GTM Alignment: Sangram Vajre on Trust, Systems, and Modern B2B Growth

Hello and welcome to the Beyond B2B Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Lee Odin, CEO of Top Rank Marketing. And today, our guest is someone who has built and exited two $100 million companies, helped pioneer the field of account-based marketing during his roles at Pardo and Terminus. And today he's transforming GoToMarket as an operating system.

Of course, I'm talking about Sangram Vadre, CEO at GoToMarket Partners. Welcome to the show. Yeah, Lee, so excited to be on it, man. It's been a while.

We haven't done something like this in a bit. And gosh, when you mention ABM and not think about go to market now and what a big shift in the last decade. It it certainly has. ~ you know, it's amazing.

I was just at a Forester conference not too long ago and and and you know, several other conferences, it's like the narrative has really changed. There's there's a lot going on right now. And I think with AI and everything else, it's hard for marketers to keep up. So this conversation, I'm sure, is gonna help bring some clarity to the chaos that's swimming around in the feeds of folks who are trying to figure things out.

So I appreciate you being here. Yeah, of course, of course. And I'm I'm like it's an open book. I'm more of a student of go to market now that I've been at it for the last decade or so.

And I feel like, man, with AI and how people think about go to market, who owns it, what does what does it even mean? We can go into as de as much depth of this topic as possible. Well, let's start at the beginning. And by that I mean your origin story as it relates to marketing.

I'm I'm kind of curious how, you know, if you look back, and we both, as you say, we've been at this a while, but how did and and it's interesting the stories that I get to hear when I ask people, ~ guests this question. How did you get into marketing in the first place? Well, I've my bachelor's, master's has been in computer science. So I was a I was supposed to be a tech guy, but I'll tell you a quick story.

I've not I've not shared that much ~ out outside of this. So this might be something new for people to hear. But when I was doing my masters, I had masters in computer science, I had this group, like you do projects. Most of the ma masters work is more projects than actual work, right?

So we were doing like four of us were doing this project. And every time I'll go to code something with them, they're like, no, Sangram, you you are such a good presenter. Why don't you present this thing? You're you're great at this.

Like, okay, well, you don't want me to code? They're like, no, no, no. We got this. You we don't have presentation skills.

You are great at this. And I was like, Lee, I'm I was like, okay, well, great. And I did that from the first semester. I did the second, third.

By the time I was like, man, I'm really good at this thing. Guess what? Ten years later, I meet all of them. We're just catching up.

I'm like, man, I gotta really thank you because of you. I'm in marketing because you told me that I'm a better storyteller. So that allowed me to get this startup. I got into marketing and I I write copy now and I'm starting to do this.

And they they said, Sanger, we have to sorry, man, we have to break the truth to you. I'm like, What? What are you talking about? He's like, they're like, look, you were such a horrible coder.

That every time you did something, it actually messed up our code. So we had to get you out of it because but we couldn't get rid of you. So they said we had you present because that's it. ~ my gosh.

So Lee, I actually have an accidental marketer ~ storyteller because for 10 years I believed their lie, and because of that, I'm actually became better at it because I just believed it. wow, that is fantastic. What a great story. Yeah.

my god. It's like a a variation on Fake It Till You Make It, you know? It's like you've got to believe and it's gonna happen. Yeah.

Yeah. And when others say you're good at it, you know, that's like you're like you really feel like, Exactly. ~ I I must be really good at it. And I'm sure I was okay at it, but it just gave me so much confidence because I did that semester after semester.

Yeah. And then when I got my first job as like like a basic marketer, I was like, Man, I can really do this. So I would with so much confidence. And and a lot of it in life, I think Lee is is about.

Are you confident enough to do what you're trying to do? Yeah. At least, at least do you believe in it? Because if you can believe in it, the chances of anybody else believing in it, so and and the market believing it is just hard.

And with all the category building with ABM and go to market, I feel like so much of it is that people say, Man, if you believe in it so much, we'll give it a try. And I think that has been the story of my last two businesses. Right. Well there's a famous quote from I think it's Napoleon Hill of that which the mind can believe the person a human can achieve, you know, type of thing.

So and and and it speaks to I think what a Yeah, absolutely. lot of marketers are looking for, and that is what to trust in, what to believe in. And they are attracted to confidence because there's a lot of different information sources out there today. ~ some of it hallucination generated, ~ meaning a, you know, AI generated slop and all that sort of thing.

And there's just a lot of sources being propagated around what is the right way forward. So I think the human-to-human connection Yeah. is more important than ever. ~ and and I think it's more important than ever, you know, some of the work that you're doing today, like let's maybe you can talk about that.

Like talk about your role at GTM Partners. ~ and what are you most excited about? Yeah. You know, there there are actually two things I'm really excited about.

Number one, I think when we wrote the book Move, which was a go-to-market book that became ~ a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and it sells more copies, by the way, now than in 2021, because guess what? Go-to-market is is really a big deal. And with AI, I think it has exponentially grown. But ~ you know, Jeffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm, gave us a quote for the book and he said, if I were to write Crest, crossing the chasm again, I would have written your book.

And that was a huge endorsement of it. Wow. That honestly, I think was one of the big reasons why it became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. But at that time, Lee, we were asking this question across the board from VCs to P firms to CEO, who owns go to market?

And the answer to that question is, and a lot of this might be surprising to a lot of your audience and and most audiences that I talk to is the CEO. Owns go to market. And that's what got us excited about it now more than ever. Because at that time in 2021, when we got that answer, it was still elusive in a way like, well, what does that even mean?

How can a CEO own go to market? Can they even see everything? Are they not dependent on so many more people to do and do all the work that needs to be done? What does ownership really look like?

And now it feels like with AI, no, ~ every CEO should own go to market. They should have Full access to everything. You can connect all of your data and insights. You don't have to wait for somebody to create a glorified report to tell you what the data is telling you and where the market is.

So owning go to market as a CEO has been one of the most fundamental things that we have seen that helps or breaks a company. So that's the one thing that I'm very excited about. That actually is truly possible now. And we show it how to do it.

And the second thing is just defining what go to market is. A lot of times. What what I have struggled with is that I thought go to market was a marketing campaign or like a sales. Well, you know, a lot of people are talking about it that way.

Yeah. So so yes, some clarity would be great. Yeah. And you know, in in the book we we went through that and and the definition that we got was and what we derived at was that go to market is a transformational process.

And that those two words are very important to to to really dig in a little bit. One, when I was talking to Brian Halligan, who was the CEO of HubSpot at that time, he was saying, Well, I won't go to market. I'm like, Brian, you're the the CEO of a publicly traded company. Like, of course the buck stops at you, but you can't Really be saying that you own go to market in the sense that you really own it.

He said, No, Sangram, you don't understand. I own go to market. And here's why. Who is gonna make the decision between to spend more money on marketing or sales?

That's me, the CEO. Nobody else can make that call. Who's gonna make the decision you should build a new company or build a new product or actually buy a company out there? That's a go-to-market decision.

Who would actually go and make a decision if we should go agency route to build our business or act actually hire a bunch of salespeople to do it? Like these are all go-to-market decisions. So that's why the definition we got was it's transforming your business. So everything that you do in your business that transforms your business is inevitably a go-to-market decision, which Lee exploded my brain because I had such a limited view of what go-to-market is.

