How Smaller Businesses Beat Bigger Competitors with Gareth Lockwood

Speaker A: Buyers are overwhelmed, uh, with noise, vendor noise. You just got to walk a trade show floor to witness tens, if not hundreds of companies offering very similar solutions. So you kind of as a customer, you almost get desensitized to some of the problems. And in our industry, that is the worst thing to have. Budgets are under pressure. Trust is a lot harder to earn.

Speaker B: Welcome to the spotlight on Marketing brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd, specialist headhunters in the B2B marketing space. I'm your host, Karen Lloyd and today I am m joined by Gareth Lockwood. He's the chief technology officer at a scale up cybersecurity firm called Trustlayer. Now some of you might be thinking, why is a product and technology leader coming on a podcast about marketing? Well, that's exactly the assumption I want to challenge. Because if you think product sits in a box and marketing sits another, that's where the problem starts. So today we're going to get into why siloed thinking kills commercial performance and whether partner marketing is here to stay. And also we're going to talk about the smaller players and how they can win against the big budgets. So welcome Gareth.

Speaker A: Thanks very much Karen for inviting me.

Speaker B: Excellent. So it's interesting because, um, you've worked for the variety of different companies and what do you think the biggest mistake is that you see where people have, you know, you sat in product. But what do you think the biggest mistake organizations have when they silo marketing sales and channel into separate functions?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting point. I've been in high tech industries now for 25 plus years and kind of worked in places where the product has been light years ahead of the market. Places where the brand has been bigger than the product and in some way channel has been the only kind of realistic path to scale, irrespective of how much as a marketer you kind of want to build your brand. So I guess if I look back over that time, the kind of single golden thread, if you like, that goes through it is that in every case go to market is the kind of difference between activity, right? So every function is contributing some work and momentum. So where every function actually creates progress and can compounds each other. And I think the biggest mistake that I've seen is that, you know, each function has a slightly different measure of what good looks like. You know, they'll start optimizing for their own version of what success looks like. So marketing might optimize for campaigns, MQLs, events, brand awareness, those, those kind of things. The sales guys will Optimize for pipeline meetings booked, um, you know, close revenue, uh, and then you've got your channel as well. Your channel guys might look at how many partners they recruit, how much MDF is spent, how many deals get registered, those kind of things. And I guess while they all matter, the customer doesn't really care. They don't care what your OG chart looks like. They just experience one, one customer. And when, you know, marketing, sales channel are not aligned, you get a lot of activity, everyone works really hard, everyone's busy, but you don't get any momentum. The market's confused. Um, you know, it really doesn't help anyone. And I've seen situations where, you know, marketing will produce a really slick, really polished campaign. You know, great creative, strong messaging, really good engagement on, you know, on socials and on inbound. But sales hasn't been brought into the story. So leads come in sales then follow up with a completely different pitch. And the customer basically thinks, you know, have I dialed into the wrong meeting? You know, the way the campaigns work in isolation. But your wider go to market systems completely failed you. And I kind of look at, and this is going back quite a few years from, um, some days when I did consumer is like, I kind of look at go to market as a rowing boat, right? You can have incredibly strong people. They can all work really, really hard. But if they're rowing at different speeds or they're in a slightly different direction or a different rhythm, then you burn a huge amount of energy. But you go nowhere or you get wet, right? So I look at GTM as the cops, right? We're setting the direction, the rhythm, the timing. And it's not really about working harder, right? It's just about making all those work streams connect. And I think that's something that's really, really important even today.

Speaker B: And how do you. I'll give an example actually of an actual live example that someone said to me last week and then we'll talk about, um, how, how you stop this happening in your business. So how would you do the go to market? But I actually can't believe this happened. But someone said that they did a trial on a piece of software and, um, they then took feedback about people in the team and why it wasn't adopted and why they didn't want to buy the software in the end. Um, and then the person who was buying at the vent went on and googled and found a video about the product and then went back to the person who was selling it. And we want this because. And they Said, we don't do that in our product. And they said, I've just watched a video about, um, your product and it says that you do this and you're saying it doesn't, you know, and that was a complete disconnect. And they lost the sale, they walked away. And they also felt ill of the company thinking that they were disjoined. So how do you, how do you prevent that happening?

