181: Why Most GTM Teams Fail to Scale (w/ Mark Kilens, Easy Llama)

Mark Kilens: The first thing any great marketer, salesperson, any great like GTM leader does is they deeply start to understand the who. Like who's the audience, who's the customer. You kind of know in your gut what, like what should be the icp. But like, let's really validate it and you might be surprised sometimes, but again, I think people like rush into some of these more complicated things before they're ready. Like they don't have the fundamentals down. What we're talking about here, icp, like ICP strategy. Welcome to Move the Needle, the show where we explore how teams turn data into growth.

Pete: Real stories, proven playbooks, books. Let's get into it. Hello everyone. I have a special guest here, Mark Killins. Killing it is what we used to call him, uh, at ah, HubSpot when we worked together back in the day. Mark built up the um, all of the customer training and education at HubSpot, which was like known, I'd say world known, world renowned in the software space for educating not just customers but our whole market. Right. And Mark led that effort and scaled that up. Now you're working at a company that helps other companies do training. You're a company called Easy Llama. Right? Um, fully bootstrapped company, uh, doing eight plus eight, eight figure business on with just 40 employees, highly profitable, 8,000 companies using the platform. So and so now you're out there like 10xing your impact on the world, helping lots of people do the kind of stuff that you did at HubSpot. Um, and you're now the VP of marketing there, um, and part uh, of the management team. Relatively small management team. Sounds like a handful of people. Uh, so glad to have you, Mark. Welcome. Anything else you want to share about your background before I jump into talking about how uh, how Easy Llama is kind of building out their business.

Mark Kilens: No, I appreciate those kind words. Um, and yeah, I think for, for Easy Llama,

Pete: we

Mark Kilens: definitely are focused on impact. Like you alluded to with HubSpot. Like we really talk about how do we make sure our customers are getting the impact, which are hr, you know, managers, HR directors, chief people, officers, compliance officers. But ultimately they take what we sell to them and then deliver that to their employees, like to their teams. And our whole notion is we want to create training experiences because we're in the compliance training and security training space, um, to match how people like to learn today. M. And that's how you get to change, or maybe you get the opportunity, hopefully get the opportunity to change someone's behavior and then Ultimately, better protect your business, reduce your company's risk, reduce human risk. It's about like, you know, actually making an impact. So I think that point you made, you know, Pete, about like, impact on. On the business, the customers you serve, but also then, like, maybe their end customers is very important to also then measure. Like, one way we measure it is course completions. How many people are not just like, getting assigned the courses, but completing the courses, and then how many people are know, assigning more courses and completing more courses. So I think having the impact metric for your business, and maybe we get to this at some point in the conversation, is very important. Like the value metric, the impact metric.

Pete: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. Yes, agreed. I think, uh, it's not always easy to come up with that in a business. Like, as you know, at HubSpot, we had, uh, the CHEESE Score, right, Where we would measure how companies are using the product, how often they're using the product. I think every SAS company has some kind of a metric like that, but it's always a little bit like, they should use the product more, right? Instead of, like, how much value are they getting. So it's nice when you can have that, um, North Star metric, some people call it, where it's like a true measure of your customer's success. Is your measure, your company's metric of success as well. So. And in the training space, I can see that, like, you ultimately want people finishing the training and then learning something that they then apply to their job to, like you're saying in compliance, where at least avoiding a risk, avoiding a catastrophe, avoiding an issue, right? Being whatever it is. So. So, yeah, totally. It's nice to. Nice to be able to have that metric. Um, yeah, we've. We've toyed around a data box of, like, trying to come up with a metric that like, measures the success of some company's business because we plug into all the tools that they use, their marketing data, their sales data, their financial data, et cetera. And so we could, you know, use actual real performance data from those companies to say, like, uh. But it's also hard to say, like, we're the drivers of that per se, because really all most of what we're doing is helping them make decisions, right? We're not making the decision for them or implementing any of the change for them, it's just there. We're helping them aggregate their data, analyze it, monitor it, track goals, performance on it, but not necessarily like, making the decisions or doing the work. So it's hard to. It's hard. In fact, I had an early customer, I'd say, like, we want to help you improve your performance and like, I don't need you to help me prove your performance. My team, I don't, I don't want you taking credit for improving my performance. My team, doing it. So, so we didn't, we didn't quite made that leap, but it's something we've talked about is having like a, a company score and, and actually grading a company based on their fundamentals and their growth.

Mark Kilens: You know what you should do though. So I just had a conversation with a former hubspotter, um, Keith. He's now the CEO of Tatango, which is this like customer success platform. And he was recently on my podcast and he blew my mind where he has implemented this thing called a value level agreement between the sales and CS teams. And this, uh, is so ingrained in the company now that they actually 25% of a salesperson's comp is tied to how well they implement that value level agreement with the customer. The CS team based off of the use cases and value drivers that, that the salesperson has got to discover and then enable the CS person to actually do and quantify. So I don't know. It could be something there like, like getting you specific with each customer. I don't know.

Pete: Right.

Mark Kilens: Yeah.

