Elevating Your Value Story at a PLG Company with Calendly's CMO
Jessica Gilmartin talks about the company's shift in marketing strategy from PLG approaches to partnering with large enterprises and shares her thoughts on a hybrid approach of both PLG and SLG strategies.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faizan, CEO of Caspian Studios.
Today, we are joined by a special guest, Jessica.
How are you?
>> I am great. Thank you. How are you doing, Ian?
>> Excited to have you on the show,
excited to chat about marketing and demand and all the really cool stuff that
you all are doing
and currently before we get into all that.
What was your first job marketing?
>> My first job of marketing was at Dell in Austin, Texas,
and I was a brand manager for our services business.
So I was the person trying to get you to upgrade,
like when your laptop breaks to get you to upgrade the service.
Incredibly annoying, but very important and high margin.
So it was a good way to get myself introduced to marketing.
>> Oh, that's really funny.
What that really is,
I agree when I worked a long time ago on a similar type of campaign for Dell
about getting your stuff fixed, so that's funny.
>> Yeah, maybe we worked on it together.
>> I know, right? That was just some of the advice.
Okay, so flash forward to today, tell us about your role at CalME.
>> So I just joined in January, so brand new.
I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at CalME.
>> Have you done any interview yet or is your first one a CMO?
>> It's my first one. I've done some written ones.
This is my first podcast.
>> Huzzah. Here we are. So exciting.
>> Yeah.
>> So tell us a little bit about your thought process coming into the role.
>> Yeah, so I had been very fortunate to be at Asana for the past two and a
half years,
which is an amazing company.
Saw it through tremendous growth during the 2020 to 2022 years.
And this was really my first introduction to PLG SLG Hybrid.
And it was so incredibly interesting.
I'd have to say for anyone that has done both,
I would say that trying to do a PLG SLG Hybrid business from marketing
perspective
is about 1,000 times harder than trying to do either PLG or SLG on its own.
So I came from an enterprise marketing background,
very traditional, reaching out to one single buyer,
and really having to figure out how to integrate the two
and still have that amazing bottoms up model,
but then add on to it and integrate a top-down approach is so hard.
It is basically like having two different marketing teams
and two different sales teams.
And so what I just got to actually really loved it.
Like I love the complexity.
I love the challenges.
And I love the democratization of it.
Right? So you have to really create a product that people love
in order to be successful in a PLG motion and an SLG motion.
And so what it was time for me to move on from Asana and sort of I had always,
my intention had always been to move back into a CMO role.
I had been CMO of smaller startups before.
And so when I was looking into what my next career move would be,
I really wanted to continue on that path.
I really wanted to look for a company that had amazing PLG chops
and incredible PLG motion and figure out how to build an integrated SLG
motion on top of it because there's actually not that many people
that have done it and seen it.
And I thought I could bring a lot of that experience.
And so when I was looking around, I talked to a few companies.
And as soon as I met Tope, our CEO of Cali and heard his vision
and understood what the company was trying to do,
it just to me was an absolute match made in heaven.
And I knew I wanted to come on.
And I thought I could really make an impact and bring that value
of having seen it at Asana, but hopefully doing it even better at Cali.
Okay, let's get to our first segment, the Trust Tree,
where we go and feel honest and trusted.
And you can share the deepest, darkest,
demand-gen and marketing secrets.
What does Cali and Lee do?
Who are your customers other than Castfian Studios,
which is a customer of Cali and we love you all very much.
So I think pretty much everybody knows what Cali does.
So where are that link that you get every time somebody wants to schedule
any email with you?
And it is absolutely magical.
We have over 10 million people that use it.
And it works so much better than people saying,
"Hey, I'm ready.
I'm available Friday from 10 o'clock to 10.30 and next Saturday
from 1 to 2 p.m."
And it works magically.
And I think the exciting opportunity for me and one of the reasons I joined
was that we are that is so much more.
Right? So we really are a scheduling automation platform
that serves individual users as well as really large enterprises.
And we really focus on four different types of users.
