Staying on Top of Industry Dynamics Through Innovation & Efficiency
Stevie Case shares how Vanta stays on top of industry dynamics through innovation and efficiency and how they’re taking the buyer’s end-to-end journey into account in everything they do.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Fazion, CEO of Caspian Studios.
Pipeline Visionaries is always presented by the amazing team I qualified,
and we love them dearly.
So go check out qualified.com and my special guest today, Stevie Case, how are
you?
>> I am doing great.
I'm so happy to be here.
>> Excited to have you on the show,
excited to chat about all pipeline,
and your background.
So let's get into it.
What was your first job in marketing?
>> [LAUGH]
This is a great question because the honest answer is,
it's the current job that I have today.
And I embrace that wholly.
I will be the first one to say I am not a marketer by trade, but
I am extremely passionate about pipeline.
And I think that I've had almost 20 year career in sales and
marrying together sales and marketing in a really elegant way.
I think is critical and obviously is really built to drive the best results.
And I tend to think of one of my key mentors in that reality,
that I'm in the first marketing related role of my career.
That was George Hu at Twilio, and George was our COO there.
And we were talking about career development at one point, and
George was talking about how you figure out what to do when you get a new job.
And he told me that the first marketing job he had ever was as CMO of Sales
force.
And I said, George, how did you know what to do?
How do you even begin if you've never been in a marketing role?
And he said the truth is when you take on a job,
the most important thing you can do is set some clear priorities for
the team, get everybody pulling in the same direction.
And if they've got that clarity, chances are you're probably gonna get it wrong
the first time, you're gonna have to iterate on it.
But as long as they're moving in a direction, you're gonna learn,
you're gonna iterate and you're gonna be fine.
I also think that your role as CRO is very emblematic of this modern marketing.
I mean, we talk about it all the time.
If you're a certain type of CMO, if you're like a PLG CMO,
you're the closest person to revenue, right?
If you're the CRO of a company that has a very SLG motion and it's very
enterprise,
you're the person closest to revenue.
So I think it stands to reason that all this stuff makes sense.
It's why like, you know, as the R teams or BDR teams or whatever can roll up
into
marketing pretty seamlessly or vice versa.
I think it's just this is them the times and like, I don't think we nailed it,
you know, however many years ago when we're like, this is marketing and this is
sales.
And there are two functions that like, you know, it's not like we got that
right.
And so it's interesting to see sort of someone like you with your role where
you
own a bunch of marketing, but not all of marketing.
And we'll get into that obviously today.
I think you're absolutely right.
And Chief Revenue Officer, it's a relatively new role in the grand scheme of
things in tech.
And I have seen it done a variety of ways.
I think some people think of the CRO role as like a VP of sales plus.
I was talking about this with the co-founders over at scratch pad last night.
And I think that idea is kind of an old school idea.
And I don't think it makes a lot of sense because ultimately,
if you're just a VP of sales plus, but you're being held accountable for the
entire revenue number,
you can't really drive success like that.
Like, you can do it indirectly, but it's incredibly inefficient.
So I think marrying marketing and sales in a much more natural way to your
point
allows you to get that synergy of moving things back and forth.
And in fact, SDR is a good one.
I've actually really changed my opinion about where that really should live.
I used to be very religious about that living in sales.
And I feel a little differently now.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that there were a lot of conversations that were really smart
back 20 years ago
about this like sales and marketing sort of like living in silos.
But that's because the buyer's journey lived in a silo back then, right?
It's like now it doesn't.
And therefore, you can't just say like, we're going to fill top funnel leads
and then like dust our hands and now it's sales job.
And then they're going to close like that is just not how this stuff works at
all anymore.
So like why even pretend that we should keep the same work structure?
Yeah, I mean, pretend is the right word.
And I think that anybody who is still pretending that that makes sense or that
when prospects
come inbound to sales, that they're just starting their buying journey, that's
just a fantasy.
We all know that by the time these folks make it to your sales team, they have
had an entire
experience with your brand, whether that's on your website or elsewhere or
through industry
contacts or wherever they got that knowledge of your company and your brand.
They are approaching you from a typically very educated point of view.
And that's not the start of their journey.
So if you pretend it is and you try to silo those things and you don't take
into account
that full end to end experience, you're really both missing out on opportunity,
but you're
also shorting your prospects by not really fully appreciating where they're at
in their journey.
Okay, let's get to our first segment, the trust tree where we go and feel
honest and
trusted and you can share those deepest, darkest, pipeline secrets.
Zooming out, what does Vanta do?