Pete: It's similar to what we tried to do at HubSpot when we had. I don't know if you remember, this was really early, but, um, we had really bad churn. There was one month where our churn spiked. Crazy. I think it was like right around the recession time. It came back down pretty quickly. We real. We. Jonah did a analysis and realized that churn varied significantly by salesperson. Um, and you could, you would have been able to guess who was. Had good retention and who had poor retention to the team. Uh, and so it was very obvious to me based on the way they sell. Right. And so, um, we made a change similar to that where compensation was tied closer to retention of the account. We. We quickly realized it was too punitive and we needed to like change it a little bit. Uh, so then we, we tied it to long term retention as opposed to churn. Um, so because ch turn is to this like as volatile, but, uh, yeah, volatile. Thank you for translating my, uh, my hand motions for the audio. Uh, exactly. All right, so let's go back to Easy Llama. When did you join?

Mark Kilens: Just about a year ago. Yeah.

Pete: Okay. Just about a year ago. Cool. And then, um, did they have a marketing function before or did you kind of establish it out?

Mark Kilens: They did. They, they didn't have a marketing leader since about October. Um, I, I actually jo a fractional marketing leader because I was in between full time gigs and.

Pete: Yeah, I remember you had. You were doing that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Kilens: And actually I did that for a few reasons, but one of the reasons why I did that for about two years is to ultimately land my next full time gig.

Pete: Okay.

Mark Kilens: It was very. That's a whole other conversation for another day.

Pete: Um, you're not the only fractional person that was doing that. Yes.

Mark Kilens: Yeah, it's very, very intentional. I also have like three kids under six. Well, one just turned six yesterday. So like kids and just. Anyway, you know how it is. Um, so yeah, they had a very like nascent marketing function and it was really a function based off of just volume, like the classic quantity. Let's not really focus on quality. Let's focus on much smaller businesses. Not super sharp and strong positioning. And messaging didn't have a very defined like icp. The focus wasn't quite there. So I'm like, oh, there's a ton of opportunity here. This is exciting.

Pete: Yeah, yeah. It's funny. It's like you're almost looking for the problems to solve. Right. Because you know that if you solve the problems, then you can be the hero and impact a lot of people.

Mark Kilens: Yep.

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Pete: Uh, so you know that I wrote out a course. I call it Predictable Scale. It has a methodology to it. It's um, five Steps, strategize, plan, execute, adjust, repeat and scale. Um, the reason I wrote it is because um, looking at our customers I could see patterns of patterns behind failure and patterns behind success. Because again, we have access to a lot of data and we can crunch that. And what I saw is that the companies that are consistently growing are good and spend the time at ah, building out a differentiated strategy. Then they are good at turning that strategy, uh, into a plan, shorter term annual quarterly plans. I'm hoping that we can dive into how Easy Llama does it as an inspiration for people and motivation for people to do it right. Um, so maybe let's start with strategy. You alluded to it a little bit. The first step in my methodology is like narrowing down your ICP so that you're focused on the customers that are either going to pay you the most, stay with you the longest, close the quickest, refer your business some m measurable metric that says this is our best customer segment. So it sounds like you guys did something like that. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you did it and, and um, and what you arrived at?

Mark Kilens: Yeah, I mean you nailed it. I mean the first thing any great marketer, salesperson, any great like GTM leader does is they deeply start to understand the who. Like, who's the audience, who's the customer. So when I joined I was kind of in a lucky spot. EasyLama had about 8,000 customers at that point. And we just looked at the customer data, everything from product usage to renewals to churn to all of it. And we tried to do a regression and say like, hey, where is their health and where is there like maybe not such great health in the install base? And then when, when you look at firmographics, you know, demographics, um, first mostly just those two kind of data sets. What are the commonalities that we could find and understand? And we kind of, you know, how every company is once you have product market fit, you know, definitely past problem market fit, your product market fit. We had product market fit. You kind of know in your gut what, like what should be the icp, but like, let's really validate it and you might be surprised sometimes. And after doing that for about six to eight weeks, and we did this cross functionally. We did this with the rev ops person that was um, on the team. We did this with the head, the head of product, the chief technology officer who's also a co founder. Uh, we did this with the, the incoming sales leader, uh, that was, was coming into the company, um, of course the CEO, like I, I led this and it was a very cross functional way to make sure everyone understood what we were doing, why we were doing this analysis, what was the like ultimate, ultimate outcome and what would we do with the information then once we had this. So that's at a high level kind of what we did, you know. Pete.

Pete: Yeah. That's awesome. I was just talking to a fractional CMO and uh, M. He was really good. Like, understands his, you know, he has a process where he defines that icp. He then moves into positioning, then he moves into what's the offer, then he moves into um, messaging and then he moves into channels and like laying it out. So like really regimented. And I said to him like, that's a lot of freaking work and you're doing it just so that you can get to the marketing. Right. Um, and so I'm. It's awesome that you included everyone because that selection of that ICP does not just govern how you market or who you market to. It governs how you build your business. And so I'd love to hear maybe one, two, three things that you guys are doing differently as a result of that icp. And hopefully there's more than just marketing changes set up for that. No, no, no.

Mark Kilens: I mean some of the big things we found, um, number one, you know, where do we win and why do we win? Right. And then where do we lose and why do we lose? And that helps tremendously with product roadmap and product strategy and product decisions. Like, that's a big piece of what we learned through this analysis. Very, um, very insightful. We also, at the same time we have a very strong user experience researcher on the team. Uh, she's excellent. I think it's another reason, it's definitely actually a reason why he joined uh, Pete is because we have an awesome product leader. They intentionally build products. We intentionally build products with a lot of like, thoughtfulness and talking to customers, talking to the market, like looking at things. We combine those things together to get a very strong point of view on our product strategy and product roadmap. So I'll stop there to see if you have any questions about that. But that was one big outcome from this.

