Leveraging AI to Forecast Meaningful Project Plans
Learn from Chris Mills, VP of Product Marketing at Wrike, about leveraging AI to increase internal efficacy.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Casperin Studios,
and I am joined by a special guest, Chris.
How are you?
>> I'm great.
>> Great to see you.
>> Yeah, excited to chat today.
We're going to talk right.
We're going to talk marketing.
Your background, everything in between in today's show is
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Go to Qualified.com to learn more about
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Chris, first question, what was your first job in marketing?
>> First job in marketing.
Let's see. I started my career in
professional services consulting doing system integrator
implementations of technology,
and then did that for six years,
and then went to business school,
came out of business school and went into product management.
Then eventually, I'd sort of
inherited a product marketing team,
I was doing a product management and product marketing,
and decided I'd like working closer to the sales side of
the house than the engineering side of the house.
So that was what started my marketing journey.
>> Then fly forward to today.
Tell me what it means to be VP of product marketing and go to market at right.
>> Yeah. So I run our product marketing team,
which consists of what you would think of
as traditional pure product marketing platform.
Marketing, working closely with our product management team,
I own our demand generation team,
which consists of both broad-based integrated campaigns,
as well as account-based marketing.
Then I own our partner,
ISV relationships too, and then generally involved in a lot of
our go-to-market strategy planning,
and what markets and segments are we going to go after?
So it's a fun job, and it's constantly evolving.
>> Yes, sure is. Everything under the sun with the product and demand.
Let's get to our first segment,
the trust tree where we go and feel honest and trusting.
You can share those deepest, darkest pipeline secrets.
Zoom it out, tell us a little bit about
right and what the company does.
>> Awesome. Well, right. So work management platform that
combines structured project management and resource management and planning,
with communication, messaging, document,
task collaboration, and then we power that with AI-powered workflow automation
and analytics.
So pretty powerful platform built to help companies manage
the modern complexities of work in a very distributed hybrid global work
environment.
>> Obviously, we're talking about this.
It's a competitive space, but it's also just a massive, massive market,
and so much an on-consumption of people who are trying to figure out what
the heck is going on in their companies and how it's done in
productivity, I think, more important than ever in
this sort of belt tightening time, especially in tech.
Who are your customers and how do you think about the market?
>> Yeah. I mean, as you said, it's a huge market.
I mean, basically any knowledge worker at any company,
whether you're a small mom and pop job or you're global,
the sort of fortune in 1,000 company can use technology of ours,
like ours to help manage and structure their work,
to collaborate, to organize, to report and get visibility into what's going on.
So generally our customers consist from relatively small companies that could
be
sort of very small businesses, mom and pop shops,
all the way up to the global, you know, fortune 100.
I think we have eight of the 10, fortune 10 companies.
And so we serve a pretty broad base of customers.
Our heavy concentration in, you know, a handful of articles,
including high-tech is a key vertical for us,
manufacturing, retail and professional services.
A lot of our customers tend to be in those industries,
but that being said, we serve companies almost every industry.
>> Yeah. And so for your role,
how much are you thinking about smaller companies versus larger companies
versus the enterprise and the different sort of buying committees?
>> Yeah. I mean, I think, you know,
given the broad set of size and complexities of companies that we manage,
you know, we offer a different set of plans with, you know,
sort of varying sets of sophistication of capabilities,
you know, a basic team plan that's built for small businesses
and tries to strip away some of the complexity of our enterprise.
Orienting solutions to, we've got enterprise scale solutions
that, you know, have a ton of configurility, flexibility,
security and, you know, sort of governance capabilities built into it,
built for the, you know, large enterprises.
I think the interesting thing is, is that, like,
as we look at our go-to-market strategy
and the different types of customers that we serve,
we have a PLG, you know, self-service motion that can, you know,
take a very small company, comes in, you know,
wants to try the product, signs up for trial, any commerce engine
where they can just sort of slap their credit card down and pat you on their
own
to sales-assisted, you know, sort of sales cycles
where a company might come in that we determine that they're in our ICP
and, you know, we have a salesperson reach out to them if they want to engage,
they can engage with the salesperson and sort of help walk through the trial
process
and, you know, go through the buying and, you know, sort of solutioning process
to sell a big deal to, you know, then on the enterprise side,
we've got enterprise sellers who are working more top-down with executive
buying committees.