Okay, so Vanta is all about automated compliance and security.
So we're really on a mission to create a more secure internet.
There's so much challenge out there with keeping data secure, protecting
consumer data.
And so many companies are out there trying to innovate and build great new
software.
And while they do that, they need to be able to prove that they have secured
all of their
assets, secured customer data, and that they are compliant with laws and
regulations.
So we provide our customers with the platform to automate those processes and
to more efficiently
track the way that they become compliant and stay compliant.
So many of our customers are software companies themselves.
And by helping them become compliant, we're helping them get through these very
old school
antiquated processes, like showing their compliant with frameworks like SOC 2
or ISO 27001.
And when they do that, they unlock the ability to do business, either with
enterprises or
new geographic markets.
So we're accelerating growth for them and also making those security and
compliance programs
much more efficient.
And then in your role as CRO, how is your team organized?
What parts of marketing do you oversee?
Yeah.
So I have the wholesale team.
We've got a sales team that is quite large here in North America.
We also have an international sales team.
We've got a growing presence in Dublin and in Sydney.
So we've got a bunch of new direct sellers out there selling our platform to
our customers.
We also have a large customer success group because the reality for us is we
provide software,
but our customers are also going through these very, at times, gnarly audit
processes.
Yeah.
So we've got a team that helps them get through that process and helps them
understand what
that looks like.
So customer success rules into me, we have an implementation team that helps
specifically
with onboarding there.
We have an overlay sales team that sells to our existing customer base.
We are the biggest player in our space.
We've got about 5,000 customers today.
By and large, those are small and medium size B2B tech companies as our
customers.
And then I do have growth marketing.
So our marketing, we've got two different parts to that team.
Our corporate marketing group has brand and communications and product
marketing that
rolls up to our CEO.
Growth marketing rolls directly to me.
And a lot of that comes back to that synergy and how we drive pipeline and how
that entire
journey through funnel drives outcomes.
So within growth marketing, we've got demand, we've got paid marketing, we've
got events,
we've got a campaigns team.
We've now got GMs that are organizing our activities around our core ICPs.
And that whole crew rolls up to me.
I love how you said that organizing activities around our ICPs.
Isn't that what it's all about, right?
It's like, gosh, I feel like we have this conversation 50 times a week and
people are
not thinking about things that way.
Not on this podcast, of course, people on this podcast are always thinking
about that.
But yeah, that's very cool to see.
And I would imagine it allows a much more holistic sales approach when the
sales team
is really aware of all those type of growth or demand activities.
That's right.
And it puts everybody a little bit more in the same boat rather than having
teams that
run one-off campaigns and hand things over and then sales giving offline
feedback, we
now have a very integrated process.
So everybody's in the mix.
And some of those changes are pretty recent for us.
We've got an incredible leadership team over this growth marketing team that's
reorienting
the entire way we think about what we do.
So we're a growth stage company.
We're really evolving the way we work.
Historically, we had taken an approach that was a little more campaign-based,
it was a
little more one-off.
So we would identify an initiative or a product launch or whatever it may be.
We'd run a campaign against it, but that campaign itself was a little siloed.
And the move that we have made and that we're now operating from within is we
have GMs that
represent each of our two core ICPs.
And then those growth GMs are coordinating activities across all of the
channels.
And they partner very closely with our sales team, with our SDRs.
It's really like one team as opposed to feeling like multiple.
And they are really focused on always on programs that target those specific I
CPs.
So we're going from a world of one-off to a world of scalable and repeatable.
I love it.
I think this is the modern playbook.
It's always on campaigns for your ICPs, thinking about audiences, thinking
about not just the
5% of the time that they're buying, but the 95% of the time that they're not,
prepping
them, having conversations with them very early in the process.
So when they are ready to buy, again, those are things that if you were just to
say, we're
going to run a bunch of paid stuff for people that are raising their hand with
intent, that's
the old way.
And so it's cool to hear you say that in a very forward, pipeline-driven
approach.
It's been a real evolution for us.
As a growth stage company, we are really fortunate.
We were first movers in the market.
Our CEO, Christina Casiopo, created this automated compliance offering.
And she created the space.
There was nothing like it before she made that.
And so we were first to market and we had such strong product market fit.
So we started with that approach, with that very old school, let's just do a
bunch of
paid and drive it inbound and our approach and the way we thought about inbound
was very
binary.
It was hand-raisers and non-hand-raisers.
And frankly, the non-hand-raisers didn't get a lot of love.
As we have matured and started to scale, we've had to introduce much more
nuance into that
process.