Speaker A: I think it's having this, this connection between marketing and the commercial functions. I said, you can have great campaigns, but they need to follow through end to end. And you know, a lot of companies see marketing as kind of nice. Uh, you know, it's the fluffy creative at the end of it. But, you know, it's something that I've got battle scars from trying to argue. You know, a lot of people, even most recently for me, kind of reduce marketing to just promotion. Right. It assumes that marketing is there just to polish things up and that kind of real commercial and strategic stuff's already happened. But you know, if you look at the more successful businesses, marketing is not the department of posters and crayons, as I've heard it called before. You know, it's the function that helps answer, uh, some really important questions. You know, it sets your North Star, who's our icp? Why do they care? Why us? Those kind of things. And if you have that kind of cohesive story through from marketing to then the commercial element and feedback back into product as well, which is really important, that's kind of how things are most successful. And you don't kind of start to see these gaps a bit.

Speaker B: But how do you get that collaboration is that everyone being in the office together, is it having meetings? How do you create that?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it's really, uh, it all comes down to culture. And as we talked previously on Recruitment, you know, culture is for me, you know, the biggest fit I think, you know, certainly in my experience with the earlier stage founders, you know, it's often a build, uh, a product, hire some sales talent, get some customers and then kind of fund marketing after that. And in product, we talk a lot about tech debt. Right. It's a byproduct of choosing like really short term engineering shortcuts over something long term. And it's the same when you, you're building up marketing. If you've got positioning debt, I guess, you know, inconsistent messaging, um, unclear ICPs, you know, sales decks that over promise. You know, I've seen that a lot where you've got huge commitments and promises in sales tax that product's not engineered. And then you know, the website kind of maybe has a slightly different tack that just builds up more debt. And I really think if you have the right mindset in the room, you know, we kind of talking around siloed approach, you can't be too precious about being in your swim lane. Uh, you've got to be able to ask the tough questions and you know, not, not be afraid to almost upset people. Obviously you do it in a professional manner, but you know, the, the most successful people I've seen have been the ones that have come in and kind of opened everyone else's eyes as to what's the right thing to do and maybe what's a better way to do things.

Speaker B: And do you think that also might look like there's a leader that sits across all of those departments rather than there's a marketing leader? Uh, there's a sales leader, uh, in some companies that they're big, obviously they're having that. But do you think that there's going to be a future different type of leader that will come out that's uh, more of a go to market leader that covers those or not?

Speaker A: My experience has kind of led almost to that anyway. You know, I started in proper hardcore engineering in the late 90s and kind of worked through, as you kind of said, product management, product marketing, technical marketing. I went to the dark side and did, you know, sales was a GM for the consumer brand for a little while. And you know, having experienced, you know, marketing, the commercials, the operations that, the legal side of things, I think it's, it's quite a, it's quite a challenge and a rarity. You almost have to be that jack of all trades. But you also need to be skilled in one or more areas. You know, you need to be credible and you know, respected through the other. So it is a quite, I wouldn't say unicorn, but it's, it's a difficult role to, to actually fill, I think from that perspective. But there's also this shift in I guess how Go to Market itself has evolved. Um, you know, we'll, we'll get on and talk about partners I guess later. But I look back and I think earlier on in my career I probably thought, you know, go to market, straightforward, right? It's launch plans, it's messaging, it's campaigns, a sales deck. You know, I guess the what would have been the traditional marketing piece, it's much more broad today. Right. So in technology terms, Go to market is the operating system. Right. It's the Thing that powers the revenue, you need someone that can oversee that. And you know, at its most basic, you're just basically connecting the reality of a product or a service to the market demand. That that hasn't changed but from there it's you know, how does the whole company make it easy for the customer? Well, easy for the right customer to uh, understand what the offering is, to trust the company they're buying from to purchase, renew and then expand on that. And yes, you still going to have your kind of critical key roles. A sales director, uh, a uh, CMO or a marketing director, they're still central to it. But Go to market is now way, way, way broader when we're having discussions around kind of routes to market and you know, customer success partners are critical in that now your supports, how you come across to customers who've already bought your products, even legal and commercial, you know, making it easy for people to do business with you is really critical now. So yeah, I think that kind of overarching role is still one that is, is definitely evolving.

Speaker B: Interesting. Now what I'm really interesting is the case study um, about in a way in your current role is a really good case study of this, isn't it? Because you've come in and you've been on quite a transformative journey with um, the since you've been there. Is it three years now?