And so generally that buying committee can consist of, like,
"Hey, I'm a team leader or project manager and I'm managing a project.
I go sign up for a trial and I buy a few or ample licenses
to the more complex buying committees which may include a functional leader.
Marketing tends to be, you know, a big buying center for us
or, you know, PMO, program management office,
tends to be a buying center for us and then professional services teams
that do client, you know, project management are also another big buying center
for us.
And so in those cases, typically, you know, some business sponsor, champion,
functional leader will initiate a buying process and evaluate, you know,
different solutions.
And then, yeah, those are complex enterprise buying cycles that, you know,
involve a handful, you know, sometimes tens of people from the functional, you
know,
business unit that we're working with potentially some of their cross-
functional work partners,
procurement, IT, legal, finance.
And so those were more, you know, kind of typical enterprise sales cycles
that involve, you know, a bunch of different buyers from the company.
You can see my auto-generated emojis.
The thing that nobody would ever have asked for.
Yeah, exactly.
The first time it showed up, I was like, why are balloons, like, shooting out
of my head?
See if it does. Yeah.
Well, it's so funny is like, if you're going to do that, like,
I need like, tell me where the, you know, where the nearest burrito shop is or
something,
you know what I mean?
If we're going to have balloons flash on the screen and the thumbs up,
it's like, give me something actionable here.
Speaking of burritos, how would you define your marketing strategy, you know,
going after all these different types of accounts?
We've got a pretty, you know, varying marketing strategy, right?
So we're trying to go after this huge market and capture all the different
kinds of people
who are looking to manage their work more effectively.
And so, you know, it starts with performance marketing.
We do a decent amount of performance marketing and we spent years sort of
refine our model
around, you know, how do we tune our, you know, engine so that we capture as
many leads
to get them to our website, to get them to convert and make sure the right
kinds of leads
that are looking for solutions that are sort of in our category and that are
good fits for us.
So, lots and lots of energy goes into those, you know, performance marketing,
you know,
machine learning models to kind of figure out, like, where should we be
spending money
on what types of terms and, you know, what channels.
We do a ton of work around SEO, so we got to hold digital team, you know,
constantly tuning
our SEO to content generation to orient towards the different types of visitors
that we want
to, you know, bring to our web properties.
And then, you know, we have other more traditional sort of enterprise, you know
demand generation marketing tactics that include, you know, integrated
campaigns, you know,
emails, webinars and seminars, event strategy, both our own events that we put
on as well
as, you know, industry sponsored events that are, you know, so where are target
customers
and prospects, tend to go to consume information.
And then, you know, we're doing one to one to one to a few targeted ABM
programs as well
for some of our, you know, biggest strategic accounts, as well as, you know,
kind of key
targeted ICP segments that we're focused on.
And either thoughts on strategy or team or buying company or anything like that
Yeah, I mean, the way our go to market organization is set up is, you know, we
think of our business,
you know, from a land and expand perspective, like, we're very sort of a team
to the way
this market buys generally is they, you know, land and, you know, kind of a
small team
or project team or part of the organization is looking for a solution they buy
and then,
you know, then there's an opportunity to take that team and can we get more
members of that
team and can we get other teams that that team works closely with?
Can we go into other functions that that function collaborates with or other
business units
that, you know, are aligned with what that team is doing?
And so we have a dedicated land team that's very focused on, you know, how do
we acquire
customers as quickly and as big as possible?
And then we have expansion teams that are divided by G.O.
So we've got general managers in the Americas and internationally who have
teams of account
managers who own the relationship and are responsible for, you know, expansions
and up
so-cross all within accounts.
Those GMs also have the customer success and renewal pieces of the customer
relationship
as well.