So we focus on recruiters and we make the scheduling of really advanced
interview paddles, incredibly, magically UV.
Another one of our core customers are customer support folks.
Again, who are interacting and trying to engage
and having high volumes of conversation with their customers.
And we make that process very easy.
Marketers. So we make the routing of leads from to sales very easy
and very streamlined so that sales people can get to leads quicker.
And then the final is salespeople.
And I think that that's probably what most people are most
functional and familiar with from a colony perspective is it just removes
the many back and forth between prospects and customers and our salespeople
so that salespeople can accelerate their deal of cycles.
And I think the most important thing that we do is we have a really safe
and secure platform with a lot of data and a lot of automation
and a lot of integrations with other important enterprise platforms
so that an entire company could use Cali.
Yeah. And so Cali obviously started as a POG company a decade ago.
I can't remember the first time I used it.
It was a long, long time ago.
Had to be like seven years ago probably.
I was pretty, pretty early.
And now y'all are working with mid-market.
You're working with large enterprises like Twilio and Octa and Zendesk
and Gusto and all those sort of people.
So how do you evolve your marketing strategy as you go up market?
Yeah. So that's where that whole having two marketing teams comes into play.
And I think what's really important, I think the interesting part about it is
that
so many companies start their journey thinking of it as two separate
fuddles. Now I talk to so many different companies that have been moving up
market
and it's almost like they think about it's cannibalizing their existing
business.
And it's really hard not to think that way because you actually are creating
teams
and most companies are creating like an SLG team and a PLG team.
And so actually fight with each other about,
hey, what leads come to the website?
Should we prioritize having them contact us for sales leads or should we have
them prioritize signups?
And then how do we prioritize when those signups occur?
What do we do with them?
Right? Do we risk interfering with the signup experience and having them go to
sales?
And so it ends up being almost like turf wars and it ends up being really
challenging conversations
around what we prioritize. My perspective is very different, which is it's one
customer.
If you take a customer-centric approach, which is we need to do what's best for
the customer
and create all the opportunities for the customer to do what's right by them,
the decisions actually become very easy. And so the way that I think about it
from a
marketing perspective is it's always still a customer who has a problem to
solve and our job is to
figure out how to help them solve it. And so when they come to our website, how
do we give them
equal opportunities to make the decision that's right for them and to give them
the information
that they need, whether that is signing up for a product or whether that is
filling out a form
to talk to sales. And then every single step of the journey, we're again giving
them opportunities
to decide what's right for them and whether that is continuing their journey as
an individual
sign up and hopefully giving us a credit card. And they can just become very
successful
self-serve customers or whether it's enabling them to understand like, hey,
there's more,
right? There's more to Calendly. And if you're part of a larger team, maybe you
're interested in
talking to a sales person so you can learn more. And then maybe if you are a
sales person that
has a larger team on Calendly, hey, maybe you would love to get your marketing
team involved.
Maybe you'd like to get your recruiting team involved. You can have a larger
conversation
around Calendly for your entire enterprise. And so I really just see it as a
continuum and as a
journey, always focus on what's best with customer. Yeah, it's so interesting
with these, with the
enterprise accounts where, and this is something Caspian worked with Asana on
was the sort of like
getting in front of the CIO in a meaningful way because you have, oh, we have
17 different teams
using Asana, for example, or Calendly, I'm sure you have the same thing
happening all over the place
with sales and recruiting and all that stuff. But at some point, somebody
starts, you know, whether
it's in finance or in IT or wherever starts to say, wait a second, like we're
using this company,
like, we're using this tool all over the place. Why don't we start an up level
of the conversation
and when you can go to those people with that insight and say, hey, this is how
y'all are using
it, that's a really advantageous place to be. Oh, 100%. So I think that to me,
two of the most
important things that you need to be a successful PLG, SLG hybrid, number one
is data. So really
understanding the usage of all the teams, all the individuals within a company
and understanding
how those teams relate to each other. And so because that's the only way that
you can have
that meaningful conversation and also understand what are the companies that
are ripe to have
that conversation with. In one of the best and the worst parts of having PLG
businesses, you have
thousands, if not millions of companies to go after. That's literally the
opportunity is endless.