And get a lot more thoughtful.
We're also moving up market at the same time.
So where it's historically the real heart of the business was selling to
startup founders.
That remains an important part of our business.
But we're looking at an entirely different ICP now.
And you got to get really much more thoughtful and evolve the way that you
interact with
your prospects to make that actually effective.
Let's get into your ICP.
Who are the people that you're selling to?
What are those types of organizations?
What does that buying committee look like?
Yeah.
So part of the business remains what we call internally SMBs.
It's really tech companies, typically B2B tech companies.
And we are selling in most cases to a founder.
So we're looking at either like a CEO of a startup or a CTO of a startup,
somebody who's
a technical leader in many cases.
And often what's driving these companies to come to us is that they're trying
to bring
a new software offering to market.
They go to sell that offering and they immediately start getting these really
gnarly spreadsheets
with a bunch of security questions.
And it's like answer these thousand security questions and they're just trying
to figure
out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's you know, if you offer something new, that's what you run into.
Because especially if you're targeting enterprise customers, that becomes such
a burden.
So we help them tackle that.
We help them get SOC 2 compliant, ISO 27000, one compliant.
They typically start there.
Some of our customers start with HIPAA.
They're trying to sell a healthcare tech and we need to be HIPAA compliant.
So we help them get there and then we grow with them.
And the persona that we have really grown into is this much richer, more
interesting,
upmarket persona.
And in many cases, it's a first security hire at a company.
So like a security engineer who's actually been hired into a company to run a
security
program.
And as a part of that, they're the one person at the company on the hook to
make sure that
they're collecting all the evidence and running the compliance processes and
audits.
So that's a common persona for us now.
And the next stage in that evolution is when a company hires chief information
security
officers.
So those CISOs are when they exist and we see them come into play somewhere
between 250
employees and a thousand, depending on the company.
When they come into the mix, they are immediately our buyer because we've got
offerings that
can help them prove their security posture, improve trust and make their entire
program
more efficient.
So we are in an interesting place that still the majority of our business is
that founder
profile.
But we are also growing into these much more complex organizations where you've
got potentially
an entire security team.
And even in some cases, sales teams who are saying, I need to be compliant to
sell my
product and I need to answer these questionnaires, please help me do this in a
better way.
And they're looking at the security team to solve it.
And we really sit at the nexus of that to help our customers solve those
problems.
So we've got a lot of different folks with different views of the world engaged
in the
buying process.
Yeah, it's also just a very, with those different personas, it's a very
different buying mindset.
Like the founders, like, I have one half of one percent of my year that I need
to dedicate
to this.
And it's really, really important that we nail it.
But I got other fish to fry, whereas the person who's brand new CISO, like that
is their
job.
And I think about this 24/7.
So I'd imagine, you know, your demand gen pipeline generating activities are
very different
for those types of people.
Extremely, extremely.
You know, it's really been such an interesting evolution for us, those founders
It's like half of a percent and they'd like it to be even less frankly.
Like, I just think this problem solved.
Please unblock me.
So they don't want necessarily all the compliance education at that early stage
They just really want the problem solved.
But the customer journey then gets really interesting because that founder who
just doesn't
want to think about it and needs a problem solved, if they're successful, they
grow into
the company that has the security hire that needs to now have higher confidence
in those
answers they're giving around security and compliance.
And they evolve into the company that hires a CISO.
And then it's really about, you know, really mitigating risk, reducing cost and
like getting
much more efficient in the way they do the work, but increasing confidence in
what they're
delivering.
So that CISO is on the hook and they've got a, you know, a brand to protect.
So they need to be sure they're doing it right.
So the needs of each of those personas is very different.
And we've had to really, we started by taking our sales team and starting to
specialize
in teams that sell to those different personas because trying to have one sales
person cover
that all basically impossible.
And we have now moved into the journey of making our approach in marketing near
that.
So that's why we've got GMs that specialize in the different ICPs.
Yeah, it's so funny.
Like this stuff is like, again, it's so obvious now when you, when you see it
all and you hear
it all, but it's like five years ago, like just people weren't doing things
that way.
And so it's, again, it's so obvious.
Someone posted some really interesting on LinkedIn the other day and they're
saying how
startups can grow with like three sales reps to like 30 million revenue now.
And it's like, yeah, you just give all your leads to those people that can
close deals
and essentially you support everything.
And I had to like, yeah, if you, if you give that AE, that really good closer,
a subject
matter expert who sat in the seat of your buyer, like that's super valuable,
right?