And then he added this thing that gave us that definition, which is that it's a process. It's not something you go at an offside and put it on a whiteboard and say, here's what we're gonna go do. That's that's your planning. That's that's the way you go and do strategy work.

But go to market is a transformational process, which means every day you're actually going through some sort of go to market strategy. And as you start peeling then in on that and start thinking about it, you're like, yeah. Like today, I made about 10 go to market decisions. What are we going to do?

What is our positioning? Which ICP we are going after? How are we going to measure our? These are all go to market decisions.

So at the bottom of all of this, what I have concluded is that go to market is the business, is the mode, is everything that every organization should be thinking about. Mm-hmm. And ABM and all of that is just part of it, a subset of it, if you will. But go to market is the business.

Mm-hmm. So that's great. That's great clarification, I think, for a lot of folks that are watching or listening. I also think that there's a lot of marketers who are feeling like, wait a minute, I thought I owned go to market, you know, or the CMO.

Like, how does so what does that how does that dynamic work? Yeah. So the CEO owns this process, this transformation, right? Obviously, marketing is a component of that.

The responsibilities of a marketing organization are part of that. How how does that dynamic work? That's just such a great question. I think in the book we actually go through and funny funny story on that one.

For about a hundred s CEOs and teams that we interviewed for this book at that time, and this is again four years ago, and every CEO would not even flinch and say they own go to market. Then we go, I'm not gonna name the companies. We talk to the CMO and the CROs, and they said, I think I own go to market. And and and there there's the divide, there's the issue.

And when you peel and like, well, what does that really mean? You'll get eight different definitions Yep. Yeah. of what that means, right?

So the role of a CMO is incredibly valuable in the business. CMOs typically are the closest to all things that are happening when it comes to go to market. Because if there's not enough leads, CMO, go figure it out. If there's not enough deals, CMO figure out some sales enablement.

If the product is not catching up, CMO, go figure out how like so the CMO is in the middle of all the problems, right? It's like one of the most chaotic roles that you could actually have as a marketer. So within that, I think the best thing a CMO could do is become a great facilitator. That's what we believe the CMO should be doing.

They should be bringing problems back to the executive team and saying, hey, I see our churn is going, going up. And we need to kind of figure out what to do. I can't just be running marketing campaigns to bring the wrong customers here. What is it that we're going to do?

Right. And that's where the framework and the process ends. Because CMOs end up becoming the most strategic people in the organization because they're looking at it a little bit longer term. They're having more deeper conversations with customers and executives, as opposed to sometimes a sales leader might be able to only look at the end of the month.

I get to get to this number. And so they're going to be like myopic at going at it. CMO has the opportunity to be like, you know what? I can look at it a little bit more strategically.

So honestly, it is one of the most important roles in go to market is the role of a CMO, but it has to mature than being a ICP, get me leads kind of role to run campaigns to something like, hey, let's figure out a business problem. And I'll I'll say one more thing on that. Most marketers really understand how to market the business. They really do, really good at it, which means they may be really good at events, they might be really good at design, they might be really good at campaigns and all those things.

But very rarely do marketers understand the business of marketing, which is a stark difference in it, Mm-hmm. right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Fantastic. This is great. I love it.

Marketing the business, anybody could. Spent 10 years in marketing and can run and run circles around it. But the business of marketing is where go-to-market becomes real. This is where you understand: hey, what does my business need for marketing to do to drive it forward?

And that might mean more events. That might mean zero events. That might mean more webinars. That might mean zero webinars and do roundtables instead.

So the business of marketing is where CMOs need to really mature into. Fantastic. Yeah. I I I love that.

Cause that business level accountability is something that, you know, is part of the transformation I think a lot of ~ executives experience as they level up in their careers, right? Having that business level perspective on the outcomes or impacts of what are the decisions that they're making, as opposed to simply on the execution layer, right? ~ so I think I think it's on your ~ on the website. that you say, and and this is a framing thing, I'm just really curious about.

Yeah. So you say, you know, B D B companies don't have a marketing problem. They they don't have a sales, customer support or even a product problem. They have a go to market problem.

Like what do you mean by that? Yeah. Yeah, it's it's like I always love kind of figuring a phrase out Ha ha ha. and then sticking with it.

Like, Yeah. you know, you talked about ABM earlier. You know, the the the stat that I ran with for 10 years was a stat from Forester actually, the kind of the event that you talked about in a minute ago, where they said less than one percent of the leads turn into customers. And I was like, man, that's such a great stat.

That just throws mud at every single person who's runs marketing and sales. Because I'm like, who wants to be the person that says that, ~ 99% of the money CEO that you give me is gonna go to waste? That's what it means. And that's what created the whole ABM transformation in the business.

Similarly, when I look at now that I've ran part out, went from a $10 million company to a $10 billion company through the acquisition of it by Salesforce, Wow. and then Terminus, we grew from a million in the first year to five in the second to 15 in the third, and then we had this $100 million plus exit with a PE firm. What I learned about that Lee was that every turn at a million, at a five, at a 10, either at Part Out, at Salesforce, or at Terminus, we were trying to solve problems departmentally.

We were not trying to solve business problems the way they needed to be solved. And the reason I think it happened over and over again was because we everyone was protecting their jobs. Everyone is protecting and showing up in every meeting with saying, Hey, look what I've done, look my metrics, look who moved the cheese, look, I I'm I'm doing the right thing, right? All these things.

I remember sitting, I think we were about 25 million at terminus. We were, I was remember, I was sitting in this executive meeting disgusted because 20, 25 minutes of the meeting was all about whose numbers are right and where the real problem is. Right. And I'm like, man, that that's rough.

And then we hired a person who ran, ~ her name is Mallory. We hired her because she ran and and she ran RevOps for us. And she sat in that meeting as well. And she looked at that and saying that, said to me, Eric and I, like the co-founders, said, This is dumb.

I'm like, yeah, this is dumb. She's like, From now on, nobody's gonna report on numbers. I will report on numbers. And that was the first time RevOps was a thing for us in GoToMarket.

And the next meeting we had, Mm-hmm. she said, Here's what all the numbers, here are all the things that that are good that are not good, and here are the things we should talk about. And now, from this moment onwards, nobody's gonna talk about numbers. We're gonna only talk about business problems.

I was so happy that day and it made me recognize the value of. Revops, the value of go to market operations, value of having a strategic view on it. So the reason we say that there's no marketing problem, sales problem, or it is because as soon as we say it's a marketing problem, we say, go give me leads. Like it's a default solution for it.

Right. Or a sales problem, all of a sudden the salesperson feels like, my gosh, my job is on the line. So they're going defend it and try to push it back to like, well, I get don't have the right leads. Or a customer success problem, they're gonna say, well, we have the wrong ICP.

So everybody's gonna deflect as opposed to try to solve the problem. So by calling it a go-to-market problem, which is not a function, which is what the business is about, you're what what I've found was it elevated everybody's, Yeah. they came to the meeting with a sense of purpose as opposed to a sense of defending themselves. And that changed everything.

