the book. But the Super Communicator framework is to me, one of the frameworks that we discussed that is illustrating that concept of pairing the team and the tools as one system very, very well. Because the way you communicate with your team and the way you give clarity to your team on what the objective is and what's the shared goal and how we're going to get there and being very specific about the different steps that we're going to take and who is responsible for what, in a way we have now with AI, a fantastic example of how important it is because everyone has experienced that problem of prompting your cloud or prompting your chatgpt or whatever LLM of choice you have, we're not specific enough and therefore the output is completely off of what you thought you were going to get. And I think through writing or reading, understanding and writing about the Super Communicator framework, I thought it bridged so nicely the concept of the team, the tools and the system as a whole. And it's one of the chapters as part of part three that I believe is one of my favorite part of the book and framework that I wrote about and talk about. Do you have a story where you used that, where it was really impactful? Yeah, absolutely, I have a story. It's not necessarily marketing, but it's all about. There's an entire section where I talk about managing up and managing down in the book and I try to illustrate every concept with a personal story. I use these personal stories from my time in New York or my time outside of living in South America. I've had the opportunity to live in many different places and I try to pair all of this. But the story for the Super Communicator is at the time I was working at the United nations and responding to an ambassador. Her name was Basanya Kadare. She was the ambassador of. She was the ambassador I was reporting to and she asked me for a report during the high level week. The high level week at the United nations is when every head of state come to New York and discuss world issues. And she asked me for a report every single day that I was at the General assembly on some of the major decisions that have been taken just so I can report and help her take decision. But at the time she had not specified that she wanted it to be printed. So you know, the first day I run my entire report and I send it by email and I thought my job was done and by the next day I think it was 6:30am or 7:00am she sends me a fire up message about like hey, this is not what I asked and I was very confused because I thought that the job was actually done pretty well understood. Then later on after you have the entire story. So I'm not going to talk about it in details right now but you have to read the book to know exactly what happened. But it involves biking across the entire city in a suit and hoping that the suit doesn't break all the way to 42nd street on First Avenue. But at the end what I understood is that I failed to ask clarifying questions to what the outcome was supposed to be and learn I guess the hard way that a couple of clarifying question to make sure that we are aligned here in this case was more managing up on what the output should look like is part of communicating and being able to articulate the right question or the right asks. And that's one of the stories that is in the book that I believe is a powerful one that of course was born from a personal experience but that anyone may have experienced in the past or. Or hopefully not in such a drastic way but we'll have to experience and learn from and I think it's yeah, that's my story. That's great. Yeah. Very excited to not only read the book myself the final version, but then also share it with others. You're touching on a lot of topics, right? How you manage up and down as one, you just mentioned the way situational leadership applies to the type of leadership you do as a marketing leader in smaller software companies. Team evolution, self awareness, things like assessments, how you use those in your management journey. Both. By the way, this book is great for individual contributors and for leaders and managers. Goal setting, team management, a lot of really, really practical tools. And what I like, Antoine, is that T2D3 kind of gives you what you have to do to grow a B2B SaaS company at a high scale and at high speed. And then I wrote Syntropree last year to talk about how you as a human being are still critical for all the things that will set you apart as a company. But everybody can use cloud, right? Or use ChatGPT to write copy. So everybody will get faster at that and maybe even better. But the work that you do as a human, you know, to have the better ideal customer profile, the better written Personas, understand your audience better than anybody else, your customers, etc. That's what sets your report. That's what Central view was about. And then level up is really how now that you know what to do and you know that you're critical doing it. Leveling up is all about how you can get better and better at it every day with your team, make yourself and those around you better. And now those around you also include AI. Of course. I think the book also translates into how you manage some of these new AI capabilities. Just like you would, you know, work with and manage people that you work with. So super excited about it. The last question. When do you think we'll. We'll get it published? I don't know if I want to answer this question anymore because I have a couple of times and I have failed to deliver. So that's a good learning opportunity for myself. But I'm hoping that within a month we should be able to launch the book. Summer launch. Yeah, it'll be a summer launch and hopefully a valuable read for the summer. Congratulations. Really cool and looking forward to it. 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.comworkshop thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time.