But like if you're selling to a founder, like I don't need to talk to another
founder to
know the pain, right?
If you're like, Hey, you need to be sock to them.
Like got it.
I know I need to be sock to just like literally let me sign the contract with V
anta.
But if I'm a CISO, it's like, I need to talk to another CISO.
I need to talk to a security professional to learn how this stuff goes.
And like that is such a different sales motion and it's such a different
marketing motion.
It absolutely is.
And we have really changed our approach to how we staff our team to reflect
that in every
part of the business.
And, you know, it's a delicate thing as well.
We throughout this journey, we have continued to just have rocket ship growth,
but the entire
market also shifted around us.
So every company we are potentially selling to, every prospect, they're facing
a completely
different set of challenges than they might have 12 months ago.
And you know, you've got other dynamics in the market.
Vanta came to market and had a huge amount of success.
And that strong product market fit, it creates a lot of attraction and we have
attracted
now 40 plus copycat competitors, which is also another dynamic that we've got
to consider.
And it's really put us in a position to get way more innovative and thoughtful
about how
we do business.
So we have really focused on efficiency and really nailing that message.
And part of the journey in the last six months has really been getting to the
heart of the
prospects who are actually ready to convert rather than trying to force
everybody through
the same experience, putting everybody on the same journey through the funnel
to like
book a meeting, see a demo and then meet their clothes or not clothes.
There's such a different journey there now and it's taking a lot of work to get
there.
And it does seem very obvious in retrospect, but it was not so obvious when we
started
that journey.
Yeah.
One of the problems that we face in marketing is person says, oh yeah, I'd love
to learn
about this, you know, disco call, whatever it is.
Hey, this is awesome.
So glad to know you all exist and even say this in the like, hey, I'm not ready
to buy.
Like I'm just trying to get this information because second half the year comes
around,
I'm going to want to fit this into my budget for us.
Like, you know, we want a podcast or we want a video podcast or whatever.
And you're like, great.
And the problem that marketers have is like, okay, how do we keep this warm?
Right.
And sales is like, how do we keep this warm?
And you're both thinking like, you know, all these levers that can change and
all this
other stuff.
And if you're trying to shoehorn that person into the old way of like, no, we
got to move
you through the stages.
We got to do this stuff.
The person is going to be really pissed off.
So I'm curious, like, how do you think about that stage of like, hey, budgeting
season
is a nine months for us.
How do we think about it from a demand gym perspective of keeping that warm and
then
a sales perspective?
Yeah.
Our approach here has has completely changed.
You know, we, if you look back a year ago, our sales cycle is very short.
Typically, it's 28 days.
So we relied very heavily on inbound.
And if, if we didn't close or, you know, the prospect said it's not time or we
're not
ready or whatever it may be, you know, it went into the backlog and closed lost
and,
you know, it's often another universe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like it's some very limited nurture happening.
And, you know, every now and then, an enterprising sales rep would go back in
there or SDRs would
run a one off campaign.
But again, it wasn't a scalable machine that addressed opportunities.
So where we've really grown to over a year is that now we've got always on
approaches
and we've got much more thoughtful nurtures, both for folks that are ready
right now, but
also folks that go to close loss, you know, with so many, so many copycat
competitors
in the market, the approach of those copycats is often undercut on price.
So we see a lot of churn out of those competitors because we'll see folks come
in.
They're tackling compliance for the first time.
So they're new to the space.
They don't yet really know what good looks like.
So they get offered a lower price elsewhere.
So maybe we end up losing the deal on price.
And what we see is a lot of those folks are ready to reconsider, certainly
after a year,
but often much sooner, so we've had to really evolve this to think about an
ongoing relationship
with any prospect who is interested in compliance in any form because they will
at some point
gravitate back towards a more robust solution.
So we need to be there for that, not in a transactional way, but in a way that
appreciates
where they're at in that journey.
And, you know, they're starting out as that founder who just wants the problem
to go away.
And if they can do that cheaply and easily, great.
That perspective shifts when they get more mature.
So as they go up that security maturity curve that we're frequently working,
they start
to appreciate the depth.
And, you know, it's been interesting to think about how we build out that
journey for them,
even when we look when it appears we've lost the original deal to then create
engagement
that keeps them warm and brings them back.
But again, we've got to do that in all ways on way and that's the mission now
rather
than in a one off outreach.
Yeah.
And it's so true that not having your campaigns like nested then and you're
doing these like
singular one offs, especially like product launches, which is like the ultimate
one off
of all one offs, which like, again, nobody cares.