So when we advise companies, Lee, one of the first thing I look at is show me your calendar and show me the meetings that you have. And if the meeting said pipeline meeting or marketing review meeting or any of those meetings that is departmental, we say, well, that is your problem. Mm-hmm. You're not solving business problems.

And that's why we we created this phrase like, look, you do not have a marketing problem because if that is what you want to look at it, then that's what you're gonna try to solve for. And maybe you need to go create a better feature in the product. Maybe you need to create a different solution on the sales enablement side. Maybe you have a certain different things, but if you pin the problem in a department.

Well, guess what? Everybody's going to focus on the department as opposed to the business problem that might be right under your nose. Yeah, it it that's great because it, you know, elevating things to a strategic and more accountable level at the business level is really where the impact's gonna happen, right? Otherwise you're just amplifying what's already broken or you're you're siloing what should be a not siloed an integrated solution, a more strategic solution, it sounds like, Yeah, and you know, yeah.

yeah, you know, and the other thing Lee we have realized in this is that and it took me a minute to get this business transformation happens in teams. It doesn't happen in departments. So if we were to go in and we we we tell every time they're like, Okay, can you help us with our marketing team? We're like, No, we're not gonna help you with your marketing team.

can you help us with the sales thing and apply this thing? And I'm like, no, we're not gonna help you with your sales thing because there are enough companies who do that, right? Like there are great frameworks for very specific things. But what stops most companies from succeeding, and we did a whole research around that, where we asked ~ go to market leaders, like, what is stopping you from hitting your numbers?

And 68 to 78%, roughly, because we run this almost every quarter. Roughly around that number, about 68 or sometimes all the way to 78% of the go-to-market leaders say the number one thing that's stopping them from hitting the numbers is not market. It's not competitive landscape, it's not even AI. It's the go-to-market clarity of what bets they should take in order to get to that number is what's they are really, Hmm.

really hurting. So because there is no clarity in it, the transformation is hard, people are in their silos. pushing back. And that's when I realized that whoa, the real issue is that business transformation is trying to happen in departments as opposed to team.

And the team is not your team, a marketing or sales team. Team is your executive team. The CEO has to own it at the executive level and he or she has to bring Mm. the team together to say, we're going to work on it.

Classically an example like an ICP problem. ICP is not a marketing problem. Mm-hmm. You we you and I have seen so many times where people say, ~ marketing, go figure.

No, no, no. ICP has to be a go-to-market problem. It needs to be in your go-to-market team meeting where you say, are we gonna focus on this ICP? Is that ICP creating the great ~ the most amount of gross margin?

Are we able to retain the people that are coming from this ICP or that ICP? Are we creating product and features for this ICP or that? Like we do not go to the next level on it, which is what I feel most businesses. so unfortunately die because they just don't ask so what questions.

Yeah, the why. Answering cle you know, clarity about the why. You know, what what is our reason for being in business? You know, what is I mean, there's some fundamental existential sorts of questions I imagine that f ~ find their way into the conversations you're having ~ with some of these companies where they have to evaluate for that clarity to achieve that clarity, exactly what is it that that they're trying to do as a business?

~ which seems crazy that, but it it does make sense. You know, I want to look backwards a little bit in ~ an and and understand the the journey of your work in the field. So, like, you know, you were focused on ABM for a long time and successful there. And ~ in fact, I was doing some research.

I saw we had we had live blogged a session of yours at B2BMX. And there's a photo, it's this is kind of funny. Wow. It's like ABM is BDB on your shoes.

I was like, you are a great marketer. Yeah, yeah. Like I've never seen anybody do that since then. So, but anyway, my question is actually around the evolution of your focus from from you know ABM and what it is to to your focus on GDM as a as an operating system.

Like I'm just wondering about your journey of going from that focus. Yeah. Is it is it reflection of your elevation as a practitioner, as a business consulting practitioner, or is it a reaction to the market, or what's that journey look like? Yeah, I think I think it's a combination of of both.

~ you know, when I ran marketing at Pardot and got acquired, we got acquired by exec target and Salesforce. I remember this where the head of sales of that function at that at Salesforce said ~ to get more leads. And we got like 3,000 leads or something like that that that quarter, and we were all celebrating it. And he came back to me.

I'm like, Sangram, you and your team did such a fantastic job. And I'm like, Yeah, I mean the team has just crushed it. And he said, just I need I I I need you to generate another five hundred leads or something like that next month. And I just sat in my chair, Lee, and I was like, like again, disgusted with like, what do you mean?

Like, why can't we work on converting these leads more? Why why do we need more leads? And he said, and he tried to explain me. And then in the end, he straight up looked at me and said, Sangram, your job is to give me leads.

Just go do that. Wow. And that was the moment where I said, man, I'm no better than a lead up like a coin operated lead machine. That's who I am.

That led me to reflect on it and say, there gotta be a better way. There gotta be a better way to do it, which led to the start of the ABM where I'm like, what does sales care really about? It's not really leads, it's about accounts. And they every sales rep knows which accounts are important or they need to close that quarter.

So why is marketing not talking about accounts? So, how can we change our conversation and words? Because words do have the power of life and death. How do we drive that conversation in it?

So, so it it it changed the so that's why the whole it was a personal challenge I felt like in that conversation. Like I'm at this $10 billion company and here I am a a, you know, just totally working on leads. That started terminus. So it is a personal reflection, if you will.

And then as we grew terminus from a million to five to Mm-hmm. you know, twenty plus and thirty plus. And every time we looked at it, I'm like, sometimes we were trying to fix marketing problem or sales problem. And I I felt like we were always looking at the symptoms.

We were always trying to fix something that is that is moving incrementally something forward. And it took me until 2020 when I started to sit back and say, What is the next thing? What what is it? What's happening?

And it led led me to write the book, Go to Market. I'm like, well, Seems like we should be talking about go to market. So it is an elevation of my own thinking in the last 10, 15 years of going from part out to Salesforce to building terminus and then finally exiting out of it. So and and in in many ways, it's so interesting that even the market has transitioned from focusing on leads to marketing automation to ABM to GTM.

So I feel like I'm I'm just a part of this whole journey with the whole industry. ~ you're the point of the spear, right? You're you're on the front, on the forefront. Yes, you are.

I think the timing has been like impeccable, right? In that I have I've got to be part of the marketing automation movement of Pardot, Marketo, Elequa, and then ABM movement with Terminus and all the the players. And now now that I'm not building a tech company, I'm actually even more excited because I got to talk to all these tech companies and talk about their challenges with building a business because I'm like, man, it's it's tough. But having done that and built a couple of hundred million dollar plus exit companies, Lee, it gives you you can you you start Doing some pattern recognition.

~ and I'll tell you, man, building a tech company ~ eight years into it, roof, ~ you know, 300 plus people. Like, I lost a lot of like nights and days and and all family time Mm-hmm. and all that stuff. So I'm like, I'm excited to do be on this side of the fence.

And I'm like, okay, now I'm I'm actually truly helping. We have over 3,000 companies, Lee, who run on GTMOS now ~ as a framework. Wow. So we are Just enjoying and s I want to see more companies just be profitable and and not just just die at a million or five or ten million dollars.

Yeah, yeah. I'm sure there's more companies that want to be profitable or more profitable too. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. What a great connection.