Pete: Yeah, that's key. In fact, I like, um, we have internal conversations that are very similar about like, what's our ICP and what are we going to do about it. Uh, and that's the, that's what I always bring it back to is like knowing the ICP or picking or narrowing the ICP the first thing you have to do is, like, do we have the best product for them objectively or not? Like, and so the next step is like, look at the competitors are competing for that market and can you differentiate or not? And if you can't, then you can't even say you have the best product for them. Because if you're just one of five or one of three or one of ten or whatever, or one of a thousand, it's hard. So very. It's very encouraging for me to hear that that impacted the product mo wrap to some degree at least. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Kilens: It's kind of these three Ps. The second P is, um, pricing and packaging. Well, it's two Ps, but, like, packaging. So, like, this helped us understand how to potentially change. And we did change some packaging and pricing at the same time when we kind of were learning these things.

Pete: Yeah.

Mark Kilens: And now, like, in the future, we're going to take this, do even more thoughtful pricing and packaging, research and discovery. But, like, that's a big thing too. Right. So you have your product strategy, product roadmap, who you're building it for. That like, kind of bullseye, like you're saying. Then it's pricing and packaging. And the third is positioning. So it's like you got your product, you got your packaging, pricing, you got your positioning.

Pete: All right.

Mark Kilens: Now those are kind of aligned to the right, like, audience. The right who? The right icp. And you can start to get really focused. And, um, hopefully what you'll see is, uh, better quality leads that have higher close rates, higher ACVs, and better retention. I mean, that's the ultimate reason why you do this, right?

Pete: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the final one is placement. Right. So I'm guessing you then took that positioning and started to put that across, across your channels, right?

Mark Kilens: Yep, yep. It's the classic 4Ps. I mean, it doesn't really go right. Right. I mean, it's really. Well, I think that's a little different.

Pete: I don't know if it's the classic one. I always forget what the classic one is.

Mark Kilens: Well, yeah, maybe it's promotion. There's a promotion one. Promotion. Because. Because it's more like, you know, physical products placed in promotion. Yeah.

Pete: Um, we're dating ourselves. We're not quite old enough to know, to actually have experience what the old 4Ps are, but we know what they are, right? Uh,

Mark Kilens: yeah. I did not go to a business school.

Pete: Marketing. Did you? What did you guys go by?

Mark Kilens: Uh, well, it was. I had a, uh, degree in, uh, tourism business Tourism. Business tourism. Uh, so not, not a, not a business degree though, business tourism. And then I have a minor in financial accounting and a minor in some other business thing.

Pete: I don't know really. It's turned out to be really useful whatever it was.

Mark Kilens: The financial accounting one has been.

Pete: Because the one you're not thinking of.

Mark Kilens: No, no, no, no, of course not. No, the financial accounting one. I, I want to do a quick take on this. Uh, Pete, it goes back to your conversation or question on like strategy from a go to market standpoint. I think the best go to market leaders, no matter if you're marketing sales CS another function, understand your P L like how, how your kind of like budget or P L like really works and impacts the overall businesses and you understand the business is piano. Like I, I when you talk about like this ICP stuff, this is all good but like what is the economics of the business? And you don't have to do like this crazy LTV to CAC analysis. You don't need to do all this shit. You don't need to have like amazing, uh, what is it called? Uh, attribution. Like attribution is a farce at this point. I mean AI will make it better I think, but uh, you just need to know like hey, when you look at your, your, your expense of gtm, like headcount, for example, right? And you look at like how much revenue that brings in, like is that healthy or not healthy? Like just start basic stuff, Pete, you

Pete: know what I mean? The relative uh, effort and expense of different things, does it have a, you know, the relative impact? Right, like just trying to get that at eye level. Yeah, basic.

Mark Kilens: And then like you can peel the onion and say okay, great, like this is looking good. This isn't looking good. Like for some things, depending on how you go to market, you definitely want to have a deeper ROI analysis. Like you know one way that we have gone to market is very marketing led, like very focused on inbounding marketing sources. A lot of our pipelines, we have a pretty big responsibility. So I'm uh, pretty dialed in on like when you think about performance marketing, paid channels, what is that ratio of spend to pipeline return to revenue return and what's the lifetime value? I think this year we're going to take it up a whole nother level with understanding that in a more real time way and being able to then take past data and say hey, you have a high chance that this is going to come true through predictive analytics. Uh, but again I think people like rush into Some of these more complicated things, Pete, before they're ready. Like, they don't have the fundamentals, they

Pete: don't have the foundation. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Kilens: Of what we're talking about here. Icp, like ICP strategy, there's all kinds of foundations.

Pete: I think one of them is that the uh, another one that we run into is like, people are like, yeah, I want to do multi touch attribution and modeling. And then we ask them, okay, what tools are you using? Using? And like, can we plug in your data? And they're like, uh, I don't have a password for that. It's like, like they don't have their password to HubSpot or Google Analytics.

Mark Kilens: Right.