Right?
Like people do care on occasion where they're like, oh, wow, that's cool.
Hey, you do this now.
Like, great.
I'm ready to buy now.
It's tough.
Like you have that person close lost.
They unsub from your email list.
You know, they're not there's they have no reason to answer emails anymore and
you go,
shoot, what am I going to put in this person in front of this person over the
next year
to get them to reconsider and just pinging them with emails from your sales
reps.
That ain't going to do it.
Curious any any thoughts you have there.
You know, we have really, we move to a much softer approach at that point
because nobody
likes that like they've just made a buying decision.
They don't want to be put back into a, are you ready to come by ours?
Still like come back.
Are you ready?
So it's got to be much more thoughtful.
We really do try to drive much more education at that point.
You know, for us, there are some key themes that we're trying to emphasize in
that ongoing
relationship.
One is the speed of innovation.
That's one of our big differentiators were the biggest were the fastest growing
and we're
innovating the fastest.
So driving that message home because what we'll find is if you go with a lower
cost competitor,
at some point in that journey, you're going to find out that the depth is in
there.
And we want to make sure that when you hit that point of realization that there
's a lack
of depth that were there to say, Hey, we actually do that and we've got a
solution for you.
And have you considered solving the problem this way?
So it is very much not a sales approach, so much more thoughtful and measured
education,
long term education of those prospects.
So we're trying to nurture that relationship over time and then it's
additionally just social
proof like, Hey, you know, it's hard to tell.
The market is noisy.
It can be hard to tell sometimes that we're the biggest in our space by a mile
and it can
be really hard to sort out the signal from the noise.
So just continuing to reinforce social proof and reinforce the data points that
help those
prospects understand that reality.
And over time we find a lot of them realize and when we get folks who are a
little skeptical
of a little dubious, we've introduced a trial and that trial we have found
massive success.
No, another thing that we've been talking about is like those customer stories
where
it's like the, Hey, this person decided to date this other person and not you.
And then all of a sudden you're seeing on their Instagram, like, they're going
to Tahiti,
like we're not going to Tahiti.
Like, it's like, Oh, that person said that they just had the best ice cream of
their
life.
Like, I'm not eating any ice cream.
You know, it's like those sort of things like just putting those customer
stories in front
of people of like, Oh, a bunch of my peers made a different decision than me.
And they're all like happy with their decision so much so that they're putting
their face
and adds like, Oh, that's not great.
And so that's like one thing that I've thought about.
The other thing is like, you know, whether it's, you know, events or, or, you
know, podcasts
or, or things where you have a little bit more of a personal connection, you
know, people
sort of like always look at things like strictly from like a, a net new like
sourced pipe sort
of perspective, but it's also a great check in opportunity.
That's a lot less, you know, stressful than like, Hey, I'm going to hop on.
I'm like a hop on a call with a sales rep of something that I didn't buy five
months
ago.
But if you see him at a conference, if like you're on their podcast, if you're,
you know,
doing some type of engagement there where you can go like, by the way, how's
everything
going?
Are you glad he didn't choose us?
Maybe like actually, you know, I've been having a few problems.
They're like, Hey, we have free trial.
Like you want to try this?
Like that's those are the sort of things that get those, those reps extra
touches and extra
like conversations when you kind of have to manufacture something out of
nothing.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And we see a huge amount of success with those type of emotions.
And it really is the visibility and just being there.
And for us, we actually, for the stage we're at, one of our most successful
strategies over
the long term has actually been out of home.
We've got a lot of billboards and that's not super common at our stage.
But you know, we've really leaned into a unique brand that's got a little bit
more of a wink
to it that's got a little bit more of a personal feel.
It's got a flavor, I think.
And you know, we have have really embraced what that looks like.
And we've got our incredible head of corporate marketing, Sarah Sharf.
She is a freaking genius.
She has come up with tagline after tagline.
That's really so deeply associated with our brand.
And the first one is we do compliance, sock to is the framework.
The tagline is compliance that doesn't sock too much.
And we've got billboards in tons of cities.
And I am constantly shocked how many prospects, how many people I run into at
networking events
that are like, I love the dad joke.
I get it.
I laughed and it's just, it's done more for us as a company than I would have
ever expected.
All right, any other thoughts on strategy?
Oh, gosh, you know, I really, so for us, the other thing we haven't really
touched on
strategy wise is outbound.
Outbound for us this year is the name of the game.
And my message to my team is everyone is responsible for pipeline generation.