You know, a lot of the impetus towards that profit goal it comes from marketing and sales, you know, focusing on goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, year-end goals. And you've said that systems are greater than goals. And what can you drill down on that? Yeah.

Like, what do you mean by that? And in like what does that look like in action from a marketing perspective? Yeah, one of my favorite books is Atomic Habits by James Clear. And he made a point when I was reading it that people do not rise to the level of their goals, they fall to the level of their systems.

So think about like every one of us have goals, Mm. Yeah. right? Like of like, hey, we everyone has pretty much the same goals.

They want to be fit, they want to be young, they want to make money, they want to have a great life. Like So, but why is it that only a certain small percentage of people actually do that? And it's not the goals that actually is the problem there. The problem is that they don't have a system to get to the goal.

And it hit me very clearly when I was reading that book, and he was trying to talk about that in terms of atomic habits. Great book, highly recommended. And it talked about like the smallest disciplines, smallest habits that you develop are actually moving towards the goal. But we do not have most people.

do not have, and I included the discipline to do the small things that over period Mm-hmm. of time creates the thing. So when he said that, that you don't rise to the level of your goals, which was such a such an interesting thing, you actually fall to the level of your systems. It it really made an impact on me.

~ Yeah. And I was yeah, Yeah, that's provocative. It is. It is great.

and I was thinking about it is like, man, all the things that I've done to like when we were at terminus, I remember we had this Head of ~ finance, and we would just sit in a room, flop open the the the spreadsheet and start putting goals and then and and say, Okay, well, if you want to get to 50 million, what do we need? ~ we need and he would just change that to 50 million. we need like 50 more reps and 30 more, you know, ~ you know, ~ campaigns to run around this thing, and we need so much budget and marketing.

And it was just a spreadsheet of a bunch of goals, and you can make Everything looks fancy, everything look good, or everything look bad. Like you can just do that. Yeah. And I remember ~ having read that book and I was like, these are just goals.

These are there is no system Yeah. to get to these goals. These are arbitrary metrics that make us look good and ~ do this rallying cry at the kickoff every year to say, hey, let's we're gonna go and do this. But what people most the people in the front lines are most l looking forward to is like, hey, what is the system to get there?

How how do how do we get to that number? How do we get to that thing? And I think that's where the system comes in. Yeah.

That's I I love that because it aligns so much with sort of transformation that we've undergone at our own company and the consulting that we do for for B2B tech companies, especially, and that is building up a system. You know, a system that is, you know, Yeah. if I I simplified it, it'd be like it's a formula with variables in that there is an architecture that is informed by what has worked in the past. And, you know, we plug in data to architect following that system.

How to be successful, how to achieve those goals, but it's reliant on the system. And the system is timeless. It doesn't matter if AI is in play or not. Yeah.

Yeah. We're the data we're using to inform it gives us what's accurate, what's relevant now, right? Anyway, Yeah. the system notion of system, I'm just saying I agree with that.

~ another thing that that I think is pretty important for folks to be paying attention now is this notion of trust. and you've talked about that. quite a bit, especially as it relates to revenue retention, right? Trust in NRR.

But a a lot of, you know, marketing still optimizes for acquisition and getting those logos, right? And and and and at the same time, trust has become more important for net new, right? There's just this information overload. There's, there's, you know, you've seen the data from different research that buyers just don't trust brands.

They don't trust marketing communications. They trust people that they know ~ and and I guess what I'm wondering about is, you know, can mark how can marketers do a better job of architecting trust into the overall go to market function, right? Not just for retention, but also for acquisition for all aspects of how a business interacts with the public. Yeah, I think ~ I was talking to we I run a lot of CEO roundtables and in one of the CO round table, they're about ten million dollars ~ C ten to fifteen million dollars CEOs.

And every one of them was focused. We were like, what is your top priority? And every one of them are like acquisition, acquisition, acquisition, new logo growth, like ARR. Like that was the topic.

And then I asked the question around what is what is your retention looks like and the numbers were not that great. And then what I'm like, what does NRR look like? You wouldn't believe Lee. Almost there were this was about twenty ~ about eighteen eighteen eighteen to twenty two, I think, ~ number of CEOs together.

Almost seven of them did not know what NRR for their business was. And these are all ten million dollar plus companies. And I dug into like I'm like Obviously, you are you you guys are smart and you know, obviously you're building something. Like, how is it that you don't know what the NRR is?

And the problem they were having was they had multiple different products, so the it everything was kind of muddy. Mm. ~ so they did not know what segment was the most profitable segment in their business, they didn't know which which product was the most profitable product because they never really cut it down to that level. People start to look at things in aggregate because it's just easy.

So when you look at a revenue and say, it's a $10 million business, but if you really cut it open, a business is made up of profitable segments and not profitable segments. And you look at the profitable segments, Right. and that might be like a $4 million business. And the six million dollar business is actually killing your $4 million business.

Right. People don't recognize that. You would rather be a $4 million profitable business that is a growth business and a retention and happy customers. Rather than a $10 million business where the six million is just ankle biting the $4 million, $4 million business.

And it is such a hard thing for CEOs and founders to go through because you would rather they, in their mind, they would rather be a $10 million business than a $4 million business. So it is an ego, it is a perception, it is understanding the health of the business challenge. And so the biggest part when we talk about NRR is what clicks for people is when I do the math for them. And most people don't do this.

Where I would like, all right, do you know that if your NRR is about 120%, you could double your revenue every 3.8 years without adding a single new customer? Nine out of 10 times they have never heard that or haven't really done the math or didn't understand that. They're What?

I can double my revenue and I don't have to go after acquisition. It's it's like a foreign concept. I'm like, yeah. Mm-hmm.

How much are your money spending on acquisition? we're spending 60% of our revenue on acquisition. Okay. Well, imagine if you could spend, take that off, and actually spend in retention and expansion and get it to 120%.

One, you have no acquisition cost or zero, you're gonna go to the same customer, you're gonna make better, healthier trust ~ with that customer by building things that work. And if they're profitable ICP, then that will be a long-term customer for you. It's hard work. I think it's It's the invisible work that nobody gets gets ~ credit for.

And and I think that's what I learned when I was at Salesforce. I was at Salesforce when we went from this, when I personally went from this $10 million company to this $10 billion company, I had this weird question in my heart where I'm like, how do you go to this the the Wall Street and make a prediction that we are going to be at? So much closer to a $10 billion or 15, whatever at that time Mark Benioff was talking about. I'm like, how is he able to predict at that precise in within 10, 20 million dollars for a 10 billion dollar company?

Yeah, yeah. And the answer to that was when I would dug into it. And that's why I spent two years. It was like the PhD of PhDs by working at Salesforce.

I was like, I was a student of every, I wanted to know everything about how do you build a business of that scale. And I looked at and I talked to the finance team and all that stuff. They're like, we already know 80% or 85% of the revenue. It's already in the bank.

I'm like, what what what what do you mean? They're yeah, yeah, we already have that in the bank. We already know all these comp customers are going to renew, all these customers are going to expand for this much revenue. So they already knew 80 to 90 percent of the revenue that's gonna be there for the next year.