And so the only way that you can help yourselves team prioritize is to give
them really good data
about who are the teams that are using it and what does that mean, right? So
like, what does that
usage mean and how can they leverage that to have a conversation with folks in
IT, with procurement,
with the finance. And the second part of that, what you understand, those
customers that are
most ripe for expansion is how do you provide that value story? And that can
really be challenging
sometimes in an PLG led business because it is so focused, typically your sales
and your
marketers are focused on adoption. It's just focused on, hey, getting
individual users to use it.
It's sometimes hard to take a step back and say, if I were talking to someone
in IT or someone in
finance that is not a user of this product, how do I demonstrate the value? How
do I make sure they
understand why somebody should go from 15 different individual plans to one
broader enterprise plan,
which generally costs more money and also has a tax on the IT team to be able
to manage it.
And that's, again, where you just need different capabilities from marketing
perspective. You need
a product marketing team that can tell that story that is able to articulate
why your product is
important in the tech stack and then real value. It's so easy to go to time
savings or productivity.
That's generally not what IT cares about, that's generally not what finance
cares about.
And so how do you move from a story of productivity and time savings to a story
of business value
and ROI? So those are two really important things from marketing perspective
that you need as you
move up market. It's such a great point. When I had a conversation with a
handful of CIOs,
like years ago, probably five years ago, and six years ago, and we were talking
about Zoom,
and I was like, I don't get it. I don't understand why all three of you who are
like some of the
smartest CIOs, like why you all love this product so much? And they're like, oh
, it's just so easy
to manage from a CIO perspective. And they were just like, like all the other
stuff,
like all the features of functionality and all that, that was not what they
were talking about.
They were just talking about the actual management from an IT perspective and
being able to roll
that out to their organization. And like, that's the sort of thing where it's
like those enterprise
level deals that were happening for those particular accounts had so much sort
of such a different
motion than what the other accounts were. And like these CIOs were treated
really well by that
team. And I always that always just stuck with me where it's like, the reason
why those CIOs were
buying is completely different than what the end user cares about, like polar
opposite things
that they care about. And I mean, you just articulated that exactly right.
That's the interesting thing that we're seeing. And I saw it at Asana and I see
it at Calumlee.
And I think most companies are experiencing this, which is you do have this
very healthy tension
between tool proliferation and user adoption and needs, right? So an IT leader
is very
incentivized to have the minimum number of tools. And so when they're looking
at their
tech stack and they're saying, why can't we just use X or Y? We already use
them for our email.
We already use them for our messaging. We already use them for a video. Why can
't we just use
them? They have a product and it looks like it works. And so that is their
incentive. And then
you have individual users who have very specific needs and they're generally
not met by the larger
platforms. And so you have this really interesting tension that goes back and
forth about how do
you make the right decisions for the company that both support security and
adaptability and
manageability, but also support those power users who need the more
sophisticated platforms to do
their job. And so I think it's like our job as marketers to educate the folks
that are making
decisions in IT and finance about why default isn't good enough and why it is
important and it is
valuable to the company to add another tool to their tool stack because they
really don't want
to do it. Any other thoughts on the POGS OG? I mean, we could literally do an
entire episode just
on this because there's so many different things there. I mean, any other
things on POGS OG and how
marketers should think about it if you are doing both and if you are moving up
market? I'd say the
number thing on it, and this is just very top of line for me because it's what
I'm thinking about
now, is that it's easy to get bogged down in a lot of tweaks on the margin. And
it's easy to
get bogged down on sort of small things that you could do or being really
reactive. And I'd say
what I would encourage everybody to think about as they are moving up market is
how do you make
sure that every single person on your team is laser focused on the things that
matter the most.
If you think about the journey, make sure you document the journey from the
beginning and really
understand what are the hot spots. So if you document, how do people find you?