Speaker A: Yeah, just, just over.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, uh, it would be great if you could talk about what the problem was when you joined and you know, what you've done, what you've done and how things have transformed.

Speaker A: It's been a, a transformation. I think we've very much shifted from a tech company with a lot of innovative IP that, that is of great value to customers. But you know we're in an industry that is saturated with the 800 pound gorillas and the big enterprise companies. So we've kind of moved away very much from product led growth to a more hybrid approach. So we've really looked at go to market uh, a little bit more pragmatically I guess than looking at the frameworks. And we've kind of been fighting for the last three years. You know, as a, although we're not a startup, you know, we're a startup mentality and I say you know, fighting against the big boys is always difficult. And you know, it's been a constant case of balancing speed, you know from, from a product development perspective and uh, a deal sales cycle perspective. Obviously you don't want two three year sales cycles like, like an enterprise organization. But you also have to have a solid end to end go to market strategy, which itself should make you faster anyway if you do it right. So I think, you know, what I've, what I've experienced has been uncomfortable at times. You know, we definitely need people that are uh, you know, comfortable in ambiguity, in just taking charge of things, not being too precious over uh, and asking the challenging questions and you know, with respect, but you know, not stepping on people's toes, but you know, just working together as a team rather than being precious over your, your, your own department. And I think the one challenge that to be fair we came over quite early days was that a lot of companies would lose momentum. You know, if you're internally debating things over and over and over, you know, who's getting things perfect, right? Who's our customer, what's the message, where should we place our bets as far as the channel, those kind of things. What's the, the value proposition? If you spend the time getting that right up front, then you move a lot faster and you don't have to have these kind of conversations as you go. And then it's just fine tuning from there on in. And uh, that helps from a product perspective because obviously we're very much product and engineering led. It's always a trade off. Do you develop features that your competitors have? Do you talk to your customers? Which is something with kudos to uh, our customer success team. Getting real live customer feedback in and being agile enough to then put that into the product within a matter of weeks is something that you can be incredibly proud of. Yeah, it's a case of being agile and being comfortable in an uncomfortable situation at times.

Speaker B: And also just saying speed is probably like you could rush things out. So there are some things that you need to be quick on and then there's some things that you need to get right. And what would you say that balance is between speed and getting it right? What's the area you can compromise and the area you can't?

Speaker A: I mean they're not completely opposing ends of the scale. I think you can have a good go to market strategy and speed at the same time. And I said, I think speed comes from having a good go to market strategy. There's a, there's a trade off I guess in that you can't over engineer everything. In product and engineering terms we have what's called an mvp, right? A minimum viable product. So that's something that has enough, I guess, core functionality to satisfy an early adopter or a customer that's already exists so when timelines are really tight, I guess you also need to apply that to go to market. So I have a minimum viable go to market plan. So when we started off it was like, what is a clear ICP to focus on? What's the most simplest value proposition you can come up with? How do you develop a repeatable scalable sales motion? You know, so that's uh, a basic enablement pack. It's a really fast feedback loop from customers and then that kind of feeds in and evolves over time. So you definitely have to have a stake in the ground when it comes to strategy. And then I said, you evolve on that. What you don't want to get into is conversation six months down the line trying to design things from the ground up. And I guess the flip side of that is from a customer perspective, the last thing anybody really wants is a supplier that is fast because they cut corners. And that's something you can kind of hear a lot. They want a supplier that is fast because they've taken their time to remove the unnecessary complexity. And that's something that, you know, we've spent a lot of time doing is it's simple, it's fast because of its design, not because of cutting corners.

Speaker B: That. Well that's interesting. And I think what is also interesting is you've also changed the way you've gone to market in terms of the sales process as well. From understanding it used to be very much direct sales team, um, and now you've gone much more down the partner side of things. It'd be great to understand like what the thinking behind that and why.