And then we've got a mix of AEs and SDRs who, you know, sort of handle, you
know, sort
of cold prospecting or kind of lower scored leads, you know, go to the SDRs,
whereas
like higher, higher qualified, higher fit leads might get directed directly to
the AEs.
Okay, let's get to our next segment, the playbook.
Where you opened up the playbook and talked about the tactics that help you win
What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items?
Yeah, I talked a little bit about the digital marketing piece, performance
marketing that
we do.
I mean, that is, you know, a core part of our marketing engine.
Now we've spent a ton of, you know, I think three years ago when, you know,
sort of money
was free and everybody was like growing like gamebusters.
We're spending more on performance marketing.
And I think everybody in the market was.
I think everybody has sort of like, you know, looked at, you know, where they
're spending,
you know, market program budget and look for ways to optimize.
So we spent a lot in the last year or so trying to make sure that like every
dollar that we
spend on performance marketing generates, you know, an adequate dollar or
dollars of
money on the return on investment.
And so we've gotten much more efficient in that just from a lot of anything
that we've
done.
So that's a key, you know, marketing budget line item for us.
And I think another sort of unmovable thing is like we throw an annual
conference every
year, called collaborate.
There's an opportunity for us to bring our customers together and, you know,
potential
customers together to talk about leadership and where the world of work is
going and,
you know, sort of best practices on how people are managing, you know, modern
work and the
challenges that come along with that as well as, you know, sort of best
practices on how
how our customers should be using, right, or how any customer that uses RIC can
use it
to the best extent.
So I think that's a key event for us that there's an opportunity to interact
with our
customers and also get our customers to sort of interact with potential
customers as well.
And so we'll always continue to do that.
We're doing sort of a hybrid event this year to look forward to, you know,
getting back
in person most likely next year.
The third area is around like just our marketing and sales tax act.
So I mean, we've got a fairly sophisticated set of marketing sales tools that
our teams
are using from, you know, Marketo and demand base, lean data, zoom info, sales
loft, and
our teams use RIC pretty extensively, both in the marketing team as well as
across the
organization.
I mean, we're definitely, you know, each young dog food, drink your own
champagne, you
know, sort of a practitioner of using RIC to run the organization.
And what is not sort of like in your, in your remit for things like, are you
not looking
at sort of like the classic corporate marketing functions like, you know,
content or comms
or brand or something like that?
So I have product marketing, demand generation with the exception of digital
and, you know,
sort of go to market strategy.
So the marketing leadership team, I have a peer who runs digital.
So that peer is responsible for our SEO strategy, our web properties and our
digital spend,
you know, performance marketing.
And then I have another peer who runs corporate marketing and creative, you
know, sort of
brand part of marketing team.
So within some of the, obviously you said you're doing a ton of stuff with paid
Paid is usually, you know, an uncutable budget item with a lot of people.
You mentioned machine learning, all sorts of stuff like that.
I'm curious though.
How do you think about sort of, you know, you have the people that are in
market and then
people that are not in market, you know, especially on the enterprise side
where it's
all a little bit more fungible, you know, the, the, the, the CMO is probably
not filling
out the, you know, a lead form just because they see an ad or, or, or, you know
, searching
for your solution necessarily.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's where our ABN tactics come into play.
And we're starting to do more and more on ABN side.
We think that there's a big opportunity there because, you know, as we're doing
more enterprise
deals and looking at selling top down.
Yeah.
But those people are not signing up for trials and responding to ads.
And so that's where there's an opportunity for us to sort of closely refine our
, ICP
and personal, you know, definitions and figure out like what companies do we
want to go
after that are good sort of industry fit size location, whatever have the types
of workflows
that lend themselves to a solution like ours and then who are the typical
buyers within
those organizations that are going to, you know, have a remit that lends itself
to like,
hey, I need to go solve problems and I'm accountable for, for driving, you know
, better
efficiency in the organization and I need a tool like Rike to help me make that
happen.
That's where our ABN programs are coming into play.
We're trying to get in front of those people to educate them on who Rike is and
then what
we do and some of the problems that we solve for some types of companies that
were helping
solve problems at pretty large scale.