Pete: Or like Search Console or hrefs. Oh, I rely on somebody to send me a report every month. I'm like, you are so far away from worrying about predictive analytics. Predictive, like you just need to get your together so that you actually know how you're performing and make the connection between the work you're doing each week and at least the potential impact of it. Right.

Mark Kilens: So that's true.

Pete: There's a lot of companies that don't have those basics. But it sounds like that's not Easy Llama. It sounds like Easy Llama has a lot of that in, in, uh, uh, in. In, uh, in place. Um, and given that you're so marketing driven, um, I imagine like you guys have like a vision or a view of how the future will be and kind of your role in it. Could you speak a little bit to that? Because that's in the strategy section of my course. It's kind of the next step. Like after you narrow your icp, after you do kind of a SWOT analysis where you're comparing your strengths relative to your competitors. Next step is to step back and say, all right, now that we have all this customer and competitive information in our heads or on paper, like what. How are we. What do we change? What is the change we want to create in the world? And so I'm curious if you guys have kind of gotten that hot, you know, uh, thought, thought that high level.

Mark Kilens: Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. Like, so simplify it down. You have small business, mid market enterprise. Right. Like those size businesses.

Pete: Pete. Okay.

Mark Kilens: I think that. And then you have your asp. What's your average sales price?

Pete: Yeah.

Mark Kilens: Um, and then you have how much change management is required when someone buys your product? Every product requires change management, but how much does it require? HubSpot. It was actually a lot of change management required for these small businesses.

Pete: Right.

Mark Kilens: So. So, like, I think you need to take those three things into account when you answer this next question that you just asked me.

Pete: Okay.

Mark Kilens: Taking those into account. You know, we're catering more to the small business, medium business. We're definitely not enterprise, not even close. Um, because it's really a red ocean for us over there. Like, we feel like there's a classic blue ocean, if you will.

Pete: Like, so the, for the small and mid sized businesses are underserved in this. They don't have an affordable, easy to use way to basically be compliant, which is, yes, important.

Mark Kilens: No, exactly, exactly. Um, like your, your company is a great probably ICP match for us. You know, I mean, as an example.

Pete: Yeah.

Mark Kilens: So we're like, all right, great, like thinking about that. You know, how do we go to market? Like, it's a bootstrap company. We're going to be very, you know, efficient. Try to be efficient. Um, and the other thing with this company you have to ask yourself is like, are you. Or how much demand can you kind of just, um, uh, what's the right term? Uh, like just cultivate or pick from versus like having to really create it. Like, like.

Pete: Yeah. How much can you capture versus that's already out existing demand that you can capture versus go out and create the need. Like convince me that I need this risk compliance uh, training tool.

Mark Kilens: And that is on a spectrum of like, how important and big is the pain. So you have to consider that as you think about your whole like, go to market strategy related to your icp. And for us, for a lot of the things we sell, not everything, but a lot of the things, Pete, Federal laws, state laws.

Pete: Okay.

Mark Kilens: Yeah, of course you have to do some of this.

Pete: Understood.

Mark Kilens: Uh, yes, but like I'm, I'm sharing all this because like it really has to inform how you think about your go to market.

Pete: Yeah.

Mark Kilens: That being said, you could be like, great, like, everyone needs this. All we have to do is like, make sure we show up in the right place for when they're thinking about this problem and we'll be good. No, Right?

Pete: Yeah. Not good enough. Right.

Mark Kilens: It's not that easy.

Pete: That's expensive to do that, right? Yes, it's expensive.

Mark Kilens: Not that easy. It's also like, yeah, there's not much like moat or like differentiation or you know, leverage. Distribution leverage, which I think is the most important thing you can think about these days. Distribution leverage. Distribution leverage. Um, so what we've done is we've started to create a new narrative around compliance. Like we've believed compliance Kind of like the HubSpot narrative, where there's an old way. We think the old way is very reactive. It's. It's almost like in a legacy kind of moment where sexual harassment, we need

Pete: to do sexual harassment.

Mark Kilens: It's like you don't want a lawsuit to happen to have you do that. You know what I mean? And also, like, the laws are changing really fast. Uh, we also do a lot with security now and security training. Um, we have an amazing phishing simulator. So our whole stance is proactive compliance, which we call, like, more agile. Like, you need to be more agile with you think. When you think about your compliance and security. Okay, so you take this messaging and point of view and storytelling, and then you start to say, all right, great. How are we going to reach this audience? Tying that point of view and messaging, not, um, from a product standpoint per se, but more of a problem standpoint. And how do we get that in front of the right people? But also at the same time, we know people are coming to us for exactly. Like you said, they're typing into Google or like ChatGPT. Now, what's the best sexual harassment training? So we need to show up in both spots, and depending on they come in, we have to meet them in the middle. You know what I mean?

Pete: Um, so going back to. I want to understand, Go back to the, like, the problem statement you said earlier is like, is. Or the positioning that you have. Is it that, like, is the positioning that, like, there's new issues that are going to arise. There's new laws, there's new regulations, there's new, um, risks to your business, and those are happening all the time. And Easy Llama is on top of those. And, and we will be able to deliver it. So you don't need to sit there and worry about what the newest thing is. So you can add, you can be agile, you can train your team on what they need to be trained and ensure compliance without worrying about it. Is that kind of the. Is that.