Speaker A: For us it's something that we've discussed on and off. Do we run two channels? So you know, do we have a direct channel and a partner channel? And partner for us could be a, uh, managed service provider, a uh, resale, I mean less so uh, resale now because that's kind of becoming a little bit antiquated, pure kind of what I would class as box shifting. You know, it's traditional resale. Everyone has to have ad their own value along the, along the way. Um, it could be telcos attaching to other products. So channel itself gets quite complicated. And in that partner led approach, the key reason for us was basically the market already has these really well nurtured trusted relationships and that would take as a startup that would take us years and years to build. You know, an ideal route to market for a startup is, you know, partner led. You don't have to necessarily build a huge amount of brand awareness, credibility Comes via the partner. You know, the product if it, you know, stands on its own two feet and you get your partner training, right. It works for everyone. You know, partners bring us, bring us reach, obviously their own brand reputation. They have resources that can deliver service capability way in advance that a startup could. And in regions or industry verticals that maybe you don't have the experience in, they've got that local knowledge and that customer context. So you know, for a smaller company, like how, I mean we're 50 or so employees, so small to mid size but you know, that's the difference between knocking on doors cold or picking up the phone cold to people and entering a market through someone that a customer already trusts or a prospect already knows. So from a strategic perspective the advantage is there. It's really clear it's all about leverage for us. Direct sales was very precise, um, and still have some really good customers in the multiple hundreds of customers from big healthcare trusts to brands and logos that everyone will know. But that's quite high cac, right? It's quite slow to scale. For us, deal sales cycles were uh, if you did something in 90 days, it was a quick deal and partner led basically gave us access to more customers more quickly. If a partner already owns that relationship, say it's a telco for instance, and you've got a complementary offer to theirs. In our instance it could be say a uh, broadband plus security. You have an addressable market there that would have taken you years to build. I guess the challenge is coming into that. How do you do it? Right. The transition is not just, uh, let's sign some partners and hope for the best. Right? It's not about collecting big logos of telcos and MSPs, VARs and things like that. Right. You need to completely change your operating model if you're going to use this new channel to create repeatable revenue. And it's a risk, right? At some point you've got to say where do we flick the switch from doing this hybrid approach of direct and partner to just flicking everything over to partner. So from that perspective you need to again sit down and spend the time up front and design the program. So partner friendly pricing and commercials, how do you enable them, how do you train them, how do you support them? Onboarding, deal registration, it's a completely different framework than dealing direct. It's at that point that from a marketing perspective the marketers have to shift how they think about your brand. Right. It's very much now about co marketing. So you know, we're almost relying on someone Else's brand guidelines, someone else's tone of voice, someone else's imagery to create our own campaign. So it's really adopting that mindset of, you know, one plus one equals three better together. That style of messaging where uh, historically in the direct channel we would have been saying, you know, it's more much of a self serving message how, how much value you add as a company. Now it's very much that partner. So it's been a, it's been a transition but as I said the scale is visible in a very short period of time.

Speaker B: And what's really interesting because I've hired, as I said to you before recently in partner marketing and one of the things I've noticed is there's an, you know, everybody, people always assume that other people are either doing it a lot better or a lot worse than them. But there is a massive difference between how people are running partner marketing. I mean some people are running it on spreadsheets and they don't even have a formal process in terms of, of what they're doing with the portal. And other people have it like an absolute nailed machine that's going round. Where do you say you would fit? Would you say, you know, have you, are you going towards the machine or are you more agile in terms of your approach?

Speaker A: I, I think we're, it's a bit of a copper but I think we're probably somewhere in the middle. It comes back to probably something we started talking about when I said like rowing the boat, right? Uh, activity versus leverage. Having an administrative version where you said it's spreadsheets and less sophisticated tools where you might track a partner name, you might log the opportunities, send out some assets, occasional training, those kind of things, they're useful but it doesn't create revenue. You know, it's a lot of effort, a lot of activity, but it doesn't necessarily generate revenue. I think the way we approached it was like to have this strategic partner function as opposed to a transactional one, you've got to maybe start by asking different questions. So from um, a metric perspective it's not necessarily right how many partners do we have, it's actually how many partners there that can create repeatable revenue without us having to step in every time as the kind of hero and come in to every single deal and kind of handhold them along the way. So it was about selecting the partners that had probably the strongest customer fit and then from then on in it was looking at the ones well, which these guys can actually sell without us having to Help out who just gets our message, buys into it and obviously can then create that momentum and it's then asking about, so where is the overlap is the other thing we talked about. So what are the partners commercial priorities and how can we make our priorities theirs? You know, what's stopping a deal from converting and then obviously how do you make that repeatable? And again, that's a conversation that you have early doors and have that upfront, you agree kind of rules of engagement with that partner. And then it starts to work. And then at that point we start introducing the most sophisticated tools, deal registration portals, PRMs, partner relationship management, SaaS, platforms, those kind of things. And that really starts to, you know, compound what you've already set out in the beginning. So I think the only real difference is if that partner function is purely record keeping, as you say in a spreadsheet, or it's actually accelerating your revenue. And that's really where we are focusing.