So to the market and the Wall Street, they were only predicting 10% of net new. And that was an aha moment for me, Liam. Like, ~ that's how you're able to grow and are able to predict growth and not scrambling for it because you really are truly spending a tremendous amount of time and effort in making sure your expansion revenue becomes your main revenue and your net new revenue becomes just a trailing revenue that's gonna help you create more expansion business. At $10 million or $15 million CEO, it is extremely hard for them to grasp that concept.

Hmm, yeah. So the the net new is icing on the cake. ~ 'cause you're optimizing for that growth from within. Yep, yep.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's why they invest so much on partnerships and the mu and the market exchange and Dreamforce Conference. You look at HubSpot, they're doing the same thing with their unbound conference now that what they're calling it.

All of these companies, Yeah. what they do and they understand really well, is that the real revenue is not net new. The real revenue is expansion and retention. That's the part that it took me 10 years to understand.

And that was that is a big know it's funny there's an expression I use I've been using with my team for for many, many years. And ~ as we, you know, reflect on ~ relationships with current clients, it's like if you're not growing, you're dying. If these programs are not growing, Yeah. they're dying.

And it's not just about adding revenue, it's about growing the breadth and depth of solutions that we're able to provide, you know, being innovative and proactive, because that's what companies are paying for, you know, ~ outside of performance. And and so yeah, it's important. ~ great, great perspective. ~ You know, earlier this week, I saw that you published a a post ~ that was talking about how most companies put the majority of their GTM budget into demand and that companies that are winning Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. are outbranding rather than outspending, right? And so you're you have this perspective, Yeah.

it's brand and demand with brand driving demand. So, but at the same time, we know, I think we've kind of established it in our conversation too, a lot of companies Have targets that are still demand focused, right? They're playing catch up in a way. Yeah, yeah.

How how do they make the internal case for investing in brand as a driver of demand outcomes? Because I'm I'm hearing this, I hear this every, Yeah. Yeah. every week where someone comes in and says, Yeah, it's lead lead gen.

Wait, we need to work with the marketing agency purely for transactional lead gen. It's and we've got to peel back the onion on them. Well, why are you going about it this way? What is the hypothesis here?

And what are your brand efforts to warm the market for that ninety five percent that Yeah. are not in market, five percent in market? So so anyway, the what's how can people make the case effectively for brand? Yeah.

You we so I've been on the board of ~ of G2 ~ for a couple of years. Mm. Okay. And so we have access to all of their data when we did and we did a whole study around this thing.

We took two companies, and because we use G two as a proxy, and for people who are not familiar, they're just they're a company that drives has lots of reviews and all those kind of things. So it allows you to get a get almost a third party perception of the brand element of it, right? Because it's not Talking about demand, it's it's really like, well, how many reviews you have and how well is your brand represented? And most people buy ~ asking either in communities or going to places like G2 to figure out, right?

So we've wanted to do this study to figure out this brand demand hypothesis. And you're right, like that's what we have said. As a matter of fact, in the GTMOS, which is eight pillars, one pillar is says brand and demand for a reason. It's one of the most controversial pillars, by the way.

~ so we'll get into that in second, but So we did this study where we looked at two roughly $50 million companies. And we were able to look at it. Obviously, they have all the data around it. And we saw that the one $50 million company for they had a big riff and they have an it's in the similar category, by the way.

~ and they stopped all brand promotions, the branding, all advertising, they just stopped any and everything related to branding for almost a quarter. Hmm. Okay. During the same exact time in the same category, we saw roughly $50 million company increasing their brand presence.

And so they were advertising, they were at the right events, they were putting themselves out there. They have all these influencer programs going on, all those things happening. Same exact time for a quarter period of time. Then we looked at the number a year later, Mm-hmm.

what happened with each one of those companies? What we found, Lee, was the company that dropped all brand activities Mm-hmm. in that quarter. It took them four more quarters to get back to acquisition at scale.

Because people do not recognize the implication of no brand. Wow. It people, the the branding is almost an imprint in your mind about some business. And if you're out of sight, you're out of mind.

Mm-hmm. And if you're out of mind, you're not in the top three list of companies. Exactly. People start.

thinking like, well, maybe maybe they we I didn't see them today this year at B2B SMX, let's just say our forest or whatever that might be. ~ maybe they're not doing that well, or maybe they're not so there is a level of perception brand creates that is impossible to attribute and it. But from a data perspective, what we saw, just one quarter, roughly of one quarter of no brand activity Took them four quarters behind the other company that literally escalated that they they just started to spend a lot more in that quarter and then they plateaued Mm-hmm.

on and they stayed constant on it. It took four quarters for this other company to even come back to the same cost of acquisition of a lead of a customer because it it it took four quarters Wow. to get back into the mind of their buyers. And and that is why we say brand drives demand.

Now, if you spend way more on demand. That is a branding, you're paying almost it's almost like you're paying for the brand in the demand context. So you're paying $10 to get a lead because you just haven't done it. Yeah.

But if you have the brand for it, you might be able to spend $2 to get the same lead. And so you're gonna end up spending on branding in some way, shape, or form. You might spend it at the cost of a pay-per-click or whatever you're doing right now. But if you actually spend on brand, Your cost of acquisition by default will go down.

So you're going to end up spending. That's why we we always look at PL. It's it's marketing and sales is a joint one line atom. It's not two line atoms.

That's why we put brand and demand as a thing, Mm. is that it goes hand in hand. And as a matter of fact, you're gonna pay for it one way or the other. How you position it's up to you.

If you love the fact that I'm spending on demand and not on brand as a Yeah. way of that's a perception problem, not a reality problem. Yeah. Wow, that's fantastic insight.

It really is. And the importance of brand is even, you know, is is increasing even in in the in an AI search environment, Way more. Yeah. right?

Because the consideration of being chosen is so influenced by elements or factors that would be put in the brand activity bucket, right? And and so, but it's obviously important to humans too, because mental availability and being part of the short list. Those are all a function more so of brand than they are necessarily of the mechanics of demand gen, right? ~ so yeah, I appreciate you you sharing that.

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, that research, honestly, I'm obviously a big brand brand guy, like, you know, being part part at Salesforce, how we did build terminus. I think it was it.

I remember like just a quick story on that. We did ~ I don't know you might remember the flip afternoon events that Yeah. we did back in the day, and we had all the competitors actually come in and speak at our event, which was I don't know if anybody's still doing that, but we did that. We had demand based six cents, like er engage your everybody come and speak.

At FlipMap Phone events. And the reason we did that was because we didn't have customers. We didn't have. So there was no way for us to build a customer conference or event.

But I knew from a branding perspective, we need to be out there and competing against people outside is gonna be crazy. So we built this FlipMap Phone where all of them paid to run this competitive event, but it wasn't, it wasn't about competition. And at the end of every single event league, We ended up closing twenty five to thirty deals. Wow.

We all there were competitors there. We had a booth just like everybody else. We were doing a keynote just like everybody else. And it was a flip map on an event.

~ and so net it was zero dollars to terminus in that sense of building this thing. But every time people were smart enough to know who was behind the movement, who was putting all the work together, what's happening, and we ended up closing two. And I think that was a hundred percent brand play. If we would have run ads to say, hey, we are the best company in the world called ABM, you gotta do this thing, and we'll show.