Mark Kilens: Bingo. We. We help you. We. You know where I'm going to go with this now? We help you identify the laws, the regulations and trainings you need to keep your business protected and people safe.

Pete: Okay. Oh, that's great.

Mark Kilens: And then. And then we help you.

Pete: We just. Did we just hear your mission statement?

Mark Kilens: Uh, no, it's not. Our mission statement's a little bit higher. Our mission statement is we help businesses create safer and more productive workplaces.

Pete: Okay. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, perfect.

Mark Kilens: Yeah.

Pete: But that's perfectly aligned.

Mark Kilens: It is perfectly aligned. Yes.

Pete: So, yeah. Awesome. Good work. It's rare. And do you have like, a separate vision statement. Ah. Of like, how you want to create what you want to create in the world or. We.

Mark Kilens: We actually don't. We have a very similar thing we did at HubSpot with an M M spot. So we do have like a. Our. We call it the llama path. The llama path.

Pete: Okay, got it. Um, everybody's got to have their, um, own the. Uh. I was. When I was talking to Chris Savage, founder CEO of Wistia, uh, about a month ago, and uh, about theirs, we learned from them because one of their executives was our VP Marketing here for a while. And we went through this process of just called defining your view of the future. Uh, and it was really helpful because many times we wrote our vision and mission statement and it never stuck. It never was memorable. We didn't get it. And we would debate over all these little words. Yours is good. I don't think you need to work on it. But we'd debate all of these words and sometimes it's too high level, sometimes it's too detailed, sometimes it's too constraining, sometimes not. Not specific enough to communicate anything. So it was really hard. And so we said, we just said stop worrying about, like, fitting it into eight words and instead just like, let's write a page on what trends happened that got us here and what. Which one of those we think will continue. And then what new trends do we think will happen in the coming years that's relevant to us and our customers for what we do? Um, and then. And like, by saying we can write a page, it allowed us to like, expand our thought process. But. And then. And the beauty of it is we were able to get agreement. And like, some of it was like, yeah, we all 100 agree with that line. And then someone was like, yeah, we're pretty cool with that line, but we got a page, so it's fine. Right. Like, so then. Then condensing that down into vision and mission was so much easier because we, we, uh, we were clear on what we were 100% in agreement on.

Mark Kilens: Yes.

Pete: And what should be in there. So it was an interesting exercise, but it sounds like you guys got your mission aligned perfectly with your positioning with your icp, which is really the crux of it. Um, so that's cool. You start. I'm going to move to like, planning a little bit and like, how easy planning. I think you guys have the strategy stuff dialed in, it seems. Um, and you already alluded to It a little bit earlier of like, um, you know, you have all these channels that you're running. You um, you need to see what, not just what the CAC is on those relative CAC is, but like you need to see is it helping, is it driving high LTV customers? So it sounds to me like you have a lot of stuff instrumented and I'm curious. And you also said that m marketing drives a big portion of the business, at least from a customer acquisition perspective. Um, and so I'm curious if you did any modeling to figure out, oh, if we want to hit this target at the end of the year. Did you work backwards to oh, what does our budget need to be over here or how much improvement do we need here? And can you just talk a little bit about that planning, mathematical planning process that you.

Mark Kilens: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean all of our stuff like can always be better. Like we're not like, like a world class company yet, but it's, it's in a pretty good spot. So we have like good, good, good data or like you say good enough data. Right, Pete? Um, to be able to, yeah. Do some modeling and forecasting based off of scenarios and then historicals.

Pete: Okay.

Mark Kilens: You know, you gotta, you gotta have, be in business at least a couple years to be able to do this. I think. Um, I mean, I guess you could do it with a couple quarters, but

Pete: it might not be super reliable. Yeah, yeah. All that, how much control you have over how much, how much there is a correlation between the work you're doing and the outcome you're producing. If you have that correlation, then you can model. But. And sometimes that can be 30 days depending on what you're doing. But yes, I agree it helps to have a few years of data and see some trends, seasonality, even things like that.

Mark Kilens: Yep. Yeah. So we had, we had a couple years of reliable data and then we did that and then we actually look at it now we have an amazing coo, um, who helps with this in a big way. We, we are really looking at it at a quarter basis like because uh, we're bootstrapped. We're like, we don't like uh. Oh, like there's not really like a board which is kind of nice, you know, to some degree. Like it's, it's, we can kind of control our own destiny here. So it's, how do we make sure we're doing the best things for our customers and the best things for the business, like kind of every 90 days almost, you know.

Pete: Okay. Yeah.

Mark Kilens: Yeah.

Pete: Awesome. Um, good and so the CEO COO is kind of quarterbacking that process.

Mark Kilens: Yep, yep.

Pete: But are you or is he working with like functional leaders or managers and like trying to model out things here?

Mark Kilens: She. Oh yeah, oh yeah, we have discussions. We went through it. Uh, he mapped out, I think it was a, um, a 10 week 2026 planning process that we methodically went through. Uh, it was five steps. Um, we had an off site during, like between step one and two, basically where we got together in Miami, really, like, and that's where we talked about like strategic priorities and we call it big bets. What are the big bets for 2026? And then how would those big bets impact? Potentially the financial side of it, but also just kind of like our normal business operations. And then we debated those. Then we went back and said these are the ones we're going to pick

Pete: and use and do.