I think one of the classic mistakes is to think like marketing generates
pipeline in
a silo and then, yeah, sales will go source some too.
A lot of people don't even think about customer success.
We as a company are committed to everybody in the org driving pipeline.
So we rolled out CSQLs this year.
So our customer success managers are responsible for creating opportunities.
They feed them to our overlay team.
And, you know, we've got hard targets for everybody to drive outbound pipeline
generation.
And in a tougher market, we are finding that is one of our biggest needle mo
vers are AEs,
our SDRs, everybody is dramatically exceeding outbound targets.
And it's really made the difference for us.
So that remains a key pillar.
How do they do stuff like that?
You know, at first, very poorly.
And we learned and, you know, for me, outbound, like doing outbound well, that
's a motion that
takes a while to develop.
And you have to have a commitment to it.
It can't just be a side job or like, you know, one of those things you
mentioned off-handedly,
you've got to have discipline and build routine that is data driven around it.
And you've got to have your leaders reinforcing the targets, the expectations
and the best
practices on a regular basis.
And then, you know, we've dialed up a new discipline.
We used to review pipeline as a part of our weekly forecast cadence.
We've actually created an entire additional cadence where we're deep diving on
pipeline
all sources every single week.
So it is a all-hands-on-deck effort.
You've got to do it in a way that's scalable and thoughtful and evolves.
And it's going to be different for everybody.
You know, there are like all of the best practices in the world are great, but
unless you figure
out how to personalize them to your company, your brand and your target person
as, it won't
work and really the only way to get there is to a bunch of it that's lots and
lots of
practice and lots of data.
Yeah, I mean, the old adage, 13 impressions equals a sale.
Now those touches, a bunch of those are outbound.
Some of those are like, you see the billboards, some of those are, you know, a
LinkedIn ad
or an event that they saw or, you know, their friend on a podcast like Gerson
or, you know,
whatever it is.
The all of those collective things, that's what keeps the outbound, you know,
working
and getting responses.
And like, if you're just doing the outbound without the other stuff or you're
just doing
the other stuff without the outbound, it's just not going to be as cohesive.
Not at all.
Yeah, you got to be in all those places and you've got to have a great high
quality human
touch and I love that qualified sponsors podcast.
We are extremely happy qualified customers.
Oh, heck yeah.
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
Oh, yeah, we're huge fans and, you know, it really brought to us.
We implemented qualified last year.
The only brand new net new channel that has delivered material pipeline for us.
And I think it works so well in part because it's a part of that broader vision
So we'll look deeper at things that convert via that qualified chat experience
from the
website.
What you'll see behind it is exactly what you're describing.
You know, it's a very important thing to do.
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It's very counterintuitive.
It's probably not on most people's no cut list,
but it's got to be the out of home.
It just works so well.
The brand equity it's gotten us is phenomenal.
People know that tagline.
They know the pun.
They associate it with us.
They know that we are the market leader.
Therefore, even though it can be a little bit harder to measure that impact,
I deep, deep in my gut believe that that is a huge needle mover for us
and I would never cut it.
I love it.
That's fantastic.
Any things that you'd be like, maybe you're the most cuttable
or just something that you don't want to invest in
or might be fainted away?
Yeah.
You know, we bought a lot of tools over time.
I'm not going to call anybody help by name,
but you think the theme of the day is we really can do way more with less.
I cut a huge amount of money,
seven figures plus of SaaS spend this year, like a lot of people did.
Really, we've been able to achieve even more impact with less tools.
It's about going deeper with the tools we have,
going deeper with the intent data we have,
going deeper with the things that we really see the most value in,
and then releasing the rest because if you spread too broadly on tools,
you end up not making good use of any of them.
So I am like a lot of the things that I've cut.
They're great tools.
I'm sure they're very useful, but for our business,
we're really pairing back to the heart of what works best.
And we're putting 110% into those rather than trying to peanut butter
across a huge tool stack.
You mentioned the compliance that doesn't sock campaign.
Any other campaigns that were either worked really well or maybe didn't work at
all?
Yeah.
On the great side is free trial.
That's one thing we really find that our customers love.
They want to get hands on.
It's a little hard for our prospects who have never engaged in that process
of becoming compliant or proving compliance to understand what's involved
and what it looks like.
So an ability to get into the platform and feel it out themselves
has been incredibly successful.
The most successful version of that,
we will do a full white glove experience and help them through it.
But we've had success even with the self service trial.
And we've had the top of the list in terms of success.
Say the things that have been less successful.
You know, are the things that are perhaps a little more aspirational for us?