And so that's where we're doing a lot of our ABN stuff.
And I think there's, you know, we're constantly sort of tweaking experiments on
things that
think of work and don't work within that.
And I think there's an opportunity for us to use those ABN tactics both within
existing
customers as well as to identify new prospects who haven't bought, right?
Chris started using us because like when you look at these enterprises, like we
may be
highly penetrated within, you know, a department within a big company or even
within a business
unit within a company and yet there are a bunch of other departments that could
benefit from
our solution who don't even know that we're there and the people that we're
working with
don't know the other people that we need to work with.
So how do we sort of, A, use the reference selling, you know, and the advocates
that
we have at the company to help us navigate to other parts of the company, but
then also
how do we, you know, sort of amplify the stories that were helping and the
benefits that were
helping generate other parts of the business.
So that, you know, others within that company can see, oh, hey, like, I didn't
know Joe from
this business unit is working with right and they're doing some pretty cool
things.
I need to go check them out.
Yeah.
Any other sort of examples there of stuff that you've, you know, how much of
that is sales
driven versus marketing driven?
I think it's a conversation of both.
I mean, we spent a lot of the last, you know, handful of months working closely
hand in
hand between the marketing team and the sales leadership team on identifying
where do we
think our top accounts that we want to go after and what's the white space in
those accounts
and what departments and sort of higher person knows the, do we want to get in
front of and
then partnering with the sales reps who own those accounts to kind of figure
out like,
hey, for this specific company, what are the tactics that we want to use to try
to, you
know, provide some air cover to educate those buyers so that when the sales rep
picks up
the phone or, you know, kind of reaches out that they're not reaching out
completely cold,
they know who we are and they know what some of the things that we're already
doing at
the company are.
What about something that's not working that you're most cuttable budget item?
You know, I don't know if it's a budget lineup because a lot of these types of
things are
free but like email as a channel, you know, it's been a dying channel for a
long time,
I think, particularly it's a standalone channel.
It's just not effective.
I mean, like everybody's in boxes or, you know, sort of exploded with, you know
, both
internal, external and people trying to sell them stuff and like, it's just not
an effective
way to get people's attention.
I think there's still, there's still a place for email both from a marketing
perspective
as well as from a sales engagement perspective where you're getting emails from
reps.
But I think like market automation tools killed the email channel, right, where
, you know,
companies were just able to sort of send massive amounts of email out at scale
and that's
resulted in, you know, all of our inboxes being filled with lots of email that
we'll
never look at or that goes straight to a junk folder.
Sales engagement tools like outreach and sales loss have done that to a degree
because they've
enabled sales teams to send out lots of emails at scale.
And I think when used correctly, sales cadences and sequences can be very
effective.
But the key is that the reps need to take the time to personalize the
interactions with
the customers or prospective customers.
Otherwise any, any one of us who gets, you know, sort of cold prospecting on a
fairly
frequent basis can spot like a generic email cadence, you know, cold outreach
in a second
and it just gets immediately deleted.
Whereas the reps who take the time to personalize the first 20% of it have a
much higher likelihood
of actually getting someone to engage.
I can think of companies trying to sell us a solution on the sales and
marketing tax
stock and they sent, you know, me, the VP of GoToMarket or CRO or CEO and our
head of revenue
operations, the same similar email.
And it was very tailored and you mentioned we were competing in a competitive
market
against these companies and, you know, what if we knew more data about where
those companies
existed, whatever.
It was super effective in terms of like a caught our attention because it was
something
that was top of mind for us, it namedrop some of the, you know, competitors
that are top
of mind and literally all of us like kind of said, did you get this email?
I got this email like we stuck to these guys and so super effective.
So email can work as a channel but typically you have to do it right.
Content and things that are going to add value versus ask for a meeting.
Yeah, I think that that's exactly it.
It's just like so much of email right now is just saying buy our shit.
Like nobody wants that anymore.
And we've covered it.
Yeah.
How do you think about experiments and like experimental budgets and try new
things?