Mark Kilens: And you know, it's basically three, four big bets. And we started with like 10. Um, you know, we did the memo approach to that process when we thought about the big bets, and then we built a financial plan based off of that. And we, we did both top down and, and bottoms up. But a lot of it comes down to ppr. Like, what does the sales team look like, what are assumed ppr? Like, what do we think about headcount, Stuff like that?

Pete: It did okay. It's nice. It's also, you can size it. That's. We struggle with that here at Databox, we are so marketing driven. Our ICP or ASP or ARPU is really low. Um, it's like $350 a month per customer. Uh, so it's hard to sit there and say like, yeah, let's just add headcount. It needs to really be driven through marketing first. Um, so. Got it. So you did the modeling. Um, but I want to step back. You said something like big bet. So in the course that I write that I wrote, going from strategy to planning, I talk a lot about objectives. Um, you probably are familiar with objectives and key results, which was pioneered back at intel days and leveraged by Google and Amazon, Airbnb and all these well known multibillion dollar companies. Um, we have a model we use called Objectives, goals and initiatives. Objectives is the same as in okrs. Goals is basically just another word for key results. But we tie initiatives to it. And so I think your initiatives could be like big bets, for example. Um, and so we have four, four big objectives and then multiple initiatives underneath. Um, but to me it sounds like you're maybe you're big Bets are similar to your objectives. My guess is that they're like somewhat qualitative, aspirational things that you want to improve in the business or have a bigger impact on the customers or the team or something like that.

Mark Kilens: Would you share.

Pete: Would you be comfortable sharing one of them?

Mark Kilens: Oh, yeah, yeah, we're actually launching one of them. When does this podcast go live? Is it coming up pretty soon?

Pete: Probably in a month or so.

Mark Kilens: Oh, yeah, so it should be out. It'd be out. Uh, we're launching something called the Compliance Copilot.

Pete: Oh, cool. Nice.

Mark Kilens: Yes.

Pete: Guess what that is. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Kilens: So, yeah, you know, it's. It's, uh. Yeah, you can guess what that is. Basically an assistant in a way to help you make sure you're staying as compliant as you can be, like, keeping up to date with all these changes and stuff, you know. So, yeah, uh, for us, like, we heard again, this is coming from customer feedback. Like, it's really hard to know, like, we have all these employees in all these states to know, like, what all the regulations are changes, like, what's going on. Like, no, we got you covered. Like, we got you covered.

Pete: So they can go into assumably a chat interface in your product and just say, hey, you know, I have new employees in Pennsylvania. Am I. What do I need to be compliant? Or, hey, am I compliant? You know, given where all my team is or whatever.

Mark Kilens: Yeah, yeah. And then we, then we, you know, through our smart assign feature, we automate the assignments, help automate the training, and then we monitor risk levels and compliance, uh, levels, completion. Like, so it's. It's really those three verbs, you know, my fan with those three jobs to be done, Pete, like identify, automate, monitor.

Pete: Like, that's, that's okay, you know. Yeah, got it. That's cool. And so, and then they can interact with all that, uh, all that data through the chat interface so they can see how am I, am I in compliance or where am I out of compliance?

Mark Kilens: Oh, yeah. Big vision around this. Big vision. I would. So one thing we do differently that goes back to the, ah, OKR piece is those big bets. I want to call them maybe okrs. Those are definitely more aspirational. Aspirational. Like you said, we have quarterly leadership priorities. So every VP and above sets quarterly priorities. There's like seven, eight of us and those then cascade. And I have then monthly priorities for my team that they set and they reflect back on. We have, you know, in marketing, we're very data driven, of course, so we have like literally daily and Weekly KPI pacing. We have waterfalls in marketing that we've set up like waterfalls and sales. But like we do have this idea of like you know, the big bets, the llama path, down to the quarterly stuff, down to the monthly, down to almost the weekly.

Pete: Gotcha. Awesome.

Mark Kilens: Yeah.

Pete: So in my execute chapter in my course that's exactly what it's all about. It's about taking your, your high level bats or in the case, in the case of our system, ogis or okrs and then breaking the key results of the goals down. Um, the org chart so that they're cascading. Um, the easy one to explain is the salesperson, sales team, sales leader has a new customer acquisition goal and then each sales reps gonna have it and then each sales rep might have a deal creation guideline and call ah, volume guideline. Right. So all those goals get cascaded down and um, we built something in databox that allows you to look at that all in one screen so you can see everything cascaded all over once.

Mark Kilens: I love that.

Pete: So um, so it sounds like you're doing. And then you have the meeting cadence that backs that up. So you have you know, the quarterly meeting with the management team. Then you have a monthly, sounds like monthly with your reports and then they're looking at things weekly and reporting that out. So it sounds like you uh. And then if you have waterfall charts where you're seeing how you're trending in a given week or given month against a goal, then you know everybody can pay, everybody can pay attention to how you're trending and if they need to

Mark Kilens: course correct sector every day. I can tell you that right now we're about two to three days ahead of pace for our core leading indicator of demand right now. Like I can, I can tell you that. Right. I can look right now and tell you that I can tell you where we are from a pipeline standpoint. Like real time. Pete, you know, you know the importance of that. Like I think it's almost unacceptable now. Like once you get to a certain point, you know you have problem market fit, you're maybe finding product market fit. You're definitely past product market fit. Like you should have real time metrics and like tracking like yeah, this is like a no brainer here. Come on folks.