So, and in really, like we have had tremendous success in events,
but not all events.
Sure.
And where we find that it's a little bit of a, you know,
an investment that makes a little less sense is if it's too far at the end of
the spectrum, outside our ICP.
So if we're either at an event that's so focused on teeny, tiny, like one to
two person companies,
which that's great.
We want to do business with them, but we don't like the event presence is over
doing it. And the ROI isn't there.
Or we go too far to the other end of the spectrum and we're at an aspirational,
like very enterprisey event.
And we're just not yet ready as a broader organization to successfully execute
on that.
Like we can do that, but I can't do a dozen of those a year because of we just
aren't there yet.
So really honing in on the core of what works, the core ICP doing less,
but doing it extremely well is what works best for us.
Yeah, it's so hard because.
You talked about this always on strategy.
Then some not always on, right?
So it's like inherently, it's different.
And so fitting that in.
I mean, events are probably the most polarizing on this because you have a lot
of people that it's like,
would never cut it in a million years.
And a lot of people are like, I would probably, or I did literally cut all of
our events,
and not to say there's a right or wrong answer every company's different.
So I would do all the preamble to figure out how you go to market.
But yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, it's not an always on thing, right?
It's a, I would say it's an accelerant to be honest.
It is.
Well, and we want to invest in, so we're very committed to events, but we're
definitely shifting strategy.
So we want to be thoughtful about the amount of lift for the sales and CS teams
because, you know, with events,
we're either, you know, staffing that with sales by and large or CS,
or we're relying on sales and CS to get customers and prospects to an event.
So the lift is not insignificant, and there's real value there.
You know, you put customers and prospects in a room.
We do these like customer prospect dinners.
It's a combination of customers and prospects.
Yep.
Anybody who sits in that room walks out incredibly loyal and like either
closing the deal or wanting to work with us
or continuing the relationship, the value so high, but man, the lift is big.
Yeah, it's a great point.
And because I think events are not.
They're never one size fits all.
They're always like a unique little flower each to themselves, which makes it
super great.
Like the feature is the bug, but it makes it really hard to replicate.
And if you are doing your own things and those like, hey, we got this like good
cadence and all that stuff.
Like you said, it's just a lot, a lot of bandwidth.
You're going to be really tight on what you're trying to accomplish with it as
well.
And I think that's one place we've really learned to get a lot better is in
early days.
It was a, you know, great event, hand-wavey goals.
Are we driving pipeline?
Are we like, is it brand?
What are we doing?
And it's like, oh, it's a little bit of all of that.
Like, that's great.
But, you know, we are now much more data driven and thoughtful about those
investments.
So when we go into an event, we know exactly the outcomes we're trying to drive
and we're able to measure the ROI
actually manifests or not.
Let's get to the desktop where we talk about healthy tension, whether that's
with your board, your sales teams, your competitors, your marketing teams or
anyone else.
Stevie, have you had a memorable dust up in your career?
So many.
You know, you know, I think when you're, when you're really trying to disrupt
and you're really trying to drive innovation, you are bound to have dust ups.
And I think the goal has to be to be able to have those in a way that is
sustainable and respectful and still move forward.
You know, probably one of the most memorable dust ups I've had over the last
couple of years has been with these competitors that have come into the space
we created.
And it was really interesting to come into that because the initial approach, I
think, you know, there was a lot of like consternation and frustration on the
team and a desire to like really directly take it on.
And what we've really done as an organization is focus inward and like, all we
can control is our own success, our own execution. So let's just focus on being
really good at what we do.
And allow the competitive noise to fade outside into the background.
And that strategy, it's taken time, but oh, it is really paid off. You know, we
're running our own race.
We're not allowing other companies to dictate our narrative or to change the
way we do business.
We have really turned it into competitive fuel and focused on confidence inside
the company on execution and on speed.
And we have turned into an execution machine over the last year, thanks to that
. So can be really tempting to like cave under that and just become very
reactive, but we had to really just refocus on our own mission.
What are we trying to accomplish? What are we great at? We've got the strongest
product. We've got the strongest team. We're moving the fastest. Let's tell
that story, instead of being reactive to outside forces.
And I think I've really taken that lesson beyond just the competitive landscape
to the market or whatever else there's always stuff going on outside.
It rarely pays to over rotate on that stuff. It almost always comes back to
your own execution and driving your own success.
Stevie, you're not only a wonderful CRO, but you're also a world famous gamer.
Can you explain the backstory with this?
Yeah, so I started my career in a very non traditional way. I was in university
. I had dreams of becoming a lawyer.