Yeah, I mean, I think we try to save 10ish percent of our budget for like, you
know, completely
net new experimental things, whether it's like trying to do piece of technology
or trying
a different type of campaign or different tactic.
We were constantly like we have a pool of money on the performance marketing
side where
we're just constantly running a B test and stuff, but that's sort of like
within that
budget.
But then we try to save off like a certain portion of budget so that we can try
, you
know, additional things and, you know, we're doing a lot of experimentation
with ADM programs
now because we think that there's a big opportunity for us, particularly as we
focus more and
on, you know, kind of larger enterprise companies to leverage ADM tactics to
help complement
efforts of the sales team.
So what like a couple examples of that might be like, how do we, how do we
better leverage
champions within our customers and understanding, you know, you know, using
data to understand
power usage and, you know, interaction and engagement.
But as well as like how do we track those advocates as they move around and,
you know,
sort of reach out to them as they go to new companies or change jobs to
leverage them.
How do we locate technographic information and understand, you know, what are
the different
either competitive or, you know, synergistic solutions that companies are using
and leverage
that to inform, you know, who we're going to go after, what's a good fit
potentially
because they're using complementary technology or potentially who to avoid it
because they,
you know, they've got other solutions that doesn't make sense for us to knock
on a door
or spend less energy knocking on the door.
So we're looking at things like that.
Any particular ways that you'll measure success, that's perhaps different from,
you know,
for your org or maybe a KPI or a metric or something that you track that's
particularly
interesting.
I mean, we're super metric driven organization.
I mean, we're constantly looking at our final metrics on a weekly, if not daily
basis and
then like at the executive team level, we're doing monthly MBRs, which are a
combination
of marketing, you know, kind of final metrics as well as, you know, sales,
final metrics
and it's sort of combined presentation from marketing leadership and sales
leadership.
I mean, we're looking at, you know, fairly typical metrics, like number of
leads, quality
and score of leads.
So, you know, we have some, you know, sort of internally built, you know,
machine learning
models that score leads based on ICP fit and size of company and other
activities that
they've done.
And we've kind of, you know, really honed in on like, you know, leads that have
a score
of nine or above converted at much higher rate than, you know, beats that have
a score
of, you know, nine or less.
And so we, you know, we route and treat those leads special.
We report how on them at a more detailed level, we're looking at things like
speed
leads or how quickly is either a SDR a following up with a lead, whether it's,
you know, a
non trial lead, you know, somebody downloaded a piece of content or asked to
talk to sales
or somebody signed up for trial, how quickly can we engage with that trial user
to offer
our systems, you know, if they want to talk to sales rep to help guide their
trial experience
or, you know, can use additional content to help educate them through the trial
experience.
You know, we're focused on how quickly can we get in front of them because we
know that,
you know, that has an impact on likelihood to close and likely to have a
positive trial
experience and get the value faster.
We're looking at converter conversion rates at every step in the funnel.
So, you know, lead to opportunity, opportunity to close.
You know, we look at a lot of product metrics because we're, you know, it's a
real P.L.G.
trial driven.
So we're looking at users in the trial and are they, you know, taking key
actions and
you're discovering value in the product in the early, you know, hours and days
of their
trial experience and if not, how do we kind of provide them with content to
help them
kind of discover that value.
We look at velocity metrics, how fast our leads and deals moving through the
funnel.
You know, and then we're looking at cost per, you know, cost per V and cost per
, you know,
through different channels.
We break everything down based on, you know, geo segment, like SMB, BSB, you
know, commercial
bit market and enterprise.
And then we take a geo, geo lens to it to see, you know, how are we performing
across
all those different slices of how we look at the funnel.
Can I ask you a question that's, that's a bit, a bit leading, but also, you
know, a
bit different.
Do you think it's all worth it?
Like, do you think that breaking everything down into all of those details, you
know, is
actually helpful in the long run to provide all that information?
Like, what part of the marketing sort of mix here?
Because, you know, your team obviously is doing all of that stuff.