Pete: Yeah, you'd be surprised how many companies don't. Uh, everybody in our funnel generally doesn't. Right. Because they're basically like well that's a problem you're solving that they, they, we can solve that.

Mark Kilens: So yeah, well that's the problem you're solving. So that's why I'm like, I'm just like encouraging people to like have data box have Pete. I'm not. He did not ask me to say this, folks. Like, you should definitely have real time visibility to how your business is doing.

Pete: And it's hard. Like, we actually just launched our um, um, chat app, we call it genie, also launched the MCP server that allows people to chat with any of the data they have connected in Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, build workflow automations in NAD or Make or whatever. Um, and so we're seeing major uptick in that because just monitoring how you're doing is good, but understanding why something is trending is harder. And it's actually really hard for most humans. Like most humans don't think in terms of correlations and inputs connecting to outputs to outcomes. Like a lot of people have trouble thinking in systems. Uh, and then when you start doing, you know, analyzing your website traffic, just as a simple example, like, you got channels, you got pages, there's so many ways that you can slice and dice things. And for a human to go through and slice and dice that and like zero in on a problem or an opportunity is hard. But AI attached to well structured data can do that shit in minutes. And like spit out like, here's your problems, here's your solutions, here's opportunities, here's recommendations. And like, it's crazy how fast you can do it now with that stuff. So I agree with you. It's your derelict and your duty if you're not paying attention to your performance after a certain size. Uh, and uh, you know the type of the I imagine you guys have with 8,000 customers, I imagine you have relatively high volume of transactions. Uh, and so like no one human can see all that without data. Right? You need data to translate that into how things are going.

Mark Kilens: You do, you do. That's cool. You're right about the insight. That's where I worry about AI. Like you can lose. You can also gain great critical thinking skills, but you can also become not a great critical thinker. I don't know, it's very tough.

Pete: Uh, yeah. So what we're seeing is like, so as you know, we work with a lot of agencies, um, a lot of really great agencies, but even in an agency that's like 50 employees and doing great, they generally have just a handful of people who are really good at analysis and they're usually a bottleneck. Um, and so what we're doing with AI with them is like they're basically writing out analytical SOPs. So it explains how to analyze something. It's like here's how we analyze LinkedIn AD accounts. They might even have an SOP for how they set up LinkedIn AD accounts and by, by feeding that plus the performance data in real time into say Claude. Now CLAUDE can use their analytics sop, their account setup SOP and the real time data to like and uh, uh yeah, and the real time data in order to do the analysis in the way that that smartest person in the agency would do. Um, and you know, because you're feeding the instructions and it's doing and it's like showing you the data as it's showing you the recommendation. Like most humans can interpret that and say oh yeah, I see that trend or I see that fall off a cliff or hey, I see that that's working better than expected. Um, and the AI is just finding that for you and then you can still validate that through the visualization of the data.

Mark Kilens: Love that. I love that.

Pete: Yeah, that's pretty crazy. We're crazy times right now, man.

Mark Kilens: It's exciting. It's definitely crazy exciting.

Pete: Yeah. Scary. We might all be out of work in about six months. We'll see. But in the meanwhile it's kind of fun. Uh, so what's ah, like stepping away from my methodology for a little bit. So um, what surprised you along the way? You've been there a year. What hasn't worked that you thought would work? And maybe that's one question to start with.

Mark Kilens: Well, I think it comes down to what metric like do you feel is going to be the one that helps like get your sales and marketing team better united? Like that's a key thing. That's like that's super important. So uh, we were, we spent, spent some time like searching for that, looking at that, looking at the data. Um, and we have this thing like called hand raisers versus non hand raisers.

Pete: Okay.

Mark Kilens: Like MQL is like we have lifecycle stages, all this crap. Like right.

Pete: Because definitions can get so lost and fucked up. Uh yeah, yeah, like simple like for

Mark Kilens: a salesperson it's simple. For a marketer simple, we have non handraisers that marketing is responsible to nurture to a hand raised state. And then we have three or four different types of offers that turn someone into a hand raiser and sales has to follow up with them and they usually do phone calls, personal emails, LinkedIn maybe use like thanks. This gifting thing we have like they are going to turn those hand raisers hopefully into a deal and it's super clean and simple, but it just took some time to get to that point, you know, like.

Pete: Right.

Mark Kilens: So like that can, where is that in your process? Maybe that's more like execution. But like that is really important for everyone listening. Like if you have a sales team, like you got to make sure like your marketing and sales team, like was

Pete: there, was there a challenge that you walked into where I was like, uh, I'm guessing you were generating more demand than the sales team could actually follow up with appropriately or effectively.

Mark Kilens: It was some of that. It was more like we were generating a lot of this demand that I thought they should try to engage with in not all of it, but some of it. And, and now with the new sales leader came in coming in, you know Ellen, she's awesome and like she and I were able to figure this out with um, a few other people's help and say like, look like it's clear that like the only uh, the only type of hand raiser they were working before is just demo requests. And we do get a lot of demo requests. It's good. Like we have a good machine but like you know, that's not going to be like the only thing that we can rely on to get to the sales number. Like we need a little bit other and we think of it as higher intent product actions. So when you think about your hand raisers, everyone listening, what are the things? It could be an interactive demo, it could be a free trial, it could be a, a uh, preview of something that's product specific. But what are the product offers you have that are higher intent, that are showing more like buying kind of interest or commitment that sales should be working, in my opinion.