What do they
do on your site? What do they do when they sign up? What do they do when they
become a lead? What
do they do when they get to sales? How do they progress from an individual sign
up to a team
sign up to hopefully an expansion? Document all of that along with all the data
points around
conversion, rate, and size. And then just pick a couple to really focus on
because it can feel
really overwhelming because there are so many touch points and there are so
many things that
you have to do and you've got to have a ton of engagement with the sales team
and they need
so many materials and you need to do expansion. You just see the YouTube land
and it can feel like
gosh you have to do everything but you can't. And so starting with what's the
customer journey?
Where are the areas where we feel like we have the most opportunity either from
a just pure volume
perspective or from a conversion perspective and then only do those make those
your KRs and you'll
benefit a lot of you'll give your team a lot of clarity where they probably are
sort of
floundering a little bit because they're trying to do everything all at once.
Yeah that's really cool. I know that one of the things which we don't really
need to get into
but that when you have that where the rubber meets the road on the rep saying
is this person my
sale or not sort of thing? I know that that's something that always ends up
being a really
difficult choice for companies to make of like hey I've talked to this person
five times then they
signed up on the website or hey I can go them five times they never responded
but now they
signed up through the website and like those sort of things it's tricky it's
tricky stuff I don't
know if you have any thoughts there or we could kind of just keep going. If you
think about it you
don't really want to pay a salesperson for a deal that would have come in
anyway and so their job
should be to create new sales should not it should not be to facilitate sales
that would have come in.
So the job from a marketing and product perspective is to make it as easy and
delightful experience
as possible to sign up and if you do that then the only customers that should
be going to sales
are ones that have questions or need more you know sales enablement need more
materials and
should be signing larger deals and what you should be doing is figuring out how
do you create the
right experience the right routing the right logic so that salespeople are
talking to the highest value
customers that can close the largest deals. Getting back to some of the
organizational like org
structure stuff you mentioned earlier in your career this idea of like building
two different
sales teams two different marketing teams that whole piece is really really
challenging for most
people how do you organize your team now at Calon Lee how do you think about
doing that? Yeah so I have
a very typical team so I've got a head of contents a head of demand gen a head
of growth marketing
head of pmm head of brands so I think they are very they're set up in a very
traditional
marketing format I think the big difference is that each of them have to think
about the different
parts of the business and I think most importantly is that one of the big
things that I did when I
came is really heavily focused them on our move to enterprise it's very easy
for people to sort of
get stuck in the same type of work that they've always been doing and really
just continuing to do
the things that got us here and what I want to make sure is that we are moving
up market still
thinking about the business as two parts of the same funnel so still focus on
driving signups
but then how do we turn those signups into expansion opportunities with our mid
-market
enterprise customers? Do you work a lot on building like a sales enablement
function and those sort of
things feels like that would be a lot newer with going into mid-market and
enterprise obviously right?
Yeah so I think one of our newest teams is our solutions marketing team which
is really focused on
how do we think about specific personas and specific verticals which is very
new and
much more traditionally enterprise I feel very lucky that I inherited a really
strong team you
never know what they're going to come into when you join a company and I feel
very grateful that my
team is really strong really motivated and I think just needed a little bit
more direction in terms
of the way to go but they're all fantastic and so I'm like it was amazing I
feel very very lucky
because lots of people come into very different situations when they join the
new CMO.
And any thoughts to come into a remote only environment?
Yeah it's really hard it was so interesting when I joined Asana I also joined
during the pandemic
and that was my first remote role and I think it was actually one of the best
things that
had happened to me because my team was global I think I had teams in eight or
nine different
countries and so I actually had to learn really good habits from the beginning
and I think being
remote only is actually a real big benefit because even when you're in an
office environment the
reality is there's almost no companies in the world unless you're a teeny
startup where everybody
is actually in the same office you're always going to have contractors you're
always going to have
folks in Europe or Asia or even other parts of the country and just having the
right discipline from
the beginning of thinking about everybody with access to the same level of
information is so
incredibly important. I learned at Asana to do everything async. I don't love
doing it but I learned
to do it which is moving towards lots of written communication lots of videos
having meeting times
that sometimes you spend and do a Europe friendly sometimes you do a APAC
friendly lots of just
really thinking very deliberately about creating an inclusive environment most
people don't have
to do that and it's really easy to fall into lazy habits of just doing
everything like tapping
somebody on the shoulder and you can't do that in a remote environment which I
actually think is
really great so that it democratizes access to information for everybody in the
company.