There's two other teams that are working, you know, and a little bit less of
the data
and more of sort of the art side of the business for like for better term.
Yeah.
I mean, I think we, we debate that.
I think that the company historically has been super, super data driven.
And, you know, when you're getting, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of
people to
sign up for trial and go through the trial, PLG experience, you know, every day
that you,
that something is broken in that process is a bunch of missed opportunity to
fix something
or adjust something to sort of improve your conversion rates.
At least that's the way we thought about it historically.
And so we don't want to wait two weeks a month towards the end of the quarter
until we see,
oh, holy shit, this metric is upside down.
Like what happened?
Oh, like some, you know, scoring algorithm broke or, you know, Google changed
something
in its algorithms and, you know, we didn't adjust until we noticed it.
And so I think, I definitely think that there's an opportunity to make sure
that you are
staying on top of those metrics.
Some things that we do are not as measurable or not as measurable in the
timelines, particularly
as you think about, you know, moving a market where deals aren't kind of
flowing through
the trial process in a matter of days and weeks, but they're potentially months
and
months.
And like all of the marketing touches that you're doing over the course of that
customer's,
you know, buying experience or customer journey are, you know, varied and
happen at different
times with different people at that account.
And so those things tend to be, you know, sort of more difficult to manage
because they're
just over a longer time horizon.
And so, you know, in some ways you have to look at, you know, different kinds
of leading
indicators, like, you know, how many accounts that are in our target segments
or, you know,
kind of one to one programs, how many are engaging, how many contacts that
those, you
know, customers are engaging, are we having an impact?
And you know, are those customers buying at a higher rate than those that aren
't?
So, you know, we're looking at different kinds of metrics there.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of metrics that we're all responsible for looking
at from
marketing perspective.
I think RIC is because of the volume and velocity of our business and the trial
, you know, PLG
nature of it, it's probably more metric driven than some of the other
organizations that
have been part of that were more, you know, solely focused on that prize where,
you know,
some of those daily, weekly monthly metrics aren't as measurable because your
deals, you
know, operate at a slower velocity.
Any other thoughts on playbook or plays or tactics or examples of stuff that's
working
well?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, lots of conversations happening around play
books now within the team,
like, what is a playbook?
And, you know, how do we enable the team on a playbook?
And like, is a playbook something that you run at a point in time or is a
playbook something
that you have at your arsenal that you pull out if and when appropriate?
So there's been a lot of like, you know, alignment around like as an example,
like we're going
after certain industry segments and we're building, you know, industry specific
solutions, messaging
and positioning of personas and, you know, sort of content that's oriented and
examples
in customer case studies and demos.
And so like, what does that playbook consist of?
Like, how do we pull all that all of that together?
How do we have the right and implement programs to enable the sales team on,
you know, what
that playbook consists of how to apply it to their book of business and, you
know, to
the accounts that they own because you won't run every playbook at every
account, right?
Like you have to use your own sort of knowledge of your, you know, the accounts
that are in
your territory to understand, you know, on a run this play at this company and
I'm a
different play at this company and I'll come back and run this other play at
the company
after I'm run the first play.
So lots of work, I mean, I think, and so there's a lot of enablement and sort
of conversations
are, you know, going on around now.
Like, how does, how do my team partner with the enablement part of our
organization to
make sure that we're getting ourselves teams, all the ammunition and training
and, you know,
sort of understanding to, you know, properly execute and activate some of the
players that
we're looking to run.
Are you all doing anything with AI, AI tools?
How are you thinking about AI?
Yeah, I mean, AI is, you know, it's come upon us over the last, you know, 12 or
18 months
I think everybody's still trying to figure it out.
It's definitely an area of focus, I think are, you know, it's interesting
because our internal
teams are trying to figure out how to use AI to do their work more effectively.
And then we're also, you know, I think most software vendors in general are
trying to
figure out like, how can we incorporate AI into our solutions to help our
customers,
you know, benefit and automate some of the things that can be automated so that
, you
know, people can focus on, you know, strategic creative work.