We we would have spent so much more money, but still haven't gotten the traction. By doing the brand play, we ended up becoming the fastest growing company in that space, especially in the first three years. That's such a great case study, too. You know, the the power of building a movement, you know, you stand for something and you have an architecture for people to see the pain and how to get from A to B, you know, and there's a system for that.

I I am wondering though, about the intersection with things like influence there. Yeah. and ~ Forrester this year, and we we've done four research reports on B2B influence. So we surveyed thousands of B2B marketers about how they're implementing influence.

And but I'll put that aside. And and Forster's prediction was seventy-five percent of enter enterprise B2B companies will invest more in in influence. And so part of driving community, part of driving authentic advocacy and engagement and understanding, you know, getting attention that's trusted, you know, through community is certainly, if you demonstrated through that story, ~ a real thing. And at the same time, I'm wondering about what your opinion is around ex ~ achieving that also through influence, meaning that Yeah.

We're not just buying reach, but you know, we're partnering with trusted voices in a marketplace to help us tell the story of our brand. It's one thing for our brand to tell the story. Yeah. Like you say, if we could just advertise or we could have a community environment where we could put you know, we could learn together.

~ what about having other people tell that story, share the good news? And I'm just wondering what you think about the intersection of influence and community building as being powerful assets. I think without having an influence strategy that that actually creates a perception in the buyer's mind that this is important for me, it is going to be extremely hard for the businesses of the future to actually have a sustainable business. For example, when I think about a company like Lovable, they just created this massive thing and people created.

At the same time, I worry about them because I think they haven't seen a retention play in because they're just a year old. So they haven't seen what companies go through and all that stuff. And and I looked at a study recently around this, and millions of people are trying to use it, but there are only like a handful of people are actually implementing and using a real product coming out of it. Mm.

So it's like a toy to most people right now. They're not actually using it, and they would do better. if they spend all of their time on the people who actually build something that actually makes money to make the case for their brand and not just say it's easy to build an app. It's more like, hey, it's it's now with with building an app, it's now possible for you to make money.

And and they they haven't connected that dot ~ beyond it's easy to make an app. Right. So they're still in the early stages of helping it. So so the influencer marketing would like outside, I mean, they should be all over that.

They should get every single creator who's making money using lovable app. They should be actually all over it and telling that story. But I still see in the market they're telling a story of like, hey, it's easy to create an app. Well, so is on now Claude is gonna do the same thing.

And so is the next thing. ~ I use like, for example, superhuman to do my emails and and drafts and all that stuff. Two days later, ~ I found another company that had a similar product. And then I'm like, wow.

Okay. They're doing something. And they did it auto drafts. And and literally a week later, Superhuman created auto draft as a feature in it.

And that company had raised seven million dollars. Then I'm like, well, why would I like so I'm like, wow, product is no longer the moat. So if product is no longer the mode, Right. then what is the mode?

Well, in my mind, it is your it is. Ultimately, distribution is going to be your mode. Like, how well are you going to be integrated and distributed with everything else in the marketplace? Well, how do you create distribution?

How do you create that level of understanding in the marketplace? Influencer marketing or allow are surrounded by the people that actually believe Mm-hmm. in that will be because if you do it and and somebody else is doing it and they're all the people I look up to, I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna give this a shot because that's that's the next magic quadrant.

if you will, is the influencer marketing. ~ and most people are not spending enough time. This goes same as the brand and demand. People think that demand is what they want, but you don't get there without having this level of thing.

So so I look at lovable, I look at all these things is like, man, if I were marketing these companies, I would spend so much more time on success stories of people building it. And that's where influencer marketing comes big time in it. Right. Absolutely.

Well, I appreciate that. Obviously, I've had interest in such a positive response to that. But it the reality is that we're seeing mileage, we're seeing impact from smart identification and activation of influencers ~ that advocate for the category Yeah. and aren't just shilling products.

I mean, there's a time and place, I suppose, for that. But there's there's a lot to be said from an execution standpoint because a lot of folks are coming into influence from a B2C perspective, which tends to be more transactional. Yeah. Yeah.

As opposed to as we all know in B2B, our sales cycles are three months, six months, twelve months, eighteen months. There's a lot more information at play. And so, ~ the way the ways in which conversations are driven, the ways in which narratives are propagated in an authentic and believable way, ~ is a little bit different than buying a bottle of makeup or shampoo or something. Yeah.

Right, right, right, right. Huge, huge. And and you know, especially if you're in B2B, right? Like you it's such a considered purchase.

You have all these other people looking at you. And I don't know how much you can really spend on ~ you know, I I think there was a time when you have to be in a magic quadrant to be well known and especially at enterprise c level, it it makes a ton of sense. I think the new magic quadrant really is influencer marketing, because if you have the ten right people in that particular industry, Saying that, yeah, yeah, this is there's a way to do this and this seems to be a better way, you're gonna be you'll be great at it.

As a matter of fact, at you know, going back to the flip my funnel, you know, the first time I did the event, I did not know anybody in B2B. I didn't know what it looks like because I'm just coming into the part Hmm. art sales force scene for a couple of years. So I I knew a little bit, but not a whole lot of people.

And and so I'm like, what how do we bring this event together beyond the competitors that that that was Part of the competitor was to actually get money because we didn't have funding. So that they would all spend $10,000 with us. So that allowed us to do the event at no cost. But then why would people show up?

When there are all these vendors sponsoring it, why would people show up? So at that time, this is 2014. I think I did like 1.0 version of whatever you are doing as influencer marketing right now.

I reached out to Scott Brinker. I did a video at that time. I literally went to the small room and I did a video. This was a new thing.

To every one of the top 30 influencers out there and said, Hey Scott, you've been writing Martech for a long period of time. I love what you're doing. I love to see if you can come and do it. It's called Flip My Funnel, and we there is no agenda other than talk about whatever is the new thing that you want to talk about in marketing.

And that challenges the status quo of marketing sales. Same thing with Megan Eisenberg. She was an up-and-coming CMO. She has had like exits like beyond crazy.

I did a video for her. I did video for Sidney Sloan. I did a bit, so I did video for all these influencers that were all known, Great. Jill Raleigh at that time, say, Hey, you actually were at Salesforce and Eloqua, you were the queen, Elo Queen.

Like, I would love for you to tell that story. I did a personalized video for every one of these 30 people. And every one of these 30 people said, Mm-hmm. Nobody has ever done that for us.

And this is 2014. I st don't still don't know if people do that. And Every one of them said yes, and every one of them flew on their own dime Асом. to come and speak at a nobody's event called Flip MyFunnel, and and that became a thing.

That's why people showed up to that event. So competitor paid for it, and the way ~ people showed up was through all these influencers who were all there not to endorse terminus or even ABM. First two events, they didn't even know what ABM was, they didn't even talk about ABM. It was challenging the status quo of marketing and sales, talk about anything.

and everything that is challenging and three hundred people showed up to the first event. And I think that was like a small version Wow, that's brilliant. of probably what influencer marketing could look like. No, that's that's fantastic.

That's very clever. and you know, it reminds me of ~ work we used to do for Content Marketing Institute and the Content Marketing World Conference. Yeah. And we worked with them for God, six, seven, eight years, something like that, where we would work with the speakers and create, you know, we treated the speakers as influencers.