Speaker B: And I think what you said at the beginning, the point is the strategic alliance is the most important thing for me because you can have a thousand partners, but none of them selling anything or there or the, the effort and the admin of, of dealing with these partners. But the amount of deals you're getting isn't worth it. So it's better to those really few people that you can invest in potentially for a smaller business and, and then scale it rather than just try and get loads of different partners and then it's just unmanageable. And then also it can start to be, well, it was our deal. No, it was their deal. Another, you know, people are, uh, arguing like salespeople, but partners arguing who was the one that recruited the side. So it can be tricky with the volume.

Speaker A: Oh, it's really tricky. And the flip side of that as well, I guess, is you don't know how good the partners are going to be upfront. So, you know, do you go after volume and say, right, well let's just get a dozen partners on board and see which ones are the best, or do you focus on maybe two or three that you are confident can deliver volume and you know, picking that and putting your bet is a bit of a challenge as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Because also I know that your business has been really successful at winning against sort of larger companies that may be more established in the, in the space as well through this methodology. You know, would you like to talk a little bit about how you've, how, you know, you've mapped, managed to do that?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I said the cyber Security industry is saturated with big, well known brands and you can't, you can't out Goliath. Goliath, right. If you think, oh, uh, it's tempting from a marketing perspective to make you look bigger than you actually are, you don't win. You know, you don't win by making yourself look like a smaller version of someone that already exists. And that's a common mistake that I see quite a bit. You know, smaller companies trying to mimic an enterprise vendor, uh, you know, you'll see marketing messages that are same, uh, the same language, you know, the same complexity in trying to make their sales motion similar, the same kind of big company posture. The challenge with that is if you play their game, there's only one winner and it ain't you. I mean, the way we saw success is you kind of have to change the game itself, right? And that could mean being faster, being simpler, being more focused, easier to work with. That's kind of a key one for us. And potentially being more relevant to a specific industry or a specific vertical. And it's really just about being honest about what the customer actually needs. And a conversation that I've had with our marketing people is around how much fluff and woolly messaging do you put around your offering and your proposal versus how direct can you be? And that's something where we, we've seen success is like being direct. So binning the jargon, you know, the gartnerisms, just being honest with the customers. You know, in, in cybersecurity, it's really easy to overwhelm customers. There are so many acronyms, you know, swig, casb, edr, xdr, uh, sase. I mean the list goes on and it's crazy. And SMBs particularly wake up in the morning wanting to buy an acronym. Right? They buy in our industry, the reduction of risk, business confidence, assurance. And for a company like us, when we're competing against the big guys, the advantage is agility and speed as we've kind of touched on. Right. The big competitors might have huge portfolios, but with that comes complexity. As a smaller company, we can go in and say, look to a prospect. We understand your specific problem, we've been there, we've seen it, we can solve it for you without making your life harder, better, faster, cheaper, whatever kind of superlative you want to add to that. But it's really just about being honest upfront and being very focused in your message and that for us, we've seen a lot of success.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, it sounds simple to do, doesn't it to say that. But as we go back from the beginning, it does take a lot of infrastructure and a bit out the place and also that ability to really listen, listen to a company and understand what they're wanting and then deliver it rather than just if there's too many layers in sales and everything else. So it really brings us back to how we started the conversation. We're running close to the end of time now. So is there anything I haven't asked you that you wanted to mention or touch on at this stage?

Speaker A: I think, you know, we've touched on partners quite a lot and I think that's probably the one message I would say is shifting at the moment. Right. I think think partner marketing is the thing that is going to evolve. I mean, it's been permanently evolving over time. But I think there are several things driving it today as we kind of touched on. Right. Buyers are overwhelmed, uh, with noise, vendor noise. You just got to walk a trade show floor to witness. Uh-huh. Tens, if not hundreds of companies offering very similar solutions. So you kind of, as a customer, you almost get desensitized to some of the problems. And in our industry, that is the worst thing to have. Budgets are under pressure, trust is a lot harder to earn, but the threat is still there. And you know, today what we're seeing is that many customers want a solution that not only comes as a product, but it might come with advice or an implementation, professional service or ongoing support, those kind of things, not just a SaaS portal. And that's where I think partners become much more important. You know, they sit much closer to the customer. And you know, as I touched on earlier, that old channel model where it was simply about resale, is probably going to go away in our industry. And that that new partner ecosystem of influence and integration and co selling and marketplaces, even where there's much more value to add, is kind of going to be the thing that a lot of companies focus on now from a partner marketing perspective. So it's that deeper shift and it's looking for customers want this true trusted route, I guess, to make their decision and that confidence that what they're buying is the right thing and is going to serve them and protect them for a long time. And that comes through this. I think that's where the evolution is going to be.