And so from a marketing team perspective, you know, our teams are using AI for
things
like, you know, we've probably 10xed our SEO content generation leveraging AI
to, to
at least draft content.
I mean, all the content that we're creating still has human eyes that touch it
and review
it and publish it.
But like you can definitely, rather than staring at a blank, you know, white
piece of paper,
I think you can use AI to sort of generate a great first draft and then modify.
So we're using it for things like that.
From a product perspective, you know, we're looking at how do we leverage AI to
take,
you know, in some cases, a massive amount of data that sits in our system
around work
and tasks and projects and things that are happening and how you use AI to help
people
summarize a big thread of communication and collaboration that's happened over
a period
of time so that they can like quickly go in and assess what's the latest and
greatest
that's happened with this, you know, sort of stream of, you know, back and
forth, or
how do I translate into things in the different languages or how do I use AI to
, you know,
create recommendations of like, hey, this workflow can be automated and here's
a way
to do that.
Using AI to, you know, use natural language to, you know, create project plans
rather than,
you know, creating a project plan from scratch saying, hey, I have a project to
do to launch
this new product in this type of market and, you know, here's what the product
consists
of and, you know, build me a project plan and it can leverage data that exists
publicly
for similar types of products, projects as well as within that customer's, you
know,
set up historical projects, like how do you kind of generate content that way
and then
how you use AI to predict risks on a project or how to use AI to identify, you
know, resources
to staff on a project like, hey, I need a resource who knows Java, who's
available from
this time period to this time period and speaks, you know, two languages and,
you know, using
using AI to go figure that out and staff those people on the right projects.
So it's interesting.
I mean, like both our internal workers are using AI that's available to us to
help us
internally and then we're also, you know, kind of looking at our AI strategy
from a product
and innovation perspective and figuring out how do we make our system more
powerful, more
intelligent to automate some things to help people, you know, focus on more
creative,
your human-centric work.
Let's get to our next segment, the desktop where we talk about healthy tension,
whether
that's with your board or sales team, your competitors or anyone else.
If you had a memorable desktop in your career, Chris, probably more than I can
remember
and working for a long time, but a recent memory was around our ideal customer
profile
and our, you know, ICP strategy.
There was a lot of focus in the 18 months of like, hey, we need to focus on
certain
ICPs that close at a higher rate and these are the kind of companies that are
good fit.
And there was a lot of back and forth and, you know, we were, we, from a
management perspective,
you know, marketing and sales leadership, the executive team were sort of
pushing like,
hey, focus on this ICP and then, you know, a couple months later focus on this
other
ICP and I think that sales team felt like whiplash because it was like, you
know, you
just had to go do this and how we focus on this.
Like what is, and so, yeah, there was a lot of resistance from the sales team.
And so when we dug into it, I think a lot of it was around sort of
misunderstanding and
miscommunication of what an ICP really was.
Like, I think most of us in the marketing world think of an ideal customer
profile as
the characteristics of a company that make them look good fit.
Like, are they right in the right industry?
Are they the right size of company?
Are they in the right locations that we can serve them effectively?
And within, right, there was more of a concentration around ICP equals the
Department of Buying
Center that typically best and most often buys our software.
And so there was this sort of this mismatch when some people were saying ICP,
other people
were thinking something entirely different.
And so there was just a lot of realignment around like, here's what an ICP is,
here's
why, I think there was also not a great understanding of why we were going
after ICPs.
Because the market is generally pretty horizontal.
Like any company in any industry, any department, any type of worker can
benefit from software
like ours.
But I think there are certain departments, buying centers, articles who tend to
have problems
that lend themselves to solutions like ours and have a higher likelihood of
buying our
software, higher likelihood of closing, et cetera.
And so I think we had to align people around the high behind the ICP strategy
before people
truly bought into it.
And then re-educate people on ICP isn't just a department, ICP is a type of
company.
Because once you land a back type of company, then you can go from department
to department
and go wider in those kinds of companies because they have not only one
department,
but often many, many departments that tend to interact together so they can
collaborate
together using our software and/or they have multiple departments who have work
in challenges
that lend themselves to a platform like ours.