And this was late 90s to date myself and Quake came out on the scene, original
first person shooter game.
And I was living on a dorm floor that was like an honors floor. Lots of really
smart people who were very into this video game and I started playing with them
. I got quite good.
Flash forward. I ended up playing professionally and I had an opportunity to
play the designer of the game and I beat him at his own game.
And that led to a career in pro gaming, which led to a career in technology. So
here I am today because I started out as a gamer.
It's amazing. That is so cool.
Gamer turned sales leader turned marketer.
I would say I'm going to embrace that. I'm hoping I can feel confident enough
to say in the near future. Okay, maybe I'm a little bit marketer. I'm like a
percentage marketer.
And the truth is like those things, those knowledge and the approach that comes
out of gaming.
Gaming is really just about strategy and resource management is very data
driven.
You have to have a lot of situational awareness. You're troubleshooting in real
time. You're adjusting strategy.
It's really not that different being a CRO.
It's all about looking at the data in front of you, looking around at the world
and finding those little areas for optimization. What can I tweak or change or
restructure that will drive more dollars in the door.
Better retention, more pipeline. So that same resource management that I was
really good at in gaming. I use a lot of those same skills today. The interface just looks a little different. Yeah, that's right.
All right, let's get to our quick hits. These are quick questions and quick
answers. Just like how quickly qualified helps companies generate pipeline
faster.
I mean, you already know because you're qualified customer apparently, which I
didn't know for this. So everybody else who's listening to happen to your
greatest asset website to identify your most valuable visitors and instantly.
And I mean instantly start sales conversations. Quick and easy. Just like these
questions go to qualified.com to learn more. Stevie, are you ready?
I'm ready. Hit me.
Number one, what's a hidden talent or skill that is not on your resume?
Oh, I'm a sailor. I know how to sailboat. And I love it. It is kind of a secret
passion.
Do you have a favorite book podcast or TV show that you'd like to recommend?
Oh my goodness. So yeah, I've gone down the the Huberman rabbit hole lately. So
I'm going to say the Huberman, Huberman podcast is my thing. I'm all into like
health hacking right now biohacking. So it's my guy.
It's like super popular right now, right? Because because I've just heard a
brother. I was talking about this.
It's fascinating. Yeah. It's really insightful. He's on Ferris, I think maybe.
I think he probably was. Yeah, he's everywhere now. Yeah, it's fascinating
stuff. I'm into it too. Let me know what you find out.
All right. I'm ready. I'm ready for it. Do you have a favorite non marketing
hobby that maybe sort of indirectly makes you a better marketer other than
gaming, of course.
Yeah, gaming is the big one. I would say, and you know, I've got my plants
behind me.
I am obsessed with plants and animals. I grew up the child of a biologist and
there is something about a connection with the natural world that slows me down
and focuses me. I think it helps me as a marketer as a salesperson.
It takes me out of that very real time day to day and makes me slow down and
think.
And that's not always a natural motion for me to slow down so that I've got
these things to help me do it is incredibly helpful. And that's when I come up
with usually my more interesting and richer strategies is when I'm dealing with
my plants.
I heard this and I don't know if this is true, but a friend of mine was a head
of facilities for a huge tech company and they put in wood, like, basically
like wood and lots of plants in their offices.
And they saw some study somewhere that basically like a human feeling the
feeling of wood in like their whether it's their desk or whatever it is, they
're like actually is like way better for your psyche and like being around
plants and stuff.
So I think you're onto something is my point.
I think it's real. Yeah, I think there's a real biology behind that. We should
get Huberman to do a deep dive there.
Yeah, exactly. Final question. What advice would you give to a first time CRO
who's trying to figure out how the heck to get their pipeline all figured out?
My advice would be whatever your scope is and every CRO has slightly different
scope.
Do not limit your focus to just the scope of your team.
You have to think about the entire funnel end to end from day one.
If you don't, you're going to fall victim to it.
You need to have a mastery of every step in that funnel and make the folks who
do own every step in that funnel your best friends.
Stevie, absolutely awesome having you on the show.
You were amazing. Any final thoughts anything to plug other than you should go
check out Vanta.
If you need to get Sock to, oh my goodness gracious.
That's exactly right. If you need to be compliant, you need help with your
security posture.
You need to prove your security posture.
We are there for you.
Also, just check me out on LinkedIn. I post a lot on LinkedIn.
I'm building a community there.
So love to see folks there and connect.
Awesome. Thanks so much.
Thanks for having me.
[Music]