Speaker B: Yeah, I've just. It's occurred to me as you've been saying that, because I think that SaaS has been really good at the direct market and some of the marketing in that, but they've been weaker at the partner marketing, but in the past we've recruited for, um, construction services companies and they are brilliant with their partner marketing. Because if you think about it, when you're having a house built, who do you do? You don't care what the roof tile is, do you? Or what the insulation in the wall is or what door you're having? Um, you don't really understand and you can't make all those decisions. So you basically go to your builder or the architect and they give you that information and they trust. So those are the people that are making the influential decisions and they can then take it down to the customer and say, well, we've got this type of tile or this type of thing that's going to make your warmer or. And that's basically where I think we've. The SAS has probably been a bit weak in that market. They've just been going direct and now they're going, actually, why don't we give it to the experts who can persuade it to the customer in their own language?

Speaker A: And it's a really smart strategy. I think certainly for smaller companies as a country. The UK is all about innovation and trying to showcase off tech and that that in turn creates a lot of startups and smaller companies. And partner led is really the smartest way to go on that. I said having that consultative approach through it, through a trusted brand, it's not automatically easier. Actually, in some ways it's harder for a startup because you're selling through people that you don't directly manage. So you've got to build and earn mindshare with those people. Um, it means making your proposition simple and supporting that partner from experience. It's not necessarily easier, it's not sales like by any means, but it means that your effort that you put in that, you know, the activity shifts to the partner to some extent and, you know, certainly the skill sets that we need to do that are, ah, quite interesting because you then need someone who's able to context switch between, you know, two different channels perhaps and, you know, partners versus internal, things like that. So it's not necessarily easy, but it is definitely, I think, something that smaller companies should really focus on.

Speaker B: Great. Well, I think you're right. I think partner marketing is an underutilized channel and I think people also want. They're expecting a quick win from it, I think as well, you know, so it's a bit like you hire in a salesperson and you think, um, oh, you need to get some money on the board and pipeline in Three months, the same. You know, you have to get them build up and get their network and get the deal cycle going. And it's exactly the same in partner space, isn't it? You have to work with the partner and iron out those creases. And also you have to trust them because as you said, they're the ones selling your company and your product and they need to know your product to be able to do that.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think what we've seen as well is that, uh, uh, a managed service provider might have a portfolio of 10, 20, even 50 different vendors or competitors of yours that they've got to sell. And you know that that's where making your proposition easy for them to sell. When they wake up in the morning, they don't think, I want to sell widget number X. Generally a lot of partners will sell or recommend the thing that they're incentivized to do, whether that's through a spiff or, you know, some, some other incentive. So, you know, as a smaller company, if you don't have that kind of MDF budget to be able to incentivize them financially, you've just got to make your service offering easy. The right commercials, the right training, and kind of almost build it into muscle memory for the partner salespeople.

Speaker B: Exactly. Well said. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Um, it's been an absolute pleasure and I know we could, you know, there's lots of other things we can explore, so I think it means round two of you coming back in the future, uh, and doing a second podcast. Thank you. So it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to Gareth today. And if you can think of one or two people that can get value from listening to this, a friend, a colleague, or someone that you think maybe needs to do something differently, then do share this with them. And just as a reminder, in today's conversation, we've covered why siloed thinking can kill commercial performance, the rise of partner marketing, and how smaller companies can win on speed. So finally, just like to say I'm very lucky to be a podcast host and I speak to brilliant marketeers and leaders and commercial product people like Gareth all the time. I'm also a headhunter and the managing director of Armstrong Lloyd. We are a sales and marketing search firm. Um, so if you're looking to grow your team and you'd like a conversation about what the current market looks like, please do drop me an email at. Ah, Karen, Armstrong Lloyd. But until next time, keep shining that spotlight on marketing. Bye Bye.