All right let's get to our next segment the playbook this is where you open up
the playbook
and talk about the tactics that help you win. You play to win the game.
Hello you play to win the game. You don't play to just play it. What are your
three channels or
tactics that are your uncuttable budget items? So number one is clearly email
so email is the
absolute best way for you to reach customers when they have signed up and are
still considering you
versus your competitors or versus the status quo so it's unbelievably important
to have a great
email strategy and to constantly A/B test it. Number two is our webinars so I
really believe
very very strongly webinars. They are fantastic ways to think about both top,
mid and bottom of the
funnel so great from a just getting people to engage with you and to create
opportunities for
them to think about your products in a more strategic and different ways. I'm a
really big fan of
bringing in third party experts just generally helping people do their job
better and then all
the way through okay maybe you are a person that has a 20 person team so let's
give you information
about how to engage better and how to use the product better and how to think
about not just a
20 person team but hopefully for 50 people or 100 person on intercompany. Webin
ars are absolutely
must have and then the third one I don't know there's so many different
possibilities right and I'd
say Google is obviously a must have I think that's pretty standard and if all
that I need to know
that I would sort of put that in the category because it's just like you just
have to do it.
So although if LinkedIn just because I think it's been really interesting to
try some different
experiments especially if you know your persona and you can do some really
interesting experiments
there. And I'm so curious you have these distinct personas that are so
different from a business
standpoint and I'm sure that with these enterprise accounts it's an extremely
different type of a
sale because selling to recruiting and selling to sales or like you know I
guess they're kind of
similar in some ways but are just very different and so I'm curious like how do
you think about
shaping these accounts these very large enterprise accounts when they have all
these different personas
in them. So that's where you have to have that value story and that's where you
have to tell the
story of why CalME makes sense across an organization and that usually comes
down to things like
manageability and extensibility integrations with other major platforms
security is a really really
important part of it and so I think that's where you have to tell a story
around business value
and why having a recruiting team and a sales team and a support team on CalME
is better than having
a recruiting team with its own set of tools and a sales team with those own set
of tools and
marketing team with some set of tools. So it really comes down to the story and
it comes down to the
data and I think it comes down to what IT cares about which we talked about at
the beginning which
is around manageability and absolutely security is number one incredibly
critical. And you thought
some measuring success talked a lot about the sort of tactics and peace there.
So it's so interesting
I was just having this conversation with the person today who runs our paid
advertising and I think
it's so dependent upon the channel. I think what's to me what's really
important is that you very
clearly define success by channel and you don't try to mix and match. Sam who
runs our PR she's
the one that helps set this great interview up. Hello Sam. So she and I talked
a lot about what's
my definition of success for PR. To me it would be ridiculous to say the
definition of success for
PR is the number of people that come to our website number of leads and revenue
we get.
That's not how PR works right like if you get a hit in the Wall Street Journal
they're not linking
to your website and you're not expecting thousands of people to come. You
should be expecting that
you're able to tell your story in a different way to a different group of
people. And so what's
really important is that you identify what do you want to accomplish with that
channel up front
and then make sure that you have very clear objectives. In my case what I care
about is that
everybody knows Cali. I don't want more hits about Cali as a scheduling link.
What I want is for
people in IT or heads of recruiting or heads of sales to read about Cali as an
enterprise
scheduling platform. And so what I said our success looks like X number of
press articles in Y
publications telling this story and we define it up front and then we look at
the back and say
did we achieve this? Did we get into X publications and you're talking to Y
people?
And I don't care at all about the revenue from that because I know it's
indirect.