We knew that the conference was limited in how much attention they could pay to breakout session speakers and the keynotes, right? They'd only do so much marketing. And we also understood that. The people that were paying ~ their own dime to come and speak at this conference, especially if they worked at a company, would want to be able to bring back evidence of impact, of visibility that it was achieved as a result of their participation in this event.

So we gave that to them by creating these interactive ebooks and marketing promotions around the conference and allowed them to give a preview of what it is that they were going to speak about. But we didn't just do it as a blog post. We did it as, like you say, as an interactive. you know, micro site type of thing, where we had things like eight bit we translated them into eight Yeah.

bit video game characters and had the sort of Mario game animations and Yeah. Love it. all kinds of fun things. Anyway, ~ that's a brilliant example that you just shared.

And I don't think a lot of people are doing that today. ~ so ~ speaking of today, of course, we got to talk a little more about AI. And ~ your your position on it I think is very, Yeah. very interesting in that you say that it it accelerates whatever GTM system That you already have.

And that lines up amazingly well with something I've been saying for years. And that is AI makes you more of what you are, right? If if you if your ideas are mediocre, Yeah. then what you're going to get through AI is mediocrity at scale.

And in turn, you know, if your system is unclear, you're just going to get confusion. So you said that a large majority of AI failures are are not died tied to the platforms or the foundational models. Yeah. They're tied to the data quality of the business, unclear ownership and and process issues.

So Yeah. You know, for that a marketer that's listening or watching right now, that's got a mandate from leadership to adopt AI for productivity or efficiency gains, what is the f what are their what should their first steps be? Yeah. I think one of the hardest things to do as a marketer, because you always get a list of things to do from everybody, because everybody thinks they're a better marketer than you, obviously, for you know, for whatever reasons, nobody tells a plumber what to do, but everybody will tell a marketer what to do because we all have this this innate ability to just tell marketing and what marketing should be, and it's so visible in a sense.

So if you're a marketer getting this constant nag of like, what are we doing in AI and what to do? And and so is everybody doing it. AI is a phenomenal thing for someone who's actually understand the real problem that they're trying to solve. The recent study, our research, I saw research by HBR shows that 95% or more of the AI projects are failing.

Like not failing for from a from a just like, ~ it's not working. Failing meaning it's actually disastrous. It means it's actually pushing you back. Wow.

We I mean I I I would do events and I would say how many people are doing AI, everybody will raise their hand. I'm like, okay, how many people are running AI projects to be more productive? Everybody will raise their hand. And then I'll ask, how many of you feel productive?

No one raises their hand. No one. They feel overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with anything, right?

They're all like having the all these slack notifications that now it's embedded and all that stuff. And then the problem is we have moved because of the speed at which AI is moving, we have we individuals. Have just gone back to like, let's just go and start working on, let's just create emails, let's just create, wow, it's creating. So we are so infatuated with the speed of AI that we have lost the plot.

And the plot or the AI is no different than the internet. So we didn't just go and create websites for the sake of creating websites. We put thought in it: like, what should be the positioning? What should be the messaging?

What should be the call to action? Where do we want to take take the journey? But AI does it. So we stop thinking.

And we have been using AI to do the thinking for us. And so one of the great the biggest thing that we tell marketers and any executive, by the way, into this is that if you use AI to do the thinking for you, then you have missed the point of AI. AI purpose is to help you grow the business. AI is to, you need to AI to build how you want to think.

Right. Like that's the part people are missing. They're not using AI to to build, they're using AI to think for them. So of course, the net result of it is this garbage.

~ and and it's not driving. That's why 95% of these projects are failing. So every a person who has had this mandate from the board and everybody do more AI, they have to ask this very important question where can we grow the most? It's like the first question of our GTMOS pillar.

And the most is everything, is is the most important part of it. Because the most means that you have to qualify what growth looks like. What is a profitable growth looks like? What is the right ICP looks like?

Is that the right segment for us? Do we have a point of view for it? Can we retain these all these questions, Mm-hmm. right?

So you need to have a possible debate, a good debate internally to say, is this where we should focus on? We're just not asking Lee those questions right now. We're just going and doing things. And doing feels good because you want you feel like you're moving, but most people are moving backwards, not forward with AI.

And the way you move forward is actually by not doing AI first. You actually go and go back to the drawing board, you actually have the tough conversation, you ask your customers what they need, you figure out what it what it is that you're trying to do. And then with the context of all that, tell AI to help you. We're using it the exact opposite way.

And I think lots of people are starting to recognize it now. But data suggest that 95% or more of the projects are absolutely disastrous for business. Yeah. That's you know, it's such a such a great point.

I think the there's a perspective shift that needs to happen before you can actually take full advantage of the technology, right? Because otherwise you're like as we said, you know, you're only amplifying something that's not necessarily fixed ~ or or really where the priority should be. Brian Solis has a book called Mind Shift that kind of sort of the architecture mentally or this and asking the it's an elaborate. version of asking this question, where can we grow most?

And then how should we adopt our processes and and and workflows and whatnot ~ before we start investing in technology? ~ And so great, Yeah. great conversation ~ and an important one, a ~ sort of prerequisite before jumping off. Yeah.

Because the ease, you know, this the Chat GPT blew up because of the ease in which you know you could use it and the, Yeah. Yeah. you know, what turned out to be the simulation of reality, the simulation of high quality was so superficial that a lot of people didn't recognize the the the hallucinations and the, you know, it did such a good job of of predicting and calculating what good looks like, but it isn't really good. Yeah.

Yeah. And therefore those that don't know any better put that into market and find out, crap, just like these large cons a couple of large consulting management consulting companies have put, you know, really expensive reports in the cli hands of their clients. Yeah. And it's like, shit, some of this was just made up.

Some of these sources don't even exist. Made up. Yeah, and people have to Anyway. now do more work reading because you're sending those reports to somebody, so now they're spending reading more crap.

but I'll I'll I'll this is interesting. I don't know most people realize this. ~ I was reading I was on an AI ~ you're part of an AI is a bunch of people who have been spending like really deep thinking in AI and we were going through like, have you have you thought about this, Lee? Where why does why does it write in front of you?

Like when you type of question, it actually shows as if it's writing in front of you. But in reality, it has all that information. Why doesn't it show you the entire let's say you say, give me a LinkedIn post on this topic? It's gonna show as if it's writing every single sentence.

Why doesn't it give you that whole thing? Because obviously it has it, otherwise it couldn't write that whole thing. But it slows down the process because it's trying to it it it's the the folks who did this process, they're so smart. They recognize that our mind cannot process if it just showed us as is.

So they put a delay in how to show it so we can read it and still feel that dopamine shot of like, Mm wow, it's doing this work for me. But they have all the information. They have all of it. So so in in many ways, it's help it's making people feel smart when in reality it's the system who is just.

Mm. Acting up and doing its thing, and you feel like, man, it's I'm reading it and I feel like I'm engaged in it, but it's a whole lot of crap that just that that just took its time. So you feel smart about yourself. So when you start really thinking about how AI functions, you will actually start.