Let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits, these are quick questions and quick answers like how qualified
helps companies
generate pipeline quickly, go qualified.com to learn more.
Quick hits, Chris, you ready?
Sure.
With the hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
It might be in my likes or hobbies or whatever, but I've been skiing since I
can almost walk.
My kids have definitely been skiing since they were like in diapers.
I've been skiing since I was a little kid.
And when I was a kid, I lived on East Coast.
Skiing was expensive.
We ski as much as we could, but it was probably five, six days a year.
That was a good year.
And I moved to California 20 years ago.
I really did eat closer to the west coast, much better skiing than the east
coast, which
is, I don't know if you've ever skied on the east coast, but it's ice back
there.
And the seasons last about six weeks.
So I moved out to California to be closer to good skiing.
And since I moved here 20 years ago, I've probably skied 500 times, maybe more.
I was a good skier when I was 18 years old.
And now many, many years later, I won't say how many years, but I'm probably
better skier
now as a multiple decades past that than I was when I was 18.
That's awesome.
Favorite mountain?
Whiskey or home mountain is what is now called Palisades Tahoe, which used to
be called Squaw
Valley.
I met my wife in the bar there and we got married.
No way.
In the valley there.
Yeah.
That's pretty epic.
That's amazing.
That is truly a story built on the slopes.
The whole family really on the mountain.
Yeah.
That's pretty amazing.
That's where the Olympics was, right?
Yeah.
It was like a 1960-ish.
It was sometime in the '60s, the Olympics were held in Squaw Valley.
Yeah.
Crazy.
What is your best advice for a first-time VP of product marketing or a demand
gen?
It may seem obvious, but never stop learning.
I think no matter how much you experience that you bring into a role when you
come in
as a new marketing leader, yes, you should rely on that experience and have
seen a movie
before.
But from my experience, every movie is a little bit different.
Every company and the stage that they're in is a little bit different and you
can't necessarily
come in and wrote, apply everything you did in a previous role out of new
companies.
You have to be flexible and understand and assess the situation that you're in.
And then I think the other big piece that I would have given 15 years ago, self
-advice
around is resist the temptation to jump into the new job and give it 120% of
your time
and neglect everything else.
Obviously, you don't want to neglect your family and your health and your
social life.
But I think one of the things that people forget to do or it's easy to cross
this off
the list because you're too busy is fostering and keeping the network of folks
that you
have in your network or even just finding new people to network with.
Because often when you jump into a new company, everyone's going to expect you
to have answers
to everything, you're not going to have answers.
It's impossible to have all the answers.
And I think having an external group of folks that you can bounce ideas off of
and commit
to rate with in some ways is super helpful in thinking through some of the
things that
you should be thinking about when you start a new role.
Because typically you're going to be the most experienced marketer at that
company.
I think the founders and CEO will have been at the company for a while and they
will
have thought through a lot of the marketing challenges.
But often you're going to have more marketing actual experience than they do.
And while they'll comment you at a lot of ideas, they won't necessarily know
that 100%
of the players to run.
And so you can bring your experience to bear, but don't forget to bring your
network of
other folks that you know or other folks that were in similar roles to bear
because they
can help you in ways that no one else internal to the company can.
Well Chris, it's been awesome having you on the show.
For listeners you can go to right.com to learn more about, well first of all if
your
marketing team is not using it, go use right.
I don't know what to tell you.
But any final thoughts, anything to plug?
No, I mean I think go check out right.
You can find it for a trial and play around with the product if you're not
already using
it.
And if you're already a bike user or a mail about us, look for some kind of
exciting things
that we'll have coming out over the next few months including industry
solutions for manufacturing
and professional services.
We're doing a lot of really interesting things around AI.
We've got some data centric products and analytics updates coming out.
So some really super exciting things will be coming out in the coming weeks and
months
ahead so check us out.
Awesome.
Thanks Chris, appreciate it and we'll talk soon.
Alright, thanks a lot Ian.
Thank you.