Then on the flip side you've got paid advertising and it's very clearly defined
right. So I am if
I am spending X millions of dollars on Google or Facebook or YouTube I'm
expecting very clear
result from it. So I'm expecting to see a certain number of leads that turn to
a certain number of
MQLs that turn to a certain number of opportunities that turn to a certain
number of sales and I
expect that to be recorded on every single week. And the way that I think about
it is that the
better a handle I have on those channels from a demand perspective and from a
budget perspective
the more opportunity I have to ask for money to support things that don't
directly drive revenue.
Right. So if I can show that I'm really intelligent and really thoughtful
around you give me
X millions of dollars I can give you Y result and stick to that then I can
start to ask for money
that does not have a very specific return and particularly things like brands,
billboard and
video ads and PR and influencer marketing. Those are not going to have a direct
influence on
revenue but they're really important from a long-term brand perspective. But I
need to earn
the right to ask for that money and that happens over time.
I agree. It's every time you compare apples to oranges on these stats you're
like you're never
gonna match up but someone sitting and listening to a 30-minute podcast episode
or a webinar
or reading your article in the New York Times or whatever it is is a completely
different thing
than then clicking on the net and going to the website. Not that one is better
or worse but it's
just they're very different and you need to shape the market in multiple ways.
Yeah and obviously having somebody listen to this podcast and listening to me
talk about
Calumli for 45 minutes is very different than somebody looking at a 30-second
video ad and
there's no way that you could measure them the same and I don't expect anybody
listening to this
call to be like I need Calumli right now maybe you will and I appreciate it if
you did but maybe
when a sales person reaches out or they see a new C&AD more likely to respond
because you've
heard this and you've heard the story and you understand what we're trying to
do. So it's just to me it's they're very different and I think if you try to create
exact parallels you're not going to be successful and I think you're going to
unfairly cut out
certain channels and certain tactics that could be really valuable in the long
run. I think all the time about Airbnb and I think nobody has done brand marketing
better than them
and who wouldn't want to be Airbnb and I think that's so important for people
to understand is that
you can't measure everything that they've done but man they've been successful.
Yeah on that note so Calumli just made an announcement about a new product
designed
to help better connect sales and marketing because sales marketing is forever a
pain point.
When we talk through some of the pieces here with PLG and SLG and all that
stuff
can you tell us more about the product announcement? This is brand new.
Yeah it is brand thank you new so it's called lead routing, advanced lead
routing we're really
excited about it and I think the interesting thing about this is a little bit
of a different sales
model and so it is it's less of a PLG motion and it's more directly supporting
marketers who are
trying to create better opportunities to tie leads to sales. I think the
general problem that every
marketer knows is that somebody comes to your website they fill out a form it
goes into some kind
of void somebody at some point does either manual routing or automatic routing
where they figure out
okay is this lead valuable they do enrichment they match it to sales force they
get it to a sales
person hopefully the sales person looks at it in their queue and then they e-
bell the lead and they
go back and forth five times to try to get a meeting and at that point it has
been god knows how long
and maybe the lead is still interested in talking to you or maybe they have
completely
forgotten about it so that probably is something that everybody I certainly
have experienced it
and it's probably something that everybody's experienced and so what our lead
routing does
is it eliminates all of that and it's pretty amazing so somebody comes a lead
comes to your website
it automatically links to things like HubSpot and Mercado so somebody fills out
a form and then
it on the back end it links to sales force so they can actually look up is this
an existing account
is this a lead that we want great Ian is the sales person that's responsible
for this account
and then it will automatically provide a calendar link with Ian's availability
and then the lead
can just set up time with Ian and it's just like all this magical work that
normally happen over
many days or weeks it now just happens immediately and so the customer has a
really fantastic experience
and they can talk to their sales person right away I love it it's so great I am
here for it speed
it all up speed it up talk to sales faster there's an amazing stat that 50% of
customers
go with the company that responds to them first yeah totally makes sense yeah
exactly when you
think about most customers are doing their research and they're looking at
three or four or five
different companies and they're probably reaching out to all of them in their
moment of need and