I I still use pen and paper to think about ideas, write about what I need to do, think about it, and then I go to AI and then start using this context layer. I've fallen that I've fell in the same trap like most people in the beginning days of like, what do you think? What do you I'm I'm asking AI what do you think? And I'm like, shoot, I've just missed the plot and I had to go back.

Yeah. It took me a month almost to like, okay, I I I need to think for myself better. And now I have more original ideas back as opposed to AI saying the same thing that it's telling every single person. Yep, yeah.

You it's funny. Ann Annaly talks about this too, about writing, you know, the ugly first draft. You know, you need to crank that out yourself and then go ahead and apply Yeah. AI to expand on your ideas, ideate, brainstorm and and and so forth.

So yeah, great point. Let's let's think about a CEO situation, a CEO mandate, let's say that's being given to a marketer, that they've got ninety days to improve the go to market performance of their organization. If you're part of that conversation, what are the first three things you would you know, three changes I guess you would make ~ using the the GTM operating system that that you're that that you're a part of, that you're advocating in the into the world? Yeah.

Yeah. And and and people can go to like we we have we have over a hundred thousand people who read our research, so they can just go to run on GTMOS dot com to get. Great website by the way. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. It's it's been like it's like it's been a fun thing to do, ~ and write because it I love I think writing is thinking. ~ so it helps it it allows the thinking to flow.

And I'll encourage everybody to start writing, even if you never publish, just start writing because it It's not about perfect English or anything like that. I'm far from it. ~ but it's it it allows you to think. It it gives you enough time, your brain to do it.

So I've learned this for a decade now that writing is actually thinking, not the other way around. ~ but but that conversation is so, so g important, what you just brought up, Lee, around like what should you do in the first like like 90 days if that's what Mm-hmm. it is. I would take the time, take the GTMOS.

It has eight questions in it. Our research shows that most companies That do well, they have clarity around these eight questions. And some of those questions are like, where can you grow the most, which we just talked about, or what is the most differentiated point of view? Mm-hmm.

Not the same point of view as your customer or as as your competitors, because if you go to your website and their website, and if the messaging is the same, you do not have a differentiated point of view. You probably are playing in the same category. You need to have some differentiated point of view that is truly. Mm-hmm.

So there are words for each one of those eight questions that will force you to think deeper, but you can build your entire go-to-market strategy on that one slide. And I did this with Yamni Rangan, who's the CEO of HubSpot now. I did this with Henry Shucks, who's the CEO of ZoomInfo. I've done this with lots of companies.

Wow. Okay. ~ even at a publicly traded companies, you can do this. And you can do that in like about 30 minutes.

Okay. So just go and take that GTMOS, write the answers to those questions. And debate as an executive team. That's your job is to go in it and say, Hey, here's the eight questions.

Let us all just write in bullets. It forces you to be very, very succinct on what are what what's your where are we going to grow the most? And let's say one person but one CEO, like let's say the the CEO has given that mandate and the CRO says, Yeah, we're gonna go after enterprises. And the marketing says, Well, we have the budget for the only SMB market.

And the CFO says that, well, those the customers in the mid-market are more profitable. That debate You don't happen. It needs to happen in every business. Mm.

But it needs to, yeah. ~ yeah, right. Like so, you really go through these eight questions to get clarity, and that's a very important work. It's the clarity is what gets companies to move forward, not certainty.

You don't want necessarily you don't really know what's really gonna work. But if but I bet you that if marketing, sales, customer success, product, the CEO, the ops. If everybody aligns on the bets that you're going to take and everybody says, Hey, you what? We're going to go after this market, this size of customers, this industry, and all that stuff, you're going to have a lot more success than marketing going after SMB, sales trying to close enterprise deals because the compensation on that one is much higher for them.

CS is just trying to trying to figure out how to balance and they're giving the same amount of importance to a $100,000 deal that they give to a $10,000 deal. All these things happen because it GTM is not connected. And there's no reason why. If you believe go to market is the business, if is the whole conversation, if if I was able to convince anybody of anything, I would say I want you to recognize that go to market is the business.

That's the final frontier that's stopping businesses from growing. Mm-hmm. So, and and how do I how do I know what's going on in my business if your entire executive team does not have the clarity around these eight questions? Lee, it is almost virtually impossible for you as a business to grow.

Doesn't mean you need to have certainty around everyone, but you need to have clarity around what market we're gonna go after, Mm-hmm. what's our point of view, which go to market motion we're gonna focus on, what how our customers are gonna remember us and value us, and what metric are we gonna look at that will show success for this quarter? If you cannot get this level of understanding at the executive level, those companies are gonna fail. Yeah.

Yeah, good luck. It's it's sounds like a fantastic tool for challenging the status quo because and that's important because no accelerated growth ever happened because of folks following the status quo. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So yeah. Well, this has been fantastic. ~ really rich insights that you've shared. I wanna wind up with a question that kind of taps your imagination a little bit.

~ Suppose marketing was not in the picture for you, Sangrum, and and you could do or had to do anything else, what would it be as a career? Yeah. ~ like the like the folks in my university made me become a speaker. I did not know that was a skill I had or ~ had to develop.

I think if I wasn't doing marketing at such, I think I would just love to figure out how I can be a ~ like for lack of of a better term, like a motivational speaker of sorts, like because I enjoy seeing sparks in people's eyes around when things change and when they can do something better. ~ I love the idea that we are in this continuous improvement of ourselves and transforming every single day through through all the things. Mm-hmm. ~ I love I love ~ being deep in faith.

So I would be talking about faith all day long and how does that shape us and what to do and how to how do you go through the toughest time in life ~ through the at the roots of having some sort of faith that makes you makes you do and and go through it. ~ Ab Mab probably will be all the time outdoors and and doing campfires and storytelling because I want people to tell stories. I want I want to hear stories. I I think stories is how we all have spent hundreds of thousands of years ~ knowing about what happened, what not happened, and and storytelling is the oldest form of marketing in Mm-hmm.

Yeah. a in a way, right? So I would do all those things and I think in some way, shape or form, I think I still do those things somehow in my own marketing world, but that's what I Yeah. Yeah, well you're a great speaker, that's for sure.

And I've seen you present and it's ~ hey, Thank you. who knows? Who knows? It's an extra thing you can do.

Yeah. Yeah. ~ well fantastic. Thank you so much.

We're so you've got a lot of places where people can connect with you, but you know, we're gonna obviously link to the book move and we're gonna link to ~ your websites, but where where's the best place for folks to connect with you? Yeah, I mean I I mean run on GTMOS is a great place for people to just read research because we drop in new research every day on Go to Market. and I post Ibi it's been a decade. I've been posting on LinkedIn ~ almost every day, or at least three or four times a week.

So if you want to connect me on LinkedIn, ~ I love I love connecting with people and and getting to know and that's probably the best place to follow me personally if you want to follow along on the journey. Fantastic. Thanks again, Sangram. I really appreciate this.

This is really great conversation. And ~ I know our community is going to appreciate the insights that you've shared. So thank you so much. thank you for being a phenomenal host, Lee, and ~ excited to continue the journey with you.

Awesome. I want to thank you for tuning into the Beyond BDB Marketing podcast. And make sure you subscribe so you can stay tuned for our next guest. And remember, there's no better time than now to become a best dancer brand.