Pete: Got it.

Mark Kilens: Okay.

Pete: Have you guys tried to build out like a product qualified lead? You have a free trial?

Mark Kilens: We, we don't. The flavor of PLG we have right now is um, a free course preview. But it's a flavor. It's not even close to true plgp. But compliance Copilot, we have a, that is a free web app. So uh, yeah, again, depending on when

Pete: this comes out, I can see how excited you are. You're hoping that makes everything easier on marketing.

Mark Kilens: Well, no, not easier. I think we're actually doing. The team's doing a great job. I think it's all about three things, right? Volume, quality and cost. How do we like get volume up, keeping quality down and cost like about the same.

Pete: We're the same. So we, we've built uh, what we call genie, which is our chat app. And, um, uh, we're just launching it to customers right now. In fact, it's only in beta for like, 20 or 30 customers right now. Um, but we do see how it will become the tool that people use to onboard themselves into our product, in which case it might make sense for us to give a portion of it away, um, and just let them connect data, start asking questions of it. And then now we have time, right, to like, say, hey, you should visualize that. Why don't you build a dashboard that you can share with your team? Or, hey, you should report that out to a stakeholder. Build a. Build a report and all those. Or set a goal, right? All these features in our product that we can push them to. Uh, and so we've talked about that as too, is potentially using the chat app as a. Basically a free thing that people get started with.

Mark Kilens: And I love that. I love it. Getting people to experience your product before they talk to a salesperson is so important today.

Pete: Yeah, we've always. We've always had that. So we have a free trial, so. And we have a PQL score, right. So we, based on what they do in the product, we can predict with pretty good accuracy whether they're going to buy. Um, and so our sales team focuses there first, but we have the same struggle of, like, all right, you've worked all those. Now what are you doing? And so then, like, the efficiency and effectiveness drops off quite a bit. But we still want the sales team doing that, especially when they have time, right?

Mark Kilens: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, I mean, it's an exciting time.

Pete: Um,

Mark Kilens: it's. There's just, I think, you know, hell, again, you saw, you always say this, and I take it with me, like, match how you go to market to how people like to buy today. Yeah, and still true. Yeah, it's still true. But it goes back to, like, what is your icp? Everyone is a person at the end of the day, right? People are people. But, you know, for your business to have the highest chance of, you know, growing or keeping its growth rate high or growing faster or whatever, like, you really got to get all of the key teams and players aligned. So, like, doing this ICP stuff as a united, like, leadership team, like, is so important. So important.

Pete: We did. We did the same thing every year, basically. We. And it's a lot of time and it's a lot of effort, and sometimes we end up just rehashing what we did the year before. But it's so important just to re. Re. Evaluate that and say, okay, yeah, we were 100% right. We're going to stick with that. Or, oh, uh, we were only 50% right. We're going to tweak that. Or, hey, we were right direction, but we didn't do enough to really have an impact there. We need to focus more, make that more of a focus. And I think those discussions are so important to get on the same page. And when you get to the point where you're past, you know, past 20 people, past 40 people, past 100 people, like, if you're not. If your management team isn't on the same page in that stuff and everybody's moving in different directions, it's very obvious to the rest of the team. It becomes obvious to the market. Um, and so, yeah, I agree with you. If you're not taking that time to do that strategy and get that alignment, it's really hard to get anything done.

Mark Kilens: Yeah, it's been an awesome conversation, Pete. I love it.

Pete: Yeah, man. I appreciate you jumping on and, uh, going through this stuff with me. Um, congrats on success so far with EZ Llama. Look forward to seeing you guys help lots more companies, um, uh, reduce their risk profile. Uh, and what was the. What was the other part? There was another part.

Mark Kilens: It was, uh, create safer workplaces. Just create safer.

Pete: Yes, Yes. I used to work in manufacturing, so I understand how important that is.

Mark Kilens: Osha.

Pete: Huge manufacturing.

Mark Kilens: Osha. Oh, my God.

Narrator: Yeah.

Pete: Yeah. Cool. Thanks, Mark. Great catching up with you. Glad to see you're still doing well. Um, uh, be careful out there in the snow. I know you got like three, uh, feet. Snow drift, so.

Mark Kilens: Well, you do too. You saw you as well, Pete. I mean, hopefully by the time this comes out, like, there is no snow on the ground.

Pete: I'm looking for. It's like, I love the seasons in New England, but there's always. Every season, there's always a point, like, I can't wait for the next season to come. And I'm at that point right now.

Mark Kilens: Oh, I'm so done. Like, so cold. So much snow. We all. I have. I have younger kids than you, but, like, the kids, they gotta, like, go outside, like, get back to school.

Narrator: Yeah.

Pete: All right, man.

Narrator: I'm gonna.

Pete: I'm gonna stop it. Thanks again.

Mark Kilens: Yeah,

Narrator: Thanks so much for listening. If you found this episode valuable, check out our other episodes or subscribe to get new ones. If you want to support. Support the show, we'd love for you to leave a review or share it with someone. And if you want a tool to help you track and improve your business performance. Try Databox free@databox.com.