it's like whoever responds to them it gives the information it gives them a
reasonable price
they're probably going to go with and you just want to be first and it's really
hard these days
with all of the tooling and all the integrations and all of the systems that we
have to do that
yeah we want to we want to RFP recently where we submitted our proposal first
first aim better
to be honest but yeah no of course if you respond well throughout the process
like that is your
customer experience right that's the whole thing like how quickly you can book
a meeting with sales
that is your customer experience yeah it's so interesting one of the things
that I love is a
marketer is to look at a slack channel we have it as on and Cal and leave or
wins channel where
people sort of talk about sales people talk about their big wins and it's the
most interesting
thing from marketing perspective to sort of understand why you win deals and so
much of it
comes down to the experience so much of it comes down to the rapport that a
sales person builds
and the confidence and the trust that they build throughout the process making
somebody feel like
you are a partner to them and out of vendor and it starts from that very
beginning interaction to
all the way through signing the contract and hopefully pass that as well
because we're as a
customer even if it's not our money it's our company's hard earned money and we
want to be good
corporate citizens we want to be good stewards we want to make the right
decisions and having a
salesperson and having working with a company that creates that trust and
confidence is so
incredibly important how do you view your website so we have a lot of
opportunity we're really
excited about upgrading and updating our website I think our website is
incredibly good from a
sign of perspective I think it's one of the best websites from a if you go to
our website you
understand exactly what we do and we make it really easy for you to sign up I
think it's super clean
I think one of the big opportunities we have is to tell that enterprise story
and to tell
the value story and to enable people to understand that we're much more than a
scheduling link so
that's one of my very big KR's for the next quarter and probably the next few
quarters
exciting I love it that's a fun it'll be really fun to chat again in six months
or so and
hear how that journey is evolving let's get to the dust up where we talk about
healthy
tension whether that's with your board your sales teams your competitor and you
know
Jessica have you had a memorable dust up in your career
we've had a lot of them we just had one where we had company we had a
competitor reach out to us
because we were comparing ourselves to them and they were unhappy with the
comparison
and it was actually really interesting because it led us to have a lot of
really
interesting philosophical conversations around how we think about ourselves
versus competitors and
how we talk about ourselves and in my history I've always taken the high road
and I've always
been of the mind that we should share what we are why we are the best company
for the customers needs
but in a way that does not denigrate our competitors and that's always been my
philosophy and I think
that's been a philosophy that I have shared with Calendy which is hey there are
ways with which
we can educate our customers about the right approach to making decisions which
we believe is our approach
without mentioning competitors or without saying anything negative I always
believe there's room
for everybody and healthy competition is really good and so that was kind of a
very recent dust
up and I think it was like my second week of Calendy that I had to negotiate
that so that was
kind of interesting it was interesting to understand what the current value and
cultures were how my
CEO thought about it how my team thought about it and how we can allay concerns
from the sales team
around sales enablement while also being true to our values all right let's get
to our final
segment quick hits these are quick questions and quick answers just like how
quickly you can talk
to someone if you go to qualified.com qualified helps companies generate
pipeline faster tap into
your greatest asset your website to identify your most valuable visitors and
instantly start sales
conversations quick and easy just like these questions go to qualified.com to
learn more
Jessica quick hits are you ready I'm ready number one do you have a hidden
tellin' her skill that's not on your resume so when I between my first and
second year at
Wharton I spent the summer playing poker in Atlantic City so I'm I at least was
a pretty decent poker
player. Do you have a favorite book podcast or TV show you've been checking out
recently?
We just finished Magpie Murders on PBS a great book and great TV show.
What advice do you have for a first time CMO trying to figure out their
marketing or demand
gen strategy? Priorize. Great advice Jessica it's been awesome having you on
the show for our
listeners go to calonlea.com if you're a big enterprise company go talk to your
CIO and CFO
and give them the oil elbow and say hey why don't we why don't we go buy a
bunch of calonlea right
now and obviously check out a new product offering. Jessica any final thoughts?
And this is a lot of fun I really appreciate it thanks thanks so much.
Awesome well thanks again.
you